Back in 2021, Silvio Rizzi, developer of the all-time great RSS client Reeder , released Mela, an app for importing, collecting, and sharing recipes. Right from the start, Mela stood out as a delightful take on the recipe app genre. Just like Reeder, it features a beautiful design and is a joy to browse and use. The app originally shipped with the ability to import recipes directly from the web, subscribe to RSS feeds, and even scan recipes found in physical cookbooks and magazines. Combining those features with its built-in tools for converting measurements and dynamically adjusting meal sizes, Mela truly cooked up the perfect recipe (pun intended) for becoming your one and only cooking app companion. You can check out John’s original review of the app on MacStories to learn more.

This month, Mela was updated to version 2.5 with several improvements, including an option to search for recipes on the web using a new native recipe search engine and the ability to import recipes from video descriptions on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, all of which have become popular platforms for discovering and sharing cooking ideas. This new version takes the app’s web scraping capabilities even further than before, and I was curious to see how it fared.

Let’s check it out.

First, I must say that I’ve been quite impressed by Mela’s interface for searching the web for recipes. The app offers several search engine options, including an extensive list of popular services like Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and even Ecosia, but the highlight is definitely its new ‘Web Recipe Search’ option, which surfaces recipes from across various recipe sites.

To get started, head to Mela’s Browser tab and start searching for a recipe. If you use the default Web Recipe Search option, the results will be presented in a neat card layout that groups recipes by website and highlights them with a picture and a short excerpt extracted from the corresponding webpage. To take a closer look at a recipe, simply tap on its card, and the app will take you to the full webpage. You can then tap the floating ’Found Recipe’ button at the bottom of the screen to import it into Mela. As usual, before saving the recipe, the app will let you preview and customize it to adjust everything from portion sizes and units to the main recipe itself.

Searching for samosa recipes via Mela’s new Web Recipe Search.

I’ve found this new web search feature to be delightful. It’s a great addition to Mela’s ability to import recipes from the web. It lets you sort through dozens of options and save recipes without ever having to deal with the clutter that comes with regular Google search results, and it allows you to bypass cookie popups on most cooking websites entirely.

The other new feature in this update is the option to import a recipe by pasting a video URL from YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok into the app’s address bar. By scanning the description of a video containing a recipe, Mela is able to successfully figure out the quantity of each ingredient and even cooking steps. My main worry was that Mela would struggle outside of English-speaking videos, but to my surprise, the app seemed to work just as well with French-speaking videos from YouTube.

I successfully imported a cookie recipe from a French YouTube channel. Just like with other imports, Mela lets you easily adjust the number of portions and changes the ingredient quantities accordingly.

When it comes to recipes found on TikTok, I’ve had less luck. Mela seems less capable of identifying recipes from there, and it often would not let me import a recipe directly after pasting a TikTok URL into the address bar. On my first attempt at importing a rougail saucisses recipe (an excellent meal from La Réunion island; you should check it out), Mela did not offer the ‘Found Recipe’ button:

However, on my second attempt, with a different rougail saucisses recipe found on TikTok, the import was successful:

Clearly, by searching for recipes in French mixed in with some Reunionese Créole, I was stress-testing Mela’s ability to parse recipes from videos. Still, I would say seven out of ten attempts worked impressively well.

I’m not a great cook – in fact, I have a hard time enjoying the process at all – but over the years, I can attest that Mela has become one of my partner’s favorite apps to use on their iPhone. I can easily understand why they’ve come to love it for collecting recipes instead of relying on browser bookmarks and scanned documents scattered on their laptop’s hard drive. Mela has come a long way while maintaining its beautiful UI design, and with its ever-extending ability to import recipes from different mediums, it definitely stands out in its category.

Mela is available for free on the App Store for iOS and iPadOS. All the app’s features can be unlocked with a one-time $4.99 in-app purchase. The Mac version is available separately as a free download on the Mac App Store, where all of its features can be unlocked with a one-time $9.99 in-app purchase.

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Game Tracker is a new videogame tracking app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac from Simone Montalto, who is probably best known to MacStories readers for developing the excellent Book Tracker. In fact, Montalto has created an entire suite of tracking apps that also includes Movie Tracker, Music Tracker, and Habit Tracker. That experience with various tracking apps shows with Game Tracker, which does a fantastic job of tailoring to the particularities of videogames and leveraging metadata to allow users to make the app their own.

Let’s take a closer look.

Game Tracker on the Mac in dark mode.

I’ve tried a lot of videogame tracking apps, from ones that are designed specifically for videogames to those that are built into general-purpose media trackers. Depending on your needs, both approaches can work well, but the nature of videogames lends them to an app designed specifically for the medium. That’s because games carry a lot of important metadata that other types of media don’t, like the platforms a game is available on, the format, the gameplay modes, and more.

Each game includes a wealth of information.

Game Tracker takes advantage of the unique information available for videogames, which gives it an instant advantage over general-purpose media apps. Pulling from the Internet Game Database, Game Tracker includes each game’s description, release date, ratings, developer and publisher information, game modes, player perspectives, platforms, completion times, screenshots, artwork, and trailers. Plus, the app lets users add their own ratings, track their progress, make notes, and record games they’ve loaned to friends.

Sort options (left), filters (center), and advanced sorting (right).

Having all that data is useful by itself, but Game Tracker uses it far better than most apps I’ve tried. For example, there are five different ways to sort your games and 11 criteria for filtering them. Plus, Game Tracker allows you to build advanced sorting rules by combining multiple sorting criteria and to create elaborate saved searches by stacking filters. With so many ways to view your games, the built-in sorting and filtering features are often enough, but I appreciate that I can do a lot more than that, and I bet anyone with a big game collection will, too.

A couple of spaces I’ve created and a note pinned to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Game Tracker also allows you to add your own content to your collection, including the media format, progress, notes, tags, and the status of any games you’ve loaned out. You can create your own hand-curated lists of games, called spaces. For example, I created a Retro Games space to collect classic games I’m currently playing or playing soon. And you can bulk edit game data. From any collection view, pick “Select games” from the three-dot menu to select as many games as you’d like to edit.

There are many ways to browse your collection.

Where Game Tracker really shines, though, is in the way it uses all the information pulled from IGDB and added by users. From the app’s main view, you can browse your collection in a wide variety of ways. You can always view all of your games at once, but you can also browse based on progress, release status, formats, smart lists, platforms, genres, and more. From the app’s primary view, you can remove any of these browsing options you don’t want, reorder them, and collapse sections as well.

Three of the six layout options.

Another nice design touch is that you are not locked into one particular layout when viewing games in your collection. The app offers six different options, and each view in the app can be set to a different layout.

Tracking time played with timers and Game Tracker’s Stats view.

If you like to track the time you spend playing your game collection, you can do that, too. For any game you’ve marked as being currently played, you can start a timer to track your total time played and take notes alongside the timer that will show up in the Notes section for that game. You can mark the percentage of the game you’ve played as well.

The total time played and percentage played will all show up in the app’s Statistics section, which collects high-level data about how much you’ve played, the dates you’ve played, your playing streak, and more. It’s a lot of data, but it’s perfect for anyone who wants to keep track of their progress. Though I haven’t used this feature much yet, I plan to dip my toes in further to see if it helps me keep up with my playtime goals better. When you start a timer, it also starts a Live Activity, so you can track your progress from your Lock Screen or the Dynamic Island as you play.

Tracking playtime from my Home Screen (left) and some of Game Tracker’s many Shortcuts actions (middle and right).

Live Activities aren’t the only modern feature packed into Game Tracker. The app includes a deep set of widgets for tracking a game you’re currently playing, any other game in your collection, and your spaces. There’s a widget that will drop you into Game Tracker’s search feature to find games, too.

The app also offers deep integration with Shortcuts, with actions to find games based on a variety of criteria, add metadata to existing games in your collection, create spaces and tags, and open and retrieve game entries based on the app’s long list of metadata, to name just a handful of the many actions. There are 10 different Control Center widgets, which can also be added to your Lock Screen, to open the app to a specific area or search for a game.

Browsing similar games.

From an individual game’s view, you can select the three-dot menu button and pull up a list of similar games, too, which is great for discovery. However, I’d like to see a dedicated discovery section added to the app that’s populated with pre-built lists like New Releases and other categories for when I’m looking for inspiration on what to play next.

Finally, your collection syncs via iCloud across all platforms, backs up periodically, and can be exported in CSV or PDF formats with filters applied. I particularly like the simple export options, which make your data far more portable than in many other apps.

One thing Game Tracker doesn’t currently handle very well is unreleased games. I’ve added several games coming later this year that I want to play, and the app lists them as released now that it’s 2025. I also have a couple of games in my collection that don’t have a release date yet (I’m looking at you, Silksong), and those are given the release year of 1969, so Game Tracker assumes they came out decades ago. That makes managing upcoming games a little hard at the moment, but it’s also something I expect will get worked out in future updates, so it’s not a big deal.

Game Tracker is a lovely native way to manage your videogame colleciton.

If you’re the sort of person who likes to collect a lot of data about your hobbies and track things in your life, Game Tracker is perfect for you. It’s the kind of app that makes dipping in and out of a large collection of games easy because you’ll know which games are active and where you are in each. I love that you can leave yourself notes for the next time you resume a game, and the tagging feature lets me do things like remember which of my many retro handhelds I’m using for a particular game – a very NPC problem, I know. But even if you aren’t playing dozens of games across a pile of hardware, Game Tracker is one of the best ways to natively manage your videogame collection and playtime across multiple devices.

Game Tracker is available to download on the App Store. The free version allows you to track five games and create one space. With the Pro version, you can track an unlimited number of games and create as many spaces as you’d like for $1.49/month, $10.99/year, or a one-time purchase of $34.99.

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I’ve been intrigued by the BANG!CASE ever since it was introduced by Bitmo Lab as a Kickstarter campaign about a year ago. The case includes a programmable button that can be used to automate actions using your iPhone’s accessibility features. However, because I don’t normally use a case with my iPhone, I never followed through on buying the BANG!CASE.

Fast forward to early January at CES when I visited the booth for JSAUX, an affiliate of Bitmo Lab. In addition to JSAUX’s portable displays and gaming accessories, the company was showing off the BANG!CASE and GAMEBABY. (More on that on NPC soon.)

It just so happens that since the holidays, I’ve continued my quest to refine how I collect and process information throughout my day. That’s led me to test a dozen or so apps, build new shortcuts, and explore other new setups. As a result, I was primed to give the BANG!CASE a try when Bitmo offered me a review unit at their booth, and I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks.

The case has a couple of minor drawbacks that I’ll get to, but by and large, it’s the most unique and useful case I’ve ever put on an iPhone. After enjoying my iPhone without a case for nearly two years, I’ve found that the utility of the BANG!CASE is significant enough that I’ve decided to keep using it, which I didn’t expect. So today, I thought I’d lay out why I like the BANG!CASE so much and how I’m using it.

At first blush, the BANG!CASE is an ordinary case made of a soft-touch plastic. It feels good to hold, includes a cutout for the Camera Control, and has hard clicky buttons that make pressing the iPhone’s standard buttons easy. However, aside from the case’s programmable button, the part of the BANG!CASE I like the most is the design of the back, which shows off its electronics and adds some character to my iPhone.

Aesthetics aside, what really sets the BANG!CASE apart is an extra button that sits midway between the side button and the Camera Control. Bitmo calls it the BANG!BUTTON, and it can be programmed to perform three different actions with a single-press, double-press, or long-press.

The BANG!BUTTON works via Bluetooth as an accessibility device, a very clever solution that has a couple of important implications worth keeping in mind. The first is that the BANG!CASE’s Bluetooth radio is powered by a rechargeable battery, not your iPhone. That means you’ll need to charge your case periodically. The case comes with a charging cable that has a USB-A plug on one end and a special connector on the other end that uses magnets and two pogo pin connectors. In my experience, the BANG!CASE doesn’t need to be charged often, but relying on a proprietary cable to do so isn’t ideal.

Setting up actions for the BANG!BUTTON.

The other somewhat fiddly implication of the BANG!CASE’s design is that you’ll need to dig fairly deep into iOS’s accessibility settings to set up the BANG!BUTTON’s actions. The first step is to hold the BANG!BUTTON until the light on the case is blinking to pair the case with your iPhone under Settings → Bluetooth. Once it’s paired, you can go to Settings → Accessibility → Touch → AssistiveTouch → Devices, where you’ll see your case listed. There, you can assign up to three actions, including a long list of system and accessibility actions, along with any shortcuts you’ve created in the Shortcuts app.

None of that is as bad as it may sound since it’s a one-time setup unless you decide to change the assigned actions. Also, I’ve been using the BANG!CASE for a couple of weeks and have yet to run out of battery, although I have topped it off a couple of times. That said, running out of juice would be a bummer because you’d lose the use of the BANG!BUTTON; having yet another thing to charge in my life isn’t great, either.

Still, I’ve enjoyed the BANG!CASE a lot – so much so that I’ve been using it daily since I got home from CES. You can get more out of Apple’s Action button using Shortcuts, as Federico has shared with his ActionMode shortcut for Club MacStories members, but it’s always nice to have more automation options, which is exactly what the BANG!CASE provides. Moreover, I find the Action button a little hard to reach on the iPhone 16 Pro Max, whereas the BANG!BUTTON is near the middle of the iPhone’s vertical side, making it easier to press.

For the time being, I’ve settled on the following for my Action and BANG!BUTTON setup:

• Action Button: I use Quick Capture for Obsidian to quickly save thoughts to a scratchpad note in my Obsidian vault.
• BANG!BUTTON Single Press: A single press of the BANG!BUTTON triggers a shortcut that starts a new recording in superwhisper, an app that uses OpenAI’s Whisper LLM to transcribe spoken audio.
• BANG!BUTTON Double Press: When I hit the BANG!BUTTON twice, it opens Control Center, giving me quick access to a variety of media playback, HomeKit, and other controls.
• BANG!BUTTON Long Press: I have several shortcuts for saving URLs from specific apps, but for those contexts I haven’t created an automation for, I copy the link and then long-press the BANG!BUTTON to save it as a task in Godspeed using its API.

So far, I’ve enjoyed this setup a lot. Having both text and voice capture just a single button press away has been perfect for saving tasks, ideas, and snippets of text. Thanks to superwhisper’s share sheet integration, it’s simple to send its transcriptions to a to-do, email, note-taking, or other app too.

The winter season is my time to try new things. I’ve burned through task managers, email services, automation and AI services, new audio and video hardware, Macs, and more. It’s an eclectic mix, but the apps and services that are sticking all have one thing in common: easy access no matter what the context is. The BANG!CASE offers that, giving me access to a larger set of button actions at my fingertips, which I’m loving so far. The iPhone is a great capture device, and it’s even better with the BANG!CASE.

The BANG!CASE is available from Bitmo Lab for $49.99.

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Sindre Sorhus has released more apps than most indie developers I’ve covered, and many are among my favorite utilities. I suspect that a big part of Sorhus’ success is the tight focus of most of those apps, which are designed to eliminate specific points of friction for users.

Sorhus’ latest utility is called Default Browser. It’s a Mac menu bar app that, as the name suggests, lets you change your Mac’s default browser on demand. Just head to the menu bar, and with a couple of clicks, you can switch between any browsers you have installed.

Switching default browsers can be simplified even further by setting a hotkey to reveal the app’s menu and then hitting the number associated with the desired browser. Alternatively, holding down Option as you click on a browser opens it without making it the default. Another nice touch is that, among the multiple menu bar icon options in the app’s settings, there’s an option to use the icon of the currently active default browser, a great reminder of which is active.

Default Browser includes several handy settings.

Default Browser works with Shortcuts, too, with actions to get and set your default browser programmatically with actions. That makes it easy to assign browsers to a device like a Stream Deck or Logitech Creative Console for push-button convenience. As Sorhus suggests in the app’s documentation, combining Default Browser with an app like Shortery, which has shortcut triggers for Mac events like connecting to a Wi-Fi network or launching a particular app, opens up a wide array of possibilities as well.

Default Browser also offers a Focus filter, giving you the ability to associate a particular browser with a Focus mode. I don’t have Focus modes for contexts where using a different browser would be useful, but I can imagine it working well for separating web browsing at home from browsing at your workplace or school, for example.

I primarily use Safari, but I’ve been experimenting with Microsoft Edge more, and I’m testing Surf, a browser fused with an AI assistant. I expect we’ll see many more browsers like Surf that aim to combine traditional search and web browsing with the best of what AI can do to organize and provide insights into data. That’s why I purchased Default Browser. The app is available directly from Sorhus for $4, and it makes it easy to quickly switch between browsers whether you’re testing them like me, you’re a developer testing code in different browsers, or you simply prefer certain browsers for certain tasks.

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Today, Apple is releasing iOS and iPadOS 18.2, the second major updates to the iPhone and iPad’s latest operating system versions. Once again, this release’s main highlight is a wave of new Apple Intelligence features that are now available to the public. And just like in October, we’re covering these new AI features separately in a special story for MacStories readers. Be sure to check out Federico’s story, which goes over the new Apple Intelligence features included in iOS and iPadOS 18.2.

But besides another batch of Apple Intelligence features, this release also includes a series of changes to the system, from updates to Safari, Find My, and Photos to the arrival of new system-wide settings for Default Apps and more. Here’s a roundup of everything new besides Apple Intelligence in iOS and iPadOS 18.2.

New Default Apps Settings

Earlier this year, Apple announced the addition of a new Settings screen in iOS and iPadOS 18.2 for choosing default apps as part of its plan to comply with the Digital Markets Act in the European Union, alongside a redesigned default browser choice screen. While it was possible to change these settings before, choosing a new default app required you to navigate to the individual app’s Settings screen (for example, Settings → Apps → Safari to make Safari the default browser). The new screen centralizes all of the default app options and is accessible at the top of the Apps section in the Settings app.

From this screen, you can set the default app for each of the following features:

• Browsing the web
• Sending emails
• Sending messages
• Dialing phone numbers
• Filtering spam calls
• Managing passwords
• Using alternative keyboards
• Performing contactless payments

If you live in the EU, you may notice an additional default app setting that allows you to set a default app marketplace instead of Apple’s App Store.

Note that you may not have any options currently available in one or more of the default app categories. To appear in the list of available defaults, developers will need to update their apps and make sure they qualify in their category.

Safari

Perhaps surprisingly, Safari ships with several new and previously unannounced features in iOS and iPadOS 18.2.

Since the release of iOS and iPadOS 15, we’ve had the ability to customize the browser’s start page with an Apple-provided wallpaper or with any image from Photos. Starting today, Safari now offers six new background options, bringing the total to 16. The first two each picture an abstract landscape, the next are renders of some of Safari’s glyphs and icons, and the last two form a pattern of curvy shapes and gradients. I’m a fan of the pastel color choices in these new backgrounds, but I do wish Apple would also make them available to use as wallpapers on the Lock and Home Screens.

These are the six new background options for Safari in iOS and iPadOS 18.2. They are also available on the Mac in Sequoia 15.2.

In addition to the new backgrounds, Safari now supports linking to text highlights on web pages. The idea here is that you can select text on any web page, tap ‘Copy Link with Highlight’, and share the copied link so that anyone opening it will immediately be shown the specific text you highlighted in yellow on that web page. It’s a small but amazing functionality for any kind of work that relies on referencing things from the web. This is what it looks like on the iPhone:

To share a highlighted portion of text on a web page in Safari, select the text, scroll the edit menu (1), and tap ‘Copy Link with Highlight’ (2). Anyone opening the link in a supported browser will automatically be directed to the highlighted text in yellow.

Linking to text highlights on the web isn’t entirely new; the feature was already supported by some web browsers, most notably Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. However, now that the feature is also available in Safari (on all of Apple’s platforms, including macOS), I suspect that it will slowly become hugely popular.

Last but not least in Safari, the app will spawn a Live Activity when a download is in progress, and it now features HTTPS Priority, an aptly named mechanism that will automatically upgrade HTTP URLs to HTTPS when available.

Photos

In iOS 18, the Photos app received a major redesign and a series of new features, including Collections. 18.2 includes several tweaks to the new Photos app, most of which revolve around navigation.

In the Recently Viewed collection, you can now clear the full history of recently viewed media. If you long-press on a photo or video, you can also remove it individually from the collection.

