EA Sports has released Madden NFL 27 Arcade Edition, a version of the popular football simulation franchise that Apple Arcade subscribers can play on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. It’s a big release built specifically to take advantage of Apple hardware, allowing players to play the game on a wide variety of hardware.
I was struck by how easy it is to pick up and play the game whether you’re a diehard NFL fan or not. I don’t follow football closely, but I was able to get the hang of the game and have fun right away, knocking out a Quick Play match when I had a few minutes to spare.
Quick Play tightly limits the overall time it takes to complete a matchup, but it doesn’t sacrifice depth in the process. There are long lists of plays you can run, including suggested plays, play types, formations, and recents, as well as a wide variety of statistics. And after a big play, you can replay it with total control over the camera angle, too.
However, if you want to go really deep, the game’s Franchise Mode lets you play a full NFL season, managing your team all the way through the playoffs. You can also draft your dream team from the game’s huge catalog of real-world NFL stars. Plus, during the real-world NFL season, player attributes shift based on their actual performance.
Madden NFL 27 also looks terrific. The 120Hz playback is smooth on the iPhone, where I spent most of my time with the game, and even nicer on a bigger screen like my 14” M4 Max MacBook Pro, making for an immersive experience.
What impresses me most about Madden NFL 27, though, is how well it makes use of the Apple hardware and technologies at its disposal. Too often, those sorts of details get left behind when a big release is published on Apple platforms.
To its credit, EA has done an excellent job adapting Madden NFL 27 for Apple Arcade subscribers. You can play across every device mentioned above, leaving off on one device and picking up on another seamlessly because saves sync across devices. Every device supports game controllers and touch where applicable, and those devices with 120Hz displays support that, too.
The App Store is evolving at a breakneck pace not seen since its earliest days. We saw the first glimmers of what was to come early in 2025, but it wasn’t until late last year that the tsunami of apps developed with the help of AI agents really took hold.
How these forces play out long-term is anyone’s guess, but it’s worth examining because, just as Federico’s link to Bryan Irace’s post about agentic coding tools foreshadowed the rise of tools like Codex and Claude Code, today’s trends are sparks that have the potential to become tomorrow’s App Store wildfires or simply fizzle out.
Utility apps are on the front lines of this change. The TechCrunch story I linked in April picked up on this trend:
Another interesting tidbit from Appfigures is that the Utilities app category moved up the top five chart.
If anything, the trend has accelerated in the months since.
It’s not surprising at all that utility apps have taken off. They’ve been a staple of new developers since long before agents came along. That’s because many are UI wrappers around command line tools. That isn’t a knock against the developers of those apps; most users don’t want to open Terminal to convert a video or audio file to another format using ffmpeg, for example. By building a great UI around command line tools, developers have made them far easier to use.
However, the relative simplicity and narrow scope of many utility apps have made them a natural fit for AI agents, too. That’s why the App Store (and my inbox) is deluged with Mac menu bar and single-screen iPhone and iPad utility apps.
On the one hand, the abundance of utilities has been great for users. More choice means you’re more likely to find the app that perfectly fits your needs.
On the other hand, though, I don’t think what’s happening in the category is sustainable and expect to see it dramatically shift again in the coming months. As we’ve seen from reporting by The New York Times, app supply is outstripping demand by orders of magnitude, which will drive down prices. That alone is likely to cause the utility app market to shrink. But there’s more to it than that.
Remember, the demand shifts that The New York Times reported, based on Sensor Tower numbers, are for the entire App Store, where download numbers have grown 2-3% this year and last. I expect utility downloads to actually shrink in the coming months – again, because of agents. Utilities, especially simple ones, are exactly the sorts of apps that are becoming trivially easy for power users – the very users these utilities are made for – to create themselves. From frontier labs‘ model improvements to a growing number of app-building tools from those same labs and third parties, it’s never been easier to build a web or native app yourself.
And although I agree with people, like Nilay Patel, who say the notion that everyone will build their own software is overblown, the utility market is different. Your average person is not downloading apps to adjust the frame rate and file format of a video or downloading YouTube videos to watch later. But those are exactly the sort of things that people who are using agents are doing with them, whether they’re having an agent do those things directly via a command line tool in an app like Codex or Claude Code or building an app to do the same thing. That’s going to put even more pressure on the category.
That said, I think there will always be a cohort of users who would rather pay for an app than build it themselves, so I’m not predicting the demise of utilities in general – just the end of today’s frothy market. I also think there remains a place for simple utilities that solve hard problems with clever solutions. Not every utility is a UI wrapper for a terminal command. Plenty of apps feature original solutions or thoughtful and unconventional remixes of disparate tools.
Utilities aren’t going away, but just like other App Store deluges, the trend will recede. It’s just that this time, it’s likely to flip faster than usual.
It’s a big sports month for Apple TV, starting with Apple Arcade, which goes all-in on football with Madden NFL 27 Arcade Edition and Retro Bowl College+. On the Apple TV side, Ted Lasso returns for a fourth season, Formula 1 is coming out of its summer break, the MLS Leagues Cup begins, and MLB continues.
Let’s take a closer look.
Apple Arcade
Apple Arcade is adding two new games this month, both on Thursday, August 6, and both of them football games. That’s not a coincidence. The NFL and college football seasons are right around the corner, and these games offer great ways to get ready for both. They’re also part of a broader trend across Apple Arcade where sports games like NBA 2K26 and PGA TOUR Pro Golf, which also have continued receiving updates, have found a fan base.
The headliner this month is Madden NFL 27 Arcade Edition, an all-new entry in EA’s long-running NFL franchise built specifically for Apple Arcade. The game includes Franchise and Quick Play modes, featuring current NFL player rosters and ratings that adapt to real-world performance. And as part of Arcade, the game cane be played across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro with controller support and no ads, paywalls, or in-app purchases.
I’m a huge fan of retro-style games of any kind, and Retro Bowl College+ looks like another winner. I love the game’s chunky pixel vibe and depth. You can choose to act as the head coach of any of 250 college teams, recruiting players, managing your school’s athletic budget, dealing with player drama, and more. Who knew an 8-bit game could be packed with this much style and story?
It’s been three years since the Ted Lasso series finale, and it still holds a special spot in the hearts of many fans. This week, the show returns on Wednesdays with a 10-episode run, in which Ted comes back to Ricmond to coach a second-division women’s team. Other returning cast members include Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple, Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt, and Jeremy Swift.
Women in Blue, Apple’s Spanish-language drama, returns August 12. Bárbara Mori’s character María is promoted to lieutenant and pulled into an investigation of a student’s death that stretches back to 1968. The season portrays María, Valentina, Gabina, and Ángeles’ fight against crime as they simultaneously endure corruption in their precinct. Episodes will be released weekly on Wednesdays through September 30.
