Lilmem · Ready Time · Flashlights · Software Dev

Apple Music Pronunciation

I Don't Care lyrics with katakana pronunciation Southern All Stars' Tsunami lyrics with romaji

Was playing music in Apple Music today and, to surprise, I saw pronunciation for an Ed Sheeran song in…katakana? Woah, when did this show up?

Of course, I had to check out J-pop and Cantopop songs too, and, ’lo and behold, pronunciation in the English alphabet! This is perfect for this ABC/multi-lingual karaoke-loving freak!

Looks like I’m gonna be spending some time karaoke’ing some songs. Cover your ears.

Beyond's 海闊天空 lyrics with Cantonese romanization The Show Pronunciation option in the lyrics menu

If you’d like to try it out yourself:

  1. Open Apple Music, start playing a song
  2. Tap the “lyrics” button on the bottom left of the player
  3. Tap the “translate” button on top of the song’s progress bar
  4. Select “Show Pronunciation”
  5. Sing your heart away!

/japan #apple #music #cantonese

Little Memory 2.3: Siri and Widgets

Who’s got time to use apps anymore, right? Can’t you just talk to AI to do things for you? We’ve got flying cars. Why can’t you write in your diary with just your voice?

Welp, Little Memory 2.3 is out, and you can write a memory without opening the app now. Say “Add a memory in Little Memory” and tell Siri what happened today. If you already saved a memory for the day, Siri will let you know and ask if you want to add to it. Ready Time got Siri last month, and Little Memory was next in line. Welcome to the future.

With Premium, the new On This Day widget shows you a memory from years ago on your Home Screen or Lock Screen. There’s a new Daily Quote widget too. Oh, and now you can find memories from Spotlight by what you wrote, the day or the place.

Also new:

  • Last Week gives you a summary of the past week every Sunday.
  • With Premium, see the moon’s phase on each day.
  • Writing in Little Memory now counts as Mindful Minutes in Apple Health.
  • You can now swipe between the day’s photos in Photo Recap (I know, this was annoying me too).
  • On iPad, drag in photos from other apps. I haven’t been able to test this on the Duo yet, but in theory this should work there too.
  • A tip jar in Settings, if you’d like to support Little Memory (I’ve had some folks ask me how they can support me more, and here ya go! Thank you from this little indie app developer!).
Morning and evening notifications from Little Memory, and the On This Day widget on the Home Screen showing a memory from exactly 1 year ago

You can download Little Memory on the App Store. If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it. Drop me a note.

/little-memory #ios-development #nerdtower

Just when I thought I’d gotten my tools settled with Xcode 27.2 (and cleaned up needing to work with multiple Xcode versions, juggling between final and beta/RC builds), Apple brings us 27.3 with Siri AI Developer Preview! Siri now has… app skills? And we get Siri Evaluations. It’s definitely been a PITA to test Siri in Simulator (ergh… Device Hub) for the recent Little Memory and Ready Time releases, but without Apple Intelligence to test with in the sims, there’s still the tedious work of manual on-device testing that needs to be done. Hoping Siri Evaluations can help offload some of that so we can automate it.

/software-development #apple #ios-development

Apparently Halloween is the biggest pizza day in the US. I would have thought Super Bowl, but looks like currently Halloween is the winner.

#food

Follow-up prediction: Acoustic Display will end up on the Macbook Pro to get rid of the speakers on the sides of the keyboards. Some folks like their larger laptops: not me. Give me a smaller laptop that I can bring around town, and then have a big monitor at home/office to plug it into when I need a bigger workspace.

#apple

New iPad mini with… WAAAAAAAT?

It’s the first iPad mini with real water resistance, which Apple chalks up to a new feature called the Acoustic Display, in which audio is being channeled through the display surface rather than more porous speakers.

Holy batman. Well, we just got flying cars recently too…

#apple

Ready Time 3.13: Done Early, Running Late

The plan was to head out the door on time. And then… you decided to take a long shower in the morning. The kid ended up moving a lot faster than normal to get dressed (ha! when does that ever happen?). Maybe the morning ritual of doing some stretches needed to get skipped for today.

