PCalc, James Thomson’s advanced calculator for iPhone and iPad, has been updated this week to version 3.8. I’ve been testing PCalc 3.8 for the past couple of months on my devices running iOS 12, and it features one of the best implementations of Siri shortcuts I’ve seen from a third-party developer yet. Even more than the app’s excellent widget, shortcuts have enabled me to integrate PCalc features into different aspects of my daily workflow, including conversations with Siri via my HomePods.
Compiling and Exporting Chapters for My iOS 12 Review with Drafts 5
Back in June, I wrote on MacStories that I was evaluating whether Drafts 5 could replace Editorial for my Markdown automation and become the app I use to write my annual iOS review. Putting together these longform pieces involves a lot of writing, editing, and navigating between different sections; the more I can automate these tasks, the more time I can spend doing what actually matters for the review – testing the new version of iOS and ensuring the review is up to my standards.
Once I started looking into Drafts 5, I realized I could take advantage of its JavaScript automation engine to build a custom action that would compile the latest version of my iOS review draft and back it up to multiple locations as a single Markdown (.md) text file.
Three Years of Club MacStories
When I introduced Club MacStories three years ago, I had no idea our crazy plan for a members-only newsletter would eventually grow into a key component of MacStories that now makes up for roughly half of its annual revenue. I remember reading a final version of my announcement post and telling my girlfriend we’d be lucky to hit 100 members in the first month. It took less than 30 minutes to surpass that number after the announcement went live. I couldn’t be more grateful to all the readers who signed up, keep reading Club MacStories to this day, and spread the word among their friends and family.
Exploring Twitter Apps
John
Connected, Episode 208: It’s Ugly and I Want It→
New iPhones are just around the corner, so it’s time to talk about rumors and solidify predictions.
On this week’s episode of Connected, our final predictions for next week’s Apple event, as well as the rest of 2018. You can listen here.
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Apple Music Gains Better Organization of Releases on Artist Pages
In an update rolled out last night following the release of global top charts, Apple redesigned artist pages on Apple Music with separation of different kinds of music releases.
Running Shortcuts as External Functions
One of Workflow’s advanced functionalities that has fortunately been kept in the new Shortcuts app is the ability to run shortcuts as external functions. Essentially, this means you can run Shortcut A inside Shortcut B without having to duplicate all the actions of Shortcut A into the other one. To master this feature means...
WhatsApp Adds Media Previews in Notifications
WhatsApp for iOS was updated earlier this week with the long-awaited ability to preview media (pictures and animated GIFs) using rich notifications on iOS. As you can see in the screenshots below, this new feature allows you to expand a notification and preview its embedded image attachment without having to open the app and before composing a reply from the notification itself.
As a heavy user of WhatsApp (it’s my second most used social/communication app, second only to iMessage), this feature was perhaps the single most important option I was hoping the app would eventually adopt. The entire flow of previewing and responding to messages that contain pictures is so much better now. Of course, I’m also waiting for an iPad version of WhatsApp.
For context, the rich notification API for media previews was introduced with iOS 10 in 2016. Here’s to hoping it won’t take the WhatsApp team until 2020 to implement Siri shortcuts.