Apple Event Predictions

Update: Post event - I've striked out the things I predicted incorrectly.

First of all, I want to state that I do not write this post with insider tips of what is going to be released on Tuesday. I am also not arrogant enough to think that more than 5 people who read this post really care what i have to say on the subject. Instead, I write this mainly for my own amusement and enjoyment to publicly state what I think will be announced so as to see how right or wrong I was afterward. If any of this is interesting to you, then so much the better. A lot of what I'm to say you've probably read elsewhere already. By typing these words to pixel, I'm forcing myself to be honest and serious about what I want to commit to and not.

Getting that preamble out of the way, I am going to categorize my predictions into:

1. What will be announced (Confident Yes)
2. What won't be announced (Confident No)
3. What might be announced (Unsure)

Confidently Yes

• Two new phone models: iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C.
• iPhone 5S in: White/Champagne, White/Silver, Black/Silver, Black/Black
• iPhone 5C with plastic backs in assorted colors
• iPhone 5C contains mostly or all iPhone 5 internals, with possible "weaker" components here and there.
• iOS 7 GM demoed (and released to developers for download)
• Sell and ship dates; pre-order Sept. 13 starting early in the morning, and delivered(FedEx/UPS) or on sale in store on Sept. 20.
• iTunes 11.1 + iTunes Radio demoed; available for download late Sept 19/early Sept 20
• AppleTV will receive some type of software update. Not sure on exact features as I haven't payed much attention to it in this beta period. AllThingsD said enchanced Home Sharing functionality to easily access your own content on foreign AppleTVs (as in ones at work or a friend's house). This plus whatever updates are being done to it to work with functionality being added in iOS 7.
• iPhone 5S will be faster, have a better camera, support new AC Wifi spec....you get the picture. Almost all existing hardware components will improve in some way.

Confidently No

• OS X 10.9 Mavericks will not be released
• No 'iWatch' or whatever it is to be called (and I'm still not convinced this will ever be a product)
• No new Apple TV hardware
• No Mac Pro or any updates to any Macs

Not So Sure About

• 128GB option for iPhone 5S Leaning yes. Somewhat confident
• I'm not sure if we'll see new iPads and iPad minis, but I'm leaning towards a no given that would be a lot to announce during a single event and we've seen very little to no rumors about these. I believe the iPad event will be in October along with the new Macs and Mavericks. Leaning no. Somewhat confident.
• iPhone 5S (maybe 5C too???) finger print scanner on the Home Button. There has been a lot of smoke about this one. Code for it was event found in the iOS 7 SDK. Leaning yes but not confident.
• Pricing shift with regards to storage due to the 5C being introduced:
• iPhone 5C will come in 2 sizes - 16GB and 32GB
• iPhone 5S will come in 3 sizes too - 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB at the existing pricepoints we're used to. Leaning yes but not confident. I can't help but feel that 16GB is much too small of a storage size on their premium model 6 years in. Adding the "cheaper" iPhone 5C for casual customers allows them to keep a 16GB option and to entice those same people to spring for the 5S due to 32GB size option on the low end. While everything I’ve listed above are a lot of things, something seems missing. Perhaps there is some sort of surprise related to any of these things - or something else entirely? Only Apple knows for sure. And they tell us one way or the other, tomorrow.

Save Extensions or Conf Call Passwords Along with Phone Numbers in iOS

A huge thanks to Jim Ray for sharing this tip. This is so useful to me that I felt compelled to share it. Someone, at iPhoneFAQ writes:

The iPhone will store and dial extensions to phone numbers in a couple of different ways, depending on how you decide to interact with the answering system on the other end. In short, you can have a number for a contact in your iPhone's address book to also store their extension or conference call ID/password/whatever. When you place the call, a new button is present on your phone's UI which will dial the stored code. Check out the guide to see exactly how to store these and how it works.

Fantasical For iPhone Released

I fell in love with Fantastical for OS X a few years back when it was released and recommend it to anyone who will listen to me and is in need of a better Calendaring application than iCal/Calendar.app. This morning, Flexibits released Fantastical for iPhone. I've bought it already and can heartily recommend it as similarly awesome as the OS X version is. It has now become my default calendaring app for my phone. My only wish was that it was universal for the iPad as well, but knowing Flexibits, they're working on either a universal version now or a dedicated iPad-only version. Make your life better, and get this app.

