This week on MacStories Unwind, I recommend Godzilla Minus One in honor of Magic Rays of Light joining MacStories and Federico shares part two of his big gaming surprise, explaining the hardware he’s using to emulate Switch games and more.

Links and Show Notes

John’s Pick

• Magic Rays of Light
• Godzilla Minus One
  • Trailer
  • Watch Godzilla Minus One in dazzling black and white during limited US run
  • Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Ticci’s Absolutely Bananas Gaming Tablet

• ROG Flow Z13
• ROG Flow Z13-ACRNM RMT02

Strap included.

The Ultimate lifestyle shots

Ticci and ACRNM.

Who doesn’t love a kickstand?

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Source: Apple.

Apple has released a guided tour of Vision Pro on its website that walks through a bunch of its features. Whether or not you’re planning to purchase Apple Vision Pro, this video is worth taking the time to watch. It’s about ten minutes long and covers many of the device’s core features from the perspective of someone using it for the first time.

I wish I’d seen this guided tour earlier. As someone who hasn’t had a hands-on demo of Apple Vision Pro, this video has done far more to get me excited to try it myself than anything else.

Tim Cook also shared a montage video on X/Twitter of the Vision Pro being manufactured, which can also be viewed on YouTube. The careful orchestration of robots milling parts and stitching bands together is mesmerizing to watch.

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The Vision Pro Travel Case.

If you finished the Apple Vision Pro checkout process with any money left in your bank account, Apple has several accessories available for its new spatial computing headset.

The Vision Pro battery.

At the $199 price point, you have three options:

• A spare battery
• A travel case
• An extra light seal

The light seal.

The light seal cushion.

However, if all you need is the light seal cushion, you can order that for $29. The Apple Vision Pro Solo Knit Band and Dual Loop Band are also available for separate purchase for $99 each.

The ZEISS lenses.

If you forgot to order ZEISS lens inserts during checkout or your prescription changes, they can be purchased separately starting at $99 for non-prescription ‘reader’ lenses and $149 for prescription lenses.

The Dual Loop Band.

The Solo Knit Band.

As previously reported, Belkin is offering a battery clip that includes a case with a clip for the battery and a smaller clip for the power cable for $49.95. Apple also lists a 30W power adapter, USB-C charging cable, the Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, and AirPods Pro (2nd generation) alongside the Vision Pro.

Oh hey, here’s an accessory for less than $100. Thanks Belkin.

Thankfully, it looks like Apple heard the critics of its AirPods Max case and built a polycarbonate protective case with a ‘ripstop outer shell’ and spots to tuck the device’s battery, optical lenses, and cover, along with ‘other accessories.’ The case looks nice, but I took a pass, figuring I can always pick one up in advance of my next trip if I decide to take the Vision Pro on the road with me.

I did, however, buy a spare battery. I expect that I’ll connect the battery that comes with the Vision Pro to power a lot of the time to get more than two hours of use out of it, but a spare battery will allow for greater portability.

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Source: Apple.

We’re excited about the Apple Vision Pro. In planning our coverage at MacStories, we’ve already collected a list of over 50 apps from some of our favorite developers who have been hard at work on visionOS versions of their apps. Soon after the Vision Pro ships, you’ll start seeing reviews of the best of those apps on MacStories.

However, as we surveyed the App Store, looking for the best examples of upcoming Vision Pro apps and heard the news that Netflix won’t be building a visionOS app or making its iPad app available on the new device, it got us thinking. What other popular apps aren’t coming to visionOS yet, and of those that are, which have gone to the trouble of creating native experiences?

You see, iPhone and iPad apps are compatible with Apple Vision Pro and made available to its users by default. Developers have to affirmatively opt-out, using App Store Connect if they don’t want their apps to show up in the device’s App Store.

It’s possible to check visionOS compatibility with Shortcuts.

As it turns out, it’s possible to tell if a developer has opted out by using App Store API endpoints. So, with a little help, we built a shortcut to check some of the most popular apps on the App Store. We had heard through the grapevine that Spotify was showing that it would be available in compatibility mode several days ago but had flipped to unavailable on the Vision Pro, and sure enough, our shortcut confirms Spotify has opted out of offering its app on day one. Also, in testing the shortcut and fact-checking its results, we came across a Gist on GitHub that was last active last week and uses a similar approach to our shortcut but by using a Python script, which lends support to our findings.

Before we get to our findings below, a word of caution. An opted-out app may become available in the future. A good example is Disney+, which was demoed by Apple to members of the press earlier this week. Disney’s app currently shows that the company has opted out of Vision Pro compatibility. Instead of indicating that Disney is taking a pass on the device, this is most likely because the app isn’t ready yet, and an app update will flip the switch to make it Vision Pro-compatible.

Sports seem like a natural fit with the Vision Pro, but so far, the list of compatible apps is a little thin.

So, as you browse the results below, keep in mind the following:

• Apps that indicate there’s a native version available means you can count on that app being available on Vision Pro launch day unless the developer withdraws it from sale in the interim
• Apps that are available in compatibility mode may or may not be available on launch day because a developer can always withdraw an app in App Store Connect
• Apps that are not available in compatibility mode or as a native app have been manually opted out by the developer and won’t be available on launch day unless they opt back in between now and February 2nd

All that said, it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s likely that many popular apps won’t be available when customers start receiving their Vision Pros. They may become available later, but there’s no guarantee that will be the case.

What we found when we searched 46 of the most popular apps on the App Store is that as of today, none will be available on launch day as native apps, and just over one-third will be available in compatibility mode. Again, those numbers can change, but we’re only 15 days out from launch, so it’s hard to see those numbers swinging significantly. Here are the full results of our research:

Finally, we checked a bunch of Apple apps that are available on the App Store and discovered several that haven’t been mentioned by Apple that may be available in compatibility mode on the Vision Pro, including:

• Shortcuts
• Reminders
• Numbers
• Pages
• Home
• Maps
• Books
• News
• Podcasts
• Apple Music Classical
• Shazam
• Stocks

It’s not entirely clear if the list above will be available on the Vision Pro in compatibility mode or not because many of these apps are App Store listings that are effectively placeholders to deal with the circumstance where users delete an app and want to reinstall it later. Those App Store listings are fundamentally different than third-party apps, and as a result, we are unable to confirm whether they will in fact be compatible with Vision Pro.

So, where does that leave you if you’re considering ordering an Apple Vision Pro tomorrow? I think it’s fair to say that you’ll be able to do quite a lot with the built-in native apps Apple offers supplemented by its apps that will run in compatibility mode. Beyond that, big-name apps are likely to be hit-or-miss affairs at launch, with some running in compatibility mode and, aside from those already announced by Apple, very few running natively. That’s a little disappointing, but this is a new platform that will have few users at first, so it’s also understandable that many companies are playing ‘wait-and-see.’

However, what I expect you’ll also see at launch is a significant number of high-quality apps from indie developers. We haven’t had a chance to test those apps yet, but we’ve been talking to developers for weeks and like what we’ve seen a lot. We’ll have lots of coverage of those apps in the coming weeks.

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

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

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

The ScreenBar Halo’s wireless dial.

The biggest difference from the older ScreenBar I was using is that the ScreenBar Halo’s controller knob is wireless, communicating with the light over Bluetooth. That alone cuts down on clutter significantly. Instead of two wires, there’s just one USB-A cable that needs to be plugged into a power source. If you’ve got a spare port on your display that works well because it allows the cable to be tucked away out of sight.

However, one downside is that the ScreenBar Halo is still using USB-A, so I needed an adapter to plug it into my Studio Display. I get that using USB-A helps keep manufacturing costs down, but it’s time for accessories like the ScreenBar Halo to make the move to USB-C. Even better would be to make the power cable detachable, so I could swap it out for one of my own that’s the perfect length for my setup. It’s a small thing, but it would go a long way toward making the ScreenBar Halo fit more seamlessly into different desk configurations.

Ultimately, I expect I’ll switch from powering the ScreenBar Halo with the Studio Display to plugging it into my Meross Smart Power Strip that includes USB-A ports. Tucked out of sight, that will allow me to integrate the ScreenBar Halo into my lighting automation, turning it off automatically when I leave the room.

The ScreenBar Halo’s backlight.

Another big difference from earlier models is that the ScreenBar Halo has a light on the rear of the device that’s built into the counterweight and allows the device to sit securely on the top of your display. It’s not an especially bright light, but I’ve found that the soft backlighting that the ScreenBar Halo provides looks nice.

The ScreenBar Halo’s dial lights up briefly when you interact with it.

Both the backlight and desk light, which is notably a little wider than the older version I was using, are controlled via the dial that communicates wirelessly over Bluetooth with the ScreenBar Halo. The surface of the dial is touch-sensitive, with an on/off button in the center that’s surrounded by buttons to control the temperature of the light and its brightness, a heart button that allows you to save a favorite configuration, a mode button for turning on different combinations of the front and back lights, and a button that automatically adjusts the brightness of the ScreenBar Halo based on your room’s ambient lighting. The dial also rotates, so you can adjust the light’s temperature or brightness.

