Voice Search for Notes from the Shortcuts Widget
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WWDC 2019: Connected Live at Hammer Theatre Center→
I’ll be in San Jose for the week of WWDC, and for the second year we will be hosting a live recording of Connected at Hammer Theatre Center on Wednesday, June 5.
Last year’s live show was amazing, and we promise this year’s edition will be the most entertaining live show of the entire week of WWDC. There will be surprises involved.
You should act fast though: tickets for the orchestra level are already sold out, but you can still get one for the parterre and balcony levels. The Hammer Theatre is a beautiful venue; even on the balcony level, you won’t be far from the stage.
https://twitter.com/imyke/status/1111311052241809408
You can get your ticket here. It’s going to be fun, and I hope you’ll join us.
New AirPods First Impressions: Wireless Magic
I don’t think I need to extol the virtues of AirPods in 2019. Over two years after their debut, Apple’s truly-wireless earbuds, in addition to providing users with a convenient, seamless way to stream music and podcasts to their ears, have become a cultural phenomenon that has spurred some of the greatest memes of Tech Twitter in recent history. Everybody loves AirPods – provided their unique size and design fit their ears – and, most of all, everybody likes to say how much they love their AirPods.
This article is no different, but there’s a small twist in the usual narrative that prompted me to write this story after receiving my second-generation AirPods yesterday.
Shortcuts 2.2 Brings New Apple Notes Actions, Travel Time Enhancements
Shortcuts 2.2, the second major update to Apple’s automation app following October’s 2.1 release, has been released on the App Store today. The new version of Shortcuts, which has been available to developers for testing via TestFlight for several weeks now, brings a variety of smaller refinements and bug fixes; more importantly, it extends Shortcuts’ integration with one of Apple’s most popular built-in apps: Notes. Additionally, Shortcuts 2.2 builds upon the existing ‘Get Travel Time’ action (based on the Apple Maps framework) with new Magic Variables well suited for shortcuts that integrate with Siri.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been building advanced shortcuts that take advantage of the new actions for Notes and Maps, which I’m going to explain and share in this article. The new shortcuts are also available through the MacStories Shortcuts Archive, which now features a dedicated Apple Notes section as well. Let’s dive in.
The Wall Street Journal Details Terms of Partnership with Apple for Apple News+ Service→
Lukas I. Alpert, writing for The Wall Street Journal about the terms between The Wall Street Journal and Apple for the newspaper’s presence on the Apple News+ service:
The Apple app will surface stories thought to be of interest to a general reader—that could be national news, politics, sports and leisure news, but also some business news, people familiar with the situation said. The paper’s entire slate of business and financial news will also be searchable within the app, but the thinking is that most users won’t consume much beyond what is actively presented to them.
Apple users will have access to only three days’ worth of the Journal’s archive, the people said. The Journal also negotiated terms that would allow it to drop out of the service, they said.
“I have not entered into this deal lightly,” Mr. Lewis said in his newsroom talk. “It was never worth doing a bad deal.”
The whole story, despite being about the WSJ and on the WSJ, is reported as a rumor based on what “people said” about a newsroom staff meeting with William Lewis, chief executive of Dow Jones & Co. and publisher of the Journal. It is, effectively, a case of The Wall Street Journal reporting news about itself as a rumor.
Fortunately, William Lewis himself published an official memo on the Dow Jones press website:
WSJ members will continue to have exclusive access to the rich business reporting and analysis about which they are so passionate. Apple News+ introduces an entirely new category of readers who will have the opportunity to experience a specially curated collection of general interest news from The Wall Street Journal. As a result, our newsroom will grow. This is an investment in quality journalism.
While today’s announcement focuses on Apple News+, our collaboration with Apple will also extend to areas like video, voice, market data and AI. I will have more to share on those plans in the coming weeks and months.
“A specially curated collection of general interest news from The Wall Street Journal” sounds like a smaller selection of what you’d otherwise get with a “real” subscription to the WSJ through the web.
