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Stephen Hawking and SwiftKey→

Fantastic story from the SwiftKey blog:

SwiftKey built a personal “language model” for Professor Hawking based on his extensive works – including documents not published in the public domain. The software learns from him to ensure it predicts contextually relevant words. It is also able to analyze the content of the specific book or lecture that he might be working on, further tailoring its predictions and autocorrections.

SwiftKey estimates that their technology has “roughly doubled” Professor Hawking’s speech rate – all because SwiftKey can understand how he uses language. I found SwiftKey’s predictions and personalizations based on social accounts to be impressive in their iOS 8 custom keyboard, but this is a whole new level (and SwiftKey says they’ve been collaborating closely with Intel for this, too).

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A Great App for Recording Podcasts→

Allen Pike writes about an idea he had for a professional app dedicated to recording podcasts and interviews remotely to replace Skype:

Okay, so, crazy idea: why doesn’t our team at Steamclock build a Mac app that solves all of these problems? A replacement for Skype, Call Recorder, and all that crap, specifically designed for recording high fidelity interviews? Something that takes the pain out the process, but results in a higher quality end product? A polished, professional tool for people that take podcasts seriously?

Last winter I started investigating exactly this. I spoke with various podcasters whose work I enjoy, and they were incredibly enthusiastic. One said, and I quote, “Take all my money. No, really, this sounds amazing, like an app of my dreams, and I love it.” Okay, that’s a good sign. Every podcaster I talked to about the idea, even ones who weren’t doing double-enders, had various awesome feature ideas. I was giddy with excitement.

It’s sad that there may not be a huge market for a small independent studio to build this kind of product. I’ve been podcasting with Myke and Stephen for over a year now, and working around Skype’s limitations and connection problems is always a pain. Skype wasn’t meant to handle podcasts with multiple guests, but it somehow became the de facto standard because, at least on OS X, it’s still easier to host a Skype call with integrated audio and chat than use FaceTime Audio and Messages for the same task.

And let’s not even mention recording podcasts on iOS without having to use separate hardware or multiple devices. Perhaps someday there will be an app specifically built for podcasters. Like Allen writes, I would pay so much money for that.

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You Can Now Rename Files and Folders in Dropbox for iOS→

The official Dropbox app for iOS was updated today with much needed renaming capabilities for files and folders. Dropbox has added a new Rename button that you can reveal by swiping over folders or hitting the “More” button in the file preview screen. On the iPhone, this extra panel (pictured above) also shows information about the selected file such as size, filename, and last modified date.

I’ve long used Boxie to rename Dropbox files directly on iOS, so this is good news given the app’s demise. You can find version 3.6 of Dropbox on the App Store and read their blog post here.

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The Effect of an App Store Feature→

So, with almost 2500 downloads you are no. 128, and just 2k more gets you to no. 4. Wow. When you look at this, it’s not really that much top-heavy as I thought. It seems that with decent media exposure you can get pretty consistent number of downloads and chart ranking.

Aleksandar Vacić’s new app, Run 5k, was featured by Apple, and he posted detailed numbers about the effect of Apple’s feature. It’s easy to guess that an Apple promotion on the front page of the App Store may help with downloads, but Aleksandar has actual numbers, and it’s interesting to look at his graphs to observe the effect over time.

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Virtual: Leaking Battery Acid→

This week Federico and Myke discuss a scientific study of Mario Galaxy, the merits and disadvantages of crowd-funded games, a GameBoy HDMI extension, tales of recent local multiplayer experiences and they talk about the iOS games they’ve been playing this week.

And if you’re looking for more podcasts for this holiday weekend, you can’t go wrong with the latest Virtual. Plenty of games and gaming-related links while we’re waiting for this month’s releases on the 3DS and Wii U. Get the episode here.

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Connected: Poster Child for Power Apps→

This week, the boys are back to discuss Federico’s use of a remote Mac mini for weird tasks and Stephen’s new Pebble before debating Twitter’s new App Graph.

On this week’s Connected, we had an interesting discussion about the Twitter app for iOS (which I use) and the relationship that other iOS users have with third-party Twitter clients. Don’t miss it, because I think it’s a good one. Get the episode here.

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Pocket’s Data on iPhone and iPad Usage→

Fascinating data analysis from Pocket:

To understand how the 6 Plus affects consumption, we first looked at users who owned both an iPhone 5/5S and iPad and looked at how they spent their time reading on both devices. For these users, 55% of content was consumed on an iPhone versus 45% on an iPad. A fairly even split.

All this changed once users had the new iPhones in hand.

I bet that the trends Pocket uncovered could be applied to dozens of other media consumption services with iPhone and iPad apps.

The truth is that bigger phones are big enough for many people who still don’t understand why they need an iPad. Or maybe they did get an iPad, but now they’re discovering that reading and watching videos can be done on an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus just as comfortably and with no compromises.

I think that, for the most part, this is an unavoidable consequence of putting a bigger screen on a device that you carry with you all the time. But, almost five years after the iPad was launched, Apple and third-party developers still tend to come out with iPad apps that are enlarged versions of their iPhone counterparts. I wonder if the lack of widespread unique iPad software is also the reason why people may be using the iPad less.

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Spotify: Friend Or Foe?→

Spotify knows what time of day users listen to certain songs, and in many cases their location, so programmers can infer what they are probably doing—studying, exercising, driving to work. Brian Whitman, an Echo Nest co-founder, told me that programmers also hope to learn more about listeners by factoring in data such as “what the weather is like, what your relationship status is now on Facebook.” (In 2011, Facebook entered into a partnership with Spotify.) He added, “We’ve cracked the nut as far as knowing as much about the music as we possibly can automatically, and we see the next frontier as knowing as much as we possibly can about the listener.”

John Seabrook’s article on Spotify for The New Yorker is a good one. A lot of interesting details about the company’s CEO, Daniel Ek, and the way they make deals with labels.

I remember trying Spotify many years ago with a fake UK account and telling my girlfriend that it was incredible and the future of music was going to be streaming. In the years I’ve spent jumping between music streaming services, I’ve kept an eye on Spotify and their marketing efforts, which the article doesn’t mention (all my friends in Italy know what Spotify is; my mom uses it).

I’ve recently started using Spotify again as my main streaming service because of its solid iPad app and new Family accounts. I am, however, excited to see what Apple does with Beats Music. I don’t know if the entire music industry will embrace streaming eventually, but the future is definitely interesting.

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#Homescreen by betaworks→

Interesting new app experiment by betaworks: #Homescreen gets the latest screenshot from your library and, assuming that’s a Home screen image, it shares it at a public URL and even recognizes apps in it. You can then tap on app icons to view their description, or you can go to the website’s homepage to view other people’s Home screens and view the Top Apps found in #Homescreen screenshots.

Home Screens are the most popular section of our MacStories Weekly newsletter, and I’m constantly asked by readers to share my Home screen and show them which apps I’m using. People love to look at Home screens to discover apps, and it makes sense for betaworks – a company that’s highly invested in analytics to improve their products – to come up with something like this.

Via TechCrunch, here’s the blog post about Betaworks’ Home screen research with some fascinating data about Twitter apps:

Twitter related apps are on 85.5 percent of homescreens. Given that the sample was based on Twitter users there’s sample bias to the Twitter number, but despite that there are some interesting conclusions to draw out of the data. Seventy-nine percent have one Twitter app on their homescreen, 6.5 percent have 2 or more and 14 percent have none — presumably these users use Twitter via the browser or an app not on the homescreen. Vine is on 12 percent of people’s homescreens, which is impressive. But Twitter’s client app is only on 37% of homescreens and third-party clients are on a whopping 55 percent of devices, with one client, Tweetbot, making up a full 49.5 percent of the sampled homescreens. It’s remarkable that a non-Twitter owned client has more market share than Twitter’s client. It’s a byproduct of the early adopter sample bias, but I think it points to the fact these users — myself included — prefer using a different, and more advanced, workflow for Twitter.

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