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AppStories, Episode 322 – A Classic Pick 2→

This week on AppStories, we each pick two apps we’ve been enjoying recently and explain why.

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On AppStories+, I dive into VR and explore whether AI can convincingly replace me or Federico as hosts of the show.

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Using ‘Phone Link’ Between iOS and Windows for iPhone Notifications and iMessage→

I enjoyed this explanation by The Verge’s Tom Warren on how Microsoft’s Phone Link app – which has long allowed Android users to connect their smartphones to a Windows PC – has been updated to support iOS notifications and sending texts via iMessage. From the story:

The setup process between iPhone and PC is simple. Phone Link prompts you to scan a QR code from your iPhone to link it to Windows, which automatically opens a lightweight App Clip version of Phone Link on iOS to complete the Bluetooth pairing. Once paired, you have to take some important steps to enable contact sharing over Bluetooth, enable “show notifications,” and allow system notifications to be shared to your PC over Bluetooth. These settings are all available in the Bluetooth options for the device you paired to your iPhone.

And:

Microsoft’s Phone Link works by sending messages over Bluetooth to contacts. Apple’s iOS then intercepts these messages and forces them to be sent over iMessage, much like how it will always automatically detect when you’re sending a message to an iPhone and immediately switch it to blue bubbles and not the green ones sent via regular SMS. Phone Link intercepts the messages you receive through Bluetooth notifications and then shows these in the client on Windows.

I got access to the updated version of Phone Link on my PC today, and this integration is pretty wild and it actually works, albeit with several limitations.

First, the setup process is entirely based on an App Clip by Microsoft, which is the first time I’ve seen and used an App Clip in real life. Essentially, my understanding is that this works similarly to how an iPhone can pair with an old-school Bluetooth car system: the iPhone and PC pair via Bluetooth, and you can then provide the PC with access to your notifications and contacts from iOS’ Bluetooth settings. This is the same UI I have for my KIA Sportage’s system, which uses regular Bluetooth to pair with my iPhone and can also display contacts and missed calls.

The setup process based on an App Clip.

The setup process based on an App Clip.

The difference between my car and Phone Link, of course, is that with Phone Link you can type text messages from a PC and they will be sent as iMessages on iOS. This bit of dark magic comes with a lot of trade-offs (check out Warren’s full story for the details on this), but it works for individual contacts. I’ve been able to start a conversation with John, reply to his messages from Windows notifications, and even send him URLs1, and they were all correctly “intercepted” by iOS and sent over as iMessages. I’ve also been impressed by the ability to clear notifications from a PC and have them go away on iOS’ Lock Screen immediately.

The Phone Link app paired with my iPhone.

The Phone Link app paired with my iPhone.

This was then sent as an iMessage.

This was then sent as an iMessage.

The limitations of Phone Link for iPhone users mean you’ll always have to fall back to the actual iOS device for something – whether it’s posting in an iMessage group or sending a photo or acting on notifications – but for quick messages, glancing at notifications, and clearing them, I think this integration is more than good enough.

  1. Fun fact: raw URLs sent from Windows are delivered as rich links from iMessage, but the card’s preview doesn’t load by default on the recipient’s device. ↩︎
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AppStories, Episode 321 – Revisiting RSS→

This week on AppStories, we revisit RSS to talk about how syncing services and apps have changed and share how our use of RSS has evolved.

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On AppStories+, I am dipping my toe into co-working but wonders if I’m more into the idea of it than it is useful.

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The Mac and iPad Pro Are on a Collision Course→

Jason Snell, in an excellent column for Macworld:

Sometimes I look back at all the effort Apple has made with the iPad Pro and wonder if it was worth it. All the additions of Mac-ish features have added complexity that’s probably lost on most users of iPadOS, and the power users for whom they were intended are probably well aware of all the ways they don’t really match up the Mac features they’re duplicating.

I want to see what happens when the walls come down. Today’s iPad Pro is powered by the same chip that’s in the MacBook Air. Would it be such a cataclysm if I could simply reboot that iPad into macOS or run macOS inside a virtual machine?

