A while ago Jason Snell said that he would do a streamer box/dongle shoot-out on an episode of Upgrade, and today’s the day he hit publish. It’s well worth your time to read it, particularly if you aren’t as familiar with “the state of the art” in the streaming landscape. The last time I did a “device shoot-out” was in 2016, and none of the platforms are the same. I certainly stopped recommending Fire TVs, and only recommend Apple TVs.
My usage of the Fire TV completely fell by the wayside as they overhauled the interface to include more and more advertising. Prime Video also has ads. Everything. Has. Ads.
That Jason Snell was able to get an ad for a local mattress retailer is a pretty clear indicator that Amazon’s insatiable appetite for advertising has only increased. I even thought about reconnecting my Fire TV 4K stick so see how bad it’s gotten, but as Jason pointed out, no one’s paying me to use one.
I’ve never had personal experience with Google’s platform, and that is perhaps the most interesting section in Snell’s overview —from the perspective of someone that mostly uses Apple products. It’s not that I’m considering picking one up, but it’s just interesting.
I would caution Apple fans from skimming this and coming away with only the comforting affirmation that the Apple TV is the frontrunner in TV streaming boxes/dongles. Snell’s clearly demonstrated that the Apple TV isn’t a laggard, but he also outlined where the competition has a leg-up on Apple. Mark Gurman’s original racing analogy doesn’t work when you’re talking about devices with many features that each can excel or fall behind.
While it’s easy for Apple fans (who are predisposed to not like, or expect ads) to point to the ads in Apple’s competition as a sign of poor quality in and of themselves, it’s worth remembering that people have different thresholds for frustration and trade-offs they will tolerate. Like I outlined in my piece for Six Colors about FAST, some people accept ads in an array of forms if their TV viewing experience is easy or inexpensive.
On a person-by-person basis there are certainly lines for what’s too much advertising, but no agreed upon quantitative or qualitative metric. Each person knows the “too much” line when they see it, and the companies all see numbers go up, or down, against other dollar signs, and engagement patterns before they decide to pull back, or push forward.
You know what they say: One man’s trash is another Mancini’s Sleep World.
It certainly took me by surprise when Apple contacted me, of all people, to be the sole news outlet to run the story about the fifth MacBook Air color being added to the recently updated line-up. Certainly they were contacting me out of deep respect, and not as a prank, right? Second, I didn’t know why this color was released so soon after the line was refreshed.
When I hopped on the WebEx call with Apple (my first, and probably only, ever time using WebEx so I savored it) I asked directly why there was a gap in product releases. I’m unclear on what part of their response I’m supposed to say since I just scribbled “Is this on background???” in the margin and never asked. It would seem that Apple wanted to release this color in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, or possibly as a condition of their settlement with the European Commission over using Ireland to dodge taxes. Or maybe it was just acoincidence? As an aside, I told them that I was one quarter Irish on my dad’s side of the family, but they didn’t have much of a reaction.
There was a mild smile, and tiny shake of the head side-to-side when I asked if this was just because people thought all the silvers are too similar. They didn’t say anything though. It was just very tense.
When I looked at the product photos Apple provided me I had to ask if they hue shifted the background and screen to be green in Photoshop or if it really was green. They assured me that there’s no mistaking this “gorgeous new shamrock”. That part they definitely told me to write down.
Maybe you have to see it in person?
They were also excited to tell me that there is also a color-matched charging cable for the new hint o’ mint. All of which is available today through the Apple Store to customers.
I wondered if buyers who recently purchased a sky blue MacBook Air would feel left out, and need to trade-in their product soon, but that’s when Apple surprised me with their latest green initiative. Apple said that while a midnight M4 MacBook Air buyer would have to use the traditional product exchange process any customer who bought a M4 MacBook Air will be able to instantly exchange it for shamrock. They won’t have to go to the Apple Store, ship products, or deal with wasteful packaging.
This product swap is entirely carbon neutral and done with energy offsets only. It seemed too good to be true, but any customer that purchased their M4 MacBook Air in sky blue, starlight, or silver will receive a new receipt by email that shows that they bought a shamrock MacBook Air, and also a new green desktop wallpaper. I don’t effectively know how that changes the color, but they said it definitely does, and then said “carbon neutral” again.
I look forward to seeing the machine in person, and especially in the vicinity of other colors, so that the bold new hue will hopefully pop —or seem like it’s more than a fourth silver.
Today I needed to scan a document I received in the mail and email it to someone. Nothing arduous, I just don’t do it very often so I forgot where the “Scan Document” function lived.
I’m glad that Scan Document function exists, and it works just fine. Bravo to the people at Apple that made it.
First, I opened the Camera app —because this is the app that takes photographs— and it wasn’t there. It’s because I’m thinking Camera -> Photo -> Attachment, when the way it works is Attachment -> Camera -> Photo.
I searched “scan a document” with Duck Duck Go, and it took me to the Apple Support document titled: How to scan documents on your iPhone or iPad. The support document started with detailed instructions on how to scan with the Notes app, and then there were instructions at the bottom for the Files app.
I followed the instructions and then went to attach it to my email with the paperclip icon, where I saw another Scan Document, which that Apple Support document neglected to mention and would have cut out intermediary steps in this instance.
Oh well, I got there in the end.
Thinking back to Apple’s statement to John Gruber boasting about Siri product knowledge, and Gruber rightfully pointing out on Mastodon that product knowledge isn’t very accurate, or helpful. I figured this was a time where I should at least try to use it. I already knew there was a support document, so it should at least send me to that.
That is what product knowledge is, after all, it’s a thing that displays part of the Apple Support document. It’s only display one thing, but it’ll do it with absolute certainty. A deep-link to the Tips app will take you right to the documentation, but you can’t share the document from the Tips app even though it also exists online at Apple’s own website. Also, for some reason, there are differences between Tips and the web, like the part about the Files app is in the web version of the document, but absent from Tips even in the latest iOS 18.3.2. If you’re looking up something on behalf of someone else and plan to send instructions to them it’s better to do that from the web, using a real search engine.
I typed my request to Siri on my iPhone and started typing “Scan” where it presented three suggestions above before I even typed “a document”. Open Simple Scan (an app I forgot I installed which would have done exactly what I wanted, sorry Greg), Open Scan+ (another app I forgot I installed, but appears to be abandoned), and Scan Document with the Files icon. That last one opens the Files app and puts you right in the document scanning interface.
As I already mentioned, that is but one of many routes built in to iOS to scan a document. There’s no way I can discover to request Notes for scanning. Any mention of “note” or “notes” makes Siri start the interface for composing a note with Siri completely ignoring the instruction to scan a document. The same thing happens if you say “mail” or “email” where it will just go right into the on-screen email composition wizard. Neither allow for attachments, which means you can’t get to the menu to scan a document for Notes or Mail.
It was taking everything I typed as a command to act on. It disregarded anything it couldn’t act on in favor of specific keywords. That’s why the mere use of “note” or “mail” made it ignore the rest of what I had said.
Speaking of keywords, in case you’re curious, from Spotlight, “Scan” shows you actions, such as directly scan in Simple Scan (which Siri does not), or directly scan into the Files app (which Siri does). Spotlight has nothing for Mail or Files. There is, however, “Scanned Documents” deep-link in notes to take you directly to things you have previously scanned.
Back to Siri: When I put the word “How” at the start of my request it went through Siri product knowledge and relayed instructions to me on how to accomplish those steps. “How to scan a document” returns the top part of the aforementioned Apple Support document, showing instructions only for Scan Document inside of Notes.
Phrasing the question this way omits the fact that Siri can open Scan Document in Files directly, or even the rest of the support page mentioning at all Files, or any other support page like you’d see if you did a web search.
If I typed “How to scan and email a document?” it gave me some abbreviated, generic instructions from the world famous scannmore.com to open any email app, and add an attachment. This is quite useless because it isn’t relevant.
Yeah that was the part that had me stumped.
If I typed “How to scan a document in Mail?” I got the incredibly verbose instructions to do that from a different Apple Support document: Add email attachments in Mail on iPhone.
Which one of these is not like the other?
I don’t know why the instructions aren’t the same, “tap the paperclip” like they are in the document, and Tips. Do any of you know the “>” is called the Expand Toolbar button? I know you know that the “>” moves back and forth every time you tap it and that it takes three taps of that shifting “>” to get to the Attach File button. There also isn’t an “Insert Attachments Action Button” but there is an Attach File, which is not what you want because the Files browser pop-over can’t Scan Documents like the Files app can. Instead of anything with “Attach” in the name you want “Scan Document” which is another tap of “>” —sorry, Expand Toolbar button.
If you scroll down in that original Siri overlay you can tap the “iPhone User Guide” (2 topics)” which shows a pop-up over the modal with truncated titles for the Apple Support documents in Tips. The first is allegedly what Siri is pulling from but the text is totally different, as I said, and the second one contains the Notes app instructions. I have no idea where Siri pulled this from. Did the team that added product knowledge do some weird logic to turn icons into words and thus mess up the meaning?
Just as a reminder, this is what the interface looks like…
I mapped out many variations of the request here:
You can click on it if you really want to get in there and look.
It occurred to me that this is why I so seldom see any of Siri’s product knowledge. I’m typing in the box like it’s a Google or DuckDuckGo search. However it accepts the text as a command, where the overriding logic is to do something —anything— even if it partially ignores the keywords in the rest of the request because certain keywords, like “how”, flip the logic gate and make it behave in a completely different way.
It doesn’t have the logic to know that it isn’t capable of fulfilling my request to both scan and email a document. It can’t revert to displaying the entirety of the support documents. The support documents are inexplicably severed into one that has Notes and Files, and one that has Mail instructions. There’s no way to formulate a request to get instructions to Scan Document in Files, but it’s also the only one that be directly opened by Siri, if you say the incantation exactly so.
This isn’t LLM-AI-AGI-GPT-Multi-Modal stuff. This isn’t trillions in funding and melting a glacier. It’s the kind of logic you’d use in a search engine where relevance comes into play. This doesn’t require years of research into a new field of study. Typing this in the blank address bar of a web browser is the level of technological advancement that outpaces Siri. Siri can’t be this picky about syntax when no one else is.
Sure, typing “Scan” and seeing “Scan Document” which launches the Scan Document function in Files is something only Apple can do, but it’s not what I needed or wanted to do in this particular case, and it is ultimately inflexible. I wanted to scan and email a document, which it can’t do, and won’t tell me about unless I use the magic word: How.
Apple’s statement to John Gruber last week that they are delaying “More Personalized Siri” has certainly sparked some conversation. With Gruber himself going on to write a pretty scathing post about this whole debacle. People certainly took note. A key part of what John wrote was that he believed in the company’s claims, because it would be unlike Present Day Apple to promote something that they couldn’t ship.
The announcement about “More Personalized Siri” fit perfectly with my expectations, which has possibly made me the person who is the least rattled by this news. The reason my expectations were so low wasn’t just because of my initial wariness, but because that wariness was confirmed by what Apple has been shipping.
Gruber details some of those features, and how there were demos, which meant that there was some reality to them. I look at it from the other side, where I’m evaluating the quality of what’s available to poke and prod at in public releases to gauge not just those features but Apple’s ability to deliver on future features.
Apple very rarely has the time to refine anything they ship. Version one of a thing tends to stick around for a long time with only extras bolted on, or omitted, because the people involved are simply too busy for a second pass. Because the bar to ship quality software is so low, and the need to revise quickly is nearly nonexistent, there was never any chance that they’d meet expectations for the robust features Apple was promising.
Let’s review what Apple actually shipped as Apple Intelligence.
The scandal that’s received the most attention, prior to this, was the notification summary debacle. Apple tried to defend themselves from criticism by hiding behind the beta label on Apple Intelligence. Jason Snell wrote:
Beta software contains an implicit promise that the developer will actively work to squash bugs and make the product better before it goes final. Adding a warning label in the interim is an easy band-aid, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem. Apple needs to do much more work here, and if it can’t, it needs to turn this feature off until it can release a version it can stand behind.
In 18.2 Apple added categories to mail, which were not really about Apple Intelligence but kinda sorta? Cumulatively, all the changes to Mail have been pretty bad, and it hasn’t been improved. It is a feature that I have turned off. It’s only been recently shipped to the Mac and iPad, and they aren’t any better off with for it. But hey, promise to ship it is fulfilled, amirite?
Then there are Writing Tools, which is something I never think about until I go to use a context menu on iOS to copy, or translate text. Writing Tools is always there. I’ve tried to use it to proofread my writing, but it just spits back out my input and doesn’t explain why it didn’t change anything. It’s also slow, the UI is weird, it’s in a context menu, and it’s only on my iPhone because my Mac can’t run Apple Intelligence. Apple doesn’t use Private Cloud Compute to run this, but any person on earth can open a web browser and use an LLM to do the same thing Apple says you need a thousand dollar phone for.
It’s ironic that the thing that LLM’s are best suited for —mushing up some words— is pegged to hardware, stuffed into a menu, and has an awkward UI. But hey, that shipped!
Lastly, we have Swift autocompletion (which did ship) and Swift Assist (which did not). That this hasn’t shipped isn’t a huge, public-facing issue for Apple, like all the others, but it is another thing that’s damaging Apple’s relationship with developers. OpenAI shipped a ChatGPT integration with Xcode, which should be even more embarrassing. As someone that opens Xcode on occasion, and has taken stabs at writing Swift, the app is so byzantine and strange, with a bloated, overly-decorated language, that assistance isn’t the worst idea in the world.
