In an announcement surprising only in its choice for the day of the week, Apple has announced an event for 9 September 2024 at 10 AM (Pacific Time). You can stream it from Apple’s website or on your Apple TV, and Apple makes it easy to add it to your calendar. Monday is an unusual day for an Apple announcement, but as John Gruber points out, a US presidential debate is scheduled for Tuesday and would compete for attention with Apple’s news. I may have to summarize the announcements for the TidBITS issue that day and go into more depth later in the week.

The teaser title for the event is “Glowtime,” probably a reference to the new iOS 18 indication that Siri is listening for a command. The event will almost certainly focus on the iPhone 16 lineup, along with the Apple Watch Series 10 and Apple Watch Ultra 3. If past performance is any indication, you’ll be able to place pre-orders on Friday, September 13, and receive them a week later on September 20. Apple will also likely announce release dates for at least iOS 18 and watchOS 11, and I anticipate the rest of Apple’s operating systems appearing on an identical or at least very similar schedule.

If you’d like to kibbitz with other TidBITS readers during Apple’s event, join us on SlackBITS.

Apple has announced that Apple Podcasts is now available on the Web, joining last month’s release of Apple Maps (see “Apple Maps on the Web Appears in Beta,” 24 July 2024). It will be a boon to Apple users forced to use Windows at work.

The Web-based Podcasts client, accessible at podcasts.apple.com, looks and works nearly identically to Apple’s native Podcasts app on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, depending on window size.

Those who don’t wish to sign in can listen to millions of free podcasts, browse Top Charts, and take advantage of Apple’s editorial collections. Signing in with your Apple ID gives you access to your Library, Up Next Queue, and subscriptions. Signed-in users can also follow shows and save play progress.

I must admit some curiosity as to why Apple has suddenly started producing Web versions of some of its apps and services. Nothing prevented Apple from doing this years ago—Google and Spotify have produced capable Web apps for ages. A few possibilities present themselves:

• Focus on the ecosystem: In the past, restricting services to Apple devices may have been seen as driving sales. Apple may now consider opening services up to non-Apple devices as a way to attract new users and keep existing cross-platform users in the fold.
• Future ad revenue: Although neither Maps nor Podcasts earns Apple much money now, some pundits have suggested that Apple plans to start displaying ads in both. Opening them up to non-Apple devices would increase the number of ad impressions if that occurs.
• Reduced regulatory pressure: Opening Maps and Podcasts up to non-Apple users may reduce the perception of Apple locking users into its platform and help with arguments against regulations aimed at increasing consumer choice.

In our most recent Do You Use It? poll, we asked how often you use iPhone or iPad apps on a Mac with Apple silicon. If you’re like the 19% of respondents who didn’t know about this feature, you might be in for a treat. Apple has been creating its own chips for the iPhone and iPad for years, the A-series. When it brought the Mac over to Apple silicon with the M-series of chips, one of the benefits was that apps written for the iPhone or iPad could run unmodified on M-series Macs.

Another 34% of respondents know about the feature but still don’t use it. I fall into this category because I have my iPhone in my pocket or at hand all the time, so it’s easy enough to use it instead of putting an iPhone app on my M1 MacBook Air. Plus, I spend more time on my Intel-based 27-inch iMac, which can’t run iPhone apps, so it’s not worth having an app on one Mac but not the other. Others said they simply didn’t find any iPhone or iPad apps helpful in the Mac context.

However, nearly half of respondents—47%—said they use the feature occasionally or regularly. These people cited a wide range of iPhone or iPad apps they found helpful on their Macs, the most common being the popular podcast client Overcast. Also heavily used were two-factor authentication apps like Authy, apps for managing security cameras from companies like Wyze and Eufy, and apps associated with smart home devices like generators, heat pumps, thermometers, thermostats, sensors, ventilation, water heaters, and window blinds. Several people said they run Apple’s iPhone Weather app on their Macs, but I’m not sure why since a native Mac version of Weather has been available since macOS 13 Ventura.

Not all iPhone and iPad apps will run on a Mac. Developers can block their iPhone and iPad apps from running on Macs, which some do to avoid additional testing and support, and others do because they prefer that Mac users rely on either a native Mac app (that may be a separate purchase) or a Web app. In the category of apps that refuse to work on Macs, people complained about Apple’s Health and Logic Pro apps, HBO Max and Netflix, the iRobot Roomba app, Minecraft, and Substack.

It remains to be seen if the upcoming iPhone mirroring capability of macOS 15 Sequoia and iOS 18 will reduce the desire to run iPhone apps on a Mac. It certainly will for me because iPhone mirroring also works on Intel-based Macs with a T2 chip. We’ll have to check back next year to see how popular iPhone mirroring has become.

Installing and Using an iPhone or iPad App on an M-Series Mac

To download an iPhone or iPad app to your Apple silicon Mac, first open the Mac’s App Store app. You can click your name at the bottom of the sidebar and then click iPhone & iPad Apps under Account to see the apps you’ve already purchased. Apps are sorted in reverse chronological order, with the newest downloads at the top, which can make finding a specific app difficult.

It may be easier to search for the app on the App Store at the top of the sidebar and click iPhone & iPad Apps again if necessary to see those results. Either way, click the cloud download, Get, or price button to get the app.

Once downloaded, you launch iPhone and iPad apps just like Mac apps. Using them can be slightly different since they’re usually limited to a single window. Some iPad apps can open multiple windows (CARROT Weather’s Map window, for instance), but settings panes and the like may remain locked into the interface, sometimes awkwardly. When using an iPad app like Overcast, shown below, you can usually resize the window because iPad apps have to adjust to different screen sizes.

iPhone apps are a different story. The two I tested allow four sizes, though you can’t drag an edge to resize them. Instead, choose App Name > Settings > General to choose between Smaller and Larger window sizes (requires relaunching the app).

For both Smaller and Larger, you can then Option-click the app’s green zoom button to increase the size further, giving you four possible resolutions. (A plain click on the green zoom button expands the app to the height of Full Screen, bordered by huge black bars.) Which size is best depends on the app and your available screen space.

• Smaller, unzoomed: 492×930
• Larger, unzoomed: 576×1082
• Smaller, zoomed: 640×1192
• Larger, zoomed: 750×1390

For the most part, using iPhone and iPad apps is self-explanatory—you use the pointer as you would your finger to interact with the controls. However, many apps have multi-touch interfaces that require additional interaction modes, which Apple supports with the options explained in the Touch Alternatives settings pane. As you can see, they let you use the W, A, S, and D keys to simulate tilting your device, press Option to use the trackpad as a virtual touch screen, press Space to tap the center of the screen, swipe using the arrow keys, and drag with a tap and drag on the trackpad. The touch alternatives take a little getting used to.

The System settings pane shows you which system-level permissions the app has requested. You can’t do anything here; manage these permissions in System Settings.

Finally, if you’re curious about which iPhone and iPad apps you’ve downloaded, you can see a list in the System Information app’s Applications screen. Sort by Kind, and scroll down to iOS. I can’t explain why some non-iOS apps, like 1Password, Google Chat, Google Drive, and python, appear in this list.

Remember, being able to run an iPhone or iPad app on your Mac is a bonus, so it’s not worth getting bent out of shape if it doesn’t work perfectly. Also, please don’t interpret my vote or any of the criticisms above as a low opinion of this feature. It’s a welcome addition that lets Macs run millions of iPhone and iPad apps, so if you have a specific one you might want to use on your Mac, try it.

I refuse to read news on the likes of Facebook and X/Twitter because of their manipulative algorithms (and as a protest against the many other societal ills they cause). Instead, I prefer to receive news from trusted sources via email, where I can read on my terms, which includes blocking trackers. Along with traditional mailing lists and email-focused services like Substack, most professional publications have email newsletters focusing on specific topics, and I subscribe to a handful that interest me. Although I long avoided headline news entirely on the principle that anything sufficiently important would filter into my life in other ways, I recently signed up for 1440, a daily email newsletter that distills stories with the most impact from over 100 sources. While it covers topics I don’t care about at all, it’s a quick enough scan that I’ve kept my subscription.

However, the real win in centralizing newsreading in email has come from RSS-to-email services. I’ve tried numerous RSS readers over the years but have never settled down with one because they require me to devote specific time to reading news. That requires remembering to do so and switching context. I actively want to see what’s new in my email every morning and throughout the day, but I never even think to launch an RSS reader. I have the same issue with Apple News, which languishes on my Mac and iPhone for weeks or months between launches. By employing an RSS-to-email service, new posts from blogs and other sites that provide RSS feeds can appear in my email automatically.

Which one to use? I’ve been testing three: Blogtrottr, Feedrabbit, and Follow.it. Although the interfaces vary a bit, the basics are similar—enter a feed URL, configure a few options, and then sit back and receive an email for each new post. Each of these services offers a free account with paid upgrades that remove limits and provide additional features. Here’s how they compare.

Ease of Setup

Blogtrottr and Feedrabbit are straightforward and easy to use, although Feedrabbit’s interface is tighter, cleaner, and more attractive. Follow.it is the most convoluted because it’s a broader service designed to take information from multiple publications and package it up for you in various ways. Follow.it starts with a directory of publications from which you can receive articles, or you can paste in the URL of an RSS feed. Where Blogtrotter and Feedrabbit limit themselves to email delivery, Follow.it also lets you add articles to a news page, create another RSS feed, get articles as Telegram messages or tweets, and even receive notifications in your Web browser via a Chrome extension.

For people like me who want to have a handful of RSS feeds delivered by email, Blogtrotter and Feedrabbit are both fine. Follow.it has additional options, but they’re overkill for most people.

Email Niceties

All three services do an acceptable job of packaging RSS feeds into email messages. However, there are three areas where differences appear: Subject lines, dealing with large images, and the experience of summary-only feeds.

