Slack Over the years the MacStories team has used a number of different group chat services, including IRC, Campfire, group iMessages, Google Hangouts, and GroupMe. But we’ve never been as happy with our group chat service than we are now, and that’s because we’re using Slack. It has everything we need from cross-platform support,...
Perks
2Do Review eBook Just yesterday, Federico published his review and guide to task manager 2Do. Just like we did with Federico’s iOS 9 Review, we’ve created an eBook version, exclusively for Club MacStories Members. To get the eBook, you will find a .zip download in the Downloads section of your profile, which can be accessed...
Tips
[[graham]] Two straightforward, but (I think) really useful tips for you all this week. If you’re doing tech support for your family this holiday season, and you notice them struggling to read their iPhone screens, ask if they’d like the font to be larger. If they do, go to Settings > Display & Brightness >...
Q&A
Question: Regarding a new iPhone Smart Battery Case, do you think it implies Apple acknowledges iPhone 6/6s’ battery is not sufficient for some heavy users? Do you think Apple will give a higher priority on battery for the next iPhone, rather than making the battery-pregnant case or removing the headphone jack? (Jung)
FedericoI think...
Apple News Can Now Feature Top Stories, Curated by Apple News Editors
(L-R) The Apple News launch screen after you update to iOS 9.2, the Top Stories channel in my Favorites section, the For You section which features Top Stories (note the red tag on the right).
Peter Kafka, writing for Re/code, reports that yesterday’s iOS 9.2 software update also included a big new feature for Apple News:
Apple’s update for its iOS app, which begins rolling out today, has two components. Only one of them will be visible to regular users: Apple’s editors will curate a list of “top stories” they’ll display for all of the apps’ users, at least a couple of times a day.
That’s a change in philosophy from this fall’s launch, when the app was supposed to highlight stories based on each of its users’ tastes and reading behaviors.
That’s still going to happen throughout the day, but in the morning and in the afternoon, Apple will assemble a handful of stories it thinks all of its users would want to see. You know — like a newspaper.
After you install iOS 9.2 and open Apple News for the first time you’ll be given the open of adding ‘Top Stories’ to your Favorites. If you do add it to your favorites, the ‘For You’ section of Apple News will prominently feature articles that Apple editors have deemed to be a top news story for the day. You can also go directly to the Top Stories channel in your Favorites to view all of the top stories in one place.
In my launch review of Apple News I was critical of the overall Apple News experience, which I found to be disappointing. One of my chief complaints was that you couldn’t rely on Apple News to give you all of the day’s big news stories – the lack of human picks and poor automated curation was readily apparent:
Arguably the most frustrating part of For You is the fact you never get a good sense of what the big stories of the day are. To me, this is vital to any news app, website, or service – I don’t just want to read interesting articles that I might like, but I want to know the most important of those stories.
I’ve only spent 20 minutes with iOS 9.2 and the updated Apple News, but early signs are positive. The For You section began with stories which were prominently marked as a “Top Story” and indeed they were (mostly) appropriate. I was pleasantly surprised to see they even have Australian editors, curating the top Australian news stories. So I’m going to give Apple News a second chance and see if it fares any better with the addition of human curated top news stories, and I’ll report back to you all next week.
Apple Introduces iPhone 6s Smart Battery Case
Apple today introduced the new iPhone Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6. Available in White or Charcoal Gray, the Smart Battery Case includes a built-in battery which will boost your iPhone’s battery life for talk time up to 25 hours and internet use up to 18 hours on LTE.
You charge the Smart Battery Case and your iPhone simultaneously and the amount of charge left in the case is displayed on your iPhone’s normal battery indicator.
The Smart Battery Case is available to purchase from today for $99. The case’s exterior is silicone whilst the interior is a soft microfiber lining. It also features a “soft elastomer hinge design”, which Apple claims will make it easy to put the case on an iPhone and take it off.
For the time being, the Smart Battery Case is only available on the 4.7” iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s, it is not available for the iPhone 6s Plus or iPhone 6 Plus.
[via AppleInsider]
Apple Maps Used “Three Times As Often As Its Next Leading Competitor”→
In an article from Associated Press, Anick Jesdanun gets a comment from Apple regarding the popularity of Apple Maps:
Apple says its mapping service is now used more than three times as often as its next leading competitor on iPhones and iPads, with more than 5 billion map-related requests each week. Research firm comScore says Apple has a modest lead over Google on iPhones in the U.S., though comScore measures how many people use a service in a given month rather than how often.
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“We are fast learners and we are fast at fixing things,” said Greg “Joz” Joswiak, an Apple vice president who oversees product marketing for iPhones and related services. “We learned the maps business incredibly fast.”
It’s abundantly clear that Apple Maps has improved significantly in just three years, but at least in my experience, it still has a way to go before it is up to the standard of Google Maps, globally.
Which is why I thought it was odd that Apple would publicly reveal, in an almost boastful manner, that Apple Maps is used “more than three times as often as its next leading competitor” (read: Google Maps). At first glance that sounds impressive, but Apple Maps has been automatically installed on every single iOS device since 2012. If someone wants to use Google Maps they need to actively take steps to find it, install it, and avoid using Apple Maps when tapping address links or using Siri.
I wonder what the statistics are for some of Apple’s other default, automatically installed, apps? How many people use Safari, or Apple Mail or Apple Calendars rather than the “next leading competitor”? I would put money on those other default apps being way more than just three times as popular as the third party alternatives.
https://twitter.com/zkahn94/status/674081643141988353
Google Calendar and Inbox Add Reminders→
Vijay Umapathy, writing for the Official Gmail Blog:
Our calendars should help us make the most of our time — scheduling meetings at work, remembering brunch with friends, and keeping track of all our other commitments. But often our to-do list is elsewhere, separate from the Calendar that organizes our day, and we end up overcommitted or miss something important because we forgot to check our list.
Now there’s a single way to manage your day: starting this week, you can create Reminders in Google Calendar to keep track of your to-dos alongside your scheduled events.
Reminders aren’t just kept in Google Calendar either, they will also be accessible from the Google Inbox, Google Keep and Google Now apps - and they’ll be coming to the web in the future. For those of you invested in the Google ecosystem, and just need a simple way to remember about tasks you need to do, this new Reminders feature from Google may be a perfect fit.
Apple Raises iTunes Match and Apple Music Library Matching Limits to 100,000 Tracks→
MacRumors reported over the weekend that Apple Music and iTunes Match libraries can now manage libraries with up to 100,000 tracks:
Over the past couple of days, MacRumors has received several reports from users who have been able to upload music libraries of greater than 25,000 tracks to iTunes Match or Apple Music’s similar scan-and-match feature, and Macworld’s iTunes expert Kirk McElhearn has also noted a number of reports on his personal blog.
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Update 12:08 PM, December 6: Eddy Cue has confirmed to MacRumors that Apple has indeed “started rolling out support for 100k libraries.”
It has taken some time, and longer than expected, but those of you with iTunes Match or Apple Music and large music libraries can now upload up to 100,000 tracks to the services, up from the previous limit of 25,000. Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services, first mentioned on Twitter in late June that Apple was working to “get to 100k [tracks] for iOS 9”. Apple missed that deadline, but Cue subsequently told MacRumors that Apple was working on it and that he expected it would be released “before the end of the year” - and indeed it now has.