Introducing the MacStories Shortcuts Archive, a Collection of 150 Custom Shortcuts for Apple’s Shortcuts App

By Federico Viticci

After several months of work, I’m pleased to announce the MacStories Shortcuts Archive – the official repository for shortcuts I’ve created over the years (including when they used to be called “workflows”) and which have been updated, tested for the Shortcuts app, and collected in a single place.

You can find the archive at macstories.net/shortcuts. In this first version, the archive contains 150 shortcuts, but more will be posted over time. Each shortcut was created and tested by me and the MacStories team; all of them have been categorized, updated for the Shortcuts app, and marked up with inline comments to explain what they do.

Even better, they’re all free to download and you can modify them to suit your needs.

Spark Adds Rich Text Formatting for Email: Lists, Text Colors, and Highlighting

By Ryan Christoffel

Today in an update to its iOS and Mac apps, the email client Spark has introduced new rich text formatting options to enable greater flexibility in styling your messages.

Spark already included the expected bold, italics, and underline options, and its macOS version previously allowed creating bulleted or numbered lists, but those list options have now come to iOS as well. Additionally, both Mac and iOS users can now change the color of text in their emails, as well as add highlighting to text.

Rich text support is a particularly important feature for an email app, so I’m glad to see it come to Spark. While I likely won’t start sending messages with different colored fonts, it’s nice having the variety of options Spark provides here. Lists in particular were something I’ve missed having in the past, and I like the idea of employing highlights to call out anything of special importance in an email. I’ve historically used bold for that purpose, but highlighting definitely does an even better job of standing out.

Spark’s latest update is available now as a free download for iOS, and the Mac update is coming soon.

AppStories, Episode 101 – iOS 13 Wish List Part 1: Files and the iPad Home Screen →

Linked By John Voorhees

On this week’s episode of AppStories, we discuss our iOS 13 wishes for the Files app and iPad home screen.

StopTheMadness: Take Back Your Web Browser [Sponsor]

By MacStories Team

When you visit a website, few things are more frustrating than when your browser doesn’t work as expected because the site has disabled common interface features. StopTheMadness is a Safari and Firefox extension that prevents sites from modifying how your browser works when you visit them.

Available on the Mac App Store for macOS 10.12 Sierra and later, StopTheMadness puts you back in control of your browsing experience. Users often assume their browser isn’t working correctly when in fact, the trouble lies with the sites they visit. To see just how bad it can be, visit StopTheMadness’ test page for a demonstration. With StopTheMadness enabled, everything on the test page is returned to working the way you expect.

Whether you’re on Safari or Firefox, StopTheMadness ensures you can:

⌘-click to open links in a new tab
Use keyboard shortcuts that rely on the ⌘ modifier
Open Safari’s standard contextual menu when you right click
Drag images and links
Select text
Paste text into any text field
Copy text from anywhere on a webpage
Auto-fill and complete passwords

StopTheMadness can even prevent clicked links in Google search results from being redirected to a different site. The extension can also be customized to work on a per-site basis allowing users to dial in the exact experience they want.

Get StopTheMadness today on the Mac App Store and take back your web browser. StopTheMadness is available as a separate purchase for Google Chrome on the Chrome Web Store.

Spectre: A Computational Approach to Long-Exposure iPhone Photography

By John Voorhees

Spectre is a new specialized camera app from the team that created Halide, one of our favorite camera apps on iOS. The Halide team describes Spectre as a computational shutter for the iPhone, which allows the app to do things like remove people from a crowded scene, create artistic images of rushing water, and produce light trails at night. The same sort of images can be created using traditional cameras, but getting the exposure right, holding the camera absolutely still, and accounting for other factors make them difficult to get right. With Spectre, artificial intelligence is used to simplify the process and make long-exposure photography accessible to anyone with an iPhone.

Apple’s Month-Long Celebration of International Women’s Day

By John Voorhees

A week from tomorrow is International Women’s Day. To mark the day, Apple has announced a series of events throughout the month of March.

In the US, Apple is partnering with Girls Can Code to bring programming to more girls and young women. The program includes Swift training for club leaders and will use the company’s Everyone Can Code Curriculum to make the programming language available nationwide to 90,000 girls. Apple’s Lisa Jackson:

“Women have earned the opportunity to have our ideas shape the future,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. “We’re excited to support Girls Who Code as they empower girls to be the developers and tech innovators of tomorrow.”

Emily Grasile of the Chicago Field Museum will be featured at Chicago’s Michigan Avenue store.