Likewise, what if the Mac had a touchscreen and Apple Pencil support and came in shapes that weren’t the traditional laptop? What if the Mac began to offer the ergonomic flexibility that iPadOS is so good at? What if I ripped the keyboard off a MacBook and had the option to switch to a touch-based mode that was essentially iPadOS?

I love this story, which I recommend reading in its entirety, because it feels as if Jason stared directly into my soul and wrote about something I’ve been feeling for the past several months.

From my perspective, Stage Manager’s failure to reinvent multitasking and iPadOS’ perennial lack of pro features (Jason mentions a proper audio subsystem in his story, and I agree; I wrote this four years ago, and nothing has improved) were the final straw that convinced me to start looking elsewhere for a convertible computer in my life. I could buy a MacBook Air, but I don’t want to be stuck with a laptop that doesn’t have a touchscreen and whose keyboard you can’t detach.

I fear that I’m going to have to wait a couple of years for the Apple computer I want to exist, and I’m not sure anymore that iPadOS can evolve in meaningful ways in the meantime.

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The New York Times Declares that Voice Assistants Have Lost the ‘AI Race’→

Brian Chen, Nico Grant, and Karen Weise of The New York Times set out to explain why voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant seem primitive by comparison to ChatGPT. According to ex-Apple, Amazon, and Google engineers and employees, the difference is grounded in the approach the companies took with their assistants:

The assistants and the chatbots are based on different flavors of A.I. Chatbots are powered by what are known as large language models, which are systems trained to recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets scraped off the web. They can then suggest words to complete a sentence.

In contrast, Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant are essentially what are known as command-and-control systems. These can understand a finite list of questions and requests like “What’s the weather in New York City?” or “Turn on the bedroom lights.” If a user asks the virtual assistant to do something that is not in its code, the bot simply says it can’t help.

In the case of Siri, former Apple engineer John Burkey said the company’s assistant was designed as a monolithic database that took weeks to update with new capabilities. Burkey left Apple in 2016 after less than two years at the company according to his LinkedIn bio. According to other unnamed Apple sources, the company has been testing AI based on large language models in the years since Burkey’s departure:

At Apple’s headquarters last month, the company held its annual A.I. summit, an internal event for employees to learn about its large language model and other A.I. tools, two people who were briefed on the program said. Many engineers, including members of the Siri team, have been testing language-generating concepts every week, the people said.

It’s not surprising that sources have told The New York Times that Apple is researching the latest advances in artificial intelligence. All you have to do is visit the company’s Machine Learning Research website to see that. But to declare a winner in ‘the AI race’ based on the architecture of where voice assistants started compared to today’s chatbots is a bit facile. Voice assistants may be primitive by comparison to chatbots, but it’s far too early to count Apple, Google, or Amazon out or declare the race over, for that matter.

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David Smith’s Widgetsmith reaches 100 Million App Store Downloads→

Source: [david-smith.org](https://www.david-smith.org).

Source: david-smith.org.

100 million of anything is a lot, and 100 million downloads on the App Store are rare. Rarer still, and perhaps unprecedented, is 100 million downloads of an app made by one person.

When it comes to apps, I can’t think of a single app made by an indie developer that has reached the milestone that David Smith did today with Widgetsmith. The app, which was released in September 2020 alongside iOS 13, lets users create personalized Home Screen widgets using photos, text, weather data, and more. Since its release, the array of customization options has continued to expand, and last fall, Lock Screen widgets were added to the mix. Most recently, Widgetsmith was updated with gradient backgrounds.

The latest update of Widgetsmith adds gradient backgrounds.

The latest update of Widgetsmith adds gradient backgrounds.

It’s been remarkable to watch Widgetsmith take the app world by storm. Thinking back to the summer of 2020 when Federico and I were testing Widgetsmith, I remember liking it, but I know neither of us had the slightest inkling that it would go viral the way it did not long after its release. Congratulations, Dave. Widgetsmith’s success is well-deserved.

Don’t miss Dave’s post on his website about Widgetsmith’s milestone. Also, the latest gradient background update to the app is available now as a free update on the App Store.

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Microsoft Outlook for Mac Is Now Free to Use→

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Outlook, its email and calendar app, is now free on the Mac App Store and doesn’t require a Microsoft 365 subscription, which has been the case for a long time on iOS and iPadOS.

