Today, we’re announcing updates for Messenger’s opt-in end-to-end encrypted chats that will help improve your messaging experience. We know that people expect their messaging apps to be secure, private and provide them a space to be expressive. This is why we are continuing to introduce some of the rich features that you already love in Messenger to end-to-end encrypted chats.

Building secure and fun interactive features takes time and requires our engineers to innovate and solve technical challenges, so this is part of a series of product updates as we keep improving our services. With cybercrime and hacking on the rise, it’s more important than ever to find great ways to connect with friends and family through private and secure communications.

We’re excited to help you express yourselves in delightful ways with your friends and family.

You can find the full list of new features and additional details in both the Messenger and Meta newsrooms.

Within the first few days, we got a nice write up from my friend Matt Birchler over at Birchtree and a bunch of mentions from internet-famous Apple nerds like Rene Ritchie! (We were his pick of this week on this episode of MacBreak Weekly.) Over the year, we were repeatedly featured in Apple’s “Stickers we [heart]” list in the App Store, and we peaked at number three in the paid stickers portion of the store (only behind two Star Wars sticker packs) .

Today Alyssa’s launching shirts based on three favorite Decline designs: Let’s Not, Nope and Not Feelin’ It. They’re unisex, come in four sizes and can be found over in her shop.

Go grab some for yourself or as gifts!

What is an accessible product?
It's a product that people can access and understand regardless of disabilities.

Note: I'll be focusing on digital products (websites, games, apps, videos, podcasts, and even email) because that's where I have knowledge to share, but accessibility matters for physical products as well.

So how many people need accessible products?
All of them. Every single one of your users, customers and potential customers need to be able to access and understand your product, regardless of disabilities.

Ok, but how many people have impairments that we should be accounting for in our products?
I don't have perfect data, but what I do have should provide some perspective.

• According to the World Health Organization (back in 2019), 2.2 billion people have vision impairment of some sort.

• According to the US Census Bureau (back in 2010):

  • 7.6 million Americans have hearing impairment

  • 8.1 million Americans have vision impairment

  • 15.2 million Americans have cognitive, mental, or emotional impairment

You have potential customers in your target market who can't become customers because you haven't made your product accessible for them.

Building accessible products makes your product better for everyone.
A few quick examples of this:

• Accessible contrast and font sizing makes your product readable for people with low vision and easier to read for everyone else.

  • Note: WebAIM has wonderful tools for this.

• As @deafgirly said in her viral tweet, "Subtitles aren't just for deaf people." The data in this UK government study corroborates her claim.

  • Note: I prefer Descript for creating transcripts & subtitles.

• Working with great content strategists or using tools like Readable will make your product usable for people with cognitive impairments while ALSO improving usability for all your users.

There are TONS of incredible resources out there that will help you make your product more accessible.

• Begin by following @steven_aquino, @shelly, and @JamesRath on Twitter. They have taught me so much.

• Then poke around on a11yproject.com and mobilea11y.com. Both are full of incredible resources and guides and tools for better understanding accessibility and for digging deeper into making your specific product accessible.

• If you're into podcasts, I'd recommend A11y Rules by Nicolas Steenhout. You could also take a look at the back catalog of my now retired podcast Accessible.

• If you're interested in making your email accessible, check out the talk I gave at Really Good Email’s UNSPAM Conference.

We built the app to solve problems we felt personally—primarily, that managing our long-term fitness progress was too difficult.

Fitness Totals solves this problem by:

• Displaying your progress as weekly, monthly, yearly totals. This sounds simple, and it is. But Apple currently does not display these totals anywhere within their Health or Fitness apps.

• Comparing your progress to last week, last month and last year. Again, basic information that is not available directly from Apple, but we find incredibly motivating.

• Simple, beautiful, customizable widgets. We make it easy to glance at your progress and compare it to last week, last month, or last year. As John Voorhees said in his MacStories review, “[Fitness Total’s] greatest strength is its widgets.”

Check it out →

San Francisco is a gorgeous city—stunning views; well-maintained parks; and during pandemic times, a wide array of outdoor restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. So we walk; we stop; we walk; and so on. It’s glorious.

