2025-01-30 00:47:40
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
This week, for episode 420 Federico and John are joined by Matt Birchler, co-host of Comfort Zone and many other projects to talk about web apps, email, AI, and more.
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It’s a packed episode with a post Switch 2 reveal vibe check and more on iPhone game controller innovation, plus John’s early impressions of the Ayn Odin2 Portal, Brendon’s review of the Miyoo Flip, and Federico’s long 2DS/3DS emulation journey.
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MacStories launched its first podcast in 2017 with AppStories. Since then, the lineup has expanded to include a family of weekly shows that also includes MacStories Unwind, Magic Rays of Light, Ruminate, Comfort Zone, and NPC: Next Portable Console that collectively, cover a broad range of the modern media world from Apple’s streaming service and videogame hardware to apps for a growing audience that appreciates our thoughtful, in-depth approach to media.
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Join Now2025-01-29 23:06:44
Game Tracker is a new videogame tracking app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac from Simone Montalto, who is probably best known to MacStories readers for developing the excellent Book Tracker. In fact, Montalto has created an entire suite of tracking apps that also includes Movie Tracker, Music Tracker, and Habit Tracker. That experience with various tracking apps shows with Game Tracker, which does a fantastic job of tailoring to the particularities of videogames and leveraging metadata to allow users to make the app their own.
Let’s take a closer look.
Game Tracker on the Mac in dark mode.
I’ve tried a lot of videogame tracking apps, from ones that are designed specifically for videogames to those that are built into general-purpose media trackers. Depending on your needs, both approaches can work well, but the nature of videogames lends them to an app designed specifically for the medium. That’s because games carry a lot of important metadata that other types of media don’t, like the platforms a game is available on, the format, the gameplay modes, and more.
Each game includes a wealth of information.
Game Tracker takes advantage of the unique information available for videogames, which gives it an instant advantage over general-purpose media apps. Pulling from the Internet Game Database, Game Tracker includes each game’s description, release date, ratings, developer and publisher information, game modes, player perspectives, platforms, completion times, screenshots, artwork, and trailers. Plus, the app lets users add their own ratings, track their progress, make notes, and record games they’ve loaned to friends.
Sort options (left), filters (center), and advanced sorting (right).
Having all that data is useful by itself, but Game Tracker uses it far better than most apps I’ve tried. For example, there are five different ways to sort your games and 11 criteria for filtering them. Plus, Game Tracker allows you to build advanced sorting rules by combining multiple sorting criteria and to create elaborate saved searches by stacking filters. With so many ways to view your games, the built-in sorting and filtering features are often enough, but I appreciate that I can do a lot more than that, and I bet anyone with a big game collection will, too.
A couple of spaces I’ve created and a note pinned to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Game Tracker also allows you to add your own content to your collection, including the media format, progress, notes, tags, and the status of any games you’ve loaned out. You can create your own hand-curated lists of games, called spaces. For example, I created a Retro Games space to collect classic games I’m currently playing or playing soon. And you can bulk edit game data. From any collection view, pick “Select games” from the three-dot menu to select as many games as you’d like to edit.
There are many ways to browse your collection.
Where Game Tracker really shines, though, is in the way it uses all the information pulled from IGDB and added by users. From the app’s main view, you can browse your collection in a wide variety of ways. You can always view all of your games at once, but you can also browse based on progress, release status, formats, smart lists, platforms, genres, and more. From the app’s primary view, you can remove any of these browsing options you don’t want, reorder them, and collapse sections as well.
Three of the six layout options.
Another nice design touch is that you are not locked into one particular layout when viewing games in your collection. The app offers six different options, and each view in the app can be set to a different layout.
Tracking time played with timers and Game Tracker’s Stats view.
If you like to track the time you spend playing your game collection, you can do that, too. For any game you’ve marked as being currently played, you can start a timer to track your total time played and take notes alongside the timer that will show up in the Notes section for that game. You can mark the percentage of the game you’ve played as well.
The total time played and percentage played will all show up in the app’s Statistics section, which collects high-level data about how much you’ve played, the dates you’ve played, your playing streak, and more. It’s a lot of data, but it’s perfect for anyone who wants to keep track of their progress. Though I haven’t used this feature much yet, I plan to dip my toes in further to see if it helps me keep up with my playtime goals better. When you start a timer, it also starts a Live Activity, so you can track your progress from your Lock Screen or the Dynamic Island as you play.
Tracking playtime from my Home Screen (left) and some of Game Tracker’s many Shortcuts actions (middle and right).
Live Activities aren’t the only modern feature packed into Game Tracker. The app includes a deep set of widgets for tracking a game you’re currently playing, any other game in your collection, and your spaces. There’s a widget that will drop you into Game Tracker’s search feature to find games, too.
The app also offers deep integration with Shortcuts, with actions to find games based on a variety of criteria, add metadata to existing games in your collection, create spaces and tags, and open and retrieve game entries based on the app’s long list of metadata, to name just a handful of the many actions. There are 10 different Control Center widgets, which can also be added to your Lock Screen, to open the app to a specific area or search for a game.
Browsing similar games.
From an individual game’s view, you can select the three-dot menu button and pull up a list of similar games, too, which is great for discovery. However, I’d like to see a dedicated discovery section added to the app that’s populated with pre-built lists like New Releases and other categories for when I’m looking for inspiration on what to play next.
Finally, your collection syncs via iCloud across all platforms, backs up periodically, and can be exported in CSV or PDF formats with filters applied. I particularly like the simple export options, which make your data far more portable than in many other apps.
One thing Game Tracker doesn’t currently handle very well is unreleased games. I’ve added several games coming later this year that I want to play, and the app lists them as released now that it’s 2025. I also have a couple of games in my collection that don’t have a release date yet (I’m looking at you, Silksong), and those are given the release year of 1969, so Game Tracker assumes they came out decades ago. That makes managing upcoming games a little hard at the moment, but it’s also something I expect will get worked out in future updates, so it’s not a big deal.
Game Tracker is a lovely native way to manage your videogame colleciton.
If you’re the sort of person who likes to collect a lot of data about your hobbies and track things in your life, Game Tracker is perfect for you. It’s the kind of app that makes dipping in and out of a large collection of games easy because you’ll know which games are active and where you are in each. I love that you can leave yourself notes for the next time you resume a game, and the tagging feature lets me do things like remember which of my many retro handhelds I’m using for a particular game – a very NPC problem, I know. But even if you aren’t playing dozens of games across a pile of hardware, Game Tracker is one of the best ways to natively manage your videogame collection and playtime across multiple devices.
Game Tracker is available to download on the App Store. The free version allows you to track five games and create one space. With the Pro version, you can track an unlimited number of games and create as many spaces as you’d like for $1.49/month, $10.99/year, or a one-time purchase of $34.99.
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
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Join Now2025-01-28 23:36:00
Bookshop.org launched in 2020 as a way to sell books online while still supporting local bookstores, which have become a rarity in the U.S. The company has seen success selling physical books online. As Boone Ashworth explains at Wired:
For physical books, Bookshop lets buyers direct 30 percent of the proceeds of a sale to their favorite participating bookstore. An additional 10 percent of those sales, plus the sales of books that are not earmarked for a specific store, gets split up and distributed to every store on Bookshop’s platform.
Now, Bookshop has added eBooks that can be purchased online and read in the company’s new Bookshop.org app, available for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Ashworth breaks down how these sales work:
Ebook sales through Bookshop, however, will see 100 percent of the proceeds going to the store that sells them through the platform. If a user buys an ebook directly from Bookshop without naming a bookstore they want to support, then a third of that profit will go into the pool of funds that gets divided between stores. The rest will go to pay for Bookshop.org’s engineers and server costs.
Giving local bookstores the ability to sell eBooks fills a big hole for those businesses. Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter shared the company’s motivation for offering eBooks with Wired:
“It’s crazy that bookstores can’t sell ebooks to their customers right now,” Hunter says. He says he wants this program to continue his company’s mission of propping up local bookstores, but he also hopes this move will help take Amazon down a peg as well.
I’ve tried Bookshop’s app briefly with some book previews, and it works well. The settings options aren’t as extensive as in other eBook readers, but the basics – like text size, pagination versus scrolling, a couple of font options, and light, dark, and paper themes – are all there. The design makes browsing your library of books or finding something new to read easy, too. It may not be enough for some readers, but this is a 1.0 release, so I’m optimistic additional options will be offered with time.
It’s great to see Bookshop offering eBooks. We have an excellent bookstore here in Davidson that I love to browse, but more often than not, I prefer an eBook over the paper version, so it’s nice to have that as an option now.
The Bookshop.org app is available on the App Store as a free download. eBooks must be purchased online and synced with the app.