Ready Time has always counted back from your Deadline, but real life doesn’t always stick to the Plan. Now, when you finish a Step early, you can tap Done. The next Step starts right away, and the time you saved becomes spare time before the Deadline. Running late? Tap the current Step to give it 5 more minutes, and Ready Time shows if you’re behind and when you’ll really finish. Short on time? You can skip an upcoming Step for just this run.

A school morning Plan in Ready Time. Get kids dressed is marked Done early, the Steps after it start sooner, and spare time appears before the 8:15 deadline. Then Shower gets 5 more minutes and the spare time shrinks, while the deadline stays at 8:15.

You can mark a Step done or add 5 minutes by long-pressing a push notification, or ask Siri: “Mark my Step done in Ready Time” or “Add 5 minutes to my Step in Ready Time”. All of it works without needing to open the app.

You can download Ready Time on the App Store. If you have feedback, we’d love to hear from you. Drop me a note.

/ready-time #ios-development #nerdtower

Kid: Where are you? Can you check on your map?
Old geezer: Yeah, I can see where I am.
Kid: Where?
Old geezer: Where the blue dot is.
Kid: …

#humor

Heard this today: company’s procurement software disappeared (they shut down?) so junior software dev on Procurement Team vibe codes their own version of the procurement software.

/software-development #ai

Halloween in Cantonese

Here are some Halloween words in Cantonese.

English Cantonese Jyutping
🎃 Pumpkin 南瓜 naam4 gwaa1
🌾 Pumpkin patch 南瓜園 naam4 gwaa1 jyun4
🦇 Halloween 萬聖節 maan6 sing3 zit3
🧛 Costume 面具 min6 geoi6
💀 Skeleton 骷髏骨 fu1 lou4 gwat1
👻 Ghost 鬼 gwai2
🕷️ Spider 蜘蛛 zi1 zyu1

#cantonese

NetNewsWire on how they added iPhone Duo support:

How we did it: we didn’t do any work at all. We built the app using Xcode 27.1 and the default iOS SDK that comes with it, and that’s it. […]

There is a good list of reasons to use standard controls in the standard ways, and near the top of that list is to be ready for these kinds of days, so we’re not bogged down for a month or more trying to adapt to big changes like this.

Yep. Those of us who’ve suffered through Apple’s UI and platform transitions over the years have learned how painful it can be if you go your own way too much. Stick to what Apple’s trying to do, and you’ll be in better shape for the next shift. I learned this the hard way with Little Memory, but I’m so glad that I finally got it rewritten with my learnings, so my own iPhone Duo support wasn’t too difficult. There were some UX considerations for the outer vs inner screen layouts to optimize the experience, but they weren’t strictly necessary.

/software-development #ios-development #apple

Ready Time 3.12: Siri

Ready Time now works with Siri! Ask “When do I leave in Ready Time?” or “What’s my next step in Ready Time?” and Siri will give her (or its?) chirpy answer without you needing to pick up your phone. Because picking up your phone takes so much work, phew! This makes it easy to use Ready Time with a paired Apple Watch too.

When plans change, say “Change the deadline for Dinner in Ready Time” and give it a new time. Ready Time updates your start times without opening the app. This works on one-time Plans for now.

You can download Ready Time on the App Store. If you have feedback, we’d love to hear from you. Drop me a note.

/ready-time #ios-development #nerdtower

Coinbase is going mobile native too

Looks like Coinbase is also joining the native mobile app party too:

Were taking Coinbase’s consumer trading app fully native, migrating off React Native and rebuilding in Swift and Kotlin! Two things changed the math: AI coding agents have collapsed the cost of building a feature twice, and the end product is simply better when nothing sits between your code and the platform. Faster startup, fewer crashes, day-one access to new iOS and Android capabilities. For an app where millions of people trade real money, that matters a lot.

Re-iterating in bullets:

Also, the team can focus on more on the user experience rather than battling tooling.

Shopify’s move came recently too.

/software-development #ios-development

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