Visualizing the Currently Playing Song with Picture in Picture Instead of Control Center
Visualizing the Currently Playing Song with Picture in Picture Instead of Control Center
One of my favorite companion utilities for Apple Music I’ve discovered lately isn’t a new third-party client (I still love and use Marvis) or a new smart home speaker (we’re still rocking the original HomePod in our kitchen and it’s great): it’s Picture in Picture for iPhone and iPad. Let me explain.
A few months ago, I wrote about an update to the excellent Yoink app for iPhone and iPad that added the ability to monitor changes to the system clipboard and continuously save them in the app, thus replicating the behavior of traditional clipboard managers for macOS that still aren’t allowed on iOS and iPadOS. Yoink’s developer Matthias Gansrigler was able to build this thanks to new APIs for Picture in Picture in iOS/iPadOS 15 that allow apps to display arbitrary content in the Picture in Picture window, not just video. In Yoink’s case, the app could show instructions for clipboard monitoring in the floating window and leverage Picture in Picture’s system-wide integration as a way to keep Yoink “alive” in the background and monitor clipboard changes. It’s a clever technique that, fortunately, Apple can’t block since this is a public API in iOS 15 and Yoink isn’t breaking any rules.