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Snowman Announces New Creative Studio and Its First App, Pok Pok Playroom, A Digital Play Experience for Kids

Today, Snowman, the studio behind some of our favorite games on Apple platforms like Alto’s Adventure and Odyssey, Where Cards Fall, and Skate City, announced Pok Pok, a new creative studio that is launching an app on May 20th called Pok Pok Playroom.

Pok Pok Playroom is an app designed to encourage interactive play with a series of digital toys that spark curiosity and creativity in kids in a low-key, calming environment. The app’s digital playroom includes multiple brightly colored toys that prompt children to explore through independent play. Here’s how Snowman explains the app in its announcement:

Pok Pok’s first app is called Pok Pok Playroom. It’s a playroom filled with educational toys that spark creativity, imagination and learning through open-ended play. There is no right or wrong way to play, only lots of opportunities for experimentation and exploration. Pok Pok puts kids at the centre of the experience so they can follow their noses and learn at their own pace.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting Pok Pok Playroom since I got a demo of an early version at WWDC in 2019 from Esther Huybreghts who, along with her husband Mathijs Demaeght, are the artist-duo and parents of two young children behind its development. I’ll have more to say about Pok Pok Playroom when it’s released on May 20th, but for now, check out the trailer, which does an excellent job of providing a feel for what the app is like:

Alongside the announcement of the trailer and app release date, Snowman announced that Pok Pok Playroom is part of a new creative studio called Pok Pok. The studio, which was incubated inside Snowman for the past few years, was co-founded by Huybreghts and Demaeght, along with Snowman’s Melissa Cash, Ryan Cash, and Jordan Rosenberg, and will continue to build Pok Pok Playroom and new content for it that will be released periodically.

For more information about the app and studio, visit playpokpok.com.

Musens: The Beautiful Music Player [Sponsor]

Musens is a beautiful, customizable music player for the iPhone that brings your music collection and Apple Music’s entire catalog to life with stunning animated artwork. The app has been built from the ground up to take advantage of Apple’s latest Swift UI frameworks and modern features. Whether you’re playing your favorite albums from your own library or trying something new on Apple Music, Musens lets you do so in a simple, elegant way.

Musen’s Home tab is the perfect place to start listening with its thoughtfully organized sections that feature playlists, albums, recently played material, top charts, recommendations, and more. It’s a deep well of music tuned to your tastes that makes picking something fast and simple because all of Apple Music’s extensive selection of music is available to browse and add to your own library.

Outstanding design is what sets Musens apart. Tap an album, and it opens with a delightful animation that reveals a vinyl record emerging from the artwork. Start playback, and the album art on the now playing screen rotates, providing a fun, dynamic turntable-like experience. The playback view is completely customizable, allowing you to enjoy static square art and three different background options too.

Musens also makes great use of intuitive gestures, making it effortless to build your playback queue. Of course, the app has dedicated tabs for easy access to your and Apple Music’s playlists, artists, songs, and albums as well as support for dark mode. Together, the attractive design and deep feature set make Musens an outstanding way to enjoy your favorite music.

Musens is the creation of Alec Attie, an iOS developer and the founder of Cybertiks, who won a WWDC scholarship in 2018 and currently works as a backend developer making apps for big companies like Miniso and the SEP, which is a governmental branch in Mexico.

Download Musens today, and start enjoying your music collection and the millions of songs available on Apple Music for just $3.99.

Our thanks to Musens for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Shortcuts Needs a Notification Toggle→

Chaim Gartenberg, writing for The Verge, on one of Shortcuts’ most annoying limitations in iOS 14 – its obsession for showing notifications for anything it does:

Apple, I assume, mandates notifications because Shortcuts are extremely powerful tools for automating things on your iPhone, and it’s easy to imagine unscrupulous use of them.

But the thing is, the power of Shortcuts is to automate things in the background that I don’t want to have to deal with, whether that’s automatically disabling rotation lock when I open or close an app, open an app with a custom icon, or change the wallpaper when the battery life is low. A big glaring notification every time I do something detracts from that idea. I want my phone to be quietly helpful, not shouting in my face every time it does what I asked it to.

Years ago in my review of iOS and iPadOS 13, I argued in favor of adding an “expert mode” to Shortcuts so power users could turn off confirmation prompts for automations (which Apple removed the following year) and other notifications. Two years later, I think this goes well beyond expert users.

