“I Live My Life a Quarter Century at a Time”→

Linked By Federico Viticci

Two days ago was the 25th anniversary of Steve Jobs unveiling the Aqua interface for Mac OS X for first time at Macworld Expo. James Thomson published a great personal retrospective on one particular item of the Aqua UI that was shown off at the event: the original dock.

The version he showed was quite different to what actually ended up shipping, with square boxes around the icons, and an actual “Dock” folder in your user’s home folder that contained aliases to the items stored. I should know – I had spent the previous 18 months or so as the main engineer working away on it. At that very moment, I was watching from a cubicle in Apple Cork, in Ireland. For the second time in my short Apple career, I said a quiet prayer to the gods of demos, hoping that things didn’t break. For context, I was in my twenties at this point and scared witless.

James has told this story before, but there are new details I wasn’t familiar with, as well as some links worth clicking in the full story.

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NVIDIA Announces GeForce NOW Support Coming to Safari on Vision Pro Later This Month

By Federico Viticci

With a press release following an otherwise packed keynote at CES (which John and Brendon, my NPC co-hosts, attended in person last night), NVIDIA announced that their streaming service GeForce NOW is going to natively support the Apple Vision Pro…well, sort of.

There aren’t that many details in NVIDIA’s announcement, but the gist of it is that Vision Pro users will be able to stream games by visiting the GeForce NOW website when a new version launches “later this month”.

Get immersed in a new dimension of big-screen gaming as GeForce NOW brings AAA titles to life on Apple Vision Pro spatial computers, Meta Quest 3 and 3S and Pico virtual- and mixed-reality headsets. Later this month, these supported devices will give members access to an extensive library of games to stream through GeForce NOW by opening the browser to play.geforcenow.com when the newest app update, version 2.0.70, starts rolling out later this month.

This is all NVIDIA said in their announcement, which isn’t much, but we can speculate on a few things based on the existing limitations of visionOS.

For starters, the current version of Safari on visionOS does not support adding PWAs to the visionOS Home Screen. Given that the existing version of GeForce NOW requires saving a web app to begin the setup process, this either means that a) NVIDIA knows a visionOS software update in January will add the ability to save web apps or b) GeForce NOW won’t require that additional step to start playing on visionOS. The latter option seems more likely.

Second, as we covered last year, there is a workaround to play with GeForce NOW on visionOS, and that is the Nexus⁺ app. I’ve been using the Nexus⁺ app on my Vision Pro to stream Indiana Jones and other games from the cloud, and while the resolution is good enough¹, what bothers me is the lack of HDR and Spatial Audio support (which should work with the Web Audio API in Safari for visionOS 2.0) in GeForce NOW when accessed from Nexus⁺’s built-in web browser.

The Nexus⁺ app supports ultra-wide aspect ratios, but HDR is nowhere to be found.

With all this in mind, I’m going to guess that, at a minimum, NVIDIA will support a PWA-free installation method in Safari for visionOS. I’m less optimistic about HDR and Spatial Audio, but as I gravitate more and more toward cloud streaming rather than local PC streaming², I’d be happily proven wrong here.

My only question is: with the App Store’s “new” rules, why isn’t NVIDIA making a native GeForce NOW app for Apple platforms?

I’d love to know from people who know more about this stuff than I do whether Safari 18’s support for the WebRTC HEVC RFC 7789 RTP Payload Format makes a difference for GeForce NOW streaming or not. ↩︎
I’m actually thinking about selling my 4090 FE GPU in an effort to go all-in on cloud streaming and SteamOS in lieu of Windows in 2025. But this is a future topic for NPC. ↩︎

iPad Pro for Everything: How I Rethought My Entire Workflow Around the New 11” iPad Pro

By Federico Viticci

My 11” iPad Pro.

For the past two years since my girlfriend and I moved into our new apartment, my desk has been in a constant state of flux. Those who have been reading MacStories for a while know why. There were two reasons: I couldn’t figure out how to use my iPad Pro for everything I do, specifically for recording podcasts the way I like, and I couldn’t find an external monitor that would let me both work with the iPad Pro and play videogames when I wasn’t working.

