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Ivory 2.2 Adds New Navigation Design and More→

Ivory, the Mastodon app by Tapbots, was updated on iOS and iPadOS yesterday with a new navigation design.

The app’s new tab bar can accommodate up to six of its many views and adds a ‘More’ button on the far right for ones that don’t fit. From the ‘More’ button, there’s also a shortcut to configure the order in which Ivory’s tabs appear. I’ve been using the new design in beta for a while and love having the added level of control over my Mastodon experience.

Tapbots has also added the ability to translate hashtags by long-pressing on them and now displays media, cards, and quotes when a post is truncated with a ‘Read More’ button. Posts that quote an account you’ve blocked are no longer visible either. Finally, there’s an all-new Blueprint app icon.

The Ivory update is available on the App Store.

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The Latest from AppStories and Ruminate

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:

On AppStories+, John explains how Apple is working to make the Apple Pencil more useful to a wider audience with Smart Script.

This episode is sponsored by:

  • Sentry – Mobile crash reporting and app monitoring. Try it for free.

John hits some limitations of Sequoia, Robb isn’t playing anything but John is, and they both bring some chili snacks

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Ticci Tabs: A Simple Way to Keep Up With Your Favorite Six or Seven Websites

It seems the tech community’s search for the perfect reading setup continues unabated. Just this week on AppStories, Federico and John discussed which RSS readers have stood the test of time. Between text-to-speech apps, RSS readers, eReaders, and more, surely there’s no room left for another approach to catching up on articles? Apparently, there is. Enter Ticci Tabs with a straightforward but specific solution.

You may have noticed something familiar about the name of this app: it contains the nickname of our venerable Editor-in-Chief here at MacStories, Federico Viticci. That’s because Ticci Tabs has an amusing backstory. Several weeks ago on Connected, Federico lamented that there wasn’t an app that allowed him to browse his favorite “six or seven” websites in their original form, separate from a browser or RSS reader in a stripped down version of Safari. Less than a week later, developer Jonathan Ruiz released a beta version of Ticci Tabs on TestFlight, and it did just what Federico described. What might have seemed at first like a fun app carrying out a function requested by one specific person has blossomed into an intriguing and well-thought-out utility. Let’s take a closer look.

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Moom 4: Mac Window Management, Upgraded

This summer, my all-time favorite window management utility Moom received a major 4.0 upgrade more than 12 years after the initial release of Moom 3. Ever since I went back to the Mac as my main computer, Moom has allowed me to create automations to arrange my windows and easily save and restore specific window layouts. From a fully customizable palette to new keyboard shortcut options to the ability to chain custom commands, Moom 4 offers a wide range of new features that make it an even more advanced utility that will appeal to anyone looking for more flexibility than Apple’s new window tiling feature, which is coming in macOS Sequoia.

Let’s check out the main new features in Moom 4.

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Bitmo Lab Opens Pre-Orders for a Delta Emulator-Friendly iPhone Case→

Source: Bitmo Lab.

Source: Bitmo Lab.

Bitmo Lab, an affiliate of JSAUX, a videogame accessory maker, has announced pre-orders for an intriguing new iPhone case. The GAMEBABY case, which I came across on Overkill.wtf, is a two-part iPhone case that allows users to remove the bottom half, moving it from the rear of an iPhone to the front. The switch transforms your iPhone into a Game Boy lookalike with A and B buttons, a D-pad, Start and Select buttons, and more.

According to Bitmo Lab, the GAMEBABY’s buttons are capacitive, meaning they don’t require power, a Bluetooth connection, or other technology to work. It’s a simple solution that, when paired with the Delta iOS game emulator, should be able to play classic emulated games on the go with the added benefit of physical buttons.

How well the GAMEBABY works remains a mystery. Bitmo Lab’s website says the case is still under development, but you can pre-order one for the iPhone 15 Pro Max or iPhone 16 Pro Max with expected shipping in October for $19.99, which is 50% off the launch price.

I’ve pre-ordered a GAMEBABY and will report back after I’ve had a chance to use it for a while.

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The Latest from Magic Rays of Light, Comfort Zone, and MacStories Unwind

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:

Sigmund and Devon compete to predict what Apple will announce at the upcoming It’s Glowtime event. Then, they go on a quick trip through the ages with the Time Bandits and land in 1960s Baltimore to recap Lady in the Lake

Matt is trying to find the right temperature, Chris is floating on Air(table), and Niléane finds out if she’s feeling lucky about getting 10 blue links.

This week, I research a local dive bar, as you do, before Federico and I both recommend gadgets that aren’t computers or videogame consoles and chat about Loot, Season 2.

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Websites Increasingly Tell Apple and AI Companies to Stop Scraping→

Wired reported today that many large websites are blocking Applebot-Extended, Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) web crawler. Wired determined this by examining the sites’ public robots.txt file, which Apple says it respects, but some AI companies don’t. According to its research:

WIRED can confirm that Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media, the USA Today network, and WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast, are among the many organizations opting to exclude their data from Apple’s AI training. The cold reception reflects a significant shift in both the perception and use of the robotic crawlers that have trawled the web for decades. Now that these bots play a key role in collecting AI training data, they’ve become a conflict zone over intellectual property and the future of the web.

