On this week’s episode of AppStories, we continue our discussion of iOS 13 wishes, this time focussing on HomeKit and Shortcuts.
Sponsored by:
Lukas I. Alpert, writing for The Wall Street Journal about the terms between The Wall Street Journal and Apple for the newspaper’s presence on the Apple News+ service:
The Apple app will surface stories thought to be of interest to a general reader—that could be national news, politics, sports and leisure news, but also some business news, people familiar with the situation said. The paper’s entire slate of business and financial news will also be searchable within the app, but the thinking is that most users won’t consume much beyond what is actively presented to them.
Apple users will have access to only three days’ worth of the Journal’s archive, the people said. The Journal also negotiated terms that would allow it to drop out of the service, they said.
“I have not entered into this deal lightly,” Mr. Lewis said in his newsroom talk. “It was never worth doing a bad deal.”
The whole story, despite being about the WSJ and on the WSJ, is reported as a rumor based on what “people said” about a newsroom staff meeting with William Lewis, chief executive of Dow Jones & Co. and publisher of the Journal. It is, effectively, a case of The Wall Street Journal reporting news about itself as a rumor.
Fortunately, William Lewis himself published an official memo on the Dow Jones press website:
WSJ members will continue to have exclusive access to the rich business reporting and analysis about which they are so passionate. Apple News+ introduces an entirely new category of readers who will have the opportunity to experience a specially curated collection of general interest news from The Wall Street Journal. As a result, our newsroom will grow. This is an investment in quality journalism.
While today’s announcement focuses on Apple News+, our collaboration with Apple will also extend to areas like video, voice, market data and AI. I will have more to share on those plans in the coming weeks and months.
“A specially curated collection of general interest news from The Wall Street Journal” sounds like a smaller selection of what you’d otherwise get with a “real” subscription to the WSJ through the web.
Earlier today I tweeted that with Apple News+ I might be able to stop paying my more expensive subscription to the WSJ and just use the Apple News+ channel instead. Now I’m not so sure I should cancel the subscription after all: I don’t like the idea of having three days to catch up on stories I want to read, and it sounds like certain stories will only be available through search. I’m going to keep my standalone WSJ subscription active for now until I fully figure out what the experience in Apple News+ is like.
Today at the Steve Jobs Theater, Apple held an event like no other in highlighting its new services in a variety of areas like TV, news, games, and even personal finance. There were no hardware announcements, but it was a fun event in its own right.
If you didn’t manage to catch the livestream of the keynote, Apple has now published the video in its entirety on its website.
You can follow all of our Apple event coverage through our March 25 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated March 25 RSS feed.
Speaking of Apple Music and Billie Eilish, Tim Ingham, writing at Music Business Worldwide, has an interview with Zane Lowe. It’s a good interview that covers a range of topics from how Lowe builds relationships with artists to what differentiates Apple Music and what they see in Billie Eilish.
An artist like Billie Eilish thinks in sounds, she thinks in colors, she thinks in visuals, she thinks in collaborations, she thinks in all kinds of different forms of creativity. When you’re dealing with an artist like that, it opens all these other areas that you can help build things around.
With Billie, there’s color everywhere, this attitude and it’s like, ‘Wow, this is really interesting.’ At Apple, because of where we’ve all come from, we understand streaming, but [we’re thinking], ‘How can we make a streaming service that is deeper and more layered and speaks to the aspects of music we grew up loving?’
I don’t ever want to look back on my time in the streaming era and think, ‘Yeah man, great job at just building a utility.’
Functionality is so important; [a service] needs to work and it needs to be intuitive. But there should 100% be room for creative discovery and it should be 100% driven by the artists, or at least in collaboration with artists.
See also: this interview with Billie Eilish and her brother/co-writer Finneas and Zane Lowe from last month. It was originally posted on Beats 1 but you can also watch the YouTube video below.
In addition to the new iPad Air and iPad mini, it looks like Logitech’s Crayon stylus, first introduced with the 6th generation iPad last year, will be compatible with the 2018 iPad Pro line too thanks to the upcoming iOS 12.2 software update. Jason Snell writes:
Over at 9to5 Mac, Zac Hall noticed that a few of us—at least myself and Nilay Patel from the Verge, and possibly others—have been passing along an interesting new iPad tidbit after meeting with Apple about the new iPad models this week. I realize that people may have missed the brief parenthetical in my Macworld story this week, so it’s worth restating here…
Logitech’s $70 Crayon, an interesting stylus that originally was available for education only and worked only with the sixth-generation iPad, will now be supported by all of Apple’s current iPad models. So not only do the new iPad Air and iPad mini work with the Crayon, but so does my 12.9-inch iPad Pro running a beta version of iOS 12.2, which should be released next week.
