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Posts tagged with "iOS"

Cassette: A Video Time Machine

Devin Davies, the developer of Crouton whom Federico and I interviewed after he won an Apple Design Award in 2024, has released a new app called Cassette. It’s an app for browsing videos from the photo library on your iPhone or iPad that has a fun design twist.

Leaning heavily into the nostalgia of watching old videos of friends and family, Cassette sorts your videos using a VCR metaphor. Videos are organized by year and by collection, with video cassette art and a label identifying each. At the top of the screen is an old CRT TV with a built-in VCR. Tap a year or collection, and it loads into the TV with satisfying haptic feedback on the iPhone.

Videos running full-screen.

Videos running full-screen.

Tap the virtual TV, and the video goes full-screen with date and location data that’s reminiscent of a VCR’s UI. While watching videos, the app offers standard playback controls along with a shuffle button, buttons to share and favorite videos, and an eject button to return to your video collections.

Videos cycle from one to the next and then loop back to the beginning, where playback continues. You can also swipe through videos TikTok-style, skipping over any you don’t want to watch. Finally, there’s a ‘Take Me Somewhere’ button at the bottom that drops you at a random location in your video collection, eliminating the need to pick something yourself.

Most of the functionality found in Cassette is available in other video players, but that doesn’t make it any less fun or delightful. What sets the app apart is its focus on design and framing. From the drop, Cassette is designed to transport you to the past with its VCR-inspired UI and singular focus on videos, transforming into a sort of handheld time machine.

Cassette is available on the App Store as a free download. Certain features are only available via a $0.99/month or $5.99/year subscription or a $7.99 one-time payment.

Folio: A Promising Read-Later App with a Strong Foundation

I’ve been using read-it-later apps since before I had an iPhone. For those of us who were Wi-Fi-only iPod touch users before owning iPhones, apps like Instapaper were great for reading on the go.

Like in those early days, the read-later universe is once again hyper-competitive, with a lot of relatively new entrants such as Matter and Readwise Reader. That’s led to other apps shutting down. ElevenLabs bought and closed Omnivore, and most recently, Pocket, which debuted ages ago as Read It Later and was eventually acquired by Mozilla, shuttered.

In the wake of Pocket’s demise, Nick Chapman, who used to work on Pocket, and the team at Less is Better debuted Folio, a new read-later app for the iPhone, the iPad, Android, and the web that they say is designed to capture the essence of Pocket. I used Pocket on and off over the years but always considered it a step behind alternatives, so my expectations for Folio weren’t high.

Still, I was curious to see what Folio had to offer, especially because it must have been put together very quickly in order to be launched as Pocket shut down. Despite my initial reservations and some gaps in the app’s functionality, the Folio team has laid a great foundation with an excellent reading experience that’s worth keeping an eye on.

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iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and Liquid Glass: The MacStories Overview

During today’s WWDC 2025 keynote, held in person at Apple Park and streamed online, Apple unveiled a considerable number of upgrades to iOS and iPadOS, including a brand-new design language called Liquid Glass. This new look, which spans all of Apple’s platforms, coupled with a massive upgrade for multitasking on the iPad and numerous other additions and updates, made for packed releases for iOS and iPadOS.

Let’s take a look at everything Apple showed today for Liquid Glass, iOS, and iPadOS.

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WWDC 2025: All the Small Things (Bento Box Version)

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Every keynote, Apple is well-known for summarizing sections of the presentation with immaculately laid-out bento boxes containing key features. They often serve as good, easily digestible overviews of all the new features for each OS.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at all the bento boxes from today’s WWDC 2025 keynote.

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Apple Acquires Indie Videogame Studio RAC7 and Is Rumored to Be Working on a Dedicated Games App

Source: RAC7.

Source: RAC7.

Giovanni Colantonio of Digital Trends broke the story today that Apple has acquired RAC7, the two-person game studio responsible for the hit Apple Arcade game Sneaky Sasquatch.

