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.
Category: Links
Quick thoughts that link out to other sites
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.
Matt Haughey, writing for his site A Whole Lotta Nothing:
As you might have guessed from a previous post, I’m not a fan of carrying keys and or even having to use them. When I moved to a new place, I knew I’d use the front door as my main point of entry (instead of a garage attached to a house), so I wanted to get it as automated as possible, where the front door unlocks as I approach it, and locks when I leave.
Matt started with an August Smart Lock and ended up getting NFC tags so that everyone in his family could tap in and out of the house. Be sure to check out the full article for all his photos of the setup too.
This bit is excellent – I’m definitely thinking about NFC “skins” instead of having white dots all over the place:
To make them blend in a bit more, I went to my local Lowe’s and bought a $5 roll of adhesive-backed shelf paper in a maple pattern that mostly matched my wood posts. I used a NFC tag as a template, traced it onto the paper, and cut out two holes, then pulled off the backing and stuck them over the tags. From a distance, you can barely tell they’re there since I put the NFC stickers over wood knots and they look like wood repair patches now.
I’ve joked before that Matt is my smart home spirit animal – he continues to fill that role well ?.
Last Monday night, I streamed on Twitch for about a half hour on the topic of Ferrite for iPad with my friend Alec Pulianas, a computer engineer and podcast editor at AMP Creative Studios.
We both edit podcasts and audio using Ferrite, a purpose-built audio editing app designed primarily for spoken word content (as opposed to Logic Pro or Garage Band which were built for music). It works on both iPhone and iPad, enabling a very natural touch input paradigm for editing your audio that both Alec and I prefer to use.
In our stream, we talked about the additional benefits when you edit on the iPad, including how using the Apple Pencil in this app feels like a remote control and which custom settings we use to edit.
We also covered details like Ferrite templates, the keyboard shortcuts, and a few of the downsides as well – it doesn’t have the same speed-changing capabilities as Logic, for example.
I really enjoyed talking with Alec—he’s a great guy—about this tool we both enjoy, especially because it’s changed how I edit audio and opened up where I can do my work.
Check out the clip on Twitch and follow my channel if you want to see future streams like this.1
- I’ve saved the entire stream as a “highlight” so it lasts past Twitch’s normal 30-days, but doing so unfortunately removes the live view count and chat comments. ↩
On episode 14 of Smart Tech Today, Mikah and I talked about what I saw at CES 2020.
But before I get to what we covered in the show, I have exciting news – Smart Tech Today is now available as a video show in addition to our regular podcast feed!
We’ve always had the cameras on for our livestream, but the show’s been doing well enough to add in video production as well.
So, make sure to subscribe on YouTube if you want to watch along afterwards, or add the video podcast feed to get them delivered directly in Apple Podcasts.
Today’s new shortcut is How far did I walk today? is designed for CES attendees but is also good for anyone really:
Looks at the Health app for total steps and distance for today, then formats the information to display in an alert or be spoken back from Siri.
Uses only the Apple Watch as the main source of data so no information is duplicated from the phone.
New shortcut “Which CES shuttle should I take?“ for CES attendees:
Pulls from a dictionary of CES hotel names and their associated shuttle #s, lets you choose from the names, then tells you which shuttle to take.
Also opens your final destination in Maps so you can follow along.
