MacStories Team

382 posts on MacStories since July 2011

Articles by the MacStories team.

Founded by Federico Viticci in April 2009, MacStories attracts millions of readers every month thanks to in-depth, personal, and informed coverage that offers a balanced mix of Apple news, app reviews, and opinion.


Letters: Hundreds of Text Designs [Sponsor]

Letters is a free graphic design app for Mac. Providing hundreds of text design templates, Letters helps anyone feel like a graphic designer by creating stylish text designs in seconds.

Every template includes beautifully-stylized text with a unique texture and background. A wide range of seamless photo-realistic textures sets Letters apart from other text design apps.

Users of the app include small businesses producing their own promotional graphics, pro designers that are looking for a quick solution, and social media content creators who need fresh, new graphics on a daily basis for Facebook and Twitter covers, YouTube channel art, YouTube thumbnails, and Instagram posts.

The app’s template collection reflects most current design trends, including:

  • Photorealistic 3D Texts
  • Watercolor
  • Retro & Vintage
  • Photos with Captions
  • Grunge Style
  • 2D Calligraphy
  • Neon & Glowing Effects
  • 3D Transformed Texts

Users can experiment with template colors, while preserving the style color scheme, and change text or background color separately, replace background images, and set any document size. Text settings allow users to change the font easily, adjust color, control geometry (chamfer, thickness, depth, and perspective), apply shadow and glow, and tune lighting. All the textures are seamless and scalable.

Letters allows anyone, from average computer users to graphic design pros, to fulfill their text design dreams and make beautiful texts available for everyone. Download Letters today for free and make your text designs stand out from the crowd.

Our thanks to Letters for sponsoring MacStories this week.


CleanMyMac X: Your Mac, As Good As New [Sponsor]

CleanMyMac X by MacPaw is your complete Mac maintenance solution. Redesigned with a beautiful new interface that makes it a pleasure to use, CleanMyMac X frees up wasted storage space, protects against malware, optimizes your Mac’s performance, and more.

It all starts with Smart Scan, the all-in-one center for analyzing, optimizing, and protecting your Mac. Here you’ll find sections to clean up unwanted and unnecessary files that are cluttering up your Mac’s drive. CleanMyMac also scans for malware, protecting your Mac against malicious third-party code and vulnerabilities. There’s an optimization section that can free up RAM and manage login items, launch agents, and memory-hungry apps too.

At each step of the process, you’ll have CleanMyMac Assistant at your side. It’s an intelligent advisor providing explanations of everything CleanMyMac does and recommending courses of action. CleanMyMac X is faster too. MacPaw tests show that it’s up to three times faster than version 3 of the app.

CleanMyMac X has added an app update module that scans your installed apps for available updates too. It’s a fantastic, centralized way to see all the apps on your Mac that have updates whether or not you bought them on the Mac App Store.

Whether you’re prepping your Mac to install Mojave, or want to optimize it after updating, you owe it to yourself to make sure your Mac is running smoothly and safely with enough storage to get your work done. So, don’t wait. Go check out CleanMyMac X today. There’s a free trial waiting to help you get make your Mac as good as new.

Our thanks to CleanMyMac X for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Setapp: The Right App, Right When You Need It [Sponsor]

Setapp is a Mac app subscription service created by MacPaw, the maker of CleanMyMac X, Gemini II, and other great apps. For one low monthly fee, Setapp offers more than 100 of the very best Mac apps from big names like Ulysses, Bartender, iStat Menus, and iMazing. It’s a collection that is continually growing, becoming more and more valuable to subscribers all the time.

Setapp is an app store done right. With over 100 apps in 10 categories to choose from, Setapp is the key to making you more productive on your Mac. You can pick from task managers and time tracking apps, text editors, photo editors, developer tools, and much more.

Getting the apps you want to use is fast and simple too. When you sign up, Setapp installs a handy catalog on your Mac for browsing its offerings. The included apps are carefully vetted and curated, so you know that only the highest quality apps from the best developers are involved. Setapp is designed to make finding just the right app easy too with its powerful search for finding apps by task or keyword.

The business model couldn’t be more clear either. There are no hidden costs or gimmicks. You pay just $9.99 per month for access to the entire catalog of apps including any updates. There are no fees for upgrades, no In-App Purchases, or other hidden costs. Every app is a fully functional version that updates automatically.

Sign up today to unlock this fantastic collection of Mac apps. Setapp is free to try, and you can extend the trial period up to six months by referring friends.

Our thanks to Setapp for sponsoring MacStories this week.


iMazing 2: Manage Your iPhone Your Way [Sponsor]

Migration to New iPhones

iMazing 2 provides safe and fast migration to any iOS device. Transferring data from your old iPhone to your new iPhone XS, XS Max, or XR is easy and convenient thanks to iMazing’s step by step wizard. You can even pre-load apps in iMazing’s App Library, so they’re immediately available once the transfer is done – no need to wait for your favorite apps to download after restoring an iTunes or iCloud backup.

Ready For The Future: macOS Mojave and iOS 12 Are Fully Supported

iMazing is made by Mac lovers, for Mac lovers. It features polished support for Mojave’s gorgeous Dark Mode, and handles the new security features gracefully. On iOS, iMazing works perfectly with iOS 12. If you haven’t updated already, backing up first with iMazing is a great idea: if anything goes wrong, you’ll have all your data at hand. Oh, and of course you can also update to iOS 12 from iMazing itself - in that case, iMazing will perform a security backup for you, just in case.

New Features Galore

iMazing is constantly updated with new features, quite a few of them resulting from user feedback. Calendars, Safari data, and ringtones management were added in June this year. The latest update has Dark Mode and a new drop zone called ‘Quick Transfer’: drop anything from your desktop to iMazing, and iMazing will display compatible apps installed on your device. You just need to pick the one you want your photos, media, or documents to go to.

