Nearly three years ago in MacStories Weekly, I wrote about an advanced technique I was using to assemble the MacStories Shortcuts Archive. As I wrote at the time, the Shortcuts Archive is itself generated by a shortcut that collects information from hundreds of text files (one for each shortcut) that contain metadata such as title,...
A Shortcuts Tip for Working with Time Periods and Recording Videos While Audio Is Playing in the Music App
Here are the highlights from the Club MacStories Discord this week: In the Automation Academy channel, I shared a simple technique to run actions in a shortcut only if the current time is between two specific moments of the day. This is the kind of approach you can reuse in many different automations. Fran shared...
Parsing Shortcuts as XML or JSON and Extracting Comments From Them
Nearly three years ago in MacStories Weekly, I wrote about an advanced technique I was using to assemble the MacStories Shortcuts Archive. As I wrote at the time, the Shortcuts Archive is itself generated by a shortcut that collects information from hundreds of text files (one for each shortcut) that contain metadata such as title,...
Six Colors’ ‘Apple in 2021’ Report Card
For the past seven years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an ‘Apple report card’ – a survey that aims to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.
The 2021 installment of the Six Colors report card is now out, and you can find an excellent summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for different categories on Six Colors.
I wasn’t able to participate in last year’s report card, but I’m happy Jason invited me back to share some thoughts and comments on what Apple did in 2021. As it turns out…I had a lot of opinions I wanted to share this year, particularly about the Mac. This may be surprising coming from me – a longtime iPad Pro user – but I’m incredibly fascinated by Apple’s new direction with the Mac platform and how it’s changed thanks to Apple silicon.
I’ll have much more to share about macOS and the M1 Max MacBook Pro I’ve been testing in the near future. In the meantime, I’ve prepared the full text of my answers to the Six Colors report card, which you can find below. Once again, I recommend reading the whole thing on Six Colors to get the broader context of all the participants in the survey.
New Apps We Are Trying or Revisiting (Part 2)
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A Wordle Super Share Shortcut, Bypassing Shortcuts’ Permission Prompts, and a Technique for Overwriting Files with Quick Action Shortcuts
It was a busy week on the Club MacStories+ Discord, and I’ve tried my best to collect highlights from the community below. There isn’t a Discord URL scheme to reopen these links in the Discord app directly; my preferred approach for these is to view them as separate tabs in Safari for iPad or Mac....
Automation Academy: Creating a Podcast RSS Feed for Your Matter Queue in Shortcuts with MatterPod
Last week on MacStories and MacStories Weekly, I explained how I leveraged the Matter integration with Obsidian to interact with the (so far not officially announced) Matter API using Shortcuts. For those who missed it, you can read my original story here, but the gist of it is: Matter has an incredible API that exposes...
Read morePreserve and Play the Original Wordle for Decades with WordleForever
Update: It appears that WordleForever is only supported on iOS/iPadOS 15.4 at the moment, which are available as public betas. I was not aware of the fact that older versions of iOS/iPadOS had a bug in the Shortcuts app that prevented WordleForever from working properly. If you want to play with WordleForever now, you’ll have to install iOS/iPadOS 15.4.
Like many others over the past week, when I saw the news that Wordle had been acquired by The New York Times, I immediately felt a mix of two feelings: I was genuinely happy (and still am!) for Wordle creator Josh Wardle, who managed to turn a simple web game into a successful venture; and I was concerned The New York Times would inevitably ruin the beauty and simplicity of the original game. And I still am.
So in the spirit of game preservation (a topic I care deeply about) and out of skepticism regarding the future of Wordle as a NYT product, I teamed up with Finn Voorhees to create WordleForever, a shortcut that lets you back up the entire Wordle game offline – on your device – using Apple’s Shortcuts app so you can keep playing the game for the next few decades. With WordleForever, you can put the original Wordle on your iPhone or iPad Home Screen and play the original game (with the same words as everyone else) for years to come.
Visualizing the Currently Playing Song with Picture in Picture Instead of Control Center
One of my favorite companion utilities for Apple Music I’ve discovered lately isn’t a new third-party client (I still love and use Marvis) or a new smart home speaker (we’re still rocking the original HomePod in our kitchen and it’s great): it’s Picture in Picture for iPhone and iPad. Let me explain. A few months...