I love Rogue Amoeba and have used their audio software for years on my Mac. Thank you for sponsoring The Loop this week. Their new app, SoundSource, gives you powerful control over all the audio on your Mac, right from your menu bar:
Per-Application Volume Control
Change the volume of any app relative to others, and play individual apps to different audio devices. Mute your browser, or send music to one set of speakers and everything else to another.
Improve Sound Quality
Use Magic Boost and Volume Overdrive to hear your audio even in loud environments. The built-in equalizer can sweeten the sound, and more advanced users will love the ability to apply Audio Units to any audio.
Fast Device Access
All the settings your Mac’s audio devices are just a click away. Adjust input and output levels, tweak the balance, and even switch sample rates, right from your menu bar.
One More Thing…
If you have a DisplayPort or HDMI device that fails to offer volume adjustment, SoundSource can help there too. It gives those devices a proper volume slider, and the Super Volume Keys feature makes your keyboard volume controls work as well. Neat!
Check out SoundSource today, with a free trial! Rogue Amoeba has extended their April sale – through May 15th, Loop readers can save 20% with coupon code LOOPSS.
Another in the series of music-by-year mashups from The Hood Internet. These started with 1979 and have, year-by-year, made their way to 1984. They are all fun to watch, especially if you have a sense of music in the ’80s.
But, in addition to the cool images, there’s insight into how the various mechanisms actually work, like the spring-loaded hinge and the more even clicking trackpad.
After the story of Amazon VP Tim Bray quitting in protest went viral, Tim posted this follow-up, mostly about the tidal wave of responses to his original, but worth reading.
Also worth reading, the like-minded posts linked in Tim’s piece.
Solid interview with Apple COO Jeff Williams. It’s an easy watch, about 3 minutes long, and packed with interesting comments about the supply chain, opening Apple Stores, and Apple’s response to leakers and bloggers.
When I want to shop Apple online, I tend to go to apple.com and pick a product category from the menu bar at the top of that main page.
If I want support for a product, or find info about Apple Store hours or Genius Bar appointments, all bets are off. More times than not, I end up doing a Google search to find the right link.
With Apple’s Apple Store Online hub, things like chatting with a specialist, getting help with trade-ins, financing, order tracking, and Genius Bar appointments just got a bit easier to find.
Here’s a link to the new hub. Worth taking a minute to swipe through it, just to get a sense of the options available. Don’t miss that “Find a store” link at the bottom.
According to sources, Defending Jacob ranks among the top three series premieres for Apple TV+, logging a big opening weekend with viewership continuing to build in Week 2 and the audience growing by five times in its first 10 days (April 24-May 3) to rank among the two fastest-growing series premieres for Apple TV+.
And:
Defending Jacob also is believed to be setting Apple TV+ records for viewer engagement. The vast majority of viewers who sampled the show during its premiere weekend watched all three available episodes, and nearly all who watched those also completed the fourth episode released May 1, I have learned.
Episode 5 of Defending Jacob is scheduled to drop today.
Three episodes per week, 15 minutes per episode. Not a minute less, not a minute more. New episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
I have a lot of respect for Ben and John, so this should be interesting. I just listened to the first episode and it was exactly how you think it would be. I enjoyed it!
Apple today announced it is awarding $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to COPAN Diagnostics, a market leader in sample collection kits that play a critical role in COVID-19 testing. This funding will allow COPAN Diagnostics to rapidly accelerate their supply of sample collection kits for hospitals across the United States, expanding production from several thousand today to more than one million kits per week by early July. As part of this effort, Apple will support COPAN Diagnostics’ expansion to a new, larger facility in Southern California, with advanced equipment that Apple is helping design. This expansion is expected to create more than 50 new jobs.
Apple continues to step up and do the right thing.
Amazing how many apps depend on the Facebook SDK. All of them started crashing, without warning, last night. Some developers worked out their own workarounds, other apps remained broken. Facebook seems to have identified a fix which is said to be rolling out now.
From Gui Rambo’s (headline linked) blog post:
The issue was caused by some bad data being sent by Facebook’s server to their SDK, which caused code in the SDK to crash, which in turn brought down the app that was running the SDK. Since this happened during the initialization of the SDK — something that occurs right after launching the app — the apps simply became unusable.
