Widgetsmith is getting a really fun update for iOS 18:
Widgetsmith 7 on iOS 18 includes new ways to use your widgets to perform useful Actions from your Home screen, Lock screen, and Control Center. Actions allow you to quickly launch an app, run a Shortcut, make a call, send a text, or play music. Actions are chosen from our curated and ever-growing list of options and can be easily personalized.
I recently switched back to Reminders for the 10,000th time, and came across this really cool Mac app that adds Reminders (and a quick-add text box) to your menubar. It belongs on the same list as InstaRemind when it comes to making Reminders easier — and faster — to use on macOS. InstaRemind’s quick-add feature is more customizable, but Reminders MenuBar puts actual tasks in its drop-down, which is pretty slick.
A classic has returned, thanks to Matt Sephton:
A couple of days ago I was reading on Hacker News about a feature in some Linux window managers where they allow collections of tabs from different apps.
This reminded me of BeOS, but at the same time it reminded me of an app from 1992 for classic Macintosh called Stapler, and how I’d talked about that and it’s one-time spiritual successor, LaunchList, in the past. These were both similar apps that allowed you to collect and launch all the apps, files, folders, documents, related to a specific task, thus saving time. Or as Ali Rantakari so succinctly put it in 2009: “ Opening a Bunch of Stuff at Once on Your Mac”.
An issue has been identified in 1Password for Mac that affects the app’s platform security protections. This issue enables a malicious process running locally on a machine to bypass inter-process communication protections.
This issue was responsibly disclosed to us by Robinhood’s Red Team after they chose to conduct an independent security assessment of 1Password for Mac. 1Password has received no reports that this issue was discovered or exploited by anyone else.
John Brayton, the developer behind the excellent RSS client Unread, has launched version 4, and with it, macOS support:
Unread for Mac is now available from the Mac App Store. Unread for Mac incorporates every Unread capability that makes sense on Mac including:
- Beautiful typography
- Color themes
- Great search functionality
- Handling of summary-only feeds
- Syncing via Unread Cloud, Feedbin, Feedly, Fever, Inoreader, and NewsBlur
- The Subscribe in Unread share extension
- The Save to Unread share extension (subscription required)
- Widgets
- Handling of link articles
Unread for Mac is a native Mac app. The user interface is built with AppKit and a touch of SwiftUI. There are some ways in which Unread for Mac goes beyond Unread for iPhone and iPad.
A month ago, I wrote about the Inspector in Reminders being different on the Mac from the version found in iOS and iPadOS:
The biggest example in my mind is the ability to move a task to a different list. On the iPhone and iPad, it’s super easy, as there’s a drop-down right in the Inspector. Mac users, however, don’t have that UI, and are left to drag and drop tasks between lists.
The Macintosh was intended to be different in many ways. One of them was its file system, which was designed for each file to consist of two forks, one a regular data fork as in normal file systems, the other a structured database of resources, the resource fork.
Resources came to be used to store a lot of standard structured data, such as the specifications for and contents of alerts and dialogs, menus, collections of text strings, keyboard definitions and layouts, icons, windows, fonts, and chunks of code to be used by apps. You could extend the types of resource supported by means of a template, itself stored as a resource, so developers could define new resource types appropriate to their own apps.
I was at a concert when I got access to the first beta of Overcast. I had barely any reception at the venue, but as soon as my wife and I got back to the car, I downloaded it and started playing with it.
That was ten years ago, and I’ve been using Overcast ever since. It pulls down new episodes faster than any other podcast player I’ve tried and Marco Arment’s audio work means shows that are poorly mixed can still sound great.
Kaleidoscope is one of those apps that makes me happy to be a Mac user. It solves a specific problem in a fun and nicely-designed way. Version 5 rolled out last week, with a bunch of cool new goodies.
The folks at DEVONtechnologies have a new free app out for Mac users, and it’s one that may seem familiar in some great ways:
You want to learn more about your Mac’s current network connection or test if a remote server is still alive or already swimming belly-up? Your connection to a server is slow and you want to find out more about what detours your data packages take on their way to their destination? Or you’re on the hotel Wi-Fi and plan to flip out on the poor network speed based on proper empirical data?
Shawn Hickman’s excellent app Sofa has arrived on two more platforms:
I’m happy to announce that Sofa is now available on the Mac and Vision Pro!
I had originally planned to have Sofa ready for Vision Pro when it launched in February, but I was deep in the middle of working on Sofa 4.0 (which launched in April). During May, I was focused mostly on 4.0 bug fixes and prepping for my trip to WWDC in early June.
If you’re looking for a deal on a bunch of cool, indie software, this is the event for you.