Since the release of iOS 14, millions of people have turned to Shortcuts as a way to customize app icons on their Home Screens. And every time they tap one of those custom icons, they have to see an alert that tells them the action they just performed was, in fact, performed. Imagine if your Mac showed you an alert every time you opened an app saying ‘You opened an app’. That’s pretty much what Shortcuts does whenever you run an automation or a shortcut added to the Home Screen.

Given the popularity of custom icons powered by Shortcuts in iOS 14 and the universal disdain for its notifications, I would be very surprised if there’s no way to turn these off in iOS 15.

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MacStories Unwind: Epic’s Antitrust Case Against Apple, CARROT Weather Updated, and Another Streaming Service Integrates with the HomePod

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Sponsored by: Inoreader – Take Back Control of Your News Feed

This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    • A collection of plain text apps that aren’t text editors
    • Federico jumps through some hoops to get his Toggl data into Timemator
    • An interview with Six Colors’ Jason Snell
    • A Scorecard giveaway

AppStories

Unwind

Deezer’s New HomePod Integration Supports Hi-Res Audio Playback

Source: Deezer.

Source: Deezer.

Late last year, music fans gained the ability to switch their default music service on the HomePod. Pandora was the first to offer the option last November and has now been joined by Deezer in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the UK, and the US.

Similar to other services, Deezer’s HomePod voice control functionality lets subscribers play albums, specific tracks and artists, as well as playlists using Siri. However, the most notable feature of Deezer’s HomePod integration announced by the company today is that its HiFi subscribers will be able to listen to hi-res audio using Apple’s smart speaker. Deezer’s Flow feature, which plays an endless playlist of subscribers’ favorite music, is also available.

The HomePod mini isn’t the best choice for hi-res audio playback, but this integration is an excellent option for Deezer users who have the original HomePod. As the only major streaming service without a hi-res alternative and with the original HomePod discontinued and rumors of a ‘new HiFi tier’ of Apple Music circulating, it will be interesting to see what Apple does in this area.

CARROT Weather 5.2 Revamps Layout Customization and Adds New Sections and Data

When CARROT Weather 5 was released in January, it became one of the most highly-customizable apps available on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. With that came a level of complexity that required a bit of a learning curve. With a bit of experimentation and the progressive unlocking of customizations, though, I thought version 5’s layout features were manageable. However, with the update released today, developer Brian Mueller has overhauled CARROT Weather’s layout functionality making it easier to get started and faster to build a personalized weather dashboard than ever before.

The Layout section of CARROT Weather's settings is where you choose from layout templates and add individual data components called Sections.

The Layout section of CARROT Weather’s settings is where you choose from layout templates and add individual data components called Sections.

The app’s settings include a new group of related items: Layout, Display, and App Icon, the first two of which are new. Layout replaces Customization and is divided into preset layouts and sections that can be added to the app’s main view. Layout presets, like Odin, Siren, and Chronos, are a great place to start when planning your CARROT Weather layout. You can preview any that you aren’t using, which takes your data settings and applies it to the new preset, so you can see how it would look. From the preview, you can tap ‘Set’ to begin using the new theme or ‘Cancel’ to return to the app’s Layout settings to make more adjustments.

The settings for each section now includes previews of what that section will look like before you add it to your layout.

The settings for each section now includes previews of what that section will look like before you add it to your layout.

The Sections part of Layout is where you pick and customize the individual data components for your layout. The big change here is that at the top of each section’s individual settings is a preview of what it will look like based on the options you’ve chosen. It’s a big improvement because it eliminates the guessing about what each change will look like before you add the section. Together with the Layout previews, the new Sections picker short-circuits the trial and error loop of version 5.0, making it much faster to design the perfect weather dashboard.

CARROT Weather 5.2 includes new Maps and Alerts sections.

CARROT Weather 5.2 includes new Maps and Alerts sections.

CARROT Weather has added a couple of new sections too. The first, which is exclusive to Premium Ultra subscribers, is a Weather Maps section that allows you to add weather radar to your dashboard. You can add multiple layers of data to the map, pick from three different sizes and zoom levels, and choose a handful of additional style and appearance settings, all of which are previewed for you at the top of the screen. There’s also a new alerts section that can be added to notify you of severe weather and other unusual conditions, as well as new tide data available in certain existing sections. Finally, you can adjust the text size and pick among multiple font choices in the new Display section of the app’s settings.

