Posts in reviews

Paku: Hyper-Local Air Quality Tracking on Every Apple Platform

With millions of people facing a long, smokey summer here in the US, I thought it would be a good time to recommend Paku by Kyle Bashour, an iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch app for tracking the air quality where you live.

Paku on the Mac.

Paku on the Mac.

Paku combines Apple’s MapKit framework with public data from PurpleAir to track air quality globally. By default, the app displays Air Quality Index data as color-coded dots on its map UI. Just like Apple Maps, you can zoom out and pan around to see data in other areas or use the app’s search functionality, but the greatest value is in knowing what the air quality is in your neighborhood.

Paku running on the iPhone.

Paku running on the iPhone.

In addition to AQI data, Paku can display temperature, humidity, and PM1.0, PM2.5, and PM10.0 data, using the toolbar overlay on the app’s map. For more information about a station’s data, tap it, and you’ll get all the available data, historical context for the current reading, and an explanation of what precautions you should take if the air quality is bad. From the three-dot More button in the corner of a station’s data view, you can also favorite an air quality station, open the PurpleAir website, or hide a station.

Examples of Paku’s widgets.

Examples of Paku’s widgets.

Paku includes Home and Lock Screen widgets too. For the iPhone’s Lock Screen, there are widgets to track air quality, temperature, and humidity. The same is true for Home Screen widgets, which feature the same types of data but use two designs. The first design uses a blue gradient background, big numerals for the primary data point, and a graphic that shows where your current air quality falls on the air quality scale. The other Home Screen widget design uses the EPA’s color scheme as the background of the widget to make the air quality reading even more glanceable.

Paku also supports a single Shortcuts action that opens the app, which is fine, but it would be better if the action returned the air quality, temperature, and humidity data instead.

Air quality alerts and alternate icons are two of the Paku benefits that are subscriber-only.

Air quality alerts and alternate icons are two of the Paku benefits that are subscriber-only.

Paku is free to download but offers a subscription with additional features, including the ability to set alerts based on readings from a sensor when air quality reaches one of the scale’s thresholds, such as Unhealthy or Hazardous. Subscribers can also access data from private sensors you can install at your home and pick from a long list of alternative icons. Of those paid features, notifications strike me as the most useful unless you don’t have a nearby public air quality sensor that you can rely on. I’m fortunate in that there’s a sensor less than a quarter mile from my home, so I haven’t felt the need to install my own sensor.

When I moved to North Carolina, I was struck by how clean the air was compared to the Chicago suburbs. I’d tracked air quality on and off in my old neighborhood, but when I got to North Carolina, there wasn’t any reason to do so. Every day started and finished solidly in the green zone. That changed last week, and although there are areas with far worse air quality than here, Paku is back on my Home Screen, helping me decide whether I should get my exercise outside each day or do something indoors. I could use the AQI data from a full-blown weather app, but I love Paku’s clean, focused design and the fact that I can set its widgets to a sensor that’s just down the street from my house.

Paku is available on the App Store as a free download. Notifications, private sensors, and alternative icons require a subscription that is $1.99/month or $13.99/year.

Working Remotely with Belkin’s BoostCharge Pro

Update (October 14, 2024): The Belkin BoostCharge Pro Wireless Charger has been recalled and should not be used. Details here.

It’s Tuesday morning, and I didn’t feel like working at home today, so after breakfast, I headed out to the co-working space I joined in the spring. As I got ready, I realized my MacBook Air’s battery was a little low. I used it a lot yesterday and didn’t charge it overnight. My Apple Watch Ultra battery was a bit low, too, thanks to the extra drain of the watchOS 10 beta.

With plans to spend most of the day away and on foot, I wanted to travel light, so instead of grabbing my big 25,600 mAh Anker battery, I went for the Belkin BoostCharge Pro charger. The compact charger, which Belkin sent me for testing about a week ago, seemed perfect for this kind of scenario. The charger is compact and lightweight compared to larger options and has the added benefit of a built-in Apple Watch charging pad.

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Tears of the Kingdom Travel Guide Is the Ideal iPhone and iPad App to Keep Track of Your Zelda Adventures

TotK Travel Guide.

TotK Travel Guide.

If your summer’s going to be anything like mine, some of these things should sound familiar: you’re going to play around with the iOS and iPadOS 17 betas and get on some TestFlights for third-party apps; you’re going to spend some time at the beach or perhaps even travel abroad; and you’ll still be playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which is a ridiculously massive game well worth waiting six years for. If the latter scenario applies to your life right now and in the near future, you’ll want to install TotK Travel Guide, which came out earlier this week for iPhone and iPad.

