By Jason Snell

New Home Collection banner offers Apple-influenced accessories

On Tuesday as a part of its deluge of smart home announcements, Apple has launched something a bit different: a series of products called Apple Home Collection that are… not quite Apple products, but not not Apple products. Instead, they’re “designed in collaboration” with partners, in this case LG Electronics and Schneider Electric.

It’s hard to tell where one company ends and the other begins, but if you carry the weight of a brand like Apple, having Apple stand over the shoulder of some other company and sprinkle in some secret ingredients isn’t the worst approach if you don’t want to actually build and support those products yourself.

According to Apple, each accessory can be set up with one tap from an iPhone, and only requires the Apple Home app. (That describes a lot of products today, too—it’ll be interesting to see if Apple’s added some new tech just for these products or if they’re largely using standard techniques that other products in the market can offer.)

Now to the products, which will be available starting in December, and all of which share a “clean, minimal aesthetic and premium materials,” which would probably be your first clue that Apple was involved in their design.

LG is offering four cameras, all of which capture 2.5K video and connect directly with iCloud for video via the HomeKit Secure Video specification.¹ There’s a video doorbell (with chime integrated with HomeView, HomePod, and HomePod mini), a combination camera and floodlight, a standard outdoor camera, and an indoor camera that can tilt down automatically to physically stop monitoring when a family member enters the home.

Apple gets in the smart lock game with LG’s Smart Deadbolt Lock, which uses UWB for automatic unlocking when you approach the door, like the locks released earlier this year by Aqara and Schlage. It’s also got NFC support for non-UWB devices, a numeric keypad, and a hidden physical key slot.

And then there are the smart thermostats. There are two of these, from LG and Schneider Electric. The two thermostats support external temperature and humidity sensors as well as those built in to HomeView, HomePod, and HomePod mini. It’s unclear what differences the two products have, but Apple’s press release hints that there might be some different kinds of system compatibility, perhaps for the home heating and cooling systems themselves, though both are described as working “with a broad range of HVAC systems.”

Every one of the accessories supports Thread, which Apple has been building into its devices for a while now. While it doesn’t seem like there’s much here that hasn’t been done in other smart home products, Apple’s stamp of approval is important. If you don’t do a lot of research, even today you can end up buying a smart home product that has hidden gotchas. These devices will presumably be as standard and Apple-friendly as they come.

That said, other smart home products also seem to live up to everything Apple is describing with the Home Collection. Until these products ship, it will be hard to determine if there’s some special stuff Apple is doing with these products that’s unavailable to other products, but at a glance it doesn’t seem so.

By Dan Moren

New Apple TV 4K adds Siri AI support

In an announcement sure to shock the very foundations of the world, Apple rolled out a new Apple Siri Remote with support for Find My with Precision Finding and a speaker that can play a noise, ensuring you’ll never again lose it in your couch cushions for months on end. And also a new Apple TV 4K with Siri AI.

The new Apple TV 4K uses an A19 chip that gives it access to the revamped Siri. For the first-time, the Apple TV also features built-in microphones that let you use Siri without depending on the remote.

The A19 chip features an AV1 decoder, which Apple says will offer high-quality streaming with less bandwidth. And you can now pair up to four second-generation HomePods or four HomePod mini 2 to create a full surround-sound experience—but bear in mind, each pair of speakers, front and back, must be of the same type.

In other big news, the Apple TV is now of the higher 128GB storage tier and comes with a commensurately expensive price: $299. That’s more expensive than the previous model, which Apple raised to $199/$249 just a few months ago, and considerably more expensive than the $129 entry-level cost it offered for the previous model when it was introduced.

The new model is available for pre-order today and will ship on November 13. The new Siri Remote is available separately and is compatible with both previous Apple TV HD and Apple TV 4K models; Find My Support will work with the second-generation Siri Remote or later, but for the Precision Finding (read: ultrawide band), you’ll need that new fourth-generation model.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

New HomePod mini 2 offers Siri AI–but not yet

Among its smart home product announcements on Tuesday, Apple announced the new HomePod mini 2, priced at $149 and powered by an S10 chip (introduced in the Apple Watch Series 10). Curiously, its banner feature—support for Siri AI—will not be available when the product ships on October 30.

