iOS

iTunes 12.5 and iOS 10 music app add lyrics to song playback

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Kirk McElhearn walks you through the process of showing lyrics on your Mac and iOS device. Love this.

Lyrics have been part of iTunes for a long time. Here’s Kirk on what’s new here:

You have always been able to add lyrics to files in iTunes, but iTunes didn’t display them other than in the Info window. On iOS, you could display them by tapping album artwork, if you had added lyrics to your files. So what’s new is the display in iTunes, in the Up Next popup, or in the MiniPlayer.

In addition, iTunes and iOS will now search for lyrics that you haven’t added to your tracks. This is new, and involves some sort of licensing, most likely with Gracenote.

So it’s a pretty big deal.

Agreed.

Teaching Siri how to pronounce unusual names

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J. D. Biersdorfer, writing for the New York Times, talks through the complexities of teaching Siri how to properly pronounce an unusual name.

A key step in teaching Siri:

If your Contacts list contains names with unusual spellings and pronunciations that Siri cannot accurately match up when you ask for them, you can try adding a phonetic version of the name to the person’s contact card. To do that, call up the contact, tap Edit in the upper-right corner and scroll down to Add Field.

Tap the Add Field option and on the next screen, select Phonetic First Name or Phonetic Last Name. Once the chosen field appears, type in the syllables of the name the way that they sound rather than how the name is spelled.

This works well in iOS, but Siri is also available on the Mac. In the Contacts application on the Mac, you’ll want to open a contact card, click Edit (lower right of the card) then, from the Contact menu bar, select Card > Add Field > Phonetic First/Last Name or Phonetic Company.

Using emoji in a Spotlight search, works in iOS and on the Mac

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The concept of using emoji for search has been around for a while, but it came up in conversation yesterday, so I thought I’d write up a little how-to.

On your iOS device, hit the home button and pull down to bring up Spotlight. Next, bring up the emoji keyboard and type the apple symbol (it’s the first emoji in the fourth section, labeled Food & Drink).

As soon as you type the Apple emoji (?), Spotlight will bring up various search results, the vast majority related to Apple and the Apple Store.

Try some other emoji. For me, the slice of cake (?) brought up a list of various bakeries in Maps. Even if Spotlight doesn’t associate the emoji with a built-in search, it will search elsewhere. For example, when I searched using the thumbs up emoji (??), Spotlight returned a list of recent Messages that used that emoji.

One final bit: This same technique works on your Mac, too. On your Mac, bring up Spotlight by tapping the magnifying glass in the menu bar or by typing command-space. If you type the french fry emoji (?), Spotlight will search for fast food.

I found this fun to play with. Another little detail that someone at Apple sweated over.

Twitter for iOS updated w/ support for keyboard shortcuts on iPad

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Greg Barbosa, writing for 9to5Mac:

Twitter’s latest iOS update, released today, now includes iPad-compatible keyboard shortcuts. Users with paired Bluetooth keyboards or Smart Keyboards will now be able to use their keyboards to create new tweets, or move between tabs.

And:

Holding down the command key on the keyboard on devices running iOS 9 or higher shows a small dialog indicating which keyboard shortcuts are available to use.

Good to know.

The Radar that brought the water pistol emoji to iOS 10

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Yesterday, Apple announced the addition of more gender diverse emoji in iOS 10. One emoji in particular, the handgun, got a lot of press attention when it was replaced by a water pistol.

Back in June, this radar (Apple’s internal bug-tracking system) was filed:

The current “pistol” emoji is a realistically rendered lethal weapon. As the spec doesn’t require it to be this way, Apple would be doing a service to society by changing this image to a plastic toy gun, such as a bright pink or green water squirter.

Solid suggestion, glad for the change.

How to use Digital Touch and handwriting in iMessage for iOS 10

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The Messages app has undergone a lot of changes in iOS 10. Much of the evolution is hidden behind two icons, just to the left of the iMessage text field (just to the right of the camera icon).

There’s a lot to play with here. Just be aware that some of the actions will send without a specific confirmation. So if you are going to experiment, you might want to warn the person on the receiving end. For example, if you tap the Digital Touch icon (two fingers on a heart), then scribble out a sketch or two finger tap, the scribble or kiss will be sent immediately, without any staging. This is not a complaint, just an observation.

All that said, the linked post from Rene Ritchie talks you through some of these features. I love this path for Messages, looking forward to seeing more of this.

Apple patents Digital Crown mechanism for iPad

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Patently Apple:

Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals that Jony Ive and his team have considered expanding the Apple Watch’s digital crown to other iOS devices such as the iPad. Apple notes that the digital crown could be used as a volume controller or locking the touch screen, turning on the touch screen, taking a picture, resizing text and other actions.

This is an interesting choice. The digital crown is effective for sliding back and forth through a list or set of settings. The trick is to connect the digital crown to a specific element in the user interface.

[…]

iCloud Tabs not working in your macOS Sierra beta? Here’s a fix.

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While my macOS Sierra beta has been pretty rock solid, there is one feature that has stopped working for me. If I click the iCloud Tabs button (the icon of two overlaid squares in the upper-right corner of the Safari window), Safari should open a view that shows all the Safari tabs in my current window, as well as the Safari tabs in my other nearby iOS devices.

For me, the macOS tabs show up just fine, but the iCloud tabs do not appear. I depend on this feature, so I dug around the net to find a workaround while I waited for the Sierra beta that fixed this problem. […]

iOS 10’s built in magnifying glass

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One of my favorite features of iOS 10 is the built-in magnifying glass, super useful if you need to read some small print or get a close-up look at something tiny.

