Accessing the Battery Health on an iPad, What Happens When Your iPhone or iPad Updates, Mona Themes, and a GPT Shortcut
HomeKit Apps for Easy Access to Scenes and Devices
This week, Federico’s dream comes true with the release of Metroid Prime Remastered, and John has fallen hard for Shrinking, an Apple TV+ comedy from the makers of Ted Lasso.
Federico’s Pick:
John’s Pick:
Apple has released betas of iOS and iPadOS 16.4 with new features and its version of new emoji approved by the Unicode Consortium last summer.
Some of the biggest changes coming to iOS and iPadOS later this spring will be to Safari. Many of the biggest user-facing features relate to web apps. Apple has supported saving web apps to the iPhone and iPad’s Home Screen since the earliest days of those devices, but today’s announcements put web apps on a more even footing with native apps than before.
According to a post by Brady Eidson and Jen Simmons on WebKit.org:
There are many other interesting additions and changes to the WebKit framework for developers that they can check out on the WebKit site.
Last summer, the Unicode Consortium announced its draft candidates for new emoji. The betas of iOS and iPadOS 16.4 include Apple’s renderings of those emoji, a handful of which are in the image at the beginning of this story. Included among the new emoji are a shaking face, three new colors of hearts, left and right pushing hands in multiple skin tones, a moose, a donkey, a blackbird, a goose, ginger, a hair pick, a flute, peas, and more.
Apple Podcasts includes changes in the betas too. Channels are Apple Podcasts’ collections of shows from a single publisher. In iOS and iPadOS 16.4, Channels will be included in the library, allowing users to access the ones they follow and subscribe to more easily. Up Next is adding the ability to resume episodes, start saved episodes, and remove any you want to skip. Plus, episodes you’re listening to in the app that you don’t follow or subscribe to will live in Up Next until you finish or remove them. Users will also be able to access their Up Next and Recently Played queues from CarPlay, which should add a lot more flexibility than before. For more detail on these changes, which are also coming to the Mac, check out Apple’s post on the Apple Podcasts for Creators website.
There are a bunch of other smaller changes coming too:
Yesterday, Primate Labs released Geekbench 6, the suite of benchmarking tools for Apple and other vendors’ hardware. According to the company:
Geekbench tests have always been grounded in real-world use cases and use modern. With Geekbench 6, we’ve taken this to the next level by updating existing workloads and designing several new workloads, including workloads that:
- Blur backgrounds in video conferencing streams
- Filter and adjust images for social media sites
- Automatically remove unwanted objects from photos
- Detect and tag objects in photos using machine learning models
- Analyse, process, and convert text using scripting languages
In addition to updating benchmark workflows, Primate Labs says Geekbench includes modern file types and file sizes that reflect current computing tasks on Macs, iPhones, iPads, and other devices. The company also changed its multi-core benchmark to include tasks that span multiple cores to align the tests with how modern devices typically tackle a job.
My time with the new benchmark apps has been limited, but running them on my Mac and iPhone went smoothly. It’s worth noting that the apps are significantly larger, and it take longer than before due to the changes made to the underlying benchmark tests. However, it’s great to see Primate Labs working to make its tests reflect modern usage patterns and hardware.
Geekbench 6 for Mac is available as a direct download from Primate Labs. The iOS and iPadOS versions of the app are available on the App Store.
This week on AppStories, we begin a new series on the impact of artificial intelligence on apps and the world around us. This week’s episode sets the stage with a look at chatbots, image-generation tools, and issues and opportunities they raise.
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On AppStories+, we share our experiments with Whisper, OpenAI’s audio to text engine, and their very different approaches to it.
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Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings:
Artificial Intelligence and Apps (Part 1) 
This week, Federico and John begin a new series on the impact of artificial intelligence on apps and the world around us. This week’s episode sets the stage with a look at chatbots, image generation tools, and issues and opportunities they raise.
Interesting Links 
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Federico