According to Apple, Siri AI will come to the HomePod mini 2 “in a future software update.” When it does, Apple’s press release hints that it will be able to tap into personal context when paired with an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone or iPad. When there’s no such device available, it’ll still have access to broader Siri AI functionality, but won’t have access to the treasure trove of data that rides with your device.

Of course, since home accessories are the order of the day, Apple has touted the HomePod mini 2’s integration with the broader home experience. Like its predecessor, you can use it to control home devices via voice commands. Apple’s also supporting a new four-speaker surround sound setup, when four HomePod minis are connected to the new Apple TV 4K.

Apple also continues to tinker with that little glowing circle at the top of the HomePod, that’s not quite a display but is… something. The new Sound Glow feature turns it into a visualizer that is based on the sound of the currently playing song, and its color scheme will match the song’s associated album art.

By Dan Moren

Apple announces HomeView smart display

As was widely expected, Apple today took the wraps off its “HomePod with a screen”, dubbed the HomeView.

The device features a seven-inch Liquid Retina display with multitouch, at 1088-by-1088 resolution and is powered by an A18 chip. It comes in two different styles: a model intended to sit on a tabletop with a half-dome and small tilt-adjustable arm holding up the display, and one that’s meant to be wall-mounted. The former comes in silver, starlight, rose pink, and space gray options, while the latter has only silver and space gray.

The other main distinction between the two is the addition of more speakers on the tabletop version: a custom down-firing woofer and dual force-cancelling passive radiators. Both, however, nominally support spatial audio with Dolby Atmos. If you opt for the wall-mounted version, you can pick up a wall mount sold separately.

That A18 chip gives the HomeView enough juice to run Siri AI, which is at the heart of the new experience. The HomeView comes with a subset of built-in apps familiar from Apple’s devices, including Calendar, Home, Safari, Music, Messages, Podcasts, Weather, FaceTime, and more. Additional apps can be powered by a connected iPhone, including Apple News and Apple TV, as well as “supported third-party audio and video apps.” Apple says the device will recognize up to six people and gives them each their own home screen, while still allowing some shared features amongst all members of a household, such as music or shared photo albums. A 12MP Center Stage camera allows for FaceTime calls.

In terms of interface, the HomeView is reminiscent of the Apple Watch, with a customizable clock screen and various “faces”, including a Home Modular face that provides access to your commonly used smart home devices.

Apple also showed off a recipe specific mode that can detect recipes in Safari and format them appropriately for the device.

Both versions of the HomeView cost $299 and will be available on November 13. Pre-orders are open today for customers in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, the UK, and the U.S. The device is not available in the European Union, due to the lack of Siri AI in that region.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Philip Michaels

App Report: Apps worth grabbing

It’s a real grab bag of apps in this week’s report, but that seems wholly appropriate somehow. After all, most of us turn to our Macs for a variety of reasons, so why not a selection of apps that speed up image processing, give you new controls over your tunes or help you keep a cleaner, better organized desktop? Oh, and there’s an iOS app in there, too, for the next time the travel bug bites you.

So why not reach in and see if any of the apps below grab you? And if there’s something we haven’t covered, drop us a line with the details at apps@sixcolors.com. We can’t respond individually, but rest assured that we take a look at every suggestion we get.

Freshly Squeezed

Each week I produce a weekly newsletter where I write about whatever’s on my mind — you should subscribe! — and one of the big production tasks is to take the images I’ve shot and convert them into 16:9 JPEGs cropped down to 2000 x 1125. It’s a job that would definitely benefit from batch processing, which is where an app like Freshly Squeezed comes into play.

Freshly Squeezed handles the jobs you’d expect from a batch image processor: It can resize, crop, compress and convert images to different files, all while retaining your originals. I’ve set up the app so that I can drop photos into it and get the right cropping and conversion, with Freshly Squeezed giving me the option to individually tweak crops if I want.

The app’s showcase feature is called Drop Folder, which you set up when you need to perform the same image processing over and over again. Once you’ve set up the parameters, just drop images into the folder, and Freshly Squeezed handles the rest.

You can download Freshly Squeezed onto your Mac for $7. A 7-day trial lets you try things out for free.

