iOS 11’s Effect on Our iOS Habits 
Nearly five months into iOS 11, Federico and John take a look at how iOS 11 has changed not only the way they work, but also how it has impacted their use of lifestyle, health and fitness, media consumption, and other types of apps.
Reliability is essential when it comes to email. Newton has you covered with rock-solid messaging, lightning-fast push notifications, sync across all your devices, and modern email management tools.
Life doesn’t just happen at your desk. Email streams in all day whether you’re working at your desk or out running errands. With Newton, you can keep on top of it all regardless of where you are because Newton works seamlessly across platforms.
What makes Newton stand out from the crowd is its simple, elegant design and flexibility. Newton supports all your email accounts whether they’re based on IMAP, Gmail, iCloud, Office 365, or another platform. The app also features modern functionality that you won’t find in many other email client. For example, with Newton, you can request read receipts and quickly find attachments. You can also schedule emails to be sent later, which is handy if you work unusual hours or with people across the world. Newton can even tidy up your inbox by putting things like newsletters to the side until you have time to look at them.
Newton works with your calendar too, eliminating the need to leave your messages when you want to add an event to your calendar. Other key features include integrations for saving email messages to Evernote, Trello, Todoist, Pocket, and other apps, snoozing messages, and sender profiles, so you know more about the people with whom you interact. It’s a powerful set of features that make it easier to manage your inbox by getting actionable items out of your email and putting them where they belong.
Harness the power of Newton to get control of your email once and for all. You can learn more on Newton’s website or go download it now and start your free trial immediately.
Thanks to Newton for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Dismantling the Digital Hub I’ve changed my mind about the HomePod several times since it was first announced at WWDC. Part of that has to do with how little information was known about it for so many months. We know more now than we did last summer, but there are still a lot of open questions as Ryan...
Q&A Question: Do you know or can you recommend an iOS app that can create AES-256 encrypted .zip files? (Anonymous)
I hesitate to recommend it because the app is so poorly designed, but the only app I’ve been able to find that uses AES-256 encryption for .zip files is WinZip. The app is available for...
App Debuts Mixel - Cocktail Recipes Mixel is a stylish cocktail recipe app. As the name suggests, the app is illustrated with pixel art depicting each cocktail and its ingredients. It’s a quirky approach to a genre of apps that often look the same, which I like. If you tell Mixel what ingredients you have on...
Editing RAW photo files can be intimidating for beginners. There are a seemingly endless number of adjustments that can be made, and it’s not always clear what each does. However, if you take the time to learn the tools and shoot RAW images on your iPhone or another camera, the results can be stunning.
Sebastiaan de With, the designer of Halide, an excellent RAW camera app for iPhone, has published the second in a series of articles about shooting and editing RAW photos. As de With explains at the outset of this second article in the series:
This guide will walk you through the basics of RAW editing and adjustment. Most of these pointers also apply to editing RAW files from other cameras, but some parts focus on iOS editing workflows and how to transfer your RAW files from your iPhone to your Mac or PC.
The remainder of the article is full of great tips and eye-opening examples of what can be done on a Mac or iOS to edit RAW photos. If you’re interested in photography on any platform, this is a must-read article. In an upcoming installment de With will cover advanced editing and editing with depth channels.
If you’ve followed Apple for any length of time, you’ve no doubt encountered someone reminiscing about Mac OS X Snow Leopard or wondering whether the time was right for some products’ ’Snow Leopard’ moment. Snow Leopard, which was released in 2009, has become synonymous with a software release focused on stability and bug fixes instead of new features.
Michael Steeber at 9to5Mac takes an in-depth look at the legend behind Snow Leopard and questions whether it’s deserved. As Steeber notes, Snow Leopard was marketed as having no new features, but it was far from bug-free. Nonetheless, the release’s marketing message, a general perception that the quality of Apple’s software declined in subsequent years, and other factors, have led to Snow Leopard’s mythological status. As Steeber puts it:
…a kernel of truth persists underneath the mythology. Improvements to iOS and macOS, no matter how small, contribute to a better experience for everyone. Fixing bugs might not be as marketable as shiny new Animoji or a fresh design, but maintenance can only be deferred so long. If Apple can knock stability out of the park in 2018, maybe the legend of Snow Leopard can finally be put to rest.
I suspect Snow Leopard’s reputation, which has become conventional wisdom at this point, will persist regardless of what happens this year. Still, it’s instructive to see how we got to this point and worth noting for the next time a similar meme circulates.
Becky Hansmeyer started building Snapthread to combine Snapchat videos. What she ended up creating is an elegant way to combine Live Photos and videos into short movies that are greater than the sum of their parts and perfect for sharing with friends and family.
What I love about the origin story of Snapthread is how much the app changed from its inception to launch, yet how close the resulting app remains to Hansmeyer’s original vision. That’s because at its core is a great idea: creating a better way to share life’s fleeting moments.
With version 1.5, Snapthread has grown into a mini iPhone video studio with a focus on making it as quick and simple as possible to assemble a video from several Live Photos or standard videos. The approach is smart. It’s easy to get caught up in filters, effects, and transitions when you’re editing video. There’s a place for that sort of app, and Snapthread lets you add things like a title card and overlay music, but what I like most about it is that the app’s focus on the basics prevents me from obsessing about my creation. It’s a design choice that makes me far more likely to create and share a clip.
My Battery Go-Bag Last week I came home from visiting a relative who had just had surgery. I was away for a total of eight days. I knew about the trip a couple of weeks in advance, but what exactly I’d be doing, how much I’d be needed to help out, and where I’d be day-to-day was...
Federico
