posts

The crew at iFixit has taken apart one of the new MacBook Pros, complete with its revised keyboards. The material that makes up the membrane over the switches is new, now made of nylon, as opposed to polyacetylene on the 2018 models.

Whatever that means.

The metal dome under each key is also tweaked slightly.

Time will tell if these keyboards hold up any better than their predecessors. I think that Apple has made improvements here over the years, but the company has a long way to go before users will fully trust these machines again.

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Steven Troughton-Smith has written an epic blog post, tracing the evolution from NeXTSTEP to Mac OS X through the lens of Mail.app.

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This week on Connected:

Myke keeps dropping his phone, Apple keeps releasing new MacBook Pros for Stephen to talk about, and Federico has published a magnum opus on the state of the iPad and iOS 12.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Backblaze: Unlimited cloud backup for Macs and PCs for just $6/month.
• Freshbooks: Online invoicing made easy.
• TextExpander, from Smile: Try the new release with the visual editor. Get 20% off your first year.

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Apple has officially sent out details for this year’s event. I am very excited to say that I will be attending the keynote; this neon unicorn’s face sums up how I feel right now:

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Exciting stuff going on here at Relay FM HQ:

Join us in celebrating Relay FM’s 5th birthday with a special live show featuring some of your favorite podcast hosts for what the kids call a podcasting extravaganza!

The live show will be in San Francisco on August 22. More information and tickets here.

And just check out this artwork!

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After months of teasing, Casey Liss has shipped Vignette, a new iPhone app for keeping your contact images updated easily.

Here’s a bit from his blog post announcing the app, about why he wrote it:

As with all ideas, it starts with a question:

Could I get new pictures for all my contacts on my iPhone off Gravatar?

That was early February. I was just goofing off, and just seeing if I could make that work at all.

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This time on Liftoff, Jason and I continue our series marking the 50th anniversary of each Apollo mission:

In May 1969, Tom Stafford, John Young and Gene Cernan took their Apollo spacecraft within 48,000 feet of the lunar service.

Come for the views of the lunar surface, stay for the floating poop and weird space music.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code LIFTOFF at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
• ExpressVPN: High-Speed, Secure & Anonymous VPN Service. Get 3 months free with a 1-year package.

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Apple has updated the MacBook Pro today, just two weeks before WWDC. Jason Snell has details:

These updates don’t bring any changes to the exterior of the MacBook Pro—it’s the same base design introduced in late 2016—but they do bring 9th-generation Intel processors with up to eight cores to the MacBook Pro for the first time. There’s also been yet another tweak to the controversial butterfly keyboard Apple first introduced in 2015.

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David Sparks has launched his new Field Guide, a video course all about Keyboard Maestro.

Keyboard Maestro is one of those applications that can really make a Mac sing, but it can be a bit intimidating at first. In this course, David walks through its features in an easily-digestible way. I haven’t used Keyboard Maestro in years, and walked away with a much better understanding of this app and how it can make using macOS more efficient. In fact, I’ve installed it and have already created several macros that are helping me work more quickly. If you’re using a Mac as your main computer, this is $24 you will not regret spending.

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After months of work, Federico has published a manifesto of sorts about the working on the iPad Pro:

Seven years after I started (slowly) replacing my MacBook Air with an iPad, my life is different, but one principle still holds true: I never want to find myself forced to work on a computer that’s only effective at home, that can’t be held in my hands, or that can’t be customized for different setups. For this reason, the iPad Pro is the best computer for the kind of lifestyle I want.

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This week marks the second anniversary of the 512 Pixels Membership. To mark the occasion, I am sharing this article, which was sent in this month’s members-only newsletter. To learn more and sign up, visit this page.

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Today, the vast majority of Macs sold are notebooks, and as we Mac nerds eagerly await a redesigned MacBook Pro, it’s easy to forget just how far Mac notebooks have come over the years.

In May 1999, Apple introduced the “PowerBook G3 (Bronze Keyboard)” which was an update to the black, curvy notebooks of the day. True to its name, it shipped with semi-transparent bronze keys that exposed the keyframes underneath under direct light.

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2019 has brought a lot of changes to my workload. I joined Mac Power Users, which radically changed how my work week looks, bringing to an end to a couple of projects and requiring changes to others.

I knew that to make informed decisions about my time as an indie, I needed data. Your gut will always be wrong about how you think you spend your time, but raw numbers don’t lie.

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