When CARROT Weather 5.0 came out, I spent some time coming up with a layout that I liked, and I never touched it again. It’s not like I spent hours trying every possible combination to come up with something that I liked, but there was enough trial and error involved that I didn’t feel like testing out anything else after that initial setup. With the new layout system, that has changed. Tweaking the size of sections and their layout is much faster with the new previews, making experimenting easier. As a result, I’ve tweaked my hourly view a little, added a Map section, and modified the data reported by a couple of other sections. The changes weren’t drastic, but it’s even better now, which I love. If you haven’t played with CARROT Weather’s customization options in a while, now is definitely the time to do so.

CARROT Weather is available as a free update on the App Store and offers multiple subscription tiers for its more advanced, data-rich features.

AppStories, Episode 216 – Substack, Email, and Data Portability→

This week on AppStories, we explore the popularity of Substack among writers leaving big media companies, rethink our email workflows after leaving Hey, and consider data portability and the tradeoffs of proprietary app systems.

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Epic Versus Apple: The MacStories Overview

Later today, Epic Games and Apple will square off in a high-stakes trial in US federal district court that’s nominally about money. However, if that were all that was at stake, the claims each company has made against the other would likely have been resolved by now. Companies the size of Apple and Epic settle because it’s rarely in their interest to have a judge make decisions for them. However, this trial is different.

There’s more to these disputes than Epic’s allegation that Apple violated antitrust laws and Apple’s claims that Epic violated its developer agreement. Underlying it all is the way the dispute was precipitated by Epic. The Fortnite creator’s actions don’t necessarily absolve Apple of antitrust violations, but Epic’s calculated orchestration of events leading to the dispute have not gone unnoticed by the judge presiding over the case and may influence the trial’s outcome. Coupled with Epic’s efforts to get regulators around the world to take up its cause and its very public crusade against the way Apple operates the App Store, it’s not surprising that the claims haven’t settled. Instead, the parties will begin today with opening arguments in front of US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who the parties have agreed will decide the dispute instead of a jury.

Regardless of your opinion of the way Apple runs the App Store or Epic’s litigation tactics, the thing to keep in mind as the trial starts is that the judge is being asked to settle a legal dispute, not set policy. Both companies have made specific claims against the other, which by definition means the judge’s ruling will likely be narrower in scope than it would be in an antitrust case brought by the US government. Nor is any remedy imposed by the judge likely to be as broad as government regulation of the App Store might be someday.

Still, that doesn’t mean the stakes aren’t high; they are. An adverse ruling against Apple could significantly change the way the company operates the App Store and would likely trigger more antitrust lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny in the future. As a result, I thought it would be useful to dig in and take a closer look at some of the parties’ arguments and the context in which this dispute arose to provide a better sense of what to expect from the trial, which is expected to run about three weeks, and what the outcome might be.

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Inoreader: Take Back Control of Your News Feed [Sponsor]

Inoreader is the premier service for RSS power users. Not only does Inoreader let you fine-tune your RSS experience, but its capabilities extend well beyond RSS to monitoring email newsletters, Twitter, Facebook pages, and webpages that don’t even have an RSS feed. Stop visiting a long list of bookmarks every day and let Inoreader deliver the Internet to you through its web app, recently-redesigned mobile apps, and third-party apps that integrate with Inoreader too.

At its core, Inoreader is a highly configurable RSS service that makes it easy to import all the feeds you subscribe to using OPML. The service offers extensive search functionality to help you find new feeds and search your existing collection too. It even recommends new feeds based on your existing ones and helps you trim your list based on inactive or dead feeds.

However, RSS is only part of the Inoreader story. The service offers a unique email address that you can use to subscribe to email newsletters, so you can enjoy them just like RSS feeds and declutter your inbox. Inoreader can also monitor complex Twitter searches, so you never miss the latest about your favorite topics. You can even monitor changes on webpages that don’t have RSS feeds and Facebook pages, pushing the latest updates to Inoreader’s central hub. Most recently, Inoreader added an audio player that allows you to use it for audio content like podcasts too.

Inoreader’s service works on the web, its own iOS and Android apps, and with a long list of third-party RSS clients that have integrated with it. Inoreader is free to try, so you’ve got nothing to lose by going there now and signing up, and until June 3rd, MacStories readers can upgrade to a Pro plan for 20% off for the first year using the code MACSTRY1 at checkout. So go there today, and take back control of your news feed with Inoreader.

Our thanks to Inoreader for sponsoring MacStories this week.