If you read MacStories, you might have caught John’s Finalist 1.0 review a few years back. A lot has changed since: version 4.0 is out this week, its biggest update yet. Finalist is a paper-inspired daily planner for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and now Apple Watch, giving you one place to plan your day, week and month. It wrangles all your stuff into one cohesive system to help you stay on top of it all: Reminders, Calendars, habits, tasks, notes, weather, and lots more.

New in 4.0 are Notes. Write native notes that sync to your iCloud, or point Finalist at a folder of markdown files and it round-trips cleanly with Obsidian vaults, GitHub, or any editor you like. Markdown tasks inside those files show up in your timelines as real tasks, on the right date, with the right tags. There are even timeline swimlanes per tag, to visualize any endeavour.

The Watch app is also new and it extends Finalist to your wrist. Its Now card answers the day’s current question: your first moves in the morning, the running time block with a countdown, an evening wrap-up with streaks to protect. It has some very nifty complications and a Smart Stack widget.

Or take a look at Broadsheet, a newsprint-inspired layout that shines on big screens. It has delightful touches throughout: tap a World Clock and the whole page retunes to another city, with date, weather, tasks, and appointments all in that timezone. The Timeline tab lets you sketch your day in pencil. Perfect for timeblocking, especially with Pencil Pro and its squeeze menu.

Apple has featured Finalist as App of the Day multiple times, and a large Discord community drives it forward. To help you try it, MacStories readers get 50% off their first year with code MACSTORIES40.

Our thanks to Finalist for sponsoring MacStories this week.

You think faster than you can type. Across a day of email, Slack, notes, and chatbot prompts, that gap quietly eats your time.

Cotypist closes that gap. It’s smart autocomplete for your Mac: as you write, it predicts your next few words and shows them inline, right at your cursor. Press Tab to take the next word or the whole line, then carry on. If a suggestion isn’t what you had in mind, keep typing and it catches up within a letter or two. Accept a word here and a line there, and you’ll have to type far less than you used to.

Most AI writing tools try to do too much and don’t sound like you. Cotypist only fills in the words you’d have typed anyway (just faster), and it picks up your vocabulary as you go, so the result still sounds like you. It works almost everywhere you write: Mail, Messages, Slack, Notes, Obsidian, your browser, even the prompt box in ChatGPT. And it all runs on your Mac, so nothing you type ever leaves your Mac.

Cotypist comes from the maker of Timing, the Mac time-tracker many MacStories readers already know, so it’s built to feel native and stay out of your way. Setup takes about a minute: drag it into Applications, launch it, then start typing, no account required.

Cotypist is free to download, with a 30-day Pro trial and no credit card. When the trial ends, you can keep Pro or drop to the free plan. Until the end of August, MacStories readers get 10% off their first bill at cotypist.app/macstories. Give it ten minutes and see if it can keep up with you.

Our thanks to Cotypist for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Staying up to date has never felt more overwhelming.

Between websites, newsletters, podcasts, social media feeds, and specialized publications, valuable information is scattered across countless apps and platforms. The challenge is no longer finding content – it’s keeping up with it without wasting time or missing what matters.

That’s where Inoreader comes in.

Inoreader helps you build your own personalized newsfeed by bringing together the sources you care about in one place. Instead of jumping between websites, inboxes, and apps throughout the day, you can keep up with everything from a single interface designed to help you stay informed while cutting through the noise.

Unlike algorithm-driven feeds, Inoreader puts you in control. Follow the websites and creators you trust and receive their updates directly. No engagement-driven recommendations and endless scrolling, just the content you’ve chosen to follow.

For those who need more than a traditional feed reader, Inoreader offers powerful monitoring tools. Create custom feeds to track keywords, brands, companies, competitors, products, or industry trends across the web and receive updates automatically whenever something new appears.

As your reading list grows, Inoreader helps you organize and revisit important information. Save articles for later, highlight key passages, add notes, and build a searchable archive of knowledge and insights that remains accessible long after you’ve finished reading.

To help you process larger volumes of content, Inoreader’s Intelligence features can summarize articles, extract key insights, and help you make sense of information faster. Whether you’re following daily news, researching a topic, or monitoring developments in your industry, Inoreader helps you stay informed without getting overwhelmed.

Advanced filtering and automation tools can further streamline your workflow by automatically organizing incoming content, surfacing what matters most, and reducing distractions – saving you time while ensuring important updates never slip through the cracks.

Inoreader is available on the web, iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, with offline reading support on mobile, so your newsfeed is always available when you need it.

