The fantastic Apple Frames Shortcut created by MacStories’ Federico Viticci has been upgraded today with a major new version. The latest iteration was completely rewritten for improved performance and reliability. And it comes with support for iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max, Apple Watch Ultra, and M2 MacBook Air, multiple display resolution options, and more.
MacStories is well-known as a leader for Apple device automation and now Federico Viticci and company will be hosting a neat month-long event focused on just that. Automation April is launching today with original content, special activities/podcast episodes, a contest, and more with a focus on the Shortcuts app.
The valuable Apple Frames Shortcut created by MacStories’ Federico Viticci has received a great update today. The utility that adds physical device frames to screenshots now has support for the new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro, Apple Watch Series 7, additional languages, and more.
The 20 MB guide is compatible with iPads as well as Macs running iBooks on OS X Mavericks, and it takes advantage of the app with inline video playback, two-page page layouts, and built-in annotations (plus, of course, font size and color controls for reading settings).
I released Writing Aid to the App Store today. Due to the glaring conflicts of interest in reviewing my own app for 9to5Mac or even having my colleagues review it, I thought instead I’d give some insight into the creative and development process behind the app. If you are looking for a more traditional review, please check out these writeups over at MacStories, Beautiful Pixels and iMore.
As a finished product, Writing Aid is best described as a dictionary app that also works in reverse. However, it didn’t start that way. For a while, I have been annoyed by the offerings on the store. Most apps are bogged down with gimmicky extras like ‘Word of the Day’ and such and many have been abandoned by their owners (which means they aren’t updated for iOS 7 either). When I’m writing, I don’t want distractions. I want to be able to type a word in a box and get a definition.
A report from MacStories yesterday claimed that many third-party websites selling developer access to Apple’s iOS betas are no longer live.
The blog apparently contacted the websites’ owners. It soon confirmed with at least one that Apple recently submitted a copyright infringement claim, so the website’s hosting service immediately took the page offline. A Wired report from last month by Andy Baio first spotlighted the trend of websites that sell developer access to iOS betas by doling UDID activations to any paying user. Apple restricts UDID activation to registered developers.
The Wired report allegedly sparked a flurry of website takedown requests. The CEO of Fused, a hosting service, even admitted to the MacStories, “Apple has been fairly heavy-handed with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests to the ones we host”:
After noticing several of the sites mentioned in Baio’s article had become unavailable in recent weeks (activatemyios.com, iosudidregistrations.com, activatemyudid.com, udidregistration.com, instantudidactivation.com), we reached out to some of them asking whether Apple was behind the takedown of their “services”, which infringed on Apple’s developer agreement. While most of our emails bounced, we heard back from one of the site owners (who asked to remain anonymous), who confirmed his hosting provider took down the site after a complaint for copyright infringement by Apple. Similarly, the CEO of Fused tweeted in a reply to Andy Baio that Apple had been “fairly heavy-handed” with DMCA requests to UDID-selling sites hosted on their network.
In the email, the site owner said that their website made $75,000 since last June, when Apple released the first beta of iOS 6 to developers. “We do not believe our service was infringing and our services did not violate their guidelines for iOS 6″, the site owner commented, adding that they will soon launch another similar site, “with better and more secure data lines to handle Apple”.
The owner of another site replied to our emails with a “no comment”. According to him, “the Wired article has caused all these sites to go down”.
Indeed, it appears Apple has started taking action against these sites recently, and more precisely after Wired ran the story on UDID activation.
To install an iOS beta, developers must register their account with Apple and receive UDID activation for $99 a year. Third-party websites, on the other hand, sell UDID activation for a cheaper price—usually around $10.
AirDisplay, a $10 application that lets your iPad function as a second (or third, fourth, etc.) display for your Mac/PC, was just updated to allow it to push HiDPI pixels to the new iPad. We explained it all here.
Developer Avatron announced its “Air Display”app, which allows iPhones, iPads and Macs to act as a second or third monitor, would be implementing support for the 2048-by-1536 resolution of the new iPad’s 264-DPI Retina display. That means you will soon be able to use your third-generation iPad as a 2048-by-1536 computer monitor.
To turn on HiDPI, you just go to the Displays Preferences and select 1024×768 (HiDPI)…HiDPI has been shipping with Mac OS X for some time. But it isn’t enabled in the System Preferences, because until now there hasn’t been a mass-produced computer display with high enough resolution to do it justice. That’s where Air Display and the new iPad come in.