Here are two walks we went on recently:

• Type: Weekday Walk

• Difficulty: Easy, One hill, No steep hills

• Distance: ~3 miles

• Stops: 1

  • Drinks at The Old Ship Saloon

• Type: Saturday Walk

• Difficulty: Moderate, Several hills, One steep hill

• Distance: ~6 miles

• Stops: 4

  • Browsing West Coast Craft at Fort Mason

  • Coffee from the Philz Coffee truck on Marina Green

  • To-go dinner from The Little Chihuahua & drinks from The Page

  • Picnic in the park

Read the full transcript →

Go read and listen to the poem →

Jacob Sunderlin has crafted a window into another world. He tells a story and paints a picture in a few words. But it’s more than that. He conveys the feelings of existing in that world, of living in the American West, of being a member of that family.

This practice of active appreciation drew my focus to the house plants that Alyssa has placed around our apartment. Each time I focused my mind on their beauty, I felt thankfulness for Alyssa’s effort, joy for the beauty of nature, and hope.

I made photos of a few of them.

Our Monstera is massive. It takes up an entire corner of our living room.

Art and house plants are pleasant shelf companions.

I love how this arrowhead in our kitchen bends and faces itself toward the light streaming through our window. There’s a lot we can learn from this plant.

Timothy Buck
April 25, 2020
San Francisco, California

His album Empty is stirring from start to finish. I’ve had it on repeat each day as I do thinking work. In fact, it’s playing as I write this. I highly recommend enjoying it with your eyes closed and lounging in your favorite chair.

Timothy Buck
April 19, 2020
San Francisco, California

Listen to Empty in Your Music App →

To kick it off, let’s take a look at the Solar Dial face on the Apple Watch.

Hodinkee published a fascinating deep dive into the intricacies of the Solar Dial watch face for the Apple Watch. I’ll quote at length from it here:

This one is simply called the Solar Dial, and it is a remarkably charming thing. It has been described as a miniature sundial for the wrist, but it is rather more like having a sundial and the Sun itself on your wrist, both at the same time…

…The portion of the dial that's in light blue represents the number of daylight hours, and the portion in dark blue, night; the boundaries between each section mark sunrise and sunset. Opposite the Sun on the 24-hour hand is a smaller dial which shows the hours and minutes, in either an analog or digital format. The four corners of the watch face are taken up with customizable complications… 

…The color of the sky also changes depending on the time of day, and during the twilight hours, you get a very pretty transition from blue, to a deeper blue, to a lovely pale pink as the solar disk begins to sink below the horizon. You can rotate the crown to show you what time sunset takes place, as well as the various phases of twilight. You'll also see, in yellow numbers in the sub-dial, how many hours it is from the current time to sunset, or other solar astronomical events.

The Solar Dial has been an option on my watch since last September, but because I didn’t understand its intricacies in the slightest, I didn’t appreciate it. While the world whirs on, I’m beginning to practice dwelling on beautiful things like this.

Timothy Buck
April 18, 2020
San Francisco, California

Read the Hodinkee Article →

While eating dinner the other night, we were listing out things we have to be thankful for and brainstorming ideas of how we can help give back during this time of turmoil, and we realized that Decline Stickers could be used to encourage social distancing.

We had a new version of the app nearly ready for release, and it’s now finished and in the App Store. 100% of the proceeds from this version of Decline Stickers will be donated to SF Marin Food Bank.

Buy Now on the App Store →

SF Marin Food Bank is an awesome organization that we’ve volunteered with in the past. They do great work and are an essential resource for so many.

Learn More & Donate Directly →

A bit about Decline Stickers version 1.1

There are 3 new stickers in version 1.1. Each of them were suggested by users.

1. How about no

2. It depends (For the lawyers and parents out there.)

3. Yeah, no (For our Australian friends.)

Explain the Why

Why did you work on this project? What is the user problem you’re solving in the first place? This is table setting, and even if you think that everyone in the room should “just get” why something made sense to do, don’t assume that it’s at top of mind for them.

Explaining the current problem that exists, especially by giving a real world example, is super useful for getting people on board. At the end of this explanation, your audience should be chomping at the bit for something better, making them more receptive to whatever you’ll be showing since it should solve the problems you’ve just presented.

