Posts tagged with "featured"

I Made You a Mixtape

I’ve always loved the idea of someone else making a mixtape for me.

When I was in middle school and until the first year of high school, we didn’t have the Internet at home. My parents were against buying me a PC; they thought it was a waste of time. Unlike many of my friends, I depended on books and magazines for my school research and hobbies. I was a voracious reader.

That was 2002. I wasn’t exactly a music fan back then: I heard music on the radio in my mom’s car on the way to school in the morning, and I occasionally slid my dad’s cassette tapes in our Siemens Club 793 stereo, but he only listened to Italian music. I wanted the English stuff.

Until one day my friend Luca told me about MP3s and compact discs with hundreds of songs on them. By leaving his computer plugged in all night, he explained elatedly, he could download any music he wanted from the Internet using programs with exotic names I had never heard – WinMX, eMule, iMesh. Then, all those songs could be “burned” onto a CD as MP3s, and I could play them back for as long as I wanted with a CD player.

I was 14, we were chatting after school, and I didn’t know what piracy was. And then, the surprise: because he knew I didn’t have the Internet (or a computer), he had made a sample CD for me with about 30 songs on it. He gave me the CD, told me to buy a CD player for myself, and he concluded with “Get back to me soon about the songs you like. I put in a bit of everything except Italian music”.

Fourteen years ago, I was handed the first mixtape someone ever made for me.

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Workflow 1.5: App Store Automation, Trello and Ulysses Actions, Audio Metadata, Safari View Controller, and More

In seven years of MacStories, few iOS apps fundamentally changed how I get work done as much as Workflow. Pythonista, Editorial, and Tweetbot are in that list, but Workflow, with its ongoing improvements and deep iOS integrations, continuously makes me question how I can optimize my setup further.

Nearly two years (and an Apple Design Award) later, Workflow is reaching version 1.5 today, an important milestone towards the road to 2.0. Unsurprisingly for the Workflow team, this release adds over 20 new actions and dozens of improvements. Some of them are new app actions based on URL schemes, while others introduce brand new system integrations (such as iTunes Store, App Store, and Safari View Controller) and web actions for the popular Trello team collaboration service. Workflow 1.5 is a packed release that is going to save heavy Workflow users a lot of time.

After testing and playing with Workflow 1.5 for the past month, I’ve been able to streamline key aspects of writing for MacStories and managing Club MacStories. With a bigger team and more Club responsibilities, we’ve been thinking about how to improve our shared tasks and creative process; Workflow 1.5 has played an essential role in it.

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Airmail 3 Review

When Federico reviewed Airmail 1.1 last month, I liked what I saw. I downloaded Airmail and started playing with it. I appreciated the ability to customize nearly every aspect of the app, but it wasn’t sticking because I couldn’t do the same on the Mac.

Like a text editor, my email client is the kind of app for which I prefer a consistent feature set and setup on iOS and OS X. While I was tempted to go all-in with Airmail, the very advancements that made it so attractive on iOS held me back because most of them were unavailable on the Mac.

This changes today with Bloop’s release of Airmail 3 for Mac, which brings Airmail’s best iOS features to the Mac. If you work on both platforms regularly, deal with a lot of email or email accounts, and want to customize your email client to match the way you work, the combination of Airmail 3 for Mac and Airmail 1.1 for iOS is a terrific choice and one to which I am now fully committed.

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Tweetbot 4.3 Introduces ‘Topics’ for Easier Tweetstorm Creation

A topic in the new Tweetbot 4.3.

A topic in the new Tweetbot 4.3.

Picture this: it’s WWDC keynote day and you’re following the event. You want to live tweet as the event unfolds. What do you do?

The answer is that, so far, Twitter the company has mostly failed to provide users with ways to rapidly tweet commentary and have tweets intelligently grouped together once an event is over. Sure, you could append the same hashtag to every tweet, “tagging it” for context, but that wouldn’t fix the underlying problem of a bunch of messages related to the same event and yet treated as atomic units with no relationship between them.

