By Jason Snell

April 7, 2023 1:10 PM PT

Friday Night Baseball’s radio overlay really works

As I write this, Apple has just debuted its Friday Night Baseball broadcasts for this season—in the afternoon, thanks to coverage of a Cubs day game. And I’m happy to report that the local radio overlay feature works well. Accessible from the More (three dots) button on iPhone and iPad and the sound icon on Mac and Apple TV, I was able to switch from Apple’s announcers to sound from the Cubs’ home radio broadcast. (Alas, audio from Rangers road games are strangely not available this season.)

The integration is flawless. Radio announcer audio is synced up perfectly with the video. When the radio broadcast isn’t providing audio, the broadcast plays stadium background audio. (In fact, it sounds to me like perhaps Apple is grabbing an announcer-only feed from the radio broadcast and then mixing in its own background audio—either that or it’s perfectly synced.)

Also I’m happy to report that Apple’s advanced probability forecasts are rounded to the nearest percentage, so a player is listed as having a 14% hit probability instead of 14.2% or 14.18%—a level of precision that’s unnecessary and probably unreal.

Finally, Apple’s scorebox still features three dots to represent the number of outs in an inning, which is as it should be, since there are three outs in an inning. (Many broadcasters make the mistake of only displaying two dots, which is criminal.)

By Jason Snell

April 6, 2023 3:48 PM PT

General Motors hates your iPhone

As first reported by Reuters, General Motors has decided that the company’s future electric cars will drop support for CarPlay and Android Auto, preferring the company’s own infotainment system based on the lower-level Android Automotive operating system. Essentially, all of GM’s EVs will run Android and offer access to certain Android apps, but any hope of connecting your phone to the cars via any means beyond Bluetooth will be gone.

I ranted about this topic for a while on this week’s Upgrade and Patrick George did an excellent job of summarizing this move at The Verge:

Ultimately, however, this is about control. Whether drivers want it or not — and I suspect a great many do not — this next generation of cars will be about consumer data and subscription features as much as they’ll be about instant electric torque and eliminating carbon emissions. The auto industry is banking on data and subscriptions being massively lucrative revenue streams. GM alone hopes to grow its subscription revenue more than tenfold to $25 billion per year by 2030. Why would any automaker want to cut Apple in on that or be forced to play ball with its software? And neither Apple nor Google charges car companies to use these features; owners don’t have to subscribe to them monthly, either. 

“From a business perspective, having more control over what happens within your vehicles is extremely valuable for both vehicle development as well as the opportunities presented by capturing and repackaging data for analysis and marketing,” Ivan Drury, Edmunds’ director of insights, told The Verge. 

I have a lot of strong feelings about this, because it’s a clear case of a corporation prioritizing its own business and technical interests over the needs of its users. While GM’s statements on the matter constantly emphasize that this is an improvement or evolution of the in-car experience, it’s all spin and lies.

The truth is, instead of allowing your smartphone—the single most important information appliance we all have—to be a key part of the driving experience, GM has decided that it will place itself at the center of that experience. This fundamentally means that it will be a second-class experience, because almost nobody will consider their car computer as their primary device.

Relying on a secondary device has huge drawbacks. First, consider compatibility: If users rely on apps and services that aren’t available on GM’s platform, they will be forced to change, fall back to Bluetooth, or go without. The arrogance in believing that GM should force people to bend their digital lives in order to fit into their cars is breathtaking. Are users going to be forced to change their podcast app of choice, or streaming music service of choice, or audiobook player of choice, all because General Motors wants to enhance its revenue?

But it’s worse than that. Even if you happen to use a supported service or app, you have to rely on syncing between devices. Now you’ve got to hope that whatever connectivity the car offers will be able to keep your music playlists and the current playing location of your podcast or audiobooks synced and up to date. Cloud syncing is tricky—do I really trust General Motors to keep all my stuff in line?

And of course, there’s the Android app experience itself. It has never been the platform’s strength. If the app you want to use is available on the Play Store, and has been flagged for Automotive use, and presumably has been approved by some invisible GM gatekeeper… will it be any good? Or will it be a mediocre-at-best-but-at-least-it-works experience?

GM wants your data. It wants to control your in-car experience. Yes, I have sympathy for a company that is trying to integrate a lot of advanced in-car navigation and safety features with its own hardware stack—in fact, I think it’s not at all unreasonable for GM to declare that if you want to use those features, you must use GM’s built-in navigation apps. But, of course, that’s not what they are actually doing. They’re trying to hide their power grab behind their need to tie auto-drive features to their own navigation system.

