Welcome to Edition 9.10 of the Rocket Report! This week we're celebrating a historic moment in Europe when a German rocket company successfully put its launch vehicle into orbit. Isar Aerospace became the first purely commercial European company to reach orbit, and impressively it did so on just its second launch attempt. How quickly can they scale up operations? How quickly will the second European launch firm reach this goal? Big questions, which for now we don't have answers to.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar Aerospace takes a huge step forward. Isar Aerospace, founded in 2018 by three students at a German university, successfully launched a privately developed rocket into low-Earth orbit on Saturday from a Norwegian spaceport inside the Arctic Circle. The two-stage rocket, Spectrum, became the first fully commercial launch vehicle in Europe to reach orbit, Ars reports. With Saturday’s success, Isar becomes the clear leader among a pack of several European launch startups vying to inject some competition into Europe’s stagnant launch market.
It's the hot new thing in tech, and it's where all the jobs are. Students who don't learn to use it fall behind. And to help them catch up in time, its creators are graciously providing the resources and curriculum for learning it, often pro bono.
That's the narrative AI companies are pitching schools on right now, but according to New York Times education technology reporter Natasha Singer, it's also how the tech industry has built its influence in classrooms for the past 15 years.
In a new book, Coding Kids,Singer details how tech companies took a central role in promoting computers and coding skills in education, promising computer sci …
I turned my Muse assistant into a purple cat. | Screenshot: The Verge
Meta has launched its new Muse assistant, marking the company's first real foray into AI-powered productivity tools. The company says its AI agent can "take the busywork off your plate" by helping you with online shopping, emails, trip-planning, and more. I decided to try out the new tool and see how well it performed - especially from a company that previously prioritized entertainment over productivity. Though the AI assistant generally worked as I expected it to, the unnerving amount of information it autonomously gleaned about me largely overshadowed my experience.
One of the first tasks I assigned Muse, which carries out actions using …
Welcome to Edition 9.09 of the Rocket Report! This edition includes an update from Blue Origin on the groundbreaking of a new Payload Processing Facility in Florida. It has been about a month since the company offered any meaningful news on its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which remains grounded after an on-pad explosion at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in May. The official line from Blue Origin is that the company is targeting a return to flight with New Glenn by the end of the year, but there's good reason for skepticism.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar Aerospace is ready to try again. Isar Aerospace is about to make the next attempt to launch the Spectrum rocket into orbit, with a weeklong launch window set to open Friday at Andøya Spaceport in Norway, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) reports. The German launch company aims to deliver several small CubeSats to orbit with the two-stage Spectrum rocket. A test flight of the privately funded launcher failed shortly after liftoff last year, and Isar has attempted to launch the second Spectrum rocket several times since January, only to be thwarted by technical problems and the unavailability of the launch range in northern Norway.
Artificial Intelligence takes center stage in a few of the apps enjoying this week’s spotlight — and not the kind of AI that’s going to have you rolling your eyes or organizing a protest march against the nearest data center. No, these are actually useful AI features that take some of the busy work of daily life out of your hands so you can concentrate on other things.
AI or no, we’re always looking for top macOS and iOS apps to feature here. If you’ve got something that fits that description, drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief outline of the whats, whys, and wherefores.
Now on to this week’s selection…
Sortio
Sortio went through my stories and categorized them.
The folders on my Mac are a mess, but who has the time to make sure that everything is filed away in its proper place? AI does, according to the makers of Sortio, a macOS utility that promises to do the hard work of organization on your behalf.
Sortio taps into AI to look at file names and metadata to help it figure out where to put each file. You can also opt to let the utility read the file, sending a 4KB excerpt to your AI provider of choice for even more detailed sorting. (Sortio also offers an offline mode that uses Ollama or LM Studio to keep its activity on your Mac.) You can further refine sorting by telling Sortio to organize things by file type, project, date, and whether the file is for work or personal use..
I took Sortio for a spin, having it go through the folder of articles I’ve written but haven’t bothered to organize for myself. Sortio was smart enough to take my submissions to Awful Announcing and separate them into their own folder. Not every search is that precise — a separate sorting session had Sortio tagging an offer letter from an old employer named Purch as a financial document — but there are edit buttons to correct mislabeled and misfiled material.