This article – which has been six months in the making – is the story of how I finally did it.

Over the past six months, I completely rethought my setup around the 11” iPad Pro and a monitor that gives me the best of both worlds: a USB-C connection for when I want to work with iPadOS at my desk and multiple HDMI inputs for when I want to play my PS5 Pro or Nintendo Switch. Getting to this point has been a journey, which I have documented in detail on the MacStories Setups page.

This article started as an in-depth examination of my desk, the accessories I use, and the hardware I recommend. As I was writing it, however, I realized that it had turned into something bigger. It’s become the story of how, after more than a decade of working on the iPad, I was able to figure out how to accomplish the last remaining task in my workflow, but also how I fell in love with the 11” iPad Pro all over again thanks to its nano-texture display.

I started using the iPad as my main computer 12 years ago. Today, I am finally able to say that I can use it for everything I do on a daily basis.

Here’s how.

The Strange Case of Apple Intelligence’s iPhone-only Mail Sorting Feature →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Tim Hardwick, writing for MacRumors, on a strange limitation of the Apple Intelligence rollout earlier this week:

Apple’s new Mail sorting features in iOS 18.2 are notably absent from both iPadOS 18.2 and macOS Sequoia 15.2, raising questions about the company’s rollout strategy for the email management system.

The new feature automatically sorts emails into four distinct categories: Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions, with the aim of helping iPhone users better organize their inboxes. Devices that support Apple Intelligence also surface priority messages as part of the new system.

Users on iPhone who updated to iOS 18.2 have the features. However, iPad and Mac users who updated their devices with the software that Apple released concurrently with iOS 18.2 will have noticed their absence. iPhone users can easily switch between categorized and traditional list views, but iPad and Mac users are limited to the standard chronological inbox layout.

This was so odd during the beta cycle, and it continues to be the single decision I find the most perplexing in Apple’s launch strategy for Apple Intelligence.

I didn’t cover Mail’s new smart categorization feature in my story about Apple Intelligence for one simple reason: it’s not available on the device where I do most of my work, my iPad Pro. I’ve been able to test the functionality on my iPhone, and it’s good enough: iOS occasionally gets a category wrong, but (surprisingly) you can manually categorize a sender and train the system yourself.

(As an aside: can we talk about the fact that a bunch of options, including sender categorization, can only be accessed via Mail’s…Reply button? How did we end up in this situation?)

I would very much prefer to use Apple Mail instead of Spark, which offers smart inbox categorization across platforms but is nowhere as nice-looking as Mail and comes with its own set of quirks. However, as long as smart categories are exclusive to the iPhone version of Mail, Apple’s decision prevents me from incorporating the updated Mail app into my daily workflow.

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Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2: A Deep Dive into Working with Siri and ChatGPT, Together

By Federico Viticci

The ChatGPT integration in iOS 18.2.

Apple is releasing iOS and iPadOS 18.2 today, and with those software updates, the company is rolling out the second wave of Apple Intelligence features as part of their previously announced roadmap that will culminate with the arrival of deeper integration between Siri and third-party apps next year.

In today’s release, users will find native integration between Siri and ChatGPT, more options in Writing Tools, a smarter Mail app with automatic message categorization, generative image creation in Image Playground, Genmoji, Visual Intelligence, and more. It’s certainly a more ambitious rollout than the somewhat disjointed debut of Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1, and one that will garner more attention if only by virtue of Siri’s native access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

And yet, despite the long list of AI features in these software updates, I find myself mostly underwhelmed – if not downright annoyed – by the majority of the Apple Intelligence changes, but not for the reasons you may expect coming from me.

