Dan Moren covers the new release of iOS 9.2 and OS X 11.2 here.
I am glad to see Apple Music at least attempting to be relevant to classical music. I think it will be years before there is a true solution for the problems that musical metadata present, but it is really nice that Apple is thinking about it.
The Apple iPad Pro Has Great Potential Among Musicians and Designers.
...duh! But seriously, this is a good read. There are a few good music apps mentioned that I did not know about.
I am glad to see that some DAWs are coming to iPad down the road that appear to be pushing into desktop class territory.
Since canceling my Apple Music subscription after the free trial, I have continued living life as a happy Spotify user. iTunes and Apple Music are the companies most disgraceful products. The music apps on OS X and iOS are inscrutable disasters of design. During the free trial, playlists and songs would not consistently sync between my devices. And managing the difference between an iTunes Match subscription and an iCloud Music Library still doesn't make much sense to me.
Still, it has bugged me that I couldn't figure it out all out. I still have this desire to see my streaming songs alongside my archive of personal audio. And one of the reasons I have been holding out is about to change. Apple Music is finally coming to Sonos. I figured it was time to give the service another trial.
When I signed up again this afternoon I was met with all of the same syncing problems as before. My MacBook, though signed into the iCloud Music Library, was acting as if it wasn't, and I could not make any sense of what was syncing and what was not. Naturally, I decided to complain about this on Twitter. But it was then that I realized Apple has an Apple Music Help account. I decided to give it a try. I have been DMing them all afternoon and they are fast, helpful, and human. I feel like they hear my concerns, comprehend them fully, and address them each thoroughly. After a few hours, I am now seeing that most of my playlists and songs are syncing between my two Macs for the first time.
I still think Apple needs to overhaul iTunes and Apple Music in 2016. If they could make syncing audio work like their new Photos app, it would be a dream. Until then, I am having a better experience the second time around. And combined with my new subscription to YouTube Red (which automatically subscribes me to Google Music), I might be able to seriously consider ditching the paid Spotify tier.
I recently took a trip to Rochester, NY to present at the New York State School Music Association conference. You can read more about that here.
This was a small trip, taking up only two school days in the middle of my week. My wife usually plans our family trips together and is quite good at navitating plane ticket deals, coordinating places to stay, and more. Though I have traveled solo before, this recent trip is the first time I felt like I really nailed it. This is mostly due to the organization I have been able to do through the use of software on my iPhone. This software has reduced so much time and stress that I thought it would be worth doing a post to share what I am using. Here are some of my workflows for traveling stress free...
My first step (and an important one if you want to book your flight tickets last minute like I did) is to shop for deals. For this trip I used Kayak to track down the cheapest flights but then I went to the website of the actual airline and searched for that flight number to see if I could find the tickets even cheaper. I will explain what I did with the boarding pass in a moment.
I keep a carefully curated homescreen of apps on my iPhone. I am always changing my layout which balances the apps I tap on to launch the most with which apps feel ergonomically correct to tap on in different places. For example, my productivity stuff is at the bottom, where I can reach it with my thumb more easily.
I keep two folders on my homescreen. One for health tracking apps and one for home automation apps since these folders have a lot of apps I am opening constantly. When I travel, I replace the home automation folder with a folder called travel. This folder contains all of the key apps I use on the go. Here are the apps that I am relying on the most.
My normal home screen.
Home screen with travel folder.
Contents of the travel folder.
I love Apple Maps for its deep integration with my Apple Watch and iOS. However, I do not always fully trust its data in new places. I keep Google Maps in this folder to get a second opinion when I am looking for a place I have never been before.
This app is always in the travel folder, even when I am not out of town. It retains its placement of priority even when I am not at home.
Whatever airline I am flying on usually gets put here. Looking up information about my flight is much quicker this way.
I am in love with Uber. Rochester does not have Uber yet, but I usually use Uber to get around whatever city I am visiting. For this trip, I still used it to get rides to and from the airport. I never feel like I am breaking the bank to use it and the entire experience of getting a car only takes a few taps. Being able to choose my pick up location and destination, access drivers location and name, and pay all from within the same app is magical. You can even connect your Spotify account to Uber so that your own music is playing when you get picked up though I think talking to Uber drivers is way more interesting.
