Passwords permeate our lives. With an ever-growing number of sites, services, and apps to log into, people need help generating, managing, and accessing them. There are excellent third-party apps that can help, but the reality is that most people aren’t going to download a third-party app, and even fewer are likely to pay for one. That’s why Apple’s work with passwords is so important.
However, what makes that work impressive is the lengths to which the company has gone to make good password practices easy for users. The password updates to iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma are fantastic examples, making it easier than ever to share passwords and for users to begin adopting passkeys, a superior method of authentication compared to traditional passwords.
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I learned a handy trick from my son Finn last week. A lot of bigger companies that offer subscription apps A/B test subscription pricing. When you open the app and see an offer to subscribe during a free trial, you might be seeing one price, and someone else might see a different one. To do...
Sarah Perez at TechCrunch covers Slingshot, a new iPhone app for sharing photos with friends. (Link) David Pierce explains a new feature in Artifact that turns the news aggregation app into a social bookmarking service. (Link) Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI image tool is out of beta and part of its Creative Cloud suite of image...
The commotion about AI has died down a little in recent weeks, and as the fever passes, tech companies, governments, and really everyone is beginning to grapple with the implications of a large language model world where AI is only going to become more capable with time. One of the most promising areas of AI...
Here are the highlights from the Club MacStories Discord this week: It’s iPhone season, so there was a lively discussion of Club members’ ordering experience this week. Cleaning out app clutter can be tricky, which is why thewaytozion’s break down of how they narrowed down apps to one per task is so interesting. There was...
Pixelmator Pro Pixelmator Pro’s latest Mac update makes it more versatile than ever with new tools for working with PDFs. The app has added support for opening individual PDF pages or multi-page documents and editing vector-based PDFs. Vector PDFs allow for the editing of images, layers, and more and include PDFs generated with Apple,...
On this week’s special AV Club edition of MacStories Unwind, John and Jonathan share their all-time favorite movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark and Memento.
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Links and Show Notes
- John’s Pick
- Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark:
- Watch the Trailer
- Watch in the Apple TV App
- Jonathan’s Pick
- Memento:
- Watch the Trailer
- Watch in the Apple TV App
- Read Memento Mori (Short Story written by Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan, upon which the film was based.)
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We’ve all been there. You say goodbye to a friend or family member after a late evening and then begin to worry if they’ll make it home safely. You ask them to share their location and text you when they get home, but it’s late, and you know they’ll probably forget to text, so you finish your fun evening together, anxiously checking Find My Friends over and over.
Check In is a new iOS 17 feature that helps eliminate that anxiety by automating the process of letting your family or friends know when you arrive somewhere safely. I finally had the chance to try Check In recently with my son Finn, who’s the only other person in my family who is currently on the iOS 17 beta. The testing conditions were a bit contrived, but what I found was that Check In is fast and easy to use and does an excellent job of explaining the information you’re sharing and how it works before you leave for your destination.
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Next week, Apple will begin releasing its new OSes, which are packed with a lot of new features. However, those updates won’t include everything you may have heard about over the summer. For the past few years, OS features that are announced at WWDC have been increasingly released after the fall release of major OS revisions. Sometimes, those later releases are signaled at WWDC, but often they’re not, so we’ve compiled a list of features that won’t be available in Apple’s fall OS updates but have been promised to come in a later release. Unless otherwise indicated, the following features will be coming later to iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma:
- One of the tentpole features of Messages this year is the ability to create stickers using every OSes’ ability to lift subjects from a photo. The option to share stickers from Messages’ ‘Plus’ menu is already in this fall’s updates, but later, you’ll also be able to send stickers using the Tapback menu, too.
- Messages will also sync settings, like text message forwarding, SMS filters, and send and receive accounts, via iCloud in a later release.
- The ‘catch up’ arrow button found now on iOS 17 that takes users to the top of new messages in a busy thread will come to iPadOS 17.
- The News widget will add playback controls for Apple News podcasts and News+ audio stories on iOS and iPadOS 17.
- AirDrop will add the ability to finish a file transfer using the Internet if a local peer-to-peer connection drops.
- A lot of Music’s promised updates are coming later, including:
- Collaborative playlists that will allow a group to add, rearrange, and remove songs.
- Emoji reactions to song collaborative playlist song choices in the Now Playing view.
- A new Favorite Songs playlist, something which I’ve maintained as a smart playlist forever, will be available automatically in your Library and via Siri.
- Marking items as favorites is expanding to include songs, albums, playlists, and artists. Favorites will automatically be added to your Library, eliminating what is now a two-step process, and will be used to improve your recommendations.
- Also, Music will add a macOS Sonoma widget to allow users to play or pause a song or album or see a list of top charts and, for Apple Music subscribers, recommendations.
- Intelligent PDF form detection with enhanced AutoFill will be available systemwide in apps like Files and Mail, as well as for scanned documents.
- The Fitness app will allow you to prioritize the volume of trainers’ voices or the training session’s music on iOS and iPadOS 17.
- Proximity sign-in using the particle cloud used by devices like the HomePod and Apple Watch will be expanded to make it easier to use a signed-in, trusted iPhone or iPad to sign in to other devices.
- Your iPhone will add the ability to tap to unlock Matter-enabled smart locks with a home key or set up a PIN code in the Home app on iOS 17.
- Finally, there’s no word yet on when Journal, Apple’s journaling app, will make its debut.
Of these features, I’m especially looking forward to the updates to Music, checking what Journal is capable of, and sending stickers using Tapback, which I expect will increase my use of them a lot. There’s no word yet when these features debut, but I expect we’ll see them trickle out starting later this year.
