John
AppStories Episode 419 - An Apple Intelligence Wish List
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This week, Federico and John look ahead to WWDC and beyond to consider how Apple Intelligence could be used to change the way we use our iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
Importing GoodLinks Articles Into Readwise Reader via the API
I know, I know. A few months ago, I wrote about finally having found the read-later app I’d been looking for in GoodLinks, a fantastic native experience for Apple platforms that supports highlights, has extensive Shortcuts actions, and integrates with widgets on both the Home and Lock Screens. The problem was, the more I used...
App Debuts
Explode I wouldn’t be surprised if Explode turns out to be the next viral iPhone app, or at the very least, a utility that will be acquired by Meta, Apple, or Snap. It’s an iPhone/iMessage app combo that lets you send self-destructing (thus the name) texts to your friends using Messages. You can set...
Apple Prophecies and Predictions for 2025
AppStories Episode 418 - Apple Prophecies and Predictions for 2025
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This week on AppStories, Federico and John predict what we’ll see from Apple in 2025. From agentic AI to App Intents and Siri, they explore what will shape the year ahead and the implications to users and developers.
Funnel
In my quest to find the easiest, fastest, and most reliable way to append text to a section of my daily note in Obsidian, I want to highlight an app that I’ve been using with great success over my holiday break: Funnel, created by indie developer Dharam Kapila. Funnel has been around for a while,...
“I Live My Life a Quarter Century at a Time”→
Two days ago was the 25th anniversary of Steve Jobs unveiling the Aqua interface for Mac OS X for first time at Macworld Expo. James Thomson published a great personal retrospective on one particular item of the Aqua UI that was shown off at the event: the original dock.
The version he showed was quite different to what actually ended up shipping, with square boxes around the icons, and an actual “Dock” folder in your user’s home folder that contained aliases to the items stored. I should know – I had spent the previous 18 months or so as the main engineer working away on it. At that very moment, I was watching from a cubicle in Apple Cork, in Ireland. For the second time in my short Apple career, I said a quiet prayer to the gods of demos, hoping that things didn’t break. For context, I was in my twenties at this point and scared witless.
James has told this story before, but there are new details I wasn’t familiar with, as well as some links worth clicking in the full story.
NVIDIA Announces GeForce NOW Support Coming to Safari on Vision Pro Later This Month
With a press release following an otherwise packed keynote at CES (which John and Brendon, my NPC co-hosts, attended in person last night), NVIDIA announced that their streaming service GeForce NOW is going to natively support the Apple Vision Pro…well, sort of.
There aren’t that many details in NVIDIA’s announcement, but the gist of it is that Vision Pro users will be able to stream games by visiting the GeForce NOW website when a new version launches “later this month”.
Get immersed in a new dimension of big-screen gaming as GeForce NOW brings AAA titles to life on Apple Vision Pro spatial computers, Meta Quest 3 and 3S and Pico virtual- and mixed-reality headsets. Later this month, these supported devices will give members access to an extensive library of games to stream through GeForce NOW by opening the browser to play.geforcenow.com when the newest app update, version 2.0.70, starts rolling out later this month.
This is all NVIDIA said in their announcement, which isn’t much, but we can speculate on a few things based on the existing limitations of visionOS.
For starters, the current version of Safari on visionOS does not support adding PWAs to the visionOS Home Screen. Given that the existing version of GeForce NOW requires saving a web app to begin the setup process, this either means that a) NVIDIA knows a visionOS software update in January will add the ability to save web apps or b) GeForce NOW won’t require that additional step to start playing on visionOS. The latter option seems more likely.
Second, as we covered last year, there is a workaround to play with GeForce NOW on visionOS, and that is the Nexus⁺ app. I’ve been using the Nexus⁺ app on my Vision Pro to stream Indiana Jones and other games from the cloud, and while the resolution is good enough1, what bothers me is the lack of HDR and Spatial Audio support (which should work with the Web Audio API in Safari for visionOS 2.0) in GeForce NOW when accessed from Nexus⁺’s built-in web browser.
With all this in mind, I’m going to guess that, at a minimum, NVIDIA will support a PWA-free installation method in Safari for visionOS. I’m less optimistic about HDR and Spatial Audio, but as I gravitate more and more toward cloud streaming rather than local PC streaming2, I’d be happily proven wrong here.
My only question is: with the App Store’s “new” rules, why isn’t NVIDIA making a native GeForce NOW app for Apple platforms?
- I’d love to know from people who know more about this stuff than I do whether Safari 18’s support for the WebRTC HEVC RFC 7789 RTP Payload Format makes a difference for GeForce NOW streaming or not. ↩
- I’m actually thinking about selling my 4090 FE GPU in an effort to go all-in on cloud streaming and SteamOS in lieu of Windows in 2025. But this is a future topic for NPC. ↩
Our Holiday Nerd Projects
Quickly Appending Notes to My Obsidian Daily Note with Drafts
As I will share in the final AppStories episode of the year next week, one of the projects I will tackle over the holidays is spending more time with Obsidian again, fine-tuning the daily note template I teased a while back and optimizing the app for writing and note-taking with automation. Hopefully, this will result...