Posts tagged with "featured"

Announcing the MacStories 10th Anniversary T-shirt and Pin

We’re very fortunate at MacStories to have a terrific group of loyal readers. As MacStories turns 10 and has become known not just for the site, but also Club MacStories and AppStories, it felt like the perfect time to celebrate with MacStories’ very first official merchandise, which is available from macstoriesmerch.com, a Cotton Bureau storefront that we’ve set up for this and any future sales. I can already sense a few of you typing ‘finally’ into your Twitter clients, but as the saying goes, ‘good things come to those who wait,’ and I think you’ll like what we’ve got for you.

The MacStories 10th Anniversary T-shirt

The first item is the MacStories 10th Anniversary T-shirt, which features the site’s classic bookmark logo and distinctive typography. The shirt, offered through our friends at Cotton Bureau, comes in three styles: Vintage Black Tri-Blend, Black 100% Cotton, and Light Blue 100% Cotton in both men’s and women’s cuts and a wide range of sizes for $30.

The MacStories 10th Anniversary Enamel Pin

The second item is the MacStories 10th Anniversary Enamel Pin. The pin features MacStories’ iconic bookmark logo in the perfect shade of MacStories red for $15.

The shirts will be available to order for two weeks and the pins will be for sale until supplies run out, so don’t wait. Two weeks is not long and we expect the pins to sell out fast.

If you have any questions about shipping, orders, payments and the like, please visit Cotton Bureau’s FAQ for more details.

We’d like to expand what we offer in the future, but that depends entirely on demand and interest from you. So let us know what you think on Twitter (@MacStoriesNet) and send us pictures of your new MacStories shirts and pins in the wild when they arrive. We’re excited to get them in your hands soon.

10 Years of MacStories

Later this week on Saturday, April 20, MacStories will turn 10 years old.

It was Monday, April 20, 2009 when, fresh out of a job from which I had gotten fired, I decided to publish the first official post on my self-hosted blog after a few weeks of running a free WordPress.com website. I was 21. My English was terrible and, at the time, MacStories was written in two languages, English and Italian – probably to hide my discomfort as a non-native English speaker. If you want to hear this story (and my entire background) in much greater detail, John interviewed me on this week’s special episode of AppStories.

Since that first post about web browsers, MacStories has been on my mind every day and it remains the most important thing I’ve ever built in my adult life. In many ways, MacStories has come to define me.

As you might guess, I’ve struggled to come to terms with the meaning of this anniversary. I don’t like celebrating work-related anniversaries. I don’t think our readers appreciate excessive self-congratulatory content and I’d rather focus on getting work done every day. I prefer to let other people compliment us if they ever feel compelled to do so; otherwise, I just want to focus on providing a service to our audience, because that’s what I’m ultimately here to do: to make sure that MacStories and our related properties can be useful and inspiring for our readers around the world.

Ten years, however, does feel like an extremely long time in Internet years. For this reason, when I started thinking about this looming milestone sometime last year, I knew I had to do something special for this anniversary – just this once – to look back at the past decade of MacStories, reflect on the things I’ve learned along the way, and plan ahead for the future.

Here’s the short version: this week is going to be extra special on MacStories. We’re launching our first official merchandise today (macstoriesmerch.com) and there will be a series of retrospectives published on MacStories throughout the week (keep an eye on this tag). In addition, we will be launching a couple of new perks exclusive to Club MacStories members.

Now, allow me to share some thoughts about creating MacStories and what this website has meant for me over the past 10 years.

Read more

Using a Mac from iOS, Part 2 – Luna Display and macOS as an App

iPad Diaries is a regular series about using the iPad as a primary computer. You can find more installments here and subscribe to the dedicated RSS feed.

In the first part of my ongoing experiment with controlling and accessing a Mac from the iPad Pro, I covered FileExplorer – the app I use to open Finder locations from iOS’ Files app – and shared a collection of shortcuts to control certain macOS features via Siri and the Shortcuts app. I also described my podcasting setup and how I’ve been taking advantage of Keyboard Maestro to automate window resizing across my two displays connected to the Mac mini. Today, I’m going to cover one of those two external displays – the iPad Pro running the Luna Display app – and how I’ve been using it to have “macOS as an app” on my iPad Pro. If you find this idea of reducing macOS to an app that runs on the iPad upsetting, the rest of this article likely isn’t going to make you happy. If you’re intrigued, however, strap in because I have a lot to share.

Read more

    New AirPods First Impressions: Wireless Magic

    I don’t think I need to extol the virtues of AirPods in 2019. Over two years after their debut, Apple’s truly-wireless earbuds, in addition to providing users with a convenient, seamless way to stream music and podcasts to their ears, have become a cultural phenomenon that has spurred some of the greatest memes of Tech Twitter in recent history. Everybody loves AirPods – provided their unique size and design fit their ears – and, most of all, everybody likes to say how much they love their AirPods.

    This article is no different, but there’s a small twist in the usual narrative that prompted me to write this story after receiving my second-generation AirPods yesterday.

    Read more

    Apple Announces Apple News+ Service for Magazines: Our Overview and First Impressions

    At the “It’s Show Time” media event held earlier today at the Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park, Cupertino, Apple took the wraps off the highly anticipated Apple News+ subscription service, which will allow users to gain access to over 300 magazines inside Apple News for a single monthly fee of $9.99. Unlike the other services announced by the company at the event, Apple News+ is available now in the United States and Canada as part of the iOS 12.2 and macOS 10.14.4 software updates.

    Read more

    Apple Announces New AirPods with ‘Hey Siri’ Support, New H1 Chip, Wireless Charging Case Option

    In a surprise announcement following a string of daily releases this week, Apple today announced a major update to AirPods, the company’s wireless earbuds. As widely speculated over the past several months, the new generation AirPods come with support for hands-free ‘Hey Siri’ activation, feature improved performance over the original AirPods (which launched in late 2016), and support wireless charging (using the Qi standard) via an optional case.

    Read more

    The New 21.5 and 27-inch iMacs: The MacStories Overview

    Today, Apple has updated its online store with improved iMacs. Although the iMac Pro models were updated in December 2017, the non-Pro version hadn’t seen an update since June 2017, the longest time ever between iMac revisions according to MacRumors. The new iMacs, which were announced via a press release, include new base models and custom-build options for the 21.5 and 27-inch models that will allow customers to configure an iMac that rivals the specs of the lower-end iMac Pro models.

    Read more