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.

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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.

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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.

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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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