Tag Archives: ios

Zappos Rolls Out iOS App Update As It Ponders The Future Of The Mobile Shopping Experience

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Las Vegas-based apparel retailer Zappos rolled out an update to its iOS app today that saw the company fold some neat new features into the mix. There are a few new graphical flourishes here and there (users can now change the animal that appears when adding an item to their cart), and user order history is much more visual than it was in days past — it now integrates images into the mix rather than forcing users to jump into each order.

Possibly the biggest addition to the mix is a feature called negative filtering, which allows users to screen their searches based on what they don’t want to see instead of having to choose a tentative handful of options. Take colors for instance — you may not know exactly what color running shoe you want, but you sure as hell know which ones you don’t, and negative filtering lets you quickly excise the offending hues from your search results. Zappos mobile development team lead Vincent Calderaro said it was one of the most requested features, and it’s making its first appearance in the iOS app.

So yes, this is a relatively small update, but the Zappos team is looking at it within the context of a much larger vision — instead of just trying to take the existing Zappos web formula and squeeze in down into a mobile-friendly experience, the company’s mobile team is looking at ways to reinvent the core of the Zappos experience depending on the device the app is running on.

“We’re trying to figure out tablets,” Calderaro said. “Tablets are more of a discovery device, where people are finding out about products and engaging with them.” Zappos is known for its in-house product shots and videos, which factor largely into the company’s vision for the tablet experience — maybe even more so than on the web. As far as Zappos sees it, when you’re sitting a computer you’re doing a task. When you’re on a tablet, you’re interacting in a much different way: touching, tapping, swiping, all actions that seem to denote the removal of a layer of abstraction between users and the products they’re considering buying.

Meanwhile, smartphones are largely limited by the sizes of their screens (though some companies are eagerly pushing that boundary), so Zappos’ focus there is to streamline the checkout process. That’s not to say that the notion of promoting product discovery has been thrown out the window entirely, but Zappos is more than happy to get out of the way and let users make their purchases in peace.

Perhaps more important here is the flow of features. While Calderaro noted that developing for different devices should lead to unique experiences, new features pushed on one platform often osmote to others — the team is looking at its presence on mobile devices as a way to unobtrusively test new features before they roll out more widely on Zappos.com itself. That’s mostly a function of engineering resources (it’s easier to rally the iOS or Android team around implementing a single feature than it is to wrangle all the web dev folks), but this free flow of notions and features help to provide a common thread between the sorts of divergent shopping experiences Zappos is trying to build.

Report: AppleCare extended warranty could become subscription-based

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It’s been a big week for subscriptions: Adobe announced that its Creative Suite software would be entirely replaced by the subscription-only Creative Cloud service, and now a report from AppleInsider claims that Apple will be replacing or augmenting its AppleCare and AppleCare+ extended warranty plans this fall with a new subscription plan referred to as “One Apple.” The new plan would support all of the Apple devices a subscriber owns rather than individual devices paired with individual plans.

Tara Bunch, an Apple vice president formerly of HP, reportedly broke the news during one of Apple’s internal town hall-style meetings. AppleCare and AppleCare+ plans are currently sold on a per-device basis, and extend free telephone tech support and hardware repair coverage from 90 days and one year (respectively) to two years (for iOS devices) or three years (for Macs). Under the new plan, the complimentary phone support period would also be increased from the current 90 days to one year.

The exact terms, pricing, and length of coverage available under the alleged subscription plan are unknown at this point. The report suggests that the plan’s perks include in-store training similar to Apple’s current One to One offering, as well as possible 24/7 phone support.

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Pickup in iOS 7 Web traffic titillates Apple-watchers

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Ars has seen a pickup in traffic from devices out of Cupertino claiming to use iOS 7, but it’s not a ton.

Apple’s engineers are apparently ramping up their testing of iOS 7, as evidenced by Web traffic on Ars and various other sites. First noted by mobile content company Onswipe and followed up by MacRumors, devices that claim to be using iOS 7—coming from Apple’s IP block in Cupertino—started showing up more and more around April 30. But while some describe it as a spike in traffic, our own analysis shows that traffic using iOS 7 is still relatively low.

Onswipe described the change as a “significant bump” in the number of visits from iPads and iPhones using iOS 7. In fact, Onswipe claims 75 percent of the visits to its partner sites came from iPhones, while iPads represented roughly a quarter of those visits. MacRumors posted its own traffic graph without explicit numbers, saying it has seen a “surge” in iOS 7 visits over the last week.

Upon analyzing Ars’ traffic logs, we can see a trend closely mirroring that of MacRumors’ (see graph at the top of this post). Around April 29-30, visits from devices claiming to be running iOS 7 began to pick up, and the numbers seem to be rising as the days go on. But we’re talking about around 100 (or lower) on most days, with only the highest point going up past 100. For us, the large majority of those are on iPads—we can count the number of visits from iPhones or iPod touches on one hand.

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RunKeeper For Pebble Arrives, Bringing Run, Walk And Bike Ride Progress Tracking To The Smart Watch

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So far, the Pebble smart watch has done little besides offer up watch faces for users to tinker with, but the apps are starting to come in, and today marks the much-anticipated debut of early marquee partner RunKeeper. RunKeeper was an early player in the smartphone-based activity tracker market, and continues to be an industry leader. It was a natural partnership for both Pebble and RunKeeper, and now consumers get to see what the two can do together.

The new Pebble RunKeeper integration works with both Android and iOS apps, and provides the same functionality for both. RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs says that his company is very interested in the wearable tech market, and he believes that the key to cracking open a much broader audience for fitness and health tracking tech could be gadgets like the Pebble, which make it even easier to access and use information gathered by tools like RunKeeper.

“What’s really exciting for me is that what people were expecting was that it just makes it easier to have a RunKeeper controller on your wrist,” he said, describing the experience of the Pebble integration’s early beta testers. “But what they’re finding is not only can it do that, but it’s actually more powerful than an app because it’s starting to change the way they’re interacting with the data, it’s more seamless to their experience, it’s not disrupting their flow.”

Jacobs says RunKeeper’s thesis as a company is that that’s exactly what needs to happen in order to help this kind of activity tracker technology find wider purchase among a mainstream audience. “The data needs to be more actionable, and it needs to be proactively given to you so that you don’t need to hunt and look for it,” he said. The Pebble is a good way to achieve that, since it can surface any data that a smartphone, either Android or iPhone, can gather on its wrist-mounted display.


On the Pebble, RunKeeper will display pace, speed, and distance travelled and offer workout start and stop features. It can work with runs, and also bike rides and walks, and does everything most will need to get a lot more out of their smartphone supported workouts right away. It offers RunKeeper a way to compete with wearables like the Nike+ GPS sport watch, all the while allowing them to focus on the tech they do best, leaving hardware to more specialized partners.

“The software is really hard, and we think it’s a really big opportunity, and we want to be the best at the software piece,” Jacobs explained. “Part of that is pushing the phone’s capabilities so that you don’t need hardware, but part of that is also playing nice with all the best of breed hardware that comes out. In terms of being that best of breed hardware ourselves, it’s not in our roadmap or aspirations. It is in our road or aspirations to be a good neighbour.”

This version of RunKeeper for Pebble is just a start, Jacobs says, noting that during the development process they realized they could add in much more, like setting pace on the smart watch, setting distance targets and more. RunKeeper also worked closely with Pebble to get this particular integration developed, and says we’ll see similar UI elements used as other fitness tracking apps come on board. Future work could go into helping RunKeeper differentiate its experience further as the development ecosystem for Pebble progresses.

Jacobs leads me to believe that RunKeeper will be opportunistic about partnerships with hardware companies and other software efforts operating in the same general space, and this Pebble partnership is just one part of a larger strategy to try to find the key to cracking the mainstream market with a product that, while successful, has had more niche appeal up until now. The Pebble is also arguably a niche product, but taken together, it’s possible two things aimed at a very specific audience could combine in just the right way to attract a much broader following.

What’s a known source of malware doing in an iOS app? Ars investigates

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A warning delivered by the Google Safe Browsing service. The link reported as malicious was embedded in a game available in Apple’s iOS App Store.

At first blush, it looked serious: a Web link to a known source of malware buried deep inside of a highly rated app that has been available for months in Apple’s iOS App Store. For years, antivirus programs have recognized the China-based address—x.asom.cn—as a supplier of malicious code targeting Windows users. Were the people behind the operation expanding their campaign to snare iPhone and iPad users?

Although Macworld writer Lex Friedman said the link was likely harmless, I wasn’t so sure. As he pointed out, an iOS app from antivirus provider Bitdefender warned that the Simply Find It app, last updated in October, contained malware classified as Trojan.JS.iframe.BKD. Even more suspicious, Google’s safe browsing service was causing the Firefox and Chrome browsers to block attempts to visit the address on the grounds that it had been reported as an attack page. “Some attack pages intentionally distribute harmful software, but many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners,” Google’s advisory warned as recently as Thursday.

So, what was the link, embedded in an HTML tag known as an iframe, doing in an MP3 file included with the game? Who put it there? And, most importantly, was it infecting people who installed Simply Find It on their iOS devices?

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Apple changes its mind on iOS VPN changes following VirnetX verdict

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Apple has walked back its decision to make changes to how iOS devices handle VPN following a $368.2 million patent verdict in favor of VirnetX. Apple originally posted a support document to its website earlier this month detailing how the settings would change when iOS users connect to VPN networks, but it updated the document this week to say the changes are no longer happening.

When Apple first posted the document, it specifically pointed to the lawsuit by patent firm VirnetX as the reason for the behavior change on iOS’s VPN On Demand feature. The change was going to be relatively minor—devices with VPN On Demand configured to “always” would instead behave as if they were set up to only establish a connection as needed.

As noted by MacRumors, some users pointed out that this option doesn’t always perform as expected. Luckily for them, it looks like the “always” option will remain as part of VPN On Demand—Apple’s updated document hints that it came to an agreement with VirnetX and was able to keep things the same without issuing any kind of software update.

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Classic Note For iOS Is Bringing Blocky Back

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In case you can’t wait for Jony Ive to give iOS a complete revamp, there’s Classic Note, an app that will bring back a bit of the Woz-Jobs magic in fully 128K glory. The app includes a note taker and calculator stuffed into a package that harkens back to the days of the original Macintosh.

Created by Salem-based programmer David T Green, the app costs $3.99 an is available now.

“My main inspiration came when I was playing around with System 6 in Mini VMac a few months ago and noted that the flat colors and shapes of the older OS had a lot in common with the design of modern mobile apps such as LetterPress, and Microsofts Metro style apps. From there I just felt it would be incredibly fun to have some simple little apps that reproduced the feel of the old desk accessories,” said Green.

While it’s lean on features, it definitely puts the iPhone screen to good use with large, chunky Chicago-style fonts and enough pixellated buttons to choke a Wild Eep. “There is no support for bit mapped fonts in iOS so I had to hand make a custom font that matches the font used on the original Mac pixel for pixel,” he said.

“Sometimes it’s fun to work within such limited visual constraints.”

[Thanks, Michael!]