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MacStadium: The Developer Cloud for Mac [Sponsor]

For nearly a decade, MacStadium has been solely focused on providing developers and Mac enthusiasts with customized Apple-centric solutions. MacStadium provides Mac infrastructure for everyone from solo developers to growing startups to Fortune 100 companies. Its solutions are trusted by iOS developers, mobile testing teams, and DevOps engineers around the world. In fact, MacStories has been running smoothly on MacStadium for years.

MacStadium provides solutions to fit every need. The company offers Intel-based Macs and the latest M1 Mac minis. The company has hundreds of those M1 minis in three different configurations in its data centers, ready for instant activation for your next project.

MacStadium is the only cloud provider to support and scale virtualization on Mac hardware. They can create private cloud environments with VMware, Veertu’s Anka, and their own Kubernetes-based Orka solution. With more teams working from home than ever, having a Mac build infrastructure in the cloud is the perfect way to ensure your app developers can work as efficiently as possible.

Recently, MacStadium announced a partnership with Teradici, the creator of PCoIP technology, to create high-performance remote access for the Mac. Working with Apple, the collaboration leverages MacStadium’s infrastructure to streamline and accelerate the delivery of Teradici CAS with PCoIP support for Mac customers around the world. Stay tuned because a product will be publicly available later this summer.

Whatever your Mac infrastructure needs, you owe it to yourself to give MacStadium a look today.

Our thanks to MacStadium for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: WWDC Recap: OS Overviews, Shortcuts on the Mac, Spatial and Lossless Audio, and Apple Design Awards

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Sponsored by:
* Daylite – The CRM with Apple Fans in Mind.
* Raycast – Goodbye Spotlight. Hello Raycast.

This week, Federico and John look back at all of the WWDC announcements and coverage at MacStories, AppStories, and the Club, plus news about spatial and lossless audio, and game and music Unwind picks for the weekend.

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    • Coming Saturday, a WWDC themed issue for Club members.

AppStories

Unwind Picks

You can follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2021 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2021 RSS feed.

2021 Apple Design Awards Given to Twelve Developers

The annual Apple Design Awards were handled a little differently this year. On June 1st, the company, for the first time, announced finalists in six categories: Inclusivity, Delight and Fun, Interaction, Social Impact, Visuals and Graphics, and Innovation. For each category, Apple picked six finalists for a total of 36 ADA contenders.

As a part of sessions held at WWDC today, Apple announced the 12 winners, an app and game in each category:

Inclusivity

App Winner: Voice Dream Reader

Apple picked Voice Dream Reader as the winner for the app Inclusivity ADA for its use of VoiceOver technology. The app is a text-to-speech reader that can turn any document or ebook into audio.

Game Winner: HoloVista

In the game Inclusivity category, Apple chose HoloVista, a game where you explore a mysterious mansion, filled with secrets you need to uncover.

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Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Record Label Pages→

Ethan Millman, writing for Rolling Stone, reports that Apple has added around 400 music label pages to Apple Music. Label pages began showing up in Music late in April with the release of iOS and iPadOS 14.5 as Federico covered in in his overview. However, with the introduction of Spatial Audio and lossless streaming, Millman had a chance to talk to Zane Lowe, Apple Music’s co-head of Artist Relations and radio host, about why the company is emphasizing record labels.

According to Lowe:

“We want to highlight labels that are really hyper-focused on building great quality. The labels we’re partnering with here are the ones where I want to search for their logo on the back of the record and would buy music unheard because I trust that,” Lowe says. “That to me is really the culture that we’re trying to represent from a label point of view here. In a way, this is an opportunity for us to reestablish the concept of a label as something more than just a bank. To look at the label system again as more than just a distribution model or an investment model, but actually as a place where music, art and culture is fostered in a really deliberate and very thoughtful way.”

Listener affinity for record labels is just one aspect of music that has largely fallen by the wayside in the streaming era. It will be interesting to see if Apple Music can rekindle interest in labels as an indicator of quality and curation. There’s more Apple could do to expand music credits, but it’s good to see the company take a step in this direction with labels.

You can follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2021 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2021 RSS feed.

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Shortcuts for Mac: The Future Is Now

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

To say we’ve followed Shortcuts closely at MacStories is probably an understatement. Federico was relying on it to run MacStories months before it was publicly released as Workflow, and today, the app is deeply embedded in every aspect of our production of the website, podcasts, and Club MacStories content, as well as the way we operate the business.

As someone who works across a Mac and iPad all day, the lack of Shortcuts on the Mac was frustrating, but something I was willing to deal with because the app was such a good fit for the way I worked, even when I had to run it in parallel to my Mac instead of on it. Going into WWDC, though, my feelings about automation on the Mac aligned closely to what Jason Snell wrote on Six Colors earlier this year. As we discussed on AppStories, the time had come for Shortcuts to be available on all of Apple’s platforms, which was why I was so pleased to see it become a reality during this week’s WWDC keynote.

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WWDC 2021: All The Small Things in Apple’s Upcoming OS Releases

WWDC keynotes cover a lot of ground, hitting the highlights of the OS updates Apple plans to release in the fall. However, as the week progresses, new details emerge from session videos, developers trying new frameworks, and others who bravely install the first OS betas. So, as with past WWDCs, we’ve supplemented our iOS and iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8, and tvOS 15 coverage with all the small things we’ve found interesting this week:

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