Guide to Mac, iPod, iPad and iPhone news and reviews
If you spend a lot of time copying and pasting formatted text from the Internet or Microsoft Word, you might just adore PlainTextMenu: It strips out colors, formatting, bold text, and all the pesky things that make sharing or pasting text a pain be…
Whether the weather be hot, whether the weather be cold, Apple’s weather app is here for you, whether you’re young or old. Yes, for today’s Macworld video, we’re going to talk a little bit about an old default: The weather app.
Apple’s Weather app is fairly easy to navigate and use; opening it presents you with a list of your favorite locations, along with quick glances at their time zone and current weather. Tap a location to view it in more detail.
Inside this expanded screen, you can get more information on your 24 hour and seven-day forecast. You can also see the current humidity, wind speed and direction, chance of rain, and feels like temperature by tapping the current temperature.
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Apple’s got two new commercials, the former Siri team is building an AI that might take over your world, and you can get some free iTunes credit when you buy an Apple TV. All this and more from Tuesday’s Reading List roundup.
Apple – iPad – What will your verse be
Apple’s latest “Your Verse” commercials (or, as the company has taken to calling them lately, “films”) center around Chinese music group Yaoband and Detroit cyclist and activist Jason Hall. Like the other Your Verse projects, these feature the film itself along with a written profile and multiple photos of the project leaders (and their iPads, naturally).
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Flexiglass (Mac App Store link) is a neat idea for window resizing from Mac development company Nulana: it uses keyboard shortcuts and multitouch gestures to help you quickly move your windows from place to place without dragging and dropping.
In addition, you can use several keyboard shortcuts to automatically resize windows to a certain portion of the screen—for instance, centering a window, or making it expand to fill the top half of the screen only.
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Head for Facebook
Sometimes, the best utilities aren’t something you necessarily can’t live without, but a little tool that makes your overall computing experience better. Head for Facebook is a tiny little circle that lives on a corner of your screen and, when clicked, reveals the Facebook.com website in a Web view (mobile or desktop), blurring out the rest of your desktop. Another click, and the website disappears.
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Happy Monday from the Macworld news desk. It’s the dog-days, newswise, but here are a few Apple-related tidbits you may have missed.
Apple’s “Dreams”
Apple’s latest ad sticks with the heart-string-tugging approach, highlighting how iPhone apps help people around the globe achieve their dreams and passions: People fly planes, set jewelry, fight fires, help children, and paint masterpieces, all with apps you can download from the store. The commercials are lovely enough, but Apple’s accompanying website also highlights the apps used by each person and provides links to learn more and download them. Supporting third-party developers plus heartfelt advertising: nice double-whammy, Cupertino.
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A (very lightly) edited transcript of Tim Cook’s comments from Apple’s Q3 earnings call:
It’s been a very busy and exciting time at Apple, and I’d like to review some of the highlights of our June quarter. We hosted our best-ever Worldwide Developers Conference last month, with over 20 million people from around the world watching our keynote session, which is a new record. We’ve had overwhelming response from customers and developers to the new features we previewed in OS X Yosemite and iOS 8. Yosemite has been redesigned with a fresh look and powerful new apps, and iOS 8 is the biggest release since the launch of the App Store. With powerful Continuity features, these upcoming releases will allow Macs and iOS devices to work together in even smarter ways. Customers can start an activity like writing an email on one device and pass it to another, picking up where they left off without missing a beat. They’ll even be able to make and receive iPhone calls on their Mac with just a click. These are features that only Apple can deliver.
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Apple developers around the world received a nice summer treat from the Cupertino company on Friday in the form of a new Swift engineering blog, among other new resources and videos for programmers. In addition, Apple is dropping the paid requirement for downloading the Xcode 6 beta: You need only be a registered App Developer, rather than having to sign up for the $100/year Mac or iOS Developer programs.
According to the Swift blog’s first entry, it won’t just be a venue for the occasional PR update and language changes, either; Swift’s actual engineering team will be chiming in on the discussion, offering hints, tips, and tricks, along with news and updates. It’s yet another major communications shift from Apple this year—cracking the vaunted engineering vault open just a bit for the public to see inside.
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Skitch offers a variety of annotation options.
Skitch has long been a beloved program on the Mac, gaining followers in its early beta days and even more converts after Evernote acquired the app in 2011. Skitch’s free iOS counterpart is just as lovely, offering mobile and tablet users a quick way to draw all over PDFs, websites, maps, and photos before sharing them with the world.
