A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays (or occasionally on Mondays). Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ An impressive demo of Google’s Gemini AI model. (Note that apparently this is pretty heavily sped up and edited, so watch with a grain of salt.) [🔗 Google // youtube.com]
2️⃣ Perhaps longer and more dramatic than strictly necessary, this is still an enjoyable read with good intentions about retuning to the principles of a more open and personal web. [🔗 Kev Quirk // thewebisfucked.com]
3️⃣ Taylor Swift is an absolute phenom. This article on her Person of the Year award is well-worth the read through her journey. (Oh, and the portraits are masterful too.) [🔗 Sam Lansky // time.com]
4️⃣ BasicAppleGuy released a do-it-yourself tier list for all the products that Apple released in 2023. I’m thinking about doing one myself, and would love to see how others rank everything up. [🔗 BasicAppleGuy // basicappleguy.com]
5️⃣ The MacStories Selects Awards has me revisiting some of the top-tier apps they’ve recognized this year. Excellent writing and choices. [🔗 MacStories Team // macstories.net]
6️⃣ As heard on ATP, this app helps you to digital save your kid’s art. It looks really slick, does everything on-device, and lets you tag it by kid, age, etc. [🔗 KidArt // apps.apple.com]
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
Mikah Sargent: What apps do you regularly use to take photos on your phone?
99.999% of the time (or higher), I use the stock Camera app on my iPhone to take photos. My go-to method to get to the camera is from the lock screen, or with a triple back-tap. I also have it set up as an icon from Control Center, conveniently placed exactly where it is on the lock screen so that there’s no fuss in getting that quick snap. With so many ways to open the camera, I don’t even have its icon on my home screen.
The only exception to my stock camera usage is when I remember that I pay for Halide’s pro plan so that I can take macro shots with my iPhone 13 mini. Although it has an ultra-wide lens, the 13 mini does not get the macro mode in the stock camera app. So I give the Lux developers $12 a year to use Halide’s macro mode instead if I ever want those up-close-and-personal shots with the micro world. Can I tell you when the last was that I used Halide instead of the Camera app? No, no I cannot. But I like having that tool available to me because I think those photos look so dang cool.
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Rosemary Orchard: What is your favorite recent, small (less than $75) tech purchase that you would recommend to others?
In some good timing, I wrote up a blog post with two-sentence reviews for a bunch of gadgets and gizmos that I’ve picked up just a few weeks ago. Not all the things on that list are under $75, but a fair few of them are.
If I were to choose a favorite off that list, I’d have to double up on Stephen’s recommendation of the Hoto Electric Screwdriver. I echo everything he said. The carrying case with all the bits is awesome. The USB-C charging is convenient. The light is nice. But the best thing is that it’s small and light, so it can be used in tight spaces where a more typical power drill just wouldn’t. And you can stick it in a pocket to carry it around the house.
But two more things deserve a mention.
First, Anker’s 733 Power Bank (or GaNPrime PowerCore 65W🤷♂️) at $70 on sale is pretty sweet. It’s both a battery bank and a wall charger, all in one! This is replacing the big battery pack and the older power brick that lived in my travel bag. Now I can just plug this one thing into the wall, and with its three charging ports, I should be able to power up everything I typically take on a trip. And if I need a little extra juice where there’s no place to plug into a wall, I can still just charge off the battery bank itself. And, I should never have to remember to charge it up because it’ll always be charging itself when plugged into the wall at night each trip. I’m pretty psyched about the features, and having one fewer thing to lug around.
Second, the Lutron Caséta switches. Granted, to get started with their required hub will probably cost a little more than $75. But the switches themselves are usually less than $75 a pop. Go for the Diva Switch for dimming lights, or the Claro Switch for simple on/off lights.
If you have members of your household who get frustrated with smart lights because Siri doesn’t like to listen to them, or they don’t want to go hunting through their phone to turn on a light, just get these. You’ll be a hero in the home because these gizmos will always work as a normal switch wired in the wall. But you can still control them via the Home app, activate them with Siri, and set up automations. They’ve been absolutely great.