Image Playgrounds has received a lot of negative press, and deservedly so. The images it produces are quite bad, and because the interface prioritizes selecting photos of you, or someone you know, you get the added benefit of insulting yourself, loved ones, and friends. In fairness to Apple, this feature produces results that are very like what they demoed, because those images were just as wince-inducing. Remember Super Mom? There have been no improvements to the output in any of the styles Apple shipped. You can have “animation” which is a medium not a style, or “illustration” which always makes me look like an angry Willem Dafoe.
WHO WANTS SOME TACOS?
Believe it or not, but the image at the top of this post is from Image Playground and it was produced with the playful, bubble inputs of “chickens roosting” and “home”. This is a feature Apple demoed, put in betas, and shipped without every course-correcting. There is absolute confidence that this is what consumers want, and that it benefits them.
The same can be said of Magic Wand, which has a “sketch” style absent from Image Playgrounds. I don’t know why you can’t use sketch in Image Playgrounds, and I don’t know why you can’t draw in Image Playgrounds itself. Whatever! It shipped! It does things and went to customers! Can’t wait to see what you do with it blah blah blah!
In the grand scheme of things Image Playgrounds and Magic Wand are actually pretty insignificant because they are so deeply uncool that no one wants to use them. If you see someone post an image that looks like it came from Image Playgrounds you will judge them for it.
Genmoji, on the other hand, is what Apple has decided to lean heavily on. They can’t lean on Siri, notifications, or even the dorky awkwardness of Writing Tools. It also hasn’t improved in any noticeable way, and you can still get mangled, Cronenberg-esque images out of it, but that doesn’t matter to Apple. It shipped, put the dancing hippo on the billboard!
Finally, something Apple shipped and can brag about.
The feature that’s the most sound is Clean Up. It’s a decent effort from Apple. I evaluated it in a video for Six Colors. It needs more work, but it’s acceptable. As far as I know it’s not been improved since it shipped, or if it has it’s been in a way too subtle for me to notice. It will smear edges, make polygonal hashes, etc. It’s good enough, and it probably won’t be touched again for years.
Lastly, we have Visual Intelligence, which doesn’t generate images, but will tell you about an image. This is so poorly conceived that I don’t even understand how the concept pitch for visual intelligence was green-lit. It relies on using the Camera Control —you know, that mini button/trackpad that does 48 other things you accidentally bump? What’s one more overloaded function between friends? Except if you have an older phone or iPhone 16e, which will use the Action Button.
It doesn’t make it obvious what will happen when you hit the “shutter” button which captures an image for processing, not taking a picture. If there’s text, it can summarize the text, but it will only show you the summarize button once you tap the “shutter”, and won’t indicate that ability beforehand.
The same is true for translation, which is still a better experience in Apple’s own Translate app because it will show a live text translation overlay as you’re moving the camera.
Without hitting the “shutter” it will show you buttons for Ask —which will only ever ask ChatGPT, and you must agree to their privacy permissions— or Search —which will only ever do a Google image search. Both of these are inferior to using those products independently, and neither provides any of the privacy Apple has been promising about their products.
Craig Federighi leaned heavily on Private Cloud Compute in the marketing since WWDC. No one even knows what it does on a practical, applied level. It doesn’t run private image search models, or private instances of ChatGPT.
Apple did add plants and animal recognition, which was something the Photos app could do, but Visual Intelligence could not. However I have been unable to get it to appear at all, and it also killed my iPhone Photos app’s ability to do plant and animal recognition and I don’t know why.
I can take a photo on my iPhone, sync to my Mac, which doesn’t have Apple Intelligence at all, and it will show the plant recognition leaf symbol as it has done for years. So it’s not like I’m taking photos of unrecognizable plants.
This takes us to another thing about Visual Intelligence: you can’t run Visual Intelligence on a photo that you already took. Unlike a Google image search, or similar, it will only accept your fake shutter button non-photos as input. Again, this is worse than existing products.
So, just in that little run-through, you can hopefully see what I see. The problem isn’t just “More Personalized Siri” not shipping, the problem is what did ship, and what that portends for all future releases. Software quality is out the window, so for “More Personalized Siri” to not meet the low bar of something like Visual Intelligence…
The thing about “AI” (chatbots) is that it really did take Apple by surprise, but chatbots are merely a tool that can be used. The most logical place to use it is in Siri, the thing you chat with, but people are only clamoring for that because nothing Apple has done to improve Siri has been sufficient. Let’s go back to Apple’s statement, through Jacquelin Roy to Gruber, where they left him holding their bag of empty promises:
Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT.
I don’t want to minimize this effort but these have not been transformative, and I frequently see these criticized - like the ChatGPT integration getting things wrong that the ChatGPT app gets right (for those who care about ChatGPT). This hasn’t been six months of success.
What they did ship for Siri was as damning as what they didn’t. None of those things matter, or do anything significant. The only thing they did with Siri in the past year that was significant was add the new visual language for Siri. I believe every Apple pundit under the sun has been in agreement that that was a huge mistake because it signaled change where there was no meaningful change.
Last week, I asked my boyfriend what time he wanted to eat lunch. My wrist must have been elevated, and apparently Raise to Speak was enabled, even though I don’t remember turning that back on. Siri responded on my Watch with “I don’t eat or drink. But I always have an appetite for a good conversation.”
That’s conversational Siri. That’s the results of years and years of effort on Siri. That’s because of the writer’s rooms generating canned responses to questions. That’s years and years of shipping updates to Siri. That’s the full power of a fully operational Cupertino brought to bear on misunderstanding what was happening and doing what it shouldn’t.
There was never any world where “More Personalized Siri” was going to ship. Even if they had a demo, I wouldn’t have any faith it would survive in real-world use. Much like I don’t have any faith in Amazon’s Alexa+ that was very carefully announced and demoed.
I know that Apple has made many mistakes in the past —the one that this is the most similar to is Apple Maps, not AirPower— and it’s true that they have runway to continue to work on the execution.
When third party solutions fall short on Apple’s platforms it’s not a problem. When first party solutions fall short on Apple’s platforms it is a very big problem. When Copilot barfs on some code, oh well, you’ll tweak it and run it again, it’s not like it’s built into the platform. Copilot duplicating import statements also isn’t mission critical, like what time your appointment is, or when the flight with your mother arrives. There is a difference between working on a task, and living your life 24/7 with an assistant.
I don’t think that Open AI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot are a threat to Apple’s revenue. They’re going after reducing labor in the workplace, which means reducing the workforce so they can collect money from what would have been salaries for employees. That they have a consumer angle is only to reinforce their lead in the workplace with people asking to use those tools, which will cost more and more over time.
