News of Shahid’s first VR game, thoughts on upcoming and recent Switch releases, and an interview with Mike Bithell to discuss Subsurface Circular.
On this week’s Remaster, we cover some upcoming Switch games, then Shahid interviews Mike Bithell on his latest release. You can listen here.
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I take extraordinarily ugly notes, a combination of terrible handwriting and the inability to organize my notes properly. Even as I’ve moved primarily to digital notes, I still struggle putting attractive and useful documents together.
Whink is almost everything we’ve come to expect from a modern note-taking app – Apple Pencil support, multimedia integration, document exporting, and more – assembled in one of the most aesthetically pleasing packages I’ve seen in its genre. By adding minor design flourishes around content, Whink transforms your notes into beautiful resources.
MacStories Weekly: Issue 95 David Pierce has a feature story on WIRED today that’s all about Siri – especially the new Siri voice coming in iOS 11. It features a variety of interesting details concerning Siri’s history, the way Apple thinks about the digital assistant, and in-depth details on how new Siri languages are added.
One of my favorite bits involves a quote from Apple’s VP of product marketing, Greg Jozwiak, who said Apple focuses on Siri’s ability to get things done:
It drives him crazy that people compare virtual assistants by asking trivia questions, which always makes Siri look bad. “We didn’t engineer this thing to be Trivial Pursuit!” he says.
This explains Siri’s productivity-focused commercial starring The Rock, and also helps make sense of the fact that Siri is often embarrassingly clueless when it comes to current events or other simple queries. Though Apple’s awareness of the problem exacerbates its lack of a suitable response in beefing up Siri’s trivia knowledge.
Other interesting tidbits from the story include the fact that Siri now has a massive 375 million active monthly users, and that Siri’s new, more natural voice was inspired in part by the movie Her.
Earlier this summer Logitech released a new home security camera called the Circle 2. The camera is sleek and can be adapted to work well in different areas of the home thanks to a variety of accessories like a window mount or plug mount. Today, thanks to loosened restrictions for HomeKit devices Apple introduced alongside iOS 11, the Circle 2 is receiving HomeKit support through a software update.
At the time of its release, Logitech announced that HomeKit support would be added in a future update, but there were conflicting reports on exactly how that would work. Today in the press release where Logitech confirmed that HomeKit support has now arrived, they clarify that it is only available on the wired model of the camera. According to a Logitech PR rep who spoke with 9to5Mac, the wired requirement is one imposed by Apple, so it is unlikely to change anytime soon for owners of the wireless model. Instructions for setting up the wired Circle 2 with HomeKit are available in a support document.
The wired Circle 2 camera is available now from many retailers for $179.95, and Logitech notes that Apple stores will begin selling the product in October.
Elk, the currency converter app that we reviewed earlier this year has been updated with a smart feature that allows you to access a currency conversion table from the Lock screen of your iPhone. The feature is a hack in the best sense of the word. By leveraging your iPhone’s Lock screen wallpaper, Elk allows you to quickly get a ballpark sense of what something costs in another currency without unlocking your phone and navigating to the app.
The simple feature grew out of the developers’ practice of manually creating a currency conversion table and setting it as their Lock screen wallpapers. Like many tedious tasks though, there was a better solution through software that eliminated typing a conversion table before every trip.
To create a currency conversion wallpaper, open the currency table you want to show on your Lock screen in Elk and tap the share icon. By default, the app will show you the system wallpapers available on your iPhone along with previews of three different currency tables overlaid on the selected wallpaper. You can also navigate to the photos on your iPhone and pick one of those for your wallpaper. After you select an image, you can save it to your photo library with the currency conversion overlay as a still or Live Photo wallpaper. Finally, open up the Settings app and set your newly created image as the lock screen wallpaper.
That’s all there is to the feature, but it’s extraordinarily handy when you want to get a rough idea of a conversion on the go. I particularly like the Live Photo version of the wallpaper because I can enjoy the image on my Lock screen, but still get to the currency table with a short press on the screen.
Of course, the data overlaid on the wallpaper cannot be updated, but it’s close enough for short trips, and you can always regenerate the wallpaper periodically with the latest rates.
Scotty Allen wanted an iPhone 7 with a headphone jack, so he set out to build his own. Jason Koebler at Motherboard chronicles Allen’s epic quest:
This sorcery took four months of engineering, Allen told me. Many iPhones were sacrificed, and lots of grey-market parts purveyors were enlisted in the quest.
The process wasn’t cheap either:
“I shifted everything up a little bit and took out protective brackets and shields and shaved things down,” Allen said. “I lost three full phones trying this, a good handful of screens, a stack of components. I broke easily close to $1,000 worth of parts in the last week, which just about broke my will. But it got to a point where I told myself—I am going to keep doing this until I prove to myself it can’t be done.”
Allen also had to design and connect a custom flexible circuit board that allowed switching between the lightning connector and his custom 3.5 mm headphone jack.
Allen’s elaborate iPhone hack isn’t something most people could accomplish and even if they could, it isn’t economical at this scale. Still, the story is an incredible tale of ingenious DIY engineering and a fascinating window into the electronics marketplaces in Shenzhen, China. I highly recommend watching Allen’s detailed account of his efforts on YouTube.
Everyone is back, and it’s a good thing, because there’s lots of news: Siri has moved in with Craig, Alexa and Cortana are hanging out and the Apple September event looms large on the horizon.
On this week’s Connected, we discuss our usage of voice assistants and smart speakers as we prepare for next week’s Apple event. You can listen here.
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On this week’s episode of AppStories, we consider ways to break up iTunes into multiple apps that are designed to accommodate how media consumption has changed, but also account for legacy devices and uses.
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