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Apple Arcade: The Launch and Favorite Games

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 132 - Apple Arcade: The Launch and Favorite Games

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week, Federico and John cover the all-new MacStories Shortcuts Icons, a set of 300 custom icons for shortcuts that you can add to your Home screen and then revisit Apple Arcade in the wake of its public launch discussing some of their favorite games so far.

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Ulysses Adopts Multiwindow, iOS 13 Design Updates, and Modern Shortcuts

Earlier this year Ulysses debuted the best implementation I had seen of single-app split view on iPad, enabling working in two documents at once or editing a document while simultaneously seeing its export preview. In today’s Ulysses 18 release, that proprietary implementation has been replaced by iPadOS’ native multiwindow capabilities, bringing more power and flexibility than was previously available. Today’s update also integrates with iOS 13’s dark mode and other new design elements, makes automation easier than ever with Shortcuts parameters, and offers a gift to Dropbox users who have long had their Ulysses capabilities restricted.

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NotePlan: The All-in-One Calendar, To-Dos and Notes App [Sponsor]

Every day is full of appointments, tasks, and meetings. Managing it all is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. With NotePlan for the Mac and iOS, you can manage your calendar, to-dos, and notes in one place so you can concentrate on getting your work done instead.

NotePlan helps you effortlessly capture all the bits of data that inundate you every day: dates, times, phone calls, meetings, follow-up tasks, and more. Nobody wants to spend their day on managing those things. By focusing on getting the information out of your head and into NotePlan in plain text, NotePlan helps you recapture your time and focus on being creative.

The app integrates with Apple’s Calendar and Reminders app, which handles keeping all your devices in sync via iCloud. There are weekly and monthly calendars to give you a bird’s eye view of your workload, which will help prevent you from becoming overwhelmed. Reviewing and managing open tasks and deadlines is trivially easy with NotePlan too. On top of that, notes are perfect for brainstorming, saving links, taking meeting notes, or storing reference materials. NotePlan is highly-customizable too with handsome light and dark themes as well as tagging for organizing and wiki-style linking between notes.

Visit NotePlan’s website today to learn more and start getting serious work done. NotePlan has a special deal just for MacStories readers too. Use this link for 10% off when you purchase NotePlan for Mac directly.

Our thanks to NotePlan for sponsoring MacStories this week.


tvOS 13: The MacStories Review

tvOS 13 is a surprising release. For years Apple has been pushing the TV app as the main draw of the Apple TV, then earlier this year it brought the app to Samsung TV sets with the promise of further expansion to Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, along with a smattering of other TV sets. The proliferation of the TV app made the Apple TV seemingly less important to Apple, but in fact with tvOS 13, available now, Apple has launched the biggest tvOS update ever. Before getting too excited, know that the bar for “biggest ever” is extremely low in the case of tvOS, but nevertheless in a year when the Apple TV felt more marginalized than ever, it’s great to see new life breathed into the device.

On the heels of Apple TV Channels debuting earlier this year, and the new Apple TV+ streaming service launching in a matter of weeks, Apple has given the Apple TV an updated Home screen, multi-user functionality, brilliant new underwater screensavers, Picture in Picture, Apple Arcade aided by PS4 and Xbox One controller support, and even more. While it can’t compare to the behemoth release that was iOS 13, tvOS 13 remains a strong update in its own right.

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Shortcuts Corner: Search YouTube, Preview Folder Contents, and Play Recent Music Albums

As I explained in today’s issue of MacStories Weekly for Club MacStories members, we’re bringing the newsletter’s Shortcuts Corner section to the site, with a twist: in this series, you’ll find simpler shortcuts that you can download for free, and which will be added to the public MacStories Shortcuts Archive; you’ll also get a preview of an exclusive shortcut available today for Club MacStories members.

In this week’s Shortcuts Corner, I share shortcuts to quickly launch a search query in the YouTube app, preview the contents of a folder in iCloud Drive, and start playback for one of your recently played albums in the Music app. Let’s dive in.

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Connected, Episode 262: The Ghost of Bilateral Charging

On this week’s episode of Connected:

There’s a lot going on: new iPhones, the new Apple Watch, iOS 13.1, Shortcuts updates and more. That’s not to mention the Galaxy Fold, iCloud woes and whatever Amazon has announced.

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

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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Connected, Episode 262

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

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