The Cross Post action takes a draft (or a prompt in Launch Center Pro) and automatically posts it to both Twitter and App.net.

Drafts

Before running Cross Post, make sure you open up the code after you import it and change “USERNAME” at the very end of it to your own specific Twitter username, otherwise the action will give an error.

Direct Import Link for Cross Post Action

Launch Center Pro

Porting the Cross Post action to Launch Center Pro was surprisingly more complex than I expected. Launch Center does not have support for posting to App.net, so we will use Drafts for that instead. Furthermore, Launch Center does not sustain variables across actions, meaning that we would have to have an input prompt for the Tweet action, and then another prompt for the Post to App.net action. Ultimately it becomes far easier to just write the prompt once and send it to Drafts to manipulated, where the same text can be reused.

Since we start in LCP, it seems logical that we would want to end there as well, so the Drafts actions will end with a callback to return to Launch Center. This complicates things, however, because Drafts has an issue with rushing through actions when they are all performed in-app. In other words, if we do this all in a single action, as would seem logical, first cross posting with the Cross Post action, then chaining back to Launch Center in the callback, Drafts will run past the Cross Post action before it actually finishes, triggering the callback and launching LCP before the task has actually successfully posted to both networks. In order to compensate for this odd behavior, we have to split the action into two different ones. The first action will Post to App.net, then chain back and call the second action. The second action will Tweet, then chain back and launch LCP. This method will properly delay Drafts long enough for it to complete both actions before launching LCP again.

Here are the necessary actions:

Launch Center Pro Actions

Direct Import Link for Cross Post Action

Drafts Actions:

Direct Import Link for launchpro-crosspost Action

Direct Import Link for launchpro-crosspost2 Action

The Parse In Fantastical Action takes a draft (or Launch Center Pro prompt) and sends it to Fantastical to be parsed. You can parse a single event or multiple events using the same action.

Drafts

If you want to parse a list of events, leave one completely blank line between each event in your draft. Type each event in natural language as you would if you were typing it directly into Fantastical.

Direct Import Link for Parse In Fantastical Action

Launch Center Pro

In Launch Center Pro, each line is set up as a new event, so do not leave a blank line between events. The LCP prompt is set up as [prompt-list]. This prompt replaces newlines with commas, which is why we require a Pythonista script to change the comma separated events sent from Launch Center into their own individual lines, then sends those to Drafts and run the Parse In Fantastical action to parse them one by one. If you don’t have Pythonista, or don’t want to have to run a script each time you add a single event, Launch Center Pro has a Fantastical action to import a single event which you can find in the Action Composer. If you want to be able to parse multiple events, use this one.

Launch Center Pro Action:

Direct Import Link for Parse In Fantastical Action

Pythonista Script:

Make sure to name your script “Parse In Fantastical” or change your LCP action to match if you choose to name it something else.

import webbrowser
import urllib
import sys

events = sys.argv[1]
i = 0
while i < len(events):
    if events[i] == ',':
        events = events[0:i] + '\n\n' + events[i+1:len(events)]
    i += 1

events = events.encode('utf-8')
events = urllib.quote(events, safe='')

base = 'drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=' + events + '&action=Parse%20In%20Fantastical'


webbrowser.open(base)

The first action ever posted to The Axx, it makes sense for the new Import Actions to be the first ones posted to The (new) Axx as well. These actions simply make importing new actions a lot easier by allowing you to type out the actions clearly in either Drafts or (now) Launch Center Pro instead of using the ugly and difficult to navigate new action area of Drafts. Once you’ve typed them out in a more friendly environment, just run an import action to have them automatically imported into your action list or Launch Center Pro setup.

The Import Actions action, for Drafts, allows you to import an infinite list of actions into your Drafts action list. If you are only importing a single action, just make sure your first line is the title for the action, and your second line is the code itself. If you are importing multiple actions, group them in sets of two lines in the same format as the single action would be, but separate each pair of lines with one completely blank line.

Drafts Actions

Import Actions requires two actions to be installed. The first is the actual Import Actions action, which you will run to import your actions. The second is the importURL action, which does the actual importing. importURL is the only one actually necessary if you are only importing a single action, but having them both keeps things simple. The Import Actions action includes an “allowEmpty=NO” parameter to stop the recursive action when it tries to run on a blank draft, bringing the sequence to an end once all the actions in the list have been imported.

Drafts

Here are direct import links for the Drafts Import Actions Action:

Direct Import Link for Import Actions Action

Direct Import Link for Import URL Action

Launch Center Pro

Launch Center Pro does not support x-callback-url in their /import URL scheme, but if you have a single action you want to build in Drafts and import into LCP, you can do so by importing the following Drafts action and typing your LCP action in the same format displayed above. Just remember to use Launch Center Pro variables instead of Drafts variable tags.

Direct Import Link for Import LCP Action

Launch Center Pro Actions

If you prefer to write your actions from Launch Center Pro, then import them into Drafts, or write your LCP actions in the same manner as you write Drafts action, but keep it contained in LCP, you can do so with the following Launch CEnter PRo actions.

Drafts

Make sure you have the Import Actions action from above installed in Drafts, then run this action in LCP. The action will give you two prompts, the first is for the title of your action, the second is for the action URL. Hit Launch from the second prompt and the rest should happen automatically. When complete, the callback will send you back to Launch Center Pro.

Direct Import Link for Import Drafts Action Action

Launch Center Pro

Run this action to get the same prompts as for the Drafts version, but they will cause an LCP action to be imported. It would probably be easier to just use the built in action composer in Launch Center, as it’s much more versatile than the one in Drafts, but I’ve provided this option anyway, just in case.

Direct Import Action for Import LCP Action Action

Yesterday marked the release of the long awaited Tweetbot for iOS 7 update. Tweetbot 3 is a radical divergence from the classic Tapbots robot-inspired design language. No longer do we power on our friendly robot bird assistant for our daily dose of tweets. Instead our old friend has shed much of his armor, still clearly the same bird, but perhaps more human after all.

They say the early bird catches the worm, but despite the efforts of Twitterrific and the official Twitter client to get their updates for iOS 7 out of the gate quickly, Tweetbot 3 has been worth the wait. More than just a fresh coat of paint, Tweetbot 3 has introduced an entirely new design language based on Tapbots developer Paul Haddad’s custom physics engine. While the UI as a whole may appear flattened out in true iOS 7 style, Haddad’s engine makes every object feel more real than the fake buttons and sliding panels of the old bot ever did. Photos flip and twirl off screen based on the direction and speed with which you swipe them, avatar circles bounce onto screen while the background shrinks back and blurs when you switch accounts, options fold out into view when you tap on a tweet, and much more. By leaving the heavy robotics behind, Tweetbot 3 is faster, more responsive, and more beautiful than ever.

Tweetbot hasn’t completely flown the coop though. While it may be sporting a brand new UI, fancy physics engine and adorable new icon, the Tweetbot we all know and love has in no way been diminished. Above all else, this is the most impressive thing Tapbots has managed to pull off with Tweetbot 3. The moment you open the app you will see how different it is, but the moment you use the app, you will realize that it’s fundamentally the same. Very much akin to how iOS 7 is still the iOS we’ve always known and loved, but at the same time something completely new and different, Tweetbot 3 at it’s most basic level is still Tweetbot. The way it moves though, the way it responds so quickly and so gracefully, and the new way it speaks all go to show that this is a Tweetbot evolved to a higher state. Suffice it to say, the new Tweetbot rules the roost for the best iOS 7 Twitter app, by far.

But trying to describe Tweetbot through words alone is a wild goose chase. Here is a quick glance at some of the main changes between the Tweetbot of old and its new evolution.

The main timeline view of Tweetbot 3 has been lightened to fit the standard iOS 7 style. Gradients and fat, buttony buttons have been exchanged for lighter off-whites and thinner icons. The status bar has been integrated into the main title bar, and profile pictures are now circles instead of rounded rectangles. Unread posts are signified in the tab bar by small blue dots instead of thick blue bars, and the icon of the current tab is highlighted blue. Your personal profile picture has moved to replace the accounts icon, and the timeline button is no longer a button to access your lists. Instead, lists are now an option for the customizable tab bar buttons, which remain the last two in the row. Tap and hold on these icons to see the options to choose from bounce up into a column from the bottom. You can swipe to the left on any tweet to see the entire conversation, or tap on one to see the same options to respond, retweet, favorite, etc. as the old Tweetbot had. When you tap on a tweet it is highlighted dark grey as the options fold out underneath. The triple tap to reply gesture is for the birds in Tweetbot 3, but since this means Tweetbot no longer needs to wait to see if you’re going to tap multiple times, it can respond far quicker to your first tap, constituting much of the app’s new feeling of greater responsiveness.

