Something reminded Jess of this quirk today, and we discovered this song has a sort of dual existence in my Apple Music library. As you see below, the song listed in my playlist and the album in my library do indeed have the incorrect “Desease” spelling. Note that I have the song downloaded—one of my music pet peeves is songs buffering or skipping. Probably comes from my CD days.

But when I search Apple Music, the song shows it is downloaded but has the correct spelling. Plus, when I search for the incorrect spelling, there are no results. So what’s going on?

Then I remembered iTunes Match still exists—the pre-subscription service that uploads all your non-iTunes-Store songs for all your devices and verifies their metadata. iTunes Match is also included in Apple Music. Of course, I ripped all my CDs back in the day, including this Phish album. iTunes then grabbed metadata for them from… whatever those services were. We could edit that metadata, and still can it seems, even for streaming songs in Apple Music.

What I think happened here is the data for this song was somehow downloaded or edited incorrectly (I rarely edited metadata; just didn’t need to). In my library, which includes viewing the song in my playlist, Apple Music respects this incorrect spelling. But when I search the Apple Music catalog, it still marks the song as downloaded but displays the correct spelling. To top-level Apple Music search, my incorrectly spelled version simply seems to not exist.

And that’s the story of how we learned we aren’t going crazy. At least, not from Apple Music.

I know my main browser, Safari, finally gained Profile features in macOS Sonoma that cater to these use cases. But they’re a little hard to find and still suffer from the same ‘forest for the trees’ problem that Bumpr and Choosy have: They’re too granular, making the user do too much work to get rolling.

I have to list individual URLs, including their short-URL alts, just to catch everything. See the example in my screenshot above: A YouTube link won’t trigger my alt browser if it’s a (barely shortened) youtu.be link, so I need to manually add both. In each utility I’ve used. And there is no mechanism to import and export existing lists.

I wish these utilities offered a collection of pre-built, one-click rule templates for major companies and use cases. I can’t be the only customer of these features trying to compartmentalize my browsing habits through the lens of privacy. I’d love a blanket ‘Google’ rule, maybe just a box I can click, that opens everything that leads back to Google in my alternate browser or Safari profile. Same with Facebook and other serious violators.

Anyway, if you’re unfamiliar with these utilities and how they can help your workflow on the Mac, I definitely recommend them. Bumpr (free) is good and I used it for years but have since switched to Choosy ($10 one-time) since it’s more flexible and feature-full for my needs. Safari Profiles might even float yer boat, no third-party apps needed (screenshot below). Simply go to Safari > Preferences > Profiles and create one, perhaps for work or a privacy scenario (I named my privacy profile Undesirables). Then go to the Websites panel > Open Links with Profile section and start adding URLs.

Bloomberg’s headline calls it “dramatic.” 9to5 quotes a snippet of “the biggest revamp since iOS 7,” which is quite the tall order.

I’d like to go on record that I actually liked the iOS 7 redesign, or at least what it eventually turned into. The previous skeuomorphic language was cute and all, but I found it annoying when trying to figure out which playful bits of an app I could tap. A lot of non-techy folks I’ve worked with over the years found it flat-out frustrating. I also felt large bits of fake leather and notebook binding rings to simply be a waste of space. But I digress.

Apple has a lot of spinning plates in the air, and some of them have already slipped. Arguably the most important features of Apple Intelligence—the cornerstone of this year’s product upgrade and the pitch all over billboards and TV ads to buy an iPhone 16—was just delayed last Friday into Apple’s next product cycle, which likely starts around June with WWDC, if not later.

Remember ‘the next generation of CarPlay’ that we saw in 2022? That was supposed to debut in 2024? It quietly no-showed and it took Apple almost a month to publicly comment on it.

I could talk about what feels like a freshly souring sentiment I’ve seen across large Apple communities like r/Apple, r/iOS, and r/iPad. Maybe you could point out they are barely a drop in Apple’s billion-user bucket.

And maybe the timing of this ‘leak’ about Apple massively redesigning its three major platforms—right after a disastrous weekend news cycle about a high-profile failure to deliver a tentpole product feature—is just a coincidence.

The iPad mini has mainly been my book reading device, but I’ve started using it for more stuff around the house in the last couple years. When the mini 7 came around earlier this year, I decided to spring for cellular so I could start taking it, too, out of the house more often. However, a second data plan felt like overkill. Besides, I had heard you can transfer carrier plans between iPads, though I assumed it involved logging into a website or—shudder—calling someone.

Today I finally tried it so I could bring my iPad mini 7 on a walk for lunch. Dear reader, I’m not sure this process could get simpler, at least on T-Mobile.

