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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.

459 — March 28, 2025

Automating Shortcuts' Tedious Permission Prompts

SHORTCUTS CORNER

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

Shortcuts Essentials

Automating Shortcuts' Tedious Permission Prompts

As I covered on Connected earlier this week, I’ve been playing around with a Mac mini server for the past month for a variety of tasks. Besides running local LLM tasks on it (such as transcribing videos or podcasts), processing audio files with shell commands, and experimenting with Cursor, I’ve found it nice to have a dedicated machine in the cloud that can run complex automations in the background and act as an always-on file server.

One of the things I figured out how to do with the Mac mini is use it as a private automation server to run shortcuts triggered from Android. This will be a standalone guide at some point in the future, but long story short, I set up webhooks via Pushcut for Mac that “listen” for incoming text sent from my Android device using Tasker. When I find some text or a URL that I want to send off to one of my shortcuts, I can trigger a command in Tasker that will send that item off to my Pushcut server running on the Mac mini, which in turn will trigger different shortcuts based on the input. It works beautifully! Except for one thing:

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459 — March 28, 2025

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

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

HuggingSnap

Earlier this week, the folks at Hugging Face released HuggingSnap, a new on-device “visual intelligence” app for iPhone. The app is very similar to Apple’s own Visual Intelligence feature for iOS 18, but what makes this stand out is that it uses the smolvlm2 vision model (specifically, the 500M one built with Swift MLX) to process everything locally without sending any data to the cloud. You can simply point your camera at something, ask questions about it, and get responses in real-time. In my tests, it worked well with scenes around me, but it struggled a little when it came to text recognition. Regardless, it’s another cool example of local, open-source AI being comparable to cloud-first models.

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459 — March 28, 2025

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

I loved this thought-provoking story by Blake Watson, who wrote about their evolving relationship with accessibility tools, envisioning a future where computers understand all kinds of natural language regardless of physical abilities. There are plenty of aspects worth criticizing when it comes to LLMs, but their positive impact on accessibility software feels undeniable. (Link)

John Gruber shared a useful Keyboard Maestro macro that prevents MarsEdit from accidentally pasting images. He should make this a regular column on Daring Fireball. (Link)

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458 — March 21, 2025

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

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

Quick Capture for Obsidian

I’ve been keeping an eye on this Obsidian companion utility for a while now, and I decided to take it for a spin earlier this week. I think it has a lot of potential, with a couple of confusing aspects I’d like the developer to work on. The idea behind Quick Capture – similar to Funnel – is that you can set up multiple capture destinations across your Obsidian vault, create new notes or append text to existing ones, attach voice recordings with transcriptions, scan documents, add images, and even send sketches. Compared to Funnel, I find Quick Capture’s design more polished and intuitive, and I’m a fan of the triple toolbar (seriously!) above the keyboard that contains formatting buttons, attachments, and destinations. However, I found the app’s setup flow for Obsidian sub-folders slightly confusing (I had to set up my Daily Notes sub-folder as a “vault” because, otherwise, the app wouldn’t save changes inside my daily note), and the integration with Todoist never worked for me. I hope the developer continues refining the app, and I’ll continue checking out its future updates.

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458 — March 21, 2025

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

Deep Research is one of Google Gemini’s most impressive models, creating detailed reports with citations to web sources. Last week, the company opened the model up to everyone to try, and this week, it posted a set of tips for getting the most out of the tool. (Link)

Apple wasn’t the only tech company to hear from the European Commission this week. Google is following in its footsteps with an EC ruling this week that its shopping, hotel, and flight services violate the DMA. If Apple’s situation is any indicator, we probably won’t hear more about this for many months. (Link)

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458 — March 21, 2025

Testing Todoist's LLM Integration with Email

THE EXTENSION

Exploring topics beyond our day-to-day coverage.

Testing Todoist's LLM Integration with Email

Ever since I’ve been back on Todoist as my primary task manager, one of the things I’ve appreciated the most about it is how its web-first nature lends itself so well to different kinds of integrations across platforms. As Club members will know, I’ve created a suite of advanced shortcuts to communicate with Todoist; but I’ve also set up zaps in Zapier to automate project creation via templates, played around with ChatGPT integrations, and used third-party apps (such as Funnel) that natively integrate with Todoist. There are a lot of cross-platform services for task management, but very few of them take extensibility and integrations seriously. Todoist does.

There is, of course, one major holdout here: email. To the best of my knowledge, Spark is the only email client that natively integrates with Todoist, but as we discussed recently, John and I have been using Shortwave as our primary email client lately. I don’t know about the Shortwave CEO’s statement that they’re building the “Cursor for email” (every few years, the trend of building “the X for Y” comes back around; remember when everyone wanted to be the “Uber for something”?), but what I can tell you is that the combination of team sharing and AI-powered automation is doing wonders for my email setup given the number of messages I receive on a daily basis.

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457 — March 14, 2025

ReaderTask: A Shortcut to Turn Readwise Reader Articles into Todoist Tasks

SHORTCUTS CORNER

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

Shortcuts Essentials

ReaderTask: A Shortcut to Turn Readwise Reader Articles into Todoist Tasks

You may have noticed that I’ve been trying to be more consistent about sharing interesting articles found around the web on MacStories lately. Besides feeling energized by new topics we’re covering and some upcoming changes in my workflow, I’m doing this as part of a broader effort to continue making the MacStories homepage a frequent “destination” for our readers with more useful content every day.

Beyond hard work alone, behind this strategy lies a shortcut and dual-app system I’ve been using recently: to make sure I don’t forget to link to stuff, I’ve created a workflow to simultaneously save an article I want to read in Readwise Reader and create a task in Todoist that points directly to that article. I call this shortcut ReaderTask, and it takes advantage of both the Readwise Reader and Todoist web APIs to allow me to save a link in two places in just a couple of seconds.

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457 — March 14, 2025

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

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

Web Apps

I mentioned this app in my story about the iPad and web apps earlier this week, and I also want to highlight it here since it received a big update this week. This app, which allows you to run web apps like Netflix, YouTube, and Figma as PWAs on the Vision Pro, now supports push notifications from web apps and has a more native visionOS launcher for all your saved web apps. You can also now download files, save images, and copy stuff to your clipboard in the app. If you want to work with web apps in visionOS, this is the app to get.

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