Subject Lines

Blogtrottr and Feedrabbit both incorporate the source feed’s name and the post title in the email metadata by default. Feedrabbit gets the nod because it changes the Sender to “[Blog name] via Feedrabbit,” whereas Blogtrottr always appears as the Sender of all its messages, regardless of which RSS feed post it’s forwarding. Blogtrottr also lets you customize the Subject lines further in its settings. In this regard, Follow.it is the least capable, identifying itself as the Sender and putting only the feed name plus “new message” in the Subject line.

Image Appearance

At his blog, The Eclectic Light Company, Howard Oakley writes smart things about Macs and Mac software, but he has also been conducting what is essentially a history of art class for years. His art posts collect and describe paintings on some theme, a particular artist, a time period, a location, or an object. Since my knowledge of art before this was minimal, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning more through Howard’s posts, and he always illustrates what he’s saying with a public-domain copy of the painting.

Blogtrotter (below left) handles such images perfectly, but neither Follow.it (below center) nor Feedrabbit (below right) can deal with the large images from his blog posts. They don’t scale the images to fit within the window size, making them impossible to read in email. They’re even worse in the Gmail app I use on the iPhone. After my report, Feedrabbit’s developer has identified the problem and says he plans to fix it.

Summary-Only Feeds

Finally, some RSS feeds, like the wonderful Explain xkcd, provide only summaries and links to read the full article on the Web. Until recently, all three RSS-to-email services worked the same here, simply giving you a link to click to load the full article in your Web browser. Blogtrottr and Feedrabbit pass that link on via email for direct access, but Follow.it recently changed its free plan to add an interstitial page that displays a 5-second countdown before revealing the Go To Article link. An ad appears under Sponsored unless your ad blocker hides it, as uBlock Origin does for me in Arc. I’m not offended by Follow.it wanting to display an ad to users of its free plan, but I find the 5-second countdown irritating.

What You Get for Subscribing

So what are the limitations of the free plans, what do you get for paying, and how much does each service cost?

• Blogtrottr: With Blogtrottr, users on the free plan see an ad at the top and bottom of each message. They’re pretty big too—you won’t miss them. To get rid of the ads, you can upgrade to a paid plan. Pay $18.99 per year to eliminate the ads, or bump up to the Lite ($46.99) or Full ($82.99) plans for additional capabilities. Those two plans also give you customizable email templates, feed titles, and sender names, along with support for PDF or text attachments, control over digest sort order, and title-only notifications. The only difference between the Lite and Full tiers is that Lite is limited to 250 subscriptions, whereas Full allows an unlimited number. Frankly, I can’t even imagine the firehose of content that would result from 250 subscriptions, but perhaps some businesses need to keep track of an entire industry of RSS feeds but still want to do it via email. An RSS newsreader would seem to be a better tool for that job.
  
• Feedrabbit: Unlike the other two, Feedrabbit doesn’t attempt to monetize its free plan with ads, so its email messages are blissfully free of distracting advertising. It prefers to attract users to a paid plan with the carrot (sorry) of reduced limits and additional features. The Basic plan is limited to 10 subscriptions and 20 emails per day, retrieved on a 3-hour schedule and sent to a single address. The $25-per-year Premium plan allows up to 100 subscriptions that generate up to 200 emails per day, retrieved on a 1-hour schedule, and can deliver posts to multiple email addresses. (Basic plan users can still use + addressing, as in [email protected].) The Premium plan also offers inclusion and exclusion filtering.
  
• Follow.it: As with everything else related to Follow.it, the pricing is more complicated than the other two services. The Free plan lets you follow up to 20 feeds, use multiple output channels beyond email, filter posts, and share stories to social media. The four paid plans increase the number of feeds you can follow, provide higher numbers of daily AI summaries scaled to each tier, receive messages faster, and obtain customer support. Ads disappear at the $10-per-month Basic plan.
  

For those getting started with an RSS-to-email service, I recommend trying Feedrabbit first. Its interface is the easiest to use, and it provides the best presentation in your email app. You can get a feel for it using its Basic plan for free, and if you discover that you want more than 10 feeds, follow particularly chatty feeds, or want filters, $25 per year is an entirely reasonable price.

Blogtrottr isn’t quite as easy to set up and use and offers different tradeoffs. Its free plan has no limits on the number of subscriptions, supports filters, and formats messages that contain large images the best, but you have to put up with ads in each message. Getting rid of the ads costs less than in Feedrabbit, with Blogtrott charging $18.99 per year.

You won’t go wrong with either of those two. In contrast, I can’t recommend Follow.it because it has the worst presentation in email, both in message lists and in formatting messages with large images, is overly complicated to set up if all you want to do is follow RSS feeds, and has annoying ads in its Free plan. Its paid plans are radically more expensive than the other two services at $60, $120, $240, and $480 per year. Follow.it makes sense only for a dedicated news junkie or a business trying to aggregate and reshare content in some way.