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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.

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446 — December 14, 2024

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

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

Joi Planner

This is a nice-looking new iPhone utility by Alexey Sekachov that combines your calendar events, basic reminders, and habit tracking in a unified timeline UI to provide you with a broad overview of your day. This app won’t replace Reminders and Todoist for me, but I’m very intrigued by the concept of its pull-down gesture: when you swipe down, you reveal a daily summary written in natural language that aggregates data for the current day in a single sentence. I have to wonder if, at some point, Apple will provide developers with an Apple Intelligence API to offer this kind of summarization for data inside their apps.

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446 — December 14, 2024

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

OpenAI demonstrated ChatGPT’s live video capabilities months ago, but the feature, which allows a user to point their smartphone’s camera at an object and interact with ChatGPT based on the live video stream, is now live according to Kyle Wiggers’ report for TechCrunch. (Link)

Victoria Song of The Verge has a detailed look at demos she received of an Android XR device and Samsung’s Project Moohan. (Link)

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446 — December 14, 2024

ActionMode: A Simpler, More Customizable Shortcut to Program Your Action Button

SHORTCUTS CORNER

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

Shortcuts Essentials

ActionMode: A Simpler, More Customizable Shortcut to Program Your Action Button

Earlier this week, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 18.2. In addition to direct ChatGPT integration with Apple Intelligence and other AI features, the updates also come with a slew of tweaks and updates to built-in apps and other functionalities originally introduced in September. As Niléane mentioned in her story about the non-Apple Intelligence changes to iOS 18.2, one of the additions for power users is a brand-new Shortcuts action called ‘Get Current App’. I will explore this action today in a shortcut I created that vastly simplifies the process of customizing the behavior of the iPhone’s Action button.

I first wrote about personalizing the Action button when I shared my original MultiButton shortcut, which I later extended with CAPS, a series of shortcuts that allowed users to define different behaviors for the Action button depending on the currently active app. Those shortcuts were based on personal automations, and they utilized various workarounds to update a text file stored in iCloud Drive with the name of the app you just opened. The system got the job done, but it was prone to error, and it relied on notoriously finicky Files operations to successfully modify the text file whenever you switched between multiple apps. It worked, but it failed more often than I’d like, and it required a lot of setup on the user’s end.

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445 — December 7, 2024

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

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

Quick Capture - Obsidian

I’ve been on the lookout for “quick capture apps” that can, well, quickly capture data into Obsidian and Todoist lately, and this one – aptly named Quick Capture – caught my attention. Designed for Obsidian power users, Quick Capture is an iPhone app that lets you capture text, files, and voice recordings and send them to your vault in Obsidian. The app supports the creation of multiple destinations in the same vault, so you can have a button that creates a text file in a folder and another that appends text to a different note. The app is very simple right now (it doesn’t have an iPad version, nor can it insert text below a specific heading of a document), but it’s got a clean interface, interactive widgets, and good integration with the Files app. I hope the developer can improve it with more options and controls for those who, for example, have a complex daily notes structure that requires a specific file name to be used.

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444 — November 30, 2024

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

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

Scribe

There are plenty of AI-based transcription apps on the App Store (believe me, I must have tried at least 10 different ones this week, and I barely scratched the surface), but how many of them use a plastic-wrapped CD as their whole aesthetic? Scribe does. The app does the same thing as dozens of similar utilities on the App Store, but at least this one has a UI design that doesn’t suck, a clear subscription-based business model that doesn’t feel scammy, and – most importantly – intuitive interactions that let you record, transcribe, generate a summary, and export. The simplicity of Scribe is refreshing, the app is pleasant to use, and it doesn’t feel like it’s constantly trying to trick you into subscribing to another plan or joining a company’s mailing list. Transcription also runs on-device, so your audio notes won’t be stored on anyone’s servers.

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444 — November 30, 2024

Batch Renaming Files on an iPad with FileBrowser

TIPS

Tips and tricks to master your apps and be more productive.

Batch Renaming Files on an iPad with FileBrowser

As I teased on Bluesky earlier this week, I’m working on the next major update to my Apple Frames shortcut. Version 4.0 will be completely rebuilt from scratch and feature even more flexibility in terms of frame customization. I hope to be able to release it before the end of the year.

Anyway, while I was working on the update earlier this week, I suddenly found myself dealing with dozens of new frame assets I had to include in the shortcut’s iCloud Drive folder. These files come directly from Apple, and the company named these PNGs using its own conventions, which don’t work with the naming scheme I’m using for Apple Frames. If I were using a Mac, that wouldn’t be a problem; since macOS Yosemite ten years ago, Finder has offered a way to batch rename multiple files with the ability to format filenames by adding prefixes and suffixes as well as by replacing text in the original filename. On the iPad, sadly, this option is not included, adding to the long list of Finder features missing from the Files app.

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