🔴 Red iPhones and Other Trinkets

There’s been a few Apple announcements of note these past seven days, besides the underwhelming iPad reveal. Let’s look at them.

Red iPhone

When I was in Japan several years ago, I spotted a red edition Nintendo DS Lite in the depths of Electric Town. It looked awesome, with its winning combination of red and black.

Apple released a red edition iPhone last week, but much to the head scratching of the internet at large, they went with a white / red combo that doesn’t look nearly as good as black / red would’ve done.

Anyway, it didn’t take long for a number of projects to spawn on YouTube where people have tried to hybridise a black iPhone with a red one to get the desired effect.

Not a simple challenge, because as we’ve seen the home button and fingerprint sensor are intrinsically linked with the other components in the phone. Also, you probably lose the waterproofing as well.

It’s not easy looking stylish.

iOS 10.3 is Released

I’d been on the iOS 10.3 beta for a while now, and it’s notable mainly for what you can’t see rather than what you can.

I’m of course talking about APFS, the new and long overdue file system to replace the flawed HFS+.

But, it’s a small feature that had me most excited; The ability for apps to change their homescreen icons on the fly.

This feature made my iOS 10 wishlist, as I felt the homescreen had the potential to communicate more info than just static icons. Sadly, it seems Apple is restricting what developers can do with this feature to manually triggered changes.

Ars has its typically in depth review of iOS 10.3 if you want to learn more.

Workflow App is Acquired by Apple

Apple now owns Workflow. I suspect a lot of people haven’t heard of Workflow, but for me it’s one of the most powerful apps on the platform. A glue which links other apps and services together and transcends many of the OS’ sandboxing limitations.

The usual pundits of the Apple world have theorised what Apple might be planning to do with it, and I’m also hoping for deeper integration into the OS than most apps allow. Things such as:

• Private API access
• Homescreen shortcuts launch directly into the workflow, rather than a pseudo web app as an ugly intermediate step
• Better deep linking into apps

Oh, and it’s now free, so go try it! And if you do, I’ve shared a few of my own workflows on Github.