Continuity Camera is amazing. Since it was introduced in macOS Ventura, I’ve been using the feature almost daily. Continuity Camera is a native feature on macOS that lets you use an iPhone as your webcam. For it to work, you can either connect the iPhone to your Mac using a cable, or use it wirelessly if both devices are signed in with the same Apple ID. It’s quite impressive that, despite having to rely so often on video calls for work, I still don’t own a webcam today. Instead, the camera I use at my desk is an old iPhone SE (2nd generation), which was my partner’s main iPhone until they upgraded last year.

Over the past few months, however, the number of video calls I have needed to take on a daily basis has become critical. As an activist, part of my work now also involves conducting online training sessions with sometimes up to a hundred participants at a time. I just couldn’t afford to join one of those sessions and not have my camera working. Continuity Camera became a feature that I need to work reliably. Sadly, it doesn’t. Half of the time, apps like Zoom and Discord on macOS could not see the iPhone SE in the list of available cameras. This meant I had to fetch a Lightning cable to manually connect the iPhone. If I was unlucky that day, and that didn’t work, I would have to completely reboot the Mac. If I was really unlucky that day, and even that didn’t work, I would end up joining the call without a camera. Despite meeting all the requirements listed by Apple Support, this problem just kept happening on random occasions.

I had to find a fix for this bug, or at least a way to work around it.

Despite meeting all the system requirements listed by Apple Support, Continuity Camera in wireless mode frequently stopped working on my Mac.

I naturally considered giving in and purchasing a dedicated webcam, and I agree, it could have been an easy solution. But hear me out: good webcams always seem too expensive, and I’m always worried about the image quality of the more affordable ones. My iPhone SE’s camera, on the other hand, looks fantastic as a webcam — and it is right here, sitting on my desk, for free. Another easy solution would have been to keep my iPhone constantly connected via a cable to my Mac. Unfortunately, unless I had the budget to invest in a bigger Thunderbolt dock, or the willingness to rework my desk setup to make space for a USB hub, I simply didn’t have enough ports to afford to keep an iPhone plugged in at all times. I truly wanted to make the wireless Continuity Camera setup work.

So, I started investigating — and by investigating, I obviously mean Googling in the middle of the night. Unsurprisingly, I was far from being the only person to encounter this issue with wireless Continuity Camera. I stumbled upon a flurry of Reddit threads and Apple Support discussions opened by people having this problem. Proposed fixes and workarounds vary. They range from the usual “Try rebooting the iPhone and the Mac”, “Make sure Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are turned on, and your Mac is not using AirPlay”, “Toggle Continuity Camera on and off”; to the more extreme “Log out from your iCloud account on your Mac, then log back in.” None of the former solutions were always successful, and the latter solution is nerve-racking, to say the least. Logging out from your iCloud account on your Mac is synonymous with hours lost to resynchronizing all your data and settings across your apps. Still, I wanted to try it at least once, to see if it would solve the issues I was having with Continuity Camera, once and for all. Unfortunately, it didn’t. In fact, the dreaded bug came back on the very next day.

This is where things get a bit blurry. I only remember trying to adjust all sorts of iCloud-related settings in System Settings on macOS. For a couple of days, I was obsessed by this bug, by how seemingly common it is, and by how difficult it is to consistently reproduce.

In the end, I discovered the strangest fix you could imagine. If Continuity Camera wasn’t working, I realized that if I headed to the ‘Touch ID & Password’ section in System Settings, and toggled the setting to automatically unlock the Mac with the Apple Watch, then Continuity Camera would immediately start working fine again. My iPhone SE would reappear in the list of available cameras on macOS, without having to use a cable and without having to reboot the Mac. The first few times I did this, I thought it was a coincidence. But over the following weeks, this trick worked, again and again. When I first mentioned this weird fix on Mastodon, people seemed as surprised as I was. Still, it worked, and so far, I haven’t discovered any other setting that could immediately make Continuity Camera work again.

Although seemingly unrelated, switching the Apple Watch unlock feature on and off on my Mac seemed to fix my Continuity Camera bug every time.

A few days ago, the wireless Continuity Camera bug happened again. I had to hop on a Zoom call, and my iPhone SE wasn’t showing up as an available camera. So, once more, I tried to toggle the Unlock with Apple Watch setting. This time, it couldn’t be toggled on. “Your Apple Watch must be signed in to iCloud to allow it to unlock your Mac. You can sign in using the Apple Watch app on your iPhone.”, my Mac said. Although the Apple Watch was connected to iCloud, it was only after I unpaired then repaired it to my iPhone that I could finally toggle the setting on the Mac. Once I did, guess what happened? Wireless Continuity Camera was working again.

Now I was convinced. The ‘Auto Unlock with Apple Watch’ feature seems to be somehow related to a background system service that is also responsible for Continuity Camera — and flipping the switch on and off causes that service to reset in some way. If I’m right, it would make sense: just like with wireless Continuity Camera, unlocking your Mac with your Apple Watch also only works if both devices are signed in with the same Apple ID.

According to Apple Support, ‘Auto Unlock with Apple Watch’ only works if both your Mac and your Apple Watch are signed in with the same Apple ID.

As a final note, I should mention that while I was furiously trying to investigate this Continuity Camera bug, one utility in particular came in very handy: Hand Mirror by Rafael Conde, which John already mentioned on MacStories about a year ago. It is an excellent companion to Continuity Camera as it helps you easily check whether your camera is currently working or not, directly from the menu bar.

Using Hand Mirror in the menu bar to check if Continuity Camera is working.

I still really love Continuity Camera. It is one of those rewarding ecosystem features that are supposed to just work. In reality, though, it just isn’t reliable enough for me. This comes at a confidence cost. Just like I’ve learned not to always rely on Universal Clipboard — which also occasionally seems to stop working for no obvious reasons — I am increasingly losing confidence in Continuity Camera, especially as it has become a frequent obstacle in my every day work. As a result, I may still invest in a dedicated webcam in the near future, or find a way to keep my iPhone SE constantly plugged in to the Mac at my desk. In the meantime, if you are experiencing the same issue with wireless Continuity Camera, and if I am indeed onto something here, it might be worth trying to toggle that seemingly unrelated ‘Unlock with Apple Watch’ setting.

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iOS 17.2.

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

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

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

Let’s dive in.

Messages

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

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

Using the new catch-up arrow in iOS 17.2.

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

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

Attaching stickers in iOS 17.2.

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

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

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

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

Adding a lot of sticker reactions.

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

Action Button

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

The new Translate Live Activity for the Action button.

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

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

Music

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

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

The new playlist for your favorite songs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And More…

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

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

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

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

New data points in the Weather app.

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

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

The new digital clock widget.

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

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

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

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

Intelligent AutoFill suggestions.

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

iOS and iPadOS 17.2

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

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

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John: Every year, it seems like the MacStories Selects awards roll around faster than the last, and this year was no exception. For most people, the year begins on January 1st, but for us, WWDC marks the beginning of our year, and the MacStories Selects Awards feel like its conclusion. Plenty happens the rest of the year, but it’s these seven months that are the main event for us.

June begins with excitement about what developers will be able to do with Apple’s latest frameworks. Reconnecting with developers and meeting new people energizes and carries us through a busy summer and fall. This year marked Federico’s return to WWDC for the first time since the pandemic, and seeing so many developers together made this year’s WWDC the best in years.

2023 was an exciting year for apps. Read-later apps continued to be hot, but nothing was quite as big as interactive widgets, which brought new experiences to our Home and Lock Screens and shook up how many of us set up our devices.

Next year promises to be an even bigger year for apps with an all-new Vision Pro App Store on the way. For now, though, it’s time to pause and reflect on the many apps we tried in the year gone by and recognize the best among them.

Like last year, we’ve picked the best apps in seven categories:

• Best New App
• Best App Update
• Best New Feature
• Best Watch App
• Best Mac App
• Best Design
• App of the Year

But there’s more. Club MacStories members picked the winner of the MacStories Selects Readers’ Choice Award. Plus, as we’ve done the past couple of years, we’ve named a Lifetime Achievement Award winner that has stood the test of time and had an outsized impact on the world of apps. This year’s winner, which joins past winners PCalc and Drafts, is the subject of a special story I wrote for the occasion.

We also recorded a special episode of AppStories covering all the winners and runners-up. It’s a terrific way to learn more about this year’s apps.

You can listen to the episode below.

So with that, it’s my pleasure to introduce the 2023 MacStories Selects Awards to the MacStories community.

[table_of_contents]

Best New App

Orion

Federico: It doesn’t happen as often these days as it used to years ago, but my favorite kind of new app is the one that represents a new category of software that’s made possible by a brand new technology added to iOS or iPadOS. This year, while Apple’s focus was on widgets and wrapping up work on visionOS, a new functionality of iPadOS 17 quietly created a whole new market on the App Store: USB video class (or UVC) and the ability to turn an iPad into a portable monitor for connected webcams, videogame consoles, or other devices. We’ve seen dozens of apps that allow you to connect portable consoles or cameras to an iPad running iPadOS 17, but the one we liked most is Orion, developed by Lux.

Orion is an iPad- and iPadOS 17-only app that lets you turn your tablet into a portable HDMI monitor for, well, anything. As long as you own a compatible video capture card (there are hundreds in existence, ranging from $20 dongles to more expensive ones that support HDMI 2.1, HDR, 120Hz, and more), Orion will let you view the connected device’s display on your iPad’s screen. There is no configuration necessary: pick your favorite accessory, plug in a Nintendo Switch, DSLR, or, dare I say, a Game Boy Camera, and Orion will turn your iPad into a monitor.

Orion on the iPad Pro.

Of course, the reason we’ve selected Orion as the Best New App for MacStories Selects 2023 is that, compared to its competition, this app goes the extra mile in terms of design, user experience, and raw performance. From a visual standpoint, the folks at Lux – previously known for their outstanding work on the camera app Halide – have outdone themselves: they designed the onboarding experience of Orion and its related manual to resemble the experience of opening up the box of a videogame console from the late 80s; this aesthetic works for the app and turns something relatively boring – we’re talking about HDMI sources, after all – into a fun technological toy. From the app’s icon to the retro-inspired ‘No Signal’ screen, there’s plenty to love about Orion’s design – especially if you’ve been playing videogames for a long time.

What sets Orion apart, however, is how well it works with connected game consoles compared to other solutions we tested this year. As I wrote in a story I published a while back, I’ve been using Orion to turn my iPad Pro’s mini-LED display into a beautiful, portable monitor for my Nintendo Switch. Not only does Orion immediately recognize my HDMI 2.1-enabled capture card, but the app supports an upscaling mode powered by on-device artificial intelligence that can turn any incoming video signal into a 4K image in real time, with no latency or image artifacts. Playing Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, or any indie games from my Steam Deck on the iPad’s larger, brighter display in upscaled 4K is glorious. Orion offers additional settings to emulate old CRTs and apply other video filters, but, in our opinion, its main attraction is the ability to connect any console or portable PC you want and enjoy a 4K image on an iPad’s display. Even better if you have a Liquid Retina XDR display on the 12.9” iPad Pro.

UVC viewer apps have single-handedly created a new use case for the iPad this year. Orion, with its fun design, reliable connections to capture cards, and solid performance, is the best one we’ve tested yet, and why we’ve chosen it as the Best New App of 2023.

• Orion website
• Orion on the App Store
• MacStories article

Best New App Runners-Up

Chronicling

John: One of the best things about writing about apps is how often developers surprise us with new approaches to old problems. Just when developers start to converge on a singular solution to a problem, and the apps in a category start to blend together in a samey mishmash, a developer comes along with a fresh take that challenges the conventional wisdom. That’s exactly how I feel about habit trackers. There are a lot of apps in the category, but there wasn’t much new happening until Chronicling came along.

However, suggesting that Chronicling is a habit tracker doesn’t do it justice. It’s fully capable of being used for that task, but the app is much more. It’s that flexibility that I appreciate most about Rebecca Owen’s app. You can easily track literally any recurring event in your life and view the data in multiple ways, teasing out patterns.

Chronicling’s flexibility is tempered by just enough structure to make the data it collects useful. Categories serve as top-level ways to organize whatever you’re tracking, while Events are the things you’re tracking. The app makes it simple to quickly enter data about whatever you’re tracking and then display it graphically in the app or its Home Screen widgets.

In addition to widget support, Chronicling integrates with Shortcuts, Focus Filters, and the latest Apple frameworks, which I love. Perhaps most impressive is that this is Owen’s debut app. With such a strong start, I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from her in the future.

• Chronicling website
• Chronicling on the App Store
• MacStories review

Federico: Many didn’t think it was possible but, somehow, six years after the release of Breath of the Wild – a game that other videogame developers are still trying to catch up with – Nintendo managed to improve upon it in every single aspect with the highly-anticipated Tears of the Kingdom. I finished the game’s main quest months ago, and I took a bit of a pause from it because I wanted to check out the myriad of other great games that launched in 2023. But I’m feeling the itch to explore the vastness of Hyrule again, and just like I did when I finished the game’s story, I’ll have a precious tool to assist me: TotK Travel Guide, created by indie developer – and previous MacStories Selects award winner – Jeffrey Kuiken.

Exploring Hyrule in TotK Travel Guide.

TotK Travel Guide is the ultimate companion app for Nintendo’s latest masterpiece. The app started as a way to explore the game’s incredibly vast map with the ability to drop pins on points of interest, view the locations of shrines and lightroots, and add notes tied to specific locations on the map. The app, however, has improved a lot since I first covered it on MacStories earlier this year, to the point where it could be described as an all-in-one mapping tool and task manager entirely dedicated to Tears of the Kingdom.

You can create tasks that are associated with specific areas and puzzles, which is a handy way to keep track of all the things you want to check out and complete in a specific part of the game. You can browse a list of all weapons, items, and other collectibles in the game, making sure you don’t miss anything. You can drop pins, view a list of all towns, Hudson signs, statues, caves, Korok seeds, and other landmarks. For a game as big as Tears of the Kingdom, with more things to unlock and discover than Breath of the Wild, you need a digital assistant that can be as comprehensive as TotK Travel Guide. In addition to its large data set – which rivals Nintendo’s official guide and, unlike the book, is interactive – the app comes with a great native design for Apple devices and integration with Shortcuts.

TotK Travel Guide combines two things I love – Zelda and native iOS apps – in a single package that is easily one of the most impressive new app releases of 2023.

• TotK Travel Guide website
• TotK Travel Guide on the App Store
• MacStories article

Best App Update

Sequel

Jonathan: 2023 was a big year for entertainment. There were, of course, two of the most significant Hollywood strikes in several decades. There was also ‘Barbenheimer’ at the box office; Mario (2 of them), Spider-Man, Zelda, and Starfield on consoles and PC; an endless amount shows on streaming and, of course, books from any genre or background to read or listen to.

Keeping track of the seemingly insurmountable list of things to watch, play, or read is complicated enough on its own. One way to ease this task is to use a tracking app. There are a handful out there, but one app came out with a big update in 2023 that changed how many of us manage our downtime: Sequel.

Sequel not only released a massive 2.0 update at the end of March but followed that up with another pretty significant 2.1 update in October.

However, the reason we picked Sequel was not for the size of its update but for how the updates genuinely helped many people better organize their clutter.

I and many others got the most benefit with the outstanding refresh of the watchlist for TV series. The next episodes of each series you’re currently watching appear here in ‘Watch Next’ when they’re available and can be easily marked as watched. Two other great sections below that are ‘Upcoming Seasons’ and ‘Upcoming Episodes’. These sections show you the countdown to new seasons and episodes, letting you get ready for them or, in the case of irregular shows like Last Week Tonight, seeing if the show is on that week. As an avid TV watcher, Sequel has proved indispensable in this regard.

Left to Right: The TV watchlist, cast and crew details, rich actor/crew credits, setting up Trakt integration.

But it wasn’t just TV series that saw some love. Across movies and TV, Sequel 2.0 saw the addition of cast and crew, actors, filmography, and integration with JustWatch so you can find which service to watch a title on. That’s not mentioning the laundry list of other additions such as ratings, synopses, trailers, widgets, release reminders, and ‘Time to beat’ for games. Then there was the 2.1 update.

That release brought a much-requested feature: Trakt integration. This, along with cast and crew search, enhanced filmography, and spoiler settings to hide critical information, show that developer Roman Lefebvre isn’t standing still with Sequel.

For myself and many other users, Sequel has become an essential part of how we consume entertainment and why, with the vast updates it made in 2023, Sequel is the MacStories Selects Best App Update of 2023.

• Sequel website
• Sequel on the App Store
• MacStories article

Best App Update: Runner-Up

Federico: Created by indie developer Adrian Schoenig, Longplay isn’t the only third-party Apple Music utility to put an emphasis on full album playback rather than playlists or algorithmic discovery of individual songs. Its 2.0 update, however, was an impressive modernization of the app that brought the ability to create custom collections for groups of albums, native Last.fm scrobbling, and a new ‘infinite shuffle’ mode to randomly shuffle entire albums from your Apple Music library.

Longplay for iPhone.

Longplay still launches to a beautiful grid of albums from your library, which you can explore by simply tapping an album to start listening to it in its entirety – as the artist intended. In version 2.0, though, you have more flexibility in terms of what you want to listen to thanks to collections, which let you create subsets of albums (perhaps grouped by artist, release date, theme, or something else); the addition of iCloud sync also ensures that users have the same Longplay experience across the iPhone and iPad. Last.fm integration is just icing on the cake for all those out there who are still scrobbling. Longplay isn’t for everyone, but if you’re the type of person who enjoys listening to entire albums rather than playlists, version 2.0 deserves a look.

• Longplay website
• Longplay on the App Store
• MacStories article

Best New Feature

Things

Federico: Over the years we’ve been covering Shortcuts on MacStories, we’ve seen our fair share of third-party apps that integrate with Apple’s automation app to let you simplify and speed up your work. But we’d never seen an integration as deep, rich, and well-thought out as Cultured Code’s complete rethinking of Things’ Shortcuts actions.

There are plenty of reasons to love Things, such as its elegant design, excellent collection of keyboard shortcuts, fast sync, and support for Markdown notes in projects and tasks. However, the app’s native support for Shortcuts is something special. Earlier this year, Cultured Code took an app whose automation features largely revolved around URL schemes and an action to create new tasks and turned it into a task manager that supports native Shortcuts automation for every functionality and corner of the experience. You can create, edit, and delete tasks; you can retrieve specific items from projects and items with advanced filters; you can even automate the process of adding sections to a project, allowing you to set up, effectively, project templates that are automatically created on a regular basis via a personal automation, without opening the app at all.

What sets Things apart from other task managers (including Apple’s Reminders) is the app’s awareness of what is currently selected onscreen. With the ability to see which tasks are selected in Things’ foreground window using Shortcuts, you can now put together a new kind of shortcut – a truly contextual one – that acts directly on the selected task to access its properties (such as due dates) and modify them as needed. This is particularly impressive on iPad, where you can pin shortcuts to the iPadOS dock to, say, instantly reschedule a selected task, flag it, or move it to another project. In other task managers, you would have to perform these actions manually; thanks to Things’ Shortcuts integration, you’re free to create your own enhancements for the app. Cultured Code didn’t make a button to change a task’s deadline? You can make your own using the app’s Shortcuts actions.

Things’ Shortcuts action for selected tasks.

In our opinion, Things’ Shortcuts integration represents the best breed of user automation on Apple platforms: without much technical knowledge, you can customize and improve the experience of the app by mixing and matching building blocks that don’t require any code, URLs, or other workarounds. There are no apps as tightly integrated with Shortcuts as Things at the moment, which is why the app’s Shortcuts support is the Best New Feature of MacStories Selects 2023.

• Things website
• Things on the App Store (iPhone, iPad, and Mac)
• MacStories article

Best New Feature Runner-Up

Philly and Hawaii in one week?

John: It just so happened that Mercury Weather 2.0 was released in the days leading up to a trip I took to the beach, which was the perfect time to test Trip Forecasts, version 2.0’s signature new feature. The problem Trip Forecasts solves is a common one. Your weather app is likely set to show you the weather where you live. So, when a trip is approaching, you find yourself repeatedly searching for the weather at your destination as you plan your trip, or you save the destination in your weather app, which will probably join a long list of other locations of past trips.

With Trip Forecasts, you set your home location, pick your destination and travel dates, and add an icon and optional nickname to represent the trip. Then, when you return to the app’s forecast view, your trip will show up automatically in the forecast timeline with the icon and nickname to distinguish it from your home weather before and after your trip. The feature is simple but elegantly implemented, with a design that highlights one of the reasons we awarded Mercury Weather this year’s MacStories Selects Best Design Award.

• Mercury Weather website
• Mercury Weather on the App Store
• MacStories review

Best Watch App

Broadcasts

Jonathan: Internet radio is an odd creature. Broadcasters like the BBC or NPR have public streams and apps available for their stations. However, apps like BBC Sounds have a pretty dire user experience. In the way that you can go to the Music app to listen to any music, there are very few good places to access all radio outside of, well, a radio. And Broadcasts.

For several years now, Broadcasts has provided a great user experience, allowing you to add any public stream to the app as a ‘station’. But developer Steve Troughton-Smith didn’t stop there. He’s continually added more features, supported more Apple platforms, and included new APIs as Apple introduced them – the latest being SharePlay.

Broadcasts released significant updates this past year to its iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and even tvOS apps, but the 3.3 update to the watchOS app caught our eye for this award.

First, the watchOS app received a complete redesign. It’s nothing too complicated, but that’s the beauty. It takes advantage of the entire screen in the way that the Music app has in watchOS 10. It pushes everything to the edges, leaving more space for the artwork and station info. That artwork creates a blurred background, creating a beautifully clean UI. This artwork can then change to reflect the song on the radio station due to the Shazam integration in the iOS app.

The other part of the app allows you to view your stations in a visually appealing grid or if you have a lot of stations, an easily scrollable list. And that’s it. The app doesn’t need to be anything more than that because, as well as the elegant UI, it’s blazingly fast. Tap a radio station, and it will almost instantly start playing from a stream. That includes cellular, something that Apple Watch streaming apps often struggle with. I switched to Broadcasts to listen to my favorite radio station, BBC 6 Music, because the differences in speed between Broadcasts and the BBC Sounds app were night and day. Embarrassingly so.

Broadcasts does one core task, listening to Internet radio, and it does so with a clean UI and at great speed, whether over cellular, Wi-Fi, or in partnership with the iOS app. That is why we are awarding Broadcasts the MacStories Selects award for Best Apple Watch App of 2023.

• Broadcasts website
• Broadcasts on the App Store
• MacStories article

Best Watch App Runner-Up

John: Flighty came to the Apple Watch later than many of the apps I use, but when it debuted this past fall, it didn’t disappoint. The Watch app opens to a list view of all the flights that you’ve previously saved on another device. Tap one, and you’re presented with the signature card-like interface of watchOS 10.

Flightly includes three views for each flight. A progress view that displays the start and endpoints of your journey, airline, flight number, and takeoff and landing dates and times. Once the flight takes off, the ring around that information fills in, giving you a quick visual indicator of its progress. The second and third cards are dedicated to more detailed departure and arrival information, such as whether the flight is on time, the departing gate, and where you can pick up your luggage. The app also includes a setting for including or excluding friends’ flights from the Watch app, which is a nice way to help manage your list of flights.

Of course, Flighty also includes complications to check the progress of flights at a glance. I found that the app’s simple circular complication that tracks the progress of an arriving flight was perfect for quick glances over Thanksgiving when I was picking my kids up from the airport.

The one thing that I’d like to see added to Flighty’s Watch app in the future is the ability to add flights from your Watch. Especially if you already know the airline code and flight number of the flight you want to track, adding it and a date via the Watch strikes me as workable, even on the Apple Watch’s small screen. That said, Flighty’s first foray into watchOS is a fantastic start that is both useful and in line with the app’s reputation for design excellence, which is why we chose it as a runner-up for this year’s MacStories Selects Best Watch App award.

• Flighty Website
• Flighty on the App Store

Best Mac App

Mimestream

John: The greatest compliment I can give Mimestream, which I reviewed earlier this year, is that I’m willing to use it, even though it’s only available on the Mac. That’s not a big deal for everyone, but I work across my Mac, iPad Pro, and iPhone every day, and switching email apps depending on which platform I’m using isn’t ideal, especially since nothing on iOS or iPadOS comes close to Mimestream on the Mac. It’s Mimestream’s meticulous commitment to quality that makes me willing to wait for its promised iOS and iPadOS app.

Mimestream only works with Gmail, so it’s not an app for everyone. However, it just so happens that all but one of my email addresses are Gmail-based. I’ve never been a fan of Gmail’s web app, and using Gmail in a traditional email client often means foregoing some of its unique features. Historically, another option was to find a third-party app that integrated with Gmail. I’ve tried a lot of those over the years, but none ever stuck because most were non-native web wrappers that are little more than a skin on top of Gmail.com.

Mimestream is different. The app is made by a small team led by a former Apple engineer who worked on Apple’s Mail app. That lineage shows. There are echoes of Mail throughout, but Mimestream takes email even further. The app is a thoroughly native app that uses Google’s latest Gmail APIs to offer fast, reliable messaging that takes advantage of the features that make Gmail different.

The app supports a long list of modern email features like:

• Undo send
• An experimental client-side snooze feature
• Tracking prevention
• Templates
• Google Calendar and Contacts integration
• Message labeling
• Conversation threading
• Automatic message categorization

However, my favorite feature is profiles, which lets you manage multiple Gmail addresses in user-defined groups. I’ve got ‘Personal’ and ‘Work’ profiles, which is probably the most obvious use case for profiles, but there are plenty of other ways to organize messages, so you’re not faced with one monolithic inbox full of messages when all you want to do is deal with work messages, for example.

Mimestream includes extensive customization options.

Another excellent feature is the ability to set up Gmail message filters inside Mimestream’s settings. I use filters to do things like separate new app beta testing invitations from the many beta update emails I get from TestFlight. The new betas get a special label that makes it far easier to find those messages among the many TestFlight messages I get every day.

Aside from iOS and iPadOS versions of Mimestream, I’d also love to see Mimestream adopt deep-linking of messages and Shortcuts support. It’s possible to copy Gmail URLs that open messages on the web, but I’m using Mimestream because I prefer it over Gmail’s web interface, so a URL that opens Mimestream would be better. Shortcuts support would also allow me to integrate Mimestream with apps like task managers and other apps I use alongside my email client.

I love the ability to create multiple email profiles.

Those limitations aside, there hasn’t been an email app I’ve ever tried on any platform that outshines Mimestream. It maintains a carefully considered balance between power user features and a robust native UI, combined with Google’s latest Gmail APIs that transcend Gmail as a service. That makes Mimestream one of a handful of Mac apps that I consider essential to my everyday work and why we’ve named it the 2023 MacStories Selects Best Mac App.

• Mimestream website
• MacStories review

Best Mac App Runner-Up

Niléane: In 2023, for the first time in two years, Bartender received a major new update. Bartender had already established itself as a must-have for any Mac users who need to declutter their menu bar.

Now, not only was Bartender 5 a great maintenance update that allowed it to run seamlessly on macOS Sonoma, but it also introduced some impressive new advanced features, along with fun new options to fully customize the menu bar’s appearance. The lovely new menu bar style settings make it possible to change the color of the menu bar, add a border or drop shadow, or even change the way it fills the top part of your screen.

In addition to the new style options, Bartender 5 lets you group multiple icons together, and the app has made its triggers even more powerful than before. You can now use AppleScript to dynamically rearrange icons in your menu bar, even going as far as automatically switching between entire menu bar presets. Thanks to this, Bartender allows me to hide the battery icon when my MacBook is plugged in, hide the music icon when none is playing, show the Time Machine icon when a backup is in progress, and even show a completely empty menu bar when ‘Do Not Disturb’ is enabled.

I honestly cannot imagine being able to enjoy my MacBook Air’s 13-inch display to the same extent without Bartender, and the many ways it helps me efficiently use the limited space to the right of the notch. The app has solidified itself as a super advanced tool for anyone who needs it to be, but it is still the simple utility that handles your overflowing menu bar icons for you. For this reason alone, Bartender 5 is easy to recommend to anyone running a Mac.

• Bartender 5 website
• MacStories article

Best Design

Mercury Weather

Niléane: As an aspiring weather enthusiast, I love trying out new weather apps, especially ones that provide a plethora of data points and graphs in their user interface. But it’s not often that a weather app like Mercury Weather manages to catch my attention. Contrary to many other weather apps, Mercury Weather is a modern app that is designed to be both beautiful and delightfully simple.

Mercury Weather uses a palette of elegant gradients to illustrate the current temperature and conditions. Combined with a great use of typography and generous white space, the forecast is always a pleasure to read. Even on a hazy day, the app feels joyful. My favorite aspect of Mercury Weather’s design is how it lays out the forecast on a neat graph line, which combines the temperature, condition, and precipitation probability in a way that never looks too crowded. This makes it easy to tell at a glance whether it’s about to get colder or warmer, and whether you should take an umbrella with you before heading out. The app’s fantastic design is the perfect showcase for how to present the right amount of basic data points in a way that remains digestible and easy to read.

Mercury Weather’s refinement can be appreciated on all of Apple’s platforms. The app makes great use of horizontal space on iPadOS, and its forecast graph is available right from the menu bar on macOS. Mercury Weather also takes advantage of the new interactive widgets in iOS 17, and even offers a large selection of small widgets in StandBy mode, which stand out with their colorful icon set.

With the addition of trip forecasts this summer, Mercury Weather has achieved an impressive balance between being a helpful weather companion on the road, and having a clear, well-thought-out user interface. The app has found its way into my collection of weather apps, outshining even the most advanced few of them solely by virtue of its beautiful design.

• Mercury Weather on the App Store
• MacStories article

Best Design Runner-Up

Matter

John: I try new reading apps all the time. Most of my reading happens in an RSS client or read-later app, so I’m always on the lookout for something that improves my setup in some way. For the past couple of years, that’s increasingly meant trying an ever-expanding universe of read-later apps.

At one point or another, I’ve tried virtually every read-later app, but since Matter abandoned its social sharing focus to refocus on its core reading experience, it’s become the app that I come back to again and again. A big part of that is that Matter gets the fundamentals right. The text parser is excellent, and there are multiple ways to organize and rediscover articles you’ve saved for later.

However, the other piece of the puzzle is design, which is why Matter is our runner-up for this year’s MacStories Selects Best Design award. Matter doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. Instead, it focuses on the reading experience. There’s no one thing that elevates the experience of reading in Matter over other apps. The combination of tasteful typography and a layout that preserves bylines, publication dates, and publisher information makes a great first impression. But features like the many ways to sort, filter, and tag saved stories, along with syncing to the furthest-read spot in an article, set Matter apart. It’s a design that isn’t just about saving links or processing data. It’s also one that understands readers and the experience of reading.

Dark mode on an iPad mini is the best way to read in Matter.

One place where I think Matter’s design falls short is its lack of integration with other apps and platforms. Matter has a single Shortcuts action to add articles to your queue, but none to send them to another app. Also, the app’s excellent audio feature for reading articles aloud doesn’t let you send the audio to another app for listening or offer an Apple Watch app or CarPlay support.

That said, there is no better way to read a longform article you saved for later than sitting down with Matter on an iPad mini. Everything about it feels like a premium experience, free from the noise that probably surrounded the article on the web, making it my favorite way to read in 2023.

• Matter website
• Matter on the App Store
• MacStories review

Readers’ Choice

Ivory

Niléane: This year’s Readers’ Choice award comes as no surprise. When Ivory by Tapbots launched in January, Twitter was crumbling, and entire communities were scrambling to find a new home. Ivory immediately materialized Mastodon’s potential to be a prime candidate for becoming one of the main new places to hang out online, delivering what we believe to be the best-designed experience for using the decentralized platform.

Building on a decade-strong foundation, Tapbots has crafted the app with a rarely matched level of care and refinement, and has incorporated advanced features in Ivory — like timeline filters, and a customizable UI — right from the beginning. Not only that, but since Federico first reviewed the app, Tapbots has steadily been keeping up with Mastodon’s evolving feature set. Today, Ivory almost allows you to use and configure your Mastodon account without ever having to rely on the web interface — which is not something that can easily be said for many other Mastodon apps. The app is fast, smooth, and its thoughtful use of gestures, haptics, and beautiful iconography make it a delightful experience.

As a result, Ivory has become a staple of Mastodon’s ecosystem in only a matter of months. The app has helped thousands of users make the transition to Mastodon and the Fediverse, and Ivory’s design has even directly inspired the developers behind Mastodon in revamping the search experience on the Web.

After launching on the Mac in May, and now closing in on its first-year anniversary, Ivory’s lovely design and popularity naturally crown it this year’s top choice for browsing Mastodon on Apple’s platforms — and, with more and more platforms adopting ActivityPub, the protocol used by Mastodon, we can only envision a bright future ahead for Tapbots’ new flagship app.

• Ivory website
• Ivory on the App Store
• Ivory for iOS review
• Ivory for Mac review

App of the Year

Widgetsmith

Federico: Few indie developer stories are as remarkable, heartwarming, and inspiring as the story of David Smith, also known in our community as ‘Underscore’.

Smith has been making apps for Apple devices since the launch of the App Store in 2008, and he’s consistently been at the forefront of integrating with the latest Apple technologies, device screen sizes, and new platforms. After a decade of work on apps that ran the gamut of functionalities – from audiobooks and pedometers to podcast clients and time zone calculators – Smith found his “overnight success” in 2020 with Widgetsmith, a utility that took advantage of iOS 14’s Home Screen widgets to let users customize the most important pages on their iPhones with all kinds of elements such as text, calendar events, photos, and more. The app took off, became a viral sensation, and has grown over the years into a piece of software that’s been downloaded over 100 million times from the App Store. But it wasn’t an overnight success: it was the result of over a decade of quality work that put Smith in the right place, at the right time. As the saying goes, fortune favors the prepared mind. And Smith, as is always the case with his apps, was prepared.

To be honest with you, dear readers, we could have given an award to Widgetsmith years ago, and it would have been well deserved. But I’m glad we waited until iOS 17’s interactive Home Screen widgets because the Widgetsmith we have today is a more powerful, more intuitive, and more useful tool that takes Home Screen customization for iPhone and iPad to the next level, in a way the original Widgetsmith for iOS 14 never could.

