Posts tagged with "featured"

How I Edit Podcasts on the iPad Using Ferrite

This has been a year of new creative projects for me. In addition to some personal endeavors that have yet to see the light of day, I joined Federico as the co-host of Adapt, a new iPad-focused podcast on Relay FM. Learning the art of expressing my Apple takes in speech rather than text has been an adventure in itself, but I’ve also grown to cultivate a very different skill: audio editing.

When I was charged with editing this iPad-focused podcast, I naturally turned to an iPad-based editing tool: every episode of Adapt has been edited in Ferrite Recording Studio, and I’ve never even tried using another app. Most podcasters I’m familiar with edit in Logic, but my Mac mini is purposely utilized as little as possible, so I knew when I dove into podcasting that I wanted an iPad-based solution if at all possible. On multiple occasions I’ve heard and read Jason Snell extol the virtues of Ferrite, so that was the app I turned to.

Getting started with podcast editing, even with an app like Ferrite that’s built for it, can be extremely intimidating. There are lots of settings, and unless you have previous experience working with audio, you likely have no idea what any of them do. I learned a lot from Ferrite’s user guide in the early days, and the aforementioned Jason Snell articles on Six Colors. And before long, I found an editing setup that worked well for me. Now, I want to share it with you.

Read more

Apple Maps in iOS 13: Sights Set on Google

Apple’s path to a home-brewed mapping solution has been long and perilous, but it’s almost arrived.

12 years ago the iPhone launched with Google powering its pre-installed navigation software; five years later, the botched debut of Apple’s own Maps app led to the firing of a key Apple executive; Apple Maps has steadily improved over the years, but seemingly its biggest weakness is that it has never truly contained Apple’s own maps. The app is Apple’s, but the maps have always come from other sources.

Last year, Apple announced a coming change that had been years in the works: Maps would soon contain the company’s own maps, and they would be transformative. The new maps started rolling out in the US last fall with iOS 12, and Apple claims they’ll cover the entire US by the end of 2019.

Timed with the spread of its first-party mapping data, Apple is giving the Maps app a big upgrade in iOS 13 that represents the company’s biggest push yet to overtake Google Maps as the world’s most trusted, go-to mapping service. Apple Maps in iOS 13 represents – if you’re in the US at least – Apple’s purest vision to date for a modern mapping service. Here’s everything that it brings.

Read more

A Timeline of iOS Accessibility: It Started with 36 Seconds

On June 8, 2009, at the end of a two-hour WWDC keynote, Phil Schiller was running through a long list of new features and apps that would be available on the iPhone 3GS, due to ship on June 19 of that year. Phil was pinch-hitting as keynote master of ceremonies for Steve Jobs, who was then on leave, recovering from a liver transplant.

At 1:51:54 in the video, just after he showed off Voice Control and the new Compass app, Apple’s version of the accessibility logo appeared on screen. It’s a stick-style figure with arms and legs outstretched. The icon is still used today.

“We also care greatly about accessibility,” Schiller said, and the slide switched to an iPhone settings screen.

For a total of 36 seconds, Schiller spoke somewhat awkwardly about VoiceOver, Zoom, White on Black (called Invert Colors from iOS 6 onward), and Mono Audio – the first real accessibility features on the iPhone OS platform, as it was then called.

And then it was over. No demo. No applause break.

Schiller moved on to describe the Nike+ app and how it would allow iPhone users to meet fitness goals.

I surveyed a number of liveblogs from that day. About half noted the mention of accessibility features in iPhone OS. The others jumped directly from Compass to Nike+. Accessibility hadn’t made much of a splash.

But in the blindness community, things were very different. Time seemed to stop somewhere after 1:51:54 in the video. Something completely amazing had happened, and only a few people seemed to understand what it meant.

Some were overjoyed, some were skeptical, some were in shock. They all had questions. Would this be a half-hearted attempt that would allow Apple to fill in the checkboxes required by government regulations, a PR stunt to attract good will? Or would it mean that people who had previously been completely locked out of the iPhone would have a way in?

