The work that Gabe, Erik, and potatowire have been doing with Technical Difficulties is top-notch: here’s a podcast that’s useful, enjoyable, and innovative in how show notes cleverly complement the audio segment.
The episode about scanning is good. I’ve probably learned more in 22 minutes and through the show notes than I have in over a year of reading blog posts on the Internet.
I first reviewed Amount back in September when the app was iPhone-only and iOS 7 wasn’t out yet. Amount was a simple unit converter that was already compatible with the new OS and that had a nice approach to unit conversions.
Since then, developer Marco Torretta has made the app Universal and added a URL scheme to launch unit conversions from other apps. On the iPad, Amount uses a split-screen layout to organize categories and units. The number pad is a floating widget in the middle of the screen that makes it easy to enter numbers, and, because of the larger screen, you don’t have to tap and swipe as much as on the iPhone. I like it.
Amount strikes a good balance between simplicity and features, and it’s only $0.99 on the App Store.
Sean Hollister for The Verge reviews the Logitech PowerShell and Moga Ace Power:
More importantly, the PowerShell and Ace Power aren’t very good at their job. The primary thing that these devices add to the experience is directional control over your games. There, Logitech fails miserably. With only a single D-pad to serve that purpose, Logitech’s job was to make that D-pad the very best D-pad it could possibly be, and it’s nothing of the sort. It’s annoyingly hard to press, and crunches when you roll it around. In games where you need to hold down a direction to keep your character walking, like Bastion and Limbo, it’s literally painful to keep pressing hard enough so the controller actually recognizes your input. On the Moga side, the sliding analog sticks and a lighter D-pad make directional input much easier, but the buttons are tiny and not well built. The triggers squish rather than having a satisfying pull, and the important A, B, X, and Y face buttons don’t reliably activate unless you press them firmly and carefully every time you use them. For $100, these gamepads wouldn’t be acceptable even if there were a library of iOS games that worked well with controllers.
Even if we had a controllers that are actually decent, they introduce a lot of friction with little added benefit. Companies making these things are asking customers to make compromises just to play a game. If you have a case on your iPhone, you’ll have to remove it before snapping your iPhone into what’s essentially another case. With wireless controllers, you’re asking people to carry around an extra accessory. The point of gaming on mobile devices like the iPhone is that you already have this thing in your pocket that can immediately sate your boredom. The best games don’t rely on virtual inputs, and instead make use of the touchscreen as a direct means to manipulate what’s happening on screen. These controllers are maybe beneficial for ports (publishers trying to make a quick buck on nostalgia), but the majority of games people are playing on a daily basis aren’t even asking for these controllers.
I’m also disappointed in Logitech. They have a great lineup of peripherals for PC gamers, but they really fell short rushing their PowerShell to the market.
It’s not for me but I think the app looks good and the animations are gorgeous. Listen lacks traditional playback controls or buttons, relying on gestures, swipes, and taps to play, pause, and skip music. The idea is that you can drag the album artwork around to trigger various actions, but it works well for some things and not so much for others. I think developers have to keep in mind that removing buttons adds a lot of complexity — in this case something simple like playing a song over AirPlay requires a very specific drag gesture. Listen’s great for shuffle play, but not so much for rummaging through your music collection. Also, what’s up with circular artwork lately?
Check it out on the App Store — it’s free to download.
Ole Begemann writes about the dilemma Apple may be facing with adding new inter-app communication features to iOS:
I think Apple faces a real dilemma here. Any API that facilitates data sharing between apps without user interaction can easily be abused for tracking purposes, a practice Apple has opposed pretty strongly – at least in word if not in actual rejections of apps.
After Apple forced Smile to stop using the Reminders database to sync TextExpander snippets across apps, this was often mentioned as the reason behind the removal of named pasteboards (which Smile used to leverage): advertisers were abusing the system to track users.
Ole’s proposed solution is “an official sharing API that only works with user interaction”, and I agree with that idea. I have lost hope over the years and I don’t think that Apple will bring something like Automator to iOS any time soon (though I’d always accept a surprise), but adding user-controlled app sharing features would be a good start.
