By Jason Snell

April 5, 2023 11:33 AM PT

Fantastical adds broader Shortcuts support

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

Back in January, I wrote about building an automation for my pal Lex that would generate a list of open meeting times for him to send to potential clients.

Lex and I both use the Fantastical calendar app, but at the time the app’s support for Shortcuts actions was pretty poor. To get our automation to work, we had to set up Apple’s default Calendar app and log it in to our Google calendars. For such a full-featured app, Fantastical’s lack of Shortcuts actions was really surprising.

Things have gotten better! Flexibits just released Fantastical 3.7.9, which adds a bunch of new Shortcuts actions, including the ability to filter events from a given Calendar Set in a given date range, and the ability to generate a simple schedule for a given day.

There’s still some more work to do here—I don’t think Fantastical can quite match the level of filtering that Apple’s Calendar actions offer—but I already see the benefit of using Fantastical for this work. Fantastical’s Calendar Sets, which are user-configurable groups of calendars, make it a lot easier to target a search for events depending on the context.

For example, I might search in a set that only contains my work events, or one that also contains broader family obligations. With Apple’s Calendar actions, I have to search one calendar at a time and concatenate the results. With Fantastical, I just target one of my Calendar Sets and it finds what I want across all the calendars in that set.

I’m happy that Flexibits recognized that its app was a bit behind on the user automation front and took steps to address the issue. Apple has said that Shortcuts is the future of automation on its platforms; I hope more app developers spend time considering how the functionality of their apps can also be used in concert with other apps.

Maybe they could take some time to consider it this month, for starters. It is Automation April, after all.

By Dan Moren

March 31, 2023 7:00 AM PT

Review: Aura’s digital photo frame is solid, if not quite picture perfect

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

Of all the standalone devices that I couldn’t imagine I’d need in the year 2023, I would have put a digital picture frame near the top. To me, they’re a device that seems to belong in that mid-2000s era where people switched to digital cameras, one of those weird bits of translation that supposes that every analog device needs an exact digital counterpart, rather than acknowledging that we simply treat our photos differently now.

But then I had a kid.

Suddenly I found that, despite the thousands of photos I’ve already taken of this child in the first eight months of their life, I had no easy way to display them around the house. I could, of course, always have some digital photos printed out and hung in various places, but that would only allow for a subset of all the great pictures I’d taken.

Suddenly a digital photo frame didn’t seem like such a wild idea, so when the opportunity arose for me to check one out, I didn’t hesitate. What I discovered is that there is definitely a niche for this digital spin on an old favorite, but that even a good entry falls short in a few ways.

Continue reading “Review: Aura’s digital photo frame is solid, if not quite picture perfect”…

By Shelly Brisbin

March 30, 2023 5:14 PM PT

Video: Using VoiceOver with the Weather app

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

Hey there, I’m Shelly Brisbin and I’m here to demo a new feature in iOS 16.4. Specifically, it’s in the Weather app, and even more specifically than that, it is for people who use the VoiceOver screen reader that’s part of iOS.

VoiceOver is a tool used by blind and visually impaired folks to hear the contents of the screen rather than viewing them. So using a combination of speech and touch, you can find out what’s under your fingers. That’s pretty easy if the content is text or even something that can be described pretty easily like a button, something that you can label. But if you have something like an overlay from inside the Weather app, it’s a little harder to use VoiceOver to describe it because it’s visual and it’s color coded. So what I’m going to show you is what I call “sonic overlay.” It’s an overlay that uses pitch to indicate the level of rain that an area is having right now.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]

By Jason Snell

March 29, 2023 2:43 PM PT

Apple in the Enterprise: A 2023 report card

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

In 2021, device-management startup Kandji approached Six Colors to commission a new entry in our Report Card series focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise. Then we approached people we knew in the community of Apple device administrators and asked them to participate in the survey. We are especially grateful to the members of the Mac Admins Slack for their participation.

This is our third year doing the survey. Over the last few weeks, we took the temperature of 117 admins, roughly half of whom report that they manage more than a thousand devices. They rated Apple’s performance in the context of enterprise IT on a scale from 1 to 5 in nine broad areas.

Below, you’ll see the survey results, plus choice comments from survey participants. Not all participants are represented; we gave everyone the option to remain anonymous and not be quoted. Though Kandji commissioned this survey—and we thank everyone there for doing so—it had no oversight over the survey results or the contents of this story, which was compiled by Jason Snell and the Six Colors staff.

Overall scores

Apple’s strongest scores came in hardware—Apple silicon Macs are a big winner—and in the company’s commitment to security and privacy.

In most categories, our panel’s view of Apple in the enterprise was on an upswing. The company made large gains in the categories of enterprise service and support and in macOS identity management (its 3.3 average was still fairly low overall, but up a whopping 0.4 from last year). However, Apple took a big hit in the deployment category, which dropped 0.2 to become the lowest scoring category in the survey.

We also asked a couple of questions outside the traditional set. For the second straight year, we asked about the pace of operating-system adoption. There was a big change here, with “quicker than usual” moving from 37% last year to 51% this year. (A decision by Apple to force a Ventura update as a “minor” upgrade may be at least partially responsible—see the comments in that category for the gory details.)

With numerous reports that Apple might be forced to open up iOS to third-party app stores, we asked our panel about what their policy might be toward such app stores. Were they open to supporting them under some circumstances, would they reject them outright, or are they in an environment that doesn’t even allow use of Apple’s own App Store?

More than half of the people who answered said that while they allowed the App Store, they wouldn’t want to allow third-party app stores. In their detailed comments, several expressed concern that any policy ruling that forced Apple’s hand might make it harder for admins to block third-party app stores, which would make them very unhappy. Only 21% of respondents said they would be open to the idea of third-party app stores.

Here’s what Tom Bridge of the Mac Admins Podcast had to say about this year’s results:

“It’s no surprise that folks are thrilled with hardware and appreciative of the privacy work Apple continues to do. I love to see that, good feedback for Apple around that.

“Deployment and Software Reliability take a hit this year. Software Update was a disaster, and that is firmly reflected here. Apple had every opportunity to make that a gain this year, but a late mistake in last year’s 12.3 release which went unnoticed til 12.6 meant a lot of updates were extremely confused this year.

“Continued gains in MDM are the result of Apple making big moves for the future. And last but not least, the future is bright. A solid grade on the hopefulness of admins.”

Read on for detailed results from each category, with unvarnished commentary from panel participants.

Continue reading “Apple in the Enterprise: A 2023 report card”…