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Retro Videogame Streaming Service Antstream To Launch on the App Store Next Week

In the wake of the Digital Markets Act, Apple made a couple of worldwide changes to its App Review Guidelines, along with many EU-specific updates. One of the worldwide updates was to allow third-party game streaming services.

Today, Antstream became the first game streaming service to announce that it will launch an app on Apple’s App Store. Antstream is a retro game streaming service with a catalog of over 1,300 videogames. The service, which is available on multiple other platforms in the EU, US, and Brazil, will bring its licensed library of games to the iPhone and iPad next week on June 27th.

Antstream’s catalog covers a wide variety of retro systems, including the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, SNES, Megadrive, PlayStation One, and Arcade classics. Antstream Arcade normally costs $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year but will be available for $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year for a limited time when it launches on the App Store.

I haven’t used Antstream Arcade yet, but I’m looking forward to trying it to see what’s in the catalog and check out how it performs over Wi-Fi.

Apple Developer Academies in Six Countries to Add AI Courses This Fall

Today, Apple announced that this fall, the company will offer a new curriculum for its Developer Academy students focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

According to Apple:

Beginning this fall, every Apple Developer Academy student will benefit from custom-built curriculum that teaches them how to build, train, and deploy machine learning models across Apple devices. Courses will include the fundamentals of AI technologies and frameworks; Core ML and its ability to deliver fast performance on Apple devices; and guidance on how to build and train AI models from the ground up. Students will learn from guided curriculum and project-based assignments that include assistance from hundreds of mentors and more than 12,000 academy alumni worldwide.

The new curriculum will be offered at 18 academies in Brazil, Indonesia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and the United States. With the company’s emphasis on Apple Intelligence at WWDC, it’s not surprising that the skills needed to implement those new features are being added to its educational efforts.

How We’re Trying to Protect MacStories from AI Bots and Web Crawlers – And How You Can, Too

Over the past several days, we’ve made some changes at MacStories to address the ingestion of our work by web crawlers operated by artificial intelligence companies. We’ve learned a lot, so we thought we’d share what we’ve done in case anyone else would like to do something similar.

If you read MacStories regularly, or listen to our podcasts, you already know that Federico and I think that crawling the Open Web to train large language models is unethical. Industry-wide, AI companies have scraped the content of websites like ours, using it as the raw material for their chatbots and other commercial products without the consent or compensation of publishers and other creators.

Now that the horse is out of the barn, some of those companies are respecting publishers’ robots.txt files, while others seemingly aren’t. That doesn’t make up for the tens of thousands of articles and images that have already been scraped from MacStories. Nor is robots.txt a complete solution, so it’s just one of four approaches we’re taking to protect our work.

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The Origin Story of Apple Podcasts’ Transcripts→

Ari Saperstein, writing for The Guardian, interviewed Ben Cave, Apple’s global head of podcasts and Sarah Herrlinger, who manages accessibility policy for the company, about Apple Podcasts transcripts. The feature, which was introduced in March, automatically generates transcripts of podcast episodes in Apple’s catalog and has been a big accessibility win for podcast fans.

The origins of Apple’s transcription efforts began modestly:

Apple’s journey to podcast transcripts started with the expansion of a different feature: indexing. It’s a common origin story at a number of tech companies like Amazon and Yahoo – what begins as a search tool evolves into a full transcription initiative. Apple first deployed software that could identify specific words in a podcast back in 2018.

“What we did then is we offered a single line of the transcript to give users context on a result when they’re searching for something in particular,” Cave recalls. “There’s a few different things that we did in the intervening seven years, which all came together into this [transcript] feature.”

Drawing from technologies and designs used by Apple Music and Books, the feature has been lauded by the accessibility community:

“I was knocked out on how accurate it was,” says Larry Goldberg, a media and technology accessibility pioneer who created the first closed captioning system for movie theaters. The fidelity of auto-transcription is something that’s long been lacking, he adds. “It’s improved, it has gotten better … but there are times when it is so wrong.”

My experience with Podcasts’ transcripts tracks with the people interviewed for Saperstein’s story. Automatically generated transcription is hard. I’ve tried various services in the past, and I’ve never been happy enough with any of them to publish their output on MacStories. Apple’s solution isn’t perfect, but it’s easily the best I’ve seen, tipping into what I consider publishable territory. The feature makes it easy to search, select text, and generate time-stamped URLs for quoting snippets of an episode, which makes the app an excellent tool for researching and writing about podcasts, too.

