New Year, New Audio Setup: SoundSource 6 from Rogue Amoeba
Here at the end of the year, the boys take a look back at the news and stories of 2015.
On this week’s Connected, we’ve taken a look back at our favorite tech stories and Apple news of the year. It was a fun one. You can listen here.
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From The Telegraph’s interview with Apple’s Kevin Lynch on the timekeeping features of Apple Watch:
Apple built its own Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers at various locations to ensure the delivered time is as close as possible to Stratum One accuracy, the time server which keeps the Apple Watch within microseconds of Stratum Zero devices - the highest possible quality for time references.
Once the time reaches the Apple Watch, the team worked to ensure it remains accurate, he says. Each device uses a temperate controlled crystal oscillator to counteract the natural drift that clocks and watches tend to experience over time.
I’m not sure any human watch wearer would ever notice a 50-millisecond difference – especially when waiting for midnight at a New Year’s Eve party – but still, fascinating tech.
Every couple of years, I find myself writing that Twitter for Mac hasn’t been abandoned.
Today’s one of those days again, as Twitter has released version 4.0 of its new Mac client with design changes and support for some of the new Twitter features.
The new app supports inline video playback, animated GIFs, group DMs, muting, and tweet-quoting support, all major Twitter platform features that previously weren’t supported by the Twitter for mac app. Previously, you had to click on a quoted tweet URL to view that tweet—not fun—and on a tweet URL to open a browser window to watch video or animations. Yuck. This is much better.
That’s good news, of course, but the problem is – it looks like Twitter shipped a ton of bugs and regressions in this release, while still missing some of the latest additions for mobile platforms and the web. From a quick scan of my timeline today:
Twitter’s new Mac app has no fullscreen support? You had one job! pic.twitter.com/0oocWTLrJk
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) December 30, 2015
It also doesn’t support Twitter polls
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) December 30, 2015
“What’s happening?” indeed. pic.twitter.com/1BPtCcPlh2
— Bird Website API (@fake_api) December 30, 2015
.@abdophoto It’s sluggish as all hell. It scrolls like butter if butter were rocks and glue.
— Nate Boateng (@nateboateng) December 30, 2015
Uhh, looks like Twitter for Mac is redrawing images while scrolling - would explain slowness? /cc @stroughtonsmith pic.twitter.com/3wiHsD2EOt
— Milen Dzhumerov (@milend) December 30, 2015
I’ve seen dozen of other people lamenting poor performance, odd behaviors on OS X, and random bugs with Twitter accounts. That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, especially after you read that the app was apparently outsourced to developers outside of Twitter. Even more baffling: Twitter Moments – one of Twitter’s biggest product releases of 2015 that got its own (confusing) TV commercial – aren’t supported in the new Mac app.
That’s disappointing, but I find some solace in the fact that I’ll get to write about these bug fixes in 2017.
A must-read guide by Andrew Cunningham if you’ve considered emulating classic games (for me, that means SNES, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance) on a new Apple TV:
Right now there are two notable emulation projects targeting tvOS. One is a distant relative of the MAME arcade emulator, though it doesn’t seem as though it’s being maintained. Another, Provenance, is the one we’ll be spending the most time with. It’s a multi-system emulator that supports most major 8- and 16-bit consoles, including the NES, SNES, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Sega CD, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance.
That’s basically it for now, but more consoles could show up in the future. Provenance is already heavily based on open source code from OpenEmu and other projects, so anyone with a little patience could port other emulators without much extra work.
That’s my kind of holiday side-project, too.
Fantastic update to my favorite videogame emulator for OS X: OpenEmu 2.0 has brought support for new systems, better integration for SteelSeries controllers (I have one for my Apple TV), a modernized interface, and even a way to organize screenshots and save states. The highlights: support for PlayStation, PSP, and Nintendo 64 games, plus real-time gameplay rewinding.
How I wish this was around ten years ago, when I was really into emulation on my PSP (which I still keep around, running homebrew software). If you haven’t tried OpenEmu in a while, now’s a good time to play with it again.
Nick Statt, writing for The Verge, has a suggestion to make sure you end up using the app that’s right for you:
And therein lies the secret to finding the best apps: don’t use what works until you know it works better than the rest. In an era of free services and near-instant downloads, it often costs us nothing but our time and a little bit of effort to experiment with half a dozen products before settling on the one we’re most comfortable with. And nothing is ever perfect. No matter what we read, or how many stars or good reviews something has, it takes a firsthand investigation to see if it’s perfect for you.
