MacStories Team

3376 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.
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DetailsPro: A Design Tool for SwiftUI [Sponsor]

DetailsPro is the accessible, graphical tool for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac that brings your app designs to life with SwiftUI. The future of modern app design on Apple’s platforms is SwiftUI, and with DetailsPro, you can be up and running immediately, designing UIs without typing a line of code.

DetailsPro uses a drag and drop interface to make designing app interfaces, widgets, and screens a completely graphical, natural experience. There are no multi-gigabyte downloads or any of the complexity you find in a tool like Xcode. Instead, DetailsPro focuses on your design first. The app is also a fantastic way to learn core SwiftUI concepts in an environment that provides immediate feedback. There’s also a terrific DetailsPro community that offers in-app downloadable templates to learn, remix, or use as starting points for your own projects.

When you’re happy with your design, simply export it to SwiftUI code to Swift Playgrounds or Xcode. That’s the sort of design pipeline that makes handing your work off to your developers simple while ensuring that the fidelity of your designs is preserved in the process.

Built in SwiftUI itself by a former Apple Design Prototyper, DetailsPro is trusted industry-wide by designers at companies like Apple itself, Starbucks, Microsoft, Nike, and Porsche, and it’s easy to see why. DetailsPro brings sophisticated SwiftUIs to life quickly and easily in a way that feels like magic.

If you’ve been looking for a way to get into designing with SwiftUI, your search is over. You can download DetailsPro today for free and use it with five files, but you can unlock unlimited files, MapKit maps, and upcoming features like versions, reusable components, designing with data, and more for just $19.99/year or a one-time payment of $49.99. That’s a fantastic price for an app that will save you time and simplify your design process.

So, download DetailsPro today, and get started designing with SwiftUI.

Our thanks to DetailsPro for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Previously, On MacStories

Swift Playgrounds 4.0: First Look Pixelmator Photo for iPhone: First Impressions iOS and iPadOS 15.2 Overview: Music, Privacy, Security, and Safety, and a Grab Bag of Other Additions and Refinements The MacStories Selects 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award MacStories Selects 2021: Recognizing the Best Apps of the Year...

Our Holiday Project Piles

[[unplugged_artwork]] This month, Federico and John dig into their collections of upcoming and incomplete projects for a preview of some of what Club members can expect from them as we head into 2022. Notes: Apps and Shortcuts Mentioned: Data Jar BetterTouchTool DEVONthink GoodLinks Keep It Matter Obsidian Templater Dataview Federico’s ShortSwitch shortcut...

In This Issue

A tip for integrating Mac shortcuts with iOS and iPadOS, Federico’s holiday grab bag of new shortcuts, John shares his Mac menu bar, the final episode of MacStories Unplugged for 2021, plus the usual Links, App Debuts, a recap of MacStories articles, and a preview of upcoming MacStories podcast episodes....

Holiday Schedule Reminder

As mentioned last week, we’re taking a few weeks off during the holidays to spend time with family and friends and recharge for next year. MacStories Weekly will be back on January 14th with Issue 303. AppStories and MacStories Unwind will be on a short two-week break too. The last episode of AppStories for 2021...

Up Next On MacStories’ Podcasts

Next week on AppStories, Federico and John look back at 2021 and discuss the app trends they expect will emerge in 2022. This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico and John cover their favorite videogames of 2021 and hit the highlights of what happened on MacStories this week....

The MacStories Selects 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award

PCalc

John Voorhees: I’d love to tell you that there was drama surrounding the selection of this year’s first-ever MacStories Selects Lifetime Achievement award, but there wasn’t. In the end, it was the easiest pick of the lot. Last month, I sat down with Federico in Rome to go over the Selects awards, and we began by scanning a list of potential Lifetime Achievement candidates that we’d put together over the previous weeks. In the end, PCalc by James Thomson, which started on the Mac and has been adapted to every possible Apple platform, was the obvious choice. Not only are James and PCalc longstanding pillars of the Apple community, but PCalc represents the sort of innovative and creative spirit that we value most at MacStories.

Below, you’ll find a written interview that Federico conducted with James about PCalc’s history, what makes the app special, having to adapt to hardware and software transitions by Apple, and what the future may hold. James also joined us for a special segment of AppStories, covering the Lifetime Achievement award and other MacStories Selects winners. Before we get to the interview, though, I’d like to take a moment to introduce you to PCalc, which has a long and rich history that not all readers may know.

PCalc 1.0 for the Mac (1992) and PCalc 1.0 for the iPhone (2008).

PCalc 1.0 for the Mac (1992) and PCalc 1.0 for the iPhone (2008).

PCalc was first released almost exactly 29 years ago with an email to Info-Mac, an online file hosting service that pre-dates the Internet. In the years since version 1.0, PCalc has updated, refined, and ported to other platforms, including the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and even the Apple TV, where you can enter calculations using a videogame controller.

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MacStories Selects 2021: Recognizing the Best Apps of the Year

John: The MacStories Selects Awards are our annual celebration of the apps we love and the people who make them. Every year, the MacStories team uses hundreds of apps. Some are familiar favorites, but most are new. So, after many months of testing those developers’ apps, we stop to recognize the best.

This year, as we headed into the final stretch of the year, we decided it was time for the MacStories Selects to honor more than just the apps from the past year. MacStories has been covering apps since Federico published his first story in 2009, and having covered thousands of apps spanning more than twelve years, it’s time to look back at all of those apps and honor the standouts that have withstood the test of time with an annual Lifetime Achievement Award, which you can read about more in a special story that includes a bit of history about the winning app and interview with its developer.

Apps have become part of the fabric of our daily lives, which makes it easy to forget that they’re the result of hard work by creative people. The MacStories Selects awards are our chance to pause and appreciate just how fortunate we are to have such a wealth of fantastic tools available from so many talented developers before we start the new year.

2021 has been an exciting year for apps. The resurgence of note-taking apps ignited by apps like Craft, Obsidian, and Roam Research continued unabated. We also saw new apps successfully remix technologies and approaches and apply them to new domains, and of course, automation continued to be a central theme, with a long list of established and new apps testing the waters of Shortcuts for Mac for the first time.

As a result, we had a wealth of apps to choose from as always for the following awards:

  • Best New App
  • Best App Update
  • Best New Feature
  • Best Watch App
  • Best Mac App
  • Best Design
  • App of the Year

Along with the Lifetime Achievement Award and Readers’ Choice Award, which was chosen by Club MacStories members, that makes a total of nine award winners plus seven runners-up for these fourth annual MacStories Selects Awards, which began in 2018. As we did last year, we have also created beautiful physical awards commemorating the winners, which we will be sent to each of the winners this week.

We also recorded a special episode of our podcast AppStories all about the MacStories Selects winners and runners-up. It’s a terrific way to learn more about this year’s apps.

You can listen to the episode below.

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

We will hold our Monthly Town Hall live event with additional MacStories Selects coverage in our Discord community for Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members tomorrow, December 14, 2021, at 12:30 PM Eastern US time and release it later as a Town Hall podcast episode for those who can’t join live.

So, with those preliminaries out of the way, it’s my pleasure to introduce the 2021 MacStories Selects Awards to the MacStories community.

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