Jacob Kastrenakes writing at The Verge about Fanhouse and other creator-focused apps’ clash with Apple’s App Review:

The app only takes a 10 percent cut on its own, so the platform’s creators could soon be earning a whole lot less. Rice says she would be okay with handing Apple a 30 percent cut of Fanhouse’s own profits. But once that 30 percent has to cut into creators’ profits, it starts to hurt people, not just the platform. “This money really means a second job for some people, that they have a place to live, that they can afford tuition,” Rice says. “And we tried to explain this to Apple.”

and

Apple’s App Store rules didn’t even acknowledge creators until this week. On Monday, they were updated with a new section saying that creator-made content and experiences are allowed in apps — so long as they’re properly moderated and monetized for Apple.

A reckoning is brewing, not just from big corporations, but from (influential) creators too. I hope Apple is willing to reconsider some of its App Store policies, which are now over ten years old, for the new lay of the land. They’re going to need to bend or risk breaking.

Go to the linked site →

Linked

A few weeks back, José Adorno at 9to5Mac reported on Spotify’s new personalized features, and it added another straw to the camel’s back in my temptation to use Spotify:

Spotify announced today a new global campaign called “Only You,” an in-app experience with personalized playlists to celebrate its users’ uniqueness. The new feature is accessible via the Spotify for iOS application and it comes with six different in-app experiences.

Those in-app experiences are ways to learn about your own music tastes based on artists you’ve enjoyed recently, the music you listen to at particular times of day, the years your music tastes stem from, and more. They’ve even introduced a new Blend feature, which automatically creates a mix of music that you and your selected friend would both enjoy.

The Blend feature would be awesome for road trips with my wife so that we’d get a good mix of music that each of us like. Meanwhile, Apple Music doesn’t even have collaborative playlists.

These interesting experiments, driven by data and algorithms, are what set Spotify apart. Apple Music’s claim to fame has been its human curation. Many of those Apple Music playlists are great — the Essentials Playlists in particular are excellent when trying out a new artist — but we miss out on neat personal insights that can only be derived by a trove of listening data. We’ve entrusted that data to Apple, but they rarely do anything interesting with it.

Apple’s Not Feeling the Competition

Before Apple Music, I was a happy Spotify subscriber. When Apple’s streaming service was introduced in 2015, there weren’t a ton of features that set the services apart, so I switched to better integrate with my existing iTunes Library. Since then, I’ve watched with some side-eye as Spotify users celebrate their discovery of new music using its algorithmic playlists, and share their Wrapped stats at the end of each year. I keep thinking that Apple will feel the pressure and respond with similar features, but so far I’ve been disappointed.

I’ll give them that Spatial Audio is genuinely great, and was a big introduction. But music made with Dolby Atmos wasn’t an Apple-first feature, and I imagine it will become table stakes sooner rather than later.

Despite longing for more social features and better use of my listening data, I’m doubtful that I’ll make the switch back to Spotify. I share Apple Music with my wife through iCloud Family Sharing, and it’s bundled in with an Apple One subscription at a great price. So, I’ll continue gazing toward the greener grass. But it draws my attention to the anti-trust and anti-competitive arguments currently being made against Apple. Do they actually face competition from outside their ecosystem? In this case, for me, no.

Music

During the whirlwind of WWDC last week, from the keynote to the session videos to the gems found within the betas, one thing kept coming back me: the lines between each operating system (OS) are blurrier than ever.

For years, we have wondered if Apple would combine its many operating systems into just one for all their devices. Indeed, since iOS was famously a variant of Mac OS X — and all the other modern OSes were forked from iOS — it didn’t seem like much of a stretch that they could be brought back together. Anxiety for this unification was rooted in fear from the Mac community that macOS was neglected in favor of iOS, which powered Apple’s more flashy and much more popular devices. Mac users feared that their preferred platform, the most powerful and flexible, would be simplified and restricted to what could run on an iPhone or iPad.

And the community had good reason to question Apple’s allegiance to the Mac’s future. Hardware stagnated and disappointed. Mac OS X 10.7 Lion introduced the first of several user interface (UI) transitions that brought many interface elements from the mobile systems. Leather and wood-styled window chrome did not feel at home on the Mac but wouldn’t be fully removed until the next UI makeover in OS X 10.10 Yosemite. In that release, Apple returned to a more cohesive design with the Mac itself, but it was in line with the simplified, flatter, and transparency-oriented design of iOS 7. With macOS 11 Big Sur, redid macOS again, this time with more space, unified icons with their iOS fellows, and again simplified title bars and sidebars. Indeed, on Big Sur, some Mac apps were nearly indistinguishable from their iPad counterparts.