In addition, Apple retail stores in Singapore, Kyoto, Hong Kong, London, Milan, Paris, Dubai, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles will host a special ‘Made by Women’ series featuring artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, musicians, developers, photographers, and others.

On the App Store, Apple will run special features all month long. Every March App of the Day will feature apps by women, and on Fridays the App Store will go behind the scenes with stories of the women behind apps and efforts being made to bring women into the tech industry. On March 8th, there will also be a special collection of games featuring Captain Marvel that coincides with the release of the film.

Apple Music will include special editorial and playlist content featuring women and Beats 1 will have a 24-hour takeover highlighting the work of women musicians. Apple’s movie, TV, books, and podcast storefronts will include content made by and featuring women too. Finally, on March 8th, Apple Watch users who complete a 1.6 kilometer walk, run, or wheelchair workout will receive a special Activity award and stickers for Messages.

Soor: A Third-Party Apple Music Client for iPhone

By Federico Viticci

Soor, a third-party client for Apple Music created by indie developer Tanmay Sonawane, is based upon a fascinating premise: unlike other standalone music players for iPhone, Soor works with Apple’s native MusicKit API, enabling direct integration with Apple Music; unlike Apple’s Music app though, Soor prioritizes one-handed gestures, user customization, and a single-page design that packs multiple sections into one view. In theory, Soor should be the optimal blend of two different worlds – a third-party music player with its own aesthetic and stylistic choices combined with Apple Music data and the service’s vast streaming catalog. In practice, while Soor has some solid ideas I’d like to see in Apple Music too, and despite its intriguing visual design, the app doesn’t qualify as a complete replacement for the Music app on iPhone.

Connected, Episode 232: The Unique Blend of Tattoos and Automation →

Linked By Federico Viticci

After skipping follow-up, Myke and Federico try to explain the new USB branding, discuss fingerprint sensors and the merits of Evernote in 2019, and wish for apps that don’t exist (but should).

On this week’s episode of Connected, I share more details about my Evernote experiments as well as an idea for an app I’d like to exist. You can listen here.

Sponsored by:

eero: Never think about WiFi again. Get $100 off the ‘Eero base unit and 2 beacons package’, and a year of eero Plus.
Luna Display: The only hardware solution that turns your iPad into a wireless display for your Mac. Use promo code CONNECTED at checkout for 10% off.
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USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 Merged Under New USB 3.2 Branding →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors about the latest rebrand in USB spec land:

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), this week announced a rebranding of the USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 specifications, under the USB 3.2 specification. As outlined by Tom’s Hardware, USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 will now be considered previous generations of the USB 3.2 specification.

Going forward, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (transfer speeds up to 5Gb/s), which used to be USB 3.0 prior to a separate rebranding, will be called USB 3.2 Gen 1, while USB 3.1 Gen 2 (transfer speeds up to 10Gb/s) will now be known as USB 3.2 Gen 2.

It gets better though:

If the swap between USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 to USB 3.2 wasn’t confusing enough, each of these specifications also has a marketing term. The new USB 3.2 Gen 1 with transfer speeds up to 5Gb/s is SuperSpeed USB, while USB 3.2 Gen 2 with transfer speeds up to 10Gb/s is known as SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps. The USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 specification with transfer speeds up to 20Gb/s is known as SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps.

Make sure to check out the comparison table on MacRumors to admire the full extent of these changes.

As someone who’s been experimenting with USB-C accessories compliant with the USB 3.1 spec over the past few months, I can’t even begin to stress how confusing for the average consumer all of this stuff can be. It took me days to wrap my head around the differences between the physical USB-C connector, the underlying specs it can support, and the DisplayPort compatibility mode – and I do this for a living. In my experience, if you’re looking to buy modern USB accessories compatible with an iPad Pro or MacBook Pro, you’re better off looking for a technical spec label rather than the “friendly names” such as “SuperSpeed”, which manufacturers often fail to mention in their spec sheets.

Until today, if you wanted to buy USB-C accessories supporting the highest data transfer rates on the 2018 iPad Pro, you had to look for devices compliant with USB 3.1 Gen. 2; with today’s rebrand, the 2018 iPad Pro supports USB 3.2 Gen. 2 for transfers up to 10 Gbps, but not the similarly-named USB 3.2 Gen. 2x2. I’m sure this is going to be so easy to explain to someone who’s looking for the “fastest” USB-C cable for their iPad Pro.