Wallet is where I store all of my cards, passes, and tickets. Once I purchased my plane tickets from Delta, the iPhone app allowed me to clip my boarding passes into Wallet where I can see them alongside all of my other, previously paper, documents. When it is time for my flight (or when my phone detects I am at the airport) this pass stays permanently visible on my phone's lock screen. You can also double tap the home button from the lock screen to get to Wallet without even unlocking your iPhone. Now that I have an Apple Watch the boarding passes appear on my wrist where I can reference them at a glance (which I do repeatedly) and even scan to get on my plane without taking my phone out of my pocket.
The Wallet app.
A boarding pass in Wallet.
The images to the left show what it looks like to interact with a Delta boarding pass on the Apple Watch. Access to the pass stays permanently visible by swiping down from the top of the screen when you are in the airport.
An Airbnb card in Wallet.
Like Uber, Airbnb has awoken me to the new shared economy. Staying in other people's homes is way cheaper, more comfortable, and interesting. The Airbnb app makes everything simple. Browsing for a place, communicating with the host, and payment all happen in the same place. Airbnb can also put a card it the Wallet app that allows you to see details about your stay at a glance.
Presenting at conferences that use Guidebook is a treat. Guidebook is an app that allows events like the one I recently attended to manage everything about their conferences. Maps, sessions, times, details, and member feedback all happen in this useful app. Needless to say, when I am in the convention center, this app is getting launched all the time.
Swarm is an app by Forsquare that allows you to "check in" to places you are going so that friends can see what you are up to. Forsquare, if you don't know, is a competitor to Yelp, so it is mostly focused on entertainment and food. In short, Swarm is a gameified way of socially sharing where you are. I realize this is kind of gimmicky, but it is also a fun way to see what is around town and capture a log of the places you check in during travel. I use a nifty IFTTT recipe to take the places I check in on Swarm and append them to a note in Evernote.
I can't say I have figured out my Instagram strategy yet, but I really enjoy using it and appreciate its professional potential. I try to post photos of what I am doing when I travel. It is a fun way to share what I am up to and promote myself publicly with engaging pictures.
Having these apps all close together in a travel folder takes so much stress out of traveling. It continues to amaze me that between Delta, Uber, and AirBnb, I can pretty much go anywhere and do anything with simplicity and peace of mind.
Apple Notes has come a long way since the days where all it could accept was plain text. Apple Notes on iOS 9 is so powerful, and pretty, that I have been recently coming to choose it over Evernote more often.
Notes allows me to gather information relating to every facet of my trip and organize it contextually so that I can see it all at a glance but go deeper if I need to. Here are some of the travel related things I organized in Apple Notes for my recent trip to NYSSMA.
This trip was a speaking engagement, so the top of the note says the name of the event, the dates it lasts, what time I am speaking, and the number of the room I am speaking in.
Next you will find a rich preview of the location I am presenting at. This link was shared with this note from within Apple Maps. If I tap it, it will show me this location in Apple Maps where I can start getting walking or driving directions.
Next, I am using check lists to create todos for the paperwork I need to fill out at school, the things I need to pack, and other travel tasks. I usually organize these things in a task app like OmniFocus, but it is just so much easier to see them in the context of all my other information.
Documentation about the event, shared with me from NYSSMA, has been clipped into this note in the form of PDF. This means that I don't have to go hunting for the schedule in another app.
This next part is pretty cool. I usually create tags or folders in Gmail to store travel and presentation related email, but this time, I simply dragged the emails from the Mail app into the body of the Notes app while on a Mac. Clicking the links takes me straight into the messages no matter what device I am viewing them from.
Finally, I have clipped some more previews of locations I have searched for in Apple Maps. This way, I can remember all the places I thought about eating once I get into town.
I will be presenting at the New York State School Music Association Conference in Rochester, NY this Wednesday, December 2nd at 9:30 am.
Find me in room 100, the Hilton Garden Eggleston.
Click here to view the session notes and save them to Evernote.
Click here to see a list of pro music software compatibility with Apple's new OS X update, El Capitan.
Generally, I update my MacBook Pro to new Apple software immediately given that it is mostly used for documents and email.
I usually wait 2-6 months to update my desktop Mac Pro that I use for music production just to be safe.
iOS 9 was released this past week. I have been running the beta on my iPhone and iPad since late July and it is just really a great update.
