My new, modular iPad Pro 12.9” setup.

Those who have been reading MacStories for a few years should know something about me: I love modding things. Whether it’s customizing the silicone tips of AirPods Pro or adding kickstands to iPad covers (which I don’t do anymore), there’s something about the idea of taking an object and modding it specifically to my needs that my brain finds deeply satisfying. I’ve done it with videogame consoles; I’ve done it with IKEA furniture¹; and I’ve done it – once again – with my 12.9” iPad Pro.

A new generation of iPad Pros and Airs is rumored to launch in the near future, and with the Vision Pro coming in a few weeks, what better way to wrap up my usage of the M2 iPad Pro than covering the mods I’ve been using?

Paperlike Screen Protector

I’m starting with a pretty common mod that you may have seen covered elsewhere before – in fact, I was convinced to try this again after watching a video by my friend Chris Lawley. I put a Paperlike screen protector on my iPad Pro again, and I’ve been happier using it than I was expecting.

I say “again” because this is not my first rodeo with Paperlike’s matte screen protectors. I tried the original model years ago, and while I liked the idea of removing glossiness from my computer’s display, the degradation in image quality was too noticeable for my taste. The original Paperlike didn’t last long on my old iPad Pro.

A few years have passed since that experiment, and things have changed in the meantime:

• I spend quite a bit of time working in my car every week, where glare is always a problem;
• We moved into our new place in 2022, and with the much bigger balcony we have now, I’d like to work outside with my iPad Pro every once in a while;
• The folks at Paperlike have come out with a second-gen revision of the screen protector that offers better picture quality and superior transparency, which should help avoiding the first model’s image degradation issues.

I should also note that I’m not interested in the Paperlike screen protector because I want to “replicate the feel of pen and paper” on my iPad Pro. I very rarely use my Pencil with the iPad as a pointing device – never as a drawing tool – and I don’t take handwritten notes. I’m merely intrigued by the idea of removing display glare and, if possible, hiding smudges and fingerprints from the screen, which is a nice bonus.

Well, I’m here to say that I’ve had a much better experience with the latest-gen Paperlike compared to the model I tried years ago. The new film does help in terms of retaining image quality once applied to the iPad Pro’s display, and I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing too much of the mini-LED display when using the new Paperlike.

As you can see, the Paperlike doesn’t completely remove reflections from the iPad’s display, but it makes working under direct sunlight much better.

A macro shot of the Paperlike to prove that small text remains crisp and legible.

Notably, the new Paperlike allows me to read font at small sizes in apps like GoodLinks and Spark without making small characters blurry, which is something that used to happen with the first-gen model. And, of course, I get all the advantages of a matte screen protector: it’s easier to work in my car or under direct sunlight, and I don’t see smudges on the iPad’s display as much anymore.

With iPad Pros soon getting OLED displays, I’m not sure I’ll be able to resist the temptation of going pure OLED without any screen protector on (I just love OLED too much), but the Paperlike experiment has been a success so far. I recommend it if you’re looking for ways to make your iPad’s display matte and get rid of fingerprints.

Magnetic iPhone Holder

Fine, let’s get to the weird stuff now.

I thought of this mod one day when I was writing with my iPad Pro on the couch and listening to music on my iPhone. Specifically, I was typing in Obsidian on the iPad and checking song lyrics on the iPhone every few seconds. In that moment, I realized that was something I do with a variety of apps on a regular basis: maybe I’m catching up on RSS on the iPad and running timers in Timery for iPhone; or perhaps I’m doing email and keeping WhatsApp open on the iPhone. Typically, I would place the iPhone next to me on the couch or, if I’m working at my desk or living room table, next to the Magic Keyboard. Wouldn’t it be nicer if the iPhone’s display was always right there instead, floating next to the iPad Pro’s display?

After some research, I remembered I once stumbled upon an Instagram ad (sometimes, they work quite well) for a company called Rolling Square that makes a clip accessory to mount a MagSafe-equipped iPhone next to a laptop’s screen or external monitor. The idea is simple enough: the Edge Pro MagSafe holder is comprised of two parts, which snap together when closed; the inner part attaches magnetically to a metal “base” that you need to stick (with adhesive) behind your laptop’s screen or at the back of an external monitor like a Studio Display.

The base of the Rolling Square Edge Pro that I attached to the back of the Magic Keyboard.

The removable magnetic clip placed on top of it.

With all the parts in place, here’s what the back of my iPad Pro looks like with the Rolling Square “base” and when the clip is closed:

The clip folded on itself.

And here’s what I see when I open the clip:

That’s all I needed to create a mounting solution for my iPhone next to the iPad Pro. I use a MagSafe case with my iPhone 15 Pro Max (the Nomad leather one), and the magnetic connection is strong enough to allow the iPhone to stay attached to the clip when I’m typing with the Magic Keyboard.²

I’ve been working with this system for the past month or so, and I’ve seen a variety of use cases naturally pop up that I wasn’t expecting would be so useful in everyday life. Running timers with the Timery app, for instance, has been a great way for me to remember to log my time when I’m working with Obsidian on the iPad. It’s easy to forget to start a timer, but with the iPhone and the Timery widget always next to my “main display”, that happens less frequently. Playing music and controlling playback – the idea that sent me down this path to begin with – has also been an exceptional addition. Instead of having to switch back and forth between the app I’m working with and either Marvis or Music, I can offload playback to the iPhone, which is always within easy reach.

My iPhone 15 Pro Max mounted next to the iPad Pro.

Reading lyrics while working in Obsidian.

You may think that having an iPhone mounted next to your computer’s display can be too distracting, but, in reality, I’ve found that handing off specific tasks to a secondary device has actually removed distractions from my iPad workflow. Whether it’s the ability to quickly read show notes for a podcast episode I’m streaming, keep WhatsApp open, or occasionally check on my Mastodon timeline, not having to do so with the iPad means that I spend less time closing and reopening Obsidian, thus helping me focus more on writing or editing articles.

In a way, what I’ve done is reminiscent of John’s old setup, when he was using an iPad floating next to his Mac’s display to offload certain tasks to the iPadOS Home Screen and manage everything with Universal Control. There’s no shared pointer and keyboard between the iPhone and iPad, but the idea is similar: it’s useful to keep a second device next to your main computer for certain tasks that may normally interrupt your workflow.

Magnetic Stereo Speakers

And now for the weirdest thing I’ve ever done to my iPad Pro.

As I was testing the Rolling Square attachment for my iPhone, I started wondering: are there other things I could magnetically mount to the sides of the iPad Pro? After all, the clips add minimal weight and thickness (2.5mm) to a device that I’m mostly using at a desk or on my lap (so weight is not a concern, really); why not explore more options?

Look, I don’t know why my brain works the way it does, but one day last month I was cooking dinner while listening to music coming from the iPad, and I had an idea:

Speakers.

The iPad Pro’s four-speaker stereo system is very good for a tablet, but what if I could find two small external speakers and mount them on both sides of the iPad Pro? I didn’t know if such a product even existed, but I was intrigued by the idea, so I started looking.

The answer came quickly by way of accessory maker Scosche. As it turns out, other people in the world had a similar idea to mine, only that instead of attaching portable speakers via MagSafe to a laptop holder, they attach them to the back of an iPhone and use the speaker as a makeshift kickstand that also happens to be a Bluetooth speaker. Said accessory is called the BoomCan MS, and it’s essentially a small puck-style speaker that packs a 3-watt driver, 500mAh battery, and Bluetooth 5.3 for fast connections to any device. But besides the diminutive footprint and the sound output (more on this below), the best aspect of the BoomCan is that it supports exactly what I imagined: get a second one, and you can pair two speakers for true stereo mode with a single Bluetooth connection to your computer.

I couldn’t believe that my silly idea was actually feasible, so I got to work. I ordered two BoomCan units from Amazon³ and mounted two additional Rolling Square Edge Pro holders to the back of the Magic Keyboard, which now looked like this:

The back of my Magic Keyboard now.

The clips aren’t too thick.

The magnetic ring I stuck to the bottom of the BoomCan speakers.

When the BoomCans arrived, I attached the magnetic metal ring that comes included with the Edge Pro clip to the bottom of the speakers for extra strength, paired the first one with the iPad Pro, created stereo mode with the second one, and voilà: my iPad is now living its Transformers era.

My iPad Pro featuring the BoomCan MS stereo speakers.

I know, I know: this looks completely and utterly ridiculous. But for those out there brave or weird enough to be fascinated by whatever this is, let me tell you: these speakers genuinely sound like a massive improvement compared to the iPad’s built-in four-speaker array when playing music at full volume. For their size and price, they provide a warmer and wider soundstage than the iPad’s default speakers, making any song sound “bigger” and with more bass.

Working from my car with the iPad Pro while listening to music via the magnetically-mounted BoomCan MS.

This is not a surprise: space inside the iPad Pro is limited, and there’s only so much air drivers embedded within the iPad’s chassis can move while keeping a low-power profile. But given my experience with other similar magnetic speakers (see footnote), I was surprised by the quality of the BoomCan MS, especially when combined in stereo mode. I often work with my iPad Pro in places where I don’t have my HomePod mini (at my mom’s place; in my car; at SIlvia’s place), so being able to listen to music without a larger Bluetooth speaker or without wearing headphones while taking advantage of the iPad’s portability is a huge plus for me.

Modularity, Always

These mods, particularly the magnetic ones, aren’t for everyone. Let’s face it – plenty of Reddit commenters are ready to poke fun at this story. But as I look forward to the next major upgrade to the iPad Pro line, these accessories reminded me of what I truly love about this platform, despite its flaws: the freedom to adapt the iPad to my workflow and complicated daily schedule.

Whether it’s used as a tablet, put inside a Magic Keyboard, connected to a Studio Display, paired with a floating iPhone or magnetically-attached speakers, the iPad’s transformative nature makes it the most flexible computer Apple makes. After all, that’s precisely the reason I fell in love with this product 10 years ago, and it’s why I can’t wait to see what its future holds.

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Here’s the thing about the iPad line: it’s always being worked on, and that work is never complete. You know, like roadwork. As a kid, I recall thinking Atlanta was only under construction for a few weeks. Oh, the naïveté.

[…]

The awkward thing about this never ending construction project is when a lower-end model get a “new” feature before a premium model. That’s what happened with the iPad 10 and the iPad Pro in 2022. The awkwardness was compounded by the fact that Apple released no new iPads in 2023. Instead, Apple introduced a third (but not third-gen) Apple Pencil. More roadwork.

I think this is a perfect encapsulation of the state of the iPad. For better or worse, it’s always being worked on. Not like how the Mac and iPhone are always “being worked on” (of course they are), but more in the sense that there’s always something that obviously needs to get fixed and we’re waiting for it.

And the funny thing is, I’ve been using the iPad as my primary computer for long enough now, I find its “current” state kind of charming at this point. It’s definitely an acquired taste, but why would you get a reliable computer that does the same reliable things for a good number of reliable years when you can experience the thrill of a platform that still feels like it launched two years ago when it is, in fact, 14 years-old and that perennially feels like it’s waiting for the next shoe to drop? Why join the navy when you can be a pirate? I’m only half-kidding with this. Besides the fact that, for me, no other computer Apple makes is as flexible as an iPad, part of the enjoyment is (again, for me) its quirky nature, constantly on the verge of improvement. (Please don’t send me this page.)

If there’s one thing you can say about the iPad line is that it’s never boring, for better or worse. If anything, we’re still blogging about it – 14 years later.

→ Source: 9to5mac.com

In the world of ActivityPub, every post everywhere is made up of a sender, a message, and a URL. Every user has an inbox and an outbox for those messages. That’s the whole protocol in a nutshell. The simplicity is the point: since ActivityPub is not a product but a data format like PDF or JPG, what you do with those messages, those URLs, those inboxes and outboxes, is entirely up to you.

You could have a Twitter-like app that emphasizes text, or an Instagram-like one with a UI that shows photos first. Your federated YouTube could be full of everybody’s videos, or you could make TikTok by filtering only for short and vertical ones. You could use a WhatsApp-style messaging app that only cares about messages sent directly to someone’s inbox.

You could try to do all those things, or you could try to do something nobody’s ever been able to do before. You could build a news reader that only includes posts with links to news sites and automatically loads those links in a nice reading interface. You could build a content moderation tool that any fediverse app could use to filter and manage content on their platform. You could build the perfect algorithm that only up-ranks shitposts and good jokes, and license that algorithm to any app that wants a “Epic Posts Only” mode. You could build an app that’s just an endless feed of great stuff for NBA fans. You could build one that’s just for crypto true believers. You could build one that lets you swipe from one to the other depending on your mood.

As I wrote earlier this week, the more I read about ActivityPub and federation, the more excited I get about 2024. I’m fascinated by what companies like Flipboard are doing (for instance, they rolled out their federated video channel today, which you can follow on Mastodon as flipboard_videos@flipboard.video), and I’m seriously considering the different ways we could leverage various ActivityPub integrations in a future version of MacStories.

I didn’t have “get excited about social media again” on my 2023 bingo card, but here we are.

→ Source: theverge.com

The new Shortcuts actions for GoodLinks.

A few weeks ago on AppStories, I mentioned to John that I was looking for the “Things of read-later apps”. What I meant is that I wanted to find an app to save articles for later that felt native to Apple platforms, had a reliable text parser, but, more importantly, featured deep Shortcuts integration to let me create automations for saved items. As I followed up after a few episodes, I realized the app I’d been looking for was the excellent GoodLinks, which we’ve covered on MacStories several times before.

Today, GoodLinks developer Ngoc Luu released a small update to the app that, however, cements it as the premier solution for people who want a read-later utility for iOS and iPadOS that also features outstanding Shortcuts support.

With version 1.8.5, GoodLinks joins Cultured Code’s Things app in offering a Shortcuts action that returns the current “state” of the app. Specifically, GoodLinks now comes with a ‘Get Current Link’ action that can be used to get the article that you’re currently reading inside the GoodLinks app. The item that will be returned in Shortcuts is a variable that contains properties for the article such as its title, URL, author, and more.

Additionally, the updated GoodLinks also offers a separate ‘Get Current Selection’ action that can return the currently-selected text in the article view as plain text, Markdown, or HTML.

The new actions to get the current link and selection.

These actions are interesting for a variety of reasons. At a high level, I’ve long been advocating for third-party Shortcuts actions that support the concept of “state” or “selection” in apps, so I’m happy to see GoodLinks follow in the footsteps of Cultured Code’s pioneering work in this area; more apps should do this. Furthermore, these kinds of Shortcuts actions are ideal candidates for Action button integration on iPhone 15 Pro or placement in the iPadOS dock. If you’re inside the GoodLinks app, you can run a shortcut tied to the Action button or saved to the iPad’s dock and perform something contextually to the article you’re reading. This “contextual automation” is an idea I’ve been developing and refining for a while, and I’ll have more to share soon.

In any case, to demonstrate the power of GoodLinks’ Shortcuts actions, I put together a custom shortcut that I’ve been using to turn articles saved for later into linked posts on MacStories. I call it GoodLinked.

As you can see from the images below, this shortcut gets the current article you’re reading in GoodLinks and extracts different properties from it, such as the title of the story, its author, and URL. Using another action, GoodLinked can see if you’ve selected any text in the article and, if so, save it as your selection. By retrieving the article’s selection as Markdown, I don’t have to do anything else to prepare a blockquote for MacStories.

With this shortcut and the new actions available in the latest GoodLinks update, I can go from reading an article, like this:

Reading an article in GoodLinks.

…to a draft post in Obsidian, already formatted with placeholders I can tweak before publishing on the site:

And a draft in Obsidian, created by my GoodLinked shortcut.

This is just an example of what you can build with Shortcuts actions that retrieve the article you’re reading in GoodLinks. You don’t have to be a blogger to take advantage of these actions: perhaps you want to put together a shortcut for the Action button that quickly shares on Threads what you’re reading; maybe you want to clip selected text to a note in Obsidian or Apple Notes. No matter your use case, there is value in being able to process the current state or selection of an app with Shortcuts and create more advanced workflows for all kinds of tasks.

I also wanted to point out some other useful additions in this GoodLinks update. On iPad, you can now open the app’s settings screen with ⌘+, (just like on a Mac); the app now properly supports Dynamic Type and respects the system’s text size (great for Accessibility); if you’ve selected some text in an article, you can also copy the formatted selection from a refreshed context menu:

The new context menu for selected text in GoodLinks.

I’ve long been a fan of GoodLinks, but the app’s newfound Shortcuts integration convinced me that, at this point in my life, it’s the read-later experience I need in my iPad and iPhone workflow. If you, like me, have been looking for a clean, native read-later app that feels right at home on Apple platforms and can be easily automated, look no further than GoodLinks.

You can download the latest version of GoodLinks on the App Store; my GoodLinked shortcut is available below and in the MacStories Shortcuts Archive.

GoodLinked

Create a draft for a linked post in Obsidian based on the article you’re currently reading in GoodLinks.

Get the shortcut here.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

Today we are beginning to open Flipboard to the Fediverse, a rapidly emerging part of the Web which includes social services like Mastodon, Threads, Pixelfed, Firefish and PeerTube all built on a revolutionary open protocol called ActivityPub.

