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The Three-D-Wallpaper Edition Thursday, February 1, 2024

Apple Vision Pro’s Secret Weapon? Mindfulness, by Brian Heater, TechCrunch

An image like a circle of flower pedals expands and contracts to help you center your breathing, while a narrator offers a guided meditation. It’s simple, like the best parts of Zen.

Couple it with the headset’s Environment offers (effectively 3D desktop wallpaper for the world around you) and you’ve got an appropriate level of immersion that forces you to focus on the app, which forces you to focus on your breathing, making you mindful of a powerful and important aspect of our lives that most people take for granted most of the time.

Apple Fixes Zero-day Bug In Apple Vision Pro That 'May Have Been Exploited', by Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch

On Wednesday, Apple released visionOS 1.0.2, the software that runs on the Vision Pro, with a fix for a vulnerability in WebKit, the browser engine that runs Safari and other web apps. Apple said the bug, if exploited, allowed malicious code to run on an affected device.

Apple Is Putting A Giant Vision Pro On Top Of The Cube For Launch, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Ahead of Vision Pro’s launch on Friday, Apple has started preparing its retail stores for the festivities. In particular, Apple appears to be working a dramatic overhaul to its Apple Fifth Avenue retail store in New York – including a huge Vision Pro replica in the front window.

Returning As Indie

Podcast App Castro Saved By Sale; Price Not Increasing 'At This Time', by Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac

The team behind Castro today announced that the app has been sold, and will continue to operate. [...] Bluck Apps said that it too is an indie developer, and it has no plans for major change.

Castro Isn’t Dead, Apparently, by Matt Birchler, Birchtree

Podcast apps don’t do a great job of this, as the place you see new episodes come in is usually the same place you listen to shows as well. What I loved about Castro was that it had an inbox page where all my shows appeared, and with a very quick UI, I was able to choose what to do with each episode, whether that be adding it to the bottom of my queue, the top of the queue, archiving the episode, or even playing it immediately.

Stuff

Apple Music Playlist Collaboration Is Age-restricted, Unavailable In These Countries, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

In addition to being age-restricted, the collaborative playlists feature is also just not available in certain markets where Apple Music is offered. These countries include Cameroon, China, Malawi, Mali, Russia, Türkiye, United Arab Emirates, and Uruguay.

Webex Now Available On Apple TV 4K For Video Calls, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Webex today announced the launch of its new Webex app that's designed for the Apple TV 4K. The app is designed to allow hybrid workers to join meetings from the biggest screen they have, which is often a television.

You Need This Mac App If You're Always Forgetting About Meetings, by Becca Caddy, iMore

In Your Face: Meeting Reminder might seem like a bold name for an app, but that's the whole point. It's designed to make sure you never miss another meeting ever again and it goes to extreme lengths.

Notes

The Creators Of Twitterrific Are Making An App To Read (Almost) Anything On The Web, by Amrita Khalid, The Verge

After nearly 16 years in operation, Twitterrific was abruptly deactivated last year during Twitter’s unceremonious purging of third-party apps. Now, the app’s developer Iconfactory is raising funds on Kickstarter to create Project Tapestry, a new internet reader for the publicly accessible web. The iOS app will serve as a “universal, chronological timeline,” pulling from federated social media networks like Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as Tumblr, Micro.blog, and any RSS feed. It’ll also be able to access governmental data sources, such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite imagery and US Geological Survey (USGS) earthquake data.

Apple Extends Modem Licensing Deal With Qualcomm Through March 2027, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Apple has extended its modem chip licensing agreement with Qualcomm through March 2027, Qualcomm said today during its first earnings call of 2024. Apple's existing agreement has now been extended for two years, so we can expect to see Qualcomm modems in the next several iPhone generations.

Bottom of the Page

Castro is great for listening to podcasts that you enjoy listening to some of the episodes. Examples, for me, includes New York Times' The Daily and BBC World Service's The Real Story. I'm sure you can think of lots of similar podcasts for you.

Every morning, you can just spend a couple of seconds in Castro's inbox and make a few decisions, and you are all set for your podcast listening pleasure for the rest of the day. There is no need to make a ton of little decisions on what to listen next throughout the day.

This is a feature that I wish other podcasting clients will copy; unfortunately, no one else did.

But like Mr Matt Birchler, I stopped using Castro a while back because of bugs. For me, it was the general lagginess with the app as my listening history piled up. It seems to me that the app continued to keep track to all the episodes I've listened, and the responsiveness of the app suffered.

I wish the new team at Castro all the best, and hopefully they can re-focus on polishing the app.

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Thanks for reading.