iOS and iPadOS 17 After One Month: It’s All About Widgets, Apps, and Stage Manager

iOS and iPadOS 17.

iOS and iPadOS 17.

Apple is releasing the first public betas of iOS and iPadOS 17 today, and I’ll cut right to the chase: I’ve been using both of them on my primary devices since WWDC, and I’m very satisfied with the new features and improvements I’ve seen to date – especially on iPadOS. More importantly, both OSes are bringing back the same sense of fun and experimentation I felt three years ago with iOS 14.

I’ve already written about the improvements to Stage Manager on the iPad ahead of the public beta of iPadOS 17. Without repeating myself, I’m still surprised by the fact that Apple addressed my core complaints about Stage Manager a mere year after iPadOS 16. To describe my past year in iPad land as “turbulent” would be a euphemism; and yet, iPadOS 17’s improved Stage Manager not only fixes the essence of what was broken last year, but even eclipses, in my opinion, the Mac version of Stage Manager at this point.

I love using Stage Manager on my iPad now. There are still features missing from iPadOS 17 that won’t allow me to stop using my MacBook Air but, by and large, the enhancements in iPadOS 17 have allowed me to be an iPad-first user again. It feels good to write that. Plus, there are some surprises in iPadOS 17 that I wasn’t expecting that I’ll cover below.

iOS 17 is not a huge software update: there are dozens of quality-of-life features that I like and – best of all – terrific updates on the widget front. A good way to sum up Apple’s software strategy this year is the following: widgets are everywhere now (including the Watch), they’re interactive (finally), and they’re likely pointing at new hardware on the horizon (you know). As someone who’s been wishing for widget interactivity since the days of iOS 14, I can’t even begin to describe how amazing it’s been to see third-party developers come up with wild ideas for what effectively feel like mini-apps on the Home Screen.

I’m equally impressed by the work Apple has put into some of its built-in apps this year with features that I’ve always wanted and never thought the company would build. You can create internal links to other notes in the Notes app. Reminders has a column view. Podcasts has a proper queue. Even Reading List – of all features – has been updated this year. In using iOS 17, I sometimes get the sense that Apple went through popular wish lists from the community and decided to add all the top requests in a single release.

To quote my friend Stephen Hackett: the vibe is good this year, and it applies to software as well. Let me tell you about some of my favorite aspects of iOS and iPadOS 17 from the past month.

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Shiny Frog Releases Bear 2.0

Today, Shiny Frog launched Bear 2.0, a ground-up rewrite of its popular note-taking app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac that has been years in the making. The new version has been rebuilt with a custom text editing engine and introduces a long list of features, including:

  • Tables
  • Section folding
  • Tables of contents and backlinks
  • Footnotes
  • Nested text styling
  • Sketching
  • Sidebar pinning
  • Link and PDF previews
  • Image cropping and resizing
  • Custom fonts and new themes
  • And more

A lot has happened in the note-taking world since Bear was first released on the App Store in 2016 and won over writers with its modern design and Markdown-friendly features. Block-based editors like Craft and Notion have become popular as have a long list of plain-text editors, like Obsidian and Roam Research, that support wiki-style linking.

With Bear 2.0, Shiny Frog seems to be trying to thread a needle by maintaining the elegant design of the Bear 1.0 while accommodating the advanced features of more recent entrants to the note-taking category. That’s not easy to do, but I like what I’ve seen in my early use of the update.

Today’s update comes with a new price structure too. Bear is available on the App Store as a free download but requires a subscription for some features. As Shiny Frog announced in the spring, existing subscribers won’t be charged more as long as they maintain their current subscription, but new users (and re-subscribers) will pay $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

AppStories, Episode 342 – The Web Apps We Use→

This week on AppStories, we explore the web apps and services we use and how we use them.

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The App Store Turns 15

Fifteen years ago, the App Store opened its doors with 500 apps. Today, the number of apps has swelled to exceed more than 1.5 million.

OmniFocus for iPhone.

OmniFocus for iPhone.

Of those first-day apps, a few are still around, including OmniFocus. Today, Ken Case, The Omni Group’s founder and CEO, shared what that first day was like on the company’s blog:

Imagine our amazement to see OmniFocus at #7 on the list—the only productivity app in the top ten! By 9am, more of our team were in the office and by 10am we’d accidentally sent a few more copies of our press release. (Can you tell we’d been pulling all-nighters?)

At 10:25am, I received congratulatory email asking if I’d noticed that OmniFocus was the 3rd most popular paid app in the App Store. I thanked them for letting me know, and noted there were a lot of smiles around Omni that day!

That weekend saw the launch of the iPhone 3G with the App Store, and 11,000 people bought OmniFocus that first weekend alone.

PCalc for iPhone 1.0.

PCalc for iPhone 1.0.

Other apps, like James Thomson’s PCalc, turned 15 today, too.

Twitterrific was there on day one as well but didn’t quite make it to 15 unfortunately.

For other notable first-day apps, be sure to check out Craig Grannell’s story on 15 notable first-day apps for Stuff.tv.

If today’s anniversary puts you in a nostalgic mood, we had extensive coverage of the App Store’s 10th anniversary in 2018, all of which is available here.

