On this week's episode of AppStories, we discuss some of the trends we expect will drive app development on iOS and the Mac this year and into the future. Sponsored by: MacStadium – Private clouds and dedicated Macs for developers and teams doing iOS/Mac app development. Start a … | Continue reading
Every few months, I like to use Twitter's official app for iPhone and iPad for a while and reassess its advantages over third-party clients, as well as its shortcomings. This is something I've been doing for several years now. While I've often come away unimpressed with Twitter's … | Continue reading
I’ve used Grocery on and off for a long time, but what finally made it stick in a way that it never did in the app’s early days was the addition of a HomePod in my living room/kitchen area. The app is built on top of Apple Reminders, which means that even from the earliest […] | Continue reading
Apple's Home app is great when it comes to controlling your smart home accessories. But once you start adding automations to your home, you quickly encounter the limits of the Home app. HomeKit is much more capable and flexible than what Apple has to offer. There is another Home … | Continue reading
Molly McHugh writing for The Ringer: The saturation of iOS and Mac products means more and more people own Apple devices—which means more and more people need help using them. Each iOS and MacOS release reveals a new suite of tools and capabilities, but also new challenges and co … | Continue reading
Mitchel Broussard of MacRumors recently published an in-depth look at the problems classical music fans have with Apple Music's approach to that expansive genre. Unlike many other common genres, such as hip-hop, pop, and country, the range of music deemed 'classical' bears its ow … | Continue reading
Jason Snell writing about a recent Apple hire for Macworld: This past week we learned that the company has hired a new head of home products, which makes me ask the question: What exactly does Apple expect Sam Jadallah to do? Is his job to make deals with HomeKit partners and mak … | Continue reading
I last covered Eventail in April 2018, when its developer Jozef Legeny brought support for the iPhone X and new color schemes to his compact calendar widget for iPhone and iPad. With version 3.1 released today, Eventail (which over the past year also gained support for overdue re … | Continue reading
The boys dive into a sea of rumors after Federico explores San Jose's municipal websites, Myke gives everyone a gift and Stephen returns from a journey. On this week's episode of Connected, we discuss the latest Marzipan rumors and consider the implications of a 6K display made b … | Continue reading
A week ago, Apple sent an email to developers announcing that it would require two-factor authentication for all developer accounts beginning February 27, 2019. The message linked to an Apple two-factor authentication support page that applies to all Apple IDs. The trouble was, t … | Continue reading
Jason Snell's podcasting setup is similar to mine – he wants to hear his own voice, record his local audio track, and have a conversation with multiple people on Skype, who also need to hear his voice coming from an external microphone. And he wants to use one computer to do it a … | Continue reading
iPad Diaries is a regular series about using the iPad as a primary computer. You can find more installments here and subscribe to the dedicated RSS feed. After several years without updates to a product that, somewhat oddly, | Continue reading
Apple shared five new videos on its YouTube channel today, all of which center around working on an iPad Pro. Each video covers a different iPad workflow, as described by the following titles: A new way to host your own podcast A new way to create a presentation A new way to go p … | Continue reading
Evgeny Cherpak’s iOS app, Remote Control for Mac, has been updated with Siri shortcut support, which opens up some interesting ways to control a Mac with shortcuts. I’ve been using the app’s new Siri shortcuts for about a week and, as I covered on AppStories today, the shortcuts … | Continue reading
When Spotify was my music streaming service of choice, one of the features I really liked was its personalized Wrapped report generated at the end of the year. I've always been a fan of geeky annual reports and stats about the usage of any given web service – be it Spotify, Pocke … | Continue reading
In a first among TV manufacturers, Samsung has announced that its 2019 TVs will ship with an iTunes Movies and TV Shows app in over 100 countries as well as AirPlay 2 support in 190 countries. 2018 models will receive the same support via a firmware update. With the Consumer Elec … | Continue reading
Last year when I wrote about my must-have Mac apps, I was coming off a tumultuous year that started with a daily commute into Chicago for my old job and ended with me working from home. As the year came to a close, I was exploring what that meant for the way I work on […] | Continue reading
Putting together my annual list of Must-Have iOS Apps is an exercise in analyzing the trends of the year and considering which ones had the biggest impact on how I use my iPhone and iPad. Two years ago, it was web services and open APIs; last year, I focused on collaboration with … | Continue reading
iPad Diaries is a regular series about using the iPad as a primary computer. You can find more installments here and subscribe to the dedicated RSS feed. One of my favorite aspects of working on the iPad is the flexibility granted by its extensible form factor. At its very essenc … | Continue reading
On Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Brussels. Cook, who has stated many times that Apple believes privacy is a fundamental human right, called for federal privacy legislation. As transcribed in Ars … | Continue reading
In the summer of 2017, Panic released Transmit 5, a top-to-bottom update to the company’s excellent file transfer app for the Mac. At the same time, Panic left the Mac App Store like many Mac apps have in recent years. Panic’s Cabel Sasser explained that the company wanted the ab … | Continue reading
Apple has just published its financial results for Q4 2018. The company posted revenue of $62.9 billion. Apple sold 9.7 million iPads, 46.9 million iPhones, and 5.3 million Macs during the quarter. We’re thrilled to report Apple’s best June quarter ever, and our fourth consecutiv … | Continue reading
