512 Pixels

Balance is a powerful menubar app for your money built by a team from Apple, Stripe and Ethereum. It was featured in the U.S. Mac App Store when it launched in February.

Securely connect to your accounts

Balance uses Plaid.com, the best API for securely accessing your financial data. It gives the app a read-only token to access your account history.

Quickly check your balances

With one click or keyboard shortcut you can pop open Balance and check all of your accounts. Lock the app with a password or TouchID.

Speedily search through your transactions

As a native app with local data storage, Balance is super fast. Quickly search through all of your downloaded transactions with powerful filters.

Powerful notification engine

Balance is Hazel for money. You can create rules to trigger useful notifications to help you stay on top of your finances.

One subscription, coming to all of Apple’s platforms

The basic plan starts at $4.99 / month. Balance is launching on iOS and watchOS later this year, and is also building a full windowed app for macOS. Early customers will get access to betas for all of these.

Check out Balance on the U.S. Mac App Store today. International support is planned for later this year.

Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society:

Sunday, August 20 marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 2. Tuesday, September 5, will be the 40th anniversary for Voyager 1. Round anniversaries like these have no special significance for spacecraft that have departed Earth’s orbit; the significance is for those of us that the spaceships left behind on a planet that still revolves around the Sun once a year.

The Voyager program is nuts. For a nice recap, check out episode 44 of Liftoff.

John Voorhees at MacStories:

According to Apple’s announcement and support pages, it will automatically convert iTunes U Collections to podcasts in September and eliminate the iTunes U section of iTunes on macOS. That means there will no longer be a way to download iTunes U course materials on a Mac. The change also means that the iTunes U catalog will only include courses and will only be accessible from an iOS device.

This week on Download, I sat in for Jason Snell to talk with Alex Cox and Mikah Sargent about the pros and cons of live-streaming news as it happens, insurance companies are offering discounts for data and whatever is happening with Facebook Marketplace.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Freshbooks: Online invoicing made easy.
• Mack Weldon: Smart underwear for smart guys. Get 20% off with the code DOWNLOAD.

From a company-wide email:

What occurred in Charlottesville has no place in our country. Hate is a cancer, and left unchecked it destroys everything in its path. Its scars last generations. History has taught us this time and time again, both in the United States and countries around the world.

We must not witness or permit such hate and bigotry in our country, and we must be unequivocal about it. This is not about the left or the right, conservative or liberal. It is about human decency and morality. I disagree with the president and others who believe that there is a moral equivalence between white supremacists and Nazis, and those who oppose them by standing up for human rights. Equating the two runs counter to our ideals as Americans.

Regardless of your political views, we must all stand together on this one point — that we are all equal. As a company, through our actions, our products and our voice, we will always work to ensure that everyone is treated equally and with respect.

Well said.

Cook announced the company will be making $1 million donations to the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League. Additionally, Apple will match employee donations to those organizations two-to-one until the end of next month.

This fortnight on Ungeniused:

While only observed twice, limnic eruptions are both terrifying and deadly.

My thanks to our sponsor:

• Mack Weldon: Smart underwear for smart guys. Get 20% off with the code UNGENIUSED

This week on Query, Ren and I tackled a couple of fun, big of topics:

John and Claire are eyeing Synology devices, while Kimberly is headed back to school and has to make some decisions about office programs.

This month in my MacStories column, I revisited the insane story of the lost/stolen iPhone 4. It was a lot of fun to re-read all the stories about this.

Up this week is Article TA36432:

The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh uses the same logic board and memory as the Power Macintosh 5500 and 6500 series computers. Like those computers, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh does not have any DRAM memory soldered on the logic boards. All RAM expansion is provided by DIMMs installed in one of the two 168-pin sockets. It includes 32 MB installed in one of the two DIMM slots.

This week on Connected:

Myke and Stephen sit down together to talk through a mountain of follow-up, consider Apple’s design options on the next iPhone and revisit App Store subscriptions.

A big thanks to our sponsors this week:

• Blue Apron: A better way to cook. Get three meals free with your first purchase, and free shipping.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code WORLD at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
• Bombfell: Find the right clothes for you. Get $25 OFF YOUR FIRST purchase.

This fortnight on Liftoff:

2014 MU69 comes into focus, SLS has a new paint job and we talk about the two rockets used in Project Mercury and the first two crewed American spaceflights.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Blue Apron: A better way to cook. Get three meals free with your first purchase, and free shipping.

For the third year running, Myke and I have done a Q&A to celebrate Relay FM’s anniversary. This year, we did it on Myke’s YouTube channel: