By Dan Moren

September 30, 2018 8:22 PM PT

Applications Folder: Fission

As someone who spends a lot of time making podcasts, I have a broad choice of applications to use when it comes to producing audio. I’m sure you’ll be unsurprised to know that I rely on Logic Pro X for the bulk of my editing needs, but one of the less commonly discussued tools still in my toolbox is Rogue Amoeba’s excellent audio editor, Fission.

Fission doesn’t take the place of Logic Pro X, of course, or even Garage Band, but that’s in large part because it’s not meant to. Most obviously, it’s only a single-track editor, and it lacks many of the audio engineering and tweaking tools that editors and producers want from their workstation.

But Fission has more than a few qualities that make it an ideal tool in certain specific situations that audio producers encounter. One is its ability to do lossless editing of compressed audio like MP3 and AAC files. So when I get all the way through to producing a final MP3 of one of my podcasts and discover I left a whole bunch of dead air at the end, or find one little edit that I wish I’d made, I can fire up Fission and often snip out the offending section without having to go through the whole export and conversion process all over again. That can save a huge amount of time.

It’s also a helpful tool for me for shows where I have to produce multiple versions of an episode. For example, my podcast with Lex Friedman, Not Playing with Lex and Dan, has both a capsule version, in which we have a discussion before and after the movie we watch, as well as a commentary version that contains us chatting while watching the film. Of course, they’re recorded as one long show, but I use Fission to help produce the final versions from the full file. That includes deleting parts of the show, inserting musical stingers, and even copying and pasting bumpers from one file to another.

Likewise, I use Fission for my podcast The Rebound, which is hosted on SoundCloud, because the app can upload directly to that service. While I used to use Fission for my transcoding and metadata tagging needs, in recent months I’ve mostly switched to Marco Arment’s Forecast tool for those tasks.

Despite that, Fission remains an indispensable tool in my suite of audio apps. Anytime I need to do a quick edit or tweak to an audio file, or sometimes even test that audio worked correctly, it’s the app I turn to. There are a host of features that I make use of only sparingly—things like lossless transcoding between formats, splitting an audio file into multiple files by detecting silence, and, yes, chapter support—any of which could be a life-saver on its own. But put them all together and you have an immensely capable tool that everybody who works with audio should consider having in their Applications folder.

[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

September 30, 2018 8:20 PM PT

A Thing We Like: A look at books

I like books a lot. I read a lot of books, mostly novels, but there’s often some nonfiction mixed in as well. And in recent weeks I’ve had a few different books bounce my way, including a couple that I think you might be interested in. (Also, iOS 12 and macOS Mojave both introduced a new version of iBooks called Books, and it’s pretty good! Maybe you could read one of these books in that app. Or not. Use paper if you like. Or a Kindle! Books are available in all sorts of forms these days.)

The first one is, of course, Ken Kocienda’s “Creative Selection”, which I reviewed on Six Colors. It’s not a reported tell-all about Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, but refreshingly, a memoir of Apple at the top of its game from someone who was in the trenches building key software tied to the Mac’s comeback and the birth of the iPhone. If you’ve ever been curious what it was like to work for Steve Jobs (and Scott Forstall), or what the origins of Safari were, or just how the iPhone keyboard came to be, Kocienda’s book covers it. Yes, like any book in this category, you’ll need to deal with the fact that there are important business lessons to be learned—look, those lessons sell a lot of books to businesspeople and students at business schools—but they’re easily navigated. Kocienda’s story is worth reading, and I say that as someone who does not love reading computer-industry books.

Closer to my heart is Glenn Rifkin’s Future Forward (Apple Books), which is about Pat McGovern, the founder of International Data Group. I worked at IDG for 17 years and got to spend a few hours a year with McGovern, who is the most interesting tech billionaire and entrepreneur you’ve probably never heard of. He didn’t just found a tech-media empire (Computerworld, Macworld, PC World, InfoWorld, the list goes on), but he was also one of the first Western investors in China. He kept a somewhat low profile and his individual media brands took the spotlight, so many people haven’t heard of him, but that was part of Pat’s secret sauce, if you asked me. He empowered his employees and the brands they helped build to do what was right for their customers. If you were in Germany, you made the right decisions for IDG Germany—nevermind what they were doing over in the UK. If you were at Macworld, you made the right decisions of Macworld—nevermind what they were doing over at PC World.

Pat passed away not too long before I left IDG. I’m glad to have known him even a little bit. He was an enormous supporter of editorial independence, and we all knew it—editors and non-editor types alike. I’m glad there’s a book that details some of the things that made him special. (Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the book and am quoted in it!)

So those are the tech books. Let me toss some fall reading in here for you, as well.

