512 Pixels

Jason Snell is back with the annual Six Colors Report Card, and as always, it was an honor to take part in it.

It was a notable year for the Mac and the Apple TV, but in very different ways.

I’ve used CARROT Weather for several years. I love weather apps, and I love apps that take advantage of everything Apple has to offer on its platforms, and CARROT sits right at the intersection.

The design is all-new, and more liking to my tastes than before, with less artwork and better data density. It comes with several themes, any of which you can customize. Here is how I have my CARROT Weather set up:

The previous version of CARROT Weather was $4.99, with in-app subscriptions available for additional features. With version 5, it is a free download with three tiers of subscriptions:

• Premium ($4.99/month or $19.99/year) provides additional features like weather data sources, notifications, customization, widgets, and Apple Watch complications.
• Premium Ultra ($9.99/month or $39.99/year) includes all the features of Premium, plus rain, lightning, and storm cell notifications (where available), a weather maps widget, and quick data source switching.
• Premium Family ($14.99/month or $59.99/year) includes all the features of Premium Ultra, with the added benefit of being shareable with up to five family members via Apple’s Family Sharing service.

For more info on how this affects existing users, check out this post on Reddit. In short, users automatically get moved to the new tier that corresponds with the features they were paying for previously.

CARROT is a truly important app to me, and version 5 makes it better than ever. If you’ve never checked it out, now is a great time.

This week on Connected, Myke has a theory, Stephen has a crush and Federico has opinions on olives. Also: a discussion about Tweetbot 6 and what makes app subscriptions worth it.

On Connected Pro, new words are reviewed, then the accents come out to play after the show.

On Connected Pro, new words are reviewed, then the accents come out to play after the show. https://t.co/9mXGn8Q5rZ pic.twitter.com/kQEok9XrlL

— Connected (@_connectedfm) January 27, 2021

My thanks to our sponsors this week:

• AirBuddy: Experience AirPods on your Mac like never before. First 100 Connected listeners get a 20% discount with this link.
• Bombas: Give a pair when you buy a pair, and get 20% off your first purchase when you use this link.
• Pingdom: Start monitoring your website performance and availability today, and get instant alerts when an outage occurs or a site transaction fails. Use offer code CONNECTED to get 30% off. Offer expires on January 31, 2022, and can be used only once.

Apple PR:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2021 first quarter ended December 26, 2020. The Company posted all-time record revenue of $111.4 billion, up 21 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.68, up 35 percent. International sales accounted for 64 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

This pretty much sums it up:

iPhone revenue was $65.6 billion, up 17% YOY; Mac was $8.7b, up 21%; iPad $8.4b, up 41(!)%; Wearables/Home/Accessories, $13b up 30%; and Services, $15.8b, up 24%. Every geographic segment that Apple reports was up as well. Everything is up, up, up.

— Six Colors liveblog (@sixcolorsevent) January 27, 2021

If you are in need of many charts, head on over to Six Colors.

This time on Liftoff, we’re marking the 50th anniversary of Apollo 14:

Less than a year after the disastrous Apollo 13 mission, the program returned to flight when Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell landed on the moon in February, 1971.

My thanks to our sponsor:

• Tuparev Technologies: Learn more about the new POLIS initiative now.

What year is it?

Swapna Krishna:

Every president gets to change the decor of the Oval Office, allowing them to personalize and put their own stamp on the room. I found it fascinating that apparently, President Biden requested the loan of a moon rock from NASA to put on display in the Oval Office.

According to NASA, this moon rock was collected on NASA’s last crewed voyage to the Moon, Apollo 17. This mission launched on December 7, 1972, and was crewed by Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Ronald Evans (who remained in the command module orbiting the Moon while the other two astronauts touched down on the surface). The sample was collected in the Taurus-Littrow Valley and is 3.9 billion years old.

So, so cool.

Apple Support:

HP printers ship by default with either LPD or 9100 Printing as the highest priority printing protocol. If for some reason you’ve configured your HP printer to use IPP, it may not work with Bonjour.

A simple 11-step process will get things rolling again.

Yoink for Mac improves your workflow by providing a “shelf" for your files and snippets.

When you drag a file in Finder, or app-content like an image from a website, Yoink appears at the edge of your screen, where it will hold any files you drag to it until you need them again.

It’s much easier to navigate to the destination of your files without having to keep your mouse button pressed the entire time.

With Yoink for iPad and iPhone, you can store anything you can drag, copy, share or download.

Deeply integrated into iPadOS and iOS, this beloved utility will keep your files and snippets and allows you to access them whenever they’re needed, via the app itself, its widget, its custom keyboard, Siri Shortcuts, and its Files.app integration.

Yoink syncs across your iOS devices, and by using Handoff, you can transfer files between your Macs, iPads and iPhones.

Users of the Mac app appear to be finding it very useful, as this 5-star review on the Mac App Store shows:

“Essential app, perfectly executed!”

Similarly, so do users of Yoink for iPad and iPhone:

“Completely brilliant and indispensable.” Yoink - drag it easy.

Om Malik:

Photography as we know it has been around for about 150 years, though its origins can be traced to earlier civilizations. But it has never been so visceral, and so much a part of our daily lives, as it is now. In short, the arc of photography’s history is that it has always been about getting more and more people to take photographs. Our desire to know more about ourselves means we must have more of them, more often, in more places, and of many more things. Whether it was new chemicals or new film or new sensors, technological advances in this area have — by and large — been about making it simpler for us to capture the moment. All of it has brought us to today, when we have quietly passed the cultural tipping point where taking a photo is as second nature as breathing. There’s no art to it. It is just something we are always doing.

In many ways, the iPhone reminds me of another groundbreaking camera: the Brownie. Launched at the turn of the last century, the original Brownie was the catalyst of change that helped us record our own history — exactly what those servicemen were doing more than a century later as I labored at my art.

This week on Mac Power Users:

As the iPhone and iPad have become more full-featured, the software that runs them has gotten more complex and powerful. This time, David and Stephen run though a whole bunch of their favorite ways to get more out of these devices.

On More Power Users, we got into the recent avalanche of Mac rumors.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• 1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.
• DEVONthink: Get Organized — Unleash Your Creativity. Use this link for 10% off.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

My thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring 512 Pixels this week.

Repetitive typing, little mistakes, searching for answers — they’re all taking precious time away from you and your team. With TextExpander, you can take it back.