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Hot on the heels of Apple’s announcement that it would be discontinuing pro photography app Aperture, the company has released updates to its other major OS X professional apps.
Friday’s updates—which bring optimization improvements and a few small new features to Final Cut, Motion, and Compressor—are nice boosts to each of the programs, but are also perhaps a move to reassure Apple’s pro customers that Aperture’s fate was limited to it alone.
Over on the Final Cut side, version 10.1.2 brings a variety of improvements to the program, including several new bonuses for editors:
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Adobe was a bit busy on Wednesday, releasing new versions of its Creative Cloud suite, new hardware, and three new iOS apps—two of them sketching and drawing-related. Adobe Sketch and Line may have been conceived as vehicles for the company’s Ink and Slide stylus and ruler, but the apps easily stand on their own as fantastic applications for drawing and drafting enthusiasts. Both apps are compatible with the fourth-generation iPad or later and first-generation iPad mini or later.
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For a few years now, Adobe’s been teasing its followers about Project Mighty, its iPad stylus and ruler prototypes. The day has finally come: Those prototypes have graduated to full-fledged products in the form of Adobe Ink and Slide, available in the United States for $200. The accessories are also paired with two new iPad apps from the company: Adobe Line and Sketch.
It’s hard to talk about Adobe’s latest accessory offering without first acknowledging its price: At over $100, The Ink and Slide has the highest price tag we’ve seen in the iOS stylus market. To be fair, that’s partly a result of Adobe packaging the Ink stylus and Slide ruler together—you can’t buy them separately. Which is a shame, because while Ink stylus is a pretty good iOS pen, it’s not the best in its class; the Slide ruler, however, is the kind of unique accessory I suspect many people will want.
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It’s been a while since the iOS stylus beat has had anything truly revolutionary come down the pipeline—Apple only offers so many tools for stylus manufacturers and app-makers to use, and often at a compromise. But iOS 8 looks to shake up this status quo somewhat with a new tool for developers: touch sizes.
According to a blog post from FiftyThree, makers of the Paper drawing app and accompanying Bluetooth stylus Pencil, iOS 8 will bring a new update to their app—“Surface Pressure.” No, this doesn’t mean actual pressure sensitivity, à la Wacom; instead, Paper works together with Pencil to note how much of the Pencil nib you’re pressing to the screen. Depending on the tool you’re using, applying more of the nib to the screen gets you pencil shading, a larger ink brush, or dynamic eraser sizing.
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Time-lapse mode is just one of the cool new features coming when iOS 8 hits devices everywhere this fall, but you don’t have to wait until September to play with it on your iPhone or iPad. There are plenty of third-party apps that offer time-lapse photography; here are four of my favorites, each offering a slightly different experience depending on what you need.
If you want something similar to iOS 8’s automatic timelapse mode, it’s hard to go wrong with Time Lapse Camera (Free with iAds, no-ad version for $1). A bare-bones but functional app, Time Lapse Camera offers you just two options: the interval you want images taken at (from every .4 seconds up to every 30 seconds), and when to press the start button.
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Apple dumped so much information on developers and fans at Monday’s WWDC keynote that it’s no wonder that some other interesting news went by unnoticed. Here are some of the stories you might want to check out now that the keynote onslaught has lessened.
Apple Shifts TV Ads In-House as Chiat\Day Rift Widens
I’ve been hearing whispers about this for the last six months or so, and now Bloomberg has released an official report along those lines: Apple’s moving its non-iPhone advertising in-house. Chiat\Day and the Media Arts Lab still appear to be doing iPhone advertising for now, but who knows how long Apple plans to keep using third-parties? It’s a great way to double down on secrecy.
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There’s a lot of gear out there for your Apple devices, but how do you know which are worth your time and what’s not worth your money? In our Gear We Love column, Macworld’s editors tell you about the products we’re personally using—and loving.
I’ve reviewed many a WaterField Designs bag over the years, and time and time again they come out on top thanks to quality, craftsmanship, and quirky highlight colors. The company’s Rough Rider Leather Messenger is no different: It’s the bigger, burlier, horizontal brother of the Muzetto, designed to hold everything from your 13-inch laptop to an extra pair of shoes. Just how burly is it? To truly test its rough-resistance, I took the Rough Rider to a place I’m loathe to take most of my nice bags: a roller derby tournament.
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