By Dan Moren

January 22, 2015 8:48 AM PT

Hit List: Album view

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Look, I’ve been pretty positive up until now, what with all my suggestions about features that Apple can improve. But it’s time to tap into our deep, collective discontent about those little aspects of Apple products that just bug us. For a company that places an emphasis on simple, elegant design, there are places where it seems to lose the thread. That’s no big deal—nobody bats a thousand—but sometimes in order to make products better, you need to remove things instead of adding them.

Case in point: the iOS Music app’s album view.

I don’t mean when you tap Albums on the toolbar and scroll through that list; I mean the annoying collage of album artwork that you only seemed to end up with when you’ve turned your phone sideways (probably by accident) while browsing your music.

Continue reading “Hit List: Album view”…

By Jason Snell

January 21, 2015 1:10 PM PT

Typed thoughts about styluses

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

There’s a lot of buzz out there regarding reports that Apple might feature a theoretical stylus on a theoretical 12-inch iPad. And as you might expect, people are wrongly suggesting that this is somehow Apple going back on the famous Steve Jobs line about how with tablets, “if you see a stylus, they blew it.”

Of course the context of that line was entirely different from what’s being rumored, as The Macalope ably explains here. This isn’t about requiring a stylus, but about offering one for specific uses. There’s definitely some demand—people like my friend Serenity Caldwell tend to get really excited when innovative Bluetooth styluses hit the market. Artists have praised the Microsoft Surface for its much more useful inbuilt support for styluses.

I admit that I have a difficult time ginning up enthusiasm for this particular tech unicorn. While I’m sure that artists and other pen-oriented niches would love an iPad that was better at accepting pen input, I’m not sure how large those niches really are.

Then again, as we saw with the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple’s product line has matured enough that the company can offer offshoots that augment the overall line without bearing the burden of appealing to everyone. A large iPad might find a few comfortable niches, including artists (pens in hand) and possibly (but not certainly) power users.

As for me, I’m absolutely the wrong person for this particular rumor. I’ve got terrible handwriting that’s only gotten worse over the years, as I’ve reached the point where I almost never use a pen¹. I type 115 words per minute (as measured by TypeRacer) on a physical keyboard. My drawing skills tend toward the stick figure, and haven’t advanced much since fourth grade. (In fact, the only time I’ve ever used a stylus on an iOS device was when I used the Cosmonaut to play Draw Something back in its heyday.)

It’s just not my thing. On top of that, I’m an iPad mini user. I’m headed in the other direction with my iPad—the smaller the better.

So for the sake of people like Serenity, I hope Apple does bring better stylus support to the iPad—whether or not it makes its very own stylus. I like the idea of Apple products being the favorite tool for artists, even though I’m most definitely not one myself.

By Jason Snell

January 20, 2015 9:51 AM PT

Last updated May 18, 2022

Meet Audio Hijack 3, my new favorite audio utility

Note: This story has not been updated since 2022.

Rogue Amoeba has announced the release of Audio Hijack 3, the successor to the venerable Mac sound utility Audio Hijack Pro. This is a huge update—the first major one for Audio Hijack in ten years—and so comprehensive that this feels more like a successor to the old Audio Hijack rather than a continuation.

I’ve been using Audio Hijack 3 in beta for six months now, for uses personal and professional, and I couldn’t be more impressed. This is a beautifully designed product that combines a clever and intuitive user interface with awesome power and versatility. It will appeal to podcasters, audio pros, musicians, and just about anyone else who needs to push their Mac’s audio capabilities past the meager sound features offered by OS X itself.

Audio Hijack 3 costs $49 for new users, but owners of any past product with “Audio Hijack” on the label will be able to upgrade to Audio Hijack 3 for $25. And anyone who’s bought Audio Hijack since this blog post 11 months ago will get it for free.

Continue reading “Meet Audio Hijack 3, my new favorite audio utility”…

By Jason Snell

January 16, 2015 4:51 PM PT

Taking CarPlay for a spin

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Inspired by Marco Arment, I bought a Pioneer SPH-DA120 CarPlay receiver and some accessories¹, so I could test out Apple’s CarPlay in-car technology without buying a new car or tearing apart my existing car. While I haven’t had the opportunity to use CarPlay while driving, I’ve spent some time with it over the past couple of months, enough to form some initial judgements.

It’s currently very early days for CarPlay. The technology currently appears on a small number of aftermarket car stereos and as an option in some brand-new cars. It’s an attempt by Apple to create a more appropriate in-car interface for iPhone apps, one that doesn’t have to rely on carmakers or the manufacturers of in-car technology. CarPlay should be CarPlay everywhere.

