Last Week, on Club MacStories: Safari Extensions, Upcoming Mail Updates, and Lesser-Known iOS 16 Features

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:

MacStories Weekly: Issue 325

Mail's Send Later Feature coming this fall

Mail’s Send Later Feature coming this fall

BetterTouchTool: Introducing the Notch Bar [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.

Nowadays, the app can configure gestures for the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad (1-3), it 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, and connect and configure MIDI devices. Also, it works great together with the new Shortcuts app on macOS Monterey.

BetterTouchTool’s developer, Andreas Hegenberg, recently introduced a new feature that is rapidly evolving: the “Notch Bar”. It is in an early development stage but already has quite a few fans, and now, Andreas would love to get your feedback on the feature to make it even better.

The Notch Bar is a customizable menu bar add-on that allows you to create completely custom bars with only the functions and widgets you regularly use. It works best on screens with a Notch, but can also be used on standard screens. It leaves your standard menu bar intact but hidden, so you can easily switch between standard and Notch Bar modes - e.g. by setting a keyboard shortcut to do so.

The Notch Bar comes with lots of default widgets, e.g. to show an emoji picker, calendar events, Shortcuts, weather, date/time, or your clipboard history. It can easily be extended using custom and third-party script widgets too. For example, the amazing Crypto Touch Bar app can now export crypto widgets for the Notch Bar.

For more info on the Notch Bar and a Quick Start Guide, please have a look at:

Here are a few examples of how Andreas is using the Notch Bar himself:

And soon, BetterTouchTool will introduce integration with the Stream Deck, so be on the lookout for an all-new way to use BetterTouchTool.

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.ai to 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.

MacStories Unwind: Strange Horticulture and Everything Everywhere All At Once

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico plays Strange Horticulture and explores Final Fantasy: Crisis Core using the PPSSPP emulator on the Aya Neo and John recommends Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Federico’s Picks:

John’s Pick:

AppStories, Episode 282 – What WWDC 2022 Means for Apple’s Platforms→

This week on AppStories, we take a step back to consider the future of WWDC and what this year’s announcements mean for each of Apple’s platforms.

Sponsored by:

  • Pillow – Sleeping better, made simple.
  • Sourcegraph – Universal Code Search. Move fast, even in big codebases. Try it now.
  • Instabug – Empower mobile teams to monitor, prioritize, and debug performance and stability issues and ship better mobile apps.
  • Memberful – Monetize your passion with membership
[Subscribe here.](https://www.macstories.net/podcasts/appstories/plans)

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, we go behind the scenes of MacStories’ WWDC coverage and Federico explains the apps and approach he plans to take with his iOS and iPadOS 16 review this year.

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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Last Week, on Club MacStories: AppStories Live, the New WWDC, Multitasking Questions, and Giveaways

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:

WWDC

  • Last week we held four live recordings of AppStories in the Club MacStories+ Discord community and took questions from listeners. Topics included:
    • Our first impressions of the WWDC keynote presentation
    • The new desktop-class features coming to iPadOS
    • Updates coming to Reminders
    • The M2 MacBook Air and macOS Ventura with special guest Myke Hurley
    • App Shortcuts, new Shortcuts actions, and our WWDC wishes that didn’t come true

Giveaways

  • We did daily app giveaways in the Club MacStories+ Discord, plus two more giveaways in MacStories Weekly 324

MacStories Weekly: Issue 324

Android Users Can Now Migrate Their WhatsApp Data to iPhone

WhatsApp announced beta support today for migrating the app’s data from Android devices to the iPhone using Apple’s Move to iOS app, which is available on the Google Play store. Move to iOS is an Android app that could already move contacts, messages, photos, videos, email accounts, and calendars.

With WhatsApp’s update, which is being released as a beta to a limited number of users to start, users with Android devices will be able to use Move to iOS to transfer their WhatsApp message history to iOS. Losing your message history in apps like WhatsApp has been one of the biggest downsides of jumping from one mobile device platform to another. By adding a way to migrate WhatsApp’s message history to iOS, it should be significantly easier for users of the messaging service to switch to iOS going forward.

WhatsApp has also added a support page to its website to walk users through the process of moving their message history from Android to iOS and a help document for anyone who has trouble with the process.

iA Writer 6 Adds Cross-Document Linking, Metadata, and More

iA Writer has long been one of the premier text editors on Apple’s platforms. The app’s design is top-notch, and it offers a feature set that makes it among the best options for writing in Markdown. Best of all, the app’s features stay out of your way while you’re writing. They’re easy to access, but they aren’t a distraction. That’s as true of iA Writer 6 today as it was with previous versions.

However, the Markdown text editor market is changing rapidly, with tools for creating interlinked notes and documents in a variety of ways that have quickly become table stakes for text editors and note-taking apps alike. iA Writer 6, which is available on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, is a response to those changes that fits comfortably with the app’s existing feature set and design. The update doesn’t go as far as an app like Obsidian when it comes to internal links. Nor is it extensible with plugins. However, for many users, I suspect iA Writer’s impeccable design and thoughtful features will outweigh its lack of certain power-user features.

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TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino Interviews Craig Federighi About Stage Manager→

Stage Manager is a very different approach to multitasking on the iPad and Mac for different reasons. TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino explored the design choices made by Apple on both platforms in an interview with Craig Federighi, the company’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering.

As Panzarino explains, Stage Manager feels very iPad-centric, but Federighi says it’s the result of the Mac and iPad teams meeting in the middle after developing similar approaches to a more streamlined version of multitasking:

“There were many of us who use the Mac every day who really wanted this kind of focused experience that gave us that balance. So we were on the Mac side, picking this idea up and saying we think that’s in reach, we want to make this happen. And separately on the iPad side we were thinking about [it]. And believe it or not two independent teams who are brainstorming and designing converge on almost the identical idea.”

In response to why Stage Manager is only supported by M1 iPads, Federighi pointed to memory, storage, and graphics as factors:

“It’s only the M1 iPads that combined the high DRAM capacity with very high capacity, high performance NAND that allows our virtual memory swap to be super fast,” Federighi says. “Now that we’re letting you have up to four apps on a panel plus another four – up to eight apps to be instantaneously responsive and have plenty of memory, we just don’t have that ability on the other systems.”

It was not purely the availability of memory that led Apple to limit Stage Manager to M1 iPads though.  

“We also view stage manager as a total experience that involves external display conductivity. And the IO on the M1 supports connectivity that our previous iPads don’t, it can drive 4k, 5k, 6k displays, it can drive them at scaled resolutions. We can’t do that on other iPads.”

There’s no doubt that Stage Manager takes some getting used to, and as Federighi acknowledges in the interview, it’s not finished, but I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen so far. Stage Manager has the potential to make the iPad a more productive device while serving as a bridge for users coming to the Mac from the iPad. That seems to be what Apple is going for, and with some refinements, and although the feature won’t be to everyone’s tastes, I think it could be a great solution for a lot of iPad and Mac users.

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