Navigating collections is now easier, too. Apple has finally re-added the ability to swipe right to go back pretty much anywhere in the Photos app, including when you’re several levels deep into an album folder. It’s hard to know whether it was a bug or if Apple was being intentional about not implementing the gesture in certain places in the app before, but I’m glad to report that it is now consistently available.

Apple has also improved the video viewing experience in the Photos app. Unlike in previous versions of iOS 18, the app will no longer zoom in and out on a video when you tap the screen. Instead, the video will now always fit the width of the screen, and you can tap the screen to show playback controls, the video scrubber, and the gallery view along the bottom of the screen. These will appear over the video and disappear if you tap the screen again. But that’s not all: you can now scrub videos on a precise frame-by-frame basis, and there’s a new option to disable auto-looping video playback.

The improved video player in Photos now lets you scrub frame by frame, which is indicated by a decimal in the timecode above the scrubber.

Overall, these small changes and improvements have helped reduce the friction I’ve been feeling since I first started using the drastically redesigned Photos app this summer. I’m hoping Apple will keep iterating on it.

And More…

Return of the volume slider on the Lock Screen. This will make a ton of people happy. iOS 18.2 brings back the volume slider on the Lock Screen when music or media is playing, in the form of an Accessibility setting. The slider was removed in iOS 16 when Apple redesigned the Lock Screen, and since then, it has only appeared under certain circumstances, such as when controlling an AirPlay device. But now, you can bring it back permanently.

To add the volume slider back to your Lock Screen, head to Settings → Accessibility → Audio & Visual, and turn on ‘Always Show Volume Control’.

Head to Settings → Accessibility → Audio & Visual to bring back the volume slider on the Lock Screen.

New Camera Control settings for iPhone 16 models. iPhone 16 owners now have the ability to lock the camera’s exposure and focus with a light press on the Camera Control. The AE/AF Lock option can be enabled by going to Settings → Camera → Camera Control.

There is also a new option to adjust the double-click speed of Camera Control. iPhone 16 users can choose between Default, Slow, and Slower. The new adjustment options are present alongside previously available options to tweak the double light-press speed and the light-press force.

New Voice Memos features for iPhone 16 Pro models. Originally announced at Apple’s September event, iPhone 16 Pro models now have access to an upgraded version of the Voice Memos app with support for layered recording. Additionally, these multitrack projects can later be imported into Logic Pro.

Natural language search in Apple Music and Apple TV. In the Music and TV apps, Apple says you can now use natural language to search for media by specifying genres, moods, actors, decades, and more. In my experience so far, natural language search in these apps doesn’t seem to make a huge difference when you’re only using a handful of words, and it starts to break down as soon as you try to input longer phrases.

Shazam history now includes location. If you’ve ever wondered where you heard a specific song, iOS 18.2 has you covered. Now, after you ask Shazam to recognize a song, you can go back to your song history and tap on each one to reveal a minimap pinpointing where you heard it.

A map pin is now included below each of your recently recognized songs.

Favorite categories in Podcasts. In Podcasts, a new Categories section has been added to the Library tab. This essentially gives you access to Apple Podcasts’ catalog of categories. You can now also choose favorite categories, and your favorites will appear at the top of the Categories section in your Library. Additionally, the Search tab in Podcasts now dynamically reorders the category tiles depending on your podcast listening habits.

Favorite categories and the personalized Search tab in the Podcasts app

Better consistency for dark and tinted icons across Settings and the share sheet. App icons in the share sheet and Settings now reflect your light or dark mode preference and even icon tinting if you’ve enabled it on the Home Screen.

Find My now supports sharing AirTags with airlines. Find My has a new option to share an item’s location with an “airline or trusted person” who can help you locate something that you’ve misplaced. In the app, select an item you’re tracking with an AirTag (or other Find My-compatible tracker), and tap ‘Share Item Location’. This will generate a link that you can share with someone else so they can view the location of the lost item.

New ‘Get Current App’ action in Shortcuts. This is huge news for Shortcuts nerds: you can use the new ‘Get Current App’ action to detect which app is currently active on-screen and automate accordingly.

AirPods Pro Hearing Test and Hearing Aid features are available in more countries. The new Hearing Test and Hearing Aid features were recently launched in the U.S. and several other countries. However, these features were unavailable to many AirPods Pro 2 owners worldwide. This was primarily due to pending approval from the relevant authorities in each nation for these health features.

With iOS 18.2, Apple is rolling out the AirPods Pro 2’s Hearing Test feature to the following countries:

• Cyprus
• Czechia
• France
• Italy
• Luxembourg
• Romania
• Spain
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom

Sadly, the Hearing Aid functionality is only coming to one additional country in this release, the United Arab Emirates.

That’s it for iOS and iPadOS 18.2. Not unlike 18.1, this release includes a significant number of non-AI changes and additions, and I’m glad to see that Apple is still iterating on many of its native apps throughout the year.

You can update your device to iOS or iPadOS 18.2 today by navigating to Settings → General → Software Update.

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Back in 2020, John opened his review of HomePass 1.7 in this way:

My HomeKit setup started out simple enough with a few Hue bulbs, but over time, it has grown to include security cameras, door sensors, electrical outlets, and more. As the number of accessories connected to my network grew, so did the hassle of managing them.

I know this is the case for many people, myself included. There seems to be an ever-growing selection of third-party apps for HomeKit, and developer Aaron Pearce has released some of the best. Where other apps add more functionality and, thus, complexity, Pearce has focused on simplicity and pure utility. The best example of that approach has always been HomePass.

Released in 2018, HomePass is a simple way to record your HomeKit accessory codes. This comes in quite handy when you need the code but can’t access it because the documentation is unavailable or you aren’t able to physically move your accessory to see it.

Since its initial rollout, HomePass has expanded to provide custom fields for additional notes and other small conveniences. But version 2, out now, is a significant step for the app on two fronts: functionality and pay structure.

Let’s get the latter out of the way first, since it’s the thing that always elicits reactions from people: HomePass is switching to a subscription model. That said, the way Pearce is going about this is, in my opinion, both fair and honorable.

Existing users of HomePass will retain access to all the app’s current features without a subscription. Pearce has written about this decision, saying, “I don’t like a deal being changed after it was made.” The subscription model is being built for the future of his suite of HomeKit apps as part of a desire to make this a full-time job. A subscription will be required for forthcoming (and as yet unannounced) features for both existing and new users.

The subscription is available from within the app, but it is clearly marked “Subscribe anyway” if you previously purchased the app as a way to support Pearce’s work further, should you wish. Lots of apps have moved to a subscription model in recent years, and this is a really good way to make that transition.

The short migration process when you update HomePass.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the meat of the update. After a short migration process, the first thing you’ll notice is that the app’s design has been updated to fit more closely with modern iOS aesthetics. Gone is the tab bar along the bottom, with the app now consisting of just a single view. Settings are hidden behind a button in the top-left corner of the screen, and you can add an accessory via a button in the top-right corner.

A singular screen gives you access to every part of HomePass.

The main screen contains three sections: Maintenance, Homes, and Devices. Homes lists all the homes you have access to, and Devices shows a list of categories containing your devices. Tapping on a home will reveal all of its devices, separated by room, in a clean list with icons for each type. One thing I’d like to see added here is the ability to reorder rooms and collapse them under their title, as was possible in previous versions of HomePass.

The headline addition in this release, however, is Maintenance. This section appears when HomePass detects information in HomeKit that you haven’t stored in the app. If a room’s name is changed, a device is moved to a different room, or a device is detected in your home that hasn’t been logged in HomePass, a corresponding entry will appear in the Maintenance section.

The new Maintenance section.

The ‘New Devices’ entry will reveal a list of devices missing from HomePass; from there, you can tap on one and add it to your library, including more information manually if you wish. This is a helpful way to ensure you have all your device information stored in the app, but I would like the ability to choose to ignore individual devices I don’t want to add, like light bulbs.

By selecting either ‘Updated Rooms’ or ‘Updated Devices’ from the Maintenance list, you can quickly update details to reflect your home setup. You can save or ignore each change individually or deal with them all at once, allowing you to quickly update information after you make adjustments in the Home app.

HomePass 2 also introduces a completely redesigned device details page. The device’s HomeKit code is presented prominently at the top, including its QR code if applicable. Below that, in neatly organized sections, are several pieces of information for the device, plus any custom fields you have created and a new addition: attachments. With this feature, you can add pictures, files, and URLs to attach instruction manuals, warranty details, and more to a device. This extends the app beyond an essential list of codes to a complete knowledge database for your smart home, and I’m here for it.

In the device details view, you can now add attachments, and it’s easy to get the device to identify itself.

One of my favorite features of HomePass – one that’s so low-key that it doesn’t even get a mention in the release notes – is the ability to easily identify a device, and it’s now much more discoverable. If you tap the ‘…’ button in a device’s detail page and choose ‘Identify’, the device will identify itself: a lightbulb will flash, a camera will toggle its LED, a thermostat like one from tado will display a cute, “Hi,” on the side. Notably, HomePass is the first app I’ve found that is capable of doing this with every brand of device within a home. First-party apps have been able to do this for a minute, but only with their own devices. If you’re moving things around a house, it can be very easy to lose track of which bulb came from where or which thermostat goes on which radiator; this helps you find the ones you want without comparing serial numbers.

Hue seems to be the problem child here, though. HomePass doesn’t always display the correct category for certain Hue products, and the Identify feature doesn’t consistently work with these products. The former issue should be fixed in the near future thanks to the upcoming ability to manually recategorize devices. (Also coming in the future is Shortcuts support, which is not available in this update.) The latter issue doesn’t seem to be easily solved. I don’t know for sure whose feet this problem falls at, but since every other device I own identifies itself 100% of the time, I can only surmise that the issue is on Hue’s end.

Rounding off this update are a couple of changes to backups, which allow you to manually export all codes and other data from HomePass. Backups can now be saved as Markdown, and PDF formatting has been improved. As great as the app is, sometimes it’s nice to just have a big page with all your information viewable at once.

HomePass looks great on all Apple devices.

If you have more than a handful of accessories in the Home app, there’s no other way of putting it: you need HomePass. Indeed, you might not have to use the app for months on end, but when you do, its clean, easy-to-use UI and wealth of data are without compare. You never know when an accessory – or even a bunch of them – might need to be re-added to your home, but when it happens, HomePass will definitely save your bacon.

HomePass is available as a free update on the App Store for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. A HomePass+ subscription is required to add more than three devices and access all of the app’s features, but subscribing is optional for previous HomePass users, who have access to all current features. The subscription costs $1.99/month, $9.99/year, or $39.99 for a lifetime purchase.

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In 2024, web browsers mostly all look the same. Their user interfaces always feature an address bar at the top of the window and horizontal tabs that allow you to navigate through multiple websites. So whenever a new browser tries to shake things up and innovate on this basic premise, it’s inevitable that it will elicit a certain amount of interest – sometimes to the point of fashioning its own fanbase. For example, with a novel approach to organizing, pinning, and managing tabs in a customizable sidebar, Arc Browser by The Browser Company has been a great showcase of what creating a brand new user experience for browsing the web can look like.

Last week, though, I stumbled upon a newcomer called Horse Browser by Pascal Pixel that immediately caught my attention. Horse is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in this space. The browser is based on a new approach that completely does away with the traditional address bar and horizontal tab layout. Instead of tabs, navigation in Horse Browser is structured in hierarchical trees called ‘Trails.’ The resulting UI is unique, appealing, and clever. But how does it hold up in everyday use?

Let’s find out.

To put it in simple terms, think of Horse’s trails as your browser history laid out in a sidebar that’s always visible. This sidebar is structured like a tree. Every time you click a link on a webpage, this new page will appear as a new line in the sidebar indented underneath the previous page. Keep clicking links, and the tree will continue to branch out. At any point in time, you can go back by clicking on higher-level branches or create a new trail to start a different tree.

Your trails are automatically saved and restored when you relaunch Horse Browser. You can reorder trails in the sidebar, and you can even rename them and assign custom emoji icons to them. Navigation trees within a trail aren’t permanently fixed in place, either. You can reorder webpages and even drag a page to make it a trail’s top-level branch. Overall, this UI is more flexible than it may seem at first.

Additionally, Horse lets you create folders to group your trails together as well as ‘Areas,’ which act like section headers for organizing folders. Both features make it easier to divide your navigation history into projects or research sections for future reference.

Individual webpages in your trails can be renamed and assigned a custom emoji icon.

Under the hood, Horse is based on the Chromium web engine. This is apparent as soon as you open the browser’s developer tools, which are essentially the same ones that you find in Google Chrome. Unlike most other Chromium browsers, though, Horse does not support installing third-party extensions from the Chrome Web Store at this time. However, the browser does ship with three built-in extensions: Ghostery, which lets you block ads and trackers; Dark Reader, which inverts the colors of websites when you have Dark Mode enabled on your system; and Saddlepack, Horse’s built-in password manager. This is a significant obstacle if you’re looking to use any other password manager with Horse Browser.

Horse Browser ships with three built-in extensions…

…but it won’t let you install any other third-party Chrome extensions just yet.

Alongside these extensions, Horse Browser also ships with a note-taking feature. Just like anything else in the browser’s sidebar, notes can be positioned inside any of your trail trees, and their icons can be customized with an emoji. Sadly, Horse’s notes are extremely basic at the moment; they don’t support any kind of text formatting as far as I can tell. That being said, the ability to take notes and compile information from the web gives Horse the potential to one day become a fully realized research-oriented browser.

Horse Browser supports creating notes alongside your navigation ttrees.

If there’s anything I’ve concluded from using Horse Browser over the past week, it’s that this unique approach to browsing the web is only ideal for users who tend to get pretty deep into their research sessions, leaving them with tens or even hundreds of open tabs to deal with. Safari, Google Chrome, and others offer the ability to group tabs, save all of your open tabs into a bookmarks folder, and separate tabs into multiple windows, but none of them allow you to keep track of the full extent of your navigation history in this straightforward way without the need to dig into your browser history. This is especially glorious if, like me, you’re the kind of person who can spend hours browsing through Wikipedia articles, sometimes to the point of landing on an article that’s totally unrelated to what you were initially reading about.

As a bonus, Horse Browser allows you to quickly export any part of your trail trees as a Markdown-formatted list of links, keeping the link hierarchy intact in the form of bullet points. To do this, right-click a webpage in the sidebar and select ‘Copy Trail,’ or drag and drop a trail from the sidebar into a Markdown editor.

Unfortunately, as soon as you try to use Horse Browser for any other type of web browsing – from watching videos on YouTube to reading the news or working in parallel in several Google Docs documents – this user interface falls apart and starts to feel overwhelmingly cumbersome. In those everyday scenarios, the permanent navigation tree in the sidebar gets unnecessarily cluttered and has many times made me feel lost.

The developer behind Horse Browser seems to have thought of this issue and implemented a setting to mitigate it. If you head to the ‘Link Behaviour’ section in the browser’s settings, you’ll see the option to switch from ‘Open Links in a Subtrail’ to ‘Open Links in Current Trail.’ When the latter is enabled, clicking a link on a webpage no longer creates a new branch in your current trail tree, and the only way to add a branch is to do so manually (by right-clicking on a link and choosing ’Open Link in Subtrail’). While this works well and immediately makes Horse feel more like a traditional web browser with vertical tabs, it’s hard not to feel like you’ve just defeated its entire purpose.

Link behavior settings let you reign in Horse’s tendency to create a new subtrail branch for every link you click.

When it comes to design, Horse Browser’s relatively simple UI is punctuated with some wild and weird touches. As you may have noticed in my screen recordings, when you start fresh with a new trail, the browser’s window is occupied by a large, 3D-animated horse that follows your mouse cursor. Similarly, the app’s icon in your Dock is adorned with a 3D-rendered walking horse. Even though I appreciate the uniqueness of this branding choice, I must warn anyone willing to give Horse Browser a try to prepare themselves for what I can only describe as a deeply unsettling vibe.

But even if you find yourself liking the browser’s uncanny horses, I think you may still suffer from the developer’s choice to undersize every single icon and context menu in the user interface. For instance, the buttons located at the top of the sidebar that allow you to create a new trail, folder, note, or area are all very small, and I’ve often found it difficult to precisely target them with the mouse. This has pushed me to rely on keyboard shortcuts more often than I would like.

Horse’s UI elements are tiny compared to most Mac apps.

When I first showed off Horse Browser to a friend this week, their immediate reaction was that this should have been a feature in an existing popular browser. What if a future version of Safari had a revamped sidebar that worked in this way? You could turn off the sidebar at any point to go back to a traditional horizontal tab UI and turn it back on whenever you need to add order to your web research chaos. The idea is certainly appealing.

But since Horse Browser is a standalone browser, it will need to evolve its UI to fit a wider range of use cases, perhaps by making it easier to toggle between a trail and a traditional tab mode. Alternatively, the browser could go in the other direction and further dig its hooves into the ground to become a specialized web-based research and work tool that can be used alongside the browser you’re already used to.

In its current state, Horse Browser is a difficult purchase to recommend. The app still lacks some basic browsing features (like autocomplete in search), and it may be genuinely hard to tell if it’s going to work well with your browsing habits. Still, I’m excited to see Horse’s feature set grow, and I will definitely be keeping an eye on it in the future. Now, hopefully, the uncanny horse imagery will stop haunting my dreams at night.

Horse Browser can be purchased from browser.horse, the app’s official website. A lifetime license costs $60, or you can subscribe for $20/year. Sadly, there is no free trial available at this time, though the lifetime license does come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

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Raycast has always been more than an app launcher. From the start, it has included a multitude of other handy utilities, including Floating Notes. I’ve used Floating Notes now and then to park a bit of text where I knew I’d be able to find it later. Because the note floated above other windows, it was easy to access, but Floating Notes always felt a little too rudimentary to use for much more than that.

Today, Raycast released an extensive update to the feature and renamed it Raycast Notes. Your notes still occupy a floating window, but now, the window auto-resizes to fit the content by default. The window’s width is fixed, but you can always resize its height to adjust how much space it occupies on your screen.

The Raycast Notes browser.

You can summon Raycast Notes just like you would any other Raycast feature. Once it’s open, ⌘ + P pops up a note switcher window with a search field and a list of your notes in reverse chronological order. Notes can also be pinned to the top of the list. ⌘ + K reveals various note actions, including:

• creating a new note,
• browsing notes,
• copying a note’s deep link,
• creating a Quicklink that can be easily accessed via Raycast,
• formatting a note using Markdown syntax,
• enabling or disabling the note window’s auto-resizing feature,
• exporting as a Markdown, HTML, or plain text file,
• viewing recently deleted notes, and
• deleting the current note.

The same actions, plus note browsing and creation, can be accessed from the window’s toolbar.

Raycast Notes actions.

That’s a nice set of options, although it’s a shame that a note’s text can’t be sent to other apps via the Share menu and that exporting a Markdown formatted file uses the .txt extension instead of .md. Still, it’s an excellent feature, and I appreciate that if I copy text from a note, it pastes as Markdown text in Obsidian but as properly formatted rich text in apps like Notes.

I’ve only played around with Raycast Notes briefly, but I like what I’ve seen. It has the potential to be an excellent inbox for ideas, links, and other bits of text you come across during your day. I can also see Raycast Notes as a good place to store template text you need repeatedly. It’s definitely a feature I plan to experiment with more to see where it fits into my workflows.

Raycast Notes is available to free and paid Raycast users. Free users are limited to five notes, while subscribers can create unlimited notes that sync between multiple Macs.

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CoverSutra by Sophiestication is a name that may sound familiar if you’re as ancient as Federico, who last reviewed the app on MacStories in January 2010. At the time, the app was a fully-featured iTunes controller. It could display your music in the menu bar as well on the Desktop. It also used to act as a Last.fm client and ship with a bunch of customization features.

This month, CoverSutra is back with version 4.0. This new version was rewritten from the ground up with a different approach: instead of being a controller for Apple’s native Music app, CoverSutra is now a standalone client for Apple Music on the Mac. In practice, this means that you can search your Apple Music library, pick any album or playlist, and start listening without ever having to launch the Music app.

Search is CoverSutra’s highlight feature. Using CoverSutra for the past week on my Mac has made me realize how much more time I usually spend in the Music app just searching through my library. Searching with CoverSutra, on the other hand, is fast and persistent. You can start typing part of an artist’s name, album, or song title, and search results will instantly appear in the menu bar popover window. And as long as you don’t start a new search, your search results will not disappear, even if you click away from the menu bar.

CoverSutra’s layout for search results puts the emphasis on album and playlist covers.

