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Federico Viticci

Editor-in-chief

Mastodon: @viticci@macstories.netEmail: viticci@macstories.net

Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, and Dialog, a show where creativity meets technology.

He can also be found on his two other podcasts on Relay FM – Connected and Remaster.

494 — December 19, 2025

Our Holiday Schedule

Our Holiday Schedule

As many of you probably know, we always take a little time off during the winter holidays to recharge and spend time with our families and friends. This year is no different. The website will be quieter than usual for a couple of weeks, and this is the last issue of MacStories Weekly for the year. Weekly will be back on Friday, January 9. The Monthly Log for December will be published as usual before the end of the month.

As for podcasts, there’s one more episode of AppStories, MacStories Unwind, and NPC coming next week, with all three shows then taking a two-week break. There will be an episode of Cozy Zone for subscribers next week, too, but Comfort Zone is taking the week off. Also, First, Last, Everything and Magic Rays of Light are currently on hiatus. Their return dates haven’t been set yet, but we’ll let you know when they resume.

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494 — December 19, 2025

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

If you’re looking for a good long-form read about something a little different over the holidays, this GQ article by Elizabeth Nelson does a great job capturing The Replacements’ at their peak in 1984, an interesting time in music that also saw Prince’s rise from local Minneapolis act to superstar status. (Link)

On a recent episode of NPC XL, Brendon explained how he’d turned a gaming handheld into an iPod. He also mentioned the Snowsky Fiio Echo Mini, a DAP (Digital Audio Player) that looks like a cassette player. That sent me on a bit of a Google search tangent, where I found this great story about the device by Gita Jackson on Aftermath. (Link)

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494 — December 19, 2025

Home Screen: Federico Viticci

HOME SCREENS

Friends of MacStories share their iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch Home screens.

A lot has changed since the last time I shared my iPhone Home Screen here in MacStories Weekly in October 2024. The past year in software and apps has been a whirlwind of experiments, discovery, and reevaluation of old workflows for me. As you can probably tell if you’ve been listening to AppStories in 2025, AI has played a fundamental role in helping me and John reassess the apps and services that we use. This entire industry is moving so fast – and the capabilities of AI are changing so quickly – that it can be (a) hard to keep up with everything and (b) challenging to settle on anything in particular for too long. When you consider that I’m a very curious person by nature, that it’s my job to write about these experiments, and that I love testing new apps…well, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that my Home Screen has been in a state of flux for the majority of 2025.

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493 — December 12, 2025

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

Bluetooth’s Auracast technology promises to revolutionize audio sharing by letting devices connect to broadcasts without pairing. I find this extremely fascinating. However, despite support from companies like JBL, Samsung, and LG, the feature remains largely unknown to consumers, which is too bad. (Link)

Spotify is rolling out a beta feature called ‘Prompted Playlists’ in New Zealand that lets users type AI prompts to generate custom playlists based on their instructions and listening history. I like this idea, and I think Apple Music should steal it in the future…whenever Apple gets their AI act together. (Link)

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493 — December 12, 2025

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.

Shiuli

Shiuli is a new utility for iPhone and iPad (from the creators of longtime favorite LookUp) that aims to solve a common problem: adding alt text descriptions to images shared online. In my experience, most people don’t add alt text to images on social media not because they don’t care about accessibility, but because writing them takes time and effort – which is something I’m guilty of, too. Shiuli uses AI to generate readable descriptions for your photos that you can then edit to match your style before copying them to Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, or wherever else you’re posting. What I find most interesting about Shiuli is that you don’t have to open the app at all; it integrates with Shortcuts, Visual Intelligence, and the share sheet, so you can get image descriptions from anywhere on iOS or iPadOS. This is one of the good uses of generative AI that can make the web a better place for everyone, and I’m going to incorporate this app into my workflow.

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492 — December 5, 2025

WhisperScribe, a Simple Shortcut for Really Fast Audio Transcription

SHORTCUTS CORNER

Get help and suggestions for your iOS shortcuts and productivity apps.

Shortcuts Essentials

WhisperScribe, a Simple Shortcut for Really Fast Audio Transcription

WhisperScribe in action in the Shortcuts app.

While I’ve decided to use Wispr Flow as my cross-platform dictation app (I signed up for a year of Pro membership yesterday, in fact), there are times when I want to quickly dictate an idea into my iPhone without having to go through the dance of enabling Wispr’s software keyboard, launching the app, and going back to a note-taking app to dictate my text. What if I just want to press a button on the Lock Screen, dictate something, save it, and forget about it – perhaps because I’m walking my dogs or doing chores around the house? I thought about this problem earlier this week, and I fixed it with a simple shortcut called WhisperScribe that lets me record my ideas, transcribes them really quickly, reformats them with AI, and saves them wherever I want to.

The “trick” to making this possible was learning that Groq (with a Q, a different company!) offers an API to transcribe audio files with the popular Whisper-Large-V3 model hosted on their fast inference platform. I previously wrote about my experience with running Groq-hosted models on MacStories, and it’s amazing to be able to issue requests to a model without having to wait around for a response. With transcriptions, I figured the idea would be the same: you’d send a file with a POST request in Shortcuts, and you’d get a transcribed version back in a few seconds.

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492 — December 5, 2025

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.

Pocket Casts

Pocket Casts has reached version 8.0, and it’s a big one. The popular podcast player (which has been my default for a few years at this point) is finally adding a feature many have been asking for: proper playlists. You can now build custom playlists with specific episodes you want to listen to, combining shows from different podcasts and even adding episodes from podcasts you don’t subscribe to. The app’s existing Filters feature has been renamed to ‘Smart Playlists’ and still automatically populates playlists based on rules you set, like release date, duration, and download status. For my taste, Pocket Casts continues to be the only podcast client that has great audio effects and a reasonable design for the queue and playlists, and I highly recommend checking it out again if you haven’t in a while.

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