The Dynasty: UConn Huskies is a three-part docu-series covering 40 years of the most dominant college basketball program in history – one that eclipses teams like Duke, UNC, Kentucky, and UCLA. The series covers the career of famed coach Geno Auriemma, who led the Huskies women’s team to 12 national championships, more than any other team in NCAA Division I history. Directed by Matthew Hamachek and Erica Sashin, it pairs never-before-seen footage with in-depth access to players and coaches as it explores UConn’s extraordinary legacy.
Stillwater returns August 21 with five episodes that will all drop the same day. Based on Jon J Muth’s “Zen” books, the kids’ series follows siblings Karl, Addy, and Michael and their neighbor Stillwater, a wise panda voiced by James Sie who helps them work through everyday problems with stories and humor.
Blake Crouch’s multidimensional sci-fi thriller Dark Matter returns for 10 more episodes on August 28. Season two picks up with the Dessen family settling into a quiet, seemingly safe life, until they’re sent running again. Jason’s obsession with the Box deepens, and Daniela’s paranoia threatens their relationship. Meanwhile, Amanda and Ryan try to find their way home, and Blair races to stop Leighton from building what he thinks is a perfect world.
Formula 1 comes back from its summer break at Zandvoort for Round 12, and it’s a sprint weekend, which will be a busy three days. Practice 1 and the Sprint Qualifying run on Friday, August 21 are free, followed by the Sprint and Qualifying rounds on Saturday, August 22. Then, the Grand Prix itself is on Sunday, August 23.
Apple’s weekly doubleheader continues every Friday in August on Apple TV, with no local blackout restrictions and coverage in 60 countries and regions:
August 14 is the highlight, with a Cardinals–Cubs matinee followed by a rematch of last year’s Yankees–Blue Jays Division Series. August 28 is nearly as good, with the Red Sox facing the Yankees while the Mariners and Blue Jays revisit last year’s Championship Series.
Beginning August 4, the Liga MX clubs face off against 18 MLS clubs for the Leagues Cup. Phase One is 54 matches in nine days, from August 4–13, with quarterfinals August 25–27. This is the first edition to include matches in Mexico, and every match is on Apple TV. The MLS regular season games continue alongside the Cup, with midweek Leagues Cup games followed by weekend MLS matches.
If you’re a Club MacStories Plus or Premier member, drop by the TV and Movies channel in Discord to chat about what you’re looking forward to from Apple TV this month, and be sure to listen to MacStories Unwind, where Federico and I cover some of these shows and games, along with our other media recommendations, every week.
Long-time readers may recall that I used to regularly cover Messages sticker packs. As sticker popularity “settled,” I retired from that beat, but I thought I should come back for today’s news that Ariana Grande is the first ever music artist to release an Messages sticker pack.
The stickers are being released in collaboration with Shazam, Apple’s music recognition app, to mark the release of Grande’s new album petal. The implementation is interesting. According to Apple:
Fans can access the sticker pack by using the Shazam app to identify any Ariana Grande song and tapping the special message that appears on the song result or by adding the collection to their emoji keyboard directly in the Messages app. Once downloaded, the stickers can be used in Messages, FaceTime, or any app where emoji keyboard is available.
That in-app link takes you to the Messages corner of the App Store where they’re featured as a Shazam Special Event. You can also access the sticker pack from Shazam’s App Store listing.
I love seeing Shazam try new things to celebrate artists and their music, and stickers are a fun way to share your excitement about a new release.
Fun Fact: My Messages sticker situation has never quite recovered from downloading hundreds of sticker packs back in the day. Some features just aren’t meant to be loved so much.
iPhone revenue was $54.3B, up 21.7%, and represented 49.6% of Apple’s total revenue.
Services revenue was $30.7B, up 12.1%, and represented 28.1% of Apple’s total revenue.
Gross margin was $54.8B, up 25.3%, with an overall gross margin rate of 50.1%.
Net income was $29.8B, up 27.1%.
Operating cash flow was $34.4B, up 23.3%.
Diluted EPS was $2.02, up 28.7%.
Apple CEO Tim Cook had this to say about the results:
Today, Apple is proud to report our strongest June quarter ever, with double-digit revenue growth across iPhone, Mac and Services, and in every geographic segment. At WWDC26, we were thrilled to introduce the all-new Siri AI, alongside all of Apple’s latest software innovations and important new child safety features.
For additional context, here’s how the results break down:
In Apple’s latest quarter: every region grew, Services reached $30.7B, and gross margin was 50.1%.
iPhone remained Apple’s largest business at $54.3B, and four of five categories grew year over year. Together, iPhone and Services accounted for 77.7% of Apple’s $109.4B in net sales.
iPhone revenue reached $54.3B, or 49.6% of Apple’s total revenue, keeping it the company’s largest consumer business.
Services reached $30.7B at a 75.6% gross margin, accounting for 28.1% of revenue but 42.4% of gross margin.
Products carried most of the revenue at $78.7B, but Services kept 75.6% of every dollar against Products’ 40.1%.
Every reported region grew, and Europe contributed the most new revenue at $5.4B, or 35.0% of Apple’s $15.4B in growth.
Going into today’s earnings call, expectations were high among analysts, who anticipated revenue of $108–109 billion and diluted earnings per share of $1.89. Apple’s results landed at the high end of the expected revenue range and exceeded expectations for earnings per share.
Matt Corey, the maker of Bills to Budget and Signals, has organized indie developers for a big sale that runs from July 28 - 30. The sale includes over 200 apps that will be offered at a discount through Thursday. The list is too long to publish here, but it includes many apps we’ve covered here on MacStories and on Club MacStories in the past, including:
There are a lot of great deals, with many apps discounted 50% or more. What’s listed above is a small fraction of the participating apps, so be sure to visit Indie App Salesand support these great indie apps.
Apple has revealed its new hardware leasing program called Apple Upgrade, which is being offered in collaboration with Klarna. This is Apple’s pitch:
Introducing Apple Upgrade, a new way to always have the Apple products you love. Lease a new iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch with pocket-friendly payments and terms that work for you. Then easily upgrade to something new at the end of your lease, and return your current device. It’s that simple.
That pitch comes with a footnote that includes other details worth considering:
The program is U.S. only (excluding U.S. territories).
You need to be a U.S. resident who is at least 18 years old, or whatever the legal age is where you live.
There are eligibility and credit approval requirements and you must have a credit or debit card and an Apple ID.
When a device is returned, it must be in good condition or damage fees will be assessed.
Upgrades require a new lease subject to whatever eligibility and credit requirements apply at that time.
For iPhones, you have to have a carrier and can’t use a prepaid plan.
The program isn’t available for refurbished devices or through the Apple Employee Purchase Plan, corporate Employee Purchase Plans, Apple at Work, Government, Education, or Veterans and Military Purchase Programs.
Okay, so maybe it’s not “that simple” after all.
The program is available for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch product lines. For the iPhone, monthly payments start at $17.99 for an iPhone 17e and start at $34.99 for an iPhone 17 Pro Max, for leasing periods of either 12 months or 24 months.
