Shortcuts Playground Remote: The Generative Shortcut That Makes Other Shortcuts

Shortcuts Playground Remote, the shortcut to create shortcuts. After months of work and debugging, I launched Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that lets you create shortcuts for Apple’s Shortcuts app with natural language. Th…

Introducing Shortcuts Playground: Create Apple Shortcuts with Claude Code or Codex

Shortcuts Playground in Claude Code. Today, I’m pleased to introduce something I’ve been working on for the past six months: Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that can create any shortcut for Apple’s Shortcuts app using natura…

Book Beats: Reading to the Rhythm

Tracking the books you read is well-trodden App Store ground. So is making music playlists. But what if you combined the two? The result is Book Beats, a new iPhone and iPad app from Olea Studios’ Casey and Lisa Doyle, that does just that, managing …

Real Madrid Immersive Documentary Releases This Friday on Apple Vision Pro

Source: Apple. Apple’s push into immersive sports continues this Friday with the release of Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness, an immersive documentary centering on the world’s most decorated football club. With a running time of 20 minutes, the …

Apple Intelligence-Infused Accessibility Features Promise Greater Flexibility and Power

Source: Apple. In what I expect will be an overarching theme at WWDC 2026, Apple’s Accessibility group took the wraps off an impressive collection of features coming later this year. The announcement, which is timed to lead into Global Accessibility…

Apple Announces Its 2026 Apple Design Award Finalists

Today, Apple announced the finalists for the Apple Design Awards in six categories: Delight and Fun Inclusivity Innovation Interaction Social Impact Visuals and Graphics Each category includes three finalists for a total of 18 apps and games from ac…

Indigo: A Clever Mashup of Bluesky and Mastodon in One Timeline

Last week, Soapbox Software (Ben McCarthy and Aaron Vegh) released Indigo, an iPhone, iPad, and Mac app that offers a unique take on social media, allowing you to log into both Bluesky and Mastodon in a single app. In the increasingly fractured soci…

BetterTouchTool: Now with a Powerful Launcher for Your Mac [Sponsor]

BetterTouchTool has long been one of the Mac’s most versatile customization tools, offering deep control over trackpad and mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, Stream Deck buttons, Floating Menus, window actions, Apple Shortcuts, and more. The latest…

Podcast Rewind: Swapping Apps, Multiple Steam Controllers, Matt’s New Cult, and John’s High-Tech Shoes

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: AppStories This week, John and Federico kick off the app swap challenge, with each of them giving the other three apps to use. We’ll be checking in on how it’s going each week with a fin…

MacStories Weekly: Issue 513

Apple Recognizes Developer Community Leaders

Source: Apple. Yesterday, Apple published a new page on its Developer site highlighting the contributions of 50 prominent members in the Apple developer community. The page recognizes individuals from around the world and across a variety of discipl…

Automation Academy: How I Can Automate Anything I Want Using Codex for Mac

Automations in Codex for Mac. It’s hard to spot long-term trends in the AI world when things are changing so quickly on a weekly basis, but if we try and look back at the first five months of 2026, it’s undeniable that the rise of personal AI agents…

A Dictation App with a CLI Is Exactly What I Needed

Monologue for iOS. As I mentioned in a recent issue of MacStories Weekly for Club members, I believe that reliable dictation and text-to-speech are largely solved problems in the AI industry right now for most languages. There are certainly subtle d…

Spark Mail Adds a Mac CLI and Agent Skills

About two weeks ago, Spark, the email app by Readdle, was updated with a CLI and a set of agentic skills for Claude Code, Codex, and other agents, allowing them read-only access to messages, calendar events, contacts, and meeting notes. These featur…

iOS 26.5 Beta Adds RCS Encryption Starting Today

Source: Apple. Apple announced that beginning today, users on the iOS 26.5 beta will be able to send encrypted RCS messages to Google Messages users who are on the latest version of that app. Apple says that means a message that is intercepted in tr…

Podcast Rewind: Codex, GameHub, a Mouse Lament, a Peacock Invasion, and an Interview with Niléane Dorffer

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: AppStories This week on AppStories, John shares a tip for moving files with Taildrop before he and Federico dig into Codex and its unique capabilities. On AppStories+, Federico and John …

MacStories Weekly: Issue 512

Spotify CLI Turns Personalized Audio into a Podcast Feed

Spotify introduced a new feature called Personal Podcasts today that’s really clever. It’s a CLI, a set of agent skills, and a Claude plugin available from GitHub that, once installed, lets users prompt AI agents to create personalized audio that ca…

A Look at Apple’s 2026 Swift Student Challenge Winners

Source: Apple. Earlier today, Apple profiled the accomplishments of Swift Student Challenge winners. The 350 students who built the winning app playgrounds come from 37 countries and were chosen from the largest pool of participants ever. Susan Pres…

Astropad Workbench Rethinks Remote Mac Control for AI Agents

There are a lot of ways to connect remotely to a Mac, and I’ve tried most of them. Today, though, I want to focus on one in particular: Astropad Workbench, an app and service for remotely connecting to your Mac that includes unique features that mak…

Apple Releases Watch Band, Watch Face, and Wallpapers to Celebrate Pride Month

Source: Apple. Apple has released its annual Pride Collection, including a new Apple Watch Pride Edition Sport Loop band, watch face, and iPhone and iPad wallpapers celebrating LGBTQ+ communities. The commemorative Sport Loop uses 11 colors of nylon…