By Dan Moren

January 1, 2015 2:03 PM PT

Wish List: Up Next for iOS

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Despite the complaints–and there are no shortage of legitimate ones–over recent versions of Apple’s iTunes software, it introduced at least one feature that I’ve come to love: Up Next. It supplanted the old Party Shuffle/iTunes DJ feature, letting you choose songs for playback and reorder them, all on the fly.

As someone who tends not to create playlists, I love the ability to rely on shuffled playback and then insert songs as I go. I tend to be an associative listener, finding that a particular song reminds me of a different track. In the olden days of yore, long, long ago, that meant searching my iTunes library and selecting the next track, then remembering to hit play when the current song ended. Up Next did away with that bit of manual dexterity, and it’s been greatly appreciated.

But it’s not on iOS.

That aforementioned sleight of hand, selecting the next song you want to listen to, is even more annoying on an iOS device, since you can’t really “select” a song in the Music app–and it’s even more frustrating when the device an iPhone that you primarily keep in your pocket. The best alternative these days is to summon Siri when the current track finishes and then request the next track you want to hear. But I’d deeply love for Up Next on Apple’s mobile platforms too.

If the conversations I’ve had are any indication, the Music app on iOS isn’t particularly beloved. I don’t dislike it as much as many seem to, but nor do I find it particularly compelling–I use it because it’s what’s provided. Despite being part of the core functionality of the iPhone and the iPod before it, it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention in recent versions, outside of a graphical refresh for iOS 7/8.

So I’m hopeful that Up Next will make an appearance on iOS in the not too distant future. There are some third party apps that provide similar features, but given the low level at which Music is tied into the operating system, an Apple provided solution would be welcome.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

January 1, 2015 10:58 AM PT

A little of the old UltraViolet

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

In case you’re not familiar with UltraViolet, it’s the movie industry’s attempt to deal with the popularity of digital video. On the face of it, that’s a good thing, because it means that the studios are taking piracy head on, rather than sticking their fingers in their ears and humming “la la la la la la” as loud as they can.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t translate into a system that is particularly consumer-friendly. Allow me to recount the steps I had to take to redeem the free digital copy of Lawrence of Arabia that came with the 50th anniversary Blu-ray I received for Christmas.

Continue reading “A little of the old UltraViolet”…

By Jason Snell

December 31, 2014 6:22 PM PT

Happy New Year

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

As I write this, I’ve been to one New Year’s party (hosted by English friends, so the celebration was in GMT) and am about to head to another, more Pacific Time-focused party. (Though presumably we will stop and acknowledge the ball dropping in Times Square at 9 p.m. Such is life in one of the last populated time zones to celebrate the new year.)

2014 has been a year of dramatic change in my life. Thanks to everyone out there who has offered their support and encouragement as I embark on the next phase of my professional life. It’s appreciated.

Onward to 2015!

By Jason Snell

December 31, 2014 1:04 PM PT

Powered by Movable Type

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

On this week’s episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber and I talked about—among many other topics—Movable Type. The venerable blogging platform was once the go-to tool for making your own blog, but the rise of WordPress along with some questionable product and company directions ended up leaving it largely¹ by the side of the road.

This is notable not just because of the tech nostalgia—there’s a lot of that in the episode, too, which is what happens when you hang around an industry for 20 years—but because Gruber and I both run our websites on Movable Type. As John says in the episode, I may be the last person to launch a brand-new website on Movable Type 4. I doubt that, but point taken!

One of the things I hope to document on this site, in addition to my coverage of Apple stuff, is my own use of technology. So I might as well tackle what the site is built on. I used Movable Type for a few reasons, including the fact I’ve been using it for years and I know its template language backward and forward. While I’ve used WordPress a little bit, setting up a site using WordPress would have required hours, or days, or weeks of setup. I launched Six Colors less than a week after I left Macworld, so the lack of a learning curve was vitally important.

Then there’s my friend Greg Knauss, who administers this site. Last year we set up the new web site for The Incomparable, and we used Movable Type for that. Similar reasons applied: Greg and I know the software by heart, and even better, Greg is a Perl programmer who can edit the code and whip up Movable Type plugins when necessary. (Which he needed to do, because Movable Type 4 doesn’t really support podcasts, so he wrote a plugin to parse podcast files for their size and run time.) The Incomparable’s implementation of Movable Type is pretty wacky, with five separate blogs that interconnect to each other like a relational database.

Again, we used it because we had some very specific features we wanted that existing CMSes—including those used by 5by5 and Relay FM—just didn’t offer. And we knew we could implement that fairly easily in Movable Type. So we did it. That was the first project I had really used Movable Type for in years, but when the time came to deploy Six Colors myself, it was sitting right there.

If Six Colors doesn’t look like a Movable Type site, that’s because I didn’t use any of Movable Type 4’s included (and out of date) templates. I built site templates² with the help of Panic’s app Coda 2—and, yes, by carefully considering what I liked and didn’t like about the sites that have been my inspiration for this entire thing, including Daring Fireball, MacStories, Very Nice Web Site, and The Loop—and then converted them into templates and template modules. I used to do that sort of job all the time in the 90s and early 2000s, but it’s been a while. My skills were rusty. They’re slowly coming back, but I am woefully behind the times on JavaScript and CSS.

So does it matter that I use Movable Type on this site? Probably not, since the entire point of the site is the content on the pages, not how it was made. It strikes me, though, that the analogy of software being like pop music is even more apt than I thought. In the App Store, we see apps that become hits and climb the charts. Is this because it’s a natural way to think of software, or because the iTunes infrastructure was built for music sales and then adapted to cover software too?

