Native Mac App Thursday
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If you’re like me, you might have thought, “I really wish I didn’t have to open a browser or switch browser windows every time I want to check Asana.” I hoped Asana, Inc. would make a native Mac app so I didn’t have to deal with this, but it wasn’t on their radar.
Fortunately, I discovered an incredible free piece of software called Fluid. Fluid basically turns web apps into native Mac apps that you can put right in your dock. This was important for me because as Asana became a major part of my workflow, I wanted it to behave like Things, which has been one of my favorite productivity apps for non-work tasks.
1 day ago The only native app I want on my future ASi MacBook is MS Office. 22july2013 Said: Maybe the future of all apps is through a browser, especially if HTML starts supporting app-like user interfaces. Twitter discontinued its native Mac app in February 2018. Thursday October 15, 2020 10:55 am PDT by Juli Clover. Pre-orders for the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 12 Pro are set to kick off on Friday.
The process is simple. Download and install Fluid and when it asks for the URL of the web app, just copy and paste the link of your “My Tasks” Asana page. Fluid does the rest to create an app that you can place in your dock for all your productivity pleasure. It also works great for other web apps, like Google Analytics or Spotify.
Pro Tip: I like my dock and desktop to look nice, so I changed the icon of the resulting Asana app so that it looks like an Asana icon. Here’s how to do it:
That gives you time to download and store your photos on a Mac. Photo Stream storage does not count against your free iCloud Photos 5GB cap.Here are the highlights:. Instead, up to 1,000 recent photos are uploaded and stored on Apple’s servers for 30 days. It’s different from iCloud Photos in that it doesn’t store your photos in the cloud indefinitely. What is Photo Stream?Introduced in 2011 alongside iOS 5, Photo Stream is part of Apple’s basic, free plan. Access photos in photos app on mac.
- Download a 512×512 pixel or larger Asana (or generic productivity) .png like this one: Download
- Right-click the .png you downloaded and select “Get Info.” Click on the icon in the top left of the info window so it gets a blue highlight. Press “CMD + C” to copy. (Note: If you only see a generic .png logo instead of the icon you want to copy, open the .png in Preview, press “CMD + A” to highlight everything and then press “CMD + C” to copy)
- Right-click the Asana app and select “Get Info.” Click the icon so there’s a blue highlight, and press “CMD + V” to paste.
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There you have it! A beautiful logo on your app that you can stick in your dock.
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One final note: If you integrate Asana with other platforms (like Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Harvest, etc.), you may need to go into the preferences and whitelist a few URLs so Fluid knows it’s OK to visit those sites as well. So as an example, if your organization tracks time using Harvest (save 50% off your first month using coupon code ASANATRAINING) then do the following:
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- Click on your newly created Asana “app” and then click on the name of the app in the toolbar.
- Go to “Preferences” and then “Whitelist.”
- Add the following URLs for the services you plan to use (including asterisks):
- *google.com* (Log in through Google)
- *harvestapp.com* and *getharvest.com* (Harvest time-tracking)
- *box.com* (Box file-sharing)
- *dropbox.com* (Dropbox file-sharing)
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Monday, 9 November 2020
Sketch, two weeks ago, celebrating their 10th anniversary and the joys of truly native Mac apps:
Native Mac App Thursday Night
Best of all, native Mac apps like ours are designed to fit withthe rest of the operating system. It’s hard to quantify, but ifyou use Apple’s built-in apps you immediately get a “feel” for howthings should work in native apps. When an app “fits in” with therest of the OS, it doesn’t just look and feel more at home on yourMac — it lowers the learning curve when you first open it. That’swhy we (and plenty of other great macOS developers) work hard tofollow the conventions set out in Apple’s Human InterfaceGuidelines, so that our Mac app has that same, familiar feel. Andyou can start using it instantly, from the first click.
This post put me in a small pickle. I absolutely had to link to it — I both love the message and the retro-Mac-inspired design of the post itself (dig those scrollbars!). But, Sketch was on the schedule to sponsor DF already. I was going to just toss in a link to this wonderful post in my sponsorship thank-you post, but it’s too good for that, and too important. It clearly deserves an entry of its own.
Sketch hits all the key marks about what best defines a great, truly native Mac app, particularly deep Mac tools for professional work. Customization that allows you, the user, to shape the tool into something personal, that fits your needs and idiosyncrasies. Familiarity — the je ne sais quoi of doing things, large and small, the Macintosh way — that makes new (or just new to you) Mac apps easy to get started with and intuitive to explore. And, well, just being a beautiful work of art unto itself.
I’ve taken to calling these apps “Mac-assed Mac apps” recently, but we need a better term. Je ne sais quoi means “a quality that cannot be described or named easily” — it’s no surprise it’s hard to categorize these apps with a term. Panic just introduced their splendid new programming editor Nova as “an extremely Mac-app Mac app”, which captures the sentiment (and sound) of “Mac-assed Mac app” in a purely joyous way. I like that. Whatever we call them, they’re worth embracing and celebrating, and Sketch sure as hell is one of them.
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