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The Issues of iPadOS 18’s New Tab Bars→

Earlier today on Mastodon, I shared some concerns regarding the Books app in iPadOS 18 and how Apple implemented the new tab bar design in the app. Effectively, by eschewing a sidebar, the app has returned to feeling like a blown-up iPhone version – something I hoped we had left behind when Apple announced they wanted to make iPad apps more desktop-class two years ago.

Unfortunately, it gets worse than Books. As documented by Nico Reese, the developer of Gamery, the new tab bars seem to fall short of matching the previous design’s visual affordances as well as flexibility for developers. For starters, the new tabs are just text labels, which may work well in English, but not necessarily other languages:

Since the inception of the iPhone, tabs in a tab bar have always included a glyph and a label. With the new tab style, the glyphs are gone. Glyphs play a crucial role in UX design, allowing users to quickly recognize parts of the app for fast interaction. Now, users need to read multiple text labels to find the content they want, which is slower to perceive and can cause issues in languages that generally use longer words, such as German. Additionally, because tab bars are now customizable, they can even scroll if too many tabs are added!

You’ll want to check out Nico’s examples here, but this point is spot-on: since tab bars now sit alongside toolbar items, the entire UI can get very condensed, with buttons often ending up hidden away in an overflow menu:

Although Apple’s goal was to save space on the iPad screen, in reality, it makes things even more condensed. Apps need to compress actions because they take up too much horizontal space in the navigation bar. This constant adjustment of button placement in the navigation bar as windows are resized prevents users from building muscle memory. The smaller the window gets, the more items collapse.

If the goal was to simplify the iPad’s UI, well, now iPad users will end up with three ways to navigate apps instead of two, with the default method (the top bar) now generally displaying fewer items than before, without glyphs to make them stand out:

For users, it can be confusing why the entire navigation scheme changes with window resizing, and now they must adjust to three different variations. Navigation controls can be located at the top, the bottom, or the left side (with the option to hide the sidebar!), which may not be very intuitive for users accustomed to consistent navigation patterns.

The best way I can describe this UI change is that it feels like something conceived by the same people who thought the compact tab bar in Safari for iPad was a good idea, down to how tabs hide other UI elements and make them less discoverable.

Nico’s post has more examples you should check out. I think Marcos Tanaka (who knows a thing or two about iPad apps) put it well:

It makes me quite sad that one of the three iPad-specific features we got this year seems to be missing the mark so far. I hope we’ll see some improvements and updates on this front over the next three months before this feature ships to iPad users.

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WWDC 2024: The AppStories Interviews with ADA and Swift Student Challenge Distinguished Winners→

Devin Davies, the developer of Crouton.

Devin Davies, the developer of Crouton.

To wrap up our week of WWDC coverage, we just published a special episode of AppStories that was recorded in the Apple Podcasts Studio at Apple Park. Federico and I interviewed three of this year’s Apple Design Award winners:

Devin Davies.

Devin Davies.

  • Devin Davies, the creator of Crouton, which won an ADA in the Interaction category
Katarina Lotrič and Jasna Krmelj of Gentler Streak.

Katarina Lotrič and Jasna Krmelj of Gentler Streak.


- Katarina Lotrič, CEO and co-founder, and Jasna Krmelj, CTO and co-founder, of Gentler Streak, which won an ADA in the Social Impact category

James Cuda, CEO, and Michael Shaw, CTO, of Procreate.

James Cuda, CEO, and Michael Shaw, CTO, of Procreate.


- James Cuda, CEO, and Michael Shaw, CTO of Procreate, which won an ADA for (Procreate Dreams) in the Innovation category

We also interviewed two of the Swift Student Challenge Distinguished Winners:

  • Dezmond Blair, a student at the Apple Developer Academy in Detroit. His app marries his passion for biking and the outdoors with technology, which creates an immersive experience.
  • Adelaide Humez, a high school student from Lille, France. Her winning app, Egretta, allows users to create a journal of their dreams based on emotions.