You can try out Sortio for free, which gives you enough of an allowance to sort through a few thousand files to get a flavor for how the app performs. After that, you’ll need to buy a license, with the $14.99/month Pro license suitable for most individual users. There are team and enterprise options as well, and paying for an annual license lowers your monthly rate.
AskPlay
Okay, that’s about right.
AI isn’t just for organizing your folders; it can also generate a playlist for you based on specific artists, songs or moods you’re hoping to hear. At least, that’s the idea behind AskPlay, an app that lives in your menu bar and lets you type or speak plain-English instructions on the type of music you want to listen to.
You’re going to need a few things besides AskPlay and its $1.99/month subscription to make the app work. For starters, AskPlay works exclusively with Apple Music, so you’ll also need to subscribe to Apple’s streaming service. In addition, you’ll need to provide an API key from an AI provider, with AskPlay supporting OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenRouter.
Those requirements are likely to limit AskPlay’s appeal to some users, but having tried out the app on my Mac, I am impressed by the results. I told AskPlay I wanted to hear songs written by Stephen Sondheim, and it dutifully produced a playlist not just from cast soundtracks but also numbers by vocalists from their own albums. That said, there were a few misfires — the playlist included a song from Tick, Tick… Boom!, a Jonathan Larson musical that only refers to Sondheim, as well as a rap song that shares a title with something Sondheim wrote. Other requests like “play upbeat songs from the ’80s” proved more successful.
An AskPlay feature I appreciate was the ability to augment playlists. After generating a playlist of Merle Haggard songs, I had the app add Johnny Cash music to the queue. Then I told AskPlay to “add more songs like these,” which brought Waylon Jennings, George Jones, and more to the party.
AskPlay seems built for a very specific kind of user, but if you like thematic playlists and already subscribe to the services that make this app tick, it brings another dimension to your listening experience. In addition to working on the Mac, AskPlay is available for a range of Apple devices including the iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro.
Pocket Screen
Pocket Screen puts contents from one window atop another.
I don’t know about you, but my workflow often requires me to jump from one window to another to perform a task — and that can often break up my workflow. I’m thinking of when I’m writing something and need to refer to notes I’ve taken in another application or a PDF I have loaded up in Preview. Jumping between apps takes me out of the flow of writing, not to mention that accurately transcribing what’s in one app to the other can occasionally be a hit-or-miss proposition.
Pocket Screen addresses some of that dilemma by creating a floating window of one app that you can keep in view when you’re working on something else. Think of Pocket Screen as a picture-in-picture feature, but for productivity. You can capture a PDF, webpage, video, chat or other kind of information and keep it close at hand in a resizable window that you can move around your desktop. The app supports up to two simultaneous views, according to its developer.
You can freely use Pocket Screen for 10-minute sessions, but true productivity mavens will likely want to unlock the app for unlimited use. That’s a one-time payment of $9.99 to remove any restrictions.
Filtre
I just don’t want to see it.
Filtre is a Safari extension for anyone whose browsing on the Mac, iPhone, or iPad takes you to places and topics they’d just as soon not read about.
Enter keywords into Filtre, and the extension blocks articles, posts and comments that include anything you consider verboten. For instance, I typed in variations of the Washington Nationals name into Filtre to avoid being spoiled on the result of a baseball game. When I visited ESPN in Safari on my Mac, all references to the Nationals and their in-progress game had been removed from view. (A pause button accessible from the Filtre Extension in Safari’s toolbar lets you restore any filtered-out content if you prefer.)
Filtre comes from the maker of Noir, a Dark Mode-enabling extension that Six Colors has profiled before, so we’re clearly talking about someone who knows their way around Safari extensions. You can try out Filtre free for a week before the extension’s $1.49/month subscription kicks in.
LogZero
You’ve got lots of ways to track everything from calories to moods on your iPhone. LogZero offers to do it all in one place. More significantly, though, LogZero promises to keep all that logged data for your eyes only, with data never leaving your device and everything stored within the app encrypted.
LogZero is a one-stop app for keeping tabs on food intake, meditation breaks, exercise, to-dos, and medications. You can also chart your mood and weight. If that sounds like a lot to keep track of, you can toggle off the items you’re not interested in logging, and they’ll disappear from the interface.
It’s worth downloading the free iOS app to see if it fits your tracking needs, though a paid subscription gives you access to more analytics features plus personalization controls. A monthly subscription costs $5, while the annual rate is $35.
