Month: July 2018

Tales from the Orchard: Apple’s App Store marks 10 years of third-party innovation

The revolution Steve Jobs resisted

 

By Stephen Silver of Apple Insider

The first iPhone saw release in 2007 with a fairly barebones selection of apps, none of which were made by outside developers. That changed when Apple opened the gates to developers a year later with iPhone OS 2.0, invigorating a sector and forever changing what it meant to be an “Apple developer.

The App Store officially launched on July 10, 2008, after it was announced the previous fall; the first software development kit was released in February of 2008.

As Apple demonstrated in an “oral history” it released a few days before the anniversary, the App Store has not only grown exponentially in its ten years of existence, but it’s also been at the forefront of all sorts of innovations in technology, culture and entertainment over the course of the decade.

The App Store has helped facilitate major growth in the content streaming revolution, as well as geolocation, e-commerce and even online dating, while also forever changing what it means to be a software developer.

All that, and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was reportedly resistant to the idea at first.

The App Store-free iPhone

When the first-generation iPhone arrived in 2007, it came with apps, but all of them were made by Apple. It had Mail, Safari, iTunes, Photos, Messages, Visual Voicemail, weather, camera, the calendar, the clock, and a few others that were Apple’s own, without any non-Apple apps, or user choice for alternative versions.

According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, the tech guru was opposed to allowing third-party to run natively on iPhone — and when pressured to do so by developers and others, he had a simple answer: Develop your own web apps that will work on the new platform.

“The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone,” Jobs said at WWDC in 2007. “And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need!”

Developers in attendance didn’t exactly rise to their feet with roaring applause. Instead, they gave the equivalent of a golf clap, a rare miss for a “Jobsnote.”

However, after the backlash from developers continued, it soon became clear that keeping native apps out was not tenable for long.

Others in the know disagree with Isaacson’s story and contend third-party apps were always on the iPhone roadmap; Jobs and company were simply not comfortable with releasing an SDK at launch.

In any case, web apps came first, with native software to follow. Apple announced the release of an SDK in October of 2007, with the software shipping out to developers the following February.

“Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February,” Jobs wrote in a letter that October. “We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users.”

Jobs, in adding that the SDK would also allow the creation of apps for the iPod Touch, ended the letter by promising that “we think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.” Apple also announced that developers could set the price of their own apps — including free — with the devs keeping 70 percent of sales revenues.

The SDK was officially released on March 6, 2008. Less than a week later, Apple announced that the SDK had been downloaded more than 100,000 times in the first four days.

The Store opens

Shortly after the iPhone 3G was released, the App Store officially came online on July 10, 2008. There were 500 apps available at launch.

The store was a hit with consumers almost immediately, as it was easy to use and figure out even for less-tech-savvy customers, and it brought life-changing technologies in all sorts of realms.

By early 2009, Apple had released a memorable TV commercial that introduced the phrase “there’s an app for that” to the lexicon:

Indeed, the App Store very soon after its launch changed life for its users in all sorts of ways, providing them with apps for fitness, gaming, navigation, book-reading, e-commerce and much more. The live-streaming revolution, with Netflix leading the way, was made possible by App Store apps. And thanks to Tinder and other geolocation-based apps, dating was never the same again.

Changes would come to the Store as time went on. When the iPad and later the Apple Watch came along, apps were part of those as well. Apple introduced in-app subscriptions for the first time in 2011, and a huge redesign debuted in the summer of 2017.

There were 500 apps available at the time of launch, a number that would grow to 3,000 by that September and 15,000 by the following January. The growth was exponential in the ensuing years, as the App Store hit 1 million apps in the fall of 2013, and reportedly reached 2 million earlier this year.

Just as the iPhone has grown from a product that didn’t exist 11 years ago to something that’s a ubiquitous part of life in the 21st century, apps are now an indisputable part of most people’s everyday existence.

 

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WIT: We need more women in tech in order to get more women in tech

The problem becomes exponentially easier to solve once you’ve begun to solve it.