I put off buying these for years because I thought they’d be tricky to install, but they’re totally not. I switched (heh) out a bunch of them in our new home all in an afternoon. The only downside? They don’t play well with smart lightbulbs. So if you have a light that you really like having RGB color-changing capabilities, maybe stick with the dumb switch for it.
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Dan Moren: What new features of iOS 17.2 are you looking forward to?
While I’d like to say the Journal app because it would spur more personal journalling, I’m too much of a realist to do so. I’ve had Day One on my home screen for years, and I still only occasionally open it up to jot down my thoughts there. I am excited for my wife to try the Journal app because she has expressed interest in starting a gratitude journal, and I think she’d appreciate a built-in app over digging through the App Store.
But since I know I probably won’t use the Journal app, I’m going to go with the Listening History Focus filter for Apple Music as well. When I need to get in the zone, nothing does it quite like orchestral music or the BEATstrumentals playlist. But I don’t need music recommendations or song counts tallying up based on those listening sessions. It’s been a long time coming, but I’m glad there will finally be a way to easily switch that history on and off.
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Stephen Robles: What new feature in macOS Sonoma has increased or impacted your workflows?
Perhaps my favorite new feature is the slow-motion screen savers/wallpapers. They bring me delight every time I turn on my Mac.
But the one that has impacted my workflows the most is probably the improved Passwords and Autofill experience. I’m slowly extricating myself from 1Password, and switching over to iCloud Keychain/Passwords has been nearly seamless. It’s great at detecting password fields, but when it needs a little help having them live behind the Autofill option in a right-click context menu is so handy.
Bonus Question:What is something that always makes you feel better when you’re sad?
Most of the time, I’ll retreat to my ‘Sad’ playlist for some good emotional music to help me get the feelings out. But if I want a pick-me-up, I’ll revisit the Instagram message chain that I have with my wife which consists of nothing but funny or heartwarming videos, usually of pets or cute animals. It’s just the best.
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My Question:For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, winter is knocking at our door. What’s something that you’re looking forward to in the upcoming snowy season?
For me, it’s ice climbing. When the weather turns too chilly for rock climbing, it’s time to pull out the ice axes and crampons and start scaling the frozen waterfalls and features. I started ice climbing back in college at the Michigan Ice Festival for a few winters. And then didn’t get another opportunity until last winter after I moved to the Adirondacks. I fell in love with the sport and now like it nearly as much as rock climbing!
In fact, I got out for a handful of pitches just this morning, despite the warmer temps and retreating ice. It’s helpful to have something that has you wishing for cold temperatures when you live in a place with frigid winters like northern New York State.
My correspondent for the PenPals project this month is Austin Huang. Austin is a statistics and computer science student by day but is a public transit enthusiast in his free time. You can check out his home page at austinhuang.me.
Our first exchange, as summarized by ChatGPT, is below:
In Austin’s introductory letter, he expresses gratitude for being a part of the Letters Project and apologizes for potentially being perceived as boring due to his age and life circumstances. He shares his past experience with penpals, mentioning his childhood correspondence with a Japanese webmaster interested in rapid transit. Austin describes his recent interaction on Zhihu, a Chinese platform, where he engaged in discussions on student life, ambition, personality, and careers. He mentions his awareness of the project through Kev Quirk and introduces himself, highlighting his quirks, including a Cease & Desist from Facebook, an interest in alternative platforms, and his social experiences. Austin seeks advice on striking up conversations, particularly offline, and invites questions. In Jarrod’s response, he appreciates Austin’s unique story, expresses interest in his penpaling experiences, and discusses common interests in public transit and technology. Jarrod shares
advice on being nice in the workplace and offers unconventional ice-breaker questions for starting conversations. He also expresses curiosity about Austin’s cease-and-desist incident and looks forward to hearing more.
If you’d like to be a penpal for this project, please reach out! I’d love to get you on the schedule.
Another Wednesday Sunday, another crashing of Clockwise. Being the fly on the wall of these conversations with you guys and your guests is quickly becoming a highlight of my week. You know the drill, let’s get going.