You can probably guess what the answer is, now that we have ten years of an accessible mobile platform in the rearview mirror – now that Apple is widely credited with offering the best mobile accessibility experience available. But it didn’t all happen at once, and not every step along the way was a positive one.

0:00
1:51

Excerpt from ‘36 Seconds That Changed Everything.’

As a companion to my audio documentary, “36 Seconds That Changed Everything: How the iPhone Learned to Talk,” I’ve put together a timeline of iOS accessibility milestones from the past ten years. I’ve focused on Apple hardware and operating systems, though there have also been important Apple app updates, and third-party apps that opened doors to new ways of using iOS accessibly. It’s a list that’s simply too long for this article. And, with a few exceptions, I’ve addressed accessibility-specific features of iOS. Many mainstream features have accessibility applications and benefits, even if they don’t fit here directly.

Read more

Secure ShellFish Review: Adding Your Mac, or Another SSH or SFTP Server, to Apple’s Files App

All my cards on the table: until I tried Anders Borum’s new app, Secure ShellFish, I had no idea what an SSH or SFTP server even was. I’ve never had the need for a file server, and have thus considered it one of those technical computing concepts that’s over my head and exists only for a certain type of user. My guess is that many other people feel the same way, not just because of the concept of servers itself, but also because the tools available for configuring and accessing servers can tend to be overly complex. Secure ShellFish, on both iPad and iPhone, aims to be the opposite: it makes configuring servers easy, and accessing them even easier because it’s built around integration with Apple’s Files app.

Read more

Catalyst Can Rescue the Mac and Grow the iPad

At WWDC 2018, Craig Federighi provided a sneak peek at what everyone was calling Marzipan: an as-yet-unnamed way for iPad app developers to bring their apps to the Mac. So, it came as no surprise when Federighi retook the stage in 2019 and revealed more details about the project and its official name: Catalyst.

What caught a lot of developers off guard though was SwiftUI, a declarative approach to building user interfaces that was also announced at WWDC this year. SwiftUI, known before the conference as Amber, its rumored project name, was on developers’ radar almost as long as Catalyst, but it’s fair to say that few anticipated the scope of the project. The purpose of SwiftUI is to allow developers to build native user interfaces across all of Apple’s hardware platforms – from the Apple Watch to the Mac – using highly-readable, declarative syntax and a single set of tools and APIs. If that weren’t enough to get developers’ attention, using SwiftUI carries the added advantage of providing features like dark mode, dynamic type, and localization automatically.

The message from WWDC was clear: SwiftUI is the future, a unified approach to UI development designed to simplify the process of targeting multiple hardware platforms. It’s a bold, sprawling goal that will take years to refine, even if it’s eagerly adopted by developers.

However, SwiftUI also raises an interesting question: what does it mean for Catalyst? If SwiftUI is the future and spans every hardware platform, why bother bringing iPad apps to the Mac with Catalyst in the first place? It’s a fair question, but the answer is readily apparent from the very different goals of the two technologies.

SwiftUI serves the long-term goal of bringing UI development for all of Apple’s platforms under one roof and streamlining it. It won’t take over immediately though. There’s still work to be done on the framework itself, which Apple will surely expand in capability over time.

By contrast, Catalyst is a shorter-term initiative designed to address two soft spots in Apple’s lineup: the stagnation of the Mac app ecosystem, and the slow growth of pro iPad apps. The unstated assumption underlying the realignment seems to be that the two app platforms are stronger tied together than they are apart, which ultimately will protect the viability of their hardware too.

The impact of Catalyst on the Mac and iPad remains murky. It’s still too early in the process to understand what the long-term effect will be on either platform. There’s substantial execution risk that could harm the Mac or iPad, but despite some troubling signs, which I’ll get to in due course, I’m convinced that Catalyst has the potential for meaningful improvements to both platforms, especially the Mac. Let’s take a closer look at what those could be.

Read more

Initial Thoughts on iPadOS: A New Path Forward

When I published my Beyond the Tablet story a few weeks ago, I was optimistic we’d get a handful of iPad-related features and optimizations at WWDC. I did not, however, foresee an entire OS designed specifically around iPad. And the more I think about it, the more I see iPadOS as a sign of Apple’s willingness to break free from old assumptions and let the iPad be what it’s best at: a portable computer inspired by the Mac, but based on iOS.

