As was prophesied earlier this month, HBO has released “The Wire” in widescreen HD on its HBO Signature channel (which is currently marathoning episodes) and in the HBO Go app.
It’s not a happy fun joyride by any means, but it’s still one of the best TV shows ever made. If you’re planning on watching (or rewatching), I highly recommend all of Alan Sepinwall’s reviews—which come in newbie and veteran editions—as great reading as you finish each episode.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
This is what Christmas looks like in Arizona.
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:
I feel we’re on the precipice of the backlash to the suggestion that “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie. I’m not here to debate the issue, but I will say that “Die Hard” is one of the best action movies ever made, and its Christmas setting gives us all a nice excuse to watch it this time of year.
This week on the tech podcast that can be listened to when sitting or standing, Myke Hurley and I discuss workstation ergonomics, traveling with technology, and how we deal with online security, before debating how to collectively name the listeners of the show.
This week, Upgrade is sponsored by:
Igloo: An intranet you’ll actually like, free for up to 10 people.
Dash: Create beautiful dashboards with a few clicks. Sign up now to get one free private dashboard.
Mailroute: a secure, hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam. Go to mailroute.net/upgrade for a free trial and 10% off, for the lifetime of your account.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
A shot from my office window, going 75 on Interstate 10.
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.
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?
Apple is still selling Aperture as an add-on item for new Macs through its online store—for $80. pic.twitter.com/fi3JcjSoZx
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.
This week on my pop-culture podcast The Incomparable, it’s a holiday spectactular as we discuss “The Star Wars Holiday Special,” one of the most ridiculously bad things ever to air on television. You don’t need to have watched the show to enjoy the podcast. Please, don’t punish yourself.
My guests this week—who may never forgive me for making them watch it—are John Siracusa, Dan Moren, Steve Lutz, Erika Ensign, Monty Ashley, Tony Sindelar, and David Loehr.
This week The Incomparable is sponsored by:
Lynda.com – Great video training, from the experts. Visit lynda.com/incomparable for a free 10-day full-access trial.
Harry’s — Great shaving stuff for a great price. Get $5 off your first purchase at harrys.com by using offer code SNELL.
Igloo — An intranet you’ll actually like! Are you dreaming of a white igloo? Visit igloosoftware.com/incomparable to learn more.
The first episode of The Simpsons aired twenty-five years ago, on 17 December, 1989, and since then, English has never been the same. Homer, Bart, Lisa, Marge, and their friends in Springfield, Wherever-it-is, have given us fancy words of pure invention, worthy of Lewis Carroll, like cromulent ‘legitimate, but not really’, and words built from worthy English parts, like the blend of opposites in craptacular ‘crappy, with attitude’ and embiggening ‘enlarging’… Embiggening is the sort of word you make up from scratch when you’re lacking the edumacation to know that enlarge already exists, and edumacation is the sort of word you use if you also use embiggening.
This is a fun article about the originalitism of the series that made D’oh the definitive annoyed grunt. (What? Originalitism is a perfectly cromulent word.)
This week Six Colors is sponsored by Econ Technologies, the makers of ChronoSync. ChronoSync is three utilities in one: It synchronizes folders, backs up files and folders, and can create a bootable backup. It works on internal and external drives, other Macs (via the clever ChronoAgent connection utility), and even network or NAS volumes.
In addition to ChronoSync and ChronoAgent, Econ Technologies makes InterConneX, a free file storage and management app for iOS that can work with ChronoAgent and ChronoSync to share, browse, and transfer files. That’s a recurring theme with Econ Technologies products: They’re built to work well together to perform useful tasks with your files and folders.
Econ Technologies is different from many other companies in that it offers free upgrades, free pre- and post-sales technical support, and continuous improvement and development of its products. ChronoAgent 1.5 will be released shortly, with 64-bit performance and several new configuration options. ChronoSync has been in development since 2002, and the company has never charged for a single update.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I always say I am not a “gamer,” yet I seem to spend a lot of time playing games, especially on iOS. My Six Colors collaborator Dan Moren is someone I consider much more of a gamer than I am, so I asked him to join me to create this list of iOS games we have enjoyed over the past year. We hope you can waste as much time on them as we did.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Right after Thanksgiving this year, I went on a short car trip and naturally decided that I was in dire need of Christmas carols. So I hit up the iTunes Store on my iPhone, where I purchased Nat ‘King’ Cole’s iconic Christmas album. (If you’ve already run through our entire holiday playlist and are looking for more, you can’t go wrong.)
