Posts in reviews

BenQ’s More Affordable 5K Display Offers Mac Users Greater Flexibility with Some Trade-Offs

Source: BenQ

Source: BenQ

Until last fall, I was the happy owner of a first-generation Studio Display. In most respects, it was great. The screen was crisp, the colors vibrant, and it included many quality-of-life features other displays lack. Features like the Studio Display’s built-in USB-C hub, iSight camera, and array of six speakers and three microphones make it more like a Mac accessory than simply a display.

Those were all tangible upsides, but they came with their own set of tradeoffs, which Apple carried over from my original Studio Display to the updated model released earlier this year. That new model adopts Thunderbolt 5 for two of its ports – one upstream and another downstream – and improves the camera and speakers. However, both Studio Display models lack HDMI, DisplayPort, KVM capabilities for easy switching between multiple connected devices, and screen size choices.

That ultimately drove me to purchase an ASUS gaming monitor that I love. It’s OLED and bigger than the Studio Display, with a higher refresh rate, more input options, and built-in KVM. However, it lacks a webcam, microphones, and speakers, which I miss at times. It’s also 4K, whereas the Studio Display is 5K.

On balance, I’m glad I went the route I did, but it’s led me to think a lot about displays and the trade-offs among them. The good news is that there are many more choices for Mac users than ever before, even if you don’t want to sacrifice the Studio Display’s 5K resolution for more flexibility. That’s why when BenQ offered to send me their 27” 5K MA270S display to try, I jumped at the opportunity: unlike my 32” gamer-oriented ASUS display, BenQ’s display is specifically targeted at Mac users.

Let’s take a look at how it stacks up to the Studio Display and other options.

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Book Beats: Reading to the Rhythm

Tracking the books you read is well-trodden App Store ground. So is making music playlists. But what if you combined the two? The result is Book Beats, a new iPhone and iPad app from Olea Studios’ Casey and Lisa Doyle, that does just that, managing to elevate books and music in a new and unique way by bringing reading and listening together. It’s a terrific example of an app made by people who deeply understand its subject matter and bring AI to bear in a focused, tasteful way that elevates the app’s experience without being gimmicky.

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Indigo: A Clever Mashup of Bluesky and Mastodon in One Timeline

Last week, Soapbox Software (Ben McCarthy and Aaron Vegh) released Indigo, an iPhone, iPad, and Mac app that offers a unique take on social media, allowing you to log into both Bluesky and Mastodon in a single app. In the increasingly fractured social media landscape we live in, it’s a fantastic idea. Instead of bouncing back and forth between two services that have a lot of overlap for some users, why not use just one?

This isn’t Soapbox’s first collaboration. You may recall Croissant, the cross-posting utility that I covered when it released in 2024. We were so taken by the app that we gave it the Best New App award in the 2024 MacStories Selects Awards. That pedigree shows in what is a much deeper and more complex app.

Like Croissant, Indigo lets you cross-post to Bluesky and Mastodon and is beautifully designed. But unlike Croissant, Indigo is a full-blown timeline app for simultaneously catching up on your Bluesky and Mastodon feeds at the same time.

Depending on who you follow on each service, a mashup of the two has the potential to generate a timeline full of duplicates, but Soapbox took that into account with Indigo. There’s no need to change who you follow or make any other sort of adjustment yourself; instead, the app automatically detects duplicate posts and removes them from sight. However, if for some reason you want to see both, the duplicate post is always available behind the tap of a Crosspost button. It’s a great feature that alerts you to the fact that one of your timelines has been altered while also giving you the chance to check out the other post.

Indigo running on an iPad Pro.

Indigo running on an iPad Pro.

Other touches, such as the color of links, provide subtle clues to convey a post’s provenance, but the shades of blue and purple used are close enough that you might not notice the difference until you run across a Crosspost button. I also appreciate the separate character limit countdowns for each service on the New Post screen, which let you know when you’re going to have to forgo Bluesky for a chattier Mastodon post. Fortunately, the app lets you just post to one or the other service if you’d like by tapping on the character countdown.

All of the other core features you’d expect are available, too. Photos, videos, and GIFs are supported, as are @mentions and hashtags. You can filter who can see your post and who can reply to it, with some inherent differences in the underlying services’ support for those features. The app also includes search, notifications, direct messages, profile viewing, and a bunch of settings you can tweak. That said, power users of apps like Ivory may feel a little constrained in Indigo. It’s an excellent 1.0, but it doesn’t yet match the full functionality of Ivory.

Scrolling dog stories on the Mac.

Scrolling dog stories on the Mac.

Indigo strikes me as a good solution for a couple of different types of users. If you want a simple, beautifully designed way to read your Bluesky or Mastodon timeline, this is a great one. While the cross-posting and deduplication features are what will set Indigo apart for many, it works well as a standalone option for either service.

However, I expect the core audience will be people who use both Bluesky and Mastodon and follow many of the same people in both places. Especially if the people you follow cross-post a lot, Indigo greatly improves the experience.