To connect your iPhone² to CarPlay, you’ll need a wired connection—Bluetooth won’t do it. Your iPhone broadcasts the CarPlay screen over Lightning and USB and onto your car’s video screen, where you can control it via buttons or via touchscreen (depending on what format your device supports). The SPH-DA120 is a touchscreen, so that’s what I used.

The main CarPlay screen looks very much like a simplified iPhone screen. There are pages of large app icons and, off to the left side, a vertical control area with a home button, the current time, and your phone’s network strength.

As you might expect, CarPlay is intentionally designed to be controlled by Siri as much as possible. The Phone and Messages apps are absolutely driven by voice—when you tap them, the expectation is that you’ll use your voice to kick off a phone call or send a message. I enabled the “Hey Siri” feature on my iPhone and was able to trigger voice commands by using that key phrase, and for the most part CarPlay followed along.

The Music and Podcasts apps are pretty much what you’d expect—they’re iPhone apps redesigned to fit into the CarPlay interface. As a result, there’s not a lot of room for lists. The Now Playing screen for both apps has large, readable text and easy-to-hit control buttons, albeit at the expense of pretty album/podcast art, which is now pushed way into the background.

The highlight of the entire CarPlay experience for me was Maps, which has been thoughtfully redesigned for the in-dash screen. You can pick a destination from right on screen, choose between alternate destinations, and get estimate times of arrival—all the stuff you can do from the Maps app on the iPhone, yes, but now it’s all on a screen in the middle of the dash. And when you’re navigating, the permanent control bar on the side of the CarPlay screen includes a Maps icon, so you can get back there quickly.

Apple’s site lists eight third-party apps that work with CarPlay, but I could only get two to work: iHeartRadio and Overcast. Both of them provided simple interfaces a la the Podcasts app, but I found them to be slow and unreliable. In my testing, both iHeartRadio and Overcast sometimes failed to display any menu at all. Other times, there would be long delays between menu items. And the apps frequently just crashed, stopping playback and taking me back to the home screen.

If one of the apps worked great, I could lay this at the feet of the other app developer, but since both of them are buggy I’m more inclined to blame CarPlay itself. And maybe, just maybe, this is why more of these promised CarPlay apps—like Apple’s own Beats Music—don’t actually appear on the CarPlay interface. Apple’s own CarPlay page lists these apps and refers to them in the present tense, but it seems like wishful thinking to me.

So is CarPlay worth it? Right now, I’d have to say no. I’m encouraged by the potential here, but it feels slow and seems buggy. Though I’ve got this Pioneer CarPlay unit right here, I’m not planning on installing it in my car… at least, not yet. An Apple-designed interface in my dashboard sounds like a great idea, but until there are more third-party apps—and until third-party apps actually work well—maybe it’s just as well that CarPlay devices are still few and far between.

By Dan Moren

January 15, 2015 1:10 PM PT

The export business

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

For the last few months, I’ve been playing around with Hanx Writer. I usually don’t hold much truck with celebrity-backed apps—they’re usually more gimmick than substances—but in this case, two things drew me to the app:

1. A very polished, nostalgic, and functional simulation of a classic typewriter.
2. Tom Hanks. I mean, who doesn’t love Tom Hanks? The man is a national treasure.¹ Even when he’s nattering on to a volleyball on a desert island, there’s just something so trustworthy about him. Tom Hanks would never lead me astray!

To be fair, it was mainly the first one. The app debuted right about the same time that I’d been brainstorming on a novel idea with a noir-ish tone, and the sound and feel of a classic typewriter seemed the perfect way to bring those sensibilities to the surface.

As a writing tool, it’s a lot of fun. Far from perfect, but it’s designed with limitations in mind. I even ponied up for the additional typewriter and font styles. Hearing the tappity-taps of the keys while writing—and that great DING! SHOOOK at the end of a line—is viscerally delightful.

But as much fun as it is to write with, it gets a little tricky when it comes to editing: there’s no search feature, no way to highlight things, etc. Well, sure—you wouldn’t have had any of those things on a typewriter; they’re just sticking to the aesthetic. “That’s cool,” I thought to myself. “I’ll just export it to another app and do my editing there.”

And this is where Hanx Writer commits its unthinkable sin. Because you can tap on the Share button and send your file to Dropbox, Good Drive, iBooks, GoodReader, and any number of other apps.

But when you do, it comes through as an un-editable PDF. “Okay, I’ll just copy and paste it into Pages.” Which sort of works, except you end up with all sorts of weird mid-line (and occasionally mid-word) line breaks, missing tabs, and so on. That might not be a pain if you’ve written a couple of pages, but on 21,000 words of a novel in progress, it’s a little more of a chore.² (Format conversion, in general, often seems to be more art than science.)

