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Remind Me Faster 4.0→

Remind Me Faster 4.0.

Remind Me Faster 4.0.

Remind Me Faster, my favorite app to create new reminders with support for natural language input and quick access to priorities and lists, received a major 4.0 update earlier this week. The app has become a staple of my iPhone and iPad dock in this final part of 2021, and it only felt right to mention its latest update now as many of us are (likely) reassessing our task managers over the holiday break.

I previously covered Nick Leith’s excellent Reminders utility in this issue of MacStories Weekly, so I won’t rehash the details again here. There are two key additions in version 4.0 worth your attention: like Apple’s Reminders app, Remind Me Faster can now create tasks with a due date, but without a due time. These reminders show up in the ‘Today’ view of the Reminders app and will match the default notification settings for all-day reminders you configured in Settings ⇾ Reminders, and it’s the first time I’ve seen a third-party Reminders client do this. You can cycle between due dates with and without times in Remind Me Faster by tapping the date button above the keyboard, and I especially like the animation Leith designed for this interaction.

The second addition is one I’m going to be using a lot: you can now create presets for locations you want to attach to reminders. Specifically, Remind Me Faster now lets you create custom presets for specific locations with an associated radius and leaving/arriving trigger; when you want to attach a location to a reminder, you just need to press a button and pick a preset without fiddling with additional buttons. This is the kind of feature that makes you wonder why Apple didn’t think of it in the first place for their Reminders app: it’s much faster to create location-based reminders this way, which is something I’ve never done on a regular basis because of all the taps required to add location alerts in Reminders.

Remind Me Faster continues to be a fantastic addition to Apple’s Reminders app when it comes to quick entry. I highly recommend checking it out if you use Reminders as a task management system but have always wished typing new tasks with dates, locations, priorities, and lists was quicker.

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WinterFest 2021: The Winter Festival Of Artisanal Software [Sponsor]

The 2021 Artisanal Software Festival is a fantastic collection of carefully-crafted software for writing, research, thinking, and more at tremendous prices. As in past years, software artisans from around the globe come together to offer fair discounts direct to you.

The 21 carefully-crafted apps and book span a wide spectrum that will assist you with everyday knowledge work. There are apps to plan your next big project, conduct research, organize your research, edit images, manage email, write, and more:

  • Aeon Timeline: The timeline tool for creative thinking
  • Bookends: The reference manager you’ve been looking for
  • DEVONagent Pro: Your smart (re)search assistant
  • DEVONthink: Your powerful information and knowledge manager
  • Easy Data Transform: Merge, clean, reformat data without coding
  • Hook: Supplies the missing links
  • HoudahGeo: Photo geocoding and geotagging for Mac
  • HoudahSpot: Powerful file search
  • Hyperplan: Flexible visual planner
  • ImageFramer Pro: Add creative borders and frames to photos
  • Marked: Smarter tools for smarter writers
  • Mellel: A real word processor
  • Nisus Writer Pro: The powerful word processor for Mac
  • Panorama X: Collect, organize, and understand your data
  • Scapple: Quickly capture and connect ideas
  • Scrivener: Your complete writing studio
  • SmallCubed Mail Suite: Manage mail like a maven
  • TextExpander: Recall your best words, instantly, repeatedly
  • The Tinderbox Way: The definitive ebook on artisanal software
  • Timing: Automatic time tracking for Mac
  • Tinderbox: Visualize and organize your notes, plans, and ideas
  • Trickster: Your recently used files, at your fingertips

There are no gimmicks, no bundles, no gotchas – just saving of hundreds of dollars on serious software from thoughtful software makers who care about their users’ experiences, including the interoperability of applications through linking. Visit the WinterFest website now for links to amazing deals each of these fantastic apps and to learn more or use the coupon code Winterfest2021 at checkout.

Our thanks to WinterFest 2021 for its support of MacStories this week.

CNN Interviews Apple Maps’ Product and Design Leads→

Jacob Krol, writing for CNN, interviewed Apple Maps’ David Dorn, its product lead, and Meg Frost, its design lead, about the app’s steady improvements since its introduction in 2012. The story covers many of the features added in the fall with the release of Apple’s latest OS updates, which we’ve covered before, but adds the context of what Dorn and Frost’s teams were trying to accomplish with the changes. For example, with respect to complex roadways the updates have meant that:

“At a glance, drivers can understand a complex intersection more quickly than ever before,” said Frost. “And that detail helps with that split-second decision of which turn they’re going to make. So we want it to be both safer and visually satisfying to navigate.”

It was also interesting to learn that each of the 3D elements added to a handful of cities, and have begun to expand to new locales, are handmade by Apple’s designers:

“We pick the amount of detail we find appropriate and create a 3D mesh of the building landmark itself. And we apply it to the base map,” explained Frost.

In the past couple of years, Apple Maps has really hit its stride, at least in the places that I’ve used it. Maps are more detailed, I’ve encountered far fewer errors than in the past, and the experience of using the app with CarPlay is excellent. Although it’s nearly 10 years old now, Apple Maps still feels new to me because of the relentless iteration on the original app. By its nature, Maps demands constant attention, but it also shows how a competitive app category goes a long way toward keeping an app fresh and innovative.

