The forthcoming People app caught my attention when it came across my timeline last week.

I always find these kinds of projects fascinating, especially because I enjoy organizing the connections between the people I know and the contexts in which I interact with them.

It’s hard to say how useful it will be without a more detailed overview of the user interface, but what’s neat is that it syncs both ways with the Contacts app.

People: Contacts Reimagined — Hidden Spectrum:

It’s starts with a time, and a place.
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The Verge reports on OpenAI’s new AI agent feature.

It seems like it will be quite a while before this kind of computing becomes reliable and normalized, but I am definitely excited about it. I think a lot of discourse about AI is filled with misplaced anger and fear, especially in artistic and teaching communities. These AI tools certainly present significant ethical issues, but what they accomplish for humans is not something I struggle with. They are bad at art and, honestly, still pretty bad at understanding. However, what they excel at is automation.

I have spent time getting comfortable with various automation apps, utilities, and languages to speed up some of my mobile and desktop computing workflows. Apps like Shortcuts, Automator, and Keyboard Maestro have been incredibly helpful over the years. However, web apps are painfully difficult to automate, and as major platform owners like Google, Meta, and Amazon continue to lock down their ecosystems, it becomes even harder for third-party apps to meaningfully manipulate these sites on the user’s behalf.

The most hopeful and optimistic take on AI is that, in the next few years, we’ll start to see it take less of a “me-too” role inside our apps and websites and instead evolve into something that can act on our behalf—stringing together cumbersome, multi-step actions and automating tasks we already perform consistently but manually.

Hopefully, Operator AI helps to instigate that trend.

OpenAI’s new Operator AI agent can do things on the web for you – The Verge:

OpenAI is releasing a “research preview” of an AI agent called Operator that can “go to the web to perform tasks for you,” according to a blog post. “Using its own browser, it can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling,” OpenAI says.
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Would you like some Bluey content? This episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz features the show’s sound designed and mixer Dan Brumm and discusses several aspects of the show’s sound, including the timing of the theme song.

Fun listen.

The Sound of… BLUEY!!! — Twenty Thousand Hertz – The stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds.:

Since its debut in 2018, Bluey has become one of the most popular and beloved TV shows of all time. In this episode, Bluey’s sound designer and mixer Dan Brumm walks us through how the show began, the unique challenges of season one, and the lengths he goes to give the show its organic sound. Plus, Dallas reveals the secret timing of the Bluey theme song.
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I really, really love Moom. Window management is one of the fiddlier aspects of using a computer, and Moom allows me to automate quite a bit of it. It lets me snap windows to the left and right sides of the screen using keyboard shortcuts. What I especially like is how it can automatically memorize the window size and placement for various apps and recall them through the Shortcuts app.

For example, when I plug into my studio desk, all the apps I need to teach private lessons open and position themselves exactly where I want them on my external monitor.

MacStories has an overview of the features in the new version. Read below.

Moom 4: Mac Window Management, Upgraded – MacStories:

This summer, my all-time favorite window management utility Moom received a major 4.0 upgrade more than 12 years after the initial release of Moom 3. Ever since I went back to the Mac as my main computer, Moom has allowed me to create automations to arrange my windows and easily save and restore specific window layouts. From a fully customizable palette to new keyboard shortcut options to the ability to chain custom commands, Moom 4 offers a wide range of new features that make it an even more advanced utility that will appeal to anyone looking for more flexibility than Apple’s new window tiling feature, which is coming in macOS Sequoia.
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Mela is my family’s preferred recipe manager. Using the share sheet, you can send recipes from the web directly to the app, which strips out all the unnecessary clutter, leaving only the ingredients, quantities, and step-by-step instructions. The app is intuitive, beautifully designed, and allows you to share your recipe database with family members.

It also integrates with your calendar and Reminders apps for grocery shopping management and meal planning purposes.

It’s one of the few “nerd apps” my wife loves to use. (Most of the apps I’ve tried to introduce to my family over the years have been, at best, tolerated.)