 

By David Yang and Nimit Maru of Recode.net

While the United States is seeing more women in leadership positions within politics and even classic old-boys-industries like finance, the tech sector can’t say the same. More startups than ever — 70 percent, to be exact — have absolutely no women on their boards of directors, and the same is true for their executive-level employees: More than half of all startups have entirely male executive teams.

And when we drill down to the computing sector — where are nested the kinds of jobs we train students for — the numbers are even more dire: The percentage of computing occupations held by women has declined sharply since the early 1990s, when it peaked at just over 35 percent of occupations held by women, despite the fact that slightly more than half of all college grads are women.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that our current efforts either aren’t working or aren’t being applied on a grand enough scale.

We need to start earlier.

We need to get everyone on board. “Diversity and inclusion,” while incredibly important as an initiative, can’t be viewed as merely that, a siloed initiative that happens in parallel with the same old ways of doing things or is overlaid at the end of projects to make sure everything looks kosher to outsiders. It has to be interwoven into an organization’s protocols.

Women, for example, have to feel comfortable being emotional in workplace conversations and not feel like they can’t bring that part of themselves to the job just because men are taught to operate that way. The default way of conducting business can’t be the “male” way.

Minorities have to feel that micro-aggressions will be taken seriously and not written off as “sensitivities” or “overreactions.” And companies have to go beyond “token” employees — because hiring only one woman or one person of color can be exhausting for that person and cause them to leave. It comes down to this: Companies can’t work toward moving the needle on big issues and then gloss over the small things.

Those little, interpersonal things add up to company culture, no matter what the values on the website say, and it’s precisely the day-to-day concerns that will drive women and people of color away, no matter how much energy a company puts into big-picture efforts.

We also need to come to a cultural understanding that the opposite of systematic disadvantage is systematic advantage. Though that seems obvious enough, initiatives like the Grace Hopper Program, which offer benefits exclusively to women, get a lot of pushback from men (and women, surprisingly enough) who see these policies as “sexist” and ultimately damaging to women, sending the message that women need a helping hand and undermining the idea of women as independent and just as strong as men. But the truth is that women do need at least one helping hand in light of the many hands that have held them down for so long. It’s one thing to say that women aren’t inherently less capable; of course they aren’t. But it’s essential to recognize that society has enforced handicaps, and women’s inherent abilities aren’t the only factors at play.

We’ve seen these same arguments against systematic advantage in the affirmative action context — that built-in preference of historically disadvantaged groups is somehow damaging to those groups. But you won’t see those who argue against affirmative action or scholarships for minorities or deferred tuition for women also arguing against the tacit advantage that majority groups have had for centuries, if not millennia. And that’s because the adage is true: When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Majority groups that have been unfairly advantaged for too long see any even minute reduction in that unfair advantage as an all-out attack.

We know that initiatives like the Grace Hopper Program’s deferred-tuition model — where women train now and pay only once they find full-time, in-field employment — work. Take Leila Loezer, for example, a Grace Hopper grad originally from Brazil. She came to the U.S. in 2008, and after reading about our unique tuition model in the Women Who Code newsletter, completed our program and was ultimately hired by the New York Stock Exchange.

So it’s on all of us, but especially organizations with a strong following, a wide reach and high-profile leadership, to articulate both the general need for and their specific support for systematic advantage as a tool to combat systematic disadvantage. In this way, we can scale up these efforts — because more women in the industry naturally begets more women in the industry, and the problem becomes exponentially easier to solve once you’ve begun to solve it.

Some 94 percent of Grace Hopper grads ultimately find full-time, in-field work, which means that every year, we’re injecting hundreds of high-quality female engineers into the tech sector. But it also means that those female engineers will attract even more female engineers.

A study from 2016 revealed that 85 percent of jobs are filled via networking and referrals. When both your team and the industry are majority male, you can bet your referrals are going to be majority male. So the snake eats its tail and the problem proliferates.

