This Week's Sponsor:

Textastic

The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try

iOS Tip: Export PDFs from Print Preview with 3D Touch

Printing to PDF with 3D Touch.

Printing to PDF with 3D Touch.

Note: this tip was first shared with Club MacStories members over a month ago in issue 16 of MacStories Weekly. We are sharing it today as a one-off sample. Subscribe now and don’t miss out on more iOS tips and workflows.

A hidden option of iOS’ Print feature I’ve recently discovered is a way to export a PDF file from the Print preview screen using 3D Touch. I haven’t been able to replicate it without 3D Touch on the iPad, which makes the option available exclusively on the latest iPhones.

When viewing a page you want to save as PDF – say, a webpage in Safari or a note in the Notes app – open the share sheet, find the Print extension at the bottom, and tap it. This will open a Printer Options screen with a page preview in the lower half. You can swipe on pages to scroll through them, but what I didn’t know is that you can also press lightly on a page and then pop it open to get a Quick Look preview of the PDF file that’s going to be printed. Because it’s a PDF file, you can share it with other apps and action extensions, saving it elsewhere.

You can also generate PDFs from the Notes app.

You can also generate PDFs from the Notes app.

Thanks to this hidden feature, you’ll be able to share PDF files generated natively by iOS with other apps, including Dropbox and Workflow, without having to save the PDF to iBooks. I wish this could also be done on an iPad.

AfterPad’s Apple TV App Catalog→

We all love our Apple TVs, but nobody loves searching for apps and games on it. The Apple TV is a box with a tremendous amount of power, but it often feels like that power is locked behind a confusing and inaccessible app store.

This catalog aims to change that. AfterPad provides a web frontend for searching and browsing the Apple TV store, as well as curating the best of the best into an Editor’s Choice section geared towards power users.

Terrific work by Kevin MacLeod at AfterPad. Until Apple comes up with a solution to link to tvOS apps and browse its App Store on the web, the Apple TV App Catalog will be useful to look up app details, prices, and screenshots.

(And I’m pretty sure he coded all of this on an iPad Pro, which is even better.)

Permalink

Apple to Restore Pencil Navigation in Next iOS 9.3 Beta→

Following reactions from around the web this week on iOS 9.3 betas losing Pencil navigation features, Apple has now confirmed to The Verge that full Pencil support will return in the next iOS 9.3 beta:

Thankfully, Apple has no plans to cripple its Pencil accessory for the iPad Pro. After the most recent iOS 9.3 beta removed the ability to navigate around iOS with the $99 add-on — marketed as a drawing tool more than a stylus — Apple has confirmed with The Verge that all of those features will soon make a comeback. “We believe a finger will always be the primary way users navigate on an iPad, but we understand that some customers like to use Apple Pencil for this as well and we’ve been working on ways to better implement this while maintaining compatibility during this latest beta cycle,” a spokesperson said. “We will add this functionality back in the next beta of iOS 9.3.”

This has to be my favorite #MykeWasRight so far. I’m glad Apple listened on this one.

Permalink

Twitter’s Fabric App Brings Real-Time Analytics and Crash Reporting to the iPhone

Over the past few years, Twitter has created and acquired an impressive array of mobile developer tools that it offers under the umbrella brand of Fabric. Today, Twitter released an iPhone companion app for Fabric that puts two of its most popular tools in your pocket – analytics and crash reporting. I have been testing Fabric, the iOS app, with two iOS apps provided by Twitter for the last few days and I’m impressed with its ability to sift through, organize, and display large quantities of data in an effective and meaningful way on an iPhone.

Read more

Placeboard: Your Favorite Places in One Location

Among my many bad habits is forgetting to keep frequently-needed information in a convenient place. Whether it’s a phone number or the address of one of my favorite restaurants, I can’t seem to develop a method for storing data I need.

Placeboard is an app that could change that. It’s a storage system for your favorite locations and, with a few smart features, is a great one, too.

Read more

A Cautionary Tale About Contacts and Backups

On episode 306 of Mac Power Users, David and Katie talked about contacts on OS X and iOS, including a discussion of Interact, which sounds pretty much like the app that Apple should have built for contacts on iOS. They also mentioned Contacts Cleaner which I consider an indispensable tool for managing contacts on OS X.