For iPads, the starting prices range from $12.99/month to $24.99/month, Macs range from starting prices of $24.99/month to $48.99/month, and the Apple Watch ranges from starting prices of $11.99/month to $47.03/month. But again, these are just starting prices. You can configure a fully loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro that is just under $230/month, and it won’t include AppleCare.
As a point of comparison, under the current program that is being discontinued, I pay $69.50/month for an iPhone 17 Pro Max, but I have a 512GB model, so my lease price for the same phone would be $40.83/month, significantly lower, but keep in mind that doesn’t include AppleCare+, which would add $13.99/month or $139/year for that iPhone. On a monthly basis, that puts a new iPhone 17 Pro Max with 512GB of storage and AppleCare+ at just under $55/month. Still a superior deal, but not nearly as good as the landing page might initially lead you to believe.
At the end of your lease you’ll have six months to decide to return the leased device, during which you’ll continue to make monthly payments, or pay a fee equal to the difference between the original purchase price and your lease payments to buy it outright. Your other option is to enter into a lease for a new device. If you return your leased device in poor condition, Klarna will charge you a damage fee. You can also terminate your lease early if you pay the remaining lease payments in full plus any taxes and fees.
If you lease accessories for your device, those don’t have to be returned. Why? Presumably because they have no value to Apple or Klarna.
Of course, if you have a device to trade in, that monthly figure could be significantly reduced. If I had the iPhone 16 Pro Max I had last year to trade in and leased a 17 Pro Max for 12 months, my monthly payments would be under $1. However, keep in mind that once you’re on the leasing train, you no longer own your iPhone, so future upgrades won’t reduce your payments the next time you swap your device for a new model. If you don’t own it, the value isn’t yours to trade in.
If you’re on the existing iPhone Upgrade Program like me, it’s being discontinued, but Apple has a transition offer for you. The old program spread payments over 24 months with the option to turn in an iPhone for a new one after 12 months. That’s not changing. If you’re paid in full on your first 12 months of an iPhone, you can sign up for the new program, get a new iPhone, and return your old iPhone to Apple, which will close your old account but won’t reduce your lease payments. You’re not obligated to join the new leasing program, though. You can also trade in your old iPhone, ending your finance contract, and buy a new full price iPhone.
As you may have figured out by now, I’m not a fan of this program, though I expect it will be successful.
Apple products, like all consumer electronics, are getting more expensive every day. The monthly payments on a leased device look very attractive compared to the pay-up-front price. For years, car leases have induced people into monthly payments that can become a burden when their financial situation changes. Now the same will be true of iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches.
Maybe as a practical matter this program isn’t that different from the old financing program, but at least there, you owned your device at the end and could just keep using it indefinitely. With the new program, that’s not an option. When your lease is over, you’re empty-handed and faced with leasing again, buying out the lease, or buying at full price with no trade-in, which is objectively worse.
Ultimately, Apple isn’t responsible for customers’ bad financial decisions, but this program feels like Apple is putting its customers in harm’s way.
Tapbots has released Pastebot 3, a ground-up rewrite of the Mac clipboard manager that includes several powerful automation and customization options, along with two new pricing models.
Pastebot was already one of the Mac’s best clipboardutilities, capable of managing an extensive collection of copied text and images in multiple formats, PDFs, URLs, files, and HTML, along with metadata. The app can handle up to 1,500 clippings and features fast search, extensive customizable keyboard shortcuts, list and detail views of clipboard items, and iCloud sync between multiple Macs.
Pastebot 3’s main menu.
What sets Pastebot 3 apart is its addition of deep automation tools. Not only does the update add MCP support, making it an excellent tool to use with Claude or ChatGPT/Codex, but it includes a brand new CLI that you or an agent can use from Terminal or incorporate into scripts you build. Commands include:
List available Pastebins
Browse and search clipboard history
Filter results by Pastebin or date
Retrieve the full text of a clipping
Retrieve images from clippings
List available Pastebot filters
Apply filters to clippings or supplied text
Place an existing clipping on the clipboard
Create new text or image clippings
Paste clipboard contents into the frontmost app
Delete individual clippings
Clear the main clipboard history
Filters.
If you’re looking to automate with Shortcuts instead, Tapbots has you covered there, too, with nine actions that feature a variety of parameters and filter options:
Clear Pastebin
Copy Clipping to Clipboard
Filter
Find Filter
Find Pastebin
Get Clipping by Index
Get Clippings
Paste Clipboard
Paste Clipping
Pastebot’s Shortcuts actions.
New filters have been added that allow you to transform clippings using text transformations and even shell scripts. Using the ability to script custom filters, I’ve begun adding a few of my own to Pastebot for things like adding and removing bullets from multiple lines of text. For any filter, just select a clipping, and you can preview how it will affect the clipping. You can even assign keyboard shortcuts to filters and combine them with other filters to chain actions together.
Picking items for a Stack.
Another powerful productivity booster available in Pastebot is called Stacks. This feature used to be called Sequential Paste, but Stacks are much easier to visualize. From Pastebot’s main UI, you can select multiple items at once and right-click to add them to a Stack, or you can pick them one at a time in any order you’d like. As you select items, they’re numbered in the order you’ll paste them into a document using a keyboard shortcut. It’s an excellent feature for filling out forms or copying data from one spreadsheet to another.
Pastebot’s design has been modernized, too, while remaining recognizable to long-time users. Along with a new icon, Pastebot 3 features new toolbars and a more customizable sidebar that lets you rearrange items inside each section and collapse sections for a more streamlined look.
A Pastebin with a couple of URLs I use often.
Pastebins, user-defined collections of saved clippings that won’t roll off the end of your clipboard once it fills up, are joined by customizable Smart Pastebins that remind me of Smart Lists in Reminders. Smart Pastebins can be created by combining any or all of up to nine criteria, providing a lot of flexibility. I haven’t used Smart Pastebins extensively yet, but they’re already making it easier for me to find copied URLs simply by setting up a Smart Pastebin that looks for “http” at the beginning of a clipping. Smart Pastebins can even match text using regex, which is great for creating lists of Markdown-formatted URLs and image links.
The bottom line is that whether you simply want to retrieve recently copied items and paste them somewhere or you’re a power user who wants to automate the way you work with lots of clippings all day long, Pastebot 3 has you covered. About the only shortcoming of the app, and it’s a big one, is the lack of an iPhone and iPad version. Pastebot got its start on the iPhone before moving to a Mac-only version a decade ago. I hope Pastebot returns to the iOS and iPadOS someday because a lot of users want that, me included. An iOS version of the app couldn’t do as much as it does on the Mac, but there are plenty of benefits to syncing your clipboard history to an iPhone or iPad, as apps like Paste and PastePal have shown.
Copy and paste is as timeless as any task on a computer. If you fill out forms and spreadsheets, maintain a collection of prompts for your AI agents, or just grab a lot of links, images, and other scraps from the web and other sources, having a clipboard manager like Pastebot 3 at your fingertips is essential – so essential, in fact, that when the beta ran out on me just before the app’s release date, my Mac immediately felt broken, which is about the highest recommendation I can give a Mac utility.
Currently, Pastebot is available directly from Tapbots for $39, which includes one year of updates, after which you can purchase an additional one year of updates at any time for $19.
Kalley Huang, writing for The New York Times about apps written with the help of AI agents that are flooding the App Store:
But as with many things A.I., just because something is easy to build doesn’t mean people will use it. It is not clear if vibecoding is breathing new life into the App Store or just cluttering it.
Last year, the number of new apps released in the App Store grew 30 percent to about 600,000, according to estimates by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. In the first half of this year, new apps doubled to about 560,000.
Now, Sensor Tower metrics should always be taken with a grain of salt. They don’t have direct access to Apple’s sales data, so they’re extrapolating from incomplete data that they collect themselves. That said, I think it’s fair to take their numbers as broadly representative of sales trends over time, and the story they tell, as reported by Huang, is interesting.
Based on Sensor Tower’s numbers, the total number of App Store releases peaked in 2016 at 890,000, hit a low of 420,000 in 2022, and this year, is on pace to pass 2016’s peak by a healthy margin. But app releases don’t equate to downloads, let alone sales. According to Huang’s reporting, downloads increased 3% in 2025 and 2% in the first half of 2026, far lower than the growth of new releases.
All of this tracks closely with what we’ve seen at MacStories. One subtle trend I’d add is that whereas for years most developers contacted us before they released an app, a lot of new developers are doing so after their apps are on the App Store. I suspect what I’m seeing is a new generation of developers learning the hard discoverability lessons of the App Store for the first time because when I check out these apps, they rarely have any App Store reviews.
The upshot of all these statistics and trends is App Store chaos of a magnitude that we haven’t seen in a long time. It’s a little like the App Store gold rush of the early days, but without the gold. Discoverability has gone from bad to worse, and the supply of apps is off the charts compared to the demand. With download numbers barely creeping up, the flood of new apps is making selling on the App Store harder for everyone.
Yet, it’s exactly this sort of chaotic disruption that leads to exciting new apps. And, it’s tools like Codex and Claude Code that empower and democratize app development, allowing people who would never have built an app to see their ideas become a reality. Those are things I love to see.
There’s no doubt that the App Store is out of whack thanks to agent-assisted coding, but like any market it will find its equilibrium again. In the meantime, it’s never been a better time to be a fan of apps because while a lot of those record numbers are comprised of mediocre apps, there are hidden gems, and we’re on the hunt for them.
Claude Code’s Mac desktop app has added Apple simulator support, and although it’s billed as “iOS Simulator Support,” it actually works with any iOS, iPadOS, visionOS, or watchOS simulator you have installed.
The process of setting up a simulator is simple. A new button with an iPhone icon appears when you open an existing project. Click it and a new iPhone simulator pane opens to the right by default. However, clicking on the name of the simulator reveals a list of every available simulator. You can also run multiple simulators at once, but that immediately made my aging M1 Max Mac Studio start to chug a little.
With access to your running app, Claude Code is more effective at debugging UI bugs.
Once you have the simulators that you want open, simply ask Claude Code to run and test your app, and it gets to work, building the app, installing it in the simulator, opening it, and poking around. I loaded up a simple word game I’ve been playing with, and after a few minutes, Claude Code found a UI bug while controlling the simulator. I asked it to fix the issue, which it did, then tested and committed. My testing has been limited, but so far it looks like a simple, effective loop.
It’s also worth noting that Claude Code is running the simulator directly inside the Claude app. This is not computer use, meaning windows aren’t going to be opening and getting in your way as you work on something else. All in all, the addition of the simulator, like the inclusion of an in-app sandboxed browser a couple of weeks ago, is a great update to Claude Code.
I test a lot of apps, so I have strong opinions about TestFlight. However I usually keep those opinions to myself because despite the fact that it’s critical to my work, TestFlight wasn’t built for app reviewers. Most people haven’t accumulated hundreds of active and inactive betas in the app like I have, and for them, TestFlight is probably fine. However, for me, TestFlight is a constant sourceof frustration.
So, you can imagine my excitement when I read a post by Zac Hall at 9to5Mac that a search field had been added to TestFlight. “Finally,” I thought to myself. I stopped what I was doing and updated the app immediately. After all, search was my number one request for TestFlight back in 2024.
An apostrophe gets you the top spot in Apple’s new alphabetical TestFlight list.
That 2024 wishlist was published in the wake of a bad stretch the app had beginning in 2023. At the time, TestFlight was plagued by laggy performance if you were on a lot of betas. To Apple’s credit, they fixed the performance issues, though the issues have begun to creep back into recent releases. Still, the past couple of years as a TestFlight user have been fine despite all the ways the app could be made better for users.
When the TestFlight update finished installing, I eagerly opened it on my Mac and then my iPhone. Sure enough, there was the search field at long last. Lists practically beg for a search field, and finally someone at Apple added one, and to whoever built that feature, a huge thanks from me and the MacStories team.
Unfortunately, this story comes with one very big “but.” Previously, TestFlight betas were listed in reverse chronological order, which I liked. The newer beta releases were at the top of the list and the older ones that were on the verge of being replaced by an App Store release were at the bottom, along with expired betas, a list that I never really understood the purpose of.
Well, those expired betas are now scattered among the active TestFlight betas in an alphabetical list and it seems that the expired beta list has been expanded to include every single beta I’ve ever been a part of. I did a rough count and for me that’s nearly 800 app listings. As you can imagine, the active betas in that list are few and far between. Search helps, but scrolling is no longer an option.
The live betas are few and far between when mixed with betas gone by.
I get that this is a very “me and a few of my friends” problem, and search does help, but it’s not enough. The active to inactive beta ratio is so bad that few iPhone screens include more than two or three active betas. So here’s my proposal:
Add a toggle in TestFlight’s settings that hides inactive betas.
That’s it, that would make all the difference in the world. I’d love to have the reverse chronological ordering back, a performance tune-up, and the other things I wished for back in 2024, but I’ll live with hiding all the noise from my beta list.
The public beta of macOS 27 Golden Gate is out today, and I’m sure many of you are wondering whether to take the plunge and give it a try in advance of its official fall release. That’s the question this preview is here to help answer. It’s not my final take on Golden Gate by any means; after all, I’ve only been using it for about a month, and there will be several more turns in the beta cycle between now and the public release. However, I’ve used Golden Gate long enough to help you make an informed decision about whether or not to install the public beta now.
Of course, it’s impossible for me to account for everyone’s unique Mac setups when considering Golden Gate’s stability, but it’s worth reiterating what I’ve said in past previews: modern Apple betas have been consistently stable. That’s to say, the risks of using the public beta are modest. It’s been years since I’ve had a critical app fail or lost data. I never go into beta season without a backup plan, though. If something goes terribly wrong, I have backups, backups of those backups, and alternate Macs I can switch to in the event of a disaster. I don’t expect to have to go to Plan B, but if you’re going to jump on the Beta Bus, you should have a Plan B, too.
