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Fontcase Simplifies Custom Font Installation on iOS and iPadOS

On Friday, The Iconfactory announced that it has collaborated with Manolo Sañudo, the developer of open-source font installation utility xFonts, on a new version of the app, which has been renamed Fontcase. The app greatly simplifies the process of installing custom fonts on iOS and iPadOS. Fontcase isn’t the first utility to do this. However, Fontcase has the advantage of being free and open-source, which should provide users confidence that it’s secure.

Security is an issue with font installers because they require a configuration profile to be installed in the Settings → General section of your iPhone or iPad. Configuration profiles can control important aspects of iOS and iPadOS that could be misused. Because Fontcase is open source, its code is publicly available for anyone to review to make sure it isn’t doing anything unexpected. However, even if you don’t review the code yourself, the mere fact that it is publicly available provides some comfort that someone else has done so.

Using Fontcase’s document browser integration to locate fonts to install.

Using Fontcase’s document browser integration to locate fonts to install.

You’ll spend most of your time in Fontcase’s Fonts tab, which is controlled by two buttons marked Import and Install. Import takes advantage of the document browser feature of iOS and iPadOS, opening the familiar Files UI for navigating to a folder in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or another file provider where you have fonts saved that you want to install. Select the fonts you want and tap Open, and they will appear in Fontcase’s UI using the font itself to provide users with a mini-preview.

Tap any font you’ve imported to see metadata and a preview.

Tap any font you’ve imported to see metadata and a preview.

Tap on a font imported into Fontcase, and the app displays metadata about it along with a full preview of the font. On the iPhone, this makes sense, but it’s too bad that on the iPad, Fontcase doesn’t make use of a list and detailed view layout for the preview of fonts. Instead, there’s a vast empty space on the right-hand side of the iPad UI.

Fontcase’s installation workflow.

Fontcase’s installation workflow.

Once you’re ready to install your collection of fonts, tap Install, which bundles all of the fonts you’ve imported into a single configuration profile. Tap Download Fonts, and the profile is saved and ready for installation in Settings → General → Profiles. Tap on the Fontcase Installation profile in the Downloaded Profile section and follow the prompts to finalize the installation. Once installed, the fonts will be available alongside the system-provided fonts in apps like The Iconfactory’s Tot, as well as many other apps that support custom fonts, including Apple’s own Pages.

It’s nice to see The Iconfactory contributing to an open-source project to provide a safe and simple way to add fonts to iOS and iPadOS. If you’re looking for good writing fonts to try with the app, I like iA Writer’s Duo font and Courier Prime, both of which are available to download for free.

Fontcase is available as a free download on the App Store and is compatible with the iPhone and iPad.

MacStories Unwind: WWDC, OmniFocus Custom Perspectives, and New Read-It-Later and Camera Apps

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This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    • Federico shares a shortcut for browsing articles by topic and domain in Reeder and GoodLinks
    • Ryan highlights apps with great implementations of features announced at WWDC 2019
    • John imagines what better external display support for the iPad Pro might look like
    • Plus lots of apps, Q&A, Links and more
  • MacStories Unplugged
    • John travels west and Federico reveals his fascination with small town America before they dive into a discussion of optimism in technology writing and explore a new trend they are seeing emerge in the App Store.

AppStories

Unwind Picks

Apple Shares WWDC Details Including Keynote Time, Developer Forums, 1-on-1 Developer Labs, and More

Little more than a week away from Apple’s first all-online WWDC, the company today revealed the full details for how this new virtual conference format will work.

While the full conference will span June 22-26, the two biggest events will be held on kickoff day, as per tradition. The Special Event Keynote will stream directly from Apple Park starting at 10 a.m. PDT on Monday, while the Platforms State of the Union will follow a few hours later at 2 p.m. PDT. The former will offer a wide variety of options for viewing, including apple.com, the Apple Developer app and website, the Apple TV app, and YouTube; the latter will be limited to the Apple Developer app and website.

