Posts in Linked

Apple Music’s Archaic Album Categorization→

Benjamin Mayo sums up one of the most annoying features of Apple Music: the way the service thinks everything is an “album”, making it extremely inconvenient to find what you’re looking for.

These artefacts of compact discs show up again when looking at an artist page. What a human would think of as an artist’s albums, and what Apple Music lists, are completely different. EPs, singles, specials, deluxe, originals are all shoehorned under one name ‘Albums’. There is no way to filter these out. This really makes finding what you want hard. When you know what you want to find, all this backwardly organised catalogue gets in your way.

There has to be a better method than packaging everything up with the same ‘album’ label. This is not a hard problem, I thought to myself. In fact, it’s already been solved … by Spotify. As you have probably noticed by now, I have included a graphical illustration of Apple Music’s biggest flaw alongside this article. If you can’t see it, your browser isn’t wide enough. If you are reading outside of a browser, like RSS, this probably won’t show up for you either. Use a browser. I encountered this exact scenario in my first day of using the service. I did not fabricate it.

Don’t miss the effective visualization of this problem on his post.

I like Apple Music, but this has been a problem since the service launched almost three years ago, and it’s time for a fix.

Here’s what makes this even more annoying: Beats Music – the very service Apple Music is largely based on – visualized albums, compilations, and different editions in separate tabs/views. Two of the worst Apple Music features (album categorization and the separation of playlists made by you vs. those made by others) had already been fixed by Beats Music, but Apple went for an inferior design that is still with us today.

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‘sodes Embodies Beauty and Minimalism in a Podcast Player→

Jared Sinclair launched a new iPhone app today, ‘sodes. Short for ‘episodes,’ the app offers a simple, no-frills podcast listening experience.

Unsurprisingly considering Sinclair’s previous work, ‘sodes is a beautiful app. Perhaps my favorite designed area is the Now Playing view; after I first tried it, going back to another app’s Now Playing screen was painful. The app especially shines on the iPhone X’s full-width display. As was highlighted in Federico and John’s discussion on AppStories last year, an indie app’s little human touches can elicit such delight – and ‘sodes is a great example of that.

‘sodes was designed to be nearly feature-absent (at least to the user’s eye), so you won’t find things like chapter support, Smart Speed, playlists, or any such extras. You can adjust the duration of skips forward and back, there are multiple color themes, and playback speed can be set anywhere from 0.5x to 2x – but that’s about it. Mainly, the app gives you podcasts in a clean, minimal, delightful wrapper. If that’s enough for you, you might just love it.

‘sodes is available on the App Store.

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Connected, Episode 180: Our True Tiny Head Form→

We have HomePod opinions, dreams about WWDC and an amazing new t-shirt.

On this week’s episode of Connected, we talk about our HomePod impressions and Apple’s plans for iOS and macOS this year. You can listen here.

As a side note, we’ve launched a new t-shirt design for Connected. You can find the t-shirt (in three colors) on Cotton Bureau.

I think this artwork (by the talented Chris Rowland) is amazing, and I’d love to see many of these t-shirts at WWDC later this year. You can get yours here.

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HomePod Leaving Residue on Some Wooden Furniture→

John Voorhees' HomePod ring; the device now sits on a coaster.

John Voorhees’ HomePod ring; the device now sits on a coaster.

Nearly a week after its launch, HomePod owners are discovering that in some cases, the device leaves a white ring in its place when stored on wood furniture. John Chase of The Wirecutter reports:

An unhappy discovery after we placed a HomePod on an oiled butcher-block countertop and later on a wooden side table was that it left a defined white ring in the surface. Other reviewers and owners (such as Pocket-lint, and folks on Twitter) have reported the same issue, which an Apple representative has confirmed. Apple says “the marks can improve over several days after the speaker is removed from the wood surface,” and if they don’t fade on their own, you can basically just go refinish the furniture—the exact advice Apple gave in an email to Wirecutter was to “try cleaning the surface with the manufacturer’s suggested oiling method.”…In other testing, we have seen no visible damage when using it on glass, granite countertop, nice MDF, polyurethane-sealed wood, and cheap IKEA bookcases.

