Can You Use a Headless MacBook Air with a Vision Pro?→

Linked By Federico Viticci

Luke Miani (who runs a great YouTube channel I’ve been following for a while) has created the sort of beautiful monstrosity I would absolutely consider for my own workflow: he was able to remove a display from an M2 MacBook Air and use the remaining “macOS slab” as a fully functioning computer for the Vision Pro’s Mac Virtual Display mode.

If the sentence above doesn’t make any sense to you, go watch the video first:

The idea of using headless MacBooks has been around for a while, but I was wondering if it’d find new life with the Vision Pro and the ability to virtualize a Mac display or use Universal Control with it. Which is why I’m very glad that Miani tried this first and confirmed that, yes, a headless MacBook Air totally works as a very expensive Vision Pro accessory.

The reason I’m so fascinated by this project is that I find the current keyboard/trackpad setup on the Vision Pro lackluster. If you don’t want to use a Mac in the middle, your best bet is to get an accessory like a Twelve South MagicBridge to hold a Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad together. However, as I shared earlier this week, that accessory’s form factor is not ideal for lap usage:

I’m waiting for two different “trays” that promise a laptop-like configuration, but as I’ve been told by others online, those don’t fix the fact that the desktop Magic Trackpad doesn’t offer the sort of palm rejection features typically found in Mac laptops.

Which brings me back to Miani’s wonderfully weird and amazing experiment: what if the input portion of a Mac laptop could become a more portable and accurate input method for the Vision Pro, with support for Mac Virtual Display when needed? What if a keyboard computer (Apple II says hi) could be used with the Vision Pro or docked at a desk with a Thunderbolt hub and external monitor?

Realistically, Apple should make this kind of accessory and I’m so surprised that their answer for people who want to work solely on a Vision Pro is “buy the keyboard and trackpad from a few years ago that still have a Lightning connector”. I’m not going to do this to my own MacBook Air. But you have no idea how tempted I am to try.

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Juno 1.1 for visionOS Adds the Ability to Open YouTube.com URLs in the App

By Federico Viticci

Opening videos in Juno from the YouTube website.

John covered Juno, Christian Selig’s new YouTube client for visionOS, on MacStories last week, and I’ve been using the app for the past few days as my default way of watching YouTube videos on my Vision Pro. Today, Selig released version 1.1 of Juno with some welcome quality-of-life enhancements such as the ability to choose video quality, faster load times, and support for dropping YouTube links in the app to watch them directly in Juno. You can read more about the changes on Selig’s blog.

The one new feature I want to call out here is the addition of URL schemes which have, once again, come to the rescue to help me navigate the early limitations of a new Apple platform.

Vision Pro App Spotlight: My Favorite Digital Clock Apps for Vision Pro

By Federico Viticci

It’s clocks all the way down.

Who would have guessed that the category of visionOS apps I’d obsessively download from the App Store would be…digital clocks?

Hear me out: it’s very easy to lose track of time when using – and especially working with – the Vision Pro. It’s not just that the current time, in the absence of a status bar – is tucked away in Control Center, which requires you to look up and open a separate window; it’s that with this new platform, and with all these new apps, I want to try everything and my brain is reacting to dozens of stimuli every minute. Time flies when I’m wearing the Vision Pro, filling my workspace with windows and juggling multiple tasks, and that’s not even to mention when I’m in an immersive environment.

Which brings me to humankind’s greatest invention: the clock. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could always see a digital representation of the current time as a tiny window somewhere in your workspace? And wouldn’t it be even better if that digital clock had configuration options that, you know, a physical clock on a wall can’t offer?

For the past few days, I’ve been downloading essentially every clock app I could find on the visionOS App Store, and I’ve compiled a list of my favorite options so far.

Let’s dive in.

Vision Pro App Spotlight: Things for visionOS Is a Familiar, Intuitive Task Management Experience

By Federico Viticci

Things for visionOS, floating in the sky.

The biggest compliment I can pay to Things for visionOS is that it doesn’t feel like a compromised version of the iPadOS experience at all. In fact, thanks to the spatial nature of multitasking on the Vision Pro, I’d venture to say that Things for visionOS is a better version of the iPad app, at this point second only to its Mac counterpart in terms of functionalities and overall flexibility.

Vision Pro App Spotlight: 1Blocker Brings Content Blocking to Safari for visionOS

By Federico Viticci

1Blocker for visionOS.

In my ongoing quest to try all the visionOS apps developers have been building over the past few months and turn the Vision Pro into my main computer (I’m making great progress on this front), I was pleased to see that 1Blocker is available as a native app and Safari extension on visionOS.

Screens VNC App Now Available in Compatibility Mode for visionOS →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Just yesterday I was looking for ways to VNC into my gaming PC because I wanted to stream Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (an amazing game that you should play) on my Vision Pro using my new NDI encoder (I understand this is a very Ticci phrase; more on this topic soon).

Anyway, I went looking for Screens, my favorite VNC client, on the visionOS App Store, and it wasn’t available. I was surprised by its absence, but I just assumed the folks at Edovia were working on some fixes for the app running on the Vision Pro. I downloaded Jump Desktop, which worked pretty well, but I’ve never been a fan of the Jump Desktop UI, and I’d rather use Screens everywhere.

Right on schedule, Screens for iPad has now been made available on visionOS in compatibility mode. This is excellent news since I can now use Screens on all my Apple devices to quickly connect to my PC and Mac mini server; you can also check out how Screens’ trackpad mode works with visionOS’ gesture system in this blog post.

And once again, you should check out Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth if you haven’t yet (I covered it on Unwind and this episode of Into the Aether about it is a great listen too).

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AppStories, Ep. 370 - 50 minutes

Apple Vision Pro: Hardware First Impressions

Federico

John

AppStories Episode 370 - Apple Vision Pro: Hardware First Impressions

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50:26

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week, Federico and John tell the story of how Federico got his Apple Vision Pro before sharing their first impressions of the Vision Pro hardware.

Early Issues with Shortcuts on visionOS

By Federico Viticci

In playing around with my Vision Pro these past few days, I’ve run into a series of issues and limitations with the Shortcuts app that I thought I’d share here in MacStories Weekly with Club members. At the moment, there is no native Shortcuts app for visionOS, which means that, if you have a Vision...

Vision Pro App Spotlight: Shortcut Buttons Turns Your Shortcuts into Spatial Launchers

By Federico Viticci

Shortcut Buttons for visionOS.

I received my Apple Vision Pro yesterday (for the full story of how it eventually found its way to Italy, you don’t want to miss the next episode of AppStories), and, as you can imagine, I’ve been busy downloading all the apps, learning my way around visionOS and – just today – using the extended Mac display mode. The first 24 hours with a Vision Pro are a whirlwind of curiosity and genuine nerd excitement, but despite my attention being pulled to a hundred different places, I’ve found the time to test one app in particular: Shortcut Buttons by Finn Voorhees.