Visit iMazing today to learn more and take advantage of a 30% off discount just for MacStories readers using the coupon code MACSTORIES30OFF2018.

Our thanks to iMazing for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Bear: Write Beautifully on iPhone, iPad, and Mac [Sponsor]

Bear is a beautiful, flexible new notes app for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. In less than two years, Bear has earned an Apple Design Award, an App Store Editor’s Choice award, and numerous mentions on Apple’s Today page for being a great way to capture ideas, write the next blockbuster novel, and much more.

Bear embraces portability, flexibility, and privacy. Your notes are written in Markdown and saved in standard formats, then organized with the power of tags and nested tags. Sketch with styluses like Apple Pencil, and grab links with app extensions. When it’s time to ship your notes elsewhere, export them to a variety of formats.

Upgrade to Bear Pro to unlock iCloud sync, a dozen beautiful writing themes, and even more powerful export options.

For iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, Bear is ready with a big update to support their best features.

On iOS, Bear now works with Siri shortcuts for powerful automation. Who even types notes anymore? Nickelback, that’s who. Use Siri and the beautiful sound of your voice to create notes, open your to-do notes, and more. For Mojave on the Mac, free and Pro users can write in the all-new Dark Mode with our new free theme: Dark Graphite.

Most of Bear’s features are free to use, so grab it from the iOS and Mac App Stores. Learn more at bear.app, and subscribe to their infrequent newsletter for tips, user interviews, and more.

Our thanks to Bear for sponsoring MacStories this week.



Focus: The Best Pomodoro App for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac [Sponsor]

Focus is a time manager that helps you beat procrastination and work more efficiently using the Pomodoro Technique. Available on iOS, the Mac, and the Apple Watch, Focus teaches you to work in intervals and reminds you to take regular breaks.

Taking breaks enables you to reenergize and concentrate better, be more thoughtful, and ultimately, work more productively. With its simple and lightweight way to organize and manage your tasks, Focus is the best way to get organized and achieve daily goals that keep you motivated. Because its task management features are unobtrusive by design, you’ll spend your time working on your tasks instead of fiddling with the app.

Focus is designed to work seamlessly across all platforms and devices through Apple’s latest technologies. You can switch devices by using Handoff and count on fast, reliable iCloud sync among devices. On iOS, you can see your current progress with a Today widget, and use rich notifications to start, stop, and extend your work. The beautiful and clear design feels right at home on macOS, and a menu bar app lets you see your current progress at a glance. Focus also helps you gain powerful insights about your work with charts comparing your activities day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month.

Focus is right on top of Apple’s new OS releases too. The iOS and watchOS apps feature Siri shortcut support, and the Mac app will include a Dark Mode that looks fantastic in Mojave when it’s released next week.

Be more productive and effective by adding Focus to your workflow. This week only, MacStories readers can purchase a Focus Pro subscription for 15% off the usual price using the promo code macstories18 from within the app. So don’t delay, get Focus on iOS and on the Mac today.

Our thanks to Focus for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Timing: Automated Time Tracking So You Can Focus on Your Work Instead [Sponsor]

Timing for macOS is the first step to recapturing your most precious resource: time. Before you can find lost time though, you need to understand how you are spending it. But manual time tracking interrupts your workflow, and it’s too easy to lose track of what you’ve done. That’s where Timing comes in. It’s different because Timing automatically tracks how you spend time on your Mac and syncs the data across all your Macs.

Timing shows you how much time you spend per app, website, and document, and categorizes that time into projects. Timing helps you be more productive by analyzing how you are wasting time too. Best of all, Timing keeps on top of the latest Mac technologies with features like a the Dark Mode seen above, which is coming with the introduction of macOS Mojave. The app includes automation features to help you save more time by doing things like automatically categorizing activities too. The app can even ask you what you did when you return to your Mac, so you never forget to track a meeting.

Stop worrying about time and focus on doing your best work instead with Timing. Download a 14-day free trial today and save 10% when you decide to buy.

Our thanks to Timing for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Tap Forms: The Digital Filing Cabinet for Your Life [Sponsor]

Tap Forms is a powerful Mac and iOS app for organizing anything and everything in one place. It’s a customizable database app that’s simple to use, but best of all, scales to fit your needs as they grow.

Whether you’re organizing your comic book collection, recipes, work documents, or business inventory, Tap Forms can help. The app is secure, searchable, and accessible from any Mac or iOS device via iCloud, IBM Cloud, Apache CouchDB, and WiFi sync, so you always have your data with you. Tap Forms also features support 7 days a week via email and its forums.

To get you started quickly, Tap Forms has dozens of pre-made, customizable forms. Of course, you can also build a form from scratch too. There are also 26 built-in field types that can be added to forms including Text, Number, Note, Calculation, Script, Photo, Location, Contact, Table, and Link to Form.

Tap Forms is just as powerful at using the data it collects. Records can be viewed in List, Multi-Column, Map, Calendar, and Photo Grid views. You can also generate 24 types of barcodes and print labels.

This fall, when macOS Mojave and iOS 12 ship, Tap Forms will gain fantastic new features including:

  • Dark Mode and Apple Script support on the Mac
  • JavaScript support for scripting actions on your form data
  • A Script field type
  • Siri Shortcuts on iOS 12 for running Form Scripts in Siri without launching Tap Forms

For this week only, Tap Forms 5 is available for 30% off the Mac and iOS versions. Don’t miss this chance for a great deal and to get organized today with Tap Forms.

Our thanks to Tap Forms for sponsoring MacStories this week.