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Relay FM Kicks Off Its Fourth Annual Fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Today, Relay FM, which was founded by our close friends Stephen Hackett and Myke Hurley, kicked off its annual fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to help combat childhood cancer. We’d love it if MacStories readers joined us in supporting this cause.

You can make a donation by visiting here.

If you’re a MacStories reader, there’s a good chance you have listened to one of the shows Federico co-hosts on the network or have another favorite, in which case you may have already contributed. However, if not, please consider donating.

St. Jude plays an important role in the fight against childhood cancer, treating kids, and doing research with other medical facilities around the world. Your donations help ensure that families aren’t charged for treatment, travel, housing, or meals, so their sole focus is helping their child get better.

Relay FM will be raising money for St. Jude through the end of September, with the highlight of the drive being Podcastathon, a multi-hour extravaganza featuring special guests from your favorite Relay FM shows that will be held September 16th and will be streamed on Relay FM’s Twitch channel.

This year, Relay FM has added the ability for others to start their own fundraising campaigns to help it achieve its goal. Anyone who participates and raises $1 or more will earn a special Relay FM challenge coin. Raise $250 or more, and you’ll receive a deskmat decorated with a sea of Myke and Stephen cartoon heads.

Thanks in advance for checking out Relay FM’s fundraiser for St. Jude and to all who donate.

Last Week, on Club MacStories: Watch Face Automation, Club-Only Wallpapers, a Giveaway, and an Anniversary Town Hall

Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings along with a look at what’s coming up next:

First Anniversary of Club MacStories+ Town Hall

Last week we marked the first anniversary of the expansion of Club MacStories with a special audio event in the Club MacStories+ Discord community. Federico, Alex and I were joined by Relay FM co-founders Stephen Hackett and Myke Hurley to look back at the Club’s past year, hear what Relay FM is doing to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital this year, and share the technology that has had the biggest impact on our lives in the past year.

MacStories Weekly: Issue 333

In issue 333 of MacStories Weekly:

Kosmik: For All Mindkind [Sponsor]

Kosmik is a dashboard for your creativity. Built for designers, researchers, and writers, Kosmik’s infinite canvas for the iPad and Mac lets you bring together notes, your writing, images, websites, PDFs, and more on a single canvas called a Universe, so you can stop switching between apps and focus on what you’re creating.

Everything in a Kosmik Universe is a card, and cards from one canvas can be incorporated into another, making the first canvas app with the sort of transclusion found in note-taking apps like Roam Research and Obsidian. It’s a powerful yet simple architecture that reduces friction, so you can focus on your work.

The flexibility of Kosmik’s canvas means you can take notes, browse the web, collect PDFs, images and other resources, and write all in one place. That encourages spatial thinking, making new connections and links between materials, and reduces distractions all at once in a single easy-to-use interface.

Kosmik is a completely native, peer-to-peer solution that respects your privacy. The app syncs your data between devices with no central server. Everything is encrypted end-to-end too.

You can publish your Kosmik canvases and cards to the web for sharing with colleagues, and even more collaboration features are coming later this year. Kosmik is available on the web now, too, making it accessible in more places and to more users than ever before.

If you’re looking for a new way to organize your thoughts, writing, and, really, anything else, sign up for Kosmik today. MacStories readers can enjoy a free year of access just by following this link. From ideation to production, Kosmik lets you think better and more freely to uncover insights and have some fun too!

Kosmik is available to download on the App Store and also offers great resources for new users like its Substack newsletter and Discord community.

Our thanks to Kosmik for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Apple Schedules Media Event for September 7, 2022

Apple has confirmed that its first fall event will be held on September 7th at 10:00 am Pacific US time. For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, this fall’s event will include an in-person component.

Invitations to other members of the press invite them to tune into the video stream of the event.

It’s expected that Apple will unveil the latest crop of iPhone and Apple Watches on September 7th, and perhaps announce updates to products like the AirPods Pro.

Apple Confirms iPadOS Update Will Be Released After iOS 16

On the heels of a report earlier this month by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman that Apple would delay the release of iPadOS until October, the company has confirmed that the OS will follow the release of iOS, although it hasn’t said exactly when. In a statement to TechCrunch today, Apple said:

 This is an especially big year for iPadOS. As its own platform with features specifically designed for iPad, we have the flexibility to deliver iPadOS on its own schedule. This Fall, iPadOS will ship after iOS, as version 16.1 in a free software update.