Okay, you’ve been warned. Let’s get to the fun part.
Every year’s macOS update is a little different, but Golden Gate is more different than most. Instead of focusing on tentpole features and apps (with the exception of a new Siri app), macOS 27’s updates fall into three broad categories:
refinements to Apple’s Liquid Glass design language,
hundreds of system-level changes intended to improve your Mac’s performance, and
Apple Intelligence, which includes the new Siri app as well as many other AI additions to existing system apps.
It’s been a while since the “Snow Leopard Moment.”
With so many past macOS updates focusing on system apps, it’s refreshing to see Apple take a more holistic system-level approach, which harkens back to how most people remember OS X Snow Leopard. In fact, during WWDC briefings, Apple representatives likened the Golden Gate update to Snow Leopard before anyone in the room even asked about it.
Source: Apple.
Snow Leopard is remembered as a release that focused on performance over features. The reality is that the update also introduced its fair share of new features, but many were less splashy from a user-facing standpoint. They were under-the-hood updates that made the Mac work better without users having to think about it much. In that sense, Golden Gate has a lot in common with Snow Leopard. Other than the brand new Siri app, you probably won’t notice that much is different when you first launch the new version. But over time, the changes will reveal themselves, adding up to a whole that – with few exceptions – is greater than the parts.
So let’s take a closer look at how Liquid Glass has evolved, the most significant system changes, and what it’s like to use Siri and other Apple Intelligence updates in Golden Gate’s public beta.
Design
Windows stand out from each other more, and the sidebar runs edge to edge in Golden Gate.
Last year’s introduction of the Liquid Glass design language was divisive. I rather like it, and others don’t, but I expect the overwhelming majority of Mac users don’t have a strong opinion either way.
That said, I came away from macOS Tahoe feeling like its Liquid Glass implementation was unfinished, or at least unevenly applied, because it varied from app to app and even within apps. Examples included different transparency treatments within apps like Finder:
I use [Finder] with the tab bar visible most of the time, whether I’m using tabs or not. I also almost always use a list view in Finder. What I discovered when I turned off the tab bar and switched to an icon grid view was that the Finder toolbar and buttons became far more transparent. Dark file icons are more noticeable beneath the toolbar, and text becomes more of a distraction.
That sort of inconsistency has been fixed.
Finder in macOS Tahoe.
Finder in macOS Golden Gate. Even with Liquid Glass’ transparency turned on as far as it can go, toolbar buttons are more visible now.
Another big inconsistency was how toolbars were handled from app to app. In some apps, like Photos, they were very transparent, making buttons difficult to see against picture thumbnails in some cases. Other apps, like Reminders, used a more frosted treatment that prevented text and icons under toolbars from competing with the toolbar’s icons and text as a user scrolled their task lists. That, too, has changed for the better.
But perhaps the single biggest change to Liquid Glass is a new slider in the Appearance section of System Settings that lets you dial in the intensity of the transparency. By default, the slider is set directly in the middle. Moving the slider to the left makes buttons and other elements more transparent, while moving it to the right reduces transparency in favor of a frosted look.
Behold, the transparency slider.
The slider is a welcome change that lets users decide how transparent UI elements are. It’s the right choice when some people love Liquid Glass, some can’t stand it, and most don’t care. The default setting works well for those who don’t care and will never think to look for the transparency slider, while those who do care can dial in the look they prefer. Me? I’m a full transparency guy, at least for now, so you’ll see a lot of that here and in my fall review.
Window sidebars have been changed in a big way, too. In Tahoe, they resembled a glass sheet sitting on top of the window. I liked the look, but if you had overlapping windows, it was sometimes possible to mistake a sidebar for a separate window, which could be confusing. With Golden Gate, sidebars extend to the edges of their windows so they look as though they’re built into the windows instead of sitting on top of them.
Apple also reversed course on another controversial Tahoe change: icons next to menu items. I use keyboard shortcuts so much that I barely noticed the icons next to every single menu item. Now, however, they’re once again used sparingly.
The evolution of the Dictionary icon.
Mac app icons have been tweaked as well. Tahoe saw icons confined to the borders of a squircle, which is still a hotly debated topic. That hasn’t changed in Golden Gate. Instead, the glass effect that subtly distorted icon images has been dialed back, resulting in crisper looking icons.
There are other design changes, like deeper shadows to help distinguish windows from each other and more uniformly shaped window corners, that I’ll cover in the fall, but my early impressions of the changes have been positive. Everything feels more considered and consistent. Rather than feeling unfinished as it did in Tahoe, Liquid Glass now feels properly embedded into the fabric of the Mac.
System Changes
Nowhere is the Snow Leopard of it all more apparent than in the hundreds of little changes made to improve the day-to-day use of your Mac. I’m not going to catalog them all here, but I’ve used Golden Gate on two different Macs at this point, and based on my experiences so far, the changes are meaningful.
I installed Golden Gate on a MacBook Pro that I have on loan from Apple as soon as I got back from WWDC in early June. That laptop has an M4 Max chip and 128GB of memory, so it was already fast. But even on that Mac, I noticed differences when I installed Golden Gate.
Spotlight is very fast, even on my M1 Max Mac Studio used for this animation.
Most apps launch faster, with fewer Dock bounces, which I appreciate, but the most noticeable performance improvement has been to Spotlight. I liked what Apple did with Spotlight in Tahoe a lot, but its responsiveness has been inconsistent. As a result, I switched back to Raycast not long before WWDC for launching apps, running shortcuts, and initiating other actions.
When I installed Golden Gate, I switched back to using Spotlight and was blown away by the difference. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the speed-up sticks long-term, but the early results have been impressive. Finding apps, files, folders, shortcuts, and clipboard items is lightning fast. Searching in Photos and Mail, which each got their own search tune-up, is very fast, too.
Search in Mail has been improved, too.
Plus, even though the MacBook Pro I’ve been using to test Golden Gate is already fast, it’s worth noting that I have roughly 3TB of data stored on it. That includes tens of thousands of photos, email messages, and texts, so even given the laptop’s speed, Spotlight’s performance is still impressive.
What’s been most impressive, though, is the difference Golden Gate has made to my M1 Max Mac Studio. It has a similar number of files and half the memory. Just before updating it to Golden Gate about a week ago, I was feeling the pain of Spotlight slowdowns. I was running macOS 26.5, and searching for an app in Spotlight often pulled up the iPhone version before the one installed on my Mac. Perhaps that’s related to the fact that my iPhone is running the iOS 27 beta, but even Mac-only apps would sometimes take five or six seconds to show up at the top of the list in Spotlight when I searched for them.
That’s completely changed with Golden Gate. I’ve used macOS 27 on my Mac Studio for a shorter period than the MacBook Pro, but the difference in speed has been a real eye-opener, making Spotlight searches nearly instant. It’s also worth noting that the initial indexing of my 3TB of data only took about a half of a work day to complete on the Mac Studio, which was faster than I expected, having watched my iPhone 17 Pro Max take days to index.
