Building an Apple-Only Research and Writing Setup 
This week, Federico and John consider whether changes coming to Apple’s OSes make a system app-only research and writing workflow possible and discuss where there’s room for improvement.
On AppStories+, Federico and John talk about Calliope, the web app that underlies AppStories+ and Club MacStories, and John shares his thoughts on the Kobo Elipsa as an eBook reader and note-taking device.
An Interview with Guilherme Rambo
This week, Federico and John continue the Summer OS Preview Series with special guest Gui Rambo for a chat about SharePlay, Shortcuts for Mac, Gui’s app AirBuddy, SwiftUI, and more.
On AppStories+, Federico shares some good news about his Wii U and quest to play early Metroid titles and John experiences the the brilliance of Amazon returns at Whole Foods stores.
My Obsidian Setup, Part 1: Sync, Core Plugins, Workspaces, and Other Settings
The App Customization Trend
This week, Federico and John discuss the emerging trend of app customization, which along with app modularity, lets users control how apps work and look.
On AppStories+, Federico provides an update about the progress on his review, and John wonders why the Mac share sheet has been so badly neglected by Apple.
An Interview with Marcos Tanaka
This week, Federico and John continue the MacStories Summer OS Preview Series by interviewing Marcos Tanaka, the creator of MusicHarbor and MusicSmart about the latest changes to Apple’s music-related frameworks, his apps, and more.
On AppStories+, Federico and John go behind the scenes about their OS preview stories, discuss Shortcuts for Mac, and Federico is searching for his Wii U.
Five iOS 15 Features You’ve Probably Missed For the past three weeks, I’ve been running the developer beta of iOS and iPadOS 15 on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and M1 iPad Pro, respectively. Common wisdom says you’re not supposed to install early developer builds of iOS and iPadOS on your primary devices; I have to ignore that since work on my annual iOS and iPadOS reviews starts as soon as the WWDC keynote wraps up, which means I have to get my hands on the latest version of the iPhone and iPad operating systems as quickly as possible. As I explained on AppStories, putting together these reviews is some of the most challenging work I do all year, but it’s rewarding, I have fun with it, and it gives me a chance to optimize my writing setup on an annual basis.
The result of jumping on the beta bandwagon early is also that, at this point, having used iOS and iPadOS 15 daily for over three weeks, I have a pretty good sense of what’s going to be popular among regular users, which features power users are going to appreciate, and what aspects of the OSes still need some fine-tuning and tweaks from Apple. And with both iOS and iPadOS 15 graduating to public beta today1, I have some initial impressions and considerations to share. You could also see this story as advance work for this fall’s proper review, and you wouldn’t be mistaken: in this article, I’m going to focus on areas of iOS and iPadOS 15 that I’ll also cover more in depth later this year.
Let me cut to the chase: I don’t think iOS and iPadOS 15 are massive updates like iOS and iPadOS 13 or 14 were. There are dozens of interesting new features in both updates, but none of them feels “obvious” to demonstrate to average users like, say, dark mode and iPad multiwindow in iOS and iPadOS 13 or Home Screen widgets in last year’s iOS 14. And, for the most part, I think that’s fine. The wheel doesn’t have to be reinvented every year, and the pandemic happened for everyone – Apple engineers included.
In many ways, iOS and iPadOS 15 remind me of iOS 10 and 12: they’re updates that build upon the foundation set by their predecessors, bringing welcome consumer additions that, while not earth-shattering, contribute to making iOS more mature, intelligent, and deeply integrated with Apple’s ecosystem.
If you’re installing the iOS 15 public beta today and want to show it off to your friends, know this: Live Text in the Camera and custom Focus modes make for the best demos, followed by the new Weather app and rethought multitasking controls on iPad. SharePlay is neat but can feel already dated now that more countries are rolling out vaccinations and returning to a semi-regular social life; the new Safari needs more work; Mail is surprisingly unchanged despite the rise of remote work in the past year. That’s how I would describe iOS and iPadOS 15 in two sentences as of the first public beta released today.
Of course, however, I want to share a bit more about iOS and iPadOS 15 while I’m busy working on my annual review. So for this preview story, I’ve picked three areas of iOS and iPadOS 15 I’ve spent the most time testing and tinkering with over the past few weeks. This year, I’m including a ‘What I’d Like to See Improved’ sub-section for each of the areas I’m covering in this story. I thought it’d be fun to summarize my current criticisms and suggestions for each feature, and it should be interesting to revisit these in the fall when iOS and iPadOS 15 are released.
Let’s dive in.
Shortcuts Preview This week, Federico and John walk through all the changes coming to Shortcuts this fall, including changes to the Shortcuts editor and the new actions you’ll find in Shortcuts on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
On AppStories+, Federico explains his new iPad Home Screen for writing his annual iOS and iPadOS review and other Home Screens he’s considering and Federico and John discuss Shared With You.
Sami Fathi, writing for MacRumors on an API change spotted in the second developer beta of iOS 15:
Currently, apps are limited to the amount of RAM they can use, regardless of the amount available on the device. For example, despite the highest-end M1 iPad Pro featuring 16GB of RAM, on iPadOS 14, apps are limited to only use 5GB. 16GB of RAM is the highest amount of RAM ever offered in an iPhone or iPad, and the 5GB limitation means that apps aren’t able to utilize even half of what the iPad Pro has to offer.
In the second betas of iOS and iPadOS 15, released to developers yesterday, Apple is introducing a new entitlement that developers may request that will expose their apps to more memory. Apple says that this entitlement will inform the system that an app “may perform better by exceeding the default app memory limit.” Apple’s developer documentation doesn’t specify how much extra RAM an app may be exposed to and also says this is limited to “supported devices.”
I’ve rarely found myself in a scenario where my iPad Pro needed more than 5 GB of RAM, but I’m also not a professional user of apps such as video or graphic editors that may take advantage of more RAM. This is an entitlement that Apple will need to grant developers who request it, and I’m curious to see how many apps will receive it later this year (or if this option will convince more developers of pro apps to finally bring them to iPad). I find it fascinating – but not surprising at all – that Apple is introducing this possibility while they’re pushing adoption of multiwindow and modern multitasking in iPadOS 15.
John