With the release of Apple Intelligence around the corner, I suppose it makes sense to single out Apple here, but this is not really news. A study in July that Kevin Rouse wrote about for The New York Times concluded that websites are blocking web crawlers from all AI companies at a dramatic rate:

The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used A.I. training data sets, discovered an “emerging crisis in consent,” as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested.

The researchers estimate that in the three data sets — called C4, RefinedWeb and Dolma — 5 percent of all data, and 25 percent of data from the highest-quality sources, has been restricted. Those restrictions are set up through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a decades-old method for website owners to prevent automated bots from crawling their pages using a file called robots.txt.

The study also found that as much as 45 percent of the data in one set, C4, had been restricted by websites’ terms of service.

These numbers don’t seem to account for websites using server-side methods of blocking crawlers or Cloudflare’s tool, which could mean the decline in available data is underreported.

Still, it’s interesting to see more and more websites evaluate the tradeoffs of allowing AI crawlers to scrape their sites and decide they’re not worth it. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the media companies that cut deals with OpenAI and others are contractually obligated to block competing crawlers.

I’d also point out that it’s disingenuous of Apple to tell Wired that Applebot-Extended is a way to respect publishers’ rights when the company didn’t offer publishers the chance opt out until after it had scraped the entire web. However, therein lies the explanation of why so many sites have blocked Applebot-Extended since WWDC I suppose.

What’s unclear is how this all shakes out. Big media companies are hedging their bets by making deals with the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity in case Google search continues its decline and is replaced by chatbots. Whether those are good bets or not remains to be seen, but at least they offer some short-term cash flow and referral traffic in what has been a prolonged drought for the media industry.

For websites that don’t make deals or are too small for AI companies to care about, I can see a scenario where some play along anyway, allowing their sites to be scraped for little or no upside. For those sites that choose to stay outside the AI silos, it’s easy to paint a bleak picture, but the Internet is resilient, and I have a feeling that the Open Web will find a path forward in the end.

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iPadOS 18’s Smart Script: A Promising Start But Don’t Toss Out Your Keyboard Yet

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

The carefully controlled demos of Smart Script at WWDC reminded me of every time Apple shows off the Photos app, where each picture is a perfectly composed, beautiful image of smiling models. In contrast, my photo library is full of screenshots and random images like the blurry one I took the other day to capture my refrigerator’s model number.

Likewise, handwriting demos on the iPad always show someone with flawless, clear penmanship who can also draw. In both cases, the features demonstrated may work perfectly well, but the reality is that there’s always a gap between those sorts of perfect “lifestyle” demos and everyday use. So today, I thought I’d take iPadOS 18’s Smart Script for a spin and see how it holds up under the stark reality of my poor handwriting.

Smart Script, meet John's handwriting (auto-refine enabled).

Smart Script, meet John’s handwriting (auto-refine enabled).

The notion behind Smart Script is to make taking handwritten notes as easy and flexible as typing text. As someone who can touch type with my eyes closed, that’s a tall order, but it’s also a good goal. I’ve always been drawn to taking notes on an iPad with the Apple Pencil, but it’s been the constraints that held me back. It’s always been easier to move and change typed text than handwritten notes. Add to that the general messiness of my handwriting, and eventually, I abandoned every experiment with taking digital handwritten notes out of frustration.

Smart Script tries to address all of those issues, and in some cases, it succeeds. However, there are still a few rough edges that need to be ironed out before most people’s experience will match the demos at WWDC. That said, if those problem areas get straightened out, Smart Script has the potential to transform how the iPad is used and make the Apple Pencil a much more valuable accessory.

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The Risk to Apple of OS Envy→

With the rerelease of iOS 18.0, the EU and the rest of the world will have two flavors of the iPhone’s operating system. As Jason Snell writes for Macworld, this is one of Apple’s greatest fears, but there are potentially bigger risks on the horizon for the company. As Jason explains:

…to me, the bigger danger is envy. It strikes me that Apple has tried to make residents of the European Union envious of other regions by withholding Apple Intelligence, at least at first. There are legal reasons to do so, of course, but it’s also a lesson to Europeans that if they support such a strict regulatory regime, they’re going to be left on the side of the road while the rest of the world enjoys the bounty of AI features inside iOS. (Whether that bounty actually exists is beside the point.)

Yet, when I consider everything being experimented with in the EU, I start to wonder if the envy is actually going to flow in the other direction. The Verge said that the iPhone is now “more fun” in the EU. Noted iOS expert Federico Viticci wrote that the EU version of iOS “is the version of iOS I’ve wanted for the past few years,” and that “we can finally use our phones like actual computers.”

As someone who loves clipboard managers and uses several apps that aren’t Apple’s defaults, I am warming up to their point of view.

I’m right there with Jason. At first, the differences between my iOS and Federico’s didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Sure, it was easier for him to access AltStore, but it’s available outside the EU if you jump through some extra hoops. However, over time, the differences have multiplied. I’ve also had the chance to try Apple Intelligence in 18.1, and although there’s more to come from Apple on the AI front, which could change my calculus, from where things stand today, I’d gladly trade iOS 18.1 for the EU’s 18.0.

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