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.
Vivaldi’s iOS app (which has been my default browser for the past month) now supports background audio playback, letting you keep YouTube and other media playing when you switch apps or lock the screen. Vivaldi has also added support for tab stacking and pinning on mobile. (Link)
Apple has launched a new feature in Australia and New Zealand that allows users to transfer their music libraries and playlists from other streaming services directly into Apple Music, using a third-party service to match songs with Apple’s catalog. I’m so intrigued by this: what service are they using? When is this launching in other countries? (Link)
If you’ve ever been surprised by a subscription renewal you forgot about, Subo is a new app to help you keep track of all your recurring charges. Created by indie developer Niclas Schmidt, the app lets you monitor when your subscriptions renew and how much you’re spending monthly and yearly across various currencies. The app comes with templates for popular services to make the setup process easier, and it can send you reminders before your next renewal date. The app is free to download, with some features requiring a paid upgrade. I love how this app looks and the attention to animations in the UI; I hope to see more data visualizations in future updates.
As I wrote on MacStories earlier this week, I’ve been testing an agentic workflow in Claude that allows the model to interact with Zapier and connect my Gmail inbox to Todoist. The idea is that every few days, I can take advantage of natural language understanding in a “hybrid automation” setup that scans my inbox for messages I haven’t replied to, understands which ones seem important, and saves them as deep-linked tasks in Todoist. In the article, I explained that those deep links are Superhuman links that reopen a specific conversation directly in the Superhuman app. More specifically, those URL schemes are constructed using the thread identifier of a conversation in Gmail, which Claude can access.
I mentioned Superhuman not because I’m particularly fond of the app, but because it’s one of the few email clients I’ve found that supports deep links based on the Gmail identifier of a message rather than a proprietary one. That discovery led me down a research rabbit hole aimed at discovering how many clients support a similar feature across platforms…and it’s not that many. Which is why I’m publishing this short note: I want to see if there’s anything I’m missing.
Specs for Sony’s upcoming WH-1000XM6 noise-cancelling headphones have leaked, revealing a new QN3 processor, 12 noise-cancelling microphones, 30mm drivers, a foldable design with a new case, and 30 hours of battery life, with a rumored May 15 release date. (Link)
Fascinating story by Scott Alexander, who tested the geolocating abilities of OpenAI’s o3 model by running it through a complex GeoGuessr prompt that emphasizes methodical observation, avoiding premature conclusions, and maintaining multiple hypotheses. The results are both impressive and scary. (Link)
After a long development time, Xogot for iPad has launched and it brings the popular open-source Godot game engine to iPadOS with a touch-first interface that lets you create both 2D and 3D games. The app comes with built-in templates for various game genres, tutorials, and documentation to help you learn as you create. What I find particularly neat is the integration with desktop Godot projects: you can import from iCloud, USB drives, or even GitHub (via Working Copy) and continue working between macOS and iPadOS. This is an amazing example of a truly native and professional iPad app that supports all kinds of modern iPadOS APIs (including Apple Pencil, Stage Manager, and game controllers for testing) and isn’t afraid to push the boundaries of what can be done on an iPad. We need more apps like this!
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.
Prolific app developer Sindre Sorhus is back with a simple app to create and edit color palettes in an open-source, JSON-based file format called Simple Color Palette. This app speaks directly to my heart. Not only can you use it to create and edit color palettes, but you can also open Adobe’s proprietary ASE-formatted color palettes. This opens up the format to many people who don’t use Adobe products but are sent design resources containing ASE files. The app itself is easy to use (par for the course for Sindre’s apps), it syncs across iPhone, iPad, and Mac via iCloud, and best of all, it’s free.
Lately is a new utility designed to get you back on schedule if you’re the type of person who’s always late for stuff. The app relies on live countdowns in the Dynamic Island/Live Activities to show exactly when you need to leave, sends you notifications, and even has an Apple Watch companion app so you can’t miss those alerts. With a Lately Premium subscription, you can unlock recurring timers for routines you’re having trouble sticking with. I know a couple of people in my life I can send this to.
