One of my very favorite game developers, Zach Gage, is back with a new one. Knotwords, by Gage and Jack Schlesinger, is a crossword-puzzle style game with a twist: instead of filling the puzzle via clues, you have to fill various regions of the board with a limited selection of letters.
It’s a logic puzzle involving getting the right words to fit in all the right places. There’s also a second type of puzzle, Twist, which also limits the number of vowels you can use in each row and column, giving you clues—but also limiting your options. There are new puzzles every day in both normal and Twist formats, as well as monthly puzzlebooks that you can complete.
I’ve been playing Knotwords for more than a week, and it’s fantastic. It’s become a daily habit, and if you like crosswords and Wordle and similar types of puzzles, you’ll love it. Knotwords is free, but the Twist puzzles, access to 30 extra monthly puzzlebook puzzles, statistics, access to archived puzzles, and customization options are all locked behind a single in-app purchase. It’s $4.99 a year or $11.99 to unlock everything forever.
I was able to ask Gage a few questions about what inspired Knotwords and how he approaches building games like this. Here’s that interview:
Over the years, all sorts of entities have purchased the television rights to sporting events at prices that don’t make sense, at least if you’re expecting them to turn a profit directly from the sporting events themselves. Fox famously overpaid for NFL rights to establish itself as a network; regional cable networks have overpaid for exclusive local baseball TV rights to keep fans from cutting the cord.
So when Apple signed on with MLB to air Friday Night Baseball, the question should probably not have been, “How does Apple intend to profit enough from selling ads and new subscriptions to make its investment profitable?” It should have been, “What is Apple trying to achieve more broadly by spending money on live sports like baseball?”
There are lots of possibilities. Maybe it’s purely brand recognition for Apple TV+—baseball helps Apple reach a new audience that might never have considered the service before. Maybe it’s about pumping up the value of Apple’s service and bundles for existing subscribers so that they don’t churn. Maybe it’s about building a new sports-focused service as an add-on for TV+. Maybe Tim Cook has Friday nights free and wishes there were better baseball games on TV.
One of my favorite theories comes from Charlie Chapman, who suggests that it’s free promotion for Apple TV+ as, market by market, local news outlets has to explain what Apple TV+ is and how fans can get it to watch their team on Friday night.
I like it. And a similar idea occurred to me: What if Apple started buying up sports rights to increase the addressable market for Apple TV+ by prompting fans to upgrade their equipment?
Sure, for many of us on the cutting edge of tech, Apple TV+ seems to be available just about everywhere. Not just Apple TV boxes but Amazon and Roku devices, not to mention just about every relatively recent smart TV out there. But the truth is, many people don’t have a device that’s capable of viewing Apple TV+. And many of the people who do, have no idea that they do!
It’s also a matter of priorities. My friend Greg, who is one of the most technically adept people I have ever met, told me that he would have to watch the Dodgers on Friday Night Baseball on a computer because his TV couldn’t stream Apple TV+. Not everybody rushes out to buy a smart TV or a streamer box. I get it.
Fortunately, the inability to put a baseball game (or, perhaps next year, NFL Sunday Ticket) on a TV set is easily solved. You can pick up a compatible device from Roku or Amazon for about $30. And once you do, you’re now part of the potential universe for Apple TV+. And if your current TV or streamer box has support for Apple TV+, maybe you’ll go to the trouble of figuring that out to watch your favorite team.
It may not sound like a lot, but every little bit helps.
Apple’s not alone in this. Amazon is broadcasting exclusive NFL games this fall, potentially even on Black Friday. Like Apple, Amazon’s motivation in spending money on sports rights for Prime Video is not about a direct payback. Needing to watch a favorite team is a great reason to buy a streaming stick.
Sure, creating great programming is one way to build your service. But even the very best-reviewed movies and TV shows compete with an avalanche of other programs on other services. If you’re a fan of a sport or a particular team, though, you will want to go where your team goes. There’s a lot of leverage there, and the streaming giants know it.
Step one is to give them a reason to start streaming. Step two is for them to give it a try. Step three… profit?
The video conferencing cameras we use, how we’d change Siri’s voice, whether we’d tackle an iPhone repair, and our plans (or lack thereof) for leaving Twitter.
It’s been 12 years since the iPad first arrived, amid hype that it was the next iPhone and pessimism that it would never live up to that hype. After some dramatic early years, the iPad has become a comfortable business that’s raking in about $30 billion a year in sales. It’s not the next iPhone, but in terms of Apple’s platforms, it’s roughly the size of the Mac.
