Affinity is now free. Early in October, photo editors and designers rightly lost their minds as the Affinity suite was pulled from sale. Cue: catastrophising about inevitable enshittification – perhaps by way of a subscription or Affinity being mashed into Canva with a fork. Nope. As I covered for Stuff, Canva’s massive curveball has been to make Affinity entirely free.

The internet still lost its shit over this. Why? I’m not sure. Presumably, people just don’t trust big tech companies anymore – and that’s fair enough. They’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. A Canva co-founder even put out a new video yesterday to outline the company’s reasoning. TL;DR: by making Affinity free, more photo editors and designers will use it. When more people use it, teams will scale in Canva, which means more subscriptions. Oh, and Adobe gets a kicking.

Hashtag remindme 1 year etc etc. But my take, right now, is that this is all a net positive in terms of more widespread access to high-end design tools. And, as I said in my piece for Stuff, Adobe should be very worried indeed regardless.

Apple’s Family Sharing helps keep children safe. Until it doesn’t. That’s my latest for Wired, which explores a rarely considered dark side to family sharing – and similar systems by other companies – that can leave children’s digital lives ‘trapped’ within coercive and abusive relationships. Apple, Google and Microsoft should take heed and rethink how they deal with family breakdown. Whether they will or not, who knows? (My experience of Screen Time and Family Sharing suggests not many sufficiently senior people at Apple are actually using these tools, because otherwise they’d be a whole lot better.)

Google is free, so why pay for Kagi search on your iPhone? I spent a month with Kagi to find out. In short, it’s great. And that’s in part because the underlying thinking behind the service is human. Kagi trusts you’ll like it enough to stick around. So instead of forging towards lock-in, Kagi actively encourages you to look elsewhere when you need to. And if you don’t use the search engine for a month, Kagi will credit you.

Apple values change. Jason Snell’s piece for Six Colors has a brutal finale. Doubly so because it’s basically two chunks of copy/paste that starkly showcase how much Apple has changed in just a year, using Apple’s own words.

The terrible new Met Office design is online. I’d hoped the reworked mobile app was a standalone thing. Nope. And given that barely anything has changed during the beta run, I suspect this design is locked. But do give feedback if you hate this revamp, even if it’s unlikely the Met Office will listen. And if you’re a weather wonk, start looking for alternatives to the Met Office’s Temu Yahoo Weather.)

I want to really like the Gamestation Go. I wrote about this My Arcade gadget for Stuff. It’s the most interesting handheld I’ve seen since the Playdate, because it adds extra controls that let you play classic arcade titles as they were meant to be played. Tempest with a D-pad sucks. Tempest with a dial is magic. But My Arcade desperately needs to improve the software on this handheld to sort some dreadful rendering issues and the insanely twitchy trackball.

Simogo is doing exciting things. If you’re all “Simowho?”, this company created the best ever iPad game, in the shape of Device 6. (If you disagree, you’re wrong. Sorry.) Many of its other titles were also stone-cold classics, not least the spectacular Year Walk and one-thumb classic Beat Sneak Bandit. 

In part responding to the ephemeral nature of games on Apple devices, the company has reworked a collection of its mobile classics for Switch and Steam. And there’s also a book, now available for pre-order, that looks into the creation of Simogo games. I’ve been fortunate enough to interview Simogo in the past and so I imagine the book will make fascinating reading. But I know for sure that the Switch/Steam collection is superb, and so if you fancy a new collection of games to see you through November, get a copy now.

Ikea’s tiny smartphone bed isn’t as stupid as it sounds. The company’s weird little bed for your phone received a mix of ridicule and love online. In this week’s Stuff column, I outline how psychological tricks such as this really can help you combat smartphone overuse.

I reviewed the iPhone 17. TL;DR: it’s the iPhone most people should buy. Are you most people? Read the review to find out.

The Sega Master System is 40. Sort of. The Sega Mark III that morphed into the SMS in 1986 turned 40 last week. Either way, this was a good excuse to write about Sega’s 8-bit machine for Stuff. (Also: the PS2 hit 25 in the US, and so I bumped a piece about that console too.)

The Commodore Amiga is back. Again, sort of. Retro Games Ltd is releasing another plug-and-play telly box, but this one is an Amiga 1200 (minus Commodore branding) with a full-size keyboard. I wrote about it and the revamped THEC64 Mini for Stuff.

Halloween is on the way. Wooooo! Etc. If you want some iPhone apps and games to celebrate the scariest of days, then check out my Halloween apps and Halloween games round-ups for TapSmart.

Looking for work? Your iPhone can help, as I outline in my latest toolkit for TapSmart.

Kagi News wants you to stop doomscrolling. Having rethought search engines, Kagi is taking on news provision, largely shaking things up by providing a single update every day. It’s a bit like a newspaper. How refreshingly old school. Natch, it won a place in my best free iPhone and iPad apps round-up.

Magazines are being further squeezed. In the UK, WHSmith morphed into TG Jones, and the new owner has continued reducing space for magazines. Our local branch has now shoved them to the rear of the store, and there’s not enough space to face everything. So you have to look behind magazines to see if the one you want might be lurking. I didn’t find any copies of The Week Junior (or the science sister paper). Staff confirmed our local branch still orders it. One copy per week. Good grief.

