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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.

All Episodes

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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SoundSource 5.8.9

TidBITS ·

2025/10/22

Rogue Amoeba has published SoundSource 5.8.9 with a smattering of updates for the audio control utility. The ARK plug-in (which powers the backend audio handling) is updated to version 12.3.3 to provide support for high-quality USB audio with AirPods Max (USB-C) headphones. The release also ensures DriverKit-based USB devices that lack unique serial numbers work as expected in macOS 26 Tahoe, makes updates to the various workarounds implemented to handle bugs in Tahoe (in anticipation of fixes

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Fantastical 4.1.3

TidBITS ·

2025/10/22

Flexibits has released Fantastical 4.1.3, featuring improved sync reliability with iCloud accounts. The calendar app now allows all users to hide the date on the app icon; fixes Control-clicking issues on Week, Month, and Quarter buttons; addresses a problem that prevented Microsoft Teams meetings from being created; fixes a bug that clipped headers in search results so they wouldn’t display the full date; and updates Meetup API support. ($57 annual subscription includes Cardhop from Flexibits

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iOS 26.1 to Add Optional Opacity to Liquid Glass

TidBITS ·

2025/10/21

I rarely cover beta releases, but after putting hours into “How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface” (9 October 2025), I would be remiss in failing to share that Apple has taken user feedback into account, acknowledging that many people find that Liquid Glass’s excessive use of transparency hurts interface readability. In iOS 26.1 beta 4, Apple introduced a new screen in Settings > Display & Brightness > Liquid Glass, offering a choice between Clear, which is the current Liquid

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GraphicConverter 12.4.3

TidBITS ·

2025/10/21

Lemkesoft has released GraphicConverter 12.4.3 with an app icon updated for macOS 26 Tahoe plus a variety of enhancements. The Swiss Army knife of graphics programs improves layout of dialogs in Tahoe, adds several new AppleScript commands for drawing shapes, adds support for extracting PNGs from LIB files, enables you to scale by percent via the Quick Scale browser context menu, improves MacBinary decoding, resolves a crash that occurred when opening BigTIFFs with a color profile stored with a

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Default Folder X 6.2.2

TidBITS ·

2025/10/21

St. Clair Software has issued Default Folder X 6.2.2 with enhancements and bug fixes for the Open/Save dialog utility. The release now tints icons of folders in the app’s menus when a color tag has been assigned to them, adds support for the Bloom file manager, ensures the toolbar appears more reliably when when using File > Move To > Other, corrects selection and window activation issues in Open and Save dialogs in macOS 26 Tahoe, turns off Tahoe’s distracting animations when

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Visual Intelligence: Occasionally Useful, but Often...

TidBITS ·

2025/10/20

I’ve been exploring the “visual intelligence” aspect of Apple Intelligence in iOS 26 on my iPhone 17 lately, and while it’s not game-changing, it is occasionally useful and can be faster than using a dedicated app. It could be even more successful if it worked more reliably and wasn’t deliberately limited by Apple. (As an aside, it’s odd that Apple, never a company to shy away from attempting to claim everyday words as product or feature names, doesn’t capitalize “visual intelligence” and treat it

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Acorn 8.3

TidBITS ·

2025/10/18

Flying Meat has issued Acorn 8.3 with an option for using the new Liquid Glass user interface in macOS 26 Tahoe. The release also introduces a new Appearance Settings tab that enables you to turn the Liquid Glass palettes on and off. More functionally, the image editor updates the Clone Tool so that it draws the on-canvas brush preview with a bit of transparency for more accurate brushing, improves internal logic for opening images without a file extension, resolves an issue where the app could get

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Neo Network Utility 2.0

TidBITS ·

2025/10/18

DEVONtechnologies has released Neo Network Utility 2.0 with a refreshed design for macOS 26 Tahoe and support for opening multiple windows. The free network discovery, testing, and monitoring tool now enables you to switch tools with menu commands and keyboard commands, adds support for displaying SSID and BSSID when location services is enabled, lets you set a preferred color scheme and accent color, adds an option to select the interface to use for the speed test, fixes a bug that prevented the

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LaunchBar 6.22.1

TidBITS ·

2025/10/18

Objective Development has issued LaunchBar 6.22 with a redesigned index window and Action Editor app, as well as improved compatibility with macOS 26 Tahoe. The keyboard-based launcher adds support for accessing MindNode Next documents, enables accessing of contacts by browsing third-party contact managers (Cardhop and BusyContacts), improves application indexing to include embedded apps of all installed Xcode versions, updates appearance of the Default theme to better match Tahoe, displays just the

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Apple TV and Peacock Bundle Feels Wrong

TidBITS ·

2025/10/17

In a press release, Apple writes:Apple and NBCUniversal today announced the launch of the Apple TV and Peacock Bundle, available beginning October 20. … Customers in the U.S. can save over 30 percent by subscribing to the Apple TV and Peacock Premium bundle for $14.99 per month, or Apple TV and Peacock Premium Plus for $19.99 per month, through either app or website. Apple One subscribers on the Family and Premier plans can subscribe to Peacock Premium Plus and receive a 35 percent discount — the

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New M5 Chip Accelerates the MacBook Pro, iPad Pro,...

TidBITS ·

2025/10/15

Apple can’t be accused of sitting on its hardware laurels. Just a month after launching the iPhone 17 lineup with the new A19 and A19 Pro chips, the company has shifted its attention to the Mac, iPad, and Vision Pro, unveiling models powered by the new M5 system on a chip. The M5 brings unprecedented performance to the base level of the next generation of Apple’s M-series chip family. It features a new 10-core GPU architecture that promises over 4x the peak GPU compute performance of the M4

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Camo Studio 2.4

TidBITS ·

2025/10/13

Reincubate has published Camo Studio 2.4 with improvements to USB device adjustment controls. The virtual camera system boosts interface visibility by displaying a bolt icon next to camera adjustments when they’re controlled via hardware, improves handling of hardware-controlled camera properties across supported devices, ensures iOS devices no longer unpause unexpectedly when the device list changes, addresses a crash that occurred when using iOS 15 Camo Camera devices in the audio tab, and

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Scrivener 3.5

TidBITS ·

2025/10/13

Literature & Latte has released Scrivener 3.5 with support for macOS 26 Tahoe and improvements to alleviate trackpad scrolling lag. The long-form writing tool also receives a new Liquid Glass app icon, works around an Apple bug where lists could take on the formatting of the preceding paragraph, updates text caret resizing code, ensures project search no longer closes the composition mode window if the latter is in a different space, fixes a bug where captions beneath images would not be

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791 results