What does this mean for you? In the next few months, everyone using Flipboard will be able to discover and follow a whole new group of writers, vloggers, artists, scientists, explorers, political leaders and millions of others who are posting content and conversing in the Fediverse. If you curate on Flipboard, not only will you have a lot more content to curate from, there will be millions more people to enjoy the Magazines and Storyboards you are curating. If you’re a publisher, creator or brand on Flipboard, you’ll start to see new visitors and engagement as people discover and share your content across the growing Fediverse.

If you’re already using the Fediverse, you’ll be able to discover more articles, videos and podcasts thoughtfully curated by Flipboard’s many publishers and curators around the world. You’ll also be able to follow and converse with them directly from Mastodon, Threads and other ActivityPub apps.

I haven’t used Flipboard in years (even though I really liked the app back in the day), but I am so fascinated by this pivot, and I want to keep an eye on what Flipboard is doing.

The way I see it, if done correctly, Flipboard could become a fast, intuitive way for a lot of people to “get on the Fediverse” without the overhead of picking a Mastodon server and other technical jargon. Just grab the Flipboard app, create an account, and start following people from, say, Threads, Mastodon, and other ActivityPub-compatible sources. Once their multi-phase rollout is complete, you’ll have a federated account on flipboard.com that will be able to (I assume) read and post content on the Fediverse. Based on what McCue is saying, it sounds like that’s exactly what the future of Flipboard will be: a well-designed client for all kinds of federated sources.

In January we will release a new version of Flipboard that will show follows, favorites and boosts from the Fediverse. It will also enable replies to and from the Fediverse as well as blocking, muting and reporting.

I’m very keen to see how Flipboard will differentiate itself here from the typical timeline experience of clients such as Ivory and Ice Cubes, or even the Threads app. I’m also curious to understand if and how the new ActivityPub-infused Flipboard will be profitable (and I hope it will be).

→ Source: flipboard.medium.com

The magic moment of using a clipboard manager comes when you realize you need to access something that’s not the One True Item on the clipboard. If you’re using the standard Mac clipboard and you copy something priceless and then, a minute later, copy something useless—welp, too bad, the priceless thing is gone, and it’s never coming back. A good clipboard manager lets you use a keyboard shortcut or a menu item to view your previous clipboards, choose the item you want to fish out and bring it back.

And that’s my pitch for why macOS should have its own clipboard manager: Because it adds undo to the clipboard via a discoverable mechanism like a keyboard shortcut and an item in the Edit menu right next to Cut, Copy, and Paste. For me, it’s become part of my Mac muscle memory: command-backslash brings up a long list of clipboard history, from which I can retrieve what I want.

It gets better. Once you know that copying something to your clipboard doesn’t destroy what’s there, your use of the clipboard can become far more extensive. You lose the fear of wiping out something important, replaced with confidence that you can grab something in case you want it later and stash it away in the clipboard history.

I agree with Jason on the idea that Apple should build a native clipboard management solution: it’s odd that they never did (especially after shipping Universal Clipboard…in iOS 10) and that they’re leaving something as sensitive as clipboard data fully in the hands of third-party developers without at least a default option for most users and a modernized framework to store the clipboard’s contents.

The lack of Mac-like clipboard management is one of the things I miss most from macOS when I work on my iPad. To give you an example: as I was putting together this post on Threads tonight with some tips I discovered, I realized I had to go back and double-check something else in the Threads app, so I copied my post (Threads doesn’t support saving as draft yet) and closed the composer UI. A few minutes later, I had already forgotten that my “draft” was stored in the clipboard, so I copied something else, and with no way to get my original text back from the iPadOS clipboard, I had to rewrite the post from scratch. That wouldn’t have happened if I was using macOS (or if Threads supported post drafts, but that’s a different story).

The clipboard management situation is even gloomier on iPadOS and iOS since, unlike the Mac, third-party apps can’t run with background privileges to monitor changes to your clipboard. Again, I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t want to make a modern API for this with all the necessary privacy controls for users. Because of these limitations, over the years I’ve seen the market for third-party iOS and iPadOS clipboard managers dry up. Remember Pastebot for iOS? Copied? Clips?

To my knowledge, it seems like the two solid (and reputable) options left are Paste (which John reviewed this year) and PastePal, both of which I’m trying again. But those apps can’t do anything about the fact that clipboard managers for iOS and iPadOS can’t be as powerful as their Mac counterparts.

If Apple ever builds their own clipboard manager, I hope it’s a multi-platform feature with an API other apps can plug into.

→ Source: sixcolors.com

In one spatial video, my mom and I were having dim sum at a restaurant and I was explaining to her what the Apple Vision Pro is and what it does. It was recorded last weekend so the memory was fresh in my mind. Rewatching the video inside of the Vision Pro, it was as if we were transported back to the restaurant, sitting across from each other over a table of dishes. I kept tilting my head a lot, almost in disbelief at how surreal it was to see my mom talking, laughing, and eating in spatial video. My mom was who got me interested in technology and I don’t think I would have a career writing about new consumer tech if not for her interest in it. To me, these convos are very precious to me, so to see them replayed with a sense of presence really tugged at my heartstrings. At one point, I fought back a few tiny tears if only because there were three Apple reps sitting next to me. Self-aware of EyeSight and the possibility that they might be able to see my tears, I asked if they could see my eyes on the Vision Pro’s outside display. I was told they couldn’t. Pre-release software, you know? I obviously couldn’t confirm that myself as the person wearing Vision Pro.

At a certain distance and window size, spatial videos can look life-sized. But even when I “pushed” the video window farther away (enabled by looking at the bar at the bottom of the window and then pulling it closer toward me), seeing my mom in 3D made me emotional. I even laid back on the sofa and placed the virtual video on the ceiling.

When I tried the Vision Pro in June, I almost got emotional “being” in someone else’s memory with the stock footage Apple had prepared for us. I can’t wait to see what it’ll be like to relive your own memories with the depth and sense of presence that Vision Pro enables. I know I’ll be capturing a lot of spatial videos with friends and family during the holidays.

→ Source: inverse.com

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.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

We definitely seem to like being able to more quickly write business emails, and we like being able to ask Excel to “make this into a bar graph” instead of hunting through menus. We like being able to code just by telling ChatGPT what we want our app to do. But do we want SEO-optimized, AI-generated news stories to take over publications we used to love? Do we want AI bots that act like real-life characters and become anthropomorphized companions in our lives? Should we think of AI more as a tool or a collaborator? If an AI tool can be trained to create the exact song / movie / image / story I want right now, is that art or is that dystopia? Even as we start to answer those questions, AI tech seems to always stay one step and one cultural revolution ahead.

At the same time, there have been lawsuits accusing AI companies of stealing artists’ work, to which multiple US judges have said, essentially: our existing copyright laws just don’t know what to do with AI at all. Lawmakers have wrung their hands about AI safety, and President Joe Biden signed a fairly generic executive order that instructed agencies to create safety standards and companies to do good and not evil. There’s a case to be made that the AI revolution was built on immoral and / or illegal grounds, and yet the creators of these models and companies continue to confidently go ahead with their plans, while saying it’s both impossible and anti-progress to stop them or slow them down.

This all gets really heady really fast, I know. And the truth is, nobody knows where all this will be even 12 months from now, especially not the people making the loudest predictions. All you have to do is look at recent hype cycles — the blockchain, the metaverse, and many others — for evidence that things don’t usually turn out the way we think. But there’s so much momentum behind the AI revolution, and so many companies deeply invested in its future, that it’s hard to imagine GPTs going the way of NFTs.

I recommend reading the whole piece on The Verge. I quoted these paragraphs because they get right to the heart of the conflict that I also feel whenever I think about ChatGPT and similar tools. On the one hand, they were (largely? Partially?) built with data sets stolen from artists and creators (including this very website); on the other, the practical benefits of, say, using ChatGPT to help me proof-read my articles are undeniable.

I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot, perhaps because I make a living out of, well, creating content for the Internet. Is there a way to enjoy the power of LLMs without feeling weird and conflicted about how they were made in the first place? Will it even matter years from now? I don’t know the answer, but I’m hoping Apple will have one.

→ Source: theverge.com

Apple could even hide the “always allow…” option until the user had allowed an app to see the clipboard like 5 times in a row. That would avoid giving full access to apps that you don’t want to give it to, and it even helps keep the number of apps with this always access down. After saying “allow paste” in Parcel 100+ times in the past few years and never hitting no, it might be safe to let me just say “always allow” at this point, but maybe an app where I paste once in a blue moon doesn’t need it.

They could go the other way as well: if you deny an app a few times in a row, there could be a new option the next time that asks if you want to block this app from the clipboard forever.

And as they’ve done recently with location, photos, and calendar access, it could make sense to occasionally show an alert that tells the user that this app has access to your clipboard and how often it’s used that access in the last X days.