I’ve also found that CoverSutra suits my listening habits pretty well. As the kind of person who likes to play albums from front to back and rarely relies on curated playlists, I’ve enjoyed how CoverSutra allows me to quickly bring up an album and play it from the beginning. The layout emphasizes album and playlist covers and makes it easy to instantly spot the album you are looking for.

In its current shape, CoverSutra 4.0 is pretty basic. Apart from search, playback controls, and the ability to set your own global keyboard shortcuts, there are no additional features or settings. However, I’m hopeful that the app can start fresh from this new foundation. Unlike similar alternatives on the Mac like Neptunes or Sleeve, CoverSutra’s potential as a standalone player in the menu bar may enable a range of more advanced features.

CoverSutra supports custom global keyboard shortcuts.

CoverSutra 4.0 is available on the Mac App Store. For a limited time, the app is available at an introductory price of $4.99. If you’ve purchased CoverSutra on the Mac App Store in the past, the upgrade to version 4.0 is free.

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The day has finally arrived. iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1 are all out and include Apple’s first major foray into the world of artificial intelligence. Of course, Apple is no stranger to AI and machine learning, but it became the narrative that the company was behind on AI because it didn’t market any of its OS features as such. Nor did it have anything resembling the generative AI tools from OpenAI, Midjourney, or a host of other companies.

However, with today’s OS updates, that has begun to change. Each update released today includes a far deeper set of new features than any other ‘.1’ release I can remember. Not only are the releases stuffed with a suite of artificial intelligence tools that Apple collectively refers to as Apple Intelligence, but there are a bunch of other new features that Niléane has written about, too.

The company is tackling AI in a unique and very Apple way that goes beyond just the marketing name the features have been given. As users have come to expect, Apple is taking an integrated approach. You don’t have to use a chatbot to do everything from proofreading text to summarizing articles; instead, Apple Intelligence is sprinkled throughout Apple’s OSes and system apps in ways that make them convenient to use with existing workflows.

If you don’t want to use Apple Intelligence, you can turn it off with a single toggle in each OS’s settings.

Apple also recognizes that not everyone is a fan of AI tools, so they’re just as easy to ignore or turn off completely from System Settings on a Mac or Settings on an iPhone or iPad. Users are in control of the experience and their data, which is refreshing since that’s far from given in the broader AI industry.

The Apple Intelligence features themselves are a decidedly mixed bag, though. Some I like, but others don’t work very well or aren’t especially useful. To be fair, Apple has said that Apple Intelligence is a beta feature. This isn’t the first time that the company has given a feature the “beta” label even after it’s been released widely and is no longer part of the official developer or public beta programs. However, it’s still an unusual move and seems to reveal the pressure Apple is under to demonstrate its AI bona fides. Whatever the reasons behind the release, there’s no escaping the fact that most of the Apple Intelligence features we see today feel unfinished and unpolished, while others remain months away from release.

Still, it’s very early days for Apple Intelligence. These features will eventually graduate from betas to final products, and along the way, I expect they’ll improve. They may not be perfect, but what is certain from the extent of today’s releases and what has already been previewed in the developer beta of iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS 15.2 is that Apple Intelligence is going to be a major component of Apple’s OSes going forward, so let’s look at what’s available today, what works, and what needs more attention.

Siri

Siri’s fancy new animation.

Siri announces itself with a flourish in Apple’s latest OS updates. Trigger it on your iPhone, for example, and a shimmering, iridescent glow animates around the edges of your screen as long as the assistant is active. Similar animations play on the iPad and Mac, too. It’s a very cool effect that sets high expectations Siri can’t live up to because many of the features Apple has planned for it won’t be out for months to come.

Down the road, the company says you’ll be able to ask the assistant to perform tasks in apps on your behalf using the technology underlying Shortcuts. Apple also promises that Siri will understand your personal context. If Apple can pull that off, Siri will be leagues ahead of where it is today, but it’s not there yet.

Siri uses the questions that precede it as context for follow-up requests.

Still, there is more to Siri in today’s updates than just a fancy animation. It may not understand your personal context yet, but Siri does have contextual awareness in the sense that it can now follow the meaning of multiple requests made one after the other. Here’s a simple example:

Me: “What time is it in Rome?”
Siri: “1:20 AM.” (Correct.)

Me: “What’s the weather there?”
Siri: “62°F.” (Also correct)

Me: “How do I get there?”
Siri: Opens Maps to show me where I am and where Rome, Italy is, as well as to let me know Maps can’t do overseas directions.

That sort of interaction is handy. I didn’t have to repeat “Rome” every time I spoke, and even though personal context is not incorporated into Siri yet, the assistant responded (perhaps coincidentally) with information for Rome, Italy, which is far more relevant to me personally than a town like Rome, Georgia – even though Georgia is far closer to my home.

Siri also does a better job than before of understanding if you trip over your words and correct yourself. That means if you ask about the weather in Philadelphia and, halfway through speaking your request, you say, “No, I mean Baltimore,” Siri will understand and give you the weather conditions in Baltimore. It’s a small change that will make a big difference if you’re like me and find yourself self-editing requests aloud.

Siri is the Kbase now.

Siri also now supports documentation for Apple products. If you ask how to turn on Dark Mode, for example, you’ll get a simple list of instructions pulled from the iPhone User Guide. I don’t foresee myself using this much, but it’s easier than opening Safari and typing a search, even if the same information is often the first result of a Google search.

Perhaps the biggest change of all is the new ability to type requests to Siri. The assistant defaults to verbal requests in most cases, but you can tap a result on the iPhone or iPad to edit it and even use a completely different query if you want. You can also double-tap on the bottom of an iPhone or iPad’s screen, use Globe + S on any compatible keyboard, or enable a double-tap on the Command button on your Mac’s keyboard to activate Siri. On the Mac, you can also drag the Siri text field anywhere onscreen, where it will sit pinned above your other windows, ready to take requests by voice or typing at any time.

Using Type to Siri to quickly capture tasks and events.

Of all the changes to Siri in today’s updates, Type to Siri is by far the most useful. On my Mac, I can leave it open at all times and, with a double-tap of the Command key, add a task to Reminders or an event to Calendar. It solves the problem of neither app having a global hotkey for quick entry. I’m not sure what other uses I’ll find for Type to Siri in the future, but for now, jotting down tasks or events as they come to me is plenty.

So far so good, but there’s one big caveat when it comes to Siri: it’s the same old Siri that isn’t any smarter than it was before today’s updates. It can pull information out of apps like Contacts, Calendar, and Messages, which isn’t new, but the results remain spotty at best. I can reliably get Siri to find a phone number or email address from Contacts and show me my schedule, but it often gets stuck in a particular mode, which leads to incorrect or unhelpful results.

I guess maybe I should be flattered that Siri expected to find Brad Pitt in my contacts.

For example, if I’ve asked about people in my contacts and then ask, “Who is Brad Pitt?” Siri is likely to tell me that there’s no one by that name in my contacts. Fair enough, but that’s not what I meant. I wanted information on the actor instead. If, however, I follow a question about someone in my contacts with a request for the weather forecast and then ask who Brad Pitt is, I’ll get a short bio of the actor.

“What did Jennifer tell me about Christine?”

I’ve seen the same sort of behavior in Messages, too. If I’ve asked a question that requires a web result and then ask Siri something like, “What did Jennifer tell me about Christine yesterday?” I’ll get Google results, including an obituary for someone named Jennifer Christine.

If I follow that with, “Who is Jennifer?” Siri will open my wife’s contact card. Then when I follow up by repeating my question, “What did Jennifer tell me about Christine yesterday?” Siri will read an excerpt from my iMessages with Jennifer containing the information I wanted to remember. The order of requests shouldn’t matter, but it does because Siri seems to get stuck in a particular mode and doesn’t always handle switching to another gracefully.

Siri is good at showing you your schedule for a particular day, too. However, it struggles to find individual events unless you phrase them exactly as they’re written in your calendar, and even that rarely works. For example, I asked Siri when Michael’s birthday is. I figured it would tell me about my nephew Michael’s birthday, which is on my calendar a few days from now. Instead, it told me that Michael Jackson was born on August 29th, 1958. I guess there’s just One True Michael.

Apple’s marketing promises results Siri can’t yet deliver. Source: Apple.

Siri’s data retrieval struggles aside, it’s still good at setting timers, including multiple timers. It will find people in the Contacts app, tell you the time and weather, provide driving directions, and search the web. However, Siri could already do those things. Its ability to understand multiple requests made in a row, respond better when you trip over your own words, and accept typed requests are all meaningful improvements to the feature, but its core “intelligence” is still a problem.

To be fair, Apple has said additional Siri “smarts” are coming later. If so, why enable new interaction modes now? Siri’s new features are welcome, but the UI and Apple’s marketing of Apple Intelligence have written a check that Siri can’t cash yet. I appreciate the new features; however, what I really want is personal contextual awareness and App Intents-powered automations.

Reduce Interruptions

Reduce Interruptions is easily one of my favorite Apple Intelligence features.

As I’ve been writing this review, I’ve turned to Apple Intelligence’s new Reduce Interruptions Focus mode multiple times. It’s similar to Do Not Disturb, but it still lets through some notifications that it deems important, which is a key difference.

In my experience, Reduce Interruptions works well. Today as I was writing, a call came through from my wife, and I saw a notification of a text message from Federico, neither of which I’d want to be blocked. What didn’t get through were messages from Discord where some MacStories team members were chatting about iOS 18.2.

Now, I could have (and have before) created Focus modes with elaborate rules about which people and apps can break through while I’m working, but with Reduce Interruptions, I’ve been able to dispense with those other Focus modes and simply turn it on when I need some “mostly quiet” time. There’s also a new ‘Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing’ toggle in Focus mode settings that allows you to apply a similar effect to any Focus mode. So far, though, Reduce Interruptions has been all I’ve really needed. Two thumbs up, would enable again.

Photos

Erasing a lawn chair with Clean Up.

There are three Apple Intelligence features available in the Photos app:

• Clean Up
• Memory Movie creation
• Improved search

Like similar tools I’ve used for years, Clean Up lets you tap, circle, or paint over an item in a photo with your finger to remove it. My first test was to erase a lawn chair from a grassy field. Clean Up did an excellent job, replacing the brightly colored chair with grass. If I zoomed in closely, I could tell that the grass was different from the area surrounding the edit, but if I were flicking through my photos and didn’t realize that one had been edited, I doubt I would have noticed. However, I do appreciate that the feature adds an ‘Edited with Clean Up’ message in the photo’s metadata and that it’s non-destructive, meaning it can be reversed at any time. In my experience, Clean Up works best with image elements that have clearly defined outlines with good lighting and high contrast.

Apple Intelligence confusing a pint of Guinness with a coffee in a “Coffee Time” Memory Movie.

The second feature, which is only available on the iPhone and iPad, is the ability to create Memory Movies based on text prompts. I’m sure a lot of people will want to try this as soon as they install iOS or iPadOS 18.1, but you’ll have to be patient if you have a big photo library. Apple Intelligence processes photos when your device is connected to power, and depending on how many photos you have, it can take days. I installed iOS 18.1 on my new iPhone 16 Pro Max on Friday, September 20, and it was still processing photos on Sunday afternoon. I’m not sure when it finished, but it eventually did.

Apple suggests prompts to help get you started with Memory Movies.

My results with Memory Movies have been mixed. Using “At the coffee shop” as a prompt was just as likely to include a photo of a bar or restaurant as it was a coffee shop. The feature also has a short memory when it comes to concepts like your home. I picked one of Apple’s suggested prompts, “Home love and laughter,” and the results were all photos taken where I live now; there wasn’t a single picture from the decades I lived in Illinois. Still, the time saved is worth it because it’s easier to generate a Memory Movie that mostly works and edit it than it is to start from scratch.

I don’t have a lot to say about Photos’ search, which now supports natural language and can find frames inside of videos, too. I’ve always thought search worked reasonably well in Photos, and it still does. It seems to handle a wider range of requests that don’t need to be as tightly defined as before, though, which is welcome.

Overall, Photos’ Clean Up feature works well. We can debate whether erasing people and other things from pictures is a good thing because it alters the reality of what was captured. In my opinion, it’s wild and a little disconcerting to completely erase someone you know from one of your photos as opposed to someone in the background who photobombed your family portrait. But in practice, I expect Clean Up will primarily be used to remove smaller distractions in a way that will improve the images without distorting reality in a meaningful way.

Improved search and simpler Memory Movie creation are examples of artificial intelligence implementations that show off how it can make it easier to access and enjoy large collections of information. With so many people carrying tens of thousands of images on their iPhones and other devices, leveraging AI to make them more accessible is a win, although it’s disappointing that Memory Movies generation isn’t available on the Mac, too.

Writing Tools

Apple Intelligence features several Writing Tools.

I’m not the target audience for most of the Apple Intelligence Writing Tools. I write for a living, and I’m not interested in having AI do it for me. That said, I expect that Writing Tools have the potential to be some of the most popular of Apple’s AI features, but they need to improve in order to really take off.

macOS Sequoia displays a tiny Apple Intelligence icon when you highlight text.

Writing Tools are found throughout Apple’s OSes. Practically anywhere you can type or select text, you can access Writing Tools. On iOS and iPadOS, you’ll find them in the context menu and, often, the toolbar above the virtual keyboard. On macOS, a little Apple Intelligence icon appears when you select text, possibly portending a more fully-featured PopClip-like context menu in a future version of macOS. Writing Tools can also be accessed from the right-click menu and from the Edit menu when you’re using an app with a text field on the Mac.

One result of these changes is that the iOS and iPadOS context menus are getting very crowded. ‘Writing Tools‘ is sometimes the second option after ‘Copy,’ pushing options like ‘Search Web’ much further down the line of as many as four context menu segments. I hope in the future that Apple gives users the ability to customize the context menu to prioritize the tools they use most, because I know for me, the menu items I rely on most are scattered across the entire menu.

Where Writing Tools are fully integrated into an app, you can access an explanation of each suggested change.

Of the Writing Tools, the one I like most is Proofreading. I’ve used Grammarly for years and appreciate its ability to catch easily overlooked errors like missing commas. Apple’s Proofreading Writing Tool is good at that, too, but the experience is different depending on the app you’re using.

The UI for stepping through suggested edits in TextEdit.

With some apps, like TextEdit on the Mac and Notes on any platform, Proofreading suggests changes that are highlighted so you can step through them, read why each change is suggested, and reject suggestions if you want, which is great. However, other apps like Pages don’t highlight suggested changes or allow you to reject individual suggestions at all, regardless of the platform you’re on. That’s a bad experience if you’re trying to proofread anything longer than a single sentence because it’s just too hard to scan for the changes without highlighting, to say nothing of the inability to reject individual changes.

The difference seems to come down to whether an app integrates with the Writing Tools APIs or is simply using the system-wide version of Writing Tools. You can tell the difference by looking for an Apple Intelligence icon that appears in an app’s toolbar or when you select text on a Mac. If you don’t see the icon in either place, the app doesn’t seem to integrate with the Writing Tool APIs.

Pages has access to a more rudimentary version of Proofreading, but it has its own built-in spelling and grammar tools as well.

Pages already has its own tools for checking spelling and grammar, so perhaps Apple Intelligence’s Proofreading tool won’t be added to it. However, I could see that changing over time as Proofreading becomes more robust and refined.

Regardless of what the future holds for Pages, the difference in the way Proofreading works in the app highlights something important: it means that any third-party app that doesn’t integrate directly with Writing Tools will have access to the inferior version of Proofreading, which is a shame. However, with the release of the developer betas for iOS and iPadOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2, Apple gave developers access to a new Writing Tools API, so hopefully the wait for full Proofreading integration in third-party apps won’t be too long.

The rewriting tools’ results aren’t terrible, but they’re often just a little too over the top. What I wrote (left) and Friendly (right).

Writing Tools can also rewrite something for you or rework it to be more Friendly, Professional, or Concise. I can imagine these tools helping in some circumstances, but none of them generate what I’d consider good writing. Friendly, Professional, and Rewrite sprinkle in unnecessary words that may fit the definition of the feature, but the results are wordy and unnatural. Hopefully with time, Apple will find a happy middle ground between the intended style and a more neutral, natural-sounding tone.

I’ve found Key Points to be the most useful of the Writing Tools’ list and summary features.

The Writing Tools menu also includes buttons to create multiple forms of lists and summaries:

• Summary
• Key Points
• List
• Table

In my testing, I find Summary usually generates results that are too short to be useful if you feed it a lot of text, but otherwise, it works fairly well. Table is a niche form of summary that only works well with information that naturally conforms to rows and columns. I suspect most people will prefer Key Points, which is a hybrid version of Summary and List that strikes a nice middle ground between a list and a block of summarized text. List can also be handy when you simply want to format a bunch of text as bullet points.

Calm down, Friendly mode; it’ll be okay.

It’s worth noting, too, that Writing Tools aren’t limited to your own writing. For example, you can highlight text on the web or in an email you receive and apply any of the Writing Tools to it as well. That can make consolidating a lot of data into a more organized set of notes easier than doing so manually.

Writing Tools are also non-destructive, meaning that whenever you use one to replace your original text, there’s an option to undo the changes with Writing Tools’ integrated ‘Revert’ button where it’s available or the tried-and-true ‘undo’ command. The feature offers an ‘Original’ button to toggle between rewritten results and your original writing, comparing the two. The rewriting tools can also be run multiple times until you find a result you like.

As things stand today, Writing Tools are good for proofreading if the app you’re using includes direct Writing Tools integration. The Key Points and List features are also useful for bringing together research materials. However, tools for rewriting text are fine for low-stakes uses like dashing off a quick email message, but they’re too rough for writing a cover letter for a job or an important memo for work. Over time, that may change, but for now, I’d use the rewriting tools cautiously and sparingly.

Mail

The Priority Inbox is a great concept, but more often than not, mine is full of Amazon delivery notifications and other messages I don’t care about.

Apple Intelligence’s Priority Inbox has made me realize something about my use of email that I never thought about. I believed that I relied on subjects and message previews much more than I actually do. In fact, I focus much more on whether a message is from a person and, if so, who they are when I’m deciding what is important.

The trouble with the Priority Inbox is that it doesn’t play by my personal email rules. It seems to be getting better over time, but for the longest time, not a single message from a person appeared in my Priority Inbox, which is exactly the opposite of what I want. If all the feature did was include messages from people I’ve exchanged messages with before, it would be vastly more useful. Instead, I’ve seen a lot of Amazon delivery notifications and other notification-type messages that just aren’t very important.

More recently, I’ve started to see a few people who I’ve corresponded with before filter into my Priority Inbox, which makes me optimistic that the feature might get to a more useful place eventually. However, it still isn’t consistent enough to rely on.

These quick responses are better than most, but often don’t sound like what I’d write.

Mail, along with Messages, also offers quick response suggestions. Other email apps have had similar features that rely on templates for a long time, and they can be helpful. However, Apple Intelligence’s suggested responses are almost never what I’d write myself, even if I’m just dashing off a quick, “I’ll check it out,” or, “Thanks,“ to let someone know I’ve seen their message and will follow up. So until they get better, I’ll simply ignore suggested responses.

Finally, Mail can also summarize the contents of messages. I’m not a fan of article summaries in Safari, but they’re more useful in Mail. They are often a poor substitute for reading a long email, but they do give you the gist of what the message is about, which may be all you need in many cases.

Summarizing email message threads is probably the best way to use Mail summaries.

Better yet, summaries also work with email threads, which is where I’ve found them most useful. Often, I’ll have multiple threads with the same person, and sifting through each to find what I’m looking for isn’t always easy, even using search. However, with summaries, I can quickly understand the topic of a long thread, which is helpful and something I will continue to use.

Summaries

Summaries drain nuance and meaning from text. Yet, summarization can also be a valuable tool if used wisely. Apple Intelligence does okay with summaries, but it could do better.

Notification Summaries

One of my favorite parts of using iOS 18.1 is reading the often hilarious summaries of Discord messages. Most of the messages in the MacStories Discord are short, and they’re often not carefully written. The results have entertained me and everyone on the team as we’ve shared the results with each other.

In other instances, notification summaries are more useful – like here, where I only really care about the most recent status change.

The summaries aren’t all funny, though. Sometimes, they’re just blunt and impersonal. I recall one where I came across as demanding and mean when the message I sent didn’t have that tone at all. Then there was the guy who got a summary of a text message breakup from his girlfriend, which is pretty brutal.