Neither one of them would do well with making a smartphone (Microsoft, especially, has learned this lesson). They can, however position themselves to sit in the place that Google occupies for providing services to consumers. This is why ChatGPT is integrated with Siri.
Meta, likewise, is not going to have another fiasco making a phone. They’re angling for synthetic “content” and synthetic accounts that people follow which can be tailored for engagement and advertising purposes. This will also be very lucrative for them without having to ship a phone.
Google’s Gemini is actually the one place where Apple needs to be concerned because Google is putting Gemini into phones. Which was part of the reason it was bizarre to hear Apple executives openly discuss Gemini as a possible candidate for their integration with Siri.
That takes us full circle to Google supplying the Maps data in iOS. A dependency that could be leveraged to get information about Apple customers, and to fortify Android as a competitor that offered the same mapping abilities for less than Apple.
How much of that is Apple hoping to shift its lucrative search deal with Google to a Siri Integration deal where they can capture sales revenue from compromised customer privacy? How much does Apple want to make an App Store for Siri integrations where they can one day financially benefit from being the middle-man?
I’d bet that’s something, but it’s probably mostly because they know they’d be able to ship it and it would look like Apple was doing visible things with Siri that were going out the door.
While no one is really going to take Apple at their word for any Apple Intelligence features they announce at WWDC 2025, they’ll be able to believe in work from third parties that already have products. The cupboards are pretty bare for anything Apple can ship, and they clearly can’t go back and improve anything.
Maybe Apple is hoping that their much-feared visual refresh of each OS will be enticing —just like the Siri glow was dangled in front of customers without Siri improvements to back it up. This turd is still a turd, but it now has an emphasis on transparency and depth.
What I’m mostly anticipating is a continued drop in quality and standards, as evident by what’s been shipped this year. On multiple occasions people have reported Apple Intelligence being re-enabled for them (even in macOS 15.3.2), or there was that time Image Playgrounds was advertised in Settings.
This transformative year, where everything got just a little worse in Apple Land. Where if you complained about Apple Intelligence online some drive-by commenter was as likely to tell you it would get better, or tell you to turn it off. Nothing’s getting better, and turning it off won’t make a problem of this magnitude go away.
I hate Shortcuts. I don’t ever want to use it. The interface is bad, nothing ever makes any sense, but it’s the only way to do certain things, especially if you want to have some kind of automation that works on iOS too. Yesterday, when I was writing my blog post, I wanted to include screenshots of the ugly PlexAmp interface. The screenshots for iOS are almost always vertical 9:16, so it’s awkward to stack many of those vertically. I usually use Shortcuts’ Combine Images to take a selection of images and combine them horizontally into one wide set of screenshots.
The problem is that Combine Images has no control over direction. It does this pretty sophisticated image operation, but it only does it newest (left) to oldest (right). That’s asinine because we’re in a culture where you read left to right so the oldest thing should be on the left. There should at least be a checkbox to reverse the order. There isn’t. It does it that way, and that way only.
If this was Python I’d just images[::-1] and call it a day. I can’t do regex to save my life, but index slicing is a piece of cake. Even if I didn’t know the index slicing off the top of my head there’s both list(reversed(images)) to reverse a list to a new list, and a images.reverse() method to modify your existing list in-place. Any of these things you can find by using Google, or Duck Duck Go, or whatever LLM you want. There is so much good, thorough documentation.
Shortcuts is too sophisticated and user-friendly to offer these solutions.
Unfortunately, I can’t use Python to do it if I want it to work on iOS, I must use Shortcuts. I should be able to build something to reverse the order with these off-brand Duplo blocks, right? Searching inside Shortcuts yields no results for “order”, “reorder”, “reverse”. NO RESULTS, JERRY!
I asked Gemini, and it said that there wasn’t anything either, but I could construct a for loop with a counter to iterate through the list I wanted to reverse. The Dark Ages. Duck Duck Go’s privacy-focused duck.ai offered access to GPT-4o and it simply made-up “Reverse action” in Shortcuts. That’s one way to solve a problem.
I asked on Mastodon, incredulous that there was no way to do this, and Nick Foster recommended the third-party Shortcuts tools from Toolbox Pro and Actions. I didn’t love having to do it with a third party library, but Sindre Sorhus’ Actions was free, so it was worth a shot.
Sure enough, Actions has Reverse List, and it reversed the list, but Combine Images would not accept it and said that it required image data. I thought that this might be a type issue, as data passes through in a variety of formats in Shortcuts, so maybe Reverse List altered it in a way that Combine Images didn’t like. Maybe this was now a list of files? More on this later.
I went to look for something to map paths back to images, which meant I was searching for “files” based operations. That’s when I came across Filter Files.
You’ll never fucking guess what Filter Files can do. Mostly because the description for Filter Files is poorly written.
Given a list of files, this action returns the files that match the given criteria.
Sort by
Optionally, what to sort the files by.
Limit
Whether or not to limit the number of files that are passed as output.
Get
The maximum number of files.
Result
The files that match the criteria.
It’s not reversing the order, it’s Sort by: Creation Date and then the hidden dropdown for Order: Oldest to Newest appears. How did something so simple —reversing the order of a list— get turned into a bunch of hard-coded, and very specific interface elements.
But wait, there’s more! Don’t forget about Filter Images. It has an identical description for what it does. I would argue that if you have two very similar but distinct items that’s precisely when you don’t want their descriptions to match. They are mostly the same, except Filter Images includes width, height, orientation, date taken, time taken, frame rate, and duration. That’s a lot of stuff in both of these filters that would be hard to code for yourself, so it’s not like the Shortcuts team is lazy. They just didn’t execute well on making sure you could know where these powerful functions are or how to use them, or making lesser functions (like a simple reverse).
For my purposes, either Filter can be used interchangeably, but neither showed up when I was trying to find a way to do this with Gemini, searching the internet, or asking online. In fact, when I posted about finding these a couple people thanked me because they never knew these existed.
This raises questions such as:
Why are there two of these?
Shouldn’t there just be a way to to reorder or sort any data based on the attributes of the incoming data, and not hardcoding different filter sets that mostly overlap?
Why don’t either of these turn up when you search for ‘order’, ‘reverse’, or ‘reorder’ when ‘Order’ is the named attribute in the secret menu that appears?
This might sound familiar if you read my rant about Search in Settings, but every part of Apple is inclined to write their own search from scratch, which means they all suck, and they all suck differently. Search is also the primary interface for building any automation in Shortcuts. If you don’t know exactly what you need you might not find it.
One of the other many annoying things about Shortcuts is that when you change a block upstream of another it can break the connections that Shortcuts automatically made for you. Even if the names of the variables still match, there is some invisible connection logic that Shortcuts does. This is unlike any other scripting language where you just need to make sure you didn’t make a typo with the variable and you’re all set.