NepTunes

For another way to control music playback on your Mac, turn to NepTunes 4, which works with both Apple Music and Spotify. In fact, the Pro version of the app even lets you toggle between the two music services.

At its most basic, NepTunes lives in your menu bar, where it shows you whatever song is currently playing along with playback controls. You can also customize NepTunes to display additional info — I’ve got the app showing recently played songs, and if you link it to your Last.fm profile, you can see stats affiliated with that account. From the NepTunes interface, you can look up similar artists, while Pro users can find similar tracks to what’s playing. And all NepTunes users can set up hotkeys to control different playback features.

I keep mentioning the Pro version, which is a $10/year subscription. Besides the aforementioned features, Pro users can display their top albums in a grid. They can also download desktop widgets in various styles, such as one that displays the album you’re listening to like it’s a CD in a jewel case. You can peruse the 15 available widgets to get a flavor for NepTunes’ visual flair.

The Pro version comes with a 14-day free trial. Otherwise, NepTunes is a free download.

Tidy

It’s an occupational hazard that I have a lot of screenshots piled up around my Mac with names like Screenshot 2024-07-09 at 10.05.32 AM that tell me nothing about what’s actually contained in the screenshot. I imagine you might have the same problem with IMG files or PDFs or any file with an inscrutable collection of letters and numbers as its only means of identification.

Tidy is the answer to our organizational prayers. This $9 macOS download takes the screenshots, scans and other oddly named files from your Downloads folder, takes a look at them using its own built-in OCR feature and proposes readable names to help you better identify what the file actually contains. You approve the names, so nothing’s forced upon you, and Tidy only generates names using what it sees, so there are no hallucinations.

Even so, Tidy occasionally misses the mark. For example, a screenshot of the NepTunes app from up above got renamed “dutton-toster” because the font for singer Sutton Foster’s name proved too tricky to decipher. I was able to reject that suggestion, though, so no harm, no foul.

More often, Tidy proved to be on the money, as a photo of the ferris wheel looming over Disney’s California Adventure was retitled “blue-sky-land-amusement-park” — a much more decipherable moniker than IMG_435.HEIC.

Appricio

Appricio looks to be an indispensable travel companion by taking advantage of your iPhone’s location awareness. Fire up Appricio in a city included in one of the iOS app’s guides, and it can tell you what to do based on where you are, what the weather is and preferences shared in the settings.

You won’t just get a list of places to visit with Appricio, though. It’s a curated guide that makes specific suggestions, with a bias toward taking you off the beaten path (at least when you’re amenable to that). For example, Appricio detected that I’m near San Francisco and that the weather’s nice right now, so it steered me away from Pier 39 — which it dismissed as a tourist trap — and guided me to a day in Golden Gate Park instead.

Appricio would be a fine app if it just helped you in the moment, but it helps you plan trips, too. That feature is somewhat limited by the fact that the app only covers 50 cities at the moment, though I was able to do web searches for an upcoming visit to San Diego (currently not among the included cities) without the benefit of Appricio’s curation.

The app is free, though a $30/year subscription gives you a dozen more cities, a multi-day planning feature in which Appricio helps build your trip and an events calendar, among other bonuses.

Droppy

If you’ve looked at the notched display on your MacBook and thought, “I wish this worked more like the Dynamic Island on my iPhone,” Droppy is here to answer the call. At its most basic, this app lets you drag documents and files up toward the notch, where they can be stored for easy access until you find a more permanent home for them. But Droppy’s feature set doesn’t end there.

Droppy provides access to other features, like music playback controls, a clipboard that keeps the history of things you copy and paste and a five-hour weather forecast. Additional widgets — or Droplets, as the app dubs them — can be added to handle things like editing screenshots, file conversion, transcription and more.

While the app complements notch-equipped machines, it brings those Dynamic Island capabilities to other Macs as well. Droppy is free to try for three days; afterwards, a $10 payment unlocks the app for up to two Macs.

[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]

By Jason Snell

Is Apple coming home to stay?

The announcement that Apple’s making a home-related announcement on Tuesday was hardly unexpected. Most things Apple does these days are reported in advance, usually by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

But this event has been years in the making. Gurman first reported in detail on the centerpiece product two years ago:

Apple… is nearing the launch of a new product category: a wall-mounted display that can control appliances, handle videoconferencing and use AI to navigate apps…. The company is gearing up to announce the device as early as March and will position it as a command center for the home, according to people with knowledge of the effort. The product, code-named J490, also will spotlight the new Apple Intelligence AI platform, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work is confidential.

