Here are today’s @MacStoriesDeals on hardware, iOS, and Mac apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get them before they end!
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#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday
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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
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Hide Newsstand In A Folder On iOS 6 With One Click, No Jailbreak Required
After the release of iOS 5 last year, several users complained that the Newsstand app (effectively a “folder” for magazine and newspaper subscriptions) couldn’t be hidden from the Springboard. Because of its nature of glorified folder, users couldn’t even put it away in an existing folder on the Home screen. However, people soon figured out a trick to make the Springboard hide Newsstand.
This year, well-known Cydia developer Filippo Bigarella has released a simple Mac app to hide Newsstand from any iOS device with a single click. I’ve just tested the app personally on my iPhone 5 running iOS 6, and it works as advertised. Even better, the app doesn’t require a jailbreak at all, as it leverages the existing “folder trick”, albeit making it easier to access.
Simply download StifleStand, and open it on your Mac. Make sure a device is plugged in and recognized by the app. Hit the Hide Newsstand button, and watch as Newsstand gets put into a folder called “Magic” on your Home screen. It literally takes one second to complete.
Please note: Just like on iOS 5 last year, opening Newsstand from a folder will crash Springboard. Use this tweak only if you don’t use Newsstand.
You can then rename the folder and put more apps into it. One bug I’ve noticed is that, because Newsstand isn’t meant to be put into a folder, if the folder is closed you won’t see the smaller preview icon for Newsstand. You can avoid this by placing more apps into the folder, leaving Newsstand at the end, so you won’t see the empty spot from your Home screen.
StifleStand works on any device and it’s super-easy to use. Download it here, and watch a demo video by iDownloadBlog here.
Access Extra Content and Perks
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
Faster Markdown Editing with Nebulous Notes Macros
I have written about Nebulous Notes before. Back in August, I posted an overview of my workflow with the app, plain text, and Markdown:
Combining Nebulous’ support for text substitution and cursor position macros has enabled me to achieve a powerful workflow when it comes to writing in Markdown. For instance, I can select words I want to turn into inline links, and have the app automatically wrap them between square brackets, and paste the contents of my clipboard (the link) to the right. To copy Markdown-ready links, I use my own bookmarklet. Or if I want to create a list, I can hit a button that inserts an asterisk and a space. Or again, if I need to create a text file with a format that OmniOutliner recognizes correctly, I can indent items with Nebulous’ $tab and $cursor macros.
Since then, a major 6.0 update to the app has been released, which, in my opinion, deserves another look. For the occasion, I’ve put together a few videos showing how I use the macros I have created for easier and quicker Markdown (more specifically, MultiMarkdown) formatting. The videos were recorded on a Mac using QuickTime capturing an AirPlay Mirroring session through Reflection. I have embedded them here using the video tag supported by most modern browsers (video files are encoded in MPEG-4). For Firefox users, there’s a fallback to Theora .ogv files (converted using ffmpeg2theora). I will also make my macros available for download at the end of this post. Read more
Access Extra Content and Perks
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
Netbot: Tweetbot Reborn for App.net
Today, App.net gets its best iOS third-party client to date, and, unsurprisingly, it comes from Tapbots. Netbot is now available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.
What’s not surprising isn’t simply the fact that Tapbots released an app that sets the bar higher for the competition; at first, it’s the fact that Netbot is basically Tweetbot re-engineered to work for App.net. Read more
Access Extra Content and Perks
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
60 Mountain Lion Tips
Published today, 60 Mountain Lion Tips is the latest entry in the MacSparky Field Guides series. Co-authored by Brett Terpstra and David Sparks, the book stands out for its clever use of iBooks 2.0 features (though a PDF version is also available) and embedded screencasts. There are 53 screencasts with 1.5 hours of video for a total of 60 tips organized in sections like Mountain Lion, Keyboard, Mail, and more.
I was able to read the iBooks version on my iPad, and, as usual, everything’s just great. I’m a big fan of David’s screencasts (see here and here for examples), and the format of this new book makes for a quick consumption that, however, doesn’t lack in depth. The tips are laid out clearly on the left side as text (assuming you’re reading in landscape mode, which lets you see more of a page), and screencasts are available as video thumbnails on the right. Both text and video are clear, concise, and to-the-point. David and Brett do the voiceover, and the quality of the videos doesn’t disappoint – they are compressed, but not too much, so they’re still pleasant to watch on the Retina display. The videos contain both voiceover and system audio, as well as on-screen tips for keyboard shortcuts and menus.
The layout of the book is clean, and, like David’s previous Field Guide, compliant with the design standards of iBooks Author. For instance, you can navigate from a page to a chapter by pinching out, you can access a dedicated page for notes and highlights, and you can watch videos inline. Similar to Push Pop Press’ old physics engine, you can also “move” videos on the screen as they play. It’s not that useful, but it’s very cool.
More importantly, 60 Mountain Lion Tips is easy to read and, in just a few hours, I actually got a lot out of it. We had our own Mountain Lion tips in our first eBook, and yet this book taught me a few OS X tricks I didn’t know about. I especially appreciated the section on third-party app tips, which many roundups usually don’t cover (we didn’t).
