Apple cares about accessibility. They’ve shown this over the years and they’re doing it again. […]

I always find these types of deep looks into design very fascinating.

Stephen Hackett wrote a piece looking back at iTunes Ping. Apple just never really gets social and music integration.

Cabel Sasser, the co-founder of Panic, made the coolest sign I’ve seen in a long time. Really.

Locate and remove duplicate files, even if they’re in remote corners of your system. Gemini 2 scans your whole disk speed-of-light fast, no matter how massive it is. Dig through scan results and hand-pick the files to erase, or better — let Smart Select do all the work.

Very nice looking interface and something I know I could use.

The Black Album Drums is a drum library for BFD3 and Kontakt 5.5 (full version) inspired by the drum sound featured on the “Black Album” by Metallica from 1991.

This is pretty special—these guys found the kit played on that record, not just the same model, but that exact kit.

Castamatic is the best way to listen to podcasts on any iOS device. Quickly assemble a custom sequence of shows to listen to, create a smart playlist, and listen to your favorite shows with top-notch audio quality, thanks to Castamatic’s custom DSP algorithms.

Another interesting podcast app.

Cheers bearded people!

Visa “has demanded that we allow fraud-prone signature verification for debit transactions in our U.S. stores because Visa stands to make more money processing,” Wal-Mart said.

The retailer pays about five cents more for a signature transaction than a PIN payment, said a person familiar with the rates.

I had no idea they paid more per transaction for a signature.

Spotify, which was created in Stockholm 10 years ago, now boasts of having close to 100 million users in more than 59 markets, despite increasing competition and, so far, a lack of profits.

Spotify claims it has 30 million paid users compared to Apple’s 13 million. Both Apple and Spotify say they are growing, so the users are coming from other services, or they are new to streaming.

Not much to really say about this one.

We all know by know that Apple doesn’t do social well at all, and that includes Apple Music. Its failed attempts with Ping and Connect underscore the company’s lack of understanding in attempting to engage customers in the social realm. However, I’ve been testing a free new app called SoundShare that really gets the integration of social and music.

I never thought Axl could pull this off, but this is pretty damn good.

Late last month, Apple brought seven leading podcast professionals to the company’s campus in Cupertino, Calif., to air their case to a room full of employees, according to two people who were there. The people would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements. The company made no promises, the people said, but several pressing issues for podcasters were discussed in frank terms.

Apple has problems, there’s no question about that. I hope these types of meetings will help, but we’ll see—I have my doubts.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been named as one of several tech industry executives that will speak at Startup Fest Europe, a festival geared towards helping startups grow faster, according to the event website.

That would be an interesting talk!

In the iOS 10 Apple Music redesign, the Connect feature will follow Ping’s lead and will be demoted. Apple Music Connect currently exists as its own tab across the Apple Music interface, but multiple sources say that the feature will lose its tab and become integrated into the “For You” recommendations page.

I do hope this is true. Connect is the most useless thing since Ping. However, I hope that “integrated” into For You doesn’t mean that it will be mixed in with my recommendations—that would completely ruin the For You tab for me. Just kill Connect and be done with it.

Immersion, a company which developers haptic feedback technology, has filed its second complaint of the year against Apple. The company claims that 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s and the Force Touch trackpad found on the 12-inch MacBook and recent MacBook Pro models violate a number of Immersion patents.

I wonder how Apple will argue this case.

I don’t even know what to say about Cupertino Mayor, Barry Chang. He complains in an article The Guardian that he showed up unannounced at Apple’s headquarters and was denied a meeting—I assume with Tim Cook–he was asked to leave. […]

This looks pretty cool. All done from the menubar.

I’ve known David for 15 years or so now—he’s one of my favorite bass players ever.

SAP, whose business software runs inside 87 percent of the world’s 2,000 biggest companies, said it would work with Apple to develop mobile business apps for iPhones and iPads that run on its HANA database software.

Another good move for Apple and its customers in the corporate world.

The study, now in its fifth year, measures customer satisfaction with tablets across five factors (in order of importance): performance (28%); ease of operation (22%); features (22%); styling and design (17%); and cost (11%). Satisfaction is calculated on a 1,000-point scale.

I love my iPad. I don’t care what Wall Street says, my 9.7-inch iPad Pro is a brilliant device and I recommend it to everyone.

John brings up some great points about Apple Music’s product design and marketing. Definitely worth a read.

Jim talks to Dave Wiskus and Joe Cieplinski of the indie rock band Airplane Mode about their stage setup, the perils of performing live, and their appearance at the upcoming WWDC 2016 Beard Bash.

Subscribe to this podcast

Brought to you by our amazing sponsors

• Casper — An obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price. 
• Backblaze — Cloud storage that’s astonishingly easy and low-cost.

Relevant links:

• Airplane Mode — Official site
• Clickarus — Stage-friendly metronome app from Airplane Mode
• Some notes on how the band sets up their metronome
• Setlists — iPad app for creating set lists and viewing lyrics
• BeatMaker 2 — For Joe’s fancy foot samples

About a month ago, I set out to find every color of iMac G3. At the time, I only owned one model — a Sage. Today, the family is complete.

This is impressive.

At WWDC 2015 we announced the transition to IPv6-only network services in iOS 9. Starting June 1, 2016 all apps submitted to the App Store must support IPv6-only networking. Most apps will not require any changes because IPv6 is already supported by NSURLSession and CFNetwork APIs.

If your app uses IPv4-specific APIs or hard-coded IP addresses, you will need to make some changes.

Apple announced this last year, so most of any work that needs to be done by developers is probably taken care of already. If not, this is a good reminder from Apple.

News came today that Apple is planning a major revamp of Apple Music at its Worldwide Developer Conference in June. This is welcome news for sure. While the service has improved considerably since its introduction, there are still some things that need to addressed—hopefully, this is it.

However, there are some lessons I hope Apple learned from last year’s introduction.

So Apple:

Accessibility enables people with disabilities to perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the web. Imagine a world where developers know everything there is to know about accessibility. You design it and they build it… perfectly. In this world, only the design itself can cause people with disabilities to have trouble using a product.

How the hell can this be possible?

Apple has hired famed robotics expert Yoky Matsuoka, one of the co-founders of Google’s X lab and former head of technology at Nest, to work on the iPhone maker’s health projects.

Her credentials are outstanding.