Where and how we watch media; whether any phone app justifies a bespoke hardware piece like Rabbit R1; intriguing tech revealed at CES; and the best pointing device for screens.
Nearly eight months after its introduction at last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the Vision Pro is poised to go on sale: Apple has said that preorders for the device will begin on January 19, with the Vision Pro expected to be available in stores starting on February 2.
Despite being the company’s first new major platform in almost a decade, though, the fanfare for the Vision Pro’s arrival has been decidedly muted. Apple didn’t hold another event, opting instead for a press release and teaser ad, and the company didn’t add much in the way of new information about the product and its capabilities.
That’s not entirely surprising though: while we may have been accustomed to a certain style of product launch from Apple, the Vision Pro is a very different type of device, and that necessitates a very different kind of release.
I love Rogue Amoeba’s Mac audio utilities, but in the Apple silicon era, installing them has been pretty rough, due to Apple requiring multiple reboots and a visit to Recovery Mode to perform a dubious-sounding reduction to a Mac’s “security policy.”
There is apparently great news on this front, however! Tucked into an otherwise perfectly nice summation of Rogue Amoeba’s year, CEO Paul Kafasis wrote:
We’ll soon be shipping updates that simplify things immensely. In fact, Airfoil, Audio Hijack, and Piezo will feature an installer-free setup that won’t even need your administrator password. Meanwhile, Loopback and SoundSource will use a new audio capture plugin called ARK that won’t require a single system restart. It’s going to be an incredible improvement to our user experience.
As someone who has had to reinstall Audio Hijack, Loopback, and SoundSource multiple times in the last few months… this is pretty fantastic news. (How in the world will Audio Hijack not even require an administrator password?! 1)
This has been a real pain point for more than three years, so kudos to everyone (presumably both inside Apple and at Rogue Amoeba) who worked on the problem and found a solution that lets some of macOS’s most clever and useful utilities run without these issues.
macOS 14.2 introduced the System Audio Recording permission box shown above, but I’ve not discovered a single app that uses it… at least not yet? ↩
The big new feature is the addition of support for ChatGPT via the same Worksheet interface BBEdit has used to interact with a command-line shell for many years. Like a Shell Worksheet, a ChatGPT Worksheet is an interactive BBEdit document: It looks like a regular text window (because it is one!), but when you type a command and press a hotkey (it’s Enter by default), that command is sent directly to ChatGPT, and the result appears right below it in the same document.
It’s a clever way for BBEdit to dip its toe into the large language model waters without implementing a Copilot-like code helper within documents themselves. Now, BBEdit users can toggle between a GPT worksheet and other documents, copying and pasting as needed, without leaving the app. I’ve used it a few times already, and it sure beats having to navigate to OpenAI’s website in order to grab some quick prototype code.
The new Cheat Sheets feature provides interactive floating palettes that can teach custom commands. For example, the Markdown Cheat Sheet not only shows various forms of Markdown but if you click on any of the examples, they’ll be automatically inserted into your document. They’re reminiscent of BBEdit’s Clippings feature, and unsurprisingly, one of the included Cheat Sheets contains all the placeholders used in building a BBEdit Clipping.
There’s also a new Minimap view, which lets you see a large thumbnail of a very long document, highlighting the portion that’s currently visible. You can navigate anywhere in a document by clicking on the Minimap. This feature will be useful for visually oriented users who need to navigate through very long documents.
As usual, there are dozens (Bare Bones says 200!) of new features in the lengthy release notes, including the addition of a grep pattern validity indicator in the Find window (so you don’t have to click before realizing you left off a parenthesis!), a big interface revision to the simple and powerful Text Factory in-app automation system, quick access to comparing different versions of the current document, a revamp of Project Settings so that they’re no longer modal, and improved Accessibility compatibility including Voiceover, Full Keyboard Access, and third-party utilities that rely on the Accessibility system such as Grammarly.
Every time there’s a new version of BBEdit, I’m inspired by the creativity that continues to flourish in a product that’s more than 30 years old. But there’s still more to do! The app’s support for Shortcuts is still quite meager, for example.
A new license for BBEdit 15 is $60, with upgrades from version 14 costing $30 and from earlier versions costing $40.
Way back when Google Reader went the way of all Google products (RIP), I ended up switching to Feedly, a web-based RSS service that had good integration with third-party clients. But this past week I decided to ditch it for good.
The truth is, I never really used Feedly’s web-based offerings, or its first-party apps on iPhone or the Mac (the latter of which was apparently quietly retired last year). Instead, I mainly used Feedly as the back-end for my RSS app of choice, Reeder.1
Lately, though, I’d noticed that certain feeds—especially those on smaller sites—just didn’t seem to update very quickly. That’s apparently by design: in part because those who paid for Feedly (which I never have) get faster updates, and in part because the polling interval seems to vary from site to site.2
Specifically I noticed that a post on my personal blog didn’t seem to be showing up, which a few people subscribed to my RSS feed let me know. That turned out to be mainly because of an issue in WordPress where my own RSS feeds were being cached, but even once I remedied that it still took a solid day for the post to show up in my own reader.
