Podcast

Musician and Programmer John Nastos - TMO BGM Interview

John Martellaro · · Add Comment

John Nastos is a multi-instrumentalist, music composer and improvisor, saxophonist, an iOS app developer, book author and is currently on faculty at Portland State University as a Jazz Saxophone Instructor.

John is one of those special people who is an accomplished jazz musician, iOS developer and author. He tells a fascinating story about how he got started as a jazz musician and the people who mentored him. Along the way, he also fondly adopted the Mac, and that stood him well when it came time to develop some very popular, technical music apps that had never existed before. As an instructor, John teaches his students the principles behind music improvisation. His first book, The Mechanism lays out those core concepts. John is a gifted speaker and educator, so don’t miss this show.

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U.S. Government Wants to Track Coronavirus Spread With Location Data

Andrew Orr ·

The U.S. government is in talks with Facebook, Google, and others to use location data to track the spread of the coronavirus.

Public-health experts are interested in the possibility that private-sector companies could compile the data in anonymous, aggregated form, which they could then use to map the spread of the infection, according to three people familiar with the effort, who requested anonymity because the project is in its early stages.

On the surface, it’s for good intentions (They always seem good on the surface). But we know that in certain situations, data can be de-anonymized. Some questions: How will they use this data? How effective would this be? Will the government keep the database afterward? My initial thought is that I have no problem with medical experts and scientists doing this. But I have no faith in this current administration, or faith in companies like Facebook and Google. What if they created an app to collect this data? That way it’s optional. And please password–protect the server.

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On Being a Woman in The Gaming Industry

Charlotte Henry ·

Just because it isn’t International Women’s Day anymore, that doesn’t mean we should not celebrate women in tech! iMore has a great interview with Camilla Avellar, a designer at Supercell – the firm behind Clash of Clans. She discusses how she got into the industry, and how it has changed over the years.

Back in the beginning of the App Store era, many people were playing games, but there still wasn’t an established market. So there were some trial games that you could get for free and then buy the premium version. There wasn’t really this free to play model yet. That came a bit later. But with the free to play model, it just exploded. Everyone had a very small barrier to entry. You could just download a game and play it for free for years. And yeah, I think that a shift in this mentality towards mobile games came with the fact that the audience is just huge and it’s an audience that is largely untapped because it’s not all gamers.