Two-Day Indie Apps Sales Event Begins Tomorrow with over 100 Apps→

Amazon’s Prime Day begins tomorrow and with the Internet in a buying mood, Matt Corey gathered indie developers to organize an App Store sale that runs from Tuesday, July 11 - 12. Corey, the maker of Bills to Budget and Signals, has put together a collection of over 100 apps that will be offered at a discount tomorrow and Wednesday. The list is too long to publish here, but includes many we’ve covered here on MacStories and on Club MacStories in the past, including:

There are a lot of great deals, with many apps discounted 50% or more, and what’s listed above is less than a quarter of the participating apps, so be sure to visit Corey’s GitHub page for all the details, including discount codes for the apps that aren’t on the App Store, and support these great indie apps.

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Stupid Companies Make AI Promises. Smart Companies Have AI Policies. [Sponsor]

It seems like every company is scrambling to stake their claim in the AI goldrush–check out the CEO of Kroger promising to bring LLMs into the dairy aisle. And front line workers are following suit–experimenting with AI so they can work faster and do more.

In the few short months since ChatGPT debuted, hundreds of AI-powered tools have come on the market. But while AI-based tools have genuinely helpful applications, they also pose profound security risks. Unfortunately, most companies still haven’t come up with policies to manage those risks. In the absence of clear guidance around responsible AI use, employees are blithely handing over sensitive data to untrustworthy tools. 

AI-based browser extensions offer the clearest illustration of this phenomenon. The Chrome store is overflowing with extensions that (claim to) harness ChatGPT to do all manner of tasks: punching up emails, designing graphics, transcribing meetings, and writing code. But these tools are prone to at least three types of risk.

  1. Malware: Security researchers keep uncovering AI-based extensions that steal user data. These extensions play on users’ trust of the big tech platforms (“it can’t be dangerous if Google lets it on the Chrome store!”) and they often appear to work, by hooking up to ChatGPT et al’s APIs. 
  2. Data Governance: Companies including Apple and Verizon have banned their employees from using LLMs because these products rarely offer a guarantee that a user’s inputs won’t be used as training data.
  3. Prompt Injection Attacks: In this little known but potentially unsolvable attack, hidden text on a webpage directs an AI tool to perform malicious actions–such as exfiltrate data and then delete the records. 

Up until now, most companies have been caught flat-footed by AI, but these risks are too serious to ignore. 

At Kolide, we’re taking a two-part approach to governing AI use.

  1. Draft AI policies as a team. We don’t want to totally ban our team from using AI, we just want to use it safely. So our first step is meeting with representatives from multiple teams to figure out what they’re getting out of AI-based tools, and how we can provide them with secure options that don’t expose critical data or infrastructure.
  2. Use Kolide to block malicious tools. Kolide lets IT and security teams write Checks that detect device compliance issues, and we’ve already started creating Checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Now if an employee accidentally downloads malware, they’ll be prevented from logging into our cloud apps until they’ve removed it.

Every company will have to craft policies based on their unique needs and concerns, but the important thing is to start now. There’s still time to seize the reins of AI, before it gallops away with your company’s data.

To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.

Our thank to Kolide for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: What’s the Deal with Fireworks?

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This week on MacStories Unwind, I explain America’s birthday to Federico and we veer into man-made lakes and nuclear power plants before recommending some of the many iPhone chargers we’ve been trying lately.

The Fourth of July

iOS 17-Compatible MagSafe Chargers and Battery Packs

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Chronicling: A Flexible Event Tracker with Modern Features and A Top-Notch Design

Chronicling is a brand-new event tracking app for iOS and iPadOS by Rebecca Owen. The App Store is full of apps for tracking everything from the very specific, like caffeine consumption, to apps like Chronicling that can be used to track nearly anything. What makes Owen’s app unique, though, is it’s one of the best examples of modern SwiftUI design that I’ve seen that incorporates the still relatively new Swift Charts and other recent Apple technologies to deliver a great user experience.

Trackers like Chronicling are the perfect fit for the iPhone. Most people have the device with them all the time, which makes it perfect for collecting data frequently, but it’s what you do with that data that matters the most. Maybe you’re trying to learn a new language and want to track how often you practice to hold yourself accountable. Or maybe your knee has been bothering you, and you want to keep track of when it flares up to see if it corresponds to an activity in your life. The point is, whether you’re trying to form a new habit or find patterns in things that happen throughout your day, part of the process is gathering the data. The other half of the equation is breaking the data down in a meaningful way. Chronicling does both well.

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Users Join Threads in Droves

Last night, by the time I called it quits and went to bed Threads, Meta’s new social network, had hit 2 million users in 2 hours. As I write this, Meta’s Adam Mosseri says the count has now surpassed 10 million in 7 hours, which exceeds Mastodon’s user base.

Currently, Threads is a pretty barebones 1.0 experience that was undoubtedly released this week to capitalize on Twitter’s latest troubles. The app is also buggy. I’ve seen posts fail to load, glitchy interactions, and other bugs, but despite the load, the new service has held up under the influx of users, which is impressive, although not entirely surprising given Meta’s scale.

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