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Apple Is Listening→

Marco Arment, from Marco.org:

It’s hard to tell when Apple is listening. They speak concisely, infrequently, and only when they’re ready, saying absolutely nothing in the meantime, even when we’re all screaming about a product line as if it’s on fire. They make great progress, but often with courageous losses that never get reversed, so an extended silence because we’re stuck with a change forever is indistinguishable from an extended silence because the fix isn’t ready yet.

But there has clearly been a major shift in direction for the better since early 2017, and they couldn’t be more clear now:

Apple is listening again, they’ve still got it, and the Mac is back.

Excellent summary of the general feeling I’ve gathered coming out of WWDC last week. Apple’s reputation for secrecy makes it hard to tell if they hear the community’s concerns, and for a time the evidence signaled that they didn’t. That’s clearly changed, however, as the last couple years have demonstrated; WWDC’s myriad of goodies for every platform was simply the latest confirmation that Apple is listening, and they care.

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Ulysses: The Ultimate Writing App for Mac, iPad, and iPhone [Sponsor]

Ulysses is a powerful text editor for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone that packs an extraordinary depth of features beneath a simple and clean interface. The app’s Apple Design Award-winning UI allows you to concentrate on your writing distraction-free with the confidence that when you need them, Ulysses’ pro tools are just a click or tap away. Also, because Ulysses syncs using iCloud, you can get your writing done wherever you happen to be and whichever device you are using.

Under the hood, Ulysses has all the functionality needed to manage and produce all of your writing projects. The Library sidebar is perfect for organizing a large number of documents into groups that can be nested. The app also features writing goals, powerful search and filtering options, support for keywords, in-line images stored locally or remotely on a server, and much more. Ulysses is constantly being updated with new features too. Recently, the iPad version added a split view, which allows you to view and work on two documents at once. Publishing to a Ghost blog was also recently added, and you can export your final product in a wide variety of formats including, plain text, Markdown, TextBundle, rich text, DOCX, ePub, HTML, and PDF, or publish to a WordPress or Medium blog.

Ulysses is a free download on the App Store and Mac App Store, so you can try it before deciding whether to subscribe for $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year. Students can subscribe for six months at a time for $10.99. However, Ulysses has a special deal just for MacStories readers. For a limited time, use this link to learn more about Ulysses and get the first year of an annual subscription for $19.99, a 50% discount off the usual price.

Our thanks to Ulysses for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Surveying Apple’s Latest Accessibility Work→

Steven Aquino, writing for TechCrunch:

Although much of the conversation around what Apple announced revolves around iPadOS and Project Catalyst, based on what I’m hearing on podcasts and seeing in my Twitter timeline, Voice Control definitely is a crown jewel too. Nearly everyone has praised not only the engineering that went into developing it, but also the fact that Apple continues to lead the industry at making accessibility a first-class citizen. Myke Hurley said it best on the Upgrade podcast following the event, the weekly show he co-hosts with Jason Snell, when he said Voice Control is something Apple doesn’t have to do. They do it, he said, because it’s the right thing to do for every user.

Aquino interviewed Sarah Herrlinger, Apple’s Director of Global Accessibility Policy & Initiatives, about three major new accessibility features: Voice Control, Hover Text, and pointing device support. While the iPad enthusiast in me is all about those pointing devices, Voice Control is a tremendously exciting technology that I hope has ramifications for the future of Siri.

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Connected, Episode 246: The Ultimate Dark Mode Is a Crash→

Live from WWDC in San Jose, Federico, Myke and Stephen review their WWDC predications and prizes are awarded after an intervention. Then, iPadOS, Shortcuts and the Mac Pro are discussed before Federico’s surprise is unveiled for the world to see.

Live from San Jose, our extra-special live episode, featuring my long-awaited surprise. You can listen below (and find the show notes here).