J490 did not, in fact, ship in March of 2025. The failed Apple Intelligence roll-out meant that the company had to push back the release of its AI-powered home products until after it could fix its AI issues and launch Siri AI last month.

It’s been a long time coming. Apple has made some runs at addressing the smart-home market in the past, but it’s never seemed to be part of a coherent, consistent strategy. (Many of us still can’t forgive it for abandoning the AirPort product line just as the advent of mesh networking would have provided the company opportunities that ended up accruing to companies like Eero, now a part of Amazon.)

Perhaps in new CEO John Ternus, Apple really does have a powerful internal advocate for the smart home. In a funny twist of fate, Apple’s intransigence in this category hasn’t really harmed its chances. Amazon and Google have been selling products similar to J490—touchscreen voice assistant home hubs—for years now, but they have failed to catch fire. I’ve used multiple Echo Shows and Google Nest Hubs in my kitchen over the years, and they have all been various degrees of terrible.

More broadly, the entire smart home market has suffered from fragmentation and mediocrity. Early devices were expensive, unreliable, and impractical. Things have gradually improved, and the tech giants have reached a detente that has made everything more interoperable. But even so, it’s really only this year that (for example) I feel like the smart lock has reached a level of tech capability that allows it to fulfill its promise, thanks to UWB support.

So is there a universe in which Apple rolls into this category at this late date and actually finds success where others have struggled to get traction? I’m not saying it’s a likely scenario, but it’s certainly possible. Apple’s track record with prioritizing user security and privacy is certainly an asset for anyone considering adding tech devices (especially ones with sensors) to their personal spaces. Apple’s tight device integration could also be a strong selling point for the many users who are fully bought in to the ecosystem.

So I’m saying there’s a chance.

The future of home is widgets?

The more I think about J490 or the HomePad or whatever it will ultimately be called—my money’s still on something with the HomePod name, possibly even just HomePod—the more I feel like it will expose Apple’s current thinking about the role of apps on its platforms. (Kind of an important topic.)

The wild success of the iOS App Store starting in 2009 transformed how Apple viewed the role of software in its operating system. Handed a big hammer, Apple saw nails everywhere. The Mac got an App Store, which exists, but I think nobody would consider a hit. The Apple Watch got an App Store, which also exists but seems kind of pointless. Messages got an App Store, which also exists, much to my surprise. And of course, tvOS was revamped under the premise that “the future of TV is apps,” but that future never really arrived.

Perhaps Apple has taken notice that the everything-has-an-App-Store strategy is really showing diminishing returns. The problem is, what do you do with a device like this forthcoming touchscreen? It doesn’t run iOS or tvOS, but apparently yet another variant of Apple’s omni-OS foundation. If it supports playing video from Apple TV but not Netflix, or podcasts from Apple Podcasts but not Overcast, or music from Apple Music but not Spotify, that’ll be frustrating. And the strength of the iPhone app ecosystem is one of Apple’s greatest assets.

So what’s Apple to do? My best guess is that it’s going to use some technology we’ve already seen to let your apps peek through on this new device from your iPhone. macOS Sequoia introduced the ability to display widgets and receive notifications directly from your iPhone—a feature that, given the timing, might actually have been invented for this as-yet-unreleased device!

In the long run, I wonder if the answer on devices that are ancillary to the iPhone—and I’ll throw the Apple Watch in here, too, since it already does this—is to allow app developers to include apps for alternate Apple platforms along with their existing App Store apps. You don’t actually need to use the watchOS App Store to download Apple Watch apps—you just get the iPhone app and your iPhone installs the app on your watch. If Apple wants real apps running on its smart home devices, perhaps they just transfer over from your iPhone.

In the meantime, projecting widgets doesn’t seem like a bad compromise to make the home hub more personal without requiring yet another App Store and all that complexity.

