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This week on MacStories Unwind, John and Federico discuss MusicBox, one of the newest ways they keep up with newly-discovered music, and Black Bird, a new Apple TV+ mini-series that John’s been watching.
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Not long ago, Twelve South introduced a new 3-in-1 charger for the iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods Pro called the HiRise 3. I’ve used a Belkin 3-in-1 charger on my desk for a few years and love it, but it takes up quite a bit of space. So, when Twelve South recently offered to send me the HiRise 3 to test, I jumped at the chance to check out its more compact design. After using the HiRise 3 for the past few weeks, I’m happy with it overall and think it’s a great choice for most users, but it comes with a couple of limitations that you’ll want to consider before buying one yourself.
This week on AppStories, we continue the MacStories Summer OS Preview Series with part one of our in-depth look at changes coming to Apple’s system apps on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, including Weather, Clock, Safari, Mail, Messages, and Photos.
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On AppStories+, John reports on his Stage Manager and Sidecar experiments on the Mac, Stage Manager’s bugginess on the iPad, Federico is itching to try Ventura, and a discussion of third-party iOS 16 Lock Screen widgets.
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One of the system app updates we covered on AppStories this week that I’m most excited about is Mail. The app will finally introduce several advanced features this fall, including:
For the first time in quite a while, that list makes Mail a much more attractive alternative to third-party apps. Mail won’t match every feature offered by third parties, but my needs for advanced email client features are fairly modest, which I expect puts me squarely in the demographic that Apple is targeting.
Until recently, my email use was split between Mimestream, which is only available on the Mac, and Spark on iOS and iPadOS. The split wasn’t ideal, but because I handle most of my email on my Mac, I tolerated it.
For the past several weeks, I’ve been using Mail exclusively on all of my devices, which has been a refreshing change of pace. Still, it’s not perfect. Of the features I use most in third-party mail clients, the single biggest shortcoming of Mail is its clunky implementation of deep linking.
I drop links to email messages in my notes and tasks all the time as a way to quickly access important contextual information. Mimestream offers Gmail URLs, and Spark can create its own app-specific and web URLs right within those apps’ UIs.
I like the way drag and drop on the iPhone and iPad links a message to its subject, but having to use drag and drop is clunky.
In contrast, on iOS and iPadOS, you can only link to a Mail message by dragging it out of Mail into another app’s text field. I’ll take it, but I’d prefer if I could quickly generate a link from the share sheet or with Shortcuts instead. The situation on the Mac isn’t much better, requiring users to resort to AppleScript to construct a URL that links back to a Mail message.
With weeks of Ventura testing ahead of me, I decided to see what I could do to improve the situation. The result isn’t perfect: I still have no choice on iOS and iPadOS but to drag and drop messages. However, I’ve improved the experience on the Mac using a combination of AppleScript and a shortcut that I trigger using Raycast to link the subject of a Mail message to its URL. For added context, my shortcut adds the sender’s name too.
Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings:
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This week on MacStories Unwind, John escapes with Ambulance, an action-packed Michael Bay movie, while Federico enjoys a classic TV period drama: Mad Men.
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John’s Pick:
Federico’s Pick:
Today, Apple introduced new exclusive live sessions on Apple Music. The music streaming service kicked off Apple Music Sessions with performances by country music stars Carrie Underwood and Tenille Townes.
The sessions with Underwood and Townes, which include both audio-only and video components, were recorded in Spatial Audio at Apple’s Nashville, Tennessee studio. Apple has more coming from other country artists too:
Apple Music Sessions kicks off in Nashville with a host of incredible country artists already lined up, including Ronnie Dunn, Ingrid Andress, and many others.
According to Apple’s press release, the company will also expand the new Studio Sessions exclusives to other music genres in the future.
I’m looking forward to seeing where Apple takes Apple Music Sessions. With music libraries essentially being identical from one streaming service to another, it’s features like this that companies can use to set themselves apart.
When Shortcuts debuted on the Mac in Monterey, Apple added more ways to run an automation than anyone expected, but there was one big omission. Shortcuts wasn’t included in Monterey’s share menu. That was a big disappointment for anyone (like me) who has built a lot of shortcuts that rely on the share sheet on iOS and iPadOS. That’s why I’m happy to report that this fall, when Ventura is released, Shortcuts users will, at last, be able to trigger their shortcuts from the Mac’s Share menu.
Shortcuts was toggled off by default in Systems settings on my Mac, so you may not see it if you go directly to the Share menu. To enable it, open System Settings and go to the Extensions section of the Privacy & Security section, where you’ll find it under Sharing. Once toggled on, you’ll be able to select it like any other Share menu item, which will display a list of shortcuts that accept the input that the app you’re using offers.
My testing is ongoing, but despite some bugs, the new Shortcuts share item works well across a variety of system and third-party apps. For example, Safari can pass the active webpage, its URL, and a PDF to Shortcuts, where I’ve used the input with actions like Get Current Web Page from Safari, Get Details of Safari Web Page, and Get Contents of Web Page.
Safari’s inputs also work with File actions like Save File, which can be used to create nicely-formatted PDFs of webpages. However, due to what appears to be a bug in Shortcuts, PDFs can only be saved if the URL is also passed as input to the Save File action, resulting in the creation of a PDF and two HTML files of the webpage contents. Another limit of Safari’s Share menu support is that it currently doesn’t work with text selections.
Safari is where I expect to use Shortcuts’ Share menu the most, but it works with other apps too. So far, I’ve used Shortcuts from the Share menu to:
There are other ways to accomplish any of these things without a share extension, but the Share menu lets you trigger your shortcuts from the context in which you’re working, which I prefer.
The addition of Share menu support is promising, but it still needs work. In addition to the Safari limitations and bugs I mentioned above, it’s worth noting that if a shortcut fails from the Share menu, the app becomes unresponsive and needs to be quit and restarted before it will work again. Also, Shortcuts’ picker window opens behind the app you’re using, so if your app window is in the center of the screen, Shortcuts’ picker might be hidden. Interaction with the app from which you trigger a shortcut is blocked while your shortcut is running too.
The Share menu, which has undergone a redesign in Ventura, removes a couple of features that would be useful with Shortcuts that I hope are added back. First, it’s no longer possible to reorder share extensions in System Settings. I’d like to move Shortcuts to the top of my list, but I can’t. Second, because the Share menu is now an independent floating pallette instead of a submenu of File → Share, individual share extensions can no longer be assigned a keyboard shortcut in System Settings.
Notwithstanding some rough edges, though, it’s good to see Shortcuts come to the Share menu. I’ve found ways around its omission from Monterey, but none have ever seemed as natural as clicking the share button in an app’s toolbar. Hopefully, by the time it’s released in the fall, Shortcuts’ share extension will do everything on the Mac that it can do on the iPhone and iPad.
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