Federico weighs in on the great pineapple pizza debate, then the conversation moves to Android N, the future of the Mac and iOS text editors.
On this week’s Connected, I also continued my exploration of Ulysses for iOS and my changing text editor preferences. You can listen here.
Sponsored by:
Glenn Peoples, reporting for Billboard:
Dubset Media Holdings has announced a partnership that will allow Apple Music to stream remixes and DJ mixes that had previous been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues. Thousands upon thousands cool mash-ups and hour-long mixes have effectively been pulled out of the underground and placed onto the world’s second-largest music subscription service.
Dubset is a digital distributor that delivers content to digital music services. But unlike other digital distributors, Dubset will use a proprietary technology called MixBank to analyze a remix or long-form DJ mix file, identify recordings inside the file, and properly pay both record labels and music publishers.
Remixes and mashups are a huge part of what my girlfriend and I listen to on a daily basis (she’s a dancer, and she often needs remixes for her choreographies; she usually finds them on YouTube and SoundCloud). This is a nice differentiator for Apple Music, though the article suggests more streaming services will follow.
Club MacStories members know that ‘attention’ is a topic near and dear to my heart that I’ve been writing about for the past month or so in my MacStories Weekly column, Ongoing Development. One aspect of attention that I haven’t covered yet is media attention. Today, in An Indie’s Guide to the Press, Curtis Herbert, maker of Slopes, a GPS tracking app for skiers and snowboarders, shares his experience and tips for dealing the press as an indie developer.
Hundreds of “I have an app…” emails hit the inboxes of the Apple-centric press every day. You’re not only competing for attention with other indies that have just as much passion about their app, though, you’re competing with the day-to-day news the tech sites have to write about. Readers trust these sites to filter out as much noise as possible. That is their job.
The most important thing I’ve realized about working with the press is that it’s all about finding the story. You have to answer the question why will their readers care?
Curtis’ advice is applicable to anyone pitching an app, not just indies. Every publication has a sense of who their readers are and what interests them. If you want to stand a chance of being heard through the noise, you need to understand that too.
As a developer myself who now writes at MacStories, two things have really struck me – the volume of pitches that MacStories receives on a daily basis, and the poor quality of many of them. Developers should heed Curtis’ advice. Doing so isn’t a guaranty that your app will be covered, but you will stand out from the crowd, which is the attention that gets your foot in the door in a way that many developers never achieve.
In a world of ever-increasing video game complexity, some games stand out as being ones that can captivate despite high-def graphics and intense gameplay. It’s certainly not easy, of course, and the ones that try have their work cut out for them.
After becoming addicted to Thumb.Run over the past week, the speedy racing game has caught my eye as a fulfillment of what’s mentioned above.
People talk about how an Apple product such as the iPhone having a halo effect on customers. If you buy an iPhone and like it, the theory goes, you’re more inclined to buy another Apple device, like a MacBook. This theory has certainly proven true in my experience – since buying my first iPhone (my first Apple product) in 2007, I’ve bought numerous other Apple products and subscribed to numerous Apple services in the subsequent years. Put another way, I was entrenched in the Apple ecosystem long before I started covering the company for a living.
Recently, a different kind of halo effect has settled on me. I’ve been using an iPad Pro for the past several weeks, and absolutely love it. Like Federico, the iPad is my computer of choice because of my deep familiarity with iOS and the ways in which working from a touchscreen device makes computing more easily accessible.1 Coming from my old iPad Air 1, iPad Pro has intensified my affinity for the iPad and iOS in general. It has impressed not merely by its technical or software merits, but by one seemingly obvious thing: its screen.
Cade Metz published a Dropbox profile for Wired, detailing how the company migrated to their own storage infrastructure:
Cowling and crew started work on the Magic Pocket software in the summer of 2013 and spent about six months building the initial code. But this was a comparatively small step. Once the system was built, they had to make sure it worked. They had to get it onto thousands of machines inside multiple data centers. They had to tailor the software to their new hardware. And, yes, they had to get all that data off of Amazon.
The whole process took two years. A project like this, needless to say, is a technical challenge. But it’s also a logistical challenge. Moving that much data across the Internet is one thing. Moving that many machines into data centers is another. And they had to do both, as Dropbox continued to serve hundreds of millions of people. “It’s like a moving car,” says Dan Williams, a former Facebook network engineer who oversaw much of the physical expansion, “and you want to be able to change a tire while still driving.” In other words, while making all these changes, Dropbox couldn’t very well shut itself down. It couldn’t tell the hundreds of millions of users who relied on Dropbox that their files were temporarily unavailable. Ironically, one of the best measures of success for this massive undertaking would be that users wouldn’t notice it had happened at all.
People who are really serious about cloud storage should make their own hardware and software, I guess.
HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver tackled the Apple-FBI fight over encryption in this week’s episode and did a phenomenal job. As always, Oliver uses humour as a tool to help illuminate the absurdity of various propositions, whilst also keeping people engaged when the topic is dry or complicated. As a result, this 17 minute video is perfect for anyone, even if you haven’t been paying much attention to this encryption debate so far.
You can watch the video on YouTube, but be warned it is NSFW. For those of you in countries where the video is geo-blocked (ugh), you should also be able to view it on the Last Week Tonight Facebook page.
Be sure to stick around to the end as there’s a brilliant satirical Apple advert that you really have to see.
When it launched in October with support for streaming and chapters, Overcast 2’s patronage model was positioned as a way to directly support the app without the promise of anything exclusive in return. With Overcast 2.5, launching today on the App Store, Marco Arment is introducing the first features available only to Overcast patrons: a dark theme, and the ability to upload audio files to Overcast’s cloud.
There was a time when I would download just about any photo editing app and give it a try. But like many things, I found that having too many tools led to paralysis of choice. I would want to edit a photo, but I couldn’t decide which app had just the right filters I was looking for.
These days I use the built-in Photos app for most of my photo editing, but I keep a handful of other apps around, and periodically add one or two to the mix on a trial basis. Not many of those trial photos apps stick, but recently I’ve been trying Black by Peter Stojanowski, which features ten attractive black and white filters based on classic film types and a few manual controls, and it’s stuck with me.
