Google Maps for iPhone Adds Pit Stops→

Aditya Dhanrajani, writing on the Google Maps blog:

Life is full of the unexpected—things that send us scrambling for a gas station in the middle of nowhere, looking up a florist on our way home from work or searching for a restaurant as we tour the back roads of our latest vacation destination. Finding and navigating to these last-minute pit stops used to force you out of navigation mode in Google Maps—and away from the traffic updates, turn-by-turn directions and map you rely on to stay on track.

That changed last October with an update to Google Maps for Android that lets you add detours to your route, without ever leaving navigation mode. And starting today, this feature will start rolling out on iOS as well, in any country where we offer navigation—more than 100 worldwide. So no matter where you’re from, where you are, or whether you use Android or iPhone, making a pit stop is now a breeze.

This is going to be useful in Rome (which I don’t know well enough) and it’s another differentiator from Apple Maps. I also like that they added the ability to 3D Touch the app icon and start navigation to your Home address.

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Apple Music Connect, Seven Months Later→

Dave Wiskus has been trying Connect, the social feature of Apple Music, for seven months. He now reports back on how the experiment has been going:

Imagine a social network where you can’t see how many followers you have, can’t contact any of them directly, can’t tell how effective your posts are, can’t easily follow others, and can’t even change your avatar.

Welcome to Apple Music Connect.

I first wrote about my experiences with Connect last year:

Someone asked why I believed that Connect would ever be better than Ping, Apple’s previous attempt at socialifying iTunes. Ping’s mistake was that it tried to connect listeners to each other, as a way of discovering new music. Apple Music has re-thought that problem in some very interesting ways, and early indications are that the new approach works. For the social component, Connect wants to be about connecting artists with their listeners, but at the moment, it falls short.

These are early days, and there’s hope.

The morning after I posted this I awoke to an email from Trent Reznor. He had spoken to Eddy Cue and the team about my concerns, and wanted to assure me that they were being addressed.

Apple has had seven months to get their s*** together. Have they?

The whole post is damning. I hate to say this, but so far those people who originally made fun of Connect as another Ping have a point.

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Doo Review: A Different Take on the Task Manager Genre

Because we carry our iOS devices with us wherever we go, we’re always looking for an app to help us complete our tasks. The problem, though, is that it’s becoming difficult to choose the right one due to the multitude of task managers in the App Store.

Doo isn’t your traditional to-do list – in fact, it is running in the opposite direction of most of the genre.

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Sam Beckett’s Advanced Control Center Concept→

Control Center was introduced with iOS 7 in 2013, since then, it has benefited from minor visual tweaks and the recent inclusion of a Night Shift toggle with iOS 9.3. In future updates, it would be great to see Control Center gain more hardware and system toggles, along with the ability for users to customise which toggles they require and where they are positioned. An enhanced Control Center could also add support for 3D Touch for additional options and introduce a new system-wide dark mode.

I don’t typically publish iOS concepts on MacStories, but Sam Beckett’s latest video is so close to my idea for a customizable Control Center (see last year), I just couldn’t resist. Tasteful, well researched, and with some great ideas for integrating 3D Touch, too.

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Airfoil Extends and Enhances Audio Streaming

Sometimes apps are hard to ‘get’ because you don’t know you have the problem they intend solve until you try them. Airfoil by Rogue Amoeba was like that for me. Airfoil acts as a hub, routing audio from your Mac to anything connected to your local network. Between technologies like AirPlay and Bluetooth, I initially wondered what purpose Airfoil served. It wasn’t until I got eight devices streaming at once in perfect sync that I started to see some of the interesting possibilities.

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Apple Files Motion to Vacate FBI Order→

BuzzFeed:

Apple filed a motion in court on Thursday asking a judge to remove an order demanding the company help crack the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists — arguing the order is not authorized under current law and, in any event, is unconstitutional.

“This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld,” the motion begins.

You can read the document in its entirety here. Here’s a section that stood out to me:

And if it succeeds here against Apple, there is no reason why the government could not deploy its new authority to compel other innocent and unrelated third-parties to do its bidding in the name of law enforcement. For example, under the same legal theories advocated by the government here, the government could argue that it should be permitted to force citizens to do all manner of things “necessary” to assist it in enforcing the laws, like compelling a pharmaceutical company against its will to produce drugs needed to carry out a lethal injection in furtherance of a lawfully issued death warrant, or requiring a journalist to plant a false story in order to help lure out a fugitive, or forcing a software company to insert malicious code in its auto-update process that makes it easier for the government to conduct court-ordered surveillance. Indeed, under the government’s formulation, any party whose assistance is deemed “necessary” by the government falls within the ambit of the All Writs Act and can be compelled to do anything the government needs to effectuate a lawful court order. While these sweeping powers might be nice to have from the government’s perspective, they simply are not authorized by law and would violate the Constitution.

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Canvas, Episode 4: Photo Editing→

In this show, Fraser and Federico look at four major applications for iOS: Photos itself, Pixelmator, Adobe Lightroom Mobile and Snapseed. All of these are very powerful applications for serious photo editing on iOS, each with their own particular strengths.

We also look at apps which provide Photo Editing Extensions. These are small bundles of features that can be accessed directly inside the editing view of the Photos app itself.

In episode 4 of Canvas, Fraser and I continued our Photos series with photo editing feature and apps. You can listen here and check out the links below.

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Connected: We Didn’t Stream Live and There Was No Showbot→

The whole gang is back this week to discuss Stephen’s semi-smart watch, Federico’s annual iPad checkup and more.

Don’t let the seemingly sad title of the latest Connected fool you: in the latest episode, we’ve talked about changes in the iOS 9.3 beta, Apple and the FBI, and the backstory of my iPad article from earlier this week. You can listen here.

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Watch WWDC Sessions and Tech Talks Videos on Apple TV→

Following yesterday’s release of the Apple TV Tech Talks videos, I came across this project by Aaron Stephenson that lets you watch WWDC sessions and Tech Talks on the Apple TV itself. You’ll need Xcode to install it, but, if you’re a developer, it’s a good way to watch videos on the big screen and take notes/try code on a Mac – WWDC sessions go back to 2011 and you can mark videos as favorites, too.

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