I love using HomeKit to control various devices in my home. This time of year, the most useful one is a Lutron Caseta Wireless Smart Lighting Lamp Dimmer, which my wife and I control from an iPhone or Apple Watch to turn on and off the lights on our Christmas tree. It is so nice to not have to reach all the way around the tree to the outlet every morning and every night. But sometimes I see a home automation device that doesn’t support HomeKit, and with a few minor exceptions (like a Nest smoke detector) I ignore those because I like being able to control everything in the Home app on my iPhone. Fortunately, this may change soon. Jason Snell of Six Colors reports that Apple, Google, Amazon, Zigbee, and others have formed a smart home alliance to increase compatibility across devices. I look forward to seeing what comes of this. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- Glenn Fleishman of Macworld explains how to enable or disable Deep Fusion and Smart HDR photography on the iPhone 11.
- Julio Ojeda-Zapata wrote a comprehensive review of the AirPods Pro for TidBITS.
- Brad Gibson of Cult of Mac reports that the rubber tips on AirPods Pro have a new plastic odor that sort of smells like blueberries. I’ve noticed this on my new AirPods Pro. There is nothing offensive about the smell, and I suppose it will go away over time, but it did surprise me.
- MacStories selected its favorite apps of 2019.
- Chandra Steele of PC Magazine recommends 26 iOS apps that she thinks are worth paying for.
- App Annie lists the most downloaded apps of the past decade.
- Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that a woman in Iowa was able to find her car after it had been stolen because her iPhone was in it, and she was able to use Find My iPhone to help the police locate her car.
- Jeff John Roberts of Fortune reports on an attempt to create a sophisticated mask to fool facial recognition systems. It couldn’t fool Apple’s FaceID, but it did fool some other systems.
- Federico Viticci created used Apple’s Shortcuts app to create a free, sophisticated assistant for Apple Music that he calls MusicBot. It makes it faster to access certain aspects of Apple Music and enables a few other features that are not simple to do in the Music app itself.
- Ryan Christoffel of MacStories explains the new Quick Find feature of the Things app.
- Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac reports can now pay for Apple Arcade on an annual basis instead of a monthly basis, and when you do so, you save $10 a year.
- I was in an AT&T store the other day and noticed an interesting screensaver running on all of the iPhones. You can view it here.
- Time magazine selected the 10 best gadgets since 2010, and three Apple products made the list: The iPad, the Apple Watch, and Apple AirPods. (The iPhone came out in 2007.)
- And finally, speaking of 2010, Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal decided to leave her iPhone at home and see what it is like to travel only with gadgets that she used in 2010, such as an old BlackBerry and a Garmin GPS. And she picked an interesting destination for her trip. Click here or the picture below to watch the video on the Wall Street Journal website.