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.
Sketch, explore and share endless ideas with Concepts’ infinite canvas for iPad. Used by creators for visual thinking, note taking, team communication and design, Concepts goes beyond a digital sketchbook.
Since everything you draw is a flexible vector-raster hybrid, you can move your ideas around like a visual playground to help you see the bigger picture. Organize notes, images and PDFs into visual moodboards and sketch your ideas on top. Use precision grids and guides to help you lay out designs, and apply real-world scale and measurements for professional projects.
With Concepts, you can whiteboard virtually with teams and clients using apps like Zoom. A built-in Presentation Mode helps you connect with others for live sharing and graphic discussion.
The app comes free as a basic sketching tool, with the ability to unlock 200+ libraries of brushes, objects and services via subscription or one-time purchase. To learn more about Concepts, visit their website.
MacStories readers – Enjoy a special 3 month extended free trial when you sign up for an annual subscription. Get three months of infinite creativity before you are billed.
Our thanks to Concepts for sponsoring MacStories this week.
UI Designer Weekly is a free weekly newsletter by designer Sahand Nayebaziz all about Apple user interface design.
As the number of Apple platforms multiplies, staying on top of the latest design trends and principles has never been more important and hard. Whether you’re a designer or developer, UI Designer Weekly will get you up to speed on the latest in UI design and help you stay there with its extensive, expert coverage.
Each issue of UI Designer Weekly is packed with thought-provoking articles that will inspire your design work. The ‘New Standards’ section looks at interface design through the lens of Apple’s OSes and apps. For example, the newsletter is currently in the midst of extensive WWDC coverage, breaking down the design language of visionOS, plus upcoming changes to Contacts, Messages, StandBy, and more.
The newsletter’s ‘Spotted’ section zooms out, analyzing UI design throughout the Apple ecosystem, whether it’s Apple’s marketing materials or keynote presentations like WWDC’s. No matter what corner of the Apple world UI Designer Weekly covers, each issue is packed with excellent examples and inspiration that will help you with your design work.
With each new issue of UI Designer Weekly, you’ll gain deep insight into where Apple’s designers are heading, how those trends impact your apps, and ideas about how to implement them yourself. And with WWDC just concluded, now is the perfect time to sign up and join the hundreds of subscribers receiving a new issue of UI Designer Weekly free every Friday and without ads.
Fin is a simple and elegant way to track your finances on your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The app takes the hassle out of keeping tabs on your income and expenses with a straightforward, modern interface that supports multiple accounts, including cash tracking.
Fin privacy-focused approach to budgeting doesn’t require you to sign up for an account, so there’s no login process, and the app works offline, so it’s always available. To get started, just set up a budget, and track your income and expenses across customizable categories. Fin also supports data import and recurring transactions and offers attachments like photos and PDFs, searching with powerful filtering, customizable notifications, and weekly reports.
Fin, which has been featured multiple times on the App Store, makes sharing easy too. You can share your accounts using iCloud Sharing. Plus, the app supports the latest OS technologies like Home and Lock Screen widgets, Focus filters, Live Text, and Shortcuts and is continuously updated. Everything in Fin syncs via iCloud for easy access, and if you need to use your data elsewhere, Fin can export it too.
However, tracking your finances is just half of the equation. Fin also features beautiful charts and graphs to help you gain insights into your finances. Armed with the data, you’ll be able to meet your budget and gain control of your finances like never before.
iMazing is the must-have multi-tool for everyone who prefers or needs to manage iPhone or iPad devices locally from their Mac or PC.
Whether you’re an individual, family, small business, or enterprise, iMazing delivers powerful and easy-to-use solutions for working with your Apple mobile devices and their contents.
