Apple today published its picks for the best media in 2018 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 categories of music, TV and movies, podcasts, and books. Alongside these editorial selections, Apple has published top charts for the year across the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Books.
Apple Publishes ‘Best of 2018’ Lists for Apps, Music, Books, and More
Apple’s Machine Learning Journal Posts Paper on How Siri Works on the HomePod in Noisy Environments→
Apple’s online Machine Learning Journal has published a paper on the methodologies the HomePod uses to implement Siri functionality in far-field settings. As Apple’s Audio Software Engineering and Siri Speech Teams explain:
Siri on HomePod is designed to work in challenging usage scenarios such as:
- During loud music playback
- When the talker is far away from HomePod
- When other sound sources in a room, such as a TV or household appliances, are active
Each of those conditions requires a different approach to effectively separate a spoken Siri command from other household sounds and to do so efficiently. The report notes that the HomePod’s speech enhancement system uses less than 15% of one core of a 1.4 GHz A8 processor.
Apple engineers tested their speech enhancement system under a variety of conditions:
We evaluated the performance of the proposed speech processing system on a large speech test set recorded on HomePod in several acoustic conditions:
- Music and podcast playback at different levels
- Continuous background noise, including babble and rain noise
- Directional noises generated by household appliances such as a vacuum cleaner, hairdryer, and microwave
- Interference from external competing sources of speech
In these recordings, we varied the locations of HomePod and the test subjects to cover different use cases, for example, in living room or kitchen environments where HomePod was placed against the wall or in the middle of the room.
The paper concludes with examples of filtered and unfiltered audio from those HomePod tests. Regardless of whether you’re interested in the details of noise reduction technology, the sample audio clips are worth a listen. It’s impressive to hear barely audible commands emerge from background noises like a dishwasher and music playback.
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No matter what you’re doing, Just Press Record is ready to capture audio. The app’s big, red record button makes starting a recording easy, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s also an iOS widget, 3D Touch functionality, an Apple Watch complication that works even when your iPhone isn’t with you, Siri shortcut support, a URL scheme, and a separate Mac app with menu bar and Touch Bar support, all ready to go when you need them.
What makes Just Press Record feel like magic is its transcription, which can turn audio clips into editable text that you can share with other apps. Transcription also powers search, making it easy to find past recordings no matter how many you’ve created. Combine that with robust iCloud Drive sync, and your recordings and transcriptions are available everywhere you need them.
Just Press Record has tons of other advanced features too. You can connect external microphones to create high-quality, uncompressed recordings. There is extensive VoiceOver support, which has made Just Press Record a favorite in the visually-impaired community. There’s even a beautiful dark mode for comfortable capture of your late-night ideas.
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Our thanks to Just Press Record for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Instagram Adds Close Friends Feature to Stories
In development for over a year, Instagram announced today that it is adding a new ‘close friends’ feature to Stories. The new feature, which is rolling out in stages today, lets users limit who can see individual Instagram Stories posts.
Limiting a photo or video to close friends is straightforward. Friends can be added or removed from the ‘Close Friends’ list from the side menu in your Instagram profile. When you’re ready to share a photo or video as part of your Instagram Story, the new feature adds a circular green button with a white star to the bottom of the screen that restricts sharing to people on your close friends list.
When you receive content from people who have added you as a close friend, their avatar at the top of Instagram’s main view will be outlined in green to signal that a close friend has shared something. The image or video is also badged as having been shared by a close friend.
It will be interesting to see how the Close Friends feature impacts Instagram. I like the idea of limiting some of what I share on Instagram with a smaller circle of friends. For many people, I expect the feature will make them more comfortable with sharing more as opposed to moving their entire Stories usage to a private group. However, it also has the potential to drain Stories of much of their content in favor of private silos.
Gaming the App Store→
David Barnard, developer of apps like Weather Up and Launch Center Pro, has written an extensive overview of tactics that are commonly used each day to game the App Store. He writes:
Any one of these tactics might seem somewhat bland individually, but when tens of thousands of apps deploy multiple tactics across many categories of apps, the impact can be measured in hundreds of millions of users and likely billions of dollars.
Tactics mentioned include employing specific keywords, buying fake reviews, implementing misleading subscriptions, and more. The idea is that bad actors can squeeze the most money out of users by following the approach Barnard outlines, which ultimately provides a bad user experience that degrades the App Store’s reputation.
