David Emery OnlineiPhoto for iOS
So, will we see the rest of the iLife suite on iOS? It’s worth mentioning, first of all, that the whole idea of a “suite of apps” may be falling off Apple’s radar very quickly. High-volume, wide-market, affordable and convenient apps make bundles financially unnecessary. Still, we know - and Apple knows - what the idea of iLife is and has been: apps to organize, enhance, and share your digital life.
iPhoto seems like the obvious next step for iOS, but personally I’d love them to go the whole hog and just skip straight to Aperture; considering GarageBand runs better on my iPad 1 then on my 3 year old MacBook Pro I can see it working on an iPad 2.
Visit ➔Web Developers Will Now Be Able To Tap Into the Power of Rdio
If you’re a developer interested in integrating music with a social bent into your web apps, start your engines: Super-social music subscription service Rdio is opening its Rdio.com API and affiliate program to developers.
Seems very nifty – certainly more expansive then Spotify’s API. Although, with Rdio’s lack of a free, ad-supported option a little bit less interesting as well (do you really want your user to have to have a $4.99/m account to be able to use your app?).
Visit ➔Twitter Drops The Ecosystem Hammer: Don’t Try To Compete With Us On Clients
Specifically, Platform lead Ryan Sarver has a fairly lengthy outline of Twitter’s line of thinking with regard to third-party clients and services. And while there’s a little bit of dancing around the topic at first, it quickly gets very clear: third-parties shouldn’t be creating straight-up Twitter clients any further.
There’s no doubt this is a very disappointing move from Twitter, considering you can’t find a company that has its success more routed in external developers and APIs. Presumably this is linked to the fact that Twitter has been promising advertising (in the form of promoted tweets and trends) in 3rd party clients to its advertisers to launch in Q2 2011; to be able to guarantee it they have to have tight control over those clients, and this is the start of that.
This seems like a major misstep; surely they can generate enough revenue from the mainstream users using the official clients (including twitter.com) not to have to resort to this?
Visit ➔Island Def Jam Partners With The Echo Nest To Create Opportunities For Developers
In what the companies are calling the first-ever alliance between a major label and the independent app developer community, Island Def Jam and The Echo Nest are partnering to make the label’s catalog available to developers who employ The Echo Nest’s API. [...] As part of this agreement, the label is rendered the publisher of the app, giving it control over distribution and making it privy to a portion of the revenue (the rest goes to the dev and The Echo Nest). In turn, IDJ will market the app and pay music publishers when need be.
Amazing work here – use Island Def Jam’s API and they effectively own your app. I can’t see any serious developer being interested in this.
The idea of being able to access label data through an API is an interesting one – we’re actually mid way through developing one ourself – but I wonder how interesting it is when it’s on a label by label basis; most of the time you’re going to want a much larger range of content I would have thought.
Visit ➔British Sea Power plans Kinect-augmented webcast
Post-punk naturalists British Sea Power will be commandeering the Roundhouse in London at the end of the month to record a webcast enhanced by augmented reality, provided by a hacked Kinect sensor.
Something we’ve put together at work which should be pretty interesting – you can tune in here on Monday night at 9pm.
Visit ➔experimenting with a second screen
I've had a rare weekend of telly. And instead of just lounging on the sofa (well, as well as just lounging on the sofa) I thought I'd see how the experience is changed by a slightly different sort of second screen. Not the usual twitter on iPad fiddling, but a little pico projector beaming Dextr next to the telly.
This is interesting. Not fully formed yet, but there’s something in this whole ‘second screen’ thing.
Visit ➔Mobile Music
As a general rule I try to avoid linking to work things on here; I’m well aware that simply by exposure I’m inherently biased, so I try and leave it to spread by itself. However, once in a while we do something that I’m really proud of that’s worth drawing attention to. This is one of those things:
The elevator pitch is simple: to listen to a stream of the new Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx record, you need to take your smartphone within range of a number of ‘transmitters’ dotted around the world. If you’re within 250 meters or so you get to hear the album; any further away and you can’t.
The concept comes out of two things that have been floating around in my head for a while: how to tie music into location in some way, and how to represent the value that an album stream has.
Location is obviously a fairly hot topic at the moment, thanks to the rise of smart phones with built in GPS. I’d originally been circling the idea of making people go to a specific location to get a free mp3 but what we ended up with is far more interesting...
Read more ➔Ikea Robotics
Adam Lassy has made a video that neatly sums up exactly the future Russell has been talking about. And it's as amazing and terrifying as he predicts. IMAGINE! A table that "expects feedback"
I love “the future is now” tech like this:
Visit ➔Readability’s new service
Today, they launched an entirely new Readability service: you pay a small fee each month, and they give most of the proceeds to the authors of the pages you choose (by using the Readability bookmarklet on them, or adding them in other ways). It’s a great way for readers to support web publishers, big and small, directly and automatically.
A really interesting concept; I can never see it supporting a proper business model for publishers, but it’s better than nothing.
Visit ➔How much more participation can you handle?
Suddenly digital is *everything* and everyone believes that social media has the power to turn boring crap into gold. Every product and every single brand wants to 'engage' users in a massive participatory experience. Especially if they're utterly dull. Obviously, you've got a Facebook page by now so you can 'be part of the conversation', but by now you've discovered there's very little to say if you're a brand people don't care much about or a product you put on food to make it taste better, or something clean your home with, or scoop up poop.
Facebook pages are the new microsites.
Visit ➔