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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.

A Club MacStories Subscription Makes a Great Gift

Last year, we introduced gift memberships to Club MacStories, and with the holidays coming up, we wanted to remind readers that the Club is a terrific gift option for friends and family members who who are MacStories readers. Club MacStories extends what we publish at MacStories, which makes it the perfect gift for anyone who wants more of our app, automation, news, tip, and other coverage.

Club MacStories offers exclusive content delivered every week including:

  • MacStories Weekly, a newsletter that is sent every Friday and is packed full of our favorite apps, themed collections, tips, automation, answers to reader questions, featured Home screens, interviews, and much more.
  • the Monthly Log, a monthly newsletter that includes long-form and behind-the-scenes stories.
  • Access to giveaways, discounts, and other treats like a special members-only edition of our podcast called AppStories Unplugged and ebook versions of Federico’s annual iOS review and other long-form stories.
  • The full archive of over 180 issues of MacStories Weekly and the Monthly Log.

All told, that’s around 60 newsletters and lots of other perks over the course of a year.

So, if you have a MacStories reader on your holiday shopping list this season, consider a Club MacStories membership that they can enjoy all year long. Monthly ($5/month) and annual ($50/year) memberships can be given using the following links:

Also, thanks to all our loyal Club members who have joined since the Club’s debut over three years ago. You’re an essential part of what we do here at MacStories, and we hope you’ve enjoyed the Club as much as we enjoy creating it for you.

Happy Holidays!

– The MacStories Team

Jonathan Morrison on Editing Video on the iPad Pro with LumaFusion→

Jonathan Morrison has an excellent walkthrough of what it’s like to edit an entire 4K video on an iPad Pro. In the video, Morrison adjusts the audio, color corrects footage, and assembles everything from multiple clips using LumaFusion running on a 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

Morrison came away impressed with LumaFusion and the iPad Pro’s performance as a video editing workstation. Among other things, previewing and scrubbing through footage was smooth and responsive, and the iPad Pro exported the final video in close to real-time.

Near the end of the video, Morrison addresses some of the criticisms leveled against Apple’s latest iPad:

Everyone’s looking at it as a laptop replacement when it’s an alternative, and you’re looking for traditional methods when you should be looking for alternative methods.

That’s a refreshing perspective from someone coming from video editing on the Mac. It’s also a point we touch upon on this week’s episode of AppStories. Trying to map workflows directly from the Mac to iOS is a recipe for disappointment because the platforms work differently. The differences often require adjustments be made, but they can pay dividends as Morrison demonstrates.

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Home Screen Icon Creator: A Shortcut to Create Custom Icons for Apps, Contacts, Solid Colors, and More

Update: Thanks to MacStories reader Thomas, I was able to remove the need to upload image assets to Dropbox. The shortcut is now much faster to run (takes about 5 seconds instead of 20) and doesn’t need to save any file in your Dropbox account. You can get the updated shortcut at the end of this post.

I’ve always been intrigued by Workflow’s implementation of ‘Add to Home Screen’ – a feature that Apple kept in the transition to the Shortcuts app, and which allows users to create home screen icons to launch their favorite shortcuts. So earlier this month, I decided I wanted to learn how Shortcuts was handling the creation of home screen icons.

After a few weeks of experiments and refinements, I ended up reverse-engineering Shortcuts’ ‘Add to Home Screen’ implementation, which turns out to be an evolution of Workflow’s existing hack based on Safari and web clips. The result is Home Screen Icon Creator, an advanced shortcut that lets you create custom home screen icons to launch apps, custom shortcuts from the Shortcuts app, or specific actions for any of your contacts; the shortcut can also generate icons with solid colors, which you can combine with matching wallpapers to create custom home screen layouts.

This shortcut is, by far, the most complex piece of iOS automation I’ve ever put together for MacStories, and I’m happy with the final product. It fully replicates a native Shortcuts feature while giving you the freedom to create icons and launchers for anything you want. There is no configuration necessary on the user’s end: it’ll take you 20 seconds to create your first custom icon, complete with onscreen instructions. Allow me, however, to offer more context on how this shortcut came to be, how it works behind the scenes, and what you can build with it.

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AppStories, Episode 88 – Returning to the iPad Pro→

On this week’s episode of AppStories, we talk about the extra RAM in the 1TB iPad Pro, external display confusion, and John’s return to the iPad Pro after a summer of using the 9.7-inch iPad.

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Apple’s New iPad Pro Ad→

Fun new iPad Pro commercial by Apple. The ad follows the company’s recent marketing strategy to establish the iPad Pro as “a computer unlike any computer”. That may be a difficult message to get across, but Apple used a mix of features that highlight the unique nature of the iPad well: power, apps, portability, multitouch, and Apple Pencil.

