Two Months with the Narwal Freo X10 Pro

By John Voorhees

In the depths of the pandemic, I bought an iRobot Roomba j7 vacuum. At the time, it was one of the nicer models iRobot offered, but it was expensive. It did a passable job in areas with few obstacles, but it filled up fast, had a hard time positioning itself on its base and frequently got clogged with debris, requiring me to partially disassemble and clean it regularly. The experience was bad enough that I’d written off robot vacuums as nice-to-have appliances that weren’t a great value.

So, when Narwal contacted me to see if I wanted to test its new Freo X10 Pro, I was hesitant at first. However, I’d seen a couple of glowing early reviews online, so I thought I’d see if the passage of time had been good to robo-vacuums, and boy has it. The Narwal Freo X10 Pro is not only an excellent vacuum cleaner, but a mopping champ, too.

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AppStories - Ep. 465 - 57 minutes

The 2025 MacStories Selects Awards

Federico

John

This week, Federico and John reveal the winners of the 2025 MacStories Selects Awards, which celebrate the exceptional design, innovation, and creativity of apps across the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.

On AppStories+, John has some Apple Music discovery tips for Federico, and they reveal the iPhone features they don’t use.

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AppStories Episode 465 - The 2025 MacStories Selects Awards

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

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Easy Ways To Support Your Favorite Creators

By John Voorhees

First, I want to go on record that I’m not a fan of the word “creator.” It’s not as bad as “influencer” as far as words go, but still, I don’t like it. However, since what I’m going to suggest applies to a wide range of people making videos and podcasts, writing, developing apps and...

Interesting Links

By John Voorhees

Federico

Bluetooth’s Auracast technology promises to revolutionize audio sharing by letting devices connect to broadcasts without pairing. I find this extremely fascinating. However, despite support from companies like JBL, Samsung, and LG, the feature remains largely unknown to consumers, which is too bad. (Link) Spotify is rolling out a beta feature called ‘Prompted Playlists’ in...

App Debuts

By John Voorhees

Federico

Shiuli Shiuli is a new utility for iPhone and iPad (from the creators of longtime favorite LookUp) that aims to solve a common problem: adding alt text descriptions to images shared online. In my experience, most people don’t add alt text to images on social media not because they don’t care about accessibility, but...

How Using AI Tools Can Be Like Asking for a Book Recommendation From a Friend

By John Voorhees

Today, I want to talk about the fuzzy art of book recommendations and how they relate to AI by posing a hypothetical: imagine you’re a lapsed reader and haven’t read fiction or followed books for a decade. You resolve to get back into reading and want to increase the chances that you become a fiction...

Alyx: A Fun, Flexible Way to Track Caffeine Intake

By John Voorhees

Alyx is a new caffeine tracking app for the iPhone by Jordan Morgan that’s simple, fun, and flexible all at once. It’s a great example of marrying Apple’s latest design language with recent technologies in a way that serves its users incredibly well.

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Adobe Announces Image and PDF Integration with ChatGPT

By John Voorhees

Source: Adobe.

Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with OpenAI to give ChatGPT users access to Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat from inside the chatbot. The new integration is available starting today at no additional cost to ChatGPT users.

Source: Adobe.

In a press release to Business Wire, Adobe explains that its three apps can be used by ChatGPT users to:

Easily edit and uplevel images with Adobe Photoshop: Adjust a specific part of an image, fine tune image settings like brightness, contrast and exposure, and apply creative effects like Glitch and Glow – all while preserving the quality of the image.

Create and personalize designs with Adobe Express: Browse Adobe Express’ extensive library of professional designs to find the best one for any moment, fill in the text, replace images, animate designs and iterate on edits – all directly inside the chat and without needing to switch to another app – to create standout content for any occasion.

Transform and organize documents with Adobe Acrobat: Edit PDFs directly in the chat, extract text or tables, organize and merge multiple files, compress files and convert them to PDF while keeping formatting and quality intact. Acrobat for ChatGPT also enables people to easily redact sensitive details.

Source: Adobe.

This strikes me as a savvy move by Adobe. Allowing users to request image and PDF edits and design documents with natural language prompts makes its tools more approachable. That could attract new users who later move to an Adobe subscription to get more control over their creations and Adobe’s other offerings.

From OpenAI’s standpoint, this is clearly a response to the consumer-facing Gemini features that Google has begun releasing, which include new image and video generation tools and reportedly caused Sam Altman to declare a “code red” inside the company. I understand the OpenAI freakout. Google has a huge user base and has been doing consumer products far longer than OpenAI, but I can’t say I’ve been very impressed with Gemini 3. Perhaps that’s simply because I don’t care for generative images and video, but these latest moves by Google and OpenAI make it clear that they see them as foundational to consumer-facing AI tools.

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Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

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Activas: Modern Design with a Sprinkling of AI

By John Voorhees

Activas is a new health and wellness tracker for the iPhone and iPad from developer Brian Hough, who built it from the ground up with Apple Intelligence and Liquid Glass in mind. The app serves as a dashboard that brings together information from the Health app in a colorful and easy-to-understand way, using progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming users with data. It’s a fantastic example of modern design that marries form and function to elevate the user experience.

The app has just two tabs that adopt iOS 26’s Liquid Glass design without sacrificing legibility. The default view is the Dashboard, which can display your recent health and wellness metrics for the last 7, 15, or 30 days. At the top of the Dashboard is a Momentum Score that’s calculated based on a composite of step count, sleep, resting heart rate, and BMI targets, plus your calorie goal. Unlike many similar apps, Activas links to research supporting its targets, which I appreciate. The Momentum Score and a handful of additional stats can also be tracked using one of the app’s Home Screen widgets.

The Momentum Score is followed by an AI-generated insight about your metrics. Because I haven’t been tracking my calories or weight recently, the app suggested I should. That’s followed by overviews of Activity, Nutrition, Sleep, Vitals, and Body Measurement. Each of these sections appears as a SwiftUI-style card that includes graphs showing recent trends, an insight about your metrics, and a suggested question that you can ask the Activas AI with a tap. Sections can be turned on and off and reordered in the app’s settings, too.

The Dashboard’s design is superb. By collecting individual measurements in groups of related statistics and providing a takeaway about each section, the app allows users to get a quick, understandable overview of where they’re succeeding and what needs work.

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