Apple:

Each year, Apple recognizes the best and most popular podcasts for their exceptional content, unique ability to engage audiences, and innovation in craft, spanning production, presentation, sound design, and more, that expand the definition of podcasting and deepen its impact on listeners worldwide.

Here’s a “Best of 2021” link that’ll open in Apple Podcasts.

Follow the headline link, scroll down for a list of top shows, episodes, then, below that, the Apple Podcast charts.

Apple:

The Apple Music Awards honor achievements in music across five distinct categories — Artist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year, Breakthrough Artist of the Year, Top Song of the Year, and Top Album of the Year — and winners are chosen through a process that reflects both Apple Music’s editorial perspective and what customers around the world are listening to the most.

And:

This year, the Apple Music Awards will introduce a new category of awards for Regional Artist of the Year, recognizing artists from five countries and regions: Africa, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia. The Regional Artist of the Year awards recognize artists who made the greatest impact culturally and on the charts in their respective countries and regions.

And about the physical award itself:

Each award features Apple’s custom silicon wafer suspended between a polished sheet of glass and a machined and anodized aluminum body. The result of this multi-month process, before it is sliced into hundreds of individual chips, is stunning and distinctive. In a symbolic gesture, the same chips that power the devices that put the world’s music at listeners fingertips sit at the very heart of the Apple Music Awards.

Short list of winners:

• Global Artist of the Year: The Weeknd
• Breakthrough Artist of the Year, Album of the Year, and Song of the Year: Olivia Rodrigo
• Songwriter of the Year: H.E.R.
• Artist of the Year (Africa): Wizkid
• Artist of the Year (France): Aya Nakamura
• Artist of the Year (Germany): RIN
• Artist of the Year (Japan): OFFICIAL HIGE DANDISM
• Artist of the Year (Russia): Scriptonite

Jeff Johnson:

The madness in this case is Safari background tabs spontaneously coming to the front again, an obviously undesirable behavior.

Read the blog post for the specifics on what causes this (props to Jeff for figuring it out). To give this a try, follow the headline link, click the “Start 5 second timer” button, then click another tab to bring it to the front. After 5 seconds, the background tab will jump to the front. Works every time.

Turns into an ad for the highly regarded StopTheMadness browser extension. Worth a look.

Apple’s retail price for the base model 14″ M1 MacBook Pro is $1999.99. Follow the headline link to B&H Photo and save $200, a pretty great deal.

Interestingly, the discount only applies to the Space Gray model. Want Silver? Pay full price. Not sure why.

Quantities are limited, so jump on it.

My thanks to BBEdit for sponsoring The Loop this week. There’s a lot to love about software I’ve been using for more than 20 years and now BBEdit, the power tool for text, is ready for Big Sur and M1-powered Macs and was just updated to version 14!

More than a year ago, at the 2020 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced that it would be adding third-party music service support to ‌HomePod‌. A few months later, Apple highlighted some of the apps that would take advantage of the new feature, including Amazon Music, Pandora, and iHeartRadio. A notable exclusion from the list – Spotify.

Whether Spotify opted not to be part of the initial batch of third-party music providers with ‌‌HomePod‌‌ support or Apple didn’t ask remains unknown.

With all of the noise Spotify has made over the years against Apple, I would guess they had been asked to be one of the third-party providers. Apple wouldn’t want to be seen excluding them from the list. With all of the bad sentiment from its users, Spotify could simply say that Apple wouldn’t let them on HomePod and turn the pressure back on Apple.

Whatever is going on, it seems Spotify needs to address this issue with its users quickly.

There’s a lot to love about software I’ve been using for more than 20 years and now BBEdit, the power tool for text, is ready for Big Sur and M1-powered Macs and was just updated to version 14!

You pissed off people by somewhat breaking your app, and they’re leaving angry reviews. How can you salvage your reputation? Apple just found one incredibly effective way — get listeners to submit better reviews by interrupting their podcast experience with an in-app prompt to submit a rating.

That’s how the Apple Podcasts app went from a publicly embarrassing 1.8-star score all the way to 4.6 stars in a little over a month without any actual fixes […]

I cringed reading this story. People that leave reviews are clearly talking about podcasts they are listening to and not the app itself, which shows confusion on the listeners part. I use Apple Podcasts app and have never seen this prompt, but it is apparently there somewhere.

Victoria Song, The Verge:

Starting with watchOS 8, Apple introduced a new accessibility feature called Assistive Touch. The cool thing about this feature is that it allows you to control the watch via gestures and your arm movements. Meaning, now you don’t even need to touch the Apple Watch screen to use it.

