John Voorhees

5824 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.
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Twitter Gives Tweets More Room to Breathe

Twitter announced some big changes today that are designed to encourage conversations and media sharing. The 140 character limit of a tweet becomes a more significant constraint as you add more ‘@names’ to a conversation or attach media to a tweet. The changes announced by Twitter, which go a long way toward addressing those constraints, will be rolled out over the coming months in Twitter’s own app and will be available to third-party Twitter clients.

Replies

Large group conversations on Twitter are hard. The more people you add to a thread, the fewer characters you have left to communicate with the group. With the upcoming change to replies, ’@names’ of up to 50 people will no longer count toward the 140-character limit of a tweet. The tweet will still be seen only in the timelines of the people @replied, but eliminating ‘@names’ from the character count should facilitate conversations among more people. I am happy to see this change overall, but I wonder whether Twitter has gone too far by allowing up to 50 ‘@names’ in a single tweet.

The change to ‘@names’ will also eliminate the quandary about what to do when you want to start a tweet with someone’s ‘@name’ that is not a reply. With the changes announced, these tweets will be treated like any other tweet and be visible to all of your followers, eliminating the need to use the convention of a period before an ‘@name’ to ensure that everyone who follows you sees the tweet.

Media

When Twitter rolls out the changes announced, photos, videos, and GIFs will not count against the 140 character limit of a tweet, which should encourage the use of more media in tweets. The existing limits of four photos, or one video or GIF per tweet still apply. Links that are pasted into a tweet and not generated by attaching media will also still count against the 140-character limit.

Retweets

Finally, Twitter announced that you will be able to retweet your own tweets. Though this struck me as strange at first, it eliminates the need for things like the ubiquitous ‘ICYM’ tweets and will allow you to share an @reply, which would normally only be visible to its recipients, with all your followers.

Airmail 3 Review

When Federico reviewed Airmail 1.1 last month, I liked what I saw. I downloaded Airmail and started playing with it. I appreciated the ability to customize nearly every aspect of the app, but it wasn’t sticking because I couldn’t do the same on the Mac.

Like a text editor, my email client is the kind of app for which I prefer a consistent feature set and setup on iOS and OS X. While I was tempted to go all-in with Airmail, the very advancements that made it so attractive on iOS held me back because most of them were unavailable on the Mac.

This changes today with Bloop’s release of Airmail 3 for Mac, which brings Airmail’s best iOS features to the Mac. If you work on both platforms regularly, deal with a lot of email or email accounts, and want to customize your email client to match the way you work, the combination of Airmail 3 for Mac and Airmail 1.1 for iOS is a terrific choice and one to which I am now fully committed.

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VSCO to Lead iOS Photography Sessions at Apple’s New Union Square Store→

As we highlighted yesterday, among the components of Apple’s new Union Square store are Creative Sessions that will be held in what Apple has dubbed ‘The Forum.’ Today, VSCO announced a partnership with Apple highlighting iOS photography:

From May 26th until July 7th, Apple Union Square will host four Creative Sessions, each led by an established photographer from the VSCO community. Each photographer will share their story, inspiration, and creative process, and will lead a hands-on lesson based on their unique style and techniques.

VSCO is the maker of a popular iOS photo editor of the same name.

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Tips

John

Telegram has quickly become my favorite messaging app. One thing I love is that Telegram is actively developed. It seems like every couple of weeks another useful feature is launched. Earlier this week, Telegram added a few useful new features. First, you can now edit messages up to two days after sending them. On...

Drafts

John

Drafts by Agile Tortoise is where I start most miscellaneous writing that is longer than a couple of sentences. Things like correspondence to the press about an app launch, a longer note to a friend, or a list of apps I want to check out all end up in Drafts. What each of these...

Apple Promotes Alternate Conferences and Events Surrounding WWDC

Apple’s history with events scheduled around WWDC has been stormy. In 2013, CocoaConf scheduled an alternative conference for developers who were unable to get a ticket to WWDC called CocoaConf Alt. The conference was set to coincide with WWDC until CocoaConf organizers received an email from the Intercontinental Hotel that they could not hold the conference due to a contractual conflict with Apple. More recently, AltConf (originally AltWWDC and changed) planned to stream the 2015 WWDC keynote and State of the Union presentations at the Metreon Theater across the street from Moscone West. Initially, Apple threatened legal action, but ultimately, agreed to allow AltConf to stream the sessions that Apple streamed itself.

That bit of recent history makes today’s news that Apple is affirmatively promoting alternative conferences all the more welcome. Not only is Apple promoting AltConf, but also Layers, a fantastic design-centric conference that I attended last year and highly recommend.

In addition to alternative conferences, Apple is promoting a couple of high-profile community events – the Beard Bash, hosted by The Loop and iMore, and The Talk Show Live, hosted by Daring Fireball.

Apple’s acknowledgement of some of the best events surrounding WWDC is welcome and the sort of thing that gets me excited for WWDC.

Quip Spreadsheets Redesigned and Updated

With a redesign and update on the Mac, iOS and the web today, Quip has made the spreadsheet component of its document collaboration tool significantly more powerful. However, most of the changes today are only to the Mac version of Quip.

Quip redesigned its spreadsheet menu and formula bars on the Mac to make existing features more discoverable. Number crunching is one of Quip’s strengths. The formula bar supports over 400 different functions and over a dozen data formats.

Quip for Mac also adds several new features to spreadsheets including:

  • Column filters
  • Cell merging
  • Checkboxes, which great for creating task lists
  • Better text formatting options
  • Additional currency options

One feature that sets Quip apart from many other spreadsheet apps is the ability to combine text and spreadsheets in one document, adding context to the numbers in a spreadsheet. This leads to another handy advantage. The formulas you are familiar with using in a spreadsheet can be dropped directly into the text surrounding the spreadsheet so the results of those formulas are automatically updated when the spreadsheet data changes. This, combined with the ability to add comments down to the individual cell level and chat in the sidebar with colleagues, makes an excellent choice for teams.

The improvements to Quip on the Mac and web are welcome, and bring Quip spreadsheets closer in functionality to dedicated spreadsheet apps like Numbers or Excel, but Quip for iOS’s functionality remains behind its Mac counterpart in significant ways. For instance, on iOS there does not appear to be a way to search for data in a spreadsheet or undo actions like sorts performed on columns, which is problematic if you make a mistake. Notwithstanding the limitations on iOS, today’s update of Quip make it a strong alternative to things like Google Docs.

Full details and a video preview on the Quip update are available on Quip’s blog.

Apple Releases iTunes 12.4 and OS X 10.11.5

Apple released iTunes 12.4 today with various design enhancements. iTunes 12.4 brings the sidebar back to the left side of the app when you are navigating your library of media, whether that’s music, movies, TV shows, apps, podcasts, or audiobooks. The sidebar is hidden when you navigate Apple Music, the App Store, and the iTunes Store.

Apple has also redesigned the media picker that sits just above the sidebar. Previously the picker consisted of a row of icons representing each media type and could be edited to include only the media types you wanted to show. The new media picker is a dropdown menu that like its predecessor is editable, and adds the name of each type of media next to its icon. Music is the one media type that cannot be removed from the media picker. iTunes 12.4 also includes simplified menus.

It is not clear from the release notes whether iTunes 12.4 includes fixes related to a recently-reported bug that deleted music files from iTunes in rare circumstances that Apple has been unable to reproduce.

Today’s updates also include a minor revision to OS X. Version 10.11.5 of OS X “improves the stability, compatibility and security” and addresses a handful of enterprise-related issues.