No Man’s Sky and its path to PlayStation, told by the man who brought it there.
If you’ve been playing No Man’s Sky this week, you don’t want to miss Shahid’s story of how the game came to PlayStation. You can listen here.
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Customize Keyboard Shortcut Bar in Scrivener
App Debuts The latest announcement from Logitech sounds like a good idea: Pop is a physical switch with support for third-party smart home devices that can turn them on individually or trigger scenes.
Pop is a simple switch for controlling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled smart devices, including products from LIFX, Phillips Hue, Lutron, and INSTEON, Smart Things and more. Plus, it works with IFTTT for control of a broader range of products.
Each switch can be used to trigger three different custom commands. For instance, use a single press to turn all the lights in a room on or off. Or, use a double press at dinner time to dim the lights and turn on your favorite Sonos jazz station. And since it works with Logitech’s Harmony hub-based remotes, you could even set a long press to start Movie Time in the living room.
Over the past year, I’ve bought a few home automation devices to bring more convenience into my life. Sometimes, I miss the ability to press a physical switch instead of fumbling with an app or a widget. The upcoming HomeKit card of Control Center in iOS 10 has improved this aspect, but it doesn’t support IFTTT or Sonos.
With the Logitech switch, I could create a recipe to turn off my lights and start recording with Manything as soon as I leave my house with one press. I’m intrigued, but I can’t find a European release date on Logitech’s website.
Interesting move from IFTTT: the company has launched a developer platform to let third-parties enable recipe-building functionality into their apps.
We’ve worked closely with a select group of partners to add IFTTT directly into their apps. Users will be able to discover and activate IFTTT Recipes without having to leave a partner’s app. These native experiences make IFTTT more accessible than ever.
Our partners all have one thing in common: the desire to add value and enable a more seamless experience for their users.
Explaining IFTTT’s web automation is probably the biggest hurdle to get started with the service. Having a streamlined recipe interface inside multiple native apps could help.
Before Federico heads to the beach for many months of vacation, the guys talk about iPad keyboards, Dropbox Paper and Instagram Stories before answering listener questions.
I wasn’t expecting to discuss Instagram Stories this week, but, as it turns out, I’m a fan. You can listen here.
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Concise, effective, and relatable. Apple is helping Google make these ads by shipping 16 GB iPhones as base models in 2016.
This week Fraser and Federico take another pass at managing tasks on iOS, this time looking at implementing Getting Things Done with OmniFocus on iOS.
If you’re an OmniFocus user, or if you’ve been considering the app, you don’t want to miss this week’s episode of Canvas. You can listen here.
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Earlier today, Spotify unveiled Release Radar, an algorithmically-generated playlist updated Friday and designed to recommend new music. Like Discover Weekly, Release Radar tailors suggestions dynamically for your tastes, with the difference that it highlights newly released music from the past few weeks instead of anything you might be interested in. Essentially, Release Radar aims to be Discover Weekly for new song release.
The Verge has more details on how Spotify approached Release Radar after the success of Discover Weekly:
“When a new album drops, we don’t really have much information about it yet, so we don’t have any streaming data or playlisting data, and those are pretty much the two major components that make Discover Weekly work so well,” says Edward Newett, the engineering manager at Spotify in charge of Release Radar. “So some of the innovation happening now for the product is around audio research. We have an audio research team in New York that’s been experimenting with a lot of the newer deep learning techniques where we’re not looking at playlisting and collaborative filtering of users, but instead we’re looking at the actual audio itself.”
As a Discover Weekly fan, I think this is a fantastic idea. Discover Weekly has brought back the joy of discovering new music into my life, but the songs it recommends aren’t necessarily fresh. I can see Release Radar complement Discover Weekly as the week winds down with songs that I don’t know and are also new.
Already in today’s first version of Release Radar, I’ve found some excellent suggestions for songs released in the past two weeks. Spotify has their personalized discovery features down to a science at this point.
Conversely, I’m curious to see what Apple plans to do with their Discovery Mix feature of Apple Music announced at WWDC (shown here with a screenshot). Discovery Mix still hasn’t become available after four betas of iOS 10. I’m intrigued, but also a little skeptical.