Earlier today I tweeted that with Apple News+ I might be able to stop paying my more expensive subscription to the WSJ and just use the Apple News+ channel instead. Now I’m not so sure I should cancel the subscription after all: I don’t like the idea of having three days to catch up on stories I want to read, and it sounds like certain stories will only be available through search. I’m going to keep my standalone WSJ subscription active for now until I fully figure out what the experience in Apple News+ is like.
A Complete List of All the Magazines Available for Apple News+ in the U.S. (So Far)
Earlier today, Apple launched Apple News+, a new subscription-based service to gain access to hundreds of magazines in the Apple News app for $9.99/month. You can read my overview and first impressions here.
After taking an initial look at Apple News+ with my US Apple ID and noticing the differences between Apple News Format-optimized magazines and standard “PDF-like” ones, I thought it’d be interesting and useful to compile the full list of all magazines currently available to Apple News+ subscribers in the US.
Below, you will find the complete list of all 251 magazines that are available for Apple News+ in the United States. The list was compiled by checking all the magazines featured in the ‘Browse the Catalog’ section of Apple News+ as well as individual categories. Apple advertises “300 publications” as being available in Apple News+; I believe that the list below is shorter for two reasons:
- These are only magazines. I didn’t count newspapers (The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times) and digital publishers.
- Apple News+ just launched. Some magazines may not have gone live yet. In fact, I had to add a few more right before posting this article.
To create this list, I manually opened each magazine and annotated whether its latest issue was using Apple News Format or the standard, PDF-like format. Magazines that support Apple News Format are labeled with “(ANF)” in the list. The split between Apple News Format magazines and standard magazines is fairly even: 125 magazines are using the richer Apple News Format in their latest issue, while 126 of them are relying on traditional PDFs (likely the format the old Texture service was using).
In simpler terms, this means that 49.8% of the magazines I counted in this list are using Apple News Format. As I wrote in my overview earlier today, I hope more and more publishers will switch to the mobile-friendly, more versatile Apple News Format in future issues.
That being said, you can find the complete list of 251 magazines I found in Apple News+ below. If I missed any, please let me know.
Apple Announces Apple News+ Service for Magazines: Our Overview and First Impressions
At the “It’s Show Time” media event held earlier today at the Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park, Cupertino, Apple took the wraps off the highly anticipated Apple News+ subscription service, which will allow users to gain access to over 300 magazines inside Apple News for a single monthly fee of $9.99. Unlike the other services announced by the company at the event, Apple News+ is available now in the United States and Canada as part of the iOS 12.2 and macOS 10.14.4 software updates.
iOS Wish List Part 2 - HomeKit and Shortcuts
John
Zane Lowe on Why Apple Music Is in the Storytelling Business→
Speaking of Apple Music and Billie Eilish, Tim Ingham, writing at Music Business Worldwide, has an interview with Zane Lowe. It’s a good interview that covers a range of topics from how Lowe builds relationships with artists to what differentiates Apple Music and what they see in Billie Eilish.
An artist like Billie Eilish thinks in sounds, she thinks in colors, she thinks in visuals, she thinks in collaborations, she thinks in all kinds of different forms of creativity. When you’re dealing with an artist like that, it opens all these other areas that you can help build things around.
With Billie, there’s color everywhere, this attitude and it’s like, ‘Wow, this is really interesting.’ At Apple, because of where we’ve all come from, we understand streaming, but [we’re thinking], ‘How can we make a streaming service that is deeper and more layered and speaks to the aspects of music we grew up loving?’
I don’t ever want to look back on my time in the streaming era and think, ‘Yeah man, great job at just building a utility.’
Functionality is so important; [a service] needs to work and it needs to be intuitive. But there should 100% be room for creative discovery and it should be 100% driven by the artists, or at least in collaboration with artists.
See also: this interview with Billie Eilish and her brother/co-writer Finneas and Zane Lowe from last month. It was originally posted on Beats 1 but you can also watch the YouTube video below.