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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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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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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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775 results