Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, and Dialog, a show where creativity meets technology.
He can also be found on his two other podcasts on Relay FM – Connected and Remaster.
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Peek is a new iPhone app that lets developers track their App Store sales data and trends. The app integrates with App Store Connect and displays key metrics like active subscriptions, revenue trends, and top-performing apps through a widget-based UI (both inside the app and with actual widgets on the Home Screen). What caught my attention is how Peek handles data visualization: you can view sales information in your local currency, set custom time ranges, and receive notifications when new data comes in. It’s worth a look if you’re an Apple developer.
In using my Android media tablet more and more lately, I realized that something I should have fixed years ago was annoying me too much: my contacts were not in sync between my Apple devices and the tablet, which is signed into my Google account. This has been an issue for over a decade across all my devices, but since I never used Android in earnest, I largely ignored the problem. With the Lenovo y700 now a permanent part my setup, I decided it was time to dig into my address book and fix the discrepancies between my primary set of contacts (synced with iCloud since the service’s debut in 2011) and…whatever contacts Google had accumulated over the years from my Gmail account. Fortunately, the solution to this was very simple and involved a single iOS app that has been around for a long time: Contacts Sync.
As the name suggests, this utility can sync your iPhone’s contacts with Google Contacts. The way it works is pretty simple: after granting the app access to your iPhone’s contacts (it recommends using only one “source” device at a time) and logging in with your Google account to give it access to Google Contacts, you can choose to enable different types of sync, including automatic, two-way sync between iOS and Google Contacts.
After one year of ownership, Castro’s developers share a behind-the-scenes look at the improvements made to the podcast app’s backend infrastructure, including faster feed updates and increased reliability. (Link)
In a fascinating deep dive into their Apple Health data export, Kieran Healy discovers nearly eight million entries of personal health metrics collected by the iPhone and Apple Watch since 2018. Stay until the end for the graphs. (Link)
Brett Terpstra has a new script that lets you automatically sync Readwise highlights to a DEVONthink database on macOS. (Link)
Gemini’s Deep Research feature, which came out before the namesake ChatGPT mode and can provide you with short essays about any topic found on the web, is now also available in the Gemini app for iPhone users. (Link)
As I mentioned on NPC, over the past year or so, I’ve embarked on a project that’s more or less complete now: I’ve been slowly digitizing my entire collection of old videogames for various platforms, converting all of them to files that I’ve meticulously organized in folders and archived in Dropbox. The process of how I’ve been converting and archiving games will be a topic on a future episode of NPC. What I want to cover here today is a different, although related, problem: as an iPad-only user who no longer owns a Mac, I didn’t know how to transfer all of those online-based folders to an SD card plugged into my iPad Pro.
You see, the reason I wanted to keep everything in Dropbox was simplicity. I test a wide variety of handhelds for NPC, and I wanted to find the fastest, most foolproof way to move my game collection from one device to another. The best solution I’ve found to date is having a single ‘Emulators’ folder stored somewhere locally (whether it’s a USB pen drive or a microSD card), plugging that into the handheld I’m testing, and either accessing those games directly from the external storage or copying them to the device’s internal storage. After a conversion process that took months, I did end up with a folder containing all my games for all the consoles I owned; however, I was constantly running into issues with the Dropbox file provider in the iPad’s Files app, which, unlike Finder, couldn’t reliably keep that ‘Emulators’ folder synced offline at all times.
I recently came across this app, which aims to be an “all-in-one capture board” that supports links, quick notes, and inspirational quotes. Bleep offers a Freesort feature, which lets you arrange cards however you want, as well as Rooms, which are basically folders. I dig the visuals, and I think more apps should support freeform drag and drop. The app syncs with iCloud across iPhone and Mac. Too bad there’s no iPad version yet.
A few months ago, I realized that Reminders wouldn’t be able to scale to my new professional life in 2025.
You see, this year we’re planning to expand and diversify MacStories even further, launching projects that have been years in the making as well as trying some new things that we recently thought of. New projects mean new responsibilities, which in turn lead to more tasks and an increased need to coordinate with different people. I love Reminders, and I think Apple has done a commendable job growing the app over the past few years, but let’s face it: it’s not built for this type of serious, advanced task management. In light of that, I started looking for a new tool to help me in my daily life.
I looked far and wide (and even considered John’s recent favorite, Godspeed), but I realized that all signs were pointing me to return to a product I’d used for years before switching to Things, and eventually Reminders: good old Todoist.
There were several reasons behind my decision to return to Todoist, but the most important one was its web API. I’m convinced that our modern AI era is marking a resurgence of web services, and I wanted to find something that could theoretically support some kind of connection to an AI assistant (such as ChatGPT or Gemini) down the road. At the same time, I also wanted something that could be easily and consistently automated. With more responsibilities coming into my life, it’s essential for me to automate all the boring parts of my job that can happen without my manual, time-consuming input. With the combination of a REST API and native Shortcuts actions, Todoist simply felt like the perfect candidate.
For the past couple months, I’ve been building custom shortcuts on my iPad and iPhone to interact with Todoist. I’ve created shortcuts to save tasks, retrieve details about specific projects and sections, export tasks, and more. In this Academy lesson, I’ll explain the key techniques behind the shortcuts, share the shortcuts themselves, and teach you how you can get started with the Todoist API and build your own shortcuts to automate your task management.
I’m also experimentIng with a new structure for each shortcut highlighted in these lessons that should (hopefully) make everything more digestible and easier to follow along with. (Let me know if that’s not the case!)
