For AirPods Early Adopters, Apple’s Hit Wireless Earbuds Are Showing Their Age →

Linked By Federico Viticci

I found myself nodding in agreement with this post by Zac Hall about how AirPods purchased in December 2016 are starting to show their age in terms of battery life:

Apple rates AirPods for up to five hours usage at 50% volume, and early testing proved that rating was actually slightly conservative. In practice, brand new AirPods could last almost five and a half hours before their batteries depleted. The carrying case doubles as a charging case, too, providing over 24 hours of battery life without needing to recharge from the wall.

But batteries are consumable, we all know so well now, and that’s proven true for the tiny batteries inside AirPods after two years of daily use. Battery life that once exceeded five hours now struggles to power AirPods through three hours of continuous usage at the same volume. Battery life results can be cut in half if you need to play audio at a louder volume.

In practice, I used to never hear the low battery alert during usage. I rarely listened to audio with AirPods for five straight hours before charging in the carrying case without thought. More recently, I’ve heard the bloop sound much more regularly, frequently followed by AirPods dying before I’m ready to recharge.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately (in fact, I proposed it as a topic for this week’s Connected) and I feel like Hall and I have gone through the same process. When my AirPods were new, I could listen to a full episode of Upgrade or Cortex at max volume and still have plenty of battery life left; now I cannot get to the end of an episode (roughly 90 minutes in length) without hearing the low-battery alert. My AirPods can’t hold a charge like they used to and I’m not surprised.

I could buy a fresh pair of AirPods now, but that seems like a waste of money given the (possible?) upcoming release of a new model. I could buy a third-party wireless charging adapter to make charging the case more convenient, but I don’t feel comfortable with an unofficial, bulky add-on case, which wouldn’t fix the battery issue of the AirPods anyway. I love my AirPods – they’re one of my favorite Apple products in recent years alongside the iPad Pro and Apple Watch – but I’m reaching the point where I’m always charging them, and I really want Apple to release whatever they’ve been working on.

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Hands On with iOS 12.2’s HomeKit Support for Smart TVs

By Federico Viticci

As I noted yesterday, the launch of the developer beta of iOS 12.2 has brought the necessary underlying APIs for manufacturers of smart TVs seeking to integrate their television sets with HomeKit. Originally announced at CES 2019, the initiative encompasses both the HomeKit and AirPlay 2 technologies, which the likes of Samsung, LG, Vizio, and Sony will roll out (albeit to varying degrees) in their upcoming smart TVs over the course of 2019. Thanks to the HomeKit Accessory Protocol and the work of enterprising third-party developers, however, it is already possible to get an idea of what the HomeKit part of these integrations will be like by installing unofficial plugins that add HomeKit compatibility to existing TV sets via software.

Thanks to developer (and homebridge contributor) Khaos Tian, I’ve been able to test native HomeKit integration with my 2017 LG TV running webOS, which does not currently support HomeKit out of the box and which, according to LG, will not receive an official software update for HomeKit support in iOS and tvOS 12.2. In this post, I’m going to share my first impressions of HomeKit’s new TV features in the iOS 12.2 beta, describe how it all works in practice, and share some suggestions for changes I’d like Apple to implement by the final release of iOS 12.2.

Developer Demos HomeKit’s New Integration with Smart TVs →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5Mac:

Developer Khaos Tian hacked the HomeKit protocol to simulate adding a smart TV accessory to the Home app. He shared some screenshots and videos of these features ‘in action’ …

By essentially faking the existence of a HomeKit-compatible Smart TV accessory on his network, he was able to add a television tile into his Home app.

This reveals new interfaces for controlling the TV. You can tap on the tile to turn it on or off and access the Details menu to change input.

Tian has posted a series of examples of this new HomeKit integration on his Twitter account, including one where he was able to control his LG TV running webOS from the iPhone’s Home app.

😉 it’s nice LG’s API can basically mapped 1:1 to HomeKit pic.twitter.com/idXgqEnrvQ

— Khaos Tian (@KhaosT) January 25, 2019

Interestingly, Tian has already contributed an update to homebridge – the third-party plugin to add all kinds of different accessories and platforms to HomeKit – with support for HomeKit’s new TV control APIs. Here’s where this gets really interesting for me: despite the launch of an online petition, LG has only confirmed that their latest 2019 TV sets will receive official HomeKit support. Thanks to homebridge, however, it should be possible to add native HomeKit integration to older LG televisions (such as my 2017 model) with plugins that bridge the webOS API to HomeKit’s new endpoints. This is precisely what Tian is doing for his demo.