Of course, the next problem this product will face is that, as a device that sits in a home, it is probably going to need to interact with more than a single user. Beyond the Mac, Apple has struggled with the concept of multiple people using a single device. You can do it on Apple TV, but it’s not a great experience. You can do it, sort of, on HomePods. But if Apple is going to tie in the contents of a user’s iPhone with this home hub, it needs the device to be able to shift context on the fly and display content from a particular person’s iPhone, or (in the case of children or guests) someone without a paired iPhone at all.

Tricky stuff, and not a place where Apple has a great track record. Gurman’s reports suggest Apple is going to try a form of face recognition (that’s sub-Face ID level, but that’s probably okay for something found inside a home) in order to determine the context of which person is interacting with the device. We’ll see how it goes, and how responsive it can be if it’s got to connect to an iPhone and display widgets or load other personal data.

The Siri AI question

Then there’s the feature that has made these products all wait for their moment in the sun: Apple Intelligence. Apple has been slow to roll out iOS 27, probably to limit a surge of use of Siri AI on Apple’s servers. Numerous people have reported that Siri AI feels a little slower now than it did this summer, when the user base was smaller.

These products—not just the home hub, but next-generation HomePod mini speakers—will live or die with the functionality of Apple’s voice assistant. I’ve found Siri AI to be a pleasant surprise, an entirely functional voice assistant that replaced an entirely dysfunctional one. But if it fails me on my iPhone or iPad, I can just do things myself. That’s a lot less true on a device that’s meant to use voice as its primary interaction mode. Apple needs to get this right.

The rest of the story

Finally, there’s the question of how Apple will approach the entire smart home ecosystem. What product categories are worthy of Apple’s own brand name, and what ones can be served by preferred partners?

Gurman’s report this week that Apple is working with LG to build a smart lock and a series of security cameras, starts to answer that question. At least for now, it seems that Apple is going to approach this with three tiers: a few Apple-built products (home hub, speakers, TV box), some “second-party” products built in collaboration with Apple but released by LG and possibly others (cameras, lock), and presumably other Matter and Apple Home certified products that will receive Apple’s attention, promotion, and Apple Store placement.

I do wonder how Apple will make its decisions about what products it will decide to build itself. Will it go this far, but no further? Or do its LG collaborations give it time to figure out what categories could use a little bit of Apple magic? (Once again, I am imploring Apple to consider bringing back AirPort.)

That said, I’ve got a couple of Aqara 4K security cameras that work great, and the Aqara and Schlage UWB locks are pretty great. Apple doesn’t need to build products in new categories if other companies are making products that meet Apple’s standards. And maybe it’s hoping that its own moves here will set a direction and encourage further investment, so Apple doesn’t have to do everything itself.

After years of Apple never engaging with the smart home category for very long, this is an opportunity for a reset. What Apple announces on Tuesday will be a good start, but we’ve seen good starts from Apple before. It needs to keep its eye on the category, keep shipping new products, and continually improve its home software. If this is just a short-term lease, it’ll be pointless. Apple needs to get a mortgage and settle into its new home.

By Jason Snell

OpenAI silences familiar voices

I got a weird email the other day from OpenAI that ended up causing a great deal of work for me:

As part of our continuous upgrade process, we are deprecating the following legacy audio models: tts-1, tts-hd, gpt-4o-mini-tts. Access to these models will be shut off on January 6, 2027.

I use OpenAI’s text-to-speech voice for the Six Colors Audio Newsletter. Ironically, I chose one of OpenAI’s least advanced voices for this brand-new feature of this website because it was one of the only modern text-to-speech models that didn’t occasionally omit, rewrite, or hallucinate text. I need the computer voice to speak all of our words, and our words only.

This is a bummer, and not just because I have only had six months with this feature before having to rebuild it! I was inspired to build it in the first place by the app (and, full disclosure, former sponsor) Listen Later, which is a read-it-later service that turns your saved articles into a podcast read by… you guessed it… a now-deprecated OpenAI TTS voice.

Not too long after I got the email from OpenAI, I heard from Yalım of Listen Later about this. Unsurprisingly, as someone who has built his entire business on this particular set of voices, he was a bit upset! And not just for the technical challenge he now faces.

It’s the human cost on his customers. Because, funny thing, our human brains are great at finding patterns in static and personifying things that aren’t people. Yalım’s customers have spent years listening to their chosen voice. Their brains have made connections to the sound, rhythm, and delivery pattern of those particular voices. Now those voices are being silenced.

