Apple Maps in 2020: Cycling and EV Routing, City Guides, and Feature Parity on All Platforms

Apple Maps has come a long way since its debut in iOS 6. Much of the app’s history, which got off to a rocky start, has been focused on gathering and improving map data worldwide, but that’s beginning to change. The task is enormous and will never really be finished, but a shift has already started.

Once, the improvements in Maps were focused mainly on its basic underlying data like getting roads and geographic features correct. However, today the emphasis is increasingly on providing a deeper set of data and new features like cycling routes and city guides. Google Maps has had some of this functionality for years, and many of the refinements to Apple Maps are in just a handful of cities and countries. However, with the completion of Maps’ rebuilt map data in the US, Apple has begun to layer in new data and functionality that is poised to spread out much more widely.

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Portal 3 Review: More of the World through Ambient Noise

There was no better time than 2020 for my discovery of Portal, the immersive ambient noise app I reviewed at the start of the year.

Back in January Portal impressed me with its multifaceted approach to providing an escape from your current surroundings. Not only are the app’s 3D soundscapes of a high sound quality and perfectly paired with headphones, especially noise-cancelling ones like AirPods Pro, but Portal also engages your other senses to help you focus, sleep, or mentally escape when you can’t physically escape. One way the app does this is through its visual scenes, which provide each different sound portal with a location’s snapshot that your imagination can lock on to. Another way is via Philips Hue integration, which enables your home lights to automatically sync to different colors and brightness settings that fit best with the portal environment you’ve chosen. This combination of immersive sound with visual scenes and real-world correlation via smart lights makes Portal a uniquely holistic experience.

I’ve been using Portal ever since January, but even more since March, when my ability to physically leave home was drastically scaled back. I don’t use it when sleeping, but it’s certainly helped me both focus and escape, providing the much-needed feeling of being in a new environment even when my physical surroundings are left unchanged. For these reasons, as well as the presence of features like breathing exercises in the app, I find it appropriate to call Portal not just an ambient noise utility, but a wellness app too.

Today, Portal is launching a big 3.0 update that leans into its core strengths by providing more of what makes the app great: its portals. Previously the app offered a total of 19 portals, and today that number more than doubles as 25 new portals have been added for a total of 44 – and more are on the way.

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Apple Music for Web Debuts New Beta Version with Fresh Design and ‘Listen Now’

The new Apple Music web beta.

The new Apple Music web beta.

It’s been less than a year since Apple launched its first public beta of the Apple Music web player, which after several months came out of beta earlier this year and resides at music.apple.com. On the heels of an updated Music app in this fall’s releases of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and more, the company isn’t delaying keeping its web player in-sync with the app versions. A new public beta of Apple Music for web can be accessed now at beta.music.apple.com, sporting a design to match the changes seen in the forthcoming macOS 11 and iPadOS 14, and a new Listen Now page that replaces the prior For You option.

The design refresh doesn’t bring major changes, just aesthetic tweaks to elements like the sidebar. Listen Now represents the most substantial update, but it still works similarly to the former For You page. It contains collections of recommended albums and playlists based on your listening activity, alongside Apple Music’s algorithmic playlists like New Music Mix and Chill Mix. You’ll also find Recently Played, New Releases from artists in your Library, and a new prominent section called Top Picks. After using Listen Now in the OS betas for the last couple months, I’ve grown to prefer it over For You, despite there being relatively few differences between the two. Having Top Picks front and center, for example, is a better choice for me than For You’s placement of the algorithmic playlists up top, since I rarely listen to those.

It’s great to see that Apple Music’s web player will be updated on the same cycle as its apps. Apple’s history with iterating its web apps isn’t great (iCloud.com, anyone?), but to better compete against Spotify, which has a first-class web player, a more intentional approach for Apple Music is needed.

Anyone can access the beta version of Apple Music’s web player at beta.music.apple.com, while the previous version is still accessible at music.apple.com.

AppStories, Episode 179 – An Interview with David Smith→

This week on AppStories, we interview developer David Smith about watchOS, widgets, what the announcements at WWDC this year mean for developers and users, and David’s apps, including a new one he’s working on for the fall.

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 179 - An Interview with David Smith

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

You can also follow our 2020 Summer OS Preview Series through our dedicated hub, or subscribe to its RSS feed.

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Calory: Track What You Eat! [Sponsor]

Calory is the calorie counter and tracker that makes it simple to record and monitor the calories you consume for healthier living. Too many calorie-tracking apps overwhelm you with data and are hard to use. Calory is different. The app’s elegant interface is designed to make quick work of logging food items and makes checking your progress easy.

