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The Nexus-Of-Passion Edition Wednesday, February 8, 2017

I Wish Apple Loved Books, by Daniel Steinberg, Dim Sum Thinking

I was an early embracer and adopter of iBooks Author. I could produce beautiful books. The software was initially frustrating but they improved it in significant ways early.

Then they stopped. [...]

I just think it's a shame that there isn't a nexus of passion about books and education at Apple like there is about health and music.

Delayed BeatsX Earphones Will Finally Be Available Feb. 10, by David Carnoy, CNET

Yes, the highly anticipated neckband-style wireless headphone will be in Apple's retail stores in the US, Apple.com and authorized resellers in white and black. Beats also announced the addition of two new colors, gray and blue. No word yet on when the earphones will be available in international markets or when the new colors will hit stores.

Artist Put iTunes Terms & Conditions Into Comic Book Form, Giving You Reason To Finally Read Them, by Ashlee Kieler, Consumerist

Who among us has actually read through the terms and conditions for every device, service, e-tailer, or telecom provider in our lives? Would you be more inclined to pore over that tedious legalese if it were in a more enjoyable form, like say, iTunes Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel?

Cartoonist R. Sikorayak is trying to inject some fun into the process of reading through thousands of words of mouseprint to find out whether or not you’re signing away your first born to Apple. His soon-to-be published graphic novel gives the company’s massive iTunes terms and conditions a much-needed and entertaining makeover.

Stuff

Todoist, by Ben Brooks

Todoist has great natural language processing on the entry form, allowing me to enter the task, set due dates, assign tags or lists all without leaving my keyboard. I truly love this and this feature alone basically sealed the deal for me.

Spark For Mac Review: A Great Mobile Email Client, Also Quite Good On Desktop, by J.R. Bookwalter, Macworld

Spark makes the leap from mobile to desktop and mostly scores a touchdown, but not all iOS features have come along for the ride so far. Both versions are free (and more importantly, free of ads or other intrusions), but Readdle plans to introduce in-app extensions in the future, presumably of the paid variety.

Iconjar — All Your Icons In One Place, by Preshit Deorukhkar, Beautiful Pixels

Iconjar is a library app that holds all your icons and offers you the flexibility and ease of working with them. Think of it as the Photos app for your icons.

Develop

Apple TV Accessory Makers Can Now Use App Launch, Wi-Fi Configuration, VoiceOver And Other iOS Features On tvOS, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

The features, which include App Launch, new accessibility features and more, aren’t documented publicly, but specs were recently made available to accessory makers in Apple’s Made-for-iPhone/iPad/Apple TV licensing program.

Apple's WebKit Team Proposes W3C Community Group To Strive For More Powerful Graphics On The Web, by Husain Sumra, MacRumors

Apple's WebKit team today proposed a new Community Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) focused on discussing the future of 3D graphics on the web. The goal of the group is to lead to development of a new Web API that would better prepare web browsers to take advantage of modern, and future, GPU technologies on a variety of platforms.

Notes

Apple Hires Amazon’s Fire TV Head To Run Apple TV Business, by Mark Gurman, Bloomberg

Apple Inc. has hired Timothy D. Twerdahl, the former head of Amazon.com Inc.’s Fire TV unit, as a vice president in charge of Apple TV product marketing and shifted the executive who previously held the job to a spot negotiating media content deals. [...]

Twerdahl comes to Apple with significant experience in internet-connected TV devices. Prior to his tenure at Amazon, he was an executive at Netflix Inc. and later a vice president in charge of consumer devices at Roku, a streaming video box developer. Twerdahl’s experience could bolster Apple’s efforts in video content and living room devices at a time when the company is looking for new categories of revenue to augment iPhone and iPad sales.

How Jimmy Iovine Plans To Take Apple Music To New Heights, by Andrew Barker, Variety

Iovine lives in Los Angeles but travels once a week to Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, where he’s known simply as “Jimmy” — he has no public job title. Dressed in cool but modest attire, save for a gold bracelet bearing the name of his wife, 38-year-old model-actress Liberty Ross, the 63-year-old mogul holds court on a plethora of topics, from the state of pop studio- craft (“If you’re looking for a quick hit, that means you’re looking for something disposable”) to his youth (“I wasn’t a good student, I couldn’t concentrate, I probably needed both Prozac and Klonopin”) to his views on President Trump (“the guy is f–king crazy”).

But whatever the subject, Iovine almost always manages to find some connective thread back to Apple Music and his vision for turning the company into one that holistically blends the fundamentally entwined yet oft incompatible worlds of Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry.

New EU Rules Will Remove ‘Geoblocking’ So Customers Can Use Online Subscription Services, Like Netflix, Abroad, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

The European Union is laying out plans to enforce new laws that breakdown geographical barriers for online subscription services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple Music. When the new regulations come into effect in early 2018, online services must provide a service to its customers regardless of their current location, as long as they stay within the EU.

Bottom of the Page

Books, magazines and newspapers are all supposed to be 'disrupted' by the iPad, and yet, none of them made any strife on the iOS ecosystem.

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Thanks for reading.