In a surprise announcement following a string of daily releases this week, Apple today announced a major update to AirPods, the company’s wireless earbuds. As widely speculated over the past several months, the new generation AirPods come with support for hands-free ‘Hey Siri’ activation, feature improved performance over the original AirPods (which launched in late 2016), and support wireless charging (using the Qi standard) via an optional case.
Reading Apps
John
Phil Schiller Interviewed on ATP→
Apple’s Phil Schiller was a guest on the latest episode of ATP. I listened to the interview this morning, and I think Marco, Casey, and John did an excellent job in getting Schiller’s perspective on how Apple approaches WWDC, the relationship with indie developers and bigger companies, and more. I strongly disagree with Schiller’s thoughts on the ideal box lunch, but it’s a fantastic interview and you should listen here.
Forcing macOS to Use the aptX or AAC Codecs for Bluetooth Headphones
I own a pair of Sony WH-1000XM3 noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones, but until recently I had no idea that, when used with my Mac mini, macOS would default to using the SBC audio codec instead of the superior aptX and AAC codecs (which have higher bandwidth and lower latency than SBC – see this article...
Prorated Upgrades to Annual Subscriptions
Today I would like to remind Club MacStories members of a somewhat hidden option available through the Memberful platform that we use to manage memberships and our monthly/annual plans. If you’re a Club MacStories member paying monthly, you can switch your subscription to annual with an upgrade process that will automatically apply a prorated...
Turning Individual Reminders into GoodTask URLs
I was recently working on an advanced Evernote shortcut to create a table for article ideas I have (you can see a preview of it at the top of this story), and I reached the point where I wondered if it was possible to reopen a specific reminder (previously saved in iOS’ built-in Reminders...
Connected, Episode 234: Photo Manage Spotify Out of Existence→
Stephen introduces his co-hosts to a groundbreaking iPad drawing application, Federico starts a new mini-series and Myke buries the lede concerning Spotify.
On this week’s episode of Connected, we started a new mini-series about improvements we’d like to see in Apple services, starting with Apple Music. You can listen here.
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Reconsidering Evernote in 2019
Like the best origin stories, this article comes from humble beginnings. A few weeks ago, I had the idea of adapting my shortcut to save webpage selections from Safari (see Weekly 151, 152, and 153) to make it work with Keep It rather than a JSON file. Simple enough, right? Given a text selection in Safari, I wanted to see if I could create a shortcut to append rich text to an existing document in Keep It without launching the app.
As Club MacStories members know, Keep It is the app I’ve been using for the past several months to hold my research material, which played an essential role in the making of my iOS 12 review (see Issues 135 and 144) of MacStories Weekly). But then I remembered that Keep It’s integration with Shortcuts was limited to URL schemes and that the app did not offer Siri shortcuts to append content to existing notes1. That was the beginning of a note-taking vision quest that culminated in this column, even though I’m not sure I reached the destination I was originally seeking.