Category: Apps

Bridges is a new app out by Jonathan Ruiz, designed to collect, organize and then use links. It’s great for creating collections that you want to share later on social media, in a blog post or in the notes for a podcast episode. It’s a one-time purchase of $3.99 for the iOS and iPadOS app, and the Mac app is the same price. No subscriptions. Check out Ruiz’s blog post for more.

This week’s Under the Radar includes an absolutely bonkers story from Underscore. I’m sure the situation was wildly stressful, but it made for some great podcasting.

Gabe Bullard at Nieman Reports, reporting an internal memo from NPR, which left Twitter back in April:

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

There’s one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic.

I can confidently say that leaving the platform has not been the disaster I once feared it would be for Relay FM or 512 Pixels. The core Apple community landed on Mastodon, while the rest of the world is slowly moving to Threads.

The lesson to learn here is that when those two platforms implode — and at some point they will — everything will be okay then, too.

Kevin Purdy, writing at Ars Technica about a fun Firefox story:

Back in June 2002, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was experiencing space for the first time, the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Microsoft was reaching its final arguments, and Adam Price, using what was then called Mozilla on a Mac, had an issue with persistent tooltips.

“If I mouseover a toolbar link, and wait for a second, a little yellow box with the description of the link appears. If I now use command-tab to move Mozilla to the background, the little yellow box stays there, in the foreground. The only way to get rid of it is to put mozilla in the foreground again, and move the mouse off the toolbar,” Price wrote on June 2. There were a few other bugs related to this issue, but Price set down a reproducible issue, confirmed by many others in the weeks to come—and months to come, years to come, and more than two decades to come.

This bug remained in place until a month ago, when a 23-year-old named Yifan Zhu patched it.

Neale Van Fleet:

Exactly 21 years ago today, Rogue Amoeba shipped its very first product: Audio Hijack 1.0. In a small nod to our birthday, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at our app icons over the years. Below, I’ve lined up the icons for all the Mac apps Rogue Amoeba has sold since the beginning.

This is delightful.

Version 4 of Obscura, the excellent camera app for iOS, has launched today. The update brings a revised interface, iPad support and a new business model, as John Voorhees writes as MacStories:

If you bought Obscura 3, you’ll still have access to all its features with the free version of Obscura 4, which you can upgrade to at a discount. I think the new pricing model is a good deal, and I wanted to mention it up front because it’s behind many of the design changes in Obscura 4.

The new subscription is called “Obscura Ultra,” and until September 11 is just $7.99/year. I think it makes a ton of sense for an app like this, and it’s far less of a hassle than the old “pay to upgrade to a new app” method that Ben McCarthy (the app’s developer) was using.

I love the app’s updated design, and the haptics are just next-level. If you are in the market for a professional camera app for your iPhone (or iPad), you can not go wrong with Obscura 4.

My pal David Sparks has a new Field Guide out:

The Obsidian on-ramp is steep. It takes a while to wrap your arms around exactly what you can do with this app and unlock its full potential. You need a guide. That’s me, MacSparky, your Obsidian pal. Once you master Obsidian, you’ll also need help picking plugins and figuring out exactly how far down that rabbit hole you want to go. I’ve got you covered there, too.

I’ve been working through this for a couple of weeks, and Sunday’s episode of Mac Power Users is all about Obsidian and this project. As usual, David knocked this out of the park. If you use Obsidian and want to get more out of it, or are Obsidian-curious, this is for you.