Posts tagged with "iPadOS"

Shareshot 1.3: Greater Image Flexibility, New Backgrounds, and Extended Shortcuts Support

If you have a screenshot you need to frame, Shareshot is one of your best bets. That’s because it makes it so hard to create an image that looks bad. The app, which is available for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, has a lot of options for tweaking the appearance of your framed screenshot, so your final image won’t have a cookie-cutter look. However, there are also just enough constraints to prevent you from creating something truly awful.

You can check out my original review and coverage on Club MacStories for the details on version 1.0 and subsequent releases, but today’s focus is on version 1.3, which covers three areas:

  • Increased image size flexibility
  • New backgrounds
  • Updated and extended Shortcuts actions
Adjusting sizes.

Adjusting sizes.

With version 1.3, Shareshot now lets you pick any output size you’d like. The app then frames your screenshot and fits it in the image size you specify. If you’re doing design work, getting the exact-size image you want out of the app is a big win because it means you won’t need to make adjustments later that could impair its fidelity.

A related change is the ability to specify a fixed width for the image that Shareshot outputs. That means you can pick the aspect ratio you want, such as square or 16:9, then specify a fixed width, and Shareshot will take care of automatically adjusting the height of the image to preserve the aspect ratio you chose. This feature is perfect if you publish to the web and the tools you use are optimized for a certain image width. Using anything wider just means you’re hosting a file that’s bigger than necessary, potentially slowing down your website and resulting in unnecessary bandwidth costs.

Shareshot is stripey now.

Shareshot is stripey now.

Shareshot has two new categories of backgrounds too: Solidarity and Stripes. Solidarity has two options styled after the Ukrainian and Palestinian flags, and Stripes includes designs based on LGBTQ+ colors and other color combinations in a variety of styles. All of the new categories allow you to adjust several parameters including the angle, color, saturation, brightness, and blur of the stripes.

Examples of angles.

Examples of angles.

Finally, Shareshot has revamped its Shortcuts actions to take advantage of App Intents, giving users control over more parameters of images generated using Shortcuts and preparing the app for Apple’s promised Smart Siri in the future. The changes add:

  • Support for outputting custom-sized images,
  • A scale option for fixed-width and custom-sized images, and
  • New parameters for angling and blurring backgrounds.

The progress Shareshot has made since version 1.0 is impressive. The app has grown substantially to offer a much wider set of backgrounds, options, and flexibility without compromising its excellent design, which garnered it a MacStories Selects Award last year. I’m still eager to see multiple screenshot support added, a feature I know is on the roadmap, but that’s more a wish than a complaint; Shareshot is a fantastic app that just keeps getting better.

Shareshot 1.3 is free to download on the App Store. Some of its features require a $1.99/month or $14.99/year subscription.

Notes on Mercury Weather’s New Radar Maps Feature

Since covering Mercury Weather 2.0 and its launch on the Vision Pro here on MacStories, I’ve been keeping up with the weather app on Club MacStories. It’s one of my favorite Mac menu bar apps, it has held a spot on my default Apple Watch face since its launch, and last fall, it added severe weather notifications.

I love the app’s design and focus as much today as I did when I wrote about its debut in 2023. Today, though, Mercury Weather is a more well-rounded app than ever before. Through regular updates, the app has filled in a lot of the holes in its feature set that may have turned off some users two years ago.

Today, Mercury Weather adds weather radar maps, which was one of the features I missed most from other weather apps, along with the severe weather notifications that were added late last year. It’s a welcome addition that means the next time a storm is bearing down on my neighborhood, I won’t have to switch to a different app to see what’s coming my way.

Zooming out to navigate the globe.

Zooming out to navigate the globe.

Radar maps are available on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions of Mercury Weather; they offer a couple of different map styles and a legend that explains what each color on the map means. If you zoom out, you can get a global view of Earth with your favorite locations noted on the map. Tap one, and you’ll get the current conditions for that spot. Mercury Weather already had an extensive set of widgets for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but this update adds small, medium, and large widgets for the radar map, too.

A Mercury Weather radar map on the Mac.

