iOS Apps Megathread: Can HealthKit track my post count?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > iOS Apps Megathread: Can HealthKit track my post count?

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The Grumbles: Jun 5, 2006

TACD posted:

(I'm not considering Apple Music because I used my trial before and found you couldn't save generative playlists or see upcoming tracks on them.)

At least on the 'artist/song radio' type generative playlists, you can see the next couple of songs in the queue.

# ? Mar 22, 2023 22:19

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# ? Apr 29, 2024 09:55

xzzy: Mar 5, 2009

It's actually nice and speedy now too. Early on everyone hated it because it was a complete mystery as to when your songs would be available on other devices. Now it syncs just about as fast as your internet connection can upload it.

Sometimes it fails but it's pretty rare so you may never notice unless you're managing a bunch of new songs every day.

# ? Mar 22, 2023 22:33

priznat: Jul 7, 2009; Let's get drunk and kiss each other all night.

Itunes match was a great product.

Wasn�t apple doing a replacement for itunes just called �music� or something? I remember hearing it was coming soon to windows. I just use the web app when I�m on a pc listening anyway though..

# ? Mar 22, 2023 23:44

Corb3t: Jun 7, 2003

People love it around here when I poo poo on Spotify and praise Apple Music.

Spotify connect is pretty good. It offers true handoff and better multi device control, which airplay2 can�t do.

Everywhere else, I think Apple Music provides a lot of benefits. Spotify seems to care less and less about music nowadays, and more about Podcasts/Audiobooks/Social stuff. Spotify has been teasing lossless for 2+ years now with no release in sight, and it will be a paid/premium option. Meanwhile, Apple Music has free Dolby Atmos spatial mastered albums in lossless, which sound amazing on my Sonos Atmos sound system.

Another great thing about Apple Music is that the music catalog is bigger. There are tons of live DJ sets and mixes that include tracklistings, like SoundCloud. For me, a streaming service�s catalog size and its sound quality is the most important thing, and Apple Music�s catalog is bigger, and has higher quality lossless and Atmos files.

Another great thing about Apple Music is it supports shortcuts and automations, so I can trigger specific playlists to my hue lights using Siri, among other things. Spotify could implement this feature if they wanted to, but they�re too focused on being the next tiktok or whatever.

Spotify has been downright horrible at adopting iOS APIs, mostly because they�re suing Apple. Their Apple Watch downloads took years to come out, and it�s not very good. For years, Spotify has refused to update their app to include airplay2 support for those who want it with homepod minis or sonos speakers that support it.

For us, AppleOne Family pricing with Music, TV, Arcade, and iCloud was comparable to what we were already paying for Spotify + iCloud storage.

Corb3t fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Mar 23, 2023

# ? Mar 23, 2023 00:07

TACD: Oct 27, 2000

priznat posted:

Itunes match was a great product.

Wasn�t apple doing a replacement for itunes just called �music� or something? I remember hearing it was coming soon to windows. I just use the web app when I�m on a pc listening anyway though..

iTunes Match is still around! I still use it to sync my library between desktop and laptop.

They keep promising that Windows will get the iTunes → Music upgrade someday, but TBH the app is still bloated and awful on macOS so don't hold your breath.

Did Apple Music ever add the option to let you specify tracks / albums to remain permanently downloaded on your phone? That was another dealbreaker for me, made it impossible to listen to music while travelling (e.g. on a plane or a train in the countryside).

# ? Mar 23, 2023 00:31

vote_no: Nov 22, 2005; The rush is on.

TACD posted:

Did Apple Music ever add the option to let you specify tracks / albums to remain permanently downloaded on your phone? That was another dealbreaker for me, made it impossible to listen to music while travelling (e.g. on a plane or a train in the countryside).

Yes, you can pick songs or albums individually, and also playlists (including smart playlists).

The main problem with the playlist download, though, is that when a smart playlist updates it doesn't remove the songs that got removed, so if (like me) you have a playlist for 3⭐ songs added in the last 2 months, it balloons over time and you periodically have to delete all downloaded songs and start again.

