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.
This week on the tech podcast that delights in follow-up, Myke Hurley and I discuss the etiquette of digital gifts, compare how we use our iOS devices compared to our Macs, and decide on a collective name for listeners of the show.
This week, Upgrade is sponsored by:
PDFPen Scan+, from Smile. The power of your office in your pocket! Scan contracts, invoices, or receipts as PDFs with your iPhone or iPad.
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.
Igloo: An intranet you’ll actually like, free for up to 10 people.
I suppose it is wonderful, in a way, that the music of some 16-year-old kids in Chicago, say, can be heard in Malaysia with one mouse click. But maybe this music shouldn’t be heard.
Nunziato’s argument is that the old days, when corporate suits made business decisions about what music would be the most marketable, were good days. Because when the suits made all the decisions, there wasn’t an infinite amount of music to choose from.
The curation aspect of what those music-industry suits and their A&R men and their talent scouts and the rest, that did (and does) have value. Today, more than ever, people who can identify what’s worth listening to (or reading, or watching) are incredibly valuable. There’s so much stuff out there, that it’s impossible for any person to try it all. We need to look to people who match our tastes to recommend things to us.
But Nunziato’s story isn’t about curation. It’s about gatekeepers. He believes that people shouldn’t be allowed to create art without a guy in a suit making a business decision to allow them to do so:
The Internet has enabled anyone with a computer, a kazoo and an untuned guitar to flood the market, no matter how horrible or simply unready the music is. This devalues the great music that is truly worthy of being heard, promoted and sold. And it is much more than just an endless supply of choices. The Internet has become a forum for all, regardless of talent. Anyone can be a writer. Anyone with GarageBand can make a record.
I’m not quite sure how the existence of bad music devalues good music. (Wouldn’t it be the reverse?) And see those last two sentences? There’s the democratization of creation, right there—and Nunziato says it like it’s a bad thing!
The Internet means that if someone creates something that people love, it doesn’t matter who they are. A kid in his basement in Minnesota can gain an online following and turn into a top-selling recording artist. That’s not a horror, that’s a miracle.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
This week on my pop-culture podcast The Incomparable, we talk about the excellent detective series “The Last Policeman,” by Ben Winters. It’s an almost noirish crime story set right before the world is going to be destroyed by an asteroid. My guests are Lisa Schmeiser, Erika Ensign, and David J. Loehr.
This week The Incomparable is sponsored by:
TextExpander touch 3 — The new version’s custom keyboard works with iOS 8 to auto-expand what you type in every app, including Apple’s.
This week’s Six Colors sponsor is Babble-on App Localization. A lot of our readers are amazing developers creating remarkable apps—in English. But what about the other six billion people on the planet? Babble-on can help you translate your app into every language of the App Store.
Babble-on is a small shop based here in San Francisco that caters to devs who really care about their international users. This is not Google Translate, but a team of professional, native-speaking translators who specialize in apps. While other companies offer varying price-versus-quality tiers for localization, Babble-on has just one level: expert. They can even help you (re)write your app description in English.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I have an iPhone and an iPad. Do you have an iPhone and/or an iPad? Did you know that you can add small programs, or “apps,” to it? Here are some of these so-called “apps” that I enjoy.
Two links to Glenn Fleishman in one day. Someone stop me before I Glenn again.
This time it’s on his own blog, extrapolating some numbers from recent social-media surveys:
Twitter’s growth has slowed, especially for active users. Podcasting has by no means reached its top, and it’s likely to be driven higher by a critical mass of adoption and shows like Serial. The number of podcast listeners could start to approach Edison’s figures for online radio listeners: about 47% of the 12+ population in America, or about 124 million people.
For people who love listening to and making podcasts, 39 million is a very nice potential audience, but striving towards 124 million sounds even better.
I’m trying to avoid The Force Awakens spoilers as much as the next guy, so I appreciate that J.J. Abrams and I seem to be on the same page. You won’t find any new pictures in this set of faux Topps trading cards (I had a bunch of these and their successors when I was a kid), just screencaps from the trailer. However, you will find character names, including Finn, Kylo Ren, Rey, and fans’ favorite soccer ball droid, BB-8.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I skipped out on the iPhone 5s, so the iPhone 6 is the first time I’ve had Touch ID—honestly, you haven’t lived until you’ve given your phone the finger. So to speak.
The other night, a friend commented that he keeps trying to unlock his original iPad Air with his fingerprint, so accustomed has he become to his iPhone 6 (yes, it’s the first worldiest of first world problems), but that got me thinking about someplace else Touch ID might come in useful: the Mac.
