I’ve been keeping a journal in Day One since at least 2015, and I’ve got to say, the practice has become very engrained in my otherwise chaotic daily routine. Whenever I get asked about journaling, I always say that it’s a habit that can take any form you like. It can take place in a paper journal, in an app as written entries, as voice notes, or even as captioned photos in a photo diary. The reason I stuck with Day One over the years is because the app is incredibly flexible. It kept up with me during periods of my life when it was harder to write down my daily thoughts, and easier to type a couple of bullet points every day instead. I believe the best journaling tools are those that can adapt to you, not the other way around. But still, when Apple announced they were building their own Journal app, built right into iOS 17, I was excited by the prospect of switching things up in this little habit of mine.

This week, Apple released the Journal app as part of iOS 17.2. As expected, the app is unfortunately only available on the iPhone. Nevertheless, Apple’s first entry in this category is very interesting, to say the least, as it revolves almost entirely around a system of smart journaling suggestions and prompts. I’ve been using it alongside Day One for a couple of weeks now, to both get an idea of what Apple’s approach to journaling is like, and to see how it intends to bring journaling to a wider audience.

Let’s jump in.

Design-wise, the Journal app is simply beautiful. It doesn’t look like any other built-in iOS apps, but it doesn’t feel too alien either. Each entry is a card that sits on top of a softly colored background. As you scroll, the cards flow behind a prominent ‘+’ button at the bottom of the screen. When I first started playing with the app, I kept scrolling the cards up and down just because I wanted to stare at the blur effect that’s applied when they disappear offscreen. It’s satisfying.

A satisfying blur is applied to the entries as they flow offscreen.

Let’s also take a moment to appreciate the app’s gorgeous icon.

Tapping the ‘+’ button brings up the app’s main highlight: a full-screen dialog with journaling suggestions, reflection prompts in the form of open questions, and a button to start with an empty entry. The suggestions intelligently try to group together your photos, workouts, places you visited, contacts you’ve interacted with, or even music you’ve listened to. This genuinely makes for great starting points to start writing. As I traveled to Lyon this week, I came back home to find the app suggesting that I make an entry about the trip. The suggestion had already combined a selection of photos I took during the day, the music I listened to on the train, a location pin in Lyon, and even a mention of my unusually high steps count. In Day One, I would typically have spent a few minutes selecting which photos to include in the entry, before struggling for a while to decide on what to write about the day. Here, the photos — and more! — were ready to be commented on.

I think this is where Journal succeeds the most at making journaling more accessible: the app lets you spend more time writing entries, and getting started on them quickly, rather than having you spend time collecting the bits and pieces of your life, and formatting them manually.

After tapping a suggestion, the app lets you select which suggested items to keep in the new entry. You can also tap ‘Save Without Writing’ to directly save the suggestion as a new entry.

Sadly, the ‘New Entry’ field itself is bare bones, to say the least. Apart from the expected ability to set the date and time of the entry, there are no immediately-apparent text formatting options. The toolbar above the keyboard lets you insert suggested items, photos, voice recordings, or a location.

While it is possible to highlight text to format it to bold, italic, or underlined, it is impossible to manually insert a link. If you paste a URL, it cannot be tapped to open in Safari. The only way to open a link is to select it, swipe horizontally on the actions tooltip, and then tap ‘Open link.’ You can, however, add a link to a Journal entry from Safari via the share sheet, but doing so will create an entirely new standalone entry with a rich link, with no way of appending it to an existing one. If this issue sounds familiar to you, it is because, until recently, the Mail app on iOS had a similar limitation where it didn’t let you create hyperlinks. Unlike the Journal app, though, at least pasting full URLs in Mail would make them tappable.

Another odd limitation, which I think is worth mentioning if you like to include a lot of photos in your journal entries, is that the Journal app will only allow you to add up to 13 photos per entry.

Text formatting in the Journal app is limited to ‘Bold’, ‘Italic’, ‘Underline’, and ‘Strikethrough’. Pasted URLs can’t be opened, unless you select them, then tap ‘Open Link.’

Links can be added to Journal via the share sheet, in which case they are inserted as rich links in a new entry.

Despite the limited formatting options, entries in Journal always look great. Items you include are arranged in a compact grid that’s complimented with subtle gradients.

Weirdly enough, though, there is no way to view an entry in a standalone view. Nothing happens if you tap an entry. Instead, you tap items that are contained within an entry — which will expand them to a full-screen view. This means the only way to read your journal is to scroll through the main view of the app. Browsing through your entries in the Journal app feels a lot like scrolling through your own private social media timeline as a result. This is very different from other journaling apps, like Day One — where journal entries can be viewed on their own, and where your list of entries is designed to resemble a summary rather than being the main way of reading through your journal.

I actually really like Apple’s direction with this browsing experience. I found myself spontaneously reading through my recent entries more often than I ever did in Day One.

Day One’s timeline of entries (Left) is meant to resemble a summary, whereas Apple intends the Journal app’s timeline (Right) to be the only way to read through your entries.

Unfortunately, in its current state, I don’t think this UI will scale well as you keep using it over months and years. You can filter entries by content type — or only display bookmarked entries, but that’s it. There are no tags, no folders, no compact view, and no way to browse by date.

What I’m missing, most of all, is a search field. Journal doesn’t offer any Home Screen widgets, isn’t integrated with Spotlight, and doesn’t provide any Shortcuts actions to retrieve entries by keywords. So, unless Apple addresses this in the coming months, I’m worried my journal entries will just keep piling up in the app’s main view, and the oldest ones will become more and more difficult to scroll down to. This is especially critical considering how Apple’s approach to proactive prompts and suggestions encourages writing multiple short entries per day instead of what would have been single, long-form entries in apps like Day One.

Entries in Journal can only be filtered by content type, or by bookmarked entries.

Currently, the app’s settings are limited to letting you set a journaling schedule, locking Journal behind Face ID, and skipping the suggestions dialog when tapping the ‘+’ button. However, if you head into Settings → Privacy & Security → Journaling Suggestions, you can actually tweak what kind of data you want to be surfaced in your journaling suggestions. This section in Settings also has a toggle to ‘Prefer Suggestions with Others’, which is supposed to prioritize moments spent with your contacts, as well as a toggle to allow your journaling suggestions to be discoverable by other people that spend time with you. I haven’t noticed a big difference yet when I toggled these features during the beta, but I’m very keen to see how it does in the long run to suggest moments I spend with my partner.

The Journal app’s settings are limited to letting you set a schedule, locking Journal behind Face ID, saving new photos to the Photos app, and skipping the suggestions dialog when creating a new entry.

Journaling suggestions can be turned off by data type in the iOS privacy settings. This is also where you can manage access to journaling suggestions by third-party apps.

Remarkably, Apple’s new journaling suggestions can also be used in third-party apps. Although developers cannot contribute to suggestions populated by the appropriately named Journaling Suggestions API, they can still incorporate Apple’s journaling suggestions in their own apps. As a result, shortly after iOS 17.2 was released, the indie journaling app Everlog and Automattic’s Day One both released updates to offer the new journaling suggestions directly from their compose fields. Day One was already able to suggest entries if you gave the app the right permissions — such as allowing the app to access your location at all times to suggest entries based on the places you visited. But the new API means third-party apps can now benefit from Apple’s on-device intelligence, instead of having to rely on invasive permission requests. Through the API, apps can only access the suggested data after you’ve inserted it.

This is very neat, so much so that it immediately made Apple’s Journal app’s main appeal fade away for me. Its best feature was suddenly available in the journaling app that I was already using.

It is not too surprising, then, to read Day One founder Paul Mayne — in a statement as part of Apple’s press release — welcoming the new app and its API, rather than deploring Apple’s competing entry in the category:

“The Journal app is an exciting development for us because it introduces the benefits of digital journaling to a wider audience and ushers in a new chapter for the practice. (…) We have integrated the Journaling Suggestions API into the Day One app to give our users an even richer experience that puts privacy at the forefront, and we can’t wait for them to try it.”

In iOS 17.2, the same journaling suggestions found in the Journal app can be accessed from Day One.

I believe Apple is on the right path to open journaling to a wider audience. The design and the interface of the Journal app are welcoming, easy to understand, and the proactive suggestions truly make a difference in overcoming the usual obstacles people can face when getting started. This is where Apple’s Journal app is already excelling, despite its shortcomings.

I’m aware that Apple’s home field advantage is playing a part here, too. I don’t think I would feel as lenient with a new third-party journaling app if it launched without tags, a search field, or any proper way to browse my entries. After using an advanced journaling app like Day One for years, my expectations are understandably pretty high. But I think Apple should keep in mind that flexibility is as good a synonym for accessibility as simplicity is. If Apple can bring the Journal app to the iPad and the Mac, and if they keep updating it to make it more flexible in terms of formatting and browsing entries, perhaps they will truly have built a journaling app for all.

In the meantime, I can’t wait to see how developers take advantage of the new Journaling Suggestions API. I have a feeling it could play a part in powering a variety of interesting new features, even beyond third-party journaling apps.

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iOS 17.2.

Today, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 17.2, the second major updates to the operating systems that launched in September and I reviewed on MacStories.

iOS and iPadOS 17.2 revolve around two kinds of enhancements: there are a series of updates to built-in apps (mostly Messages, Music, and Camera) and various tweaks to widgets; then, there’s the brand new Journal app for iPhone, which aims to reinvent the practice of journaling for iOS users with a built-in solution that’s deeply integrated with the OS and apps.

We’re going to cover Journal with a standalone article on MacStories from the perspective of someone who’s been keeping a journal in Day One for several years. In this story, I’m going to focus on what else is new in iOS and iPadOS 17.2 and the different improvements you’ll find throughout the system.

Let’s dive in.

Messages

There are two notable additions to the Messages app in iOS and iPadOS 17.2: the ability to add stickers as reactions to a message, and the catch-up arrow – a UI element that we briefly saw during the iOS 17 beta cycle in the summer, and which Apple eventually postponed until this release.

The catch-up arrow isn’t a groundbreaking innovation in the messaging space: WhatsApp has offered a similar functionality for years now, and the iMessage version behaves more or less the same way. When you open a conversation that has a long list of unread messages, the catch-up arrow will appear in the top-right corner of the transcript to let you instantly jump back to the first unread message in the thread. If you need to, well, catch up on a conversation you haven’t opened in a while, look for this button in the Messages app.

Using the new catch-up arrow in iOS 17.2.

The other addition to the Messages app in iOS and iPadOS 17.2 is the ability to add any sticker (either emoji stickers, photo stickers, or third-party ones) as a “reaction” to a message. The quotes are necessary since, contrary to what some were expecting, these stickers aren’t part of the Tapback reaction system. When Apple first announced the ability to react to messages with stickers, many of us assumed Apple would open up native Tapback reactions to include support for more symbols, emoji, or any sticker. That is not what the company has done.

The Tapback menu is unchanged in iOS 17.2, and it’s still limited to the six default reaction types that have been with us since iOS 10. The menu – which is still accessed by double-tapping a message bubble – doesn’t even have a button for the new ability to attach a sticker to a message. Instead, you can find a new ‘Add Sticker’ button by long-pressing (or right-clicking on iPad) a message; pressing it will bring up the familiar sticker selection tool of iOS 17, which contains all your custom photo stickers, an emoji picker, and stickers from third-party apps. Select a sticker, and without having to manually drag it onto a message, it’ll be automatically attached to the bottom-right corner of the message bubble.

Attaching stickers in iOS 17.2.

So, how is this different from the existing ability to manually pick a sticker and drag it onto a message? It isn’t, really. The new ‘Attach Sticker’ button is, effectively, a quicker way to attach a sticker with a default size, in a predefined part of the message, without having to do the manual drag-and-drop and resize work yourself.

This feature is, quite frankly, a bit of a disappointment.

The majority of the real-time chat and messaging industry has embraced emoji reactions over the past few years; in the meantime, Apple’s Tapbacks are still limited to six symbols, and this new way of attaching stickers doesn’t do much to grow the ways you can express yourself in a response to a message.

Attaching stickers simply isn’t as good as adding a Tapback. When multiple people in a group thread add their Tapbacks, the reactions get stacked in the same corner of the message bubble as a compact UI element, which you can long-press to get a quick summary of everybody’s reactions. The sticker system, on the other hand, quickly becomes tedious the more stickers people add. The first sticker gets placed in the bottom-right corner; the second sticker is placed in the top-left corner by default; then, starting with the third sticker, the placement becomes random, which means it may even cover the contents of the message you’re responding to. Apple may have mitigated this issue compared to the first beta of iOS 17.2 with a better behavior for the first couple stickers added to a message, but if you plan on using this feature in noisy group chats with many potential sticker reactions, it’s just not flexible enough.

Adding a lot of sticker reactions.

As a result, I don’t think this functionality is very good. It doesn’t scale well beyond two stickers, and I’m still left wishing for a proper expansion of the Tapback system to incorporate emoji and more diverse reaction types. Until that happens, I’m just going to continue using this new sticker button to attach the occasional 🤔 emoji to messages.

Action Button

In iOS 17.2, Apple added a new option for the Action button for iPhone 15 Pro owners: a new Translate Live Activity to quickly translate spoken phrases into another language.

The new Translate Live Activity for the Action button.

This feature joins the list of changes to the Translate app this year, and it’s pretty remarkable: as you hold down the Action button and start speaking in the language previously selected in the Translate app, your phrase is transcribed in real time as the Live Activity animates to tell you it’s listening. When you’re done, the text will be immediately translated inline within the Live Activity, giving you the ability to listen to the translated text out loud with a dedicated play button.

While I continue to hold out hope for Apple to implement real-time language detection in Translate and Siri (just like the assistant, Translate isn’t really multi-lingual in real time; you have to select in the Translate app what the ‘source’ language is), this addition to the Action button is useful and well-designed, and it’s going to come in handy for quick translations when traveling.

Music

Although collaborative playlists in Apple Music have been once again pushed back to a future release of iOS and iPadOS, Apple still found the time to ship a couple other updates to the Music app in this release.

After moving away from ‘loved songs’ to embrace the ‘favorites’ nomenclature, Apple is adding a feature that Spotify has offered for quite some time: a favorites song playlist that automatically collects all tracks you’ve loved favorited over the years. You’ll find this new default playlist in your library after upgrading to iOS 17.2, and I believe it’s a great way to quickly put on something you know you’re going to like. It’s particularly handy when asking Siri to “shuffle my favorite songs”.

The new playlist for your favorite songs.

Another option that mirrors Spotify is the new setting for automatically adding favorite songs to your library. It’s enabled by default, but if you’d rather mark a song as favorite without adding it to your library, you can disable it in Settings ⇾ Music.

The best enhancement to Apple Music in iOS 17.2, however, is something that will quietly differentiate Apple’s service from Spotify by taking advantage of system integrations that Spotify barely considers.¹ In iOS 17.2, there is a new Focus filter to pause your Apple Music listening history when a particular Focus mode is active.

You’ll find this feature as a ‘Set Use Listening History’ filter when configuring a Focus mode on your iPhone or iPad. If enabled, this filter will temporarily pause your listening history so that whatever you listen to while the Focus is active won’t influence your recommendations and mixes, appear under Recently Played, or be shown to other users on Apple Music.

