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I've been using Airmail as my only email client on the Mac since I finally abandoned POP mail about three years ago. Simplifying how I managed email across devices meant funneling everything through a single Gmail account, and Airmail was originally designed to operate solely with Gmail. Since then, it's gained considerable new powers, including the ability to deal with other account types (although some of its Gmail-centric assumptions got me into trouble when I first tried to use it with an Exchange account).

Once again late to the party, I've just recently tried Airmail for iPhone. I was a little worried what form it would take, since I don't find the desktop version to be a particularly Mac-like app in terms of interface; it does offer tons of power-user customizability, though. There is some family resemblance, but it's clear that Airmail for iOS is a brand new app, in some ways outpacing its Mac predecessor. And since it no longer makes sense for Airmail to take all of its cues from a single email platform (Gmail), it's taken its cues from the app platform (iOS).

Airmail adds splashes of color and meaningful iconography to the bland table view offered by Apple's Mail app. But the true power lies in Airmail's ability to process email with swipe workflows and an in-message action menu, which can be tweaked to create a unique configuration for every user. The action menu slides in from the right with a single tap and bears an uncanny resemblance to the action menus in Drafts, another standout app for iOS power users.

Even Airmail's shortcomings have been blessings in disguise. On launch, you are taken to a unified inbox that combines messages from all of your accounts. You can exclude accounts from this view, but unlike on the Mac, it can't be disabled entirely. I excluded all my accounts, thinking it would be the same — it's not. While this means extra taps to see email, it also means that when I launch Airmail I typically don't see any email. Airmail's declaration of "Inbox Zero" is a white lie, but it would make the coiner of that phrase, Merlin Mann, very happy; he's gone to great lengths in the past to avoid the randomness of the inbox when trying to accomplish a targeted email task, like writing a new message or finding a particular piece of past correspondence.

I know I've only scratched the surface of what Airmail for iOS can do. It's annoyances won't come from the app, or the platform, but from the aging, overburdened medium of email itself. Against that powerful force, at least on iOS, Airmail is doing the best it can.

I'll admit that there are plenty of interesting developments in the Android phone world that I, by and large, just don't pay attention to. Of course, there are also a lot of blatant iPhone wannabes and copying, from both low-rent and high-profile phone makers. The latest bit of fakery that I happened to notice is the home screen of the new Huawei P9.

The uncanny valley is shiny.

The first-party apps have all had their icons overdesigned in metal tones (to match the hardware casings of the P9 line, which — surprise! — comes in silver, grey, gold, and pink) but otherwise they look like iOS app icons, neatly arranged four across. There's a dock at the bottom, with phone, contacts, messages, and a browser. And every folder neatly arranges a maximum of nine tiny icons inside a dark grey rounded rectangle. It's Springboard, to a T.

The imitation is precise, but should Apple be flattered? Springboard is, after all, the one piece of iOS that has gone almost entirely unchanged since iPhone OS 1.0. It's on the borderline between venerable and outdated. Mimicking what worked for a 3.5-inch phone in 2007 is not guaranteed to be a winning strategy.

Apple has proven that not even they should be slavishly replicating Springboard across every device. The 12.9" iPad Pro turns Springboard from an efficient app navigation interface into a sprawling mess, with gaps between icons so big you can literally drive an original iPhone through them. It's impossible to say whether a platform-wide overhaul is in the works for iOS 10, but it would be shocking if there weren't at least Pro-exclusive changes. It's an interface that's becoming embarrassing, which brings us back to Huawei's Android fork. Is there really no better way to appeal to customers than to offer them an almost-iPhone? That's certainly the way to go for deceptive knockoffs, but the P9 is a flagship product, with innovative hardware including dual cameras, something that the current iPhones lack.

Regardless, skinning a Springboard lookalike on top of Android is the route Huawei has chosen for the P9 and it's EMUI operating system. (They say it stands for "emotional user interface", but I can't help interpreting it as "emulates iPhone".) Huawei has decided to play the copying game, and their success depends on how quickly they can reproduce new designs. That's a game Apple should be happy to play — they always get to go first.

Every once in a while, even a seasoned Mac user stumbles across a built-in feature that they never knew existed. For me, it happened most recently as I was switching applications using ⌘-Tab — something I've done thousands upon thousands of times. I've long known that multiple presses of tab will select the next app to the right. To reverse the direction, there are options: either add a Shift modifier or press ⌘-`.