→ Source: wired.com
2025-01-28 05:02:35
](https://cdn.macstories.net/blingpod-1738008861951.jpg)
Behold, the BlingPod. Source: Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s is auctioning the estate of renowned designer Karl Lagerfeld. The auction house, which is auctioning the estate’s assets in multiple lots, includes several collections of classic iPods and custom iPods, like the ultra-blinged-out one above. The estate’s collection also includes these first-generation iPod Nanos that Parker Ortolani posted on Mastodon:
](https://cdn.macstories.net/custom-ipods-1738010119850.jpg)
Source: Sotheby’s
Compared to Lagerfeld’s full collection, though, Sotheby’s selection is a drop in the bucket. It’s estimated that the designer owned over 500 iPods when he passed away. According to graphic novelist Warren Ellis’s website:
Lagerfeld famously had an “iPod nanny” to digitise his collection for the iPods and to add new music to new devices. This is how he ended up with over 300 of them – he treated them like cassette tapes.
.](https://cdn.macstories.net/custom-ipods-3-1738010119271.jpg)
Source: Sotheby’s.
I’m impressed with Lagerfeld’s commitment to the iPod long after all but the Touch was discontinued. There’s a lot to be said for single-purpose devices like the iPod. I’d love to see Apple bring the iPod back one day, even if it were just a limited run. But if they do, I hope they get weird with it and take inspiration from some of these great custom iPods from Lagerfeld’s collection.
→ Source: sothebys.com
2025-01-28 02:08:06
Starting them young. Source: Apple.
The drip, drip, drip of Apple Intelligence continues with iOS and iPadOS 18.3. There are still some big-ticket features announced at WWDC 2024 that are yet to come, but with today’s release, Apple keeps ticking items off its list.
The biggest change is one that is largely hidden from view. Starting with iOS and iPadOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence is turned on by default. That should result in greater adoption of the features, and it’s a good indicator that Apple is confident LLM hallucinations won’t come back to bite the company in its reputation. We’ll see about that last bit, but given the size of the iPhone market, Apple’s guardrails have held up reasonably well so far.
That said, Apple is walking back one feature a little. Notification summaries will no longer be applied to news apps, after some high-profile confabulations. Given that news apps typically send headlines, which are inherently summary in nature, I don’t think that’s a great loss, although the change is reportedly temporary. However, one change to notifications is not temporary: starting with iOS and iPadOS 18.3, summarized notifications appear in italics to help distinguish them from other notifications.
Visual Intelligence has been updated in iOS 18.3 as well. Accessed by pressing and holding the iPhone’s Camera Control, Visual Intelligence can now add events to your calendar, identify animals and plants, and get information about places around you, such as a store or restaurant’s hours.
The latest update also adds back a Calculator feature. When you tap the equals sign repeatedly, the Calculator app will apply the last-used operation each time.
Finally, Apple introduced its latest Black Unity Collection earlier today. The iPhone and iPad wallpapers are part of iOS and iPadOS 18.3, and the new Unity Rhythm watch face is included with watchOS 11.3.
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
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Join Now2025-01-27 23:41:17
DeepSeek’s newfound popularity has made it impossible to log in as of the publication of this story.
And just like that, ChatGPT has been dethroned from its perch at the top of the App Store’s free app list, replaced by DeepSeek, another AI app. What’s interesting is that DeepSeek, which was developed by a Chinese startup, was reportedly created at a fraction of the cost of ChatGPT and other large language models developed in the US, which has tech stocks in turmoil.
Last week, DeepSeek revealed its latest LLM, which matches or outperforms OpenAI’s o1 model in some tests. That’s nothing new. AI companies have been one-upping each other for months. What’s different is that DeepSeek was reportedly built with a fraction of the hardware and at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI’s o1 and models like Anthropic’s Claude.
DeepSeek is also open source, potentially undermining the financial viability of U.S. and other for-profit companies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing models that require a paid subscription. And, because it’s free, DeepSeek rocketed to the top of the App Store’s free app list, passing OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been at or near the top of the list for months.
That has caused a stir in Silicon Valley. As VentureBeat’s Carl Franzen puts it:
The open-source availability of DeepSeek-R1, its high performance, and the fact that it seemingly “came out of nowhere” to challenge the former leader of generative AI, has sent shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley and far beyond, based on my conversations with and readings of various engineers, thinkers and leaders. If not “everyone” is freaking out about it as my hyperbolic headline suggests, it’s certainly the talk of the town in tech and business circles.
Now, as DeepSeek is starting to look like the real deal, the stock market is causing competitors’ stocks to drop, including NVIDIA’s, which, according to the Financial Times, fell 13% at the opening of the New York Stock Exchange.
If there’s one thing that has been a truism of the AI industry over the past couple of years, it’s that it moves very fast. Today’s leaders are tomorrow’s laggards. Will DeepSeek dethrone the U.S. AI companies? It’s far too early to know, but it certainly is beginning to look like there’s a new horse in the race.
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
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