Disabling your Apple Music listening history with the new Focus filter.

Essentially, this is a filter to temporarily pause the recommendation algorithm of Apple Music. Those of you out there who have kids or like falling asleep to specific playlists will immediately understand why this is a great addition to Apple Music.²

Perhaps your kid insists on putting on the Frozen soundtrack whenever you drive, or maybe you like drifting off to a white noise playlist at night – and that’s fine, but then you end up irreparably damaging your Apple Music recommendations, Replay stats, and weekly mixes. With iOS and iPadOS 17.2, there is now a way to exclude those playback sessions from your listening history: just assign the new Focus filter to, say, your Driving and Sleep Focus modes, and you’ll be set. Soon enough, your Apple Music recommendations will be free of that Paw Patrol soundtrack, the sounds of a rainforest, or, in my case, the Plans album by Death Cab for Cutie (I’ve been relaxing with this album at night for the past 15 years).

Whoever thought of this feature at Apple deserves an immediate promotion as head of the Music team.

And More…

Here’s a list of all the other changes you can find in iOS and iPadOS 17.2:

Capture spatial video in the Camera app. Apple’s getting ready for the Vision Pro, and, starting with iOS 17.2, so can you. If you have an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, you can enable an option in Settings ⇾ Camera ⇾ Formats to record spatial video for Apple’s Vision Pro headset. This way, you’ll be able to relive your precious memories with an incredible sense of depth and presence when viewing the video on a Vision Pro in the future. I was able to experience these videos for myself at WWDC, so believe me when I say that, if you can, you’ll want to make sure you archive some of your favorite memories with this format.

Recording spatial video is limited to landscape orientation at the moment, and it only works for 1080p video at 30 fps. These aren’t the best quality settings to future-proof a video, but since 1 minute of spatial video alone takes up 130 MB of storage because of all the depth data it contains, I guess Apple wanted to strike a balance between performance, convenience, and good-enough quality for now. I appreciate that Apple rolled out this feature now, even if the Vision Pro is still a few months away, with the holiday season coming up and families getting together to celebrate. You’ll be able to record videos of your kids playing, your parents, or your friends enjoying some eggnog without looking like a weirdo creeping on them while wearing a Vision Pro.

New data points and widgets for the Weather app. The Weather app keeps not-so-quietly growing into a serious forecasting tool for the so-called “weather power users” out there or, more broadly, people who just want to know a lot of details about the weather. The app now shows precipitation amounts for rain and snow conditions for any given day over the next 10 days; there’s a wind map snapshot to see wind patterns for the next 24 hours; there’s even an interactive moon calendar to visualize the phase of the moon for any day over the next month.

New data points in the Weather app.

In addition, there are new widgets to display the next-hour precipitation, daily forecast, sunrise and sunset times (I use this one), and specific current conditions such as air quality, feels like temperature, and wind speed.

Digital clock widget. I know I’m going to upset a very specific type of person by saying this, but I can’t stand analog clocks, especially on computers, because I can’t read them as quickly as digital ones. We have computers that can show us real-time numbers; why should I waste time with a replica of an analog watch face to tell what time it is?

The new digital clock widget.

Anyway, with iOS 17.2 Apple added a new digital clock widget that you can put on the Home Screen and show in StandBy mode. It’s the time, but digital. Imagine that.

Fast fade option in the Books app. When reading a book in the Books app, you’ll find a new option for a fast fade animation that, as the name implies, fades to the next page more quickly.

AirDrop enhancements. While Apple is busy fighting a misinformation campaign against NameDrop, the company has improved the proximity-based aspect of AirDrop in iOS 17.2 with the ability to share boarding passes, movie tickets, and other eligible passes by bumping two iPhones together. This is faster than sending passes to someone else over iMessage, and I’m glad the option is here now.

Intelligent AutoFill for fields in PDFs. Lastly, this feature was also announced a while back, and it’s debuting now with iOS and iPadOS 17.2: AutoFill can now intelligently help you fill fields in PDFs and other forms by offering suggestions that should match the requirements of any given field.

Intelligent AutoFill suggestions.

When opening a document with fields that AutoFill detects as compatible with its new assisted filling, you’ll get a notification banner at the top of the page. Tap it, and AutoFill will detect the fields and provide you with suggestions for each one. These can be your name, address, zip code, and more. In my tests, intelligent AutoFill for PDF documents worked well enough, but it also thought (as you can tell from the image above) that my height was 150 centimeters, and I have no idea where it took that from (I’m 1.83m tall).

iOS and iPadOS 17.2

So that’s the overview of the changes you can expect in iOS and iPadOS 17.2 beyond the Journal app, which is, arguably, the marquee addition to this release. As I mentioned at the outset, we’re going to publish a standalone story about Journal since it deserves a deeper look by someone who knows journaling well and can compare Apple’s app to existing solutions by third parties. Stay tuned for that story on the site soon.

You can find iOS and iPadOS 17.2 in Settings ⇾ Software Update. I would have liked to see more improvements to Stage Manager and iPadOS, but I guess I’ll have to wait for the new year and likely iPadOS 17.4 for those.

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Ever since Apple updated its OSes, I’ve been trying a long list of widgets. We’ve written about a lot of them, but there are always more, so I gathered up some additional favorites that are worth trying if you haven’t yet. Let’s have a look.

Music Widgets

Doppler, Longplay, and WidgetPod widgets.

It should come as no surprise that music widgets are one of my favorite categories, and I’ve got three to share today:

Doppler

Doppler.

Doppler by Ed Wellbrook is an iPhone and Mac app for people who own their music. The app can handle MP3, AAC, M4A, FLAC, ALAC, and WAV file formats natively and includes extensive features for enjoying and managing your music collection.

With iOS 17, Doppler has added two interactive playback widgets that feature album art, a background that pulls the dominant color from the album’s artwork, and play/pause and skip forward and back buttons. The iOS app also includes a StandBy widget. Doppler’s Mac app doesn’t include widgets of its own, but you can also control the iOS app from your Mac’s desktop by using its widget there as long as your iPhone is nearby.

Longplay

Longplay.

Longplay is an album-oriented take on music for the iPhone and iPad by Adrian Schoenig that I reviewed in August. One of the app’s recent features is the ability to divide your albums into collections. I’ve got over 1,000 albums in my Apple Music library, so collections have become my favorite way to add a little organization to my library, allowing me to create groups of albums by genre, mood, or current favorites.

With the app’s extensive set of interactive widgets, you can display albums in a grid that’s similar to the app’s main interface, using small, medium, or large widgets. Then, you can customize the widget by picking your entire library or a collection, whether you want the order of albums to change from day to day, and whether you want the widget to display the name of the collection they come from. Tapping on one of the albums toggles playback. With space for 25 albums on the large version of the album grid widget, I’ve found it to be perfect for maintaining a ‘heavy rotation’ collection of albums that I revisit often. The app also includes a ‘now playing’ widget that has a button with a die on it for starting a random album.

WidgetPod

WidgetPod.

The greatest strength of WidgetPod by Aditya Rajveer is the customizability of its widgets. The app includes small, medium, and large interactive widgets on the iPhone and adds an extra-large version on the iPad. In the main app, you can design multiple versions of each widget size, sticking with the app’s good-looking defaults or tweaking things like accent colors, artwork, what happens when you tap the widget, and the information listed about an album. I’m partial to the default widget style, but there are also versions that hide artwork altogether, zoom in on it, and superimpose the album art on a slowly spinning vinyl record. With playback basics and the option to show and toggle a song’s liked status, WidgetPod has quickly become my favorite way to track and control my music listening from my Home Screen.

Soundboards

Thwip and Klang.

Soundboards are fun whether you’re idly tapping out of boredom or need a way to occupy a small child for a while. The satisfaction is immediate and entertaining. The two soundboards I’ve found that I like the best are Thwip and Klang, both of which offer a variety of interactive Home Screen and StandBy widgets for playing short sounds.

Thwip, by Rafael Conde, is an iPhone and Apple Watch app that comes with nine built-in sounds. There’s an air horn, sad trombone, bell, crickets, and even a web shooter. You can add new sounds from the Files app, adding a name, color, and icon so it fits in nicely with the other choices. The widgets come in small, medium, large, and extra-large sizes, but you’ll need to add some of your own sounds to fill out the large and extra-large widgets, which hold 16 and 32 sound buttons, respectively. Also worth noting is that Thwip is the only app I’ve come across that doesn’t offer an iPad version of its app but does offer an extra-large iPad-only widget, which you’ll see when the app is running in compatibility mode on an iPad.

Klang is an iPhone and iPad app that takes a slightly different approach, using emoji to offer soundboards of animals, instruments, vehicles, and fun sounds. Like Thwip, you can add your own sounds, but you can also create your own boards, adding your sounds or any of the built-in ones to them. In all, there are 65 built-in sounds with large categories like animals and vehicles that should keep kids busy and entertained for quite a while.

Even More Widgets

Tally.

Greg Pierce’s Tally, the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch app for counting things, is a natural fit for interactive widgets. The app is for counting anything, from keeping score during a game to tracking your reps at the gym. With interactive widgets, the app now offers small, medium, large, and extra-large widgets that can increment one or a set of two counts. The counts on the widget update immediately, and tapping anywhere else on the widget opens the full app to adjust the settings of your tally or to set up a new one.

LookUp.

LookUp, the dictionary app from Vidit Bhargava, is another MacStories favorite that’s made great use of widgets for a while. With interactivity, users can add a ‘Word of the Day Shuffle’ widget to their Home Screen to cycle through multiple words at a time, learning as they go. The same widget also has a button to have the word spoken aloud, a heart button to mark it as a favorite, and a shuffle button for advancing to the next word, which also happens if you mark a word as a favorite or have it spoken to you. The ‘Word of the Day’ widget includes buttons to speak a word and favorite it, but it only changes once per day. In addition to StandBy widgets, Bhargava also updated the Watch version of the app to match watchOS 10’s design changes.

WaterMinder.

One of WaterMinder’s hallmarks is how easy the app makes it to log what you drink. That’s important because even a slight amount of friction, and you’ll probably stop tracking. With interactive widgets, that tracking is even simpler than before.

There are enough WaterMinder widgets that it’s impossible to fit every one of them on even a 12.9-inch iPad Pro’s screen, but there are some common interactivity themes. Several of the widgets include a circular button with four smaller circles inside of it. Tapping that button acts as a toggle, changing a view that tracks your water intake to a set of buttons for logging your saved favorite drinks. On some large and extra-large widgets, there’s room in the widget to include those saved drinks without toggling views, but I’m a big fan of the space-saving option available on the smaller widgets.

Widgetive.

This fall, Funn Media, the makers of WaterMinder and several other apps, also added a brand-new app to their catalog called Widgetive. The app, which works with the iPhone and iPad, is free with ads, or you can subscribe to eliminate the ads, personalize your widgets, and unlock some more advanced widgets.

In a similar vein to Widgetsmith, Widgetive offers a long list of what are effectively mini apps divided into the following categories:

• Health and Fitness
• Countdowns
• Games
• Time Zones
• Tools
• Quotes and Jokes

The design of the widgets is excellent. Most have a clean, black-and-white look by default but can be customized with a variety of colors and typefaces for their various elements. So, while many of the widgets found in Widgetive can be found in other apps, I’m glad there’s an option that offers a wide variety of choices in a single app with deep customization.

That’s it for our initial coverage of iOS 17 widgets – for now. Of course, we’re always on the lookout for new and interesting widget implementations and will be back with even more as part of our usual coverage of new and updated apps.

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The problem is that, put simply, this feature just isn’t good enough in this first version of iOS 17.2. And since I’m always told to “file feedback early in the process to make sure things get seen”, and since blogging about iOS feature requests on my website makes me feel better than begrudgingly filing actual feedbacks about them, here we are.

Jason Snell, writing for Six Colors:

This new feature has no connection at all with the fun double-tap gesture that’s synonymous with Tapbacks. I didn’t expect stickers to be a peer to Apple’s classic collection of six Tapback icons, but I did sort of assume that at the very least, performing the Tapback gesture would also give you the option of choosing a sticker. (And the right thing for Apple to do would be to display recently used stickers alongside the Tapback icons.)

Instead, to send a sticker response you have to tap and hold on a message and then choose Add Sticker from the resulting contextual menu, then choose a sticker or emoji. It’s an extra step that really shouldn’t be necessary and makes stickers feel like an afterthought, which they apparently are.

I get why Apple doesn’t want to let users customize the default roster of “official” Tapbacks. iMessage is used by hundreds of millions of people every day, and they don’t want to overcomplicate an established feature with too many options. However, I think a much better compromise would be the following:

• Align custom sticker reactions with regular Tapbacks in the message bubble so they don’t cover text;
• Make the ‘Add Sticker’ button appear when you double-tap a message instead of requiring a long-press.

That’s it. I really like this feature, but the design isn’t quite there yet. Hopefully, there’s enough time (and willingness on Apple’s part) to change it.

→ Source: sixcolors.com

iOS 17.1.

Today, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 17.1 – the first major updates to the operating systems that launched (and I reviewed) in September. I’ll cut to the chase: these are not big updates and don’t come with new emoji. Instead, iOS and iPadOS 17.1 bring a variety of previously-announced (and then delayed) features such as AirDrop over the Internet and new cover art templates in Music, but they don’t address the complete list of functionalities for this OS cycle that Apple originally announced last June.

Let’s take a look.

Music

The most important change in Music for iOS and iPadOS 17.1 is that Apple is moving away from the ‘Love’ terminology for items you like and is instead embracing the more widely industry-accepted connotation of ‘favorites’.

The star symbol is used to indicate favorite tracks in the Music app. As a result, popular songs on Apple Music now carry a dot indicator instead of a star symbol.

The Favorite button is now very prominent in different screens of the Music app, which makes it easier than before to build a collection of favorite songs, albums, and playlists. The animation when you tap it is also nice.

As before, you can mark songs, albums, and playlists as favorites in iOS and iPadOS 17.1. When you update your devices, your existing collection of loved songs will be automatically carried over to favorites so, really, you’ll only have to worry about getting used to the new name. You can also filter your library by favorites, which is a nice way to quickly find all favorite albums or playlists.

Although iOS and iPadOS 17.1 don’t come with the (also previously announced) dedicated playlist for favorite songs, they do have a couple other enhancements worth noting.

The Music app now comes with templates for playlist cover art: select ‘Edit’ while viewing one of your playlists, tap its artwork, and in addition to choosing an image as cover, you can now scroll a collection of built-in cover styles.

Playlist cover art templates.

While this feature sounds nice in theory, I find it kind of half-baked. There are only eight fixed templates to choose from, and they’re all based on abstract or geometrical patterns with no ability to edit them or choose different shapes. To make matters worse, these covers get randomly assigned a primary accent color that you can’t modify. If you don’t like the purple and black colors that get picked by the system for one of your playlists, well, you’re out of luck. Apple says that these are “designs that change colors to reflect the music in your playlist”, but I’ve been unable to identify a connection between songs in my playlists and colors picked by iOS 17.1.

I do like the idea behind this feature and I hope Apple iterates on it. For now, I’m going to stick with using Denim for my playlist covers. Apple needs to take another pass at this with more templates, a color picker, and more variety.

I was looking forward to the second big addition to playlists in iOS 17.1 and, unfortunately, it also turned out to be somewhat disappointing, at least in my experience. Taking a page from Spotify, which debuted this functionality years ago, Apple Music now offers song suggestions at the bottom of playlists so that, in theory, you can more easily build out a playlist by adding songs suggested by the service.

Song suggestions at the bottom of playlists.

According to Apple, these songs should match “the vibe of your playlist” and make sense as additions to an existing list of songs. In my tests, I can confirm that Apple Music does match the vibe and style of a playlist pretty well – I just wish it had a better sense of context from the playlist regarding time periods.

In a playlist I share with my girlfriend, which is heavily skewed toward pop-rock and acoustic tracks, I did get solid recommendations for Ed Sheeran, Coldplay, Jason Mraz, and John Mayer. Song suggestions are displayed at the bottom of a playlist and, just like Spotify, you can add each song to the playlist with one tap or reload the entire set of suggestions for as long as you want.

Song suggestions worked well in my tests for a Christmas playlist (center) and all-time favorite songs (right); alas, the algorithm failed to understand a playlist containing songs released in 2023 (left).

My understanding is that the algorithm favors more songs from existing artists in the playlist and throws in the occasional new artist with a song that should match the vibe of the playlist. Which, as a generale rule of thumb, works for me.

My problem is that this feature is entirely unaware of songs’ release dates and different eras. For instance, each year I create a ‘Best Of’ playlist in which I collect my favorite new songs of the year. In my ‘Best of 2023’ playlist for this year, Music suggested blink-182’s The Rock Show (2001), My Chemical Romance’s Sing (2010), Arctic Monkeys’ 505 (2007), and Placebo’s Pure Morning (1998). Now, these are great songs in their own right and I love them all, but was it too hard to infer that the playlist called ‘Best of 2023’ that contains all songs released in 2023 maybe wasn’t a great fit for, you know, a song from 25 years ago?

Apparently yes, which is why I’m reserving my judgement on the effective utility of this feature in Apple Music. Maybe Eddy should consider getting some help from AI here.

AirDrop Over the Internet

Following the major redesign and expansion in iOS 17, Apple is continuing to improve upon the new foundation of AirDrop with the ability for transfers to continue over the Internet even if you step out of AirDrop’s local, peer-to-peer range.

As far as I can tell, there’s nothing special you need to know here and no different UI for you to learn. I tried to test this feature by initiating an AirDrop video transfer from my iPhone 15 Pro Max to my iPad Pro and then literally running outside, about 30 meters away from the iPad; AirDrop seamlessly continued to transfer the file and, after a few minutes, it was on my iPad Pro.

As long as you have ‘Use Cellular Data’ enabled in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ AirDrop ⇾ Out of Range, this should work.

iPadOS

Apple is slowly chipping away at Stage Manager for iPad with another addition in iPadOS 17.1 that I requested in my review last month: the ability to press Shift-Return in Spotlight to add a selected app result to the current workspace. As I noted last month, this option joins the (new in iPadOS 17) Shift-clicking behavior for adding apps to a workspace, but this keyboard shortcut allows you to do so without lifting your hands off the keyboard.

If you press Shift-Return in Spotlight, iPadOS 17.1 will instantly add the selected app result to the current workspace.

Furthermore, iPadOS 17.1 brings a new contextual menu in the Messages app that incorporates a compact Tapback menu. When you perform a two-finger click on a message bubble in iPadOS 17.1, you’ll be presented with a context menu that includes Tapback options at the top:

The new Tapback menu activated with a right-click on the Magic Keyboard’s trackpad.

Apple still hasn’t rolled out the ability to attach any sticker as a Tapback reaction, but this redesigned menu is a nice time-saving tool for iPad users who no longer have to long-press on messages to add a Tapback reaction.

Everything Else

Here’s a rundown of other changes and fixes in iOS and iPadOS 17.1:

The Shortcuts library is back to a regular view. Remember how I noted in my iOS 17 review that Apple ruined the default ‘All Shortcuts’ view of the Shortcuts app to only show a subset of top shortcuts per folder? The company recognized the mistake and the view is back to normal now. When you want to see all your shortcuts, you now see all your shortcuts at once. As it should be.

Back to a reasonable design.

You can now choose specific albums for Photo Shuffle on the Lock Screen. I asked for this feature last year when Apple unveiled the new Lock Screen in iOS 16, and I’m glad it’s here in iOS 17.1. When selecting the Photo Shuffle wallpaper, you can now pick a specific album as the source of photos that will rotate on the Lock Screen.

The new album option for Photo Shuffle.

The system defaults to shuffling your Favorites from Photos, which is the right approach and the option I think most people will end up using. However, if you want to shuffle photos from album of your dogs, partner, or kids, you can now do that.

StandBy gets new display options. Exclusively for iPhone 14 Pro and 15 Pro devices with the Always-On display, there are new options in Settings ⇾ StandBy ⇾ Display to control when the display should turn off. You can choose between an automatic behavior that intelligently turns off the display when your iPhone is not in use and the room is dark (the default behavior), after 20 seconds, or never. I left mine set on automatic and it’s been fine.

As you can see, iOS and iPadOS 17.1 are not huge releases: they’re mostly about enhancements to Apple Music, a notable addition to AirDrop, and a variety of small enhancements across the board. While we wait to find out what Apple will bring to iOS 17.2 (the Journal app is still missing, for one) and whether or not we’re going to see new product launches at the end of the month, you can find iOS and iPadOS 17.1 in Software Update now.

And in case you missed it or set it aside for later, you can find my iOS and iPadOS 17 review here and re-download an improved version of the EPUB if you’re a Club member.

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In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

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Apple first introduced the Translate app in iOS 14. Although it was a welcomed addition to the language translation space, I stopped using it a couple of months after its release. Many languages were still missing, its interface was lackluster at best, and I found that its French translations were not great. I would also still often rely on Google Translate to translate text in the real world using the iPhone camera — a feature that was initially missing from Apple’s app. This year, however, the Translate app received a substantial makeover and a handful of new features in iOS 17.

Let’s see how Translate fares in 2023.

The Translate app consists of four tabs: Translation, Camera, Conversation, and Favorites. Translation is the main tab where you can perform basic translations. Up until iOS 16, the input field occupied the entire screen and resized when the virtual keyboard appeared, which could feel disorienting. The interface is much clearer today: each performed translation is constricted to a card. Cards can be scrolled vertically, and it’s very easy to go back to a previous translation card. This design is both simple and well thought out.

The new Translation tab allows for fast input of multiple translations in a row.

Each translation card contains the same set of actions: ‘Show Full Screen,’ ‘Add to Favorites,’ ‘Define,’ and ‘Copy.’ Adding to Favorites is not something I expected to use, but it’s actually very useful, considering that the Translate app will not keep a full history of your translations after you close it. It makes sense to be able to save a translated snippet of text and come back to it later in the Favorites tab. However, I wish there was an option to automatically keep a full history for people like me who will often forget to tap the ‘Add to Favorites’ button.

In iOS 17, the Translation tab got a new feature that I’ve rarely seen in other translation tools: the possibility to manually select a grammatical gender for nouns and other gendered words.

As you may know, my main language is French, which is, unfortunately, a very gendered language. Most nouns have a different form depending on whether they designate a woman or a man — and most adjectives that accompany these nouns need to be gendered accordingly. Google Translate and most other apps will try to guess the correct grammatical gender for nouns by solely relying on context, but this falls apart if the sentence you provide doesn’t have any. I am glad Apple added this feature to easily be able to tap a word and use the context menu that appears to switch to the appropriate grammatical gender. This is certainly a nice workaround for all the times when the translation algorithm is simply not capable of guessing on its own which grammatical gender to use.

In languages like French, gendered words are highlighted and can be tapped to select the appropriate grammatical gender.

The Conversation tab is probably the most clever part of the Translate app. Thanks to the way the translations are laid out — as speech bubbles on each side of the screen — I think it is also the best-designed part of the app. With voice input, the app is able to automatically tell which of the two languages is being spoken and translate accordingly. But unlike in most other translation apps, Apple’s Conversation mode is for more than just voice input between two speakers. In iOS 17, each speaker can also type and edit their sentences with the virtual keyboard instead of having to speak into the microphone. And, similarly to how the Translation tab works, any previous message in the Conversation tab can be acted upon: each can be selected, copied, added to favorites, shown in full screen, or played out loud again.

The Conversation tab has an option to automatically play translations out loud as soon as they’re typed. (Pardon my German.)

The Camera tab is interesting since it doesn’t contain any new features that you could not already perform elsewhere in iOS. But I’m glad Apple decided to give them room to breathe in one dedicated place. The Camera tab lets you point the iPhone camera at any string of text in the real world and immediately see a translation onscreen. The translation is overlaid on top of the original text and can be tapped to perform system actions like Select, Copy, and Look Up. It is also easy to select any image from your photo library and translate text contained within any picture you may have previously taken. This is all powered by Live Text, the system-wide feature first introduced in iOS 15, that makes it possible to select text directly from the Camera app as well as in any image in Photos, Safari, and any third-party apps that support it.

Translating text with the iPhone camera isn’t a new feature, but I wish Apple had improved the way the translation overlays look. They pale in comparison to Google Translate, which excels at integrating translated text into the image as well as at handling text that is partly off-screen. Apple’s translation overlays, on the other hand, can obstruct parts of the image and often feel visually distracting.

Translating a column from a French magazine. Left is the original text viewed from the iPhone Camera. Center is the translated text in Apple’s Translate app. Right is the translated text in Google Translate.

Taking some time to explore these changes brought by the Translate app in iOS 17 made me realize something: I already use Apple’s translation tool every single day – I just never open the dedicated Translate app. But this is where I found it to be at its best: Apple has infused translation in all parts of the OS. As a multilingual user of the Internet, tapping the ‘Translate’ button when selecting text is something that I expect to work reliably, whether that’s when I’m reading an article, browsing social media, or looking at a restaurant menu in Berlin that I’m not quite able to understand. The fact is: Translate does work reliably, and while I did not previously realize it, Apple’s translations to French are now really good. So much so that it has become quite common for me to rely on it on a regular basis.

Translation is accessible anywhere you can select text in iOS and directly from the Camera app using Live Text.

Although many languages have been added since iOS 14, Apple’s Translate app still doesn’t support as many languages as its competitors. However, I can safely say that there have been substantial improvements for the languages it already supports. The app also stands out with some of its features. The Conversation tab is unique in its well-thought-out design. Manually selecting the grammatical gender for gendered words sets it apart from a simple translation app you may use during your vacation abroad, perhaps transforming it into a daily work tool. But, like many of Apple’s built-in apps and services that are well integrated into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, Translate truly shines when you realize that you’ve actually been using it this whole time without noticing.

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I’ve never been a big fan of the Philips Hue app. It has improved over time, and I appreciate its fine-grained control over my lights and its Shortcuts support, but the app has always felt a little clunky. That’s why I was happy when I discovered Hue Widgets over a year ago now. It’s a simple widget creation tool that lets you activate your Hue lights and scenes from your iPhone’s Home Screen, which is a much easier and nicer experience than using the Hue app. Better yet, with iOS 17, the app’s widgets are interactive, so lights and scenes can be triggered without ever opening the app.

Many Hue lights support features you can’t control from Apple’s Home app. For instance, many Hue lights can create animated and multi-color gradient lighting scenes that aren’t supported by HomeKit. These extended features can be accessed in the official Hue app, but it doesn’t have widgets, which is a faster and easier way to control your lighting and where Hue Widgets comes in.

Controlling lights and scenes from Home Widgets.

The Hue Widgets app has two main tabs: a list of the rooms in your home, and an interface for creating widgets. The Home tab allows you to turn on an entire room or zone’s lights or control them individually, turning lights and scenes on and off and adjusting brightness levels, light temperatures, and colors. The official Hue app works similarly, but Hue Widgets’ interface is simpler and faster.

Building a widget.

However, I’ve spent most of my time in the Widgets tab. Here, you can set up small, medium, or large widgets to control your Hue lights. The small version of the widget controls one light or scene, while the medium and large sizes control four and eight, respectively. After you pick the widget size you want, it appears in the Widget tab’s main interface. Then, tapping on each widget’s tiles walks you through picking a room and light or scene to control. Hue Widgets also lets you assign a color for each tile in your widget. It’s a quick and simple process but requires you to set up your lights and scenes in the Hue app first because Hue Widgets acts as a controller for the Hue app, not a replacement. When you’re satisfied with the widgets you’ve designed, return to your iPhone’s Home Screen to add one of the widgets you built, choosing the size you created in the app.

One thing I wish I could change in Hue Widgets is how it names widgets. Each is named automatically along the lines of ‘Small Widget #1’ and ‘Small Widget #2.’ If you create a lot of widgets, this isn’t ideal because it makes it hard to remember which widget is which. I’d prefer to assign more memorable names myself. I’d also love to see Hue Widgets on the iPad, where it could offer an extra-large widget.

Hue Widgets pairs nicely with Home Widget, which I recently reviewed.

I was a fan of Hue Widgets before iOS 17, but having tried the interactive versions of its widgets, I can already tell I will be using them a lot more than before. Paired with the recent addition of Matter support for Hue hubs, which seems to have improved the responsiveness of my lighting, Hue Widgets has become a core part of my growing home automation setup.

Hue Widgets is available on the App Store for $1.99.

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Widgle is a collection of four simple puzzle games for the iPhone and iPad that integrate with your photos. As I mentioned in connection with Widgetsmith’s Tile game, interactive widgets’ system-imposed button and toggle limitation severely constrains the kinds of games that can be built as a widget, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still be fun. Widgle’s four games, a tile sliding puzzle, a maze, a lights out-style game, and a matching game each come in small and large sizes.

Tile Slide (left) and Lights On (right).

The Tile Slide game uses a photo of your choosing, scrambles the tiles, and overlays numbers, which can optionally be turned off in the widget’s settings. There’s one free space, and by tapping tiles, you can try to put them back in the correct order, reassembling your image. There are four grid options, too, a couple of which are only available in the large version of the widget.

Lights On begins with one of your photos divided into a grid with some of the squares missing. Tapping on a square inverts the others around it, and with some careful poking, you can reassemble your entire photo so it includes no blanks. Like Tile Slide, there are four grid size options, with two exclusive to the large-sized widget.

Maze Master (left) and Match Up (right).

Maze Master overlays directional arrows around the edges of the widget, so you can guide your character through a maze backed by one of your photos. There are three difficulty levels to choose from and six different emoji characters available.

Finally, Match Up starts with a grid of squares with question marks in their centers. Tap squares to reveal the hidden emoji underneath. Find a matching pair of emoji, and the squares reveal part of one of your photos.

As I mentioned at the top. Widgle’s games are very simple classics, but I’ve still enjoyed idly playing with them when I need a break. The inclusion of photos, which can be picked in the main Widgle app, makes each game feel more personal.

Widgle is available on the App Store as a free download with an In-App Purchase of $1.99 to customize the puzzle with your photos.

