FedericoManifest Manifest is a beautiful time tracker for iPhone and iPad that I first linked in Issue 79 of MacStories Weekly. With version 3.1 released last week, in addition to support for iOS 11 and the iPhone X, Manifest gained Toggl integration with a new export feature. While Manifest doesn’t sync with Toggl in...
Organizing Ulysses Sheets with Filters
Ulysses documents, which are called sheets, are organized into groups in the app’s Library. I have separate groups for MacStories, Club MacStories, and AppStories articles. That organization works well in most instances, but what if I want to see only those articles I’ve worked on this week or every article I’ve ever written about...
The App Store Adds Weekend Deals Feature
Apple has introduced a new feature in the Today tab of the App Store called ‘This Weekend Only.’ Each Thursday, one app will offer an exclusive deal to users that lasts through Sunday.
The new feature is being kicked off with five deals instead of one:
- Hotel Tonight - up to 40% off original room prices
- Glasses by Warby Parker - a free geometric case with any weekend order
- Under Armour - $20 off orders of $100 or more
- Chipotle - free chips and queso with an entree
- Shoptiques - 15% off orders over $100
The new promotion strikes me as a good way to help drive traffic to the App Store on weekends, which are slow sales days for many developers. It also makes sense to kick off the App Store’s new feature with apps from relatively large companies with broad appeal, but I hope that in the long run, smaller independent development shops are included too.
Jony Ive and an Apple Park Architectural Lead on Apple’s New Headquarters and Design→
Wallpaper Magazine’s Nick Compton has an extensive interview with Foster + Partners’ Stefan Behling, one of the lead architects of Apple Park, and Apple’s Chief Design Officer, Jony Ive. There are a lot of great details about Apple Park and the Steve Jobs Theater in the article, including this from Behling on constructing a roof on the theater that appears to hover in space:
A network of 44 conduits, carrying electricity, data and sprinkler systems, is housed in three-quarter-inch strips of aluminium in-between the theatre’s glass surrounds. The carbon-fibre roof, tested, built and unbuilt in Dubai, was made the same way you make the hulls of racing yachts and weighs just 80 tons. ‘This is the first time in the history of mankind that this has been done,’ says Behling. ‘It’s the biggest carbon-fibre roof of its kind in the world. If you are serious about achieving something like this, and making it look effortless, you have to go all out. And that does mean doing something that has never been done before.’
Jony Ive has a lot to say about Apple Park too. In response to criticism that the building isn’t sufficiently configurable he says:
Our building is very configurable and you can very quickly create large open spaces or you can configure lots of smaller private offices. The building will change and it will evolve. And I’m sure in 20 years’ time we will be designing and developing very different products, and just that alone will drive the campus to evolve and change. And actually, I’m much more interested in being able to see the landscape, that is a much more important capability.’
Ive also talks about Apple’s design philosophy in general noting that his team’s goal is to ‘get design out of the way.’ However, my favorite part of the interview is Ive’s insight that with every new product, two are actually created:
‘When I look back over the last 25 years, in some ways what seems most precious is not what we have made but how we have made it and what we have learned as a consequence of that,’ he says. ‘I always think that there are two products at the end of a programme; there is the physical product or the service, the thing that you have managed to make, and then there is all that you have learned. The power of what you have learned enables you to do the next thing and it enables you to do the next thing better.
Wallpaper’s interview is a must-read for anyone intrigued by Apple Park and Apple’s approach to design.
SuperDuper! Updated for macOS High Sierra and APFS
High Sierra introduced APFS, Apple’s first entirely new file system on the Mac in decades. Today, Shirt Pocket Software announced an update to its backup utility SuperDuper! that is compatible with APFS. In fact, the app can create a bootable clone for any Mac running Mac OS X 10.9 and later.
Supporting a brand new file system is a tall order. As Dave Nanian explains on the Shirt Pocket blog, APFS volumes are handled differently by macOS than HFS+ ones were. That complicated the update of SuperDuper!, but as with earlier OS updates, Shirt Pocket has solved the issues and is ready with an update that works with Apple’s latest version of macOS.
If you’re not already making a bootable backup of your Mac’s drive, the update to SuperDuper! is the perfect time to download the app and get started.
