New Year, New Audio Setup: SoundSource 6 from Rogue Amoeba
CarPlay in iOS 13 and Vignette with Casey Liss 
This week, John is joined by Casey Liss to dig into the big changes coming to CarPlay in iOS 13 and the story behind Vignette, Casey’s app for assigning profile pictures to contacts.
Joe Cieplinski, writing on his blog:
I have reached the unfortunate conclusion that RECaf’s watch app will not be able to go fully independent this fall with the release of watchOS 6. While you have always been able to log from your wrist using the app or Siri shortcuts, I was hoping folks who didn’t want to keep RECaf installed on their phones would be able to continue using RECaf on their wrist.
There are simply too many things that can’t be done on watchOS alone at this point, however. So for now, you’ll have to keep that phone app installed.
Cieplinski outlines three main areas that independent Watch apps are currently lacking in their capabilities, two of which involve HealthKit limitations, while the third is that you can’t perform any kind of In-App Purchase on an independent Watch app, so unlocking pro features or a subscription plan is impossible without an iPhone companion.
These are significant drawbacks, not the type of edge cases that would be more understandable and expected for watchOS’ first take on stand-alone apps. App independence was the primary story Apple told for watchOS 6 at WWDC, but I suspect not many apps will be able to go independent until greater feature parity is achieved between independent apps and those still tethered to the iPhone.
Tomorrow, MacStadium is announcing something big, but we’ve got a sneak peek just for MacStories readers. MacStadium is releasing Orka, their new virtualization platform. Orka (Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple) is a new build infrastructure based on Docker and Kubernetes technology. It’s the very first solution for orchestrating macOS in a cloud environment using Kubernetes on Mac hardware.
MacStadium developed Orka to provide Mac and iOS developers with the ability to use container technology features the same way they can on other platforms. With Orka, MacStadium’s customers will now have a more software-driven, self-service capable experience using MacStadium’s infrastructure that’s similar to what they may have used with AWS, Azure, or GCP.
At launch, Orka will ship with plugins for Jenkins. Additional Plugins for Buildkite, Bamboo, and TeamCity will be released soon. Orka has already been adopted by Homebrew, the popular package manager for macOS. Aso, if any readers plan to be at DevOps World | Jenkins World, be sure to catch MacStadium’s live Orka demo on Wednesday, August 14th or visit MacStadium.com to learn more about Orka.
Of course, MacStadium is also the premier Mac hosting company that provides dedicated Mac hardware and private cloud services, and it has a special deal just for MacStories readers. Just use the coupon code MACSTORIES at checkout and MacStadium will take 50% off the first two months of a hosted Mac mini server.
Our thanks to MacStadium for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Chance Miller of 9to5Mac details a fresh update to an Apple USB-C adapter:
Apple this week has quietly released a new version of its USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter. This $69 adapter includes a USB-C port, HDMI port, and USB-A port, with the new version making several notable improvements.
The new USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter adds support for HDMI 2.0, an upgrade from the original model’s HDMI 1.4b. This means you can now drive 4K 3840 x 2160 video at 60Hz
4K 60Hz throughput is supported on the iPad Pro, iMac Pro, and 2017 or later versions of the 15-inch MacBook Pro and Retina iMac. Miller also notes that the updated dongle now includes “support for HDR video in HDR10, as well as Dolby Vision.”
I’ve been interested in purchasing the prior version of this adapter for contexts where I’d like to watch a video but don’t have an Internet connection. Since the Apple TV doesn’t support offline downloads, but many apps on the iPad do, connecting my iPad Pro to a TV set via HDMI seems like the best solution. The added flexibility of including a USB-A port, and even a USB-C port to enable power charging, makes this an especially appealing dongle for me.
You can order the new USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter from Apple’s website for $69.
On this week’s episode of Connected:
Federico is just a pile of recurring automations now, so Myke and Stephen discuss the rollout of Apple Card and the macOS bounty program, before a dive into FileMaker’s history and recent rebranding and a discussion of moving on from the Apple Watch.
