THIS WEEK'S SPONSOR:

Kolide

Ensure that only secure devices can access your cloud apps. It’s Zero Trust tailor-made for Okta.

MacStories Unwind: Octopath Traveler II and Bono & The Edge, A Sort of Homecoming with David Letterman

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This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico is a fan of what Square Enix has done with Octopath Traveler II and I enjoy a tour of Dublin and one of my favorite bands in Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming with David Letterman.

Sponsored by: Kolide – Ensures only secure devices can access your cloud apps. It’s Zero Trust, tailor-made for Okta. Book a demo today.

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Federico’s Pick:

John’s Pick:

Coming Soon: The Second Annual Automation April Community Event Featuring Shortcuts, Interviews, Discord Workshops, and a Shortcut Contest

We are back with another edition of Automation April. Last year’s kickoff event was a big success. We published a wide variety of automation stories, released special podcast episodes, held online automation events, and capped off the month with a Shortcuts contest. But best of all, we saw tremendous excitement and participation throughout the automation community. It was amazing to see the community come together to share their love of automation and learn from each other all month long.

Great automation is about more than efficiency. It’s also about making your devices your own, so they suit your needs better than off-the-shelf apps can by themselves. The spirit of tinkering, customization, and building something better is what Automation April is all about, which is why we’re pleased to be spending April showcasing automation on Apple platforms alongside developers and MacStories readers again this year.

If you joined us for Automation April last year, you’ve got a head start on what to expect this year. For everyone else, you can expect special Automation April stories on MacStories.net, special episodes of AppStories, themed issues of our Club MacStories newsletters, and events in the Club MacStories+ Discord community. Along the way, MacStories will turn 14 on April 20th, which makes this month all the more special for us. We’ve got a lot planned, so let’s dig into things in a little more detail:

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AppStories, Episode 321 – Revisiting RSS→

This week on AppStories, we revisit RSS to talk about how syncing services and apps have changed and share how our use of RSS has evolved.

Sponsored by:

  • Kolide – Kolide ensures only secure devices can access your cloud apps. It’s Zero Trust tailor-made for Okta. Book a demo today.
  • Zocdoc: Find the right doctor, right now with Zocdoc. Sign up for free.
  • Setapp: More than 230 powerful apps. Try it free for 7 days.
[Subscribe here.](https://appstories.net/plans)

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, I am dipping my toe into co-working but wonders if I’m more into the idea of it than it is useful.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

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

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Last Week, on Club MacStories: A Markdown Editor, Why Safari for iOS is So Good, and Apple TV+’s Slow Horses

Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings:

MacStories Weekly: Issue 360

Up Next: AV Club, Featuring Slow Horses

AV Club is a monthly event held in the Club MacStories+ Discord community. Club members vote on a movie, TV show, videogame, book, or music to enjoy as a group. It’s like a book club but for all kinds of media.

Join us Thursday at 11 am Eastern US time in the Club MacStories+ Discord community for a live AV Club discussion of the Apple TV+ British spy drama Slow Horses. Federico, Jonathan, and I will record the conversation and release it in the Town Hall podcast feed.

Six 8BitDo Controllers Add Support for Apple Hardware

Source: 8BitDo

Source: 8BitDo

8BitDo, a popular maker of game controllers, announced today that six of its products now officially support Apple hardware:

  • 8BitDo Ultimate Controller 2.4g
  • 8BitDo Pro 2
  • 8BitDo SN30 Pro +
  • 8BitDo Pro
  • 8BitDo SN30 Pro for Android
  • 8Bitdo Lite SE

The controller firmware update, which can be applied using the company’s Upgrade Tool, will allow gamers to use 8BitDo’s supported controllers wirelessly with any iOS, iPadOS, macOS, or tvOS game that has adopted Apple’s game controller APIs. Playing wired is also supported on iPads and Macs with USB-C ports.

According to 8BitDo, up to four controllers can be connected at once for games with multiplayer support, but rumble and motion control are not supported “for the moment,” suggesting that a future update may support those features. Links to detailed directions and illustrations of how to connect 8BitDo’s controllers are available by hovering over the images of the controllers on the company’s dedicated Apple device webpage.

I have a bunch of the controllers for which Apple device support was announced, and I can’t wait to try them. A couple of the controllers I have already have some basic support for Apple devices, thanks to compatibility with Sony and Microsoft controllers. However, the firmware update should extend the functionality of the controllers to the full set of features that Apple now supports.

Microsoft and Netflix Aim to Challenge Apple in Mobile Gaming

Two pieces of mobile gaming news caught my eye this morning.

The first was an interview that Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, gave to the Financial Times. The annual Game Developer Conference began today, and Spencer wants developers to know that Microsoft intends to publish games on mobile devices:

We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play.

He continued:

Today, we can’t do that on mobile devices but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up.

