Apple Music Classical, the Apple Watch Ultra, and Scripting Obsidian with ChatGPT Here are the highlights from the Club MacStories Discord this week:
Roman kicked off a conversation about Apple Music Classical and its odd limitations. Our recent episode of AppStories about the Apple Watch Ultra led to a great conversation in the hardware channel about the device. Daniel explained in the Obsidian channel how he...
App Debuts Aiko Aiko is a simple audio transcription app from Sindre Sorhus that uses OpenAI’s Whisper model to convert audio to text. The app, which is available for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, supports 100 languages, and all transcription happens on-device. In addition to using the app to create text versions of lectures, meetings, podcasts, and...
Interesting Links Spotify has added a TikTok-like discovery feature to its app, which uses a vertical scrolling UI to help users discover new music, and Smart Shuffle, a subscriber-only feature that makes playlist recommendations. (Link) E-ink tablet maker Remarkable introduced a new $199 keyboard case for the Remarkable 2 that Alex Cranz at The Verge and...
You’re Not Expected to Use Everything: Complex Apps, Sparingly Used A recurring theme on AppStories over the years is the tension between ‘do-everything’ apps and single-purpose utilities. Like a fashion trend, the app world swings between these two poles regularly. Recently, the pendulum has swung firmly in the ‘do everything’ direction for some categories of apps, and I think it’s worth trying to understand the...
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This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico recommends Kirby Ferguson’s final video, Everything is a Remix, Part 4 and I have been relaxing to Blanc on the Nintendo Switch.
Federico’s Pick:
John’s Pick:
The Macintosh Desktop Experience: My 2023 Mac-Centric Office Setup After six years of working from home, my office setup is about as close to ideal as I’ve ever wanted. I started out in a corner of our basement in Illinois, which was cold for about 8 months of the year, working from a desk I built from a scrap of plywood. I graduated to...
Read moreOn March 28th, Apple will launch Apple Music Classical, a free app that’s already available for pre-order that will offer a catalog of over 5 million classical recordings to Apple Music subscribers at no additional cost.
The app, which will be iPhone-only at launch, has been anticipated for months. Apple acquired Primephonic, a classical music streaming service in August 2021, and said at the time that it would release an Apple-branded classical music streaming service the following year. 2022 came and went without a new app, but references to the new service began appearing in iOS beta releases, leading observers to believe that a release was imminent.
Apple says that Classical’s 5 million tracks, which include thousands of exclusives, is the largest in the world and has “complete and accurate” metadata. The company also says in the app’s release notes:
Apple Music Classical also makes it easy for beginners to get acquainted with the genre thanks to hundreds of Essentials playlists, insightful composer biographies, deep-dive guides for many key works, and intuitive browsing features.
Classical’s search will also be optimized for the genre, include editorial content, and be streamed at up to 192 kHz/24-bit Hi-Res Lossless, with thousands of tracks supporting spatial audio with Dolby Atmos.
Users can pre-order the free app today from the App Store, which will be downloaded to their iPhones on March 28th when the app goes live.
This week on AppStories, we cover the increasing competition among web browsers and the emerging features we find most useful.
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On AppStories+, I struggle with security cameras, Federico’s desk setup continues to evolve, and we share our theories on the popularity of web-first apps.
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Source: david-smith.org.
100 million of anything is a lot, and 100 million downloads on the App Store are rare. Rarer still, and perhaps unprecedented, is 100 million downloads of an app made by one person.
When it comes to apps, I can’t think of a single app made by an indie developer that has reached the milestone that David Smith did today with Widgetsmith. The app, which was released in September 2020 alongside iOS 13, lets users create personalized Home Screen widgets using photos, text, weather data, and more. Since its release, the array of customization options has continued to expand, and last fall, Lock Screen widgets were added to the mix. Most recently, Widgetsmith was updated with gradient backgrounds.
It’s been remarkable to watch Widgetsmith take the app world by storm. Thinking back to the summer of 2020 when Federico and I were testing Widgetsmith, I remember liking it, but I know neither of us had the slightest inkling that it would go viral the way it did not long after its release. Congratulations, Dave. Widgetsmith’s success is well-deserved.
Don’t miss Dave’s post on his website about Widgetsmith’s milestone. Also, the latest gradient background update to the app is available now as a free update on the App Store.
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