Mastodon: @johnvoorhees@macstories.netEmail: voorhees@macstories.net
John, MacStories’ Managing Editor, has been writing about Apple and apps since joining the team in 2015. He also co-hosts MacStories’ podcasts, including AppStories, which explores of the world of apps, MacStories Unwind, a weekly recap of everything MacStories and more, and MacStories Unplugged, a behind-the-scenes, anything-goes show exclusively for Club MacStories members.
Great reads and links from around the web.
Apple published an article on its security blog this week explaining Memory Integrity Enforcement and how it secures iOS devices. (Link)
Ever wonder about how quantum computers can theoretically break modern encryption? Ben Brubaker explains how it works in a fascinating story for Wired. (Link)
Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.
It’s been a while since I kicked the tires on Kagi, but as I recall, one of the search engine’s touted AI features is its finely-tuned summarizer. Kagi has spun that off as a separate free iOS app that works from the share sheet. Send the app an article or other text, and it can summarize it, as well as adjust its style, length, and language. (The app supports 30 languages.) The text you get back from Kagi Summarize can then be formatted using a variety of presets to dial in a look you like.
More stories for Club members.
For the first time in a while, Apple has made it hard for me to choose which iPhone to buy. The Air looks amazing but has compromises, while the Pro line has the power I want, but I’m lukewarm on the design and colors. In the end, I’ll go Pro, but aside from one feature, I found the iPhone portion of this year’s fall event a little boring.
Don’t get me wrong. I think this year’s iPhone lineup is better than it’s been the last couple of years. However, the iPhone has become such a utilitarian device to me that I don’t get all that excited about it like I used to. I’m also just more into apps and OSes than hardware.
Great reads and links from around the web.
The Browser Company has been acquired by Atlassian, an enterprise-focused corporation. Given Atlassian’s focus and acquisition, I’m not optimistic about the future of Arc or Dia, but with a big company behind them, there’s always the possibility that The Browser Company will flourish. (Link)
The review season has prevented me from wading into the 200-plus-page PDF decision in the antitrust case against Google, but the upshot is that Google is keeping Chrome and its contracts with browser vendors like Apple. (Link)
Tips and tricks to master your apps and be more productive.
One of the more annoying tasks I do every day, over and over, is creating Markdown-formatted links, like this: [MacStories](https://www.macstories.net). Markdown links are great because they’re much more readable than raw HTML, but adding them as you write a story or assemble a list of articles can be laborious, requiring a lot of copying and pasting, brackets, and parentheses. So today, I thought I’d share a few tools I use to speed up the process.
The first and simplest situation is when you have text in something you’re writing that you want to turn into a link. Most Markdown-aware text editors have a keyboard shortcut that can handle this. Personally, I use Markdown Insert, an Obsidian plugin that my son Finn wrote and we shared with Club members in 2021. With it, I select some text and type the hotkey assigned to the plugin, and Markdown Insert takes care of the rest, taking any URL on my clipboard and linking it with the proper formatting to the highlighted text.
Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.
Flying Meat’s image editor was updated to version 8.2 this week, adding a diffing tool to the app’s export feature. Now, when you export an image, you have the option to view a highlighted overlay of any changes made to it. There’s also a new feature that adds non-destructive linear and radial multi-stop gradient filters to images. I’m a little out of my image editing depths when it comes to such things, but I’m sure if you understand what that means, you’ll probably be happy with the change. There are a bunch of other smaller changes in this release that you can read about on the Flying Meat blog, as well as an update on preparing the app for Liquid Glass.
Going into my August break, I was feeling a little overwhelmed. My office had gotten disorganized and out of control, and I had some projects on my mind that I’d been putting off for too long. I wanted to come out of the break in a good frame of mind for the busy fall season and feeling like I’d accomplished a few things, but I also wanted to take it easy. I had a couple of long weekend trips planned, which meant the time I could spend on projects was limited, so I decided on two tightly defined projects that I thought could have a big impact.
The first was reorganizing my office. On the surface, not much has changed, although my bookshelf is less cluttered and there are no longer things stacked on my desk. What I did, though, was pull out everything from every shelf, storage bin, and other surface and reorganize it. It was overwhelming at first, but as I slowly decided where everything should go, the progress snowballed. It was the perfect project for a break because it was physical, not mental. I caught up on podcasts, listened to some music, and just chipped away at organizing all my gear for a couple of days.
