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MacStories Unwind: The Video Game History Hour and Playing Classic Games with the Dolphin Emulator

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This week, John recommends the Video Game History Hour, a podcast from the Video Game History Foundation, and Federico takes us along on his videogame emulation journey from handeld Windows PCs to the Apple’s M1 Max MacBook Pro.

John’s Pick:

Federico’s Pick:

Luigi's Mansion.

Luigi’s Mansion.


Luigi's Mansion.

Luigi’s Mansion.


Metroid Prime.

Metroid Prime.


The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker


The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Apple Releases a Statement on Its Efforts to Deter The Misuse of AirTag and the Find My Network

Apple has released a statement about its efforts to prevent unwanted tracking using AirTags. The company’s statement outlines its cooperation with law enforcement to apprehend people who have misused AirTags and details the steps it is taking to improve AirTags and the Find My network, including:

  • New privacy warnings when AirTags are set up
  • Making it clear when AirPods have caused a Find My network alert
  • Expansion of AirTag and Find My network support documentation
  • A new Precision Finding feature for the iPhone 11 and later that will make it easier to locate a nearby AirTag
  • On-device alerts to accompany audible alerts that an AirTag is with you
  • Refinements to the logic used to decide when to alert users of unwanted tracking
  • Adjustments to the sounds played by an AirTag traveling with you

It’s good to see Apple open up about the steps it’s taking to address the misuse of AirTags. As I said last month:

This is also a topic where some added transparency about what Apple is doing to address concerns about stalking would help observers decide whether it’s enough instead of having only anecdotal news reports to go on.

Today’s statement is exactly the sort of increased transparency I was hoping we’d see from Apple. I’ll leave it to people with expertise in personal safety to comment on whether these steps go far enough. I’m just glad that those experts’ opinions can now be based on facts instead of speculation.

AppStories, Episode 259 – New Apps We Are Trying or Revisiting (Part 2)→

This week on AppStories, we conclude our tour of new apps we are trying for the first time or revisiting.

[Subscribe here.](https://appstories.net/plans)

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, we highlight our favorite changes coming to iOS and iPadOS 15.4 and macOS 12.3, including Face ID With a Mask, Universal Control, and Shortcuts refinements.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

To learn more about the benefits included with an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.

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Tweetbot 7 Adds Back the App’s Stats View and Includes New Themes

Over three years ago, Tweetbot removed the app’s stats view as a result of Twitter API changes. Today, that view is back in Tweetbot 7 for the iPhone and iPad, thanks to the social media company’s increased willingness to open its platform to third-party developers like Tapbots.

The view includes a graph at the top, followed by statistics detailing your timeline activity for the last week, including Likes, Replies, Tweets, Retweets, Quotes, and Follows. You can swipe across the graph to see each category by day or tap the categories under the graph to jump straight to that view.

Tweetbot 7 also includes new dark themes called hej and bumblebee. Hej features a slate blue background with yellow highlights, while bumblebee has a near-black background with brighter yellow accents.

The pace of Tweetbot updates has picked up significantly in recent months, which is fantastic. I missed the app’s stats view, so it’s nice to see its return. However, with each new feature and refinement to Tweetbot’s iOS and iPadOS apps, the Mac app looks more and more dated. The two versions are badly out of sync in terms of features too. As someone who spends a lot of time on the Mac, that’s disappointing and something that I hope will change soon.

Tweetbot 7 is available as a free update on the App Store for the iPhone and iPad. However, some of the app’s features require a subscription.

Contactless Payments Are Coming to the iPhone

Today, Apple announced Tap to Pay, a new contactless payment option coming later this year for the iPhone XS and later.

According to Apple’s press release:

Tap to Pay on iPhone will be available for payment platforms and app developers to integrate into their iOS apps and offer as a payment option to their business customers. Stripe will be the first payment platform to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone to their business customers, including the Shopify Point of Sale app this spring. Additional payment platforms and apps will follow later this year.

The new payment system leverages NFC and the iPhone’s existing privacy-oriented Secure Element, which is part of Apple Pay existing technology infrastructure.

