Learn Ulysses ⇢

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Over on The Sweet Setup, Shawn Blanc has launched a video series about Ulysses, the text editor for macOS and iOS. I’ve been able to check out a bunch of the videos in advance, and the series really is good. Ulysses is a great app, but can be a little intimidating at first, and the series does a good job at breaking it all down.

Connected #157: Your Legacy Chooses You ⇢

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This week on Connected:

Federico is back from the Genius Bar and joined by Stephen to discuss Time Machine and iCloud Backups, Apple’s push with Swift education and SMS filtering in iOS 11.

My thanks to our sponsors for this week’s show:

  • Eero: Never think about WiFi again. Use code CONNECTED for free overnight shipping.
  • Ting: A smarter way to do mobile. Save $25 on selected devices or keep it as Ting credit.
  • Crimson Mesa: Announcing Shokem Nimai, The Ancient Game of the River.

RSS Sponsor: Balance for Mac ⇢

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Balance is a powerful menubar app for your money built by a team from Apple, Stripe and Ethereum. It was featured in the U.S. Mac App Store when it launched in February.

Securely connect to your accounts

Balance uses Plaid.com, the best API for securely accessing your financial data. It gives the app a read-only token to access your account history.

Quickly check your balances

With one click or keyboard shortcut you can pop open Balance and check all of your accounts. Lock the app with a password or TouchID.

Speedily search through your transactions

As a native app with local data storage, Balance is super fast. Quickly search through all of your downloaded transactions with powerful filters.

Powerful notification engine

Balance is Hazel for money. You can create rules to trigger useful notifications to help you stay on top of your finances.

One subscription, coming to all of Apple’s platforms

The basic plan starts at $4.99 / month. Balance is launching on iOS and watchOS later this year, and is also building a full windowed app for macOS. Early customers will get access to betas for all of these.

Check out Balance on the U.S. Mac App Store today. International support is planned for later this year.

The Wrong Way Around ⇢

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Chuq Von Rospach recently retired his Touch Bar MacBook Pro, and doesn’t miss it as much. His thoughts on the technology resonated with me:

It seems to me Apple fell in love with the technology of the Touch Bar system, which if you dig into it a bit is a stunning piece of engineering, and expected all of us to fall in love with it as well. The problem is: Apple rarely sells things to us based on neat technology, it sells us based on the stories of how that technology will solve problems for us, and right now, the problems a Touch Bar solve for us that we care about being solved are few and far between.

Why are there so Many Knobs in Garageband? ⇢

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John Lagomarsino at The Outline:

Skeuomorphic design, where user interfaces emulate the appearance of physical objects, has been popular for pretty much the history of personal computing. The ideas of “files,” “folders,” and the “recycle bin” in Windows could be considered skeuomorphs, intended to help transition early computer users from analog to digital, as could the idea of an “inbox” and “outbox” in email and the paperclip that symbolizes attachments. More recently, a lot of early iOS apps were famous for their heavy-handed skeuomorphic elements, with felt textures and chunky drop shadows.

But no area of computing has so thoroughly gone for it more than audio software.

Amazon and Whole Foods Deal Moves Forward ⇢

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Amazon and Whole Foods have announced that the former’s acquisition of the latter will close on Monday, August 28. The companies say one of the immediate goals is to make Whole Food’s prices more affordable, starting next week.1

Then there’s this:

In addition, Amazon and Whole Foods Market technology teams will begin to integrate Amazon Prime into the Whole Foods Market point-of-sale system, and when this work is complete, Prime members will receive special savings and in-store benefits. The two companies will invent in additional areas over time, including in merchandising and logistics, to enable lower prices for Whole Foods Market customers.

It will be interesting to see how much of Amazon ends up in Whole Foods. Will products beyond food start to appear on shelves?

  1. These products are listed as being cheaper starting next week: bananas, organic avocados, organic large brown eggs, organic responsibly-farmed salmon and tilapia, organic baby kale and baby lettuce, animal-welfare-rated 85% lean ground beef, creamy and crunchy almond butter, organic Gala and Fuji apples, organic rotisserie chicken and the Whole Foods branded butter. ↩

Apple Announces Data Center in Iowa ⇢

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Over at Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced plans to build a 400,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art data center in Waukee, Iowa, to better serve North American users of iMessage, Siri, the App Store and other Apple services. Like all Apple data centers, the new facility will run entirely on renewable energy from day one.

Apple’s investment of $1.3 billion will create over 550 construction and operations jobs in the Des Moines area, and the company is contributing up to $100 million to a newly created Public Improvement Fund dedicated to community development and infrastructure around Waukee.