Now with a Powerful Launcher for Your Mac
AirPods are shipping, Mario needs the Internet and Myke has a story.
A fun episode of Connected this week with a good variety of topics. You can listen here.
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Following a soft rollout last month in the Netherlands, Apple has now launched a new Support app in the U.S. App Store for both iPhone and iPad.
This new app is the latest sign of Apple’s efforts to provide easy and convenient ways for its users to get the help they need with support issues. It follows an expanded presence on Twitter in the last year, where the company started with an Apple Music Help account , then later replaced it with a more wide-reaching Apple Support account .
Support serves many of the same functions as Apple’s Support website , but within the simple interface of an app.
You may remember Pastebot as an early iOS clipboard manager. That app is no longer available, but Tapbots has brought Pastebot back in the form of a macOS app. Pastebot for Mac can store up to 500 of your most recently copied items, including text, URLs, images, and files. The clips are stored chronologically with the most recent ones on top. That makes finding recent clips easy, but even older clips that are buried under recent items aren’t hard to find thanks to Pastebot’s smart search functionality. In addition, you can save frequently used clips to custom pasteboards and manipulate clips with filters.
I wasn’t sure I needed a 12.9-inch iPad when Apple announced the iPad Pro in September 2015. And yet, over a year later, the iPad Pro is, by far, the best computer I’ve ever owned. I’ve never felt so satisfied with any other Apple device before – but the transition wasn’t easy.
My thanks to the following people for their feedback and for helping me find the right focus and motivation:
Apps mentioned in the story: 50
Hardware products mentioned in the story: 17
Workflows linked in the story: 6
Today, Apple updated macOS Sierra 10.12.2 and yesterday, it updated watchOS 3.1.1 with the usual unspecified bug fixes and performance enhancements, but there are also a few other nice perks that are likely to attract customers to the update.
The macOS and watchOS updates both feature the same emoji added to iOS 10.2. The 72 new emoji, approved as part of Unicode 9.0 in June 2016, include new smileys, animals, food items, professions, sports, and more. Apple has also redesigned many of the existing emoji with a slightly more three-dimensional look and greater detail. As has been the case in the past, the new emoji added to macOS and watchOS should encourage adoption of what are otherwise primarily maintenance updates to each OS.
In addition, macOS adds four new wallpapers called Abstract Shapes, Color Burst 1, Color Burst 2, and Color Burst 3. The Color Burst wallpapers were first seen at Apple’s October MacBook Pro event and have since made cameos in advertisements for the new MacBook Pros.
Two days out from the release of Super Mario Run for iPhone and iPad, Nintendo’s marketing onslaught continues unabated, this time with a podcast.
Apple has published a new podcast featuring an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the beloved Nintendo character. The podcast’s official description reads:
Join the video game designer and creator famously known for Super Mario Bros. and other iconic Nintendo games for an insightful chat on the making of Super Mario Run. He’ll be in conversation with TV personality Katie Linendoll to share the importance of fun and the inspiration behind the gameplay.
The Super Mario Run podcast is available in both video and audio formats. It is unknown at this time whether future episodes can be expected, or if the one episode available now will remain a stand-alone.
This year should be the first time that music streaming revenue meaningfully exceeds download revenue. According to Pitchfork:
Going into 2017, streaming will no longer be a niche for music but the new normal. The big question is no longer whether streaming is the future, but what form that future will take, who will benefit, and what that might mean for listeners.
To mark this pivotal moment in the music industry’s history, Pitchfork published a survey on the state of music streaming. The article goes into depth about each of the major players, evaluating the highlights and lowlights of each and considers what the future may hold.
Apple Music gets high marks from Pitchfork for solidifying its number two position behind Spotify through exclusive deals with artists, but it also points to missteps that angered customers and artists this year. As for the future, Pitchfork predicts more exclusives and algorithmic playlists for Apple Music and concludes that:
Apple was too late to streaming to hold anything like the stranglehold iTunes had over downloads (at least, not yet). Instead, Apple Music’s battle with Spotify may be more like the Mac vs. PC debate: a corporate presentation of chic tastefulness versus an ostensibly techier rival.
The on-going battle between Spotify and Apple will be interesting. Spotify has never turned a profit and Apple has the cash to weather a long, drawn-out fight for the hearts and minds of customers. With the bulk of music revenues now coming from streaming, it looks as though 2017 could turn out to be an interesting year for the music industry.
Apple revealed AirPod wireless headphones at its iPhone event in September. Initially, they were slated for release in October, but Apple subsequently announced that the product would be delayed.
This morning Apple updated its online store opening orders for AirPods. I ordered a pair and at least in the Chicago area, they are set to arrive by December 21st.
Today Apple released tvOS 10.1 and iOS 10.2, both of which bring several additions to the operating systems. Chief among all additions, the clear centerpiece of these updates is a brand new app called TV. When Tim Cook announced this app onstage earlier this fall, he plainly stated its purpose: TV exists to create a unified TV experience, one place to access all TV shows and movies.
Does it succeed? Is this the best television experience available today?
Before answering those questions, it’s important to consider the history of underwhelming television endeavors that brought Apple to this point.
Steve Jobs introduced the first Apple TV set-top box over ten years ago, in September 2006. That product unveiling came at the tail end of a keynote focused on the iPod and iTunes, where Jobs announced the additions of Movies and TV Shows to the iTunes Store. At its birth, the Apple TV was not meant to revolutionize television; it was made to support the iTunes ecosystem Apple was building.
Throughout its first three iterations, the Apple TV was never a hallmark product like the iPod, Mac, or iPhone; it was simply a hobby for the company. It was Apple dipping its toes in the TV market. But the fourth generation Apple TV represented a shift. With modern hardware, a new operating system dubbed tvOS, and a vision that the future of TV is apps, Apple dove full force into the television market. It set out to create the best TV experience possible.
The newly released TV app is a significant step forward in realizing that goal.
TV is intended to address a modern issue. While the future of television may be apps, up until now Apple’s implementation of that vision has been lacking; it’s been lacking because the more video apps you have, the more navigating it requires to find the content you love. More time navigating means less time watching. TV was built to solve this problem.
The TV app on tvOS and iOS centralizes content from a wide array of video apps in one place, presenting that content in a simple and familiar interface. No one wants to juggle an assortment of video apps, jumping from one app to another to find the content they’re looking for. We’ve all learned to tolerate it, but none of us wants it. So Apple built TV to be the new hub of our video-watching life.
