512 Pixels

Apple’s VP of Product Marketing Stan Ng, and Evans Hankey, Apple’s VP of Industrial Design, have spoken with HYPEBEAST about the Apple Watch’s band system. It’s a fun look at what has turned into a whole world of products unto itself.

This week’s Mac Power Users is a very special one:

David and Stephen are joined by Apple’s Jeremy Butcher to discuss the company’s new Business Essentials program.

Then, the guys revisit iCloud storage management, clipboard apps and email providers. USB-C hubs and migrating to an Apple silicon Mac are also discussed.

I really enjoyed getting to chat with Jeremy about Apple Business Essentials, but if I have to install another clipboard manager, my Mac may explode.

Get 12 award-winning Mac apps for up to 78% off for a limited time at The Applaudables. My thanks to the Applaudables for sponosring 512 Pixels this week.

Well, this thing is on my Apple collection wishlist now:

This week on the show:

Myke is on vacation, so Federico and Stephen are finally free to talk about the Mac and AirPower. Then, a Q&A session for the ages.

I miss him, but we sure had a lot of fun at his expense without Myke.

This week on Liftoff:

The future of the International Space Station is the topic of a new report, all while the SLS inches closer to its first launch. Also: DART is on its way to a celestial crash and a spacewalk has been delayed thanks to debris from the recent Russian ASAT test.

Myke Hurley has been big into mechanical keyboards for over a year now, and we finally got together to build me my first custom keyboard. I have to say, I love how it turned out:

I started with the new Keychon Q1 in Navy Blue. To that, I added a full set of NovelKeys_ Silk Red switches. I was worried about how much force the keys would take to press, but these linear switches may be too light. I just have to brush a key for it to register, so I may end up swapping in something more robust.¹

The real treasure here is the keycap set. As you can see, it has a real vintage Mac feel, which is what attracted me to them. The set is the Drop + biip MT3 Extended 2048, which is somehow in stock as I write this. I’m using a mix of regular and colorful modifier keys:

When we first built this, I was using more of the colorful modifiers, but in practice, they were a bit distracting, so I’ve opted to keep everything beige except Option, Command and Return. One word of warning: if you order this keycap set, the Accent Modifier kit doesn’t include all the modifier keys, so you need the beige set as well. This left me with a lot of extra keys, but I suppose that’s the price of having something so perfect on my desk.

An article releated to yesterday’s video:

On your Mac, use the Spoken Content pane of Accessibility preferences to customize the system voice, be notified when an alert or app needs your attention, and set other options for content your Mac can speak aloud.

The Mac has been able to speak since its introduction, and today the feature is core to the Accessibility story for macOS. However, some of the voices available today are straight from the classic Mac OS. In this video I compare some examples from Mac OS 9 with some from macOS Monterey:

The Applaudables is a new, limited-time bundle featuring twelve award-winning apps — from promising debutants to all-time classics — that truly bring new magic to your Mac.

The bundle includes:

• Unite 4 - Turn any website into an app on your Mac
• Unclutter - Files, notes & clipboard manager for Mac
• uBar 4 - The dock replacement for Mac
• TextSoap 9 - Powerful text transformations with just a click
• TextSniper - Extract any uncopyable text from your Mac’s screen
• Squash 3 - Batch resize and optimize images on macOS
• Permute 3 - The easiest to use media converter
• PathFinder 10 - File manager for macOS
• Default Folder X - Enhanced Open and Save dialogs for macOS
• DaisyDisk - Analyze disk usage and free up disk space on Mac
• BetterZip 5 - The next generation of archiving
• Aeon Timeline 3 - Create beautiful data-rich timelines

512 Pixels readers can get any of these apps for 50% off, or the entire bundle for just $75 USD (78% off)! But hurry, this offer is only available for a limited time.

This week, our pal Daniel Jalkut drops by Mac Power Users to talk about his indie development career, the new MacBook Pro and the many options developers face when picking a method for writing a macOS application.

This week on Connected:

Federico and Myke are joined by alternating members of the Hackett family. Beats are reviewed and thanks are given.

(Please rate and review the show.)