Introducing MacStories Unwind: A Weekly Podcast Review of Everything MacStories and More

We’re excited to announce Unwind, a new MacStories podcast recapping everything happening at MacStories and more. Every Friday, the new show will run down the stories, reviews, and other posts published on MacStories, the topics covered on AppStories, and what’s new with Club MacStories, plus a couple of media picks for unwinding over the weekend.

You can subscribe to Unwind in all the usual places using the buttons below and listen to the trailer introducing the show right here:

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MacStories Unwind Trailer

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Unwind

We publish a lot every week between the site, our podcasts, and the Club, and we know that sometimes it can be hard to keep up. With Unwind, you’ll get a short, fun guide to everything going on at MacStories, along with links, so it’s easy to jump to what interests you most.

Each week, we’ll also highlight the media we’re enjoying when we take time to unwind ourselves. Every episode will feature a couple of picks including the movies, TV shows, albums, books, articles, and video games we love. Especially with so many readers and listeners stuck at home, now felt like the perfect time to share more of how we spend our downtime.

Of course, we have a new page dedicated to Unwind on MacStories, and you can always access the full catalog of episodes at MacStories.net/tag/unwind.

Helping MacStories’ Sponsors During Uncertain Times

Sponsorships are a big part of what allows us to continue to produce MacStories and each of its properties. We’re fortunate to work with top-notch companies that make terrific products that we’re delighted to promote to readers and listeners.

We plan to offer Unwind as a separately-sponsored podcast like AppStories eventually. However, as we developed Unwind, it didn’t feel appropriate to ask companies already facing uncertainty from the COVID-19 pandemic to take a chance on a new show too. So, for the time being, Unwind will be part of the MacStories homepage sponsorship at no additional cost. Our hope is that including Unwind will help the companies that have been so good to MacStories over the years by providing them with additional exposure.

Working with sponsors to promote products to our readers and listeners in a manner that doesn’t ruin the reading or listening experience and allows us to continue to produce the content you love and the quality you expect has always been of utmost importance to us. To the sponsors with whom we’ve worked in the past and will work with in the future, we hope Unwind adds some value to a MacStories sponsorship that helps make these uncertain times a little less difficult. To our readers and listeners, we hope you enjoy the new show.

– Federico and John

Todoist Introduces New Upcoming View Across All Platforms

Popular cross-platform task manager Todoist is introducing a new Upcoming view today that serves as a replacement for the previous Next 7 Days view and adds greater functionality to it with a new calendar element and by offering access to all future tasks.

If you’ve used Next 7 Days in the past, or even the Scheduled view in Apple’s Reminders app or Upcoming in Things, you’ll feel right at home in Todoist’s Upcoming view. It’s essentially an endless list of all tasks with due dates, divided by day. One detail I appreciate is that even days containing no assigned tasks remain visible in the view, whereas in Reminders, for example, Scheduled only shows days with assignments. I could see this bothering some users, but for my needs it’s great because it allows easily rescheduling tasks by dragging and dropping them on to any day I’d like; if only the days with existing tasks were visible, that wouldn’t be possible. It’s just as well-suited for creating new tasks, since you can drag the add task button on to any day you’d like.

Besides providing access to all scheduled tasks, rather than just the next week’s worth, the main change with Todoist’s Upcoming view is the new calendar element. Similar to the Forecast view found in OmniFocus, this takes the form of a row lining the top of the screen that displays the next week’s worth of dates. A small dot indicates whether a day has assigned tasks or not, and you can swipe left to page through future sets of days. You can also tap the month/year button in the top-left corner of the calendar row to bring up a scrolling month view for the sake of quickly navigating further into the future.

The Upcoming view isn’t exactly world-changing, but it is markedly better than what it replaces, and if Todoist were my primary task manager it would absolutely be the view I spent all of my time in. I love the ease of seeing all my tasks in one place, rescheduling them via drag and drop, and the added utility of the new calendar row. Everyone’s task management needs and preferences are different, but if it were up to me, every task manager would have a view that works like this.

Todoist is available on the App Store.

Ulysses 19 Brings iPad Cursor Support, External Folders, Material Sheets, and More

The latest version of Ulysses, the excellent Markdown editor, is available now. Ulysses 19 offers enhancements in several different areas, from fully optimizing for the new iPadOS cursor, to supporting external folders for the first time, introducing a new ‘material’ designation for sheets, and adding keyword improvements, exportable backups, and even a new font. It’s a strong update, and one that continues to prove Ulysses the best app for my writing needs.

Read more

Darkroom 4.6 Adds Video to Its Excellent Photo Editing Workflow

Darkroom is a terrific photo editor for the iPhone and iPad that leverages iCloud Photos with a robust set of editing tools and filters. With the release of version 4.6 today, Darkroom adds video to the mix. What’s impressive about the update is that it manages to apply the same set of tools and filters available for photos to video in real-time, which results in a fast, efficient editing workflow.

Read more

Connected, Episode 291: The Scrooge McDuck of Computers→

On this week’s episode of Connected:

Myke and Federico share their impressions of the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro and Stephen reveals the number of items in his collection and the group announces The Hackett Number — the computers-per-capita figure for Stephen’s household.

You can listen below (and find the show notes here).

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Connected, Episode 291

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AppStories, Episode 159 – The Evolution of Clipboard and Shelf Apps→

This week on AppStories, we look back at the origins of clipboard apps on iOS, how they’ve evolved, and the apps we’re currently using on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac to save snippets of information for use elsewhere.

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AppStories Episode 159 - The Evolution of Clipboard and Shelf Apps

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Apple Maps’ Look Around Feature Expands to Chicago→

Apple has updated the Look Around feature of the Maps app to include Chicago, and as always, Justin O’Beirne has all the details.

According to O’Beirne, Chicago, which is the tenth US city to be added to Look Around, is the biggest expansion of the feature by land area to date. Not only is the city included, but so are many of the surrounding suburbs. The feature still covers only about 0.3% of the land area of the US, but by covering eight of the country’s ten largest US cities, Look Around accounts for nearly 14% of the US population.

For more details on the update, including fantastic animated GIFs that visualize the expansion of Look Around to Chicago and previous cities, be sure to read O’Beirne’s full story.

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