I’ve enjoyed playing around with Indigo for the past few weeks and noticed a couple of things. Despite following roughly the same number of people on both services, the Bluesky accounts I follow are a lot chattier than those on Mastodon. I also have far fewer Crosspost buttons in my timeline than I expected. I guess I just follow very different accounts on each.

If you’ve ever felt the fatigue of jumping back and forth between a Bluesky and Mastodon timeline and found it hard to keep up with both, be sure to give Indigo a try. It makes the entire experience much nicer. You can download Indigo from the App Store on iPhone, iPad, and Mac and unlock its full feature set by purchasing the Ultraviolet tier, which costs $4.99/month, $34.99/year, or a one-time payment of $119.99.

Spark Mail Adds a Mac CLI and Agent Skills

About two weeks ago, Spark, the email app by Readdle, was updated with a CLI and a set of agentic skills for Claude Code, Codex, and other agents, allowing them read-only access to messages, calendar events, contacts, and meeting notes. These features were extended again a few days ago with new abilities that added email triage actions and more skills. The approach is clever in its local architecture, which keeps your message data on your Mac while making it available to agents.

CLIs are one of this year’s top app trends, with a wide variety of productivity apps adding them. The reason is simple: agents that work in the Terminal like Claude Code and Codex can use local CLIs, which keeps token usage down because the agent only sees a command’s text output instead of carrying tool schemas with it the way MCP servers do.

Spark works with several agents.

Spark works with several agents.

Spark isn’t the first to create an email CLI. The Google-created, but “not an official product,” googleworkspace CLI interfaces with Gmail and a bunch of other Google services, offering over 100 skills. The difference is that a CLI like googleworkspace contacts Google’s Gmail servers and acts on your messages in the cloud, whereas Spark’s CLI acts as a remote control for the Spark app itself, managing the messages locally on your Mac and then syncing them back to Gmail via the desktop app.

I’ve worked with both the googleworkspace CLI and Spark’s, and Spark’s is by far the easier one to use because you don’t need to set up a Google Cloud project or deal with OAuth. The only drawback is that the Spark app needs to be open for its CLI to work because everything happens on your Mac. However, as a practical matter, that’s not a limitation that has impacted me since my email app is open when I’d want to use Spark’s CLI or skills anyway.

Read-only actions are available for all users. Triage actions require a Pro subscription.

Read-only actions are available for all users. Triage actions require a Pro subscription.

There are two levels to what Spark offers. The read-only CLI and skills are available to all users, whether or not they subscribe to Spark Pro. Those actions include the ability to search and summarize messages, fetch context, read threads, and view your calendar, contacts, and meeting notes. A Pro subscription adds message drafting, replying, snoozing, pinning, labeling, moving, and archiving, along with team commenting. It’s an excellent set of actions that uses syntax similar to Gmail, which means it should be familiar to many long-time Gmail users straight out of the box.

And there’s more. Readdle has also released a set of recipes and personas, which are open-source skills. The recipes include instructions for morning and end-of-day email reviews, reviewing of new senders, catching up on messages after vacation, and more. Personas are more holistic approaches to your inbox that apply to an entire email session and have modes. For example, the Founder persona has Rapid Triage, Aggressive Delegation, and Cross-Team Oversight modes. Other personas include Executive Assistant, Freelancer, and Team Lead. Full details of every recipe and persona are available on Readdle’s GitHub page.

Searching email via the command line.

Searching email via the command line.

I’ve spent time using the read-only actions of Spark’s CLI with Claude Code, and it’s an excellent option for automating your email. Setup is simple and fast, and it works well. I’m not sure personas are for me, but there are a bunch of interesting ideas among the recipes, which I intend to explore more and use to create my own skills.

Spark Mail is available as a free download on the Mac App Store. The CLI’s triage actions are exclusive to users who subscribe to Spark Pro, which costs $20/month or $200/year.

Cronos: The New Dawn Showcases the Mac’s MetalFX and Ray Tracing

Source: Bloober Team.

Source: Bloober Team.

Top-tier games continue to roll out on Apple’s platforms at a steady clip. Recently, Crimson Desert landed on the Mac on the same day as other platforms, and then last week, Control: Ultimate Edition added support for the iPhone and iPad, joining the Mac version that was released last year.

Today, Cronos: The New Dawn, a survival horror game by Bloober Team, joins the Mac gaming scene via Steam. In a post-apocalyptic, retro-tech setting, you play as the Traveller, who has been sent on a mysterious mission by a group called The Collective. Not long after you set out on your quest, you realize you aren’t alone. The landscape is littered with corpses that merge into mutant, zombie-like enemies that you have to fight off with a combination of weapons and melee attacks.

Cronos debuted on the Xbox, PlayStation 5, Switch, PC, and Linux last September, but I didn’t play it on any of those platforms. Instead, I dove in fresh when I got the chance to try it on the Mac, thanks to a few days’ early access. I haven’t played very far into the story yet, but despite not being a huge fan of horror games, I was immediately captivated by the game’s incredible sound design, retro tech vibe, and creepy story.