What were the pivotal moments in the iPad’s 12-year history? What were the key events that led it from there to here? I’ve forced myself to rank the top moments.
The new online store offers more than 200 individual parts and tools, enabling customers who are experienced with the complexities of repairing electronic devices to complete repairs on the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups and iPhone SE (3rd generation), such as the display, battery, and camera. Later this year the program will also include manuals, parts, and tools to perform repairs on Mac computers with Apple silicon.
I browsed through the new site1 out of curiosity, and it struck me that while the replacement parts are affordable for most people, the tools are quite expensive. A torque driver, for example, runs between $80-$100, depending on what version you need. There’s also some pretty hefty equipment, like a Heated Display Removal Fixture that’s more than $250, and is clearly aimed at mom-and-pop repair shops.
However, Apple is also offering tool kits that you can rent for seven days, that include all of the tools you need for a specific device, for a very reasonable $49. And I mean everything:
The tool kit comes in cases that, when stacked on top of each other, measure 20 inches wide and 47 inches high. One case weighs 43 pounds and the other weighs 36 pounds (a detailed list of included items is included below). The cases each have roller wheels to aid in transport.
No doubt the service manuals will be of interest to a lot of people, since they clearly lay out the kind of details that in the past have been left for firms like iFixit to deduce themselves. I doubt we’ll see manuals for new Apple products until a while after their releases, though.
All in all, most customers are probably still likely to turn to Apple or an authorized service center for repairs, but, hey, if you’ve ever wanted to order a new SIM Tray for your iPhone, you can do it now.
Weirdly, the site for the repair program feels surprisingly un-Apple-like, down to the typography and use of stock photos. ↩
Apple has released both developer and public beta versions of macOS 12.4 that include within them a beta version of the firmware for the Apple Studio Display. This is the first update to the Studio Display firmware since it shipped, and Apple says that it “has refinements to the Studio Display camera tuning, including improved noise reduction, contrast, and framing.”
Since my Studio Display arrived last week and I haven’t yet sent back Apple’s review unit, I’m in the enviable position of having two Studio Displays available for testing. So I updated my display, kept the stock firmware on the review unit, placed them as close as possible to one another to take similar shots, and compared the two.
But first, some observations about the process of updating the Studio Display. After updating to the macOS 12.4 beta and rebooting, the new Studio Display firmware becomes available as an update. Applying this update requires another reboot (and a stealth reboot at the end of that process).
Since the software that runs the display’s webcam is on the display itself, you should see those changes even on Macs not running the latest beta. (This makes sense—Apple would never want a display to suddenly become incompatible with older devices due to a firmware update.) So if you really want to update a display but don’t want your primary Mac to be running a beta, perhaps find another Mac that’s capable of running the update to sacrifice to the cause.
So how does it look? I’ve posted a video on YouTube so you can see for yourself. I’ve placed a few stills from that video below.
In general, I’d say the new firmware generates a better picture. A lot of that is down to the fact that it seems to prefer a wider crop. That’s good, because it means it’s using a larger portion of the Center Stage camera’s 12 megapixel image. More pixels should equate to a better image.
I’m not sure I have figured out how the Center Stage framing algorithm may have been tweaked. An advantage of the new, wider crop that Center Stage seems to prefer is that it requires less panning in general—a slight shift in posture isn’t nearly as dramatic when there’s more room around a face in the frame. In certain circumstances it did appear that framing adjustments were happening later on the new firmware, but in other cases the panning seemed pretty much identical.
In terms of image quality, beyond having access to extra pixels due to framing, it looks like the camera is being a bit less aggressive when it comes to softening the image and in trying to decrease contrast. In some of the lighting conditions I tested, the dynamic range of the image seemed to be a little wider—highlights weren’t as crushed down, though blacks were still a little more of a gray. Compare it to another Apple webcam like the iMac Pro and you can really see how much less contrast this camera provides.
With Center Stage turned off, the crop is not as hilariously high.
One other change in this version: Turning off Center Stage provides a lower crop than it did in the previous firmware, which was comically high. This one is more likely to include my entire face in the frame, rather than just the top portion of it. (The image sample above is actually a little unfair to the new firmware; in order to get the two displays to work simultaneously, I had to place the new-firmware display higher above my desk than I normally would.)
So is all forgiven? Not really. Anyone who thought that a firmware update would transform the Center Stage camera into a different camera was probably fooling themselves. This is still a 12 megapixel wide-angle camera that’s being dynamically cropped, and while firmware fixes can definitely improve the image output, there are limits to those changes.
