Gladys for Mac,Board Games for iOS (Vol. 7), an interview with Grocery developer Conrad Stoll, plus the usualWeekly Q&A, Links, App Debuts, a recap of MacStories articles, and a preview of the next episode of AppStories....
Interesting Links
Apple COO Jeff Williams spoke at an event at Elon University recently discussing, among other topics, the Apple Watch and the company’s efforts to make its products more affordable. (Link) BBEdit 12.6 was released with app sandboxing, which paves the way for it to be released on the Mac App Store. (Link) For a preview...
Interview: Conrad Stoll
Twitter: @conradstoll. Developer of Grocery for iOS, mobile engineering at Under Armour, and photographer for UltiPhotos. There are lots of apps that manage one sort of list or another on iOS. What sets Grocery apart from them? List apps are a huge category on the App Store and lots of people have used general list...
In This Issue
This month, Stephen picks iOS apps he’d like to see come to the Mac, Ryan joins the Mac mini club and has some preliminary thoughts on how he plans to use it, and John looks at the parallels between Apple’s consumer health care and banking strategies....
Home: A Powerful, Flexible Alternative to Apple’s Home App [Sponsor]
Apple’s Home app is great when it comes to controlling your smart home accessories. But once you start adding automations to your home, you quickly encounter the limits of the Home app. HomeKit is much more capable and flexible than what Apple has to offer.
There is another Home app in the App Store developed by Matthias Hochgatterer. This app has been around for over 3 years and was released long before Apple introduced its Home app with iOS 10. The app is a full-featured HomeKit app that lets you configure, control and automate your HomeKit accessories.
You can configure your home, create rooms and zones, and arrange accessories as you like. You can create accessory groups to group multiple devices together. The app even creates smart groups for you, so you can turn off all lights in your home with a single tap.
The app offers multiple Today widgets and a watchOS app to view your most important accessories at a glance too. There is even dedicated camera widget, where all your favorite cameras are listed.
One of the most beloved features of the Home app is that you can create automations
that are not possible with any other HomeKit app. For example, you can turn on your heater when the current temperature drops below a certain threshold. There are endless possibilities to create your own smart home with HomeKit and the alternative Home app.
Now is the best time to get a copy of Matthias Hochgatterer’s Home app because it’s 30% off until March 4, 2019. To learn more about the app and HomeKit in general, visit the Home website.
Announcement
Every year, I like to take some time in an issue of MacStories Weekly to thank Club members for sending in their shortcut requests and questions for the Workflow Corner and Q&A sections of the newsletter. We appreciate you taking the time to send us your ideas and comments, which often inspire more complex shortcuts...
In This Issue
A note from Federico, Holedown, a Launch Center Pro NFC Sticker giveaway, EverSafari: A Shortcut to Save Safari Webpage Links in Evernote, Ryan re-evaluates the HomePod after using it for a year, an interview with developerJohn Sundell, plus the usual Weekly Q&A, Links, App Debuts, a recap of MacStories articles, and a preview of next...
Interesting Links
According to Axios, Apple bought a voice technology startup called PullString that powered interactive voice apps used in toys, perhaps to aid in Siri development. (Link) An auto-tuned cat video led Dani Deahl of The Verge down a deep online rabbit hole of people making auto-tune videos using an app called Voloco. (Link) On Tedium,...
Up Next on MacStories’ Podcasts
Next week for episode 100 ofAppStories, Federico and John look at app trends and discuss where they may lead....