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

It’s time to take a brief break from widgets to bring you scrobbles. Scrobbling is Last.fm’s name for matching and logging the music to which you listen. The payoff of scrobbling is the in-depth statistics that Last.fm delivers monthly and annually to users. It’s also a great way to relive musical moments in your life and find music that you may not have in your library but that you may have heard while you’re out and about.

One of the best ways to scrobble on the iPhone and iPad is with AirScrobble, which has grown into a terrific all-around Last.fm utility. One of the app’s previous limitations, though, was that it only worked with music playing over a speaker. If you were using AirPods or other headphones, so the music couldn’t be matched via an iPhone or iPad’s microphone, you were out of luck. However, with the app’s latest release, you can now scrobble even while listening with headphones.

Scrobbling from Broadcasts.

That alone is pretty great, but AirScrobble now works with any app that produces audio, too. Say you’re using Steve Troughton-Smith’s excellent Internet radio app Broadcasts to listen to your favorite college radio station. Now, AirScrobble can match the songs as you listen. The same goes for Reels you watch on Instagram, YouTube videos, and a lot more.

AirScrobble also includes Live Activity support. If you’ve started automatically scrobbling as you listen, the Live Activity expands when a song is recognized, offering an interactive button for manually scrobbling the song immediately.

AirScrobble’s App Shortcuts, Manual Scrobble App Shortcut, and Live Activity on my Lock Screen.

The app has added support for App Shortcuts, too. If you’re out at a restaurant and hear a song you don’t know and want to capture it, do a quick Spotlight search for ‘AirScrobble’ and pick the Match App Shortcut. There’s also a Manual Scrobble App Shortcut, which lets you search for the name of a song using the search field. Plus, there’s a Love Track App Shortcut for marking a track as one of your favorites.

I love this update to AirScrobble. It works in so many more situations now that headphones are supported, as well as other audio sources. The Live Activity makes it easy to scrobble while doing something else on your iPhone or iPad, too. If you’re a music lover and use Last.fm, check be sure to check out AirScrobble.

AirScrobble is available on the App Store as a free download. Some of the app’s features require a subscription.

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

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The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

You might have wondered what would become of widget-focused apps like Home Widget when Apple announced at WWDC that a Home widget was coming to iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma. I did too. But, even though the Home widget works well, it’s limited, leaving room for developers like Clément Marty to take their widgets to an entirely different level.

If you’re a home automation nerd, you’ll quickly run into the Home widget’s limitations. For instance, it’s great for toggling lights on and off, but it can’t dim your lights or change their color. Home Widget goes beyond the binary choice of on or off across a spectrum of features, making it indispensable for home automation fans.

Let’s see what it can do.

Setting up a panel with Home Widget.

Home Widget doesn’t allow itself to be constrained by the fact that widget developers are limited to using buttons and toggles for interactivity. Like the Home widget, you can use it to toggle lights on or off, but you can also dim them or change their color.

The way this works is clever. When you set up a widget in the Home Widget app, a process that is similar to creating widgets in Widgetsmith, you can pick a ‘Type’ for each widget tile. For lights, actions can include toggling them on and off, toggling them after a five-second delay, and toggling them after user confirmation. There are also a couple of different dimmer options.

Once your widget is set up to control dimming and color, when you tap the widget, a new view appears with what appears to be a slider and a grid of color buttons. You can’t swipe on the slider because widgets only support buttons. Instead, tap along it to set the level of brightness you want, and then pick a color by tapping it. It works really well, but it takes a while to get used to tapping the slider.

A sampling of widget sizes and types.

The confirmation ‘Type’ that I mentioned above is a nice addition to the latest version of the app if you have something like a HomeKit-enabled garage door. Instead of accidentally opening your garage with a stray tap, you’ll be asked to confirm your action first. Interactivity also means that Home Widget can now adjust your blinds and refresh your widgets manually, neither of which could be done with Apple’s Home widget. Another nice addition that isn’t interactive is the ability to show sensor data on a widget, like the temperature and humidity, both of which are far too buried in the Home app’s interface.

In addition to Home Screen widgets, Home Widget has updated its Lock Screen widgets to be interactive. On the iPad, Home Widget uses the new larger size available in the sidebar when your iPad is in landscape mode. The size and actions available are comparable to the small Home Screen widget. In my testing on the 12.9” iPad Pro, though, there’s a bug that causes the image in the Lock Screen widget to be off-center.

Home Widget’s StandBy mode.

Home Widget also works in iOS 17’s StandBy mode. Like other widgets I’ve covered, the StandBy version is similar to Home Widget’s small-sized Home Screen widget, which can include one or four items. If you find yourself wanting to control lights or other devices throughout the day, having your iPhone connected to MagSafe and in landscape mode can be a nice way to quickly get to your favorite devices.

Also worth mentioning is that Home Widget is much more performant, with devices responding more quickly than in the past.

I’ve only just begun scratching the surface of what can be done with Home Widget. I plan to use it to control a core set of devices from my iPhone and a more extensive set from my iPad Pro and Mac desktop. If you have a large collection of HomeKit devices or are frustrated by the limited ways the Home app widgets let you control them, I highly recommend checking out Home Widget.

Home Widget is available for the iPhone and iPad on the App Store as a free download. Certain of the app’s features require a subscription.

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In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

It’s interesting to compare Timery 1.6, Joe Hribar’s time tracking app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, with Widgetsmith. David Smith’s app uses interactivity across a wide range of different types of widgets, allowing for a highly personalized approach to your Home Screen. Timery is a little different. It’s just as customizable, if not more so, but in a deep, focused way that makes it hands-down the most customizable and useful way to track time from a widget.

If you had asked me how I used Timery in the spring, I would have said I primarily use the Mac app. That’s changed drastically over the summer. My answer now is that I’m primarily a Timery widget user.

What I love about the app’s widgets is that they allow you to create a set of widgets that work how you use the app and nothing more. One of Timery’s strengths has always been its rich set of features that make it valuable to a broad cross-section of users. However, that means there is more to Timery than most people need. But with the app’s widgets, it’s possible to pare the app down to just the components that are essential to you, which is the ultimate in customization.

That doesn’t mean you won’t use the main app ever again. Some people may, but I certainly haven’t. Instead, it’s been more of a focus shift that allows me to continue whatever I’m working on, switching timers as needed on the fly from whichever device I have handy at the moment without opening the app most of the time. Timery’s update is a stellar release, which also comes with a new watchOS app that fans of the app are going to love.

Timery, which uses the Toggl Track web service as its back end, offers seven different types of widgets:

• Dashboard
• Projects
• Current Time Entry
• Single Saved Timer
• Saved Timers
• Recent Timers
• Time Tracked
• Summary Report

The Project and Single Saved Timer widgets are both brand-new with this release.

Timery includes multiple widget sizes for each type.

Every widget type is customizable, comes in at least two sizes, and some, like the Dashboard, have over 30 different settings that can be tweaked. Don’t worry, I won’t cover every one of them. Instead, I’ll hit the widget highlights of what’s new in the latest update. For more on the basics of Timery, which is a MacStories favorite, be sure to check out our past coverage on MacStories and Club MacStories.

With interactivity, the app’s developer, Joe Hribar, has been able to add a laundry list of interesting options to many of the app’s widgets. That starts with the ability to start and stop timers right from the widget without the app opening. On the iPhone and iPad, that also starts a Live Activity, allowing you to monitor your timers from the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island, too.

Timery’s new widgets include pagination buttons.

One thing that I’ve always found difficult to do when setting up Timery widgets is deciding which timers to include of the many I’ve saved. It’s always required a careful balancing of timers versus available space onscreen, which can be especially tough on smaller screens like the iPhone.

With today’s update, Timery has added the option to include pagination buttons to some of its widgets. For example, in place of a saved timer, forward and back buttons appear that allow you to page through multiple groups of timers. There’s still something to be said for using a large widget that allows you to access more saved or recent timers with a single tap, but if you don’t have the space, pagination buttons are a fantastic solution.

Timery’s new start controls.

Timery has also added the option to include start controls to its widgets. In place of a saved or recent timer, the app includes a start button as well as customizable buttons that can start a timer a certain amount of time in the past or based on the time you stopped your most recent timer.

Timery’s graphs let you drill down into individual projects.

Timery’s graphs allow you to drill down into individual projects, too. Wherever you see a caret next to a project in a chart, tap it, and you’ll get more details on that entry. A small close button will appear in the top left corner of that section of the widget, allowing you to close the current view and return to where you began.

Also, be sure to check out Timery’s updated Lock Screen widgets that have added interactivity, allowing you to start or stop timers from the iPhone and iPad’s Lock Screen. On the iPad’s Lock Screen, Joe Hribar has taken advantage of the option to offer larger widgets than the iPhone, adding a wide variety of interactive widgets similar to the small-sized Home Screen ones.

A Timery StandBy widget on the right.

Tapping Timery’s Live Activity in StandBy expands it to show the current timer.

The app has more StandBy widgets than most, too, with seven options that are similar to the app’s small Home Screen widgets. Because the app supports Live Activities, you’ll see a small oval indicator at the top of any StandBy screen with your counter counting up, too. Tap it, and the name of the timer appears, along with an interactive stop button to end the timer.

Timery’s current timer, reports and time entries on watchOS 10.

Timery saved timers and the watchOS 10 Smart Stack widget.

Finally, Timery’s watchOS redesign looks fantastic. The main interface looks modern and includes corner controls on most screens, like the one that shows the current timer that’s running. The app works with the watchOS 10 Smart Stack, a handy place to pin Timery’s widget that makes it easy to stop timers that you may have forgotten about when you step away from your desk. The app’s complications have been updated, too.

The latest update of Timery is incredibly deep and worth setting aside some time to explore in depth. There’s a lot there, but after spending a little time experimenting, I’ve found the options that make the app work for me, affecting which Timery widgets I use as well as their size and setup. With a little upfront work, I wouldn’t be surprised if most readers tweak their Timery setups in some way, too.

Timery is available on the App Store as a free download. Some features require a subscription.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

It’s clear from David Smith’s iOS 17 update to Widgetsmith that he intends for the app to hold its position among the most customizable widget creation tools available. That’s exactly what he’s done with a long list of new widgets, customization options, and features that push interactivity to the limit of the technologies Apple provides.

The new widgets focus on weather, calendar events, photos, and a game. The number of permutations available is vast because there’s so much to customize. The image at the beginning of this story is just a small sample of what is possible, but with adjustable colors, fonts, and other elements, the combinations that can be created are nearly endless. So, let’s dig into the highlights.

A couple of the new Widgetsmith weather widgets.

The new small weather widgets are a few of my favorites. One includes what is effectively a widget tab bar letting you switch between current, hourly, and daily data. Another lets you ‘scroll’ an hourly forecast using arrow buttons along the top and bottom edges of the widget. There’s a graph-style version of the same hourly weather widget that ‘scrolls’ horizontally, too. I put ‘scroll’ in quotes here for a reason. As I’ll discuss below, the interactivity of widgets is limited, which means there are constraints on what Widgetsmith can do that you won’t find in apps. Here, that means scrolling with buttons instead of swipe gestures. Still, both widgets pack far more information into a small form factor widget than was ever possible before, which is great, especially on smaller screens.

I’m also a fan of Widgetsmith’s new interactive calendar widget. It comes in medium, large, and extra-large sizes and shows your events for each of the next seven days. Tapping the date at the top of the widget switches to showing the events for that date in the space below. Tap the part of the widget where you see your events, and it opens Widgetsmith to its built-in calendar interface.

One of the more popular uses of Widgetsmith is to display photos as widgets. Here, Widgetsmith has added the ability to tap through photos using a Cover Flow-like interface. Another interactive version of the photos widget uses a tab bar-like interface similar to the one used in the app’s interactive weather widget, putting the focus on one photo that can be changed by tapping the photo thumbnails along the bottom edge of the widget. Plus, there is an interactive photo locket and carousel widget.

Widgetsmith’s unique dual-widget display.

The app does something else unique with photos, allowing a single photo to be combined with another widget. There are two types, but both are activated by tapping on the photo you pick. When tapped, the photo of the first variant slides up, revealing a ‘drawer’ containing the second widget. The other version flips over to show the second widget. It’s a very clever way to enjoy a favorite photo most of the time but see the weather, time, or other information with a single tap.

The interactive music collection widget.

Widgetsmith has always been an excellent way to quickly access favorite albums and playlists, but now there’s also an interactive version. Like one of the new photo widgets, the interactive music widget uses a Cover Flow-like interface that allows you to tap among several albums and playlists. Tapping on an album or playlist starts playback. Tapping a second time restarts playback instead of pausing it, which may be a limitation of the way the widget is built, but it was still unexpected.

The Widgetsmith Tile game.

The app adds an interactive tile game, too. It’s a little like a simplified version of Threes, where the object is to line up matching numbers and slide them together, which adds them together. This isn’t the first game we’ve seen implemented as an interactive widget, and I’m sure it won’t be the last by any stretch of the imagination. The limitations on widget interactions mean that all widget-based games will be simple, but they can still be a fun way to pass the time.

Speaking of interaction limitations, it’s worth noting how they impact interactions with Widgetsmith widgets and all other interactive widgets. Widgets can be interacted with using buttons and toggles only. For example, that means when you see a Cover Flow-style widget in Widgetsmith and try to swipe from one album or photo to another, it won’t work. It also means you can’t swipe down to close the app’s drawer-style widget either. Instead, you’ll invoke Spotlight Search. That’s a limitation of interactive widgets that can take some getting used to if an app pushes the boundaries of what’s possible the way Widgetsmith does. Instead of swiping, you have to remember to tap. It makes some widgets feel broken at first, but over time, it’s possible to get used to it.

A Widgetsmith weather widget on the iPad’s Lock Screen.

In addition to the Home Screen widgets that I’ve highlighted above, Widgetsmith’s new widgets are available as Lock Screen widgets in the new large Lock Screen size, too. Photo widgets aren’t very effective in monochrome, but others, like the weather widget above, are clear, handy to have on your iPad Lock Screen, and fully interactive.

Widgetsmith widgets in StandBy.

Finally, Widgetsmith also supports iOS 17’s new StandBy mode, allowing you to add small-sized interactive widgets for when your iPhone is charging and in landscape mode.

It’s remarkable what an app like Widgetsmith has been able to achieve, even within the relatively tight system constraints of widget interaction. Over time, I’d love to see Apple loosen the reigns on widgets, but it makes sense to start slow, see how developers use interactivity, and expand from there. If you’re into customizing your Home Screen and Lock Screen, Widgetsmith’s new interactive widgets are some of the first you should check out.

Widgetsmith is available on the App Store as a free download. However, certain features require a subscription.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Today, Federico published his iOS and iPadOS 17 review. As in past years, we’re releasing a wide variety of perks exclusively for Club MacStories members throughout the week, including an eBook version of the review, a special ‘making of’ edition of MacStories Weekly, a behind-the-scenes AppStories+ segment, and two new Club-exclusive Obsidian plugins.

