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Fritz von Weizsäcker, Sohn des früheren Bundespräsidenten Richard von Weizsäcker, ist am Dienstagabend während eines Vortrags in einer Klinik in Berlin erstochen worden. Die Polizei hat den Tatverdächtigen festgenommen.
Die Telekom Baskets Bonn sind neuer Tabellenführer in der Gruppe D der Champions League. Das Team glänzte am Dienstagabend im Spitzenspiel in Dijon und gewann mit 78:66 beim bisherigen Spitzenreiter.
Im letzten Gruppenspiel gegen Nordirland hat die DFB-Elf nur anfangs ein paar Schwierigkeiten. Nach dem überraschenden Führungstor der Gäste steigert sich die Auswahl von Bundestrainer Joachim Löw deutlich - und glänzt vor allem dank zweier Bayern-Profis.
We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.
Nintendo Switch Lite Console with Pokemon Sword or Shield Plus Case and Screen Protector | $240-$250 | Walmart
Yesterday, Apple Maps received its biggest US update by area yet, encompassing several states in the Midwest and West. Along with it, came a comprehensive update from Justin O’Beirne, who has been chronicling the updates since they began.
Apple started rolling out new, more detailed maps of the US in September 2018 and said at WWDC this year that the new maps would cover the entire US by the end of 2019. With the latest update, which is the sixth, only the Southeast and Central states, Alaska, and a few other areas remain un-updated.
Source: justinobeirne.com
According to O’Beirne’s post, Apple’s new maps now cover over 50% of the US by area and two-thirds of its population, including the country’s ten largest cities. Although almost half of the US by area has yet to have its maps updated, the accelerated pace of updates, suggests to O’Beirne that it is possible the remaining parts of the US may still be completed before the close of the year.
In addition to dozens of GIFs with side-by-side comparisons of the old and new Apple Maps for different regions of the US, O’Beirne goes into detail on the changes Apple has made to identifying roads, parks, and other landmarks at different zoom levels. It’s a fascinatingly in-depth analysis that suggests that Apple has increasingly automated its map creation process.
Be sure to check out O’Beirne’s post for all the details and the many GIF comparisons.
→ Source: justinobeirne.com
Waffle Knits | Starting at $20 | Jachs
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Die A4 bei Eschweiler ist seit Dienstagmittag nach einem Unfall gesperrt. Dort war ein Mann mit seinem Lastwagen umgekippt, der Fahrer stand dabei unter erheblichem Alkoholeinfluss.
DHL Express hat am Dienstag am Flughafen Köln/Bonn sein neues Logistikzentrum in Betrieb genommen. Dabei bemüht sich das Unternehmen auch um Klimaschutz.
Buckler’s Skin Rescue Essentials Kit | $26 | Huckberry
Im ehemaligen Spielwarengeschäft Puppenkönig in Bonn wird auch in diesem Jahr eine Modelleisenbahn aufgebaut. Viele Bonner hatten befürchtet, in Zukunft zur Vorweihnachtszeit darauf verzichten zu müssen.
Das Bonner Landgericht hat zwei Cousins im Alter von 29 und 52 Jahren zu mehrjährigen Haftstrafen verurteilt. Der jüngere der beiden Männer hatte gegenüber seinen Opfern seinen ganzen Charme spielen lassen.
Spotify aims to do for podcasts what it’s done for music recommendations with today’s announcement of a new algorithmic podcast playlist.
One of the music streaming service’s greatest strengths is the analysis it does of users’ listening habits, which it uses to recommend new tracks through playlists like Discover Weekly and Daily Mix. According to Spotify, its new ‘Your Daily Podcasts’ playlist will analyze recent episodes you’ve streamed and the shows you follow to make recommendations tailored to the type of shows that match your interests. For example, for story-based sequential shows that you haven’t tried before, Spotify will offer the trailer or first episode of a show, while for daily, news-based podcasts, the playlist may include a recent, topical episode.
The addition of ‘Your Daily Podcasts’ is not surprising given remarks by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek when the company acquired Gimlet Media and Anchor. At the time, Ek said Spotify would offer improved ‘curation and customization’ for users and ‘better discovery, data, and monetization to creators.’
