Sonos let its fans know weeks ago that the company’s multi-room, wireless speakers would not support Apple Music at launch. But there is some good news: we now know that Apple and Sonos are trying to make it a reality. A Sonos spokesperson has confirmed to The Verge that the two companies are working together to bring Apple Music support “before the end of the year.”
I’ve never used the Sonos system but those I know who have rave about it. Good to see they and Apple are going to work together. Also interesting to see Apple confirm this “rumor”.
Even if you have zero interest in sports, take a moment to appreciate the incredible athleticism in this goalkeeping effort from Friday’s match between Colombia and Argentina.
That’s David Ospina in goal for Colombia, stopping shots from Argentina’s Sergio Aguero and then Lionel Messi.
A few things to note here. First, keep your eye on the keeper as he sprawls full out to stop the first shot, then somehow gets to his feet to lunge and stop the second shot.
Next, keep your eye on Aguero. He makes the first shot, then watches in disbelief as Ospina somehow stops Messi’s header.
This is an incredible display of athleticism, perfectly showcased as a Vine.
A side note: When I first saw this, I posted this tweet, but misspelled Colombia as Columbia. Interestingly, the moment I hit send, I got this reply tweet:
@davemark I think you mean “Colombian”
So smart. And effective. I deleted my original tweet, then fixed my typo, retweeted.
Before you read the linked article, make sure you’ve already read Serenity Caldwell’s epic Apple Music FAQ post.
With that under your belt, take a look at Johnny Evans’ linked post for some additional info.
One note:
As well as Zane Lowe, Ebro Darden and Julie Adenuga, Apple will offer celebrity spots from Josh Homme, Pharrell, Drake, Dr Dre, St Vincent, Disclosure, Elton John, and Jaden Smith. (That’s in the first wave; later, I predict a Taylor Swift show).
That’s a great cast. Oh, and Sir Elton’s Beats 1 show is going to be called Elton John’s Rocket Hour. That’ll be destination radio for me.
Dean Murphy does a comparison of iMore.com before and after iOS 9 content blocking was enabled.
With no content blocked, there are 38 3rd party scripts (scripts not hosted on the host domain) running when the homepage is opened, which takes a total of 11 seconds. Some of these scripts are hosted by companies I know, Google, Amazon, Twitter and lots from companies I don’t know. Most of which I assume are used to display adverts or track my activity, as the network activity was still active after a minute of leaving the page dormant. I decided to turn them all off all 3rd party scripts and see what would happen.
After turning off all 3rd party scripts, the homepage took 2 seconds to load, down from 11 seconds. Also, the network activity stopped as soon as the page loaded so it should be less strain on the battery.
To answer the obvious questions, yes. Everyone here and at our network, Mobile Nations, saw it. Everyone here and at our network were also well aware of it, and have been working for months already to improve it. That we haven’t made it further, faster is an indication of how hard it is when you’re talking about websites visited by tens of millions of people, and companies that employ more than a dozen writers. Of course, everyone here is going to continue working to find better, smarter ways of solving the problem, because that’s our jobs. I’m sure other large websites are doing likewise.
This is an interesting and non-trivial issue. If we completely block ads, the advertising revenue that pays folks who write for sites like iMore is impacted, if not eliminated. As nature abhors a vacuum, some other mechanism, immune to this type of ad-blocker, will no doubt rush to fill this void.
Apple has updated the terms of its AppleCare+ Protection Plan for iPhone, iPad, iPod and Apple Watch to cover batteries that retain less than 80% of their original capacity within the extended warranty period, whereas it previously covered batteries that retained less than 50% of their original capacity. The change applies to AppleCare+ purchased for iPhone, iPad, iPod and all Apple Watch models on April 10, 2015 or later.
Ian Rogers was the CEO of Beats Music and is now Senior Director, Apple Music. He also holds a series of patents, including this one. Credentials established. Smart, and in the center of the Apple Music universe.
Writing for his blog, FistFulaYen, Rogers talks about his past opportunities, expressing appreciation along the way, leading up to:
Seeing Apple Music on stage at WWDC this month (fast forward to 1:43:00 in the above video) it was hard not to feel like the last 20+ years was leading to this day.
He follows with this statement:
Tuesday morning we’ll be unveiling the next chapter. Please make a note to upgrade to iOS 8.4 at 8am PT Tuesday, June 30th and listen to the first Beats 1 broadcast at 9am PT.
Interestingly, if you reload the page this morning, you’ll see that the 8am PT time was deleted from the post. No matter, the real point is that it sounds like iOS 8.4 is a required upgrade in order to sign up for Apple Music.
Intuit has confirmed to TechCrunch that it has laid off 399 people, or just under 5 percent of the company’s roughly 8,000 employees, in a re-alignment of the company. Patrick Barry has also stepped back from leading Demandforce, though he remains an employee of Intuit.
I’m looking forward to the launch of Beats 1 for a couple of reasons, but mostly because I have no idea what it’s supposed to be. I was at the keynote, I read the New York Times article, and I read Apple’s Web site. I still have no idea what it is.
There are a few slots on The Deck available in July and August. Need to get your product in front of millions of curious folks? Drop a line for a nice price for a new advertiser. The Deck only works with the highest quality sites, including The Loop, Daring Fireball, and many others.
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Cook’s specialty is the running of the business, and at that he excels. But he also knows when to let his team do its job, and doesn’t try to replicate the way Jobs ran the company.
The more I consider it, the more I’ve begun to think that even were Jobs still around, Cook might still be the better choice for CEO in this day and age. Can you imagine Jobs being as receptive as Cook was to calls for improved diversity at Apple? Or embracing social media? Or posing for selfies? Yeah, me neither.
Any discussion that Cook isn’t a good CEO in general or “good enough for Apple” is utterly ridiculous. Cook is arguably a better CEO for Apple, at least right now, than Jobs would have been.
Taylor Swift has answered one of the last remaining questions about Apple Music before it launches: her popular album 1989 will be available on Apple Music when it launches on Tuesday. The development follows Swift’s high profile letter to Apple over how artists would be paid during the streaming service’s 3-month free trial. Apple later reversed its decision announcing it would pay artists during the trial.
While the pop star says it isn’t an Apple Music exclusive (like Pharrell’s upcoming release), the album is notably not available on Spotify as Swift removed her catalog last year due to the service’s free tier.
Take a look at the sequence of tweets in the linked post. This all feels so very pat. It’d be cynical of me to think this was all cooked up in a back room, planned in advance, right?
Every year we see the same promise: this is the year that Android-first development will become a reality. At the same time we see big companies like Instagram repeatedly introduce new apps that are iOS-only. Android has been able to tout more market share than iOS for quite some time, but that doesn’t seem to have translated into app developers releasing Android apps at the same time as their iOS counterparts, much less Android-first.
Lots of interesting elements in this piece. First, note that this comes from an Android blog, not an Apple blog.
One issue is willingness of users to pay for their apps. From one small developer:
“Everything we’ve read, every number we’ve seen shows that it’s really difficult to get people to pay for apps on Android. We didn’t think we could release a paid app on Android and create something sustainable enough to fund further development.”
And then there’s the issue of fragmentation:
“We were finding Android in general to be a slower platform to move on. There’s more time spent dealing with fragmentation bugs. There’s more time spent dealing with testing and debugging, and we would rather spend that time building new functionality.”
There’s a lot more to this. There are obviously counterexamples, developers who find Android an easier platform for their app. And we all know that the iOS app store is not paved with gold. There are quotes from John Gruber about Branch Q’s Vesper price hike and from Marco Arment about the free app model with in-app purchase to unlock premium features.
The key ingredient here is Google’s Speech Recognition API (though others like its translation services are also at work). The API lets the fridge recognize voice input in up to 40 different languages, with the ultimate goal of recognizing the single phrase “I am Canadian” (Molson’s longtime marketing slogan).
Molson makes some spectacularly awful beer but they do some really interesting promotions around the theme of “I am Canadian”.
Mitchell Lunn and Juno Obedin-Maliver, both clinical fellows at the University of California, San Francisco, have spent the past decade studying the health problems that many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer identified people face.
Their biggest challenge is the lack of population health data about LGBTQ people.
The researchers hope that an iPhone app can change that.
It’s gone from one or two examples to a bona fide trend—which, as any journalist knows, occurs whenever there is least three of something. The trend in this case is the hiring of human editors to filter through the news, music, and other forms of content that are being produced and/or hosted by a variety of platforms. So Apple is hiring editors for its News app, which it announced at its recent developer conference, as well as editor/DJs for the streaming music service the company is rolling out soon.
And:
Facebook is launching a new feature called Instant Articles with partners like the New York Times, but the site’s staff won’t have anything to do with the selection of stories that become part of the program—and the choice of who sees them and when will be left to Facebook’s all-powerful algorithm. Much like Facebook, Google’s services are also powered completely by algorithms.
Interesting choices. Can an AI make better news/music curating choices than a human? No doubt, that day is coming. At the same time, more and more music and news is being created algorithmically. Humans are still the exclusive consumers of both news and music and we decide what is good enough to satisfy our needs.
What I dread is the day that AIs are mostly producing content for other AIs.
Alright boys and girls, get ready to be schooled. A new study conducted by the University of Queensland’s School of Psychology has found that listening to extreme music like heavy metal can help people process anger and even increase their positive emotions, like inspiration.
Jim and Dan speculate on what really happened with the Apple Music policy change, and talk about the changing music industry, Eddie Van Halen, The Terminator, and more.
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Schwarzenegger may be a real life jerk but he is a publicity machine and will do whatever it takes to promote his projects. This is a great stunt. I can’t wait to see the movie. The theme music alone gives me chills.
For the last 12 years, Mr. Lowe has been a top tastemaker on the BBC’s Radio 1 by championing brand-new music, landing interviews with stars like Kanye West and running his show with a frenetic production style inspired by hip-hop itself. Now he is preparing for a much broader role as the guiding voice of Beats 1, a free Internet radio station from Apple that on Tuesday will begin broadcasting to smartphones and laptops around the world — an experiment, of sorts, to reinvent live radio.
I hope we see profiles of the other two featured DJs for Beats 1. This is an aspect of Apple Music I find especially interesting and, I think, will make or break the service.
I’m not feeling a lot of love for OS X El Capitan out there. That might not be surprising, given that it’s firmly in the tradition of Mountain Lion and Snow Leopard–new-feature-light, speed-and-stability-focused OS X updates.
But as someone who reviewed Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, I can tell you that not only did these cat modifier cat releases contain a bunch of bug fixes and other internal tweaks, they also managed to add a bunch of new features, too. Apple can’t help itself.
So let me present to you six reasons to be excited about what’s coming in El Capitan.
This is a solid take on some of what’s coming with OS X El Capitan. My hope is that, as with any stability-focused release, Apple has taken the time to get under the hood and do a bit of tune-up.
PIAS Entertainment Group And Play It Again Sam recordings, reached an agreement with Apple Music for their large roster of independent artists.
Thiese quotes are from TheQuietus.com:
On Monday, Apple Music agreed to pay royalties to rights holders during the three-month free trial period offered to users of their service. This came after days of uncertainty and disagreements that came to a head with Taylor Swift penning an open letter criticising Apple’s initial decision not to pay. Now label group PIAS have issued a statement that concludes “despite what one might read, this was not entirely down to Taylor Swift.”
And:
Adrian Pope, Managing Director of PIAS, says: “ Over the last three weeks or so we and others have worked hard to secured a range of significant benefits, protections and improvements on the originally proposed terms.
And:
“A key point of improvement is that we will now receive a per stream payment from day 1 of any free trial period. Other controls and protections have been added such that we feel this is a genuinely good deal for the labels and artists we represent. It should be noted that [PIAS] made it contingent that in us approving this agreement the same terms would be made available to all 4000+ independent labels, thus providing a fair playing field for all.”
For each song that is streamed free, Apple will pay 0.2 cent for the use of recordings, a rate that music executives said was roughly comparable to the free tiers from services like Spotify. This rate does not include a smaller payment for songwriting rights that goes to music publishers; Apple is still negotiating with many publishers over those terms, several publishing companies confirmed on Wednesday.
First things first, the money Apple will pay out during each free trial period is still under negotiation. It will be more than .2 cents a song. How much more is not yet known.
But at .2 cents a song, if you listen to 5,000 songs, Apple will shell out $10 for usage rights. Spread over 30 days, that’s 167 songs a day.
At an average song length of 3.5 minutes (your mileage may vary, but here’s one take at that math), that’s almost 10 hours a day of wall-to-wall music.
Very few people will hit that threshold. According to a survey by Edison Research, Americans listen to an average of just over 4 hours of music a day. That’s about 70 songs a day.
At that rate, Apple will pay out about 70 x 30 x .2 cents = $4.20 per month for each trial period user. Add in publishing costs, as well as other costs associated with running a business, and there’s enough cash going out to make it clear why Apple hesitated before agreeing (rightly so) to pay artists for that free trial period.
FirstLetter is a game that was specifically designed for Apple Watch. It is playable on the iPhone, but its minimalist design and simple game mechanics make it perfect for the wrist worn device.
As things currently stand, the interface options for an Apple Watch app are quite limited. And that fact puts a real crimp in the design efforts for any sort of Apple Watch game. But FirstLetter is pretty simple and provides a good template for Apple Watch game design.
Another point worth noting is the price. It’s free, with an ad-canceling version, available via in-app purchase, for $1.99.
To be clear, FirstLetter is not necessarily my cup of tea, but it does show off a particular gaming mechanism that works well on the Apple Watch.
