512 Pixels

Today marks the reboot of Myke’s long-running interview show. Instead of the hour-long 1-1 format the show has had for years, this episode marks the start of a serialized approach.

“Behind the App” takes a look at the App Store and how it has changed nearly everything in the consumer electronic space. Myke recorded hours and hours of interviews with developers, telling the story of the iPhone, the history of iOS app development and how to make a living writing code.

Myke’s been working on this for months, but the idea of a show like this was one of the driving factors that led us to form Relay FM. It’s a big break from normal tech shows, and I know you’re going to enjoy it.

I know I couldn’t be prouder of it.

The Verge’s John Lagomarsino has written a manifesto about podcast listening speeds, of all things:

Radio — like film, music, TV, theater, and dance — is a temporal art. It relies on the passage of time to play with anticipation, tension, and release. A good radio producer knows how long a thought will linger in a listener’s consciousness, and either grants her that time, or purposely denies it. A conversation between two hosts is riddled with pregnant pauses and interruptions designed to head off miscommunications. We’re used to these patterns, and a good podcast is paced to play into them. Why, then, should we mess with that balance in the name of efficiency?

There are a few ways podcast apps go about speeding programs up. The most common is simply to run the audio at faster-than-normal speeds, often 1.5x. Thankfully, this process doesn’t tend to affect the pitch of the material. At best, it forces our brains to work in overdrive; worst, it destroys the art of timing.

He goes on to show that speeding up a podcast like Serial or This American Life makes it worse, as things like music and dramatic pauses get compressed, lessening their effect.

I read the article this morning, but wasn’t going to weigh in. Even as someone who co-owns a podcast network, I really didn’t care about the article because I wrote it off pretty easily.

Marco Arment explains what I was thinking:

Enjoying the full experience of all media and preserving “what the artist intends” is a romantic ideal, but it’s both overrated and unrealistic in reality. Not everything is that good, not everyone cares that much, and not all media produced is perfect and immutable.

The biggest reason people cite for not listening to more podcasts is that they don’t have the time. My goal with Smart Speed was to directly address that: to make more time for people. And it has: since Smart Speed time-saved totals are synced to Overcast’s servers, I can happily report that Smart Speed has cumulatively saved 55 years of listening time so far. I bet that the vast majority of that time saved was subsequently filled with… more podcasts.

As a host and producer of podcasts, I view things like Smart Speed as a net positive on the industry. I’ve saved 33 hours in Overcast personally, as a matter of fact.

Yes, Smart Speed and features like it change our shows; listening above 1x can cause little issues with things like music ¹ and pauses, but in reality, it doesn’t greatly impact what we create each week.

The truth is, for shows like ours, it doesn’t matter anyways. The ebbs and flows of conversation are still present when sped up a touch. What the listener hears and what we produce doesn’t have to be 1:1 to be good.

I’d rather people listen a little faster and consume more of our content than hear every single beat, as it comes out of Logic.

Federico Viticci:

Version 3.7 of Dropbox, available now on the App Store, adds an action extension that lets you copy any file that can be shared with iOS’ native share menu directly to your Dropbox account. The extension is fairly basic: you can save to your root Dropbox folder and navigate sub-folders; when uploading, a modal dialog will show a progress bar, which will be automatically dismissed when the upload is done.

Boom.

The Onion’s take on Project Titan is pretty great.

On Saturday, one of the most iconic images of all time turned 25 years old.

On February 14, 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft took a photo of the solar system, capturing Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Earth — which showed up as the “pale blue dot” in the brown band on the right side of the photo.

The photo — taken 3,720 million miles away from Earth — puts us in our place in a way that is beautiful and haunting. All of our knowledge, all of our passion, all of our shit, all of our everything is just a few pixels across.

It reminds me that, really, we are quite small, and I think it’s okay to be reminded of that every once in a while.

Let’s face it, brainstorming and sketching sucks!

You rather go straight to coding or building.

But, hold on gun slinger…

All great products start with a sketch. Even the fastest cars and sleekest phones started out as a sketch.

If your idea is the seed, the sketching is the water that will bring it to life.

With Loose Leaf you can now easily sketch your ideas and flush out the key concepts so you can start building your products.

Loose Leaf offers iPad users a fresh, simple, scratch paper app for brainstorming, sketching, cutting, and sharing.

Bring your creativity to life and let your ideas finally be understood by your mom and grandma.