Club-Wide Perks

The Club-wide extras this year are:

• An eBook version of Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 17 review
• A special edition of MacStories Weekly featuring:
  • Federico’s annual in-depth look at the making of the review
  • A special guest column by Michael Steeber, who created the beautiful 3D iPhone and iPad renders you’ll find throughout Federico’s review

The eBook

iOS and iPadOS 17: The MacStories Review, a Club MacStories exclusive

iOS and iPadOS 17: The MacStories Review. The eBook version of Federico’s review is fully interactive, complete with all the images and videos. The review is a great read on the web, where you can enjoy its opening animation and special navigation features, but the eBook is an excellent alternative, especially for sitting back with your iPad and Apple Books, where you can take notes and highlight passages.

Also (because we are asked this a lot), if you read the eBooks in Apple Books and want to zoom in to get a close look at any of the screenshots, double-tap images on iOS devices (or double-click on the Mac) to open a full-sized version.

Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 17 review is available now as a free download exclusively for members of Club MacStories who can access them from their member downloads page.

MacStories Weekly

In Friday’s edition of MacStories Weekly, Federico will share his annual ‘Making Of’ story. This year’s review includes some fascinating refinements to last year’s workflow related to Obsidian. In his column, Federico will explain the shortcuts, Obsidian plugins, apps, and other tools that helped him pull together this year’s review on a compressed time schedule.

MacStories Weekly will also feature a special column by Michael Steeber, who designed the cover animation art and other artwork throughout Federico’s review that brings the marquee features of iOS and iPadOS 17 to life.

You can read more on Club MacStories here and sign up using the buttons below.

Club MacStories+ and Club Premier Perks

We’ve got exclusive perks for Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members, too.

AppStories+

A special episode of AppStories+.

First, we released an extended version of AppStories today that is available now, covering Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 17 review workflow. As always, AppStories+ is also ad-free, released one day early most weeks, and delivered in high-bitrate audio. for Club Premier members and AppStories+ subscribers.

Two Obsidian Plugins

Backlinker.

Like last year, Federico and my son, Finn, have teamed up again this year to produce two Obsidian plugins just for Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members. Both plugins will be available later this week.

• Backlinker is a powerful plugin that allows you to open all backlinks to a document as separate tabs with a single command. The plugin also includes advanced options for filtering backlinks based on the document’s title.
• Image Inserter is a super fast way to insert images in Obsidian with the native image picker on Apple platforms or by pasting an image from the clipboard.

Image Inserter.

• To enjoy these Club MacStories+ or Club Premier perks, join Club MacStories+, which starts at $10/month, or choose the best value by subscribing to Club Premier, which starts at $12/month.

Club Premier adds AppStories+, the extended, ad-free version of our flagship podcast, to a long list of other perks like our Discord community, exclusive columns from Federico and John, advanced web search and filtering of Club content, and lots more.

You can read more about Club MacStories+ and Club Premier, then sign up or upgrade your account using the buttons below:

Join Club MacStories+:

Join Club Premier:

Today’s iOS and iPadOS 17 review is the culmination of a lot of work by Federico. Every year, we try to make it extra special for readers of the site and Club members who want even more of the iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS coverage that we’re known for. Thanks as always for reading MacStories, and a special thanks to our Club members who help us continue to do what we love.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Hourly precipitation predictions for a full 10 days.

The Weather app includes hourly precipitation predictions in its 10-day forecast detail view. Is there really a 45% chance of rain in Nashville a week from Monday? Probably not, but if that sort of precision is what you’re looking for in a weather app, Weather has it.

The wind animates on the new radar map overlay.

Wind map overlays have been added to Weather, too. The overlay looks excellent and animates to show you which way the wind will blow over the next 24 hours. It’s a great addition if you’re going out to fly a kite or a drone, sail a boat, and more.

It’s warmer in Nashville than the average September 16th. I’m not sure what to do with that information, but now we both know.

Historical trends have been added to Weather, too. Tapping the ‘Averages’ tile shows you how far above or below the average temperature today’s temperature is. That data is accompanied by a graph of today compared to the historical range as well as a month-by-month chart of average high and low temperatures. When you tap on the 10-day forecast, you can also swipe back one day to compare today’s predicted weather with yesterday’s actual conditions.

Hyperlocal weather is now available in the Weather app.

Location names are more specific, too. I found an entry for Duke University. There’s a separate entry for Durham, the town where the school is located. Duke was predicted to be one degree warmer and cooler today than Durham, but as I write this, they’re the same temperature, which is good to know, I guess.

The moon gets a lot of attention in the latest update to Weather.

If you’re a moon stan, you’re in luck because it got even more attention in Weather this year. Tap on Weather’s moon tile to learn about its illumination, the time of the moonrise and moonset, the days until the next full moon, and its distance from Earth. There’s also a dial-like interface element that lets you move forward and back through the calendar, which is connected to an animated moon graphic that updates as you swipe on the dial. Plus, there’s a calendar for each month that shows the moon’s phase and includes the date of that month’s new and full moon.

Apple has enhanced its visualizations to reflect the position of the sun and conditions.

Not bad Weather, not bad at all.

Finally, Apple says that it has improved its use of the correct standard units for different geographic regions, and the visual effects you see behind the weather data have been enhanced. Looking at today’s weather and then looking out the window, I’ve got to say, they look very close.

Although I personally think a lot of the data in Weather is overkill, I also recognize that what may seem superfluous to me isn’t to everyone. So, as easy as it is to poke fun at the Weather app, I do appreciate that it’s become more than just a list of current conditions and a short-term forecast. Plus, if you just enjoy reading about weather conditions, there’s plenty to learn about from the Weather app, too.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Passwords permeate our lives. With an ever-growing number of sites, services, and apps to log into, people need help generating, managing, and accessing them. There are excellent third-party apps that can help, but the reality is that most people aren’t going to download a third-party app, and even fewer are likely to pay for one. That’s why Apple’s work with passwords is so important.

However, what makes that work impressive is the lengths to which the company has gone to make good password practices easy for users. The password updates to iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma are fantastic examples, making it easier than ever to share passwords and for users to begin adopting passkeys, a superior method of authentication compared to traditional passwords.

Shared Passwords

Sharing passwords from the iPhone.

Shared passwords are the most significant new security feature of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma. Apple’s work with passwords has come a long way in recent years, but until now, password sharing was a one-off thing. However, with this year’s OS updates, users will be able to share entire sets of passwords with friends, family, and other trusted users. That’s a big deal because, in prior OS versions, that limitation was one of the most common reasons why many of our readers are still using a third-party password manager.

You can start sharing passwords with the button at the top of your list of passwords.

The first time you open the Passwords tab of Safari on macOS or the Passwords section of the iOS and iPadOS Settings app or the Mac’s System Settings, you’ll see a new option near the top of your list of passwords that says ‘Share Passwords with Family.’ That message may lead you to think that password sharing is limited to an iCloud Family Sharing group, but it’s not. They can be shared with any trusted person regardless of whether they are part of your iCloud Sharing group.

Notifying someone you’ve added to a password group is done using Messages.

The notification sent to anyone invited to a shared password group is similar to other sharing notifications on Apple’s OSes.

I’ve begun setting up a shared password group for my family, but so far, it’s limited to me and my son, who is also running the macOS Sonoma beta. You’ll also discover during the setup process that shared passwords will only be accessible from devices that are on the latest OSes. That may be frustrating for whoever is the early OS adopter in their family or other password-sharing group, but it’s a good reason to encourage your family and other contacts to update their devices.

Shared passwords can only be used on devices with Apple’s latest OSes.

After adding someone, you can search through your passwords and select the ones that you want to share. The final step is to notify the person you’re sharing your passwords with that they’ve been shared. Later, if you want to edit a group, you can reopen the group, where you’ll see an option to manage its members. From here, you can add new members, remove people from a group, or delete a group entirely. It’s worth noting, too, that if you delete a group, your passwords aren’t deleted. Instead, they’re moved back into My Passwords, which serves as your default password group.

A shared password group’s owner is the only person who can add more participants.

As the creator of a shared password list, you have sole control of adding and removing members of the group, but once part of a group, each member can add and remove any of the passwords regardless of who added them originally. Also, Passwords live in just one group at a time. For example, if I want to share my Hulu password with my family, adding it to my Family password group removes it from the ‘My Passwords’ section. If you want a password to live in two places, you’ll need to create a second password entry as though it were a brand-new password.

Shared passwords are indicated by a little two-person sharing icon.

You might wonder if passwords living in one location make it hard to find them when you don’t recall which list they live in, but in practice, it doesn’t. The main Passwords view includes a search field that searches all of your passwords. The ones that are shared will appear in search results with a little ‘two-person’ sharing icon indicating that it’s part of a shared list. You can also search individual lists, so I haven’t found it any more difficult to find passwords than in the past.

Passwords are easy to move, too. When you open a password’s detail view, you see a ‘Group’ field that can be used to move a password to any of your groups. You can even set up a new group from the drop-down menu. Alternatively, you can access the same menu by long-pressing a password on iOS 17 or iPadOS 17 or right-clicking on a password on macOS Sonoma. Another way to move passwords is from the ‘plus’ button. The context menu it displays has a ‘Move Passwords to Group’ option that displays all of your passwords in other groups so you can move them into the current group.

Federico accepting my shared password invitation and adding a new password to the shared group.

One quirk of moving passwords is that only the group owner can move them. I call it a quirk because any member of a group can delete a password, eliminating access to it for everyone, including the person who set up the list. Moving a password out of a shared group would have the same effect as deletion on other members, yet it’s not possible. It’s an odd limitation but enough of an edge case that I don’t expect it will be a problem in most circumstances.

In my testing, creating lists of shared passwords was easy, and I expect it will be more than enough to meet the needs of many families, roommates, and other groups of trusted contacts. It may also be enough for some small businesses, but in setting up a shared list of passwords with Federico, I immediately missed the categories of passwords that I’ve set up in 1Password. Apple’s shared passwords don’t include the ability to set permission levels or attach documents either, which is possible with third-party password managers. You can work around these limitations using separate lists and password-protected notes in the Notes app, but that’s more cumbersome than a third-party app if those features are important to you.

Until very recently, my use of shared password groups has been limited because not all of my devices have been on the latest OSes, and few of the people in my life are running betas. Still, I plan to move the handful of shared passwords my family shares to Apple’s system. Apple’s system may not be the best solution for shared MacStories passwords, but I expect it will be far easier than convincing family members to download and learn a third-party app.

Apple ID Passkeys

The latest OSes automatically generate a passkey for your Apple ID.

iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma automatically generate a passkey for your Apple ID. Passkeys, which are based on a cross-platform web standard, are a way to replace traditional passwords with the biometric authentication methods on your devices. For the Mac, that means the Touch ID sensor. For the iPhone and iPad, that could be Touch ID or Face ID, depending on the device. Your passkeys sync across all of your Apple devices using iCloud Keychain, allowing you to use those biometric authentication methods to sign in with your Apple ID on every device you own.

Passkeys have been available for icloud.com and apple.com sites to anyone running macOS Sonoma, iOS 17, or iPadOS 17 since shortly after WWDC, so I’ve been using my Apple ID passkey all summer. The best part about passkeys is that when they’re enabled, you quickly forget about them because they’re available on all of your devices and use the same authentication methods you’re already used to for unlocking your devices, but they’re more secure than passwords. It will be years before most apps and websites support passkeys, but I’ve already seen them implemented for a handful of websites I use, like CVS, the pharmacy my family uses, Shop by Shopify, and Tailscale.

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

Passwords should be freed from the clutter of the Settings app.

When you look at where Apple’s support for managing passwords is today, the question we and others have been asking for the past few years at MacStories is more relevant than ever:

Why isn’t there a separate system app for passwords?

Apple is doing a better job than ever surfacing passwords system-wide, but users still need to dig through Settings too often.

Settings on iOS and iPadOS and System Settings on the Mac need a makeover that goes deeper than the type of design refresh we saw in macOS Ventura. There’s too much in both settings apps, and removing passwords and making it a standalone app would be a great way to reduce those apps’ complexity.

Bigger picture, passwords have never fit well in settings anyway. To my mind, a password app is more like a specialized note-taking app than it is a settings app. Managing passwords doesn’t have a direct impact on the operating system in the same way changing from light mode to dark mode or silencing notifications does. With the password features of Apple’s OSes so competitive with standalone password apps now, I hope we see them rolled into a separate app in next year’s OS updates.

Year after year, Apple has improved the way passwords are managed on our devices, and this year is no different. Shared passwords will make sharing among family members and other trusted groups significantly easier to manage than before. The generation of Apple ID passkeys should help push passkey adoption forward, too, once users see how convenient they are and start to wonder why more sites and services don’t support them yet. I’d love to see Apple’s password features rolled into their own app, but that doesn’t take away from the great work that’s been done to make generating, managing, and accessing passwords easier than ever across every Apple OS.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

We’ve all been there. You say goodbye to a friend or family member after a late evening and then begin to worry if they’ll make it home safely. You ask them to share their location and text you when they get home, but it’s late, and you know they’ll probably forget to text, so you finish your fun evening together, anxiously checking Find My Friends over and over.

Check In is a new iOS 17 feature that helps eliminate that anxiety by automating the process of letting your family or friends know when you arrive somewhere safely. I finally had the chance to try Check In recently with my son Finn, who’s the only other person in my family who is currently on the iOS 17 beta. The testing conditions were a bit contrived, but what I found was that Check In is fast and easy to use and does an excellent job of explaining the information you’re sharing and how it works before you leave for your destination.

Check In’s onboarding is top notch.

Check In lives in Messages. From the new plus button interface, pick Check In to begin the setup process. The first time you use the new feature, iOS 17 will walk you through how it works and what to expect. Apple onboarding screens for Check In are some of its best yet, with clear, concise explanations of the feature and examples that set expectations before committing to sharing information with someone.

Check In explains how it works to your recipient, too.

The onboarding works both ways, too. When you send a check-in, the recipient will get an explanation of what that means and what to expect. It would be easy to cynically dismiss these setup screens as a form of ad for Check In, and maybe they are to a degree, but they eliminate a lot of potential back-and-forth explanations for anyone who isn’t familiar with the feature and might be hesitant to use it. That’s a good thing because it lowers barriers to a feature that is about personal safety.

For my test, I set out from my home to a local coffee shop. It was early on a Saturday, so not the sort of situation in which you’d typically use Check In, but it allowed me to test both ends of the feature well enough.

Setting up a check-in.

Check In integrates with Maps, so after picking it from Messages’ menu, the first thing I did was search for the coffee shop in the Maps interface and set it as my destination. That way, Finn would get an alert that I’d arrived when I got within the geofenced area around the shop. Alternatively, you can set Check In to alert based on the expiration of a timer.

The map interface also lets you choose how you are getting to your destination, with options for driving, transit, and walking, each of which has estimated arrival times that will be used to track your progress. There’s an option to add time to your route, too.

When setting up a check-in, you have the choice between sharing limited or full data. Limited data includes your location, battery information, and data signal for your iPhone and Apple Watch. Full data adds the route you’ve taken, the last time you unlocked your iPhone, and the last time you removed your Apple Watch.

Check In explains clearly explains the information sharing options you have.

