This week, the boys discuss honeymoon etiquette and dispense financial wisdom about AAPL before discussing Loom, Apple’s new environmental video, MacStories 4.0 and the new OS X Beta Seed Program.
In case you wanted to hear more about our redesign, Stephen and Myke kindly allowed me to talk about it on The Prompt. Get the episode here.
Manton Reece’s Tweet Library remains my favorite app to find old tweets from my account directly on iOS (it works with any Twitter Archive). Tweet Library isn’t a full-featured Twitter client: it does come with basic tweeting and timeline functionalities, but it’s made for retrieval of tweets and organization in collections.
This week, Manton released a 2.5 update that fixes bugs and adds a URL scheme to launch Tweet Library searches from other apps. The URL scheme makes it easy to trigger searches from Drafts and Launch Center Pro, and I’m also happy about the CSV export option for collections.
Here’s Manton on the update:
When I gave up on Twitter as a user, many people asked if I would abandon Tweet Library. I wasn’t sure at first, but the answer now is a clear “no”. In fact, since my last personal tweet in 2012, I’ve released new features and even redesigned the app for iOS 7.
But I do need to start consolidating my work on Tweet Library and Watermark, because the apps share so many concepts around archiving and search. To that end, this week I’m retiring tweetlibrary.com as a way to browse and publish collections. The site will now redirect to a special landing page on Watermark. Published collections from Tweet Library also go to a public page on Watermark.
Tweet Library is $4.99 on the App Store.
Stephen Hackett:
Building a new operating system is a monumental challenge, and in January 2000 when Aqua was introduced, Apple was in the thick of the transition to OS X.
Beyond the staggering amount of development work taking place to smash Mac OS and NeXTSTEP together, Apple was hard at work on the user interface of OS X. But to understand what OS X would become (and how it would look), it’s important to remember where the company had been before.
Well-researched retrospective of Apple’s work on the Aqua interface over the years. I enjoyed the collection of screenshots and links, and it’ll be interesting to see where Apple will take Aqua with the next OS X.
Yinka Adegoke, writing for Billboard:
Two of music’s most successful brand marketers, Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, are in the hot seat as label sources grouse that the first 100 days of the duo’s subscription streaming service, Beats Music, has been a disappointment and soon will face competition on the mobile platform when Sprint begins bundling Spotify with its “Framily” plans.
According to Beats Music CEO Ian Rogers, the company is doing fine and the problem has been converting iOS users to paid subscriptions.
I still believe that the human curation Beats is doing for music recommendations offers great value, but the service needs to be available internationally and on more platforms. Spotify is available in several countries outside the United States, has desktop and mobile apps, and, more importantly, it has mindshare after years of existence. For some people, Spotify is synonym of “legal music streaming” (when I was using Rdio, I would always introduce it to my friends as “an app like Spotify”).
If Beats Music doesn’t want to offer a free plan, they should aim at people willing to pay for streaming services through new software, international rollouts, and exclusives. Last week, they released an update to their iPhone app with better social integrations and App Store subscriptions. iTunes will undoubtedly make it easier to subscribe to Beats Music, and I’m hoping that the company will find a way to grow its userbase quickly without compromising on the original vision.
It’s an unusual trip in that its point is to give a reporter exposure to the way Apple works, a departure from the company’s usual maniacal secrecy. But when it comes to the environment, Apple consciously carves out an exception to its standard opacity. Part of the motive, of course, is generating a halo effect from good works. But Apple also hopes to inspire other companies and organizations to embark on similar ecologically helpful enterprises. Though it may not have always been the case, Apple has a good Earth Day story to tell.
Here’s that story: Apple is close to its goal of powering all its facilities 100 percent by renewable energy. Its corporate campuses and data centers are now at 94 percent renewable and rising. (In 2010 it was 35 percent.) The next step is to extend the efforts to its retail stores.
A fascinating insight into Apple’s environmental efforts from Stephen Levy at Wired, who was given the opportunity to tour an Apple solar plant and data center in Nevada with Apple’s senior vice president of environmental initiatives, Lisa Jackson. It’s no surprise that the tour given to Levy is a good news story for Apple, but equally interesting are the things that Jackson notes Apple has yet to achieve - in particular converting their retail stores to renewable energy (which is this year’s goal).
Also interesting (but not surprising), Levy was allowed to report on anything he saw, except “the manufacturer of the servers” in the Reno data center.
David Smith:
For the last month I have been doing a series of episodes on Developing Perspective trying to unpack practical, actionable improvements that could be made to the App Store. I didn’t want to just whine about its shortcomings, I wanted to think of realistic ways to improve it.
There are some great suggestions in David’s article, and I agree with many of them.
Josh Ginter on apps that implement sloppy swiping through loose gestures that can be activated anywhere on the screen:
Stretching your thumbs to the topmost corner or having to swipe from off screen to go back is not natural in any way. Mobile phone users often find themselves in situations where the precision of pressing a specific button is both inefficient and aggravating. Swiping from off the screen can also be aggravating, especially when using the iPhone with your right hand when on the move. I actually find inaccuracies with swiping from off the screen to be more annoying than having to button-mash to go back a menu.
I’m a fan of the system-wide Back gesture introduced with iOS 7, but I prefer apps (like Unread and Facebook Paper) that don’t force you to swipe exactly from the edge of the screen. I find that kind of gesture implementation comfortable, friendly, and natural.
This week Federico and Myke catch up on a bunch of follow up and listener mail, before discussing some upcoming games that have caught their interest over the last few weeks, like Tomodachi Life, Mario Kart 8, Below and Severed.
A fun episode of Directional in which we catch up on some recent game announcements; don’t miss the links in the show notes, and especially the Tomodachi Life video. Get the episode here.
This week, Stephen, Federico and Myke re-visit Carousel, Greg Christie’s departure from Apple and CarPlay. Then, Federico buys a shirt on the air and leads a discussion about boredom with apps, tinkering with setups and feature creep in apps and services.
This week on The Prompt, we discuss a topic that I’ve been thinking about for a long time: can software become boring? Why do we always want “more” and “new” from apps? How can developers balance the tension between simplicity and feature additions? To be continued, for sure.
Get the episode here.
