We’re pleased to announce that starting today, Magic Rays of Light, the podcast hosted by Sigmund Judge and Devon Dundee is joining MacStories. Federico and I couldn’t be happier to be adding Sigmund and Devon’s expertise in all things Apple TV+, tvOS, and Apple Arcade to MacStories. It’s a fantastic show full of thoughtful insights on one of Apple’s most interesting platforms.
You can subscribe to Magic Rays of Light using the buttons below:
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Ideas are precious but fleeting. One moment, inspiration strikes, but if you don’t capture that lightning in a bottle, it’s gone before you know it. With Whisper Memos, you can harness the power of artificial intelligence to turn your ideas into orderly memos.
Whisper Memos combines the convenience of quick capture with the power of GPT-4. You can save a voice memo using your iPhone’s Action Button, the app’s Lock Screen widget, Whisper Memos’ Apple Watch app, Shortcuts, and more. Then, Whisper Memos uses AI to turn your recordings into orderly, paragraphed memos delivered directly to your email inbox a few seconds later.
The results are incredible. One moment, you’re recording audio on your iPhone or Apple Watch, and the next, you’ve got an email message easily identifiable by its custom subject line that has been carefully transcribed and organized into neat paragraphs.
Whisper Memos works on Wi-Fi, over a cellular connection, and offline, so it’s always available. The app also supports a long list of languages, and it integrates with Zapier, which allows you to connect Whisper Memos to other productivity apps like Notion, Trello, or your task manager. There’s even a privacy mode for ensuring no trace is left behind after your voice memos have been processed.
So, check out Whisper Memos today. You’ll be amazed at how fast, accurate, and reliable it is at preserving your precious thoughts.
Our thanks to Whisper Memos for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
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MacStories Weekly: Issue 400 Thread has a problem. It was supposed to be the low-energy, wireless protocol that lets all of your smart home devices talk to each other no matter who built them. However, in practice, devices from different makers don’t play very well with each other, often resulting in multiple Thread networks, largely defeating the purpose of the standard.
The good news is that Jennifer Pattison Touhy reports for The Verge that the Thread Group has a solution:
Thread Group’s plan to fix the multi-network problem is to standardize how border routers share credentials with border routers from different manufacturers. In a blog post released at CES this week, the group says these changes should make it easier to add a new Thread border router or Thread device to an existing network. The result will be “a single, larger ranging Thread mesh network, including multiple Border Routers, which in turn can increase the reliability of all the devices in it.”
That sounds great, but like any standard, it’s likely to take a while to filter through to the devices you use in your home. Still, it’s progress and a reason to be optimistic that eventually, your smart home devices may play nice with each other no matter who makes them.
This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico surprises John with his big holiday videogame project in the first part of what promises to be a fun Unwind miniseries.
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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
We’re only two days into CES 2024, and something occurred to me in the aftermath of ASUS’s packed presentation. We’re in a new golden age of gadgets, the likes of which we haven’t seen in many years. The world seems ready for something new after spending more than a decade cramming everything imaginable into our phones. An awful lot of companies seem to think the next big thing will be powered by artificial intelligence. Perhaps it will be, but even if it isn’t, we’re seeing a breadth and depth of gadget innovation at CES that’s exciting.
Yesterday, the gadget that stuck with me the most was the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid. I love the flexibility and modularity it promises. ASUS’s ROG Phone 8 line of mobile phones was a close second with its beefy, game-friendly specs. But neither captured my imagination quite like one of the accessories ASUS saved for yesterday’s presentation.
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
Continuity Camera is amazing. Since it was introduced in macOS Ventura, I’ve been using the feature almost daily. Continuity Camera is a native feature on macOS that lets you use an iPhone as your webcam. For it to work, you can either connect the iPhone to your Mac using a cable, or use it wirelessly if both devices are signed in with the same Apple ID. It’s quite impressive that, despite having to rely so often on video calls for work, I still don’t own a webcam today. Instead, the camera I use at my desk is an old iPhone SE (2nd generation), which was my partner’s main iPhone until they upgraded last year.
Over the past few months, however, the number of video calls I have needed to take on a daily basis has become critical. As an activist, part of my work now also involves conducting online training sessions with sometimes up to a hundred participants at a time. I just couldn’t afford to join one of those sessions and not have my camera working. Continuity Camera became a feature that I need to work reliably. Sadly, it doesn’t. Half of the time, apps like Zoom and Discord on macOS could not see the iPhone SE in the list of available cameras. This meant I had to fetch a Lightning cable to manually connect the iPhone. If I was unlucky that day, and that didn’t work, I would have to completely reboot the Mac. If I was really unlucky that day, and even that didn’t work, I would end up joining the call without a camera. Despite meeting all the requirements listed by Apple Support, this problem just kept happening on random occasions.
I had to find a fix for this bug, or at least a way to work around it.
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
After what already feels like a week of CES, it’s the official day one of the conference. There have been a ton of announcements already. As anticipated, gaming is very big this year, with new handhelds, laptops, and other devices announced. Interesting new approaches to hybrid computers, ASUS’s first NUC, and a handful of smart home devices have been announced already, too, so let’s dig into the latest.
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
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Every year, I dig into the press releases and reporting coming from the CES show floor, so you don’t have to. The pandemic took the wind out of CES’s sails for a few years, but the show and interesting gadgets have made a comeback for 2024, with a wide range of announcements made in the days leading up to the show, which doesn’t even officially start until tomorrow. I’ll be back with more updates throughout the week, but here are some of the announcements that have caught my eye so far.
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
