Posts in Linked

The First Professional Athlete to Record a Competition with Google Glass→

Alyssa Bereznak of Yahoo Tech writes has a report on Jason Belmonte, a professional bowler who recorded himself bowling a perfect game during competition using Google Glass. He’s an advocate of the technology, and has been using it to showcase his skills and give fans a new perspective.

Though Google’s PR team has been promoting “stories” that tout Glass’ technical capabilities for firefighters and DJs alike, the typical Explorer’s experience tends to be less mind-blowing than you might think. As Belmonte is neither a developer nor a darling of the Glass PR team, his capabilities in the bowling alley are essentially limited to recording his firsthand experience. Even live-streaming on TV, which is something he’s hoping to start doing during competitions, isn’t at the HD resolution he’d prefer.

Instead, he’s begun uploading his post-game footage for networks to splice in with recaps of the game. On a recent bowling program, ESPN cut straight to Belmonte’s Google Glass perspective — something he’s nicknamed Belmo Vision — during a game.

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Cactus for Mac Speeds Up Local Web Development→

Cactus speeds up web development by creating a project folder on your Mac, where you can create websites locally without having to install a local development environment like XAMPP. With Cactus, you can get a head start on your blog or portfolio page by selecting from a variety of templates, which establishes some basic site structure for what you want to accomplish. Cactus supports languages like Markdown, SCSS and SASS, and CoffeeScript, and lets you add functionality to your site with simple python scripts (or plugins). With your site developed, Cactus sets up your domain and deploys to Amazon S3. Alternatively, you can export your finished project if you’re hosting the website yourself.

Cactus is $29.99 on the Mac App Store, and a demo is available to download.

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StorageStatus Keeps You Notified of Disk Activity on Your Mac→

StorageStatus keeps you informed of when your internal and external drives spin up and spin down, when devices have been connected and disconnected, and how long drives have been active or sleeping. It’s designed to be a modern replacement for Apple’s SpindownHD utility, making it useful for monitoring power consumption when mobile, or diagnosing why hard drives might start up when they’re not supposed to. The app is $0.99 through February on the Mac App Store.

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PolyFauna: An Audio and Visual Experiment from Radiohead for iOS and Android→

Thom Yorke on Radiohead’s Dead Air Space:

PolyFauna is an experimental collaboration between us (Radiohead) & Universal Everything, born out of The King of Limbs sessions and using the imagery and the sounds from the song Bloom.

It comes from an interest in early computer life-experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious.

In some ways, PolyFauna reminds me of Proteus. The app is free to download in the App Store.

[Hat tip: Macgasm]

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Eric Pramono’s Tips for Threes→

If you’ve been trying to get high scores in Threes, you’ll want to check out Eric Pramono’s tips and explanation of the point system.

The game score is determined by the numbers and types of tiles you have at the end of the game. Each white tile is worth three times the score of its previous number, for example the 768 tile is worth 19,683 points whereas the 384 tile is only worth 6,561 points.

Fair warning: this may require an even larger investment of your time to play Threes, which is a great game.

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Calzy 2.0→

Calzy

Calzy


Calzy, one of my favorite iOS calculators, has been updated to version 2.0, which brings several new features and design changes over the old version. I reviewed Calzy in May 2013, shortly after the app had been released on the App Store, and I appreciated its clean design and gesture-driven interactions:

I use Calzy because it blends powerful features with delightful gestures and animations. For instance, the app comes with full undo/redo support: to activate this, you can swipe right or left, respectively. If you want to clear an entire expression quickly, you can tap & hold the backspace button. And – my favorite feature – if you need to edit, not just view, single items in the current expression, you can tap & hold on the display to bring up the expression editor (with another sweet animated transition). From the editor, you can swipe to delete numbers or use a button in the top left to achieve the same functionality.

