Category: Apps

This morning, Apple announced 30 new titles for Apple Arcade, bringing the total to 180 games as part of the $5/month service. Some of these games are new, and some are … not.

John Voorhees at MacStories has details:

Second, Arcade includes two new game categories: Timeless Classics and App Store Greats, which are a big collection of all-time favorite iOS games that are now available at no extra cost as part of an Arcade subscription on the iPhone and iPad and differentiated from other titles with the addition of a ‘+’ in their titles. Games included in the category include Zach Gage’s Good Soduku, Mini Metro, Fruit Ninja Classic, Badland, Blek, Flipflop Solitaire, Reigns, Monument Valley, and more. It’s an impressive list of classics that that is great to see spotlighted by Apple and preserved.

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If the TenFourFox name doesn’t mean much to you, it’s a project that has kept the Mozilla browser alive for PowerPC Macs. It’s been a labor of love, and now, some 15 years after the Intel transition, it’s coming to an end. This is a bummer, but it’s amazing that the work has gone on so long.

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Manish Singh has details:

The Android-maker said on Tuesday that starting July 1, it is reducing the service fee for Google Play to 15% — down from 30% — for the first $1 million of revenue developers earn using Play billing system each year. The company will levy a 30% cut on every dollar developers generate through Google Play beyond the first $1 million in a year, it said.

Citing its own estimates, Google said 99% of developers that sell goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees, and that 97% of apps globally do not sell digital goods or pay any service fee.

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This week, several Mac apps have been updated to support Apple silicon natively.

The biggest title is Adobe Photoshop. Darrell Etherington has details on TechCrunch:

Per internal testing, Adobe says that users should see improvements of up to 1.5x faster performance on a number of different features offered by Photoshop, vs. the same tasks being done on the emulated version. That’s just the start, however, since Adobe says it’s going to continue to coax additional performance improvements out of the software on Apple Silicon in collaboration with Apple over time. Some features are also still missing from the M1-friendly addition, including the ‘Invite to Edit Cloud Documents’ and ‘Preset Syncing’ options, but those will be ported over in future iterations as well.

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CleanMyMac X is the only Mac “cleaning” utility I ever recommend, and it just got a nice update. I checked out the beta on my M1 MacBook Pro, and it runs great.

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The Apple TV app comes to the $50 streaming device just in time for season 2 of For All Mankind to start tomorrow.

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I’ve used DEVONthink for about a year to hold all of my research and gathered materials relating to tech history. As of this writing, I have 22,197 items in the application, across ten databases. Its search features make quick work of crawling all of these bits of information, letting me find anything I have on a certain topic across a range of PDFs, text documents, web archives and more.

DEVONthink on the Mac is solid, but the mobile app has felt left behind, with version 3 of DEVONthink To Go, that’s changed.

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Jason Snell:

On one level, the impending death of Call Recorder, a utility I’ve relied on for more than a decade, shouldn’t actually be a big deal. As useful and easy as it was, it’s not as if there aren’t alternatives.

In fact, if I’m being honest, Call Recorder hasn’t been my primary audio-recording tool for years. That distinction goes to Audio Hijack, which works with any app (not just Skype). But I have kept Call Recorder running for every Skype call I make, sometimes as my primary recorder, more often as a backup.

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Sam Byford at The Verge:

Apple has released an official extension for the Windows and Mac versions of Chrome that lets you use passwords stored in your iCloud Keychain. For anyone who uses Chrome as their browser and iCloud Keychain in lieu of a dedicated password manager, this could make bouncing between Windows and Mac computers much easier.

This should make life easier for people using this part of iCloud, but it’s not enough to take me away from 1Password.

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I’ve used CARROT Weather for several years. I love weather apps, and I love apps that take advantage of everything Apple has to offer on its platforms, and CARROT sits right at the intersection.

The design is all-new, and more liking to my tastes than before, with less artwork and better data density. It comes with several themes, any of which you can customize. Here is how I have my CARROT Weather set up:

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Michael, writing on the Panic blog:

Once upon a time, we made one of the earliest MP3 players for the Mac, Audion. We’ve come to appreciate that Audion captured a special moment in time, and we’ve been trying to preserve its history. Back in March, we revealed that we were working on converting Audion faces to a more modern format so they could be preserved.

Since then, we’ve succeeded in converting 867 faces, and are currently working on a further 15 faces, representing every Audion face we know of.

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Thanks to Todoist’s annual reporting, I have found a lot of information about how I worked last year. In total, I completed 4,362 tasks in 2020, which breaks down to these averages:

• 11 tasks per day
• 82 tasks per week
• 363 tasks per month

April was my most productive month, as you can see from these numbers showing how many tasks I completed by month. You can see that March wasn’t very good, and that I put my head down in April to work through the panic:

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