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LLMs Have Made Simple Software Trivial→

I enjoyed this thought-provoking piece by (award-winning developer) Matt Birchler, writing for Birchtree on how he’s been making so-called “micro apps” with AI coding agents:

I was out for a run today and I had an idea for an app. I busted out my own app, Quick Notes, and dictated what I wanted this app to do in detail. When I got home, I created a new project in Xcode, I committed it to GitHub, and then I gave Claude Code on the web those dictated notes and asked it to build that app.

About two minutes later, it was done…and it had a build error.

And:

As a simple example, it’s possible the app that I thought of could already be achieved in some piece of software someone’s released on the App Store. Truth be told, I didn’t even look, I just knew exactly what I wanted, and I made it happen. This is a quite niche thing to do in 2026, but what if Apple builds something that replicates this workflow and ships it on the iPhone in a couple of years? What if instead of going to the App Store, they tell you to just ask Siri to make you the app that you need?

John and I are going to discuss this on the next episode of AppStories about the second part of the experiments we did over our holiday break. As I’ll mention in the episode, I ended up building 12 web apps for things I have to do every day, such as appending text to Notion just how I like it or controlling my TV and Hue sync box. I didn’t even think to search the App Store to see if new utilities existed: I “built” (or, rather, steered the building of) my own progressive web apps, and I’m using them every day. As Matt argues, this is a very niche thing to do right now, which requires a terminal, lots of scaffolding around each project, and deeper technical knowledge than the average person who would just prompt “make me a beautiful todo app.” But the direction seems clear, and the timeline is accelerating.

I also can’t help but remember this old rumor from 2023 about Apple exploring the idea of letting users rely on Siri to create apps on the fly for the then-unreleased Vision Pro. If only the guy in charge of the Vision Pro went anywhere and Apple got their hands on a pretty good model for vibe-coding, right?

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macOS Tahoe’s Messy Menus→

Nikita Prokopov writing on tonsky.me about macOS Tahoe’s menu icons:

In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.

It’s a brutal assessment of the sprinkling of iconography throughout Tahoe’s menu system that had me nodding along in agreement as I read it.

There’s no denying the inconsistencies in icon choices, their lack of legibility, and the overall clutter added to menus. Yet at the same time, I can’t say I’ve been terribly bothered by them either. That’s probably because I use keyboard shortcuts and launchers so much, rarely relying on the Mac’s menu system. At the same time, though, part of me wonders whether those tiny icons are at least partially what drove me to buy a bigger monitor recently. I don’t think so, but maybe?

In any event, if you care about design, Prokopov’s detailed and well-illustrated analysis of Tahoe’s menu icons is well worth your time.

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App Marketing: My Extended Q&A for Paul Hudson’s Everything but the Code→

Earlier this year, Paul Hudson asked me to answer a few questions about app marketing for a book he was writing called Everything But the Code.

The book is finished now, and it’s full of great advice from Paul and a long list of indie developers whose apps are some of MacStories’ favorites. Paul covers the entire process of making apps, from validating an idea to selling your app and beyond. The only thing he doesn’t cover, as the book’s title makes clear, is building apps, which is the subject of other books and courses he’s created.

Paul was kind enough to ask me to share some insights on marketing apps to the press. You’ll find my contributions in the Prelaunch and Publicity and Aftermath and Evolution chapters, and now that the book is final, I thought I’d share extended versions of my responses with readers. Although the focus is on apps, I expect there are a few lessons here for anyone pitching their creative work to the world. So, here you go.

Paul Hudson: What common mistakes do developers make when pitching their app to the press?

Me: Most developers do a great job thinking through what they’re pitching but don’t spend enough time thinking about who they’re pitching to. I’d love to be able to tell developers do these five things, and you’ll have a pitch you can send to anyone, but it doesn’t work that way. Developers need to think about things like who at a publication typically covers certain types of apps.

For example, if you know a publication has a musician on staff who has covered music apps before, that person should be at the top of your list if you’ve built a guitar tab app. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t contact anyone else at the publication. People get busy, so don’t limit yourself. However, focus your efforts on the people who are most likely to be receptive to your app.

It also pays to make things easy for the person you’re pitching to. Keep your pitch short and to the point, link to a press kit, beta, and other materials, and follow up closer to launch.

A few other pitch pointers:

  • Don’t wait to send your pitches until the last minute. Personally, I prefer getting pitches at least a couple of weeks in advance of a launch, so I can make the time for testing and writing about them.
  • Don’t send pitches during WWDC, on Apple event days, or major holidays. Your pitch is much more likely to get lost in the shuffle on those days.
  • You don’t need to ask if it’s okay to send a TestFlight link. If the person you’re pitching to isn’t interested, they won’t use it.
  • It’s okay to copy multiple people at a publication if you’re unsure who to contact.
  • Try to understand where a writer likes to be contacted. Email is probably the safest bet, but social media DMs might be better for some people.
  • It’s okay to send follow-up reminders about your app launch. I personally appreciate them.
  • Don’t expect app feedback from most press contacts. I let developers know when I find the kind of bug I’d mention in a review, but unfortunately, I usually don’t have time for much more than that.
  • Don’t take it personally if you don’t get a response to a pitch. Remember, the people you contact are getting a lot of pitches.
  • Don’t close down your TestFlight beta immediately after you launch your app. If a publication can’t get a story out to coincide with your launch, closing down your beta immediately so it can no longer be downloaded makes it less likely they’ll cover it post-launch.
  • Don’t forget to include the name of your app in your pitch – yes, that happens.

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Our Final 2025 MacStories Setups Update→

Our desk setups. Federico (left) and John (right).

Our desk setups. Federico (left) and John (right).

John: As 2025 comes to an end, Federico and I thought we’d cap off the year with a final update on our setups. We just went through this in November, but both Federico and I decided to take advantage of Black Friday sales to improve our setups in very different ways. Let’s take a look.

My changes were primarily to my office setup. I’ve wanted a gaming PC for a long time, but I never had a good place to set one up. The solution was to go with a high-end mini PC, the GMKtec EVO-X2, which features a Strix Halo processor, 64GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. It came with Windows installed, but after a few days, I installed Bazzite, an open-source version of SteamOS, which makes it dead simple to access my Steam videogame library.

Two things kept me from getting a PC earlier. The first was space, which the EVO-X2 takes care of nicely because it’s roughly the size of the Mac mini before its recent redesign.

The second and bigger issue, though, was my Studio Display. It’s an excellent screen, but it’s showing its age with its 60Hz refresh rate and 600 nits of brightness. Plus, with one Thunderbolt port for connecting to your Mac and three USB-C ports, the Studio Display is limiting. Without HDMI or DisplayPort, connecting it to other video sources like a PC or game console is nearly impossible.

The GMKtec EVO-X2 mini PC, Switch 2, and 8BitDo Ultimate 2 controller

The GMKtec EVO-X2 mini PC, Switch 2, and 8BitDo Ultimate 2 controller

So I also bought a deeply discounted ASUS ROG Swift 32” 4K OLED Gaming Monitor, which is attached to my desk using a VIVO VESA desk mount. I’d wanted a bigger screen for work anyway, and with its 240Hz refresh rate and bright OLED panel, the ASUS has been excellent. However, the ASUS display really shines when connected to my GMKtec and Nintendo Switch 2. As I covered on NPC: Next Portable Console recently, the mini PC combined with a great monitor, which also allows me to stream games to my handhelds over my local network, was the missing link in my setup, delivering a flexibility I just didn’t have before.

Along with the gaming part of my desktop setup, I updated my desktop lighting with two Philips Hue Play Wall Washer lights and a Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K, which casts light against the wall behind my desk that’s synced with what’s onscreen. In fact, the Sync Box 8K works with all the Hue lights in my office, allowing me to create a more immersive environment when I’m gaming.

I’ve been using a handful of other accessories lately, too, including:

That’s it from me for 2025, folks. Enjoy the holidays! Things will be a little quieter at MacStories over the next couple of weeks as we unwind and spend the time with family and friends over the holidays, but we’ll be back with lots more before long.

Federico: For this final update to my setup before the end of the year, I focused on two key areas: audio and my living room TV setup.

The biggest – literally – upgrade for me this month has been switching from my previous LG 65” TV to a flagship LG G5 77” model. I’d been keeping an eye on this TV for a while: it’s LG’s first model to use Tandem OLED technology, and it boasts higher brightness in both SDR and HDR with reduced reflections thanks to the new panel. I took advantage of an incredible Black Friday deal in Italy to buy it at 50% off, and we love it. The TV rests almost flush against the wall thanks to its compact design, but since it’s not completely flush, it allowed us to re-install our Philips Hue Gradient Light Strip behind it. Since I was in a renovation mood and I also wanted to future-proof my setup for the Steam Machine in 2026, I also upgraded to a Hue Bridge Pro and replaced my previous Hue Sync Box with the latest 8K edition that is certified for HDMI 2.1 connections. Speaking of gaming: as I discussed this week on NPC, I got a Beelink SER9 Pro mini PC and installed Bazzite on it to get a taste for SteamOS in the living room; this one will eventually be replaced by a more powerful Steam Machine.