But when women — who have likely found support in small, women-friendly communities like Girl Develop It, Women Who Code, Black Girls Code, etc. — join your organization, suddenly your pipeline includes those very targeted groups. And more importantly, when many of the women from those groups see your company as more friendly and more accessible — you already employ a woman they know — they suddenly have a chance at employment that they didn’t have before.

What do think needs to be done in order to get more women into the Tech world? Tell us in the comments below!

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App of the Week: Thumbtack

How Thumbtack Plans To Become The Amazon For Home Services

Thumbtack’s Instant Match makes finding a plumber, home cleaner, or landscaper on the service much faster.

By Emily Price of fastcompany.com

Thumbtack started eight years ago with one goal in mind: to become an Amazon of sorts for home services like plumbers, home inspectors, and house cleaners. Today it moves a little bit closer to that goal with the launch of Instant Match on the service, a new feature that instantly connects customers with service providers who are available to work.

“When you think about it, there are very few things at this point you have to work hard to buy. The internet has made them dramatically more accessible and more convenient and yet the entire local services category, not just plumbers, not just home services, remains an exception to that broad trend,” says Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta.

He thinks that hiring someone to perform a service in your home should be as easy as ordering a book online.

“Over the last eight years, we’ve made an immense amount of progress toward that dream. We’ve helped more than 25 million Americans find pros and have sent cumulatively billions of dollars to our pros from these customers,” he says.

While Zappacosta feels like the company has made great strides toward its goal of becoming an Amazon of home services, he notes that the company still has a bit further to go.

“The reality is if you sort of take me at my word and say we want to make hiring a plumber as easy as buying a book, we have not yet accomplished that,” he says. “But today we’re going to take a big step in that direction.”

The way things used to work on Thumbtack, you would make a request for a plumber, for instance, who would come and unclog your shower drain. That request would get sent to all the available plumbers in your zip code, who would then respond to your request with their price quotes. You’d look through all those bids, and then make your selection.

That made it dramatically easier than looking through a directory and calling all those plumbers one by one, but it also wasn’t perfect.

“The reality is you still had to wait to get options, and nobody wants to wait. We all want things instantly,” Zappacosta says.
With the company’s new Instant Match feature, your wait time is cut down from hours to seconds.

The process starts with the Thumbtack app as a brief 5- to 15-question interview. If you’re looking for a house cleaner, for instance, interview questions might entail asking you how big your home is, how many bedrooms need to be cleaned, and if you have pets.

Once you’re done answering questions, Thumbtack will instantly return a handful of automated quotes from professionals in your area it knows are available to do the job. You can look at all of them, read reviews, and decide which one best fits your needs.

When you find a pro you like, you can message them within the app to set up an appointment for the service.

“Really what Thumbtack is doing is interviewing and sort of replacing the conversation that you used to have to have with each and every individual pro to basically tell them ‘Hey, here’s what I need. Can you do it.? And if so how much are you going to charge,’” says Zappacosta.

The instant quote saves plenty of time–previously, a pro would have to look over the survey and decide how much to quote you.

Now, It’s instant due to some inputs that Pro has already put in. A housekeeper, for instance, can say they’re available to work 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays, and charge $100 for a 1-bedroom apartment, $150 for a 2-bedroom apartment, and $300 for a 3-bedroom. When I put in my request for my two-bedroom apartment to be cleaned on Thursday, I’ll get their quote seconds later, saying it can be done for $150. If I want my cleaning on Friday, then that person won’t be part of my returned quotes since they’re not available.

It streamlines the whole process by eliminating the need to find out if someone is available or how much they’ll charge for your specific job.

It’s also good for professionals. When they set those rates, Thumbtack uses its database of historic prices that’s it’s collected over the past eight years to let them know the average cost for that service in that zip code. For instance, if most housekeepers charge $250 for a 2-bedroom, then the person who is charging $150 knows they can probably charge a little more. If the average cost is $75, then they can know they’re overcharging a bit based on the norm, and that’s probably why they’re not getting much business.

