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SoundSource

New Year, New Audio Setup: SoundSource 6 from Rogue Amoeba

Reading Newsletters with Feedbin and Reeder

As I’ve mentioned in previous Club MacStories newsletters as well as my Must-Have Apps story, I used the holiday break as an opportunity to do some cleanup of various kinds of digital cruft on my devices. I reorganized apps on my Home screen; I deleted old shortcuts with LaunchCuts and installed custom icons for my frequently used ones; I fixed metadata for certain albums on my Sony Walkman (a process I want to write about on the site) and moved all my Pokémon links to Raindrop.io. When I was done with apps and links, I turned my attention to email – specifically, newsletters.

It should come as no surprise that I love newsletters. I (partially) make a living out of sending two of them on a regular basis! Obviously, I believe in the strength, convenience, and personal approach of the medium, especially because my favorite writers – whether Jason Tate from Chorus.fm or Jason Snell from Six Colors or Dieter Bohn from The Verge – all tend to have a casual, looser writing style in their newsletters that feels like they’re writing directly to me.

The problem: despite automatic filing of newsletters performed by SaneBox into a folder called ‘SaneNews’ in my Gmail account, I realized that I don’t really like reading newsletters in an email client. I don’t like spending time in an email client these days, period. For professional reasons, I receive a lot of email on a daily basis, so I find it hard to concentrate and read a longform newsletter in an app that is filled to the brim with messages and not exactly built around focused reading.

As I was thinking about ways to improve this (I considered using a second email app just for newsletters, for instance), I remembered that Feedbin, my RSS service of choice, offers the ability to give you a unique email address you can send newsletters to. Emails sent to your personal Feedbin email address will end up in the service’s queue alongside your other regular RSS subscriptions, and you can then choose to file the “source” behind a newsletter however you see fit – for example, by creating a folder in Feedbin called ‘Newsletters’. Feedbin has more details on this functionality here. Given how I’ve been trying to consolidate all my reading into Reeder by way of the app’s support for RSS and a read-later account, I thought it’d be interesting to try throwing newsletters at it as well.

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Twitter Launches Brazil Test of Stories-esque ‘Fleets’ Feature

Today Twitter announced a test, limited to Brazil, of a major new feature for the social service: Fleets, which take their inspiration from the Stories feature found on Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook.

Fleets, short for “fleeting tweets,” live at the top of your timeline just like stories do in other social media apps, and they disappear after 24 hours. Multiple fleets can be written in a day and include text, images, GIFs, and videos, but the way they are interacted with is different than a standard tweet. There’s no way to retweet or reply to someone’s tweet in a public sense; instead, followers can react to a fleet via DM, or a reaction which is sent via DM. Presumably this means that if someone’s DMs are closed, only people they follow can respond to their fleets.

This new test was announced by Twitter Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour in a series of tweets where you can see both images and video of fleets being demoed.

Normally tests of new features, especially ones as limited as this, wouldn’t necessarily merit reporting on because there’s a good chance they may not come to fruition in full release. Fleets, however, are a major new functionality for Twitter and they have clearly had a lot of work poured into them. They’re also a reflection of where other social media services have already moved, making it highly likely that they’ll eventually get a wide release on Twitter, in some form or another.

Although I’m not a big user of ephemeral sharing on other services, and that’s unlikely to change here, I’m nevertheless happy to see Twitter continue pouring work into evolving its product. If fleets do get a worldwide release in the future, I’ll be interested to see if they cause the quality of timelines to improve as tweets are reserved for more important statements while fleets house everything else.

Connected, Episode 283: Doing the Dance Again→

On last week’s episode of Connected:

Myke and Federico discuss the difficulties of connecting HomeKit to the internet, consider better solutions for iPad multitasking, feel disappointment for the Files app, and see what their boy Buffet is up to.

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

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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Connected, Episode 283

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

Sponsored by:

  • Clean My Mac X: Your Mac. As good as new.
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AppStories, Episode 152 – App Subscriptions Revisited→

This week on AppStories, we revisit the topic of app subscriptions and what we learned in the nearly three years since we covered subscriptions in episode 5.