Biometric security—and fingerprint readers in particular—are nothing new on PCs. Plenty of laptops have a built-in scanner, but they’re often finicky, and software support for them is generally halfhearted at best. Like some of my past suggestions, all of that adds up to something that fits right into one of Apple’s sweet spots.
In this week’s episode, my co-host Dan Moren and I chat with guests Georgia Dow and Myke Hurley. We talk about Apple’s App Store rejections, early video game memories, Siri on the desktop, and why we should care about Net Neutrality.
Clockwise is sponsored this week by:
Boom 2 – Giving you the power to fine-tune every single element of audio coming out of your Mac. Try it for 7 days free and save 20% off when you buy using the coupon code clockwise.
Over at Macworld Glenn Fleishman provides a useful reminder: If you’ve got two-factor authentication turned on for your Apple ID, you need to make sure you’ve saved your recovery key somewhere. If you get in a situation like Owen Williams of The Next Web did and get locked out of your account, Apple literally can’t get you back into your account.
Apple has designed its two-step recovery system, just like iOS 8’s passcode protection and Mac OS X’s FileVault encryption, so that if the necessary credentials are lost, the firm cannot recover your data. It’s not just being perverse. Apple doesn’t retain information in a way that lets it gain access without key pieces of data or devices only you possess. If it has the secrets, then attackers can gain them, too, or it can be compelled to surrender them to government agents.
If you can’t find your recovery key, go generate a new one and put it in a safe place.
But why does Regis hold the top spot in this list? How is it possible that the unremarkable talk show host is the most mocked man in Letterman’s long career? Sure, he’s a frequent guest on the show, but he’s not an A-list celebrity. He’s never been involved in a major scandal. He’s not someone who gets name-checked abundantly on other comedy shows. How did Regis become one of the longest running inside jokes in the history of late-night comedy?
I remember the first night of the Top Ten Lists. Back then I recorded the show every night and watched it before going to school the next morning. When it started it was just another recurring comedy bit, appearing in the place of some other bit that had worn thin. And while we can argue about whether or not the Top Ten bit has itself worn thin—it’s been almost 30 years!—it has become a delivery mechanism for an absurd number of jokes.
We talked a little bit about automation on last week’s Clockwise and I lamented that I’ve never been very good at actually putting together workflows. But this new app—let’s call it “Automator for iOS, only better”—looks amazing. I’ve played around with it for just a few minutes this morning, and I’ve hardly scratched the surface of what it lets you do.
Between this, IFTTT, Launch Center Pro, and Editorial (the latter two of which Workflow provides hooks for), there’s are some really impressive automation tools for iOS devices. If anything’s going to make people—including me—eat their words about just how much iOS is capable of, it’s the kind of power user features that, to date, have mainly been limited to the Mac
Hey, you know what would make this app really handy? Workflows that you could launch from a Notification Center widget. cough****cough
A week ago, a friend who works at a small game developer came to me, asking for recommendations on what his company should be using to distribute alpha versions of a new title. They didn’t want to go the TestFlight route, since it required Apple’s approval before they could send it to people outside the company.
Naturally, I pointed them towards HockeyApp, the other major app-testing system I’ve used.
Today:
We’re happy to share some exciting news with you: Microsoft has acquired HockeyApp! This is a tremendous opportunity to continue to provide developers with the best app development tools and users with the best app experiences.
Huh.
Well, I suppose it’s not exactly shocking: HockeyApp says Microsoft itself has actually been using the system to distribute test builds of its own apps, and Redmond has been making a point recently of writing software that runs on Windows Phone, Android, and iOS–all of which HockeyApp supports. (Since its acquisition by Apple, TestFlight unsurprisingly supports only iOS.)
Really nice piece by Farhad Manjoo about holiday deals, with a prominent appearance from my friend Jacqui Cheng, editor in chief of The Wirecutter.
During the holidays, Ms. Cheng turns her entire staff of about 20 writers and editors toward investigating advertised discounts on technology and home goods. “I kind of expected that we would be able to say that 85 percent or 90 percent were bad, but it turns out that almost literally every single one is bad,” Ms. Cheng said.
My daughter, who is 13, has become obsessed with holiday sales. It’s really amazing to see how sales psychology works on someone who is not yet inoculated with a modicum of shopping savvy. She keeps wanting to buy things because they’re a great deal, even if she doesn’t actually need them. And, as it turns out, it’s probably not a great deal either.
