A weekly list of things I found interesting, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ Apple now lets developers create custom offer codes for subscriptions | 9to5Mac

Filipe Espósito:

As announced on the Apple Developer website, developers can now create their own custom discount codes (like SPRINGPROMO) to distribute to customers, similar to what online stores already offer.

A good move that means we’ll probably been seeing more app ads in podcasts.

2️⃣ The eject button held all the power on the original Xbox | The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

The console’s design reflects the eject button’s priority. The disc eject button is bigger, higher up, and surrounded by an LED ring in the console’s iconic green glow, drawing even more attention to it.

The reasoning here is simple: the original Xbox (like its contemporaries and predecessors) was useless without discs for games, DVDs, and CDs. Without the disc tray button, your Xbox was never more than a hulking hunk of green and black plastic. So Microsoft wanted to direct you toward that button because it meant that you had bought a game and were ready to play or that you wanted to swap out discs to play something else.

What’s in a button? A good reflection on how product design should reflect the use of it, both intended and actual.

3️⃣ Concept: How Apple could turn HomePod mini into a delightful and adorable smart display | 9to5Mac

Parker Ortolani:

HomePod mini’s light-up surface is on the top of the device, but I propose that Apple angle the surface and add a proper touch display. The new angle would allow users to more easily use controls and view content — it’d be far better and add more utility to the product.

I would love this product for around the house, and it seems like the natural evolution for added functionality in the HomePod mini. Basing it off the watchOS interface makes sense for the limited interaction I’d expect, and it plays nicely into the fact that the HomePod mini already runs on the Apple Watch processor. I share Matt Birchler’s concern for its usefulness across a room due to the display size, and continue to long for an iPad/HomePod mashup device for the kitchen in particular.

4️⃣ Mile-1 App | OnStarboard LLC

Mile 1 provides you with the most comprehensive highway milepost locator service ever built. Easy to use day or night, quickly know your distance to the nearest posts. Nearly every highway on the U.S. Interstate system is included along with a growing list of state and U.S. highways.

It’s in the worst situations on the highway, like when you’re stuck, that you need to know your mile marker. But if there’s not one in sight, what do you do? This free Mile-1 app made by developer Chris Dry saves you from walking up and down the interstate to determine the closest mile marker. I haven’t had to use it yet, but I’m glad to have it in my toolbox. It’s just too bad that it can’t get an entitlement to work with CarPlay.

5️⃣ Something New in Something Old | Pixel Envy

Nick Heer:

So: Last.fm. There are a few things I like about it. First, it seems to take into account my entire listening history, though it does give greater weight to recency and frequency. Second, it shows me why it is recommending a particular artist or album. Something as simple as that helps me contextualize a recommendation. Third, its suggestions are a blend of artists I am familiar with in passing and those that I have never heard of.

Most importantly, it feels free of artificial limitations. Apple Music only shows a maximum of eight similar artists on my iPhone, but there are pages of recommendations on Last.fm. Echo and the Bunnymen has twenty-five pages with ten artists each. I can go back and see my entire listening history since I started my account there. Why can I only see the last forty things I listened to on Apple Music?

Should Apple buy Last.fm? It would booster their recommendations. People love Last.fm. It would give them another lens into up-and-coming artists. I’ve been giving Last.fm a try over the last month to get more insight into my listening habits, and hopefully some better new artist suggestions than I’m getting from Apple Music itself.

6️⃣ Room Key in Apple Wallet demo | Rich DeMuro

If you’ve ever tried using a hotel app as your digital room key, this is so much better. The key is now stored in Apple Wallet, which means there is no need to unlock your phone, open an app or activate a key before you want to use it.

The key is always ready, just tap your phone to unlock a door in seconds.

The apps use Bluetooth, this new Apple feature uses NFC.

The future is here!

7️⃣ Lessons on Living Well, From Nick Offerman | The Ezra Klein Show

If you’re a fan of Nick Offerman, you’ve got to listen to this podcast interview of him with Ezra Klein. I love Nick’s outlook on life, and was tickled by his study of Aldo Leopold, who is another favorite of mine.

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Thanks for reading 7 Things! If you enjoyed these links, or have something else neat to share, please hit me up on Twitter or send me an email!