Calzy 2.0 is a free update that brings a new design for iOS 7, which isn’t dramatically different as it makes numbers thinner, brings some lightweight blurring in certain parts of the UI, and introduces themes – which I like (especially the Dark + Gold setting, pictured above). The expression editor has been revamped so you can easily reorder values in the expression, and the app has currency rounding available by tapping a button below the number pad. My favorite addition, though, is the ability to bookmark calculations with a note: tap & hold the equal sign, type a note, and a bookmark will be added (with a nice animation) and saved. Bookmarks have their own section in the History view, and I find this particularly handy to save how much I’ve spent while grocery shopping and access previous notes at any time.

Calzy 2.0 is a nice update that adds new functionality without compromising the app’s simple approach. Calzy is $0.99 on the App Store.

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logtempo→

Our thanks to logtempo for sponsoring MacStories this week. logtempo is the easiest way to log time spent on any task: it only takes two taps.

Whether you’re a freelancer, consultant, or other professional who needs to account for time spent on client projects and tasks, logtempo removes all of the complexity and potential for error of time tracking tools and lets you focus on your work instead of your timesheet.

A natural progression from those hand-written notes and timesheets, with the reporting side already taken care of, logtempo takes a pragmatic approach: multiple tasks can be added to the app, and logged time can be added with another tap by choosing a time amount. When you don’t need a task anymore, you can remove it from your task list, but times logged against it are kept. Reports with times logged for the current day, working week, and last 7 days can be emailed or otherwise shared directly from the app, with an option to delete logged times from the summary report.

logtempo is a new approach to time tracking. Check out logtempo here, and subscribe for updates on Twitter and Facebook.

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Apple Adds Apple TV Channel To Celebrate The Beatles’ American Debut→

As noted by MacRumors’ Richard Padilla, Apple today added a new channel to the Apple TV to celebrate The Beatles’ debut in the United States 50 years ago:

The channel allows users to view The Beatles’ groundbreaking performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” for a limited time, and also offers download links to The Beatles’ U.S. releases, which are available digitally for the first time on iTunes.

The Beatles made their first appearance on American television on February 9, 1964, on The Ed Sullivan Show. From Ed Sullivan’s official website:

Never before had so many viewers tuned-in to a live television program, which with 73 million viewers, was three-fourths of the total adult audience in the United States. A music group from England had never crossed over into American culture in such a way, and, at the time, it wasn’t too common for a variety television show to book an English rock band. However, because Ed Sullivan traveled to England frequently, and had a great eye for talent, The Beatles caught his attention and earned a slot on his popular variety program on CBS.

After years of negotiations, The Beatles’ digital catalogue arrived on iTunes in 2010, with Apple celebrating the event with a press release and promotion on its website and iTunes’ front page. Apple has been adding standalone channels to the Apple TV in the past several months, including Yahoo Screen, PBS, Crackle, Bloomberg News, Vevo, Disney Channel, and The Weather Channel.

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Ending The App Store Top 200→

Manton Reece thinks that Beats Music’s editorial curation efforts could work well as a template to improve how apps are discovered on Apple’s App Store:

The answer is in Beats Music. They have no overall top 200 list! Instead, they have a bunch of people — musicians and writers who deeply care about music — curating playlists. The top 25 playlists in a genre are so buried in the app that I had to search them out just to write this blog post, because they seem to carry no more weight than any other playlist. Much more common are playlists like “our top 20 of 2013”. That’s not a best-selling list; it’s based on real people’s favorites.

There are literally hundreds or maybe thousands of other playlists. Intro playlists for a band, related artists that were influential to a singer you like, playlists for a mood or activity, and more. This extra manual step makes it much easier for an algorithm to surface great music: just look for playlists that contain songs you already like, and chances are good that you’ll discover something new.

I’ve argued in favor of more editorial curation before, and while I’m a huge fan of what Beats Music is doing, it’s too early to tell whether the company will be successful or not.

I think there is merit to the idea of showcasing human-curated playlists in lieu of an automatic system (charts) that can be exploited with bots, paid installs, and other solutions. Beats Music’s curated playlists are updated every day, they are contextual to current events, and, more importantly, they are visible in search. Apple has been building a good collection of curated sections for featured apps and categories, but they are not regularly updated and they’re completely hidden from search.

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