This Week's Sponsor:

Textastic

The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try

Apple Celebrates the Hour of Code with Today at Apple Sessions and Announces New Curriculum Offerings

As in the past, Apple is marking Computer Science Education Week by participating in the Hour of Code. The company will host special Hour of Code sessions in its retail stores from December 1 - 14 as part of its Today at Apple programming. Apple also announced new curriculum offerings:

The company also introduced Swift Coding Club materials to help teach coding outside of the classroom with Swift, Apple’s easy-to-learn programming language used by professional developers to create world-class apps. And to help prepare and develop students for the workforce, the company unveiled new Advanced Placement curriculum and App Development with Swift certification.

This is the sixth year that Apple has participated in the Hour of Code. Participants from 6 - 12 years old will learn to code with robots, while kids 12 and up will use Swift Playgrounds and the iPad.

The Hour of Code is just a small part of Apple’s Everyone Can Code initiative, which has dramatically expanded in recent years. The program now reaches children from their earliest years in school through college graduates.

My kids have participated in past Hour of Code sessions and had a great experience. They are an excellent introduction to coding for any kid who is curious about programming. I suggest signing up soon if you’re interested though because in past years, the sessions, which should go live soon, have filled quickly.

Hopes and Expectations for Apple’s 2019

Forward-looking columns about Apple’s business in the new year are usually saved for late December, but I wanted to get ahead of all those pieces because we now know what Apple’s full 2018 product lineup looks like. While new AirPods and the AirPower charging mat are both suspiciously still absent, and one or both could in theory be launched via press release any time, most likely what we have now from Apple is what we’ll be left with until after the new year begins. As such, today seems like a great time to start sharing hopes and expectations for the year ahead.

Read more

Luna Display: Turn Your iPad into a Second Display [Sponsor]

Luna Display is the only hardware solution that turns any iPad into a true, wireless second display for your Mac.

Available in USB-C and Mini DisplayPort versions, Luna Display is incredibly simple to set up. Just plug it into your Mac, and launch its free iPad and Mac companion apps, and your Mac automatically recognizes your iPad as a second display. Everything works seamlessly over WiFi, but if WiFi is unavailable, you can use a USB connection instead.

Once you’re up and running, you’ll be blown away by Luna Display. It’s lightning fast with crystal clear image quality thanks to proprietary LIQUID Technology that ensures reliable performance and wireless flexibility. The image quality is doubly remarkable when you realize that it’s all being done wirelessly.

Using your iPad as a second display is a game changer. Luna Display not only expands your screen real estate without having to buy a second display, but its portability frees you to work wherever you please. Better yet, Luna Display brings touch interaction to the Mac. Luna Display is fully compatible with external keyboards, the Apple Pencil, and touch gestures. Also, if you’re an artist, Luna Display is an excellent companion to Astropad, which turns your iPad into a Mac graphics tablet.

Luna Display is available for $79.99, but MacStories readers can purchase Luna Display for 10% off by using the promo code MACSTORIES at checkout. That’s a great deal, but it ends December 1, 2018, at 11:59 PM CST, so don’t delay. Luna Display also makes a great holiday gift for friends and family.

Turn your iPad into a second display today with Luna Display.

Our thanks to Luna Display for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Connected, Episode 219: Your Best Friend, Base64→

Stephen formalizes a new show segment, Federico is making magic in Shortcuts and Myke has thoughts about picture frames.

On this week’s episode of Connected, I detailed the backstory of Home Screen Icon Creator and we covered a whole bunch of other topics. You can listen here.

Sponsored by:

  • Pingdom: Start monitoring your websites and servers today. Use offer code CONNECTED to get 30% off.
  • Hover: Show the world what you’re passionate about with 10% off your first purchase
  • 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.
Permalink

Google Integrates Assistant App with Siri Shortcuts on iOS

Google released an exciting update for its Assistant iOS app today, bringing support for Siri shortcuts and, for the first time, opening lines of communication between the two competing assistants.

Siri and the Google Assistant have historically been unable to work together in any way, but thanks to the opening up of Siri via shortcuts in iOS 12, that changes now. With the latest update, you can set up a shortcut in iOS to immediately, via Siri, trigger any command you’d like to give Google’s Assistant.

Read more

My Today at Apple Experience

It took nearly 18 months of Apple’s regular Today at Apple promotions through keynote events and press releases, but I finally had my interest in the program piqued. As I wrote earlier this month, whereas every other Apple product is analyzed to death by writers, podcasters, and YouTubers, the company’s retail stores and Today at Apple program are often ignored by tech media. But Apple’s increased trumpeting of its retail initiatives, in the face of a collective shrug from the press, made me wonder what exactly we’re all missing out on here. I mean, if the company is passionate enough about Today at Apple to host over 18,000 sessions per week, then there must be something special about the program.