The data plan switcheroo

For posterity, here are the relevant details:

• We’re on T-Mobile with a Magenta family plan
• That plan includes one data line that my iPad Pro has used for years
• iPad Pro M4 13” (previously the M1 Pro and other 12.9” models before that)
• iPad mini 7

Check out screenshots below, but here is the process in a nutshell: I started with Settings > Cellular on the mini 7, initiated the transfer, verified I wanted to make the change on the Pro, waited around 20-30 seconds for T-Mobile to (I assume) swap the data line to the eSIM in the mini 7, and boom I was off to Potbelly’s.

I wonder if this process is so smooth because iCloud is somehow involved; after all, it knows I have two cellular iPads. Maybe it somehow takes part in the eSIM switch? Otherwise, how would T-Mobile know the mini 7 is connected to me at all?

To finish this post, I switched the plan back to my Pro with no trouble. It was around an hour and a half from the start of this experiment, walking to and from lunch, and writing most of this post. I don’t know if T-Mobile has any kind of cap or cooldown on how often you can do this in a week or month. But I am pleasantly surprised at how easy this is, and I’m looking forward to bringing my mini with cellular out of the house more often.

Someone cracks a joke or floats an idea in a comment, and right before your eyes it can blossom into an entirely new community, sometimes with broad appeal, sometimes just as niche humor. One of my favorite examples (of the latter) is the subreddit r/BitchImABus.

Note: That sub expressly forbids footage of actual violence, like bad collisions. Sometimes bus or car accidents may appear there, but only the kind where people are not seriously injured.

Over a decade ago, someone posted a story about riding on the bus when a car aggressively tried to cut it off and turn right in front of it, all the while honking like a jerk. The bus driver, calmly speaking to himself and anyone in ear shot, just defiantly said “bitch, I’m a bus.” Someone joked in the comments that this should be a new subreddit, and boom.

It has over 229,000 subscribers now. I think I’ve submitted a couple posts over the years. All of it done for free and love of the game—from a moderation and participation standpoint, Reddit communities are staunchly against things like influencers, clout-chasing, and financial incentives. Hence why the entire site is structured around topics instead of following people, like on most other social media (This is one of my favorite aspects about it). While you technically can follow other users on Reddit, I don’t think it’s a popular feature. After all, the site and its culture are built on a foundation of anonymity (for better and worse, but that’s a different conversation).

The communities that do tolerate or solicit things like self-promotion or interacting with known celebrities, such as the occasional events put on by the Ask Me Anything subreddit, usually have strict rules about how it’s done. In my experience, you almost always have to clear it with a mod before you post.

Bitch, I’m a Bus is just people enjoying humor about anthropomorphized buses, thanks to a funny anecdote from a bus ride. I love it.

The first issue that caught my eye is video game magazine Edge #403, with a featured article about an upcoming game very much on my wishlist: Revenge of the Savage Planet. Except, that starts on page 54 and Apple News doesn’t seem to have much in the way of magazine navigation. Tapping anything in the ToC got me nowhere, but at least there’s a little thumbnail scroller in the lower left. Better than nothing, but it’s still a weak effort, Apple.

The color magazine really pops on this OLED iPad Pro. Doubly so since Savage Planet is a decidedly bright, colorful game full of corporate satire and wacky monsters. This visual feast quickly made me queue up more photogenic issues from National Geographic, Scientific American, and Amateur Photographer, even though my only camera is my iPhone 16 PM. It’s fun to be able to grab whatever I want and strut out of the store.

Yes, they’re still… magazines; not much has changed since I largely stopped subscribing well over a decade ago. They still look like glorified PDFs (at least in Apple News), there are still ads in between articles, and content feels laid out in much the same way. But so far I do enjoy flipping through articles again as they ebb and flow around photos and sidebars. There is interesting writing here that I can’t find online, but I also can’t link directly to this Savage Planet article to share it with my fellow capital-J gamers. This sword has multiple edges.

I don’t have a grande thesis, just an observation. I’m also not sure how successful Apple News has been as a product, or specifically its magazine section. But for now, it’s a welcome option on my journey to spend a little less time on social media, and more time on reading things that matter.

Indie apps are just the best. They’re usually built by people who care about the problem they’re solving. They’re also often the first to adopt the great new OS features that make our devices easier, faster, and more delightful to use.

I’d like to shout out a bunch of indie apps I use on any sort of regular basis. Instead of turning this into some kind of series, I decided to try a speedrun of the ones that have earned their keep on my devices. No particular order, but you should definitely download and buy or subscribe to all their things. Or at least some of them, please. Let me know if you’d like me to delve further into how I use any of ’em.