Dan Moren:I’m curious about how you consume books these days. Are you a paper book person, an e-book person, audiobook? And where do you buy them, and read them?
Well, now, that’s an interesting question. At this very moment, one two three four five six seven paper books on my nightstand, all begging to be read. Also on that nightstand, I have a Kobo e-reader with a couple of digital titles queued up, and that’s definitely my preferred way to read. I’ll download e-books from my library via the Libby app, which the Kobo can do on-device, or I’ll purchase them directly from Kobo if it’s not available to check out and I’m itching to read it now (which rarely happens).
But the true answer is that I haven’t finished any books this year (well, except for one that I re-read in the spring) because I also have an iPad mini chock full of hundreds of web articles saved to read. Those probably equate to dozens of novels consumed in terms of the number of words — actually, I’d love to know that…hopefully Pocket will come out with a ‘wrapped’ feature soon — but little actual book reading gets done in any form lately.
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Florence Ion:What are you doing with your health data?
In a word, collecting. I wear an Apple Watch every day, which keeps track of all kinds of metrics for me, from heart rate to step count to goodness-only-knows-what. For a few years, I was also stepping on our smart scale every morning to log my weight (which I’m only just now realizing I’d stopped and should start that up again). I’ve had connected water bottles, apps, and shortcuts to keep a history of my water intake.
But what do I do with that data? Not much.
I do occasionally like to go diving through the trends and make that weird frown-like shape with my mouth while nodding up and down as I come across some interesting insight. But I don’t have a primary care physician (I know, I know, I will) so I don’t really have anyone to share it with. I guess I’m just tracking on the off chance that it will be useful someday, and I’m happy to keep doing so as long as it doesn’t add much extra hassle to my day.
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Mikah Sargent:How, if at all, have you used technology to help you with house chores?
The first thing that comes to mind is apps. I’ve piled reminders for chores into my task manager over the years, to varying levels of success. I particularly like when you can set a task to repeat X number of days after the last completion. So for things like changing out the cat litter, it’ll restart the clock for when I need to change it next, even if I didn’t get it down on the exact day that it was set to be due. Without those reminders, many fewer chores would get done around our house.
That said, I’m close to declaring task bankruptcy because of everything that’s gotten jammed up in there. Too many tasks are “due today” not because they need to get done today, but because I set a due date so that I wouldn’t lose track of them, but I’ve yet to complete them. With dozens of tasks cluttering up my ‘Today’ view, some chores have slipped through the cracks, which is no good at all.
That’s why, as of listening to the very discussion, I’ve moved a bunch of those chores and things that require nagging over to the Due app. Due’s claim to fame is that it will continually send notifications to remind you to get a task done until you actually check it off. I’m hoping that the combination of nagging, and having them separate and prominent, will help me to check them off.
The other bit of tech that has transformed a chore is our litter robot. This contraption “scoops” (really pushes) the cat’s business away into a contained area, and then the box only needs to be switched out every few weeks. I love that I don’t need to scoop the cat litter every day, which used to be my least favorite household task, but the machine leaves a bit to be desired. I’m considering picking up a different style of litter robot because I don’t think I can ever go back to doing it manually.
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Christopher Phin:What bit of old software, that you don’t use anymore, do you have a weirdly disproportionate crush on?
As a connoisseur of productivity apps, I still long for the days of Wunderlist and Mailbox. Both were best-in-class, offered delightful interactions and animations, and were each acquired and subsequently “sunset”.
Wunderlist by 6Wunderkinder — a fantastic name for a business, by the way — ran my life in the same way that Things does now. I’ve always had an affinity for task management apps, and it was Wunderlist that instilled in me a need for them to look and feel good. It pulled me away from Reminders, and I doubt I could go back now. It was acquired by Microsoft and its spirit now lives on somewhere in Microsoft To-Do.