7 Things

David Heinemeier Hansson:

The Mac is such an inconvenient platform for Apple. It prevents the company from making any credible claim of an impending security catastrophe, if lawmakers force the iPhone to allow installation of apps without the App Store. With the Mac, we have almost forty years of proof that computers don’t need an App Store to be safe. Made by the same company that now tries to pretend to legislators that this isn’t possible!

Worse still, Apple continues to brag about this solid security record for the Mac when they try to sell you a new computer while their lobbyists argue the opposite on Capitol Hill.

I mean, he has an agenda, but he’s got a point.

If you think back to the Mac vs. PC ads, Apple pushed pretty hard on the rock-solid security of their platform. Sure, things have gotten more complicated since those aired, but does Apple really think users should worry about trusting their Mac?

Here are a couple of other examples.

To be clear, I’m not in favor of allowing side-loading on iOS. Nor do I think that the Mac should be locked down to iOS levels. I like that iOS and macOS are different in that regard. I just think that Hansson is rightfully holding Apple’s feet to the flame on how they characterize the relative security of their platforms.

Go to the linked site →

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As an aside, I still love the Mac vs. PC ads. They were a stroke of genius and hold up to this day.

Linked

As a follow-on to my ‘Copy as Embedded Tweet’ shortcut that I made last year, I set out to further improve my workflow for preparing posts for 7 Things. That shortcut let me get the proper HTML for embedding a live Tweet right from the Share Sheet. Since I also share a lot of videos in those weekly posts, I wanted a similar solution for embedding videos without having to click through the YouTube website. So, I give you a new shortcut that accomplishes a similar task, but in a different way.

Get the ’Copy as Embedded YouTube Video’ shortcut → Original Version | Latest Version

This time around, I used very different techniques to build the embed code. Instead of putting together a longer URL by combining one with another, this time I needed to break down the canonical YouTube link for the video.

1️⃣ To make sure we’re working with a real link and not just text, we use a ‘Get URLs from Input’ action. That pulls the ‘Shortcut Input’ variable, which was either passed into the shortcut or retrieved from the clipboard.

Since we can’t rely on the shared URL to be a youtube.com link, the first step is to expand the URL out in case it’s a bit.ly or youtu.be version.

2️⃣ Once we have the full-length URL, we make the first of two splits using the ‘Split Text’ action. Our goal is to narrow down to just the video’s ID, which always comes directly after the ?v= characters in the URL. After splitting it by those characters, we get the last variable, which includes the ID, using ‘Get Item from List’.

3️⃣ The next split for that variable is by & since additional attributes are after ampersands. We get the first variable from the list this time, which we know must be the video’s ID.

4️⃣ Now that we have the ID, it’s just a matter of filling in that string of characters as a variable into the pre-formatted ‘Text’ action. Since the ID is the only important thing that changes between different embedded HTML for YouTube videos, that’s the only bit we need to change. The text is then copied to the clipboard.

5️⃣ The final two actions serve to confirm that everything has been copied as expected. The ‘Text’ action just lets us format the confirmation message as we please, and the ‘Show Result’ action displays it.

Now the code is ready to be pasted into another text document or website.

Here’s an example:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xv0BEyKi6lM" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

My next challenge is going to be to combine my two embedding shortcuts into one, or running them as functions from a different menu. That, however, will be for another time. So far, using this shortcut throughout the week to prepare links for 7 Things has been working great and saves me time.

Get the ’Copy as Embedded YouTube Video’ shortcut → Original Version | Latest Version

Let me know if you get some use out of this shortcut, too!

Shortcuts Blogging

In what I believe to be a first for Apple TV+, the full pilot episode of a premiering series has been published on YouTube to the official Apple TV channel.

The Afterparty is the latest series to come to Apple’s streaming service, which is one of the only services not to feature a free tier. They do offer generous free trial periods, three months with any new Apple product that can play their movies and shows, but it’s a one-time deal. That’s why posting an entire episode to YouTube is so notable. Now anyone can watch the first episode, whether or not they’ve ever tried or paid for Apple TV+.