Notification summaries for multiple messages often lose context and come across as brutally blunt.

At times, notification summaries are useful, providing a quick way to catch up on key points, even if details are lost. The problem is that they are too often nonsensical or vague. Perhaps that will improve over time.

The contrast with Writing Tools here is interesting. Whereas Writing Tools will go out of their way to add extraneous friendly phrases that sometimes tip into sounding insincere, notification summaries ruthlessly cut all nuance. It makes me wonder if our communications are about to enter a strange era where every message is sent dripping with excess and read with brutalist efficiency.

Safari Summaries

Most summaries are too brief to be useful except as a way to get a superficial idea of a story’s topic.

Safari includes a button to summarize articles when you’re in Reader mode. These summaries are so short that their utility is extremely limited. Here’s the summary of Federico’s iPad mini review:

The new iPad mini features the A17 Pro chip, 8GB of RAM, and Wi-Fi 6E, improving performance and Wi-Fi speeds. Despite its unchanged display and lack of Stage Manager support, the iPad mini remains a compelling companion device for media consumption and streaming. The iPad mini’s compact form factor makes it ideal for streaming games and other media-intensive activities.

It’s accurate, but it completely misses the notion of ‘The Third Place,’ which is the most interesting part of the story and what sets the review apart from others.

Summaries aren’t always accurate, either. Take this summary of my story about the iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS 15.2 betas:

According to the summary, the article includes the notion that, “These features aim to enhance user creativity and productivity, while also providing safeguards to protect user data and privacy.“

Those ideas aren’t anywhere to be found in my story. So while summaries may provide a very high-level gist of articles, I wouldn’t rely on them for any more than that.

Apple Intelligence is still in its infancy. It’s a rougher mix of features than the company usually releases to the public, which I don’t like; but given where the tech industry is with AI, I’m not surprised that Apple didn’t wait to release them in beta form. Today’s features will undoubtedly evolve and improve quickly. Sometimes, that’s just how the tech industry goes.

Limitations aside, I think the largely on-device, privacy-first approach Apple is taking is the right one. I also like the way Apple has deeply integrated Apple Intelligence into its OSes and system apps.

Still, I’ve never been more apprehensive about the company’s direction than I am now. Steve Jobs planted Apple at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. That was more than just marketing fluff. The company was founded and thrived on the creative tension at that intersection, somehow managing to maintain a balance between the two.

With Apple Intelligence, I fear the scales have tipped too far in favor of technology at the expense of the liberal arts. AI has vast potential to do good in the world, but too often, it’s been used to drain the humanity from whatever it touches. That’s antithetical to the values Apple has stood for historically, but even Apple mined the web for content to train its large language models with casual disregard for its creators, which gives me pause.

I want Apple to look at AI differently and challenge AI’s status quo, pushing the industry forward in a way that advances culture instead of undermining it. That’s a tall order, but shouldn’t that be the exact sort of goal that one of the biggest companies in the world with Apple’s heritage aims to achieve?

The launch of Apple Intelligence today will fade into another tick mark on technology’s long timeline. Apple Intelligence’s rough edges will be smoothed out and forgotten, and we’ll all move on to the next big thing. What’s important, though, is that these features are the first steps of one of the world’s biggest companies down a path that has profound consequences beyond the company’s quarterly earnings report. I wish I had a better feeling about and insight into where this is heading, but what I know for certain is that I’m here for it.

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Today, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 18.1, the first major release since the operating system versions that launched in September and were reviewed by Federico.

As you may know, the main highlight of this new release is the first wave of Apple Intelligence features available to the public. AI has arrived, and for better or for worse for Apple’s platforms, this is only the beginning. Be sure to check out John’s review of all the new Apple Intelligence features included in iOS and iPadOS 18.1 (as well as macOS Sequoia 15.1) for the details.

Fortunately, Apple Intelligence isn’t the only highlight of this release. It also includes a series of changes to the system, from Control Center and the Camera app to Shortcuts and the arrival of new health features for AirPods Pro 2 users.

Here’s a roundup of everything new besides Apple Intelligence in iOS and iPadOS 18.1.

Control Center

Control Center received a major overhaul in iOS and iPadOS 18. It is now fully customizable, can span across multiple pages, and supports custom controls provided by third-party apps installed on your device.

With iOS and iPadOS 18.1, Apple has enriched Control Center with a handful of new built-in connectivity controls that can be individually added from the gallery and placed anywhere in your custom Control Center layout. These new standalone controls exist alongside the previously available ‘Connectivity’ tile, which bundles together all of the main connectivity controls.

These are all the standalone connectivity controls available in iOS 18.1:

• Wi-Fi
• Cellular Data
• Bluetooth
• VPN
• Personal Hotspot
• AirDrop
• Airplane Mode
• Satellite

In addition to these new connectivity controls, you’ll also find two other new controls: ‘Measure’ and ‘Level’. These allow you to quickly open the Measure app directly in either of its main tabs.

Now, if you’ve always found Control Center to be hard to reach with one hand, especially on any of the taller iPhone models, you’ll be glad to hear that iOS 18.1 comes with a new Shortcuts action to open, close, or toggle Control Center. In practice, this means that it is now possible to reassign one of your two Lock Screen controls to open Control Center without having to form a claw with your hand to reach the top of the screen.

All you need to do is create a new shortcut with the new ‘Show Control Center’ action and customize one of the two controls on your Lock Screen to trigger that shortcut. Alternatively, you can assign your shortcut to the Action button or place it anywhere in the bottom half of your Home Screen for easy access.

Finally, Apple has added an easy way to reset Control Center to its default layout. This is useful whether you’re looking to start customizing your Control Center from scratch or you’re simply content with Apple’s default layout. To reset Control Center, head to Settings → Control Center and tap ‘Reset Control Center’.

Camera

The Camera app has been updated in iOS 18.1 to feature a new dedicated ‘Spatial’ mode. If you own an iPhone 15 Pro, 16, or 16 Pro, this mode will allow you to shoot spatial photos and videos thanks to the vertically-oriented camera sensors on those devices. When in this mode, to the right of the shutter button, you will find a two-way switch for toggling between capturing photos and videos. Previously, shooting spatial photos and videos was available via a toggle within the Camera app’s regular Photo and Video tabs.

Additionally, if you own an iPhone 16 or 16 Pro, you can now use the Camera Control to switch between the front- and rear-facing cameras with a couple of swipes and light presses.

Hearing Health Features for the AirPods Pro 2

Hearing Test results in the Health app in iOS 18.1. Source: Apple.

Last month at its September 2024 event, Apple unveiled a series of major new health features coming to the AirPods Pro 2. These include the ability for users to take a hearing test, use the AirPods as over-the-counter hearing aids, and benefit from a new on-by-default hearing protection mode that will automatically lower loud environmental noise across all listening modes (Transparency, Adaptive Audio, and Noise Cancellation).

These new hearing health features will start rolling out today with the release of iOS 18.1 and an accompanying firmware update for the AirPods Pro 2 (version 7B19 or later), which should automatically install on users’ earbuds over the coming days. While there is no way to manually update your AirPods, you can increase your chances by keeping your AirPods Pro 2 fully charged and in their charging case overnight. Once your AirPods Pro 2 are properly updated – and once your region becomes eligible – head to the Health app on your iPhone to start your hearing test.

Apple has detailed on a new support page the worldwide availability of each of the new hearing health features for the AirPods Pro 2.

And More…

You’ll find a handful of other changes in iOS and iPadOS 18.1 as well:

Change the primary email address associated with your Apple Account. As most trans people know, changing your name online is particularly difficult. Name changes often require that you create an entirely new account when they aren’t supported by a service provider. While Apple already lets you update your first and last name on your Apple Account pretty easily, until today it was not straightforward to change the primary email associated with your account. This was a problem because the primary email address is not only used to sign in and recover your account, but it is also visible to people you collaborate and share documents with using iCloud. So if the email address you used to create your account contained your former name, you were out of luck.

Fortunately, in iOS and iPadOS 18.1, you can now easily set any of the email addresses associated with your Apple Account as the primary email to be used by Apple. To add an email address and choose a new primary email for your Apple Account, head to Settings, tap your name at the top of the screen, and choose ‘Sign-In & Security’.

In iOS 18.1, you can set any email address associated with your Apple Account as the primary email to be used by Apple.

Two new names for the Up Next queue in the Apple TV app. Starting with iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS 18.1, what used to be known as the Up Next queue in the Apple TV app is now called ‘Continue Watching’. It is still positioned below the carousel at the top of the Home tab, and it still functions essentially in the same way, letting you jump back into an unfinished movie, start watching a newly released episode, or play a movie or TV show that you have manually saved to the list. Consequently, the option to manually add a piece of media to the list has also been renamed to ‘Add to Watchlist’.

There are now effectively two terms inside the TV app that both refer to the same area in the app’s Home tab. I haven’t spent much time with this change yet, but I do wish Apple had chosen to add a dedicated Watchlist tab to the app instead — and I’m worried that this change in terminology will only add more complexity and confusion to a rather rapidly evolving app.

In the TV app’s Home tab, the Up Next queue is now known as ‘Continue Watching’. To manually add a movie or TV show to this queue, select ‘Add to Watchlist’.

Updated design for the emoji keyboard. The emoji keyboard has been updated to pave the way for the upcoming Genmoji feature in iOS 18.2. The emoji grid is now larger, Memoji and custom stickers are included, and the navigation strip for jumping to a specific emoji category now features updated glyphs that are more in line with the design of the emoji contained in the corresponding category. If you’re interested, Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge went into detail on Threads about these design changes to the emoji keyboard.

In iOS 18.1, the emoji keyboard now features a larger grid, sections for Memoji and custom stickers, and redesigned glyphs.

Notification badges on the Lock Screen. Grouped notification banners on the Lock Screen are now adorned with an icon badge corresponding to the number of notifications contained within the group. Unlike the existing red notification badges on the Home Screen, these new badges on the Lock Screen are translucent.

Updated Calculator history. The new history panel in the Calculator app has been moved. It now resides in a floating sheet that appears above the keypad instead of in the sidebar.

Calculator History in iOS 18.0 (left) and iOS 18.1 (right)

RCS Business Messaging. Apple already baked RCS support into the Messages app in iOS 18. Now, the company is expanding it to allow businesses to communicate with their customers over RCS. Keep in mind that RCS Business Messaging will only work if your carrier supports RCS messaging in the first place.

Support for wired Xbox controllers. Since Xbox controllers use a custom fast USB protocol called GIP instead of the standard protocol used by other controllers, they previously couldn’t be used in wired mode with Apple devices. Now, in iOS and iPadOS 18.1 (as well as macOS Sequoia 15.1), Xbox controllers can be used with a wire, just like any other supported controller.

Send Game Center invitations directly from the Contacts app. Previously, you could only invite a friend to Game Center via its dedicated section in the Settings app. In iOS and iPadOS 18.1, you can send a Game Center invitation directly from the Contacts app.

Share songs from Apple Music to TikTok. Just as you’ve been able to with Instagram, you can now share songs from the Apple Music app to TikTok via the share sheet. To share a song to TikTok, long press on any track, tap ‘Share’, then select the TikTok app from the share sheet.

That’s it for iOS and iPadOS 18.1. Overall, despite the focus on its new Apple Intelligence features, this release still includes a significant list of non-AI changes and additions. Still, it will be interesting to see how Apple continues to update its operating systems over the next year while managing to ship its upcoming waves of Apple Intelligence features.

You can update your device to iOS and iPadOS 18.1 today by navigating to Settings → General → Software Update.

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MacPaw has released a new version of its cleanup and maintenance utility CleanMyMac, dropping the “X” from its name, refreshing the design, and simplifying the app substantially.

The latest version is divided into six modules that host a variety of tools:

• Smart Care
• Cleanup
• Protection
• Performance
• Applications
• My Clutter

It also includes an assistant that rates the health of your Mac and recommends maintenance actions to you.

A lot of the tools available in CleanMyMac’s update will be familiar to long-time users. The difference is that the app’s modules have been simplified and explained in a less technical manner, which should make the app approachable to a broader audience.

The My Clutter module does more to find file clutter than before, scanning for large, old, and duplicate files, as well as images that are the same or close matches to each other. The scan can take a while depending on the amount of storage on your Mac, but I was impressed with the volume of files it identified that I could summarily delete.

CleanMyMac’s menu bar item.

The app also features a menu bar item that opens a grid of tiles reporting the highlights of your Mac’s health. Clicking on any of the tiles reveals additional details about that component.

The Smart Care, Cleanup, Protection, Performance, and Applications modules include a variety of other maintenance tools. You can tune up your Mac by clearing caches and other unnecessary files taking up your storage, free up memory, scan for viruses and malware, and uninstall or update apps to name just a handful of the many tools at your disposal.

The My Clutter scan may take a while if you have a lot of files.

I’ve been running the new version of CleanMyMac for about a week, and it’s been running smoothly. The My Clutter file scan does take a lot of time; my 4TB Mac Studio took about 25 minutes to scan, but the app did a fantastic job identifying files I could delete. The other available scans have worked well, too, and are faster, making it simple for me to periodically maintain my Mac.

CleanMyMac is available directly from MacPaw starting at $39.95 per year for one Mac (with multi-device bundles available at a discount), or as a one-time purchase starting at $119.95. Either option includes a seven-day free trial. Alternatively, you can download CleanMyMac as part of a Setapp subscription (affiliate link).

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The Native Union Voyage with USB-C cable and canvas pouch.

Last week, I abandoned the Belkin BoostCharge Pro Wireless Charger because of a recent recall. Fortuitously at about the same time, Native Union sent me its Voyage 2-in-1 Magnetic Wireless Charger to test. Although I preferred having the Apple Watch charging puck integrated with the power source for charging, as the Belkin battery did, the Native Union’s Voyage has proven to be an excellent replacement and far more flexible in how it can be used.

The Voyage consists of two charging disks joined by a soft rubberized strip that allows the two halves to fold into a compact, magnetically connected unit. The device comes in sandstone or black and is made of plastic, with the soft-touch rubbery hinge extending around the exterior edge of the disks. When folded, the Voyage is about the thickness of two iPhone 16 Pros, which may be too thick for some pockets but works well in a bag with your other gear. Overall, the device feels sturdy, and the build quality is excellent.

Charging an iPhone and AirPods Pro 2.

There are a few ways to use the Voyage. If you want to charge your iPhone and Apple Watch at the same time, you can fold the Voyage flat, push up on the Apple Watch charging puck so it’s perpendicular to the rest of the device, and start charging both. The Voyage is a Qi2 charger, meaning it can deliver 15W of power to an iPhone. The Apple Watch puck delivers 5W of power. Qi2’s power delivery is a step up from the original Qi standard, but it’s worth noting that you can get faster charging from Apple’s official iPhone MagSafe charger and Apple Watch charger.

Charging an iPhone and Apple Watch at 15 and 5W, respectively.

That said, there’s a benefit to the Voyage’s integrated design that Apple’s faster chargers don’t offer. Not only can you charge your iPhone and Apple Watch (or AirPods Pro) simultaneously, but you have other options, too. First, if you fold the Voyage back on itself, you can charge just your iPhone. In this configuration, the Voyage is thick enough to double as a landscape-oriented stand, allowing you to use it to watch videos whether you’re charging your iPhone or not. If you’re charging in this configuration, you’ll also have access to the iPhone’s StandBy mode.

Using the Voyage in StandBy mode.

Another option is to flip the same configuration over and drop your Apple Watch or AirPods Pro on the Voyage’s flat surface to charge. Alternatively, you can flip the charging puck up and use your Apple Watch in nightstand mode as it charges. That’s a total of four ways to charge your devices with a charger that has a footprint not much bigger than an official Apple MagSafe charger.

Using the Voyage as a stand.

The Voyage comes with a fabric-covered USB-C cable that matches the color of the device. There’s also a canvas bag in the box for storing the Voyage and its cable, although I’ll probably use it for storing small dongles and other odds and ends instead.

So far, the Voyage has been a good substitute for the charger I was using before. I’d prefer it if the Voyage supported faster MagSafe charging, but its compact size makes up for the slower charging in most contexts. The device has been equally handy having around the house whenever I need to top off my iPhone, Apple Watch, or AirPods Pro as it’s been easy to keep in my backpack for working away from home. So while the Voyage won’t replace faster charging solutions I have connected to my desk, it’s filled the role of having a charger handy at all times very well.

The Voyage 2-in-1 Magnetic Wireless Charger is available directly from Native Union for $99.99.

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Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about and showed off Logitech’s MX Creative Console, a two-piece device made up of a keypad and dialpad, that takes the Elgato Stream Deck head-on. Well, today, Logitech is back with a slightly different approach in the form of its POP Icon Keys keyboard, which borrows some tricks from the Creative Console.

The $49.99 keyboard, shipping later this month, is solidly built and low-profile. It weighs 530g and has four big rubber pads on the bottom corners, giving it a sturdy, stable feel on my desk. The keys use scissor switches and feature aggressively rounded corners, and they’re quiet and have more throw and resistance than an Apple Magic Keyboard, but are easy to adapt to if you’re used to Apple’s keyboards. I particularly like the texture of the keys – which could be partially due to the fact that I’ve been using a worn-down Magic Keyboard – but the keys have a nice feel and don’t show fingerprints.

The POP Icon Keys comes in four color options.

The body of the keyboard is made of a similar plastic, and the keys are surrounded by a strip of glossy, transparent plastic that adds a little flair to the entire package. The color options available for the POP Icon Keys are fun, too. I’ve been testing a black keyboard with neon yellow accents for about a week, and I like it a lot, but there are other color combinations available, including pink, orange and white, and a purpleish-blue color scheme. Also, the POP Icon Keys runs on two AAA batteries, which Logitech says can provide 36 months of operation thanks to the keyboard’s onboard power management.

If that’s where the story ended for the POP Icon Keys, I’d recommend it because it’s a very good keyboard for the price. What sets the POP Icon Keys apart, though, is that it goes a step further, adding automation features similar to those found on the more expensive MX Creative Console.

Logitech has designated the Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, F4-F12, and brightness keys as programmable via its Logi Options+ app. Among other things, you can use these keys to control system settings, execute keyboard shortcuts, and run multiple actions combined into macros. The keys’ original functionality remains available, too, if you hold down the function button. The POP Icon Keys also shares the MX Creative Console’s ability to set up app-specific profiles, meaning you can program keys to perform different tasks depending on which app is active.

For example, you could use the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down buttons to open different sets of apps for work, a special project, or relaxing with a game. Or you could use the function keys to trigger keyboard shortcuts in your favorite apps or Shortcuts automations.

There are a couple of things I love about this functionality. First, the flexibility is fantastic, especially since you can access the programmable keys without taking your hands off the keyboard, which is an advantage over the MX Creative Console. Second, for just $50, the POP Icon Keys is a great entry point into the world of push-button automation. If it turns out that keyboard-driven automation isn’t your thing, you still have an excellent keyboard, but if it is, you can go a long way with the POP Icon Keys’ options before you graduate to the MX Creative Console or another similar device.

All in all, I like the POP Icon Keys a lot. It’s nicely built and a great way to get started with keyboard automation or supplement other automation workflows you already use. The device is available directly from Logitech and Amazon.

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

Social media has splintered across multiple services since the decline of Twitter. I’ve always managed a lot of social media accounts between my own and ones for MacStories, but today the situation is worse than ever. There have always been services like Buffer that make it easier to juggle multiple accounts and services, but they are more expensive than most indie developers, artists, websites, and other creators can afford and offer more features than most need.

That’s where Croissant comes in. It’s a new iPhone app from Ben McCarthy and Aaron Vegh that simplifies cross-posting to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads at an indie-friendly price. The app doesn’t try to replicate the many features you’ll find in services like Buffer. Instead, it’s focused on making it easier for indie creators or anyone with multiple social accounts to post on multiple platforms at once.

Croissant’s tint color, app icon, and posting button icon are all customizable.

I’ve been testing Croissant over the past week, connecting it to two Bluesky accounts, two Threads accounts, and five Mastodon accounts, and I’ve been loving it. First off, the design is top-tier, as you’d expect from one of Ben’s apps. The UI’s focus is on drafting your posts, and it’s accented with a deep yellow/orange hue that I love. However, the app offers seven other color options to choose from. There are also a total of seven app icon options and three icons to pick from for the button that publishes a post.

Managing accounts in Croissant.