“We can get you quotes that are as intentful, as specific, as the pros doing it themselves but programmatically, Zappacosta says.

“This is admittedly straightforward. But this represents I think the biggest step that the service sector has taken in basically its entire existence. It’s about moving it from the 20th century to the 21st century.”

Going back to that Amazon example, he thinks that one of the biggest reasons Amazon is so successful is because you can go to the site and instantly see everything that is available, read reviews, and take action to buy the item you want.

The way they’re able to do that is because they have data on what’s in the warehouse ready to be shipped. In a way, having professionals fill out their availability and pricing within Thumbtack gives it the same power.

Asking for quotes from professionals is free for everyone involved. When you as a customer ask for more information or contact one of the professionals, then that professional is charged for the interaction, regardless of whether or not you ultimately choose them for the job.

It’s a process somewhat like Google AdWords. A plumber, for instance, can say he’s willing to spend $100 a week on getting new customers. The pricing for how much an interaction costs changes a bit depending on how expensive the service is and how many other professionals are on the platform doing the same thing. A house cleaner might pay $12 for a connection, but that might lead to a $200 job every single week.

That’s a bit of a difference from Thumbtack’s previous model, in which it charged professionals each time they gave a quote to a customer. Now the charge happens a little further down the pipeline, so they have a greater chance of success. It’s also a bit cheaper, something Zappacosta says Thumbtack has done because it thinks Instant Match is better, and it wants to incentivize pros to come over.

Currently, Thumbtack has a supply problem. There’s more demand for services on the platform than it’s able to fill. The hope is that Instant Match will help move the process along faster, and make it easier for professionals to find work, and customers to find them. It also makes it so that house cleaner, plumber, or landscaper can focus on what they do best, without having to figure out marketing in the process.

Thumbtack has been trying out Instant Match with roughly 7,600 of the professionals currently on its platform. Tuesday’s announcement opens that program up to all of the professionals using the service in 11 categories nationallly; 65 categories are available in at least certain markets, with more on their way.

“Phase one is all about the supply side, enabling this sort of instant match product by building out this whole inventory system, sort of like the equivalent of our fulfillment center,” Zappacosta says. He says that Phase two, which will likely be announced next year, will take things a step further and make them every more streamlined, allowing you to make that purchase even faster.

“There’s no magic in terms of what customers want. They want things instantly. They want to see prices, they want to see reviews, and they want to take action with confidence. We’re going to do that for the whole service sector.”

Download Thumbtack for iOS here.

Download Thumbtack for Android here.

What do you think of Thumbtack and Apps like it? Tell us in the comments below!

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How to: Teach Siri to Pronounce Names, Learn Nicknames

Need to teach Siri how to pronounce a name or understand a nickname in your contacts list? You can train her to better understand your commands on iOS.

 

By Lance Whitney of PCMag.com

Are you tired of Siri mangling the names of people in your contact list? Siri can get vexed and perplexed by names that aren’t easy to pronounce, but you can fix her mistakes so your friendly, neighborhood voice assistant learns the right way to speak the names of family, friends, and other folks.

Siri can also get confused when you try to call or text someone in your contact list when you try to use a nickname. You can train Siri about pronunciations and nicknames on your iPhone or iPad, but the process will need to be repeated for both devices. Luckily it works the same no matter what you’re using.

Pronounce First Name

Let’s say you’ve asked Siri to call or send an email or text message to someone, and in so doing, Siri mispronounces the name. Activate Siri again and say: “You pronounced it wrong.” Siri asks how you pronounce the person’s first name. Tell her, and she’ll display a list of options, asking you to choose the right one. Tap on each option to hear how the name will be pronounced. If none of the options sound right, tap on the link to “Tell Siri again.” Siri asks you to say the name again, then displays another list of options. Again, tap on each one to hear it and then tap on Select to choose the best one.

