The episode of Punch Up the Jam on “Hook” by Blues Traveller was in my podcast queue for far too long, I finally got around to listening last night. It was pure joy!

Miel’s skepticism (but obvious enjoyment) of this bananas song, coupled with Amir’s utter ecstasy at every line, had me smiling from beginning to end. So much fun.

Although I’ve always enjoyed this song, particularly after it was featured in the Emma Stone and Jimmy Fallon spectacle, but I’d never actually listened to its lyrics. Turns out that it’s right up my alley and simply hilarious.

It doesn’t matter what I say
So long as I sing with inflection
That makes you feel I’ll convey
Some inner truth or vast reflection
But I’ve said nothing so far
And I can keep it up for as long as it takes
And it don’t matter who you are
If I’m doing my job, it’s your resolve that breaks

I can’t wait to dig into more of Punch Up the Jam.

You can listen on the Overcast website, which also has links to other popular podcast players.

Fair warning: Podcast episode has strong language, so maybe listen with headphones.

Linked

1. AirBuddy 2 for Mac recreates the quick, easy, and beautiful card-based interactions like those on iOS for all the AirPods and Beats headphones. Even more, it provides battery status and power user options for many other Bluetooth devices. [Guilherme Rambo]
2. Hush for Mac, iPhone, and iPad blocks all those annoying pop-ups on websites for you to confirm the use of cookies. Over. And over. And over again. You just set it, then forget it. [Via John Gruber]
3. HealthyShoe is a really simple app for iPhone that integrates with the Apple Health database to keep track of the miles you put on your running shoes. I used to track this with Nike+ Running, but I’ve long since gone all-in on the Apple Watch’s workout app. Just tell HealthyShoe when you started using each pair of shoes, and it automatically totals up the miles and recommends when you should replace them. No account, no personal data tracking, just a simple utility. [Via Steve Troughton-Smith]
4. Personal Best Workouts, like HealthyShoe, is an app that integrates with the HealthKit database on iPhone. This app shows you insights and metrics on your workouts like time spent, calories burned, and distance traveled. You can see your bests over selected time periods, and drill down to individual workouts. As someone who enjoys reviewing stats of all kinds, and who is getting back into fitness, these kinds of utility apps are right in my wheelhouse. [Via Club MacStories]
5. Brain.fm is an iPhone and iPad app that I’d heard of before but always passed by. I was able to use it for free this month, and I think I might subscribe. Being able to have dedicated focus “music” that doesn’t influence my actual music library recommendations has been great. It really has helped me to focus, and I like that the sounds are set on a timer, which keeps me on track throughout the day. [Via Club MacStories]
6. Robinhood captured the world by storm this week. I’m not a gambler, but I did take advantage of all the explainers this week to learn more about how the stock market actually works. Here’s a good one by The Verge on the whole fiasco. Turns out I had a free $5 stock from Robinhood that I set up a couple of years ago. So far it’s earned…$1.65! [Elizabeth Lopatto]
7. ScanThing is an app for iPhone and iPad that fills a particular need that I’ve had for a while. I used to use the Scannable app by Evernote for all my digital scanning needs, but it hasn’t seen significant development for a while. Despite the plethora of scanning apps out there, they all have more complex workflows. I really valued the simplicity of opening an app straight to its scanning mode, having it auto-capture, and then send off to another app or the file system for saving with a custom name. I’ve tried creating a custom Shortcut to solve this problem, but it never worked quite right. ScanThing does it perfectly and comes with a few other awesome bells and whistles. It automatically applies OCR, so I can search the text of a document later. It can also capture just the text of something in the viewfinder, which is perfect for copying tracking numbers from receipts and other similar situations to get text from the physical world. And, the real magic, you can “scan” objects, which automatically removes the background around the subject to great effect. I take a lot of pictures of items that I can no longer keep but don’t want to forget, and then add them to my Day One journal. ScanThing is a winner. [Pierre Liebenberg]

Bonus: Craft is a new note-taking and personal wiki app that everyone is raving about. I’m giving it a try as a place to store work-related notes for a few current projects. It hasn’t really clicked with me yet, but I might have more to say on it in the future. [Via MacStories]

7 Things Apps

The giving season has recently passed, and perhaps you also received an Apple Gift Card or two. Besides being much more versatile than the iTunes Gift Cards of the days of yore,¹ the new Apple Gift Cards are hiding an extra special secret: they also include a free sticker!

When you pull out the bit of paper with the card’s code on the back, you may notice that the spot of color than peeked through the Apple logo cutout on the front isn’t printed but is instead a removable sticker. And no residue or clinging paper tags along either — like it’s asking to be peeled off!

These aren’t just any stickers, either. I have handfuls of white Apple stickers from products bought over the years, but these are colorful and…familiar. I thought I’d seen them before, and with a quick search my theory was proven correct. Perhaps you remember back in October of 2018 when Apple sent invitations to what was rumored to be an iPad event. Rather than sending the same invitation design to each guest, as usual, this time each invitation seemed to be unique and possibly drawn on an iPad.