That seemed silly to me: I only subscribe to thirty-some feeds, probably about half of which are actually updated regularly, and I’d prefer for the control over when I get my items delivered to be in my own hands, not that of a middleman.
Fortunately, Reeder (like other RSS readers) at some point added the ability to subscribe to feeds within the app and have them synced between devices via iCloud. All I had to do was export the feeds from my Feedly account as an OPML file and import them into the iCloud account, something that took probably less than a minute.
It was really the simplicity of that last part that struck me: the fact that feed readers still rely on an open format that’s easily portable between apps and services. I’ve relied on RSS to do my job since I first started writing about the Mac back in the mid 2000s, and even in a world that’s become dominated by social media it’s still pretty effective. I kind of wish that other services made this kind of portability so easy and painless—after all, we should be in control of our own data, not some middleman.
I don’t want to knock Feedly here: I found their service stable and reliable for more than a decade, and not only did I not pay a dime for it, they didn’t put roadblocks in my way to leave. That’s actually pretty great, as far as service goes, and frankly I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t throw some money their way. But as the year starts off, I like the idea of removing some of the little tech annoyances that I just take as a given and seeing if I can make my life a little smoother.
I was a longtime NetNewsWire user, and I still really like the app, but I’ve now been using Reeder for so long that it’s just the way my brain works. ↩
Presumably this is a sort of caching system, as I imagine it doesn’t want to hit the same site x number of times for everybody in Feedly subscribed to it? ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
Jason and Myke are back just in time to miss the Vision Pro shipping news, but they’ve still got time to catch up on the news they missed and preview their expectations for the year to come.
Game designer Sean Bates found an iPhone in a bush Sunday that had fallen from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 when it lost a part of its fuselage shortly after takeoff. The phone was undamaged, still on, and had the end of a sheared-off charging cable plugged in. Bates posted pictures of his discovery that afternoon, one of which included the screen showing a still-open email with a baggage receipt.
The goggles do…something? Well, you’ll find out soon enough: Apple announced on Monday that the Vision Pro will be available in the U.S. starting on February 2, with preorders starting next Friday, January 19.
Unsurprisingly, the spatial computer will be available at all Apple Stores in the U.S., but it’ll also be available via the online store as well—there’d been some speculation in recent weeks about whether or not that would be the case at launch, given the need for fitting particular accessories.
While we’re all plenty aware of the Vision Pro’s $3499 price tag, Apple’s also added some additional information. For one, the Vision Pro has 256GB of onboard storage (and, as far as we can tell, no options for more). For another, those users who need vision correction will be able to pick up optical inserts that attach magnetically: $99 for readers, and $149 for prescriptions, though the company doesn’t go into further detail about which prescriptions will be available or how you’ll convey that information.
And we now know exactly what’s in the box: in addition to the Vision Pro, it’ll include two different bands, a Solo Knit Band and Dual Loop Band; a Light Seal and two Light Seal Cushions; a cover for the front of the device; the battery and USB-C charging cable; a USB-C Power Adapter (for $3499, I’d hope so); and, most importantly, a Polishing Cloth.
The press release, which happens to drop on the same day that CES opens on Las Vegas and no doubt is intended to steal some thunder there, also suggests that the company won’t hold any further events to talk up the Vision Pro before its launch. Given that supplies are expected to be constrained, and the addressable market is on the smaller side, Apple’s no doubt banking on the fact that people who want to buy one already know all about it.
One big question mark is the retail experience, which Apple Store employees are being trained on now, according to reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and others. The Vision Pro is perhaps the most challenging product from a store experience perspective, and it will be fascinating to see exactly how the company handles the sales and fit process—especially for physical stores versus online. But we’re sure to find out in short order.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
Last month, I took a bit of an odyssey and explored the idea that maybe there aren’t that many must-have third-party apps, only nice-to-have ones. I wasn’t saying that everyone should dump all their software and return to their defaults, but I was saying that macOS’s default configuration has come a long way over the years and that the right approach to setting up a new Mac might be to start with the basics and then slowly add when you find you need a little bit more.
One of the apps I was thinking about while I wrote this was Flexibits’s Fantastical, which has been my calendar app for more than a decade. As a result of that decade spent away from Calendar, I’ve largely lost track of what separates a third-party app with a $57 annual subscription fee from the stuff Apple gives me for free with my devices.
I’ve also had a general sense that most of Flexibits’s recent updates to Fantastical focused on features that don’t actually improve my use of the app. I’m not open for meetings, so the Openings feature didn’t really land, and the meeting proposal feature ended up being much heavier and Fantastical-centric than just using a lightweight scheduling app like StrawPoll. It seems like most of the company’s focus over the past two years has been on refining those features, which might be wise for serving their core audience, but it just doesn’t register for me.
So, I decided to spend a few weeks without Fantastical, just using Apple’s Calendar app. Here’s what I learned.
Surviving on the default
Unsurprisingly, the moment I switched back to Calendar, I lost a whole bunch of features. I was used to Fantastical’s split interface on my Mac and iPad, which lists all events on the left side of the screen and then displays my preferred interface, the Week view, on the right side. Apple just wants to show you the floating colored blobs. (On the iPad, Apple’s calendar also doesn’t display the start time of events in Week view, which was a drag.)
