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The Profound-Sense-of-Togetherness Edition Thursday, December 2, 2021

App Store Awards Honor The Best Apps And Games Of 2021, by Apple

Apple today revealed the 2021 App Store Award winners, recognizing the 15 best apps and games that helped users tap into personal passions, discover creative outlets, connect with new people and experiences, and simply have fun. This year’s winners include developers from around the world whose apps and games were selected by Apple’s global App Store editorial team for delivering exceptional quality, innovative technology, creative design, and positive cultural impact.

“The developers who won App Store Awards in 2021 harnessed their own drive and vision to deliver the best apps and games of the year — sparking the creativity and passion of millions of users around the world,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “From self-taught indie coders to inspiring leaders building global businesses, these standout developers innovated with Apple technology, with many helping to foster the profound sense of togetherness we needed this year.”

Apple Music Is The Last Library Focused Music Service, by Erdal

Sure you can still buy songs and organize everything yourself, through Plex Music for example, but the idea that your own added and cloud based songs could co-exist and benefit from a voice based assistant like Siri or search with Spotlight is quite the commitment from Apple.

Stuff

Apple And Spotify Reveal 2021's Most-streamed Songs, by Mark Savage, BBC

Pop stars Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny were among the most-streamed artists of 2021, according to figures from Apple Music and Spotify.

Apple Music Replay 2021: Here’s How To Get Your Most-played Songs Of The Year, by Michael Grothaus, Fast Company

One cool feature of the Replay 2021 list is that it also shows you how many hours of music you’ve listened to during the year. Additionally, the Replay 2021 list lists songs in descending order from most-played to least-played, and next to each song you’ll find the exact number of times you played the song.

4 Free Apps That Make Working From Home Way Better, by Doug Aamoth, Fast Company

You might also love it, hate it, or fall somewhere in the middle. Whatever the case, if you find yourself working from home on a regular basis, you absolutely, positively must add these four free apps to your remote-work setup.

Notes

Why Monterey’s Best Feature Still Hasn’t Arrived, by Jason Snell, Macworld

Universal Control is ambitious. It builds on tech Apple has been adding on to macOS and iOS for years now. And it promises to make life with multiple open Apple devices much better. Is it annoying to have to wait six months since it was announced to try it out? Of course. But you know the saying. Good things come to those who wait. And so we wait.

Apple Tells Suppliers iPhone Demand Has Slowed As Holidays Near, by Debby Wu, Takashi Mochizuki, and Giles Turner, Bloomberg

The company has told its component suppliers that demand for the iPhone 13 lineup has weakened, people familiar with the matter said, signaling that some consumers have decided against trying to get the hard-to-find item.

[...]

Shortages and delivery delays have frustrated many consumers. And with inflation and the omicron variant bringing fresh concerns to pandemic-weary shoppers, they may forego some purchases.

Why Apple Isn’t Worried About Theft In Its Stores, by Charlie Sorrel, Lifewire

It boils down to this: If you remove a demo unit from the store, it notices, and stops working.

Bottom of the Page

I relooked into my shortcuts that I use to play Apple Music today, and discovered I've used the wrong 'function'. Instead of filter music tracks, I've had the shortcuts to filter files. It still worked for my shortcuts -- I was only using that to sort the tracks by random -- but I was wondering all along why the filtering doesn't work on music meta-data such as genres and such. Mystery solved. :-)

Still, I haven't find a way for a shortcut to get all the playlists names from my music library. I will still have to manually modify my shortcuts whenver I add or remove playlists from my library.

This is the motivation for my re-visiting today. I've moved this loop of getting all the music tracks from all the playlists out into a subroutine... I mean, a separate shortcut. I will only have to update just one shortcut from now on when my playlists change in the future.

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Thanks for reading.