By Dan Moren

August 13, 2026 2:20 PM PT

Review: SuperDuper! 4 gets a stem-to-stern revamp, but is just as seaworthy as ever

Backups, as any computer user knows, are worth their weight in gold. If it isn’t backed up, it might as well might not exist. That’s why I have for years trusted ShirtPocket’s SuperDuper! to ensure that all my data is safe and sound. And now, for the first time in a very long time, the venerable backup utility has gotten a top-to-bottom update that brings it into the modern era without sacrificing any of the features—and, most importantly, the reliability—that its users have come to depend on.

While SuperDuper! 4 may look like an entirely new beast, its history has stuck around. It still explains what it’s doing in plain English. It still allows you to make complete, bootable backups. It still has its excellent Smart Update option to optimize the copying process.

But it’s gotten some significant updates too. There’s a new interface, for starters, which conforms to Apple’s current Liquid Glass aesthetic, love it or hate it. It’s a bit of a shock to the system after so long without a change, but it’s hard to deny that the old look had grown somewhat antiquated. The result is an app that makes backups as simple and straightforward as they should be, so that anyone can figure it out: click here to set your destination, choose what method, and click Go.

The changes to SuperDuper! 4 also run more than just skin deep. For example, it’s considerably faster than the previous version—up to an order magnitude faster using the new Turbo implementation of Smart Update, according to Shirt Pocket. That’s born out in my real-world usage. For example, my last nightly backup of 20.55GB took less than 4 minutes.

There are new capabilities here, too. A new Preview feature lets you perform a dry run of your copy job, letting you see every file that will be changed without actually doing any of it. With a new background helper app, copies won’t interrupt whatever you’re doing. And there’s Shortcuts support, so you can run a workflow when your copy job is completed—or even have one of your shortcuts kick off a copy job.

I’ve been using betas of SuperDuper! 4 for a month or so now, and what’s impressed me most is how much it maintains that set-it-and-forget-it strength of the previous versions. The most important thing for a backup is that element of reliability, so when I open up the app and see “31 successful in a row” note, I know that my data is right where it should be. And if something goes wrong, it’s easier than ever to see what happened: click on a failed job and you’ll get the details, including an Apple Intelligence-powered summary of the job. (You can get that for completed jobs too.)

There are way more features here too, ones that I just don’t have much reason to use for my purposes, but might just well be what you’re looking for. For example, copy rules that let you handle certain files and folders in granular ways, such as excluding certain ones from backups; support for any file system that macOS understands; and there’s support for multiple copy jobs at the same time, even for those that are scheduled.

Backup apps may not be the most exciting software category, but I dare you to find one that’s more crucial. For me, SuperDuper! has done the job for years and I’ve never had any reason to complain about it. Nothing about that seems poised to change with version 4.

SuperDuper! 4 requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. A free trial version lets you make unlimited full erase backups, but to unlock the rest of the features requires a one-time payment of $43.95. There’s also an upgrade discount for owners of SuperDuper 3 of up to 30 percent. (And, if you bought version 3 very recently, you may be able to get version 4 for free.) And good news: if you need to run backups on older systems, SuperDuper 3 is sticking around.

For everybody who’s already backing up their Macs, SuperDuper! 4 may offer some new features and speed increases that will make the process even smoother. For those of you who aren’t yet…what are you waiting for?

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

August 12, 2026 2:50 PM PT

MLB hires indie Mosaic app developer

Formerly indie developer Jason Weingardt, on Threads:

Some personal news: I’ve joined the team at Major League Baseball, and the Mosaic app has come with me. The last 3+ months have, without question, been the wildest of my life. I’m beyond thankful to MLB for the chance to help shape how fans experience baseball, and even more thankful to the community of fans around the world who tried Mosaic, filed bug reports and feature requests, and helped shape it along the way.

We believe Mosaic can be a valuable tool to help learn more about what fans want…. I will keep working on Mosaic as part of my job…. Most importantly: Mosaic is sticking around. Features may come and go, but my ask is that you continue to write in with your feedback about what you like, don’t like, and what you’d want to see in a baseball app. I’m excited for what’s next, and I hope you are too.

Mosaic is a baseball app that’s been in TestFlight for a few months. (Scroll back through Weingardt’s Threads history for details.) From the moment I saw it, I was dazzled—it’s a great iOS baseball app that uses all of Apple’s platform technologies to lay out live game data and show off other MLB features in ways that MLB’s own app just doesn’t. And it even integrated with MLB TV, so if you’re a subscriber to MLB’s premium video service, you can watch games via Mosaic, including in the most mind-blowing multiview I’ve seen.

