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Finalist: A Paper-Inspired Daily Planner with Notes for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Now Apple Watch [Sponsor]

10 August 2026 at 13:50

If you read MacStories, you might have caught John’s Finalist 1.0 review a few years back. A lot has changed since: version 4.0 is out this week, its biggest update yet. Finalist is a paper-inspired daily planner for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and now Apple Watch, giving you one place to plan your day, week and month. It wrangles all your stuff into one cohesive system to help you stay on top of it all: Reminders, Calendars, habits, tasks, notes, weather, and lots more.

New in 4.0 are Notes. Write native notes that sync to your iCloud, or point Finalist at a folder of markdown files and it round-trips cleanly with Obsidian vaults, GitHub, or any editor you like. Markdown tasks inside those files show up in your timelines as real tasks, on the right date, with the right tags. There are even timeline swimlanes per tag, to visualize any endeavour.

The Watch app is also new and it extends Finalist to your wrist. Its Now card answers the day’s current question: your first moves in the morning, the running time block with a countdown, an evening wrap-up with streaks to protect. It has some very nifty complications and a Smart Stack widget.

Or take a look at Broadsheet, a newsprint-inspired layout that shines on big screens. It has delightful touches throughout: tap a World Clock and the whole page retunes to another city, with date, weather, tasks, and appointments all in that timezone. The Timeline tab lets you sketch your day in pencil. Perfect for timeblocking, especially with Pencil Pro and its squeeze menu.

Apple has featured Finalist as App of the Day multiple times, and a large Discord community drives it forward. To help you try it, MacStories readers get 50% off their first year with code MACSTORIES40.

Our thanks to Finalist for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Dark Hours Rejected From the App Store

7 August 2026 at 22:25

[Update: See the retraction below.]

Terry Godier:

On the web, if I build something that works within the standards, it works. Whether people use it is up to them. On iOS, there is another question entirely: whether Apple decides it should exist.

[…]

In the past couple of years I’ve built three apps that were rejected from the App Store on various grounds.

[…]

A while ago I tried to submit an iOS app for Dark Hours, my astronomy website for normal people. It was rejected on the grounds that it was astrology.

[…]

I see countless ChatGPT wrappers with nearly identical icons and eye-watering subscriptions. I see astronomy apps requesting permissions that have nothing to do with looking at the night sky. My kids download games that interrupt play every few minutes to advertise the developer’s other subscription apps, each with their own $20–50 yearly plans.

Via John Gruber (Mastodon, Hacker News):

But if you actually look at Godier’s Dark Hours, for even just a few seconds, it is instantly obvious that it pertains to the science of astronomy and has absolutely nothing — zero, zilch, nada — to do with astrology.

[…]

Godier proceeded through a series of escalations up to the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.” Which isn’t even about astrology. It’s straight out of Kafka.

[…]

This isn’t just contrary to the benefit of developers, like Godier. It’s obviously contrary to the benefit of Apple itself, which should not just accept an app like Dark Hours, but celebrate it as an exemplar of the platform.

Mistakes happen. But in a functioning system mistakes get corrected, and mistakes as obvious as this one get corrected almost instantly and include a quick apology for the conflation. The App Store is not a functioning system.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-10): John Gruber:

To the best of my recollection, this is the first post I’ve retracted in the 24 years I’ve been writing Daring Fireball. I hope it’s the last. I was misled, both overtly and through omissions[…]

[…]

The truth is, the app, as originally submitted by Godier to the App Store (under the name “Asterly”, not “Dark Hours”), was entirely dedicated to astrology, not astronomy, and did in fact include a “Tarot card of the day” feature amongst other occultist horseshit.

[…]

I wrongly took Godier at his word, both in his public blog post and in private iMessage correspondence yesterday, that the rejection wasn’t just merely debatable, but completely and rather preposterously ungrounded. Whether Godier ever submitted a build of “Asterly” to the App Store that contained no occult horseshit and only the hard-science astronomy features that were present in his “Dark Hours” website that was available for the last week, I don’t know. But I have no reason to believe that he did.

[…]

In an uncomfortable exchange between Beher and Godier on Bluesky, Beher pointed out that Godier’s Dark Hours had the same bug as Beher’s that routed people to “random fields in Mexico”. Earlier today, Godier took his web app down and redirected his darkhours.io domain to Beher’s darkhours.app.

I’m really unhappy about this, both for my role in spreading a false story and because I think it will hurt the cause of reforming App Review. I know there are many crazy rejections and have experienced some first-hand. This story was believable because of that well-known history and because Godier didn’t seem like a nobody trying to get attention—he was the developer of another highly regarded app. But now people are going to point to true developer stories and accuse them of being fakes, too.

Jeff Johnson:

Terry Godier has just published a so-called “Mea Culpa” blaming Claude for cloning an open source app and denying foreknowledge.

There’s no mention of or apology for how Godier deceived Gruber and the world about the astronomy/astrology App Store submission/rejection.

The blog post essentially confirms that this person cannot be trusted.

Update (2026-08-11): Colin Cornaby:

BOTH projects were generated using Claude. So you have two people - both generating the same app from the same training data - having a public throw down over who copied who.

[…]

The “original” developer does claim to know how to code - which wasn’t clear from my research. That still doesn’t necessarily mean the original app was the source of the training data. They both may be a result of the same training data.

