Your Secret Weapon for Exception, Uptime, and Cron Monitoring
This week on AppStories, we consider whether changes coming to Apple’s OSes make a system app-only research and writing workflow possible and discuss where there’s room for improvement.
Sponsored by:
The process of adopting new emoji as part of the Unicode character set continues, and today, Emojipedia has what it anticipates will be part of the Emoji 14.0 collection. These emoji represent the complete set of draft emoji that the Unicode Consortium will vote on in September, so there’s still a possibility that there could be changes. The approved emoji are expected to begin showing up on devices and in apps in late 2021 and into 2022.
The draft set of emoji include several smileys such as Melting Face, Face with Diagonal Mouth, and Saluting Face. There are also many new hand emoji in the set in different skin tones and combinations, including Handshake, Heart Hands, and Hand with Index Finder and Thumb Crossed. People include Person with Crown, Pregnant Man, and Pregnant Person. There’s also a Troll, which I expect will be popular, a nest with and without eggs in it, a Mirror Ball (someone on the Unicode Consortium is apparently a Taylor Swift fan or maybe Sarah McLachlan given the spelling), and Biting Lip.
Emojipedia is conducting a vote in connection with the new emoji to coincide with World Emoji Day, which is this Saturday:
You can vote for which you are most looking forward to in the Most Anticipated Emoji award, being drawn on July 17 aka World Emoji Day.
The images in this post include a handful of the draft emoji being considered by the Unicode Consortium as imagined by Emojipedia. The final designs will depend on each company that adopts them. Be sure to visit Emojipedia for all the details and the full set of renderings of the draft emoji.
This week on AppStories, we discuss the emerging trend of app customization, which along with app modularity, lets users control how apps work and look.
Sponsored by:
This week on AppStories, we continue the MacStories Summer OS Preview Series by interviewing Marcos Tanaka, the creator of MusicHarbor and MusicSmart about the latest changes to Apple’s music-related frameworks, his apps, and more.
Sponsored by:
Sponsored by: Concepts – Sketch, Note, Draw
This week on MacStories Unwind:
This week on AppStories, we walk through all the changes coming to Shortcuts this fall, including changes to the Shortcuts editor and the new actions you’ll find in Shortcuts on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Sponsored by:
Sami Fathi, writing for MacRumors on an API change spotted in the second developer beta of iOS 15:
Currently, apps are limited to the amount of RAM they can use, regardless of the amount available on the device. For example, despite the highest-end M1 iPad Pro featuring 16GB of RAM, on iPadOS 14, apps are limited to only use 5GB. 16GB of RAM is the highest amount of RAM ever offered in an iPhone or iPad, and the 5GB limitation means that apps aren’t able to utilize even half of what the iPad Pro has to offer.
In the second betas of iOS and iPadOS 15, released to developers yesterday, Apple is introducing a new entitlement that developers may request that will expose their apps to more memory. Apple says that this entitlement will inform the system that an app “may perform better by exceeding the default app memory limit.” Apple’s developer documentation doesn’t specify how much extra RAM an app may be exposed to and also says this is limited to “supported devices.”
I’ve rarely found myself in a scenario where my iPad Pro needed more than 5 GB of RAM, but I’m also not a professional user of apps such as video or graphic editors that may take advantage of more RAM. This is an entitlement that Apple will need to grant developers who request it, and I’m curious to see how many apps will receive it later this year (or if this option will convince more developers of pro apps to finally bring them to iPad). I find it fascinating – but not surprising at all – that Apple is introducing this possibility while they’re pushing adoption of multiwindow and modern multitasking in iPadOS 15.
This week on AppStories, we dig into the latest iteration of the research and note-taking setup that Federico is using to prepare his annual iOS and iPadOS review, a big part of which features Obsidian.
Sponsored by:
