Apple today revealed the winners of the 2024 App Store Awards, honoring 17 apps and games that helped users ignite their creativity, achieve new milestones, and cherish everyday moments with family and friends. This year’s winning developers have created apps and games that improved users’ lives and impacted culture around the world. From solo entrepreneurs to multinational teams, these App Store Award winners were chosen from 45 finalists by App Store Editors for demonstrating the highest levels of user experience, design, and innovation.
I had the chance to spend time with three of this year’s winners and ask them about how they created their Apple award-winning apps.
Balatro+ takes home the prize for Apple Arcade Game of the Year after already capturing so many of our hearts. The roguelike game is a fantastic mix of poker, deck-building, solitaire and more that gets addictive quick. It's only been available on iOS through Apple Arcade or as a standalone purchase since September.
The new HomePod software adds support for Apple Music natural language search, which means you can describe what you want to hear in more casual language.
You can ask Siri for music using different combinations of genres, moods, activity, decades, and more. Examples include "songs about cats," "songs with a vibe," "relaxing songs," "artists similar to Taylor Swift," "sad 80s songs," and "songs about food."
Apple is bringing layered recordings to the Voice Memos app on the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. With the new feature, you can record vocals while listening to an instrumental track out loud in iOS 18.2.
These features are, on the whole, more ambitious than the initial batch released back in in October, and some of them build on those features: for example, the ability to now generate specific changes to text in Writing Tools. This also marks the first third-party integration of generative AI features into Apple’s own platforms, with the ability to connect to ChatGPT.
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But does this latest round of AI features move the needle in Apple’s quest to improve its users lives? Let’s delve in and see.
The spot features a custom song called "Anything You Like" by The Dare, and it runs through a list of rhyming Genmoji creations like gnome, foam, pink comb, and skeleton made out of chrome, showing each Genmoji as it's mentioned in the song.
Today, someone tried to pull a scam on me, and it had some notable approaches I haven't seen or heard about before so I figure I'll write it up in case someone else someday is searching for a strange bunch of behaviors that hit their credit cards and their inboxes at the same time.
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I believe someone had my working credit card number, then either used a quick spammy script or paid a service to sign me up to several hundred services at once, so that my inbox would be completely inundated with mail to the point that I'd miss a Best Buy email among all of them.
Beats describes today’s new additions as Special Edition with Sunrise Pink and Twilight Blue joining the line. Why special edition? The MagSafe outline on the back is replaced with the Beats b logo.
Now, it’s a gigantic, high-res curved display with perfect viewing angles, too. That makes the price feel a little closer to right.
The task management app’s enhanced Shortcuts include the new Complete Action, Complete Project, and Find Folders actions, the updated Today’s Forecast (with support for due, deferred, tagged, and flagged actions), and the beta Find Actions and Find Projects Shortcuts.
LinearMouse is a free app that lets you choose different settings for every mouse and touchpad you connect to. This can help you solve the acceleration problem I just mentioned and also lets you do things like use natural scrolling on one device and not others. It can also customize all the buttons on your mouse.
Businesses in Maryland can now use a state-developed app to check mobile driver’s licenses for age verification. The app, one official says, looks to innovate and streamline how residents interact with businesses and government organizations in the state.
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Businesses using the mobile ID app for age verification will only see necessary information, meaning the app will only present data that confirms if the customer is 18 years old or 21 years old, for instance, and will not reveal other information such as the person’s birth date, she explained.
The leaked software references the "MacBook Air (13-inch, M4, 2025)" and the "MacBook Air (15-inch, M4, 2025)," confirming that new M4 MacBook Air models are in development and are likely not too far off from launching.
Apple this "past summer" canceled the development of a high-performance Mac chip that would have consisted of four smaller chips stitched together, in order to free up engineering resources for a planned AI server chip, according to The Information.
Based on the report's description of the chip, it sounds like Apple has canceled a previously-rumored "Extreme" chip for the Mac. It was previously reported that an "M2 Extreme" chip was scrapped a few years ago, but perhaps Apple had revisited the idea since then. In any case, it now sounds like an "M4 Extreme" chip is also unlikely.
Starmer and Cook are expected to discuss Apple's investment in Britain, where the company has pumped in 18 billion pounds ($23 billion) over the last five years, the spokesperson told reporters.
I have a bunch of classical music playlists, and I combine them all, and I shuffle up all the tracks, and listen to them all day.
I wonder how many classical music fans do I offend by this one simple act.
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Thanks for reading.