In this issue: John recommends Substage and offers a few Todoist tips, and Jonathan shares a personal experience with Apple Intelligence that represents larger issues the company is facing, plus the usual Links, App Debuts, the latest happenings in the Club MacStories+ Discord community, and a recap of MacStories articles and this week’s episodes of MacStories podcasts.
I’ve been trying to use web clippers for as long as I can remember. From Evernote’s old browser extension to the more recent Raindrop extension, Readwise Reader’s clipper, and finally the Obsidian Web Clipper, I’ve always believed in the theoretical value of saving web content for future reference. The only problem: I’ve never been able to stick with any system for too long in practice because of the inherently diverse nature of web content I want to save, not to mention the friction I’d later encounter in attempting to find a particular piece of content again. I liked the idea of saving anything I come across; I just needed a more practical solution that would fit my needs.
Of all the extensions and services I’ve tested again over the past few months, the Obsidian Web Clipper came the closest to my vision. Here I had a browser extension available anywhere that could clip web content in an open plain text format (good), use AI to summarize key information from a webpage (also good), and be customized with templates to tweak frontmatter properties and other metadata (great). As part of my self-imposed lofty goal to build a “perfect memory” system powered by Obsidian and AI thanks to Obsidian Copilot, I used the Obsidian Web Clipper for months and loved it. However, when I noticed that I was saving more YouTube videos and other types of webpages than I initially imagined, I realized that it was maybe time for me to roll my own web clipper, specifically optimized for the kind of personal search index I wanted to build in Obsidian.
So a couple months ago, I got to work.
I learned a lot in the process. As I’ve documented on MacStories and the Club lately, I’ve played around with various templates for Dataview queries in Obsidian; I’ve learned how to take advantage of the Mac’s Terminal and various CLI utilities to transcribe long YouTube videos and analyze them with Gemini 2.5; I’ve explored new ways to interact with web APIs in Shortcuts; and, most recently, I learned how to properly prompt GPT 4.1 with precise instructions. All of these techniques are coming together in Universal Clipper, my latest, Mac-only shortcut that combines macOS tools, Markdown, web APIs, and AI to clip any kind of webpage from any web browser and save it as a searchable Markdown document in Obsidian.
Unlike traditional browser extensions, Universal Clipper can analyze any URL you give it, identify the type of webpage you’re on (whether it be an article, video, social media discussion, or product page), extract relevant metadata, summarize content using AI, and save everything as a beautifully formatted note in Obsidian. Thanks to built-in metadata, webpages clipped with Universal Clipper can be visualized in Obsidian with Dataview; the shortcut supports adding manually typed notes in addition to AI-generated summaries; Universal Clipper can even act as a pre-processor for other shortcuts in your library, and it can be invoked remotely when you’re not at your computer.
Universal Clipper is one of the most advanced shortcuts I’ve built in recent years, and in today’s Automation Academy lesson, I’m going to explain how it works, showcase all the techniques I used to make it, and tell you how you can modify it to your liking.
Let’s dive in.
In this issue: Federico has a shortcut to for carrying on a conversation with GPT-4.1, John offers a practical example of how AI can supplement other research methods, and Jonathan argues for a more exciting Apple Watch SE refresh, plus the usual Links, App Debuts, the latest happenings in the Club MacStories+ Discord community, and a recap of MacStories articles and this week’s episodes of MacStories podcasts.
This month, John explains all the ways Shortwave has improved how he handles email and Devon dives head first into Mac automation.
In this issue: John shares his newfound love for Forklift, Federico updates readers on how well the major LLMs integrate with Shortcuts, and Jonathan has a new screenshot-framing shortcut, plus the usual Links, App Debuts, the latest happenings in the Club MacStories+ Discord community, and a recap of MacStories articles and this week’s episodes of MacStories podcasts.
In this issue: This week, John shares an app for allergy sufferers and a collection of third-party Mac apps with great Shortcuts integration, and Jonathan explains how he’s linked Ulysses to Obsidian, plus the usual Links, App Debuts, the latest happenings in the Club MacStories+ Discord community, and a recap of MacStories articles and this week’s episodes of MacStories podcasts.
As I mentioned last week in the MacStories Weekly newsletter and have been hinting recently on both Connected and AppStories, I’m in the process of building a “perfect memory” system in Obsidian that allows me to save, archive, and search anything I write, think about, or come across on the Internet. This project is a work in progress comprised of different components that need to fall into place, and for this Automation Academy lesson, I’m going to focus on a project that I’ve been refining for a while: automating my voice recordings and turning them into searchable notes in Obsidian.
A couple months ago, I realized that I’ve become the sort of person who likes to brainstorm ideas and tasks by, well, talking out loud and recording myself. I mostly do this when I’m driving alone (technically, with my two dogs in the backseat) or doing chores around the house. I find the process oddly relaxing and better than taking typed notes. Perhaps 12 years of podcasting every week have rewired my brain so that I make better connections between ideas by talking about them, or maybe it’s a byproduct of “shifting modes” and feeling less constrained by the absence of a keyboard and text editor in front of me. Regardless, I’ve been recording myself talking about stuff I have on my mind or need to do for a while now, and I love the process.
After I started recording myself, I quickly realized that I needed those rambling voice recordings to be more than just audio files in a folder. Rather, I wanted to turn them into structured notes in Obsidian containing actionable items extracted from the recording session. I also wanted them to be searchable with Obsidian Copilot, easy to reference, and – ideally – automatically organized with lots of metadata, a summary, and a list of key tasks from the voice recording.
That’s why, after a lot of experiments, I built a hybrid automation to bridge spoken words and Markdown – a system that combines the non-deterministic nature of human language and messy voice recordings with the reliability of Shortcuts, the power of Hazel rules on macOS, and the flexibility of LLMs, which are ideal for processing natural language. The system revolves around a shortcut called Process Transcript that takes the raw transcript of a voice recording and turns it into a structured note in Obsidian, complete with a summary, action items, an embedded audio player, and an internal link to the full transcript.
Building this system has been a fun and informative journey, and today, I want to show you how I did it.
In this issue: Jonathan recommends photography app AgBr, Federico updates his Obsidian Watch Later setup, and John examines the threat to Apple posed by tariffs and AI, plus the usual Links, App Debuts, the latest happenings in the Club MacStories+ Discord community, and a recap of MacStories articles and this week’s episodes of MacStories podcasts.
In this issue: Federico shares his shortcut for generating YouTube transcripts, Jonathan tries out intuitive stretching app Bend, and John explains why Simple Scan is his favorite scanning app, plus the usual Links, App Debuts, the latest happenings in the Club MacStories+ Discord community, and a recap of MacStories articles and this week’s episodes of MacStories podcasts.
This month, Devon checks in one year after beginning to use Everlog to create a timeline of his life, and John thinks it’s time to stop hyping or ignoring AI and judge it critically like any other technology.
