This week, in addition to the usual links, app debuts, and recap of MacStories' articles and podcasts:
MacStories Weekly: Issue 272
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Apple Prepares to Open Its Latest Flagship Store in Rome’s Historic Via del Corso Shopping District
Today, Apple took the wraps off its latest flagship store in the heart of Rome’s Via del Corso shopping district. The store is Apple’s first in Rome’s historic center, although the company has long had a presence in Rome and other parts of Italy, including another flagship store that was opened in Milan in 2018. The new Rome location isn’t open yet but will be soon.
As with many of Apple’s other flagship stores around the world, restoration of the historic location was spearheaded by the architectural firm Foster + Partners. The new store is located next to Piazza di San Silvestro, in the center of Rome within a short distance of landmarks like the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain.
Palazzo Marignoli, the building in which Apple’s new store is housed, has been carefully restored to its late 19th century glory. The palazzo once housed Caffè Aragno, a destination for writers, painters, and other creatives of Rome, a history that fits nicely with Apple’s vision of its flagship stores as destinations for creativity through technology.
In fact, you can see from the photo above, which was taken earlier today, that the window coverings say ‘Creativi dentro’ or ‘Creative inside.’ According to Apple, the message honors Rome’s rich cultural history embodied by Carrara marble, the predominant stone used in the store’s construction and the material that has been used by Roman architects and sculptors for centuries to create artistic masterpieces.
The same marble is incorporated into the Apple logo which weaves the company’s signature six colors into the veins of the stone. According to Apple, the logo symbolizes the fusion of Rome’s cultural history with Apple’s mission to provide tools that unlock everyone’s creativity with programs like those that will be led by Apple Creatives in the Via del Corso store when it opens to the public.
Alessandra Gatta contributed to this story with Italian-English translations.
Photo Editor and Organizer Darkroom Adds New Clarity Tool
Photo editing and management app Darkroom has been updated with a new Clarity slider that I’ve been testing on the iPhone and iPad for a couple of weeks now.
The new slider in the app’s editing panel is deceptively simple. Move the slider to the right to make the details of an image pop or to the left to smooth out the details. If you look carefully, though, you’ll notice that the increase in contrast isn’t uniform across a photo. You can turn the Clarity of a portrait down to smooth a person’s skin, for instance, without affecting their hair or eyes.
As Jasper Hauser explains on the Darkroom blog, the Clarity slider is logarithmic, meaning that the effect intensifies more quickly as you approach the endpoints. Picking a point in the middle of the slider’s range produces a subtler effect.
The effect works well with landscapes like the photo of skyscrapers along the Chicago River at the beginning of this story. You can see that increasing Clarity brings out the details in the windows of each building, and turning Clarity down softens areas like the water.
Clarity can achieve a wide range of effects like this shot where it is turned down, smoothing details
As Hauser explains, Clarity works by building a detail map of an image and then adjusting the contrast of its regions using an algorithm called a Fast Local Laplacian Filter. There’s a lot of math happening under the hood that Hauser links to if you’re interested in learning more behind what the Darkroom team has managed to incorporate into a simple slider interaction that’s yet another excellent addition to this Apple Design Award-winning app. To learn more about Darkroom’s features, be sure to check out our past coverage and interview on AppStories with Darkroom co-founder Majd Taby.
Darkroom’s latest update is available on the App Store.
Pixelmator Pro Teases ML Crop Feature and Announces a 50% Off Sale
Some of the most impressive additions to Pixelmator Pro in recent updates have been the ones that rely on machine learning. From the auto enhancement feature added in 2018 to last year’s ML Color Match and ML Super Resolution, a wide variety of the app’s tools have harnessed machine learning to help photographers edit their images. Today, the Pixelmator team announced that their extending Pixelmator Pro’s reliance on machine learning to its cropping tool with ML Crop.
ML Crop uses machine learning to analyze the composition of a photo and suggest how you might like to crop it with the click of a single button. From the video in Pixelmator’s blog post, which is excerpted in the GIF above, the feature looks promising. ML Crop joins features that let you quickly set primary and secondary colors for an image and edit colors in a composition using drag and drop.
In addition to the sneak peek at ML Crop, Pixelmator announced today that the app is currently on sale for 50% off, which makes it a great time to jump in and give Pixelmator Pro if you haven’t yet.
AppStories, Episode 217 – Our 2021 macOS WWDC Wishes→
This week on AppStories, we begin our annual pre-WWDC wish list episodes with our 2021 wishes for macOS.
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Snowman Announces New Creative Studio and Its First App, Pok Pok Playroom, A Digital Play Experience for Kids
Today, Snowman, the studio behind some of our favorite games on Apple platforms like Alto’s Adventure and Odyssey, Where Cards Fall, and Skate City, announced Pok Pok, a new creative studio that is launching an app on May 20th called Pok Pok Playroom.
