Apple has released the first big update in over a year for its Clips video creation tool. Following the trend begun in iOS 12, which added Animoji support to FaceTime, now all Animoji and Memoji characters can also be used inside Clips. Though I would have expected such an update a year ago, it’s nevertheless good to see. Besides Animoji and Memoji, Clips 2.1 only adds a couple other small new features, like a fresh batch of Mickey and Minnie stickers, a ‘Let It Snow’ winter poster, and support for right-to-left languages. After spending some time with the update, there are a couple nice implementation details related to Animoji that deserve highlighting.
Hands-On with Clips 2.1: Memoji and Animoji Support, Plus New Sticker Face Tracking and More
Club MacStories Makes a Terrific Holiday Gift
As you shop for holiday gifts for friends and family, we wanted to remind everyone that Club MacStories memberships can be given as gifts year-round. The Club extends what we publish at MacStories, which makes it the perfect gift for someone who wants more of the kind of app, automation, and other coverage you find on the site.
Club MacStories offers exclusive content every week including:
- MacStories Weekly, a newsletter that is sent on Fridays and packed full of our favorite apps, themed collections, tips, Shortcuts automations, answers to reader questions, featured Home screens, interviews, and much more.
- The MacStories Unplugged podcast, a monthly show featuring a discussion of what’s going on behind the scenes at MacStories, articles we’re working on, the gear we’ve been testing, and more.
- The Monthly Log, a monthly newsletter that includes long-form and behind-the-scenes stories.
- Access to giveaways, discounts, and other treats like eBook versions of Federico’s annual iOS review and other long-form stories.
- The full archive of over 250 issues of MacStories Weekly and the Monthly Log.
All told, that’s around 60 newsletters and lots of other perks over the course of a year.
Now is also a great time to join the Club because we have a lot planned for 2020, including a special issue coming in January that will be packed with goodies for members.
So, if you have a MacStories reader on your holiday shopping list this season, consider a Club MacStories membership that they can enjoy all year long. Monthly ($5/month) and annual ($50/year) memberships can be given using the following links:
Also, thanks to all our loyal Club members who have joined since the Club’s debut in 2015. You’re an essential part of what we do here at MacStories, and we hope you’ve enjoyed the Club as much as we enjoy creating its special content for you every week.
Happy Holidays!
- The MacStories Team
Chirp 2.0 Offers a Remarkably Full-Featured Twitter Experience on Apple Watch
It’s time for Apple Watch apps to grow up, and Chirp for Twitter is leading the charge.
Chirp 2.0 debuted today, offering a full-featured Twitter experience on the Apple Watch. Chirp was already the prime Twitter client on watchOS, but with version 2 the app becomes something truly special: an iPhone-quality app on the Watch. Thanks to SwiftUI and other new developer tools Apple has built for watchOS, Chirp can do all the things you would expect from a full-featured iOS app, such as load your whole timeline, with liking and retweeting functionality, display videos and open links embedded in tweets, offer tweet composition, full user profiles, DMs, and much, much more.
Watch developer Will Bishop has been shipping impressive apps for a while, but Chirp 2.0 undoubtedly represents his best work yet.
Apple News Debuts Daily Email Newsletter→
Benjamin Mayo, reporting for 9to5Mac:
Apple News is expanding its mail notifications with a new ‘Good Morning’ daily newsletter. Previously, users could opt in to receive email alerts from Apple News about select featured stories. The company appears to be formalizing that into a regular daily newsletter.
If you were already signed up to receive emails from Apple News, you’ll now receive this new daily newsletter; personally, I never cared for the previous emails focusing on featured stories, but this newsletter looks more suited to my interests, so I’ve just signed up. Here’s how the first new email describes itself:
Welcome to the new Apple News email, now coming to your inbox every morning with top news, smart analysis, and fascinating features. We’ll bring you the best stories from the most trusted sources — everything you need to be informed (and entertained) as you start your day. Enjoy!
Apple News used to have a digest section where, at different times during the day, you could get a quick overview of several important stories of the day in a similar curated fashion to what this newsletter represents. The digest disappeared following the debut of Apple News+, which is a shame because it was one of my favorite features of the app. I’m hopeful this newsletter will serve as an adequate replacement, despite not being quite as convenient as the in-app digest.
If you’d like to start receiving the newsletter, or you’re already subscribed but don’t like the idea of a daily email, you can visit appleid.apple.com and adjust your email subscriptions from the ‘Messages from Apple’ page.
AppStories, Episode 141 – Pick 2: Reeder for the Mac and iOS→
This week, we cover one of our favorite RSS clients for the Mac and iOS: Reeder by Silvio Rizzi.
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Apple Announces Winners of the Inaugural Apple Music Awards
Apple has made a habit of honoring some of the top apps, music, books, podcasts, and more on an annual basis at year’s end, and this year is no different. However, one change to the format for 2019 is that Apple has split out music as its own separate awards category dubbed the Apple Music Awards. There are five distinct awards given, with some winners chosen by Apple’s editorial team while others are determined by streaming data:
The winners for Global Artist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Breakthrough Artist of the Year were hand-selected by Apple Music’s global editorial team of experts and tastemakers and given to artists who have true passion for their craft, who boldly defy conventions in the category and who embody a sense of humanity, where listeners are drawn as much to who they are as to their music. The awards for Album of the Year and Song of the Year are based on streaming data and reflective of what Apple Music customers have been listening to (on repeat) this year.