Podcast discovery remains an area that a number of companies are working to improve. As Spotify’s share of the podcast listener market increases, its ability to anticipate the podcasts and individual episodes that subscribers will enjoy has the potential to rival what has already made it such an attractive service for many music fans. Given its dominance of podcasting, it will also be interesting to see if Apple counters by enhancing its own discovery tools in the future.
Spotify says that the new playlist is available to subscribers in the US, UK, Germany, Sweden, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand who have listened to at least four podcasts in the past 90 days.
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„Finde das Muhh!“ heißt es derzeit wieder in der Werbung von Müllermilch. Einem 19-Jährigen aus Fritzdorf ist dies gelungen, er hat eine von nur fünf Gewinn-Flaschen erwischt. Wirklich glauben konnte er es zunächst nicht.
My iPadOS Home screen.
For several years after its launch, one of the best and worst things about the iPad was that it was basically just a blown-up iPhone. This meant the device was extremely easy to use and intuitive, but it also meant lots of “computer-like” tasks were difficult to perform on an iPad. When the iPad Pro debuted in late 2015, that began to change. Features like Split View, Slide Over, Picture in Picture, and drag and drop made the iPad a more capable computer than ever. However, despite those advancements, it took until this fall before one of the iPad’s core iPhone inspirations was altered: the Home screen.
Before iPadOS, the iPad’s Home screen was just a larger version of an iPhone Home screen, with no unique advantages to it. That finally changed mere months ago, when iPadOS 13 brought two primary improvements to the Home screen: it could hold 30 icons rather than 20, and it could include pinned widgets.
These two changes alone weren’t radical departures from the Home screen’s iPhone origins, but combined with other discoveries, they unlocked significant new possibilities.
On a recent episode of Adapt, I challenged Federico to try re-creating a Mac-like desktop environment on the iPad’s Home screen, complete with file and folder launchers. What he came up with is exactly what I’d hoped for. This newfound ability, alongside iPadOS 13’s enhancements to how shortcuts work when added to the Home screen, and the debut of MacStories Shortcuts Icons, meant it was time for me to seriously consider a new approach to my Home screen.
What I’ve come up with includes apps, app folders, files, file folders, shortcuts, and of course, widgets. It’s a diverse setup, and it all lives on a single page of icons. Let me explain.
My dock contains 14 apps and a folder.
Like with all modern iPad Home screens, the most important part of my Home screen is the dock. With the exception of some apps in my dock’s folder, the dock only contains apps that I use on a daily basis, typically many times each day. There are some daily-use apps that aren’t in my dock, and instead reside in my Home screen’s grid, but those are apps I typically only use in fullscreen. Since the dock is the easiest way to add apps to Split View or Slide Over, I reserve its limited space for apps I regularly multitask with.
I won’t go into much detail about the specifics of apps in my dock, because most of them are familiar to you already. I use a lot of first-party apps, partly because I tend to agree with many of Apple’s design decisions, but also because of how seamlessly these apps work across a variety of devices – iPad, iPhone, Watch, HomePod, and Mac.
As for the apps you may not recognize, from left to right:
My lone dock folder has a slightly humorous backstory. Historically I haven’t used folders in my iPad’s dock, because when I first tried one during the iOS 11 beta cycle, dragging an app icon out of a folder, for the purpose of adding that app to Split View, wouldn’t automatically dismiss the folder. That bothered me, so I stopped using a folder in my dock. Little did I know that Apple fixed this issue years ago.
When I learned this spring that the problem was fixed, I started using a folder in my dock again. Unfortunately, less than a month later, the iPadOS 13 beta re-broke functionality in the same way as before: dragging an app out of a folder would require manually dismissing the folder. Again, I reverted to keeping no folder in my dock…until the issue was fixed again, this time in iPadOS 13.2. So the folder’s back for now. Who knows how long it will last this time.
My dock’s lone folder.
Inside my dock’s folder I keep apps that I launch a lot and that I use in Split View or Slide Over regularly. If I didn’t multitask with these apps often, they would belong in my Home screen grid instead. Noteworthy apps:
A fantastic addition to iPadOS, widgets can now be pinned on the Home screen so they’re just a glance away. You can technically pin as many widgets to the Home screen as you’d like, but they’re constrained to a limited area on the left side of the Home screen, and only a few can fit on-screen at once. If you pin more widgets than what’s visible on-screen, you can scroll through the widgets to see any that are hidden. If you keep all your widgets in compact mode, up to four will fit on-screen at a time; you can also optionally keep one or more expanded if you need its additional functionality.
