This week Fraser and Federico take their Apple Pencils in hand and share some notes on taking notes with the iPad Pro.
We’ve covered some excellent Pencil-based note-taking apps for iPad on this week’s Canvas, and also explained why the Pencil is a must-have accessory for iPad Pro owners. You can listen here.
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Apple has a new ad, Casey has an iMac, Ticci watches TV and everyone has workflows.
On today’s Connected, we covered a lot of the automations we’ve created with Workflow, as well as some custom workflows I’ve built for MacStories. You can listen here.
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Our review of the Nintendo Switch, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (with no story spoilers).
On this week’s Remaster, we share our first impressions of the Nintendo Switch after a week of play, and I spend 30 minutes going through my notes on Breath of the Wild. This is a good one. You can listen here.
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Dieter Bohn of The Verge reports on some major changes coming soon to Google Hangouts. Google’s new strategy for the service aims to make Hangouts a formidable Slack competitor as a team collaboration tool. The changes are focused in two main areas:
Bohn adds:
Google Hangouts has been having an identity crisis ever since Google tried to relaunch it as an end-all, be-all replacement for Gchat. It’s been ping-ponging between Google Plus, business video chat, Google Voice, Project Fi, SMS, and lord knows what else. Focusing on business chat seems like a better strategy — and thankfully one that doesn’t feel beholden to some other Google product with a dubious future. Hangouts is fully a Google Cloud / G Suite product now, and it will be developed for those users.
Google’s changes to Hangouts follow recent moves by Facebook and Microsoft in the collaborative chat space. These days, it seems everyone wants a piece of the workplace collaboration pie.
Apple added collaboration tools to iWork last year, but otherwise the company has shown no signs of creating its own competitor to Slack. I do wonder, though, how iMessage could potentially evolve in the future to serve many of the needs that tools like Slack currently meet. The user base is already there, and iMessage Apps could provide the extensibility needed to compete with Slack.
The question, however, is not “Could Apple do it?” Instead, it’s “Would they want to?” They could very well be content to simply serve as the platform where these competing services live.
Stephen Nellis, writing for Reuters, shares an interesting look into Apple’s method for teaching Siri a new language:
At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, an acoustic model is built that tries to predict words sequences.
Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator, in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.
After enough data has been gathered and a voice actor has been recorded to play Siri in a new language, Siri is released with answers to what Apple estimates will be the most common questions, Acero said. Once released, Siri learns more about what real-world users ask and is updated every two weeks with more tweaks.
The report also shares that one of Siri’s next languages will be Shanghainese, a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in Shanghai and surrounding areas. This addition will join the existing 21 languages Siri currently speaks, which are localized across a total of 36 different countries.
Debating the strengths and weaknesses of Siri has become common practice in recent years, particularly as competing voice assistants from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have grown more intelligent. But one area Siri has long held the lead over its competition is in supporting a large variety of different languages. It doesn’t seem like Apple will be slowing down in that regard.
In the last two days, updates to the official Twitter and Dropbox apps for iOS have added an option to clear the contents of their caches.
Cache management has always been an issue on iOS: some apps can accumulate several hundred MBs of cached data and there isn’t an easy way to purge all these separate app caches, which is why companies are implementing their own custom solutions. Currently, Facebook has a cache of 534 MB on my iPhone; Twitter and Instagram have 365 MB; Super Mario Run, GIPHY, and Google Maps have 340 MB stored in cache.
These numbers add up, particularly if you don’t buy Apple’s highest-capacity iPhone models. I appreciate that developers are fixing this problem themselves, but Apple should add a native option in the iOS Settings app to clear app caches more easily.
This week, Stephen talks about a possible iMac Pro while his co-hosts play Zelda. They come back to round robin some things that they find frustrating about working from iOS and the iPad.
On this week’s Connected, we share some more thoughts on USB-C and describe the areas where iOS is still lagging behind the Mac. You can listen here.
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Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5Mac:
As we reported exclusively last night, Apple Pay is now live in Ireland. The service allows iPhone and Apple Watch owners to use the NFC chips in their devices to pay for their shopping at contactless terminals in retail stores across the country.
Apple Pay requires iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, iPhone SE, iPhone 7, or any Apple Watch, and is launching with support for Ulster Bank and KBC in Ireland. Apple has also announced that the service is coming soon to Italy.
I’ve been waiting for Apple Pay to launch in Italy, and I’m glad to see Apple has confirmed the service will roll out “soon”. However, as I feared, my bank – despite being one of the largest banking groups in Italy – is not going to be supported at launch. This has happened with 14 other countries (including Ireland) before, though, and I hope Apple will quickly get other major Italian banks on board.
This week Fraser and Federico tackle a core part of iOS: the Share Sheet.
For this week’s Canvas, we asked ourselves a question: how difficult could it be to explain the iOS share sheet and its inner workings? To find out, you can listen here.
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