This Week's Sponsor:

Turbulence Forecast

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Last Week, on Club MacStories: Voting on the Next AV Club Pick, a Tip for Avoiding Accidental Lock Screen Activations, Utility Shortcuts for Mac, and a New Episode of Unplugged

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:

AV Club Voting Begins

Don’t forget to vote for the latest AV Club pick in the Club MacStories+ Discord. Head to the Announcements channel for the details and to vote for one of the following four choices:

We’ll discuss the videogame or show selected as a community with a live Discord Town Hall event that is tentatively set for March 15th. For those unable to join live, we’ll publish the conversation to the Club MacStories Town Hall podcast feed after the event, as we did earlier this month for the Matrix movie series.

AV Club is a monthly event held in the Club MacStories+ Discord community. Club members vote on a movie, TV show, videogame, book, or music to enjoy as a group. It’s like a book club, but for all kinds of media. Our Discord community is one of the many perks for Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members.

MacStories Weekly: Issue 309

New Club MacStories+ and Club Premier Discount

Typefully is a beautifully designed Twitter utility for writing, scheduling, and publishing tweets and threads from the makers of Mailbrew.

Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members can get 30% off on their first year’s subscription to Typefully by visiting the Club Discounts page.

Tweetbot 7.1 Adds Background Notifications for Follows, Quotes, and User Tweets→

A tweet notification from Tweetbot. This one took about four minutes to arrive – not too bad considering they're not based on push notifications.

A tweet notification from Tweetbot. This one took about four minutes to arrive – not too bad considering they’re not based on push notifications.

We’ve been keeping an eye on Tapbots’ rapid development pace for Tweetbot on iPhone and iPad over the past few months (we gave Tweetbot 6 a MacStories Selects award in December), and I continue to be impressed by how Tweetbot is growing and adding new features thanks to its new business model and Twitter’s new API.

In today’s 7.1 update, Tweetbot has gained support for background notifications. These notifications, unlike push notifications, are managed by iOS/iPadOS’ background app refresh system, which comes with some benefits and limitations that Tapbots has outlined here. In terms of why this matters for users, background notifications alllow Tweetbot to support notifications for more types of activities: you can now enable notifications for new followers, people who quote one of your tweets, and – my favorite – new tweets from a specific user. The latter can be enabled on a user’s profile page (pictured below) or by long-pressing someone’s profile picture in the timeline.

Enabling notifications for specific users.

Enabling notifications for specific users.

Being notified when a specific user tweets was one of the features I was missing from the official Twitter app, so I’m glad Tapbots figured out a way to add it to Tweetbot. Since Tapbots’ system is based on Apple’s background app refresh technology and they can’t control the timing of notifications, Tweetbot’s version of these alerts won’t likely be as immediate as the Twitter app, but that’s fine as long as I get a list of new tweets from specific users.

I look forward to testing these notifications over the next few days. Tweetbot 7.1 is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad; hopefully, we won’t have to wait much longer for Tweetbot 7 to arrive on macOS too.

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Prizmo: Pro Scanner App with OCR, Pencil Annotation, PDF & DOCX Export [Sponsor]

Prizmo is a fully-featured scanner app for iOS and Mac that lets you capture documents and receipts, turning them into professional PDFs that you can share, archive, annotate, fill out as forms, or sign with the Apple Pencil or your finger. The app is perfect for scanning business cards to add people to your contacts too.

The capture workflow on iOS has been streamlined in Prizmo’s latest release as a tap-free multi-page scanning process with the ability to review pages as you scan. Text recognition starts immediately in the background, and the PDF is auto-uploaded into your shared folder immediately without any user action.

Prizmo also offers some of the deepest editing tools available in any scanning app, such as page curvature flattening, edge repair, background cleanup, user-editable OCR layout, and much more. Prizmo edits are non-destructive, meaning you can reverse any operation at any time without the need of rescanning, so even your Apple Pencil annotations from a week ago can be edited at any time.

Among Prizmo’s output formats, PDF gets many customizable options, including image compression level and a JBIG2 encoder for extremely lightweight black and white scans of just 40KB per page, useful for archiving large amounts of data. It also comes with image and text exports and can create fully-formatted DOCX documents that you can edit further in Apple Pages or Microsoft Word.