Since it was announced at WWDC over the summer, the lion’s share of conversation around shortcuts has been about getting things done quickly and efficiently. Apple’s marketing message focuses on how shortcuts in iOS 12 help “streamline the things you do often” using Siri and/or t … | Continue reading
The iPhone XR won't show up on your doorstep or at your local Apple Store until Friday, but today the embargo on reviews for the device was lifted. The common refrain from reviewers is that the XR is more similar to the XS than different. So similar that Nicole Nguyen of Buzzfeed … | Continue reading
Last week we linked to Marco Arment’s article critiquing Apple’s watch faces and calling for Apple to open up watch face design and development to third parties. By the next day, Steve Troughton-Smith had an Xcode project up and running that uses SpriteKit to simulate custom watc … | Continue reading
In a post on Marco.org, Overcast developer Marco Arment critiques the design of many of the current Apple Watch faces. Using a variety of analog watches as references, Arment highlights the design elements that make them legible, few of which are followed by Apple’s faces: Across … | Continue reading
Yoink is the app I use on my Mac every day as a temporary spot to park files, snippets of text, images, and URLs. By itself, Yoink for Mac has been a fantastic time-saver. The latest updates to Yoink for iOS and the Mac, however, have been transformative. There's more that can be … | Continue reading
MacStories readers may be familiar with the way I like to present iPhone screenshots in app reviews and other stories – particularly for | Continue reading
watchOS had a bumpy first few years. Some poor decisions and perhaps a premature initial launch forced significant design changes to be in order right away. It wasn't until last year's watchOS 4 release that it finally felt like the waters had calmed. Apple seemed to have solidif … | Continue reading
I just got home from a trip to my local drugstore using Google Maps’ new CarPlay integration. Once I had a destination selected and was on my way, the experience was fine, as long as I didn’t stray from the path. Overall though, from my very preliminary, single test drive, I wasn … | Continue reading
After years of unabated visual and functional changes, iOS 12 is Apple's opportunity to regroup and reassess the foundation before the next big step – with one notable exception. | Continue reading
As first reported by Tim Bradshaw Apple has announced a media event for September 12, 2018 at 10:00 am. The event will be held at Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino. pic.twitter.com/WLoYywasG5 — Tim Bradshaw (@tim) August 30, 2018 Based on widespread speculation, Apple is expected t … | Continue reading
For years, iLife defined the Mac experience, or at the very least, its marketing. An iMac or MacBook wasn't a mere computer; it was a tool for enjoying your music, managing your photos, creating your own songs, editing your home videos, and more. iLife was brilliant because it wa … | Continue reading
FiftyThree, the maker of the iOS apps Paper and Paste, has been acquired by WeTransfer, a file transfer company based in Los Angeles and Amsterdam. Paper, FiftyThree’s iPad drawing app, was named iPad App of The Year in 2012. Paste, which is FiftyThree’s iOS presentation app, all … | Continue reading
The latest chapter in Twitter’s contentious relationship with third-party developers is coming to a close. In April 2017, Twitter announced plans to eventually deprecate certain parts of its API that third-party apps rely on. Fast forward one year to April 2018, roughly 10 weeks … | Continue reading
Our Internet-driven society has seen a decline in book reading, though not necessarily a decline in reading altogether. Despite book readers being less common than in past decades, we all do a fair amount of reading each day on our smartphones – reading messages from friends, or … | Continue reading
When iOS 12 launches this fall, it will introduce a newly redesigned iBooks app simply named Books. Though the reading experience in Books is largely the same as before, the rest of the app is drastically different, offering the biggest app redesign on iOS since last year's App S … | Continue reading
The App Store had just turned one when, sometime in the summer of 2009, concept artist and game developer Zach Gage published a preview video for an iPhone game he had been working on. The game was based on a simple premise: Gage's girlfriend liked playing Tetris for iPhone, whic … | Continue reading
Have you ever watched the construction of a new building while knowing nothing about what the finished product would be? You track its progress a piece at a time, clueless about the end goal until finally there comes a point when, in a single moment, suddenly it all makes sense. … | Continue reading
Apple released the first public beta of iOS 12 today, allowing non-developer testers to check out the new features and improvements in the next major version of iOS, set to be released sometime in the fall. While it's always good practice to avoid installing a beta OS on your pri … | Continue reading
In my Future of Workflow article from last year (published soon after the news of Apple's acquisition), I outlined some of the probable outcomes for the app. The more optimistic one – the | Continue reading
If you're anything like me, you probably remain perpetually dissatisfied with your task management setup. You may have chosen an app and settled in with it, but some of its design choices don't quite fit with your way of working, so you're always keen to try the latest and greate … | Continue reading
The tower form factor may be a thing of the past, at least until the new Mac Pro shows up next year, but for years, if you needed the most powerful and flexible machine money could buy, the Power Mac was the only way to go. For almost five years, the heart of the Power […] | Continue reading
In April, Twitter delayed a transition to a new API that was expected to have a significant impact on third-party Twitter clients like Twitterrific and Tweetbot. The delay came in the wake of an outcry from users of third-party Twitter clients prompted by developers who banded to … | Continue reading
With a statement provided to iMore earlier today, Apple confirmed what Bloomberg's Mark Gurman first reported in late 2016 (not a typo): the company is officially exiting the WiFi router business by discontinuing the AirPort line of products. From Rene Ritchie's story: Routers ar … | Continue reading