Apple will also offer over 100 engineering sessions throughout the week. Rather than having these sessions at different times throughout each day, as usual, Apple will instead drop a new batch of videos every day at 10 a.m. PDT, which developers can view via the Apple Developer app or website.

Perhaps the biggest question marks about the conference have been what opportunities for interaction with Apple engineers will be made available. The company is addressing this in two ways: with brand new Apple Developer Forums and by offering reservation-only 1-on-1 Developer Labs. Through forums Apple will enable over 1,000 of its engineers to interact with the developer community in a more public way, while developers can get private help from an engineer through a 1-on-1 lab. More information about how to sign up for a lab slot will be forthcoming.

While this will certainly be a WWDC unlike any before, it sounds like Apple is doing everything it can to ensure developers get as much value out of conference participation as possible. Whether you’re a developer or not, there’s surely a lot of exciting things the week will bring.

Adobe Photoshop Camera Brings Real-Time Filters and AI to Photo Sharing

Adobe has released a filter-focused camera app called Photoshop Camera that relies heavily on the company’s Sensei AI technology to make it easy to take photos, apply filters, and share them. The app, which was announced last November and has been in beta ever since then, is free with an In-App Purchase available to unlock 20GB of Creative Cloud storage.

Sensei is Adobe’s AI technology that the company has been weaving into more and more of its desktop and mobile apps. Like other companies adding AI to image processing, Sensei touches a wide variety of features in different apps, assisting with everything from aspects of the photo editing process like object selection to settings like exposure. With Photoshop Camera, Sensei plays an even more pronounced role, automating the process of mobile photography and applying filters to create an experience that balances ease-of-use with image quality.

As Adobe explained last fall:

With Photoshop Camera you can capture, edit, and share stunning photos and moments – both natural and creative – using real-time Photoshop-grade magic right from the viewfinder, leaving you free to focus on storytelling with powerful tools and effects. Leveraging Adobe Sensei intelligence, the app can instantly recognize the subject in your photo and provide recommendations, and automatically apply sophisticated, unique features at the moment of capture (i.e. portraits, landscapes, selfies, food shots), while always preserving an original shot. It also understands the technical content (i.e. dynamic range, tonality, scene-type, face regions) of the photo and automatically applies complex adjustments.

Photoshop Camera comes with several pre-installed filters, which Adobe calls Lenses, with additional ones available for download from the app’s built-in Lens Library. Some Lenses have been designed by Adobe, while others have been created by third-party photographers, and even musician Billie Eilish. There are a wide variety of Lenses available at launch, and the company says new ones will be released weekly going forward. The Lens Library also lets users manage their collection of Lenses, adding new ones, deleting others, and reordering them to customize the app to your tastes.

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Apple Announces iTunes U and iBooks Author Will Be Discontinued

iBooks Author will become unavailable soon.

iBooks Author will become unavailable soon.

Today through two new support pages that have been posted on Apple’s website, the company announced that iTunes U will be discontinued at the end of 2021 and iBooks Author will become unavailable much sooner: on July 1, 2020.

While both announcements are noteworthy since they concern software with long histories, signs of these moves have been visible for years. iTunes U has received minimal investment of late as Apple has redirected resources to its Classroom and Schoolwork platforms. iBooks Author, similarly, has grown stagnant as many of its features have made their way into recent Pages updates.

Apple is recommending that publishers of public iTunes U content move their content over to Apple Podcasts or Apple Books, as appropriate. Private content, on the other hand, is better suited for moving to Schoolwork.

iBooks Author won’t receive any more updates and will become unavailable for download altogether as of July 1. Anyone who already owns the app will be able to continue using it, but Apple encourages everyone to move book creation to Pages. According to the company:

If you have iBooks Author books you’d like to import into Pages, a book import feature is coming to Pages soon. It will allow you to open and edit iBooks Author files (.iba) in Pages.

Hopefully this forthcoming update will also bring Pages’ book creation tools closer to feature parity with what currently exists in iBooks Author, but it’s possible that may not happen for some time.

With WWDC 2020 drawing ever closer, Apple is clearly trying to get any pre-announcements out of the way so the big show can focus on the future rather than the past. In this context, we may see more app- or developer-related announcements over the next couple of weeks.