However, there are a few details about backing up and restoring contacts that I wanted to add. And by “details” I mean “war stories” and by “war stories” I mean “let me tell you how I got these scars.”

Read more

Apple Pencil and Navigation in iOS 9.3 Beta→

Serenity Caldwell, writing for iMore on an Apple Pencil regression in the iOS 9.3 beta:

Unfortunately, whether by bug or intentional design, the Pencil’s navigational prowess appears to have vanished in the iOS 9.3 public betas. With 9.3, you can no longer scroll or manipulate text; the only places the Pencil works are on canvas or when pressing digital buttons.

Normally, I don’t write about beta bugs and features, because it’s a beta: There are always bugs, and features change. But this functionality is important enough that I wanted to talk about it before Apple submits its final 9.3 release. It could be a bug, yes: But several betas in, we’ve seen fixes for Smart Connector keyboards and new features, and the Pencil remains crippled. Which makes me think, more and more, that this is a conscious decision on the part of Apple’s engineering team. (I did reach out to the company about the issue, and will update if and when I receive a response.)

Like Serenity, I refrained from bringing it up due to the beta nature of iOS 9.3, but, as I mentioned earlier today in my iPad story, this is starting to feel like a conscious decision on Apple’s part.

I think it would be a mistake to remove general Pencil navigation features from iOS 9 at this point. While Apple may have not envisioned the Pencil to be used for tasks beyond drawing and sketching, owners of an iPad Pro have gotten used to the functionality four months into owning the device. Using a Pencil to scroll lists and interact with menus has serious benefits for people with RSI problems, and, I have to say, it’s just convenient if you don’t want to switch back and forth between touch and Pencil all the time.

I hope that Apple will listen and restore the full Pencil functionality as seen in iOS 9.2 when the final version of iOS 9.3 ships.

Permalink

Working on the iPad: One Year Later, Still My Favorite Computer

My iPad Pro Home screen.

My iPad Pro Home screen.

Four years ago, I struggled to move from a Mac to an iPad. Today, I only have to open my MacBook once a week. And I wish I didn’t have to.

In February 2015, after years of experiments and workarounds, I shared the story of how the iPad Air 2 became my primary computer. The article, while unsurprising for MacStories readers who had been following my iPad coverage since 2012, marked an important milestone in my journey towards being Mac-free.

As I wrote last year:

Three years ago, as I was undergoing cancer treatments, I found myself in the position of being unable to get work done with a Mac on a daily basis because I wasn’t always home, at my desk. I was hospitalized for several weeks or had to spend entire days waiting to talk to doctors. I couldn’t write or manage MacStories because I couldn’t do those tasks on my iPhone and I couldn’t take my MacBook with me. I’d often go weeks without posting anything to the website – not even a short link – because I couldn’t do it from my bed. I began experimenting with the iPad as a device to work from anywhere and, slowly but steadily, I came up with ways to speed up my workflow and get things done on iOS. I promised myself I’d never let a desk set my work schedule or performance anymore.

Being tied to a desktop computer isn’t an option for me. No matter what life has in store for the future, I have to be ready to work from anywhere. I have to consider the possibility that I won’t always be okay, working from the comfort of my living room. That means having a computer that can follow me anywhere, with a screen big enough to type on, and a higher degree of portability than a MacBook. That means using an iPad. That means iOS.

The past 12 months have cemented this vision and raised new questions. But, more importantly, the iPad and iOS 9 have been essential to launching a project I’ve been working on for years.

At this point, I can’t imagine using a computer that isn’t an iPad anymore.

Read more

Apple, FBI, and iPhone Security: A Roundup of News and Links

Apple made headlines around the world last week when Tim Cook announced, in an open letter to their customers, that Apple would oppose a court order requiring it to circumvent iOS security features. Since then, new developments in the story have broken and many have contributed with explanations of why the outcome of this battle between Apple and the FBI is significant.

Our relative silence on this topic at MacStories is not because we don’t think this story is important. To the contrary, we believe it is incredibly important and we applaud the principled stand that Cook’s Apple has decided to make. But we are hesitant to wade into this important debate, which can be incredibly technical, when there are far smarter minds out there who better deserve your time and attention.

To that end, we’ve compiled a list of useful news articles, opinion pieces, and other resources that we believe are worth a few minutes of your time.

Read more