Category: Apps

In an average month, I edit and publish a whole bunch of podcast episodes on Relay FM. I edit every episode of Liftoff, Query and Ungeniused,¹ and sometimes handle Connected and Download.

I edit in Logic Pro X, adding music, removing crosstalk, tweaking segments and — as of about a year ago — adding chapters. These chapters allow a listener to easily skim around within an episode. We were slow to adopt them because there was a real lack of good tools to create and manage them on macOS, but with Forecast, Marco Arment changed the game:

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Finally. Update: You can drag content into these apps, but not out of them, into other apps. Oh, Google.

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With High Sierra, Apple changed how the media playback control keys work on Macs without Touch Bars. In the past, these keys were locked to iTunes, even if media was playing in Safari, Messages or another application. Now, if I view an Animoji video from someone in Messages, the media keys become disassociated with iTunes, and they seem to get stuck with Messages far too long.

This has been driving me crazy on my iMac, where I keep iTunes running nearly all day. Thankfully, Milan Toth has fixed this regression with a little free Mac app named High Sierra Media Key Enabler. I’ve been running it since I saw Brian Stucki tweet about it, and it’s pretty great.

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Karan Varindani, writing about the updated version of Clips:

Playing with the Selfie Scenes in Clips last week, I had the same feeling that I did playing with Photo Booth on my Mac many years ago. It was a little surreal, as someone with incredible front-camera shyness, to find myself having so much fun with it. The whole experience had me thinking: In a few years, once the Face ID technology has spread to the rest of the iOS line (and maybe even the Mac), could Clips be the successor to Photo Booth? Between Selfie Scenes, stickers, Live Titles, and fast sharing to social media, it seems the perfect fit.

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Neil Hughes has been running battery tests on the iPhone X and his findings blew my mind a little bit:

Reddit normally features a white background and black text, but with Apple’s smart invert colors option enabled, the back of the screen is now black and the text is white. This is important because black pixels in an OLED are essentially “turned off” and consume far less power — a stark contrast from LCD displays, where the backlight must illuminate all pixels, including black ones.

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About the new version of the backup utility:

Have no fear. SuperDuper v3.0 is here, and it includes full High Sierra HFS+ and APFS support!

Dave Nanian has written about the changes under the hood required to support APFS+ on his blog.

3.0 is a free update to owners of SuperDuper and is out now.

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Unread, my favorite RSS client for iOS, just got a big update:

• Support for Split View and Slide Over on iPad
• Support for iPhone X
• Readability view improvements

The app has changed hands a couple of times, and has suffered for it. Thankfully, it seems like things are back on track, and I’ve put it back on the homescreen of of my iPad.

Check it out on the iOS App Store.

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Ernie Smith takes a look back at an email client that defined the medium for many.

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As spotted by Ryan Christoffel at MacStories, Apple has quietly announced limited SiriKit support on the upcoming HomePod:

With the intelligence of Siri, users control HomePod through natural voice interaction and can conveniently access iOS apps that support SiriKit Messaging, Lists, and Notes. Siri recognizes SiriKit requests made on HomePod and sends those requests to the user’s iOS device for processing. To prepare your app, make sure that your SiriKit integration is up to date and that you’ve adopted all of the appropriate intents.

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Back in 2012, I wrote up what was in my Mac’s menu bar, and I thought five years was long enough, so here we are again:

Here’s what’s hogging space on my iMac’s menu bar, from left to right:

Third-Party Apps

Carrot Weather

Carrot Weather for Mac isn’t quite as polished as its mobile cousin, but I love having quick access to the weather from everywhere on my iMac. A click of the icon brings up current conditions, a five-day forecast and the ability to open a somewhat mediocre radar.

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As noted by Zac Hall, this kbase article about prepping your Mac for sale has a surprise step for those of us with Touch Bar Macs:

You can clear any information stored by the Touch Bar before you sell or give away your MacBook Pro.

First, start up from macOS Recovery: Hold down Command-R on your keyboard immediately after pressing the power button to turn on your Mac, or immediately after your Mac begins to restart.

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Flexibits, the makers of Fantastical, have a new Mac app out for dealing with contacts. It boasts the same easy-to-use, text-driven intelligence that its calendar-based sibling does. The natural language input field at the top of the menu bar app can handle search, creating contacts, editing record information and more.

The app can also serve as a launchpad for contacting someone. The input field can turn “email Jason Snell” into a draft to the man with a spider in his iMac. It builds upon natural language input in a new way that I find clever.

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