You can listen below (and find the show notes here).
Sponsored by:
On this week’s episode of Adapt:
With September fast approaching, Federico and Ryan reflect on iPadOS 13 after two months of use, then Ryan does a deep dive on Apple Mail – how he uses it, what power user features it offers, and where it’s still lacking.
You can listen below (and find the show notes here), and don’t forget to send us questions using #AskAdapt and by tagging our Twitter account.
CarPlay fascinates me because it’s a relatively rare example of a successful Apple software product that isn’t tightly integrated with the company’s hardware. Of course, CarPlay runs from an iPhone, but it also relies on automaker media systems to deliver its experience to users in their cars. This lack of integration shows in cars with slower media systems; however, even when automakers’ hardware provides a subpar experience, CarPlay’s simplified but familiar interface and access to content already on users’ iPhones is superior. So much so in fact that Apple says CarPlay has managed to capture 90% of the new car market in the US and 75% worldwide.
I first tried CarPlay three years ago, when I leased a Honda Accord. As I wrote then, Honda’s entertainment system was slow, but the experience was nonetheless transformative. Easy access to the music and podcasts I love, multiple mapping options, and access to hands-free messaging all played a big part in winning me over.
When my lease was up earlier this year, CarPlay support was at the top of the list of must-have features when we began looking for a new car. We wound up leasing a Nissan Altima, which has a faster entertainment system, larger touchscreen, and better hardware button support for navigating CarPlay’s UI. The hardware differences took a system I already loved to a new level by reducing past friction and frustrations even though the underlying software hadn’t changed.
Just a few weeks after we brought the Altima home though, Apple announced that it would update CarPlay with the release of iOS 13 this fall. In a jam-packed keynote, CarPlay got very little stage time, but I was immediately intrigued by the scope of the announcement. CarPlay hasn’t changed much since it was introduced in 2014, but with iOS 13, iPhone users can look forward to not only significant improvements in its design, but a new app and other features that make this the biggest leap forward for CarPlay to date.
Apple’s Shot on iPhone series has highlighted photos and video taken with iPhones for several years now. Today, the company published a new series of four videos titled ‘Apple AMSR’ that were shot on the iPhone XS and XS Max. The videos, which the company suggests watching with headphones for the full auditory experience, are longer than ones produced in the past ranging from about 6 to over 10 minutes long. Each video features a different sound: rain at a campground, the crunching sound of someone walking on a hiking trail, the scraping of wood in a woodworking shop, and whispering in the Neskowin Ghost Forest in Oregon.
These videos are some of the strangest that Apple has published on YouTube, but they certainly do a good job of showcasing the iPhone’s ability to shoot video and record sound. There may be more coming too based on the fact they’re collected as a playlist on Apple’s YouTube channel that is labeled ‘Season 1.’ You can check all of them out below:
This fall when iPadOS 13 launches, it will bring an updated Home screen that incorporates pinned widgets and a denser arrangement of apps. The changes aren’t as revolutionary as iPad power users may have hoped when they heard whispers of a redesigned Home screen, but they’re a start. While the addition of widgets is valuable in its own right, in my beta testing of iPadOS I’ve also discovered a lot of potential for the larger set of icons the Home screen can now hold – particularly when combined with a new feature just added to Launch Center Pro.
Debuting today, Launch Center Pro 3.1 centers around a major upgrade to the app’s icon composer that provides countless options for creating custom icons. While the use cases for this icon creation tool are vast, I was intrigued by one specific possibility: designing icons that could be exported as image files and used by Apple’s Shortcuts app when adding shortcuts to the Home screen, since Shortcuts allows choosing custom images for Home screen shortcuts. Combined with several key OS changes, and the icon creation tool in Launch Center Pro, it’s a better time than ever to add shortcuts to your iPad or iPhone Home screen.
Federico
John