After I’d set up the Check In details, I was alerted that Finn would get a notification when I sent my check-in and when I arrived at my destination. The alert also explained that if I was delayed during my journey or placed an Emergency SOS call, I’d be prompted to respond, and if I didn’t do so within 15 minutes, Finn would be notified. The alert also explained that he’d be notified if my iPhone went offline for an extended period of time.

With that, I sent my check-in and set out for a morning cup of coffee. Finn received my check-in notification and a prompt to allow Check In to send him Critical Alerts if I got delayed. That way, if he had his iPhone muted or in Do Not Disturb, he’d still get a Lock Screen notification, and a sound would play – a good thing if it were late at night and his iPhone had already switched to a nighttime Focus mode silencing alerts. The Check In graphic in our Messages thread also showed where I was going, my estimated arrival time, and a ‘Details’ button where he could get more information.

What each person sees when you send a check-in.

I must have been eager for my morning coffee because I beat the estimated arrival time of my check-in by eight minutes. On both ends of our conversation, the Check In bubble changed, confirming that I’d arrived at my destination.

As you can probably tell, there’s a lot going on with Check In. What makes it a great feature, though, is that from a user standpoint, it’s easy to set up and use. Once you send your check-in to someone, your iPhone handles the monitoring in the background, letting your loved ones know if something unexpected happens to you. It’s something I plan to use a lot and encourage my kids to use liberally with me and their friends.

What each person sees when you arrive at your destination.

There’s one limitation I’d love to see Apple tackle, though. I tested Check In while Finn was visiting us. He lives in Ireland and left the next day for home, which involved a long flight and bus trip before he arrived home at a time that was the middle of the night for us. I’d loved to have used Check In to know when he landed in Ireland and get alerts if something happened on his bus ride home, but that’s not possible because Check In doesn’t work with air travel.

The trouble with air travel is that your iPhone has to drop off the network for an extended period of time, which is something the feature is designed to warn your loved ones about. If you’re traveling internationally, you may also be switching carriers. That adds a lot of potential complexity to Check In, and it may not be something that can be overcome, but I hope Apple tries. As it was, Finn could still send a check-in to me for the Ireland part of his trip, which was better than nothing.

Over the past few years, Apple has greatly expanded the ways that its products help monitor your safety. Whether it’s fall detection on the Apple Watch, car crash detection, satellite calls for help, or now, giving friends and family the peace of mind of knowing you made it home safely. I’m a big fan of Check In and encourage readers to give it a try. A low-stakes test like I did with Finn for my morning coffee run is the perfect way to see how it works, and I bet it will sell a lot of people on using it regularly thereafter.

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The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

Next week, Apple will begin releasing its new OSes, which are packed with a lot of new features. However, those updates won’t include everything you may have heard about over the summer. For the past few years, OS features that are announced at WWDC have been increasingly released after the fall release of major OS revisions. Sometimes, those later releases are signaled at WWDC, but often they’re not, so we’ve compiled a list of features that won’t be available in Apple’s fall OS updates but have been promised to come in a later release. Unless otherwise indicated, the following features will be coming later to iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma:

• One of the tentpole features of Messages this year is the ability to create stickers using every OSes’ ability to lift subjects from a photo. The option to share stickers from Messages’ ‘Plus’ menu is already in this fall’s updates, but later, you’ll also be able to send stickers using the Tapback menu, too.
• Messages will also sync settings, like text message forwarding, SMS filters, and send and receive accounts, via iCloud in a later release.
• The ‘catch up’ arrow button found now on iOS 17 that takes users to the top of new messages in a busy thread will come to iPadOS 17.
• The News widget will add playback controls for Apple News podcasts and News+ audio stories on iOS and iPadOS 17.
• AirDrop will add the ability to finish a file transfer using the Internet if a local peer-to-peer connection drops.
• A lot of Music’s promised updates are coming later, including:
  • Collaborative playlists that will allow a group to add, rearrange, and remove songs.
  • Emoji reactions to song collaborative playlist song choices in the Now Playing view.
  • A new Favorite Songs playlist, something which I’ve maintained as a smart playlist forever, will be available automatically in your Library and via Siri.
  • Marking items as favorites is expanding to include songs, albums, playlists, and artists. Favorites will automatically be added to your Library, eliminating what is now a two-step process, and will be used to improve your recommendations.
  • Also, Music will add a macOS Sonoma widget to allow users to play or pause a song or album or see a list of top charts and, for Apple Music subscribers, recommendations.
• Intelligent PDF form detection with enhanced AutoFill will be available systemwide in apps like Files and Mail, as well as for scanned documents.
• The Fitness app will allow you to prioritize the volume of trainers’ voices or the training session’s music on iOS and iPadOS 17.
• Proximity sign-in using the particle cloud used by devices like the HomePod and Apple Watch will be expanded to make it easier to use a signed-in, trusted iPhone or iPad to sign in to other devices.
• Your iPhone will add the ability to tap to unlock Matter-enabled smart locks with a home key or set up a PIN code in the Home app on iOS 17.
• Finally, there’s no word yet on when Journal, Apple’s journaling app, will make its debut.

Of these features, I’m especially looking forward to the updates to Music, checking what Journal is capable of, and sending stickers using Tapback, which I expect will increase my use of them a lot. There’s no word yet when these features debut, but I expect we’ll see them trickle out starting later this year.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

John: Part of the widget story for all of Apple’s OSes this fall is StandBy, an iPhone-only mode that displays widgets, a clock, or photos when your device is stationary and charging in landscape orientation. When StandBy was first rumored before WWDC, I was skeptical. It didn’t sound like something I needed or would find useful. Boy, was I wrong. I’ve been using StandBy daily since just after WWDC at my desk and on my nightstand, and I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’ve begun using it elsewhere, too. So, today, I thought I’d hit the highlights of what StandBy can do because it’s a lot and not immediately obvious and, along with Federico, recommend several chargers that we’ve been using to enable it.

To use your iPhone in StandBy, it must be charging and in landscape mode. Official MagSafe and MagSafe-compatible chargers work, as does charging via a Lightning cable. Oddly, though, Apple’s white MagSafe battery pack doesn’t work. Your iPhone also needs to be stationary as Federico discovered when he tried it in his car while driving.

Tapping on a a widget causes a button to appear in the corner that you can tap to open the related app.

StandBy has three modes: dual widgets, a clock, and photos, all of which are customizable. Like Home Screen widgets, StandBy widgets can be stacked and swiped through vertically, and they’re interactive. Tapping on a widget causes an arrow to appear in the top right corner of the widget, which can then be tapped to open the associated app. It’s a nice touch that prevents accidentally opening apps when you don’t want to, which wasn’t part of the feature in the earliest betas.

Adding widgets is a lot like adding them to your Home Screen.

Adding a new widget to StandBy.

If you’re already using widgets on your iPhone, adding them in StandBy mode will be very familiar. Tapping and holding on a widget puts the selected widget or widget stack in a jiggle mode where it can be edited and where you can activate Smart Rotate or Widget Suggestions, similar to the way widget stacks work on the iPhone’s Home Screen. In jiggle mode, there’s also a plus button for adding a new widget to the selected stack.

One of my favorite clock widgets.

Changing the clock’s accent color.

StandBy isn’t just about widgets, though. There’s a clock mode with five clock options. My favorite is a big digital clock that also shows the day, date, temperature, and the time of my next alarm. Long-pressing on the clock face lets you change the accent color, similar to the way you can change colors on a watch face in watchOS to a bunch of pre-defined colors or one you pick yourself.

StandBy’s retro Analog clock.

StandBy’s World clock.

There’s also a retro analog alarm clock option that includes your next alarm, the day, and the date. Its color accents can be updated, too. A world clock option displays a world map made up of dots highlighted to show any cities you’ve set up in the system Clock app. Tapping on any of the highlighted cities switches the digital time on the corner of the display to that city’s time.

StandBy’s Solar clock.

StandBy’s Float clock.

The simplest two clocks are another digital version called Solar with a background gradient that shifts throughout the day. Long-pressing on the face lets you change the color of the gradient. Finally, Float is a digital clock with big, rounded numerals that overlap, plus your next alarm. Like the other clocks, you can edit the colors used and even pick from multi-color options. When the time changes, the new digits animate into view, rotating up from the bottom of the screen.

StandBy’s photo mode.

The UI for adding any album to the photo mode and picking among pre-defined photo sets.

The final StandBy option is the photo viewer, which can be set up to rotate among featured photos, nature shots, cities, and people by default. While each photo is onscreen, it slowly zooms in using a Ken Burns-like effect to add some motion. If you choose people, you can also set who should be included. The photo mode’s jiggle mode includes a plus button to allow you to pick any photo album from the Photos app to use in StandBy, too.

When a notification comes in, it’s initially dominated by the icon or profile picture of who sent it.

The notification transitions to a view that puts more emphasis on the contents of the notification.

StandBy can also optionally display notifications. If you don’t manage your notifications carefully, this could be a distraction, but I find it less distracting than a notification on my Mac, so I’ve kept notifications turned on. For example, if a text message comes in, the text is big and legible, so I immediately know if it’s something I need to pay attention to or not. It’s a lot like managing notifications using the Apple Watch.

If you see a notification you want to act on or simply want to tap on a widget to access its app, StandBy is a bit of a mixed bag. Tapping on a notification or widget will open up the related app, but unless the app supports landscape mode, which many do not, you’ll probably find yourself grabbing your iPhone off of its charger instead of trying to use a portrait mode app that’s rotated 90 degrees.

Calendar works well in landscape, but most apps don’t.

Apple’s system apps are a good example of the difference. Tap on a calendar notification or its widget, and you’ll get a landscape view of your calendar that looks great. However, tap the weather widget to see a multi-day forecast, and it opens rotated 90 degrees, which isn’t a good experience. I’m not surprised that many of Apple apps don’t support landscape mode because there haven’t been many reasons to do so historically. However, I suspect we may see a trend toward landscape mode adoption if StandBy is as popular as I expect it will be.

StandBy’s Night Mode.

On top of all of that, there’s also a Night Mode built into StandBy, which can be deactivated in Settings. When the lights are dimmed, the StandBy screen turns red, so it doesn’t shine brightly in your eyes as you try to sleep. A short time after entering Night Mode, StandBy turns off, so your screen is completely dark, but with a wave of your hand, it will light back up if you want to check the time, although this can be turned off in settings if you prefer.

So, as you can probably tell, what looks like a simple feature in the screenshots and demos shared at WWDC actually has a lot of depth. There are a bunch of ways for users to customize StandBy to their liking through the interface itself as well as Settings and plenty of room for developers to participate by offering widgets.

I’m a big fan of StandBy. I can monitor a couple of widgets plus notifications without picking up my iPhone, which makes it less likely that I’m going to get distracted by something else on my iPhone. The feature has also decluttered my Mac’s menu bar. I’ve moved calendar events and the weather out of the menu bar and onto my iPhone in StandBy mode, for instance.

I also prefer StandBy to the Apple Watch’s nightstand mode. The iPhone’s screen is easier to read in the dark without my glasses on when it’s in StandBy’s clock mode, and it frees up my Apple Watch for sleep tracking. Plus, the photos mode makes a surprisingly good photo viewer for other times I’m not using my iPhone. Perhaps most surprising of all is how useful StandBy has already been even before I’ve used many third-party widgets. That’s a good sign because it’s only going to get better when your favorite third-party apps join the StandBy party.

As I mentioned at the top, I got started with StandBy at my desk, quickly moved on to also using it on my bedside table at night, and most recently, I’ve been experimenting with mobile solutions so I can use the feature when I’m working on my balcony or away from home, or cooking in the kitchen. Federico’s been on a parallel journey with StandBy, which has led us both to try multiple charging solutions, which we thought we’d share for those who are interested in trying StandBy as part of the iOS 17 public beta.

Federico’s StandBy-Friendly Chargers

Federico: I’ve been taking advantage of StandBy in iOS 17 with two different types of MagSafe-certified chargers for my iPhone 14 Pro Max. One of them is a recent discovery, while the other is a product I’ve been using for months.

Anker Cube

Anker’s 3-in-1 MagSafe charging cube has to be one of my favorite tech accessories of all time. For those who may not know this about me, I love cubes and believe they’re the perfect shape. History doesn’t lie. So what better combo than having a tiny, cube-shaped charger that supports fast charging on iPhone and Apple Watch, has regular wireless charging, is MagSafe-certified, and is also extremely compact?

I started using Anker’s cube months ago and liked it so much, I purchased two more: one for my desk and another for Silvia’s nightstand. What I love most about the cube is that it’s comprised of different layers that you can adjust and reveal only when needed. The main MagSafe charger, for instance, is a square-shaped surface that supports angle adjustment or can be closed flat on top of the cube. When lifted, the charger lets me attach the iPhone both in portrait or landscape mode; with the latter option, I can use StandBy mode, which I’ve been doing a lot with the cube on my desk, so I can keep an eye on my calendar or the currently running timer in the Timery app for iOS 17 (currently in beta).

The cube.

The cube on my desk next to my HomePod mini with a battery base.

What’s also great about the cube is that it offers flexibility in a compact and elegant package. On the right side, there is a special compartment for an Apple Watch charging puck, which I can reveal when needed by pressing on the side of the unit. If I don’t need to charge my Watch, I can push the puck inside the cube, and it disappears from view. Similarly, if I want to charge my AirPods Pro wirelessly, I can place the case on the back of the MagSafe charger: the upper surface of the cube has a built-in Qi charger, which is just the right size for AirPods Pro.

Anker’s MagSafe cube is not a cheap accessory, but the build quality is terrific, and it has the sort of modular flexibility that I love to see in products I use every day without giving up on a minimalistic design that looks fantastic on a nightstand or desk. For these reasons, the cube is my favorite wired MagSafe charger that works with StandBy in iOS 17 out of the box.

OtterBox’s 2-in-1 MagSafe Battery

The other charger I’m using for StandBy is something I’ve been trying to find for a while: a portable battery with an official, MagSafe-certified charging puck that also doubles as a USB-C battery and Apple Watch charger.

The OtterBox charger is a USB-C battery about the size of two iPhone 14 Pro Max units stacked on top of each other. It is not, as you can guess, a lightweight battery you can easily fit in a pocket. However, it is the only way I’ve found to have a real MagSafe charger that I can move around the house without wires or take with me in a bag if I’m out of town.

The battery.

The reason I wanted to find this kind of product is that, in iOS 17, StandBy mode will eventually support a special ‘MagSafe memory’ feature that takes advantage of the fact that each MagSafe charger has a unique ID to remember the StandBy page and widget configuration you want to use on a specific charger. As I wrote in my iOS 17 preview story, this feature isn’t working for me at the moment, but my understanding is that it will soon. And once that happens, I’ll be able to have a MagSafe-certified charger that lets me tilt the iPhone upright next to my iPad Pro, no matter where I am, without being connected to a power outlet – all while perfectly integrating with StandBy.

This is how the battery folds open to reveal a MagSafe stand.

The OtterBox charger is a 10,000 mAh battery that, in addition to a MagSafe puck that supports iPhone fast charging up to 15W and wireless charging for AirPods, also has an integrated Apple Watch charging puck (for charging up to 5W) and a USB-C port to charge other devices at 20W. The port is also used for charging the battery itself, which I usually do at the end of the day when I’m finished working.

