Ingrid Lunden writing for TechCrunch:

As Spotify continues to inch towards a public listing, Apple is making a move of its own to step up its game in music services. Sources tell us that the company is close to acquiring Shazam, the popular app that lets people identify any song, TV show, film or advert in seconds, by listening to an audio clip or (in the case of, say, an ad) a visual fragment, and then takes you to content relevant to that search.

We have heard that the deal is being signed this week, and will be announced on Monday, although that could always change.

Ever since Shazam was first integrated into Siri, I only ever thought of this as the long term solution. Simply buying them to tidy it all up would be worth it in my opinion. However I assume they will gain a lot more than just that.

Read the full article.

I don’t care how cliché this storyline is, but they’re going back to the island!

And I can’t wait!

Because, as we all know, life will always find a way.

🦕🦖🌋

Watch it on YouTube.

Spoiler Warning!

Description taken from YouTube page:

It’s been four years since theme park and luxury resort Jurassic World was destroyed by dinosaurs out of containment. Isla Nublar now sits abandoned by humans while the surviving dinosaurs fend for themselves in the jungles.

When the island’s dormant volcano begins roaring to life, Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs from this extinction-level event. Owen is driven to find Blue, his lead raptor who’s still missing in the wild, and Claire has grown a respect for these creatures she now makes her mission. Arriving on the unstable island as lava begins raining down, their expedition uncovers a conspiracy that could return our entire planet to a perilous order not seen since prehistoric times.

YouTube have again, of course, released their annual Rewind video.

I’m always impressed with the overall production quality of these videos, and maybe I’m forgetting the previous ones, but this looks really well made.

It gets very cheesy at times, which I guess that’s it’s meant to be. But the music is mixed well, and it contains a huge number of Youtubers. It would of been funny for PewDiePie to be involved as well though.

Youtube Rewind Website
YouTube Rewind: The Shape of 2017 Video

Chris Sheldrick had an idea to make addresses better for the entire planet, and inside just one TED talk he explained how it works, the current progress, and how it can make everyones lives better.

With what3words, Chris Sheldrick and his team have divided the entire planet into three-meter squares and assigned each a unique, three-word identifier, like famous.splice.writers or blocks.evenly.breed, giving a precise address to the billions of people worldwide who don’t have one. In this quick talk about a big idea, Sheldrick explains the economic and political implications of giving everyone an accurate address — from building infrastructure to sending aid to disaster zones to delivering hot pizza.

Watch on TED.com, or below if the embedded video works.

Downloading files from the web on iOS has always been a prickly issue, but Michael Rockwell, writer at Initial Charge, has come up with a rather simple solution:

One aspect of the iOS-first lifestyle that has been a bit of an issue, for many users, is dealing with files. Apple has done a lot to try and fix that with the Files app in iOS 11, but it isn’t fool-proof. One common pain-point for me has been trying to download MP3 files that exist behind a paywall. Luckily, a few must-have iOS apps are available to smooth out the rough edges.

I subscribe to Wrestling Observer to gain access to their premium podcast content — because I’m a nerd who likes pro wrestling. I prefer to listen to these shows in Overcast so I can use the app’s Smart Speed feature and play it back at about 1.2x, but Overcast doesn’t have support for password protected RSS feeds. I’m holding out hope that this will be added in the future, but until then, I’ve been using iCab Mobile to download the audio files, which I can then upload to Overcast’s servers with my Premium subscription. And of course, Workflow is there to facility the process.

Michael seems to always have nifty solutions to things on iOS, so it’s worth reading the full article, and maybe even subscribing to the blog in your RSS reader of choice.

Here’s something interesting – The guys over at iA (devleopers of the iA Writer app), have made their own font. Prevously the apps used a font called Nitti, which kind of became part of the iA brand, but they took it upon themselves to develop a more writing focussed option.

Hell just froze over. After seven years of offering no font options to write, iA Writer now comes with a choice. Next to the monospace Nitti you will now find a brand new duospace font. Duospace?

[…]

For an app that was designed as the digital equivalent of a typewriter, a monospace font is not a far fetch. But, if font choice were just a matter of style, there are better and less expensive ways to impress than leasing a high end monospaced typeface that many take for a silly Courier.

There was clearly a lot of investigastion that went into it, and I’m a fan of the results!

Read the full article on the iA Blog, and download iA Writer for iOS and macOS.