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.
Control Center was introduced with iOS 7 in 2013, since then, it has benefited from minor visual tweaks and the recent inclusion of a Night Shift toggle with iOS 9.3. In future updates, it would be great to see Control Center gain more hardware and system toggles, along with the ability for users to customise which toggles they require and where they are positioned. An enhanced Control Center could also add support for 3D Touch for additional options and introduce a new system-wide dark mode.
I don’t typically publish iOS concepts on MacStories, but Sam Beckett’s latest video is so close to my idea for a customizable Control Center (see last year), I just couldn’t resist. Tasteful, well researched, and with some great ideas for integrating 3D Touch, too.
Free- Download iPhone App Lively My favorite app for basic Live Photo exporting needs, Lively lets you convert Live Photos to GIF, movie, or static frames. There are plenty of settings to play with: GIFs can be played backwards and auto-reversed with speed settings and two sizes; individual frames can be extracted from...
This week, we received two similar questions about converting PDFs to images on iOS: block {.question} Question: I give presentations regularly. Due to compatibility issues I have started saving all my slides as images. This has been my fail safe measure against font issues and other unforeseen ridiculousness and has worked great on the...
This was brought to my attention by the MacStories team earlier this week: on the iPhone 6s, you can 3D Touch contact pictures in the Spotlight search page to access shortcuts for phone calls, messaging, and FaceTime. These are the same shortcuts available in the Contacts app, but because they’re available by swiping right...
Findings Findings wants to reinvent the lab notebook. An app for scientists with a rich set of features, Findings can organize ongoing and completed experiments, with a calendar view to drop protocols into your week and set up parallel protocols if necessary. Great interface design, tons of other functionalities, and available on both iOS...
Apple filed a motion in court on Thursday asking a judge to remove an order demanding the company help crack the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists — arguing the order is not authorized under current law and, in any event, is unconstitutional.
“This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld,” the motion begins.
You can read the document in its entirety here. Here’s a section that stood out to me:
And if it succeeds here against Apple, there is no reason why the government could not deploy its new authority to compel other innocent and unrelated third-parties to do its bidding in the name of law enforcement. For example, under the same legal theories advocated by the government here, the government could argue that it should be permitted to force citizens to do all manner of things “necessary” to assist it in enforcing the laws, like compelling a pharmaceutical company against its will to produce drugs needed to carry out a lethal injection in furtherance of a lawfully issued death warrant, or requiring a journalist to plant a false story in order to help lure out a fugitive, or forcing a software company to insert malicious code in its auto-update process that makes it easier for the government to conduct court-ordered surveillance. Indeed, under the government’s formulation, any party whose assistance is deemed “necessary” by the government falls within the ambit of the All Writs Act and can be compelled to do anything the government needs to effectuate a lawful court order. While these sweeping powers might be nice to have from the government’s perspective, they simply are not authorized by law and would violate the Constitution.
In this show, Fraser and Federico look at four major applications for iOS: Photos itself, Pixelmator, Adobe Lightroom Mobile and Snapseed. All of these are very powerful applications for serious photo editing on iOS, each with their own particular strengths.
We also look at apps which provide Photo Editing Extensions. These are small bundles of features that can be accessed directly inside the editing view of the Photos app itself.
In episode 4 of Canvas, Fraser and I continued our Photos series with photo editing feature and apps. You can listen here and check out the links below.
The whole gang is back this week to discuss Stephen’s semi-smart watch, Federico’s annual iPad checkup and more.
Don’t let the seemingly sad title of the latest Connected fool you: in the latest episode, we’ve talked about changes in the iOS 9.3 beta, Apple and the FBI, and the backstory of my iPad article from earlier this week. You can listen here.
Following yesterday’s release of the Apple TV Tech Talks videos, I came across this project by Aaron Stephenson that lets you watch WWDC sessions and Tech Talks on the Apple TV itself. You’ll need Xcode to install it, but, if you’re a developer, it’s a good way to watch videos on the big screen and take notes/try code on a Mac – WWDC sessions go back to 2011 and you can mark videos as favorites, too.