Welcome to Edition 9.08 of the Rocket Report! Some major news this week from the state of Louisiana, previously associated with space due to NASA's aging Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans. Now the state has a chance to become the epicenter of SpaceX's Starship program as the company plans to invest up to $100 billion to construct factories and multiple launch pads for the super heavy lift rocket. It would utterly transform coastal Louisiana.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
ESA announces big launch challenge contracts. The European Space Agency said Thursday it signed contracts with a handful of European launch startups to help them continue development of their vehicles. "The European Launcher Challenge is ESA’s initiative to expand European launch service supply and ensure more robustness in Europe’s access to space," the space agency said of the award, which supports the development and operation of small launch vehicles in Europe. For some of these firms, the funding will provide a key lifeline.
We’ve got a pair of apps that help you get a little reading done, albeit with two different approaches. Still, whether you prefer having someone else read the articles to you or if you just prefer a cleaner feed of articles, there’s something for everyone in this week’s App Report.
If there’s something you think belongs in our weekly look at promising macOS and iOS apps, just drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of the app in question. We can’t reply to every email we get, but we’ll certainly take a look at any and all apps for a future column.
Listen Later
Six Colors readers may be familiar with Listen Later, which has provided a way to turn articles you’ve been meaning to read into podcasts that you can listen to at your convenience. Recently, there’s been an expansion in the ways you can access the service, with both an iOS app and a Safari extension giving you new ways to send URLs and PDFs to Listen Later so that they can be converted into a podcast.
In the iOS version of Listen Later, a Submit tab offers a field for pasting text, HTML or links; there’s also an optional button for uploading PDFs to the service. I’m able to link Listen Later to my podcatcher of choice — in this case, it’s Overcast — and a new episode featuring the content I’ve submitted shows up in my feed after it’s been converted to audio form.
The Safari extension for macOS works much the same way, only there’s a button next to the search/URL field that I tap when I want to submit something to Listen Later.
Both the Listen Later iOS app and Safari extension for macOS are free downloads, with $2 in credits for new users. If you like what you hear, you’ll need to purchase additional credits through Listen Later to cover the cost of AI processing and audio generation.
PageFeed
Reading articles on your iPhone can be a delight, but scrolling from the start of the article to the end can take some of the pleasure out of the process. If that’s a problem for you, PageFeed comes to the rescue by adopting a more book-like format for a news reader. Instead of scrolling, you tap to turn the page to make your way through an article.
The idea, PageFeed developer Brad Moss says in the description for the iOS app, is to add some degree of calm to reading through your news feed. You can select the sources and topics you want to read about. A share sheet can also send articles you find elsewhere to PageFeed for a scrolling-free experience.
You can download the app to your iPhone or iPad for free and use it for 14 days to get a feel for PageFeed’s approach. After that, a one-time $10 fee unlocks the app for good.
Tansei
It would be unfair to describe Tansei as kind of a universal clipboard for your Mac, even if that’s what this utility does, at least in a broad sense. But Tansei is really a storage space for anything. Besides text and URLs, it can hold images, screenshots and even colors, keeping them in a shelf on the side of your display for you to access whenever you need.
In my testing, Tansei has already proven its worth for a weekly newsletter I put together every week. I include a lot of links in that newsletter, and previously, that meant keeping an open text document where I could copy down URLs to articles of interest for use when it came time to put a new issue together. With Tansei running on my Mac, all I have to do is copy the URL, and it shows up in Tansei’s shelf automatically. I can also drag-and-drop items into Tansei, and hide the app off to the side when I want an uncluttered screen.
I wish there was a way to exert a little more control over what gets copied. For example, while moving the newsletter text into the publishing site I use, every block of text I copy over appears in Tansei. At least the app offers a bulk management feature that I can use to delete unnecessary items in one fell swoop.
You can buy Tansei for a one-time payment of $7, though a three-day trial lets you use the app for free without restrictions.
WidgetScreen
The release of macOS Sonoma three years ago brought desktop widgets to the Mac. WidgetScreen now pulls off the same trick for your Mac’s lock screen, letting you add weather forecasts, calendars and other bits of information that remain visible even before you’ve unlocked your computer.
Specifically, WidgetScreen includes widgets for weather, clock, stopwatch, reminders and battery. You can also add a Now Playing widget that controls music playback or a Pomodoro widget for when you want to focus or take breaks. A $10 Premium purchase unlocks additional widgets, such as Live Lyrics and News, while giving you greater customization powers over your lock screen.
