2025-07-16 01:23:05
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
This week, Federico and John share a grab bag of projects we’d like to see Apple pursue from software to hardware and corporate acquisitions.
On AppStories+, Federico and John take their wish list further with a bunch of gadgets they’d like to see Apple make.
This episode is sponsored by:
This week on NPC, lots of follow-up about microSD Express cards, the Switch 2 Dock, XR glasses, and the dbrand Killswitch – plus, Retroid’s second screen accessory, Windows handhelds, a new eGPU, and more.
On NPC XL, John automates his Mac with the 8BitDo Micro, Brendon finally finds a Switch 2 Pro Controller, and Federico acquires a cozy PC controller.
NPC XL is a weekly members-only version of NPC with extra content, available exclusively through our new Patreon for $5/month.
Each week on NPC XL, Federico, Brendon, and John record a special segment or deep dive about a particular topic that is released alongside the “regular” NPC episodes.
You can subscribe here.
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, 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.
If you’re interested in advertising on our shows, you can learn more here or by contacting our Managing Editor, John Voorhees.
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;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.
Join Now2025-07-15 23:01:46
Longplay by Adrian Schönig is an excellent album-oriented music app that integrates with Apple Music. The app started on iOS and iPadOS, then later added support for visionOS. With today’s update, Longplay is available on macOS, too, where it adds unique automation features.
If you aren’t familiar with Longplay, be sure to check out my reviews of version 2.0 for iOS and iPadOS and the app’s debut on the Vision Pro. I love the app’s album art-forward design, collection and queuing systems for navigating and organizing large music libraries, and many other ways to sort, filter, and rediscover your favorite albums. Here’s how Adrian describes Longplay in a post introducing the Mac version:
It filters out the albums where you only have a handful of tracks, and focusses on those complete or nearly complete albums in your library instead. It analyses your album stats to help you rediscover forgotten favourites and explore your library in different ways. You can organise your albums into collections, including smart ones. And you can go deep with automation support.
With the introduction of Longplay for Mac, the app is now available everywhere, with feature parity across all versions. Plus, Longplay syncs across all devices, so your Collections and Smart Collections are available on every platform.
The other big deal about Longplay for the Mac is its deep integration with automation tools. The app features the same extensive support for Shortcuts on Mac as it does elsewhere, with over two dozen available actions. It supports AppleScript, too, which is what drives an Alfred workflow that is linked in Longplay’s settings. Longplay also integrates with Last.fm and ListenBrainz for tracking what you listen to.
Claude compiling a Longplay Collection based on a comparison of my Apple Music library to the list it created for me previously.
However, the most interesting of all of Longplay’s automation integrations is its built-in MCP server. MCP is a protocol that allows AI chatbots like Claude to interact with apps. With Longplay’s MCP server, you can do things like create Collections and Smart Collections and queue albums for playback from inside a chatbot. What makes the integration so powerful is the ability to perform those actions with the sort of natural language requests that are the bread and butter of chatbots.
For example, the other day I asked Claude Sonnet 4 to compile a list of the top 100 alternative and indie albums of the ’80s. After consulting several sources, Claude generated a list, which I then asked it to use to create a Longplay Collection using my Apple Music library. Claude got to work and created my Collection after comparing its list with my Apple Music library for a couple of minutes.
Longplay is the first app I’ve tried that uses a built-in MCP server, and I’m sold. The combination of a chatbot’s research strength and Longplay’s actions makes its MCP integration a compelling way to explore your music.
I had fewer of the albums on Claude’s list than I expected, which is something I’ll have to correct manually given MusicKit limitations.
One downside of controlling Apple Music with an MCP server – which I want to emphasize is not a Longplay limitation – is that it can only create Longplay Collections from the albums in your library. You might expect that the MCP integration would allow Longplay to add all 100 of the albums in the Top 100 list to my library, but it can’t because MusicKit doesn’t offer that functionality. It’s a shortcoming of Apple’s that has held back automation in other areas like Shortcuts ever since the debut of Apple Music a decade ago.
Apple’s API limitations aside, Longplay is one of the most automatable music apps I’ve tried. Add to that its beautiful design and thoughtful discovery features, and what you get is one of the premier music apps on any of Apple’s platforms. It’s made all the better by the addition of the Mac app, which nicely rounds out Longplay’s lineup.
Longplay for Mac is available as a standalone purchase from the Mac App Store for $24.99 and directly from the Longplay website.
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;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.
Join Now2025-07-15 21:00:00
Source: CD PROJEKT RED.
Last fall, alongside the announcement of the M4 MacBook Pro, Apple and CD PROJEKT RED said that Cyberpunk 2077 was coming to the Mac in early 2025. But when WWDC rolled around last month with no more news about when the game would come to the Mac, I thought it might slip to the fall when macOS Tahoe is expected to be released with Metal 4 and other game-friendly features.