Nick Lockwood:

Holy shit, so the “Claude plagiarised an app” story is actually “Claude produced the same app twice when prompted to do so by two separate developers” 😅

It’s not clear to me exactly how much each developer relied on Claude or which training data was used, but I wanted to note this angle of the story.

Update (2026-08-14): Rosyna Keller:

With all this talk of an astrology app being rejected by App Store review I’m reminded there’s still a flat Earth/astrology app on the App Store that actively leaks the location of all of its users.

Cotypist: Smart Autocomplete for Your Whole Mac [Sponsor]

3 August 2026 at 13:19

You think faster than you can type. Across a day of email, Slack, notes, and chatbot prompts, that gap quietly eats your time.

Cotypist closes that gap. It’s smart autocomplete for your Mac: as you write, it predicts your next few words and shows them inline, right at your cursor. Press Tab to take the next word or the whole line, then carry on. If a suggestion isn’t what you had in mind, keep typing and it catches up within a letter or two. Accept a word here and a line there, and you’ll have to type far less than you used to.

Most AI writing tools try to do too much and don’t sound like you. Cotypist only fills in the words you’d have typed anyway (just faster), and it picks up your vocabulary as you go, so the result still sounds like you. It works almost everywhere you write: Mail, Messages, Slack, Notes, Obsidian, your browser, even the prompt box in ChatGPT. And it all runs on your Mac, so nothing you type ever leaves your Mac.

Cotypist comes from the maker of Timing, the Mac time-tracker many MacStories readers already know, so it’s built to feel native and stay out of your way. Setup takes about a minute: drag it into Applications, launch it, then start typing, no account required.

Cotypist is free to download, with a 30-day Pro trial and no credit card. When the trial ends, you can keep Pro or drop to the free plan. Until the end of August, MacStories readers get 10% off their first bill at cotypist.app/macstories. Give it ten minutes and see if it can keep up with you.

Our thanks to Cotypist for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Inoreader: Build Your Own Newsfeed and Cut Through the Noise [Sponsor]

27 July 2026 at 13:46

Staying up to date has never felt more overwhelming.

Between websites, newsletters, podcasts, social media feeds, and specialized publications, valuable information is scattered across countless apps and platforms. The challenge is no longer finding content – it’s keeping up with it without wasting time or missing what matters.

That’s where Inoreader comes in.

Inoreader helps you build your own personalized newsfeed by bringing together the sources you care about in one place. Instead of jumping between websites, inboxes, and apps throughout the day, you can keep up with everything from a single interface designed to help you stay informed while cutting through the noise.

Unlike algorithm-driven feeds, Inoreader puts you in control. Follow the websites and creators you trust and receive their updates directly. No engagement-driven recommendations and endless scrolling, just the content you’ve chosen to follow.

For those who need more than a traditional feed reader, Inoreader offers powerful monitoring tools. Create custom feeds to track keywords, brands, companies, competitors, products, or industry trends across the web and receive updates automatically whenever something new appears.

As your reading list grows, Inoreader helps you organize and revisit important information. Save articles for later, highlight key passages, add notes, and build a searchable archive of knowledge and insights that remains accessible long after you’ve finished reading.

To help you process larger volumes of content, Inoreader’s Intelligence features can summarize articles, extract key insights, and help you make sense of information faster. Whether you’re following daily news, researching a topic, or monitoring developments in your industry, Inoreader helps you stay informed without getting overwhelmed.

Advanced filtering and automation tools can further streamline your workflow by automatically organizing incoming content, surfacing what matters most, and reducing distractions – saving you time while ensuring important updates never slip through the cracks.

Inoreader is available on the web, iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, with offline reading support on mobile, so your newsfeed is always available when you need it.

You can get started with Inoreader for free, or explore everything the Pro plan has to offer with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required. New Pro subscribers can also get 30% off their first year.

Learn more and get started at inoreader.com.

Our thanks to Inoreader for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Update 5.1 do app do MacMagazine traz “Peek” nos posts, suporte a deep links e novos ajustes de personalização

28 July 2026 at 12:30

E vamos deixando o nosso aplicativo — disponível para iPhone, iPad, Mac e Apple Watch — cada vez mais nos trinques! 😉

Acaba de sair a versão 5.1 dele, e agora é possível dar um “Peek” nos artigos diretamente pela tela inicial de posts: basta tocar e segurar sobre um deles para ter uma prévia rápida do conteúdo, sem precisar abri-lo por completo.

Também chegou o suporte a deep links: a partir de agora, ao tocar em qualquer link do MacMagazine — seja recebido por mensagem, encontrado em outro app ou mesmo em uma busca —, você é automaticamente levado para o post correspondente dentro do nosso app.

A tela de posts ganhou ainda dois novos ajustes de personalização: um para sempre lembrar o filtro selecionado e outro para exibir sempre os títulos completos dos posts na lista principal, sem cortes.

Além disso, esta versão traz correções de bugs e refinamentos na interface, bem como mais aprimoramentos gerais em acessibilidade.

Agradecimentos

Fica aqui um agradecimento especial ao Cassio Rossi pelas colaborações feitas em nosso projeto no GitHub para esta versão.

A atualização já está disponível na App Store — e, como sempre, vale a pena atualizar o quanto antes para aproveitar todas as novidades. Em breve, é claro, voltamos com mais! 😉

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