JP Morgan Estimates That New iPhone Could Boost GDP By 0.5 Percent

Call me skeptical given that it comes from JP Morgan (I distrust any mainstream Wall St. analysts given their track record) but if this is true, that would be crazy. Tim Reid, at Reuters:

Feroli laid out his math. J.P. Morgan's analysts expect Apple to sell around 8 million iPhone 5s in the fourth quarter. They expect the sales price to be about $600. With about $200 in discounted import component costs, the government can factor in $400 per phone into its measure of gross domestic product for the fourth quarter. Feroli said the estimate of between a quarter to a half point of annualized GDP "seems fairly large, and for that reason should be treated skeptically." But, he added, "we think the recent evidence is consistent with this projection." Again, that's crazy - but cool if true.

iOS App Review: Newsify

Finding A Replacement For Reeder

By grouping iOS apps into niche markets, aside from the static categories that Apple defines in the App Store, at the top of any list has to include RSS, To-Do, and Twitter clients. There are many options for these three types of apps to choose from, and everyone has their favorites. To-Do apps in particular seem to be all over the map with no clear favorite (except maybe Clear? Pun intended). However, with Twitter or RSS reading apps - Tweetbot and Reeder seem to be the clear frontrunners.

Recently Reeder pushed out a major update for the iPhone version of its iOS application. Many things have changed about it, the biggest changes being the user interface, and supported services. I didn't like either of these changes, as well as how Reeder seems to be promoting Readability over other offline reading services such as Instapaper or Pocket. My offline reading application of choice is Instapaper, and I dislike Pocket…but I very much dislike Readability due to their ongoing lack of respect for their cusomters and publishers.

Because of these reasons, and a few other minor subjective annoyances I have with the user interface of Reeder, I've been searching for a worthy replacement as my main iOS RSS client for about a year now. Without naming names, I've tried many of Reeder's competitors and not found any that I like sufficiently enough to use instead of Reeder. The last time I searched possible replacements about 6 months ago, I came up short. The other day, however, Reeder pushed out a new update for the iPhone version of their app. This new update shoves the Readability icon onto the top of the UI of every individual post. Even after going into settings and turning off Readability, the icon is still present which links to the mobilizer version of Readability. As I detest Readability, the company, and everything it stands for, this simply will not do. Thus began my search for a replacement once again. As I was writing this review, Reeder has pushed out an update that allows the end user to remove ther Readability mobilizer from view. Regardless of this, the direction the developer is taking this app has lead me to seek out alternatives. After a few searches, I came across Newsify. At first, the preview screenshots within the store did not get my attention, but after browsing a few other apps and then ranking them by high-ranking reviews, I came back to Newsify. Due to its price of $0.99, I threw caution to the wind and bought it.

Visual Design

So far, I couldn't be happier. I'll start with the icon, which you can see a little higher up in this article. I like the design and it looks nice on my homescreen (and for my iPad, on my dock). The icon design is clean and is easy to pick out from the rest of my home screen apps. Also, it is not blue…don't get me wrong, I love blue, but so many apps tend to go with that color. The entire UI of the application uses custom artwork and while some of the icons are similar to the default UIKit artwork, the developer has done a good job of using the same elements users are familiar with, such as the refresh circle, while making custom icons for the 'mark as read' menu or the sharing menu. Within a folder or 'all feeds' sub-menu, the application displays articles in a nice reader-friendly view giving beautifully formatted excerpts of each feed item with a thumbnail image if the article has one. See the below screenshot for an example.

Newsify showing the MacRumors feed view.

