As Twitter was crumbling under Elon Musk’s new leadership in 2023, various online circles found themselves flocking to alternative platforms. While some may have kept using Twitter (now known as… X), a non-negligible number of communities migrated over to Mastodon and other small … | Continue reading
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: This week, Federico and I cover the developer features we’re excited to see come to third-party apps later this year. This episode is sponsored by: Vitally: A new era for customer success productivity. Get a free pair … | Continue reading
Delta, the retro gaming emulator that took the App Store by storm when it was released earlier this spring and now has over 10 million users, has been updated in the EU via AltStore PAL and for Patreon members, who can sideload the app. An update to the App Store version has been … | Continue reading
Insta360 X4. Source: Insta360. Insta360 has had a busy week. Earlier this spring, the company released the X4, an advanced 360º action camera, which became available at Apple.com for the first time last week. Then this week, the company released the Insta360 Flow Pro, an AI-power … | Continue reading
All of MacStories’ podcasts are now available on our YouTube channel. Currently, Comfort Zone is the only show that includes video, but now you can also listen to our audio-only shows via YouTube. Here are links to each show: Video Podcasts Comfort Zone Audio-Only Podcasts AppSto … | Continue reading
Indie App Sales is back with excellent deals on apps from many of your favorite developers. With over 300 apps to choose from, the complete list is full of gems like: FitWoody Bills to Budget Plinky Bushel Denim Everlog Home Widget HomeCam HomeUI PowerPhotos Prizmo 5 Sunlitt Text … | Continue reading
Today, Tapbots released version 2.0 of Ivory, the company’s Mastodon client for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The update brings a notable list of improvements, one exciting new feature that should make it easier to follow and curate specific topics on the fediverse, and a fully redesig … | Continue reading
Alvin Cabral, writing for The National, got a nice quote from Apple’s Billy Sorrentino on the redesigned Photos app in iOS 18: “As our features, users and libraries have grown, so has the density of the [Photos] app. So rather than hunt and peck throughout, we’ve created a simple … | Continue reading
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: This week on Magic Rays of Light, Sigmund and Devon highlight Apple Original film Fancy Dance starring Lily Gladstone, discuss Sigmund’s experience with the new Beats Pill, share their thoughts on the third season of … | Continue reading
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: This week, Federico and I share tips on iPadOS, macOS, RSS, cross-platform file transfers, and more. This episode is sponsored by: Sofa – Be More Intentional with Your Downtime. For episode 3 of NPC, we cover the late … | Continue reading
Eugen Rochko, writing on Mastodon’s blog today: To reinforce and encourage Mastodon as the go-to place for journalism, we’re launching a new feature today. You will notice that underneath some links shared on Mastodon, the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associa … | Continue reading
CC0: No rights reserved. Federico: Historically, technology has usually advanced in lockstep with opening up new creative opportunities for people. From word processors allowing writers to craft their next novel to digital cameras letting photographers express themselves in new w … | Continue reading
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: This week on Magic Rays of Light, Sigmund and Devon highlight new Apple Original bilingual comedy series Land of Women, discuss latest with regards to Apple and the Digital Markets Acts, and recap The Big Cigar. Niléa … | Continue reading
Half-Life was a defining game of the late 90s, which is why Mac users were excited when a Mac OS port was announced in 1999. However, within months, the game was canceled. As Greg Gant writes on Inaudible Discussion: The official reason why the port was axed was given by Gabe New … | Continue reading
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: This week, Federico and John attempt to clear up confusion about MacStories’ position on AI web crawlers before rethinking email apps in light of the update to Apple’s Mail app coming this fall. On AppStories+, Federi … | Continue reading
For years, Bartender has remained one of the best ways to manage the Mac’s menu bar, especially on newer MacBook models with a notch where menu bar real estate is even more valuable. I reviewed the great Bartender 5 last year and came away impressed. Unfortunately, though, my rel … | Continue reading
