Apple Debuts ‘Make Music’ Advert for the iPad Air 2

Coinciding with Sunday’s Grammy Awards, Apple debuted a new iPad Air 2 advert with a focus on music creation. Featuring recording artist Elliphant, producer Riton, DJ The Gaslamp Killer and director So Me, the advert is a 60 second montage of the ‘All or Nothing’ remix being written, produced, performed and filmed on the iPad Air 2.

iPad is changing how we live, work, and create more and more each day. For recording artist Elliphant, it’s liberating her to make music in a radical new way. And whether she’s writing lyrics at home or recording on the road, iPad has become an essential part of her process. It was even used by director So Me to shoot this film.

Like most of Apple’s recent adverts, they’ve set up a page on their website with more information about the advert and those featured in it. As noted on the page, the apps featured in this advert are GarageBand, iMPC Pro, NanoStudio, Serato Remote and Manual Camera.

We’ve embedded the advert below, but you can also view it on Apple’s website and on YouTube.
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Reasons for Web Automation

I’ve been thinking a lot about web automation and whether I should keep investing time and money into IFTTT and Zapier when I can’t seem to find problems that need to be fixed. For years, I fiddled with web automation, recipes, and connecting services together, but I’ve never really relied on web automation and I feel like I experimented with it because I liked the idea on principle.

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Drafts 4.1 and Merging Notes

A few months ago, I wrote about trying to capture pieces of text via extensions and merging them in a single note. Given the lack of an iOS 8 extension capable of directly appending text to an existing note, I ended up using NoteBox, which worked well.

Today’s 4.1 update to Drafts contains, among a plethora of fixes and improvements, operations for drafts, which include a Merge mode. This enables me to go back to a single note-taking app on my devices as Drafts can now handle capturing text through the extension and merging of notes.

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Agents of Change→

A fantastic point in an editorial by Jason Snell for iMore:

There are plenty of other examples of Apple’s corporate culture and accepting the inevitability of change. I admire the way the company introduced the iPad with no fear about the possibility that it would cannibalize Mac sales. This was a lesson I learned during the early days of the web, when I was working for media companies focused on print: If you resist change out of fear that you’ll cannibalize your existing business, all you’ll be doing is allowing someone else to cannibalize your business instead of doing it yourself.

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Photos for Mac Coming with OS X 10.10.3→

Apple announced today that Photos for Mac, first showcased last year, will be included in Yosemite’s 10.10.3 update set to be released later this Spring. As previously explained, Photos for Mac will sync with iCloud Photo Library and replace iPhoto as the single place where users will be able to browse, organize, edit, and share their photos.

A few months ago, I took all my photos and put them into iCloud Photo Library. I’m talking about almost 9 years of photos stored in iCloud. The service (which costs me €0.99/month as everything is under 20 GB) has been working extremely well for me. Photos are available on all my devices and I like that I can take pictures on my phone, come home, and find everything on my iPad when I sit down.

I’m curious to see how Photos for Mac will integrate with the rest of the ecosystem and if performance will keep up. In the meantime, you can read hands-on impressions at The Verge, Re/Code, and Wired.

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Connected: The Microsoft of Ourselves→

To celebrate the show’s silver anniversary, the boys talk about Stephen’s shownote museum, Myke’s Mac Pro and Federico’s iPad Air 2.

This week’s Connected includes a discussion about Microsoft’s Outlook app for iOS and an addendum to my iPad story from yesterday. You can listen to the episode here.

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Tweetbot 2.0 for Mac Coming As Free Update→

Tapbots announced today that Tweetbot 2.0 for Mac will be released on Yosemite and it’ll be a free update for existing customers.

My preference on iOS these days may go to Twitter’s official app, but, on the desktop, Twitter for Mac is in a very sad state, whereas Tweetbot is a great client with tons of handy features. I’m curious to see if Tapbots will manage to add support for modern Twitter features, but, overall, the visual refresh is already looking good. Considering that it’ll be a free update, you can buy the app today from the Mac App Store, get your Twitter token in, and wait for the new version to launch.

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Olloclip 4-in-1 Lens for iPhone 6 Review

olloclip 4-in-1 Pocket-Sized Lens Kit for iPhone 6

For convenience and high-quality results, it was hard to beat the Olloclip accessory lenses for the iPhones 4 through 5s. The 4-in–1 model was especially good, cleaning up a lot of the optical aberrations of the earlier models.

Then came the iPhone 6, in regular and plus sizes, and your old Olloclip was suddenly useless.

The Olloclip is a widget that slides over the corner of the phone and places a wide-angle, fisheye or close-up macro lens over the iPhone’s camera. The new iPhones’ design meant that the old Olloclips wouldn’t fit. But did the folks from Olloclip just pull out a Dremel and cut a groove to let the old model slip over the new iPhone’s sticky-out lens?

Of course not. They came up with a whole new design, a design that’s bigger, but which adds support for the front selfie camera. So how does it compare?

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