Posts in stories

Introducing Shortcuts Playground: Create Apple Shortcuts with Claude Code or Codex

Shortcuts Playground in Claude Code.

Shortcuts Playground in Claude Code.

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.

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Hands-On with Anthropic Labs’ Claude Design Preview

Last week, Anthropic introduced Claude Design, a new research preview product from the equally new Anthropic Labs. Claude Design, which is currently available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers through the Claude web app, can prototype apps and websites, design presentation materials, generate marketing materials, and more. As someone who has felt as though Claude’s design skills noticeably lagged behind its coding, I was eager to give it a try. So, over the weekend, I tasked Claude Design with coming up with a brand new progressive web app and helping me design a new feature for an existing project.

I’m always looking for a way to resurface articles, apps, products, and other links I save in a variety of places, so my first test of Claude Design was to build an iPad-first web app that would deliver those things to me automatically using a magazine-style design. Claude Design is organized into a sidebar and canvas with tabs in the sidebar for creating prototypes, slide decks, template-based designs, and blank designs. To get started, I named my project and picked a “high fidelity” prototype. Then, I dragged some screenshots of a similar AI assisted reading app I’d seen on social media into Claude Design and described what I wanted, answered some follow-up questions, and let Claude get at it.

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Introducing Apple Frames 4: A Revamped Shortcut, Support for Frame Colors, Proportional Scaling, and the Apple Frames CLI for Developers

Apple Frames 4.

Apple Frames 4.

Well, it’s been a minute.

Today, I’m very happy to introduce Apple Frames 4, a major update to my shortcut for framing screenshots taken on Apple devices with official Apple product bezels. Apple Frames 4 is a complete rethinking of the shortcut that is noticeably faster, updated to support all the latest Apple devices, and designed to support even more personalization options. For the first time ever, Apple Frames supports multiple colors for each device, allowing you to mix and match different colored bezels for each framed screenshot; it also supports proportional scaling when merging screenshots from different Apple devices.

But that’s not all. In addition to an updated shortcut, I’m also releasing the Apple Frames CLI, an open source command-line utility that lets developers and tinkerers automate the process of framing screenshots directly from the Mac’s Terminal. And there’s more: the Apple Frames CLI is also designed to work with AI agents, and it comes with a Claude Code/Codex skill that lets coding agents take care of framing dozens or even hundreds of screenshots in just a few seconds, from any folder on your Mac.

Apple Frames 4 is the result of an idea I had months ago that enabled me to remove more than 500 actions from the shortcut, going from over 800 steps down to ~300. I did all that work manually, but it was worth it; the improved shortcut is faster and vastly more reliable than before thanks to a more intelligent logic that adapts to the growing ecosystem of Apple screen sizes and display resolutions.

Apple Frames 4 and the Apple Frames CLI represent a substantial step forward for screenshot automation, and I’ve been using both extensively for the past few weeks.

Let’s dive in.

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MacStories Setups: Refining and Simplifying

Federico's setup (left) is as sleek as mine is chaotic (right).

Federico’s setup (left) is as sleek as mine is chaotic (right).

I always enjoy these MacStories Setup updates because everyone is different, with its own unique themes and trends. Last year, Federico spent a lot of time paring back his gadgets, while I was busy expanding my office setup, driven largely by moving away from a Studio Display. For this setup update, I’d say we’re a little more in sync. Federico was a busier shopper than I was over the past few months, but we both spent time refining and simplifying our setups. Let’s look at where we landed.

At the end of 2025, I treated myself to a new 4K 32” OLED display and mini PC for gaming. The combo is great, and I don’t regret not waiting for the new Studio Display, but it did require a few adjustments.

Here's a glamor shot of the Elements E5 Hub from CalDigit because in reality, hubs with cables coming out of every side look messy.

Here’s a glamor shot of the Elements E5 Hub from CalDigit because in reality, hubs with cables coming out of every side look messy.

