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UK gets iTunes Radio early

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I’m not sure if it’s really early or whether it’s really here as in here to stay but as of this morning, iTunes Radio is available in the UK.

It doesn’t look finished – the US one has a lot of “featured stations” and this UK one has none – so it might just be another blip and it’ll go away again. But I’ve been enjoying the US iTunes Radio a lot, it’s a very good service.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s like Spotify or Pandora or any of those in that it streams music at you with the odd ad. Doesn’t sound exactly headline news so far but the way you can be listening to your own music and then on a whim switch to it, I’ve been quite addicted.

But it has been disconcerting. I could try it when the service was only available in the States because I have a US iTunes Store account but there’s a geo- and chrono- kind of problem with that. I’d click on its Eighties Hits radio station and find I’d never heard or even heard of maybe half of the tracks. Pop Gold seemed more universal, or at least to have more British music.

Funny: my favourite artists – quick list, Dar Williams, Suzanne Vega, Bruce Springsteen, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Cyndi Lauper, Sheryl Crow – are all American or at least not British. So I wouldn’t expect to notice a lack of British music but I really did. I think one gets surrounded by the music of one’s time and one’s place much more than I had realised.

So I’ve enjoyed discovering that and thinking about it. But I’ve also often switched away from the featured stations like that to ones based on those favourite artists of mine. Unlike some services, if you pick a station based on one artist you don’t get a huge amount of that artist. The first track after you’ve created the station is always theirs but thereafter you’ll go quite a long time before hearing them again. Sometimes that’s fine: you get similar artists or ones that people who like your favourite have also liked and I’ve enjoyed hearing a lot of new music. 

But sometimes you do long for more of that particular artist and that’s when I tend to go back to my own iTunes collection.

Mind you, I have a thing. There will be a song that gets in my head and I love it so much that I will play it over and over and over, often literally repeating it. Play the song, let iTunes nip on to the next track – and think no, I fancy that again, tap, tap and we’re back.

I’ll play them so much that eventually I come to hate them. So over the years I’ve built up a playlist in iTunes of music that I used to be besotted with and now can’t bear. Um. Something wrong there.

Especially since I keep coming back to this playlist that I call Discoveries. (I don’t know why I called it that.) Of all the music I’ve got, I keep coming back to this list. 

Do you know those blogs where the writer lists the current track they’re listening to as they write to you? I’ve never done that. I may never again do it. But for your information, I’m listening to iTunes Radio which is playing me Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel in its Classic Rock Radio. I’m not sure you needed to know that but I appear to need to tell you.

Normally I’d now tell you where you can get iTunes Radio in the UK but if you have iTunes and you’re in the UK, you’ve got it already. Even if you didn’t realise. Open iTunes, choose Music from the drop down list of media and across the top you’ll see Radio. It’s in that line of headings Songs, Albums, Artists and so on. 

Apple says these are the best productivity apps of 2013

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They don’t, actually. The word productivity doesn’t come in to it. But the company has published lists of the best apps of 2013 for iPhone and iPad – and amongst all the games, there is some tremendously useful software.

I’m not sure what the metric is for defining best: there’s certainly a heavy weighting due to the number of times they’ve each been downloaded, I imagine sales income must be a factor, but there is also an editor’s pick element. You can see the entire list, which features movies, music and TV too, here but note this takes you to iTunes automatically if you have it installed: http://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZContentLink.woa/wa/link?path=Bestof2013

If you don’t have iTunes installed, it takes you to a very boring page suggesting you install iTunes. 

But while we’re talking, here are the highlights.

Duolingo

The language-teaching software is the App of the Year for iPhones. Interestingly, the App of the Year for iPads is less immediately obviously productive: it’s Disney Animated, a tour of the film studio’s work. None of the runners-up for iPad are work tools but the iPhone’s pick includes Citymapper, a free journey planner for London and New York. It’s good, it’s free and it’s about New York? I’m sold.

There are also further lists of, presumably, didn’t-quite-make-it items and these include some noteworthy entries. For the iPhone, there’s the calendar replacement Fantastical 2 and the iOS IFTTT app for the If This Then That service. On iPad, the list features the superb Reeder 2 – can you tell that’s the only one so far that I’ve used, and used a lot? 

