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Spotify Debuts on Apple Watch, Promising Advanced Features Still to Come

The latest version of Spotify for iOS has been released, and it includes the music player’s first Apple Watch app. The App Store release notes stress this is merely a “first version” of the Watch app, which is reassuring considering how limited the app is now.

Spotify’s Watch app currently serves as a way to start playback of recently played music, and control that playback via play/pause, skip, and volume controls. You can also choose a connected device to send music to, and like a song to add it to your collection. And that’s it.

As a 1.0, Spotify’s Watch app covers the basics well. I’m especially pleased that volume control via the Digital Crown is enabled here. Spotify has designed its own custom volume indicator, visualized as a vertical dotted line in the upper right corner of the screen, and it’s especially satisfying to see each area of the line fill in sync with the haptic clicks of the Series 4 Watch’s Digital Crown.

One strikingly disappointing oversight is that Spotify isn’t optimized for the new 40 and 44mm Series 4 displays, as you’ll notice in the framed images above. Launching two months after new devices debut, but without support for those devices, is not a good look. I’m hopeful we won’t have to wait long for that issue to be remedied, though. In its announcement post for the Watch app, Spotify candidly acknowledged that there’s plenty more work to be done to create the best Watch experience – “we have many exciting things coming up —including the ability to listen to your music and podcasts offline.” Surely support for modern Watch displays is one of those ‘exciting things.’

AppStories, Episode 87 – Pick 2: Grocery and HomeRun→

On this week’s episode of AppStories, we go in-depth on two apps we’ve been using a lot recently: Grocery, a grocery shopping list app, and HomeRun, an Apple Watch app for triggering HomeKit scenes.

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Reminder and GoodTask: Third-Party Upgrades to Apple’s Reminders

Reminder (left) and GoodTask (right)

Reminder (left) and GoodTask (right)

Apple has long prided itself on being a company that carefully weaves hardware, software, and services together to offer a holistic user experience. Because of this, every purchaser of Apple products benefits from the built-in apps and services that accompany those products. And on the two most popular sellers, the iPhone and iPad, one of those bundled apps is Reminders.

At its core, Reminders is a simple list and to-do app that can be surprisingly powerful thanks to features like repeating tasks, location-based reminders, collaborative lists, and note support. Many times over the years Reminders has been my primary task manager and served me fairly well. It may not be as capable as alternatives like Things, but the app remains an appealing tool for those whose needs are light, and who value the ease afforded by Apple’s built-in ecosystem.

Unlike most of Apple’s other iOS apps, Reminders is built on a framework that’s accessible to third-party developers. Though developers can’t build apps that hook in directly with your Messages or Notes databases, Reminders is a different story. The underlying system powering Reminders is calendar-based, meaning it’s not tied to a single first-party app. Just as Fantastical and Timepage offer access to your existing iCloud calendars, developers can similarly build entire replacements for the Reminders app utilizing your existing collection of lists and to-dos. Two such apps, Reminder and GoodTask, serve as perhaps the best third-party Reminders clients on the App Store.

Each app takes a different approach to enhancing Reminders, with one focusing on modern design while the other offers power user features and flexibility; both, however, retain some of the benefits of staying in the Apple ecosystem while improving upon the first-party Reminders app.

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Vectornator: Graphic Design for the iPad and iPhone Reimagined [Sponsor]

Vectornator unlocks the power of vector graphic design for everyone by bringing a high-performance rendering engine and a unique, user-friendly interface to iOS. It’s exactly what you need to create stunning artworks from anywhere.
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Vectornator integrates with the Adobe Creative Cloud, so you can work seamlessly between a Mac and your iOS devices. Of course the app supports the Apple Pencil, but it also works with several third party input devices too.
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What makes working in Vectornator fast and delightful is its one-of-a-kind interface that gets out of the way and puts the focus on your artwork. With the latest release of Vectornator, the user interface has been completely reimagined for simplicity and speed. Among other things, there’s a new color picker and a slick new toolbar. The toolbar now has contextual options which allow you to tweak path smoothing for example. There’s also a context-aware inspector panel, so what you need is always available where you need it.

The user interface is also a pleasure to the eye. Through the use of translucency it appears to float on top of the canvas. This way you get an immersive experience and what appears to be a much bigger canvas to work on.

