Let Me Share This Podcast With You→

Joe Rosensteel:

Many of the things holding podcast-listening back are things that I see podcasters lament on Twitter. There is a lot of consternation over SoundCloud from some people, and a warm embrace from others. Their program is in beta, and appears to have some quirks. People want searchable, legible, text versions of hour-long podcasts to spread links about the really good stuff. Even the ability to jump to a specific moment in playback as part of a URL has been bandied about.

The entire article is great and I agree with Joe’s points. There are several factors at play: iTunes’ stagnation for podcast producers (but, hey, at least it works), the lack of podcast-specific standards for annotations/players/show notes (podcasts themselves are delivered using another technology, RSS), and a fragmentation of independent producers, networks, and large publications that deliver podcast-like content but don’t care about interoperability with “open formats” , “clients”, and other “technologies” that could move the podcast medium forward.

Honestly, when I’m asked about my podcast by friends and family, I just point them to iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app. That’s the easiest way in, and it gives an idea of the power of lock-in, ease of use and access, and discovery (“Just go to iTunes and search for The Prompt, mom”).

RSS helped spark the diffusion of podcasting and, now that it’s still relatively new, I wouldn’t mind seeing more efforts towards a standardization of features like show notes, transcriptions, and episode bookmarks. I don’t know how it could be done, but it needs to happen, it needs to be open for everyone to use, and developers shouldn’t have to hard-code their own custom solutions from scratch.

There’s so much potential in improving the presentation of podcast content, it’s depressing to see how primitive the basic technology is. It works, and it lets us do this stuff on a weekly basis, but it could – should – be better.

Until someone improves the technology behind podcasts, though, I’ll just have to recommend iTunes.

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Paid, Paymium Or Freemium?→

Choosing the right pricing strategy for any new app is hard, but if you choose the wrong pricing model, it can cost you thousands of dollars in lost revenue. In this article I’m going to cover the three main revenue models on the App Store and explain how to make sure you pick the one that’s right for your app.

Good post by Realmac’s Dan Counsell about the three modern realities of the app business. This is the first time I see the term “paymium”, and it’s true that a few apps in the Productivity and Business categories of the App Store have been trying that model.

See also: Contrast’s David Barnard on shaping the App Store economy.

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Apple Q1 2014 Results: $57.6 Billion Revenue, 51 Million iPhones, 26 Million iPads Sold

 

Apple has published their Q1 2014 financial results for the quarter that ended on December 28, 2013. The company posted revenue of $57.6 billion. The company sold 26 million iPads, 51 million iPhones, and 4.8 million Macs, earning a quarterly net profit of $13.1 billion.

We are really happy with our record iPhone and iPad sales, the strong performance of our Mac products and the continued growth of iTunes, Software and Services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We love having the most satisfied, loyal and engaged customers, and are continuing to invest heavily in our future to make their experiences with our products and services even better.

The quarter sets a new record for Apple: before today’s results, the company’s record was $54.5 billion revenue reported for Q1 2013. Read more

iOS 7 iPhone Wallpapers→

I’ve recently finished designing a collection of 50 wallpapers made for iPhone home screens. Without app icon shadows, iOS 7 can make the home screen look quite cluttered. I started with very simple ambient colour spectrums and decided to make a few more.

Beautiful wallpapers by Thomas Ricciardiello (via Mike Rundle). I’m trying one of the Light Spectrum ones on my iPhone now (I’ve been using an Apple default one since September). It’d be great to have iPad versions.

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The General-Purpose iPad→

Ben Thompson has a good post about the differences between “computing” tasks on the Mac and the general-purpose nature of the iPad. I agree with his conclusion:

Ultimately, it is the iPad that is in fact general purpose. It does lots of things in an approachable way, albeit not as well as something that is built specifically for the task at hand. The Mac or PC, on the other hand, is a specialized device, best compared to the grand piano in the living room: unrivaled in the hands of a master, and increasingly ignored by everyone else.

Forget about this stuff and forget about “convergence”. My question is: for the future, does Apple think that the iPad – and by extension, iOS – will become suitable for traditional computing tasks?

Right now, Apple’s answer is that the Mac and iPad can coexist, each in a different space – and I believe that’s accurate. But as more people will choose tablets and smartphones as their primary computers in the coming years (with Mac sales further shrinking alongside the rest of the PC industry), will they start wondering whether spreadsheets, layouts, and photo management can be done on a multitouch display?

Does Apple think that their customers will want more from the iPad? And how would they deliver more without making the iPad more complex and less “magical”?

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Pushpin for Pinboard Updated with New iOS 7 Design, iPad UI, Search Improvements

Pushpin

Pushpin

Pushpin, a full-featured Pinboard client that used to be my personal favorite before iOS 7, has today been updated to version 3.0, which brings a new design, a split pane interface on the iPad, and several other features. On the iPhone, I now prefer Pinswift, but Pushpin remains the best Pinboard experience for the iPad, which is where I spend most of my time bookmarking links and discovering new ones every day.

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How The “Lost” Mac Intro Video Was Found→

On January 24, 2005, Majo posted the video on his site for the Mac’s 21st birthday. The traffic was overwhelming. To watch, you had to download the 20MB file, and majo’s site soon crashed. We were SlashDotted, kottke.orged, and etc. He begged for mirror sites, and a bunch of other people helped out. I wrote a blog post about the video. I watched the comments come in from around the world as people woke up and discovered the “lost” video (that I didn’t realize had been lost). The comments show how excited people were to discover the video, and how eager they were to help by mirroring it. It was a pretty cool day.

Like many other “lost videos”, there’s a good story behind Jobs’ Macintosh intro (via Daring Fireball).

See also: how the original Macintosh demo was actually put together, by Andy Hertzfeld.

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Macminicolo Launches Mac Pro Colocation Service→

Macminicolo, the first Mac mini colocation service that has been hosting Mac mini servers for over 9 years, has today announced a Mac Pro colocation service, called MacProColo. The service will allow users to send their new Mac Pros to take advantage of the benefits of a data center to have powerful, dedicated hosting with all the benefits of OS X and the Mac Pro’s advanced technologies.

From the company’s blog post:

We tested the Mac Pro quite a bit in the data center. It performs incredible and there is no issue with heat. The Pro does pull quite a bit more power though. (And in a data center, power is one of the biggest expenses.)

For most people, the Mac mini will easily do the job and will also be less expensive for purchase and for colocation. In my opinion, I think most people will want the Mac Pro on their desk and the Mac mini in the data center.

Speaking to MacRumors’ Jordan Golson, Macminicolo’s Brian Stucki noted that the fan of the new Mac Pro makes it easy to get air through the machine, and he added that heat dissipation won’t be an issue in most data centers.

We’ve been running MacStories on Macminicolo for over a year now, and I couldn’t be more satisfied with the service’s uptime and the company’s support. We’ve changed a few hosting providers over the years, and while setting up a dedicated Mac server for our needs required some time, it was absolutely worth it. We won’t need a Mac Pro upgrade (at least not for the time being), but I can personally vouch for Macminicolo and I’m looking forward to reading about other websites switching to MacProColo.

Details about pricing are available here.

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