Our watchOS and tvOS WWDC Wishes 
This week, Federico and John share their wishes for watchOS and tvOS including a fitness app, more customization and complication options, APIs for third-party TV remotes, and more.
How I’m Using Perspectives in OmniFocus Yesterday, we released the latest product under the MacStories Pixel brand – MacStories Perspective Icons, a set of 20,000 custom perspective icons for OmniFocus Pro. You can find more details on the product page, read the FAQ, and check out my announcement blog post here. As we mentioned at the top of this issue...
Craig Hockenberry, writing on The Iconfactory blog:
We’re happy to announce a new version of Tot with some features frequently requested by the app’s legion of fans.
The main focus of today’s release are system extensions that allow Tot to co-exist with other apps. To this end, we’ve added a Sharing extension for both iOS and macOS. Additionally, there’s also a widget for iOS that lets you quickly access any of Tot’s dots. Like everything else in Tot, attention was paid to minimizing friction, allowing information to be collected as quickly as possible.
Tot’s new share extension is, quite possibly, the best one I’ve ever tried for a plain text note-taking app. In an intuitive, compact UI, the extension offers everything I need: I can pick one of Tot’s seven dots; I can choose to append or prepend text to a dot; the extension even lets me pick the number of line breaks I want to put between a dot’s existing content and the new text I’m inserting into a note. And here’s the best part: the upper section of the share extension’s popup has a full, scrollable preview of the selected dot, so I can see what the entire note will look like before appending or prepending text. Tot is the first note-taking app I’ve used that gets this aspect of sharing text/links to an extension right.
It may be considered a small enhancement to the app, but Tot’s new extension shows how much consideration went into designing an experience that is both powerful and willing to get out of the way as quickly as possible. I wish more note-taking apps offered a share extension similar to The Iconfactory’s app, which, months after its original release, I still use as my go-to scratchpad every day.
Today, I’m thrilled to announce MacStories Perspective Icons, a set of 20,000 icons for custom perspectives in OmniFocus Pro.
Here’s the short version of this story: our brand new Perspective Icons offer 400 unique glyphs with two distinct icon shapes available in 25 different colors, for a total of 20,000 icons included in the set. Yes, you read that number right. The icons can be easily installed in OmniFocus Pro for Mac, iPad, and iPhone using Finder or the Files app; all the icons and colors have been optimized for OmniFocus and designed to look like native additions to the app.
For a limited time, you can get the set at $17.99, down from the regular price of $24.99.
Imagining the Perfect Research App
This week, Federico and John, who have been spending too many of their waking hours investigating research apps on iPadOS and the Mac, discuss the features and approaches they’d like to see in an ideal research app or suite of apps.
Member Requests Question: Is there a shortcut that will open your current webpage or URL (from a non-private Safari tab) in a new private window? (Erick, @Smoothmotif)
There are no Shortcuts actions to open URLs in private tabs in Safari. However, I’ve been using this new utility called Incognito over the past few weeks to open...
Creating File Launchers with GizmoPack Back in November, I shared a shortcut on MacStories called FS Bookmarks that made it possible to retrieve filesystem paths for files and folders in the Files app via Scriptable. By using a combination of JavaScript and Apple’s file bookmarks technology, the shortcut relied on Scriptable to retrieve file paths, which could be combined...
I’m happy to announce that MacStories Shortcuts Icons, our custom icon set for adding shortcuts to the Home screen, has received a free update today that adds 50 new glyphs. With this second free update, the set has reached 400 unique glyphs available in four versions for a total of 1,600 icons included in the complete Bundle edition.
The update is now available, free for existing customers (just download the file again); for new customers, the update is part of the standard purchase for all editions of MacStories Shortcuts Icons: Bundle, Color, and Classic.
For those who may have missed it last year: MacStories Shortcuts Icons lets you customize the look of your shortcuts added to the Home screen by choosing from hundreds of glyphs designed specifically with Shortcuts users in mind, going beyond what’s provided by Apple in the Shortcuts app. The icons are available in two versions – Classic and Color – and a Bundle edition containing both (and discounted by 40% right now) is available as well.
For as long as I can remember being interested in music as more than a mere source of background audio, but as an art form, I’ve been interested in the people who make music – the artists and their craft. Back when I used to buy CDs at my favorite record store in Viterbo, my hometown, I would peruse each album’s liner notes to not only read official lyrics and check out the artwork and/or exclusive photographs contained inside the booklet, but also to read the credits so I could know more about who arranged or mixed a particular track. Beyond the feeling of owning a tangible piece of music, there was something about reading through an album’s credits that served as a simple, yet effective reminder: that people – engineers, instrumentalists, vocalists, producers – created the art I enjoyed.
In today’s world of endless, a la carte streaming catalogs, we’ve reduced all of this to a cold technological term: metadata. Our music listening behaviors have shifted and evolved with time; when we browse Apple Music or Spotify, we’re inclined to simply search for a song or an album and hit play before we return to another app or game on our phones. A streaming service isn’t necessarily a place where we want to spend time learning more about music: it’s just a convenient, neatly designed delivery mechanism. The intentionality of sitting down to enjoy an artist’s creation has been lost to the allure of content and effortless consumption. Don’t get me wrong: I love the comfort of music streaming services, and I’m a happy Apple Music subscriber; but this is also why, for well over a year now, I’ve been rebuilding a personal music collection I can enjoy with a completely offline high-res music player.
Whether by design or as a byproduct of our new habits, metadata and credits don’t play a big role in modern music streaming services. We’re frustrated when a service gets the title of a song wrong or reports the incorrect track sequence in an album, but we don’t consider the fact that there’s a world of context and additional information hidden behind the songs and albums we listen to every day. That context is entirely invisible to us because it’s not mass-market enough for a music streaming service. There have been small updates on this front lately1, but by and large, credits and additional track information are still very much ignored by the streaming industry. And if you ask me, that’s a shame.
This is why I instantly fell in love with MusicSmart, the latest utility by Marcos Antonio Tanaka, developer of MusicHarbor (another favorite music app of mine). MusicSmart, which is a $1.99 paid upfront utility, revolves around a single feature: showing you credits and additional details for albums and songs available in your local music library or Apple Music’s online catalog.
John
