Federico
John
AppStories Episode 133 - Building an iOS Media Companion
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Federico helps John set up an iPod touch as a media companion for watching TV and movies, enjoying music, and controlling HomeKit devices.
Building an iOS Media Companion
TickTick: Your Lightweight All-In-One Task Manager [Sponsor]
TickTick is an all-in-one task management tool with a focus on simplicity. The app is available for more than ten platforms, including iOS, Mac, and Apple Watch.
Time is at the heart of TickTick. The app includes everything from a Pomodoro timer and habit tracker, to calendar views. It’s a to-do list, planner, reminder, as well as a calendar, which eliminates switching between apps, saving you time and effort.
At the same time though, TickTick is lightweight. The app’s workflows are carefully designed and optimized. For example, you can start by adding tasks and setting reminders. Later, you could use the Pomodoro timer to help you stay focused as you work on those same tasks, or you could punch in daily to develop a task into a habit. TickTick puts you in full control letting you choose to show or hide each of these features in the Tab Bar so you always have exactly what you need, no more, no less.
Another essential part of the app is TickTick’s simple clean-cut design. From List to Subtask, each interface is clean and tidy. Unlike to-do apps that are littered with checkboxes, TickTick makes managing tasks a breeze that feels as natural as note-taking.
All-in-one is not only about features, but also the seamless sync across multiple platforms, including iOS, Mac and Apple Watch. TickTick’s R&D team develops each and every application to fit its many platforms. There are even web and Windows versions of the app, which users love. Getting things done on every platform you work on has never been so easy.
TickTick free version for iOS (Apple Watch included) and Mac is perfect for daily use and includes Siri, Shortcuts, and URL scheme support. Premium features, like Custom Smart Lists, Reminders for Sub-tasks, and adding up to 299 lists, 999 tasks per list, and 199 sub-tasks per task, are available for just $2.99 monthly or $27.99 annually.
Visit the TickTick website today to learn more.
Our thanks to TickTick for sponsoring MacStories this week.
14-Year-Old Developer Created Game for Apple Arcade’s Launch→
Patrick Klepek writes for VICE about the 14-year-old developer, Spruce Campbell, whose game Operator 41 was part of the Apple Arcade launch:
“When I saw the Apple Arcade announcement in March I dropped everything and decided to build a whole new game for Arcade,” [Campbell] told VICE via email. “I thought that the games that really fit Apple Arcade will probably be designed for it from the ground up, so I came up with a stealth game that would work on all the Arcade platforms.”
Campbell has quite a personal story. As Klepek notes, the young developer taught himself to code starting at the age of 8, and when he was 12 he designed a game, CyberPNK, that netted him a BAFTA award. He also received a scholarship to attend WWDC this June, which is where he was able to personally pitch Operator 41 to Apple for Arcade inclusion. Campbell says following that pitch:
“I went back to the dorms, and over the next week I was accepted onto the service,” he said. “I’d say that was the luckiest moment of production—so many stars had to align for me to be accepted onto the service and everything went so well.”
Klepek’s concluding words put into perfect context what this story means for the potential of Arcade’s future.
Operator 41 doesn’t have many reviews. It didn’t get a big marketing push, and wasn’t on Apple’s big stage…But what’s remarkable is that Operator 41 exists at all, and shows Apple having a willingness to give people a shot. Apple Arcade isn’t a place where, like the App Store, anything can get published. There is a curation element. Campbell wasn’t signed because he made a hit that Apple thinks will bring new people into Apple Arcade. In this case, Apple decided it was worth including a game by a mostly unknown 14-year-old designer.
Arcade’s launch has been fantastic, and with the near-certainty of more stories like Campbell’s moving forward, the service’s future looks bright.
Shortcuts Corner: Apple Frames for iPhone 11 and 11 Pro, App Store Updates Page, Logging Completed Reminders, and Time Zones
In this week’s installment of the Shortcuts Corner, I share an interesting assortment of shortcuts, from an updated version of my Apple Frames shortcut and an easy way to open the App Store’s Updates page to an automation that takes advantage of a feature in the latest Numbers update. And for Club MacStories members, I’ve prepared two shortcuts that should speed up the process of getting the current time for different cities around the world – both via the Shortcuts app and Siri. Let’s dive in.
MacStories Weekly: Issue 194
This week, in addition to the usual links, app debuts, and recap of MacStories' articles and podcasts:
Tripsy Review: The Ultimate Trip Planner for iPhone and iPad
Summer may be over, but there’s never really an offseason for planning future vacations or business trips. We all have our own methods of trip planning – where we store important documents, how to set an agenda and share that agenda with family or friends – but I’d guess most of us aren’t entirely satisfied with our current planning systems. Important information can be scattered across different apps, services, or analog files, which is fine but not ideal. Tripsy aims to solve that problem.
Tripsy isn’t entirely new to the App Store, having first launched almost a year ago, but it recently received a major 2.0 update alongside iOS 13’s debut. While I never used the previous version, the new Tripsy is exactly the tool I’ve wanted for trip planning for a long time. The app serves as a one-stop shop for organizing all of your trip-related information: you can add Apple Maps points of interest to your agenda, scheduling them to specific times and days, add notes to each saved location, store important travel documents in the app, and share your full trip data with fellow travelers. All of this functionality is enhanced by a strong app experience thanks to system features like multiwindow on iPad, Sign In with Apple, dark mode, and more.
Adapt, Episode 10: Home Screen and Share Sheet Shortcuts→
On this week’s episode of Adapt:
The iPadOS 13 Shortcuts series continues with an exploration of what’s changed with shortcuts run from the Home screen and share sheet. Afterward, Clips drives Federico crazy, so he gets his revenge with a challenge for Ryan.
You can listen below (and find the show notes here), and don’t forget to send us questions using #AskAdapt and by tagging our Twitter account.
Connected, Episode 263: Moon Plus Sign Plus Sign→
On this week’s episode of Connected:
This week, Stephen tells a story about his Apple Watch accomplice, Myke reviews tvOS 13 and Federico explains how Deep Fusion and Capture Outside the Frame work.
You can listen below (and find the show notes here).
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GoodNotes Adds Superior Multiwindowing, Dark Mode, and OCR Scanning
When Apple introduces a fundamental change to how apps interact with iOS (and now iPadOS), it’s always fascinating to see the different ways those changes are adopted by third-party developers. Although Apple sets a baseline for how new frameworks work, it has less control over how they are used, and it’s those implementation details that often have the greatest impact on users.
In the inaugural version of iPadOS, that’s been the case for multiwindowing. Many apps stick to the basic built-in ways to open multiple instances of the same app. However, the real power of multiwindowing is revealed by apps like GoodNotes, which goes the extra mile and provides an experience better than any other multiwindow app I’ve tried.
Dragging a PDF into a new window.Replay
What makes GoodNotes special is not just the sheer number of unique ways to open a second window for the app, though that’s impressive in itself, but the thoughtfulness of its execution. In every corner of the app where you might want to move a folder, document, page, or bit of data into a new window or document, you can. The result is a level of flexibility that even Apple’s own iWork suite doesn’t match, further cementing GoodNotes as my favorite app for taking handwritten notes.