That means version 16.1 will be the first public release of iPadOS, skipping version 16.0 entirely.

The issues with the iPadOS 16 betas, in particular Stage Manager, are well documented. The feature has a lot of promise, but as Federico covered in his iPadOS preview and as we’ve discussed on AppStories, there are still significant bugs and design inconsistencies. Hopefully, the extra development time will allow Apple to ship a more refined version of Stage Manager that delivers on the vision that the company clearly has for the feature.

Everything New Coming to the Home App in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura

I’ve spent a lot of time in the Home app since moving to North Carolina. I moved right after WWDC, so I’ve disassembled, reassembled, and reconfigured my home automation setup, all in the midst of testing the latest iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS betas. What I’ve learned is that the Home app’s new design is much better for navigating a large collection of smart devices than before, but the app’s changes don’t go far enough. The app’s automation options are still too rudimentary, which limits what you can accomplish with them. Still, the update is an important one worth exploring because it promises to relieve a lot of the past frustration with the Home app.

One question that’s fair to ask about Home’s redesign is: Why now? The app’s big, chunky square tiles have been a feature of the app since the start and criticized just as long. The issues that I suspect have spurred the change are two-fold. First, the square tiles of the app’s previous design were too uniform, making it hard to distinguish one device from another. Second, they wasted space. That was less of a concern on a Mac or bigger iPad, but no matter which iPhone you used, Home could never display more than a handful of devices. Both issues have been problematic for a while, but with the Matter standard poised to bring more devices into the Home app, the issues were bound to get even worse without a redesign.

Say goodbye to Home's sea of square tiles.

Say goodbye to Home’s sea of square tiles.

Since Home was first released, Apple has tweaked the iconography available in Home and added a row of status buttons along the top of the app, but the big space-wasting tiles endured. That led me to control my HomeKit devices with Siri most of the time. That’s not a bad way to control devices, but it’s not as reliable as tapping a button. Plus, the app is just more convenient than Siri in many situations, like when I’m already using my iPhone for something else or when it’s early in the morning, and my family is still asleep. That’s why I was so glad to see Apple rethink how Home uses valuable screen space and the way devices are organized.

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AppStories, Episode 292 – What Makes a Great Modern Shortcuts Action?→

This week on AppStories, we consider what it takes to create a great set of modern Shortcuts actions using examples of what Apple is doing in its own apps and what some of our favorite third-party apps are already doing to make Shortcuts accessible to a wider audience and more useful to power users.

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[Subscribe here.](https://appstories.net/plans)

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, we look back at one year of AppStories+ and the expansion of Club MacStories and consider the ways that Apple’s new Shortcuts actions for Safari on iOS and iPadOS can be used to get more out of your web browsing.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

To learn more about the benefits included with an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.

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The Club MacStories and AppStories Expansion: One Year Later

One year ago tomorrow, we introduced the MacStories audience to all-new versions of Club MacStories and AppStories. Club MacStories+, Club Premier, and AppStories+, were the culmination of months of work on ideas that we’d been considering for years and represent the first step in offering MacStories readers and listeners a tightly integrated experience across everything we do. There’s more to come, but to mark the first year on this journey, we wanted to take a quick look at how the Club and AppStories have evolved in that time and announce what we’re doing to celebrate this week.

Our Discord Community

Our Discord community, which is part of both a Club MacStories+ and Club Premier membership, has become a pillar of the Club. It’s a dynamic community rich with terrific recommendations for apps, hardware, automations, and more.

However, the Club Discord community is more than a resource for tips and tricks. It’s where members share their passion for all sorts of media, photography, development, their pets, and more. The Discord server is also where we regularly gather for community Town Halls, which are live audio events hosted by the MacStories team, often with special guests from the community, covering Apple events, WWDC, Automation April, and other events.

Discord is the home of Beta Beat, a series of channels where we invite developers to share their upcoming apps with members who provide feedback. So far, Beta Beat has included apps like LookUp, Play, Timery, MusicBox, and Runestone.

Our periodic bookclub-style AV Club events happen on the Discord server too. We collectively pick and enjoy a book, TV show, movie, or other media and then discuss it during a special Town Hall. We’ve even got a special Discord bot for giveaways that we’ve done for events like Automation April.