It won’t break if I change the name of my_list to your_list as long as I do it in both places. Python doesn’t care. It’s just text. It’s not invisibly-connected text. Connection is visible as the matching characters and that’s it.
This is relevant because I noticed that even when I was passing perfectly good images from Filter that Combine didn’t want to work. There was no thin, gray line connecting Filter and Combine, but Combine had the variable pointing to the output of Filter. I even right-clicked on the variable in Combine, and did Select Variable to point it at Filter’s output but it wouldn’t connect. It showed as valid —valid is blue, if you wanted to know— but obviously the data wasn’t flowing.
You'd think the lack of a line makes it easy to debug the missing connection, but good luck figuring out what you can change when everything else is identical to the working version.
I deleted the Combine and put down a fresh one after Filter, and it connected correctly. It turns out that there’s a bug in Shortcuts (GASP! Shock! Horror!) where Combine Images will permanently lose it’s upstream connection if you put anything above it, no matter what variable you select. However this only happens on my MacBook Pro running 15.3, not my iPhone running iOS 18.3, which does connect Combine Images as expected with it’s phantasmal powers.
Remember when I said I’d get back to Sindre’s Reverse List? Well it fucking works great, as a matter of fact! It wasn’t working when I put it down only because it broke the invisible Shortcuts connection, just like what happened with the Filters. I only figured it out after I went through the other steps.
It’s good to know that there’s a solution that doesn’t require installing third party tools, but the simplicity of a function that does one thing, like reverse, and it’s the thing it’s called, is something the people working on Shortcuts could surely take a lesson from. Rather than Filter Files or Filter Images, which are packed with functionality but don’t explain themselves, and aren’t as universal.
Since my previous blogposts on this subject, where I found out that all the streaming services are either bad because of how they treat artists, or bad because how they treat the world, I tried some far less desirable options.
I have been very resistant to using Plex. I used Handbrake a million years ago to rip DVDs for my iPod Video, and iPod Touch. It was a fuss. Plex is a fuss. I don’t want to fuss! However, people kept mentioning it to both me, and to David Pierce, that I tried it for music. After all, music should be a simpler problem than movies, right?
Plex doesn’t read any data from my Music library, or XML files. It looks at the directories and makes up its own database. This means none of my likes, stars, play counts, playlists, etc. go to Plex. I searched and there used to be an iTunes plugin for Plex, but they deprecated it.
The desktop browser interface is bad. Comically awful. They don’t even make an Electron app so you don’t have to look at the localhost address bar stuff.
The really awful part is actually the part people were excited about: PlexAmp. It’s their iOS app that requires a $4.99 subscription. Even though I’m hosting everything, I pay them $5 a month. Surely that means the app is polished? No, of course not.
My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
It’s full of jewel-tone puke gradients. They filled the app with automated playlists that are generated based on moods from some database, and they don’t map to anything meaningful.
That this rose to the level of recommendation is mind-boggling. I can only assume that people have a deep investment in Plex for its other functions, so they are more willingly to go along with this.
I have no problem with Astiga in theory, and the developer is a really nice guy. The easiest way to use it is to connect it to your Dropbox, but … that means that Astiga has access to everything in my Dropbox, not just my music. I asked the developer (again, he’s very nice!) and there’s no way to limit the scope like you used to be able to do with app folders for Dropbox. That meant that the next easiest/cheapest thing to do was to use a S3 bucket (not from Amazon, but from another provider) that would cost $4.99, in addition to the $4.99 for Astiga. That’s a lot to self-host music.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work super well for some of the same reasons as Plex. It doesn’t import my library XML, just the files. The web player isn’t very good. For iOS, I used Amperfy, but it also wasn’t a particularly great player, and it all seemed laggy. Either from my storage, or the off-brand bucket.
That’s just too many things that aren’t working for me to continue with it, or to recommend this kind of approach. I know people are very into Navidrome, or Jellyfin with Manet, but this is decidedly not for me.
I’m back to what I was doing for most of my music listening lifetime and that’s using iTunes Music, but not using Apple Music, and also … doing it in the Finder? That also means I have to deal with large parts of the Music app interface that are just billboards to get me to subscribe to Apple Music.
Gotta make that Services revenue go up.
It’s extremely tacky, and it makes the app annoying. However, it has all my data inside of it, and it works with CarPlay. I just have to have all my music files on my device. Despite paying for iCloud, that’s for files, photos, and data, but not your music library, which is only a cloud product through Apple Music.
It really is a shame about the interface though. I’m not the kind of person that relents just because I’m sick of seeing an ad, it has to be for a reason.
The other thing that I tried out was Albums, which is not a great name for SEO, but it explains some things about the app’s design. David Pierce had linked to it, and John Voorhees had even reviewed it on MacStories in 2021. It’s really all focused on an album-centric listening experience. For example: The playback timeline is for the album, not just the song you’re listening to (fortunately, you can change that in settings).
Look at all those old music purchases.
It does have little things in the interface to encourage you to pay for a premium subscription ($18.99/year), but not anything like Apple Music does. It also seems to use MusicKit, so it interacts with my Music library without having some other method for syncing or playlists. It does have its own Collections interface if you decided you wanted to invest in that for organization, but good luck getting that data out. I’ll skip it for now.
Albums is much better than Music if you want to browse a non-Apple-Music library without being constantly pestered. It’s what I’m sticking with right now.
As I mentioned at the start of this whole thing I don’t really listen to new music constantly, I will eventually want to listen to new music. That’s one of the things about Apple Music where I could just hit play and there it was. I also still have two subscription services (YouTube, Amazon) that stream music if I’m trying to decide to buy it, they’re just not places I want to keep a music library. As for purchasing music, Amazon still sells unencumbered MP3 files, but I’ll probably try the Qobuz store.
The unexpected thing about this whole experience of having to do library maintenance, moving around files, downloading, uploading, etc. is that I have an experience that’s centered on my library again instead of trying to get me to check out what’s new. I’ve rediscovered a lot of purchases that I had not listened to in a long while, like American Prince’s Other People, Bodies of Water’s A Certain Feeling, or Interpol’s Our Love to Admire. It’s like I cleaned out a closet and found them, except the closet was digital albums I hadn’t scrolled through recently.
Anyway, I saved $10.99 a month, or $131.88 a year which isn’t going to Apple, which is the grand total of my meager protest. I’m still paying them for iCloud+, and AppleCare. They still skim off all the app subscriptions I have (although I have moved everything I could to direct payments). I would still buy Apple products if I had to buy new hardware. There’s no chance that this amounts to anything at all, but didn’t we learn some fun stuff?
David Pierce apparently ran a parallel music app project while I was doing my own. He has a much wider pool to draw from at The Verge so he has services I’ve never heard of, like Astiga, which can stream your music from any cloud storage source, but they do charge a monthly subscription for that.