Not everyone is going to want to bring the widget experience to their Mac’s lock screen, but if you’ve ever wanted to replicate the iPhone’s widget capabilities, WidgetScreen feels like a simple way to do that.
MailTwin
I’m not fully sold on the value of AI-powered writing tools at this point in time, though that could be the professional writer in me talking. For people who don’t mash sentences together for a living, every little bit of writing assistance helps, especially when it comes to dashing off emails.
So in that sense, I can see the use case for MailTwin, which promises to help you draft emails using a voice drawn from the messages you’ve previously sent. Even more helpfully, MailTwin can differentiate between different email accounts if you keep your personal and business correspondence separate, so that the messages it generates aimed to be tonally appropriate depending on context. Replies are generated in a separate window, and you can paste the results into a draft in macOS’s Mail app if you’re satisfied.
MailTwin can tie into eight different AI providers, including the Apple Intelligence that’s already on your Mac. The data only passes between your Mac and the AI service, with nothing ever winding up on a MailTwin server.
You can try out the app for free. After 30 days, you’ll need to pay $20 to unlock the app, though that’s a one-time fee.
Clearly, creating Mac apps that make the most of your voice continues to be a focus of developers — at least based on the offerings coming across my radar lately. Following last week’s profile of two different takes on on-device transcription software, we’ve got yet another voice-powered app to take a look at, with this macOS download supporting dictation that you can then paste into other apps.
But other apps are finding different ways to make some noise, including a pair of simple-yet-satisfying utilities and an old favorite that’s learned some new tricks. If you’ve got an app that you’d like to bring to our attention, let us hear about it at apps@sixcolors.com, adding a brief description on what the app does and what devices it supports.
And now, on to the business at hand. Or at voice, as the case may be.
Lesskeys
Some times, it’s better to dictate than to type, and Lesskeys looks to make that process as simple as possible. With the app running in your menu bar, just hit a hotkey — it’s Option-Period by default — to start recording your dulcet tones. As you speak, your words are captured in a clipboard that you can copy and paste into any app once you stop recording by tapping the hotkey again. Alternatively, you can also hold down the hotkey to jot down quick thoughts with the recording stopping once you release the keys.
Lesskeys’ bag of tricks extends beyond just dictation. There’s a command for recording phone calls made through your Mac, and you can also import audio and video files to be transcribed. Additionally, the app boasts the ability to identify speakers when you record conversations. Power users will also appreciate how Lesskeys lets you set up different configurations for different apps, such as a different language, model or prompt when a particular app is in the foreground.
Lesskeys is free to download, but you’re limited to 5 minutes of dictation per day, along with five audio and video transcriptions each. That should be enough of a ceiling to test out the app and decided whether it’s worth the one-time $49.99 Pro license to remove any restrictions.
PeekNote
If you’re like me, you put the Mac’s clipboard through quite a workout, copy and pasting various text snippets, URLs and other captured material into different apps. And if you’re even more like me, you wind up using a lot of the same snippets and URLs over and over again. PeekNote is a handy macOS utility that keeps frequently used snippets close at hand.
Essentially, PeekNote is a floating window where you can stack multiple bits of text to paste into any window on your desktop. As I’m applying for a lot of jobs at the moment, I can use the PeekNote window to stash links to articles and other parts of my profile that I frequently use in cover letters and web forms.
Pay a one-time $9.99 fee, and you unlock the full app, which includes the ability to create 22 different tabs for organizing related text blocks. The unlocked version of PeekNote also lifts any limitations on the number of blocks.
If I had a suggestion for PeekNote, it would be to make it easier to shrink the app window so that it only expands when you need access to one of the text blocks you’ve got stored in there. But otherwise, it’s a fine utility when you want frequently used links and snippets to be right at your fingertips.
Carrot Weather
If you’ve looked beyond the built-in Weather app on your iPhone, you doubtlessly have some familiarity with Carrot Weather and its… unique take on delivering the forecast. The app, which works across a host of Apple devices including the Mac, Apple Watch and Vision Pro, tells you the weather with attitude, using a sliding snark scale that you can adjust to your liking. Additionally, as you can see from this 2023 Six Colors profile, developer Grailr has built some other high-end capabilities and customization features into the app, the more intriguing of which are positioned behind a paywall.