These features include:
backup iPhone or iPad to external storage or NAS volumes, with snapshot support (like TimeMachine for iOS devices)
browse the contents of old device backups; export any data from them
export or print SMS, MMS, iMessage, and WhatsApp messages, including attachments and metadata (great for memories or business purposes)
easily place a device in kiosk mode (use old iPads as photo frames or dedicated FaceTime devices)
create blueprints and bulk configure devices locally with iMazing Configurator
migrate your business from one MDM solution to another without losing any device data
iMazing also packs powerful media transfer capabilities, enabling you to browse and export photos and videos from your devices faster and with more options than Apple’s own Image Capture. iMazing can also export music and playlists from any Apple mobile device to your computer, so that special recording that only survives on your old iPod can be enjoyed elsewhere.
Many iMazing features are also available free of charge, including Spyware Analyzer and QuickTransfer, the faster way to transfer files from your computer to a device with just a single drag-and-drop.
iMazing provides the power and flexibility that pro users demand with the ease of use and flexible export features that all users will love. Try iMazing today for free by visiting their website and taking it for a spin.
Our thanks to iMazing for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Collections Database is the premier personal database app for organizing anything and everything on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
The app features more than 20 field types, linkable sub-databases, reusable lists, and a robust customization system. It’s a powerful and flexible solution that makes Collections easy to get started with for beginners, while meeting the needs of advanced users too.
Collections provides essential templates to get started, including Expenses, Contacts, Subscriptions, Books and more. However, you’re always free to start from scratch by building your own custom templates.
A long, complete list of field types is available for your databases too. The set includes everything you’d expect from a modern database app, including Text, Number, Date, Picture - even Barcode fields. Collections can also import spreadsheets from other apps, using its powerful CSV import functionality. Collections also offers quick filters, sorting, password protection, smart text-based search, and more.
The app has recently added extensive support for Shortcuts, which expands its capabilities even more.
Collections is free to try, but by upgrading to the Pro version via In-App Purchase, you’ll gain access to an unlimited number of database entries and files, plus advanced filters. The Pro version also includes a unique visual formula editor the makes building complex formulas intuitive and easy.
The app is a universal purchase, so your purchase will be available on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. At the same time, though, Collections has been carefully optimized to each Apple platform for the best experience on every platform.
Collections is regularly updated to take advantage of the latest Apple technologies and is privacy-minded. Your data isn’t collected or sent anywhere else.
To learn more, and download Collections Database visit the App Store today.
Our thanks to Collections Database for sponsoring MacStores this week.
SaneBox is the all-in-one solution to email clutter and overload, so you can spend less time managing email and more time on what matters. It works with any email client or service, and any device - literally anywhere you check your email. Oh, and there’s nothing to download or install. It just works.
SaneBox is like having a personal email assistant that automatically organizes your inbox, so you don’t have to, saving valuable time. SaneBox works in the background, so your most important messages always reach your inbox. The rest of your messages are carefully organized into designated folders like SaneLater and SaneNews for later. You can snooze emails, too, setting them aside to deal with when you have the time.
Better yet, if there’s something you never want to see again, drag in into the SaneBlackHole folder. It’s far easier than the hit or miss process of unsubscribing from email lists.
Recently, SaneBox added Deep Clean, the perfect tool for cleaning out old emails from your inbox, which will keep you more organized than ever before. The feature will clean out the old messages automatically, so you won’t need to pay your email provider for more stoarage and can enjoy a completely unclutterred inbox. Just run Deep Clean and review messages, which are organized by sender, making it easy to decide which to delete and which to keep.
Sign up today and save $25 on any subscription. You’ll see big benefits immediately as the message count in your inbox drops, and you’ll be able to maintain control going forward with SaneBox’s help.
Our thanks to SaneBox for sponsoring MacStories this week.
SugarBot is an easy-to-use way to maintain a healthy diet by tracking sugar intake and other nutritional data from the maker of CardioBot. With SugarBot for the iPhone and Apple Watch, you can track your data and gain insights into trends from its in-depth graphs and recommendations to form healthier habits.
Getting started with SugarBot’s elegantly designed interface couldn’t be easier. The app comes with an extensive database of foods. Log your meals, and SugarBot does the rest, recording sugar and other information, including protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat for each meal. Everything tracked is measured against your goals, which can be set up in the app’s Settings. You can set up SugarBot according to a Keto diet or to lose, maintain, or gain weight. Individual nutrient goals can be set as well.
