Embarrassed to share your Spotify Wrapped?

Let me guess, your Spotify Wrapped wasn’t great. Not a match with your friends? Did you listen to Taylor Swift all year and are embarrassed to show the world that Kanye isn’t your favourite? Well, I don’t have a solution for you, but I can surely say that Apple Music users are really missing out on some genuinely cool stuff here. Apple Music is aesthetic, yes. But, that’s only on the iPhone! Their Mac app is buggy, and don’t get me started on the Windows app. I could probably start learning from WhiteHateJr and create something better.

For those of you oldies, who use Amazon Music and Gaana- Spotify Wrapped is just a fancy way of showing your yearly music stats. Flashy infographics like Instagram stories highlighting some of your top songs, artists, genres, music aura and much more. Oh yes, and your annual listening time. I listened to music for 580 hours, that number is bigger than all my marks combined this term :) The best part being, Spotify offers this feature to its basic plan users too, so you don’t have to pay to access Spotify Wrapped. And Apple Music charges you $9.99 just to create your yearly favourite playlist. It doesn’t even have a fancy cover image. Spotify deserves to win here.

On a completely unrelated note, Google might launch their very own smartwatch by the end of next year. What a surprise! Well, maybe for you. But honestly, I saw this coming when Google acquired FitBit. Wait, so it will be called the Pixel Watch? So cool, I just hope it isn’t as bad as Google’s first pixel phone. For the basics, the watch will run Google’s WearOS and will probably cost more than a FitBit, somewhere close to an Apple Watch, so it will be entering and competing with flagship-level watches. I am guessing they will get crushed before they even launch but let’s wait and watch.

That’s not it from Google, this week. Google just started widely rolling out the Locked Folder feature on the Google Photos App. Yes, you can now hide and password-protect some of your photos. The photos added to this folder don't sync with the cloud either. So, all of it is offline, protected by biometrics. This feature was previously only available on the new Pixels and select OnePlus and Samsung devices, but now should roll out to anyone and everyone running Android 6 and above.

That’s enough news from Google. Let’s head over to Microsoft now. Microsoft is rolling out some really neat cosmetic changes to Office applications on Windows 11, and it looks so sleek! Sleek and Microsoft don’t usually go together, but this time they have created one hell of a piece. This subtle change only involves some extra curvature to window edges and transparency changes but it looks so much better than regular Office! Again, like Google, this isn’t the only update from Microsoft this week. Microsoft is finally undoing some controversial changes they made with Windows 11. Windows 11 made it harder for users to change their default browser. In Windows 10 you could modify your default browser with the click of a button. But Windows 11 complicated this process by allowing users to set a default browser for every file type like .svg and .html along with default links. But, unhappy users result in unnecessary chaos on Microsoft forums so yes, Microsoft complied. They restored the older version in a beta build. In my opinion, you should stick to Edge. It is way better than Chrome. Edge is simple, way more secure and consumes way less battery!

—

Would I be able to call this a tech newsletter if I didn’t use the word NFT? Well, I am not going to talk about NFTs here. I am just putting forward the fact that Wikipedia’s co-founder is selling his first Wikipedia article as an NFT along with the iMac he used to make that change. Again, this is not exactly tech-related but since all money from this NFT will go to a charitable cause, I wanted to appreciate this gesture.

And yes, you have successfully reached the end of this issue. Well done on that! You are now caught up with everything that happened in the tech domain this week. And now that you have read the entire issue, I am guessing you found it interesting. I would love it if you could share the issue with your friends and family and support my work :) Yes, go ahead and share this, and I will catch you next week. Until then, make sure to update all your devices.