Conversation view, revealed by swiping to the left on any tweet, is very nicely redesigned. The tweet you swiped to get there is displayed in the same black color as any selected tweet, with the action menu directly below it, and the previous tweets in the conversation below that. I love the new emphasis on retweets and favorites. Always buried within submenus on Tweetbot 2, now they are both displayed prominently within the selected tweet. You can tap the retweets button to see retweets within the app, but the favorites button will launch the web browser to show the tweet in Favestar. A swipe right gesture from the left edge will bring you back to the timeline when you’re finished.

The new profile view is possibly my favorite part of the app. Instead of the old model of placing the account username and description beneath the background photo, Tweetbot 3 instead overlays this info on top of it. This saves a significant amount of space, meaning you no longer have to scroll down to access a users tweets from their profile view, but the best part comes from swiping down from any point in the profile view (assuming the profile in question has a background photo). I’ll let you try it yourself to see what it does, but I was delighted by it, and played with the effect for a few minutes the first time I experienced it.

Instead of the old modal window from Tweetbot 2, tapping the accounts button in the top left in Tweetbot 3 now triggers a beautiful animation, blurring the background and zooming it back behind the darker interface for picking between your accounts. The account bubbles and names all slide from the right to the left of the screen, and bounce when they hit the left edge. The animation is beautiful, but I switch accounts quite a lot, so it’s a little too slow for my tastes.

When composing a new message in Tweetbot 3, it’s no longer necessary to pull down on the text box to view the contents of the message you are responding to. (The Tweetbot 2 screenshot above was taken while swiping down and holding so that the contents of the message I was replying to, normally hidden above the top of the frame, was visible.) Instead, the whole conversation before your reply is displayed between the text box and the keyboard so that you can easily check it and remember what exactly was being said. The view does feel a little cluttered now, but the added information seems worth the small sacrifice. The buttons above the keyboard for suggesting usernames or hashtags as you type them has been tweaked to fit the new UI as well. Thankfully, the odd symbols that Tweetbot 2 used for hashtags and at mentions, which always confused me, have been replaced by large “@” and “#” symbols, eliminating the issue. (These symbols show up above the keyboard when a username or hashtag is not being displayed.) It’s also a great relief to finally have access to the iOS 7 keyboard in Tweetbot, as being stuck on the old keyboard was my biggest annoyance with having to wait for the new app the last few weeks.

Here’s a photo I cobbled together from screenshots of both apps showing a few of the new design aspects I mentioned above more closely, as well as some I didn’t discuss. The new loading animation is much more subtle and nice looking, although I admittedly miss the sound effect that the old one made, which had always been one of my favorites in the app. Speaking of sound effects, they’re all new as well, and while I definitely do like the new ones, I loved the old Tweetbot noises as well, so overall it will just take some time to adjust. I don’t think either set is necessarily better than the other, but the new one does sound a bit less robotic, fitting in with the rest of the app.

One of my other favorite changes to Tweetbot 3 is the new graphic for how many unread tweets remain in my timeline. Instead of the thick bar obscuring a good portion of the top tweet in my timeline, I now get a far smaller and simpler little tab at the top right of the timeline. Tapping the tab will still dismiss it just like swiping up on the bar did in Tweetbot 2.

An aspect of the design I don’t particularly like, verified users now receive blue checkmarks on their profile picture at all times, even inside of the timeline. This information seems superfluous, I don’t usually need to be reminded that someone I follow is verified every time they tweet. I hope Tapbots will remove this in the next update.

Overall, Tweetbot 3 is an incredible update to our favorite flying friend. While many developers flocked to simple, visual redesigns which were mostly no more than a new skin on their old app, Tapbots has taken a much different approach. Instead of prioritizing speed over functionality, Tapbots took its time and released a product that they could truly be proud of. Our little bird has spread its wings, evolving into the form it was meant to be, and I can’t wait to see where it flies from here.

You can get Tweetbot 3 on the App Store, and for a limited time, it’s on sale for only $2.99.

Yesterday’s Apple Event introduced a host of new products: Mavericks, iLife, iWork, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, iPad Air and iPad Mini. Many of these products displayed incredible leaps forward, and after the event the Internet was abuzz with discussion of the new features, designs, price tags and release dates. However, amongst all the new releases Apple announced yesterday, all the revolutionary innovations and rejuvenating iterations, there was one new feature that went largely under the radar: Apple quietly announced a huge simplification of consumer choice, greatly reducing the difficult decisions that the average consumer must make when deciding whether to purchase an Apple product, and which Apple product to purchase.

MacBooks

Before yesterday’s event (▼)(▲)And technically continuing for certain products until the new models are released., if you’re a consumer looking to purchase an Apple product, you have an intimidating amount of decisions which you must make before pulling the trigger, and once that trigger is pulled, there’s basically no going back. If you’re looking to purchase a MacBook, you have to decide between the Pro and the Air. Each comes with a variety of advantages and disadvantages that may be difficult for the average consumer to make, or possibly even completely over their head. The best MacBook Pros have retina displays, something that anyone who owns a recent model of iPhone or iPad may find difficult to go without. However, that retina display comes with a price tag at least $500 more than the basic MacBook Air. If you’re willing to forgo the retina display to save the money, you can get an older model MacBook Pro, which is a few hundred dollars cheaper, but far thicker and heavier because it still ships with a SuperDrive which you likely never need to use anymore. Furthermore, it’s running on much older technology. Do you really want to spend over a thousand dollars to purchase a machine that is already slightly obsolete, and will only become more so in the near future? Then there’s one more issue to consider: battery life. If you buy a MacBook Pro, no matter what model, it is going to have significantly lower battery life than the MacBook Air. So perhaps a MacBook Air is the better idea, but then you lose the retina display and the processing power of the Pro models…

These are the types of decisions that every potential new Macbook owner had to make until yesterday. A spiderweb of complexity and choosing between tradeoffs. How could you ever know if you’re going to desperately need longer battery life, or if you’re going to really want that extra processing power, or just how much you will miss not having a retina display? Well yesterday, Apple launched a massive offensive on the variety and difficulty of these decisions. The new MacBook Pros with retina displays now have significantly improved battery life, the 15 inch models claiming eight or more hours and the 13 inch models boasting at least nine. This battery life, while still not quite as good as that of the longest lasting MacBook Airs, is competent enough to be negligible on your decision. The price of all retina MacBook Pro models has dropped by $200, and all but one non-retina model has been eliminated. Basically, if you absolutely know that you will need a SuperDrive for some reason, you should buy the non-retina model, but for everyone else, $100 extra is not very much when you’d already be spending $1,200 on the non-retina Pro: another tough decision vanquished. If you’re an average consumer looking to buy a MacBook, now you only have a few things you need to think about: size, resolution, and power. If you know you want the smallest device possible: 11 inch Air. If you want the biggest: 15 inch Pro. If you don’t care about size, or you want the middle range, now you choose based on resolution: want retina? 13 inch Pro. If you don’t care about that either, its just down to power. If you don’t need a work horse for processor intensive tasks, go for the Air. If you do, go for the Pro. The beauty of this new decision making process is not only that it is simpler, but that each decision is exponentially easier, because there are virtually no tradeoffs. No longer must you agonize about whether or not you are going to need longer battery life, whether that extra power is worth paying hundreds of extra dollars for, or if buying outdated hardware is a good middle ground. Your decisions are simple and easy, and best of all, if you end up making the wrong one, it’s highly unlikely that your mistake will be fatal. Your battery dying in a place where you desperately need your Mac but don’t have access to power could signify a huge mistake in your purchase, but now batteries are similar enough that that case would probably have occurred no matter what model you bought. If you purchase a 15 inch and you decide you should have bought a 13, not really that huge a deal.

iWork

You’re an average consumer, and you just bought a new Mac for thousands of dollars. You open it and want to dive in and get to work, but you come to the realization that it comes with very little preinstalled software for some of the most basic tasks like word processing, spreadsheet making, etc. Now you have another decision to make: Microsoft Office or iWork? Either one is going to cost, but Office is better known. Now you’re going to spend over $100 more (or sign up for a $20/month subscription) to buy Microsoft’s software for your Apple hardware. On the other hand, you could purchase iWork, which you are probably less experienced with, and then have to waste time learning how to work these new apps. Well as of yesterday, these decisions too have been hugely simplified. iWork is now completely free. While it may not have been worth spending money on new applications and then trying to learn them when you could have just bought Office and gotten to work, now you’re deciding between a $20/month subscription or a completely free, fully featured productivity suite which also comes with free apps for your iPhone and iPad, and syncs automatically and flawlessly between the three devices. Oh and you can access all documents online for free from any computer in the world. Is this even a decision anymore? (▼)(▲)Furthermore, since people will actually be using iWork apps now, maybe Apple will update them more frequently than every five years.

iLife

iLife already comes preinstalled on new Macs, but now you can view and edit your projects on your iOS devices too. Just one more reason to stay within Apple’s ecosystem for all your technological needs.