(There’s also an accessibility angle here: As you might expect, Listen Later has a lot of visually impaired users. I’m not sure OpenAI has thought through the ramifications of what this change will mean for those users’ lives, but then again, OpenAI strikes me as a company that doesn’t think a lot of things through.)

I can’t speak to Yalım’s users, but obviously I’m also concerned about this for the Six Colors members who subscribe to the Audio Newsletter. (If you’re someone who likes this site and prefers to listen rather than read, I highly recommend becoming a member and subscribing—you’ll get the stories of the day in a podcast, chaptered and fancy like.) Unfortunately, I don’t expect OpenAI to budge on this, so I’ve spent the last week investigating other options, both local and API-based, to replace my six-month-old version.

Much to my surprise, the winner of my bake-off was the brand-new ElevenLabs v4 engine, which is remarkably good. Yes, I’m going to be spending dollars a month instead of pennies, but the results are very good. Even if the voices are not, alas, our old friends. What I have had to do is create a workflow that tests every audio file that comes out of the API to make sure it’s saying the words it’s supposed to be saying, and not hallucinating. Yes, that means articles take a ridiculous round trip from text-to-speech-back-to-text. But it means that I can use more sophisticated models while guarding against AI omissions or hallucinations. So far, so good.

If you’d like to sample the newsletter or just compare the two sets of voices, good news! I’m currently running both models simultaneously as a test. Here’s a recent example of the current OpenAI voice style, and here’s the beta version of the new ElevenLabs alternative.

I hope people like the new voices, and that Listen Later users don’t suffer too much from the discomfort that change can bring.

By Philip Michaels

App Report: All that Jazz

Sometimes, putting these columns about intriguing macOS and iOS apps together feels a little like improvisational jazz — I’m not always sure where this is going or how it’s going to wind up, but hopefully there’s a note or two that someone gets some enjoyment out of. Well, this week, we’re going to look at an app that deals with actual jazz. How’s that for a tie-in?

Before we get to that offering, though, there’s a pair of Mac productivity boosters that caught my eye, particularly for research projects. And just so iPhone users don’t feel left out, we’ve got a couple of iOS entries, too, aimed at helping improve your sleep and your brain power, respectively.

Do you know of an app that makes your heart sing? Let us know by emailing apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description. Due to the large volume of tips we get, we’re not able to respond to each email, but rest assured if you send us a note about an app, we’re going to read it.

And now on to our first number…

Eno PDF

I’m of the mind that AI is best suited to perform repetitive tasks that might otherwise derail me from getting my main work done, and Eno PDF seems to be of the same mind. Billed by its developer as “AI for people who hate AI,” the app taps into artificial intelligence to dive into documents to find the information you might otherwise invest a lot of time to track down on your own.

Eno PDF doesn’t just expect you to take its word for it, though, as it summons up the exact part of the text that shows what you’re looking for, so that you can verify the result.

When testing Eno PDF, I loaded up four years of Apple SEC filings into the app and asked it to track down exactly how much revenue Apple made from iPhone sales last year. Eno PDF produced the right answer and even highlighted the part of the fiscal 2024 report that showed the number. (And yes, the 2024 fiscal year was the last full year of data I had Eno PDF search through.) More impressively, as it was searching, Eno PDF listed what documents it was poring over, further reinforcing the idea that its results aren’t being pulled out of thin air.

The searches take place natively on your Mac, so they’re relatively speedy depending on the size of the documents you’re having Eno PDF sort through. Nothing’s stored on external servers, though snippets of documents are sent out for AI analysis.

You can download Eno PDF for free, with 1,000 free credits available for you to test out the app. After that, it will cost you $15 to add 5,000 credits for future searches.

Not everyone’s going to need a tool like Eno PDF on their Mac, with the developers touting the app for professionals like lawyers and academics. But if you work on any project that requires research, Eno PDF can take a lot of the grunt work out of your hands while giving you the confidence that the results coming back to you aren’t some AI hallucination.

Caddy

Speaking of research projects, I’m a sucker for any app that can keep all my related ideas in one place. And Caddy, which adds a project tab to the side of your Mac’s screen, fits that description to perfection.