But if you look away from software and into the other categories that iTunes sells, you get some notable inclusions such as Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In and the particularly absorbing Letters of Note by Shaun Usher.

Seriously, though, how many links must a man write down? Have I overdone it this time? 

Apple improves Gmail support in OS X 10.9.1

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Right now my Mac is nudging me. Oi, William, it’s saying, I’ve got something for you. That’s nice but what’s nicer is that I can say nudge me again in an hour or maybe try me tonight or perhaps tomorrow and the nudging will go away.

And it will come back so I don’t have to add to my To Do list that there is a new version of OS X Mavericks, I certainly don’t have to remember that lottery-number-length “10.9.1”. I can just agree to it being downloaded the next time I leave my desk.

The significant digit of the 10.9.1 is that last .1 because this is a small, minor, trivial update so I’m happy to just let it loose while I go off somewhere. But it’s also one of those teeny updates that bring important things – to some people. If you are a heavy Gmail user then you’ve apparently been narked by how OS X Mavericks broke Apple’s support for Gmail. It didn’t break it enough that you could see it had died, no, it just bent it a bit so that you’d be working away unaware that something wasn’t right.

I don’t believe anyone lost any data, this was a matter of convenience but an important matter of convenience. Apparently.

I’m not particularly a fan of Gmail – ask me why some day, it’s trivial but it sticks with me – so I don’t need the update for this. But there are also tweaks akimbo for software that I do use, such as the Safari web browser.

Plus, it’s such a quick download and such an automatic don’t-need-to-think-about-it kind of job that if you’d started it instead of reading this, you’d be updated now. Sorry about that.

Your Mac will be telling you the update is available but if it hasn’t yet, check up the Software Update option in the App Store.

The surprising truth about what motivates us

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It’s money, right? Apparently no. Which is good, since there seems to be a lot less of that around. This is a short lecture accompanied by animated annotations that are absorbing and ultimately rather hopeful about what we do, why we do it and what we can do next.

You will want the video to pull back out to show the entire animated board and it doesn’t. Sorry about that.

Mimic OmniFocus’s great Maildrop with Mail and IFTTT

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If you send me an email with something I have to do, I’ll forward it right into my OmniFocus inbox and deal with it. It’ll be right there in my To Do list because OmniFocus has this terrific maildrop feature. But now you can have that whatever To Do app you use because there is an If This Then That trick to do exactly this with Apple’s Mail and Reminders app.

From Cult of Mac, here’s how:
http://m.cultofmac.com/cultofmac/#!/entry/turn-your-emails-into-reminders-with-if-this-then-that,52aa162ce56d0bb85341cd80/1

T’was the Night I mixed up my iTunes accounts

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You know when something is going to come back and bite you in the backside? Many, many years ago, I got myself a US iTunes account. I’m in the UK but you can or at least could get a US one if you had an address in the States, which I do. (I’ve a correspondence address for a business.) Apple really likes you to have a credit card but won’t take international ones. Only, you can or at least could say you’d do that bit later and in the meantime, enjoy any of the free downloads or to up the account with US iTunes gift cards.

The gift cards have got a lot harder to use recently. You used to be able to buy digital gift cards online internationally but Apple now blocks that. I’ve resorted to buying some when in the States or even getting friends there to buy them, just so I could get the latest series of Leverage earlier than I would in the UK. (The show is cancelled now but for a time it was running here a year behind the States. A year.)

But the freebies work fine. And they are the really big advantage of the US store. American iTunes is replete with freebies and most especially so in television. Far, far and three times far more than the UK store gets. Come the start of the new season in September, come many shows offering their pilot episodes for free. I can’t count how many series I’ve tried because the pilot was free. And I can’t count how many seasons I’ve then gone on to buy. (This is exactly how I got hooked on Leverage, for instance.)

But.

If you do this, if you have both a US and a UK iTunes Store account you will go spare. You will go mad. Which store are you in now? Is that app showing me a price because I’m not in the store I first bought it in? Updates get in a right tizzy too. It’s all small stuff that adds up.

And today it’s added up more.

