Link Post

šŸ”— iOS 11 Tidbits from Mac Rumors

iOS 11 Tidbits: Customizable Control Center, One-Handed Keyboard, Type to Siri and More - Mac Rumors:

iOS 11 introduces a huge number of major changes to the operating system, ranging from a redesigned Control Center experience to a host of new features specific to the iPad, but along with all of these major changes, outlined in our iOS 11 announcement post, there are also dozens of smaller changes that have been added to the beta. 

Below, we've outlined some of the smaller but still significant tweaks that went unmentioned during Apple's whirlwind keynote announcement. 

I love articles like this. In the coming weeks, people who are running the iOS 11 beta will likely be discovering all of the nice little features that there wasnā€™t time in the keynote to address. Every once in a while, I find that there is one little minor change that is going to solve a daily frustration for me. A few from this that really resonate with me areā€¦

  • Type to Siri (an accessibility setting allowing you to type Siri inquires rather than saying them)

  • Customizable Control Center

  • Offload Unused Apps (auto delete apps that havenā€™t been opened in a while)

  • Drag and Drop for iPhone (does not work across apps though)

  • AirPod settings (now, double tapping the right side can perform a different ask than tapping the left side)

  • Screen recording (will be awesome for making how-to videos and recording Snapchat videos

šŸ”— Bringing Apple HomeKit Support to Ring

As someone who has invested hundreds of dollars in home automation devices over the past two years, this news was exciting to me.

Bringing Apple HomeKit Support to Ring:

Some of you may have recognized a familiar name onstage at Appleā€™s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) earlier this week.

Weā€™re excited to officially announce that HomeKit support is coming to Ring later this year, which means Ring neighbors will have an easy, secure and private way to monitor their home via the new Home app in iOS 10. Weā€™re also adding Siri support, which gives you another great way to interact with your home and Ring products.

Unfortunately, it is one year later and the app is still not updated with HomeKit support. I am still looking forward to it though. The demo at WWDC last year depicted the Ring doorbell app sending ā€œrichā€ notifications to the iPhone. Rather than launching the Ring app to see the video feed of who is at your door, the live video feed was embedded right into the notification. Pretty neat stuff.

 

 

šŸ”— Why Remix ā€˜Sgt. Pepperā€™sā€™? Giles Martin, The Man Behind The Project, Explains 

Looking forward to catching up on my podcast queue this weekend with this oneā€¦

Why Remix ā€˜Sgt. Pepperā€™sā€™? Giles Martin, The Man Behind The Project, Explains

I have not had enough time to dig into the new Sgt. Peppperā€™s remaster but when I do, I am sure I will listen to the original multiple times through before digging into the new version.

 

šŸ”— Drumset = You

John Colpittsā€™s ā€œDrumset = Youā€ is a fun read. Having grown up with so many of these drum set method books, I admire his dedication to the small amounts of written text contained within them. Growing up, of course, I rarely read this material, having been in middle school and being very anxious to get to the playing music part.

Drumset = You by John Colpitts:

Iā€™m a mostly untrained drummer. Iā€™ve taken lessons for brief periods, but until recently Iā€™d missed out on that most essential component of drum pedagogy: the method book. In my efforts to improve, Iā€™ve been drawn to the introductions of these books, which feature efficient, often dull languageā€”and in which, occasionally, the eccentricities of the authors shine through in remarkable ways. In the last few months, Iā€™ve become obsessed with gleaning hints about drummersā€™ personalities from these books, far too many of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been written by men. Lost in the hinterland between art and technique, their introductions tend to exhibit grouchiness, pretension, narcissism, penury, New Age quirkiness, and sometimes even wisdom. What follows is a survey of some of the more striking entries.

šŸ”— You kids like the wrong music

Ethan Hein back at it again with a great post deciphering the idea that it doesnā€™t take musical ability to be a popular singer these daysā€¦

You kids like the wrong music, part two:

Itā€™s true, we donā€™t expect unamplified and unedited singing at Carusoā€™s level anymore. But we expect a lot of other things. For one thing, we expect singers to write their own material, which Caruso didnā€™t do. For another, we demand a lot of studio technique that Caruso would have found unbearably alien. To say that ā€œeditedā€ recordings are of intrinsically lower musical value than live recordings makes no sense. By that standard, we should require that all movies be plays that are filmed in real time. Film acting isnā€™t the same craft as stage acting, and unamplified stage singing isnā€™t the same craft as studio singing. Some people manage to master both crafts, but not many.

So much great stuff here. Read the whole thing.

šŸ”— Limitations streaming iTunes music in the cloud with third party apps

Couldn't agree more with this post from MacStories. The original story they are covering is this post from the app developer Steamclock about limitations that third party apps have when accessing iTunes tracks stored in the cloud.

From Steamclock's blog post:

According to our latest stats, 17% of Party Monster users have been unable to play a song in their iTunes library, and 22% of WeddingDJ users have tried to cue a playlist that has so many unplayable tracks that we need to display a warning. While itā€™s a miracle that weā€™ve been able to maintain a 4 star rating through all of this, itā€™s not going to last if we stay the course.

Given all of this, we have a couple options. We could double down and go pro, catering to serious DJs who can load DRM-free music into our sandbox. Pro DJs who use our apps often have a large licensed library of songs, and wonā€™t rely on iTunes Match or Apple Music.

Alternatively, we could steer towards the mass market, drop crossfading support, and regain full iTunes compatibility. We could also put in the work to add support for Spotify or other competing streaming services, and focus our apps less on playback features and more on having a great UI for queueing.

I am glad this problem is getting some publicity. I have been frustrated with the fact that iTunes tracks can't stream from third party apps for years.

šŸ”— The Tragedy of iTunes and Classical Music

Robinson Meyer's The Tragedy of iTunes and Classical Music is the best thing I have read all week. It is a perfect overview of the problems haunting serious music geeks when it comes to archiving large and complex music collections in iTunes.

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kempā€™s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough, and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as theyā€™re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didnā€™t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hopā€™s tradition of guest MCs or jazzā€™s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

And they really, really fall apart when they need to classify classical music.

Read the whole thing, it's great! File this under "things I wish I had written myself."