Pronounce Last Name

Next, Siri asks how you pronounce the person’s last name. Pronounce the name for Siri. She displays the list of options. Tap on each one to hear it. No good? Tap on “Tell Siri again” and repeat the name. Tap on each of the new options and tap Select to choose the best one. If the person has a middle name, Siri will ask you how to pronounce that as well.

Teach Siri With a Direct Command

Alternatively, you can say: “Hey Siri, learn to pronounce name of contact.” Siri goes through the same steps, asking how to pronounce the first name and then the last name by prompting you to select the best option for each.

Enter Phonetic Spelling

If you can’t get Siri to pronounce the name by voice, then you may have better results diving into the person’s contact information and spelling the name phonetically. Launch the Contacts app, open the person’s entry, and tap on Edit in the upper-right corner. Swipe down the contact page until you see the link to add field. Tap on that link. At the Add Field page, tap on the entry for Phonetic first name.

 

Finalize Phonetic Spelling

In the Phonetic first name field, type the name phonetically as best as you can. You may want to look up the name in a dictionary or search online to see how it’s spelled phonetically. Swipe down the screen, tap on add field, and tap the field for Phonetic last name. Type the last name phonetically in the appropriate field. Tap Done. You can then ask Siri to show you contact information for that person, and Siri will now pronounce the full name.

Pronouncing a Company

You can extend this process beyond a person’s name to the name of a company. The contact information for a company includes a field for Phonetic company name. Add that field. Type the name phonetically, and Siri should learn the right way to pronounce it.

Nicknames

What if their names are pronounced correctly, but Siri is having trouble telling people apart. This is where nicknames become handy.

Let’s say you ask Siri to call or text someone by saying his or her first name, for example, “call John,” and there’s more than one John in your contact list. Siri will ask which John, displaying and speaking the possible choices.

If you want to avoid all that, simply giving the contact’s last name will allow you to identify the correct contact quicker. As a warning, this method works best for last names that are different from the first names of other contacts. If you have more than one contact with the same last name, Siri will still ask you to specify the correct person.

Set a Relationship

Maybe you want to call or text a family member or relative but want to refer to that person by the relationship rather than his or her name. Here, you have a few options. Say: “Hey Siri, call Dad.” The first time you do this, Siri asks for your father’s name. Give her the name, and Siri then asks if you want to remember that person as your father. Say yes. From then on, ask Siri to “Call Dad” or “Call my father,” and she’ll know who to contact.

 

Set a Relationship With a Direct Command

You can also give a nickname to a specific person based on your relationship by explaining it to Siri. Say: “Siri, wife’s name is my wife” or “husband’s name is my husband” or “son’s name is my son.” Siri asks if you want to remember that the person you named is your wife or husband or son. Answer yes, and Siri records the relationship in your entry in the Contacts app. You can extend this to friends, cousins, doctors, dentists, and other people in your life.

Manually Set Relationship

Alternatively, you can go directly to your entry in the Contacts app to create a nickname. Launch Contacts and open your own entry. Tap on Edit. Swipe down the screen and tap on the button for “add related name.” Tap on the term that best describes the relationship, e.g., mother, father, brother, sister, spouse, manager. Then tap on the info button next to Related Name and select the contact you want to associate with the term you selected.

Set Custom Label

If none of the existing terms are a good match, tap the entry at the bottom to “Add Custom Label.” Type the term you want to use, such as Accountant. Tap Done. Then tap on the Info button next to Related Name and select the contact name for your accountant. Tap Done.

Remove a Nickname

What if you need to change or remove a nickname? No problem. You can tell Siri: “Joe Smith is no longer my accountant” or “Jane Doe is no longer my boss.” Siri asks if you want her to remember that information. Tap or say yes. If the nickname is saved in your entry in the Contacts app, just edit your entry and tap on the Delete button to remove the nickname and relationship.

 

How do you feel about Siri’s ability to learn? Sound off in the comments below!

