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Posts tagged with "app"

PicoChat or PictoChat: Can You Tell the Difference?

It’s been a very long time since I reviewed an iMessage app, but past issues of MacStories Weekly and this site chronicle the hundreds of iMessage apps Federico and I tried and wrote about. Today, though, I was reminded that there’s still fun to be had in what has to be Apple’s most obscure corner of the App Store because this afternoon, Brendon Bigley sent me a link to PicoChat for iMessage, a nostalgia-filled delight from developer Idrees Hassan.

PicoChat lovingly recreates the look and feel of PictoChat, a local messaging app that shipped with the Nintendo DS beginning in 2004 and later with the DS Lite and DSi. PictoChat used a short-range proprietary wireless protocol that could only extend about 65 feet, which ultimately led to its demise as smartphones with cellular connections and Wi-Fi became popular. However, for several years, it served as a short-range communications and creative outlet for a generation of kids.

For context, here’s PictoChat running on my matte black Nintendo DSi, a model that is one of Brendon’s ‘dream devices,’ as he recently shared on NPC: Next Portable Console:

Now, here’s a close-up of the original PictoChat interface and the iMessage app side-by-side.

PictoChat on a DS (left) and the PicoChat for iMessage app (right).

PictoChat on a DS (left) and the PicoChat for iMessage app (right).

Just like the DS, the iMessage version has a teeny tiny keyboard with space above it for doodles. If it weren’t for the lower resolution of the DS’s screen, I bet most people would have a hard time telling them apart.

Getting back to Hassan’s app, it’s accessed like other iMessage apps from the Plus button in a Messages thread. Once you’re finished composing your masterpiece, the app converts it into an image and sends it like any other image is sent in Messages.

That’s it, but it’s more than enough to have sent a whole lot of Nintendo DS fans down a nostalgia-filled rabbit hole today, which was cool. Even if the DS wasn’t your thing, check out PicoChat and send some doodles to your friends and family. It’s a lot of fun.

PicoChat is available as a free download on the App Store.

Hyperspace: Quickly Recover Mac Storage Without Deleting Files

Earlier today, John Siracusa released a Mac app called Hyperspace. The app scans any folder on your Mac, identifying duplicates. When the scan is finished, you can review the results and choose whether to reclaim the unnecessary space taken up by the duplicates.

Ready to scan.

Ready to scan.

Because of the way Apple’s APFS file system works on the Mac, Hyperspace’s deduplication of files doesn’t delete or move anything. How APFS does this is complicated and explained on the app’s website if you want to learn more, but to over-simplify a bit, APFS allows Hyperspace to eliminate duplicative data without changing the location of the files or their metadata. That means it’s a non-destructive operation, allowing you to reclaim drive space at no cost to your data’s integrity.

Hyperspace gives you a chance to review the files it has identified as duplicates.

Hyperspace gives you a chance to review the files it has identified as duplicates.

The app has safety measures in place so system files aren’t affected, and users can label certain folders as ‘Source’ folders that will never be altered. You also have an opportunity to review the results of Hyperspace’s scan before the app does anything to your files.

Hyperspace requires a subscription or one-time purchase to reclaim space.

Hyperspace requires a subscription or one-time purchase to reclaim space.

I took Hyperspace for a spin to see what it could find on my Mac Studio, which stores about 2.5 TB of data. The scan was impressively fast at around 30 seconds, identifying 4.04 GB of data that it could free up. That’s not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it was also nice to know that I don’t generate a lot of duplicate files with my workflows.

Hyperspace is free to download from the Mac App Store. The free version allows you to scan the folders on your system. However, to recover space, you need to subscribe for $9.99 per month or $19.99 per year, or purchase a lifetime license for $49.99. There are also options to purchase a single month license for $9.99 or a single year for $19.99.

Mela 2.5 Adds Web Search Engine and Recipe Import from YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok Videos

Back in 2021, Silvio Rizzi, developer of the all-time great RSS client Reeder , released Mela, an app for importing, collecting, and sharing recipes. Right from the start, Mela stood out as a delightful take on the recipe app genre. Just like Reeder, it features a beautiful design and is a joy to browse and use. The app originally shipped with the ability to import recipes directly from the web, subscribe to RSS feeds, and even scan recipes found in physical cookbooks and magazines. Combining those features with its built-in tools for converting measurements and dynamically adjusting meal sizes, Mela truly cooked up the perfect recipe (pun intended) for becoming your one and only cooking app companion. You can check out John’s original review of the app on MacStories to learn more.

