Tag: apps

Categories
recommendations

Damn it Apple

Apple Music on iOS has turned into a ad-infested shitshow of dodgy UX patterns that verge on deceptive; where the big obvious click signs you up to become a positive number on some Apple ARPU dashboard.

This sucks. Quite a lot. You literally cannot be rid of this incessant upsell bullshit. Fucking Apple, I pay a premium to avoid this shit.

My current solution is OK but has limitations – the paid iOS app ‘Cesium’. Two bucks on the App Store. Reliable, no ads, none of the upsells and I’m a happy customer. It can’t download music, bummer, and I’ve not tried the playlist editing but overall at least it works and doesn’t try to scam me out of more money.

Categories
Watches

Introducing Watchsmith – David Smith, Independent iOS Developer

Watchsmith is an application that seeks to give you complete control over the appearance and utility of your Apple Watch. First, it provides a wide array of complications. Each of these is completely customizable, with controls for things like font, color, hand type and location1. The initial set is just over 50 unique complications, with dozens more planned down the road. My goal is to provide a complication for just about every use and let you make it look just how you want. In the absence of 3rd-party watch faces, this is the closest I can get to making my own watch faces.

Introducing Watchsmith – David Smith, Independent iOS Developer

Insta-download. Yeah, I got a v5 Apple Watch a week or so ago and wow how they gotten better since the launch version I bought when they first came out. Anyway, Watchsmith looks quite clever and promising, and its free to try out.

His privacy policy is fantastic:

Other than these two cases, no personal data ever leaves your devices. Unless you email me for support, I will have no information about you or what you do within the app.

I don’t want the responsibility of managing your data correctly, so I don’t collect it, which I think is better for both of us.

Categories
recommendations

Mammalz – one for Terri

Y’know, I have a tiny readership, and rather than emailing posts to people I’m going to try blogging them instead, with the faint hope of sharing more widely. I’ll use first names only, unless it’s a public thing like this post for Dan.

Anyway, in the local paper there’s news of a local startup – a social network for fans of the outdoors. I don’t know anyone involved, but it seems a nice idea and I wish them luck.

The mobile app and website is meant to be a destination for people sharing and watching nature videos and other wildlife media, including live-streamed content.
The startup’s founders Rob Whitehair and Alex Finden told me in May that they wanted to update a Hollywood genre that’s failed to keep up with Silicon Valley’s warp speed: nature programming.

SD-UT

News story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/technology/story/2019-09-06/wildlife-filmmakers-in-san-diego-launch-mammalz-network-for-nature-lovers

Site: https://www.mammalz.com/

Categories
Flying recommendations

One wonders

Sometime you see an aircraft flying oddly and wonder. Allow me to recommend an ADS-B app, this is the iOS app OpenADSB:

This one was tracking CA-56. I wonder why?

Anyway, an ADS-B app shows all sorts of interesting stuff. Some time ago it showed FLIR surveilling San Diego:

Anyway, go grab yourself an app, there are others too, and hit the ‘show trails’ button to see where an aircraft has been. Sometimes its quite interesting.

Categories
recommendations

A good argument for fast Internet…

The latest batch of Mac and iOS updates came out this week, and at 1 to 4GB per device, they will load your internet:

Screenshot 2018-09-18 19.04.36

xcode alone is a staggering 3.76GB… damn.

Screenshot 2018-09-18 19.04.56

The two meters are iStatMenus and PeakHour, both paid and both worth your money. You’re seeing the difference in time durations, so PeakHour is showing 64.5MB/sec and iStatMenus is measurig 31.53. The PeakHour measurement is queried from the SNMP counters in the the router. Here’s the full PeakHour setup:

Screenshot 2018-09-18 19.12.37

I have it setup to query the NAS, the router and the managed switch. I mean, why the heck not?