A stealth announcement at WWDC23 is that Apple has significantly lowered the barrier of entry to port PC games to the Mac. A new Game Porting Toolkit “provides an emulation environment to run your existing, unmodified Windows game,” says Aiswariya Sreenivassan — a GPU, graphics and displays software engineer at Apple.

It’s a big gap to clear, which is why the Mac has been left behind in recent years. PC games are compiled for the Intel x86 architecture that the Mac just finished moving away from. The unified Apple silicon architecture bears little resemblance to the standard gaming PC with discrete graphics cards and memory. Apple’s Metal 3 library is very different from DirectX, Unity, Unreal and Vulkan — the usual suspects across the computing pond.

Apple’s new tools could open the floodgates for Mac ports of popular PC games. According to a game engine programmer I spoke with, the Game Porting Toolkit demo is “really impressive.” If the tools work as well in practice as in Apple’s demo, they “would be incredibly useful,” said the developer, who works for a major game developer and asked to remain anonymous.

Making regular, reoccurring payments will soon be a feature of Apple Cash. This will make the payment system useful for rent or allowances or other financial transactions that happen each week or month.

Plus, the system will be able to automatically bring in more money when needed.

June 7, 1993: Apple debuts the PowerBook 180c, a solid upgrade that brings a world of dazzling colors to the company’s laptop line.

The 180c’s big improvement over the grayscale PowerBook 180, which launched the previous October, is its active-matrix, 256-color screen. Such a screen is something of a novelty for laptops in the early 1990s.

If some random person decides you need to see a picture of his anatomy, iOS 17 will save you. The new Sensitive Content Warning scans texted images and automatically blurs any that contain nudity.

It’s a feature already in iPhone to protect children, and it’s now being extended to adults.

If you haven’t tried a multi-device charging stand, you’re missing out. There’s nothing like the convenience of plopping your Apple devices — iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods — in one place like a side table or night stand to top them off.

And right now you can get 25% off SwitchEasy’s 4-in-1 and 2-in-1 magnetic wireless charging stands in the Cult of Mac Store. The sale ends at 11:59 p.m. Pacific on June 7.

A dozen “best-in-class” apps and games took honors in the Apple Design Awards Monday at WWDC23. Winning development teams hailed from around the world, delivering innovative apps with great design, Apple said.

“Apps and games are integral to how we live, work, and play. At Apple, we love to recognize outstanding developers whose apps reflect incredible creativity and design excellence,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations.

Apple is souping up the systems for entering text into iPhone with iOS 17. Autocorrect is getting enhanced with AI for fewer typos, as part of multiple improvements to what Apple calls “intelligent input.” And Dictation is getting a boost that promises more-accurate voice recognition, too.

I tested the changes in the first iOS 17 beta. Here’s how well they work … so far.

Just a day after Apple unveiled its Vision Pro AR/VR headset at WWDC23, news came along Tuesday that the company acquired Los Angeles-based AR headset startup Mira.

Mira makes headsets for other companies — notably Super Nintendo World theme parks — and holds contracts with the U.S. military.

How does Apple’s new “spatial computing” platform visionOS work exactly?

At WWDC23 this week, Apple detailed a bunch of interesting tidbits about how the new Vision Pro headset works. Apple detailed how buttons look and behave in the spatial computer, how they are pressed without any physical controls, and how apps work in 3D.

Here’s how Apple’s spatial interface works.

Apple has made its OS developer beta builds free to download. You can now enroll in the Apple Developer Program for free.

This will allow you to download the latest iOS, iPadOS, or macOS beta for free. Previously, Apple made the download available for developers who paid the yearly $99 subscription fees.