Disclaimer: No, I have not rigorously vetted the financials or company structure of every app on this list. Maybe one or two are quietly owned by Microsoft or some sort of… app hedge fund? Are those a thing? Whatever. To the best of my knowledge, these all seem to be from indie crews and, in some cases, individual developers.

Annotable

website
Solid utility for marking up images with arrows, shapes, redacted boxes, and more. Annotable has an editing extension that appears in Photos, which is probably 95% of the way I interact with it. iPhone, iPad

Play

website
A ‘watch it later’ app for YouTube, Vimeo, and many other services. It has lots of handy stuff like tags, a quick-access app extension, a Mac version, and an Apple TV version, which is where I actually watch stuff. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV

Tripsy

website
A personal, collaborative, and private travel app that feels more focused on vacations than other services, most of which seem business-first to me. You can add a wide variety of vacation-y activities (a concert, national park, tour, etc.) to an itinerary, view them as a rolling schedule, plot them all on a map, and collaborate on trips with other people. iPhone, iPad, Mac

Mematic

website
Nice, straightforward app for creating memes. It has a meme-specific search engine for templates, or you can use your own photos. iPhone, iPad

Ivory

website
A spiritual successor to the exceptional Tweetbot, built by the same devs. A great Mastodon app with nearly all the features I want (though I wish I could browse and interact with other public servers). iPhone, iPad, Mac

Callsheet

website
A full alternative to the IMDB, Callsheet finds info on films, TV shows, actors, and such. It also has clever features like the option to hide character names, episode titles, and even thumbnails in order to avoid spoilers. iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision

Darkroom

website
Not a camera, but a powerful way to edit and organize your photos and videos that basically sits on top of your Photos library. Delete a few shots in Darkroom, they’re gone from Photos. iPhone, iPad, Mac, iMessage

Sofa

website
A “downtime organizer” to collect and track things you want to watch, play, and read. Better than a simple notes app or bookmark tool, it automatically grabs stuff like trailers, release dates, and links to stream or buy the thing. You can even create custom categories to track whatever you want, like bike paths or recipes. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision

Drafts

website
“Where text starts.” Drafts is a fast, powerful way to get ideas out of your head and onto digital paper, then do something with them later—edit, publish, or send to another app. One of my favorite features is the Watch app can be set to launch directly into dictation mode, which is probably the primary way I use it. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch

MusicMatch

website
Find music on your preferred service. Someone shares a Shopify link to an album? MusicMatch will take you to it on Apple Music, or YouTube, or Pandora, etc. iPhone, iPad, Mac

SongShift

website
Copy and share playlists to different music services. Want to share a playlist with a friend who uses a different service? Are you switching form Spotify to YouTube, or Tidal to Apple Music? SongShift makes the dream happen. iPhone, iPad

Raindrop

website
Feature-packed bookmarking service that supports tags, folders and collections, automation, and saving a PDF copy of every link and article. It supports IFTTT too, so sky’s the limit. iPhone, iPad, and Mac via browser extension + web app

Carrot Weather

website
Beautiful, flexible, and optionally malicious weather app. It has a fake bot personality that can be as murderous or light-hearted as you choose. Its app layout and Apple Watch complications are exhaustively customizable, so you can dial in exactly the info you need, complete with multiple layouts. iPhone, iPad, Watch, Vision

GIFWrapped

website
Clever app for searching and collecting a library of GIFs. It has a Messages app for quick responses. I wish its UI was a little more useful when it comes time to grab something to paste into apps other than Messages, but it’s still good at what it does. iPhone, iPad, Mac, iMessage

Ulysses

website
Excellent Markdown writing app whether you want to journal, run a blog, write a book, or produce client work. Ulysses is quite flexible and packed with clever features. I’ve written the majority of Finer Things in Tech in it. iPhone, iPad, Mac

Keep It

website
A notes app packed with quite a few features, though my favorite is that it supports Document Providers in iOS and iPadOS. This means it can appear as a source alongside iCloud, OneDrive, and Dropbox in the Files app and anywhere you can up/download files. iPhone, iPad, Mac is a separate purchase

Things 3

website
A pinnacle of elegant, useful task and project management. Things 3 is beautiful and clever throughout. While I have my complaints—I really wish we could create headings in Areas, which are basically a place to organize projects—it splits my task needs with Apple Reminders. It’s a separate purchase for iPhone, iPad, Mac

Halide

website
A powerful camera with a simple design to control everything when taking photos—white balance, exposure, focus, etc. It has an optional, handy beginner’s email course if you’re new to taking the reigns of your photography, and a new “Process Zero” mode that can remove as much of Apple’s automatic processing as possible. iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch

Tailor

website
A single-serving utility that automatically stitches together multiple screenshots of long, scrolled content. Not just for chat threads, it can stitch together webpages, articles, a long list of tasks, a ‘tall’ screen in an app, just about anything I’ve thrown at it. iPhone only, though I wish there was an iPad version

Honorable Mentions

This is the category of “I own and like these apps but do not yet use them as often as I wish I did.”