Mailbox was everyone’s favorite email app, which is a surprising thing to say because nowadays no one can agree on a good email app. It pioneered things that we consider table stakes these days: swipe to archive, snooze, and push notifications for emails. It was also the first app that I can remember to launch with a massive waitlist. It was fairly minimal in its design to begin with, but Mailbox had one of the best redesigns to fit in with iOS 7’s “flat” interface. When you cleared out your inbox, it revealed a pleasant version of the mailbox logo and I aspired to see the new version each day. Dropbox eventually acquired Mailbox and killed it off a few years later without a replacement. The closest Mailbox experience I’ve found is Spark by Readdle, although I’d say that’s getting kind of bloated and losing the thread these days.
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Bonus Question:Do you have a favorite holiday tradition?
When I was young, it was waking up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, after Santa had arrived, and sleeping next to the Christmas Tree waiting for the rest of the family to wake up and begin the festivities.
Nowadays, I like stretching the day out with baking cookies, opening stockings, and then getting to the gift-giving. Giving gifts is my love language (along with email), so it’s always an enjoyable day.
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My Question:Which accessibility feature of your device(s) do you get the most use out of?
I’ve tried many features from the Accessibility pane of Settings over the years, and I actually just wrote up a big blog post about the Personal Voice feature this week. But the one I’m getting the most use out of is the ‘Speak Screen’ feature, which you can use to have your device read out what’s on the screen. It’s kind of like a less detailed version of VoiceOver, and I use it to read articles out loud from apps that lack their own text-to-speech feature. I’ll also use it to proofread this very article!
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This was fun, as always! But that first episode of December will be here before we know it! Until then, thanks for having me on yet again.
2️⃣ Want a quick pick-me-up? Scroll through this thread of some truly excellent kid-friendly jokes. 😂 [🔗 @mosseri // threads.net]
3️⃣ If you want to be in control of your space on the web, that starts with the domain name. Micro.blog has seriously souped up their domain registration and transfer capabilities this week. [🔗 Manton Reece // manton.org]
5️⃣ Based on this introduction video, the holy grail of AI-generated art is here: text-to-video. I’m on the waitlist, so I can’t tell you if it’s actually any good, but it sure does look impressive. [🤖 pika.art]
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
Just wanted to pass along a message that Cotton Bureau, where I host the HeyDingus Store, is having a 50% off sale on all phone cases this weekend. That means you can get delightful phone huggers such as these for as little as $14!
Kev Quirk and I exchanged our final letter for the PenPals project this month. You can follow along with our conversation here, but you owe it to yourself to see the awesome email styling that he’s done over on his site.
Here’s a tease of our last exchange, as summarized by ChatGPT:
In this final email exchange for the month, Kev and Jarrod reflect on the enjoyable experience of sharing insights and look forward to Kev’s upcoming conversation with Robb Knight. They delve into Kev’s reasons for avoiding Micro.blog/Hugo for his personal blog, discussing limitations in managing site elements and templating complexities. Kev offers encouragement for Jarrod’s diverse business idea involving a climbing gym and doggy daycare. The conversation touches on watch syncing rituals and a shared tendency to be detail-oriented. Jarrod expresses his preference for quick news summaries over traditional news consumption and discusses podcast favorites. The exchange concludes with mutual appreciation for the engaging conversation, with plans to continue their communication.
If you’d like to be a penpal for this project, please reach out! I’d love to get you on the schedule.
I finally got around to creating a Personal Voice on my iPhone the other day. I had big plans for it, and was thrilled it only took 15 minutes of recording, and then one overnight of processing — I thought it’d take like an hour, and then days of waiting. Guess what, it’s pretty accurate, too!
Creating your Personal Voice involves 15 minutes of reading some quirky phrases aloud to your phone. ⌘
This fall, Apple launched its new Personal Voice feature, available with iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma. With Personal Voice, users at risk of speech loss can create a voice that sounds like them by following a series of text prompts to capture 15 minutes of audio. Apple has long been at the forefront of neural text-to-speech technology. With Personal Voice, Apple is able to train neural networks entirely on-device to advance speech accessibility while protecting users’ privacy.
