Apps

The feature, called Maven, lets you type prompts like, “show me fantasy audiobooks that I can complete on an 8-hour road trip.” Audible will then use AI to come up with matching audiobooks.

Audible is rolling out Maven as a beta to half of US-based users on Android and iOS. Amazon just debuted an AI-powered discovery feature on its Music app as well.

If you update to macOS Sequoia, you’ll have to go to Settings > Security & Privacy and approve the app on first open, because Apple is taking away the current right-click (ctrl-click) workaround.

The warning signifies the developer never had Apple malware scan and notarize the app. Sensible security step or not, I’ll still grumble every time I have to open Settings to run something.

You may need to close and reopen the app to see it, but according to Android expert Mishaal Rahman, Gemini is showing up for non-Google Workspace users.

Gemini can do things like summarize emails, suggest next steps, or draft replies. Before now, you’ve needed a Google AI premium subscription or a Workspace account for access to the AI assistant.

A new “Everything else” option under “Add to Wallet” is now rolling out to the app that uses AI to process things like concert tickets or insurance cards to make custom digital passes. Before, you could save photos of cards with bar codes or QR codes to the Wallet app — this sounds better.

In 9to5Google’s example, it successfully recreated a Sam’s Club card, barcode and all.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday that the platform is close to reaching 200 million monthly active users, and now it’s official.

The Italian software company, which notably acquired — and limited free access to — Evernote, has added WeTransfer to its growing portfolio. WeTransfer CEO Alexandar Vassilev says the company will “continue to serve your creative tooling needs” following the acquisition.

A little over a week after the CrowdStrike outage brought down mobile orders at Starbucks, the app had some trouble again today.

For most of the morning, around the globe weren’t been able to place orders, with the app saying, “We’re having trouble with store locations right now.” It looks like the feature is back online now though, so we won’t have to wait in line for our drinks.

Update, July 30th: Noted that mobile ordering works again.

No, this isn’t another cardboard bed situation — the reasons for blocking the app make sense and mirror similar actions that Grindr took during the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, after it was used to out a number of athletes during the previous Rio Games.

That means mapping developers can access the 2.3 billion unique buildings, 54 million places of interest, 200 million addresses, and other global data collected by the Overture Maps Foundation. The open-source initiative launched in 2022 with the goal of offering a free alternative to mapping data provided by Google and Apple.

Apple Music Classical now has a Top 100 chart. A collection of keyboard concertos composed by Johann Sebastian Bach is at number one, followed by recordings of Johannes Brahms-composed symphonies.

Apple updates placement on Mondays, using data from Apple Music / Music Classical, iTunes, and Shazam, according to MacRumors.

A new Canary test build of the Chrome browser (I see it in version 128.0.6611.0 in macOS) has a new performance alert to tell you when a tab is hogging resources, Windows Report spotted.

To try it, open the Canary Chrome browser, navigate to chrome://flags/#performance-intervention-ui, enable “performance intervention suggestions,” and restart. Now Chrome can complain about Chrome’s memory usage, too!

The professional-grade video recording app debuted on Android in June but was only available on a small number of Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel devices.

An updated version of the app is now available on the Google Play Store adding features like HDMI monitoring while also expanding supported devices to OnePlus and Xiaomi phones running Android 13 or later.

Based on the screenshot below from app researcher Nima Owji, the new checkmark would be in the same menu as other per-post options that let you limit replies. X employee Christopher Stanley confirmed the feature, Engadget spotted.

The popular iOS podcast app has been rewritten from the ground up by developer Marco Arment in time for Overcast’s tenth anniversary.

Overcast is now much faster and has a new interface, but it keeps the same audio engine, Arment says in a blog post. Streaming, however, was removed, because of bugs and problems caused by dynamic ad insertion.