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An Indie’s Guide to the Press→

Club MacStories members know that ‘attention’ is a topic near and dear to my heart that I’ve been writing about for the past month or so in my MacStories Weekly column, Ongoing Development. One aspect of attention that I haven’t covered yet is media attention. Today, in An Indie’s Guide to the Press, Curtis Herbert, maker of Slopes, a GPS tracking app for skiers and snowboarders, shares his experience and tips for dealing the press as an indie developer.

Hundreds of “I have an app…” emails hit the inboxes of the Apple-centric press every day. You’re not only competing for attention with other indies that have just as much passion about their app, though, you’re competing with the day-to-day news the tech sites have to write about. Readers trust these sites to filter out as much noise as possible. That is their job.

The most important thing I’ve realized about working with the press is that it’s all about finding the story. You have to answer the question why will their readers care?

Curtis’ advice is applicable to anyone pitching an app, not just indies. Every publication has a sense of who their readers are and what interests them. If you want to stand a chance of being heard through the noise, you need to understand that too.

As a developer myself who now writes at MacStories, two things have really struck me – the volume of pitches that MacStories receives on a daily basis, and the poor quality of many of them. Developers should heed Curtis’ advice. Doing so isn’t a guaranty that your app will be covered, but you will stand out from the crowd, which is the attention that gets your foot in the door in a way that many developers never achieve.

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Dropbox’s Exodus From the Amazon Cloud Empire→

Cade Metz published a Dropbox profile for Wired, detailing how the company migrated to their own storage infrastructure:

Cowling and crew started work on the Magic Pocket software in the summer of 2013 and spent about six months building the initial code. But this was a comparatively small step. Once the system was built, they had to make sure it worked. They had to get it onto thousands of machines inside multiple data centers. They had to tailor the software to their new hardware. And, yes, they had to get all that data off of Amazon.

The whole process took two years. A project like this, needless to say, is a technical challenge. But it’s also a logistical challenge. Moving that much data across the Internet is one thing. Moving that many machines into data centers is another. And they had to do both, as Dropbox continued to serve hundreds of millions of people. “It’s like a moving car,” says Dan Williams, a former Facebook network engineer who oversaw much of the physical expansion, “and you want to be able to change a tire while still driving.” In other words, while making all these changes, Dropbox couldn’t very well shut itself down. It couldn’t tell the hundreds of millions of users who relied on Dropbox that their files were temporarily unavailable. Ironically, one of the best measures of success for this massive undertaking would be that users wouldn’t notice it had happened at all.

People who are really serious about cloud storage should make their own hardware and software, I guess.

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Last Week Tonight With John Oliver on Encryption→

HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver tackled the Apple-FBI fight over encryption in this week’s episode and did a phenomenal job. As always, Oliver uses humour as a tool to help illuminate the absurdity of various propositions, whilst also keeping people engaged when the topic is dry or complicated. As a result, this 17 minute video is perfect for anyone, even if you haven’t been paying much attention to this encryption debate so far.

You can watch the video on YouTube, but be warned it is NSFW. For those of you in countries where the video is geo-blocked (ugh), you should also be able to view it on the Last Week Tonight Facebook page.

Be sure to stick around to the end as there’s a brilliant satirical Apple advert that you really have to see.

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How Apple Saved My Life→

It can be easy to lose track of how technology changes lives. Apple takes great care to make products that are accessible, leading by example, and encouraging third-party developers to embrace accessibility, both at WWDC, and by maintaining APIs that make it easy to do so.

But the technical details are impersonal and abstract, which is why it is good to reflect on the real impact Apple’s efforts have on individuals. James Rath, a 20-year-old filmmaker who was born legally blind, made a short film about what the accessibility features across all of Apple’s products have meant to him since he and his family made an impromptu visit to an Apple Store in 2009:

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Philips Introduces Hue White Ambiance Bulbs→

James Vincent, writing for The Verge on Philips’ new set of Hue bulbs:

Are you a light connoisseur? Can you tell the difference between “cool daylight” and “warm white”? If so, Philips has just announced what could be your next favorite lightbulb: the Philips Hue white ambiance. The company promises that the white ambiance delivers “every shade of white light” from color temperatures of 6,500 k to 2,200k. And by hooking up the bulbs to the new Philips’ Hue app, you can use the “Routines” feature, which shifts the color temperature of the bulb as the day progresses, supposedly leading to better sleep.

Sounds like a good companion for the upcoming Night Shift in iOS 9.3. I’ve already been dimming my Hue lights manually after Night Shift turns on, so I should probably upgrade to these bulbs in my living room. They’ll be available in the US this Spring.

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Clipper Chip Redux→

Steven Levy writing on Backchannel:

Is it any wonder that the government is rebooting the crypto wars? For the first time, it’s really struggling with the results of the first war, as more information is now encrypted, increasingly in a manner the government finds really hard (or impossible) to decode.

[…]

As with the first round of the crypto wars, the stakes could not be higher. Once again, the government is seeking to control that genie first released by Diffie and Hellman. But the physics of computer security have not changed. Last July, a panel of fifteen eminent security specialists and cryptographers — many of whom are veterans of the first crypto war — released a report confirming there was no way for the government to demand a means of bypassing encryption without a dire compromise of security. It just doesn’t work.

The crypto wars, as Steven Levy calls them, are not new. In his excellent 2001 book Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government – Saving Privacy in the Digital Age, Levy recounted the struggle during the 90s between a small group academics who developed public key encryption and the US government, which was determined to outlaw encryption or mandate a back door. Sound familiar?

Memories are short, especially on the Internet. With the Department of Justice’s insistence that Apple unlock a terrorist’s iPhone, we are facing the same issues that were addressed in the 1990s. The difference is that the stakes are higher now. For individuals, there has never been more private data stored electronically, whether on a device like an iPhone or in the cloud. For governments, we have reached a point where some information is too hard, or impossible, for them to recover thanks to cryptography. As the struggle over the future of encryption plays out, it’s useful to keep in mind the perspective of those like Levy who were there the first time around.

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Connected: Don’t Be Scared, Myke. Go On.→

This week Myke and Federico share a potpourri of topics including FlexBright, malware creeping in to BitTorrent clients, Workflow, and rich text. Federico then covers the current state of text editors on iOS.

On this week’s Connected, we also discussed the differences between iOS and OS X for people who like to tinker. You can listen here.

Sponsored by:

  • Casper: Because everyone deserves a great night sleep. Get $50 off with the code ‘CONNECTED’
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Microsoft Builds Evernote Importer for OneNote→

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Today Microsoft announced a new Evernote importer app that lets you bring your Evernote data into its excellent OneNote application. If you’ve been thinking of leaving Evernote—especially if you’re already paying for Office 365, so you’re paying for OneNote—it’s worth considering.

Unfortunately, the tool currently only runs on Windows. Typical Microsoft. Fortunately, a Mac version is on the way “in the coming months.”

First Apple, now Microsoft. I wonder if Evernote is starting to regret adding the export option.

(I also wonder how much these import solutions are going to impact Evernote, and if they’ll decide to turn exporting off eventually.)

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Alien Blue Update Gifts Pro Users with Four Years of Reddit Gold→

Nice move from Reddit (via MacRumors): if you bought a Pro upgrade for Alien Blue (which was acquired by Reddit in 2014), the latest update will get you a four-year Reddit Gold subscription for free.

I realize that I’m spending quite a bit of time on Reddit each day (some subreddits can be surprisingly civil and informative), but I never really considered the Gold membership. It’s got some intriguing perks.

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