# ? Mar 23, 2023 00:43

Violator: May 15, 2003

I ended up dumping all of the main artists and albums I really like into Plex and use PlexAmp on my phone to find and quickly play music I know I like. It�s basically like using an old iPod but with slicker suggestions and whatnot. I use Apple Music for their playlists and exploring new music.

# ? Mar 23, 2023 00:44

Raymond T. Racing: Jun 11, 2019

OldSenileGuy posted:

Not strictly iOS focused but - are there any guides out there that give an in-depth look at transferring everything from Google Photos to iCloud Photos? I googled for it, and every "guide" doesn't really go any deeper than "download everything from google and upload it to icloud!"

Specifically -

Downloading everything from Google gave me a .json file for every picture and video. It looks like these files contain metadata. Should I just delete these? Or can iCloud make use of them?

It looks like Google did save my iPhone photos as HEIC, however it looks like in order to implement Live Photos, it saved a short .mp4 for every Live Photo. I assume iCloud will not turn these back into Live Photos? Should I just dump the whole folder into iCloud, or will that leave me with a ton of 2-second long mp4 files that I don't necessarily want?

How does it deal with duplicates? I'm pretty sure there's a ton of these that already exist in my iCloud, but I really don't want to sort through all this myself. And I also don't want to be taking up twice as much space in my iCloud as I need to.

I'm probably gonna dump the whole folder onto iCloud and let it run overnight and see what happens, but I'm not sure if I will like the results.

This will be your friend https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper

# ? Mar 23, 2023 01:30

OldSenileGuy: Mar 13, 2001

Thwomp posted:

So I recently did this with my own photos and I'm trying again with my spouse's and I'll just say its a huge pain.

First thing is to get all the photos down in as much of a go as possible via Google Takeout. If you don't, you risk them not having all the needed metadata to correctly file themselves by date and time. Extract them all to one central location.

Next, import them by a year at a time. It can take days and days to sync a large library import to iCloud so its best to do it in smaller bits. If something doesn't sync right (and there will be some that don't), then you can mass edit them into the correct year at least before you move on to the next year. Much easier than trying to sort your whole library after the fact.

The json files do contain the needed metadata and I cannot honestly remember how exactly I managed them because I did do it for my photos. My own searching led to an exiftool that I'm kinda weary on.

Duplicates will get sorted both before and after. It'll ask to Import New Photos to exclude any obvious duplicates. If it finds further duplicates afterwards, they'll show up in their own item in the Photos app on the Mac (are you doing this on a mac? I probably should've asked earlier).

No idea on the HEIC/mp4 bit. I think that stems from the short time after Apple announced for format shift and before Google Photos natively supported Live Photos.

Good luck and also let us know how it goes!

Edit: Now that I found this link, it looks real familiar and I believed I used this on my photos to bring in the metadata from the json files first before importing into the Photos app on my Mac.

Definitely agree on it being a huge pain.

As you noted, Google leaves the metadata in the pictures alone, and any metadata changes you made are included in the .json files that are downloaded in the Google Takeout batch. But Apple doesn't know what to do with those, so there are several different options of how to merge that data back into the photos. I ended up using https://metadatafixer.com, which is a paid option that cost like 20 bucks, but also all I had to do was point it to the 29 zip files that Google gave me and it processed them all overnight and left me with nicely organized and tagged folders in the morning.

Also, to my surprise, it seems like Apple Photos DOES have the capabilities to merge the .HEIC's and associated .mp4's back into a single Live Photo. Although now that I'm typing it out, I'm realizing that all my tests have been on recent photos, so it's possible that some older ones might not be as seamless.

The biggest problem now that I'm dealing with is on Apple Photos. When I first started using Google Photos like 4 years ago, I THOUGHT I switched off Apple Photos backup, but apparently I did not. So like 75% of the photos I downloaded from Google will already be in Apple. And when I did a test of importing the 2023 photos into Apple, it only correctly found and identified like 80% of the duplicates. I'm not sure why it didn't correctly identify some of the duplicates - the photo content, file name, and metadata is exactly the same. The only difference is the file size, because the Google Photo versions are much smaller. This shouldn't even need any "advanced machine learning ai algorithm" detection to detect these, it should be a slam dunk.

Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to actually trigger Apple Photos to do a "scan library for duplicates" check. It looks like it's just something that happens when your computer is idle, which kinda sucks.

# ? Mar 23, 2023 15:43

101: Oct 15, 2012; Vault Dweller

Apple Music needs native Last.fm support for me. I have a scrobbler on my Mac, but I have to use Marvis on my phone, which doesn't have CarPlay support.

# ? Mar 23, 2023 17:21

Boris Galerkin: Dec 17, 2011; I don't understand why I can't harass people online. Seriously, somebody please explain why I shouldn't be allowed to stalk others on social media!

Alternatively, just leave the poo poo in google photos as is and treat it like another backup. You never know if/when apple photos is gonna gently caress something up.

# ? Mar 23, 2023 17:26

Grassy Knowles: Apr 4, 2003; "The original Terminator was a gritty fucking AMAZING piece of sci-fi. Gritty fucking rock-hard MURDER!"

101 posted:

Apple Music needs native Last.fm support for me. I have a scrobbler on my Mac, but I have to use Marvis on my phone, which doesn't have CarPlay support.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1439731526

# ? Mar 23, 2023 17:30

Corb3t: Jun 7, 2003

101 posted:

Apple Music needs native Last.fm support for me. I have a scrobbler on my Mac, but I have to use Marvis on my phone, which doesn't have CarPlay support.

Eavescrobb can do background scrobbling for you

MusicHarbor is another great resource for tracking new releases, especially if you have a huge library.

Edit: Soor works too.

Boris Galerkin posted:

Alternatively, just leave the poo poo in google photos as is and treat it like another backup. You never know if/when apple photos is gonna gently caress something up.

This is fine, but the copy on Google Photos is going to be compressed unless you pay for storage. I just realized I get 1TB of Adobe Lightroom storage, so I've been backing up my library there recently.

Corb3t fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Mar 23, 2023

# ? Mar 23, 2023 17:34

101: Oct 15, 2012; Vault Dweller

Grassy Knowles posted:

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1439731526

Appreciate the suggestion, but it crashed about 8 times in the 5 minutes I was playing around with it. Refunded

Corb3t posted:

Eavescrobb can do background scrobbling for you

Hasn't been updated in 4 years and afaik all third party scrobbling apps have the issue where if you listen to a track more than once between scans then only the latest play is counted.

I like the stock Music app and I pay for Apple One anyway, but unless they every add a better API that gets that data reliably or build it in natively, I'm sticking elsewhere :/

# ? Mar 23, 2023 20:24

TACD: Oct 27, 2000

Alright, I'm giving Apple Music another go since everyone seems to rate it so highly. Couple of questions:

The Grumbles posted:

At least on the 'artist/song radio' type generative playlists, you can see the next couple of songs in the queue.

How do I access this?

Also, how do I see which artists I've marked as a favourite? This support article says it should be in Listen Now, but I've been scrolling up and down and closing/restarting Music for a few minutes and I just don't have that section? Is it somewhere else now?

# ? Mar 23, 2023 20:47

priznat: Jul 7, 2009; Let's get drunk and kiss each other all night.

TACD posted:

Alright, I'm giving Apple Music another go since everyone seems to rate it so highly. Couple of questions:

How do I access this?

If you tap on the "up next" button (on web player but looks like this):

It will either show the playlist or in a generative one the next track.

e: unrelated my biggest beef with apple music these days is how hard it is to clear out what it thinks your favourites are. All it takes is playing a bunch of kids tunes or "lo fi beats for sleeping" and it thinks that is all of your favourite poo poo ever.

priznat fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Mar 23, 2023

# ? Mar 23, 2023 21:03

Skeezy: Jul 3, 2007

priznat posted:

e: unrelated my biggest beef with apple music these days is how hard it is to clear out what it thinks your favourites are. All it takes is playing a bunch of kids tunes or "lo fi beats for sleeping" and it thinks that is all of your favourite poo poo ever.

One good thing about Spotify is that it there's an "Offline Mode" option so anything you play isn't added to your favorites.