On the one hand, this news isn’t that surprising. Sneaky Sasquatch was a launch title for Apple Arcade when it debuted in 2019, and it has been highlighted in several keynotes in the years since. As Colantonio notes in his story, Apple Arcade Senior Director Alex Rofman specifically called out Sneaky Sasquatch as an Apple Arcade success in a 2024 interview with Digital Trends.

On the other hand, however, this is Apple’s first known game studio acquisition and a very small indie studio acquisition at that. Out of context, that seemed like an odd acquisition. However, not long after Digital Trends broke the acquisition news, Mark Gurman reported for Bloomberg that Apple will unveil a dedicated Games app, which lines up with a previous report by 9to5Mac. Not much is known about the rumored app at this point, but it certainly puts the RAC7 acquisition in a different light. I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear news of other indie studios joining Apple in the coming months.

Shareshot 1.3: Greater Image Flexibility, New Backgrounds, and Extended Shortcuts Support

If you have a screenshot you need to frame, Shareshot is one of your best bets. That’s because it makes it so hard to create an image that looks bad. The app, which is available for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, has a lot of options for tweaking the appearance of your framed screenshot, so your final image won’t have a cookie-cutter look. However, there are also just enough constraints to prevent you from creating something truly awful.

You can check out my original review and coverage on Club MacStories for the details on version 1.0 and subsequent releases, but today’s focus is on version 1.3, which covers three areas:

  • Increased image size flexibility
  • New backgrounds
  • Updated and extended Shortcuts actions
Adjusting sizes.

Adjusting sizes.

With version 1.3, Shareshot now lets you pick any output size you’d like. The app then frames your screenshot and fits it in the image size you specify. If you’re doing design work, getting the exact-size image you want out of the app is a big win because it means you won’t need to make adjustments later that could impair its fidelity.

A related change is the ability to specify a fixed width for the image that Shareshot outputs. That means you can pick the aspect ratio you want, such as square or 16:9, then specify a fixed width, and Shareshot will take care of automatically adjusting the height of the image to preserve the aspect ratio you chose. This feature is perfect if you publish to the web and the tools you use are optimized for a certain image width. Using anything wider just means you’re hosting a file that’s bigger than necessary, potentially slowing down your website and resulting in unnecessary bandwidth costs.

Shareshot is stripey now.

Shareshot is stripey now.

Shareshot has two new categories of backgrounds too: Solidarity and Stripes. Solidarity has two options styled after the Ukrainian and Palestinian flags, and Stripes includes designs based on LGBTQ+ colors and other color combinations in a variety of styles. All of the new categories allow you to adjust several parameters including the angle, color, saturation, brightness, and blur of the stripes.

Examples of angles.

Examples of angles.

Finally, Shareshot has revamped its Shortcuts actions to take advantage of App Intents, giving users control over more parameters of images generated using Shortcuts and preparing the app for Apple’s promised Smart Siri in the future. The changes add:

  • Support for outputting custom-sized images,
  • A scale option for fixed-width and custom-sized images, and
  • New parameters for angling and blurring backgrounds.

The progress Shareshot has made since version 1.0 is impressive. The app has grown substantially to offer a much wider set of backgrounds, options, and flexibility without compromising its excellent design, which garnered it a MacStories Selects Award last year. I’m still eager to see multiple screenshot support added, a feature I know is on the roadmap, but that’s more a wish than a complaint; Shareshot is a fantastic app that just keeps getting better.

Shareshot 1.3 is free to download on the App Store. Some of its features require a $1.99/month or $14.99/year subscription.

Notes on Mercury Weather’s New Radar Maps Feature

Since covering Mercury Weather 2.0 and its launch on the Vision Pro here on MacStories, I’ve been keeping up with the weather app on Club MacStories. It’s one of my favorite Mac menu bar apps, it has held a spot on my default Apple Watch face since its launch, and last fall, it added severe weather notifications.

