It helps you take regular breaks from your Mac to rest your eyes, without breaking your flow.
Music Part 2: Music Discovery, Playback, and Utility Apps
Music Part 1: How We Listen 
This week, Federico and John talk about Apple Arcade’s big expansion and the iOS component of John’s retro gaming project before beginning a new mini-series focused on music. For the first installment, Federico and John focus on hardware and services, covering their current setups, how they listen to music, and the services they use.
Chris Plante, writing for Polygon on today’s major Apple Arcade news:
Microsoft’s and Apple’s bets on downloadable subscription services would seemingly place them behind their streaming counterparts in the long run, but that’s not quite the case. Their success shows that they’re neither ahead of the curve nor behind it; they’re simply meeting the expectations of their players. Apple debuted 30 games on Friday on a service that costs $4.99 a month and is often included in larger Apple product purchases for free. Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate tier costs $14.99 a month and includes games on Xbox console, Windows PC, and Android devices — and will now regularly feature launch-day releases from Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, and even Sony, along with a rotating collection of more than 100 catalog titles. They’re providing the best deals in gaming at this moment.
Compare Friday’s news and these strategies with other industry announcements from this week. Nintendo ceased selling a digital collection of Mario games for no greater reason than artificial scarcity, despite already hosting an online subscription service that could house the games. And Sony confirmed that it will be closing its digital storefronts for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation Vita — with no clarity on how or if those venues or their games will be preserved, let alone be made available in the future.
The fact that Apple, possibly inspired by Microsoft, has a real chance to do game preservation better than Sony is not a sentence I would have expected to type in 2021.
See also: my story from 2018, App Preservation: Saving the App Store’s History, featuring – among others – Zach Gage, who brought four classic games to Apple Arcade today.
Using a Kobo Forma eReader to Centralize Books and Read-Later Content As Club MacStories members and AppStories listeners should know by now, I’ve been on a journey to find the ideal read-later solution for me for several weeks. I tested a variety of apps and services, and I thought I had ultimately landed on saving articles found in Safari as “personal documents” to my Kindle...
Three Months with Spotify It’s been just a little over three months since I switched from Apple Music to Spotify and sprung a surprise on John on Episode 200 of AppStories. So how’s the experiment going? I’ll cut right to the chase: not only am I glad I decided to give Spotify a try for the entire year,...
Earlier today, Spotify announced their latest feature rollout for both free and premium users: Spotify Mixes. Inspired by the Daily Mix, which the company introduced in 2016, Spotify Mixes are a collection of personalized playlists tailored specifically to each user and available in three main “flavors”: in the updated Made for You hub (which you can find in the Search page), you’ll find Artist Mixes, Genre Mixes, and Decade Mixes.
Here’s how Spotify says these new playlists will work:
Each mix is created with you at the core, based on your listening habits and the artists, genres, and decades you listen to most. They’re rooted in familiarity, meaning that you won’t just hear your favorite artists, but your favorite songs from those artists.
Then, we supplement by adding in songs we think you’ll love, meaning they’ll be filled with the music you have on repeat alongside some fresh picks. So whether you want to jam out to a specific artist or hear more music from another decade, there’s a mix just for you.
According to Spotify, these new mixes will update over time to reflect your listening habits and will present a dynamic collection of playlists from different artists, genres, and decades, including both songs you already know and new ones the service thinks you might like.
I received the new Spotify Mixes this morning and, as you can see in the image above, they provide an eerily accurate representation of my diverse music preferences – from late 90s Placebo and mid 2000s emo punk to modern artists such as Pale Waves and Taylor Swift.
As I’m writing almost on a weekly basis now, I’m impressed with Spotify’s ongoing streak of product launches and understanding of what their users seek in the service. With genre filters, the ability to shuffle liked songs based on mood, and now mixes for decades and artists, Spotify helps me enjoy and rediscover music in any moment of the day; so far, I’m glad I decided to switch from Apple Music for a year.
Apple at Home This week, Federico and John scrutinize Apple’s home strategy from its discontinued Airport routers and HomePod to the Apple TV, HomePod mini, HomeKit routers, the Home app, and more, plus ongoing browser and calendar experiments, and the hunt for an elusive keyboard continues.
Trying Firefox as My Default Browser on iPhone and iPad It all started when I remembered how my friend Myke Hurley always complains about Safari’s tab view on iPhone. As Club MacStories members should know at this point, I’ve spent the past few months exploring a variety of options for read-later apps. I’ve tried so many, and ultimately came away thinking the perfect solution...
As announced by Spotify last week, the company is rolling out a refreshed home hub in its mobile app featuring a new Recently Played section, an easier way to stream new releases from your favorite artists, and shortcuts to play and resume podcast episodes with one tap:
About a year ago, we reworked the Spotify mobile experience to refresh our Home interface. Since then, Spotify users have been able to access the content they love more quickly and easily—and maybe even discover something new straight from their home screen. But the ease and discovery don’t stop there. This month, we’re announcing a series of updates that will make the Home experience even more personalized for each and every listener.
We’re constantly working on ways to improve our user experience. Through this latest update, we’ll be rolling out several advancements on the mobile Home hub designed to make finding the audio you love easier and more intuitive. These will roll out to users globally on iOS and Android this month.
The redesigned home hub is the latest announcement in a series of recent product updates, including genre and mood filters for liked songs, real-time lyrics, and the upcoming lossless tier.
In my tests with Spotify this year, I’ve been positively impressed by the company’s pace of updates. What I find particularly intriguing in the refreshed home hub design is the integration with podcasts: I was very skeptical of blending music and podcasts in the same app when I switched to Spotify at the end of last year, but the more I use it, the more I understand why podcast listening in Spotify is growing rapidly. There’s something about making both kinds of audio content accessible in one place that works well for removing friction from having to choose what I want to listen to. I’m curious to see how Spotify will balance music and podcast episodes in new home hub (which I don’t have in my Spotify app yet).
John