CalZones Review

I’ve always struggled to find apps that understand how people work across multiple time zones. In the 10 years I’ve been writing MacStories, I’ve come across dozens of time zone conversion utilities (and I even created my own with Shortcuts), but as someone who works remotely with people all over the globe, I know there’s more to time zone management than just performing a quick conversion. Perhaps you’re planning a Skype call with three more people, each living in a different time zone; maybe you have to coordinate a product launch and need to know at a glance what “3 PM GMT” means for your customers in New York, San Francisco, Rome, and Sydney. CalZones, the latest app by _David Smith, is the first iOS app I’ve ever used that fundamentally gets how people work and schedule events across multiple time zones. It’s almost like CalZones was made specifically for me, and it’s an app that speaks directly to my heart.

CalZones, available today on the App Store as a Universal app, is based on a simple, ingenious concept that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been done on the App Store before: the app combines a time zone viewer with a calendar client, enabling you to compare times across multiple cities as well as view and create calendar events that display start/end times in multiple formats. By fusing time zone comparisons and calendar events into one product, Smith was able to create an app that is greater than the sum of its parts because it solves a problem that neither traditional world clocks nor calendar clients could fix before.

Read more

The Perfect Side Gig

MacStories was a big part of my life for over five years, from January 2011 through November 2016. I only vaguely recall emailing Federico about the possibility of writing for MacStories, though I do remember sending him two sample articles – one of which was about the iPad (naturally!). Federico was happy to give me a go and I started pretty much straight away.

Read more

‘Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level’ Is an Insightful Look at the Values that Guide the Company’s CEO

Leander Kahney, who has previously published books about Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, takes on the ascent of Apple’s current CEO in a new book titled Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level. When Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, many people doubted that Tim Cook, an operations expert, was up to the job of CEO. As Kahney summarizes in his book’s introduction titled ‘Killing It,’ the numbers have proven the doubters wrong. By exploring Cook’s early influences and how they have affected his leadership of Apple, Kahney sheds light on the values and other qualities that have led to Cook’s success. The result is an interesting look at Cook’s background growing up in Alabama and his career before joining Apple, about which little has been previously written, but the book’s recounting of Cook’s Apple years may be less informative to close observers of the company.

Read more

AppStories, Episode 107 – Interview: Ten Years of MacStories with Federico Viticci→

On this week’s episode of AppStories, to mark MacStories’ 10th anniversary, John interviews Federico about how MacStories got started, what led to the MacStories that readers know today, and what’s in store for the site and other MacStories properties in the future.

Sponsored by:

  • Agenda - An elegant new take on notes.
  • Linode - High-performance SSD Linux servers for all of your infrastructure needs. Get a $20 credit.

Permalink

Latest iPad Pro Ads Highlight the Device’s Versatility

Today Apple published six new videos that focus on the iPad Pro. Five of them are continuations of the ‘A New Way’ series that debuted in January, highlighting the device’s versatility in tasks like video creation, wedding planning, and serving as the perfect travel companion. The final video, titled ‘Life on iPad,’ follows a man around town as he uses the iPad Pro during what’s presented as an average day – he uses the device to make a Group FaceTime call, do illustrative work while connected to an external monitor, email a file, and draft a document during a flight.

All five ‘A New Way’ videos do a great job showcasing real-life tasks being tackled on the iPad. Most are focused on getting things done, but the video about travel also highlights the iPad’s strengths as a video player and even coloring book. The task-focused videos offer step-by-step examples of workflows that can be helpful to users aiming to stretch their use of the iPad Pro.


As with the prior round of ‘A New Way’ ads, these all end by highlighting how they were filmed, edited, designed, and made entirely on iPad Pro, no doubt with similar workflows to the ones Apple previously documented.

Read more

Announcing the MacStories 10th Anniversary T-shirt and Pin

We’re very fortunate at MacStories to have a terrific group of loyal readers. As MacStories turns 10 and has become known not just for the site, but also Club MacStories and AppStories, it felt like the perfect time to celebrate with MacStories’ very first official merchandise, which is available from macstoriesmerch.com, a Cotton Bureau storefront that we’ve set up for this and any future sales. I can already sense a few of you typing ‘finally’ into your Twitter clients, but as the saying goes, ‘good things come to those who wait,’ and I think you’ll like what we’ve got for you.

The MacStories 10th Anniversary T-shirt

The first item is the MacStories 10th Anniversary T-shirt, which features the site’s classic bookmark logo and distinctive typography. The shirt, offered through our friends at Cotton Bureau, comes in three styles: Vintage Black Tri-Blend, Black 100% Cotton, and Light Blue 100% Cotton in both men’s and women’s cuts and a wide range of sizes for $30.

