Tailscale
One of my persistent quests over the years has been making it easy to access all my devices no matter where I am. I’ve played with everything from SSH and SFTP to remote screen sharing and VPNs. 2024 was the year I added a new tool to the mix: Tailscale.
The idea of Tailscale is that you create your own little network that all your devices can connect to (it accomplishes this using VPN technology). You can also set up any of your devices to be an “exit node,” so, for example, if you’re surfing the web from a café, you can set it up so that your connection is routed through your Mac mini sitting at home. Plus it lets you access any of the machines on your little network, so it’s easy if you need to retrieve a file or do something on your home Mac.
Tailscale is free, works with any platform—including everything from your iPhone to your Apple TV to your Synology—and is relatively easy to set up. As someone who has more devices than is probably wise, it’s a great little utility for making sure they can always talk to each other. —Dan Moren
Shareshot
For a couple of months each year, framing iOS screenshots is a major task on my to-do list. My book about iOS accessibility features 175 or so. I’ve used various shortcuts over the years to place device frames around the shots I take. Some worked better than others, and most performed the basic task of framing one or more screenshots, hopefully allowing me to create an easy workflow from phone to computer to book document.
This year, I was happily surprised to come upon Shareshot. It’s an iOS app (not a shortcut) that frames your screenshots according to several parameters, and based on the device that took the screenshot. Employ a shadow, a simulated spotlight, a small, medium or large amount of white space – there are many ways to make your screenshots look just the way you want them. It’s a slick, professional app.
Since the product is new, there are features that have yet to be implemented, like support for placing multiple screenshots side-by-side. But the current version has already come a long way in the few short months it’s been available. A surprise bonus for me was the innovative way the developer supports VoiceOver accessibility. Any app can tell you which settings are on and off, as you flick across them. But with Shareshot, tapping your screenshot gives you a full description of everything you’ve done to it within the app. That’s very innovative.
It’s also worth mentioning that when I reached out to the developer about some screen contrast issues I had with Shareshot, he quickly responded, and sought further information about my issue. Two thumbs, way up.—Shelly Brisbin
Sleeve
I discovered quite a few nifty Mac utilities this year, and Sleeve remains in constant use on my desktop. It’s a $6 utility that displays what’s currently playing in Apple Music or (if you prefer) Spotify. I’ve permanently parked a widget on the bottom left corner of my display, showing the currently playing tack. Sleeve also adds global hotkeys for play/pause and volume control, and even scrobbles to Last.fm! I just like seeing pretty album art and song information on my desktop, though.—Jason Snell
A Better Route Planner (ABRP)
My husband and I began our electric car journey this year. We started, as nerds naturally do, by hunting down apps we could use with our new Kia EV6. One of our favorites is ABRP, which will plan routes, based on charging locations between your starting point and destination, and the range of your specific car. You can set parameters, like the speed or provider of a charging station, and you can save routes for future use. This year, ABRP got a big boost in CarPlay integration, making it easy to follow routes from the driver’s seat. You’ll also get efficiency data for your charging and driving experiences, which is especially welcome if you’re just getting comfortable with how measuring EV efficiency differs from the same task for gas-powered cars. There are also all sorts of live data feeds you can use to connect to other EV drivers, if you want them. ABRP was acquired by Rivian late last year. So far, that’s meant rapid feature improvements, no matter what EV you drive, but there are a few Rivian-specific features that seem interesting, too.—SB
SwiftBar 2
On January 2, one of my very favorite Mac utilities got a 2.0 update: SwiftBar. This utility lets you put anything in your menu bar, making it a great place to stash ambient data. The 2.0 update added support for plugins fed by Shortcuts, making it even more accessible to people who aren’t comfortable feeding data via pretty much anything that runs via the command line. I use SwiftBar to display my local weather data, my solar data, and even my podcast live-stream stats. But it can pretty much do anything you want. And it’s free and open source.-JS
Runestone
2024 marked the release of the Apple Vision Pro, and while I don’t think I’m going to award anything to a $3500 developer kit, I do want to praise it as a tool that’s remarkably good at certain tasks, including letting me write in complete isolation. On iPadOS, my text editor of choice is 1Writer, but it only works on the Vision Pro in iPad compatibility mode—and the text rendering in that mode is inferior to native visionOS apps.
Enter Simon Støvring’s Runestone, an open-source visionOS (and iOS and iPadOS) text editor that supports Markdown. It’s pretty bare bones, but it does the job. I’ve written thousands of words on my Vision Pro, and almost all of them have been in an immersive environment while using Runestone.—JS
Star Wars: Outlaws
For me, it’s not a year-end list if there’s not something Star Wars on it. For years I wanted an immersive Star Wars game, one where I could run around on a planet, dealing with stormtroopers or scoundrels, then hop in my starship and take off for space-based combat. Star Wars: Outlaws finally delivers on that, all couched in a fun story about minor criminal Kay Vess and her journey to becoming a serious player in the galaxy. Is it wonky at times? Sure, though patches have fixed a lot of the most egregious issues. And it does, as many AAA games do these days, suffer a bit from over-collectible-ization, but nothing has come closer to the feel of being immersed in a galaxy far, far away.—DM
Balatro
I spent most of this year playing Marvel Snap, but the release of Balatro on the iOS App Store and Apple Arcade broke me out of that rut in a hurry. Balatro is a card game that’s modeled on poker, but that doesn’t do it justice: it’s a roguelike game where you face increasing challenges that you can only surmount by modifying the rules with a series of jokers, and by using your earned cash to change your deck and alter the payout math. Once you lose, all that work is wiped clean and you must start again, which isn’t as bad as it sounds since it basically leads you to explore different winning strategies based on the jokers that come your way. It’s exactly what I want from a game: you can play a session pretty quickly, but there’s always another challenge the next time you sit down to play.—JS
Disney+ for Vision Pro
I feel like I need to praise the third-party visionOS app I’ve probably spent the most time in: Disney+. There are other streaming apps for visionOS, but none (other than Apple’s own TV app) offer the breadth of 3-D content that Disney+ offers. (C’mon, Max, where are the 3-D movies?) Disney also offers some pretty amazing immersive environments for you to watch movies in, including Marvel and Star Wars worlds. My only real complaint is that they’re so good, they should be available as environments throughout visionOS… but Apple is the one who needs to make that visionOS feature happen.—JS
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