Linked List: July 25, 2022

Monday, 25 July 2022

Twitter Poll for Safari Users: How Often Do You Use Tab Groups? 

I asked this on Twitter this morning — poll runs for another 12 hours. I’m genuinely curious how much this feature is used.

The Talk Show: ‘I’ve Kissed That Mouse’ 

Marco Arment returns to the show to talk about the new M2 MacBook Air and stuff.

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TextExpander Raises $41 Million in Funding 

Ingrid Lunden, reporting for TechCrunch:

Today, a company called TextExpander — which has identified and built a way to fix a similar gap in another repetitive aspect of business life, communications, by letting users create customized shortcuts to trigger longer text-based actions such as specific phrasing around a topic, calendar events, emails, messages, CRM systems and many other environments — is announcing $41.4 million in funding to expand something else: its business.

Alongside the funding, the company is also appointing a new CEO, J.D. Mullin, who is taking over from Philip Goward, who co-founded the company originally with Greg Scown. TextExpander was born out of another developer platform they built called Smile — you can read more about that early history, with an interesting nod to how they originally met at Macworld and how the threat of a clone led them to build for iOS after first launching on Mac, here — and both are keeping seats on the board and remaining involved in aspects of development.

Mullin arrives at TextExpander after a four-year stint as an executive at Intuit, a company beloved in the Mac community for its commitment to excellent platform-native software.

Apropos of nothing, longstanding rivals to TextExpander include Typinator, TypeIt4Me, and aText.

The Apple Store Time Machine 

Michael Steeber:

The Apple Store Time Machine is a celebration of the places and products that have shaped our lives for more than twenty years. This interactive experience recreates memorable moments in Apple history with painstaking detail and historical accuracy.

What Steeber has made here is astonishing. It’s effectively a Mac game that you download and explore. The “levels”, as it were, are exquisitely-detailed 3D recreations of four iconic Apple Stores, including the Fifth Avenue “cube” in New York. Each store has been rebuilt to look exactly like it did on grand opening day, right down to the boxes of software on the shelves. However uncannily accurate, nostalgic, and fun you might be thinking this sounds based on the above description, you’re underestimating it.

It’s free to download and explore, if you choose, but Steeber also has an option to pay a voluntary amount. If this pleases you even half as much as it does me, I’m sure you’ll do what I just did and pay for it.