Sports fans, I’m currently reading The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking (Apple Books) by Russell A. Carleton, which is a delightful combination of an acceptance of modern baseball analytics as well as an understanding that as much as number crunching has dramatically improved our understanding of sports, it remains true that sports are played by human beings—and human beings are complicated. Carleton is a trained psychologist as well as a baseball writer, and that combination is pretty delightful. I am a huge believer in sabermetrics—but I also understand that the dynamics in the game are much more complicated than some of our statistical understandings can uncover. Carleton makes the case, for example, that the most important job of a baseball manager is not setting a line-up or deciding a pitching order, but being a manager in the business sense, making sure that the 25 young men under his care keep an even keel during the high pressure of a baseball season. It’s really smart.

Novel time: I just finished a couple of sequels, Imposter Syndrome by Mishell Baker and European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss. I highly recommend both, but you should start at the start: Baker’s Borderline (Apple Books) is a noir detective story in L.A. except the detective is a multiple amputee dealing with severe mental illness and the person she’s been hired to find is not a person, but a fairy. Goss’s The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (Apple Books) is a 19th century mystery adventure starring the daughters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the bride of Frankenstein, a puma woman created by Dr. Moreau, and a few other characters from classic literature. Also, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are major supporting characters. It’s incredibly fun. I also devoured Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars (Apple Books) and The Fated Sky (Apple Books), two books (both released this summer!) set in an alternate history where we get into space a decade or so before we actually did… and with a few interesting twists along the way.

I like books! I mostly read them on my Kindle these days, but give it a spin in dead-tree form or in your sparkly new Books app if you like. And happy reading!

By Stephen Hackett

September 30, 2018 7:43 PM PT

The Hackett File: iOS Needs to Grow to Meet the Needs of Big iPhones

This year, all of Apple’s flagship phones are over 5.8 inches in size. They make the iPhone 8 and even the 8 Plus the smaller phones of yesteryear, like the iPhone 5S before them.

When I first upgraded to an iPhone 6 Plus, iOS 8 was the latest and greatest, but it felt like iOS wasn’t really designed for screens as large as that found on the Plus. Even though Control Center was, at the time, revealed by swiping up from the bottom of the screen, just about every app had its controls pinned at the top of the screen, as they always had.

At the time, I figured that by iOS 9 or 10, Apple would start migrating things to the bottom of the screen, and that Reachability was just a short-term hack until iOS could evolve to meet the needs of users with larger phones.

Sadly, I was wrong. Today, in iOS 12, most critical controls and buttons are still at the top of the display. Control Center is now hidden behind a swipe from the top of the screen, making it basically useless on my new 6.5-inch iPhone XS Max. I love this big phone, but between its size and iOS’s design, it is most definitely a two-handed phone.

Despite being burned before, I am hopeful that things may be changing, albeit slowly. Just take a look at these two apps:

All of Maps’ interactive UI elements are confined to a sheet that expands when needed, up from the bottom. It makes searching for a location while walking a lot easier than it would be if all of those controls were pinned to the top of the screen. Shortcuts uses a similar design, as does Music, even though it also uses the top of the screen for some controls.

Contrast this with something like Messages or Mail, where everything is far, far away from the bottom of the screen. These apps use the same basic structure they shipped with on the original 3.5-inch iPhone back in 2007. While functionally these apps are clean and fast, they haven’t scaled to a world of larger phones. I’d love to see iOS 13 usher in a new design paradigm designed with phones like the XS, XR, and XS Max in mind.

[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]

By Jason Snell

September 30, 2018 7:35 PM PT

The Holiday Quarter approaches…

Well, here we are again. A new iPhone and Apple Watch announcement in the rearview, some possible product announcements from Apple on the horizon. Apple is revving its product and production engines and getting ready for the biggest three months of the year in terms of sales and marketing. We’re a few days away from entering the Holiday Quarter, a magical time that generates billions and billions of dollars in revenue and profits for Apple. My wallet’s already lighter than it was at the beginning of this month… how’s yours?

There’s a lot for me to write about at this time of year, and I owe you all reviews of the iPhone XS and the Apple Watch Series 4. Once the initial wave of embargoed reviews drop, I’ve found that there’s no point in trying to rush out a review that’s less well informed than the ones that were written by people who’ve gotten to spend a week with the product. (I also had to get my final review of macOS Mojave out the door!) So now I’ve lived with the products for a week and I’m ready to start writing. You should see the results in the next week, though I’ve already dropped a few hints in pieces I’ve written the last couple of weeks. It’s a busy time.

I will give it away and say that I love the Apple Watch Series 4, though not without reservation. I almost feel that the Apple Watch has reached the level where it’s worth criticizing now, especially on the software side. The Apple Watch hardware is simply excellent—the new watches are thinner and with much larger screens. watchOS 5 is a breakthrough in so many ways. As I noted on Six Colors earlier this month, I can finally do things like play podcasts directly from my watch to my AirPods while running—and while also using an interval-training app on my watch. The dream is real.