(I haven’t been able to test if earlier iPad Pro models will also add compatibility via this update, or if compatibility is limited to the 2018 and 2019 models.)
If you don’t like the design of the new Apple Pencil and would rather use a thicker stylus based on the same drawing tech but that charges via Lightning, the Crayon is a very good alternative to Apple’s device. Just keep in mind the differences between them.
Jason Snell, in his review of the new iPad mini:
I’ve always preferred using a Kindle to read books, but I have to admit that the iPad mini is a pretty great size if you’re primarily planning on using it to read books, newspaper apps, and websites. The screen may feel a bit cramped when using productivity apps, but switching to the iPad mini from the 12.9-inch iPad Pro was like going from a coffee-table book to a trade paperback. Reading from apps while holding the iPad mini in vertical orientation in one hand was easy and pleasant.
However, the increased screen density of this device means you’ll probably need to crank up the default text size in your apps and in the Text Size setting in the Display & Brightness section of the Settings app. As on previous iPad minis, everything’s just a bit smaller, and unless your eyes are particularly keen (and young) you’ll need to slide that text size up a notch or two in order to get it back into comfortable territory.
While the 12.9” iPad Pro is my main work iPad, in December I bought a base model of the 11” version that I use exclusively as a media device to read books and articles, watch videos via Plex and YouTube, and play iOS games. I love the design and gesture-driven UI of the new iPad Pros, but I’m also intrigued by the extreme portability of the new iPad mini. I don’t plan on switching because I value the design and better screen of the Pro, but I definitely want to go to an Apple Store and play with the new mini for a bit. As someone who used to work on an iPad mini years ago, I’m glad Apple brought this product back.
See also: John Gruber’s review and Rene Ritchie’s video on the new iPad mini.
The boys take some time to mark National Ravioli Day, then dive into Apple’s new iPads and iMacs before making predictions for the company’s upcoming media event.
On this week’s episode of Connected, we share our predictions for next week’s Apple event – with a special twist that involves our future WWDC predictions. You can listen here.
Sponsored by:
On this week’s episode of AppStories, we discuss our favorite reading apps including Apple Books, Kindle, Comixology, and Shonen Jump.
Sponsored by:
In celebration of Garageband’s 15th anniversary this year, Rolling Stone was granted special access to the studio where Apple’s music apps come to life. If I had one major takeaway from the article, it would be that the amount of thought and effort Apple’s team expends in Garageband’s development is remarkable. Rolling Stone’s Amy Wang writes:
In the first media visit Apple has ever allowed to its under-the-radar Music Apps studio, the team of engineers showed Rolling Stone how the creation process for Garageband’s two types of sounds — synthetic and “real” — can span weeks or sometimes months per instrument, with new hurdles at every turn. Synthesized sounds (i.e. the type of obviously artificial notes often heard in EDM) are made from code and tweaked by code; “real” sounds have to be recorded in a drop-dead-silent studio setting, dozens of times, then pieced together like patchwork to form single perfect notes, one by one.
Some instruments are extra excruciating. In the digital reproduction of an American upright bass, a player in the studio plucks a string, holds his breath for seven seconds to ensure there’s no extra noise on the recording whatsoever as the note shivers into the air (engineers have custom-coded an app to time the duration precisely), and repeats the endeavor at different finger positions, volumes and pressures, day in and day out. After wheeling each of the cavalcade of instruments out of the studio, the team pores over the hundreds of recordings to pick out the best. When adding a suite of East Asian instruments in a recent product update, the engineers consulted with designers across the world to pick out the specific color of wood and font of a poem that would make a Chinese guzheng appear the most authentic. Engineers also constantly browse music-making forums for complaints, suggestions and thoughts on what to tweak next.
Garageband’s continued development over such a long period of time is a testament to music’s importance to Apple, a point that’s reinforced several times in the full article.
Besides highlighting the work that goes into making Garageband a better tool for creators, one other interesting tidbit from the article involves Apple’s future direction for the app:
“Without getting into specifics, I think machine learning — as in, systems and software that will enable more ability to help anticipate what someone wants to do — will be of value,” [Phil] Schiller says about what’s in the works.
Perhaps before the year’s out we’ll see the fruits of Apple’s efforts to apply machine learning to music creation.