Regardless, it turns out that software can also be considered uncool, even if it still works. Not only is Movable Type uncool (the equivalent of ’80s hair metal), but the language it’s written in, Perl, is supremely uncool. Like, New Kids on the Block uncool. The razzing John Siracusa takes about being a Perl developer isn’t really because Perl is old, or bad, but because it’s just not what the cool kids are talking about. The world has moved on.

And yet, sometimes that old stuff still works, and is still the best tool for the job. And that’s why, at least for right now, this site is built on software that was initially released 14 years ago and given its last major update five years ago. We’ll use it until it doesn’t make sense to use it anymore.

By Jason Snell

December 24, 2014 9:03 AM PT

The Six Colors holiday meta-post

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve posted a bunch of stuff that I’ve tried to pass off as somewhat holiday related. Since it’s Christmas Eve, I present a recap of that stuff in case (as the kids say) you missed it:

Tech things from the Holiday Gift Guide:

• Favorite hardware
• Favorite iOS games, from both me and Dan Moren
• Favorite iOS apps
• Favorite Mac apps
• Favorite services and stuff
• In praise of Marvel Unlimited

And a few things that are a little less techy, but that I think you’ll like:

• Favorite board games
• My favorite geeky holiday music
• Philip Michaels’ excellent holiday playlist

By Jason Snell

December 23, 2014 10:45 AM PT

No other gatekeeper but me

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

One of the privileges of being an editor at a large publishing organization is that you’re insulated from aspects of the business. Occasionally you’d see a weird ad on your web site and you’d roll your eyes, but the business of ad sales was not your job. Just as sales people don’t tell editors what to write, editors don’t tell sales people what ads to sell. (We could give them a signal if we felt a product was particularly sketchy, but it wasn’t our job to approve or disapprove ads.)

Being the sole proprietor of a web site means you’re not insulated. By accepting weekly sponsors for this site, I put myself in a position I’ve really never been in before, of having to decide if a sponsor is appropriate for my audience—and turn away business if I feel that it’s not a good fit with what I’m trying to do.

This week’s original feed sponsor, an antivirus product for Mac and iOS, wasn’t one I felt comfortable with. I failed to look carefully through the marketing material after I received it last week, and though I felt trepidation when I posted that material live to the site Monday morning, I overrode that feeling and lived up to the terms of the sponsorship agreement. That one’s my fault, and certainly my inexperience as a gatekeeper of advertising was on display Monday.

When readers called me on it almost immediately after it posted, I realized that it was a bad decision to allow the sponsor on the site. I don’t want to disparage that sponsor’s product, but it’s fair to say that I’ve got some healthy skepticism about how it was described in the accompanying marketing material.

As soon as I saw the reaction to the post, which reinforced my own skepticism, I made the decision to kill the ad and refund the sponsor’s money.

All of this happened from the passenger seat of my family’s minivan, doing 75 miles per hour through the Arizona desert on the way to my mom’s house for Christmas. In one way it was a pretty great example of the power of the iPhone as a productivity device. In the span of an hour I removed the old sponsor post, edited the text ad via FTP using Transmit for iOS, tweeted that the sponsor had been removed, texted with a potential replacement sponsor, received that sponsor’s information, and posted the new sponsor on the site. All from my iPhone, in the passenger seat, in the middle of the desert. What a world.

Back to the sponsorship issue: It’s a painful lesson, learned. I will pay more attention going forward to my role as a gatekeeper. I don’t want to run sponsorships from products that I am dubious about. I’ll try harder to watch for that.

Sponsorships are paid advertising. On Twitter yesterday, someone suggested that I accept no advertising from any product that I didn’t personally use and endorse. That’s not only impractical, it’s not how advertising works. I’m not a developer, but a couple of weeks ago an app-localization service sponsored the site. I know enough about the industry to have confidence in that service, but I haven’t used it.

When I use the product of a sponsor and have something to add about my personal experience, I might do so. (For example, Myke Hurley has me read the ads for MailRoute—also this week’s new Six Colors sponsor!—on the Upgrade podcast, because I use their service and Myke doesn’t.) But my personal endorsements aren’t for sale, and I add them in at my own discretion.

Finally, an update about me. I’m loving my new life, writing for this site and doing podcasts and doing some freelance writing as well. The question for 2015 is, can I make a living this way? Sponsorships are one way to help me toward my goal of staying independent, and I appreciate the support that’s been shown on that front. I’ve also heard from readers who don’t have any product to market, who want to help me in some way. One of my goals for early 2015 is to find a way for readers to support this site directly. I’m still working on how to do that most effectively and what to provide in return for the support.

So, to sum up: I’m used to someone else choosing what ads are the right fit with my audience. Now that I’m trying to make it on my own, that’s my job. I’ll be more diligent about it in the future. Thanks for your support.

By Jason Snell

December 22, 2014 8:56 AM PT

Would you like this discontinued software?

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Back in June, Apple announced that it was discontinuing Aperture and iPhoto, to be replaced in 2015 with a new Photos app targeted at both iPhoto and Aperture users.

I was speaking at a user-group meeting last week, and afterward I spoke with a die-hard Aperture user who was quite upset about the prospect of having to switch to Lightroom. I mentioned that the new Photos app was indeed intended to support people like her, but had to admit my skepticism that Apple would be able to create one app that could satisfy the user bases of both Aperture and iPhoto.

In any event, I’m looking forward to seeing what the new Photos app brings next year. But in the meantime, don’t you think Apple should stop selling Aperture to the buyers of new Macs?

Following this tweet from Khoi Vinh, I went to the online Apple Store and selected the Mac Pro, and was helpfully offered the option to buy preinstalled copies of Final Cut Pro ($300), Logic Pro ($200), and Aperture ($80).

I hope nobody is taking Apple up on this not-so-generous offer to buy in to an application that’s been out on the ice floe for six months already.