Paired with Live Speech, another new feature from this fall, users can hold ongoing conversations in a replica of their own voice:
Live Speech, another speech accessibility feature Apple released this fall, offers users the option to type what they want to say and have the phrase spoken aloud, whether it is in their Personal Voice or in any built-in system voice. Users with physical, motor, and speech disabilities can communicate in the way that feels most natural and comfortable for them by combining Live Speech with features like Switch Control and AssistiveTouch, which offer alternatives to interacting with their device using physical touch.
The Newsroom article was more than just a reminder about Personal Voice and Live Speech, though. As an entry posted under the new Stories branding, there was an even more personal side to it. Apple spotlit Tristram Ingham, an accessibility advocate, who has a condition which “causes progressive muscle degeneration starting in the face, shoulders, and arms, and can ultimately lead to the inability to speak, feed oneself, or in some cases, blink the eyes.”
Ingham created his Personal Voice for Apple’s “The Lost Voice,” in which he uses his iPhone to read aloud a new children’s book of the same name created for International Day of Persons with Disabilities. When he tried the feature for the first time, Ingham was surprised to find how easy it was to create, and how much it sounded like him.
That children’s book is the subject of the short film, ‘The Lost Voice’, that Apple made to accompany this story, and, spoilers, Ingham narrates it using his Personal Voice and Live Speech.
It’s a touching film, and an especially relevant article to read this week considering it’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities this Sunday (a fact I didn’t realize until seeing the MacStories article about Apple’s Newsroom feature).
I’m not currently at risk of losing my voice, but I’m certainly sympathetic to those who are. Here’s Ingham on the importance of having a digital voice that captures your unique intonations and mannerisms:
“Disability communities are very mindful of proxy voices speaking on our behalf,” Ingham says. “Historically, providers have spoken for disabled people, family have spoken for disabled people. If technology can allow a voice to be preserved and maintained, that’s autonomy, that’s self-determination.”
I applaud Apple on having a guiding vision for this set of features. Certainly it’s fun for someone like me to be able to play around with an on-device voice model, but for many other people, it can be the difference between retaining part of their identity or having yet another bit of it snatched from them by the unforgiving jaws of a cruel disease.
Frankly, it’s astounding that we have the power to make a replica of our voice using nothing but the device that already lives in our pocket. I consider the marriage of microphone quality, software UX, machine learning models, and neural engine cores coming together to make this feature possible a true triumph.
Also, you never know when you might need it. I (also) encourage everyone to spend the few minutes it takes to have a replica of their voice ready, just in case.
Finish the job with your own apps, please, Apple
About those “big plans” for my Personal Voice that I mentioned earlier. For years, I’ve dreamed of automatically creating an audio version of my blog posts, read in my own voice. We talk about a writer’s writing voice being distinctive, but I think there’s something extra special about hearing their written words read aloud in their verbal voice. Ben Thompson has this dialed with his Stratechery articles released both in text form, and read by him in a podcast. I don’t have the time, tools, or bandwidth to record a bespoke podcast for each of my silly blog posts. But I could create a close approximation with Personal Voice and Shortcuts.
Or, at least, I’d like to, but Shortcuts lacks the ability to use my Personal Voice with its actions. I was so sure that my Personal Voice would appear as an option in the ‘Speak Text’ and ‘Make Spoken Audio from Text’ actions once it was finished processing. I even had a shortcut built out, ready to start producing narrated versions of my blog posts. Why was I so convinced? Because the Personal Voice pane in Settings provides a specific option to let other apps use your voice. Certainly Shortcuts, the first-party Apple app that has hooks into all kinds of settings and that is the poster child for extending Accessibility features into complex workflows that can’t be accomplished any other way, would be the first to request use of my voice. Alas, it appears to have slipped through the cracks.
You’d think ‘Jarrod’s Personal Voice’ would be in this list, right? 🤨⌘
My dream will have to wait. But getting this included is far more important than my inconsequential audible blog post idea. Shortcuts’ integration with the rest of the system features makes it way more powerful and able to handle nuanced situations.
Having some saved phrases in Live Speech is great, but imagine having dictionary full of common phrases you use, able to be contextualized and surfaced base on location, calendar events, or Focus mode.
