The app is called MacPlayer and works thanks to the magic of Spotify Connect. The speaker itself streams and plays the music, and the Mac simply tells the speaker which song to play (as well as volume, current playlist, shuffle mode and other settings). Communication is over Wifi.
The app performs well on a stock SE/30, although it does rely on a bit of help from the on-board OpenWRT Wifi router to handle the HTTPS communication with the Spotify API. The router has stunnel installed on it, which acts as a HTTP to HTTPS tunnel. I updated the MacWifi Extension to allow the Mac to create SSL tunnels on the router as needed. Here’s a video of how the app performs (no music unfortunately due to Copyright):
I don’t understand half of what he is talking about but it looks amazing.
This is a little bit of a wander, so please bear with me. All of this is in appreciation.
First things first, I grew up in New Jersey, and as is the law, I am a lifelong fan of The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. I know that I am far from alone in this.
Bruce is winding down his career, just wrote his bestselling memoir, the excellent Born to Run. Bruce also created an intimate one-man-show, Springsteen on Broadway, which sold out every single performance of its entire, just-concluded, run.
Sadly, I was unable to make it to see the show. A missed opportunity that, a bucket list item for me. But Netflix worked with Bruce to create a movie of the show. It is truly wonderful, a soulful gift to his fans who couldn’t make the show.
If you are a fan, this is not to be missed. If you wonder what all the hype is about, this should answer the question. The real magic of Springsteen is seeing him live. And not just for the music, but for the storytelling, the preacher side of Bruce, the showmanship of it all.
OK, moving on. So the headline above talks about grabbing people out of the audience to perform. Meaning, an established artist has someone in the audience (likely pre-vetted, but unrehearsed) come up and perform with the star.
This happens far more than you might think. So much so, that Casey Newton pulled together this thread showing examples of this in action:
Recently I decided my favorite YouTube genre is “teenagers getting pulled on stage to perform with their idols and melting everyone’s faces off,” and so here are some videos in that vein that you may enjoy
One of the videos from this thread fits this Loop post just perfectly. Bruce and a kid from the audience singing “Growing Up” (embedded below). Don’t miss the part in the middle where the kid plays along and Bruce talks about the lesson he learned about getting his first guitar. And that selfie at the end. What a moment.
We tested four of the hottest handsets running Google’s operating systems and Apple’s iPhone to see how easy it’d be to break into them. We did it with a 3D-printed head. All of the Androids opened with the fake. Apple’s phone, however, was impenetrable.
And:
An iPhone X and four Android devices: an LG G7 ThinQ, a Samsung S9, a Samsung Note 8 and a OnePlus 6. I then held up my fake head to the devices to see if the device would unlock. For all four Android phones, the spoof face was able to open the phone, though with differing degrees of ease. The iPhone X was the only one to never be fooled.
And:
When first turning on a brand new G7, LG actually warns the user against turning facial recognition on at all. “Face recognition is a secondary unlock method that results in your phone being less secure,” it says, noting that a similar face can unlock your phone. No surprise then that, on initial testing, the 3D-printed head opened it straightaway.
And:
There’s a similar warning on the Samsung S9 on sign up. “Your phone could be unlocked by someone or something that looks like you,” it notes.
What I get from these tests: Android facial recognition is for convenience. Apple’s Face ID is for both convenience and security.
This whole “50 Years in Tech” series is an insightful and interesting look back, but this story is my favorite so far. Does not hurt that Jean-Louis Gassée was both in the room when it happened (yes, a Hamilton hat tip) and is a terrific writer.
Solid list from the folks at Time Magazine, albeit short. There more pages to this that I missed?
One thing that struck me: All 10 apps on this list run on iOS. Three of them also run on Android. This simply iOS bias? Or something more, perhaps a comment on the craft/tools/devs in each community?
I’ll be the first to admit that, even though I’ve seen these things a million times, I really had no idea what they were and certainly didn’t know they were grown.
After Apple announced a large new campus in Austin, Tex. — creating as many as 15,000 jobs, none of them expected to be manufacturing — it’s worth looking at the company’s flirtation with advanced manufacturing in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. > Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, had an abiding fascination with the tradition of Henry Ford and the original mass manufacturing of automobiles in Detroit, as well as the high-quality domestic manufacturing capabilities of Japanese companies like Sony. But his efforts to replicate either in California were examples of his rare failures.
With Apple’s present success, many don’t realize what awful shape the company was in with past CEOs and decisions. Makes their comeback and success today even more remarkable.