60 Mountain Lion Tips is only $6.99. Check out the website here for more information and a link to the separate PDF purchase.
Access Extra Content and Perks
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
Better Dropbox Camera Uploads with CameraSync
Two weeks ago I wrote about my new Dropbox-based workflow for photos. Towards the end of the article, I mentioned how I was handling uploads from my iPhone:
The official Dropbox app recently gained the capability of automatically uploading photos to the Camera Uploads folder: this means every time I go out and take some photos, I can come back home, open the Dropbox app, let it do its magic, then delete the photos from my iPhone. The photos will be uploaded to the Camera Uploads folder, and sorted using the same Hazel workflow described above.
Thanks to a third-party app, I’ve managed to (partially) automate the process of uploading photos from my iPhone (and iPad) as soon as I get home. I’m now using CameraSync to upload photos to Dropbox automatically. Read more
Access Extra Content and Perks
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
Latest Dropbox Beta Brings Redesigned Menu
Announced last night on the public forums, the latest beta of Dropbox 1.5 for Mac brings a completely redesigned popup menu, support for Mountain Lion’s Notification Center, a new installer, and better performance.
Sporting a new modern look, the redesigned popup menu is reminiscent of “popovers” that have become extremely popular among iOS developers. The new menu takes a more visual approach at displaying changes in your Dropbox, with icons for added or deleted files (that you can click to quickly go to Dropbox), a play/pause button for sync, and a large “Open Dropbox folder” to launch a Finder window at the “root” of your Dropbox.
This new popup combines all the functionality from the older tray menu with a new view of your Dropbox’s event stream, letting you see your (or other people’s) latest changes. In addition, you can use the events to easily view, share, or restore files.
Alongside the new appearance of Dropbox in the menubar, the team also says version 1.5 will bring full Notification Center support and a new, simpler installer for Mac users. The new installer works as advertised: you can simply double-click the icon for Dropbox to “update” itself to a new version. Unfortunately, while enabled in Notification Center, I haven’t been able to test the new notifications on the desktop, as I assume the functionality isn’t quite ready yet in this beta.
Personally, I think what Dropbox is showing in this experimental build is very promising. The popup menu was in need of a serious upgrade, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it will evolve throughout the next betas.
To download the latest Dropbox experimental build (and send feedback to the developers), you can head over the Dropbox forums.
Access Extra Content and Perks
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
Great iPhone 5 Wallpapers
One downside of Apple changing the size of the display on the new iPhone is that all your iPhone wallpapers no longer fit properly without being stretched. Whilst Apple has included some new default wallpapers and made them all in the new iPhone 5 resolution, sometimes you just want a bit more choice. Thankfully quite a few people have already done the work to recreate their wallpapers for the new 1136 x 640 resolution of the iPhone 5. We had a bit of a search and found these collections and individual wallpapers that you might enjoy.
Collections
- InterfaceLift: a great website that already has over 100 wallpapers for the iPhone 5
- Louie Mantia: over 80 wallpapers and some stunning wallpapers
- David Lanham: a couple of beautiful drawings and illustrations
- Subtle Papers: our own Chris Herbert updated his collection for the iPhone 5
- Matt, Julie and Ani: a great Flickr photostream I stumbled upon
- Poolga: dozens of nice wallpapers including some abstract ones
- Duckfarm: a bunch of great abstract illustrations and nature photographs
- Aperture Science set by Damien Erambert
- Simple iPhone 5 Wallpaper Set by Kai Halfinger
- PXL wallpaper set by Pixelcave
- (New) CriterionCast Collection
- (New) fiftyfootshadows iPhone 5 Wallpapers
- (New) Max Themes iPhone 5 Collection
- (New) Daniele Delgrosso Photographs for iPhone 5
Individual Wallpapers
- Steve Jobs Silhouette: Agile Bits’ Dan Peterson updates this classic wallpaper for the iPhone 5
- Wooden Shelf: Realmac Software recreates the popular and beautiful wooden shelf wallpaper for the iPhone 5
- Solaris: Cole Rise makes a beautiful space wallpaper for the iPhone 5
- iPhone 5 Event Poster: Last week I recreated the poster from Yerba Buena and included an iPhone 5 version
- Daniel Waldron makes a very nice, subtle wallpaper
- Aharon Rabinowitz makes a really cool, abstract wallpaper
- Grill by Pixelcave (iPhone 5 and 4S sizes)
- Redlands by Timothy Reynolds
- (New) iPhone 5 Internals by iFixit
- (New) Cube by Marc Edwards
- (New) Antracite by Marc Edwards
- (New) Hex Grid by Matt Gemmell
If you’ve made some iPhone 5 wallpapers or know of some other great ones we missed, let us know by tweeting us at @macstoriesnet.
Access Extra Content and Perks
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
iPhone 5: First Thoughts And Random Impressions
When you first pick up the iPhone 5, your hand immediately contours to the same grip it’s become accustomed to with your previous iPhone. This is no small achievement. Despite how much thinner, lighter, and taller the 5 is than any previous iPhone, it still feels unmistakably like an iPhone; simultaneously something brand new and, by this point, instinctually familiar. Read more
Access Extra Content and Perks
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.