The other area of improvement was audio. I recently realized that I wanted to fully take advantage of Apple Music and Spotify’s support for lossless playback with wireless headphones, which is something that, alas, Apple’s AirPods Max do not support. So after much research, I decided to treat myself to a pair of Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2, which are widely considered some of the best Bluetooth headphones that you can buy right now. But you may be wondering: how do you even connect these headphones to Apple devices that do not support Qualcomm’s aptX Lossless or Adaptive codecs? That’s where the BT-W6 Bluetooth dongle comes in. In researching this field, I came across this relatively new category of small Bluetooth adapters that plug into an iPhone’s USB-C port (they work on a Mac or iPad, too) and essentially override the device’s built-in Bluetooth chip. Once headphones are paired with the dongle rather than the phone, wireless streaming from Apple Music or Spotify will use aptX Lossless instead of Apple’s legacy SBC protocol. The difference in audio quality is outstanding, and it makes me appreciate the Px8 S2 for all they have to offer.

While I was at it, I also took advantage of another deal for a Sonos Move 2 portable speaker; we’ll have to decide whether this one will be permanently docked on my desk or next to a record player that Silvia is getting me for Christmas. (We don’t like surprises for each other, especially when it comes to furniture-adjacent shopping.)

So that’s my update before we go on break for a couple of weeks. I can already feel that, when I’m back, I’ll have some changes to cover on the software front. But we’ll talk about those in 2026.

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How Stu Maschwitz Vibe Coded His Way Into an App Rejection and What It Means for the Future of Apps→

This week on AppStories, Federico and I talked about the personal productivity tools we’ve built for ourselves using Claude. They’re hyper-specific scripts and plugins that aren’t likely to be useful to anyone but us, which is fine because that’s all they’re intended to be.

Stu Maschwitz took a different approach. He’s had a complex shortcut called Drinking Buddy for years that tracks alcohol consumption and calculates your Blood Alcohol Level using an established formula. But because he was butting up against the limits of what Shortcuts can do, he vibe coded an iOS version of Drinking Buddy.

Two things struck me about Maschwitz’s experience. First, the app he used to create Drinking Buddy for iOS was Bitrig, which Federico and I mentioned briefly on AppStories. His experience struck a chord with me:

It’s a bit like building an app by talking to a polite and well-meaning tech support agent on the phone — only their computer is down and they can’t test the app themselves.

But power through it, and you have an app.

That’s exactly how scripting with Claude feels. It compliments you on how smart you are, gets you 90% of the way to the finish line quickly, and then tortures you with the last 10%. That, in a nutshell, is coding with AI, at least for anyone with limited development skills, like myself.

But the second and more interesting lesson from Maschwitz’s post is what it portends for apps in general. App Review rejected Drinking Buddy’s Blood Alcohol Level calculation on the basis of Section 1.4, the Physical Harm rule.

Maschwitz appealed and was rejected, even though other Blood Alcohol Level apps are available on the App Store. However, instead of pushing the rejection with App Review further, Maschwitz turned to Lovable, another AI app creation tool, which generates web apps. With screenshots from his rejected iOS app and a detailed spec in hand, Maschwitz turned Drinking Buddy into a progressive web app.

Maschwitz’s experience is a great example of what we covered on AppStories. App creation tools, whether they generate native apps or web apps, are evolving rapidly. And, while they can be frustrating to use at times, are limited in what they can produce, and don’t solve a myriad of problems like customer support that we detail on AppStories, they’re getting better at code quickly. Whether you’re building for yourself, like we are at MacStories, or to share your ideas with others, like Stu Maschwitz, change is coming to apps. Some AI-generated apps will be offered in galleries inside the tools that created them, others will be designed for the web to avoid App Review, and some will likely live as perpetual TestFlight betas or scripts sitting on just one person’s computer, but regardless of the medium, bringing your ideas to life with code has never been more possible.

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iPhone vs $2000 Pro Camera — How Close Are They Really?→

I constantly see articles or videos proclaiming that iPhones are better than traditional cameras or that traditional cameras will always be superior to the iPhone’s camera system. So it’s great to see a measured opinion – with plenty of comparisons – from someone who clearly loves shooting with both pieces of hardware.