The MacStories 10th Anniversary Enamel Pin

The second item is the MacStories 10th Anniversary Enamel Pin. The pin features MacStories’ iconic bookmark logo in the perfect shade of MacStories red for $15.

The shirts will be available to order for two weeks and the pins will be for sale until supplies run out, so don’t wait. Two weeks is not long and we expect the pins to sell out fast.

If you have any questions about shipping, orders, payments and the like, please visit Cotton Bureau’s FAQ for more details.

We’d like to expand what we offer in the future, but that depends entirely on demand and interest from you. So let us know what you think on Twitter (@MacStoriesNet) and send us pictures of your new MacStories shirts and pins in the wild when they arrive. We’re excited to get them in your hands soon.

10 Years of MacStories

Later this week on Saturday, April 20, MacStories will turn 10 years old.

It was Monday, April 20, 2009 when, fresh out of a job from which I had gotten fired, I decided to publish the first official post on my self-hosted blog after a few weeks of running a free WordPress.com website. I was 21. My English was terrible and, at the time, MacStories was written in two languages, English and Italian – probably to hide my discomfort as a non-native English speaker. If you want to hear this story (and my entire background) in much greater detail, John interviewed me on this week’s special episode of AppStories.

Since that first post about web browsers, MacStories has been on my mind every day and it remains the most important thing I’ve ever built in my adult life. In many ways, MacStories has come to define me.

As you might guess, I’ve struggled to come to terms with the meaning of this anniversary. I don’t like celebrating work-related anniversaries. I don’t think our readers appreciate excessive self-congratulatory content and I’d rather focus on getting work done every day. I prefer to let other people compliment us if they ever feel compelled to do so; otherwise, I just want to focus on providing a service to our audience, because that’s what I’m ultimately here to do: to make sure that MacStories and our related properties can be useful and inspiring for our readers around the world.

Ten years, however, does feel like an extremely long time in Internet years. For this reason, when I started thinking about this looming milestone sometime last year, I knew I had to do something special for this anniversary – just this once – to look back at the past decade of MacStories, reflect on the things I’ve learned along the way, and plan ahead for the future.

Here’s the short version: this week is going to be extra special on MacStories. We’re launching our first official merchandise today (macstoriesmerch.com) and there will be a series of retrospectives published on MacStories throughout the week (keep an eye on this tag). In addition, we will be launching a couple of new perks exclusive to Club MacStories members.

Now, allow me to share some thoughts about creating MacStories and what this website has meant for me over the past 10 years.

Read more

Agenda: First Your Calendar, Now Your Reminders [Sponsor]

Agenda is a strong new entrant in the arena of note taking apps for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It’s elegant and powerful — Agenda was the only Mac app to win an Apple Design Award in 2018 — and includes a few twists on what you have come to expect from a note taking app.

To begin with, Agenda focuses on dates. You organize your notes chronologically in projects, with each project flowing from future, through present, and into the past. Use Agenda to plan for a future meeting or vacation, and have your notes ready when it is time to begin. When it’s all over, the very same notes are preserved for posterity in Agenda’s unique timeline.

You can even link notes to events in your calendar app, and edit the events without leaving Agenda. Rather than competing with your calendar, Agenda complements it, working perfectly in tandem.

Even more exciting, the Agenda team is putting the finishing touches on an update which will bring that same level of integration for Apple’s Reminders app. Reminders is great tool for scheduling tasks that are due at a particular time or place; in just a few weeks time, Agenda will allow you to create and edit reminders without leaving the app.

Similar to calendar support, the Agenda team have opted to integrate with the existing Reminders app, rather than reinvent the wheel. You will be able to link reminders to list items in Agenda, so that you get a notification when they become due. Agenda will autofill as much information as possible, making it ridiculously easy to create new reminders for your tasks. There is even support for a markdown-like syntax, so you don’t even have to stop typing.

Agenda is free to download and use forever. It is a great time to give it a try, because there is now support for importing from Evernote and Apple Notes, and free sync via iCloud.

A premium feature upgrade is available via In-App Purchase. It includes all current premium features, as well as new ones added in the next 12 months. Best of all, the features you unlock are yours to use forever — strictly no subscription.

Our thanks to Agenda for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Calory Review: Simple, Convenient Calorie Tracking

In my estimation, there are two types of nutrition-tracking apps on the App Store: those for users who want full control of all nitty-gritty details regarding what they consume, and those for people like me who just want to do simple calorie-tracking. Calory, a new iOS app from the makers of WaterMinder, HealthView, and HabitMinder, falls strictly in the latter category. While you can optionally track certain statistics like fat, carbs, and protein, the primary purpose of Calory is convenient calorie tracking – and the app excels at that.

Read more