Spencer is banking that the EU’s Digital Markets Act will force Apple and Google to open up their devices early next year. Microsoft is having troubles of its own with US, UK, and EU regulators over its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Part of Spencer’s strategy to win regulators over appears to be the prospect of bringing competition to mobile gaming with its own store and a native Game Pass app that isn’t relegated to streaming via a browser, which is the case for it and services like NVIDIA’s GeForce Now under current App Store rules.

The second piece of news comes from Netflix, which says it has 40 mobile games coming to iOS in 2023, which will join the 55 already available. Working within the constraints of the App Store’s guidelines, Netflix’s games are released as separate App Store downloads that Netflix subscribers can download and play at no additional cost. I’ve been impressed with the quality of the games released by Netflix, which include titles like TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge, Kentucky Route Zero,Reigns: Three Kingdoms, Oxenfree, and Lucky Luna.

However, perhaps even bigger than the news of Netflix’s growing catalog is that the first two Monument Valley games are coming to the company’s mobile game catalog in 2024. That’s a big deal because both games are currently part of an Apple Arcade subscription, as well as being available as separate App Store purchases. It’s not clear whether the games will remain part of Arcade after they’re published by Netflix, but even if they are, it will provide another avenue to play the games at no additional cost, which will dilute the value of an Arcade subscription.

Microsoft and Netflix are already competing with Apple in mobile gaming to a degree, but their hands are tied by App Store guidelines. Microsoft has settled on streaming games, which is clunky and constrained, while Netflix has launched dozens of individual games without a good way to organize and market them under their brand.

What Microsoft and Netflix have done so far demonstrates that a little competition is a good thing. Developers have more avenues for publishing their games, and consumers have more choices. The Digital Markets Act has the potential to be the catalyst that opens the door to competition even wider, which I expect will create all sorts of new opportunities for developers and consumers alike.

Kolide: Can Zero Trust Be Saved? [Sponsor]

Right now, “Zero Trust” is in serious danger of becoming an empty buzzword. The problem isn’t just that marketers have slapped the Zero Trust label on everything short of breakfast cereal–it’s that for all the hype, we don’t seem to be getting any safer.

At the heart of Zero Trust is a good idea, but the way most companies execute that idea is incomplete. Specifically, most security practitioners forget that device compliance is a crucial element of Zero Trust.

Think about it: your identity provider can ensure that only known devices access your company’s apps, but just because you recognize a device, doesn’t mean it’s in a secure state. A malware-infected laptop running an outdated OS can’t exactly be “trusted.” And you can’t count on MDMs to achieve total compliance. Things like unencrypted access credentials are out of their reach, not to mention Linux devices writ large.

Kolide solves the device compliance element of Zero Trust for companies that use Okta.

Our premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps.

Kolide’s unique approach works with Okta to make device compliance part of the authentication process. If a device isn’t compliant, users can’t log in to their cloud apps until they’ve fixed the problem. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own.

Kolide works across your Mac, Windows, and even Linux devices, with mobile support coming soon. Our lightweight agent complements your existing tools, brings a lot of compliance issues into scope and under control, and can complete your Zero Trust picture.

To learn more and see our product in action, visit kolide.com.

Our thanks to Kolide for sponsoring MacStories this week.

The Mac and iPad Pro Are on a Collision Course→

Jason Snell, in an excellent column for Macworld:

Sometimes I look back at all the effort Apple has made with the iPad Pro and wonder if it was worth it. All the additions of Mac-ish features have added complexity that’s probably lost on most users of iPadOS, and the power users for whom they were intended are probably well aware of all the ways they don’t really match up the Mac features they’re duplicating.

I want to see what happens when the walls come down. Today’s iPad Pro is powered by the same chip that’s in the MacBook Air. Would it be such a cataclysm if I could simply reboot that iPad into macOS or run macOS inside a virtual machine?

Likewise, what if the Mac had a touchscreen and Apple Pencil support and came in shapes that weren’t the traditional laptop? What if the Mac began to offer the ergonomic flexibility that iPadOS is so good at? What if I ripped the keyboard off a MacBook and had the option to switch to a touch-based mode that was essentially iPadOS?

I love this story, which I recommend reading in its entirety, because it feels as if Jason stared directly into my soul and wrote about something I’ve been feeling for the past several months.

From my perspective, Stage Manager’s failure to reinvent multitasking and iPadOS’ perennial lack of pro features (Jason mentions a proper audio subsystem in his story, and I agree; I wrote this four years ago, and nothing has improved) were the final straw that convinced me to start looking elsewhere for a convertible computer in my life. I could buy a MacBook Air, but I don’t want to be stuck with a laptop that doesn’t have a touchscreen and whose keyboard you can’t detach.

I fear that I’m going to have to wait a couple of years for the Apple computer I want to exist, and I’m not sure anymore that iPadOS can evolve in meaningful ways in the meantime.

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