​Their new design philosophy is inspired by their users’ workflows, built with amateurs and professionals in mind. Vectornator is the perfect place for new users to learn graphic design and grow their design skills. At the same time it offers a great environment for professionals to work for extensive hours on their next masterpiece.
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Vectornator adopts the latest iOS technologies to bring users the power they need to create compelling designs. For example, image layers are automatically named using CoreML and paths are rendered live with a Metal-accelerated engine. The app also includes CMYK color previews, color profiles, and integrates with Icons8, which makes over 80,000 free icons available to users. To learn more, visit vectornator.io.
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Best of all, Vectornator is completely free to download from the App Store. So don’t delay, download Vectornator today.
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Our thanks to Vectornator for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Broadway Ditches Age-Old Processes To Run Shows with iPads→

On last week’s episode of Connected, I mentioned having heard from a couple of MacStories readers who work at different Broadway production companies, who told me they’re increasingly switching their workflows to be portable and iPad-only. Here’s Samantha Murphy Kelly, writing for CNN (via David L. Jones):

Several shows, including Kinky Boots and Pretty Woman: The Musical, are shifting to a paperless system that packs the script, lyrics, videos, and costume and prop notes, into one spot for the director, crew and cast members.

The productions are leaning on an app from startup ProductionPro, which is already used at companies such as Walt Disney Studios to help produce film and TV shows.

During a recent rehearsal of Pretty Woman: The Musical attended by a handful of reporters, production stage manager Thomas Recktenwald ran lines with three cast members subbing in for an evening performance. Swiping through the ProductionPro app on an iPad Pro, Recktenwald showed off recent changes made to the script. It had notes scribbled into the margins via an Apple Pencil, and he tapped his way through videos that highlight blocking, broken down scene by scene.

Also interesting: ProductionPro can be tried for free, but unlocking the complete feature set (which includes collaboration and bigger file sizes) requires a $19.99/month subscription.

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Getting the iPad to Pro→

Thoughtful essay by Craig Mod on the limitations and virtues of working from an iPad Pro. This point about breaking the flow of getting work done while moving across apps is extremely relatable:

Switching contexts is also cumbersome. If you’re researching in a browser and frequently jumping back and forth between, say, (the actually quite wonderful) Notes.app and Safari, you’ll sometimes find your cursor position lost. The Notes.app document you were just editing fully occasionally resetting to the top of itself. For a long document, this is infuriating and makes every CMD-Tab feel dangerous. It doesn’t always happen, the behavior is unpredictable, making things worse. This interface “brittleness” makes you feel like you’re using an OS in the wrong way.

In other writing apps, the page position might remain after a CMD-Tab, but cursor position is lost. Leading to a frustrating circus of: CMD-Tab, start typing, realize nothing is happening, tap on screen, cursor inserts to wrong position, long-press on screen to get more precise input, move cursor to where it needs to be, start typing. This murders flow. It creates a cost to switching contexts that simply doesn’t exist on the macOS, and shouldn’t exist on any modern computing device.

This stuff has been broken on iPad for years (essentially since 2015, when Split View was introduced in iOS 9). Don’t even get me started on figuring out which app in a Split View pair is the “active” one receiving keyboard input (and therefore listening for keyboard shortcuts). These small interaction annoyances might have been okay three years ago as we all sort of imagined Apple was just getting started with bringing serious multitasking to iPad; now that we’ve reached this generation of iPad Pros, they’re just downright inexcusable.

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iPad Diaries: My First 48 Hours with the New 12.9” iPad Pro

Two days ago, I walked into my local Apple Store and bought the new 12.9” iPad Pro along with a Smart Keyboard Folio, second-generation Apple Pencil, and LG’s UltraFine 4K display (plus, of course, AppleCare+ because these iPads don’t come cheap). As I shared on Twitter and the Connected podcast on Wednesday, I went for a 1 TB configuration (with cellular) in Space Gray, and the display is the monitor I’ll primarily use with a new Mac mini I also plan on buying very soon. It’s been a busy couple of weeks in our apartment: we’ve been doing some renovations and buying new furniture, including a larger desk for my “office” (read: a section of our bedroom). As I’ve shared on my various podcasts for the past few months, getting a bigger desk with a Mac mini and 4K display that would support both macOS and iOS was always part of the plan.

While in previous years I was able to offer reviews for the new iPad Pros before launch day, that wasn’t possible this year. For this reason, I decided I didn’t want to wait several weeks to prepare an in-depth review of the new iPad Pro and avoid questions from MacStories readers until the story was finished. So in a break with tradition, I’m trying something different this time: as part of my semi-regular iPad Diaries column here on MacStories, I’m going to share a collection of shorter and more topical articles about the new iPad Pro over the next few weeks.