I’ve been looking forward to this show, the first three episodes of which are available to watch now on Apple TV+. It’s directed by Christopher Miller and has an all-star cast. I’ve got Knives Out vibes from the trailer, not just from the murder mystery genre, but also the laugh-out-loud humor. It’s going to the top of my watch list.

The video’s description shows that this YouTube premier will be short-lived and points viewers to Apple TV+ to continue watching the series:

Watch the first episode of The Afterparty, a new whodunnit comedy from Lord Miller starring Tiffany Haddish, Ben Schwartz, Sam Richardson, Ilana Glazer, Ike Barinholtz, Zoe Chao, and Dave Franco. Continue watching the next two episodes, available now on Apple TV+ and don’t miss Xavier’s final EP and music video for “Imma Live Forever” dropping February 1 https://apple.co/_TheAfterpartyEpisode2

[…]

Available on YouTube until February 6 at 11:59p PST

Apple has made their streaming content freely available before, but not in full on another platform — you always had to figure out how to get to Apple TV+. I could see this being the start of a new strategy to hook potential subscribers on a new show by meeting them where they already find new video content, and that’s YouTube.

TV Shows

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge:

Your browser will store these topics for three weeks before deleting them. Google says that these categories “are selected entirely on your device” and don’t involve “any external servers, including Google servers.” When you visit a website, Topics will show the site and its advertising partners just three of your interests, consisting of “one topic from each of the past three weeks.”

There are probably a lot of nuances to learn about here. But Topics sounds way more private for Chrome users than the cookies they have now and better than FLoC. But will it only be applicable to Chrome users?

Go to the linked site →

Linked

If you’re a long-time reader, you’ll know that HeyDingus doesn’t have a lot of photography. Screenshots? Sure. But featured photos? Not really. Despite having created a complicated shortcut for uploading pictures to a CDN, and cobbled together a workflow to make those Markdown-based images work with Squarespace, it’s rare that I include images in my posts.

Part of that is because I’m an inexperienced photographer without a lot of confidence. And it’s partly due to my influences — I tend to gravitate toward word-focused blogs like Daring Fireball. However, there’s no denying that the occasional featured image can enhance a post and key the reader into the subject. But with my Shortcuts-centric, iPhone and iPad-heavy workflow, what’s the best (read: easiest, because any friction will reduce my interest in using them) way to get quality photos ready to insert with Markdown?

With Shortcuts itself, of course!

I’ll cut to the chase. This shortcut searches a stock photo library, presents options, previews your selection, and then gives you options on what to do with it using the Share Sheet, and copies the photo’s credit to the clipboard. It’s pretty neat.

Get the ‘Search for Stock Photo’ shortcut → Original Version | Latest Version

A Little Background

Months ago, I noticed a Shortcuts action provided by Toolbox Pro that mentioned Pexels photos. I knew I had seen that word, “Pexels”, before. A quick search showed me that it’s a stock photo library. It is similar to Unsplash (which seems to integrate with every service and their brother, including Squarespace) in that it offers free stock photos and videos but is different in that it isn’t owned by a large corporation.

When I saw that action, I knew I could build what I wanted: a shortcut that would let me choose a photo and then pass it and its metadata through to my existing workflows. But the key to its effectiveness was leveraging the excellent parameters that developer Alex Hay built into the Toolbox Pro action.

Now would be a good time to mention that while Toolbox Pro is a free application with tons of outstanding actions at no cost, this particular ‘Find Pexels Photos’ action is part of its premium in-app purchase. That said, a mere $6 one-time payment unlocks all of the premium actions. I’ve barely scratched the surface of Toolbox Pro’s power, and there will be so much more to explore once Alex introduces macOS support down the road. Yes, that also means that this shortcut doesn’t yet work on the Mac. It’s a bummer for me, too.

Let’s get into how the shortcut is put together.

Putting Together the Pieces

1️⃣ I got clever in how this shortcut handles input. I wanted it to accept text input so that I could highlight a word in an article and then share it to the shortcut as the search term. I could have used iOS 15’s new Shortcut Input parameters to have it ask for text if nothing was passed in, but I wanted to reuse the actions if I needed to restart a search using the same search term — more on that later. So, in this case, I have the shortcut continue onto an ‘If’ action when no input is passed.

