Automating the Action Button of an iPhone 15 Pro

My iPhone 15 Pro Max shipped last week. A couple of quick observations (and more on an upcoming episode of the podcast).

• I moved up from a smaller pro phone to the Max this year for the camera improvements. I was nervous it would be far too heavy but I am surprised to say that the new titanium material makes me perceive it as lighter than my previous pro model.

• I have missed the larger screen size.

• The camera is very good. If you are up for an upgrade, the Pro Max is definitely the one to get this year.

• It is a a dream to have an entirely dedicated hardware button on the side that I can customize.

The Action Button replaces the old mute switch, and while it can be used to toggle mute on and off, Apple also lets you customize it to do something else, like open the camera, turn on a flashlight, take a voice memo, or run a Shortcut.

Naturally I wanted to get the most out of this button, so I programmed it to run a Shortcut. The Shortcut I programmed it to run changes the behavior of the button based on which Focus Mode my phone is in.

Click here to download the shortcut.

The Shortcut first looks to see if my phone is upside down (which it often is in my pocket). If so, the button toggles mute off and on, like the button traditionally has done. This way, I can quickly mute it if an unwanted call comes through, by feeling the button through my pocket (though my phone us usually on silent mode).

If the phone is in any other orientation, it does the following action, based on Focus Mode:

• Personal Focus: Opens a new note in the Drafts app

• Work Focus: Opens a Google Doc with the school schedule

• Private Lesson Focus: Unlocks the side door to my studio so my next student can enter

• Sleep Focus: Toggles flashlight

• Concert Focus: Opens camera

• Driving Focus: Opens my garage door

And this is only the beginning! I am looking forward to all the cool automating I can do with this button.

Ableton Announces the Push 3

Ableton introduced the Push 3 last month and it looks amazing. The MPE-enabled touch sensitivity features are huge improvements to what was already a very playable and expressive piece of hardware. I appreciate that Ableton is making this a standalone production device by building an audio interface into it. So many products in the “colorful grid of squares” category already are, and it makes sense that a device as powerful and loved as the Push goes in this direction.

Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro released for iPad

On May 23, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro were released for iPad. My 2018 iPad Pro is not capable of running Final Cut, but I have been testing Logic Pro in order to better cover it on an upcoming podcast episode.

Both The Verge and Macstories have great overviews of Logic if you want to get into the details.

The general consensus from the tech press is that Final Cut has some catchup to do and that Logic has feature parity with the Mac version, for the most part. This has really not been true in my experience. For making music, Logic does an ok job. But I use Logic for a huge variety of other projects and workflows. Podcast editing, cleaning up concert recordings, etc. Logic on iPad has a lot of the great musical instruments, effects, loops, and tools that are familiar to the Mac, in an excellent touch-first redesign.

For me though, what makes Logic great is that it is flexible enough to be used for nearly all of my audio editing needs. Logic on iPad is currently unable to edit projects that are time-based rather than measure-based. It is unable to work with spatial audio projects. And it is terribly slow at syncing projects from Mac to iPad over iCloud. In fact, the first three of my recent audio projects I tried to open on the iPad (all of which started on the Mac), would not open for one compatibility reason or another. And these were not projects that used third-party plugins (which are currently not all accessible on iPad unless the developer has released an iOS version). What would make Logic useful to me on iPad isn’t so much that it is a great stand alone app (which it very much is), but the ability to more seamlessly move between my Mac and iPad files with ease. iPadOS and Logic for iPad simply lack this ease.

These new pro apps represent my general feelings towards iPad software the past few years. On the one hand, it is incredible to have them, and I am grateful they exist. At the same time, I wonder what took Apple so long to get them out the door if they aren’t more feature-complete. The touch-first redesigns are great, but they do seem to symbolize that Apple believes in iPadOS as a distinct operating system. There is still so much the iPad can’t do that the Mac can. And with an iPad Pro attached to a Magic Keyboard, it is ever increasingly more frustrating that it can’t do things my Mac can, when the form factor and technology is just as capable. As much as iPadOS inches closer and closer to the Mac each year, it doesn’t seem like it will ever catch up unless Apple makes a much bigger change to their vision for the product.

I will keep pushing Logic to the limits and continue to write about it here.

The first three projects I attempted to open on iPad were incompatible.

I do enjoy that pro iPad apps tend to have appropriately simplified export screens compared to their macOS counterparts.

Screen telling me that some of my third party plugins will not work.

For all of my difficulty, Logic did open this very large file from 2020 where I edited a “virtual ensemble.” It contained a three minute audio file for all 60+ members of my Wind Ensemble and did not hesitate at all when navigating the project on iPad.

Soulver for iPad is out

My favoite natural language calculator tool (and home of my beloved pizza calculator) is now available on iPad. Check it out at https://soulver.app/

Look no further than this MacStories review to get a feel for what Soulver is.

MuseClass Introduces AutoGrade Feature

In an email from the MuseGroup earier this month...

We are thrilled to announce the public beta launch of AutoGrade for MuseClass! This new feature will revolutionize the way educators grade and provide feedback to their students, saving countless hours of your time. With AutoGrade, teachers can focus on teaching and providing personalized feedback to their students, while we take care of the grading. Our team has been hard at work developing this innovative tool that accurately evaluates student performances.

And best of all, it's FREE!

