Pro iPad Apps and Where iOS Holds Them Back After announcing tickets for their live WWDC show and judging their predictions for Apple’s media event and breaking a score between Stephen and Myke, the guys share their impressions of the new AirPods, Apple News+ and more.
On this week’s episode of Connected, we grade our predictions for Apple’s media event and discuss some of the news related to services and AirPods. You can listen here.
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In a statement first reported by TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino, Apple has confirmed that AirPower, the wireless charger with support for multiple devices first announced in September 2017, has been cancelled.
“After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project. We apologize to those customers who were looking forward to this launch. We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push the wireless experience forward,” said Dan Riccio, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering in an emailed statement today.
Voice Search for Notes from the Shortcuts Widget Earlier this week, Apple released Shortcuts 2.2, a substantial update to the app that, in addition to fixes for iCloud sync and enhanced Travel Time actions, has brought a new integration with Apple Notes. As I detailed in my coverage on MacStories, the new Notes actions allow Shortcuts to access contents of individual notes,...
I’ll be in San Jose for the week of WWDC, and for the second year we will be hosting a live recording of Connected at Hammer Theatre Center on Wednesday, June 5.
Last year’s live show was amazing, and we promise this year’s edition will be the most entertaining live show of the entire week of WWDC. There will be surprises involved.
You should act fast though: tickets for the orchestra level are already sold out, but you can still get one for the parterre and balcony levels. The Hammer Theatre is a beautiful venue; even on the balcony level, you won’t be far from the stage.
https://twitter.com/imyke/status/1111311052241809408
You can get your ticket here. It’s going to be fun, and I hope you’ll join us.
I don’t think I need to extol the virtues of AirPods in 2019. Over two years after their debut, Apple’s truly-wireless earbuds, in addition to providing users with a convenient, seamless way to stream music and podcasts to their ears, have become a cultural phenomenon that has spurred some of the greatest memes of Tech Twitter in recent history. Everybody loves AirPods – provided their unique size and design fit their ears – and, most of all, everybody likes to say how much they love their AirPods.
This article is no different, but there’s a small twist in the usual narrative that prompted me to write this story after receiving my second-generation AirPods yesterday.
Shortcuts 2.2, the second major update to Apple’s automation app following October’s 2.1 release, has been released on the App Store today. The new version of Shortcuts, which has been available to developers for testing via TestFlight for several weeks now, brings a variety of smaller refinements and bug fixes; more importantly, it extends Shortcuts’ integration with one of Apple’s most popular built-in apps: Notes. Additionally, Shortcuts 2.2 builds upon the existing ‘Get Travel Time’ action (based on the Apple Maps framework) with new Magic Variables well suited for shortcuts that integrate with Siri.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been building advanced shortcuts that take advantage of the new actions for Notes and Maps, which I’m going to explain and share in this article. The new shortcuts are also available through the MacStories Shortcuts Archive, which now features a dedicated Apple Notes section as well. Let’s dive in.
Lukas I. Alpert, writing for The Wall Street Journal about the terms between The Wall Street Journal and Apple for the newspaper’s presence on the Apple News+ service:
The Apple app will surface stories thought to be of interest to a general reader—that could be national news, politics, sports and leisure news, but also some business news, people familiar with the situation said. The paper’s entire slate of business and financial news will also be searchable within the app, but the thinking is that most users won’t consume much beyond what is actively presented to them.
Apple users will have access to only three days’ worth of the Journal’s archive, the people said. The Journal also negotiated terms that would allow it to drop out of the service, they said.
“I have not entered into this deal lightly,” Mr. Lewis said in his newsroom talk. “It was never worth doing a bad deal.”
The whole story, despite being about the WSJ and on the WSJ, is reported as a rumor based on what “people said” about a newsroom staff meeting with William Lewis, chief executive of Dow Jones & Co. and publisher of the Journal. It is, effectively, a case of The Wall Street Journal reporting news about itself as a rumor.
Fortunately, William Lewis himself published an official memo on the Dow Jones press website:
WSJ members will continue to have exclusive access to the rich business reporting and analysis about which they are so passionate. Apple News+ introduces an entirely new category of readers who will have the opportunity to experience a specially curated collection of general interest news from The Wall Street Journal. As a result, our newsroom will grow. This is an investment in quality journalism.
While today’s announcement focuses on Apple News+, our collaboration with Apple will also extend to areas like video, voice, market data and AI. I will have more to share on those plans in the coming weeks and months.
“A specially curated collection of general interest news from The Wall Street Journal” sounds like a smaller selection of what you’d otherwise get with a “real” subscription to the WSJ through the web.
Earlier today I tweeted that with Apple News+ I might be able to stop paying my more expensive subscription to the WSJ and just use the Apple News+ channel instead. Now I’m not so sure I should cancel the subscription after all: I don’t like the idea of having three days to catch up on stories I want to read, and it sounds like certain stories will only be available through search. I’m going to keep my standalone WSJ subscription active for now until I fully figure out what the experience in Apple News+ is like.
Earlier today, Apple launched Apple News+, a new subscription-based service to gain access to hundreds of magazines in the Apple News app for $9.99/month. You can read my overview and first impressions here.
After taking an initial look at Apple News+ with my US Apple ID and noticing the differences between Apple News Format-optimized magazines and standard “PDF-like” ones, I thought it’d be interesting and useful to compile the full list of all magazines currently available to Apple News+ subscribers in the US.
Below, you will find the complete list of all 251 magazines that are available for Apple News+ in the United States. The list was compiled by checking all the magazines featured in the ‘Browse the Catalog’ section of Apple News+ as well as individual categories. Apple advertises “300 publications” as being available in Apple News+; I believe that the list below is shorter for two reasons:
To create this list, I manually opened each magazine and annotated whether its latest issue was using Apple News Format or the standard, PDF-like format. Magazines that support Apple News Format are labeled with “(ANF)” in the list. The split between Apple News Format magazines and standard magazines is fairly even: 125 magazines are using the richer Apple News Format in their latest issue, while 126 of them are relying on traditional PDFs (likely the format the old Texture service was using).
In simpler terms, this means that 49.8% of the magazines I counted in this list are using Apple News Format. As I wrote in my overview earlier today, I hope more and more publishers will switch to the mobile-friendly, more versatile Apple News Format in future issues.
That being said, you can find the complete list of 251 magazines I found in Apple News+ below. If I missed any, please let me know.
John