The latest update apparently adds the ability to extract recipes not only from websites but also from the descriptions in videos like those on YouTube and TikTok. I’m curious to see how reliably that feature works.

Mela:

Quickly save a recipe while browsing. Mela’s in-app browser will display a live preview when it detects a recipe on the currently viewed page. Want to add or view a recipe from outside of Mela? Just use Mela’s sharing extension.
Subscribe to your favorite recipe blogs to view all the recipes in Mela’s native recipe viewer.
Scan a recipe from a book. With the help of text recognition, you can just add it to your personal collection and view it in Mela’s native recipe viewer, as any other recipe.
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This is a good take. I remember one of the main draws for me when moving to the Mac was the power and ease of its creative apps. It makes perfect sense that today’s Apple would lead the industry with creative mobile apps, just as it does with its mobile operating system. Apple doesn’t strike me as very focused on that anymore.

Even the professional creative apps, Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, sometimes seem to have survived only because they became industry standards, which many professionals would be very disappointed to lose. Apple has been advancing these two apps on mobile with relatively recent iOS versions, but they still feel far from productive compared to their macOS counterparts.

Clips feels like the kind of app that should attract creative people to the iPhone, much like GarageBand, iMovie, and iPhoto drew me to the Mac 20 years ago.

Daring Fireball: Remember Clips?:

Apple makes a lot of apps, and they could easily afford to assign a team to make Clips truly great. It’s no different than 20–25 years ago, when Apple dedicated itself to making iMovie and Final Cut both great apps. It’s no different than the motivation to create GarageBand. The monetization wouldn’t be direct; it would be downstream of the general idea that if you’re editing videos for social media on your phone, the best app to do it with is from Apple and it’s exclusively available on iPhone. The idea is that Apple doesn’t just make the best computing devices for artists, writers, and creators, but they also make some of the best apps for those fields too.
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I don’t use OMR software much these days, as the kind of thing I find it useful for is often the kind of thing where it is still just easier to notate music out manually.

That isn’t to say that music scanning software hasn’t improved in the past few years. I really enjoyed this post and podcast episode from Scoring Notes covering some of the notable movement in this space since 2021.

Scanning the current OMR landscape – Scoring Notes:

Optical music recognition (OMR) software — or “music scanning software” as it is more casually known — has a wide audience, appealing to hobbyists, professionals and everything in between. Like every other corner of the music notation software universe, there seem to be endless opinions about the best available options, dependent upon personal preferences and use cases.

Moreover, since we last visited this topic in early 2021, the technology and the products have significantly changed. Four years can seem like a lifetime or more in this area! No doubt, these products will continue to evolve, and others will come and go . So, while this article is a review of some of the most widely used options, it is not intended to rate what the “best” OMR product on the market is — only to report on how the different products performed on a specific set of tests, what to expect as a user, and observations about the experience and results.
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This is worth your time and thought.

The Anti-Social Century – The Atlantic:

Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.
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Ted Gioia has been following music on Spotify that he suspects is AI-generated. Music that exists only for the purpose of saving the company money every moment it is playing instead of something that would require paying royalties.

This is the kind of technology and attitude towards art that must be resisted.

The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed:

In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists.

I listen to jazz every day, and pay close attention to new releases. But these Spotify playlists were filled with artists I’d never heard of before.

Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they even exist?
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One of the apps I continue to pay a subscription for is CARROT Weather. And the app just got way better this week. I love the Live Activities feature of iOS where apps can publish live info to my Lock Screen. CARROT for long has shown a rain or snow graph as a live activity, but you have had to launch the app first to get it running, which for me has sort of defeated the purpose of having this kind of information there.

The latest update pushes these Live Activities to the lock screen without opening the app. There is also a CarPlay app that shows a weather map overtop your driving directions, though I have not found this compelling enough to give up Apple or Google Maps in the car.

CARROT Weather Introduces CarPlay App and Automatic Live Activities – MacRumors:

The popular weather app CARROT Weather today was updated with two key new features: CarPlay support and automatic Live Activities.

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