Federico Viticci

9525 posts on MacStories since April 2009

Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, and Unwind, a fun exploration of media and more.

He can also be found on his other podcasts on Relay FM: Connected and Remaster, two shows about Apple and videogames, respectively.

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MultiButton 1.1 Makes the Action Button Change Its Behavior Based on the Currently Open App

The same Action button; multiple behaviors for different apps.

The same Action button; multiple behaviors for different apps.

What if the Action button could change its behavior depending on which app is currently open?

That’s what I started wondering months ago after I released MultiButton, my shortcut for toggling between two commands assigned to the Action button rather than being limited to only one. Having the choice between two distinct commands is great, but can you imagine if MultiButton could become a truly contextual shortcut system that adapted to whatever app is currently on-screen?

I’ve spent the past few months working on this idea, and I’m happy to report that I was able to get it to work. In the process, I realized that what I’d designed was a comprehensive, advanced automation system that can be extended beyond MultiButton to a variety of use cases.

Later this week in MacStories Weekly and exclusively for Club MacStories members (of all tiers), I will release my latest creation that makes contextual app automation possible. It’s called CAPS, which stands for Contextual Apps Plugin System.

CAPS is comprised of three standalone shortcuts that allow you to define rules for which shortcuts should be run when the Action button is pressed while using a particular app. CAPS supports creating an unlimited number of rules for as many apps as you want; best of all, it’s based on an open file format that can be integrated with all kinds of shortcuts.

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The Best Small Feature of visionOS 1.1

Apple released visionOS 1.1 earlier today. The update focuses on a variety of performance enhancements (I’m intrigued to test improved cursor control and Mac Virtual Display), but, arguably, updated Personas are the most important feature of this release.

I haven’t recreated my Persona for visionOS 1.1 yet, but judging by comparisons I’ve seen online, Apple’s 3D avatars should now look more realistic and, well, less creepy than before. David Heaney at UploadVR has a good rundown of the changes in this update.

I’m here to talk about what is, for me, the best small feature of visionOS 1.1, which isn’t even mentioned in Apple’s changelog. In the launch version of visionOS last month, there was an annoying bug in the Shortcuts app (which is still running in compatibility mode) that caused every ‘Open App’ action to open the selected app but, at the same time, also remove every other window from your field of view.

I ran into this issue when I thought I could use shortcuts to instantly recreate groups of windows in my workspace; I was unpleasantly surprised when I realized that those shortcuts were always hiding my existing windows instead. And even worse, every other Shortcuts action that involved launching an app (like Things’ ‘Show Items’ action) also caused other windows to disappear. It was, frankly, terrible.

All of this has been fixed in visionOS 1.1. Using ‘Open App’ actions in Shortcuts doesn’t hide other currently open windows anymore: it just spawns new ones for the apps you selected. This means that a shortcut like this…

…when run on the Vision Pro with visionOS 1.1 will open a Safari window and an Obsidian one in front of other windows I have already open, without hiding them. This unlocks some interesting possibilities for “preset shortcuts” that open specific combinations of windows for different work contexts (such as my writing workspace above) with one tap, which could even be paired with a utility like Shortcut Buttons for maximum efficiency in visionOS. Imagine having quick launchers for your ‘Work’ windows, your ‘Music’ workspace, or your ‘Research’ mode, and you get the idea.

I guess what I’m saying is that my favorite feature of visionOS 1.1 is a bug fix that hasn’t even been mentioned by Apple in their release notes. Maybe I’ll change my mind if my updated Persona won’t make me look like an exhausted 50-year-old Italian blogger anymore, but, for now, this Shortcuts update made visionOS 1.1 worth installing immediately.


Emulation on iPhone

Last year I wrote an about retro gaming on iOS. I’ve had a lot of fun playing games on the platform, especially through emulation. Much of what I wrote last year is still applicable today, but I thought I’d revisit the topic with a focus on the state of emulation on iOS and all of the software and accessories you’ll need to get started.