Carrot Weather is worth revisiting these days thanks to an added feature that arrived over the summer — a trip planner capability for the iPhone version that lets you track the forecast for any upcoming getaways. I’ve got a trip to Detroit in my immediate future, and when I head over to the Locations section of Carrot Weather, I can see that I had better pack an umbrella for the thunderstorm that’s forecast on at least one day of my trip.
The 6.7 update to Carrot Weather also introduced new custom notifications that alert you when a data point hits a certain threshold — say, a temperature drop or a rise in UV index levels. Both the Trip Planner and custom notification features require a Premium Ultra subscription that costs $9.99/month.
SmartTracker
With holiday shopping ramping up in the next few months, you’re going to want to stay on top of pricing to make sure that you’re paying the best price for anything on your wish list. Certainly, there are websites where you can do that — CamelCamelCamel is one of the better ones in my opinion — but an app like SmartTracker can pull off the same task while keeping your search data entirely on your Mac.
Enter a URL into the SmartTracker app, and it will do the watching for you; you’re even able to set a target price and get a notification should the object of your desire hit that magic number. Several other features such as home screen widgets, Siri shortcuts and collections for grouping items together will appeal to power shoppers.
SmartTracker runs on macOS, iOS and iPadOS, though I only looked at the Mac version of the app. You can track up to five items and manage three collections when you download the app, but paying $6.99/year (or a one-time $19.99 payment) gets rid of those limits.
TuckBar
Utilities don’t come any simpler than TuckBar, which performs one task but does it well. You use the macOS utility to hide away the menu bar on displays of your choosing, only to bring it back the moment you move back toward the top edge of the screen.
That’s going to be welcome functionality if you use multiple displays and want to keep some of them truly uncluttered, while letting you keep the comfort of the menu bar on (presumably) your primary display. TuckBar mimics the appearance of your desktop wallpaper to obscure the menu bar, or if you prefer, the utility features a slider to turn down the menu bar’s brightness.
Normally, TuckBar costs $3 to download, though at time of writing, the app was free as part of a limited-time promotion.
Mathematician James Maynard has spent a lot of time this past year "soul searching." A professor at the University of Oxford and winner of the prestigious Fields Medal, Maynard told The Verge he's been grappling with the future of his field as the traditionally slow-moving discipline hurries to adapt to AI.
Days before we spoke, OpenAI revealed it had produced the solutions to 10 long-standing mathematics problems, some of which had confounded academics for decades. Like generative AI used to produce text and images or propose ideas in science and medicine, the technology learns patterns and connections from the vast amount of material it' …
Recently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he'd used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he'd hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, "Do cool shit." I made what I hoped was a polite noise. What reaction was this man looking for? He probably hoped someone, maybe me, would say it was cool or inspiring. It seemed I was not the first person he'd told about this poster. "You know, it's funny," he said to me. "No one ever says anything about it."
I have been thinking about this now for several days. There's a sort of turducken of things that I find off-puttin …
Tom Vek burst onto the scene in 2005 with his album We Have Sound, which garnered a solid 7.6 from the tastemakers of the day over at Pitchfork. His undeniably catchy brand of dancy indietronica landed him an appearance on The OC and placement on the Grand Theft Auto IV soundtrack. His follow-up, Leisure Seizure, had a lengthy gestation period, but arrived in 2011 to similar success, reaching No. 79 on the UK charts.
Vek has continued to release music at regular intervals over the last 15 years, dropping Newer Symbols in 2022. But in 2020 he started toying with this idea he had for a music player called Sleevenote. Inspired by viny …
Your voice may be your passport, as a certain Robert Redford picture once asserted, but two macOS apps in our spotlight this week view your voice as a way to get more things done on your Mac. We’re talking transcription apps with two apps that take very different approaches to what you can do with vocal recognition and AI.
But that’s not all for this week. We also look at a tool to help you better enjoy email newsletters, an iPhone app for making your photos sound as good as ever and a multiplatform game that helps you fine-tune your puzzle-solving skills.
Got an app of your own that you’d like to see highlighted? Let us know at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of what it does, and we’ll take it from there.
Vox Dictum
I record a lot of interviews, which means I need to transcribe a lot of interviews, and so far, I’ve found the Apple Intelligence tools built into Apple’s various software platforms to be fairly wanting in this area. So when an app like Vox Dictum promises a better transcription experience, I’m all ears.
Vox Dictum is a macOS app that makes privacy its calling card — all the transcription happens directly on your Mac, as do the AI-powered summary features that you can access with the cost of a subscription. A Pro subscription costs $7.99/month and gets you features like large AI models to download to your Mac plus AI summaries while the $12.99/month Pro+ package adds a speaker recognition feature.
I do think it’s easier to label speakers in VoxDictum than with any of Apple’s built-in features, though transcripts — while fairly accurate — feature line breaks that aren’t necessarily suited to my purposes.
As for the summary feature, I found it to be hit-and-miss: Vox Dictum did a great job highlighting the main points of an interview I conducted for a freelance article, making the summary a good reference tool, but a recorded discussion between me and my wife produced a summary with conflicting dates on some action items. That said, I do like that Vox Dictum’s summary feature lets you designate if the recording is an interview, a meeting, a news bulletin or a podcast, which seems to help focus the summary.
Processing time can take a bit, but if you find yourself needing to transcribe a lot of interviews, Vox Dictum is definitely worth a download so you can see if its base features improve on your current approach.
Bonfiyah
Like Vox Dictum, Bonfiyah promises to turn recordings into transcripts, while also recognizing who’s saying what. But transcription is really just a sideshow in this case — the app’s real strength lies in its ability to track your conversations.
Available for the iPhone, iPad and Mac — I tried out the macOS version — Bonfiyah records conversations, meetings and brainstorming sessions. (You can also import audio files into the app.) Besides transcription and speaker identification features, the app also taps into AI to summarize action items that come up in your conversation and who’s responsible for taking care of them. A feature I particularly like is an analysis tool that analyzes how to communicate more effectively with the people you talk to on a regular basis.
Transcription does take place off-device via AssemblyAI, though Bonfiyah deletes that info from its servers after seven days. The app includes privacy features such as marking conversations as privileged.
Bonfiyah comes across as a pretty sophisticated tool that might be overkill for anyone who needs transcripts with more basic summary features. But you can try out all the features to start with for 14 days before you need to commit to either a $24.99/month Pro or $34.99/month Pro AI account for more advanced features.
Letterboxx
Letterboxx exists under the premise that an email inbox is no place to enjoy a newsletter and a traditional mail client is not a reader app. Inboxes are places for taking action like responding to timely messages, but newsletters are something that you want to spend time diving into — hence the Letterboxx interface, which is designed to use the ample space provided on your Mac.
With Letterboxx, you can redirect newsletters sent to supported email accounts to a dedicated reading space, complete with folders for organizing incoming missives by type. You also get ad-filtering tools, ways to highlight relevant text and even shortcuts for managing your many subscriptions.
You’ll know right away if this app is just right for your newsletter-heavy reading habits or if it’s more management features than you need, but you can confirm with a two-week free trial to Letterboxx before the regular $4.99/monthly subscription rate kicks in.
Echo Photo Album
I don’t really find much use for Live Photos, the built-in iPhone camera feature that adds a little bit of movement and audio to your images. But Echo Photo Album might cause me to reconsider augmenting my photos with its focus entirely on audio.
You can record up to 60 seconds of audio in Echo Photo Album, adding it to a shot you either take through the app or find in your photo library. In testing Echo Photo Album on my iPhone — it’s also compatible with iPads and Apple Watches — I found it worked best adding the sound of my cat purring to seem feline portraits or ocean waves crashing to a coastal landscape shot. I imagine it could also come in handy adding sounds to accompany road trips, baby photos and group get-togethers.
You can download Echo Photo Album for free, with a $4.99 purchases removing a 10-image limit.
Chess Peace
All work and no play makes for a dull app profiler, so here’s a game I’ve been playing lately that runs on the Mac as well as on iPhones and iPads. (I’ve been testing the macOS version.) Chess Peace is one of those games that you play to keep your mind active. Best of all, you don’t really need to be a grand master to get something out of the game.
The only thing you need to know about chess to thrive at Chess Peace is how each of the different pieces move around the board. That knowledge lets you position each piece on the board of a Chess Peace puzzle in such a way as to prevent any other piece from capturing them — keeping your rook out of the diagonal attacks of your bishop, for example.
The game serves up a new puzzle every day, with a library of older puzzles for you to play as well. An $8.99 in-app purchases unlocks 26,500 puzzles across five game modes plus custom themes to let you change the look of Chess Peace.
