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Posts tagged with "iOS"

Apple Says It Won’t Ship Major New OS Features in the EU This Fall Due to DMA Uncertainty→

A new round in the fight between the EU and Apple has been brewing for a while now. About a week ago, the Financial Times reported that unnamed sources said that the EU was poised to levy significant fines against the company over a probe of Apple’s compliance with the Digital Markets Act. Then, earlier this week, in an interview with CNBC, the EU’s competition chief, Margrethe Vestager telegraphed that Apple is facing enforcement measures:

[Apple] are very important because a lot of good business happens through the App Store, happens through payment mechanisms, so of course, even though you know I can say this is not what was expected of such a company, of course we will enforce exactly with the same top priority as with any other business.

Asked when enforcement might happen, Vestager told CNBC ‘hopefully soon.’

Apple made no comment to CNBC at the time, but today, that shoe has apparently dropped, with Apple telling the Financial Times that:

Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act, we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these [new] features – iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence – to our EU users this year.

Is it a coincidence that Apple made its statement to the same media outlet that reported that fines were about to be assessed? I doubt it. The more likely scenario is that Apple is using OS updates as a negotiating chip with EU regulators. Your guess is as good as mine whether the move will work. Personally, I think the tactic is just as likely to backfire. However, I’m quite confident that you’ll be hearing from me again about fines by the EU against Apple sooner rather than later.

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Sequel 2.3’s Magic Lookup Is a Perfect Example of How Apps Should Integrate AI

If you haven’t tried Sequel to track your media queues, you’re missing out and have some catching up to do. There’s a reason we gave Sequel 2.0 the MacStories Selects Best App Update award last year. The app, which is available on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, is one of the very best media trackers in a very crowded field.

One way to get up to speed with Sequel’s core features is my review of version 2.0, which I won’t repeat here. Since that review, developer Romain Lefebvre has released updates that continue to improve the app in meaningful ways. However, today’s version 2.3 release is special because it’s one of the first apps I’ve tried that uses AI in a truly useful, non-gimmicky way. Plus, the update adds Shortcuts integration, allowing users to automate the app in new ways, as well as a Markdown-compatible note-taking feature and new layout and search options.

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Apple Marks Global Accessibility Awareness Day with a Preview of OS Features Coming Later This Year

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Thursday is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and to mark the occasion, Apple has previewed several new accessibility features coming to its OSes later this year. Although this accessibility preview has become an annual affair, this year’s preview is more packed than most years, with a wide variety of features for navigating UIs, automating tasks, interacting with Siri and CarPlay, enabling live captions in visionOS, and more. Apple hasn’t announced when these features will debut, but if past years are any indication, most should be released in the fall as part of the annual OS release cycle.

Eye Tracking

Often, Apple’s work in one area lends itself to new accessibility features in another. With Eye Tracking in iOS and iPadOS, the connection to the company’s work on visionOS is clear. The feature will allow users to look at UI elements on the iPhone and iPad, and the front-facing camera – combined with a machine learning model – will follow their gaze, moving the selection as what they look at changes. No additional hardware is necessary.

Eye Tracking also works with Dwell, meaning that when a user pauses their gaze on an interface element, it will be clicked. The feature, which requires a one-time calibration setup process, will work with Apple’s apps, as well as third-party apps, on iPhones and iPads with an A12 Bionic chip or newer.

Vocal Shortcuts

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Vocal Shortcuts provide a way to define custom utterances that launch shortcuts and other tasks. The phrases are defined on-device for maximum privacy using a process similar to Personal Voice. The feature is like triggering shortcuts with Siri, but it doesn’t require an assistant trigger word or phrase.

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AltStore’s Clip Is the Best Clipboard Manager on iOS Yet

Last month, AltStore was finally made available on iOS for everyone living in the European Union. Not only does the first alternative app marketplace on iOS ship with the great Delta videogame emulator, but it also lets you install Clip, a clipboard manager unlike any other on the iPhone.

The app’s uniqueness resides in the sole fact that it’s the first ever clipboard manager on the iPhone that can actually run in the background and continuously monitor your clipboard, regardless of the app you’re in. And despite the fact that the app is pretty bare-bones right now, this core ability alone makes a huge difference in usage, enough to crown Clip the best clipboard manager to ever ship on iOS.

Let’s check it out.

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Sofa 4.0: A Customizable Downtime Tracker Without Compromises

I’ve written about media-tracking apps a lot in the past, and they tend to fall into one of two categories: there are ‘generalist apps’ that cover multiple types of media, and there are ‘specialist apps’ that go much deeper into one particular kind. The benefit of the former is having a one-stop destination for all your media tracking, while the latter usually goes further, focusing on the unique characteristics of one media type. There are advantages to each approach, but they’re serving two different kinds of users, so it’s not that surprising that apps don’t try to do both.

That’s why I was intrigued when I heard about Sofa 4.0 and its custom Categories and Ingredients features, which launch today. Sofa has always been one of my favorite apps for tracking multiple types of media, but as soon as I saw custom Categories and Ingredients, I knew the app had the potential to transcend the media tracker category by letting users have a greater say in how it’s used. That’s exactly what its developer, Shawn Hickman, has done, and the results are fantastic.

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Ketchup: The Only Pokémon Companion App You’ll Ever Need

As any Pokémon fan knows, the series is all about data – lots and lots of data. So much data that entire websites and apps are dedicated to helping players keep track of it all. That’s a big design challenge for any app developer, which is why I was so glad to see it taken on by Ben McCarthy, whose apps, including the camera app Obscura, are some of the best designed on the App Store.

