This Week's Sponsor:

Quip

A supercharged clipboard manager for Apple devices with on-device intelligence, iCloud sync, and text expansion.


AppStories, Episode 305 – A Close-Up Look at Anybox and Spring

This week on AppStories, we dig into two excellent apps we’ve been enjoying recently: Anybox, a bookmark and file organizer, and Spring, a third-party Twitter client.

Sponsored by:

  • Memberful – Monetize your passion with membership.

On AppStories+, Federico explains what’s coming next with Apple Frames 3.1, his shortcut for framing screenshots with Apple hardware images.

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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Unlock Your Sales Potential with the New Daylite Opportunities Board [Sponsor]

For small businesses, acquiring new business often means juggling multiple priorities at the same time, as each deal has its own time frame and different client requirements. That’s why you need a tool that will help better manage your sales pipeline, so you’re making the most of every sales opportunity that comes your way.

Meet the Daylite Opportunities Board

The Daylite Opportunities Board lets you visually track your deals’ progress at every stage and helps you prioritize sales opportunities. This powerful feature gives you a holistic view of your sales pipelines, allowing you to track where each Opportunity is in the process, so you and your team can focus on the most valuable ones. The drag-and-drop functionality allows you to move opportunities from one stage to the next, and you can easily classify deals as “won” or “lost” by dragging them to the respective status categories. Learn more about how this powerful Daylite feature has become a game-changer for Apple-savvy small businesses

About Daylite

Daylite is an award-winning CRM and productivity business app that empowers small businesses to get more done throughout the full customer lifecycle. Daylite is a native app built exclusively for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. From meeting prospects and taking control of your sales to managing the moving pieces on projects, all the way through to winning more repeat business, it’s all done in Daylite. 

And now, with the Daylite Opportunities Board, you can finally better manage your sales process and unlock your sales potential. 

Are you ready to close more deals with Daylite? Start your free trial here.

Our thanks to Daylite for sponsoring MacStories this week.



AppStories, Episode 304 – Calendars, Communications, and More Revisited

This week on AppStories, we pick up where we left off in episode 300 by revisiting episode 200 about calendar apps, communications, home assistants, and Federico’s first surprise of 2021.

Sponsored by:

  • MasterClass – Get unlimited access to EVERY Class and get 15% off an annual membership.
  • Memberful – Monetize your passion with membership.
  • Kolide – We believe that maintaining endpoint security shouldn’t mean compromising employee privacy. Check out our manifesto: Honest Security.

On AppStories+, we argue against waiting to upgrade macOS and share some of our plans for our redesigned workspaces.

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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Apple Provides More Detail About Its Emergency SOS Service Coming Later this Month

Apple announced that later this month, it will launch Emergency SOS via satellite, a new service for the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro that allows users who are out of range of mobile and WiFi networks to message emergency services. The company also said that the upcoming service is the result of a $450 million investment by the company’s Advanced Manufacturing Fund, which predominantly went to Globalstar, a global satellite service company.

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Globalstar operates 24 low-earth orbit satellites that will relay messages from iPhone 14 users via satellite and ground stations to emergency services or a relay center with Apple-trained emergency specialists if local emergency services cannot receive text-based messages. The ground stations use high-powered antennas designed for Apple by Cobham Satcom. In addition to Emergency SOS, iPhone 14 users will be able to send their location via satellite using the Find My app.

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, said:

Emergency SOS via satellite is a perfect example of how American ingenuity and technology can save lives. We are proud this service is enabled by leading US companies, and that our users can explore off-the-grid areas knowing they are still within reach of emergency services if they are in need.

Seeing the infrastructure that goes into Emergency SOS really drives home the complexity of the technology that underlies the service. I hope I never need to use Emergency SOS, but I’m looking forward to trying the Find My integration the next time I’m beyond the reach of a mobile or WiFi network.


Apple Music Announces Its 2022 Artist of the Year

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Today, Apple Music announced that Bad Bunny is its 2022 Artist of the Year. Un Verano Sin Ti, which Bad Bunny released in May, is the most streamed album on Apple Music and the biggest Latin album of all time.

