FitnessView: All-in-One Health & Fitness Dashboard [Sponsor]

By MacStories Team

FitnessView is a brand new health and fitness dashboard for tracking Health data and gaining valuable insights using the iPhone and Apple Watch. The Apple Watch has become a robust health and fitness device that, coupled with the iPhone, lets you track more data than ever about your workouts and overall health. FitnessView takes that overwhelming mountain of data and makes sense of it with a beautifully designed app that helps you spot trends and measure your progress.

FitnessView tracks the progress of your Activity Rings and a whole lot more. By picking the goals that matter to you most from the app’s comprehensive list, you can create a dashboard designed just for you.

FitnessView also tracks workouts, providing the most important stats at a glance with in-depth data just a tap away. Those stats power the app’s Home Screen widgets, allowing you to keep track of your most essential data without opening the app. FitnessView’s data is available on the Apple Watch, too, along with multiple watch complications that bring FitnessView’s power to the face of your Apple Watch.

The app has detailed Stats and Workout sections. From Stats, you can analyze your health and fitness data over time to get a sense of your progress and dive into the details whenever you want. The Workouts section provides a similar experience, allowing you to browse through your training sessions chronologically. You can even filter workouts by type and access high-level monthly stats.

FitnessView also supports Quick Add for tracking goals like hydration, making it easy to keep up with all your objectives. You can even share your progress with friends and family or on social media with an animated version of your Activity Rings.

Download FitnessView today to stay on top of your health and fitness goals all year long with its beautiful all-in-one dashboard.

Our thanks to FitnessView for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: Doppler for Mac, Sofa 3.0, GarageBand, Earnings and a Big Album Drops

By John Voorhees

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Sponsored by: Honeybadger – Your Secret Weapon for Exception, Uptime, and Cron Monitoring

This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

Monthly Log
- Federico on managing his music collection on an Intel NUC using his iPad
- John on his note-taking philosophy and why you should delete and archive more notes
MacStories Weekly
- Federico recommends Roon, the client app for the music server running on the Intel NUC he wrote about in the Monthly Log
- John shares a shortcut for converting podcast audio clips to text and saving them in Obsidian alongside the embedded audio file
- Christopher Lawley shares his iPad Home Screens
MacStories Unplugged
- Panic’s Playdate
- A conversation about 4th of July parades and real estate open houses leads to Italian private investigators and American personal injury lawyers
- Federico invites members to play a guessing game

AppStories

AppStories, Episode 233 – Building an Apple-only Research and Writing Setup

Unwind

Federico and John’s Joint Pick:
- - Happier Than Ever by Billie Eilish

Apple Releases Remix Sessions, Sound Packs, and Producer Packs for GarageBand on the iPhone and iPad

By John Voorhees

Source: Apple.

Today, Apple announced Sound Packs for GarageBand for iOS and iPadOS from artists and producers that allow users to remix hit tracks from Dua Lipa and Lady Gaga and create their own music, using hundreds of loops and sounds from producers that include Boys Noize, Mark Lettieri, Oak Felder, Soulection, Take A Daytrip, Tom Misch, and TRAKGIRL.

Apple VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Bob Borchers explained that:

GarageBand continues to be a catalyst for music creation — making it easy for novices to get started and for seasoned pros to develop their ideas on the go. For this update, we’ve collaborated with an incredible group of artists and producers to give musicians an amazing collection of new sounds to play with, and we hope even more people will be inspired to tap into their creativity and start making music in GarageBand.

Source: Apple.

The Remix Sessions feature Break My Heart by Dua Lipa and Free Woman by Lady Gaga and allow users to remix the tracks using GarageBand’s built-in tools. Apple is also releasing seven Producer Packs from big names in music production. According to Apple’s press release:

Each Producer Pack is bursting with hundreds of royalty-free loops, beats, instruments, drum kits, synth patches, and samples that embody the sound and vibe of each producer. And in-app videos feature each producer offering words of encouragement to beginners, as well as insights into their creative process.

Source: Apple.

One of the Producer Packs will serve as a companion piece to an upcoming docuseries with producer Mark Ronson called “Watch the Sound With Mark Ronson.” The TV+ series, which Apple says “explores and celebrates the intersection of music and technology,” will let GarageBand users create music using sounds inspired by the series.

I’m a little surprised that the Mac version of GarageBand isn’t part of Apple’s announcement today, but I love these sorts of add-ons to apps like GarageBand. This content allows fans of artists and producers to work with the same raw materials they do to come up with remixes and original music that express their personal tastes using a tool that is very approachable and fun.

Doppler for Mac Offers an Excellent Album and Artist-Focused Listening Experience for Your Owned Music Collection

By John Voorhees

I haven’t purchased much music in the past six years or so, but there was a time when it was a big part of my entertainment spending. I still have a huge collection of albums ripped from CDs I bought and later purchased online from the iTunes Store. That changed with the advent of streaming services like Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, and later Apple Music. I still have those files frozen in time on the 2015 Mac mini I use as a Plex server. So, when Ed Wellbrook told me he was bringing Doppler, his excellent iPhone music player to the Mac, I figured it was time to dust of my old music collection and give it a try.