Spectre

website
From the Halide folks, Spectre is a long-exposure app for taking unique photos you can’t get any other way. It can blur a waterfall, make lights linger and dance, or on the other end of this spectrum, make a crowd disappear from a busy tourist spot. I’m taking a vacation with my wife soon, I really want to try that last idea at a couple landmarks. iPhone only

Nebula

website
A creator-owned video platform that is mostly the smart, interesting stuff from YouTube without the ads—video essays, culture analysis, podcasts, and some original series now too. I think you can find most of this stuff cross-posted to YouTube for obvious reasons. But creators also post exclusive stuff here and, as I think I heard somewhere, get a larger cut of sub revenue. iPhone, iPad, Apple TV

Streaks

website
A habit tracker I recently dusted off with a refreshingly simple UI. I’m bad at creating and keeping habits, so here goes nothing. One feature I like about it is the option of a sort of ‘anti-habit’ to track things you want to stop doing, like biting your nails. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, Vision

But when introducing Safari as our protagonist and feathered camera repellant, the ad conveniently glosses over the fact that Apple maintains a mighty profitable search relationship to this day with one of the web’s oldest and worst offenders of privacy: Google.

When a user opens Safari on iPhone, iPad, or Mac to search the web, Google will be their default chaperone, thanks to a yearly $18 billion contract Apple has with the company. Yes, we could delve into the nuance of that contract—Apple may have eroded some of Google’s utility with new Spotlight features, Google could potentially use its popular apps to crush Safari and Spotlight, maybe this contract should exist as a modern day peace treaty—but I don’t really give a shit. The situation is what it is, and Safari defaulting to Google is not the privacy rallying cry Apple and wishes it was with this ad.

To me, “Flock” attempting to make the case of protecting our privacy with a product that tosses users into the lion’s den of privacy dismantling companies is just… sad. It’s sad to see Apple try its privacy sales pitch with one of the weakest and most contradictory pillars of said pitch.

That said, I thought the ad concept and execution were great. Evoking The Birds as robotic surveillance cameras is timely and poignant. I just wish Safari was as effective a remedy as Apple falsely claims.

Like. I think it’s great that they post entire episodes of Apple TV series to fucking Twitter.

You know. The place filled with and run by monsters who want to wipe out entire groups of valid human beings. People who associate with groups that want to revoke the rights of Apple’s own CEO. Some of them even want to wipe out Apple’s CEO, just because of who he is. Like, completely.

Tim Cook and all of Apple’s management is just great. Boy is this a great time. Apple? Super great.

The links

But nothing lasts forever, I can’t support that company anymore, and it’s time for a change and to re-focus. If you still want to keep up with my social shenanigans, my writing (thank you!), or my streaming aspirations, here we go:

• Mastodon: Not a perfect alternative, but it has some great ideas. Plus, I feel its goals align much better with creating a safe, reasonable social media space for us
• Tumblr: Still a fun space, now owned by WordPress
• Right here: I’ve wanted to get back to writing, and this is one of the spaces I’ll do it
• Finer Tech Newsletter: Like this site, but different and delivered to your inbox
• Personal blog: Less tech. More art, Chicago, photography, dogs, occasional mental health struggles, and we’ll see what else

I’m also getting into streaming, now that I finally have a proper office and gaming space in our basement. I love to laugh while I play and create a chill, welcoming place for people to hang out, whether I’m solo in a variety of games or with friends probably raiding in Destiny 2. If you partake in games of the video variety:

• My gaming Mastodon: Figured I’d give my video game adventures their own account
• Gaming Tumblr: Ditto
• Twitch: This will become more active and regular very soon, and I’ll figure out a schedule. Come hang out!
• YouTube: More videos soon too

Thanks for joining me in any of these adventures. I really do appreciate it.

The non-TL;DR

I started souring on Twitter years ago, once it finally clicked that Twitter’s incentives and goals are antithetical to creating a safe, reasonable social space.

It’s an ad-based business. It needs as many eyeballs as possible. I’m sorry this analogy will get dark, but: in the same way the NRA quietly celebrates at every school shooting in the U.S. (because gun sales spike. Every. time.), some level of hate and abuse is good for Twitter’s business.

Their ads need attention. Twitter is heavily incentivized to wield moderation with a light touch to avoid banning too many accounts. At its core, Twitter is heavily incentivized to allow as many hateful, despicable, and abusive users as the service can tolerate. The destruction to our society is just collateral damage as long as their lines go up, the press remains passively or actively complicit, and the rest of us can’t be bothered to do anything about it.