You can get started with Inoreader for free, or explore everything the Pro plan has to offer with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required. New Pro subscribers can also get 30% off their first year.

Learn more and get started at inoreader.com.

Our thanks to Inoreader for sponsoring MacStories this week.

HomeSnap remembers everything your HomeKit home does, shows you its live status, and tells you the moment something needs attention, right from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. No accounts, no third-party servers, and your data stays private to you.

Your Home, Remembered

Apple’s Home app shows you this instant. HomeSnap shows you the whole story. It quietly captures a snapshot of your entire setup about once a day and tells you exactly what changed, room by room and device by device. A Timeline and a live Event Log let you scroll back through motion, lights, locks, and doors as they happened, so “did the garage really open at 2 a.m.?” finally has an answer.

Your Home Has an API

This is the part power users tend to love. Flip one switch in Settings and HomeSnap serves your home over your own Wi-Fi, off by default, LAN-only, no cloud and no account involved:

• A local web dashboard you can open from any laptop, phone, or tablet on your network: live status tiles, an activity heatmap, charts, and per-room and per-device pages.
• A read-only JSON HTTP API with real endpoints for your home, rooms, accessories, scenes, automations, events, change history, health, and battery and temperature trends. Point a script, a shortcut, or a Home Assistant REST sensor at it and pull structured data out of HomeKit without touching a single Apple framework.
• An MCP server (Model Context Protocol), so you can connect the AI assistant you already use, like Claude, and ask about your home in plain language: “which batteries will die first?”, “what happened in the garage last night?”, “which lights were on longest this week?” The assistant reads your home, read-only, over your own network.
• Markdown and JSON exports of your home and its history, plus live updates over WebSocket for anything you want to build on top.

Everything here is read-only and stays on your network. Nothing about your home is sent to a third party, and you can put a password on it.

Live Status and Smarter Batteries

The My Home tab is your home exactly as it is right now: which lights are on, which doors are open, what every sensor reads. Battery-powered devices are ranked most-urgent-first, and HomeSnap estimates how long each one will last (“about 3 weeks”) from its own history, so a dying sensor never catches you off guard.

Alerts You Actually Want

Build your own notification rules: pick an accessory, pick a trigger (a light turns on, a garage door opens, a fan passes a speed you set), and get told when it happens. Add freeze and overheat temperature alerts, low-battery warnings, and quiet hours so nothing pings you overnight.

Insights Into How Your Home Lives

A native Insights screen shows an activity heatmap of your busiest hours, your most active devices and rooms, each light’s total on-time, and recent door and lock activity. The same numbers power a private web dashboard you can open from any device on your Wi-Fi.

A Vault for Your Setup Codes

HomeSnap saves your HomeKit and Matter pairing codes so you can re-pair a device after a reset. Scan a code or type it in, and it comes back later as a scannable QR or a large, readable number, safely stored in iCloud.

Our thanks to HomeSnap for sponsoring MacStories this week.

If you read MacStories, you’ve likely heard of Halide. For nine years, it’s been the definitive iPhone “pro camera app,” garnering an Apple Design Award, and happy users all over the world. Two years ago, Halide added Process Zero, a feature that lets your iPhone take photos free of AI and algorithms in the spirit of analog photography. Halide Mark III takes that to the next level with its new Looks, Photo Lab, and streamlined design.

Halide Mark III now produces gorgeous photos straight out of camera, thanks to film-inspired Looks developed in partnership with renowned Hollywood colorist Cullen Kelly. For the times you feel like fine-tuning things, Mark III includes a powerful image lab that makes it easy to dial in a perfect look in seconds.

Chip shortages are hitting everyone’s wallets, so we’ve decided to run our first sale in three years, exclusively for MacStories readers. This week only, you can get Halide for 25% off your first year with offer code MACSTORIES2026SUB, or 25% off a one-time-purchase with offer code MACSTORIES2026OTP.

Our thanks to Halide for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Summer and WWDC arrive together this year, and Hello Weather is ready for both. It’s one of the most beloved indie weather apps around, and right now it’s half off, which makes it a great time to give it a try as your daily driver.

Hello Weather has always been known for its simple, friendly, and readable design. The information you care about most, including the current conditions, hourly forecast, and outlook for the days ahead, is always close by, where and when you need them.

It provides instant access to current conditions, the hourly forecast, and the forecast for the days ahead all live on a single screen, so the info you actually care about is right in front of you without having to scroll through clutter or hunt for what you want.

