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Search results for "21"

Deadline Extended for Automation April Shortcuts Contest to April 21st

As we head into the weekend, we wanted to let everyone know that we’ve extended the Automation April Shortcuts Contest to Friday, April 21st, at 5:00 PM Eastern US time. That gives you four extra days to finish your shortcuts and submit them.

Remember:

  • You can submit up to two shortcuts for consideration in any of the six categories
  • You can edit your submissions until the deadline on April 21st
  • Shortcuts do not have to be complex to win the contest; originality and utility are key factors in the judges’ decisions
  • We have tons of great prizes, including a Loupedeck Live S and CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 4 for the winner of the Best Overall Shortcut, plus Club MacStories memberships

For the complete rules, be sure to read our post from last week.

Good luck, and use the extra time wisely!

You can also follow MacStories’ Automation April coverage through our dedicated hub, or subscribe to its RSS feed.

AppStories, Episode 321 – Revisiting RSS→

This week on AppStories, we revisit RSS to talk about how syncing services and apps have changed and share how our use of RSS has evolved.

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On AppStories+, I am dipping my toe into co-working but wonders if I’m more into the idea of it than it is useful.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

To learn more about the benefits included with an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.

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Six Colors’ ‘Apple in 2021’ Report Card

For the past seven years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an ‘Apple report card’ – a survey that aims to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.

The 2021 installment of the Six Colors report card is now out, and you can find an excellent summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for different categories on Six Colors.

I wasn’t able to participate in last year’s report card, but I’m happy Jason invited me back to share some thoughts and comments on what Apple did in 2021. As it turns out…I had a lot of opinions I wanted to share this year, particularly about the Mac. This may be surprising coming from me – a longtime iPad Pro user – but I’m incredibly fascinated by Apple’s new direction with the Mac platform and how it’s changed thanks to Apple silicon.

I’ll have much more to share about macOS and the M1 Max MacBook Pro I’ve been testing in the near future. In the meantime, I’ve prepared the full text of my answers to the Six Colors report card, which you can find below. Once again, I recommend reading the whole thing on Six Colors to get the broader context of all the participants in the survey.

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Apple Frames 2.1: Apple Watch Series 7 and 2021 MacBook Pro Support, New Update Flow, Plus Chinese and Czech Localization

Apple Frames, now with support for the latest MacBook Pros.

Apple Frames, now with support for the latest MacBook Pros.

Today I’m pleased to announce the release of Apple Frames 2.1, the first major update to version 2.0 of my popular Apple Frames shortcut, which I launched last October. It took me longer than I hoped to put together this update, but I’m happy that I was able to add compatibility fo all the latest device frames supported by Apple, new languages, as well as a brand new update flow that will make it easier to download the latest templates powering Apple Frames in the future.

Let’s take a look.

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Apple Recaps Its 2021 Services

In a press release today, Apple shared an update on the success of its services. According to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services:

Apple’s world-class portfolio of services proved essential in 2021, as people worldwide sought new ways to keep entertained, informed, connected, and inspired. With over 745 million paid subscriptions, Apple continues to connect the world’s developers, artists, and storytellers with users across more than a billion devices, delivering powerful tools, content, and experiences that enrich their lives in profound ways every day.

Apple says that developers have earned more than $260 billion on the apps and games sold through the App Store since its inception in 2008. That’s a $60 billion increase since last year’s services announcement. The company also reports that 2021 was another record year for sales, and the Christmas to New Years Day period saw double-digit sales growth. However, unlike past years, sales numbers weren’t shared for the week between Christmas and New Years Day or for New Years Day.

Apple has created lists of 2021’s most downloaded apps and games, if you are curious about which apps resonated with the most users last year.

Apple’s press release recaps a long list of achievements of its other services, too, recapping the highlights of 2021, including the nominations and awards won by Apple TV+, the expansion of Apple Pay, and the recent additions to Fitness+. Having followed this annual services press release since its earliest days, what’s most impressive is how long the list of services has grown. What was once primarily an App Store and Apple Music recap now covers a much broader range of services.

WinterFest 2021: The Winter Festival Of Artisanal Software [Sponsor]

The 2021 Artisanal Software Festival is a fantastic collection of carefully-crafted software for writing, research, thinking, and more at tremendous prices. As in past years, software artisans from around the globe come together to offer fair discounts direct to you.

