Month: July 2015

Finally, a Good Google Podcast

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I’ve been searching for a good Google podcast for a long, long time but my search may be over. I’ve give Material’s first 4 episodes a listen and it’s very entertaining. What makes it better than most is their keen understanding that for their chosen platform to be great doesn’t mean the competition needs to be bad. They tackle topics in a very engaging, thoughtful manner and avoid bashing the competition – instead focusing on what makes Android/Google their platform of choice. Doesn’t hurt that 2/3 of the crew are former iOS users, so they have good perspective about both platforms.

I highly recommend it, give it a shot!

Don’t order the fish

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Marco Arment on Apple Music:

But the iTunes Store back-end is a toxic hellstew of unreliability. Everything that touches the iTunes Store has a spotty record for me and almost every Mac owner I know.

And the iTunes app itself is the toxic hellstew. iTunes has an impossible combination of tasks on its plate that cannot be done well. iTunes is the definition of cruft and technical debt. It was an early version of iTunes that demonstrated the first software bugs to Grace Hopper in 1946.

Probably not coincidentally, some of iTunes’ least reliable features are reliant on the iTunes Store back-end, including Genius from forever ago, iTunes Match more recently, and now, Apple Music.

I feel like iTunes 13 has to be a re-do.  Maybe I’m wrong, but Apple Music is such a bolted-on mess compared to the relatively well-done iOS versions that 12.x has to be a placeholder for a fairly ambitious rewrite.

Right?

A little housekeeping…

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I’ve been going through Archive.org and trying to pull in any half-relevant post from the old danielandrews.com/wtmcgee.com days before I blew things up and started over.  If you see anything odd in your feed from years ago, I’m basically copying/pasting the text into new back-dated entries that I’ll eventually set up proper redirects for as […]

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New stuff from WWDC 2015

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A great gist listing all of the New stuff from WWDC 2015:

Here’s my own list of the interesting stuff announced during this year’s WWDC, collected from the keynotes, various Apple docs, blog posts and tweets.

I missed a ton of the SDK stuff especially, so it’s nice to have a consolidated list for reference.

A Watch, Water and Workouts

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Craig Hockenberry:

In case you haven’t guessed by now, I love my Apple Watch. I find myself working out more and having a better understanding of my overall health.

I’m also thrilled that the watch is working so well with my favorite workout: swimming in the ocean. Despite some hiccups in functionality, I still get enough information to improve my performance and extend my goals.

I hope this the information in this report will help others understand what the watch can and cannot do in the presence of water. I also hope my experiences will help Apple improve the watch’s capabilities for swimming workouts.

Pretty cool to see how well the Apple Watch performs in the water overall. I’ve avoided really doing much more than rinsing mine off after running but it’s encouraging to know it can stand up to way more than that.

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams wants developers to come back

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Twitter co-founder Ev Williams wants developers to come back:

Williams also suggested that it was time for Twitter to look for new ways to connect with software developers and to take another stab at making Twitter a platform. Twitter  famously went to war with developers several years ago when it restricted developers’ access to the API that allowed developers to grab Twitter data for their own use.

This is a very good thing if it actually comes to pass.  While I like what Twitter has been doing lately with their native iOS app, their Mac and iPad apps are horribly out of date.  I’m a Tweetbot user on the Mac and waffle between Tweetbot and Twitterrific on iOS, but would love to see even more innovation in the Twitter app space.  Right now, developers’ hands are tied.

Safari and the User Centric Web

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If you haven’t been keeping up with this small-scale drama, Nolan Lawson wrote an article about a week ago about how Safari is falling behind other browser vendors.  This led to a pretty large outcry from the Apple faithful (which, honestly, I typically consider myself part of) and finally a slight backtrack from the author. […]

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Initial Apple Music Impressions

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On June 30th at around 10am, the switch was flipped on the iOS 8.4 upgrade that contained the new Apple Music app and about an hour later, Beats 1 went live on the new streaming service. Overall, it’s been a fairly smooth launch from what I gather, and I’ve had a chance to kick the […]

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