And:
You know how people are saying these days that it’s dangerous how companies like Apple and Google control their ecosystems, to the point of accusing them of monopoly? I’m not going to dismiss that completely here, but I think we have a much bigger problem that’s been lurking in our apps for several years, unnoticed: third-party SDK creep.
Since 2014, Wink has grown to support more than 4 million connected devices. During this time, Wink has relied solely on the one-time fee derived from hardware sales to cover ongoing cloud costs, development, and customer support. Providing users with local and remote access to their devices will always come at a cost for Wink, and over the years we have made great progress toward reducing these costs so that we can maintain that feature.
And:
We have a lot of great ideas on how to expand on Wink’s capabilities and satisfy the many requests from our user base. In order to provide for development and continued growth, we are transitioning to a $4.99 monthly subscription, starting on May 13, 2020.
And:
Should you choose not to sign up for a subscription you will no longer be able to access your Wink devices from the app.
Dependence on any single technology or company can produce unwelcome surprises. As we were reminded last night.
A beta app launched by the UK this week shows the huge challenges they face and, crucially, the difficulty in designing an effective app without the help of the tech giants that make our phones.
And:
Instead of decentralizing the data across devices, the UK will pool the information it collects in a single database operated by the National Health Service.
And:
In addition to privacy issues, researchers have identified a major problem in the UK’s efforts to build an app without Google and Apple: it simply won’t work as advertised.
Apple’s iOS normally forbids applications from broadcasting via Bluetooth when running in the background. That means you would have to leave a contact-tracing app open in the foreground all the time for it to work properly.
Read both articles for the details but, in a nutshell, the centralized data pooling approach seems to rely on people leaving their app running in the foreground (rendering the phone useless for all other purposes, not going to happen) or negotiating exceptions with Apple to allow Bluetooth to ping in the background.
The Library may share the same tab bar as the other buttons in the TV app but they are otherwise disconnected. It’s like having two separate apps rolled into one, each with their own UI components and each operating on a different set of data. It’s like having two people living in the same house that do not talk to each other. For the Library tab, Apple essentially took the old iOS Videos app and transposed it as one screen inside of TV.
They didn’t modernise it all, and its age shows through.
And:
Everything is just very disjointed, both in concept and in their underlying implementations. A better TV app would have everything holistically driven by the same shared data source. You should be able to add any show to your library; it shouldn’t matter if that show is backed by a physical file on disk or not. The Apple Music app does a much better job at unifying the deprecated iTunes Store and the modern subscription-based experience.
Couldn’t agree more. I spend a fair amount of my TV watching experience in the Apple TV ecosystem. I would be more than happy to live in the TV app, consume all my content from that one focused source. But as is, things are just too confusing. Drives me to the individual apps, with their myriad ways of doing things. Confusing switching contexts, too. I’d love a rewrite.
Apple Watch and iPhone have supported a feature called Medical ID that lets you collect critical health data in one place. Medical ID can include your contact information, date of birth, medical conditions, blood type, and more.
And:
iPhone and Apple Watch offer a separate feature called Emergency SOS. When you hold down the Side Button on an iPhone and Apple Watch for several seconds, the device can call local emergency services for you.
And:
What’s new in iOS 13.5 and watchOS 6.2.5 is a new capability that connects Medical ID and Emergency SOS together. Starting later this month, customers can opt into a new Emergency SOS feature that automatically shares Medical ID information with emergency services.
Apple today announced it is awarding $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to COPAN Diagnostics, a market leader in sample collection kits that play a critical role in COVID-19 testing. This funding will allow COPAN Diagnostics to rapidly accelerate their supply of sample collection kits for hospitals across the United States, expanding production from several thousand today to more than one million kits per week by early July.
What I really found fascinating (emphasis mine):
As part of this effort, Apple will support COPAN Diagnostics’ expansion to a new, larger facility in Southern California, with advanced equipment that Apple is helping design.
Makes me wonder if we’ll see Apple branded health hardware (beyond Apple Watch) in the future.
Not to minimize Apple’s efforts here in any way. This is great work that benefits us all.
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the release of the Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart. In honor of this tremendous occasion, please enjoy this digital timeline of the life and work of Bob Newhart.
