Linked List: June 30, 2015

Tuesday, 30 June 2015

Brent Simmons:

This is the age of writing iOS apps for love. […]

You the indie developer could become the next Flexibits. Could. But almost certainly not. Okay — not.

What’s more likely is that you’ll find yourself working on a Mobile Experience for a Big National Brand(tm) and doing the apps you want to write in your spare time.

If there’s a way out of despair, it’s in changing our expectations.

There is so much that could and should and will be said about this. But the bottom line is that indie development for iOS and the App Store just hasn’t worked out the way we thought it would. We thought — and hoped — it would be like the indie Mac app market, only bigger. But it’s not like that at all.

Whatever Happened With Apple’s PrimeSense Acquisition? ★

Interesting piece by Matt Sayward on where Apple might be heading as the world’s leading camera company:

In November 2013, Apple acquired an Israeli 3D-sensor company named PrimeSense for somewhere in between a reported 350,000,000 and 360,000,000 dollars. As Apple acquisitions go, that’s a biggie. Only Beats (the foundation of Apple Music at $3bn), NeXT (the deal that brought Steve Jobs back for $400m), and AuthenTec ($390m that manifested itself in Touch ID) were certifiably bigger buys.

And yet, two years on, we still can’t really say what happened with PrimeSense’s technology with any sense of fortitude.

On this point:

Last November, on another episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber dropped a unusually heavy hint about what he’d heard about the upcoming set of iPhones that will debut in Q3 of this year:

The specific thing I heard is that next year’s camera might be the biggest camera jump ever. I don’t even know what sense this makes, but I’ve heard that it’s some kind of weird two-lens system where the back camera uses two lenses and it somehow takes it up into DSLR quality imagery.

Well, I had a think about this. And I might have something feasible.

For what it’s worth, I think I might have been wrong about the timing on this. If Apple sticks with the tick-tock schedule and unveils iPhone 6S and 6S Plus updates in September, the new dual-lens camera is probably a 2016 iPhone thing, not a 2015 iPhone thing. I should have realized this all along.

Anyway, rumors aside, Sayward has some interesting speculation on why Apple might go this route.

‘Improves Networking Reliability’ ★

OS X 10.10.4 shipped today, and as expected based on the developer betas, Discoveryd is gone, replaced by an updated version of good old mDNSresponder. At WWDC, word on the street was that Apple closed over 300 radars with this move. Not dupes — 300 discrete radars.

‘It’s All About Curation, Curation, Curation’ ★

Christina Warren’s first look at Apple Music:

The real heart of Apple Music is the For You tab. This is basically your music homescreen. When you open the section for the first time, you’re asked to go through a discovery exercise. This was lifted directly from Beats Music and it’s one of the best discovery tools I’ve used over the years. […]

It’s hard for me to over-stress how much I like For You. From the very beginning, the recommendations in playlists and albums that the app showed me were dead-on accurate, reflecting my various musical interests.

Straight out, I was given a recommendation of a Taylor Swift love ballad playlist and albums from The Kinks, Sufjan Stevens, Elliot Smith, The Shins, Miguel and Drake. So basically my musical brain.

Apple Music on Tumblr ★

They’re on Twitter and Instagram, too.

Also: gorgeous use of the San Francisco font family on this page.

Jim Dalrymple Talks to Eddy Cue and Jimmy Iovine About Apple Music ★

Jim Dalrymple:

“As part of this ecosystem, what if there was a station that didn’t have any of those rules and didn’t serve any of those masters,” said Iovine. “What if it just took anything that was exciting, whether it be on Connect or a new record out of Brooklyn or Liverpool.”

“Or whether it was rock or hip hop,” added Cue.

So one of those genres could literally follow the other on Beats 1 Radio.

“It works,” said Iovine. “And it works because the DJ is in the middle explaining how it works. DJs give you context.”

So what does Beats 1 Radio compete with? Nothing, according to Iovine.

“It doesn’t compete with anything that’s out there because there’s never been anything like this,” said Iovine.