David got the same feedback I did, that people love Plex for music with the Plexamp app.
Plexamp and Roon both came up a _lot _as a way to manage and access your music collection from anywhere. (Supersonic also has some fans.) Plexamp in particular was probably the most-recommended piece of software in my inbox this week.
I don’t run a media server, so it doesn’t work for me without buying additional hardware, and managing that hardware as another project in addition to managing the music library itself. I could do that, but I could do a lot of things. Something like Astiga sounds more appealing on the surface, but the screenshots of compatible apps don’t look great, so I’m not sure it will service my needs.
David didn’t mention Deezer, which was one of the apps/services I tested, and liked the most of the three. That’s fine though, because I updated that post to mention that I’m not using Deezer after I found out more about who owns the company that has a controlling interest in it.
My Apple Music subscription is still going to lapse 2/26. I will use David’s list to test some other alternatives.
I was right that Apple Music isn’t special, and I do fee like they take users for granted — as there are a plethora of options. However, the ownership of nearly every one of these is shot through with people that support major anti-democratic politicians, or strong anti-artist policies.
I wrote about my dissatisfaction with Apple, and Tim Cook, a few weeks ago and said that I would be looking for ways to reduce what I’m spending with Apple. There is no great alternative for all of Apple’s products and services, because many alternatives are run by companies that align themselves with the same authoritarian interests as Apple. If I’m going to change something then there should be a reason why. It can be as simple as evaluating my recurring subscriptions through Apple and seeing which you can pay directly with the developer or service. There are some services where there are choices, and Apple Music is certainly one of those.
A major reason I used Apple Music is because it used to be the only streaming service that could work with Siri. I’m dependent on using Siri while I’m driving. That exclusivity hasn’t been the case for some time, but Apple dragged its feet on that just long enough to ensnare some of us. Music’s not even a very good app, or service. It’s from the Eddy Cue side of Apple which makes things that never seem fully baked. It worked for a demo; ship it.
I canceled my $10.99 Apple Music subscription, and it will expire at the next renewal period in six days. That gives me a window to evaluate alternatives. If nothing works well enough then I can flip the switch back on, but it puts a certain amount of pressure on me to get off my ass (or really, get on my ass? I have to sit at the computer for a lot of this.)
Many things have changed with music apps and services since the last time I seriously looked around. I gave Apple Music a go and bailed on it once before in 2015 when it chewed up my iTunes Music Library. I was on Amazon Music Unlimited once before, but they’re also a mess, and a big no-no at the moment so I shan’t be returning.
I get YouTube Music as part of my YouTube Premium subscription (I can’t watch ads on YouTube or I’ll die) but the YouTube Music experience is a mess. It’s not a fully developed product, just something where they noticed they had music and users and smushed the two together. YouTube will soon have a new plan that omits music for a reduced monthly rate that I plan on switching to. It’s called YouTube Premium Lite, which sounds like a terrible beer.
Spotify is the leader in music streaming, but I dislike the company’s treatment of artists, and how it funds people like Joe Rogan. Tidal is majority owned by Block, Jack Dorsey’s company, and there’s very little to distinguish it, and nothing to distinguish Jack Dorsey.
This leaves Deezer (which I had heard of, but don’t know a soul using it) and Qobuz (which I thought was some kind of prank name). I signed up for the free one-month trials of each service. More on that below.
I also wanted to know if I really needed a streaming service at all. When I asked on Mastodon for what alternatives people are using several mentioned Doppler as a music player for their purchased music (from Bandcamp, Qobuz’s store, or other online stores). I decided to give that a go too. It has a free one-week trial but costs $30 to buy the app.
For all three of these experiments I needed to get my data out of Apple Music. There ended up being several routes for that.
Qobuz has a strong focus on audiophiles and music collectors that are interested in a magazine-like approach to discovery. Major Pono vibes.
Hmm.
It’s worth mentioning that the service is is $12.99 a month when purchased directly, and $16.99 a month when you subscribe through Apple. Just another reminder that Apple is anticompetitive in this space. The direct subscription less if you pay directly for a year upfront, but that discount would only come into effect if I liked it after using it for a long while since the year is $129.99.
For importing music they partner with Soundiiz —one of the many music playlist transmutation services that exist— and you can import music from any supported source to Qobuz and only Qobuz without paying Soundiiz for one of their plans. The import was a little glitchy where I wasn’t sure if it had actually finished or not. Because I had started it on my iPhone I wasn’t sure if the long pauses were from the phone going to its locked state periodically, or the servers processing the data. It took a while to collect it.
They can only match music from one service to music on another service, so if the music is absent, or simply not an exact match, from that streaming service it isn’t transferred. They do provide CSV files for what it did, but it’s not very friendly at summarizing exactly what didn’t import from the songs in the browser.
The resulting library in Qobuz is mostly indistinguishable from my Apple Music Library at first glance. That’s the fun part about subtle data loss. However, I know full-well that there are many things in my library that aren’t things I listen to, or have alternate versions, so having a one-to-one copy on Qobuz is less important than it might seem.
I’m disappointed that Qobuz doesn’t offer anything for handling this import on the desktop themselves and you have to use this service they partnered with, but at least it isn’t an additional fee, and it’s not something you do often.
The Qobuz desktop app is a chromium blob thing. Fine, whatever, but on initial launch it has a modal dialog telling the user that they need to go to settings and grant the Qobuz app accessibility permissions so media playback keys will work for the app. That’s a big “no” from me. As near as I can tell, the keys work for the app while it is open, so this is more about those times you hit media playback keys when the app is not open and it would otherwise launch Music. I guess? Anyway, I’m never turning that on.
Surprisingly, Siri can’t find or playback anything from Qobuz. That’s pretty important while I’m driving the car. Articles talk about how there’s CarPlay support, and all the Siri toggles are turned to on in the preferences, but they don’t have support?
That’s an immediate dealbreaker for a music streaming service. I’m not going to pursue evaluating their music store right now, but I’d have to put those tracks in another app that has Siri compatibility to get anything out of it.
I know, the name, but we must look past that. I would say that Deezer is more like Spotify in appearance. They want to be cool and fun. Frustratingly, they make you pick 15 artists that you like before you can do anything at all. That’s not cool and fun. Once I was through that roadblock it was obvious that the reason why they do that is so their “Flow” dynamic playlist system can work. Flow picks based on mood or genre, and uses your favorites for weighting the selections.
Seems fun? Not too stuffy and not pushy about things I don't like. See, it even has Mr. 305.
Deezer has an ad-supported plan with some limitations, like Spotify, but I hate ads interspersed with my music. The premium tier has more options, and comes in at $11.99 when purchased directly, or $14.99 for Apple to wet its beak. Deezer has a yearly plan for $107.99, which is a decent discount (about $9 a month) if I decide I like it.
As for importing, it’s just like Qobuz where the apps can’t import anything, but they partner with a playlist transmuting service to do that. In this case it’s TuneMyMusic. Curiously, when I tried to import from Apple Music using desktop Safari it didn’t work… It let me authorize the access, but the button to proceed after that was endlessly stuck on “Processing”. The iOS version got past that step but it wanted me to sign up for a paid TuneMyMusic plan. That’s wrong. I tried in desktop Safari again, and then I noticed there was the option to upload iTunes XML. That’s a horse of a different color! I exported a fresh XML from iTunes Apple Music, and dragged it in. Like Soundiiz, there were songs it didn’t match, but it would let you filter to show only the ones that didn’t match. It also had a single CSV export option.
Deezer does have Siri integration and works just fine with CarPlay. I do have to say, “Play Mona Lisa Overdrive by Juno Reactor on Deezer” which is quite a mouthful, but it works. You can’t argue with results.
The iOS app is quite good, and clearly where Deezer spent the majority of their time and effort. The interface is thoughtful, fun, but still very functional. I have no serious ding other than the aforementioned weirdness with the import I initiated on iOS not working.
They provide a desktop app, like Qobuz, but it’s also a steaming pile of Chromium. I’m not someone who’s an elitist about using native Mac apps, but there’s just simply nothing that the desktop app does that the browser version can’t do. Well, except for one thing: It adds itself to the login items. Yes, that’s right, every time you open the Deezer app it’ll re-add itself to the login items. You always want to have the Deezer Chromium app running at all times, don’t you?
Fortunately, because this is just a web app, I can very easily use “Add to Dock” in Safari to create an identical Deezer “app” but one that won’t insist on launching at startup. The app icon is the Deezer purple heart on a white background but its easy enough to pull the purple heart on black background from the Deezer app bundle.
Unfortunately it doesn’t have the unified playback experience of Spotify, but Apple Music didn’t have that either. Each instance of Deezer that you’re running will remember the last thing you were doing in it before it was closed, not the last thing you played on any Deezer client. There is a Deezer Connect option but it’s kind of quirky in my limited experience testing it. When I connected from my iPhone to my Mac and hit play, it played the last track I had played in the Mac client, but showed album info for something completely different in the iOS app. When I picked something new on the desktop app, while connected, then they were both in sync. Disconnecting let the iOS resume playing, but now they’re not in sync. This makes it into a strange kind of remote control. I’ll need to play with that more. Ultimately, my life will go unchanged.
Disappointingly, Deezer does default to some extremely hostile marketing defaults for your notifications.
Deezer Nutifications.
To its credit: all the bullshit is in one spot, as opposed to Apple sprinkling different notification settings throughout the apps and Settings panes like the world’s worst Easter egg hunt.
I’ll level with you right from the start: I absolutely do not see myself using Doppler. There’s a moment of excitement where you think about how you have total control over your library and have no recurring fees, but then it sets in that you have to manage cover artwork, metadata, and most importantly: transfer files.
Like traveling back in time. I mean that both as a positive and a negative.
I did give it a try though. After all, it’s free for seven days. I downloaded the Mac app. On launch it wanted to import my data from Apple Music. That’s great!
It only imported what was downloaded to my computer, which was hardly any of my music. That left me with a handful of tracks and only three incomplete playlists that the tracks happened to be in. I wasn’t going to listen to James Horner’s “Surprise Attack” on a loop for the rest of my life so there had to be something else I could do, right?
Well, I can force Apple Music to download all my purchased music. I didn’t want to bother downloading the tracks I don’t own, because those will stop working next week. I made a smart playlist of all my “Purchased” tracks and I hit download. Apple Music spat out a bunch of errors. Most of the tracks it was having trouble with were ones I had purchased from Amazon’s MP3 store. Amazon had a DRM-free store (technically they still do) and so I had made many purchases through them over many years. I don’t know why Apple Music won’t let me get my “matched” files back. I know it’s not a backup solution, but I wouldn’t have expected it to be a one way trip, especially since I want to keep my playback metadata that Apple Music does have.
From your Amazon Orders page you can search for “MP3” and it will bring up every order you have. If you try and click on the album it will redirect you to Amazon Music’s streaming service with its tier for Prime subscribers, and the tier for Amazon Music Unlimited. That will show you your purchased music but not everything had a download button, and didn’t have one for the whole album. It wasn’t helpful.
However, if you click on “View order details” instead of the album, then you’ll get a button to download a zip file containing all the MP3s in that order. If you bought two albums in the same order, they will be in the same zip.
I know that Sam Davis’ TypeScript project to bulk download Kindle files has making the rounds lately, in no small part thanks to Jason Snell, but I was not going to be able to modify it to bulk-download the MP3 files.
I manually downloaded each zip file, expanded them, and consolidated any artists (they have an artist hierarchy before album). Once that was done I needed to get Apple Music to point to those files instead of the “Cloud” location. I couldn’t figure that part out so I dragged the new files in and had duplicates. Yay!
There is a menu option to show duplicates in your library, but that doesn’t offer anything for merging duplicates. Instead, I went to “File” > “Library” > “Update Cloud Library” and waited for it to complete. Then closed and reopened the app. Remember all the work Apple had to do to get the Cloud Library to stop fucking up peoples’ libraries? Well, a side effect of that work is apparently that it correctly consolidated the file location with the playback information from the cloud. Perfecto.
I did a fresh XML export at this stage too.
That left me with a weird problem: There was no way to trigger that Apple Music import that I got the first time I opened the app. I could manually import the tracks, but that’s just files, not playlists. I couldn’t import the XML, it was grayed out.
Deleting the Doppler library from ~/Music didn’t do anything. However, I found in the support documents that there was a location for where you could back up your library database and that was in ~/Library/Application \Support/Doppler. Simply delete Library.dopplerdb then relaunch Doppler and it’ll give you that onboarding screen. I pointed it at Apple Music again and this time it got all my purchased music files from both Apple and Amazon.
Unfortunately, this is when I realized I couldn’t go back to files. Doppler on the Mac uses a completely separate app called Doppler Transfer to send files to the iOS version of the Doppler app.
Doppler doesn’t have any kind of cloud syncing, and it can’t use iCloud for seamless storage. This was like handing me a butter churn and a tricorn hat. This is why we all got away from files. There isn’t even a sync, where I can make some set list of what to transfer and what not to like you used to do in iTunes.
I did all this work, so at least I have this at the ready, if the world ends, but I still have electricity, I can listen to the album “Ta Dah” by the Scissor Sisters.
Another benefit of the XML export still existing in the Music app is that it retains so much data that can be transformed into ways to put your mind at ease about transitioning to other platforms. The XML itself is not particularly helpful to look at, but I know that it can be transformed into something else I can sort more easily.
I asked Gemini for a python script to turn the XML file into a CSV.