Each data point logged is immediately accessible from the app’s main screen giving you a quick view of today’s nutritional intake and the option to navigate back to prior days. There’s also an ‘All nutrients’ view for daily tracking your nutritional intake by category.
For longer-term trend analysis, SugarBot has a dedicated Insights tab that displays graphs of your intake of nutrients over time. It’s a fantastic way to ensure you’re on track with your goals and understand how your food consumption affects other areas of your health.
Download SugarBot today to start your journey to better health through tracking what you eat.
Our thanks to SugarBot for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Ulysses is an exceptional text editor for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone with an unrivaled set of advanced features and a beautiful design that is always being refined and improved. The winner of an Apple Design Award, Ulysses features a distinctive balance of power-user features that writers appreciate in a simple, elegant, distraction-free UI that makes the app a pleasure to use.
A terrific example of the power available in Ulysses is its publishing tools. Users can publish to the most popular blogging platforms from right inside Ulysses. The app includes deep integration with WordPress, Ghost, Medium, and Micro.blog, allowing you to publish directly to them, complete with images, tags, and excerpts. Most recently, Ulysses added the ability to copy and paste tables from Excel and Numbers with row sorting and sketching on the iPhone and iPad versions of the app. The Mac gained PDF and image annotation too.
Ulysses has built-in grammar and style checking for over 20 languages and a special dashboard in the sidebar that includes statistics, keywords, and footnotes. An outline of the headings in your writing provides a handy bird’s-eye view of your work and a way to navigate your document.
The app’s Library sidebar helps order your writing into groups that can be nested. Along with features like sync, powerful search and filtering options, keyword support, in-line images that can be stored locally or remotely on a server, and new customization options, Ulysses is as flexible as it is powerful. Ulysses includes support for Projects now too, allowing you to show only what’s most relevant to your current task and hiding everything else.
You can also set character, word, and other types of writing goals that can be attached to a single document or entire group, which, combined with deadlines, is a fantastic way to form good writing habits. Then, when you’re finished writing, Ulysses has abundant export options, including plain text, Markdown, TextBundle, rich text, DOCX, ePub, HTML, and PDF. To learn more about Ulysses, visit ulysses.app.
Ulysses is free to try before deciding whether to subscribe for $5.99/month or $39.99/year. MacStories readers can take advantage of a special extended one-month free trial for a limited time. It’s a terrific way to discover the app’s full capabilities, so be sure to check out Ulysses’ new features right away.
Our thanks to Ulysses for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Are you tired of juggling multiple browser tabs while working on your Mac? Unite 4 for macOS revolutionizes your browsing experience by allowing you to transform any website into a tailor-made app for your Mac. Leveraging a lightweight, WebKit-powered browser as a backend, Unite 4 enables you to effortlessly create isolated, customizable apps from any site.
Unite 4 offers a multitude of features and customization options, making it a fantastic alternative to resource-intensive Electron apps or lackluster Mac Catalyst implementations. The apps you create are simple to set up, fast, isolated from your other browsing activity, and only limited by your imagination.
Creating dedicated apps for your favorite streaming services like Netflix and Disney+
Conserving your laptop’s battery by using Unite for Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp with full notification support
Utilizing AI tools such as ChatGPT and MidJourney alongside your other macOS apps
Streaming music through services like Apple Music or Spotify
Tuning into podcasts with Overcast
Organizing your notes in a dedicated Roam Research app
Never losing your Figma design work amidst a sea of Safari tabs
Restricting apps like Facebook from tracking you across sites
Browsing your Instagram feed
Monitoring your finances with Robinhood
This week only, MacStories readers can enjoy a 20% discount on Unite 4 by visiting bzgapps.com/macstories or using the promo code ‘MacStories’ at checkout.
Unite offers a 14-day free trial and is also available as part of a Setapp subscription.
Download Unite 4 today and transform your favorite websites into your favorite apps.
Our thanks to Unite 4 for sponsoring MacStories this week.