Here are a few unsorted thoughts on the update:
- Battery life. Battery management has improved tremendously. I can actually get through most days using my phone like a normal person without needing a recharge at 3pm. Low power mode is also a nice touch. At 20 percent, my phone offers to conserve battery life by doing things like turning down the backlight and restricting apps from running in the background.
- Power features on iPad. Now the iPad can view two apps on the screen at once. You can also close out of an app you are watching a video on and the video will stay visible in the corner of the screen even when you leave and enter into other apps. I also love the keyboard update. Dragging with two fingers on the iPad keyboard turns it into a curser. No more pressing and holding to use that flakey magnifying glass.
- Spotlight for all apps! Now any app can allow you to search its contents from the Spotlight search, making it really easy to search apps like Dropbox and Documents. Sadly, Evernote has not enabled this feature yet.
- Siri is quiet. Small thing. But I love that Siri does not make a "boop" sound when activated anymore.
- Proactivity. Now my phone tells me when I need to leave for my next appointment based on my calendar and traffic info. It also searches the signatures of emails sent to me to suggest the names of people who are calling me if their names are not in my contacts list. Some of these features are lackluster. For example, going to the Spotlight search is supposed to suggest to you the apps you use and the people it thinks you might want to interact with based on usage patterns. I have found it to more often just suggest recently opened apps. But I have been noticing all sorts of other features of this nature that Apple has quietly added. For example, today I got in my car and booted up Apple Maps. The first option for directions was to my friend's house. The address had a mail icon next to it. I can only assume that Maps looked in my mail and saw the email from that friend inviting me to a party, including both that days date and his address, so it connected the dots and suggested that I might be driving there at that time. Fantastic!
- Another great example of Proactivity. Every morning, I launch an app that my school system uses to take student attendance on. Now, around the start of my first period class every morning, my iPad has been showing me a tiny version of the icon for that app in the lower left corner of the screen. All I have to do is touch it and swipe up to instantly launch into that app.
- You can now search for different parts of the Settings app!
- The new system wide font looks great.
- Maps is smarter and more accurate than ever before.
- Reminders stay on the lock screen until they are checked off to be extra remind-y.
- The new Notes app is awesome. But it is just not going to replace Evernote for me.
If you have been scared to update an Apple device before due to them being buggy or taking up too much space, I would still encourage you to download iOS 9 immediately. Not only does it have all the features listed above and more, but it really does feel a hundred more times polished than the updates of the past few years.
Here are a few of my favorite reviews of the operating system so far:
iOS 9: The MacStories Review, Created on iPad | FEDERICO VITICCI
This post by Christopher Russel does a great job capturing my feelings about the importance of the Apple Watch in a busy classroom environment.
The surprise Apple Watch feature this week has been a combination of Siri and Alarms. Yes, alarms.
Our Middle School has no bells (other than start of the day and end of the day). We have different schedules all the time. So what I have done is this: at the end of one class, I raise my wrist, say, “Hey Siri, set an Alarm for 10:15” (or whatever the ending time of the next class is).
At 10:15, my watch dings, but more importantly, taps my wrist, and I know that I need to dismiss students.
I cannot overstate the importance of alarms. My school has bells this year and I STILL need alarms to remind me when to let kids pack up in time to be at their next classes. I am usually setting alarms throughout the entire day. In the frantic moments of teaching it absolutely does make a difference to save a few moments asking Siri on my wrist to do it rather than fiddling around with my phone.
The same goes for notifications. I am always on the move at school. And I am able to be attentive to so many things without ever stopping the task at hand. I get notifications from Slack (the messaging service our music department uses to collaborate), iMessage, and important staff emails. This might seem unnecessary, but I love being able to know if one of my colleagues is sending me a troublesome student or if there is going to be a fire drill at a particular time that afternoon without dropping what I am doing. I keep all of my Apple devices on silent or do not disturb mode so I only get notified by the gentle haptic feedback on my wrist. The only exception is when I am sitting in front of my Mac which I also leave in do not disturb mode at work but see the little red badge on various apps to know I need to attend to something. Watch notifications are non intrusive enough that I can easily ignore them. But they are still pretty non intrusive even if I choose to read them. I think the basic clock and notification features of the Apple Watch are so well implemented that they very well may be the "killer apps" everyone is always saying a new and innovative product needs to have. At least they are for me.