I keep four widgets on-screen in compact mode at all times: Up Next, Timery, World Clock Widget, and CARROT Weather.
I keep four pinned widgets on my Home screen.
Up Next is unique in that it’s built by Apple and isn’t tied to a single app, but rather it pulls data from Calendar, Reminders, and Clock to keep you informed about what’s happening next in your day. Though the widget can only show one, or sometimes two items at a time, I still find it extremely helpful for making sure I don’t forget a scheduled meeting, or to see what my next due reminder is. Up Next’s Clock integration means that near day’s end it will show you what time your morning alarm is set to go off; my alarm doesn’t change often, but it’s still a nice touch.
Timery is the app I use for time tracking via Toggl. I love its widget because it offers one-tap triggers for the only two timers I ever use, and when a timer’s running I get a live-updating record of it.
World Clock Widget is an app that exists solely to offer a widget featuring clocks from various parts of the world. As someone who lives one or more time zones away from most colleagues and family members, it’s always helpful having immediate access to all relevant clocks. There are plenty of apps on the App Store that offer similar functionality, I just prefer the way World Clock’s widget looks.
CARROT Weather used to be in my Home screen grid itself, but since I added it to my list of pinned widgets, I no longer need it in the grid since I can tap its widget to open the full app. CARROT is, I believe, the best weather app on the App Store, and I appreciate how customizable its widget is.
These four widgets offer everything I need from my iPad widgets, so I don’t even have additional widgets enabled for scrolling through.
This is where things get really fun. I’ve made a lot of recent changes to my Home screen that take advantage of updates in iPadOS 13. The first major change is that I now have but a single Home screen page: the ability to have 30 icon slots per page, up from the previous limit of 20, means I no longer need to deal with extra pages.
My original plan, in fact, was to keep the bottom row of my Home screen either partially or entirely empty so that new apps I install for the sake of testing or reviewing could live there, in plain sight, ensuring I don’t forget about them. Unfortunately, I discovered that even when the first Home screen page is left partially empty, and it’s the only page you have, iPadOS still installs new apps on a second page. Upon this discovery, I decided to fill my first page completely. When new apps are installed, at least now I’m reminded of them by the page indicator at the bottom of the screen that shows me I have more than a single page active.
Up to 30 icons can fill the Home screen grid.
The main reason my new Home screen is noteworthy, however, isn’t its limited page count, but its variety of content types. There are apps, of course, and app folders, but there are also shortcuts, some of which perform actions and others of which open specific files or folders in the Files app.
Google Calendar and Gmail are here not because I want them here, but because they’re requirements for work. I could access them through Safari, but with Gmail in particular the web app doesn’t adapt well in Split View configurations, so I just stick with the native app (even though it somehow doesn’t support Split View itself).
YouTube, News, and Bible Memory are all fairly self-explanatory. Maps is on my Home screen not because I use it for navigation, but because I’m using my iPad all day long, so any time I want to look up a location, or plot out a route, I do that on my iPad.
I don’t play a lot a games on my iPad, but my Arcade folder exists because there are a lot of games I want to play on my iPad, but haven’t made the time for yet. My most recent Arcade Highlights story covered one title I’ve recently enjoyed, Sayonara Wild Hearts, but most other titles in this folder are still waiting to be played.
My Other folder contains every other app contained on my iPad. Most of these are apps that I use, but only rarely, so I typically launch them using Search. The first page of the folder contains apps I use a little more regularly than the rest, but still not too often. However, the folder also has a lot of apps I’m not actively using, but instead keep installed so I can apprised of any updates they receive. For example, despite Reminders being my current task manager of choice, I keep Things 3 and Todoist installed because I may want to re-try those apps when they add new features; also, for the sake of covering noteworthy updates on MacStories, it’s easier to just keep extra apps installed on my device rather than deleting them and re-downloading later.
My Home screen contains 10 shortcuts.
