The Apple Music app on the iPhone has a Radio tab where you used to be able to listen to a station called Beats 1. Apple has now rebranded that station to Apple Music 1, and also launched two new radio stations: Apple Music Hits and Apple Music Country. The "Hits" station features favorite songs from the '80s, '90s, and 200s. It also features some specific shows that you can listen to on demand — which, unlike live radio, gives you the ability to skip ahead if you don't like a song. As someone who graduated high school in 1987, I enjoyed the first episode of '80s Radio with Huey Lewis. The songs are great, and it is interesting to listen to the information about the songs that Huey Lewis provides between tracks. Other folks you might recognize with shows on Apple Music include Billie Eilish, Elton John, Frank Ocean, the Backstreet Boys, Alanis Morissette, Snoop Dogg, Meghan Trainor, Shania Twain, Carrie Underwood, Luke Combs, and many, many more. If you are looking for something new to listen to during the pandemic, check out one of these offerings on the new Apple radio stations. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- I mention this periodically, but it is always worth saying again: if you don't use a password manager, you really should. Scott Gilbertson of Wired discuses some of the best password manager options, and names 1Password the best overall password manager.
- Geoffrey Fowler of the Washington Post describes the new COVID-19 exposure notification app available in Virginia that uses technology from Apple and Google.
- Jason Cross of Macworld describes some of the accessibility features coming in iOS 14 that everyone may found useful. I'm looking forward to trying out the Back Tap feature.
- Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac describes how you can hide photos from your iPhone camera roll in iOS 14.
- Sean Endicott of Windows Central notes that the Microsoft Teams app was updated this week to let you see six people at one once on the iPhone (2x4) and nine people at once on the iPad (3x3).
- I seriously doubt that Apple would do something like this with the iPhone, but former Apple employee David Shayer wrote an interesting article in TidBITS about how he helped the U.S. government create a top secret iPod back in 2005 that was used for ... well, he's not exactly sure, but he has a theory.
- And finally, at some point in the future, we will have an iPhone that supports 5G. How useful might that be? Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal explores that question in this interesting (and amusing) video:
