31 posts with tag “Apple”

Apple TV+’s takeover of the Apple TV app Home Screen

Part of what used to be great about the Apple TV is that — unlike an Amazon Fire TV, for instance — Apple didn’t really have specific content it was trying to push on you. Sure, it might suggest that you rent or buy a movie from iTunes instead of from Amazon; and it would be safe to assume it might only recommend content that was available on iTunes, but practically that included everything.

Amazon, on the other hand, since they had gotten into the original content market, would be incentivized to give priority to their TV shows over others. Is my Amazon Fire TV recommending Sneaky Pete to me because it’s similar to stuff I watch, or because they stand to gain from it?

When Apple TV+ was announced, I worried that Apple’s having a stake in what specific content I watch would taint the Apple TV experience.

Boy, has it.

Below is a full view of the contents of the macOS TV app. The TV app on the Apple TV streaming box is roughly identical.

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Apple’s incomplete pronoun fields

In iOS 17, you are now able to add pronouns to contacts, including your own contact card. This is a good thing, but at least one important pronoun case is missing from the “English” options.

The cases included are:

  1. Subjective (“Yesterday, she went outside.”)
  2. Objective (“I went with her.”)
  3. Possessive pronoun (“The idea was hers.”)

These three cases mirror the common “she/her/hers” structure used to communicate pronouns on social platforms like Twitter and Zoom; as such, they may seem complete, but they aren’t.

The missing case is the possessive adjective: “It was her idea.”

This may seem redundant, because in the declension of feminine pronouns, the possessive adjective is the same as the objective: “her.”

But in masculine pronouns, the possessive adjective is the same as the possessive pronoun: “his” (as in, “It was his idea”).

CaseFeminineMasculine
SubjectiveSheHe
ObjectiveHerHim
Possessive pronounHersHis
Possessive adjectiveHerHis

This isn’t a problem when interacting with people — we know how to decline the common feminine and masculine pronouns, so we know which form to use for the possessive adjective.

But because the iOS 17 UI doesn’t have a field for the possessive adjective, the OS and apps that have access to these fields — which have to behave programmatically — can’t know what to use for that case.

If I’m writing an app and I want the UI to say, “Would you like to call her?” in reference to some contact of yours, I can use the objective pronoun field. But if I want the UI to say “Her birthday is coming up” (the possessive adjective), I don’t have the necessary information.

I can try to guess, based on what I know about the declension of these common pronouns. But what about uncommon ones, like Ze or Xe? Anything I want to use will have to be hard-coded.

This is not even to mention the reflexive case — “She was proud of herself” — which is entirely absent.

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Third-party gyroscopic head tracking is not “Spatial Audio”: the Anker soundcore Liberty 4

From a credulous 9to5Mac review of some new Anker earbuds:

Arriving with active noise cancellation, Anker also backs its Liberty 4 with Spatial Audio support, thanks to the internal gyroscope that helps immerse you in the sound.

From the description on the Amazon product page, titled “soundcore by Anker Liberty 4, Noise Cancelling Earbuds, True Wireless Earbuds with ACAA 3.0, Dual Dynamic Drivers for Hi-Res Premium Sound, Spatial Audio with Dual Modes, All-New Heart Rate Sensor”:

360° Immersive Spatial Audio: As you listen to music and watch movies, the built-in gyroscope and spatial audio algorithm track your head movements to always keep you at the heart of the sound for a completely immersive experience.

From the FAQ on Anker’s product website:

How do I enable Spatial Audio?

  1. Wear the earbuds.
  2. Enter the soundcore app and connect Liberty 4.
  3. Select Spatial Audio. 
  4. Spatial Audio cannot be turned on while sound effects are turned on. 
  5. Select Movie or Music mode to adjust the sense of distance while listening to different types of audio content.

Spatial Audio — the Apple feature — is an OS-level capability for taking true many-channel audio and “shaping” it to mimic the effect that the contours of your ears have on physical sound waves when they reach your head. Thus a sound in a movie that would be directed to the rear right speaker in a theater or surround sound system will sound like it is coming from behind and to the right of you when you are wearing compatible headphone hardware.

In other words, if you wear the Anker soundcore Liberty 4 earbuds, connect them to your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV, and watch a movie that contains Dolby Atmos audio — you will not be hearing that movie in Spatial Audio. You will be hearing it in stereo, with the Liberty earbuds (on platforms where the app is available) shaping the waveforms so that they sound like they are originating from a space in front of you rather than the center of your head. No sounds will appear to come from behind you with this technology, as they can with true Spatial Audio.

Dynamic Head Tracking — the Apple feature — is a joining of hardware and software, whereby the source of your audio (your iPhone or iPad) is “aware” of its spatial relation to your headphones. Thus if you turn your head, the audio will continue to sound as though it’s coming from the device, rather than in the direction you’re facing; similarly, if you move the device around your head, the perceived locus of the audio will follow the device.

If you wear the Anker soundcore Liberty 4 earbuds and listen to music on your iPhone or iPad, even with the soundcore app, the experience is less clear to me. I believe that the app may ask permission to read your device’s motion sensors, giving it enough data to cause the audio to always follow the device, but I can’t be sure. In any case, this will not be the system-level Dynamic Head Tracking that is only possible with iOS 15+ and compatible Apple headphones.

