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10 Years of MacStories

Later this week on Saturday, April 20, MacStories will turn 10 years old.

It was Monday, April 20, 2009 when, fresh out of a job from which I had gotten fired, I decided to publish the first official post on my self-hosted blog after a few weeks of running a free WordPress.com website. I was 21. My English was terrible and, at the time, MacStories was written in two languages, English and Italian – probably to hide my discomfort as a non-native English speaker. If you want to hear this story (and my entire background) in much greater detail, John interviewed me on this week’s special episode of AppStories.

Since that first post about web browsers, MacStories has been on my mind every day and it remains the most important thing I’ve ever built in my adult life. In many ways, MacStories has come to define me.

As you might guess, I’ve struggled to come to terms with the meaning of this anniversary. I don’t like celebrating work-related anniversaries. I don’t think our readers appreciate excessive self-congratulatory content and I’d rather focus on getting work done every day. I prefer to let other people compliment us if they ever feel compelled to do so; otherwise, I just want to focus on providing a service to our audience, because that’s what I’m ultimately here to do: to make sure that MacStories and our related properties can be useful and inspiring for our readers around the world.

Ten years, however, does feel like an extremely long time in Internet years. For this reason, when I started thinking about this looming milestone sometime last year, I knew I had to do something special for this anniversary – just this once – to look back at the past decade of MacStories, reflect on the things I’ve learned along the way, and plan ahead for the future.

Here’s the short version: this week is going to be extra special on MacStories. We’re launching our first official merchandise today (macstoriesmerch.com) and there will be a series of retrospectives published on MacStories throughout the week (keep an eye on this tag). In addition, we will be launching a couple of new perks exclusive to Club MacStories members.

Now, allow me to share some thoughts about creating MacStories and what this website has meant for me over the past 10 years.

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The New TV App: Our Hands-On with Channels, the Redesign, and More

Apple’s TV app is getting a makeover, and just in time for its expansion to smart TVs and third-party streaming devices. The new app is coming first, of course, to Apple’s own hardware: the Apple TV, iPhone, and iPad will be updated in May with the new TV experience; the Mac will follow this fall.

I’ve used Apple’s TV app as my primary video hub since it launched in late 2016, so I was eager to get my hands on the updated app. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long – an early version of the new TV app is available now as part of the iOS 12.3 and tvOS 12.3 beta releases. Here are full details on all the ways it’s new and improved.

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New AirPods First Impressions: Wireless Magic

I don’t think I need to extol the virtues of AirPods in 2019. Over two years after their debut, Apple’s truly-wireless earbuds, in addition to providing users with a convenient, seamless way to stream music and podcasts to their ears, have become a cultural phenomenon that has spurred some of the greatest memes of Tech Twitter in recent history. Everybody loves AirPods – provided their unique size and design fit their ears – and, most of all, everybody likes to say how much they love their AirPods.

This article is no different, but there’s a small twist in the usual narrative that prompted me to write this story after receiving my second-generation AirPods yesterday.

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The Case of the Late-2012 iMacs

The recent iMac updates brought additional power and flexibility to Apple’s all-in-one desktop, but didn’t redesign or modernize the iMac as we’ve known it for many years.

As the 21.5- and 27-inch machines are here to stay for at least a while longer, I thought it would be a good time to look back at the first of their kind, introduced at a press event in October 2012. You probably can’t tell if the press image above is from 2012 or 2019.

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Reconsidering Evernote in 2019

Like the best origin stories, this article comes from humble beginnings. A few weeks ago, I had the idea of adapting my shortcut to save webpage selections from Safari (see Weekly 151, 152, and 153) to make it work with Keep It rather than a JSON file. Simple enough, right? Given a text selection in Safari, I wanted to see if I could create a shortcut to append rich text to an existing document in Keep It without launching the app.

As Club MacStories members know, Keep It is the app I’ve been using for the past several months to hold my research material, which played an essential role in the making of my iOS 12 review (see Issues 135 and 144) of MacStories Weekly). But then I remembered that Keep It’s integration with Shortcuts was limited to URL schemes and that the app did not offer Siri shortcuts to append content to existing notes1. That was the beginning of a note-taking vision quest that culminated in this column, even though I’m not sure I reached the destination I was originally seeking.

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Why the Siri Face Is All I Need from My Apple Watch

What should a wrist computer ideally do for you?

Telling the time is a given, and activity tracking has become another default inclusion for that category of gadget. But we’re talking about a computer here, not a simple watch with built-in pedometer. The device should present the information you need, exactly when you need it. This would include notifications to be sure, but also basic data like the weather forecast and current date. It should integrate with the various cloud services you depend on to keep your life and work running – calendars, task managers, and the like. It doesn’t have to be all business though – throwing in a little surprise and delight would be nice too, because we can all use some added sparks of joy throughout our days.