Caddy can hold whatever you need to have on hand for a particular assignment — notes, files, documents, images or what have you. I’ve set up a Caddy tab to contain research for a story I’m working on so that I can slide out the tab when I need to reference my notes without distracting from the app I have open. You can set up multiple Caddy tabs, using different colors to distinguish them.

The app is a free macOS download with a subscription-based Caddy Club ($3.99/month or $29.99/year) adding the ability to further customize tabs, collaborate with other people or send a copy of your Caddy to someone else so they can see what you’re working on.

Sessionography

I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial when I contend that the more specific your music tastes, the less you might feel well-served by streaming music apps built with general audiences in mind. Sessionography looks to bridge that gap, at least when it comes to appreciating jazz music.

Type an artist, album or song into the Sessionography app, and you can easily fall down a jazz wormhole. (Jazz Wormhole, incidentally, is the name of my poorly received second album.) Typing “Bill Evans,” for example, brings up a list of all the pianist’s albums, which you can then sort through by whether the artist was the leader or sideman. Speaking of sidemen, you can get a list of everyone who played on a particular album, delving into their catalog, too. Create a smart playlist with the tap of a button — assuming you’ve got an Apple Music subscription to also enjoy playing back your selections, that is.

The free version of Sessionography limits you to 10 taps per day for exploring artists and music along with three smart playlists, but a subscription (99 cents/week or $19.99/year) unlocks unlimited activity. It’s an ideal app for jazz enthusiasts to find new combinations and for the jazz-curious to find out what kind of tunes they like.

Wavelength

Like a lot of people reading this, I struggle to get a good night’s sleep, and while there are probably many factors at play, perhaps one I can take more control of is the quality and duration of the ambient light around me. That’s the notion behind Wavelength, an iOS app that taps into your iPhone’s camera to measure the light around you to see if it might be throwing off your body clock.

The first time you fire up Wavelength, you’ll enter in the time you woke up that morning along with your preferred wake-up time. Wavelength then charts out the times of day you should be out in daylight or at least bright light to boost your body clock and when you might want to steer clear of brighter lights, lest you throw off your body clock. Not only does this help with sleep, but it can help you stave off jet lag, too, the app’s developers claim.

If this sounds like hooey to you, Wavelength’s release notes point to the research all this is based on. So there’s some circadian science behind all the app’s recommendations on heading to the light.

Normally a $29.99 download for the full app, all of Wavelength’s features are currently free to all users through September 2027, according to the Wavelength App Store listing.

Geo Text

Part of my daily puzzle habit is to play the latest edition of MapTap online, where I have to drop a pin on a globe as accurately as possible to whatever city is part of that day’s game. Geo Text takes a similarly geographical approach to gaming, bringing a guessing game to the Messages app on your iPhone.

After downloading Geo Text to your iPhone, you access it in Messages, where you’re given a 360-degree photo of a place to scroll around looking for clues. You then tap the part of the globe where you think that photo was taken — the closer your pin to the right result, the more points you accrue.

Here’s where the Messages component comes in. Sharing your Geo Text result to a chat or group message lets everyone you’re chatting with play along — provided that they download Geo Text, too, of course. It’s a way to add a little friendly competition to your chats, as you battle friends for geographic supremacy.

There’s just one Geo Text game per day in the free version of the app, but $1.99 in-app purchases unlock separate games for the 50 U.S. states as well as soccer stadiums around the world.

[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]

By Jason Snell

Spotify opens new front in war on fair use

Late last month I got several emails from Spotify, all pretty much the same:

Hello,

Our automatic review tools determined that this podcast may contain content that infringes the rights of a third party. Due to this, we’ve removed:

Title: 14: Ribsy

Detected Content: “Ribsy” by Beverly Cleary

Why did this happen?
Spotify for Creators supports the distribution of audio and video podcasts. Our automated review process may remove any content that appears to be distributing third-party literary material.

What’s next?
If you think your episode does not infringe the intellectual property rights of a third party, or is subject to a copyright exception (such as fair use), you may submit an appeal. We’ll review your appeal and notify you of our decision.

Please note: Abusing the appeals process may result in restrictions on submitting future appeals. Under our repeat infringer policy, shows or users with multiple strikes will be removed from Spotify, and their accounts terminated. However, if your content is reinstated—either through a successful appeal or because the claim is withdrawn—we’ll update your records and remove the strike.

