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Creating Gradients with Your iPhone and an App Clip→

Recently on AppStories, I asked listeners to suggest apps for creating gradients. I’ve tried a few, but none have grabbed me yet, so I’d sort of given up for the time being. But then a listener suggested something totally different and amazing: a prototype App Clip that uses your iPhone’s camera to create gradients.

It isn’t a complete app. For instance, you can’t save a captured gradient to your photo library; instead, you have to take a screenshot of the gradient. That isn’t ideal, but the lack of functionality doesn’t take away from the concept, which I love.

A wallpaper made with Kandravy's App Clip.

A wallpaper made with Kandravy’s App Clip.

When the App Clip launches, it presents you with just three adjustable sliders that control things like the diffusion of the image your camera is recording and its saturation. Once you’ve framed a gradient you like, tapping the screen freezes the image so you can take a screenshot and start using the gradient as a wallpaper. Another option is to use an image from your photo library to create a gradient. Adobe has something similar baked into its Capture app for the iPhone and iPad, but it’s more complicated and only generates 640x640-pixel images that aren’t suitable to be used as wallpapers without doing additional work in another app.

The App Clip was created by Dominik Kandravy, a designer who is looking for a developer to turn the prototype into a full-blown app. I’m hoping Dominik can find someone to help because the simple elegance of the prototype is compelling.

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Transit Can Now Track Underground Trains without GPS→

Source: Transit

Source: Transit

Earlier this month, Transit, one of my favorite apps of all time, gained an impressive new feature: the app is now able to track your train and warn you when you are about to reach your destination even when your train is underground. Previously, Transit had to rely on GPS and cellular service to precisely locate your train on its route, which meant it couldn’t reliably function as soon as you entered a subway tunnel.

The way they have been able to achieve this is fascinating. Transit now utilizes the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer and analyzes its patterns to identify when the vehicle you boarded is in motion, and every time it reaches a station. The company’s account of the whole process is nothing short of impressive. The team spent a week riding buses and trains to collect data and proceeded to create an entirely new prediction model that is able to count down the underground stations that you will need to ride through to reach your destination. Transit says the model works completely offline and on-device.

I know I’m going to give this new feature a try as soon as I get a chance to ride the Paris Métro next week.

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The Mac mini Excels as a Videogame Emulation System→

Over at Retro Game Corps, Russ Crandall put the new M4 Mac mini through its paces to see how it handled videogame emulation. As Crandall’s video demonstrates, even the base model version of Apple’s tiny Mac did very well:

Crandall walks viewers through the basics of setting up Emulation Station Desktop Edition on a Mac, which serves as a front-end that uses a variety of emulators to play classic systems. It’s not surprising that the M4 mini didn’t break a sweat emulating the oldest systems like Nintendo’s NES and Game Boy. However, it also did well with more modern systems like GameCube, running at six times the native resolution at 4K.

The mini struggled at times with the most modern systems Crandall tested, like Xbox, but the takeaway is clear: the Mac mini is a capable videogame emulation system. That will be true for other M4 Macs, too, but what’s unique about the mini is its size. The computer’s small footprint lends itself to sitting under a TV or pairing with a portable monitor to play games wherever you have the space.

Uses like Crandall’s are what make the Mac mini such a compelling update. It’s always been small, but by shrinking the mini even further and significantly improving its power, Apple has opened up new possibilities for its smallest Mac.

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Dave Lee Reveals the Old-School Technology and Flaws Behind the tinyPod→

Announced back in May, the tinyPod is a plastic case that turns your strapless Apple Watch into an iPod-like phone. The company claims the case can make a cellular Apple Watch your “phone away from phone” with core apps like Messages, Phone, Music, Maps, and more. You can even use an app like μBrowser – which I talked about on this week’s AppStories – to stay connected to the web as well.

When the tinyPod was announced, I wasn’t sure whether this was incredibly silly or genius, but I was certainly intrigued to hear how it worked out. Units have now started appearing in the wild, and YouTuber Dave Lee (aka Dave2D) got ahold of one to test out.

Unfortunately, it seems like the quality of the case is poor, and the button in the middle of the scroll wheel is non-functional. Going back and looking at the promotional videos, I can now see that this was a deliberate choice.

What’s most intriguing about this accessory, however, is the mechanism the folks at tinyPod constructed to allow the scroll wheel to turn the Digital Crown. I’ll let Dave show you in detail, but suffice it to say it’s weird, old-school, and flawed – but I kind of love it. Crucially, though, it’s not enough to make me want one.

While the tinyPod seems like a no-go, I do admire people trying crazy ideas like this because every now and then, one of them sticks the landing.

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Michael MJD Revisits the Short-Lived HP TouchPad and Its Precursor Multitasking UI→

On YouTube, the fantastic Michael MJD—known for exploring the history of tech devices and software—recently revisited the 2011 HP TouchPad.

