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MacStories Unwind: Dark Noise, Soor, and Game Reviews, Plus a Developer Debrief

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This week on MacStories Unwind:

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  • MacStories Weekly
    • iOS 14 tips from Federico
    • A Collection of John’s favorite first-gen Catalyst apps
    • Ryan on why the iPadOS update is a bigger deal than it appears
    • An interview with Spend Stack developer Jordan Morgan
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MacStories Unwind: Pixelmator Pro and Ulysses Updates, Plus a HomeKit Camera

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This week, Federico and John celebrate World Emoji Day with big updates to Pixelmator Pro and Ulysses, a rundown of iOS 13.6 features, the Eve Cam, plus YouTube creator and movie Unwind picks.

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  • MacStories Weekly
    • Favorite: GoodLinks
    • Shortcuts: Federico’s Reminders shortcuts
    • Extension Column: Ryan on Widgets
  • MacStories Unplugged, a Club-exclusive podcast
    • A porcupine story leads to bigger and better animal stories and Federico’s brush with the police for trespassing on an abandoned golf course. Plus, John provides an update on his macOS Big Sur review, including the apps he’s using as he finalizes his research and outlines the review.
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Apple Shares Preview of Upcoming Emoji with Emojipedia

Source: Emojipedia.org

Source: Emojipedia.org

Back in January, the Unicode Consortium approved Emoji 13.0, which is used by companies like Apple to create new emoji designs. In Apple’s case, new emoji are expected to ship in a point update to the company’s OSes in the fall. In the meantime, though, Apple has shared a preview of its upcoming designs with Emojipedia.

The new designs include a wide variety of images including a ninja, a dodo bird, a boomerang, nesting dolls, pinched fingers, a tamale, bubble tea, and others. If past years are any indication, the new emoji will we released with iOS and iPadOS 14.1 or 14.2 and with a macOS update sometime in October.

For a run-down on all of the upcoming emoji, be sure to visit Emojipedia.

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Pixelmator Pro 1.7 Adds Type to Path, Canvas Rotation, and More

Source: Pixelmator.

Source: Pixelmator.

Version 1.7 of Pixelmator Pro was released today with support for placing text along a path, rotating the app’s canvas, a refinement of ML Super Resolution, and a new quick-start welcome screen.

The update, dubbed Sequoia, adds three type tools: Circular Type, Path Type, and Freeform Type. You can pick one of those tools to create a path for your text or click on an existing path in a project to type along it. With the text tool selected, your pointer switches as you approach the border of a shape in your project to the text path tool, indicating that you can begin typing along the shape with a click. The tool supports emoji and SVG fonts and can be converted to shapes too.

Source: Pixelmator.

Source: Pixelmator.

Canvas rotation is handled by a circular puck in the lower-right corner of Pixelmator Pro’s image viewer. You can enter a precise number of degrees to rotate the canvas, drag the dot along the circle’s perimeter, or use multi-touch on a trackpad to dial in the exact rotation you want. When using the trackpad to rotate, Pixelmator Pro provides haptic feedback in 90-degree increments, which is a nice touch. By default, the rotation tool appears when you begin a trackpad rotation, but you can set it to always or never be visible from the View menu too. Canvas rotation is a fantastic addition for anyone using Pixelmator Pro with Sidecar on an iPad.

Source: Pixelmator.

Source: Pixelmator.

There have always been several entry points into Pixelmator Pro, but it’s easier to pick the one you want with the new welcome screen. The screen includes recent documents, the option to create a new empty document from one of the app’s many templates, and the ability to pick an image from Photos or anywhere in your Mac’s file system.

Finally, today’s update also adds improvements to ML Super Resolution. This feature refines images’ resolution to allow them to be displayed at bigger sizes with a minimum amount of blurring. It’s a handy feature that I’ve used in the past to upscale screenshots of standard definition video. In addition to working better than before with the latest update, MS Super Resolution has added support for RAW images and a progress bar.

Pixelmator Pro has long been one of my favorite image editors on the Mac. With each release, the app has gained additional functionality that makes it more than just a photo editor. With tools like typing along a path and canvas rotation, Pixelmator Pro should be far more capable than ever before in a designer’s hands.


Apple Releases iOS 13.6 with Apple News Audio Features and Expanded Local News Coverage, Plus Digital Car Key Support

Today Apple announced big enhancements to its Apple News offerings paired with the launch of iOS 13.6. Apple News is entering the world of audio through two main products: a daily news program called Apple News Today, which is available free to all users, as well as premium audio versions of News+ stories which are exclusive to paying News+ subscribers. iOS 13.6 also introduces curated local news experiences to Apple News in a handful of regions, and brings initial support for the digital car key feature first announced at WWDC.

