Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Today in Hyperbole (or Possibly Reality): What Did Apple Just Kill?

Many of Apple’s software and Web updates announced today come quite close to products already offered by other companies. Here’s the rundown of affected apps:

Apps like Dropbox could be less relevant for Mac users, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents will automatically be synced across devices.

Flickr, SmugMug and mobile photo apps like Instagram could be impacted by Photostream, which automatically sends all photos taken on an Apple device to all your other Apple devices, including the Apple TV, and backs them up there for 30 days.

Many of the Camera+ photo-improving features such as its grid and zoom are now part of the iOS camera itself.

Instapaper and other article-saving apps such as Readability appear to have a direct competitor in Reading List, which formats and syncs pages in Safari. (Instapaper one-man developer Marco Arment’s reaction on Twitter? “Shit.”)

And to-do lists like Remember the Milk now have to compete with a built-in option called Reminders, which even uses the new iOS geo-fencing feature, so you can set it up to get a notification if you attempt to leave a particular location without completing a certain task.

Group messaging apps like GroupMe and textPlus have a challenger in iMessage. But not really, because it’s only for iOS devices.

However, folks who use BlackBerries just for BBM may find themselves with more reason to go iPhone.

Apple also probably didn’t make people happy at Google by mimicking the Android notification pull-down menu at the top of the screen–and the consolidated notifications experience looks like it replaces that of the independent app shop Boxcar. And Steve Jobs–who has tussled with Facebook over past integrations–certainly fired a missile toward Palo Alto by deeply integrating users’ Twitter accounts into its built-in software.

All in a day’s work!

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google