However, during all this time of flux and redesign, Apple’s response to questions about macOS going away or uniting the OSes was a firm “No!”.

Some Advantages?

Let’s say that Apple did want to unify its platforms, despite its insistence to the contrary. What would be the advantages? It would mean that developers could write apps just once to be deployed across an iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. This streamline would give them more places to acquire customers without the effort of rewriting for another device.

For users, the advantages are many. Features would be available across all platforms simultaneously instead of a slow rollout, if at all. Users would need to learn only one UI (optimized for each platform and its appropriate input devices, of course). Fewer UI paradigms mean less cognitive load, making it easier to switch between devices. If it’s easy to switch between Apple devices to get things done, more users would likely buy within the ecosystem, a bonus for developers and Apple alike to keep those customers. And the devices could work more seamlessly together if they were all running the same software.

Would it all be rosy? No, of course not. But assuming existing features were brought into this new unified OS rather than abandoned, it sounds compelling.

What Do We Have Today?

But, “Wait,” you might say. All those benefits sound similar to what we have in the Apple ecosystem today, despite no unifying “appleOS.” Have we arrived there anyway?

Let’s look at the newest releases coming out of WWDC21: Each platform does use a consolidated UI with similar visual styles (e.g., transparency, white space), iconography (e.g., app icons, SF Symbols), and interaction model (e.g., Control Center, keyboard shortcuts, focus engine). Each UI is refined for their screen size, direct or external input, and intended use case, but nobody could miss the family resemblance.

Furthermore, features that once would have been prioritized to come to iPhone and iPad first and now becoming available on day one for the Mac. This year’s WWDC showed off many such features like Live Text, FaceTime improvements, and Shared with You. More times than not, Apple simply recapped features in each section of their keynote, saying that they were also coming to their subsequent platforms.

Technologies like Swift, SwiftUI, and Mac Catalyst mean developers can create more efficiently across all Apple’s platforms than ever. They can share code and start to bring existing mobile apps to the Mac with the click of a button. App Bundling and Universal Purchases make getting their apps onto all of their customers’ devices seamless, which is a great selling point. Today, developers can get features for “free” — like Mac Menu Bar commands appearing in iPad versions of apps, without any additional work.

And with the Mac, the last holdout, making its transition to Apple silicon means that features can be designed from the start with all of Apple’s devices in mind. We got a taste this year with innovations that use the Neural Engine, image processing pipeline, unified memory, and the guarantee for both power and efficiency cores in the CPU. And automating on and between devices is tied together ever more tightly with Shortcuts and Siri.

What’s Still Missing?

If we’ve gained the benefits of a unified OS, what keeps Apple from making the final leap to an official introduction? For one, unified input across devices isn’t quite there. The iPad is Apple’s most versatile device with native touch, keyboard, pointer, and stylus input. Device input is a sticking point for Apple, which seems reluctant to bring touch to the Mac and more complexity to the iPhone. I could envision a future in which the Mac gains basic touch interaction, and the iPhone gets compatibility with the Apple Pencil. Perhaps touch and stylus support could come to external monitors as a stopgap.

---

Ultimately, introducing “appleOS” is a marketing decision as much as it is a technical one. All the platforms stem from the same software foundation and now run on the same chip architecture. Code and UI creation tools have been designed to work across platforms seamlessly and will only get more capable. And all this has happened without the Mac, or any other platform, losing what makes it special.

Perhaps Apple was being honest about having no plans to eliminate the Mac or create a franken-OS. Instead, they’ve elegantly transitioned and tied their OSes together right in front of our eyes. Those of us who were rooting for an appleOS can stop dreaming. If we take a look around, we’ll see that we’re living it.

WWDC

Parker Ortolani at 9to5Mac outdid himself in compiling stand-out moments from nearly 25 years of WWDCs:

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is our Super Bowl. It’s the most important time of the year for Apple fans, journalists, and of course developers. Each year for more than 20 years, Apple has brought its community together and spent a week detailing their next major software innovations.

[…]

Even though WWDC technically started in 1990, let’s start where things got interesting, which is in 1997.

With WWDC21 freshly in the rearview mirror, it is fun to compare this year’s conference highlights to the past 20+ years of conferences. I’ve been watching the keynote and following the development community for the past 14 or 15 years, so it was neat to catch up on Apple’s turnaround in the late 90s and early 2000s from a development perspective.