I hope the team at Apple that’s working on this firmware continues that work, because there’s more that can be done to improve things. (I still think the firmware’s insistence on doing rapid, jerky recentering of the image is a mistake, compared to subtler movements like you’d see on television. And the contrast could still be better.) But this firmware release is a definite improvement on what was there last month when the Studio Display shipped.
Jason added a (working) Studio Display and a Playdate to his house last week, and Myke’s a little upset. Also CNN+ died, Netflix went into crisis, and Apple kept making sports streaming deals. We also discuss the parking situation at Apple Park, accept the passing of the iPhone mini, and envision a new use for the HomePod name.
Last week’s strange news tidbit: the full-size HomePod, that most recent of Apple’s perhaps misguided product choices, is going at a premium on the resale market after having been discontinued back in spring 2021. It’s odd but not inexplicable. As my colleague Jason Snell pointed out, the HomePod was a case of Apple making trade-offs that ultimately appealed only to a niche audience—but a niche audience that was very excited about it.
The lesson I take away from all this is that though the full-size HomePod was not necessarily a market success, Apple should be willing to take risks on product categories that may not be obvious crowd-pleasers. Macs, iPhones, iPads—all of these are established products these days, ones that the company can count on selling in droves when they release updates every year or two. They’re easy and, if I can be excused for saying so, boring.
But the weird one-off products? The kind that seem destined to be appreciated by the few? Those are the places where you never know when you might find a hit.
I use Reincubate’s Camo to turn my iPhone into a high-quality webcam for my Mac. Even an older iPhone’s camera is better than any webcam you’ve got, but mounting it can be fussy, and you have to unlock the phone and launch the Camo app every time you use it—which isn’t very convenient when the phone’s display is facing away from you and the whole thing is horizontal.
I will only be using the iPhone 6 Plus as a webcam and I will have it permanently mounted to my monitor, so to make it easier to launch the Camo app on the iPhone after the phone have been locked, I put the iPhone into Single App Mode using Apple Configurator and disabled the passcode on the phone. When in Single App Mode (sometimes also referred to as “kiosk mode”), the iPhone will only be able to launch a single app and the app will automatically be launched when the phone is unlocked.
If you’ve got an unused iPhone sitting around, this seems like a great second life for it.
Emergency podcast! Julia and Jason reconvene for a second time in a week to discuss Netflix’s very bad quarterly results (and how the company will change its behavior and strategy as a result) and the rapid but not entirely surprising death of CNN+.
A baseball digression (including some tech talk), a Mac app that outpaces its cross-platform competition, and the curious case of the HomePod (and why Apple should take more chances).
That got me thinking: when I start recording a show, I could run a script that fires off a shortcut that contains a Timery action to start time tracking. I don’t want to manually tell Shortcuts which podcast I’m recording, but Audio Hijack can help here as well: the app can pass the name of the session that just started to Shortcuts. If I named my Audio Hijack sessions with the same name I use for each podcast project in Timery, does that mean I could invoke one shortcut that knew exactly what podcast I started recording?
Though scripting Audio Hijack does require some rudimentary JavaScript, its ability to pass data to Shortcuts lowers the bar for ease of use considerably. (I’m a fan of Federico’s approach of passing a JSON dictionary to Shortcuts; it allows a single shortcut to flexibly respond to different kinds of input rather than requiring a whole bunch of different shortcuts to perform slightly different tasks.)
Listening to last week’s Accidental Tech Podcast made me realize: that the original HomePod and the Apple Studio Display have a few things in common. Both products entered a category full of competition—displays and voice-activated speakers. Both were regarded in some quarters as overpriced and over-engineered.
But in some ways, isn’t that just describing the archetypal Apple product? They’re nicer than the competition, but more expensive. They have extra features that most manufacturers wouldn’t bother with—but Apple bothers, because it’s Apple.
Most striking, though, was listening to Marco Arment talk about how he loves his HomePods and how there’s nothing on the market today that’s a match for them in terms of quality and functionality. As someone who just bought a Studio Display, that concept sounds awfully familiar. (Oh yes, and HomePods are now appreciating in value.)
When viewed from the perspective of the overall smart-speaker market, the HomePod seemed like a misstep. But individual users have specific desires and demands. When you try to gauge the market for any particular product, you’re trying to figure out how it fits and if it will sell. These can be entirely different perspectives.
