Linked List: November 13, 2015

Friday, 13 November 2015

Tim Cook’s Company-Wide Memo on Black Teens Kicked Out of Melbourne Apple Store 

Tim Cook:

While I firmly believe that this was an isolated incident rather than a symptom of a broader problem in our stores, we will use this moment as an opportunity to learn and grow. Our store leadership teams around the world, starting in Australia, will be refreshing their training on inclusion and customer engagement. These are concepts and practices they know well, but can always stand to reinforce.

‘Next Year’ 

James Vincent, writing for The Verge under the headline “Bluetooth Will Get Much More Powerful Next Year”:

The ever-growing number of connected gadgets on the market is putting a strain on our Bluetooth connections. To keep up with the increased burden, the Bluetooth standard is getting an upgrade, with longer range, faster speeds, and mesh networking all in the works for 2016. The incorporation of these new features is being overseen by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), an industry body that counts companies such as Apple, Intel, Microsoft, and Lenovo among its backers.

“Next year it will work great” should be the motto of Bluetooth.

Michael Tsai: ‘No One Minding the Store’ 

Michael Tsai:

The Mac App Store is supposed to make things easier, but it’s also a single point of failure. Not only is it neglected, but sometimes even the existing functionality stops working. Mac OS X 10.9 introduced a code signing bug that prevented me from submitting updates for several months. In June 2015, there was a month-long iTunes Connect bug that prevented my uploaded build from entering the review queue. And I currently have a bug fix update that Apple has been reviewing for 33 days (with 8 days of waiting before that). When I inquired about the status, Apple told me that everything was normal and that I should just keep waiting. In short, the system is broken on multiple levels, and there is no evidence to suggest that things will get better.

Harsh words, but I don’t see how anyone could disagree.

He also has a collection of tweets regarding the App Store’s expired certificate fiasco. The last one made me laugh.

UIFocusEngine Hidden in iOS 9.1 

Speaking of the intrepid developer Steven Troughton-Smith, last night on Twitter he uncovered that tvOS’s UIFocusEngine is built into iOS 9.1. That means, using private APIs, you can build an app for iPhone or iPad that has a UI that is entirely navigable using the keyboard — up, down, left, right, Return, Esc.

Steven sent me a small demo project so I could try it out, and it worked like a charm. For something that is clearly not even close to being ready for real-world use, it looks and feels pretty cool. The only hiccup I ran into is that there is no Esc key on the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard.

To be clear, this isn’t useful today, at all. Not only are they all private APIs, but the controls are only accessible through a hardware keyboard. So if you make a regular button with UIKit, it can be tapped (with your finger), but can’t be navigated to using a keyboard; if you make a button using UIFocusEngine, you can select it and trigger it using the keyboard, but it doesn’t respond to touch. But perhaps it’s a sign that Apple is thinking deeply about making iOS navigable using the keyboard — which is something they really need to do.

(One last note: I paired my SteelSeries Nimbus game controller to the iPad Pro. On Apple TV, you can use a game controller to navigate the entire UI. On iOS, it doesn’t work. It only works with an actual keyboard.)

Apple’s List of ‘Amazing Apps for iPad Pro’ 

These apps all take advantage of the bigger display or make good use of the Pencil, but as Steven Troughton-Smith observed, it’s more like a list of great “pro” apps for iOS, period.