StopTheMadness: Take Back Your Web Browser [Sponsor]

When you visit a website, few things are more frustrating than when your browser doesn’t work as expected because the site has disabled common interface features. StopTheMadness is a Safari and Firefox extension that prevents sites from modifying how your browser works when you visit them.

Available on the Mac App Store for macOS 10.12 Sierra and later, StopTheMadness puts you back in control of your browsing experience. Users often assume their browser isn’t working correctly when in fact, the trouble lies with the sites they visit. To see just how bad it can be, visit StopTheMadness’ test page for a demonstration. With StopTheMadness enabled, everything on the test page is returned to working the way you expect.

Whether you’re on Safari or Firefox, StopTheMadness ensures you can:

  • ⌘-click to open links in a new tab
  • Use keyboard shortcuts that rely on the ⌘ modifier
  • Open Safari’s standard contextual menu when you right click
  • Drag images and links
  • Select text
  • Paste text into any text field
  • Copy text from anywhere on a webpage
  • Auto-fill and complete passwords

StopTheMadness can even prevent clicked links in Google search results from being redirected to a different site. The extension can also be customized to work on a per-site basis allowing users to dial in the exact experience they want.

Get StopTheMadness today on the Mac App Store and take back your web browser. StopTheMadness is available as a separate purchase for Google Chrome on the Chrome Web Store.

Spectre: A Computational Approach to Long-Exposure iPhone Photography

Spectre is a new specialized camera app from the team that created Halide, one of our favorite camera apps on iOS. The Halide team describes Spectre as a computational shutter for the iPhone, which allows the app to do things like remove people from a crowded scene, create artistic images of rushing water, and produce light trails at night. The same sort of images can be created using traditional cameras, but getting the exposure right, holding the camera absolutely still, and accounting for other factors make them difficult to get right. With Spectre, artificial intelligence is used to simplify the process and make long-exposure photography accessible to anyone with an iPhone.

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Apple’s Month-Long Celebration of International Women’s Day

A week from tomorrow is International Women’s Day. To mark the day, Apple has announced a series of events throughout the month of March.

In the US, Apple is partnering with Girls Can Code to bring programming to more girls and young women. The program includes Swift training for club leaders and will use the company’s Everyone Can Code Curriculum to make the programming language available nationwide to 90,000 girls. Apple’s Lisa Jackson:

“Women have earned the opportunity to have our ideas shape the future,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. “We’re excited to support Girls Who Code as they empower girls to be the developers and tech innovators of tomorrow.”

Emily Grasile of the Chicago Field Museum will be featured at Chicago's Michigan Avenue store.

Emily Grasile of the Chicago Field Museum will be featured at Chicago’s Michigan Avenue store.

In addition, Apple retail stores in Singapore, Kyoto, Hong Kong, London, Milan, Paris, Dubai, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles will host a special ‘Made by Women’ series featuring artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, musicians, developers, photographers, and others.

On the App Store, Apple will run special features all month long. Every March App of the Day will feature apps by women, and on Fridays the App Store will go behind the scenes with stories of the women behind apps and efforts being made to bring women into the tech industry. On March 8th, there will also be a special collection of games featuring Captain Marvel that coincides with the release of the film.

Apple Music will include special editorial and playlist content featuring women and Beats 1 will have a 24-hour takeover highlighting the work of women musicians. Apple’s movie, TV, books, and podcast storefronts will include content made by and featuring women too. Finally, on March 8th, Apple Watch users who complete a 1.6 kilometer walk, run, or wheelchair workout will receive a special Activity award and stickers for Messages.

Soor: A Third-Party Apple Music Client for iPhone

Soor, a third-party client for Apple Music created by indie developer Tanmay Sonawane, is based upon a fascinating premise: unlike other standalone music players for iPhone, Soor works with Apple’s native MusicKit API, enabling direct integration with Apple Music; unlike Apple’s Music app though, Soor prioritizes one-handed gestures, user customization, and a single-page design that packs multiple sections into one view. In theory, Soor should be the optimal blend of two different worlds – a third-party music player with its own aesthetic and stylistic choices combined with Apple Music data and the service’s vast streaming catalog. In practice, while Soor has some solid ideas I’d like to see in Apple Music too, and despite its intriguing visual design, the app doesn’t qualify as a complete replacement for the Music app on iPhone.

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Connected, Episode 232: The Unique Blend of Tattoos and Automation→

After skipping follow-up, Myke and Federico try to explain the new USB branding, discuss fingerprint sensors and the merits of Evernote in 2019, and wish for apps that don’t exist (but should).

On this week’s episode of Connected, I share more details about my Evernote experiments as well as an idea for an app I’d like to exist. You can listen here.

Sponsored by:

  • eero: Never think about WiFi again. Get $100 off the ‘Eero base unit and 2 beacons package’, and a year of eero Plus.
  • Luna Display: The only hardware solution that turns your iPad into a wireless display for your Mac. Use promo code CONNECTED at checkout for 10% off.
  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code CONNECTED at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
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USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 Merged Under New USB 3.2 Branding→

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors about the latest rebrand in USB spec land:

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), this week announced a rebranding of the USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 specifications, under the USB 3.2 specification. As outlined by Tom’s Hardware, USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 will now be considered previous generations of the USB 3.2 specification.

Going forward, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (transfer speeds up to 5Gb/s), which used to be USB 3.0 prior to a separate rebranding, will be called USB 3.2 Gen 1, while USB 3.1 Gen 2 (transfer speeds up to 10Gb/s) will now be known as USB 3.2 Gen 2.

It gets better though:

If the swap between USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 to USB 3.2 wasn’t confusing enough, each of these specifications also has a marketing term. The new USB 3.2 Gen 1 with transfer speeds up to 5Gb/s is SuperSpeed USB, while USB 3.2 Gen 2 with transfer speeds up to 10Gb/s is known as SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps. The USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 specification with transfer speeds up to 20Gb/s is known as SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps.

Make sure to check out the comparison table on MacRumors to admire the full extent of these changes.

As someone who’s been experimenting with USB-C accessories compliant with the USB 3.1 spec over the past few months, I can’t even begin to stress how confusing for the average consumer all of this stuff can be. It took me days to wrap my head around the differences between the physical USB-C connector, the underlying specs it can support, and the DisplayPort compatibility mode – and I do this for a living. In my experience, if you’re looking to buy modern USB accessories compatible with an iPad Pro or MacBook Pro, you’re better off looking for a technical spec label rather than the “friendly names” such as “SuperSpeed”, which manufacturers often fail to mention in their spec sheets.

Until today, if you wanted to buy USB-C accessories supporting the highest data transfer rates on the 2018 iPad Pro, you had to look for devices compliant with USB 3.1 Gen. 2; with today’s rebrand, the 2018 iPad Pro supports USB 3.2 Gen. 2 for transfers up to 10 Gbps, but not the similarly-named USB 3.2 Gen. 2x2. I’m sure this is going to be so easy to explain to someone who’s looking for the “fastest” USB-C cable for their iPad Pro.

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Why the Siri Face Is All I Need from My Apple Watch

What should a wrist computer ideally do for you?

Telling the time is a given, and activity tracking has become another default inclusion for that category of gadget. But we’re talking about a computer here, not a simple watch with built-in pedometer. The device should present the information you need, exactly when you need it. This would include notifications to be sure, but also basic data like the weather forecast and current date. It should integrate with the various cloud services you depend on to keep your life and work running – calendars, task managers, and the like. It doesn’t have to be all business though – throwing in a little surprise and delight would be nice too, because we can all use some added sparks of joy throughout our days.

Each of these different data sources streaming through such a device presents a dilemma: how do you fit so much data on such a tiny screen? By necessity a wrist computer’s display is small, limiting how much information it can offer at once. This challenge makes it extremely important for the device to offer data that’s contextual – fit for the occasion – and dynamic – constantly changing.

Serving a constant flow of relevant data is great, but a computer that’s tied to your wrist, always close at hand, could do even more. It could serve as a control center of sorts, providing a quick and easy way to perform common actions – setting a timer or alarm, toggling smart home devices on and off, adjusting audio playback, and so on. Each of these controls must be presented at just the right time, custom-tailored for your normal daily needs.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because this product already exists: the Apple Watch. However, most of the functionality I described doesn’t apply to the average Watch owner’s experience, because most people use a watch face that doesn’t offer these capabilities – at least not many of them. The Watch experience closest to that of the ideal wrist computer I’ve envisioned is only possible with a single watch face: the Siri face.

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AppStories, Episode 100 – App Trends→

On this week’s episode of AppStories, we discuss some of the trends we expect will drive app development on iOS and the Mac this year and into the future.

Sponsored by:

  • MacStadium – Private clouds and dedicated Macs for developers and teams doing iOS/Mac app development. Start a Mac mini subscription and get two months for the price of one with the code APPSTORIES.
  • Luna Display – The only hardware solution that turns your iPad into a wireless display for your Mac. Use promo code APPSTORIES at checkout for 10% off.

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Using a Twitter Saved Search to Read Replies, Mentions, and Quoted Tweets in a Single View

Every few months, I like to use Twitter’s official app for iPhone and iPad for a while and reassess its advantages over third-party clients, as well as its shortcomings. This is something I’ve been doing for several years now. While I’ve often come away unimpressed with Twitter’s native offerings, switching back to Tweetbot or Twitterrific after a couple of days, it’s been a week since I started using the official Twitter app on my iPhone and iPad again and I don’t find myself craving Tweetbot’s UI design or timeline as much as I thought I would.

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