With limited time, I focused on the game’s performance on two Macs: my M1 Mac Studio connected to a 4K ASUS display and an M4 Max MacBook Pro, both on its own and connected to a BenQ 5K display I’ve been testing. As I expected, the difference between the two Macs was noticeable, showing just how far Apple silicon has come in terms of gaming. My Mac Studio may still pull its weight when it comes to productivity tasks, but the M4 Max MacBook Pro operates on an entirely different level.

Bloober Team is no stranger to Apple silicon, having released The Medium with Metal 3 support for Apple silicon in 2023. The experience shows in the studio’s incorporation of both MetalFX upscaling and hardware-accelerated ray tracing in Cronos.

By default, Cronos’ MetalFX and ray tracing settings are turned off, but both are worth trying along with frame generation because they make a big difference. After some experimentation on my M1 Max Mac Studio, I landed on a pretty consistent 70-75 FPS at 1440p with the help of MetalFX and frame generation. Hardware-accelerated ray tracing isn’t supported by Apple’s M1 family of chips, so that wasn’t an option at all.

As you’d expect, performance was much better on the M4 Max MacBook Pro, which does support hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Starting with the default settings and playing on the MacBook Pro’s display, I turned on ray tracing, MetalFX, and frame generation and got a consistent 55-65 FPS, and turning off ray tracing bumped that more consistently into the 60s. The game struggled a little bit when I connected to an external 5K display, but with a few more tweaks, it was running well, too.

What’s clear is that Cronos pushes the Mac’s hardware hard and that Apple’s latest gaming technologies make a big difference in performance. On the MacBook Pro, the fans spin up loudly soon after starting the game; plus, if you don’t have your laptop plugged in, you may be prompted to switch to Low Power Mode pretty quickly. However, the overall experience on Apple’s most recent hardware has come a long way since the M1 chipset, and with every hardware revision, more games like Cronos become viable. And whether you play it on the Mac or not, Cronos: The New Dawn is worth checking out for a creepy futuristic good time.

Cronos: The New Dawn is available on Steam and is 30% off until May 1.

Pedometer++ 8: Glimmers of an Apple Wrist Renaissance

Today, when you mention David Smith’s name, most people probably think of Widgetsmith, his runaway success that caught fire on TikTok and is still going strong today. But for me, Pedometer++ is what comes to mind first. Still a couple of years away from releasing my own apps or writing at MacStories, I was fascinated by the dynamics that made the app a success when it debuted in 2013. Part of that success was how quickly David got it onto the App Store in the wake of the iPhone 5s and its M7 coprocessor that made step counting possible.

It didn’t hurt that Pedometer++’s initial release was also free (and the core features still are), but the app’s elegant, simple design played a big part, too. Pedometer++ appealed to a wide audience who appreciated its focus and frequent updates that systematically took it from basic step counting to badges, confetti, workouts, maps, and more. It’s a great example of a developer who jumped on a new hardware feature quickly with a focused initial release and then relentlessly iterated year after year without sacrificing what made that first version a favorite of so many people.

Today’s 8.0 release is focused first and foremost on the Apple Watch, which is the other aspect of so many of David’s apps that I appreciate. Few people know the ins and outs – and frustrations – of watchOS (née WatchKit) development like David does. But despite the platform’s rudimentary beginnings, David has stuck with it, making the best watch version of Pedometer++ that was possible with each turn of the SDK and, later, OS. That’s as true with version 8.0 of the app as it has ever been.

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Remodex Is the Best Codex Remote Client for iOS (Until OpenAI Releases an Official Codex Mobile App)

Remodex for iOS.

Remodex for iOS.

Various OpenAI employees and members of the Codex team have been hinting at a native Codex app for iOS lately. While I very much hope that’s in the cards – especially if the project involves connecting to a remote Mac running the full Codex app – I wanted to highlight an indie utility I’ve been using a lot lately to access my Codex setup on my Mac Studio server from my iPhone.

The app is called Remodex, and it was created by Italian indie developer Emanuele Di Pietro. Remodex, as the name suggests, acts as a remote for the Codex CLI installed on a macOS computer, and it lets you operate your existing projects and chats with a UI that is reminiscent of the official Codex app for Mac. Even better, Remodex is not based on some hack-y workaround: it’s entirely powered by OpenAI’s official (and open-source) Codex App Server.

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Hour by Hour: Reverse Engineering Your Schedule

Hour by Hour is a clever new approach to scheduling your time from Joe Humfrey of Selkie Design that took me a little while to get used to, but has really grown on me.

The app was inspired by travel planning and the age-old question, “When should I leave for the airport?” You’ve probably been there before. You have a flight at, say, 2:00 pm, but you need to drive 30 minutes to the airport, add some time to park, take a shuttle to the terminal, get through security, and build in a little extra wiggle room just in case traffic is bad or something else goes sideways. Suddenly, 2:00 pm becomes an exercise in mental gymnastics as you work your way back to when you should walk out the door.

Hour by Hour solves this sort of scheduling, but for every type of event, by using the same kind of reverse planning. At the same time, it’s not really a calendar app so much as a scheduling companion for your calendar. You can pull your calendar events into Hour by Hour, but you don’t have to, and if you dive into the app expecting to use it the same way you use a traditional calendar, the assumptions you bring with you will probably trip you up.

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