Barnard concludes the article with a challenge to Apple:
Featuring an app is a great carrot, and Apple doesn’t generally feature apps that so blatantly flaunt App Store manipulation and user hostile tactics, but the carrot of getting featured pales in comparison to how much money can be made by gaming the App Store. It’s well past time for Apple to employ more carrots to create great experiences on the App Store, and to use a bigger stick on those manipulating the App Store and creating terrible user experiences for Apple’s customers.
I love this idea as a potential solution to encourage quality apps on the App Store. The revamped App Store from iOS 11 with daily feature articles is great, as are things like the Apple Design Awards at each WWDC, but if Apple wants to retain a strong quality brand for the App Store, it wouldn’t hurt to find more ways to reward good developers.
Apple Music Coming to Amazon Echo Devices
In a blog post published this morning, Amazon announced that Apple Music is set to launch on Amazon Echo devices next month, starting the week of December 17.
According to Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon Devices, Echo users will be able to ask Alexa, the device’s built-in voice assistant, to play their favorite songs, artists, albums, playlists created by Apple’s curators, as well as radio stations available on the service. Beats 1, Apple Music’s own live radio station featuring artist interviews and daily programs, will also be accessible via the Amazon Echo, the company said. The integration will be enabled just like any other skill on the Amazon Echo by connecting your Apple Music account to Amazon’s device using the Alexa app.
“Music is one of the most popular features on Alexa—since we launched Alexa four years ago, customers are listening to more music in their homes than ever before,” said Dave Limp, senior vice president, Amazon Devices. “We are committed to offering great music providers to our customers and since launching the Music Skill API to developers just last month, we’ve expanded the music selection on Alexa to include even more top tier services. We’re thrilled to bring Apple Music – one of the most popular music services in the US – to Echo customers this holiday.”
While Apple Music has long been available on Android in addition to iOS and macOS (and on Sonos speakers in addition to HomePod), the upcoming Amazon Echo integration marks a major shift as Apple Music has never been able to integrate with competing smart speakers through third-party voice assistants. It’ll be interesting to see if the Amazon Echo integration will be more limited than the HomePod’s native Apple Music access, which we’ll make sure to test once Apple Music’s Alexa skill goes live next month.
Made on iPad→
Michael Steeber, writing for 9to5Mac:
The new iPad Pro has ignited conversations about the future of computing and new possibilities for creative work. Paired with a second-generation Apple Pencil, the hardware unlocks potential that has driven many professionals to re-evaluate how iPads best fit in their lives. My own experience with the new iPad Pro has been a journey of discovery. To expand my horizons and help others get more out of their devices, I asked the creative professional community to share their own iPad workflows.
From digital illustration to managing a business, the vast range of ways people are working on iPads proves there’s no one right way or wrong way to use them. Some have embraced iOS as their platform of choice for every task. Some use a Mac and an iPad in concert to create powerful workflows that highlight the capabilities of each device. Others are developing entirely new ways of working that simply couldn’t exist before.
Fantastic idea by Steeber, and a collection of great examples of all kinds of people using the iPad for all kinds of professional work. Another reminder that we – as tech press – can only cover a fraction of the tasks an iPad is able to accomplish.
Connected, Episode 220: Numeric Professional→
Stephen and Federico walk through their new Mac mini setups, then Federico fights with iCloud in Radar #46282145. Please help.
On this week’s episode of Connected, Stephen and I discuss our new Mac minis and I explain how I’ve started using it for automation. You can listen here.
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- PDFpen, from Smile: The ultimate tool for editing PDFs. Click here to learn more.
YouTube Stories Expand to Broader Base of Creators→
YouTube’s take on the popular Stories format from Instagram and Snapchat was previously only available to select YouTubers, but starting today it’s rolling out to all accounts with over 10,000 subscribers. Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
YouTube is beginning to roll out Stories to a wider set of creators, giving them access to the new creation tools that include the ability to decorate the videos with text, stickers, filters, and more.
The feature is very much inspired by rival social apps like Snapchat and Instagram – except that, in YouTube’s case, Stories disappear after 7 days, not 24 hours.
The idea behind YouTube Stories is to give creators any easy way to engage with their fans in between their more polished and produced videos. Today’s creators are no longer simply turning a camera on and vlogging – they’re creating professional content that requires editing and a lot of work before publication, for the most part.
While I haven’t encountered any of my favorite YouTubers using Stories yet, I hope that changes after today. While Instagram’s IGTV seems like it hasn’t taken off very well, plenty of YouTubers remain heavy users of Instagram Stories. If YouTube Stories can offer a similar experience, without users needing to leave YouTube, it could be a really solid addition to the platform.