I strongly disliked the redesigned clipboard prompts in the first version of iOS 16 (a perfect example of user experience dictated by security engineers rather than designers at Apple), and I was relieved when the company improved the system with per-app clipboard settings in 16.1. Still, these clipboard prompts feel antiquated, user-hostile, and not intelligent at all. For starters, they should be consistent – like Matt suggests – with Apple’s other privacy prompts. Second, they should learn from user habits in terms of granting access or reminding people to review their apps with clipboard access.

Third, I can’t believe it’s still not possible for third-party developers to make a proper clipboard manager for iOS and iPadOS – a software category that continues to thrive on macOS. I was writing about this stuff 13 (!) years ago, and it’s wild that nothing has changed.

→ Source: birchtree.me

In their first interview since leaving Apple to start something new, the trio tells me that their focus is on bringing generative AI to the desktop in a way that “pushes operating systems forward.” While they don’t have a product to show off yet, they are prototyping with a variety of large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT and Meta’s Llama 2. The ultimate goal, according to Weinstein, is to recreate “the magic that you felt when you used computers in the ’80s and ’90s.”

“If you turned on an Apple II or an Atari, you’d get this basic console where you could type in basic code as a user and program the computer to do whatever you wanted,” he explains. “Nowadays, it’s sort of the exact opposite. Everybody spends time in very optimized operating systems with pieces of software that are designed to be extremely easy to use but are not flexible.”

An example he gives: “Sometimes you’ve got a browser window open with a schedule on it, and you just want to say, ‘add this to my calendar,’ and somehow, there’s no way to do that… We think that language models and AI give us the ingredients to make a new kind of software that can unlock this fundamental power of computing and make everyday people able to use computers to actually solve their problems.”

They don’t have a product to show yet, but I’ll say this: if there’s anyone out there who can figure out how to turn generative AI into something more than a text prompt or writing assistant for Word and Notion – something that can be truly integrated with your computer, your data, and, well, your workflow, it’s this trio. I absolutely can’t wait to learn more about what they’re working on.

Also worth noting: the company’s website (great domain, too) is a delightfully retro, emulated browser version of Mac OS 8.

→ Source: theverge.com

Tears of the Kingdom on my iPad Pro.

Those who have been reading MacStories for a while know that I have a peculiar obsession for portable setups free of the constraints typically involved with working at a desk or playing games in front of a TV.

It’s not that I don’t want to have a desk or dislike my 65” OLED TV: it’s that I don’t want those contexts to be my only options when it comes to getting work done or playing videogames. This is why I’ve spent the better part of my career fine-tuning my iPad-first lifestyle and why I’m so excited at the prospect of a giant screen that can always be with me. Modularity, portability, and freedom from a desk or TV are the driving factors in everything I use or buy these days.

For these reasons, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I embraced the ability to use the iPad Pro as a portable monitor for videogame consoles thanks to UVC support. As I covered in my iPadOS 17 review, this feature was primarily conceived to let iPad users connect external webcams to their computers, but that hasn’t stopped developers from re-using the same underlying technology to create apps that allow you to display a video feed from any accessory connected via USB.

It’s a very intriguing proposition: the 12.9” iPad Pro has a gorgeous mini-LED display; what if you could use that to give yourself a little extra screen real estate when playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder or Tears of the Kingdom without having to pack a separate portable monitor with you?

In my review, I mentioned the Genki Studio app, which I used to play games with my Nintendo Switch and ROG Ally and output their video feeds to the iPad Pro’s display. Today, I want to explain how I took my setup a step further by enhancing the picture quality of the Nintendo Switch when viewed on the iPad Pro and, most importantly, how I created a fully-portable setup that allows me to play Switch games on the iPad Pro anywhere I am.

Orion for iPad

The first change in my setup compared to September is the app I’m using to display a connected Switch on my iPad: the excellent Orion, created by the Halide team.

Orion, like Genki Studio or Capturino, is an app to display a video feed from a connected USB device on your iPad’s screen. In addition to the app’s exquisite design (which I suggest you read more about here), the reason I’m recommending the app on MacStories is the following: Orion is the most intuitive UVC app for iPadOS 17 with the best settings for tweaking image quality if you want to play games via a portable console connected to your iPad. With a $5 In-App Purchase, you can unlock Orion Pro, which adds support for manual picture adjustments, CRT emulation for retro consoles, and – my favorite – AI-powered, real-time 4K upscaling.

Orion in Stage Manager.

Now, let me tell you about my history with Nintendo Switch upscaling. Famously, the console is limited to 720p resolution (in a best case scenario) when in handheld mode and 1080p (again, not always) when docked to a TV. The lack of proper 4K output isn’t a dealbreaker given Nintendo’s design ethos and astounding gameplay for their first-party titles, but let’s be honest: it sure would be lovely to play Zelda or Metroid at native 4K at some point.

To overcome these limitations, over the years I tried a variety of hardware solutions to enhance the picture quality of the Switch when docked. One of these is the mClassic, an HDMI dongle that sits in between the Switch dock and your TV, takes the console’s video feed, and upscales it to 1440p. It’s not 4K, and the image gets softened a little too much for my taste, but it works. I also tried the PhotoFast 4K Gamer Pro, another HDMI dongle that claims to sharpen the Nintendo Switch’s image and blow it up to 4K. In that case, the extra aliasing caused by sharpening turned out to be a problem. I even tried to combine the mClassic and 4K Gamer Pro in one monstrous contraption that required multiple HDMI extension cords and micro-USB cables to power the dongles. All of that just to have a tiny taste of higher resolutions for my Switch.

Enter Orion Pro and its AI-powered, software-based 4K upscaling. You pay $5, flip a toggle in the iPad app, and that’s it: Orion will upscale your Switch’s video stream to 4K in real-time without adding any latency or altering colors.

This is all you have to do to upscale a video feed with Orion.

I played multiple hours of Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Bros. Wonder on my iPad Pro using Orion’s 4K upscaling and it’s been an absolute blast. In toggling Orion’s 4K button on and off, I can tell the difference between the Switch’s standard quasi-1080p video feed and Orion’s post-processed version, which is objectively more pleasant to look at on a 12.9” iPad Pro. Impressively, I’ve also had zero problems with latency in Orion with upscaling turned on. The combination of Orion’s plug-and-play nature, fantastic retro-inspired design, and sheer performance make it, in my opinion, one of the best iPad apps of the year so far.

If you have a compatible capture card (more on this below) and are looking for an app to use your iPad as a portable HDMI monitor for other consoles, my top pick is Orion, and I can’t recommend the Orion Pro purchase enough if you plan on using the app with a Nintendo Switch.

The Gear

Compared to my review in September, there are two key changes I want to cover that have made my setup 100% portable. By that I mean that I’ve created the sort of setup that I can use from my car, without having to be next to a power outlet.

The first upgrade was a new capture card with superior performance to the one I was using before. After a lot of research, I went with ASUS’ brand new TUF Gaming 4K Capture Pro card. In a very compact and sturdy form factor (it’s made of aluminum, which I appreciate, and comes with built-in RGB LEDs), this capture card features:

• Support for HDMI 2.1
• HDR passthrough up to 4K @ 144Hz
• Variable refresh rate passthrough
• Video capture up to 4K at 60 fps over USB 3.2 Gen. 2

I’ve tried a lot of capture cards and dongles over the past few months, and given my high-end setup with the ROG Ally and external 4090 GPU, I wanted to get the best the market could offer at the moment to capture footage on my iPad Pro or PC. Currently, options are limited to this ASUS card and a new one by AVerMedia, which more or less offers the same specs. In any case, my new capture card is extremely lightweight and portable, and it was immediately recognized by Orion as soon as I plugged it in over USB-C with no additional configuration necessary.

My new capture card.

The card is compact and sturdy.

The second upgrade is all about powering a docked Nintendo Switch on the go. For years now, I’ve been using Genki’s Covert Dock Mini in lieu of Nintendo’s bulky dock to connect my Switch to a portable monitor or, say, TVs in hotel rooms. Switch games typically have better performance when the console is docked (with some exceptions), so whenever possible, I try to play with my Switch in docked mode. The only problem: I always need to be close to a power outlet since I never figured out how to run a docked Switch off a portable battery.

That is, until now. A couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon the OmniCharge Omni 20+, a 20,00mAh/71Wh battery pack that, in addition to standard USB-C and USB-A ports, also comes with a 220V AC port at 100W that, well, lets you connect any appliance with a standard two-prong European plug (a U.S. version is also available). This was a true revelation for me since it made me realize I could finally be free of the constraints of power outlets and take my Nintendo Switch with me anywhere – this time even in docked mode.

The battery powering the Nintendo Switch via the Covert Dock Mini.

