Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings:
The Macintosh Desktop Experience: My 2023 Mac-Centric Office Setup
In the latest installment of my Club MacStories+ and Club Premier column, I share my new office setup
Last night, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced at the 95th Annual Academy Awards ceremony that it had picked The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse for Best Animated Short Film.
The Apple TV+ film, which also recently won a BAFTA Film Award and four Annie Awards, is based on a book by Charlie Mackesy. According to Apple’s press release:
The poignant journey follows the unlikely friendship of a boy, a mole, a fox, and a horse traveling together in the boy’s search for home. The film, featuring Mackesy’s distinctive illustrations brought to life in full color with beautiful hand-drawn animation, stars Tom Hollander as The Mole, Idris Elba as The Fox, Gabriel Byrne as The Horse, and newcomer Jude Coward Nicoll as The Boy.
Zack Van Amburg, Apple’s head of Worldwide Video, commented on the Oscar win:
We are so proud of Charlie and the brilliant team who brought The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse to the screen and we sincerely thank the Academy for tonight’s recognition. This powerful story has deeply affected audiences around the world and has shown that no matter what age you are or where you live, it’s never too late to spread more compassion, empathy, and kindness in our daily lives. Congratulations to everyone involved, including our teams across the globe. We are all celebrating with you tonight.
Last year, Apple TV+ was the first streaming service to ever win the Best Picture Oscar for CODA.
This week, Federico and John answer listener questions about apps, automation, podcasting, tattoos, and more.
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Here are the highlights from the Club MacStories Discord this week:
Roman kicked off a conversation about Apple Music Classical and its odd limitations. Our recent episode of AppStories about the Apple Watch Ultra led to a great conversation in the hardware channel about the device. Daniel explained in the Obsidian channel how he...
Aiko Aiko is a simple audio transcription app from Sindre Sorhus that uses OpenAI’s Whisper model to convert audio to text. The app, which is available for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, supports 100 languages, and all transcription happens on-device. In addition to using the app to create text versions of lectures, meetings, podcasts, and...
Spotify has added a TikTok-like discovery feature to its app, which uses a vertical scrolling UI to help users discover new music, and Smart Shuffle, a subscriber-only feature that makes playlist recommendations. (Link) E-ink tablet maker Remarkable introduced a new $199 keyboard case for the Remarkable 2 that Alex Cranz at The Verge and...
A recurring theme on AppStories over the years is the tension between ‘do-everything’ apps and single-purpose utilities. Like a fashion trend, the app world swings between these two poles regularly. Recently, the pendulum has swung firmly in the ‘do everything’ direction for some categories of apps, and I think it’s worth trying to understand the...
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This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico recommends Kirby Ferguson’s final video, Everything is a Remix, Part 4 and I have been relaxing to Blanc on the Nintendo Switch.
Links and Show Notes
Federico’s Pick:
John’s Pick:
After six years of working from home, my office setup is about as close to ideal as I’ve ever wanted. I started out in a corner of our basement in Illinois, which was cold for about 8 months of the year, working from a desk I built from a scrap of plywood. I graduated to...
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Federico
