Sonos and Apple Music

Sonos is a great speaker system. After much badgering from Mac Power Users listeners, I started investing in them several years ago, and now I have a collection of them throughout my house. However, where Sonos failed to keep up was voice control. As Amazon, Google, and now Apple all start releasing their speaker-in-a-can products with voice assistants built-in, consumers are finding it easier to use their voice to play their music rather than fiddle with an application on the phone.

I have several friends who swear by playing music through their Amazon Echo devices because it's so easy. That has never been me. I love the sound of my Sonos system, and I can't imagine playing Miles Davis through the crappy little speaker of my Amazon Echo. Actually, I did try it once while I was making waffles. It was terrible, so I washed my hands and played it properly through the Sonos system. I’m picky about these things. I’m not even sure the Apple HomePod is going to be Miles-worthy.

Nevertheless, the rest of the world is moving forward with voice-based audio systems, and Sonos is behind in the game. This past week they attempted to solve that problem in a few ways.

First, they partnered with Amazon to build the Amazon Echo into the new Sonos One speaker. This gives you the convenience of the Amazon Echo combined with the quality of the Sonos speakers. Moreover, just having one of these in your Sonos system should let you drive everything using your voice.

I have received a lot of emails asking if I'm going to buy one of these. I'm not. While I have an Amazon Echo in my house, I'm increasingly pushing toward Siri with HomeKit devices, and I would ideally like to have just one ecosystem.

The real sticking point for me is that I'm a happy Apple Music subscriber. My entire family, including the non-geeks, has a complete understanding of how to find and play music on Apple Music and they love it. I’ve got some killer playlists, and I like the integration with Siri. Since I am all in with Apple gear, using their music streaming service makes a lot of sense.

Whether the issue is Apple or Amazon (or both), I don't know, but for whatever reason, Apple Music does not play through the Amazon Echo. To have a streaming service on your Amazon Echo, you need either Spotify or Amazon’s music streaming service. So even though Alexa can now talk to my Sonos, Alexa doesn’t have my Apple Music library, which in hindsight is one of the primary reasons I’m not so keen on adding more Echoes to my home.

That is, however, not the end of the story for Apple Music subscribers. Sonos also announced they're going to be incorporating AirPlay 2 next year. This is a new technology announced by Apple back in June at WWDC. This next iteration of AirPlay should allow you to easily drive your audio to any compatible speaker system. It is, however, a lot more than that. It also allows you to cache music and control sending the music via Siri. Dave Hamilton wrote an extensive piece on the uses of AirPlay 2 over at the Mac Observer.

It is my sincere hope that when all of this gets sorted out, I will be able to control my Sonos system with my voice through Siri, playing my Apple Music playlists. In theory, this wouldn't require me to buy any new speakers either. However, at this point, it is not an actual feature but instead a promise of a future feature. I hope Apple and Sonos can make that happen. In the meantime, if I want I want to play some music on my Sonos system, I have to take my phone out of my pocket and tap a few buttons, like an animal.

Jazz Friday: Joey Alexander’s Joey. Monk. Live!

Joey Alexander, the jazz piano prodigy that continues to surprise me, released a new album, Joey. Monk. Live!, (iTunes)(Apple Music) where he played music from Thelonious Monk. I’ve written it before but I can’t get over how Joey plays with so much fire. I’ve heard a lot of prodigies that are technically excellent but yet their music still lacks soul. That’s not the case with Joey. This is a great album for the weekend.

Home Screens – MacSparky's Strange Looking iPad

This week I’m featuring my own iOS 11 iPad home screen, partly because it’s so weird. Here it is. (Click to enlarge.)

The Gorilla on the Couch - That Crazy Dock

For a long time, I’ve kept all my apps on the home screen with everything not on the screen located in four folders. I’ve given those folders verb names, Make, Learn, Fix, and Play. Traditionally I opened apps from the home screen or one of those folders. I still do that on my iPhone.

To say I flipped out when Apple announced iOS 11 is an understatement. I installed beta 1 like a crazy man. One of my first observations about iOS 11 was that the dock is now much more important. It is prime real estate for apps, particularly if you like to use split screen multitasking. Unless you have your iPad connected to a keyboard, getting to apps to split the screen takes too many steps. At first I filled the dock with as many icons as it would accept but then they got too small and I use enough apps that I still didn’t have everything I regularly needed.

About halfway through the iOS 11 beta, I got the idea of putting all my apps on the dock. It started out as a sort-of joke so I could share screenshots of my iPad looking more like a Mac. The thing is though ... it worked for me. So now my home screen is empty and my dock has a few essentials, but also my Make, Learn, Fix, and Play folders. Opening the folder to get to a split screen app feels silly but is still way faster than getting to an app on the home screen.

