Buying a Home Computer for Christmas? ⇢

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If you’re looking to buy a Mac this holiday season, Apple of 1995 has you covered:

Once upon a time, purchasing a family computer was more complicated than finding four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree. With recent price drops for personal computers and a proliferation of easy-to-use and useful software, there’s never been a more affordable or better time to bring your home into the 21st century.

Wish lists and children’s letters to Santa can be daunting enough without adding bits and bytes, RAM and ROM, to the equation. So here are 10 tips for buying a computer the whole family will use and enjoy for seasons to come.

Apple Announces Security Changes for iCloud, Expanding End-to-End Encryption for 23 Services ⇢

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Apple Newsroom:

Apple today introduced three advanced security features focused on protecting against threats to user data in the cloud, representing the next step in its ongoing effort to provide users with even stronger ways to protect their data. With iMessage Contact Key Verification, users can verify they are communicating only with whom they intend. With Security Keys for Apple ID, users have the choice to require a physical security key to sign in to their Apple ID account. And with Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, which uses end-to-end encryption to provide Apple’s highest level of cloud data security, users have the choice to further protect important iCloud data, including iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, and more.

Snell has more, and Joanna Stern talked with Apple’s Craig Federighi about the changes.

MarsEdit 5 Released ⇢

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Daniel over at Red Sweater Software has released version 5 of his excellent blog editor for macOS:

MarsEdit 5 features a beautiful new icon, a “Microposting” feature for streamlined short-form blogging, enhanced plain-text editing with built-in Markdown syntax highlighting, a completely rebuilt rich text editor based on Apple’s latest WebKit2 technologies, and a variety of nuanced improvements to make your blogging workflow smoother, and more enjoyable than ever.

My favorite feature of the update is the Markdown syntax highlighting, which you can see in this screenshot:

MarsEdit 5

As someone who does all of his blogging in MarsEdit, it’s a great addition and helps ensure that I don’t make silly syntax errors.

The new version of MarsEdit also includes a new system-wide quick post feature that makes it easy to send short posts to a blog of your choosing:

Microposting in MarsEdit 5

As with previous versions, Daniel has upgrade pricing avaible:

This update is free for MarsEdit 4 users who purchased a license on or after June 1, 2022. For all other licensed MarsEdit 4 users, the upgrade fee is $29.95. For all other users the one-time purchase price is $59.95.

Users who purchased the in-app purchase via the Mac App Store can obtain the same upgrade discounts within the Mac App Store version of MarsEdit 5, when it becomes available, by locating a valid copy of MarsEdit 4 with premium features unlocked.

Version 5 should be in Setapp shorlty.

I’ve been using MarsEdit 5 in beta for a while,1 and it continues to be a critical tool in how I run 512 Pixels. The new version makes it all the better. I’m excited to see the new Microposting evolve over time, making my shift away from social media even easier.

  1. Disclosures: Red Sweater Software is a past — and future — sponsor of 512 Pixels and provided a license for MarsEdit 5 to me for free, but did not pay/approve/even see this blog post before it went up. I just really dig the app, which is why Red Sweater is a sponsor. ↩

Orion Due to Splashdown Sunday ⇢

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Eric Berger, writing at Ars:

The Orion spacecraft swung by the Moon on Monday, flying to within 130 km of that world’s surface as it set course for a return to Earth this weekend.

In making this “powered flyby burn” to move away from the Moon, Orion’s service module performed its longest main engine firing to date, lasting 3 minutes and 27 seconds. After successful completion of the maneuver, NASA’s mission management team gave the “go” to send recovery teams out into the Pacific Ocean, where Orion is due to splashdown on Sunday, during the middle of the day.

Don’t miss the amazing images the spacecraft took while near the moon.

Sports Alerts Brings Scores to Dynamic Island and Live Activities ⇢

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This app was mentioned on last week’s Upgrade, but I wanted to highlight it here as well, as it offers in-depth stats on the player, team and game level, as well as loads of customization in the app itself.

Sports Alerts is one of the first apps I’ve found to bring live sports scores to the Dyanmic Island and Live Activies. I’m running the iOS 16.2 beta, and have had Apple’s own TV app prompt me to start a Live Activity for a handful of Memphis basketball games, but it seems hit or miss so far as to what games it can display.1

The UI isn’t the nicest I’ve seen; in fact, it feels a little like the iOS 7 days in places, but the killer feature is live scores visible from anywhere:

Score Alerts

Like every other application that offers them, Score Alerts cannot start a Live Activity on its own. In this case, you have to open the app, find your game, and manually start a Live Activity. I’ve enabled “Start of Game” notifications for my favorite teams to act as a reminder to pop into the app and start the Live Activity.

It’s still early days for this iOS feature, and I’m sure more well-known sports app will add Live Activities for games, but for now at least, Sports Alerts has earned itself a spot on my iPhone.

  1. After installing the 16.2 beta, I re-enabled push notifications for TV.app on my phone to test these new sports features, and I came to regret that after just a few days. I really dislike how many HEY COME WATCH THIS THING notifications TV.app sends. ↩

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