For some years, Apple has done a 12 Days of Christmas promotion and, very unusually, it has excluded the USA. Not this time. This year, America gets it too: one free gift each day from December 26. There will be music singles, there will be at least one book, you can bet there’ll be a game, probably a movie. No idea what or when, but they arrive once a day in that season and then they vanish. One day each, no exceptions. There are always many disappointments but in any one year you will get a couple of things that are well worth having.

Each year, Apple releases the 12 Days of Christmas app in early to mid-December and it sits there until the first day a gift is due – except invariably Apple releases something early. It’s done that today. Today you can get an early gift of a song called No Better by Lorde.

Or I think you can. I think you can get that if you have a US account. I don’t know because this poor little 12 Days of Christmas app is looking at me and asking what the hell is going on with all these accounts. Right now it won’t let me try this single because, for sure, my account details are fried. For some reason I’m having trouble logging out of the UK store and in to the US one on my iPhone and I’ll try it again later. I’m not fussed about a single by a band I’ve never heard a single from, but I hope to get this sorted by the time the proper 12 Days start. I’ve enjoyed the anticipation of what each day will bring and I hope I still get to.

If you are sensible and normal – you don’t look sensible or normal but I think you can pretend when necessary – then do get the free 12 Days of Christmas app for your country. And today you may be able to try out this Lorde lot. Let me know if I’m missing out. Here’s the 12 Days app link: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/12-days-of-gifts/id777716569?mt=8

Localscope updated

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I remember the very first time I reviewed any app on the App Store. We were on holiday in the Lake District, I couldn’t sleep, it was 3am and I had just found an app called Vicinity. I so clearly remember sitting on the side of the bed, using this app that showed me what was nearby. Directions to a restaurant, details of local attractions. It was so immediately impressive that I wrote a gushing review of its cleverness and was certain I’d use it daily.

I haven’t used Vicinity in years.

But only because many others came along and, I believe, Vicinity fell a little behind. I was right that I’d use something of this sort daily and I pretty much do. For about two years, though, I’ve bounced between one called Localscope and one called Where To?

Recently Where To? has been winning and so much so that it’s become the standard for me: I no longer look to see what a similar vicinity app can do, I look to see if it’s as good as Where To? So I thought this was it, I was sticking with that app and that I was done with swapping about. Only, Where To? isn’t the greatest-looking app and even though it has been updated to use iOS 7 features, it still looks oddly old. I know that looks aren’t everything and actually they shouldn’t matter, but they matter and they are everything. The sole reason I will never try replacing Reeder with Mr Reader is that I cannot bear the icon on the latter. I don’t want to see it every time I look at my iPhone or iPad.

Where To? has an icon with a US-style highway logo saying Exit (so prominently that I have to stop to think that the app is not called Exit) and that’s fine, that looks good. It’s the innards that feel just a bit old.

So when Localscope updated to iOS 7 in the last few days, I decided to try it again. I’ve replaced Where To? on my iPhone front screen with Localscope and am trying to use it exclusively.

It’s very good. It’s very slick. Also rather quick. I like very much that it shows you search results from many places. So I was looking for a particular shop for Angela and Localscope returned results from Google, Yelp, Facebook and many more, all saying the shop was 70 yards away. Actually, it says 70 vd: there’s a display fault on the results. In this case, I think having several search results returned was overkill. But then later I needed a post office and by only looking at the top result, I missed better answers below.

All results are dependent on how good the source data is and in that case, one or other of the sources was significantly poorer than the others.

So you need to keel a few sources but you can have too many. Localscope lets you switch off whatever you don’t like so I’m experimenting with what sources I do and don’t want to schlep through.

Which means I’m still playing. And I miss the old Augmented Reality feature of Localscope. I liked how you could hold your phone up and it would overlay results on the camera screen. This way to the post office. That kind of thing. According to the makers, that feature is still there but I can’t find it.

So maybe it’s not as easy or obvious to use as it was or as Where To? is but what I can see and use in it seems quicker, stronger, better than Where To? so now I’m comparing everything to Localscope.

If you haven’t already got it, Localscope is US $2.99 or UK £1.99. It’s iPhone-only, there isn’t an iPad one. Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/localscope/id409869453?mt=8

Where To? is also iPhone-only and costs the same. Link: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/where-to-discover-your-next/id314785156?mt=8

And it turns out that Vicinity is still available. Also iPhone-only, also the same price, link: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/vicinity/id284496131?mt=8