Widgetsmith for iOS 17.

Thanks to widget interactivity in iOS and iPadOS 17, Smith has been able to turn Widgetsmith into a modular playground for system features that you can put on the Home Screen with the design you choose. Perhaps you want to create an interactive calendar widget that lets you view events for the day you select in the widget; Widgetsmith lets you do that. Or maybe you want to have a compact weather forecast with the ability to switch between hourly and daily predictions from the same widget; Widgetsmith also lets you do that. It gets even better if you’re an Apple Music user: in an incredible throwback to the days of the iPod and iTunes, Widgetsmith now comes with a new Cover Flow-inspired widget that lets you flick through albums and playlists to start playing them directly from the Home Screen. It’s wild.

It’s kind of scary to consider the amount of options for colors, layouts, fonts, and types of widgets that are now available in Widgetsmith and that have been augmented by the addition of inline interactivity. And I haven’t even mentioned the app’s integration with StandBy – another area of iOS that you can fully customize with Widgetsmith now – its seasonal theme updates, or its series of ongoing updates, which included, among other things, a monthly calendar widget that lets you select individual days on the right side to view events on the left.

There are hundreds of other widget apps on the App Store, but there’s nothing else quite like Widgetsmith. The app strikes a unique balance of visual theming and power-user features that are presented in an easy-to-use, reliable, well-designed experience made by someone who clearly understands the ins and outs of the platforms he’s developing for. That’s the kind of quality only 15 years of experience and iteration can buy.

Widgetsmith has revolutionized how people think of their Home Screens, and it’s doing it again with iOS and iPadOS 17. For all these reasons, Widgetsmith is our App of the Year.

• Widgetsmith website
• Widgetsmith on the App Store
• MacStories article

App of the Year Runner-Up

Federico: What else can I say about Ivory that hasn’t already been said in other sections of this very story? Tapbots’ magnificent comeback to the App Store has, at least for me, redefined my approach to a timeline-based social network. I know that the whole point of Mastodon and decentralized networks is the ability to use whatever client you prefer, but when I think of using Mastodon on Apple devices, I think of Ivory.

Ivory for iPad.

Like other apps we’ve awarded before, there’s something special about Ivory that makes me return to the app every time I try something else. Maybe it’s the polished, fun design imbued with personality by longtime Tapbots designer Mark Jardine. Maybe it’s the buttery-smooth scrolling and overall performance made possible by developer Paul Haddad’s experience with social timelines and Apple platforms. Or maybe it’s the combination of all these factors that turn Ivory into an experience that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Ivory may have not reinvented the classic Tweetbot look, and there are still a lot of features Tapbots should add to match the functionality of more versatile competitors, but Ivory is the new app I’ve used most in 2023, and it deserves recognition in this category as well.

• Ivory website
• Ivory on the App Store
• MacStories article

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of the Pixelmator Team’s image editing apps at MacStories. A lot of our coverage in recent years has focused on Pixelmator Pro and Photomator, but long before those apps ever hit the App Store, there was just plain Pixelmator, an app that’s still available on the iPhone and iPad, and I still use regularly.

Pixelmator debuted on the Mac in the fall of 2007. Here’s how the Pixelmator Team described the release on its blog:

Pixelmator Team today released Pixelmator 1.0, GPU-powered image editing tool that provides everything needed to create, edit, and enhance still images.

Built from the ground up on a combination of open source and Mac OS X technologies, Pixelmator features powerful selection, painting, retouching, navigation, and color correction tools, and layers-based image editing, GPU-powered image processing, color management, automation, and transparent HUD user interface for work with images.

It’s fun to look back at the app’s launch page with its focus on the iSight camera, iPhoto, and the latest Mac OS X technologies like Core Image and Open GL. It feels dated now, but the fundamentals that made Pixelmator an exciting new app in 2007 are just as important for the app and the Pixelmator Team’s other apps today as they were then.

Early promotional shots of Pixelmator.

Pixelmator has always focused on GPU-powered image editing. In 2007, that meant supporting PowerPC and Intel-based Macs to squeeze as much performance out of Pixelmator as possible. Today’s Macs are vastly different, allowing the Pixelmator Team to increasingly move into machine learning-based editing with features like Pixelmator Pro’s Super Resolution and ML Enhance.

Another feature touted by Pixelmator on that original launch page that I had forgotten was deep automation support via Automator. The same commitment can be seen in Pixelmator Pro today, which includes an extensive set of Shortcuts actions that few other apps can match. It’s a reflection of the Pixelmator Team’s early understanding that its apps are often used as part of workflows that rely on other apps – an all-too-rare approach by developers.

A few years later, Pixelmator was one of the earliest apps on the Mac App Store, where it saw early success, with $1 million in sales in 20 days. Throughout those early days, the Pixelmator Team continued to refine the app, shipping new features, adding tools like Content-Aware fill, a healing tool, and improved drawing tools.

Editing in today’s Pixelmator on the iPhone.

Pixelmator’s development continued unabated on the Mac in the years that followed. In the meantime, Apple released the iPad, a canvas that felt like a natural fit for an app like Pixelmator. That became a reality in 2014, with an iPhone version following less than a year later.

Pixelmator has since been replaced on the Mac with Pixelmator Pro, an app I rely on for editing many of the images on MacStories. The Pixelmator Team has also expanded its lineup to include Photomator, an excellent photo editor for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

For a time, it seemed inevitable that Pixelmator Pro for the iPhone and iPad would be the next shoe to drop, but it hasn’t, much to the consternation of some users. Instead, the original Pixelmator app for the iPhone and iPad has continued to evolve. The latest version has a new, more modern design, a faster Metal-based editing engine, and support for Pixelmator Pro files.

Editing in Pixelmator on the iPad.

Pixelmator may not be on par with what can be accomplished with Pixelmator Pro on a Mac, but it’s an app that has stood the test of time for those of us with limited image editing needs. Pixelmator was one of the first apps on iPadOS to support layered image editing, and for that, it’s still one of the easiest to use. I’m a fan of what Affinity and Adobe have done on the iPad, but most of my needs are still met by Pixelmator all these years since its introduction. The app is simple to use and intuitive, without the learning curve that I’ve experienced with other image editors. So, while I hope Pixelmator Pro makes its way to the iPhone and iPad eventually, I also hope Pixelmator hangs around to address the sort of editing it does so well.

It’s remarkable how much the Pixelmator Team got right with its first release on the Mac. They saw a GPU-powered path that allowed them to create a sophisticated image editor with native Mac controls and deep support for automation. That legacy has extended to its other apps on every platform and is why Pixelmator remains a great choice on iOS and iPadOS nearly a decade after its debut.

Not everyone is a graphics pro, but everyone needs to edit images from time to time, whether that’s for your work or in your personal life. With Pixelmator, the Pixelmator Team recognized that those people weren’t being served by the existing apps on the market. For that and the app’s legacy that’s reflected in Pixelmator Pro and Photomator, Pixelmator deserves to be recognized with 2023’s MacStories Selects Lifetime Achievement Award.

• Pixelmator website
• Pixelmator on the App Store
• MacStories review

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

Source: Annapurna Interactive.

Stray, a high-profile and well-regarded videogame that debuted in 2022, is now available on the Mac. Initially launched on PlayStation and Windows, followed by an Xbox version this past August, today’s Mac release is available on both the Mac App Store and Steam.

The game, created by BlueTwelve Studio and published by Annapurna Interactive, is set in a neon-lit, post-apocalyptic cityscape where you play as a cat. Thrown into an unfamiliar environment, your goal is to solve the mysteries of a dangerous rundown city aided by a flying robot named B-12.

Stray was generally well-received by reviewers, who appreciated how BlueTwelve imbued its cat protagonist with personality and captured life-like cat movement and behavior. As a result, it’s unsurprising that the number of systems on which you can enjoy Stray’s feline adventures has continued to expand.

I played Stray when it debuted on the PlayStation 5 and enjoyed it. The game’s controls are relatively simple, and the story isn’t terribly long, but the puzzles are challenging, and the cyberpunk visuals are stunning. It’s been a while since I last dipped into Stray, but the game was one of my favorites of 2022, so when I got the chance to play it a day before the launch, I jumped at the opportunity.

I’ve only had time to play Stray on the Mac for a few hours, navigating through the introductory scene and the early part of the game, so this isn’t a review. However, as someone familiar with the console version, I thought I’d share my early impressions playing on my M1 Max Mac Studio and my M1 MacBook Air.

Stray struggled in the opening scenes on my M1 MacBook Air.

I didn’t have high hopes for the M1 MacBook Air, and my instincts were correct. Stray may be rated on the App Store for the M1 and above, but the game is too much for Apple’s entry-level, first-generation M1 Mac to handle. I fiddled with the graphics settings, but even when I set Effects, Shadow, Texture, and Mesh Quality to low, I rarely hit 30 fps. Also, playing Stray was one of the few times my MacBook Air got noticeably warm on my lap. It clearly was struggling.

My Mac Studio fared much better. I cranked the settings up to see how it did and was happy to see that I was getting around 60 fps with occasional small dips in the heart of the game. However, that isn’t to say that there weren’t issues. Sometimes, the game would freeze as I passed a checkpoint, and the game autosaved my progress. I saw short freezes in a few other spots where the M1 Max seemed to have trouble keeping up with the action, too. Dialing back some graphics settings seemed to help but didn’t entirely eliminate the issues. For a game like Stray, that wasn’t a deal breaker because most of the game involves exploring and solving puzzles, but it was distracting.

It wasn’t flawless, but Stray was much more playable on my M1 Max Mac Studio.

Most of my testing was spent with MetalFX upscaling turned on. There’s a second option called ‘Built In,’ which worked a little better than MetalFX in some scenes, but in the short time I’ve had to play so far, the differences weren’t substantial.

Interestingly, Stray struggled the most in the opening sequence of events that set up the game’s premise. On the Air, frame rates dipped into the teens, making for a rough experience. The Mac Studio did far better, but it, too, struggled a bit. Once I was to Dead City, the game’s second chapter, the graphics smoothed out noticeably and were every bit as gorgeous as the console version.

Memory wasn’t a constraint in my testing. I saw usage climb to between 7 and 8GB on my Mac Studio after playing for about an hour, but with 64GB available, I had plenty of room to spare. My MacBook Air’s 16GB of memory wasn’t an issue on that system either.

Although the minimum target chipset for Stray is the M1, based on my experience, I wouldn’t recommend playing it on the lowest end of the M1 spectrum. Perhaps the developers can tune the game to play better on those systems in the future, but currently, you’re better off playing on a console unless you have a beefier Mac. Stray wasn’t perfect on my M1 Max, either, but the handful of issues I had were minor and didn’t prevent me from enjoying the game. Also, it stands to reason that the experience would be better on an M2 or M3 Mac, but I haven’t tested the game with Apple’s latest systems.

Stray supports third-party controllers on the Mac, which worked well in my testing. I connected an Xbox controller, and with Stray running in macOS Sonoma’s Game Mode, everything ran smoothly and responsively.

However, it’s worth noting that you can’t save your progress in Stray between multiple Macs, which I’d like to see added in the future. I’d also love to see iPhone and iPad versions of Stray released in the future. That said, if you haven’t played Stray before and have a Mac capable of running it at a consistently high frame rate, the Mac version is worth a look.

Stray is available on the Mac App Store for $29.99 and Steam for $19.79 as part of a limited-time sale.

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Artwork source: Procreate.

I’ve been playing with Procreate Dreams for about a week. The brand new animation app from Procreate shares a lot of DNA with the company’s flagship drawing and painting app. As a result, despite my limited time and scant artistic talents, I expect Procreate Dreams will be a hit.

Procreate made a name for itself with artists with its gesture-driven, hands-on approach to art. By focusing on gestures, the company’s first app puts your artwork front and center, providing the maximum context for what you’re working on and reducing distractions. The approach also encourages interacting with the app’s canvas in a natural, fluid way.

Artwork source: Procreate.

That same approach is the hallmark of Procreate Dreams. The app tackles animation in much the same way Procreate reimagined drawing and painting on an iPad. The tools at your fingertips are deep and sophisticated but get out of the way of your creation. At times, the discoverability of features suffers a little as a result, but after spending some time tapping UI elements, long-pressing to reveal context menus, and experimenting with multi-finger gestures, Dreams reveals itself, rewarding the curious who take the time to learn what it can do.

All of the familiar Procreate brushes and tools are available in Dreams. Artwork source: Procreate.

Procreate Dreams, which has been in development for five years, offers multiple ways to create 2D animation. The full suite of Procreate brushes and tools is available to artists. For anyone who has used Procreate before, this is the perfect place to start with Dreams because it will immediately feel like home. However, underlying those familiar brushes is a new and more powerful painting engine that allows for larger canvases and more complex artwork, giving the app room to grow into the future.

Dreams also introduces a new way to animate called Performing, which allows artists to record the movement of their creations using touch. Tap record and drag a selected item on the app’s stage, and Procreate Dreams will add keyframes and paths automatically, simplifying the process of bringing your artwork to life.

Artwork source: Procreate.

Other edits can be accomplished from the timeline, which supports multiple layers, manual keyframing, cel animation, video editing and compositing, and more, all using gestures to access features and select content. When you put it all together, there’s a lot going on, but it works smoothly thanks to Apple’s Metal framework running on Apple silicon.

You’re not limited to hand-drawn animation on a blank canvas, either. Dreams supports video, to which you can add an animation layer and edit, crop, zoom, pan, and more. Separate audio tracks can be added, too.

I plan to spend some quality time in Procreate Dreams over the holidays. Drawing apps has never been my forté, and drawing on a timeline adds an additional element of complexity. However, Dreams isn’t like any other animation app I’ve tried before. My familiarity with Procreate gave me a head start, easing me into unfamiliar territory. That’s a big advantage for the app and an even bigger one for anyone who has ever wanted to try their hand at animation.

Procreate Dreams is available on the App Store as a one-time purchase for $19.99.

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

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

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

I have always been a huge fan of city-building games. The first video game I ever played was SimCity 3000, on my uncle’s bulky PC running Windows 2000. I then went on to play SimCity 4 throughout middle and high school. Sadly, EA’s reboot of the franchise in 2013 was a sizable disappointment, and has lead fans to love Cities: Skylines instead, a newcomer to the genre.

Cities: Skylines was released in 2015 simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I have fond memories of playing the game on my newly purchased 13-inch MacBook Pro. It was my companion during numerous train trips I took across France and Germany that winter. Although the MacBook Pro’s battery would probably have been depleted in 20 minutes if it were not for the presence of power plugs in most trains, the fact that it launched and ran on my Mac without compromise was impressive.

I was eagerly looking forward to the release of Cities: Skylines 2 this year. After reading a number of positive reviews, I knew I would want to play the game as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Paradox Interactive threw a wrench in my plans: Cities: Skylines 2 is currently exclusive to Windows, and the company has not yet announced any plans to release the game on macOS.

This year at WWDC, Apple released the Game Porting Toolkit, a software translation layer that can help game developers easily port their Windows games to the Mac. It seemed the toolkit was allowing users to launch their favorite Windows games on their Mac with surprising ease. Intrigued, I wanted to test it out to see if I could play Cities: Skylines 2 on my M2 MacBook Air.

Getting started first meant I had to keep a handful of basic understandings in mind:

• Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit is a tool primarily aimed at developers to help them port their games to macOS. Apple is not expecting end users to use it to launch Windows games on their Mac.
• Although the Game Porting Toolkit seems to have a high success rate at running Windows games, sometimes with little to no additional configuration needed, there was absolutely no promise that it was going to work for me here.
• The Game Porting Toolkit is leveraging well-known technology that has already been used on other platforms for years. Valve’s Proton is a similar translation layer that allows Windows games to run on the Linux-powered Steam Deck console. Both the Game Porting Toolkit and Proton are based on Wine. Wine is an even older software translation layer that allows you to run Windows software on Linux and macOS.

One of the first Google search results lead me to an article on AppleGamingWiki.com, describing the process of installing the Game Porting Toolkit (GPTK) and how to use it to launch a game. This was both a frightening sight, because that article is full of Terminal commands, and a relieving one, because I immediately knew that everything about this process was going to be well documented.

The article quickly mentions an automated tool, the Game Porting Toolkit Installer by InstallAware, that simplifies the process of installing all the requirements for the GPTK and installing the GPTK itself, without having to deal with Terminal commands. The tool can also be used to launch Windows games by selecting a Windows executable file (.exe) you have previously downloaded. Sadly, this was a short-lived experiment. While it allowed me to install the Windows version of Steam, it was never able to actually launch it — a necessary step if I was going to try to play any of my Steam library games.

InstallAware’s opensource automated tool successfully installed the Game Porting Toolkit…

… but it was never able to launch Steam.

I probably could have tried troubleshooting this for a while, but I felt motivated to try another tool I quickly stumbled upon during my research. So I went ahead and removed all the files and folders that were previously created by my failed attempt, and I started from scratch, this time using Whisky.

Whisky is truly impressive. It is a modern, open-source Mac app, written in SwiftUI, that provides a graphical user interface for both Wine and the Game Porting Toolkit. The app is incredibly easy to install. It automates the process of installing everything you need, even ensuring Rosetta 2 is properly installed if it is not already present on your Mac. Even better: Whisky can let you maintain multiple Windows configurations side by side, which is perfect if you need to keep a separate Windows XP configuration to run an older game that doesn’t behave well with a Windows 10 set up.

Whisky makes sure Rosetta is installed, and lets you install the Game Porting Toolkit with just a click.

Perhaps thanks to Whisky’s more exhaustive way of checking for dependencies, I had no problem installing and launching the Windows version of Steam. The process was as simple as clicking ‘Run…’ in Whisky’s main window, then selecting the Windows installation file for Steam.

Now that I was logged into Steam, I could begin downloading and installing Cities: Skylines 2, which requires a minimum of 56 GB of available storage space. Although the M2 MacBook Air I was using for this experiment only had a tiny 256 GB SSD, I still had approximately 65 GB of free space, which should have been sufficient for the game. Despite this, Steam kept preventing me from proceeding, and reported that I only had less than 300 MB of free space. Even weirder: Steam kept reporting a different value every time I re-launched it. Unable to find a solution online, I kept restarting Whisky and Steam, hoping each time that Steam would report a big enough number to let me download the game.

Even with 65 GB of available storage space on my MacBook Air, Steam would think that I only had 400 MB of free space, and would not let me download the game.

After a while, and after getting rid of the biggest files resting in my Downloads folder, it was finally happening. I was downloading Cities: Skylines 2 on my Mac. As a Steam notification popped up in the bottom right corner of my screen to indicate that the game was ready to launch, I was already envisioning myself spending the entire night constructing my brand-new city.

I could finally click Play to launch Cities: Skylines 2…

… but my troubles were not over.

When I tried to launch the game for the first time, Paradox Interactive’s launcher failed to install. After a bit of Googling, I found out that I had to install Microsoft’s .NET framework for the launcher to work, with one last manipulation: clicking ‘Winetricks…’ in Whisky’s main window, then entering dotnet48 win10.

The Paradox Launcher was now working. I thought I was almost there.

Unfortunately, after all this trouble, I am sad to report that the game itself would not launch. Instead, I was only greeted with a black screen, which was quickly followed by a crash dialog.

A few hours after this attempt, I discovered that I was not the only person encountering this issue. So far, and still as of writing, it seems that no one has been able to successfully launch Cities: Skylines 2 on a Mac. Until the game is officially released for macOS, I will keep an eye on this matter to see if anyone finds a way to make the game work. However, for now, I stand defeated.

Not all is dark, though. Out of curiosity, I tried using Whisky to launch a handful of other games from my small Steam library: out of those, Stardew Valley, Euro Truck Simulator 2, and Kerbal Space Program all seemed to launch and run fine. I even had a lot of fun discovering that I could resume my 5-year-old career save in Euro Truck Simulator 2 on ‘Ultra’ graphical settings.

Thanks to Whisky, I was able to resume my 5-year-old career save in Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 isn’t the most demanding game, but I was pleased to see it could run on its highest graphical settings with no issues on the M2 MacBook Air.

Stardew Valley can run natively on macOS, but installing the Windows version allowed me to resume an old save I had started on my previous Windows PC. Whisky is a great solution for running these lovely indie games that are not always available on macOS.

I have since been able to play Cities: Skylines 2 on my M2 MacBook Air via Nvidia’s cloud gaming service, GeForce Now. Although the service is a great solution, it requires a strong and reliable Internet connection. So I am yet to be able to recreate the satisfaction I felt in 2015 when I could tend to my city during my long train trips across France.

However, thanks to this tiny experiment, I discovered a great utility that I will now whip out every time I want to attempt to run a Windows-exclusive game on my Mac. This has also made me feel slightly more confident about a brighter future where most games can be played on a Mac without having to fiddle with Terminal commands — assuming more developers start taking advantage of Apple’s newest porting tools.

If you feel like experimenting with your favorite Windows games on your Mac, Whisky is a free and open-source app, available for all on GitHub.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

In my watchOS 9 Review last year, I spent the introduction reminiscing on the more exciting days of watchOS yore. Those early years were full of whimsy and foolishness, with many wild and ambitious new features that failed far more often than they succeeded. By my count, it took until watchOS 4 for Apple to find its footing, and by watchOS 6 the predictable pattern of iteration that I laid out last year had begun.

As I said last time, it’s hard to argue against the slow and steady march of watchOS. This software joined with the Apple Watch hardware has resulted in a years-long market domination that shows no sign of stopping. Yet, market be damned, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Health and fitness features were flourishing, but the rest of watchOS never quite felt fully baked.

As it turns out, Apple seems to have agreed.

In watchOS 10, for the first time in years, the iterative update pattern is broken. Rather than the usual handful of minor app updates, new watch faces, and health and fitness features, Apple has instead dropped another major rethink of Apple Watch interaction methods. The side button has been reassigned, the Dock has been demoted, apps have a new design language throughout the system, and widgets have made their Watch debut.

This is the largest year-over-year change to watchOS since version 4, and I am here for it. Let’s jump in and see if Apple has hit the mark this time, or if they’ll be back to the UI drawing board again in the years to come.

[table_of_contents]

The Dock and the Side Button

Where better to start than a hardware button reassignment? Across all of Apple’s products, a change to the software functionality of a physical button is a rare thing to see. The last time it happened was back in 2016, when Apple reassigned this same button in watchOS 3.

At that time, they were dumping the ignominious Friends interface in favor of the then-new watchOS Dock. Now, after a seven year run, the Dock is out too. Taking its place, for some reason: Control Center.

A single-click of the side button now opens Control Center, and a double-click of the Digital Crown now opens the Dock.

I really can’t say why Control Center is on the Side button. A hardware-bound Control Center does not match the pattern of any other Apple device. Even after months of using watchOS 10, I still look in the wrong place every time before remembering to press the button. I don’t think it’s a natural fit at all.

It feels like all of the core watchOS UI features decided to play a game of musical chairs. The new widgets interface sat down where Control Center used to be, Control Center snagged the seat by the Side button, and the Dock was left standing.

While it may have lost its seat, the Dock hasn’t left the party. It’s still hanging out in the back, now buried behind a double-click of the Digital Crown. Adding insult to injury, it has also lost half of its previous functionality. Despite retaining the name “Dock”, it’s now only a list of your most recently opened apps. The setting to manually choose a list of static “favorites” has been removed.

In this sense, the watchOS Dock is now far more akin to the iOS multitasking interface, right down to the Digital Crown double-click mirroring the old Home button double-click when opening these views. While I’m not sure why Apple is still bothering to title it “Dock”, I otherwise find this to be a fine place for the interface to land. I never used it enough to justify its prime position on the Side button, and based on this change, I’m guessing few others did either.

One complication associated with the Dock’s new position is that double-clicking the Digital Crown already had a behavior in watchOS. This action has long been used to automatically swap back and forth between two apps, or between an app and the watch face. I suppose that feature was the true loser of the musical chairs game, because it no longer exists at all. That said, the Dock is at least a logical successor here: if your muscle memory has you double-clicking the Crown to swap to the last app you used, then now you simply have an extra tap to complete the process of opening it.

I do wish Apple would make the watch face itself accessible from the Dock. In the old system, if you opened a single app and then wanted to hop right back to the watch face, the Digital Crown double-click action would make that happen instantly. Without the watch face showing up in the Dock though, the only method we’re left with is to press the Digital Crown, wait a few moments to make sure you aren’t going to register a double-click, and then press the Crown again. To me, that forced delay feels worse than it would to find the watch face in the Dock interface and tap it.

Control Center

Alright, we have to talk about Control Center. This interface, despite being elevated to the wildly excessive honor of direct hardware access, is entirely unchanged from last year. Not only that, but because Apple has been content to mostly ignore it for its entire existence, it continues to maintain the exact same set of flaws that I admonished it for seven years ago when it was first released. Since nothing has materially changed here, let me just quote myself from my watchOS 3 review in 2016:

Overall, I find Control Center for Apple Watch to be supremely underwhelming as a whole. In the last three months of using watchOS 3, I have only opened it two times with real needs for its functions. Both times were to make my iPhone ring when I couldn’t remember where I had left it in my house.

I’m not against the idea of the upward swipe being tied to Control Center at all, but what surprises and annoys me about the change is that the Now Playing screen is not a part of the new interface.

The “evolution” of Control Center from watchOS 4, to watchOS 8, to watchOS 10.

After seven years, I still only use Control Center to occasionally ring my lost iPhone. I’ve mostly left this interface alone in my last several reviews since it seemed like Apple was uninterested in improving it, and I didn’t feel the need to make the same argument over and over again. However, based on this year’s promotion, Apple has made it clear that they think Control Center is great exactly as it is. Moreover, they think it’s so good that it deserves an even more prominent position than the one it already had. I am here to disabuse them of that notion.

As far as user interfaces go, Control Center is totally fine. It’s a grid of nicely sized buttons that toggle various controls or execute useful utilities. Nothing fancy, but nothing problematic either. My problem with it has not changed since watchOS 3: it just isn’t useful enough to deserve the valuable real estate that it has possessed. If this was the case when said real estate was a swipe up from the watch face, it’s an order of magnitude more true when Control Center ascends from the user interface entirely and takes the throne of a hardware button.

It is such a rare and beautiful opportunity to get to assign a hardware button on an extremely popular device. Apple could have done anything here, including giving non-Ultra Apple Watch users access to the extremely cool customizable Action button. In that case, Apple Watch Ultra users would get two Action buttons, so everybody still wins. But, no, we’re all stuck with Control Center.

I also would have been fine with this change if Apple had done any work to improve Control Center in a way that made it deserving of its new station. Take the extremely obvious idea that I’ve been calling for since watchOS 3: put the Now Playing screen at the top of Control Center. I would love it if I could tap the Side button on my Apple Watch at any moment and immediately control playback of whatever is playing on my iPhone or other nearby devices. Every other Apple platform includes playback controls in their respective Control Centers, but watchOS — despite now having the most easily accessible Control Center of all platforms — does not.

Another quick and easy suggestion: add HomeKit controls to Control Center. Tap the Side button on my Apple Watch and instantly set a lighting scene in my home? Yes, please! How about an Apple TV remote, or buttons to set timers or alarms? I am not having original ideas here, I’m just opening Control Center on my iPhone and looking at what’s there.

For the time being, the Side buttons of all Apple Watch users will be wasted for at least the next year. I guess the good news is that the Side button was already being somewhat wasted on the Dock, and before that it was wasted on the Friends interface. Perhaps someday Apple will show us a good reason for why they even put the Side button on these devices in the first place.

Smart Stack

My disappointment with the Side button change aside, I actually really like what Apple has done with watchOS 10 overall. In particular, the all-new “Smart Stack” interface is a wonderful addition.

The Smart Stack is clearly a descendant of the old Siri watch face, which was a marquee feature in watchOS 4. Both interfaces are made up of the date and time hovering above a vertically-scrolling list of cards, with each card showing information from some app on your Apple Watch. The list is generated automatically, and tries to sort by the most relevant items at any given time.

Left: the Siri watch face in watchOS 5. Right: the new Smart Stack in watchOS 10.

The Siri watch face was a great idea, but I always believed it suffered from being a watch face as opposed to a more general-purpose feature for intelligently surfacing data on the Apple Watch. As I stated in my watchOS 6 review:

I’ve never really felt like the Siri watch face was solving the problem in the right way. If it truly lived up to its expectations then the Siri face would sanitize the Apple Watch experience. Everyone would have to use it or else sacrifice major functionality.

Exactly. The wide variety of watch faces are one of the main factors in making the Apple Watch a truly personal device. Locking everyone into the same Siri watch face in order to access the intelligent cards interface was antithetical to the Apple Watch experience. Apple seems to have come to the same conclusion, because the last time the Siri face received any notable attention was in watchOS 5.

I’m not sure why it took Apple five years to reimagine the Siri watch face in an improved form, but they’ve done it now, and their new solution solves nearly all of the problems I had with the original version. The Smart Stack has taken over Control Center’s old spot directly beneath the watch face. Swiping up on the watch face or turning the Digital Crown upward will slide in the new view. This works on any watch face¹, so you’re no longer forced to choose between advanced functionality and personalization.

The Smart Stack interface is very reminiscent of the Siri watch face, but with some notable improvements. First and foremost, you can now tap-and-hold on any card in the stack to access a new editing interface. This includes buttons in the corners to delete the card, or to manually pin it to the top of the list. There is also a large ‘+’ button at the top which you can use to manually add more cards to your stack.

If you don’t add anything manually, most cards will still appear programmatically when your Apple Watch thinks they’re relevant. But, the ability to add exactly what you like — particularly combined with pinning whatever is most important to you to the top — transforms this interface’s functionality from hit-or-miss to beautifully consistent. By default the Smart Stack will use machine learning to attempt to intelligently display what you want before you tell it, just like the Siri watch face did. But for those of us who are willing to put a bit more work into taking control of things, we are empowered to tell the interface what we want (or what we don’t want) when it inevitably gets something wrong.

This is exactly what I always asked for from the Siri face. Machine learning is great, but it’s impossible for it to guess what we want with 100% accuracy. Every time an “intelligent” interface fails to show us something we expect from it, it degrades trust and makes us less likely to think about consulting that interface next time (see: Siri).

Starting with machine learning is a great idea, because it allows new users to get some functionality out of the interface without having to put in any work up front. But as users adjust to it, successes become less special and failures become more jarring. Allowing us to build from the initial machine learning foundation with easy-to-use controls creates a perfect learning curve to help users build a system that works for them personally. This is exactly what the Smart Stack provides, and I love it.

As for the cards themselves, which have now officially received the title of “widgets”, they are made up of small composable data-only interfaces. For now, developers cannot make watchOS widgets interactive, although Apple’s own Now Playing widget does include a functional play/pause button, so hopefully a future update will enable widget interactivity for all watchOS apps.

In the meantime, watchOS widgets are like a far more evolved version of watchOS 1’s Glances. Rather than giant, full-screen views that were inefficient to navigate between, the Smart Stack’s widgets take up a little over one third of the screen. This allows you to fully see two widgets at a time, plus get a glimpse at those remaining in the stack below. Scrolling this interface with the Digital Crown is pleasant and efficient — it’s a great way to quickly move through data from a variety of different apps.

Apple also includes a single special widget that is made up of three circular watchOS complications. You can customize these by tapping and holding on the widget to bring up the Smart Stack’s editing interface. Use the small ‘x’ button to remove an existing complication, which then reveals a larger ‘+’ button to add a new one in its place. If you’d like to only keep one or two of the slots filled, just don’t replace a removed complication and the interface will adjust those remaining to be centered. watchOS apps need to have their complications updated to work with these new versions, so not all circular complications from older apps will be available.

The complications widget is a great addition to the Smart Stack. By default, it sits at the very bottom of the interface at all times. If you’d like quicker access to your three chosen apps though, you can pin it to keep it at (or closer to, depending on your pinning order) the top of the stack.

My one gripe with the Smart Stack is the top of the interface. When you first open it, you’re greeted with a static clock and date which take up fully half of the screen. Seeing as how you just came here from a watch face, re-showing the time is an enormous waste of screen real estate. The date is a bit more forgivable since not all watch faces show it, but I still don’t understand why Apple didn’t just put some customizable complications up here so that we could use this space however we want. Alternatively, they could place a button to open Control Center in this space, thus keeping it fairly easy to access while also freeing up the Side button to become an Action button.

Other than the date and time, I’m loving the Smart Stack. It’s a combination of so many old watchOS ideas which were not bad, but simply executed poorly. Now, finally, Apple has figured out an effective interface for showing quick bits of glanceable information from apps throughout the system, choosing and sorting those bits algorithmically, and still enabling their most invested users to make customizations. More of this everywhere, please.

New Systemwide Design Language

watchOS 10 includes a refreshed design language throughout the system. App interfaces have been expanded all the way to the screen edges, and most buttons have transitioned to circular icons which float above the interface layer. All of Apple’s first party apps have been upgraded to this new design.

I find the new design language to be an improvement across the board. The expanded interfaces and floating buttons create a very pleasant effect. The new buttons appear similar to circular complications from the watch face, making them feel instantly familiar and natural to use. It’s not all form over function either; the changes in many apps have resulted in more data being fit into the same screen real estate, or enabled better navigation or access to controls in more intuitive ways.

While we don’t need to go into all of them, we’ll take a quick look at the changes in a few different apps which are representative of the new design.

Now Playing

The Now Playing screen in the Audiobooks app in watchOS 9 (left) and watchOS 10 (right).

The Now Playing screen has been updated significantly, as have its embedded versions in the Audiobooks, Podcasts, and Music apps. Pictured above is the Audiobooks version, although they all look essentially the same. While the information density of this interface isn’t particularly improved, it certainly looks a lot nicer.

The AirPlay and playback speed controls have been moved to a menu behind the button in the top-right corner. While this technically removes some single-tap functionality, in practice I don’t think most users need either of these controls often enough for that to be a huge deal. Playback speed in particular made for easy accidental taps in the old design, which was quite annoying since you had to continue tapping until you cycled all the way back around to the speed that you wanted. The new control behind the menu includes ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons so that you can easily adjust speed back and forth.

