Posts tagged with "developers"

tvOS 9.2 to Bring Support for Dictation→

Juli Clover, reporting for MacRumors on the the third beta of tvOS 9.2 seeded to developers earlier today:

There’s now support for onscreen text entry via dictation in countries where Siri is available. When updating to tvOS 9.2 beta 3, users will be prompted to enable or disable dictation. With dictation, Apple TV users can dictate text and spell user names and passwords rather than typing them. With dictation enabled, the tvOS search bar alternates between a blank search field and an option to hold the Siri button to dictate text.

Feels like another feature that should have been there since tvOS debuted. Maybe the ability to actually link to tvOS apps will be next.

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CloudKit Gets Server API→

A notable addition to CloudKit announced by Apple today – an API for server-to-server requests:

In addition to providing a web interface for users to access the same data as your app, you can now easily read and write to the CloudKit public database from a server-side process or script with a server-to-server key.

Benjamin Mayo explains what this means in practice:

Until now, interaction with CloudKit has been limited to the APIs Apple provided in apps. Although this was useful, it lacked the options for more advanced use — most modern apps rely on servers to perform tasks whilst users are away. With the addition of the web API, developers can create many more types of applications using CloudKit as the backend. For instance, an RSS reader app can now add new feed items to the CloudKit stack from the server. Before, this action could only occur when a user opened a CloudKit-powered app, which was essentially impractical and meant developers had to use other tools.

Somewhat coincidentally, the announcement follows the news of Facebook shutting down Parse, the popular backend-as-a-service tool for developers. I’ve tried a few CloudKit apps over the past year that would have benefitted from a web counterpart checking for changes in the background – hopefully this change will enable more functionality for those types of apps. A feed reader built entirely off CloudKit with timely updates would be interesting.

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Activist Engineering→

Matthew Bischoff:

You’ve been there. You’re sitting in a meeting and your boss, a product manager, or an executive is talking about Q2 goals. They’re laying out a roadmap of the features that are going to be “coming down the pike”. All of a sudden you see it. An innocuous bullet that makes your blood boil: “Auto-invite friends”, “Re-engagement notifications”, or “Disable ATS”.

The particular feature isn’t important. What matters is that you’re the engineer that’s noticed this capital-B Bad Idea. You know why it’s a problem. This time it’s not just the technical debt or the time it’d take to implement. This idea is bad because it trades a worse product for a better “business”: revenue, eyeballs, impressions, you know the drill.

You have a choice in this moment.

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Facebook to Shut Down Parse→

Mike Isaac and Quentin Hardy, reporting for The New York Times:

Facebook acquired Parse, a toolkit and support system for mobile developers, in 2013. At the time, the social network’s ambitions were high: Parse would be Facebook’s way into one day harnessing developers to become a true cloud business, competing alongside the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Those ambitions, it seems, have fallen back to earth. On Thursday, Facebook said it plans to shut down Parse, the services platform for which it paid upwards of a reported $85 million.

And from the announcement on the Parse blog:

We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible. We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrate applications to other services.

Parse provided a series of online backend tools for app developers, and this will certainly be a hassle for those who implemented Parse services in their iOS apps. Not to mention apps that were built on top of Parse and then abandoned – while those apps may still be working on modern versions of iOS thanks to backwards API compatibility, they will stop working once Parse – the online component – shuts down for good.

Below, I’ve compiled a list of some reactions from the developer community to the Parse announcement. See also: Connected #13 from November 2014 on App Store preservation.

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Apple Opening Europe’s First iOS App Development Center in Naples, Italy→

Interesting announcement from Apple this morning: the company will open the first iOS App Development Center in Europe – the second globally, as noted by VentureBeat – in Naples, Italy:

Apple today announced the creation of Europe’s first iOS App Development Center in Italy, to give students practical skills and training on developing iOS apps for the world’s most innovative and vibrant app ecosystem.

The iOS App Development Center, to be located at a partner institution in Naples, will support teachers and provide a specialized curriculum preparing thousands of future developers to be part of Apple’s thriving developer community. In addition, Apple will work with partners around Italy who deliver developer training to complement this curriculum and create additional opportunities for students. Apple expects to expand this program to other countries around the world.

Details are scarce at this point, but according to Repubblica, Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi lauded Apple’s commitment to innovation for “over 600 people” (a figure only Renzi shared) and announced he is going meet with Tim Cook tomorrow to discuss the initiative.

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Apple Discontinuing iAd App Network→

Apple:

The iAd App Network will be discontinued as of June 30, 2016. Although we are no longer accepting new apps into the network, advertising campaigns may continue to run and you can still earn advertising revenue until June 30. If you’d like to continue promoting your apps through iAd until then, you can create a campaign using iAd Workbench.

