The process for this year’s iOS and iPadOS review was, on the surface, similar to last year’s: I researched, wrote, and edited the entire story in Notion, then used a custom tool to export it to Markdown for MacStories. Structurally, it was also a mirror of last year’s setup: I had separate databases for notes...
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How I Used Notion, Agents, and Local AI to Research and Organize My iOS 27 Review
Shortcuts Playground Remote: The Generative Shortcut That Makes Other Shortcuts
After months of work and debugging, I launched Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that lets you create shortcuts for Apple’s Shortcuts app with natural language. The plugin is free and open source, and it can be installed in your favorite agent from this repo. You can read more about it in...
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Automation Academy: How I Can Automate Anything I Want Using Codex for Mac
It’s hard to spot long-term trends in the AI world when things are changing so quickly on a weekly basis, but if we try and look back at the first five months of 2026, it’s undeniable that the rise of personal AI agents has been a central theme of the year. What started as a...
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Automation Academy: Apple Intelligence, GPT-5, and the ‘Use Model’ Action in Shortcuts
As I mentioned in my iOS and iPadOS 26 review, I find Shortcuts’ ‘Use Model’ action one of the more interesting additions to Shortcuts this year (that is, besides the excellent Mac-only automation features) and a fascinating example of how Apple can leverage its third-party app ecosystem to sidestep the fact that they’re behind other...
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Automation Academy: How I Built a Smarter Web Clipper for Obsidian Using Shortcuts and AI
I’ve been trying to use web clippers for as long as I can remember. From Evernote’s old browser extension to the more recent Raindrop extension, Readwise Reader’s clipper, and finally the Obsidian Web Clipper, I’ve always believed in the theoretical value of saving web content for future reference. The only problem: I’ve never been able...
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Automation Academy: How I Turn Voice Recordings into Searchable Obsidian Notes with Shortcuts, Hazel, and LLMs
As I mentioned last week in the MacStories Weekly newsletter and have been hinting recently on both Connected and AppStories, I’m in the process of building a “perfect memory” system in Obsidian that allows me to save, archive, and search anything I write, think about, or come across on the Internet. This project is a...
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Working with Web APIs in Shortcuts: My Collection of Shortcuts for the Todoist API
A few months ago, I realized that Reminders wouldn’t be able to scale to my new professional life in 2025. You see, this year we’re planning to expand and diversify MacStories even further, launching projects that have been years in the making as well as trying some new things that we recently thought of. New...
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Automation Academy: How I Reimagined Apple Music Discovery and Recommendations with Marvis Pro’s Custom Sections
If you’re anything like me, you probably like Apple Music a whole lot more than Spotify, but you’re in a perennial state of jealousy regarding one advantage Spotify has over Apple Music: discovery of new music. I’ve struggled with this a lot over the years, and I’ve come to accept the reality that I just...
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Automation Academy: My Collection of Advanced Shortcuts for Things
A few months ago, I decided to switch to Things as my default task manager. As I shared multiple times on AppStories and MacStories Weekly, I’m really happy with my decision: not only does the design of the Things app create a more relaxed environment for me to manage my responsibilities, but Cultured Code’s embrace...
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