Stephen’s family staged a HomePod intervention, Myke names his favorite Apple Watch apps, Apple kills off iTunes LP and Federico has some news.
We discussed a variety of fun and interesting topics on Connected this week, but MacStories readers shouldn’t miss the final part of the show. You can listen here.
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Developed by Aaron Pearce (the creator of Homecam, one of my favorite iOS apps this year), HomePass is a handy utility for iPhone and iPad to store HomeKit setup codes.
If you’ve been playing around with home automation on iOS, you know that managing accessory pairing codes isn’t exactly fun or convenient. While iOS 11 added support for QR codes and special NFC pairing tags, most accessory makers still stick basic alphanumeric codes on the back or at the bottom of accessories and essentially require you not to lose them. That’s not ideal. HomePass aims to be a single repository where you can easily keep track of all your setup codes, sync them across devices with iCloud, and even protect them with Face ID. Instead of taking pictures of your codes and storing them in Apple Notes (which is what I’ve been doing), you can collect every HomeKit code in HomePass, where they’ll be presented alongside device names, HomeKit rooms they belong to, and custom icons.
I’ve been testing HomePass for the past couple of weeks, and there are some nice touches I want to point out. First, if you grant the app access to your HomeKit data, it’ll be able to see existing accessories and allow you to simply enter the code without choosing a device name or icon (you can also create new accessories from scratch). In addition, the code displayed in the Code field of a device’s detail view is formatted with the same shape and font used on physical setup codes; this means you can open HomePass on your iPad and scan a code directly with the Home app on your iPhone. Lastly, you can add notes to your accessories and export everything as CSV if you prefer to have an additional backup of your accessory database.
One of the many shortcomings of Apple’s native Home app is the lack of deeper organizational tools for users who own dozens of HomeKit accessories and need a better way to store their codes. Ideally, such a feature shouldn’t be needed, but in my experience things sometimes go wrong and you may need to reset an accessory and add it to HomeKit again. When that happens, you don’t want to go hunting for the setup code on the back of a thermostat. I highly recommend using HomePass instead, which is available at $2.99 on the App Store.
Earlier this week, Apple engineers visited the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired where they led a programming course from the company’s Everyone Can Code curriculum. According to the Austin Statesman’s technology blog, Open Source, the class was the first such session led by Apple for blind and low-vision students.
With the assistance of VoiceOver, the students completed assignments in Apple’s Swift Playgrounds iPad app. The students also got a chance to go outside and fly Parrot drones using Swift Playgrounds. Viki Davidson, a technology teacher at the school, told Open Source:
“We see this as a way to get them interested in coding and realize this could open job opportunities,” said Vicki Davidson, a technology teacher at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. “Apple has opened up a whole new world for kids by giving them instant access to information and research, and now coding.”
Apple’s director of accessibility, Sarah Herrlinger, who will participate in a session on Innovations in Accessibility at South By Southwest on March 15th, said:
“When we said everyone should be able to code, we really meant everyone,” said Sarah Herrlinger, Apple’s director of accessibility. “Hopefully these kids will leave this session and continue coding for a long time. Maybe it can inspire where their careers can go.”
Swift Playgrounds and Apple’s Everyone Can Code curriculum have grown at a remarkable rate and are fantastic resources for students, teachers, and parents. However, it’s Apple’s long-standing commitment to accessibility across all of its products that helps ensure that those resources are available to as many students as possible.
In the first update since November 2017, Apple today released version 1.7.8 of Workflow, the powerful iOS automation app they acquired last year. The latest version, which is now available on the App Store, introduces a brand new Mask Image action, adds support for Things’ automation features, and improves the ability to extract text from PDFs using the company’s PDFKit framework, launched in iOS 11. While the unassuming version number may suggest a relatively minor update, Workflow 1.7.8 actually comes with a variety of noteworthy changes for heavy users of the app.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been over 4 years since Sunlit debuted as an iOS photo-sharing app built on top of App.net, the social network that has since been shut down. App.net didn’t make it, but Sunlit is back and has been reimagined as a photo blogging app for Micro.blog and WordPress sites.
