Posts in Linked

Yahoo Releases New Weather and Mail Apps→

Casey Newton:

Yahoo Weather represents one such attempt to delight users into giving the rest of the company’s products a try. Meteorology has been a strength for Yahoo, which has provided data for the default weather app for iPhone since it came out in 2007. But Apple’s weather app has evolved very little over the years, and Yahoo decided to build a new app that emphasizes photos over text. Open Yahoo Weather in big cities around the world and you’ll see sharp, high-resolution images that have been gathered from Yahoo-owned Flickr. The app displays different photos based on location, weather conditions, and time of day.

Nice updates by Yahoo, which seems to be iterating faster than ever with Marissa Mayer at the helm. The new Weather app uses a photo background fetched from Flickr, with clean font and icon overlays for weather information. For my location, the app can only fetch one photo; interestingly, weather data for forecasts is provided by Wunderground.

There are several nice touches in the app. Information is laid out vertically, and as you swipe the background is slightly blurred to put the focus on weather data. There’s no pagination, and the only screen that snaps into view is the first one; at the very bottom, the Wind & Pressure and Sun & Moon sections are both animated (and the current time of the day is reflected in Sun & Moon). Something I don’t like is the advertisement for other Yahoo apps in the left sidebar, though I understand why the company wants people to know Yahoo does still make stuff for the App Store.

I won’t switch from Today Weather, but Yahoo Weather is a good 1.0 release. I like it more than Apple’s own Weather app (which is powered by Yahoo).

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Twitter Announces #music App→

From the Twitter blog:

Today, we’re releasing Twitter #music, a new service that will change the way people find music, based on Twitter. It uses Twitter activity, including Tweets and engagement, to detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists. It also brings artists’ music-related Twitter activity front and center: go to their profiles to see which music artists they follow and listen to songs by those artists. And, of course, you can tweet songs right from the app.

The new app isn’t available on the App Store yet (tip: to check, refresh Twitter’s page in iTunes using CMD+R). Twitter #music will launch with direct support for iTunes previews, plus Rdio and Spotify streaming for users who have accounts on those service. I’m interested to see how Twitter will handle the login process for Rdio and Spotify, but based on what I’m reading, it sounds like a good idea. Maybe Twitter does have the network infrastructure and willingness to do social music right.

I’ll leave more thoughts for a review. In the meantime, check out Twitter’s official #music landing page, and Joanna Stern’s preview of the app at ABC News.

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Evernote Wants To Build Hardware→

Jay Alabaster for PCWorld:

The CEO of archiving service Evernote said his company will soon release branded hardware with partners, as it moves toward creating its own devices.

“We won’t actually do the manufacturing, but we’ll do the co-design together,” said Phil Libin, who spoke to IDG News Service on the sidelines of the New Economy Summit, a technology conference held Tuesday in Tokyo.

After 6 apps, 2 web tools (Clearly and Web Clipper), a Business service, and expansion on 3 major platforms (OS X, Windows, Android) it makes sense for Evernote to consider more collaborations on the hardware side. Some facts worth keeping in mind: Evernote has its own developer platform and ecosystem for both apps and compatible hardware; the company signed a partnership with Moleskine to enable automatic tagging of notebook pages using stickers; they have a Chinese version of the service; and, they’re not new to other kinds of collaborations such as carrier deals and smart fridges. Evernote wants to grow.

Tighter integration with hardware would, in theory, allow Evernote to create apps that have a more direct connection with the OS. I don’t think it’d be absurd to guess Evernote is considering a Home-like approach: Evernote’s tools span note-taking, document management, photos, location, contact management, and even digital handwriting. Why wouldn’t Evernote want deeper access to mobile OSes for phones and tablets?

Again, from PCWorld:

Libin emphasized that the company aims to make devices that are “new and magical,” rather than entering an existing product category.

We’ll see in a few years.

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Recovering From A Hard Drive Failure→

Riccardo Mori:

Remember: hard drives die unexpectedly in most cases. (Solid State drives too, in case you’re wondering). It will happen when least you expect it. It will happen at an inconvenient time. You will be bothered. If you don’t have a backup of your stuff, you will also be panicking. Be prepared.

