Posts tagged with "iOS 9"

Shut Up Is an iOS 9 Content Blocker to Hide Comments on the Web

Developed by Ricky Romero and based on Steven Frank’s popular Shutup.css, Shut Up is an iOS 9 Content Blocker that hides comments on the web.

We’ve all been there: you’re reading a great article on one of your favorite blogs, you scroll down…and you wish you didn’t. Most comment sections can be an unregulated, nasty place on the Internet, and what Shut Up aims to do is to provide a system-level blocking solution that will try to hide comments in Safari and Safari View Controller. This will allow you to browse and read without fearing for your intellectual safety when reaching the bottom of webpages – not to mention gains in performance and readability when the browser doesn’t have to load comment sections.

I’ve been testing Shut Up for iOS 9 over the summer, and it’s the Content Blocker I prefer for hiding comments. What I like about Shut Up is that, besides being based on Frank’s stylesheet and working well for the websites I visit, it offers a whitelist to specify websites where you do want to see comments – either because they usually have great conversations, or because they’re meant to be read as “comments” (such as Facebook or Reddit threads). Shut Up comes with a built-in list of allowed sites, and it also detects URLs in your clipboard when you open the app, letting you easily whitelist its domain.

Given the removal of Peace (which also licensed Shutup.css) from the App Store last week, I recommend giving Shut Up a try. It’s free on the App Store.

Just Press Record Is a Simple Voice Recorder for watchOS 2 and iOS 9

Among the various first-party omissions on watchOS 2, the lack of a Voice Memos app for Apple Watch is perhaps the most curious one. Given the OS’ support for audio recording and playback, a native Voice Memos app for the Watch would be an ideal companion for capturing ideas and audio notes anywhere. Just Press Record, a $2.99 Universal app, wants to provide the missing voice recorder for Apple Watch users.

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iOS 9 and YouTube Picture in Picture with YouPlayer

With the release of iOS 9 last week, I was hoping YouTube would be ready with an app update to support Picture in Picture. As I suspected, though, YouTube hasn’t brought iOS 9’s improved video playback experience to their official app yet, and I wouldn’t be surprised to know they’re not thrilled to enable a floating video player that would make ads and annotations non-tappable.

To overcome the lack of Picture in Picture for YouTube – a perfect use case for the feature, especially if you consider YouTube as a music player – I’ve started using YouPlayer, a free app by Homegrown Software that supports iOS 9 multitasking on iPad and, more importantly, Picture in Picture for all videos.

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iOS 9 Installed on 50% of iOS Devices→

Apple published a press release this morning confirming that the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus will be available in retail stores at 8 AM on Friday, September 25. In the press release, the company also announced that iOS 9 has been installed on 50% of active iOS devices:

Apple also announced the fastest iOS adoption ever, with more than 50 percent of devices already using iOS 9.

And:

“Customer response to the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus has been incredibly positive, we can’t wait to get our most advanced iPhones ever into customers’ hands starting this Friday,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iOS 9 is also off to an amazing start, on pace to be downloaded by more users than any other software release in Apple’s history.”

The numbers are based on App Store stats as measured on September 19 – three days after the launch of iOS 9. While the adoption rate will slow down in the next few weeks, this is an impressive result regardless and it shows that Apple’s focus on making updates smaller in size and easier to install is paying off.

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iOS 9 and Accessibility: My 5 Favorite Details

I’ve made the case more than once that accessibility, conceptually, is not a domain exclusive to the disabled. Certainly, persons with disabilities will always be the target market for accessibility features, but I think many fully-abled people overlook the fact that accessibility features can help them too. To me, the canonical example is larger text. Yes, something like Large Dynamic Type is a boon to the visually impaired, but it can also benefit someone with aging or tired eyes.

In a similar vein, accessibility isn’t solely about discrete Accessibility features. While a big part of my writing involves reporting on iOS’ (and watchOS’) Accessibility features and how they affect users, I do make an effort to focus and write on the smaller aspects of accessibility. That is to say, I try to find accessibility in less obvious places – for instance, how technologies like Touch ID and Force Touch impact the disabled.

This concept has extended to my testing of the iOS 9 public beta throughout the summer. As I’ve gotten used to the new operating system on my iPhone 6 and iPad Air, I’ve come to notice several details that aren’t intentionally for accessibility, but nonetheless make the experience more accessible (and more enjoyable).

With that in mind, here are five “little things” in iOS 9 that stand out the most.

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What’s New for iOS Management in iOS 9

Since the early days of iOS, Apple has always made it relatively easy to configure iOS devices to meet the needs of managed deployments in schools, businesses, and other mass-deployment situations. Heck, even the good old iPod Classic had a “museum mode” that could lock down the device to show specific notes on the screen while audio played.

Over the past few years, iOS deployment has become more ‘professionalised’ – which might be a euphemism for ‘complicated’. Honestly, all mass computer deployment is deeply complex when you get down to it. The best systems automate almost everything. iOS deployment, as it has developed in recent years, has tended to keep most of the moving parts close to the surface. These parts have been difficult or impossible to automate and easy to overlook or forget. That would be fine if most of these parts were optional, but they’re not.

The main parts of an iOS deployment are a Mobile Device Management server for configuring and tracking your devices, the Volume Purchase Program for bulk-buying apps from the App Store, and the user of the device having an Apple ID.

When Apple launched the Volume Purchase Program, they introduced the ability for administrators to assign apps to users’ Apple IDs, rather than to devices. This also introduced the requirement that every device have a single, identifiable user who has a working Apple ID.

This was quite a good idea in the early days of iOS in the enterprise. These were days when users were bringing their own iOS devices to work and businesses had to make apps available to them. It wasn’t such a good idea for more centrally-managed deployments where the use of the device was perhaps more task-oriented than user-oriented. Think: supermarket employee who picks up one of twenty available iPads to do stock control. It also wasn’t great for schools, where many users didn’t have Apple IDs and there were no tools for bulk creation of said accounts.

I would love to tell you that iOS 9 fixes all of these problems. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that. What iOS 9 does is fix one problem while introducing another.

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Marco Arment Pulls Peace From the App Store→

After a successful launch on the App Store earlier this week, Marco Arment has decided to pull Peace, his Content Blocker for iOS 9, from the App Store:

As I write this, Peace has been the number one paid app in the U.S. App Store for about 36 hours. It’s a massive achievement that should be the highlight of my professional career. If Overcast even broke the top 100, I’d be over the moon.

Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate, but probably should have. Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit.

For more details on his motivations and how to ask for a refund, check out Marco’s post.

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