Professional Email Marketing Built Just for Mac Users
I was a guest on The Menu Bar podcast last week, and I had fun talking with my friend Zac about my recent experiments with HomeKit, Apple’s approach to privacy and ethics, and the modern era of music streaming services. You can listen here.
See also: my original appearance on The Menu Bar almost five years ago, which has been made available again to Menu Bar supporters on Patreon.
Over the weekend, developer Louis D’hauwe released a new plain text editor to the iOS App Store. Textor is about as simple an app as you could get: while it does offer support for modern iOS technologies, like Split View on iPad, and modern iOS screen dimensions, like the iPhone X and iPad Pro sizes, it doesn’t offer any kind of innovative features to pull you in. In fact, it doesn’t really contain much in the way of features at all.
D’hauwe created Textor as a result of exploring what new iOS tools he would need before making the iPad his primary computer. His recently launched terminal app, OpenTerm, birthed from the same roots.
For the past few months I’ve been looking at what it would take for an iPad to become my main computer:
A terminal: OpenTerm ✅
A plain text editor: Textor ✅— Louis D’hauwe (@LouisDhauwe) March 11, 2018
Textor is unique in how utterly stripped down it is, and it’s that simplicity that makes it so appealing. Launch the app – which is free and open-source – and you’ll see iOS 11’s new Files document browser. This enables opening existing plain text files stored in any app that serves as an iOS file provider. You can open directly from iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Working Copy, and more. You can also create a new document in any of these places by hitting the + button in the top-right corner.
Outside of the Files document browser, the only interface is found in the editor itself: a plain canvas with a purple blinking cursor. It’s just you and the text.
Textor’s lack of noteworthy features makes it a fitting TextEdit-equivalent for iOS. It also makes it unlikely to be the best text editor for you, unless your needs are extremely minimal.
Despite its bare-bones nature, I was excited to hear about Textor’s launch because it happens to fit exactly the tiny niche I was looking for. My everyday writing is done in Ulysses, an app I absolutely love. But when it comes to editing other people’s work, Ulysses isn’t a great solution because its custom formatting engine doesn’t play nice with existing Markdown drafts.
Every week as part of preparing the latest Club MacStories newsletter, I edit about ten different Markdown files stored in a GitHub repo and accessed through Working Copy. I’ve tried several quality apps for this job, including iA Writer, 1Writer, and Textastic – all can open files directly from Working Copy, but a variety of issues big and small make none of them the ideal solution. Textor does exactly what I need: opens documents via Files, allows me to edit them free from cumbersome frills, then saves them in place when I’m done editing.
There are a couple changes that would make Textor a better tool for me: auto-saving drafts so I don’t have to hit the app’s ‘Done’ button to save changes, and support for Markdown styling so I get a preview of what my document will look like when published. Those features aren’t necessities though, and I don’t expect to see Textor add them. Everyone will have their own list of two or three features they’d like, but Textor doesn’t need to be feature-complete. The app exists to offer a no-nonsense writing experience with Files support, and it succeeds at exactly that.
Textor is available as a free download on the App Store.
Bike sharing data in Apple Maps got a big boost today in a deal struck with Ito World, a real-time transit data company. Apple Maps already included some bike sharing data, but according to TechCrunch, the partnership means Apple Maps now has bike sharing data in more than 175 cities in 36 countries.
If you type ‘bike sharing’ into Apple Maps, it will scroll to the bike sharing station closest to you. The app also supports searches near other locations, using queries like ‘bike sharing near Chicago Union Station.’ Each entry in Apple Maps provides the address of the bike sharing station and a link to the website of the company that operates it, but there are no details about the number of available bikes or parking spots.
Apple has struck several deals with third parties over the past couple of years to add data like electric vehicle charging stations and parking lot data to Apple Maps. I expect we will continue to see third-party arrangements like the one with Ito World because it’s a faster way for Apple to try to close Google Maps’ local data lead over Apple Maps than collecting the data itself.
Air travel can be stressful. FlightLogger, which is available on iOS and Android, reduces the stress of travel by making it simple to search and save your flights, get up-to-date notifications on any changes to gates and terminals, share your travel plans with friends and family, and much more.
Too many flight tracking apps are a cluttered mess. FlightLogger’s design reduces the number of taps and information you have to input. Combined with a clear, glanceable timeline of your itinerary, FlightLogger is the perfect companion for the modern traveler.
FlightLogger is packed with innovative features:
The spring and summer travel seasons are just around the corner. Make your life easier by heading over to FlightLogger’s website to learn more and download the app today.
Our thanks to FlightLogger for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Today Apple announced the completion of its latest acquisition: Texture, a digital magazine subscription service.
Texture brings over 200 of the world’s best magazines to life, providing an easy way for users to read high-quality stories and entire issues of their favorite titles. With Texture, users enjoy the magazines they know and love, while discovering new content that fits their passions and interests.
Texture’s iOS app was previously featured by the App Store editorial team as one of the best apps of 2016. Currently, you can still sign up for the service’s $9.99/month subscription. There’s no word in Apple’s press release regarding whether Texture’s existing app will shut down or continue running as-is.
Texture’s Netflix-style model of subscription service feels like a perfect fit for future integration in Apple News. Individual subscriptions to publications like The Washington Post are currently available inside News, but this acquisition creates the potential for an official Apple service, similar to Apple Music, that bundles together the various magazine articles included in Texture. With Texture’s existing catalog as a starting base, Apple could also be in the market for additional acquisition targets that would serve to beef up a future News-related service before its launch. Texture could just be the beginning.
