John Voorhees

5429 posts on MacStories since November 2015

John is MacStories' Managing Editor, has been writing about Apple and apps since joining the team in 2015, and today, runs the site alongside Federico. John also co-hosts four MacStories podcasts: AppStories, which covers the world of apps, MacStories Unwind, which explores the fun differences between American and Italian culture and recommends media to listeners, Ruminate, a show about the weird web and unusual snacks, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about the games we take with us.


Highlights for iPhone and iPad: An Excellent Companion for Researchers

I wish I had Highlights for iOS and iPadOS when I was a lawyer. Back then, it wasn’t unusual for me to review PDFs of legal documents that were hundreds of pages long. Unfortunately, the digital tools I had for annotating those documents were primitive. So instead, I typically fell back on marking up hard copies with highlighters and adding notes in the margins.

Highlights is a PDF annotation app that’s been available on the Mac for a long time but is brand new on iOS and iPadOS. The app translates the analog process of marking up a PDF to the digital world very well by providing tools that demonstrate an understanding of the needs of students, researchers, and anyone who spends a lot of time with PDFs.

I don’t have the same PDF needs I once did, but as I’ve used Highlights the past couple of weeks, I’ve appreciated its flexibility and power, and I expect that anyone who works with lots of PDFs will too.

Read more


AppStories, Episode 157 – Research Tools

This week on AppStories, we recap the MacStories’ iPad at 10 coverage and then compare notes on the research apps we use and approaches we take when working on a big project.

Sponsored by:

  • Diarly – Modern Digital Diary. Enter here by April 10, 2020, for a chance to win one of fifteen copies of Diarly.
  • Linode – Cloud Hosting and Linux Servers. Get a $20 credit.

https://staging.macstories.net/podcasts/appstories/episodes/157/embed/

Permalink

Pixelmator Photo 1.2 Adds Cursor and Split View Support, ML Match Colors, and More

The Pixelmator team has released version 1.2 of Pixelmator Photo for the iPad with iPadOS cursor and Split View support and Pixelmator Pro’s ML Match Colors feature. The update also includes a new way to change the intensity of color and preset adjustments and a ‘Recents’ section for its filter tool.

Pixelmator Photo uses a custom cursor for tasks like cropping images.

Pixelmator Photo uses a custom cursor for tasks like cropping images.

The addition of cursor control is a welcome enhancement to Pixelmator Photo, which already supported keyboard shortcuts. Now it’s possible to make edits to a photo with a combination of the keyboard and either a trackpad or mouse without reaching up to touch the screen. Combined with the addition of Split View, Pixelmator Photo is far more powerful when used in combination with another app than it was before.

For example, when I’m working on an article and want to touch up a photo, I often use Pixelmator Photo to touch up any photos I plan to use. Before the update, if I was doing that with my iPad Pro in a stand, I would usually remove the iPad and edit with it lying flat on a table because it was easier than reaching up repeatedly to navigate Pixelmator Photo’s UI.

Editing images while I write in iA Writer.

Editing images while I write in iA Writer.

With cursor support, my iPad can remain in the stand while I edit. Better yet, with Split View, I can edit an image alongside the article I’m writing and use the app’s share sheet support to use a shortcut that uploads the final image to our CDN and returns a URL that I can paste into the story. The pairing eliminates the need to switch back and forth between Photos and my text editor, saving time. It’s worth noting that Pixelmator Photo does not support iPadOS’s multiwindowing feature, which I imagine could be valuable in some editing scenarios.

Read more


Research Tools

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 157 - Research Tools

0:00
37:56

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week, Federico and John recap MacStories’ iPad at 10 coverage and then compare notes on the research apps they use and approaches they take when working on a big project.

Read more