Alex Guyot

58 posts on MacStories since January 2014

Alex has been writing for MacStories since 2013. These days he mostly covers Apple events and authors the annual MacStories watchOS reviews. Since graduating with a Computer Science degree from the University of Arizona in 2016, Alex has worked as a cloud engineer for the home automation company SmartThings. He is also the developer of Storybot, the MacStories Slack bot.

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Safari on iPadOS is Living Up to the Hype→

Dieter Bohn at The Verge spent some time with the new and improved Safari on iPadOS:

Google Docs has long been a huge problem on the iPad, for two reasons. First, Google’s own iPad app is god-awful and the company seems hell-bent on not updating it to work better. Second, Google Docs in Safari on the iPad right now redirects you to that app even if you “Request Desktop Site.”

On iPadOS, however, Google Docs in Safari seems great.

Admittedly, I only spent about five minutes poking around, but I went straight for the stuff I didn’t expect to work at all — and it worked. Keyboard shortcuts for formatting and header styling, comments, cursor placement, and even watching real-time edits from another person in the doc all worked.

In iPadOS, Apple is setting the Safari user agent to the desktop version (previously, Safari on iPad has used a mobile user agent), but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Setting the user agent will cause websites to display their desktop varieties, but those were built with the expectation of mouse interactions rather than touch. There's a lot more details to uncover here, but it looks like Apple has done a huge amount of work under the hood to make touch interactions work intuitively in the desktop browser paradigm.

We'll have many more details on the new Safari changes over the coming weeks and months, but at first glance it's great to see that Apple wasn't kidding about iPadOS Safari being truly desktop-class.

You can also follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2019 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2019 RSS feed

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watchOS 6: The MacStories Overview

Today at Apple's annual WWDC keynote address in San Jose, California, Tim Cook took the stage to announce the latest update to Apple's smartwatch operating system. watchOS 6 is coming this fall, and boasts a number of big changes. Most significantly, watchOS 6 makes progress on the independence of the Apple Watch from the iPhone, adds a number of new APIs and health features, and includes an all-new native UI framework for developers.

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Apple Releases Memoji Makeup Tutorial Video with YouTube Stars

YouTube stars Patrick Starrr and Desi Perkins joined forces with Apple to create a makeup tutorial video using only this year's huge iOS 13 Memoji update. The new Memoji appear to be massively more customizable, and can be used to create Bitmoji-like stickers. Starrr and Perkins' video premiered during Apple's WWDC keynote address, and you can watch it below.

We'll have more on the new Memoji updates and all of the changes coming in iOS 13 later today.

You can also follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2019 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2019 RSS feed

Apple Publishes “For All Mankind” Apple TV+ Trailer

At this year's WWDC keynote address, Apple dropped the first trailer for their upcoming Apple Original drama series For All Mankind. The series will follow an alternate timeline in which the space race never ended, and is set to premier this fall.

We're actively at work on in-depth coverage for all of today's announcements, and will be reporting on any additional news that trickles out in the coming days as WWDC 2019 continues.

You can also follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2019 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2019 RSS feed

Apple Publishes Goodnight Developers Video from WWDC 2019 Keynote

Apple kicked off this year's WWDC keynote address with a black and white video of developers hard at work in the middle of the night. The video, titled Goodnight Developers, showed a variety of iOS developers struggling and eventually succeeding in getting their apps to build. Check out the video below.

You can also follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2019 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2019 RSS feed

My MacStories Story: How iOS Automation Changed My Life

Six years ago I was a senior in high school – a laughably short timeline compared to the immensity of growth and change which took place within it. Graduation, all of college, and a lonely move across the country; a career imagined, pursued, and achieved; friends and relationships come and gone. Not many threads of life make it all the way from the start of your late teens through the end of your early twenties, but those that do feel special in a way not much else can. MacStories is one of mine.

This week we're celebrating MacStories' 10th anniversary, and this year marked the fifth anniversary of my first article on the site. It boggles my mind to think that I've been part of this incredible team for more than half of MacStories' life, but that's nothing compared to the feeling of when it all began.

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Apple Card: The MacStories Overview

This morning at Apple's special event in the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park, Vice President of Apple Pay Jennifer Bailey took the stage to announce Apple Card. These "Apple" name prefixes are growing tedious, but Apple Card is looking to reduce the tedium which permeates the credit card industry. Apple is championing its credit card as a new industry leader in a variety of areas, including privacy, security, transparency, lack of fees, and fair interest rates. Apple Card gives rewards in cash rather than points, and these "Daily Cash" rewards are distributed to your Apple Cash account every day. If Apple Card can deliver on its promises, it shows real potential to be a disruptor in the often exploitative credit card industry.

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The New MacBook Air: The MacStories Overview

This morning Tim Cook took the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House to announce a brand new revision of the MacBook Air. This is the first significant redesign in years for Apple's most popular line of Macs, and features huge improvements across the board.

The new machine marks the debut of a Retina display on the MacBook Air, which Cook said has been the most requested feature by far. Among other changes, the size and weight of the enclosure have also been decreased, two Thunderbolt 3 ports line one edge, screen bezels have been reduced, and new color options are available.

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