Pasting or typing text into the Live Speech field is useful for ongoing conversations, but what if you wanted to save that favorite bedtime story, read in full in your voice, as an audio file that your granddaughter could listen to, again and again, long after you’re gone?
With Shortcuts and Personal Voice, those ideas could easily be reality, able to be harnessed by billions of people around the world.
In the meantime, I’ve laid out this case in a Feedback (FB13427747) to Apple and hope we’ll see Personal Voice get the extensibility it deserves very soon.
Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge on the terse words Robert De Niro had for Apple after part of his acceptance speech for the Gotham Awards was removed last minute:
Robert De Niro slammed Apple and the Gotham Film & Media Institute this week after claiming his speech for the Gotham Awards had been censored — allegedly by an Apple employee just minutes before the show started, according to Variety’s sources — to remove criticisms about Donald Trump and the entertainment industry.
Weatherbed goes on to say that a source claims this was a miscommunication and they didn’t know De Niro hadn’t approved the final draft. Either way, this is an unfortunate smear on the record for Apple and its high-profile Killers of the Flower Moon film. It’s not a good look, especially after similar censorship rumors continue to float around Jon Stewart’s show cancelation.
When a member of the cast or crew accepts an award on behalf of the rest of the studio, I do think that the studio should get some input on the acceptance speech to make sure it reflects the values they hold. But it should be a joint effort, and it’s certainly no compromise if the copy is edited last-minute without the knowledge or approval of the person actually making the speech.
Our concern that Apple executives would be overly involved in the creative production of Apple TV+ shows and films essentially dried up when we saw how “adult” their first releases were. It seemed like they trusted their creative partners to tell compelling stories without corporate oversight. I don’t know if that trust is eroding, or Apple is becoming more cautious as a company, but I fear that with these allegations flying around, talent and production partners are going to think twice about signing on with them.
If you’re the kind of person who likes to save articles to read later, you’re going to wonder how you lived without Play in your life. It’s a read-it-later app, but for YouTube videos! I’ve mentioned it before, and Play continues to be one of my very favorite apps across my iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.
Today, Play’s developer Marcos Tanaka, introduced a major new release of Play, version 2.0, with some incredible features that will save you from having to delve into the YouTube app, maybe ever again. You should definitely check out the app’s website, the MacStories review of v2.0, and Devon Dundee’s blog post for a good rundown of the new features and its (pretty reasonable, I think) new subscription.
I don’t know if the headlining new Follow Channels feature — where you can now use Play as an inbox for new videos from your favorite channels and save the ones you want to watch — will be for me. I’ve used RSS for years to keep on top of new videos from channels I follow and I don’t think I’ll end up wanting a separate place to check for new stuff, but I can totally see how it would be great for anyone not as “all in” on RSS as I am. That said, I’m using the one week free trial to see if it’ll change my mind about that.
[Update: I made this shortcut to help with following all your existing YouTube channel subscriptions in Play all at once.]
But what I am super excited about when it comes to channels, and that actually came in a release earlier this year, is the auto-populating folders for each YouTube channel that you have at least one video saved from. So when I save videos from a shortcut or the share sheet, they show up in that channel’s list in the sidebar. I tend to binge stuff from a single creator, so it’s perfect for the way I like to watch videos.
All the videos sorted by channel at last. Miranda Goes Outside!! is one of my favorite YouTubers — she’s hilarious! ⌘
The last thing I’ll leave you with is a couple of screenshots that show how I’ve set up Play-specific home screens. I love how I can jump right into a video without having to browse the app first. As of iOS 17, they’re even interactive so I can filter by tag or Smart Search lists.
The one shortcut icon you see next to Play is this one, my YouTube Launcher that presents a menu to jump directly into specific parts of the YouTube app, which prevents me from getting having to navigate throughout the app and risk distraction from my goal.
Congratulations to Marcos on a solid new release, and for earning not just a spot on my home screen, but multiple full home screens with this vital creation.
P.S. Once you’ve downloaded Play, go ahead and try two of Marcos’ other apps, MusicBox (it’s like Play, but for songs, albums, and playlists you want to listen to later), and MusicHarbor (for keeping up with every new release from artists in your music library).
