Apple Company • Page 392

it must be nice to live in a country where everything is going so well that that's big news

 

ive had the Max since release day and i feel im not using it to its full potential. Pissed at myself for that.

 

Yarrrrr, I lost a single AirPod...

Does anyone know if I need an appointment at the Apple Store for this or if I can just walk in?

 

you can probably just walk in. gonna cost you a cool $69 though iirc

 

is there anything they can do for you? or do you just need to buy new airpods?

 

So, I really want AirPods. So badly.

But feel like they’re due for an upgrade and I know I’d have buyer’s remorse if I missed out.

 

at this point i'd probably hold out just because it's more likely than not they're gonna release an update soon, but other than random connectivity issues, i can't imagine wanting anything more from them. they're practically perfect.

 

I'd at least wait until after the rumored late October Apple event. If nothing is announced at that then I'm guessing it would be spring before we heard anything.

 

You can set up a walk in but it would need to go through the Genius Bar regardless. Usually those appointments have a low wait time, but if call outs occur/the bar is running behind, it could be a little bit of a wait.

 

I think I'm definitely going with the XR around upgrade time (end of December) unless for whatever reason I can sway my parents to help me out for Xmas to get the XS. Question: Does anyone have experience with Mous cases? How are they?

 

Shortcuts Archive – MacStories

A whole bunch of cool Siri Shortcuts.

 

Reconfigured my Activity Report shortcut. Removed stuff I didn’t need anymore and reformatted a few things. Figured I'd share it.

It’ll ask how many days to evaluate, and default to the previous 7 days. After running it’ll tell you how far you moved, and how much you averaged per day. How many steps you took total and how many you averaged per day. How many oz of water you drank and how much that averaged out per day. (I'm trying to drink more water each week.)

Then it’ll do a weight computation to tell you how much you gained or lost weight.

If you want an easy way to start tracking water, this shortcut is great.

Toss it on the homescreen.

 

Really ready for a new iMac... 2011 21.5 base (later maxed out with RAM) is starting to really show its age with my RAW files during Photoshop and just daily usage... hoping the October update is big otherwise may just opt for a refurbished model from this or last year.

 

I dig both of those shortcuts. Thanks!

 

I wish I could have two languages at the same time for Siri. I put it in French so I could send Messages to my friends and family, but I would use English for Music since most of my music is in English. As it is now, I have to say the artist names weirdly for it to understand.

 

NP. Glad someone else can maybe find some use in them as well.

I went down a massive Shortcut deep dive yesterday. I'm still tweaking a few, but I'll share them at some point. After reading Federico's idea about only putting a few out on the home screen (and the today widget stuff), but without names, I realized that would be kinda cool to play around with. Which then led to me creating new ones as well because they're fun.

Trying out a new second screen layout now:

 

I've heard this from a few people.

I hope they figure it out. I've heard it's really weird on stuff like the HomePod.

 

sorry if i missed this, but how did you center your app icons?

 

It's a pretty clever hack.

You take a screen shot of the empty home screen, then upload that. Then that website will let you download icons for each "space" that match the background. So I did that for the bottom left space to center my two shortcuts. I think it looks better since I've never liked having the bottom row filled up.

 

bless Federico and the team at MacStories. they do some really great work.

also, my mind is blown on the empty spaces home screen. I need to try this tonight when I have some time because ever since I got the Hue lights I installed the Home app and put it on the home screen and it really threw me off. so naturally I re-did it all. I'm using Launcher way more and I usually have the home screen full and three apps on the dock but I like the way this looks, a lot.

 

Heh, yeah, the blue "home" icon/app turns on a very specific HomeKit scene. I use it all the time. Like having access to it via scrolling to the left and getting the widget, or the right, and getting that.

 

Haven't totally played around with the widget yet, but that's gonna have to be a project for later today.

 

I didn't use Siri much until I got a car with Carplay in May. Now bilingual Siri is my most wanted feature. If I want to say Thrice, I have to say something like "Treece". And that's not a complicated name. Saying album names is even worse.

 

Is it October 30th yet?

 

Ok, a couple more Shortcuts I've been playing around with that may give someone an idea or inspiration to create their own or build off it.

Basically, what I wanted were two Shortcuts to run, one at night when my day's over, and one in the morning when my day is about to start. I've been doing a lot more tracking of things in the Health app over the past few years, so I also decided I wanted this to try and log my "in bed" time as a sort of pseudo sleep tracker as well. Since I don't wear an Apple Watch in bed (I am amazed that people can sleep in any watch), I wanted something that could at least track the "in bed" part, even if it doesn't give me the "when I'm actually asleep and not just restless" stuff.

When I hit the "Bedtime" Shortcut, which I do right before I'm putting my phone down for the rest of the night and actually trying to go to sleep, it will:

• Turn on DND.
• Turn the phone brightness all the way down. (So if I check something late at night it doesn't attack my eyes.)
• Gets the current date and time and creates/updates a text file in iCloud Drive where it stores this information. (I use this information in the next Shortcut.)
• Exits.

In the morning, when I wake up, I tap the "Morning" Shortcut. This then:

• Increases the brightness on the phone.
• Turns off DND.
• Grabs the file I saved the night before and sets the date/time as a new variable.
• Calculates the time between now and when I went to bed, then logs this information as "in bed" in the Health app under Sleep Analysis.
• Gives a motivating good morning alert letting me know what time I went to bed at and therefore roughly how long I slept.
• Pops up the daily weather forecast from Carrot weather so I can see if it's going to rain today, and the expected temperature.
• Once that's dismissed, it moves me to my Today view in Things so I can take a look at what kind of tasks I need to do today (and therefore not look at Twitter first thing).

I've been thinking that I want to add a step before checking the weather to look at my calendar and see if there are any time related events on there I need to know about, and if there are, maybe put that information in the morning alert, but I haven't gotten around to that yet.

Nothing too fancy, but I figured someone may like the idea and run with it.

Combined with already tracking food via MyFitnessPal (which updates the health app), exercise/heart/etc with the Watch, logging my weight, caffeine, and water via Shortcuts, and now being able to add sleep information to it as well, I really like what the Health app has become. It's really interesting to read through and look at trends and other information.