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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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Winding Down Tweet Library and Watermark→

Manton Reece on ending development for Tweet Library and Watermark:

Last week, Twitter announced that they’ve expanded their search index to include the full history of tweets going back to 2006. I was thrilled by this upgrade to the Twitter service. That the search was so limited for so long was the primary reason I built Tweet Library and Watermark to begin with. Unfortunately, this functionality is only for the official Twitter apps. It will not be made available to third-party developers.

It’s time for me to wind down development on my Twitter-related apps. I’ll continue to sell Tweet Library through the end of 2014, then remove it from the App Store. Watermark will also shut down at that time. Because all the tweets stored in Watermark are public tweets (by design it never supported DMs or protected accounts), I will attempt to make the entire Watermark database archive of millions of tweets available publicly. Existing customers can also sync tweets and collections to Dropbox for personal archiving.

Tweet Library was a great way to browse the Twitter archive on iOS, but the new Twitter search makes it less important. It’s good to see that Manton is planning to preserve the archives, though.

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Virtual: I Love the Noise That the Chicken Makes→

This week Federico and Myke talk about the upcoming Majora’s Mask remake, Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, Fantasy Life, Monument Valley, Sunset Overdrive, Shovel Knight, Crossy Road and Vain Glory.

We talked about a lot of games this week, but expect even more in the next few weeks between Super Smash Wii U, amiibo, and Pokémon ORAS. Get the episode here.

Side note: The original Nintendo DS came out 10 years ago today. To celebrate, you can read this beautiful post at TinyCartridge and go listen to the Nintendo DS keynote retrospective we did when the show was called Directional.

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More on WatchKit→

Following the release of WatchKit earlier this week, I’ve been reading through the documentation and listened to what developers had to say about it. Here’s my original roundup of links and tweets. Below, other interesting reads from around the web.

Serenity Caldwell has an excellent overview of Apple’s announcements at iMore:

Tapping and swiping continue to be the primary way of interacting with all iOS apps, Apple Watch included. The watch has a few new swipe gestures, including a left edge swipe (to return to the previous screen) and a swipe up from the bottom (which activates Glances). Pinch-to-zoom and other multi-finger gestures don’t exist on the Apple Watch; instead, you’re presumably expected to use the device’s Digital Crown to zoom in and out. There’s also Force Touch, a long-press action that activates the menu or important contextual buttons within an app.

John Gruber compares WatchKit to the iPhone in 2007:

In a sense, this is like 2007 all over again. The native APIs almost certainly aren’t finished, and battery life is a huge concern. But with the Watch, Apple is ahead of where they were with the iPhone.

MG Siegler notes that the Apple Watch will be highly dependent on the iPhone:

To that end, the Apple Watch is more of a “widget watch” — that is, it displays content which are less like apps and more like the widgets found in the notifications drop-down on iOS devices. (And yes, they require iPhone apps as a base.) And that shows the importance of iOS 8, which first introduced these widgets to third-party developers. For the first couple months of iOS 8, these widgets were pretty clunky. It’s only now that developers are starting to smooth out the kinks and make these widgets more useful and performant. And this will clearly be key for the Apple Watch as well.

Craig Hockenberry posted a technical overview of the new developer technologies in WatchKit with plenty of good advice:

Once you have the PDF to give you an idea of the physical size, you can then start to see how your design works at that scale. Thibaut has already made the world’s ugliest watch and it’s doing important information design work. Here it is showing a simulated scroll view and exploring glance interactions.

These physical interactions with your designs are incredibly important at this point. Wondering why the scroll indicator only appears in the upper-right corner while you scroll your view? I was until I realized that’s where the digital crown is physically located.

In his thoughts on WatchKit, Nick Heer takes a look at the new Apple font, San Francisco:

San Francisco Text — that’s the one for smaller text sizess — has similar metrics to Helvetica Neue. Not the same, but if you squint a little, kind of close enough, and closer still to the metrics of Lucida Grande. Perhaps this is eventually the new UI font for all Apple interfaces. It certainly would be more of a distinct signature face than Helvetica, and it would be more legible, too.

And last, some early mockups of third-party Apple Watch apps.

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Connected: The Old Mac Paladin→

This week, Myke escaped. Federico and Stephen talk about Twitter and WatchKit, then debate productivity for a while before realizing the irony of it.

Don’t miss the show notes on this week’s Connected – we mentioned some fine apps and linked to an old Power Mac G5 used as a grill (really). Get the episode here.

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Billboard to Start Counting Streaming Services in Top Charts→

Ben Sisario, writing for The New York Times:

Now Billboard and Nielsen SoundScan, the agency that supplies its data, will start adding streams and downloads of tracks to the formula behind the Billboard 200, which, since 1956 has functioned as the music world’s weekly scorecard. It is the biggest change since 1991, when the magazine began using hard sales data from SoundScan, a revolutionary change in a music industry that had long based its charts on highly fudgeable surveys of record stores.

It’ll be interesting to see how music streaming services will affect the position of recent and older songs in the charts. Here’s how the system will work:

SoundScan and Billboard will count 1,500 song streams from services like Spotify, Beats Music, Rdio, Rhapsody and Google Play as equivalent to an album sale. For the first time, they will also count “track equivalent albums” — a common industry yardstick of 10 downloads of individual tracks — as part of the formula for album rankings on the Billboard 200.

Given speculation that Beats Music will be bundled in iOS starting next year, it looks like Apple will have an even bigger influence on the Billboard 200.

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David Smith’s Initial WatchKit Impressions→

David Smith comments on today’s launch of WatchKit for developers:

Apple took a clever approach to handling the extremely constrained power environment of the Watch (at least initially). To start with 3rd Party apps will run in a split mode. The Watch itself handling the UI parts of the app with an iPhone based app extension doing all the heavy lifting and computation. This is architected in such a way as to enhance interactivity (it isn’t just a streamed movie) while still keeping the Watch components very lightweight.

As he notes, Apple enabled more than he was expecting for this first release.

What’s impressive after reading some documentation and thoughts from developers today is the technology that’s powering WatchKit remote apps – Extensions. Initially, many of us assumed that extensibility in iOS 8 would just be about sharing files between apps, but it’s turning out to much more.

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Facebook Launches Dedicated Groups App→

Dieter Bohn, reporting for The Verge about Facebook’s latest standalone app for iOS and Android, Groups:

We’ve been using the app for a few days now and found it to be fast, fluid, intuitive, and surprisingly fun. That’s not a huge surprise – it comes in part from Facebook’s Creative Labs, which has been responsible for other polished Facebook apps like Paper and Slingshot. Animation on both Android and iOS is fluid and fast, the overall app layout is simple and direct, and functionality (including privacy settings) is easy to intuit just by poking around a bit. It’s a great app.

Groups joins Messenger in the list of dedicated utilities for specific Facebook features, but, unlike Messenger, users won’t be forced to use it and Groups will still be available in the main Facebook app (for now?). Like most recent standalone experiments by Facebook, I’m skeptical that this will take off in the real world.

Anecdotally speaking, I have a lot of friends who use groups to coordinate events and chat together – on WhatsApp. I have seen WhatsApp groups that go back years, with my friends using photos uploaded to a group as essentially another camera roll for shared photos.

I wish that I could say the same about iMessage group threads, but that would only be a sad joke.

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