The 21 carefully-crafted apps and book span a wide spectrum that will assist you with everyday knowledge work. There are apps to plan your next big project, conduct research, organize your research, edit images, manage email, write, and more:

  • Aeon Timeline: The timeline tool for creative thinking
  • Bookends: The reference manager you’ve been looking for
  • DEVONagent Pro: Your smart (re)search assistant
  • DEVONthink: Your powerful information and knowledge manager
  • Easy Data Transform: Merge, clean, reformat data without coding
  • Hook: Supplies the missing links
  • HoudahGeo: Photo geocoding and geotagging for Mac
  • HoudahSpot: Powerful file search
  • Hyperplan: Flexible visual planner
  • ImageFramer Pro: Add creative borders and frames to photos
  • Marked: Smarter tools for smarter writers
  • Mellel: A real word processor
  • Nisus Writer Pro: The powerful word processor for Mac
  • Panorama X: Collect, organize, and understand your data
  • Scapple: Quickly capture and connect ideas
  • Scrivener: Your complete writing studio
  • SmallCubed Mail Suite: Manage mail like a maven
  • TextExpander: Recall your best words, instantly, repeatedly
  • The Tinderbox Way: The definitive ebook on artisanal software
  • Timing: Automatic time tracking for Mac
  • Tinderbox: Visualize and organize your notes, plans, and ideas
  • Trickster: Your recently used files, at your fingertips

There are no gimmicks, no bundles, no gotchas – just saving of hundreds of dollars on serious software from thoughtful software makers who care about their users’ experiences, including the interoperability of applications through linking. Visit the WinterFest website now for links to amazing deals each of these fantastic apps and to learn more or use the coupon code Winterfest2021 at checkout.

Our thanks to WinterFest 2021 for its support of MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: Best Videogames of 2021

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This week on MacStories Unwind:

Best Videogames of 2021

MacStories Rewind

The MacStories Selects 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award

PCalc

John Voorhees: I’d love to tell you that there was drama surrounding the selection of this year’s first-ever MacStories Selects Lifetime Achievement award, but there wasn’t. In the end, it was the easiest pick of the lot. Last month, I sat down with Federico in Rome to go over the Selects awards, and we began by scanning a list of potential Lifetime Achievement candidates that we’d put together over the previous weeks. In the end, PCalc by James Thomson, which started on the Mac and has been adapted to every possible Apple platform, was the obvious choice. Not only are James and PCalc longstanding pillars of the Apple community, but PCalc represents the sort of innovative and creative spirit that we value most at MacStories.

Below, you’ll find a written interview that Federico conducted with James about PCalc’s history, what makes the app special, having to adapt to hardware and software transitions by Apple, and what the future may hold. James also joined us for a special segment of AppStories, covering the Lifetime Achievement award and other MacStories Selects winners. Before we get to the interview, though, I’d like to take a moment to introduce you to PCalc, which has a long and rich history that not all readers may know.

PCalc 1.0 for the Mac (1992) and PCalc 1.0 for the iPhone (2008).

PCalc 1.0 for the Mac (1992) and PCalc 1.0 for the iPhone (2008).

PCalc was first released almost exactly 29 years ago with an email to Info-Mac, an online file hosting service that pre-dates the Internet. In the years since version 1.0, PCalc has updated, refined, and ported to other platforms, including the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and even the Apple TV, where you can enter calculations using a videogame controller.

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MacStories Selects 2021: Recognizing the Best Apps of the Year

John: The MacStories Selects Awards are our annual celebration of the apps we love and the people who make them. Every year, the MacStories team uses hundreds of apps. Some are familiar favorites, but most are new. So, after many months of testing those developers’ apps, we stop to recognize the best.

This year, as we headed into the final stretch of the year, we decided it was time for the MacStories Selects to honor more than just the apps from the past year. MacStories has been covering apps since Federico published his first story in 2009, and having covered thousands of apps spanning more than twelve years, it’s time to look back at all of those apps and honor the standouts that have withstood the test of time with an annual Lifetime Achievement Award, which you can read about more in a special story that includes a bit of history about the winning app and interview with its developer.

Apps have become part of the fabric of our daily lives, which makes it easy to forget that they’re the result of hard work by creative people. The MacStories Selects awards are our chance to pause and appreciate just how fortunate we are to have such a wealth of fantastic tools available from so many talented developers before we start the new year.

2021 has been an exciting year for apps. The resurgence of note-taking apps ignited by apps like Craft, Obsidian, and Roam Research continued unabated. We also saw new apps successfully remix technologies and approaches and apply them to new domains, and of course, automation continued to be a central theme, with a long list of established and new apps testing the waters of Shortcuts for Mac for the first time.

As a result, we had a wealth of apps to choose from as always for the following awards:

  • Best New App
  • Best App Update
  • Best New Feature
  • Best Watch App
  • Best Mac App
  • Best Design
  • App of the Year

Along with the Lifetime Achievement Award and Readers’ Choice Award, which was chosen by Club MacStories members, that makes a total of nine award winners plus seven runners-up for these fourth annual MacStories Selects Awards, which began in 2018. As we did last year, we have also created beautiful physical awards commemorating the winners, which we will be sent to each of the winners this week.

We also recorded a special episode of our podcast AppStories all about the MacStories Selects winners and runners-up. It’s a terrific way to learn more about this year’s apps.

You can listen to the episode below.

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We will hold our Monthly Town Hall live event with additional MacStories Selects coverage in our Discord community for Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members tomorrow, December 14, 2021, at 12:30 PM Eastern US time and release it later as a Town Hall podcast episode for those who can’t join live.

So, with those preliminaries out of the way, it’s my pleasure to introduce the 2021 MacStories Selects Awards to the MacStories community.

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