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Gamery

A sleek and intuitive game library app for casuals and pros

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.

MacStories Unwind: Pokémon Legends: Arceus

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This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico and John cover their first joint Unwind pick, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, plus MacStories highlights.

Federico and John’s Joint Pick:

MacStories Rewind

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AppStories, Episode 258 – Starting the New Year with New Shortcuts, Workflows, Apps, and More→

This week on AppStories, we look back at the MacStories Starter Pack coverage last week, digging into the themes and details of each of the stories we wrote and the ways you can incorporate everything into your own workflows.

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

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, a little behind the scenes of the MacStories Starter Pack, along with a detailed discussion of the bug fixes and other changes to Shortcuts in iOS and iPadOS 15.3 and our wishes for the app’s future.

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Preserve and Play the Original Wordle for Decades with WordleForever

Playing the original Wordle offline with WordleForever.

Playing the original Wordle offline with WordleForever.

Update: It appears that WordleForever is only supported on iOS/iPadOS 15.4 at the moment, which are available as public betas. I was not aware of the fact that older versions of iOS/iPadOS had a bug in the Shortcuts app that prevented WordleForever from working properly. If you want to play with WordleForever now, you’ll have to install iOS/iPadOS 15.4.

Like many others over the past week, when I saw the news that Wordle had been acquired by The New York Times, I immediately felt a mix of two feelings: I was genuinely happy (and still am!) for Wordle creator Josh Wardle, who managed to turn a simple web game into a successful venture; and I was concerned The New York Times would inevitably ruin the beauty and simplicity of the original game. And I still am.

So in the spirit of game preservation (a topic I care deeply about) and out of skepticism regarding the future of Wordle as a NYT product, I teamed up with Finn Voorhees to create WordleForever, a shortcut that lets you back up the entire Wordle game offline – on your device – using Apple’s Shortcuts app so you can keep playing the game for the next few decades. With WordleForever, you can put the original Wordle on your iPhone or iPad Home Screen and play the original game (with the same words as everyone else) for years to come.

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Unite 4: Turn Websites into Apps on Your Mac [Sponsor]

Unite 4 for macOS can turn any website into an app for your Mac. The app uses a lightweight, WebKit-powered browser as a backend, allowing you to easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site. It’s a terrific way to get those sites you visit every day out of a tab and into a dedicated, standalone app.

Unite 4 has dozens of features and customization options that make it a terrific alternative to resource-hogging Electron apps or uninspired Mac Catalyst implementations. The apps you create are easy to set up, fast, and only limited by your imagination:

  • Create dedicated apps for your favorite streaming services like Netflix and Disney+
  • Save your laptop’s battery by using Unite for Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp with full notification support
  • Listen to music services like Apple Music or Spotify
  • Enjoy podcasts with Overcast
  • Organize your notes in a dedicated Roam Research app
  • Never again lose your Figma design work among a sea of Safari tabs
  • Limit the ability of apps like Facebook to track you across sites
  • Check your Instagram feed
  • Track your finances with Robinhood

No matter which sites you use, Unite can turn them into apps for your Mac with customizable colors, an icon that fits the version of macOS you use, dark mode, support for the macOS Keychain, floating windows, and even menu bar-based apps that appear with a single click.

This week only, MacStories readers can get 20% off when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/macstories or by using the promo code ‘MacStories’ at checkout.

Unite is free to try for 14 days and is available as part of a Setapp subscription too.

Download Unite 4 today and turn your favorite websites into your favorite apps too.

Our thanks to Unite 4 for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: Brooklyn 99, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Ghost of Tsushima, Director’s Cut

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This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico shares his favorite season of Brooklyn 99 and Horizon Zero Dawn, which he’s been playing in advance of the release of Horizon Forbidden West, and John explains why Ghost of Tsushima, Director’s Cut is so good on the PlayStation 5.

Federico’s Pick:

John’s Pick:

MacStories Rewind