New Year, New Audio Setup: SoundSource 6 from Rogue Amoeba
A sleep-deprived Myke joins Federico and Stephen to talk about WWDC, new MacBooks and App Store search.
On this week’s Connected, the first details of our upcoming trip to San Francisco for WWDC, some fun speculation on Apple’s announcements, and some hints on what we’re announcing tomorrow at MacStories. You can listen here.
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Fruity Maps is a proof of concept web app made by Tim Broddin (via 9to5Mac) to demonstrate what an Apple MapKit web view would look like.
This is undocumented, but Apple is also using an embedded MapKit view on their WWDC Attending page, which seems to suggest that an announcement in June could be likely. Tim has posted some details on how he put this together on GitHub.
Apple just posted a new video on the YouTube Beats 1 channel promoting its Apple Music streaming service. The video, called Taylor Mic Drop, features Taylor Swift who picks a ‘Getting Ready to Go Out’ playlist from Apple Music. When she sees The Middle by Jimmy Eat World, she plays it, dancing and lip syncing along to the music. The video is fun and does a nice job of highlighting what Apple Music calls Activity Playlists.
Sarah Perez, reporting for TechCrunch, on the effect iOS 9 multitasking had on MLB’s At Bat app since they added support for Split View and Picture in Picture two months ago:
During these first two weeks, MLB fans spent 20 percent more minutes per day, on average, watching live video on iPad compared with the 2015 season, when multitasking was not available. (MLB says that any form of multitasking behavior was counted here, not just spilt-screen viewing.)
In addition, fans who were using the new multitasking features and watching live video of MLB games in the At Bat application were spending 162 minutes per day on average consuming MLB.TV on iPad. That’s an increase of 86 percent from the 2015 season.
Picture in Picture fundamentally transforms the video experience of an iPad. Now imagine if two of the biggest video services around also realized this.
Slack is a fun product to use (and company to observe) because they’re constantly challenging how things should get done in a team collaboration service. Their latest addition to the desktop client lets you easily attach reminders to messages with a contextual menu:
Today we welcome a new addition to reminders: Message reminders! #changeloghttps://t.co/DYD2uqGjXO pic.twitter.com/h80kqultuq
— Slack (@SlackHQ) April 14, 2016
Once this becomes available on iOS too, I think I’m going to use it a lot.
This week, Myke speaks about his two-iPad setup, Federico discusses his Telegram usage and Stephen interviews Kristen Gallerneaux from The Henry Ford Museum about their working Apple I.
This was a fun one: Stephen had a great interview with Kristen Gallerneaux of The Henry Ford Museum and we talked about Myke’s dual iPad setup. I also offered a bit of background on why we’re trying a Telegram channel for MacStories.
You can listen here.
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Ghost Digital Cinema released a documentary about professional skateboarder Sean Malto that was shot entirely on an iPhone using an app called FiLMiC Pro, which is just $9.99 on the App Store. The filmmakers supplemented the iPhone with equipment like professional lenses, a gimbal and a drone, but the heart of the operation was an iPhone and a $10 app.
In addition to the documentary, Ghost Digital Cinema posted a behind the scenes video explaining how they made the Malto documentary. The amazing things that people make on their iPhones never never ceases to amaze me.
Alissa Walker, writing for Gizmodo on a fascinating study about emoji implementations across different platforms:
A study by the GroupLens Research team at the University of Minnesota examines the variations between some popular emoji presentations and how they are perceived. The most widely misinterpreted is the “grinning face with smiling eyes” emoji, which—depending on the platform—can range from the rosy-cheeked cherubic face of glee to the anguished clenched-teeth look of constipation.
Just seeing the difference in emoji presentations is revelatory in itself. But then it gets even more interesting. GroupLens researchers asked subjects to rate 22 anthropomorphic emoji from five platforms by sentiment, using a scale that ranged from strongly negative (-5) to strongly positive (5). And here’s where you start to see where “grinning face with smiling eyes” goes so very wrong. Apple’s average sentiment ranking was almost -1, while Microsoft, Samsung, LG, and Google all were 3 or above.
It’s curious to see what happens when you only have a loosely defined standard.
Scanning with just the camera on the back of the device is an area of iOS that has been around for many years and has matured significantly over that time. The latest generation of iOS scanner apps, coupled with ever-better cameras on our devices are really very usable scanners indeed. Couple that with increasingly sophisticated post-scan workflows and you have a tool that James Bond could only dream of.
On last week’s episode of Canvas, we talked about one of the kinds of mobile software that has been reinvented by the iPhone’s camera – scanner apps. There’s a lot of choice when it comes to scanning documents and going paperless on iOS. You can listen here.
