John
AppStories Episode 308 - Gone but Not Forgotten
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This week, Federico and John explore the Apple apps and features that have disappeared from its platforms in recent years.
Using a Workspace for Music Apps on iPadOS
I was chatting with some fellow members in the Club MacStories Discord earlier this week, and John pointed out that a screenshot I pasted for the setup I use to listen to music on my iPad Pro was worth writing about as a tip in MacStories Weekly. So here we go. Like other MacStories...
Achieving the Universal Control Dream
For the past month or so, I’ve been talking on AppStories and Connected about my new desk setup, which involves an iPad Pro and Apple Studio Display. Here’s a quick recap for those who don’t listen to the shows and may be new to this whole saga: After buying a house earlier this year, I...
Last.fm Turns 20 – and People Are Still Scrobbling→
I enjoyed this story about Last.fm’s 20th (!) anniversary by Jacob Kastrenakes, writing for The Verge:
I was a little surprised to see that Last.fm was still around when I first started writing this story, let alone that it had new communities flourishing around its data. (The company didn’t respond to a request for an interview.) But I suppose in a world where most services close off and hide your data, there’ll always be people looking for a way to track it and analyze it themselves. And in exchange, they get the joy of arguing about music stats every day — and not just once a year when Wrapped comes out.
My co-hosts on Connected like to make fun of me for being One of Those People Who Still Scrobbles, but I can honestly say it’s one of the best things I’ve done for my music consumption in the past few years. (That, plus having an offline library with albums I own that I can enjoy with my favorite headphones and amp – which I also scrobble via Roon.) Ever since I started scrobbling again last year thanks to Marvis Pro on iPhone and iPad (and NepTunes on the Mac), I’ve been able to enjoy some fascinating monthly and annual breakdowns of my music listening habits that go much more in depth than Apple Music or Spotify would ever want to.
In Internet years, it’s pretty wild for anything to turn 20 – let alone a service that faces competition from the likes of Apple and Spotify. And yet Last.fm has been able to carve a niche for itself by appealing to people like me, who want to know more about the music they listen to. Maybe it’s a weird thing to say in 2022, but if you listen to a lot of music every day, I can’t recommend dusting off your old Last.fm account enough.
Masto-Redirect, a Mastodon Shortcut to Redirect Profiles and Posts to Your Own Instance
Like many others over the past month, I’ve been thinking deeply about my experience with Twitter and whether I want to align my social media usage with the kind of platform Twitter is rapidly becoming. It’s a complex discussion (if my readers are still on Twitter, am I doing them a disservice by not using Twitter?), but in the meantime, I’ve decided to learn more about Mastodon. And in doing so, I came across an aspect of the service that I wanted to improve with a shortcut.
I created an account on Mastodon.social all the way back in 2018, and you can find me as @viticci there as well. I don’t want to turn this post into a guide to Mastodon (you can find an excellent one here), but, long story short, Mastodon is a decentralized service that is based on a federated network of instances. Essentially, there isn’t a single “Mastodon website” like, say, twitter.com; instead, there can be multiple Mastodon instances across different domains (hence why it’s “decentralized”) but, thanks to an underlying API, you can follow and be followed by people regardless of the instance they’re on. I can be on Mastodon.social, and you can be on Journa.host or Mastodon.online (different instances of Mastodon), but we can still communicate with one another via the protocol Mastodon uses. It’s like living in different countries but speaking the same language. You can read more about this here.
Nerding Out for the Holidays (Part 2)
Apple’s Taken the Joy out of its Books App with iOS 16→
I enjoyed this article by Mitchell Clark, writing for The Verge, about the removal of the classic page-turn animation from the redesigned Books app in iOS 16:
Apple Books has been my main reading app for years for one very specific reason: its page-turning animation is far and away the best in the business. Unfortunately, that went away with iOS 16 and has been replaced by a new animation that makes it feel like you’re moving cards through a deck instead of leafing through a digitized version of paper. And despite the fact that I’ve been trying to get used to the change since I got onto the beta in July, I still feel like Apple’s destroyed one of the last ways that my phone brought joy into my life.
I forgot to mention this in the Books section of my iOS 16 review. The Books app received a major redesign this year, and I’ve heard from quite a few people over the past few months about why, for serious readers like them, the new UI layout of the Books app is a regression from iOS 15. All that aside, however, I don’t understand why the page-turn animation – a fun, whimsical aspect of the Books UI that felt uniquely Apple – had to be taken away.
I agree with Mitchell on this: the page-turn animation should come back – if anything, as an optional setting.
Nerding Out for the Holidays (Part 1)
Two Tips for Improving the Club Experience on Apple Platforms
With Twitter probably meeting a sad and inevitable demise, I’m spending more time than ever in the Club MacStories Discord – which I want to optimize with new features and channels over the coming weeks – and I thought I’d share a tip that makes reopening Discord links from the Spotlight section of MacStories Weekly...