But beneath that simplicity lies an amazing amount of depth. There are a dozen data points, each with a dedicated deep-dive and beautiful charts for the UV Index, Air Quality, Humidity, Wind, Feels Like Temperature, Moon Phase, and more. Extended hourly forecasts make it easy to time an afternoon hike, figure out when the rain will clear, or decide whether Saturday’s barbecue is a go.

Another great touch is that you can choose your own weather data source. Hello Weather supports more than a dozen providers, including Apple Weather, AccuWeather, Foreca, and The Weather Company. Stick with whichever is most accurate for your area, or swap between them to compare.

Hello Weather is loaded with all the latest Apple technologies you expect, too: proactive notifications that fire only when something’s worth knowing, a smooth real-time radar for when conditions change fast, and a great Apple Watch app with rich complications. The flexible widgets are a great way to freshen up your Home Screen, and you can customize themes, icons, and layouts to make the app your own.

The app also respects your privacy. It doesn’t collect user-identifiable data, has no ads, and won’t sell your information. Made by a small independent team, it’s been serving millions of forecasts to happy customers around the world for over a decade, and it’s a regular App of the Day in the App Store.

To celebrate WWDC week, Hello Weather is 50% off: use code WWDC to get half off your first year. Download free, start a 7-day trial, and make it your go-to app for the summer and beyond.

Our thanks to Hello Weather for supporting MacStories’ WWDC coverage this week.

Mindspace is a journal for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac that pulls everything you’d normally find scattered across multiple apps into a single scrollable timeline. The app pulls your writing, photos and videos, voice notes, mood and habit trackers, locations, and tasks together to tell your story. You can even add drawings if you have an iPad and Apple Pencil.

Privacy sits at the core of Mindspace. Entries are stored locally on your device, and iCloud sync uses Apple’s encryption — end-to-end if you have Advanced Data Protection turned on. Nothing is routed through Mindspace’s servers, or anyone else’s for that matter, and a full JSON export is always a tap away in Settings.

The app makes thoughtful use of Apple platform features. A freeform Apple Pencil canvas supports the full palette of available tools, making it a natural place to sketch a diagram, draft a letter, or map out a thought. The Apple Intelligence features run entirely on-device, too. There’s a writing suggestion when you open a blank entry, automatic theme tagging, and a custom journaling prompt for every intention you set. Plus, voice notes recorded inside an entry are transcribed locally using iOS 26’s SpeechAnalyzer, and Apple Health auto-fills steps, heart rate, weight, water, distance, and calories burned into your trackers the moment you open your Today page. There are also Quick Entry, Tasks, and Tracker widgets that make adding and viewing what you track simple.

Visit Mindspace to learn more and download the app. MacStories readers get 50% off their first year automatically at checkout. There’s no code required.

Our thanks to Mindspace for sponsoring MacStories this week.

BetterTouchTool has long been one of the Mac’s most versatile customization tools, offering deep control over trackpad and mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, Stream Deck buttons, Floating Menus, window actions, Apple Shortcuts, and more.

The latest version adds a powerful new Spotlight-like Launcher that brings many parts of your Mac and BTT together in one fast interface. Open it with e.g. a hotkey, gesture, mouse button, or Stream Deck button, then launch apps, run Shortcuts, search and browse files, switch windows, use clipboard history, create reminders or calendar events, control Apple TV, and run BTT actions. The Launcher also handles complex calculations and unit conversions directly in the search field, powered by the excellent Soulver.app.

Your own BTT triggers can appear there too, so personal automations sit alongside apps, files, Shortcuts, and system actions.

One of the Launcher’s most powerful features is native Swift plugin support. Plugins can add rows, commands, nested results, and rich custom interfaces inside the Launcher window, making it possible to build mini apps for BTT: dashboards, device controllers, API clients, automation panels, and more. BetterTouchTool’s built-in [email protected] assistants can even create custom Launcher plugins from a prompt, making advanced customization more approachable for Mac power users.

Since BetterTouchTool’s last sponsored MacStories post, input-device support has expanded too. Native Logitech mouse and keyboard support makes many Logitech devices directly configurable in BTT without extra software, including special keys and remappable buttons. Normal mouse support has gained scroll modifiers, e.g. for smooth scrolling, drag gestures, and trackpad-like interactions such as fluid space switching and zooming, while Magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse users continue to get new options for deep gesture customization.

Try BetterTouchTool free for 45 days at folivora.ai. MacStories readers can use MACSTORIESBTT2026 for 20% off a license.