The ScreenBar Halo can be tuned to a nice range of temperatures. Source: BenQ.

I’ve been using the ScreenBar Halo for nearly a week, and already, it’s a big improvement over the prior model. The wider light bar provides better desktop illumination, and the subtle backlighting looks good, but the real key to the device is the wireless controller. The elimination of that single cable cuts down on clutter and gives you more options when placing the controller on your desk.

Aside from my complaints about the device’s undetachable USB-A cable above, the biggest downside of the ScreenBar Halo, which I’d like to see BenQ solve in a future design, is that the front of the light’s mount blocks my Studio Display’s camera. That isn’t a deal breaker for me because I don’t do a lot of video calling on my Mac, but if you do, there aren’t a lot of great choices other than sliding the light to the side for calls, which could get old fast. A notch in the center of the mount would probably solve the problem for most displays with built-in cameras, but for whatever reason, that hasn’t been done.

Source: BenQ.

Still, the BenQ ScreenBar Halo has been a nice addition to my desk setup. It allows me to dial in exactly the amount of light I want and where I want it, with fewer wires than before and the bonus of a little backlighting behind my display.

The ScreenBar Halo is available directly from BenQ for $179 and can also be purchased from Amazon.

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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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Yesterday, the US Supreme Court told Epic Games and Apple, “No, thank you,” and Apple served up an ugly alert to developers who can now offer payment options outside the App Store. If you’re thinking, “Wait, didn’t this all get resolved ages ago?” I feel you. The legal system moves at its own pace, which is an order of magnitude slower than technology. However, what might feel like a lifetime ago to many MacStories readers is pretty typical. It also means that it’s time to put on my ‘former lawyer’ hat for a moment to revisit where things stand with Epic and Apple and consider what’s next.

Still from a video released by Epic jabbing Apple for its control over the App Store.

This whole mess started in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic when Epic Games decided to manufacture a dispute with Apple by sneaking a store for purchasing Fortnite in-game currency into the mobile versions of that game. Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store, Epic sued, claiming antitrust violations, Apple countersued for violations of its developer agreements, and the rest has unfolded over the course of over three years.

The case was tried in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. She decided the case about a year later, ruling that Apple wasn’t a monopoly but used a California state anti-steering law that gives judges wide latitude to fashion remedies to order that Apple cannot prevent developers from linking to external payment options in their apps. As a result, neither party was totally happy with the ruling, although Apple clearly came out of the trial with a bigger win than Epic did.

Epic’s Tim Sweeney vowed to appeal, which he did, as did Apple. As I said at the time:

I doubt Epic will prevail on appeal. Antitrust cases turn first and foremost on the trial court’s determination of the facts, and in an appeal, the trial judge’s findings of fact are given more deference than their legal conclusions. That’s because the trial judge was in the room with witnesses and, therefore, is assumed to be the best arbiter of what the evidence at trial demonstrated.

Judge Gonzalez Rodgers is no dummy. She knew there would be an appeal and crafted a decision designed to be as bullet-proof as possible on appeal.

As I expected at the time, the judge’s decision withstood both parties’ appeals. Earlier this year, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision, which set the stage for the US Supreme Court’s actions yesterday.

Appealing to the US Supreme Court is a little different than the initial appeal of Judge Gonzalez Rodgers’ decision because the Supreme Court doesn’t have to accept the appeal. In fact, the vast majority of appeals to the Supreme Court are rejected. When that happens, the decisions of the courts below it stand, and the decision of the trial court becomes final.

That’s what happened here. Epic and Apple were both unhappy with Judge Gonzalez Rodgers’ decision. So both appealed, the Ninth Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision, and the Supreme Court effectively said, “Go away. Don’t bother us with this.”

That’s not the same as the Supreme Court ruling against either party, as I’ve seen reported in some places. In fact, it’s the opposite of a ruling. The Supreme Court decided not to decide. That’s significant because it carries no weight as legal precedent. Had the Supreme Court ruled, the decision would have been binding on all other US federal courts. As it stands, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision is binding precedent for the federal courts in that district only. That’s it. Parties can argue about the issues decided by the District Court and the Ninth Circuit in other districts, but they aren’t binding on those courts.

So it’s over, right? Well, sort of. Judge Gonzalez Rodgers can sleep well knowing her decision won’t be second-guessed, but as we’ve already seen from the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s non-decision, legal battles between big companies that don’t like each other and have a lot of money never really end.

Apple’s new warning for developers who want to link to external payment systems.

Epic’s Tim Sweeney immediately proclaimed that Epic Games would contest Apple’s “bad-faith compliance plan.” Epic can do that because all Judge Gonzalez Rodgers decided was that Apple had violated California’s anti-steering law. Apple has responded by revising its app distribution rules. Developers have to request a StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement and use a somewhat scary and unsightly disclosure sheet warning users of the risks of buying things on the Internet. Going this route will only save developers 3% on Apple’s App Store commission, which I expect won’t be enough for many developers to bother with. Epic and Sweeney have additional issues with Apple’s implementation, which Sweeney detailed in a statement to 9to5Mac. So now, the fight is over whether what Apple has done is sufficient to steer clear of California’s anti-steering law.

For its part, Apple says Epic owes it $73 million in legal fees it spent fighting with Epic. I have no doubt that Apple’s developer agreements provide for this sort of reimbursement and that Epic will fight it.

So, what have we learned from the past few years? The main takeaway is that it’s clear that Apple isn’t going to change the way it runs the App Store without a legal fight or government regulation. Its strategy is to fight and lobby, make incremental changes at the margin, rinse, and repeat. I expect we’ll see something similar play out with side-loading by March 7th, which is the deadline for Apple and other companies to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act.

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

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

ScreenFloat 2.0.

ScreenFloat 2.0 is a Mac-only screenshot utility from Matthias Gansrigler of Eternal Storms Software. As Gansrigler explains, the app is like Picture-in-Picture for screenshots, allowing you to float screenshots or screen recordings above other windows to use as reference material on your Mac. That’s a great explanation of one of the core use cases for ScreenFloat 2.0, but the update opens up exciting new possibilities that go even further, which I think anyone who works with screenshots will like a lot.

Activating ScreenFloat from the Mac menu bar.

At its heart, ScreenFloat is a menu bar utility that patiently sits in your menu bar, waiting to be called into service with a keyboard shortcut. If you’ve used screenshot utilities before, that’s how many of them work, and, like other screenshot apps, ScreenFloat can take screenshots of a user-defined part of the screen, a window, or the entire screen. The app can also take screen recordings and timed shots.

A subtle toolbar sits at the top of your floating screenshot windows.

Once a screenshot or recording has been made, by default, it opens in a separate floating window that’s a 1:1 mirror of the shot you took. When you hover your pointer over the screenshot, a translucent toolbar appears at the top of its window. From here, you can close the screenshot. Alternatively, you can add a title, star rating, tags, and notes, all of which are powerful tools for organizing and revisiting your images later.

You can use ScreenFloat’s toolbar to add a title, tags, notes, and a rating to each image.

On the right side of the toolbar is a document icon with export options and a gear icon packed with other actions. The export icon allows you to save your screenshot in five formats to a default location, drag it elsewhere, copy the file, and open or share it with other apps. Those file options come along with additional settings for preserving the alpha channel, saving metadata along with the image, including annotations with your export, resizing the image, and more. That’s a lot, and it’s exactly the sort of flexibility I love in a utility like this because it means ScreenFloat can adapt to a wide variety of workflows.

The export menu.

For its part, the gear icon in the toolbar collects a long list of actions that are divided into four categories:

• Share
• Edit
• Organize
• Visibility

Share includes some of the same options as the export tool, allowing screenshots to be copied, exported, printed, and shared with other apps. There’s also an option to detect data, including text, faces, and barcodes, which allows text to be copied or redacted and faces and barcodes to be blurred out, a fantastic use of macOS’s built-in data detection technology.

ScreenFloat’s extensive collection of actions.

The Edit section provides tools for editing metadata and annotating images in a wide variety of ways by adding text, bulleted lists, shapes, arrows, lines, and more. All of these edits are non-destructive, meaning you can add them for reference purposes but still retrieve an unedited version of the screenshot later. This is an excellent addition for anyone who wants to mark up an image to highlight some aspect of it but preserve the ability to use a clean version in the future.

The Organize section has options for marking screenshots as favorites, rating them, moving them to folders, opening the Shots Browser, and accessing the app’s Settings. Of these options, the Shots Browser is easily my favorite because it extends ScreenFloat from a simple floating screenshot reference tool to a dedicated screenshot organization app.

The Shots Browser is my favorite ScreenFloat feature.