This may have been the first comedy album I ever heard as a kid and I still love listening to it. Newhart’s particular style was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen and his comedy was/is brilliant.
Mesh networking for small networks appeared in 2015 with the claim that it would solve Wi-Fi problems by improving coverage, speeding networks, and eliminating hassle. It also promised to remove the need to place base stations meticulously around a home or small office to avoid dead and slow spots.
Five years after its initial widespread emergence, those promises appear to have been fulfilled. Mesh networks have become the best way to set up a new network that spans more than a single, standalone Wi-Fi gateway can manage—or to overhaul an existing inadequate or outdated one.
How does mesh networking pull off this trick? What are the ideal circumstances to pay more for mesh over standalone base stations? And which should you consider? Let’s look into those questions in turn.
As always, Fleishman does a good job explaining the technical aspects of mesh networking.
My wife is in hospital for a separate procedure (she’ll be fine) but they test all incoming patients for Covi-19 as a precaution. If this isn’t a reason to stay inside (look at how deep that swab goes!), I don’t know what is.
She said she could still feel the swab seven hours later.
I’ve not had a problem with my AirPods Pro, but I definitely feel like the phrase should be Noise Reduction and not Noise Cancellation. With Noise Cancellation turned on, I can still hear background noise, though it is definitely reduced.
If you are having issues with active noise cancellation, here’s Apple’s support article, for what it’s worth.
The iPhone and later the iPad didn’t immediately re-invent the cursor. Instead, it removed it entirely. Replacing your digital ghost in the machine with your physical meatspace fingertip. Touch interactions brought with them “stickiness” — the 1:1 mating of intent and action. If you touched a thing, it did something. If you dragged your finger, the content came with it. This, finally, was human-centric computing.
Then, a few weeks ago, Apple dropped a new kind of pointer — a hybrid between these two worlds of pixels and pushes. The iPad’s cursor, I think, deserves closer examination.
Great, long read, interspersed with comments from Craig Federighi, sharing insight into how this new hybrid cursor came to be.
My Mom died a few weeks ago and this story really hit home for me. Tim Cook has compassion, empathy. He’s a mensch.
Don’t miss the part of the story where the photo of the Reddit poster’s Mom turned out to be a Live Photo. I can imagine how much that little detail meant.
I absolutely love the Memoji artwork pulled together by the WWDC team. The faces are hidden, buried in MacBooks, shot with a Portrait Lighting effect, a combination of dark, eerie, and whimsy. Delicious!
Spotify Technology SA Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ek said he expects Apple Inc. to further open up its platform a year after the Stockholm-based music streaming company filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union.
And:
Spotify has criticized Apple for taking a 30% cut of subscriptions and accused it of limiting app updates and preventing functionality on the Apple Watch and Siri.
And:
Since then, Apple has slightly opened up, rolling out a feature for Siri last year that lets the digital assistant control music services other than Apple’s own. Spotify also released an updated Apple Watch app and Apple TV app in recent months.
And:
Ek also reiterated his previous statements that he believes Spotify is growing faster than Apple Music, saying Spotify is twice the size of its nearest competitor and has three times the engagement.
That last bit, to me, makes it hard to make the argument that Apple is stifling Spotify’s growth.
As to the 30% cut, this from Apple (quote from March 2019):
“Even now, only a tiny fraction of their subscriptions fall under Apple’s revenue-sharing model. Spotify is asking for that number to be zero.”
Has Apple done enough here to avoid further antitrust action from the EU?
Apple today announced it will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference virtually, beginning June 22, in the Apple Developer app and on the Apple Developer website for free for all developers. The company also announced the Swift Student Challenge, an opportunity for student developers to showcase their love of coding by creating their own Swift playground.
And:
Developers are encouraged to download the Apple Developer app where additional WWDC20 program information — including keynote and Platforms State of the Union details, session and lab schedules, and more — will be shared in June. Information will also be made available on the Apple Developer website and by email.
Can’t wait. Very curious about how the labs will be implemented.
Was going through my backlog of posts, found this, was curious if the site was still alive. It is. Curious that people are still posting to it, keeping it going.
I also found this Reddit thread extremely useful. Not the original post necessarily, as much as the comments that followed, especially the discussion of the various levels of graphics performance with each model.
