John Voorhees

5632 posts on MacStories since November 2015

John is MacStories' Managing Editor, has been writing about Apple and apps since joining the team in 2015, and today, runs the site alongside Federico. John also co-hosts four MacStories podcasts: AppStories, which covers the world of apps, MacStories Unwind, which explores the fun differences between American and Italian culture and recommends media to listeners, Ruminate, a show about the weird web and unusual snacks, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about the games we take with us.
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voorhees@macstories.net

Apple Design Awards for 2020 Awarded to Eight Developers

Typically, the Apple Design Awards have been held on the evening of the first day of WWDC. With the conference online this year, Apple held off until today to announce the winners. This year, in a collection that has a distinct iPad focus, the company announced four app winners and four game winners.

The 2020 Apple Design Award winners for apps are:

Darkroom

A MacStories favorite, Darkroom by Bergen Co. is a beautiful photo and video editor for the iPhone and iPad that takes advantage of many of Apple’s latest OS features.

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MacStories Unwind: WWDC Wrapped – Themes, Overviews, and Music

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    • Federico shares his first two iOS 14 Shortcuts
    • Ryan collects his favorite and most surprising announcements of WWDC
    • John evaluates which of his workflows worked best during WWDC
    • Plus apps, Q&A, links and more
  • MacStories Unplugged
    • John explains the Illinois cicada invasion, Federico gets ready to write his iOS and iPadOS 14 review, we preview some of our summer plans for MacStories and the Club over the summer, and we explain why we hope that WWDC will return to being an in-person event next year.
  • Join Club MacStories

AppStories

Unwind Picks

Q&A

Question: What are some potential issues to be mindful of when using any of the betas just announced? I am particularly interested in how Shortcuts and iCloud data could be affected. I plan to use non-production devices, but I’m concerned that Shortcuts and iCloud data could be affected since I would use the same Apple...

App Debuts

Ryan

Crossy Road Castle Crossy Road Castle has been one of my favorite Apple Arcade titles to release this year, but when it first debuted there was only a single endless tower available to climb, with the promise of new towers coming later. This week the first of those new towers was released in an...

Keeping Up With WWDC

John

Keeping up with WWDC can be tough. Writing, watching videos, and recording and editing podcasts leave very little room for monitoring the commentary, discoveries, and insights of others published across the web and on social media. That’s why I spent some time before WWDC tweaking my systems for collecting information coming out of the...

A GoodLinks Read and Listen Later Shortcut and Custom Action→

When I reviewed GoodLinks, I knew its unique combination of Shortcuts integration and custom in-app actions that rely on URL schemes had the potential to sit at the center of powerful, automated workflows. My hunch was correct.

When I tried GoodLinks for the first time, I began thinking of ways to integrate it into the research I do for MacStories and Club MacStories. Michael LaPorta’s thoughts, however, immediately turned to music.

LaPorta has built a ton of music-related shortcuts that you can find on his website. After reading my review of GoodLinks, he set out to create a shortcut to allow him to save music reviews and related reviews to read and listen to later. Here’s how LaPorta explains it:

So here’s the concept: GoodLinks can grab music reviews and store them to read or access later. When grabbing the music reviews you can customize the information associated with the review. You can use this customized info to also grab the album and add it to your Music library. Once you have the review (along with its customized info) saved in GoodLinks and the album saved in Music, you can use GoodLinks as a read-and-listen-to-it-later app that can be accessed via Shortcuts in a variety of contexts.

LaPorta didn’t stop there, though. He also added a way to handle upcoming releases and begin listening to an album from inside its review in GoodLinks using the app’s custom action builder.

I highly recommend giving LaPorta’s shortcut and GoodLinks action a try. These are precisely the sort of automations that the new breed of read-it-later apps like GoodLinks make possible.

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Apple’s WWDC 2020 Design Sessions

I’ve watched a lot of sessions this week. I’ve been impressed with the production quality of them all and the shorter, more condensed format of many of them. I’m still working my way through everything that has been released, but my favorite sessions by far have been the ones presented by Apple’s design team. Through a combination of under-the-hood peeks at how various design elements work and practical tips for implementing new UI controls, the sessions are terrific resources and provide fascinating insight into where design is heading across all of Apple’s products.

Probably my favorite session of the bunch has been Design for the iPadOS pointer. The session explains not only how the pointer works on iPadOS, but why it works that way through a technique called adaptive precision that accounts for the context in which the pointer is being used to define its level of precision. The talk also covers pointer inertia, magnetism, and interaction with controls and other screen elements. It’s an excellent place to start for anyone adapting an iPad for pointer support.

Designing for the unique characteristics of each platform.

Designing for the unique characteristics of each platform.

One of the big picture themes that I came away with from the design sessions I’ve watched so far is the emphasis on designing for the unique qualities of each platform’s hardware. As Design for iPad explains, this doesn’t just mean designing something in between a Mac and an iPhone for the iPad, it also requires developers to consider what makes using an iPad different from either of those platforms. Having used far too many iPad apps that feel like blown up iPhone apps in the past, I hope this session is watched by a lot of developers and designers. I also enjoyed the Design with iOS pickers, menus and actions session, which explains the migration away from (but not complete elimination of) action sheets and popovers in favor of pickers and menus.

Menus and Pickers.

Menus and Pickers.

Finally, I want to mention the SF Symbols 2 and the details of UI typography sessions. I’m a big fan of SF Symbols. I love the consistent look and feel they provide across UIs. This year there are over 750 new glyphs including Apple device, transportation, game controller, and human-related images, plus multicolored symbols for the first time.

As someone who looks at text all day, I also enjoyed nerding out on typography with the details of UI typography session. It’s a fun deep-dive into a subject that I don’t know well, but appreciate for what it adds to an app’s experience.

Even if you’re not a developer or designer, the design sessions at WWDC are some of the most accessible talks released this week. I highly recommend them to anyone who has any interest in how the apps they use are made and the care that goes into the process.

You can also follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2020 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2020 RSS feed.