# ? Mar 23, 2023 23:35

101: Oct 15, 2012; Vault Dweller

Skeezy posted:

One good thing about Spotify is that it there's an "Offline Mode" option so anything you play isn't added to your favorites.

I think you're confusing 'Offline' and 'Private session'

# ? Mar 23, 2023 23:45

TACD: Oct 27, 2000

priznat posted:

If you tap on the "up next" button (on web player but looks like this):

It will either show the playlist or in a generative one the next track.

Oh, thanks. Weird that on iOS it'll deign to show you one upcoming track but on macOS there's just no playlist at all.

# ? Mar 24, 2023 00:27

Skeezy: Jul 3, 2007

101 posted:

I think you're confusing 'Offline' and 'Private session'

Shoot my bad, yeah that's what I mean.

# ? Mar 24, 2023 03:29

Question Mark Mound: Jun 14, 2006; Tokyo Crystal Mew
Dancing Godzilla

I'm in need of the kind of app that it feels like doesn't get made any more, but thought I'd check. There's a few still kicking about on the app store but curious if anyone has a specific recommendation of something particularly good.

I need to track how many journeys I have left on a handful of travel cards (there's no proper app or card payment system in this country, so I gotta juggle like 4 cards for the journeys I make a bunch for the best prices). Basically, I just need to have an app that'll show me multiple named items with number counters that I can easily tap to remove 1 from, or interact in some other way to add 10 to.

Right now I just have a Notes document with the four cards listed and I'm manually typing in how many journeys I have left on each one any time I travel with it or top it up, but something smoother would be nice.

I don't mind paying a few quid if it's slick, but even something as simple as this feels like it would be part of some kind of subscription service. Bonus points if there's an NFC hook that would let me tap the card to my phone to auto-remove 1 from it on the app, but just launching the app via the card with a normal Shortcut is fine, that's what I'm doing crrently to open the Notes app.

Question Mark Mound fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Mar 24, 2023

# ? Mar 24, 2023 10:08

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Question Mark Mound posted:

I need to track how many journeys I have left on a handful of travel cards (there's no proper app or card payment system in this country, so I gotta juggle like 4 cards for the journeys I make a bunch for the best prices). Basically, I just need to have an app that'll show me multiple named items with number counters that I can easily tap to remove 1 from, or interact in some other way to add 10 to.

Right now I just have a Notes document with the four cards listed and I'm manually typing in how many journeys I have left on each one any time I travel with it or top it up, but something smoother would be nice.

I don't mind paying a few quid if it's slick, but even something as simple as this feels like it would be part of some kind of subscription service. Bonus points if there's an NFC hook that would let me tap the card to my phone to auto-remove 1 from it on the app, but just launching the app via the card with a normal Shortcut is fine, that's what I'm doing crrently to open the Notes app.

Is this not possible with a normal shortcut? You could add a little button or widget on the Home Screen to start a shortcut that adds or removes from a menu of named items. The main thing you want to look into is managing persistence, which you can do by saving and restoring to/from a dictionary in a file (or just lines in files).

The Toolbox Pro or Actions apps give you shortcut actions to help with persistence and making menus, but you dont actually need them. NFC should be possible by the automation tab of Shortcuts. If you need more control over NFC, Toolbox Pro can help there too.

Finally you can also make a custom home screen widget with Scriptable

# ? Mar 24, 2023 10:35

DRINK ME: Jul 31, 2006; i cant fix avs like this because idk the bbcode - HTML IS BS MAN

Maybe a knitting/crochet row counter app?

I added three �cards� at the bottom, with this one you have to tap into the entry and then + or - the number, but there are so many of these apps you could probably find one closer to what you want.

# ? Mar 24, 2023 12:10

Grassy Knowles: Apr 4, 2003; "The original Terminator was a gritty fucking AMAZING piece of sci-fi. Gritty fucking rock-hard MURDER!"

DRINK ME posted:

Maybe a knitting/crochet row counter app?

That this exists at all is breaking my brain right now. Like I�m mad at knitting breaking my brain.

# ? Mar 24, 2023 12:12

Question Mark Mound: Jun 14, 2006; Tokyo Crystal Mew
Dancing Godzilla

DRINK ME posted:

Maybe a knitting/crochet row counter app?