I don’t want to lean too much into the current state of the official MLB app, but it used to be so cutting-edge and great that when I was at Macworld, we gave it a zillion awards and ended up just inducting it into our “app hall of fame.” But over the years, that app has become generic and unfocused and one-size-fits-all. It is no longer a joy to use.

So Jason Weingardt wrote Mosaic, by himself, and it’s a properly great iOS app (that also runs on iPad and Mac and, as of today, Apple TV). I ran into Weingardt at WWDC and he was so happy that people had already fallen in love with his own personal semi-secret passion project.

We all pretty much expected Mosaic to be crushed by MLB once it figured out what was going on. No matter that it was using public APIs and honoring MLB’s own premium content subscriptions, it just felt like the kind of thing that was too good to be true.

Instead, to their immense credit, MLB hired Weingardt, and Mosaic is now apparently a part of MLB’s digital strategy. I almost can’t believe it. It’s the best possible outcome for Weingardt, MLB, and baseball fans with Apple devices.

I’m so happy to think that MLB’s apps may now be on a trajectory to go back to where they belong—in the app hall of fame.

By Jason Snell

August 12, 2026 10:53 AM PT

TerminalWidget makes custom widget building easy

I’m a huge fan of displaying ambient information in my computer interfaces, which on my Mac tends to involve putting data about weather, solar power and the like in my menu bar, so it’s available at a glance. My tool of choice for this is SwiftBar, itself a follow-on to BitBar (which has been rebooted as xbar). On my iPad, I’ve been using custom widgets generated with Simon Støvring’s Scriptable app to do the job.

Now here’s a new contender that generates widgets on both Mac and iOS: Brett Terpstra’s $20 TerminalWidget, which lets you send data to a widget from a command-line script, Shortcut, AppleScript, or a URL scheme.

Widgets are more complicated than little items that live in the menu bar. That’s why Scriptable uses little JavaScript scripts to build them. TerminalWidget has a basic set of terminology that lets you target specific widgets and provides some pre-filled functionality that lets you generate some design elements without much hassle. It’ll also just… take text you give it and display it if you want.

If you’re working via Shortcuts, you can update TerminalWidget using a bunch of different template types: Chart, Image, Progress, Table, or Text. Just as with the command line, each Shortcuts action contains a bunch of variables, so you can customize colors and fonts, add a caption and title, or other things that help fill out TerminalWidget’s templates. It’s by design a lot less flexible than something like Scriptable, where the sky’s the limit—but it’s also a lot more approachable, since you’re basically filling in the blanks with whatever data you want to provide.

I wasn’t really able to replicate my beloved Scriptable weather widget in TerminalWidget—not flexible enough—but TerminalWidget also supports straight-up image use, which allowed me to generate the contents of my Scriptable widget via script, output it as an image, and then tell TerminalWidget to load that image. So if you wanted to offload widget duties to your Mac or a remote server, you could do that and just display the image in TerminalWidget.

In a way, TerminalWidget turns its limitation (lack of flexibility) into a strength, because the learning curve is so gentle, especially if you use Shortcuts, which literally shows you every single possible variable you could possibly use, so you can tinker and figure out what you want to display. Dr. Drang is using it for planetary positions, because that tickles his fancy. If there’s something you’d like to put on a glanceable widget across iPad, iPhone, and Mac, TerminalWidget will let you do it. That’s a beautiful thing. Now I need to figure out what widgets to add to my own devices…

By Philip Michaels

August 12, 2026 8:32 AM PT

App report: Talk back and track on a Mac

Clearly, creating Mac apps that make the most of your voice continues to be a focus of developers — at least based on the offerings coming across my radar lately. Following last week’s profile of two different takes on on-device transcription software, we’ve got yet another voice-powered app to take a look at, with this macOS download supporting dictation that you can then paste into other apps.

But other apps are finding different ways to make some noise, including a pair of simple-yet-satisfying utilities and an old favorite that’s learned some new tricks. If you’ve got an app that you’d like to bring to our attention, let us hear about it at apps@sixcolors.com, adding a brief description on what the app does and what devices it supports.

And now, on to the business at hand. Or at voice, as the case may be.