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import csv
def xml_to_csv(xml_file, csv_file):
"""Converts iTunes XML to CSV."""
try:
tree = ET.parse(xml_file)
root = tree.getroot()
tracks = []
for track in root.findall('.//dict/dict'):
track_data = {}
for item in track:
if item.tag == 'key':
key = item.text
elif item.tag == 'string' or item.tag == 'integer' or item.tag == 'date' or item.tag == 'true' or item.tag == 'data':
track_data[key] = item.text if item.tag != 'true' else True # Store True as boolean, data as string
if track_data: # Ensure there's data for this track
tracks.append(track_data)
# Get all possible keys (columns) for the CSV. This handles cases where
# not every track has the same fields.
all_keys = set()
for track in tracks:
all_keys.update(track.keys())
keys_list = sorted(list(all_keys)) # Sort keys for consistent column order
with open(csv_file, 'w', encoding='utf-8', newline='') as csvfile:
writer = csv.DictWriter(csvfile, fieldnames=keys_list)
writer.writeheader()
writer.writerows(tracks)
print(f"CSV file '{csv_file}' generated successfully.")
except FileNotFoundError:
print(f"Error: XML file '{xml_file}' not found.")
except ET.ParseError:
print(f"Error: Could not parse XML file '{xml_file}'.")
except Exception as e:
print(f"An error occurred: {e}")
if __name__ == "__main__":
xml_file = "YouriTunesLibrary.xml" # Replace with your XML file
csv_file = "itunes_tracks.csv" # Output CSV file name
xml_to_csv(xml_file, csv_file)
I modified that to handle the files better and put it inside of a Shortcut that works as a quick action. There’s unnecessary stuff in the python, but I didn’t want to waste time dicking around with it. I can open the CSV in Numbers and create a pivot table of any of the attributes in the data that I want to sort or filter by.
Like lets say that I want to know what songs I had in my Apple Music library that I did not purchase. These would be pure streaming adds. Purchased is either “TRUE” or no value. In the pivot table, I just collapse “TRUE” and I have everything else. There’s more I can do to sort and filter. Like if I want to see ones that I played often, or recently.
I have no plans to make purchase decisions based on this right now, especially since I’m using Deezer for the time being, but it feels a little comforting to have something I can look through more easily than the XML file. Even if you don’t have any plans of leaving Apple Music you can export and look through the XML. Kieran Healy and Doctor Drang could make some graphs or something.
I absolutely won’t rule out returning to Apple Music —after all, I did it once before! Right now though, it makes me feel a little more in-control of expressing my dissatisfaction with a company. I don’t owe Apple fealty. They have to convince me to give them money, particularly if its for something as generic and uncompetitive as Apple Music.
No one at Apple will care about me unsubscribing, or even notice in the aggregate of users joining and canceling every month. This isn’t an “every vote counts” situation.
Surely, once I publish this, I’ll find out Deezer has contracts with Elon Musk, or murders babies, or something.
UPDATE:I was right. While I knew that 41% of Deezer was owned by Access Industries Investment Fund I didn’t go to the next level of research, as Patrick Toomey pointed out, the owner of Access is Len Blavatnik. See, I knew something bad would surface! I will not be pursuing Deezer further. Blavatnik also mostly owns Warner Music Group, and finances films for A24. Fun!
There’s never going to be a pure, saintly, capitalistic streaming service. I don’t want to pirate anything. I don’t really want to manage files. All I can do is make a choice that works best, not perfectly, for my circumstances and goals.
If anyone else feels similarly, you’re free to use this to help guide you in any way that it benefits you. If not, I hope my woke-flailing is at least entertaining.
Netflix deeply regrets accidentally making Netflix a better product for its customers. It temporarily pushed out a change that let people see Netflix shows in the Apple TV app, a change people have been asking for since the debut of the Apple TV app in 2016 with its Up Next queue and content aggregation features. Fortunately, Netflix swiftly corrected the error before too many of its users could experience anything approaching joy, or satisfaction with Netflix. Customers should definitely drop the issue and not press Netflix to turn the feature that certainly exists back on.
They may very well turn it on later, like, let’s say if Apple is actually shipped a tvOS update that completely displaces the old home screen, and reduces visibility of their app at all. However such a move is just as likely to hurt the commercial appeal of the Apple TV for customers that find Netflix’s mediocrity essential. This “error” may never see the light of day again, or it could be flipped back on any minute now.
I was recently in New York City and that meant I was juggling Google Maps and Apple Maps to get around. They’re largely comparable products these days, but there are some strengths and weaknesses that make it worth my time to juggle them. I created a Shortcut to help with that.
Google Maps is where my boyfriend and I go to check location information, and to collaboratively edit the Google Maps List of places we plan on visiting. I have talked about this extensively inmytravelposts. Apple has walking direction previews for the Apple Watch so you can keep your phone in your pocket while you walk around the gray slush of New York City in the winter.
There I was, entering the long name of a place in Apple Maps that I had just entered in Google Maps, with my capacitive-friendly gloves that don’t work well for small tap targets, and it occurred to me that there had to be some way to automate this. That meant my old nemesis, Shortcuts.
Google Maps doesn’t immediately expose a traditional Share Sheet when you share a location. In the upper right corner of the location information is the sharrow which brings up a modal preview card for the location, and three buttons to share this place, copy link, or share as a collaborative list. Sharing this place finally brings up the Share Sheet.
What the app shares is a shortened URL, like this one:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/8YUvDPbQPrasqC528?g_st=ic
Fortunately, Shortcuts has a URL expander. The expansion of that example URL gives us this:
What an ugly, but extremely useful URL. The name of the location is in the URL with + in the place of whitespace. Unfortunately, this meant I needed to use regex, and even worse still, use regex in Shortcuts, which for some reason requires two steps: Match Text (for the regex), and Get Group From Matched Text (because Match Text returns a list, even if it’s only one item).
The one thing LLM’s are good for is writing regex. I asked one to write me some of The Devil’s Language, and I got (?<=q=)([^&]+). I do a simple replace on + to and I have a totally normal location string.
Aux Merveilleux de Fred, 37 8th Ave, New York, NY
This is fed to the the Open in Maps Shortcut block. I have it set to walking directions because that it is my use case, and I wanted to reduce prompts, but it could just as easily ask the user. All I have to do is tap those share buttons, the shortcut, hit “Go” when Apple Maps appears, and then I’m off to the races. No typing things over again.
The shortcut works great, although there’s no easy way to only surface the Shortcut only when the Google Maps Share Sheet is up. Because it’s a URL, any other sharing function that uses a URL will display this. I did build an if statement to make sure the input is the expected URL format, but that’s not the same thing as only showing the button when it’s applicable to do so.
It was a little disappointing that I built this on the very last day I was in New York, but I’ll have it ready for the next time I travel, and you can too.