The Shots Browser opens in a separate window from any floating screenshots and is divided into three sections. On the left is a library navigation panel. On the right is an info panel with details about the selected screenshot. In the center are resizable thumbnails of each screenshot, with some basic data about each. Tools for sharing, editing, and organizing your screenshots are available from the Shots Browser’s toolbar or by right-clicking on any screenshot.

ScreenFloat includes an excellent collection of Shortcuts actions.

Returning to the screenshot window’s toolbar to complete our ScreenFloat tour, there’s also a Visibility section that has tools that control whether a screenshot floats, which of your Mac’s Spaces it appears in, and whether mouse clicks on the screenshot should be ignored. Finally, it’s worth noting that ScreenFloat incorporates keyboard shortcuts throughout the app, includes detailed settings to finely tune the app to your personal tastes, and supports Shortcuts actions for capturing screenshots, importing images, and hiding, unhiding and closing floating screenshots, and offers widgets.

Tip: Scroll vertically on a floating screenshot to reveal what’s underneath.

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A good example of how you can tune ScreenFloat to your personal needs is the way I’ve been using it. I don’t often need to float screenshots above my other windows for reference purposes. However, I do take and annotate a lot of screenshots, and organizing them can be cumbersome in the Finder. The first thing I did with ScreenFloat was to turn off the default behavior that floats screenshots on top of other windows. It’s a small change, but it allows me to take a bunch of screenshots for a story like this one and then pop open the Shots Browser when I’m ready to organize and annotate them. That’s not something I need for every project, but a big one like my annual macOS review, where I take hundreds of screenshots over many weeks, is perfect for the sort of non-destructive annotation, tagging, and other organizational tools that ScreenFloat provides.

Annotating a screenshot.

The only thing about ScreenFloat that I’d change is that it doesn’t appear in the Dock or when Command-Tabbing. I use Command-Tab constantly to move between apps, and without it, the Shots Browser can get lost among my windows. This isn’t the end of the world because I can always summon it with a keyboard shortcut, but it breaks a longstanding personal habit that’s been hard to adjust to.

That said, ScreenFloat 2.0 is an excellent update that’s packed with loads of useful, flexible features. You can tell that a lot of thought has gone into the app’s feature set in the year and a half that it’s been in development.

ScreenFloat 2.0 is available on the Mac App Store for free to existing users and at an introductory price of $6.99 for new users. There is also a 28-day free trial available directly from Eternal Storms Software.

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

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

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One of the big open questions about the Apple Vision Pro is how well its virtual keyboard works. Interestingly, Engadget’s Cherlynn Low and Dana Wollman had very different experiences with it:

Cherlynn: It’s not as easy as typing on an actual keyboard would be, but I was quite tickled by the fact that it worked. Kudos to Apple’s eye- and hand-tracking systems, because they were able to detect what I was looking at or aiming for most of the time. My main issue with the keyboard was that it felt a little too far away and I needed to stretch if I wanted to press the buttons myself….

Dana: This was one of the more frustrating aspects of the demo for me. Although there were several typing options – hunting and pecking with your fingers, using eye control to select keys, or just using Siri – none of them felt adequate for anything resembling extended use. It took several tries for me to even spell Engadget correctly in the Safari demo.

Engadget’s editors were also impressed with the Disney+ Avengers and Star Wars-themed environments.

The Verge’s Victoria Song and Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel also spent some time with the Apple Vision Pro. According to Song’s story:

Nilay had shot some spatial videos where he’d intentionally moved the camera to follow his kid around the zoo and felt some familiar VR motion queasiness. Apple says it’s doing everything it can to reduce that, but it’s clear some shots will work better in spatial than others — like any other camera system, really.

Song describes the experience of seeing EyeSight demoed, too:

So we got to see a demo of EyeSight — what an onlooker would see on that front display when looking at someone wearing the Vision Pro. It’s a bit goofy, but you can see the wearer’s eyes, part of what Apple calls a “persona.” (We were not able to set up our own personas, sadly.) When Apple’s Vision Pro demo person blinked, we saw a virtual version of their eyes blink. When they were looking at an app, a bluish light appeared to indicate their attention was elsewhere. And when they went into a full virtual environment, the screen turned into an opaque shimmer. If you started talking to them while they were watching a movie, their virtual ghost eyes would appear before you. And when they took a spatial photo, you’d see the screen flash like a shutter.

What’s clear is that it’s one thing to read about these experiences with the Vision Pro and a completely different thing to live them. After reading several accounts, I still don’t know what to expect myself, except in the broadest sense. That’s both a little frustrating but also very exciting.

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

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

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

Source: Apple.

Apple has revealed new information about the entertainment that will be available when Vision Pro launches on February 2nd.

One of the highlights will be 3D movies. There will be more than 150 3D movies available, including Avatar: The Way of Water, Dune, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, all of which can be watched from a simulated personal theater environment or immersive Environments, including Yosemite, Haleakalā, and Mount Hood. Also, Apple Vision Pro users who already own a movie for which a 3D version becomes available will have access to it at no additional cost. Apple says streamers like Disney+ will offer 3D movies as part of their services, too.

Source: Apple.

Those same streaming services will also offer other unique experiences. For example:

With Disney+, subscribers can watch thousands of TV shows and films from four iconic environments with vivid details: the Disney+ Theater, inspired by the historic El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood; the Scare Floor from Pixar’s Monsters Inc.; Marvel’s Avengers Tower overlooking downtown Manhattan; and the cockpit of Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder, facing a binary sunset on the planet Tatooine from the Star Wars galaxy.

Source: Apple.

Apple’s TV app will have Apple Immersive Video, a new 180-degree, 3D 8K format with Spatial Audio. At launch, there will be four titles available at no added cost:

• Alicia Keys: Rehearsal Room offers a rare glimpse into the Grammy winner’s creative process with this intimate rehearsal session featuring renditions of her hits “No One,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” and “You Don’t Know My Name.” Users can also access these performances as a special EP exclusively on Apple Music when it debuts.

• Adventure follows pioneering athletes as they take on awe-inspiring challenges in some of the world’s most sensational locations. In the first episode, Highlining, viewers step into thin air with highliner Faith Dickey as she takes on her biggest challenge yet: a daring traverse 3,000 feet above Norway’s breathtaking fjords.

• Wild Life takes viewers up close and personal with some of the most charismatic creatures on the planet to uncover what makes them unique, featuring the experts who know them best. The first episode brings viewers into the world’s largest rhinoceros sanctuary where a former police captain has dedicated her life to rescuing, raising, and rewilding these gentle giants.

• Prehistoric Planet Immersive: The award-winning Apple Original docuseries from Jon Favreau and the producers of Planet Earth returns with an immersive film that transports viewers into the daily lives of dinosaurs, and follows the struggles and triumphs of these majestic animals amid spectacular scenery. Prehistoric Planet Immersive whisks viewers along a rugged ocean coast where a pterosaur colony settles in for an afternoon nap, which proves to be anything but restful.

Source: Apple.

Apple is releasing a new free app with the Vision Pro called Encounter Dinosaurs, too:

With Encounter Dinosaurs, a new free app developed by Apple that ships with Vision Pro, users can peer into the Cretaceous, a period more than 66 million years old, where dinosaurs roamed the earth and Mother Nature reigned supreme. Executive produced by Jon Favreau and inspired by his award-winning work with Prehistoric Planet, Encounter Dinosaurs makes it possible for users to interact with giant, three-dimensional reptiles as if they are bursting through their own physical space.

I’m eager to try Apple Immersive Video and see what it’s like to enjoy a 3D movie in one of the Vision Pro’s Environments. Although technologies like 3D TVs were a flop, I expect the immersive nature of the Apple Vision Pro to add more to the experience than ever before. Hopefully, I’ll have a better idea of just how much more the Apple Vision Pro adds to the experience in just over two weeks.

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 is an exciting day for Magic Rays of Light. We couldn’t be happier that our show is joining the MacStories family of podcasts. Before the first episode of this new era releases on Wednesday, we thought we’d take a moment to introduce ourselves and the show to you.

You can subscribe to Magic Rays of Light using the buttons below:

Magic Rays of Light is a weekly podcast exploring the world of Apple TV hosted by Sigmund Judge and me, Devon Dundee. You may remember Sigmund from his tvOS 17 review last fall. He’s the founder of Apple TV-centric website Screen Times and has been covering the platform since 2015.

In July of 2020, Sigmund launched Magic Rays of Light as a biweekly podcast discussing Apple TV news and everything happening with the upstart Apple TV+ streaming service. Each episode featured a special guest co-host, with guests ranging from journalists to developers to Danny Rojas himself, Ted Lasso star Cristo Fernández.

As for me, I came across the podcast when it debuted and was immediately hooked. I’ve been a dedicated Apple TV user since I picked up a third-generation model in 2012 and have been blogging about my favorite shows and movies ever since.