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AppStories, Ep. 114 - 48 minutes

Craig Federighi: The AppStories Interview

FedericoJohn
AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 114 - Craig Federighi: The AppStories Interview

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week, Federico and John are in San Jose attending WWDC where Federico sat down with Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering to talk about Apple’s new developer tools like Catalyst and SwiftUI, as well as iPadOS.

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Safari on iPadOS is Living Up to the Hype→

Dieter Bohn at The Verge spent some time with the new and improved Safari on iPadOS:

Google Docs has long been a huge problem on the iPad, for two reasons. First, Google’s own iPad app is god-awful and the company seems hell-bent on not updating it to work better. Second, Google Docs in Safari on the iPad right now redirects you to that app even if you “Request Desktop Site.”

On iPadOS, however, Google Docs in Safari seems great.

Admittedly, I only spent about five minutes poking around, but I went straight for the stuff I didn’t expect to work at all — and it worked. Keyboard shortcuts for formatting and header styling, comments, cursor placement, and even watching real-time edits from another person in the doc all worked.

In iPadOS, Apple is setting the Safari user agent to the desktop version (previously, Safari on iPad has used a mobile user agent), but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Setting the user agent will cause websites to display their desktop varieties, but those were built with the expectation of mouse interactions rather than touch. There’s a lot more details to uncover here, but it looks like Apple has done a huge amount of work under the hood to make touch interactions work intuitively in the desktop browser paradigm.

We’ll have many more details on the new Safari changes over the coming weeks and months, but at first glance it’s great to see that Apple wasn’t kidding about iPadOS Safari being truly desktop-class.

You can also follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2019 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2019 RSS feed

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Hands-On with iPadOS and iOS 13: Changes Big and Small

iPad and iPhone users are in for a big treat this fall when iPadOS and iOS 13 launch. Each update is a major release that pushes Apple’s mobile platforms forward in big and small ways, making them more powerful for consumers and professionals alike.

If you haven’t read my iPadOS and iOS 13 overviews yet, the majority of details about each release are documented there. But I’ve been using the beta versions of both systems for a few days now, and while these are just an early look at what the finished releases will be, there are a lot of changes – some very significant, while others are relatively minor – that I’ve been excited to see.

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Craig Federighi: The AppStories Interview

It’s been an exciting week at WWDC. Despite rumors and leaks going into the keynote on Monday, the presentation was full of surprises and fulfilled many of the wishes of Mac and iOS developers and users.

Federico and I arrived in San Jose last weekend and planned to record an episode of AppStories that would begin to sift through the huge stack of announcements made by Apple. Those plans were almost immediately cast aside when a unique opportunity presented itself.

Federico is attending WWDC this week, and Apple graciously offered to schedule a time for him to interview Craig Federighi, the company’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering. With a WWDC packed with announcements that will affect app development for years to come, we of course agreed immediately.

When you step back from the details of what was announced in the keynote and since, I expect that WWDC 2019 will be remembered as the event when a new vision for apps on all of Apple’s platforms from a tiny Watch face to a Mac Pro driving a 32-inch Pro Display XDR began to come into focus. The tools made available to developers – like Catalyst for bringing iPad apps to the Mac, and SwiftUI, a new declarative way to build app UIs with less code – promise new efficiencies and capabilities to help developers build apps on every Apple platform. Combined with powerful new features coming to the iPad in iPadOS and an extensive Shortcuts update, there’s an opportunity for a future with deeper, pro-level iPad apps and experiences, a more diverse Mac app ecosystem, and tighter integration across Apple’s entire hardware lineup.

Against that backdrop, Federico sat down with Craig Federighi for a special episode of AppStories, one of MacStories’ growing lineup of podcasts, to explore the impact of developer tools like Catalyst and SwiftUI and the new iPadOS on the apps we use today and the apps these technologies will enable in the future.

Thank you to Apple for arranging the interview, Craig Federighi for participating, and as always, thank you for listening to AppStories. We hope you enjoy the show.

You can find the episode here or listen through the AppStories web player below.

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