Ulysses 20 Review: New Dashboard Featuring Advanced Grammar and Style Check, Outline, and Much More

By Ryan Christoffel

Ulysses 20 for iPad’s new dashboard.

One of the promises regularly made by apps transitioning to a subscription model is that they’ll be able to deliver more regular, incremental updates rather than going untouched for extended periods of time, and they can also focus on adding functionality that existing users will appreciate rather than needing to build something entirely different to attract a new target market. Ulysses has been a subscription app for nearly three years already, and I believe it’s one of the apps doing the best job of delivering on both of those fronts.

A quick search on MacStories will show that I’ve covered Ulysses a lot, in part because it’s my primary Markdown editor, but also because there are consistently several updates per year that stand out as noteworthy and meriting a fresh review. Today’s version 20 is no exception, introducing an advanced grammar and style check ‘revision mode’ on the Mac (coming soon to iPad and iPhone) and a new dashboard view across all platforms. Both enhancements leave what was already great about Ulysses alone, while offering valuable new utility for writers sure to delight existing users and perhaps even draw a flock of new ones.

Apple Debuts Web Portal for Apple Card Management

By Ryan Christoffel

Apple Card users can now view their entire transaction history, make payments, and more from card.apple.com.

Launched today, the new web portal for Apple Card users addresses a concern prospective users voiced when Apple Card first launched: how do I manage my credit card if I lose my iPhone (and/or iPad)? That should no longer be an issue, since Apple’s website now enables users to:

Check their Apple Card balance
Make payments, including setting up scheduled payments
Download PDF statements of monthly activity
View information about their Apple Card Monthly Installments
Set up and remove bank accounts

The new card.apple.com landing page.

The timing of this new web portal coincides nicely with a special promotion Apple just started, which offers new Apple Card users a $50 credit to use toward Apple services. Just a couple weeks ago, Apple Card also gained special 0% financing options for a host of Apple products, including Macs, iPads, AirPods, and more.

I’ve been an Apple Card user since the beginning and love it. While I don’t expect to use the web interface on a regular basis, it’s a great option for people who need it, and I’m happy to see Apple continue to make the product more appealing.

Apple News Loses The New York Times →

Linked By Ryan Christoffel

Kellen Browning and Jack Nicas, writing for The New York Times:

The New York Times said on Monday that it was exiting its partnership with Apple News, as news organizations struggle to compete with large tech companies for readers’ attention and dollars.

Starting on Monday, Times stories were no longer appearing alongside other publications’ articles in the curated Apple News feed available on Apple devices.

The Times is one of the first media organizations to pull out of Apple News. The Times, which has made adding new subscribers a key business goal, said that Apple had given it little in the way of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business. It said it hoped to instead drive readers directly to its own website and mobile app so that it could “fund quality journalism.”

This is a major loss for Apple. According to an Apple statement in the piece, the publication “only offered Apple News a few stories a day,” but losing access to the most prestigious newspaper in the US is nonetheless a bad look.

Apple News readers will doubtless still have plenty of quality journalism options to choose from, yet perhaps the most significant problem for the company is that this move may inspire other partners to follow suit. Apple’s 125 million monthly News readers are a formidable audience, and few publishers have near the clout of The New York Times and thus can’t necessarily afford to take similar risks. However, Apple News has long held a reputation – fair or not – for failing to be very profitable for most publications, so this move could indeed spark a larger exodus if Apple doesn’t work hard to keep its partners happy.

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How the watchOS 7 Handwashing Feature Works →

Linked By Ryan Christoffel

Brian Heater at TechCrunch has published a detailed explanation of how the upcoming handwashing feature for Apple Watch works:

The feature, which is built directly into the forthcoming version of watchOS, is designed to work like fitness tracking in a number of ways. For starters, if the user opts into it, it’s designed to automatically trigger when handwashing is detected, starting a countdown timer of 20 seconds. The accelerometer is the key piece of hardware here, waiting for the specific handwashing pattern — which apparently adopts a number of different methods, depending on who’s actually doing the scrubbing.

The system uses machine learning models to tackle different methods, but the system gets an additional nudge from the Watch’s microphone. Along with motion, the app listens for the sound of running water. Even that’s not enough, though — after all, eco sinks have become increasingly popular, meaning that there’s often less water sound to be listening for. The sound of squishing soap takes care of that last bit. It’s got a unique enough audio signature so as to confirm that handwashing is taking place.