A Mercury Weather radar map on the Mac.

With a long list of updates since launch, Mercury Weather is worth another look if you passed on it before because it was missing features you wanted. The app is available on the App Store as a free download. Certain features require a subscription or lifetime purchase via an in-app purchase.

Terminology 5: Rebuilt and Better than Ever

It’s been quite a while since I did a full review of Agile Tortoise’s Terminology, an extensible dictionary and reference tool for the iPhone and iPad. It’s hard to believe the app has been around for 15 years now, but with today’s release of version 5.0, Greg Pierce has introduced a thoroughly modern ground-up rewrite of the app that is richer and more extensible than ever, making it one of my favorite research tools.

Let’s take a look at what’s new.

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Hands-On with Multiple Pinned Item Lists in Callsheet

It’s been over a year and a half since the debut of Callsheet, the app from Casey Liss for looking up information about films and TV shows, and the app has grown a lot in that time. From new app icon variations to more fine-grained spoiler settings to actors’ heights and ages, Callsheet has gained many new capabilities. My favorite addition thus far is the indicator for mid- and post-credit scenes in movies.

The app’s latest update expands greatly upon a feature that’s been present since the beginning: pinned items. Users can now create multiple separate lists of pinned items and organize them to their hearts’ content. As someone who watches quite a bit of TV and covers it regularly, I could certainly benefit from this feature, so I decided to give it a try.

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Recipes Are Coming to Apple’s News+ Service

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Apple continues to layer new features into its News+ service. With iOS and iPadOS 18.4, the company says the service will add recipes from well-known publishers including Allrecipes, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Good Food, and Serious Eats:

With the new Food feature, users will be able to find stories curated by Apple News editors, as well as browse, search, and filter tens of thousands of recipes in the Recipe Catalog — with new recipes added every day. The beautifully designed recipe format makes it easy to review ingredients and directions, and a new cook mode takes step-by-step instructions to the full screen. Users can also save their favorite recipes for later and access them offline.

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Interestingly, Apple’s press release makes no mention of the Mac. I’d rather use my iPhone or iPad in the kitchen, but a Mac is a great place to browse recipes, so hopefully News+ Food will be brought to the Mac eventually.

My Latest Mac Hacks Column: Using Google Gemini with Read-Later and Listen-Later Services for Research→

A Google Gemini report on the Sony PlayStation Portable.

A Google Gemini report on the Sony PlayStation Portable.

Yesterday, I published the latest installment of my Mac Hacks column, an exclusive perk of Club MacStories+ and Club Premier, covering how I use Google Gemini combined with read- and listen-later services to do preliminary research for projects.

What started as a way to reduce distractions when doing research with the help of Google Gemini quickly evolved into something more. As I explain in the conclusion:

The result of this workflow is that I can generate a Gemini report for an ongoing project and then read it at my leisure somewhere other than at my desk, whether I’m using my laptop, an iPad, or an e-ink device. I also have the option of heading out to my local coffee shop for a change of scenery and listening to a report as I walk. On a busy day, it’s a nice way to get some exercise and knock out some research at the same time. That flexibility, combined with fewer up-front distractions, has proven to be a great productivity boost.

Research is a universal task that touches every sort of project. It’s also a place where it’s easy to get bogged down. If you’re interested in streamlining the process, don’t miss the latest Mac Hacks.

Discounts are just one of the many Club MacStories perks.

Discounts are just one of the many Club MacStories perks.

Mac Hacks is just one of many perks that Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members enjoy, which also include:

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  • a vibrant Discord community of smart app and automation fans who trade a wealth of tips and discoveries every day, and
  • live Discord audio events after Apple events and at other times of the year.

On top of that, Club Premier members get AppStories+, an extended, ad-free version of our flagship podcast that we deliver early every week in high-bitrate audio.

Use the buttons below to learn more and sign up for Club MacStories+ or Club Premier.