Matt goes on to cover 6 more important parts of delivering a good product demo. Go read the whole thing. But there is one thing I’d like to add.

I’m not sure I can stress enough the importance of speaking from the perspective of a user, particularly when you’re describing the problem and the solution.

It’s easy to speak about functionality and capability and tech debt and operational efficiency and other important things. But if you truly understand the problem you’re solving for the customer, and you can describe the problem and solution in the simple words of a friend, you will deliver a great product demo.

Continue reading on BirchTree →

iPad Pros is a podcast about getting work done on iOS. Tim and I had a lovely conversation about some of the accessibility features of iPadOS that help people with a wide range of accessibility needs get things done. Give it a listen.

Listen on Overcast

Listen on Apple Podcasts

In recent years, scientists have associated meditation with a wide variety of benefits ranging from improvements in memory, digestion, and circulation to reductions in stress, loneliness, and cognitive decline. Headspace has a team of scientific researchers that has published 16 studies in peer-reviewed journals about the benefits of guided meditation for focus, kindness, happiness, stress relief, and more.

I have found meditation to be profoundly beneficial for regaining focus when my mind wants to wander, falling asleep when my thoughts won’t stop, and alleviating stress and anxiety when life gets difficult. 

At its core, Headspace is a content subscription service. The iOS app (which I use), Android app, and Web app are important for the quality of experience you recieve, but the real value is in the company’s content—audio recordings of guided meditations.

Getting Started with Headspace

The Headspace Basics course is a good place to start for anyone who hasn’t spent much time meditating. It provides ten guided meditations. When starting each installment, you can select a 3-, 5-, or 10-minute version and pick between a male or female guide. Each installment begins with a short lesson about meditation concepts and then transitions into the guided meditation.

Once you’ve completed the Basics course, or if you’re already comfortable with the foundational concepts of mindfulness meditation, try out Headspace’s everyday meditations. These are good for users who want to create a consistent meditation practice. 

If you find the idea of meditating with other people appealing, Headspace provides an option called Everybody Headspace, which offers are guided meditations that begin regular times throughout the day and night. You can either wait with others for the next session or join an ongoing session.

Continue reading on TidBITS →

Paint Slurry

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Red Wall Texture

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Striped Wall Texture

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Evening City Bokeh

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Plant Shadows

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Pure Bokeh

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Autumnal Colors

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These backgrounds come from Unsplash.

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Studying your competition can be quite valuable, but that's not what I mean in this case. I'm talking about researching analogous problems in other fields that have already been solved (or have failed to be solved) by companies in those markets.

In my experience, these analogies are hugely beneficial for two primary purposes: storytelling and solution design.

Storytelling

Analogies should always take a back seat to a clear, compelling, empathy-inducing problem statement, but as a product manager pitching or explaining the problem you're solving, analogies can be powerful frames of reference for others. This can be true in a wide variety of situations such as:

• Pitching your work to executives, investors, managers.

• Getting buy-in from non-product groups who may be necessary to fully solve your problem statement or are impacted by the solution.

• Building excitement in the product, engineering, design teams who will be working on this problem.

Solution Design

Analogies have the potential to be either beneficial or detrimental to solution design. It’s important to make it clear to your product team that the analogy is not the solution but a jump-start for the solution design process. Without calling that out up front, analogies can stifle creativity and put the team in a copying mindset. When used correctly, analogies will provide the product team with a launching point for conversation and permission to think outside the box.

He wrote in great detail and clarity, covering everything you need to know about watchOS 6 from health to watch faces to the calculator.

And he concluded with an adroit position on the state of watchOS overall:

watchOS continues to grow up, and each year it gets objectively better than the year previous. The team behind this product have done a fantastic job of maintaining its simplicity all while adding on genuinely useful features that don’t always feel like much at the time, but have added up to an improved platform in almost every way.

