We also saw new apps successfully remix technologies and approaches and apply them to new domains, and of course, automation continued to be a central theme, with a long list of established and new apps testing the waters of Shortcuts for Mac for the first time.Īs a result, we had a wealth of apps to choose from as always for the following awards:Īlong with the Lifetime Achievement Award and Readers’ Choice Award, which was chosen by Club MacStories members, that makes a total of nine award winners plus seven runners-up for these fourth annual MacStories Selects Awards, which began in 2018. The resurgence of note-taking apps ignited by apps like Craft, Obsidian, and Roam Research continued unabated. Supported By MacStadiumĢ021 has been an exciting year for apps. The MacStories Selects awards are our chance to pause and appreciate just how fortunate we are to have such a wealth of fantastic tools available from so many talented developers before we start the new year. MacStories has been covering apps since Federico published his first story in 2009, and having covered thousands of apps spanning more than twelve years, it’s time to look back at all of those apps and honor the standouts that have withstood the test of time with an annual Lifetime Achievement Award, which you can read about more in a special story that includes a bit of history about the winning app and interview with its developer.Īpps have become part of the fabric of our daily lives, which makes it easy to forget that they’re the result of hard work by creative people. This year, as we headed into the final stretch of the year, we decided it was time for the MacStories Selects to honor more than just the apps from the past year. So, after many months of testing those developers’ apps, we stop to recognize the best. Some are familiar favorites, but most are new. Every year, the MacStories team uses hundreds of apps. That seems like a better use to me than having a bunch of functions that constantly change as you switch between windows.John: The MacStories Selects Awards are our annual celebration of the apps we love and the people who make them. I can see the potential value of putting stuff that otherwise sits as icons in the menubar into the TouchBar instead. But then you run into weird interface issues where only part of the screen is touch-sensitive, so that’s no good, either. It might have done better if it were at the bottom of the screen rather than the top of the keyboard. The one thing I do like about it is that its controls for adjusting volume & brightness are better than single press buttons and probably better than mouse- or touchpad-controlled sliders. It just feels wrong.įurthermore, it mostly duplicates controls also available elsewhere (by design and by necessity, since not all Macs had a TouchBar), so it’s an additional place to look for a way to do something-I don’t want more places to search for actionable interface elements! They expect it to feel like pressing a keyboard key, and instead it has zero physical feedback. Based on it’s location and appearance (and the way it replaced the function key row), it seems like it wants to be part of the keyboard, but it is completely jarring whenever I push the buttons on the TouchBar with my fingers. The TouchBar was an interesting idea that I don’t think works very well. If the original Mac OS had needed to support a large body of users who had cursor keys but didn’t have a mouse, then maybe the mouse would have gone away just like the Touch Bar. This brings to mind the decision (attributed, I believe, to Jobs) to omit cursor keys from the original Mac keyboard–developers will adopt a feature if they have to, and they had to support the mouse. So even if you had a great idea to implement a feature with the Touch Bar, you would still have had to develop an alternate implementation for the large population of users who didn’t have one. Apple never stopped selling non-Touch Bar laptops, and the Touch Bar was never available on any sort of external keyboard for use on iMacs or Mac Minis (or iPads for that matter). This lack of support seems to me to have resulted from the lack of universality. It failed not due to lack of capability but due to lack of support, from both Apple and third-party developers. I’m not surprised that they killed the Touch Bar, but I am disappointed.
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