If you have a lot of accounts you want to use with Croissant, you’ll need to start by signing into each, which requires a little patience. However, once you’re set up and ready to go, the rest is smooth sailing. You’ll see icons for each of the accounts you’ve signed into at the top of the app’s compose view. Tap on the row of icons to manage your accounts, removing any you no longer use and adding any new ones. The gear icon in the top-left corner of the view reveals tint, post icon, and app icon settings, and the box icon at the top-right is used to access draft posts that you can save using the app’s Menu button at the bottom of the compose field.

That same Menu button also allows you to delete a post, add to an existing thread, add a content warning, and pick from various audience options. Plus, there are buttons to tag someone, add hashtags, and attach photos or videos to a post. Croissant displays a character counter at the top of each draft post, too.

I appreciate the ‘Do you really want to post this everywhere?’ step.

My favorite part of Croissant is the interaction that takes place when you’re ready to launch your latest hot take into the social media wilderness. Before you post, a list of every account you’ve connected to Croissant slides up from the bottom of the screen. By default, all of your accounts are selected. Tap the big Post button at the bottom of the list, and you’ll launch your words of wisdom into the world across every service you’ve configured. Before you post, you can also de-select any of the accounts listed. That’s great because, although I could fairly be accused of being a chronic cross-poster, even I rarely post everywhere all at once, so I appreciate the chance to fine-tune where my posts will be published.

I like the simplicity of Croissant a lot, but there are a couple of things I’d love to see added in future updates. The first is Shortcuts support. An action that allows me to pick the accounts to send a post from, coupled with Shortcuts’ ability to pull items from RSS feeds, would make publicizing new MacStories articles and podcast episodes a lot easier. Second, a scheduling feature would go a long way toward completely eliminating the need for services like Buffer for a lot of people. Of course, an iPad and Mac version of Croissant would be great too, but I’ve found using the iPhone app on my iPad and on my Mac with iPhone Mirroring to fill that need well so far – except that on the iPad it means logging into all of my accounts a second time, which is a little tedious.

Sometimes the hottest takes cool after a few days in the drafts box.

There’s an added side benefit to using Croissant that I didn’t realize at first but Brendon pointed out to me. Croissant lets you post without the distraction or stress of getting sucked into your timelines. I’ve often had times where I felt like I needed a break from social media but felt compelled to jump back in to make sure we were promoting everything happening at MacStories. With Croissant, you can have it both ways, letting the world know what you’re up to without needing to scroll your timeline.

Croissant, which is available on the App Store for free but requires a subscription for some features, is a clear win for anyone who works online and wants to promote what they make or who maintains active accounts across several services. Neither group is a good fit for expensive social media management services, but for $2.99/month, $19.99/year, or a one-time payment of $59.99, Croissant is a no-brainer.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

15 years into its life, Reeder is one of the most popular and beloved RSS readers available on Apple’s platforms. You can’t have a discussion about the best way to follow RSS feeds without Reeder coming up as a contender – and believe me, we’ve had many such discussions here at MacStories and on the Club MacStories+ Discord. It’s an institution, and one that many people have very strong feelings about.

With a product as successful and engrained as Reeder, it would be easy for the app’s developer Silvio Rizzi to stick to what works and keep it the same without rocking the boat. But to Rizzi’s credit, that’s absolutely not the case with the new version of Reeder, which is available today. Instead, the new Reeder expands the app’s scope far beyond that of a typical RSS reader and fundamentally rethinks the traditional approach to keeping up with feeds. It’s a massive break from the past that will likely prove divisive among Reeder’s longtime user base. At the same time, it has the potential to appeal to a whole new audience of users who’ve never tried RSS readers before.

Reeder Classic (formerly Reeder 5) is here to stay.

There’s a lot to cover in this update, but first, a word of reassurance for fans of Reeder as we know it: it isn’t going anywhere. The previous version, Reeder 5, has been renamed Reeder Classic and remains available on the App Store. In fact, Rizzi intends to continue developing Reeder Classic in conjunction with the new version. If you want to stick with the Reeder you know and love, you certainly can, and I think offering both versions is the right call given the huge change in direction Rizzi has gone with this update.

The best word to describe the new Reeder is “ambitious.” Its purpose is not just to be your RSS reader, but your inbox for keeping up with feeds of many different kinds from various sources across the Internet – text from websites, sure, but also videos on YouTube, audio from podcasts, posts on social media, and more. It’s a one-stop shop for the feeds you follow online, collecting them together into a single timeline that you can seamlessly browse across all of your devices. As I said, it’s a lofty goal.

It’s also quite different from what previous versions of Reeder were trying to do. In order to take on this new role as an inbox for all of your feeds, Reeder has been rebuilt from the ground up, a characteristic that shows both in its design and functionality. Many new features have been added, but nearly as many have been removed. Whether this update looks like a streamlined evolution or a stripped-down regression depends largely on if you’re interested in this sort of catch-all tool at all, but that’s the risk one takes when reimagining an established product in such a substantial way.

Let’s start with what you won’t see in the new version of Reeder. The app does not integrate with RSS sync services like Feedly and Inoreader. Instead, Reeder syncs subscriptions and other data exclusively via iCloud. This limitation is necessary due to the fact that Reeder incorporates other types of feeds that aren’t supported by RSS sync services, but it’s also a big break from the norms of typical RSS readers. Users switching from a sync service to Reeder can import their subscriptions in a single batch via an OPML file.

There are several newer items in this list that I haven’t seen yet, but I have no way of knowing.

If that isn’t enough of a shock, Reeder also does away with one of the most basic precepts of reader apps: unread counts. In the world of Reeder, there is no concept of an article that’s been read or unread. There’s no badge indicating how many new items you’ve yet to see. Rather, the app simply records your position in the timeline and lets new items fill in above it. To check out new items, you just scroll up, and your timeline position syncs between all of your devices so that you’re always starting from where you previously left off.

This change makes keeping up with your feeds feel more like browsing social media than reading a list of articles. Without an unread count dwindling down as you work your way through your feeds, you’re left trusting Reeder to put you in the right place every time to ensure you don’t miss anything. That’s a big ask, and it only works if the position syncing is rock solid.

Thankfully, it is. In my testing, I’ve found that the app places me at my previous position in the timeline each time I open it. I’m someone who cares very much about seeing everything that comes across the feeds I choose to follow, so my expectation level is very high for a feature like this, and Reeder meets it reliably.

The last big feature users have come to expect from RSS clients that isn’t available in Reeder is feed organization. The app includes a list of subscriptions automatically grouped by feed type, including Podcasts, YouTube channels, and regular RSS feeds, but users cannot manually organize their subscriptions further. All RSS feeds are lumped together, so if you follow sites covering various topics like technology, music, and entertainment, there’s no way to create separate timelines for each of those categories. In this case, I don’t think the new approach Reeder is taking demands this omission; it’s just not an option currently available. I’d like to see it added because I know that’s how a lot of people approach RSS, especially if they have a large collection of feeds they follow.

Reeder’s list of feed sources that can be added (left), podcast search results (middle), and social media feed options (right.)

With that out of the way, let’s move on to what’s possible with the new Reeder that wasn’t in previous versions. The app supports subscribing to feeds from a variety of sources:

• RSS feeds
• Podcasts
• YouTube channels
• Mastodon accounts, tags, and home timelines
• Bluesky accounts and home timelines
• Micro.blog accounts, Discover feeds, and home timelines
• Glass accounts
• Flickr accounts
• comic strips
• subreddits

Many of these sources are technically accessible via RSS, but finding their feeds can be tricky, and those feed URLs can change over time. Reeder makes adding these sources as simple as searching for them in a text field, and whether the app relies on RSS, an API, or some other integration doesn’t really matter to the user. All they see is a clean, well-designed feed of items from the source they’ve chosen.

Reeder makes for a decent read-only Mastodon client.

To me, the most interesting options in this list are the social media home timelines. Selecting one of these feed types prompts the user to sign in to their account on the selected service. Once that’s done, Reeder literally becomes a read-only client for the social media site the user has chosen. I don’t use Bluesky or Micro.blog, so I wasn’t able to test those, but the Mastodon integration is implemented surprisingly well. The timeline displays posts and reposts with properly formatted usernames, attached images, and embedded links. Tapping a post will show it in context with replies, and tapping on a username will open that user’s profile in a web view. I’m not personally looking for a read-only Mastodon client, but if I were, Reeder would make a great one.

If this list of feed sources seems like a mishmash of vastly different content types, that’s because it is. The Reeder timeline combines text articles, photos, videos, social media posts, audio files, and more all together in a single view. For some, that may sound like chaos. But to others, it’s actually harmony. It saves users from having to check a different app for each type; instead, all the content they care about is available in one convenient place.

Displaying all of this content together in a way that’s intelligible requires considered design, and Reeder delivers on that front in spades. The app features a three-pane layout with categories listed in the leftmost pane, feed item previews in the middle, and the content of the selected item on the right. The design is simple and well spaced out without coming off as sparse. Iconography and accent colors are used infrequently but effectively, putting the emphasis on the content of your feeds above all else.

The categories list starts with the app’s three timelines: Home, Video, and Audio. Home is the main timeline where feeds of every type are listed. Feeds can be optionally excluded from the Home timeline via a toggle in each feed’s settings, but by default, every feed you subscribe to goes in Home. The Video and Audio timelines filter the Home view to only display items that include video and audio content, respectively. The Video timeline features YouTube videos from channels you subscribe to, but it also includes any articles with embedded video links.

Adjusting a feed’s settings.

Underneath the three timelines are the app’s various category sections. Each source type is given its own section in the sidebar, and every section can be expanded to display a list of the feeds it includes alongside their favicons. Long-pressing on a feed reveals options to delete it or adjust its settings, including its name, whether or not it appears in the Home timeline, and how items from the feed should be displayed. Each feed’s settings pane also includes its URL, which can be copied to the clipboard.

The Saved section is a special category of item tags provided by the app itself: Links, Later, Bookmarks, and Favorites. The Links tag contains any links that have been added to the app via the share sheet. Items from feeds within Reeder can be tagged with Later, Bookmarks, or Favorites to be stored in those lists long-term. You can also add custom tags to items in your timeline, and these tags will be listed in the Saved section as well.

To me, Reeder’s Saved tags are the least polished aspect of the app. They’re difficult to manage because the app doesn’t include a tool for selecting multiple items at once or even swiping on them to remove them from a list. Instead, you have to remove items one at a time by long-pressing on them and deselecting the tag in the context menu.

The Later list is also the one place in the app I miss unread counts. If I save an item for later, I want it to get some special treatment and not be mixed in with a bunch of other similar-looking items that I may or may not have read. Maybe if it were easier to untag items, then it wouldn’t be a problem, but as it is, it’s not viable even as a basic read later solution in my eyes.

A tag’s settings with sharing enabled (left), the shared tag’s public webpage (middle), and its JSON feed imported into Reeder Classic (right).

The Saved section does contain a powerful hidden feature, though: any tag, including a custom tag, can be shared publicly via a webpage or JSON feed. You can enable this feature by long-pressing on a tag, opening its settings, and toggling on the ‘Public JSON Feed’ option. Once the feature is enabled, the app will display a small cloud icon next to the tag and present you with a shareable link to a page that lists all of items marked with that tag. The page also includes a link to a JSON feed for the tag that you can subscribe to in another RSS app. You can quickly copy the public URL and JSON feed URL for a shared tag by long-pressing on it. This feature has a wide array of possible use cases, like syncing your read later list to another app or quickly spinning up a page of links on a particular topic. It’s a very cool addition that I would have never thought of for an app like Reeder, but I’m into it.

Selecting a timeline, tag, or feed in the sidebar will open a list of the items it contains. Reeder displays items with a uniform look regardless of their type, which is impressive given the variety of types the app supports. Each item lists its feed source and favicon at the top, followed by a short text preview of its contents (or its entire contents if the item is a social media post). At this point, item types diverge to show elements specific to their content. Articles include their main image next to their text previews, whereas audio items show their cover art underneath a play button that starts audio playback when pressed. Video items display their thumbnails underneath a play button that starts the video when pressed.

Videos start playing inline but can be expanded to full screen or moved to picture-in-picture mode. When in full screen, videos are shown in the default system video player, which includes playback controls, a scrubber, a button for changing playback speed, and a volume slider. Reeder’s video player options are clean and adaptable, allowing you to watch videos the way you prefer.

Reeder’s audio mini-player (left), its full-size player view (middle), and the audio player in action on my iPhone’s Lock Screen (right).

The app’s audio player is top-notch. It initially appears as a miniplayer at the bottom of the screen displaying the audio file’s cover art alongside a play/pause button and buttons to skip forward and backward. Tapping on the mini-player expands it into a full-size player view that includes artwork, the item’s name and feed source, a scrubber, playback controls, a speed selector, a link to the audio file’s item listing, and even a tappable list of MP3 chapters. The player integrates with system playback controls in Control Center and on the iPhone and iPad Lock Screen, too. I’m impressed with how feature-packed the audio player is, and it shows how much of an emphasis this update puts on supporting audio.

As pleased as I was with the audio player during testing, I was genuinely shocked to find that the app’s timeline syncing feature extends to audio playback. If you start listening to a podcast on one device and later open the app on another, you’ll see a partially filled circle around the item’s play button. Tap it, and the app will resume playback where you left off. The combination of a fully-featured audio player and position syncing makes Reeder an actual contender in the podcast app space. I personally don’t plan to switch to it as my main podcast app, but I do use it to subscribe to a couple of shows I listen to irregularly. I always have a good experience when I listen to podcasts in Reeder, and it genuinely makes me want to use the app for this purpose more often.

All of that is well and good, but at a certain point, you will want to use Reeder to… you know… read something. Thankfully, the app’s text parser inherits the quality of previous versions – that is to say, it’s best in class. Tapping an item in a timeline, tag, or feed list will open its contents in full. The app offers a nice, distraction-free reading experience with inline images and original text formatting. It really can’t be beat. The reading view also includes buttons to quickly tag an item or send it elsewhere via the share sheet.

There are some feeds that don’t play nicely with any text parser, or that only include a portion of each article before forcing you to go to the web to read the rest. For these feeds, I enable the app’s Reader View, which usually does the trick. You can enable Reader View on a per-feed basis by long-pressing on a feed and opening its settings. Or if you prefer, you can set a feed to automatically open its items in a web view instead.

The app’s reading experience includes important accessibility features like adherence to the system text size and Bionic Reading, but no customization options.

The reading view isn’t as customizable as in previous versions of Reeder. The app doesn’t include options to change its font, font size, line spacing, or text alignment. Font size does respond to the system’s text size, though, and Bionic Reading is available in the app’s settings. Although the default reading experience is excellent and just accommodating enough to work for most people, it would be nice to have more customization options in the future. I’d also like to see the ability to open the next article in a list by scrolling past the bottom of the current item re-added soon.

The app’s settings page is pretty bare overall. General settings include the ability to disable the app’s auto-refreshing feature and Background App Refresh, as well as the option to add left and right swipe gestures within lists for quickly tagging an item or opening it in the browser. The Display & Layout section lets you enable dark mode, slightly adjust the appearance of items in lists, and set a default layout for the app to use in landscape mode. And finally, there is a Default Apps section where you can select which apps you’d like to use for opening links to Mastodon, Micro.blog, and Reddit.

The lack of customizability is another way in which the new Reeder is not a one-to-one replacement for the previous version, as is the absence of Shortcuts actions and widgets. While I would like to see these features added in time, I think the simpler state the app is currently in could be intentional. This new version is so different from what came before that the transition will be tough for a lot of Reeder 5 users, so offering them a more streamlined experience could help smooth things over in a small way.

This new Reeder is certainly more opinionated than the last. It offers users a lot of options for feed sources in exchange for less choice when it comes to how the app looks and works. For a lot of people, that will be a dealbreaker, and that’s understandable. But for those who are willing to give this new approach to feed subscriptions a try, I think the new Reeder offers an excellent way of keeping up with the online sources you want to read, watch, and listen to.

I was initially skeptical of the idea of combining so many of the sources I care about into one app. I downloaded a beta version of the new Reeder mainly to check out its design. The design was so compelling that I decided to try it out as my go-to RSS reader, but I had no intentions of adding any other sources. Over time, I was so drawn in by the experience that I wanted to spend more time in it and slowly started migrating more and more feeds over: YouTube channels, a few podcasts, even some news-focused social media feeds. What I found throughout the transition was that adding different types of content into Reeder didn’t water down the experience; it made it even better. It turned the app into a destination that I look forward to checking throughout the day.

That doesn’t mean I’ll use Reeder for every possible feed it can contain. There’s still something to be said for apps that are purpose-built for specific types of content, like podcast players and social media apps. But for a good portion of the sources I want to keep up with every day, Reeder is the best way I’ve found to do so, and having them in one app has turned out to be great.

Making such a foundational change to a long-established app is a huge risk, but that risk comes with an equally weighty purpose: to recreate Reeder into a one-stop digital inbox fit for the current web landscape. It’s a tall order, but the app hits the mark dead center. The work Silvio Rizzi has done on this new version is nothing short of excellent; I encourage readers to give it a try. It might not be what we’re used to, but new things can often surprise us, maybe even delight us. The new Reeder has certainly done that for me.

Reeder is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It’s free to use with up to ten feeds, and a $1/month or $10/year subscription to Reeder+ unlocks the ability to subscribe to unlimited feeds along with creating shared feeds and adding social media home timelines.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

It seems the tech community’s search for the perfect reading setup continues unabated. Just this week on AppStories, Federico and John discussed which RSS readers have stood the test of time. Between text-to-speech apps, RSS readers, eReaders, and more, surely there’s no room left for another approach to catching up on articles? Apparently, there is. Enter Ticci Tabs with a straightforward but specific solution.

You may have noticed something familiar about the name of this app: it contains the nickname of our venerable Editor-in-Chief here at MacStories, Federico Viticci. That’s because Ticci Tabs has an amusing backstory. Several weeks ago on Connected, Federico lamented that there wasn’t an app that allowed him to browse his favorite “six or seven” websites in their original form, separate from a browser or RSS reader in a stripped down version of Safari. Less than a week later, developer Jonathan Ruiz released a beta version of Ticci Tabs on TestFlight, and it did just what Federico described. What might have seemed at first like a fun app carrying out a function requested by one specific person has blossomed into an intriguing and well-thought-out utility. Let’s take a closer look.

The opening flow of Ticci Tabs.

When you first launch the app, below a nice trio of onboarding screens (which you can access again from the app’s settings, an option I always appreciate) is a big ‘Save a new tab’ button. Tap this, and you’ll be shown a card containing two fields: Title and URL. Input the title and URL of the website you want to add and tap ’Save.’ It’s as easy as that. The website now appears in your Ticci Tabs list. You can add as many sites as you want (not just six or seven), and anytime you tap on a tab, the app will open an in-app browser window displaying the selected website. You can then read and scroll through the site and, when you’re finished, close the browser window and move on to another website in your list. Within your website list, you can also drag sites around to reorder them and quickly delete one with a swipe to the left.

That’s the core of what Ticci Tabs does. However, this simple-seeming app has some clever touches that elevate the user experience beyond the basics. Chief among them is saving website logins. Using cookies, the app will keep you logged in to every website in your list, which is especially helpful for sites that require a login. If you’ve ever used an in-app browser in another app, you’ll know that persistent logins are not a given.

The process for signing in to sites that use secure email links.

Most impressive of all, though, is the way the app deals with websites that send “secure” sign-in links via email. Apart from being a bit unsafe and very annoying, these links are also incompatible with tools like Ticci Tabs. When you tap a sign-in link from an email, it opens in your default browser, defeating the point of starting a login session within the app. Ruiz has come up with a novel way around this. After you add a website to Ticci Tabs, open the page and start the login process. When you receive your login link via email, copy its login link and switch back to Ticci Tabs. Long press on the website in your list and select ‘Use sign in link.’ The system will prompt you to grant clipboard access to the app, and after you allow it, the website will open up and log you in. From then on, you will stay logged in when you open the site in Ticci Tabs.

Ruiz didn’t stop there, though. He’s included Shortcuts actions, a share sheet extension, and some basic widgets as well. The app’s Shortcuts actions allow you to add new tabs as well as open, delete, or get information for any tab in the app. The share sheet extension will create a new tab with the URL and title of any website you send to it, and the widgets grant one-tap access to any tab in your list, with options to configure widgets to display a single site or a grid of favicons for multiple sites.

Ticci Tabs has solid support for Shortcuts, the Share Sheet, and Widgets.

