Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings along with a look at what’s coming up next:
Timery has been updated with a long list of new features and improvements that fans of the app are going to love.
Lock Screen Widgets and Live Activities
Timery’s new Lock Screen widgets.
First off, Timery has added iOS 16 Lock Screen Widgets and Live Activities. The Lock Screen widgets can display your current time entry, the total amount of time tracked today, or start a new timer. Each widget type includes circular and rectangular variants when added beneath the Lock Screen’s time, as well as a narrow in-line version that can be added to the top of the screen. The widgets can be configured to start a specific saved timer or show a list of timers and optionally show the app’s edit view for tweaking the details of the timer you start. It’s worth noting that Timery’s editing view now supports ‘@’ as a way to quickly search and add projects and ‘#’ for adding tags.
Timery’s Live Activities.
Live Activities display the current time entry on the iPhone 14 Pro line’s Dynamic Island and the Lock Screen. Long-pressing either reveals additional information about the current project, task, and total time tracked for the day.
I’m a big fan of Timery’s new widgets and Live Activities because they offer the sort of glanceable details that weren’t possible before unless you were using the Mac version of the app and enabled its menu bar app. Now, I don’t have to unlock my iPhone or iPad to check on a timer, which allows me to get the information I want without getting distracted by other things on either device.
Sebastiaan de With, part of the team behind the excellent camera app Halide, has published his annual iPhone camera review, this year putting the iPhone 14 Pro Max through its paces in and around San Francisco, Bhutan, and Tokyo. de With’s review is packed with details about every lens and Apple’s computational photography pipeline, taking readers behind the scenes in ways that Apple simply doesn’t.
…with iPhone 14 Pro’s ultra-wide camera comes a much larger sensor, a new lens design and higher ISO sensitivity. While the aperture took a small step back, the larger sensor handily offsets this.
While arguably, a quad-bayer sensor should not give true 48-megapixel sensor resolution as one might get from, say, a comparable ‘proper’ digital camera, the results out of the iPhone 14 Pro gave me chills. I have simply never gotten image quality like this out of a phone. There’s more here than just resolution; the way the new 48 megapixel sensor renders the image is unique and simply tremendously different than what I’ve seen before.
Overall, the advances made to Apple’s Pro-line cameras are impressive this year. With new shooting modes and changes across all of the cameras, I’m looking forward to spending more time experimenting with what the iPhone 14 can now do.
Be sure to check out the full review for de With’s stunning photography and details on the iPhone 14 Pro Max’s other lenses, as well as what’s improved and what hasn’t when it comes to Apple’s Photonic Engine processing pipeline.
This week on AppStories, we cover Apple’s controversial App Store advertising moves before going in-depth on my macOS Ventura review to discuss Stage Manager, System Settings, and Shortcuts.
Sponsored by:
Memberful – Monetize your passion with membership.
FITIV Pulse is the most fully-featured health and fitness app available on iOS and Apple Watch. Leveraging the power of Heart Rate Training, FITIV Pulse helps users plan, track and analyze their progress toward their fitness goals.
FITIV Pulse was designed to solve a seemingly simple problem: tracking and motivating a sustainable healthy lifestyle. Designed specifically for Apple Watch, FITIV has evolved to make use of the ongoing innovation of iOS and watchOS like Live Activities and the iPhone 14 Pro’s Dynamic Island. FITIV Pulse is unique in the Health and Fitness space because of its meticulous work to ensure that FITIV is the only app athletes need to track their fitness progress across the entire breadth of activities they perform.
With finely-tuned customization options, eye catching in-workout visuals, detailed post-workout analysis, a personal health dashboard, and social functions, including workout sharing templates and leaderboards, FITIV Pulse is the perfect companion for athletes of any fitness level.
The FITIV Community within the app allows users to connect with athletes around the world: participating in leaderboards, sharing fitness advice, and posting their accomplishments. The FITIV Community also comes together to participate in monthly challenges, earning badges to celebrate their workout milestones.
FITIV Pulse has also evolved to take advantage of technological advances in iOS and Apple Watch with features like customizable widgets, programmable workout intervals, Apple Watch complications, Live Activities, and much more.
This week, Federico and John cover Apple’s controversial App Store advertising moves before going in-depth on John’s macOS Ventura review to discuss Stage Manager, System Settings, and Shortcuts.
This episode is sponsored by:
Memberful – Monetize your passion with membership.
This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico is rewatching Breaking Bad having recently finished Better Call Saul, and I share what the Metal 3 frameworks could mean for Mac gaming having tested Resident Evil Village, the first Metal 3 game released on the Mac App Store.
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Federico
John