This Week's Sponsor:

Gamery

A sleek and intuitive game library app for casuals and pros

CleanMyMac X: Make Sure You Can Trust Your Mac [Sponsor]

In these uncertain times, the only person who we can truly rely on is ourselves, more specifically, you and your computer. But can your Mac help you reach your goals? Is it in good enough shape, fast, and organized?

To be sure, you need CleanMyMac X from MacPaw. It’s the ideal decluttering app for Mac.

CleanMyMac X isn’t just one tool, though. It’s an entire suite of powerful utilities designed to tune up your Mac:

  • It includes 49 tools to find and delete invisible junk.
  • It removes junk that’s slowing your Mac down, so it always runs at its maximum speed.
  • It organizes disk space, too, showing your large hidden folders.
  • It can free up tons of space, so your Mac never runs into storage issues.
  • It’s also the perfect tool to get your Mac ready for macOS Monterey too.
  • Finally, it fights Mac-specific malware and adware.

There are a lot of other Mac cleaning utilities available, but CleanMyMac X stands out with its award-winning, elegant design that makes it a pleasure to use every day. In fact, in 2021, CleanMyMac was honored with the Red Dot Award and the UX Design Award. It’s so enjoyable to use, and you’ll be discovering new ways to optimize your Mac each time you run this app.

Moreover, CleanMyMac X is notarized by Apple, so you can use it with the confidence that it’s safe.

MacPaw has a special deal just for MacStories readers. For the next four weeks, you can purchase the app for 5% off by using this link. So, get started today with CleanMyMac X to make sure you can trust your Mac.

Our thanks to CleanMyMac X from MacPaw for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: The Art of Foundation, the iOS App Icon Book, a New Apple Original Podcast, and Lots of Videogame News and Recommendations

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This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    • Mac keyboard tips
    • A Mac shortcut for cleaning up your Downloads folder
    • How Federico uses GameTrack
    • Two Reminders-based shortcuts from Club members
    • Brian King’s M1 MacBook Pro video editing setup
    • Lots of apps

AppStories

Unwind

Coming Soon: The Fourth Annual MacStories Selects Awards, Featuring Expanded Readers’ Choice and New Lifetime Achievement Awards

Soon, we’ll announce the fourth annual MacStories Selects Awards, honoring our favorite apps in a wide variety of categories. Winners will receive a physical MacStories Selects award designed by MacStories’ Silvia Gatta. As with last year, awards will be selected in the following eight categories:

  • App of the Year
  • Best New App
  • Best App Update
  • Best New Feature
  • Best Design
  • Best Watch App
  • Best Mac App
  • Readers’ Choice Award

We’re also making a couple of changes this year to expand the awards and Club MacStories member participation.

First, we’re introducing an all-new Lifetime Achievement Award to recognize an app that has had an important impact on the world of apps. We’ll be choosing an app beloved by users and inspiring to developers, which has left its mark on the App Store’s history.

Second, we’re adjusting the Readers’ Choice Award to incorporate Club MacStories’ new structure.

All Club members can nominate their favorite apps for the Readers’ Choice Award. A link to the nomination form and details about which apps are eligible for the award can be found in Issue 297 of MacStories Weekly right at the beginning of the issue. Nominations will be accepted until 5:00 PM Eastern US time on Monday, November 15th.

After nominations close, we’ll tally the submissions and open voting on the top five nominees to Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members via our Discord community. Voting will conclude at Noon Eastern US time on Thursday, November 18th.

For more details on Club MacStories, please visit plus.club.

Every year, we look at hundreds of terrific apps. MacStories Selects is our way to call out a handful of our absolute favorites that are shining examples of the best apps on Apple’s platforms.

We look forward to sharing our selections and our Club members’ pick. We’ll be handling announcements a little differently this year, too, so keep an eye on all we do here and elsewhere for the big reveal in December.

AppStories, Episode 248 – Our iPad mini Home Screen and Focus Setups→

This week on AppStories, we go into detail on our iPad mini Home Screen setups, including how they differ from other devices and how we use widgets, Focus modes, and Shortcuts to manage the setups.

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

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, John brings a little bit of strange American culture along with him to Rome, surprising Federico with a Thanksgiving Dinner Candy Corn taste test.

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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Michael Flarup Announces The iOS App Icon Book→

Source: Michael Flarup.

Source: Michael Flarup.

Four years in the making, designer Michael Flarup has launched a Kickstarter campaign to finalize, print, and ship The iOS App Icon Book.

Source: Michael Flarup.

Source: Michael Flarup.

As Flarup explains, the iPhone sparked a golden era of icon design. The iOS App Icon Book is a 150-page art book that traces the history of iconography on iOS, with full-color, detailed reproductions of some of the best icon work from the past decade. In addition to the artwork, the book also includes a primer on Flarup’s approach to icon design and profiles of leading icon designers. The book traces the evolution of notable icons too.

Source: Michael Flarup.

Source: Michael Flarup.

The book is also meant to preserve the history of iOS iconography. As Flarup explains, the history of iOS icons is:

A history that is quickly fading. Many apps featured in this book aren’t around anymore or have evolved — which means the work we’ve been doing to capture this artwork have borded on internet archaeology. If we don’t preserve these things now, while we still have the opportunity to, they will be gone forever.

Flarup says the book is about 90% complete and should be finished by late January 2022, with the final product shipping in April 2022.

I’ve been following Michael Flarup’s progress on The iOS App Icon Book since its earliest stages, and I’m excited that it’s nearly finished. Icons are an important piece of iOS history, and I can think of no better person to chronicle its evolution.

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BetterTouchTool: Customize Your Input Devices [Sponsor]

BetterTouchTool is an indispensable Mac app that has stood the test of time. The app was one of the first covered by MacStories back in November 2009. In those early days, BetterTouchTool was a simple app for adding customizable gestures to MacBook trackpads and the Magic Mouse.

Today, many things have changed in BetterTouchTool. Of course, it still allows you to configure all sorts of gestures for the Magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse. However, nowadays, the app also supports many more input devices. BTT enables full Touch Bar customization, allows users to define keyboard shortcuts, including a powerful Hyper Key, bind the buttons of mice, create custom mouse gestures, customize the Siri Remote, connect and configure MIDI devices, and more.

BetterTouchTool offers a long list of predefined actions to automate tasks on your Mac that can be assigned to any input-device trigger you choose. The app also contains some handy features like window snapping, a clipboard manager, a screenshot editor, and much more. There is even a free iOS app to remotely control your Mac and trigger actions.

Also, BetterTouchTool already supports macOS Monterey and integrates deeply with the new Shortcuts app. It now lets you run Shortcuts using any of BTT’s triggers. Additionally, BetterTouchTool makes many of its actions available to be used within the Shortcuts app. For examples see https://community.folivora.ai/c/shortcuts/18.

The breadth of what can be accomplished with BetterTouchTool is only limited by your imagination. A great place to get started and be inspired by other BTT users is the BetterTouchTool Community at community.folivora.ai. Users have shared some fantastic BTT presets there, including some very advanced custom Touch Bar setups that you should definitely check out.

BetterTouchTool comes with a 45-day trial, after which you can choose between a license that includes all updates for 2 years and a lifetime license.

For a limited time, MacStories readers can purchase BetterTouchTool for 20% off by using the coupon code MACSTORIESBTT at checkout. So, don’t delay. Go to folivora.aito learn more about this fantastic Mac app and take advantage of the special limited-time, 20% discount on BetterTouchTool.

Our thanks to BetterTouchTool for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Kotaku Collects the Beautiful Artwork of Apple TV+’s Foundation→

Source: Kotaku.

Source: Kotaku.

The Apple TV+ show Foundation has been on my mind a lot this week. I’ve really enjoyed the first season so far, and yesterday, we hosted a live audio discussion in the Club MacStories+ Discord community, where we were joined by a few Club members to dig into the show’s first seven episodes. The discussion was part of AV Club, a channel in our Discord community where we pick media to enjoy as a group each month. It was a lively and fun discussion that is available to Club members as a podcast too.

As I was collecting my thoughts on Foundation in preparation for our group conversation, one of the aspects of the show that I kept coming back to was its visuals. It’s a sci-fi epic that doesn’t look like any sci-fi show I’ve watched before. From the elegance of Trantor’s surface, which is home to Empire, to the gritty reality of the planet’s subterranean levels, the inhospitable environment of Terminus, and the watery Synnax, every planet has a unique and authentic feel of its own that creates an immersive experience for viewers.

If you haven’t watched the show before or are a fan already and interested in learning more about Foundation’s unique style, I highly recommend browsing through the gallery of concept art for the show that is collected on Kotaku in a story by Luke Plunkett. The gallery of dozens of images includes costume design, landscapes, spaceships, weaponry, and more. Foundation is a big budget production that has more in common with the scale I’m used to seeing in movies. What the artwork spotlighted by Plunkett shows is that beyond the mountain of money spent on Foundation, an extraordinary amount of care has been taken by a group of incredibly talented artists to bring the story to life.

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AppStories, Episode 247 – Everything New in iOS and iPadOS 15.1

This week on AppStories, we dig into SharePlay and the other changes released last week with iOS and iPadOS 15.1.

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

Subscribe here.

Federico returns to modding iPad accessories for his iPad mini and John wonders whether he should get one of the new MacBook Pros.

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.

Apple Releases Hooked, an Apple Original Podcast with No Ties to Other Properties→

Benjamin Mayo writing for 9to5Mac reports that Apple has published its first podcast that isn’t tied to a TV+ property or Apple News. The show, called Hooked, is a true-crime story featuring career bank robber Tony Hathaway. As Mayo notes, the show is listed as an ‘Apple Original podcast.’

Perhaps more notable is that there doesn’t seem to be a standard RSS feed associated with the show. Instead, the show’s first four episodes and trailer are available only via the Apple Podcasts app. Of course, a feed could be added, but if one isn’t, this would mark Apple’s first foray into exclusive audio content, something which Spotify has been doing for quite some time.

During an investor call last week that Podnews reported on, Spotify declared itself the number one podcast provider in the US and over 60 other countries based on an Edison Research report. As a result, it would come as no surprise if Apple has begun competing head-to-head with Spotify with its own exclusive audio content in the highly-popular true-crime category. At the same time, though, one of podcasting’s strengths has always been its open nature, and it would be a shame to see that further eroded by Apple, which has been a steward of the format for so long.

Update: Although not indexed and available in all podcast apps yet, Hooked does have a traditional RSS feed, which can be found here.

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