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MusicSmart 2.0: Dig Into Music Discovery

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Marcos Tanaka’s music apps at MacStories. MusicHarbor makes keeping up with new and upcoming releases a breeze, and MusicBox ensures you won’t lose track of music that you don’t have time to enjoy until later. The apps are indispensable for music fans who follow a long list of artists.

MusicSmart, which is available for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, is a little different than Tanaka’s other apps. Instead of casting a broad net to track the entire range of your musical tastes, the app is about digging deeper into individual songs, albums, or artists’ catalogs. But follow the threads offered by MusicSmart, and the narrow focus that sets it apart from Tanaka’s other apps will paradoxically lead to new musical discoveries and, ultimately, broaden your tastes.

As Federico explained in his review of MusicSmart’s debut:

Whether by design or as a byproduct of our new habits, metadata and credits don’t play a big role in modern music streaming services. We’re frustrated when a service gets the title of a song wrong or reports the incorrect track sequence in an album, but we don’t consider the fact that there’s a world of context and additional information hidden behind the songs and albums we listen to every day. That context is entirely invisible to us because it’s not mass-market enough for a music streaming service. There have been small updates on this front lately, but by and large, credits and additional track information are still very much ignored by the streaming industry. And if you ask me, that’s a shame.

Despite stiff competition among music streaming services, the state of liner notes hasn’t improved since Federico wrote that. Fortunately, though, MusicSmart has only gotten better, adding new data sources, better organization, and more polish with each release. However, version 2.0 of the app combines its existing strengths with new features and an improved design in a way that transcends earlier versions, making this version 2.0 of MusicSmart feel more fully realized than ever before.

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Ulysses: The Ultimate Writing App for Mac, iPad and iPhone [Sponsor]

Ulysses is an exceptional text editor for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone with an unrivaled set of advanced features and a beautiful design that is always being refined and improved. The winner of an Apple Design Award, Ulysses features a distinctive balance of power-user features that writers appreciate in a simple, elegant, distraction-free UI that makes the app a pleasure to use.

A terrific example of the power available in Ulysses is its publishing tools. Users can publish to the most popular blogging platforms from right inside Ulysses. The app includes deep integration with WordPress, Ghost, Medium, and Micro.blog, allowing you to publish directly to them, complete with images, tags, and excerpts. Most recently, Ulysses added the ability to copy and paste tables from Excel and Numbers with row sorting and sketching on the iPhone and iPad versions of the app. The Mac gained PDF and image annotation too.

Ulysses has built-in grammar and style checking for over 20 languages and a special dashboard in the sidebar that includes statistics, keywords, and footnotes. An outline of the headings in your writing provides a handy bird’s-eye view of your work and a way to navigate your document.

The app’s Library sidebar helps order your writing into groups that can be nested. Along with features like sync, powerful search and filtering options, keyword support, in-line images that can be stored locally or remotely on a server, and new customization options, Ulysses is as flexible as it is powerful. Ulysses includes support for Projects now too, allowing you to show only what’s most relevant to your current task and hiding everything else.

You can also set character, word, and other types of writing goals that can be attached to a single document or entire group, which, combined with deadlines, is a fantastic way to form good writing habits. Then, when you’re finished writing, Ulysses has abundant export options, including plain text, Markdown, TextBundle, rich text, DOCX, ePub, HTML, and PDF. To learn more about Ulysses, visit ulysses.app.

Ulysses is free to try before deciding whether to subscribe for $5.99/month or $39.99/year. MacStories readers can take advantage of a special extended one-month free trial for a limited time. It’s a terrific way to discover the app’s full capabilities, so be sure to check out Ulysses’ new features right away.

Our thanks to Ulysses for sponsoring MacStories this week.

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Brydge Ceases Operations, Leaving Employees in the Lurch→

Chance Miller published an excellent exposé on the downfall of Brydge, an iPad, Mac, and Microsoft Surface accessory maker. The company got its start with a Kickstarter campaign in 2012, and for a time, its keyboard accessories were a popular choice among iPad users, including me.

However, as Chance explains, Brydge’s fortunes took a turn for the worse as it was forced to compete head-on with Apple’s Magic Keyboard, later spiraling out of control as its cash flow ran out:

Brydge, a once thriving startup making popular keyboard accessories for iPad, Mac, and Microsoft Surface products, is ceasing operations. According to nearly a dozen former Brydge employees who spoke to 9to5Mac, Brydge has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs within the past year after at least two failed acquisitions.