I’m tired of not doing anything about it. I’m tired of the rules and safety of our online social spaces being at the whims of what’s gOoD foR bUsiNeSs. Fuck their ‘line goes up’ at the expense of the rest of us.

Again, this isn’t entirely because of Musk. But his brand of callous, clueless, racist, and abusive arrogance is one hell of a strong catalyst. You don’t need to search very hard to find the miles of shit he drags people through, or the fact that he’s basically a charlatan inventor who got lucky from his parents’ South African apartheid money.

The plan-ish

I think I’ll take the typical route: I have a lot of longstanding relationships on Twitter, so I’ll promote this a few times over the next week or two before leaving so my friends and connections have a good chance to see it. Fun fact: a healthy majority of your followers never see a post the first or even second or third time, and it isn’t entirely the algorithm’s fault. It’s just the nature of social media. Check the analytics on any of your non-viral tweets to see what I mean.

I’ll request my Twitter archive, which might take a while since it seems like the exodus is, at least, not insignificant. Then I’ll delete all my personal accounts, which include things like @Bender, @Fry, and @Stewie. Told you I’ve been there a while.

There’s a restaurant in France called ‘Chartier.’ Without fail over the years, mostly tourists (I assume) have mistakenly thanked my Twitter account for a delicious dinner evening. Maybe the restaurant can finally have the handle, if they don’t abandon ship with the rest of us.

I think I finally fixed the problem, and it may be a combination of a self-inflicted wound running into what I think might be a long-tail bug. Fortunately, our HomePods are back to playing requests from our individual libraries and Apple Music, including my custom playlists.

Context

For a long time, if you created a .Mac/iCloud account and used Apple’s default domains, you could not change the account login to a different email. The account I’ve used to purchase all music, videos, apps, and now subscriptions is a .Mac that I created before the introduction of the original iTunes Music Store.

Apple recently removed this account limitation. Users with a .Mac, MobileMe, or iCloud account that used those default domain names can now change their login address to anything—Outlook, Yahoo, or a custom domain. Earlier this year, I changed the login email for my store account to something at one of my personal domains, chartier.land.

The problem

Now, we don’t play music on our HomePods all the time. In the evenings we watch TV together or I’m playing games on my PC. During the day I hook my MacBook up to my PC speakers and listen to music and YouTube there while working.

Once we did try playing music and our HomePods could no longer find artists or playlists in either of our libraries, it was long enough after I changed my account address that I did not initially consider it a suspect.

I tried everything—resetting all HomePods, manually signing out and back into all accounts (including my .Mac with a new personal email), complaining on Mastodon. Nothing worked, and eventually we just gave up trying to play music on what became expensive well-designed, furniture-staining paperweights.

The fix

Yesterday, it dawned on me that my .Mac account switch could be the problem. At first I didn’t understand why it would also affect my wife’s ability to play music from her library. But then I remembered we share an Apple Music family subscription purchased through my .Mac account that has a potentially problematic login address change.

After work, I logged into the Apple ID site and changed my .Mac account login back to its original address. I changed it on my iPhone too, then did another hard reset of our living room HomePod. I saw the original .Mac credentials listed in the Home app, but it was ‘Configuring’ for a bit (I think it downloads the latest HomePod OS update right away). We watched some Sandman and Midsommer Murders, then went to bed.

Conclusion

This morning I asked our living room HomePod to play my Instrumental Work playlist of chill-but-not-sleepy music I’ve curated over the years. HomePod started playing like normal. Jessi asked it to play some Fleetwood Mac (which is not in my library) and it switched over without a hitch.

I suspect the HomePod OS and/or Apple Music don’t like it when a .Mac (or other Apple service) account gets a login address change, despite Apple announcing this as an officially supported feature not long ago. However, if some people have successfully changed addresses but avoided this problem, maybe it’s something more specific, such as my .land TLD. I still run into some websites and services that don’t recognize it as a valid domain.

Of course, I’ll report this as a bug to Apple, although it strikes me as quite far on the long tail of problems to fix. I’m just happy our HomePods can play music again.

Comment on a PeerTube video with your Mastodon account. Follow someone’s photos on PixelFed with your Pleroma account. The mechanism that enables all this interaction is ActivityPub, a W3C standard protocol that enables us to publish content with one tool and read at least a basic version of that content with any other compatible tool.

A good analog is blogs, RSS, and newsreaders. There are a ton of ways to publish posts to a website. If that site makes its posts (or at least part of them) available in a standard RSS format, there are a ton of apps and services that can read those posts. The Fediverse turned this idea up to 11, and I’m fascinated by it.