Wise words. Thomas Brand also had a good piece about Time Machine:

When I was a Mac Genius in 2004, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard had yet to be released, people were not backing up. When a Mac came to the Bar that wasn’t booting, that was making strange clicking sounds, I got scared. The diagnosis was simple, the hard drive hard failed. The repair was straightforward, the hard drive had to be replaced. But someone would have to tell the customer that if there wasn’t a backup, they had lost everything. That someone was me.

I use SuperDuper, and run a backup on a weekly basis. SuperDuper helped me recover from hard drive crashes in the past, and it couldn’t be easier to use (because you don’t really use it, after all).

However, I’m not as anxious about backups as I used to be. With the move from local storage to cloud services, I feel comfortable knowing that my documents always exist somewhere. I see this every time I set up a fresh install of OS X: my documents, passwords, and photos are in Dropbox and Evernote, my music is on Rdio, my purchased apps are on the Mac App Store, and if they’re not, I have a license saved in my Gmail account. My movies and TV shows are on Plex and iTunes in the Cloud.

I’m not saying backups aren’t important. But I’m lucky enough to not having to work with large files that require local storage, and I know that restoring my Mac from scratch isn’t as painful as it would have been three years ago.

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Screencast and GIF iOS apps→

David Chartier details his workflow for iOS screencasts and GIF generation. I have exactly the same setup, especially when it comes to GIFs:

After you open or drag a video into GIF Brewery, you can select a small portion of the timeline to GIF; it’s really pretty simple. You have some control over how colors are squashed for the GIF format (it only handles 256 colors, so you might have to fiddle a bit here) and the GIF frame rate. You also get an overall file size meter and warning if you get close to or over 1MB; a number of of services (like Tumblr) and web hosts seem to not like anything over that, so GIFer beware.

I love GIF Brewery ; I’ve used it for several GIFs here on the site, and I’ve always liked its simplicity (and icon).

In addition to ScreenFlow, I would also suggest ffmpeg2theora, a simple converter for Ogg Theora video files. It’s a command line utility, and I use it every time I want to embed an HTML5 video on MacStories with MP4 and Ogg source files.

Obviously, Reflector is still the must-have for iOS screencasts.

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Context→

The iPhone does not know enough. Proper context will require data in many more dimensions, dimensions which can define the user and his state. Their sheer number will placate strenuous constraints on their size and energy consumption but demand ever more accurate data. It is not difficult to realize that sensors will ride the next wave of innovation in computing. These minuscule and sophisticated apparatus will usher in the age of personal data.

Great post by Amit Jain.

More sensors and new algorithms will make our devices more personal, context-aware, and versatile. Let’s keep in mind that, however, more always-on sensors will require Apple to make significant strides in another area.

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Ecoute 1.2 With URL Scheme→

Nice update to my favorite iPhone music player: automatic download of missing artwork, iTunes 11-like “Play Next” feature, and a URL scheme (linked above).

We first reviewed Ecoute in August 2012; in October, I added:

The thing I like about Ecoute is that it displays Artists using album thumbnails. The Music app does this only for the Albums view, and then again they’re small thumbnails arranged in a list view. Ecoute is more similar to iTunes’ grid view, which I use on my Mac.

I like the new URL scheme, and especially the search action. I use Rdio on a daily basis, but I keep some albums on my iPhone. With Ecoute 1.2, I can use a Launch Center Pro action to look for a specific artist/album name and view search results for matching artists, albums, and songs. Here’s what it looks like.

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“So You Wanna Be A Mac Consultant Now”→

Great advice (again) by Patrick Rhone:

If you are not a very, very, very, patient, friendly, likable and kind people-person you probably should not be in this line of work. I’ve seen tons of consultants who quite obviously would have been happier if they had never shaved their neck beard and ventured out of their mother’s basement. If that is you, please take up some line of business that keeps you in the basement. You have to be a person who honestly likes dealing with people that are clueless when it comes to this stuff. Your thrill has to come from giving these people “lightbulb moments”.

I also like the brief follow-up by Stephen Hackett (a former Genius):

We did a fair amount of consulting, and the most important thing I told people was this: “I don’t know, but I know how to find out.”

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