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Tales form the Orchard: Apple may release new iPhone colors this year, including red, blue, and orange

 

 

 

  • Apple is expected to release three new iPhone models this fall.
  • The least expensive model could come in a variety of colors, including blue, red, and orange, according to an analyst.

By Kid Leswing of Business Insider

Apple could release an iPhone later this year with gray, white, blue, red, and orange color options.

The colorful new phone would be a less expensive model that has facial recognition and an edge-to-edge screen, according to details from the TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo shared by 9to5Mac.

The iPhone 8 is available in silver, black, gold, and red. The iPhone X comes in silver and black.

Apple watchers are expecting three new iPhones this year: one that looks like the iPhone X but with updated components; a supersize version of the iPhone X; and a less expensive, colorful iPhone with an edge-to-edge LCD screen and facial recognition that costs $650 to $750.

The supersize iPhone X could come in another new color — gold — according to the note shared by 9to5Mac.

Apple most recently released a lower-cost iPhone model with the iPhone 5c in 2013. That too came in a variety of colors, but it was not as strong a seller as Apple had hoped, and the model was discontinued soon after its release.

Kuo is a well-regarded analyst who often reveals new details about Apple’s production plans before they are public. While he was at another bank last November, he shared this graphic with his prediction about the 2018 iPhone lineup:

 

How do you feel about the potential colors for the new iPhone lineup? Sound off in the comments below!

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WIT: Robotics Barbie joins the corporate call for diversity

Robotics Barbie is also part of a Mattel Inc. initiative to promote new jobs for girls, in line with a public pledge the company made earlier this year.

 

By Jeff Green of Bloomberg

Robotics Barbie is a lab-coat-and-glasses-wearing robotics engineer, a far cry from the 1992 “math class is tough” version. Appropriately, she’s also part of a Mattel Inc. initiative to promote new jobs for girls, in line with a public pledge the company made earlier this year.

In February, Mattel senior vice-president Lisa McKnight joined 40 executives onstage at the Makers women’s diversity conference to make a range of commitments towards improving women’s professional lives.

McKnight promised 10 such dolls this year; advertising group UM said it would double the number of women of colour at every level of its organization; LinkedIn said it will add job coaching for returning moms.

These kinds of pledges have in recent years become a kind of progressive calling card for companies looking to keep and attract young talent. There’s a promise for every interest group, with a wide range of commitment and accountability.

Some 300 CEOs have signed on to the CEO Action coalition, which seeks to share successful diversity initiatives. Many members of that group are also part of Paradigm for Parity and Parity.org, which have similar missions to increase all forms of workplace diversity.

The Thirty Percent Coalition, 3% Movement, and 2020 Women on Boards ask signees for a commitment to specific levels of female representation. Others focus singly on LGBT rights, or ethnicity, veterans or the disabled or in a specific field such as the Tech Inclusion Pledge.

“There are strong social norms right now around committing to these kinds of goals,” said Dolly Chugh, an associate professor of management and organization at the NYU Stern School of Business.

She has studied how public pressure changes diversity behaviour. “If you’re among the minority of CEOs who isn’t signing the pledge or promise, you’re violating a norm and norm violations make people very uncomfortable.”

By most measures, two decades of increased efforts to improve diversity have slowed or stalled. Parity for women in boardrooms is still at least three decades away. Women and people of colour are dramatically underrepresented in top management. At the CEO level, white men still occupy 95% of the seats.

In some specific areas, though, public commitments have prompted change. Formed in 2011, the 3% Movement was named after the ratio of women creative directors in the advertising world to men (they now make up 29%).

The more the merrier, says Shannon Schuyler, who heads corporate responsibility at PwC. The professional services company started CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion a year ago. Almost 90% of the organizations either have or are planning to add unconscious bias training. “This is about the CEO saying that they will put themselves out there, to really be able to make the change happen,” Schuyler said.