So far, so good.
But when I bought the album, all of the songs started downloading. Besides the fact that I was in an area with somewhat spotty reception, I simply didn’t want the tracks downloaded to my phone right then and there: I really just wanted to stream them. As an iTunes Match subscriber, that’s how I deal with most of my music: I have a central downloaded repository on my Mac mini, and then I stream everything on my other Macs and iOS devices.
All I really wanted (for Christmas) was for the Music app on iOS to register that I had in fact purchased the album, so I could stream Cole’s dulcet tones. What I got was my phone insisting that it had to download the entire album; I tried to pause the downloads and they got stuck at an eternal “Processing” stage. I killed the iTunes Store. I killed the Music app. Finally I restarted the entire phone and resentfully let it download the tracks so I could play them. What should have taken maybe 30 seconds had turned into a five-minute ordeal.
Here’s the thing: it’s not a difficult situation for Apple to accommodate. For one thing, the very feature I wanted is already available if you buy a movie or TV show via iTunes on your iOS device. When you try that—even on Wi-Fi—iOS asks you if you want to download it now or later. Even if you choose “Later,” you can immediately go into the Videos app and stream the video.
Granted, videos files are much larger than music files, so Apple probably—rightly—assumes that people may not want to eat up their iOS device’s capacity. But extending the same capabilities to music would be great. Maybe such an option will follow on a streaming service, were Apple to ever release such a thing. (iTunes Beats, anyone?)
[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.]
Sports Illustrated’s Jon Wertheim has done some math that suggests that a future where we’re all cord cutters bodes ill for the economic underpinnings of sports. ESPN would need to charge $30/month, and for regional sports networks (and the teams they fund via rights fees) the story is worse:
Regional sports networks (RSNs), for one, which charge between $2 and $3 a month. Ratings suggest that only a very small percentage of subscribers would pay that voluntarily. Take Denver, a market of 1.57 million cable households. During Rockies games, Root Sports Rocky Mountain draws 37,000 viewers… Do the back-of-the-envelope math, and the Denver RSN would have to charge more than $1,000 per subscriber annually to offset the drop in reach. “That whole business model is going to explode,” says Tom Spock, another Scalar founding partner.
I’m a sports fan, and live sports is one of the reasons I haven’t cut the cord yet. But it’s undeniable that, indirectly, every subscriber to cable or satellite TV is subsidizing the sports industry, especially on the regional level—and if people who don’t care about sports have the ability to opt out, the economics of the entire industry could fall apart.
(Update: Interesting argument about embedded channel costs from Alex Tabarrok via Roshan Vyas. I’m not saying that Wertheim’s math is perfect, but the sports industry has extracted huge amounts of money from cable and satellite providers because live sports are seen as one of the last bulwarks against cord cutting. If everyone cutting the cord is inevitable, that proposition disappears, and what’s left is a product that has to be priced for a la carte sale or rolled into other, larger bundles. Wertheim’s piece mentions that as a possible outcome—not a premium subscription for your local sports franchise of choice, but games being integrated to other specific offerings. For example, San Francisco Giants fans might need to subscribe to an NBC streaming package to gain access to games.)
New: Today widget. Now back with the addition of recent drafts summary. Thanks to the help of some fine folks inside Apple for sorting this out.
So I guess this is how we live now. I’m glad that so far the eventual decision has been to allow these features, but I have to roll my eyes about it taking an act of Congress a tornado of outrage every single time.
I’m not sure where the disconnect comes in, but clearly someone in the chain of responsibility has a different view of what apps should be able to do. But I’d hope that after having their decisions overturned this many times they might get with the program.