Tweetbot for iOS Adds 280-Character Tweet Support
Yesterday, Twitter extended the character limit of tweets to 280. Unlike some features, Twitter has made the new tweet length available to all third-party developers.
First out of the gate is Tweetbot by Tapbots. Less than 24 hours after Twitter’s announcement, Tweetbot users can use a full 280 characters in tweets. I expect we’ll see additional updates from other Twitter client developers soon.
Tweetbot is available on the App Store.
AppStories, Episode 30 – The Apps and Workflows We Use to Cover Apple Earnings Calls→
On this week’s episode of AppStories, we explain the apps and workflows we use to cover Apple earnings calls and then cover updates to Newsify on iOS and Twitterrific for macOS.
Sponsored by:
- Balance - A wallet for all the worlds currencies and tokens.
AppStories Episode 30 - The Apps and Workflows We Use to Cover Apple Earnings Calls
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Twitterrific for macOS Adds Poll Support and Other Refinements
The Iconfactory is on a tear with Twitterrific for macOS updates. Version 5.0, the crowdfunded rebirth of the app, launched less than a month ago. A couple of weeks later, Twitterrific 5.1 added muffles and mutes, which we discussed on AppStories this week. Then yesterday, Twitterrific 5.2 dropped, with support for polls and and an enhancement of its user search functionality.
Poll support is notable because third-party developers don’t have access to Twitter’s polling APIs. Instead, users of third-party Twitter clients have had to go to the official Twitter client or the web to vote in polls, which I rarely bothered to do. Lack of API support hasn’t stopped The Iconfactory from implementing a workaround to make polls available to its users though. The feature isn’t perfect, but in my preliminary testing, I’ve been impressed with how well it works.
Twitterrific detects tweets that include polls by looking for clues like whether ‘#poll’ or the graph or ballot box emoji are used. The app also looks at the format of the question posed. If a tweet looks like a poll, Twitterrific displays a button below the text of the tweet. When the poll button is clicked, a popover with a mini-browser opens the poll so you can vote and see the results. If you want to monitor a poll, drag the popover away from your timeline to transform it into a standalone window that will stay put and can be refreshed with the latest results.
Poll creation still requires Twitter’s app or website, which cannot be avoided. Nonetheless, I can already tell that being able to open a poll, vote, and view results all from Twitterrific is going to increase my participation in them. For now, the feature is available on macOS only, but it is under consideration for the iOS app depending on how well it is received by users on the Mac.
Twitterrific also added fast user searching via the Cmd+U keyboard shortcut and has improved syncing of your timeline position between iOS and macOS. Next up for both versions of the app is support for Twitter’s new 280-character tweet limit, which, unlike polls, is available to third-party developers.
If you’re interested in trying a new Twitter client, Twitterrific is an excellent choice. The handful of gaps in the macOS version’s original feature set are being addressed rapidly and innovative approaches to things like polls set it apart from its competitors.
Twitterrific 5.2 is available on the Mac App Store.
Twitter Adopts 280-Character Tweet Limit
Twitter extended the 140-character limit of tweets to 280 characters for a test group of users in September. In a blog post today, Twitter’s Aliza Rosen proclaimed the test a success noting that the additional characters have been used where needed, but that most tweets remain under the previous 140-character limit.
As a result, Twitter has begun to roll out the new feature worldwide for every language where ‘cramming’ was an issue. The company describes cramming as:
the deviation of the actual length distribution from the theoretical log-normal distribution near the character limit — “cramming,” as it likely reflects people’s attempts to “cram” their Tweets within the character limit.
In plain English, cramming is when your tweet is just a little long, and you spend time editing it to fit into 140 characters. According to Rosen:
Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending. With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. Since we saw Tweets hit the character limit less often, we believe people spent less time editing their Tweets in the composer. This shows that more space makes it easier for people to fit thoughts in a Tweet, so they could say what they want to say, and send Tweets faster than before.
Cramming is a bigger problem for some languages than others. At the other end of the spectrum are languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which can express more in fewer characters and will continue to have 140-character limits.
The new tweet length limit is still rolling out to users. If you don’t have 280 characters to work with yet, check the official Twitter again later because it will undoubtedly take a while to propagate to all users.