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.

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462 — April 18, 2025

Allergy Plus by Pollen.com →

John

MACSTORIES RECOMMENDS

Great apps, accessories, gear, and media recommended by the MacStories team.

Allergy Plus by Pollen.com

John

I’ve always suffered from seasonal allergies, but things got worse when I moved to North Carolina, and global warming isn’t helping. In the spring, there is so much tree pollen that it blankets everything outside in a fine dusting of greenish yellow that peaks in April, until it’s finally washed away by the rain.

There are a lot of apps for tracking pollen levels on the App Store, but many are semi-abandoned or not very good to begin with. So after a particularly bad week of allergies, I went looking for an app that offered a pollen forecast and integrated with my Home and Lock Screens.

462 — April 18, 2025

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

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

Federico

Long Ago: Habit & Life Tracker

Long Ago, the habit and life tracker by Oscar Bazaldua, received a big update this week with version 1.3, adding a fully native Apple Watch app so you can log activities and follow progress right from your wrist. The new watch complications mean your activity stats are always a glance away, and the new chart widgets let you keep an eye on your habits from the Home Screen. The update is definitely worth another try if you first tested the app when it came out late last year.

462 — April 18, 2025

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

Federico

Geoffrey Litt shows how they built a simple but effective (and very polite!) personal AI assistant called “Stevens” using just a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs. I wish I had the dev skills to also pull this off. (Link)

Anders Thoresson writes about using LLMs for “vibe monitoring,” a new approach to media monitoring that relies on LLM intuition rather than classic keyword filters. Fascinating project. (Link)

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461 — April 11, 2025

China and AI: Apple’s Rock and Hard Place

John

MACSTORIES EXTRAS

China and AI: Apple’s Rock and Hard Place

John

Between U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods and the company’s lack of AI advancements, Apple has found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Meet the Rock: U.S. Tariffs

Most of Apple’s hardware is made in China, and a 145% tariff on Chinese goods bound for the U.S. will significantly increase the company’s costs.

461 — April 11, 2025

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

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

Federico

Preshow Theater

I discovered this app a few days ago, and if you’re the kind of person who still misses the old iTunes Trailers app, this one is meant for you. Preshow Theater lets you watch the latest trailers for upcoming movies in a native video player on visionOS, iOS, and iPadOS with up to 4K resolution. Amusingly, the Vision Pro app lets you watch trailers in a drive-in virtual environment, which I tested and found so funny and nostalgic despite having never been to a drive-in myself.

461 — April 11, 2025

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

John

Jennifer Quellette covered a NatGeo documentary for Ars Technica that recounts how researchers used a detailed 3D scan of the Titanic to gain new insights about the ship’s sinking. (Link)

Dan Goodin, also writing for Ars Technica, reported on how OpenAI’s ChatGPT was used to send more than 80,000 spam messages over at least four months. (Link)

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460 — April 4, 2025

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

Federico

As first reported by Semafor, Google’s Sissie Hsiao is stepping down as head of the Gemini app and will be replaced by Josh Woodward, who led Google Labs and developed NotebookLM. Given how beloved NotebookLM is these days, this seems like a good change for the company. (Link)

Ace is a new “computer autopilot” that can perform tasks on your desktop using your mouse and keyboard. This is yet another “computer use agent” like those we’ve seen pop up recently, but the company’s claims about the model they’ve created do sound impressive, and all the shared demos were recorded in real time. Worth keeping an eye on. (Link)