This move is infuriating enough simply by dint of it being a giant corporation deciding that its customers were too satisfied with making their own choices. But let’s be honest, the software track record of auto companies is poor.

Even when they do a good job—let’s give them the benefit of the doubt—their priorities are never aligned with the users. If you buy a new iPhone, or upgrade to the new version of iOS, you get new features and better hardware. The computer on a GM car will never get a hardware upgrade, and I would wager that the software will remain fairly static—with key new features and updates only arriving on newer model cars. Even if GM begins this process in a competitive position versus CarPlay and Android Auto, that advantage will begin to depreciate the second you drive the car off the lot.

Tangentially, two EV companies have already gone down this path: Tesla and Rivian. And yes, both of them are just as arrogant as GM in preferring their own stock software to the smartphones in everyone’s pockets. At least GM will have access to Android apps—Tesla finally added support for Apple Music earlier this year! (It took just eight years!) A guy in Poland has spent countless hours trying to hack CarPlay into the Tesla web browser.

I get the impulse to want to control everything that happens in your car, if you’re an automaker. But given the fact that the smartphone is everyone’s real ride-or-die, the best choice is to integrate tightly with the supercomputer we all keep in our pockets, not to say “let them eat Bluetooth” and be happy degrading the customer experience in the interest of control and incremental revenue.

The real question is, what happens next? Of course, the smart move would be for GM to backtrack and offer basic CarPlay support on future models, but I don’t think anyone is actually expecting that. What is worth watching is what other automakers do next. According to some numbers revealed by Apple last year, 79 percent of new car buyers in the U.S. say that CarPlay is a must-have feature. (Obviously, GM doesn’t believe those stated preferences are particularly strong.)

Will GM’s competitors follow its lead, relieved that the world is finally starting to trend away from bring-your-own-device support in cars? Or will they consider CarPlay a competitive advantage that will allow them to market their own vehicles against GM’s? I sure hope it’s the latter, because we’re never going to give up our smartphones—and if our cars don’t talk to them properly, our in-car experiences will always be second-rate.

By Jason Snell

April 5, 2023 11:33 AM PT

Fantastical adds broader Shortcuts support

Back in January, I wrote about building an automation for my pal Lex that would generate a list of open meeting times for him to send to potential clients.

Lex and I both use the Fantastical calendar app, but at the time the app’s support for Shortcuts actions was pretty poor. To get our automation to work, we had to set up Apple’s default Calendar app and log it in to our Google calendars. For such a full-featured app, Fantastical’s lack of Shortcuts actions was really surprising.

Things have gotten better! Flexibits just released Fantastical 3.7.9, which adds a bunch of new Shortcuts actions, including the ability to filter events from a given Calendar Set in a given date range, and the ability to generate a simple schedule for a given day.

There’s still some more work to do here—I don’t think Fantastical can quite match the level of filtering that Apple’s Calendar actions offer—but I already see the benefit of using Fantastical for this work. Fantastical’s Calendar Sets, which are user-configurable groups of calendars, make it a lot easier to target a search for events depending on the context.

For example, I might search in a set that only contains my work events, or one that also contains broader family obligations. With Apple’s Calendar actions, I have to search one calendar at a time and concatenate the results. With Fantastical, I just target one of my Calendar Sets and it finds what I want across all the calendars in that set.

I’m happy that Flexibits recognized that its app was a bit behind on the user automation front and took steps to address the issue. Apple has said that Shortcuts is the future of automation on its platforms; I hope more app developers spend time considering how the functionality of their apps can also be used in concert with other apps.

Maybe they could take some time to consider it this month, for starters. It is Automation April, after all.

By Dan Moren

March 31, 2023 7:00 AM PT

Review: Aura’s digital photo frame is solid, if not quite picture perfect

Of all the standalone devices that I couldn’t imagine I’d need in the year 2023, I would have put a digital picture frame near the top. To me, they’re a device that seems to belong in that mid-2000s era where people switched to digital cameras, one of those weird bits of translation that supposes that every analog device needs an exact digital counterpart, rather than acknowledging that we simply treat our photos differently now.

But then I had a kid.

