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WiFi Explorer: Scan, Monitor, and Troubleshoot Wireless Networks [Sponsor]

Optimizing your WiFi network doesn’t have to be difficult. With WiFi Explorer, you can scan the networks around you, troubleshoot issues that slow yours down, and keep things humming along as conditions change.

The trouble with setting up a WiFi network is that it can be hard to understand how other networks affect yours. WiFi Explorer eliminates the guesswork by providing a rich, graphical visualization of all the networks within range. You can see exactly where you’ve got channel conflicts with overlapping networks and make changes accordingly. It’s invaluable information for fine-tuning your network.

Whether you’re setting up or optimizing your home network or troubleshooting an enterprise network, WiFi Explorer is a fantastic solution. The app reports signal quality based on the signal-to-noise ratio and signal strength, scanning and collecting data continuously so you can analyze it in real-time or save it to study later. There’s also a handy advanced tab with all sorts of network configuration data that’s a lifesaver when you’re troubleshooting a network issue.

WiFi Explorer is incredibly advanced, but if you’re an IT or WLAN professional who needs even more, there’s a Pro version of the app just for you. WiFi Explorer Pro adds active and passive scan modes, integrated spectrum analysis, enhanced filtering, support for networks with hidden SSIDs and remote sensors, dark and light themes, and more.

WiFi Explorer has a special limited-time offer just for MacStories readers. Use the coupon code MACSTORIES30 at checkout to get 30% off on WiFi Explorer or WiFi Explorer Pro.

Thanks to WiFi Explorer for supporting MacStories this week.

The Evolution of Alto’s Odyssey→

iMore’s Serenity Caldwell and Luke Filipowicz put together a great Q&A with Team Alto to discuss the making of Alto’s Odyssey.

Here’s my favorite bit, which only adds to my love for this game:

One of the big breaks in the new game’s theming came from the lives of Team Alto’s members themselves. “Things really clicked when we reflected as a group on how much our lives had changed since the release of Alto’s Adventure,” wrote Cymet. “The team had grown, some of us had moved away from the homes we knew to live in other places, and we had all experienced big personal upheaval in different ways.

“What we arrived at was a desire to capture the feeling of going outside your comfort zone, exploring the unfamiliar, and accepting that the concept of ‘home’ is related to the people close to you, not any one place. In many ways, this is what led us to the grandeur of Alto’s Odyssey’s setting. This idea of a fantastical place far from what you know as home, where you learn to see the beauty in embracing the unknown.”

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Connected, Episode 181: Headspaced Against My Will→

Federico has a surprise for the group, then goes on to teach about Things 3 before Stephen complains about its repeating task support. In a shocking turn of events, Myke has the need for a Mac app.

I had a lot of fun on this week’s episode of Connected. You don’t want to miss the surprise I’d been keeping from the group. You can listen here.

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Anchor 3.0 Exhibits a New Level of Maturity for the Podcasting Service

Anchor today launched a major new version of its iPhone app, alongside a new web experience for creators. Anchor 3.0 is a ground-up redesign that takes lessons learned in past versions and applies them for the purpose of making podcasting as effortless and accessible as possible.

My prior experience with Anchor has been limited, but every time I’ve given it a try, I came away impressed. The latest update to Anchor isn’t so much about flashy new features, but more about demonstrating a new level of maturity: the interface is now cleaner and easier to navigate, the task of recording and publishing podcasts has never been simpler, and there are new built-in tools available to creators to help make recordings professional-grade.

In preparing this story, I wanted to approach the app as a new user might, documenting the experience of getting set up and creating a new show. Anchor has always done fairly well at being user-friendly, but I think that’s more true now than ever before.

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Smart Speakers and Speech Impairment→

Steven Aquino covers an important accessibility angle of smart speakers that I’ve never truly considered:

Since the HomePod started shipping last week, I’ve taken to Twitter on multiple occasions to (rightfully) rant about the inability of Siri—and its competitors—to parse non-fluent speech. By “non-fluent speech,” I’m mostly referring to stutterers because I am one, but it equally applies to others, such as deaf speakers.

This is a topic I’ve covered before. There has been much talk about Apple’s prospects in the smart speaker market; the consensus seems to be the company lags behind Amazon and Google because Alexa and Google Home are smarter than Siri. What is missing from these discussions and from reviews of these products is the accessibility of a HomePod or Echo or Sonos.

As I see it, this lack of consideration, whether intentional or not, overlooks a crucial part of a speaker product’s story. Smart speakers are a unique product, accessibility-wise, insofar as the voice-first interaction model presents an interesting set of conditions. You can accommodate for blindness and low vision with adjustable font sizes and screen readers. You can accommodate physical motor delays with switches. You can accommodate deafness and hard-of-hearing with closed captioning and using the camera’s flash for alerts.

But how do you accommodate for a speech impairment?

A human assistant would know how to deal with stuttering, dialects, or even just the need to repeat a part of a sentence you got wrong. None of the modern digital assistants currently goes beyond being a slightly humanized command line activated by voice, and I wonder who will get there first.

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Unread Gains Inoreader Integration and Automatic Safari Reader Option→

As John and I recently discussed on AppStories, there’s never been a better time to use RSS. There are several powerful services to choose from (we both like Inoreader), and the selection of modern RSS clients for iOS is also solid these days.

Unread, now developed by Golden Hill Software, is one of the more elegant options based on comfortable gestures and a focused reading experience. I linked to the app in November when it received support for the iPhone X and iPad multitasking; in the post, I noted that I still wanted to see Unread gain Inoreader integration and haptic feedback on the latest iPhones.