Ben’s new app is called Ketchup, and it’s a comprehensive compendium of every generation of Pokémon that incorporates powerful search, caught and favorite Pokémon tracking, a battle match-up utility, and a quiz game all in one app. But what makes it special and sets the app apart from others I’ve tried over the years is the design, which makes it easy to find what you’re looking for and presents it in a coherent, understandable, and modern interface.

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Supercell Announces That Squad Busters Will Be Released Worldwide on May 29th

Earlier this week, Supercell soft-launched Squad Busters, a party action game, in Canada, Mexico, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Singapore. Today, the company announced that the game will launch on iOS and Android worldwide on May 29th.

According to Supercell’s CEO, Ilkka Paananen:

Our dream is to create great games that as many people as possible play for years and that are remembered forever. Huge credit to the Squad Busters team – it’s already apparent that the game has such high potential, making it our first company game launch since Brawl Stars in 2018. Squad Busters brings together our Supercell characters in a fun way that fans have never seen before and I can’t wait to see the reactions from players across the globe!

I haven’t had a chance to play Squad Busters yet, but from the demo Supercell shared with me, it looks like an interesting addition to its lineup, which includes popular titles like Clash of Clans. The Supercell team likens Squad Busters to the fun, chaotic competition of classic games like Mario Kart. Players compete against friends and online squads in ten-person, four-minute matches that are populated with characters from across Supercell’s stable of games, collecting gems and other items. Along the way, characters evolve in a style similar to Pokémon games.

Squad Busters may superficially look a little like a last-person-standing battle royale game, but Supercell says its goal was to design a competitive action game that is accessible to players of all skill and experience levels. To that end, prizes are awarded no matter where you finish among the squads competing during a match. It’s not easy to design a game that appeals to such a broad spectrum of gamers, but if Supercell can manage it, Squad Buster’s colorful, frenetic, one-button gameplay has the potential to become a big hit. In that same vein, Supercell has worked to make sure that the game works on multiple generations of hardware as far back as the iPad mini 2.

Clash of Clans and Supercell’s other games have never appealed to me, but Squad Busters is intriguing. The gameplay I’ve seen looks fun, and I can see it working as a way to introduce a new wave of gamers to the company’s other titles.

Squad Busters is available for pre-order on the App Store now.

Game On: Speed Running Game Emulation on iOS

Delta.

Delta.

Game emulators are nothing new to mobile phones. That is unless you have an iPhone. There’s a long history of emulation on Android and an even longer history on Macs, PCs, and other platforms. However, with ‘retro game console emulators’ (Apple’s App Review Guidelines term) now allowed worldwide on iOS, we’re seeing the iOS world speed-running game emulation. It will be a while before iOS emulators catch up to Android and other OSes, but in just over a week, there’s already been a lot of news.

It started with a Commodore 64 emulator.

It started with a Commodore 64 emulator.

The short-lived Bimmy.

The short-lived Bimmy.

  • About the same time that iGBA was being pulled from the App Store by Apple, Bimmy, an NES emulator, appeared on the Store for $0.99. It, too, was pulled from the Store within a day or two, but this time, it was the developer who pulled it, not Apple. Tom Salvo, Bimmy’s developer, told Zac Hall of 9to5Mac that he pulled the app “out of fear” and not as the result of pressure from anyone.
Delta works with a variety of classic systems.

Delta works with a variety of classic systems.

  • Then, last Wednesday, Delta, Riley Testut’s game emulator that supports a long list of older Nintendo systems and the Sega Genesis console, was released on the App Store everywhere except the EU, where it is available on AltStore. Within hours, Delta shot to the top of the App Store’s Free Apps Top Chart, where it remains today.
  • In the wake of Delta’s success, other developers have announced that they plan to bring their game emulators to iOS, including the maker of the Sony PSP emulator PPSSPP and the developer of Provenance, which works with multiple systems.
  • The rush to the App Store by emulator developers isn’t universal, however. The creators of Dolphin, which works with Nintendo GameCube and Wii games, announced that it will not be coming to iOS because Apple doesn’t allow the necessary Just-In-Time recompilers to be integrated with game emulators.

Meanwhile, all eyes are on Nintendo. The company is notoriously protective of its intellectual property. And, although Nintendo has not sought to restrict the availability of emulators for its oldest systems, it aggressively pursued the makers of Yuzu, a Switch emulator, which resulted in the emulator being forced from the Internet with other emulators following suit. So, while emulators for early Nintendo systems have been available elsewhere for years, the sudden mainstream popularity of Delta on the App Store could draw an unwanted reexamination of emulators by the company. My hope is that instead of litigation, the new crop of iOS emulators spurs Nintendo to offer older games on the App Store and via other channels, but history isn’t on the side of my hopes and dreams.

How to Load Your Game Boy Games Onto the iPhone to Play in the Delta Emulator

So, you’ve probably seen the (totally justified) hype surrounding the Delta emulator’s launch on the App Store and downloaded it because, why not, it’s free. You may have also recalled that, like a lot of people, you have a box of old Game Boy cartridges stored somewhere that are gathering dust. Or, like me, maybe you spent way too much money on second-hand videogame sites during the COVID lockdown. Regardless of your Game Boy cartridge origin story, today I’m going to show you a simple way to breathe new life into those games by bringing them, along with your save files, to your iPhone.

The GB Operator. Source: Epilogue.

The GB Operator. Source: Epilogue.

The easiest way I’ve found to pull the game files from a Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance cartridge is with a little USB-C accessory called the GB Operator by Epilogue, or as I like to call it the Game Boy Toaster. That’s because the device looks like a top-loading transparent toaster that takes game cartridges instead of bread. If you have a big collection of game cartridges, the GB Operator is a great investment at $50 because it allows you to both play and back up your games using a Mac.

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