Suddenly I found that, despite the thousands of photos I’ve already taken of this child in the first eight months of their life, I had no easy way to display them around the house. I could, of course, always have some digital photos printed out and hung in various places, but that would only allow for a subset of all the great pictures I’d taken.

Suddenly a digital photo frame didn’t seem like such a wild idea, so when the opportunity arose for me to check one out, I didn’t hesitate. What I discovered is that there is definitely a niche for this digital spin on an old favorite, but that even a good entry falls short in a few ways.

Continue reading “Review: Aura’s digital photo frame is solid, if not quite picture perfect”…

By Shelly Brisbin

March 30, 2023 5:14 PM PT

Video: Using VoiceOver with the Weather app

Hey there, I’m Shelly Brisbin and I’m here to demo a new feature in iOS 16.4. Specifically, it’s in the Weather app, and even more specifically than that, it is for people who use the VoiceOver screen reader that’s part of iOS.

VoiceOver is a tool used by blind and visually impaired folks to hear the contents of the screen rather than viewing them. So using a combination of speech and touch, you can find out what’s under your fingers. That’s pretty easy if the content is text or even something that can be described pretty easily like a button, something that you can label. But if you have something like an overlay from inside the Weather app, it’s a little harder to use VoiceOver to describe it because it’s visual and it’s color coded. So what I’m going to show you is what I call “sonic overlay.” It’s an overlay that uses pitch to indicate the level of rain that an area is having right now.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer, host of the Parallel podcast, and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]

By Jason Snell

March 29, 2023 2:43 PM PT

Apple in the Enterprise: A 2023 report card

In 2021, device-management startup Kandji approached Six Colors to commission a new entry in our Report Card series focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise. Then we approached people we knew in the community of Apple device administrators and asked them to participate in the survey. We are especially grateful to the members of the Mac Admins Slack for their participation.

This is our third year doing the survey. Over the last few weeks, we took the temperature of 117 admins, roughly half of whom report that they manage more than a thousand devices. They rated Apple’s performance in the context of enterprise IT on a scale from 1 to 5 in nine broad areas.

Below, you’ll see the survey results, plus choice comments from survey participants. Not all participants are represented; we gave everyone the option to remain anonymous and not be quoted. Though Kandji commissioned this survey—and we thank everyone there for doing so—it had no oversight over the survey results or the contents of this story, which was compiled by Jason Snell and the Six Colors staff.

Overall scores

Apple’s strongest scores came in hardware—Apple silicon Macs are a big winner—and in the company’s commitment to security and privacy.

In most categories, our panel’s view of Apple in the enterprise was on an upswing. The company made large gains in the categories of enterprise service and support and in macOS identity management (its 3.3 average was still fairly low overall, but up a whopping 0.4 from last year). However, Apple took a big hit in the deployment category, which dropped 0.2 to become the lowest scoring category in the survey.

We also asked a couple of questions outside the traditional set. For the second straight year, we asked about the pace of operating-system adoption. There was a big change here, with “quicker than usual” moving from 37% last year to 51% this year. (A decision by Apple to force a Ventura update as a “minor” upgrade may be at least partially responsible—see the comments in that category for the gory details.)

With numerous reports that Apple might be forced to open up iOS to third-party app stores, we asked our panel about what their policy might be toward such app stores. Were they open to supporting them under some circumstances, would they reject them outright, or are they in an environment that doesn’t even allow use of Apple’s own App Store?

More than half of the people who answered said that while they allowed the App Store, they wouldn’t want to allow third-party app stores. In their detailed comments, several expressed concern that any policy ruling that forced Apple’s hand might make it harder for admins to block third-party app stores, which would make them very unhappy. Only 21% of respondents said they would be open to the idea of third-party app stores.

Here’s what Tom Bridge of the Mac Admins Podcast had to say about this year’s results:

“It’s no surprise that folks are thrilled with hardware and appreciative of the privacy work Apple continues to do. I love to see that, good feedback for Apple around that.

“Deployment and Software Reliability take a hit this year. Software Update was a disaster, and that is firmly reflected here. Apple had every opportunity to make that a gain this year, but a late mistake in last year’s 12.3 release which went unnoticed til 12.6 meant a lot of updates were extremely confused this year.

“Continued gains in MDM are the result of Apple making big moves for the future. And last but not least, the future is bright. A solid grade on the hopefulness of admins.”

Read on for detailed results from each category, with unvarnished commentary from panel participants.

Continue reading “Apple in the Enterprise: A 2023 report card”…