Spark: The Future of Email [Sponsor]

Email steals precious time from everyone. Spark recovers those lost moments by identifying what’s important and organizing it all for you neatly and automatically.

Spark’s smarts start with its Smart Inbox. Messages are categorized as Personal, Notifications, and Newsletters making it easy to focus your efforts on what’s important and save the rest for later.

Powerful search makes it simple to find messages no matter where you may have filed them. Spark’s natural language search thinks like you do. Just search for messages the way you would if you were asking a friend.

Notifications can spin out of control quickly with email too, sending you alerts about everything. Spark filters out the junk with Smart Notifications that only notify you of what you need to know now.

In addition, Spark features beautifully designed card-style calendar invitations that can be accepted with just one tap, the ability to send later and set up reminders for messages that don’t receive a reply, message snoozing, and Quick Replies that let you acknowledge a message with a single tap. Spark also has customizable gesture actions and works with Dropbox, Box, iCloud Drive, and more. Spark looks great too with a beautifully threaded design that makes following a conversation simple.

As if that weren’t enough, in just a few short months, Spark 2.0 will introduce Spark for Teams, which will change the way teams collaborate.

The future is now. Download Spark today for free and take control of your inbox.

Thanks to Spark for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Canvas, Episode 49: Long-Form Editors – Honorable Mentions→

In this episode, we wrap up our look at long-form editors with a look at the honourable mentions for other interesting apps on iOS.

In the final episode of our long-form writing mini-series on Canvas, we take a look at Editorial, 1Writer, Pages, and more. You can listen here.

Sponsored by:

  • Balance Open: Find out more about Balance Open and get $2 in Ethereum.
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In Search of the Perfect Writing Font→

The folks at iA have been looking for new font to use in their iA Writer app (version 5.0 for iOS was launched just a couple of weeks ago), and they settled on the idea of a duospace font:

This year, again, we set out exploring our own writing font. We started from scratch, moved from proportional to monospace to three spaces (50% for i and j) and ended up with duospace for MWmw. Progressively, we came to realize that the right question is how to make a proportional font look like a monospace, but how many exceptions you allow until you lose the benefits of a sturdy monospace.

With Latin characters you need to free the m’s from their obsolete mechanical straight jacket. What about the w’s then? And if you give room to lower case letters, what about their parents? The M and the w look alright in mono, no? They almost look better, even… Well, not next to a free m. In Cyrillic, there are a couple of characters more that need breathing room. If you give 150% to the letters w, W, m, and M, you get a text image that has almost all benefits of a monospace font, but the text flows nicely. And born was the duospace concept.

Duospace is a notion familiar from Asian fonts where there are single and double width characters. Our candidate is a bit different. It offers single and four 1.5 width characters.

I’ve always loved the thought and care that goes into iA Writer’s typography. In fact, I like iA Writer’s approach so much, I bought the Nitti family last year and have been using it as my writing font in Ulysses since. Standard Nitti looks terrific in Ulysses, but the new iA Writer Duospace (which is based off the recently released IBM Plex) is gorgeous as well. I mean, just take a look at this.

I’m going to experiment with iA Writer Duospace as my writing font in Ulysses for a few weeks. Installing custom fonts in Ulysses for iOS is easy: go to the GitHub page, download each one, and open them in Ulysses (with the share sheet) to install them. Alternatively, I recommend using AnyFont to make custom fonts available system-wide in any native font picker for iOS.

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Dual Lens Switching on iPhone X→

Dan Provost of Studio Neat (makers of the excellent Glif) ran some tests to analyze the low-light performance of the iPhone X’s telephoto lens:

Last year, when the iPhone 7 Plus was released, Glenn Fleishman wrote a terrific piece for Macworld about how the dual lens camera system works. In short, when you zoom-in to 2X, the camera does not always switch to the telephoto lens. In some cases (typically in low light scenarios), you will be presented with a cropped image from the wide angle lens instead. This was sacrilege to camera nerds, but Apple would argue that if the cropped image looks better in those low light situations, then that is the correct approach.

Results are impressive:

As you can see, the iPhone X required very little light before it decided to use the telephoto lens. The iPhone 7 Plus required quite a bit more. I used the app Light Meter to measure the light at each interval, which I denote in the video. The app measures the lux, which is a measure of illuminance equal to one lumen per square meter. (I measured from both devices and averaged the results, as the readings were slightly different. I wouldn’t expect an app to function as well as a true light meter, but this probably gets us in the ball park).

Make sure to check out the video to see the lens switching in action. The difference between the iPhone 7 Plus and the X is substantial when it comes to the amount of light required for the system to pick the telephoto lens.

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Apple Posts ‘Sway’ Holiday Ad Featuring AirPods and Apple Music

Just ahead of Thanksgiving in the United States, Apple posted their annual holiday ad on YouTube earlier today. The company’s holiday commercials have become a tradition in recent years, and they tend to carry a message that goes beyond advertising the specific features of Apple products.

This year’s ad, titled Sway, is all about AirPods and Apple Music. The video is set on Tuesday, December 19, and follows a woman who starts dancing and walking down a street as she listen to Sam Smith’s Palace on her AirPods. The performance continues after she bumps into a man walking by and the two start dancing together in the snow while sharing AirPods. The ad cuts back to reality and the tagline “move someone this holiday” appears. As with holiday ads in previous years, Apple picked a beautiful song to accompany the video; the incredible choreography nicely complements the idea of sharing a moment with someone through music.

Apple’s 2017 holiday commercial follows last year’s ‘Frankie’s Holiday’ and 2015’s ‘Someday at Christmas’ featuring Andra Day and Steve Wonder. You can watch the video below.

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Connected, Episode 169: Really Regular Nightstand→

Stephen is struggling with a lot of things and makes a task management confession, but Federico broke his iPhone X, so it all comes out in the wash. Oh, and Myke is gone, so don’t tell him he was right about the HomePod being delayed.

On this week’s Connected, Stephen and I talk about the iMac Pro, task managers and smart speakers (again), and my broken iPhone X. You can listen here.

Sponsored by:

  • TextExpander, from Smile: Communicate smarter with TextExpander. Get 20% off your first year when you tell them you came from this show.
  • Timing: The automatic time tracking app for macOS. Use this link to get 10% off your purchase of Timing.
  • Simple Contacts: Contact lens prescriptions from home: Use offer code Connected for $30 off your contact lenses
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