On this week's episode of AppStories, Federico provides an update on the progress he's made on his iOS 13 review, and then we dig into how travel affects the apps and gear we use. Sponsored by: Atoms – The world's first shoe to come in quarter sizes. Moo – Custom business printin … | Continue reading
(View full size) Apple has released iOS 12.4 with improvements to Apple News, a new iPhone migration tool, support for the HomePod in Taiwan and Japan, and a fix for the security flaw in the Apple Watch's Walkie-Talkie app. With the release of version 12.4 of iOS, downloaded maga … | Continue reading
(View full size) Over the weekend, podcast client Overcast launched a few new features in its latest update. Most notably, the app's recommendation engine for suggesting new podcasts has been completely revamped and improved in a big way. Additionally, the recently added feature … | Continue reading
(View full size) Atoms are the ideal everyday shoe designed for comfort and style with your feet in mind. Not everyone's feet are exactly the same size. In fact, 60% of people have one foot that's a little bigger than the other, which is where Atoms sets itself apart. Atoms deliv … | Continue reading
It’s a special kind of dilemma when an app is already one of the best in its category, yet it lives on a platform that requires constant improvement. Some apps in this predicament continue adding feature after feature in a way that ends up detracting from what users initially lov … | Continue reading
On this week's episode of Connected: Federico has concerns about dummy units of the next iPhone. Stephen is troubled by the icon used for Software Update in macOS. Both of them receive a visit from a mystic being named Myke. Oh, and it's World Emoji Day! You can listen below (and … | Continue reading
Mercury Intermedia, in a post on Medium, shares its extensive documentation of Apple Maps' iconography over the years: A few years ago we published a post examining the point of interest (POI) icons within Apple Maps titled More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Apple’s Spotligh … | Continue reading
Today on World Emoji Day, Adobe has shared the results of its recent survey of 1,000 US emoji users: Among the emoji users surveyed, the overwhelming majority use emojis to lighten the mood of conversations (93%) and show support to people (91%). Aligned with this finding, emoji … | Continue reading
Tomorrow is World Emoji Day, and Apple is starting the celebration early by offering a sneak peek at some of the new emoji arriving later this year in iOS 13, iPadOS 13, macOS Catalina, and watchOS 6. In early February the Unicode Consortium, which makes all emoji approval decisi … | Continue reading
On last week's episode of Connected: Myke has a story about the beach, Federico has a plan for NFC stickers, and Stephen has some thoughts on this week's MacBook news. You can listen below (and find the show notes here). 0:00 01:22:50 Connected, Episode 251 Sponsored by: Pingdom: … | Continue reading
On last week's episode of our iPad-focused show Adapt: Safari is growing up this fall in iPadOS 13 to a true desktop-class browser, and Federico and Ryan detail everything that's new; also, this week’s challenge involves using apps to perform OCR on a 400+ page PDF. You can liste … | Continue reading
Today on Dialog, we are joined by video game narrative designer and novelist Carrie Patel. In this first part of our conversation, we explore narrative design in games Patel has worked on at Obsidian Entertainment, including Pillars of Eternity and The Outer Worlds, which is comi … | Continue reading
I love my two HomePods. One sits in my living room and the other in my studio. When I finish working for the day, I can ask Siri to move my music from the studio to the living room where I continue what I'm listening to as I make dinner and relax. Most of the […] | Continue reading
The makers of the Apple Design Award-winning app Airmail are back with Airmail Zero, a brand-new take on Gmail for the Mac and iPhone. Speed is critical to getting through a mountain of email messages, and you don’t want your email client slowing you down. That’s why Bloop, desig … | Continue reading
On this week's episode of AppStories, we take a close look at the upcoming changes to the Photos app on iOS and the Mac. Sponsored by: Secure Shellfish – Connect your servers and your apps. Remote for Mac – Remote Control for Mac. Linode: High-performance SSD Linux servers for al … | Continue reading
On June 8, 2009, at the end of a two-hour WWDC keynote, Phil Schiller was running through a long list of new features and apps that would be available on the iPhone 3GS, due to ship on June 19 of that year. Phil was pinch-hitting as keynote master of ceremonies for Steve Jobs, wh … | Continue reading
Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch: Apple has disabled the Apple Watch Walkie Talkie app due to an unspecified vulnerability that could allow a person to listen to another customer’s iPhone without consent, the company told TechCrunch this evening. Apple shared an official … | Continue reading
Minit is a new-to-iOS indie adventure game by Jan Willem Nijman, the co-founder of Vlambeer, Kitty Calis, Jukio Kallio, and Dominik Johann. The game, which was brought to iOS a little over one week ago by Devolver Digital, first debuted in April 2018 and is now available on all m … | Continue reading
Today on Dialog, we conclude our conversation with screenwriter and author John August. Although August is a screenwriter and author, he's also been involved in a wide variety of other related projects like the creation of Fountain markup syntax, which is a variant of Markdown de … | Continue reading
Today in conjunction with the kickoff of its Back to School promotion, Apple has announced significant changes to its laptop lineup, updating the MacBook Air and entry-level MacBook Pro while discontinuing the smallest Mac laptop, the 12-inch MacBook. The MacBook Air, which Apple … | Continue reading
On this week's episode of AppStories, we look at our strange assortment of recently-downloaded apps. Sponsored by: Pingdom: Start monitoring your websites and servers today. Use offer code APPSTORIES to get 30% off. Astropad Studio: Turn your iPad into a professional graphics tab … | Continue reading
When the App Store opened for business in 2008, Apple released Texas Hold'em, the company's first and only iOS game and successor to an iPod version that debuted in 2006. The game, which Stephen Hackett profiled for MacStories last year was short-lived, disappearing from the App … | Continue reading
The makers of the Apple Design Award-winning app Airmail are back with Airmail Zero, a brand-new take on Gmail for the Mac and iPhone. Speed is critical to getting through a mountain of email messages, and you don’t want your email client slowing you down. That’s why Bloop, desig … | Continue reading
On this week's episode of Connected: Federico reminds everyone that it's okay to not have strong feelings about Jony Ive leaving Apple, while Stephen feels tempted by iOS 13. Meanwhile, Eddy Cue talks about rumors of Tim Cook meddling with Apple TV+ scripts and Project Catalyst c … | Continue reading
Today on its blog GoodNotes shared that the upcoming macOS version of GoodNotes 5 would be based on the iPad app using Catalyst: Earlier this year, we launched our all-new iOS app GoodNotes 5. It has been rewritten from scratch with a much more stable and flexible internal archit … | Continue reading
Leading up to WWDC last month, rumors indicated that iTunes on the Mac was being split into multiple apps, including standalone Music, TV, and Podcasts apps. It was expected that Apple might use its Catalyst technology (formerly known as Marzipan) to base the new Music app on Mus … | Continue reading
On this week's episode of AppStories, we continue our series of episodes on the new and updated apps coming from Apple in the fall with Reminders. Sponsored by: Direct Mail – Create and send great-looking email newsletters with Direct Mail, an easy-to-use email marketing app desi … | Continue reading
Today on Dialog, we published the latest interview of Season 1 featuring screenwriter and author John August. John August is a screenwriter whose credits include films like Go, Big Fish, Charlie’s Angels, Titan A.E., Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, and Frankenwee … | Continue reading
Apple has a big update coming to Reminders in iOS 13, and despite all that’s changing in the app, one important thing is not: developers will still be able to integrate with Reminders so you can create, check off, and manage your tasks from a third-party app. The latest app to ta … | Continue reading
Samuel Axon spoke to developers and marketing, developer relations, and engineering representatives from Apple in a story for Ars Technica about Catalyst, Apple's project for bringing iPad apps to the Mac. Prior to WWDC, Apple gave a handful of companies access to Catalyst. Axon … | Continue reading
Worse Than Death is a narrative-driven horror game from Toronto-based Benjamin Rivers, the developer of Home. The two games share some similarities. Both games feature creepy, small-town mysteries where you play as a pixelated protagonist in a chunky-pixel world. What’s different … | Continue reading
Have you heard of Screen Time, Apple’s time tracking feature for iPhone and iPad that shows how long you use each app on your iPhone or iPad? Good news — Screen Time is coming to macOS Catalina this fall! And if you haven’t heard of this feature yet, you may want to check out the … | Continue reading