Nick Heer at Pixel Envy tested how well 2018 Siri performs commands given to the voice assistant in a 2010 demo video. The video takes Siri, which started as a stand-alone, third-party app, through a series of requests like ‘I’d like a romantic place for Italian food near my office.’ Just a couple of months after the video was published, Siri was acquired by Apple and the team behind it, including the video’s narrator, Tom Gruber, began integrating Siri into iOS.
That was eight years ago. Inspired by a tweet, Heer tested how well Siri performs when given the same commands today. As Heer acknowledges, the results will vary depending on your location, and the test is by no means comprehensive, but Siri’s performance is an eye-opener nonetheless.
What’s clear to me is that the Siri of eight years ago was, in some circumstances, more capable than the Siri of today. That could simply be because the demo video was created in Silicon Valley, and things tend to perform better there than almost anywhere else. But it’s been eight years since that was created, and over seven since Siri was integrated into the iPhone. One would think that it should be at least as capable as it was when Apple bought it.
Eight years is an eternity in the tech world. Siri has been fairly criticized recently for gaps in the domains it supports and their balkanization across different platforms, but Heer’s tests are a reminder that Siri still has plenty of room for improvement in how it handles existing domains too. Of course, Siri can do things in 2018 that it couldn’t in 2010, but it still struggles with requests that require an understanding of contexts like location or the user’s last command.
Voice controlled assistants have become a highly competitive space. Apple was one of the first to recognize their potential with its purchase of Siri, but the company has allowed competitors like Amazon and Google catch up and pass it in many respects. The issues with Siri aren’t new, but that’s the heart of the problem. Given the current competitive landscape, 2018 feels like a crucial year for Apple to sort out Siri’s long-standing limitations.
I love this concept by 9to5Mac’s Michael Steeber, who imagined how Apple’s Health app could become a friendly, useful motivational tool instead of being just a pretty collection of charts and data points:
The majority of people using iPhones and Apple Watches to track their health have the simple wish to reach their goals and monitor their wellness. While today’s Health app is rich with data points and charts, it takes valuable time to dive in and parse the information. Even more challenging is drawing accurate and informed conclusions from the data without a medical background.
The Health app of the future could be a dashboard for your body, filled with daily insights into your wellness. Helpful tips for living a better life could be drawn from the treasure trove of data synced from your Apple Watch and connected apps, tailored to your specific health history and needs. Rather than just a data aggregator, Health could become a proactive and motivational tool.
Not only is Michael exactly right about the features missing from the Health app – his mockups are beautiful, and I could see the card-style UI fitting nicely within Health.
As I was reading Michael’s article, I was reminded of something I wrote three years ago in my iPhone health story, after I spent months tracking everything about myself:
What I’m missing, however, is advanced and intelligent connections between the pieces of data I’m tracking about myself. I’ve spent months logging all I could about my body and daily activity using my iPhone. I’d love to see a smart AI capable of understanding actual patterns about my lifestyle and that could give me more detailed insights about my habits. What happened in the week I ate more vegetables than meat – did I lose weight and sleep better? What are the locations where I tend to walk more and when during the week? I can see how steps taken correlate with sleep quality, but how about something more practical such as, for instance, caffeine and food plotted against sleep?
This was published in March 2015, before I got an Apple Watch. Three years later, the Health app is still largely the same. I think it’s time for Apple to consider how data tracked in the Health app could be used in meaningful, practical ways going forward. I hope something similar to Micheal’s ideas is in the works.
Stephen’s family staged a HomePod intervention, Myke names his favorite Apple Watch apps, Apple kills off iTunes LP and Federico has some news.
We discussed a variety of fun and interesting topics on Connected this week, but MacStories readers shouldn’t miss the final part of the show. You can listen here.
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Developed by Aaron Pearce (the creator of Homecam, one of my favorite iOS apps this year), HomePass is a handy utility for iPhone and iPad to store HomeKit setup codes.
If you’ve been playing around with home automation on iOS, you know that managing accessory pairing codes isn’t exactly fun or convenient. While iOS 11 added support for QR codes and special NFC pairing tags, most accessory makers still stick basic alphanumeric codes on the back or at the bottom of accessories and essentially require you not to lose them. That’s not ideal. HomePass aims to be a single repository where you can easily keep track of all your setup codes, sync them across devices with iCloud, and even protect them with Face ID. Instead of taking pictures of your codes and storing them in Apple Notes (which is what I’ve been doing), you can collect every HomeKit code in HomePass, where they’ll be presented alongside device names, HomeKit rooms they belong to, and custom icons.
I’ve been testing HomePass for the past couple of weeks, and there are some nice touches I want to point out. First, if you grant the app access to your HomeKit data, it’ll be able to see existing accessories and allow you to simply enter the code without choosing a device name or icon (you can also create new accessories from scratch). In addition, the code displayed in the Code field of a device’s detail view is formatted with the same shape and font used on physical setup codes; this means you can open HomePass on your iPad and scan a code directly with the Home app on your iPhone. Lastly, you can add notes to your accessories and export everything as CSV if you prefer to have an additional backup of your accessory database.
One of the many shortcomings of Apple’s native Home app is the lack of deeper organizational tools for users who own dozens of HomeKit accessories and need a better way to store their codes. Ideally, such a feature shouldn’t be needed, but in my experience things sometimes go wrong and you may need to reset an accessory and add it to HomeKit again. When that happens, you don’t want to go hunting for the setup code on the back of a thermostat. I highly recommend using HomePass instead, which is available at $2.99 on the App Store.