This short-lived tablet is quite fascinating. It originally shipped with webOS, an operating system which was ahead of its time, featuring a gesture- and card-based multitasking interface. In many ways, it resembled the iOS and iPadOS interfaces we’re all familiar with today.

Much like today’s iOS and iPadOS, webOS on the HP TouchPad allowed users to navigate the interface and switch between apps through swipes on the Home Screen, which hosted an overview of all your open apps.

I remember reading about the excitement surrounding the HP TouchPad when it launched—only to be discontinued a mere 49 days later. Watching Michael MJD explore its OS and unique UI truly felt like time travel to a time when the iPad was just beginning to take off as a computer for power users. I highly recommend checking out his walkthrough.

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iPod Fans Are Trying to Preserve Lost Click Wheel Games→

I last wrote about iPod click wheel games here on MacStories in…2011, when Apple officially delisted them from the iTunes Store. Thirteen years later, some enterprising iPod fans are trying to preserve those games and find a way to let other old-school iPod fans play them today.

Here’s Kyle Orland, writing at Ars Technica:

In recent years, a Reddit user going by the handle Quix used this workaround to amass a local library of 19 clickwheel iPod games and publicly offered to share “copies of these games onto as many iPods as I can.” But Quix’s effort ran into a significant bottleneck of physical access—syncing his game library to a new iPod meant going through the costly and time-consuming process of shipping the device so it could be plugged into Quix’s actual computer and then sending it back to its original owner.

Enter Reddit user Olsro, who earlier this month started the appropriately named iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project. Rather than creating his master library of authorized iTunes games on a local computer in his native France, Olsro sought to “build a communitarian virtual machine that anyone can use to sync auth[orized] clickwheel games into their iPod.” While the process doesn’t require shipping, it does necessitate jumping through a few hoops to get the Qemu Virtual Machine running on your local computer.

Olsro’s project is available here, and it includes instructions on how to set up the virtual machine so you can install the games yourself. Did you know that, for example, Square Enix made two iPod games, Crystal Defenders and Song Summoner? Without these fan-made projects, all of these games would be lost to time and link rot – and we unfortunately know why.

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Pixelmator Team to Join Apple→

Today, the Pixelmator team (this and next week’s MacStories sponsor) announced on their company blog that they plan to join Apple after regulatory approvals are obtained. The Pixelmator team had this to say about the news:

We’ve been inspired by Apple since day one, crafting our products with the same razor-sharp focus on design, ease of use, and performance. And looking back, it’s crazy what a small group of dedicated people have been able to achieve over the years from all the way in Vilnius, Lithuania. Now, we’ll have the ability to reach an even wider audience and make an even bigger impact on the lives of creative people around the world.

Pixelmator also says:

There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time.

The Pixelmator Team’s apps have always been among our favorites at MacStories. In 2022 we awarded Pixelmator Photo (now, Photomator), the MacStories Selects Best Design Award, and in 2023, Pixelmator received our MacStories Selects Lifetime Achievement Award. Congratulations to everyone at Pixelmator. We can’t wait to see what this exciting new chapter means for them and their fantastic suite of apps.

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GameSir G8+ iPad mini and iPhone Controller Walkthrough→

The new iPad mini is the first model with Wi-Fi 6E support, which makes it the best mini for game streaming yet. Of course, it’s a great size for playing App Store and Apple Arcade games too.

Last weekend, I did an in-depth review of the GameSir G8+ for Club MacStories Weekly, which included an early look at the controller and a video walkthrough on the MacStories YouTube channel as a new perk for Club members. The video is now available for everyone to watch here:

For early access to future hardware walkthroughs and the full review, you can join Club MacStories now through November 1st for 20% off all annual plans by using the code CLUB2024 at checkout, as detailed here.

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You Can Use Clean Up with a Clear Conscience→

I enjoyed this take on Apple Intelligence’s Clean Up feature by Joe Rosensteel, writing for Six Colors last week:

The photographs you take are not courtroom evidence. They’re not historical documents. Well, they could be, but mostly they’re images to remember a moment or share that moment with other people. If someone rear-ended your car and you’re taking photos for the insurance company, then that is not the time to use Clean Up to get rid of people in the background, of course. Use common sense.

Clean Up is a fairly conservative photo editing tool in comparison to what other companies offer. Sometimes, people like to apply a uniform narrative that Silicon Valley companies are all destroying reality equally in the quest for AI dominance, but that just doesn’t suit this tool that lets you remove some distractions from your image.

It’s easy to get swept up in the “But what is a photo” philosophical debate (which I think raises a lot of interesting points), but I agree with Joe: we should also keep in mind that, sometimes, we’re just removing that random tourist from the background and our edit isn’t going to change the course of humankind’s history.

Also worth remembering:

For some reason, even the most literal of literal people is fine with composing a shot to not include things. To even (gasp!) crop things out of photos. You can absolutely change meaning and context just as much through framing and cropping as you can with a tool like Clean Up. No one is suggesting that the crop tool be removed or that we should only be allowed to take the widest wide-angle photographs possible to include all context at all times, like security camera footage.

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