Fan made games, and how copyright owners react to these projects.
For this week’s Remaster, I spent some time researching the world of fan-made games and mods, and I ended up discovering a fascinating community of game makers and dedicated fans. You can listen here.
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Katie Dupere writes for Mashable about the stories shared in a new series of Apple videos:
Meera is nonverbal, living with a rare condition called schizencephaly that impacts her ability to speak. But with the help of her iPad and text-to-speech technology, she can make her thoughts and opinions known — and she sure does. From her love of Katy Perry to her passion for soccer, Meera will let you know exactly what’s on her mind. All it takes is a few taps of her tablet, and with a specialized app stringing letters into words, and words into phrases, her thoughts are played out loud.
Meera’s relationship with tech is just one of seven stories featured in a powerful video series created by Apple to spotlight the company’s dedication to accessible technology. The videos were released in celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 18, a day emphasizing the importance of accessible tech and design.
Accessibility features have long been prioritized in Apple’s software, and this new video series tells the stories of people who depend on those features. What to some may simply be an ignored option in the Settings app is to others a pathway to significant new experiences and empowerment.
Steven Levy got an exclusive, inside look at Apple Park for Wired magazine. You may have seen photos and drone footage of the outside of Apple Park in the past, but Levy explains what it feels like from the inside:
…peering out the windows and onto the vast hilly expanse of the courtyard, all of that peels away. It feels … peaceful, even amid the clatter and rumble of construction. It turns out that when you turn a skyscraper on its side, all of its bullying power dissipates into a humble serenity.
Wired’s feature is full of interesting insights from the people involved in bringing Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple Park to life. For Jony Ive, the building is an architectural and construction wonder, but also a means to a greater end:
“It’s frustrating to talk about this building in terms of absurd, large numbers,” Ive says. “It makes for an impressive statistic, but you don’t live in an impressive statistic. While it is a technical marvel to make glass at this scale, that’s not the achievement. The achievement is to make a building where so many people can connect and collaborate and walk and talk.” The value, he argues, is not what went into the building. It’s what will come out.
Still, it’s fascinating to consider the challenges that the design posed, including the four-story glass doors of the café that can accommodate 4,000 people:
For Seele, the very toughest challenge came from constructing the giant glass sliding doors for the café—they had to extend from the ground to the roof, a full four stories. Each door leaf is about 85 feet by 54 feet. “The only doors I know of in the world that size are on an airplane hangar,” Diller says.
The steel that frames each leaf weighs 165 metric tons, which is about 360,000 pounds. Structural components, like rods, weigh another 18,000 pounds. Then there are 10 panels of glass, each weighing nearly 6,500 pounds. So you have two leaves, weighing 440,000 pounds apiece, that have to slide open and closed. “And it’s a restaurant, so you want to have it move without any major noise,” Diller says. The solution was to put all the machinery underground.
The final product, Apple Park, is designed to perpetuate Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple and the company’s values:
The phrase that keeps coming up in talks with key Apple figures is “Steve’s gift.” Behind that concept is the idea that in the last months of his life, Jobs expended significant energy to create a workplace that would benefit Apple’s workers for perhaps the next century. “This was a hundred-year decision,” Cook says. “And Steve spent the last couple of years of his life pouring himself in here at times when he clearly felt very poorly.
Levy’s profile of Apple Park goes into extraordinary detail and is a must-read for anyone curious about this astonishing achievement of architecture and design.
Sal Soghoian, Paul Kent, and Naomi Pearce are collaborating on a new conference called CMD-D covering automation and scripting on macOS and iOS.
The conference is called CMD-D (pronounced “Command-D”), and it will be held August 9th at the Santa Clara Convention Center. It’ll be a full day of exploring the current state of automation technology on both Apple platforms, sharing ideas and concepts, and showing what’s possible—all with the goal of inspiring and furthering development of your own automation projects.
To assist in this exploration of all things Automation, I’ve invited some of my smartest friends to present sessions focused on their own areas of automation expertise, on macOS and iOS. And, for those new to automation, we’re also planning a Scripting Boot Camp on August 8th.
Speakers include Andy Ihnatko, Jon Pugh, Jason Snell, John Welsh, and Sal Soghoian. Registration is open and can be found here.
On this week’s episode of AppStories, John and I covered how app subscriptions work, the pros and cons for consumers and developers, and examples of apps using creative subscription models. After some research, we discovered more indie apps that have added subscriptions over the past year than we initially imagined.
You can listen to the episode below, or jump directly to the app examples (and download them from the show notes) using this Overcast link.
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Jason Yuan, writing for Medium’s Startup Grind:
Earlier this year I applied and interviewed for a graphic design internship at Apple Music (an opportunity of a lifetime), and was turned down with a very kind letter stating that although they liked my work, they wanted to see more growth and training.
At first, I was frustrated — Northwestern University doesn’t offer any sort of undergraduate graphic design program, so whatever growth they were looking for would have to be self taught…
…but as soon as I came to this realization, I became inspired to embark on what became a a three-month long journey to the holy grail — the iOS app that Apple Music deserves.
We don’t often link to concept pieces, but Yuan’s work is well worth a look. Besides the clean, elegant visual updates found here, one of the most interesting segments in the piece concerns a proposed new music discovery method called ‘My Sampler.’ The idea is that users can sample short clips of songs and either swipe down to add a song to their library or swipe up if they don’t like it. Yuan does a great job of showing how this type of gamification through gestures could be a welcome addition to the iOS Music app.
Beddit, which makes a sleep sensor that collects sleep and other health data and sends it to companion iPhone and Apple Watch apps, was acquired by Apple. According to Beddit’s privacy policy:
Beddit has been acquired by Apple. Your personal data will be collected, used and disclosed in accordance with the Apple Privacy Policy.
Since the introduction of the Apple Watch Series 2, Apple has placed renewed emphasis on the health and fitness tracking features of the Watch. One notable hole in Apple’s lineup of built-in health and fitness apps has been the lack of a sleep tracker. With Beddit, Apple fills that gap and presumably adds a team of engineers that can help it develop additional sleep tracking capabilities in-house.
The Beddit 3 Sleep Monitor is available on Apple’s online store.
The band is back together just in time to talk about Federico’s new iPhone case, the Echo Show, Phil Schiller’s comments on App Store upgrade pricing and more.
We’re all back on Connected this week with a variety of topics, including Amazon’s latest addition to the Echo family. You can listen here.
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