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?
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.
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.
Toolbox Pro makes excellent use of both search and output parameters to make this an incredibly flexible 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
Evaluating the Shortcut Input, getting the search query, and presenting the results. ⌘
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.
The ‘Choose from List’ action gives us rich, albeit small, thumbnail previews of the search results. ⌘
Although it looks straghtforward, we get a little more advanced with these ‘Choose from Menu’ choices. ⌘
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.
Here’s where you can see the selected image in more detail. ⌘
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.
’Show Notification’ actions can include images, too. ⌘
🔟 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.
There we have it. The original quality stock photo and its credits ready-to-go. ⌘
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.
And here’s the resulting stock image! (Image: Josh Sorenson) ⌘
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.
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.
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”.
Straight from the horse’s mouth, only about three years of updates for the Pixels. ⌘
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.
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.
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.
Adding a new customer search is as easy as coming up with an abbreviation and pasting in a URL with the right format. ⌘
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.
Searching with “az” prepended to the term in Spotlight, both on iOS and macOS, will open directly to Amazon’s website. ⌘
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.
I’ve got a bunch of Keyword Search items set up and use them daily. ⌘
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!)
Depending on whether the destination is a website or an app, the searching actions can vary, but they all rely on the ‘searchTerm’ variable. ⌘
’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.
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!
There are a number of dedicated fitness trackers that seek to provide you with an indication of how “rested” or “recovered” you are each night’s sleep. My goal is to bring this to automatic sleep tracking on the Apple Watch.
After laying out the three measurements that factor into it — Heart Rate Variability, Resting Heart Rate, and Restful Sleep Duration — David explains the scale for the daily Readiness Score:
These three values are then combined into a single numerical score from 0 to 100. With 100 indicating that all three measures are pointing you towards a highly restorative night. And 0 indicating that your body appears to have been really struggling during the night. Additionally, each composite value, and its comparison to baseline, is shown for reference.
His short explainer blog post is worth reading in full to better understand how and why the score makes sense.
Sleep++ has been my sleep tracker of choice for years because of its no-hassle approach. I beta-tested this new version and have already found value in checking my Readiness Score. And it’s accurate — when I wake up feeling tired, I’ll check the score, and it is always indeed on the low side. Sleep++ is free, so there’s no reason not to give it a try!
Quick Reviews is a very basic website that replicates the look of my reviews but does it entirely in HTML, CSS, and a hit of JavaScript. This is aggressively simple, and it’s far from a premium site at this point, but I wanted to get something out there and see if people are interested.
I’ve enjoyed and coveted Matt’s micro-reviews for a while. It’s super cool that he’s put this together for anyone to use. If I had one piece of advice, it would be to put a Carbon ad on the page to augment his side hustle income. I think it will be a popular little tool, and I’ve started using it for my TV series reviews.
The better way to handle this would be to create a new type of streak for weekly goals and provide associated badges which are separate from the daily goals. This preserves everything from users who are currently happy with how everything is implemented, while creating a new paradigm for those who aren’t as emphatic about fitness but want to remain healthy. For example, I could see where a user might set weekly goals — say 10,000 kCals active calories burned, 180 exercise minutes, and 45 standing hours — which sets up their week with more flexibility to adjust their routines based on how they are feeling.
I hadn’t considered a weekly goal before, but I like this idea!
So with all the latest TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, TCL, Hisense, and others now announced and due to ship over the next few months, it seems an opportune moment to review the features you should be looking for when TV shopping.
A helpful roundup if you haven’t been staying on top of the latest in TV tech.
Say hello to Universal Sign On. 1Password will remember how you log in to each account so you can get where you’re going with a single click
The only thing of any real interest to me on this forward-looking site from 1Password is for it to save what sign-in service I used for each site. I typically use only email or ‘Sign in With Apple’ but there are a few exceptions. The rest of this mini-site is too corporate to get excited about. This makes sense when looking at their funding model lately.