I came aboard as co-host in May 2021, and since then, Sigmund and I have been covering everything Apple TV on a weekly basis together. Over the past 104 episodes, we’ve discussed updates to the Apple TV hardware line, software updates and new features, our favorite Apple Originals, and much more. We’ve brought on a wide array of guests to share their perspectives on Apple TV and had the opportunity to interview creative voices behind Apple Originals including Servant, Little America, and Severance.

It’s been a great run so far, and we’re thrilled to be taking this next step. MacStories is the perfect home for Magic Rays of Light and the topics that we discuss. We hope that our show will be an enjoyable supplement to the coverage you’ve already come to expect from the MacStories team.

The world of Apple TV is vast, and there’s so much to talk about:

• Hardware: The Apple TV isn’t on a regular update cycle, but Apple does love to surprise their TV fans with new hardware out of the blue. When each new iteration does come, we test it thoroughly and share every detail and addition, as well as our ideas of what we’d like to see come next. And of course, we have strong opinions on every single version of the Siri remote.
• Software: tvOS is a constantly-evolving platform with changes big and small coming year-round. We keep an eye on updates to share what’s coming next for Apple TV users. We also routinely share our own vision for the future of tvOS and highlight great third-party apps from the App Store.
• Apple Originals: Apple has become a major player in the worlds of streaming and TV/film production. Each week, we dive into new releases and round up all of the latest Apple Original news including production, development, casting, and awards.
• Games: We love to play games on the biggest screen in our homes, and Apple Arcade provides a continuous stream of new games to play. We highlight each new title as it arrives on the service and share what we’re playing in our downtime. With Apple’s continued push to bring top-tier games to its platforms, we’re always keeping an eye on new non-Arcade titles coming to the App Store, too.
• Apple Home: The Apple TV continues to play a central part in Apple’s smart home offering. In that vein, we keep up with the latest updates to the Home app and share our own smart home strategies with listeners. We also cover updates to the HomePod line and its integrations with Apple TV.

With so much going on, it’s an exciting time to be an Apple TV fan. We love exploring everything about it each week, and we’d be thrilled for you to join us! Magic Rays of Light makes its debut on MacStories this Wednesday. We can’t wait to talk to you then.

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’re pleased to announce that starting today, Magic Rays of Light, the podcast hosted by Sigmund Judge and Devon Dundee is joining MacStories. Federico and I couldn’t be happier to be adding Sigmund and Devon’s expertise in all things Apple TV+, tvOS, and Apple Arcade to MacStories. It’s a fantastic show full of thoughtful insights on one of Apple’s most interesting platforms.

You can subscribe to Magic Rays of Light using the buttons below:

You can find Magic Rays of Light in the MacStories channel in Apple Podcasts.

If you’re already a Magic Rays of Light listener and are wondering if the show you love is about to change, the answer is ‘no.’ We asked Sigmund and Devon to join MacStories because we love what they’ve done with the show and want them to keep doing it. In practice, that means that the podcast feed will stay the same, so there’s no need to re-subscribe. Also, episodes will continue to be released weekly.

That said, there will be a couple of minor changes. First, Magic Rays of Light will be published this Wednesday and every Wednesday going forward instead of Sundays, which slots in nicely between AppStories and MacStories Unwind, which bookend the MacStories podcast publication week. The schedule also fits well with the release timing of many Apple TV+ shows. Magic Rays of Light has moved to the MacStories podcasts channel in Apple Podcasts, too. If you’re not an Apple Podcasts user, that might not mean much, but the MacStories channel is one convenient place in Apple’s podcast directory where you can find all of our shows and the latest episodes of each.

We also plan to work Magic Rays of Light into other aspects of what we do at MacStories. Whether it’s a notable addition to tvOS, a highly-anticipated new TV+ movie or show, or a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process behind the media you love, we’ll be exploring ways to share Sigmund and Devon’s knowledge beyond Magic Rays of Light to MacStories.net and Club MacStories members.

For those of you who haven’t listened to Magic Rays of Light before, I encourage you to give it a try. I think you’ll immediately understand why it fits so well with our existing shows and MacStories generally. The show goes beyond the superficial plot summaries and trailers you find elsewhere to provide thoughtful, critical analysis about what makes some shows and movies work so well while others don’t. It also provides the kind of broad industry context that provides perspective on Apple’s media efforts in a way very few shows do.

It happens to be the perfect time to jump into Magic Rays of Light, too. The show recently published its 100th episode, and with many critically acclaimed shows wrapping up their current seasons on Apple TV+ and new shows and movies landing on the streaming service soon, I know Sigmund and Devon have a lot of great episodes planned for the coming weeks.

And, to kick things off and welcome Magic Rays of Light to MacStories, Federico and I will be joining this week’s episode as guests to talk about two of our favorite shows that just wrapped up on Apple TV+: Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and For All Mankind, Season 4. The latest episode of AppStories also features guest appearances by Sigmund and Devon, who we invited to the show to talk about the move to MacStories and their favorite media tracking apps.

We hope you join us to listen to both episodes and add Magic Rays of Light to your regular podcast rotation using the buttons below as we expand MacStories’ coverage of Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and tvOS. We couldn’t have a better duo to help us do more in these areas, and we are excited to help Sigmund and Devon do even more of what’s made the show such a success over more than 100 episodes.

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.

Ideas are precious but fleeting. One moment, inspiration strikes, but if you don’t capture that lightning in a bottle, it’s gone before you know it. With Whisper Memos, you can harness the power of artificial intelligence to turn your ideas into orderly memos.

Whisper Memos combines the convenience of quick capture with the power of GPT-4. You can save a voice memo using your iPhone’s Action Button, the app’s Lock Screen widget, Whisper Memos’ Apple Watch app, Shortcuts, and more. Then, Whisper Memos uses AI to turn your recordings into orderly, paragraphed memos delivered directly to your email inbox a few seconds later.

The results are incredible. One moment, you’re recording audio on your iPhone or Apple Watch, and the next, you’ve got an email message easily identifiable by its custom subject line that has been carefully transcribed and organized into neat paragraphs.

Whisper Memos works on Wi-Fi, over a cellular connection, and offline, so it’s always available. The app also supports a long list of languages, and it integrates with Zapier, which allows you to connect Whisper Memos to other productivity apps like Notion, Trello, or your task manager. There’s even a privacy mode for ensuring no trace is left behind after your voice memos have been processed.

So, check out Whisper Memos today. You’ll be amazed at how fast, accurate, and reliable it is at preserving your precious thoughts.

Our thanks to Whisper Memos for sponsoring MacStories this week.

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.

This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico surprises John with his big holiday videogame project in the first part of what promises to be a fun Unwind miniseries.

Sponsored By:

• Kolide – Kolide ensures that if a device isn’t secure it can’t access your apps.  It’s Device Trust for Okta. Watch the demo today!

Links and Show Notes

Federico’s New Year Surprise

• The Yuzu Switch emulator
• Switch Hacking Is Easy
• Hekate
• Nintendo Switch Piracy & Hacking - Did You Know Gaming Ft. Dazz
• Discoverer of the Tegra chip exploit

MacStories Unwind+

We deliver MacStories Unwind+ to Club MacStories subscribers ad-free and early with high bitrate audio every week.

To learn more about the benefits of a Club MacStories subscription, visit our Plans page.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

Source: CES.

We’re only two days into CES 2024, and something occurred to me in the aftermath of ASUS’s packed presentation. We’re in a new golden age of gadgets, the likes of which we haven’t seen in many years. The world seems ready for something new after spending more than a decade cramming everything imaginable into our phones. An awful lot of companies seem to think the next big thing will be powered by artificial intelligence. Perhaps it will be, but even if it isn’t, we’re seeing a breadth and depth of gadget innovation at CES that’s exciting.

Yesterday, the gadget that stuck with me the most was the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid. I love the flexibility and modularity it promises. ASUS’s ROG Phone 8 line of mobile phones was a close second with its beefy, game-friendly specs. But neither captured my imagination quite like one of the accessories ASUS saved for yesterday’s presentation.

The ASUS ZenScreen Fold OLED Portable Display

The ASUS ZenScreen Fold OLED MQ17QH. Source: ASUS.

The ASUS ZenScreen Fold OLED MQ17QH has a lot in common with the ASUS ZenBook 17 Fold OLED laptop, except instead of being a laptop, it’s a portable, foldable, 17.3-inch OLED screen. The display’s 2560×1920 resolution makes it extra tall. The screen can be used in either portrait or landscape orientations, with the content that’s displayed onscreen switching automatically between the two. ASUS makes a stand for the screen that uses a quarter-inch tripod mount to secure the display, but it also has a built-in kickstand that works in either orientation. When folded, the ZenScreen Fold is roughly the size of a 13-inch laptop. The device features two USB-C connectors for power and video transmission, as well as a mini-HDMI port.

