MacStories Team

3425 posts on MacStories since July 2011

Articles by the MacStories team. Founded by Federico Viticci in April 2009, MacStories attracts millions of readers every month thanks to in-depth, personal, and informed coverage that offers a balanced mix of Apple news, app reviews, and opinion.
team@macstories.net

Genius Scan: A Scanner in Your Pocket [Sponsor]

Genius Scan makes scanning and managing documents with an iPhone or iPad simple, fast, and efficient. The app works the way you do and includes a flexible set of powerful, modern tools that are always with you. Its scanning engine is fast and accurate, delivering crisp, clear scans on the go, using your device’s camera or by picking images from the app’s system file picker, your photo library, or as part of a custom shortcut.

Just place a document in front of your device’s camera. Genius Scan has advanced edge detection that quickly picks out the page against its background, using powerful AI and cropping multiple scans and gathering them into a single PDF for sharing or archiving. The app’s scanning algorithms also clean up artifacts, shadows, and unclean edges, to give you fantastic results every time.

Rescanning is easy too. There’s no need to rescan an entire document from scratch because Genius Scan lets you delete or replace individual pages with a few taps. It’s a workflow that’s as intuitive as it is efficient.

Genius Scan features highly accurate optical character recognition, enabling full-text searching of your scans and the ability to copy the text for use elsewhere. The app also supports machine learning-based file naming, Shortcuts, extensive sharing options, Split View and Slide Over on the iPad, and much more. There’s a big update coming soon too!

Used by everyone from students to doctors and pilots, Genius Scan offers pricing to fit all needs. Genius Scan Basic is free and fully functional with no watermarks, scanning limits, third-party ads, or tracking. Genius Scan+ unlocks background uploading support to cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive, OCR, locking the app with Touch ID, PDF encryption, and smart document naming for just $7.99. Also, a Genius Cloud subscription adds document sync and backup for peace of mind for $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

So download Genius Scan today, to support these independent, honest, privacy-conscious developers and put the App Store’s best scanner in your pocket.

Our thanks to Genius Scan for sponsoring MacStories this week.

In This Issue

John shares a collection of obscure, but handy Mac keyboard shortcuts, Robby Burns’ desk setup, plus the usual Links, App Debuts, the latest happenings in the Club MacStories+ Discord community, a recap of MacStories articles, and a preview of upcoming MacStories podcast episodes....

Reader Setup: Robby Burns

Twitter: @robbyburns; Website: robbyburns.com. Musician, Educator, Author, and Host of the Music Ed Tech Talkpodcast. This desk is in my home music studio in Maryland. I run a private percussion teaching studio out of this space and produce my blog/podcast Music Ed Tech Talk. My 14” MacBook Pro is the core of my computing life....

New Club MacStories+ and Club Premier Discounts

For those who haven’t joined the Club MacStories+ and Club Premier Discord community, we wanted to let you know that we have added two new discounts to the rotating list of app and service discounts: 30% off Clean Email, the email batch processing and inbox cleaning service with apps on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac...

Previously, On MacStories

Stories Preserve and Play the Original Wordle for Decades with WordleForever CARROT 5.5 Debuts Redesigned Weather Maps with Expanded Customization Options Podcasts AppStories, Episode 258 – Starting the New Year with New Shortcuts, Workflows, Apps, and More MacStories Unwind: Brooklyn 99, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Ghost of Tsushima, Director’s Cut...

Up Next on MacStories’ Podcasts

Next week on AppStories, Federico and John conclude their tour of new apps they’re trying and rediscovering. This week on MacStories Unwind, we cover our first joint Unwind pick, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, plus MacStories highlights....

In This Issue

This month, Federico covers FloatingPlayer, a unique music utility that uses Picture-in-Picture to create a floating now-playing widget on the iPhone and iPad, and John embarks on an iCloud sync-based RSS experiment that splits his feeds across two apps....

Unite 4: Turn Websites into Apps on Your Mac [Sponsor]

Unite 4 for macOS can turn any website into an app for your Mac. The app uses a lightweight, WebKit-powered browser as a backend, allowing you to easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site. It’s a terrific way to get those sites you visit every day out of a tab and into a dedicated, standalone app.

Unite 4 has dozens of features and customization options that make it a terrific alternative to resource-hogging Electron apps or uninspired Mac Catalyst implementations. The apps you create are easy to set up, fast, and only limited by your imagination:

  • Create dedicated apps for your favorite streaming services like Netflix and Disney+
  • Save your laptop’s battery by using Unite for Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp with full notification support
  • Listen to music services like Apple Music or Spotify
  • Enjoy podcasts with Overcast
  • Organize your notes in a dedicated Roam Research app
  • Never again lose your Figma design work among a sea of Safari tabs
  • Limit the ability of apps like Facebook to track you across sites
  • Check your Instagram feed
  • Track your finances with Robinhood

No matter which sites you use, Unite can turn them into apps for your Mac with customizable colors, an icon that fits the version of macOS you use, dark mode, support for the macOS Keychain, floating windows, and even menu bar-based apps that appear with a single click.

This week only, MacStories readers can get 20% off when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/macstories or by using the promo code ‘MacStories’ at checkout.

Unite is free to try for 14 days and is available as part of a Setapp subscription too.

Download Unite 4 today and turn your favorite websites into your favorite apps too.

Our thanks to Unite 4 for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Previously, On MacStories

Apple Q12022 Results - $123.95 Billion Revenue MacStories Starter Pack: The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1300 Is Perfect for Anyone Whose Paperless Workflow Still Starts with Paper MacStories Starter Pack: Reverse-Engineering the Matter API and My ‘Save to Matter’ Shortcut MacStories Starter Pack: Customizing Your Workflows with Deep Links Apple Publishes AirTag Additions to Its Personal Safety...