That’s great news for Mac users. Outlook has been optimized for Apple silicon Macs and supports iCloud, Gmail, Outlook, IMAP, and other email systems. And, because it’s native, Outlook supports features like widgets, Handoff between devices logged into the same Apple ID, and rich notifications, plus it includes a menu bar app for quickly checking your calendar. In its announcement, Microsoft also said it is working on support for Focus modes through an Outlook feature called Profiles.

Source: Microsoft.

Source: Microsoft.

Microsoft’s move came as something of a surprise and in the midst of rebuilding the Windows version of Outlook. The company is also experimenting with a progressive web app version of the app but told The Verge that it is committed to native apps on Apple’s platforms.

Microsoft Outlook is available to download free on the Mac App Store.

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Apple Frames 3.1.1 with Support for Passthrough Mode→

The 'Shortcut Result' variable, used as an image variable in a shortcut that calls Apple Frames.

The ‘Shortcut Result’ variable, used as an image variable in a shortcut that calls Apple Frames.

I just released a small update to Apple Frames 3.1, which came out earlier this week, with a new output command: &passthrough. With this output command for the Apple Frames API, you’ll be able to generate a framed image (from whatever source you like) and simply pass its result to the next action in a shortcut as a native image variable.

I wrote about this as part of my Extension column in MacStories Weekly today, where I also covered the ability to run Apple Frames from the command line on macOS. Here’s the excerpt about version 3.1.1 of Apple Frames and the new passthrough mode:

As I was researching this column for Weekly, I realized there was an obvious candidate for an output command I did not include in Apple Frames 3.1: a passthrough command to, well, pass framed images along as input for the next action of a shortcut.

Here’s what I mean: when you run Apple Frames from a helper shortcut using the ‘Run Shortcut’ action, that action produces an output variable called ‘Shortcut Result’. If you’re running Apple Frames as a function, thus turning it into a feature of another workflow, it can be useful to take the framed images it produces and use them as a native variable in other actions of the shortcut. The problem is that the output commands I launched with Apple Frames 3.1 all involved “storing” the framed images somewhere, whether it was Files or the system clipboard.

This is no longer the case with the &passthrough output command I added to Apple Frames 3.1.1, which you can redownload from the MacStories Shortcuts Archive or directly from this link. If you run the Apple Frames API with this command, framed images will be passed along as native output of the shortcut, which you can reuse as a variable elsewhere in a shortcut that’s invoking Apple Frames.

And:

Any shortcut or longer workflow that involves running Apple Frames in the background and retrieving the screenshots it frames can take advantage of this method, allowing you to bypass the need to store images in the clipboard, even if temporarily. Essentially, passthrough mode turns Apple Frames into a native action of the Shortcuts app that returns a standard image variable as its output.

This is the only change in version 3.1.1 of Apple Frames, and I’m excited to see how people will take advantage of it to chain Apple Frames with other shortcuts on their devices. You can download the updated version of Apple Frames below.

Apple Frames

Add device frames to screenshots for iPhones (11, 8/SE, and 12-13-14 generations in mini/standard/Plus/Pro Max sizes), iPad Pro (11” and 12.9”, 2018-2022 models), iPad Air (10.9”, 2020-2022 models), iPad mini (2021 model), Apple Watch S4/5/6/7/8/Ultra, iMac (24” model, 2021), MacBook Air (2020-2022 models), and MacBook Pro (2021 models). The shortcut supports portrait and landscape orientations, but does not support Display Zoom; on iPadOS and macOS, the shortcut supports Default and More Space resolutions. If multiple screenshots are passed as input, they will be combined in a single image. The shortcut can be run in the Shortcuts app, as a Home Screen widget, as a Finder Quick Action, or via the share sheet. The shortcut also supports an API for automating input images and framed results.

Get the shortcut here.

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AppStories, Episode 318 – Apple Watch Ultra and The Watch Apps We Use→

This week on AppStories, we compare notes on the Apple Watch Ultra, including what makes it special and what frustrates us, and share the apps we’re using regularly.

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On AppStories+, we dig into HomeKit-enabled blinds, shades, and shutters and explain our Nintendo Switch HDMI upscaling experiments.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

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