All of my nerd-friends think I’m crazy but I’ve been pretty happy with this setup. I think the tipping point for this is people that use multitasking without a keyboard. If that’s you, give this a try for a week.

The other thing I did was to turn off Suggested and Recent Apps to the right of my dock. I found I wasn’t paying attention to those so a few weeks ago I toggled them off in the Dock preferences tab. I haven’t missed them.

Some of My Favorite Apps

I love so many Apps. For this post, I want to focus on a few that particularly shine in iOS 11:

Gladys

There was a lot of talk prior to iOS 11 about adding a “shelf” to iOS. Federico Viticci did a great job of showing the advantage of such an interface in his iOS 11 concept video. Apple didn’t add a shelf but with the drag and drop tools, they made it possible for third party app developers to, in essence, make a shelf. The idea behind a shelf is a temporary space on your iPad where you can store things for later use, like digital walnuts you’re burying for winter.

There are a lot of developers releasing shelf apps and I’ve been buying and trying these as they release. I don’t know what app will rise to the top of this space but my current favorite is Gladys. With this app, I can drop most kinds of media, text, and links as I collect them on a project and, using slide over, have them available for use elsewhere as I work on my iPad. This is such a key tool for multitasking that I’ve put Gladys in my dock despite how much I dislike the icon.

Fantastical

Of course the Fantastical team was early to drag and drop. Not only can you now drag and drop events and reminders inside Fantastical, you can also pull events out of Fantastical and drop them in other apps. Drag an appointment out of Fantastical into an email and it becomes an ICS file. Drag some text into Fantastical and it creates an event using the dropped text.

OmniFocus

Drag and drop OmniFocus has been a game changer for me. Every day I start out auditing my email on the iPad with Apple Mail on the left and OmniFocus on the right. Much dragging and dropping ensues. One of the nice things is the link-back created in OmniFocus for linked emails works on both Mac and iOS. I’ve already started production on some screencasts around OmniFocus and iOS 11. It will be a free update to the OmniFocus Video Field Guide and I’ll be releasing it in the next month (hopefully a few weeks).

1Password

This is another app that jumped into drag and drop with both feet. The new 1Password lets me drag passwords onto web forms and re-arrange fields internally.

I feel like this drag and drop thing is going to only get better as app developers feed off each other’s ideas.

My Current Guilty Pleasure

I'm spending a lot of time in iBooks lately. It’s not debugging one of my own iBooks but instead reading Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View. A lot of Star Wars fiction is garbage. This is not.

A Small Change

If I were in charge at Apple, I would continue iterate on multitasking. One small change that I think could help would be to include Finder search at the top of the Control Center/Spaces screen. That’s accessible from a single swipe up from the bottom of the screen and would make it much easier to get to non-dock-based apps when multitasking.

My Wallpaper

Another advantage of putting everything in the dock is that I can use really nice wallpaper and see it all. Currently I'm using some concept art from the Disneyland Star Wars expansion. I change wallpapers often though.

 

Fixing the Print to PDF Trick for High Sierra

One change from the High Sierra macOS update is a slight modification to the command to print to PDF. Years ago I shared a tip about printing to PDF by holding down the Command key and pressing P twice. It’s a great tip and people still use it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in High Sierra. That is because Apple removed the ellipsis from the command. To fix this, go to your keyboard shortcuts and remove the ellipsis, and all will be good again. See the screenshot below and video for help.

SaneBox (Sponsor)

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This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that can help you get control of your inbox. For a lot of folks, email is a constant pain, and it doesn’t need to be. With SaneBox, you add a powerful set of email tools that can work in just about any email client. SaneBox allows you to:

  • Wake up everyday to find that the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant.
  • Defer email for hours, days, or weeks so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time.
  • Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email, SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.
  • Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).
  • Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services such as Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.
  • Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

One of the best parts about SaneBox being a web services is that it works no matter which mail application you prefer. If you want to jump between different mail apps on your iPad, no problem. If you want to upgrade your Mac to High Sierra, there’s no need to wait for SaneBox to work. It already does. SaneBox is a set of tools that will move with you between different applications on different platforms with no trouble at all.

Why not straighten out your email today? I’ve been a paying subscriber for years and can’t imagine getting by without it. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount off your subscription.

Game Pick: Flower

Something I’ve come to realize about myself is that my preferences in video games has changed over the years. When I was younger, I loved “twitchy” games where it always felt like a race to get the bad guys on time, or the starship into battle, or my pod racer to the finish line. These days I prefer games that are more leisurely.