And:

Using on-device machine learning, the feature makes use of the watch’s accelerometer, gyroscope, and optical heart rate sensor to read how your muscles and tendons move. The result is that the watch can tell when you’re pinching your fingers or clenching your fists. You can also enable a motion-based cursor that works like a mini-mouse when you tilt your arm.

Great post, love the animated GIFs that show various gestures at work.

John Gruber:

This appears to be a cause for celebration in right-to-repair circles, but I don’t see it as a big deal at all. Almost no one wants to repair their own cracked iPhone display or broken MacBook keyboard; even fewer people are actually competent enough to do so.

Not sure how big the audience for right-to-repair is, but I do count myself in its number. And if it was easier to do, I suspect that number would be much larger. Imagine if repairing a cracked display was a simple, five minute operation. Wouldn’t you rather order the new display and make the swap yourself?

It used to be relatively easy to customize and repair your gear. As parts have given way to part assemblies (glued/soldered assemblies that become a single replaceable requirement, even if a single part fails) and the quest for smaller makes devices harder to open, harder to take apart, the ability to repair your own gear has become harder, almost impossible.

So those small numbers John points out are real. But should this be the way it is? Again, wouldn’t you love the ability to swap out a display as easily as you used to be able to swap out RAM on your old Macs?

More from Gruber:

Nothing announced today changes the fact that Apple still requires Apple genuine parts for all authorized repairs, no matter who does the repairing.

Yup.

Today’s announcement, to my eyes, is about nothing more than reducing regulatory pressure from legislators who’ve fallen for the false notion that Apple’s repair policies, to date, have been driven by profit motive — that Apple profits greatly from authorized repairs, and/or that their policies are driven by a strategy of planned obsolescence, to get people to buy new products rather than repair broken old ones.

Going into an Apple Store with a problem has never felt like a money grab scheme to me. I’ve always felt like the support staff wants me to leave satisfied. If they can find a way to get me a fix without spending money, they’ll do so. But when there’s no way but to replace a parts assembly for $900 on an out-of-AppleCare device, that’s what they do.

Don’t get me wrong: this program is nice, and perhaps a bit surprising given Apple’s public stance on the issue in recent years. We’re better off with this Self Service Repair program in place than we were without it. (Making service manuals available might actually help extend the lifetime of older devices for which Apple no longer sells parts.) But to me it clearly seems to be a small deal, not a “big deal”, as Chen claims.

I agree. It’s a big deal for folks who want to do their own repairs, but for the vast majority, it doesn’t change a thing.

Questions: Will Apple expand the parts they offer for Self Repair beyond those offered in their existing Independent Repair Provider program. For example, will we be able to repair, say, charging ports? Might we be able to buy parts for our devices and bring the part and device to an independent repair shop (perhaps bringing the shop a part they cannot get from Apple)?

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Back in August, Apple said that it would pay out $100 million and make several changes to the App Store to settle a class-action lawsuit brought about by developers, and the settlement offer received preliminary approval yesterday

How much will developers get?

Developers who earned $1 million or less through the U.S. storefront for their apps in every calendar year between June 4, 2015 and April 26, 2021 can receive between $250 and $30,000.

Sounds like a floor of $250. Not nothing.

As to the timing?

Going forward, briefs, papers, and memoranda in support of the final approval of the settlement must be filed by April 29, 2022, and a Fairness and Final Approval Hearing will take place on June 7, 2022. If and when final approval is granted, developers will begin to receive money from Apple.

Here’s a link to the settlement website, where you can sign up to be notified when the settlement process goes live.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Apple yesterday released the third developer and public betas of iOS 15.2, and in addition to the changes reported yesterday, the update also includes a notable tweak to the Music application. For the first time, you can now search within a playlist for a specific song.

This does deserve a “finally”. Especially if you put effort into building a playlist of favorites that you listen to regularly.

In typical Apple fashion, the search bar is hidden within the user interface. To find the new search field, open a playlist in the Music app on your iPhone, then swipe down from the top to reveal the new “Search” field.

That pulldown to reveal the search bar is low discoverability but, to be fair, it is a device used pretty consistently throughout iOS.

Apple:

Apple today announced Self Service Repair, which will allow customers who are comfortable with completing their own repairs access to Apple genuine parts and tools. Available first for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups, and soon to be followed by Mac computers featuring M1 chips, Self Service Repair will be available early next year in the US and expand to additional countries throughout 2022. Customers join more than 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASPs) and 2,800 Independent Repair Providers who have access to these parts, tools, and manuals.

And:

The initial phase of the program will focus on the most commonly serviced modules, such as the iPhone display, battery, and camera. The ability for additional repairs will be available later next year.

Big news for the right-to-repair movement and for folks (like me) who like fixing their own stuff.