Lesskeys

Some times, it’s better to dictate than to type, and Lesskeys looks to make that process as simple as possible. With the app running in your menu bar, just hit a hotkey — it’s Option-Period by default — to start recording your dulcet tones. As you speak, your words are captured in a clipboard that you can copy and paste into any app once you stop recording by tapping the hotkey again. Alternatively, you can also hold down the hotkey to jot down quick thoughts with the recording stopping once you release the keys.

Lesskeys’ bag of tricks extends beyond just dictation. There’s a command for recording phone calls made through your Mac, and you can also import audio and video files to be transcribed. Additionally, the app boasts the ability to identify speakers when you record conversations. Power users will also appreciate how Lesskeys lets you set up different configurations for different apps, such as a different language, model or prompt when a particular app is in the foreground.

Lesskeys is free to download, but you’re limited to 5 minutes of dictation per day, along with five audio and video transcriptions each. That should be enough of a ceiling to test out the app and decided whether it’s worth the one-time $49.99 Pro license to remove any restrictions.

PeekNote

If you’re like me, you put the Mac’s clipboard through quite a workout, copy and pasting various text snippets, URLs and other captured material into different apps. And if you’re even more like me, you wind up using a lot of the same snippets and URLs over and over again. PeekNote is a handy macOS utility that keeps frequently used snippets close at hand.

Essentially, PeekNote is a floating window where you can stack multiple bits of text to paste into any window on your desktop. As I’m applying for a lot of jobs at the moment, I can use the PeekNote window to stash links to articles and other parts of my profile that I frequently use in cover letters and web forms.

Pay a one-time $9.99 fee, and you unlock the full app, which includes the ability to create 22 different tabs for organizing related text blocks. The unlocked version of PeekNote also lifts any limitations on the number of blocks.

If I had a suggestion for PeekNote, it would be to make it easier to shrink the app window so that it only expands when you need access to one of the text blocks you’ve got stored in there. But otherwise, it’s a fine utility when you want frequently used links and snippets to be right at your fingertips.

Carrot Weather

If you’ve looked beyond the built-in Weather app on your iPhone, you doubtlessly have some familiarity with Carrot Weather and its… unique take on delivering the forecast. The app, which works across a host of Apple devices including the Mac, Apple Watch and Vision Pro, tells you the weather with attitude, using a sliding snark scale that you can adjust to your liking. Additionally, as you can see from this 2023 Six Colors profile, developer Grailr has built some other high-end capabilities and customization features into the app, the more intriguing of which are positioned behind a paywall.

Carrot Weather is worth revisiting these days thanks to an added feature that arrived over the summer — a trip planner capability for the iPhone version that lets you track the forecast for any upcoming getaways. I’ve got a trip to Detroit in my immediate future, and when I head over to the Locations section of Carrot Weather, I can see that I had better pack an umbrella for the thunderstorm that’s forecast on at least one day of my trip.

The 6.7 update to Carrot Weather also introduced new custom notifications that alert you when a data point hits a certain threshold — say, a temperature drop or a rise in UV index levels. Both the Trip Planner and custom notification features require a Premium Ultra subscription that costs $9.99/month.

SmartTracker

With holiday shopping ramping up in the next few months, you’re going to want to stay on top of pricing to make sure that you’re paying the best price for anything on your wish list. Certainly, there are websites where you can do that — CamelCamelCamel is one of the better ones in my opinion — but an app like SmartTracker can pull off the same task while keeping your search data entirely on your Mac.

Enter a URL into the SmartTracker app, and it will do the watching for you; you’re even able to set a target price and get a notification should the object of your desire hit that magic number. Several other features such as home screen widgets, Siri shortcuts and collections for grouping items together will appeal to power shoppers.

SmartTracker runs on macOS, iOS and iPadOS, though I only looked at the Mac version of the app. You can track up to five items and manage three collections when you download the app, but paying $6.99/year (or a one-time $19.99 payment) gets rid of those limits.

TuckBar

Utilities don’t come any simpler than TuckBar, which performs one task but does it well. You use the macOS utility to hide away the menu bar on displays of your choosing, only to bring it back the moment you move back toward the top edge of the screen.

That’s going to be welcome functionality if you use multiple displays and want to keep some of them truly uncluttered, while letting you keep the comfort of the menu bar on (presumably) your primary display. TuckBar mimics the appearance of your desktop wallpaper to obscure the menu bar, or if you prefer, the utility features a slider to turn down the menu bar’s brightness.

