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This week on AppStories, we explain the changes to watchOS and tvOS that we’d like to see made in 2023.
On AppStories+, troubleshooting hardware and software issues.
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Today, Apple has launched new Apple Maps and Music features for live music fans. Apple Maps has added more than 40 Guides highlighting over 10 venues worldwide. In addition to editorial content about the music scenes in the featured cities, users can learn more about each venue and its upcoming shows using features that the Shazam app incorporated last spring, using information from Bandsintown.
In the Music app, Apple has created a new category called Set Lists that offers information about major artists’ concerts, along with a playlist of songs they’re playing on tour. Apple’s press release says users can browse upcoming shows of the artists spotlighted in Set Lists using the same Shazam tools that power the similar Apple Maps feature too.
The new Apple Music Guides announced today include Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York City, San Francisco, Berlin, London, Paris, Vienna, Tokyo, Melbourne, Sydney, and Mexico City. To view the guides, you can visit apple.co/MusicVenues. Set Lists are beginning to appear in Apple Music, too, although as of publication, I’ve only been able to locate them via search. Later, you should be able to browse all Set Lists at apple.co/setlists too.
It’s fantastic to see Apple Music and Maps expanding into live music. These sorts of features are something that Federico and I have been hoping Apple would implement for years, and I hope with time, we’ll see more guides for more cities around the world as well as a growing collection of Set Lists.
Thursday is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and as in years past, Apple has previewed several new accessibility features coming later this year. This year, Apple is focusing on a wide range of accessibility features covering cognitive, vision, hearing, mobility, and speech, which were designed with feedback from disability communities. The company hasn’t said when these features will debut in its operating systems, but if past years are any indication, most should be released in the fall as part of the annual OS release cycle.
Assistive Access is a new customizable iPhone and iPad mode created for users with cognitive disabilities to lighten the cognitive load of using their favorite apps. Apple worked with users as well as their trusted supports to focus on the activities they use most, like communicating with friends and family, taking and viewing photos, and listening to music. The result is a distillation of the experiences of the related apps. For instance, Phone and FaceTime have been combined into a single Calls app that handles both audio and video calls.
The UI for Assistive Access is highly customizable, allowing users and their trusted supporters to adapt it to their individual needs. For example, an iPhone’s Home Screen can be streamlined to show just a handful of apps with large, high-contrast buttons with big text labels. Alternatively, Assistive Access can be set up with a row-based UI for people who prefer text.
Today, Funn Media released FitnessView Teams, a fitness-tracking app that allows coaches or personal trainers to track multiple team members or clients at once. I’m not a coach or a trainer, but I’ve been trying the app with demo data and like what I’ve seen a lot.
FitnessView Teams, which builds on Funn Media’s FitnessView app for individuals, works on the iPhone and iPad, but it’s best on the iPad where you can see more data at once. From the main view, you can switch among multiple teams, browse data by team member, invite new team members, and invite other coaches to your team. Coaches and team members can both be added via a QR code or an invitation link that allows FitnessView Teams to access the data collected by a team member’s Apple Watch. You can also browse team member data by date using a calendar strip along the top of the iPad’s screen.
Most of the app’s main view is dedicated to health metric tiles that are fully customizable in the app’s settings. Tapping on any health metric brings up additional details, including a graph for that data over time, as well as daily averages and monthly progress. Reports for each athlete can be exported as a customizable PDF-formatted report too.
Other data visualizations include a tab dedicated to a full month overview per athlete. There’s also a tab that breaks down a team’s progress by fitness metric, which allows coaches to easily compare the stats of one athlete compared to another on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. All of the same data is available on the iPhone, too, but the limited screen space requires more navigating between views and scrolling of data.
I’ve always been a fan of FitnessView for individuals. The app’s simple, clean design provides an excellent overview of core health metrics, with the ability to dive into each for more detail. FitnessView Teams takes the same approach and succeeds in organizing an even bigger set of health data for multiple people at once, which is an impressive accomplishment. If you’re a coach or trainer, FitnessView Teams is worth checking out.
FitnessView Teams is available to download for free. However, a subscription is required to add multiple team members or clients to the app, which starts at $59.99/month to track ten users.
Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings:
SugarBot is an easy-to-use way to maintain a healthy diet by tracking sugar intake and other nutritional data from the maker of CardioBot. With SugarBot for the iPhone and Apple Watch, you can track your data and gain insights into trends from its in-depth graphs and recommendations to form healthier habits.
Getting started with SugarBot’s elegantly designed interface couldn’t be easier. The app comes with an extensive database of foods. Log your meals, and SugarBot does the rest, recording sugar and other information, including protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat for each meal. Everything tracked is measured against your goals, which can be set up in the app’s Settings. You can set up SugarBot according to a Keto diet or to lose, maintain, or gain weight. Individual nutrient goals can be set as well.
Each data point logged is immediately accessible from the app’s main screen giving you a quick view of today’s nutritional intake and the option to navigate back to prior days. There’s also an ‘All nutrients’ view for daily tracking your nutritional intake by category.
For longer-term trend analysis, SugarBot has a dedicated Insights tab that displays graphs of your intake of nutrients over time. It’s a fantastic way to ensure you’re on track with your goals and understand how your food consumption affects other areas of your health.
Download SugarBot today to start your journey to better health through tracking what you eat.
Our thanks to SugarBot for sponsoring MacStories this week.
In this special episode of Unwind, Federico, who received The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom one day earlier than most people, shares his first impressions of the game, which has received rave reviews from critics.
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This week on AppStories, we continue our wish list series with our wishes for iPadOS 17.
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On AppStories+, stand-up lawn mowers and my struggles with social media.
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Raycast, the keyboard-driven launcher for the Mac, introduced a new subscription service today called Raycast Pro that adds AI, syncing, templating, and extended clipboard functionality to the app.
Raycast Pro, which is $8 per month when billed annually and is also included in Team plans, includes three artificial intelligence features:
According to Raycast’s FAQs, the app uses OpenAI’s GPT 3 and GPT 3.5-Turbo large language models “as well as some other models” for their AI features and does not offer an option to use your own OpenAI API key.
If you use Raycast on multiple Macs, a Pro subscription will allow you to flip a toggle to sync items like Extensions, Quicklinks, Snippets, and Hotkeys. Subscribers can customize Raycast with themes and build their own sharable themes in the app’s Theme Studio too. Finally, a subscription adds an unlimited clipboard history that is stored locally on your Mac and not synced as part of the app’s new sync features for security reasons. Free users are limited to a maximum of three months of clipboard history.
For anyone who relies heavily on AI for their work or has complex Raycast setups that they find hard to maintain across multiple Macs, a Raycast Pro subscription should be attractive. For everyone else, you can still take advantage of the free features, which haven’t changed. I’ve relied on Raycast for more than a year now and don’t need the Pro features myself, but I’m glad to see Raycast expanding its offerings and ways users can support the app’s continued development.
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