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Game Tracker: A Powerful App to Track, Organize, and Customize Your Videogame Library

Game Tracker is a new videogame tracking app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac from Simone Montalto, who is probably best known to MacStories readers for developing the excellent Book Tracker. In fact, Montalto has created an entire suite of tracking apps that also includes Movie Tracker, Music Tracker, and Habit Tracker. That experience with various tracking apps shows with Game Tracker, which does a fantastic job of tailoring to the particularities of videogames and leveraging metadata to allow users to make the app their own.

Let’s take a closer look.

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Bookshop.org Now Supports Local Booksellers with eBook Sales→

Bookshop.org launched in 2020 as a way to sell books online while still supporting local bookstores, which have become a rarity in the U.S. The company has seen success selling physical books online. As Boone Ashworth explains at Wired:

For physical books, Bookshop lets buyers direct 30 percent of the proceeds of a sale to their favorite participating bookstore. An additional 10 percent of those sales, plus the sales of books that are not earmarked for a specific store, gets split up and distributed to every store on Bookshop’s platform.

Now, Bookshop has added eBooks that can be purchased online and read in the company’s new Bookshop.org app, available for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Ashworth breaks down how these sales work:

Ebook sales through Bookshop, however, will see 100 percent of the proceeds going to the store that sells them through the platform. If a user buys an ebook directly from Bookshop without naming a bookstore they want to support, then a third of that profit will go into the pool of funds that gets divided between stores. The rest will go to pay for Bookshop.org’s engineers and server costs.

Giving local bookstores the ability to sell eBooks fills a big hole for those businesses. Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter shared the company’s motivation for offering eBooks with Wired:

“It’s crazy that bookstores can’t sell ebooks to their customers right now,” Hunter says. He says he wants this program to continue his company’s mission of propping up local bookstores, but he also hopes this move will help take Amazon down a peg as well.

I’ve tried Bookshop’s app briefly with some book previews, and it works well. The settings options aren’t as extensive as in other eBook readers, but the basics – like text size, pagination versus scrolling, a couple of font options, and light, dark, and paper themes – are all there. The design makes browsing your library of books or finding something new to read easy, too. It may not be enough for some readers, but this is a 1.0 release, so I’m optimistic additional options will be offered with time.

It’s great to see Bookshop offering eBooks. We have an excellent bookstore here in Davidson that I love to browse, but more often than not, I prefer an eBook over the paper version, so it’s nice to have that as an option now.

The Bookshop.org app is available on the App Store as a free download. eBooks must be purchased online and synced with the app.

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iOS and iPadOS 18.3 Tweak Apple Intelligence and Add a Few Features

Starting them young. Source: Apple.

Starting them young. Source: Apple.

The drip, drip, drip of Apple Intelligence continues with iOS and iPadOS 18.3. There are still some big-ticket features announced at WWDC 2024 that are yet to come, but with today’s release, Apple keeps ticking items off its list.

The biggest change is one that is largely hidden from view. Starting with iOS and iPadOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence is turned on by default. That should result in greater adoption of the features, and it’s a good indicator that Apple is confident LLM hallucinations won’t come back to bite the company in its reputation. We’ll see about that last bit, but given the size of the iPhone market, Apple’s guardrails have held up reasonably well so far.

That said, Apple is walking back one feature a little. Notification summaries will no longer be applied to news apps, after some high-profile confabulations. Given that news apps typically send headlines, which are inherently summary in nature, I don’t think that’s a great loss, although the change is reportedly temporary. However, one change to notifications is not temporary: starting with iOS and iPadOS 18.3, summarized notifications appear in italics to help distinguish them from other notifications.

Visual Intelligence has been updated in iOS 18.3 as well. Accessed by pressing and holding the iPhone’s Camera Control, Visual Intelligence can now add events to your calendar, identify animals and plants, and get information about places around you, such as a store or restaurant’s hours.

The latest update also adds back a Calculator feature. When you tap the equals sign repeatedly, the Calculator app will apply the last-used operation each time.

Finally, Apple introduced its latest Black Unity Collection earlier today. The iPhone and iPad wallpapers are part of iOS and iPadOS 18.3, and the new Unity Rhythm watch face is included with watchOS 11.3.