If this all seems like a very back-to-basics approach to browsing the web, that’s because it is. But to be honest, after using it for only a short period, I’ve been enjoying this simplified way of browsing my favorite websites. It directs my attention to the sites themselves, and I like the feeling of opening the app purposefully to visit my chosen sites rather than mixing them in with the dozens of other tabs I have open in Safari or the endless list of articles in my RSS reader.

One aspect of the app I’m not a fan of is the visual design of its UI elements. The gradients feel like a very early iPhone design style and could do with a more modern look. The layout of the UI is good; it’s just the look of the individual elements that I can’t get onboard with. I also think there should be a warning when you swipe to delete a tab from your list. It’s not a big issue, but it would be a helpful precaution.

These minor issues aside, developer Jonathan Ruiz has a great little utility on his hands. He took a half-brief from someone on a podcast and created an app with a very specific purpose. But he also took the time to really think through the various user interactions involved to make sure that nothing gets in the way of the app’s intention: giving people easy access their favorite six or seven (or so) websites.

Ticci Tabs is available for free on the App Store and built for the iPhone and iPad, though the iPad version can also be installed on Apple silicon Macs and the Vision Pro. The app includes a tip jar should you wish to show the developer your appreciation.

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This summer, my all-time favorite window management utility Moom received a major 4.0 upgrade more than 12 years after the initial release of Moom 3. Ever since I went back to the Mac as my main computer, Moom has allowed me to create automations to arrange my windows and easily save and restore specific window layouts. From a fully customizable palette to new keyboard shortcut options to the ability to chain custom commands, Moom 4 offers a wide range of new features that make it an even more advanced utility that will appeal to anyone looking for more flexibility than Apple’s new window tiling feature, which is coming in macOS Sequoia.

Let’s check out the main new features in Moom 4.

The new version of the app still includes an optional palette that appears when hovering over the green button in a windows’s title bar. This palette is meant to supplant macOS’ default tooltip and lets you quickly tile your windows to either side of the screen, maximize them to fill the entire desktop, or create a vertical layout with your windows.

But this update takes the palette even further: it’s is now entirely customizable. In addition to repositioning every button inside the palette, you can now also enrich it with your own custom shortcuts and layouts created with Moom. While I used to turn off the palette in Moom 3 and solely rely on keyboard shortcuts and predefined layouts, the ability to customize the palette has completely changed that for me. I am now a big fan of the feature.

Moom’s palette is now customizable. To add one of your custom layouts, drag it from the sidebar to the palette editor.

One of Moom’s main features is its window resizing grid, which carries over from previous versions. When enabled, you can use it to quickly draw a rectangle onscreen to immediately move and resize a specific window. The grid’s cell sizes can be customized in the app’s settings, and there’s also an option to add gaps between and around tiled windows. The smaller the cells, the more flexibility you have when tiling windows on the fly.

But if like me, you’re not a fan of arranging your windows in a grid and prefer to let them float above each other, Moom 4 has you covered with a great new feature called ‘Hover.’ This lets you move and resize windows on the fly with your cursor while holding down specific modifier keys, without the need to click and hold on a window’s title bar or reach for one of its four corners.

In my setup, I’ve chosen to use the Globe (fn) key as the move window modifier and Globe + Control (^) as the resize window modifier. In practice, this means that I can place my cursor over any window onscreen and hold down the Globe key to reposition that window simply by moving the mouse. To resize that window, all I have to do is place my cursor near a corner and add the Control (^) key into the mix. You may think that I’m exaggerating, but in usage, this combination makes rearranging windows with the mouse extremely satisfying.

Customizing the modifier keys to be used with Hover.

This modifier key logic has also enriched Moom’s ‘Snap’ feature. In addition to replicating the experience from Windows 11 and macOS Sequoia by letting you drag windows to the edges of the display to tile them, Moom 4 also allows you to hold down the modifier key of your choice when moving a window to quickly place it in a custom ‘drop zone’. This is especially useful if there is an area on your screen where you always like to keep a specific application.

For instance, I have set up this feature to set up a custom layout that allows me to quickly snap the Ivory window back into a predefined position on the screen:

After creating a custom layout to save Ivory’s position onscreen…

…and assigning that custom layout to a modifier key (Option ⌥),…

…all I need to do is hold the modifier key while moving the Ivory window to snap it back into position.

In addition to the ability to save and restore custom window layouts, Moom 4 can now chain any of the app’s built-in commands together. For example, you can create a chain that will successively resize a window and center it on the screen.

The possibilities with chained commands are endless, and it’s hard to imagine every conceivable use case, but I was able to leverage the feature to create two useful chains for my workflow. At my desk, I often use my iPad Pro as a secondary display with Sidecar while I’m working. When that happens, I almost always like to put windows in full screen on the iPad’s display. However, this process is often tedious and requires that I spend ten seconds every time moving a window and putting it in full screen.

To solve this, I used Moom 4 to create a chain called ‘Move to Sidecar.’ When triggered, this chain moves the currently active window to the iPad’s display and immediately puts it in full screen. I created a second chain called ‘Move back from Sidecar,’ which exits full screen and immediately moves the window back to my main display. Now, I can easily send a window to the iPad’s display with a single click, directly from Moom’s palette, without having to manually drag the window over and toggle full screen.

I’ve set up a chain in Moom 4 to easily move a window to the iPad’s screen in Sidecar and immediately put it in full screen, plus a second chain to quickly move a window back to the main display.

Since almost everything in Moom 4 can be tied to a keyboard shortcut, all of these features are available without the need to ever use the mouse. But even if you haven’t assigned a keyboard shortcut to one of your custom commands, you can still trigger it using only the keyboard via Moom’s new onscreen controller. The controller can be launched via a dedicated keyboard shortcut (I’m using Option ⌥ + Shift ⇧ + H) and looks a lot like Spotlight on the Mac. When the controller is displayed, you can immediately start typing to select and run a specific Moom command, or navigate between options using the arrow keys.

The new onscreen controller in Moom 4.

Moom 4 is an incredible update to a long-standing Mac utility that had already found its place on my list of apps I always recommend to Mac newcomers. The app is more flexible than ever and will prove itself useful to a wide range of Mac users, including both those who are looking for ways to manage their windows entirely from the keyboard and those who would rather use the mouse.

This is especially true when you consider that every single feature in Moom is optional and can be disabled entirely. Think of Moom as a window management Swiss Army knife: it is always nice to have, even if you’re not going to use more than half of its built-in tools.

While macOS Sequoia is finally getting the ability to tile windows side by side this fall, it is clear that Moom has nothing to worry about. Its flexibility and enhanced potential for automation place it miles ahead of anything macOS has to offer natively.

Through September 4th, Moom 4 is on sale for $10 for new users and $6 for users upgrading from Moom 3. After that date, Moom 4 will be available to purchase for $15, or $8 for Moom 3 users. The app can be purchased and downloaded directly from ManyTricks’ website.

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I’ve used Federico’s Apple Frames shortcut to add device frames to screenshots for years. It’s a great way to quickly process multiple screenshots and upload them to the MacStories CDN with minimal effort. But as great as Shortcuts is for simplifying this sort of task, there are advantages to using a native app instead.

Editing screenshots on the iPad.

Shareshot is an app for iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro that occupies a lot of the same feature space as Apple Frames, using Apple hardware to frame screenshots. However, the app simultaneously does more and a little less than Federico’s shortcut. That one missing feature means that I won’t be abandoning Apple Frames, but because of the things the app can do that Apple Frames can’t, Shareshot will be joining the shortcut as a utility I expect to use a lot.

Let’s dig into what makes Shareshot shine.

Shareshot isn’t the first app to frame screenshots, but it’s the most tastefully designed one I’ve used. The app is also incredibly easy to use, allowing users to quickly frame iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV screenshots. In addition to official hardware frames, the app lets users add their own custom frames, too.

Editing screenshots in Shareshot.

When you open Shareshot, you’re given three options: frame the most recent screenshot in your photo library, pick another screenshot from among your photos, or choose a screenshot from the file picker. You can also paste screenshots from the system clipboard into Shareshot. Once you’ve chosen a screenshot, the app automatically frames it based on its dimensions. If multiple devices match the screenshot’s size, Shareshot picks a frame based on various factors such as the type of device you’re using. It’s a clever educated guess that I expect will be correct for most people, most of the time. If the app gets it wrong, though, you can always swap in another frame.

Shareshot comes with an extensive collection of flat and gradient backgrounds to set your framed screenshot against, as well as the option to use any photo or a blurred version of the screenshot itself as a background. Shareshot’s backgrounds are excellent, and I appreciate the variety available, but I’d also like the option to use a system color picker to create a flat or gradient background with a color I pick myself. Still, it’s a testament to the quality of the built-in backdrops that I haven’t gotten bored of them.

Shareshot offers multiple aspect ratios for framing screenshots.

Near the top of Shareshot’s main view are three aspect ratios and a transparent background option that produce framed shots that work in most social media and web contexts as well as for incorporation into other apps. At the very top of the view are buttons to access the app’s settings and rename the image, too.

The bottom of the main view includes buttons to edit your composition, share it, and adjust its size to 50% or 25% of the original. The Edit view is where you can swap in a different background, change the angle of the image’s light source or eliminate it, and adjust the diffusion of the framed hardware’s drop shadow or remove it. The Edit view also includes options for changing the padding around a device, picking a different hardware frame, changing the frame’s color, and sharing your screenshot.

Shareshot’s ability to use any photo as a backdrop for your screenshots opens up some interesting possibilities.

When you tally all the choices available, it’s a lot. It’s also a testament to the app’s design that I haven’t found a way to create an ugly framed screenshot, except perhaps by picking a horrible photo from my own library. Yet, despite the number of parameters that can be tweaked in Shareshot, it’s very easy to use, making it simple to create images that look great quickly.

Shareshot works with the Vision Pro, too.

It’s also worth noting that Shareshot’s settings include ten app icon options. Screenshots are exported as PNG images by default, but there is a setting to export them as JPEGs instead.

Finally, Shareshot works with Shortcuts. There are actions to frame your last screenshot or a specific screenshot, use a custom background with a screenshot, or open the app with your most recent screenshot. Best of all, the actions that generate framed images all include the ability to set parameters like the aspect ratio, background, and other options described above.

Using transparent backgrounds and a combination of Pixelmator Pro and CleanShot X, it’s possible but not convenient to build multi-device screenshots with Shareshot.

Shareshot is great, and the only reason I don’t plan to use it for most of my screenshot generation needs is that it can only frame one screenshot at a time. You could use transparent backgrounds and then stitch multiple screenshots together, as I’ve done in this review, but I’d prefer to feed the app multiple images, have access to its excellent backgrounds, and let it do all of that work for me. I’d also like the option to frame screen recordings.

That said, Shareshot does things that a shortcut can’t, and the results it produces look fantastic. So, despite a short wishlist of features, I’ve subscribed to the app and expect it will be a staple among the many iOS and iPadOS utilities I use. If you’re a developer, designer, or marketer, or if you you find yourself regularly using screenshots for any other purpose, I highly recommend adding Shareshot to your app toolbox.

Shareshot is available on the App Store as a free download that adds a watermark to the images you create. You can remove the watermark and access other features by subscribing to Shareshot Pro for $1.99/month or $14.99/year, although for the next week, the subscription is available for $1.39/month or $10.99/year as part of the app’s launch week sale.

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One of my greatest frustrations with read-later apps is how hard most make it to get your data out on your terms. Few allow you to export links using Shortcuts or some other system, and even fewer offer to do the same with highlights – until now. With version 2.0, GoodLinks adds highlighting and note-taking combined with excellent Shortcuts support, giving users full access and flexibility to incorporate saved URLs, highlights, and notes into their workflows however they want.

Thanks to Obsidian’s deep catalog of plugins from third-party developers, it’s been possible to import highlights from read-later apps like Readwise Reader and Amazon’s Kindle app for some time. Those are good solutions when I’m working in Obsidian, but both I and our readers use lots of different apps. That’s why I was so glad to see GoodLinks (available for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac) get this major 2.0 revision that transforms it from a place to save links and articles to a more well-rounded research tool, thanks to highlighting and notes.

GoodLinks offers six highlighter colors.

MacStories readers should be familiar with GoodLinks because we’ve covered it many times in the past. It’s an app that I’ve come back to time and again because it’s native on all of Apple’s platforms and I appreciate its clean design and support for the latest OS features.

Now, with the addition of highlighting and note-taking, developer Ngoc Luu has eliminated one of GoodLinks’ biggest shortcomings. The app’s saving, organizing, and reading experiences have always been excellent, but until the release of version 2.0, the inability to highlight text and take notes meant it didn’t work well as a research tool.

Highlighting and note-taking options are available in the edit menu on iOS and iPadOS.

Like the other aspects of GoodLinks, highlighting a saved article in version 2.0 is a thoroughly native experience. On iOS and iPadOS, select text, and ‘Highlight’ and ‘Add Note’ appear in the popover edit menu. Tap ‘Highlight’, and the selected text is overlaid with your default highlighting color, which you can choose in the app’s settings. Tap again and you can ‘Copy,’ ‘Add Note,’ ‘Delete’, ‘Share’, or switch to any of the six highlighting color options. The ‘Share’ button offers plain text or Markdown-formatted text as options and then shares the results via the share sheet. The app also has a wonderfully nerdy setting for tweaking how exported highlights and notes are formatted. On the Mac, the same features and options are available by selecting text and right-clicking on it.

Highlights and associated notes are housed in a panel that appears from the right side of the screen on the iPhone and iPad with a swipe from the device’s edge when reading an article. Alternatively, you can access highlights and notes by tapping on the pen icon in GoodLinks’ floating toolbar. On the Mac, there’s a dedicated panel button in the app’s toolbar.

Color-coded tick marks in the margin make it easy to navigate your highlights.

One touch I love is that on every platform, GoodLinks displays small colored tick marks to show where your highlights are located. The color corresponds to the color you use during highlighting, and tapping on one jumps you to the spot in the article where the highlight is located.

I’ve been using GoodLinks on macOS Sonoma and Sequoia 15.0, iPadOS 17 and 18.1, and iOS 18.1, and highlights and notes have synced well between devices with a few exceptions that seem to be limited to iOS and iPadOS 18.1. The instances where a highlight didn’t sync as quickly as on other OSes were uncommon and limited to the latest developer betas, so it’s not something that I’ve found to be a problem or concerning, but it’s still worth mentioning in case you’re on those bleeding-edge builds.

Extensive Shortcuts support sets GoodLinks apart from all other read-later apps.

GoodLinks surpasses other read-later apps in ease and flexibility of exporting highlights and notes simply by making them available via the share sheet. However, the app goes much further than that with deep Shortcuts support. That’s nothing new to GoodLinks, but I’m glad to see it continue with version 2.0. New Shortcuts actions include the following:

• Open Highlight
• Find Highlight
• Edit Highlight
• Delete Highlight

It’s worth noting that Find Highlight offers filters with multiple parameters, sorting, and limiting the number of results returned, and Edit Highlight adds a note to a highlight. Combined with GoodLinks’ other actions for working with links and tags, the flexibility offered is better than any other read-later app I’ve used.

GoodLinks’ new Highlights widget.

GoodLinks also has a new widget available in small, medium, and large sizes that draws from your most recent highlights or those associated with a specific tag.

Version 2.0 of GoodLinks comes with a new business model, too. The app was previously a one-time purchase but has switched to a subscription plan similar to apps like Due. The base app costs $9.99, with GoodLinks Premium adding $4.99. If you pay $4.99 for GoodLinks Premium, you’ll get updates for one year, and even if you cancel your subscription, you’ll retain all of the features released in that year. Also, if you purchased GoodLinks in the 12 months prior to version 2.0’s release, you’ll get the highlighting and note-taking features for no additional fee.

GoodLinks is a great example of the argument for native apps over web apps. There are very good read-later and link-saving apps that have gone the web app route, and it has some advantages. However, if you primarily use Apple devices and care about automation and the latest OS features, GoodLinks is the better choice.

GoodLinks is available on the App Store for $9.99.

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The Dynamic Island has been one of my favorite software additions to the iPhone since it was introduced with the iPhone 14 Pro lineup. The feature is a fun blend of hardware and software that turns the new pill-shaped TrueDepth camera array into a status bar that can collapse and expand to display media controls, Live Activities, and more.

While Live Activities are now also available on iPadOS, neither the iPad nor the Mac have gotten a Dynamic Island following their latest hardware and software revisions. I would argue that the latest generations of Apple silicon MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are pretty good candidates for a Dynamic Island. Both lineups feature a notched screen that currently doesn’t serve any purpose apart from expanding the display to the top edges of the laptop’s aluminum case and limiting the amount of space available for Mac menu bar apps.

Today, I’m taking a look at two Mac apps that add functionality to the notch to make it more Dynamic Island-like. Both have made me realize that, while not absolutely essential, the Dynamic Island definitely has a place on the Mac.

MediaMate

MediaMate’s main purpose is to replace the Mac’s default volume and brightness indicators. In their place, the app replicates the volume and brightness indicators found on iOS and iPadOS, down to making them interactive with the mouse and displaying specific icons when using AirPods, AirPods Max, or Beats headphones.

The app offers four different indicator styles, and if you select the ‘Notch’ style, the MacBook’s notch at the top of the screen will slightly expand to reveal a volume or brightness slider whenever you press the dedicated keys on your keyboard.

MediaMate allows you to integrate the brightness and volume indicators with the notch…

…but it can also replicate the iOS look.

The app even allows you to assign a specific style based on your currently active display. I’ve set up MediaMate to replicate the iOS volume and brightness sliders when I’m at my desk using my external display and to integrate with the notch when I’m using my M2 MacBook Air’s built-in display.

MediaMate can also display playback controls for your music. Similarly to the volume and brightness controls, these can be set to appear in the notch or as a separate floating UI on an external display.

MediaMate adds media controls to your notch.

Media controls can also be set to appear in a floating, interactive notification.

The app’s settings are quite advanced. You can set specific timing rules to define how long the UI stays onscreen and when the notch should expand (on track change, on Play/Pause, or on volume change). You can also exclude specific apps from appearing in MediaMate’s playback controls. Incredibly, MediaMate even supports Focus Filters and will remain hidden when a specific Focus mode is enabled.

MediaMate can be hidden when a specific Focus mode is enabled.

I’ve been impressed with MediaMate. The app is stable and well-designed with smooth animations all around. If you’re looking to add some basic media functionality to your Mac’s notch, I recommend giving it a try. It’s one of those small Mac apps that you can set up once and then forget that it’s not even a part of the native macOS experience.

MediaMate is available to purchase on Gumroad for $9.20 with a free trial available on the official website.

NotchNook

NotchNook by lo.cafe is similar to MediaMate, but it attempts to bring even more functionality to the notch. In addition to adding media controls, NotchNook can expand the notch even further to display widgets.

As of version 1.2, four widgets can be added to NotchNook: Media Player, Calendar, Shortcuts, and Mirror. While the first three speak for themselves, Mirror is actually a quick way to activate and preview your webcam with just a click, similar to Hand Mirror. More widgets are listed in the app’s settings – Notes, Quick Apps, and To-dos – but they’re currently labeled, “Coming soon…”

Just like the Dynamic Island on iOS, NotchNook displays the album artwork and a waveform on each side of the notch when music is playing.

NotchNook configured with three widgets when expanded: Media Player, Calendar, and Mirror.

The app can be used as a quick way to launch shortcuts.

Widgets aside, my favorite feature in NotchNook is its ability to act as a temporary space to store files. When the app is running, you can drag any file on your Mac onto the notch. There, you can either drop it into the Tray, which will temporarily hold your file until you drag it out into another app, or onto the AirDrop area, where you can you easily send it to a friend or one of your other devices. These are the only two file functions currently available, but the developer says more are coming, including the ability to compress images and zip/unzip files.

When dragging a file to the notch, NotchNook will expand to let you send it via AirDrop or temporarily store it in the Tray.

My main issue with NotchNook is that, unlike MediaMate, it always looks like a notch – even on an external display. While it works as expected, the addition of a software notch where there isn’t a hardware one on my actual monitor is visually jarring. My suggestion to the developers would be to handle external displays differently, perhaps by making NotchNook look like a floating island rather than an artificial notch.

