Apple Shares First Series of HomePod Ads →

Apple today shared its first series of HomePod ads on its official YouTube channel, titled Bass, Beat, Distortion, and Equalizer.
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The music-focused ads are each set to their own song, including Ain’t I by Lizzo, DNA by Kendrick Lamar, Holy Water by Hembree, and All Night by Big Boi. Apple continues to position the HomePod as a “breakthrough speaker” first and “intelligent home assistant” second in the description of each video.

If there was any doubt on how Apple is trying to position the HomePod, these ads have no mention – visual or otherwise – of Siri functionalities at all. They’re just about music. (Personally, I love the style and animations.)

As someone who actually believes in the utility of smart speakers, I’m curious to see how this strategy will play out for Apple this year, and if they’re going to air “lifestyle” HomePod + Siri commercials at some point (as they did many times before).

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Download Enhanced Voices for Text-to-Speech Services on iOS

By Federico Viticci

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Currency Conversions with Historical Exchange Rates

By Federico Viticci

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Connected, Episode 177: Whatever State Asparagus Is Born In →

Linked By Federico Viticci

After wading through HomePod and iOS 11.3 news, the boys give a status report on how they’re feeling about iOS 11 and High Sierra several months into running the releases.

On this week’s episode of Connected, we covered all the latest news from Apple on iOS 11.3 and HomePod, and we also checked in on our experience with iOS 11 and High Sierra so far. You can listen here.

HomePod Supports User Presence at Home for Personal Notifications →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Refinery29’s Madeline Buxton has spent one hour testing a HomePod ahead of preorders going live tomorrow, and, like others noted at WWDC ‘17, she came away impressed with the small footprint of the device and its audio quality compared to other smart speakers.

This bit from her story is interesting:

Secondly, although everyone in your apartment will be able to use the speaker, only the person who sets up HomePod on their iCloud account will be able to send texts, set up reminders, and get calendar notifications via voice commands. Google Home and Amazon Echo, meanwhile, can recognize different voices and provide personalized content accordingly. (If you do set up personal notifications on HomePod, these will only be available when you are on the network, so you don’t need to worry about your texts being read aloud at home when you are at work. If you don’t want them read aloud when you’re home, you can go into your HomeKit settings and turn off the notifications.)

To my knowledge, this is the first time we hear that HomePod does indeed support calendar notifications (which aren’t mentioned on Apple’s HomePod webpage). As Benjamin Mayo notes, details on how personalized calendar alerts would work are still unclear.

Update: Refinery29 has updated their story to clarify that HomePod will not support calendar notifications.

In addition, I assume that the ability to detect when the HomePod’s owner is at home is powered by the new user presence feature added to HomeKit in iOS 11. Even without a HomePod, iOS 11 lets you set up HomeKit automations with conditions that determine whether you or someone else is at home. The HomePod, as a HomeKit hub, will likely take advantage of the same API, which, in my experience with HomeKit automation in our apartment, has worked well since my girlfriend and I updated to iOS 11 on all our devices in September.

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Changes Coming to Safari 11.1 in iOS 11.3 and macOS 10.13.4 →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Apple’s Ricky Mondello has a great thread on some of the improvements for users and web developers coming to the next version of Safari, which is available in today’s betas of iOS 11.3 and macOS 10.13.4.

Among the highlights: animated GIFs can be replaced with silent videos; Intelligent Tracking Prevention is getting even smarter; Safari Reader has an improved parser and support for link blogs; Password AutoFill for Apps, which debuted with iOS 11, now works in web views inside apps. If you’re on the iOS 11.3 beta, you can try the improved Reader on this very post. As for GIFs, here at MacStories we already replaced them with silent .mp4 files loaded via native auto-play (see one in action here), but we’re considering adding support for video content in <img> tags as well. I’m also glad to see Apple expanding support for modern web app technologies including Service Workers and Web App Manifest.

You can find the full documentation for Safari 11.1 on Apple’s website here.

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Apple Announces iOS 11.3 with ARKit 1.5, New Animoji, Health Records, Music Videos, and More

By Federico Viticci

In a press release, Apple today announced iOS 11.3, the third major update to iOS 11 set to be released in beta for developers later today, and launching to the general public this Spring. iOS 11.3 will improve upon iOS 11 and features that debuted alongside the iPhone X with new Animoji, a major upgrade to ARKit, the ability to store health records in the Health app, plus other improvements for built-in system apps.

No Cutting Corners on the iPhone X →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Brad Ellis on the very special corners of the iPhone X:

Here’s where the nerd part comes in, iPhone X rounded screen corners don’t use the classic rounding method where you move in a straight line and then arc using a single quadrant of a circle. Instead, the math is a bit more complicated. Commonly called a squircle, the slope starts sooner, but is more gentle.

And:

Now let’s talk about the notch itself. The left and right sides have two rounded corners. Because of the curve falloff, one curve doesn’t complete before the next one starts — they blend seamlessly into each other. As a result, no tangent line on this edge actually hits a perfect vertical.

I love this type of design details. Almost three months later, sometimes I still stop and stare at the screen on my iPhone X to realize what a marvelous feat of industrial design and engineering it is.

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Apple Rolls Out Beta of ‘Apple Music For Artists’ Analytics Dashboard →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Speaking of music services, Billboard’s Melinda Newman reports on today’s beta launch of Apple Music For Artists, a dashboard to provide artists with hundreds of data points about their fans’ listening habits.

The initial beta rollout involves a few thousand artists who will test the product and see what adjustments and expansions, if any, should be made before Apple Music for Artists opens in the Spring to the several million artists with content on the iTunes and Apple Music platforms. Later plans call for a mobile app.

The easily navigable dashboard’s home page provides artists with their current number of plays, spins, song purchases and album purchases. The user can specify the time period ranging from the past 24 hours to the 2015 launch of Apple Music.

Other services have offered similar analytics products for years, but Billboard notes that Apple’s take features more depth and a cleaner user interface for artists.

In addition to broad strokes, artists can drill down on a granular level in myriad ways. A global map allows musicians to click on any of the 115 countries in which Apple Music/iTunes is available and find out what’s happening with their music. They can select individual cities and see how many plays and sales they have in each market, as well as look at their top songs in every city. They may further examine the listener demographics per city, for example, calling up how many times females ages 16-24 in Los Angeles have listened to a particular song.
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Additionally, artists can view all Apple-curated playlists on which they appear, see how many plays they receive and how they are trending over time.

If you’re an artist offering content on Apple Music, this sounds like a pretty cool addition to the service, especially because you can inspect data going back to Apple Music’s launch over two years ago.

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