Posts tagged with "mac"

First Look: Logitech’s MX Creative Console Is Poised to Compete with Elgato’s Stream Deck Lineup

Source: Logitech.

Source: Logitech.

Today, Logitech revealed the MX Creative Console, the company’s first product that takes advantage technology from Loupedeck, a company it acquired in July 2023.

I’ve been a user of Loupedeck products since 2019. When I heard about the acquisition last summer, I was intrigued. Loupedeck positioned itself as a premium accessory for creatives. The company’s early products were dedicated keyboard-like accessories for apps like Adobe Lightroom Classic. With the Loupedeck Live and later, the Live S, Loupedeck’s focus expanded to encompass the needs of streamers and automation more generally.

Suddenly, Loupedeck was competing head-to-head with Elgato and its line of Stream Deck peripherals. I’ve always preferred Loupedeck’s more premium hardware to the Stream Deck, but that came at a higher cost, which I expect made it hard to compete.

The Logitech MX Creative Console slots nicely into my existing setup.

The Logitech MX Creative Console slots nicely into my existing setup.

Fast forward to today, and the first Logitech product featuring Loupedeck’s know-how has been announced: the MX Creative Console. It’s a new direction for the hardware, coupled with familiar software. I’ve had Logitech’s new device for a couple of weeks, and I like it a lot.

The MX Creative Console is first and foremost built for Adobe users. That’s clear from the three-month free trial to Creative Cloud that comes with the $199.99 device. Logitech has not only partnered with Adobe for the free trial, but it has worked with Adobe to create a series of plugins specifically for Adobe’s most popular apps, although plugins for other apps are available, too.

Read more

Reeder: A New Approach to Following Feeds

15 years into its life, Reeder is one of the most popular and beloved RSS readers available on Apple’s platforms. You can’t have a discussion about the best way to follow RSS feeds without Reeder coming up as a contender – and believe me, we’ve had many such discussions here at MacStories and on the Club MacStories+ Discord. It’s an institution, and one that many people have very strong feelings about.

With a product as successful and engrained as Reeder, it would be easy for the app’s developer Silvio Rizzi to stick to what works and keep it the same without rocking the boat. But to Rizzi’s credit, that’s absolutely not the case with the new version of Reeder, which is available today. Instead, the new Reeder expands the app’s scope far beyond that of a typical RSS reader and fundamentally rethinks the traditional approach to keeping up with feeds. It’s a massive break from the past that will likely prove divisive among Reeder’s longtime user base. At the same time, it has the potential to appeal to a whole new audience of users who’ve never tried RSS readers before.

Reeder Classic (formerly Reeder 5) is here to stay.

Reeder Classic (formerly Reeder 5) is here to stay.

There’s a lot to cover in this update, but first, a word of reassurance for fans of Reeder as we know it: it isn’t going anywhere. The previous version, Reeder 5, has been renamed Reeder Classic and remains available on the App Store. In fact, Rizzi intends to continue developing Reeder Classic in conjunction with the new version. If you want to stick with the Reeder you know and love, you certainly can, and I think offering both versions is the right call given the huge change in direction Rizzi has gone with this update.

The best word to describe the new Reeder is “ambitious.” Its purpose is not just to be your RSS reader, but your inbox for keeping up with feeds of many different kinds from various sources across the Internet – text from websites, sure, but also videos on YouTube, audio from podcasts, posts on social media, and more. It’s a one-stop shop for the feeds you follow online, collecting them together into a single timeline that you can seamlessly browse across all of your devices. As I said, it’s a lofty goal.

It’s also quite different from what previous versions of Reeder were trying to do. In order to take on this new role as an inbox for all of your feeds, Reeder has been rebuilt from the ground up, a characteristic that shows both in its design and functionality. Many new features have been added, but nearly as many have been removed. Whether this update looks like a streamlined evolution or a stripped-down regression depends largely on if you’re interested in this sort of catch-all tool at all, but that’s the risk one takes when reimagining an established product in such a substantial way.

Read more

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.

Read more

Creating a Custom Weather and Home Climate Control Menu Bar App with MenuBot and Shortcuts

Last year, I wrote about how I was able to display the temperature from my outdoor sensor in my Mac’s menu bar using a combination of Shortcuts, SF Symbols, and small utilities like One Thing and Data Jar. I’ve been using this approach ever since, but this summer, I came across a tool that changed that: MenuBot.

MenuBot is an app for the Mac that lets you build your own indicators and applets for your menu bar directly from the output of a shortcut. The app is more powerful than it may seem at first: you can create entire submenus and even tie URLs and actions to each menu entry. In the end, I was able to use it to completely revamp my outdoor temperature indicator in the menu bar and even enhance it with HomeKit controls.

I’ve been having a ton of fun playing with MenuBot. Let me show you what I’ve done with it.

