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Posts tagged with "mac"

BenQ ScreenBar Halo: Lighting Your Entire Desk Setup

Years ago, I bought a BenQ ScreenBar with Dial. It sat perched on top of my display, bathing my desk in light. I loved it, except for the cables that snaked down the back of my monitor: one to power it via USB-A and the other leading to a knob for turning it on and off and adjusting brightness and light temperature.

I stopped using the BenQ ScreenBar when I moved my desk to an area of my old house where the back of my screen was exposed. The wires hanging off of the ScreenBar were just too messy looking, no matter what I did.

Not long ago, I pulled the ScreenBar out of storage and began using it again. I still wasn’t a fan of the wires, but with my Studio Display facing a wall, it was usable again. That’s why I was interested in trying the ScreenBar Halo when BenQ offered to send me one to test. It’s similar to the older model I was using but with a couple of crucial differences.

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Globetrotter: Your Photos and Memories on a World Map

Every time I open the Memories tab in Apple’s Photos app, I feel disappointed. The memories it surfaces always seem to rehash the same events in my life, and they never really achieve to put my photos back in context. This is a big reason why, for so many years, I’ve been keeping a personal journal in Day One, which lets me revisit my journal entries by looking at a map of everywhere I’ve recorded a memory. Likewise, the ‘Places’ section in Apple Photos is my favorite way to browse through my older photos.

Globetrotter is a delightful new app created by indie developer Shihab Mehboob that embraces this idea of revisiting your photo memories by looking at them on top of a world map. The app does so in a beautifully-designed interface, with a focus on your travel memories. Let’s take a look.

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First Look: Stray for Mac

Source: Annapurna Interactive.

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.

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Introducing the New MacStories Setups Page

Federico's setup (left) and John's (right).

Federico’s setup (left) and John’s (right).

Setup optimization is a never-ending journey at MacStories. We’re always looking for the fastest, most efficient, and often, most portable way to do everything in our lives. The result is constant change. Hardware and apps are swapped in and out of our systems and workflows frequently.

We write or talk about our setups in a bunch of different places, which we realize can make it hard to keep up with the most current version of what we’re using. That’s why we’ve dedicated macstories.net/setups/ to our setups. That way, the next time you wonder, what was that pair of headphones Federico mentioned on AppStories or that giant battery pack John wrote about for Club MacStories, you’ll have a place where you can quickly find the answer. You’ll find a link to the new Setups page in the navigation bar at the top of the MacStories homepage, too.

Our new Setups page is what Apple might call ‘a living document.’ We’ll update it periodically throughout the year with changes we make with links to everything that’s still being sold somewhere.

Speaking of links, many of the ones you’ll find on the Setups page are affiliate links. If you buy something using those links, MacStories, Inc. will receive a small commission. You can learn more about how MacStories uses affiliate links in our privacy policy.

Also, if you have any questions about the gear and apps listed on the Setups page, feel free to reach out on Mastodon using @viticci or @johnvoorhees, or ping us on Discord.

Spotlight on Club MacStories+ and Club Premier App Discounts

When we launched Club MacStories+ and Club Premier in 2021, we offered members exclusive deals on around a dozen of our favorite apps and services. In the two years since expanding the Club, our discount program has grown substantially. Now, thanks to the generosity of the developer community, Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members enjoy discounts on 34 apps and services from 24 developers.

To put the Club deals into context, taking advantage of them all would save you more than the cost of two years of Club Premier, the highest Club tier. That’s before you even consider the many other perks Club MacStories and Club Premier members enjoy, including:

  • Weekly and monthly newsletters
  • A sophisticated web app with search and filtering tools to navigate eight years of content
  • Customizable RSS feeds
  • Bonus columns
  • An early and ad-free version of our Internet culture and media podcast, MacStories Unwind
  • A vibrant Discord community of smart app and automation fans who trade a wealth of tips and discoveries every day
  • Live Discord audio events after Apple events and at other times of the year

On top of all of that, Club Premier members get AppStories+, an extended, ad-free version of our flagship podcast that we deliver early every week in high-bitrate audio.

That’s a lot, but with Thanksgiving upon us here in the US, I wanted to take a moment to focus on just the discounts and thank the developers who work with us to bring Club members such great deals and spotlight each of them for all MacStories readers. Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members can access all Club deals by visiting club.macstories.net/discounts.

The lineup changes regularly, but here are all the deals that Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members can take advantage of now:

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I Tried to Run Cities: Skylines 2 on My M2 MacBook Air via Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit… And I Discovered A Great App Instead

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.

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Audio Hijack Gains Beta Audio Transcription Feature

I’ve been playing around a lot with OpenAI’s Whisper speech-to-text engine this year. Whisper isn’t perfect, but it does a remarkably good job, substantially lowering the effort and cost of generating transcripts.

There are dedicated apps to transcribe using Whisper like MacWhisper by Jordi Brun and Transcriptionist from the makers of Ferrite, both of which I’ve tried. However, the most promising option so far is a new Transcribe block released today as part of Audio Hijack by Rogue Amoeba.

The new block is a beta feature that Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis says the company will continue to refine. It’s using the same underlying Whisper technology as other apps, but by reducing transcription to part of your existing recording flow, it’s possible to transcribe on the fly as you record and identify speakers whose audio is coming from separate channels.

We weren’t recording any shows today, so to test the new feature, I copied our MacStories Unwind recording session and used the Zoom audio settings as a stand-in for Federico. I spoke into my microphone, which was one source, and used the piano music from Zoom’s settings as the other source. Audio Hijack recorded both and started transcribing the audio as I was still recording. Here are the results:

This was a very limited test. It remains to be seen how the app does with a longer recording session, but the ease with which I set this up has me excited. By renaming the sources fed into the Transcribe block, I was able to create a real-time transcript complete with timestamps and our names.

Still, as impressive as the results are, I don’t publish what I record in Audio Hijack. It still needs to be edited, at which point the transcript created with this session would diverge from the released audio. Nonetheless, for a newly released beta feature, I’m impressed and looking forward to seeing where Rogue Amoeba takes this.

Apple Introduces the New MacBook Pro in Three M3 Chip Configurations

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed about the rollout of Apple silicon Macs is that the old rules don’t apply, and the new ones are still being written. The cadence of releases is still settling in, and today, in the face of speculation that Apple was struggling to release M3 Macs, Apple made it clear that not one, but three 3 nanometer process-based chips are ready to ship. Along with the M3 iMac, the company refreshed its entire lineup of MacBook Pros, computers that gained the M2 chip less than a year ago.

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Apple Reveals New M3 iMac

The new iMac.

The new iMac.

Just over two years ago, I spent the summer with a 24” M1 iMac on my desk and loved it. The elegant simplicity of an all-in-one Mac with just a couple of cables trailing off the back side of the computer is wonderful. The all-in-one design of the M1 iMac wasn’t new, but it was a stunning departure from its predecessor, with a slim, flat design that wasn’t possible in the Intel era. Plus, it came in a variety of vibrant, fun colors, which is all too rare in Apple’s product lineup.

Today, Apple announced the successor to that iMac that features an all-new M3 chip that, by Apple’s account, is ‘scary fast.’ Just how fast the new iMac is compared to other models will require hands-on testing, but from the specs alone, the new iMac is impressive.

Let’s take a look.

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