Contacts

Viewing a contact in the Contacts app in watchOS 9 (left) and watchOS 10 (right).

The Contacts app has embraced Apple’s new Contact Posters feature, making for a far more dramatic interface than the older version. Despite the new full-bleed layout, Apple still managed to fit another button on the first page of the interface.

The incoming call screen in watchOS 10 sports a very similar interface, Contact Poster and all. These new interfaces make their year-ago versions look instantly outdated, and I am very much a fan of the changes.

Home

The Home app in watchOS 9 (left) and watchOS 10 (right).

The design changes to the Home app look initially quite subtle, but they represent something that Apple is doing across many apps on the system. By moving the page title from a huge word on the top left to a much smaller caption on the right, they’ve cleared up space to add nice navigation buttons in more areas of the interface.

For Home, Apple used this change to shake up the app’s hierarchy. Now rather than having to scroll all the way down your list of devices to get to other rooms, you instead just hit the back button to access a new screen with options to open a certain room or a list of scenes. Especially if you have more than 5 or so devices, this is a definite improvement over the previous setup.

Watch Faces

The first thing to note for watch faces in watchOS 10 is that you can no longer swipe from the edge of your screen to switch between them. Instead, you now need to first tap and hold to enter the edit view for watch faces, at which point you can switch to a different face and then tap to select it. I’m still not quite used to this change, but I think it’s the right move either way. I mostly only used the edge-swipe to get back to my main watch face whenever an accidental gesture changed it.

One of the most exciting things about the Smart Stack is that it unburdens the watch face from being the only avenue for customization and quick access to information on watchOS. Now that a quick swipe up or a spin of the Digital Crown can reveal a host of information and utility, the pressure is off for every watch face to support advanced features like complications.

I know that that pressure has never really stopped Apple from doing what it wants on watch faces, but for more advanced Apple Watch users, it always made most of the faces feel disqualified before they even had a chance. I certainly have a long history of criticizing watch faces for this very reason. Choosing a watch face with no or very few complications meant cutting yourself off from a significant amount of features on your Apple Watch.

The Smart Stack releases this tension. For the first time I feel free to experiment with low-utility watch faces, because even greater utility than complications ever granted is very easily accessible.

Obviously, complications still have a leg up for certain use cases due to their showing information with zero taps rather than first requiring a user interaction, but that now feels like a more scoped use case. Rather than deciding between having any access to easily accessible data from apps, you’re now just deciding on your willingness to interact with your device before seeing that data. If you need instantly glanceable info, there are tons of watch faces with complications. If you are okay with first spinning the Digital Crown before getting to that same info (and much more), you can now use any watch face you please. This is a far more reasonable set of tradeoffs to consider than it was before.

With all that in mind, let’s take our usual look at this year’s new watch faces.

Palette

There’s not too much to say about Palette. It’s a perfectly nice watch face which fits comfortably into the increasingly packed category of simple, colorful faces. Palette has four corner complications, and includes a vast array of colorization choices. The strongest advantage Palette holds over existing color-based watch faces is its nice effect when the always-on display is dimmed. Palette features multiple regions of color, each of which follows one of the hands around the watch face. When dimmed, the second hand’s colors disappear and leave behind a very nice sweeping gradient which goes from black to saturated as it catches up with the hour and minute hands. This effect is similar to the Gradient face’s dimmed mode, but I find Palette’s version more pleasing.

Snoopy

Finally, the main event. I’m as surprised to be writing this as any long-time followers of my watchOS reviews will be to read it, but I love the Snoopy watch face. I have been using it as my daily-driver face for nearly four months now, and I’m still not sick of it. This watch face is an absolute triumph of whimsical, amusing design.

The Snoopy watch face consists of two animated characters, Snoopy and Woodstock, from the Peanuts comic strip. Over the course of each day, whenever you raise your wrist, you’ll find Snoopy (and often, though not always, Woodstock) engaging in some form of shenanigans on your watch face. Amazingly, these characters will actively interact with the hour and minute hands on the watch face, no matter what time of day it may be. At midnight, Snoopy might slide down the hands like they’re a fire pole. Around the 15th or 45th minute of any given hour, you may find him napping on the minute hand.

Increasing the fun and intrigue is the fact that the animations can even depend on the weather, the current season, or what activity you’re currently doing. Going for swim? You may find Snoopy surfing a wave on your watch face. Raining outside? Snoopy’s popping open his umbrella. Fall has arrived? Snoopy is raking together a leaf pile.

There are at least 148 unique animations for this watch face, according to a fascinating inside look that GQ managed to land. That article also described the engineering feats it took to bring this watch face to life:

If you’re going to the effort of sketching out Snoopy as he rides his kibble bowl down the minute hand, that helter-skelter-style joyride needs to have the opportunity to show up more than once an hour. So Apple’s engineers created a whole scene layout engine that can rotate certain clips by six degrees every minute, as well as a Snoopy decision engine that figures out the optimal time to showcase them without too much repetition.

Excellent. And in practice, they nailed this. Sometimes when I’m bored, I’ll just look at a bunch of Snoopy animations in a row, and there is almost never a duplicate within those short timespans. Even after four months I don’t think I’ve seen all the tricks Snoopy has up his sleeves — just last week I saw at least two or three animations that I had never witnessed before (they were fall-based, so I think he’s still holding back some seasonal fun).

Adding even more fun to the equation is the watch face’s default “Sunday Surprise” color scheme. There isn’t much to the surprise (I had hoped for custom Sunday-only animations, but it’s more just charming than particularly surprising), but if you really don’t want it spoiled then you should skip the next paragraph.

While you can manually choose a colored background for the Snoopy face to hold at all times, if you leave it on Sunday Surprise then the background will be gray. There is also a dotted texture to it, making it appear like the newspapers that Peanuts was originally printed on. The Sunday Surprise is a tribute to Sunday comics, in which newspapers print a full-color comics section on Sundays. As such, every Sunday the Snoopy face will spend the day showing a different colorful background each time you raise your wrist.

Despite the relative subtlety of the Sunday Surprise, I’ve grown fond of it anyway. Maybe it’s the nature of my remote job making the days sort of blend together, but the Sunday Surprise always gives me a pleasant reminder that another week has begun. I smile every week the first time I see it on my wrist.

Unsurprisingly given the complex animations at play, the Snoopy watch face includes no complication slots. Last year this would have frustrated me, and I do still slightly wish that they’d managed to include one or two in the top corners (where the animations rarely make contact). That said, in the new age of the Smart Stack, this feels more like a minor inconvenience than a disqualifying factor.

I encourage everyone to at least give the Snoopy watch face a shot. I did so with little expectation that I’d keep it going forward, and I was tremendously surprised by how much I enjoyed it. There’s just something so very satisfying about these animations. After learning how much engineering effort went into them, I get where that satisfaction is coming from.

Health and Fitness

Despite the sweeping changes across watchOS 10, Apple still found time to make its annual advancements to health and fitness features in watchOS. This year, they focused on several areas: mental health, vision health, cycling workouts, and hiking features.

Mental Health

Apple is continuing to expand the Apple Watch Mindfulness app in watchOS 10. This year they have added a new ‘State of Mind’ option to the app, which seeks to help users monitor their mental wellbeing over time.

Users who want to take advantage of this new feature will need to get in the habit of opening the Mindfulness app on regular basis to log how they’re currently feeling. Once you’ve done so for the first time, the Mindfulness app will prompt you to enable reminder notifications two times daily. Each time you return, you can choose between logging how you’re feeling right now, or how you’ve felt on this day overall.

Whichever option you choose, you’ll be taken to an interface with a horizontally scrolling list of feelings. Starting at ‘Neutral’, you can scroll upward into negative feelings (‘Slightly Unpleasant’, ‘Unpleasant’, or ‘Very Unpleasant’), or downward into positive feelings (‘Slightly Pleasant’, ‘Pleasant’, or ‘Very Pleasant’). After picking one of these high-level feelings, the app will then ask ‘What best describes this feeling?’, and provide a variety of more descriptive single-word options for you to choose from, such as ‘Calm’, ‘Content’, ‘Indifferent’, or ‘Drained’, among many others. Finally, you’ll be asked ‘What’s having the biggest impact on you?’, from which you can pick from a long list of categories, including ‘Work’, ‘Health’, ‘Fitness’, and ‘Family’.

As you record State of Mind data, it will be aggregated into the Health app on your iPhone. You can find it by opening Health, navigating to ‘Show All Health Data’, and tapping into the ‘State of Mind’ category. This view will display your historical data, including in the form of a nicely plotted chart, so that you can start to get a sense of how you are feeling over time, and what’s causing these feelings.

Vision Health

Apple Watches running watchOS 10 will now track how much time you’re spending in the sunlight. This data is logged in the Health app, and can be a helpful new way to ensure you’re spending enough time outside. According to Apple, not spending enough time outdoors is the leading cause of nearsightedness in children, so this new metric may be particularly helpful for parents to ensure that their kids are maintaining their vision health.

Cycling

Via Apple.

For cyclists with both an Apple Watch and an iPhone, watchOS 10 and iOS 17 are pairing up this year to support a new Live Activity. Now when you start a cycling workout on your Apple Watch, a Live Activity for the workout will activate automatically on your iPhone. Tapping will open a new full-screen view of your workout metrics on your iPhone.

This feature has been specifically created for cyclists due to the prevalence of phone mounts on bikes. If you have your phone mounted to your handlebars, you can now keep open a huge, easily glanceable view of your current workout metrics.

watchOS 10 also allows the Apple Watch to automatically connect to various Bluetooth cycling accessories, such as power meters and speed and cadence sensors. If connected, these sensors will power a new slate of workout metrics, including cycling power (watts), cadence, and Functional Threshold Power (FTP). The FTP data drives the watchOS 10 workout app’s new Power Zones metric view, which is very similar to last year’s heart rate zones metric.

Hiking

Via Apple.

While hiking in watchOS 10, the Compass app will automatically drop two new waypoints: the last place you had a cellular connection, and the last place you had a connection to make an emergency call. The former will of course give you access to all of your usual cellular capabilities, including calling anyone or sending text messages. The latter looks for the last known connection you had with any carrier’s network, such that you could make an emergency call.

In the watchOS 10 Maps app, maps will now display a topographic overlay with shading and contouring for hills and elevation details. Maps can also now search for nearby hiking trails and trailheads. Tapping into one of these will show information on trail length, type, and difficulty.

Miscellany

• Apple’s new NameDrop contact sharing feature is also coming to watchOS 10. Hold your Apple Watch close to someone else’s iPhone who doesn’t have your contact info to share it with them.
• Offline maps downloaded to your iPhone on iOS 17 can also be accessed on a paired watchOS 10 Apple Watch.
• FaceTime video messages can be viewed from Apple Watch, and Group FaceTime audio is now supported for the first time in watchOS 10.
• The Medications app can now send follow-up reminders when you fail to log a scheduled medication within 30 minutes.

Conclusion

Apple has been playing it safe with watchOS updates for the last several years. While none of these updates have been bad, and are often particularly great for health and fitness, the rest of the platform has remained mostly static. I’ve grown increasingly worried that Apple thought watchOS was “done” — that its final form was more a vehicle for health and fitness than a fully-fledged computer watch. This year, Apple made it decidedly clear that that is not the case.

I don’t want to return to the early years of watchOS, when huge parts of the operating system were changing every year; but I do believe that Apple has not yet made the Apple Watch the best that it can be. I’d like to see the company get there, and watchOS 10 includes some tremendously positive steps toward that goal.

Before we can address the positives, it’s still important to consider the negatives. I think the assignment of the hardware button to Control Center, without updating the Control Center interface at all, was downright lazy. It feels as though Apple knew they wanted to place the Smart Stack where Control Center was (a perfectly reasonable idea), but didn’t put in the work to think of a new place for Control Center to live where it would actually make sense. Perhaps the company has future plans to add functionality to Control Center that makes it deserving of this hardware accessibility, but if that’s the case then it’s still lazy to ship it as-is while knowing it’s not yet good enough.

I really hope Apple addresses this situation in next year’s update in one way or another. I can understand if it just didn’t have time to get to some planned Control Center improvements this year, but if so then let’s hope Apple feels the pressure to ship those improvements by watchOS 11. Alternatively, I wouldn’t mind at all if the company reconsiders Control Center again, making it a software button at the top of the Smart Stack, and changes the Side button into an Action button.

Speaking of the Smart Stack, this interface is such a great addition to watchOS. Many years of good watchOS ideas which just didn’t quite work out have finally been distilled into something that feels functional. watchOS apps have a new avenue to get glanceable information in front of users, and users can access this information no matter which watch face they choose to use.

The interface itself isn’t perfect yet. I’d love to see Apple rethink the placement of the enormous date and time at the top of it. Give us customizable complication slots up there, or add that button to open Control Center (why not both?). For a first shot though, I think that there’s a lot to love about the customizable scrolling list of widgets that make up the rest of this interface. The Smart Stack is already useful and useable as it is, and I’m excited to see Apple iterate on it going forward.

As for the rest of watchOS 10, Apple hasn’t missed a beat. Health and fitness have received their usual grouping of improvements. This time around it is cyclists and hikers getting some really nice new features. The new State of Mind tracker in the Mindfulness app is a potentially meaningful feature for anyone, and I encourage everyone to at least give it a try to see if it sticks. Finally, throughout all of Apple’s first-party apps, they found time to make upgrades to a beautiful new interface design language.

My qualms with Control Center aside, I think it’s clear that watchOS 10 is the best update to the Apple Watch operating system in years. It’s so great to see that Apple is still willing to rethink the Apple Watch in ways that don’t revolve around health and fitness. I’m more excited about this operating system than I’ve been in a long time, and I can’t wait too see Apple continue to iterate on these new foundations in the years to come.

watchOS 10 was released in September, and is available for all Apple Watches Series 4 and later. If you haven’t already, try the Snoopy watch face.

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iOS 17.1.

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

Let’s take a look.

Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playlist cover art templates.

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

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

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

Song suggestions at the bottom of playlists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

AirDrop Over the Internet

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

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

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

iPadOS

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

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

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

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

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

Everything Else

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

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

Back to a reasonable design.

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

The new album option for Photo Shuffle.

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

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

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

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

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As Club MacStories members know, I’ve been spending time the past few weeks decluttering my digital life and setting up systems so it’s harder for things to come undone again. One of my strategies to make life easier for ‘future me’ is to minimize the number of places I store things.

For notes and articles I write, that means Obsidian. In the past, I’ve resisted putting every text file in Obsidian because the app’s file management tools haven’t always been the best. Part of that historical weakness is undoubtedly the result of Obsidian’s emphasis on linking between documents. Fortunately, Obsidian’s folder and file management tools have come a long way. Paired with Omnisearch, a powerful third-party search plugin, I’ve overcome my hesitation and gone all in with Obsidian as an editor and text storage solution. So, when I heard that Obsidian’s open-source import tool had been updated to work with Apple Notes, I thought I’d export some of my notes to Obsidian to get a feel for how well it works.

The Importer plugin.

Apple Notes doesn’t have an export option. Instead, as Obsidian’s blog post on the Importer plugin update explains, it stores your notes in a local SQLite database. The format isn’t documented, but the developers of the plugin were able to reverse-engineer it to allow users to move notes and their attachments out of Notes and into two folders: one with Markdown versions of your notes and the other with the files attached to your notes. The folder with your notes includes subfolders that match any folders you set up in Notes, too.

Importer is an Obsidian plugin that can be downloaded and installed from the Community Plugins section of Obsidian’s settings. The Importer’s UI can be opened using the command ‘Importer: Open Importer,’ which gives you options of where to save your imported notes, along with options to include recently deleted notes and omit the first line of a note, which Obsidian will use to name the note instead. Click the Import button, and the plugin does its thing. That’s all there is to it.

When you run Importer, it requires you to confirm where your Notes are stored, which is easy because the plugin takes you there itself.

I ran Importer twice to see how well it worked in practice. The first time was on a set of more than 400 notes, many of which hadn’t been touched in years. The import process was fast, but it failed on 36 notes, and it wasn’t clear from the plugin’s interface whether that caused it to get stuck part of the way through or if the plugin just skipped those notes. I don’t know why some of my notes failed to import, but the results weren’t too bad for an undocumented file format of an app with no official export feature.

Importer isn’t perfect but it’s close enough given my large collection of old, rarely touched notes.

The import process is non-destructive, meaning it doesn’t delete the notes in Apple Notes. I took advantage of this by deleting everything I’d just imported into Obsidian. Then, I went back to Notes and cleaned them up a bit, deleting old notes I didn’t need anymore and reducing the total note count to 149. I re-ran Importer, and this time, I got no errors. I haven’t checked every note, but based on a spot check, the import process looks like it was successful.

The end result of using Importer is a folder of Apple Notes and related subfolders, plus a folder of attachments.

One limitation of Obsidian’s Importer plugin is that it requires you to use the Obsidian app. However, the beauty of plain text is that once you have a folder full of Markdown files, you can use them with any app that supports Markdown, so it’s a tool worth considering whether you’re an Obsidian true believer or not.

That said, I don’t intend to abandon Apple Notes completely. It was easy to move a bunch of reference notes to Obsidian, where they’ll be easier to use alongside other notes. However, Obsidian’s Achilles heel is its lack of a workable system for collaboration. Until there’s a fast, secure, and simple way to share and edit notes with others, I’ll still use Apple Notes’ sharing feature. For everything else, I’m in deep with Obsidian because the portability and flexibility of plain text combined with a rich selection of third-party plugins make it the best tool for the sort of work I do.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

Every year, one of the most anticipated iPhone hardware announcements is changes to its camera. This year, the iPhone Pro Max’s new telephoto lens was the center of attention. However, there were other notable tweaks to the camera hardware and software across the iPhone lineup, too. Plus, we got a hardware bonus in the form of the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max’s Action button, which can perform some interesting tricks. Now, with the new iPhones in the hands of people around the world, we’re starting to see what that hardware can do in practice, and I’ve got three examples I’d like to share.

Source: Lux.

The first is an update to the camera app Halide that does something incredibly clever. Built into version 2.13 of the app is a shortcut that can be tied to the Action button to open Halide with a single press. That’s something you can do with any app using an Open App action, but Halide goes a step further by offering in-app functionality if you tie the button to its app. In the app’s settings, you can choose to tie the Action button to any of the following options:

• Do nothing
• Lenses
• Exposure Mode
• Focus Mode
• RAW
• Resolution
• Capture

After using the Action button to open the app, pressing the button again will perform whichever action you picked in its settings. For example, if you chose Lenses, the first press of the Action button from outside the app will open Halide, and subsequent presses will cycle through each of the available camera lenses. I love this use of the Action button and hope other developers do the same, adding contextual actions to more apps.

A 5x telephoto shot by Sebastiaan de With.

Speaking of Halide, Sebastiaan de With, one of its creators, published a review of the iPhone 15 Pro Max camera today, concluding that:

With iPhone 15 Pro Max’s default 24 megapixel resolution, added ‘lenses’ under the main camera lens, automatic depth capture for portraits, and that 5× lens, this release might not blow away on a spec sheet, but is massive for everyone who uses an iPhone to take photos.

There’s a lot of ground to cover between the hardware and processing changes happening behind the scenes. Plus, de With is an excellent photographer whose shots do a fantastic job illustrating what is possible with the iPhone 15 Pro Max. So be sure to check out the full review.

Finally, the iPhone’s camera takes amazing video, too. This year saw the introduction of Log encoding for Pro Res 4K footage. That opens up a wider range of editing control using apps like Final Cut Pro, which Joey Helms used to create this amazing video of Chicago:

I’ve had my iPhone 15 Pro Max for just four days, and already, I’m enjoying taking photos as I walk around my neighborhood and playing with features like adding Portrait mode after the fact to images like the one below.

Before (left) and after (right) applying Portrait mode.

The result is a lot more creative freedom that’s more accessible than ever, not only because your iPhone is usually in your pocket but because the tools Apple has created for taking great photos and videos are so easy to use.

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In one sense, the story of this year’s macOS update is that there is no story, but that’s not exactly right. Instead, it’s a bunch of stories. It’s the tail end of the realignment of macOS with Apple’s other OSes that began with macOS Catalina in 2019. However, Sonoma is also part of a work-at-home story accelerated by COVID-19. The OS is also linked to the story of visionOS, only part of which has been revealed. Sonoma is a bundle of narrative threads built on the foundation of past releases, adding up to a collection of updates that will be less disruptive for most Mac users than recent macOS updates. Instead, Sonoma is packed with a variety of useful new features that help draw it closer to iPadOS and iOS than ever before, design enhancements, and a few disappointing omissions.

The timing for a more modest macOS update is right. In recent years, Mac users have had to adjust to substantial redesigns of everything from their favorite system apps to the Finder’s windows and toolbars. The changes were inescapable and necessary to harmonize the Mac with Apple’s other products, but also disruptive for some long-time users.

Sonoma adds a vast collection of new wallpaper and screensaver options.

With macOS Sonoma, the biggest design shifts seem to be behind us – at least for the time being. Interactive widgets on the desktop are a big change this year, but it’s not like macOS dumps a bunch of them on your desktop by default. If you never want to see a widget anywhere near your desktop, you don’t have to. Other than the subtle way the login screen has changed and the new screensavers and wallpapers that are available, the core macOS experience has barely changed.

Instead, this year’s update is primarily about refining and building upon the foundation of the past few years, coupled with a handful of more significant updates to system apps. So, while the marquee features and design changes may be less notable than in recent years, there is still a long list of new and refreshed items that touch nearly every aspect of the OS, so let’s dive in.

[table_of_contents]

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

Widgets are everywhere this fall, but nowhere is that more true than the Mac. Not only are Mac widgets interactive, like they are on the iPhone and iPad, but they’re no longer hidden away in Notification Center. Not everyone is going to like the aesthetic of having widgets on their desktop, but I absolutely and unconditionally love it. Widgets are finally useful on the Mac, and I can’t get enough of them.

There’s a lot going on with widgets in general and even more going on with Mac widgets, so let’s break it down, starting with what’s unique to the Mac. OS X Yosemite introduced Apple’s modern take on widgets to the Mac nearly a decade ago, tucking them out of the way in Notification Center, which in recent years required you to click on the clock in the Mac’s menu bar to access them.

In 2014, Yosemite moved widgets from Dashboard to a new Today view that became Notification Center.

I’ve never liked Notification Center on the Mac. The way notifications are handled has issues of its own, but widgets were not only hidden away but shoved into a corner buried under a list of your notifications. As a result, I barely used widgets before I installed Sonoma in June.

With macOS Sonoma, widgets have been given room to breathe on your desktop for the first time since Apple discontinued Dashboard, migrating widgets to Notification Center. Depending on the size of your Mac’s screen, there’s plenty of room to spread out your widgets in any way you want, and thanks to some clever design touches by Apple, the entire arrangement is easy to keep neat and tidy.

You can still use Notification Center for your widgets if you’d like.

There are plenty of Mac users who don’t like to have files sitting on their desktops, let alone widgets. If you prefer that kind of minimalist approach, you’re in luck because widgets can still be tucked out of the way in Notification Center, although you won’t be able to put extra-large widgets there.

I understand the appeal of working on a desktop that’s an unbroken expanse. It looks great and is arguably less distracting. However, for me, the utility of seeing the widgets I rely on and interacting with them throughout the day far outweighs anything an empty desktop has to offer.

Apple has created an entirely new UI for managing your Mac’s widgets that has a lot in common with the iPhone and iPad. Right-click on the desktop or open Notification Center, and in either case, pick ‘Edit Widgets.’ A panel will slide up from the bottom of your screen. On the left of the panel is a sidebar with a search field and an alphabetical list of all of the apps that offer widgets. On the right are images of the widgets themselves, with each size and type offered organized with Suggestions at the top, followed by the apps in alphabetical order.

Sonoma’s new widget management interface will be familiar to iPhone and iPad users.

On the right side of the panel, some blocks of widgets say ‘From iPhone.’ That’s because the catalog of widgets from which you can choose has been expanded with macOS Sonoma. Not only can you pick widgets offered by the Mac apps installed on your computer, but if you have an iPhone on the same Wi-Fi network or nearby, all of your iPhone widgets are available, too. Curiously, iPad widgets aren’t available on macOS Sonoma, perhaps because doing so would result in a lot of duplicate widgets.

The inclusion of iPhone widgets on the Mac was a big surprise at WWDC, but it makes a lot of sense, especially when considered in the context of iOS 17’s StandBy mode. By putting iPhone widgets on your Mac desktop, you get the benefits of the glanceable information they offer on the iPhone, while still using StandBy on your iPhone uninterrupted.

However, there are a couple of downsides to iPhone widgets being available on the Mac. It’s the professional hazard of someone who writes about apps like I do, but I have a lot of apps on my Mac and even more on my iPhone. I’m undoubtedly an outlier, but the result is that the list of apps and widget previews in Sonoma’s widget panel are long. Search and the sidebar list of apps make it faster to navigate, but scrolling is choppy at times. I expect that if I had fewer apps the situation would improve, but as it is, the interface feels a little broken on my Mac.

These aren’t duplicate Parcel widgets, just similar widgets for its separate iPhone and Mac apps.

The other problem is that because some apps offer separate iPhone and Mac apps, you’ll sometimes see two entries for an app in your list of widgets. If you do, pick the Mac one because iPhone widgets come with some limitations. For example, the delivery tracker Parcel has separate iPhone and Mac apps. The app’s widgets look the same, but if you pick the iPhone version and click on a delivery, the app will tell you that you need to open the iPhone app for more details about your package. However, if you use the Mac version of the same widget and click on a particular delivery, the app will open immediately with that package selected. Fortunately, the list of widgets labels the ones that are from your iPhone, so it’s not hard to choose the Mac version if you see two widgets for the same app. I can’t help but wonder whether having two widgets that look the same but behave differently will lead more developers to release Universal versions of their apps.

A Clock widget guided into alignment using Sonoma’s automatic grid layout.

Apple’s designers have come up with a clever tiling system to avoid your widgets becoming a jumbled, disorganized mess. When you drag a widget to the desktop near another widget, an outline appears, showing where it can be placed in relation to your other widgets. However, if you drag a widget to a spot far away enough from other widgets, you can drop it anywhere you want. Also, if you have folders and files on your desktop, moving a widget over them will cause the folders and files to flow around the widget so they’re not obscured. Another way to avoid widgets competing with your folders and files is to activate Stacks, which organizes your files and folders into neat piles along the right edge of your desktop.

Files and folders flow around your widgets.

What you can’t do with widgets on the Mac is overlap them or stack them the way you can on the iPhone or iPad. I feel like I have plenty of room to place widgets on the Studio Display’s 27” screen without stacking, but that limitation will undoubtedly be a problem for some 13” MacBook Air users (myself included), especially if you’re used to being able to assign different widgets to multiple Home Screens on a similarly-sized 12.9” iPad Pro. That’s because you can’t place a unique set of widgets per Space on a Mac. So, if you were hoping to create different sets of widgets and assign them to project or task-specific Spaces, you’re out of luck, which is a shame and something I’d love to see Apple address in a future update.

Limitations aside, simply having widgets where I can see them has been a game changer. I’m especially happy with how well widgets work with Stage Manager, which I’ve been using full-time since last fall’s Ventura’s release. I usually don’t cover Stage Manager’s strip with apps, so I can see what’s available to me. On the Studio Display, that leaves a bit of space at the ends of the strip that is perfect for widgets. The top corner is where I’ve put a small Weather app widget with the current conditions and predicted high and low temperatures. The rest of the widgets are loosely arrayed in the top left corner of my screen in an orderly grid, thanks to Sonoma’s layout system.

Widgets fade into the background when a window is active, but they are still interactive and take on the colors of your wallpaper.

I’m also a fan of the way widgets fade into the background when an app is active, taking on the color scheme of the wallpaper behind the widgets. Some may find this distracting, but for me, it’s not been any more distracting than having information in the menu bar or other app windows peeking out from behind whichever one I’m currently using.

Using a Hot Corner to activate my desktop widgets.

When I want to see a widget that’s covered up, I can click on an open space on the desktop, which whisks all windows away into Stage Manager’s strip. Alternatively, I’ve set the top right corner of my screen as a Hot Corner that reveals the desktop, which has a similar effect. Whichever way I choose to clear my desktop temporarily, doing so not only reveals all of my widgets but returns them to their full-color glory, allowing me to focus on the information each has to offer.

But widgets on the Mac’s desktop have more to offer than just up-to-date information on things like the weather, your calendar, or packages making their way to your home. As on iOS and iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma widgets are interactive, even if they’re faded out in the background. That allows me to do things like adjust the lights in my office or turn off a battery charger when I see from another widget that a device is fully charged. Other times, I’m checking off tasks in Reminders or starting a timer in Timery. What all of these widget interactions have in common is that they’re the sort of things I repeatedly do throughout the day. Over the course of the summer, I’ve discovered that bringing these micro-tasks to my desktop is far less distracting than grabbing my iPhone to do them.

Examples of some of the updated system widgets.

Along with moving widgets to the desktop and making them interactive, Sonoma also introduces new and updated system widgets. The one I use the most is one of the two new Home widgets. The widget comes in small and medium sizes, which accommodate four and eight actions, respectively, and can control individual HomeKit accessories or activate scenes. If your needs aren’t met by the eight tiles available in the medium-sized widget, you can add additional Home widgets to cover more devices and scenes, but I also recommend checking out Home Widget by Clément Marty, which I recently reviewed on MacStories.

The other Home widget comes in small and medium sizes and is a timeline showing when it’s estimated that the energy in your area will be cleaner, using a new Home feature called Grid Forecast. By keeping track of when energy will be cleaner, you can defer tasks that require a lot of electricity to a time when their environmental impact will be less. I’d love to see this feature built out as part of Shortcuts to allow me to shift my electricity usage automatically. Apple has also introduced Contacts, Shortcuts, and Safari widgets for the first time on the Mac, each of which is the same as its counterpart on iOS and iPadOS 17.

Apple Podcasts has added interactivity, too, allowing users to play and pause episodes from its widget. In a future update, Apple has promised a Music widget for the Mac, which would be a first for the OS. According to Apple, the Sonoma Music widget will include playback controls, allow users to follow top charts, and offer music recommendations for Apple Music subscribers. There’s been no word yet on when the Music widget will debut.

Of course, the new interactive widgets can be offered by third-party developers, too. We’ve already covered some of the apps that feature interactive widgets on MacStories and will continue to cover them throughout the fall.

Until Sonoma, widgets on the Mac seemed like a half-hearted experiment. Hiding them away in Notification Center allowed Apple to check the feature parity with iOS and iPadOS boxes, but that’s about it. As originally conceived, widgets were meant to provide glanceable information to users, so tucking them away where they couldn’t be seen at a glance defeated the whole purpose of them.

With interactivity and moving widgets to the desktop, Apple has placed a bigger bet, of which widgets are just one part. As Federico explained in his iOS and iPadOS 17 preview story,

Widgets are transforming apps into modular experiences that go beyond glanceability.

[T]o an even greater extent than what Shortcuts has been doing for years, interactive widgets take specific functionalities of apps and make them available as à la carte components that you can mix and match however you want. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, to know that this is possible because App Intents, the technology that powers Shortcuts actions, is being used for actions in interactive widgets, too.

When you look at widgets and features like Live Activities, Focus modes, and App Shortcuts through this lens, it’s easy to see similar modular solutions playing out on visionOS, a HomeKit hub device with a screen, and other products Apple might be considering. All are built on top of App Intents, the technology that underpins Shortcuts, which is fascinating, but it is widgets that have begun to emerge as the glue among Apple’s hardware platforms.

Those connections among devices have fundamentally changed how I work. I find myself using a combination of Mac desktop widgets, iPadOS widgets on my iPad Pro using Universal Control, and my iPhone in StandBy mode. That may sound like a lot, but as a substitute for grabbing my iPhone or iPad and risking getting sidetracked, having the right widgets arrayed across multiple devices working in concert is a far better solution.

A Clean Slate

Sonoma features over 100 new wallpapers and screensavers.

Sonoma adds an elegant, updated canvas for macOS with a streamlined Lock Screen, plus new wallpapers and screensavers.

As with so many design tweaks to macOS in recent years, the new Lock Screen is reminiscent of the iPad’s. It’s also more customizable than before. With the redesign, your login image and the password field have been moved to the bottom of the screen. They’re also smaller, and you can even eliminate your login profile picture entirely, which I’ve done with my Mac Studio because only I use it.

Sonoma’s new Lock Screen design.

The top of the Lock Screen is dominated by the date and time by default, but that can be turned off for an extra minimalist look. I’ve settled on a Lock Screen with the date and time at the top and no account profile picture, which makes my Mac’s Lock Screen look almost exactly like the one on my iPad. It’s a small thing, but I like the consistency between the two and appreciate the ability to eliminate my profile picture because I don’t need it.

Examples of the new Sonoma wallpapers.

Apple has added new screensavers and wallpapers this year, too. There’s a bright new abstract Dynamic Wallpaper that changes depending on things like the time of day and whether you’re using light or dark mode, which can also serve as your desktop wallpaper. However, my favorites are the new slow motion, aerial video screensavers, and accompanying wallpapers that are similar to what you may be familiar with from the Apple TV. There are four categories: landscape, cityscape, underwater, and Earth. In all, there are 120 different options across the four categories, plus options to shuffle them all or by category. The default is Sonoma Horizon, a beautiful rural California landscape, but there are many, many other excellent options, so I encourage you to browse them all or try one of the shuffle settings to find your personal favorites.

The screensaver to wallpaper animated transition.

The coolest trick, though, is that when your screensaver is enabled, and you resume using your Mac, the screensaver continues to animate for a couple of seconds as your windows come into view. It’s a subtle but excellent touch that makes the transition back to an active desktop feel smoother than before.

Sonoma’s Lock Screen, wallpapers, and screensavers serve a couple of different purposes. They’re a great way to express your personality by decorating your Mac with your favorites, of course. However, they’re also the way to ease into your workflow. The animations between the screen savers and wallpapers in Sonoma transition you into your work environment in an organic and inviting way that I absolutely love. It’s a small touch, but one that is quintessentially Apple and still a delight even after seeing those animations hundreds of times over the summer.

