Timing for Mac Tracks Your Time So You Don’t Have To [Sponsor]

By Federico Viticci

Timing for Mac.

Have you ever spent all day in front of your Mac, just to wonder where the heck all that time went?

Or tried to bill a client, but couldn’t reconstruct how many hours you spent working for them?

You could use a time tracker. But to be honest, manual time tracking sucks. You have to start and stop timers, enter what you did, and so on. And if you forget that, you are back to square one.

Not so with Timing.

Instead of making you do all the work, Timing automatically tracks how you spend your time. It logs which apps you use, which websites you visit, and which documents you edit. You can easily categorize activities into projects.

Also, your data is not uploaded to anyone’s server. It stays safe on your Mac at all times.

Still not convinced? Download the free trial (direct link) now and on Friday review all the gory details of what you did this week. (But don’t blame Timing when you see all those hours wasted on Facebook and elsewhere!)

You can purchase Timing on the Mac App Store or check out the website at timingapp.com. The app is 20% off this week at $19.99 – that already pays for itself by recovering just half an hour of unproductive or unbilled time.

Our thanks to Timing for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Twitter for iPhone Gets Extended 3D Touch Support with Peek & Pop

By Federico Viticci

With an update released earlier today on the App Store, Twitter has extended integration with 3D Touch in their iPhone app (previously limited to quick actions on the Home screen) to peek and pop previews in the timeline and other sections of the app.

With the latest version of Twitter for iPhone, you’ll be able to press on tweets, links, pictures, and profiles to bring up a 3D Touch preview of the content. By swiping a peek upwards, you’ll also gain access to shortcuts to either share via direct message and iOS extensions or, in the case of profiles, mute, block, and report a user.

Twitter’s extended 3D Touch support isn’t as advanced as Tweetbot – for instance, peek and pop previews don’t seem to work in the Notifications tab – but it’s a step forward regardless.

You can get the latest version of Twitter for iPhone from the App Store.

What Google Photos Could Do Next →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Mat Honan, writing for BuzzFeed, interviewed Anil Sabharwal, vice president of Photos at Google, on the future of the service. It sounds like they’re thinking of more ways to let artificial intelligence make photo management and sharing smarter:

Google refers to these auto-generated moments as “creations.” According to Sabharwal, the company has made 1.6 billion of them in the past year and has big plans to do more. “I think there’s a really great opportunity to mix the machine learning and creations together,” he said. “One [creation] we love is the concept of ‘rediscover this day’ — where we present to our users meaningful moments on a particular date in previous years. Rather than ‘here’s what happened a year ago,’ it’s here’s a set of photos from the last time you were with these people, or the last time you were at this restaurant.”

Sabharwal also said Photos might become smarter about the albums and movies it creates by giving them a stronger perspective and point of view. It might, for example, automatically select a wedding shot in which you and your partner are looking at each other for the hero shot in an anniversary album.

The success of Google Photos doesn’t surprise me. Unlike other Google products, it’s focused, updated often, and it distills the best of Google (machine learning at scale, speed, online backup) down to a clear, user-friendly product. I think it’s the best consumer service they’ve launched in years.

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Tips

By Federico Viticci

Federico

There are some nice touches in Gboard, Google’s custom keyboard for the iPhone and iPad. When searching for emoji, for instance, you can try out different expressions or words associated with a particular emoji, and Google will often return results for you. Try with “Nooooo”, “thinking”, or “party” to see what I mean. Also,...

Canvas, Episode 11: Travelling with iOS →

Linked By Federico Viticci

With summer - and WWDC - coming up, Fraser and Federico bring you advice on the equipment, apps and tweaks for your iOS devices that you need when travelling with your iOS devices.

The the travel bags are opened to reveal the essentials within. Fraser and Federico share their favourite travel accessories, techniques for getting online abroad and their preferred iOS settings tweaks and Apple Watch complications for having fun and staying safe abroad.

This week’s Canvas is all about traveling. We share our favorite gear, best practices, and tips for using iOS devices and apps when you’re on vacation. You can listen here.

Workflow 1.5: App Store Automation, Trello and Ulysses Actions, Audio Metadata, Safari View Controller, and More

By Federico Viticci

In seven years of MacStories, few iOS apps fundamentally changed how I get work done as much as Workflow. Pythonista, Editorial, and Tweetbot are in that list, but Workflow, with its ongoing improvements and deep iOS integrations, continuously makes me question how I can optimize my setup further.

Nearly two years (and an Apple Design Award) later, Workflow is reaching version 1.5 today, an important milestone towards the road to 2.0. Unsurprisingly for the Workflow team, this release adds over 20 new actions and dozens of improvements. Some of them are new app actions based on URL schemes, while others introduce brand new system integrations (such as iTunes Store, App Store, and Safari View Controller) and web actions for the popular Trello team collaboration service. Workflow 1.5 is a packed release that is going to save heavy Workflow users a lot of time.

After testing and playing with Workflow 1.5 for the past month, I’ve been able to streamline key aspects of writing for MacStories and managing Club MacStories. With a bigger team and more Club responsibilities, we’ve been thinking about how to improve our shared tasks and creative process; Workflow 1.5 has played an essential role in it.

The Similarity of Differences →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Seth Clifford:

Apple and Google, in the eyes of the general public and many tech bloggers, have been at war for many years, and in vague terms, both companies sell fancy mobile phones. But the implications of those businesses are so far beyond the face value of what we see. And what I’ve realized is that they aren’t zero-sum or mutually exclusive. What I’ve come to understand is that the more the two companies seem to have been battling, the more the individual directions of each company become unassailably concrete.

Different directions toward the same destination. But I would also add fundamentally different cultures and focus. This is what makes observing both companies so fun these days.

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Lookmark for Apps →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Lookmark is a great utility by Claes Jacobsson to bookmark apps for later and download them when you can. Today’s 2.0 update to Lookmark, which I’ve been testing over the past few days, adds the ability to bookmark any iTunes content and a solid extension that can add bookmarks directly from Safari.

It’s quite impressive: if you try it on a website that mentions apps like MacStories, the extension will scan links on the webpage and you’ll get a popup at the bottom to save apps for later.

Also new today: a Price Watch subscription service to be alerted of price changes for bookmarked apps. That’s going to come in handy for @MacStoriesDeals.

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Remaster, Episode 11: Uncharted 4 →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Federico and Myke discuss their thoughts on the final instalment of Nathan Drake’s journey.

Uncharted 4 is the kind of game that justifies the purchase of a console these days. You can listen here, but make sure you’ve finished the game first.