Mac OS X

In past releases of Mac OSX, many people chose not to update despite it only being twenty or thirty dollars. Their Mac functioned just fine, so there wasn’t necessarily much point. OS X adoption was still very strong, but not as strong as it could be. This year, Apple made the decision as easy as it could seemingly get. You now have the option to get the newest and most advanced desktop operating system completely for free. I can think of no reason that the average consumer would not want to do that. (▼)(▲)This could also be bad news for Microsoft, now the only company still selling an operating system.

iPads

The greatest area in which Apple has eliminated difficult consumer choices is in regard to buying an iPad. Previously, if you wanted an iPad, you had to decide between the full size iPad and the iPad Mini, but this choice could get quite difficult. The full size iPad ran Apple’s A6 SoC, state of the art until last month’s iPhone event. The iPad Mini, however, ran the notably slower two-year-old A5 chip. Furthermore, the Mini still maintained a non-retina display, something that is a much bigger deal on tablet devices than it is on laptops. Particularly in regard to running iOS 7, many iPad Mini owners reported the new OS really brought the A5 chip to its limits, and that the new, thinner UI was really made for a retina display. If you purchased an iPad Mini, there was no doubt going to be difficult tradeoffs. The full size iPad, on the other hand, may have housed state of the art technology and powered a retina display, but it was far heavier and thicker, making for a significantly worse experience when trying to use it with only one hand. The bigger screen as well could be a bit too much than some people needed. When purchasing a device that becomes so ingrained in your life, these decisions become exceedingly difficult to make.

With yesterday’s Apple event, more than with anything else described above, Apple has simplified the choice between which iPad to buy to as small a level as it possibly could. The iPad Mini made a huge jump forward, completely skipping the A6 chip to now power the top of the line A7, as well as the M7 motion co-processor chip introduced with the iPhone 5S last month. At the same time, it also received a retina display, and all of this with no effect on battery. The Mini did become 0.3 millimeters thicker, and 29 grams heavier, but the highly upgraded internals and retina display make up for the increase.

The full size iPad made similarly incredible leaps, but in different areas. Now dubbed the “iPad Air”, this new iPad shaved off a full 28% of its weight, dropping from 1.4 pounds to only one. At the same time, the iPad Air is now 20% thinner than its predecessor, making it only 7.5 millimeters thin. The bezel on either side of the iPad Air has also been reduced, and the taper changed to match the new form factor introduced with the iPad Mini last year. That means the iPad Air has become an overall smaller device in every dimension except hight, while still maintaining the same screen size, the same retina display, the same battery life, and of course being upgraded to the state of the art A7 SoC, and the M7 motion co-processor. That apple managed to decrease the size, weight and width of the iPad Air, while at the same time greatly increasing the power of its processor, and having no effect on battery life, is truly magical. Unlike the shift from the iPad 2 to the iPad 3 (or the iPad Mini to the iPad Mini 2), where size and weight were sacrificed for graphics and power, the new iPad Air is, amazingly, a completely uncompromising device. This is the kind of thing that only Apple can do.

So what do these new iPads mean for the average consumer trying to make a choice between them? It means that that choice has been ground down, in classic Apple fashion, to the simplest, most basic possibility: screen size. The internals on both iPad models are identical, the size and weight are comparable. The only thing you need to decide on is whether you want a bigger one or a smaller one. This amazing, no compromise approach clearly shows that Apple doesn’t consider the iPad Mini a second class citizen. No longer is the big iPad the flagship model, they both are. This is also fantastic for less tech-savvy consumers. Trying to explain to someone who doesn’t know much about technology that one iPad has a slower processor and less pixels is difficult, but now Apple store employees can simply say, “do you want the big one or the small one?”

With yesterday’s Apple event, not only did the tech giant release a host of revolutionary new products, but they also made huge strides towards improving the difficulty consumers face when choosing what devices to purchase or what software to buy. If you want an Apple product, no longer is it necessary to make compromises based on models or money, resulting in a poorer experience in some manner depending on which model you choose. If you purchase a MacBook, you’re going to have the amazing Mac experience with incredible battery life no matter what model you pick, so deciding on power, size and resolution is far easier than before. Once you own your Mac or iOS device, the problem of getting powerful software on it no longer exists, because Apple provides everything you need to be up and running free of charge. Deciding if upgrades to your Mac are worth the price or not, regardless of how low, is now completely negligible, because there is no price. Finally, the decision of which iPad to buy is now hugely simplified to the easiest, and most obvious decision of screen size. It may be hard for us Apple nerds to decide what we want in advance, but for people to walk into a store once both models are available and hold one in each hand, it’s going to be a much easier choice now that all the compromises have been removed.

All things considered, yesterday’s Apple event was revolutionary in more ways than are easily visible. It was an event to be remembered.

A few days ago, the guys at Shipp, along with a few others, released their new app, Skim, on the App Store. While still a young app, the idea behind Skim is really interesting. In wake of the recent Snapchat craze, Skim is taking advantage of the cultural interest in self-destructive exchanges and trying to apply that to text messaging. While Snapchat has always supported text as well, the design has never been very friendly, placing an ugly black bar with white text across your photo, and it limits the amount of text you can actually write. While the implementation of text in Snapchat could probably be improved, the problem of being able to write more text really cannot. Disregarding the fact that Snapchat is primarily a photo app anyway, and having more text on top of your picture doesn’t make a lot of sense, this would be a problem regardless because the time people take to read the text is going to vary so greatly that their simple time intervals of 1 to 10 seconds would no longer work. It only takes a moment to understand a picture, but it takes far longer to read text. Skim has solved this problem with an implementation that functions fantastically, while still maintaining an incredibly beautiful design.

Instead of following Snapchat, allowing users to choose from an assortment of predefined time intervals, which wouldn’t make sense in a text based app, Skim has the option for the receiver to choose between slow, medium or fast text speeds. The default is medium, and that works fine for me. When you receive a message, you will get a push notification which takes you to Skim, but does not immediately open the message. This is a smart choice, as you may not be quite ready to read when you hit the notification, and since messages self-destruct as you read them, you need to be prepared to do so or risk missing the message completely. Once you are in the app and a message is awaiting you, tap on the cell and the entire interface will slide off to the left as the message slides on behind it. You now have a few moments to begin reading before the message begins to self-destruct (I believe it is one second on medium speed). This is where Skim really shines. Instead of just giving you a set amount of time to read the message, then deleting it, messages in Skim begin to slowly fade away from the beginning to the end. Each letter disappears as if someone is erasing it bit by bit. The effect is beautiful, and the metaphor makes so much sense in regard to what the app is all about. Instead of reading your message and then assuming it has been deleted when it goes away, you are literally watching out of the corner of your eye as your message is being erased above the point at which you are reading.