As it stands today, Brydge employees have not been paid salaries since January. Customers who pre-ordered the company’s most recent product have been left in the dark since then as well. Its website went completely offline earlier this year, and its social media accounts have been silent since then as well.

From what former employees told 9to5Mac, it appears that a number of factors contributed to its downfall, but the saddest part of the story is how Brydge treated its employees, keeping them in the dark and, in many cases, unpaid to this day.

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MacStories Unwind: A Goat Walks into a Dive Bar

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week on MacStories Unwind, we have important follow-up about potato chip flavors, an exploration of American dive bars, the art of winning an argument by shouting ‘Goat!’, and the record by boygenius.

Unite 4 – Turn Websites into Apps on Your Mac.

Show Notes

Chip Follow-Up

Dive Bars

Vittorio Sgarbi

Joint Pick

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Apple Reports Q2 2023 Earnings

It’s been a rough year for the tech industry as a whole. In the wake of a COVID-induced spending spree on computers and other gadgets, and faced with rising prices, consumer demand for tech products has taken a nose dive.

The lack of new hardware announcements has undoubtedly been another drag on Apple’s earnings. For several years, Apple held a spring press event to debut device updates but not in 2023.

Although the company has managed to avoid the massive layoffs that have occurred at many tech companies, today’s earning show that it’s not immune from falling consumer demand. For its second fiscal quarter of 2023, Apple reported total revenue of 94.8 billion, which is a 3% year-over-year drop that includes a reduction in Mac sales and a significant drop in iPad sales, dips that were slightly less severe than analyst expectations but still dips. The company also announced stock buybacks of $90 billion and a $0.24/share dividend, which is expected to calm market reactions to its lower sales.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, had this to say about the company’s earnings:

We are pleased to report an all-time record in Services and a March quarter record for iPhone despite the challenging macroeconomic environment, and to have our installed base of active devices reach an all-time high. We continue to invest for the long term and lead with our values, including making major progress toward building carbon neutral products and supply chains by 2030.

If there’s a silver lining in today’s earnings, it’s that services and iPhones served to mitigate weak sales in other areas of Apple’s product lineup. In any event, Q2 historically hasn’t been a very interesting quarter for Apple. With rumored AV/VR headset on the way at WWDC, it will be far more interesting to see how financial markets react later this year and next.

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Is Landscape Mode the Key to Split View on the iPhone?→

Source: [Basic Apple Guy](https://basicappleguy.com).

Source: Basic Apple Guy.

This week on AppStories, we covered our wishes for iOS 17. One of Federico’s wishes was for Split View on the iPhone. Split View is not the sort of feature that I think would work with every app, but the iPhone is powerful enough to handle it, developers are already experimenting with in-app versions of it, and you know what? It’s useful.

To get an idea of what an OS-level Split View would be like on the iPhone, check out Basic Apple Guy’s mockups. Home Screen landscape mode never really got much traction when it debuted in 2014, but with Apple’s renewed emphasis on sidebar-based design for iPad apps, I think Split View could translate nicely to the iPhone and has a shot at better adoption if it returned whether as part of a Home Screen redesign or not.

Be sure to check out the full post for additional mockups on how landscape mode would work with widgets, the Dynamic Island, and other Home Screen elements.

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AppStories, Episode 327 – Our iOS 17 Wishes→

This week on AppStories, we kick off our annual OS wishes series with a long list of rapid-fire wishes for iOS 17.

Sponsored by:

  • Hit The Island – Funn Media’s innovative, fun, and deceptively simple game for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
[Subscribe here.](https://www.macstories.net/podcasts/appstories/plans)

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On AppStories+, Federico and I share our thoughts on AI-generated music and my struggles with managing 200 betas in TestFlight.

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To learn more about the benefits included with an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.

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Last Week, on Club MacStories: Raindrop, Obsidian Automation on the Apple Watch, iPad Apps on the Mac, and Too Many Genius Bar Visits

Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings:

MacStories Weekly: Issue 366

Federico's Mac mini server.

Federico’s Mac mini server.

Monthly Log for April 2023

Making iPad apps readable on the Mac.

Making iPad apps readable on the Mac.

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

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Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

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