The pace at which Apple reinvented itself leading up to the launch of the iPhone was almost breakneck. I didn’t know that Xcode wasn’t even introduced until 2003, and just a few years later, it was the center of development for Apple’s most important devices. When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Apple couldn’t and didn’t slow down. Thinking about how many operating systems they now maintain (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS), I’m even more impressed at what Apple gets out of the door every year.

Indeed, here are three things that stood out to me from this year’s WWDC:

WWDC 2021
June 7-11 - Cupertino
Apple Park
Highlights

• Xcode Cloud provides developer teams better and more efficient ways to work together, and even individual developers can take advantage of cloud compiling and testing.
  
• Privacy features give users even more options to mask their online activity through iCloud Private Relay, Mail Privacy Protection, on-device Siri, and more.
  
• Shortcuts on the Mac brings the building block-style automation that millions are familiar with to Apple’s most powerful platform.

“Shortcuts is the future of automation on the Mac.” - Craig Federighi

Go to the linked site →

Linked WWDC

1. The fine folks at Panic (historically a software company) have been working on their first hardware product for the past couple years: a delightful handheld gaming device called Playdate. This week they posted a video update about it as they near the finish line. Playdate looks like a super fun gadget full of original ideas (look at that crank!) — but the video presentation was also really creative! The graphics were next level, and I appreciated how despite the “slides” being behind the presenters, they were effective and kept the focus on the person.
2. Over the past few days, I binged a quick, five-episode podcast series about creating a new pasta shape. Sounds boring, I know, but I was enthralled! The three-year journey had success and disaster, and many experts telling Dan, the host of Mission: ImPASTAble, that his dream of creating a new kind of pasta was unrealistic and unattainable. But Dan’s infectious enthusiasm and years of hard work resulted in something great. I can’t wait for my order to arrive. [Via Kottke.org]
3. It’s difficult to see your idols fall. People are multi-faceted, and I believe that Tim Cook and Co. from Apple do good things to advance not only computing, but society in general. However, I find it hard to disagree with Marco Arment here. The fallout from comments Apple’s leadership has made (both in public and private) on their third-party developer relations, is a black eye that they need to acknowledge. Only then can they learn, adapt, and start to heal the damage.
4. Jason Fried, of Basecamp, wrote a short piece about listening to podcast episodes from 12 months ago — at which time we were still freshly into the pandemic. He found it insightful to look back at how much we didn’t know, even as we tried to make the best of a deeply scary and uncertain time. I’ve been listening to back to decade-old episodes of Hypercritical, a tech podcast by John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin.¹ It, too, is fascinating to consume with the benefit of future knowledge.
5. I’m glad that Twitter is exploring a paid experience, but these are not features I would have chosen for it. The most obvious feature, removing ads, is missing, and the 30-second undo feels half-assed. Instead of fully editable tweets, they provided a feature that any third-party could implement for free. Hopefully they keep iterating and adding more value here.
6. I was one of the people crossing their fingers for Face ID on the Mac. John Gruber’s explanation of Apple’s support document about Secure Intent lends credence to why we haven’t seen it introduced yet. To confirm intent that can’t be spoofed, it would likely need a physical button press anyway, which is why we saw Touch ID introduced on an external keyboard. I’m with Gruber that Face ID would still be nice, but I’m not as eager for it anymore.
7. Upon seeing the new logo for WarnerMedia and Discovery’s merged media company, I literally laughed out loud. M.G. Siegler had a good take: ‘Discovery’ is a better brand for today’s world, much like how CBS All Access recently changed to Paramount+ for their streaming service. Keep ‘Warner Brothers’ for the movie studio if you must, but ‘Warner Bros. Discovery’ is no good.