That said, the techie in me feels like the Apple Watch is kind of in need of a complete rethink. watchOS 1 was the result of a company who didn’t know exactly what that product was and they threw everything against the wall to see what stuck. A few things like activity and workout tracking, watch faces, complications, and communication ended up being the biggest hits, and they’ve evolved those from their initial incarnations very well. But I feel more than ever like we’re getting to the point of diminishing returns and each update is proving less and less impactful on the product as a whole.

watchOS 6: The BirchTree Review →

Apple Arcade

For those of you who may not know, Apple Arcade is a new “Netflix for gaming” service from Apple, launching September 19. It’s priced at $4.99 a month and provides access to 100+ ad-free games that require no additional purchases to play.

1. This is a direct response to the incredible popularity of iOS games that use casino-informed designs to cause addiction and get users to spend large amounts of money or watch ridiculous numbers of ads.
   
   As these types of games have taken over the App Store’s top charts, beautiful indie games have become less financially viable and horror stories of people spend huge amounts of money on “coins” have become more common.
   
   Although the details aren’t fully public, Apple is funding the development of Apple Arcade games up front and continuing to pay creators on an ongoing basis. For studios who want to build great games without having to focus on in-app purchase conversion metrics and who are selected by Apple to build Apple Arcade games, this may provide financial viability.
   

2. The $4.99 per month price point is reasonable for an individual, but it gets quite interesting for families with kids. That same price gets up to five family members access to all of those games within their own accounts.
   

3. In the end it comes down to the quality of the games within Apple Arcade. If the games are good, I think it will be successful.

Apple TV+

Apple TV+ is Apple’s new streaming video service coming November 1. Apple isn’t renting a back catalog of content from any of the large content companies. Instead they’re filling the service entirely with original content. They’ve already announced content from big-name stars like Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell to name a few.

This streaming service was originally teased in the spring, and in the time since then, at least in my circles, the excitement for Apple TV+ dropped precipitously, especially after Disney announced their Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ bundle for $12.99 a few weeks back.

Two things in today’s Apple TV+ announcements brought back the excitement for me.

1. Apple TV+ is priced at $4.99 per month for a whole family. This is a competitive price at the low end of the market.

2. Apple TV+ will be free for 1 year to anyone who buys a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac or iPod touch starting September 10.
   
   Apple sold 217 million iPhones in 2018. If we assume Apple will sell a similar amount over the next 12 months and we ignore the tens of millions of people buying iPad, Apple TV, Mac or iPod touch over the next year, that still puts Apple TV+ in the hands of hundreds of millions of people for free.
   
   People like free.

Over the next week or so I’ll be releasing two new podcast episodes that will dive deeper into what Apple has announced.

• Accessible: Steven Aquino and I will talk about the accessibility impacts of everything Apple announced as well as what it was like for Steven to be at another Apple event.

• UNCO: As a follow up to my pre-event interview with Guilherme Rambo and another episode in my The Future of Apple series, I’ll be sitting down with another 9to5Mac writer, Benjamin Mayo, to discuss what this event’s announcements mean for the future of Apple.

Sip is a $10 menu bar app that allows you to pick colors anywhere on your Mac, quickly organize them into palettes, and smartly use those colors in other apps. Brothers André Gonçalves and Rui Aureliano designed Sip with advanced features for professional developers and designers, but its core functionality is simple enough that any Mac user might find it useful for color management.

Sip Basics

The first thing you’ll do with Sip is pick some colors. You can open the color picker—which is a circle that magnifies a small portion of the screen underneath it—by clicking the menu bar icon or pressing a keyboard shortcut (Command-Option-Control-P). Sip provides plenty of shortcuts, all of which you can change in its settings.

To pick a color, position the color picker over the desired hue, wherever on the screen it may be, and click. That adds it to Sip and copies the color to your clipboard. Press a modifier key while picking a color to add additional tweaks:

• Shift: Adds multiple colors in a row.

• Option: Automatically creates a new palette and puts each color you pick in that palette.

• Control: Creates a new palette with the colors you’re picking.

• Command: Sends the color directly to the app in which you’re working, if it’s one of the 17 currently supported apps, including Web development apps like Coda and Espresso, and Adobe’s Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop.

For more precise color picking, use Sip’s keyboard shortcuts to increase or decrease the zoom of the color picker, to make the color picker’s grid larger or smaller, and to move the color picker around in 1- or 10-pixel increments. This is great for grabbing a 1-pixel border color or the color of small text.

Continue reading on TidBITS →