This Week's Sponsor:

TRMNL

The E-ink Companion For Your Favorite Tools

Overdrop Weather: Weather Simplified [Sponsor]

Weather might be the dreaded theme no conversation should reach, but how the tables turn when you start reciting temperature, wind speed, precipitation, the UV index, cloud cover, pressure, and humidity from the top of your head. You’re updated on all that and much else, live with ​Overdrop –​ a beautiful weather app for iPhone, powered by leading forecast providers.

Launch O​verdrop, and key information is elegantly displayed on an animated illustrated landscape that matches what you see out the window (save, perhaps, the noisy dog and grocery store that should offer disinfectant but doesn’t). A daily overview includes an exhaustive collection of live metrics – including the aforementioned – and a weather graph with temperature, wind speed, and precipitation, helps you stay one 24-hour step ahead.

The advanced quad-layer radar map with a time-travel bar predicts weather changes four days in advance, and if even that isn’t enough, plan up to a week in advance with a detailed 7-day weather forecast.

Turn on notifications, and alerts for severe weather can be delivered to Notification Centre. A sizeable set of themes – some dark – lets you customise icons, colours, and illustrations. And on iOS 14, ​Overdrop will offer beautiful, data-rich Home Screen widgets for ever quicker use.

So break the ice with a chat about the weather.

Our thanks to Overdrop for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: Pixelmator Pro and Ulysses Updates, Plus a HomeKit Camera

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Sponsored by Magic Lasso Adblock – Block Ads, Trackers and Pop-Ups on Your iPhone, iPad, and Mac

This week, Federico and John celebrate World Emoji Day with big updates to Pixelmator Pro and Ulysses, a rundown of iOS 13.6 features, the Eve Cam, plus YouTube creator and movie Unwind picks.

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  • MacStories Weekly
    • Favorite: GoodLinks
    • Shortcuts: Federico’s Reminders shortcuts
    • Extension Column: Ryan on Widgets
  • MacStories Unplugged, a Club-exclusive podcast
    • A porcupine story leads to bigger and better animal stories and Federico’s brush with the police for trespassing on an abandoned golf course. Plus, John provides an update on his macOS Big Sur review, including the apps he’s using as he finalizes his research and outlines the review.
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Unwind Picks

Apple Shares Preview of Upcoming Emoji with Emojipedia→

Source: Emojipedia.org

Source: Emojipedia.org

Back in January, the Unicode Consortium approved Emoji 13.0, which is used by companies like Apple to create new emoji designs. In Apple’s case, new emoji are expected to ship in a point update to the company’s OSes in the fall. In the meantime, though, Apple has shared a preview of its upcoming designs with Emojipedia.

The new designs include a wide variety of images including a ninja, a dodo bird, a boomerang, nesting dolls, pinched fingers, a tamale, bubble tea, and others. If past years are any indication, the new emoji will we released with iOS and iPadOS 14.1 or 14.2 and with a macOS update sometime in October.

For a run-down on all of the upcoming emoji, be sure to visit Emojipedia.

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Apple Partners with Historically Black Colleges and Universities to Create New Coding Centers→

Today Apple announced an expansion of its initiative of partnering with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to create hubs for training the next generation of coders. 10 new HBCU coding centers are being added throughout the US, from which nearly 500 teachers and community leaders will soon participate in “a virtual Community Education Initiative Coding Academy that Apple is hosting for all initiative partners.” During this training:

Educators will learn the building blocks of coding with Swift, Apple’s easy-to-learn coding language. Participants will work in teams to design app prototypes to address real community challenges. After completing the coding academy, educators will begin to integrate the coding and creativity curricula into their communities by launching coding clubs and courses at their schools, hosting community coding events, and creating workforce development opportunities for adult learners.

This announcement comes as Apple just last week shared updates to its lineup of coding resources for students, educators, and families alike, demonstrating the company’s investment in developing coding initiatives across all age groups. The move also follows Tim Cook’s open letter in June addressing racism in America and subsequent creation of a new $100 million Racial Equity and Justice Initiative by the company. The executive leading this initiative, Lisa Jackson, commented on today’s HBCU news saying:

“Apple is committed to working alongside communities of color to advance educational equity,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. “We see this expansion of our Community Education Initiative and partnership with HBCUs as another step toward helping Black students realize their dreams and solve the problems of tomorrow.”