Excellent overview by Mike Rockwell on the different options iPhone users have for running emulators on iOS. I can also recommend the G8 controller, which, as Club members know, I even modded to fit an iPad Pro.

See also: Wulff Den’s video on using the iPhone as a gaming handheld, and Riley Testut’s announcement that AltStore’s MarketplaceKit entitlement has been accepted by Apple in Europe.

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MacPad: How I Created the Hybrid Mac-iPad Laptop and Tablet That Apple Won’t Make

Hello, MacPad.

Hello, MacPad.

It all started because I wanted a better keyboard for my Vision Pro. I had no idea that, in looking for one, I’d accidentally create the hybrid Apple computer of my dreams.

As I quickly discovered after working on the Vision Pro daily, you can get by without an external trackpad, but a keyboard is necessary if you want to type something longer than a passcode. That’s where my journey began: if I wanted to write and edit articles on the Vision Pro, what would the best keyboard-trackpad setup be?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve tested all the options at my disposal. I started with an Apple Magic Trackpad and Keyboard, which I then placed inside a Twelve South MagicBridge (it was too uncomfortable to put on my lap for longer stretches of time). Next, I tried using different types of “trays” for these two accessories that offered a laptop-like layout (comfort was better, but lack of palm rejection was an issue). I even attempted to revive an old Brydge keyboard and use it with the Vision Pro, but, alas, third-party trackpads aren’t supported on visionOS at the moment.

Eventually, I settled on the solution that I should have known was coming for me all along: the best keyboard and trackpad combo for a Vision Pro is a Mac laptop. So I started using my MacBook Air every day, taking advantage of Mac Virtual Display and Universal Control to get work done with the Vision Pro in a mix of classic desktop apps and new visionOS experiences. I’ll write more about this soon, but, so far, it’s felt powerful and flexible in a way that iPadOS hasn’t made me feel in a while.

But something kept nagging me.

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Beautiful Things for Spatial Computing

I came across this fun website while browsing the Vision Pro community on Reddit: beautifulthings.xyz is a curated collection of 3D USDZ files that you can download for free on any Apple device. On the Vision Pro, these models can be freely placed anywhere in your environment alongside other windows, allowing you to inspect up close, say, a Spider-Man model, a Lamborghini, or, should you feel like it, a first-gen iPod classic.

Here is, for instance, a screenshot of a nice-looking Italian pizza and a Hylian shield just floating around my living room:

Pizza and Zelda? Yep, that's me.

Pizza and Zelda? Yep, that’s me.

According to the website’s creator, more than 100,000 items have been uploaded to the site in the past week alone, and the developers are working on a curated daily feed to showcase the best objects you can view on a Vision Pro.

Fun project, well worth a few minutes of your time even just for opening 3D models of stuff you can’t afford in real life. I hope they’ll consider adding a search functionality next.

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Six Colors’ ‘Apple in 2023’ Report Card

For the past nine years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an ‘Apple report card’ – a survey to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.

The 2023 edition of the Six Colors Apple Report Card has just been published, and you can find an excellent summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for different categories here.

I’m happy that Jason invited me again to share some thoughts and comments on what Apple did in 2023. As you’ll see from my comments, I was very disappointed with the iPad – there was literally no new hardware last year and only minor changes in software – and more intrigued by what’s happening in macOS land. This, I think, will be a recurring theme on MacStories in 2024: as I move my workflow to the Vision Pro with the Mac as an accessory to it, I expect I’ll be using macOS a lot more as a result. In 2023, I was also very impressed with iPhone hardware, somewhat annoyed with the lack of changes to the AirPods line, and surprised by the updates in tvOS 17.

I’ve prepared the full text of my answers to the Six Colors report card, which you can find below.

