This week’s episode of the In the News podcast takes a deeper look at some issues that we’ve discussed before. Following up on our past discussion of the new Live Activities feature, we talk about some apps that do it well such as ParkMobile and Flighty. Following up on our past discussion of crash detection on the iPhone 14, we discuss some recent tweaks made by Apple. And following up on our past discussion of the Apple Card credit card, we discuss a great offer that gives new customers 5% back. We also discuss Belkin’s new $15 product for cleaning a pair of AirPods, the new App Store awards, and Apple’s fantastic new video called The Greatest.
In our In the Know segment, Brett shares a tip for customizing background app activity. I discuss the value of AirDrop and recommend some possible adjustments that you can make depending on how you want to use the feature.
As I had hoped, we are starting to see more developers take advantage of Apple’s Live Activities function so that notifications can update themselves to provide useful information. I saw a great example the other day when I used the ParkMobile app that I reviewed in 2016. This app lets you pay the “meter” for street parking in New Orleans and many other cities. After I paid for parking, ParkMobile put a notification on my lock screen with a countdown timer showing me exactly how much time I had left on my parking spot, plus other information such as the number of the zone where I parked. This meant that while I was taking care of things, I could just glance at my iPhone screen to immediately see how much time I had left, without needing to unlock the iPhone and open an app. The feature even worked when my always-on display activated and the screen dimmed, although to preserve power, in this mode the notification only displays the number of minutes left without updating the seconds. Bravo to ParkMobile for this incredibly useful implementation of Apple’s Live Activities feature. And now, the news of note from the past week:
If you use Apple Music, you can now take advantage of the Apple Music Replay feature to see your favorite songs, albums, etc. from 2022. Attorney John Voorhees of MacStories has the details. It works great unless you let your teenager use your iMac to play video games while he listens to music via iTunes without logging out of your account, in which case you will find that all of “your” top songs from the year are songs and artists that you have never heard of. Ahem.
A few weeks ago, I discussed reports that certain roller coasters were triggering crash detection alerts on the iPhone 14. As Felipe Espósito of 9to5Mac explains, this week, Apple released iOS 16.1.2 to improve the crash detection feature on the iPhone 14 models. I’m sure that the large number of iPhone 14 models now in use has given Apple lots of data to analyze about how to improve the feature.
Andrew Liszewski of Gizmodo reports that Belkin released an AirPods Cleaning Kit, including earwax softener, to get your AirPods (but not the AirPods Pro) looking and sounding good as new. The kit is only $14.99. Seems like a good stocking stuffer, and not a bad present for yourself.
Chance Miller of 9to5Mac predicts that the second generation AirPods Pro (my review) ($229 on Amazon) could be the most popular gift this holiday season. I certainly love mine.
As a result of several statements that Elon Musk made on Twitter this week, it looks like there could be a dispute on the horizon between Apple and Twitter. Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac reports that Elon Musk met with Tim Cook on the Apple Campus this week, and hopefully they were able to iron things out.
I consider a password manager to be critical, but developers of password manager apps need to be extra careful about the security of their own products. Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac reports that LastPass was breached back in August, and it was learned this week that attackers were able to access some customer data. I’ve been using 1Password for many years, and this hasn’t happened to them. I’m not saying that something similar couldn’t happen to 1Password tomorrow in theory, but the fact that it hasn’t happened gives me additional trust in that product.
If you don’t have an Apple Card credit card yet, there is a promotion running right now where new customers can get 5% Daily Cash back on purchases between now and Christmas.
This week, the App Store recognized some of the best apps of the year. I was thrilled to see that GoodNotes was recognized as the iPad App of the Year. GoodNotes is a fantastic app that I use in my law practice and in my personal life just about every day—a great way to use an Apple Pencil to write notes on an iPad.
In an article for Six Colors, Jason Snell reports that even if you only have access to iMessage—such as when you are on an airplane using the free Internet feature that only supports text messages—you can still receive push notifications. As a result, apps like Flighty can give you real-time flight updates even if you are in the air.
If you have an Apple Watch Ultra and you like to dive underwater, you’ll want to check out the new Oceanic+ dive computer app that came out this week. The app is free, but you can pay to add special features. The Apple website has a very in-depth look at the Oceanic+ app.
If you have been using a small handheld device for as long as I have, then you probably used a Palm or PalmPilot years ago. Jason Scott creates a new online emulation, available at the Internet Archive, that lets you run old Palm software again. Playing Solitare Pack from Stand Alone, Inc. on my iPhone as it emulated a PalmPilot made me feel like I was in the late 1990s again.
And finally, Apple released a video this week called The Greatest that shows off some great iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac accessibility features such as Door Detection, Voice Control, Sound Recognition, and Siri. The video does a nice job of demonstrating how empowering these features can be. Also interesting is the same video with audio descriptions.
I’ve been using a pair of HomePod mini speakers for almost two years, and I love them. For a while, I had them in two different rooms downstairs in my house, and it was fun to have the music flow from room to room. But since I use them in our living room / family room so much more often than anywhere else, I eventually decided to put both of them in that room and create a stereo pair to make the music even richer. However, my left HomePod mini is located on a table behind a couch, and because the table is just a little bit lower than the back of the couch, it seemed to me that the HomePod should be elevated just a little bit. I was surprised to find that there are many products on sale for this very purpose. The one that I purchased on Amazon, the balolo Real Wood TriPod for HomePod Mini, is exactly what I was looking for: a little elevation in a form factor that looks nice.
What it is
The TriPod, which is handmade in Germany, consists of three legs made of walnut wood attached to a 1.5mm powder-coated steel circular base.
The feet have cork on the bottom to protect the table and absorb vibration.
Elevated sound
Using the TriPod couldn’t be easier. Just place the TriPod in a location and sit your HomePod mini on top of it. That’s it. Nothing to attach or anything like that.
The product raises the height of the HomePod mini about 1.25 inches. For me, that was just enough to get it a little higher behind my couch, which is what I was looking for.
Does this make a noticeable difference in sound? To be honest, I cannot say yes using any objective scale, but I feel like it is better. On the one hand, it makes more sense to me for my HomePod to be a little higher because of the edge of my couch. On the other hand, Apple clearly designed the acoustics of the HomePod mini to sit on a flat surface and bounce sound off of that surface, and I’m cognizant of the fact that using a stand changes that.
My other HomePod mini is on a shelf, so I didn’t see any reason to raise it even higher. But for this HomePod mini, the slight elevation seems to make sense to me.
Elegance
The primary reason that I’m a fan of this stand is that it looks great. I have a lot of wood in my living room, and having wooden feet on this HomePod mini makes it fit into the decor even better.
The walnut version that I selected pairs well with a black HomePod mini. If you have a white HomePod mini, you might want to get the oak version because the wood is a lighter color.
Conclusion
This is a simple product, but it looks great and it does exactly what I wanted. And unlike many of the other HomePod mini stands that you can find on Amazon that are made of plastic and look cheap, I think that this one looks nice and improves the overall look of the HomePod mini.
