Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, Unwind, a fun exploration of media and more, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about portable gaming and the handheld revolution.
For the first time, we are opening up Pocket’s understanding of what’s good and worthwhile on the Internet, and making it easy for anyone to search and discover the best of the best on any topic. No Pocket account necessary.
[…]
When you first visit Pocket Explore, you’ll be greeted with a question: What interests you?
While Google is great at helping to answer a question, and Pinterest is a great place to search around an idea or thing to do, never before has there been a specific and intentional place to go when you want to satisfy a curiosity or surface the best content around a specific topic you care about.
I switched to Pocket late last year, and their recommendations have been, by far, the best article recommendations I’ve ever been given by a read-later service of this kind. There’s no shortage of great articles and longform stories nowadays, but being able to browse the best options in a single place seems convenient. Potentially, this could also become a better research tool than Google for specific topics.
When I have to research and outline longform feature stories such as my iOS reviews, I use iThoughts. I wrote about my mind-mapping workflow in the Club MacStories newsletters before: essentially, iThoughts allows me to have finer controls over the way my mind maps look and how they work with external keyboards on the iPad.
I love the way I can structure a mind map in iThoughts to my needs, and several touches such as pasting images into nodes or quickly creating parallel or nested nodes speed up editing and collection of research material. Without iThoughts, my iOS 10 review wouldn’t have been possible.
Today, iThoughts developer Craig Scott launched version 4.0 of the app with native Markdown formatting. Markdown was already supported in the iThoughts URL scheme to create templates; now, you can format text inside individual notes with standard Markdown and iThoughts will display it as rich text when you’re done editing.
I took Markdown formatting for a spin today, and it’s exactly what I hoped it would be (for instance, I like how links are automatically converted after pasting them in a node). This is going to be extremely useful in June 2017, but I also think it’ll help me use iThoughts more regularly alongside my text editor.
While a lot is super good, there are a couple areas where the Portrait Mode just ain’t gonna cut it. Complicated foreground and background combinations seemingly overwhelm it and the blur edges get confused throughout the photo.
Portrait Mode doesn’t even begin to successfully work with translucent or shiny objects. Though this is pretty understandable considering the hardware — attempting to detect depth on objects like these is probably difficult. Not sure if Apple will ever be able to get over this one unless their machine learning becomes near-perfect.
He concludes:
People have asked me what camera I used to take these photos, which is I’d call a good sign. I like how they look, and this is a camera I can keep in my pocket all day as I walk all over a beautiful country. That’s a win for me.
Check out his examples here and here. They’re not technically perfect, but I think they’re beautiful, and they were made on a portable computer. Impressive.
After months of speculation, Nintendo’s next big console has been unveiled and named. This week on Remaster, we discuss whether the Nintendo Switch is shaping up to be what we always wanted.
On the latest episode of Remaster, we talked about our first impressions of the Nintendo Switch and what a hybrid console means for the future of Nintendo games. You can listen here.
This is a good video by Marques Brownlee on where things stand today between Siri (iOS 10) and the Google Assistant (running Android Nougat on a Google Pixel XL). Three takeaways: Google Assistant is more chatty than old Google Voice Search; Google still seems to have an edge over Siri when it comes to follow-up questions based on topic inference (which Siri also does, but not as well); and, Siri holds up well in most types of questions asked by Brownlee.
In my daily experience, however, Siri still falls short of basic tasks too often (twoexamples) and deals with questions inconsistently. There is also, I believe, a perception problem with Siri in that Apple fixes obvious Siri shortcomings too slowly or simply isn’t prepared for new types of questions – such as asking how the last presidential debate went. In addition, being able to text with Google Assistant in Allo for iOS has reinforced a longstanding wish of mine – the ability to converse silently with a digital assistant. I hope Siri gets some kind of textual mode or iMessage integration in iOS 11.
One note on Brownlee’s video: the reason Siri isn’t as conversational as Google Assistant is due to the way Brownlee activates Siri. When invoked with the Home button (or by tapping the microphone icon), Siri assumes the user is looking at the screen and provides fewer audio cues, prioritizing visual feedback instead. If Brownlee had opened Siri using “Hey Siri” hands-free activation, Siri would have likely been just as conversational as Google. I prefer Apple’s approach here – if I’m holding a phone, it means I can look at the UI, and there’s no need to speak detailed results aloud.
I was recently asked by my friend Myke if it was possible to inspect the raw contents of an RSS feed on iOS. Mac users have long been able to look at the XML structure of an RSS feed on the desktop: both Safari and Chrome can display a feed as structured XML with...
Google released a nice update to their iOS keyboard, Gboard, earlier today.
Cursor control can now be activated with 3D Touch, which is consistent with the behavior of Apple’s keyboard. Gboard can’t move the cursor freely on the screen like the system keyboard, though, which makes it more limited when it comes to swiping across multiple lines of text. Also, Google didn’t implement haptic feedback when switching between contextual keyboard menus (such as holding down on the dash key), which is another detail that I appreciate in Apple’s keyboard on the iPhone 7.
Similarly, Gboard now features Contacts integration to look up a person’s contact card directly from the keyboard – but it’s not as tightly integrated as QuickType suggestions in iOS 10. However, I prefer the presentation of contact cards in Gboard and I think Google’s is a sweet solution as well.
Integration with native iOS features and apps has always been one of Workflow’s strong suits. With an update released today, however, the Workflow team is considerably expanding the scope of the app to work with any web API, giving Workflow a virtually infinite feature set that goes beyond iOS alone.