Some context is necessary here. As I explained in a recent episode of AppStories, I’ve embarked on a bit of a journey lately in terms of understanding the role of AI products and features in modern software. I’ve been doing a lot of research, testing, and reading about the different flavors of AI tools that we see pop up on almost a daily basis now in a rapidly changing landscape. As I discussed on the show, I’ve landed on two takeaways, at least for now:

I’m completely uninterested in generative products that aim to produce images, video, or text to replace human creativity and input. I find products that create fake “art” sloppy, distasteful, and objectively harmful for humankind because they aim to replace the creative process with a thoughtless approximation of what it means to be creative and express one’s feelings, culture, and craft through genuine, meaningful creative work.
I’m deeply interested in the idea of assistive and agentic AI as a means to remove busywork from people’s lives and, well, assist people in the creative process. In my opinion, this is where the more intriguing parts of the modern AI industry lie:
- agents that can perform boring tasks for humans with a higher degree of precision and faster output;
- coding assistants to put software in the hands of more people and allow programmers to tackle higher-level tasks;
- RAG-infused assistive tools that can help academics and researchers; and
- protocols that can map an LLM to external data sources such as Claude’s Model Context Protocol.

I see these tools as a natural evolution of automation and, as you can guess, that has inevitably caught my interest. The implications for the Accessibility community in this field are also something we should keep in mind.

To put it more simply, I think empowering LLMs to be “creative” with the goal of displacing artists is a mistake, and also a distraction – a glossy facade largely amounting to a party trick that gets boring fast and misses the bigger picture of how these AI tools may practically help us in the workplace, healthcare, biology, and other industries.

This is how I approached my tests with Apple Intelligence in iOS and iPadOS 18.2. For the past month, I’ve extensively used Claude to assist me with the making of advanced shortcuts, used ChatGPT’s search feature as a Google replacement, indexed the archive of my iOS reviews with NotebookLM, relied on Zapier’s Copilot to more quickly spin up web automations, and used both Sonnet 3.5 and GPT-4o to rethink my Obsidian templating system and note-taking workflow. I’ve used AI tools for real, meaningful work that revolved around me – the creative person – doing the actual work and letting software assist me. And at the same time, I tried to add Apple’s new AI features to the mix.

Perhaps it’s not “fair” to compare Apple’s newfangled efforts to products by companies that have been iterating on their LLMs and related services for the past five years, but when the biggest tech company in the world makes bold claims about their entrance into the AI space, we have to take them at face value.

It’s been an interesting exercise to see how far behind Apple is compared to OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of the sheer capabilities of their respective assistants; at the same time, I believe Apple has some serious advantages in the long term as the platform owner, with untapped potential for integrating AI more deeply within the OS and apps in a way that other AI companies won’t be able to. There are parts of Apple Intelligence in 18.2 that hint at much bigger things to come in the future that I find exciting, as well as features available today that I’ve found useful and, occasionally, even surprising.

With this context in mind, in this story you won’t see any coverage of Image Playground and Image Wand, which I believe are ridiculously primitive and perfect examples of why Apple may think they’re two years behind their competitors. Image Playground in particular produces “illustrations” that you’d be kind to call abominations; they remind me of the worst Midjourney creations from 2022. Instead, I will focus on the more assistive aspects of AI and share my experience with trying to get work done using Apple Intelligence on my iPhone and iPad alongside its integration with ChatGPT, which is the marquee addition of this release.

Let’s dive in.

Apple Frames 3.3 Adds Support for iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, M4 iPad Pro, and Apple Watch Series 10 (feat. An Unexpected Technical Detour)

By Federico Viticci

Apple Frames 3.3 supports all the new devices released by Apple in 2024.

Well, this certainly took longer than expected.

Today, I’m happy to finally release version 3.3 of Apple Frames, my shortcut to put screenshots inside physical frames of Apple devices. In this new version, which is a free update for everyone, you’ll find support for all the new devices Apple released in 2024:

11” and 13” M4 iPad Pro
iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro lineup
42mm and 46mm Apple Watch Series 10

To get started with Apple Frames, simply head to the end of this post (or search for Apple Frames in the MacStories Shortcuts Archive), download the updated shortcut, and replace any older version you may have installed with it. The first time you run the shortcut, you’ll be asked to redownload the file assets necessary for Apple Frames, which is a one-time operation. Once that’s done, you can resume framing your screenshots like you’ve always done, either using the native Apple Frames menu or the advanced API that I introduced last year.

So what took this update so long? Well, if you want to know the backstory, keep on reading.

A Feature from 10 Years Ago Is Back – with a Twist – in My Favorite RSS Client

By Federico Viticci

Unread’s new custom shortcuts.

When it comes to productivity apps, especially those that have to work within the constraints of iOS and iPadOS, it’s rare these days to stumble upon a new idea that has never been tried before. With the exception of objectively new technologies such as LLMs, or unless there’s a new framework that Apple is opening up to developers, it can often feel like most ideas have been attempted before and we’re simply retreading old ground.

Let me be clear: I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that. I’ve been writing about iPhone and iPad apps for over a decade now, and I believe there are dozens of design patterns and features that have undeservedly fallen out of fashion. But such is life.

Today marks the return of a very MacStories-y feature in one of my longtime favorite apps, which – thanks to this new functionality – is gaining a permanent spot on my Home Screen. Namely, the RSS client Unread now lets you create custom article actions powered by the Shortcuts app.

Denim Adds Direct Spotify Integration to Customize Playlist Artwork

By Federico Viticci

Denim’s Spotify integration.

I don’t remember exactly when I started using Denim, but it was years ago, and I was looking for a way to spruce up the covers of my playlists. I was using Apple Music at the time, and it was before Apple added basic playlist cover generation features to the Music app. Even after that feature came to Music, Denim still provided more options in terms of colors, fonts, and patterns. Earlier this year, I covered its 3.0 update with the ability to automatically recognize artists featured in playlists for Club members here.

I switched to Spotify months ago (and haven’t looked back since; music discovery is still leagues ahead of Apple Music), and I was very happy to see recently that Denim can now integrate with Spotify directly, without the need to save covers to the Photos app first. Essentially, once you’ve logged in with your Spotify account, the app is connected to your library with access to your playlists. You can pick an existing playlist directly from Denim, customize its cover, and save it back to your Spotify account without opening the Spotify app or having to save an image file upfront.

That’s possible thanks to Spotify’s web-based API for third-party apps, which allows a utility like Denim to simplify the creation flow of custom covers down to a couple of taps. In a nice touch, once a playlist cover has been saved to Spotify, the app lets you know with haptic feedback and allows you to immediately view the updated cover in Spotify, should you want to double-check the results in the context of the app.

The combination of this fast customization process for Spotify and new artwork options added in this release only cements Denim’s role as the best utility for people who care about the looks of the playlists they share with friends and family. Denim is available on the App Store for free, with both a lifetime purchase ($19.99) and annual subscription ($4.99) available to unlock its full feature set.

iPod Fans Are Trying to Preserve Lost Click Wheel Games →

Linked By Federico Viticci

I last wrote about iPod click wheel games here on MacStories in…2011, when Apple officially delisted them from the iTunes Store. Thirteen years later, some enterprising iPod fans are trying to preserve those games and find a way to let other old-school iPod fans play them today.

Here’s Kyle Orland, writing at Ars Technica:

In recent years, a Reddit user going by the handle Quix used this workaround to amass a local library of 19 clickwheel iPod games and publicly offered to share “copies of these games onto as many iPods as I can.” But Quix’s effort ran into a significant bottleneck of physical access—syncing his game library to a new iPod meant going through the costly and time-consuming process of shipping the device so it could be plugged into Quix’s actual computer and then sending it back to its original owner.

Enter Reddit user Olsro, who earlier this month started the appropriately named iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project. Rather than creating his master library of authorized iTunes games on a local computer in his native France, Olsro sought to “build a communitarian virtual machine that anyone can use to sync auth[orized] clickwheel games into their iPod.” While the process doesn’t require shipping, it does necessitate jumping through a few hoops to get the Qemu Virtual Machine running on your local computer.

Olsro’s project is available here, and it includes instructions on how to set up the virtual machine so you can install the games yourself. Did you know that, for example, Square Enix made two iPod games, Crystal Defenders and Song Summoner? Without these fan-made projects, all of these games would be lost to time and link rot – and we unfortunately know why.

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