One of the tradeoffs I see a lot in the apps we cover is between simplicity and flexibility. Simplicity has its virtues, but often apps designed to make things as easy as possible for users end up being inflexible, resulting in cookie-cutter output. The flip side is that maximum flexibility can get out of hand fast, leading to a steep learning curve. Striking the right balance is hard, but the apps that do are always among my favorites because they work so well for a wide audience. That’s exactly how I feel about Captionista, an iPhone and iPad app for adding text to video. It’s simple to understand but includes the kind of depth that epitomizes what it means to do one thing well.
I don’t work with video a lot, and when I do, my needs are pretty simple. Often, I want to demonstrate something with a screen recording, which isn’t always easy to follow without some sort of explanation. That’s where Captionista comes in.
If you’re a MacStories reader, there’s a good chance you have listened to one of the showsFederico 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.
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:
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.
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 accessjust by following this link. From ideation to production, Kosmik lets you think better and more freely to uncover insights and have some fun too!
This week on MacStories Unwind, I recommend two building sims: Townscaper and Dorfromantik, and special guest Alex Guyot revisits the TV show Parenthood.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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