In 2009, Apple introduced iTunes LP content as an enticement for music fans to purchase full albums. The format bundled an album with additional material like bonus tracks, liner notes, videos, and other extras. Earlier today, the UK-based website Metro reported that it had seen an email message from Apple to music industry professionals announcing that it will not accept iTunes LP content after March 2018, which Apple subsequently confirmed to The Verge.
The format, built from a bundle of JavaScript controller files, CSS, HTML, XML, an iTunesMetadata.plist file, images, and videos, never took off.1 Contrary to Metro’s initial report that Apple is deprecating iTunes LPs entirely though, Apple told The Verge that:
While iTunes LP submissions will end this month, existing iTunes LPs will not be depreciated. Not only will these iTunes LPs continue to be available, but users will still be able to download any previous or new purchases of iTunes LPs at any time via iTunes.
The decision to no longer offer new iTunes LP content is not surprising in light of the decline of music sales industry-wide and the rise of streaming services like Apple Music.
On this week’s episode of AppStories, we interview two members of Team Alto, Harry Nesbitt and Ryan Cash, about Alto’s Adventure, the challenges they faced in following it up with Alto’s Odyssey, the creative process of making games, and the mobile game industry.
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Whether you’re a developer who’s working on mobile apps, or just someone enjoying the millions of apps available for your phone, today is a very special day. It’s the ten year anniversary of the original iPhone SDK.
I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this release changed a lot of people’s lives. I know it changed mine and had a fundamental impact on this company’s business. So let’s take a moment and look back on what happened a decade ago.
Craig Hockenberry published a fantastic retrospective on a decade of the iPhone SDK, which, after months of jailbreaking, allowed developers to start making real iPhone apps in 2008. It’s an excellent, well-researched story (with a lot of links, which you should open in new tabs; take your time to explore) that brings back a lot of memories. You should also check out the replies (standard and quoted) to Craig’s tweet for a lot more interesting stories.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that I wouldn’t be here, typing this post today, hadn’t Apple decided to open iPhone app development to third-party developers 10 years ago. I think many of us in this community of people who still care about this stuff at least partially owe our careers to the iPhone SDK. I’ve shared this story before, but in 2008 I dropped out of university, got a job at a physical “eBay store”, and later started blogging with a free WordPress website because I wanted to write about apps. But really, I wanted to write about iPhone apps and try as many as possible to share my thoughts with other people. That website eventually became MacStories and these words I’ve been putting out for almost 9 years now.
In hindsight, it feels strange that thousands of jobs around the world were created or inspired by a huge and sprawling corporation, but it didn’t feel that way back then. Even as a nobody watching and blogging (in poor English) from the sidelines of a burgeoning industry, that period between the spring of 2008 and early 2009 carried a palpable sense of discovery, surprise, and wild experimentation that I remember fondly. I saw app developers as pioneers charting a future we couldn’t even imagine. It was, in many ways, a different, ingenuous, more enthusiastic era – one that I hope to live through again someday.
Apple posted a short film on its YouTube channel called ‘Welcome Home’ directed by Spike Jonze, starring singer/dancer FKA twigs, and featuring the song ‘’Til It’s Over’ by Anderson .Paak. The video, which promotes the HomePod, is the first since the device was released to spotlight Siri. The spot begins with a young woman’s long, crowded commute home in the rain. She arrives home wet and exhausted barely able to muster “Hey Siri, play me something I’d like.’
She sits down on the couch in a small apartment as the HomePod begins to play ’Til It’s Over.’ As she starts to relax and sway to the music, she discovers she can extend her apartment with simple hand gestures. The remainder of the video is an energetic and colorful dance routine that shows off FKA twigs’ talent as she moves around the apartment extending the walls. The spot ends with FKA twigs opening her eyes as she lies on the couch apparently waking from a dream.
Video can’t capture the sound quality of the HomePod that Apple points to as one of the device’s main selling features. Instead, Jonze captures the convenience of asking Siri to play something you’d like. Siri has serious limitations on the HomePod, but controlling Apple Music works well and is a strength that I’m not surprised to see Apple highlight.