Your goal is to push the envelope forward, Apple. So is the developers’. Let ’em do it.
In this week’s episode, my co-host Dan Moren and I chat with guests Casey Johnston and Jeff Carlson. We talk about 2015 tech we’re excited to see, Apple OS features we don’t use, the Good (?) Old Days of the media world, and the Sony leaks.
Clockwise is sponsored this week by:
Caskers – A curated club that ships high-quality spirits to your door. Get $10 off your first order with code CLOCKWISE.
There’s nobody better than Federico Viticci of MacStories when it comes to writing about iPad productivity. His latest piece on the matter breaks down his favorite apps:
New technologies in iOS 8 have allowed developers to come up with fresh ideas that have revitalized the iOS platform, and this impacted my iPad usage in unexpected ways. With extensions, custom keyboards, and document pickers, I find my iPad to be a more versatile computer than my MacBook for what I need to do on a daily basis.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Carcassonne
I live in a house with three other people. My wife and I have been living under the same roof for quite some time, but at some point we welcomed these tiny crying creatures into our house. They keep getting bigger, though. One of them is now 13 and the other one’s 10, and to keep them entertained sometimes we play games on our dining-room table.
If you also live with people—children or otherwise—and enjoy playing games, you might be interested in buying one of these and giving it as a gift. I don’t know, is it still gift-giving season?
Note: I’m including Amazon links here, but I strongly encourage that you consider visiting your local game store, if you’ve got one. Local game stores are an amazing resource, filled with people who will help you pick exactly the right game for the needs of your friends and/or family.
For most people who use iCloud mail or Gmail, we recommend Mailbox. Its easy swipe gestures to file or defer mail can help you keep your inbox manageable without losing track of important messages, and its companion mobile app allows you to extend that philosophy to all your devices.
There are a lot of interesting choices as alternatives to Apple Mail. The good news is, the wide variety means that even if you have some very specific needs, there’s probably a good alternative waiting for you if it’s time to give Mail the boot.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Photo: Amanda Munoz. (Photo was cropped and edited.)
[Philip Michaels worked at Macworld for more than a decade, and now is available for your freelance writing and editing needs.]
Really, I blame a lot of this on iTunes.
It’s hard to remember this, more than a decade after Steve Jobs cajoled and arm-twisted the music industry into selling electronic versions of songs for 99 cents, but in the Before Times, when one wanted music, one bought The Whole Damn Album. (If one did not want to feel like donning a ski mask and a switchblade as one downloaded songs illegally, of course.) So when you strolled the aisles of a store during the holiday season and came face to face with an entire array of Christmas CDs, you had to ask yourself this question: Do I really want to buy this entire Dean Martin CD of Christmas songs when only one, maybe two of the tracks will be any damn good? And thus was snuffed out another impulse buy.
iTunes knows no such mercy. You want to hear Dean-o crooning out “Silver Bells?” Be our guest, friend… and why don’t you download “It’s a Marshmallow World at Christmas” while you’re at it? You want John Denver twanging out Christmas songs? (With or without Muppets?) Kenny Chesney? Kenny G? Kenny from South Park? They are all there, adding their particular takes on holiday standards, and they can be yours with just the click of a button.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that the iTunes Store coupled with the impulse control of a magpie has caused my library of holiday tunes to swell like an overstuffed stocking in recent years. And that’s not necessarily because the songs I bought and paid for are all outstanding — far from it. Many are quite terrible, as I expounded on at length in an episode of a podcast that inexplicably keeps having me on and in an article for a website that stopped employing me. I guess when it’s 99 cents to $1.29, the prospect of downloading John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John dueting on a creepy-even-for-this-song version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for a good chuckle doesn’t seem so off-putting. Until you listen to the song, of course, and realize that you own it forever.
But we’re not here today to talk about regret. Jason asked me if I could write an article about good Christmas songs — songs that I actually like and would play around others without reservation during the holidays. This is probably because Jason is a relentlessly positive person, which is an absolutely off-putting trait if I’m being honest, though I suspect it’s also because he bet somebody that I couldn’t come up with a couple hundred words worth of niceness.