Animations

One of the features I liked about Reeder was the ability to pull-down on articles to move on to the next item. Mimicing Loren Brichter's pull-to-refresh idea, Reeder allowed a user o pull-down or pull-up on an article which would scroll down or back up to other feed items. Other Reeder competitors (Newsrack comes to mind) did not allow for this scroll motion, and instead, cramped up and down arrows into the top right corner of the user interface. In effect, this made reading items quite tedious when holding my iPad in portrait mode. I tend to hold my iPad from the bottom, especially when laying on the couch or in bed. Arrow controls in the top right corner caused me to have to constantly move a hand off the iPad to interact with those UI controls, while trying to continue holding the iPad with my other hand. This isn't horrible when reading longer articles but when skimming down a feeds list, it was very tedious. Newsify uses the same pull/push to progress gesture as Reeder, however, the animation that Newsify uses is very satisfying to use. It reminds me a lot of the original pull-to-refresh from Tweetie in its use. There is a suble arrow flip, from down to up or up to down as you pull or push, and beside this arrow, Newsify gives you a preview of the headline of the next or previous feed. It is very nicely done.

Settings

A point that may sometimes make or break an app (if there is a lack-thereof) are the settings. I am happy to report that Newsify offers a ton of custom settings for reading, fonts, sorting, refreshing, visual elements, home-screen options, and the ability to customize your sharing service options. Given that I want to eliminate seeing services I do not use, such as Readability, I greatly appreciate this. Another feature I appreciate is the ability to add, remove, and manage my feeds from within the application. Other competitors do not offer this feature, but instead force the user to log into reader.google.com to manage your subscriptions. Forcing me to log into a Google product never makes me happy.

The Developer

I reached out to the developer, Ben Alexander, to ask him a few questions about his application. Ben made Newsify by himself, doing all development and design. He launched the application on April 22, 2012, and says that it has been very successful so far. Apple even recently featured it in the App Store. When I asked Ben why he decided to develop and release an RRS client in an already crowded market for this particular niche, he said:

"As a Google Reader user, I was looking for a more visually interesting way to read RSS feeds. I couldn't find anything that was satisfying to me and thought others might feel the same way." Ben was also kind enough to talk about some upcoming features for Newsify: The next update will bring night mode, mark read while scrolling, tap and hold to mark read and a few other improvements. As for the previous releases on Newsify, there have been several updates to the app since release. Ben is doing an excellent job staying on top of things as far as updates. It is also one of the top RSS reader clients on the App Store based on positive ratings. I feel fairly confident Ben will continue to activley develop this app for some time which makes me at ease with choosing this as my RSS reader.∗

Jobs’s Biographer to Page: What Part of “I’m Going to Destroy Android” Didn’t You Understand?

John Paczkowski, at AllThingsD:

During a lecture Wednesday evening at the U.K.’s Royal Institution, Isaacson took issue with Page’s remarks, stressing that Jobs was hardly kidding around when he threatened to destroy Android, which he lambasted as a stolen product. “[Apple's iOS] is almost copied verbatim by Android,” Isaacson said as reported by Macworld UK. “And then they licence it around promiscuously. And then Android starts surpassing Apple in market share, and this totally infuriated [Steve]. It wasn’t a matter of money. He said: ‘You can’t pay me off, I’m here to destroy you.’” The actual quote, verbatim, from Jobs to Isaacson was this: “Our lawsuit is saying, ‘Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.’ Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products — Android, Google Docs — are shit.” John Packzowski sums up: That’s a rant uttered for show? A little anecdote to give Apple employees an “obvious competitor … to rally around”? Hardly. If you want to talk about things that are for show, Larry, here’s a good one: Don’t be evil.

Stamped

John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes:: "New social network/recommendation engine, which like Instagram, is debuting with but a single interface: a native iPhone app. The premise is simple and ambitious: you “stamp” things that you enjoy and recommend. There aren’t different types of stamps. There’s no rating from 0-5 or anything like that. Just stamped. What kind of things can you stamp? All sorts of things: restaurants, places, books, movies, music." "Stylish, distinctive, nice-branded UI, too"

Stamped describes itself as:

Stamped is a new way to recommend only what you like best—restaurants, books, movies, music and more. No noise, no strangers, just the things you and your friends love. Read their entire introductory blog post.

How Many iPhones Will Be Upgraded Next Year?

Horace Dediu, writing for Asymco:

Last week I proposed that there were two significant markets for the new iPhone: 1) the existing iPhone user base 2) smartphone “non-consumers”. Today I want to dig a bit deeper into the first market to get an idea of what it amounts to. Very good analysis.