Besides the fact that the Omni 20+ has become my favorite battery ever made (and I’m keeping an eye on the brand new and very expensive Omni 40 as well), I think you can imagine what happened next. Thanks to the battery’s built-in AC port, I’ve achieved my final form: I’ve been able to play Tears of the Kingdom in docked mode while waiting in my car, using the iPad Pro as an external monitor for my Switch.

Is it messy? Yes. Is it also Tears of the Kingdom on a 12.9” display sitting on my lap while I wait in my car? Yes.

All I needed to do was plug the Covert Dock Mini into the battery, connect the docked Switch to the capture card, and plug the capture card into the iPad Pro. The dock’s minimal power consumption means I can play with this setup for hours at a time, which will be handy in the future when I’ll have to wait in my car for hours again or, say, I’ll be on a plane without a compatible power socket nearby.

Of course, this battery has also been useful for other things – like powering my MacBook Air when I forgot my MagSafe charger, topping up my iPhone or iPad Pro, or recharging my Steam Deck and ROG Ally. There’s also another – “classic Ticci”, someone would say – use case: relying on the battery to charge the iPad Pro while wearing XReal glasses to work with a giant version of iPadOS in front of my eyes. But that’s a story for another time.

It may be a mess of cables, but it’s fully portable.

In the words of my friend Myke Hurley, “this is a much more portable setup than trying to record a podcast on an iPad”. As is often the case, Myke is right. As someone who’s obsessed with portability and freedom from desks, the jungle of cables I often find myself dealing with may not be a pretty sight, but it works. The combination of the Omni 20+ and Orion has enabled me to play Nintendo Switch games on a bigger screen, at a higher resolution, with better audio, and – of course – the freedom to do so anywhere I am.

Perhaps in a few months, I’ll be able to do the same on an OLED iPad Pro. Until then, I’ll be using Orion and iPadOS 17 to play some Super Mario and switch to my email client via Stage Manager if I need to. What a time to be alive.

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.

Spooky Ternus.

At this evening’s ‘Scary Fast’ Apple event, the company announced the new generation of M3 chips – M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max – that will power three new models of MacBook Pro and the updated iMac, which is getting a refresh for the first time since its redesign featuring the M1 chip was introduced in 2021.

We’ll have more detailed overviews of the new computers up on MacStories soon, but in the meantime, here’s a breakdown of when you can expect to be able to get your hands on these new machines:

• MacBook Pro
  • The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 starts at $1,599;
  • The 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M3 Pro starts at $1,999;
  • The 16‑inch MacBook Pro starts at $2,499;
  • All models except the M3 Max can be pre-ordered today and will be available next Tuesday, November 7th;
  • The M3 Max models will be available “later in November” – current shipping estimates mention “2/3 weeks’.
• iMac
  • iMac with 8-core GPU starts at $1,299 and is available in green, pink, blue, and silver;
  • iMac with 10-core GPU starts at $1,499 and is available in green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver;
  • All models can be preordered today and will be available next Tuesday, November 7th.

You can follow all of our October 2023 Apple event coverage through our October 2023 Apple event hub or subscribe to the dedicated October 2023 Apple event 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.

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

Jason Snell, writing for Six Colors:

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

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

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

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

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

→ Source: sixcolors.com

Matter — the IOT connectivity standard with ambitions to fix the smart home and make all of our gadgets talk to each other — has hit version 1.2, adding support for nine new types of connected devices. Robot vacuums, refrigerators, washing machines, and dishwashers are coming to Matter, as are smoke and CO alarms, air quality sensors, air purifiers, room air conditioners, and fans. It’s a crucial moment for the success of the industry-backed coalition that counts 675 companies among its members. This is where it moves from the relatively small categories of door locks and light bulbs to the real moneymakers: large appliances.

And:

While it’s possible today to get your lights to flash when your laundry is done, turn a light red when your fridge’s temperature rises, or shut off the HVAC system if the smoke alarm goes off, it can be complicated to set up and often wholly unreliable. You need to download multiple apps, maybe buy a sensor or two, deal with laggy cloud integrations, and worry about whether your washer is even compatible with your smart home app in the first place. With Matter support, this type of simple command and control should be much easier to implement in any ecosystem.

I spent the past year making as many parts of my new home as connected as possible (our apartment is powered by KNX; I had this bridge installed to bring lights, temperature sensors, and shutters into HomeKit) so, as you can imagine, I’m very much on board with the idea of having my accessories be compatible with multiple ecosystems at once. We live in a “mixed assistant” household (we use Siri in English and Alexa in Italian), so the idea behind Matter is the kind of technology we’re looking for.

The problem, at least from my perspective, is that I have very little hope regarding Apple’s ability to support the new device types added to Matter in their Home app anytime soon.

Apple’s Home app is, by far, the UI I use most for manually controlling my smart home, whether it’s from the Home app itself or Control Center. It’s also leagues beyond the terrible design of the Alexa app; its integration with automations and the Shortcuts app is also incredible. But let’s be honest: the Home app already struggles to fully support device types that were added years ago, such as sprinklers; realistically, how long is it going to take Apple to integrate with robot vacuums and air purifiers?

The way I see it, any connected home standard is only as useful as the UI that lets you control its accessories. So while I’m excited about Matter and strongly believe in the initiative, the weak link for me remains Apple’s Home app.

→ Source: theverge.com

iOS 17.1.

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

Let’s take a look.

Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playlist cover art templates.

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

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

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

Song suggestions at the bottom of playlists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

AirDrop Over the Internet

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

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

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

iPadOS

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

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

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

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

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

Everything Else

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

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

Back to a reasonable design.

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

The new album option for Photo Shuffle.

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

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

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

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

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.

One of the perks of a Club MacStories+ and Club Premier membership are special columns published periodically by me and John. In this week’s Macintosh Desktop Experience column, John explained how widgets in macOS Sonoma are the glue between apps and services that make the Mac feel even more like part of an integrated ecosystem of platforms and devices:

The Mac’s place in users’ computing lives has changed a lot since Steve Jobs returned to Apple and reimagined the Mac as a digital hub. Those days were marked by comparatively weak mobile phones, MP3 players, camcorders, and pocket digital cameras that benefitted from being paired with the Mac and Apple’s iLife suite.

The computing landscape is markedly different now. The constellation of gadgets surrounding the Mac in Jobs’ digital hub have all been replaced by the iPhone and iPad – powerful, portable computers in their own right. That’s been a seismic shift for the Mac. Today, the Mac is in a better place than it’s been in many years thanks to Apple silicon, but it’s no longer the center of attention. Instead, it sits alongside the iPhone and iPad as capable computing peers.

What hasn’t changed from the digital hub days is the critical role played by software. In 2001, iLife’s apps enabled the digital hub, but in 2023, the story is about widgets.

Stay until the end of the story and don’t miss the photo of John’s desk setup, which looks wild at first, but actually makes a lot of sense in the context of widgets.

Macintosh Desktop Experience is one of the many perks of a Club MacStories+ and Club Premier membership and a fantastic way to recognize the modern reality of macOS as well as get the most of your Mac thanks to John’s app recommendations, workflows, and more.

Join Club MacStories+:

Join Club Premier:

→ Source: club.macstories.net

Over the last decade or so, Apple has been hard at work in simplifying the user interfaces that power its myriad platforms. I’ve welcomed most of that work, but it’s hard to deny that we’ve all lost some things along the way.

Today, we look at a UI element that started life in iTunes, but spread to the iPod, iPhone and Mac over time: Cover Flow.

I had completely forgotten that Cover Flow eventually found its way to Safari as well. I miss Cover Flow more today than I ever used it at the time; I wonder if a similar 3D interface could be revived for the age of visionOS and Vision Pro.

→ Source: 512pixels.net

MultiButton for iPhone 15

I got my iPhone 15 Pro Max last week, and I’m loving the possibilities opened by the Action button combined with the Shortcuts app. But as I was playing around with different ideas for the Action button, I had a thought:

Wouldn’t it be great if instead of just one shortcut, I could toggle between two shortcuts with the same Action button press? That’s exactly what my new MultiButton shortcut does.

With MultiButton, you’ll be able to assign two separate shortcuts to the Action button. Unlike other solutions you may have seen that always make you pick shortcuts from a menu, MultiButton automatically cycles between two shortcuts if you press the Action button multiple times in rapid succession. You don’t need to pick shortcuts from a list; just press the Action button and MultiButton will take care of everything.

Allow me to explain how MultiButton works and how you can configure it for your Action button. In the process, I’ll also share some new shortcut ideas that you can start using today on your iPhone 15 Pro.

MultiButton

The core idea behind MultiButton is this: you press the Action button the first time, and it runs a primary shortcut; if you press it again within a few seconds, it’ll run a secondary shortcut. Effectively, MultiButton lets you double the shortcuts you can assign to the Action button, thus making you (hopefully) faster and more productive on your iPhone.

