On this week’s episode of AppStories, we interview two members of Team Alto, Harry Nesbitt and Ryan Cash, about Alto’s Adventure, the challenges they faced in following it up with Alto’s Odyssey, the creative process of making games, and the mobile game industry.
Sponsored by:
Apple posted a short film on its YouTube channel called ‘Welcome Home’ directed by Spike Jonze, starring singer/dancer FKA twigs, and featuring the song ‘’Til It’s Over’ by Anderson .Paak. The video, which promotes the HomePod, is the first since the device was released to spotlight Siri. The spot begins with a young woman’s long, crowded commute home in the rain. She arrives home wet and exhausted barely able to muster “Hey Siri, play me something I’d like.’
She sits down on the couch in a small apartment as the HomePod begins to play ’Til It’s Over.’ As she starts to relax and sway to the music, she discovers she can extend her apartment with simple hand gestures. The remainder of the video is an energetic and colorful dance routine that shows off FKA twigs’ talent as she moves around the apartment extending the walls. The spot ends with FKA twigs opening her eyes as she lies on the couch apparently waking from a dream.
Video can’t capture the sound quality of the HomePod that Apple points to as one of the device’s main selling features. Instead, Jonze captures the convenience of asking Siri to play something you’d like. Siri has serious limitations on the HomePod, but controlling Apple Music works well and is a strength that I’m not surprised to see Apple highlight.
Tinderbox is a powerful Mac app that stores and organizes your notes, plans, and ideas, bringing order and understanding to the vast amounts of information collected when you’re working on a big project. Whether that’s writing a book, creating course materials, planning a wedding, or just managing your day-to-day life, Tinderbox helps impose structure on your data.
The app acts as a personal content assistant giving you the tools you need to discover connections and relationships between your notes that you might otherwise miss. Best of all, Tinderbox adapts to the way you work. You can use mind maps with shapes, colors, and links to surface connections between ideas, or one of many other tools like outlines, word clouds, timelines, and dashboards. Each is a powerful way to gain new insights and perspectives on your ideas.
Tinderbox also has agents and rules, which are fantastic automation tools that can do things like surface a series of tasks coming due soon or a particular topic you’re tracking. The options are only limited by your imagination.
Tinderbox works beautifully with other apps and platforms too. Connect the app to Apple’s Notes app, and notes you enter on your iOS devices or Mac can be automatically categorized in Tinderbox. The app also works with other apps like Evernote, DEVONthink Pro, and Dropbox.
Eastgate, the maker of Tinderbox, has a very special deal just for MacStories readers. Use this link to save $53 on Tinderbox – that’s over 20% off the usual price.
Our thanks to Tinderbox for supporting MacStories this week.
Sketch, the popular design app from Bohemian Coding, received a big update today, but perhaps the most interesting aspect of the update is the incorporation of Apple’s official iOS 11 design template. An earlier update of Sketch added Libraries, sets of design assets that can be saved, reused, and shared. With the new version of Sketch released today, those Libraries can be stored in Sketch Cloud and shared with other Sketch users who can download and subscribe to them.
The utility of the new feature is highlighted by the inclusion of Apple’s official iOS 11 UI Assets as a Shared Library.
We’re really excited to say that we’ve integrated Apple’s iOS 11 design template into Sketch, and can now offer this invaluable resource as a built-in Library.
The Apple iOS UI library has all of the components you’ll need to start working on your next project, carefully crafted for Sketch. This expansive Library includes everything, from tab bars and status bars to buttons and switches, ready to be inserted into your latest designs.
Users can download the iOS 11 design template from the Libraries tab of Sketch’s Preferences. Once downloaded, users will receive notifications of updates to the templates.
Sketch’s latest release also adds prototyping. The feature allows users to link artboards and add animated transitions. Prototypes can be previewed in Sketch, using Bohemian Coding’s Mirror iOS app, or using Sketch Cloud.
To get a sense of what can be done with Sketch’s new prototyping feature, check out the video below by Sam Beckett, who has worked with MacStories in the past on Federico’s iOS concept videos.
