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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.

495 — January 9, 2026

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

I expect AR glasses to become more mainstream in 2026 as prices start to fall while the tech has improved. One sign on the tech side is innovations like those from Lumus, a company that Engadget profiled this week, which has greatly improved the field of view for AR glasses. (Link)

It feels like Goldman Sachs began signaling that it wanted out of its deal with Apple on the Apple Card almost as soon as it launched. This week, their wish was finally granted as Chase took over the reins. (Link)

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495 — January 9, 2026

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

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

OmniOutliner 6

This week, The Omni Group released OmniOutliner 6, a big update to their outlining app for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro. With this release, OmniOutliner is now a universal purchase, meaning one payment buys you the app on each of the Apple platforms they support. There are two versions: Essentials, which is $24.99, and Pro, which is $99, although upgraders can save 50%.

The app has been updated for Liquid Glass throughout, and features that used to be exclusive to some platforms are now available everywhere. In addition, OmniOutliner has a new theme picker, supports light and dark modes, and integrates with The Omni Group’s Omni Links system that allows users to leverage cloud services for sharing and syncing outlines. Apple Intelligence features have been added throughout, too. Sadly, although the app supports exporting to PDF, HTML, RTF, plain text, and spreadsheets, Markdown is still not an option.

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495 — January 9, 2026

How iTunes Shaped the Apple of Today

MACSTORIES EXTRAS

More stories for Club members.

How iTunes Shaped the Apple of Today

iTunes 1.0. Source: Ars Technica.

25 years ago, Apple introduced iTunes, an app for managing your digital music collection that evolved into a media jack-of-all-trades in the years that followed. It’s hard to overstate iTunes’ importance to today’s Apple, even though it’s been years since the app last existed on any of its hardware. iTunes’ story is a reflection of the modern history of Apple itself, shifting from a company that made software to support hardware sales to one where software just as often sells Apple’s services. So for this week’s MacStories Extra column, I thought I’d look back at some pivotal points in iTunes’ history and consider how it helped shape Apple and music itself.

SoundJam MP. Source: Wikipedia.

Few apps have had such a profound effect on Apple as iTunes, which is really saying something for an app that started its life as SoundJam MP, a third-party Mac-only app for organizing your music. However, not long after iTunes’ January 2001 launch, the first iPod was introduced, and the two together became an unstoppable force in the years to come by making it easy to copy your CDs and load them onto your iPod, leading Apple to take over the nascent MP3 player market in just a few years. Those sales added wind to the sails of Apple’s already improving financial footing after the company’s near-death experience in the late ‘90s.

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Monthly Log — December 30, 2025

Why I Came Around on Notion

Why I Came Around on Notion

It’s fair to say that in 2025 I changed my mind about Notion, or at least, I’ve come to realize that its strengths make putting up with its quirks worth the effort. In fact, I think Notion is positioned to become the universal workspace it has always aspired to be. The company seems to feel the same way, with rumors that it will file for an IPO in 2026. So as we look ahead to the new year, I thought I’d look back at why I didn’t stick with Notion in the past, and what’s changed.

The thing I never liked about Notion is its block-based structure. For writing and editing, I greatly prefer working in Markdown in a plain text editor. Block-based editors like Notion have always felt like web-based WYSIWYG editors to me. The text selection is more fiddly than plain text and the text formatting gets in the way. Over time, Notion’s editor has improved, which I appreciate when I’m using it, but for MacStories writing, I’m still using Obsidian, not only because it’s a plain text editor, but because I can also customize it to suit my particular writing needs. What’s changed is that I’ve moved everything else to Notion, including notes, research, and production and administrative tracking that I used to do in Obsidian.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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