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PDF Expert’s New Reading Mode Offers the Best iPhone PDF Experience

Original PDF (far left) vs. PDF in Reading Mode (all other images).

Original PDF (far left) vs. PDF in Reading Mode (all other images).

If you’ve ever read a PDF on your iPhone, you know the experience is less than ideal. For short documents you can manually zoom to make the text readable and pan from line to line. For long documents though, that’s a pretty painful option. The best method you can use involves a Max-sized iPhone turned into landscape mode, but even that comes with drawbacks, such as the weight distribution making it uncomfortable to hold your phone one-handed while reading. A solution has long been needed, and now it’s arrived.

PDF Expert is launching a new feature today, Reading Mode, which offers easily the best PDF reading experience available on iPhone. When viewing a PDF in the app, there’s a new button in the bottom-right corner that opens Reading Mode. This mode takes the contents of the PDF, converts it to a simplified layout that’s optimized for your device’s size, and provides custom view settings you can tweak to your liking. It reminds me a lot of Safari’s own Reader view, but for PDFs rather than websites.

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AppStories, Ep. 158 - 35 minutes

Digital Spring Cleaning

FedericoJohn
AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 158 - Digital Spring Cleaning

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week, Federico and John discuss their approaches to digital spring cleaning.

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Gear.Coffee: Upgrade Your Coffee Ritual with the Kinu M47 Series Hand Grinders [Sponsor]

If you’re someone who can’t get through the day without coffee, I’m sure you understand the importance of having great coffee. With the Kinu M47 Series Hand Grinders from Gear.Coffee you can upgrade your entire coffee experience with freshly-ground, flavorful coffee.

Each cup of coffee should be supreme, and you should enjoy each sip you take during the day. After all, believe it or not, this is part of what makes your day great. Every little detail sums up to produce an outstanding cup of coffee, but freshness is key here. So make sure that you get this part of your coffee ritual right.

To get a fully flavor-filled experience, the first thing you need is fresh-ground coffee beans. And to get the richest infusion of flavor and aroma to your coffee, you should grind it just before you brew it. Of course, you need a coffee grinder to accomplish this because coffee beans are super hard!

Gear.Coffee makes it easy for you to choose because they’ve selected the top three high-quality manual coffee grinders by Kinu Grinders. The German-engineered Kinu M47 Phoenix and Simplicity hand grinders feature the best in consistency and reliability no matter how you prepare your coffee: Aeropress, Pour-over, Espresso, Moka Pot, Drip, etc.

Choose the one that suits you best. There’s no wrong choice with these grinders!

MacStories readers can get $10 off their first grinder purchase by visiting the Gear.Coffee website using code “macstories10” at checkout throughout April. Check out these terrific grinders today and enjoy a fantastic cup of coffee.

Our thanks to Gear.Coffee for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Apple Shares ‘Creativity Goes On’ Video on YouTube→

Apple today published a new video on YouTube that shouldn’t be missed. It’s called “Creativity goes on,” and it celebrates the resilience of humanity amidst a pandemic and self-quarantine.

The video shows how people around the world are using Apple devices to express themselves and connect with each other. One example shows an elderly man and presumably his grandson playing chess together, with the grandfather connecting over FaceTime on the child’s iPad. Another features a person following an instructional yoga video that’s playing on their Mac. The soundtrack for the whole thing is lovely, evoking Apple’s traditional sentimental holiday videos. It’s well worth 98 seconds of your time.

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Apple and Google Partner for COVID-19 Contact Tracing

Today Apple announced a special partnership with Google to develop contact tracing technology designed to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in the coming months. The plan involves two steps:

First, in May, both companies will release APIs that enable interoperability between Android and iOS devices using apps from public health authorities. These official apps will be available for users to download via their respective app stores.

Second, in the coming months, Apple and Google will work to enable a broader Bluetooth-based contact tracing platform by building this functionality into the underlying platforms. This is a more robust solution than an API and would allow more individuals to participate, if they choose to opt in, as well as enable interaction with a broader ecosystem of apps and government health authorities. Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze.

Additionally, Apple has published draft technical documentation covering their joint work with Google.

This marks only the latest of several efforts Apple has developed to help fight the spread of COVID-19. The company developed an app and website, in partnership with the CDC, to help people with symptoms know what they should do. Additionally Tim Cook has been tweeting periodic updates about the masks and face shields the company has sourced and developed to send to first responders. Today’s partnership with Google, however, may be the most significant effort to date.

The World Health Organization explains how contact tracing – which involves keeping track of anyone who has been in contact with an infected person – can help limit the transmission of disease. Although current social distancing policies are a strict form of containment, well-implemented contact tracing could help prevent the need for such drastic measures in the future.

I’m glad that Apple and Google are collaborating on this effort, and that it will be privacy-first and opt-in. Anything that can be done to minimize the spread of COVID-19 is a good thing.

Highlights for iPhone and iPad: An Excellent Companion for Researchers

I wish I had Highlights for iOS and iPadOS when I was a lawyer. Back then, it wasn’t unusual for me to review PDFs of legal documents that were hundreds of pages long. Unfortunately, the digital tools I had for annotating those documents were primitive. So instead, I typically fell back on marking up hard copies with highlighters and adding notes in the margins.

Highlights is a PDF annotation app that’s been available on the Mac for a long time but is brand new on iOS and iPadOS. The app translates the analog process of marking up a PDF to the digital world very well by providing tools that demonstrate an understanding of the needs of students, researchers, and anyone who spends a lot of time with PDFs.

I don’t have the same PDF needs I once did, but as I’ve used Highlights the past couple of weeks, I’ve appreciated its flexibility and power, and I expect that anyone who works with lots of PDFs will too.

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The Beauty of the Apple Watch’s Solar Dial Face→

Jack Forster at Hodinkee has a wonderful deep-dive essay on the Solar Dial face on Apple Watch, which was added last year in watchOS 6:

Tapping the Solar Dial watch face will allow you to see whether it’s day, or night, or one of the various phases of twilight. You can also see how many hours of daylight there are. The color of the sky also changes depending on the time of day, and during the twilight hours, you get a very pretty transition from blue, to a deeper blue, to a lovely pale pink as the solar disk begins to sink below the horizon. You can rotate the crown to show you what time sunset takes place, as well as the various phases of twilight. You’ll also see, in yellow numbers in the sub-dial, how many hours it is from the current time to sunset, or other solar astronomical events.

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I give the Apple Watch Solar Dial a lot of credit for taking the properties of the smartwatch and using them to create a very captivating experience. The luminosity of the display and its ability, as night falls or sunrise dawns, to display different colors, as well as the general composition of the dial, makes for something much richer and far more emotionally evocative than the mere delivery of information. And too, it gives us a chance to reflect on what darkness and light have meant, and continue to mean, culturally and historically. There is something irresistibly compelling about having a little model universe on your wrist.

It’s remarkable how much attention to detail Apple gave to this watch face, including the intricate nuances of the different phases of twilight. I’ve never used the Solar Dial face before, but Forster’s piece has changed that, and I’m eager to see how the face transforms throughout the remainder of today.

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Connected, Episode 289: Let Me Remember My Opinion→

On this week’s episode of Connected:

This week, Myke talks about a sell on Cinema Displays, then the guys move on discuss Federico’s recent iPad article on modularity, the possibilities of widgets in iOS 14 and Stephen’s Mac Madness winner and picks.

You can listen below (and find the show notes here).

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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Connected, Episode 289

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

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