Linked List: June 20, 2015

Saturday, 20 June 2015

Answers 

My thanks to Crashlytics for again sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Answers, their mobile analytics platform. Answers has gone from zero to being the second-most-used mobile analytics tool in under a year, and it’s not hard to see why: it’s gorgeous, reliable, and powerful.

Check them out for the inside story of how and why they built Answers.

Facing the Music 

Still catching up from last week. Here’s Dr. Drang on the Apple Music segment of the WWDC keynote:

The new Apple Music service/app/thing occupied the celebrated “one more thing” position, and it was painful to watch. Apple used five presenters — Jimmy Iovine, Trent Reznor, Drake, Zane Lowe, and Eddy Cue — to try to explain what Apple Music is and why we should care, and they all failed. Of the five, Reznor and Lowe acquitted themselves best, but that’s probably because they were recorded, not live. I can imagine Iovine being very persuasive one-on-one or in a small group, but he certainly wasn’t impressive on the big stage. He never gave the impression that the words he was speaking were his. Drake seemed to think he could just wing it during his section; he’s obviously used to adoring fans applauding every off-the-cuff remark he makes on stage. Which leaves us with poor Eddy Cue, who’s going to bear the brunt of the criticism.

The Talk Show: ‘Schiller Did Not Have to Put Up With This Bullshit’ 

New episode of America’s favorite three-star podcast, with special guest Guy English. We make a valiant but failed effort to cover all of the technical/developer news from last week’s WWDC. Among the topics we did hit: app thinning, Bitcode, WatchKit 2.0, CloudKit (and opening it up to web developers), Swift 2.0, Metal coming to the Mac, accessibility and low-level support for right-to-left languages, iOS 9’s new low-power mode, and more.

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