Klickitcast was a podcast by John McCoy and Phil Gonzales that covered every book by Beverly Cleary. Episodes were usually an hour long, and generally started with the hosts reading the first paragraph about the book to kick off their discussion.

I measured a few of them. An hour or more of critical content, and maybe 30 or 45 seconds of quoting from the work being discussed. This is the very definition of “fair use,” in which excerpts from works may be used specifically for the purpose of making editorial points about those works.

It’s very obvious what happened. Not being satisfied by its endless patrolling of podcast episodes for music that appears in Spotify’s own music libraries, the company had moved on to either:

• Lazily scanning the titles of podcasts to see if they matched books.

or

• Lazily transcribing podcasts and matching them to some book text, possibly even only the first portion of the book.

Either way, if a match was found, Spotify would immediately remove the podcast episode from its service and send one of those emails that I received.

On the one hand, I was offended because anyone could see that these were not pirate podcast episodes that were illegally creating audiobooks out of copyrighted works. When I use the word “lazily,” what I’m saying is that there is clearly a way to build a tool that analyzed the transcripts of podcast episodes and compared it to book text and intelligently determined whether the episode was pirating books. But Spotify didn’t bother with that. It just hoovered up anything and everything, including an episode where book text took up a grand total of 0.008% of its runtime.

On the other hand, I was also offended because this is just another example of the ruination of the legal concept of fair use. Fair use is not a copout or a loophole, it’s a fundamental understanding that copyright law has limits, and quoting a work to criticize it can’t be stifled by authors demanding that their copyright entitles them to prevent critics from quoting their work.

The problem is that fair use on the internet has been stifled by content-detection algorithms that don’t care about your fair use. It just notices that you used something that belongs to someone else. On YouTube, this can lead to account deactivation, loss of ad revenue, and even the hijacking of your ad revenue and the diversion of it to someone else who claims they own the rights to the thing you are using legally.

Let me give you an example of how this chilling effect works. Next week we’re posting the first episode of the new series of Designed in California, which is about the creation of the iPod. To set the scene, there’s an episode about the origins of the MP3 audio format, which includes an amazing story about a particular pop song that was used by one of the creators of the MP3 to fine-tune the format.

I thought it would be great to play a few seconds of the song in the podcast, when illustrating just how difficult it was to encode an a capella voice performance and explaining that the father of the MP3 estimates that he had to listen to the song a thousand times before he felt he had gotten it right.

We aren’t playing the song, though, because I’m sure it would run afoul of YouTube and Spotify’s content algorithms, and we’d need to risk the argument that it’s fair use—and potentially threaten the distribution and revenue generation of our brand-new podcast. Nothing like having episode one of a five-part series disappear from the internet because we ran afoul of content scanning.

(Yes, you can appeal these sorts of rulings. In fact, Spotify did reply the next day to my response to its rejection notices and agreed that it was in the wrong and restored the episodes. But as a content creator, you are throwing yourself on the mercy of the organization, and if they decide you’re in violation, you are out of luck.)

After all this, I decided to delete my Spotify account and sever The Incomparable’s relationship with that company. To be honest, I had only put my network’s podcasts up on Spotify because I had heard from a few Spotify users who were interested in listening to them there. But for shows like mine, the truth is that we rarely had double-digit listeners of any given episode.

And more broadly, I believe Spotify is bad for podcasting. It’s not really podcasting, of course, because it ingests the files and re-serves them. It’s not interested in the broader podcast ecosystem (hence its original plan to buy a bunch of popular shows and limit their distribution to Spotify). It’s a massive company that has decided to feed the growth beast by consuming as many adjacent pieces of content as it possibly can.

And that includes podcasts and audiobooks. (Yes! Is it a coincidence that just as Spotify began its lazy inspection of podcasts for violations of literary content, it’s also ramped up its own audiobook offerings, including AI-generated audiobooks? I assume not, while also assuming that there probably is a plague of AI-generated audiobooks out there that really do violate copyright. It’s not wrong—but it’s conveniently self-serving.)

If you listen to podcasts on Spotify, I encourage you to stop. Your iPhone comes with a free podcast app that’s pretty good, and many others are available. We all have better options.