This, however, doesn’t mean that Apple is discontinuing iAd completely. Benjamin Mayo explains:

The announcement is confusingly worded, but it does not mean that all of iAd is being discontinued. Developers will still be able to show iAd banners in their application; it’s just that the inventory for App Store apps to advertise will no longer exist. This is a blessing and a curse — it won’t help iAd improve its fill-rates but the CPM on these type of ads was significantly lower as the buy-in from the publisher side was also lower.

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Drag & Drop Demo for iOS 9’s Split View→

CoreDragon is a new open source library for iOS developers created by Nevyn Bengsston designed to bring multitouch drag & drop to iOS 9:

The eighties solved this with another piece of direct manipulation: drag and drop. Today, I bring the eighties right back into 2016 with my new open source library CoreDragon. CoreDragon lets you get rid of context menus, modal interactions and even copy paste, by allowing you to mark some areas of your application as things that can be dragged; and other areas as places where you can drop things.

The key feature of CoreDragon is support for dragging and dropping content between apps in Split View on iPad:

CoreDragon uses similar concepts as the drag’n’ drop APIs on MacOS, and modifies them to work better in a world with view controllers. It works within a single application, and on modern iPads, between applications that are running in split screen mode.

Take a look at the video Nevyn put together to demonstrate drag & drop in Split View. This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this idea, and it’s extremely close to what I imagine Apple will eventually add to the iPad platform.

As I mentioned in my iOS 9 review, drag & drop is an interaction paradigm ripe for being reimagined by multitouch. Using the clipboard and extensions to transfer content between two apps running simultaneously is feeling outdated at this point, and I want to believe something similar to CoreDragon is in the works for the future of iOS. Nevyn has some interesting ideas on how to augment traditional drag & drop with multitouch, too.

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AgileCloudKit and 1Password 6 for Mac→

Nice (and free) update to 1Password for Mac released today:

It’s a new year and we’re starting things off on a strong note with a great new update to 1Password for Mac: Version 6.0! This latest version of everyone’s favorite password manager is looking better than ever, and we couldn’t have done it without you. Your awesome feature requests, suggestions, bug reports, and usage scenarios really helped us decide what to include in this release.

If you use multiple vaults, you may want to check out the new functionalities in 1Password 6.0 (release notes here). I don’t, but I may reconsider this to set up vaults for my family and MacStories.

Also of note: AgileBits built a framework to use CloudKit JS for the version of the app sold outside of the Mac App Store. Apps that aren’t available on the App Store can’t implement iCloud support natively, but AgileBits figured out a way to use CloudKit technologies for web apps in their Mac client:

From our customers’ point of view, iCloud Sync in the AgileBits Store version of 1Password will look a little bit different during the initial setup. CloudKit JS does not use the iCloud settings from OS X, so to authenticate with Apple, 1Password will prompt you to log in to your iCloud account by displaying the iCloud login page in your default web browser. Once you have logged in to your iCloud account, CloudKit web services sends an authentication token back to 1Password, which it then stores (securely, of course). This enables 1Password to sync with iCloud without having to reauthenticate each time. Since the iCloud login for CloudKit JS is completely separate from the iCloud settings in OS X System Preferences, you can even use a completely different iCloud account if you like!

I don’t know whether I should be impressed that AgileBits created this workaround or sad about Apple’s decision to restrict iCloud to the semi-abandoned Mac App Store (maybe a bit of both). AgileBits plans to make AgileCloudKit open source, too.

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The Medium.com Hosted Press Kit→

Robleh Jama has been using Medium to share press kits for apps:

When you put everything a blogger needs for their article in one spot, they’re going to like that. They’re going to appreciate you because you didn’t just do what’s most convenient for you. You actually thought about them. And even if they don’t write about you now, it starts the relationships on the right foot.

We kept it as unlisted because we figured that it’d be best for bloggers and journalists to get the details first, before passing it along to their audiences. Unlisted posts on Medium are visible to only those who have the link. It won’t be listed on Medium’s public pages or your profile. You can choose to keep it as a draft, or publish the post as an Unlisted post, like we did, or a public post.

I agree with this. I’ve been sent a few Medium-hosted press releases over the past few months – most recently, one for Pigment – and the experience was better than having to download a bunch of PDFs and folders full of screenshots. Perhaps Dropbox could leverage the convenience of easily editable/linkable documents with Paper (imagine if you could combine text and media stored somewhere else in your Dropbox within a single shared document).

Side note: if you’re looking for something a bit more customizable and advanced, I can’t recommend presskit() enough.

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