This Week's Sponsor:

Proxyman

Need to Capture HTTPS for Debugging? Try Proxyman! Works with iOS Devices and Simulators.

Celebrate The Mac→

Jonathan Zufi:

To celebrate Mac’s 30th birthday, I’ve created this micro site for all the world to enjoy. In 2009, I started taking photos of every Apple product ever made since 1976. Then I turned them into a really big photo site. I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane, and I hope that the Macintosh’s anniversary brings your happy memories of your own experience with Apple.

Beautiful photos. Jonathan is also the author of ICONIC, a fantastic photo book about Apple products. Make sure to check out the PowerBooks page and then look down at your new MacBook’s trackpad.

Permalink

Apple Executives On The Mac At 30→

Macworld’s Jason Snell has an interview with Apple executives Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, and Bud Tribble about the 30 years of the Mac (Tribble was part of the original Macintosh team). It’s a great interview, and this part about convergence of OS X and iOS stood out to me:

The reason OS X has a different interface than iOS isn’t because one came after the other or because this one’s old and this one’s new,” Federighi said. Instead, it’s because using a mouse and keyboard just isn’t the same as tapping with your finger. “This device,” Federighi said, pointing at a MacBook Air screen, “has been honed over 30 years to be optimal” for keyboards and mice. Schiller and Federighi both made clear that Apple believes that competitors who try to attach a touchscreen to a PC or a clamshell keyboard onto a tablet are barking up the wrong tree.

“It’s obvious and easy enough to slap a touchscreen on a piece of hardware, but is that a good experience?” Federighi said. “We believe, no.

Later in the article, Snell included other quotes by Federighi and Schiller about how each device in Apple’s lineup fills a specific role. The message is clear, but I’m sure that it still won’t convince analysts to better understand the company they’re covering.

Permalink

Workflow Requests #1→

Earlier today, I asked:

I had some free time, and decided to provide a solution to some of the requests I received. I don’t know if I will repeat this experiment in the future (although it’s likely, because I had fun), but if you have questions, feel free to ask. I don’t see why you shouldn’t speed up that tedious task you’ve been doing over and over on your iPad or iPhone with an action, workflow, or script.

The best part – you can download the actions below and skip this step entirely.


Permalink

Apple Brings New Features, Design Changes To iWork for iCloud

In an update released earlier today, Apple brought various design changes and feature additions to iWork for iCloud, the company’s suite of iWork applications for web browsers available at iCloud.com. Today’s update (the first since November 2013) focuses on collaboration, editing, Accessibility improvements, and bug fixes.

All of Apple’s three web apps (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) have been refreshed with an iOS 7-inspired design that Apple first introduced to iCloud.com last year. The new design, however, has only been applied to the apps’ document libraries for now, as the document editors retain the service’s old user interface. From the main screen, it’s now possible to view a list of shared documents you have access to by clicking on the clock icon in the top toolbar, which will display a “Shared with Me” popover, listing shared documents. The three apps have also received support for sharing documents protected with passwords, a feature that will be added to iWork’s OS X and iOS counterparts as well.

The same new features were also added in terms of editing: keyboard shortcuts for object manipulation and support for floating tables (with formatting) are now available on iCloud.com, alongside other app-specific changes such as endnote editing in imported documents for Pages, or text flowing to adjacent cells in Numbers.

Apple first introduced iWork for iCloud as beta in October 2013, when the company also unveiled the next generation of iWork apps for OS X – both of which were met with widespread criticism. Following the launch of the new iWork suite, Apple confirmed that it was listening to its users and promised to bring back old features to the Mac apps while rolling out updates to its iWork for iCloud public beta.

You can read the changelog of today’s iWork for iCloud update below. Read more

Etymologies, Pronunciation, and Notes with WordBook

WordBook

WordBook

I was recently looking for a dictionary app that could handle standard dictionary features (thesaurus, synonyms, web lookups, etc) as well as user notes for words, and I decided to check out WordBook after reader Jeff Clatworthy recommended it to me on Twitter. As I mentioned last night on The Prompt, WordBook isn’t the prettiest app around, but it does exactly what I need for definitions and notes.

Because English isn’t my first language, I often want to associate Italian expressions with English words to remember the context of a definition – for instance, I would associate “for the umpteenth time” with “per l’ennesima volta” in Italian, which makes it easier for me to remember the word “umpteenth”. Surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find a dictionary app with this kind of feature (Terminology, my favorite one, doesn’t have one) and, of course, Apple’s built-in dictionary lookup functionality on iOS is limited to the basics. WordBook has an option to add notes to words and, in trying the app, I also found other features that I like.

Read more

#MacStoriesDeals: January 23, 2014

MacStories Deals

MacStories Deals

MacStoriesDeals is the best place to find great deals for Mac and iOS apps and games, Apple hardware deals, and some great book and audio specials.

There are thousands of software and hardware deals online. We carefully pick the best ones and collect them in a single post with links to buy or share discounted products. You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter, where we tweet the best App Store deals every day.

Read more

Stockfish For Mac with Chess Analysis→

Developed by Daylen Yang, Stockfish is a free and open-source chess app for Mac based on the Stockfish chess engine.

The app does a couple of interesting things: it’s Retina-ready and it can go full-screen, so you’ll enjoy a chess game on your MacBook Pro’s display without distractions. It supports two-player games and it’s got exporting capabilities and keyboard shortcuts. But more importantly, it comes with advanced chess analysis that lets the computer tell you who’s winning and calculate the best move. I’m fascinated by the technological premise: the app can let you choose to optimize analysis for maximum performance so that more cores will be used to compute chess analyses; even the amount of memory to use can be adjusted. It should be pretty impressive on a new Mac Pro.

Stockfish is free on the Mac App Store and open-source. The Stockfish engine is available here.

Permalink