You can probably work some crazy grep madness to try and restore it to a usable format, but this is all a pain for something that should have been easy.

I’m not sure exactly what workflow the Hanx Writer folks had in mind—print it out, maybe?—but I’m pretty sure that the format in which it exports is not a standard that most publications, book publishers, or movie studios would take without a raised eyebrow and a disbelieving chuckle—well, unless you’re Tom Hanks, probably.

Long story short: don’t hold your user’s data hostage. As much as I like Hanx Writer and enjoyed typing in it, I’m a working writer—emphasis on “working”—and, at the end of the day, I’m going to land on the practical tool that helps me get my work done, not the idiosyncratic one that I have to wrestle into submission.³

[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 Dan Moren

January 15, 2015 8:04 AM PT

Wish List: Siri for OS X

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

I know, right? We’ve had a voice-controlled intelligent assistant on our iPhones since 2011 and on our iPads since 2012, but on the Mac, nothing. Yes, the speech-to-text dictation feature arrived in Mountain Lion and in Mavericks we got enhanced (read: offline) dictation.

But still no Siri.

Siri has its detractors, but as folks like John Gruber have noted, it does seem to be improving, at least in terms of performance. There are certain features that I use it for frequently: checking the temperature, adding reminders to a list, sending texts while in the car, and so on.

Here’s the thing: too many people call Siri a failure because it’s not better at everything. But it doesn’t need to replace conventional inputs like keyboards, pointing devices, and remotes; it can live along side them. Really, it just needs to be better at some things—and there’s no question that it is.

So, would it be useful on the Mac?

I maintain yes—with a couple of caveats. Only one major improvement came to Siri in iOS 8: the “Hey Siri” feature. I’d say that’s critical to the best possible use case scenario for Siri on OS X. Right now, the Hey Siri feature on iOS is limited to use when the device is plugged in.¹ Given that your desktop Macs are always plugged in (and your laptops have a much higher capacity battery), they could presumably listen for Hey Siri all the time. And the higher processing power of Macs combined with their much more permissive architecture could be harnessed to let Siri do more than it can do now. Combining Siri with Automator and Apple Script, for example, could allow for much more powerful and user-created capabilities.

This isn’t anything new, by the way. Old school Mac users may remember all too well the voice control options that date back to the classic OS. A vestige of them still remains in OS X, as it happens, squirreled away under the Accessibility preference pane; there you can associate a phrase with some sort of action. But it lacks the innate intelligence of Siri: you can’t ask it questions, it can’t really look information up, etc. More than anything, it’s simply a set of voice-activated macros.

I don’t know if most Mac users would take advantage of Siri, but it could open up some pretty interesting possibilities. Imagine if your iPhone, iPad, and Macs were all front ends to a single instance of Siri that’s optimized for you, learning what tools you use, what information you want, and so on. All of it available simply by saying “Hey Siri”—or, hopefully, some name of your choice: “Computer,” “Jarvis,” etc.

Perhaps that triggers worry of some sort of HAL- or Ultron-like malevolent AI, I don’t know. To the Star Trek nerd in me, the idea of a computer available to answer questions addressed seems awesome. Amazon’s after something very similar with the Echo, but there’s certainly an element of suspicion that accompanies it—Amazon’s core business, after all, is retail, so where’s the catch?²

Adding Siri to the Mac probably isn’t a high priority for Apple, honestly, and after seeing three major versions of the OS come and go without bringing the virtual assistant to the Mac, I wouldn’t be shocked if this year’s upgrade (Big Sur? Redwood? Alcatraz?) left it on the wayside once again. But if Apple’s serious about improving Siri, and if Amazon’s Echo gains any traction, I think the company really should consider adding the Mac to the fold.

[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

January 14, 2015 1:16 PM PT

Last updated May 18, 2023

How I podcast: Recording

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

I do a lot of podcasting. And I am often asked about what tools I use and how I produce my podcasts. So in a series of articles on this site, I hope to detail my approach to making podcasts. What I don’t intend is to suggest that this is the only way to make podcasts—it’s just the way that I make them. If I can provide some sort of inspiration—or even a cautionary example of what not to do—I’m glad to do so.

While I think it’s true that many people underestimate how much work goes into making a podcast, I also get the sense that other people overestimate the time I spend. And depending on what kind of a podcast you’re creating, the amount of time required to put it together can vary widely. The average episode of The Incomparable takes several hours to edit; the average Vulcan Hello I can turn around in 10 minutes.

Continue reading “How I podcast: Recording”…