MacStories Team

3292 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.

Airmail: An Elegant, Customizable Email Client for Mac and iOS [Sponsor]

Airmail is the 2017 Apple Design Award-winning email client from Bloop for the Mac and iOS that marries elegant design with rich, customizable features that tame your inbox.

Everyone approaches email a little differently. For some people, their inbox is a sort of task manager. For others, keeping their inbox empty and messages neatly organized into folders is paramount. No matter how you manage your email accounts, Airmail has you covered.

Airmail is highly customizable while maintaining a clean, intuitive interface that makes it a pleasure to use. The app supports all major email technologies, including Gmail, iCloud, Exchange, IMAP, and POP3. On macOS, Airmail also incorporates the latest operating system features like the Touch Bar.

With Airmail, you can manage one or several email accounts. With multiple accounts, it’s just as easy to review messages from every account in a unified inbox as it is to dive into just one account. Airmail also features rich customization like the ability to send messages later, snooze messages, and create smart folders and rules. Actions let you send messages to other apps you use like task managers and your calendar or create a PDF from a message. On the Mac, Airmail supports the Touch Bar too. Best of all, you only need to set up Airmail once because your settings sync via iCloud to all your Macs and iOS devices.

Airmail is actively developed across all of Apple’s platforms. Most recently, Airmail has added a redesigned and improved search system, user templates that sync across all your devices, and Spotlight search, so you can find messages even when you’re not in Airmail. The app’s broad feature set and customization all add up to make Airmail the perfect choice for email power users.

Download Airmail for the Mac today from the Mac App Store and for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch from the App Store.

Our thanks to Airmail for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Interesting Links

Apple fan Hap Plain has amassed one of the largest private collections of rare and unreleased Apple prototypes. The collection includes more than 250 prototypes of iPhones, iPads, Macs and more. (Link) As noticed by Benjamin Mayo at 9to5Mac, Apple is discontinuing its own photo printing service built into the Photos app for Mac. Apple...


Perks

Boxy for Twitter Boxy is a brand-new Twitter client for the Mac from the makers of the Boxy Suite of Google apps for the Mac. Club MacStories members can purchase Boxy for Twitter for 20% off using the exclusive coupon code macstories-friends at checkout for a limited time. To learn more, visit the Boxy for...



In This Issue

Sleep++,a Tip for generating one-time passwords in 1Password, an exclusive discount on Boxy for Twitter, two handy shortcuts from Federico, Ryan checks in on the HomePod six months later, plus the usual Weekly Q&A, Links, a recap of MacStories articles, and a preview of next week’s episode of AppStories....


Our App Store Anniversary Coverage

Over the course of last week, we published tens of thousands of words and hours of podcast episodes covering the tenth anniversary of the App Store. We are very happy with how the coverage turned out, but we understand that it was also more than most people could absorb in one week. Fortunately, the history...


Previously, On MacStories

Adobe Acknowledges Working on a Full Version of Photoshop for the iPad Game On: A Decade of iOS Gaming App Preservation: Saving the App Store’s History Personal App Store Stories from the MacStories Team The App Store at 10: The Next Decade iOS 12 AR Quick Look Demos After Two Years with Pinterest, Instapaper Regains...


The App Store at 10: The Next Decade

The App Store has changed the world. Over the last decade society as we know it has been irrevocably shaped by the App Store and its products.

Just as no one 10 years ago could have predicted where the App Store would have brought us today, so is it impossible to guess what the next decade might bring. There’s no stopping us from trying though.

As we close out our App Store anniversary week coverage, here are our hopes and expectations for the next 10 years.

Federico

Apple predictions often age badly because the company has a tendency to not directly follow the latest market trends; at the very least, they offer their unique twist on ideas others have been experimenting with for some time. However, based on how the App Store has evolved for the past 10 years, I see some interesting signs in its trajectory that are pointing to obvious changes coming down the road. So, even though I may turn out to be dramatically wrong in 10 years, here’s my list of App Store changes I believe will occur over the course of the next decade.

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Personal App Store Stories from the MacStories Team

Over the past week we’ve released articles and podcast episodes documenting the stories of Apple and third-party developers during the App Store’s decade of life, but as our celebration week nears its end, we wanted to shift gears and share our own stories.

The story of the App Store doesn’t just belong to Apple, nor is it limited to the developers who have made the App Store such a vibrant marketplace. Everyone who has ever downloaded an app on their iPhone, iPad, or even iPod Touch has their own story of the App Store’s impact on their life. In that vein, here are the MacStories team’s personal stories of what the Store and its products have meant to us.

Federico

I told the story of how MacStories came to be before. After dropping out of university (where I thought I was going to study Philosophy – it’s funny to imagine another timeline where I ended up a Philosophy professor), I got a full-time job as a seller at a physical eBay store. Those stores, which were quite common before the smartphone era and the mobile-marketplace app boom, helped folks who didn’t know how or didn’t have the patience to sell old items on eBay. My job consisted of assisting customers who came into the store with boxes full of stuff, explaining to them how eBay and our fees worked, putting items up for sale, monitoring the auction, and taking care of shipments. It was a fun job, but it was also repetitive and somewhat boring after a while, yet it allowed me to save money toward the first computer I wanted to buy entirely with my own money. I wanted to buy a 15” MacBook Pro.

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