System Apps

Reminders

It sounds a little silly, but of all the new features in Reminders this year, it’s section headings that brought me back to the app more than anything else. Every summer, I move my projects back to Reminders so I can test all of its features thoroughly, but Reminders doesn’t usually stick. It’s still a little early to call it a certainty, but I have a feeling this time is different. There are still things Reminders could do better, but the simplicity with which it allows me to organize my projects and individual days is hard to beat.

The reason that the addition of sections to task lists is the thing that pushed me back to Reminders has a lot to do with Reminders’ history. The app started as a simple checklist creation tool. In the years since, Reminders has evolved significantly. The app can still be used for simple lists like the grocery list I share with my family, but it’s capable of a lot more.

The trouble with using Reminders as a more full-blown task manager was that for big projects, I’d wind up with very long lists that were a chore to visually parse. One way I could have dealt with that was through a combination of breaking down projects into smaller lists or creating subtasks related to other tasks. I tried that at times but didn’t like it because it just added more administrative overhead, requiring me to manage my lists instead of doing my work.

Sections help break up long lists visually.

List sections are an elegant, lightweight solution that works incredibly well in most situations. If you’ve ever used Things by Cultured Code, which uses a similar system, you probably know why. Sections allow you to visually break up related parts of a project into groups within the same list.

I suspect the origins of the new list sections lie in the way tasks are automatically organized into sections in the Today view, breaking them up into Morning, Afternoon, and Evening, and Scheduled Tasks, which are organized by date. User-created lists don’t lend themselves as easily to automated sections, but that doesn’t mean they don’t benefit from the same sort of structure.

My work lends itself to a handful of core areas, including MacStories, Club MacStories, Podcasts, Sponsors, and MS, Inc. As much as I like the Today view and dragging to-dos between periods of the day, those five lists were always a problem because they can get long, which made it hard to work with them.

With sections, I can divide a list like ‘MacStories’ into sections like ‘Writing,’ ‘Research,’ ‘Promotion,’ and ‘Writing Ideas,’ breaking up what would otherwise be a long list of tasks. Sections help visually, but they also make organizing related tasks easier. You can add new tasks at the bottom of a section or simply add a task to that list, in which case the task moves to the bottom of the list, where you can leave it or drag it to a section later. It’s not a revolutionary change by any means, but it has a simple elegance that is fantastic.

Sections become column headers in Reminders’ Column View.

However, there’s even more to those sections than meets the eye. First, from the View menu, you can switch from the default list view to a column view. That arranges your tasks into multiple side-by-side lists that are organized by the section headings you’ve assigned to them. Any tasks that aren’t organized into sections will default to an ‘Others’ list to the far right of your other lists.

Column view is another excellent affordance for managing long lists by spreading them out horizontally, which is especially useful on a big external display. Most to-dos are short, actionable descriptions that wind up taking up a lot of vertical space. That works well enough on an iPhone that’s typically used in portrait mode, but a big, widescreen column view is a superior way to manage a big task list. With sections arrayed horizontally, it’s simple to drag to-dos around within a list or between them.

Another way you can use column view is as a Kanban-style status board, moving items through the stages of a process. I experimented with this over the summer during our Summer OS Preview Series, moving the stories we planned from an idea stage through research, writing, and published phases. I shared the list with Federico, which allowed each of us to update it and keep track of where we stood with the series without coordinating with each other directly. I don’t expect to use Reminders this way very often, but it worked quite well for that sort of use case.

Grocery lists in Reminders.

The other part of the ‘sections’ story is a brand-new list type called Groceries. When you set up a new list, you now have the option to designate it as a Groceries list instead of a Standard or Smart List. Once set up, when you add items to your list, Reminders will automatically sort them into pre-defined sections. So bananas will end up in a Fruits and Vegetables list, and ice cream will wind up in Frozen Foods. Because foods are organized according to common store layouts, it makes shopping a lot more efficient than one long list where everything is in the order that items were added. Reminders can handle common non-food items, too. Also, if something is miscategorized, you can drag it into another section, and Reminders will learn your preferences. Reminders will also suggest moving an item if it detects that you might have added it to the wrong section.

If you miscategorize an item, Reminders will offer to move it.

Auto-categorization is an obvious win for grocery lists that I’d love to see expanded as an option for any list. Grocery items are a well-defined problem set, but perhaps with a little sprinkling of AI magic, Reminders could learn to put ‘Write macOS review’ in a Writing section I set up or ‘Figure out the ChatGPT API’ in Research. Those are the kinds of applications of AI that could help take even more of the tedium out of chores like managing a task list that I’d appreciate. For now, though, I’m a big fan of the new Groceries list type.

There are also features that I’d like to see from Reminders in the future, including:

• The filter for including lists in a Smart List only lets you pick one but should allow you to select as many as you’d like. An obvious example is that I’d like to include several work-related lists as part of a Smart List but exclude my Personal and Grocery task lists.
• You can move a task from one list to another with drag and drop, but unlike the iOS and iPadOS versions of Reminders, you can’t switch a task’s list by clicking on the task’s info button. It’s a small thing but an odd inconsistency that trips me up.
• Column view should work with the Scheduled Tasks list. When I sit down to plan my week or even just the next few days, I like to look at what past me, thought future me could handle on those upcoming days. Then, I drag tasks around to refine the workload for each day to come up with a more realistic plan. It would be easy to view an entire week and then some on a 27” display and then drag tasks from day to day. For bonus points, include the same morning, afternoon, and evening dividers found in the Today list, so I can get even more granular with my planning, and add column view to the Today list, too.
• Every standard Reminders list can be assigned a color, and I’d love that color coding to carry over to the tasks themselves, making it easy to identify the parent list a task belongs to in a mixed list like Today.

Reminders’ update for Sonoma is a bigger deal than the one short paragraph it got on Apple’s macOS Sonoma preview page would suggest. The app has evolved a lot in recent years from a rudimentary tool to one that scales gracefully from simple grocery lists to more complex project planning. It’s a trend that’s emerged with more than one of Apple’s system apps across all of its platforms and one I hope continues to spread to all corners of macOS.

Notes

Note Linking

The macOS update to Notes this year includes an important cross-over theme with Reminders. Both implemented new features that make navigating the app much nicer for anyone who uses it to store a lot of information. For Reminders, that meant implementing a column view, which lets you take a long list of tasks that’s been divided into sections and display multiple lists horizontally, taking advantage of wide screens. In Notes, the story is a little different. Instead of a different view, Notes obviates the need for long notes entirely by allowing users to link them together in a web of related content.

For anyone who is familiar with wiki-style links or has used an app like Obsidian that allows you to link documents together, this kind of linking is old news. However, it’s a big deal for a mainstream tool like Notes. And, of course, Apple has put its own spin on inter-note links.

Using internal links in Notes to create a table of contents leading to other notes.

What’s different from some linking systems you might know is that Notes’ links are one-way links. That means you can create a note, link it to another, and when you follow the link, you won’t see a link back to the original note. What is known as back-linking is a very nerdy feature that some people love, but I suspect that most people will be fine with the way Apple has implemented linking. For everyone else who tries inter-note linking for the first time and finds Apple’s implementation too limiting, there are plenty of third-party apps that support backlinks. For them, I expect Notes’ linking implementation will serve as an introduction that will actually spur more interest in apps like Obsidian, Logseq, and Roam.

Linking a note with the >> shortcut.

To create a link in Notes, all you need to do is type the familiar ⌘K keyboard shortcut that’s used in multiple places throughout macOS and many third-party apps. That opens a window where you can type or paste a URL or start typing the name of a note. As you type the name of a note, a dozen suggestions appear and update as you type. Alternatively, you can type the shortcut » to immediately pull up a list of recent notes to link. Pick one, name it something different than the title of the note if you’d like, and click ‘Ok.’ That’s it. Alternatively, you can highlight some text and follow the same steps to directly link a note to that text. It really couldn’t be easier.

What I love about linking notes is it lets you break up a topic into chunks, so you’re not facing a huge wall of text. Notes’ existing formatting tools do a nice job of organizing the contents of a note, but linking to related content is often better. This is especially good for reference material because it makes it easier to skip around to the parts you need instead of endlessly scrolling past information you don’t.

PDFs

Sonoma supports reading and marking up PDFs in Notes.

Even if creating webs of notes isn’t your thing, I think a lot of MacStories readers will be happy to see what the Notes team has done with PDFs. Everyone deals with PDFs at least now and then, and for some people, that’s one of the main sources of information with which they work. That’s true of anyone working in an academic or another research field, lawyers, and many others.

You could already add PDFs to Notes, but they were just file attachments. To do any markup or editing, you had to open them up in Preview or another app. Most people won’t need that anymore because Notes’ new PDF integration, which allows you to read and mark up PDFs inline, is so good.

When you drag a PDF into Notes, it’s laid out horizontally. It’s a great design for a couple of reasons. The first is the practicality of working inside a note that includes a PDF. By lining the pages up horizontally, there’s room for you to take notes above or below the PDF. A lot of apps offer a vertical scrolling option as if the PDF were a webpage, which is fine, but with a document that’s been paginated like a PDF, I prefer moving through it like a book.

Navigating a PDF using the thumbnails above the PDF.

Navigating a long PDF is easy. You can scroll the document from left to right or use the ‘Show Thumbnails’ button at the top of the PDF and skim through those even faster. Right-clicking a thumbnail also reveals options to copy, rotate, or delete it and insert a blank page or file. You can also adjust the size of the PDF at the top of your note, using the drop-down menu next to the PDF’s filename and selecting ‘View As,’ which provides small, medium, and large options. Small is just a file thumbnail without previews of individual pages of your document, but medium and large display every page of the PDF, with medium offering more room for taking notes.

Small…

Medium…

…and large views of the same PDF.

There are a couple of ways to mark up a PDF, too. If you want to highlight text, you can right-click on it and choose ‘Highlight.’ However, if you want to do more than that, you’re going to have to go to the drop-down menu next to the PDF’s filename and pick ‘Markup’ or ‘Open Attachment.’ Markup will be the better option in most circumstances because it opens your PDF in what is essentially a stripped-down version of Preview with similar annotation tools. Most importantly, though, the Markup option saves the changes you make back to the version of your PDF that’s attached to your note. If you choose to ‘Open Attachment’ instead, it will open in Preview, and any changes will be saved to a new copy of your document elsewhere on your Mac.

Marking up a PDF.

The one thing I don’t like about the Markup interface is that you have to scroll through your PDF vertically. Which kind of scrolling you prefer is a matter of personal taste, but I think horizontal scrolling in Markup mode should at least be an option so it’s consistent with navigating your document in Notes.

In the future, I’d also like to see the ability to link highlighted text to notes. If you’re working on a long document and taking notes above or below it, you can reference page numbers if your document has them, but that’s a pain, and documents like presentations often don’t have page numbers at all. If you could create a link when you add the highlighting that could be pasted into your notes, that would make PDFs more navigable, a lot like Apple’s done with its excellent inter-note linking, but between the notes you type and the reference materials you’re reading.

Other Notes Updates

Notes can be moved to Pages.

There are a few other changes to notes worth mentioning. First, you can move a document from the Notes app into Pages. This is accomplished with the ‘Open in Pages’ option that’s new to the Notes Share button. Once your note is in Pages, you’ll have access to that app’s wider variety of formatting and other features, but your changes won’t sync back to Notes. Nor can you send Pages documents to Notes. This is a one-way process designed to let you expand a note into a full-blown word-processing document when you need more features than Notes offers.

A block quote and code in a monospaced font.

Second, there are new formatting options in Notes this year. There’s a monospaced font that has a unique background. If you’ve ever tried to store snippets of code in Notes and been tripped up by its rich text causing problems when you paste your snippets into a plain text editor, you’ll appreciate this feature. Now, you can store those snippets and easily move them out of Notes and into a code editor. There’s also a block quote format, which will be handy for anyone doing research.

There was a time when PDFs were a big deal to me. That’s because when you’re a lawyer and are sent a 500+ page PDF to read and analyze, you’re going to want an efficient way to navigate the document, highlight the parts that are important, and take notes on what you read. These days, my obsessions are RSS, read-later services, and bookmarking apps. However, I remember what those PDF days were like, and I appreciate how far Apple has come with its PDF integration in Notes, which, along with the new formatting options and internal linking, makes Notes a much more robust and realistic alternative to students and anyone else looking for a place to pull together their research notes and PDFs.

Safari

As someone who is perpetually on the web, all day, every day, I love how much attention Safari has received in Apple’s OS updates over the past few years. The redesign a couple of years ago made for a rocky beta season, but I appreciate that the Safari team continues to push Apple’s browser forward and listened to the feedback from users.

This year’s update to Safari isn’t as extensive, nor thankfully, as controversial. However, competition for Mac users’ web browsing time has been on the upswing with new browsers like Arc being released after a long, invitation-only beta period, as well as SigmaOS, Kagi’s Orion, Vivaldi, and others.

One of the things driving innovation in browsers is that, more than ever, the browser has effectively become the operating system for lots of people. Between Google’s suite of web apps, Figma, Notion, Slack, Discord, and many, many others, people want and need more from their browsers than ever before.

Profiles

Profiles in Safari.

For many people, both their work and personal lives flow through a web browser. The ability to log into web apps on a Mac, whether it’s a computer that your job gave you or your own machine, is simultaneously convenient and messy. It may be convenient to log into a service and deal with something at work from your home, but it can be messy, making it hard to separate your work and personal life as you log into and out of services you use for both.

Safari’s Sonoma update addresses this sort of situation with a new profiles feature. It’s a similar approach used by other browsers that allow you to create separate personas for different areas of your life. The easiest example is the one above, where you want to separate your work and personal lives, but it can be handy for students who want a profile for each area of their studies or a freelancer who wants a different profile for each client for whom they work. The circumstances vary, but the use case is always the same. If there’s a task, project, or area of your life where you want to separate the sites you visit and the services you use, profiles is the answer.

Setting up a profile.

Apple’s Safari profiles are pretty simple but powerful if you work in multiple modes. There’s a new tab in the app’s Settings where you set them up. The first time you open the tab, you’ll be prompted to set up profiles, which allows you to name each profile, assign it an icon and color, and specify whether you want to start a new bookmarks folder for the profile or use an existing one.

A newly-created Personal profile.

Adding a profile puts a new button in Safari’s toolbar, which allows you open a new window for one of your profiles, but can also be done using Focus modes. The button is tied to the button that opens and closes Safari’s sidebar, meaning that if you want to rearrange your toolbar, the sidebar button and profiles button move together and cannot be separated.

That seems to be because Apple has chosen to tie profiles closely to Tab Groups. If you click on the profiles button, you’ll see a list of the Tab Groups associated with that profile. There are also options in the drop-down list to create an empty Tab Group or a new window for any of your profiles. In addition to helping you manage separate logins and Tab Groups for each profile, your browsing histories, cookies, extensions, and favorites are separated.

Profiles isn’t a feature that I’m going to use because I don’t have the need or the desire to segregate my web browsing between areas of my life, projects, or anything else. That said, there’s a lot to like about the feature for anyone who wants or needs that sort of separation. Not only do profiles offer the convenience of logging in to the same service with different credentials on separate profiles, but it’s a way to clean up messy collections of favorites and Tab Groups and prevent your browser extensions from taking over Safari’s toolbar by only associating them with the profile to which they correspond. So, if you’ve always wanted to cordon off different parts of your online life, it’s worth giving profiles a look.

Single-Site Web Apps

Raindrop.io as a Safari web app.

The other tentpole feature of Safari in Sonoma is single-site web apps. There are several third-party developers that offer single-site web app solutions, such as Unite, Coherence, which is made by the same developer as Unite, and Fluid. Some of these tools are built using WebKit, the framework that powers Safari, and others use Chromium, the underpinnings of Google’s Chrome browser.

The benefit of a single-site browser is that it allows you to take a web service and treat it like a standalone app. Tools like Slack and Discord are good candidates for single-site web apps, as are social media services like Instagram, but just about any web-based site or service works. Of course, the same sites and services can be used in a Safari tab, saved as favorites, pinned, or added to a Tab Group, but a single-site web app gets them out of Safari, decluttering your browser tabs.

Creating a web app also opens up automation options like using Shortcuts’ Open App action to launch your web app. You can set different notification settings for each web app you create in System Settings. Plus, your web apps will show up as separate apps in Mission Control, Stage Manager, and when you ⌘-Tab through your open apps.

Creating a single-site web app is incredibly easy.

The process for setting up a single-site web app is simple and closely resembles the process of creating a Dock-based shortcut. In Shortcuts, there’s a File menu item that allows you to add your shortcuts to the Dock, where they’re treated like standalone apps. The same ‘Add to Dock…’ item has been added to Safari too. Pick it, and you have the option to edit the name of your web app, its URL, and its icon. Most sites will get the name and URL correct but need you to add an icon like this web app for The Verge:

You’ll have to supply your own icon for some web apps you create.

I’ve been very happy with the web apps I’ve set up for services like:

• Mailchimp
• Grammarly
• Instagram
• Raindrop.io
• Discord
• Matter
• Tailscale
• Feedly

I also have web apps for many of our internal MacStories tools, like the interface for publishing to Club MacStories and AppStories and our image uploader.

I’ve noticed a couple services work better than their dedicated apps or websites, too. For example, Discord opens much faster than its app counterpart, and I haven’t noticed any limitations in the part of the service that I use. Mailchimp seems to use less memory than it does in a browser tab. That can be hard to judge even after consulting Activity Monitor with multiple Safari threads running simultaneously, but I’ve definitely seen fewer memory warnings than I tend to when I’m using Mailchimp in the browser, and so far, it’s worked just as well.

I’ve set up more web apps than I expected I would and still need to find a few icons for some of them.

One of the byproducts of testing a long list of services as single-site browser apps is realizing just how much of my computing life has moved to web-based apps and services. That’s true for a lot of people and is why we’ve seen a crop of new browsers being developed. So, I’m glad to see Apple leaning into the trend with a new way to experience web apps. I won’t be sticking with single-site apps for all of the services I’ve tested, but I prefer the experience to using them in Safari tabs, whether as part of Tab Groups or pinned in a browser window. Maybe that dates me as an app-first person, but it’s also because so much of my browsing is about reading and research that adding services to them mix means they often get lost, so the separation is welcome.

However, the long list of single-site apps I’ve created also makes me a little sad. Some of the services I’ve turned into web apps have their own apps, but they aren’t very good, which is why I resorted to a single-site browser app. Others like Mailchimp, Matter, and Instagram could be better as native apps, but I don’t hold out hope that any of them ever will be. I don’t believe everything needs to be a native app, but I do think an entire generation of apps and services are being launched with subpar user experiences in the name of cross-platform expediency. If the economics of a dedicated Mac app aren’t there, I’d rather have a web-based tool running as a single-site web app than nothing at all, but that doesn’t make it the best solution or the one I prefer.

More Safari Updates

It’s a little hard to tell, but the tabs on the end are both selected.

There are a bunch of other smaller additions to Safari, too, including changes to Passwords, which I’ll save for later in this review. As someone with far too many tabs open most days, another great addition this year is the ability to select multiple tabs. Once selected by ⌘-clicking on multiple tabs or Shift-clicking to select a range of tabs, you can right-click any of them for options to:

• Pin Tabs
• Duplicate Tabs
• Close Tabs
• Close Other Tabs
• Move Tabs to New Window
• Move to Tab Group

Close Tabs, Close Other Tabs, and Move Tabs to New Window all require at least one unselected tab to appear. The options are self-explanatory and handy for quickly cleaning up a messy Safari window. I’ve also found that moving multiple tabs into a new window is a good way to use Safari extensions that work with multiple tabs, and I would love to see more developers consider supporting that option where it makes sense.

What I don’t like about the new multi-tab selection feature in Safari is that it doesn’t work with the share menu. You’d expect that if you select three tabs and use the share button to send an iMessage to someone, it would send all three URLs to the recipient, but it only sends the first one that was selected. Likewise, there’s no way to use multiple tab selections in Shortcuts. So, while multi-tab selection is a welcome addition to Safari, I hope its utility is extended in later updates.

Favicons in the Favorites Bar.

Another change is that Safari’s favorites bar can display favicons in macOS Sonoma. It’s a small change, but one that I know a lot of people have wanted for a while. Favicons can be turned on by right-clicking on the favorites bar and selecting ‘Show Icons.’ If you rename a favorite using an emoji in the name, the favicon will be replaced by the emoji, too. I’m not a heavy user of the favorites bar, and at first, I found having favicons turned on in the favorites bar visually confusing with tabs just below it, but over time, I’ve become used to it, and the update one that I’m sure anyone who is used to identifying sites by their favicons will appreciate.

There are new Safari privacy features in Sonoma, too. If you open private windows and tabs, they will lock along with your Mac when it’s not in use. That way, even if you unlock your Mac, your private windows and tabs will remain locked until you provide your password. Extensions that access your browsing are turned off by default when you open a private window, requiring you to grant each access before they can access the sites you visit. With Sonoma, many of the tracking parameters added to links sent by email and text message will be automatically stripped from their URLs by Mail and Messages, too. Apple says Safari’s ability to block known trackers from loading pages or identifying you has been enhanced.

Video Calling

It’s hard to look at the collaboration and video conferencing features added to Apple’s OSes during the past couple of years and not think about the pandemic. The experience of so many people working from home in 2020 and 2021, Apple employees included, undoubtedly shaped the direction that these OS features have taken. Of course, it would have been nice for some of these features to have debuted a few years ago, but the reality is that video conferencing and online collaboration were part of many people’s work and personal lives before the pandemic and continue to be. The pandemic merely accelerated the trend. Today, video calls are part of nearly everyone’s lives, whether you work from home, have colleagues spread around the globe, or just want to catch up with friends and families who live elsewhere.

Video calls started on the iPhone with FaceTime. It’s hard to believe that FaceTime was introduced in 2010 on iOS and debuted on the Mac the following year. What started as a very consumer-oriented app has evolved in the wake of COVID to become a much deeper set of tools encompassing work use cases and embracing cross-platform support via the web. With Sonoma, that evolution continues with improvements to screen sharing, making presentations, expressing yourself during video calls, and controlling your camera.

There are a few new video conferencing features designed to make sharing easier in Sonoma. The simplest new feature, and one that I expect people will appreciate the most, is that when you start a video call and share a window or the whole screen, you can click on the video icon in the menu bar to see what you’re sharing. Before, you had to go to Control Center. It’s a small change but will relieve a lot of anxiety about what’s being shared because it’s so easy to check. It also happens to be a system-level feature, so it’s available in apps like Zoom and Webex, as well as FaceTime.

Sonoma’s video menu bar item previews what you’re sharing and make it easy to swap in new content.

Sharing windows and your screen is easier, too. There are three sharing options accessed by clicking on the button in the Video menu with the icon of a person superimposed over a screen. Clicking that button changes the Video menu’s interface from a preview of yourself on the call to a sharing UI from which you can choose to share your entire screen, a single window, or an app that will include all open windows for that app. After clicking one of those options, you can confirm what you want to share by navigating to the app and selecting the button that appears, which will immediately display the window you’re sharing in the Video menu. Alternatively, you can hover over the green stoplight button of any window to share it or its app with someone. If you’re already sharing a window or app, you can swap in a new one through both means or add multiple windows or apps, too.

Collaboration is incorporated into the new Video menu too.

Also, flipping to an app that supports collaboration will trigger a notification that it’s available to use on your call. When you return to the Video menu’s sharing view, you’ll see the collaboration app at the bottom of the sharing UI, which you can click to start collaborating.

What’s great about each of these sharing features is that they’re all consolidated in the menu bar item, making it a one-stop destination for setting up video calls. After using it for just a short time, visiting the menu bar to make adjustments and set up new configurations becomes second nature regardless of what conferencing service you use.

Testing Presenter Overlays with Keynote.

Once you’ve shared a window, app, or your whole screen, you can also choose from two Presenter Overlays, which are Apple silicon-only features. If you pick ‘Small’ in the Video menu, you’ll appear in a small onscreen circle with a sky-blue background. Your image isn’t completely constrained to the bounds of the circle, though. As you move outside the circle, your image will quickly fade, but it’s a nice effect that adds depth and looks a little like you’re popping out from a hole in someone’s screen as you present something, helping to keep their attention. The other presenter option is ‘Large,’ which superimposes you in front of what you’re sharing with your room in the background. In my testing, both options worked well.

From the Video menu, you can also toggle Center Stage, the Portrait and Studio Light effects, and Reactions on and off. Both the Portrait and Studio Light effect sections can be expanded to reveal sliders that regulate the strength of each effect when using a Studio Display or iPhone camera via Continuity Camera. The Studio Light effect is entirely new to macOS Sonoma, and while Center Stage and Portrait mode aren’t, the greater user control they offer is.

Adjusting the Studio Light effect (left) and panning and zooming my Studio Display camera (right).

For anyone who has never liked Center Stage, Sonoma gives you more control over the camera once you’ve turned off the effect. The controls are a little hidden, though. Unlike the effects that gain a caret that can be clicked to reveal slider controls, the camera controls only appear if you hover over the preview of your video feed when Center Stage is turned off. When you do that, you’ll see a magnification level that can be adjusted by dragging left and right on the scale beneath the magnification label. You can also grab elsewhere on the image to change the camera angle or click on a ‘Recenter’ button to put yourself back in the middle of the frame. Also, if you’re using Continuity Camera with an iPhone 11 or later, you can switch Center Stage between the Wide and Ultra Wide cameras.

I’ve never understood the backlash against the lack of control over Center Stage and the other FaceTime video effects, but I don’t do a lot of video calls, which is undoubtedly part of it. Nor do I care that I’m not broadcasting myself in pore-popping 4K resolution, which is probably best for everyone on the handful of video calls I do. Still, I know a lot of people care deeply about this, or there wouldn’t be Mac utilities for using DSLRs as webcams, so for all of you, I’m happy. I’m also glad that Apple implemented these controls in a way that is discoverable but sufficiently out of the way that I can ignore them.

As you can tell from his reactions, Federico is very enthusiastic about whatever it was I said.

From the Video menu, you can also trigger the following reactions:

• Heart
• Thumbs up
• Thumbs down
• Balloons
• Rain
• Confetti
• Lasers
• Fireworks

Better yet, there are a series of hand gestures available to trigger each of the eight available effects, some of which are similar to the effects available in the Messages app. Early in the betas, I triggered an effect by accident, but that hasn’t happened since, so the sensitivity seems about right.

Fireworks.

As I said, I don’t do lots of video calls, but for someone like me, the new video menu bar item is perfect. I’m not a video conferencing pro, so being able to see a preview of what I’m sharing is ideal. The reactions are fun, too, but the multiple easy ways to share windows, apps, and a full-screen view of your Mac are what I think users will appreciate most whether they’re working from home, holding meetings with far-flung offices around the world, or just showing something off to a friend or family member.

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Shortcuts has barely changed this year.

There’s not a lot to say about Shortcuts this year. There wasn’t much to say last year either, and that’s the biggest Shortcuts news and disappointment of Sonoma. We were told that Shortcuts was the future of Mac automation, but it hasn’t turned out that way. Yes, Shortcuts effectively replaced Automator, which is still available, but little has happened to move Shortcuts forward since its introduction on the Mac. Only Apple knows why that is, but I suspect it’s a question of priorities.

App Intents is a framework from Apple’s Shortcuts team that’s an evolution of what was originally called Siri Shortcuts, except that they’re no longer limited to Siri. App Intents power App Shortcuts, Focus modes, widgets, Live Activities, Spotlight Search on iOS and iPadOS, and the Shortcuts app itself. That’s a massive expansion in a relatively short period of time that has undoubtedly impacted the development of Shortcuts on the Mac.

Whether that expansion is why Shortcuts for Mac has barely budged in the past two years, or there’s another reason doesn’t really matter. The result is the same either way. There’s just not much to say about Shortcuts for Mac again this year.

A few of the Shortcuts for Mac actions that could come in handy.

That said, there are a handful of new and updated Shortcuts actions available on the Mac, including:

• Transcribe Audio for converting audio to text
• Delete Alarms to remove alarms from the Clock app
• Find Alarm has replaced Get All Alarms, allowing you to find fewer than all of your alarms using filtering criteria
• New stopwatch actions
• Show Passwords, which opens the Passwords section of System Settings
• Start Time Machine Backup to begin or end a Time Machine backup
• New network details are returned by the existing Get Network Details action
• Get Details of Event Attendees has added a new ‘Type’ attribute
• A new Find Message action for Mail, that includes multiple filters for locating messages
• A new Print Center section of Shortcuts for the Mac that includes a Print Documents action that I haven’t been able to get to work

The list of new Shortcuts actions on iOS and iPadOS 17 is longer, but not a by a lot. Some of the actions added to iOS and iPadOS 17 are relevant to the Mac, too, but aren’t part of Sonoma, resulting in the Mac version of Shortcuts falling further behind than ever. On top of that, the Mac version of Shortcuts still doesn’t support personal automations or App Shortcuts, which were significantly expanded in iOS and iPadOS 17. Finally, the Shortcuts app is the buggiest system app on the Mac by a wide margin.

At this point, Shortcuts for Mac is beginning to feel a lot like a modern version of Automator – a neglected, dead-end tool that never fulfilled its potential. Perhaps next year will be different, but I’m no longer optimistic it will be.

Stage Manager

Stage Manager took a step backward with Sonoma.

Last year, the issues with Stage Manager on the iPad were so profound that they made the Mac version of the feature feel like a breath of fresh air by comparison. That didn’t mean there weren’t rough edges, but the feature was good enough that I found myself sticking with it throughout the past year. Unfortunately, instead of improving Stage Manager with macOS Sonoma, the feature has taken a step backward.

Like last year, the main issue with Stage Manager on the Mac is that it’s too hard to set up sets of apps. As I said in my Ventura review:

Once set up, sets of apps in the strip are easy to use. The problem is that it’s too hard to create app sets in the first place. Creating sets of apps is one of the few places where iPadOS’s version of Stage Manager outshines the Mac. On both platforms, you can drag an app from the strip onto the current stage to create a set of apps or windows from the same app. The trouble is that Shift-clicking on apps in the strip and dragging and dropping them are the only options for creating app sets on the Mac. In contrast, you can drag apps from the dock or out of a Spotlight search to create a set on the iPad.

The problem with Sonoma is that the ways to create sets of apps are just as limited as Ventura, but the interactions are more confusing than before. With Ventura, if you Shift-clicked on an app stack in the strip, the top one would be added to the current stage. That’s changed in Sonoma.

Strangely, Shift-clicking a stack in the strip pulls apps from the bottom of the stack to the stage and breaks up any remaining stack in the strip.

Now, the bottom app is pulled from the stack and added to the stage. Why? I’ve given up trying to figure it out. Pulling from the bottom is counterintuitive to the way I think of a stack, but it’s a practical issue, too, because the strip only shows icons for the top three apps in a stack. That means if you have four or more apps piled up and Shift-click on the stack, you’re going to get a hidden app from the bottom of the stack.

The other thing that happens when you Shift-click on a stack is that any other apps in the stack you select are separated into separate single-app items in the strip. That means the price of peeling a single app off a stack is pulling the rest of it completely apart, even though you might have wanted to use the rest of those apps together on the stage again later.

Are you still with me? I know, right? It took me most of the summer to figure out what’s going on with Stage Manager, and I’m still not sure I’ve captured the entirety of the odd changes that have been made, but whether I have or not, the impact is the same. Stage Manager is more confusing than before, which is a step backward.

When I saw these changes in the early betas, I thought they were part of an evolving interaction model for Stage Manager and hoped they’d be resolved, but they weren’t. Instead, Shift-clicking on a stack of apps in the strip is so confusing and messy that I’ve stopped using it as a way to build stacks for the most part. Instead, I’ve been resorting to switching stacks, removing individual apps from the stage that I want to use in another stack, and then switching back to my first stack and adding to it. It’s a cumbersome process that I hope changes because I’m still a fan of Stage Manager as a concept, but these changes have really tested my patience this summer.

In addition to window setup issues, Stage Manager is still in need of a solution for the Open dialog dance where opening a document in an app like Pages causes apps to jump on and off the stage, as the Open dialog closes before the document opens. The feature is also in desperate need of keyboard shortcuts, including a right-click menu for the strip, and Shortcuts support, which is non-existent.

I find myself in a very strange place with Stage Manager. I’ve been using it full-time on my Mac since the first Ventura beta. In contrast, the issues with the feature on the iPad drove me away for the entirety of iPadOS 16. Now, however, the tables have turned. I agree with Federico’s remaining critiques of Stage Manager on the iPad, but with iPadOS 17, it’s finally a useful feature that I enjoyed using all summer during the iPadOS beta. In contrast, the overhead of setting up app sets and the added confusion layered on by Sonoma has me rethinking my use of the feature on the Mac, which is a shame because there’s value in having a Mac and iPad setup that work similarly.

I still believe that the ideas for decluttering the Mac desktop that underlies Stage Manager are sound, but unfortunately, Sonoma is a step in the wrong direction. Hopefully, with the worst of the iPadOS issues behind it, Apple can dedicate time to examining how people use Stage Manager on the Mac and how it could be made to fit better with a wide range of use cases.

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

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

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

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Sharing passwords.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apple ID Passkeys

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

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

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

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

Passwords should be freed from the clutter of the System Settings app and Safari’s Settings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

URL Tracking Parameters

You’ve undoubtedly come across tracking parameters on the web. They’re the part of a URL that follows a question mark and can be used for a wide variety of types of tracking, from something as innocuous as identifying that a URL was opened from an RSS feed to identifying a specific person who was sent a URL by text message or email and then tracking them as they visit other websites.

Tracking parameters that track individuals across sites are stripped from URLs sent via Mail and Messages and those opened in a private Safari window. My understanding is that this feature won’t strip a parameter that, for example, tells the sender of an email newsletter that someone opened their newsletter, but it would do so if the parameter was designed to identify that you opened the newsletter and track you across other sites. Removing these parameters doesn’t break the URLs. It simply protects your privacy. Tracking parameters have a place on the web, but they’re misused like a lot of web technologies, so I’m glad to see Apple is cracking down on uses that identify individuals.

Sensitive Content Warnings

Communications Safety, which allowed parents to blur sensitive photos sent or received by their kids with Messages, has been expanded to videos. The feature has also been expanded from Messages to the system photo picker.