My idea is still the same one from May:
This is an issue that I have been pondering for years. In 2010, Chris Clark posted a prototype (powered by Briefs) of a “services menu for iPhone”, and I keep thinking that such menu could be the solution to iOS’ inter-app communication woes. I don’t see Apple moving away from the one-app-at-a-time model, but I think that allowing users to invoke a menu (either for text selection or general shortcuts) to activate actions could help in better linking apps together. The menu would be sanctioned by Apple and available with a new API, so that developers would also be able to integrate it in more classic versions of “Open In” and “Share” menus.
Furthermore, by leveraging technologies like XPC, I’d like to see Apple enabling users to do less switching back and forth between apps. Today, you can tap on “Email” buttons to bring up a Mail.app modal view that doesn’t yank you out of the current app. Imagine, with iOS 7, being able to “read this later” by tapping on a link and saving it in a Pocket popup; pasting text and links from Safari into a Pages popup of the document you are working on; or, tweeting a photo from the Camera app with a Tweetbot menu and composing a Drafts note from anywhere.
Today, Greg Pierce tweeted about a possible “OAP” (Other-App Purchase) concept, and that’s also something I’ve been thinking about. If apps could better communicate with each other, apps could become “features” to unlock. Imagine if the user could choose to save a photo to Evernote or Dropbox from any app using a Mail-like popup that doesn’t take you out of the current app. Maybe next year?
Khoi Vinh, writing on Medium:
[…] what I find is absent from streaming music is everything that complements the act of listening to music. It’s the very thing that digital music, more even than records and CDs, should excel at: metadata.
Who produced that debut album from Lorde? Who were the musicians who played with her on it? Where was it recorded, and when? Does Lorde thank God, her parents, and/or her cat for making the record possible? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, because I’ve only ever experienced Lorde’s music via Spotify, where such information is absent entirely.
Remember when Apple promised richer, digital equivalents of liner notes and album artwork with iTunes LP?
What I don’t want is a PDF copy of that album’s included artwork, nor do I want glitchy Flash-like interactive experiences that sidestep my music app when I purchase music from the iTunes store. The former feels lazy and the latter feels like a cheap gimmick. I’d rather see lyric metadata in the songs I purchase from iTunes, which would show up when that album artwork is tapped on iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. Heck, Nine Inch Nails was doing simple stuff like embedding individual pieces of artwork into their digitally downloaded songs and that was actually cool. Making digital music feel like it has more substance doesn’t need to be complicated. And if it’s just metadata we’re talking about, then there’s no reason little things like this couldn’t be done by any service to make music feel much more tangible.
Such a great story about an Apple retail store’s staff opening early to make a kid’s day feel special. Read the post to see why, look at the photos, and remember the importance of Apple’s work on Accessibility features for iOS:
Over the last few years Ben’s various vision team members have talked about how wonderful the iPad is as an assistive device. Kit researched and learned more about the amazing technology it has to help people with visual impairments, the list of apps great for kids with visual disabilities, even built in features like Siri can make a significant difference in the day to day lives of someone with a vision challenge. We just didn’t know how to make that happen with the budget, so it was something we kept in the back of our minds but hadn’t pursued. Once again little miracles started to fall into place with offers of help and surprises here and there and so much support and love from friends and family.
With a press release, Apple today announced that the new Mac Pro, originally introduced at WWDC, will be available tomorrow, December 19. From the PR:
The Mac Pro is available with a 3.7 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of VRAM each, 12GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage starting at $2,999 (US); and with a 3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of VRAM each, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage starting at $3,999 (US). Configure-to-order options include faster 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processors, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of VRAM, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 1TB of PCIe-based flash storage.
As we wrote in October:
The new Mac Pro is all about being small, quiet, yet entirely capable of delivering performance for today’s audio and visual professionals. The Mac Pro, unlike desktop towers of old, has been designed into a compact round aluminum canister that sucks heat away from components using a single unified thermal core. While uniquely shaped, components in the new Mac Pro are user accessible, with connectivity to server racks and other peripherals being mitigated through an array of Thunderbolt 2 ports.
The new Mac Pro is Apple’s latest crown jewel, assembled in the US and packing an incredible amount of hardware innovations. More details are available at the Mac Pro’s official webpage.
