WWDC kicks off today!

It's WWDC keynote day. Christmas in June! (If you are a nerd like me) Tune in here  at 10 am PDT.

🔗 Bringing Apple HomeKit Support to Ring

As someone who has invested hundreds of dollars in home automation devices over the past two years, this news was exciting to me.

Bringing Apple HomeKit Support to Ring:

Some of you may have recognized a familiar name onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) earlier this week.

We’re excited to officially announce that HomeKit support is coming to Ring later this year, which means Ring neighbors will have an easy, secure and private way to monitor their home via the new Home app in iOS 10. We’re also adding Siri support, which gives you another great way to interact with your home and Ring products.

Unfortunately, it is one year later and the app is still not updated with HomeKit support. I am still looking forward to it though. The demo at WWDC last year depicted the Ring doorbell app sending “rich” notifications to the iPhone. Rather than launching the Ring app to see the video feed of who is at your door, the live video feed was embedded right into the notification. Pretty neat stuff.

🔗 Why Remix ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’? Giles Martin, The Man Behind The Project, Explains

Looking forward to catching up on my podcast queue this weekend with this one…

Why Remix ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’? Giles Martin, The Man Behind The Project, Explains

I have not had enough time to dig into the new Sgt. Peppper’s remaster but when I do, I am sure I will listen to the original multiple times through before digging into the new version.

🔗 Drumset = You

John Colpitts’s “Drumset = You” is a fun read. Having grown up with so many of these drum set method books, I admire his dedication to the small amounts of written text contained within them. Growing up, of course, I rarely read this material, having been in middle school and being very anxious to get to the playing music part.

Drumset = You by John Colpitts:

I’m a mostly untrained drummer. I’ve taken lessons for brief periods, but until recently I’d missed out on that most essential component of drum pedagogy: the method book. In my efforts to improve, I’ve been drawn to the introductions of these books, which feature efficient, often dull language—and in which, occasionally, the eccentricities of the authors shine through in remarkable ways. In the last few months, I’ve become obsessed with gleaning hints about drummers’ personalities from these books, far too many of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been written by men. Lost in the hinterland between art and technique, their introductions tend to exhibit grouchiness, pretension, narcissism, penury, New Age quirkiness, and sometimes even wisdom. What follows is a survey of some of the more striking entries.

🔗 New update to Dorico

New update to Dorico. Read about it at Scoring Notes here. See a preview video about it below.

I have been using Dorico since the fall and I love it more and more every day. I still need to boot up Sibelius every now and then, but I have mostly phased out of it.

🔗 You kids like the wrong music

Ethan Hein back at it again with a great post deciphering the idea that it doesn’t take musical ability to be a popular singer these days…

You kids like the wrong music, part two:

It’s true, we don’t expect unamplified and unedited singing at Caruso’s level anymore. But we expect a lot of other things. For one thing, we expect singers to write their own material, which Caruso didn’t do. For another, we demand a lot of studio technique that Caruso would have found unbearably alien. To say that “edited” recordings are of intrinsically lower musical value than live recordings makes no sense. By that standard, we should require that all movies be plays that are filmed in real time. Film acting isn’t the same craft as stage acting, and unamplified stage singing isn’t the same craft as studio singing. Some people manage to master both crafts, but not many.

So much great stuff here. Read the whole thing.

🔗 Joe Steel's Apple TV wish list for WWDC 2017

I love how passionate Joe Steel is about the Apple TV. Read his WWDC 2017 tvOS wish list here.

The ATV is my go to device at home. Despite its many flaws, I really enjoy mine. Steel echoes many of the features I included on my own WWDC 2017 wish list. 

Control your computer's data usage on the go with TripMode 2

If you tether your PC to the cellular connection of your phone or tablet while traveling, you might want to check out this app.

From David Sparks at Macsparky.com...

TripMode 2:

There’s a new version of TripMode out. I’ve written about TripMode before. It’s a Mac app that will monitor your internet traffic and selectively turn off apps. This can be a lifesaver when tethering. As a quick war story, I once had a very large podcast file come in over Dropbox while I was tethering my Mac and burned through a month’s wireless data in about an hour. With TripMode, when I tether, I turn off Dropbox so that doesn’t happen.

I have been looking for an app like this for a while. The idea of tethering my Mac to my iPad’s data connection while I am away from a reliable wireless network is appealing. I always worry about the data that my computer is hogging throughout the various processes that run in the background (things like Dropbox and photo app syncing). With TripMode, that is no longer a concern. You can download TripMode 2 here.

The not so death of MP3

You may have caught this headline last week:

The MP3 Is Officially Dead According To Its Creators

It is worth a read, but make sure you read Marco Arment’s followup:

“MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story

In summary:

MP3 is supported by everything, everywhere, and is now patent-free. There has never been another audio format as widely supported as MP3, it’s good enough for almost anything, and now, over twenty years since it took the world by storm, it’s finally free.

Readdle Brings Drag and Drop to their iOS apps! What is this black magic!??!

A timely followup to MacStories’ iOS 11 Wish List Video…

One of my favorite productivity app developers, Readdle, has added drag and drop support to all of their iOS apps. This means that you can actually drag an email attachment from Spark Mail on one half of your iPad's screen onto the Documents app on the other half of your screen and drop it in a folder. It works the other way too, allowing you to drag files from Documents into mail messages in Spark as email attachments.

For those of you who don’t know, Documents is a fantastic app and pretty much serves the role that a Finder app would if Apple ever chose to release one on iPad. Readdle’s apps are featured prominently throughout my book. PDF Expert, Documents, and Scanner Pro are especially useful in my daily teaching workflow.

Readdle has a great blog post demoing this feature and explaining how they were able to pull it off. It really is black magic! Read the post here.

Watch the video below.