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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458 — March 21, 2025

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

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

Federico

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.

458 — March 21, 2025

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

John

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)

458 — March 21, 2025

Testing Todoist's LLM Integration with Email

Federico

THE EXTENSION

Exploring topics beyond our day-to-day coverage.

Testing Todoist's LLM Integration with Email

Federico

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

Federico

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

Federico

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.

457 — March 14, 2025

App Debuts

APP DEBUTS

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

Federico

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.

457 — March 14, 2025

Interesting Links

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

Federico

Pocket Casts has made their web player completely free and accessible to everyone without requiring a subscription, a great addition to the service that continues to be the best all-around podcast experience for most people in my opinion. (Link)

GitHub has released an official Xcode extension for GitHub Copilot that provides inline coding suggestions and a chatbot assistant. Meanwhile, in Cupertino… (Link)

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456 — March 7, 2025

PDF It All →

Federico

MACSTORIES RECOMMENDS

Great apps, accessories, gear, and media recommended by the MacStories team.

PDF It All

Federico

I know: the name of this app sounds eerily similar to the hundreds of scammy, subscription-based PDF apps on the App Store that do very little beyond letting you preview PDFs. But this one is legit, and I’ve been using it for months.

I stumbled upon PDF It All last year when I had to convert a webpage to PDF and Safari – for whatever reason – wasn’t doing a good job with it. I’ve had these issues with Safari, especially on the iPad, in the past: webpages that can be printed to PDF just fine with other desktop browsers look weirdly formatted, or lose entire elements of the page, when converted to PDF from Safari. I have no idea why. Specifically, last year I was trying to convert a few pages from Apple’s and Anthropic’s developer documentation, and Safari’s PDF conversion was eating entire blocks’ worth of useful information from the pages. Not good.