Free software advocate Robert Martinez made a simple graphic (below) of how Fediverse services interact with each other, thanks to ActivityPub. Maybe this can help people wrap their head around what’s going on and start getting their feet wet.

To me, Cue seems far more interested in playing Hollywood Guy, and one could say he’s done a great job on that end of his duties. Arguably, the content available in most of Apple’s services is a home run. Maybe he can focus on that. But the apps and functionality powering Apple’s services need to go to someone who has the time and attention to make them worthy of Apple’s brand. Right now, they aren’t.

I’m also interested in all the little features on the way—swiping through stacks of shared photos in Messages; browsing an album or artist from a track playing in Music; the new ‘Assigned to Me’ section in Reminders.

Naturally, I have a growing list of little features that I hope Apple will add to iOS someday. Since WWDC 2021 was not that day, I’ll share them here.

Widgets default on Today sheet

Know when you pull down the Today sheet to see notifications, and you can swipe right to see widgets? I wish we had the option to swap the two—pull down for widgets, swipe right for notifications.

Set any photo as wallpaper

Since day one of iPhone OS, the only way to set a wallpaper is to first save the image to Photos. This means my actual photos have always been cluttered with wallpapers of fictional landscapes, abstract art, and game fandom. It’s tedious on multiple levels.

Since nearly day one of iPhone OS, I’ve wished we could set a wallpaper from any photo laying around on the web, in an app, and now Files. The Mac has been able to do this for… decades?

Related feature: Rotate wallpapers automatically from a folder. I’ve used this feature in macOS.

Auto-pause for outdoor walks

Please allow watchOS a brief cameo. I thoroughly enjoy walking, and it’s good for us. While the built-in Workout app can automatically pause for runs and outdoor cycling, it can’t pause when tracking a walk. Why is Apple prejudice against walkers.

Quickly define words

One of the littlest of little features, I use the macOS dictionary popup surprisingly often. Mouse over a word, then press Command + Control + D for a popover with a definition, thesaurus, and sometimes other info from sources like Wikipedia. I’d love to have this option on iPadOS.

Settings in Split View on iPad

Does it seem weird to anyone else that Settings has never support Split View or Slide Over? Seems weird to me.

Avatars in Mail

This is one of the little features I appreciate in Airmail, the client I’ve used for years. I don’t know which directories it checks to power this, but it’s a nice way to bring a little humanity into email.

Interactive widgets

I want to complete tasks, save my clipboard to apps, and toggle (third-party) switches without having to open their entire corresponding app.

Require apps to support Files

Photos hasn’t been the only tool we can use to save and upload images for four years. I think it’s long overdue for Apple to require apps to support it as an option.

Sort songs in playlists

We’ve been able to sort songs in iTunes Music for decades. How has iOS never inherited this basic feature of organizing our music?

The major privacy flaw with Messages in iCloud, outlined in Apple’s iCloud security overview, is that enabling this feature essentially renders your messages readable by authorities.

If you use iCloud Backup, a copy of your Messages encryption key is stored in your backups on Apple’s servers. Apple also retains keys to decrypt your iCloud backups. Now, authorities can use various legal means to obtain access to data stored on servers—including your iCloud backups. Bob, as they say, is your uncle.

But does Messages really need iCloud to keep messages in sync, and to bring all your conversations over to a new device? The CPUs in our devices these days do, like, eleventy billion calculations per second. We can use high-bandwidth WiFi to exchange photos and large files between devices with AirPlay (yes, after they first use Bluetooth for local device discovery).

When it comes to the day-to-day of syncing read states and the occasional photo deleted from a chat, couldn’t our devices just work it out directly with each other, no iCloud in the middle? And when it’s time to restore or buy a new device, they already collaborate to exchange a lot of information during setup. Couldn’t our Messages history go along for the ride?

This strikes me as a big potential win for privacy, and possibly a way to reduce complexity of iCloud sync and backup services.

Technically, it’s an interactive PDF built to be used within an app like GoodNotes. The big advantages are free form note taking with a Pencil, a smart organizational design, and GoodNotes can search handwriting.

Day One is a journaling and diary app, built primarily for the digital age. You can type entries and add photos and files, automatically scoop up social activity, automate certain things with IFTTT, and more. While Day One has gained the ability to add sketches to entries, it’s still primarily a digital-first app, not a mimic of a physical counterpart. It also doesn’t do very much with features like organizing tasks, tracking moods, or other quantifiable data beyond tags (which are implemented quite well).

I really wish there was a hybrid of these two products.

Digital Planner comes from the Focus Course (built by my friend Shawn Blanc and the people behind The Sweet Setup). I really like their emphasis on sitting down with a writing instrument to think about your day, week, goals, and more. Combining some advantages of digital tools with the physical sensation of writing has been a great experience in that regard.