“You know, Barkley has a big personality,” my dad, Lin Wang, told me last year, when I recorded him talking about Barkley.
As I talked about the relationship with more and more people, I began to think that either my dad was one of the luckiest basketball fans ever — or this whole thing was an elaborate joke, a “Dinner For Schmucks”-type situation.
Americans are becoming less reliant on physical currency. Roughly three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) say they make no purchases using cash during a typical week, up slightly from 24% in 2015. And the share who say that all or almost all of their weekly purchases are made using cash has modestly decreased, from 24% in 2015 to 18% today, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
As more Americans are going cash-free, a growing share of the public is comfortable being without physical currency. Today, 53% of Americans say they try to make sure they always have cash on hand just in case they need it. That represents a 7-percentage-point decline from the 60% who reported this in 2015.
Even when I have money, I rarely, if ever, use cash to purchase things.
After what’s being described as a highly competitive bidding situation, Apple and its forthcoming originals operation has landed the rights to new Peanuts content.
The tech giant, which has not-so-quietly been amassing a strong roster of talent and original productions that is said to start rolling out in 2019, has completed a deal with DHX Media to create series, specials and shorts featuring iconic Charles M. Schulz characters such as Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the entire Peanuts gang. DHX, the Canadian-based kids programming giant that acquired a stake in the Peanuts franchise in 2017, will produce all of the projects.
Better to see Apple get this property than Disney.
The value of a Costco membership just got significantly better. Today the popular wholesaler started selling units from the MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac lines on its website with starting discounts ranging from $50 to $200. Impressively, you’ll sometimes get AppleCare+ included with the price.
The more and varied places you can buy Macs and get discounts, the better.
Dave and I talk about Apple’s recent decision to discontinue Apple Music Connect, as well as talking about if we could give up our iPhones for a year.
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For years, the incredible discovery of the Titanic’s wreckage at the bottom of the ocean in 1985 was thought to have been a purely scientific effort.
But that was a ruse.
Speaking to CNN on Thursday about now-declassified events, Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, said that the expedition was part of a secret US military mission to recover two sunken nuclear submarines on the bottom of the ocean.
“They did not want the world to know that, so I had to have a cover story,” Ballard said.
The true story of what happened now serves as a museum exhibit at The National Geographic Museum in Washington, which is open through the end of the year.
This story had been rumoured for years. Best part of the story is Ballard saying, “I cannot talk about my other Navy missions, no,” he said. “They have yet to be declassified.”
From his basement in upstate New York, Herbert MacDonell launched modern bloodstain-pattern analysis, persuading judge after judge of its reliability. Then he trained hundreds of others.
But what if they’re getting it wrong?
In 2009, a watershed report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences cast doubt on the whole discipline, finding that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ opinions were generally “more subjective than scientific.”
It’s kind of terrifying to think this “science” made just be a load of bollocks. Even worse, how many innocent people were convicted? How many guilty people went free?
It’s that time. We’re looking back at the best ads of 2018, a year when marketing truly ran the full spectrum, from silly and sarcastic to weighty and wonderful.
With all the industry hand-wringing of late about whether creative agencies are a dying breed, one might have expected a drought of ambitious advertising in 2018. Instead, we saw that when bold marketers put their faith in provocative agencies, they can create work that doesn’t just reflect culture but also drives it forward.
Congratulations to Apple for getting three spots on this top 25 list.
Apple Music Connect appears to slowly be going the way of iTunes Ping. Apple has started notifying Apple Music artists that it is removing the ability for artists to post content to Apple Music Connect, and previously posted Apple Music Connect content is being removed from the For You section and Artist Pages in Apple Music. Connect content will still be viewable through search results on Apple Music, but Apple is removing artist-submitted Connect posts from search in May
Building a social network of any kind is hard. Even if you get the design right, which is hard enough, there’s the difficulty of getting people to embrace that design, to build a critical mass of users.
Some might say that social is not in Apple’s DNA. But there is an exception. Messages. As much as I use Twitter, et al, I use Messages even more.
Want to build an instant chat room to discuss an idea for an app? Or an upcoming group trip? Or prep for a big presentation or test? Just start a message thread with everyone involved. Add people as needed, even mute the thread so you won’t be interrupted by replies to the group (you’ll still see the badge showing how many new replies since you last checked in).
Messages is not perfect, but it does the job well enough, and has achieved critical mass. I’ve always wondered what the Messages team could do if they were given the mandate to weave Apple Music intimately throughout the Messages client. Make it easy, and fun, to share music with others, make it easy to listen along with your friends, without the cumbersome overhead of copying and pasting links.