Read more

NotchNook and MediaMate: Two Apps to Add a Dynamic Island to the Mac

The Dynamic Island has been one of my favorite software additions to the iPhone since it was introduced with the iPhone 14 Pro lineup. The feature is a fun blend of hardware and software that turns the new pill-shaped TrueDepth camera array into a status bar that can collapse and expand to display media controls, Live Activities, and more.

While Live Activities are now also available on iPadOS, neither the iPad nor the Mac have gotten a Dynamic Island following their latest hardware and software revisions. I would argue that the latest generations of Apple silicon MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are pretty good candidates for a Dynamic Island. Both lineups feature a notched screen that currently doesn’t serve any purpose apart from expanding the display to the top edges of the laptop’s aluminum case and limiting the amount of space available for Mac menu bar apps.

Today, I’m taking a look at two Mac apps that add functionality to the notch to make it more Dynamic Island-like. Both have made me realize that, while not absolutely essential, the Dynamic Island definitely has a place on the Mac.

Read more

Unread 4.0 Brings a Fast and Native RSS Reader to the Mac

Unread by Golden Hill Software has long been an excellent and elegant RSS client for iOS and iPadOS. Today, it arrives on macOS with version 4.0. While I have been exploring new ways to keep up with my favorite feeds as the web enters its federated era, using Unread on the Mac hasn’t felt like a step backwards. Unread 4.0 is a fully native, fully-featured app built using AppKit and SwiftUI that feels modern and performs incredibly quickly.

Let’s check it out.

Read more

The Story Behind Half-Life’s Canceled Mac Port→

Half-Life was a defining game of the late 90s, which is why Mac users were excited when a Mac OS port was announced in 1999. However, within months, the game was canceled. As Greg Gant writes on Inaudible Discussion:

The official reason why the port was axed was given by Gabe Newell, president of Valve, citing the lack of Team Fortress Classic and multiplayer with PC users and fear of releasing an inferior product.

However, according to a companion video version of the post on the Definitive Mac Upgrade Guide channel, the real reason was bad blood between Apple and Valve, Half-Life’s developer:

Drawing from an interview with developer Rebecca Heineman, who worked on the port, the video explains that Valve canceled the port after being misled by an Apple games evangelist about expected sales figures.

In addition to Heineman’s story about the cancellation of the Mac port of Half-Life, the video covers how Valve intended to bring the technology that powers the Steam Deck to the Mac and why it never did. Plus, for those who have always wanted to play Half-Life on the Mac, Gant explains the best ways to do so on a variety of Mac architectures.

Gant’s story of the failed Half-Life port is an interesting bit of Apple history from a time when most major videogames were ported to the Mac. That’s no longer the case, although Apple seems to be making efforts to turn that tide. Gant’s story shows that there’s a lot of history to overcome.

Permalink

Managing Your Mac Menu Bar: A Roundup of My Favorite Bartender Alternatives

For years, Bartender has remained one of the best ways to manage the Mac’s menu bar, especially on newer MacBook models with a notch where menu bar real estate is even more valuable. I reviewed the great Bartender 5 last year and came away impressed. Unfortunately, though, my relationship with Bartender is not in a great place today.

Three months ago, the app was silently acquired by a company called Applause. Obviously, acquisitions happen, and often without any hiccups. In this case, however, users were caught off guard as the new owners had to renew all of Bartender’s certificates. This caused a permission reset for everyone who had the app installed on their Mac, prompting some understandable concern on Reddit, where the new owners finally started explaining what was happening. Up to that point, no one was even aware that the app had been acquired.

Apps like Bartender tend to require numerous sensitive system permissions to work. It makes sense: there are no native APIs provided by Apple to manage the menu bar, which is why Bartender has no choice but to rely on accessibility APIs and screen recording access to power its features. But this is exactly why a silent acquisition can be worrying. Even if both the original developer and the new owners have since clarified the situation, it’s hard to trust an unfamiliar company with all of these system permissions when they’ve already failed a necessary trust exercise on day one.

If your trust in Bartender has wavered as a result of this series of events, you may be looking for alternatives. I have been, too. So, I’ve rounded up some of my favorite menu bar management utilities available right now and even a couple of macOS tips to help manage the menu bar without having to install any third-party apps at all.

Let’s check them out.

Read more

QuickTune: A Music Remote App for Mac with Tiger Vibes

I’m not usually nostalgic about apps. I appreciate classic designs from the past, but I find ‘new’ more exciting. However, for every rule, there’s an exception, and for me, it’s Mario Guzmán’s beautiful, pixel-perfect reimagining of classic Apple music apps.

Guzmán’s latest app is QuickTune, a remote control utility for Apple Music. The app is the spitting image of QuickTime 71 running on Mac OS X Tiger, with a sprinkling of modern features and fun interactions that make it a pleasure to use.

Read more