7 Things

• Living in a hot and humid Brunswick, Ohio (for now). Seriously, the heat has been out of control for this early in the summer. Can’t wait to put the apartment complex’s pool to good use soon! Next month, my wife and I will be taking a trip out to Washington State to check out as a possible next state to call home. Moving west has always been in the cards for us, and we’re aiming for the end of the year to make it a reality. I’m pretty amped!
• I’m no longer working for the Boy Scouts of America. I ended my employment with them about a month ago, and am currently seeking new and different opportunities. While I still firmly believe in the mission of the BSA, it was the right time for me to move on for my own health, for some . Outdoor recreation and education are as important now as they have ever been, and I look forward to contributing as a volunteer while I pursue other interests professionally. It turns out when you work as an administrator or director for outdoor recreation, there’s precious little time to partake in it yourself as a participant. I can’t wait to be able to spend more time reestablishing my skills as a climber, guide, and outdoor educator. I’ve interviewed at a few places, and hope to have an offer for a new job by next week. 🤞
• In the months leading up to my departure, a few major projects took a lot of my time and energy, which meant I really fell off the fitness bandwagon. But I’m happy to report that I’m back at it again with a routine established. Phin and I have gotten our runs up to four miles, and my rings are a motivator once more.
• Likewise, my writing here at HeyDingus took a backseat for a while. But the combination of more time available these past few weeks, a trove of blog post ideas saved up, and the plethora of announcements coming out of WWDC, the hiatus is over. I’m actually currently trying to wrangle my thoughts on what stuff should be published as a blog post versus a tweet.
• Being fully vaccinated and with COVID restrictions lifting, the world has become a larger place once again. My wife and I have made two big travel trips, and I’ve had a few more myself. It feels good — if weird — to get out and about. My immediate family have been fortunate to not catch COVID, but we, like so many others, did not escape having people we know and love become sick and sadly pass due to the virus. Go get vaccinated.
• I just had to check my Goodreads account because I’m between books at the moment. I did finally finish Morning Star and A Promised Land. After those, I moved on to Becoming by Michelle Obama which I enjoyed as an audiobook narrated by the former First Lady herself, and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal — all of which were excellent. All the Light We Cannot See was particularly moving. This was the yearly “classic” book gifted to me by my mother-in-law, and it was a great choice. Set in the years of World War 2, but alternating between the point of views of two growing children, one in Germany and one from Paris, the story is riveting, harrowing, and makes you feel. The Relentless Moon was a fun (if meandering at times) addition to the Lady Astronaut series. I think I’m going to stick with the space theme and go for Artemis by Andy Weir next. Andy wrote The Martian which enthralled me.
• My queue of online articles and YouTube videos has taken priority over games as of late. I did have the chance recently to play Ticket to Ride and Overcooked 2 with my wife and a friend. Both are fun and engaging games, but at utterly opposite ends of the spectrum. Ticket to Ride is a slow, calm, and strategic board game in which you build railroad lines to connect cities across the US. Overcooked is a fast-paced, chaotic, and reactive Switch game where you fulfill restaurant orders as a team by chopping, cooking, and combining various ingredients.
• From my TV watchlist, I’d been looking forward to the return of Trying (cute British comedy), and Mythic Quest (taking on some tougher subjects like gender equality this season), both of which have started releasing episodes of their second seasons. For new stuff, I was utterly drawn in by Mosquito Coast (boy, I love me some Justin Theroux) which just ended, and I finally got around to starting season one of Veep (its comedy style is right up my alley so far). My wife and I continue to binge Modern Family, which I’m eager to wrap up. I haven’t done a ton of movies lately, but I have been making my way through a slow rewatch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in timeline order (a fun look back), and caught Tenet (absolutely bananas of a movie, but intriguing) on HBO Max.
• As I type, I’m jamming to a specially curated jazz playlist full of tracks enabled for Spatial Audio. That new audio format has kickstarted an effort to listen back to old favorites that have been remastered for it. Bleachers and Montaigne are my two newest artist muses, so they make up a large portion of my listening history.
• My latest hobby has been learning to code using Swift Playgrounds. I’ve always had an interest, and I figure if it turns out to be something that I enjoy — and it “sticks” — it could be another basket with which to differentiate career options.

Wow, this Now update has run a bit long, I guess I’ve just had words stored up! I’ll try to rein it in next month.

Now Journal

Basic Apple Guy with a comprehensive look at what makes the new Siri Remote so great:

Just how much Apple doubled down on creating a remote that functions so much better than the previous Siri Remote is intriguing. There is no technical reason for why this remote needed to be as thick, tall, and chunky as it ended up being. Instead, its design appears intended to compliment the environment and ergonomics of how it will be used.

It may seem obvious that a remote should be designed around its intended environment and ergonomics, but that certainly wasn’t the case for the previous version.

I’m in agreement with nearly everything in this piece — the size is better, the click-wheel touch surface more functional, and the dedicated power button a nice bonus. I do, however, use the Siri button, and like its new position on the side to match with the iPhone. It looks like the Remote app will be updated to match.

And, yes, the placement of the mute and play/pause buttons is backwards.

I have a gripe with the mute button being the bottommost button on the remote and would have preferred Apple keep the Play/Pause button located there instead. I’m far more likely to want to pause than mute someone, so having it remain the bottommost button makes more sense to my use case.

Go to the linked site →

Linked

From Filipe Espósito at 9to5Mac:

While I don’t expect Apple will make the Pro Display XDR more affordable, the company should reconsider bringing back Cinema Display as an alternative for regular users. It doesn’t have to feature a 32-inch 6K display with super HDR or Mini-LED, but it can have above-average quality with the macOS integration that only Apple can do.