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MacStories Unwind: The Evolution of iPadOS, Widgets, ADA Interviews, and a New Use for ARKit

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This week on MacStories Unwind:

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  • John’s Pick:
    • Hanna available on Amazon Prime Video

Apple Opens First Public Betas for iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS 14

Apple has opened its public beta program for iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14 on the Apple Beta Software Program website.

Developers, who can access betas of Apple’s OS releases before the general public, received the first developer betas on June 22nd, the first day of WWDC and a second version earlier this week. If past practice is a guide, the public beta released today should be identical to the second developer beta released on Tuesday.

If you would like to sign up but haven’t, visit beta.apple.com and log in using your Apple ID. It should go without saying that you should only install betas on your devices after you’ve taken appropriate steps to protect your data and are willing to endure potentially buggy software.

For more on what’s in the betas check out our full overviews of iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 and tvOS 14, which are terrific overviews that we published during WWDC.

Stay tuned for more over the summer too. The MacStories team is working on special preview stories that cover a wide range of features in the public betas as we approach the publication of our annual OS reviews this fall. Federico and I will also be doing some special interview episodes of AppStories this summer to dig deeper into what the new OSes will mean to MacStories readers and the apps they love.

Update: An earlier version of this story stated that the macOS Big Sur and watchOS 7 public betas have been released too, which was incorrect. We expect macOS Big Sur and watchOS 7 to be released soon, but they are not yet available.


Apple Updates Coding Resources for Students, Teachers, and Families

Apple has updated its lineup of coding resources for kids and educators across the board and introduced all-new resources for parents and children interested in learning to program from home.

Apple first introduced its Everyone to Code program in 2016. That program was joined by Develop in Swift in 2019. Between the two programs, Apple has developed resources for students of all ages and their teachers. With today’s announcement, Apple has updated its existing materials and is expanding them with new offerings. As Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Markets, Apps, and Services describes it in an Apple press release:

“Apple has worked alongside educators for 40 years, and we’re especially proud to see how Develop in Swift and Everyone Can Code have been instrumental in helping teachers and students make an impact in their communities. We’ve seen community college students build food security apps for their campus and watched middle school educators host virtual coding clubs over summer break. As part of our commitment to help expand access to computer science education, we are thrilled to be adding a new professional learning course to help more educators, regardless of their experience, have the opportunity to learn coding and teach the next generation of developers and designers.”

The new course that Prescott mentions is a free online course that educators can take to prepare themselves to teach Apple’s Develop in Swift curriculum.

Apple has also updated its set of four free Develop in Swift books that are available from the Apple Books app. The company also introduced a new Everyone Can Code book and teacher guide called Everyone Can Code: Adventures, which is also available in Apple Books.

Also introduced today is a new coding guide that parents and their kids can use at home:

To support parents with kids learning to code at home, Apple is adding a new guide to its set of remote learning resources. “A Quick Start to Code” is now available and features 10 coding challenges designed for learners ages 10 and up, on iPad or Mac. Additional resources are available on Apple’s new Learning from Home website, launched this spring, where educators and parents can access on-demand videos and virtual conferences on remote learning, and schedule free one-on-one virtual coaching sessions, all hosted by educators at Apple. New videos are being added all the time as part of the Apple Education Learning Series — including videos about using Apple’s industry-leading accessibility features.

As someone who struggled to find good resources for my kids to learn to code when they were younger, I’m pleased to see that Apple has continued to expand and support its educational programs. These programs, along with Swift Playgrounds, are rich resources for kids, teachers, and their parents and a terrific way to help kids get started with coding.

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MacStories Unwind: The ADAs, New Apple Watch Details, and Big Sur’s Redesign

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This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    • John shares a collection of small but interesting changes coming in macOS Big Sur
    • Federico shares an OmniFocus shortcut for iOS and iPadOS 14
    • Ryan considers Apple’s plans for gaming
    • We’ve got a reader straw poll about WWDC 2020
  • Monthly Log
    • John on the Big Sur redesign and whether it’s a sign of an imminent touchscreen Mac, part of a longer-term experiment, or something else
    • Stephen considers the design changes coming to the Mac with Big Sur
    • Ryan shares some of the apps he’s switching to while testing iOS and iPadOS 14

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