The speed you have chosen in settings determines how quickly the text fades away, but even when set to fast I have no problem reading my messages in time. For slower readers, I would be surprised if medium or slow went by too fast for them. Once you’ve finished reading the message, it isn’t necessary to wait until the animation completes to reply, you can tap the reply button at the top right corner at any time you want to begin typing your response. When you tap the reply button, the screen slides to the left again, giving the whole interface a nice feeling of being set within three panes: the main area with all of your conversations listed, the second pane where you read messages, and the third pane when you reply. When you finish your reply, the screen slides to the right to bring you back to the main view, which makes sense again since the secondary view self-destructed, and thus, no longer should be between the other two. One feature I think would benefit the app even more would be the ability to swipe to the left from the right edge to move from the main view to the reading view, or the reading view to the replying view. The app is set around these three views so well that I think something along those lines would fit in completely naturally. The one piece of the app at odds with this metaphor of horizontal movement is the settings screen, which slides up from the bottom when you tap the gear in the top left corner of the main screen. I think it would be far more natural if settings was positioned as a fourth pane that was off to the left instead of the right, and it could be accessible from a left-to-right swipe. On the other top corner of the main view is a pencil icon to send a new message. Tapping that also brings a view up from the bottom, but this makes more sense because it is another view, just like the main view, to begin a conversation from. Once you pick a friend to send a message to, the screen slides left again to reveal the compose message panel as it naturally should. Maybe my settings suggestion is nit-picky, but as it is, swipe-right gestures are completely nonexistent in the app, and with the iOS 7 system wide swipe-right-from-left-edge gesture to go back, it would seem natural for a horizontal sliding app like Skim to access settings in this manner instead of only with the small button in the top left.

Within settings, your choices are pretty sparse, which makes sense for such a simple app. You have choices of Account, Friends, Text Speed or Notifications, then below those are options to see the About page, send feedback, or sign out. Within account the only options are to set your first and last name, or change your profile picture. Accounts themselves are drawn, when you first open the app, from either Facebook or Twitter, so the lack of a lot of options here isn’t too odd, but the account screen in settings still seems a bit sparse, leaving too much white space.

The second view in settings is Friends. Tapping this brings you to a list view of all your current friends in the app. At the top of the list are buttons to switch between confirmed friends and people requesting to be your friend, the latter also including pending requests of your own to others. Each friend you have is displayed as a list item, and you can swipe across any of these items to reveal options to delete the friend or send them a message (skim them? Send them a skim?). These are the same options available in the main view when you swipe conversation cells to the left, giving the whole app a nice and cohesive UI. An odd omission from the friends screen is the ability to actually add friends. This can only be achieved from the main view by tapping the new message icon. That reveals a screen displaying all your confirmed friends in a list, as well as a text field at the top to search for new friends by name. Once you find them you can request them, but you can’t actually send them a message until they confirm. The list of friends will also include Facebook friends or people you follow on Twitter, depending on which account you linked, who you haven’t yet friended, providing a quicker way of requesting people you’re more likely to be chatting with. Once your friends have confirmed your requests you can message them, and they will appear back in your friends list in settings. I do find it a bit odd that, while everyone’s accounts on Skim are created from their accounts on Twitter or Facebook, there are no links back to these accounts, so there is no way to get information on who a person is except through their profile pictures and names. It would be really nice if Skim would search for what apps you had installed on your phone, and then provide a quick link to view someone’s profile in Facebook or Twitter. For a really nice feature, they might even look for Tweetbot or Twitterrific, and let you open profiles in those as well.

The third view in settings, Text Speed, is very straightforward. It displays three large cells, each with a circle inside with the words “Slow”, “Medium” or “Fast”. Simply tap anywhere in any cell to select that option. There is no further indication of the exact speed which each option will erase content at.

The last option in settings, Notifications, is just a checklist of what you wish to receive notifications from Skim for. It includes the option to receive a notification if a friend takes a screenshot of a message you send them. Unlike in Snapchat, you do not have to hold a finger down on the screen or do anything else to allow you to take a screenshot. All the notifications are on by default. I do wish Skim would add support for in-app notifications, because if you receive a new message while in Skim your phone will buzz, but there is no other way to know the nature of the message without returning to the main view and looking for which friend has a blue circle on the side of their conversation cell, indicating a new message is awaiting you.

If I could add one more setting to Skim, it would be the option to change the font size in the compose screen. The current font size, which you cannot change, is far too big for my liking, and the margins on either side are too big as well. This is my own personal preference of course, but I think this font size is a bit too big for the average user in general, and an option in settings would be nice.

Overall, Skim is a beautiful app which focuses on doing one thing well: creating an environment for self-destructing conversations. Skim claims on the website that such conversations are more akin to real life conversations, in which you never have a back up and must always live in the moment of. Skim’s graphical way of displaying the destruction of your messages, by fading them out as you read, is beautiful and functional, and it’s my favorite part of the app. Skim is still young, and I hope they fix a few of the issues I brought up above, but overall, if the idea of “conversational freedom” appeals to you, or you just want to play around with and experience the great design, you should check Skim out. You can grab Skim for free on the App Store.

Last Friday marked exactly three weeks since I waited in line outside my local Apple Store and purchased my 32 GB iPhone 5S in Space Gray. (▼)Yep, I’m going with the capital S. Since that morning I’ve had my fingerprint scanned hundreds of times, taken hundreds of photos, slo-mo’d quite a few videos, used the flash once, and caught myself staring at the device an embarrassingly large amount of times. All in all, I believe I’ve had enough experience with the iPhone 5S by this time that my opinions on it are appropriately solidified.

The Design

This may be old news for most, since the iPhone 5S comes with almost the same design as the previous iPhone 5, but I upgraded from an iPhone 4S so it’s all fairly new to me, and there are still a few differences in the new model from the old.

The iPhone 5S is beautiful. From the lighter, slimmer profile to the shining chamfer edges, to the mysterious recessed black circle at the bottom center of the device, no detail has been overlooked in the iPhone 5S build. That black circle, with the sloping ring surrounding it and the rounded rectangle icon of previous iPhones removed, is far more pleasing to look at. By not breaking the solid black slab-like look of the iPhone's face with the white icon, the phone is even more elegant than previous models have been. Furthermore, the choice of Space Gray instead of the Slate Gray of the iPhone 5 makes an extraordinary difference. The contrast from the pitch black glass top and bottom on the phone’s back to the Space Gray aluminum center is stunning. The diamond cut chamfer around the whole picture catches the light brilliantly, adding another contrasting color on the other side of the glass. While I wasn’t sure before I bought it if my choice of Space Gray was going to be a good one, I absolutely am now. The gold or silver models cannot look this good.

From a purely aesthetic perspective, the iPhone 5S design seems almost perfect, but there are a few objections I have with the design when going beyond simple outward appearances. Most notably, the home button on the 5S has changed not only in look, but in feel from older models. It seems to be far more, for lack of a better word, clicky. While older iOS devices required only the slightest tap, and moved almost imperceptibly downwards, the button on the 5S requires a little more force, then makes a much more powerful click with a further downward movement. This change wasn’t to my liking right off the bat, but I figured it was just because I was used to the old version. Three weeks later, however, while I am a lot more accustomed to the new button’s feel, and it doesn’t particularly bother me, I still much prefer the function of the older iPhone home buttons.

Touch ID

Speaking of the home button on the iPhone 5S, it does quite a bit more than just click harder. Built into the button is a fully functional fingerprint scanner, and this feature is used to unlock the iPhone 5S, as well as to make purchases from the iTunes or App Store without needing to type in a password. Touch ID has been hailed by tech bloggers as incredible and almost flawless in function, many reporting estimated success rates of over 95% of tries.

I love Touch ID on my 5S, but unfortunately, I can’t claim to be seeing quite as high of a success rate on unlocking. Immediately upon getting the phone I was having some issues with Touch ID. It worked fairly well, and was (and is) undeniably more convenient than typing in a passcode to unlock, but it wasn’t quite as magical as I had been expecting based on early reviews. I tried rescanning my finger, and even using two different scans on the same finger, one for the top half and one for the bottom half. The latter actually did seem to work better, but the phone was noticeably slower to unlock. Finally, after 4 or 5 different scans, I got one that worked almost all the time for me. I think that at the very least the scanning process should allow you to scan a little more of your finger than it does.

As time has gone by though, I’ve recently been finding the scanner to be less and less dependable. I can’t be sure, but the best guess I can come up with for this is that the weather is getting colder, and my hands often get dry during the winter seasons. The sensor seems to be far less dependable on drier skin than it was on normal skin. Sure I should probably just put on some hand lotion in the mornings, but that doesn’t change the fact that the scanner should not become less dependable due to such a commonly occurring change in people’s skin throughout each year.