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Detail Duo and Detail for Mac: A Modern, Machine Learning-Powered Approach to Video

It’s harder than ever to push Apple devices to their limits. Sure, some apps and workflows will do it, but for everyday tasks, Apple silicon has opened a gap between hardware and software that we haven’t seen in a while.

The transformation was gradual with the iPhone and iPad compared to the sudden leap the Mac took with the M1, but the result is the same. There are fewer and fewer apps that push Apple’s chips to the max.

That’s beginning to change with the focus on machine learning and Apple silicon’s Neural Engine. While pundits fret over Apple’s lack of an AI chatbot, developers are building a new class of apps that use local, on-device machine learning to accomplish some pretty amazing feats on all of Apple’s devices.

Detail Duo.

Detail Duo.

Great examples of this are the apps by Detail, an Amsterdam-based startup. Detail has two apps: Detail Duo, an iPhone and iPad video production app, and Detail for Mac, which does something similar but with a focus on multi-camera setups more suitable to a desktop environment.

As I explained in my Final Cut Pro for iPad first impressions story last week, I don’t work with much video. However, I’ve been dabbling in video more, and I’ve discovered a story as old as personal computers themselves.

Every hardware advance that creates a huge amount of performance headroom is eventually consumed by the ever-growing demands of apps. That’s just as true with Apple silicon as it was for other chip advances. What seemed like more power than average consumers would ever need quickly becomes a necessity as apps like Detail Duo and Detail push that hardware to its limits.

It’s these sorts of advances that I find incredibly exciting because when they’re coupled with intuitive, well-designed apps, they open up entirely new opportunities for users. For Detail, that means simplifying and democratizing video production that would have been out of reach of most users not that long ago, expanding access to video as a creative outlet.

Before digging into these apps further, though, you should know that my son Finn is on the team building Detail and Detail Duo. That’s one of the reasons I’ve known about and followed these apps for a long time now. I figured that’s context readers should know.

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Mimestream: The Perfect Email App for Gmail Users on the Mac

I’m going to straight-up spoil this review for you at the top. If you primarily use Gmail and work on a Mac, you should try Mimestream now. It offers the core Gmail experience wrapped in a thoughtfully designed native Mac app. If you spend a lot of time on other devices or have non-Gmail accounts, the call is tougher, but that’s exactly my situation, and I think Mimestream is still the best Mac email choice for most people. Here’s why.

I have four primary email accounts. Two are work-related, and two are personal. All but my iCloud email are connected to Gmail, which makes me a pretty strong candidate for Mimestream, which launched this week after a couple years in beta.

I’ve been using Mimestream on and off for over a year, returning to it in late January after briefly trying Missive. What drew me back to Mimestream was the app’s native design, tight integration with Gmail, and open roadmap. The app doesn’t have everything I want from an email client. However, because I handle most of my email on the Mac and most of what I’d like to see Mimestream incorporate is planned or under consideration for future updates, it’s become how I manage most of my email.

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Ivory for Mac Review: Tapbots’ Superb Mastodon Client Comes to Apple Desktops and Laptops

Ivory, Tapbots’ Mastodon client, is now available on the Mac, and like its iOS and iPadOS counterparts that Federico reviewed in January, Ivory for Mac is every bit as polished.

A lot has changed since Ivory was released on the iPhone and iPad. At the time, there were hardly any native Mastodon apps for the Mac, so I was using Elk in a pinned Safari tab. That’s changed. There are several excellent native apps now, including Mona, which I reviewed earlier this month. What Ivory brings to the growing field of native apps is what we saw with iOS and iPadOS: impeccable taste and snappy performance that few other apps can match.

By now, most MacStories readers are probably familiar with the table stakes features for Mastodon clients. Ivory ticks all of those boxes. Also, if you’ve already tried Ivory for iOS or iPadOS, you’ve got a big head start on the Mac app because they’re very similar. However, if you’re new to Ivory, I encourage you to check out Federico’s review of Ivory for the iPhone and iPad because I’m not going to cover that same ground again. Instead, I want to focus on the Mac version’s unique features and the details that make it such a compelling choice for Mac users.

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MusicSmart 2.0: Dig Into Music Discovery

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Marcos Tanaka’s music apps at MacStories. MusicHarbor makes keeping up with new and upcoming releases a breeze, and MusicBox ensures you won’t lose track of music that you don’t have time to enjoy until later. The apps are indispensable for music fans who follow a long list of artists.

MusicSmart, which is available for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, is a little different than Tanaka’s other apps. Instead of casting a broad net to track the entire range of your musical tastes, the app is about digging deeper into individual songs, albums, or artists’ catalogs. But follow the threads offered by MusicSmart, and the narrow focus that sets it apart from Tanaka’s other apps will paradoxically lead to new musical discoveries and, ultimately, broaden your tastes.

