A sleek and intuitive game library app for casuals and pros
If you didn’t follow the live stream or announcements as they unfolded today, you can replay it on Apple’s Events site and catch the product videos on Apple’s YouTube channel.
The keynote video can be streamed here and on the Apple TV using the TV app. A high-quality version is also available through Apple Podcasts as a video and audio podcast. There is also an American Sign Language version of the event, which is available here.
More videos after the break.
Apple announced the following pre-order and availability dates for the products announced today:
You can follow all of our September Apple event coverage through our September 2021 event hub, or subscribe to the dedicated RSS feed.
Today, Shazam surpassed 1 billion songs recognized using its Music Recognition control available in iOS and iPadOS’s Control Center. That’s a huge number, especially considering that the feature was first added in iOS and iPadOS 14.2 less than a year ago.
The Music Recognition control can be added to Control Center from the Settings app. When tapped, the feature creates a digital fingerprint of the audio and sends it over the Internet for matching against Shazam’s database of songs, securely and privately making a match without sending the actual audio. In addition to recognizing songs playing around you, the feature can recognize songs played in any app and even while you’re wearing AirPods.
According to Apple, the ten most Shazamed songs from Control Center are:
Earlier this summer, the Shazam app crossed 1 billion daily songs recognized and a lifetime total of over 50 billion. With the release of iOS and iPadOS 15, developers will be able to incorporate song recognition into their own apps using ShazamKit, which will undoubtedly accelerate the number of songs recognized even further.
The Music Recognition control doesn’t save songs it recognizes to the Shazam app, which I wish it did, but when iOS and iPadOS 15 are released, users will be able to touch and hold the control to reveal a list of recently-recognized songs. Selecting a song from the list opens it in the Shazam app. Alternately, you can swipe left on an entry to delete it.
I’ve used Shazam since long before it was acquired by Apple, and the Music Recognition control has become one of my most-used Control Center features since it launched. Whether I’m out somewhere and hear a song I like or watching a TV show with an interesting soundtrack, quickly swiping down to access Control Center has become an ingrained habit at this point.
Shake eliminates the headaches and hassles of processing bug reports in your mobile app. Tracking down bugs and fixing them is critical to your app’s success, but too often, identifying and resolving them is an inefficient mess. With the Shake SDK, you can streamline the process and get better data, allowing you to resolve more issues quickly and effectively.
Just add Shake to your app, and your users can submit a comprehensive bug report in seconds simply by shaking their device. Shake eliminates incomplete, vague bug reports so often submitted over email, social media, and word of mouth. With Shake, your users not only can communicate problems with screenshots but with screen recordings and markup tools, all presented inside your app.
Bug reports and crash reports are supplemented with loads of useful data that’s delivered instantly and automatically to a beautifully designed web dashboard that lets your team chat about the reported bugs, review logs, assign priorities, and tag them. Shake also integrates seamlessly with the other tools you already use, like Jira, Slack, GitHub, Azure DevOps, and Trello. Developers can customize Shake to suit their particular needs delivering any variable value they want from users’ devices too. It’s a powerful set of tools that will help you debug issues in your apps 50 times faster than before.
Shake is free to try without any time limitations on its standard features, and you can upgrade to a premium plan any time to add more attachments per bug, unlimited tags and bug reports, and full activity history for up to 30,000 MAU. Try Shake today to learn how fast, efficient bug reporting and tracking can accelerate your app development process.
Our thanks to Shake for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Yesterday, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers decided Epic Games’ antitrust lawsuit against Apple, delivering a ruling in favor of Apple that comes with significant caveats. Although the Judge found that Apple‘s operation of the App Store isn’t an exercise of monopolistic power, she concluded that App Review Guidelines and related provisions of its agreements with developers foster a lack of pricing transparency store-wide that undermines competition under California law. So, while the decision is undeniably a win for Apple in many respects, it’s also a decidedly mixed bag. I’ve taken the time to read Judge Gonzalez Rogers’ 185-page decision and having written an in-depth look at the issues going into the trial, I thought I’d follow up with what the Court’s ruling is likely to mean for Epic and Apple as well as all developers and consumers.
Sponsored by: Quill – Messaging to Make Your Team Better
This week on MacStories Unwind:
Earlier this summer Apple began testing the expansion of its updated Maps data in Italy, a rollout that started with North America before continuing in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. Today, the company officially launched its new Maps data in Italy, San Marino, Vatican City, and Andorra, along with a host of related features.
FaceTime has been a centerpiece feature across all of Apple’s platforms for a long time. However, with the pandemic, it became more important than ever, playing a critical role in the way friends and family have stayed connected. Of course, FaceTime isn’t the only way have kept in touch. The app had plenty of competition from Zoom, Skype, and other services.
So, it’s not surprising that this year’s FaceTime updates focus on fundamentals like audio and video quality and making the app available outside of Apple’s ecosystem, allowing it to compete better with other services. Nor is it surprising that Apple announced SharePlay, which won’t ship until later this fall, so friends and family who can’t be together can still enjoy synchronized group activities like watching a video or listening to music. I’m skeptical that SharePlay will be the hit that Apple’s marketing suggests the company hopes it will be, but even putting SharePlay aside, the app is getting some major improvements that I think everyone will appreciate, so let’s dig in.
This week on AppStories, we examine the growing trend of app customization in the context of Apple’s system apps, focusing on Reminders’ Tag Browser and Smart Lists and Notes’ Tag Browser and Smart Folders.
On AppStories+, Federico explains how his recently-purchased Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 has enabled a unique reading and note-taking workflow.
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