This week Federico and Myke discuss music influenced by video games, revisit the Wii U as a viable platform, celebrate 20 years of PlayStation, give their first impressions of the new Pokemon games and bemoan what EA have done to Peggle.
Make sure to listen to the second Crying album I mentioned, and go check out USgamer’s retrospective on the original PlayStation. You can get the episode here.
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Rob Rhyne, in response to Allen Pike’s post about the lack of a great app to record podcasts, has a few ideas about pricing professional software:
Professionals use your software to make money. If you can find a way for them to do their job faster or better, they will pay nearly any price. Did you purchase the maximum spec for your last computer or did you buy the cheapest you could find? Professionals always trade money for productivity. The real trick is building a product that makes them faster and better. Solve that problem and you can name your price.
I completely agree with Rob. Even on iOS, developers should consider creating professional software that’s aimed at a specific audience willing to pay what is a considered a “premium” on the App Store. There are examples of developers that understand this well, such as Teleprompt+, Numerics, Omni’s apps, and TrialPad.
If you can build a customer base that needs your app to get work done faster, there’s a good chance they’d be willing to pay higher prices and reward you with commitment to the product, constant suggestions and bug reports, and no inclination to be curious about competing products, even if they’re cheaper. I believe that’s true on any platform and digital marketplace.
For more on this topic, check out Michael Jurewitz’s blog posts from last year.
Stephen, Myke and Federico discuss accents, social networks, web browsers and the Today widget fiasco. Myke has a headache again.
Back from the Twitter discussion of last week, we talk about Apple’s confusing policies for Today widgets and our different setups for Safari and Chrome on iOS and OS X. You can get the episode here.
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The year is about to end, and as usual Spotify has launched a Year in Music microsite for global and personal trends.
The global stats are cool, but largely unsurprising. What I really like is the breakdown of your personal listening habits by genre, artist, day of the week, season, and more. You can even see the split between desktop and mobile device streaming, and, if you’re a Premium subscriber, the location of your favorite artists on a chart.
I’m a big fan of Spotify’s use of data to improve algorithms, and this is another nice experiment. If you’re into this kind of visualizations, I also recommend the excellent Exist.io service, which supports Spotify (and many other wearable devices/apps).
As for my top songs:
Death Cab for Cutie and Tegan and Sara? Looks about right.
I missed this update to the Apple Watch website when Apple refreshed it last week (via TUAW). The Watch microsite has been updated with more details for timekeeping and fitness features, revealing more details about customizable complications, watch faces, fitness and activity tracking, and more.
Many watches include a few specialized functions — known in watchmaking as complications — that go beyond telling the time. But Apple Watch comes with a full range that can be added to most faces. Some complications are traditional, such as moon phases or sunrises and sunsets. And some are unique to Apple Watch, like stock quotes, weather reports, your next calendar event, and a daily activity tracker. When you tap a complication, Apple Watch opens the corresponding app.
Use the built-in speaker and microphone for quick chats, or seamlessly transfer calls to your iPhone for longer conversations. To mute an incoming call, just cover Apple Watch with your hand.
Apple Watch shows your daily activity at a glance. To see your progress and trends over longer periods of time, there’s Fitness, an Apple Watch companion app on your iPhone. You can view your activity history, workouts, and achievements by the day, week, or month. And the Fitness app can share your activity and workout data with the Health app on your iPhone, where it can be accessed by your favorite third-party health and fitness apps.
You can read our original overview of the Apple Watch here.
Fantastic story from the SwiftKey blog:
SwiftKey built a personal “language model” for Professor Hawking based on his extensive works – including documents not published in the public domain. The software learns from him to ensure it predicts contextually relevant words. It is also able to analyze the content of the specific book or lecture that he might be working on, further tailoring its predictions and autocorrections.
SwiftKey estimates that their technology has “roughly doubled” Professor Hawking’s speech rate – all because SwiftKey can understand how he uses language. I found SwiftKey’s predictions and personalizations based on social accounts to be impressive in their iOS 8 custom keyboard, but this is a whole new level (and SwiftKey says they’ve been collaborating closely with Intel for this, too).
Allen Pike writes about an idea he had for a professional app dedicated to recording podcasts and interviews remotely to replace Skype:
Okay, so, crazy idea: why doesn’t our team at Steamclock build a Mac app that solves all of these problems? A replacement for Skype, Call Recorder, and all that crap, specifically designed for recording high fidelity interviews? Something that takes the pain out the process, but results in a higher quality end product? A polished, professional tool for people that take podcasts seriously?
Last winter I started investigating exactly this. I spoke with various podcasters whose work I enjoy, and they were incredibly enthusiastic. One said, and I quote, “Take all my money. No, really, this sounds amazing, like an app of my dreams, and I love it.” Okay, that’s a good sign. Every podcaster I talked to about the idea, even ones who weren’t doing double-enders, had various awesome feature ideas. I was giddy with excitement.
It’s sad that there may not be a huge market for a small independent studio to build this kind of product. I’ve been podcasting with Myke and Stephen for over a year now, and working around Skype’s limitations and connection problems is always a pain. Skype wasn’t meant to handle podcasts with multiple guests, but it somehow became the de facto standard because, at least on OS X, it’s still easier to host a Skype call with integrated audio and chat than use FaceTime Audio and Messages for the same task.
And let’s not even mention recording podcasts on iOS without having to use separate hardware or multiple devices. Perhaps someday there will be an app specifically built for podcasters. Like Allen writes, I would pay so much money for that.
The official Dropbox app for iOS was updated today with much needed renaming capabilities for files and folders. Dropbox has added a new Rename button that you can reveal by swiping over folders or hitting the “More” button in the file preview screen. On the iPhone, this extra panel (pictured above) also shows information about the selected file such as size, filename, and last modified date.
I’ve long used Boxie to rename Dropbox files directly on iOS, so this is good news given the app’s demise. You can find version 3.6 of Dropbox on the App Store and read their blog post here.
So, with almost 2500 downloads you are no. 128, and just 2k more gets you to no. 4. Wow. When you look at this, it’s not really that much top-heavy as I thought. It seems that with decent media exposure you can get pretty consistent number of downloads and chart ranking.
Aleksandar Vacić’s new app, Run 5k, was featured by Apple, and he posted detailed numbers about the effect of Apple’s feature. It’s easy to guess that an Apple promotion on the front page of the App Store may help with downloads, but Aleksandar has actual numbers, and it’s interesting to look at his graphs to observe the effect over time.