Ask the guy who built this. I think he’s got plenty of great ideas.
The Mac is a stable, mature operating system. It carries the baggage of having been in the market for 35 years, but also the freedom of precise and reliable input mechanisms. When Apple created the iPhone OS, they decided to break free from the Mac’s interface conventions and start from scratch. A menubar and windows would be absurd in a tiny 3.5″ screen, and the tiny mouse targets are very hard to hit with fingers. Makes perfect sense: they’re completely different devices.
Absolutely.
Fast forward to almost-2019: the iPad is now “Pro”, the screen goes up to 13″, it has an optional keyboard and pointing device, and bests over half the MacBook line in benchmarks. Yet it still runs the iPhone’s OS.
The Mac interface has kept to its roots, but has also been completely torn down and rebuilt from scratch. The core of the interface is windows, the menu bar, and the mouse. Windows still behave much the same as they did from the beginning (the controls have evolved, but the similarities from now to the original windows are recognizable). The mouse still works pretty much the same way. And the menu bar still carries command-key shortcuts and many of the same commands.
The underlying OS wiring, the “plumbing”, is completely different, but the user experience evolved slowly and remains recognizable.
Radu writes about his experience using Luna Display, which lets you use your iPad Pro as a front-end for your Mac, touch-screen and all. It is a compelling read.
It’s not perfect (even though it looks really good). Luna Display doesn’t have a software keyboard, so without the Keyboard Folio or some other keyboard, it’s useless, and even though you can scroll with two fingers on the screen, other trackpad gestures (like 3-finger swipes for Mission Control) just don’t work.
And:
Besides, things look just tiny—not because they’re being scaled (they’re not), but because everything on the Mac is just smaller. The Mac’s mouse pointer is precise down to 1 screen point, and because the cursor is responsive to changes in tracking speed, it’s easy to control it with precision, so there’s no need for the huge tap targets we find on iOS.
And that last is a key difference between a mouse driven and a touch driven device. My fingers are big and fat, hiding any pixels I want to tap. iOS takes this into account, building finger diameters into the equation when calculating touch targets. While Mac mouse targeting can be extremely precise, iOS knows your fingers just can’t be that precise. As Radu says, everything on the Mac is just smaller.
What does the future hold? Will we find some middle ground, where macOS and iOS meet each other, each compromising some aspect of their UI?
Or, perhaps, will iOS take a page from the macOS playbook, keeping the overall foundations, but doing a complete redo on the internals, building something designed for the incredible power of the A13X Bionic chip and all that built in neural net support, yet with flexibility for macOS complexities, such as a menu bar and a sophisticated windowing system.
Apple Inc , facing a court ban in China on some of its iPhone models over alleged infringement of Qualcomm Inc patents, said on Friday it will push software updates to users in a bid to resolve potential issues.
And:
Earlier this week, Qualcomm said a Chinese court had ordered a ban on sales of some older Apple iPhone models for violating two of its patents, though intellectual property lawyers said the ban would still likely take time to enforce.
A ban would have cost Apple many millions of dollars, as well as damage to its brand in China. This story is still unfolding.
Now this is really beautiful if more than a bit heart-stopping. In the incredible video below shot from above by a drone off the coast of New Zealand, you can see a trio of curious orcas (aka killer whales) closely follow a lone swimmer near to shore.
The group of orcas (also known as a pod), seems to have fun trailing and nearly grazing the swimmer as she freestyle swims along the beach.
Yes, this video is beautiful but, if you knew anything about orcas (or even watched the video), you’d realize it’s not “terrifying” at all. There has never been a recorded instance of an orca (they aren’t called “killer whales” anymore) in the wild killing a human being. I’ve been scuba diving with them and it is an amazing experience.
I love this story. In a nutshell, Mark Bramhill, host of the wonderful podcast “Welcome to Macintosh,” imagined a “person meditating” emoji, then set about figuring out how to get that emoji through the approval process.
Samsung today introduced its latest smartphone, the Galaxy A8s. It is Samsung’s first smartphone with an Infinity-O display, which has a nearly edge-to-edge, uninterrupted design beyond a small hole for the front-facing camera.
And:
It is also Samsung’s first smartphone without a headphone jack, much to the amusement of iPhone users.
Cupertino, California and Austin, Texas — Apple today announced a major expansion of its operations in Austin, including an investment of $1 billion to build a new campus in North Austin. The company also announced plans to establish new sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City and expand in cities across the United States including Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado over the next three years, with the potential for additional expansion elsewhere in the US over time.