Apple released watchOS 4.2 in December with new workout APIs for skiing and snowboarding workouts. Those additions have allowed third-party developers to offer an enhanced workout experience to Apple Watch Series 3 users when they hit the slopes. In a press release today, which was timed with the release of updates to several popular skiing apps, Apple said:
Developers are taking advantage of the built-in GPS and altimeter in Apple Watch Series 3 as well as custom workout APIs released in watchOS 4.2 to enable tracking of specialized metrics. App updates for snoww, Slopes, Squaw Alpine, Snocru and Ski Tracks now track new metrics on the slopes including:
- Total vertical descent and horizontal distance
- Number of runs
- Average and maximum speeds
- Total time spent
- Calories burned
The new workout features include other benefits for skiers and snowboarders too:
Apps can auto pause and resume and users will get credit towards their Activity rings; workout information will also be recorded to the Health app on iPhone with user permission. Using Siri, users can start Slopes and snoww to track their runs using just their voice.
Apps that take advantage of the new watchOS 4.2 features are also spotlighted in the App Store’s Today section and include:
There’s more Apple could do to improve the overall experience of developing for watchOS, but it’s good to see the workout APIs continue to expand and third-party developers take advantage of them.
On this week’s episode of AppStories, we talk about the trends and app culture surrounding mindfulness and meditation apps.
Sponsored by:
Optimizing your WiFi network doesn’t have to be difficult. With WiFi Explorer, you can scan the networks around you, troubleshoot issues that slow yours down, and keep things humming along as conditions change.
The trouble with setting up a WiFi network is that it can be hard to understand how other networks affect yours. WiFi Explorer eliminates the guesswork by providing a rich, graphical visualization of all the networks within range. You can see exactly where you’ve got channel conflicts with overlapping networks and make changes accordingly. It’s invaluable information for fine-tuning your network.
Whether you’re setting up or optimizing your home network or troubleshooting an enterprise network, WiFi Explorer is a fantastic solution. The app reports signal quality based on the signal-to-noise ratio and signal strength, scanning and collecting data continuously so you can analyze it in real-time or save it to study later. There’s also a handy advanced tab with all sorts of network configuration data that’s a lifesaver when you’re troubleshooting a network issue.
WiFi Explorer is incredibly advanced, but if you’re an IT or WLAN professional who needs even more, there’s a Pro version of the app just for you. WiFi Explorer Pro adds active and passive scan modes, integrated spectrum analysis, enhanced filtering, support for networks with hidden SSIDs and remote sensors, dark and light themes, and more.
WiFi Explorer has a special limited-time offer just for MacStories readers. Use the coupon code MACSTORIES30 at checkout to get 30% off on WiFi Explorer or WiFi Explorer Pro.
Thanks to WiFi Explorer for supporting MacStories this week.
On this week’s episode of AppStories, we follow up our RSS app and service episode with a closer look at how each of us uses RSS for work and pleasure reading.
Sponsored by:
Hot on the heels of Twitter’s abandonment of its official Mac client last week, The Iconfactory announced new Twitterrific features and a price reduction.
One of the highlights of the update is enhancements to multi-account support. If you have more than one Twitter account set up in Twitterrific, right clicking on the reply, quote, retweet, or like buttons displays a popup window for choosing which account you want to use for each of those functions. Alternatively, if you are in the middle of composing a reply or quote-tweet, click on your avatar in the compose window to switch the account from which it will be sent.
The Iconfactory has added several other nice refinements too:
Twitterrific for Mac has come a long way since the commencement of its crowdfunding campaign last winter, and many of the shortcomings of version 1.0 that I highlighted in my review last October have been addressed. It’s fantastic to see Twitterrific continue to grow and evolve, especially now that Twitter has walked away from its Mac app.
To celebrate the one year anniversary of Project Phoenix, the crowdsourced Kickstarter project that relaunched Twitterrific on macOS, the price of the app has been reduced from $19.99 to just $7.99. Twitterrific is available on the Mac App Store.