It may have been the lower profile of the Magic Keyboard, or it might have just been clumsy fingers, but as I reached for the backtick, I missed and hit 1 instead. The switcher and most of my windows vanished! Suddenly I was in Mission Control's "app windows" mode, but I was baffled as to how I got there, since ⌘-1 doesn't usually trigger it.

I had inadvertently discovered that application switching and Mission Control are more closely linked than I'd thought. Not only was this hotkey deliberately placed near the keys used for app switching, but tab and backtick cycle apps within Mission Control regardless of how it is invoked, including by ⌃-Down Arrow or a swipe gesture.

This doesn't seem to be documented in any Apple support materials. I began looking around the web and found that, of course, I wasn't the first person to notice ⌘-1. Bite-size tips and tricks articles on Mission Control or the app switcher often included it. But how was I to find those before I already knew what I was looking for?

When I was a kid, I devoured massive tomes like The Macintosh Bible and MacWorld's Mac Secrets from cover to cover. It wasn't always thrilling reading — I remember questioning whether I really wanted to slog through a chapter on printers — but my early completionist instincts kicked in. Each book was comprehensive, if not exhaustive, and full of gems like the ⌘-1 trick. I learned a lot because I knew that I was getting the full picture.

Today, especially with the demise of Mac OS X Hints, there's nowhere I can turn for definitive coverage of hidden features. This is one more reason why user interface designs are often criticized if their features aren't discoverable. The "-able" suffix here does not imply "by any means"; after all, I discovered ⌘-1, but purely by accident. In the past, I would have had a second chance at discovery (or more accurately, learning), even if it meant checking out a five-pound book from the library. Now, I have to rely on good design, and in its absence, happy coincidence.

When Siri debuted in 2011, in addition to its breakthrough voice control features it also shipped with plenty of silly answers to silly questions. The motivation was clear: in order to convince ordinary people to talk to their phones, the robotic voice had to be humanized. Five years later, it's gone too far, as yesterday Apple leaked the dates for WWDC hours before the official announcement through yet another overly coy Siri response. As the news spread, people dropped thousands of dollars on nonrefundable plane tickets to attend a conference they aren't guaranteed admission to — and Siri "can't wait!"

Siri announces WWDC 2016 will be held June 13th through June 17th in San Francisco https://t.co/k6lqunSP8P pic.twitter.com/qBouJfMcvy

Siri's flippant attitude infects the everyday too. I'm sick of Siri being the endpoint for all of Apple's dad joke humor. While Easter eggs are good fun and to be encouraged, playing everything as a joke is tone-deaf. I promise that I never want to hear that "a watched iPhone never boils." Even with Siri set to only speak when in hands-free mode (with headphones or a Bluetooth speaker connected), I've set enough timers to have heard it a hundred times. It wasn't funny the first time, and it's plain disrespectful now. Children who tell the same awful joke ad nauseum get put in timeout; insufferable human assistants get fired.

We shouldn't have to put up with time-wasting nonsense from virtual assistant technology, and even diehard Apple fans are looking for alternatives. Merlin Mann has been singing the praises of the new Hound app for iOS because it returns fast, no-frills results. Launching a separate app is no barrier when it's guaranteed to save time in the long run.

If you haven't tried Hound yet, here's a little demo showing why it blows my mind.https://t.co/RlOdStuFpS

In addition, practically every week I listen to a podcast with a host who is a new convert to the Amazon Echo. Their primary reason for shouting out commands to Alexa rather than Siri is that the Echo returns results quicker and more succinctly — even compared to the device that's strapped to their wrist.

With this level of competition, it's clear that Siri has to grow up and improve its behavior. The rumors were already swirling that Siri will come to the Mac this year, and the wink-wink nudge-nudge WWDC announcement is just one more indication that they'll be correct. If Siri on Mac OS is a desktop laugh factory and non sequitur generator, it will only serve to make the Mac look unprofessional. The "you can't get serious work done on an iPad" trope could well spread across the product line, especially as other voice control products improve every day. As someone who weathered the Mac vs. PC wars of the 90s, I can hear critics dismissively saying, "Oh, Siri isn't a serious virtual assistant — those iPhones, iPads, and Macs are just toys." But Apple isn't the world's largest toymaker, and its customers are not all easily amused children. So hey, Siri, next time you want to tell a joke? Shut up. We have some work to do.