Federico gets creative making an eBook with Apple's Pages app, then the guys go deep into the strengths and challenges of the new multitasking system in iPadOS 13. In this week's episode of Adapt, I had a lot of fun playing around with Pages for Ryan's challenge; we also dig deep … | Continue reading
Excellent piece by Dieter Bohn at The Verge following news of Jony Ive’s coming departure from Apple: While Apple might have a good story about having been founded in a garage, the true founding myth of Apple is the myth of genius. You know the fable, which has the benefit of als … | Continue reading
Great piece by John Gruber on Jony Ive leaving Apple and the end of the Ive era at Apple: I think Tim Cook is a great CEO and Jeff Williams is a great COO. But who’s in charge of product design now? There is no new chief design officer, which, really, is what Steve Jobs […] | Continue reading
Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times dropped a bombshell: Jony Ive is leaving Apple to start his own design firm called LoveFrom, and Apple will be its first client. Ive told Bradshaw: While I will not be an [Apple] employee, I will still be very involved — I hope for many, many y … | Continue reading
Myke resumes his role as the tvOS guy and Federico's Memoji have all been killed. Apple's Public Betas have arrived, as have new rumors of a future small iPhone. Stephen preaches the good news of Carbon. On this week's episode of Connected, we discuss Apple's latest public betas … | Continue reading
All my cards on the table: until I tried Anders Borum’s new app, Secure ShellFish, I had no idea what an SSH or SFTP server even was. I’ve never had the need for a file server, and have thus considered it one of those technical computing concepts that’s over my head and exists on … | Continue reading
All three of the apps in Apple's iWork productivity suite received a substantial update this week. Changes varied by app and across platforms, but the lion's share of the revisions improved the apps' flexibility, text styling, and image handling capabilities, and, on iOS, Pencil … | Continue reading
Ahead of the first 2020 Democratic debates, which take place over the next couple days, Apple News has launched a dedicated candidate guide pooling information about each presidential hopeful from a wide variety of sources. News has offered similar election-related hubs in the pa … | Continue reading
Last weekend, I dove into my first HomeKit project in a while, installing two Insignia Wi-Fi Garage Door Controllers. That’s quite a mouthful, so I’m just going to call it the Insignia Controller. I sat on this project for months before getting started. I love playing with new ga … | Continue reading
Today on Dialog, we published the conclusion of our interview featuring musician and songwriter Frank Turner. To wrap things up with speak to Turner about the democratization of the creation, access, and distribution of music and other media, the role of hard work and luck, the s … | Continue reading
Today Apple has released its first public beta versions of its forthcoming software updates. iOS 13, iPadOS 13, macOS Catalina, and tvOS 13 are all available as public betas. As in years past, there is no public beta available for the Apple Watch or HomePod. Users interested in t … | Continue reading
At WWDC 2018, Craig Federighi provided a sneak peek at what everyone was calling Marzipan: an as-yet-unnamed way for iPad app developers to bring their apps to the Mac. So, it came as no surprise when Federighi retook the stage in 2019 and revealed more details about the project … | Continue reading
The web is a visual medium, so it pays to make the most of what it has to offer with beautiful, interactive animations. With Tumult Hype Professional 4.0 for the Mac, you can create stunning animations without writing a single line of code. The app uses a powerful key-based anima … | Continue reading
App Review has been a black box for over a decade now, with virtually no details leaking out of Apple. That's begun to change in 2019. Earlier this year, Mark Gurman interviewed Phillip Shoemaker, a former head of App Review, on Bloomberg's Decrypted podcast where Shoemaker descr … | Continue reading
It was the summer of 2016 when Pokémon GO took the world by storm, and now, almost exactly three years to the day later, there’s a new AR game trying to capture the same magic. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite launched today in the US, UK, and select other countries from the same stud … | Continue reading
Federico and Stephen are joined by David Sparks to talk about the state of Apple's current betas, the updated Files and Shortcuts apps and the ever-growing system of rules that form Connected's drafts. On this week's episode of Connected, we had a great conversation with David Sp … | Continue reading