Tech companies helped destroy the White House. In that sense, it turns out they part-funded it. Good job, everyone! That definitely makes you not appear to be evil!

Lego is releasing a BTTF DeLorean. Only, for some reason, it’s not allowed to call it a DeLorean and so in January we’ll be getting ‘Time Machine from Back to the Future’. Licensing is fun! Anyway, the set looks great, and is part of my new upcoming Lego update.

Sleaford Mods and Gwendoline Christie: not the collab you expected but quite possibly the one you needed.

I simplified my audio setup some years back. In my column for Stuff this week, I dig into the reasons why – and find validation in the excellent new Ruark MR1 Mk3 speakers – along with offering a dash of audiophile baiting for good measure.

Want to give your brain a workout? Here are 12 excellent puzzle games for iPhone, each offering bite-sized challenges.

Little Computer People is 40. I loved this game as a kid. Although ‘game’ is perhaps underselling it. LCP was more like a digital goldfish – a pet person that was proto-Sims mixed with a Tamagotchi. I remain amazed that no one has resurrected it for smartphones, because it would be a perfect pocket companion. Check out the piece I wrote for Stuff about this 8-bit classic.

Moodflow deleted a year of my records. I’m not thrilled about this. The Google Play store is now flooded with angry customers, and there’s almost certainly no way to get the data back. (The app in theory backed up to Google Drive, but another bug apparently signed users out before obliterating their records – including mine.) Safe to say I won’t be writing about this app ever again.

As a child of the ’80s, I grew up with the C64 and ZX Spectrum. I still love how ancient systems tackle imagery. Retrospecs is the best way to process pics as old-school art, from delicate Mac Plus emulation to custom animated ASCII weirdness. It’s now on sale for just two bucks. If you own an iPhone or iPad and have any interest whatsoever in classic computer graphics, it’s a must-buy.

Slide Over is back. Apple has resurrected its popular ‘stashable’ iPad window – ish. It now only holds one app (albeit one per display) but it can now be resized. I wrote about this for Stuff, noting how it gives me hope Apple will fix other aspects of its revised operating systems. *cough Liquid Glass cough*

Sleep Score worries me. Apple isn’t alone in ‘rating’ your sleep. And I know some people thrive on gamifying every aspect of their lives. But over at TapSmart, I explore the damage such systems can cause.

A new Twitter? Not quite. Rather than connecting with people, I spent some happy hours connecting with our feathered friends by way of BirdNET.

EastEnders vs fridge? In a now sadly deleted Reddit post, I learned the Internet of Shit is alive and well. The poster claimed their Samsung fridge was picking up and playing audio from their neighbours, including EastEnders. They couldn’t find a way to disable Bluetooth. Turning off the speaker effectively made many of the fridge’s smart features redundant. Although, frankly, a non-smart fridge that isn’t connected to the internet seems like a good idea to me, given what else Samsung is experimenting with.

Human-centric AI publishing! That’s apparently the latest wheeze, according to a press release I received earlier. This would combat the tide of AI slop by allowing people to create a non-fiction book. In an hour. Uh-huh.

I stole Fairphone’s Moments switch. I was at a tech event last week, where bemused journos are herded into an underground space to bounce around between PRs. Fairphone was the main brand that caught my eye, especially when the Moments switch was demonstrated to me. When I got home, I made something similar for my iPhone, as outlined in Why Apple should steal the Fairphone 6 Moments switch for the iPhone.

Razer is bonkers. I say this on the basis that last year I wrote about ‘hacking’ a GameSir X2s to create an iPad Pro ‘handheld’. But Razer’s Kishi V3 Pro XL now does this in an official capacity.

I love matrix synths. They make it easy for anyone to create music. TonePad was the best. I write about how to bring it back for iPhone.

Retro games on iPhone? Apple pushed back for so long against emulation, but the iPhone emulation scene is slowly improving. My classic games toolkit for TapSmart explores how to get started, apps to check out, and accessories to add.

Keen on the night sky? I added Star Walk to my iPhone classics series. The app first appeared waaaay back in 2008 and has since influenced a whole host of astronomy apps.

Please subscribe! Speaking of TapSmart, its iPhone/iPad incarnation Swipe is a twice-monthly indie publication. Issue 337 is our latest, packed with all sorts of goodies. If you’d like to support us, there’s a free trial, and then subscriptions are just $2/£2 per month, which also unlocks dozens of back issues.

“Your presentation is pedantic and boring.” Ken Segall recalls Steve Jobs using this line, eviscerating a former colleague’s pitch – and then applies the same argument to Apple’s current events, which he thinks are too “slick, repeatable… and safe”. I think they also lack humanity. Pre-covid stage-based stuff was always much warmer. Apple events today come across as a weird combination of polished, sterile and ‘Steve Jobs cosplay’ (in terms of everyone’s delivery).

Galaxy Ring crushes finger. Ouch. I wasn’t excited about the prospect of a smart ring anyway. Even less so now. My Apple Watch strap isn’t going to strangle my wrist.

A playable Lego Game Boy? Someone got it working. And not even with a Pi, which was my assumption of how someone might achieve such a feat. 

Dashy Crashy is back. The remastered version dials down the IAP to a single payment, drip-feeding missions and new cars over the weeks ahead. iOS-only for now, but lots of fun. I added it to my best free iPhone games feature. To grab it right away, head to the App Store.