I love the app’s design and focus as much today as I did when I wrote about its debut in 2023. Today, though, Mercury Weather is a more well-rounded app than ever before. Through regular updates, the app has filled in a lot of the holes in its feature set that may have turned off some users two years ago.

Today, Mercury Weather adds weather radar maps, which was one of the features I missed most from other weather apps, along with the severe weather notifications that were added late last year. It’s a welcome addition that means the next time a storm is bearing down on my neighborhood, I won’t have to switch to a different app to see what’s coming my way.

Zooming out to navigate the globe.

Zooming out to navigate the globe.

Radar maps are available on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions of Mercury Weather; they offer a couple of different map styles and a legend that explains what each color on the map means. If you zoom out, you can get a global view of Earth with your favorite locations noted on the map. Tap one, and you’ll get the current conditions for that spot. Mercury Weather already had an extensive set of widgets for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but this update adds small, medium, and large widgets for the radar map, too.

A Mercury Weather radar map on the Mac.

A Mercury Weather radar map on the Mac.

With a long list of updates since launch, Mercury Weather is worth another look if you passed on it before because it was missing features you wanted. The app is available on the App Store as a free download. Certain features require a subscription or lifetime purchase via an in-app purchase.

After Years in the Lab, CarPlay Ultra Emerges

Image: Apple.

Image: Apple.

Almost three years ago, Apple offered a sneak peek at an elaborate new version of CarPlay that spread beyond the rectangle of most car infotainment systems to occupy the instrument cluster space in front of front seat passengers. As I said at the time:

It will be interesting to see how widespread the adoption of the features Apple demoed will be. The company listed 14 automakers like Land Rover, Mercedes, Porsche, Nissan, Volvo, Honda, and Ford that they are working with, but it remains to be seen which models will adopt the new CarPlay and how quickly.

Originally set to launch in 2024, Apple announced today that what is now called CarPlay Ultra is available for new Aston Martin orders in the U.S. and Canada and soon as a software update to Aston Martins with the carmaker’s “next-generation infotainment system.” Apple says Aston Martin support in other countries will follow over the next 12 months.

Image: Apple.

Image: Apple.

The difference between standard CarPlay and the Ultra flavor is that the new version takes over a driver’s entire dashboard and extends beyond traditional CarPlay features to vehicle-specific data and controls. As Apple describes it:

CarPlay Ultra provides content for all the driver’s screens, including the instrument cluster, with dynamic and beautiful options for the speedometer, tachometer, fuel gauge, temperature gauge, and more, bringing a consistent look and feel to the entire driving experience. Drivers can choose to show information from their iPhone, like maps and media, along with information that comes from the car, such as advanced driver assistance systems and tire pressure, right in the instrument cluster.

Drivers can also use onscreen controls, physical buttons, or Siri to manage both standard vehicle functions like the car’s radio and climate, as well as advanced, vehicle-specific features and controls like audio system configurations or performance settings, right from CarPlay, giving them a more fluid and seamless experience. CarPlay Ultra also introduces widgets powered by iPhone that perfectly fit the car’s screen or gauge cluster to provide information at a glance.

Although CarPlay Ultra looks great, one car maker is a far cry from the 14 automakers listed on a slide at WWDC in 2022. That’s not surprising given pushback from automakers like GM, which announced in 2023 that it was ending CarPlay and Android Auto support for its EVs, and resistance from the likes of Tesla and Rivian to add CarPlay in the first place. However, Apple clearly oversold what would become CarPlay Ultra in 2022 in a way that in hindsight now feels a lot like Apple Intelligence’s enhanced Siri demo at last summer’s WWDC.

Still, I’m glad to see CarPlay Ultra emerge from the labs, even if it’s in a car that few people can afford. Auto tech inevitably trickles down to ordinary cars, and I’m sure CarPlay Ultra will, too, although I expect it will be quite a while until then.