That being said, I am curious to see what other kinds of apps can be made when Apple releases watchOS 2 on September 16th. This update is shipping with a native SDK which will allow software developers to make their apps perform a lot faster (all third party apps are garbage slow right now) and take advantage of the hardware of the watch, particularly the digital crown, speakers, and haptic engine. I am desperately awaiting a metronome app for the watch that allows me to change the tempo with the crown and feel the tempo with haptic feedback rather than the speakers.
Click here to read The New York Times's coverage.
Oliver Sacks's books have had a huge impact on me. I especially recommend you read Musicophilia if you are interested in him and do not know where to start.
Good post by Daniel Andrews that sums up some of my relationship with Apple products lately.
The only Apple apps on my home screen are Mail, Messages, Camera, Photos and Passbook. Not a great ratio. I mention this because it makes it easier for myself and anyone else to decide to try another platform if they like if their vendor lock-in is so low. Further, if users get in the habit of looking at default Apple apps on iOS and thinking “oh, I don’t need this” it actually creates a negative perception in their mind. Apple isn’t in the “surprise and delight” business as much as they used to be – instead, they’re focused on locking their users into their ecosystem, and honestly the apps they’re using to do that are not very good.
For me, it's Messages, Photos, and Safari. Messages and Safari are solid apps. No complaints there. Photos is great too, a true example that Apple can do cloud services. However, I use Dropbox instead of iCloud Drive in most cases because it is more reliable and has better sharing features. Google Maps instead of Apple Maps for the same reason. Overcast over the Podcasts app, mostly because it is more reliable but also because it's design is top class (and because I truly miss it's smart speed feature when I am using another app). I use Evernote over Notes mostly because Evernote has features that allow me to get stuff into it more easily. I use Fantastical over Calendar for reasons that could fill another blog post. And I use Outlook over Mail beacuse it allows me to attach documents from cloud services, snooze mail, and more.
Apple does have a tendency for making apps that are “just good enough.” This has always been the case with Apple. It's not disappointing that there are often more powerful third party alternatives. This is the nature of software. That being said, the more Apple requires you to use their apps to get features deeply tied into the operating system (for example, saying “Siri, take me home” and getting instant directions through, and only through, Apple Maps), the more disappointed I become. These deep connections to the operating system are often massively time saving which is especially noticeable on mobile devices.
Additionally, I’ve begun to hedge my bets and avoid buying into Apple’s ecosystem too much when I can avoid it. This means that instead of buying lots of Airplay-compatible speakers, I’ll be buying a Sonos system instead. Rather than looking at something that is HomeKit based, I might invest in a Nest instead. And obviously, I trust Apple with their cloud services as little as possible – instead, I use Google’s cloud, Dropbox and others with my data these days. Instead of doubling down on Apple’s streaming solutions in the household, I’m buying a NAS that can work with any HTPC or video streaming solution. I’m not looking to get out of the Apple ecosystem per se, but I am making sure that if things continue to trend in a downward fashion I have a fairly easy exodus ahead of me.
Once you start getting used to bugs, it is really easy to stop trying the new features that make new technology so compelling.
Some of Apple's recent software issues that have plagued me are: AirDrop and AirPlay never working reliably (so frustrating for dining room music listening that I recently bought a Sonos and it works great!), frequent iOS animation lagging and crashes, searching in Apple Maps, everything about Apple Music, iCloud Drive syncing reliability, Mail app syncing, and more…
The bottom line is: Apple can't be criticized for making software that some people don't want to use. They are the least guilty of this. Samsung phones come with tons of useless software installed on them. Windows PCs come with countless apps that most users don't even know the meaning of. This has always been part of owning a computer. That being said, Apple is loosing my trust with unreliable software, particularly when it comes to maps and music. Truthfully, I don't think they need to make the best software in the world. I just wish I could set some defaults on my iOS devices. Simple things like web browsers, maps, and mail so that I could take advantage of the third party options like I can on a Mac. This kind of ecosystem lock-in appears to be the way of mobile operating systems, but if Apple is going to hold my feet the the fire with their default apps, they have a lot of work to do to keep me happy.
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