Now, as someone who’s been running homebridge and the homebridge-webos-tv plugin for the past few months (and I promise I will write about this eventually), I’m excited about the idea of having a native interface for controlling my TV from the Home app (and, ideally, Siri too). As you can see, the plugin I’m currently using can only “fake” controls in the Home app by adding switches. It can get…confusing:

Configuring homebridge plugins (left) requires working with a JSON document.

But it works. I’ve been running homebridge and this plugin without issues for months now, and I’ve gotten so used to asking Siri to change inputs on my TV, I can’t imagine not having these integrations anymore. A recent update to homebridge-webos-tv even added support for individual channel input and more remote control buttons. For this reason, assuming that the folks at LG don’t change their mind and ship a HomeKit software update for older TV sets, I think I’m going to experiment with a dual setup for webOS TV support in HomeKit: some controls based on the official HomeKit API, and others provided as custom switches – both based on homebridge plugins. But that’s a story for another time.

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Connected, Episode 227: Caveats Ruin People →

Linked By Federico Viticci

After Stephen ruins the intro, Federico finally gets around to talking about his second iPad Pro and Myke shares a secret.

On this week’s episode of Connected, I finally addressed why I bought a second (11”) iPad Pro last December. You can listen here.

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Connected, Episode 226: The Instagram Secret Society →

Linked By Federico Viticci

The boys discuss a bunch of Apple products that may be receiving refreshes after years of neglect, including the iPad mini and iPod touch, then are taught how to edit photos like pros by Tyler Stalman.

If you want to get better at taking pictures on your iPhone, you don’t want to miss the second half of this week’s Connected. I learned a lot from Tyler and now have a handful of new apps to play with. You can listen here.

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Dates with Siri →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Before I get any further, let me tell you that some of what I’m going to say here was already covered by David Sparks in this post from almost six years ago. This was just a year and a half after the “beta” introduction of Siri with the iPhone 4S, and David was pleased with what Siri could do. I like a lot of what Siri can do with dates, too, but there are still some frustrating blind spots and inconsistencies. In fact, with one of David’s examples, Siri isn’t as convenient as it was six years ago.

Context has always been one of Siri’s weaknesses, and that’s where it failed Casey. Any normal human being would understand immediately that a question asked in January about days since a day in December is talking about the December of the previous year. But Siri ignores (or doesn’t understand) the word “since” and calculates the days until the next December 18.

Solid collection of examples of date calculations with Siri by Dr. Drang. As he notes, it’s not that Siri can’t answer complex questions involving dates – it’s that you often have to phrase your questions with an exact syntax that a computer program can understand. This is frustrating because Apple promotes Siri as a smart assistant that can infer context without a refined syntax. I still run into a similar problem with time zone conversions; of course, the old trick I used to rely on no longer works for me unless I preface the question with “Ask Wolfram”.

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Connected, Episode 225: The Bear Will Charge You →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Stephen, Myke and Federico kick off 2019 with annual predictions, a look at Apple’s recent TV moves and the most amazing Shortcut of all time.

On this week’s episode of Connected, we share our predictions for Apple in 2019. You can listen here.

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Apple Frames Shortcut, Now with Support for the 11” iPad Pro and Apple Watch Series 4 40mm

By Federico Viticci

Apple Frames, my shortcut to add device frames to screenshots taken on modern Apple devices, has been updated with support for the 11” iPad Pro and 40mm Apple Watch Series 4. This marks the second major update to Apple Frames, which now supports the following Apple devices:

iPhone 6, 7, 8, and X
iPhone XS and XS Max
iPad Pro 11” and 12.9” (2018 models)
Apple Watch Series 4 (44mm and 40mm)
MacBook Pro (Retina 13”)
iMac 5K

Apple Music Wrapped: A Shortcut to Visualize Your Most Listened Songs, Artists, and Genres of the Year

By Federico Viticci

When Spotify was my music streaming service of choice, one of the features I really liked was its personalized Wrapped report generated at the end of the year. I’ve always been a fan of geeky annual reports and stats about the usage of any given web service – be it Spotify, Pocket, or Toggl. I appreciate a detailed look at 12 months of collected data to gain some insight into my habits and patterns.

I’ve always been annoyed by the lack of a similar feature in Apple Music; I’m surprised that Apple still hasn’t added a native “Year in Review” option – a baffling omission given how the company is already collecting all of the necessary data points in the cloud. Official “Apple Music Wrapped” functionality would bolster the service’s catalog of personalized features, providing users with a “reward” at the end of the year in the form of reports and playlists to help them rediscover what they listened to over the past year.

But Apple doesn’t seem interested in adding this feature to Apple Music, so I decided to build my own using Shortcuts. The result is the most complex shortcut I’ve ever created comprising over 540 actions. It’s not perfect due to the limitations of iOS and Shortcuts, but it’s the closest I was able to come to replicating Spotify’s excellent Wrapped feature.

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