This week, we dive into our favorite HomeKit devices, apps, and automations.
Sponsored by:
It’s become a tradition for Apple to release a special holiday season video each year, and this year is no different. Today, the company revealed the 2019 version entitled ‘The Surprise.’
The storyline follows a family as they visit the mother’s father. The video chronicle’s the family’s journey and visit with their two young children. To appease the kids when they fight or get in the way, their parents hand them an iPad to watch movies and play games. However, the children’s use of the iPad evolves over the course of the video, which reveals they’ve used it to create an interactive story about their family and their grandfather’s wife who had passed away.
It’s a touching video packed with emotion that does an excellent job of showing off the kind of creative projects that are possible with an iPad and pulls it off without being overbearing. The video reminds me a lot of the Emmy award-winning video called ‘Misunderstood’ from the 2013 holiday season.
Our Favorite HomeKit Gear, Apps, and Automations Metapho has been one of my favorite photo utilities on iOS for years. The marquee feature has always been its ability to strip metadata from images, which is handy when sharing photos online, for instance. Over time though, Metapho has grown to incorporate other functionality for inspecting and editing photo metadata that has made the app a must-have iOS utility. With its latest update, Metapho has added Deep Fusion and Night Mode photo detection, an intriguing addition that I haven’t seen any other app offer.
TouchRetouch There are a lot of apps that can handle photo retouching and many have other features, but when I’m in a hurry and just want to make a few tweaks to an image before sharing it, I’ve found that TouchRetouch can’t be beat. My primary use of the app is to erase objects from...
App Debuts Spring Falls Relaxing puzzle games are one of my favorite genres, and Spring Falls is another great example of the genre. The game features 60 levels that require you to manipulate the landscape as water tumbles down the side of a mountain composed of geometrically-shaped columns. As you guide the water down the mountainside,...
Q&A Question: Can I build an automation in HomeKit or Shortcuts that sends me a text message when motion is detected in my home by my Arlo security camera? (Eric, @Tr14more)
From the Home app’s Automation tab, you can trigger shortcuts when the motion sensor, like the one in the Arlo camera, detects motion. However,...
The long-anticipated release of Photoshop for iPad was met with disappointment by many users who felt that significant functionality was missing. Although Adobe explained at the time that version 1.0 was a foundation upon which it intended to build rapidly, the length of time it took to create that foundation left many people skeptical. Today, to try to dispel some of the doubts surrounding Photoshop for iPad, the company published a blog post previewing some of the features coming later this year and in the first half of 2020.
Before the end of 2019, Adobe says it will ship the ‘Select Subject’ feature that it showed off at the Adobe MAX Conference earlier this month. The feature takes advantage of the company’s Sensei AI machine learning technology to facilitate complex subject selection. Adobe also says that cloud PSD files will upload and download faster in December after it makes changes to its systems.
Selection tools will get another boost in the first half of 2020 with Refine Edge allowing for soft edge selections. Curves for tonal adjustments and new adjustment layer options will be available too. Adobe also plans to bring features over from apps like Fresco, including brush sensitivity and canvas rotation. Finally, Adobe says it will integrate Photoshop with Lightroom for iPad, so you can process RAW images in Lightroom and use them in compositing projects in Photoshop.
With the reaction at Photoshop for iPad’s launch, I’m glad Adobe chose to showcase these new features in advance. It makes competitive sense too, given that alternative iPad apps that compete with at least some aspects of Photoshop continue to move forward rapidly. It’s that sort of competition that I expect will make pro iPad apps interesting to watch in 2020.
Timery for Toggl continues to add new iOS 13 features with the release today of version 1.05, which includes improved Shortcuts support and new design elements.
The most significant addition to Timery is support for shortcut actions with parameters and data output. Now users can start a project with a description, tags, and its billable status. The action outputs Time Entry Details, which makes the project name, task, description, tags, start time, duration, billable status, and entry name available.
Projects and tags can be added to the ‘start timer’ action from your list of saved projects and tags when you set up a shortcut or from another source like a user prompt. Any tags applied by a shortcut action that don’t already exist will be added to your Toggl account, but using an incorrect project name will result in an error. Timery also supports adding multiple tags to an entry, although they must be separated by commas or on their own lines. Time is output in total numbers of seconds, in ‘00:00:00’ format, or written out like ‘1 hour, 45 minutes, and 32 seconds.’ The time entry name that the shortcut action generates is a combination of the project name and description. A separate action for stopping a timer outputs the same data.
The other available actions allow users to check the time logged for:
Each of these actions returns duration data in the three formats described above for time logged on the current day only. One thing I’d like to see added in the future is a parameter to adjust the time period reported, so I could use a shortcut to check the total time logged for a project this week or month, for example.
The new shortcut actions open up a lot of interesting possibilities, including the ability to do things like send time tracking data to apps like Numbers, which could be used to create charts. A simple shortcut that I’ve found to be effective is one that checks the current timer I have running and reports back with its elapsed time and the total time tracked today. It’s the sort of shortcut that’s handy to stick in the Shortcuts widget or on your Home screen for a quick time check that doesn’t require opening Timery itself.
Check your currently-running timer and total time logged for the day. Timery for Toggl is required for this shortcut.
From a design standpoint, Timery has added context menus, which serve as an alternative to swiping left and right on saved timers and time entries, to play, stop, and delete timers and entries. Although the addition doesn’t extend the functionality of the app, I personally prefer context menus to swiping to reveal options and will be using this feature a lot, especially on my iPhone, where using the context menu provides a nice bit of haptic feedback.
Timery has also made use of inset grouped table views, the card-like UI seen throughout iOS 13. Editing a saved timer or an existing time entry pulls up the card-like UI from the bottom of the screen with the same editing options I covered in my review of version 1.0. Again, the change doesn’t affect the functionality of Timery, but it serves to align the app with current design trends, which prevents it from looking dated.
As I explained in a MacStories Weekly column for Club MacStories members recently, Timery has had a significant impact on the way I work every day. Whether or not you track time for billing purposes, Timery is a valuable tool for anyone curious about how they spend their time. As a result, I’m glad to see it continue to be refined with the latest frameworks and APIs. I particularly appreciate the addition of shortcuts with parameters, which provide a lot more flexibility than was previously possible.
Timery for Toggl is available on the App Store as a free download with certain features available via a subscription.
Federico