Pok Pok Playroom is an app designed to encourage interactive play with a series of digital toys that spark curiosity and creativity in kids in a low-key, calming environment. The app’s digital playroom includes multiple brightly colored toys that prompt children to explore through independent play. Here’s how Snowman explains the app in its announcement:
Pok Pok’s first app is called Pok Pok Playroom. It’s a playroom filled with educational toys that spark creativity, imagination and learning through open-ended play. There is no right or wrong way to play, only lots of opportunities for experimentation and exploration. Pok Pok puts kids at the centre of the experience so they can follow their noses and learn at their own pace.
I’ve been eagerly awaiting Pok Pok Playroom since I got a demo of an early version at WWDC in 2019 from Esther Huybreghts who, along with her husband Mathijs Demaeght, are the artist-duo and parents of two young children behind its development. I’ll have more to say about Pok Pok Playroom when it’s released on May 20th, but for now, check out the trailer, which does an excellent job of providing a feel for what the app is like:
Alongside the announcement of the trailer and app release date, Snowman announced that Pok Pok Playroom is part of a new creative studio called Pok Pok. The studio, which was incubated inside Snowman for the past few years, was co-founded by Huybreghts and Demaeght, along with Snowman’s Melissa Cash, Ryan Cash, and Jordan Rosenberg, and will continue to build Pok Pok Playroom and new content for it that will be released periodically.
For more information about the app and studio, visit playpokpok.com.
Our 2021 macOS WWDC Wishes
Federico
John
Musens: The Beautiful Music Player [Sponsor]
Musens is a beautiful, customizable music player for the iPhone that brings your music collection and Apple Music’s entire catalog to life with stunning animated artwork. The app has been built from the ground up to take advantage of Apple’s latest Swift UI frameworks and modern features. Whether you’re playing your favorite albums from your own library or trying something new on Apple Music, Musens lets you do so in a simple, elegant way.
Musen’s Home tab is the perfect place to start listening with its thoughtfully organized sections that feature playlists, albums, recently played material, top charts, recommendations, and more. It’s a deep well of music tuned to your tastes that makes picking something fast and simple because all of Apple Music’s extensive selection of music is available to browse and add to your own library.
Outstanding design is what sets Musens apart. Tap an album, and it opens with a delightful animation that reveals a vinyl record emerging from the artwork. Start playback, and the album art on the now playing screen rotates, providing a fun, dynamic turntable-like experience. The playback view is completely customizable, allowing you to enjoy static square art and three different background options too.
Musens also makes great use of intuitive gestures, making it effortless to build your playback queue. Of course, the app has dedicated tabs for easy access to your and Apple Music’s playlists, artists, songs, and albums as well as support for dark mode. Together, the attractive design and deep feature set make Musens an outstanding way to enjoy your favorite music.
Musens is the creation of Alec Attie, an iOS developer and the founder of Cybertiks, who won a WWDC scholarship in 2018 and currently works as a backend developer making apps for big companies like Miniso and the SEP, which is a governmental branch in Mexico.
Download Musens today, and start enjoying your music collection and the millions of songs available on Apple Music for just $3.99.
Our thanks to Musens for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Shortcuts Needs a Notification Toggle→
Chaim Gartenberg, writing for The Verge, on one of Shortcuts’ most annoying limitations in iOS 14 – its obsession for showing notifications for anything it does:
Apple, I assume, mandates notifications because Shortcuts are extremely powerful tools for automating things on your iPhone, and it’s easy to imagine unscrupulous use of them.
But the thing is, the power of Shortcuts is to automate things in the background that I don’t want to have to deal with, whether that’s automatically disabling rotation lock when I open or close an app, open an app with a custom icon, or change the wallpaper when the battery life is low. A big glaring notification every time I do something detracts from that idea. I want my phone to be quietly helpful, not shouting in my face every time it does what I asked it to.
Years ago in my review of iOS and iPadOS 13, I argued in favor of adding an “expert mode” to Shortcuts so power users could turn off confirmation prompts for automations (which Apple removed the following year) and other notifications. Two years later, I think this goes well beyond expert users.
Since the release of iOS 14, millions of people have turned to Shortcuts as a way to customize app icons on their Home Screens. And every time they tap one of those custom icons, they have to see an alert that tells them the action they just performed was, in fact, performed. Imagine if your Mac showed you an alert every time you opened an app saying ‘You opened an app’. That’s pretty much what Shortcuts does whenever you run an automation or a shortcut added to the Home Screen.
Given the popularity of custom icons powered by Shortcuts in iOS 14 and the universal disdain for its notifications, I would be very surprised if there’s no way to turn these off in iOS 15.