If that all sounds like it will cost a lot, it will. Although ASUS didn’t reveal the price of the ZenScreen Fold during its presentation, it told Abt in the video above that it will be close to $3,000.

ASUS Comes Out Swinging

The ASUS AirVision M1. Source: ASUS.

The ZenScreen Fold wasn’t ASUS’s only interesting product announced yesterday. The company also showed off the AirVision M1, a pair of glasses that serve as an external display, similar to the XREAL Air glasses that Federico and I have and the XREAL Air 2 Ultra glasses I covered earlier this week.

The AirVision M1 features an impressive 1100 nits of peak brightness, a 57-degree vertical field of view, which is wider than many similar products, support for multiple aspect ratios, and displays content in 1080p. The glasses also work with a Windows app that allows it to display multiple virtual screens of content. There’s no word yet on when and where the glasses will be available or how much they’ll cost.

The ASUS Zenbook Duo. Source: ASUS.

Dual-screen laptops aren’t new, but ASUS’s entry in the category looks promising. The Zenbook Duo features two 14-inch 2.8K connected touch-enabled screens that refresh at 120Hz and can be used in landscape or portrait orientations, plus a keyboard that can be detached. The multiple configurations appear to provide a lot of flexibility in the way the Zenbook Duo can be used, and at just 3.3 pounds, it’s not much heavier than a MacBook Air. According to The Verge, the Zenbook Duo will start at $1,499.

Odds and Ends

The Sennheiser Momentum Sport. Source: Sennheiser.

There have been a lot of other interesting announcements at CES over the past couple of days, too, including:

• The Razor Aether Monitor Light Bar, a computer screen-mounted light that bathes your desktop in light but can also throw game-synced RGB color against your wall behind your monitor, which will be out in March for $129.99
• JBL announced the Live Buds 3 and Live Beam 3 earbuds that are IP55 and IP54 rated for water and dust resistance respectively and feature a touchscreen charging case that can receive notifications and other alerts from an Android phone.
• Sennheiser introduced the Bluetooth 5.4 Momentum Sport earbuds that include a heart rate sensor that syncs its data with the Apple Watch and are IP55 rated. The earbuds will be available on April 9th for $329.95.
• Nanoleaf is ready to turn the entire exterior of your home into an RGB playground with its descriptively-named Smart Multicolor Permanent Outdoor Lights.
• TP-Link introduced the Tapo DL130, a smart door lock that doubles as a video doorbell and works with Apple Home that the company says is coming soon for an unspecified price.
• Wi-Fi 7 has been certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, so expect wireless router manufactures to start rolling out certified Wi-Fi 7 routers soon with promises of faster speeds.

Weird and Wonderful

The Seergrills Perfecta. Source: Seergrills.

Every year, CES is flooded with expensive cooking gadgets, and this year is no different. UK-based Seergrills demonstrated a grill called the Perfecta that allows you to grill a steak in under two minutes. The $3,500 grill’s burners can reach 1,652 degrees Fahrenheit, and, of course, it uses AI to help you perfect your grilling skills. Seergrills says the Perfecta will be available in Q4 2024.

Razor’s Project Esther. Source: Razer.

I love Razer’s over-the-top gamer gear. Alongside computers and accessories, the company showed off Project Esther, a new haptics technology built into what it says is the world’s first HD haptic cushion for a gaming chair. Razer’s rumble chair is still just a prototype, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a version of it is released eventually.

Samsung’s Ballie. Source: Samsung.

Companies seem to have learned the lesson that showing off creepy humanoid robots at CES gets attention, but not necessarily the right kind of attention. This year, Samsung and LG both showed off cute robots. Samsung’s Ballie is a colorful round robot that incorporates a projector and can perform smart home tasks and video phone calls.

Hot Take: LG’s robot is cuter than Samsung’s. Source: LG.

LG’s robot rides on two-wheeled legs and performs household tasks as part of the company’s ThinQ home system. According to LG, the unnamed bot acts as your agent, controlling home appliances, traffic reports, weather, and other information using “AI.”

The Pivotal Helix. Source Pivotal.

To wrap things up today, I want to leave you with Pivotal’s personal aircraft. The one-person electric vehicle, which is called the Helix and looks a little like a drone for humans, is available for purchase for just $190,000. The Helix doesn’t require a pilot’s license because it’s classified as an ‘ultralight’ aircraft by the FAA in the US, which is a little frightening if you ask me, but fortunately, that also means it can’t be flown over congested areas or near airports.

Alright, that’s it for this CES roundup. I’ve got to go add the Helix to my list of reasons not to move to Silicon Valley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Source: CES.

After what already feels like a week of CES, it’s the official day one of the conference. There have been a ton of announcements already. As anticipated, gaming is very big this year, with new handhelds, laptops, and other devices announced. Interesting new approaches to hybrid computers, ASUS’s first NUC, and a handful of smart home devices have been announced already, too, so let’s dig into the latest.

Gaming

The ROG Phone 8. Source: ASUS.

Handheld gaming is big at CES this year, but not every device looks like a Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck. ASUS introduced its ROG Phone 8, ROG Phone 8 Pro, and ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition, a trio of gaming-focused Android phones. As devices like the Ayn Odin Pro 2, which we covered on MacStories Unwind, have shown, Qualcomm’s latest chipsets running Android are a great option for gamers. What’s different about ASUS’s mobile phones is that they go even further with a newer generation chipset, more memory than a typical mobile phone, and a focus on cooling to ensure its chips are running at top speeds.

The ROG Phone 8 has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, with an RGB logo on the back for $1,099.99. The Pro is $100 more with 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and an LED matrix display on the back. The Edition adds another $300 which gets you 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The Phone 8 line uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset and has bright, high-refresh rate screens.

The AeroActive Cooler X. Source: Asus.

For cooling, the phones use boron nitride and copper, achieving what ASUS says is 20% more thermal efficiency than the models the Phone 8 line replaces. For even more cooling and a sick Transformer vibe, ASUS introduced the AeroActive Cooler X, which attaches to your Phone 8 to aid in cooling.

For additional details, I suggest Jon Porter’s overview of the new Phone 8 line on The Verge.

The Lenovo 9i. Source: Lenovo.

The usual suspects have begun announcing new and improved gaming laptops, too. I mentioned Razer’s Blade updates in my last CES update, but there are many others worth mentioning:

• Lenovo introduced a bunch of gaming laptops, including the Legion 9i, a new top-of-the-line computer with Intel’s Core Gen i9-14900HX CPU, a GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, and 16-inch 165Hz 3.2K display, with up to 64GB of RAM and 2TB of storage starting at $4,400, which will be available later this month.
• Not to be outdone, MSI released the Titan 18 HX, a massive 18-inch, 7.9-pound (3.6 kg) gaming laptop, with the same processor as the Lenovo 9i, DLSS 3.5 support, RTX 4080 and 4090 GPU options, a 3840 x 2400 Mini LED display, up to 128GB of DDR5 RAM, a PCIe Gen 5 M.2 SSD slot, and two other SSD slots, which The Verge reports will be cost $5,000.
• ASUS revealed the ROG Zephyrus G14 and G16 laptops both of which feature an aluminum case, a 3K 120Hz OLED panel on the smaller 14-inch model and 2.5K 240Hz OLED display on the 16-inch model, support for NVIDIA G-Sync, up to 32GB of RAM. The smaller model uses AMD’s Ryzen 8000 series processors and up to an NVIDIA RTX 4070 GPU, while the larger G16 features an Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU and RTX 4090 graphics. Both laptops are expected to be available in February.

The Claw by MSI. Source: MSI.

Yesterday, MSI also officially revealed the previously-leaked MSI Claw, a Windows-based handheld gaming device. The Claw looks a lot like the ASUS ROG Ally but features an Intel processor. The device also has a 120Hz 1080p 7-inch IPS display, 16GB of memory, and up to 1TB of PCIe M.2 SSD storage.

Computers and Tablets

The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid. Source: Lenovo.

The line between laptops and tablets is blurring more than ever. One of the best examples at CES is the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid, a convertible tablet/laptop that Lenovo debuted at CES. In tablet mode, the device runs Android, and set up as a laptop with its keyboard, it runs Windows. Also, the screen can be detached from the keyboard and operated independently when the keyboard is connected to a display. It’s a cool idea that I’m sure would work even better if both OSes were made by the same company. Imagine, for instance, a similar hybrid from Apple that could run macOS in laptop mode and iPadOS in tablet mode.

The ROG NUC. Source: ASUS.

ASUS revealed its first NUC mini-PC, having taken over production of the diminutive computers when Intel exited the market last year. The ROG NUC is a tiny Windows PC with an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor, NVIDIA RTX 4070 GPU, and DDR5 memory. The NUC also features one Thunderbolt 4 port, HDMI 2.1, and an easy-to-open case.

