Recently Amazon rolled out Audible Channels as a new benefit to Prime subscribers. Channels similar to podcasts and to some degree compete for listeners. If you are an Amazon Prime member and an Audible customer then you can subscribe to topical feeds filled with interesting content like The Great Courses, McSweeney’s, and HBR. The topics are interesting, such as a Great Course series on the realities of life in ancient Rome.

TJ on Twitter sent out the fire alarm for ScanSnap users. Fujitsu is telling ScanSnap owners not to upgrade to Sierra because they failed to update their software for the new OS. That link sums up a complete failure by Fujitsu. Their scanners will simply fail to scan in a variety of ways. I recommend using Scanner Pro on your iPhone.

Well, well, well. This is just great. A very generous person just dropped me a note today to say that in iOS 10 it’s very easy to convert an email to a PDF. From the standard message print screen pinch out to open the message in a new window. Now use the share sheet to send the PDF to another app. Apparently this has been available since iOS 9 in some form or another.

Here’s a couple of nice options that may not be well known. You can share a contact by visiting the contact card in iOS and using the share sheet to send it as a text message. The shared contact can then be added, in its entirety, by the recipient on their iOS device.1 Maybe even more obscure than sharing a contact card, is sharing a voice message from iOS. While the message is selected for playing, tap the share icon in the upper right corner of the message.

Every year there’s one or two iOS apps that really elevate the platform to a new level for me. In the early days it was Tweetbot and iThoughts. Then it was Evernote and Editorial, and Workflow. More recently, scanning applications like Scanner Pro or Scanbot have been tremendous new tools. This year I think there are two or three fundamentally new apps that really change how I use my mobile devices.

Hazel for Mac is 10 years old and to celabrate Noodlesoft has a 50% off sale running right now. Just visit the store and get it for $16. Hazel is one of the main reasons I’d never go iOS only. It makes my Mac far too efficient to abandon.

I’ve been using MailMate for years and contributed to the fundraiser for version 2. If you’re a paid user then you should have access to the beta features, including the new design just released. The new modern theme looks good and I especially like how quoting works. Revision 5260 is pretty significant. The beta development for version 2 is taking longer than I guessed but as a paid user, it’s like I already have it through stable beta builds.

Plex is one of the best investments I’ve made in any service. In the last month they’ve announced two major new features: Plex for Sonos The Plex DVR I’m a lifetime Plex Pass holder and I use a lot of the features. What I find most striking is how Plex continues to push the service forward with top notch software. The iOS apps are great, the server is rock solid, and the library sharing is easier than almost anything else I’ve tried.

My favorite iOS browser has a good update out today. iCab 9.5 adds smart folders, bookmark coloring, download and bookmark searching. There’s a lot in this update as usual. Just take a look at the version history for an idea of how powerful this browser is. The new version offers a couple of features for in app purchase and is pretty honest about needing the IAP to support development. But only a couple of non-critical features are held back for IAP.

From Charl Botha: Fast forward to July 15, 2016 (there’s that lab journal again…) when, after receiving an email from Google asking me to indicate how exactly I would like them to use my data to customise adverts around the web, and after thinking for a bit about what kind of machine learning tricks I would be able to pull on you with 12 years of your email, I decided that I really had to make alternative plans for my little email empire.