posts

Realmac Software’s Dan Counsell:

When you get swept along in the shininess of the App Store it’s easy to forget that you no longer know who your customers are. You don’t have any of their details, you can’t even respond to them when they leave a review on the App Store. The fact of the matter is they are really Apples customers, not yours.

When you sell directly outside of the Mac App Store you get the contact details for every single person that buys your products (and rightly so), this is often overlooked but it’s key to running a healthy and sustainable business.

Continue reading ⇢

Since the summer of 2011, I’ve carried a notebook with me.

It started as a way to journal on the go, but that was replaced by Day One pretty quickly. My use of paper notebooks evolved into a low-friction capture system for notes during phone calls, meetings and brainstorming sessions.

For a while, I stored them in a big Ziploc bag, but that didn’t scale for long. It was hard to go back and find notes later, and as work got busy, I was burning through notebooks pretty quickly. Before long, I had a stack of filled notebooks hanging around.

Continue reading ⇢

This week, on Connected:

At the end of 2014, Stephen and Myke reflect on what proved to be a wild year in technology.

Come for jokes about Instagram, stay for a review of the most important new app of the year.

This episode was made possible by:

• lynda.com: An easy and affordable way to help individuals and organizations learn. Free 10-day trial.
• Sketchparty TV: the fun, fast drawing and guessing game for Apple TV.
• Squarespace: Start Here. Go Anywhere. Use code WORLD for 10% off

Continue reading ⇢

The BBC:

Mars rover Opportunity, which has been exploring the Red Planet for more than 10 years, is suffering from memory problems, Nasa has said.

The six-wheeled vehicle - not to be confused with Curiosity, which launched in 2011 - keeps resetting unexpectedly.

The Opportunity team thinks an age-related fault affecting the flash memory used by the robot is to blame.

It believes it has found a way to hack the rover’s software to disregard the faulty part.

Continue reading ⇢

Once a year, I’m reminded how glad I am that I didn’t study broadcast journalism in school.

Continue reading ⇢

Parents, don’t let your kids read this blog post.

Continue reading ⇢

The hardest part of working on The Sweet Setup is keeping older reviews updated. The vast majority of the apps we look at receive updates on a regular basis, and sometimes, that march of progress means we need to revisit the whole thing.

iOS Pinboard apps have seen an incredible year, and as of today, we’ve chosen a new favorite: Pinner.

Continue reading ⇢

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Joe Caiati. Joe works as an IT professional in New York City. He maintains a weblog called dot info and calls Twitter his second home.

---

Depending on the year it was purchased or whether you configured it with top-tier specs, your once-current Mac’s performance may be less than desirable and at this point you could be facing those tough questions.

Luckily, older Macs are more flexible with hardware upgrades and coupled with third-party software, you can unlock features that Apple doesn’t support on older models. Here is how to get the most life out of an aging Mac.

Continue reading ⇢

Instagram is great. We love seeing our friends’ photos and interacting with them. Wouldn’t it be great if you could remove boring photos, tap on URLs, view multiple accounts, and browse natively on the iPad?

That’s where Primary comes in. Primary is a universal Instagram gallery app for iOS that lets you do more. Like hide all those pictures, people, tags, and videos you don’t want to see. You can tap on URLs. You can switch between accounts.

Continue reading ⇢

Jeanne Marie Laskas at GQ:

He was a war-hero fighter pilot. He was an MIT rocket scientist. He was a lot of impressive things, and then Buzz Aldrin went to the moon, which is maybe all you know about one of the most famous men on earth—a guy who’s been frozen, like a footprint in lunar dust, in America’s mind for forty-five years now. But the thing about Buzz is that he still wants way more than the moon.

Continue reading ⇢

This week, on Connected:

This week, Stephen, Myke and Federico tackle a mountain of listener questions and are cast in ‘Connected: The Motion Picture.’

This episode of the show was made possible by:

• Dash: Create beautiful dashboards with a few clicks. Sign up now to get one free private dashboard.
• Zones: A super simple and super awesome way to manage time zones.
• iStat Menus 5, by Bjango: an advanced system monitor for your Mac’s menubar.

Continue reading ⇢

Reuters:

When Apple has released previous security patches, it has done so through its regular software update system, which typically requires user intervention.

The company decided to deliver the NTP bug fixes with its technology for automatically pushing out security updates, which Apple introduced two years ago but had never previously used, because it wanted to protect customers as quickly as possible due to the severity of the vulnerabilities, [Apple spokesman Bill] Evans said.

Continue reading ⇢