Siri is ever-changing, often quietly getting updated behind the scenes, unbeknownst to us mere mortals. Yet the latest Siri update on tvOS got a rather public introduction, with the presentation of a splash screen on all Apple TV devices indicating "what's new". (This is where savvy users had to play spot the difference — five of these features came as part of tvOS 9.2, while Live Tune-In is the new server-side change.)

Much has been made of so-called "off-cycle" feature introductions to tvOS's big brother, iOS — for me, the most noticeable was the addition of Night Shift in iOS 9.3. Live Tune-In is another level removed, but could foreshadow bigger changes to come in tvOS 10. The feature allows for a new type of deep linking directly to a live video feed within certain apps (the sort that have "partner" access with Apple — that level of privilege which was necessary to have any presence on earlier Apple TVs, and the current minimum bar to be a candidate for inclusion in universal Siri search). Although it didn't seem like it, clearly this functionality was possible within tvOS 9.2, since no operating system update was applied at its roll-out.

At the moment, though, Live Tune-In's abilities are limited. Sure, it does what it says on the tin, even letting you choose from multiple feeds for a single app. If I know that the game I want to watch is airing on ESPN2, this saves me some tapping and swiping. But the bigger question is to what degree I or anyone else still thinks of live television as coming in channels at all. I might care a little about which conglomerate owns the broadcast rights for the basketball game I'm trying to see, but mostly I just want to see it.

Here is the shape I hope that Live Tune-In can take once it has more support than an off-off-cycle change to the Siri backend: tvOS will know what live video it has access to, not just by fixed channel name, but by program. My dream since tvOS and the Siri remote were announced is the ability to say "Hey Siri, show me college football games," and get listings across ESPN, Fox, CBS, and more (this would, of course, require Fox Sports to build a tvOS app in the first place). And for the truly undecided, a simpler command, "Hey Siri, what's on now?" could bring up a guide interface, hopefully with smart highlighting of what the device is already authenticated to, what requires in-app purchase, and what requires an app download.

Live Tune-In is a very small step towards making the Apple TV experience more TV-like, in the traditional sense. The exciting part is that, if Apple's other operating systems really are setting precedent, the bigger steps could also arrive at any moment.

This coming Saturday is April 16th — Foursquare Day! — got any big plans? If your answer is a resounding "no", don't worry, you're not alone.

Foursquare is one of the companies that came out of the golden age of SXSW, debuting at the 2009 festival, two years after Twitter was the darling of Austin. I waited eagerly for them to expand beyond the Bay Area and New York City and I finally(!) logged my first checkin in January 2010. It was the kind of magic that was only possible thanks to the iPhone. The app quickly earned a spot in my iPhone's dock, I used it so regularly.

The serendipitous joy of the checkin.

I'd say that today I'm Foursquare's last big fan, but technically that's not true. In 2014, Foursquare made the puzzling decision of offloading the paradigm that it invented, the checkin, into a separate app called Swarm. Foursquare was betting that it's core business was its ability to give great recommendations. (In truth, I'd say it's the accuracy of their place database, but not the "soft" data that recommendations are formed on). And Foursquare recommendations used to be excellent; the only time I ever visited Austin, in 2012, I swore by Foursquare and saw and ate some amazing things.

Unfortunately, today Foursquare can't recommend their way out of a paper bag. They're liable to tell you to go Subway when you ask for the best food in a town you've never been to before. They also sucked the fun out of checkins. At the time of the great Swarm schism, they killed the concept of becoming "mayor" of a venue by checking in the most times — one of the most original, endearing, and addicting conceits of Foursquare. Mayorships returned, but it's obvious that Swarm is not swarming, as I become mayor of anywhere I check into twice. It makes sense in hindsight: who can get a respectable percentage of their users to install a brand new app and carry on as if nothing happened? Even Facebook had similar struggles when they spun off Messenger into a separate icon on millions of Springboards across the world.

Yet I do check in, daily, but not because I feel like I'm participating in a social network, and certainly not to win a gamified competition. I do it because it's a way to track interesting data about where I've been (sure, call it "lifelogging" if you want). It's fun to be out to dinner and have the person across the table wonder "Hmm, when were we last at this restaurant?" and answer "Three months ago" without missing a beat. But it's not the kind of thing you can build even a fake national holiday around. In 2013, the city I lived in made an official proclamation of Foursquare day. In 2016, I'll celebrate by checking in at the gym and keeping my fingers crossed that Foursquare keeps its head above water for another year.