Sponsored by:

  • Direct Mail – Create and send great-looking email newsletters with Direct Mail, an easy-to-use email marketing app designed exclusively for the Mac.
  • Indeed – Post your job today and get a free sponsored job upgrade.

https://staging.macstories.net/podcasts/appstories/episodes/152/embed/

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Apple Announces Winners of Its ‘Shot on iPhone’ Night Mode Challenge→

Photograper: Konstantin Chalabov (Moscow, Russia), iPhone 11 Pro

Photograper: Konstantin Chalabov (Moscow, Russia), iPhone 11 Pro

Apple has announced the six winners of its Shot on iPhone challenge. The contest, which was announced at the beginning of the year, asked photographers to submit their best Night mode shots taken with the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max.

The winning photos, which were taken by photographers from China, India, Russia, and Spain, were judged by a panel of professional photographers and Apple executives and employees. The photos are currently being featured on apple.com, Apple’s Instagram account, and will appear on billboards worldwide in the future.

The images chosen by Apple’s panel of judges are fantastic. It’s remarkable what can be accomplished with Night mode, especially when you look back at what nighttime photography was like on the iPhone just a few years ago.

Don’t miss all six winning Night mode shots in Apple’s press release.

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AppStories, Ep. 152 - 50 minutes

App Subscriptions Revisited

FedericoJohn
AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 152 - App Subscriptions Revisited

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week, Federico and John revisit the topic of app subscriptions and what they’ve learned in the nearly three years since they covered subscriptions in episode 5.

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abode iota Review: A Flexible HomeKit Security Solution

For years, I had a traditional security system in my home that cost hundreds of dollars each year for the monitoring service that went with it. I ditched that system about two years ago in hopes of finding a cheaper, smarter solution, but I’ve had mixed success.

The products I’ve tried in the past have been plagued by unreliable hardware and limited functionality. That’s why I was interested in trying abode’s HomeKit-compatible iota Security Kit when they offered to send me a test unit. After several weeks with the kit, which is available in the US and Canada, I’ve been impressed with both the reliability and flexibility of the hardware.

The iOS app doesn’t match the quality of abode’s hardware, but the issues with the app are mitigated by a solid web app and HomeKit compatibility that provide alternative ways to control the system. I’d certainly prefer a better iOS app. Still, even as is, the combination of abode’s hardware and the services offer a flexibility that other systems I’ve tried just can’t match.

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CleanMyMac X: Your Mac, as Good as New [Sponsor]

CleanMyMac X by MacPaw is your complete Mac maintenance solution. With an award-winning, beautiful design, CleanMyMac X frees up wasted storage space, protects against malware, optimizes your Mac’s performance, and a whole lot more.

It all starts with Smart Scan, the all-in-one center for analyzing, optimizing, and protecting your Mac. Here you’ll find Space Lens an intuitive tool for cleaning up unwanted, large files and System Junk. CleanMyMac also scans for malware, protecting your Mac against malicious third-party code and vulnerabilities. Better yet, the app’s Malware Monitor can scan for threats in the background, in real-time, catching and notifying you of malware before it takes hold. There’s an optimization section that can free up RAM and manage login items, launch agents, and memory-hungry apps too.

CleanMyMac X includes an app update module that scans your installed apps for available updates too. It’s a fantastic, centralized way to see all the apps on your Mac that have updates whether or not you bought them on the Mac App Store. When you want to uninstall an app, CleanMyMac X is there to help, deleting hidden files and any other cruft that an app would otherwise leave behind.

CleanMyMac X is a fantastic investment to get an older Mac running as good as new and to ensure that more modern Macs keep running smoothly and safely with enough storage to get your work done. The app is notarized by Apple, too, meaning you can download it with confidence.

So, don’t wait, check out CleanMyMac X today. There’s a free trial waiting to help you make your Mac as good as new.

Our thanks to CleanMyMac X for sponsoring MacStories this week.