Apple Music Recommendations. Not “For Me”

Apple Music has been great for our family. We all love music and we all listen to different kinds of music. Thanks to Apple Music we are listening to more music than ever and spending less money doing so. I know this shouldn’t be news for anybody that’s been in the subscription music game for any amount of time, but with the $15 a month family price point, it’s really been great for us.

All of that said, I really hate Apple Music recommendations. Below is my “for you” recommendations earlier today.



With the exception of a single Miles Davis album none of those are “for me”. I suspect the reason I get so many pop recommendations is because my family shared a single iTunes account for many years. However, we are now all on separate family sharing accounts and I can assure you that I’ve never favorited a Beyoncé album. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)


My favorite music largely includes obscure living jazz artists and less obscure dead jazz artists. I’ve wasted hours favoriting albums and marking other “recommended” playlists as ones I don’t like. Nevertheless, I open iTunes nearly every day as I work at my iMac and get the same Selina Gomez album thrown at me in place of Thelonkous Monk.

Maybe if I started a new iTunes account from scratch I would be in better shape. But that would require me to walk away from thousands of dollars of music, movies, and apps I purchased from iTunes in the past. I’m in a cage of Apple’s creation and I believe they should figure a way out of it. At the very least, if I tell Apple Music I don’t like the One Direction playlist (again, not that there is anything wrong with that), Apple Music should not throw it at me again … every day … for the rest of my life. How does the algorithm not take into account when the user specifically says, “please don’t show me this again”?

The net result of all of this is that I am unable to use Apple Music recommendations. I guess that’s okay because I know other ways to find new and interesting music but it also just kind of sucks.

Stack Social’s Pay What You Want Bundle




StackSocial’s Spring “pay what you want” bundle is worth consideration. Because you get to choose your price, it accommodates all budgets. If you pay more than the average price, you’ll receive the full upgraded bundle with all 13 applications. There are several good ones on this list, many of which I’ve already paid full price for. There are a lot of apps here but to me, the combination of Screens 3, Pomodoro Time Pro, and Marked 2 are really what sells this bundle. Here’s the full list.

Marked 2 ($13.99 value): Bret Terpstra continues to improve upon this markdown swiss army knife. In the years since Brett first released this app it has grown to do so much more than just Markdown, including Fountain, CriticMarkup, MathJax, Scrivener, MarsEdit, and VoodooPad. It’s a long list.

Screens 3 ($29.99 value): Remotely control your computer with this user-friendly VNC for Mac. I started using Screens when it was version 1 and I’ve never looked back. There are lot of VNC applications out there but Screens does it solid reliability and a modern user interface. I’m using it even more now that I keep using the iPad Pro.

Pomodoro Time Pro ($4.99 value): Define & manage tasks, track progress. I recently broke myself out of a rut but bringing disciplined work bursts into play using pomodoro timers. This stuff works. Here’s a pretty timer to help you along.

Owlet ($499 value): Turn your 3D models into photorealistic images

Flux 6 ($99 value): Build websites with this powerful & user-friendly WYSIWYG tool

AfterShot Pro 2 ($79.99 value): An all-in-one RAW convertor, photo editor, and high-speed photo manager

Hands Off! ($49.99 value): Controls the access of web apps to your network and disks

FoldersSynchronizer 4 ($40 value): Synchronize & back up files, folders, and disks

AllMyMusic ($29 value): Record audio from any online streaming site

iClip ($14.99 value): Easily organize & access the contents on your clipboard

FilePane ($4.99 value): Drag a file, folder, text or images from any app

Emulsion App ($49.99 value): A powerful flexible digital photo librarian & editor

skEdit 4 ($29.99 value): Easily craft & edit quality code in this text editor

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The MacSparky Mailing List

For years I’ve been getting emails from readers asking me to put together a regular newsletter. I’ve decided to commit and start making a monthly newsletter. The newsletter will have some original content and point at other content that I hope is interesting. I’ll be publishing the first such newsletter this week so if that’s your thing, go sign up.

Sponsor: SaneBox and SaneReminders




I’d like to thank SaneBox for sponsoring MacSparky.com this week. SaneBox is a kick in the pants for your email. It adds a host of additional features to any email account and works with exchange, Google mail, or IMAP accounts.

