Category: Apps

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.

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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.

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Tim Hardwick:

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.

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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.

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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?”

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Corbin Davenport:

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.

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Classic Mac Gaming on YouTube has a great video about a true classic for Mac OS:

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Apple Support:

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.

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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.

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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.

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Today, Apple launched iOS 26. Over at Cross Forward, we’ve got major updates to three of our apps today:

Widgetsmith 8

This is a big one. Widgetsmith’s design has been updated for Liquid Glass, but we took that opportunity to make meaningful improvements across the app:

• New main screen that makes it easier to find your existing widgets and create new ones.
• Search is now implemented across the app to make searching for a widget type or theme much faster.
• It’s now easier to take an existing theme and apply it to other widgets.
• You can now apply a theme based on a wallpaper to multiple widgets at once.

Widgetsmith 8 is in the App Store now.

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It’s been a busy summer at Cross Forward, and David is showing off part of that work today, with a tour of the next version of Pedometer++:

I love this refresh, and can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on for Widgetsmith.

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