Posts tagged with "featured"

Apple Releases iOS and iPadOS 17.4 with Major Safari and App Store Changes in the EU, Transcripts for Podcasts, New Emoji, and More

Today, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 17.4, the fourth major updates to the operating systems that launched in September and Federico reviewed on MacStories.

iOS 17.4 is a significant release, bringing major platform changes to iOS in Europe as part of Apple’s response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), as well as a handful of new features, including transcripts in Apple’s Podcasts app, new emoji, multilingual updates to Siri, and more.

Let’s dive in, starting with the main changes for iPhone owners in the EU.

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MacPad: How I Created the Hybrid Mac-iPad Laptop and Tablet That Apple Won’t Make

Hello, MacPad.

Hello, MacPad.

It all started because I wanted a better keyboard for my Vision Pro. I had no idea that, in looking for one, I’d accidentally create the hybrid Apple computer of my dreams.

As I quickly discovered after working on the Vision Pro daily, you can get by without an external trackpad, but a keyboard is necessary if you want to type something longer than a passcode. That’s where my journey began: if I wanted to write and edit articles on the Vision Pro, what would the best keyboard-trackpad setup be?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve tested all the options at my disposal. I started with an Apple Magic Trackpad and Keyboard, which I then placed inside a Twelve South MagicBridge (it was too uncomfortable to put on my lap for longer stretches of time). Next, I tried using different types of “trays” for these two accessories that offered a laptop-like layout (comfort was better, but lack of palm rejection was an issue). I even attempted to revive an old Brydge keyboard and use it with the Vision Pro, but, alas, third-party trackpads aren’t supported on visionOS at the moment.

Eventually, I settled on the solution that I should have known was coming for me all along: the best keyboard and trackpad combo for a Vision Pro is a Mac laptop. So I started using my MacBook Air every day, taking advantage of Mac Virtual Display and Universal Control to get work done with the Vision Pro in a mix of classic desktop apps and new visionOS experiences. I’ll write more about this soon, but, so far, it’s felt powerful and flexible in a way that iPadOS hasn’t made me feel in a while.

But something kept nagging me.

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Vision Pro App Spotlight: Longplay Adds Immersive Album Listening

The music experience on the Apple Vision Pro is excellent. It starts with the device’s built-in headphones and spatial audio, which work hand-in-hand with the visual components of spatial computing. Apple has already shown off the potential for immersive experiences like Alicia Keys: Rehearsal Room, but the music experience goes deeper than that, thanks to third-party developers.

I’ve already covered Juno, Christian Selig’s YouTube player app, which is great for watching music videos and other content, and NowPlaying, which supplements Apple Music with editorial content, lyrics, and more. Today, though, I want to focus on Longplay, Adrian Schönig’s album-oriented playback app for Apple Music.

Longplay 2.0 was released last August. It was a big update that I reviewed at the time and have been enjoying ever since. The app is available on the Vision Pro now too, complete with an immersive mode that I love.

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A Comprehensive Guide to Gaming on the Apple Vision Pro

The lack of any kind of port significantly limits the type of gaming you can do in the Apple Vision Pro – or does it? Sure, even one USB-C port would make a big difference to gamers looking to play titles outside the App Store, but there is a surprisingly wide array of ways to play almost any game on the Vision Pro with the help of a combination of apps and hardware. The solutions run the gamut from simple to complex and span a range of price points. I’ve tried them all and have pointers on how to get started.

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Juno 1.1 for visionOS Adds the Ability to Open YouTube.com URLs in the App

Opening videos in Juno from the YouTube website.

Opening videos in Juno from the YouTube website.

John covered Juno, Christian Selig’s new YouTube client for visionOS, on MacStories last week, and I’ve been using the app for the past few days as my default way of watching YouTube videos on my Vision Pro. Today, Selig released version 1.1 of Juno with some welcome quality-of-life enhancements such as the ability to choose video quality, faster load times, and support for dropping YouTube links in the app to watch them directly in Juno. You can read more about the changes on Selig’s blog.

The one new feature I want to call out here is the addition of URL schemes which have, once again, come to the rescue to help me navigate the early limitations of a new Apple platform.

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Vision Pro App Spotlight: My Favorite Digital Clock Apps for Vision Pro

It's clocks all the way down.

It’s clocks all the way down.

Who would have guessed that the category of visionOS apps I’d obsessively download from the App Store would be…digital clocks?

Hear me out: it’s very easy to lose track of time when using – and especially working with – the Vision Pro. It’s not just that the current time, in the absence of a status bar – is tucked away in Control Center, which requires you to look up and open a separate window; it’s that with this new platform, and with all these new apps, I want to try everything and my brain is reacting to dozens of stimuli every minute. Time flies when I’m wearing the Vision Pro, filling my workspace with windows and juggling multiple tasks, and that’s not even to mention when I’m in an immersive environment.

Which brings me to humankind’s greatest invention: the clock. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could always see a digital representation of the current time as a tiny window somewhere in your workspace? And wouldn’t it be even better if that digital clock had configuration options that, you know, a physical clock on a wall can’t offer?

For the past few days, I’ve been downloading essentially every clock app I could find on the visionOS App Store, and I’ve compiled a list of my favorite options so far.

Let’s dive in.

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Vision Pro App Spotlight: Things for visionOS Is a Familiar, Intuitive Task Management Experience

Things for visionOS, floating in the sky.

Things for visionOS, floating in the sky.

The biggest compliment I can pay to Things for visionOS is that it doesn’t feel like a compromised version of the iPadOS experience at all. In fact, thanks to the spatial nature of multitasking on the Vision Pro, I’d venture to say that Things for visionOS is a better version of the iPad app, at this point second only to its Mac counterpart in terms of functionalities and overall flexibility.

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Vision Pro App Spotlight: Shortcut Buttons Turns Your Shortcuts into Spatial Launchers

Shortcut Buttons for visionOS.

Shortcut Buttons for visionOS.

I received my Apple Vision Pro yesterday (for the full story of how it eventually found its way to Italy, you don’t want to miss the next episode of AppStories), and, as you can imagine, I’ve been busy downloading all the apps, learning my way around visionOS and – just today – using the extended Mac display mode. The first 24 hours with a Vision Pro are a whirlwind of curiosity and genuine nerd excitement, but despite my attention being pulled to a hundred different places, I’ve found the time to test one app in particular: Shortcut Buttons by Finn Voorhees.

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The Best Way to Take Screenshots on Apple Vision Pro

Taking good-looking screenshots on the Apple Vision Pro isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either. I’ve already spent many hours taking screenshots on the device, and I thought I’d share my experience and some practical tips for getting the best screenshots possible.

Although I’ve only had the Apple Vision Pro for a week, I’ve already spent a lot of time thinking about and refining my screenshot workflow out of necessity. That’s because after I spent around three hours writing my first visionOS app review of CARROT Weather and Mercury Weather, I spent at least as much time trying to get the screenshots I wanted. If that had been a review of the iOS versions of those apps, the same number of screenshots would have taken less than a half hour. That’s a problem because I simply don’t have that much time to devote to screenshots.

Taking screenshots with the Apple Vision Pro is difficult because of the way the device works. Like other headsets, the Apple Vision Pro uses something called foveated rendering, a technique that’s used to reduce the computing power needed to display the headset’s images. In practical terms, the technique means that the only part of the device’s view that is in focus is where you’re looking. The focal point changes as your eyes move, so you don’t notice that part of the view is blurry. In fact, this is how the human eye works, so as long as the eye tracking is good, which it is on the Apple Vision Pro, the experience is good too.

However, as well as foveated rendering works for using the Apple Vision Pro, it’s terrible for screenshots. You can take a quick screenshot by pressing the top button and Digital Crown, but you’ll immediately see that everything except where you were looking when you took the screen-grab is out of focus. That’s fine for sharing a quick image with a friend, but if you want something suitable for publishing, it’s not a good option.

Fortunately, Apple thought of this, and there’s a solution, but it involves using Xcode and another developer tool. Of course, using Xcode to take screenshots is a little like using Logic Pro to record voice memos, except there are plenty of simple apps for recording voice memos, whereas Xcode is currently your only choice for taking crisp screenshots on the Vision Pro. So until there’s another option, it pays to learn your way around these developer tools to get the highest quality screenshots as efficiently as possible.

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