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The oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet, TidBITS brings you the Apple Macintosh, iPhone, iPad, and iPod news, reviews, tips, and commentary that matters. Join us each week for audio versions of award-winning coverage from industry stalwarts Adam Engst, Glenn Fleishman, Julio Ojeda-Zapata, Michael Cohen, Rich Mogull, Jeff Carlson, Tonya Engst, and others.

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TextExpander 8.4

TidBITS ·

2025/11/10

TextExpander has issued TextExpander 8.4 with a new Date Picker feature. When building snippets, the Date Picker Fill-in lets you select any date (past, present, or future) from a visual calendar and insert it directly into your Snippet as it expands. (Check out this TextExpander blog post, which features an overview video featuring TidBITS alum Josh Centers.) The release also improves sync reliability and fixes issues with renamed or deleted snippet groups not syncing correctly across devices. ($40

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Audio Hijack 4.5.5 and Piezo 1.9.7

TidBITS ·

2025/11/10

Rogue Amoeba has updated Audio Hijack 4.5.4 (full-featured audio recording) and Piezo 1.9.7 (simple audio recording) with full support for macOS 26 Tahoe—Rogue Amoeba recommends macOS 26.1 or higher in the strongest possible terms. The two audio utilities work around a bug in Tahoe that could cause audio to be corrupted and fix a bug related to launch order that could prevent the capture of FaceTime audio. Audio Hijack now supports capturing audio from the new Phone app in Tahoe, ensures choosing a

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Comparing the Classic and Unified Views in iOS 26’s...

TidBITS ·

2025/11/10

I suspect many TidBITS readers are of the generation that still uses the iPhone as a phone. Heck, many of us remember rotary phones that needed actual dialing, and some may even have had party lines, which were, sadly, a lot less fun than they sound now. Since then, phones have switched to keypads, gone cordless, shrunk and grown again, and become our constant companions. As a result, we’ve grown accustomed to the iPhone’s Phone app, and for the most part, it works reasonably well. Nonetheless,

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Tahoe’s Terrible Icons, Another Take

TidBITS ·

2025/11/05

A few months ago, we pointed to an Apple icon comparison (see “BasicAppleGuy’s macOS Icon History,” 9 September 2025). Now Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba has weighed in with another look at how Apple’s app icons have changed in macOS 26 Tahoe. Paul writes:On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a

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Apple Launches Unified App Store Website

TidBITS ·

2025/11/04

With no fanfare, Apple has launched a new App Store website that brings together the individual platform stores for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, visionOS, watchOS, and tvOS. It’s a well-designed, responsive site that adjusts well to different screen and window sizes. You can switch between stores, browse categories, search for apps, view each app’s full entry, and share a link via Messages and to apps with sharing extensions. You can’t copy the URL directly from the share sheet, but you can grab it from your

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Six Colors Charts Apple’s Fiscal 2025

TidBITS ·

2025/11/04

At Six Colors, Jason Snell writes: Being that Apple’s fiscal 2025 has now concluded, it’s time for a second set of colorful financial charts, ones that take the longer view and show the changes in Apple’s business over an entire year. Let’s dig into the charts, starting with the big one, overall Apple revenue for the last 27 years: While we like covering Apple’s quarterly reports to contextualize where the company is going throughout the year, Jason’s charts of Apple’s annual performance give a

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OS 26.1 Updates Bring Small Improvements

TidBITS ·

2025/11/04

A week later than past release patterns suggested, Apple has pushed out the 26.1 versions of all its operating systems. iOS and iPadOS receive the most changes, while macOS gets a subset, visionOS adds just a couple, and watchOS, tvOS, and HomePod Software see only bug fixes. Shared iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS 26.1 Improvements For many things, Apple tries to keep its operating systems in feature parity, so changes appear in multiple operating systems at once. As I wrote in “iOS 26.1 to Add

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1Password 8.11.16

TidBITS ·

2025/11/03

1Password has issued 1Password 8.11.16, adding ChatGPT Atlas as a trusted Web browser. (As a counterpoint, also see “Be Cautious with Agentic Web Browsers,” 1 November 2025.) The password manager now adds breadcrumb navigation to the SSH Agent and CLI pages, resolves an issue where 1Password’s main window could unexpectedly take focus away from other apps, fixes a bug that could prevent you from unlocking the app if it was closed during sign-in, ensures icons load significantly faster across the

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Transmit 5.11.1

TidBITS ·

2025/11/03

Panic has released Transmit 5.11.1, adding support for renaming files larger than 5 GB in AWS S3. The file transfer app also updates the default connection address for DreamObjects, addresses a potential crash when dragging files out of Transmit, fixes a problem that would cause the selection to change unexpectedly in column view, avoids a crash that could occur in column view when displaying the contextual menu, ensures opening folders using keyboard shortcuts works as expected, and fixes a bug

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Be Cautious with Agentic Web Browsers

TidBITS ·

2025/11/01

At The Verge, Robert Hart writes:In the past few weeks alone, researchers have uncovered vulnerabilities in Atlas allowing attackers to take advantage of ChatGPT’s “memory” to inject malicious code, grant themselves access privileges, or deploy malware. Flaws discovered in Comet could allow attackers to hijack the browser’s AI with hidden instructions. Perplexity, through a blog, and OpenAI’s chief information security officer, Dane Stuckey, acknowledged prompt injections as a big threat last week,

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Canva’s Affinity Combines Photo, Designer, and...