Apple’s got a bunch of Calendar widgets, but they’re inferior to Fantastical’s. The List view, in particular, is not nearly as information-dense as Fantastical’s list widget. Still, I switched over to Calendar’s.
I have a default set of calendars that I want to view at all times, but sometimes, I need to briefly toggle on other calendars so I can coordinate with my wife’s calendar or place something on a shared podcast calendar. I used Fantastical’s Calendar Sets feature to toggle between views, but there’s no such control available in Calendar. Instead, I built a Keyboard Maestro macro that clicks on specific calendar locations to make them disappear and reappear.
Three copies of every event.
Speaking of multiple calendars, it’s baffling to me that Calendar is unable to display multiple identical events on different calendars as a single item. When I toggle into my podcast scheduling view, every Incomparable podcast becomes a cramped stack of three identical items: one for my calendar, one for the calendar used by panelists, and one for our public-facing calendar used by listeners and various automations.
But my biggest adaptation came in the menu bar. Fantastical offers a powerful menu bar app that lets me quickly add events and, more importantly, view a list of events for the next few days without needing to open the app. Calendar has… nothing?
Fantastical (left) and Itsycal (right) dropping down from the menu bar.
I ended up solving this problem by using Itsycal, a free app by Mowglii Apps. Itsycal hit the spot, though it’s not quite as pretty as Fantastical’s menu bar item, and adding a new event requires a second keystroke and doesn’t support natural-language entry of events. You also can’t edit events from within Itsycal.
Starter calendar
So, after three weeks of using Apple’s apps on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad, what’s the verdict? I feel like my original suggestion about defaults was pretty accurate, actually. Apple’s Calendar app is fine. It works, it’s serviceable, the widgets are fine, and with a free third-party utility, you can even get a nice quick-access calendar in the menu bar.
That said, it was also clear to me that Fantastical offers a much more useful and refined experience than Apple. Calendar feels pretty old and static, and some of its gaps are really baffling—especially quick access in the menu bar! Is Fantastical $57 a year better? (I should mention that there’s a free version of Fantastical, but it omits some features that Calendar offers.)
Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? If you schedule a lot of meetings and have people schedule meetings with you, it’s probably a no-brainer! But for me, it was a little tougher. Still, after three weeks without, I feel like I’m willing to spend $57 a year just to get a nicer, better calendar experience than Apple offers. But I also would not hesitate to suggest that any new Mac user start with Calendar (and maybe Itsycal!) and try it out before considering spending extra on a fancier calendar app.
I wish Fantastical had given me more of a sense of forward motion and value over the last four years for my subscription fee. I wish Apple would take some lessons from Fantastical and strive to make the default Calendar app a little less generic.
Minneapolis-based investment firm, Deepwater Asset Management, predicts that in 2024 Apple will finally acquire Peloton – the firm is headed by former tech analyst, Gene Munster.
Oh, of course. Answering the question “Does Gene Munster still writes Apple fan fiction?” Yes. The answer is yes.
The article then raises the question: can Betteridge’s Law of Headlines also be applied to sentences that appear in the article?
Would Apple acquire a business that hasn’t shown growth in nearly three years?
It’s not completely out of the question for Apple to buy Peloton.…
Instead of a memorial photo of Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I chose a “Pets” filter.
Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle. Over the next few months, I watched the photos change in and out at random—always with a dog in focus.
Not only do I empathize with Warzel’s situation (we lost a beloved dog in August 2022), but as I wrote about last year, my wife and I also recently started using the Photo Shuffle feature that was introduced with iOS 16… and it’s pretty powerful.
Not a week goes by where my wife doesn’t show me one of the pictures of our kids (her phone is set to shuffle through photos in which either of our children’s faces has been identtified) that have surfaced on her phone’s lock screen. We’ve taken tens of thousands of photos of these children over two decades, and while many photos are familiar (the ones that we’ve printed out and framed, or put on calendars, or added to a Favorites list), the vast majority of them have largely gone unseen, filed away in an infinite iCloud Photo Library filing cabinet.
One of the magical thing about Photo Shuffle is that those obscure photos also keep floating to the top. They’re not necessarily the best or most polished, but they’re surprising and delightful.
Warzel writes that iOS has “taught me how to grieve,” and while I haven’t used Photo Shuffle to grapple with that particular emotion, just a few weeks after our dog died, our youngest child went off to college and we officially became empty nesters. I suppose the Photo Shuffle is filling a particular (but different) emotional need for us, too.
Where we’re putting our social media energy in 2024, which subscriptions we’re canceling, our opinions on the Apple Vision Pro, and what feature we want for our devices this year.
Last year was a little quiet for Apple, but 2024 is going to be loud. The launch of the Vision Pro, a new product running a new operating system in a new category (for Apple), more or less guarantees it. But there’s a lot more than the release of the Vision Pro to Apple’s 2024.
Let’s take a look at what this year will offer through the lens of your longtime Apple-watching columnist and his somewhat cloudy crystal ball. How better to think about the future, after all, than to predict it on a website?
