This Week's Sponsor:

Textastic

The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try

GoodTask: Get It Done With the Task Manager Based on Apple’s Reminders and Calendars [Sponsor]

GoodTask is the powerful, customizable task manager for getting things done on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. That’s because it’s built on top of Apple’s Reminders app and integrates with Calendars too. It’s a solid foundation that GoodTask extends with fast, reliable syncing, Siri and Shortcuts support, widgets, and much more.

GoodTask is highly customizable too. You can view tasks as lists or in Kanban-style boards, and filters allow you to create Smart Lists based on the criteria that are most important to you.

The app also offers Quick Actions for integrating multiple task options into a single tap or click and eliminating the need to repeatedly type common information. It’s a terrific way to streamline your workflow, so you can spend your time getting things done instead of creating new tasks.

The app also offers fully customizable widgets on the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac too, making it easy to see the tasks that are most important to you and your calendar at a glance. GoodTask has a theme system, too, offering built-in options as well as the ability to create and import themes to suit your personal tastes.

GoodTask extends beyond lists allowing you to set goals and review reports. The Today and Next Pages are designed to cut through the noise of your list and focus on what can be done now. It’s a fantastic way to avoid becoming overwhelmed by a long task list.

Start getting things done today by visiting GoodTask’s website to learn more about its Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and Watch apps and discover the power of the premier task manager based on Apple’s Reminders and Calendar apps.

Our thanks to GoodTask for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: An App Review Comic Book, Podcast Subscriptions, and Shazam Milestones

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Sponsored by:
* MacStadium – The Developer Cloud for Mac.

This week on Unwind, John is joined by Alex Guyot to recap the week, including John’s story about the 5th anniversary of the App Store Review Guidelines comic book, milestones reached by Apple’s Shazam service, plus Apple Podcasts channels and subscriptions, developer reactions to WWDC, and TV and movie Unwind picks.

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    • Federico on his new iOS and iPadOS review Focus mode
    • John imagines his ideal research app
    • An interview with Apollo developer Christian Selig
    • A Pillow giveaway
    • A reader poll

AppStories

Unwind Picks

The iPad’s New Universal Keyboard Shortcuts→

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors about one of the new keyboard-related additions to iPadOS 15:

In iPadOS 14, if you hold down the Command key, you can see a list of app-specific features and their key equivalents. It’s like a quick-reference card for keyboard shortcuts. In iPadOS 15, it’s been expanded to become more like the iPad equivalent of the Mac menu bar—not only does it list keyboard shortcuts, but it can list every command in the app, and you can click any of them to execute them. iPad apps that build out the Mac menu bar for their Catalyst version can pick this feature up for free. It’s another way that the Mac and iPad are trading features and complementing one another.

Then there’s the Globe key. Hold it down in any app in iPadOS 15, and you’ll see a different set of commands, all of which can be applied globally. (Get it?) These menus are full of shortcuts to switch to the home screen (Globe-H), open a Quick Note (Globe-Q), activate Control Center (Globe-C), and pretty much any other system-level area.

I particularly like Snell’s suggestion regarding these new global keyboard shortcuts and the Shortcuts app in the future. As I explained on Connected this week, I’ve been using iPadOS 15 since the first beta came out at WWDC, and I’m still learning all kinds of new keyboard shortcuts that are now supported by the system. Impressively, the new Globe modifier has been associated with all sorts of system functions, including Siri and Control Center.

If you use a third-party hardware keyboard that doesn’t have a Globe key, you can always remap another one in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Keyboard ⇾ Hardware Keyboard ⇾ Modifier Keys. And while the keyboard shortcuts menu can be dismissed by holding the Globe key (or ⌘, for app-specific commands) again or clicking outside of it, you can also press the ⌘. shortcut (which is the equivalent of an Escape button on iPadOS) to instantly close it. Lastly, you can start typing while the menu is shown to quickly filter commands by name.

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Shazam Passes 1 Billion Monthly Songs Recognized for a Lifetime Total of More Than 50 Billion

WWDC saw the introduction of ShazamKit, a new framework that will allow third-party developers to incorporate the song recognition service into their own apps. Less than a week later, Apple has said that the service has surpassed 1 billion songs recognized per month for a total of over 50 billion Shazams since the service launched.

“Shazam is synonymous with magic,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats, “both for the fans getting a song recognition almost instantly, and for the artists being discovered. With 1 billion recognitions a month, Shazam is one of the most popular music apps in the world. Today’s milestones show not only people’s love for Shazam, but also the ever-growing appetite for music discovery around the world.”

To put the 1 billion per month figure into context, Shazam, which was founded as a text messaging service in 2002, took 10 years to reach its first billion songs recognized. The recognition rate has been steadily increasing since then for a lifetime total of over 50 billion songs matched.