But part of Digital Planner’s approach involves tracking data that only digital apps can quantify in a useful way—completing tasks, tracking habits, tagging entries for collection, review, or even sharing. Digital Planner is an impressive tool, but still just a PDF at heart.

While I have found a couple iPad apps that are in the direction of uniting these two experiences, they fall too far short for me to give them a serious try. The closest I’ve found is Pencil Planner & Calendar Pro. The UI is interesting though somewhat foreign, and it combines some things like Pencil writing and bringing in my digital calendar events while still allowing sketching on the calendar.

But Pencil PLanner & Calendar Pro (it just rolls off the tongue!) doesn’t capitalize on quantifiable data. I can add tasks but there’s no checkbox to tap. I can set a mood for the day, but it’s just a circle drawn around an icon, not something I can view on a monthly basis. Plus, it uses a home-grown sync option, (not iCloud, which I would prefer), and I can’t find a mention on whether it’s E2E encrypted.

I think there’s a great opportunity to meld the benefits of physical journaling and planning with the advantages of digital tools and data. I recommend both Digital Planner and Day One as great products in their own right. But I’d also love to see what’s possible in a hybrid of the two.

Since the iTunes Store gained a podcast section, people have been free to publish shows there and everywhere else. The podcast platform has RSS feeds built into the foundation, which means we have been able to listen with just about any tool we want, or even create our own.

But recently, a bunch of closed, opportunistic, and VC-backed platforms like Luminary and Spotify started attacking the medium. Luminary came out swinging with high-profile exclusive podcasts, then republishing shows they don’t own and without permission. Spotify launched podcast support a while ago, then this week bought exclusive rights to one of the largest podcasts in the world.

Today, Apple is rumored to toss its hat into the exclusive ring. I don’t necessarily blame it—podcasts have been a major, if arguably underutilized, section of the iTunes Store. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they were a not insignificant catalyst for a number of music, video, and more recently, subscription sales.

With new competitors picking apart the podcast publishing industry, I imagine Apple’s hand is largely being forced. I do hope for the best, and that plenty of podcasts can survive and thrive on their own on the open web.

But as with any corporate incursion into democratized creativity, I worry.

Take any kind of long ‘explainer’ video, like “Why is everyone copying AirPods?” It could be stated in seconds: headphone cables suck, AirPods are insanely popular, and that’s capitalism. Be sure to like, share, and subscribe. The end.

This massive runtime inflation across the platform is driven by three factors:

• In recent years, YouTube has exploded beyond the stratosphere in terms of users, sheer minutes watched, and session length
• To help encourage longer videos, YouTube started allowing more ads on them
• Naturally, The Algorithm pivoted to recommend longer videos
• Bonus tip: 70 percent of YouTube views are driven by said algorithm

For some creators, increasing video length by a few minutes allowed for 1-2 more ads and it tripled their per-video revenue. I don’t blame them, being a YouTuber is hard.

Now, in some ways, I don’t mind the increase. I subscribe to and watch a lot of YouTube channels, many of them long-form, sometimes just in the background—pop culture essays from Lyndsay Ellis and Wisecrack, tons of gameplay and humor like Marz, Slimecicle, Valkyrie Aurora, Nutz Gaming (Yeah, I know) and Indiemaus, the occasional home improvement how-to, and more. Many of these channels wouldn’t and couldn’t exist without the current ad system.

Sidenote Pro Tip: YouTube Premium removes automated ads from every video (but it can’t do anything about the in-video sponsorships creators may choose to run). If you split a family account with, ahem, ‘family members,’ it becomes just a few bucks a month per person. I think YouTube splits this revenue between creators you watch a la Netflix, but I haven’t seen an explainer on this.

However, I do mind the death of brevity at the hands of advertising and Google. YouTube is the largest and, for many genres, only viable user-generated video platform. Not everything needs to be tweet-length. But this rapidly expanding genre of 10-20+ minute videos that should have been a fraction of the length seems… wasteful.

Banner photo via Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Reader spawned from one of those famed “20 percent time” Google projects. Eventually, it blotted out the sun of its competition. Like many of Google’s dead products, the company struggled to shoehorn ads into Reader, so it quickly became useless. Due to this, the rise of social media, and likely other factors, Google let Reader languish. Improvements and major features slowed to a crawl, then nothing at all.

Externally, far too many of us were still high off the toxic fumes of free web services, which enabled Reader to decimate its competition and many a developer’s hopes and wireframes. Google’s lethargy strangled the market of nearly all new ideas, specialization, and sheer progress, right when social media cocooned us into filter bubbles with unprecedented force.

