I’m on my way to California for WWDC, and with the conference kicking off tomorrow, I thought I’d take advantage of my 12 hours on this airplane by sharing the latest addition to the Apple Frames CLI: support for video framing.
RemCTL 1.0.5, Now with Support for All-Day Reminders and Task Assignments→
I wanted to share a quick update to RemCTL, my CLI for Reminders that I released last week, which brings almost every Reminders feature to your agent or terminal of choice.
As it turns out, I forgot to support two more Reminders-exclusive (i.e. not available to third-party clients) functionalities in the initial version: all-day reminders and the ability to assign a reminder to another person in a shared list. The former is the feature that lets you enter a task with a due date such as “Tuesday” but without a due time;. those tasks can now be properly read and written by RemCTL.
Additionally, while RemCTL cannot share lists with iCloud (it requires a private Apple entitlement – same reason why the CLI cannot share a template via iCloud), it can now read and create task assignments from an already-shared Reminders list. In a nice touch, you can even lookup assignees by name, email address, or phone number.
You can find a detailed changelog of the latest release here. As always, the best way to update the CLI is to simply ask your agent to pull the latest version and update its installed skill to match the most recent version from the repo.
Our WWDC Automation Wish List
JohnThis week on AppStories, Federico and John share their WWDC automation wishes.
Then on AppStories+, they share more details on their research setups for the summer.
Also available on YouTube here.
We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.
To learn more about an AppStories+ subscription, visit our [Plans page](macstories.net/appstories-plans/, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.
AppStories Episode 487 - Our WWDC Automation Wish List
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37:00
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This episode is sponsored by:
Things: The award-winning to-do app.
Region-Free Computer Use in Codex for Mac with Cua Driver
Native computer use in Codex is one of my favorite features of the Mac app – let alone the best implementation of computer use I’ve tested – and since I last wrote about it, it’s gotten even better with the addition of Appshots, which are directly inspired by the concept of Skyshots that I covered...
Introducing RemCTL: The Power-User Reminders CLI for macOS and AI Agents
Today, I’m pleased to release my latest free and open source project: RemCTL, a power-user Reminders CLI that, unlike others, exposes all the latest Reminders features as of iOS and macOS 26. RemCTL supports reading and writing subtasks, tags, sections, rich links, image attachments, grocery lists, and even templates.
It’s available on GitHub here, and it comes bundled with a skill for desktop agents.
Our macOS 27 Wishes
This week on AppStories, Federico explains how he’s using the recently-released Notion developer platform before he and John share their wishes for macOS 27.
On AppStories+, John asks Federico about the technical underpinnings and evolution of the Shortcuts Playground project that he published last week.
Also available on YouTube here.
We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.
To learn more about an AppStories+ subscription, visit our [Plans page](macstories.net/appstories-plans/, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.
This episode is sponsored by:
- Steamclock – We make great apps. Design and development, from demos to details. — https://steamclock.com/appstories
Shortcuts Playground Remote: The Generative Shortcut That Makes Other Shortcuts
After months of work and debugging, I launched Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that lets you create shortcuts for Apple’s Shortcuts app with natural language. The plugin is free and open source, and it can be installed in your favorite agent from this repo. You can read more about it in...
Read moreIntroducing Shortcuts Playground: Create Apple Shortcuts with Claude Code or Codex
Today, I’m pleased to introduce something I’ve been working on for the past six months: Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that can create any shortcut for Apple’s Shortcuts app using natural language. With Shortcuts Playground, you can simply prompt Claude Code or Codex with a sentence requesting a shortcut of any kind; a few minutes later, you’ll end up with a real shortcut in Finder, ready to be imported into the Shortcuts app. It’s as simple as that.
Shortcuts Playground is free and open source: anyone can download the plugin from this GitHub repo, where I extensively documented how it works behind the scenes and where you can also inspect the code yourself.
Just point your preferred desktop agent to the repo, and it’ll find the plugin marketplace to install it for you. You can also check out the dedicated mini-site we launched for it at macstories.net/shortcuts-playground.
For Club MacStories+ and Premier members, I’m also releasing Shortcuts Playground as a generative shortcut. It’s quite meta: once you have the main plugin installed on a Mac, you can use a shortcut to make more shortcuts and install them directly on an iPhone, iPad, or other Mac. The Shortcuts Playground shortcut is highly customizable, and I’ve shared a detailed guide for Plus and Premier members here.
As part of this announcement, we’re also launching the completely redesigned MacStories Shortcuts Archive. The new archive is easier to browse with new categories and filters, and it also includes 100 shortcuts that were entirely generated by Shortcuts Playground and verified by me. I figured that it’d be nice to offer concrete evidence of Shortcuts Playground’s capabilities; I think 100 shortcuts should do the trick.
You can read more about the new MacStories Shortcuts Archive here.
Our iOS and iPadOS 27 Wishes
This week on AppStories, we share our wishes for iOS and iPadOS 27, and for AppStories+ subscribers, we tackle Visual Intelligence and whether there are any use cases that aren’t creepy.
Also available on YouTube here.
We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.
To learn more about an AppStories+ subscription, visit our [Plans page](macstories.net/appstories-plans/, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.
AppStories Episode 485 - Our iOS and iPadOS 27 Wishes
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34:04
34:04
This episode is sponsored by:
- Steamclock: We make great apps. Design and development, from demos to details.
- Claude: For problems worth solving — get started with Claude today.