Nobody makes great displays like Apple. What I’d love to see is a redesigned Thunderbolt Display that takes the best-in-class panel from the iMac, and pairs it with a touch-capable layer. Not necessarily to enable touch on macOS, but instead to allow touch input when connected to an iPad.¹ Bonus points if it features a hinge mechanism like the Surface Studio for using that touchscreen with the Apple Pencil.

Go to the linked site →

Linked

I’ll be honest, when Apple flipped the switch to turn on Spatial Audio in Apple Music, I didn’t quite get it.

Spatial Audio is a new technology for music that expands from the two channels in stereo music to having the entire 3D space available to surround the listener with sound. Apple’s implementation uses Dolby Atmos as the format to deliver Spatial Audio.

The promise for “the future of music” (News link without a paywall) had me as eager as Christmas morning, and I couldn’t wait to try it out. So when reports came in that first tracks were appearing in Apple Music on Monday afternoon, I grabbed my favorite headphones, made sure the Dolby Atmos settings were enabled, and threw on a familiar album to try it out. For me, it was Taylor Swift’s excellent folklore. And while the music sounded good, it wasn’t earth-shattering as Apple’s marketing had led me to believe.

That was until I tried it with the “Jazz in Spatial Audio” playlist. Then the barrier was shattered, and I “got” it. With those songs (here’s the track that did it for me), it sounds like you’re standing within the band as they play around you. The separation between instruments is astounding.

The difference with the jazz, I think, was that I could better isolate the individual instruments and tell how they were positioned in the virtual space of surround sound. It also helped when I realized I could check the difference between spatial and stereo audio by turning Dolby Atmos off and on while a song was playing. When switching to stereo, every sound comes across as crushed together and in competition for attention. After that, I went back to lyrical tracks and compared them with Spatial Audio on and off — the difference is stark, and I much prefer the songs with it enabled.

A friend and I spent several hours last night swapping songs back and forth and gushing over how great they sounded.¹ It’s been a ton of fun to rediscover old favorites on this new sound stage. Soundtrack scores sound like you’re within a personal movie theater with the orchestra coming at you from all sides. Singer/Songwriter tracks sound intimate as if the artist is singing just for you. Pop is wide and punchy. Everything has space and depth that makes each sound like a live performance.

I’ll echo what others are saying, that the quality of the spatial effect varies from track to track. Most that I’ve tried do sound incredible, while others are a little off. For example, in “Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne, the instruments were too quiet in the background behind the vocals. When switching from stereo, I felt like I was straining to hear those bits of the song. I imagine that, like with anything new in the toolbox, artists and their producers will figure how best to use it. I’m eager to hear how it will impact artists’ creative process as they craft new music with Spatial Audio in mind — if it gets widespread adoption.

Suppose you don’t hear the difference at first when trying Spatial Audio, as I didn’t. In that case, I recommend turning it off and on while tracks are playing from within the Settings app (or touch and hold on the volume slider in Control Center when using AirPods Pro or AirPods Max). By doing that, you should be able to tell if you like it much more effectively than when listening in a vacuum.

So here’s to the future of music. Besides the Spatial Audio playlists curated in Apple Music (definitely try the Jazz in Spatial Audio one), below is a list with a few albums and playlists that I recommend trying out:

• Celebrating John Williams by Los Angeles Philharmonic
• What’s Up by 4 Non Blondes
• folklore and evermore by Taylor Swift
• Come Away With Me by Norah Jones
• Maniac by Halsey

Music

After some minor sleuthing, I think the name “iMac Pro” will be reintroduced and fully replace the 27-inch iMac. The M1 iMac webpage doesn’t include the phrase “24-inch iMac” anywhere. The 27-inch iMac page, on the other hand, alludes to its size everywhere. If the larger, higher-powered model were to share the standard iMac name, you’d think the 24-inch would continue to include that differentiator.

When the iMac Pro was discontinued earlier this year, I figured Apple would explain it by saying the regular iMacs, powered by Apple Silicon, were so powerful that there be no need for a “Pro.” There would be smaller and larger versions, as usual, and that would satisfy the iMac market just like it did before the iMac Pro was a thing. Because otherwise, why not keep selling the old iMac Pro until an Apple Silicon version was ready? Now I think it was simply a matter of supply and demand, along with wanting to clear the decks for a grand reintroduction.¹

Without copy to change on the 24-inch iMac’s marketing page, the transition will be that much easier.