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Re/code: Beatles Coming to Apple Music, Other Streaming Services This Week→

I don’t usually link to rumors, but Peter Kafka’s report on the Beatles coming to Apple Music and other streaming services on Christmas Eve sounds like pretty much a done deal:

You can spend Christmas streaming the Beatles.

The world’s most famous band will finally be available on streaming music services, starting this Thursday, Christmas Eve. And they’ll be available very, very widely: Industry sources say that the Fab Four’s music will be on all of the obvious music services, including Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play and Tidal, as well as some you might not expect, including Amazon’s Prime Music.

Also relevant: Kafka says that you can now stream a big selection of Beatles songs on YouTube, “legally, for free”.

Seems like Thursday is going to be a day we’ll never forget.

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iOS App Icon Colors in 2015→

Hwee-Boon Yar:

I wrote a couple of Ruby scripts and pulled charts from the iOS US app store using RSS feeds from Apple, downloaded the icons and extracted the primary colors used in each icon. I then wrote a Mac app to generate the numbers, charts and tables. The Newsstand category includes apps from several charts and did not have a separate paid app chart so while I have included the data for completeness sake, I wouldn’t be looking at it.

I extract the primary color from each icon and put them loosely into one of these color groups: red, green, blue, black, white and gray. If they are identified as black, white and gray, I look at their secondary color and try to place them into red, green, blue instead where possible (e.g a small, single blue letter on a white background might work better if it’s classified as blue instead of white).

The app icons for each chart are then stacked vertically. The taller a column is, the more commonly that color is used for icons in that chart.

The data was pulled over several days from 16 Dec to 22 Dec 2015.

You may remember a similar research by Stuart Hall from earlier this year. Hwee-Boon Yar’s builds upon it with more details for categories and a full breakdown of distribution of app icons. I’m always fascinated by these studies.

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Facebook Starts Rolling Out Support for Live Photos→

Harry McCracken, writing at FastCompany:

Facebook is announcing that it’s begun introducing support for Live Photos in its app for the iPhone and iPad, allowing users of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus to upload Live Photos from their devices. The feature will be available to just a small percentage of members at first, and will gradually roll out to more.

People who are included in the app rollout and who view those photos on an iPhone or iPad running iOS 9 will see the photos you shared as Live Photos. Everybody else—such as those with Android phones, Macs, or Windows PCs—will just see a conventional still picture and be none the wiser.

Facebook follows Tumblr as the second big network to add native support for Live Photos. If only there was also a social network where you could post pictures as quick updates and they could animate in a timeline. That would be nice, I guess.

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60 Minutes: What’s Next for Apple→

60 Minutes (the US edition on CBS) today had an in-depth feature on Apple. 60 Minutes’ correspondent, Charlie Rose, spoke to a number of Apple Executives including Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Angela Ahrendts and Phil Schiller.

Apple is one of the most interesting business stories in generations and it finds itself at the heart of some of the biggest issues facing American companies today: the way terrorists may be using encrypted technology to plot attacks, the battle over the corporate tax rate, and the challenges of working in China. We talked about all of that with Apple CEO Tim Cook as part of a journey through the world’s biggest and richest company.

There wasn’t a huge deal of new information in tonight’s program, but Rose’s interview with Tim Cook, particularly regarding encryption and corporate tax rates makes it well worth a watch. Although perhaps more interesting is the brief look at a new design for Apple Retail Stores with Angela Ahrendts, as well as a look inside Apple design’s studio with Ive (complete with cloth-covered tables).

If you’re in the US, you can watch the 60 Minutes segment on Apple on their website. You can also read a transcript of the program here.

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Connected: TicciDo→

This week, people are nose tapping, Dropbox is sunsetting and Myke is colo(u)ring.

Also on this week’s Connected, a discussion on Slack and how we’re using it at MacStories (where the title comes from). You can listen here.

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Evernote Ending Support for Skitch on iOS→

With a blog post published today, Evernote has announced they’ll end support for various versions of Skitch (including iOS), Clearly, and Evernote for Pebble. Skitch for Mac will continue to receive support.

Specifically this means that as of today, we will no longer be making updates to these apps and as of January 22, they’ll no longer be available for download.

If you currently use any of these apps, you’ll find that they may continue to work for some time beyond January. We are not turning these apps “off,” but external changes like updates to your operating system or browser may break features or functionality at any point in the future.