Among the MacStories team, Federico and John have both encountered this issue, while I have not. Serenity Caldwell of iMore explains the inconsistency:

Not all whole-wood table finishes are alike: Certain wood oil treatments include drying agents that have organic compounds present in them — compounds that could potentially interact with the silicone in Apple’s base.

It appears that for those who will face this problem, it doesn’t take more than a couple days for the white ring to become at least faintly visible. If you’re not seeing anything after several days of HomePod use, it’s likely that your furniture will be fine, but if you’re concerned, using a coaster seems like the best low-budget fix at this point.

Update: Also per Serenity Caldwell, Apple has now put together an official support document, dubbed “Cleaning and taking care of HomePod.” It provides official details regarding HomePod and wooden surfaces:

It is not unusual for any speaker with a vibration-dampening silicone base to leave mild marks when placed on some wooden surfaces. The marks can be caused by oils diffusing between the silicone base and the table surface, and will often go away after several days when the speaker is removed from the wooden surface. If not, wiping the surface gently with a soft damp or dry cloth may remove the marks. If marks persist, clean the surface with the furniture manufacturer’s recommended cleaning process. If you’re concerned about this, we recommend placing your HomePod on a different surface.

The new document also addresses the matter of cleaning HomePod – only with a dry cloth, or, if necessary, a slightly damp one – and informs users to keep HomePod away from liquids and heat sources.

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An In-Depth, Technical Analysis of the HomePod Concludes It’s a Bona Fide Audiophile Speaker→

Given Apple’s emphasis on the audio quality of the HomePod, the lack of technical reviews from audiophile publications at launch struck me as odd. That’s why I was intrigued when I saw this tweet last night from Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing:

https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/962883051184275456

The review, by Reddit user WinterCharm in the audiophile subreddit, is an in-depth, technical analysis of the HomePod that includes a side-by-side comparison with a pair of KEF X300A high-end bookshelf speakers that sell for $1000 at retail. There’s a lot here that is beyond my limited understanding of audio equipment and testing, but the conclusion of WinterCharm’s hours of analysis is crystal clear:

I am speechless. The HomePod actually sounds better than the KEF X300A. If you’re new to the Audiophile world, KEF is a very well respected and much loved speaker company. I actually deleted my very first measurements and re-checked everything because they were so good, I thought I’d made an error. Apple has managed to extract peak performance from a pint sized speaker, a feat that deserves a standing ovation. The HomePod is 100% an Audiophile grade Speaker.

Judging from the comments to the post, WinterCharm isn’t the only audiophile excited about the HomePod and eager to try two as a stereo pair when that feature is released in a future software update.

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Loup Ventures’ HomePod Siri Tests→

Loup Ventures, a US-based venture capital firm, ran a series of Siri tests on the HomePod to evaluate the assistant’s capabilities on Apple’s new speaker. After 782 queries, Siri understood 99% of questions but only answered 52% of them correctly – meaning, Siri on the HomePod failed to answer one out of two questions. I’d love to see a full data set of the questions asked by Loup Ventures, but, overall, it doesn’t surprise me that the Google Assistant running on the Google Home speaker was the most accurate in every category.