Reader decomposed quickly when it fell, creating nourishment, space, and potential for the market to thrive. New products and ideas planted quickly.

Some newsreaders keep it simple, others cater to power users, businesses, and teams. Some support authenticated feeds, some pay special attention to media-rich feeds like webcomics and photo blogs. Many sync with a web-hosted service, some use private iCloud sync or local storage. A variety of dedicated web services sprouted, third-party apps blossomed, and DIY options can get your hands dirty.

On this note, newsreaders are one of the few current bastions of open, interoperable standards. It is usually trivial to export all your feeds and followed sites to a file that any other reader can gobble up.

In just a quick search, I found a respectable list of options below. Most did not and could not exist in the age of Google Reader.

Whether you’re curious about news readers, in the market to switch, or want to stay informed while looking for refuge from social media, I’m sure something here can get you started.

Free(mium) services

• Feedly (paid features available)
• NewsBlur
• Inorader
• The Old Reader
• Bloglovin
• FlowReader
• Feeder

Dedicated apps

• Reeder for iOS and Mac
• Fiery Feeds for iOS
• Newsify for iOS
• Unread for iOS
• NewsTab for iOS, Android, and the web
• Flipboard for iOS, Android, and desktop
• NetNewsWire for Mac (it’s back baby!)
• Feedreader for Windows

Prosumer, business options

• Inoreader
• Feedly
• Netvibes

Self-hosted

• Selfoss (self-hosted, third-party app options available)
• Use Zapier to create your own RSS reader in any app

Unlike the last couple years, I waited to jump on the public beta until this week (public beta 7, dev beta 8). Aside from one of my most anticipated features being pulled mid-beta, I’m pretty happy so far. Here are some quick thoughts.

Widgets on the homescreen are great

But I think I need time to learn how to get the most out of them. Launch Center Pro is a shoe-in for me here, but we’ll see what else.

Dark Mode, finally

It is quite welcome, especially the option to automatically toggle it with sunup and down. I’m excited for more apps to support it.

Multitasking for Slide Over apps is fantastic

I frequently work in Split View with an app in Slide Over, but I often switch Slide Over apps. This removes a huge point of friction for me.

New text editing gestures go back to the roots

I still remember watching the original iPad keynote while on a company cruise at 1Password. Jobs struck a cord with me about being able to touch content and apps. I think it still rings true today, it’s one of my favorite things about the iPad experience.

These new gestures to pinch and zoom for copy and paste (respectively) feel like a return to iPad fundamentals. Popup and popover menus are fine but, just as with traditional computers, they’re also a proxy for manipulating content. They aren’t quite… iPad.

Like dragging a link from Safari into a Messages conversation, these gestures just feel right to me. And even in the beta, they’re implemented well. I can see them becoming new muscle memory, and another success for removing friction.

A big change to the share sheet

I’ll need some time to get used to the big share sheet redesign, but I like where this went. I frequently share things to specific people, so I like the new, dedicated row for recents contacts now.

While I still like and use AirDrop, I appreciate the reduction of its presence in the sheet (it’s an app icon now which you cannot remove or reorder on that row). I’m still unsure about the distinction between app icons (second row) and actions (scrolling list at the bottom), but I think I like this too.

Shared iCloud folders are still missing

I really hope Apple gets this working either for release or shortly after. Shared folders have been one of iCloud’s embarrassing deficiencies for the better part of a decade, and surely one of the big reasons many people stick with something like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Considering Apple is light years behind with this feature, it actually worries me to see it appear in a beta only to be pulled quickly. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

Lots of quality-of-life changes are a big improvement

As you may know, the little changes are often my favorite, and geeze do iPadOS and iOS 13 have a lot of little changes.

A small change to the share sheet

The share sheet now sticks around after you finish sharing to another app. It’s simple to dismiss with a tap anywhere, but I really appreciate this change.

I often find myself sharing a link or photo to multiple apps, people, or services, but this workflow usually isn’t a good fit for automation with Shortcuts. Now that the share sheet stays persistent until dismissed, I save a bit of time during this frequent process.

Name files when saving them to Files

We can finally name a file as we save it somewhere with the Files app (just tap the file name). In fact, that’s what I did with all the screenshots I took while writing this.

The new Safari menu

Lots of disparate controls now collected under a handy menu. Nice. I especially appreciate the dedicated new “Hide Toolbar” button; triggering that manually was always clunky.

Screen Time can set limits for apps

Previously we could only set limits for app categories which causes all kinds of problems, especially catching false positives.

Honorary iPhone mention: Force Touch triggers much faster

I use and like Force Touch, and it’s nice to see it become more speedy and useful in iOS 13.