It bears repeating that Spatial Audio and Dynamic Head Tracking are two separate things, but now it seems necessary to add that there is no Spatial Audio without Apple hardware, period.

There’s no technical reason that Apple couldn’t make this kind of third-party Spatial Audio compatibility possible, as far as I can tell, but as of yet, they haven’t done so.

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Oh, Gee

Yesterday I became aware of the awkwardly named “The OG App” (🙄), which promises “the OG Instagram experience”: “With the OG app, you can easily filter what you see in your Instagram feed, create custom feeds, remove reels, ads, suggested content, and more!” It seemed impossible, and that’s because it is.

I nearly gave the app access to my Instagram account, believing for a moment that maybe, given its presence in the App Store at all, it had been properly vetted; but because of their suspiciously slow homepage, as well as the company’s bizarre name (“Un1feed”) and the dearth of info about it, I decided to wait. I’m glad I did.

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iPadOS 16 Will Not Include Arbitrary Windowing

A discovery in some public WebKit code referencing MULTITASKING_MODE has some people breathlessly anticipating what they consider the obvious and long-overdue solution to multitasking on the iPad: arbitrary windowing:

And as it stands, the Magic Keyboard is more of a convenient desktop accessory than a productivity tool, but giving it a new interface would make it far more useful. A desktop or pro mode would instantly change that.

Google does something similar with its Chrome tablets, but Apple could do it better with a hybrid macOS-iPadOS environment that seamlessly switches between tablet and desktop mode while unlocking the benefits of a touchpad with an intuitive, powerful interface.

Macworld

We’ve all been burned many times by hoping a new iPadOS update will bring significant improvements for power users, but this does seem to be pretty solid evidence suggesting iPadOS 16 could be the year this finally changes.

9to5Mac

More recently, Mark Gurman wrote for Bloomberg:

The iPad’s next major software update, iPadOS 16, will have a redesigned multitasking interface that makes it easier to see what apps are open and switch between tasks, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the changes aren’t yet public. It also will let users resize app windows and offer new ways for users to handle multiple apps at once.

Admittedly, multitasking on the iPad has always been far from perfect. iOS 15 went a long way, I think, to solving some of its issues, but it’s still clunky and confusing.

But the solution is not and will not be “arbitrary windowing”: the ability to resize apps to any size and layer them on top of each other indefinitely.

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What Rumors?

A headline from MacRumors: “AirPods Pro 2 Likely to Feature Almost Exact Same Design, Contrary to ‘Stemless’ Rumors”.

Whenever I see a reference to Apple “rumors” like this, I always ask: What rumors?

This MacRumors article, of course, doesn’t actually link to any sources for this claim, trustworthy or otherwise, since (a) writers don’t do the due diligence of adding links to their stories anymore, and (b) most tech blogs are just SEO link farms and Amazon affiliate spam.

So I tried to find out myself: Where did this rumor start? I searched my feeds for “airpods stemless” and found a few references in Macworld, here:

According to LeaksApplePro (writing for iDropNews), the upcoming AirPods Pro will bring…a new stemless design that fits flush in the ear…

Ah, yes, the venerable “LeaksApplePro” and “iDropNews,” of course.

But also, here:

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, for example, believes that the new AirPods Pro will have no stems, in a radical step. He said in a May 2021 report that the new AirPods Pro may not feature shafts, following a similar design to the Beats Studio Buds or the Beats Fit Pro.

Ah, ok, Mark Gurman. People seem to take what he says seriously enough that a brief mention by him becomes canon. But, of course, this Macworld story doesn’t link to that “May 2021 report”; if Gurman said it, then it is just a Fact In The World that needs no citation.

So what did he actually say? I found another source that brought me a little closer, from GSMArena.com in May 2021:

The AirPods Pro 2 will have no stems at all. The design is supposed to debut with new a Beats headset expected next month…

So we’re somewhere between “may not feature shafts” and “will have no stems at all.” Does journalistic stalwart GSMArena.com link directly to this report? Sadly but predictably not.

So it seems as though we’re possibly looking at a single Mark Gurman quote from May 2021 as the reason anybody is expecting stemless AirProds Pro. Helping this, of course, is the fact that people will believe and continue to spread just about any Apple rumors they hear, especially when it comes to a change in form factor, and especially when that change in form factor aligns with something they think Apple “ought” to do — never considering, in this case, that (a) truly stemless AirPods would be more difficult to handle (you think they’re easy to lose now?), and that (b) the AirPods stems are one of the most iconic and recognizable pieces of Apple design in the last decade.

GSMArena.com did, however, link to bloomberg dot com slash technology, so taking a look at that in the Wayback Machine, I was finally able to locate the infallible words of the Great Oracle. Here’s the quote in question, from Bloomberg:

For the new AirPods Pro, Apple has also tested a smaller design that eliminates the stems. That look will debut on new Beats-branded wireless earbuds planned to be announced next month.

HAS ALSO TESTED.” This is the reason that it necessitates a headline, over a year later, dispelling the now virtually established fact that of course the next AirPods Pro will be stemless, everybody knows that, and if not, Apple is really just continuing to spin their wheels, aren’t they? Where’s the innovation coming out of Cupertino?

Am I right?

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