In Apple’s press release, Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats, said:

We’re thrilled to celebrate the achievements of Bad Bunny, whose influence on every corner of culture could not be ignored in 2022. Watching Bad Bunny ascend from an Apple Music Up Next artist in 2018 to our Artist of the Year this year has been nothing short of extraordinary. We congratulate him on his record-breaking year and for continuing to bring Latin music to a massive global audience.

Apple Music has created a dedicated section of the Music app celebrating Bad Bunny’s achievement and music. Bad Bunny has also taken over the La Fórmula playlist to spotlight some of his favorite Latin tracks. Plus, Apple Music 1 is dedicating today to Bad Bunny’s music, interviews with the artist, and more.

Apple’s Artist of the Year is celebrated with a unique award featuring a 12-inch silicon wafer suspended between a sheet of glass and anodized aluminum. Last year and in prior years, Apple announced additional awards like the Breakthrough Artist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year, and more. This year, though, only an Artist of the Year was named.


Apple Frames 3.0: Completely Rewritten, Support for iPhone 14 Pro and Dynamic Island, New Devices, Multiple Display Resolutions, and More

Apple Frames 3.0.

Apple Frames 3.0.

Today, I’m pleased to announce the release of version 3.0 of Apple Frames, my shortcut to put screenshots taken on various Apple devices inside physical frames for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.

Apple Frames 3.0 is a major update that involved a complete re-architecture of the shortcut to improve its performance and reliability on all Apple platforms. For Apple Frames 3.0, I entirely rebuilt its underlying file structure to move away from base64 and embrace Files/Finder to store assets. As a result, Apple Frames 3.0 is faster, easier to debug, and – hopefully – easier to maintain going forward.

But Apple Frames 3.0 goes beyond a new technical foundation. This update to the shortcut introduces full compatibility with the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max with Dynamic Island, Apple Watch Ultra, and the M2 MacBook Air. And that’s not all: Apple Frames 3.0 also brings full support for resolution scaling on all iPad models that offer the ‘More Space’ display mode in iPadOS 16. And in the process, I also added support for ‘Default’ and ‘More Space’ options on the Apple Silicon-based MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, and iMac. All of this, as always, in a native shortcut designed for high performance that uses Apple’s official device images and requires no manual configuration whatsoever.

Apple Frames 3.0 is the biggest, most versatile version of Apple Frames to date, and I’m proud of the results. Let’s dive in.

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Last Week, on Club MacStories: MusicBox, a Screenshot Shortcut, the Underlying Problem with Stage Manager, and Ventura Tips

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:

MacStories Weekly: Issue 343

Monthly Log: October 2022


Kolide: Nail Third-Party Audits and Compliance Goals with Endpoint Security for Your Entire Fleet [Sponsor]

Do you know the old thought experiment about the AI designed to make paper clips that quickly decides that it will have to eliminate all the humans to maximize paper clips?

Many security teams have a similar idea when meeting compliance goals: it would be much simpler if it weren’t for all the pesky users.

That way of thinking has brought us to the current state of endpoint security, dominated by MDMs that hamper device performance and turn every laptop into Big Brother. This approach to security is bad for culture and morale; moreover, it doesn’t actually work. If it did, no company with an MDM and annual security training would have a data breach.

Kolide is endpoint security and fleet management that takes a different approach. We help our customers meet their compliance goals–whether for auditors, customers, or leadership–by enlisting the support of end users.

Kolide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack, educating them on why they’re important, and giving them step-by-step instructions to resolve them themselves.

For IT admins, Kolide helps you prove compliance via a single dashboard. From there, you can monitor the security of your entire fleet, whether they’re running on Mac, Windows, or Linux. (You read that right; Kolide can finally provide visibility into your Linux users.)

If you’ve read this far, it’s because you’re intrigued by an approach to endpoint security that gets end users involved. Click here to learn more about how it works. If you like what you see, you can sign up for a free trial; no credit card required.

Our thanks to Kolide for sponsoring MacStories this week.