I created MultiButton because I wanted to run two shortcuts from the same Action button press, but I didn’t want to always pick them from a menu. I wanted to define a “primary” shortcut that would be my default Action button press, plus a secondary shortcut that would only run if I pressed the Action button again after a few seconds.

All of this wouldn’t have been necessary if Apple supported multiple gestures for the Action button, such as double- and triple-presses. Alas, in this version of iOS 17 for the iPhone 15 Pro, the Action button can only be associated with one shortcut at a time. That seemed like something I could fix with some clever programming in Shortcuts.

The first time you download and install MultiButton, you’ll be asked to enter the two names of the shortcuts you want to run with it. In this step, pictured below, it is very important that you enter the exact names of the shortcuts you want to run with MultiButton. You can always change these shortcuts later in the MultiButton editor.

You’ll be asked to enter the names of the two shortcuts you want to run with MultiButton at setup (left), but you can always change them later in the editor.

When you run MultiButton the first time, you may also be asked to give it permission to access a folder in iCloud Drive and run other shortcuts. Files/Finder access is necessary because MultiButton needs to create and modify a configuration file (named MultiButton.json) stored in iCloud Drive ⇾ Shortcuts. Don’t worry: MultiButton won’t read any other files or contact any third-party servers. It simply needs to store a timestamp of the last time you used MultiButton.

The initial setup flow for MultiButton. You’ll only see these prompts once.

You see, the “clever” technique behind MultiButton is that it takes advantage of Shortcuts’ built-in date calculations to understand if you pressed the Action button within 7 seconds of the last time you pressed it and ran a shortcut with it. If you do, the shortcut will then run the secondary shortcut instead of the primary one. If you wait longer than 7 seconds, MultiButton will run the default, primary shortcut instead.

By default, MultiButton runs the second shortcut if you press the Action button within 7 seconds of the first shortcut run. You can change this number if you want (right).

The 7-second threshold is an arbitrary number that I picked based on my real-life usage of the Action button. In most scenarios, I thought 7 seconds was an amount of time short enough to press the Action button again, but not too long so that you’d need to wait for MultiButton to “reset” its state. If you want to modify this time limit, you can do so from the ‘Number’ action shown above.

That’s all you need to know about MultiButton. There’s nothing else to configure and no other actions to tweak. Simply assign it as the Action button shortcut in the Settings app, and you’re good to go.

Using Shortcuts with MultiButton and the Action Button

I’m going to give you some examples about my own usage of MultiButton. On my iPhone, I wanted to have a way to perform two actions with the same Action button press:

• By default, save a quick note;
• If I pressed the button again, bring up a list of more shortcuts.

As you can see, this is what MultiButton does on my iPhone 15 Pro Max if I press the Action button a second time after running the first shortcut:

My MultiButton setup.

There are some technical details and limitations worth explaining here. For starters, you cannot press the Action button a second time while the first shortcut is still running. You’ll have to wait for the primary shortcut to be finished running. On iOS, Shortcuts doesn’t support running two shortcuts from the Action button at the same time. You can, however, cancel the first shortcut (if it comes with a ‘Cancel’ button) and press the Action button again; in that case, even if you canceled the first shortcut, the secondary one will still trigger.

Furthermore, the Action button offers a handy ‘Show Folder…’ action for Shortcuts that brings up this UI element:

This menu is exclusive to the Settings app.

Alas, this new menu is exclusive to the Action button Settings screen. There is no action in the Shortcuts app to replicate the look of this menu with rounded buttons and the ‘Open App’ launcher. I hope that’s something Apple will add in the future; for now, the only way to have this menu is to choose it from the Settings app, in which case you won’t be able to use MultiButton.

There is, however, a workaround I implemented to simulate the same behavior, and it’s a simple shortcut I created called ‘Run Shortcut From Folder’. With this shortcut, you can select any folder from the Shortcuts app and run one of the shortcuts contained in that folder. It’s a handy way to have access to a folder of “favorites” in the Shortcuts app and run one of them from MultiButton.

A shortcut that presents a menu to run more shortcuts.

Run Shortcut From Folder

Select and run one of your shortcuts from a specific folder.

Get the shortcut here.

While I was putting together MultiButton, I also created some other shortcuts that would make for nice utilities for the Action button. For instance, my ‘Pause Media’ shortcut uses the free Actions app to detect if audio is playing and, if so, pause playback from the Action button.

Pause Media

If media is playing, pause playback.

Get the shortcut here.

I find myself taking and sharing a lot of screenshots on my iPhone on a daily basis, so I created a couple of shortcuts to speed up the process from the Action button. The first one, called ‘Take Screenshot and Share’, does exactly what it says: it captures a screenshot of whatever is onscreen and immediately presents the share sheet to send the image to an app or someone else. This is a great one to assign as the primary shortcut in MultiButton.

Take Screenshot and Share

Take a screenshot and share it.

Get the shortcut here.

A modified version of this shortcut, called ‘Screenshot, Markup, and Share’, lets you modify a screenshot with the native Markup editing UI before passing it to the share sheet:

Screenshot, Markup, and Share

Take a screenshot, edit it, and share it.

Get the shortcut here.

Lastly, I realized I could get a bit creative with conditions in Shortcuts and put together a shortcut to open all my shutters with a press of the Action button only if I’m on my home WiFi and if it’s after 9 AM. The typical scenario: I wake up, and as I stumble my way across the living room to turn on my espresso machine, I can half-mindedly press the Action button to instantly open all the shutters and get some much needed sunlight. That’s exactly what my ‘Blinds After 9’ shortcut does.

When you first run the shortcut, you’ll be asked to enter the name of your home WiFi network and select a time after which the blinds should open via HomeKit. My recommendation is to enter a date and time in natural language (like “Today at 9 AM”), which Shortcuts will recognize. You’ll need, of course, to select the accessories you want to open from the ‘Control My Home’ action using your own HomeKit setup.

Blinds After 9

Open the blinds/shutters via HomeKit only if you’re on your home WiFi network and if it’s after a certain hour of the day.

Get the shortcut here.

Download MultiButton

Despite the poor state of the Shortcuts app in iOS 17, Action button programming is creating a great opportunity for power and casual users alike to automate tasks on their iPhones with a single press of a button. And with MultiButton, you’ll be able to toggle between two shortcuts instead of one, preserving the benefit of having a default “fallback” shortcut while also having a secondary one ready to go with a second press of the Action button.

I have some other ideas for how to evolve MultiButton in the future and I am, of course, open to feedback and requests. In the meantime, you can download MultiButton below and find it, alongside hundreds more shortcuts as well as the extra ones I mentioned above, in the MacStories Shortcuts Archive.

MultiButton

Toggle between two shortcuts from the Action button. MultiButton will run a secondary shortcut if you press the Action button within a few seconds of your first press.

Get the shortcut here.

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.

Here’s Joe Rossignol, reporting at MacRumors:

In a video interview with Brian Tong, Apple’s VP of Sensing and Connectivity Ron Huang explained why only the updated second-generation AirPods Pro with a USB-C charging case support lossless audio with Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset.

Huang revealed that the H2 chip in the USB-C AirPods Pro supports the 5GHz band of wireless frequencies for ultra-low latency and less interference, while the H2 chip in the original second-generation AirPods Pro with a Lightning case is limited to the 2.4GHz band. Apple says it is this 5GHz support that enables the updated AirPods Pro to support lossless audio with the Vision Pro, which is slated for release in the U.S. in early 2024.

You can watch the video below:

The addition of 5GHz wireless makes complete sense in hindsight, and it doesn’t surprise me that Apple prioritized sound quality and latency reduction for a platform where full immersion is key to the experience.

Beyond Vision Pro, however, I wonder whether we’ll ever have any updates on the lossless audio front regarding Apple Music and AirPods Pro.

We know that Apple Music’s lossless catalog supports resolutions “ranging from 16-bit/44.1 kHz (CD Quality) up to 24-bit/192 kHz”. The new AirPods Pro fall short of supporting hi-res lossless playback at 24-bit/192 kHz, but so-called CD Quality lossless playback should now be within the capabilities of the device. Last time Apple gave a statement on the lack of lossless playback in AirPods Pro, they mentioned there are “other elements” to improve sound quality that aren’t necessarily about Bluetooth codecs. Is Apple waiting until they can support full 24-bit/192 kHz playback in future AirPods Pro hardware, or are there more audio-related changes coming with the launch of Vision Pro?

→ Source: macrumors.com

For starters, yes – Apple implemented DisplayPort connections over USB-C just like on the iPad Pro. The iPhone, however, is limited to a lower resolution:

iPhone uses the DisplayPort protocol to support connections to USB-C displays at up to 4K resolution and 60Hz.

