MyAppleMenu - Mon, Jul 13, 2015

Mon, Jul 13, 2015The Unfinished-Version Edition

On Negative App Store Reviews During Betas Of iOS And OS X, by Federico Viticci, MacStories

For third-party developers – the folks who make the apps you use every day – the problem is compounded by the fact that their finished apps can be installed and run on an unfinished version of iOS/OS X and that users can leave regular, public App Store reviews for them. This is the core of an issue that presents itself every year.

I will not miss it if Apple removed the entire review feature in the app stores.

I Deleted My Entire iTunes Library And You Can Too, by TJ Connelly, Medium

I won’t lie: this was a little bit terrifying, or at least as terrifying as any other experience you can have sitting at a desk. I checked my backups like four times and was still nervous I’d wake the next day to discover a missed checkbox has vanished my playlists, or sent my music to the big iCloud in the sky.

My end goal was to move all the music out of iTunes and leave things like Movies and TV Shows behind so I can still make use of my Apple TV. I don’t particularly care about things like Date Added and Watched status for these items, so I was free to handle this fairly simply.

Stuff.

Klok Puts Interactive Time Zone Conversions In A Widget, by Federico Viticci, MacStories

Developed by buUuk, Klok isn't the first iPhone app to make different time zones available from a Notification Center widget. However, unlike similar apps I've used before, Klok allows for basic interactions in the widget, which can be useful when comparing different times at a glance without having to calculate differences between them.

Develop.

News Sites Are Fatter And Slower Than Ever, by Frédéric Filloux, Monday Note

Websites designers live in a bubble, they’re increasingly disconnected from users. Their work requirements include design (fonts, layouts elements), advertising (multiple ad serving and analytics), data collection (even though most sites collects way more data that they are able to process), a/b testings, and other marketing voodoo.

Then, when a third party vendor shows up with the tool-everyone-else-uses, the pitch stresses simplicity: ‘Just insert a couple of lines of code’, or ‘A super-light javascript’. Most often, corporate sales and marketing drones kick in: ‘We need this tool’, or ‘Media-buying agencies demand it’. The pressure can even come from the newsroom struggling to improve its SEO scores, asking for new gadgets “To better pilot editorial production”, or “To rank higher in Google News”.

What Happens When An Apple Guy Explores Material Design?, by Matthieu Aussaguel, Medium

Notes.

Satoru Iwata, Nintendo Chief Executive, Dies At 55, by Liam Stack, New York Times

Over the 1980s, Mr. Iwata worked on a number of the company’s biggest titles. He became company president in 1993, just after he helped put out the first installment of the Kirby franchise, Kirby’s Dream Land.

The game, which features a puffy, pink protagonist who gobbles up enemies and spits them out as projectiles, became a hallmark of casual gameplay for the mobile game device well before the era of smartphone games.

Similarly, simplicity and ease of use were the driving forces behind the motion sensor technology that made the Wii console so popular.

Parting Words

@ollymoss pic.twitter.com/KtmJtazEoH

— Steve Gaynor (@fullbright) July 10, 2015

Thanks for reading.