MacStories Team

3288 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

HealthView: Your Go-To Apple Health Dashboard App [Sponsor]

HealthView is a beautifully-designed iPhone and Apple Watch app that brings the health data those devices collect together in a highly-customizable, unified dashboard.

The iPhone and Apple Watch are capable of collecting lots of health data but making sense of it all and accessing it can be frustrating. Instead of poking around in the many sections of the Health app, give HealthView a try. The app provides a clean, concise view into your health data on both the iPhone and Apple Watch.

As good as HealthView looks, though, the app’s utility runs much deeper. HealthView is highly customizable, allowing you to tailor its dashboard to your specific needs and interests. You can set goals and track your progress, making it easier than ever to reach those goals. You can also view daily, weekly, monthly, and annual totals for metrics like steps, hydration, workout minutes, distance, mindful minutes, weight, heart rate, and a lot more.

If you want more detail, just tap into a category to focus on a single metric that reports all your stats alongside graphs that display the data over time. HealthView also offers a wealth of beautiful widgets, so you can get your most important stats from a quick glance at your iPhone’s Home Screen. No matter the your goals, HealthView can be customized to suit your needs.

So, download HealthView today to see why so many users rely on it for tracking their health and fitness.

Our thanks to HealthView for supporting MacStories this week.

Interesting Links

Apple designer Alan Dye spoke to Australian Financial Review in an interview covering topics including how design helps bring hardware and software together in products like the Apple Watch. (Link) Google Stadia, the company’s videogame streaming service, began beta testing a progressive web app version of the service that works on iOS using Safari. (Link)...

Interview: Balint Orosz

Twitter: @balintorosz. Founder and CEO of Craft. What led you to build Craft? At my last job, I transitioned from and Individual Contributor to a Leadership Role – this meant two specific things for me personally: I had teams across 5 countries and traveled a lot – meaning lots of time spent in airports and...

Happy Holidays!

We wanted to remind you that the MacStories Team is taking a couple of weeks off to unwind during the holidays. We’ll be back with a special New Year’s themed issue on January 8th, 2021, which we think you’ll enjoy. AppStories is taking a short break too but will be back on January 11th with...

In This Issue

Wonder, a collection of Home Screen customization apps and utilities, Federico’s Timery Home Screen setup, an interview with Craft Founder and CEO Balint Orosz,plus the usual Links, App Debuts, a recap of MacStories articles, and a preview of MacStories podcasts....

Previously, On MacStories

Level Touch: A HomeKit-Enabled Smart Lock That Everyone in Your Household Can Appreciate MacStories Unwind: AirPods Max, Fitness+, Two New Shortcuts, and a HomeKit Lock Review MacStories Selects 2020: Recognizing the Best Apps of the Year Apple Releases iOS and iPadOS 14.3 with Apple ProRAW, App Clip Codes, Fitness+ Support, and Direct App Launches from...

Up Next on MacStories’ Podcasts

Next week on AppStories, Federico and John rethink task management surveying the modern to-do app landscape and discussing their current setups. This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico and John recap the 2020 MacStories Selects Awards, Federico’s update to his WallCreator shortcut, the release of iOS and iPadOS 14.3, Fitness+, Headland, and ProRAW, plus...

MacStories Selects 2020: Recognizing the Best Apps of the Year

John: The MacStories Selects Awards are our annual love letter to apps and the people who make them. Apps have become ubiquitous, seeping into every corner of our lives. They help us find a job and home, get work done, blow off steam, order a meal, and everything in between. With so many apps available in the App Store, though, it’s easy to take them and their creators for granted, which is why as the year comes to a close, we step back and pause to celebrate the MacStories Team’s favorite apps and the people who make them.

To say that bringing an app to life from idea to a fully-formed 1.0 is tough is a vast understatement, and 2020 hasn’t made the process any easier. However, as we survey the past year, the depth of innovative apps makes it clear that many developers poured themselves into their apps in 2020. The result was a list of MacStories Selects candidates that was longer than in any prior year of the awards.

We had a wealth of excellent apps to choose from this year for the seven categories the MacStories Team chose:

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

Along with the Readers’ Choice Award, which was chosen by Club MacStories members, that makes a total of eight award winners plus twelve runners-up. These are the third annual MacStories Selects Awards, which we debuted in 2018. As we did last year, we have also created beautiful physical awards commemorating the winners, which we will be sending out to each in a couple of weeks.

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

AppStories Episode 198 - The 2020 MacStories Selects Awards

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

So, it’s with great admiration and respect for the developers who have persevered through a tough year to produce some of the best apps we’ve ever used that we present to our readers the 2020 MacStories Selects Awards:

Read more

Agenda: Date-Focused Note Taking [Sponsor]

Agenda has had a great year. In May, Agenda 10 added note templates, a powerful sharing extension, and translations in 11 new languages. Just a few months later, Agenda 11 introduced Widgets and Scribble (handwriting recognition), as well as support for the new Apple Silicon Macs.

And the team at Agenda is not resting yet. They are currently working on one of the most requested features in the Agenda Community: Tables. Agenda 12 will allow you to embed tables directly into your notes, and take them with you on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Tables are already being beta tested by the Agenda faithful and will be available in January 2021. Best of all, you will be able to use Agenda’s new tables for free.

If you aren’t familiar with Agenda, it’s a note-taking app with a twist — it focuses heavily on dates. You organize your notes into projects, sorted into a timeline. You can link notes to calendar events and reminders in Apple’s apps.

The tight integration of notes and dates is what makes it a unique note-taking experience. For example, by tying notes you’ve been taking in advance of a meeting to the event in your calendar, the notes are right there when you need them.

It sounds like a great idea, but we all know a great app is more than an idea. Agenda won an Apple Design Award in 2018 and was named MacStories’ Best New App the same year. It’s been featured countless times in Apple’s App Stores and is an Editors’ Choice. It’s not just a great idea — it’s a very polished app.

Agenda is free to download from the Mac App Store and iOS App Store.

Our thanks to Agenda for its support of MacStories this week.