I believe this generation of iPad Pros is one the most exciting changes to the iPad line in years, and I want to jump straight into the discussion by detailing, step by step, my ongoing experience with the new iPad Pro from the perspective of someone who’s been using an iPad as his main computer for the past five years. I plan to write about iOS, apps, and my iPad Pro workflow soon, but today I’d like to start by explaining my purchase decision and sharing some initial impressions about the iPad’s hardware. Let’s dive in.

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Austin Mann: A Photographer’s Review of the iPad Pro→

Source: austinmann.com

Source: austinmann.com

Austin Mann has published a review of the new iPad Pro for photographers. Mann, a professional photographer, is in Iceland shooting 100-megapixel images with a Hasselblad H6D-100c that generates 216MB RAW files that are a great test of Apple’s new hardware. Mann demonstrates how well the iPad Pro handles those images by zooming in and out and panning around with little lag in a video demo of Adobe Lightroom CC.

Beyond the sheer performance of the hardware though, Mann has been impressed with the versatility and portability of the device. As he explains:

I was working with Mavic Pro 2 in the black volcanic deserts of south Iceland. While sitting in the car (in the middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere), I decided to offload my images and review them.

I pulled out the iPad Pro and a card reader, and within only a few moments I was reviewing them on screen. Next thing I knew I was editing them with the Pencil in Lightroom CC and then I shared one with my wife—all within just a few moments.

It’s really easy to sit just about anywhere (even with a steering wheel in your face) and not just use it, but use it to its full extent. Another cool feature in this scenario is eSIM. Because the iPad Pro is connected to cellular, even in the middle of nowhere Iceland, I could quickly share the images without even thinking about my connection, WiFi, hotspots, etc. Time wasn’t mission critical on this shoot, but in a scenario where time is of the essence, this kind of workflow could be a game-changer.

That’s a sort of power the iPad Pro brings to bear that can’t be measured in chip speeds or other specs. It’s a flexibility that allows photographers and other creative professionals to work in more contexts and with greater efficiency. It’s hard to quantify but just as important.

Be sure to check out Mann’s review for more on his iPad Pro photography workflow and his beautiful photos of Iceland.

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Apple’s Clips Introduces New Selfie Scenes, Filters, and More

On launch day for the new iPad Pros, which feature the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera system for the first time, Apple has upgraded its Clips video app with new features that take advantage of TrueDepth’s power. Today’s update also brings new camera filters, posters, stickers, and soundtrack options.

If you have an iPhone X, XS, or XR, or one of the new iPad Pros, the highlight of this release is a batch of six new Selfie Scenes. Last year when the iPhone X launched, Clips debuted Selfie Scenes as a fun and impressive way to utilize the new device’s TrueDepth camera system. Selfie Scenes isolate you from your environment and replace your surroundings with interesting digital backgrounds, such as the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, or an animated world. The new scenes added in today’s update are called Clouds, High Noon, Big Backyard, Monster Lab, Animal Forest, and Municiberg Mayhem, a scene from The Incredibles 2. They’re all a lot of fun, providing different moods through sound effects and music. Apple says that Selfie Scenes perform better than ever on recent devices thanks to the A12 Bionic’s Neural Engine, and in my tests I did notice that the scenes were smoother and more responsive than before.

Filters and soundtracks are Clips’ next most substantial upgrades. There are three new filters: Comic Mono, Watercolor Mono, and Aged Film. Of these, the latter is easily my favorite, as the first two are only monochrome versions of existing filters. On the soundtrack side, there are a whopping 17 new tunes to choose from for your videos.

Every major Clips update adds a host of new posters, stickers, and text labels, and today’s is no exception. Continuing Apple’s partnership with Disney, there are poster options from Coco and The Incredibles 2, as well as designs related to sports, science, and more.

Though the app’s development cycle has slowed, Apple continues to plug away making Clips a great tool for short video creation. My biggest wish for the app – non-square video – has still gone unfulfilled, but hopefully one day we’ll get that change. Until then, the Selfie Scenes are a fun demo of the newest iPhones and iPad Pros, and Clips continues to be the most enjoyable video creation tool I’ve ever used. I think Apple’s on to something here, but the square video restriction continues to hold Clips back.