My final two Home screen rows both contain shortcuts. Before getting into the specifics of these shortcuts, however, it’s worth noting for long-time Shortcuts users that this past year Apple substantially improved the way Home screen shortcuts work. Formerly, launching a shortcut from the Home screen would first open Safari, because behind the scenes Shortcuts was employing web clips. If you, like me, try to keep your Safari tabs to a minimum, this made Home screen shortcuts extremely unappealing, because every time you ran a shortcut you’d be left with a new Safari tab, not to mention the annoying extra step of having to make a pit stop in Safari before arriving in Shortcuts. All of this has been fixed today: Home screen shortcuts now avoid Safari altogether, launching directly in the Shortcuts app as they always should have.
You’ll notice that while a couple of my Home screen shortcut glyphs can be found in the Shortcuts app, most of them cannot. Shortcuts includes a moderate-sized collection of glyph options, but it could stand to double or triple that assortment in the future to better suit common Home screen use cases. In the absence of appropriate options inside Shortcuts itself, nearly all of the glyphs I’m using come from the MacStories Shortcuts Icons, enabling my Home screen icons to more accurately portray the shortcuts they represent.
I’ll start with my fourth row, containing five shortcuts, two of which relate to my work schedule and the other three to audio playback.
The Week icon originally triggered a shortcut that Federico created for Club MacStories members called Agenda Preview. As described near the end of his Toolbox Pro review, Agenda Preview gathers information about your tasks and calendar events over the next week and presents it all in a well-organized view, offering a quick, comprehensive look at your whole week. It’s a great shortcut, but just days ago I actually changed this icon to perform a different, yet related function.
As part of fulfilling a challenge for episode 13 of Adapt, I recently discovered a calendar app called Kalends which offers a single-screen view that, like Agenda Preview, combines events and reminders. What I really like about Kalends’ view is that it puts a full seven days on-screen at once, with no scrolling required. So now, my Week icon simply runs a shortcut that launches Kalends, enabling me with a single tap to instantly see my whole week ahead with no further interaction required. Normally, I’m not in the practice of adding Home screen shortcuts that simply launch a specific app, but in Kalends’ case I’m not a fan of its app icon, and I like thinking of it less as an app and more as a single-screen view of my week, so running it as a shortcut works well.
The second icon, Logged, runs a shortcut that’s almost as simple as my Week icon: it launches the Toggl app directly into the Reports tab so I can see how much time I’ve logged for work during the current calendar week. I have to do this in the official Toggl client because my preferred app, Timery, doesn’t yet offer reports functionality. I have a goal of hitting a certain number of logged hours each week, so I’ve found it helpful to keep a dedicated Home screen icon that immediately informs me of where I stand at any given point in the week.
The next three icons are all audio-related. It’s no coincidence that they sit directly underneath iTunes Store, Podcasts, and Dark Noise, which are all similarly audio-focused.
Music kicks off an advanced shortcut Federico has been working on for some time now, which he plans to share soon, but for today you’ll just have to trust me when I say it’s pretty fantastic.
The Play and Pause icons, as you can tell from their glyphs, have to do with my HomePod. Whenever I’m home, all of my audio playback goes through a HomePod, and these two shortcuts make that more convenient.
The Play shortcut contains two actions: Set Playback Destination and Play/Pause. The former sets the playback destination of my iPad to the HomePod, and the latter simply resumes the latest thing that was played on my iPad. Even though the HomePod is optimized for voice input, I almost never speak to Siri to initiate audio. I prefer manually selecting podcasts and music on my iPad or iPhone, then using AirPlay to stream that audio to the HomePod. Mainly this is so I can adjust volume and other playback controls from my device, rather than using additional voice commands for those things.
The Pause icon is even more simple than the Play one, containing a single Play/Pause action that either plays or pauses whatever my iPad’s currently playing. Typically, the Play shortcut is what I use when I’m first starting to listen to something, and thus need to connect to my HomePod first, while the Pause shortcut is for quickly pausing and resuming that stream throughout the day as needed. Avoiding opening Control Center and fiddling with playback and AirPlay settings from there has been very nice.
The five icons in my bottom row all have something in common: they relate to my university coursework. They also represent the fruit of Federico’s recent experimentation with Shortcuts and Scriptable to enable directly opening files and folders from Apple’s Files app.
This is something I’ve hoped would be possible for a long time, yet despite all the other Mac-inspired concepts the iPad has borrowed, storing files and folders on the desktop/Home screen has never been a built-in feature. Needless to say, I was thrilled that Federico came up with a solution.
Using Federico’s FS Bookmarks shortcut, I created two shortcuts that launch folders in iCloud Drive, and two that launch specific files; the fifth shortcut in my final row launches a specific note in Apple Notes.