So I attended my first session.

Last Monday morning I opened the Apple Store app and booked a session at Apple Fifth Avenue called “Photo Lab: Crafting Your Shot Co-created with Chase Jarvis.” As I suspect is true of most iPhone owners, I love taking pictures with my phone, but I know absolutely nothing about the ins and outs of quality photography. As a result, the Photo Lab session seemed like a great place to start.

Much of the time when Apple promotes Today at Apple, it highlights sessions taking place in its global flagship stores, with beautiful open forums and enormous wall displays. My experience was a lot more low-key, as the Fifth Avenue location is currently approaching two full years in temporary housing as major renovations to its previous location near completion. While the revamped Fifth Avenue store will undoubtedly come with all the beauty and grandeur of locations like Michigan Avenue and Regent Street, for now the site lacks all those modern bells and whistles; rather than taking place in a forum, my Today at Apple session took place around a small table that sat eight participants.

I’m not going to get much into the specifics of the session’s contents, which were solid overall; instead, I want to share three simple takeaways from this first Today at Apple experience. They’re the three main things that were on my mind following the session, and after rewatching portions of Apple’s October event in Brooklyn, I realized that my takeaways actually line up with statements shared by executives at the event.

Read more

My Markdown Writing and Collaboration Workflow, Powered by Working Copy 3.6, iCloud Drive, and GitHub

For the past couple of years, I (and the rest of the MacStories team) have used Working Copy to store and collaborate on Markdown drafts for our articles. As I explained in a story from late 2016, even though Working Copy is a Git client primarily designed for programmers, it is possible to leverage the app’s capabilities to perform version control for plain text too. Each MacStories team member has a private GitHub repository where we store Markdown files of our articles; in the same repository, other writers can make edits to drafts and commit them to GitHub; this way, the author can then pull back the edited file and use Working Copy’s built-in diff tool to see what’s changed from the last version of the file and read comments left by whoever edited the draft.1

As I mentioned two years ago, this system takes a while to get used to: GitHub has a bit of overhead in terms of understanding the correct terminology for different aspects of its file management workflow, but Working Copy makes it easier by abstracting much of the complexity involved with committing files, pushing them, and comparing them. This system has never failed us in over two years, and it has saved us dozens of hours we would have otherwise spent exchanging revised versions of our drafts and finding changes in them. With Working Copy, we can use the text editors we each prefer and, as long as we overwrite the original copies of our drafts and keep track of commits, the app will take care of merging everything and displaying differences between versions. From a collaboration standpoint, using Working Copy and GitHub for file storage and version control has been one of the best decisions I made in recent years.

Read more

My Skin Track UV: A Tiny Wearable to Track UV Exposure

Spending too long in the sun can damage your skin. By the time you have a painful sunburn, it’s too late; you’ve already overdone it. You can plan your day based on the UV forecast in a weather app, but forecasts are no guarantee of the actual conditions and can’t account for how long you’re exposed to harmful UV-A and UV-B rays.

The awkwardly-named My Skin Track UV sensor by La Roche-Posay is designed to pick up where forecasts leave off by measuring your actual exposure to harmful UV rays throughout the day without needing to be charged. It’s a remarkably small wearable sensor with a companion app that reports other environmental data too.

The My Skin Track UV sensor performed well in my testing, and I felt like it provided useful, actionable data about potentially harmful conditions that would be hard to judge without the device. The lack of charging and diminutive size makes the My Skin Track UV sensor easy to carry with you all day too. The trouble is, the My Skin Track UV is so small and light, and the clip is just slippery enough, that it’s easy to misplace or lose altogether, which I promptly did. Here’s what happened.

Read more

Apple Releases Annual Holiday Ad ‘Share Your Gifts’

Apple has released its annual holiday ad titled ‘Share Your Gifts.’ The video tells the story of Sophia, a creative young woman who uses a MacBook to write but puts her finished work in a box where no one can see it. Set to ‘come out and play’ by Billie Eilish, the story follows Sophia over time as she continues to write and pursue other creative avenues always hiding them from others.

In the heart-warming conclusion of the video, Sophia’s dog pushes her window open causing the pages of her printed writing to blow out the window into the streets. Sophia races outside after the sheets of paper, but can’t retrieve them before townspeople pick them up and start reading with smiles on their faces as they enjoy her writing.

The video was released with an accompanying ‘making of’ video that shows how much went into the piece, which combines hand-built miniature sets and CG graphics. It’s a fascinating look at how much care and work went into making the nearly three-minute video.

I’ve always enjoyed Apple’s holiday ads and this year’s is no exception. The message of sharing your creativity as a way of connecting with others is a great message for the holiday season that also fits well with the company’s products.