Note that the latest iPad Pros support connections up to 6K, allowing you to connect an iPad Pro to a Pro Display XDR if you hate your wallet. You can try this with an iPhone 15 too, but display resolution is going to be limited to 4K. The Studio Display will be supported too, obviously.

Another tidbit from Apple’s support document:

You can connect your iPhone to an HDMI display or TV with a USB-C to HDMI adapter or cable. Adapters and cables that support HDMI 2.0 can output video from your iPhone at 4K resolution and 60Hz.

The Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter is compatible with iPhone. This adapter can output video from iPhone at up to 4K resolution and 60Hz, including content in HDR10 or Dolby Vision if your display or TV supports HDR.

If my theory is correct, we should soon be able to connect an iPhone to an HDMI capture card (such as the ones I covered in my iPadOS 17 review) via Apple’s adapter and an HDMI cable, connect the capture card to an iPad, and use a compatible app to see the iPhone’s display on your iPad. That could be used for screencasts, playing videos from an iPhone on the iPad’s display, or, better yet, play a videogame from the iPhone in a Stage Manager window on the iPad.

The iPhone itself doesn’t support Stage Manager, so, unlike Samsung phones, it can’t be turned into a desktop workstation when plugged into an external monitor (I hope this happens down the road though). However, I do believe we’re going to start seeing some interesting experiments with iPhones being used as handheld gaming consoles with external monitors. Whether you’ll be using a capture card to turn an iPad into an external monitor for an iPhone using apps like Orion¹ or Genki Studio² or connect it to a portable OLED display, I think this newfound hardware modularity is going to be fascinating to observe.

→ Source: support.apple.com

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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Apple Music today gained a new “Discovery Station,” which is located under the “Listen Now” section under Top Picks in the ‌Apple Music‌ app. The customized radio station is paired with the personalized radio station featuring your name, and it has the “Made for You” label. It can also be accessed through this link for those who do not yet see it.

As noted by AppleInsider, the radio station appears to play songs of a similar style to songs that are in your personal library and that you have listened to and liked in the past, but it chooses songs you don’t have in playlists or your library.

I’ve been writing about the topic of algorithmic discovery in music streaming services for years now, so as soon as I read about this new station, I immediately went to check it out.

It’s only been a few hours, but my impression is that Apple sees the “discovery” part of this ‘Discovery Station’ as something fundamentally different from Spotify’s Discover Weekly. Spotify’s popular algorithmic playlist (which refreshes once a week) is generally skewed toward lesser-known acts and recent releases; in the hours I’ve been testing Apple’s new radio station, it seems it’s not afraid to recommend older music from bands I am familiar with and that I wouldn’t consider “niche”, but which I don’t have in my music library either. For instance, I’ve been listening again for the last 30 minutes, and my recommendations were largely mid-2000s emo/pop-punk songs. Not that I’m complaining.

Apple hasn’t officially announced the Discovery Station yet, and I assume they’re still adjusting the balance of the algorithm powering it. I did get a few recommendations from new and unknown (at least to me) artists, which is a good sign that the ultimate goal of the radio station might be a healthy mix of songs you’ve never heard of and songs you sort of knew but never saved in your library.

I’m going to keep an eye on the Discovery Station; I have a feeling I’ll end up listening to this radio station a lot over the coming weeks.

→ Source: macrumors.com

tvOS 17 isn’t trying to reinvent any of this. There are now six icons in each row, so you can add yet another app to your main “dock” at the top of the screen, but that’s about as exciting as the big interface changes get. Apple no longer seems preoccupied with becoming some all-encompassing aggregation hub for streaming entertainment, and there are good reasons for this. The company’s pipe dream of streaming content from popular third-party subscription services directly from the Apple TV app quickly fell apart. Netflix refuses to play ball with any effort to create a universal watchlist outside of the confines of its own app — whether it’s from Apple, Google, or anyone else — so what’s the point? Things are now more fragmented than I’d like, but it’s the content owners and streaming services putting those walls up for their own self-interest.

So instead, Apple is making improvements and touching up areas of the Apple TV experience that it can fully control. And it’s starting with one of the iPhone’s first major ecosystem tricks.

Chris put together a great list of changes coming to tvOS this year, most of them revolving around the ecosystem advantage Apple has compared to their competitors in this field. Rather than trying to beat Google and Amazon on price, Apple is finally leaning into the unique feature they have: iPhone owners who also have an Apple TV.

My favorite change coming in tvOS 17, however, is something that will allow me to stop using my iPhone when watching TV: VPN apps.

For years I’ve been forced to watch HBO content¹ with a fake US account by starting playback on the iPhone and AirPlaying the video stream to my Apple TV. Later this year, I’ll be able to install a VPN app directly on the Apple TV and stream content on it without having to worry about my iPhone and AirPlay. Good riddance.

→ Source: theverge.com

Here’s Jason Snell, writing last week at Six Colors:

Unfortunately, one of my most hoped-for features for Stage Manager didn’t make it into iPadOS 17: you can’t run the iPad on an external display with its internal screen shut off, as you can when a MacBook runs in lid-closed mode. Not only can the second screen be distracting, but there’s stuff Apple insists on displaying on the iPad screen, and sometimes apps get thrown over to the iPad screen when you don’t want them there.

I’ve been working with the fake clamshell mode I detailed on MacStories for the past few weeks. It’s doable, but some of the inherent limitations of this workaround are incredibly annoying. For instance: there’s no way to show Control Center on an external display (seriously). I want to believe Apple is working on a real clamshell mode for iPadOS 18.

David Pierce, writing at The Verge, has also some ideas for features still missing from Stage Manager:

But now Apple needs to make Stage Manager an actual iPad feature. It needs to integrate it with the other iPadOS navigational tools and windowing systems in a way that makes sense. Let me have widgets and apps together in a space! And please, please let me save a collection of apps with a name and then bring it up with a Spotlight search, please. It needs to take advantage of the tablet’s outrageous processing power and actually let you use more than four apps at a time. It needs, in short, to make Stage Manager feel like part of the iPad instead of a wholly separate device that just happens to live inside the same screen.

The more I look at macOS Sonoma, the more I wish I could see widgets from my iPad’s Home Screen underneath Stage Manager’s windows. That’s the kind of feature that would make a lot of sense on a bigger iPad Pro.

→ Source: sixcolors.com

This is a key (and likely killer) feature for onboarding someone into Threads. Like TikTok, you don’t have to do anything else after signing up to start seeing stuff. Is all of that going to be relevant to you? Probably not. But it removes the problem of most social media platforms: a user signing up and then going, “Ok, now what?” Building on top of the Instagram social graph removes a huge barrier and gives Threads a bootstrapping head start. It’s “valuable” to any Instagram user almost immediately. The app itself is fine. It’s not what I would prefer in an app for this kind of thing (Ivory is). But it’s fine. In my playing around with it over the past few days, I have two main thoughts, the first is on what works, and the second is on what needs to change. Let’s start with what works. The people are here. Joining Mastodon and joining BlueSky, I can find maybe 5% of the people I’m looking for. On Mastodon, it’s a lot of my tech and nerd friends. On BlueSky, it’s a few joke accounts. On Threads, I’d venture almost 90% of the people I’m looking for are there. Music people and bands that never joined Mastodon are there, and they’re posting. Many of the baseball and basketball accounts I follow are there, and they’re posting during games. This is a huge use case for me in a real-time app like this. Social media, and communities, are all about who is on the platform. The value a user gets is directly tied to the people who are there posting on it. I can love Mastodon as much as I want, but if I cannot extract the value I’m looking for from it daily, I’ll use it less. And that’s why I want Threads to succeed if they follow through on their promise to federate with the Fediverse.

That’s precisely the issue with Mastodon for me. I love Mastodon, and I’ve built an amazing audience of tech enthusiasts and MacStories readers there, but the non-tech people I want to follow online just aren’t there. I’ve been on Mastodon for several months now, and so many communities I used to follow on Twitter never signed up; meanwhile, I noticed folks from music Twitter, VGC Twitter, and videogames Twitter show up on Threads within days. And they’re posting.

So far, the value of Threads² is that it fills a hole left by Twitter that Mastodon, for a variety of reasons, never filled. I don’t know if it’ll ultimately succeed without Meta ruining it in the long run, but anything to move communities away from Elon works for me right now.

→ Source: chorus.fm

iOS and iPadOS 17.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Widgets Everywhere

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

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

Reminders widgets in iOS 17.

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

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

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

Interactive widgets for Music and Podcasts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Count up and down from a Home Screen widget.

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

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

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

Start and stop timers from widgets and Live Activities.

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

StandBy Mode

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

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

The three different areas of StandBy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

App Highlights

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

Column View in Reminders

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

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

Column mode in Reminders.