Your time is precious. So, instead of spinning your wheels as you look for the next thing to watch, read, play, or do, try Sofa for iPhone, iPad, and soon, the Vision Pro. It lets you be more intentional with your downtime by creating organized lists as you discover new things to … | Continue reading
Today, the European Commission informed Apple that based on its preliminary investigation it has determined that the company is in violation of the Digital Markets Act. The EC has also opened a separate non-compliance procedure against Apple over the Core Technology Fee and other … | Continue reading
Nice find by Kaleb Cadle in the first beta of iPadOS 18: Now in the Files app on iPadOS 18, when we right click or hold press on an external drive and select “Erase”, new options appear for reformatting the drive. Currently, the format options here are APFS, ExFAT, and MS-DOS (FA … | Continue reading
A new round in the fight between the EU and Apple has been brewing for a while now. About a week ago, the Financial Times reported that unnamed sources said that the EU was poised to levy significant fines against the company over a probe of Apple’s compliance with the Digital Ma … | Continue reading
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: This week on Magic Rays of Light, Sigmund and Devon share early hands-on impressions of the tvOS 18 developer beta, highlight Apple Original drama series Presumed Innocent, and recap the second season of The Big Door … | Continue reading
Apple announced that today it is releasing Final Cut Pro 2 for the iPad and Final Cut Camera for the iPhone on the App Store. Both apps were announced at the company’s Let Loose event in May. To recap, Final Cut Pro 2 for the iPad adds the following features: Live Multicam, which … | Continue reading
Last week, Federico and I asked Robb Knight to do what he could to block web crawlers deployed by artificial intelligence companies from scraping MacStories. Robb had already updated his own site’s robots.txt file months ago, so that’s the first thing he did for MacStories. Howev … | Continue reading
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: This week, Federico takes us on his journey to build the world’s best eGPU, and we take a first look at the Anbernic RG35XXSP, a foldable retro handheld that two out of the three of us have received. This week, Federi … | Continue reading
In the wake of the Digital Markets Act, Apple made a couple of worldwide changes to its App Review Guidelines, along with many EU-specific updates. One of the worldwide updates was to allow third-party game streaming services. Today, Antstream became the first game streaming serv … | Continue reading
Today, Apple announced that this fall, the company will offer a new curriculum for its Developer Academy students focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence. According to Apple: Beginning this fall, every Apple Developer Academy student will benefit from custom-built … | Continue reading
Over the past several days, we’ve made some changes at MacStories to address the ingestion of our work by web crawlers operated by artificial intelligence companies. We’ve learned a lot, so we thought we’d share what we’ve done in case anyone else would like to do something simil … | Continue reading
Ari Saperstein, writing for The Guardian, interviewed Ben Cave, Apple’s global head of podcasts and Sarah Herrlinger, who manages accessibility policy for the company, about Apple Podcasts transcripts. The feature, which was introduced in March, automatically generates transcript … | Continue reading
Earlier today on Mastodon, I shared some concerns regarding the Books app in iPadOS 18 and how Apple implemented the new tab bar design in the app. Effectively, by eschewing a sidebar, the app has returned to feeling like a blown-up iPhone version – something I hoped we had left … | Continue reading
Devin Davies, the developer of Crouton. To wrap up our week of WWDC coverage, we just published a special episode of AppStories that was recorded in the Apple Podcasts Studio at Apple Park. Federico and I interviewed three of this year’s Apple Design Award winners: Devin Davies. … | Continue reading
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: This week on Magic Rays of Light, Sigmund and Devon recap the Apple TV and entertainment announcements at WWDC – including tvOS 18, visionOS 2, Immersive Video updates, and more – and score their event predictions. We … | Continue reading
Dan Moren has an excellent guide on Six Colors that explains how to exclude your website from the web crawlers used by Apple, OpenAI, and others to train large language models for their AI products. For many sites, the process simply requires a few edits to the robots.txt file on … | Continue reading
