Yes, yes, it’s late this week. But if it wasn’t, a feature would have been late instead and an editor would have taken my knees. And I like my knees. Anyway…

I hate letting gear and games die. So I wrote about how iMazing and an APK extractor have let me breathe new life into old iPods while also ensuring my favourite mobile games of old can be brought back from the dead.

Is Apple making a games controller? Maybe. We’ve all heard this rumour a bunch of times before. So rather than squee about yet another one, I wrote about what Apple/Beats would have to do to make me part with my cash.

OutRun is 40. Sega’s classic arcade game is getting on. And – *whisper* – I never really liked it that much. Sure, it was a technical marvel and Magical Sound Shower lodged in my brain forever. But the gameplay never entirely clicked with me. OutRun 2, though? That’s the best racing game ever made. Agree? Disagree? Either way, read my piece about the entire OutRun series.

Apple upgraded all the things. iOS 27! iPadOS 27! macOS 27! hardware-Apple-Barely-Remembers-ExistsOS 27! I dutifully wrote tips on Liquid Glass, Siri AI, Photos and a bunch of other stuff. 

Speaking of iOS 27 and photos, I also wrote a piece for Amateur Photographer on the 15 best new iOS 27 Camera and Photos tips for iPhone photographers.

The Portal app is rather lovely. And now it’s reached version 4, which brings a bunch of updates and an interface refresh. I wrote about it for TapSmart, which, alas, will be my final contribution to the publication. It was a good almost 14 years…

I switched to Feedbin. This wasn’t entirely by choice. But I’ve been testing (and getting really into) a Boox tablet, and I wanted to get as much of my digital reading onto it as possible. That meant RSS. The tiny snag: most Android RSS clients are bloody awful. Capy Reader is not. In fact, I’d say it’s just as good as my iOS favourite, NetNewsWire. The one snag? It only supports Feedbin, hence the switch. Still, it turns out Feedbin is rather fab. I should have switched years ago.

Minecraft went splat. In spectacular fashion. Mini-G showed me the game on her iPad. Various things were glitching. Most of the interface was invisible. I assumed it was either her iPad or just that model of iPad. Nope. It was basically all iPads, along with quite a few iPhones and a bunch of Nintendo Switch consoles too. And, yes, I did wonder if some AI shenanigans had been at play.

Retroid is having a sale. I wouldn’t usually mention that kind of thing here, but the Pocket Classic at $99 is stupidly cheap. I bought a yellow one a while back (for $149) and it’s fab.

I won’t go back to X. I’m seeing an ongoing push to encourage people back to Elon Musk’s heaving bosom. Quite a few folks in the Mac and tech space are arguing everyone should return, and many political commentators never stopped. Thing is, even if I ignored everything else about the site – and there’s a lot – it’s run by someone hurling millions of bucks at extremists in my country, demanding they push for insurrection over entirely imagined events. “But you might have more reach,” they say. Yeah, I burned that bridge long ago, when I quit the site. I took a significant hit in terms of work and connections. But it was the right thing to do. It still is.