According to Engadget, ASUS has more NUCs coming soon, which I hope is the case. I love the idea of a tiny gaming computer tucked away out of sight behind my TV or under my desk.

Smart Home

The Aqara M3 Hub. Source: Aqara.

Aqara has already announced multiple home automation devices at CES. One of the most interesting is the Aqara Hub M3. The company has made multiple hubs for its gear in the past, but what sets the M3 hub apart is the inclusion of a Matter controller, which means you’ll be able to use it with non-Aqara devices. The M3 Hub will also support Thread, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and infrared for communicating with devices. Aqara says the M3 Hub will ship in the second quarter of 2024. Also worth mentioning from Aqara is a smart plug that serves as a Matter border router, which is unusual for smart plugs.

That’s it for now folks. I’ll be back with more soon, including more weird and wonderful gems that beg for your attention.

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Source: CES.

Every year, I dig into the press releases and reporting coming from the CES show floor, so you don’t have to. The pandemic took the wind out of CES’s sails for a few years, but the show and interesting gadgets have made a comeback for 2024, with a wide range of announcements made in the days leading up to the show, which doesn’t even officially start until tomorrow. I’ll be back with more updates throughout the week, but here are some of the announcements that have caught my eye so far.

Gaming

Source: NVIDIA.

NVIDIA revealed that it’s adding G-Sync variable refresh rate technology to its GeForce NOW game streaming service. The same service will add day passes beginning in early February, allowing gamers to stream games from the company’s RTX 4080 servers for $8. During its presentation, NVIDIA revealed that Horizon Forbidden West will launch on the PC with DLSS 3 support and Diablo IV will feature RTX ray-tracing in March.

Finally, NVIDIA introduced the RTX 4080 Super and RTX 4070 Ti Super. Both graphics cards offer improved performance over the models they are replacing in the lineup, with the 4080 Super getting a price cut compared to the 4080 it replaces. According to NVIDIA:

the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER can power fully ray-traced games at 4K. It’s 1.4x faster than the RTX 3080 Ti without frame gen in the most graphically intensive games. With 836 AI TOPS, NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation delivers an extra performance boost, making the RTX 4080 SUPER twice as fast as an RTX 3080 Ti.

Computers

Razer Blade 18. Source: Razer.

2023 saw some excellent gaming laptop releases, but progress marches on, and for 2024, we’ve got more Hz, nits, and more. Razer says it will be pushing its Blade 16 laptop to the next level with a 240Hz OLED screen, while its 18-inch model will get a 165Hz 4K LED panel with G-Sync. Both will show 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut too. The screens on these new Razer laptops sound great, but the real question that won’t be answered until they’re in player’s hands is just how well they can run the most demanding games.

TVs

Both LG and Samsung are showing off transparent TVs at CES. The LG 77-inch TV is based on OLED technology and will be available later this year at an unspecified, likely nose-bleed, price. You can even beam content to LG’s OLED T wirelessly from across the room. Chris Welch of The Verge got a demo of LG’s TV and was impressed.

Samsung’s transparent MicroLED TV is on display on the show floor, too, but sadly, remains a mere prototype.

There are plenty of other TVs being released at CES this year from LG, Samsung, and others, but most of the announcements so far are incremental updates of existing models that lean heavily into AI processing.

Roku Pro Series TV. Source: Roku.

Last year, Roku unveiled a line of bargain-oriented TVs at CES made with partner TCL. This year, Roku is stepping up its display game with a ‘Pro Series’ line that feature Mini LED screens that come in 55, 65, and 75-inch models. According to Engadget, the TVs will be available in the US this spring.

AR and VR

In the leadup to CES, Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2, a chip that Samsung, HTC and others are expected to use to create competitors to Apple’s Vision Pro. The chip is designed to drive mixed and virtual reality devices as well as smart glasses. Among other benefits, Qualcomm touts the energy efficiency of its chip, stating that it won’t require an external battery pack, a not-to-thinly-veiled reference to the Apple Vision Pro’s external battery pack.

XREAL Air 2 Ultra. Source: XREAL.

Also, XREAL debuted its Air 2 Ultra glasses at CES, a $699 pair of AR glasses. According to Adi Robertson of The Verge:

The Air 2 Ultra offers a 52-degree field of view compared to the 46-degree Air 2; both products feature 500 nits of brightness, a 1080p screen for each eye, and a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. The Ultra glasses are a touch heavier, though, weighing 80 grams compared to 72 grams for the standard Air 2. Like the Air 2, they can be plugged into a range of computing devices, including macOS and Windows-based computers, Samsung Android phones, and the iPhone 15. On Android, macOS, and Windows, they will support Xreal’s Nebula AR environment.

The Air 2 Ultra glasses are slated for release in March.

Accessories

Mophie is filling the void left by the fact that Apple no longer makes a case that incorporates a battery. The Mophie Juice Pack works with the iPhone 15, 15 Pro, and 15 Pro Max and includes 2,400, 2,600, and 2,800mAh batteries respectively. Mophie says the cases will be available for pre-order in late February for $99.99.

Weird and Wonderful Gadgets

Who wants to press a button when you can talk to your bidet? That’s the premise of Kohler’s hands-free bidet seat that lets you mod your existing toilet, transforming it into something futuristic and fancy. For a mere $2149, you can connect your bidet-let (the hot new toilet/bidet combo category) to Alexa, Google Home, and Kohler’s own Kohler Konnect app but not HomeKit.

The Clicks keyboard accessory. Source: Clicks.

Clicks isn’t the first, and it is unlikely to be the last, keyboard case accessory for the iPhone, but it certainly looks promising. I spend most of my day typing on a proper keyboard, but sometimes that’s just not possible. Clicks appeals to that part of my brain that used to bang out articles for MacStories while riding a train into downtown Chicago, not to mention my nearly forgotten Blackberry days as a lawyer. The accessory is essentially an iPhone case that incorporates a physical keyboard at the bottom. I’m not sure how often that would fit into my daily life now, but I’m excited to try it, especially since it will support system and app-specific keyboard shortcuts. The Clicks keyboard accessory will begin shipping next month.

Moonwalkers X. Source: Shift Robotics.

Moonwalkers are back at CES with a new version of their robot shoes that help you walk fast. Shift Robotics’ Moonwalkers X weigh 3.2 pounds and have six wheels per foot and sell for $1,400 (both feet included). The robot shoes strap onto your existing shoes and are meant for commercial applications, but who knows, maybe you’ll see them on a street near you soon.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

Source: Apple.

Apple has announced that the Vision Pro will be available for pre-order beginning on January 19th at 5 am Pacific time with the device available on Friday, February 2nd at Apple retail stores and its online store.

The Apple Vision Pro starts at $3,499 and has 256GB of storage. The device comes with a Solo Knit Band and Dual Loop Band, a Light Seal, two Light Seal Cushions, a cover from the front of the Vision Pro, a polishing cloth, a battery, a USB-C charging cable and a USB-C power adapter. Also, ZEISS Optical is offering reader inserts for $99 and prescription inserts for $149 that will attach to the Vision Pro magnetically.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said of the device:

The era of spatial computing has arrived. Apple Vision Pro is the most advanced consumer electronics device ever created. Its revolutionary and magical user interface will redefine how we connect, create, and explore.

Today’s Apple Newsroom announcement includes images of the Solo Knit Band, Dual Loop Band, and Light Seal:

The Apple Vision Pro’s Solo Knit Band. Source: Apple.

The Apple Vision Pro’s Dual Loop Band. Source: Apple.

The Apple Vision Pro’s Light Seal and Digital Crown. Source: Apple.

As previously announced at WWDC in June 2023, the Apple Vision Pro will be initially available in the US only. Left unanswered by today’s announcement is whether additional storage options will be available and what they will cost. Also left unsaid is how ordering the ZEISS Optical inserts will work.

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

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It seems like every company is scrambling to stake their claim in the AI goldrush–check out the CEO of Kroger promising to bring LLMs into the dairy aisle. And front line workers are following suit–experimenting with AI so they can work faster and do more.

In the few short months since ChatGPT debuted, hundreds of AI-powered tools have come on the market. But while AI-based tools have genuinely helpful applications, they also pose profound security risks. Unfortunately, most companies still haven’t come up with policies to manage those risks. In the absence of clear guidance around responsible AI use, employees are blithely handing over sensitive data to untrustworthy tools. 

AI-based browser extensions offer the clearest illustration of this phenomenon. The Chrome store is overflowing with extensions that (claim to) harness ChatGPT to do all manner of tasks: punching up emails, designing graphics, transcribing meetings, and writing code. But these tools are prone to at least three types of risk.