This pretty much sums up the way I look at years of app coverage here at MacStories, and why I’m not a big fan of “the best app for X” roundups with a single recommendation. In today’s sea of mobile apps, “best” is a fleeting reward, often reset with weekly updates, semi-annual redesigns, features adopted by other apps, and discontinued services.
“What works for you” is, I think, a more approachable, relatable consideration. There’s an argument to be made about evaluating dozens of similar apps and pointing out an absolute “winner” in terms of amount of available features, stability, price, or other objective metrics, but a single “best” implies a one-size-fits-all nature that just doesn’t work with the App Store anymore. Maybe seven years ago, when you could count iPhone apps in the hundreds, but not today. To mention a recent example: I could say that 2Do is my favorite task manager or the one with the most customization options or free updates, but it’s not necessarily the best for everyone.
This is also why I strive to keep a fresh mind and stay curious about apps. The only way for me to stay on top of the ever-changing App Store ecosystem is to try as many apps as I can and challenge my preconceptions – always asking myself “Would this app make me save time, be more efficient, and work better?”.
Sometimes it’s not fun, it’s a time-consuming process, and it’s definitely not cheap, but, after all, this is what I chose to do. And it often pays off with some nice surprises.
Dr. Drang, in response to an article by Craig Mod arguing that Touch ID has gotten too fast on the iPhone 6s’ Lock screen and that it shouldn’t unlock a device by default:
But would you really want to go back to the slower Touch ID? How often, when you unlock your phone, do you want to use one of the lockscreen affordances? And how does the time you lose in those cases compare to the time you gain in all those cases when you don’t want to use the lockscreen? Since I’m in a betting mood, I’ll bet the time you’ve saved overwhelms the time you’ve lost. And I’ll bet Apple studied iPhone usage enough to know that would be the case long before the improved Touch ID was released.
Despite the annoyance of my Lock screen being dismissed by the faster Touch ID on the 6s, I think the trade-off is worth it. The number of times I was glad my iPhone unlocked quickly have, in my experience, outweighed the disruption caused by having to re-open Notification Center to view my missed notifications.
As I wrote in October, I’d rather see Apple explore 3D Touch as a way to wake an iPhone’s screen without the commitment of unlocking it with Touch ID:
If we assume that Touch ID is staying in the Home button for the foreseeable future, I wouldn’t be surprised to know that Apple is exploring the idea of using the display itself to wake the device. Think about it: why rely on a sensor that is used to unlock the iPhone and why continue to press a button hundreds of times each day when you could turn on the screen just by pressing on it? I shared my theory before, and now that the iPhone’s display has a new layer to account for, it seems odd that it’s not being used to wake the device without unlocking it. I want to be able to wake the 6s Plus with 3D Touch: this way, I’d be able to press anywhere on screen to do it, and I’d only use the Home button when necessary.
The VLC app for iOS was yesterday updated to version 2.7.0, adding support for a number of iOS 9 features, as 9to5 Mac reported:
The latest update includes an updated watchOS 2 app for Apple Watch users and several new iOS 9 features for iPhone and iPad.
VLC now supports system wide search through Spotlight, Split View for side-by-side apps on the latest iPads, and Touch ID unlocking on iPhones and iPads with fingerprint scanners.
A solid update to VLC, with new features and adding support for iOS 9 and watchOS 2. But I must admit, I was surprised to realize that although they added support for iOS 9’s Split View, VLC still doesn’t work with iOS 9’s Picture in Picture mode.
The initial release notes incorrectly stated that the update added an Apple TV app for VLC – in fact it does not. But the VLC Apple TV app is coming, and soon.
Pete Souza, Chief Official White House Photographer, writing on Medium:
Many followers have inquired about whether a certain photograph is taken with an iPhone or DSLR (digital single lens reflex camera). In choosing the photographs for my year on Instagram, I decided to select only iPhone photographs that were captured in the square format on an iPhone. For many purists, the square format was the original inspiration for Instagram. And I certainly admire those that continue to post only square photos taken with a smart phone.
My approach to my Instagram feed continues to be all square photos are taken with an iPhone, and full-frame horizontals and verticals are taken with a DSLR (usually a Canon 5DMark3, but I’ve also posted some from Sony, Nikon and Leica cameras).
There’s a beauty about Instagram’s original square format – a creativity derived from the boundaries of constraint – that I still see as the purest expression of mobile photography. Some of Souza’s photos are somewhat staged, but the majority of them have taken on the spur of the moment, where a smartphone makes for an excellent storytelling tool. Fantastic shots. I love the last one.
