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CARROT Weather 4.5 Brings Achievements, Alternate Icons, and More

The latest update to CARROT Weather, a MacStories favorite among iOS weather apps, brings a variety of improvements big and small, with the most noteworthy designed to add extra fun to the app: achievements and alternate icons.

Achievements are an attempt to gamify your weather app experience. While with most apps that sentence would sound ridiculous, achievements fit well with the personality and character of CARROT Weather. Currently there are 32 achievements you can unlock, many of which have to do with weather events you experience, while some involve travel and other activities. All available achievements can be viewed from CARROT’s dropdown menu.

Alternate icons, like achievements, aren’t a necessary addition to a weather app, but they do add joy to the user experience. Developer Brian Mueller has put together a diverse, high-quality set of icons to choose from, ensuring you can make CARROT fit in well with your existing Home screen layout vibes.

Other changes worth noting in version 4.5 are that the Secret Locations feature has been removed from its previous home in the search box, instead getting its own dedicated place in the dropdown menu. This move is accompanied by a revamp of the map view for carrying out assigned missions. Also, the app’s main search box has had its autocomplete upgraded to work much faster and comprehensively, and you can reorder saved locations easily using drag and drop.

Today’s update isn’t a major one, but it does make a great weather app even better. Features like custom icons and achievements help boost CARROT Weather’s already extensive amount of character, endearing the app to users in a way few apps can. If you haven’t tried the app yet, I highly recommend it.

CARROT Weather is available on the App Store.

The Sweet Setup Launches ‘All the Things’ Video Course

Today The Sweet Setup launched ‘All the Things’, a video course primarily aimed at explaining how to get the most out of Things, the popular task manager for Mac and iOS.

Like they did for their Ulysses screencasts last year, the folks at The Sweet Setup have produced a series of videos covering Things with walkthroughs of its basic features, project organization, as well as more advanced options such as iPad drag & drop and workflows. The videos included in the $29 ‘All the Things’ Basic package are:

  • Walkthrough of Things on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone
  • Anatomy of a Task
  • All the ways to Capture
  • Anatomy of a Project
  • Anatomy of an Area
  • Cloud Sync & Backup
  • iPad drag & drop
  • AppleScripts & Workflows

In addition to the screencasts, the Basic package includes setup interviews with Things users who rely on the app to get work done. I was honored when Shawn asked me to participate in the course, and it was fun to answer his questions about my decision to switch to Things and how I use the app. You can find my interview here.

I’m a fan of The Sweet Setup’s screencast courses. I like Shawn’s style of demonstrating features and how they work in practice, and I think the Basic video package is a great deal at $29 if you’re looking for a way to get started with Things and learn how other people use it.

There’s more, though. In the Pro version of the ‘All the Things’ package, available at $39 for a limited time, you’ll also get access to Shawn’s productivity training videos that contain general tips that work for any task manager. So whether you use Todoist or OmniFocus or something else, videos such as ‘How to Schedule Your Day’ and ‘Weekly Planning & Reviewing’ will likely give you something you can apply to your own workflow. And if you just want these videos without the Things screencasts, that’s also an option at $35.

I watched nearly every video of the ‘All the Things’ Pro bundle over the past week, and – I don’t say this because I was interviewed for this series – I think $39 for the discounted Pro package is great value whether you want to learn Things or optimize the way you work. You can find all the details about ‘All the Things’ and purchase the course here.

Fiery Feeds 2 Review

Fiery Feeds, an RSS client developed by Lukas Burgstaller, has long been among the top choices of iOS power users given its integration with multiple RSS services and ability to create custom actions for sharing articles with other apps. In the aftermath of Google Reader’s demise, Fiery Feeds found its niche as a client that supported a variety of modern RSS services and that also catered to users who had been looking for an alternative to Mr. Reader – which pioneered the idea of a highly customizable and extensible RSS app for iOS long before iOS 9 and the iPad Pro.

With Fiery Feeds 2, released on the App Store today, Burgstaller has largely focused on two fronts: modernizing every aspect of the app, and adopting a subscription-based business model that clearly separates features available for free from those exclusively available to paying customers. In the process, Fiery Feeds has grown into a cleaner, more elegant client that looks nicer on iOS 11 and the iPhone X; at the same time, Burgstaller has been able to extend Fiery Feeds’ appeal with a powerful premium-only feature dubbed Smart Views.

The result, while not perfect or as deeply integrated with iOS 11 as lire, is among the best options for RSS clients on the platform.

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A Promising Work in Progress: Initial Thoughts on HomePod

At the start, you should know two things about me: HomePod is the first smart speaker I’ve ever owned, and I’m all-in on the Apple ecosystem.

These facts make me the HomePod’s perfect customer, and they will surely color my comments. I’m guessing if I had more experience with other smart speakers, or I didn’t own nearly every modern Apple product, my thoughts on HomePod would be different. That said, here are my early impressions.

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Outcast: Download and Play Podcasts without Your iPhone [Sponsor]

Outcast is a brand-new Watch app that lets you download and enjoy podcasts directly on your Apple Watch. This app handles it all. Everything from finding podcasts, downloading them, and listening is managed entirely on your Apple Watch eliminating the need to bring along your iPhone.

