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New AirPods First Impressions: Wireless Magic

I don’t think I need to extol the virtues of AirPods in 2019. Over two years after their debut, Apple’s truly-wireless earbuds, in addition to providing users with a convenient, seamless way to stream music and podcasts to their ears, have become a cultural phenomenon that has spurred some of the greatest memes of Tech Twitter in recent history. Everybody loves AirPods – provided their unique size and design fit their ears – and, most of all, everybody likes to say how much they love their AirPods.

This article is no different, but there’s a small twist in the usual narrative that prompted me to write this story after receiving my second-generation AirPods yesterday.

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Cardhop for iOS Review: A Powerful New Alternative to Apple’s Contacts

Any time a new app launches in the same category as a first-party, pre-installed app, there’s always a lot to prove. It’s one thing to find new customers in a market limited to third-party options, where prospective users have to pay one way or another to access an app in that category. But when there’s a free, built-in option, third-party apps not only have to prove that they’re good apps, they also have to offer enough extra benefit above and beyond what the Apple-designed default provides. The bar for such apps is raised higher in many ways.

Facing that challenge today is a new app from Flexibits, Cardhop for iOS, which serves as the iPhone and iPad companion to the contacts app launched for Mac in late 2017. Powered by a convenient natural language input system, Cardhop includes a host of features that differentiate it from Apple’s Contacts app and pose a strong threat to the iOS default.

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Shortcuts 2.2 Brings New Apple Notes Actions, Travel Time Enhancements

Shortcuts 2.2, the second major update to Apple’s automation app following October’s 2.1 release, has been released on the App Store today. The new version of Shortcuts, which has been available to developers for testing via TestFlight for several weeks now, brings a variety of smaller refinements and bug fixes; more importantly, it extends Shortcuts’ integration with one of Apple’s most popular built-in apps: Notes. Additionally, Shortcuts 2.2 builds upon the existing ‘Get Travel Time’ action (based on the Apple Maps framework) with new Magic Variables well suited for shortcuts that integrate with Siri.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been building advanced shortcuts that take advantage of the new actions for Notes and Maps, which I’m going to explain and share in this article. The new shortcuts are also available through the MacStories Shortcuts Archive, which now features a dedicated Apple Notes section as well. Let’s dive in.

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The Sweet Setup Launches Revised and Expanded ‘Learn Ulysses’ Course

In August 2017, The Sweet Setup introduced a video course designed to equip users to get the most out of Ulysses, the popular Markdown text editor. Today, that ‘Learn Ulysses’ course is being expanded and revised in a major way. Everything has been completely modernized with entirely new videos that replace the previous set, plus the addition of brand new videos, written tutorials, and setups covering a variety of in-depth topics.

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Drafts for Mac: The MacStories Review


The quest for the perfect text application – for some of us it has been a lifelong goal, or at least it feels like it. I realised very early on in my computing life that I did not enjoy playing with formatting in Word or Pages, and when I discovered that Markdown provides the ability to make items **bold** or _italic_ with just a few simple characters, I felt like I had finally found my text formatting holy grail.

Many years ago I discovered Drafts for iOS, and the idea appealed: you open the application and type. No creating a new file, or trying to decide what to do with the text before the thought is fully formed, just open, type, then decide. I frequently need to jot down notes, save links, and have found being able to write without thinking too much about where the words need to go, and how they’re going to get there, is extremely helpful in today’s world of constant interruptions.

Last year saw Drafts 5 released for iOS with even more capability than before, allowing you to truly customise it to be the text editor you’ve always dreamed of having. There was only one small but important snag – no Mac version.

Today there is a Mac app. It is what many of us have been waiting for, albeit with a few missing features at the moment. Drafts for Mac has landed.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: you’ve probably heard of Marzipan, the Apple project to enable iOS developers to bring their applications to the Mac. This is not one of those apps. It is an app written from the ground up for macOS, which works as expected with the system features.

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The Wall Street Journal Details Terms of Partnership with Apple for Apple News+ Service→

Lukas I. Alpert, writing for The Wall Street Journal about the terms between The Wall Street Journal and Apple for the newspaper’s presence on the Apple News+ service:

The Apple app will surface stories thought to be of interest to a general reader—that could be national news, politics, sports and leisure news, but also some business news, people familiar with the situation said. The paper’s entire slate of business and financial news will also be searchable within the app, but the thinking is that most users won’t consume much beyond what is actively presented to them.