I added three �cards� at the bottom, with this one you have to tap into the entry and then + or - the number, but there are so many of these apps you could probably find one closer to what you want.

That might just do the trick! I tried a couple of basic "counter" apps but that all seem to be purely about counting up on a tap and made reducing the count a more complicated process.

mawarannahr posted:

Is this not possible with a normal shortcut? You could add a little button or widget on the Home Screen to start a shortcut that adds or removes from a menu of named items. The main thing you want to look into is managing persistence, which you can do by saving and restoring to/from a dictionary in a file (or just lines in files).

The Toolbox Pro or Actions apps give you shortcut actions to help with persistence and making menus, but you dont actually need them. NFC should be possible by the automation tab of Shortcuts. If you need more control over NFC, Toolbox Pro can help there too.

Finally you can also make a custom home screen widget with Scriptable

A series of Shortcuts was what I was thinking since I like playing with those for other things but I had no idea how manage persistent data. Maybe this is a good excuse for me to learn how to do that.

Question Mark Mound fucked around with this message at 13:13 on Mar 24, 2023

# ? Mar 24, 2023 12:24

Skeezy: Jul 3, 2007

MacStories has a Shortcuts archive, might be worth taking a look there?

https://www.macstories.net/shortcuts/

# ? Mar 24, 2023 14:45

Question Mark Mound: Jun 14, 2006; Tokyo Crystal Mew
Dancing Godzilla

I had no idea what Dictionaries were in shortcuts but they�re basically just pretty usable arrays and I�ve got something that does what I need! The app will show all items in the Dictionary file (a title of the card plus the number value of journeys left). Tapping on it removes 1, alerts me to the new value (plus a second warning if 3 or less), then overwrites the file.

I have a second shortcut to add 10 but otherwise do the same thing.

I�m sure I could do more tinkering to have it accept an input from an NFC scan automation and throw that into the �choose from list� prompt, but for now this is great.

Thanks for the advice about using Shortcuts and Dictionary files! I always forget just how useful they can be sometimes.

Question Mark Mound fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Mar 24, 2023

# ? Mar 24, 2023 17:19

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Congrats. Shortcuts are great and thet make you feel accomplised. I do recommend looking into the Actions abs Toolbox Pro apps, theyre worth the few bucks for quality of lift imo.

I've been makin some Posting Tools in Shortcuts... i posted an earlier version of one I wrote to turn a webpage Into BBcode for easy posting. I've since been improving that to handle edge cases better, offer options for posting summaries with Twitter-style article thumbnails, re-host images on Imgur and so on.

Ive got a quotesearching shortcut too. If you automate it on a schedule you can get iOS notifications of you've been quoted on forums. I'll share these when the code doesn't look so embarrassing and wont break easily.

I also wrote a SAVBB syntax and action group for Drafts Pro. It's way better than Awful.app for writing a longer post (and you wont worry about crashes)

My posting is augmented :awesomelon:

# ? Mar 24, 2023 20:30

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

I hate JavaScript and dragging shortcut elements so much though. There's an app called Rubyist that can he used to program and make shortcuts, automations, and widgets in Ruby:

Seems pretty nice to code:

code:

puts "Hello World!"
puts "Ruby Engine: " + RUBY_ENGINE
puts "Ruby Version: " + RUBY_ENGINE_VERSION
API = "https://api.my-ip.io/ip.json"
json = HttpRequest.get(API).body
ip = JSON.parse(json)["ip"]

# Rubyist is giving you access to native iOS APIs like Clipboard.
Clipboard.copy(ip)
puts "Current IP Address: " + ip

code:

puts "Hello World!"
puts "Ruby Engine: " + RUBY_ENGINE
puts "Ruby Version: " + RUBY_ENGINE_VERSION
API = "https://api.my-ip.io/ip.json"
json = HttpRequest.get(API).body
ip = JSON.parse(json)["ip"]

# Rubyist is giving you access to native iOS APIs like Clipboard.
Clipboard.copy(ip)
puts "Current IP Address: " + ip

The photo thing:

code:

# Let's build a widget that displays a random Unsplash picture.
random_image = Image.from_url("https://source.unsplash.com/random")

w = WidgetUI.new do   
  HStack {
    VStack(alignment: :leading) {
      Spacer()
  
      Text("Random Photo")
        .color(Color.white)
        .bold
    }  
    Spacer()
  }
  .background(random_image)
  .frame(width: :infinity, height: :infinity)
  .padding(15)
end

# Calling present will render it when running your script from a home widget or preview the widget inside the app by running the script. 
w.present

# ? Mar 24, 2023 20:47

DR FRASIER KRANG: Feb 4, 2005; "Are you forgetting that just this afternoon I was punched in the face by a turtle now dead?

Yes this seems way easier.

# ? Mar 24, 2023 20:48

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Apparently the developer of Toolbox Pro, the Shortcuts toolkit app, has just passed away

I hope it isn't true, but he did have cancer.
https://twitter.com/mralexhay/status/1412871532817309696
The "If Or" action alone is worth the price tag. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/toolbox-pro-for-shortcuts/id1476205977

The only comparable alternative is Actions, which doesn't implement everything (although it has its own unique features).

mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Mar 27, 2023

# ? Mar 27, 2023 09:31

Crime on a Dime: Nov 28, 2006

priznat posted:

Rdio had the best UI, RIP. It rocked between phone and pc. I use apple music because I�m on the one plan and it�s fine, but definitely lacking in a lot of nice QoL stuff that spotify and even Rdio did better.

I know the person who worked on a lot of that rdio UI, he's the guy you would probably recognise when someone mentions google glass

# ? Mar 27, 2023 11:43

Crime on a Dime: Nov 28, 2006

also why not use tidal for stuff that isn't on Bandcamp

# ? Mar 27, 2023 11:44

Violator: May 15, 2003

mawarannahr posted:

Apparently the developer of Toolbox Pro, the Shortcuts toolkit all, has just passed away I hope it isn't true, but he did have cancer.

Very sad.

# ? Mar 27, 2023 13:22

tuyop: Sep 15, 2006; Every second that we're not growing BASIL is a second wasted; Fun Shoe

Alright I'm ready to give up. Does anyone have any good pain tracking apps they could recommend? I'm pretty close to just using a spreadsheet.

# ? Mar 27, 2023 20:58

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD: Jul 7, 2012

xzzy posted:

It's actually nice and speedy now too. Early on everyone hated it because it was a complete mystery as to when your songs would be available on other devices. Now it syncs just about as fast as your internet connection can upload it.

Sometimes it fails but it's pretty rare so you may never notice unless you're managing a bunch of new songs every day.

I've never had it fail. I love how reliable it is. If they ever discontinue it I will scream.

# ? Mar 27, 2023 22:52

kri kri: Jul 18, 2007

tuyop posted:

Alright I'm ready to give up. Does anyone have any good pain tracking apps they could recommend? I'm pretty close to just using a spreadsheet.

I use the Heath app to track my meds, what are you looking to do?

kri kri fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Mar 28, 2023

# ? Mar 28, 2023 01:43

priznat: Jul 7, 2009; Let's get drunk and kiss each other all night.

Ugh I don�t know why but now the apple music web player won�t log me in and it�s super annoying. I may try a different browser (currently on edge) but this really ticks me off!

A little OT but after the music app discussion..

# ? Mar 28, 2023 03:19

POCKET CHOMP: Jul 20, 2003; me irl.

priznat posted:

(currently on edge)

you sure are, OP!!

# ? Mar 28, 2023 04:24

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 29, 2024 09:55

tuyop: Sep 15, 2006; Every second that we're not growing BASIL is a second wasted; Fun Shoe

kri kri posted:

I use the Heath app to track my meds, what are you looking to do?

I�d like to be able to independently rate pain in different parts of my body. It�d also be good if I could at least add some notes about food, sleep and activity so I can see how those correlate. I just don�t think I�m ever going to see a pain clinic again so I�m trying to be more active in managing it myself.

# ? Mar 28, 2023 11:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > iOS Apps Megathread: Can HealthKit track my post count?

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