In 2015, Mark Bramhill, burst onto the Apple podcast scene seemingly out of nowhere with a new tightly-edited podcast called Welcome to Macintosh. Besides the high production values that Bramhill brought to that first season, the show succeeded by offering concise, compelling storytelling about interesting and sometimes obscure moments in Apple’s history.

Today, Bramhill announced Season 3 of Welcome to Macintosh, which will be published every other Friday beginning August 18th. Season 3 is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $17,000 to cover travel and other production costs. Backers of the project will receive behind-the-scenes videos and a special podcast feed available alongside the new Season 3 episodes, all of which are accessible from a special Members page on Macintosh.fm.

Season 3 features 10 all-new episodes and kicks off with a multi-episode series on how emoji are created and Bramhill’s efforts to convince the Unicode Consortium to approve a new emoji he created himself. I won’t spoil the episodes, but I had the opportunity to listen to two of them, including the first called ‘Will You Be My Emoji?,’ and they didn’t disappoint. As with earlier seasons, Bramhill’s skillful storytelling left me eager for more.

In connection with today’s announcement, Bramhill released a short promotional teaser episode. ‘Will You Be My Emoji?’ will be released on August 18th and subsequent episodes every other Friday thereafter.

You can listen to Season 3 on Macintosh.fm or subscribe to Welcome to Macintosh from iTunes, Apple’s Podcasts app, or any other podcast player using the show’s RSS feed.

Anchor, the service that aims to bring audio creation to the masses, introduced a new feature today in its iOS app that offers a better way to share audio clips on social media: Anchor Video.

Put simply, an Anchor Video takes your recorded audio, transcribes it, then creates a video out of the content. The finished product includes your original audio complemented by a running stream of the clip’s spoken words in written form; transcribed words animate across the screen as the clip plays, providing an elegant visual way of sharing your content on social media. If a follower comes across your video and doesn’t want to or can’t listen to audio in a given situation, they can simply watch the transcription fly by; and even if they do want only audio, presenting that audio as an Anchor Video will make it stand out more in a social media feed.

The creation of an Anchor Video is smooth and easy. It starts with selecting a recorded clip on your Station and tapping the video button to the left of the share icon. Anchor will then work to transcribe the clip, which for longer clips may take a while, so there’s a feature to get notified when it’s done – a nice touch. After the transcription is complete, you can check to make sure it got everything correct and make any edits as necessary, including adding, removing, or editing words. When it all looks good, the video will generate – again, there’s the option to get notified when it’s finished if you don’t want to wait – and you can then share it in one of three formats: Square (1:1), Wide (16:9), and Stories (9:16). You don’t pick the format until after the video’s generated, so it’s easy after the fact to export in different formats for different services.

Anchor Video is a well-polished solution to the problem of sharing audio across social media. It makes the task simple for users, takes into account how different services are optimized for different aspect ratios, and creates a finished product that looks good enough to share.

Today the team at Supertop announced the release of Castro 2.3, which introduces rich notification support for the podcast app.

Castro 2 launched last August with a new interface for managing podcast episodes that centers around an inbox and queue. With an increasing number of great podcasts available, the traditional model of subscribing to a show and adding all of its episodes to your feed can get overwhelming. In Castro 2 the solution to this problem is to have new episodes land in an inbox. The inbox allows users to decide which episodes make it to their queue for listening, and which don’t.

Previously, when notifications for a new episode came in, you were presented the options to play, queue, or archive the episode. But unfortunately, while the episode’s title would display in the notification, with many podcasts a title isn’t enough information to properly decide whether the show’s content is something you’d be interested in. As such, taking action on a notification often couldn’t happen in an informed way without opening the full app anyways. That changes with today’s update. Thanks to its implementation of iOS 10’s rich notification framework, a notification from Castro will now display a show’s artwork and a portion of the episode description along with the aforementioned action buttons. So now when a show’s episode title is San Frosé, you can be well informed about what the subject matter actually is.

Besides using rich notifications as a triage method, Supertop has one other interesting implementation of the feature. If you pause an episode when there are less than three minutes remaining, Castro will immediately send a silent notification that presents you with the option to archive the show and, optionally, play the next show in your queue. So if a show has a couple minutes worth of outro that you prefer to skip, rather than hitting the skip button several times you can now simply hit pause, then interact with the notification that appears in order to either move to the next show or end playback altogether.

The full list of changes in Castro 2.3 is available on Supertop’s blog. Castro can be downloaded from the App Store.

Castro is designed around the philosophy of making it easy to access the podcast episodes you want to hear. The focus of Castro 2.0 when it launched in August was to make it simple to assemble a single queue of podcast episodes using an inbox to triage episodes from your podcast subscriptions.

Version 2.2 of Castro leverages its flat inbox/queue hierarchy to its advantage with new ways to get at your favorite podcasts. On the iPhone, Castro adds a new widget and 3D Touch support. By default, both display the first four podcast episodes in your queue with buttons featuring show art that can be tapped to start or resume an episode.

Castro’s widget can be expanded to reveal up to twelve episodes at the top of your queue. The use of show art makes identifying and playing an episode easy. The one downside of this approach though, is that there is no way to distinguish between different episodes if you have multiple episodes of the same show near the top of your queue.

In addition to displaying the first four episodes in your queue, 3D Touch adds shortcuts to other functionality, including the ability to kick off a search for new shows in Castro’s Discover tab using text on your clipboard, a feature that is handy if you read about a podcast somewhere that doesn’t include a ‘subscribe’ link. You can also set a sleep timer or jump directly to your inbox or queue with 3D Touch.

Finally, Castro 2.2 adds CarPlay integration, which I previewed in my CarPlay review last week. With just a queue and inbox to contend with, Castro makes navigating podcast episodes in your car a breeze. Instead of drilling through layers of playlists to find what you want to hear, you can go straight to your queue, or jump to your inbox if you’ve exhausted the queue, using the tabs at the top of Castro’s CarPlay interface.

Castro 2.2 is a free update for existing customers and $3.99 for new customers, a $1.00 price reduction from its launch price.