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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I’ve been experimenting with Canva more this school year, and I have to say, it’s really finding a place in my workflow. There are plenty of times when I need to design something that serves a simple, temporary purpose but doesn’t need to look particularly polished or bespoke. In these moments, the Canva Mac app has helped me get the job done quickly.

Katie Miller has shared some fantastic ideas for using Canva in the music classroom. An edu account is free for teachers and packed with powerful features. Give it a shot, and read Katie’s post.

25+ Ways to Use Canva to Create Teaching Resources:

Being a teacher encompasses so many different skills. Some skills are taught and practiced in our pre-service work while others we have to figure out once we are deep in the trenches of student learning. 

One of the skills that didn’t get much attention, at least in my pre-service program, was the practice of design in helping students gain, organize and use information.  I understood the importance of design to prepare, present and practice standards that students needed to master but I didn’t have a way to easily do it. 

I can remember copying transparencies to project onto paper so I could trace images to make my classroom materials more appealing. I also remember searching through clipart collections to find the perfect addition to digital items I created. And I will never forget making copy after copy to enlarge, reposition or get things to fit just right. Designing materials in my classroom  involved lots of magic tape!

Thank goodness that things change! I have learned new skills and new tools, like Canva, have been created to make design as easy as drag and drop!

Speaking of federated social services…

With all the upheaval in social media over the past few years, I think it is so important for people to own their own spaces on the internet where they share and post what is meaningful to them.

With Micro.blog, you can get just that, for a reasonable price, and with the same ease you get posting to Bluesky, Threads, or Mastodon (it even integrates with them).

Micro.blog:

Another term for cross-posting is POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Micro.blog embraces this and many other IndieWeb principles.
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I love the idea.

I recently came across a violist named Emad Zolfaghari, and I had to share. Emad won the Primrose International Viola Competition and created a video showing his progress over 10 years, from when he started playing at age 10 to now, at 20.

The video is an example of what dedication and consistent practice can achieve. It’s a perfect reminder for any music student that progress takes time but pays off.

Share this with your students for a dose of inspiration!

In an effort to keep preaching that we all move to federated social media services, allow me to suggest you give Pixelfed a try. It is pretty much the utility of Instagram, but with none of the nonsense.

Instagram alternative Pixelfed now has apps – The Verge]:

Pixelfed, a decentralized and ad-free Instagram alternative, now has apps on iOS and Android, as reported by TechCrunch. The iOS app launched today, while the Android app launched on January 10th.

The platform is seeing a surge in popularity following Meta’s announcement last week that it would be drastically changing its content moderation policies; over the weekend, Pixelfed said that it’s seeing “unprecedented levels of traffic” to the pixelfed.social server and was working to increase resources.
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