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John Voorhees

Managing Editor

Mastodon: @johnvoorhees@macstories.netEmail: voorhees@macstories.net

John, MacStories’ Managing Editor, has been writing about Apple and apps since joining the team in 2015. He also co-hosts MacStories’ podcasts, including AppStories, which explores of the world of apps, MacStories Unwind, a weekly recap of everything MacStories and more, and MacStories Unplugged, a behind-the-scenes, anything-goes show exclusively for Club MacStories members.

Monthly Log — March 31, 2025

Approaching AI with a Critical Optimist's Eye

Approaching AI with a Critical Optimist's Eye

On Friday, Allison Morrow published a story for CNN Business suggesting that Apple’s delay of AI features doesn’t matter because AI isn’t good enough for the sort of consumer products we’re accustomed to from the company. In Morrow’s parlance, Apple isn’t failing AI; AI is failing AI.

She argues that Wall Street’s desire for an iPhone upgrade super cycle pushed Apple to announce Apple Intelligence too early, and now, the tech media is scolding users for not adapting to AI’s imperfections. If that sounds familiar, it‘s because it’s a form of the old “You’re holding it wrong” argument that Steve Jobs was rightly criticized for using during the iPhone 4 Antennagate incident in 2010. Blame the user, not the technology.

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459 — March 28, 2025

The Automation Gap: Apple Is Running Out of Time to Build a Shortcuts Bridge to the Future

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More stories for Club members.

The Automation Gap: Apple Is Running Out of Time to Build a Shortcuts Bridge to the Future

Next week on AppStories, Federico and I will cover some of our favorite recent automations. Not to spoil the episode, but it’s not an episode about Shortcuts.

Yes, we each share some shortcuts we’ve built, but there’s also a healthy dose of third-party automation apps, services, and AI projects sprinkled throughout. I take that as a sign that automation is alive and well on Apple platforms. At the same time, though, it’s also a symptom of a bigger issue, especially on the Mac, that I don’t think can be ignored given Apple’s push to make apps interoperable via Apple Intelligence.

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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

A Tour of My PopClip Extensions

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A Tour of My PopClip Extensions

Earlier this week, as I was digging through the details of Sindre Sorhus’ Scratchpad app, I noticed that there was a PopClip extension available. There are very few Mac apps I’ve used as long as PopClip. It’s a simple utility that pops up a menu directly above selected text, just like iOS and iPadOS do. What makes the app so compelling is that in most circumstances, you’re probably using a mouse or trackpad to select text, making a pop-up menu the perfect way to do something with that text.

Over the years, I’ve used a bunch of different PopClip extensions and even built my own, but I’ve settled on a core set that matches the apps where I tend to send snippets of text. Back in 2018, when I named the app one of my must-have apps of 2018, my PopClip lineup was spartan, consisting of relatively few extensions that I used constantly. Most of those are still part of my PopClip extension lineup today, but the list has grown, so I thought I’d offer an update.

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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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