Normally, TuckBar costs $3 to download, though at time of writing, the app was free as part of a limited-time promotion.

[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]

By Glenn Fleishman

August 10, 2026 11:00 AM PT

Recovery Key storage transition highlights Apple’s privacy and obscurity

We trust Apple with a lot of our data. In general, that hasn’t seemed like a bad idea; in particular, compared to its competitors, Apple seems to ensure that it can inspect or interact with very little of our data. The company has built its platform and its reputation on being an elegant, frictionless, hands-off conduit. While we can make many complaints about Liquid Glass, its increased focus on invasive (and poor) advertising, its software quality, and much else, Apple has kept its corporate nose cleaner than anybody else. Its transparency and documentation are, oddly, worse than its actions and clear intent.

I was thinking about this when I received an email from an anonymized iCloud Hide My Email account, asking for more detail about how Apple managed the transition from the old method of presenting or escrowing (in iCloud) your macOS FileVault Recovery Key to the new method, in which the key is stored in Passwords. This transition, which I’ve documented in a few places, was a step forward in privacy and security.

But not transparency! I’ll explain, but you can’t find an explanation on Apple’s site about the transition. The support documentation remains out of sync with Tahoe. That leaves it to yours truly to explicate.

Continue reading “Recovery Key storage transition highlights Apple’s privacy and obscurity”…

By Jason Snell

August 10, 2026 8:00 AM PT

Apple to air four MLB games in Immersive Video

This is turning out to be the year of immersive sports.

In January, Apple worked with Spectrum and the L.A. Lakers to debut a series of immersive NBA games. And beginning August 28, it’ll be airing a live immersive Major League Baseball game every Friday night for the rest of the Friday Night Baseball season.

Unlike the NBA games, which were limited to cable subscribers, these games are part of Apple’s own Friday Night Baseball package and will be available to all Apple TV subscribers with a Vision Pro. (In Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK, and the U.S., anyway.)

As with the NBA games, this will be an immersive-specific telecast with its own announcers (Paul Severino, Xavier Scruggs, Michelle Margaux), replays, and graphics. Apple says that during commercial breaks, viewers will “stay immersed in the in-stadium experience from all angles.”

As always, the details will be fascinating to see. While I thought that the immersive NBA games were pretty good, some viewers complained that there were too many changes in camera angle that broke immersion. Baseball is a very different sport, in terms of pace and in the size of the field, so it’ll be interesting to see how Apple chooses to approach its coverage.

The four immersive games on the schedule are: Red Sox at Yankees (August 28), Angels at Pirates (September 4), Padres at Giants (September 11), and Giants at Dodgers (September 18).

By Philip Michaels

August 6, 2026 12:09 PM PT

App report: Listen, read… checkmate

Your voice may be your passport, as a certain Robert Redford picture once asserted, but two macOS apps in our spotlight this week view your voice as a way to get more things done on your Mac. We’re talking transcription apps with two apps that take very different approaches to what you can do with vocal recognition and AI.

But that’s not all for this week. We also look at a tool to help you better enjoy email newsletters, an iPhone app for making your photos sound as good as ever and a multiplatform game that helps you fine-tune your puzzle-solving skills.

Got an app of your own that you’d like to see highlighted? Let us know at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of what it does, and we’ll take it from there.

Vox Dictum

I record a lot of interviews, which means I need to transcribe a lot of interviews, and so far, I’ve found the Apple Intelligence tools built into Apple’s various software platforms to be fairly wanting in this area. So when an app like Vox Dictum promises a better transcription experience, I’m all ears.

Vox Dictum is a macOS app that makes privacy its calling card — all the transcription happens directly on your Mac, as do the AI-powered summary features that you can access with the cost of a subscription. A Pro subscription costs $7.99/month and gets you features like large AI models to download to your Mac plus AI summaries while the $12.99/month Pro+ package adds a speaker recognition feature.

I do think it’s easier to label speakers in VoxDictum than with any of Apple’s built-in features, though transcripts — while fairly accurate — feature line breaks that aren’t necessarily suited to my purposes.

As for the summary feature, I found it to be hit-and-miss: Vox Dictum did a great job highlighting the main points of an interview I conducted for a freelance article, making the summary a good reference tool, but a recorded discussion between me and my wife produced a summary with conflicting dates on some action items. That said, I do like that Vox Dictum’s summary feature lets you designate if the recording is an interview, a meeting, a news bulletin or a podcast, which seems to help focus the summary.

