Why The Way Apps Are Made Has Changed 
This week, Federico and John look at how making apps has changed along with the evolution of Apple’s hardware lineup and what that means for the future of apps on those platforms.
The End of the Light Strip Saga, and A New Beginning for My Home Automation Who would have guessed that sometimes the most obvious answer is also the correct one? (Well, I can name one guy.) For the past two weeks, I’ve been writing about my experiment with an RGB light strip that I got from Amazon and wanted to make compatible with HomeKit by using either Homebridge or Home...
It’s the Year of Linux on Light Strips This piece for the Monthly Log was supposed to be a different one. In the latest issue of MacStories Weekly, I wrote about how I installed a Bluetooth-powered RGB light strip on my balcony and my idea for making it HomeKit-compatible by using either Homebridge or Home Assistant. I thought that was going to be...
Where Is The App Economy Heading?
From a Balcony Light Strip to Matter Updates My girlfriend and I have finally reached the point where we’re thinking about furniture for our balcony (we moved into our new place a year ago and, let me tell you, buying furniture and lights is…a process) and one of the things I knew I wanted to have was a multi-color light strip that would...
macOS Sonoma and iOS and iPadOS 17 Public Betas
Combining Notes’ Tables and Internal Links for Effective Note Launchers For this week’s issue of MacStories Weekly, I want to show you something very simple and effective I’ve started doing in the Notes app for iOS and iPadOS 17 to more easily navigate my frequently used notes. Ever since I recreated a Dashboard note in the Notes app (for context, this serves as a central...
Speaking of catching up on my reading queue: here’s Chris Welch, writing at The Verge last week about tvOS 17:
tvOS 17 isn’t trying to reinvent any of this. There are now six icons in each row, so you can add yet another app to your main “dock” at the top of the screen, but that’s about as exciting as the big interface changes get. Apple no longer seems preoccupied with becoming some all-encompassing aggregation hub for streaming entertainment, and there are good reasons for this. The company’s pipe dream of streaming content from popular third-party subscription services directly from the Apple TV app quickly fell apart. Netflix refuses to play ball with any effort to create a universal watchlist outside of the confines of its own app — whether it’s from Apple, Google, or anyone else — so what’s the point? Things are now more fragmented than I’d like, but it’s the content owners and streaming services putting those walls up for their own self-interest.
So instead, Apple is making improvements and touching up areas of the Apple TV experience that it can fully control. And it’s starting with one of the iPhone’s first major ecosystem tricks.
Chris put together a great list of changes coming to tvOS this year, most of them revolving around the ecosystem advantage Apple has compared to their competitors in this field. Rather than trying to beat Google and Amazon on price, Apple is finally leaning into the unique feature they have: iPhone owners who also have an Apple TV.
My favorite change coming in tvOS 17, however, is something that will allow me to stop using my iPhone when watching TV: VPN apps.
For years I’ve been forced to watch HBO content1 with a fake US account by starting playback on the iPhone and AirPlaying the video stream to my Apple TV. Later this year, I’ll be able to install a VPN app directly on the Apple TV and stream content on it without having to worry about my iPhone and AirPlay. Good riddance.
As I always do every summer, I read other journalists’ opinions about the new versions of iOS and iPadOS after I’ve published my preview story. This week, as I’m catching up on my reading queue (yes, I’m still using the Reading List/Notes setup I described here), I was pleased to see I’m not the only one who’s liking the new Stage Manager for iPadOS 17. Similarly, I’m not alone in thinking Apple should continue refining the iPad’s multitasking system and catching up with macOS.
Here’s Jason Snell, writing last week at Six Colors:
Unfortunately, one of my most hoped-for features for Stage Manager didn’t make it into iPadOS 17: you can’t run the iPad on an external display with its internal screen shut off, as you can when a MacBook runs in lid-closed mode. Not only can the second screen be distracting, but there’s stuff Apple insists on displaying on the iPad screen, and sometimes apps get thrown over to the iPad screen when you don’t want them there.
I’ve been working with the fake clamshell mode I detailed on MacStories for the past few weeks. It’s doable, but some of the inherent limitations of this workaround are incredibly annoying. For instance: there’s no way to show Control Center on an external display (seriously). I want to believe Apple is working on a real clamshell mode for iPadOS 18.
David Pierce, writing at The Verge, has also some ideas for features still missing from Stage Manager:
But now Apple needs to make Stage Manager an actual iPad feature. It needs to integrate it with the other iPadOS navigational tools and windowing systems in a way that makes sense. Let me have widgets and apps together in a space! And please, please let me save a collection of apps with a name and then bring it up with a Spotlight search, please. It needs to take advantage of the tablet’s outrageous processing power and actually let you use more than four apps at a time. It needs, in short, to make Stage Manager feel like part of the iPad instead of a wholly separate device that just happens to live inside the same screen.
The more I look at macOS Sonoma, the more I wish I could see widgets from my iPad’s Home Screen underneath Stage Manager’s windows. That’s the kind of feature that would make a lot of sense on a bigger iPad Pro.
John