From a market perspective, the HomePod’s price and features made it a poor fit in a limited category, and it appeared from the start that it wouldn’t be a big seller. It wasn’t—in fact, it seems like Apple made an initial batch and then spent the rest of the HomePod’s life trying to unload them all. As a product competing in a market, it was a flop.
But for a small category of users—too small for the full-sized HomePod to continue as an ongoing product—the HomePod was the right combination of features. It fits the use cases of people like Marco Arment, and with it gone, there’s nothing around that’s a good replacement.
Nothing burns like finding the perfect product for you and then discovering that it’s being killed because nobody else wanted it. (I learned this lesson in the late 1970s when my dad’s favorite snack chip was discontinued.) We should never confuse popularity for quality, but if a product is not popular enough to continue being produced, it won’t matter how good it is.
Anyway: The Studio Display. It’s not going to be discontinued due to a lack of interest. On the contrary, it seems to be massively back-ordered. Apple is going to sell a lot of them.
Is the Studio Display overpriced and over-engineered? Depending on how you view the category of “external computer displays,” you could argue that it is. Random PC users and people who literally don’t see anything wrong with a 32-inch curved Dell 4K display will not be buying a Studio Display.
But if you’re a Mac user who wants a high-resolution 5K display in the style of the 5K iMac, this is the one to get. The display market has had years to make versions of this display, and it collectively yawned at the prospect, leaving only one option: the LG UltraFine 5K, a display that many Mac users have bought, but few have loved. Apple has essentially spent half a decade building demand for a product that (essentially) nobody else wanted to make, but it’s a product that appeals to Apple’s core Mac customer base.
The original HomePod and the Studio Display are both outliers in their product categories. In one case, there just weren’t enough people to fill that niche, leading Apple to refactor the product to try to find a larger audience with a cheaper, lower-quality version. In the other, there is enough pent-up demand for the product to be a success.
They may both be weird outlier products, but both of them have communities that love them. Sometimes that’s enough. And sometimes it’s not.
When I first tried Ecamm Network‘s live-streaming app Live, I didn’t like it.1 I liked the idea of it. Software that streams live to YouTube, Twitch, and other services is dominated by open-source projects like OBS and Streamlabs and expensive cross-platform apps like Wirecast. Live is a rarity: it’s a relatively young (introduced in 2017), Mac-only app. There aren’t many of those out there in any category, and this was a category that frustrated me with unreliable, slow cross-platform apps.
Most of my friends who have dived into live streaming gave up and bought Windows PCs, dedicated to running that software. No judgment—I get it. But I really didn’t want to go down that path. I wanted to use my Mac, if at all possible.
Unfortunately, my first attempt at embracing Live didn’t take. In early 2020, I desperately hoped it could replicate my needs for streaming Total Party Kill (and, potentially, Six Colors). Unfortunately, the app wasn’t flexible enough. I wanted control of the layout of the live display. For example, I wanted to place video of two people side by side, with a small picture-in-picture overlay of a screen capture. It just couldn’t be done—Live had a very particular way of approaching a document with a single “source” dominating the screen and additional items being added on top of it.
I gave up and went back to Wirecast, OBS, and Streamlabs, and spent a couple of years frustrated that not even an iMac Pro with eight Xeon cores had enough horsepower to stream videos smoothly on the Internet. (These apps, all focused primarily on Windows, don’t properly take advantage of various Mac features, making them less efficient on macOS.) I had crashes, failures, and frustrations with interfaces that just weren’t made for me.
Earlier this year, I decided to check in on Live to see if it had made progress in the last two years. It turns out, if you build a sustainable business model—Live costs $16/month, or $32/month for a Pro tier—you can afford to steadily update your software! In two years, Live had addressed literally every frustration I had experienced with the 2020 version of the app. I can’t see ever going back to another video-streaming app now. (I used Live for our first experimental Six Colors stream last month.)
How it works
The big breakthrough in Live was its addition of the concept of a scene with its source set to Blank. This allows me to place objects on the canvas any way I want without working around a big, primary source like a camera or a screen capture. (I realize that most video streamers want that feature, which is why Live initially implemented it that way—but I am a bit of a control enthusiast.)
Live’s main window is the live-stream canvas. You can add items to it as overlays, which display in a floating palette that’s analogous to the Layers window in Photoshop. Items you can add to the canvas include images, cameras, screen or window captures, and text. You can position, resize, and crop them all easily. I especially appreciate that objects can be placed on Show In All Scenes or Show In Background layers, reducing the redundancy of elements you use in every scene. You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to individual overlays, so it’s easy to make overlays appear or disappear quickly.