Apple’s announcement of “dark mode” icons has me thinking about how I would approach adapting “light mode” icons for dark mode. I grabbed 12 icons we made at Parakeet for our clients to illustrate some ways of going about it. Before that though, let’s take some inventory. Of the … | Continue reading
From Apple’s Machine Learning Research1 blog: Our foundation models are trained on Apple’s AXLearn framework, an open-source project we released in 2023. It builds on top of JAX and XLA, and allows us to train the models with high efficiency and scalability on various training ha … | Continue reading
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: For the latest WWDC episode of AppStories, Federico is joined by Myke Hurley to talk about the Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence before John pops up with some AI tidbits and a WWDC vibe check from in and around Apple … | Continue reading
In what has become a yearly WWDC tradition, Apple executives have been out talking about the big announcements from this year’s conference. Craig Federighi, Greg Joswiak, John Giannandrea, and Tim Cook have given interviews to YouTubers, news sites, and John Gruber on a special e … | Continue reading
In a perfect world, end users would only work on managed devices with IT-approved apps. But every day, employees use personal devices and unapproved apps that aren’t protected by MDM, IAM, or any other security tool. There’s a giant gap between the security tools we have and the … | Continue reading
Yesterday, during its WWDC 2024 opening keynote, Apple officially revealed its latest software story for Apple TV. Coming this fall, tvOS 18 introduces new intelligence-based features such as InSight and on-device Siri, native 21:9 aspect ratio support, new screen savers, and a h … | Continue reading
Alongside updates to Apple’s platforms and Apple Intelligence, the company announced an assortment of new features coming to its line of services this fall. From the press release in Apple Newsroom: “So many of our users rely on Apple services throughout their day, from navigatin … | Continue reading
After months of anticipation and speculation about what Apple could be doing in the world of artificial intelligence, we now have our first glimpse at the company’s approach: Apple Intelligence. Based on generative models, Apple Intelligence uses a combination of on-device and cl … | Continue reading
Source: Apple. Earlier today, I got the very first live demo of Swift Assist, one of the many developer tools introduced today by Apple. I also saw code completion in action. It was an impressive demo, and although the tools seem like magic and will undoubtedly be valuable to dev … | Continue reading
Image: Apple. At its WWDC 2024 keynote held earlier today online and with an in-person event at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, Apple officially announced the next versions of the operating systems for iPhone and iPad – iOS and iPadOS 18. As widely speculated in the lead up … | Continue reading
During today’s WWDC keynote, Apple announced a number of updates to its watchOS software as well as some improvements to the Fitness and Workout apps. While there weren’t any groundbreaking features revealed, there were several interesting additions and a couple of long-requested … | Continue reading
At its WWDC 2024 keynote held earlier today, Apple officially announced the next version of macOS, macOS Sequoia. As per its naming tradition over the past decade, this new release is once again named after a location in California; the version number for macOS Sequoia will be ma … | Continue reading
Today, Apple revealed visionOS 2, the first major upgrade to the software powering Apple Vision Pro. The update, coming this fall, will include quality-of-life improvements, new ways to create and share spatial content, additional tools for developers, and more. Interacting with … | Continue reading
During the WWDC keynote earlier today, Apple devoted an entire section to home and audio updates coming this fall. These updates include features for tvOS, AirPods, and the Home app. We’ll have a full tvOS overview later, but first, let’s dive into what’s coming for AirPods and H … | Continue reading
During its WWDC 2024 keynote earlier today, Apple announced that the Vision Pro will be launching in more countries and regions later this month. Specifically, the Vision Pro will become available for pre-order in China mainland, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore on June 13, with a … | Continue reading
Raycast makes your Mac better because it’s fast, ergonomic, and reliable. Best of all, though, Raycast comes with powerful tools your Mac should have but didn’t. Plus, it’s extensible, with a rich catalog of extensions built by developers around the world that solve every product … | Continue reading