Apple announced Thursday morning that developers all over the world for its platform have generated over $70 billion in total revenue, a new record since the launch of the App Store almost nine years ago in 2008.
The number 70 appears to be Apple’s lucky number this year, as app downloads have also soared 70% in the last 12 months, illustrating interest in numerous new app titles that took the App Store by storm.
Facebook is rolling out new tools today to help publishers who post Instant Articles on the Facebook platform make their fast-loading news stories compatible with the Apple News format and Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages.
According to the social networking giant, an updated Instant Articles SDK, now available on GitHub, allows publishers to build content publishable as Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Support for Apple News articles is coming soon, says Facebook.
Politico reported today that Apple has created a new Editor-in-Chief position on Apple News. The Cupertino giant hired Lauren Kern, former Executive Editor at New York Magazine, for the newly created position.
Facebook's updated SDK removes a time and resource-consuming step in publishing on multiple platforms by having the markup publishers use to create Instant Articles automatically generate the code needed to build these other formats.
For instance, any custom formats—things like fonts, colors and captions—that publishers have designed in the Style Editor will now be “closely mirrored” in the other formats.
The company wrote:
Media executives told us about the challenge they face using multiple platforms to share their stories–more distribution formats create more content management costs.
Developers who attended our Journalism Project Hackathons in New York and London also asked for a way Instant Articles could support other major publishing formats.
Instant Articles debuted as an iPhone exclusive in May 2015.
Rival Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages in October the same year. Both features aim to make news articles from participating publishers load in a fraction of a second on mobile devices than their non-optimized versions.
Both Google and Facebook want to speed up webpage loading times, especially for users in emerging markets and those on unreliable or slow Internet connections. The faster the page loads, the more likely the user is to actually read the article. And the more news articles users consume on any given day, the more ads they'll see.
Instant Articles have been criticized for being confined to Facebook's wall garden and their ad system. As for Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google is giving them preferential treatment in search results, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
While these pages do load significantly faster versus the regular mobile pages, all Accelerated Mobile Pages implement Google's own scrolling behavior that feels weird on iOS while making it harder than necessary to visit the original article.
Accelerated pages have their own unique URLs. To visit the original article, you must first tap the hyperlink icon at the top of the page to reveal the original URL, then tap the URL to visit the original page on the publisher's website.
The worst thing about Google's accelerated pages is the fat that they don't let you use Safari's clutter-free Reader Mode or the Find in Page feature, available from the Share menu.
Apple has created a new Editor-in-Chief position for Apple News, naming Lauren Kern, Executive Editor at New York Magazine, to the position. It's unclear what exactly Kern's new role will entail, Politico said.
The move is being described as “sure to raise eyebrows” in media circles.
Kern is one of New York magazine’s “most high-ranking editors,” said Politico. Prior to joining New York Magazine, she was a deputy editor at The New York Times Magazine. The hiring suggests Apple intends to advance the Apple News service and the stock News app.
Apple executive Eddy Cue said in February that Apple wants to cut down on clickbait on Apple News. The company, said Cue, wants to “vet and make sure that the news providers in Apple News are legitimate.”
Following its 2015 debut which replaced Apple Newsstand, Apple News is currently available in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. iOS 10 brought out an Apple Music-like redesign for Apple News with bold headings, larger images and other visual tweaks.
Kern declined to comment and Apple has yet to confirm the hiring.
Every Apple announcement sparks interest from the fanbase. Many armchair analysts try to predict event announcements from the tea leaves found scattered about the event invitations. Regardless of your interpretation of the WWDC 2017 event invitation imagery, the designs always make excellent wallpapers.
A popular category in the Wallpapers of the Week section, Apple event announcements always prove to be the most visited and downloaded. We are excited to provide downloads for an entire pack of WWDC 2017 wallpapers for iPhone, iPad, and desktop.
The developer team at Crunchy Bagel has taken the wraps of HealthFace, a product designed to assist regulars of Apple’s Health app in monitoring their vital data on the fly. HealthFace is capable of reaching deep into your personal Health catalogue and displaying virtually any data point in form of a complication on your wrist.
For users constrained to keeping a close eye on their vitals, food intake or other health related parameters, the app sets out to become a quasi extension of Apple’s Health app.
As you know, Apple shuttered its in-app iAd advertising network back in the summer because selling ads is “just not something we’re good at”. A new report this morning from Recode revealed that the iPhone maker is leaving the creation, selling and management of ads on its Apple News service to the ad sales teams over at NBCUniversal.
“Apple is going to hand over ad sales for the app to Comcast’s NBCUniversal in an exclusive deal that starts in January,” reports the outlet.
Today, Apple announced the new MacBook Pro with a new touch sensitive function bar that dynamically changes based on active applications. Naturally, there were some shiny images shown on the screens, during the keynote this morning. Quickly, I began getting requests for modifications and mock ups of these images via Twitter.
Thanks to the quick work from some followers, I was able to collect the necessary images and present them below. As always, if you have tips, tricks, or would like some fresh wallpapers during the week, please catch me on Twitter @jim_gresham. It is the community that makes these posts possible.
This tutorial shows you how to turn on notifications for your favorite news channels in the Apple News app, or turn them off if you no longer want to receive their alerts.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman is reporting today that Apple is in the process of unifying its separate cloud services team in an effort to foster tighter collaboration between them, better compete with Google and Amazon in the cloud space and improve Siri, Maps, iTunes, iCloud and other services.
Eddy Cue, Apple's boss of Internet Software and Services, will oversee the effort to move cloud service engineering teams to a single campus as Apple continues shifting its cloud to its own infrastructure.
Apple has launched an official Twitter account on Friday. With @Apple, the company now has yet another channel for releasing important announcements and promoting products and events to the public.
Apple just announced the iPhone 7 media event, to be held on September 7. Their invitation has sparked many comments and additional rumors about the content of the media event. "See you on the 7th" could hint at many different announcements, but perhaps the strongest is optical or camera upgrades.
Per usual, the goal of our Wallpapers of the Week series is to highlight photo quality images for your iOS devices. Apple media event wallpapers for iPhone are always our most popular posts. These images are submitted to me via Twitter @jim_gresham. If you would like to add your images, simply send them my way.
Step inside for the latest download, in a post that will be updated throughout the day!
Among the new things Apple announced 10 today is a redesigned News application. This is a standalone news aggregation app, first introduced in iOS 9 last summer, and it's getting some significant improvements in the upcoming iOS 10 update.
These start with what Apple is calling an "all-new design." In the 'For You' tab, your stories are now broken up into clear sections like Top Stories, Trending—which shows you the top stories right now, and topics you follow, like cars or sports.