MyAppleMenu

The Massive-Email-Lists Edition Thursday, July 21, 2016

Polymail Launches iOS App With Contact Profiles, Email Read Receipts, And More, by Mitchel Broussard, MacRumors

Desktop email client Polymail recently launched a new iOS version of its app, focusing on simple and intuitive ways to get users through massive email lists with the same connected and social-minded aspects of the desktop app. Polymail allows users to manage their Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, or other IMAP accounts, through the iOS app, which now syncs automatically with the Mac app as well.

Talking Books

New App By Indigo Creates A Social Platform For Book Lovers, by Jessica Vomiero, Mobile Syrup

These days, there seems to be a social network for every community. Indigo’s latest announcement ensures that avid readers aren’t left out of the fun.

Reco is the first iOS app to be released by the book giant Indigo and offers a social platform for readers to connect, talk and give recommendations about books they’ve read to each other.

Worldreader Launches 'Read To Kids' App, by IANS

As part of its Read to Kids educational programme, global non-profit organisation Worldreader on Wednesday launched here it's Read to Kids mobile app to help parents and teachers tell stories to children below six years of age.

Tap Tap Tap

SwiftKey Launches New Emoji-Predicting Keyboard App 'Swiftmoji', by Mitchel Broussard, MacRumors

Called Swiftmoji, the app runs a crowdsourced usage data algorithm to begin suggesting its users specific emoji characters when they send text messages, with the app set to eventually learn each user's preferences and recommend frequently-used emoji above those hardly ever sent in a message.

With Just Three Keys, Keyboard Manages To Make Typing More Complicated, by Carli Velocci, Gizmodo

Learning how to efficiently type on a QWERTY keyboard is tough enough for many of us, but one Reddit user decided to make the process even more complicated thanks to a three-button binary keyboard.

End Of P2P

Skype Sets A Course For The Cloud, Abandoning Older Operating Systems On The Way, by Blair Hanley Frank, IDG News Service

Skype is leaving behind its peer-to-peer roots and going all in on the cloud. While the popular messaging app made it this far by facilitating connections between computers for video calls and other communications, it’s moving to a cloud architecture that is supposed to improve performance and expand the service’s capabilities. [...]

With that transition comes the end of support for some legacy platforms. [...] The service won’t support iPads and iPhones running anything older than iOS 8.

Peak App

Exploring The App Store’s Top Grossing Chart, by Graham Spencer, MacStories

If you regularly browse the App Store's Top Charts most of these results would likely serve to confirm what you had already assumed. Most obviously, if you were to randomly pick an app from the Top 200 Grossing charts, chances are extremely high that you would pick a free app with IAPs and it would most likely be a game. But what is particularly suprising is the degree to which free apps with IAP dominate the charts with essentially no paid apps or no apps without IAPs.

Mossberg: I Just Deleted Half My iPhone Apps. You Should Too., by Walt Mossberg, Recode

You very likely have too many apps, taking up precious space, and you should ruthlessly kill off the ones you don’t use or need. Maybe you, too, can cut 54 percent of them and gain back 24 percent more free space.

But this isn’t one of those columns about digital housecleaning or how to free up more space on your iPhone, valuable as those are. It’s easier to save space by offloading most photos, video and music to the cloud anyway. No, this column is really about the fact that I think the novelty of the app itself has worn off. We’ve reached peak app.

Stuff

LiquidText For iPad Review: All You Need For Deep Research Projects, by Jackie Dove, Macworld

LiquidText, an iPad-only app, seeks to impose some order in the new chaos of gathering and referencing information, with an innovative interactive interface that, in version 2, allows you to integrate multiple documents on one screen.

It May Be A One-trick Pony, But It's A Nifty One-trick Pony For Final Cut Pro X Users, by Aaron Lee, Apple World Today

Conner Productions's Seal is a one trick pony, but it's a pretty nifty trick. It's a professional template to make introductory seal titles for Apple's Final Cut Pro X (FCP X). And it's free.

Letterpress Arrives On The Mac, by Preshit Deorukhkar, Beautiful Pixels

It features the same familiar interface and the same delightful animations seen the iOS app. If you’re an existing player, you can sign in with your account and continue playing your games here as well.

Notes

Not Everything Is As It Memes, by Dave Pell, Medium

I’m going to tell you a story that will dash your expectations. And you’ll thank me for it.

Fred Barley was a homeless black teen who had set up camp in Barnesville, Georgia. If you only view life through the prism of current headlines, you know how this story goes. But wait. Here’s where we smash the meme and remind ourselves that there is a world beyond the headlines; one that is quite often much more hopeful than the one described above the fold.

Wal-Mart, America's Largest Grocer, Is Now Selling Ugly Fruit And Vegetables, by Maria Godoy, NPR

Over the past few years, so-called ugly fruit and vegetables have been gaining a host of admirers.

Now, Wal-Mart has officially joined the bandwagon. Starting this week, America's largest grocer says it is piloting sales of weather-dented apples at a discount in 300 of its stores in Florida. If this were one of those Hollywood movies where the mousy girl gets a dramatic makeover, this would probably be the scene where she gets asked to the prom (minus the sexist subtext).

Bottom of the Page

If Apple is not satisfied with the in-app purchases money coming in from Pokémon Go, and they shouldn't, Apple should really help out to get the game onto Apple Watch. And add a fourth Activity Ring that counts, say, the number of Pokémons caught.

Okay, I am kidding about that last part.

~

Thanks for reading.