Read more

Craig Federighi: The AppStories Interview

It’s been an exciting week at WWDC. Despite rumors and leaks going into the keynote on Monday, the presentation was full of surprises and fulfilled many of the wishes of Mac and iOS developers and users.

Federico and I arrived in San Jose last weekend and planned to record an episode of AppStories that would begin to sift through the huge stack of announcements made by Apple. Those plans were almost immediately cast aside when a unique opportunity presented itself.

Federico is attending WWDC this week, and Apple graciously offered to schedule a time for him to interview Craig Federighi, the company’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering. With a WWDC packed with announcements that will affect app development for years to come, we of course agreed immediately.

When you step back from the details of what was announced in the keynote and since, I expect that WWDC 2019 will be remembered as the event when a new vision for apps on all of Apple’s platforms from a tiny Watch face to a Mac Pro driving a 32-inch Pro Display XDR began to come into focus. The tools made available to developers – like Catalyst for bringing iPad apps to the Mac, and SwiftUI, a new declarative way to build app UIs with less code – promise new efficiencies and capabilities to help developers build apps on every Apple platform. Combined with powerful new features coming to the iPad in iPadOS and an extensive Shortcuts update, there’s an opportunity for a future with deeper, pro-level iPad apps and experiences, a more diverse Mac app ecosystem, and tighter integration across Apple’s entire hardware lineup.

Against that backdrop, Federico sat down with Craig Federighi for a special episode of AppStories, one of MacStories’ growing lineup of podcasts, to explore the impact of developer tools like Catalyst and SwiftUI and the new iPadOS on the apps we use today and the apps these technologies will enable in the future.

Thank you to Apple for arranging the interview, Craig Federighi for participating, and as always, thank you for listening to AppStories. We hope you enjoy the show.

You can find the episode here or listen through the AppStories web player below.

Sponsored by:

  • Things – Where your ideas take shape – one step at a time. Try the delightful, award-winning app on Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Watch.
  • Linode – High-performance SSD Linux servers for all of your infrastructure needs. Get a $20 credit.

iOS 13: The MacStories Overview

iOS 13 is the latest major version of Apple’s mobile software platform, unveiled earlier today during the company’s WWDC keynote. Contrasting with last year’s iOS 12, which focused largely on performance improvements and brought fewer new features than usual, iOS 13 promises to continue the theme of strong performance while also adding a wide array of enhancements across the board. From a systemwide dark mode, updates to Shortcuts, a long-awaited redesign for Reminders, enhancements to an unprecedented number of system apps, and much more, there is a lot to take in here.

What’s not included in iOS 13 is iPad-specific updates, but that’s because Apple has split off the iPad’s version of iOS into its own dedicated software platform: iPadOS, which you can read our complete overview of here.

As for iOS 13, despite not including the variety of iPad improvements Apple has built, it remains a substantial release meant to take the mobile computing experience to a whole new level. Let’s dive in.

Read more

Apple Shows Off New Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR Coming in the Fall

During the keynote presentation at WWDC today, Apple previewed the long-awaited Mac Pro alongside a new 32-inch pro display. Both hardware announcements are aimed at professionals in fields like video compositing, 3D rendering, photography, and audio engineering.

Mac Pro

The Mac Pro is designed with performance and customization in mind. The computer’s design echoes the classic ‘cheese grater’ Mac’s shape, vent system, and handles. The frame of the Mac Pro is built from stainless steel, and the casing is aluminum. With a twist of a latch on the top of the computer, users can lift the case off using the two stainless steel handles to access internal components from all sides and install expansion cards.

The case also incorporates a lattice pattern to maximize airflow through the case. According to Apple, the three-dimensional interlocking hemisphere pattern simultaneously assists with airflow by maximizing surface area and makes the case rigid but lightweight. Optional wheels can be added to the case to make it easier to transport in a workspace.

Read more