Processing time can take a bit, but if you find yourself needing to transcribe a lot of interviews, Vox Dictum is definitely worth a download so you can see if its base features improve on your current approach.

Bonfiyah

Like Vox Dictum, Bonfiyah promises to turn recordings into transcripts, while also recognizing who’s saying what. But transcription is really just a sideshow in this case — the app’s real strength lies in its ability to track your conversations.

Available for the iPhone, iPad and Mac — I tried out the macOS version — Bonfiyah records conversations, meetings and brainstorming sessions. (You can also import audio files into the app.) Besides transcription and speaker identification features, the app also taps into AI to summarize action items that come up in your conversation and who’s responsible for taking care of them. A feature I particularly like is an analysis tool that analyzes how to communicate more effectively with the people you talk to on a regular basis.

Transcription does take place off-device via AssemblyAI, though Bonfiyah deletes that info from its servers after seven days. The app includes privacy features such as marking conversations as privileged.

Bonfiyah comes across as a pretty sophisticated tool that might be overkill for anyone who needs transcripts with more basic summary features. But you can try out all the features to start with for 14 days before you need to commit to either a $24.99/month Pro or $34.99/month Pro AI account for more advanced features.

Letterboxx

Letterboxx exists under the premise that an email inbox is no place to enjoy a newsletter and a traditional mail client is not a reader app. Inboxes are places for taking action like responding to timely messages, but newsletters are something that you want to spend time diving into — hence the Letterboxx interface, which is designed to use the ample space provided on your Mac.

With Letterboxx, you can redirect newsletters sent to supported email accounts to a dedicated reading space, complete with folders for organizing incoming missives by type. You also get ad-filtering tools, ways to highlight relevant text and even shortcuts for managing your many subscriptions.

You’ll know right away if this app is just right for your newsletter-heavy reading habits or if it’s more management features than you need, but you can confirm with a two-week free trial to Letterboxx before the regular $4.99/monthly subscription rate kicks in.

Echo Photo Album

I don’t really find much use for Live Photos, the built-in iPhone camera feature that adds a little bit of movement and audio to your images. But Echo Photo Album might cause me to reconsider augmenting my photos with its focus entirely on audio.

You can record up to 60 seconds of audio in Echo Photo Album, adding it to a shot you either take through the app or find in your photo library. In testing Echo Photo Album on my iPhone — it’s also compatible with iPads and Apple Watches — I found it worked best adding the sound of my cat purring to seem feline portraits or ocean waves crashing to a coastal landscape shot. I imagine it could also come in handy adding sounds to accompany road trips, baby photos and group get-togethers.

You can download Echo Photo Album for free, with a $4.99 purchases removing a 10-image limit.

Chess Peace

All work and no play makes for a dull app profiler, so here’s a game I’ve been playing lately that runs on the Mac as well as on iPhones and iPads. (I’ve been testing the macOS version.) Chess Peace is one of those games that you play to keep your mind active. Best of all, you don’t really need to be a grand master to get something out of the game.

The only thing you need to know about chess to thrive at Chess Peace is how each of the different pieces move around the board. That knowledge lets you position each piece on the board of a Chess Peace puzzle in such a way as to prevent any other piece from capturing them — keeping your rook out of the diagonal attacks of your bishop, for example.

The game serves up a new puzzle every day, with a library of older puzzles for you to play as well. An $8.99 in-app purchases unlocks 26,500 puzzles across five game modes plus custom themes to let you change the look of Chess Peace.

[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]

By Jason Snell

August 5, 2026 12:01 AM PT

Review: “Ted Lasso” returns, refreshed, to the pitch

“Ted Lasso” is back on Apple TV, which was no sure thing after the series more or less wrapped up in May of 2023. But it’s back for a fourth season, in which—after an episode-long visit to Ted’s home of Kansas City—the football-turned-soccer coach returns to Richmond, where—as teased at the end of season 3—a new women’s team is launching and just might need a coach.

I’ve seen the first half of the season, and I’m happy to report that though the teams have changed, this is still “Ted Lasso” through and through. Thematically the first three seasons were about Ted’s journey in running away from a dissolving marriage. With season four, a whole new set of themes begin to emerge.

