Last year I switched to Airr as my main podcast app when they launched the beta, and have used it exclusively just about every day since.
Airr’s killer feature is the “AirrQuote”, which lets you clip snippets of podcast audio to share. There’s no other podcast app like it with as many integrations, like highlighting and syncing to your Readwise knowledge management workflow. It also has transcripts for tons of shows, which is a feature I didn’t know I wanted til I tried using Spotify or Overcast again and couldn’t scan through the shows in text form.
An AirrSpace for [Norman Chella](https://twitter.com/NormanChella)'s excellent [RoamFM](https://twitter.com/roamfm)
Hot off the presses last week, the Airr team shipped a slick new feature called “AirrSpaces”, which adds an audio chat room sort of functionality, an interesting innovation in a podcast player. An AirrSpace is like a combination of a podcast, Discord group chat, and Clubhouse room — hosts record clips and post into the room, which can be played in top to bottom sequence, like a normal podcast conversation. Others in the room can submit clips, too, like questions or comments for the host to review and post to the room or reply to. The Airr team hosted an introductory space you can take a look at as an example.
All of that is a cool mixture of some existing ideas, but they’ve not been done before in a podcast app. Podcast creation has historically been surprisingly lacking in client apps. What Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and AirrSpaces are bringing to the party is participatory audio: lowering the barrier for creating and enabling direct audience involvement. One of my favorite features is the asynchronous nature of an AirrSpace. One can be active for days with new conversation to return to, just like entering a group chat and catching up.
The “aftershow” genre has been a pattern catching on in Clubhouse; perhaps AirrSpaces will create a form of audio comment threads per episode that can spin up a new AirrSpace for post-show discussion on each one.
I normally avoid early upgrades to iOS betas, having been burned too many times in the past. But this time, the release of iPadOS is too exciting for me to avoid. Now that the public beta is available, I set it up and am already enjoying the changes. So far, the home screen app density and Today view up front is already a huge improvement for using the iPad for productivity, as expected. The Share Sheet changes are also pretty slick. Once I spend more time with it I’ll probably post some more thoughts, but it’s looking good for further enabling those of us interested in getting work done on iPad.
Paul Ramsey considers who might be in the best position to challenge Google as the next mapping company:
Someone is going to take another run at Google, they have to. My prediction is that it will be AWS, either through acquisition (Esri? Mapbox?) or just building from scratch. There is no doubt Amazon already has some spatial smarts, since they have to solve huge logistical problems in moving goods around for the retail side, problems that require spatial quality data to solve. And there is no doubt that they do not want to let Google continue to leverage Maps against them in Cloud sales. They need a “good enough” response to help keep AWS customers on the reservation.
Because of mapping’s criticality to so many other technologies, any player that is likely to compete with Google needs to be a platform — something that undergirds and powers technology as a business model. Apple is kinda like that, but nowhere near as similar to an electric utility as AWS is.
With the release of the amazing new Mac Pro and other things announced at WWDC, it’s clear that Apple recognizes its failings in delivering for their historically-important professional customers. Marco Arment addresses this well here across the Mac Pro, updates to macOS, iPadOS, and the changes that could be around the corner for the MacBook Pro.
I’m excited to get iPadOS installed and back to my iPad workflow. This is a good comprehensive overview from Shawn Blanc, someone who has done most of his work on an iPad for a long time.
A brand new podcast player for iPhone built by Marco Arment.
I’ve switched to using Overcast full time from a couple of years on Instacast. It’s got the basics covered so far, and the addition of Overcast’s “smart speed” feature is fantastic. It dynamically adjusts playback speed based on the properties of the audio.
's excellent [RoamFM](https://twitter.com/roamfm)](/images/post-images/airrspaces.jpg)