Based on what I’ve written so far, I think you can see why I’m falling in love with this product. Despite its shortcomings (the battery could be bigger, and the build quality of the plastic arm that contains the MagSafe puck could be better), it grants the kind of freedom and MagSafe certification that I haven’t been able to find in any other battery. There are many “MagSafe compatible” batteries out there, but they’re not MagSafe official; for that reason, their charger doesn’t have a MagSafe ID associated with them, and they won’t support the MagSafe memory feature of StandBy I mentioned above. The OtterBox battery is the only MagSafe-certified portable charger that exists at the moment, at least to my knowledge.

They go well together.

I plan to rely on the following setup for the rest of the summer: iPad Pro, iPhone, Apple Watch Ultra, and the OtterBox battery. If you’re willing to compromise on size and battery capacity to have real MagSafe and proper StandBy wherever you are, I can’t recommend the OtterBox 2-in-1 MagSafe battery enough.

John’s StandBy-Friendly Chargers

John: I’ve experimented with several different charging solutions for StandBy and settled on three: one for my desk, one for my nightstand, and a portable charger for everywhere else.

Belkin 2-in-1 BoostCharge Pro

Belkin’s 2-in-1 BoostCharge Pro

Belkin’s 2-in-1 BoostCharge Pro is the charger I’m currently using at my desk. I used to use the Belkin BoostCharge Pro 3-in-1 charger, but it was an older model that didn’t charge an Apple Watch at maximum power. The BoostCharge Pro 3-in-1 was also bulky, so I switched to the smaller 2-in-1 model that can charge an iPhone and AirPods Pro but forgoes the Watch charger.

The iPhone also sits higher than the 3-in-1 model, which I prefer, and the build quality is excellent. The only thing I don’t like about Belkin’s 2-in-1 charger is the power brick, which is a little bigger than I’d prefer.

However, if you’re looking for a solution that also charges an Apple Watch, it’s worth noting that Belkin has updated the 3-in-1 BoostCharge Pro with more powerful Apple Watch charging. It appears from Belkin’s website that the design is exactly the same as the older model I have, which works perfectly well with Standby because the charging pads are far enough apart to accommodate an iPhone in landscape mode as well as an Apple Watch.

Twelve South HiRise 3

Twelve South’s HiRise 3.

This is the charger that I’m using on my nightstand. What I like most about the HiRise 3 is its small footprint. The charger is heavy enough that it won’t tip over, and it has a tacky bottom that sticks it to my table, but it’s removable and hasn’t left any marks on the wood table. The HiRise can accommodate an Apple Watch, charging at 3W, an iPhone, and AirPods Pro. I don’t use the HiRise to charge my Apple Watch Ultra at night because I use it for sleep tracking, and the HiRise 3 charges too slowly for the Ultra, but I was using it for my iPhone before the iOS 17 beta and have continued to use it.

The charging pad of the HiRise 3, which I reviewed in more detail on MacStories last summer, is rectangular, which means that if you’re charging in landscape mode to take advantage of StandBy, you’re going to see a short ‘chin’ peeking out along the bottom edge of your iPhone, even if you’ve got an iPhone Pro Max. That doesn’t bother me because I’m using StandBy in my bedroom at night with the lights off, so it’s not usually visible, but I know from talking to a couple of people in the Club MacStories+ Discord, that not everyone likes that look, which is understandable. Another downside is that you need to supply your own USB-C charger to use with the HiRise 3. That said, as a space-saving nightstand charger, the HiRise 3 is excellent, and it’s worked well enough for me that I haven’t felt the need to replace it.

Ugreen 10,000mAh MagSafe Wireless Power Station

Ugreen’s battery pack with kickstand.

The best portable StandBy solution that I’ve found so far is the Ugreen 10,000mAh MagSafe Wireless Power Station. Unlike the Otterbox case Federico recommends, it’s not MagSafe-certified, which means it won’t be able to take advantage of the MagSafe memory feature Federico mentions. However, it’s also the same size battery and currently about one-third the price of the Otterbox battery pack on Amazon’s US store.

Ugreen’s battery pack with StandBy’s photo mode.

Ugreen’s battery pack is a 10,000mAh battery with one USB-A and one USB-C port, plus MagSafe. That’s a good-sized battery without being too heavy, making it one that I don’t mind carrying around in my backpack. In MagSafe mode, the battery works just like Apple’s battery pack, but it’s significantly thicker, making the combination with your iPhone heavy and awkward even in bigger pockets, so I don’t recommend using it that way.

The secret sauce of this battery pack is a little kickstand on the back that lets you prop up your iPhone in landscape mode for StandBy. With no power cord or charging cable needed, the Ugreen battery is perfect for sitting anywhere that a wall outlet isn’t available or when you just don’t want to deal with the clutter of cables. I’ve been using this solution primarily for sitting outside, working on my balcony at home, and in the kitchen as I cook. I’ve also used it traveling as my travel alarm clock.

Honorable Mention: Belkin’s iPhone Mount with MagSafe for Mac Desktops and Displays

Belkin’s MagSafe Continuity Camera adapter for external displays.

This isn’t the prettiest solution, but it works and is travel friendly.

StandBy works whether your iPhone is charging via MagSafe or a Lightning cable. So, one of the first portable solutions I tried was Belkin’s Continuity Camera adapter, which works with external displays. I connected my iPhone to the adapter, which also works well as a horizontally oriented stand. That by itself doesn’t work to trigger StandBy, but once I started charging my iPhone with a Lightning cable, StandBy kicked in, and I was good to go. Pairing this setup with a Lightning cable and battery pack makes a nice portable setup on a nightstand because it doesn’t take up much space. It’s also a good solution for traveling because the Belkin adapter doesn’t take up much space, and you’re probably already going to be traveling with a Lightning cable and perhaps a battery pack, too.

One of the things I like most about StandBy is the way it takes inspiration from Home Screen widgets as well as watchOS. The combination provides an excellent passive experience at a distance that’s genuinely useful but not intrusive. I expect with the addition of third-party widgets, the experience will be even better, integrating the iPhone into more aspects of your day than ever.

You can also follow our 2023 Summer OS Preview Series through our dedicated hub or subscribe to its RSS feed.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for over six years.

In that time, members have enjoyed nearly 400 weekly and monthly newsletters packed with more of your favorite MacStories writing as well as Club-only podcasts, eBooks, discounts on apps, icons, and services. Join today, and you’ll get everything new that we publish every week, plus access to our entire archive of back issues and downloadable perks.

The Club expanded in 2021 with Club MacStories+ and Club Premier. Club MacStories+ members enjoy even more exclusive stories, a vibrant Discord community, a rotating roster of app discounts, and more. And, with Club Premier, you get everything we offer at every Club level plus an extended, ad-free version of our podcast AppStories that is delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.

iOS and iPadOS 17.

Apple is releasing the first public betas of iOS and iPadOS 17 today, and I’ll cut right to the chase: I’ve been using both of them on my primary devices since WWDC, and I’m very satisfied with the new features and improvements I’ve seen to date – especially on iPadOS. More importantly, both OSes are bringing back the same sense of fun and experimentation I felt three years ago with iOS 14.

I’ve already written about the improvements to Stage Manager on the iPad ahead of the public beta of iPadOS 17. Without repeating myself, I’m still surprised by the fact that Apple addressed my core complaints about Stage Manager a mere year after iPadOS 16. To describe my past year in iPad land as “turbulent” would be a euphemism; and yet, iPadOS 17’s improved Stage Manager not only fixes the essence of what was broken last year, but even eclipses, in my opinion, the Mac version of Stage Manager at this point.

I love using Stage Manager on my iPad now. There are still features missing from iPadOS 17 that won’t allow me to stop using my MacBook Air but, by and large, the enhancements in iPadOS 17 have allowed me to be an iPad-first user again. It feels good to write that. Plus, there are some surprises in iPadOS 17 that I wasn’t expecting that I’ll cover below.

iOS 17 is not a huge software update: there are dozens of quality-of-life features that I like and – best of all – terrific updates on the widget front. A good way to sum up Apple’s software strategy this year is the following: widgets are everywhere now (including the Watch), they’re interactive (finally), and they’re likely pointing at new hardware on the horizon (you know). As someone who’s been wishing for widget interactivity since the days of iOS 14, I can’t even begin to describe how amazing it’s been to see third-party developers come up with wild ideas for what effectively feel like mini-apps on the Home Screen.

I’m equally impressed by the work Apple has put into some of its built-in apps this year with features that I’ve always wanted and never thought the company would build. You can create internal links to other notes in the Notes app. Reminders has a column view. Podcasts has a proper queue. Even Reading List – of all features – has been updated this year. In using iOS 17, I sometimes get the sense that Apple went through popular wish lists from the community and decided to add all the top requests in a single release.

To quote my friend Stephen Hackett: the vibe is good this year, and it applies to software as well. Let me tell you about some of my favorite aspects of iOS and iPadOS 17 from the past month.

Widgets Everywhere

It’s hard not to get the feeling when using iOS 17 that Apple has been building toward this moment for the past several years, starting with the introduction of SwiftUI and widgets in iOS 14. Three years after the debut – and massive success – of widgets on the Home Screen, iOS 17 is the logical culmination of Apple’s efforts: not only are widgets everywhere in the operating system now, but they’re also interactive, and they are transforming apps into modular experiences that go beyond glanceability.

That’s where we left widgets three years ago, and it’s also how Apple pitched Lock Screen widgets last year: in the old era, widgets were supposed to be glanceable and serve as miniaturized previews for data and information contained in apps. This is changing with iOS 17, where both Home and Lock Screen widgets now fulfill two simultaneous roles: they’re still designed to be informative at a glance, but they also support inline interactions that let you perform actions from a widget itself without launching the associated app. I always thought I’d like this type of widgets in theory; now that I have them, I have to be honest: I love them, and they’re my favorite feature of iOS and iPadOS 17.

Reminders widgets in iOS 17.

You don’t have to look far to see some excellent examples of widgets with familiar designs that have been rejuvenated by the addition of interactivity in iOS 17.

The Reminders widget, for instance, still shows you a list of tasks based on the list you’ve configured to appear in the widget. Those tasks, however, can be checked off directly from the Home Screen or Lock Screen now. You don’t need to open the Reminders app to do it; without losing the context of the Home Screen, you can quickly mark a reminder as completed. The updated WidgetKit framework for developers supports both inline buttons and toggles, meaning that simple interactions such as marking a task as done are possible in iOS 17. Do not expect to see widgets that bring up the keyboard for typing a note or a photo picker for choosing a photo; basic, quick interactions are key in iOS 17. But I’m sure some developers will try regardless.

The new suite of Music widgets are another great showcase of interactive widgets. Like before, they show you a preview of albums or playlists you’ve recently played, but now there’s also a play button to start listening directly from the Home Screen. And since widgets in iOS 17 can animate in-place after an interaction occurs, when you tap that play button and playback starts, it morphs into a pause button, and vice versa.

Interactive widgets for Music and Podcasts.

The same is true for the Podcasts widget, which I’ve been using a lot in combination with the Music one in a stack. Taken in isolation, these may not sound like huge savings in interaction time; in practice, they add up over time. iOS 17 widgets create the feeling that app interaction has spilled over to the Home Screen; it’s as if apps are finally integrated with other areas of the OS in a way that goes beyond static previews.

Another personal favorite of mine? The new collection of Home widgets. For years now I’ve lamented the lack of dedicated Home widgets for controlling HomeKit accessories without having to use Control Center or Shortcuts. iOS 17 brings small and medium-size Home widgets that can show a total of four or eight accessories at once, respectively. I use the small one a lot: I set it to show me four fixed accessories (this widget also supports scenes or recommended items) and I rely on it to quickly turn on the living room lights or the LED strip beneath my TV.

The new, interactive and configurable Home widget in iOS 17.

I’ve been thinking about this idea: interactive widgets are exactly the kind of interactions I want to have with my iPhone. Sometimes, I know I want to open a full app, so I spend a few minutes (or if it’s Threads, a few hours) in it, close it, lock my iPhone, and unlock it again after a minute because I’m addicted. I think I speak for a lot of us here. But sometimes I just need to do something quickly while I’m doing something else and I don’t want to switch contexts. This is where interactive widgets come in: they are productivity catalysts for self-contained interactions that can happen in the neutral, limbo state of the Home Screen.

This is what I meant above when I mentioned app modularity: to an even greater extent than what Shortcuts has been doing for years, interactive widgets take specific functionalities of apps and make them available as à la carte components that you can mix and match however you want. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, to know that this is possible because App Intents, the technology that powers Shortcuts actions, is being used for actions in interactive widgets, too. This is how Apple rolls.

In terms of third-party interactive widgets, I’ll say this: prepare to have fun later this year. If early experiments I’ve seen are of any indication, interactive widgets are going to fundamentally change how we use popular third-party apps on our iPhones. I can give you a few examples of my favorites so far.

Tally, the simple counting app by Greg Pierce, has a perfect use case for interactive widgets: in iOS 17, you’ll be able to count up and down directly from the Home Screen by simply tapping + or - buttons in a widget. It couldn’t be easier, and this interaction demonstrates why some functionalities shouldn’t require opening a full app these days.

Count up and down from a Home Screen widget.

MusicHarbor, the music tracking tool by Marcos Tanaka, is bringing an interactive calendar widget to iPadOS 17. Available in the XL size, this widget lets you tap dates in a calendar on the left side to see associated music releases for the selected day on the right. It’s perfect. Imagine what task managers or calendar clients could do on the Home Screen with a similar idea.

Blur and Yellowcard on the same day? Sign me up.

My favorite beta so far, and likely the app I’m going to use most for widgets this year, is Timery. With widget interactivity, Timery will let you start and stop timers from widgets and Live Activities on the Home Screen, Lock Screen, and StandBy (more on this below). Because of this new integration, I now remember to track my time when I’m working more frequently than before since there’s a lot less friction in starting and stopping timers.

Start and stop timers from widgets and Live Activities.

A month into iOS 17, I’ve been more impressed by widget interactivity on the Home Screen than the Lock Screen, and I think that makes sense. I see the Lock Screen as the place for glanceable information, and the Home Screen for interactions. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong by some especially clever Lock Screen widgets, but I think the limited number of widgets on the Lock Screen doesn’t help in this regard.

StandBy Mode

Speaking of the Lock Screen, a feature of iOS 17 that’s been quickly growing on me over the past few weeks is StandBy. This new Lock Screen mode kicks in when an iPhone is charging, is placed in landscape mode, and is in a stationary position; if these criteria are met, StandBy turns your iPhone into a quasi-smart display-like accessory that can cycle through different pages of content including interactive widgets, your photos, and a giant clock. If you think this is Apple experimenting in the open with technologies to build a HomePod with a screen, well, yes.

StandBy has been a slow burn for me over the past month, and I’ve learned to appreciate it because of two reasons: we recently placed a few Anker MagSafe cubes around the house, including one on my desk; and I also purchased a portable magnetic battery pack that lets me use StandBy when I’m not working at my desk in the office. The combination of these two factors has ensured that I get access to StandBy more frequently and with more freedom than just seeing it when my iPhone is charging on my nightstand.

The three different areas of StandBy.