The 2019 Apple Music Awards winners are:
- Global Artist of the Year: Billie Eilish
- Breakthrough Artist of the Year: Lizzo
- Song of the Year: “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X
- Album of the Year: “WHEN WE FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?” by Billie Eilish
- Songwriter of the Year: Billie Eilish and her brother FINNEAS, for co-writing “WHEN WE FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?”
In addition to a dedicated Apple Music Awards page inside the Apple Music service itself, Apple will be celebrating the awards with a globally live-streamed performance from the big winner, Billie Eilish, whose breakout album was streamed on Apple Music over a billion times in 2019, the most of any album on the service. Eilish will be performing at the Steve Jobs Theater on December 4 at 6:30 p.m. PST.
The physical awards Apple designed for winners feature, of course, a few special touches. Apple explains:
Each award features Apple’s custom silicon wafer suspended between a polished sheet of glass and a machined and anodized aluminum body. The wafers start as a perfect 12-inch disc of silicon with nanometer level flatness. Copper layers are deposited and patterned by ultraviolet lithography to create connections between billions of transistors. The result of this multi-month process, before it is sliced into hundreds of individual chips, is stunning and distinctive. In a symbolic gesture, the same chips which power the devices that put the world’s music at your fingertips sit at the very heart of the Apple Music Awards.
2019’s Apple Music Awards could effectively be called the Billie Eilish Awards, so it will be interesting to see if a similar trend continues from year to year, with artists earning several of the limited number of award possibilities. It seems reasonable to expect Apple will try to avoid that moving forward, but since certain awards are determined entirely by popularity, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a regular occurrence. You never know which artists may have a major standout year.
Apple Announces ‘Best of 2019’ Lists for Apps, Books, and Podcasts
Apple today published its picks for the best media in 2019 across its various platforms and services. These include selections for best app on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, as well as top picks in books and podcasts. Alongside these editorial selections, Apple has published top charts for the year across the App Store, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Books. Separately, Apple announced the first-ever Apple Music Awards, which we’ve covered here.
Apple’s pick for the iPhone’s App of the Year is Spectre Camera, the long-exposure camera app from Lux Optics, which we reviewed in February when it was released. Lux Optics is also the maker of Halide, one of our favorite iOS camera apps.
The winner of iPhone Game of the Year is Sky: Children of the Light from thatgamecompany. From the makers of the popular console, and later iOS, game Journey, Sky is a social adventure game that shares a similar aesthetic with Journey.
On the iPad, Apple picked Flow from Moleskine as App of the Year, which we reviewed here, and Hyper Light Drifter by Abylight as Game of the Year, while on the Mac, the company selected Affinity Publisher as the App of the Year and GRIS as the Game of the Year. The Apple TV’s App and Game of the Year, respectively, are The Explorers and Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap. This year, Apple also added a new category: Apple Arcade Game of the Year, which it awarded to the excellent Sayonara Wild Hearts by Simogo, which you can learn more about here.
Like last year, Apple’s App Store editorial team highlighted two App Store trends too. The 2019 App Trend of the Year was ‘Storytelling Simplified,’ with Apple featuring apps focused on telling stories through a wide range of media, spotlighting Anchor, Canva, Unfold, Steller, Spark Camera, Over, and Wattpad. The Game Trend of the Year was ‘Blockbusters Reimagined,’ which highlighted well-known game franchises reimagined for mobile like Mario Kart Tour, Dr. Mario World, Minecraft Earth, Pokémon Masters, Assassin’s Creed Rebellion, Gears POP!, The Elder Scrolls: Blades, Alien: Blackout, and Call of Duty: Mobile.
In addition to apps, Apple also made editorial selections for other media categories, including best podcasts and books of the year. Rather than singling out individual overall winners, Apple highlighted a variety of its favorites, which can be found in the Browse section of Apple’s Podcasts app and the Book Store section of the Books app.
Express Mode for Apple Pay Now Available with Transport for London→
Benjamin Mayo, reporting for 9to5Mac:
If you are in London, you can now travel using Apple Pay on the Underground network without having to use Touch ID or Face ID authentication.
This means that you don’t need to hold up the queue at the turnstile when travelling the Underground. You can simply tap and go with either iPhone or Apple Watch.
Express Transit has been a feature since iOS 12.3 but it requires partnerships with the transit networks in order for the feature to work. Apple announced the new support for the London Underground today with a new web page and sending out notifications to iPhone and Apple Watch users in the United Kingdom.
One particularly interesting detail about Express Mode is that it enables a special Power Reserve state for your iPhone or Apple Watch. When your device is set up for Express Mode, and its battery is close to depletion, iOS and watchOS will automatically save a certain amount of power so you can still use your device for transit access for another five hours after Power Reserve kicks in. This will undoubtedly reduce a lot of anxiety for people who regularly deplete their battery, and would otherwise want to keep an alternate transit access method as a backup. Power Reserve is available on the iPhone XR and newer, and Apple Watch Series 4 and newer.
Even setting aside Power Reserve, the convenience of no longer needing to pre-authenticate with Express Mode is a significant user experience improvement for transit customers. The feature’s also available in my home of New York City, but only in an extremely limited rollout; I can’t wait for it to be part of my daily commute.
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Our thanks to UpHabit for sponsoring MacStories this week.