This Week's Sponsor:

Textastic

The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try

Concepts: Sketch, Note, Draw [Sponsor]

Sketch, note, and explore endless ideas with Concepts’ infinite canvas for iPad. Draw in designer COPIC colors with liquid pens and brushes, and organize images, text and sketches into visual mood boards. Used by creative professionals for visual thinking, note-taking, team communication, storyboarding, product design and architectural planning, Concepts lets you sketch and share your ideas in the moment.

Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible, editable vector. Nudge, edit and reorganize your ideas with natural finger gestures. Drag and drop images and objects onto the canvas for fast ideation and reference, use layers and grid layouts to organize your work, mark up PDF documents, and apply real-world scale for professional design projects. Export and share standard, high-resolution and vector file types for flexible work between teams and apps.

Concepts’ built-in Presentation Mode lets you connect with others for live sharing and graphic discussion too. Whiteboard virtually with teams and clients using apps like Zoom, then instantly share your discussion.

The app comes free as a basic sketching tool, with the ability to unlock 200+ libraries of brushes, objects and services via subscription or one-time purchase. To learn more about Concepts visit their website today.

MacStories readers – Enjoy a special 1 month extended free trial when you sign up for an annual subscription. Get a month of infinite creativity before you are billed.

Our thanks to Concepts for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: Best TV Shows and Movies of 2021

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This week on MacStories Unwind:

Best TV Shows and Movies of 2021

Rewind

Wallpaper Tours Apple Park’s Design Studio→

Wallpaper has published an in-depth profile of Apple’s Design Team that takes readers behind-the-scenes at Apple Park for a peek at the wide array of disciplines for which it is responsible. The story covers everything from hardware design to typography and sound design and includes interviews with Apple’s Evans Hankey, vice president of industrial design, and Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design.

Wallpaper’s piece is packed with anecdotes about Apple’s design process, such as this one about the Apple Watch’s haptic feedback system:

For Apple Watch, the team had to design, build, and implement a physical notification system. How strong? How long? What felt natural? ‘We knew that the Watch was going to be the most intimate, the most personal product that we’ve ever made,’ says Hankey. ‘We also knew it needed to get your attention at some point.’ It was Duncan Kerr, a long-standing member of the Design Team, who suggested the idea of the ‘tap’. ‘It’s such a lovely simple thing, but we had no idea how to bring that to life,’ Hankey says. Through a series of clunky prototypes and the work of haptics expert Camille Moussette, the ‘tap’ was refined and perfected.

Apple’s design process is rarely on display, which makes Wallpaper’s story, which includes loads of photos of the Design Team in action, one that you won’t want to miss.

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Pok Pok Playroom Releases Major Town Toy Expansion

Pok Pok Playroom, the delightful collection of digital toys that won an Apple Design Award earlier this year, got a big update today that expands the app’s town toy significantly. In the months since the app’s launch, the Pok Pok team has been hard at work adding to and refining the app’s digital toys, but today’s update is particularly noteworthy for its depth.

Source: Pok Pok.

Source: Pok Pok.

It’s not surprising that the town toy is among kids’ favorites. The town’s wide variety of buildings, people, animals, and other elements provided a rich environment for exploration and imagination. Today’s update grows the town into a thriving, diverse metropolis. The original parts are still there, but kids will also find more occupations, green spaces, new means of transportation, a farm, and even a movie set complete with a dinosaur.

Pok Pok's revamped town has a movie set.

Pok Pok’s revamped town has a movie set.

The all-new town was developed in collaboration with Sarah Kaufman, an urban planner from New York City, who helped the Pok Pok team incorporate the cultural, design, and community elements of modern cities. The results are fantastic. There’s a wealth of new areas available that I expect kids will find engaging and fun.

If you have kids and haven’t tried Pok Pok yet, now is a great time to do so. You can learn more on the Pok Pok website and donwload the app on the App Store. Also, if you want to hear from the Pok Pok team themselves, listen to the interview we did with them on AppStories when they won an Apple Design Award.

AppStories, Episode 252 – Obsidian In Depth: Core Plugins (Part 2)

This week on AppStories, we continue our series on Obsidian with a discussion of the app’s core plugins, which control many of its most advanced features.

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

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+ this week, we discuss Apple’s 2021 Apps of the Year and take a behind-the-scenes look at the upcoming MacStories Selects Awards.

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.

MacStadium: Orka Virtualization Is Coming to Apple Silicon Hardware [Sponsor]

Orka is MacStadium’s virtualization layer created for Mac build infrastructure that allows Mac and iOS developers to orchestrate macOS in a cloud environment using Kubernetes on genuine Apple hardware. Soon, Orka 2.0, which is currently in beta, will be released, allowing developers to harness the combined power of Apple’s M1 chip architecture and Orka for the first time.

Since Orka was first released, users have used it to streamline their development pipeline with high-performance, scalable, secure, and reliable Apple hardware. Soon, Orka will run on Apple silicon Macs too. With Orka 2.0, developers will be able to virtualize macOS across M1 Macs just like they’ve been doing on Intel machines and even mix clusters using both Intel-and M1-based virtual machines. It’s a big step forward, which will make it easier for developers to migrate their Mac and iOS build pipelines to Apple silicon. With Orka 2.0, you’ll be able to control Orka VMs with a native Kubernetes command line too.