Robotics Engineer Barbie, which comes with a humanoid robot and laptop, will partner with the Tynker game platform and Black Girls CODE to encourage girls to embrace computer science, according to Mattel. The company says it has introduced 17 dolls focused on careers and female role models, more than the 10 promised.

Among the other companies on the Makers stage with specific goals was Adobe Systems Inc., which promises gender pay parity at all locations by the end of this year, and is at least 80% there already, said Donna Morris, executive vice-president of the customer and employee experience at the maker of Photoshop.

AT&T Inc. and L’Oreal SA promised to improve their representation of women in advertisements, as measured by progress on the scorecard generated by #SeeHer, an organization that has its own pledge to improve the portrayal of women by 20%, as measured by viewers, by 2020.

“People really, really, really value keeping a promise,” said Ayelet Gneezy, an associate professor at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied how people react to promises honoured and broken.

“It’s really about the value of trustworthiness and reliability,” Gneezy said. “So there’s also a risk to not keeping the promise. I don’t really care what they tried to do, I care what they did.”

How do you feel about the new line of STEM Barbie dolls? Sound off in the comments below!

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App of the Week: FirstSeed Calendar

FirstSeed Calendar: Manage Events and Reminders on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

 

By the MacStories Team

Whether you work on iOS, a Mac, or both, FirstSeed Calendar takes advantage of the unique features of each platform providing a seamless experience that anyone with a busy schedule will appreciate.

The app has a comprehensive month view that makes viewing, adding, editing, deleting, moving, and duplicating events a breeze and an innovative week view. Most calendar apps require scrolling to see a full day’s events in week view. FirstSeed provides a grid view of the core of your day and shows any other activities as a list view, making it possible to see everything at a glance. There’s a list view, day view, and reminder support too.

FirstSeed Calendar packed with clever features. There’s a clock interface for intuitive event editing, a dedicated button to quickly switch between views and a continuous month view that takes advantage of every pixel on your screen.

The app has natural language support for English and Japanese too. Just type events as you would typically describe them and FirstSeed populates your calendar like magic.

FirstSeed is designed with each platform’s hardware in mind. On iOS, the app’s emphasis on one-handed operation makes it the perfect choice for working on the go. The iOS versions of FirstSeed support keyboard shortcuts too. On the Mac, FirstSeed uses the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar and includes a menu bar app for quick access to your schedule.

Managing your calendar doesn’t have to be hard. Take control of your schedule today with FirstSeed Calendar.

Download FirstSeed Calendar here.

What’s your favorite Calendar app? Make your case in the comments below!

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How to: Quickly Identify and Delete iPhone Apps You Don’t Use Anymore

 

 

By Emily Price of Lifehacker.com

When it comes to giving new apps a try, I’m a pretty easy sell. I’ll download almost any app from the App Store someone has convinced me has a use and give it a test drive. However, once that test drive is over I’m not good at taking the time to delete the apps that don’t quite make the cut. The result? My phone is pretty loaded with stuff.

If you have an iPhone, finding those unused apps and deleting them is pretty easy to do. I used to do it regularly and was reminded of the feature this week thanks to a post on MacRumors.

To get to the apps on your phone go into the Settings menu and then select “General” followed by “iPhone Storage.” When you do, your device will list all of the apps you currently have installed on your device with the largest of those listed first.

If you scroll down, you’ll see a “Last Used” date below each app that lists the last time you opened it. If it’s been a few months, it might be time to part ways with it.

If you tap on the app on the list you’ll be given two options: Offload app and Delete app. If you choose to Offload it will remove the app from your device but preserve the data you have associated with it, that way if you decide to download it again later on, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off. If you choose to delete, then all the app’s data will go along with it.

If you’re routinely running out of space on your device, I also recommend enabling the “Offload Unused Apps” feature found on the iPhone Storage page. With that, your phone will handle offloading apps you’re not using on its own, so you don’t have to.


How do you manage your unused Apps? Sound off in the comments below!

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