🏠 Tour My 100% Apple Smart Home

Building a 100% Apple Smart Home

Over a year ago my family started building a new house in Central Florida from the ground up, which provided a unique opportunity for me to retrofit my ideal smart home! While there are still smart devices and features I haven’t gotten to yet (like a Level Lock+), our house has over 100 devices all running on Apple Home. Check out the full tour here:

If you’d like to see more of the process, even running ethernet and speaker wire through walls and ceilings, check out my first smart home video from a year ago where I go through the plan for internet and home theater. Thankfully, it all worked!

iOS 16.4 Features for Apple Podcasts

Not only have I been creating podcasts for 12+ years, I also love listening to podcasts. Everyone’s listening habits vary, but I am meticulous about the podcast episodes that would get slotted to play next, programming how many seconds to skip in the intro for my favorite shows, and other fine-tuned controls.

For that reason, I’ve used Pocket Casts as my default podcast player for a long time. It provides all those features, reliability syncs your listening progress across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and web apps, and its Watch companion app is also incredibly useful. If you want to see why I love it so much, check out this video:

This week Apple released its first developer beta of iOS 16.4, which will likely be available to the public sometime in March. Along with the remix of Apple’s HomeKit architecture upgrade (hopefully now fixed), the Apple Podcasts app is getting some much needed features, like better Up Next controls and more navigation options.

You can read about all the changes on Apple’s website, but I hope to test the iOS 16.4 beta this week and really explore everything new. I’ve actually transitioned from using Pocket Casts, which I still love, to the stock Podcasts app full-time for my own listening. For the podcasts I produce, over 70% of listeners use the Apple Podcasts app, and knowing how they experience the episodes I produce is important to understand.

Plus, the Podcasts app has been slowly improving over time, and with these new features I may no longer gravitate to a third-party podcast player. With the ease of subscriptions built-in to the app for many shows, tighter Siri integration, and more options with Shortcuts, it may be time to take another look at the Podcasts app.

More Features in iOS 16.4

You can read this article on more of the changes coming to iOS 16.4, but a few that interest me are the ability to toggle Always-On Display for iPhone 14 Pro with a Focus Mode (very cool), and some great new Shortcuts actions. Those include:

• Silence Unkown Callers

• Set Stage Manager

• Set True Tone

• Set Announce Notifications

• Shut Down

• Lock Screen

• Set Always on Display

• Intercom

• Set VPN

• Set AirDrop Receiving

• Set Night Shift

iPhone 15 Pro Rumors

Shortly after I finished editing the weekly AppleInsider podcast 🫥 an exclusive from 9to5Mac claims to have knowledge of the forthcoming iPhone 15 Pro. The material could move to a brushed titanium, larger camera bump, smaller bezels, and notably, USB-C!

You can check out their article, but it all seems fairly likely, and if this is the year iPhone finally goes USB-C (or hopefully Thunderbolt 4 on the Pro models!) I’m all for it.

Weekend Fun

For those of you into tech AND movies, you should definitely listen to the latest Movies on the Side episode where Nate Baranowski and I review Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania! I’ll be honest, I had high hopes going in…that didn’t pan out so well.

But to lift your spirits, take a listen to our bonus episode this week where we reminisce about 1am college-days Taco Bell runs, when does a biscotti actually expire, sleeping-in as an adult, and more! You can listen with a 3-day free trial and access the entire back catalog of bonus episode directly in Apple Podcasts! Or support us on Patreon at: Patreon.com/moviesontheside