This month, Mela was updated to version 2.5 with several improvements, including an option to search for recipes on the web using a new native recipe search engine and the ability to import recipes from video descriptions on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, all of which have become popular platforms for discovering and sharing cooking ideas. This new version takes the app’s web scraping capabilities even further than before, and I was curious to see how it fared.

Let’s check it out.

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Game Tracker: A Powerful App to Track, Organize, and Customize Your Videogame Library

Game Tracker is a new videogame tracking app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac from Simone Montalto, who is probably best known to MacStories readers for developing the excellent Book Tracker. In fact, Montalto has created an entire suite of tracking apps that also includes Movie Tracker, Music Tracker, and Habit Tracker. That experience with various tracking apps shows with Game Tracker, which does a fantastic job of tailoring to the particularities of videogames and leveraging metadata to allow users to make the app their own.

Let’s take a closer look.

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Bookshop.org Now Supports Local Booksellers with eBook Sales→

Bookshop.org launched in 2020 as a way to sell books online while still supporting local bookstores, which have become a rarity in the U.S. The company has seen success selling physical books online. As Boone Ashworth explains at Wired:

For physical books, Bookshop lets buyers direct 30 percent of the proceeds of a sale to their favorite participating bookstore. An additional 10 percent of those sales, plus the sales of books that are not earmarked for a specific store, gets split up and distributed to every store on Bookshop’s platform.

Now, Bookshop has added eBooks that can be purchased online and read in the company’s new Bookshop.org app, available for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Ashworth breaks down how these sales work:

Ebook sales through Bookshop, however, will see 100 percent of the proceeds going to the store that sells them through the platform. If a user buys an ebook directly from Bookshop without naming a bookstore they want to support, then a third of that profit will go into the pool of funds that gets divided between stores. The rest will go to pay for Bookshop.org’s engineers and server costs.

Giving local bookstores the ability to sell eBooks fills a big hole for those businesses. Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter shared the company’s motivation for offering eBooks with Wired:

“It’s crazy that bookstores can’t sell ebooks to their customers right now,” Hunter says. He says he wants this program to continue his company’s mission of propping up local bookstores, but he also hopes this move will help take Amazon down a peg as well.

I’ve tried Bookshop’s app briefly with some book previews, and it works well. The settings options aren’t as extensive as in other eBook readers, but the basics – like text size, pagination versus scrolling, a couple of font options, and light, dark, and paper themes – are all there. The design makes browsing your library of books or finding something new to read easy, too. It may not be enough for some readers, but this is a 1.0 release, so I’m optimistic additional options will be offered with time.

It’s great to see Bookshop offering eBooks. We have an excellent bookstore here in Davidson that I love to browse, but more often than not, I prefer an eBook over the paper version, so it’s nice to have that as an option now.

The Bookshop.org app is available on the App Store as a free download. eBooks must be purchased online and synced with the app.

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Transit Can Now Track Underground Trains without GPS→

Source: Transit

Source: Transit

Earlier this month, Transit, one of my favorite apps of all time, gained an impressive new feature: the app is now able to track your train and warn you when you are about to reach your destination even when your train is underground. Previously, Transit had to rely on GPS and cellular service to precisely locate your train on its route, which meant it couldn’t reliably function as soon as you entered a subway tunnel.

The way they have been able to achieve this is fascinating. Transit now utilizes the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer and analyzes its patterns to identify when the vehicle you boarded is in motion, and every time it reaches a station. The company’s account of the whole process is nothing short of impressive. The team spent a week riding buses and trains to collect data and proceeded to create an entirely new prediction model that is able to count down the underground stations that you will need to ride through to reach your destination. Transit says the model works completely offline and on-device.

I know I’m going to give this new feature a try as soon as I get a chance to ride the Paris Métro next week.