Well, what a difference a week makes. Seven days ago I was lambasting Smile for their announcement of TextExpander 6 and its new business model. I'll admit, I was uncertain about publishing my same-day reaction; part of me wanted to wait and see if things cooled off. And I suspected that given the size of the tempest stirred up, things might change.

Indeed, yesterday some "adjustments" were made. The statement from Smile's founder is more than contrite, saying "we didn’t get some things right at the start" and "there were a number of things we could have done better". I speak for myself, but I think that level of sincerity really counts with long-time Smile fans.

The biggest change Smile has made is establishing a larger, permanent discount for current TextExpander users, lowering the price from $50 to $20 per year, which is on par with what those customers paid as ordinary upgrade fees in the past. This should halt the mass exodus, but I still question the long-term business strategy. Some loyal users will sign up right away, but others, like myself, will wait to begin their subscriptions until a new release offers substantially improved features or compatibility. I just don't see much in 6.0, which feels like it got its version number artificially inflated. Perhaps 6.1, 6.2, or the next OS X release will be what gets me on board.

I still dislike the sense of expiration that comes with subscription software. I hate setting up recurring credit card payments (on an annual basis, by the time the next charge comes around, frequently the card details have changed and the payment fails anyway). I may dislike knowing that unless I constantly feed the meter my software could vanish forever, but on the other hand that's the truth of the market. And at the new price point, that feels more like a gentle reminder than an extortionate "Hey, nice software ya got there. Shame if anything happened to it."

As for new consumer customers, I don't think they'll buy in at the $50 price point, but TextExpander's new business tier may well compensate for that, and I wish them the best. It's become clear that while text expansion software may seem nerdy and niche, there is plenty of room for competition within the small space. I'm glad that Smile realized they were pricing themselves out of a vibrant market. I still plan on trying Typinator again, but now out of curiosity, not necessity. That bodes well for a healthier indie app economy.

I don't have many things on the Internet of Things, but I'm always looking for better ways to integrate them and make them smarter. HomeKit has been a disappointment, mostly because it's invisible, surfacing core features only through third party software. The one first-party access point to HomeKit is Siri, and she frequently suffers bouts of amnesia over whether there are lightbulbs in the living room of my house.

Given that it's third party or bust with connected home devices, I was excited when the release of Thington popped up in several places on my Twitter feed last week. Yes, smarter and easier connection of my devices! Yes, not just HomeKit supported devices! Let's do this!

I was at work when I heard about and downloaded the app, so it wasn't until I got home that I tried it — after all, it's pretty common for these apps to require local network access at least to set up the devices they control. I was hit immediately with an "allow notifications" modal. No worries, I'll ignore those and turn them on later if I need to. But then I was really stopped in my tracks: "Let's start off with a proper introduction. Login [sic] with your Twitter account to tell me a little about yourself."

I live on the internet and this is no proper introduction (it's almost akin to awful popover feedback surveys that appear before you've even seen the website they're hiding). What on earth do my Twitter credentials have to do with switching my lights on and off? I can't even concoct a useful IFTTT recipe that involves the two. Perhaps this is where I reveal myself to be a crotchety old man, but I refuse to use Twitter or Facebook logins as the lazy way into other services. Segmenting accounts keeps them secure and well-behaved. Relying on an API that has no features in common with your app is shoddy design — its not as bad as single-function package dependencies, but my Hue bulbs are rated to keep shining longer than my most pessimistic forecasts for Twitter.

Back in the Thington app, I hunted and poked for an alternative. I read the FAQ on Thington's site and confirmed I'm not allowed to create my own login. The introduction did not go well, and the app went in the trash. No ton of things for me.

The more Apple TV apps I install, the more confused I become. I'll happily take some of the blame, but I feel that the lack of clarity is partially the platform's fault. Specifically, input to the Apple TV is deliberately limited, with just six buttons on the Siri remote, and this increases ambiguity, and perhaps user anxiety.