De acordo com uma reportagem da Bloomberg, a Apple dará o pontapé inicial nos preparativos para o evento especial de lançamento dos próximos iPhones com um sorteio interno entre funcionários de suas Apple Stores, com o objetivo de selecionar quais deles trabalharão presencialmente lá no Apple Park durante o grande dia.
Como trata-se de um número limitado de vagas (que certamente são bem disputadas), a empresa abriu inscrições para funcionários interessados até o dia 8 de agosto, e notificará os selecionados até o dia 17 do mesmo mês, segundo um memorando ao qual o veículo teve acesso.
Para se inscrever, os candidatos também não podem ter participado da WWDC26 e nem do evento especial de lançamento dos iPhones em setembro do ano passado — o que garante uma maior rotatividade nos funcionários selecionados para esses eventos.
Os funcionários que forem agraciados com o sorteio, segundo o memorando, atuarão em tarefas como organização de filas, check-in dos convidados e recepção aos participantes, bem como fornecerão informações e oferecerão suporte às equipes de segurança envolvidas.
O memorando também diz que o evento ocorrerá na primeira quinzena de setembro. Tradicionalmente, ele ocorre na 2ª terça ou quarta-feira do mês. Como segunda (7/9) será feriado nos Estados Unidos, é provável que o grande evento deste ano aconteça na quarta-feira (9/9).
Illustrators have spent years sounding the alarm about generative artificial intelligence startups training their models on artists' work without permission. They've pointed out how the practice is tantamount to theft, and in response, many gen AI boosters have argued that it's necessary for the technology's evolution. This has led to contentious legal battles, but it's also given rise to a new wave of AI startups like Pippa that market their services as being more ethical than the competition.
Like most companies selling access to text-to-video models, Pippa's main product is short bursts of user-generated footage that can be cobbled toget …
Angela Nissel smiles through the pain. | Image: Angela Nissel
Angela Nissel's latest book, Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom Is Dead, is my kind of memoir. Sure, it's a deeply emotional tale about caring for a terminally ill parent. But it's delivered with the sort of gallows humor that I often turn to to get me through tough times.
Of course, that sort of dark humor should come as no surprise from Nissel. She first made a splash with The Broke Diaries, which grew out of a blog she kept in college detailing her daily struggles and, at times, embarrassment at being a broke student. Eventually she went on to produce and write for hit shows including Scrubs and The Boondocks.
That cover art is almost certainly AI, too. | Image: Fenix Flexin
Fenix Flexin is best known as a member of Shoreline Mafia, a rap duo from Los Angeles. But he's recently found solo success with the track "Rubberz," which has climbed to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100. Almost immediately, though, questions were raised about the song's origins, with many speculating that it was largely, if not entirely, generated by AI. Fenix has denied those accusations, but done little to dispel them.
Part of the suspicion is certainly due to the fact that the song is a dramatic left turn. Fenix has primarily trafficked in trap-influencedWest Coastrap. "Rubberz," on the other hand, is heavily influenced by '80s UK s …
Welcome to Edition 9.05 of the Rocket Report! It was a big week for launch contracts, with both Rocket Lab and SpaceX scoring sizable deals from the US military for their respective Electron and Falcon 9 rockets. The vehicles have been the workhorses for small and medium lift for the United States over the past decade and may remain so for some time. Also, there will be no Rocket Report next week, as I am traveling on assignment, and Stephen is taking a week off.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Rocket Lab wins large Electron deal. Rocket Lab Corporation announced this week that it has been awarded its largest launch contract to date, a $266 million multi-launch contract with the US Space Force. Under the contract awarded by the US Space Force Space Systems Command, Rocket Lab will execute 12 suborbital launches, with up to six additional launches. The first launch of this contract is expected no earlier than the end of 2026.
(Left to right): Annotate, Kickabout, and Undolly.
For the most part, I’m going to focus on Mac apps with these columns, because that’s where the action seems to be these days. But iOS remains a vibrant platform, too, and every now and again, we’ll look at some of the interesting apps being created for iPhones and iPads. This is one of those now and agains.
Want to see your app included in a future round-up? Get in touch at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of your app, and you just might make the cut.
Kickabout
The World Cup is just a memory now, but if you’re missing the daily infusion of soccer (or football, depending on what part of the globe you’re reading this from), Kickabout brings the action back to your iOS device in a very condensed form.
