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ExtraBITS for 3 August 2015

You can now watch Adam and Tonya’s Çingleton 2014 talk about what it’s like to be a small publisher, the Nielsen Norman Group outlines four iOS interface patterns that don’t work well, we learn how iTunes fails fans of classical music, T-Mobile kicks off some intriguing incentives for iPhone users, and Nike has been ordered to pay big bucks to FuelBand owners.

Watch Adam and Tonya’s Çingleton 2014 Talk — Late last year, at the Çingleton 2014 conference, Adam and Tonya gave a talk entitled “Through the Lens of a Boutique Publisher.” It’s a 35-minute tour through the past, present, and future of TidBITS and Take Control, with lots of personal anecdotes and photos mixed in as they talk about what it’s like to be a publisher. Çingleton may be no more, but you can at least see what the last one was like (other talks are linked at the top of the Vimeo page). Highly recommended.

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Four iOS Interface Patterns That Work Badly — User experience company Nielsen Norman Group has posted an article pointing out problems with four official iOS interface patterns: page control dots, form submission links at the top, the plus icon, and the move icon. The authors aren’t speaking theoretically — these design patterns fail in actual usability testing — and they both give specific examples of each criticism and offer alternative approaches. In other words, if you’ve had trouble with an app that uses these interface controls, it’s not just you.

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How iTunes Fails Classical Music Fans — Over at The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer explains how iTunes, and even the MP3 format, fails fans of classical music. It began with a lack of a composer tag in the MP3 format, which was added to iTunes only in 2004. Furthermore, Meyer says Apple Music offers slim pickings for classical fans, as well as a number of library-wrecking bugs.

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T-Mobile Announces Incentives for iPhone Users — T-Mobile has announced two incentives for iPhone users. The first is that Apple Music will be included in its Music Freedom service, which means that streaming songs from Apple Music will not count against T-Mobile users’ bandwidth caps. The second is that anyone who has an iPhone 6 through the $15-per-month JUMP! On Demand program can trade up to the next iPhone for free until the end of 2015.

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Nike Ordered to Compensate FuelBand Owners — As part of a class-action settlement, Nike is distributing a total of $2.4 million to owners of its FuelBand fitness tracker, due to inaccurate tracking of calorie burn, steps, and overall activity. Affected customers can opt to receive $15 in cash or a $25 gift card. Hopefully the Apple Watch is more accurate.

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