The ‘If’ action checks to see if the input has any value and then presents an ‘Ask for Input’ action. When there is input detected, it’s filled by default. If not, the ‘Ask for Input’ is blank.

2️⃣ Here’s the meat of the shortcut; the ‘Find Pexels Photos’ action. You can see here that I’m using the ‘If’ result as a Magic variable, labeled as ‘searchQuery’. I’ve set the search parameters to be any orientation, a minimum of 12 megapixels, and providing 15 results. Those results are passed as a variable to a ‘Choose from List’ action, using the ‘Pexels Photos’ type.

3️⃣ Here’s where we start making use of the output parameters. This ‘Get Images from Input’ action retrieves the image from the URL of the medium-sized image URL that Pexels provides. It’s big enough to preview using the ‘Show Result’ action, but not full-quality. This method speeds things up and reduces the amount of data you’re downloading throughout the shortcut.

4️⃣ Since the ‘Choose from List’ thumbnails are pretty small, I wanted the option to choose again in case the selected image wasn’t quite right upon further inspection with ‘Show Result’.

5️⃣ The first option is simply to continue, and it gets the variable for the selected image so it can be passed as the result of the ‘Choose from Menu’ action.

6️⃣ The second option is where things get interesting. I told you we’d come back to rerunning this shortcut as a function. Since there’s no easy way to return to an arbitrary point in the shortcut once it’s running, the best way to return to the result list is just to run it again. So that’s what happens if you select “No, choose again”. It reruns itself, passes the original search term as input, and stops the first run-through. It’s important to stop the initial shortcut here because otherwise, you get into a nasty loop.

Remember how the initial ‘If’ action presents an ‘Ask for Input’ based on the Shortcut Input. The shortcut will default to the inputted search term when running it as a function. All you need to do is hit “Done”, but you could edit the query on the second round, too.

Running shortcuts as functions, especially running itself, is an advanced technique that I’m still somewhat wrapping my head around.

7️⃣ If you’d prefer to start fresh rather than rerun the exact search, this option runs the shortcut as a function, but no input text is passed along. Again, we stop running the original flow with a ‘Stop Shortcut’ action.

8️⃣ In the end, we want the actual full-quality photo, right? By using another ‘Get Images from Input’ action, but acting on the Original URL output parameter this time, we download the selected photo for later use.

For a little while, I got tripped up by the ‘Pexels Photo’ output parameter when I tried to use that as the final photo. It doesn’t work as well as getting the original image from its URL.

9️⃣ People like to be recognized for their work, so I do my best to credit anyone on HeyDingus for linked and quoted articles and any images that I use and didn’t create. Pexels doesn’t require it as part of their Terms of Service, but I still think it’s important.

This ‘Text’ action formats the image credit the way I like them for HeyDingus. My personal preference is to credit the artist rather than the platform, so I link the photographer’s name back to the photo’s page on Pexels’ website. That page also links to the photographer’s profile and the rest of their work.

🔟 All that’s left is to copy that Markdown-formatted credit text to the clipboard, so it can be pasted alongside wherever the photo goes next. However, I hope you’ll notice that there’s something special about the notification I use to confirm that everything has finished as expected.

In addition to displaying the text just copied to the clipboard, the ‘Show Notification’ action lets you include an attachment. When adding the ‘Selected Image’ variable, we get a tiny image preview right in the notification. I’ve set it to the ‘Tiny URL’ parameter since it’s only going to be a small thumbnail anyway.

🎉 By grabbing the Magic Variable from our last ‘Get Images from Input’ action for this ‘Share’ action, you finally send it wherever you want next.

I say “finally”, but in reality, this whole shortcut runs in less than 30 seconds from start to finish — including typing in a search term and making a selection.

Get the ‘Search for Stock Photo’ shortcut → Original Version | Latest Version

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A brief note: When you run this shortcut for the first time, it will look like you’re passing along all of the search results and their metadata through the actions. I don’t know why it runs like that, but I can confirm that the result is only your selected image. If you choose “Always Allow”, you won’t see that weirdness again.