Doppler, which we’ve covered before here and in MacStories Weekly, including, most recently, Issues 252, 261, and 275, is a music player for people who buy their music. Apple’s Music app continues to maintain backward compatibility for users who own their music libraries, but Apple’s focus these days is squarely on streaming, not purchasing. That’s left apps like Doppler to fill the void offering features like the ability to add new music to your library from an iPhone, something that isn’t possible with Apple Music.

The minute you try Doppler, you can tell it’s made by someone who cares deeply about music and the experience of listening to it. The interface puts albums and artists front and center, focusing on album art and simple, intuitive controls to make listening to music on-the-go a pleasure.

Wellbrook has brought the same sensibility to a native Mac version of the app, which was released today. Doppler for Mac is a lot like what I’d imagine Apple’s Music app would be like if Music were split into separate apps for streaming and owned music. That’s not likely to ever happen, but fortunately, Doppler has you covered if you own your music.

Sofa 3.0 Adds New Ways to Manage Your Media Lists Along With a New Business Model

By John Voorhees

Sofa 3.0, an app that I last reviewed in March, is out with loads of new ways to track, organize, and browse the media lists you create. The app also has a new subscription business model for its pro features.

Media recommendations come at us all from every angle, whether it’s friends and family or sources like reviews. You can save lists of books, movies, videogames, and other media you want to try in lots of ways. You could use an app like Apple’s Notes or Reminders, but they’re general-purpose apps that don’t address the specific needs related to media consumption. Plus, trying to track media in something like a task manager gets out of control and messy fast.

Another option is to turn to an app designed for a specific type of media, and there are many good options available on the App Store. The advantage Sofa has, is that it makes it just as easy to pick a book as a movie or something else when you’re deciding what media to try next. It’s a subtle but important distinction. With single-purpose apps, you need to decide what kind of media you want to consume and then turn to an app to pick something. Sofa dispenses with the first step allowing you to answer a broader question: “How do I want to spend my free time?” That a one-stop approach is one of Sofa’s greatest strengths and one that the app leans into hard with the latest excellent update.

Apple Q3 2021 Results - $81.4 Billion Revenue

By John Voorhees

Apple has just published its financial results for Q3 2021. The company posted revenue of $81.4 billion. Apple CEO Tim Cook said:

“This quarter, our teams built on a period of unmatched innovation by sharing powerful new products with our users, at a time when using technology to connect people everywhere has never been more important,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re continuing to press forward in our work to infuse everything we make with the values that define us — by inspiring a new generation of developers to learn to code, moving closer to our 2030 environment goal, and engaging in the urgent work of building a more equitable future.”

Expectations for Q3 2021 and the Year-Ago Quarter (Q3 2020)

Apple didn’t provide guidance for Q3 2021, but going into today’s earnings call, Yahoo Finance reported the following analyst expectations::

Here’s what Wall Street is expecting from Apple, as compiled by Bloomberg, versus how it performed in the same quarter last year.

Revenue: $73.8 billion expected versus $59.7 billion in Q3 2020
Earnings per share: $1.01 expected versus $2.58 in Q3 2020

iPhone revenue: $34.5 billion expected versus $26.4 billion in Q3 2020

Services revenue: $16.3 billion expected versus $13.2 billion in Q3 2020

Graphical Visualization

After the break, we’ve compiled a graphical visualization of Apple’s Q3 2021 financial results.

AppStories, Episode 233 – Building an Apple-Only Research and Writing Setup →

Linked By John Voorhees

This week on AppStories, we consider whether changes coming to Apple’s OSes make a system app-only research and writing workflow possible and discuss where there’s room for improvement.

Sponsored by:

Privacy – Smarter payments. Get $5 to spend on your first purchase.
Instabug – Ship Quality Apps with Real-Time Contextual Insights
Swell – A new voice-based social platform. Try it now.

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Honeybadger: Your Secret Weapon for Exception, Uptime, and Cron Monitoring [Sponsor]

By MacStories Team

Honeybadger is your one-stop solution for error tracking that combines error monitoring, uptime monitoring, and cron monitoring into a single, simple-to-use platform. It’s the only service that combines all those elements into one elegant solution that has your back when you need it most.

If your production site goes down, the last thing you want is to hear about it first on Twitter or by email from unhappy customers. With Honeybadger, you know the instant a problem arises. The included uptime and cron monitoring also let you know when your external services are having issues or your background jobs go missing or silently fail.

What’s more, Honeybadger is easy to set up, taking just minutes, not hours. The service hooks into popular web frameworks, job systems, authentication libraries, and front-end JavaScript. Most installations are just a few lines of code. Honeybadger also includes a comprehensive online dashboard and context-rich reporting system that helps you diagnose and resolve issues quickly.

Honeybadger is a bootstrapped company built from the ground up to serve developers. They answer to you, not VCs, and their mission is straightforward: tame production and make you a better, more productive developer.

Honeybadger is used by tens of thousands of customers of all sizes, including eBay, DigitalOcean, heroku, thoughtbot, and even MacStories. Sign up for Honeybadger’s 15-day free trial today and join the growing list of companies whose developers swear by Honeybadger. There’s no credit card required to sign up, so you’ve got nothing to lose. Give Honeybadger a try and see how it feels to stop wasting time tailing logs and spend more time doing the development work you love.

Our thanks to Honeybadger for sponsoring MacStories this week.