Thus Twitter the community came up with the idea of the tweetstorm, a clever workaround based on how Twitter threads work. If you want to post multiple tweets in a row and establish a thread between them from start to finish, reply to your own tweet, removing your username at the beginning of the message, and you’ll “fake” a series of topical tweets which Twitter sees as part of a conversation…with yourself. It’s not the most elegant solution, and it doesn’t work well for rapid fire live tweeting, but it sort of works and a lot of people use it by now.

Tweetbot, the excellent Twitter client developed by Tapbots which relaunched with version 4.0 in October, is introducing an update today that fully embraces the concept of tweetstorms with a feature called “topics”.

Topics simplify the process of chaining tweets together with an intuitive interface that makes it look like Twitter rolled out support for topics. Under the hood, Tapbots is still leveraging the aforementioned @reply workaround, but they’ve been clever enough to completely abstract that from the UI, building what is, quite possibly, one of the most ingenious Tweetbot features to date.

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With Launcher 2.0, I’m Rethinking My Notification Center Widgets

When iOS 8 came out, I thought I’d stop using URL schemes altogether. Until two years ago1, my attempts at working on iOS had focused on overcoming the lack of inter-app communication with URL scheme automation, as our old coverage here at MacStories can attest. iOS 8 showed a new way to get things done on the iPhone and iPad thanks to extensions, eschewing the limited functionality (and security concerns) of URL schemes for a native, integrated foundation.

Two years later, I’ve largely reappraised my usage of URL schemes, but, unlike I first imagined, they haven’t disappeared completely from my iOS computing life. iOS automation has taken on a different form since 2014: thanks to its action extension, Workflow has brought deeply integrated automation to every app, while Pythonista remains the most powerful environment for those who prefer to dabble with Python scripting and advanced tasks (also while taking advantage of an action extension to be activated from apps).

Today, URL schemes are being used by developers and users who want to go beyond the limitations of system extensions: apps like Drafts and Workflow use URL schemes to invoke specific apps directly (which extensions can’t do – see Airmail and its custom app actions) and to link more complex chains of automated actions. URL schemes are also the best way to set up templates and import workflows for dedicated functionalities – a good example being The Omni Group with their latest automation options for template generation in OmniFocus.

While Apple’s goal with iOS 8 might have been to “kill” URL schemes by turning them into a niche technology mostly supplanted by extensions, that niche has continued to quietly thrive. iOS automation is drastically better (and more secure) today because of extensions, but, for many, URL schemes still are the backbone of app shortcuts and complex workflows. Where extensions can’t go, there’s a good chance a URL scheme will do the trick.

It’s in this modern iOS automation landscape that Launcher, first released in 2014, is graduating to version 2.0 with a focus on what it does best: standalone app shortcuts. Launcher 2.0 offers more control than its predecessor over widget customization and activation, with new features and settings that have pushed me to reconsider how I use Notification Center widgets on both my iPhone and iPad Pro.

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iOS 10: Wishes and Concept Video

iOS 10 concept.

iOS 10 concept.


(Full-res)

I almost can’t believe there was a time when the iPad didn’t have Split View. Or that, for years, I thought Apple would never bring split-screen multitasking to iOS.

More than any other iOS update before, iOS 9 has fundamentally reinvented the role of the iPad in my computing life. As I’ve written in my iOS 9 review and look at the iPad one year after my decision to stop using my Mac, iOS 9 and its multitasking improvements have catapulted the iPad away from the old limitations of iOS into a different league.

With iOS 9 and the iPad Pro, the list of tasks I can’t perform on my iPad is down to a single item.

I’ve never been happier with an iOS device and operating system than I am with the iPad Pro and iOS 9. Getting my work done is faster; using apps in Split View is a treat compared to iOS 8; and the software keyboard (despite some problems) continues to impress me with the addition of trackpad mode and the Shortcut Bar. The iPhone 6s, too, has been a pleasant surprise thanks to its superior performance and 3D Touch.1

There’s never been a better time to be an iOS user. But that doesn’t mean that everything’s perfect. When it comes to iOS, happiness is often a fleeting moment – a temporary satisfaction with the current state of things before the inevitable longing for something deeper. Such is the constant pursuit of the future.

