Ian Fuchs - page 4

Did you know that Gmail has more than 1.5 billion users? For a large portion of those users, email is something they must deal with on a regular basis — whether for work-related matters, personal communication or staying updated on the latest deals at their favorite retailers. Staying on top of your email can be a major pain, and even with all the smarts that Gmail offers, once you fall behind, it’s daunting to catch up.

Kiwi helps add a layer of convenience and intelligence to managing your Gmail and G Suite accounts on your Mac or Windows PC, all while offering the familiarity and comfort of Google’s mail platform.

If you’re in the market for an iPad Pro, but working on a budget, B&H Photo Video is currently offering the 2017 12.9-inch iPad Pro at an amazing discount. With savings ranging from $220 to $330 off, you can pick up last year’s biggest tablets for hundreds less than their 2018 counterparts.

With B&H’s current offering, you can get a 2nd Generation (2017) 12.9-inch iPad Pro with 64GB of storage and Wi-Fi for $579 (a $230 savings). Or get the fully loaded Wi-Fi + Cellular model with 512GB for a cool $999 (a $280 savings).

The best deal of the bunch, coming in at $330 off, is the 256GB Wi-Fi + Cellular model for $749.

The new iPad Pro is arguably the most powerful, most familiar, most versatile, and most fun computer you can get today. Yes, you read that correctly. I said computer.

For the past week, I’ve been testing out Apple’s latest 12.9” iPad Pro. I’ve used it around the house, and at work, in the kitchen, and in bed, at the coffee shop and on the couch – and it’s been great. I actually look forward to using it, and it has replaced both my MacBook and my iPhone for a lot of my most common situations.

It’s finally here – Apple’s most drastic change to iPad since it was introduced in 2010. The brand new iPad Pro with slimmer bezels, a gesture-based UI, blazing fast processors, and a downright gorgeous design. It’s the first Apple product in a long time that I’m truly excited to get my hands on.

So that’s what I did.

The Mac serves many roles for many people. Whether it’s used for creativity, research, development, content consumption, or as a server, there is a Mac for the job. During Apple’s October “More in the Making,” the company highlighted several of these key roles the Mac plays, and gave a shoutout to MacStadium’s incredible Mac server farm.

But what is MacStadium really doing, and what does it actually look like to be surrounded by hundreds of Mac mini? YouTube technology entertainer Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs had a chance to visit their Las Vegas facility to find out more.

At WWDC 2017, Apple announced speaker support for the Home app, powered by an update to AirPlay. While introducing Airplay 2, they highlighted several speaker makers that would add support for the new protocol. Nearly a year later, iOS 11.4 finally launched with support for the updated wireless audio protocol.

As of today – 4 months after becoming available in iOS – speaker manufacturer Libratone has made good on their AirPlay 2 promise.

In 2015, I purchased my wife a stainless steel Apple Watch (series 0) for her birthday. Since then, she’s used it to track hundreds of workouts, reply to thousands of texts, and triage countless notifications. She’s also told me nearly every day for the past year that she hates it and it never works right.

While that might be a bit of an exaggeration, she has a point. The original Apple Watch is slow and unresponsive. Plus, some features have become frustratingly unreliable (looking at you, Siri).

This year, we decided to upgrade her Apple Watch in time for our family vacation to Disney World. It was the perfect opportunity to test Apple’s magical wrist communicator at the most magical place on Earth.

With our 50 Essential iOS Apps series, the goal was to help you find some of the best apps for iPhone and iPad. Picking the finest offerings from the more than 2.2 million iOS apps in Apple’s App Store proved challenging. But we highlighted apps that offer excellent features or make life easier in various ways.

To wrap up the series, we’ve sorted the apps by category to make the list easier to browse. We’re also showcasing Cult of Mac readers’ alternatives to our picks.

(You’ll find reader faves linked at the end of this post. That’s especially helpful since one of our must-have apps is about to die an unceremonious death.)

With the release of iOS 12 earlier this week, Apple made broad sweeping improvements to the OS. Unfortunately, the update also came with a small bug for fitness zealots sporting a cabinet full of limited edition Activity challenge badges. If that just described your Apple Watch badge collection, you can cool your cycling shorts, everything will be ok.

Purchased digital content has been around since before the launch of the iTunes Store back in 2003, but things were much different then. Devices weren’t constantly connected, and streaming wasn’t the primary way to access your “purchased” (or subscription) content, and most things came in the form of physical media (VHS tapes, DVDs, CDs, or 8-Tracks). Now that things are streamed, stored in the cloud, and available across all our devices, digital content ownership is much more complicated than simply buying a movie, book, or album and having it indefinitely.

