On This Day in Collections

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since I first wrote about the Collections app for Club MacStories, but it’s true. Now, I’m back to share a new way I’m using the app: an On This Day view to resurface entries from the current date in previous years. I love this type of feature for my journal and photo library, so I thought it would be worth exploring if I could replicate it with my Collections databases. It turned out to be a fun experiment and one I now get to benefit from every day.

If you’re interested in learning more about how I added an On This Day feature to Collections, check out my story in the Club MacStories Monthly Log.

Pinning

In the November edition of the Club MacStories Monthly Log, I got a chance to write about an app that’s been on my list to cover for many months: Pinning. On the surface, it’s a straightforward countdown app, but Pinning has so many integrations and features built in that it’s hard to summarize everything it’s capable of. Rather than try (and fail) to do so, I instead shared some tips I’ve picked up from my personal use of the app to help others get the most out of it.

I hope you’ll check out the story if that sounds like something you’d be into, and even if not, I highly recommend giving Pinning a try. It’s an app that I’ve come to rely on more and more over time, and it’s constantly surprising me with the way it continues to grow and improve.

Ticci Tabs

A couple of months ago, Jonathan Ruiz released a new app called Ticci Tabs that I’ve really been enjoying. Why did it take me so long to write about it? Great question. Let’s just say I was waiting to publish this in honor of the first birthday of Jonathan’s other app Bridges, shall we?

My tardiness aside, Ticci Tabs is a great tool for saving websites that you visit frequently. Instead of bookmarking a link in a browser where it might get lost or you might get distracted, you can save it in Ticci Tabs to quickly access it anytime. I’m using it as a quick way to get to a bunch of pages I open often, like Wordle, my Walmart orders page, and Netflix’s network speed test.

I’ve been following the app’s development from its origin as a rapid response to Federico’s request on the Connected podcast to its maturation into a full-fledged product and beyond. It includes some really nice touches like support for sign-in links sent via email, an optional retro UI, Shortcuts actions, and alternative app icons. And it’s gotten some major new additions in its short life, including the ability to organize links with tags and support for iOS 18’s system-wide controls.

From its laser-focused purpose to its development story to its continued growth, I love everything about Ticci Tabs, and I use it every day. It’s a free app with very straightforward functionality that can fit a lot of different use cases, so I recommend trying it out if you haven’t yet.

The New Reeder

Ever since I started using RSS to read articles from my favorites sites, Reeder has been my go-to app for catching up on my feeds. A brand new version is out today, and it takes the app in a whole new direction. From my review on MacStories:

The best word to describe the new Reeder is "ambitious." Its purpose is not just to be your RSS reader, but your inbox for keeping up with feeds of many different kinds from various sources across the Internet – text from websites, sure, but also videos on YouTube, audio from podcasts, posts on social media, and more. It's a one-stop shop for the feeds you follow online, collecting them together into a single timeline that you can seamlessly browse across all of your devices.

For more details on the update and my thoughts after using it daily for some time, check out the full review. It was a privilege to get to cover the app for the site, and I had a lot of fun putting the story together.

Collections

In today’s issue of MacStories Weekly, I kicked off a two-part series on Collections, a database app I’ve been trying and found to be extremely useful. I’ve used it to build four databases so far, two of which – a collection of MacStories articles that I’ve edited and a log of my cars’ maintenance appointments – are documented in the story.

It’s less a review of the app and more an introduction to how it works using practical examples from my day-to-day life. My hope is that it will inspire some readers to try Collections themselves and use it to build something cool of their own.

Check out the story on Club MacStories, and be on the lookout for part two coming next week in the Monthly Log!

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Update: The second story in this series is now available as part of the June 2024 Club MacStories Monthly Log. It covers how I’m using Collections as a budgeting tool and a creativity log recording everything I’ve published online since 2008, plus some more techniques for getting the most out of the app.