So it was a pleasant surprise to find out that Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition, which includes the Phantom Liberty DLC, will be out this Thursday on the Mac App Store, as well as on GOG.com, Steam, and the Epic Games Store. Cyberpunk, a notoriously demanding game when it comes to system resources, will run on any Apple silicon Mac with 16GB of memory that is running macOS Sequoia (or the Tahoe developer beta).
Source: CD PROJEKT RED.
To support every 16GB Apple silicon Mac since the M1 MacBook Air, Cyberpunk relies on the latest Metal technologies, including Tile-Based Deferred Rendering and tools like Metal’s C++ interface and the Metal Shader Converter, to optimize for Apple GPUs. The game also takes advantage of Apple’s MetalFX Upscaling.
CD PROJEKT RED has gone all out with other compatibility features to make its game feel at home on the Mac, too, including:
In the fall, Apple says Cyberpunk will get a boost from the videogame technologies announced at WWDC 2025. Those include MetalFX Frame Interpolation to increase and stabilize frame rates, which Apple says will allow the game to hit 120 fps using the game’s Ultra settings when combined with MetalFX Upscaling. Cyberpunk will utilize MetalFX Frame Denoising to clean up the noise produced by its path-tracing renderer, too.
Source: CD PROJEKT RED.
I’m looking forward to trying Cyberpunk on the Mac. I already own it on Steam and have played it on the Steam Deck and the Nintendo Switch 2, both of which should be excellent points of comparison to the wide range of Macs that Apple says will run Cyberpunk 2077.
The Mac version of Cyberpunk 2077 will debut this Thursday, July 17. There is no additional charge for the Mac version if you already purchased the game from one of the stores that offers it. Alternatively, you can purchase the game from the Mac App Store, where Cyberpunk 2077 is making its debut.
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;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.
Join Now2025-07-15 19:57:52
Matt Corey has once again gathered indie developers to organize a huge sale today and tomorrow. Corey, the maker of Bills to Budget and Signals, has organized a collection of over 250 apps that will be offered at a discount through Wednesday. The list is too long to publish here, but it includes many apps we’ve covered here on MacStories and on Club MacStories in the past, including:
There are a lot of great deals, with many apps discounted 50% or more. What’s listed above is a small fraction of the participating apps, so be sure to visit Indie App Sales and support these great indie apps.
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;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.
Join Now2025-07-15 04:19:41
The EU’s Digital Markets Act requires Apple to allow third parties to offer web browsers with their own browser engines. However, more than a year later, there are no browsers built with Chromium, Gecko, or any other engine in the EU.
At a recent EU workshop on Apple’s compliance with the DMA’s browser requirements, Apple representatives were asked some pointed questions by Open Web Advocacy (OWA), and others about its browser engine policies. OWA, a non-profit that advocates for the open web, raised multiple issues with Apple’s approach to browser engines in the EU that they believe are holding back third-party engines.
One issue is that versions of the same browser with different engines can’t be part of the same app bundle. According to OWA, that effectively means vendors like Google and Mozilla would need to release a new EU-only version of their browsers, starting the process of acquiring users from scratch, which I can’t imagine any browser company would sign up to do voluntarily.
Another issue OWA raised is that there is currently no way for web developers outside the EU who are not associated with the browser makers to obtain browsers with competing engines for testing purposes. That’s a problem that’s been solved with other apps by allowing test versions to be distributed outside the EU. However, as things stand today, OWA says that web developers couldn’t use EU-only browsers for testing even if there were any available.
Other issues were raised, too, but these two strike me as practical impediments to third-party browser engines that can and should be resolved. Apple’s responses to OWA’s challenges focused on privacy and security, which are legitimate factors to consider, but it’s disappointing that more than a year after the DMA took effect, the practical problems raised by OWA and others still haven’t been solved.
→ Source: open-web-advocacy.org
2025-07-14 18:42:46
If you run a business, a side hustle, a podcast, or just want to stay in touch with a community, you know how important great email marketing can be. That’s where Direct Mail comes in — a native macOS app that makes it incredibly easy to design, send, and track email campaigns that get results. Unlike web-based alternatives, Direct Mail is designed specifically for macOS, with the speed, polish, and Mac-first integration you expect.
The brand-new Version 7 is a huge leap forward. This update brings a host of new features, including a reimagined user interface, smarter list management, powerful email signup forms, upgraded reporting, and all-new tools to help your emails stand out. Whether you’re sending to 10 people or 10,000, Direct Mail gives you the tools to do it professionally and painlessly.
If you’ve ever been frustrated with clunky, web-based email marketing tools, or just want something that feels right at home on your Mac, check out Direct Mail. It’s free to download and try, with flexible pricing plans to match every budget — including pay-as-you-go options. You can be up and running with your first campaign in just minutes. Our friendly customer support reps are available via live chat to help with any questions, ensuring you’re never stuck. Get started today and expand your reach with powerful, Mac-first email marketing tools.
Our thanks to Direct Mail for sponsoring MacStories this week.
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;
Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.
Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.
Join Now