These last couple months have seen many companies express a desire to work toward pursuing racial equality and justice, but true change takes more than just words, so I’m glad to start seeing the early fruits of Apple’s new commitments.

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Pixelmator Pro 1.7 Adds Type to Path, Canvas Rotation, and More

Source: Pixelmator.

Source: Pixelmator.

Version 1.7 of Pixelmator Pro was released today with support for placing text along a path, rotating the app’s canvas, a refinement of ML Super Resolution, and a new quick-start welcome screen.

The update, dubbed Sequoia, adds three type tools: Circular Type, Path Type, and Freeform Type. You can pick one of those tools to create a path for your text or click on an existing path in a project to type along it. With the text tool selected, your pointer switches as you approach the border of a shape in your project to the text path tool, indicating that you can begin typing along the shape with a click. The tool supports emoji and SVG fonts and can be converted to shapes too.

Source: Pixelmator.

Source: Pixelmator.

Canvas rotation is handled by a circular puck in the lower-right corner of Pixelmator Pro’s image viewer. You can enter a precise number of degrees to rotate the canvas, drag the dot along the circle’s perimeter, or use multi-touch on a trackpad to dial in the exact rotation you want. When using the trackpad to rotate, Pixelmator Pro provides haptic feedback in 90-degree increments, which is a nice touch. By default, the rotation tool appears when you begin a trackpad rotation, but you can set it to always or never be visible from the View menu too. Canvas rotation is a fantastic addition for anyone using Pixelmator Pro with Sidecar on an iPad.

Source: Pixelmator.

Source: Pixelmator.

There have always been several entry points into Pixelmator Pro, but it’s easier to pick the one you want with the new welcome screen. The screen includes recent documents, the option to create a new empty document from one of the app’s many templates, and the ability to pick an image from Photos or anywhere in your Mac’s file system.

Finally, today’s update also adds improvements to ML Super Resolution. This feature refines images’ resolution to allow them to be displayed at bigger sizes with a minimum amount of blurring. It’s a handy feature that I’ve used in the past to upscale screenshots of standard definition video. In addition to working better than before with the latest update, MS Super Resolution has added support for RAW images and a progress bar.

Pixelmator Pro has long been one of my favorite image editors on the Mac. With each release, the app has gained additional functionality that makes it more than just a photo editor. With tools like typing along a path and canvas rotation, Pixelmator Pro should be far more capable than ever before in a designer’s hands.

Apple Releases iOS 13.6 with Apple News Audio Features and Expanded Local News Coverage, Plus Digital Car Key Support

Today Apple announced big enhancements to its Apple News offerings paired with the launch of iOS 13.6. Apple News is entering the world of audio through two main products: a daily news program called Apple News Today, which is available free to all users, as well as premium audio versions of News+ stories which are exclusive to paying News+ subscribers. iOS 13.6 also introduces curated local news experiences to Apple News in a handful of regions, and brings initial support for the digital car key feature first announced at WWDC.

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Eve Cam: An Excellent Addition to a HomeKit Secure Video Setup

Last week I added a new camera to my HomeKit Secure Video setup: the Eve Cam. Announced at CES this year, what drew me to the camera was its slim profile and HomeKit Secure Video support. I’ve used other Eve home automation products in the past and had high hopes that the Eve Cam would be just as easy to install, and as reliable as the electrical outlets and door sensors I’ve tried. So far, I haven’t been disappointed.

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Ulysses 20 Review: New Dashboard Featuring Advanced Grammar and Style Check, Outline, and Much More

Ulysses 20 for iPad’s new dashboard.

Ulysses 20 for iPad’s new dashboard.

One of the promises regularly made by apps transitioning to a subscription model is that they’ll be able to deliver more regular, incremental updates rather than going untouched for extended periods of time, and they can also focus on adding functionality that existing users will appreciate rather than needing to build something entirely different to attract a new target market. Ulysses has been a subscription app for nearly three years already, and I believe it’s one of the apps doing the best job of delivering on both of those fronts.

A quick search on MacStories will show that I’ve covered Ulysses a lot, in part because it’s my primary Markdown editor, but also because there are consistently several updates per year that stand out as noteworthy and meriting a fresh review. Today’s version 20 is no exception, introducing an advanced grammar and style check ‘revision mode’ on the Mac (coming soon to iPad and iPhone) and a new dashboard view across all platforms. Both enhancements leave what was already great about Ulysses alone, while offering valuable new utility for writers sure to delight existing users and perhaps even draw a flock of new ones.

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