And, on Apple’s just announced Self Service Repair Online Store:

To ensure a customer can safely perform a repair, it’s important they first review the Repair Manual. Then a customer will place an order for the Apple genuine parts and tools using the Apple Self Service Repair Online Store. Following the repair, customers who return their used part for recycling will receive credit toward their purchase.

The new store will offer more than 200 individual parts and tools, enabling customers to complete the most common repairs on iPhone 12 and iPhone 13.

You order a replacement part from Apple, return the used part for credit. The only thing missing is the ability to use parts from 3rd parties for repairs.

As the announcement says, Self Service Repair will open up early 2022 in the US. I’ll definitely be giving it a try.

Sarah Scire, Nieman Lab:

Discovering they had to get on the phone to cancel a subscription they signed up for online rankled several respondents in our survey looking at why people canceled their news subscriptions. The reaction to the call-to-cancel policy ranged from “an annoyance” and “ridiculous” to “shady” and “oppressive.”

And:

A study of 526 news organizations in the United States found that only 41% make it easy for people to cancel subscriptions online, and more than half trained customer service reps in tactics to dissuade customers who call to unsubscribe.

There are many examples of this heinous practice, something the FTC refers to as “Negative option marketing”.

From the official FTC enforcement policy:

ROSCA requires negative option sellers to provide a simple, reasonable means for consumers to cancel their contracts. To meet this standard, negative option sellers should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the consumer used to initiate the negative option feature.

And:

In addition, negative option sellers should provide their cancellation mechanisms at least through the same medium (such as website or mobile application) the consumer used to consent to the negative option feature.

That last bit is critical. If, say, a service lets me sign up on a web site, they can’t make me use a different medium to cancel. So if I sign up on the web, they can’t make me cancel on the phone, they have to allow me to cancel on the web.

Google Maps blog:

Whether you’re heading to your hometown or exploring a new city, you can use Area Busyness, a new feature that combines live busyness trends to help you instantly spot when a neighborhood or part of town is near or at its busiest.

And:

Want more info? Tap on a neighborhood to see how busy it is at different times of day, along with the restaurants, shops and recreational places (like a museum) within it, so you can decide if you want to visit.

And for malls, airports, train stations, etc.:

To help you find your way around large buildings fast, we’re expanding the Directory tab globally on Android and iOS for all airports, malls and transit stations around the world. Now, when we have this data available, you can quickly see what types of stores are in a building (like toy stores or jewelry boutiques), airport lounges, car rentals, parking lots and more. And within each category, you can see a list of the relevant businesses, in addition to helpful information about whether it’s open, its rating and what floor it’s on.

And “pickup with Google Maps”:

Once you place your order from the retailer, pickup with Google Maps lets you track your order status, share your ETA and let the store know you’ve arrived, all from the app.

And:

As of today, it’s now available in over 2,000 store locations in more than 30 states across the U.S. People who use pickup with Google Maps typically wait less than five minutes for their groceries, meaning you can grab exactly what you need and get right back to your day.

This all feels like a challenge for Apple Maps, especially the funneling of store order pickup relationships to Google Maps.

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

> It’s no secret at this point that Apple is becoming more interested in the sports segment, as the company has been investing and hiring related professionals to work in its TV division. 9to5Mac has now found evidence to support these rumors, including a new “SportsKit” framework for iOS and tvOS apps.

And:

> The “SportsKit” home screen widget includes the ability to receive real-time updates of sports matches like those found on the Coral Betting Shop Near Me. Right now, Siri can already show sports scores, so Apple probably wants to expand this interaction to other parts of iOS and tvOS.

And:

> Apple has been reportedly building its own sports platform to be part of the company’s Apple TV+ streaming service.

I’ve noticed a fair number of notifications (for quite some time now, not new) about live sporting events on Apple TV where you can see how practices through simulator packages are finally paying off. Watching a show, and we’ll see something like “Close game, 76ers vs Bucks, tied, 4th quarter”, with the ability to click for more info, or to watch the game.

I can imagine a customizable dashboard, tracking all my favorite teams, with live scores and links to channels carrying the games, maybe even supporting picture-in-picture so I could flip between the tracked games and keep the scores and highlights on the screen.

I suspect fans would pay for a better sports experience, too, much in the way they pay for the NFL Red Zone channel. Feels like an opportunity for Apple.

Chaim Gartenberg, The Verge:

Qualcomm is looking to seriously beef up its PC processors, with the company announcing plans for a next-generation Arm-based SoC “designed to set the performance benchmark for Windows PCs” that would be able to go head to head with Apple’s M-series processors.

And:

The new chip will be designed by the Nuvia team, which Qualcomm had bought earlier this year in a massive $1.4 billion acquisition. Nuvia, notably, was founded in 2019 by a trio of former Apple employees who had previously worked on the company’s A-series chips.

Taking this with a grain of salt.

Qualcomm doesn’t expect their first of the new generation of chips in consumer machines before 2023, and I’d expect Apple to be at least one generation further along by then (with the M2 rumored to drop in 2022).

Came across the linked article, which walked through the process of hiding photos on your iPhone.

• Open the Photos app.
• Tap on the photo or video you want to hide.
• Tap the Share arrow.
• Scroll until you see the Hide option.
• Tap Hide to hide the photo from view.

And to find them, just head over to Albums and tap Hidden. And if you really want to get tricky, head over to Settings > Photos and disable the Hidden Album switch.

But all that trickery won’t fool anyone who knows about this setting. Trivial to find and undo, revealing all your hidden photos.

How about adding a Face ID verification to enable the Hidden Album switch? At the very least, that prevents someone who’s got hold of your phone from snooping. Just a thought.

Here’s a link to the Mac App Store feature story, which highlights shows, the X-Ray feature, and Downloads.

And here’s a link to the app itself, which offers a bit more detail:

App features:

• Download videos to watch offline.
• Continue to watch your favorite movie, TV show or a live event via Picture-in-Picture (PiP) while interacting with other apps or websites.
• Rent or buy new-release movies and popular TV shows (availability varies by marketplace). Multi-user profiles allow creating personalized entertainment experiences.
• Go behind the scenes of movies and TV shows with exclusive X-Ray access, powered by IMDb.
• Watch on iPhone and iPad by downloading the separate iOS app (requires iOS 12.1 version or later).
• Watch on Apple TV by downloading the separate tvOS app (requires Apple TV 3rd generation or later).

To me, this app is a huge improvement over watching Amazon Video on the Amazon web site. It’s miles more focused, without the retail clutter (do I want to buy a DVD of a movie or just watch it?) and search and show management is much better than the Apple TV interface.

This is also a big step for the Mac, a sign of recognition that a native app is worth the investment.

Dan Petrov (via SixColors):

It seems that Apple has quietly added a new tool in macOS Monterey for measuring your device’s Internet connectivity quality. You can simply call the executable networkQuality, which executes the following tests:

• Upload/download capacity (your Tx/Rx bandwidth essentially)
• Upload/download flows, this seems to be the number of test packets used for the responsiveness tests
• Upload/download responsiveness measured in Roundtrips Per Minute (RPM), which according to Apple, is the number of sequential round-trips, or transactions, a network can do in one minute under normal working conditions

The advantages of networkQuality tool:

While these tools measure a few more metrics like latency to a target server, they both only measure capacity, and do this only in serial mode (the download and upload speed tests are done sequentially one after the other).

On the other hand, networkQuality measures the upload/download capacity and responsiveness in parallel by default

To test this yourself, fire up Terminal (it’s in Applications > Utilities) and type networkQuality (don’t sweat the cap Q in the middle, either will work). I’ve found that there are significant differences between the upload/download speeds reported by networkQuality and web-based tools like speedtest.net.

According to Apple’s official tech note:

The Apple Network Responsiveness test reports its results using a measure called Round-trips Per Minute (RPM). The RPM is the number of sequential round-trips, or transactions, a network can do in one minute under normal working conditions.

Guessing the differences are the measurement metrics, as well as a different destination server for each. Please do ping me with any insights.

Follow the headline link, check out the teeth on Mickey and Buzz. I’m predicting they will win.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

For the past decade or so, Apple Inc.’s chief rival was considered to be Google. The two have gone toe-to-toe in smartphones, mobile operating systems, web services and home devices.

The next decade, however, could be defined by Apple’s rivalry with another Silicon Valley giant: Meta Platforms Inc.—the company known to everyone other than its own brand consultants as Facebook.

And:

The real fight will be over virtual and augmented reality headsets, smartwatches, smart home devices and digital services, as well as their own respective definitions of the “metaverse.”

From the Metaverse Wikipedia page:

The metaverse (a portmanteau of “meta-” and “universe”) is a hypothesized iteration of the internet, supporting persistent online 3-D virtual environments[1][2] through conventional personal computing, as well as virtual and augmented reality headsets.

As Mark says in his post, the Metaverse is the next big battleground, not yet here, but definitely coming in the next few years, much as 5G loomed big, was massively hyped, and is now baked in, expected.

To get a sense of the current state-of-the-metaverse, watch the video embedded below, as Joanna Stern straps on a headset and dives in deep. It’s obviously early days still, but I found this a great intro into what the fuss is all about.

And don’t worry about the lack of legs. They’ll be here soon enough.