It’s weird to quote myself, but here goes:
I’ve listened to Apple podcasts for a long time, and with over 250 episodes published, Mac Power Users has been a constant listen of mine for years.
Mac Power Users isn’t just a podcast; it’s an institution. The guest list is impressive, with greats like Rod Roddenberry, Merlin Mann, Aisha Tyler and David Allen making appearances.
That’s why today’s announcement is so exciting: MPU is joining Relay FM.
Blink: Better Affiliate Links is a universal iOS app for anyone who wants to earn commissions from the iTunes affiliate program. Creating affiliate links on iOS is time-consuming and fiddly. Blink simplifies the process by saving your tokens and other preferences so they are always at your finger tips, literally.
Blink converts existing appsto.re, itun.es, tw.appstore.com, tw.itunes.com, apple.co, appstore.com and itunes.com links into affiliate links. And if you don’t already have a link, Blink can search across Mac and iOS apps, film, TV, music, audiobooks and iBooks all at once, making it easy to grab the link you want.
Blink is available from other apps via an extension, so you can create links without interrupting the flow of your work. Blink also has URL scheme support and can generate links in three Markdown styles.
Blink: Better Affiliate Links, which is available on the iTunes App Store, is the most recent iOS app from Squibner LLC, an independent iOS development company based in Hinsdale, Illinois.
Apple has updated its guidelines for marketing App Store apps. There are some real gems concerning Apple Watch:
Apple Watch is awkward to talk about, much less write about. Apple’s removal of articles before their product names isn’t anything new, but the whole collection business is a new world of hurt.
Scarlett Kilcooley-O’Halloran, writing for Vogue:
“We don’t think about what we do in those terms,” said Ive. “Our focus has been doing our very best to create a product that’s useful. When we started on the iPhone it was because we all couldn’t bear our phones. The watch was different. We all loved our watches, but saw that the wrist was a fabulous place for technology, so there were different motivations. I don’t know how we can compare the old watches we know, with the functionality and the capability of the Apple Watch.”
The story of the Watch’s conception — in contrast to the iPhones’s — has been shared before, to the stress of many Apple watchers 1 and fans. Could something created this way be any good? Has Apple lost its touch?
I think the answer is a little further down this article:
“I think that we’re on a path that Apple was determined to be on since the Seventies, which was to try and make technology relevant and personal. If people struggle to use the technology then we have failed,” said Ive. “The consequences of that path? I don’t know. Sadly so much of our manufactured environment testifies to carelessness - something that was built to a price point or a schedule. The products that we have developed describe who made them. I hope that people will like the watch and find it a beautiful item.”
That language about technology being well-designed, relevant and personal is the language Steve Jobs taught Apple to speak.
See what I did there? I’m actually very sorry. ↩︎
New from Google: a pay-for-what-you-use, invite-only, Nexus 6-only cellular plan that stiches together service from Sprint, T-Mobile and a Wi-Fi networks.
I can’t think of anything more Google-like.
This week, on the world’s most jetlagged podcast:
Federico, Stephen and Myke discuss Apple Watch shipments, search on Android, Chrome on iOS and music on the go.
These awesome companies made it possible:
Myke and I are working with the Glide team on an iPhone and Apple Watch app for Relay FM. Go check out the trailer.
This week on Upgrade:
Stephen Hackett joins Jason to talk about John Siracusa’s semi-retirement, online shopping, the future of the OS X brand name, Photos for Mac, and Myke’s trip to Atlanta.
Mac Backup Guru makes bootable clones & incremental snapshots easy.
Ever wanted to copy and paste anything - even a bootable copy of your startup disk - in the Finder? Now you can.
What about storing 30 copies of your 1TB Startup disk on your 1.5TB Backup disk? This is the first 3rd party backup utility that utilizes hardlinks to allow you to preserve rolling versioned backups of data without using considerably more space on your backup drive. All deleted files and modified versions of files are easily accessible in the backups using the Finder. A more powerful version of Time Machine with finer grained control. Store 30 bootable snapshots of your entire hard drive on your backup disk without large space requirements. Accessible in the Finder.
After setting a schedule backing up your drive becomes a matter of attaching an external disk.
Mac Backup Guru is the most easy to use mac backup software you’ll encounter. Guaranteed.
I was thrilled to be the guest on episode three of TechTonic:
The digital world is largely a byproduct of Apple computers. Along with Stephen Hackett, Joe and Joshua discuss the ways that life changed for everyone over the last 30 years with the Mac. They also review our affair with photos, and the ways at present that we manage our ever-growing photo library concerns.
“Smorgasbord” being a navigation item on this site sums up everything wrong with Apple in 1994.
The Glide team:
Building an app yourself is hard work. Normally you need a lot of technical skills that most people don’t have. Glide makes it easy to create beautiful apps that look professional right from the start.
You simply put text, images and movies into folders, and Glide will build the app for you. When you change the content, the app updates automatically.
We have created a number of award winning apps using Glide, but we believe that everyone should be able to afford their own app. This Kickstarter is our way of making this happen.
This looks super awesome. Choose a template, build it out with files on Dropbox and boom, hello app. Seems like magic.