Check out this map, showing Apple’s projected US employment by 2022:
And this map, showing Apple’s current US employment numbers/distribution:
The mind reels at this success story. Especially when you think back to that comment (please tweet at me if you can find a link for this) Michael Dell made about buying Apple for couch cushion money.
Got some great advice a long time ago. In a nutshell, avoid shoulda, coulda, woulda. As in, I shoulda bought Apple stock when it was $12 a share, pre-split.
But it is fun to imagine what a $10,000 investment back at the IPO would be worth now (by my math, about $4.3 bmillion). So if you don’t to miss on such surprising investment opportunities, you can always get updated on sites like blaze token io.
Gotta love this Steve Jobs quote, courtesy of MacDailyNews:
> I saw a lot of other people at Apple, especially after we went public, how it changed them, especially the ones who figured out the best crypto to buy now UK had. A lot of people thought they had to start being rich. A few people went out and they bought Rolls-Royces, they bought homes, and their wives got plastic surgery. I saw these people who were really nice, simple people turn into these bizarre people. I made a promise to myself: I said, ‘I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.
> You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past 10 years.
> I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important. I never did it for the money.
UPDATE: First things first, wow was my math off!!! Check the comments for the details, but $4.3 million, not $43 billion. But still. Check Apple stock worth today at https://www.checkman.com/quote/aapl.
Also, with thanks to @moeskido, here’s a link to an article about Michael Dell walking back that “shut down the company, return the money” comment.
The percentage of US adults who use a smartwatch will cross the 10 percent milestone for the first time in 2019, predicts research firm eMarketer. About 28.7 million Americans 18 and older, or 11.1 percent of the adult US population, will use a smartwatch next year, eMarketer said.
And:
eMarketer cited new features in the Apple Watch Series 4, which incorporates new sensors that can detect falls, one of the major causes of death for the elderly. If there’s an accident, the watch can place an emergency call.
A new electrocardiogram feature on the Apple Watch allows wearers to have a heart-rate monitor on their wrist. It can be used to detect a serious heart condition called atrial fibrillation (AFib), a fast heart beat that can increase the risk of heart attack or stroke.
Seems to me, as much success as Apple already has, a bigger adoption wave is coming. Apple Watch is opening the door to more people entering the Apple ecosystem.
Many holiday stories cynically trade on the fact that, for a great many people, the holidays are filled with pain and loss. But “Fairytale of New York” doesn’t play this for laughs, nor does it pull the old trick of cheap last-minute redemption.
Sung as a duet by Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl to the boozy tune of an Irish folk ballad, the song “is loved because it feels more emotionally ‘real’ than the homesick sentimentality of ‘White Christmas.'”
New York Times crossword puzzle constructor (also known as a cruciverbalist), David Kwong, shows us how he makes a crossword puzzle.
While I rarely do them nowadays, I have a soft spot in my heart for crossword puzzles. My mom and I used to sit on the couch, solving them together, when I was a kid. This look into how some of them get created is fascinating.
After more than 8 years as a paid-for app, djay for iOS is changing. With the latest release, we are now offering a single universal app as a free download which offers everything you need to DJ, along with an affordable new monthly Pro subscription service with power user features, video mixing, music production tools, and most importantly, unlimited access to a large library of audio loops, samples, FX, and visuals.
Changing your business model is always tricky, no matter what your app does. The company posted an extensive explanation on its web site that should answer most questions from customers, including the differences between the free and subscription-based app. I’ve always loved djay and the people behind the app, so I’ll be interested to see how this transition goes for them.
Heartwarming moments are meant to be shared. Bring home behind-the-scenes, exclusive footage from Bao and 10 other critically-acclaimed shorts when you get the Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 3 on Digital, @Movies_Anywhere, and Blu-ray today: https://t.co/aNv3akp3OZpic.twitter.com/hpnroh4xtm
In “Bao,” an aging Chinese mom suffering from empty nest syndrome gets another chance at motherhood when one of her dumplings springs to life as a lively, giggly dumpling boy. Mom excitedly welcomes this new bundle of joy into her life, but Dumpling starts growing up fast, and Mom must come to the bittersweet revelation that nothing stays cute and small forever. This short film from Pixar Animation Studios and director Domee Shi explores the ups and downs of the parent-child relationship through the colorful, rich, and tasty lens of the Chinese immigrant community in Canada.
I’m obviously biased but I love that this is set in Canada. Sadly, it’s in Toronto.