While Apple has clearly a lot of work ahead for Siri on the HomePod (this was the consensus of all the reviews, too), it also appears that Siri simply performs worse than other assistants because it doesn’t support certain domains. Here’s Gene Munster (whom you may remember for his Apple TV set predictions), writing on the Loup Ventures blog:

Adding domains will quickly improve Siri’s score. Some domains like navigation, calendar, email, and calling are simply not supported. These questions were met with, “I can’t ___ on HomePod.” Also, in any case that iPhone-based Siri would bring up Google search results, HomePod would reply, “I can’t get the answer to that on HomePod,” which forces you to use your phone or give up on the question altogether. Removing navigation, calling, email, and calendar-related queries from our question set yields a 67% correct response, a jump from overall of 52.3% correct. This means added support for these domains would bring HomePod performance above that of Alexa (64%) and Cortana (57%), though still shy of Google Home (81%). We know Siri has the ability to correctly answer a whole range of queries that HomePod cannot, evidenced by our note here. Apple’s limiting of HomePod’s domains should change over time, at which point we expect the speaker to be vastly more useful and integrated with your other Apple devices.

Adding new supported domains would make Siri’s intelligence comparable to Alexa (at least according to these tests), but Apple shouldn’t strive for a honorable second place. Siri should be just as intelligent (if not more) than the Google Assistant on every platform. I wonder, though, if this can be achieved in the short term given Siri’s fragmentation problems and limited third-party integrations.

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The Problem of Many Siris→

Bryan Irace writes about one of the biggest challenges Apple faces with Siri:

It’s no easy task for a voice assistant to win over new users in 2018, despite having improved quite a great deal in recent years. These assistants can be delightful and freeing when they work well, but when they don’t, they have a tendency to make users feel embarrassed and frustrated in a way that GUI software rarely does. If one of your first voice experiences doesn’t go the way you expected it to – especially in front of other people – who could blame you for reverting back to more comfortable methods of interaction? Already facing this fundamental challenge, Apple is not doing themselves any favors by layering on the additional cognitive overhead of a heavily fragmented Siri experience.

I think Irace is right on in this observation – Siri’s fragmentation is a real problem.

On the more optimistic side, it could be taken as good news that the fix appears fairly obvious: create a single Siri that’s consistent across all platforms. This seems like it would be a clear net positive, even though such a change could reduce Siri’s accuracy in some cases; for example, I’m guessing Siri on the Apple TV is currently tuned to expect TV and movie queries more than anything else, so it can more effectively produce the right kind of results – tweak that tuning, and Apple will have to work even harder at helping Siri understand context.

One thing that’s concerning about the apparent simplicity of this fix is that Apple hasn’t made it yet, meaning, perhaps, that the company thinks there’s nothing wrong with Siri’s current fragmentation. This conversation would be different entirely if Apple had begun showing an increased effort to unify Siri across its platforms, but recently, the opposite has been true instead. The latest major Apple product, HomePod, includes a stripped-down Siri that can’t even handle calendar requests. And SiriKit, which launched less than two years ago, was designed in a way that fundamentally increases fragmentation. Irace remarks:

If the Lyft app is installed on your iPhone, you can ask Phone Siri to order you a car. But you can’t ask Mac Siri to do the same, because she doesn’t know what Lyft is. Compare and contrast this with the SDKs for Alexa and the Google Assistant – they each run third-party software server-side, such that installing the Lyft Alexa “skill” once gives Alexa the ability to summon a ride regardless of if you’re talking to her on an Echo in your bedroom, a different Echo in your living room, or via the Alexa app on your phone.

The only recent occasion that comes to mind when Siri has moved in the right direction – gaining knowledge on one platform that previously existed only on another – was when iOS 10.2 brought the full wealth of Apple TV Siri’s movie and TV expertise to iOS. This only happened, though, because iOS 10.2 introduced the TV app.

Until Siri can answer the same requests regardless of what platform you’re on, most people simply won’t learn to trust it. Users shouldn’t have to remember which device’s Siri can answer which questions – all they should have to remember is those two key words: “Hey Siri.”

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Connected , Episode 179: The Tiny Head Pandemic→

The boys are joined by Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge to talk about a rash of App Store rejections regarding the use of emoji. After that, discussion turns to HomePod reviews and the possibilities of watchOS 5.

Another fun episode of Connected this week, with a great discussion about a recent emoji controversy with the Master of emoji himself, Jeremy Burge. You can listen here.

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