MacStories

Stephen solves a problem that has been plaguing the podcast, Federico has concerns about Apple's rumored news service and Myke is fighting a losing battle with AirPlay 2. On this week's episode of Connected, I reveal something from my youth and we consider the…

Yesterday Benjamin Mayo released Tabs to Links, a Mac utility that can grab the links and page titles from your open Safari tabs and send them to another app. The app is as simple as it sounds, but its thoughtful touches make it a tool I expect to use often.…

Agenda recently passed the milestone of its first full year in public release, with the Mac version debuting last January and the iOS app a few months later. The team behind Agenda has been keeping busy ever since, with improvements like Siri shortcuts, dark…

On this week's episode of AppStories, dive into Federico’s experiments in mixed iOS and Mac automation for controlling his Mac mini, iTunes, and podcasting setup. Sponsored by: RAW Power - Make your best shots better. If you miss Aperture, check out RAW…

Apple today announced that its Health Records feature is coming soon to all U.S. veterans thanks to a partnership with the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The announcement includes key quotes from Apple executives that highlight the growing importance…

Time zones are hard, but they don’t have to be. With The Clock for iOS and the Mac, you can stay in touch with friends and family and schedule meetings with colleagues scattered across the globe without the confusion that time zones can cause. The hallmark…

In advance of 2019's Grammy awards, airing this Sunday, February 10, Apple has shared three new Apple Music ads on its YouTube channel. Each minute-long ad is a music video wherein well known artists are represented in Memoji form. One video features Ariana…

Stephen was right, Angela is gone, Myke has a theory and Federico is automating his TV. In this week's unjustly-titled episode of Connected, we share some thoughts on Apple retail stores and the changes coming to HomeKit in iOS 12.2. You can listen here.…

Today, Apple issued an update to iOS that fixes the serious bug that we reported on last week, which could be exploited to eavesdrop on someone using FaceTime. With iOS 12.1.4 in place, Apple has turned Group FaceTime back on server-side too, but it will only…

iPad Diaries is a regular series about using the iPad as a primary computer. You can find more installments here and subscribe to the dedicated RSS feed. After several years without updates to a product that, somewhat oddly, "remained in Apple's lineup", the…

Obscura 2.0 was one of our favorite iOS app updates of 2018, which garnered it a MacStories Selects Best App Update Runner-Up award. Since it was released eight months ago, developer Ben McCarthy has continued to refine the app and add new features such as…

CARROT Weather has had one of the top tier Apple Watch apps for a long time now. In the early days of the Watch, CARROT was one of the few apps that loaded quickly and worked reliably. Since third-party complications were introduced, CARROT’s had some of the…

Rumors have been circulating for several days that Spotify was in talks to acquire podcast producer Gimlet Media. Today, Spotify announced officially that it is not only acquiring Gimlet but also Anchor, the company that makes mobile apps for podcast creation.…

Apple has announced a major change to its executive team: Angela Ahrendts, the company's Senior Vice President of Retail, is leaving the company this April. Stepping in to fill her big shoes is Deirdre O'Brien, whose title before today was Vice President of…

Representations of what to expect from 2019's new emoji, created by Emojipedia. The Unicode Consortium, which is responsible for approving each year's list of new emoji, has released the full details on 2019's upcoming batch. According to Emojipedia, there are…

On this week's episode of AppStories, we dive into our collections of iOS and Mac utilities and discuss some favorites. Sponsored by: Linode - High-performance SSD Linux servers for all of your infrastructure needs. Paste - Cloud clipboard time machine for Mac…

Being comfortable is part of getting a good night’s sleep, and a big part of that is your pillow. Hullo Pillow is a buckwheat pillow that allows you to adjust its shape and thickness to perfectly support your head and neck reducing pressure on your muscles,…

Apple announced this morning two ways it plans to celebrate Heart Month in February. First, a new Activity Challenge for Apple Watch users will run from February 8-14, rewarding those who close their Exercise ring each day of that week-long period with a…

In writing about Workflow (then) and Shortcuts (now) for a living, at some point I realized that if I wanted to build more complex shortcuts to either deal with web APIs or store data in iCloud Drive, I had to learn the basics of parsing and writing valid…

Apple and Facebook try to outdo each other in who can have the more terrible week, and Stephen test drives the iPhone XR. In this week's episode of Connected, we discuss at length the latest Facebook privacy scandal and share our thoughts in the aftermath of…

Evernote is still alive. The popular note-taking app celebrated its tenth birthday last summer, but the last few of those years haven't been easy, with two CEO transitions and sizable layoffs at several points. Still, the core product keeps pushing forward. I…

Facebook is in the news again, and unsurprisingly it's not the good kind of publicity. Yesterday Josh Constine of TechCrunch exposed a "Facebook Research" VPN that Facebook has been using to harvest extensive phone data from users age 13 to 35 in exchange for…

Apple's ever-growing focus on services was on display during yesterday's quarterly earnings call, and today the company is continuing that narrative by announcing a new partnership with American Airlines that enables Apple Music subscribers to stream music…

As in past quarters, Jason Snell has prepared a transcript of Apple’s earnings call on Six Colors. This quarter marked the first time since the iPhone was introduced that Apple saw a year-over-year revenue decline for the holiday quarter. It was also the…

Apple has just published its financial results for Q1 2019, which is the company’s holiday quarter. The company posted revenue of $84.3 billion, which is the first holiday quarter decline in sales since the iPhone’s introduction. Apple CEO Tim Cook said:…

The latest update to Fortnite on iOS adds support for MFi controllers. I don’t play Fortnite on iOS regularly, but I tried the game when it was released on iOS and have played on the Nintendo Switch from time to time. The game has done extraordinarily well…

AirBuddy by Guilherme Rambo is one of the handiest Mac utilities I’ve tried in a while. AirPods connect almost instantly to iOS devices, but the process of pairing them to a Mac is not as simple, often requiring fiddling with your Mac’s Bluetooth settings…

Aetna, the health insurance provider, has announced a new Apple Watch app forthcoming for its customers that was developed in partnership with Apple. The app, named Attain, will serve as a way to track fitness data and provide an incentive for healthy living.…

Apple's Reminders is one of the few native iOS apps with a database that can be directly tapped into by third-party clients. Like the iOS Calendar app, which has no shortage of alternatives on the App Store, developers can create their own task managers that…

On this week's episode of AppStories, we consider Apple's latest iPad ads and provide suggestions for other third-party apps the company could use to show off its hardware. Sponsored by: Clean My Mac X: The all-in-one package to awesomize your Mac.