1. Malware: Security researchers keep uncovering AI-based extensions that steal user data. These extensions play on users’ trust of the big tech platforms (“it can’t be dangerous if Google lets it on the Chrome store!”) and they often appear to work, by hooking up to ChatGPT et al’s APIs. 
2. Data Governance: Companies including Apple and Verizon have banned their employees from using LLMs because these products rarely offer a guarantee that a user’s inputs won’t be used as training data.
3. Prompt Injection Attacks: In this little known but potentially unsolvable attack, hidden text on a webpage directs an AI tool to perform malicious actions–such as exfiltrate data and then delete the records. 

Up until now, most companies have been caught flat-footed by AI, but these risks are too serious to ignore. 

At Kolide, we’re taking a two-part approach to governing AI use.

1. Draft AI policies as a team. We don’t want to totally ban our team from using AI, we just want to use it safely. So our first step is meeting with representatives from multiple teams to figure out what they’re getting out of AI-based tools, and how we can provide them with secure options that don’t expose critical data or infrastructure.
2. Use Kolide to block malicious tools. Kolide lets IT and security teams write Checks that detect device compliance issues, and we’ve already started creating Checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Now if an employee accidentally downloads malware, they’ll be prevented from logging into our cloud apps until they’ve removed it.

Every company will have to craft policies based on their unique needs and concerns, but the important thing is to start now. There’s still time to seize the reins of AI, before it gallops away with your company’s data.

To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.

Our thank to Kolide for sponsoring MacStories this week.

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

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

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

WinterFest 2023: The Festival of Artisanal Software is back with a fantastic collection of carefully crafted software for writing, research, thinking, and more at tremendous prices.

Innovative software often comes from small teams, fired with imagination and a vision of a better way to work. There are no bundles, games, or prices that are too good to be true: just fresh software with fantastic support at great, sustainable prices.

Software artisans from around the globe have come together for this time-limited event to bring you innovative systems to assist you with everyday knowledge work. This incredible catalog of productivity software includes:

• Bookends: The reference manager you’ve been looking for 
• DEVONagent Pro: Your smart research assistant 
• DEVONthink: Your powerful information and knowledge manager 
• Easy Data Transform: Merge, clean, and reformat data without coding 
• EagleFiler: Capture and organize files, emails and web pages
• Hookmark: Supplies the missing links 
• HoudahSpot: Powerful file search 
• HyperPlan: Flexible visual planner 
• ImageFramer Pro: Add creative borders and frames to photos 
• Mellel: A real word processor
• Nisus Writer Pro: The powerful Mac word processor
• Panorama X: Collect, organize, and understand your data
• Photos Workbench: Organize, rate, & compare your photos
• Scapple: Quickly capture and connect ideas 
• Scrivener: Your complete writing studio 
• SpamSieve: powerful e-mail spam filtering
• Tinderbox: Visualize and organize your notes, plans, and ideas 
• Trickster: Your recently used files at your fingertips

These sorts of amazing deals don’t come around often, so act today to start 2024 off with the best software available from this terrific group of developers.

Visit the WinterFest website to learn more and for links to these amazing deals, or use the coupon code Winterfest2023 at checkout.

Our thanks to Winterfest for sponsoring MacStories this week.

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.

This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico and I recap our videogame hardware experiments of 2023 and pick our favorite games of the year.

Hardware Picks

• Asus ROG Ally
• XG Mobile 4090
• OLED Steam Deck
  • Steam Clip
  • Deckmate
  • Allymate
• XREAL Air
• UVC Capture on the iPad
  • Orion app
• Ayn Odin 2 Pro
• Daijisho
• HandheldDIY

Game Picks

• Joint Game of the Year
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
• Other Joint Picks
  • Metroid Prime Remastered
  • Super Mario Bros. Wonder
• Federico’s Other Picks:
  • Cocoon
  • Sea of Stars
• John’s Other Pick:
  • Hi-Fi Rush

Backlogs

• Federico
  • Lies of P
  • Jusant
  • Final Fantasy XVI
  • Chants of Sennaar
  • Baldurs Gate 3
  • Armored Core VI, Fires of Rubicon
  • Resident Evil 4 Remake
  • Blasphemous 2
• John
  • Spider-Man 2
  • Dave the Diver
  • Dredge

Also mentioned:
GameTrack, an iOS, iPadOS, and Mac game tracking app

MacStories Unwind+

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Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

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

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

I should start with my favorite feature in Globetrotter, which is the ability to visualize the itineraries I took on a particular day. The app tries to link together your photos based on their time and location, and overlays the resulting route on the map. It was truly lovely to see the paths we took on a hike in the Alps a few years ago, or the beautiful road trips we took along the coast of La Réunion Island back in 2019.

Visualizing our road trips on La Réunion island thanks to Globetrotter’s Event Route feature.

There are playful animations all throughout Globetrotter’s UI

Because Globetrotter uses Apple Maps, not a third-party map provider, navigating the map feels smooth and fast. Shihab Mehboob also took advantage of Apple Maps’ detailed 3D landmarks, and automatically collects those you visited in the app’s ‘Highlights’ tab, along with the flags of all the countries you’ve traveled to. I have to admit, this aspect of the app has made me want to travel again just to collect more landmarks and expand my collection.

The ‘Highlights’ tab is also where you can find a recap of the year, à la Spotify Wrapped or Apple Music Replay, in the form of a slideshow that looks a bit like Instagram’s Stories. Globetrotter’s ‘2023 Wrapped’, like almost anything in the app, can be shared to friends and family members via the share sheet, as well as to your Instagram stories.

The social aspect in Globetrotter goes a little further. Similarly to Apple’s Fitness app, and provided that they also use the app, you can invite your friends to share your travel highlights and see a ranking of who’s the biggest globetrotter in your circle.

Globetrotter is like a traveler’s pinboard where you can collect landmarks and flags of the countries you have visited.

Globetrotter can be used on all of Apple’s platforms. The app looks great on iPadOS and macOS, and it is also available for the Apple Watch, where you can quickly view your travel highlights stats. Globetrotter provides a few Home Screen widgets on iOS and iPadOS, as well as desktop widgets on macOS. Unfortunately, the widgets are quite basic, and they currently cannot be customized to exclude or include specific memories.

Globetrotter lets you glance at your traveling stats on the Apple Watch

Globetrotter makes great use of horizontal space on the Mac and the iPad.

Despite Globetrotter being a brand-new app, it already includes a decent number of settings to tweak the experience. The app provides a handful of basic appearance settings, and the possibility to exclude locations from appearing in your travel highlights. I particularly appreciate the option to disable the autoplaying music in memories slideshows — a setting that I really wish we could have in Apple Photos.

Globetrotter lets you exclude certain locations from your travel highlights and disable the slideshow music.

Unfortunately, I think the app’s settings are also where there is a big margin for improvements. Most urgently: unlike in Apple Photos, I can’t exclude people from appearing as memories in Globetrotter.

I also wish I could decide what the total percentage of visited locations, at the top of the app’s ‘Highlights’ tab, corresponds to. Right now, since I’ve only traveled as far as Germany, the UK, and a few other places in Western Europe, it shows that I’ve only seen three percent of the world, accompanied by a mostly empty world map. While I’m sure this could be a fun stat for people who travel a lot, I don’t think it is a meaningful number for most. In 2023, traveling is expensive. With inflation affecting many parts of the world, long-distance travel has probably rarely been so inaccessible to the average person — including to the average iPhone owner. What if, instead of measuring how much of the world you’ve seen, the app could let you see the percentage of your hometown that you’ve covered in photos? Or of your home country? Or of a selection of your favorite destinations? Globetrotter could then scale down to motivate you to explore your surroundings, and appreciate the memories you’ve captured closer to home.

I’ve only seen 3% of the world according to Globetrotter.

I believe that with a few additional settings like these to complement its beautiful design, Globetrotter could have the potential to be a fun and delightful app for everyone to revisit their memories, including for the average person who rarely crosses oceans.

If you would like to give Globetrotter a try, the app is available on the App Store. Its features can be unlocked for $3.99 per month, $19.99 per year, or through a one-time purchase of $49.99.

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.

A scene from GTA: Vice City. Source: Rockstar Games.

There’s been a lot of gaming activity on Apple platforms, with several big announcements in recent weeks.

First off, Netflix continues to nab some big titles for its growing catalog of games on iOS and iPadOS. In October, it was announced that one of my all-time favorite games, Dead Cells, which won a MacStories Selects award in 2019, would join Netflix Games.

More recently, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, which includes GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas, was released simultaneously on iOS and iPadOS as part of Netflix games. According to Kotaku, these Netflix versions of the games, which are also available as separate App Store purchases, have been updated to fix visual glitches and spruce things up a bit, too.

Resident Evil 4. Source: Capcom.

Resident Evil 4 from Capcom is out on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Capcom is currently offering the game for 50% off, with DLC 25% off for a limited time.