That’s why I was such a fan of Alto’s Adventure. It was meandering. Yesterday, the award winning game, Flower, was released for iOS. Flower is the made for meanderers. I played it for 20 minutes last night and I’m hooked. In Flower, you are the wind. As you move around the environments you can pick up flower pedals and slowly change the environment. I’m not sure my 8-year-old self would have been very interested but the current me is digging it. If you’ve never been a gamer, this may be one worth trying.

I also like the business model. The game is $5 and doesn’t bug you anymore about upgrades, virtual coins, or anything else once you buy it. If you’d like to be the wind this weekend, give Flower a try.

A Few Notes on High Sierr

It’s kind of hard to believe that Apple released a major update to macOS this week. It just didn’t move the needle much in geek circles. I remember when we used to go to the Apple Store on the night of a new Mac OS X release and it was a big deal. (I still have my 10.4 Tiger T-shirt somewhere.)

All that said, I’ve been kicking the tires on the beta for a bit and here’s my collection of notes.

  • My APFS transition on both the laptop and iMac went off without a hitch. I know APFS is much better its predecessor and once you get on the APFS, your data is safer. However, you really won’t notice any performance differences until you start making copies of files
  • Duplicating files with APFS is jarring. I keep waiting for the progress bar but it never shows up, because it’s not necessary. (APFS doesn’t need to save until you make changes to the copy.)
  • While everyone talks about the importance of Metal 2 at the high end, I'm curious about what it does at the low end. Will these developments make smaller Macs (with long battery lives) a viable option?
  • Photos gets the most improvement. That makes sense in light of the fact Photos is a relatively new product. While there are several new features, I think people will be surprised at significant improvements of the advanced editing tools. It still isn’t Aperture but it’s a lot closer.
  • At the other end of the spectrum, for people that don’t know what editing curves are, more Moments is good. I’ve observed a lot of non-geek family members spending time with Photos’ Memories feature. The feature solves a problem that we all have with way too many photos. I expect even more of that going forward.
  • Another relatively young app that made progress this year is Apple Notes. For two straight years Apple Notes has seen significant attention and it shows.
  • I like all the improvements to Safari but stopping auto-play video gets a special place in my heart.
  • It’s taken years but the way Apple Mail handles replies and composing while in full screen finally gets it right.
  • For a more in-depth review of High Sierra, check out Stephen Hackett’s weighty review.

In answer to the emails I’ve received asking whether you should upgrade, I'd say you are fine upgrading (provided you have a few backups first). I expect High Siera adoption will be slower than some of the prior Mac operating system updates. High Sierra has a lot more under-the-hood tuning than fancy paint and chrome. However, those features that were added, like the new photo and video formats and Notes improvements, are also on iOS so leaving your Mac behind could get frustrating.

inShort for Project Management (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by inShort. inShort is a project planning application for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad that lets you plan projects and processes graphically across all of your Apple devices. This brings a new paradigm to process and project planning and is absolutely worth checking out. 

One of the more innovative features is the way it allows you to embed processes and drill down to the level of detail you need at the moment. I like to think of this as "nested" flowcharts, and I believe that it's pretty useful. Most recently inShort’s received updates making its Gantt charts and work breakdown structure tools even more powerful. 

The inShort development team has also added a satellite service, workflow.link that gives you a way to work with, edit, and manage your projects from any device with a web browser. 

Want to learn more? Check out the website and read the developer's PDF. 

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Mac Power Users 397 - More on iOS 11 and High Sierra

The latest episode of Mac Power Users is up. I spent a lot of time in the betas this year and this show dives deep on my favorite new features and how to put them to work for you.

Sponsors include:

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
  • 1Password Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don't have to worry about that anymore. 
  • Fujitsu ScanSnap ScanSnap Helps You Live a More Productive, Efficient, Paperless Life. 
  • Fracture Bring your photos to life.

Learn Ulysses

I know that Ulysses is the subject of some controversy lately as a result of their switch to a subscription model, but I have been using the app quite a bit in my large writing project workflows. One of the things I like about Ulysses is its relative ease of use. However, like all great apps, there are some hidden depths there. If you are using Ulysses and would like to get better at it, I recommend the Sweet Setup's new Learn Ulysses course. Shawn Blanc and team did a great job on these instructional videos.

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Austin Mann's iPhone 8 Plus Camera Review

Austin Mann has been writing iPhone camera reviews for years and they're great. It's really nice seeing what a professional photographer can do with the new iPhone hardware. This year he took a trip to India and has some great examples of the new portrait features and comparisons to prior iPhone hardware. I can't wait to see what he does when he gets his hands on an iPhone X.

Austin is a very nice fellow. He guested on Mac Power Users a few years ago and shared some great iPhone photography tips.