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I’ve spent a lot of time testing and adapting this shortcut and had fun learning about some trickier techniques to get it just right. It’s amazing that you can build a tool like this that saves you from browsing through websites to download files and copy things endlessly back and forth. I look forward to using it to spruce up my blog posts, and I hope you’ll get some use out of it, too.

Shortcuts Blogging

I’m baffled by Google’s lack of long-term support for their first-party Pixel phones. I thought that was a huge selling point for going with the “Google Phone”.

I had to do some Wikipedia research to remember when the first Pixel phone debuted. It was in 2016, and then it stopped getting the latest updates after three years. It was Google’s first phone (even though it really wasn’t), so I could forgive that. Let’s check in a few years later with the Pixel 3. That phone came out in 2019 and won’t get updates after this year (2022). Again, just three years of new features. Hmm. Fast-forward to today. The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, the latest and greatest from Google, and which run on their own custom silicon, are still only guaranteed the newest version of Android for three years (until 2024).

Shall we compare to the iPhone? iOS 15 is available on phones all the way back to the iPhone 6, which was released in 2015. A whole year before the first Pixel. Apple doesn’t provide a timeline for how long their phones will receive the latest version, but the support length has only been getting longer over time, and it appears to be at least double that of Google with Pixel.

It’s hard not to see the parallels between Google’s commitment, or lack thereof, to its messaging services and its Pixels phones. You can’t build loyalty with your customers if you’re not loyal to your own product. That’s why I scoff when folks suggest that Apple intentionally inhibits their phones so that people have to buy a new one. I’m not a happy customer if I have to do that. Not good “customer sat”, Tim Cook’s favorite metric. Instead, Apple offers the most extended support in the industry, while their most comparable competitor gives up halfway around the track.

As the A-series silicon has gotten more advanced, efficient, and faster, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the iPhone 13 dancing on the grave of Pixel 6 as it gets iOS 22, 7+ after its debut.

Jason Cross, writing for Macworld:

It’s [sic] would be a trivially small amount of money for Apple to create an internal group dedicated to proactively finding and eliminating scam, copycat, infringing, exploitive apps. But every one it finds costs Apple money. And doing nothing isn’t hurting sales, not when it’s so much cheaper to just market the App Store as so secure and trustworthy. Apple seems to view App Store trust and quality as a marketing activity more than a real technical or service problem.

The scams and ripoffs keep on coming. While I don’t think that Apple actively views scams as a profit area, there’s no denying that they do benefit — 15-30% of every immoral transaction — from them. And that’s pretty gross.

Go to the linked site →

Linked

A few months back, I created a shortcut that lets me quickly and easily take any Amazon product URL and format it into a clean link with my affiliate tag attached. Since this site is a hobby with ongoing costs, I count it as a win whenever I can get a few pennies back for products that I recommend and y’all purchase.

As a side effect of the shortcut making it so simple to open any page with the affiliate link, I’ve started using it when I purchase things myself. It may not be in the spirit of the affiliate program, and perhaps I’m shooting myself in the foot by writing about it here, but it’s a fun experiment.

But something was nagging at the back of my head. My understanding is that the affiliate link is only effective if it’s the one that opens your browsing session. So, if I’m searching around for an item, find it, and then reopen the page with the affiliate tag, does it still work? That led me to wonder if I could build the tag right into my quick searches.

Fortunately, the Amazon Affiliate website offers built-in functionality to attach your affiliate link to a particular search. By deconstructing the resulting URL, I was able to identify where the search term goes, hardcode in the Amazon Smile domain, and remove the additional tracking parameters that Amazon includes by default.

Here’s the final search URL, in which “@@@” is replaced with the search term, and “###” is replaced with the Affiliate ID:

https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=@@@&tag=###

Making it all work with Keyword Search

Since I have the excellent (and free) Keyword Search Safari extension installed on all my devices, setting up a custom search was trivial. This app lets you create custom searches for nearly any site using an abbreviation that you define. I just added a new item with “az” as the keyword and “https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=@@@&tag=heydingusnet-20” as the expansion. And I only had to add it once since Keyword Search syncs automatically across its installations.

All I need to do to open an Amazon search page with my affiliate link included is to prepend “az” to my search query. I can do this directly from Safari’s Address Bar or Spotlight on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I typically use Alfred as a Spotlight replacement on the Mac, and it works there, too.