Each of these different data sources streaming through such a device presents a dilemma: how do you fit so much data on such a tiny screen? By necessity a wrist computer’s display is small, limiting how much information it can offer at once. This challenge makes it extremely important for the device to offer data that’s contextual – fit for the occasion – and dynamic – constantly changing.

Serving a constant flow of relevant data is great, but a computer that’s tied to your wrist, always close at hand, could do even more. It could serve as a control center of sorts, providing a quick and easy way to perform common actions – setting a timer or alarm, toggling smart home devices on and off, adjusting audio playback, and so on. Each of these controls must be presented at just the right time, custom-tailored for your normal daily needs.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because this product already exists: the Apple Watch. However, most of the functionality I described doesn’t apply to the average Watch owner’s experience, because most people use a watch face that doesn’t offer these capabilities – at least not many of them. The Watch experience closest to that of the ideal wrist computer I’ve envisioned is only possible with a single watch face: the Siri face.

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Ten Years Ago, Apple Said Goodbye to Macworld but Set the Stage for the Future

Macworld 2009. Image via Engadget

Macworld 2009. Image via Engadget

In January 2009, Apple took to the stage at Macworld Expo one final time. The company announced the change a few weeks before the show. Phil Schiller would deliver the keynote. News of Steve Jobs’ medical leave would break just weeks later, one day before the keynote.

All of this cast a weird vibe over the event, and while it was far from Apple’s most exciting keynote, it’s worth revisiting Phil Schiller’s three announcements now, ten years later.1

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Revisiting Evernote: Checking in with the Former Note-Taking King

Evernote is still alive. The popular note-taking app celebrated its tenth birthday last summer, but the last few of those years haven’t been easy, with two CEO transitions and sizable layoffs at several points. Still, the core product keeps pushing forward.

I last reviewed Evernote in early 2017, when version 8 of its iOS app launched as a major redesign. I concluded then that one of the service’s greatest strengths, particularly when compared with competitors like Apple Notes, is that Evernote strives to be more than just a note-taking app. It’s a solid way to take notes, but it also aims to make those notes easily accessible, to create connections between notes, and ultimately serve as a valuable aid to productivity.

Though Evernote has retained a large user base all these years later, and in fact became cash flow positive nearly two years ago, there are a lot of former users who left the service long ago and haven’t looked back. Personally, while I’ve kept an eye on Evernote over the years, I never put its recent updates to the test – until recently, that is, when I set out to revisit the popular note-taker.

As part of checking back in on Evernote, there were three core features I wanted to focus on evaluating: Templates, Context, and Dark Mode. These are some of the major developments Evernote has touted in its last few years of work, and they make for an interesting case study on the company’s future direction.

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Thinking Different: Keys to Adopting an iPad-First Workflow

No matter how tech-inclined a person may be, no one sits down at their first computer and instantly finds themselves at home with the device. We all have our own tales of computing learning curves – figuring out how menus, file systems, and other traditional software elements work. Similarly, when making the move from one type of computer to another, there’s an adaptation cost in acquainting yourself with all that’s new. This is true when switching from a PC to a Mac, and also a Mac to an iPad.

Before the iPad Pro debuted in late 2015, transitions from Mac to iPad were extremely scarce. The iPad’s hardware and software were both far too limited to compel many switchers. The software has advanced since that time – thanks to Split View, drag and drop, and Files, it’s far easier to work on an iPad than before – but there’s plenty more progress still to be made. The hardware, however, is where the iPad has shined most, especially with the newest iPad Pros.

Compare the iPad Pro’s hardware to Apple’s modern Mac lineup and the difference is striking. The iPad has Face ID, while Macs are stuck with Touch ID; the iPad has a Liquid Retina display with ProMotion, and Macs are still Retina only; the iPad Pro benchmarks comparably to the most powerful portable Macs; iPads can include LTE, while Macs cannot; and where Mac keyboards are vulnerable to specs of dust, the iPad’s Smart Keyboard Folio can endure any crumbs you throw at it – plus, with the iPad you can choose the keyboard that’s best for you. To top off all these advantages, the iPad Pro is also more affordable than most Macs.

Software limitations aside, the iPad clearly has a lot going for it; the iPad Pro is a more attractive Mac alternative than ever before. But moving to the iPad still involves some growing pains. The longer you’ve used a traditional computer, the harder an iPad transition can be. There are a few key things, however, that can help make your iPad adoption a success.

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