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Raycast Overhauls Its Notes Feature

Raycast has always been more than an app launcher. From the start, it has included a multitude of other handy utilities, including Floating Notes. I’ve used Floating Notes now and then to park a bit of text where I knew I’d be able to find it later. Because the note floated above other windows, it was easy to access, but Floating Notes always felt a little too rudimentary to use for much more than that.

Today, Raycast released an extensive update to the feature and renamed it Raycast Notes. Your notes still occupy a floating window, but now, the window auto-resizes to fit the content by default. The window’s width is fixed, but you can always resize its height to adjust how much space it occupies on your screen.

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CoverSutra Adds a Standalone Apple Music Client to Your Mac’s Menu Bar

CoverSutra by Sophiestication is a name that may sound familiar if you’re as ancient as Federico, who last reviewed the app on MacStories in January 2010. At the time, the app was a fully-featured iTunes controller. It could display your music in the menu bar as well on the Desktop. It also used to act as a Last.fm client and ship with a bunch of customization features.

This month, CoverSutra is back with version 4.0. This new version was rewritten from the ground up with a different approach: instead of being a controller for Apple’s native Music app, CoverSutra is now a standalone client for Apple Music on the Mac. In practice, this means that you can search your Apple Music library, pick any album or playlist, and start listening without ever having to launch the Music app.

Search is CoverSutra’s highlight feature. Using CoverSutra for the past week on my Mac has made me realize how much more time I usually spend in the Music app just searching through my library. Searching with CoverSutra, on the other hand, is fast and persistent. You can start typing part of an artist’s name, album, or song title, and search results will instantly appear in the menu bar popover window. And as long as you don’t start a new search, your search results will not disappear, even if you click away from the menu bar.

CoverSutra's layout for search results puts the emphasis on album and playlist covers.

CoverSutra’s layout for search results puts the emphasis on album and playlist covers.

I’ve also found that CoverSutra suits my listening habits pretty well. As the kind of person who likes to play albums from front to back and rarely relies on curated playlists, I’ve enjoyed how CoverSutra allows me to quickly bring up an album and play it from the beginning. The layout emphasizes album and playlist covers and makes it easy to instantly spot the album you are looking for.

In its current shape, CoverSutra 4.0 is pretty basic. Apart from search, playback controls, and the ability to set your own global keyboard shortcuts, there are no additional features or settings. However, I’m hopeful that the app can start fresh from this new foundation. Unlike similar alternatives on the Mac like Neptunes or Sleeve, CoverSutra’s potential as a standalone player in the menu bar may enable a range of more advanced features.

CoverSutra supports custom global keyboard shortcuts.

CoverSutra supports custom global keyboard shortcuts.

CoverSutra 4.0 is available on the Mac App Store. For a limited time, the app is available at an introductory price of $4.99. If you’ve purchased CoverSutra on the Mac App Store in the past, the upgrade to version 4.0 is free.

Adding to My Mac’s Swiss Army Knife: A Raycast Extension Roundup

If you have ever heard or seen me talk about my macOS setup, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of Raycast. A few years ago, Raycast took off on the Mac as an incredible alternative to Spotlight and the long-time Mac power user favorite, Alfred. Today, it has cemented itself as an essential piece of software in my daily workflows.

Raycast’s main strength is that it’s fast. It lets you launch apps, run shortcuts, and manage your windows with straightforward commands, and it is extremely flexible in the way that it allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts and aliases to any command.

That being said, I believe the one aspect of Raycast that drives the tool to its maximum potential is its ecosystem of third-party extensions. Developers can build their own commands and offer them in the Raycast extensions store for free. The store, which users can access by typing “Store” directly in the Raycast search bar, has hundreds of extensions available that vary in functionality and quality. And while some of those optional extensions can be pretty simple or offer a single feature each, the way that they come together to turn Raycast into a Swiss Army knife for your workflows on the Mac makes each of them valuable in their own respect.

So today, rather than highlight Raycast’s well-known built-in features, I thought I would round up some of my favorite optional extensions instead. Here’s a word of warning: some extensions in this list are very specific. But at the same time, though, they’ve each become an integral part of my Mac’s Swiss Army knife.

Alright, let’s get into it.

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