Archive for December 16, 2024

Monday, December 16, 2024

Take Control of Apple Media Apps

Take Control (via Kirk McElhearn):

Back in 2019, Apple replaced iTunes for Mac, iOS, and iPadOS with three apps—Music, TV, and Podcasts—with audiobooks handled by the Books app. Take Control of Apple Media Apps is your guide to this post-iTunes world. Covers macOS 15 Sequoia, iOS 18, and iPadOS 18 or later, plus Apple Watch, Apple TV, and HomePod.

Expanding on his earlier title Take Control of macOS Media Apps, Kirk McElhearn shows you how to manage your music, videos, podcasts, and audiobooks on all your Apple devices. Whether you just want to play your media, or you want to go deeper with special features like Apple Music, Genius, Shuffle, Playing Next, and iTunes Match, this comprehensive guide has the answers you need.

Kirk also looks at various ways of bringing audio and video into Apple’s media apps, tagging music and videos so you can find them more easily later, creating playlists, sharing your library over a home network, and accessing your media libraries on your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, or HomePod.

Apple started with a simple app, iTunes. You ripped CDs or bought songs on your Mac and synced them to your iPod. But now there are multiple media apps, devices, cloud services, formats, and rating systems. There are subscriptions, streaming, Siri, AirPlay, and families. I can think of no one better than McElhearn to make sense of it all.

Previously:

Forked

Drew McCormack (Mastodon):

I’m launching a new Swift framework called Forked for working with shared data, both on a single device, and across many.

[…]

The merging that @ForkedModel provides is pretty powerful. It does property-wise merging of structs, and if you attach the @Merged attribute, you can add your own custom merging logic, or use the advanced algorithms built in (like CRDTs).

To give an example, the notes property above is a String. With @Merged applied, it gets a hidden power — it can resolve conflicts in a more natural way. Rather than discarding one set of changes, or merging to give somewhat arbitrary results, it produces a result a person would likely expect. For example, if we begin with the text “pretty cool”, and change the text to “Pretty Cool” on one device, and to “pretty cool!!!” on another, the merged result result will be “Pretty Cool!!!”. Nuff said.

And this works within your app’s process, between processes (eg with sharing extensions), and even between devices via iCloud.

See also:

Previously:

Gemini 2.0

David Pierce (Slashdot):

Google is releasing Gemini 2.0 on Wednesday, about 10 months after the company first launched 1.5. It’s still in what Google calls an “experimental preview,” and only one version of the model — the smaller, lower-end 2.0 Flash — is being released. But Hassabis says it’s still a big day.

“Effectively,” Hassabis says, “it’s as good as the current Pro model is. So you can think of it as one whole tier better, for the same cost efficiency and performance efficiency and speed. We’re really happy with that.” And not only is it better at doing the old things Gemini could do but it can also do new things. Gemini 2.0 can now natively generate audio and images, and it brings new multimodal capabilities that Hassabis says lay the groundwork for the next big thing in AI: agents.

[…]

Google is also launching Project Mariner, an experimental new Chrome extension that can quite literally use your web browser for you. There’s also Jules, an agent specifically for helping developers find and fix bad code, and a new Gemini 2.0-based agent that can look at your screen and help you better play video games. Hassabis calls the game agent “an Easter egg” but also points to it as the sort of thing a truly multimodal, built-in model can do for you.

Matt Birchler:

The basic idea of this seems to be that you ask Gemini a question about a topic, ideally something complex with several things you want to know, and it will go out and read a bunch of websites to generate a Google Doc with all if its findings. It takes a few minutes to do this, so you can even close the browser tab and come back when it’s done, but once it does, it creates a pretty decent “executive summary” of the topic at hand.

[…]

I mentioned at the start that I prefer ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini, and I’m pretty confident that preference still stands even with these updates. I think Cluade is a very good coding assistant and its web UI is so much better than anyone else at letting me play with the generated code as I iterate on it.

Mike Rockwell:

If you watch a handful of videos showing how to troubleshoot a plumbing issue, for example, YouTube will start showing recommendations for other plumbing-related videos.

But you haven’t suddenly become a plumbing enthusiast. You needed to fix a single problem and, once you’re done, that’s it.

Previously:

macOS 15.2 Breaks Bootable Backups

Dave Nanian (Mastodon, 2, Hacker News):

Apple broke the replicator. Towards the end of replicating the Data volume, seemingly when it’s about to copy either Preboot or Recovery, it fails with a Resource Busy error.

In the past, Resource Busy could be worked around by ensuring the system was kept awake. But this new bug means, on most systems, there’s no fix. It just fails.

[…]

Since Apple took away the ability for 3rd parties (eg, us) to copy the OS, and took on the responsibility themselves, it’s been up to them to ensure this functionality continues to work. And in that, they’ve failed in macOS 15.2.

I wonder if this is related to the problems I’ve been having since Sequoia where I can’t cleanly eject drives, e.g. after making a non-bootable backup. Finder will show a spinner for a while and then offer to let me Force Eject even though Sloth and other tools show no open files.

Bri:

It pains me to see the authors of good software like SuperDuper! just having throw up their hands and say there’s nothing that can be done, because Apple broke our shit and there’s no way to work around it since they intentionally locked down the system and made it impossible for us, the users, to do what we want.

Remember when copying a system was as simple as just copying the System Folder to another drive? How far we’ve fallen.

Previously:

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