Every year, I put together a list of the changes I’d like to see in the next version of iOS. I’ve been doing this for several years now. This year, I wanted to prepare something bigger. The tenth version of iOS due to be released later this year will be a major milestone for Apple and iOS users. It only felt appropriate to celebrate the occasion with a different take on my annual iOS wish list.

For the past few months, I’ve been collaborating with Sam Beckett (author of a fantastic Control Center concept we linked to a while back) to visualize my iOS 10 wishes with a professional concept video and static mockups. Sam and I discussed my ideas for a couple of months, and he was able to visualize2 what I would like to have in iOS 10 – both for the iPhone and iPad – with a style and attention to detail I’m extremely happy with.

Below, you’ll find a collection of my iOS 10 wishes, organized in tentpole features (the ones also shown in the video) plus additional sub-sections. Some of these wishes have been on my list for years; others are a consequence of the features Apple shipped with iOS 9.

Let’s get started.

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  1. I use 3D Touch heavily every day. Peek previews for tweets and links in Tweetbot, Home screen actions, keyboard cursor control, and channel shortcuts in Slack are gestures I intuitively perform daily. ↩︎
  2. He was also very patient. As you can imagine, I sent him a lot of ideas and comments before signing off on the final version. I can't recommend working with Sam enough. ↩︎

With Version 1.1 and an iPad App, I’m Switching to Airmail

When I first covered Airmail for iPhone, I noted how the vision of an email client for power users on iOS was only halfway there due to the lack of an iPad app and a variety of glitches and technical issues. Airmail showed that it was possible to build an email app for power users on mobile devices – asking for a fair price in the process – but I couldn’t switch to it as my full-time client yet.

That’s changing with today’s update to Airmail for iOS, which I’ve been using as my only email client on the iPhone and iPad for the past several weeks. In addition to an iPad app – which mostly follows in the footsteps of its iPhone counterpart in terms of UI and navigation choices – Airmail 1.1 brings powerful new features such as saved searches, customizable keyboard shortcuts, support for send later and read receipts, and more.

While the majority of “modern” email clients are focused on reinventing email with new display options for the inbox and novel interfaces, Airmail wants to redefine how much control you’re given over your email on iOS. Which is to say – Airmail is the most powerful email app for iOS out there right now, treating iPhone and iPad users with the same respect and attention other developers would only show for their Mac apps.

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DeskConnect Brings Fast File Transfers Between iOS and OS X

Before he co-founded Workflow, Ari Weinstein was the creator of DeskConnect. Originally born out of a hackathon, DeskConnect was a Mac and iOS utility to speed up the process of transferring bits of text and files between devices. Based on a cloud service and built with speed in mind, DeskConnect predated Apple’s Continuity efforts with AirDrop in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite; when it launched in the summer of 2013, DeskConnect was featured by Apple on the Mac App Store and it ranked in the top charts for several consecutive days.

However, after Weinstein and Workflow co-founders Conrad Kramer and Nick Frey began working on the app that would later win an Apple Design Award, DeskConnect was put on the shelf so the team could focus on their powerful take on iOS automation. They never forgot about DeskConnect, though. With a major redesign and adoption of modern iOS technologies, DeskConnect’s comeback, launching today on the App Store, brings an even faster way to share documents, photos, and just about anything across multiple devices. After testing the new DeskConnect for the past couple of weeks, it’s impossible not to be impressed with its simplicity and speed.

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Apple Releases iOS 9.3: A Collection of New Features and Tidbits

With an announcement in January, Apple unveiled iOS 9.3, a surprisingly feature-rich update to iOS 9 with major changes for education and several tweaks to the user experience of system apps. After the generally positive response to iOS 9 and the 9.1 and 9.2 updates, few were expecting Apple to bring more features to iOS 9 ahead of WWDC and the (likely) unveiling of iOS 10.

For the past two months, I’ve been using iOS 9.3 on my two primary devices (an iPad Pro and iPhone 6s Plus) starting with the first beta, and I’ve been keeping track of all the changes – big and small – that Apple is bringing with their latest iOS release. Below, you’ll find a collection of everything I’ve discovered.

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