The app is available on the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, which ensures you’ll always have a device nearby to help you stay on track. On each platform, one of Calory’s hallmarks is its straightforward, glanceable design. There is no distracting, extraneous information, just refined visual cues to make tracking your progress easy and a big plus button for quickly logging calories and meals. For more detail, you can view your data in a journal view, which provides a snapshot of each day tracked.

Calory’s clutter-free interface lets you monitor your calories daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly to spot trends. Tracking other statistics like carbs, proteins, fat, sodium, and more is available too. You can track water intake and your weight, and the app works with Apple Health, which privately stores the data you log.

To make entering meal data even easier, Calory lets you save custom plates, so you can quickly log your most common meals, and scan barcodes. There’s even a recipe database to help inspire you to try new, healthy meals. Of course, there is also Shortcuts integration, which allows you to log items and track your progress using Siri and your own custom shortcuts.

Download Calory today to start tracking what you eat or visit calory.app to learn more about the easiest, most elegant way to count your calories.

Our thanks to Calory for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: Game Tracking, Wallpapers, and Cooking App Reviews

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week on MacStories Unwind:

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Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    • A joint story on the widgets we’d love to see this fall and beyond
    • A collection of iOS utilities from Ryan
    • A member Home screen featuring widgets and creative wallpapers
    • Plus, lots of apps and more.
  • MacStories Unplugged
    • This week Federico and John explore iced coffee, America’s obsession with drive-thrus, and ghost towns, along with updates on their OS reviews, the AppStories developer interview series, and more.
  • Join Club MacStories

AppStories

Unwind

GameTrack Review: An Elegant Way to Discover, Track, and Share Videogames

There is far more media I’d like to try than I have time for. Between TV shows, movies, music, books and other reading, podcasts, and videogames, the supply of content far outstrips the time I have by an order of magnitude. As a result, I’m both picky and often slow to getting around to some media, especially games, which often require a substantial time commitment. The trouble is that it’s easy to lose track of games I’ve read about, that someone has recommended, and even those that I’m in the middle of playing if I can’t play regularly.

I’ve approached the problem in a lot of different ways. Text notes are a quick and portable solution but lack detail. Apps designed to track lots of different kinds of media have the benefit of consolidating everything in one place, but often don’t accommodate features specific to one kind of media. As a result, I’ve recently gravitated to apps that focus on just a single type of media. For videogames, that solution has been GameTrack, an app that we’ve covered in our Club MacStories newsletters in the past.

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John Giannandrea on the Broad Reach of Machine Learning in Apple’s Products→

Today Samuel Axon at ArsTechnica published a new interview with two Apple executives: SVP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy John Giannandrea and VP of Product Marketing Bob Borchers. The interview is lengthy yet well worth reading, especially since it’s the most we’ve heard from Apple’s head of ML and AI since he departed Google to join the company in 2018.

Based on some of the things Giannandrea says in the interview, it sounds like he’s had a very busy two years. For example, when asked to list ways Apple has used machine learning in its recent software and products, Giannandrea lists a variety of things before ultimately indicating that it’s harder to name things that don’t use machine learning than ones that do.

There’s a whole bunch of new experiences that are powered by machine learning. And these are things like language translation, or on-device dictation, or our new features around health, like sleep and hand washing, and stuff we’ve released in the past around heart health and things like this. I think there are increasingly fewer and fewer places in iOS where we’re not using machine learning. It’s hard to find a part of the experience where you’re not doing some predictive [work].

One interesting tidbit mentioned by both Giannandrea and Borchers is that Apple’s increased dependence on machine learning hasn’t led to the company talking about ML non-stop. I’ve noticed this too – whereas a few years ago the company might have thrown out ‘machine learning’ countless times during a keynote presentation, these days it’s intentionally more careful and calculated in naming the term, and I think for good reason. As Giannandrea puts it, “I think that this is the future of the computing devices that we have, is that they be smart, and that, that smart sort of disappear.” Borchers expounds on that idea:

This is clearly our approach, with everything that we do, which is, ‘Let’s focus on what the benefit is, not how you got there.’ And in the best cases, it becomes automagic. It disappears… and you just focus on what happened, as opposed to how it happened.

The full interview covers subjects like Apple’s Neural Engine, Apple Silicon for Macs, the benefits of handling ML tasks on-device, and much more, including a fun story from Giannandrea’s early days at Apple. You can read it here.

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