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, Unwind, a fun exploration of media and more, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about portable gaming and the handheld revolution.
In a second special WWDC edition of AppStories, Federico and John interview Apple Design Award finalists and winners, including the developers of The Outsiders and Tide Guide and the publishers of Pine Hearts and BALL x PIT.
Sofa – Organize everything you watch, read, play, and do. AppStories listeners can get 25% off the first year of Super Sofa with the link above.
Agenda – Date-focused notes deeply integrated with the Apple ecosystem.
Dropzone 5 – The essential drag & drop productivity enhancer for Mac. AppStories listeners can get 50% off the usual $35 price of Dropzone 5 using the link above.
Federico and John are joined this week by Myke Hurley and Chris Lawley to share their first impressions of the WWDC keynote and discoveries in the hours following the presentation.
I just came back to my hotel room after a long day at Apple Park (I documented most of it in my Instagram stories, including a very cool shot), and, like everyone else here in Cupertino, I’m still processing the information overload from the past 12 hours. The MacStories team already covered iOS and iPadOS 27, plus Siri AI and Apple Intelligence, and we have more coming tomorrow.
Before I call it a day though, I wanted to link the first thing I read on my way back: Apple’s latest article on the Machine Learning blog about the new Apple Foundation Models that were announced today – three cloud-based models, and two on-device ones.
Apple Frames CLI, now with fancy progress bars for video framing.
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 with support for task assignments and all-day reminders.
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.
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...
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.
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.
John