StandBy is comprised of three pages that you move between by swiping horizontally on-screen: widgets, photos, and clock. As you can imagine, the widgets page is the one I’ve been using the most because I’m in love with the idea of turning my iPhone into an interactive smart display when I’m working on the iPad Pro. StandBy widgets are built with the same technology as Home Screen ones, but they’re further optimized for legibility and contrast: they’re bigger, have monochromatic backgrounds, and only two of them can be active at the same time in two separate columns.

Configuring StandBy widgets. To enter this mode, long-press on the Lock Screen while in StandBy.

You can place multiple widgets in each column like widget stacks on the Home Screen; columns support the same widget suggestions and smart rotate options seen on the Home Screen too. Even the interface to add and manage widgets is consistent with previous versions of the widget gallery for the Home and Lock Screens.

While I haven’t used the Clock and Photos pages much (although I like how both can be customized), StandBy widgets have been growing on me because they’re unlike anything else Apple devices offer in terms of interactivity and glanceability. They are, effectively, the always-on display and interactive widgets rolled into a new kind of experience.

When I’m writing at my desk, I can keep an eye on the current timer from Timery or check out a list of my tasks left for today. These aren’t just previews: since StandBy widgets are also interactive, I can stop a timer or check off a task directly from StandBy with a single tap. I’ve also enjoyed leaving a monthly calendar open on one side and the Batteries widget on the other. Once third-party developers start flooding the widget gallery with their StandBy widgets, the combinations will be endless.

Working with the iPad Pro at my desk with Timery in StandBy mode.

There are other aspects of StandBy I appreciate. In the latest beta, Apple added a new feature that prevents accidental app launches. When you tap on a widget, an arrow indicator appears on-screen; if you want to open the full app associated with the widget, that’s the button you need to press.¹ I love how StandBy deals with incoming notifications, Siri requests, and Live Activities (which are also interactive in iOS 17): all of them have special full-screen interfaces that are optimized for fast interactions and glancing at text from a distance.

From left to right: Siri, a Live Activity, and an incoming notification as shown in StandBy.

There’s another feature of StandBy that, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to test yet: MagSafe memory. In theory, for each place you charge your iPhone with MagSafe and use StandBy, the system should remember the page and widget configuration you use. Imagine, for example, StandBy automatically showing you a clock on your nightstand and two specific widgets on your desk.²

I like the sound of this feature a lot, but, in practice, it hasn’t worked for me yet in the iOS 17 beta. Every time I put my iPhone on a different MagSafe charger, it defaults to showing me the most recently used StandBy configuration. I’m assuming this is a bug and this functionality will start working on my iPhone 14 Pro Max soon. Once it does, I’ll have to convince my girlfriend that we need even more MagSafe chargers for our apartment.

The widget story in iOS 17 makes me feel like three years ago, with a palpable sense of excitement based on the feeling that how we use our phone is going to change soon.

With iOS 17, Apple didn’t just slap interactivity on top of widgets and called it a day: interactive widgets are a pervasive system layer that can be found on the Home Screen, Lock Screen, StandBy, and Live Activities. As a result, apps are becoming interactive in more places, ultimately allowing us to be faster, more efficient, and more connected. I know we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg here, and I can’t wait for developers to start offering interactive widgets everywhere in iOS 17.

App Highlights

Both iOS and iPadOS 17 are full of big and small changes to core apps. It’s impossible to cover them all in a preview story, but I’ve picked three highlights I want to cover today. I’ll cover changes to Messages, FaceTime, Safari, and other apps in my standalone review later this year.

Column View in Reminders

I didn’t think this day would ever come: the Reminders app now supports a Kanban-like board mode to split up your lists in different sections and view them as columns.

Obviously, Apple is not calling this mode ‘Kanban’, but that’s what it is. Specifically, Reminders in iOS and iPadOS 17 lets you create sections inside regular lists, which is a functionality we’ve seen before in the likes of Things and Todoist. By default, lists are displayed vertically, and you can use drag and drop to move tasks between them. However, by pressing the ‘More’ button in the top right corner of a list, you’ll find a new option in iOS and iPadOS 17: the ‘View as Columns’ button. Tap it, and the selected list will switch to a familiar horizontal board layout that you may have seen before in Todoist, GoodTask, and Trello.

Column mode in Reminders.

Column mode, as you can imagine, is particularly effective on iPad, where you can take advantage of the large screen in landscape to visualize different stacks of tasks with a clear separation between them. You can still long-press or right-click tasks to access actions for them, use drag and drop to re-assign them to a different section, and create new tasks directly in a specific column by clicking on the empty space at the end of a column. You can freely alternate between list and column mode (which is also supported on the iPhone) at any point; by default, tasks that do not belong to any column/section are saved into an ‘Others’ view in the selected list.

As a longtime fan and user of Trello and GoodTask, I’m incredibly happy that Apple found a way to ship what’s arguably a power-user feature in an app that is used by hundreds of millions of people every day. Column mode in Reminders isn’t as flexible as the one previously seen in GoodTask (there are no automatic columns for days of the week, for instance), but it’s more than good enough for me, and I think it’s going to be a fantastic way to turn Reminders into a professional task manager for more complex projects. As a result, I’m moving back to Reminders again. This time, most likely for good.

Internal Linking in Notes

Speaking of things I never thought would actually happen: the Notes app now supports internal linking to other notes.

For the past few years, I’ve been arguing that Apple needed to modernize Notes by taking a look at the current state of third-party note-taking apps and implementing functionalities that have been become a staple of the experience for millions of people. And if you consider products like Obsidian, Notion, and Craft, it’s undeniable that “wiki-style linking”, or the ability to easily reference another existing note, has become a key feature among note-takers who demand a fast, reliable way to organize and structure their notes. Whether you want to create a table of contents for an essay, a trip itinerary that references other notes, or just need a way to navigate a large collection of notes about a topic, the ability to add a link that takes you to another note is an excellent time-saving tool. And Notes now has exactly that.

There are two ways to add internal links to notes. In a very Apple fashion, the first one is a modern spin on the classic ⌘K keyboard shortcut, which has existed for decades on macOS to turn selected text into a clickable hyperlink. In the new Notes app, the ⌘K hotkey has been repurposed as a menu that lets you either link text to a webpage in Safari or create a link to an existing note inside the app. To add an internal link, simply start typing the title of the note, find the result you’re looking for, and that’s it. Notes will enter a yellow, underlined link that points directly to a note in your library.

Creating an internal note link in the Notes app for iOS 17.

The second way is a so-called ‘accelerator’ – a combination of characters that brings up an inline menu with suggestions. Type >> in Notes, and you’ll see a popup with a list of your most recently modified notes as suggestions. At this point, you can use the menu to quickly insert an internal link to a note or search for it by name.

The quick menu for internal links.

If all this reminds you of double-square brackets in Obsidian, you’re not alone: that’s precisely the sort of interaction that Apple copied and simplified for the Notes app. Even better (and just like Obsidian), if the list of results brought up by the >> menu does not include a note you’re looking for, you can create a new one immediately from there.

Just like Reminders, I think it’s wild that Apple looked at such a geeky functionality and devoted resources to understanding its essence and shipping a version of the feature that can be used by people who have no idea what Obsidian or Notion are.

At the same time, I also know I shouldn’t be too surprised. This is how Apple operates with its built-in apps: they take a look at the market, see what’s popular, and raise the bar with features that abstract complexity and result approachable to everyone. For obvious reasons, Notes still can’t be as flexible as Obsidian with its internal links (there are no backlinks or section-specific links, for example), but like I said above: it’s more than good enough, and it’s the reason why I’m seriously considering Notes for my note-taking needs again.

A Proper Queue in Podcasts

I complained about this on Mastodon a couple months back, and iOS 17 fixed it: the updated Podcasts app now has a dedicated ‘Queue’ feature that lets you build a proper queue of episodes you want to listen to later.

Previously, it was always unclear to me how the Podcasts app would organize episodes between the Up Next screen of recommendations and the episodes listed in the ‘Playing Next’ section of the Now Playing screen. iOS 17 resolves this confusion with an ‘Add to Queue’ button that you can find on any episode you long-press in the app. Once an episode goes into your queue, you can access it from a new, standalone tab of the Now Playing screen that you can open by tapping a new ‘list’ icon next to the AirPlay symbol.

The new queue system and chapter switcher in the Podcasts app.

The Queue page is excellent: it shows episodes you’ve manually queued, which you can remove with a swipe or re-arrange with drag and drop; if the episode supports chapters, there’s even a new switcher at the top of the screen that shows you all chapters for the episode and tells you how long each one is.

As a result of these queue-related changes, I found myself using Apple’s Podcasts app as my main podcast player again. The lack of audio effects such as voice boost and trim silence isn’t great (and I continue to think Apple should add them), but there’s something about the app’s native feel, widgets, and integration across the ecosystem that speaks to me now that I have an Apple Watch Ultra and HomePod mini in addition to an iPhone and iPad.

We’ll see how this experiment goes this summer.

iPadOS 17

I’ve already written at length about Stage Manager for iPadOS 17 on both MacStories and the Club, and my opinion hasn’t changed.

Stage Manager in iPadOS 17 is great. Apple listened to feedback, iterated on what wasn’t working for power users, and shipped a much more flexible, stable, and powerful version of Stage Manager that, right now, is a pleasure to work with. I started using Stage Manager again last month and haven’t stopped. The combination of more versatile window placement and keyboard shortcuts (including the ability to Shift-click app results in Spotlight to add them to a workspace) is terrific. If you didn’t like Stage Manager for iPad last year, I urge you to give it another try.

The new version of iPadOS is, as always, largely consistent with what’s changing in iOS. There are interactive widgets on the Home Screen, the same app enhancements in core apps such as Reminders and Messages as seen on the iPhone, and so forth. There are, however, some unique traits of iPadOS 17 I want to point out.

The iPad Lock Screen is getting support for widgets, and I like how Apple is taking advantage of the iPad’s different form factor here. While widgets in portrait mode resemble their iPhone counterparts, the landscape iPad Lock Screen is getting a brand new design with a sidebar on the left that you can fill with widgets:

The new iPad Lock Screen.

I like this idea: most people who work with their iPads do so with the device in landscape mode, likely connected to a keyboard or stand, and Apple figured out a better way to take advantage of the extra space on the Lock Screen. This also means that you can use a lot of widgets at once on the iPad’s Lock Screen: on my 12.9” iPad Pro, I was able to fit five medium-size widgets, but I could mix and match them with small widgets for a much larger number of items displayed at once.

My only skepticism about Lock Screen widgets on the iPad is that, unlike the iPhone, I barely see the iPad’s Lock Screen to begin with. The iPad does not have an always-on display, and when I sit down in front of my iPad Pro, I press the space bar and unlock it immediately with Face ID. The Lock Screen on the iPad just isn’t a place where I usually want or need to hang out. That said, it’s probably too early to tell and I want to reserve my judgement for later this year. I like the idea of Lock Screen widgets on the iPad, and maybe my usage will increase over the next few months.

The one iPadOS 17 feature that has truly surprised me so far is support for external cameras. By adding support for USB video class (or UVC) devices, the iPad can now take advantage of any webcam or otherwise compatible peripheral connected over USB-C. In my tests over the past month, I’ve already seen the benefits of this technology in a couple different ways.

For starters, when I’m using my iPad Pro in fake “clamshell mode” at my desk connected to the Studio Display, the iPad running iPadOS 17 can now use the Studio Display’s webcam. There’s nothing to configure: the camera is automatically picked up by FaceTime and other apps, and I can configure its properties (such as Center Stage and Portrait Mode) from Control Center’s updated video effects panel. This is the way it should have always been.

Using FaceTime on the iPad Pro connected to a Studio Display with the Studio Display’s built-in camera.

The other unexpected benefit of UVC support on iPad is the ability to use videogame capture cards on iPadOS.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been using Capture Pro, a UVC viewer and capturing tool currently in beta, to display my Nintendo Switch’s screen on the iPad and record footage of Tears of the Kingdom directly on my iPad Pro. The capture card I have (a NZXT Signal 4K30) was immediately recognized by iPadOS with a single USB-C cable, and I can now view Zelda being played on the Switch on the iPad Pro’s display with no latency and proper sound output. It is, frankly, incredible. Expect much more on this front in my iPadOS review this fall.

Capturing Tears of the Kingdom on the iPad Pro.

My iPad Pro gaming setup with a capture card for the Nintendo Switch.

I’m going to have more to say on iPadOS later this year, but early signs so far are very, very encouraging. There are still things I cannot do on my iPad (alas, there’s no support for better audio routing and external microphones still) and there are aspects of Stage Manager that could be improved, but I get the sense that Apple has truly listened to feedback from iPad users over the past year.

I’m happy to be an iPad-first user again.

The iOS and iPadOS 17 Public Betas

Should you install the public betas of iOS and iPadOS 17? This year, my answer is a resounding “yes”.

If you’re an iPad user and want to get work done on your iPad with greater efficiency than last year, the improved Stage Manager in iPadOS 17 is a no-brainer. The updates to the multitasking system are particularly visible when working with an external display, where more flexible window placement makes the iPad feel like a better fit for a desktop workstation. I wouldn’t underestimate support for UVC-based video capturing tools, either. Whether it’s a USB webcam, DSLR, or game capture card, support for this class of USB devices further extends the iPad’s capabilities into desktop territory. If anything, I’m waiting for someone to figure out how to ship an all-in-one solution to stream real-time gameplay from a Nintendo Switch to Twitch using only an iPad Pro in the middle.

On the iPhone, if you like widgets and customization, and especially if you’ve bought into the MagSafe ecosystem with different chargers, you’re going to have a lot of fun this summer customizing widgets and using StandBy. The biggest compliment I can pay to the iOS 17 beta right now is that it’s causing me a problem: I want to try all the widgets, and I can’t choose which kind of interactivity I want to add to my Home Screen. This is a great problem to have, and it’ll grow exponentially once developers start releasing their widget updates later this year. More than ever, iOS 17 is pointing at another widget gold rush coming to the App Store very soon.

There are a lot of smaller app enhancements and system tweaks I haven’t covered today, but that’s a story for another time. I’ve spent most of my time this month using Notes, Podcasts, Reminders, and Messages, but there are some fascinating changes coming to the likes of Safari, Passwords, and Music that we’ll analyze with the final release of iOS 17.

I’m also keeping an eye on Apple’s new set of intelligence features such as improved auto-correct and new Visual Look Up image identification categories; it’s too early for a definitive judgement, but my experience so far (especially with auto-correct) is extremely positive. For context, I typed most of this story at night with the touch keyboard on my iPad Pro so I wouldn’t disturb my girlfriend sleeping next to me. That hadn’t happened in years. The new auto-correct is already that good. Hopefully it’ll stay that way until September.

What you should know today is that both the iOS and iPadOS 17 betas are in a good place right now, widgets are back, and it’s a great time to be an iPhone and iPad user. You can download the public betas of iOS and iPadOS 17 today.

I’ll see you this fall, ready, as always, with my annual review of iOS and iPadOS.

You can also follow our 2023 Summer OS Preview Series through our dedicated hub, or subscribe to its RSS feed.

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