As Federico explained in his review of MusicSmart’s debut:

Whether by design or as a byproduct of our new habits, metadata and credits don’t play a big role in modern music streaming services. We’re frustrated when a service gets the title of a song wrong or reports the incorrect track sequence in an album, but we don’t consider the fact that there’s a world of context and additional information hidden behind the songs and albums we listen to every day. That context is entirely invisible to us because it’s not mass-market enough for a music streaming service. There have been small updates on this front lately, but by and large, credits and additional track information are still very much ignored by the streaming industry. And if you ask me, that’s a shame.

Despite stiff competition among music streaming services, the state of liner notes hasn’t improved since Federico wrote that. Fortunately, though, MusicSmart has only gotten better, adding new data sources, better organization, and more polish with each release. However, version 2.0 of the app combines its existing strengths with new features and an improved design in a way that transcends earlier versions, making this version 2.0 of MusicSmart feel more fully realized than ever before.

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Snowman’s Laya’s Horizon Takes Flight

There’s a lot to like about Laya’s Horizon, the brand-new mobile game from Snowman that’s available today on iOS, iPadOS, and Android via Netflix. However, it’s the game’s control scheme that elevates it to unique heights. Laya is by no means the first game to employ a simple two-finger control scheme. But, it’s the best I’ve tried, enabling a surprisingly deep and intimate gaming experience. Combined with Snowman’s excellent taste and attention to detail, Laya’s Horizon is incredibly fun and a game you won’t want to miss.

I got an early glimpse of Laya’s Horizon in early 2019, sitting on the floor of a Marriott in San Francisco during the Game Developer Conference. That feels like a lifetime ago, but it should give you a sense of how much work has gone into the game. What I saw in 2019 was a very early demo, but even watching someone else control the game, the sense of flight was palpable. With the game in my own hands, that sense became tangible instantly.

Laya’s Horizon is played in landscape orientation. You’re Laya, who has just earned her first cape for flying. The game kicks off with a tutorial that walks you through the mechanics of flying around its 3D map from a third-person perspective. Slide your thumbs down together to climb, up to dive, together for a boost of speed, apart to parachute down, and one up and the other down to bank left and right. It takes a bit of practice to get good at flying, but the tutorial does a nice job of walking you through the basics without overdoing it and becoming boring. As you play, if you seem to be struggling with a maneuver, on-screen reminders appear to help you along the path to mastering flight.

Opening up new areas of the map.

Opening up new areas of the map.

Those simple on-screen controls coupled with haptic feedback on the iPhone create a connection with what’s happening on the screen that’s remarkable. Before long, I found myself flying high over forests, diving into ravines, buzzing along the island’s shoreline, and bouncing off hot air balloons. There’s a lot more to Laya’s Horizon, but I expect that the simple act of flying around the game’s island will be more than enough of a hook to bring players back for more.

Aside from the joy of soaring through the sky, Laya’s Horizon offers a variety of challenges, races, and missions to level up your skills, collect new capes, and meet new islanders known as Windfolk. Alternating those activities with flying around the island, taking in the diverse scenery and enjoying the game’s excellent sound design and music, creates a soothing, relaxing experience reminiscent of Snowman’s Alto’s Adventure.

Diving down a mountainside.

Diving down a mountainside.

What’s very different from a game like Alto’s Adventure is that Laya’s Horizon is an open, 3D environment. The island’s map is revealed in stages as you explore and complete missions, opening up areas like the top of a mountain from which you can reach any other point. There are no restrictions on where you can travel, but missions and other activities are clearly marked, so there’s always something to do within your field of view as you explore. In all, there are 50 missions, 40 levels, and over 100 collectibles to find along the way, which is more than enough to keep you enjoying Laya’s Horizon for quite a while.

Races are one of my favorite parts of Laya’s Horizon. You’re shown the path from the finish line to the start and then compete with NPCs. Along the way are checkpoints you need to fly through, which act as loose directional signposts to keep you on the correct path. Flying close to the ground, through tight spots, and other risky maneuvers lets you collect sparks, which can be used to temporarily boost your speed during races, rewarding you for doing more than just floating above the fray.

Laya’s Horizon is a real treat to play. The game maintains a careful balance that allows players to dip into it for a short mission or get lost in its beauty for longer stretches. The result is a delightfully relaxing, fun-filled experience that I expect a lot of people will enjoy.

Laya’s Horizon is free to download from the App Store and play for anyone with a subscription to Netflix.