The Siri remote has been dragged through the mud enough, so I won't belabor it here. But figuring out what its buttons do — not what they are labeled — is part of the tvOS learning curve. Eventually you come to know that the little TV icon means "home" and "MENU" means "back". But back to where? I frequently find myself afraid to hit the menu button because doing it feels like making a bet. This is especially true for live-streaming apps, which often take a punitive attitude towards pre-roll ads, making you not just wait but actually miss a portion of the content. For on-demand video, the spectre of losing play position and having to work your way back looms, even though Siri and scrubber thumbnails make that simpler.

All I can ever be certain of is that hitting MENU will take me somewhere else. Maybe it will end my stream, or perhaps it will open up a whole screen full of features not accessible anywhere else, as in the MLB At Bat app. Even if each individual behavior is well thought out, I still have to be mentally tracking modes all the time: if I'm in this app, with it in this state, then the mystery meat button will take me over there.

There's one way to fix this in software: institute basic wayfinding at the system level. Understandably, the tvOS interface has to be nil when displaying video, so there are gestures to bring up information and options. Swipe down for audio and video preferences, and swipe up for, well, "other" — although in many apps this gesture goes unused. I'd like to see that bottom third overlay (which developers can take full control over, it seems) to also give me an indication of what MENU will do. This would be akin to labeling leftward navigation buttons in iOS, which also correspond to swipe gestures. Two ways to accomplish an action are always more effective than one, and are decidedly Apple-like. (Think of how keyboard shortcuts are displayed in menus on the Mac. They serve as teaching aids to the novice and uncertain, and it's no fuss to a veteran power user that ⌘C appears next to Copy.)

There's no fixing the Siri remote without another generational update to Apple TV hardware. But as we've already seen with its touchpad behavior being modified in tvOS 9.2, changes to software can improve its utility. Taking the mystery out of the menu button in tvOS 10 would be a step in a known direction: forward.

Maybe I'm impatient, but I'm still waiting for the future of TV — apps! — to arrive. Several months in, my new Apple TV isn't doing much more for me than my old one was, apart from being able to actually handle basic live video decoding. Nothing new has emerged as a killer app on tvOS.

There have been high profile releases: the C+ March Madness app that I endured for three weeks, and the latest high-priced over-the-top service from Starz. Games aren't driving the platform either (and how could they with such confusingly limited controls?). The latest crop of featured games is pitiful, including a port of a 22-year-old Sega Genesis title and a more recent iOS port — sorry, universal app — whose icon is pure nightmare fuel.

Choose your dystopian hellscape: fire or robots.

Below those in the App Store lurk services like Hulu and Netflix. As great as these services and their ties to universal search are, they still don't satisfy my primary desire for the platform: to simply watch TV, sometimes live, without managing a dozen subscriptions. Even just a few channels, the equivalent of broadcast, would suffice.

On my old Apple TV, I had an app that served this function: Aereo. Technically in residence on my iPad, proper live TV was accessible via AirPlay at a moment's notice — no crappy pre-roll ads, no flaky custom video players. (Then the Supreme Court killed it. I'm still bitter.) Bringing even that basic experience to the Apple TV's powerful hardware would be pretty killer: it would increase my use and almost certainly drive more casual TV viewers to buy into the platform. Think about Phil Schiller's recent dig at old Windows PCs that could be replaced with iPads. How many million "sad" 5-year-old cable boxes are there in America? How many people would love to replace an older relative's clunky cable box with a simple Apple TV? But if it doesn't get NBC, it's a no go.

Content deals with major US networks allegedly held up the 4th generation Apple TV's release. With seemingly no progress on that front, I had assumed that the holy grail of over-the-top services would never arrive. Then out of nowhere came PlayStation Vue, a more comprehensive offering than I'd ever imagined, at a sensible price, garnering rave reviews.

this is not a sponsored post: 2 days in and I LOVE PlayStation Vue. Saving me literally ~$100/mo. in TV cost.https://t.co/Ju4FKZym5s

Now Apple is in danger of falling far behind in TV. We may never know why negotiations stalled — could the iTunes Music Store have really made TV networks so gun-shy, while Apple Music deals were being inked at the same time? Perhaps Apple still has a chance to leapfrog, if they can produce an Apple TV service, mirroring the model of Apple Music (everything new plus the back catalog, for a fixed fee). Unless that happens, watching a national sporting event or getting election news on tvOS is going to be at best clunky and at worst impossible. If only other platforms get killer apps (PS Vue runs on the Amazon Fire TV), tvOS apps won't be the future, they'll be the prey.