MyAppleMenu - Fri, May 8, 2015

Fri, May 8, 2015The You-And-Taylor Edition

Really Real Time

I've Been Texting With An Astronaut, by Laura Hudson, Boing Boing

Although you can play the game on an iPad or iPhone—either through the app or right inside the lock screen—Lifeline was designed specifically to take advantage of the Apple Watch, where its short text bursts fit beautifully on the small digital face.

The Apple Store reviews are spangled with glowing praise, mostly about the sense of connection and relationship that Lifeline forges between you and Taylor. The game takes about three days to play if you check in regularly, and what makes it really compelling is how it combines the familiar back and forth of text messaging with the tense passage of time to make your relationship with Taylor—and the impact of your choices—feel surprisingly real.

Stuff.

Hallmark's New eCard Mobile App Hopes To Target 'Soulless' Interactions, by Matt Hamblen, Computerworld

"If you post 'Happy Birthday' on somebody's Facebook wall, at the end of the day you're really just a number, a little red number at the top of somebody's Facebook page. What we're trying to provide artistically and technologically is a way to communicate more deeply."

Thred Is A New iPhone Storytelling App From The Creator Of The Sims, by John Callaham, iMore

Much like Wright's earlier games like The Sims and SimCity, which gave users free will to create their own cities and virtual people, Thred is designed to give users the freedom to make their own stories on the iPhone, using photos that come from other Internet sources as well as their camera roll.

Hands On: Castaway 1.0 (iOS), by William Gallagher, MacNN

Hands On: Airmail 2.1 (OS X), by William Gallagher, MacNN

There should be a big market for Airmail: its looks - remember, you'll be spending a lot of time in your email client so looks are handy - coupled to its speed and features mean that this is a very, very good application.

Ask The iTunes Guy: Prep Your Songs For Other Devices, by Kirk McElhearn, Macworld

With summer just around the corner, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about taking music from iTunes and playing it in other devices. I address two of those in this week’s column, one about burning CDs with tracks in random order, and another about putting a shuffled playlist on an SD card. I also look at how to listen to audiobooks on an iPod shuffle, and a problem where an artist’s name may show up twice in iTunes or on an iOS device.

How To Wirelessly Share Files Between A Mac And PC, by Peter Cohen, iMore

Expedia Makes Finding Local Activities And Booking Car Rentals Much Easier In Latest Update, by Dan Thorp-Lancaster, iMore

Develop.

4 Years Of Success And Failure On The App Store, by Derek Clark, Medium

In hindsight, I definitely should have focused on a much smaller handful of apps, perhaps 2–3 at most. The problem at the time was, I didn’t feel like any of the things I’d done were successful enough to justify putting all my focus into. I’m pretty sure now that at least 2 of the apps were worth putting more effort into. Alas.

Product Revenue Snapshot, by Dan Counsell

You ideally want to have multiple sales channels and revenue streams. Why would you put the fate of your success in the hands of search and chart ranking algorithms that you have little understanding of and zero control over?

When 'Top Paid' Doesn't Mean Anything, by Jason Snell, Six Colors

LifeMap Solutions Reports Success In Post To Apple's ResearchKit Blog, by AppleInsider

Nice Ivy League Degree. Now If You Want A Job, Go To Code School, by John Lauerman, Bloomberg

The #1 reason most indie developers are not more successful (myself included) is that our apps are simply not good enough. Software is hard.

— Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) May 8, 2015

Notes.

Spotify To Hold May 20th Event Ahead Of Apple's Beats Music Relaunch, by Chris Welch, The Verge

Apple Inc Faces Big Irish Tax Bill, by Jonathan Ratner, Financial Post

Streams.

Today, I learnt that the cliche "if you're not the customer, then you are the product yada yada yada" orginated from a MetaFilter thread back in 2010 according to Jason Kottke. And if you are not subscribed to Jason Kottke's blog, you should.

Legacy

Big And Weird: The Architectural Genius Of Bjarke Ingels And Thomas Heatherwick, by Brad Stone, Bloomberg

The most ambitious project unveiled by Google this year isn’t a smartphone, website, or autonomous, suborbital balloon from the Google X lab. You can’t hold it, or download it, or share it instantly with friends. In fact, the first part of it probably won’t exist for at least three years. But you can read all about it in hundreds of pages of soaring descriptions and conceptual drawings, which the company submitted in February to the local planning office of Mountain View, Calif.

The vision outlined in these documents, an application for a major expansion of the Googleplex, its campus, is mind-boggling. The proposed design, developed by the European architectural firms of Bjarke Ingels Group and Heatherwick Studio, does away with doors. It abandons thousands of years of conventional thinking about walls. And stairs. And roofs. Google and its imaginative co-founder and chief executive, Larry Page, essentially want to take 60 acres of land adjacent to the headquarters near the San Francisco Bay, in an area called North Bayshore, and turn it into a titanic human terrarium.

Parting Words

Plot twist: Rihanna is every Mario character pic.twitter.com/DFb9uKJD3w

— Common Gay Boy (@CGBPosts) May 7, 2015

Thanks for reading.