There are three ways to get podcast episodes into Outcast. You can search for shows on the Watch using its dictation or ‘Scribble’ handwriting feature. Alternatively, you can browse shows by category. Whether you enjoy comedy, politics, technology, or another topic, Outcast makes it easy to find the very best podcasts available. Finally, you can also use the export as OPML feature of many popular iPhone podcast players to copy a list of your favorite shows into Outcast.

Once you’ve picked an episode, tap the download button and enjoy. Outcast supports downloads over WiFi and cellular networks and includes a full set of playback controls including play/pause and skip ahead and back. You can even adjust playback speed by force-touching the playback screen.

Bringing all that functionality to the Watch’s tiny interface posed a substantial design challenge. As the creator of the Apple Design Award-winning habits app, Streaks, Outcast’s developer, Crunchy Bagel, was up to the challenge. The result is a beautiful, easy-to-use Watch app that’s the best way yet to enjoy podcasts on your Apple Watch without bringing along your iPhone.

For a limited time, Outcast is just $0.99. That price is going to go up, so take advantage of this deal now by going to the App Store to download Outcast now.

Our thanks to Outcast for sponsoring MacStories this week.

An In-Depth, Technical Analysis of the HomePod Concludes It’s a Bona Fide Audiophile Speaker→

Given Apple’s emphasis on the audio quality of the HomePod, the lack of technical reviews from audiophile publications at launch struck me as odd. That’s why I was intrigued when I saw this tweet last night from Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing:

The review, by Reddit user WinterCharm in the audiophile subreddit, is an in-depth, technical analysis of the HomePod that includes a side-by-side comparison with a pair of KEF X300A high-end bookshelf speakers that sell for $1000 at retail. There’s a lot here that is beyond my limited understanding of audio equipment and testing, but the conclusion of WinterCharm’s hours of analysis is crystal clear:

I am speechless. The HomePod actually sounds better than the KEF X300A. If you’re new to the Audiophile world, KEF is a very well respected and much loved speaker company. I actually deleted my very first measurements and re-checked everything because they were so good, I thought I’d made an error. Apple has managed to extract peak performance from a pint sized speaker, a feat that deserves a standing ovation. The HomePod is 100% an Audiophile grade Speaker.

Judging from the comments to the post, WinterCharm isn’t the only audiophile excited about the HomePod and eager to try two as a stereo pair when that feature is released in a future software update.

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Loup Ventures’ HomePod Siri Tests→

Loup Ventures, a US-based venture capital firm, ran a series of Siri tests on the HomePod to evaluate the assistant’s capabilities on Apple’s new speaker. After 782 queries, Siri understood 99% of questions but only answered 52% of them correctly – meaning, Siri on the HomePod failed to answer one out of two questions. I’d love to see a full data set of the questions asked by Loup Ventures, but, overall, it doesn’t surprise me that the Google Assistant running on the Google Home speaker was the most accurate in every category.

While Apple has clearly a lot of work ahead for Siri on the HomePod (this was the consensus of all the reviews, too), it also appears that Siri simply performs worse than other assistants because it doesn’t support certain domains. Here’s Gene Munster (whom you may remember for his Apple TV set predictions), writing on the Loup Ventures blog:

Adding domains will quickly improve Siri’s score. Some domains like navigation, calendar, email, and calling are simply not supported. These questions were met with, “I can’t ___ on HomePod.” Also, in any case that iPhone-based Siri would bring up Google search results, HomePod would reply, “I can’t get the answer to that on HomePod,” which forces you to use your phone or give up on the question altogether. Removing navigation, calling, email, and calendar-related queries from our question set yields a 67% correct response, a jump from overall of 52.3% correct. This means added support for these domains would bring HomePod performance above that of Alexa (64%) and Cortana (57%), though still shy of Google Home (81%). We know Siri has the ability to correctly answer a whole range of queries that HomePod cannot, evidenced by our note here. Apple’s limiting of HomePod’s domains should change over time, at which point we expect the speaker to be vastly more useful and integrated with your other Apple devices.

Adding new supported domains would make Siri’s intelligence comparable to Alexa (at least according to these tests), but Apple shouldn’t strive for a honorable second place. Siri should be just as intelligent (if not more) than the Google Assistant on every platform. I wonder, though, if this can be achieved in the short term given Siri’s fragmentation problems and limited third-party integrations.

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Major VLC Update Released with Support for 4K, 8K, HDR, 360 Video, Google Chromecast, and More

Today, VideoLAN, the non-profit organization behind VLC, released version 3.0 of its media player app across several platforms, including macOS and iOS. The update, known as Vetinari, supports a long list of modern video, audio, and streaming technologies such as:

  • hardware decoding by default to allow for 4K and 8K video playback on supported hardware
  • HDR
  • 360 Video and 3D audio
  • HDMI passthrough for HD audio codecs
  • Streaming to Google Chromecast devices
  • Blu-Ray Java menus
  • Local network browsing of drives and NAS
  • Improved subtitle rendering

There are many other additions and refinements to VLC 3.0, which you can read about on VideoLAN’s website. The iOS update to VLC should be available later today as a free download on the App Store. The Mac version is already available on VideoLAN’s website.