GoodLinks Review: A Flexible Read-it-Later Link Manager Packed with Automation Options

The original crop of read-it-later apps that date back to the earliest days of the App Store were based on web services maintained by the developers of those apps. Apps like Instapaper and Pocket, the two biggest names in the space, have always been backed by web services that integrate tightly with native apps across Apple’s platforms. It’s a model that worked, and although those apps have continued to evolve and change with regular updates over the years, new entrants into the category were few and far between in this once hyper-competitive category – until now.

Thanks to relatively recent changes to Apple’s OSes, a new generation of read-it-later apps are emerging. They no longer need to run their own web services and are leveraging the latest OS technologies in new and interesting ways. One of the very best is GoodLinks, a new read-it-later app and link manager released today by Ngoc Luu, the developer of the well-known text editor 1Writer.

GoodLinks' main UI.

GoodLinks’ main UI.

Since returning to Reeder for the RSS feeds I follow, I’ve been using its read-it-later service, which is terrific. We’ve also covered apps like Abyss and Readit in MacStories Weekly. Like GoodLinks, those apps use iCloud sync to keep articles you save synced across all the devices they support instead of using a developer-maintained web service. That’s a relatively new development for these sorts of apps, but the difference in this new generation of read-it-later apps runs deeper. New features of the OSes on which GoodLinks runs have breathed new life into the category, and its developer has taken advantage of these features to provide new utility to users.

Having settled into a comfortable Reeder workflow, I didn’t expect the way I manage links to be upended anytime soon. However, that’s exactly what has happened since I began using GoodLinks. What grabbed me is a versatility that stems from the fluidity of getting links into the app, managing them, and getting them out again. There’s built-in flexibility to GoodLinks that allows it to adapt exceedingly well to a wide variety of use cases. As with any 1.0 app, there’s room for improvement, but my wishes for GoodLinks are just that: wishes borne of enthusiasm for a terrific app that has quickly found its way into my daily workflow. Let’s dig into the details.

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Pastel Review: A Modern Color Utility for iPad and iPhone

Five years into the iPad Pro era, iPad software is finally starting to catch up to its excellent hardware. Thanks to a mix of software enhancements, business model trends, and key developer tools such as Mac Catalyst, both iPadOS and its third-party app ecosystem have become more accommodating to professional uses.

Entering that context is Pastel, the latest app from developer Steve Troughton-Smith. Pastel is a color palette utility for the iPad and iPhone that has a Catalyst-powered Mac version coming soon. The app offers a dedicated home for storing collections of color palettes and individual colors you want to save for reference. It also takes advantage of technologies like drag and drop and context menus to perfectly complement other creative tools on your device.

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How I Use Custom Perspectives in OmniFocus

My custom perspective setup.

My custom perspective setup.

A few weeks ago, we released the latest product under the MacStories Pixel brand: MacStories Perspective Icons, a set of 20,000 custom perspective icons for OmniFocus Pro. You can find more details on the product page, read the FAQ, and check out my announcement blog post here. The set is available at $17.99 with a launch promo; Club MacStories members can purchase it at an additional 15% off.

As part of the release of MacStories Perspective Icons (which, by the way, takes advantage of a new feature in OmniFocus 3.8 to install custom icons with a Files picker), I wanted to write about my perspective setup in OmniFocus and explain why custom perspectives have become an integral component of my task management workflow.

Let me clarify upfront, however, that this article isn’t meant to be a primer on custom perspectives in OmniFocus. If you’re not familiar with this functionality, I recommend checking out this excellent guide over at Learn OmniFocus; alternatively, you can read The Omni Group’s official perspective documentation here. You can also find other solid examples of OmniFocus users’ custom setups around the web such as these two, which helped me better understand the power and flexibility of perspectives in OmniFocus when I was new to the app. In this story, I’m going to focus on how I’ve been using perspectives to put together a custom sidebar in OmniFocus that helps me navigate my busy life and make sense of it all.

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