Yes, love ’em or hate ’em Ted’s homespun aphorisms still abound. The relationship between owner Rebecca and marketing genius Keely continues to be as strong as ever. Higgins is still doing his Higgins stuff. Mae is still tending bar. Those three fans in the pub are as random as ever. But in coaching a barely-formed women’s team that is in desperate need of players and fans, “Ted Lasso” returns to its roots as an underdog story, which helps make the whole thing feel more like the show’s first season. (There’s even a press conference scene that is disastrous for entirely different reasons from the original.)

It’s great to have series co-creator Brendan Hunt back as Coach Beard, but the addition of Tanya Reynolds (“Sex Education”) as Alice Chilton introduces a new dynamic. Chilton is the only coach who can go into the locker room without permission, she thinks she deserves the managerial job, and she’s got some serious anger control problems. Reynolds adds a lot of grit to the proceedings, preventing it from becoming too much of a sickeningly sweet reunion love-fest.

The character least served from the season, at least so far as I’ve seen, is breakout character Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein). He’s there and has some moments, but since he’s the manager of the men’s team, he’s often relegated being a gruff, bearded question mark attached to questions about his relationship status with Keeley. I appreciate the ironic turnabout of the men’s manager being an afterthought who’s only relevant in terms of his romantic storylines, but I do wonder if Roy is too strong of a character to be served in such limited doses.

Anyway, the best review I can give to season four of “Ted Lasso” is that each episode made me laugh out loud, a lot. Not only was it nice to see these familiar characters again, but the show did the most important job any comedy has—it’s funny. Welcome back, coach.

By Glenn Fleishman

August 4, 2026 8:30 AM PT

Soulver 4 casts a wider calculating net

The almost-natural-language notepad calculator Soulver's latest release adds better tools for calculating durations or intervals between dates and times, planning travel itineraries, tracking inflation, finding distances, performing bandwidth math, and splitting restaurant bills or other expenses. That's not all, but a good starting list. Should it do all these things? A point we could argue about! But many of the features it offered in the past, and several of the new ones it provides, previously required one or more web searches to find a tool or to pull together disparate information. That's welcome.

Soulver 4's release comes at an interesting time, when many people have turned to chatbots and Google's search dialog—and soon will turn to Siri AI—to answer questions that are better written out or spoken than described as just numbers or operators.

This significant update succeeds in bringing a sort of authoritative basis to stuff you need to calculate or convert. Behind the scenes, there's no inference or autocompletion—it's numbers, baby, all the way down. However, the developers aren't unaware of the AI glow-up. They've addressed it in an interesting way, making it easy for agents to ask questions of Soulver!

How many bushels in a peck as I travel a furlong faster than a parsec?

Soulver has filled a gap for me in my calculating needs since I dug into the subject in 2015. While I love PCalc and use it for regular and advanced calculator needs, Soulver is where I go when I need to mix things up.¹

PCalc and Soulver offer overlapping Venn diagrams of what's possible in number space, but they are distinctly different beasts at heart. Where PCalc mostly calculates within a calculator-style interface, Soulver mostly offers a way to make sense of numbers, units, percentages, time, intervals, and much more. I think of it as a "take stuff in various units or other formulations and then produce an output in a way I want" tool.

Continue reading “Soulver 4 casts a wider calculating net”…

By Glenn Fleishman

August 3, 2026 8:30 AM PT

Preparing for next year’s Rosetta 2 demise

The reckoning is coming. Apple has done it before, and it's doing it again. After macOS 27 Golden Gate, you will no longer be able to run legacy Intel apps using Rosetta 2. After the 26.4 update in March, when running any affected app in macOS 26 Tahoe, you see a notification banner when you launch affected software or a background component launches that uses Intel code:

Support Ending for Intel-based Apps. This version of "[App Name Here]" will not open in a future release of macOS. Learn how to update to an Apple silicon version. [Learn More pop-up menu]

There is one carveout noted for "certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks," so far unnamed.

With information in hand, you can plan how to deal with Intel-only apps that have been abandoned, or the developers have seemingly no interest in updating. Printer makers are, so far, the worst.

A history of looking backward

Apple has done this before—many times, in fact. I've argued in the past that one of Apple's key strengths, and a key to the continuity of the Mac's operating system, is how well it's managed transitions across chip architectures, frameworks, and operating system changes.¹

Continue reading “Preparing for next year’s Rosetta 2 demise”…