Adults have the option to receive sensitive content warnings in Messages now, too. When turned on, you’ll be prompted to pick whether you want to see a photo or video that has been flagged as containing nudity. You’ll also have the option to block the contact. Apple has made its on-device Sensitive Content Analysis available as a framework to developers so they can add it to their apps, too.

But Wait, There’s More

There are other security and privacy features sprinkled throughout macOS Sonoma. A few more worth mentioning are:

• Website security codes delivered via Mail autofill like they do when you receive a text message in the Messages app
• Calendar includes a new permission that allows apps to add events but not read events on your calendars
• The Photos permission alert to allow apps to access your photo library has been updated to tell users how many photos they’ll be giving an app access to if they allow full access
• The addition of new privacy labeling options for developers so they can explain to users the privacy practices of any third-party SDKs that their apps use

Accessibility

If you cover the tech world long enough, it’s very easy to react cynically to announcements by companies about topics like accessibility. Too many companies talk a good game but are short on follow-through. What’s different about Apple is that it has the track record to back up its words.

This year is no different. As Apple’s hardware evolves, it poses new accessibility challenges but also opportunities. A great example of what hardware advances are enabling is the fact that some Apple silicon Macs can now be paired with Made for iPhone hearing devices for Mac users with hearing disabilities.

Live Speech lets you type what you want to say, which is then read aloud.

Speech is a big part of Apple’s accessibility story this year, too. Like the iPhone and iPad, Live Speech is available as part of macOS Sonoma. The feature allows users to type what they want to say and have it spoken out loud on FaceTime calls or in person.

To set up a Personal Voice, head to the Accessibility section of System Settings.

For Mac users who are at risk of losing their ability to speak, Personal Voice is also available. The feature can be found in the Accessibility section of System Settings under ‘Speech.’ The first thing you’ll be asked to do is authenticate yourself with Touch ID or your system password. After reading about 150 phrases aloud, which you’re told will take about 15 minutes, your Mac will generate a personal voice for you securely and locally. It takes a while, but then, you’ll be able to use your Personal Voice for Live Speech alongside the system voices built into macOS.

There are other new accessibility features throughout macOS this year, including:

• Voice Control phonetic spellings that suggest similar sounding words that are spelled differently
• A Voice Control guide with tips on how to use the feature
• The addition of VoiceOver to Xcode
• Improvements to how Siri voices sound at higher speeds and an option to slow Siri’s speech
• A single place to adjust the text size of several system apps individually or as a group
• The ability to set automations to pause automatically

There’s always more that can be done to make computers more accessible to an even wider audience, but Sonoma is an excellent example of how Apple has continued to work to make its products more accessible with every new OS release, which I love.

Everything Else

This is always one of my favorite sections to write because there are always dozens of interesting changes to a new version of macOS that don’t merit their own section but are nonetheless important. They’re also the kind of thing you can try to impress your friends with. I say ‘try’ because, let’s face it, OS trivia is only going to impress a very specific crowd. Still, there are a lot more handy new features in macOS Sonoma that are worth covering, so let’s get to it.

Autocompletion, Autocorrection, and Dictation. As someone who types all day, I appreciate Apple’s improved autocompletion and autocorrection feature more than just about any other change this year. The feature is the very definition of one that saves you a very small amount of time but so often that it builds up quickly over time.

Autocomplete’s suggested text appears in a slightly lighter shade of gray than the text you’ve typed.

The new autocompletion is so well done that apps that don’t support it feel like something is missing. The feature, which suggests word completion and even multiple words at times, is available in any standard macOS text field. When you see an autocompletion suggestion appear in light gray, just tap the Space Bar, Tab key, or Return to accept the suggestion.

Unfortunately, the feature doesn’t work in Safari and, by extension, its new web apps, or apps built on other technologies like Electron. That means, for instance, that I get suggestions in a native Mac app like iA Writer but not Obsidian. It also means you won’t get autocomplete in apps like Notion, Discord, or Slack either. Those are big apps used by a lot of people that aren’t likely to switch to native technologies for autocompletion, but it’s one more reason to appreciate and gravitate toward native Mac apps.

Clicking on a word that is autocorrected gives you the option to go back to what you typed.

Also, the English, French, and Spanish keyboards are all using a new transformer model that is more accurate for autocorrect, and it’s far superior to the old version. Corrections are made as you type, and the corrected word is temporarily underlined in the app’s accent color. Click on the word, and a popup will appear to let you change the text to what you originally typed.

Tapping the Magic Keyboard’s globe key brings up a contextual emoji picker.

Another nice touch is that when you tap the globe key on an Apple keyboard, an inline emoji picker will appear with emoji suggestions based on the message you’re writing. If you don’t want the suggested emoji, just click on the drop-down arrow to open the full macOS Character Viewer. The cursor also transforms to show you when you’ve turned on Caps Lock with a similar inline indicator.

Dictation has been improved, too. When activated, the line you’re dictating has an accent color glow around it to indicate you’re in dictation mode. Stop speaking, and a dictation icon appears above the cursor so you know you’re in that mode. However, you can seamlessly wrest control from the microphone simply by starting to type. When you stop typing, the microphone icon will reappear, and you can resume dictation. The same thing allows you to move around in a document with a pointing device, dictating edits. When you’re finished, tap the Escape key or the Apple Magic Keyboard’s dedicated Dictation key to cancel dictation. Unlike autocorrect and autocompletion, dictation works system-wide, including in Safari and non-native apps, which is great.

Touch typing is so ingrained in me that I don’t see myself switching to dictation for writing. However, I plan to experiment with it more over the course of the next several months for note-taking.

Mail. Apple Mail received an extensive update last year with macOS Ventura. This year’s update is far more modest, with just a handful of changes.

If Sonoma detects that you’ve received a travel-related email, like a hotel reservation, it will float that message to the top of your inbox as your travel date approaches. I haven’t been on a trip that included travel emails since WWDC, but in concept, I like the idea of being able to find my flight information more easily, but we’ll have to see how well it works in practice.

Just like iOS and iPadOS 17, Sonoma can clean up emailed password verification codes.

I’m more excited about the fact that when you receive a password verification email, Apple Mail will offer to auto-fill the code that arrives in your email inbox and delete it automatically. The feature is limited to Apple Mail, and most of my email accounts are Gmail accounts, but for those times when codes arrive in my iCloud account, I appreciate the helping hand to keep the mess out of my inbox.

A perennial problem I think a lot of people have with email is that once you download an attachment, it’s separated from the context of the message that came with it. This happens to me a lot. Someone sends me a file, I download it, and when I find the file later and have forgotten who it was from or why it was sent, I wind up back in Mail, trying to find the original message.

The Finder’s right-click menu provides new contextual options for files downloaded from Mail.

With Sonoma, you can right-click on a downloaded file, and you’ll see a couple of options. First, you’ll see a ‘Show in Mail’ option that will take you back to the original message. Second, there will be a ‘Reply to [Name of Sender]’ option, which makes it dead simple to compose a reply to someone after reviewing an attachment without navigating back to your Mail inbox, which I love.

Mail is also adding support for sending large emoji in messages. It’s not a big addition, but this was already possible on iOS and iPadOS, and parity between the platforms for this sort of thing makes a lot of sense.

Messages. Messages should be more fun on the Mac. Yes, I do my ‘serious’ work on the Mac, but I also spend the day chatting with friends and family in Messages, and I’m bummed that stickers are barely implemented there compared to iOS and and iPadOS 17. I can access stickers I create on my iPhone or iPad and add them to messages, but I can’t make stickers on the Mac, and the effects you can add to them look flat and bland, which I’m sure is a technical limitation, but still.

Filtering Messages’ search results.

That said, the new ‘swipe to reply’ gesture is a nice, quick way to respond to someone, and I appreciate that there are more ways to filter search results. For example, in the screenshot above, it’s simple to quickly filter to find all messages to Federico that include links and mention Tim Cook. We run a lot of MacStories’ business over iMessage, and having better search filtering has been a huge help already. The ability to quickly jump to the beginning of a series of unread messages in a busy thread using the new Catch-Up button is handy, too.

You can stop an audio message and pick up again where you left off before sending it.

Audio messages are more versatile, too. You can start a message, pause it, and then resume recording. Plus, you can play back messages at twice the speed or view a transcription of the messages you receive with Sonoma.

The biggest win, though, is that Messages will offer to delete those text messages you get with one-time password codes. I’ve been using this feature all summer on all my devices, and it’s made a big difference, decluttering my Messages inbox and greatly improving the signal-to-noise ratio.

Game Mode. It’s not like there’s absolutely no fun happening on macOS Sonoma. Apple continues to work on the Mac as a videogame platform. The Mac may not be going toe-to-toe with Windows PCs yet, but I appreciate that Apple continues to improve macOS for gamers and developers.

Game Mode is an automatic Apple silicon Mac mode that gives running games priority over CPU and GPU operations. Apple has also doubled the sampling rates for Bluetooth controllers and lowered the audio latency of AirPods, which should improve the gameplay experience across the board.

Game Mode works automatically.

In typical Apple fashion, Game Mode isn’t something you turn on. It’s enabled as soon as you start a game. I don’t have two comparable systems to test the impact of Game Mode in practice, but I appreciate the effort to provide a better Mac gaming experience.

For developers, Apple has released and continued to iterate on its Game Porting Toolkit. The tool allows developers to run PC games on a Mac using a compatibility layer that works like Proton does on the Steam Deck. That way, they can identify bottlenecks in their games that need to be worked on to port them to the Mac. It’s good to see this sort of effort by Apple to make it easier for developers to test their games on Macs because its systems are different from others, and the Mac user base is still relatively small.

Photos. Like iOS and iPadOS 17, Photos can identify dog and cat breeds, as well as food and symbols using the expanded Visual Look Up feature. In my testing, the results were mixed. The app also supports pet albums, which, along with any other album, can be added to the Photos widget for the first time.

Photos knows dogs.

Editing refinements have been included in Sonoma, too. Photos allows for intelligent copy and pasting of edits between images that match the white balance and exposure between the photos. Memories, which are generated by the app, are more editable, too, allowing for photos and videos to be added and rearranged within the Memory.

Photos has also added sharing via an iCloud link and a Sync Now button for those times when iCloud sync has been paused, and you don’t want to wait.

Enhanced AutoFill. Other time savers include the enhancements to AutoFill. On the Mac, you can right-click on a text field and pick AutoFill to see options to pick a contact stored in your Contacts app or a password, which opens a mini version of the System Settings and Safari password interface. After you select the password or contact you want, AutoFill pastes it into your document.

Autofill works in any text field the same way it does in a Safari password field.

The final step is to pick the information you want to share.

Screen Sharing. Screen Sharing is now a proper Mac app with a proper interface in macOS Sonoma. I’ve been experimenting with Tailscale for the past month, and the new Screen Sharing interface in Sonoma has replaced my use of third-party VNC clients on the Mac. The app lets you save connections to other Macs and organize them into groups, making it easy to reconnect without looking up a Mac’s IP address or knowing its local network name. I only connect to a couple of Macs in my home, so my screen-sharing needs are simple, but I’ve been very happy with the update.

The new Screen Sharing app.

Apple silicon Macs can also be able to take advantage of a new high-performance screen-sharing mode that’s more responsive for working remotely over a high-bandwidth connection. The feature allows you to view a remote Mac’s screen at the resolution of the Mac you’re using to access it, avoiding scaling issues that can impact the quality of the image delivered from the remote computer. High-performance mode also supports HDR if your remote Mac has an HDR screen. This isn’t something I’ve had the occasion to do, so I haven’t tested it, but it should be a big win for anyone working remotely on resource-intensive projects.

Motion and other sensor data is logged to the security section of Home tab in the Home app.

In addition to the foregoing, macOS Sonoma includes a laundry list of other miscellaneous features:

• Home logs door and window sensor, door locks, security system, and garage door activity and displays when electricity in your area is cleaner.
• Books has added updated store pages for series of books.
• Freeform has improved diagramming, has been added as a share menu option in other apps, the ability to guide collaborators around your board, and Quick View support for 3D objects.
• Pronouns can be added to Contacts.
• AirTags can be shared with up to five people, a great option for things like a shared set of car keys. Sharing prevents an AirTag from alerting the person it’s shared with that they are being followed by a tag if they use the shared item.
• The Print Center app has a new, modern interface but no meaningful new features.
• System Settings is a little easier to navigate thanks to a back button.
• Maps allows users to specify a preferred EV charging network.
• Sonoma drops support for the 2017 MacBook Pro, 2017 iMac, and 2017 12-inch MacBook.

Books includes new options for tracking series.

Several features announced at WWDC aren’t ready yet and will be released later. For a complete rundown on what’s coming later, be sure to check out the story we published on MacStories.

Conclusion

As I wrap up this review at my desk with an iPad Pro on one side using Universal Control and my iPhone on the other in StandBy mode, I’m struck by how well these three devices work in concert as well as individually. That’s no small feat, and it highlights how well-integrated Apple’s systems are now.

A big part of that integration is widgets. Apps vary from system to system based on screen size and device capabilities, but widgets are the same system-wide. They’re the glue that links an iPhone to an iPad to a Mac. They provide continuity across devices, allowing you to spread your work out across any number of them. Yet, at the same time, widgets work just as well on a single device.

That wasn’t really true before Sonoma. Sure, we’ve had widgets on the Mac for a while, but I’ve yet to meet someone who used them a lot before Sonoma because they were hidden away behind the menu bar’s clock. Desktop widgets won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and you may prefer to stick with widgets on an iPhone or iPad as you work at your Mac, but with Sonoma, desktop widgets are a critical link in a mixed device environment that recognizes that for many people, the Mac isn’t their only work tool. I’ve never worked solely on a Mac, which is why I’m such a big fan of widgets on the desktop.

I’m also struck by how far apps like Reminders and Notes have come from their origins. There was a time when Reminders was a barebones checklist tool, and Notes didn’t support formatting. Now, they’re both worthy competitors to some of the best alternatives available from third-party developers. What’s more, they scale elegantly from their original, simple use cases to more complex ones, which is a testament to their thoughtful, considered design.

Widgets everywhere.

Safari single-site web apps complete the Sonoma triumvirate of my favorite features. I’m sure it’s a product of when I began using computers more than anything else, but I can’t help it. I prefer native apps to web apps. However, in my hierarchy of computing needs, I prefer the best tool for a job over anything else, and increasingly, in recent years, that’s a web app. Still, I’ve never enjoyed working in browser tabs, whether they’re at the top, on the side, or part of a special-purpose profile. There are third-party apps with more bells and whistles, but over the past few months with Sonoma, I’ve found that Safari web apps have been the perfect lightweight solution to the internal MacStories web tools we use, as well as a laundry list of third-party services. I’d still prefer native apps that take advantage of macOS-specific features like the share menu and Shortcuts, but I’m glad Apple has embraced the reality of web apps and given me and other users a practical solution.

Those are my personal favorites among the many Sonoma updates, but the best part is that there’s something in this release for everyone, from significant improvements to video calling to gaming to password management. It’s a grab bag of utility that’s only marred this year by the neglect of Shortcuts and Stage Manager, both of which got off to a good start when they debuted but have felt stuck in first gear ever since then.

On balance, though, there’s never been a better time to be a Mac user who also uses other Apple devices. It wasn’t that long ago that the Mac seemed like an also-ran platform without much of a future. Computing has changed. Mobile is dominant, and web apps are a growing segment of the app landscape. There’s still plenty of room for the great native Mac app experiences we’ve enjoyed for years, but with Sonoma, Apple has shown it can adapt. Bringing the Mac further into the fold of its other OSes with the help of widgets and giving users a better way to use web apps. Paired with Apple silicon, it’s an exciting, dynamic time on the Mac again, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds.

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I’m sitting on an American Airlines flight, crammed in a window seat in economy class. I brought my iPad mini to catch up on some reading while I’m away, but at the last minute, I threw my Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard and a Twelve South Compass Pro. I cleared my task list for this trip, but it’s also been a while since I used the iPad mini for any productivity tasks, so I thought I’d bring it and the accessories along in case I had some downtime to do things like catch up on email.

I didn’t expect to do anything on the flight, especially writing. Tray tables are too shallow these days for even my M1 MacBook Air, let alone a mini in a stand with a separate keyboard. But when I settled into my seat, Jennifer pointed out the phone holder in the seatback in front of me. They’re meant for entertainment, replacing the in-seat screens airplanes used to have.

However, I discovered something arguably better that was also a fun opportunity to publish a story from 34,000 feet in the sky. When I pulled the little phone shelf out from the seatback, I saw the top bracket extended high enough that I could use it with my iPad mini. I signed up for in-flight Wi-Fi, paired the Logitech keyboard, and I was good to go.

The ergonomics are surprisingly good. The iPad is at eye level, and with nothing but the keyboard on the tray table, I can shove it closer to the seat in front of me, so my arms can extend to a comfortable position. The only downside is that without a pointing device, I have to reach up to log into websites and interact with some parts of apps, but it’s been far better than trying to type on a laptop or an iPad Pro in a Magic Keyboard. I highly recommend trying this the next time you need to work on an American Airlines flight.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

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

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

Shared Passwords

Sharing passwords from the iPhone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apple ID Passkeys

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

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

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

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check In’s onboarding is top notch.

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

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

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

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

Setting up a check-in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What each person sees when you arrive at your destination.

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

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

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

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A major change introduced by iPadOS 17 that is going to make video creators and gamers happy is support for UVC (USB Video Class) devices, which means an iPad can now recognize external webcams, cameras, video acquisition cards, and other devices connected over USB-C. I started testing iPadOS 17 thinking this would be a boring addition I’d never use; as it turns out, it’s where I had the most fun tinkering with different pieces of hardware this summer.

Most of all, however, I did not anticipate I’d end up doing FaceTime calls with a Game Boy Camera as my iPad Pro’s webcam.

I’m in the process of writing my annual iOS and iPadOS review, and in the story I’ll have plenty more details about the changes to iPadOS 17’s Stage Manager and how I’m taking advantage of UVC support to play Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck games on my iPad’s display. But in the meantime, I wanted to share this Game Boy Camera story because it’s wild, ridiculous, and I love it.

Before I get into some of my weirdest experiments with UVC capture on iPad Pro, let’s start from the basics. As someone who uses an iPad Pro at a desk with an Apple Studio Display, I was very happy to see that iPadOS 17 supports the Studio Display’s built-in webcam, allowing me to use it for FaceTime calls and grainy selfies.

FaceTime on the iPad Pro via the Studio Display’s webcam.

The way UVC capture works on iPad Pro is simple: if a compatible camera is connected to the iPad, apps like FaceTime (and iPadOS 17 ones that have added support for the new API) will switch to it as the default video source. There’s nothing else to configure and no menus to pick webcams from. This addition turned out to be perfectly timed with my decision to use the iPad Pro in fake clamshell mode: I can now keep the iPad with the Magic Keyboard lid closed under my desk and still be on a FaceTime call thanks to the connected Studio Display.

My experiments turned weird – in the best possible way – when I realized that UVC support meant Apple was opening up the iPadOS platform to game capture cards, DSLR adapters, and other USB accessories that let you connect a USB video source to a computer. I want to highlight two things I did.

For starters, I wanted to see if I could play games from my Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck on my iPad Pro’s Retina Display by using an external game capture card. The answer is yes. The capture card I bought is this one by NZXT, which offers an HDMI-in port and a USB-C port that you can use to connect to an iPad Pro. To output video from a Nintendo Switch, I use the excellent Genki Covert Dock Mini; for the Steam Deck, I use Valve’s official dock.

iPad Pro, Steam Deck with dock, and NZXT capture card.

The key component is the software: you need an app on your iPad that can read video input from connected UVC devices. Thankfully, indie developer Jingcheng Tang built exactly that with Capture Pro: UVC Viewer, a simple utility (currently in beta) that uses the new iPadOS 17 APIs to display and capture external video sources plugged into the iPad Pro. Here’s what it looks like:

My Steam Deck’s library as seen via Capture Pro on iPad.

As I was finalizing my tests with the NZXT capture card for the review, I looked at my shelf of portable consoles and had an idea: what if I could use a Game Boy Camera as a webcam on my iPad Pro and do a FaceTime call with it?

My Game Boy Camera.

Let me explain. During my tests with UVC devices, I noticed that, just like the FaceTime app can pick up the Studio Display’s webcam when the iPad Pro is connected to it, so it can use other UVC devices’ input as its video source. To prove my point, I plugged a Steam Deck into the capture card, connected it to the iPad Pro, opened FaceTime, and there it was: Elden Ring on FaceTime.

The FaceTime app doesn’t know I’m Tarnished: it thinks everything’s a webcam.

So I started crafting an even bigger-brain theory. I have an Analogue Pocket, which is an outstanding modern take on the Game Boy that can play original Game Boy cartridges. I also have the Analogue Pocket dock, which lets me play Game Boy games on a big screen by taking advantage of the Pocket’s excellent upscaling mode for Game Boy graphics. And, of course, Nintendo made everyone’s favorite camera from the late 90s, which you can get pretty cheap these days on eBay. If I could use the Game Boy Camera on a Pocket and send the video feed from the console to the iPad Pro, would I then be able to do a FaceTime call with someone while looking like a character straight out of a Game Boy game?

The answer, my dear readers, is a glorious, resounding Yes.

At first, I had trouble with the NZXT capture card not sending the Pocket’s image to the FaceTime app, so I tried with an Elgato Cam Link dongle, and that worked right away on my iPad Pro. The Pocket outputs a 1080p video signal over HDMI, which the FaceTime app seems to prefer over 720p video sources; even then, I was barely recognizable with the Game Boy Camera’s image quality, which was exactly the point. I put my AirPods Pro to have at least good audio and called my girlfriend on FaceTime.

Bingo.

It all worked out of the box and I, incredibly, was able to do a FaceTime video call using the Game Boy Camera, a modern Game Boy, and some HDMI adapters with my iPad Pro.

Game Boy Camera FaceTime thanks to iPadOS 17.

Two-player Game Boy Camera FaceTime with John.

But there’s more: when I swiped down to open Control Center, I noticed that even with the capture card plugged and feeding video to FaceTime, video effects were enabled. As I suspected, Portrait, Center Stage, and Studio Light did nothing with the Game Boy Camera’s image. But get this: reactions worked.

FaceTime video effects when using a Game Boy Camera.

This new FaceTime feature plays 3D animations such as balloons or hearts when a person performs a specific hand gesture on a FaceTime call. Since reactions are based on hand recognition rather than camera quality, once I positioned myself just right in front of the camera and performed a victory sign, FaceTime on Silvia’s iPhone did, in fact, show balloons.

FaceTime didn’t recognize heart hands and thumbs up, but it got the balloons right.

That’s when I truly lost it. There I was, performing gestures in front of a Game Boy Camera in 2023 to test video capture and FaceTime on an iPad Pro. None of this makes sense, and no regular person will ever need to use this. And yet, somehow, the fact that everything worked as it was supposed to filled me a strange sense of peace and nerd satisfaction. If this ridiculous thing can work, perhaps the iPad is going to be okay after all.

You might argue that I was so preoccupied with whether or not I could that I didn’t stop to think if I should. And I’m sorry, but I won’t accept that criticism when it comes to this experiment. The iPad Pro lets me use a Game Boy Camera as a webcam, and I think that pretty much sells iPadOS 17 for a certain kind of person out there.

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Source: Apple.

It was a warm, humid morning in North Carolina when I went out for a run today. I came back a sweaty mess, which got me thinking about my Apple Watch Ultra.

I’m no mountaineer, but I love the Ultra’s long battery life and big screen. It’s been my constant health and fitness companion for everything from sleep tracking to a variety of workouts. However, there’s one thing in particular that I miss from the standard Apple Watch: band choices.

The last thing I wanted to do after a post-run shower was put my Apple Watch Ultra back on with its soggy Alpine Loop band. So, I did what’s become a regular post-run habit of swapping bands and tossing the sweaty one in the laundry. Besides the Starlight Alpine Loop that came with my Ultra, I have a Black/Gray Trail Loop. Of the two, I like the Trail Loop better because the Alpine Loop’s clasp sometimes digs into my wrist as I type. However, I use both regularly because one is almost always waiting for me to do a load of laundry.

I’ve been running more. As a result, my two bands have begun to dictate when my laundry gets done, whether I have much else to wash or not. That led me to Apple’s website to buy a third band, where I was immediately struck by the lack of choices.

A small selection of the many band options for the standard Apple Watch. Source: Apple.

If you own the standard Apple Watch, you have dozens of options at a wide variety of price points. Apple offers the Sports Loop, Braided Solo Loop, the Solo Loop, the Nike Sports Band and Loop, two types of leather bands, stainless steel bands, and Hermès bands at price points from $49 for many models to $599 for the Hermès Orange/Blanc Swift Leather Casaque Double Tour. There are so many bands for the standard model that there’s an entire website and app dedicated to collectors of the bands, which makes sense because, after all, the Watch is a wearable that’s not just a wrist computer. It’s also a fashion accessory.

Three may be company, but it’s not enough for Watch bands. Source: Apple.

So why, with so many standard Apple Watch bands, are there just three models in three colors at a single price point for Apple Watch Ultra owners? Looking at the Sports Band alone, there are nine options available for the standard Apple Watch. I really don’t get it. I like the three choices offered for the Ultra, but I’d like more colors, styles, and price options. I certainly don’t think the limited choice is because the Ultra has been a flop because I see them when I’m out all the time.

I recognize that I could buy a band from a third-party company. Perhaps that’s what I’ll end up doing because what I really want is something akin to the Sports Band that can be cleaned without putting it in the laundry. Alternatively, I may start using my collection of standard Apple Watch bands. They work, but I don’t think they look great with the Ultra’s big watch face, so that’s not ideal either.

Why aren’t there special edition bands for the Ultra too? Source: Apple.

What I would prefer is an Ultra band update schedule comparable to the standard Watch. Apple has made it a tradition of refreshing bands in the fall and spring and issuing special editions, like the Black Unity and Pride Edition models, at other times of the year. I expect we’ll see new bands for the Ultra this fall, and while I’m sure the Ultra market is significantly smaller than the original Watch’s, my wish for 2024 is to not have to wait another full year for new Ultra bands.

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Yesterday, the iMac turned 25, and The Verge had an excellent trio of articles, plus a visual history, covering the computer’s impact on Apple, the computer industry, and culture.

The series includes a look back at the introduction of the iMac in 1998 by Jason Snell and the many controversial design choices the iMac introduced like foregoing a floppy drive and including USB-A ports. The iMac also introduced color and transparency to consumer electronics that spread throughout the gadget world, but I agree with Jason’s take that the most important contribution of the iMac was that it pulled Apple back from the brink of financial disaster:

[P]erhaps the iMac’s strongest legacy is Apple itself. The company was close to bankruptcy when Jobs returned, and the iMac gave the company a cash infusion that allowed it to complete work on Mac OS X, rebuild the rest of the Mac product line in the iMac’s image, open Apple Stores, make the iPod, and set the tone for the next twenty five years.

The Grape iMac.

Alex Cranz looked at how Apple marketed the iMac to college students at the turn of the millennium to build a foundation of life-long customers:

When it launched the iMac, it also launched a then exorbitantly pricey marketing campaign focused not just on traditional Mac owners but also students. “Being the first computer truly owned by a student entering college gives a company like Apple tremendous brand leverage over future computer loyalties,” Laine Nooney, a computer historian, professor at New York University, and author of The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal,told me over the phone. “That marketing isn’t just paying for a couple of years of sales… it’s helping create a generation of users.”

The M1 iMac.

However, as important as the iMac has been to Apple historically, the lack of an update in over 800 days can’t be overlooked. The iMac’s role in Apple’s lineup is a shadow of what it once was. The Verge’s Monica Chin’s contribution to the site’s series wonders aloud what’s next for the all-in-one desktop:

The iMac was once the computer that everyone I knew had on their desk. That is now, without question, the MacBook. The laptop, as a category, has come so far and permeated culture so thoroughly in the past two decades that it’s hard to see any desktop — regardless of its purported numbers — as a mainstream option. I wouldn’t be surprised if, like the Mac Studio, the iMac leans more into a niche over the next few years. Maybe that’s offices that want a beautiful setup. Maybe that’s people with yellow bedrooms. 

Or maybe it’s the high-performance space. If there’s an opening in the market for a premium desktop like the Mac Studio, I don’t see why there’s not a larger one for a premium iMac. It could essentially be a MacBook Pro with a much larger built-in screen than any MacBook Pro can provide. Plus, maybe this one could also come in yellow.

My first Mac was a white plastic Intel-based iMac. I also owned an early aluminum model. However, other than testing a loaner M1 iMac, my Apple desktops in the years since have been Mac minis and my current Mac Studio paired with a MacBook Air for on the go.

I guess I’m part of the problem. I love the simplicity and elegance of the iMac, but the power and modularity of the Mac Studio paired with a laptop fit my needs much better these days. Still, my sense is there’s room for both a consumer-level iMac that serves as a shared family computer or a simple space-saving desktop solution and a more powerful, big-screen iMac for tasks like photo and video editing.

Rumors point to an iMac refresh this fall, so the drought should be over soon. I just hope what Apple introduces takes some chances aimed at broadening the iMac’s user base beyond where it is today.

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

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

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

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

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

Adding a new widget to StandBy.

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

One of my favorite clock widgets.

Changing the clock’s accent color.

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

StandBy’s retro Analog clock.

StandBy’s World clock.

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

StandBy’s Solar clock.

StandBy’s Float clock.

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

StandBy’s photo mode.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

StandBy’s Night Mode.

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

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

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

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

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

Federico’s StandBy-Friendly Chargers

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

Anker Cube

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

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

The cube.

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

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

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

OtterBox’s 2-in-1 MagSafe Battery

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

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

The battery.

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

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

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

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

They go well together.

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

John’s StandBy-Friendly Chargers

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

Belkin 2-in-1 BoostCharge Pro

Belkin’s 2-in-1 BoostCharge Pro

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

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

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

Twelve South HiRise 3

Twelve South’s HiRise 3.

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

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

Ugreen 10,000mAh MagSafe Wireless Power Station

Ugreen’s battery pack with kickstand.

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

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

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

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

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

Belkin’s MagSafe Continuity Camera adapter for external displays.

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

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

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

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

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

On the same day that the App Store turned 15, the Video Game History Foundation released a study that concludes 87% of all classic videogames released in the US are no longer commercially available. The study looked at a broad cross-section of platforms and found that this isn’t a problem that’s limited to one corner of the videogame industry. It’s universal. As a result, a large segment of videogame history is at risk of being lost forever.

The Video Game History Foundation’s mission is to preserve videogame history, and along with libraries, museums, and archives, they’re seeking exemptions from US Copyright law to make game preservation easier. On the other side of their efforts is the gaming industry, which argues, among other things, that commercial re-releases and remasters of classic games are satisfying preservation needs.

That debate is what prompted the Foundation’s study:

It’s true that there’s more games being re-released than even before. But then why does the gaming community believe that so few classic games are still available? What’s the real story here? If we want to have a productive conversation about game preservation, we need an accurate understanding of where things stand right now.

We conducted this study to settle the facts. It’s not enough just to have a hunch. We need hard data.

The results of the Video Game History Foundation’s study tell a different story than the one the videogame industry tells and is one that’s equally applicable to mobile games and apps on Apple’s App Store. Federico and I have written about app and game preservation before, including during the 10th anniversary of the App Store. And while I applaud Apple’s decision to promote classic iOS games as part of Apple Arcade, the Foundation’s study shows that it’s not enough. It’s a start, but for every game that is given a new lease on life as part of Arcade, there are dozens that lie dormant and unplayable.

The problem extends to apps too. Craig Grannell, with the help of Internet sleuths, set out to recreate the list of 500 apps and games that debuted on the App Store as its 15th anniversary approached. Grannell’s Google Spreadsheet currently lists 355 titles, and guess what? By my count, only 43 of those apps and games have live App Store URLs, which works out to 12%, almost exactly the same results as the Video Game History Foundation’s study. Grannell’s spreadsheet may not have been compiled as rigorously as the Foundation’s study, but the point stands: we’re losing access to culturally significant apps and games on the App Store alongside the videogame industry.

That’s why I was happy to see the Video Game History Foundation take the important step of gathering the facts that support their preservation efforts. Its focus is on games, but hopefully, it will help raise awareness about preserving apps too.

A good way to learn more about the Video Game History Foundation’s study is also to listen to the latest episode of its podcast, where Kelsey Lewin and Phil Salvador of the Foundation were joined by Brandon Butler, Director of Information Policy at the University of Virginia Library and Law and Policy Advisor at the Software Preservation Network.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

Apple itself is hailing watchOS 10 as the largest software update since the introduction of the Apple Watch. I’m not sure I quite agree with that characterization, but it’s certainly the biggest update we’ve seen in many years. The tenth iteration of watchOS includes an exciting fresh take on some of its core interactions, including a reassignment of the hardware side button and a brand-new widget interface. Apple has released the watchOS 10 public beta today, which you can access as part of the Apple Beta Software Program.

There’s a lot to dig into here, but we’ll leave most of the digging for my official watchOS review later this year. For now, let’s take a look at the highlights of watchOS 10, what exactly has changed, and what seems to be working after just a few weeks of usage.

The very first thing you’ll notice after installing watchOS 10 is the new post-update onboarding experience. It is unskippable, which initially annoyed me before I realized the extent of the interaction changes.

After greeting you with a full-screen “Hello”, your Apple Watch will instruct you to press the Digital Crown while explaining what this will do (open the view to all of your watchOS apps). Once you do this and see the app screen for a few seconds, the onboarding experience returns and tells you to press the Digital Crown again to return to your watch face. Next, it will instruct you to spin the Digital Crown to access the new widgets view, and finally to press the side button to access Control Center. I don’t have an Apple Watch Ultra, but I presume the experience would step through the Action button as well if you have one.

I was initially bothered by the onboarding experience forcing me to slowly press the Digital Crown twice — with seconds of delay in between — in order to get to my apps screen and back. These interactions haven’t changed, and thus I already knew what was going to happen. Once I got to the Digital Crown and side button though, I was actually thankful that watchOS forced me to undertake these actions slowly, while reading exactly what they were going to do, because I otherwise would have been confused when my hardware buttons no longer worked as I expected them to. Instead, I actually understood exactly what the update had changed without having to experiment a bunch to try to figure it out.