If I seem to be putting Touch ID down too much, don’t get me wrong, I love the technology. It’s far more natural than having to type in a four digit passcode, and it allows me to keep a full password lock on my phone and enable it immediately without being highly annoyed by having to type it in all the time. As great as touch ID is though, there is certainly room for improvement.

The Camera

I think that the number one reason to upgrade to the 5S is the camera. The basic specs may not seem to have been greatly upgraded, so it hasn’t gotten a huge amount of press attention, but the addition of new features like burst mode and slo-mo video have made the camera on the 5S incredible. I’ve been shooting photos and videos with my 5S at youth group (I’m a middle school youth group leader at my church) for the last few weeks, as well as on a weekend retreat we went on last weekend. Here’s a quick video with just a few seconds from one of the slow motion videos I took at the retreat.

One thing I do wish would be added into the camera’s feature set (on the software side) would be the ability to slow down multiple portions of each slo-mo video I take. If I’m recording an entire scene in 120 frames per second, shouldn’t I be able to slow down multiple different portions of that scene?

An even bigger issue at the moment is the complete lack of a good way to move slo-mo footage off of your iPhone. If you try to post your videos to Instagram or share them to Facebook or Youtube, the slow motion effect is removed for no particular reason, and with no warning. Even importing videos from my Mac through iPhoto or Final Cut reduces them back to 30fps and removes the slow motion. It seems really weird that Apple has made it this difficult to get your slow motion footage off of your iPhone. (▼)The ways I’ve managed to do it so far are either through emailing the videos to myself, a slow process which doesn’t work well, if at all, with very large videos, or airdropping the clips to my iPad, then airdropping them back to my iPhone. Either of these methods will result in a 30fps version of your video which still includes the slow motion effect, and therefore can be shared to various services or exported to your Mac.

As I said earlier, I’ve only actually taken one photo with my iPhone’s flash, but even that one photo showed a significant improvement in low light conditions. In fact, I took the photo in complete darkness (it was during a night game at the retreat last weekend and the leaders had to hide), yet the colors appear exactly as they were in real life. An impressive difference to the flash photos from iPhones with the older hardware, which always washed the color out with bright, unnatural white light. The quality of the photo is still not fantastic, it’s not nearly as crisp as photos taken in brighter conditions, but it’s acceptable. Low light photos are still the biggest area for improvement for Apple’s cameras. Here’s the photo to see what I’m talking about.

The final feature of the iPhone 5S camera I’ll touch on, burst mode, is absolutely incredible. This should be one of the flagship features of the new iPhone. While it is referred to as a “mode”, the best part about burst mode is that it’s not something that actually has to be enabled. Simply hold down the shutter button on the iPhone 5S and it automatically begins shooting at a crazy speed of 10 photos per second. Once you finish shooting, all the photos that you took are displayed together in a stack on the camera role. In the top right is a little text saying “Burst” followed by the number of photos in the burst. At the bottom is a “button” (it’s iOS 7, so just text actually) saying “Choose Favorites…” Clicking the button brings up a side swiping list of each photo from the burst. At the bottom of this view are thumbnails, similarly side by side. The display is very reminiscent of the multitasking view in iOS 7. If you swipe on the big photos at the top, they’ll move slowly, one by one. If you swipe the small thumbnails at the bottom, however, they will scroll quickly, and the photos at the top will actually turn into a stop-motion like stream of pictures that look almost like a video. The iPhone’s software automatically picks a few of the photos that it thinks are the best. These are signified by a small dot underneath the thumbnails on the Choose Favorites screen. When scrolling through Choose Favorites, you can tap any of the images to select them as your favorites. You can pick the ones the phone suggests or not, but in my practices I’ve found the choices by the 5S are always pretty accurate. When you’re finished, tap Done and the pictures you chose as favorites are placed in the camera role directly after the burst stack as their own individual photos. If you’re finished with the rest of the burst, scroll back to it and you can delete all of the other pictures at once. The ease of removing all of these photos is great. If you had to go back and select, one by one, all the photos from each burst, it would be far more trouble than it’s worth. Since you can delete all the ones not marked as favorites at once though, and since the whole burst is displayed as only a single photo until you go into the Choose Favorites view, your camera roll will stay uncluttered and easily managed.

One feature I wish burst mode would also have is an automatic prompt to delete the rest of the burst when you finish choosing favorites. As it is, once favorites are chosen you are returned to the full screen photo view on the last favorite chosen, so to delete the rest of the burst you have to scroll back through however many favorites you chose until you get to the full burst, then go through the standard motions to delete. In my experience, any time I decide to pick my favorite photos I always wanted the rest of the burst deleted, so it would be really nice to be able to tell it immediately to delete once I’ve picked the favorites. Most of the time when I don’t want the burst deleted, I don’t bother to pick favorites but just keep the whole burst connected. That’s mostly when I take an action burst, so I can still watch the awesome stop-motion effect of scrolling my finger back and forth through the burst. Here’s one of those action bursts, photos taken straight off the 5S:

Bust mode is an awesome feature, and if you’re on the line of getting a 5S vs a 5C or something else, the mere presence of burst mode (and slo-mo) should push you to get the 5S.

The A7

The iPhone 5S runs Apple's newest processor, the A7 chip, and it is fast. How fast? It’s so fast that when I first started using it I didn’t even realize how fast it was. The utter lack of load times on apps that I was used to waiting seconds for on my 4S made me overlook their existence at all. When I picked my 4S back up and opened an app, all of a sudden this realization hit me. Where my 4S made me wait 1 or 2 seconds just to open a simple app like Tweetbot, Drafts, or Launch Center Pro, apps on the 5S are loaded and awaiting input so quickly that I can barely see the splash screen appear. The change is truly extraordinary. Particularly for apps such as LCP or Drafts, which are completely focused on opening quickly so that you can enter text or run an action as fast is possible, running on the 5S makes the experience ridiculously better. There may only be a difference of about a second, but it's a big difference between a second of load time versus no load time at all. Other apps that took far longer to load on my 4S, such as Pythonista, are now reduced to load times that are at least bearable of only a second or two as opposed to around five.

Conclusion

The iPhone 5S is a truly revolutionary device. The combination of the A7 chip, burst mode, slo-mo video and Touch ID put the 5S far above the competition in regard to speed, security (▼)While Touch ID may not be revolutionary in regard to maximum possible security, as it has already been defeated by some fairly advanced, but not incredibly complex techniques, it is instead revolutionary in regard to increasing the minimum security for the iPhones of the masses. Where previously people, myself included, kept no passcodes on their iPhones at all, or codes that only enabled after very long periods of time because typing them constantly was so inconvenient, now they will enable Touch ID because it's far less of a hassle. Even if Touch ID isn't the most secure way of protecting your phone possible, it is far more secure than having no security measures at all. It also works well enough that people will not get fed up and deactivate it. With Touch ID Apple has started down a path of changing iPhones, in the eyes of would-be common thieves, from easy, unprotected targets to useless, password locked and GPS tracker enabled tickets to trouble., and taking great photos and footage. Before the 5S was released, I heard a lot of people saying that there was no way Apple could make a phone good enough to merit paying an extra $100 to get instead of just buying an iPhone 5, which was so good already that it had reached the point of “good enough.” Apple has answered that challenge with a phone featuring far more powerful internals and far more compelling features than many would have guessed. the iPhone 5S is absolutely the greatest iPhone to date.

A New Beginning

Welcome to Unapologetic, my new foray into the tech blogging industry. My name is Alex Guyot. You may recognize me from previous work at my original website, The Axx. I started The Axx in February of 2013. At that time I had already been following the tech industry for a few years, and starting my own blog to contribute to all the other sources from which I was reading had been a goal of mine for quite a while, I just hadn’t gotten around to pulling the trigger. In all likelihood, I may never have gotten around to pulling that trigger had it not been for Federico Viticci’s insatiable appetite for iOS automation and a little app called Drafts. It was on a Wednesday, the 13th, when I finally got the prompt I needed to incite me to action. It came in the form of a blog post by Federico describing a sequence of Drafts URL actions I had built in response to his challenge, which chained together five different iOS apps, utilizing each to perform a different function on the same original piece of text. After Federico’s post, which had no way of linking back to me except through my Twitter account, and with a host of other action ideas in mind, I realized I needed a place to put them all so I could share them with others. It was time to pursue my ambition to start a tech blog and join the industry.

