Cult of Mac: “How an Under-Appreciated iOS 7 Feature Will Change the World”

The Multipeer Connectivity Framework enables users to flexibly use WiFi and Bluetooth peer-to-peer connections to chat and share photos even without an Internet connection. Big deal, right?

But here’s the really big deal — it can enable two users to chat not only without an Internet connection, but also when they are far beyond WiFi and Bluetooth range from each other — connected with a chain of peer-to-peer users between one user and a far-away Internet connection.

It’s called wireless mesh networking. And Apple has mainstreamed it in iOS 7. It’s going to change everything.

Mike Elgan

Among the many possible applications of multipeer connectivity, the one most likely to ‘change the world’ is enabling anonymous and surveillance-free communication in countries where the regular channels and social networks are blocked by their governments. Groups of people could quickly and secretly organize mass protests or spread news censored by the official media. Of course, surveillance is increasingly becoming an issue in first world countries as well, so we might start seeing more and more chat apps making use of this new Apple technology. And with Google considering adding it to Android in the future, a new mode of instant communication could indeed take over the world, turning the WhatsApps of the current mobile phase into a fading fad of the past.

Monday Note: “Wearables Fever”

Simplifying a bit, younger people don’t wear watches at all and older generations use them as jewelry — and gender-specific jewelry, at that. Furthermore, how many veteran watch-wearers wear the same watch all the time? Many of us own more than one watch, and select the appropriate timepiece (or two — or none at all) for the occasion. These aren’t trivial issues, they’re uncharted territory for mobile device makers and marketers.

Jean-Louis Gassée

Another article about the overhyped smartwatch movement, this time much more grounded in reality. To shortly sum it up, there are a lot of questions about how and why to build a (good) smartwatch, but a massive shortage of answers.

I too know people who are very passionate about wrist watches, owning dozens of models and swapping them depending on the mood or social situation. Personally I own a single one, wear it for years until I get bored and then spend weeks searching for a new model – mostly based on how it looks and feels. Neither of these use cases can be satisfyingly replaced by a smartwatch with average design, that you will probably have to upgrade at the same pace as your smartphone.

What’s new in Chrome 34

If you were among the Windows users upset by the decision to remove scrollbar steppers in Chrome 32, version 34 will solve this annoyance and bring arrows back – but only on Windows. I don’t use the scrollbar arrows very often, but when I needed precision positioning inside a page I missed not having that option, so it’s good to have arrows back.

The other big update is ‘Search by Voice’, included by default for English (U.S.) users on Windows, Mac and Linux; you can enable it by going to google.com, clicking on the mic icon and allowing the new feature. Alternatively, you will also find the corresponding option in Settings, called ‘Enable "Ok Google" to start a voice search’. I played around with it a little while writing this blog post and the success rate is not very impressive, the voice search recognized only half of the commands correctly. You have to speak very clearly and define words carefully to get good results. It’s nice that for some search results – I think where Knowledge Graph is involved – you also get a female voice reading back some information from the top hit. Performance-wise though the feature is slowing down the browser and PC considerably, it’s constantly accessing the CPU to detect voice inputs; at least on my work laptop with the Dev version of Chrome I had to turn this off to recover something resembling normal performance.

New design for Facebook user profiles on iOS

Less than a month passed since the last Facebook update on iOS and the social network already released the next major version. Just like last time, it introduced some changes not mentioned in the official release notes; after status updates, in version 8.0, Facebook redesigned user profiles. The cover photo and name are both larger, and so are the buttons to ‘Message’ and ‘Call’; the snippets of information on the right of the profile picture have been removed in favor of a small activity stream lower on the page, which is collapsed by default and can be expanded by tapping on the ellipsis; the links to ‘About’, ‘Photos’ and ‘Friends’ have been moved further down and redesigned slightly to match the cleaner look of the new profiles. The cover photo has a small Easter Egg: on the top right corner you can see an arrow pointing left; when you tap it, the cover photo bounces, revealing another photo – much like the Camera icon on the iOS 7 lock screen. You can then swipe through more photos – though these are not past cover photos, as one might expect, but photos in which the user is tagged. This time I also noticed an option to ‘Text’ the user, if he added a phone number to the Facebook profile, but that was probably available before. Overall the new profiles look much nicer thanks to more white space and increased contrast.

The Next Web: “Apple understands the difference between a pocket watch and a wrist watch”

I think you will want an iPhone on your arm, and in the beginning it will feel just as awkward as those soldiers must have felt when they first strapped their pocket watches to their wrists. To them, it felt unnecessary and maybe even made them feel a bit self-conscious. But after discovering how much easier it is work time into everything they do, the wrist watch became more than a convenience. It changed the outcome of wars. Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Interesting analogy, but like most analogies it can only go so far: a watch does a single thing, show the time, and very rarely two-three others like date or timer; a smartphone on the other hand performs dozens of separate functions and only grows more complex over time as you add new apps for new needs. Even ‘dumb phones’ could do much-much more than the single task watch. Fitting even a fraction of them on a watch-like device will require much more than just strapping an extra display to your wrist.

Moving away from another Google service, FeedBurner

The shutdown of Google Reader last year made if painfully clear: there are no guarantees that free services will continue to be supported, even if they belong to large corporations like Google. Leadership changes, plans and priorities shift from year to year and some products will end up abandoned, even if they are very important to many people. That seems to be the case with FeedBurner as well; the API has been discontinued a while ago, they don’t have a blog or Twitter account anymore and some people started reporting disruptions in the service. One could say it’s surprising it lasted that long. In any case, I decided not to wait around for the service to be officially closed and to find alternatives for my blog.

There are three main tasks I used FeedBurner for: feed delivery and statistics, email subscriptions and social sharing. While there are plenty of paid solutions for the first two, blogging is just a hobby to me and I don’t have massive amounts of traffic, so it makes no sense to go for a paid-only service like FeedBlitz. After searching around, I settled for FeedPress, which offers a free version with sufficient features for my current needs.

A Metro replacement for Chrome’s New Tab page

As long-time user of Chrome, I generally prefer to keep my browser light, installing as few extensions as possible, for both performance and security and privacy reasons. Apart from a couple heavy-weight must-have add-ons like AdBlock Plus and LastPass, I manage to get around with lighter extensions, user scripts and bookmarklets. There is one area though where a full-featured extension recently became indispensable: the New Tab page! The previous version with Chrome apps and most visited pages was replaced with a giant Google search box, removing direct access to many useful links while basically duplicating the Omnibox functionality. Many users were not happy with the change, but apparently Google knows better, so the old page was completely removed in version 33. While I agree that the old design was more functional, I had actually abandoned it several months ago in favor of an extension called new metroTab. I think it offers a much nicer experience than the current New Tab page in Chrome or than other similar extensions I used in the past, so this seems like a good time to write about it here on the blog.

Chrome New Tab page replaced by metroTab