Before iOS 10’s Magnifier, to get a close-up look at some small print, say, I would open the camera, do my best to focus close in, take a picture, then hop over to Photos, and pinch out to zoom in on the details. That is now no longer necessary.

If you’ve got access to the iOS 10 beta, give this a try:

  • Go to Settings > General > Accessibility. You should see an item called Magnifier.
  • Tap Magnifier, tap the switch to turn it on, then exit settings.
  • Now, triple click the home button to launch Magnifier (You might also see an alert asking you to choose between Assistive Touch and Magnifier – Tap Magnifier).

Just like a magnifying glass, move your iPhone or iPad over the thing you’re trying to magnify. Magnifier will keep the focus sharp and close in. The interface allows you to turn on the flash, slide to zoom in and out, and even grab a still image.

This is a brilliant addition to iOS. Very glad to have it around.

Mossberg: I just deleted half my iPhone apps — you should too

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Walt Mossberg, writing for The Verge:

Over the past few days, I’ve methodically deleted 165 apps from my iPhone, about 54 percent of the 305 apps I had on the phone when I started culling the herd. When I was done, I had significantly decreased the phone’s clutter: I’d gone from 15 home screens to eight, and reclaimed nearly 8GB of free space, about a 24 percent gain in my case.

And:

But this isn’t one of those columns about digital housecleaning or how to free up more space on your iPhone, valuable as those are. It’s easier to save space by offloading most photos, video, and music to the cloud anyway. No, this column is really about the fact that I think the novelty of the app itself has worn off. We’ve reached peak app.

And:

Before going on, I want to make it clear that I am not against apps as a software type. Just the opposite: I believe them crucial to mobile devices. I personally find that, for many targeted tasks, a well-designed app is much better to use on even a large phone than is a mobile web browser, even if both the app and a web page are tapping the same online services.

For instance, I’d use Facebook and Twitter much less on my phone if I had to use them through the browser, partly because they make it easy to open and close referenced web pages right inside their apps, with just a click.

And it’s still possible to create a sensation with a great app that introduces genuinely new experiences — like Pokémon Go with its augmented reality interface. But one reason that Pokémon is so newsworthy is that such blockbuster apps are rarer and rarer.

It’s easier to make a wave in a pond than an ocean, and that’s where we are now. The same is true in the businesses of movie/TV/journalism production. It is harder and harder to make content that stands out in that ocean of content that you’re competing against. That is the nature of any maturing business.

Exploring the App Store’s Top Grossing chart

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Graham Spencer takes you on a behind-the-scenes guided tour through the App Store’s Top Grossing chart.

From the wrap-up:

If you regularly browse the App Store’s Top Charts most of these results would likely serve to confirm what you had already assumed. Most obviously, if you were to randomly pick an app from the Top 200 Grossing charts, chances are extremely high that you would pick a free app with IAPs and it would most likely be a game. But what is particularly suprising is the degree to which free apps with IAP dominate the charts with essentially no paid apps or no apps without IAPs.

Some fascinating numbers here.

Length in days of every iOS beta

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This is pretty interesting, the kind of chart that bears some digging. iOS 5 is clearly the champion, with eight betas spanning more than 120 days.

iOS 10 and some New Years fireworks

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From this tweet by Mark Gurman:

Make sure to text all of your friends running iOS 10 “happy birthday” and “happy new year.” (Seriously this should be opt-in, even opt-out).

Give it a try.

iOS 10 and removing built-in apps from the Home screen

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Apple officially allows you to remove most built-in apps from your iOS device running iOS 10. Interestingly, some of these apps allow a 3rd part app to act as a fallback. Others do not. Read on for some details.

Force touch in Control Center in iOS 10

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I’ve been using iOS 10 since WWDC and have now updated all my devices to iOS 10 beta 2. My experience with this beta has been solid and marked by little pockets of discovery.

One of those discoveries, here since beta one, I believe, is the addition of Force Touch to Control Center. Read on for the details.

Everything new in iOS beta 2

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Not to be confused with yesterday’s MacRumors-linking post, this is a more extensive walk through the iOS 10 beta 2 change-log. Lots of detail.

The beta cascade: Why Apple’s latest OS’s require each other

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Dan Moren, writing for Macworld:

My Apple Watch, much as I like it, is hardly an indispensable part of my everyday life. And ready I was to go ahead and install the watchOS 3 beta when I ran up against a bit of a brick wall—because in order to install the watchOS 3 beta, I also needed to install the iOS 10 beta on my iPhone.

New Photos app detects 4,432 kinds of objects and 7 facial expressions

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MacRumors:

Over the weekend, a Reddit user discovered a few lines of code within the framework of Apple’s beta of the macOS Sierra Photos app, possibly detailing both the specific facial expressions that the app recognizes and every single searchable object users can find in both Sierra and iOS 10.

Apple’s disappearing iOS Apps

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Kirk McElhearn encountered a problem trying to find and update certain iOS apps on his Mac.

To see this for yourself, jump into iTunes on your Mac and do a search for:

Find My Friends

You’ll find no such app, though you will find the app if you search on your own apps, not on the App Store. Know why? Tweet at me.

The best iOS apps for scanning documents

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Andrew O’Hara did a nice job pulling together this list. More importantly, he did a nice job describing the features you should look for in a scanning app. I definitely learned something here.

iOS 9’s contextual keyboard shortcuts window

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David Chartier:

When using a hardware keyboard with iOS 9, you can hold the Command key to view a cheat sheet of an app’s shortcuts (assuming its developer has updated to add some). But I noticed this morning that those shortcuts can be contextual, based on the task at hand or which panel or tab you are currently viewing.