John Voorhees

5810 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.
@[email protected]
@johnvoorhees.macstories.net
voorhees@macstories.net

This Week's Sponsor:

Crickets

The first alarm app for families.

Newton: Supercharged Email [Sponsor]

Newton rethinks email from the ground up. That starts with a rock-solid foundation. Newton works with all your email accounts whether they’re based on IMAP, Gmail, iCloud, Office 365, or another platform and syncs with all your devices.

Built on top of that foundation are cutting-edge features you expect from a modern email client. You can also schedule messages to be sent later and let Newton clean up your inbox by putting things like newsletters to the side until you have time to look at them. Other key functionality includes calendar integration, the ability to save email messages to Evernote, Trello, Todoist, Pocket, and other apps, read receipts, undo send, snoozing messages, and sender profiles, so you know more about the people with whom you interact.

With its latest update, Newton is taking email to a new level by re-imagining the inbox. Traditional email’s folder system meant you had to leave your inbox and go to the Sent folder to find the latest messages you’d sent. With True Inbox, Newton treats sent messages more like chat apps displaying them in your inbox even before someone responds to you. Conversations are sorted by activity when you reply too, so they float to the top of your inbox. Finally, every message can be found in just one place.

Harness the power of Newton to get control of your email once and for all. Download Newton today and start your free 14-day trial immediately.

Thanks to Newton for sponsoring MacStories this week.

The Fragmentation of iOS’s UI Design→

Benjamin Mayo on the state of iconography in Apple’s built-in iOS apps:

My gripe is there is no consistency, no structure or logic to this. Apps introduced later sometimes use rounded icons, sometimes not, sometimes create all-new custom glyphs of their own. Incredulously, you could open flagship apps like Messages, Mail and Safari and have no idea Apple was even playing with bold icons as a conceptual change. These apps adopted the iOS 11 large bold navigation bar title formats, but their icons and glyphs have stagnated for more than four years at this point.

Mayo uses eight examples of Apple’s action icon to emphasize the design inconsistencies.

Since iOS 7, each revision of iOS has felt like a tentative design experiment, with icons in a handful of apps moving in different directions. The trouble is, Apple doesn’t seem to have settled on a clear winner among the several options tested, which has begun to make the UI feel directionless. Although rumors seem to indicate that a design refresh of iOS is at least another year off, I hope we’ll start to see indications of where iOS design is going this year at WWDC.

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AppStories, Episode 53 – In Search of Apple TV Apps→

On this week’s episode of AppStories, we cover how we use the Apple TV and highlight a handful of notable Apple TV apps.

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 53 - In Search of Apple TV Apps

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31:02

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

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AppStories - Ep. 53 - 31 minutes

In Search of Apple TV Apps

FedericoJohn
AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 53 - In Search of Apple TV Apps

0:00
31:02

↓

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

Federico and John cover how they use the Apple TV and highlight a handful of notable Apple TV apps.

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CardioBot: Heart Rate and Activity Tracker for Apple Watch [Sponsor]

Make sense of the heart rate data the Apple Watch collects with CardioBot. The Apple Watch measures your heart rate throughout the day. In fact, the Watch captures your heart rate every four minutes. That adds up to a lot of data very quickly. With CardioBot’s beautifully-designed charts and graphs, understanding what it all means is easy.

Collecting data is simple. The hard part is recognizing patterns in the data that help you make healthy lifestyle choices. CardioBot, which has been featured in the App Store in over 85 countries, combines heart rate data collected throughout the day, workout data, and sleep analysis to provide you with a comprehensive dashboard that includes data for individual days, detailed timelines, and day-over-day comparisons. The app also categorizes your heart rate data into low, resting, high-resting, and elevated levels assigning a separate color to each making it simple to spot trends.

Just this past week, CardioBot was updated to support Heart Rate Variability (HRV) analysis. HRV is the the variation in intervals between heartbeats. It’s believed that high HRV readings are good and that an increasing HRV trend indicates improved fitness, whereas declining HRV can indicate overtraining and accumulated fatigue. With its all-new HRV tracking, CardioBot has even more tools to track your fitness and health, which makes it a must-have addition to your iPhone and Apple Watch.

CardioBot is available on the App Store for just $2.99.

Our thanks to CardioBot for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Where Will an Apple Video Streaming Service Fit?

John

Streaming video has become increasingly competitive with deal after deal signed in the hope of attracting new subscribers. Hollywood has a hard time keeping a secret, and so we know that Apple has signed over a dozen deals for original content and is targeting March 2019 to launch a video service. We also know...

GIFwrapped

John

Humor is all about timing. When you think of the perfect GIF to send in response to a friend or to post on Twitter, you don’t want to be searching around in folders full of saved GIFs or scrolling pages of search results on Giphy.com. No, GIF pros turn to GIFwrapped by Jelly Bean...

Q&A

Question: I’ve seen people complain about Electron on Twitter. What is Electron and what’s so wrong about it anyway? (Antonio Lopez, @payencidh)

John

You picked a good week to ask about Electron. Not long after you sent us your question, GitHub, which created Electron, began advertising its GitHub Desktop Mac app on its website touting...