Even though I received the final motivation to create The Axx because of Drafts and URL actions, I still decided to relegate that aspect of the site to a subpage, known as The Action Page. The home page of my site was reserved for the blog I had been wanting to start for so long. I’ve always had a passion for writing, surpassed only by my passion for technology. Since a technology themed blog evoked a perfect union of the two, I was eager to get going. Once I had made up my mind to begin what would become The Axx, however, I was faced with an issue of impatience.

Starting your first website can be a daunting task, particularly when you have the goals that I was holding for my own: I wanted to write the entire site from scratch by myself, I wanted the design to be beautiful and simple, I wanted dedicated areas for the blog portion and the Drafts actions portion, I wanted an awesome name to represent me which I could also continue to use in future exploits in other areas of the industry, and I wanted it all finished and active within two days. Ultimately, for someone with very little actual hands on experience with HTML and CSS, and who was also in the midst of the last few months of his senior year in high school, all of these goals could not be accomplished in the timeframe I was allowing.

Compromises

So I made compromises. Mainly, I pushed away my goal of writing my entire website from scratch, as there was no way I could get that done quickly, particularly not while maintaining a good looking design. Instead, I went with Squarespace, which I had been hearing about constantly on many of my favorite podcasts. With a fairly generous discount code from The Talk Show in hand, I set to work.

Despite the fact that I really hated having to go with a template based design (there’s just something about writing the code for a project entirely by yourself), I have to hand it to Squarespace, it’s an excellent service. The templates were beautiful, and setting them up was a breeze. More importantly, even though my design was template based, Squarespace allowed for a fantastic amount of customization. Certainly not as much as I truly wanted, but more than any other service I’ve seen that’s anywhere near the same quality. I was able to create a website that was uniquely mine, despite starting from a template that every Squarespace user had access to. Best of all, my entire site was designed and ready to go in a single day. There was only one facet missing: the name.

The title “The Axx” never fully pleased me. It came from my App.net username, which in turn came from the sad fact that I had joined App.net as a fairly early adopter, and had wanted to display that by having a “cool” three letter username. When I sat down to try to think of a great name for my site, I found myself drawing a blank. Axx.net was the only thing I could come up with, and since that domain was taken, I had to throw “The” onto the front. I don’t think The Axx is an inherently bad name, and I don’t think it would be impossible for me to stick with it throughout my future exploits, but the simple fact of the matter is that I have never been fully happy with it. Perhaps this is mostly because, in actuality, “The Axx” means absolutely nothing. Not only does it not relate to what I’m doing, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem (▼)Daring Fireball doesn’t appear to have anything to do with tech either, but it has certainly worked out for John Gruber. Similarly, other notable blogs like inessential, A Very Nice Website, and any blog simply named after the writer (Marco.org, Kottke.org, etc.) have no obvious ties to tech, but that hasn’t prevented them from succeeding. This is not the main issue., but the very word itself is nonsensical. It’s a word that I made up, three letters that I stuffed together seemingly at random. I could never be completely pleased with it because I wanted a title that actually represented my goals for the site. The Axx indeed has served me well, but it has never been that title. (▼)Marco Arment’s discussion on Episode 25 of ATP about a great name being necessary for motivation for your project mirrors my thoughts exactly. As long as I didn’t fully respect my blog’s name, I couldn’t be fully devoted to it, and I couldn’t stop myself from being self conscious about it whenever I described the project to my friends and family. That was simply not sustainable. I knew it wasn’t right at the time, but I also knew that, try as I might, I wasn’t coming up with anything better. Mainly this was because even I wasn’t fully sure what The Axx was, or what it was going to be. I knew I wanted to write a tech blog, and I knew I wanted to post my Drafts actions, but that was it. I was unsure if my writing would be good, I was unsure of exactly what type of tech blog I would become and I was unsure if my new actions would continue to generate interest, or even if I could continue to generate new actions. I was also keenly aware that, at that time, hardly anybody even knew who I was outside of my own home town in Tucson, Arizona. If my endeavor failed, and no one ever took interest in me, all the time I would spend building the site from scratch, thinking of a great name, and writing original content, would ultimately be for little gain. I wanted to make an impact, and I was convinced that the opportunity to make it had just been presented for me by Federico’s article, and that if I didn’t move quickly I would lose that chance. So I compromised on the coding and I compromised on the title. Still, despite my compromises, I managed to start a site that I loved, which I filled with content I was passionate about. My rapid movement did indeed catch the end of the swell of interest Federico had created for me, and I generated a small audience right away. As time went on, I wrote content I was proud of, posted actions people loved to use, got Fireballed and interviewed (and interviewed again), and made connections with all sorts of interesting and awesome people from all across the globe. All in all, I love where The Axx had taken me. I can absolutely, unequivocally call The Axx a resounding success, and even with the beginning of this new site, I don’t plan on bringing my time at The Axx to an end. Instead, I’m forking it. The home page of The Axx may have always been my blog, but really, Drafts actions and iOS automation have always been at the heart of it. So I’ll be moving the writing portion of The Axx over here, which means The Action Page will finally get the position it deserves as the face of the site. The Axx has always been a place for iOS automation, and now it can represent that role more proudly than ever.

An End to Lazy Writing

Despite the reasonable notoriety I received from my writing on The Axx, mainly in the form of the Fireball, I’ve never felt that I put enough effort into it. Particularly as time has gone by, I have grown lazy with my writing. The vast majority is now links with a very small amount of my own content. Link blogging is great, but ultimately, it’s an area that is already well covered by more infamous sources like Daring Fireball, The Loop, A Very Nice Website, and many more. Being just another link blog is not something necessarily impactful on the industry. More importantly, and unsurprisingly, link blogging is not something I’m particularly passionate about. As I stated before, my greatest passions are writing and technology, and I started The Axx as a place to integrate those passions. As The Axx has evolved, I’ve posted less and less original content, and I don’t like that. It's also resulted in my audience plateauing at around 100–200 viewers each day. This is a number that I’m still quite proud of, and I appreciate every person who comes to read my site more than I can say, but it’s also a number I want to grow, and by continuing to follow my current path, that’s not going to happen. (▼)I should emphasize that page views in and of themselves are not a metric I'm interested in. I hate the current obsession of many blogs and news websites to get the maximum number of page views possible by any manner of deplorable techniques, and I will never pursue those routes in a desperate attempt to increase page views. However, while trying to grow the number for the sake of growing the number is not a good practice or idea, the metric is still useful to identify whether or not my site is continuing to see growth based on the one method I do use to increase my page views: writing great content. What I've learned from watching page views at The Axx, and what I know from simple common sense, is that when I write interesting and original content on a regular basis, page views will grow naturally without the need for link bait headlines, ridiculous claims about Apple's impending doom, etc. With Unapologetic, my focus will be entirely on writing content my readers will enjoy, and based on that change alone I think my page views will grow as well. It’s time to reevaluate my goals for my website, reengage myself in the writing I so much enjoy and refresh the content of that writing to reflect what I’ve discovered myself to be best at, and what I enjoy writing about the most.

When I started The Axx, I didn’t know who I was as a writer. I doubted myself and my ability to write things that would interest others. I felt I had potential, but was unsure how that potential could be substantiated. All of this lead me to place more importance in my page views than in my content. When I had no page views, I had nothing to lose, and that lead me to write my best posts, on a wider variety of subjects. But once I gained my small audience, I stopped taking risks. I mostly just linked to others’ posts and wrote a few comments instead of writing posts of my own. I never wanted to offend people, so I never wrote anything controversial, or anything that I wasn’t absolutely sure about. I stuck to the subjects that I knew my readers were interested in, and often became just a clone of other, more popular link blogs. Compounding this overly cautious attitude is the fact that I’ve simply become lazy at The Axx, not posting enough and not taking the time needed to maintain it. Growth has been stagnant for months.

I realized all of these things a few months ago, and that was when I decided it was time to make a change. Sure I could just revamp The Axx and rededicate my work ethic for it, and that was what I had planned to do at first, but then I realized this was my chance to finally correct the compromises I made when I began. I finally wasn’t battling a ridiculous deadline. I could take the time needed to build up a site from scratch, the time needed to come up with a new name that I truly loved and that meant something to me, and the time needed to reevaluate my workflows around a new system. And so without further gilding the lily and with no more ado, after two months of hard work and decision making, here is my final, finished product. Welcome, to Unapologetic.

