Find Federico on MastodonFind John on MastodonFind Alex on MastodonFind Club MacStories on Mastodon

John Voorhees

Managing Editor

Mastodon: @johnvoorhees@macstories.netEmail: voorhees@macstories.net

John, MacStories’ Managing Editor, has been writing about Apple and apps since joining the team in 2015. He also co-hosts MacStories’ podcasts, including AppStories, which explores of the world of apps, MacStories Unwind, a weekly recap of everything MacStories and more, and MacStories Unplugged, a behind-the-scenes, anything-goes show exclusively for Club MacStories members.

494 — December 19, 2025

Rethinking the Studio Display

THE EXTENSION

Exploring topics beyond our day-to-day coverage.

Rethinking the Studio Display

As I detailed yesterday, I recently abandoned my Apple Studio Display for a 4K OLED gaming display from ASUS. I like my new monitor a lot, but it left me disappointed in Apple because its Studio Display could be so much more than it is.

The Studio Display has a lot going for it. First of all, 5K resolution makes macOS look terrific. The ASUS is just 4K, and while I realize that’s a deal-breaker for many Mac users, as a practical matter, the ASUS’ advantages have easily outweighed it for me.

READ MORE

494 — December 19, 2025

Our Holiday Schedule

Our Holiday Schedule

As many of you probably know, we always take a little time off during the winter holidays to recharge and spend time with our families and friends. This year is no different. The website will be quieter than usual for a couple of weeks, and this is the last issue of MacStories Weekly for the year. Weekly will be back on Friday, January 9. The Monthly Log for December will be published as usual before the end of the month.

As for podcasts, there’s one more episode of AppStories, MacStories Unwind, and NPC coming next week, with all three shows then taking a two-week break. There will be an episode of Cozy Zone for subscribers next week, too, but Comfort Zone is taking the week off. Also, First, Last, Everything and Magic Rays of Light are currently on hiatus. Their return dates haven’t been set yet, but we’ll let you know when they resume.

READ MORE

494 — December 19, 2025

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

If you’re looking for a good long-form read about something a little different over the holidays, this GQ article by Elizabeth Nelson does a great job capturing The Replacements’ at their peak in 1984, an interesting time in music that also saw Prince’s rise from local Minneapolis act to superstar status. (Link)

On a recent episode of NPC XL, Brendon explained how he’d turned a gaming handheld into an iPod. He also mentioned the Snowsky Fiio Echo Mini, a DAP (Digital Audio Player) that looks like a cassette player. That sent me on a bit of a Google search tangent, where I found this great story about the device by Gita Jackson on Aftermath. (Link)

READ MORE

494 — December 19, 2025

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.

miSales

miSales is a new App Store Connect companion app to help developers make sense of the firehose of sales data Apple offers. The app, which is available on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, is free to download and use for tracking net sales, net proceeds, and refunds. The free version also offers charts that display data from recent days. Subscribing to miSales Pro extends the app’s capabilities with configurable widgets for your Lock and Home Screens, notifications of new data from App Store Connect, historical data, and multi-vendor integration. It’s worth noting, too, that the data is all processed locally on your device once it’s been pulled from App Store Connect.

READ MORE

Only Premier members can view this post on Club MacStories.

Already a Club Premier member? Sign in

493 — December 12, 2025

How Using AI Tools Can Be Like Asking for a Book Recommendation From a Friend

MACSTORIES EXTRAS

More stories for Club members.

How Using AI Tools Can Be Like Asking for a Book Recommendation From a Friend

Today, I want to talk about the fuzzy art of book recommendations and how they relate to AI by posing a hypothetical: imagine you’re a lapsed reader and haven’t read fiction or followed books for a decade. You resolve to get back into reading and want to increase the chances that you become a fiction reader again by picking a good mystery because that’s a genre you enjoyed years ago. The trouble is where to start to find a mystery you’ll like.

There are lots of ways to approach this kind of problem. You could ask friends and family for recommendations, ask people online what they like, dive into reviews from publications you respect, or pore over sales charts. These are all common approaches, but each is limited in its own way. Your tastes may not align with those of people recommending books to you, reading lots of reviews takes time that might be better spent reading your book, and sales charts are a pretty rough approximation of quality. But because you want to get reading and not research endlessly, you choose a way to approach the problem, pick a book, and hope for the best, knowing full well that you’re operating on incomplete, imprecise inputs.

READ MORE

493 — December 12, 2025

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

Bluetooth’s Auracast technology promises to revolutionize audio sharing by letting devices connect to broadcasts without pairing. I find this extremely fascinating. However, despite support from companies like JBL, Samsung, and LG, the feature remains largely unknown to consumers, which is too bad. (Link)

Spotify is rolling out a beta feature called ‘Prompted Playlists’ in New Zealand that lets users type AI prompts to generate custom playlists based on their instructions and listening history. I like this idea, and I think Apple Music should steal it in the future…whenever Apple gets their AI act together. (Link)

READ MORE

493 — December 12, 2025

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.

Shiuli

Shiuli is a new utility for iPhone and iPad (from the creators of longtime favorite LookUp) that aims to solve a common problem: adding alt text descriptions to images shared online. In my experience, most people don’t add alt text to images on social media not because they don’t care about accessibility, but because writing them takes time and effort – which is something I’m guilty of, too. Shiuli uses AI to generate readable descriptions for your photos that you can then edit to match your style before copying them to Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, or wherever else you’re posting. What I find most interesting about Shiuli is that you don’t have to open the app at all; it integrates with Shortcuts, Visual Intelligence, and the share sheet, so you can get image descriptions from anywhere on iOS or iPadOS. This is one of the good uses of generative AI that can make the web a better place for everyone, and I’m going to incorporate this app into my workflow.

READ MORE

493 — December 12, 2025

Easy Ways To Support Your Favorite Creators

TIPS

Tips and tricks to master your apps and be more productive.

Easy Ways To Support Your Favorite Creators

First, I want to go on record that I’m not a fan of the word “creator.” It’s not as bad as “influencer” as far as words go, but still, I don’t like it. However, since what I’m going to suggest applies to a wide range of people making videos and podcasts, writing, developing apps and games, and more, I’m sort of stuck with “creator.”

Terminology aside, I thought I’d share some of the ways you can support your favorite creators in the spirit of the holiday season. The obvious way to do that is financially, whether it’s buying what they make directly, tipping them, joining a Patreon, subscribing, or whatever. I talk with a lot of creative people, and many are struggling to continue what they do, so if you have a favorite creator and can afford to buy something from them, by all means, do so. I like to think of it as “shopping local.” The Amazons, Apples, and other big companies get plenty of my money, but a purchase I make means more to the indie creators who I care about, so I support them as much as I can.

READ MORE

Only Premier members can view this post on Club MacStories.

Already a Club Premier member? Sign in

NEXT PAGE