MacStories Team

3497 posts on MacStories since July 2011

Articles by the MacStories team. Founded by Federico Viticci in April 2009, MacStories attracts millions of readers every month thanks to in-depth, personal, and informed coverage that offers a balanced mix of Apple news, app reviews, and opinion.

Muse: Tool for Thought on iPad [Sponsor]

A new professional app for the iPad launched last week. It’s called Muse, and it turns your iPad into a tool for thought.

Muse gives you a spatial canvas for your research notes, sketches, screenshots, PDFs, and bookmarks. File managers and note-taking apps put your content into sorted lists and grids. By contrast, Muse is inspired by your desk: personal, creative, even a little messy.

You can pull in documents and clippings from iCloud or Dropbox, your iCloud photo library, or drag-and-drop from other apps. Use your Pencil to draw on, around, or in between everything, discovering and making connections between ideas as you go. And the zooming interface allows you to nest all your content to create a beautiful, explorable knowledge garden.

Muse is $99.99 per year, but you can try it for free with up to 100 cards. It’s a terrific way to dig in and understand how Muse can help you organize your projects.

Download Muse from the App Store today. Because deep thinking doesn’t happen in front of a computer.

Our thanks to Muse for sponsoring MacStories this week.


MacStories Unplugged

[[unplugged_artwork]] This episode Federico and John take a break from tech to explore the world of American regional fast food. Chicago hot dogs and pizza are coming, but in this episode John needs Federico’s opinion on how Italian an Italian beef sandwich is. Spoiler: Not very. Show Notes The Italian beef sandwich from Chicago Some...


Perks

Muse Exclusively for Club MacStories members, we have 10 coupon codes for Muse, a terrific new iPad app that’s a spatial canvas for organizing research materials, handwritten notes and sketches, screenshots, and bookmarks. Enter for a Chance to Win Muse...


In This Issue

A peek at some of what’s to come for the Club’s 5th anniversary, a collection of recently-released iOS games, a Muse app giveaway, a tiponquickly launching files and folders on iOS and iPadOS 14, Ryan on his widget and Home Screen setup, a new episode of MacStories Unplugged, plus, the usualWeekly Q&A, Links, lots of...


Interesting Links

On August 22nd, Apple began testing the new maps coming to Ireland and the UK, and as usual, Justin O’Bierne has the details on his site. (Link) Apps have to be slimmed down to serve as App Clips and Guilherme Rambo takes a close look at what that means for an app like his ChibiStudio....


Previously, On MacStories

Apple Launches Oprah’s Book Club Podcast Featuring 8-Part Series on Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” Apple Announces Fall Event Focused Work Review: Staying on Task Amidst Growing Distractions iOS and iPadOS 14 Users Can Now Set Google Chrome as the Default Browser Apple Updates Multiple App Review Guidelines Addressing Game Streaming Services,...


Up Next on MacStories’ Podcasts

Next week on AppStories, Federico and John walk through the changes to Apple’s App Review Guidelines and what they mean for game streaming services and other apps. This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico and John cover Focused Work, a new productivity app, the upcoming Apple Event, Oprah’s Book Club podcast, plus AppStories, the...


Coming Soon: Club MacStories’ 5th Anniversary Celebration

As Federico and John discuss further on today’s episode ofMacStories Unplugged, September 14th will mark the 5th anniversary of Club MacStories. As in the past, we will be celebrating with deals for Club members on some of our favorite apps and services over the next four weeks. We’ll have over 30 apps and services this...


Textastic: The Code Editor for Your iPad and iPhone [Sponsor]

Textastic is the most complete and versatile code editor available for your iPad and iPhone. The app’s versatility starts with its extensive support of syntax highlighting for more than 80 programming and markup languages. Textastic handles highlighting for HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, C, C++, Swift, Objective-C, Java, LaTeX, Python, Ruby, Perl, Lua, and dozens more.

Textastic is also a full-featured Markdown text editor that includes a built-in web server and Safari support for previewing your work. The app is compatible with Sublime Text and TextMate syntax definitions too.

Textastic goes well beyond the features of a classic text editor, though. You can manage remote file transfers with FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Dropbox, and Google Drive and there’s a terrific, full-featured SSH terminal built right into the app. Because Textastic supports tabs, you can even have multiple files and SSH terminals open simultaneously.

With robust search and replace that supports regular expressions, keyboard shortcuts that are customizable, and support for Git repositories using Working Copy, it’s the most powerful code editor you’ll find anywhere with a long list of features, including support for the Files app, drag and drop, printing, iCloud Drive, Split View, multiwindowing, context menus, and a whole lot more.

The app is regularly updated and maintained too. With the release of version 9.3 in June, Textastic gained new keyboard shortcuts for code comments, a setting for automatically inserting a matching closing character for parentheses, square brackets, and curly brackets, code awareness that allows for automatic indentation based on syntax context, an adjustable line height setting, and a setting for displaying the selected line indicator in a document’s gutter. Dark mode has been improved too, allowing users to select a separate code editor theme and keyboard appearance and preview Markdown using a dark color scheme.

To learn more about Textastic and what it can do for your code editing needs on the iPhone and iPad, visit textasticapp.com, to download a copy today. You’re going to love it.

Our thanks to Textastic for sponsoring MacStories this week.