Accents is an app that lets you use the iMac/MacBook Neo accent colors on any Mac.
This is really clever. The iMac and MacBook Neo come with custom accent colors that are only available on those machines. Thanks to Michael Tsai for linking to this little gem of a macOS app.
Back in the day, Apple had three suites of applications:
Apps like Aperture and Final Cut Express were also around for a while. Meanwhile, Logic and MainStage are just out there doing their own things. I don’t even know what’s going on with Freeform, as it’s updated with OS releases, not as a standalone app like the others.
Over the years, this slowly broken down. iTunes became it’s own thing. The only iLife apps left are iMovie and GarageBand, even if Photos is the successor to iPhoto. The iWork apps all moved out to their own places years ago.
Starting on January 28,1 the bundle is back. Here’s a bit from the press release announcing Apple Creator Studio:
Apple today unveiled Apple Creator Studio, a groundbreaking collection of powerful creative apps designed to put studio-grade power into the hands of everyone, building on the essential role Mac, iPad, and iPhone play in the lives of millions of creators around the world. The apps included with Apple Creator Studio for video editing, music making, creative imaging, and visual productivity give modern creators the features and capabilities they need to experience the joy of editing and tailoring their content while realizing their artistic vision. Exciting new intelligent features and premium content build on familiar experiences of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform to make Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite to empower creators of all disciplines while protecting their privacy.
The new bundle also brings new branding to these apps:
(I love the icons.)
This bundle is clearly designed for prosumers and professionals, as these apps are going to be included in Apple Creator Studio:
Apple Creator Studio will cost $12.99/month or $129/year, with a one-month free trial. New Macs and “qualifying” iPad purchases will come with a three-month trial. (Family Sharing is supported.)
According to Joe Rossignol at MacRumors, Apple Creator Studio isn’t eating all of Apple’s creative apps:
Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage will each remain available for one-time purchase, and free versions of the Numbers, Pages, Keynote, and Freeform apps will continue to exist. However, only Apple Creator Studio subscribers will receive access to some of the premium new AI features and content.
Ah yes… premium content and AI features… back to the press release:
With Apple Creator Studio, productivity gets supercharged with all-new features that bring more intelligence and premium content to creators’ fingertips so they can take their projects to the next level. The Content Hub is a new space where users can find curated, high-quality photos, graphics, and illustrations. A subscription also unlocks new premium templates and themes in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers.
In addition to Image Playground, advanced image creation and editing tools let users create high-quality images from text, or transform existing images, using generative models from OpenAI.12 On-device AI models enable Super Resolution to upscale images while keeping them sharp and detailed, and Auto Crop provides intelligent crop suggestions, helping users find eye-catching compositions for photos.
To help users prepare presentations even more quickly in Keynote, Apple Creator Studio includes access to features in beta, such as the ability to generate a first draft of a presentation from a text outline, or create presenter notes from existing slides. Subscribers can also quickly clean up slides to fix layout and object placement. And in Numbers, subscribers can generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition with Magic Fill.
I don’t love features in apps like Keynote, Numbers, Pages, and Freeform being put behind a paywall. These apps are used by millions of people every day, and make Apple’s ecosystem better for each of them.
However, I totally understand that professional apps have moved to a subscription model. Heck, I pay Adobe over $60/month for access to its suite of creative applications that I rely on almost every day.2 Compared to that cost, Apple Creator Studio at $12.99/month or $129.99/year looks like a deal. If you’re a college student, it’s even better: just $2.99/month or $29.99/year.
Yours truly in The Daily Helmsman newsroom as a freshman in August 2004. Names and phone numbers have been redacted to protect people who probably don’t remember me at all.
Twenty years ago, I was halfway through my first sophomore year of college1 and loving it. Moving into the dorm in August 2004 marked the first time I had access to the real Internet (not just AOL or Juno), and I dove into being a Mac nerd. I spent time on the Apple Discussion Boards and OS X forums across the web to learn everything I could about the PowerBook on my desk and what it could do.
Reflecting on that time, here are some of the apps I was using:
One of the first things I did when I got to college was set up an AOL Instant Messenger account. I was the last of my friends to do so, but I quickly jumped in. I chatted with friends and classmates, and set some super emo away messages.
iChat had launched in 2002 with Mac OS X Jaguar, but it took until Leopard for Apple to add tabbed chats. This meant that every open chat you had spawned its own window. Even on a 15-inch PowerBook, that would quickly spiral out of control.
