What becomes a favorite app is personal, complicated, and evolves over time. Favorites can be brand-new apps that debuted this year, old standbys that you go back to over and over, or newly-discovered apps that have been around for a while. With the end of the year in sight Alex, Jake, and I got together and each picked a handful of our favorite Mac apps that we used in 2016 to share with you.
Posts in roundups
Our Favorite Mac Apps of 2016
#MacStoriesDeals Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2016: The Best Deals for iOS and Mac Apps & Games
Every year, thousands of iOS and macOS app deals are launched for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. At MacStories, we handpick the best deals for iOS and Mac apps and collect them in a single roundup with links to buy or share discounted products directly. You don’t have to be overwhelmed by app deals; we take care of finding the best ones for you.
Bookmark this post and come back to find updated deals starting today through Monday. Updates will be listed as new entries at the top of each section; iOS apps are organized in sub-categories for easier navigation.
For real-time updates, you can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.
Exploring the iMessage App Store One Month Later: Our Favorite Stickers and iMessage Apps
It was clear before iOS 10 launched that sticker packs and iMessage apps were going to be big. The only question was – how big? In the last 30 days, the iMessage App Store has exploded. According to SensorTower, there were over 1,650 sticker packs and apps available in the iMessage App Store after just ten days. The first couple of weeks felt like the early days of the App Store. If you wanted to, you could browse every sticker pack and iMessage app available. There were a lot, but you could make out the edges where the store stopped. One indication of the iMessage App Store’s growth is that those edges are rapidly disappearing.
Over the past four weeks, we’ve been scouring the iMessage App Store for the best stickers and apps. We started sharing some of the best in the Club MacStories Weekly newsletter, but every time we went back to the store there were three more cool things for every one we had shared. So, to mark the first full month of iOS 10, we thought we would do another, even bigger roundup of iMessage apps and sticker packs with the best ones shared with Club MacStories members so far, plus a whole lot more.
Messages Apps and Sticker Packs Roundup
Messages started life as an innovative app that unified SMS with Apple’s own free iMessage service when it was introduced five years ago. As time passed, Messages fell behind many of its competitors like Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, and others.
With the introduction of iOS 10, Apple has made up substantial ground with Messages while upholding its commitment to customer privacy. Few third-party developers would have imagined even a couple of years ago that Apple would open up one of its most important first-party apps to them, but that is precisely what Apple has done with iOS 10.
In the process of unlocking Messages, Apple has created a whole ecosystem of apps and sticker packs with their own dedicated store built right into Messages. Developers immediately sensed an opportunity and an all-new land rush is in full swing.
Over recent weeks, Federico and I have tested dozens of iMessage apps and sticker packs, exchanged hundreds of stickers, made interactive to-do lists, played games, edited photos, and much, much more. Some of the things we’ve tried are highlighted in Federico’s iOS 10 review to illustrate particular aspects of the Messages app, but we’ve seen so many interesting apps and stickers, we wanted to share them with readers in one place.
The 9.7-inch iPad Pro: Our Complete Overview
At a media event held earlier today at its campus in Cupertino, Apple took the wraps off the highly anticipated smaller iPad Pro. With a 9.7-inch display (same size of the iPad Air 2) and carrying (mostly) the same features of its 12.9-inch counterpart, the smaller iPad Pro brings all the power of the bigger iPad Pro in a more compact package with some new additions as well.
“iPad Pro is a new generation of iPad that is indispensable and immersive, enabling people to be more productive and more creative. It’s incredibly fast, extremely portable, and completely natural to use with your fingers, Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard. And now it comes in two sizes,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.
Apple Releases iOS 9.3: A Collection of New Features and Tidbits
With an announcement in January, Apple unveiled iOS 9.3, a surprisingly feature-rich update to iOS 9 with major changes for education and several tweaks to the user experience of system apps. After the generally positive response to iOS 9 and the 9.1 and 9.2 updates, few were expecting Apple to bring more features to iOS 9 ahead of WWDC and the (likely) unveiling of iOS 10.
For the past two months, I’ve been using iOS 9.3 on my two primary devices (an iPad Pro and iPhone 6s Plus) starting with the first beta, and I’ve been keeping track of all the changes – big and small – that Apple is bringing with their latest iOS release. Below, you’ll find a collection of everything I’ve discovered.
#MacStoriesDeals: January 20th, 2016
We’ve collected the best #MacStoriesDeals for January 20, 2016, so be quick and get them! Today, a lot of productivity-related iOS and OS X apps went on sale in what appears to be an organized promotion across the App Store – similar to the ‘Get Productive’ sale launched around the same time last year.
For more deals, you can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.
New Apps for 2016
Every year around this time, after compiling a list of my must-have apps and thinking about the goals I want to achieve in the next 12 months, I like to get started on the upcoming season of writing by reassessing some of the ways I get work done. Change never stops: rather than getting stuck in my own ways and refusing to embrace it, I feed my curiosity by entertaining the possibility of better tools for my trade.
Plus, it’s always fun to spend a couple of weeks trying a bunch of apps and new services, seeing what works and should be explored further.
While this has become a new-year tradition, I’ve only written about it once – four years ago, when I was just getting started on the “iPad as a computer” idea. With 2016 and the transition to primary computer finally complete, I thought it’d be appropriate to publish a similar article again – if anything, for future reference.1
The apps below aren’t my new must-haves. They are alternatives or additions to my current must-haves that I’m considering out of intellectual curiosity for now. I’m not ready to fully endorse them, but I like some aspects of them. Most of them aren’t new, but they’ve received redesigns or feature updates that piqued my interest again.
Apple’s 2015: Year In Review
2015 was a big year from Apple, arguably its biggest yet. Over the course of the past twelve months we’ve seen Apple release the MacBook, Apple Watch, iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, iPad Pro, new Apple TV, refresh the MacBook Air and iMac, and even release updated iPods. Then there’s all the new software from iOS 9 to OS X El Capitan, to watchOS 2, and even the unveiling of tvOS.
In assembling this story, I thought about how I could present the information in a way that wouldn’t be overwhelming and would hopefully be unique from everyone else’s “year in review” stories. As you can see below, I choose to display it in an interactive widget. You’ll be able to see at a glance which months were significant for Apple, and for what reason (iPhone, Mac, TV, etc). Then you can dive into a particular month and swipe across to get summaries of the big stories from Apple. If you want to learn more about a particular story, there’s a link that’ll take you to the full story.