Graham Spencer

1054 posts on MacStories since January 2011

Former MacStories contributor.
graham@macstories.net

Plex Now Available on Apple TV, and Apple Adds Top Charts to Apple TV App Store

The highly anticipated official Plex app for the new Apple TV is now available on the App Store as a free download. The Plex Apple TV app can play all of your video, music, TV and photo collections from any computer or NAS device that you install the Plex Media Server on. You can view more screenshots of the Plex Apple TV app on the Plex Blog.

There truly isn’t any other platform we’ve wanted to be on for as long as we have the Apple TV. Today’s the day, and we’re celebrating. The app is free in the app store for everyone, and requires the latest media server.

Meanwhile, Apple appears to have listened to some of the complaints about the lack of discoverability in the Apple TV App Store and added a Top Charts section. Just as it does on iOS, the Top Charts section is broken down into Top Free, Top Paid and Top Grossing lists.

Top Charts is currently limited to the US App Store, but it seems likely that the feature will roll out to international stores over the coming days. Unsurprisingly, the lists for the Top Paid and Top Grossing apps are dominated by games, whilst the Top Free list is mostly occupied by media and entertainment apps. If you don’t have access to an Apple TV or live outside the US, you can see the top 10 apps in each list on MacRumors.

Perhaps in another effort to increase the discoverability of Apple TV apps, Apple has refreshed the App Store Featured page and is now highlighting some new apps. Typically on the iOS App Store they only refresh the App Store Featured page once a week on Thursdays. Hopefully this happens more frequently on the Apple TV App Store, at least until they introduce categories or some other ways to discover apps that aren’t featured or trending.

Three iPhone 6s Observations

[[graham]] On Monday,Federico posted his thoughts on the iPhone 6s Plus, which I encourage you to read if you haven’t already. But I thought I’d take this opportunity to make three additional observations about my new iPhone 6s (the Plus was too expensive for me, and I’m not sold on its benefits yet), an upgrade...

MacStories Weekly Survey Results

[[graham]] In last Friday’s issue of MacStories Weekly we asked for some feedback on MacStories Weekly and Club MacStories generally. We’ve now looked at the results, read the comments and discussed it between ourselves. But we figure that this would also be a great opportunity to share some of the key insights with you all:...

Q&A

Question: I have been wondering if you guys knew of any there is a good Markdown readers for iOS. I am aware of and love to use the Markdown-enabled editors on iOS (Byword, Drafts, etc.), but would also like to have a way to read Markdown files without having to navigate to them and preview...

CARROT Fit

For months I’d heard great things about the collection of CARROT apps, but for whatever reason I never quite got around to buying them. Anyway, I stumbled across the CARROT Bundle (US$10.99)last week and I decided to grab it. Since then I’ve been using CARROT Fit and I think it’s fantastic. It’s essentially one of...

Orders for the New Apple TV Are Now Open, Begins Shipping This Friday

The new Apple TV is now available for order on Apple’s website, with deliveries expected to start arriving from this Friday, October 30.

The new Apple TV, now in its fourth generation, features a familiar but overhauled user interface, a new Siri remote and there’s now an App Store for apps and games. The new Siri remote, which primarily operates over Bluetooth and charges via a Lightning port, features a touch surface for navigation, as well as dual microphones so that you can use Siri to interact with the Apple TV. You can learn more about the new Apple TV here.

Pricing & Availability

When Apple announced the new Apple TV at its September Keynote, it noted that it will be available in 80 countries at launch and over 100 by the end of the year. It also revealed US pricing which is US$149 for the 32GB model and US$199 for the 64GB model. Now that the Apple TV is available for order we can see the international prices, some of which I’ve included below:

  • United Kingdom:
    • £129 for the 32GB model
    • £169 for the 64GB model
  • Canada:
    • $199 for the 32GB model
    • $269 for the 64GB model
  • Australia:
    • $269 for the 32GB model
    • $349 for the 64GB model
  • France, Germany, Italy:
    • €179 for the 32GB model
    • €229 for the 64GB model

Relax, It’s the Weekend

Ctrl-Walt-Delete Podcast Subscribe to Podcast on iTunes Learn more & find RSS feed Ctrl-Walt-Delete is a new podcast from The Verge, featuring the fantastic Walt Mossberg and Nilay Patel. I’m fairly certain I subscribed to it on day one and now that we’re a couple of weeks in, I can safely say that it is...

Announcement

Now that we are six issues in to the new version of MacStories Weekly, we’d like to get some feedback to make this newsletter even better. Please take two minutes to fill out this very brief feedback survey; it really does help us out and we appreciate the feedback. Thanks again for being a...

Revisiting Past Collections, Vol. 1

Managing Calendars & Reminders In Issue 1 of the Classic MacStories Weekly we featuredFantastical, Sunrise Calendar, Calendars 5, Week CalendarandLogacal. Today we add 2Do and Outlook. 2Do

Federico

2Do has been around for a long time, and it’s gone through multiple visual transformations and feature updates that make it one of the most...