The biggest change has been the addition of a CalDigit Elements E5 Hub. My ASUS display has fewer ports than my old Studio Display, so it was time to expand. What I love about the Elements hub is that it’s tiny compared to CalDigit’s docks. That’s because all it has is Thunderbolt 5 and USB-A ports. I didn’t need HDMI, Ethernet, and the rest of what the CalDigit docks offered, so I saved some space and money and filled every port available.

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First Look: Hands-On with Claude Code’s New Telegram and Discord Integrations

Late yesterday, Anthropic announced messaging support for Claude Code, allowing users to connect to a Claude Code session running on a Mac from a mobile device using Telegram and Discord bots. I spent a few hours playing with it last night, and despite being released as a research preview, the messaging integration is already very capable, but a little fiddly to set up.

Let’s take a look at what it can do.

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Hands-On with Claude Dispatch for Cowork

Claude Cowork Dispatch

Claude Cowork Dispatch

Today, Anthropic launched a new Cowork feature called Dispatch as a research preview that allows you to control a Mac-based, sandboxed Cowork session from a mobile device. Currently, the feature is only available to Max subscribers, but Anthropic has promised Pro users will get Dispatch within a few days.

Dispatch on the Mac.

Dispatch on the Mac.

Dispatch is a close cousin of Claude Code’s recently-released Remote Control feature, but for Cowork. Remote Control requires a Claude Code session to be active in Terminal on your Mac. Similarly, Dispatch requires that your Mac be awake with the Claude app open.

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Six Colors’ Apple in 2025 Report Card

Average scores from the 2025 Six Colors report card.

Average scores from the 2025 Six Colors report card.

For the past 10 years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an “Apple report card” – a survey 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 2025 edition of the Six Colors Apple Report Card has been published, and you can find a summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for the different categories here.

I’m so grateful that Jason invited me, once again, to participate in the survey and share my thoughts on Apple’s 2025. As you’ll see from my comments – and as you know if you’ve been listening to AppStories or Connected lately – I’ve been focusing on AI agents, hybrid automation, and splitting my work between iPadOS and macOS for the past few months. The LLM takeoff in the productivity space is accelerating on a weekly basis, and modern AI tools are fundamentally changing the way I get work done. Case in point: this article was written before OpenClaw went viral, and the past month alone has seen so many of my habits and automations get upended by this incredible open-source tool. As I noted in my comments, however, one thing is not changing: iPadOS essentially gets no access to any of these modern AI tools, which are increasingly launching as Mac-only apps or features.

I’ve prepared the full text of my responses for the Six Colors report card, which you can find below.

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The Sentence Returns with iOS 26.4, Sort of

Yesterday, Apple released developer beta 1 of iOS 26.4, which among other things adds a feature to the Music app that uses Apple Intelligence to generate a playlist from a short description of what the user wants to hear. That immediately reminded Federico and me of The Sentence, a Beats Music feature that sadly didn’t survive the app’s acquisition by Apple.

The Sentence allowed subscribers to describe the music they wanted to hear based on a Mad Libs-style sentence construction. Every sentence was structured as “I’m [location] & feel like [mood] with [person/group] to [music genre].” The feature was a fantastic innovation that made playlist creation fun and easy. As Federico described it in 2014:

It’s The Sentence, though, that steals the spotlight in how it combines regular, Pandora-like song shuffling with a context/mood-based menu to tell Beats what you want to listen to. The Sentence, as the name implies, lets you construct a sentence using variable tokens for location, mood, user, and music genre. You can request things like “I’m at my computer and feel like dancing with myself to pop”, “I’m in the car and feel like driving with my friends to indie”, or more absurd contexts such as “I’m underpaid and I feel like shoveling snow with my lover to metal”. As reported by Re/code [Ed. note: This is a dead link], Beats explained that “the content, and the filters, are selected and tuned by humans, and an algorithm generates the playlist from your choices”.

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