Interestingly, the piece notes that this feature has been in the works for years, it isn’t simply a reaction to the current pandemic. I haven’t tried the feature yet, but I’m anxious to see if it works as advertised. If it’s unreliable, I’ll surely leave it turned off, but if it works well it could be a valuable aid to preventing the contraction of COVID-19. At the very least, I’m always happy to see Apple explore new areas of health.

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Everything Changing in Apple Notes and Reminders in iOS and iPadOS 14

By Ryan Christoffel

Notes and Reminders in iOS 14.

Apple Notes and Reminders are two of my most-used apps, and each has received significant updates in iOS and iPadOS 14. Though neither app’s improvements have been held up as tentpole features of this fall’s releases, Apple has nonetheless given noteworthy attention to making the user experience for each app better in a variety of key ways. You won’t find fundamental evolutions in how either app works, but these updates prove the power of iteration. From visual tweaks that make everything look and feel more modern, to quality of life enhancements, and more substantive new features, the list of total changes is surprisingly rich.

After a few days of use, here’s everything new I’ve discovered in Notes and Reminders.

WWDC 2020: All the Little Things in Apple’s New OS Releases

By Ryan Christoffel

WWDC week is always full of big and small announcements about Apple’s core software platforms. Monday’s keynote only has time for sharing a limited number of details, however, so as the week goes on many new discoveries are made as developers and writers delve into the first beta OS releases themselves. As a result, we always have a roundup of new things to share midway through the week. So today, on top of everything detailed in our overviews of iOS and iPadOS 14, watchOS 7, macOS Big Sur, and tvOS 14, here’s an assortment of extra goodies that will be arriving on your devices this fall.

Apple Audio: AirPods Receive Automatic Switching, Spatial Audio on AirPods Pro, and HomePod Integrates with Third-Party Music Services

By Ryan Christoffel

Apple’s audio products – especially AirPods and AirPods Pro – are becoming major players in the company’s product ecosystem, and as a result it’s no surprise that new features for these products were announced at WWDC. Easily my favorite audio announcement was automatic switching between devices, but there’s a lot of other great audio news too: spatial audio on AirPods Pro, third-party music services on HomePod, audio sharing on tvOS, headphone accommodations, and more.

tvOS 14: The MacStories Overview

By Ryan Christoffel

Apple announced a lot of new software improvements during yesterday’s WWDC keynote, but time was short and one major platform didn’t receive its own segment: tvOS 14. Apple announced new tvOS features as part of its discussion of the home, but fortunately that doesn’t mean the latest Apple TV software release is light on improvements. In addition to features like HomeKit integration, new controller support, and improved Picture in Picture, tvOS 14 will offer a variety of other important updates when it launches this fall.

Here’s my overview of all the best new features.

Craig Federighi on Apple’s New Privacy Initiatives →

Linked By Ryan Christoffel

Michael Grothaus at Fast Company interviewed Craig Federighi on a subject that was prominent in yesterday’s WWDC keynote: privacy. The interview begins with Federighi sharing how Apple considers the extended long-term impact of its decisions in this area:

“We hope to build a lot of great products that bring customers a lot of joy every year,” he says. “But in the fullness of time, in the scope of hundreds of years from now, I think the place where I hope people can look back and talk about the places where Apple made a huge contribution to humanity is in helping people see the way of taking advantage of this great technology without the false tradeoff of giving up their privacy to do it.”

Grothaus highlights several new privacy features throughout his piece, all of which will arrive this fall in Apple’s new batch of software releases. One especially interesting feature is called Approximate Location:

With this option, an app will never know the precise spot you’re at. Instead, it will learn the general area, which is often enough to provide the same level of service without intruding on your privacy to the same degree. To achieve the “approximate location” feature, Apple divided the entire planet into regions roughly 10 square miles in size. Each region has its own name and boundaries, and the area of the region is not based on a radius from the user–it’s fixed. That means that an app can’t extrapolate your precise location from approximate location data, because you aren’t necessarily at the center point of that approximate location boundary.

In a packed, fast-moving keynote, it was noteworthy that Apple dedicated an entire segment of the presentation to privacy. The company ships new privacy features annually, and considering its stated focus on future centuries, it shows no signs of letting up any time soon.

You can also follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2020 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2020 RSS feed.

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