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AppStories, Episode 254 – App Trends for 2022

This week on AppStories, we look at the app trends we expect to see in 2022, including trends that will continue from 2021 and new trends we think will emerge in the new year.

Sponsored by:

  • Memberful – Monetize your passion with membership
  • Linode – Simplify your cloud infrastructure

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

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, we chat about our holiday plans, John waits by the window for his Analogue Pocket to arrive, and Federico cracks Matter’s read later API.

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.

Early Experiments with BetterTouchTool’s ‘Notch Bar’ as a Visual Shortcuts Launcher for macOS

The notch bar in BetterTouchTool.

The notch bar in BetterTouchTool.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing around with (and thoroughly enjoying) BetterTouchTool’s latest major feature: the notch bar. This feature is currently available as an optional alpha update in BetterTouchTool, and it’s still rough around the edges, so don’t consider this short post a full review of it; I’m sure we will revisit this functionality more in depth over the course of 2022. However, since I believe the notch bar is one of the most exciting developments in the Shortcuts for Mac ecosystem lately, and since I’m having so much fun with it, I figured it’d be worth an early hands-on preview before the end of the year.

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DetailsPro: A Design Tool for SwiftUI [Sponsor]

DetailsPro is the accessible, graphical tool for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac that brings your app designs to life with SwiftUI. The future of modern app design on Apple’s platforms is SwiftUI, and with DetailsPro, you can be up and running immediately, designing UIs without typing a line of code.

DetailsPro uses a drag and drop interface to make designing app interfaces, widgets, and screens a completely graphical, natural experience. There are no multi-gigabyte downloads or any of the complexity you find in a tool like Xcode. Instead, DetailsPro focuses on your design first. The app is also a fantastic way to learn core SwiftUI concepts in an environment that provides immediate feedback. There’s also a terrific DetailsPro community that offers in-app downloadable templates to learn, remix, or use as starting points for your own projects.

When you’re happy with your design, simply export it to SwiftUI code to Swift Playgrounds or Xcode. That’s the sort of design pipeline that makes handing your work off to your developers simple while ensuring that the fidelity of your designs is preserved in the process.

Built in SwiftUI itself by a former Apple Design Prototyper, DetailsPro is trusted industry-wide by designers at companies like Apple itself, Starbucks, Microsoft, Nike, and Porsche, and it’s easy to see why. DetailsPro brings sophisticated SwiftUIs to life quickly and easily in a way that feels like magic.

If you’ve been looking for a way to get into designing with SwiftUI, your search is over. You can download DetailsPro today for free and use it with five files, but you can unlock unlimited files, MapKit maps, and upcoming features like versions, reusable components, designing with data, and more for just $19.99/year or a one-time payment of $49.99. That’s a fantastic price for an app that will save you time and simplify your design process.

So, download DetailsPro today, and get started designing with SwiftUI.

Our thanks to DetailsPro for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: Best Videogames of 2021

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This week on MacStories Unwind:

Best Videogames of 2021

MacStories Rewind

Swift Playgrounds 4.0: First Look

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Yesterday, Apple released Swift Playgrounds 4.0, the first version of the app from which you can build an app and publish it on the App Store. That’s a big step forward for the app that started as a limited sandbox for learning to code. The app is not as capable as Xcode. Still, with support for Swift 5.5, live previewing of the app you’re building as you code, multiwindowing, access to SwiftUI, UIKit, the ability to move projects between Swift Playgrounds and Xcode, and more, the app has an enormous amount of potential waiting to be tapped.

Apple's coding course selection has grown steadily since 2016.

Apple’s coding course selection has grown steadily since 2016.

Swift Playgrounds has steadily improved since its introduction in 2016 on the iPad and launch on the Mac last year. Early versions of the app were firmly grounded in learning to code. That’s still the case. The app includes an extensive catalog of lessons on how to code and build apps. There’s also a new ‘Get Started with Apps’ lesson and an App Gallery section that includes several sample apps to help teach coding basics.

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Pixelmator Photo for iPhone: First Impressions

Pixelmator Photo has long been one of my favorite iPad photo editing apps. The app makes great use of the iPad’s large screen, which provides space for tools alongside the image you’re editing. Reducing that experience to even the largest model of iPhone is a tall order, but from my preliminary testing, it looks as though the Pixelmator team has pulled it off.

Pixelmator Photo on the iPad offers an extensive suite of editing tools that strike a nice balance. The app makes it simple to apply the app’s machine learning-based tools for quick editing and sharing, but it also includes fine-grained controls for when you want to more finely tune a photo. The same is true on the iPhone, but the design tilts in favor of quick access and edits, which I think is appropriate on a device like the iPhone. The deeper tools are still there, just beneath the surface and easy to access when you need them, but on the iPhone the emphasis is on accessing frequently-used tools quickly.

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