In addition to being available as always in your favorite podcast app as an audio-only podcast, This special episode of AppStories is available on our new MacStories YouTube channel, which is also the home of Comfort Zone, one of the two podcasts we launched last week and other video projects.

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Subscribe here.

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To learn more about the benefits included with an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page or read the AppStories+ FAQ.

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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:

This week on Magic Rays of Light, Sigmund and Devon recap the Apple TV and entertainment announcements at WWDC – including tvOS 18, visionOS 2, Immersive Video updates, and more – and score their event predictions.

We’re back! After surviving our first challenge together, the gang is back for more with new goodies, an unexpectedly heavy topic, and a new mysterious challenge we didn’t see coming.

This week, John is joined by Jonathan Reed and Sigmund Judge for an explanation of how John missed his first episode of AppStories in seven years this week, an update from Sigmund on what’s coming to tvOS and Apple TV+, plus a bunch of picks from everyone.

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Opting Out of AI Model Training→

Dan Moren has an excellent guide on Six Colors that explains how to exclude your website from the web crawlers used by Apple, OpenAI, and others to train large language models for their AI products. For many sites, the process simply requires a few edits to the robots.txt file on your server:

If you’re not familiar with robots.txt, it’s a text file placed at the root of a web server that can give instructions about how automated web crawlers are allowed to interact with your site. This system enables publishers to not only entirely block their sites from crawlers, but also specify just parts of the sites to allow or disallow.

The process is a little more complicated with something like a WordPress, which MacStories uses, and Dan covers that too.

Unfortunately, as Dan explains, editing robots.txt isn’t a solution for companies that ignore the file. It’s simply a convention that doesn’t carry any legal or regulatory weight. Nor does it help with Google or Microsoft’s use of your website’s copyrighted content unless you’re also willing to remove your site from the biggest search engines.

Although I’m glad there is a way to block at least some AI web crawlers prospectively, it’s cold comfort. We and many sites have years of articles that have already been crawled to train these models, and you can’t unring that bell. That said, MacStories’ robot.txt file has been updated to ban Apple and OpenAI’s crawlers, and we’re investigating additional server-level protections.

If you listen to Ruminate or follow my writing on MacStories, you know that I think what these companies are doing is wrong both in the moral and legal sense of the word. However, nothing captures it quite as well as this Mastodon post by Federico today:

If you’ve ever read the principles that guide us at MacStories, I’m sure Federico’s post came as no surprise. We care deeply about the Open Web, but ‘open’ doesn’t give tech companies free rein to appropriate our work to build their products.

Yesterday, Federico linked to Apple’s Machine Learning Research website where it was disclosed that the company has indexed the web to train its model without the consent of publishers. I was as disappointed in Apple as Federico. I also immediately thought of this 2010 clip of Steve Jobs near the end of his life, reflecting on what ‘the intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts’ meant to Apple:

I’ve always loved that clip. It speaks to me as someone who loves technology and creates things for the web. In hindsight, I also think that Jobs was explaining what he hoped his legacy would be. It’s ironic that he spoke about ‘technology married with Liberal Arts,’ which superficially sounds like what Apple and others have done to create their AI models but couldn’t be further from what he meant. It’s hard to watch that clip now and not wonder if Apple has lost sight of what guided it in 2010.

You can follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2024 hub or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2024 RSS feed.

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Designing Dark Mode App Icons→

Apple’s announcement of “dark mode” icons has me thinking about how I would approach adapting “light mode” icons for dark mode. I grabbed 12 icons we made at Parakeet for our clients to illustrate some ways of going about it.

Before that though, let’s take some inventory. Of the 28 icons in Apple’s preview image of this feature, only nine have white backgrounds in light mode. However, all icons in dark mode have black backgrounds.

Actually, it’s worth noting that five “light mode” icons have black backgrounds, which Apple slightly adjusted to have a consistent subtle black gradient found on all of their new dark mode icons. Four of these—Stocks, Wallet, TV, and Watch—all seem to be the same in both modes. However, no other (visible) icons are.

Fantastic showcase by Louie Mantia of how designers should approach the creation of dark mode Home Screen icons in iOS 18. In all the examples, I prefer Mantia’s take to the standard black background version.

See also: Gavin Nelson’s suggestion, Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines on dark mode icons, and the updated Apple Design Resources for iOS 18.

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