MacStories Headline News Reader

Rdio 2.2, released earlier today, includes — besides an improved interface and label search — a new URL scheme for launching searches from other apps (thanks, Adam). The URL scheme is fairly simple: rdio://search/[search term] In the past, I relied on a…

Following this morning’s rollout of the Voice Search for desktop, Google has also announced through the official Chrome blog that Chrome for iOS will receive the same feature “over the coming days”. Voice Search, already available through the standalone…

Twitter updated its official Mac app today to include support for Notification Center and fixes for Growl (among other improvements). Notifications can be configured in the Settings, and, in my initial tests, they worked fine for mentions and direct messages.…

Rdio 2.2, released today for the iPhone and iPad, brings a series of important new features such as label search and improved user search, plus a revamped look for the slide-out navigation. A feature highly requested by Rdio’s userbase, label search allows…

Announced in December 2012, The Omni Group has today started the public rollout of OmniPresence, their new free automatic document syncing solution for OS X and iOS. OmniPresence, based on open web technologies, is available inside OmniGraffle,…

I’m a big fan of Flipboard’s magazine feature, which was introduced earlier this year with version 2.0 of the app. By leveraging Flipboard’s existing presentation style – capable of re-formatting web articles, videos, and photos with a beautiful…

Jerry Hildenbrand: Google Now style voice search has just went live in the latest Chrome stable version for the desktop (Version 27.0.1453.93). As far as we can tell from playing around testing things, the full contextual search isn’t running like we saw in…

Apple rolled out a series of design changes to its online Store overnight, bringing a cleaner, more subdued style for graphical elements and larger, image-centric spots for products and accessories. The most notable change is the front page of the Store, which…

Adam C. Engst, in his overview of Keyboard Maestro 6: In fact, many of my macros are utterly simple and obvious — I could type “cheers… -Adam” at the end of every email message I send, or I could press Control-period. Just because I’m saving only a…

FiftyThree gives us a closer look at Zoom, explaining why they chose to use a loupe instead of expanding the entire drawing. Our team spent many hours with the accessibility zoom, and looked at the best implementations of zoom across a range of apps. One…

This is a great collection of Evernote workflows by my friend Sean Korzdorfer. I have been trying them for the past hour, and I’m impressed by the search workflows with filters for note content, attachments, and dates. Make sure to read the documentation to…

Chrome’s App Launcher, now available for preview in the latest Chromium build on the Mac, can be found on Chromebooks and is currently available in beta builds on Windows. It’s Google’s take on Jump Lists on Windows or Stacks on OS X: grids of web…

Readdle’s Scanner Pro has been my favorite iOS scanner app for over a year now: …for the professional who runs a small business, or individuals who do scan documents, just not so many every day, I’d seriously suggest considering Scanner Pro on the new…

Long-time MacStories readers know how deep-seated Keyboard Maestro is in my OS X workflow. I use it every day, constantly, to automate my Mac to speed up writing, resize images, save PDFs, execute scripts, and more. Version 6.0 is out today and it brings over…

I rely on Smile’s TextExpander to save keystrokes on my Mac on a daily basis, but the iOS counterpart, TextExpander touch, has always felt vastly underpowered due to limitations imposed by Apple on the iPhone and iPad. Today’s major update, TextExpander…

I wrote MacStories’ tutorial on how to integrate Gmail with Outlook for Mac 2011 back in 2010. There’s been quite a few updates since then, and Microsoft has fixed many of the issues I mentioned in the original guide. Too, Gmail itself has been visually…

We have many great deals for #MacStoriesDeals today. You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter. Staff Favorites Last week’s sponsor: Smile Software New! Checkmark: $4.99 > Free (review) New! Google Hangouts for iOS: Free Skala Preview for Mac: $4.99 >…

Gus Mueller: But how are we going to know Apple has finally fixed iCloud syncing for developers and is really serious this time? And I’m not just talking about Core Data syncing, I’m also talking about the APIs developers are given to push document data…

Brett Terpstra: The initial release of CriticMarkup included a preprocessor for Marked 1.5+, but given the uncertain release date of the next incarnation of Marked, I wanted to make it work with the standard custom processor feature of Marked 1.4. A few…

A collection of 10 DRM-free Evernote screencasts by my friend Bradley Chambers. I watched the videos, and I think Bradley did a good job in providing a general overview of Evernote, as well as offering some useful tips on how to use it on OS X and iOS. An…

Also new in iTunes 11.0.3 is an update to the app’s AppleScript dictionary that adds support for controlling AirPlay speakers. The AppleScript additions contain several options: you can check on an AirPlay device’s name, activity, availability on the…

  In the 11.0.3 update for iTunes released today, Apple included a new “Updates” area for iOS apps. As noted by MacStories reader Graham Robson, the Apps area of iTunes now comes with a new “Updates” tab that lists available app updates (if any); if…

Released in late November 2012, Apple today updated iTunes to version 11.0.3. The new version, available through the Mac App Store’s Software Update panel, brings a redesigned MiniPlayer, an improved songs view, support for multi-disc albums, and performance…

For both Android and iOS, Pebble developers can now add two-way communication to their applications for their watchapps through Pebble’s SDK, PebbleKit. The AppMessage API enables Pebble watches to send and receive data from smartphone apps for remotely…

Impressive results from the Pixelmator team: Pixelmator 2.2 downloads have surpassed the previous record downloads and topped half a million making it the most successful release in our history,” said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. “Also, the…

With a press release published this morning, Apple formally announced the 50 billion app download milestone they hit yesterday, alongside the name of the $10,000 App Store gift card winner and 50 billionth app download. The 50 billionth app was Say the Same…

Google demonstrated a new version of Google Maps during the Google I/O 2013 keynote today, showcasing a full screen maps application for the web that reacts to every click. Redesigned in an effort to put an emphasis on directions and places, Maps’ new…

A few days ago, I remembered a story by TouchArcade from last year that explained how adding iCloud support to games was no easy task for most independent developers: It’s also obvious to us that iCloud and the implementation of it needs to be easier, and…

As expected, Apple has hit the 50 billion app downloads milestone today. The countdown that the company launched two weeks ago was updated with a new “Thanks” image on Apple’s servers earlier today, which is now publicly available across Apple.com…

Ellis Hamburger and Dieter Bohn have published an in-depth feature story on the newly launched Hangouts over at The Verge. Make sure to watch the video. A detail that struck as a great feature was, surprisingly, related to Google+ and photos: The service’s…