Speaking of which, Discord played a big role during Automation April, one of two new special events we debuted in 2022. Participants shared their shortcuts in discord, traded tips, and attended Town Halls dedicated to the event. Participants and winners received special Discord roles too. The community played a big role in the success of the event, which is something we plan to expand to our other MacStories events.

Most important of all, though, are the people who make up the Discord community. We have heard repeatedly from members who join our Discord server about how much they enjoy the civil, respectful conversations with other members. We’re very fortunate to have such a great group of people along for the ride. Of course, we’re also incredibly grateful to our moderators, who have provided valuable feedback to us along the way.

Automation Academy and The Macintosh Desktop Experience

The expansion of the Club marked the debut of two Club MacStories+ and Club Premier-exclusive columns. Automation Academy is Federico’s column where he breaks down Shortcuts actions and techniques to help Club members get more from Apple’s automation system. So far, he’s covered topics from Reminders and Files actions to ways to optimize your shortcuts for the Mac. The column is where Federico debuted his shortcut that creates a podcast feed from articles stored in Matter too.

The Macintosh Desktop Experience is my modern spin on Apple’s oldest OS. In the past year, I’ve written about ways to combine AppleScript, Shortcuts, and third-party automation tools to create advanced automations, covered hardware like the Loupedeck Live, explored modern app launchers such as Raycast, and explained how I’m using Universal Control to incorporate the iPad Pro into my Mac setup.

MacStories Weekly, the Monthly Log, and Discounts

Of course, we’ve also continued to publish our MacStories Weekly and Monthly Log newsletters, which have been greatly enhanced by Calliope, the web app and technologies assembled by Alex Guyot that underly everything we do with the Club and AppStories. Calliope allows all Club members to read the newsletters on the web in a format that’s far better than Mailchimp’s web versions of newsletters and manage their Club account.

Explore allows Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members to filter Club stories based on a long list of metadata.

Explore allows Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members to filter Club stories based on a long list of metadata.

Plus, Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members can search and filter seven years of newsletter content by keyword and an extensive set of predefined parameters. Better yet, Explore’s filtered results can be turned into individualized RSS feeds, allowing members to build a personalized Club MacStories experience.

Explore results can be turned into RSS feeds.

Explore results can be turned into RSS feeds.

The new Club website is also where Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members will find a rotating list of deeply discounted apps and services, including CleanShot X, Keyboard Maestro, Typefully, and Hook.

AppStories+

[Subscribe here.](https://appstories.net/plans)

Subscribe here.

Last but not least, we launched AppStories+ one year ago, which is our extended, ad-free version of the show that is published a day early for subscribers in high bitrate audio. AppStories+ is available as a standalone subscription from us or via Apple Podcasts, but the show is best experienced as part of a Club Premier plan. Not only is that the most economical way to enjoy everything we offer at MacStories at just $2/month more than the standalone Club MacStories+ membership that’s included as part of Club Premier, but the show is also recorded live in the Club MacStories+ Discord community for special events like Apple events and WWDC as an added perk for Club members.

After over a year of recording AppStories+, there’s a big back catalog of bonus content, too, with over 70 extended episodes published since May 2021. In total AppStories+ subscribers and Club Premier members have access to more than 14 hours of bonus content on a wide range of topics.

What’s Next

To kick off year two of our expanded offerings, we have a few special things in store for Club members this week. The first is a special Town Hall in the Club MacStories+ Discord. Federico, Alex, and I will be on hand to talk about the Club and AppStories+ and will answer member questions. Mark your calendars to listen in live at 4:30 PM Eastern on August 23rd. We’ll release the audio of the Town Hall later in the Town Hall podcast feed too.

We’re also welcoming Vidit Bhargava’s app LookUp back to Beta Beat, so users can test what Vidit is doing with Lock Screen widgets.

Finally, we’ve got a special digital download gift for all Club members, which will be announced in Friday’s issue of MacStories Weekly.

Thank You

Thanks to all of you who subscribe to Club MacStories and AppStories+ and who read MacStories. The direct support of readers and listeners has been critical to MacStories’ growth for years now, and the expansion we launched last year is the fuel that will drive the next generation of MacStories forward.

We have lots of new ideas in the pipeline for the Club and AppStories for the coming year that we can’t wait to share with you, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s too early to announce anything, but we’ve been clear from the start that last summer’s expansion of the Club and AppStories was part of a much longer-term project. We’ve spent the past year testing and fine-tuning the technical underpinnings of what we built last year, and it’s ready to take on more. So, stay tuned for the next chapter of MacStories.