With version 1.9 released today, Unread now fully supports Inoreader and plays subtle taps for different kinds of swipe gestures. Syncing subscriptions with Inoreader supports the full range of options available on the service: in addition to unread and starred articles, you can view your active searches, browse websites by folder, or open articles for individual subscriptions. Along with the aforementioned Taptic Engine integration, I also want to point out that Unread 1.9 supports one of the lesser known Safari View Controller features on iOS: in the app’s settings, you can now enable an option to load Safari View Controller in Reader mode by default when you tap any link in the app.

Unread isn’t my default RSS client (I use Fiery Feeds 2 now), but I keep the app on my devices when I feel like I want to take a more relaxed approach to reading articles I’ve starred.

Unread 1.9 is available on the App Store.

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A Year-Long Experiment Comparing the Best Map Navigation Services→

We all have our own anecdotal reasons for thinking a certain map navigation service is best, but few of us are willing to perform a committed experiment that gathers enough data to prove our beliefs. Artur Grabowski, however, did just that.

In an experiment that began early last year and led to recording 120 different driving trips, Grabowski compared the big three mapping services: Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze. Though more complex studies could certainly be done, Grabowski kept things simple by focusing on answering only three questions:

  1. Which navigation app estimates the shortest travel time?
  2. How does each app over/underestimate travel times?
  3. Which navigation app actually gets you to your destination most quickly?

His results found that Waze estimated the shortest travel times, but that actually wasn’t a good thing, because the service also had the least accurate estimates. Apple Maps estimated the longest times, but that resulted in it being more accurate than its competitors. Google Maps, meanwhile, most often produced the fastest actual travel times, with Apple Maps and Waze placing second and third, respectively.

Grabowski’s tests are accompanied by the asterisk that his routes were all taken in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Apple Maps is likely at its strongest. Even so, the data he compiled over the year is fascinating to analyze, and shows just how competitive these services are with each other in the areas that matter most.

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Tim Cook Reflects on Apple’s Success in Fast Company Interview→

Earlier this week, Fast Company released its annual ranking of the most innovative companies of the year. Apple scored the top spot, moving up from its fourth-place grade a year prior. In a follow-up piece, Robert Safian of Fast Company today published an exclusive interview with Tim Cook focusing on the company’s success.

The whole interview’s worth reading, but one segment of it stuck with me most. In response to a query regarding whether Cook views some years at Apple as better than others, the CEO replied that every year is a good year, because even if public launches aren’t as exciting, there’s always something big in the works behind the scenes.

Even when we were idling from a revenue point of view…those were some incredibly good years because you could begin to feel the pipeline getting better, and you could see it internally. Externally, people couldn’t see that. With the iPod, before it came out, we didn’t really know that it would become as big. But it was clear it was changing things in an incredibly good way. Of course with the iPhone it was clear that that was a huge change, a category definer, but who would’ve thought [it would have impact] to the degree that it [did].

Though the example isn’t as extreme as the years leading up to launching the iPod or iPhone, one recent proof of what Cook’s talking about is the contrast between Apple’s 2016 and 2017. The former was viewed as a somewhat unexciting year by many of the company’s closest followers. Major product launches included the iPhone SE, 9.7-inch iPad Pro, Apple Watch Series 2, iPhone 7, MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, and just barely squeaking into the calendar year, AirPods. It was a solid lineup to be sure, but many of the product updates felt more iterative than evolutionary, particularly when compared with the impressive year that followed.

In 2017 Apple introduced a low-budget iPad, new 10.5-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pros, revisions across the entire MacBook lineup, the Apple Watch Series 3 with cellular, the Apple TV 4K, iPhone X and iPhone 8, the iMac Pro, and they took the veil off HomePod. It was the sort of strong year, hardware-wise, that you simply can’t have every year.

From inside the company, however, it’s easier to view every year as a good one – because regardless of what the world at large sees, you’re working to build the future.

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Alto’s Odyssey Review: Desert Tranquility

The sky above the desert has chosen a peculiar, almost plum-like shade of purple tonight as I’m nimbly moving past tall silhouettes of cacti and palm trees, when I see the black contours of a rock. My experience tells me that, in most cases, rocks have to be avoided, so I jump. While airborne, I glance at the dune ahead of me, and decide to attempt a backflip. The sky in the distance is a sight to behold – a full moon, barely visible among the clouds, faintly illuminates a panorama of ancient ruins left to age and crumble. In fact, the horizon is so beautiful, I don’t see another rock waiting just ahead of me as soon as I stick the landing. I hit the rock and fall face down in the sand. It’s game over.

I try again.

An angry lemur is chasing me, probably because I, once a mountain shepherd and now a tourist with a sandboard and little knowledge of lemur manners, woke the creature who was resting in his hut. His only goal, apparently, is to attack me and stop my speedy exploration. But I just need to make it to the next chasm and leave him behind, shaking his tiny lemur fist at me as I backflip over the void. That shouldn’t be too hard.

He’s fast though. Suddenly, I see a potential way out: a rushing water stream connects to a narrow wall, which I can vertically ride to hop onto a vine where I can grind, jump, and backflip to build up speed and escape the lemur. Seems easy enough. My jumps are precise and I elegantly make it onto the vine. But the lemur isn’t giving up – he’s right behind me. 10, 9, 7, 5 meters behind – he’s going to catch me. But we’re at the end of the vine now, and if I jump, I’m going to land and sprint. I take the leap and start my backflip. I think I made it. Except the lemur also jumps, grabs me, and I’m face down in the sand again. It’s game over.

I keep trying.

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