Accessory maker Satechi has been around for years, offering a wide range of charging solutions, headphones, dongles, and computer peripherals for both Mac and PC. Their newest Mac accessories, the Aluminum Bluetooth keyboard and Aluminum USB keyboard offer Apple-inspired design at a fraction of Apple’s keyboard prices.

For about 18 hours, iOS 12 beta testers were incessantly prompted to update to a new version of Apple’s upcoming software . Unfortunately, most found that no such update existed. The prompts, which appeared at every unlock of a users device sparked frustration, but also became fodder for musician and jingle creator Jonathan Mann.

Ikea, the Swedish-based “affordable” home furnishing company, is looking to expand its lineup of Trådfri smart home accessories to include an affordable smart switch. The report, which was first published on reddit and reported by Swedish tech site Teknikveckan, shows a pair of smart plug accessories that would allow your to control “dumb” devices with your smartphone or connected speaker.

The perfect cocktail can compliment nearly any moment in life. Whether it’s celebratory event, a social drink, or a work function, the blend of flavors in a quality drink can be icing on the cake. Highball makes saving or sharing your favorite drink recipes easy and beautiful. Best of all, you’ll never have to guess whether the perfect cosmo has 1oz of cranberry juice, or 2.

Staying informed and up-to-date with the latest news is tough. Scrolling through Twitter or browsing the web can often lead to news stories that you want to read, but can’t be bothered to read RIGHT NOW. With Pocket, you can save those stories for later and catch up on the stories you want to read on your schedule.

Research shows that keeping a journal is great for your mind. It allows you to clear your thoughts or think through problems in different ways. Finding a good way to journal is easy with the Day One app. Designed to provide a feature-rich, modern journaling experience, Day One gives you the ability to keep track of, write about, or create a virtual archive of almost anything you want.

For the past several years, the iPad has served as a tool to digitize the analog world. Board games are now virtual, books are electronic, and with the art app Paper by FiftyThree, your sketches and artwork are turned digital. Thanks to the incredible touch interface of the iPad and Apple Pencil, the app makes your device feel like its analog counterpart.

When Apple Music launched in 2015, the service received mixed reviews. One of the biggest gripes was the impact it had on the Music app. Instead of it being a place for your music library, the app began catering to the streaming service.

Cesium offers a better music library experience. The simple, brilliant app brings back the classic Music app (aka the “iPod” app), making it easy to view and enjoy your personal song library.

Email can be a total productivity bottleneck. Following conversations between multiple participants gets confusing. The unfortunate result of all this email chaos? Important tasks get lost in long email chains.

Luckily for collaborators everywhere, messaging app Slack replaces the need for internal email, allowing for real-time productivity and communication for teams. Instead of redundant threads and signatures, Slack strips away the cruft of the email inbox. It turns your communication into what it was meant to be — a conversation.

For the last few years, health has been a key focus area for Apple. Fitness tracking, sleep tracking, nutrition tracking, mindfulness and even reproductive health have made their way into the Health app. Unfortunately, when it comes to your sexual wellbeing, Apple’s offering is pretty minimal. With Clue: Period and Ovulation Tracker, you can track a wide range of physical and mental details and gain useful insights into patterns and abnormalities in your natural cycle.

Some of the most useful apps on iOS take system features and turn them up to 11. For a few years, the photos app has had basic markup tools but it’s felt underwhelming and lacked pro features. Annotable for iPhone and iPad adds pro-level annotation and markup tools to highlight or hide whatever you want in an image.

For the last few years, discussions about whether you can do “real work” on iOS have circled the internet. One of the most commonly cited issues with iOS was the lack of a file browser. In iOS 11, Apple gave us the Files app, but it suffers from some major limitations. Documents by Readdle takes the file management on iOS to the next level.

If you’ve ever done a freelance project, worked as a consultant, or spent any time being self employed, you know how important keeping track of time spent working can be. Some people prefer to log their time on a sheet of paper, while others have little routines to mark the start and stop of work. Hours for iPhone is a time tracking app designed to make logging your time easy.

Since its introduction, the iPad has slowly won over new markets of people. Over the past couple years, photo and image editing apps have found a home on Apple’s tablet. Pixelmator for iOS takes photo editing and graphic design on iOS to a new level, bringing a photoshop-like experience to your fingertips.

Streaming music has revolutionized the way we listen to music on the go. Starting with streaming radio, and quickly evolving to carrying millions of songs in your pocket (thanks to cellular data), streaming services have enabled incredible access and discovery of great music.

With Spotify, you can experience your favorites and discover great new music better than ever, thanks to algorithmic intelligence and some genius features.