Apps for Managing Big Projects Advertising and trackers are a big problem on many websites. Pages load slowly wasting your time, draining your battery, and using up your mobile data. Even worse, ads sometimes serve malware to unsuspecting users. To take back control, you need 1Blocker X.
1Blocker X is a complete ground-up rewrite of the original 1Blocker that puts even more fine-grained controls in the hands of its users. In fact, the app now has over 120,000 powerful rules that are organized into categories like:
In the unlikely event that 1Blocker X doesn’t have a rule you need, you can add your own too.
One aspect of content blocking that often gets forgotten is that they aren’t just about blocking ads. 1Blocker X also eliminates distracting page elements like social network share buttons and comments that get in the way of an enjoyable web experience.
You can even hide individual elements on a webpage with 1Blocker’s powerful action extension. All you have to do is invoke the extension, tap what you want to hide, and then save. It’s incredibly simple and effective for page elements that aren’t already blocked by 1Blocker X’s extensive built-in rules.
So don’t wait, go get 1Blocker X today on the App Store or if you’re feeling lucky, enter to win one of 30 copies of 1Blocker X that we are giving away here. The giveaway will be open until Noon Eastern time on Monday, July 23, 2018 and winners will be contacted within 7 days thereafter.
Our thanks to 1Blocker X for sponsoring MacStories this week.
An Interview with Ryan Cash and Harry Nesbitt of Team Alto
Interviews with Michael Flarup and Marc Edwards
An Interview with Zach Gage 
Federico and John are joined by independent game developer Zach Gage the creator of hit games like Ridiculous Fishing, SpellTower, Really Bad Chess, Typeshift, Flipflop Solitaire, and Pocket Run Pool to discuss the App Store’s effect on gaming.
Nowhere has the App Store’s impact been more profound than the game industry. Roughly one-third of the 500 initial apps that debuted on the App Store were games. The percentage of games on the App Store has risen over the past 10 years, but not by much. By some estimates, between 35 and 40 percent of the App Store’s apps are games today. What has changed is the size of the Store. With over 2.1 million apps currently available for download, that means around 800,000 are games.
Mobile gaming has become the primary driver of growth in the game industry over the past several years. According to a recent report by Newzoo, the mobile game industry, in which iOS plays a central role, will be a $100 billion market in just three years time.
The success of games on iOS parallels the phenomenal success of the iPhone and App Store. The iPhone’s hardware played a significant role with its novel design that provided game developers with the flexibility to experiment. Just as important, though, was the advent of In-App Purchases. Games, like other apps, were originally free or paid. When In-App Purchases came along, a whole category of games that offered in-app, paid consumables, level packs, and other digital goods was born that has been wildly successful for many game developers.
Now, free-to-play games with In-App Purchases dominate the top grossing charts and a relatively small cadre of games soak up the majority of money spent on the App Store, making it harder than ever to succeed as a game developer on the App Store. It’s a familiar story faced by app and game developer alike. Notwithstanding the stiff competition in the games category though, the mobile game market’s sheer size has allowed creative, independent game developers to find ways to succeed on the App Store.
Perhaps most exciting of all though, the success of mobile games has led to an enormous influx of people into gaming who would never have considered themselves gamers. That creates a tremendous opportunity for Apple and game developers which has become all the more interesting as the constraints of early iOS devices have been replaced by hardware that approaches the capability of game consoles. Mobile games stand at a pivotal moment in time that has the potential to upend preconceptions about the distinction between mobile and other video games, but to understand what the future might hold, it’s instructive to start by looking at the past 10 years.
Q&A Question: Now that the location tracking service Moves is coming to an end, is there any similar app that automatically records location data in the background without needing to be manually switched on and off? (George Zhu)
Good timing George. Just this week, Gyroscope was updated with this sort of location tracking. Gyroscope is...
Favorite Noteworthy Games from the App Store’s First Decade While preparing an article that we published today about the iOS game industry for our App Store 10th anniversary coverage, I started thinking about games that I consider influential. I opened up Bear and started typing. It’s not an easy list to create, with so many games over so many years, but I came...
Bloomberg reports that its sources say that Adobe is working on full versions of its desktop Photoshop app and other Creative Cloud apps for the iPad. Although Adobe has not committed to the October unveiling and 2019 ship date also cited by Bloomberg’s sources, its Chief Product Officer, Scott Belsky did acknowledge that the company is working on a new cross-platform version of Photoshop and other apps. Bloomberg’s sources say Illustrator is one of the other apps being developed for the iPad, which they say will be released sometime after Photoshop.
Belsky, noting that newer versions of Apple’s iPad Pro line are now capable of running Photoshop, told Bloomberg:
“My aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible,” Belsky said in an interview. “There’s a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring our products into this cloud-first collaborative era.”
The addition of Photoshop and other Creative Suite apps to the iPad would be a significant step forward for the tablet’s push into the pro user market. Currently, only Microsoft’s Surface line of tablets is capable of running a fully-functional version of Adobe’s pro apps, making it the default choice for creative professionals who want to use Creative Suite on a tablet.
Federico
