NPR’s Elise Hu:
Digital streams of Morning Edition, All Things Considered and hourly newscasts will be available on a new 24-hour streaming NPR station on iTunes Radio.
This is exciting news. There is great content on NPR and other terrestrial stations. Bringing them to mobile devices is a great step.
John Timmer, Ars Technica:
Earlier today, IBM announced that it would be using Watson, the system that famously wiped the floor with human Jeopardy champions, to tackle a somewhat more significant problem: choosing treatments for cancer. In the process, the company hopes to help usher in the promised era of personalized medicine.
The announcement was made at the headquarters of IBM’s partner in this effort, the New York Genome Center; its CEO, Robert Darnell called the program “not purely clinical and not purely research.” Rather than seeking to gather new data about the mutations that drive cancer, the effort will attempt to determine if Watson can parse genome data and use it to recommend treatments.
Shawn Blanc:
Here is a running list of our personal favorite apps on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. These are the apps we, The Sweet Setup staff, use day in and day out for work and play.
Why this list? We enjoy spending an inordinate amount of time to research, test, try, use and then pick the best apps. However, this is a slow process for us. And so, what to do in the meantime as we build out our catalog of app recommendations? Well, here are the apps that we use.
Myke interviewed Jonathan Mann on this week’s Command Space, and the whole interview is just great. The bits about the iPhone 4 and ATP shouldn’t be missed.
There’s a rumor floating around that Apple will be bringing TextEdit and Preview to the iPhone and iPad with iOS 8.
For years on OS X, Preview has been the default applications for opening images and PDFs. Preview has had iCloud support on OS X for a couple of years ago — leading to confusion for some users — and it’s a no-brainer that Preview for iOS would tap into that iCloud container. Saving a PDF or an image in Preview on the Mac would sling it over to iOS over the air, which would be great.
We celebrate The Prompt’s ruby anniversary by discussing how Google approaches wearables (and how Apple may move in a different direction), Checkmark 2, iOS 8 rumors and the recent changes Apple has made to its iPhone and iPad lineups.
Sponsored by lynda.com, Squarespace (use code TALLYHO3 for 10% off) and Freshbooks
Shawn Blanc:
My analog watches are my reminder that utility exists apart from an internet connection and usefulness doesn’t require the latest software.
Adrianne Jeffries at The Verge:
Twitter has shelved a project that would have made it more difficult for the government to intercept users’ private messages without a court order, sources tell The Verge, a sudden reversal for a company that has been ahead of the curve on privacy at a time of creeping surveillance.
Most of Twitter’s content is public, but there are a few channels that users consider private: personal information, protected accounts, and direct messages, which function like a limited email system.
As a demo at least, this doesn’t look bad at all. I think it really drives home how voice-driven devices like these need to be, which is where some of this falls down for me.
If Siri were the only (or at least main) control scheme for my watch, there’d be lots of times I would’t be able to fully use it. I work in an open office, and would never use Siri at my desk. Likewise, I often look at my watch while watching a movie, at church, while with a resting child and in about a billion other situations where silence is critical.
Federico Viticci at MacStories:
The return of the 16 GB iPad 4 marks the company’s official discontinuation of the iPad 2, first introduced in March 2011 and sold until today as the most affordable iPad in Apple’s line-up. The relaunched iPad 4 is the same device that Apple unveiled in October 2012 — it comes with an A6X processor, FaceTime camera, and LTE support, but it replaces the iPad 2′s 30-pin connector with Lightning, making it consistent with the rest of Apple’s iPad family.
After a successful fundraising campaign, App.net launched in 2012 as a member-supported Twitter-like social network.
That makes a ton of sense, as App.net was born during a period of distrust around Twitter. Many of my geeky friends flocked to it, hoping to re-kindle the magic of 2007-era Twitter. While I think that did happen to an extent, the reality is that App.net could probably never really rival Twitter.
App.net’s leadership recognized this early on, and have been working for years to grow App.net into something much broader. As a result, App.net has grown over the years, and now has several core services:
OneNote is pretty great on the PC, and the Mac version isn’t far behind it. I’m glad to see Evernote have some competition on OS X, and I find it very interesting that this on the Mac App Store. My guess is that the Office update rumored to be coming later this year will be in the App Store as well.