Of these five categories, it is pretty obvious which is the one that Apple should focus on more going forward.

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Connected, Episode 218: My Thumb Is Now Useless→

Federico and Myke thoroughly review the iPad Pro and its accessories – while eschewing the typical podcast format.

On last week’s Connected, Myke and I shared more thoughts on the new iPad Pro after a week of usage. You can listen here and treat this episode as a complement to my ongoing iPad Diaries column about the new devices.

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Panic’s Transmit Returns to the Mac App Store

In the summer of 2017, Panic released Transmit 5, a top-to-bottom update to the company’s excellent file transfer app for the Mac. At the same time, Panic left the Mac App Store like many Mac apps have in recent years. Panic’s Cabel Sasser explained that the company wanted the ability to distribute a demo version to prospective users, but couldn’t, though it would continue to reevaluate the decision and hoped to be back some day.

Today, just over about 16 months since that announcement, Transmit is back on the Mac App Store. The app’s return to Apple’s newly-redesigned Mac App Store has been anticipated since June when it was previewed at WWDC. As part of the announcement of the redesigned Store, Apple highlighted several apps that would be coming to the Store for the first time or returning, including Microsoft Office 365, Adobe’s Lightroom CC, Bare Bones’ BBEdit, and Transmit.

At WWDC, it wasn’t entirely clear what was being done to entice developers to come back, though changes to sandboxing seemed to be a factor:

No additional information emerged over the summer, and the new Mac App Store was launched alongside the release of macOS Mojave in September with no sign of Transmit or the other apps that appeared onstage at WWDC.

However, today, Transmit was released on the Mac App Store with a subscription-based business model that includes a 7-day free trial. In a blog post about the release, Cabel Sasser confirms that sandboxing played a role in the decision not to release Transmit 5 on the Mac App Store, but has changed to allow Transmit to return to the Store:

…sandboxing has evolved enough that Transmit can be nearly feature-parity with its non-sandboxed cousin.

The FAQs on Panic’s blog elaborate on the differences between the Mac App Store and direct-sale versions of Transmit:

Does it have the same features as regular Transmit 5?
With one small exception — “Open in Terminal” depends on AppleScripting the terminal, which isn’t possible with sandboxing (yet). But even viewing or editing or changing the permissions of files you don’t own is now possible, which wasn’t until very recently.

Transmit Disk is also not part of the Mac App Store version of Transmit.

As Panic indicated back in June, the business model for Transmit on the Mac App Store differs from the direct-sale version available on Panic.com. The Mac App Store version is subscription-only, which is designed to make the app more economical for users who only need to use it for a short time. The subscription costs $24.99/year and includes a 7-day free trial. The direct sale version of the app is still available from Panic for $45.

It’s good to see Transmit back in the Mac App Store and I’m intrigued by the business model. By targeting two very different types of users, the Mac App Store gives Panic a simple end-to-end solution to reach a new set of short-term users who might not have been willing to pay the up front cost of the app before. Meanwhile, the paid-up-front option is still available for heavy users. This is a model that I could see working well for many pro-level apps.

Apple Updates Final Cut Pro X and Other Video Apps with Third-Party Extensions and More

Apple has updated Final Cut Pro X, Motion, and Compressor with several new features.

Headlining the update is Final Cut Pro X, which gained support for third-party extensions. The pro video editing app now includes built-in extensions from Frame.io, Shutterstock, and CatDV, which provide access to those apps and services from within Final Cut itself. The extensions, which match the interface of Final Cut are available from the Mac App Store as free downloads. Apple says it expects additional extensions to be made available in the future.

The Final Cut update includes other enhancements to the app too including:

  • Batch sharing of clips and projects
  • A new Comparison Viewer to allow editors to compare footage against a reference image during the color grading process
  • A customizable floating time code window that can display color-coded clip names, roles, project time codes, and other data
  • Video noise reduction for low-light footage
  • Closed captions in SRT format and formats compatible with a wide variety of video websites
  • Improved marquee selection

Motion and Compressor gained new features too. Motion, which is used for adding motion graphics to Final Cut Pro footage, has added the same color grading tools found in Final Cut. That means editors can use those same tools to adjust the colors of their titles and motion graphics. Motion also gained new comic effect and tiny planet filters.

Compressor, which is used for encoding video, has added a 64-bit engine for improved performance, while maintaining support for 32-bit codecs. Like Final Cut Pro, Compressor now supports SRT closed captioning too.

Final Cut Pro X, Motion, and Compressor are free updates for existing users that are available on the Mac App Store. New users can purchase Final Cut for $299.99, Motion for $49.99, and Compressor for $49.99.