You can read more about the feature here.

Forscore 14 Automation Links

forScore 14 came out last month. It is an awesome release which includes updates to the metadata panel, tuner, Apple Pencil support, and other redesigned user interface elements. You can read about all the details here.

My favorite feture in this update is called Automation Links. The feature allows you to copy a link to a score (or a page within a score) to your clipboard and paste it somewhere else. This kind of deep linking has become a core part of my productivity workflow over the years. Most of my productivity tools offer a shortcut like this, and it is so awesome to see the feature added to one of my more musically specific apps.

Watch the video below to see the feature in action along with two demos of how I use the feature to teach music more efficiently.

Note: Automation Links are a paid forScore Pro feature.

Apple Music Classical is out

Apple Music Classical is out! MacStories has a detailed overview here.

Why this app needs to exist and exactly what kind of problem it solves has been covered a little bit here on the blog and on the podcast over the years. I have been using and recomending IDAGIO for some time now.

I have been using Apple Music Classical a lot since last night, and while it leaves a lot to be desired (like an iPad, Mac, and car app!), it is good enough for me to replace IDAGIO.

The fact that it links to my existing Apple Music account and library means that I can continue using the standard Apple Music app in combination with it. One library for all of my music, but two app interfaces to interact with it, depending on which context makes the most sense.

I plan to cover this app on the podcast some time soon. You can download Apple Music Classical here.

Actions for Obsidian Released

You may have heard me talk about the note app Obsidian here a lot over the past year (like for example here, here, or here). I also really like automating my life with the Apple Shortcuts app (which you can read about here, here again, or here).

Obsidian is already very automatable, but using Shortcuts for the job makes everything way easier and less abstract. I am happy to report that there is now an awesome Mac app which adds Obsidian actions to the Shortcuts app.

Actions for Obsidian is the missing link between Obsidian and macOS / iOS. It brings 30+ Shortcuts actions into the Shortcuts app to help bring your notes and automations together. The Mac app is out now and the iOS version is coming soon.

From the developer:

Actions for Obsidian is a macOS application that adds over 30 Shortcuts actions for working with Obsidian notes and vaults, making Obsidian a first-class citizen in Apple's Shortcuts app.

Obsidian is very powerful, and its large community has created hundreds of useful plugins that make working inside an Obsidian vault even more powerful and easier, but there was no integration with macOS and Apple's automation ecosystem until now. Actions for Obsidian adds that integration and makes it easy to bring information from other apps into your notes, or to bring information from your vaults into other apps.

I have been testing the app for a bit now, and it has really cleaned up a lot of my daily workflows.

For example, here is a Shortcut that takes looks at my daily calendar events, creates a note for each of them all in Obsidian, and then preappends my Obsidian Daily Note with links out to all of them so that they are associated with the current day.

That last action in the sequence is provided and made possible by Actions for Obsidian. You can download the app here and get ideas for how to use it in their Workflow Library.

Here is a little sample of what calendar notes look like when embedded in my daily note:

Actions for Obsidian is free to download with a 14 day trial period. It has a "pay what you want pricing" starting at $9.99.

Linking Together Data Across Many Apps using Obsidian and Hookmark

In my recent trip to TMEA, I presented on the topic of my book, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers.

There are a lot of different types of data to manage on a computing device. There are notes, tasks, events, words, websites, audio, video, sheet music, and more.

One of the things we discussed in the session is how the move to web-based productivity apps like Google Docs has made it challenging to organize website URLs alongside the documents that are stored locally on a computer.

It can be confusing to keep track of where all of this data is, especially when your different files may be spread across multiple apps and websites, even though they relate to the same subject.

I have been using a PKM app called Obsidian to create "dashboards" where I link this various data together.

Linking URLs to Google Docs is easy enough using copy/paste. But linking to other files that live on my hard drive is tricky.

I have been using the Mac app Hookmark, which solves this very friction. A keyboard shortcut (mine is Control+Command+Spacebar) takes whatever data is in the foreground, generates a link to it, and copies it to the clipboard, where it can be pasted somewhere else.

For example, I can be inside a note or a document I open frequently, invoke Hookmark, and then paste the a URL directly to that file right inside of my Obsidian Dashboard. The Dashboard can therefore include links to websites, notes, documents, and nearly any other kind of data imaginable.

I have a dashboard that matches each large project I have going in OmniFocus (where I manage my tasks). Creating links with Hookmark also allows me to link to specific tasks inside of the dashboard. It goes the other way too. I can link an Obsidian note to the notes field of an OmniFocus task to create better context for my data.

You can learn more about Obsidian in the podcast episode below.

Making a Wiki for Your Music Program in Craft

I have been singing the praises of Craft lately, a Personal Knowledge Management app made easy.

You can learn about Craft in the video or podcast episodes below.

Craft has replaced software I was previously using for notes, websites, writing, collaboration, and word processing. Making a note sharable with anyone who has the link is only two clicks.

Because Craft is so much easier to use than a learning management platform or a website builder, I have moved a lot of the information and resources I share with my music students to it. I can edit everything in Craft, students can see it all on the web.

At my recent TMEA presentation Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers, I spoke about this and showed off my "Band Wiki." A few people who attended the session asked to see how I have these pages set up in Craft. Here are some screenshots of how I set up the Band Wiki.