MacStories

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: Comfort Zone In this very special episode, the gang makes their “Pro” and “Pro Max” predictions for tech in 2025 and oh my, does it get wild! Who’s best clued into the tech coming this…

MacStories’ video rollout on YouTube continues today with MacStories Unwind, the podcast where Federico and I swap funny stories about the differences between life in the U.S. and Italy and share media picks and deals. The show is released every Friday, just…

Earlier today Nintendo announced the first official details about the Switch 2 console. There are still a lot of unknowns, but there are interesting details that can be gleaned from Nintendo’s video announcement. Join Federico, Brendon, and me for our…

The second half of 2024 saw a lot of change to my setup and Federico’s. We launched the MacStories YouTube channel, expanded our family of podcasts, and spent time chasing the ultimate portable gaming setup for NPC: Next Portable Console. The result was that…

Sindre Sorhus has released more apps than most indie developers I’ve covered, and many are among my favorite utilities. I suspect that a big part of Sorhus’ success is the tight focus of most of those apps, which are designed to eliminate specific points…

Sebastian Vogelsang, the Berlin-based developer of Skeets, an alternative to Bluesky’s official client, is working on a new photo-sharing app called Flashes that is built on the same codebase as Skeets. As reported by Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: When…

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: AppStories This week on AppStories, Federico and John predict what we’ll see from Apple in 2025. From agentic AI to App Intents and Siri, they explore what will shape the year ahead and the…

Introducing 1Blocker 6, the most powerful version yet of the trusted Safari content blocker. Now available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, this update marks almost a decade of innovation and dedication to creating a better web experience. For ten years,…

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: Comfort Zone Niléane is out, so Chris and Matt are left to fend on their own. Chris steals like an artist and Matt defends a new purchase. Ruminate Some snack reviews from the festive period,…

Just over two years ago, MacStories left Twitter behind. We left when Elon Musk began dismantling the company’s trust and safety infrastructure, allowing hateful speech and harassment on the platform. Meta is now doing the same thing with Threads and…

Source: Razer. Yesterday, Brendon and I wandered into a ballroom where Razer was showing off its latest hardware. We weren’t expecting much beyond super-powerful gaming laptops (✅) and lots of RGB lights (also ✅). However, just as our guided booth tour…

One of my favorite surprises during CES 2025 so far was when Brendon pointed to a small device sitting on a table at the GameSir booth and asked ‘What’s that?’ It turns out it was a prototype Game Boy-style smartphone controller that doubles as a battery…

Yesterday, Brendon Bigley and I walked over 8 miles on the CES show floor in search of ‘the next big thing’ in handheld gaming. We ended a long day against the backdrop of the Las Vegas Sphere to talk about what we’d seen and our initial impressions of…

CES kicked off Sunday evening with Unveiled, a press-only showcase of a subset of gadgets that I found a little underwhelming. It’s not that there hasn’t been interesting tech announced at the event, but it’s buried under strata of hype, over-the-top…

Two days ago was the 25th anniversary of Steve Jobs unveiling the Aqua interface for Mac OS X for first time at Macworld Expo. James Thomson published a great personal retrospective on one particular item of the Aqua UI that was shown off at the event: the…

With a press release following an otherwise packed keynote at CES (which John and Brendon, my NPC co-hosts, attended in person last night), NVIDIA announced that their streaming service GeForce NOW is going to natively support the Apple Vision Pro…well, sort…

Source: Apple. Apple has announced a slew of additions to its fitness subscription service, Apple Fitness+, including new workout programs for strength, yoga “peak poses”, breath meditation, and even training for pickleball. New editions of the Artist…

Source: espresso Displays. Late yesterday, espresso Displays announced the addition of a new portable display to its Pro lineup. The espresso 15 Pro joins the company’s 17 Pro, which was released last year. Highlights of the 15.6” display include a…

Shazam has released the Shazam Fast Forward 2025, a group of artists that the music recognition service expects to break out in 2025. As explained on its dedicated Shazam Fast Forward 2025 website: These are Shazam’s Predictions for breakthrough artists in…

PowerPhotos is the ultimate toolbox for Photos on the Mac. It works in conjunction with the Apple Photos app, filling in missing features that Photos itself doesn’t provide.  PowerPhotos allows you to work with multiple Photos libraries and store them…

Today, I began packing my bag full of the gear I’m bringing to CES. I’m excited because it’s shaping up to be a very NPC CES. Brendon, Federico, and I started NPC: Next Portable Console because we each sensed that handheld gaming had reached a tipping…

Packing for CES has been a little different than WWDC. The biggest differences are the huge crowds at CES and the limits the conference puts on the bags you can carry into venues. My trusty Tom Bihn Synapse 25 backpack isn’t big, but it’s too large for…

NPC has been a lot of fun to produce this year. If you haven’t tried the show yet, this week’s episode is a good place to start because it brings together so much of what we’ve covered since launching the show in June. NPC: Next Portable Console To close…

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: AppStories This week, Federico and I round up the tech and productivity projects we have planned for our annual holiday break. On AppStories+, I explain the refinements he’s made to my reading…

Yesterday, the team at Lux announced that they are working on the next major release of their pro camera app, Halide, which will be dubbed Halide Mark III. The next iteration of Halide, which Lux hopes to release in 2025 will focus on three areas: Color…

In 2024, I came to grips with the fact that I’ll never be an E Ink-first reader. Most of my reading is web-based, and I like having all of my reading-adjacent apps available too much to use a Kindle, Boox Palma, or other reading-first device regularly.…

WinterFest 2024: The Festival of Artisanal Software is back with a fantastic new collection of carefully crafted software for writing, research, and thinkings. Innovative software often comes from small teams, fired with imagination and a vision of a better…

About six months ago, Josh King posted on the SBCGaming subreddit about a 3D printed iPhone game controller he’d created called the M-Con. The post was accompanied by a YouTube video walkthrough that lent credibility to the Sony PSP Go-like design, that…

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: Comfort Zone Niléane has a new webcam, Chris is downing in keyboards, and everyone installs some web-ass web apps. Magic Rays of Light Sigmund and Devon share their favorite shows, films, apps,…

In September, I wrote about two interoperability proceedings commenced by the European Commission (EC) against Apple. As I wrote then: In a nutshell, the EC is unhappy with connectivity between iOS and third-party devices and plans to tell the company how to…