Category: Link Post

Amazon revamps Prime Video’s Apple TV app | The Verge

Wow, another finally for the Apple TV.

My son watches a lot of kids’ content on Amazon Prime and frequently asks to rewatch the same episode (or 10-second clip) over and over again.

The fact that Amazon has been using its own janky playback controls instead of Apple’s far superior ones has made me want to rip my hair out on occasion. This will be a welcome improvement.

Amazon revamps Prime Video’s Apple TV app | The Verge:

Amazon’s Prime Video app just got a big update on Apple TV. The app is now better optimized for tvOS, allowing you to swipe on the Siri Remote to scroll through Prime Video’s shows and movies as well as use touchpad gestures for fast-forwarding, rewinding, and scrubbing through content.
Keep reading here…

Netflix finally has integration with the Apple TV app – FlatpanelsHD

Wow, finally! I thought this would never happen. I use the Apple TV’s Up Next feature so often that I almost never see Netflix content. It was almost certainly a contributor to my decision to cancel Netflix a few years back.

This integration seems like it isn’t as complete as the integration of other apps like Amazon Prime and Disney+, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.

Netflix finally has integration with the Apple TV app – FlatpanelsHD:

It seems that Apple has finally struck a deal to integrate Netflix into the Apple TV app, with Netflix content now appearing in Continue Watching, Search, and the Watchlist
Keep reading here…

After a bruising year, Sonos readies its next big thing: a streaming box | The Verge

We have a lot of Sonos speakers in our house. $200-$400 dollars for a tv box seems crazy high in cost. Unless they really nail the interface for it and provide far more HDMI outputs than my TV, I don’t see how this competes with the abundance of affordable streaming devices on the market–let alone the premium (yet still less expensive) Apple TV.

After a bruising year, Sonos readies its next big thing: a streaming box | The Verge:

After the most tumultuous nine months in Sonos’ history, the brand is trying to find its footing again. Even as work continues to rehabilitate the company’s beleaguered mobile app, Sonos is planning to take a big swing in a new product category: it’s getting into video for the first time. In the coming months, Sonos will release a streaming player that sources tell me could cost between $200 and $400 — a truly staggering price for its category.
Keep reading here…

Apple in 2024: The Six Colors report card

CleanShot 2025-02-04 at 14.48.06@2x.

As someone who uses and thinks about Apple computers quite a lot, this read from Six Colors is always interesting.

Apple in 2024: The Six Colors report card – Six Colors:

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

This is the tenth year that I’ve presented this survey to my hand-selected group. They were prompted with 14 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) and optionally provide text commentary per category.
Keep reading here…

If you ask me, here’s how I’d rate Apple right now:

  • Mac: B – Mac hardware is better than ever, but macOS is cluttered with intrusive privacy popups. I’ve never found the operating system more distracting or off-putting.

  • iPhone: B – Battery life on my iPhone 16 Pro Max isn’t as good as my last phone, but I’m loving the new camera button for quick shots of my kid.

  • iPad: C – The latest iPads are great refinements of the 2018 iPad Pro design, but the software remains ok at lots of things, and not a great computer. Just put macOS on it.

  • Wearables: C – AirPods 4 and the new health features in AirPods Pro 2 are highlights, but the Vision Pro is a miss. It’s the first new Apple product category I haven’t felt tempted to buy… ever?

  • Watch: C – I love the Apple Watch, but OS updates and widgets feel half-considered. I never know whether I’ll see my watch face or the widget screen when I glance at my wrist. The Siri watch face and developer API seem abandoned, and Apple needs to figure out how to bring back the blood oxygen sensor in the U.S. before I consider upgrading.

  • Home: E – No meaningful updates. The Apple Home ecosystem remains unreliable, and the smart home industry still feels as chaotic as it did in 2019.

  • Apple TV: D – It’s odd to rate this so low because it’s still the best streaming box by very far, but Apple rarely updates the OS or expands its potential. There’s so much more I’d love them to do.

  • Services: C – Apple TV+ is decent, the news and game subscriptions are forgettable, and iCloud is passable but still not rock-solid.

  • Hardware Reliability: A – If there’s one thing Apple still nails, it’s hardware reliability.

  • Developer Relationship: E – Watching Apple handle EU regulations this past year has made it clear: their business practices hurt developers and users alike. It appears that any real improvement will require regulation.

  • World Impact: E – Given how much Apple prioritizes profit over progress in personal computing, it’s hard not to see them as more of a force for harm than good these days.

Cantai: AI-Powered Vocal Synthesis for Opera and Choral Music

David MacDonald turned me on to this vocal plugin for DAWs and notation software. I don’t know anything about this company, but the demo is pretty interesting.

Cantai:

Cantai, created by composer Richard deCosta, is a groundbreaking AI-powered vocal synthesis platform designed to transform written scores into lifelike operatic and choral performances.
Keep reading here…

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The People App

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.
Keep reading here…

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OpenAI’s Operator AI

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.
Keep reading here…

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The Sound of… BLUEY!!! — Twenty Thousand Hertz

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.
Keep reading here…

Moom 4: Mac Window Management, Upgraded – MacStories

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.
Keep reading here…