Kickabout will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever gathered around a foosball table in a rec room, with a look that will bring a smile to the face of Subbuteo tabletop football aficionados. You take charge of an 8-player team, with players only free to move about certain areas of the pitch. (No length-of-the-field Maradona-esque wonder golazos for your squad.) You use your finger to drag your players around, swiping any which way to boot the ball toward the goal as you look to rack up the most goals in each 2-minute match.
Goals and shots off the post earn you points, which translates to tickets that you cash in to collect various national teams, from the U.S. all the way to newly minted world champion Spain. You can also buy gear, including stands for your virtual stadium. It’s a fun element that adds to Kickabout’s replayability as you try to assemble your own World Cup field.
Kickabout has both single-player and dual-player modes, though I found the latter to be a little cramped for my iPhone 17 screen. I imagine head-to-head matches are much more enjoyable on the iPad. Still, Kickabout offers plenty of fun even for single players, as you try to master the game’s different difficulty levels.
Kickabout is free to download, and a $3 in-app purchase gets rid of any ads.
Undolly
The Photos app has a built-in tool to weed out duplicate images, but if you find yourself taking a lot of photos, Undolly brings a whole suite of tools that promise to bring order to your iOS device’s photo library. Besides getting rid of duplicates, the mobile app also lists large videos taking up space in your library, rounds up any screenshots you may have stashed somewhere and keeps tabs on other potential space-takers like RAW, timelapse and animated images.
The value of Undolly will depend heavily on how you use your photo library. For instance, I take a lot of screenshots for articles that I don’t always remember to delete, and the app helped me track down some that were three to five years old. I also appreciate Undolly’s swipable comparisons of similar shots, so you can see for yourself whether the images differ enough to keep. Undolly’s algorithm also rates images by their framing, quality and expressiveness of subject to better help you determine the shots that deserve a place in your library.
While it’s free to download initially, you will have to subscribe to Undolly to use its features, with a free three-day trial letting you get the lay of the land. After that, a monthly subscription costs $4, while annual and lifetime payments go for $15 and $40, respectively.
VWLSS
Nearly five years after Wordle first appeared, we’re still living in a golden age for daily word puzzles. Add VWLSS and its daily serving of mobile word play to the pile, though there are some unique iPhone elements that could help this free offering earn a place in your regular rotation of gameplay.
You have eight words to guess, each tied to a specific category and with all the vowels stripped out. It’s up to you to figure out the actual word, which you can do either by typing in the answer or using a handy speech feature. I prefer talking to typing, though I’m still sore that my guess of “Bob Barker” in the game show hosts category was misheard as “Bob Parker.” Revenge will be mine tomorrow, I guess.
Annotate
Between Notes and the still-new-to-iOS Preview app, you’ve got more than a few built-in tools for marking up documents and images on your iPhone or iPad. The Annotate app looks to expand on that with 17 tools that allow you to crop, blur and add notes to your heart’s content. If you find yourself making a lot of the same annotations, the app lets you create and save templates and there are shortcuts for watermarking and auto-redacting faces and phone numbers.
You can download Annotate for free and export up to five annotated photos and documents. After that, you’ll need to make a one-time $10 payment to use the app. Annotate works well enough on my iPhone, though I suspect iPad users will get more out of using this app’s many features on their larger-screen devices.
Oli Freke is a musician and journalist whose works have appeared in Sound on Sound, The Quietus, and Mixmag. This has included using math to explore the melodic potential of the Western 12-tone scale and deep dives on effects plug-ins. He's even written a book tracing the evolution of the synthesizer from 1963 through 1995, charting the change from analog to digital and back.
His new project is Beat Gems, a coffee-table visual history of drum machines from publisher Bjooks. Like other Bjooks titles, Beat Gems is loaded with gorgeous photos, fascinating historical tidbits, and practical advice for making the most of your gear, whether it's …
Meta's smart glasses have been a PR headache for the company. Public backlash has been swift, and fierce; people are concerned about the erosion of privacy and expansion of surveillance. Some especially bad actors are using the glasses to film themselves "pranking" random strangers. Women have become unsuspecting social media content for men filming themselves hitting on them without their knowledge. When your product is being referred to as "pervert glasses," you have a problem on your hands.
On Thursday, Business Insider reported that Meta was taking the fairly extraordinary step of banning some content filmed with Meta glasses from the c …
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