Happy New Year! I hope that you and your family had a wonderful holiday season. and have managed to stay warm during this crazy cold weather. I know that Apple and many app developers certainly enjoyed the season because Apple announced yesterday that the App Store had a record-breaking holiday season. There were $300 million in purchases on New Year’s Day, and $890 million in purchases during the week starting on Christmas Eve. Apple VP Phil Schiller announced that “[i]n 2017 alone, iOS developers earned $26.5 billion — more than a 30 percent increase over 2016.” And since the App Store launched in July 2008, iOS developers have earned over $86 billion. And now, the news items of note from the end of the year and early 2018:
- California attorney David Sparks reviews Best Photos, an app that can help you to sort and prune through the photos on your iPhone.
- Sparks also discusses iCloud syncing. Sparks mentioned on a recent Mac Power Users podcast that he is now relying almost exclusively on iCloud for his document management, with just rare use of Dropbox.
- For a very long time (well over a year), my favorite iPhone weather app was Weather Line. A few months ago I changed to Carrot Weather, which I really like (not only on the iPhone, but also on the Apple Watch where Carrot Weather is my favorite third-party Apple Watch app). However, Zac Hall of 9to5Mac reports that Weather Line was updated this week and now supports the iPhone X, so I’ll have to check in again on that old favorite.
- Jon Chase of Wirecutter has a round up of some of the best HomeKit-compatible smart-home devices. There are quite a few good ones on that list, but my personal favorite is the Lutron Caséta line.
- Cliff Kuang of Fast Company Design discusses the 12,000 chairs that Apple purchased for its new Apple Park campus.
- John Gruber of Daring Fireball discusses ways that Apple can improve the feature where you press the side button on an iPhone X to confirm a purchase.
- Gruber also has a good overview of what makes the iPhone X so amazing.
- Here is iMore’s roundup of the best devices, accessories and apps of 2017.
- Jason Snell of Six Colors explains how to use Workflow (on an iPhone) and Hazel (on a Mac) to turn your iPhone into a remote control for your Mac.
- If you are planning a trip to New Orleans this year, Brett Anderson, food critic for the Times-Picayune, posted his 10 favorite restaurants in New Orleans for 2018. It’s a fabulous list, and Commander’s Palace is my #1 choice. But picking just 10 means that he left off many other great ones — Galatoire’s, Shaya, Dante’s Kitchen, Emeril’s, Meril, Restaurant August, and many more that I won’t name because now I’m getting hungry.
- And finally, it has been a long time since I have watched one of the drone videos of the new Apple Park campus, and Matthew Roberts made one just a few weeks ago that is of really high quality and shows off a lot of features that I hadn’t seen yet: