We’ve covered dozens upon dozens of great iOS 8 tips over the past month or so in an effort to ensure that users get the most out of their iPhones and iPads after updating them. After all, iOS 8 includes hundreds upon hundreds of user-facing and behind-the-scenes changes, many of which can potentially have a big impact on how you use your iOS device. We try to zero in on one tip or trick that is particularly interesting or helpful from time to time, and today we’ll discuss how to get your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to read text aloud so you can focus elsewhere.
In this, the inaugural Private i column, I want to freak you out just a little bit. In the coming weeks, this column will help Mac and iOS users understand the implications of the latest security exploits, privacy hacks, and encryption options, and how to protect themselves or take advantage of them, as the case may be.
But I want to start with Touch ID and why it’s a technology that needs more discussion as its use as an identity validation has broadened to other apps in iOS 8.
Fingerprint-based identification isn’t new, nor are biometric markers for authentication, like scanning one’s optic nerve or handprint or blood-vessel pattern or the like. They’re the thing of sci-fi movies made thoroughly real, routine, and boring with modern technology. Prior to the addition of Touch ID to the iPhone 5s, however, the fast majority of biometric ID was at fixed locations, like the entrance to a secure facility or even at my children’s after-school care program, where my fingerprint read by a USB-connected reader let me check them out from a Windows PC.
The University of Illinois has created a database that catalogs stain solutions so that if you know what caused the stain, you can look up how to remove it. So handy!
Google has rolled out a new iPhone app called Primer, aimed at teaching startups the fundamentals of marketing – with a Google spin, of course. The new app, available only on iOS for now, but coming soon to Android, complements the Google Primer website which further explains how the mini-marketing lessons Google provides overlaps with the company’s larger agenda. “We… Read More
Above: Quip co-founder and chief executive Bret Taylor at the startup’s office in San Francisco.
Image Credit: Jordan Novet/VentureBeat
SAN FRANCISCO — Quip, a startup that had the nerve to come up with a word processor for the 21st century, has now gone a few steps further and devised spreadsheet-making capabilities. But Quip won’t merely offer it as a standalone app, like, say Microsoft’s Excel.
After all, while you could add a table to a Word document, they “stink,” Bret Taylor, chief executive and a co-founder of Quip, told VentureBeat in an interview. “I can’t actually do anything for real there.”
Quip’s engineers are convinced that full-featured spreadsheets can and should coexist alongside other kinds of content in documents, even on teeny-weeny smartphone screens. Today Quip is introducing the feature, long in the works, to the rest of the world.
On Quip, Taylor showed me how he could tap here and there on his new iPhone 6 with a specially designed button-rich keyboard and cook up a complex formula in a spreadsheet . And he could use the data from one spreadsheet in a document to populate the data in another one. He could also switch from a neat little embedded table in the document to a full-screen spreadsheet and back.
Below and above the spreadsheets, he could stick a checklist, a headline, a photo, and a few paragraphs of freeform text. And his colleagues could watch and even “like” every single change he made in a chat window.
In essence, then, Quip has gone against the trend that Foursquare, Path, and even Taylor’s former employer, Facebook, have pushed in the past few months — the dividing up of big mobile applications. Instead, Quip is pulling many functions together.
Taylor describes his startup’s documents as “sort of one canvas in which you can put everything.” Indeed, that’s what Quip does for letters to its board members, Taylor said. As a result, the latest figure in a spreadsheet can appear in a paragraph elsewhere in the document.
Such unification of components could attract attention. That’s because it stands out from online mobile spreadsheet apps from companies like Google and Microsoft. Yes, those two companies have been bolstering their mobile capabilities, but with thousands more employees than Quip, they might not be able to move as fast as the tiny San Francisco startup can.
Above: Notice the Quip-designed numerical keyboard in action.
Image Credit: Quip
And Quip has more to do. It wants to keep going beyond word processing and come up with additional tools people can use to collaborate, Taylor said. Just don’t be surprised if they get wedged in with the current app.
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