Quick thoughts that link out to other sites
Tomorrow, Thursday March 25, I’ll be streaming with my designer friend Joey Banks and walking him through some of the oddities of the Home app, working on scenes, grouping devices, and HomeKit automations:
Join us on YouTube – and add my livestream calendar to tune into future streams.
I’ve created a new Google Calendar for all of my livestreams so that folks can add it to their devices and see when I’ll be live for both public and private member streams:
I’ll include links for each event for public YouTube streams, member posts with unlisted streams embedded inside, and my Twitch channel.
Check out the calendar online here and add it directly to your Calendar using the iCal format.
Last Friday, the episode of Automators that I recorded with Rosemary Orchard and David Sparks dropped — and it’s a great hour-and-a-half conversation about the current state of Shortcuts.
Rose, David, & I haven’t talked since the release of iOS 14, so this is a dive into how I’ve been applying those features, my latest breakthrough with my shortcuts, and my updated Shortcuts Library.
Rose & David are my kind of people, so this conversation was naturally a blast — listen to the full episode:
Last week, I had the pleasure of being a guest on episode 4 of Sigmund Judge’s podcast Magic Rays of Light, a new show dedicated to all things Apple TV.
That episode is out now and available to download in your podcast app of choice.
Talking with Sigmund was a treat and we had a great conversation about:
As part of my new Shortcuts Catalog1, I’ve created a brand-new newsletter called What’s New in Shortcuts?.
This free newsletter is designed for anyone interested in learning more about Siri Shortcuts, covering:
* feature updates as they’re discovered,
* interesting ways to use Shortcuts related to topical stories, and
* creative new shortcuts or apps with Shortcuts actions.
In addition, What’s New in Shortcuts acts as a way to subscribe to learn about future updates to my Shortcuts Library, Action Directory, and upcoming additions to the Shortcuts Catalog.
Your email each week will consist of a short-and-sweet series of bulleted lists explaining ways you can use Siri, the Shortcuts app, and related technology, all written out as trigger phrases like “Hey Siri, remind me to vote early.”
Each line will link out to a page in the Catalog, directly to an iCloud URL for a shortcut, or to an article on my site or someone else’s2.
At the bottom, you’ll also find member updates around any new pre-release shortcuts or bonus content available for the Shortcuts Catalog – check out my membership page to learn more3.
Plus, if you aren’t a member, there will still be free shortcuts every week.
And that’s it!
Subscribe now and you can easily stay up-to-date with all the best ways to use Apple’s new automation tools in your daily life – from myself and the growing Shortcuts community4.
New emails go out weekly on Fridays — just after the “What’s New in Alexa” emails 😈 — so there’s time to read up and experiment with things over the weekend.
Sign up today and look the next issue soon – I’m looking forward to sharing more with you all!
Then, make sure post them as a good shareable tweet so I can retweet as well and DM it to me. ↩
Shortcuts creator and designer Brad Siefert has created a dedicated website for people looking to discover various links and creators related to Siri Shortcuts – check out the new Shortcuts Directory.
Em Lazer-Walker, Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, on what she’s calling the “audio version of ARKit” in iOS 14:
They talked about this largely in context of playing movies with multi-channel surround sound, but that’s probably the least interesting application of spatial audio.
As someone who’s been working in the field for a long time — my research at the MIT Media Lab in 2015 and 2016 focused on location-based storytelling in public spaces using spatial audio — I wanted to try to give some context around why this is interesting and what it might enable.
Fascinating summary of Apple’s new Spatial Audio feature and its potential – this covers what it is, how it differs from surround sound, and goes into detailed applications for this like wayfinding, vocal content, and real-world play/gaming experiences.
Every year for the past few years, John Gruber of Daring Fireball has interviewed an Apple executive or two on his podcast The Talk Show, just after WWDC and often in a venue right nearby the conference.
This year, as with everything else WWDC, it was done online, with special guests Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Apple, and Greg Jozwiak, Apple’s Vice President of Product Marketing.
Federighi and “Joz” filmed from Apple Park (in seemingly separate rooms, as one does nowadays) over the web with Gruber for over an hour and a half, which you can watch on YouTube:
Recorded June 11th, I had the privilege to be on Andru Edwards and Jon Rettinger’s podcast Geared Up.
We had a great conversation where I told them all about Siri Shortcuts, plus we covered Andru’s YouTube situation, Apple’s worldwide developer conference (WWDC) & the transition to ARM Macs, and the PS5 announcements – here are the show links:
New shortcut: I’m washing my hands:
Sets a timer for 20 seconds so that you can wash your hands thoroughly without thinking about how long it takes.
Use this to help internalize how long it takes to wash your hands, especially amongst the Coronavirus concerns.