Apple’s press release explains how Tap to Pay will work from users’ perspective:

At checkout, the merchant will simply prompt the customer to hold their iPhone or Apple Watch to pay with Apple Pay, their contactless credit or debit card, or other digital wallet near the merchant’s iPhone, and the payment will be securely completed using NFC technology. No additional hardware is needed to accept contactless payments through Tap to Pay on iPhone, so businesses can accept payments from wherever they do business.

Although Tap to Pay won’t require new hardware, it will need to be incorporated into participating apps. Apple says developers can expect a Tap to Pay SDK in an upcoming iOS beta.

It’s good to see that Tap to Pay will work with a broad array of credit cards, debit cards, Stripe, and other payment processors. However, it’s disappointing that Tap to Pay will be US-only at launch, although it’s not surprising either. I use my iPhone for payments a lot, so I’m glad to see the addition of Tap to Pay, which will make that possible in even more circumstances.

Play: A Fantastic Utility for Saving and Organizing YouTube Videos for Later

Today, Marcos Tanaka released Play, an iPhone, iPad, and Mac app for saving links to YouTube videos for later. The app doesn’t save the videos themselves. Instead, it saves their URLs, along with metadata, making it easy to organize, sort, filter, and rediscover videos that might otherwise fall by the wayside.

Play is an excellent example of how purpose-built apps often outshine more general solutions. There are many ways to save a YouTube video for later, from a bare URL pasted in a text file to a bookmarking or read later app. YouTube has its own solution, too, with its Watch Later playlist. Each solution I’ve tried in the past works to a degree, but by focusing solely on the experience of saving YouTube links for watching later, Play outshines them all.

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Six Colors’ ‘Apple in 2021’ Report Card

For the past seven years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an ‘Apple report card’ – a survey that aims to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.

The 2021 installment of the Six Colors report card is now out, and you can find an excellent summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for different categories on Six Colors.

I wasn’t able to participate in last year’s report card, but I’m happy Jason invited me back to share some thoughts and comments on what Apple did in 2021. As it turns out…I had a lot of opinions I wanted to share this year, particularly about the Mac. This may be surprising coming from me – a longtime iPad Pro user – but I’m incredibly fascinated by Apple’s new direction with the Mac platform and how it’s changed thanks to Apple silicon.

I’ll have much more to share about macOS and the M1 Max MacBook Pro I’ve been testing in the near future. In the meantime, I’ve prepared the full text of my answers to the Six Colors report card, which you can find below. Once again, I recommend reading the whole thing on Six Colors to get the broader context of all the participants in the survey.

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Genius Scan: A Scanner in Your Pocket [Sponsor]

Genius Scan makes scanning and managing documents with an iPhone or iPad simple, fast, and efficient. The app works the way you do and includes a flexible set of powerful, modern tools that are always with you. Its scanning engine is fast and accurate, delivering crisp, clear scans on the go, using your device’s camera or by picking images from the app’s system file picker, your photo library, or as part of a custom shortcut.

Just place a document in front of your device’s camera. Genius Scan has advanced edge detection that quickly picks out the page against its background, using powerful AI and cropping multiple scans and gathering them into a single PDF for sharing or archiving. The app’s scanning algorithms also clean up artifacts, shadows, and unclean edges, to give you fantastic results every time.

Rescanning is easy too. There’s no need to rescan an entire document from scratch because Genius Scan lets you delete or replace individual pages with a few taps. It’s a workflow that’s as intuitive as it is efficient.

Genius Scan features highly accurate optical character recognition, enabling full-text searching of your scans and the ability to copy the text for use elsewhere. The app also supports machine learning-based file naming, Shortcuts, extensive sharing options, Split View and Slide Over on the iPad, and much more. There’s a big update coming soon too!

Used by everyone from students to doctors and pilots, Genius Scan offers pricing to fit all needs. Genius Scan Basic is free and fully functional with no watermarks, scanning limits, third-party ads, or tracking. Genius Scan+ unlocks background uploading support to cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive, OCR, locking the app with Touch ID, PDF encryption, and smart document naming for just $7.99. Also, a Genius Cloud subscription adds document sync and backup for peace of mind for $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

So download Genius Scan today, to support these independent, honest, privacy-conscious developers and put the App Store’s best scanner in your pocket.

Our thanks to Genius Scan for sponsoring MacStories this week.