📱💻 Finer Tech Newsletter ⌚️📺 Siri Suggestions, playlist sync, contact photos, and more

Hello all you finer readers. I know it’s been a hot minute since the last issue, and for that I apologize. I’m going through some bumpy patches in life right now that take a lot out of me. But I’ve made changes to get back to publishing this bimonthly again.

To try and make it up to you, I packed this issue with a few extra tips and links. I’m also sacking away a lot of good stuff for when iOS 13, iPadOS, and macOS Catalina ship this fall.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue or if there’s something you’d like to see covered in the future. If you know people who would enjoy this newsletter, I’ll owe you a beverage if you share this signup link and my Patreon link.

If you add an early morning event to your Calendar, Siri might suggest to set an alarm for it. I’m not sure what conditions trigger this, but it was noticed by a friend who provided this screenshot.

I use Apple Music, but I know plenty of people who use Spotify or even YouTube. This has made it hard to share music playlists with them until I discovered SongShift for iPad and iPhone.

This is a clever, single-serving utility that duplicates your playlists between services, then keeps them in sync. It’s the reason I can share my Instrumental Work playlist with you on Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube.

Upgrade to Pro to get batch actions, playlist merging, more fine-tuned control when matching songs, and much more.

I’ve always wanted something like this, but every other option I’ve tried over the years requires personal data, access to social accounts, or who knows what else.

Vignette for iPhone is another single-serving utility that I find incredibly useful. It searches places like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Gravatar to find profile photos of your contacts. But it doesn’t require any login credentials, and everything is done on your device. Vignette doesn’t transmit any of your contact data, and it only searches public profiles and photos.

Vignette is free to try. To save found photos to your contacts, get the one-time in-app purchase.

I often shuffle playlists with Apple Music. Sometimes I also want to add a specific song to the mix. If you don’t know how to do this: Force Touch/long press any song and, in the menu that appears, tap Play Next.

This adds that song to the top of the stack of music, which you can see by scrolling down on the Now Playing screen (the one with large album art and playing controls).

When you add songs to Up Next like this, Music dims the Shuffle button. It’ll stay that way until it gets through all songs manually added to Up Next.

Sharing Apple Notes is incredibly useful. But too many notifications from busy notes can get annoying.

Fortunately, you can disable notifications for individual notes, without having to disable them for the entire app. Just select any shared note, tap the person icon at the top, then enable Hide Alerts.

Things is my primary task manager of choice. One of the many features I appreciate is being able to change multiple tasks at once, and it works on both iOS and macOS.

iOS: In any list, swipe left on a task. This enables a bulk edit interface. Tap one or more other tasks, then use the options below to schedule, move, tag, duplicate, share, and more.

Mac: Like most apps, simply hold Shift or Command while clicking multiple tasks, then use any of the available options from the menu bar.

Contrary to some corners of the Apple community, I like the Touch Bar and I hope Apple continues to iterate on it.

If you’d like to take a screenshot of your Touch Bar, use Command + Shift + 6. You can also save it directly to your clipboard by adding Control to the mix (you might need two hands to make that work).

Even if you don’t play video games or know much about the Mario series, I think you could still enjoy the humor here. I think Brian David Gilbert is a national treasure.

How did you like this issue? Was it useful and bite-sized enough? Are there certain kinds of tips or apps you’d like to see here? Let me know what you think!