Hardware Reassignments

Control Center, the new Smart Stack, and the Dock.

This is not the first time we’ve seen reassignments of hardware buttons on the Apple Watch, but it is the first time in a number of years. Spinning the Digital Crown hasn’t had a significant role on the main watch face since Time Travel was dropped, and the side button’s last reassignment was to switch from the Friends interface to the Apple Watch Dock. Both of those changes occurred in watchOS 3.

The tenth version of watchOS is as good a time as ever to rethink these hardware interactions once again. I’ve never found the Apple Watch Dock to be particularly useful, and making the Digital Crown do nothing except trigger a few fun yet frivolous watch face animations was always a bit of a waste. I’m not sure that the new interactions are perfect, but at least it’s good to see Apple experimenting with the Apple Watch again.

In watchOS 10, Apple has assigned Control Center to the side button. This moves it from its previous position just below the watch face, opening that spot up for the all-new widgets interface which Apple has dubbed the “Smart Stack”. The Smart Stack can be accessed by swiping up on the watch face — just like Control Center was previously. However, it can also be accessed by turning the Digital Crown upward, a new interaction for the watch face which Apple presumably added to improve discoverability of the new interface.

This shuffle has displaced two other interactions: the handful of watch face animations that were triggered by spinning the Digital Crown, and the Apple Watch Dock. The former is still available on watch faces that support it, but you now have to manually tap on the watch face a single time to switch into an animatable mode, at which point spinning the Digital Crown will control the animation rather than open the Smart Stack.

Tapping the Metropolitan face transitions from the first image to the second, at which point you can spin the Digital Crown to stretch or squish the numerals.

The Apple Watch Dock, while still available, has been relegated to a double-click of the Digital Crown in watchOS 10. I think Apple may be letting this feature live solely as a benefit to power-users, because that interaction was not even covered in the onboarding experience. Furthermore, in various places of Apple’s marketing materials for watchOS 10, the Dock has been stripped of all honor and title and is simply referred to as a list of recently used apps. The ‘Dock’ section of settings in the Watch app for iOS 17 has also been removed, meaning you can no longer manually set which apps show up in it — it’s always just a list of recent apps now.

I still need some time to sit with all of these hardware changes, but my first impression is that I really like the placement of the new Smart Stack, but I think Control Center continues to occupy far more valuable real estate than it deserves. I have been arguing this since Control Center was first added in watchOS 3 seven years ago, and every word of that original argument still stands today.

In particular, I still wish Apple would bring back the old Now Playing screen and place it at the very top of the Control Center interface — just like it is on iOS. This would elevate Control Center from a feature I only use occasionally (just like in 2016, I continue to almost solely use Control Center to ping my iPhone when I can’t find it) to one that I use frequently every day.

Barring a Now Playing screen addition, I wish Apple would consider moving Control Center to a split swipe-down approach, in which swiping down from the left side of the watch face would open Notification Center, while swiping down from the right side would open Control Center. I don’t necessarily love the finickiness of that interaction, but I think users would find it familiar since it would directly mirror iOS. This would keep Control Center accessible while freeing up the side button to become a customizable Action button just like on the Apple Watch Ultra (Ultra users would thus get two different customizable buttons rather than one).

Smart Stack

With the interaction shakeup out of the way, let’s take a brief look at the interface. The Smart Stack is explained quite easily to any long-time watchOS observers: Apple has taken all of the good ideas of the old Siri watch face and put them into a new interface which is easily available from every other watch face. This essentially wipes out all of the drawbacks of the Siri face: its boring look, lack of complications, and purely machine-learning-based card sorting. The look and the complications no longer matter since you don’t have to choose this as your actual watch face, and the Smart Stack lets you manually pin widgets that you want to always be available close to the top.

Left: the old Siri watch face. Center: the new Smart Stack. Right: scrolling through Smart Stack widgets.

In a word: excellent. I love the Smart Stack, and I think this new feature will be opening up a flood of increased usage of Apple Watch apps throughout the system. That said, at this point in the beta cycle, I still mostly have first-party watchOS apps in my Smart Stack. Not being able to see data from the many third-party apps that I use every day is a significant limitation in assessing just how useful this feature will be.

My only real complaint about the Smart Stack so far is that it displays either an analog or a digital time based on which watch face you are currently using. I generally like a digital time, but also generally prefer analog watch faces for their visual appeal (I usually add the digital time as a complication somewhere). I’d love for Apple to add a setting to manually set the Smart Stack to show either the analog or digital time, regardless of which watch face you’re currently using.

Analog and digital variations of the Smart Stack, which are currently chosen automatically based on which watch face you’re using.

Once third-party apps arrive in the Smart Stack, I think there’s huge potential for this feature to bring in a new era of watchOS. I can’t wait to see how it evolves going forward, and I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say about it in my watchOS 10 review later this year.

App Redesigns

Throughout the system, watchOS 10 introduces a new design language in Apple’s first-party apps. Interfaces have been expanded to make much better use of the larger displays of modern Apple Watches. Apps feel more spacious, and include new buttons which hug the rounded edges of the display. These buttons are positioned similarly to the corner complications that we’ve seen on watch faces for years now, which makes them seem instantly familiar as user interface elements.

Once again: excellent. Across the board, these changes have resulted in better app interfaces which feel almost luxurious in their designs. I am loving this for first-party apps, and I’m so excited to see third-party developers start working with these new building blocks.

Watch Faces

So far at least, there are only two new watch faces in watchOS 10. Palette is a straightforward face with concentric circles of varying colors that change further as the second hand spins. Snoopy, however, is a truly whimsical new experience.

The new Palette and Snoopy watch faces, and one of the fun color titles for the Snoopy face.

The Snoopy face will not be for everyone, probably myself included, because it only supports the analog time and includes no complications at all. However, Apple has outdone itself here. The Snoopy face shows animations of Snoopy and Woodstock each time you raise your wrist, and these animations actually interact with the watch hands. Snoopy may be falling asleep on a watch hand before slipping off of it, or tossing a wadded up piece of paper which bounces off one of the hands. There are dozens of animation options — I am still finding new ones after days of full time usage of this watch face.

There are quite a few color options for the background of the Snoopy face, and the colors are delightfully named using references to the Peanuts comic strip. The default option is “Sunday Surprise”, which appears to be identical to the “Newspaper” color. However, I have not yet been wearing this watch face on a Sunday, and as such I am very much looking forward to next Sunday to see what magic Snoopy and Woodstock have in store for me.

Conclusion

I love examining sweeping new interface and interaction changes, which makes watchOS 10 the most exciting update I’ve seen in years. I’m still not sure Apple made all the right decisions, but this is certainly an improvement over where watchOS was at before. The Smart Stack in particular is a promising new interface which I think will propel the Apple Watch to new heights of usefulness. I can’t wait to get my hands on more third-party widgets and put its “smart” sorting to a true test.

There’s much more to cover in watchOS 10, including the usual batch of great new health and fitness features, some improvements to communication apps, and an app grid that now only flows in a single axis so that it can be scrolled with the Digital Crown. I’ll be hitting all of these aspects and more in my watchOS review later this year.

In the meantime, if you want to take the new Apple Watch features for a spin, the watchOS 10 public beta is available today.

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

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

Never before have the iPhone, iPad, and Mac been as interconnected as they are today. It wasn’t that long ago that the iPhone was, well, the iPhone, the iPad was essentially a big iPhone, and the Mac was off doing its own thing. Now, the iPad has its own OS, the Mac is running on a whole new chip architecture, and the design and functionality of virtually every bit of UI and system app of every device have been realigned along a more rational continuum, making it easier than ever to move among them.

A big part of reshaping macOS involved updating system apps to match the functionality available on Apple’s other OSes. That work is largely finished, which leaves us entering a new phase of macOS’s evolution. Instead of playing catch-up to iOS and iPadOS, macOS is moving along the same path, with a collection of genuinely useful new features coming this fall that I’ve been testing as part of Apple’s developer beta program. Now, you too can join in the testing if you’d like because today, Apple released its first public beta of macOS Sonoma as part of the Apple Beta Software Program.

We’ll have full reviews on MacStories of each OS when the final versions are released this fall. However, after about a month of using Sonoma daily, I wanted to hit the highlights of what’s in store this fall for any readers who might be thinking of joining the public beta.

Is It Safe to Install the macOS Sonoma Public Beta?

If you want to try the beta features of macOS Sonoma before they’re released this fall, and you’re willing to put up with some bugs, go for it. Macs and the apps people use on them vary a lot, but for what it’s worth, I’ve been using Sonoma since I got home from WWDC, and it’s one of the most stable beta releases in recent years. Sure, I’ve run into some things that don’t work quite right, but I haven’t had my Mac crash or restart, I haven’t lost any data, and with the exception of Rogue Amoeba’s apps and Logic X, which won’t save projects, every app I regularly use works.

However, every time you install a beta, you should have a ‘Plan B’ in case things go terribly wrong, whether that’s a backup strategy, a second Mac, or another plan. That’s just common sense. However, the conventional wisdom that macOS betas are somehow different than iOS or iPadOS and that you should wait to update macOS until at least the third public point release is old thinking that doesn’t hold water anymore. Being careful and cautious is good; blindly following dogma, not so much.

What’s in It for Me?

This is a preview of macOS Sonoma, not a review, so this isn’t a comprehensive look at every new feature, change, and detail you’re likely to find this fall. After all, we’re still in the early weeks of the beta period, and I expect Sonoma to continue to change and be refined throughout the summer. Instead, I’m going to hit the highlights of the public beta because those are what most people weigh when deciding if it’s worth installing a beta and putting up with the inconvenience of bugs.

Compared to recent years, Sonoma’s changes to macOS are less extensive, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t features you might want to get an early look at. In fact, this year’s updates are focused on core system apps that have already made a meaningful difference in how I use my Mac, making Sonoma one of my favorite macOS betas. It’s a focused list of high-impact changes that I expect will improve how nearly all MacStories readers use their Macs.

Interactive Desktop Widgets

macOS Sonoma includes a new UI for managing widgets.

No single Sonoma feature has had as immediate an effect on how I use my Mac as interactive desktop widgets. I’ve never been a fan of the way macOS Big Sur put widgets in Notification Center, an offscreen panel that is only accessible by clicking on the clock in the menu bar. That’s still available, kind of how the Today view is still a feature of iOS, but migrating widgets to the desktop from Notification Center makes them infinitely more useable.

There’s a lot more going on with widgets in Sonoma. The most obvious change is that they can be placed on your Mac’s desktop. To add a widget to the desktop, you can drag it out of Notification Center or click on ‘Edit Widgets’ at the bottom of Notification Center, find the widget you want, and drag it onto your desktop.

Widgets snap to a grid when placed near other widgets.

Widgets can be placed anywhere you like, but as you drag one close to another widget on your desktop, you see an outline in the shape of the widget that guides you to place it on an invisible grid system that lines your widgets up in an orderly fashion. The placement feature is a nice compromise between an arbitrary system and maintaining a tidy desktop. If you’ve got files, folders, or Stacks on your desktop, they’ll move out of the way to make room if you want to place a widget in the space they occupy, with an animation that reminds me of reorganizing icons on an iPhone or iPad’s Home Screen.

Full-color widgets appear when no other apps occupy your desktop.

With other windows onscreen, desktop widgets fade into the background.

If you use multiple desktops, the widgets you place on one desktop will appear on all of them. Widgets appear in full color if there isn’t an active window on your screen. When a window is active, the widget’s color fades to a translucency that allows the colors of your desktop wallpaper to shine through by default. I like the effect a lot. Widgets are still readable but not distracting. However, you also have the option to use full-color widgets all the time by flipping a toggle in System Settings.

Timery (beta), Reminders, and Home, are all widgets that support user interaction.

Like iOS and iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma’s widgets are interactive for the first time, too, adding a new dimension of utility to them. For example, you can check off tasks as completed in Reminders, click on a light in the new Home widget to turn it on, or start and stop timers in the beta version of Timery without opening any of the related apps. For apps that only require quick interactions most of the time, widget interactivity is a game changer.

Desktop widgets work especially well with Stage Manager.

Desktop widgets work especially well with Stage Manager because clicking anywhere on your desktop hides all of your open windows and activates your widgets in full color. If you’re not a Stage Manager user, I’d suggest assigning a Hot Corner to show your desktop, which has the same effect. I’ve done this, even though I use Stage Manager full-time, for when my desktop isn’t showing at all.

iPhone widgets like these from CARROT Weather can be added to the Mac and will update if your iPhone is on the same Wi-Fi network or nearby.

Finally, you’re not restricted to the widgets provided by the apps on your Mac. You can also add iPhone widgets to your desktop, and as long as the two devices are on the same Wi-Fi network or close to each other, they’ll update. So, for example, you can add a CARROT Weather widget to your Mac’s desktop, and in my initial testing, it will update within a second or two of any change to the widget on your iPhone. Oddly, though, you can’t add iPad-only widgets to the Mac’s desktop, which I hope changes before the fall.

Widgets’ new interactivity is fantastic, but simply having widgets on the Mac’s desktop is the biggest deal of all. There are lots of apps I open throughout the day just to see one piece of information. Sometimes that’s the checking status of a package in Parcel. Other times it’s checking the time in Rome, using Dato, or the air quality in Paku. There are still reasons to open those apps, but desktop widgets make them far more useful when I’m in the middle of something else. Judging from the early betas we’ve already seen, readers can expect a lot of interesting and innovative new widgets from third-party developers this fall, which we’ll be covering in-depth on MacStories.

Reminders

Reminders’ new automatic grocery categorization.

The greatest strength of Reminder is its ability to scale from a simple shopping list to a complex project. With Sonoma, users at every level will get a little something this fall.

Even when I haven’t used Reminders as my primary task manager, I’ve continued to use it for grocery shopping because its shared lists work so well. With Sonoma, grocery lists are a special type of to-do list that automatically categorizes items by type as you add them to your list. That way, tomatoes and carrots will end up in a Produce section of your list, and eggs will be put in Dairy, Eggs & Plant Proteins.

‘Groceries’ is a special new list type in Reminders.

Automatic categorization does a couple of things very well. First, it breaks up long lists into sections, making them easier to read. Second, everything is grouped in the way most supermarkets are organized, meaning you’ll wind up doing less in-store backtracking as you shop.

If you install the macOS Sonoma beta and share a grocery list with someone who isn’t on any of Apple’s betas, it’s not an issue. Their version of the list will appear as it always has as one long list. Items added using an older OS won’t be categorized on your list either, but you can always drag them into relevant categories manually if you want.

Sections are a great way to break up a list.

The sections used in grocery lists carry over to all Reminders lists minus the automatic categorization. Any list can be divided into multiple user-defined sections. The feature reminds me a lot of the sections feature of Things 3, which I like a lot too. It may sound like a small thing, but breaking up a long list into sections makes it a lot easier to navigate, read, and organize, allowing me to maintain one list for each broad area of my work, with sections serving as a way to organize sub-projects without creating an entirely separate list.

Reminders’ new column view.

Sections are also how Reminders implements a new column view that can be used as a simple Kanban board. When you switch to column view, each of a list’s sections becomes a column that includes all of the items in that section. Any tasks that aren’t assigned to a section are added to a column labeled ‘Other.’

One way I’ve been experimenting with column view is to create a project for our OS Summer Preview Series that I shared with Federico. The two of us can add items to the list and move them from column to column as articles move from research to writing to editing, and podcast episodes move from preparation to recording to production. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to use column view a lot, but I’m glad it’s available. I just wish the built-in Scheduled Tasks list could be viewed as columns organized by date to make it easier to plan my week’s work.

Notes

Taking notes on a PDF in Apple Notes.

Internal linking between notes is coming to Apple’s Notes app this fall, and the implementation is excellent. One of the problems I’ve had with Notes in the past is similar to the problem of long lists in Reminders. Especially on smaller screens, a long list or note becomes its own worst enemy, making it hard to read and find things.

Unlike Reminders, Notes already had a way to break up a wall of text using headings and other formatting options. That goes a long way, but nothing beats links to separate, self-contained notes for skipping around in a long document. Instead of scrolling, links allow you to build a web of interconnected notes on related topics.

Internal linking in Notes.

If that sounds a little like Obsidian and other ‘personal knowledge management’ apps, it’s because it is. One of the strengths of apps like Obsidian is their ability to connect related materials.

However, Notes takes a different tack than apps like Obsidian. Notes’ links are one-way, meaning when you visit a linked note, you won’t automatically see which other notes that link to it, a feature Obsidian calls back-linking. There are advantages to back-linking, but having used Obsidian for a couple of years, 90% of the value I’ve gotten from linking notes is from one-way links, not back-links. That’s not true for everyone, of course, but I think it was the right move for Notes to stick to one-way linking.

With linking, Notes is far more useful for creating reference materials. Whether it’s documenting a complex procedure you use at work or planning a vacation, subdividing a long note into independent, linked notes can keep things more organized and easier to digest. I’ve only just begun experimenting with linked notes, but I expect that they will allow me to use Notes for certain things where I’ve relied on apps like Notion in the past.

Linking a note with the >> shortcut.

Creating a link is simple. Highlight text in your note, press ⌘K, and start typing the name of a note. You’ll immediately see search results of notes to which you can link. Alternatively, you can type >>, and a list of the dozen most recent notes you’ve edited will appear. You can also paste a URL into Notes’ Add Link window if you want to link to a website.

The other big addition coming to Notes is improved PDF handling. Dragging one or more PDFs into a note displays them as a horizontal strip of pages that you can swipe among to navigate. Alternatively, you can click ‘Show Thumbnails’ and skip around from page to page that way. You can also pinch and zoom or drag from the edge of a PDF to resize it.

There are multiple ways to navigate a PDF, including by a thumbnail strip along the top of the document.

You cannot annotate PDFs in Notes on the Mac the same way you can on an iPad, where an Apple Pencil is a great way to mark up PDFs. Still, it’s disappointing that the full set of annotation tools that are available in an app like Apple’s own Preview app isn’t part of Notes too. That said, the ability to swipe through a PDF taking notes under it is a big upgrade from Ventura and prior releases of macOS, which supported PDFs, but required them to be opened in Preview for reading.

Notes is adding a monospace font and block quotes too.

Notes will gain a couple of new formatting options this fall, too: block quotes and a monospaced typeface. As someone who likes to use notes to store code snippets for MacStories, the monospace font is an addition I’ll use a lot. Quotes will be excellent for research projects too.

Finally, it’s worth noting that you can export a note from Apple Notes to Pages to take advantage of that app’s deeper formatting options. Keep in mind, though, that this is not a sync feature. Once a note is in Pages, it’s a Pages document and doesn’t sync with Notes. Nor can a Pages document be opened in Notes.

Safari

Raindrop.io running as a single-site web app.

There are a few big-ticket items coming to Safari in the fall, including single-site web apps and profiles. Of these, I’m probably most excited about web apps. The feature isn’t something particularly new. There are many third-party apps that can create a standalone web app from a website, but most offer more customization than I need.

What I love about Apple’s single-site browser apps is that there’s virtually no work involved in setting one up. Just navigate to the site you want to turn into a web app, select ‘Add to Dock’ from the file menu, an option we first saw with the introduction of Shortcuts to the Mac, and that’s it. You can change the name of your app if you’d like and add a custom icon if you don’t like the default, but that isn’t necessary. Once you’ve got your web app, you can remove it from the Dock if you’d like and trigger it with a launcher app like Raycast or open it with Shortcuts or Spotlight because it behaves just like any other app on your system.

Launching a Grammarly web app from Raycast.

One of the benefits of creating siloed web apps like this is privacy. Each app is sandboxed, so it doesn’t have access to your other web browsing. I’ve also found that some services seem to run better as web apps. For example, Mailchimp is a notorious resource hog, but for whatever reason, it consumes far less memory as a web app, which is where I’ve now quarantined it.

I’ve also set up web apps for Instagram, the read-later service Matter, Grammarly, MacStories’ internal image uploading app, the WordPress admin panel for MacStories, our homegrown Club MacStories CMS, and a new web-based app I’ve been testing. It turns out I use more web-based services than I realized, and although I have simply pinned some of them as tabs in Safari in the past, I think of them as separate tools, which is why I like that they’re now separate apps.

You can give profiles custom icons and colors to tell them apart.

Profiles let you create separate Safari identities, each with its own set of web service logins, extensions, Tab Groups, favorites, histories, and cookies. Profiles can be tied to Focus Filters and sync across the Mac, iPhone, and iPad too.

This feature would have been great back in the days when I worked at a big company if they would have let me use a Mac, which they wouldn’t have. Nowadays, I don’t have a use for profiles, but I still understand their utility. For a lot of people, they’ll be great for keeping work and personal web browsing separate. The same goes for freelancers who want different setups for each of their clients or students who want a separate schoolwork mode on their Mac. My life doesn’t split neatly along lines that could be defined by profiles, but they’re a great addition to Safari that I expect a lot of users will appreciate.

Messages and Videoconferencing

I need to work on my sad collection of Messages stickers.

Messages on macOS will get some of the new features the app is getting on iOS and iPadOS 17, but not all of them. The most disappointing omission in the current beta is that there’s no way to create stickers on the Mac. Perhaps that will come in a later beta update, but currently, you can copy the subject of an image and share it, but there’s no option to save it is a sticker. However, the stickers you create on iOS and iPadOS will sync to Messages for Mac for use there too.

Another caveat is that effects added to a sticker don’t translate completely to the Mac. For example, if I make a sticker shiny on my iPhone, it creates a holographic effect that shimmers as I tilt my phone. On the Mac, you can tell the effect has been added, but it’s completely flat looking and doesn’t change as you change your viewing angle. Hopefully, more robust sticker support is something that will come in a later beta release because it’s okay to have fun on your Mac too.

In addition, Messages for Mac will gain search filters for people and file types such as photos and links. This has already come in handy when I know who I had a conversation with because it allows me to search only messages sent between the two of us. Swipe to reply will also be available as part of Sonoma.

Presenter Overlay. Source: Apple.

Videoconferencing is getting a big update with Sonoma too. I don’t particularly care about videoconferencing, but video calls are a fact of life for most people, so it’s nice to see some useful new features coming this fall, along with some fun touches. These features will be available in any videoconferencing app that uses the relevant APIs, and I can confirm from my initial testing that the new gestures for Reactions already work in both Zoom and Webex, as well as FaceTime.

Reactions are like a combination of Messages’ Tapbacks and message effects. They allow you to convey meaning without interrupting someone and can be triggered using hand gestures or manually. There are a total of eight reactions, including thumbs up, thumbs down, rain, fireworks, lasers, confetti, hearts, and balloons. Reactions can also be triggered from the new video item that appears in your menu bar when you open a compatible video conferencing app. From the menu item, you can also turn off Reactions entirely.

You know what you get when you FaceTime with me? Fireworks.

I’ll probably turn off Reactions and toggle them back on only when I want to use one. The reason is that the way I discovered that reactions already work in Webex was by mistake. I was waiting for a video call to start, moved my hands into the view of my Studio Display’s camera, and sent an inadvertent thumbs up to myself, which I didn’t expect. That’s the kind of thing that might get more finely tuned during the course of the betas, but reactions aren’t a feature I see myself using frequently anyway.

The new videoconferencing features that I find more useful are Presenter Overlay and new ways to screen share. Presenter Overlay allows Apple silicon Macs to put you in an onscreen circle alongside the content you’re sharing during a video call or superimposed on top of the content, separating you from your background, which is replaced by whatever you’re showing off.

Presenter Overlay is just part of a collection of new screen sharing features coming to macOS Sonoma. Screen sharing is more flexible because Sonoma will let you share your entire screen, a single window, multiple windows, and multiple apps. Sonoma will even let you share a window from the menu that appears when you hover over a window’s green ‘stoplight’ button.

The new video menu bar item.

Videoconferencing controls have been consolidated in a dedicated menu bar item that appears when you start a video conferencing app. Click on it to get a preview of what your viewers can see and adjust effects, including Center Stage, Portrait, Studio Light, and Reactions. There is more control over effects too. If you turn off Center Stage, you can control the level of zoom, pan and zoom the camera, and recenter it. The Portrait and Studio Light effects have sliders, so you can adjust their intensity too. It’s a one-stop destination for setting up a call for anyone who, unlike me, is picky about how they look on video calls.

There’s also a supercharged version of screen sharing coming to Sonoma for connecting to your Mac remotely over a high-bandwidth connection. Apple says the feature, which only works on Apple silicon Macs, uses the M-series chips’ media engine to create a high-resolution, highly responsive remote working environment. This sounds a lot like a feature created for Apple’s engineers to work at home during COVID that’s now being rolled into macOS Sonoma. Whether that’s the case or not, having a remote connection that’s closer to working in person will be a great option for anyone who has found themselves going into the office just to use a more powerful Mac.

Gaming

Game Mode. Source: Apple.

It remains to be seen whether Apple can attract day and date releases of AAA videogame titles. Mac hardware is faster than ever, and Apple’s announcements at WWDC this year and before show it’s interested in gaming, but the Mac market is still relatively small, and its chip architecture is substantially different than other systems game developers build against. So, as much as I like what I’ve seen and am encouraged by Apple’s commitment to making the Mac a better gaming platform, I’m a skeptic and will remain one until those day and date releases start rolling in. I hope they do, but in the meantime, macOS Sonoma will bring meaningful updates to playing games on your Mac that you can take advantage of now during the public beta.

The big change in Sonoma is Game Mode, a collection of under-the-hood improvements that improve the gaming experience on Apple silicon Macs. Game Mode kicks in automatically when you start a game, prioritizing its CPU and GPU needs over other processes that might be running in the background. This isn’t something I’ve had a meaningful way to test since I don’t have two M1 Max Mac Studios to make side-by-side comparisons (I wish), but if it works as advertised, Game Mode should result in more stable, consistent frame rates and overall better performance.

Sampling rates for third-party controllers connected to your Mac will be doubled when running Sonoma too. Audio latency has also been reduced for AirPods, which along with the controller updates, should make games more responsive.

The best part of Game Mode is that it isn’t something you have to turn on, and it works with any game. You’ll still have the ability to tweak settings in individual games to your heart’s content, but at least as far as system optimizations go, they should just work out of the box.

Stray. Source: Apple.

In addition to Game Mode, Apple has continued to release updates to its underlying gaming frameworks and tools like its new Game Porting Toolkit to make it easier for game developers to bring their games to the Mac. You may have seen Reddit posts and websites dedicated to running some of the most demanding PC games on various Apple silicon Macs. These experiments are cool, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the Game Porting Toolkit is designed for developers to get a sense of how well their games run on the Mac without any optimizations and how much work would be required to adapt them to Apple silicon. I don’t think the Game Porting Toolkit is a sign that Apple plans to build a consumer-facing compatibility layer that works like Proton does on the Steam Deck, even though the underlying technologies are related. I do hope, however, that the toolkit will encourage more developers to test the Mac waters.

Everything Else

This is just a preview of macOS Sonoma – a taste of what is to come this fall. I’ll have a lot more to say about all of Sonoma’s features in my full review. In the meantime, here are some of the other big features coming to which I’m looking forward.

Passwords, Privacy, and Security

Setting up shared passwords and passkeys.

Are passwords exciting? Maybe not in and of themselves, but anything that makes managing them easier is a win from my perspective. With Sonoma, Apple is introducing shared passwords, which will allow you to share passwords with your family, friends, co-workers, or anyone else you trust with them.

I haven’t set up a shared password group yet, because, other than Federico, no one I’d share passwords with is on any of the betas. However, I expect that this feature may be the last one needed to convince many people to switch from a dedicated password management app to Apple’s system. There will still be features in third-party apps that Apple won’t offer, but the advantage of having the feature built into the operating system is not having to convince someone you’re sharing passwords with to pay for and install a dedicated app.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’m beginning to wonder if I’m using a separate password manager simply because I always have. That’s usually a sign that it’s time to tear down my system and try something new, which is what I plan to do once everyone in my life is on the latest OSes this fall.

There are other privacy and security features coming to Sonoma too. In addition to shared passwords:

• Safari will lock private browsing sessions by default
• Mail and Messages will strip certain tracking parameters from URLs automatically
• Calendar and Photos will get updates to make it clear what you are sharing with third-party apps and restrict apps from seeing all of your calendar events
• Communications safety to protect kids from sensitive photos is coming to AirDrop, FaceTime, Photos, and Contacts, and adults will have the option of receiving sensitive content warnings too

Wallpapers, Screen Savers, and the Lock Screen

Not every cool part of an OS update is about productivity. A fresh coat of paint is always welcome too. A new batch of wallpapers and screen savers is par for the course when a new version of macOS drops, and this year will be no exception. In fact, Apple has gone further than usual.

Apple’s new abstract wallpaper in light mode.

There’s a bright new abstract Dynamic Wallpaper that changes depending on things like the time of day and whether you’re using light or dark mode, which can also serve as your desktop wallpaper.

When a window is onscreen, widgets are translucent and reflect the color of your wallapaper.

More impressive, though, is the large collection of aerial screen savers and wallpapers that are reminiscent of the Apple TV’s screen savers. There are four categories: landscape, cityscape, underwater, and Earth. Some of my favorites include:

• Grand Canyon
• Patagonia
• Yosemite
• London
• California Kelp Forest
• California Dolphins
• Caribbean Day

When your screen locks and the screen saver kick in, each high-resolution, slow-motion video begins. When you log back into your Mac, the screen saver continues for a couple of seconds more, creating a nice transition as your Mac wakes up. Each screen saver can be set as both a wallpaper and screen saver, or you can pick a screen saver that’s different from your wallpaper, although that isn’t currently working for me.

I love the simple clean look of the new Lock Screen.

I’m also a fan of the new Lock Screen. This change is going to trigger anyone who thinks the Mac is turning into an iPad because it’s clearly inspired by the Lock Screens of the iPad and iPhone, but I like it a lot. You’ve got a lot of control over what shows up on the Lock Screen, which I’ll go into in more detail in my review, but I really appreciate that my Mac’s Lock Screen is now nothing more than a beautiful screen saver, plus the date and time.

Autocorrect and Autocomplete

Autocorrect is much better. It’s a seemingly small change that makes a big impact.

Yes, I’m excited about macOS Sonoma’s updated autocorrect and autocomplete system. It may not be a sexy feature, but everyone makes typing mistakes, and a good autocorrect system goes a long way toward making your life easier.

Apple’s new autocorrect system is orders of magnitude better than the old system on every OS. Apple is using a new, more accurate language model. The core system works a lot like the old one, but you’ll notice differences as soon as you begin to type in an app. As you go, Sonoma will also suggest the autocompletion of words, and event phrases.

Another nice touch is a cursor indicator when Caps Lock is turned on.

If autocorrect makes a change you don’t want, you can change it back, and the system will learn from your changes. The cursor has been updated as part of this autocorrect process too. The color of the cursor matches the dominant color of the app you’re using. An indicator appears if Caps Lock has been engaged, and a new mini emoji picker appears when you press the Globe key. Paired with more seamless transitions between dictation and typing, text input is receiving a nice bump with Sonoma.

I suspect for some people, seeing auto-completion suggestions pop up as they type will feel like a distraction at first, but I’ve found that I’ve gotten used to them quickly and use them regularly to save some key presses. Autocorrect and autocomplete are the very definition of small changes that add up to a big impact over time. If you type a lot – and really, who doesn’t? – I think you’ll settle into it and enjoy the system too.

Source: Apple.

My first impression of macOS Sonoma is that it’s a grab bag in the best sense of the word. There’s a big dose of productivity features mixed with some playful, fun features and visually striking interface updates.

A month into testing, I still have more to do, but the features I’ve come back to over and over are desktop widgets, Reminders’ new sections and grocery lists, Notes’ ability to create links between notes, and Safari’s web apps. The keyboard enhancements have improved my daily experience without me having to do anything too.

After several years of significant design and engineering changes that make Apple’s OSes feel like part of a coherent family, Sonoma’s refinements and more tightly targeted new features are a nice change of pace. I also appreciate that despite a narrower focus, there’s something in Sonoma for everyone, which I expect will make it a popular release.

As always, the rest of the MacStories team and I will have more to say this fall when the beta period is over and we’ve finished probing every corner of each OS. If you’d like to join us in kicking Sonoma’s tires, you can find the public beta on Apple’s website here.

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

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iOS and iPadOS 17.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Widgets Everywhere

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

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

Reminders widgets in iOS 17.

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

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

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

Interactive widgets for Music and Podcasts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Count up and down from a Home Screen widget.

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

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

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

Start and stop timers from widgets and Live Activities.

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

StandBy Mode

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

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

The three different areas of StandBy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

App Highlights

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

Column View in Reminders

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

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

Column mode in Reminders.

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

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

Internal Linking in Notes

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

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

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

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

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

The quick menu for internal links.

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

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

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

A Proper Queue in Podcasts

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll see how this experiment goes this summer.

iPadOS 17

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

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

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

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

The new iPad Lock Screen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capturing Tears of the Kingdom on the iPad Pro.

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

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

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

The iOS and iPadOS 17 Public Betas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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WWDC never gets old. There’s the excitement surrounding Apple’s announcements, but it’s far more than that. At its heart, the value of WWDC is in the people you see.

Ten years ago, I attended my first WWDC ever as the parent of what is now called the Swift Student Challenge. At the time, I’d already begun dipping my toe into iOS development and arrived knowing nobody. By the end of the week, I’d met long-time indie developers like Daniel Jalkut, Craig Hockenberry, and Paul Kafasis, plus a couple of baby podcasters named Myke and Stephen.

WWDC 2013.

WWDC was in San Francisco in those days, which had its pluses and minuses. There were great restaurants and a vibrant nightlife, but the city was also crowded and expensive. I’m glad Federico got to experience that version of WWDC in 2016, but I was happy about the switch to San Jose. The city is sleepier than San Francisco, but the big courtyard outside the convention center and the handful of hotels people stayed at made it easier to bump into people than you could in San Francisco.