Sending a 47MB EPUB file from one Mac running Golden Gate to another.
Also worth noting is that AirDrop is much, much faster now, too. I move images and other files between my iPhone, iPad, and Macs with AirDrop dozens of times each week. It’s a deeply embedded part of my workflow. Before installing Golden Gate, I rarely sent multiple items via AirDrop simultaneously because it could be very slow or even fail completely. Now, however, I’m retraining myself to send multiple screenshots and other files all at once because AirDrop is so much faster than before.
Launching apps and sending screenshots more quickly aren’t sexy new features that come with fancy screenshots I can share with you, but these are meaningful changes just the same. It remains to be seen how the improvements will hold up over time, but they’ve made a great first impression, so I’m optimistic. Changes that reduce friction are the kind of updates that help keep me focused on what I’m doing and get more done, which I consider a big win.
Those are the big-ticket system changes to the Mac, but of course, there are many other system-level changes coming, like better window positioning consistency when you use multiple displays, HDR UI elements and faster refresh rates for displays that support those features, resizable windows in the iPhone Mirroring app, full-resolution images in Shared Albums in Photos, and enhancements to Notes, Maps, Podcasts, and Messages. I’ll have more details on all of them in my fall review.
Apple Intelligence and the Siri App
The new Siri app.
The headline Apple Intelligence feature this year is the new Siri app, a dedicated chatbot-style interface that benefits from Apple’s AI collaboration with Google. Before I get into Siri, though, it’s worth noting that there’s more to Apple’s AI story this year than just the digital assistant. In fact, Apple Intelligence features have been sprinkled throughout the system:
Finder uses AI to suggest file and folder names based on their content;
Safari tabs can be automatically organized by topic;
Weak passwords can be automatically updated in the Passwords app;
Messages spawns little buttons that let you pull information out of a chat and into apps like Reminders and Calendar;
Natural language descriptions can be used to create Calendar events; and
Photos includes new AI-driven features like Spatial Reframing, Extend for expanding the borders of a photo, and improvements to the Clean Up tool.
Building shortcuts with natural language.
Shortcuts has joined the fray, too, with the ability to build shortcuts simply by describing them. This is the sort of democratization of automation that I love. Building shortcuts has always been simpler than writing code, but it’s also had a steeper learning curve than most people were willing to deal with. You won’t be able to build a complex shortcut with natural language alone, but the reality is that even people who know how to make complex shortcuts use a lot of simple ones for day-to-day tasks, and for that, the new feature is fantastic.
I’m also a fan of the ability to build Safari extensions by describing them. I’ve made a couple, like one that generates a Markdown-formatted link list from selected tabs, and the process of building it was fast and effective.
I’ll have more to say about all of these features in the fall, but they’ve made good first impressions. In past macOS updates, some of the Apple Intelligence features have felt a little out of place and bolted on. I appreciate that these new features are woven more cleanly into their underlying apps. Maybe the era of self-consciously calling every feature AI is coming to an end and they’ll just be called features again. We’re probably not quite there yet, but one can hope.
Using Siri AI from inside Spotlight.
As for Siri AI, which is surfaced in the new Siri app, Spotlight, context menus, and other locations, it’s worth keeping in mind that Apple has said it will launch later this year as a beta. The Siri AI features are also gated behind a waiting list, so don’t install the beta expecting to be able to use them right away, and even if you do get it, Siri AI is a beta of a beta.
As a result, Siri AI has more rough edges than other parts of Golden Gate. For example, it’s not uncommon for Siri requests to simply fail on one Mac but be correctly answered on another.
Other parts of Siri AI don’t work at all, like third-party app integrations since developers have to update their apps first. I can add tasks in Reminders, events in Calendar, and notes in Notes, but I haven’t had the chance to try a third-party Mac app that works with Siri AI yet. If you’re a developer working on Siri AI support, get in touch. I’ll be highlighting the best ones I try in the fall.
Siri is excellent for finding old texts in Messages, adding tasks to Reminders, and more.
Despite the current limitations, if you use chatbots as a replacement for Google Search, you’ll probably have a good experience with the new Siri app. That’s because even in these early betas, if you ask Siri something like, “Give me a day trip itinerary for a trip to Chicago this Saturday,” you’re likely to get good but pretty middle-of-the-road recommendations. From there, though, you can drill down with follow-up queries to get something more in line with your tastes. The results include source links you can follow, too. Given the ad-strewn mess that web search has become, using Siri for this sort of thing is a meaningfully better experience.
The one caveat on Siri’s world knowledge is that it’s roughly 2-3 weeks stale in some places. Ask Siri to give you the most recent article on any website, and it will be 2-3 weeks old. However, fetching current information instead of specific posts is more timely. When I asked whether Anthropic had made any announcements recently about Cowork, Siri correctly linked me to stories from two days prior.
Current events and sports show up quickly in Siri, but that’s not true for all web-based queries.
Likewise, facts like sports scores and celebrity deaths seem to get updated more quickly. I’m writing this on July 9, and I saw a headline in Apple News this morning that singer Bonnie Tyler passed away yesterday. I asked Siri if she was still alive and was told that she was “as of June.” I asked again a couple of hours later, and Siri answered that her death was announced on July 9 – the same day I asked.
Siri is also good at completing one or more actions as long as they fit within the defined set of App Intents schemas. “Remind me to walk the dog at 5:00 pm, add dinner with Jennifer at Mandalino’s to my calendar for Friday at 7:00 pm, and create a note that says ‘Hello World’” works reliably. In my early testing, Siri is also good at generating images comparable to what you’d get directly from Image Playground, creating and summarizing text, playing media like a requested podcast episode, and maintaining continuity when follow-up questions are asked.
Sometimes, Siri just takes a random stab at an answer.
Personal context generally works well, too. Siri can find old iMessages I’ve sent to people, it knows who my wife is and where I live, and it can find all sorts of information buried in Notes and other apps where Apple has done the work to expose that information. But like all AI systems, it sometimes makes things up. I asked Siri how old Federico is, and it looked at his entry in Contacts, which includes his birthday. The trouble is, I only included the month and day of Federico’s birthday, not the year, so Siri “guessed” that he’s 116 years old, which is off by a little. Siri also equates Reminders tasks that are assigned a time with Calendar events, which is odd.
When you dig deeper into Siri AI, you’ll discover that not all structured data on your Mac has been given the necessary makeover to work with it. A good example is Music. You can prompt Siri to play a song, but most of the rich metadata in the app isn’t exposed to Siri, which is a shame because it is exposed elsewhere, for example to AppleScript. Again, though, this is a beta, and there’s clearly more work to be done to take better advantage of what’s on your Mac.
Apps like Music don’t expose as much of their data to Siri AI as they do to AppleScript, which is frustrating.
Despite the limitations and rough edges, I expect that the new Siri app will be a hit. I’ve found Siri’s world knowledge answers to be a little superficial – similar to what Google’s AI Overviews produce. However, in-depth research isn’t the point, nor is it what people want or need most of the time. For information about current events, businesses, and other everyday questions, Siri is fine. Throw in the ability to manage tasks, calendar events, notes, and the other things people commonly do on their Macs and other devices, and it adds up to a greatly improved Siri experience.
Overall, Golden Gate is shaping up to be an excellent release. As for whether you should give it a try, I think it’s worth it, especially if you have an older Apple silicon Mac that would benefit from the performance gains. I also think many people will get a lot out of most of the Apple Intelligence features right away. Plus, if you primarily use an app like ChatGPT or Claude to search for information and like the idea of occasionally dropping information into apps like Calendar and Reminders, you’ll get a lot out of Siri, too.
And of course, even if you want more out of Siri than it offers today, patience is in order. I set my expectations for Siri low after Tahoe, and while I would have preferred more from this beta release, I’m willing to wait it out a little. I’m optimistic that it will improve because if Apple is able to assemble a tool that can perform multiple actions across its own apps and those from third parties, users will have an elegant, simple, privacy-focused solution that will go a long way towards fulfilling what was demoed at WWDC in 2024. And that’s something worth waiting for.
I can’t recall the last time I was truly excited about a mouse. I primarily use a trackpad whether I’m at my desk or using a laptop. The trouble with a trackpad-only setup, though, is that I sometimes wind up with wrist and elbow pain. That’s why I keep a Logitech MX Master 4 mouse on my desk to balance out the stress on my arms.
But that only works if I’m at my desk. More and more, I’ve been turning to a MacBook Pro for working away from my desk at home or elsewhere. Those locations are always less ergonomic than sitting at my desk, causing wrist and elbow pain more quickly. Still, I’ve never made it a habit to bring a mouse with me, especially when I’m away from home, because it’s more than I want to carry – that is, until Logitech’s latest mouse, the Mobi Fold, came along.
The Logitech Mobi Fold is an impossibly small mouse that folds completely in half, reducing its footprint to about ⅓ the size of my iPhone 17 Pro Max and about twice its thickness. Unfolded, it’s close to the length of the MX Master 4 but narrower. The Mobi Fold is impressively full-featured, too, making it an excellent all-around travel mouse worth taking a closer look at.
Folded, the Mobi Fold doesn’t look much like a mouse.
I’ve been testing the Mobi Fold for about a month, and my favorite thing to do with it is fold it up, show it to someone, and ask them to guess what it is. No one has guessed correctly because a folding mouse just isn’t a thing most people have encountered before. Instead, the most common guess is that the Mobi Fold is a small battery for charging an iPhone, until I unfold it and the shape becomes more familiar.
The Mobi Fold is tiny.
Really tiny.
The Mobi Fold is powered by a rechargeable battery that Logitech says lasts for up to 33 days (and up to 22 hours on a one-minute quick charge). The device also turns itself on and off automatically when unfolded and folded, which I love. Plus, the Mobi Fold can connect to up to three devices, and it supports both Bluetooth connections and Logitech’s Bolt dongle (sold separately).
The Mobi Fold’s surface is a soft-touch plastic that feels comfortable in your hand, and it has three buttons arrayed across the front. The middle button doubles as a trackpad, allowing you to drag a finger across its surface to scroll and perform gestures like a double tap for zooming in and out of a webpage.
The Mobi Fold pairs with up to three devices.
By default, tapping the front of the middle button navigates forward, while tapping the back navigates back in a browser. However, as with other Logitech mice, you can program the Mobi Fold’s buttons and gestures to:
perform different actions depending on the app you’re using,
control system settings like brightness and volume,
perform macro-like smart actions, and
display the Logitech Actions Ring, a customizable set of actions that are overlayed on your work environment.
That’s a lot of customization for a diminutive mouse, which I appreciate. However, because the Mobi Fold is typically my “long work sessions at the coffee shop” mouse, I’ve found that all I really need is its traditional point-and-click functionality.
The Mobi Fold makes a good companion to an iPad.
Ultimately, the Mobi Fold isn’t going to replace the MX Master 4 sitting on my desk, but it’s not meant to. I’ve fallen for the Mobi Fold just the same because its compact size and light weight make it a no-brainer to carry with me. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at just how comfortable the Mobi Fold is to use, unfolding into a sturdy, angular shape that feels good in hand, unlike, say, Apple’s shallower Magic Mouse.
As a result, I really can’t recommend the Mobi Fold enough for on-the-go use with a Mac laptop or iPad. The combination of features in such a small, portable package sets it apart from every other mouse I’ve used and makes it well worth its $79.99 price tag.
The Mobi Fold is available in Graphite, Lilac, Off White, and Sand colors, both directly from Logitech and from Amazon.
It’s July, and Apple TV and Apple Arcade have an interesting lineup, including four games that debuted last week, the return of Silo, one of my favorite Apple TV series, Lucky, a limited series starring Anya Taylor-Joy, and The Dink, a pickleball movie that looks like a lot of fun.
The game I’m most curious about this month is Stray Fawn Studio’s Dungeon Clawler+, which Apple says “combines the strategic depth of a roguelike deckbuilder with the unpredictability of an arcade claw machine.” The hook is that instead of drawing cards, you use a claw to grab weapons, shields, and other items that affect your next move.
Creatures of the Deep+ is a single-player fishing adventure that pairs fishing with exploration and mystery. Your job is to embark on the open seas, catch fish, and learn the secrets that lie beneath the waves.
If you’ve ever played a classic Sim City game, you’ll have a feel for Pocket City 2+. You play as the city’s mayor and are charged with building and maintaining your city, which you can explore on foot as you build.
Draw It+ challenges players to draw things based on prompts under time pressure. It’s a single-player family-friendly game that can be passed around at a party or played solo, while honing your doodling skills.
I only just started Silo, season 2, prompted in part by the release of season 3 last Friday. It’s a fantastic dystopian mystery starring and executive produced by Rebecca Ferguson and created by Graham Yost. If you like a good post-apocalyptic brain teaser, be sure to check the new season.
This week the acclaimed British comedy Trying returns for a fifth season. Starring and executive produced by Esther Smith and Rafe Spall, the series is a lighthearted look at the ups and downs of family life.
Lucky is a limited series starring Anya Taylor-Joy based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Marissa Stapley. Taylor-Joy plays a young woman whose former life of crime comes back to haunt her, just as she thinks she’s escaped her past.
The Dink is a comedy about a former tennis star played by Jake Johnson who has been reduced to coaching kids at a suburban country club. Johnson, who stars with an ensemble cast that includes Ed Harris, Ben Stiller, and Mary Steenburgen, discovers that he loves pickleball, which just may save the ailing country club.
That’s it for July. I’m personally looking forward to moving on to season three of Silo once I finish season two and watching Lucky.
If you’re a Club MacStories Plus or Premier member, drop by the TV and Movies channel in Discord to chat about what you’re looking forward to from Apple TV this month, and be sure to listen to MacStories Unwind where we will undoubtedly cover these shows in the coming weeks.
When Fable 5 returned last week, I knew exactly what to throw at it. In February, I started a project out of frustration that likewise ended in frustration, so I put it on the shelf and waited. Five months later, Fable 5 was released, and I knew it was time to finish Editor, a single-view diffing tool for writers rather than developers.
At MacStories, we all write in Markdown, and we’ve used GitHub to share and sync changes among team members since 2015. GitHub is primarily a developer tool, but it’s a fast, reliable way to share our Markdown-formatted article files, too.
We use GitHub the most for the Club MacStories newsletters. Every week, Federico, Devon, Jonathan, and I work on sections for MacStories Weekly and save them to a GitHub repo. That allows any of us to sync the sections locally for reading, editing, and assembling the issue.
The trouble is that as great as Markdown text editors are to write and GitHub is for versioning and syncing, there isn’t a good way to view the changes someone has made to a document. I know because I’ve been looking for a solution for a long time. Some Markdown apps like iA Writer and Bear support versioning or backups, but I’ve yet to find a text editor that can visualize changes made by someone else based on a document’s Git history.
Of course, developers have many ways to track changes to code, including GitHub Desktop, Kaleidoscope, and Git Tower. Code is just text, so those apps can be used by writers, too. However, the process of writing and editing prose is fundamentally different from code. I’ve tried the apps above and others, and it’s just too hard to track changes in the formats development tools use.
This is what it’s like trying to track changes in GitHub Desktop.
We wouldn’t have stuck with GitHub as long as we have if it didn’t work, but that hasn’t made the friction of reviewing changes any less frustrating, especially on Fridays when we send MacStories Weekly. That’s when I had the idea for Editor. I was trying to parse some changes Devon had made to one of my stories with GitHub Desktop, and the friction finally got to me.
One obvious problem was the side-by-side document view many code diffing tools use. I wanted more detail than most diffing tools offer, but in a single, readable view, so I could skim through changes quickly.
Most agent-assisted projects benefit from some up-front research and planning. I knew what I wanted would sink or swim on the design, not the app’s underlying Markdown viewer, so I spent time researching systems for visualizing document edits.
That’s when I came across Upwelling, a multi-author project from Ink & Switch that describes itself as “an independent research lab exploring the future of tools for thought.” In their research paper, the authors described my exact problem:
Unfortunately, version control tools like Git, which are designed for software development, do not suit the needs of writers. Git cannot compare or merge files from WYSIWYG editors such as Microsoft Word… and graphical user interfaces for Git are cluttered with complex concepts such as commit hashes and visualizations of non-linear branching and merging histories.
Ink & Switch’s solution, a prototype collaborative text editor, wasn’t what I wanted to build, but the research behind it was full of interesting ideas that helped me settle on several principles for what would become Editor:
Document changes needed to be visible in a single view that carefully balanced highlighting changes with readability;
A writer should be able to instantly switch from the marked-up version of their document to the clean original and edited final version;
Changes needed to be categorized by filterable types like punctuation, word choice, capitalization, insertions, and deletions to reduce clutter in heavily edited documents;
Change types would be color coded using a side rail system inspired by maps of London’s tube system;
Navigating among individual edits needed to be done by simple j/k keyboard input; and
Global document navigation should employ a mini-map of a document’s edit regions (a feature borrowed from developer IDEs like Xcode) to make it easy to jump from one area of a document to another.
Working with Claude and artifacts to prototype Editor.
With those choices made, I got busy in Claude Code and came up with a proof of concept quickly, but sadly, these were the days of Claude Opus 4.6, which wasn’t nearly as good at design as today’s models. What I wanted was possible, but what I had was a mess.
The prototype is recognizable as Editor, but far less readable than the finished version.
As it turns out, designing track changes that are accurate but readable is hard. For example, does changing “day” to “date” replace one word with the other or substitute one character (the “y”) for two others (“te”)? Despite putting clear parameters around what Editor should look like, I could tell Claude was stuck, so I called it quits and moved on.
However, I’d wanted something like Editor for far too long to simply give up. So I saved what I had to a GitHub repo and figured I’d take another run at it later.
Editor makes it easy to see small changes like punctuation with filters.
A lot has changed in the six months since I put Editor on ice. Notably, Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Design were released, and Claude became better at using a browser, all of which fit nicely with Editor’s relatively complex design.
Dark mode does a particularly nice job of highlighting changes.
Between Opus 4.8 and Claude Design, I expect I could have finished Editor without Fable 5, but with it, the only thing that slowed me down was my five-hour token limit. I repeatedly hit the limit in under an hour as Fable managed a swarm of subagents. What could have taken a few hours last Friday night spanned an evening and the next morning. The token gating slowed me down, but at the same time, I expect that using Opus 4.8 and Claude Design would have taken the entire weekend.
But it isn’t just speed that makes Fable 5 impressive; it’s the fact that it got Editor’s complex UI right the first time. Fable took a carefully planned but very broken prototype and turned it into a polished product that the whole MacStories team can use.
Editor is built to run on the internal tools foundation Federico created.
However, there’s a big difference between a web app running on my Mac mini server for personal use and something that can be shared. Fortunately, Editor also benefited from the internal tool foundation Federico has built over the past several months.
He originally built it to house Feedboard, his kanban-style RSS feed reader; Images, an update to our tool for uploading images to the MacStories CDN; and iOS Review Search, a semantic search tool for his iOS and iPadOS reviews. It’s a login-protected internal page built on web app hosting platform Vercel. I later contributed a tool that summarizes Apple Newsroom posts and simplifies uploading their promotional images to our server.
Federico managed Editor’s deployment, in part, from Cursor for iPhone.
With a couple of those tools in hand as context for Fable, I asked Claude to get Editor ready for our internal tools page and passed it off to Federico with a separate set of specs and instructions he could point Claude at for deployment and the creation of a landing page. That introduced bugs that required some troubleshooting, which Federico handled in part using Cursor and it new iPhone app, but by that afternoon, Editor was ready for production. The entire process from old, broken prototype to production web app took less than 24 hours, and for a lot of that time we were either asleep or away from home.
Navigating by individual edit.
When you use agentic tools like Claude every day, it’s easy to forget how far they come so quickly. All you see are the flaws that still serve as roadblocks. What was different about using Fable 5 was that there were no roadblocks. It simply took a project that Opus 4.6 struggled with in February and made short work of it. It was a remarkable thing to see. And now, we have a tool that I’ve wanted since we started using GitHub for our writing in 2015.
Tomorrow, Fable will move to usage credits that are just too expensive for my tastes, given how fast the model burns tokens. Hopefully, it will trickle back into Anthropic’s subscription tiers in the future. Until then, though, I’ll continue knocking out prototypes, and if they’re too much for Opus, I’ll shelve them until a better model comes along. They always do.
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