Lo and behold, those abstract logos have been given another purpose. In their article for MacRumors, Julie Clover linked to an album containing each of the 371 different versions.² I found the designs from my gift cards!

It’s rare for Apple to include even a Space Gray sticker in their products, and here nearly 400 colorful stickers have been hiding in plain sight.

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1. Did you know they can now be used for hardware in addition to software and services?↩︎

2. If you like the look of these logos, I can recommend a screensaver that cycles through the animated versions from the keynote’s intro video.↩︎

Greatest Hits

1. I hadn’t realized that the Vice President is sworn in first during the inauguration. Make sense so that there’s succession in place, just in case a catastrophe occurs in the first few moments of a new administration. Although, a large chunk of the succession line attended church together prior to the ceremonies this week. Wholesome…but risky. [Emily Jacobs]
2. Amanda Gorman’s poem, The Hill We Climb, which she performed at the inauguration this week was poignant and powerful. I have a feeling she’s going to be one to keep an eye on. [Via John Gruber]
3. If you’re in the mood for some incredible performance art stationed at the intersection of Magical and Moving, do yourself a favor and watch In & Of Itself on Hulu. [Via Lex Friedman}
4. Clever of the Biden Administration to put a job application call-to-action for website developers within the new WhiteHouse.gov source code. [Mitchell Clark]
5. I, like the rest of the internet, have loved the Bernie memes this week. They’re endearing in a way that most memes aren’t. It’s also super cool that Bernie turned the sensation into an opportunity to help people. [David Matthews]
6. Although not unexpected, the pandemic has now been proven to be adversely affecting the mental health of youth. The President/CEO of the American Camp Association insists that (safe) summer camps are needed now more than ever. I agree. [Tom Rosenberg]
7. After 12 years, I never expected to see a sequel to Doodle Jump, one of the OG great iOS games (and has been kept up-to-date for modern devices). But The Doodler is back in Doodle Jump 2 with some great improvements. It’s just as fun today as it was back in 2009. [Alex Guyot]

7 Things

1. Impeachment.fyi has been a succinct way to keep up with the impeachment progress this week. And full marks for the website URL. [Dan Sinker]
2. This new overhead projector-like app for video calls would have been perfect when I was doing daily activity demonstrations earlier this year. I’ll still stick it in my toolbox. [Charlie Chapman]
3. White Rhinos are on the razor’s edge of extinction. Scientists are trying to fix that problem (which we created) by making embryos before it’s too late. [National Geographic]
4. These (unofficial) Twitter and Instagram feed are simply Apple marketing photos and nothing else. It’s a fun walk down memory lane, and a reminder of how awesome Apple is at product shots. [ Archive]
5. Daniel Dale has been fact-checking Donald Trump for every day of his presidency, and these are what he believes are the President’s 15 most notable lies. I can scarcely imagine a more depressing and crazy-making job. [Daniel Dale]
6. I hadn’t known that the phrase “Designed in California” had significance beyond Apple’s iconic usage on all its products. [Diana Budds]
7. Later in 2021 will be the 10-year anniversary of Steve Jobs’s death. Steve didn’t take many interviews, but he made time for the AllThingsD Conference. After Steve’s death, AllThingsD made all his appearances available to watch (along with a collection of essays about him) available on Apple Podcasts. I still find Steve’s ideas and the way he presented them to be fascinating. [Via Robert Silvernail]

7 Things

I’ll say this upfront: I’m particular about my music collection. Back in high school, I would rip music into iTunes from every CD I could get my hands on and then spend hours making sure all of the metadata was correct and finding the highest quality album artwork to drop in. Now that all my music comes from a streaming service, triple-checking metadata is a thing of the past. But I’ve only found new ways to obsess about curating the perfect library.

Should I only add items that I’ve marked as “loved” and then discovered again?¹ Should I add the full album or only the songs that I’ve enjoyed?² Do holiday albums belong in the library, or a separate playlist so that they don’t pop up throughout the rest of the year?³ What about soundtracks and “chill out” music that I use to focus or relax?⁴

It may sound tedious — and it is — but it’s fun to go through everything from time to time and rediscover old favorites.

However, one of my biggest pet peeves about collecting music is when I have duplicates of songs hiding within the masses. Why? Because I’ve come to appreciate the data-driven playlists and insights that can come from a well-manicured collection. If I have duplicates, then play counts are split, album counts are inaccurate, and there’s too much album artwork to associate with a given track — in other words, it’s all just wrong.

This particular preference is at odds with the way many artists release their albums with a few hit singles to drum up excitement and then a full album, which includes those same singles, a little later. Since I don’t want to miss out on the new hotness, I’ll add the singles and then have to remember to carefully scour the full album track list to remove the singles’ albums that are represented there. I’ve gone so far as to sequester singles out of my library and into a specific playlist. But there’s a better way!

This glass of ice water in the hell of music management is a feature born of streaming services: the “Upcoming Album”. Evidently, an artist can choose to release an album to the public without the full track list, and then release single tracks over time but which live in the upcoming album, not in their own album. When the full album is ready, the rest of the tracks join the singles as a cohesive whole.

This approach has several advantages. First, it keeps me sane. Second, anyone can add the pre-release album to their library ahead of time so that they automatically get the new music (and notifications) as it’s available. I’m sure that’s good for first-week stream counts. Third, from personal experience, I can say that I’m far more excited by a tantalizingly grayed-out track list with a release date than from a mess of singles in my library.

I hope more artists take advantage of this option for releasing tracks from their new album over time. There’s certainly a place for singles that don’t make sense in an album — covers, for example — but an Upcoming Album takes advantage of streaming as a medium in a helpful way.

Music

Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac:

Notably, CBS This Morning host Gayle King also teased that more of the interview will air tomorrow, as Apple is expected to make a “big announcement” of some sort — but it’s “not a product.”

My money is on a pandemic-related announcement. Perhaps mapping out testing centers, or a vaccination ID in Health Records on iPhone or Apple Wallet.

It’s odd for CBS to pre-announce an Apple announcement. Not long left to wait.

Read the article on 9to5Mac.

UPDATE: I would have lost my money. Turns out it was a few new major projects for Apple’s Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. The Apple Developer Academy courses in Detroit, and the Propel Center look particularly interesting.

Linked

Jason Snell, who recently finished the incredible 20 Macs for 2020 project on Six Colors:

Now, note my choice of words there: notable. I’m not saying these are my favorite Macs—a bunch of them I only knew in passing and never used myself. I’m not saying these are the best Macs ever—a difficult thing to measure, since (with a few obvious exceptions) the best Macs made are the most recent ones, otherwise we’d all still be using G3 iMacs.

If you’re an Apple nerd like me, you’ll appreciate the depths to which Jason dug to put together these 20 stories, podcasts, and videos. Sometimes I forget that the Mac was introduced way back in 1984 — 10 years before I was born¹ — so I looked forward to learning a little more of the full story each week. With the introduction of the M1 Macs a few months ago, I have to believe the Mac’s best years are ahead of it, and I’m thrilled to be along for the ride!

I have owned three Macs so far, with the fourth, an M1 Mac mini, arriving later this month. The first was an original Intel MacBook Pro in high school, then a 2011 iMac throughout college, and finally a 2016 MacBook (Adorable) which is still kicking around as my daily driver. The most notable of that collection has to be the MacBook Pro. It was one of the first with that sleek all-metal enclosure that still informs laptop design to this day, and was my gateway drug into the Mac ecosystem.²

Linked Podcasts

1. People have timed out how to watch movies so that their climax happens exactly at midnight. I bet there are more examples out there. I’ll file this away for next New Year’s Eve. [David Sparks]
2. At least anecdotally, the volume of subscribers and payout for building apps as a side project is much lower than I expected. [Becky Hansmeyer]
3. I should probably get some bottled water stashed away. [Stephanie Czekalinski]
4. The idea of circular time vs. linear time. But I particularly enjoyed the picture at the bottom of the post which shows how to think about time in a more human, rather than analytical, way. [Austin Leon]
5. Could be just me, but I always thought that the US Postal Service was largely funded by tax dollars. Turns out not at all for operating expenses. [USPS]
6. Not even during the Civil War did the Confederate Flag make it across the Capitol’s threshold, but it was flaunted by the terrorists who stormed the Capitol this week.¹ The whole ordeal was disgusting, and I hope eye-opening as to the intentions of the MAGA group. [Maria Cramer]
7. This app, Longplay, should help with my recent habit of listening to albums straight through to appreciate their stories. [Jason Snell]

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1. Excepting, of course, that its symbolism was featured on the Mississippi state flag until it was finally changed last summer. Better late than never, I suppose.↩︎

7 Things

I’ve spent some time with the AirPods Max after a long wait, and I could wax rhapsodic about how much I like them. But M.G. Siegler, writing at his site 500ish, wrapped it up better than I ever could in the title of his post alone: ‘Pretty Great, Pretty Loud, Pretty Expensive, Pretty Heavy, and Pretty’:

That leads back to the main purpose of these things: the sound. Again, I’m hardly the person you should listen to in this regard, but they are fantastic to my ears. Yes, better than the QC35s and certainly than the smaller AirPods (as you might hope given the price). I’ve turned them up loud, they not only get loud, they do not seem to distort.

It’s well worth a read.

Other reviews that I’ve read or watched and largely agree with:

• Heavy is the Head the Wears the AirPods Max by John Gruber at Daring Fireball
• AirPods Max Review: An Audiophile’s Perspective by Quinn Nelson at Snazzy Labs
• Apple AirPods Max review: luxurious sound for a luxury price by Chris Welch writing at The Verge
• AirPods Max Review: Luxury Listening! by Marques Brownlee at MKBHD

Linked Gear