Stability-wise, the app isn’t perfect. To name a few minor issues, I am currently unable to populate the Calendar widget with my events, the Mirror widget doesn’t work with my external camera (only with the MacBook Air’s built-in webcam), and the Now Playing preview is always visible on top of fullscreen apps, including fullscreen videos, sometimes obscuring part of the content. However, since the app is updated regularly, I’m hopeful that these issues will all disappear over time.

NotchNook is available on lo.cafe for a $3/month subscription or $25 one-time purchase with a free trial. The app is also available as part of a Setapp subscription.

Trying both MediaMate and NotchNook has convinced me that Apple needs to add native functionality to the notch. I would be content with just brightness and volume indicator integration, but I think the most logical development would be the addition of Live Activities to the Mac. Last year, Live Activities were successfully brought to iPadOS, albeit only to the iPad’s Lock Screen. Why not bring them to macOS via a notch power-up?

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Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

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Unread by Golden Hill Software has long been an excellent and elegant RSS client for iOS and iPadOS. Today, it arrives on macOS with version 4.0. While I have been exploring new ways to keep up with my favorite feeds as the web enters its federated era, using Unread on the Mac hasn’t felt like a step backwards. Unread 4.0 is a fully native, fully-featured app built using AppKit and SwiftUI that feels modern and performs incredibly quickly.

Let’s check it out.

In addition to keeping your subscriptions on-device or using the app’s own syncing service, Unread supports a variety of third-party RSS syncing options including my service of choice, Feedbin, which lets you subscribe to email newsletters. But the app also allows you sign in to several read later services – like Raindrop.io, Pocket, Plinky, and more – to perform ‘Article Actions’ via toolbar buttons that allow you to save an article with a single click.

Several third-party RSS syncing services are supported…

…as well as several read later services that can be added to Unread’s toolbar.

Unread’s interface on the Mac is very straightforward. In the leftmost sidebar, you will find all of your subscribed feeds in alphabetical order, as well as three main sections to view your unread, starred, and saved items. While I wish the sidebar also included favicons to help distinguish feeds, this classic layout style remains the clearest way to design an RSS reader, and I’m glad that Unread 4.0 is sicking with it.

The app’s toolbar behaves like any native Mac app’s. It is fully customizable with a selection of buttons that can be placed in any order. In Unread 4.0, a new button will also let you easily fetch an article’s content from either the RSS feed or directly from the webpage. The app will even ask if you would like to make that setting persistent for the current feed.

Unread’s toolbar is customizable like most native Mac apps.

Overall, I have been impressed with the way Unread fetches and displays content. Newsletters (via Feedbin), regular articles, and YouTube videos all display perfectly inside the app. Unlike other RSS clients on macOS, Unread is able to display images and video in fullscreen and thus can act as a great YouTube client.

Unread 4.0 can fetch content from the RSS feed, directly from the linked web page, or from both at the same time.

Even YouTube feeds behave nicely in Unread.

Despite its native foundation, Unread’s appearance on the Mac is still fairly customizable. It comes with 14 different theme palettes (seven light and seven dark) that will alter the app’s accent colors as well as its desktop widgets. You can also combine these themes with one of Unread’s 32 custom Dock icons. Even though the custom Dock icon will only appear when the app is running due to a system limitation, it is a welcome touch that I wish we could see in more native apps on the Mac.

Unread’s 14 themes…

…and 32 Dock icon options.

Unread’s widgets look great on the Mac desktop and follow the app’s color theme by default.

Unfortunately though, it is currently impossible to change Unread’s default font, Whitney, apart from tweaking its size.

Font customization is limited to size adjustment.

Moving forward, I plan to use Unread as my go-to RSS reader on the Mac, at least for a while. The app’s ability to cache articles will likely prove useful during my regular train trips across France, where cellular connectivity can become unreliable at times.

Most importantly, I should stress again how refreshing it feels to have such a great native experience with Unread. The app is really fast, even when it’s loaded up with hundreds of feeds. In this respect, it contrasts with Reeder, my long-time favorite RSS client on the Mac. If it gains a few more display options, like favicons in the sidebar and custom font choices, Unread may be able to win me over in the long run.

Unread 4.0 is available to download for free on the App Store for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. An optional $29.99/year or $4.99/month subscription unlocks caching articles, saving to Unread via the share sheet, saving to third-party services from Unread, widget customization, and custom icons.

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Overcast has long been my favorite podcast player on iOS and iPadOS with its beautifully simple user interface that complements a great audio engine. Today, developer Marco Arment is celebrating Overcast’s tenth anniversary with the release of a new version featuring a user interface that’s been rewritten from the ground up.

From the app’s main screen to playlist and podcast pages, show notes, chapters, and search, this new version of Overcast looks completely modern, and it feels fast. But at the same time, the app remains true to itself and retains a familiar look, with no drastic visual changes that would disorient its long-time users.

The app’s revamped player is perhaps my favorite aspect of this fresh coat of paint. There, you can still find the app’s landmark audio features, Voice Boost and Smart Speed, but the player’s sections have been reorganized to create a clearer overall layout. Chapters have been moved to a separate view, with more space on each line for longer chapter titles. Episode notes, on the other hand, can be toggled on and browsed through with the player controls still accessible at the bottom of the screen.

The new player also comes with a great quality-of-life addition: when skipping chapters or seeking through an episode, a ‘Go Back’ button now appears briefly on top of the podcast artwork. Tapping this button immediately returns you to your previous position. This is essentially an ‘undo’ function for accidental taps within the player view. (If you unintentionally scrub the player on your iPhone Lock Screen, you can quickly open the app and go back as well.) I never realized that I needed this feature in a podcast player until now.

Overcast’s new player. Notice the ‘Go Back’ button (left) that appears when skipping chapters or seeking through an episode.

In addition to iOS, Overcast shines on iPadOS. The app now utilizes the iPad’s wider screen in a way that I wish more iPad apps would: by presenting a great three-pane layout. The app’s main screen resides in the leftmost pane, the middle section is reserved for subsections like podcast pages, and the player can be found on the right. This left-to-right hierarchical layout subtly reminds me of the official Twitter app that launched on the iPad about 14 years ago.

The new Overcast on iPad.

With this release, Overcast no longer has the ability to stream podcast episodes. Instead, episodes must be downloaded before you can start listening to them. In my experience using the new version of the app, this hasn’t bothered me. Most of the time, I only need to wait a couple of seconds before Overcast finishes downloading an episode, and when it does, the episode automatically starts playing.

Combined with the option to automatically remove downloaded episodes (either when completed or 24 hours after completion), I don’t think this change will be noticeable, even to users who previously chose to stream their podcasts.

Rather than streaming episodes, Overcast will always download them before you can start listening.

Aside from the ability to create priority rules for sorting podcasts within playlists, there aren’t any other notable new features in this release. And with the recent introduction of transcripts in Apple Podcasts recapturing some listeners’ attention (including my own), there’s certainly room for new features to come to the app. Still, I’m glad to see Overcast gain a brand-new foundation on top of which it will hopefully keep evolving in the near future.

This is an exciting new start for my favorite podcast player.

Overcast is available to download for free on the App Store. Subscribing to Overcast Premium for $9.99/year removes banner ads from the app’s playback screens and allows users to upload their own audio files for listening.

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Controller for HomeKit is an alternative way of controlling and setting up your HomeKit accessories, scenes, and automations from your iPhone. While the app has been around for some time, this month it received a major upgrade with a new feature that turns the app into a fun and powerful control center for your home.

Now, in Controller for HomeKit, you can leverage the iPhone’s LiDAR sensor to scan your entire home and create a 3D floor plan, on top of which you can overlay your lights, scenes, and other HomeKit accessories. The result is a fun, customizable, and interactive UI that works so well and is so intuitive that it almost feels like it belongs in Apple’s own Home app for the iPhone.

Let’s check it out.

The first thing to note about Controller for HomeKit is that the app’s entire interface has been refreshed. The main screen now features a fairly simple layout, from which you can easily jump into a room or a list of your HomeKit categories filtered by type. This is also where you can get into the app’s more advanced sections, where you can create workflows, build scenes, or even set up automations around custom NFC tags. Since a home full of smart devices can quickly become overwhelming, the simplicity of Controller’s main screen is a welcome departure in this app category, so it gets a big thumbs up from me.

Among the app’s more advanced sections, my favorite one is probably ‘Maintenance’. This is where Controller for HomeKit lists all of your potential setup issues, such as devices that are low on battery, have duplicate names, or are currently unreachable. This section may finally give me the motivation necessary to work through all of my HomeKit issues over the next few weeks.

Controller’s main screen lets you easily jump into your rooms, automations, and the app’s advanced sections, including a ‘Maintenance’ overview.

But the star of this update by a long mile is Controller’s new ‘Floor Plan’ feature. Right from the main screen of the app, you can start the process of scanning your home with the iPhone’s camera and LiDAR sensors. Although the process can take some time depending on the size of your home, it is fairly easy and intuitive. All I had to do was follow the app’s instructions and hold the phone in front of me as I started walking through every room in our apartment.

Honestly, this was a lot of fun. The quality of the scan underlines how powerful the iPhone’s LiDAR sensor and AR capabilities can be. All of our main pieces of furniture showed up exactly where they were meant to be, and some specific types of furniture (couches, chairs, beds, kitchen appliances, and tables) even had their own 3D models.

To start creating a floor plan, tap ‘Discover’ on the app’s main screen, follow the instructions, then walk around your home to scan it room by room.

Once you’re done scanning, the app brings you to an edit screen where you can start dropping your HomeKit accessories and scenes directly on top of the floor plan. This is where your floor plan becomes interactive. You can place room labels that you can tap to quickly jump into a room view, lights that can be turned on and off, and even sensors that can display their readings right on the map.

When you’re done scanning your home in Controller, you can start manually placing your HomeKit accessories and room labels on the floor map. All of the icons are customizable.

Controller for HomeKit’s floor plan is interactive. Tapping an accessory icon on the map lets you toggle its state, and tapping a room label lets you jump into a room overview where you can control and edit accessories.

Again, this may take a while depending on the number of accessories you want to add, but the result of this whole process is incredibly satisfying. And on the iPad and the Mac, the experience is even more glorious. The app takes full advantage of the devices’ widescreen layout.

Our home in Controller for HomeKit on macOS.

In addition to being able to view your floor plan from inside the app, Controller for HomeKit comes with two new widgets that display your floor plan on the Home Screen. Sadly, these widgets essentially act as simple buttons to open the app. Your accessories and room labels are not displayed in the widget, and you can’t interact with them without having to open the app. This means that Controller’s Home Screen widgets are merely decorative for now. This is too bad; there’s great potential for a fully interactive widget here, and I really hope this is coming.

Currently, Controller’s Floor Plan Home Screen widgets are not interactive and only serve as a shortcut to open the app.

Still, Controller’s interactive floor plan is now a must-have on my iPhone. Even if, at its core, the feature is not revolutionary by any means, the UI paradigm that it creates for controlling your HomeKit devices is one of the most intuitive that I’ve ever seen on iOS. I find it hard to think of a more natural interaction to turn on a specific light in the apartment than to glance at the room on the map and simply tap the light exactly where it is in the room’s physical space. If Apple ever decides to go this route, it could be the best upgrade to the UI of the native Home app in years. As a result, I have now officially added an interactive floor plan to my wishlist for iOS 18.

If you would like to give it a try, Controller for HomeKit is available for free on the App Store for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. Its floor plan feature can be unlocked with a $29.99 yearly subscription or a $99.99 lifetime one-time purchase.

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If you haven’t tried Sequel to track your media queues, you’re missing out and have some catching up to do. There’s a reason we gave Sequel 2.0 the MacStories Selects Best App Update award last year. The app, which is available on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, is one of the very best media trackers in a very crowded field.

One way to get up to speed with Sequel’s core features is my review of version 2.0, which I won’t repeat here. Since that review, developer Romain Lefebvre has released updates that continue to improve the app in meaningful ways. However, today’s version 2.3 release is special because it’s one of the first apps I’ve tried that uses AI in a truly useful, non-gimmicky way. Plus, the update adds Shortcuts integration, allowing users to automate the app in new ways, as well as a Markdown-compatible note-taking feature and new layout and search options.

Adding a game to Sequel from an article on The Verge.

At the heart of Sequel’s latest update is the app’s aptly named Magic Lookup feature. If you use a media-tracking app, you can probably relate to the fact that adding new media to the app can be tedious. For example, maybe you’re reading an article about a new movie that you want to save in your media tracker. Most apps would require you to copy the movie’s title from the article, head over to the media app, run a search, and save the results.

Sequel’s Magic Lookup reduces that process to a few quick taps. The feature starts with Sequel’s share extension, which is available on the iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro versions of the app. Tap it, and the app grabs the URL and runs the content through an AI model. A second or two later, Magic Lookup suggests media to add to Sequel. That’s all there is to it.

Best of all, Magic Lookup is reliable. It isn’t perfect, but it’s surprisingly good at pulling media from all sorts of sources. The feature will even offer multiple suggestions when an article mentions several different things, which I thought might stump it. Throw a Top 10 Movies of 2024 article at Magic Lookup, and more likely than not, the app will find all ten, which you can quickly add to the app by tapping the plus buttons from the search results.

The AI sometimes has trouble with TV series numbers, but overall is remarkably accurate.

If Magic Lookup finds something that looks like media but can’t find a perfect match in the media databases Sequel uses, you’ll get a search button instead, which will kick off a search in Sequel for the suggested text. If that doesn’t return the results you want, editing the search a little can help.

One example where Magic Lookup has a little trouble finding content is with TV shows where the name is described along with a season number. So, for example, when I found a Polygon article about TV shows debuting this summer that included ‘The Bear, season 3,’ Magic Lookup offered to search for ‘The Bear season 3’ instead of finding the show. I then ran a search for ‘The Bear, season 3’ and removed the reference to season 3, which worked. Later, I tried running the article through Magic Lookup again, and the AI found the series. Perhaps Sequel can be fine-tuned to deal with the app becoming confused about seasons, but that’s about the only wrinkle I’ve been able to find so far. Most of the time, I’m reading about a particular videogame, movie, book, or whatever, and the app finds it immediately, making it quick to add to my queue.

Adding Markdown notes to an item in Sequel.

Personal Notes is another excellent addition to Sequel. I often save media in the app that I want to talk about later on MacStories Unwind. With the app’s new notes feature and dedicated formatting bar, it’s simple to add headings, formatting, checklists, horizontal rules, block quotes, and links. Plus, because the notes are formatted as Markdown, it’s easy to then export them with the share sheet to another app, if you’d like.

A selection of Sequel’s Shortcuts actions.

Sequel 2.3 brings Shortcuts automation to the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro versions of the app for the first time, too. The app includes App Shortcuts to add items and open specific sections like ‘Movies,’ ‘Series,’ and ‘Games.’ However, for more complex automations, Sequel includes actions to edit items; get, add, and remove collections; open collections, items, libraries by type, and the search view; and find books, audiobooks, TV series and episodes, games, movies, and specific items, all with filtering options.

I haven’t spent a lot of time building shortcuts for my Sequel media collections yet, but there’s plenty here to explore and use to create some handy automations. For instance, I plan to create a shortcut that finds items with notes that contain ‘Unwind’ to make it easy to find media I want to recommend on the show.

Finally, Sequel 2.3 adds a layout option for larger media artwork and the ability to search for items within individual Library categories like Movies, Series, and Games.

Sequel has helped me fill out my movie queue effortlessly as I read my RSS feeds.

Sequel 2.3 is a big step forward for the app and one of my favorite app updates so far this year. Quickly saving things for later and then finding them again makes a big difference. Even the smallest amount of friction can convince someone that it’s not worth the time to save an item to the app in the first place. Magic Lookup reduces that friction in a meaningful way that makes it much easier to use.

Magic Lookup is also a shining example of AI implemented in a useful, positive way. It doesn’t try to make the reviews of media you find on the web obsolete. Instead, Sequel’s use of AI is additive, making it easier to continue enjoying what you’re reading and save recommendations for later. This is exactly the sort of AI integration I hope we see from Apple at WWDC next week.

Sequel 2.3 is available as a free download on the App Store. Certain features require a subscription.

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I’m not usually nostalgic about apps. I appreciate classic designs from the past, but I find ‘new’ more exciting. However, for every rule, there’s an exception, and for me, it’s Mario Guzmán’s beautiful, pixel-perfect reimagining of classic Apple music apps.

Guzmán’s latest app is QuickTune, a remote control utility for Apple Music. The app is the spitting image of QuickTime 7¹ running on Mac OS X Tiger, with a sprinkling of modern features and fun interactions that make it a pleasure to use.

Mario Guzmán’s Music MiniPlayer.

Music Widget.

QuickTune isn’t Guzmán’s first Music remote app. I’ve covered both Music MiniPlayer and Music Remote, and we interviewed him for MacStories Weekly about Music Widget, which recreated the iTunes Dashboard widget. If you’re familiar with those earlier apps, you’ll know what to expect from QuickTune.

The native AppKit app uses Scripting Bridge and Distributed Notification Center to communicate with and control Apple’s Music app, whether you’re playing music you own, streaming from the Apple Music catalog, or listening to an Apple Music radio station. Guzmán also explains that the app uses Core Graphics and Core Animation to look great whether your Mac has a Retina display or not.

In a morning spent listening to my Apple Music Favorites Mix, QuickTune has worked flawlessly. The app features a central play/pause button, as well as buttons to skip forward and back through tracks, shuffle songs, and toggle between repeat modes. There’s also a volume slider and playback progress bar that you can drag around with your Mac’s pointer or click to jump to a particular point in a track. If Music isn’t open when you click play, QuickTune will launch it, which is handy.

QuickTunes’ inspector.

The current track, album, and artist information cycle in the title bar of the app’s window, but if you want more information, you can open an inspector, which adds the source, duration, genre, release year, album artist, composer, and play count information. You can also access and play your playlists from a separate QuickTune window using the app’s Window menu or with the shortcut ⌥ + ⌘ + L and jump to the Music app at any time using ⌥ + ⌘ + S.

Playlist support.

QuickTune includes a bunch of great animations, too. There are two default window sizes that you can toggle between by double-clicking the app’s title bar, which kicks off a satisfying resizing animation. If you don’t want to display album art, just drag the bottom edge of QuickTune’s window up and let go somewhere beyond about half the window’s height. QuickTune takes care of the rest, snapping to the perfect size to hide the artwork. The same thing works in reverse as you expand the window, eliminating the need to precisely size it yourself. However, you also have the option to pick a size between the smallest window and largest version by dragging from the corner, which helpfully snaps to a size that won’t letter or pillar-box your album art. It’s a small thing, but it’s the sort of detail I love.

QuickTune’s three default sizes.

The app also includes options to float its window above all other windows, display the duration or remaining time of tracks in the scrubber, and check for and install updates automatically. Every feature includes keyboard shortcuts, too.

There are two features that I’d love to see added to QuickTune. The first is a button to toggle infinite playback on and off. It’s a Music feature that I like to use, but not all the time, so having a button that indicates whether it is on and allows me to toggle it would be a welcome addition. Second, I’d like a setting to designate a default playlist or album that would start playing if there isn’t a track selected in Music, allowing me to get up and running with a favorite playlist or album more quickly.

QuickTune (left) and Music’s MiniPlayer (right).

So why use QuickTune instead of Music’s own MiniPlayer? It’s a fair question. The MiniPlayer can do more and fits in better with macOS Sonoma, and ultimately, that’s why I usually prefer modern app design.

However, there’s something about music that makes an app like QuickTune and Mario Guzmán’s other nostalgia-soaked Music utilities work for me when other retro-style apps don’t. The difference is the music itself. You probably remember where you were when you first heard one of your favorite albums; I know I do. In the same way, I also associate certain music with versions of OS X and macOS, and QuickTune is a fun trip back to that time and place. So yes, I will still use Apple’s MiniPlayer, but for a change of pace and a trip back in time, I highly recommend QuickTune, which is free to download from Mario Guzmán’s website.

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Last month, AltStore was finally made available on iOS for everyone living in the European Union. Not only does the first alternative app marketplace on iOS ship with the great Delta videogame emulator, but it also lets you install Clip, a clipboard manager unlike any other on the iPhone.

The app’s uniqueness resides in the sole fact that it’s the first ever clipboard manager on the iPhone that can actually run in the background and continuously monitor your clipboard, regardless of the app you’re in. And despite the fact that the app is pretty bare-bones right now, this core ability alone makes a huge difference in usage, enough to crown Clip the best clipboard manager to ever ship on iOS.