There is a lot you can do with SaneBox to tame your email. One feature that a lot of users aren’t aware of is SaneReminders. Often you will send an email to someone and have some sort of expectation about a reply. That creates a pesky problem for you. Do you try and just remember to follow up on it in a week or two? Do you tie a string around your finger? Do you create a task in your task list application to remind you to check on whether or not there’s a reply? There really isn’t a simple, efficient way to handle that problem.

With SaneReminders, when you send an email to someone, you can blind copy it to SaneBox with some designated amount of time like, “1week@sanebox.com”. SaneBox then quietly watches out for a reply to that email. If you don’t get a reply within one week, you get a note from SaneBox reminding you. If you deal with a lot of people, this is a completely friction-free way to track email replies. I use this feature every day.

Learn more about all of the features of SaneBox over at SaneBox.com. If you sign up using the links in this post, you even get a nice discount. Who doesn’t want a nice discount? Thank you SaneBox for supporting MacSparky.com.

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MPU 317: Myke Hurley: Collector of iPads

This week’s episode of Mac Power Users features Myke Hurley, who talks about how he is using his iPad Pro and some of his favorite workflows for the business side of running a podcast network.

There was a problem with the feed (my fault) where some listeners got last week’s episode (MPU 316) instead of the new one. If that’s you, just re-download the episode and you’re fine

Sponsors include:

  • Clean My Mac 3: A simple and powerful application for keeping your Mac clean, maintained, and healthy. For a limited time, Mac Power Users listeners can save 30%.
  • Drobo Created by you. Protected by Drobo. Save $100 off select models using code MPU100.
  • Automatic The connected car company that improves your driving and integrates your car into yoru digital life. Enter code MACPOWER to get 20% off your purchase. 
  • Fracture Bring your photos to life.

Stanford’s Latest iOS Course

Every year Stanford releases a course on iOS application development to iTunes U. It’s always good and this year the materials are updated for iOS 9 and Swift. These courses aren’t beginner level but they certainly aren’t expert level either. If you’re curious about these things, this is a pretty good place to start.

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Speaking at the Release Notes Conference

I’m excited to be named as a speaker at this year’s Release Notes Conference in Indianapolis on September 27–29. The Release Notes Conference is all about independent developers and the challenges they face. Indie developers are some of my favorite people. They are entrepreneurs, geeks, and fearless trailblazers all at once. I can’t wait to talk to them about the perils and thrills of working for yourself.

FotoMagico 5

For years I’ve had the reputation in my friend and family groups as being the “slide show wizard”. If somebody’s getting married, or having an anniversary party, or whatever, they always come to me and ask me to put on their slide show.

I always hedge a bit, explaining that it is very time consuming and that if I’m going to do it, they should at least make sure I get extra cake and ice cream. They always agree to my terms.

What they don’t know is that all this time I’ve simply been taking their pictures and dumping them in FotoMagico with some good music. The app does all the work.

Recently Boinx released version 5 of FotoMagico and now I’ll look even better. They’ve now got features like:

* Resolution independence. Your slide show will play on any projector up to 4K

* Adding video

* New slide transitions and better text animation

One of my tricks for weddings is to always get a shot of the bride and groom’s first kiss and then add it to the end of the slide show for the reception. Everybody loves that. Now FotoMagico makes that job easier with a pre-built snippet for just that purpose.

There’s more, like export functions, synchronization with music beats, and other fancy tricks but to me the real value in this app is how easily it makes a great slideshow. Learn more over at Boinx Software.

Drawing on iPad Word

I don’t know what they’re feeding the Microsoft iOS development team but I wish they’d give some of it to the Mac team too. I’ve been using Word’s latest new feature that lets you annotate Microsoft Word documents on the iPad with the Apple Pencil. It feels super natural and makes a great deal of sense once you get the workflow down. I was going to write it up but Jeff Richardson covered it thoroughly today so I’m just going to point you over there.

At this point I’m beginning to wonder if it’s inevitable that I’ll be moving my Apple Pages template documents over to Word and just go all-in for Word. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.