The possibilities created by Orka 2.0 don’t end there, though. Just last week, AWS announced that EC2 instances on M1 Mac minis are on the way. AWS’s M1 mini instances are currently in preview, but the news opens up intriguing possibilities for developers, such as running Orka 2.0 on AWS or building a hybrid cloud pipeline on MacStadium servers and AWS.

Learn more about Orka 2.0 at MacStadium and sign up for the beta today to be among the first to experience your development pipeline on M1 Macs. It promises to be a big leap forward that you won’t want to miss.

Our thanks to MacStadium for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: The Best Music of 2021

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This week on MacStories Unwind:

Our Favorite 2021 Albums and Singles

Federico

Albums:
- Screen Violence by CHVRCHES
- If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power by Halsey
- 30 by Adele
- An Evening with Silk Sonic by Silk Sonic
- Who Am I? by Pale Waves
- SOUR by Olivia Rodrigo
- Knebworth 1996 by Oasis
- Draw Down the Moon by Foxing
- Futures: Phoenix Sessions by Jimmy Eat World
- XOXO: From Love & Anxiety In Real Time by The Maine
- Pressure Machine by The Killers

Album of the Year:

Singles:

Song of the Year:

John

Albums:

Album of the Year:

  • SOUR by Olivia Rodrigo

Singles:

Songs of the Year:

Rewind

MacStories and Club MacStories Highlights

AppStories
- Obsidian In Depth: The Basics (Part 1)

Apple Names the 2021 App of the Year Award Winners

Apple has revealed its annual App of the Year winners. This year, the company picked a collection of 15 apps and games from among the millions available on the App Store, naming them the Apps of the Year. In recent years, Apple has also used its App of the Year awards as an opportunity to highlight trends on the App Store. This year, the company’s App Store editorial team picked just one trend, Connection, sharing a collection of 5 apps that span a wide spectrum of genres.

Just like last year, Apple has honored 15 apps and games as the App of the Year winners from a wide variety of categories. According to Apple’s press release:

“The developers who won App Store Awards in 2021 harnessed their own drive and vision to deliver the best apps and games of the year — sparking the creativity and passion of millions of users around the world,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “From self-taught indie coders to inspiring leaders building global businesses, these standout developers innovated with Apple technology, with many helping to foster the profound sense of togetherness we needed this year.”

Mac App of the Year, Craft.

Mac App of the Year, Craft.

This year’s app winners are:

Apple Arcade Game of the Year, Fantasian.

Apple Arcade Game of the Year, Fantasian.

Apple also recognized games on each of its platforms, plus its Arcade service:

Apple Watch App of the Year, CARROT Weather.

Apple Watch App of the Year, CARROT Weather.

The App Store editorial team sees a lot of apps every year, and the trend it saw emerge in 2021 was ‘Connection,’ a theme embodied in the following apps:

Bumble is among five apps selected as embodying the Trend of the Year, Connection.

Bumble is among five apps selected as embodying the Trend of the Year, Connection.

In addition to naming this year’s winners, Apple called out each of the developers of the apps and games in a special ‘Developers make all the difference’ story, which links to profiles of each app and game. You’ll also find features on each app and game in Apple’s App Store apps.

Apple has created a profile story for each App of the Year winner.

Apple has created a profile story for each App of the Year winner.

To commemorate this year’s App of the Year winners, Apple’s designers created physical awards, which made their first appearance last year. The blue awards resemble the App Store’s icon and are made from 100% recycled aluminum with the winner’s name engraved on the back.

Picking the best apps of the year isn’t easy, which makes it easy to quarrel with individual picks. However, I think the choices by Apple’s editorial team this year do an excellent job of capturing a wide range of the best that the App Store has to offer.

Congratulations to this year’s Apple App of the Year award winners. I always enjoy seeing developers’ hard work and contributions to Apple’s platforms recognized.

Shortcuts for Mac’s Superpower→

Earlier today on Six Colors, Jason Snell wrote about running Shortcuts from the command line:

I was reminded by Simon Støvring, maker of the excellent Mac and iOS utility Data Jar (which is a persistent data store that’s accessible via Shortcuts), that people may not be aware of just how well integrated Shortcuts is into macOS.

Jason has put his finger on something I think has gone unnoticed by a lot of users. The deep integration of Shortcuts with macOS is its superpower, especially because it’s bidirectional. You can run your shortcuts from the command line and run command line scripts in your shortcuts. The same goes for AppleScript.

Add to that the ability to run shortcuts via AppleScript files, as applets, or with third-party apps, and there’s an incredible amount of room for creativity in bringing tools built into macOS and third-party automation apps together in new ways. It’s what led me to build the utility shortcuts I wrote about on MacStories and Club MacStories today and Federico to explore new ways to pass input into shortcuts earlier this week.

Be sure to check out Jason’s story for examples of the way shortcuts can be run from the command line and the results passed to other apps or used by macOS in various ways.

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