Prizmo offers not one but three OCR engines to handle the variety of languages and document styles too. And its most advanced one, Cloud OCR, is about to get an important update in the coming weeks with new, breakthrough capabilities.

Prizmo is localized in many languages, and it offers specific accessibility features for blind and vision-impaired users, including VoiceOver support and a dedicated text reader.

Through Sunday, March 6th, Prizmo’s Premium Pack, which is a one-time payment, is 30% off on the App Store, so be sure to download it today for just $/€13.99. Prizmo for Mac is on sale, too, for 33% off ($/€39.99) on the Mac App Store.

Our thanks to Prizmo by Creaceed for sponsoring MacStories this week.

AppStories, Ep. 262 - 42 minutes

2022 Apple Hardware Predictions

FedericoJohn
AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 262 - 2022 Apple Hardware Predictions

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42:14

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week, Federico and John survey the many Apple hardware rumors circulating and take a stab at predicting the new hardware we’ll see in 2022.

This episode is sponsored by:

  • RevenueCat – Subscription management built for mobile apps
  • Instabug – Empower mobile teams to monitor, prioritize, and debug performance and stability issues and ship better mobile apps

not
[appstories]

[Subscribe here.](https://staging.macstories.net/podcasts/appstories/plans)

Subscribe here.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

To learn more about the benefits included with an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.
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MacStories Weekly: Issue 309

This week, in addition to the usual links, app debuts, and recap of MacStories' articles and podcasts:

Read more

AppStories, Episode 261 – Shortcuts Code Injection and 10 Innovations Apple Should Adopt from Third-Party Apps→

This week on AppStories, Federico explains his experiments with injecting code into shortcuts before he and John cover ten innovations from third-party apps that they would like to see Apple adopt in its system apps and OSes.

[Subscribe here.](https://staging.macstories.net/plans)

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, John updates Federico on his latest HomeKit experiments and Federico gives John automation homework.

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Last Week, on Club MacStories: The Matrix Movies Town Hall, Shortcuts Code Injection, Scheduling and Remotely Triggering Shortcuts on the Mac, and a New App Discount

Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created guide to the past week’s happenings along with a look at what’s coming up next:

AV Club Town Hall, The Matrix Movies

AV Club is a monthly event held in the Club MacStories+ Discord community. Club members vote on a movie, TV show, videogame, book, or music to enjoy as a group. It’s like a book club, but for all kinds of media.

This month, we rewatched the original Matrix movie trilogy and watched The Matrix Resurrections, which was released late last year. Then, on Wednesday, we held a live audio AV Club Town Hall on Discord hosted by Federico, John, and Alex, who were joined by two Club members to discuss the films and take questions from members who listened live.

If you’re a Club MacStories+ or Club Premier and missed the lively discussion, it’s available as a Club-only podcast that you can enjoy on the Club website or subscribe to from your the Club Podcasts page.

MacStories Weekly: Issue 308

Replacing an existing shortcut with one that has been modified by injecting code into it.

Replacing an existing shortcut with one that has been modified by injecting code into it.

  • Federico shared a proof of concept shortcut that can be used to modify shortcuts by injecting code into them. The shortcut automates the entire process including resigning the modified shortcut in the Terminal, and reimporting it into the Shortcuts app.
  • John explained how to schedule and remotely trigger shortcuts on the Mac using built-in system apps.
  • In the Club MacStories+ Discord Share Your Setup channel, a member shared an in-depth look at their email workflow and related automations, and in the Off-Topic channel, members shared their favorite sites and restaurants in Rome.
  • Plus:

New Club MacStories+ and Club Premier Discount

Recurrence is a task manager for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac to track the repeating tasks in your life. Perfect for chores, bill payment, and much more. Recurrence puts history at the forefront, allowing you to see when something was last done and accompanying notes.

Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members can try Recurrence for 3 months free by visiting the Club Discounts page.

Up Next

Next week on Club MacStories:

  • An all-new episode of MacStories Unplugged, the monthly anything-goes Club podcast that’s a free-form discussion of apps and a behind-the-scenes look at what we’re doing at MacStories.
  • A new installment of The Macintosh Desktop Experience, John’s Club MacStories+ and Club Premier column that explores new ways to get more out of your Mac, with a focus on the latest tools and technologies available to Mac users and how they fit in the context of the Mac’s rich history.