Now, any Amazon search that I start from my Mac, iPhone, or iPad always opens to Amazon Smile, includes my affiliate tag, and doesn’t include any other grossness from the end of the URL. You can, of course, change the Affiliate ID to any you want (or keep mine if you’d like to support this site 😉). And if all you want is quick access to a clean Amazon search, you’re welcome to remove everything after the “@@@”.

If you haven’t tried Keyword Search before, I highly recommend it. It’s a far faster way to find something from a specific domain or search engine on the web.

Bonus: Search Menu shortcut

I couldn’t let you go without including something for Shortcuts. Ever since I installed Keyword Search, my ‘Share Menu’ shortcut gets less use these days, but I used to run it all the time. Say you have a shortlist of places that you search regularly. For example, YouTube, Twitter, HeyDingus, Apple Maps, and Amazon. This shortcut asks for a search term and then presents a menu of just those places that you’ve defined. Tap one, and you’re brought directly to the search results. There is no need to locate the app on your device, then navigate to its search view, and then finally type in the term to search for the results.

It works with search engines built into the ‘Search Web’ shortcuts action and any URL you construct, like the one above. And, if an app on your device provides a search action, you can add those in, too (e.g., Maps or Reeder). (You’ll also find in it a teaser for another shortcut that will be published on HeyDingus soon!)

’Search Menu’ works well as a widget, as a standalone icon on your Home Screen, or in other launchers. It’s also compatible with the Mac, as long as the corresponding apps are also installed there.

Get the ‘Search Menu’ shortcut → Original Version | Latest Version

Shortcuts Tips Apps

Casey, John, and Marco discussed on Accidental Tech Podcast how Apple could bring lossless music support to its wireless headphones. It was sparked by a recent interview with Gary Geaves, an Apple audio VP who hinted that they’re not content with Bluetooth’s capabilities.

A brief synopsis of their discussion: Using vanilla Bluetooth sounds like it’s out of the question for lossless because it’d take too much bandwidth, so Apple would need to use some special sauce on top or go with a new protocol. John did some (banned) research and found that Ultra Wideband (UWB), which Apple has built into several generations of iPhones, not only has plenty of bandwidth but also beats out Bluetooth on a whole host of features like range battery life, and latency.

Looking back at the launch of the U1 chip with the iPhone 11, Apple didn’t have much to say about why it deserved its spot on the tightly-packed motherboard where space is at a premium. But they did tease future capabilities (emphasis mine):

The new Apple‑designed U1 chip uses Ultra Wideband technology for spatial awareness — allowing iPhone 11 Pro to understand its precise location relative to other nearby U1‑equipped Apple devices. It’s like adding another sense to iPhone, and it’s going to lead to amazing new capabilities.

With U1 and iOS 13, you can point your iPhone toward someone else’s, and AirDrop will prioritize that device so you can share files faster. And that’s just the beginning.

Since that humble beginning, not much has come of the U1. HomePod mini uses it to bring more reliable music handoff when tapping your phone to the speaker. Some cars can use it for a key, and some new HomeKit locks do too. Developers are starting to get access to use it in their apps. But no features have been introduced that I would say warranted that unusual public tease from Apple.

However, if Apple were to put UWB chips into more of their products to enable better wireless audio, I think they’d have a banner feature. It would be another way for Apple to own and control the underlying technology leading directly to a better experience for their customers. John mentions that Ultra Wideband is an open standard, which means that third parties could likely still take advantage of its capabilities down the road. Still, Apple can bring it unilaterally across its entire ecosystem more quickly and effectively than perhaps any other company. I could see that as a tangible benefit to switching to the Apple ecosystem.

If everything John said about UWB is possible, it really could lead to “amazing new capabilities.” It doesn’t have to stop with audio. Any sort of local device-to-device data transfer that benefits from fast speed and low latency could potentially benefit from it. Maybe features like Universal Control would be better suited to use UWB than the legacy Handoff stack built on Bluetooth and peer-to-peer Wi-Fi.

Anyway, the entire discussion in this linked podcast chapter is worth a listen. I’m firmly on Team UWB and hope to see more fruits from it soon!

Go to the linked site →

Linked