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

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

Internal Linking in Notes

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

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

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

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

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

The quick menu for internal links.

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

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

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

A Proper Queue in Podcasts

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll see how this experiment goes this summer.

iPadOS 17

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

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

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

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

The new iPad Lock Screen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capturing Tears of the Kingdom on the iPad Pro.

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

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

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

The iOS and iPadOS 17 Public Betas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Running Threader via Back Tap on Twitter and Mastodon.

Instagram just rolled out Threads, the company’s new text-based social network that’s been advertised over the past few weeks as an alternative to Twitter. I’m trying out Threads (you can find my account at threads.net/@viticci) and in the process of setting up the list of people I want to follow, I immediately run into an annoying issue that I fixed with a shortcut.

There are several aspects of Threads I want to get into at a later time (the app is iPhone-only, like Instagram; their promised ActivityPub federation isn’t available yet; there is no chronological timeline), but for now, let me explain the problem I’ve been having for the past hour or so. After leaving Twitter, I rebuilt my social graph on Mastodon. Since Threads rolled out on the App Store earlier today, a lot of the people I follow on Mastodon have been posting links to their Threads profiles, which is a convenient way to re-follow them on the new service. However, when I click on profile URLs from the popular app Ivory, I get an error because the app thinks I clicked on a Mastodon profile URL:

Well, this doesn’t seem right.

It’s not any better on the Twitter website: after logging in with my account and clicking on some profile URLs, I was presented with Threads webpages that do not have a Follow button at all:

Not good either.

I thought there would be an opportunity to make this process easier with Shortcuts, especially right now that a lot of folks are signing up for Threads. Fortunately, I was right. It took a bit of reverse-engineering in Shortcuts, but I figured out the URL scheme for opening account pages directly in the Threads app, and I built a shortcut to make the migration process from Mastodon and Twitter much easier and quicker.

The shortcut is called Threader, and it’s meant to be used as a Back Tap shortcut on your iPhone. Back Tap is an Accessibility feature that lets you run shortcuts by double- or triple-tapping the back of your iPhone, which you can set up in Settings ⇾ Accessibility ⇾ Touch ⇾ Back Tap. You can also read more about it here.

Threader uses Shortcuts’ text recognition capabilities to take a screenshot of the Mastodon or Twitter screen you’re looking at, find Threads profile URLs in it, and let you choose which one you want to open directly in the Threads app. It couldn’t be easier: install the shortcut at the end of this post, set it up for Back Tap, then double-tap the back of your iPhone while looking at some posts with Threads account URLs. You’ll be a shown a list of recognized account URLs. Pick one, and once you’re in the Threads app, you can tap the Follow button to follow the selected account (the shortcut can’t do this on your behalf).

Running Threader via Back Tap in Ivory.

Behind the scenes, Threader performs OCR on the screen you’re looking at, uses a regular expression to find Threads URLs, and relies on a URL scheme to open the selected account in Threads.¹ It’s a relatively simple shortcut powered by some advanced technology under the hood, which is one of my favorite things about building useful automations in the Shortcuts app.

Ideally, Threads will soon implement Universal Links so that profile URLs will start automatically opening in the app, or Ivory will stop trying to load those links as Mastodon profiles. But neither of those things are going to happen tonight, and tonight is for having fun rebuilding a social graph once again.

You can download Threader below and find it in the MacStories Shortcuts Archive; you can follow me on Threads here.

Threader

Quickly open Threads profile URLs in the Threads app. This shortcut takes a screenshot of the current screen in Mastodon or Twitter, finds Threads URLs in it, and allows you to open one direcltly in the Threads app.

Get the shortcut here.

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.

TotK Travel Guide.

If your summer’s going to be anything like mine, some of these things should sound familiar: you’re going to play around with the iOS and iPadOS 17 betas and get on some TestFlights for third-party apps; you’re going to spend some time at the beach or perhaps even travel abroad; and you’ll still be playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which is a ridiculously massive game well worth waiting six years for. If the latter scenario applies to your life right now and in the near future, you’ll want to install TotK Travel Guide, which came out earlier this week for iPhone and iPad.

TotK Travel Guide was created by indie developer Jeffrey Kuiken. You may be familiar with Jeffrey’s work since he won a MacStories Selects Award in 2021 with Noir, a Safari extension, and, more importantly, previously released another Travel Guide app for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Jeffrey is back with TotK Travel Guide, which I’ve been able to test for the past month alongside other members of our Club MacStories Discord as part of our ‘Beta Beat’ invitational program for upcoming apps. And since I’m 45 hours into Tears of the Kingdom and still far from seeing anything even remotely resembling an “end” for this game, I thought I’d highlight how I’m taking advantage of TotK Travel Guide so far.

The key concept to understand about TotK Travel Guide is that it’s both an interactive map and a note-taking system rolled into one. The lack of a powerful map with filters and more browsing options is my only criticism of Tears of the Kingdom; TotK Travel Guide addresses that with a set of features that is flexible enough without unnecessarily spoiling the game for you.

One of my concerns with most Zelda-based apps and online tutorials is that, inevitably, they ruin the surprise of playing the game or otherwise diminish the sense of discovery that is intrinsic to a game like Tears of the Kingdom. Travel Guide’s approach here is both elegant and clever: by default, the app hides locations – including whole regions of the map, towers, and shrines – until you specifically mark them as discovered. This way, you can open the app for the first time without being shown all the regions of Hyrule at once (let alone every single shrine location); as you play, you can mark regions as discovered and use a camera button to mark individual POIs as ‘discovered’. I love this interaction since it balances the need to fill the map with my desire to keep the sense of discovery intact – which is why I haven’t consulted any online map for the game so far. If you don’t like this default setting, however, you can tweak the app to always show all locations at once.

Manually discovering locations in the app.

As you start adding locations to Travel Guide, you’ll notice that there’s a lot to discover in this game. As of its first version, Travel Guide supports the following categories of locations:

• Shrines
• Towers
• Lightroots
• Dispensers
• Villages
• Stables
• Inns
• General Stores
• Shops
• Chasms
• Caves
• Wells
• Korok Seeds
• Zonai Reliefs
• Labs

You can browse individual categories in the app as well as tap on a specific location to view it on the map. There are several visual and functional details worth appreciating here. For starters, you can group locations by discovered or undiscovered, by region, or by notes. One of the key features of Travel Guide is, in fact, the ability to add generalized ‘quick notes’ or notes tied to a specific location. For instance, if you spot something by a stable but want to come back to it later, you can add a note for that stable’s location, which you’ll find later in that stable’s detail page.

In location pages, you’ll also find coordinates (the app also lets you manually navigate to a location by pasting its coordinates) and useful links to open YouTube or Google searches for the selected location. The latter is an especially nice touch if you’re having trouble solving a shrine and want to check out its solution on YouTube.¹

Location pages include coordinates, a notes field, and useful links to solve shrines.

I haven’t taken advantage of setting manual pins in the map yet, but that’s another option supported by Travel Guide. Personally, I tend to manually discover locations with the camera button and add notes to specific location pages. If I’m playing the game and want to save a note quickly, I use the catch-all Quick Note feature – which is also available as a Shortcuts action – and worry about organizing notes by location later.

In addition to how the map and note-taking systems work, what I like about Travel Guide is the fact that it’s a great platform citizen on iPhone and iPad. The whole UI is heavily inspired by Apple’s Maps app with a bottom-oriented panel that is easy to operate with your thumb and expands to reveal categories and locations. On iPad, the panel looks just like the Maps one, and I actually find its behavior superior to Apple’s app since it supports two expanded states as opposed to Apple’s one. The use of pull-down menus, overlays to switch between map layers, and transitions between the different sections of the app are excellent.

TotK Travel Guide for iPad; the app syncs with iCloud.

That said, this is a first version of Travel Guide, and there are some aspects of the experience I’d like to see improved. Right now, Travel Guide lacks any sort of database for items and armor, which I hope is something the developer plans to add in a future update (it’s a big effort, so I understand it may take a while). I’d like to see native support for images (sometimes I want to save a screenshot someone shared online for future reference) as well as the ability to format my notes in Markdown. I often find myself saving videos about interesting Zonai builds from YouTube, but when I paste those into Travel Guide, they’re not formatted as rich links. Lastly, I’d like the ability to pin specific notes to the top of the Notes view, like I can in Apple’s Notes app.

Based on Jeffrey’s track record with the Animal Crossing Travel Guide, I’m very optimistic about the future of TotK Travel Guide, which has replaced my rudimentary note-taking system in the Notes app for Tears of the Kingdom. If you’re loving the game as much as I am and plan to keep playing it for hundreds of hours this year, I can’t recommend the app enough.

TotK Travel Guide is free to download on the App Store; a $3.99, one-time In-App Purchase unlocks all features of the app.

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.