TidBITS ·

2025/10/31

The market for high-end graphic design software just got weirder. Several years ago, I wrote “Consider Switching from Creative Cloud to Affinity V2” (5 December 2022) to encourage those who were paying significant monthly fees to Adobe for Creative Cloud to check out a competing trio of apps from a company called Serif. Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher gave Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign a run for their money. They may not have fully matched up to Adobe’s powerhouse apps, but they

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Services, Mac, and iPhone Drive Apple’s Q4 2025...

TidBITS ·

2025/10/31

$102.5 billion: that’s how much revenue Apple generated in its fourth fiscal quarter of 2025. That mind-boggling figure is a September-quarter record and is 8% higher than the same quarter last year (see “Apple Sets Q4 2024 Revenue Record on Services and iPhone Growth,” 1 November 2024). Of that revenue, $27.5 billion was profit, driven by double-digit annual growth in the Services and Mac categories and 6% growth in the iPhone segment. Services revenues set an all-time record, and iPhone revenues

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Can Agentic Web Browsers Count?

TidBITS ·

2025/10/30

Everyone and their dog is now releasing a Web browser with a built-in chatbot. At last check, that includes at least: Brave, from the company of the same name ChatGPT Atlas, from OpenAI Comet, from Perplexity Dia, from The Browser Company (now owned by Atlassian) Edge, from Microsoft Google Chrome (not yet available to me since I don’t subscribe to Gemini) Opera Neon, by Opera (I’m still on the waitlist) Apart from the last two, I’ve played with each of these a bit, mainly by asking questions

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Cardhop 2.4.2

TidBITS ·

2025/10/29

Flexibits has published Cardhop 2.4.2 with a dollop of improvements and bug fixes for the contact management app. The release adds an option to export a list as a vCard, improves the Perform Contact Action shortcut by offering the option to search for a contact, adds support for adding a Threads username to a contact card, resolves an issue where YouTube URLs were incorrectly detected as Mastodon URLs, fixes a bug where alerts could appear off-screen, ensures actions performed via the Perform

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Lightroom Classic 15.0

TidBITS ·

2025/10/29

Adobe has issued Lightroom Classic 15 with several new features and performance updates. The desktop-focused photo cataloging and editing app introduces the AI-powered Assisted Culling feature to help select the best shots from a large set of images; enables you to stack your images based on time and visual similarity; improves performance while cropping (especially with Soft proofing enabled); adds a Dust Removal feature to help remove dust spots in a photo; brings faster image previews while

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Modern CSV 2.2.4

TidBITS ·

2025/10/29

Gallium Digital has released Modern CSV 2.2.4, a maintenance update loaded with bug fixes. The CSV manipulation app resolves an issue where Save File As ignored the line ending chosen in Save Parameters, solves a false delimiter-length warning when saving files with no delimiters, improves the ability to type Japanese characters, fixes a bug that caused Save Visible Data As to be disabled in some circumstances, addresses a crash when closing a tab while editing in the editor pane, and ensures newly

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Does Deleting Voicemail Free Up iPhone Storage?

TidBITS ·

2025/10/27

Did you know that voicemail messages are stored on your iPhone? I hadn’t thought about it until yesterday, when Tonya and I were flying home from Vancouver after visiting our son Tristan. I was working on an article about the new Phone app in iOS 26—while in airplane mode, of course—when I accidentally tapped a voicemail message… and was surprised when it played. Scrolling to the bottom of the Voicemail screen revealed hundreds of voicemail messages I’ve received since May 2018, including many from

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BusyCal 2025.4.1 and BusyContacts 2025.4.1

TidBITS ·

2025/10/27

Busy Apps has released BusyCal 2025.4.1 and BusyContacts 2025.4.1. BusyCal introduces new options to automatically include travel time whenever a location is added, provides a setting to select a default origin for travel time, adds cycling as a mode of travel for time calculation, and adds a Format Menu option for strikethrough (Command-Shift-S). The calendar app also gains an option to turn off copying event duration when using event suggestions, improves compatibility with additional CalDAV

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Timing 2025.8

TidBITS ·

2025/10/27

Daniel Gräfe has released Timing 2025.8, adding the capability to track the billing status of your time entries. After enabling billing status tracking in Timing’s preferences, you can set a default billing status for new time entries and track the lifecycle through billable, billed, and paid statuses. The time and productivity tracking app also enables you to select multiple time entries and make bulk billing updates, filter reports by billing status, and use a new AppleScript command to

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Nisus Writer: Schrödinger’s Word Processor

TidBITS ·

2025/10/25

At this moment, Nisus Writer is essentially Schrödinger’s word processor: it is simultaneously dead and alive, and there’s no way to know more than that right now. We do know that apps, like cats, don’t live long without care and feeding. So, the longer it takes to open the metaphorical box, the more likely it is that it will contain a dead word processor.Nisus Writer Pro and its sibling Nisus Writer Express (collectively, “Nisus Writer”) are Mac word processors from Nisus Software that have

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804 results