John Voorhees

5444 posts on MacStories since November 2015

John is MacStories' Managing Editor, has been writing about Apple and apps since joining the team in 2015, and today, runs the site alongside Federico. John also co-hosts four MacStories podcasts: AppStories, which covers the world of apps, MacStories Unwind, which explores the fun differences between American and Italian culture and recommends media to listeners, Ruminate, a show about the weird web and unusual snacks, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about the games we take with us.
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voorhees@macstories.net

Google Releases Gemini for Mac

Google released a native Mac app for its Gemini chatbot today.

The app, which can be launched from your Applications folder, Dock, the menu bar, or a global hotkey, will be familiar to anyone who has used Gemini in a browser. The chatbot supports Gemini 3 in Fast and Thinking modes, as well as Pro mode, which uses Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini can also interact with files, the contents of a window, Google Drive, Photos, and NotebookLM. It’s multimodal, too, with support for the generation of text, images, video, and music. Dig a little deeper into Gemini’s menus and you’ll find support for Canvas, Deep Research, Guided Learning, and Personalized Intelligence.

A Gemini mini window is available from the menu bar and a global hotkey.

A Gemini mini window is available from the menu bar and a global hotkey.

Even though I just downloaded the app a short time ago, my Gemini chat history was immediately available in the app. The history appears in the app’s sidebar along with a search field, My Stuff, which includes things like images and video generated in the past, and access to your account. The app is written in Swift which was a pleasant surprise.

All my past prompts were immediately available in the new Gemini Mac app.

All my past prompts were immediately available in the new Gemini Mac app.

I’ve only just begun testing Gemini for Mac, but I can already tell that it’s a cut above my hand-crafted single-purpose Safari web app solution. All the same tools found on the web are here, but in a native wrapper, which I appreciate. If you use a Mac and Gemini, the new app is well worth giving a try.

Gemini for Mac is available as a free download from Google.

AppStories - Ep. 480 - 38 minutes

OpenAI’s Everything App Trap

JohnFederico

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This week, on AppStories, we return to a topic that’s an old favorite: the Everything App in honor of OpenAI’s announcement that they are building a Super App.

On AppStories+, Federico consolidates the tools and services he uses.

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 480 - OpenAI’s Everything App Trap

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This episode is sponsored by:

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Hour by Hour: Reverse Engineering Your Schedule

Hour by Hour is a clever new approach to scheduling your time from Joe Humfrey of Selkie Design that took me a little while to get used to, but has really grown on me.

The app was inspired by travel planning and the age-old question, “When should I leave for the airport?” You’ve probably been there before. You have a flight at, say, 2:00 pm, but you need to drive 30 minutes to the airport, add some time to park, take a shuttle to the terminal, get through security, and build in a little extra wiggle room just in case traffic is bad or something else goes sideways. Suddenly, 2:00 pm becomes an exercise in mental gymnastics as you work your way back to when you should walk out the door.

Hour by Hour solves this sort of scheduling, but for every type of event, by using the same kind of reverse planning. At the same time, it’s not really a calendar app so much as a scheduling companion for your calendar. You can pull your calendar events into Hour by Hour, but you don’t have to, and if you dive into the app expecting to use it the same way you use a traditional calendar, the assumptions you bring with you will probably trip you up.

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Claude Mythos Preview Will Only Secure Part of the Internet

Yesterday, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new general-purpose model that it says is exceptionally good at finding security vulnerabilities in code. In fact, the model is so good that Anthropic has decided not to release Mythos Preview to the general public. Instead, it’s being released to a select group of companies that control OSes and other critical software.

Anthropic found thousands of vulnerabilities across every major OS and web browser with Mythos Preview, but used these three examples to illustrate their severity:

  • Mythos Preview found a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD—which has a reputation as one of the most security-hardened operating systems in the world and is used to run firewalls and other critical infrastructure. The vulnerability allowed an attacker to remotely crash any machine running the operating system just by connecting to it;
  • It also discovered a 16-year-old vulnerability in FFmpeg—which is used by innumerable pieces of software to encode and decode video—in a line of code that automated testing tools had hit five million times without ever catching the problem;
  • The model autonomously found and chained together several vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel—the software that runs most of the world’s servers—to allow an attacker to escalate from ordinary user access to complete control of the machine.

A lengthy Frontier Red Team report brings the receipts for security researchers with an in-depth look at what Mythos Preview uncovered and the step change that the new model represents over Opus 4.6:

For example, Opus 4.6 turned the vulnerabilities it had found in Mozilla’s Firefox 147 JavaScript engine—all patched in Firefox 148—into JavaScript shell exploits only two times out of several hundred attempts. We re-ran this experiment as a benchmark for Mythos Preview, which developed working exploits 181 times, and achieved register control on 29 more.

As part of a test, Mythos Preview also managed to escape its sandboxed environment, message the researcher conducing the test, and then, outside the parameters of the test, posted about the exploit online.

The idea behind Project Glasswing, whose participants include Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks, is to give them a head start at securing their systems before similar models emerge and are exploited for cyberattacks. If Mythos Preview’s capabilities are as Anthropic makes them out to be, this seems like the right approach. However, I do worry that with time, it could lead to a two-tier Internet where big tech companies operate in relative security thanks to tools like Mythos Preview, while those without access are left to swim with the sharks.