Based on early reviews, the consensus seems to be that, at least when it comes to mobile devices, the game is best on an iPad Pro, which isn’t terribly surprising. Unlike non-Apple platforms, RE4’s graphics options have been locked on the iPhone and iPad, and frame rates are capped at 30fps. Nonetheless, early reports indicate that the game still has trouble hitting 30fps at times, especially on the iPhone, including the iPhone 15 Pro models. On mobile devices, the game has the same onscreen controls as Resident Evil Village, that cover a lot of the game’s action, so a separate controller is recommended. Despite the visual hiccups, TouchArcade concludes that the Resident Evil 4 remake is ‘an easy recommendation.’ I haven’t had a chance to play Resident Evil 4 yet, but plan to do so over the holidays.

A couple of game developers shared interesting Mac sales statistics this fall too. The developers of The Pale Beyond mentioned in a late November video that 5.26% of its players were playing the game on the Steam Deck compared to 1.36% on the Mac. Both numbers are tiny compared to Windows but show the kind of odds that game developers are up against when porting games to the Mac. Similar statistics led Valve to announce in October that Counter-Strike 2 would not be coming to the Mac because its players were ‘less than one percent of active CS:GO players.’ Recent Apple silicon Macs are better suited to gaming than ever before, but obviously, there’s still a long way to go.

GRID Legends.

Finally, I’ll leave you with a game recommendation for the holidays. GRID Legends was ported to the Mac by Feral Interactive earlier this month, and it’s a lot of fun. I’ve covered Feral Interactive ports of GRID games before, and this Mac-only version of Legends is every bit as good as earlier ports.

I’ve been playing GRID Legends on and off over the past week and love the story mode and tight integration with third-party controllers. The racing game, which debuted on other platforms in late 2022, runs smoothly at high frame rates when playing at 1080p on my Mac Studio but struggles at higher resolutions. I recently switched to playing on an M3 Max MacBook Pro that Apple sent me for testing, which kicked performance up significantly. Plus, the game looks absolutely gorgeous on the MacBook Pro’s Liquid Retina XDR display.

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 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.

If you’re a MacStories reader, you probably know about Setapp. It’s a simple, effective way to discover the best apps for every task, no matter what you do. Setapp is also an amazing value. I bet you also have someone in your life who could benefit from Setapp but hasn’t tried it yet, which makes it the perfect gift this holiday season.

A Setapp gift card is the perfect way to help your loved ones get more out of their Mac and iOS devices by helping them:

• Save time
• Complete tasks
• Find the perfect solution to every digital challenge

Best of all, your Setapp gift won’t gather dust or sit in a forgotten corner of a closet. With a dedicated team that has curated a diverse collection of over 240 of the best apps available, your gift will get used and become a daily reminder of your assistance and generosity.

And right now, Setapp is spotlighting a special collection of apps: The Jolly Sleighing Toolkit includes Spark Mail, Luminar Neo, Diarly, Busy Call, and other great apps that will help users track holiday to-dos, connect with others, and spruce up their photos.

So, head on over to Setapp right now to gift your loved ones the relief of checked-off tasks and more with a Setapp gift card.

Our thanks to Setapp for sponsoring MacStories this week.

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.

This week on MacStories Unwind,  Federico and I share our favorite TV shows and movies of 2023 and discuss the return of Europe to Threads.

Sponsored By:

• Television Time – Your Ultimate Companion for tracking your favorite shows, and discovering new ones.
• Kolide – It ensures that if a device isn’t secure it can’t access your apps. It’s Device Trust for Okta. Watch the demo today!

Threads Returns to Europe

• The MacStories Team Is on Threads (Again)

Federico’s TV Picks:

• Suburræterna on Netflix
• Ted Lasso on Apple TV+
• Platonic on Apple TV+
• For All Mankind on Apple TV+
• Also mentioned:
  • Media tracking app, Sequel

John’s TV Picks:

• Lessons in Chemistry on Apple TV+
• Slow Horses on Apple TV+
• Shrinking on Apple TV+
• Silo on Apple TV+
• The Last of Us on Max
• A Murder at the End of the World on Hulu

John’s Movie Picks:

• Astroid City
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

MacStories Unwind+

We deliver MacStories Unwind+ to Club MacStories subscribers ad-free and early with high bitrate audio every week.

To learn more about the benefits of a Club MacStories subscription, visit our Plans page.

Support MacStories and Unlock Extras

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

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

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

Source: Philips Hue.

A couple of weekends ago, after we put up our Christmas tree, I broke out Hue’s Festavia lights, which the company recently sent me to test. Ever since we moved in late 2022, we’ve had a generic string of big-bulb white lights hanging around the perimeter of the second-floor balcony that I controlled with the help of an outdoor smart plug. The setup provided a little extra light and atmosphere whenever we sat outside in the evening, which I enjoyed. However, I was also curious to see how I could take the setup further and add some holiday cheer with a set of the Festavia lights. So, instead of putting the lights on our tree, I replaced our existing balcony lights with the Hue lights.

Philips Hue offers two sets of Festavia lights: one with 250 lights and the other with 500. At first glance, the lights look a lot like traditional Christmas tree lights, with each tiny LED light spaced about three inches from the next one on a long cord.

Philips Hue sent me its 500-light string of lights, which stretch to over 130 feet (nearly 40 meters) in length. To put that in context, my balcony is roughly 19 feet (5.8m) x 8 feet (2.4m), so I was able to circle the perimeter twice. The 250-light model is half that length and would have worked, too, but I prefer the look of the second loop and the extra light it provides.

Unlike the lights I’ve put on Christmas trees in the past, the power adapter of the 500-light model of Festavia lights is in the middle of the string with lights, extending to the left and right of the cord in a ‘T’ shape. The lights can be used for decorating a Christmas tree, in which case Hue recommends wrapping each strand from just below the middle of the tree and moving up with one strand and down with the other for the best lighting effects. Our tree is artificial and pre-lit, which is why I hung the lights on my balcony instead, draping them from the hooks I already had in place for our old set of lights.

Hanging the lights, which are weatherproof, dimmable, and can change color, was easy. So was adding them to the Hue app, which works the same as adding any other Hue product to its app.

The same app allows you to control your Festavia lights alongside any other Hue lights you own, turning them on and off, creating scenes, adjusting colors, and setting up automations. Many of the same features can be controlled in Apple’s Home app, but it pays off to spend some time in the Hue app browsing through its gallery of colorful scenes, which include several holiday-themed color schemes.

Also, the Festavia lights offer effects, which can be accessed in the Hue app to animate your lights. There are six effects in total:

• Candle
• Fireplace
• Sparkle
• Glisten
• Opal
• Prism

Each effect has a different color scheme and automatically dims and brightens the lights in animated sequences. This is where the Festavia lights really set themselves apart from using a standard string of lights with a smart plug. With the wide array of colors that Hue’s lights can simultaneously display and animate, the range of possible effects is vast.

Setting up scenes and effects in the Philips Hue app.

Overall, the build quality of the Festavia lights is excellent, too, which makes them great for outdoor use where they’re exposed to the elements. That said, I’ve only used the lights for a couple of weeks so far, so longevity is an open question. Fortunately, though, the lights come with a two-year warranty, and it’s worth noting that I’ve used other Hue products for years and never had one break.

So, if you’re looking for maximum flexibility to decorate a Christmas tree this year or just want to add some colorful, animated flare to your home, the Festavia lights are an excellent, although expensive, choice. Hue Festavia lights can be purchased directly from Hue, Amazon, and other retailers for $219.99 (250-light set) or $359.99 (500-light set).

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.

With Threads’ launch in Europe today, we thought it would be a good time to reintroduce readers to the MacStories Threads account as well as those of the MacStories team.

It’s been quite a year for social media. Almost exactly one year ago today, we announced that MacStories had established its own dedicated Mastodon server for MacStories, AppStories, and Club MacStories. That move has been successful beyond our wildest imaginations. MacStories’ core audience is on Mastodon, which has made it the perfect place to interact with readers and listeners.

However, not everyone is on Mastodon. That’s why we created MacStories Instagram and Threads accounts earlier this year. Federico and I have been on Instagram for years and joined Threads immediately, although it wasn’t long before Meta prevented Federico and other users in the EU from accessing Threads.

Today, Meta has reopened Threads to Europe, which means Federico, Silvia, and Niléane are back on the service along with Alex, Jonathan, and me. So, today, we thought we’d reintroduce the MacStories Threads account to everyone and link the team’s Threads accounts below to make it easy to follow whomever you’d like.

You can expect to hear about the latest stories published by the team on MacStories.net, what’s going on with Club MacStories, and updates on AppStories, MacStories Unwind, and upcoming new projects if you follow MacStories. To follow individual team members, you can use the links below:

• Federico
• John
• Alex
• Silvia
• Niléane
• Jonathan

We know that Threads isn’t for everyone, and the same is true of Mastodon, which is why we’re on both. So, wherever you’re hanging out these days, feel free to say hello. We love hearing from the MacStories community and are excited to have the full team together on Threads again.

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.

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

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

Let’s jump in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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