Connected, Episode 233: AirDrop the Bass→

Federico talks about the new MacStories Shortcuts Archive and the guys check in with iOS 12 halfway through its lifecycle.

On this week’s episode of Connected, we reassess the impact of iOS 12’s major new features. You can listen here.

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Introducing the MacStories Shortcuts Archive, a Collection of 150 Custom Shortcuts for Apple’s Shortcuts App

After several months of work, I’m pleased to announce the MacStories Shortcuts Archive – the official repository for shortcuts I’ve created over the years (including when they used to be called “workflows”) and which have been updated, tested for the Shortcuts app, and collected in a single place.

You can find the archive at macstories.net/shortcuts. In this first version, the archive contains 150 shortcuts, but more will be posted over time. Each shortcut was created and tested by me and the MacStories team; all of them have been categorized, updated for the Shortcuts app, and marked up with inline comments to explain what they do.

Even better, they’re all free to download and you can modify them to suit your needs.

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Spark Adds Rich Text Formatting for Email: Lists, Text Colors, and Highlighting

Today in an update to its iOS and Mac apps, the email client Spark has introduced new rich text formatting options to enable greater flexibility in styling your messages.

Spark already included the expected bold, italics, and underline options, and its macOS version previously allowed creating bulleted or numbered lists, but those list options have now come to iOS as well. Additionally, both Mac and iOS users can now change the color of text in their emails, as well as add highlighting to text.

Rich text support is a particularly important feature for an email app, so I’m glad to see it come to Spark. While I likely won’t start sending messages with different colored fonts, it’s nice having the variety of options Spark provides here. Lists in particular were something I’ve missed having in the past, and I like the idea of employing highlights to call out anything of special importance in an email. I’ve historically used bold for that purpose, but highlighting definitely does an even better job of standing out.

Spark’s latest update is available now as a free download for iOS, and the Mac update is coming soon.

AppStories, Episode 101 – iOS 13 Wish List Part 1: Files and the iPad Home Screen→

On this week’s episode of AppStories, we discuss our iOS 13 wishes for the Files app and iPad home screen.

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AppStories Episode 101 - iOS 13 Wish List Part 1: Files and the iPad Home Screen

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

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StopTheMadness: Take Back Your Web Browser [Sponsor]

When you visit a website, few things are more frustrating than when your browser doesn’t work as expected because the site has disabled common interface features. StopTheMadness is a Safari and Firefox extension that prevents sites from modifying how your browser works when you visit them.

Available on the Mac App Store for macOS 10.12 Sierra and later, StopTheMadness puts you back in control of your browsing experience. Users often assume their browser isn’t working correctly when in fact, the trouble lies with the sites they visit. To see just how bad it can be, visit StopTheMadness’ test page for a demonstration. With StopTheMadness enabled, everything on the test page is returned to working the way you expect.

Whether you’re on Safari or Firefox, StopTheMadness ensures you can:

  • ⌘-click to open links in a new tab
  • Use keyboard shortcuts that rely on the ⌘ modifier
  • Open Safari’s standard contextual menu when you right click
  • Drag images and links
  • Select text
  • Paste text into any text field
  • Copy text from anywhere on a webpage
  • Auto-fill and complete passwords

StopTheMadness can even prevent clicked links in Google search results from being redirected to a different site. The extension can also be customized to work on a per-site basis allowing users to dial in the exact experience they want.

Get StopTheMadness today on the Mac App Store and take back your web browser. StopTheMadness is available as a separate purchase for Google Chrome on the Chrome Web Store.