Chax was a third-party app that added a bunch of functionality to iChat — including tabs — but I had stability issues with it. So, instead, I turned to Adium.
If you used a Mac in the early 2000s, Adium probably holds a special place in your heart. It worked with AIM and a wide range of other chat services and offered tabbed chat windows.
Adium’s real strength was its customization options. Users could change the icons, emoticons, sounds, chat styles, buddy list layout, and much more. As you can see in this one terrible photo of my dorm desk, you can see that I had online buddies in green, away buddies in red, and offline buddies showing up in black:
Safari was a few years old by the time I was in school, but I wasn’t a huge fan. Instead, I used the beloved Camino, which was described by its creators like this:
Camino combines the awesome visual and behavioral experience that has been central to the Macintosh philosophy with the powerful web-browsing capabilities of the Gecko rendering engine. Built and tested by thousands of volunteers, Mozilla’s Gecko brings cutting-edge innovations and capabilities to users in a standards-friendly and socially responsible form.
Sure, you can use a typical web browser, with typical features. Or you can use a browser that “also” supports the Mac. Or you can use a browser you have to pay for. What if there was one that offered everything, for free?
That browser is Camino. Camino makes your web experience more productive, more efficient, more secure, and more fun. It looks and feels like a Mac OS X application should, because it was designed exclusively for Mac OS X and the high standards set by Mac users. You’ll see the entire internet the way it was intended. Camino is the browser that gets out of your way, and that means Camino users need not worry about things they shouldn’t have to.
With an Aqua interface and the heart of Firefox under the hood, Camino was fashionable and fast. Here’s a screenshot of version 1.0.3 or so:
When I said that I used a PowerBook in my early college years, that is only part of the truth. I also had a Blue and White Power Mac G3 under my desk that I used as a “server.”
I put server in quotes because I really just used it as a backup target for my laptop; it didn’t run Mac OS X Server or provide any real services.
I ran it headless, so to access it, I used a VNC client called Chicken of the VNC. That is the best name any application has ever been given other than CalZones (RIP). It let me quickly access the Blue & White from anywhere on campus with just a few clicks.
Student email at the University of Memphis ran on Exchange, and connecting to the mail server via IMAP in Apple Mail was pretty janky. Since I refused to use webmail, I turned to a cracked version of Microsoft Entourage, the company’s email and personal information manager for the Mac.
This let me access my email in an actual application, like a gentleman. Later in college, I experimented with various hand-me-down Palm Pilots and even a PocketPC. I used various versions of Palm’s HotSync and The Missing Sync to get data in and out of Entourage.
Being a young nerd in the early 2000s meant that I loved reading the web via RSS. To do so, I would have turned to NetNewsWire, but I couldn’t afford the commercial version, so instead, I used the freeware RSS client Vienna. It wasn’t nearly as nice as NetNewsWire, and as soon as I came across the free — and awesome — NewsFire in 2008, I jumped ship to that. That was the beauty of RSS, and why it’s still special today.
It was wild to think about this list and consider the fact that I still have solutions for all of these categories today. Now it’s Messages/Slack/Discord instead of Adium, Safari instead of Camino, and Apple’s built-in screen sharing features instead of Chicken of the VNC.
Entourage has been replaced by a set of apps including Mimestream, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders. Vienna is still around, but now I read RSS with ReadKit.
I even still have that old Blue and White G3. It’s sitting on a shelf in my office across from my desk.
Here is how I have Control Center set up on my iPhone 17 Pro:
At the top, I’m using the stock Connectivity and Now Playing controls.
Down from there are switches for Silent Mode and Orientation Lock. I don’t touch these very often, but want them handy for when I need to hear my phone or rotate it into landscape mode. Next to these two switches are slides for Screen Brightness1 and Volume.
I don’t use Focus Modes very frequently. Only Do Not Disturb, Sleep, and Reduce Interruptions live behind that button. On the other hand, I use Alarms and Timers all the time, and like having an easy way to get to them quickly.
Up next are two actions. The first is built with Widgetsmith, tapping it fires an action within the app to go to my iMessage thread with my wife Merri.
The second is a simple Shortcut named Fast Tasks that lets me type into a box and have it land in my Inbox in Reminders, with a due date of today. This Shortcut is also tied to my Action button, and its name and icon are in honor of Casey’s now-retired app, Fast Text.
The last two rows are pretty straightforward:
Previously, Spotlight could optionally retain clipboard contents for up to eight hours, but the latest update expands that flexibility with three options – 30 minutes, 8 hours, or 7 days. There’s also a new “Clear Clipboard History” button in System Settings ➝ Spotlight, giving users the ability to manually wipe stored clipboard data without having to wipe Spotlight search history wholesale.
Clearly, Apple heard the feedback from power users that 8 hours wasn’t enough.
I’m always surprised at just how often I’m asked about how I read RSS. For years, this was a very stable setup, but has recently changed.
I’ve used Feedbin for ages. It is widely supported by RSS clients, and has the ability to receive emails newsletters and put them inline with articles coming in via RSS. As someone who doesn’t like reading newsletters in his inbox, this is great.
For years, I was using what is now known as Reeder Classic on all of my devices. It looked great, worked well, and was super customizable. However, as the developer has moved on to the new version of Reeder, Classic has begun to get a bit creaky, and its future doesn’t seem very bright, unlike the blank screens I would often get as the app tried to load articles on iOS.
The macOS version was still holding up, so several months ago, I switched to NetNewsWire on the iPhone and iPad. It’s lean, fast, and I love the fact that it’s a community project. It has a handful of customization options, but I struggled to get it to look the way I wanted. This wasn’t enough to go looking for a new app, however, until Jason mentioned ReadKit on this week’s episode of Upgrade.
I hadn’t used ReadKit in over a decade, and when I checked it out again, I was impressed. It’s looks modern with Liquid Glass support, works with Feedbin, and works as well on the Mac as it does on iOS and iPadOS. I’ve been running it this week and so far, so good!
Nisus Writer is a word processor for the Mac that dates back to 1989. It survived basically every major change the platform has ever seen, but its time as a beloved Mac app may be coming to an end, as Joe Kissell writes:
For more than a year, we’ve heard scattered complaints: problems with Nisus Software’s website, particularly the user discussion forum; slow or absent responses to support requests; assorted bugs; and other issues. But earlier this week, on 22 October 2025, the reports changed to: “Did you know the Nisus website is completely down, and that Nisus Writer is no longer in the Mac App Store? Does this mean they’re out of business?”
On the one hand: The site is back online as I write this. The app still works. I’m writing the first draft of this article in Nisus Writer Pro on a Mac running macOS 26 Tahoe, and it’s fine. You can still download it and buy a license. At least one human being is actively involved in the company. It’s (mostly) alive!
On the other hand: All available evidence suggests that the app, and the company behind it, are on life support, and the prognosis is doubtful. It’s (mostly) dead!
I’m going to tell you what I know.
I used iWeb back in the day to make early versions of my personal website, as well as websites for friends, before I started learning more about web development and switched to Adobe Dreamweaver. Apple only released two major updates to iWeb, with the last one arriving in the iLife ’09 package. When the company migrated its cloud services from MobileMe to iCloud, the ability to publish personal websites was removed, and iWeb was finally discontinued in 2011.
Even though Apple’s web hosting services are long gone, you can still use iWeb and save your finished site to a local folder or FTP server. The last versions were Intel-native Mac applications, so iWeb should work all the way up to macOS 10.14 Mojave, released in 2018. It can’t run in newer macOS releases because Apple ripped out support for 32-bit applications.
The web has changed dramatically since 2011, so I thought it would be a fun experiment to revisit iWeb and see how its websites hold up to modern standards. I installed iWeb 3 on my old Mac Mini running Snow Leopard and got to work.
I have wanted to do this for years, and major props to Corbin for diving deep on this project.
Classic Mac Gaming on YouTube has a great video about a true classic for Mac OS:
The Clips app is no longer being updated, and will no longer be available for download for new users as of October 10, 2025. You can continue to use Clips on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 or earlier.
Save your Clips videos to your photo library or another location. You can save videos with any effects you might have added in Clips or save individual clips without effects. Then, watch your videos in other apps like Photos or make new videos with individual clips using iMovie or other third-party apps like InShot, VN Video Editor, and GoPro Quik.
If you previously downloaded the Clips app, you can still redownload it from your Apple account in the App Store.
Quick Look is a great Finder feature, and now it can see into folders thanks to a free Mac app named Folder Quick Look. Here’s what it is like in action:
John Gruber, in his link to it:
Looks, feels, and works like a feature that ought to be built into the Finder itself. Cool.
Underscore, writing last week:
Five years ago, a TikTok video changed my life.
And I can say that without any hyperbole.
I remember watching Widgetsmith rocket to the top of the App Store, and I could not have been more excited for Dave as it was happening. It’s a thrill to work on such a large project now.