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Vision Accessibility on Apple Vision Pro

I have low vision. A kind you can’t really correct for with glasses or contacts. I also bought Apple Vision Pro at launch. Why would I do this? Well because I’m a nerd who wants to see the future, but also because I was fascinated to see how Apple would handle accessibility for this new product. Apple’s track record on accessibility in the past decade has been stellar, in my opinion, with their teams adding powerful options every year and ensuring every new platform has accessibility support built in from the start.

After watching Apple’s WWDC23 session on visionOS accessibility, I knew accessibility on visionOS was an important point for them. But even after consuming as much information on the platform as I could, I knew I had to try it for myself to know the answer to the important question: how well does it work for me?

Terrific overview of the Accessibility features of visionOS and Vision Pro by Zach Knox.

It’s no surprise to learn that Apple’s Accessibility team did some amazing work for this new platform too, but it’s impressive to see that on day one of the Vision Pro there are already dozens of Accessibility features and accommodations in place. And keep in mind that these are Accessibility options that work with Apple apps and third-party ones, right out of the box. This is the kind of ecosystem advantage and platform integration that newfound tech reviewer Zuckerberg probably forgot to mention in his video.

See also: Tom Moore’s story on trying the Vision Pro with one eye only, Peter Saathoff-Harshfield’s Mastodon thread, Shelly Brisbin’s story for Six Colors, and Ryan Hudson Peralta’s fantastic overview (via 9to5Mac) of using the Vision Pro without hands, which I’m embedding below.

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Sharing a Vision Pro with Someone Else Is Too Hard

Adi Robertson writes for The Verge about the Vision Pro’s lackluster support for multiple users and how hard it is to share the device with someone else:

The Vision Pro is $3,499 and only one person in your household can ever use it fully, which makes no sense at all. The privacy issues are technically there on the Vision Pro — letting anyone else use it without setting restrictions in guest mode grants them access to everything you’ve got on the headset, including your messages. But as my experience demonstrates, they may not even be able to use it well enough to get that far. You can start a guest session by holding the Vision Pro’s left-side hardware button for four seconds, but you can’t store a second user’s information so they can log in quickly next time without calibration. Basically, imagine if every time you passed an iPad to somebody else in your family, they had to spend a minute poking colored dots.

The worst part of using the Vision Pro for the past two weeks has been trying to get someone else in my family to use it. As a novel type of computer that almost demands to be tried by different people in your life, the lack of multi-user support at launch is a major cause of friction for me right now. I’ve been able to get a separate set of light seal and cushion for Silvia and my mom, but the problem is visionOS. There is a guest mode, but every time someone other than me wants to try the Vision Pro, they have to do the eye setup process from scratch. It gets annoying quickly without the ability to save calibrated presets for other people.

In the demos I’ve conducted for people in my family over the past week, I’ve also realized how hard it is to guide someone else through visionOS for the first time. I wish Apple had built a dedicated “demo app” for new users who try the Vision Pro – sort of like a pre-installed (and interactive) version of Apple’s guided tour, which is also very similar to the demo I had at WWDC last year.

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It’s Time for Apple to Get Weird

Speaking of weird things: I’m on the record with saying that I’d love to see Apple get weird with some of their products, so obviously this story by Jason Snell at Macworld resonated with me:

While I admire the great care Apple takes before it brings a product to market, I do sometimes think that the company is missing out on some potentially great products because they’re not willing to get weird and risk failure. Consider the original MacBook Air, which was deeply weird but led to a second-generation model that became the template for Apple’s laptop design for the next decade!

The technology already exists today for Apple to create some wild stuff, the likes of which we’ve never seen from them. The Vision Pro has broken the seal. Let’s get weird, Apple.

As a longtime proponent of Weird in my computing life (I mean), I love that Apple released the Vision Pro in its current form: it’s a weird product with tons of rough edges and I want to make it my main computer. But, like Jason suggests, there are so many other product categories where I’d like to see Apple try and make something weird and wonderful. I have some experience with Android foldables, including some recent ones, and while I like the form factor a lot, I can’t help but think how glorious an Apple device that unfolded to become a larger tablet could be.

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