This fall, when Apple’s updated OSes are released, the monthly rate of Shazam matches is poised to accelerate further as developers begin adding ShazamKit to their apps. The new song matching framework was announced last week at WWDC and will allow developers to add functionality to their apps to recognize songs and report information to users like the song’s name, the artist, genre, and other details.

I’ve used Shazam since it debuted when the App Store launched, and I’m intrigued to see what developers will do with it. For example, I could see it becoming a convenient way to add artists I’m following in Marcos Tanaka’s app MusicHarbor. With a wealth of third-party music apps already available on the App Store, I expect we’ll see many innovative uses of the new framework soon.

Everyday Robots Releases A Two-Part WWDC 2021 Developer Special→

Everyday Robots, a podcast by Jonathan Ruiz, released a two-part episode today featuring developer reactions to WWDC. Ruiz’s guests include Becky Hansmeyer, Frank Foster, Marc Aupont, James Thomson, Zack Becker, Kim aka kaydacode, Ish Shabazz, Christian Selig, and Jeff Rames.

In a year without an in-person WWDC, it was fun to hear which of the announcements this year excited developers and what they felt was missing. I always enjoy Apple’s keynote, and there are a lot of additional details in the WWDC sessions, but there’s nothing like getting a sense of both the big announcements and practical everyday updates that developers are excited about to get a sense of where apps will be headed in the fall.

Both episodes are available on the Everyday Robots website and on Apple Podcasts:

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Apple Podcasts Channels and Subscriptions Launch

Podcast channels and subscriptions are now available as part of the new Apple Podcasts Subscriptions service first announced in April. As Apple explains in its press release:

…listeners in more than 170 countries and regions can purchase subscriptions for individual shows and groups of shows through channels, making it easy to support their favorite creators, enjoy new content, and unlock additional benefits such as ad-free listening and early access, directly on Apple Podcasts.

As we previously covered on MacStories, when a listener subscribes to a show, the page in the Apple Podcasts app is updated with subscriber content and a badge confirming for the listener that they’ve subscribed. Channels, which are collections of subscription-based and free podcasts, are incorporated into Apple Podcasts’ search, recommendation, and sharing functionality. After a listener has subscribed to two or more channels, a new row called ‘My Channels’ appears in the Listen Now tab to facilitate browsing them.

The company’s press release spotlights a long list of shows that are participating in Apple Podcasts Subscriptions. There’s a wide variety of podcasts represented, which makes the press release a good place to start if you’re looking for a channel or subscription to explore. Of course, channels and subscriptions are front-and-center in the Podcasts app too, and I’ve found it easy to find and understand what shows offer.

2021 Apple Design Award Winners: The AppStories Interviews→

Federico and I had the pleasure of interviewing four of the twelve 2021 Apple Design Award winners for AppStories. The awards, which were announced by Apple last Thursday, recognized an app and a game in each of the following categories for their outstanding designs: Inclusivity, Delight and Fun, Interaction, Social Impact, Visuals and Graphics, and Innovation.

For today’s special episode, which is the official kick-off of our Summer OS Preview Series of stories and AppStories episodes, we spoke with the following ADA winners:

  • Winston Chen, the developer of Voice Dream Reader, which won an ADA in the Inclusivity category
  • Esther Huybreghts, Mathijs Demaeght, and Melissa Cash from Pok Pok, the developers of Pok Pok Playroom, which won an ADA in the Delight and Fun category, and we covered when it launched
  • Brian Mueller, the developer of CARROT Weather, which won an ADA in the Interaction category and has been covered often on MacStories
  • Maria Sayans and David Fernandez Huerta from ustwo games, the creators of Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, which won an ADA in the Social Impact category

All four interviews are fantastic conversations that reveal common threads of thoughtful design, innovative approaches that feature the latest Apple technology, and a deep understanding of their users.

Thank you to everyone for taking the time for the interviews, Apple for helping arrange them, and as always, thank you for listening to AppStories. We hope you enjoy the episode.

Sponsored by:

Concepts: Sketch, Note, Draw

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AppStories, Episode 226 – Three Features That Set iOS 15 Apart→

This week on AppStories, we cover the three features that will sell iOS 15 to most users: Focus Mode, SharePlay, and Live Text and share some of our recent audio gear purchases for lossless streaming and AirPlay. We also took questions from listeners who watched us record the episode on Instagram Live.

Sponsored by:

  • DEVONthink – The one place for storing and working with all your documents, snippets, and bookmarks.
  • 1Blocker – Remove ads, trackers, and browse faster.
  • Pillow – Sleeping better, made simple.

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