The new version includes native support for Apple silicon Macs, and it takes advantage of the ScreenCaptureKit API in macOS for much better performance when capturing windows, according to 9to5Mac. I’m looking forward to taking it for a spin.
Category: Apps
Twitter Had Plans to Build an... OnlyFans Competitor ⇢
Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton have published an in-depth piece at The Verge that dives into a plan Twitter was working on to become more profitable:
In the spring of 2022, Twitter considered making a radical change to the platform. After years of quietly allowing adult content on the service, the company would monetize it. The proposal: give adult content creators the ability to begin selling OnlyFans-style paid subscriptions, with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue.
Dropbox Announces Beta for macOS Monterey Coming in Q4 ⇢
A public beta for full support of macOS will be available in early Q4. For now, you can still double-click to open files in Finder. Everything else is working as usual.
The “full support” language is in regard to a change Apple made in macOS 12.3 that deprecated the type of kernel extensions used by both Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and others. This extension allowed Mac applications to open online-only files from Dropbox as if they were stored locally. For users running macOS 12.3 or later, a workaround is available, but the experience is less than ideal.
Spotify Separating Music and Podcasts in Upcoming App Redesign ⇢
This week, we are launching a new Home experience that includes feeds for both Music and Podcasts & Shows. The feature is currently rolling out to Android users and will soon be available on iOS. By creating these feeds, Spotify will help listeners to easily scroll through the type of content they’re looking for at that moment. The updated interface will make the experience more personalized while allowing users to dig even deeper into their recommendations.
July 17
It has been 20 years and change since Apple first introduced Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. Here’s a bit from the press release:
Apple today previewed the next major version of Mac OS X, code-named “Jaguar,” to more than 2,500 Macintosh developers at its Worldwide Developers Conference. “Jaguar” will be available to customers in late summer 2002, and will further establish Mac OS X as the most advanced operating system in the world.
Two Apps For Entering Tasks into Reminders More Quickly
Apple’s Reminders has come a long way over the years, but some third-party apps have better tools for quickly entering tasks with natural language processing.
To be clear, Reminders has some natural language processing, but it doesn’t really hold up when compared to things like Todoist or Remember the Milk.
There are a couple of apps that make all of this better.
The first is a macOS application named InstaRemind. It runs in the menubar and gives Reminders a system-wide quick entry feature that takes advantage of natural language for due dates, lists and more.
iOS 16, Ventura Beta 3 Brings Reminders Badge Changes
I am so happy that this request was heard. Reminders.app, here I come.
Pages Regains Mail Merge Feature After Nine Years ⇢
The feature was originally included in Apple’s word processing software, but got the axe in 2013’s version 5.0, when Apple redesigned its iWork suite to give even footing across the iOS, iPadOS, and macOS platforms. In the interim, Mail Merge remained possible only via workarounds like Sal Soghoian’s Pages Data Merge app.
Version 12.1, released today, brings a brand new implementation, however, which lets you populate a template document either from your contacts or a spreadsheet. On the Mac, just create a template with the File > New command or open an existing one, and then choose File > Mail Merge to step through the process. (The feature’s also available for the first time in the iOS and iPadOS versions of Pages, under the three dots menu: tap Mail Merge to start the process.)
Apple Could Get Me to Switch to Reminders With This One Weird Trick
I’ve attempted to move from Todoist to Apple’s Reminders app a few times over the years. I’ve always hit some bit of friction, then returned to the third-party option.
With macOS and iOS 16, Reminders gains some powerful smart list features that I am really excited about. However, there is one small feature that still keeps me from switching.
There is no way to have Reminders show a badge for a task due Today.
Bring Back the Away Message ⇢
I miss Away Messages. This nostalgia is layered in abstraction; I probably miss the newness of the internet of the 1990s, and I also miss just being … away. But this is about Away Messages themselves—the bits of code that constructed Maginot Lines around our availability. An Away Message was a text box full of possibilities, a mini-MySpace profile or a Facebook status update years before either existed. It was also a boundary: An Away Message not only popped up as a response after someone IM’d you, it was wholly visible to that person before they IM’d you.
Timery 1.4 ⇢
The best time-tracking app just got even better — and now ships with an Apple Watch app. I use Timery every day and just love it.
WorldWideWeb ⇢
The folks over at The Iconfactory have a new app out, named WorldWideWeb. It’s a simple web server for both macOS and iOS. It comes at a time when Apple has made doing this with the Mac harder than ever, and as a bonus, it’s free.
Alex Guyot has a review of WorldWideWeb over on MacStories:
WorldWideWeb’s killer feature is simplicity. The app’s entire main interface consists of two tiny sections: in the first you select a folder, and in the second you start or stop the web server. When the server is activated, a URL is generated. The app uses Bonjour to make the address available to any device on the same Wi-Fi network as the host. Just copy and paste the URL or press the ‘Open in Browser’ button to view the website natively in a web browser.