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Search results for "sofa"

Last Week, on Club MacStories: HomeKit Apps, Turning Twitter Searches into RSS Feeds, a Sofa Giveaway, and MacStories Unplugged

Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings:

MacStories Weekly: Issue 356

A Twitter advanced search converted to an RSS feed.

A Twitter advanced search converted to an RSS feed.

Up Next

Tomorrow at 11:30 am Eastern US time, we’ll be hosting a live audio Town Hall in the Club MacStories+ Discord community to discuss the movie, Glass Onion. If you can’t join us live, you can catch up later with the podcast version of the event.

Sofa 3.4: List Sharing, Shortcuts Actions, Lock Screen Widgets, and More

Shawn Hickman is back with another excellent update to Sofa, the downtime/media organization app for iPhone and iPad that we’ve covered several times on MacStories. Sofa remains my favorite one-stop app for managing lists of media I don’t want to forget to enjoy later. The app supports TV shows, movies, books, audiobooks, videgames, music, podcasts, board games, and apps, making it the most comprehensive media organizer I’ve used. However, what makes Sofa special is its design and extensive customization options, which is why it was the runner-up for Best App Update in last year’s MacStories Selects awards.

What I appreciate most about version 3.4 of Sofa is that it extends the app beyond its existing boundaries with list sharing and new Shortcuts support. To round out the update, Sofa also adds Lock Screen widget support and TV and movie provider details for Super Sofa subscribers. It’s an excellent batch of new features for an app that I already consider one of the finest in its category.

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Sofa 3.3 Adds Extensive Customization Options

Sofa 3.3, the media organizer app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, is out, and the update is all about customization. If you haven’t tried Sofa before, check out our recent coverage of the app, which was a runner-up for the MacStories Selects awards in the Best App Update category last year. The update includes a long list of ways to personalize Sofa, which are best shown off by showing you what’s possible, so let’s update the list of books I’ve got in Sofa.

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MacStories Unwind: Doppler for Mac, Sofa 3.0, GarageBand, Earnings and a Big Album Drops

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24:21

Sponsored by: Honeybadger – Your Secret Weapon for Exception, Uptime, and Cron Monitoring

This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • Monthly Log
    • Federico on managing his music collection on an Intel NUC using his iPad
    • John on his note-taking philosophy and why you should delete and archive more notes
  • MacStories Weekly
    • Federico recommends Roon, the client app for the music server running on the Intel NUC he wrote about in the Monthly Log
    • John shares a shortcut for converting podcast audio clips to text and saving them in Obsidian alongside the embedded audio file
    • Christopher Lawley shares his iPad Home Screens
  • MacStories Unplugged
    • Panic’s Playdate
    • A conversation about 4th of July parades and real estate open houses leads to Italian private investigators and American personal injury lawyers
    • Federico invites members to play a guessing game

AppStories

Unwind

Sofa 3.0 Adds New Ways to Manage Your Media Lists Along With a New Business Model

Sofa 3.0, an app that I last reviewed in March, is out with loads of new ways to track, organize, and browse the media lists you create. The app also has a new subscription business model for its pro features.

Media recommendations come at us all from every angle, whether it’s friends and family or sources like reviews. You can save lists of books, movies, videogames, and other media you want to try in lots of ways. You could use an app like Apple’s Notes or Reminders, but they’re general-purpose apps that don’t address the specific needs related to media consumption. Plus, trying to track media in something like a task manager gets out of control and messy fast.

Another option is to turn to an app designed for a specific type of media, and there are many good options available on the App Store. The advantage Sofa has, is that it makes it just as easy to pick a book as a movie or something else when you’re deciding what media to try next. It’s a subtle but important distinction. With single-purpose apps, you need to decide what kind of media you want to consume and then turn to an app to pick something. Sofa dispenses with the first step allowing you to answer a broader question: “How do I want to spend my free time?” That a one-stop approach is one of Sofa’s greatest strengths and one that the app leans into hard with the latest excellent update.

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MacStories Unwind: Federico Test Drives a High-End iPad Dock, We Recap Reviews of Panic’s Nova and Sofa, and the Sad, Perplexing HomePod News

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Sponsored by: Raycast – Goodbye Spotlight, Hello Raycast

This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    * Federico shares three more Taio automations
    * John on CleanShot X
    * An Interview with Sawyer Blatz, developer of Nudget

AppStories

Unwind

Downtime Organizer Sofa Adds Apps, Audiobooks, Board Games, Deeplinking, Backups, and More Themes

Sofa is a terrific downtime organizer. Since its release, the app has seen frequent updates that have added features and refinements that make it an excellent one-stop destination for collecting media you want to enjoy later. We’ve covered the app before, so I won’t revisit its core functionality here, but if you’re new to the app, be sure to check out our previous reviews for more details.

The headline feature of Sofa’s latest update is the addition of apps, audiobooks, and board games to the lineup of media it can track. I’m especially pleased to see that iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps have been added to Sofa. I’ve long considered trying new apps as a form of entertainment. Even poking around productivity apps that most people would consider ‘work’ apps is fun for many people.

The addition of apps is timely given the trend towards subscription-based apps with free trials. If an app catches your eye, but it’s got a relatively short free trial period, you can drop it into Sofa to try later when you can make the most of the trial. The addition of apps also provides a way to track games on Apple’s platforms that weren’t always available in Sofa’s videogame category. However, the change also means that you may have to search for an iOS game in a couple of different places at times.

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Sofa Adds New Design, Widgets, More Themes, and “The Pile”

Sofa is an organization app for media which we last covered earlier this year. It provides a nice interface in which you can store TV shows, movies, books, podcasts, music, and videogames. I’ve been using it mostly to organize media that I’ve already seen, for record-keeping purposes. Another option is certainly to store media that you’re planning on consuming at some point in the future.

This week marked the release of Sofa 2.12, a huge update for iOS 14 which includes a refreshed design, widgets, new themes, an “Activity” list, and a brand new element which has been dubbed “The Pile.”

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