The Name

As you can tell, I place a lot of value in the names of things. Names can be powerful things, you know. (▼)Any fans of The Name of the Wind out there? I wanted the name of this website to reflect the core values which I hope to uphold throughout the writing that I do here. Unapologetic is an excellent match in almost every way I can think of.

First and foremost, Unapologetic represents the style I plan to enforce on all the writing that I do here. Bear with me, I don’t want to impose the wrong idea. When I say I’ll write unapologetically, I don’t mean that I will refuse to admit my mistakes. Quite the opposite, I plan to write in a manner that will allow me to make mistakes, something that the writing I’ve been doing at The Axx has not been open to. At The Axx, I never took any risks. I was too afraid to step outside the bounds of the few subjects I was fully comfortable with because I didn’t want to make any mistakes or lose a single reader who no longer found my topics interesting. I stuck mostly to posts relating to iOS automation and whatever topics were currently popular in the other tech blogs and Twitter feeds at the time. At Unapologetic, I will no longer limit my reach, and more importantly, I will no longer fear mistakes. Of course I will try to keep them to a minimum, but mistakes foster learning and growth, and an environment which stifles all chances of making them is not an environment where I can mature and develop as a writer and a blogger. So when I make mistakes in my writing here, I will not hide behind apologies while berating myself for the error. Instead I will own up to it, take it in stride, and do my best to correct the issue. As my readers, I welcome you to correct me in any mistakes you see. Whether it be a bad source I’ve linked to, a flawed thought process I’ve asserted, a faulty hypothesis, or even simple typos and errors in punctuation. I want to hear about these issues so that I may correct them, not have them ignored so I may never realize them. I’m a perfectionist at heart, and I feel a duty to the details, so I really do want to know about any and all issues you see in my writing so I can amend them. As for expanding my topics, don’t worry, I’m not going to start writing about nature or history. My passion is firmly entrenched in technology, and that’s where most of my topics will stay, but technology is an expansive landscape, and my reach can certainly go further than Drafts and the latest Apple, Google, or Microsoft scandal. I also hold other interests that I may touch on every once in a while: coffee, soccer, religion, movies, music and leather crafting, to name a few. I hope my views in other areas can be as interesting to my readers as my views on tech. Every once in a while it can be nice to take a break from technology and examine something new. When I do write these posts, I would truly love to hear your comments and feedback, but before you complain that I didn’t write about technology, remember that the subjects of my posts will, in almost all instances, be unapologetic.

Another big reason for the new name: I think Unapologetic is a title with potential to carry me into the future far more naturally than The Axx. (▼)It’s my most forward thinking blog title yet! I’ve long planned on building my own iOS app, and The Axx has never been a title that could fit very well into that area. Unapologetic, being a descriptive word, easily flows into all sorts of different possibilities. Be it this blog, an app, or any other venture I may pursue in the future, Unapologetic is a name that won’t fail me in a time of need.

Finally, Unapologetic represents the attitude I’ll be taking in respect to this new website. The lack of sense that the title of The Axx made often made me hesitant to discuss it freely or proclaim it easily. I dreaded the question “why is it called The Axx?” because I had no answer. That’s something I’ll be changing here. As you can tell, I have quite a long answer to the question “why is it called Unapologetic?”, and I can’t wait to give that answer to anyone who asks. No longer will I dodge questions about titles. It’s time to stand tall behind my creation.

The Design

Upon first reading the title of this website, you may have recalled the instantly famous words of Jony Ive in the recent iPhone 5c introduction video:

The iPhone 5c is beautifully, unapologetically plastic.

While this was not the actual source of inception for the idea, when I came up with the name this sentence immediately came to mind. I quite like the parallel, as it ties this site back to Apple in a unique and interesting way, which only those of us following the industry would understand. Furthermore, this connection reveals the unapologetic inspiration of many of the design choices I’ve made: the colors of the iPhone 5c and iOS 7.

I’ve always loved the simplicity of my design for The Axx, and I’ve gotten quite a few compliments on it from some awesome readers, but all in all it’s always been a bit on the boring side. Simplicity is great, but unbridled chaste can easily lead to monotony. By adding in the bright colors, subtle transitions, and larger, friendlier text and font, I’ve thrown some much needed personality into the greyscale dullness. Not by accident, the six chosen colors are the major colors used in iOS 7, as well as the same colors found in the original Apple logo. I’m particularly fond of the way the six colors cycle through the hyperlinks in each paragraph, blasting a surprise color into the black and white whenever they’re hovered over, then fading away out of sight when they’re not needed. (▼)I must give some credit for the changing of colors to my pal Phillip from App.net, who gave me the idea of using the CSS 3 nth-of-type selectors to create the effect of having a different color pop up for each article title, cycling through the main colors used in the site’s scheme. I ended up expanding the idea to encompass the title, links, horizontal rules and footnotes, and I love the playful feeling it’s given the site. (Tap that, it’s a pop up footnote!)

Speaking of pop up footnotes, I’m very proud of my own personal implementation of footnotes for Unapologetic. I hate the clutter caused at the end of posts by conventional footnotes, and the jarring confusion of being launched to a completely new position in the page and then back. My pure CSS 3 footnotes are completely invisible until you call for them. Then they still jump the page, but only to directly underneath the line in which the footnote lies. This allows you to scroll ever so slightly upwards and see directly where you are in the page, or reread the context of the footnote without having to keep bouncing around from the middle of the page to the bottom and back. The background of the footnotes are also just barely transparent, so you can see the text below showing through. This is a particularly cool effect when there is an image lower down on the page, as it allows you to really keep your bearing of where you are in the text while reading the footnote. It’s not quite as great as the blur effects in iOS 7, but it’s about as close to that as I can get using only CSS.

Last but not least is Unapologetic’s responsive design. Using CSS media queries, Unapologetic will automatically adjust based on the screen size of the device it’s being viewed on. This means that when you open Unapologetic on your iPhone, the design is still simple, beautiful, and most importantly, readable. The body fills the screen, eliminating excessive, wasted white space. The title, the article titles, posts, footnotes, and everything else blow up to two to three times their normal size, so you can read them from a normal viewing distance without needing to first double tap the screen or zoom in any way. One of my favorite aspects is the pictures, which expand to beautifully fill the entire width of your screen. If you’re reading this on your iPhone right now, you can see one in the wild over at the About page.

All in all, I love Unapologetic’s design, and I’m proud to have finally realized my goal of writing my entire website from scratch, while still maintaining a great design that is fun, unique, responsive, and simple. If you have any thoughts, praises, questions or feedback, or even critiques or criticisms, please don’t hesitate to contact me with them. I really want to know what everyone thinks of my new design.

Closing (▼)For those of you still with me almost 4,000 words later, I feel I should warn you in advance that this is what you should expect from many of my posts if you continue to read what I’ll be writing here. It’s always been my tendency to write in large volumes. In high school, instead of having the difficulty faced by normal kids of needing to add enough content to essays to satisfy the minimum requirements, I was constantly faced with the (in my opinion) far more annoying problem of needing to cut content out of assignments because I had written more than the maximum. Now that I’m writing about topics I truly care about, that characteristic is magnified even more, so I hope you enjoy long reads.

Many thanks to all of you reading this through. I hope this post has served to pique your interests for what I have to come. If you are interested in reading my future posts, you can subscribe to the Unapologetic RSS feed, follow Unapologetic on App.net or Twitter, or follow me on App.net or Twitter. More importantly (and I’ve already said this, but will say it again because it’s important to me), if you have any comments, questions, concerns, critiques, praises, jokes or Seinfeld references regarding this post or any future posts, make sure to send them to me. As I set out to accomplish these new goals, entering new domains of interest, taking more risks, making and correcting (hopefully not too many) more mistakes and writing unapologetically, your feedback will be more important than ever.