So now it’s about the details. The new complications on the Apple Watch faces have huge potential, but there’s a lot of additional work to be done. I’m impressed with the new Infograph faces on the Series 4, but disappointed that Apple didn’t bother updating any of the other faces to support the new complication styles. Apple Watch faces are nice, I suppose, but they need to be better. There need to be more of them, with more variations, and the designs need to be much more flexible.

The sign of a maturing platform is that users stop asking for the developers to fill in obvious gaps in the fundamental design, and instead ask the developers to start sweating the details. That’s where we are with Apple Watch now, I think. It’s good, and it does everything it needs to do (more or less), but now it needs polish and attention to detail—and it all starts on the watch face itself.

On the iPhone side, my reactions are—forgive me—spectacularly boring. This is a solid update as they all are. If you’ve got an iPhone X, you don’t need to upgrade unless you desperately want to return to a Plus-sized phone or if you simply can’t resist the idea of a major upgrade to your photos. (The camera on the iPhone XS is good… and the way the images are captured and massaged by the A12 processor is even better.) This year’s not about iPhone X updaters, it’s about people who have never experienced the Face ID and edge-to-edge display of the iPhone X finally taking the plunge. They’ll be delighted.

The only open question is… what will happen with the iPhone XR when it’s released in October? It’s a good price for such a feature-packed phone, and it’s a lot cheaper than the iPhone XS Max, but it’s still a very large phone and the price tag isn’t exactly bargain-basement. Still, with the iPhone X-style edge-to-edge display, Face ID, and position as the lowest-priced new iPhone in Apple’s line, I am tempted to predict that the iPhone XR might be Apple’s biggest hit during the Holiday Quarter.

We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m hoping to get a new iPad Pro next month… and dare I hope for some new Macs as well? While it’s possible that Apple will make us wait until after the Holiday Quarter to see those new products, I’m betting they’re on the horizon. With any luck, we’ll be discussing those updates in this very space next month. I can’t wait!

By Dan Moren

September 30, 2018 12:41 PM PT

The Back Page: Very useful Shortcuts for everyday practical usage (very practical!)

The real triumph of technology is to make a difference in people’s lives, and Apple has always made it clear that this is one of their highest goals. And personally, I think that the Siri Shortcuts features and attendant Shortcuts app that Apple is rolling out in iOS 12 could be the biggest improvement since people started Snapchatting sliced bread. (I’m not really up on the latest lingo.)

But while the sample shortcuts that Apple includes in its gallery are fine, I think users want to see more practical explanations of how these workflows can benefit them. We need to see concrete real-world shortcuts that people are going to use, not just proof of concepts like tea timers and image resizing.

Okay, I get it, if I’m going to demonstrate the usefulness of Shortcuts, I need to put my skills where my mouth is. So here are a handful of workflows that I’ve just whipped up on the spot that could have a huge impact on all of our daily lives.

Hey Siri, is this undercooked? Foodborne illness isn’t trivial. Best case scenario you might end up finding yourself in dire and urgent need of restroom facilities for a day or two. What if it could all be avoided by simply pointing your iPhone’s camera at that chicken cutlet, tapping this shortcut and having the result compared to the FDA’s food preparation guidelines.

That joke’s not funny We’ve all composed the perfect tweet, Facebook post, email, or Slack message only to realize––right after we sent it, naturally––that it actually was a bad idea. This shortcut could save us from this fate worse than death by parsing our composition and responding with simple emoji ratings: rolling on the floor laughing, expressionless face, or for the truly egregious, face with hand over mouth.

Random Hamilton Lyric Fitting in with a new social crowd can be tough, especially when everybody’s bonding over their favorite historical hip-hop musical sensation that you think is just fine, but not something you really need to memorize, I mean it’s no Newsies. Still, you don’t want to be left out, so just punch this shortcut and drop a classic lyric like, uh, “Alexander Hamilton.” Wait, it’s just his name? Seriously?

I saw a corgi! My understanding of modern society is that if you see a cute dog, you are obligated to share it with everybody you know. Look, I don’t make the rules, I just help you create shortcuts that embrace them. Anyway, this shortcut takes the last picture from your camera roll—presumably a corgi—and then sends it to a specified contact (or, by default, all of your contacts), along with a helpful message about the dog you saw.

Can I afford this avocado toast? Look, there’s no way Shortcuts is going to be allowed to access your banking info—it’s just not secure. So let’s go with the safe answer: “Not if you ever want to own a house.” Sad emoji sad emoji sad emoji.

[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.]