When WWDC kicked off this year, I could have comfortably sat at home at my desk in my home office, taking in the keynote. If I’d done that, I certainly would have written more and gotten podcast episodes out faster. Still, I would have lost something far more valuable: the chance meetings with MacStories readers, podcast listeners, developers of the apps we cover, and the Apple engineers and other Apple folks who work hard to make WWDC something special every year.

Source: Apple.

If it weren’t for COVID, I’d have a perfect ten-year WWDC streak going. Those two online-only years were hard. We did some of our best coverage ever at MacStories, but we entered the summer season with something missing. I know it may sound like a platitude to some, but WWDC truly is what fuels MacStories. We write about apps, but we care about the people behind them more, the stories that led to their creation, and how they affect the people who use them. It’s the encounters at WWDC with developers and the people who use their apps that put a face to everything we do and inspire our work for the rest of the year.

The same goes for Apple’s engineers. We love obsessing over the smallest details of Apple’s OSes and system apps. WWDC is a time to meet the people who make what we love and appreciate their hard work. It’s also a chance to explain where we think the OSes and system apps fall short and where we’d like to see them head.

During COVID, some speculated that in-person conferences were finished and that WWDC’s successful two-year run as an online-only event would continue. Instead, Apple dipped its toe back into the in-person waters last year, taking a hybrid approach that allowed it to show off its new Developer Center and offer developers and the media a look inside Apple Park.

It was fantastic to be back at WWDC last year, but in hindsight, it felt like a mere warmup compared to this year. In 2022, COVID loomed large over the event, putting a damper on social events. At the same time, it was my first keynote invitation, and experiencing Apple Park for the first time was a real treat. It was good to be back and despite the hesitancy of people to gather, everyone I talked to was glad to be back at WWDC and enjoyed the event.

The MacStories team reunited after four years.

Heading to the keynote. Photo: Federico.

However, last year felt like a practice run. Part of that is personal. This year was the first chance Federico, Alex, and I have been together since 2019. It was also a treat to go to Apple Park with Myke Hurley, who should have attended his first keynote with me last year but caught COVID and spent WWDC 2022 in a hotel room.

Source: Apple.

Of course, another big part of what made this year’s WWDC special was Vision Pro. It’s not often you get to witness the unveiling of a whole new platform. Apple’s engineers were clearly excited to take the wraps off of something they’d worked on for years. It was infectious, and by all accounts of people who have tried Vision Pro, it delivers.

There also seemed to be more developers at WWDC this year. I feel like I’m still playing catch-up after two online years of WWDC, but it felt great to meet so many people whose apps we’ve written about but never met.

Recording in the Apple Podcasts studio

This year’s format closely followed 2022’s. Monday was dominated by the keynote, Platforms State of the Union, and Apple Design Awards. Developers also met with Apple engineers and participated in various Apple Park tours, while the media participated in briefings. Tuesday was dedicated to Vision Pro development talks for developers, Vision Pro demos for the media, and recording in the Apple Podcasts studio. It was a whirlwind couple of days that slowed significantly on Wednesday, which concluded with The Talk Show Live at the California Theater.

The Apple Design Awards.

Overall, the experience was terrific, but I’d suggest a few changes. First, WWDC would benefit from expanding to fill all of Wednesday. That would allow for a more relaxed schedule for developers and media, leaving more time to meet people.

Second, with more time, I’d like to see Apple create a communal space for developers, its engineers and other employees, and media to gather. The trouble is that Apple Park is off-limits unless you have an invitation for an event. Without a convention center or nearby hotel to meet at, a lot of mingling happened at the Visitor’s Center, which wasn’t ideal because it’s a store and not that big when flooded with hundreds of developers. The Visitor’s Center cafe worked well as a gathering and workspace for the media, but it would be too small for everyone.

The Visitor’s Center worked well as a media gathering spot, but it’s not big enough for everyone. Source: Apple.

I’d love to see Apple open up the Developer Center and turn its parking lot into a gathering spot. Throw up some tents, add some tables and chairs, serve snacks and drinks, and I bet it would be a big hit, solving the problem that people can’t meet inside Apple Park and that hotels are spread out, preventing anywhere from becoming a central gathering spot during WWDC. Ideally, though, I’d love to see Apple set up a festival-style space inside Apple Park. I’m sure there are many security and other challenges to overcome, but the fields outside the company’s fitness center would be perfect.

WWDC 2023 was excellent, and it’s clear that a lot of work went into making it memorable for everyone who attended. I left tired and a little sick, but happy to have been part of the events and mostly glad to have had a chance to spend time with so many amazing people for a few days. If the experience can be extended a little and the socializing facilitated with a centralized meeting spot, all the better.

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

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

Vision Pro.

I’m going to be direct with this story. My 30-minute demo with Vision Pro last week was the most mind-blowing moment of my 14-year career covering Apple and technology. I left the demo speechless, and it took me a few days to articulate how it felt. How I felt.

It’s not just that I was impressed by it, because obviously I was. It’s that, quite simply, I was part of the future for 30 minutes – I was in it – and then I had to take it off. And once you get a taste of the future, going back to the present feels…incomplete.

I spent 30 minutes on the verge of the future. I have a few moments I want to relive.

The Carousel

This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards…It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel; it’s called the Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels: around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

I was reminded of this quote by Don Draper, the fictional advertising executive played by Jon Hamm in Mad Men, during my demo of spatial photos and videos with Vision Pro. I was transported to a place in time where I didn’t originally belong, and yet: it felt like I was there again.

Let me back up.

After putting on the Vision Pro headset (more on the setup process and onboarding experience below; this story is not in chronological order) and getting familiar with the Home View and some built-in apps, I was told to open Photos. The first few shots in Apple’s gallery were “regular” pictures that I was able to view in a Photos window virtually pinned to the wall in front of me in the room I was in at Apple Park. With a single “pinch tap” gesture, I was able to make the Photos UI go away and check out photos in full-screen. I then scrolled to the next item (again, more on gestures below) and I was suddenly staring at a panorama of Iceland that wrapped all around me. The room – which I could still see thanks to Vision Pro’s video passthrough – dimmed and it felt like I was standing there, where the pano shot was taken. 

Looking at a panorama from Vision Pro.

We then switched to a panorama of the Oregon coast, which was equally wrapping around me as I was sitting on Apple’s couch with two people guiding me through the demo. At that point, I said I felt like I was staring at a realistic painting in front of me, and I don’t think I was able to convey what I meant in that moment. Now I know what I wanted to say: I felt like the man standing on the cliff in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. The illusion was so credible, and the image quality of Vision Pro’s two 4K displays was so high, that for a moment I did feel like I was alone, staring at an indefinite expanse stretching toward the horizon. And as I will repeat many times throughout this story: I keep thinking about how nice that felt.

Then we moved on to spatial photos and videos. The first scene was a static 3D photo of kids eating a birthday cake. It’s hard to describe what these feel like in an article, but I’m going to try. Imagine a little diorama in front of you, only instead of a cartoonish environment, it’s a realistic 3D reconstruction of a scene. A spatial photo is a fully three-dimensional scene where you can get closer, peek around corners, and almost “step” into it as it was captured, frozen in time. I thought it was remarkable, but then we moved to a spatial video of the same scene.

Once the video started, I was no longer looking at a static capture: it’s almost like I was re-witnessing a moment in time, saved and archived so I could forever loop it before my eyes. The kids were laughing and everybody was having a good time. At first I sat there, sort of unsure what to do. I’m fully aware that what I’m writing – without screenshots or videos to prove it – may sound extremely silly. But like I said, I’m just recalling how I felt. And for a second, I did feel petrified – like I stepped into someone else’s memories and didn’t want to disturb them. The quality of the 3D capture and model is that good.

It’s only when I was told I could move “around” the video that I realized I didn’t have to sit back and watch. So I got closer to a memory, which is not a sentence I thought I’d type on MacStories in 2023. And when the scene switched to another video of a group of friends just chilling around a bonfire at night and laughing together, I did it again. As the memory unfolded, I got closer to them, looked around, listened to them. I was a silent participant in someone else’s memory.

The screenshot doesn’t do it justice, but imagine this video being in 3D.

And that’s when it hit me. Spatial video capture isn’t just a fascinating piece of technology (which it absolutely is). It’s a time machine. Years from now, when this technology will be more affordable and capturing spatial photos and videos will be possible on an iPhone rather than a headset¹, how much would I be willing to pay to relive, even for just a few seconds, a moment when my dogs were younger and playing together? How much to be “around” my grandma again? If I was given the ability to witness, with high fidelity, an old moment of happiness with my friends, how could I say no?

As Don Draper said, nostalgia is delicate – but potent. I don’t know if I was supposed to feel this during my demo, but here we are. Spatial video was the most delicate moment of my initial experience with Vision Pro, and the one that left the strongest impact on me.

The Spatial Computer

I’ve long been intrigued by the idea of using virtual reality as a multiplier for productivity. If you’re in a virtual environment, you’re no longer constrained by the physical limitations of your desk when it comes to spawning windows in front of and around you. That’s why a few months ago I purchased a Meta Quest 2 VR headset: as I covered on my podcast Connected, I wanted to understand what it would feel like to get work done with, effectively, an infinite combination of virtual PC monitors at my disposal. And after trying a handful of Vision Pro apps and its computer experience for a few minutes, I believe that Apple is going to outclass its competition in terms of visual fidelity, design clarity, and interactions with a 1.0 product.

The key aspect to understand about Vision Pro is that, once you put it on, the first thing you see is not a virtual environment: it’s your surroundings. Using video passthrough, Vision Pro keeps you grounded in your reality; as we heard last week, this was one of the underlying design principles of the product. When I put it on and pressed the Digital Crown², I just continued seeing what was around me. I did not have to scan my room at any point during the demo; the perspective of what I was seeing inside the Vision Pro was not any different from what I normally see.

It may sound trivial, but consider all the work and machine learning tech that needs to go into making sure video passthrough feels like looking around a room with your own eyes while avoiding latency, image distortion, or visual glitches. Vision Pro’s cameras are not placed at eye level; and yet, wearing it felt like I was just looking around the room. I didn’t experience any kind of motion sickness during the demo.

The one thing I’ll note about video passthrough is that it doesn’t quite match the sharpness of real life as seen from your own eyes.³ I could tell it was a video feed, but it was a high-quality 4K one. The quality of Vision Pro’s video passthrough was leagues beyond anything I ever experienced with similar modes on the Quest 2 or PSVR 2. It was in full color, refreshing at 90Hz, and it didn’t have the chunky pixels seen on the Quest 2.⁴ So yes, I could tell it was a video of my surroundings, but it was a great one; it instantly felt like a great compromise to stay present and aware of what and who was around me.

The Home View of visionOS in the Mount Hood environment. Imagine working here.

I then invoked the Home View (which is the equivalent of an iOS/iPadOS Home Screen and ironically similar to my beloved PS Vita’s one), looked at Safari, opened the app, and that’s when I realized: this is a computer. I wasn’t just dipping in and out of augmented reality for a few minutes at a time, like I would with any ARKit experience on my iPhone; I could spend time in it and use apps, like I would on an iPad – but without the limitations of a 12.9” display.

There are several things to unpack here, and I’ll try my best to recall all the thoughts I had during the demo.

Eye and hand tracking on the Vision Pro were remarkable and, again, vastly superior to their Quest 2 counterparts.

For the first minute I was in the Home View, I was paying attention to how eye tracking worked: I was thinking about it to see how it performed the same way I thought about touch control on the original Nintendo DS or multitouch on the iPad. But the thing is, after a couple of minutes, the novelty wears off and this new input method becomes natural. Of course it should work like this, I started thinking. And it was impressive: with no discernible latency, when I was told to find Safari, I just looked at the icon; when I had to switch from the grid of apps to the Environments tab (more on this below), I looked at the tab bar on the left side of the Home View, and it expanded into a sidebar. Once the sidebar was shown, scrubbing through a list of items was simply a matter of…looking up and down.

Tab bars float on the side of windows.

The Window Bar and toolbars are the bottom.

Like Apple’s other innovations in input systems, what I’m saying is that eye tracking disappears behind the scenes very quickly. After a few minutes, I just wasn’t thinking about the fact that my eyes were being used as a pointer anymore, which was wild.

It took me a bit longer to adjust to hand tracking and gesture-based controls. The Vision Pro uses new types of “pinch-tap” and “pinch-hold-drag” gestures to tap and scroll in apps, respectively. The gestures were easy to memorize and their recognition felt as fast as eye tracking. Since Vision Pro has cameras and sensors pointing down, I was able to keep my hands on my lap for most of the demo while laying back on the couch, and gestures were recognized nearly every time.

I only had to repeat a scroll gesture twice, and I’m guessing that’s because I was too relaxed after the mindfulness demo and my hand had exited the device’s downward-facing field of view. In any case: based on what I saw, it’s not like you’ll have to use gestures with your arms outstretched in front of you. (Someone once said that the ergonomics of this aren’t great.) You can just keep them in a natural resting position and gestures will be picked up by visionOS.

The Vision Pro’s list of supported hand gestures.

In my demo, all these aspects clicked very quickly and I found myself navigating visionOS (sometimes skipping ahead of the demo and what Apple’s people wanted me to do) because everything felt intimately familiar. As someone who’s been reviewing iOS and iPadOS every year for the past decade or so, I knew what I was supposed to do a few minutes into my demo. The Window Bar, which is the element at the bottom of a window that you can use to grab it and move it around in space, is reminiscent of the iOS Home indicator; the apps I tried (Safari, Messages, and Photos) featured layouts reminiscent of their iPad versions; when I was selecting icons on the Home View or toolbar items with my eyes, they animated with a parallax effect similar to the one found on tvOS.

One of the many consistencies between visionOS and Apple’s other operating systems: the window resize control of visionOS is the same one seen in Stage Manager for iPad.

This is the advantage Apple has over its competitors: they can leverage over 15 years of work on iOS to launch a new platform that immediately fits into an established ecosystem of apps, services, user interactions, and developer frameworks.

I only had a few minutes to play around with apps and windows, but the moment I started arranging my workspace in front of me, it felt liberating. I was using apps I already knew, but I wasn’t constrained by a physical screen anymore. So I took a Safari window, made it extra-large, and pinned it to a wall on the left side of the room; then I took Photos, made it smaller, and placed it in front of me; last, I grabbed Messages and placed it above Photos.

Safari on Vision Pro. Like on iPadOS, apps support multiple windows.

This concept isn’t totally new – again, I have a Quest 2 – but what’s fundamentally different with Apple’s take is that I was doing all of that while being aware of my surroundings. And not just somewhat “aware”: I was literally blending digital content with the room I was in.

For this reason, in imagining a future use of Vision Pro in everyday life, I can see the following scenario coming true in 2024: I can just lay on the couch, open a giant Obsidian window in front of me, pin a small Timery one to the bottom left, and maybe leave Ivory by the kitchen table. I could get work done from the couch, all while keeping an eye on my dogs or being available to Silvia since I’m not isolating myself in a closed-off VR environment. And when I’m ready for an espresso break, I could head over to the kitchen for a few minutes without taking my Vision Pro off, catch up on Ivory in the kitchen while the espresso machine is warming up, and walk back to the couch when I’m done.

Until a few months ago, this would have seemed unreal, right? And yet that’s exactly what I experienced, in a limited fashion, in my demo. The fact that Vision Pro is marketed as a spatial computer doesn’t just mean that it can be a fancy entertainment device for immersive TV content; it means it’s a computer that does computer things and its potential should also be considered through the lens of productivity and office/remote work. Sure, a lot of people will be drawn to its entertainment and media capabilities at first; personally, I also saw its future as a machine I could use to be productive with a kind of flexibility I’d never experienced before.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard this argument from me before.

Still, there are questions that have been left unanswered for now. I tested Vision Pro in a relatively small, square room inside Apple Park. Will its real-time room-mapping capabilities work just as well for my larger living room? What happens when my dogs decide to, say, walk in front of Safari? (Apple people in the room never walked in front of my windows.) Will I be able to pin a window all the way to the back of my living room, like I did in Apple’s demo room? With the exception of a 3D object in Freeform that popped out of a board, the apps I tried didn’t really have volumetric designs. What kind of experiences will third-party developers build now that, in addition to windows, they can also create 3D and full-space experiences?

I can’t answer these questions now, but if what I saw is of any indication, and based on the marketing materials on Apple’s website, I think what I imagined above will be absolutely possible next year.

With a spatial computer, my entire space can become a canvas for apps. As you can guess, I’m pretty excited about that.

Immersion Vs. Presence

At the moment, I own two VR headsets: a Meta Quest 2 and PSVR 2. I can only use them if a) I’m home alone or b) it’s a collaborative situation with friends who came over to test videogames in VR, so we’re taking turns with the headset.

The biggest hurdle of VR headsets has always been, and will likely continue to be unless their designs are rethought completely, their sense of isolation from the outside world. To an extent, that’s by design: maybe you do want to shut yourself off completely from reality. In my experience, however, I’ve always found that to be a platonic ideal more than a practical advantage of VR headsets. Sure, in theory it sounds good that I can fully immerse myself in a videogame without being aware of my surroundings at all; in practice, unless I’m alone, I don’t want to be a jerk to my girlfriend, dogs, or other people around me and become unreachable unless I take off the headset.

In most modern VR headsets, immersion and presence are mutually exclusive aspects of the experience. The opposite is true on the Vision Pro: you can be immersed and present at the same time, but that is only possible thanks to the hardware and engineering efforts that went into the design of this device.

To get a feel for immersion, Apple had me try one of their environments, which is accessed from a tab on the left side of the Home View. The one I (and I assume other members of the media too) tried was Mount Hood. Once I selected it, I was transported to this beautiful location in Oregon that appeared in front of me, in the middle of my field of view.

The environment was similar to this scene.

By default, stepping into an environment doesn’t fully immerse you into the scene – you still see your surroundings on the left, right, and behind you.⁵ Then, with a spin of the Digital Crown, I slowly expanded the virtual recreation of Mount Hood until it was all around me. I was in it. I opened the Home View, selected an app, and there I was, doing computer things while sitting in front of a beautiful lake.

And once again, I couldn’t help but wonder: what if I could, say, do my Markdown text editing while immersed in a tropical rainforest? Listen to Music at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge? Open my RSS reader on the Monday morning after WWDC week, but do it in front of the ocean, so I can watch all the hot takes wash up on the shore?

The main point, though, is that even when I’ll get to do that, I won’t be inaccessible to the outside world, which is also something I got to experience during my demo. First, I was told to hold out my hands, and when I did that, I could see them in front of me, surrounded by a shimmering outline. (It’s similar to the outline you get when selecting a subject in the Photos app.) At any point during any of the immersive demos, I could just hold out my hands and, say, see the Apple Watch on my wrist. That was neat.

I was stunned, however, by the Breakthrough feature, which is as obvious in hindsight as it must have been incredibly challenging to build.

When you’re immersed in an environment or any other full-screen space, if someone gets close to you or starts talking, you see them appear in your field of view. They fade in, smoothly and quickly, with a visual effect that is neither creepy nor disconcerting. It just feels natural. And once we tried it a couple times during the demo, it was clear to me that Breakthrough is one of those classic Apple “ah-ha” features that will make other headsets feel broken without it. Of course somebody should be able to interrupt me and of course I should be able to see them and talk to them without taking my Vision Pro off.

The “content-based” experiences I had during the demo were also impressive. I watched two minutes of Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D, and all I can say is that I’m never going to watch a 3D movie in a theater again once I have a Vision Pro.

Why would I? You have to wear lousy plastic glasses, sit in an uncomfortable chair, and all you get is a grainy image with washed out colors. On the Vision Pro, the image was crystal clear and spatial audio sounded good with the device’s built-in speakers. The 3D effect was believable, and it just made the two-minute clip-watching experience feel more premium than sitting in a theater surrounded by loud-chewing people ever was. I was even able to switch the scene to a virtual movie theater, where I could watch the movie alone from the comfort of a couch. I get the appeal of going to the movies with friends (which I like to do and will continue to do), but for “technical” creations such as Avatar, I’d prefer the high-fidelity experience of a Vision Pro.

I then watched a montage of clips recorded with Apple Immersive Video, which consists of 180-degree footage recorded in 8K. The best way I can describe these is that they were like a video version of the panoramas I mentioned above. Imagine a panoramic video that expands in front and around you, with fantastic display quality and spatial audio. The videos were so large and expansive, I felt like I was “in” them at several times, or at least very close to the action.

One moment I was flying over the ocean, the next I was watching a group of scientific researchers (I think?) in a jungle care for a rhino. As one of the women in the group started scratching the rhino’s nose, I could hear the sound of the rhino’s thick skin in my left ear since my head was turned in the opposite direction. Later in the video, another baby rhino came closer to me, and I instinctively went “aww” and reached out with my hand because I wanted to scratch its nose this time. The montage ended with a very intense, front-facing shot of a woman standing on a tightrope between mountains looking straight into my “eyes”. In that moment I looked down, afraid of the void, then back up again at her gaze, and the video cut to black.

How the tightrope scene was captured in Apple Immersive Video. Source: Apple.

Based on the two different video clips I saw, I have no doubt about the potential for entertainment and educational content on the Vision Pro. The latter was also highlighted by another 3D demo I experienced, in which a portal into prehistoric times opened at floor level in front of me and a butterfly came out flying. I was told to hold out my finger, and the butterfly landed on it, which was some nice stagecraft on Apple’s part. Later, a dinosaur (a T-Rex?) approached the portal and half of its body slowly came out of it, looking around the room. At that point, I was told I could stand and get closer to it, so I grabbed the Vision Pro’s battery pack with my left hand and, since I was in a mixed reality environment where I could see my surroundings, naturally walked around the coffee table in front me, past the Apple people in the room, and stood in front of the dinosaur.

As I was staring into the dinosaur’s eyes, it felt like it was there. The quality of the 3D creature and textures were outstanding. I held out my right hand again, and when it made a sudden movement, I flinched. I can’t even begin to imagine what museums, documentary makers, and apps for historical studies could do with this technology in the future – especially when you consider how, on top of the 3D performance I just mentioned, you still have a computer with spatial audio and multitasking capabilities powering an experience that may or may not isolate you from the real world.

On a similar note, as someone who’s been working at home, remotely, by myself well before the pandemic (I’ve been doing this since 2009), I was fascinated by the brief demo I had of personas, which is Apple’s name for photorealistic 3D characters of other people you have conversations with on FaceTime.

Based on what I’ve heard from other press members last week, my understanding is that the quality of personas has been fairly hit or miss, most likely due to connection issues at Apple Park or the early nature of the product. Regardless of other people’s thoughts, my persona demo was flawless. I was connected in a couple seconds to another Apple employee somewhere in Apple Park, and there they were: a reconstructed 3D head of someone else floating in my field of view as we started collaborating on a Freeform board with 3D objects that were popping out of the board.

Collaboration with a persona over FaceTime, SharePlay, and Freeform.

This feature is hard to describe in an article because, let’s face it, it sounds kind of creepy when I put it like that. Not knowing the real face of the Apple employee who was chatting with me, I have no frame of reference as to whether their persona was accurate or not. (Of course, I couldn’t see whether I also had a persona on the other side of the call.) But what I can say is that it didn’t feel uncanny to me. Their facial expressions seemed believable, their eyes were looking around the room and looked fine, and I was able to “grab” the FaceTime tile and put it somewhere else next to me. Once Vision Pro ships and an improved version of human-like spatial personas becomes available, would I consider this technology instead of regular 2D FaceTime video calls? Yes. Did I also prefer it to Meta’s Wii-like cartoon characters for remote work sessions? Absolutely.

Lastly, I believe the Vision Pro’s immersive capabilities have a real shot at rejuvenating the market of mindfulness and meditation apps. In a 1-minute experience I had during my Vision Pro demo, I tested a version of Apple’s Mindfulness app for visionOS. As soon as I opened it, a sphere made of colored, translucent leaves appeared in front of me. As the sphere started pulsating and a guided voice told me to focus on my breath, the leaves started spreading around until the whole room grew dark and I was completely surrounded by colors.

It started like this…

…and it ended similar to this.

I have to be honest: it felt nice. For just a few seconds, it was just me, soothing music, and a relaxing 3D visualization that gently engulfed me until I returned to the real world, ready to continue working my way through the demo. Once developers of mental health-focused apps and services start crafting more personalized and complex experiences for visionOS, I think we’ll be able to appreciate the dualistic nature of Vision Pro – it’s immersive only as long as you want it to be – even more.

Miscellaneous Tidbits and Open Questions

Below, I’ve collected a series of miscellaneous notes and tidbits from my Vision Pro demo.

The setup process took a while; will the final experience be like this? To prepare for my Vision Pro demo, I first had to use an iPhone with a Face ID-like onboarding process that scanned the shape of my face and ears. Then, since I wear prescription glasses, I went into what looked like an optometrist’s office and my glasses were scanned by a machine to see what kind of custom attachment lenses I would need on the Vision Pro. In total, this process took about five minutes, and I had to wait 15 more before my demo began. Then, once I put on the headset and pressed the Digital Crown, I had to calibrate eye tracking by looking at a moving dot in a circle of more colored dots.

Will the final onboarding and setup process be similar to this? What about trying to test a Vision Pro inside Apple Stores? Will you be able to perform some of these initial steps on your own at home, before ordering a Vision Pro online? These questions have been left unanswered for now. All I can say is that, after this entire process, I was able to use Vision Pro without my glasses and I could see everything clearly – a first for me with VR headsets.

I used a top head strap and didn’t find the Vision Pro heavy. This isn’t included in the marketing materials for Vision Pro, likely because the design isn’t final: when I put on the Vision Pro, I adjusted its snugness with a wheel on the right side, but then I also attached a top head strap. From what I saw, this essentially looked and felt like a nylon Sport Loop band for Apple Watch, down to the velcro-like attachment mechanism.

Other people’s opinions on this may differ, but I personally didn’t find the Vision Pro too heavy or unwieldy. It felt right. The light seal (the fabric component that sits in between your face and the unit) was letting a tiny bit of light in at first from under my eyes, but then I pushed the headset more firmly against my face, and that fixed it. Having tried a bunch of VR headsets over the years, I can say that the Vision Pro was, by far, the most comfortable and premium one I’ve ever tried. The curved glass in the front looks exquisitely Apple-y and the whole thing has a very “this is an object from the future” vibe.

I didn’t mind the battery pack. I sort of expected this would be the case and, yes: having an external battery pack was a non-issue in my experience. When I was sitting down, the battery was placed somewhere around my left hip and I completely ignored it. When I walked up to the dinosaur, I grabbed the battery and noticed it was warm to the touch. Apple wouldn’t say whether battery packs for Vision Pro will be hot-swappable as you’re using the device, but I hope that will be the case once the product ships. As someone who frequently works in 3-4 hour focused writing sessions, having to turn off the device to replace the battery pack wouldn’t be an optimal experience.

Apparently, the butterfly didn’t land on everybody’s finger. I heard from a little birdie that there’s a bit of an internal debate inside Apple in terms of who managed to get the butterfly to land on their hand or not. Mine landed on my right index finger and flapped its wings. Looking closer at it, I could see a tiny gap between its legs and the surface area of my finger, which I assume means 3D collisions may still need a bit of work.

Safari supports rubber-banding. In case there was any doubt: scrolling in Safari (and I have to assume everywhere else) supports the smooth, elastic scrolling effect Apple is known for on each of its operating systems. I grabbed a page, scrolled quickly to the bottom with the dedicated pinch gesture, and the page accelerated until it gradually stopped. That felt great.

The speakers were good, but not AirPods Pro quality. I was impressed by the spatial audio performance of the Vision Pro’s built-in speakers, but if I were to watch a full movie or listen to music, I’d still go for the superior sound quality of AirPods Pro. That’s not surprising, but it was good to confirm there will be at least a built-in sound output option on the Vision Pro that will not require a separate purchase of AirPods Pro.

Frontiers

I’ve been writing MacStories since 2009, and over the past 14 years, I’ve been able to attend my fair share of Apple keynotes and product events. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my experience, it’s this: it’s a rare thing to go to an Apple event and witness the future of your job in front of you – tangible, but not quite within your grasp yet.

I’m fully aware of the fact that, in this very moment, many of you reading this are rolling your eyes and scoffing at my excitement. It’s too expensive. It’s just a new toy. It’s creepy. No one will ever use it. A laptop is better. I have a TV already. I understand your skepticism. And I’m here to tell you that, at this point, I think I’ve been around long enough to have a pretty good sense for when things are about to change.

I’m convinced that Vision Pro and the visionOS platform are a watershed moment in the arc of personal computing. After trying it, I came away reflecting that we’ll eventually think of software before spatial computing, and after it. For better or worse – we can’t know if this platform will be successful yet – Apple created a clear demarcation between the era of looking at a computer and looking at the world as the computer. Whether their plan succeeds or not, we’ll remember this moment in the history of the company.

In the business of covering technology for a living, it’s easy – whether for personal taste or financial incentives – to prefer a certain kind of jaded, artificially-objective reporting that constantly aims to find faults in exciting products. In my case, I’m not saying that criticizing Apple is a mistake. To name a recent example, I spent a year calling out the flaws of Stage Manager for iPad. What I’m saying is that I hold Apple to a high standard, and I love my job because every once in a while, the company redefines what a high standard even means.

You see, my philosophy in life is pretty simple. When I dislike something, I loudly – but, I hope, always elegantly and constructively – make my case against it. But when I love something, and more specifically, when a piece of technology – be it software or hardware – captures my imagination and upends my expectations in a way I didn’t think possible, then I really love it. When I see something wonderful, I want to point at it. To each their own style; personally, I don’t think I’d still do what I do after 14 years without this approach.

What’s the point of writing about something for so long if you don’t love some of it?

My Vision Pro demo was the best tech demo I ever experienced. It was a glimpse of a future in which the computer – this machine that can make me productive, entertained, connected to my friends, nostalgic, focused, and everything in between – isn’t limited by a “screen” anymore.

The Vision Pro I tried felt like the distillation of every single OS feature, design change, and platform enhancement I’ve covered in my annual iOS and iPadOS reviews so far. I loved it, and I exited the demo room already longing for it.

Someone asked me last week: would you use a Vision Pro instead of your iPad Pro?

I don’t know if the Vision Pro is meant to replace other computers in my life yet. But I can’t help but feel that it’s all been leading up to this.

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

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Stage Manager on iPadOS 17 beta 1.

I’m in Cupertino for WWDC this week, and after yesterday’s whirlwind of announcements and surprises, I had some time to sit down with my 12.9” iPad Pro, install iPadOS 17 beta 1 on it, and try the improved version of Stage Manager. As you know, I have a…complicated history with the iPad’s latest multitasking system. Before coming here, I was worried Stage Manager would be left untouched without any updates for at least another year.

I’ll cut to the chase: Apple listened to feedback about Stage Manager and – at least so far – implemented the key improvements I wanted to see. I’ve been using Stage Manager on my iPad Pro since yesterday afternoon, and I even tested it on a portable external display that I brought with me for this trip. If this early, limited experience is of any indication, I think I’m going to be happy with Apple’s revised version of Stage Manager for iPad by the end of the summer. But then again, caution is necessary given how last year’s beta evolved over time.

The one aspect of last year’s Stage Manager that Apple undid in iPadOS 17 is also the most important in my opinion: you now have much greater freedom in terms of window sizing and placement.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, Stage Manager for iPad is still based on different size classes for apps, which means that when you resize a window, you’re effectively choosing from a list of invisible presets that control how small or big a window can be and how its contents are laid out. However, compared to iPadOS 16, it feels to me as if the process of resizing a window is smoother and more lenient than before. You still see a window “blink” as it gets resized, but I’m under the impression that there are more “intermediate steps” when it comes to the sizes you can choose from. I understand why resizing an iPad app cannot be as pixel-precise as resizing a Mac one, but as long as Apple figures out a system to make layouts more flexible given the limitations of iPadOS, I’m good with that.

There’s even better news on the window placement front: unlike the original Stage Manager, you can now almost freely place windows anywhere and make them overlap as much as you want if necessary. The “almost” part is necessary since I believe there is still a rail-based system underneath Stage Manager, but in iPadOS 17, it’s like those rails have gotten way denser than iPadOS 16, giving you a lot more options for placing a window somewhere and making it stay there. Which, as I argued last year, should be the whole point of a windowing-based multitasking system.

Stage Manager in iPadOS 17 can be an overlapping fest, if you want to.

Stage Manager in iPadOS 17 is considerably less aggressive than its iPadOS 16 counterpart when it comes to deciding where windows you place onscreen should be. Or in other words: in iPadOS 17, Stage Manager sort of doesn’t decide on its own anymore. When you make a window bigger and drag it to the left side, you can cover the strip and hide it; if you change your mind, drag the window back to the right, place it anywhere you want, and you can show the strip again. Want to make a window small and tuck it in a corner of the screen? You can do that now and Stage Manager will not “intelligently” attach it next to another window. Want to use a workspace with a mix of large and small windows, precisely positioned in specific areas of the screen? iPadOS 17’s Stage Manager lets you do that.

Some of you may be thinking right now “Freely movable windows, what a concept!” – and you’re right, but still. It’s rare to see Apple completely reverse course on a major functionality they just introduced the previous year. I’m pleased to see this is the case with Stage Manager in iPadOS 17.

To give you more examples, in my tests I tried replicating some of the issues I had with last year’s Stage Manager to see what they’d be like in iPadOS 17. Take this screenshot from iPadOS 16, for instance:

Here’s what I wrote:

In this configuration, the strip gets hidden, and there is no way for me to make these two windows overlap to regain more space onscreen. Stage Manager will not allow them to overlap.

In iPadOS 17, I can replicate the same layout…

…or I can just grab the Music window, drag it just a little to the right, make it overlap with Safari, and the strip is shown again:

The list of examples goes on. Last year, I complained about being unable to drag a window to the top left corner of the screen without accidentally activating the strip. This year, I can make a window as small as I want it, drag it to the top left corner, and it just stays there without accidentally triggering anything:

Also last year, I noted that it was impossible to lay out four windows in a grid in the same workspace without making them overlap. As part of the additional resizing options in iPadOS 17, that’s possible now:

A real grid of windows is possible now.