Of course, I’m always wanting more. I’d like to be able to lock objects at their current aspect ratio so that resizing them doesn’t become a bit of a guessing game in terms of getting their current crop to remain unchanged. More masking options would be nice, and I’d like to be able to move or resize multiple objects at once.
Every scene is its own individual canvas, and you can switch between them by clicking, via keyboard shortcut, or via a Stream Deck button. You can choose one of two modes—in the default mode, when you switch to or edit a scene, the results are immediately reflected on your live stream. If you switch into Preview Mode, any switching or editing isn’t displayed on your live stream until you press Return. Both have their advantages.
Live has a document-based interface, sort of: each different project appears as a different Profile in the Profiles menu, with its own set of scenes and destinations. So I can have a Profile for Six Colors and separate ones for every D&D campaign I’m streaming. You can export and import Profiles to exchange them with other people or move them to other devices.
I’ve also been very impressed with just how fast and stable Live has been. In other apps, capturing a bunch of windows leads to reduced frame rates. I’d been reduced to capturing cropped portions of my screen, which saved me on frame rates—but also meant that if I accidentally moved a window atop the windows I was capturing, I would mess up the capture completely. In Live, I was able to capture a Zoom window, make copies of the capture, crop them differently, and place them all together. Not only did the frame rate not suffer, but the Live interface itself didn’t become sluggish, another common occurrence when capturing a lot of windows in other apps. It feels like Live is that much more capable on Macs with Apple silicon; using a Mac Studio with an M1 Max chip, it felt like there was literally nothing I couldn’t do with Live.
Live supports streaming to several different services, but only one at a time. It supports restreaming services to let you, say, stream to YouTube and Twitch at once. (It might be nice if Live was capable of streaming to more than one service itself.)
As is usually the case with products like this, I know I’m not taking advantage of a fraction of the app’s features. My friends Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard use the Pro version of Live to produce iOS Today; they use Zoom to communicate with each other and the TWiT studio, but rather than using a webcam, they are sending the output from Live across the Zoom link. This lets them choose to display themselves or a locally shared iPhone or iPad screen capture, which is a key part of what they do on that show. In essence, they’re using Live to direct their own portion of the show themselves.
Another Pro feature is support for Live’s own integrated videoconferencing service. I’ve used this on live streams with Matthew Cassinelli, and it’s quite good. But it’s not enough to make me switch from using Zoom, especially since most of my D&D sessions feature far more than Live’s four-guest limit. Live even supports NDI, which allows you to import individual guests in apps like Skype as their own cameras, so you don’t have to section up a screen capture of a VOIP window. Unfortunately, my podcasting app of choice is Zoom, which doesn’t support NDI in regular use! (Liminal’s ZoomISO sort of does this, but it feels really hacky. I’d love to see Zoom support NDI directly—and perhaps it will, since Zoom recently bought Liminal.)
While it’s true that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, I’m glad I revisited Live two years on. In the intervening time, Ecamm has removed every stumbling block that made it an impractical app for me. Live is now my live-streaming app of choice. It feels good to add a new, Mac-only app to my toolbox.
Julia has some advice for David Zaslav as he takes the reins of Warner Bros. Discovery—mostly about the fates of CNN+ and the Harry Potter franchise. Plus, the rise of streaming sports.
As of April 15, 2022, Apple has quietly added cycling directions for the parts of the Midwest covered in Expansion #6, including Chicago (pictured below), Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Charleston…
Indeed, O’Beirne notes that this was the second expansion this month; on April 1, the northeast region was also updated with cycling directions.
A quick check shows, yes: my hometown of Boston does finally have cycling directions. As an infrequent cyclist who is constantly trying to to do more biking, this is a welcome addition.
However, the feature is not without its issues. For example, we have a great bike path nearby, and though Maps’s cycling directions do let you prioritize avoiding hills or busy roads, it’d be nice if we could also put a premium on separated cycling routes; there are lots of cases where I will gladly spend the extra five minutes getting to the bike path to enjoy a safer and more leisurely remainder of my trip. (That bike path is also scheduled to be extended later this year, and I’ll be interested to see how long it takes Apple Maps to take that into account.)
Overall, I’m glad that cycling directions are available in more places; the feature was added back in iOS 14, but had been relatively sparsely rolled out in the last year—a fact I noted on Twitter last fall at iOS 15’s release.