Honestly, I’m starting to consider an exit from 1Password back to iCloud Keychain. Better family sharing features would make the exit cleaner, but waiting for that isn’t absolutely necessary. iCloud Keychain’s substantive improvements over the last couple of years have been impressive, and there’s no sign of that team slowing down.
The problem isn’t the failure of users to embrace buying pizza inside iMessage chats and turning sticker apps into the next big thing. The problem is that when it flopped, Apple seemed to react with what I’ll charitably call indifference, though it might be more accurate to call it denial combined with inflexibility. Instead of diagnosing the failure and seeing what was next, Apple did what it often does with its failures, which is to leave them to rust away and then make them quietly disappear.
Snell lays out how iMessage had had significant misses over the past decade, rather than being the resounding success that locks people to the iPhone. His point here cuts deeply because we see it happen far too often with Apple products. If a feature doesn’t take off, nary a word is spoken about them, no improvements come, and then they just disappear.
Without even digging too deeply, here’s a brief list of example:
I would love it if phone calls came with a subject line. Sure, there’d be kinks to work out, like if someone called from a landline or other unsupported phone. And it would bifurcate smartphone operating systems even further if it wasn’t a standard across multiple ecosystems. But just imagine if it were!
an analysis of the two player asymmetric adversarial pencil and paper word guessing game hangman
Fell down a rabbit hole and learned more about hangman than I ever needed to know. But be wary if I ever challenge you to this weird game. I have a strong strategy now!
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!
Sometimes getting the perfect thing on-screen to capture can be tricky. Trying to hit the hardware button combination at just the right time leads to frustration and a photo library full of erroneous screenshots. Getting the right moment would be way easier if all you needed to do were simply lift your finger. Luckily, Apple has built just such a method into iPadOS.
You may not know that you can take a screenshot on an iPad using a gesture as an alternative to pressing the standard hardware buttons. Using a finger or Apple Pencil, just drag inward from the bottom left-hand corner to take a full-screen screenshot. I like to think of it as the opposite of Hot Corners in macOS, where you fling your mouse into a corner to activate an action.
Playing around with this gesture led me to discover today’s quick tip. If you don’t lift from the screen after swiping in, you’ll see that the screenshot UI appears, and the preview stays active. It isn’t until you release the gesture that the screenshot is saved and the markup controls pop in.
A cool byproduct of this method is that when you’re trying to capture a frame from a video, it keeps playing while the screenshot gesture has been started. Just set it up, wait for the perfect moment, and then lift. It’s way better than trying to scrub to the right frame or pause at the right moment with software controls that fade out.
See the gesture in action below and let me know if you find other neat uses for this.
Bonus: If you have a hardware keyboard connected to your iPad, the standard Mac keyboard shortcuts for screenshots work too. Give Command-Shift-3 (full-screen capture) and Command-Shift-4 (capture straight into crop mode) a try.
If the gesture isn’t working with your finger, check the Settings app to ensure it’s enabled and not just for the Apple Pencil. Go to Settings → General → Gestures → ‘Allow Finger to Swipe from Corner’. I had to disable and re-enable it to get it to recognize my finger.
The iMac starts at just $1,299. That base model comes with a Magic Keyboard ($99) and a Magic Mouse ($79). Right off the bat, you can remove $180 off the price. Apple’s displays don’t need to come bundled with other accessories. Then remove the actual computer. I can’t really say what the computer inside of the iMac would cost, but it’s likely that the display itself is a more expensive component than anything on the motherboard. Apple could probably charge less, but to maintain a healthy margin they could sell their display for just $999. In fact, that’s the price of the last consumer display that was retired in 2016.
Yes! Use 👏 the 👏 same 👏 parts! By all accounts, the 24-inch iMac has a great display. Keep the speakers, the ports, the webcam — hell, even the same enclosure would be fine — and call it a day. They’ve already done the hard part.
Then Apple can shift focus to high-end monitors with fancy features like Mini LED, HDR, and high refresh rate.