I’ve also been able to appreciate the additional options for window placement when using Stage Manager on an external display. Last night, when I was using the iPad Pro with my C-Force portable display, I was able to take a small Music window, drag it to the bottom right corner of the screen and…it stayed there. I know: imagine that. Yet, for all those of us who had to suffer through the first version of Stage Manager for a year, all these small victories count. And given how they fundamentally alter the foundation of Stage Manager, I don’t even think they’re that small.

Small windows on external displays now stay where you put them.

Lastly, I want to mention keyboard shortcuts. In iPadOS 17, I’m happy to see that you can Shift-click app icons in the dock, App Library, and the strip to instantly add a window to the current workspace. Shift-clicking has been available in Stage Manager for macOS since last year, and I always thought that its absence on iPadOS was odd; now, not only is Shift-clicking supported on the iPad, but it’s also consistently available throughout all the places from where you may want to open an app.

The addition of Shift-clicking fixes one of my biggest gripes with Stage Manager on the iPad: now, drag and drop is no longer the only way to bring a window into an existing workspace. This keyboard shortcut considerably cuts down the time spent interacting with Stage Manager, which is a good thing when all you’re trying to do is getting work done on your iPad.

It’s too early in the iPadOS 17 cycle to be able to confidently say whether Apple’s second take on Stage Manager addresses all the issues I reported last year. But today – two days into using the updated Stage Manager on my iPad Pro – I can see that Apple is on the right path towards improving the worst aspects of last year’s version and listening to the most common complaints from power users.

There are still bugs with Stage Manager and, look, this is not surprising given this is the first beta of iPadOS 17. However, it feels like part of the philosophy behind Stage Manager has changed. It’s almost like Apple is willing to make concessions to power users without giving up on the underlying vision for a system that can neatly organize different workspaces and modernize the concept of overlapping windows.

I wrote last year that Stage Manager could be salvaged, but only if Apple wanted to truly understand the problem behind it. It seems like they did, and because of that, I want to give it another chance.

You can follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2023 hub or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2023 RSS feed.

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Today, Apple released Final Cut Pro for iPad alongside Logic Pro. I’ve been testing the app for about a week with sample projects from Apple and some drone footage I shot with one of my kids during the winter holidays. Like Logic Pro for iPad, Apple has packed a lot of sophisticated features into Final Cut Pro for iPad, but with one crucial difference. Whereas Logic Pro projects can be sent back and forth between the iPad and Mac versions of the app, Final Cut Pro projects cannot.

Managing Final Cut Pro for iPad projects.

Final Cut for iPad projects can be opened in Final Cut for Mac, but once they’re on the Mac, they can no longer be opened on the iPad. Nor can projects started in Final Cut Pro for Mac be opened on the iPad. That will be a significant downside for people who already work in Final Cut Pro for Mac, but for creators with a mobile-first workflow or who want to try Final Cut Pro for the first time without paying the Mac version’s steep price, compatibility will be a non-issue.

My early experiments with Final Cut Pro for iPad with some drone footage I took in December.

That’s the camp I fall into. I don’t edit a lot of video, and except for testing Final Cut Pro for iPad, I would probably have dropped my drone clips into iMovie, added a few transitions, and called it a day. That sort of editing is absolutely possible in Final Cut Pro, too. However, the app allows you to do far more, as the two sample projects I’ve been studying make clear.

Final Cut Pro’s default layout. Source: Apple.

Like Logic Pro for iPad, Apple has done an exceptional job designing a complex app in a way that feels at home on the iPad. The screen is divided into three parts:

• A preview player, which can be taken fullscreen or moved to picture-in-picture
• A browser for selecting video clips, effects, transitions, titles, audio, and other assets
• A timeline for editing your video

Each section of the app is adjustable, allowing users to hide what they don’t need and shrink or enlarge them as needed, making the best use of the iPad’s limited screen space.

Final Cut Pro’s inspector panel.

There’s also an inspector panel that can be displayed along the left side of the screen with details about the clips in your timeline, along with volume, animation, and multicam elements that can be toggled on and off in the timeline section of the app. A jog wheel can also be displayed along either edge of the screen. By default, the jog wheel is a tiny floating element that stays out of the way until it’s tapped and expands in a semi-circle along the edge of the screen. It’s possible to really crowd the iPad’s UI, but by resizing and hiding elements until you need them it’s easier to focus on one aspect of your video at a time.

Having used iMovie in the past, I immediately felt at home in Final Cut Pro for iPad. Of course, there are many more features and options in Final Cut Pro, but the overall structure and editing process are similar, which made it easier to get started.

Final Cut Pro’s jog wheel is an incredibly natural feeling way to review clips.

The jog wheel and Apple Pencil hover support are two of my favorite features of the app. When the jog wheel is expanded, it’s incredibly fast to select a precise edit point, moving quickly by spinning the wheel with a fast swipe or slowly advancing the frames one by one. There is an extensive list of keyboard shortcuts for navigating your timeline, too, which is often a better approach when using an iPad in a Magic Keyboard. The neat thing about hover is that you can skim through your timeline footage quickly without moving the playhead. When you find what you’re looking for, simply tap the top of the timeline to jump the playhead to that position, and then zero in frame-by-frame using the keyboard or jog wheel.

Final Cut Pro’s multicam support. Source: Apple.

Final Cut Pro for iPad takes advantage of Apple silicon’s machine learning capabilities to enable several features. The app supports the following:

• Multicam editing, allowing users to sync multiple camera angles, edit them, and switch between them
• Scene Removal Mask for pulling subjects from the background of a clip and placing them against a different backdrop
• Auto Crop, which crops a project to social media-friendly aspect ratios while preserving the important parts of a shot
• Voice isolation to clean up noisy audio

Another fun feature is Live Drawing, which lets you write on top of a video using the iPad’s familiar drawing tools. What you write is automatically animated, appearing on the screen as though you were writing it live. Your handwriting is a separate layer in the timeline, which you can edit just like any other part of your video.

Exporting from Final Cut Pro for iPad.

In addition to editing, Final Cut Pro for iPad can be used for capturing footage too. The app’s camera interface includes manual controls for focus, white balance, an exposure offset, and a zoom dial. There are also overexposure indicators and grid overlays. Finally, when it’s time to export your video, Final Cut Pro supports popular social media video aspect ratios and resolutions outputting to Apple ProRes, HEVC, and H.264.

I have mixed feelings about Final Cut Pro for iPad. As someone who hasn’t done a lot of video work, the app strikes me as a great place for someone to start who wants to go beyond what apps like iMovie can do. The $4.99/month or $49/year subscription with a free one-month trial also makes advanced video production accessible to a wider audience than the Mac version, which costs $299.99. The app is also perfect for anyone whose workflow is primarily on mobile devices too.

Am I saying that Final Cut Pro for iPad isn’t a ‘pro’ app? Not exactly. There are plenty of people for whom the iPhone and iPad are the sole devices they use for making videos.

However, not having the option to move a project back and forth will hamper the ability for users to get the most out of both apps, which is a negative to anyone who wants to use both. I’m sure there are plenty of people working with Final Cut projects in offices on Macs who would like to take those projects project home with them on an iPad instead of on a laptop but won’t be able to. The same goes for students using school Macs during the day who want to edit on an iPad after class. Whatever the roadblock to round-tripping Final Cut Pro projects between a Mac and iPad is, I hope it’s resolved because until it is, the lack of flexibility will likely mean most users will stick to one hardware setup or the other and view the iPad version as the lesser of the two.

Final Cut Pro for iPad is available on the App Store with a free one-month trial, after which the app is $4.99/month or $49/year. Final Cut Pro for iPad requires an iPad with an M1 chip or later and iPadOS 16.4 or later.

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

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

I was as surprised as anyone when Apple announced that Logic Pro was coming to the iPad. I was excited too. Logic Pro is an app I use every week to produce MacStories’ podcasts, and I’d wanted the freedom to do that work on the iPad for a very long time.

However, my excitement was tempered by skepticism about whether the kind of work I do would be supported. Logic Pro for the Mac is designed for music production. It’s a very capable podcast production tool, too, but editing podcasts uses only a tiny fraction of Logic Pro’s tools. With the focus on music production in Apple’s press release announcing the iPad version, I wondered whether the subset of production tools I use would find their way onto the iPad or not.

Music production projects are typically much more complex than podcast edits.

So, when Apple offered to send me a 12.9” M2 iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil last week to test Logic Pro for iPad, I jumped at the chance to see what it could do. Since last week, I’ve played with Logic Pro’s music-making tools, which I’ll cover below. They’re impressive, but I’ve spent most of my time putting the app through a more personal, real-world test: podcast editing. After some initial exploration of Logic Pro’s UI to get my bearings, I created a project, dropped in the audio tracks from last week’s episode of MacStories Unwind, and started editing.

Logic Pro for iPad includes a collection of lessons to help you learn the app, along with a catalog of sound packs and loops.

What I found is that Logic Pro for iPad is a remarkably capable alternative to the Mac version. The app comes with limitations and frustrations, like any first version of a complex new app, but it’s also the real deal. Logic Pro for iPad isn’t a companion app to the Mac version. The iPad version doesn’t match the Mac app feature-for-feature, but it’s not a watered-down version of the desktop version either. Instead, Logic Pro for iPad delivers on the promise of the iPad’s hardware in a reimagined way that we haven’t seen enough of with so-called ‘pro’ apps.

There’s a lot of ground to cover between my podcasting experiments and the music production features of Logic, so let’s dive in.

Rethinking Logic Pro for Smaller Screens

Logic Pro for iPad integrates with the iPadOS system file picker.

Music and podcast production require precise editing, which is why Logic Pro uses a timeline-based UI that you can zoom in and out of when editing tracks. That’s why I’ve always preferred to edit podcasts on my Mac Studio connected to a Studio Display. The 27” screen, paired with the precision of a mouse or trackpad, gives me the space and control I need to move fast while editing. Then, when I’m finished, I export my project as a single WAV file.

You can open up multiple panels with multiple toolset options.

Designing a timeline-based app like Logic Pro for smaller screens like the M1 MacBook Air that I sometimes use to edit and, now, the iPad, poses significant challenges. On the Mac, there are a lot of panels and views enabled by default that can be closed or hidden to maximize your workspace on smaller screens. Apple has taken a similar approach with Logic Pro for the iPad but to greater effect. The Control Bar on the iPad is more compact, freeing up vertical space, and even before customization, the toolbar and other onscreen elements feel cleaner and easier to navigate.

The design is so well done that, at least for my usual two-track edits, I can even use my iPad mini. I wouldn’t want that when I could turn to my iPad Pro, but making a few quick edits and exporting an episode is entirely doable in a pinch.

It’s not ideal, but it’s easier to edit a simple project on the iPad mini than I expected.

The effect of the iPad version’s design choices has been to make me more receptive to editing on a smaller screen than I’ve ever been when my only alternative was my MacBook Air. I can set up my Mac and iPad Pro to show the same amount of audio, but the less cluttered UI of Logic Pro for iPad makes me want to edit with it.

The effect is similar to a good photo editor that puts your images front and center, allowing you to focus on the image you’re editing without getting distracted by the tools you’re using. With Logic Pro for iPad, the audio tracks are the primary focus. The tools are easy to summon, just as they are in a good photo editor, but they stay out of the way until you need them, which I love. The result is that all else being equal, I’d rather edit audio in Logic Pro on a 12.9” iPad Pro than a 13” MacBook Air.

Editing Podcasts in Logic Pro for iPad

Editing MacStories Unwind in Logic Pro for iPad.

Logic Pro for iPad’s focused editing environment is an advantage over the Mac that can only take it so far. The real test is what it’s like to edit in the app.

With Logic Pro’s focus on music production, I figured there was a good chance that editing a podcast in the iPad version wouldn’t be possible or might be limited in a way that didn’t fit how I edit. The good news is that editing podcasts in Logic Pro for iPad is absolutely doable, but there are definitely places where the process could be streamlined more than it currently is.

Logic Pro for iPad takes advantage of iPadOS features like context menus.

Logic Pro for iPad takes advantage of all the iPad’s input methods: multitouch gestures, the Apple Pencil, and keyboards. That leaves room for several different approaches to editing, which I like, but in practice, I’ve found that each editing mode has drawbacks and friction points that I hope get addressed in the future. The issues aren’t deal breakers, but I expect the limitations will limit how often I edit on the iPad.

Editing a podcast in any version of Logic Pro is relatively simple mechanical work. At the highest level, you line up multiple audio tracks on the app’s timeline, clean up the conversation by snipping out small segments or pulling apart cross-talk, and then closing up any gaps left by your edits.

Everyone seems to edit podcasts a little differently. Personally, I listen to the entirety of every episode I edit at 1x speed. If I find a segment I want to clip out, I split the track on both sides of the audio I want to remove, delete it, and then slide the parts of the tracks that I haven’t edited yet to the left to close the gap. Pulling apart cross-talk is similar but doesn’t always involve deleting any audio. At the heart of the process is a lot of moving around the playhead, splitting tracks, and then selecting and dragging them into place.

Dragging audio files into Logic Pro for iPad from an external SSD connected to my iPad Pro using Files.

That’s as simple as it sounds, but the way the tools are implemented makes a big difference in how quickly you can edit. Setting up a project to edit MacStories Unwind was easy. I was pleasantly surprised that copying audio files into tracks in a new Logic Pro for iPad project was faster than on my M1 Max Mac Studio. I don’t know what it is about Logic Pro on the Mac, but in the six years I’ve used the app, importing audio into a project has been slow compared to copying a file from one folder to another in Finder.

After I’d dragged the audio tracks into alignment with my finger, I was ready to start editing. I alternated between editing with the iPad Pro in and out of the Magic Keyboard to compare the two experiences. On balance, I preferred editing without the iPad Pro in the Magic Keyboard case, which comes down to the biggest drawback of Logic Pro for iPad: the lack of depth of its keyboard shortcuts.

On the Mac, Logic Pro has a keyboard shortcut for just about everything. In fact, there are so many shortcuts that don’t even require a modifier key that I find it far too easy to change something unintentionally. The iPad app is different. There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts for an iPad app, but they are primarily for showing and hiding the app’s various tools, selecting different project elements, and a few other things.

As a practical matter, that means you still have to poke at the screen even if your iPad connected to a keyboard, which slows the editing process. My podcast editing workflow is a good example.

Dragging the Split marker to slice two tracks at once.

If I’m listening to MacStories Unwind in Logic Pro with the iPad Pro in the Magic Keyboard, I can tap the Space Bar to start and stop playback – so far, so good. However, editing requires two modes: Split and Trim, which don’t support keyboard shortcuts. When I find audio I want to remove from the episode, I can use the Magic Keyboard’s trackpad to place the playhead at the beginning of a segment that I want to remove. However, if I’m not in Split mode already, I have to tap the Split control in the segmented control beneath the app’s Control Bar. Then, with a tap of a track, Logic Pro’s Split control appears beneath the playhead as a separate marker with an icon of a pair of scissors. The Split marker can be dragged along the timeline independently of the playhead indicator, and when you’re ready to split the track, dragging downward on the indicator clips the selected tracks at the Split marker.

Next, I repeat the same process on the other side of the audio segment I want to delete. However, to delete the clip I want to remove, I have to switch to Trim mode, click or tap the track, which activates a context menu, and tap the delete button. Trim mode is also necessary to close the gap between segments of the track I’ve edited.

Deleting an audio segment and closing the gap in Trim mode.

If I’ve got the iPad Pro in the Magic Keyboard, positioning the playhead, activating Split mode, splitting tracks, deleting unwanted audio, and closing any gaps in my tracks all require touching the screen or using the trackpad. Actions like moving between Trim and Split modes, splitting selected tracks, and deleting selected segments would all be faster using just the keyboard. The trackpad isn’t a bad alternative, but it’s a modal switch from typing that’s a little cumbersome.

The alternative is to edit without the keyboard using multitouch gestures only, which has its own tradeoffs. The biggest downside to editing solely in multitouch is that you lose the convenience of starting and stopping the audio with the Space Bar. That means you need to reach up to the Control Bar to tap the Play and Stop buttons instead. Interacting with the iPad without an attached keyboard is more immediate, so the reach isn’t as big of an issue as it would be if the Magic Keyboard were connected, but the buttons are just small enough that they require more precision to hit than I’d like.

On balance, though, I like editing without the iPad Pro’s keyboard attached a lot. The interactions feel more immediate and fluid than when I’m separated from the app by keyboard input. The Apple Pencil is perfect for precisely placing the playhead or Split control along the app’s timeline, but even using just my fingers feels more natural and precise than trying to drag elements around using the Magic Keyboard’s relatively small trackpad.

The overall effect of editing in multitouch mode is the perfect match for Logic Pro for iPad’s UI. The two create a focused editing environment that’s only held back by the lack of a deeper set of gestures for starting and stopping playback and switching between modes like Trim and Split. A two-finger tap or similar gesture would be perfect for playing and pausing audio. Also, a floating palette for switching between modes and other tools that users could place wherever they want on the screen would go a long way toward eliminating the need to reach for the relatively small buttons in Logic Pro’s Control Bar and toolbar.

Logic Pro for iPad’s support for keyboard shortcuts is a good start, but they need to cover more of the app’s functionality.

There’s room for improvement when the iPad is connected to a Magic Keyboard too. The existing keyboard shortcuts are a good start, but switching among modes like Trim and Split should be as easy as tapping the Space Bar to play and pause audio. Instead, having to use the trackpad or reaching out to tap the screen slows me down. The same is true of splitting a track. On the Mac, ⌘T splits a track. It should do the same on the iPad, which isn’t already using that key combination for something else.

Even better than defining additional keyboard shortcuts for all users would be allowing them to set up their own keyboard shortcuts. Logic Pro is a deep app that’s used in a lot of different ways by its users. I’d love the ability to define my own keyboard shortcuts for the handful of functions that I use a lot that don’t have them already.

Logic Pro for iPad supports markers, which can be used to create podcast chapters.

It’s worth noting, too, that Logic Pro for iPad allows you to add markers to a project, which can be used to create chapter markers for a podcast episode.

Logic Pro for iPad also supports external recording hardware. I plugged in my Elgato Wave XLR audio interface and recorded myself using an external XLR microphone directly to Logic Pro with no trouble. However, for those who are wondering whether Logic Pro for iPad can record your local audio while you talk to a podcast co-host via Zoom, Skype, or another app, you can’t. Logic Pro’s access to the iPad’s audio is interrupted as soon as a voice or video calling app needs the audio from the iPad or a connected microphone.

Exporting a project to an uncompressed WAV file.

The final step of any edit is exporting the project as a single audio file. I export to WAV but AIFF, AAC, and Apple Lossless are also available. In my testing, the resulting file preserved my markers, and the same 25-minute episode was exported at almost exactly the same speed on both my M1 Max Mac Studio and the M2 iPad Pro. Both devices have nearly identical single-core Geekbench scores, so the results were in line with what I expected.

Logic Pro for the Mac looks old in contrast to the iPad version.

Despite the limitations of the different modes of editing podcasts on the iPad, which I hope Apple works on, I’m excited to incorporate it into my workflow. Podcast editing is the sort of task I tend to do at the end of my day because it doesn’t require the energy that writing does. But by the time I turn to editing a podcast, I’ve often been at my desk all day and want a change of scenery. My MacBook Air is always an option, but there’s something about the immediacy of manipulating audio tracks on the iPad that I prefer.

Of course, Logic Pro isn’t the only option for editing podcasts on the iPad. For example, Ferrite is an excellent alternative. However, because I spend most of my work hours in front of a Mac, where I’ll continue to use Logic Pro as I have for the past six years, having Logic Pro’s familiar interface on both platforms is a big advantage.

It’s too early to judge how often I’ll switch between the iPad and Mac to edit podcasts, but the experience so far has convinced me I will, especially since I can pass the same project back and forth between the Mac and iPad versions of the app. Third-party plug-ins that haven’t been adapted for the iPad won’t work, but I don’t use any, preferring to pre-process my audio files outside Logic Pro. That simplifies moving between platforms with my Logic Pro projects, which I’m eager to spend more time doing.

Everything Else

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Logic Pro for iPad can do. I don’t produce music, so I haven’t spent a lot of time with the app’s other features besides experimenting with a sample project from Apple. However, for those curious about what’s available, here’s an overview.

Logic Pro’s Browser. Source: Apple.

I’m impressed with just how well Apple’s engineers and designers have adapted Logic Pro’s interface for the iPad. In addition to the panels that can be exposed or hidden on the left side of the screen, the app features Plug-in Tiles, a widget-like system for the most important features of any plug-ins that you use. To access a plug-in’s full controls, you simply need to double-tap it.

Software instruments. Source: Apple.

The panel on the app’s left side can be switched between the Browser and an inspector with track and region details. The Browser is where you’ll find tens of thousands of instrument patches, audio patches, loops, audio samples, plug-in presets, and Step Sequencer patterns. Everything is consolidated in one place and searchable to help you find what you want. The Browser also includes a huge list of filters to narrow down the library of sounds into smaller, more manageable groups.

Logic Pro’s mixer. Source: Apple.

The app also offers:

• Software-based instrument plug-ins to do things like manipulate samples, retro-style synthesizers from the 70s and 80s, along with keyboards, strings, horns, and more
• Beat creation tools for making and manipulating beats using an extensive collection of samples
• A mixer with an extensive collection of controls, third-party extension support, and more
• Guitar and bass amps and stompboxes
• Drummer and drum kit tools

In addition to compatibility with Logic Pro for Mac projects, you can also import GarageBand for iOS projects into Logic Pro for iPad.

Source: Apple.

Logic Pro for iPad is a remarkably deep and well-designed app that offers a first-class music production experience as well as a meaningful way to edit podcasts for many users.

Still, not every feature is available. For example, many of my fellow podcast editors use Logic Pro for Mac’s ability to remove silences from audio tracks, which the iPad version doesn’t support. Still, the core editing functionality is available, which will open up new editing workflow options for iPad users.

I like Logic Pro for iPad a lot. It’s an app I’ve wanted since the introduction of the 2018 iPad Pro, and as polished as it is for a 1.0, there are limitations like the ones that I’ve described above that I hope are addressed quickly. Fair or not, if Logic Pro for iPad had come out five years ago alongside the 2018 iPad Pro, I’d be more patient. However, having waited so long, my hope is that Apple iterates on the feedback it gets from users quickly, making it an even more capable alternative to the Mac version.

Setting aside how long it took for Logic Pro to make its way to the iPad, its debut is an important moment for the device. Logic Pro isn’t the first pro-level app on the iPad by any means. Adobe’s been steadily working on offering desktop-class features to Creative Suite for a long time now and more recently, powerful apps like Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve have found a home on the iPad. Still, there’s no better signal to the developers of pro apps who are still sitting on the fence about bringing their apps to the iPad than Apple demonstrating its commitment to the platform by bringing its own pro apps to the iPad.

There’s room for more apps on my Mac, but if I’m just doing a simple edit, the iPad Pro is a good alternative.

Having Logic Pro on the iPad is a big step forward toward an iPad-first podcast editing workflow, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. The iPad still can’t separately record local audio during an audio or video call, and it will undoubtedly take a while for plug-in makers to bring their plug-ins to Logic Pro for iPad. There are other tools I use on the Mac to match audio loudness and transcode uncompressed audio into compressed formats that I don’t have a good iPad solution for yet, either. However, with Logic Pro for iPad filling the biggest hole in my podcast editing workflow, my hope is that more supporting apps in my workflow will follow suit, allowing me to move between devices even more efficiently as time passes.

Logic Pro for iPad is available on the App Store. Apple is offering a one-month free trial, after which the app is $4.99/month or $49/year, a bargain, in my opinion, that will make Logic Pro accessible to a broader audience. To run Logic Pro for iPad, you need an iPad with an Apple A12 Bionic chip or later, plus iPadOS 16.4 or later.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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Source: Apple.

Earlier this week, Apple announced a series of new accessibility features coming to its OSes later this year. There was a lot announced, and it can sometimes be hard to understand how features translate into real-world benefits to users.

To get a better sense of what some of this week’s announcements mean, I spoke to David Niemeijer, the founder and CEO of AssistiveWare, an Amsterdam-based company that makes augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) apps for the iPhone and iPad, including Proloquo, Proloquo2Go, and Proloquo4Text. Each app addresses different needs, but what they all have in common is helping people who have difficulty expressing themselves verbally.

What follows is a lightly edited version of our conversation.

Let me start by asking you a little bit about AAC apps as a category because I’m sure we have readers who don’t know what they do and what augmented and alternative communication apps are.

David Niemeijer: So, AAC is really about all ways of communication that do not involve speech. It includes body gestures, it includes things like signing, it includes texting, but in the context of apps, we typically think more about the high-tech kind of solutions that use the technology, but all those other things are also what’s considered AAC because they augment or they are an alternative for speech. These technologies and these practices are used by people who either physically can’t speak or can’t speak in a way that people understand them or that have other reasons why speech is difficult for them.

For example, what we see is that a lot of autistic people is they find speech extremely exhausting. So in many cases, they can speak, but there are many situations where they’d rather not speak because it drains their energy or where, because of, let’s say, anxiety or stress, speech is one of the first functions that drops, and then they can use AAC.

Source: Apple.

We also see it used by people with cerebral palsy, where it’s actually the muscles that create a challenge. [AAC apps] are used by people who have had a stroke where the brain system that finds the right words and then sends the signals to the muscles is not functioning correctly. So there are many, many reasons. Roughly about 2% of the world population cannot make themselves understood with their own voice.

Proloquo for iPad. Source: Apple.

What’s the history behind AssistiveWare’s apps?

Niemeijer: Well, we actually got started in 2000, but at that time, our focus was on computer access technology for the Mac, helping people with physical impairments who couldn’t access their computers. That’s how we originally started. But 2009 is when we first released Proloquo2Go on iOS, but we already had an app called Proloquo on Mac since 2005, which was also in the same category.

Could you tell me a little bit more about your apps? What do they do, and how do they address some of these challenges?

Niemeijer: So, I would say we have two types of apps. We have an app that is for people who don’t speak and do read and write, and that’s called Proloquo4Text. And then we have several apps that are designed for people who do not read and write but need speech but that are symbol supported. So they allow people who can’t read to still learn and compose messages. And they’re also designed in such a way that they help you with learning language and learning or growing towards using the alphabet. And those apps are used especially by children but sometimes also by people with brain damage. And again also, autistic people may be fully literate, but when there’s too much going on at the same time, they might find it super helpful to actually see buttons with words there rather than having to construct them letter by letter.

Proloquo for iPhone. Source: Apple.

What excites you about the accessibility features Apple announced this week, and where do you see your apps adopting the new technologies?

Niemeijer: There’s a lot of exciting news, but I think there are two areas that are most exciting. The first is Personal Voice. There have been technologies like this on the market for a while, but there are some challenges in using them.

One challenge is that [existing technologies] typically require high-quality headsets for recording, not like Personal Voice that lets you just grab your iPhone and start.

The other part is that because of the costs involved, people often need to apply for funding, and those two things actually pose significant barriers. And where people are going to lose their voice, they need a certain amount of time to come to grips with that idea. If there are then additional barriers that prevent them from starting to record their own voice, what often happens is that they start too late and that they start doing this by the time they’re starting to lose their voice already, which means that the quality of the recordings is going to be a lot lower.

And I think the whole concept of Personal Voice, the ease with which you can make the recording, the fact that you don’t have to either look for funding or spend money on it, it takes away those barriers. So what I’m hoping is that it becomes so easy that people just do it at the stage where it’s not too late to do it.

I also think that the whole idea of privacy – of not having what you record go to the cloud and then be processed there – is really exciting.

And finally, voice is really a key part of people’s identity. It’s important for them personally but also for the people that love them. And so anything that makes it easier for someone to have a voice that sounds like them is really powerful.

I’ve already seen some reactions from our community, especially those people that are part-time AAC users, which means they sometimes speak, and sometimes they use a device. They love the idea of being able to, at no cost, easily record their own voice so that they can sound like themselves. So that’s a whole category that would not typically get any funding today, which makes other solutions challenging from a cost perspective. So, I think that’s a group that will be really excited about it.

For us as developers, we don’t know yet what it will take to integrate this Personal Voice feature, but it definitely sounds like something that’s interesting to do.

What’s also exciting about this is, as I mentioned, there are other companies that do similar things, but as a developer, that means I need to include this SDK for that company and that SDK for another company. When there’s a new iOS version, I need to get new versions of those SDKs and test them again. That’s been a barrier for us to include this kind of technology in some of our products. And so having a first-party solution from Apple that addresses this will lower the barrier for us to offer this kind of feature to more users. So I think that’s a big plus from a developer perspective.

Assistive Access. Source: Apple.

How about Assistive Access? I’ve got to imagine that having the ability to put your app in an Assistive Access setting would help with keeping people who use the app, especially children, focused on your app in settings like schools.

Niemeijer: I see Assistive Access as a really nice extension from what we have with Guided Access. Guided Access for the last decade allowed you to lock someone into an app, and block out certain parts on screen, but it didn’t allow you to switch back and forth between multiple apps. And being able to set something up where a user can switch between two apps is actually really interesting for us because it allows people to kind of go back and forth between two or three products that are really valuable to them, rather than that they need someone else to come in, unlock one and lock in the other. So I think it really gives people more autonomy but in a safe kind of environment.

I also expect that for the elderly population, this is going to be huge. That’s not our primary target group, but looking around me and also reading what other people say, including in my own team, there’s a lot of potential there. So I see this not just as a boon for people with cognitive disabilities but for anyone who doesn’t need all those power user features and is afraid to get lost.

And having a more forgiving environment also means that people are going to use technology more. Because if you go to someone today who is a little fearful of technology, and they see all the options they have there, they might just not use this product, or they might not use this particular app because they’re afraid they might break it or get stuck in a corner. And an environment like Assistive Access should eliminate a lot of that fear and give them the essential functions that they’re really looking for. So I think it’s huge.

That leads really well into my next question, which is something you’ve written about in the past – the democratization of communication. What’s your perspective on how devices like the iPad and the iPhone have democratized communication?

Niemeijer: In the days before iPhone, in a country like the US, only a fraction of the people that could have benefited from this kind of technology got access. Devices would cost anywhere from two to three thousand dollars for a small little handheld iPod touch kind of device to ten to fifteen thousand dollars for more of an iPad-like device. And when I say ‘like,’ they were heavier and clunkier but with a bigger screen than the small devices.

So what happened was that by putting this kind of technology on consumer devices, it de-stigmatized the fear of a school. A student might have one of those devices, but when they went out to the playground, it was locked in the cupboard because, God forbid, it got damaged because it was $15,000. The moment the iPod touch started being used in schools, and later the iPad, suddenly it could be taken to the playground.

Kids would suddenly be the cool kid because they have the device, whereas before, they were the weird kid that had a clunky device. Younger kids suddenly got access because these dedicated devices, where before, the cost of them typically meant that you might be eight or ten years old before you would get anything. Now, a two-year-old or a four-year-old can get a device, and the earlier in your development that you get access to a piece of communication, the more opportunities you have in terms of language development. In terms of learning, you’re not going to miss out. So that’s been really big.

The other part was that the kind of people who got access expanded. In the past, it was typically people with cerebral palsy and people with physical disabilities that would get funding and would get these devices, but with first the iPhone, iPod touch, and then the iPad, this really opened up to people with Down syndrome, autistic people, and people were also suddenly able to make that decision, because they could buy the device in an Apple Store, and then go the App Store, even if a professional would say, “I don’t think he’s ready yet for this,” or “I don’t think it’s a good choice.” So that really democratized access, made it more affordable, and today, the number of people who get access to this technology has multiplied maybe by a factor of 10 every year.

We’re still nowhere near where everyone who would benefit from the technology can actually get it, but we’re so much further ahead than before the App Store.

Source: Apple.

Where do you hope technology will take AAC apps in the future?

Niemeijer: I think one of the biggest challenges is in the educational environment. What we see is that, especially in the US, schools are required by law to provide these kinds of devices to provide communication, but teachers are struggling to use that effectively in the classroom and support the students that use this kind of technology effectively.

What we’re trying to do is work toward them actually being helpful to the teacher. So in our latest product, Proloquo, we actually significantly expanded the default vocabulary with a lot of the words necessary for the curriculum, and I think if we want AAC to further take off from a technology perspective, we really need to look more at how we can help teachers benefit from it, and not only have yet another thing that they’re responsible for in the classroom.

You make apps that are specifically targeted at accessibility, but what advice would you give to your fellow developers who maybe aren’t making accessibility apps but really want to incorporate some of Apple’s accessibility features in their own apps? Where should they start, and what are the kind of things they should be thinking about to do more with their own apps?

Niemeijer: One of the things I think to think about is how making your app accessible is not only good in terms of it’s a good thing to do, it’s not only good because you’ll get more customers who would otherwise not be able to use your app, but it can actually help you in your development and testing. If you make sure that every element in your app is accessible, for example, for a VoiceOver user who cannot see the screen, that also means that with the tools that Apple provides, you can actually build automated tests to see if your app function correctly.

To give you an example, some of our apps cover quite a few languages, and for the App Store, you need to upload screenshots in multiple device sizes for multiple languages. You make a change to your app, and things look slightly different, so you have to do it again. So what we did is we used those accessibility features to automate navigating the UI so we could automatically capture the screenshots. And what used to take a few days, it now runs on a machine for a few hours independently.

So it cuts both ways. You get better products, you get more accessible products, but you can also actually enhance the quality for everyone.

And sometimes, you don’t yet see the use of certain things, but then Apple introduces something like Voice Control, where you can actually speak to your device to interact with it. That opens a whole other kind of use for it. Automation features typically make use of these kinds of technologies.

So, I would say it’s one of those things when you’ve never done it, it looks really scary, but it’s actually really easy to do. And Apple provides a really great foundation. If you use standard elements, you get most accessibility features, like 95% for free, and the other 5% is not going to keep you working through the night.

When you make custom elements, you need to do more work. But again, it’s manageable, and the benefits to users and also to being able to deliver good quality, well-tested software are huge as well. So we do it for every product we do, even if we are not necessarily expecting that this product is going to be used by this category of people who would need this particular piece of accessibility. We see this as something that’s a must-have for whatever we do.

Thanks to David Niemeijer of AssistiveWare for joining me to talk about Apple’s upcoming accessibility features, and thanks to Apple for arranging for today’s interview.

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

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

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