That’s exactly what designer and creator Oliur has done with his latest video and blog post.

I took the new iPhone 17 Pro and the Fujifilm X100VI out with me, shot the same scenes, edited everything the same way I normally do, and then mixed them up to see whether anyone could guess which was which.

Some of the results genuinely surprised me.

I originally posted the challenge on X to see who could figure out which camera was which, and out of all the comments, only one person got them all right.

What’s striking is how, despite the Fuji camera’s evident technical prowess, it’s not so simple:

Technically, the Fuji should win. But in real-world photos — especially the kind most people share online — the gap isn’t as big anymore.

While the blog version is good, I’d recommend Oliur’s YouTube version for more in-depth breakdowns and an interesting conclusion.

The iPhone’s convenience and computational power make it competitive in almost every normal scenario. If someone told me they rely solely on their phone for photography today, I wouldn’t argue with them.

As someone who loves photography but doesn’t want to commit to a dedicated camera, it’s good to know that after some adjustments, the iPhone’s input can now result in an output that is competitive with a traditional camera – at least for my use cases.

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Apple Music’s Replay 2025 Is Live→

Apple Music has released its annual Apple Music Replay overview of subscribers’ listening statistics for 2025 along with top charts for 2025. The recap can be accessed on https://replay.music.apple.com, where you’ll find details about the music you listened to throughout the year, including your top albums, songs, artists, playlists, and genres.

Replay includes statistics about your listening habits.

Replay includes statistics about your listening habits.

As with past years, Replay ‘25 begins with an animated highlights reel of your year in music set to the songs you enjoyed throughout the year. Replay also spotlights listening milestones like the total number of minutes listened and the number of artists and songs played. Subscribers can browse through their statistics by month, too. Your Replay ‘25 playlist, which includes your 100 most listened-to songs is available from the Replay website and Apple’s Music app. In addition to Replay ‘25 Apple Music released top charts for countries around the world and genres.

Apple Music's top charts.

Apple Music’s top charts.

The timing of Replay ‘25 is opportune for me, since Federico and I are beginning to assemble our lists of favorite music of 2025 for an upcoming episode of MacStories Unwind. Most of all though, I just enjoy using Replay ‘25 as a way to revisit my favorite music of the year.

To view your own Replay 2025 statistics, visit music.apple.com/replay.

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Why is ChatGPT for Mac So Good?→

Great post by Allen Pike on the importance of a great app experience for modern LLMs, which I recently wrote about. He opens with this line, which is a new axiom I’m going to reuse extensively:

A model is only as useful as its applications.

And on ChatGPT for Mac specifically:

The app does a good job of following the platform conventions on Mac. That means buttons, text fields, and menus behave as they do in other Mac apps. While ChatGPT is imperfect on both Mac and web, both platforms have the finish you would expect from a daily-use tool.

[…]

It’s easier to get a polished app with native APIs, but at a certain scale separate apps make it hard to rapidly iterate a complex enterprise product while keeping it in sync on each platform, while also meeting your service and customer obligations. So for a consumer-facing app like ChatGPT or the no-modifier Copilot, it’s easier to go native. For companies that are, at their core, selling to enterprises, you get Electron apps.

I don’t hate Electron as much as others in our community, but I can’t deny that ChatGPT is one of the nicest AI apps for Mac I’ve used. The other is the recently updated BoltAI. And they’re both native Mac apps.

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“The iPad’s Software Problem Is Permanent”→

I love my iPad Pro, but, as you know, lately I’ve been wondering about what comes after iPadOS 26. We have much better multitasking now, and key workflow limitations such as file management, audio recording, and long-running background tasks have been addressed by Apple this year. But now that the user-facing system’s foundation has been “fixed”, what about the app ecosystem?

Over at Snazzy Labs, Quinn Nelson has been wondering the same, and I highly recommend watching his video:

Quinn makes a series of strong, cogent arguments with factual evidence that show how, despite multitasking and other iPadOS 26 improvements, using apps on an iPad Pro often falls short of what can be achieved with the same apps on a Mac. There is so much I could quote from this video, but I think his final thought sums it up best:

There are still days that I reach for my $750 MacBook Air because my $2,000 iPad Pro can’t do what I need it to. Seldom is the reverse true.

I’m so happy that Apple seems to be taking iPadOS more seriously than ever this year. But now I can’t help but wonder if the iPad’s problems run deeper than windowing when it comes to getting serious work done on it.

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