Let’s check it out.

To be able to monitor your clipboard and build a history, a proper clipboard manager needs to keep running in the background at all times. However, due to the system limitations of iOS and Apple’s rules on the App Store, building a clipboard manager for the iPhone isn’t as straightforward for developers as it is on macOS. On iOS, only some system entitlements allow apps to do this, and to this date, Apple still doesn’t permit third-party developers to release an app on the App Store that can continuously run in the background to monitor your clipboard.

As a result, clipboard manager apps like Yoink and Paste have long relied on cumbersome workarounds, like manually adding content to the clipboard history via the share sheet, having to tap a Home Screen widget, or even installing a full third-party keyboard to access and manage your clipboard history from any app’s text fields. These workarounds aren’t ideal to say the least. They require you to jump out of your context, and they simply won’t work if you regularly forget to save your clipboard content.

Clip is different. Since it doesn’t have to follow Apple’s strict rules for apps released in the App Store, Clip is able to use the iPhone’s location services to continuously run in the background. This allows the app to send you a notification every time you copy something on iOS, regardless of the app you’re in. All you have to do is swipe down on the notification banner, and that’s it. You’ve just updated your clipboard history. You didn’t have to use a share sheet extension, install a new keyboard, or go back to the Home Screen to tap a widget — and best of all, you didn’t have to leave the app you were in. It’s glorious.

Clip sends you a notification every time you copy something on iOS. Simply swipe down on the notification to add it to Clip without leaving the app you’re in. It even works with images.

To set up Clip (assuming you’ve already gone through the process of installing AltStore and Clip on your iPhone), open Settings, scroll down to ‘Clip’, then make sure you give the app the proper permissions:

• ‘Allow location access’ must be set to ‘Always’; otherwise, Clip will not be able to keep running in the background. This will also let you see your clipboard history items on a map inside the app. If you’re understandably weary about this setting, know that the developers behind Clip and AltStore specifically mention that, ”Your location data never leaves this device.“
• ‘Paste from Other Apps’ must be set to ‘Allow’ (instead of the default ‘Ask’); otherwise, iOS will systematically display a permission popup every time Clip attempts to read your clipboard. Note that even after granting this permission, Clip is not able to read your clipboard unless you swipe down on the app’s notification.

For Clip to work properly, make sure the app’s location access is set to ‘Always’ and clipboard access to ‘Allow’.

Inside the app itself, the only two settings you can tweak are the number of clipboard history items to keep and a toggle to disable location icons.

Apart from that, the UI is very basic. You can tap on clipboard history items in the List tab to copy, delete, or share them via the share sheet, and you can switch to the Map tab to view your clipboard history items on a map. The app supports various types of clipboard content, including text, URLs, and images (in which case a preview is displayed).

Additionally, in the current beta version of the app (which you can also install via AltStore), Clip is adding a custom keyboard to allow you to paste items from your clipboard history directly into any text field. Simply tap the globe icon to view your clippings and select one of them to paste it. You’re then automatically brought back to your regular keyboard so you can continue typing. It’s a welcome addition that makes it even easier to tap into your clipboard history without having to switch apps.

You can tweak the number of clipboard history items to keep in Clip.

Clip Beta is adding a custom keyboard to allow you to paste items from your clipboard history directly into any text field.

Even in its current basic state, Clip is already far ahead of any other clipboard manager app on the iPhone in that I actually use it without having to actively think about it. Still, I think the app would cement itself as a great productivity tool if it gained a couple of more advanced features in the near future.

Here’s my small wish list for Clip:

Add Shortcuts support. Right now, it’s pretty easy to go back and forth between Clip and other apps to string together multiple clipboard history items in, say, a note. However, it can quickly become frustrating if you’re trying to act on more than two or three items at once. As a result, I would love to be able to create simple shortcuts to fetch a set number of recent clipboard history items and manipulate them. Even better, I would love a shortcut action that could let me fetch all my clipboard history items that contain a specific keyword or string of text.

Add drag and drop support. This one will make more sense once Clip and AltStore are available on iPadOS (hopefully later this year), but even on iOS, being able to drag and drop clipboard history items from Clip to other apps would be amazing. On the iPad, I can’t wait to be able to keep Clip in Slide Over, or in a floating window with Stage Manager, and quickly pick up and drop items from my clipboard history to a code editor or a note in Obsidian.

Add a Home Screen widget. Even if Clip doesn’t need a Home Screen widget to function, it would be helpful to be able to see your recent clipboard history right on the Home Screen without having to open the app. Already, I suspect many heavy Clip users will want to keep the app icon on their Home Screen; since the app is already taking up precious space there, it might as well be functional.

Ship on macOS. Like I said, hopefully we’ll get to use Clip on both iOS and iPadOS later this year. But the even greater prospect would be to have Clip run on macOS as well. When using Clip, you may notice that the app is already able to monitor your Mac clipboard thanks to Universal Clipboard. As soon as I copy something on my Mac, a Clip notification appears on my iPhone, letting me add what I just copied on macOS to my clipboard history inside Clip on iOS. If a Mac version of Clip existed, it could automatically add my Mac’s clipboard content to its history and keep it in sync between the two devices. Clip could be the app that brings us closer than ever to the productivity dream of having a proper universal clipboard manager that works across all of Apple’s platforms.

Since it was not nearly as anticipated as Delta, Clip is flying a bit under the radar following AltStore’s release in the EU. But here’s the thing: Clip represents and highlights the potential for apps released outside of Apple’s App Store, apps that could have never existed because of the company’s limitations. It will be interesting to see whether apps like Clip take off in the EU in the coming months and years. If that happens, hopefully Apple will take the hint: if it isn’t going to add a native clipboard manager to iOS and iPadOS anytime soon, then it should at least let apps like Clip thrive in its own App Store for all to enjoy.

In the meantime, if you don’t live in the EU, you should be jealous. We have working clipboard managers here.

Clip is available in AltStore. In the EU, AltStore requires a €1.50 (+ VAT) annual subscription. Clip can be installed after pledging to the AltStore team’s Patreon.

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Screens by Edovia is a screen-sharing app that lets you control your computer from another device, and today, version 5.2 is out with an excellent set of updates that improve the app’s performance and usability. However, the biggest change is that Screens now works on the Vision Pro, which is a big deal for anyone managing computers remotely.

I’m a longtime Screens user, but I was initially skeptical about using it with the Vision Pro. How useful or easy-to-use would Screens be when running on the device? The answer is ‘very.’ The Vision Pro version of Screens is a terrific addition to the previously-released iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions, and combined with the other changes in version 5.2, this is a bigger update than the point release might suggest.

Watching myself take screenshots of Screens via Screens.

I’m going to stick to covering the visionOS version of Screens and the other changes introduced in version 5.2 because I reviewed version 5.0 of the app late last year. So, if you’re unfamiliar with Screens’ core functionality, be sure to check out that review.

Suffice it to say, I’m a big fan of Screens. I’ve used the app to connect to my Macs, whether at home or away, for years. Sometimes, I’m just being lazy because a file I need is on my office Mac, and I’m in another part of my home, and other times, I’m away and forget something important. Either way, firing up Screens makes it easy to get what I need.

That sort of convenience is multiplied when I’m using the Vision Pro. If I’m close to my Mac, I can simply mirror its display in the Vision Pro using visionOS’ built-in remote access feature. That only works well, though, when I’m near the Mac it’s connected to. What’s great about Screens 5.2 is that it allows me to do something similar from anywhere, which is incredibly cool. That means being able to type in an app on my Mac Studio no matter where I am. I love it.

Connections can be sorted by frequency of use.

Not only that, but I can open a connection to my Mac mini or laptop, too, spreading three virtual Macs around my living room if I want. I don’t have a good reason to do that, but if your job is managing multiple Macs or running different processes on a bunch of computers, I have to imagine it would be a lot nicer to have multiple big windows that you can spread out around your space than flipping among them on a fixed-size display.

Another highlight of Screens on the Vision Pro is the quality of the image it mirrors. As part of the version 5.2 update, Edovia updated its rendering engine across all platforms, which I expect made a difference. Text was crisp and legible on every Mac I accessed, and images looked great, too. Plus, unlike the Mac mirroring built into visionOS, you also have access to all the tools available in Screens, which are arrayed in toolbars along the bottom and left side of its visionOS window.

If there’s a downside to accessing your Mac from the Vision Pro with Screens, it’s that the gestures to control your Mac take some getting used to. I’ve been mirroring my Macs in the Vision Pro since I got the device. However, to navigate the Mac using mirroring, you need a keyboard and trackpad because it doesn’t support gestures, so you better have a Magic Trackpad for moving your cursor around.

Screens includes an excellent set of gestures for navigating remote computers.

In contrast, Screens does support gestures. The app allows you to move the pointer by pinching and dragging. A single pinch is the same as a single click, and a double-pinch is a double click. If you pinch with both hands and move them up or down, the active window will scroll. Also, a right-click is triggered if you pinch with both hands and rotate them a little. After some practice, I found it easy to get around my Mac’s UI using these gestures, but the experience is different enough from working with native visionOS windows that you should expect it to take a little time to wrap your head around conceptually.

Unused sidebar sections can be toggled off.

In addition to the new rendering engine I mentioned above, Screens now allows users to set image compression on a per-connection basis. That way, if you have a connection you know isn’t great, you can compress the image more to help improve performance. Codecs can be specified for PC connections, too. Finally, if there are sidebar sections you don’t use, you can toggle them off in settings, and your library of connections can be sorted by connection frequency so the ones you use the most are at the top of the list.

Mac mirroring is one of the Vision Pro’s best features. It’s both an escape valve for things the Vision Pro can’t do or where app support is thin and a powerful way to interact with the Mac, period. Screens 5.2 takes that idea even further, allowing you to interact with multiple Macs and other computers anywhere and making the app the most useful utility I’ve tried for visionOS so far.

Screens 5.2 is available on the App Store for $2.99/month, $24.99/year, or a one-time payment of $79.

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I’ve written about media-tracking apps a lot in the past, and they tend to fall into one of two categories: there are ‘generalist apps’ that cover multiple types of media, and there are ‘specialist apps’ that go much deeper into one particular kind. The benefit of the former is having a one-stop destination for all your media tracking, while the latter usually goes further, focusing on the unique characteristics of one media type. There are advantages to each approach, but they’re serving two different kinds of users, so it’s not that surprising that apps don’t try to do both.

That’s why I was intrigued when I heard about Sofa 4.0 and its custom Categories and Ingredients features, which launch today. Sofa has always been one of my favorite apps for tracking multiple types of media, but as soon as I saw custom Categories and Ingredients, I knew the app had the potential to transcend the media tracker category by letting users have a greater say in how it’s used. That’s exactly what its developer, Shawn Hickman, has done, and the results are fantastic.

Before Sofa 4.0, the app was limited to storing media.

Shawn Hickman has always pitched Sofa as a downtime organizer instead of a media tracker, which makes more sense now than ever before. It’s an app that makes it easy to decide what to watch, read, play, or listen to next. Yet, until version 4.0, Sofa was limited to the same sort of downtime activities you see in a lot of media-tracking apps:

• Movies and TV
• Music
• Books
• Audiobooks
• Videogames

The app also incorporated podcasts and apps, which few media trackers do.

Examples of custom Categories that I’ve created.

However, with custom Categories, it’s now possible to expand what you save to Sofa to include many more options, extending the app’s utility beyond media to all sorts of activities.

Categories can be anything you want to collect in Sofa. The default set includes the media types mentioned above, which are now called Easy Categories and can be toggled on and off. Now, however, you can add your own Categories, too. Sofa has a handful of suggested custom Categories, including articles, events, hikes, places, restaurants, videos, and websites, but you’re not limited to those. You can create your own Category and give it a name and icon. Then, when you add a new item to Sofa, you’ll see your custom Categories listed below the default ones.

Trip, restaurant, and shopping entries created using custom Categories.

Since I’m still new to the Charlotte, North Carolina area, I set up a new Group in Sofa called ‘Getting Out.’ Then, I set up custom Categories for Restaurants, Shops, and Places, allowing me to create lists for each type of destination. I’ve also added a custom Websites Category for those one-off sites that I want to explore later but don’t fit into my existing read-later system. I could use Raindrop.io for this sort of thing instead, but I’ve enjoyed the experience of keeping a handful of websites in Sofa that I want to look at more carefully in the short term.

A selection of the Ingredients I’ve created in Sofa.

The other big addition to Sofa is Ingredients, which are bits of metadata that can be applied to any of your Categories. The metadata can be text, a number, a date, a link, a toggle, or a single- or multiple-choice selection from a defined list. For example, you can create a five-star rating system and apply it to everything you store in Sofa, allowing you to rate books, games, TV shows, and more. Or, you could add a toggle to items to mark them as completed. The options are really only limited by your imagination and can be applied selectively to just those Categories where they make sense.

What makes Categories and Ingredients even more interesting, though, is that they can be combined along with other variables as filters to build Smart Lists. Smart Lists are created by giving them a name and, optionally, a Group, just like a standard list. However, you can also add as many filters as you’d like, including built-in options like the Date Added, Date Edited, Pinned Items, Logbook Items, whether an item has a Sticky Note and what the content of the note is, and the Categories and Lists to which an item belongs, plus the custom Ingredients you’ve added.

Using my Status ingredient to create custom In Progress and Next Smart Lists.

My Sofa setup includes several standard types of media grouped by type of activity. For example, Watch includes lists of movies and TV shows. However, with my custom ‘Status’ Ingredient, I’ve created Smart Lists called ‘In Progress’ and ‘Next’ that cut across all media types. Similarly, I created a ‘Distance’ Ingredient for my Shopping, Trips, and Eating Out lists. That made it easy to create a custom Smart List that lets me see all the activities I’ve saved based on how far they are from where I live.

Adding a website using the share sheet.

Another great addition to Sofa is its share sheet integration. Sofa has excellent built-in search for the core set of Categories it offers, but to extend the app beyond the defaults, Sofa includes the ability to add URLs to the app from the clipboard, manually, or via the share sheet as you browse the web or any app that generates a URL. So, not only have I added websites for restaurants I want to try (complete with an image and description of the location, which are pulled from the site automatically), but I can add items from Apple Music, Spotify, the TV app, and any other apps that use URLs. When you add an item via the share sheet, you can also define its Category, the list to which it should be added, and any Ingredients, eliminating the need to go into Sofa to add those details later.

Sofa 4.0 now lets users pin entire lists just like you can pin individual items. Doing so moves the list out of any group it’s in and puts it right at the top of your lists. Along similar lines, there are more options to customize Sofa’s home screen. For example, I’ve hidden the Logged Items list because it’s not something I want to see very often. When I do, I can still access it from the menu button at the top of the screen.

The core of Sofa isn’t compromised by its customization options.

What impresses me most about Sofa 4.0 is that its deep customization doesn’t come at the expense of usability. That’s a tradeoff a lot of apps make in the name of flexibility; however, Sofa hasn’t made those tradeoffs.

The ability to create complex Smart Lists is easy to find and use, but the app’s main UI is no more complicated than it ever has been. If you prefer to simply create manual lists of media, that’s as easy as ever. The difference, though, is that Sofa now rewards those who spend some time exploring its new capabilities. With its limitation to media removed, the app invites users to think about how they spend their downtime and make lists of whatever they’d like to save whether it involves media or not. It’s the kind of novel, modular approach that I can already tell I’ll be spending a lot more time tweaking in the coming weeks.

Sofa 4.0 is available on the App Store as a free download with certain features only available as part of a $3.99/month or $29.99/year Super Sofa subscription. For a limited time at launch, the annual plan is 40% off until Saturday, May 4th. Sofa also offers a lifetime version for $179.

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Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

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As any Pokémon fan knows, the series is all about data – lots and lots of data. So much data that entire websites and apps are dedicated to helping players keep track of it all. That’s a big design challenge for any app developer, which is why I was so glad to see it taken on by Ben McCarthy, whose apps, including the camera app Obscura, are some of the best designed on the App Store.

Ben’s new app is called Ketchup, and it’s a comprehensive compendium of every generation of Pokémon that incorporates powerful search, caught and favorite Pokémon tracking, a battle match-up utility, and a quiz game all in one app. But what makes it special and sets the app apart from others I’ve tried over the years is the design, which makes it easy to find what you’re looking for and presents it in a coherent, understandable, and modern interface.

You really can never have too much information about Magikarp.

The core of Ketchup is its catalog of Pokémon, moves, items, and abilities. The free version of the app includes the first generation of 151 Pokémon, with all nine generations – a total of 1,025 creatures – available via a one-time In-App Purchase.

The catalog defaults to showing a summary list of Pokémon, but it can be filtered to display moves, items, and abilities, too. The summary view is organized by generation and includes a small image of the Pokémon, its name and entry number, and icons representing its types. If a Pokémon has been caught, you have its shiny variety, or it has been marked as a favorite, that information is shown in the summary, too, and synced to other versions of the app via iCloud. A touch I like a lot is that you can mark a creature as caught from the summary view simply by swiping to the right and tapping, making it easy to add them while in the midst of a gaming session.

Search and the compact and full versions of ‘recents.’

Another of my favorite parts of Ketchup is its search functionality, which is present across all of its iOS tabs and in the corner of the iPad app’s window. On iOS, the search field is built into a slide-up card element. A short swipe up on the card reveals a compact, horizontally scrolling list of recently viewed entries. Swipe again, and additional details about everything you’ve viewed are revealed. I’d love to see more apps take this approach to search. It’s perfect for a reference app like Ketchup. The only time you won’t find recently viewed items in Ketchup is when you’re in full-screen mode on the iPad. There isn’t a natural place to put recents, like there is on the iPhone or small iPad size classes, but I’d like to see it tucked away in the iPad’s sidebar or somewhere similar in a future update.

That’s a lot of information about Pokémon, and we haven’t gotten beyond Ketchup’s creature summary view yet. However, there’s a lot more available when you tap on a Pokémon’s Ketchup entry, which reveals a detail view that goes much deeper. Here, you’ll find the same information you can get from the summary view, plus evolution information, catching information by game, abilities, type match-up data, physical characteristics, and learned and Technical Machine moves. It’s a ton of information, but it’s expertly organized in a way that makes it easy to understand the basics of each creature and progressively dig deeper as you scroll through each entry. Add the fact that every entry is tinted with the color of the Pokémon depicted, and each one feels a lot like a classic sports trading card, with the exact sort of nerdy stats that Pokémon fans, which Ben clearly is, will love.

Moves.

Abilities.

Items.

It’s worth noting that moves and abilities also have their own separate sections accessible from the iPhone version’s summary view and the sidebar on the iPad, which is a convenient way explore them independently of the Pokémon themselves. Items can be accessed from Ketchup’s catalog summary view, too, and include every variety of Pokéball, candy, powder, potion, berry, stone, and everything else that can be found in Pokémon games, along with a detail view for each.

Favorites, match-ups, and a fun quiz.

In addition:

• Any Pokémon marked as a favorite is accessible from a separate tab on the iPhone and a section in the iPad’s sidebar for quick access.
• There’s a Pokémon match-up utility similar to Ben’s app Aether that uses a clever dial-like interface to evaluate Pokémon match-ups by picking the type of the attacker and defender. The feature accounts for dual-type Pokémon, too.
• You can test your Pokémon knowledge with the Quiz tab, which shows the silhouette of a random Pokémon and gives you three guesses to pick it from a list of 16 choices.

Anyone who has gotten deep into the weeds of the decades of Pokémon games knows how much information there is out there about every aspect of the game. Ketchup is a great utility because it will appeal to fans at all levels. For casual players, it’s a great way to track the creatures you catch and make a list of your favorites.

Playing Pokémon Yellow in Delta alongside Ketchup.

However, as you get more into the series, Ketchup is the perfect guide to understanding Pokémon types, match-ups, and other details that will add depth to the experience. The only thing I think that would make Ketchup an even better companion to Pokémon games would be an option to create notes about whichever game you happen to be playing. Still, Ketchup’s timing is excellent because with the release of the Delta game emulator, I’ve been feeling the itch to go back to some of the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance entries in the Pokémon series. I’m sure I’m not alone.

If you love Pokémon games, go get Ketchup now. It’s easily the best Pokémon companion app I’ve tried.

Ketchup is available as a free download on the App Store and comes with the first generation of Pokémon. A one-time purchase of $9.99 unlocks the full catalog of creatures. There is also an option to pay $19.99 if you want to pay more to support this excellent app.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

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