The discontinuation of Skitch for iOS doesn’t come as a surprise: Evernote has been discontinuing other apps to put more focus on the main product; many of the dedicated Skitch functionalities are also available in the Evernote app; and, Evernote had left Skitch for iOS languishing anyway. Evernote acquired Skitch in August 2011.

Fortunately, there are plenty of options for quick image annotations on iOS these days. Personally, I recommend Pinpoint and PointOut.

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Apple Names Jeff Williams Chief Operating Officer, Phil Schiller Adds App Store Responsibilities→

This morning, Apple announced some major changes to its executive team:

Apple today announced that Jeff Williams has been named chief operating officer and Johny Srouji is joining Apple’s executive team as senior vice president for Hardware Technologies. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, will expand his role to include leadership of the revolutionary App Store across all Apple platforms. Apple also announced that Tor Myhren will join Apple in the first calendar quarter of 2016 as vice president of Marketing Communications, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.

Jeff Williams has been with the company since 1998 and has overseen the entire supply chain since 2010. Johny Srouji joined Apple in 2008 to lead the development of the A4, the company’s first system on a chip.

Also of note, Phil Schiller is now taking additional responsibilities for the App Store:

Cook continued, “In addition, Phil is taking on new responsibilities for advancing our ecosystem, led by the App Store, which has grown from a single, groundbreaking iOS store into four powerful platforms and an increasingly important part of our business. And I’m incredibly happy to welcome Tor Myhren, who will bring his creative talents to our advertising and marcom functions.”

And:

With added responsibility for the App Store, Phil Schiller will focus on strategies to extend the ecosystem Apple customers have come to love when using their iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Phil now leads nearly all developer-related functions at Apple, in addition to his other marketing responsibilities including Worldwide Product Marketing, international marketing, education and business marketing. More than 11 million developers around the world create apps for Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS — as well as compatible hardware and other accessories, and customers have downloaded more than 100 billion apps across those platforms.

The App Store has long been criticized by the developer community for lacking proper accountability and a public figure in charge of the platform. It’ll be interesting to see how the App Store platforms will evolve and adapt following Schiller’s extended role.

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The First Spotlight Interface Is Still the Best→

Riccardo Mori:

From Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard onwards, while the Spotlight menu and find-as-you-type list of results on the upper right corner of the desktop remained essentially unchanged, this neatly organised window disappeared, and the Show All option simply triggered a new Finder window with the search results amassed in an unorganised fashion. If you didn’t find what you were looking for in the first results Spotlight displayed from the Search menu on the top right, you’d have to perform more organised searches with various filters and criteria directly from a Finder window. But the overall approach was less clean and clear than under Mac OS X Tiger. On the other hand, Spotlight got better as an app launcher and new features were introduced, like the ability to do quick calculations from the Spotlight search field itself.

When the Spotlight interface was finally redesigned with the release of Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, it was great to see that Apple was revisiting that kind of search interface, with a panel front and centre, and with the results organised in categories in a similar way as it was under Tiger. Since I upgraded from Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks to 10.11 El Capitan avoiding Yosemite completely, I only started using this new Spotlight interface in recent times. And I have mixed feelings about it.

This is a terrific analysis of the behavior and design choices of Spotlight for OS X Tiger and the latest El Capitan. I agree with Riccardo – the organization of results in the original interface still looks better.

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Apple and IBM Partnership Surpasses 100 Enterprise Apps→

In July 2014, Apple and IBM announced a partnership which would see the two companies collaborate to deliver specialized enterprise apps. Today, the two have announced that they have produced more than 100 iOS apps, as Ariel Bogle of Mashable reports:

Katharyn White, vice president of the Apple and IBM partnership at IBM Global Business Services, told Mashable the company was excited to hit the 100 app milestone, but said the number was secondary to the achievement of having an impact across 14 industries and 65 individual professions, from travel to telecommunications and healthcare.

“It’s even more powerful to see these are coming through amazing use cases,” she said. “Whether nurses or insurance agents, manufacturing managers or retail shop workers.”

Although they’re not revealing total customer numbers, some of these specialized enterprise apps have been deployed by companies including Coca-Cola Amatil, Japan Post and Scandinavian Airlines. As Gartner analyst Van Baker told TechCrunch, the appeal of this partnership to enterprise customers is that it “combines the dominant enterprise device vendor with a dominant enterprise software vendor”.

In 2016, the Apple and IBM partnership aims to add more apps to the suite as well as more users, she said, but also to add value to existing apps as their analytics improve. IBM is also developing products to take advantage of the iPad Pro’s larger screen size and multi-tasking capabilities.

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