Yearly Archives: 2015

The guys at Algoriddim do a great job with their software.

UltraTuner is the most precise digital tuner available for iOS, providing precision down to .01 (yes, that’s 1/100th) of a cent. UltraTuner is 10x more precise than mechanical strobe tuners, which are generally considered the “gold standard” of precision tuners, and they typically don’t fit into your shirt pocket.

This looks very cool. The screenshots of it on the Apple Watch are just great.

BIAS FX turns your iPad into a world-class, guitar amp-and-effects processor. It gives you an endless collection of insanely great-sounding guitar pedalboards, ultra-high definition stereo rack effects, dual amps and dual signal chain. You can share and download users and artists signature guitar pedalboards from the cloud.

Yes. Download!

Alex Vollmer is a very talented guitar player and he’s come up with an explanation and video of how to play Eddie Van Halen’s “Little Guitars.” It’s great.

Jim and Dan talk all about the Apple Watch.

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Finally, learning and practicing a new language is easier and more intuitive than ever before. Introducing HelloTalk, the language app where your teachers are native language speakers from around the world. You just pick the language you want to learn—there are over 100 from which to select—and almost instantaneously you’ll be in touch with native speakers of that language … and you’ll start learning and practicing immediately.

HelloTalk isn’t a course you strictly follow; rather, you learn and practice at your pace and in the manner that best meets the way you learn. Practice foreign languages with people around the world. Simultaneously speak and type the language you’re learning. Record your voice before speaking to your HelloTalk friends and compare your recording to standard pronunciations. Change your friends’ audio messages to text for better understanding, and receive help to improve your grammar. Easily translate whenever you don’t understand, and so much more.

With HelloTalk, you’ll discover learning a new language is fun … and fast. Download your copy for iPhone or Android today.

Apple on Monday posted revenue of $58 billion and quarterly net profit of $13.6 billion, for the company’s second fiscal quarter. These results compare to revenue of $45.6 billion and net profit of $10.2 billion in the year-ago quarter. […]

Some people might not care. Like painting the back of the fence or finishing the underside of the cabinet, it’s a detail that only people who take tremendous pride in craft really care about. And, of course, people who look for just exactly that kind of quality.

Quality matters. Lining up ports matter. The details matter.

Unread is a really nice RSS reader for iPhone and iPad. I have it on my devices.

You need more than technical chops to succeed as an independent developer. You need business sense as well. So this October, join some of the most experienced entrepreneurs and leaders in our community as they gather to talk about the business of iOS and Mac development.

This is going to be a great conference. I’ll be speaking, but I’m also looking forward to hearing the other speakers and meeting some new people.

Really interesting video from the Condé Nast International Luxury Conference. I love listening to Ive talk. It’s not just the British accent but you get the sense he has thought a lot and deeply about these things.

Mesosphere:

Apple announced during a Wednesday night meetup at its Cupertino, California, headquarters that the company’s popular Siri application is powered by Apache Mesos.

We at Mesosphere are obviously thrilled about Apple’s public validation of the technology on which our Datacenter Operating System is based. If Apple trusts Mesos to underpin Siri — a complex application that handles Apple-only-knows-how-many voice queries per day from hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users — that says a lot about how mature Mesos is and how ready it is to make a big impact in companies of all stripes.

This might be a little too “inside baseball” for most people but it’s interesting if only for fact Apple “opened the Kimono” to a segment of the developer community. I think it’s yet another sign of Apple being a little less closed off and secretive and acknowledging that others need and want to know their future plans.

These torture tests are interesting but painful to watch. Consumer Reports also has an article “The science behind smartwatch scratch resistance” about how they did the scratch test and what it means.

Bottom line? “The face of the Apple Watch is definitely harder than that of the Apple Watch Sport. But the performance of the hardened glass of the Sport model is pretty impressive as well.” It sounds like, as long as you take the usual amount of care with your expensive electronics, the Apple Watch screens are pretty durable.

Apple: Aid Nepal earthquake relief efforts by making a donation to the Red Cross. As I have recently discovered, every little bit helps. Even if you only have $5 to spare, it adds up.