Gene Munster is back with Fall 2013’s instance of the biannual Piper Jaffray study on how Apple is doing in the teen market. I wrote a post on the Spring ’13 survey back in April, and while I can’t say I’m in high school any longer, I’m still very much in tune with teen demographic, maintaining many connections with younger teens from middle school to high school ages, as well as older teens my own age in college. I’m a middle school youth leader at my church, so I’m notably in contact with many middle schoolers from all over the North side of the city (the predominantly middle to upper class side) on a regular basis. I also do most of my work from a Starbucks nearby a huge local high school, and I see hordes of high schoolers come and go through there all the time. In almost all situations, I constantly find myself paying attention to what devices the people around me are carrying with them because the purely anecdotal evidence I collect has always been of interest to me. Hopefully in light of this survey it can be of interest to you as well.

Some of the main claims from this season’s survey state that the iPhone has grown in popularity from 48% of teens owning iPhones in Spring 2013 to 55% in Fall 2013, that of the 56% of teens owning tablets, 60% of those are full size iPads and 8% are iPad Minis, that of the 20% of teens who plan on buying a tablet in the next month, 52% plan on buying a full size iPad while 12% plan on buying an iPad Mini, and that 65% of teens expect their next phone to be an iPhone.

iPhones

Just like last time, my own observations quite clearly corroborate the study’s validity. In fact, iPhone adoption in Tucson, a fairly average, not especially tech savvy American town, with only a single small Apple store for miles, is booming. Not to suggest the study is undercutting, as I’m sure it’s balanced out in other areas, but if the iPhone doesn’t make up even more than 55% marketshare for smartphone owning Tucson teens, I would be very surprised. Furthermore, most of the teens I’ve talked to who don’t have iPhones seem to want them desperately. Only long contracts and empty wallets stand in their ways.

Moving on from my anecdotal evidence, allow me to conjecture as to the reason for Apple’s immense popularity within the teenage demographic. First, a cite from John Moltz’s similarly biannual response to the Jaffray study, in which he reminds us that Apple is a Piper Jaffray client, plus a couple other objections:

I’m sure teens do love them. They also love music, junk food and loudly proclaiming that no one understands them and slamming the door.

As much as I would love to stand up for my own demographic, I’m afraid Moltz is quite right in his sum up of the teenage proclivity to throw themselves passionately, and too often over-emphatically, behind particular interests. Argue with a teen about why their favorite band isn’t really that good, and prepare to face the wall of an irrational infatuation, a barrier even the soundest of logic can rarely penetrate. Teens love to love things, but the flip side of this affinity towards fanaticism is that the teenage culture loves to forget things. Insult any given teen’s favorite band and prepare to withstand a tirade of ardent vindication, but insult the band they were die hard fans of just last year and scratch your head when they agree with you. Bringing us back around to technology, it works the same way with social media. This year they flock to Twitter and Instagram, last year it was Facebook and just a few years before that, MySpace reigned supreme. Suffice it to say, teenagers are not known for their brand loyalty.

A bit of insight from my fairly unique perspective: it’s not the same with Apple. In fact, you don’t even need to base this realization on the purely observational insight of one teenager from one city, all you have to do is look at the trends from the last decade. The iPhone may be the latest Apple product to be gaining traction among teens, but we can’t forget to look beyond it to another Apple innovation a little bit older: the iPod. Apple’s iPod was a hit in the teenage market before the iPhone even existed. An iPod is the only MP3 player most teens have ever owned. Apple established itself as “cool” in the eyes of teenagers with the iPod long before iPhone, and while iPods may be dropping in popularity among teens (and just in general), this isn’t because they’re leaving Apple for a competitor, it’s because they’re buying iPhones instead. Unlike music, clothes or social networks, Apple devotion is not just a fad to be abandoned at the drop of a hat, but a long standing tradition.

All my observations, everything I hear, and a decade of history with Apple products all point not only to the legitimacy of Piper Jaffray’s study, but also to the idiocy of all the Apple bashers mindlessly proclaiming that Apple is no longer cool to teenagers. Apple has been more popular among teens longer than almost any other brand, and there is absolutely no indication of this interest waning any time soon. In fact, the iPhone 5c and 5s have generated more buzz among the teens I know than any other iPhone update I’ve witnessed. In a population in which self differentiation is simultaneously sought after and feared, having iPhones with such easily demonstrable features as fingerprint sensors and on-the-spot slo-mo videos, or such obviously new and excitingly bright externals as the candy colored casings on the iPhone 5c is a powerful draw for teens wanting to stand out from the crowd. iPhones of any type are cool, but having the newest or the best iPhone brings others flocking around you to see. For attention craving teenagers, nothing beats this feeling of being envied by their peers.

Before I get to the iPad, there’s one last iPhone-related caveat I’d like to discuss. John Gruber points out this in regard to the survey’s results:

I would say AppleInsider’s headline (“More Than Half of Teens Own an iPhone, iPad Immensely Popular”) is wrong. The description of the methodology suggests that lower-income teens were not included in the survey.

This prompted me to stop and think more closely about the cross section of teens I see on a regular basis. Since almost all of them are from the North side of town, I really am only seeing this huge interest in iPhones in what are likely the upper and middle class teens that the poll clearly claims to be surveying. Curious as to what the lower class demographic looked like, I turned to my friend Jansen Azarius.

Jansen is the director of a youth center called Higher Ground, located in South Tucson. The South side is a notoriously low income area, with over 50% of the residents of South Tucson living below the poverty line, and an average yearly income of a little over $20,000. Higher Ground draws kids from all over this part of the city, a cross section of a huge portion of schools and teens in the area. When I asked Jansen what types of phones they carry, he reported that the majority of them use Cricket for their cell phone provider due to the service being prepaid, so it was likely that hardly any had iPhones at all, he certainly hadn’t noticed any trends in that direction. Furthermore, the area has a high crime rate, and it’s well known that iPhone theft is a bit of an epidemic all over the US in recent times, another reason for teens in bad areas to avoid having an iPhone.

With Jansen’s remarks in mind, I find it doubtful that the iPhone truly holds near 50% of the total teen market, as AppleInsider and others are suggesting based on this study. The iPhone has always been a premium product, like most Apple products, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise if lower income families cannot afford them, or at least the expensive contracts that accompany them. However, since Cricket just recently started selling the iPhone, perhaps it’s share will begin to creep higher in lower income markets now that a prepaid version is available.

iPads

I won’t say much on iPads. They aren’t carried around in plain sight as obviously as iPhones are, so it’s much harder to gauge how popular they are and I don’t want to blindly guess. That said, I will say that of the teens I do see using iPads, I almost never see iPad Minis. This goes right along with Jaffray’s results that the Mini has yet to become as popular as other Apple products. Based on what I’ve heard about the iPad Mini from other teens I know, I don’t believe that Apple has done a good enough job marketing it to the teen demographic. Teens I’ve spoken to don’t see a point to the iPad Mini. They think that it is too small to do any school work on and too big to carry around easily like their iPhones. While that’s obviously not true (need we any more evidence that the Mini can be a productivity powerhouse than knowing that Federico does most of his writing for MacStories from a Mini?), I’d say the fact that many teens I’ve spoken with think it is true shows a small failure on Apple’s part, or at least a missed opportunity. The iPad Mini is an iPad nearly as fully featured as the full size iPad, yet smaller and more portable and significantly cheaper. That sounds like something that teens would be coming to buy in droves, but somehow Apple hasn’t yet succeeded in making such an impression with the Mini.

Of course, the iPad Mini is also still young, not even a year old at the time of this writing, and no previous Apple product has gained traction in the teen demographic during its first year either. I think many had expected the Mini to be an exception since it wasn’t exactly a whole new product category, and I think it could have been had Apple managed to catch the eyes of more teens with their marketing. Still, the fact that it hasn’t yet gained traction means nothing about the iPad Mini’s future in the teen market. Once more teens get Minis, and its made clear that they can be used for more than just reading and playing, I think the Mini will grow rapidly in popularity.

Overall, from my purely observation based anecdotal evidence, I believe Piper Jaffray’s claims are valid. I can’t speak certainly for iPads, but I have no real reason to doubt they’re about as successful as the survey suggests. The iPad Mini, at least, definitely seems to fit with the poll’s evaluation. As for the iPhone, even without the support of lower income families, this device is an undeniable success in the teenage demographic. With no signs of iPhone popularity abating, and with interest in the newest iPhone models seeming stronger than ever before, I predict Apple’s growth in the teen demographic to continue to increase. iPhones are much more than just another fad in today’s teenage culture, they’re part of a long standing brand loyalty the likes of which a tech company like Apple has never before known from teenagers.