The School and Syllabi icons are the two folder-launching shortcuts, offering quick, convenient access to iCloud Drive folders I regularly access inside the Files app. Homework is the Notes launcher I mentioned, opening a note where I keep a running list of all important upcoming assignments. And Vocab and Workbook each launch different PDFs, also stored in iCloud Drive, that relate to my studies. I’m taking a foreign language class, so the Vocab icon gets launched all the time to help me practice the vocabulary repetition I need.
Aesthetics on my Home screen are important to me, so it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that before committing to the colors of my current Home screen shortcuts, I did some testing.
Color options for Home screen shortcuts.
Yes, I made a Home screen icon for every possible color that Shortcuts lets you use, then slowly filtered down to the ones I thought looked best in both light and dark modes with my current iPad wallpaper and with the other app icons in my grid. Part of me wishes Shortcuts offered a lot more flexibility in color choice, but it may be for my own good that a limited number of options are present.
I settled on various shades of blue and purple as my favorite choices for Home screen shortcuts, and decided to use my three favorite shades to differentiate between different types of shortcuts. My bottom row shortcuts, which all relate to school, are the same blue color. The row above that, however, containing my schedule and audio-geared shortcuts, features two distinct colors. The difference is subtle, but my two schedule icons lie more on the blue end of the spectrum, while the audio icons are a bit more purple. I purposely wanted them to look very similar, but with a slight hint of distinction. And both, of course, needed to blend well with the blue icons below them. It was also no coincidence that the row of apps immediately above my blue/purple row have – you guessed it – icons dominated by blue and purple.
Matching colors make me happy.
Gone are the days when an iPad’s Home screen was just a larger version of the iPhone’s. You can now pin widgets, load an omnipresent dock with your most-used apps, and use the extra icon slots to save shortcuts that range from opening files and folders to controlling audio playback to performing more complex actions.
The beautiful thing about all of these changes is that users can completely ignore them if they want to. If you want to use your iPad effectively as a large iPhone, you can still do that, with the classic grid of apps and no further complications. For users who want more, however, iPadOS has a lot of depth to offer.
The iPad’s Home screen can now be a true workspace, flexible and diverse enough to make it whatever you need. It’s fitting that this is the year device rotation finally stopped messing up your icon positioning. If you use the new, expanded icon grid, your arrangement of icons stays in place whether in portrait or landscape orientation. No more having your workspace shuffle around every time you switch modes.
This small, but important tweak is emblematic of the wider changes iPadOS brought to the Home screen: they may seem like minor iterations on paper, but in everyday experience, they solve so many of the pain points and limitations of iPad power users.
After Apple supercharged the iPad’s dock in iOS 11, the Home screen felt superfluous. Many users put all of their apps in the dock and left their Home screens empty, and I understand why: the Home screen simply didn’t have much to offer. With the dawn of iPadOS this year, that’s entirely changed. The dock remains the most important place for apps, but now the rest of the Home screen can bring value too. With pinned widgets plus 30 icon slots to fill with apps, files, folders, and other shortcuts, the Home screen has more potential than ever before. It takes some thought and effort to set up, and involves more workarounds than it should, but iPad users can now build more powerful Home screens than ever before.
iPad computing has never been better than this.
Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.
Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.
Join NowA huge Puma sale, SteelSeries Mouse, Mophie power bank, and an Anker Gold Box lead off Tuesday’s best deals from around the web.
Ein 71-Jähriger aus Frankfurt/Main hat sechs Richtige im Lotto gehabt und wäre somit um rund 24.000 Euro reicher geworden. Das Geld bekommt er jedoch nicht ausgezahlt, der Senior machte einen entscheidenden Fehler.
Völlig überraschend hat die Stadtverwaltung am Dienstag wenige Stunden vor Sitzungsbeginn den Projektbeirat für die Beethovenhallen-Sanierung gestoppt. Sie begründet dies mit Problemen beim Zeitplan. Aus den Fraktionen kommt harte Kritik.
Die Polizei hat den Mann identifiziert, der mit einem Audi gezielt auf einen Beamten auf der Rabinstraße in Bonn zugefahren sein soll. Er wird nun mit Haftbefehl gesucht. Gegen ihn wird wegen versuchten Mordes ermittelt.
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