Apple users will have access to only three days’ worth of the Journal’s archive, the people said. The Journal also negotiated terms that would allow it to drop out of the service, they said.

“I have not entered into this deal lightly,” Mr. Lewis said in his newsroom talk. “It was never worth doing a bad deal.”

The whole story, despite being about the WSJ and on the WSJ, is reported as a rumor based on what “people said” about a newsroom staff meeting with William Lewis, chief executive of Dow Jones & Co. and publisher of the Journal. It is, effectively, a case of The Wall Street Journal reporting news about itself as a rumor.

Fortunately, William Lewis himself published an official memo on the Dow Jones press website:

WSJ members will continue to have exclusive access to the rich business reporting and analysis about which they are so passionate. Apple News+ introduces an entirely new category of readers who will have the opportunity to experience a specially curated collection of general interest news from The Wall Street Journal. As a result, our newsroom will grow. This is an investment in quality journalism.

While today’s announcement focuses on Apple News+, our collaboration with Apple will also extend to areas like video, voice, market data and AI. I will have more to share on those plans in the coming weeks and months.

“A specially curated collection of general interest news from The Wall Street Journal” sounds like a smaller selection of what you’d otherwise get with a “real” subscription to the WSJ through the web.

Earlier today I tweeted that with Apple News+ I might be able to stop paying my more expensive subscription to the WSJ and just use the Apple News+ channel instead. Now I’m not so sure I should cancel the subscription after all: I don’t like the idea of having three days to catch up on stories I want to read, and it sounds like certain stories will only be available through search. I’m going to keep my standalone WSJ subscription active for now until I fully figure out what the experience in Apple News+ is like.

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Apple Card: The MacStories Overview

This morning at Apple’s special event in the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park, Vice President of Apple Pay Jennifer Bailey took the stage to announce Apple Card. These “Apple” name prefixes are growing tedious, but Apple Card is looking to reduce the tedium which permeates the credit card industry. Apple is championing its credit card as a new industry leader in a variety of areas, including privacy, security, transparency, lack of fees, and fair interest rates. Apple Card gives rewards in cash rather than points, and these “Daily Cash” rewards are distributed to your Apple Cash account every day. If Apple Card can deliver on its promises, it shows real potential to be a disruptor in the often exploitative credit card industry.

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A Complete List of All the Magazines Available for Apple News+ in the U.S. (So Far)

Earlier today, Apple launched Apple News+, a new subscription-based service to gain access to hundreds of magazines in the Apple News app for $9.99/month. You can read my overview and first impressions here.

After taking an initial look at Apple News+ with my US Apple ID and noticing the differences between Apple News Format-optimized magazines and standard “PDF-like” ones, I thought it’d be interesting and useful to compile the full list of all magazines currently available to Apple News+ subscribers in the US.

Below, you will find the complete list of all 251 magazines that are available for Apple News+ in the United States. The list was compiled by checking all the magazines featured in the ‘Browse the Catalog’ section of Apple News+ as well as individual categories. Apple advertises “300 publications” as being available in Apple News+; I believe that the list below is shorter for two reasons:

  • These are only magazines. I didn’t count newspapers (The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times) and digital publishers.
  • Apple News+ just launched. Some magazines may not have gone live yet. In fact, I had to add a few more right before posting this article.

To create this list, I manually opened each magazine and annotated whether its latest issue was using Apple News Format or the standard, PDF-like format. Magazines that support Apple News Format are labeled with “(ANF)” in the list. The split between Apple News Format magazines and standard magazines is fairly even: 125 magazines are using the richer Apple News Format in their latest issue, while 126 of them are relying on traditional PDFs (likely the format the old Texture service was using).

In simpler terms, this means that 49.8% of the magazines I counted in this list are using Apple News Format. As I wrote in my overview earlier today, I hope more and more publishers will switch to the mobile-friendly, more versatile Apple News Format in future issues.

That being said, you can find the complete list of 251 magazines I found in Apple News+ below. If I missed any, please let me know.

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