Quickly and easily import images and photos; then cut, crop, and annotate to get your ideas across.

Loose Leaf was made for that exact moment when pen and paper say it best. Perfect for one-on-one meetings, storyboarding, brainstorming, and more.

Get it for iPad on the App Store.

Yesterday afternoon, the Apple-centric corner of the Internet freaked out over a report from The Wall Street Journal that said Cupertino has “several hundred” people working on an electric car project named “Project Titan:”

Mr. Cook approved the car project almost a year ago and assigned veteran product design Vice President Steve Zadesky to lead the group, the people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Zadesky is a former Ford engineer who helped lead the Apple teams that created the iPod and iPhone.

Mr. Zadesky was given permission to create a 1,000-person team and poach employees from different parts of the company, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Working from a private location a few miles from Apple’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino, the team is researching different types of robotics, metals and materials consistent with automobile manufacturing, the people said.

(Reuters says the project is for self-driving cars, but I tend to believe the WSJ more on Apple stuff.)

My immediate response was one I saw all over Twitter: that if Apple is already doing too much, what happens if this is true?

I think this a valid concern, despite the knee-jerk humor. iOS and OS X are moving at a speed that doesn’t feel sustainable, and a lot of the pro-Apple camp agree. ¹

All that aside, Apple moving deeper into the automotive industry is fascinating.

CarPlay may not be perfect, but I think Apple could move the needle in a real way when it comes to in-car entertainment.

My car is less than a year old, and while it doesn’t wear a luxury brand’s badge, it came with a relatively sophisticated in-dash system, but it just kinda sucks in a bunch of ways. The software and hardware works, but it’s clunky and unattractive … not unlike the MP3 players of 2000 and the smart phones of 2006.

This rumor is about something way bigger than taking over the dashboard, however. While the Jobs-ruled Apple had shockingly low R&D budgets, that’s changing under Tim Cook. It makes sense that a company of Apple’s size spend time and money investigating new projects, and things learned in tinkering with an electric car could benefit lots of other Apple products.

I don’t think an R&D project is enough to light ourselves on fire concerning Apple being stretched too thin.

While Project Titan may not end up sitting in my driveway any time soon, it very well could one day in the future. I think Cook and his team know, that at some point, Apple may need to branch out beyond consumer electronics. That may very well include a car — or parts of a car — at some point. The lines between the technology industry and the automotive industry are blurring.

That idea may not sit comfortably with me at this point, but I’m reminded of what people have said throughout the ages about a computer with a mouse, a music player from a dying computer company and a phone from PC guys.

Clearly electric vehicles are part of our future, and in many ways, Tesla is reminiscent of Apple. There have been reports for a while now of the two companies trading blows in the hiring market.

So, do I think Apple is building a car? I’m not convinced they are by this report, but I do think something strange is afoot at the Circle K. And anytime Cupertino moves into a new market, it’s worth paying attention to what is going on.

“Apple’s making a car.”

http://t.co/zVT2xjeDOc

*Oh look, Finder’s crashed.*

— Stephen Hackett (@ismh) February 13, 2015

I rest my case.

Yikes.

A shocking, tragic loss not only for his family and The New York Times, but for us all.

Last night’s show was a fun one:

This week, the guys talk about Sunrise, ChromeOS, Photos.app and Tim Cook’s remarks at the Goldman Sachs Conference.

It was made possible by these good-looking folks:

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• PDFPenPro 7, from Smile.

One of the privileges of doing so much work on the Internet is getting to know people from all over the world.

In 2012, I went to Macworld for the first time, flying for free thanks to Matt Alexander, who was working for an airline at the time. He set up with some friends and families vouchers after seeing me tweet about the cost of traveling to San Francisco being too much to handle at the time.

In the three years since, I’ve come to know Matt better, thankful he didn’t fly me to San Francisco just to steal my organs.

It’s been a busy 36 months for both of us. Matt launched Need and Myke and I launched Relay FM in the time that has elapsed.

Today, Matt’s newest venture — Foremost — is live. I couldn’t be happier for my buddy today. Launching things is stressful and exhilarating, all at the same time.

I love what Matt and his team are doing. Yes, I’ve bought some things from them over the last year, but what excites me more than the product is all of the work going on behind-the-scenes. The drive Matt has for creating excellent work filters up through the technology, design and products for sale.

Go check it out.