I’m on my way to California for WWDC, and with the conference kicking off tomorrow, I thought I’d take advantage of my 12 hours on this airplane by sharing the latest addition to the Apple Frames CLI: support for video framing.
Posts tagged with "AI"
Apple Frames CLI, Now with Support for Framing Screen Recordings
RemCTL 1.0.5, Now with Support for All-Day Reminders and Task Assignments→
I wanted to share a quick update to RemCTL, my CLI for Reminders that I released last week, which brings almost every Reminders feature to your agent or terminal of choice.
As it turns out, I forgot to support two more Reminders-exclusive (i.e. not available to third-party clients) functionalities in the initial version: all-day reminders and the ability to assign a reminder to another person in a shared list. The former is the feature that lets you enter a task with a due date such as “Tuesday” but without a due time;. those tasks can now be properly read and written by RemCTL.
Additionally, while RemCTL cannot share lists with iCloud (it requires a private Apple entitlement – same reason why the CLI cannot share a template via iCloud), it can now read and create task assignments from an already-shared Reminders list. In a nice touch, you can even lookup assignees by name, email address, or phone number.
You can find a detailed changelog of the latest release here. As always, the best way to update the CLI is to simply ask your agent to pull the latest version and update its installed skill to match the most recent version from the repo.
Introducing RemCTL: The Power-User Reminders CLI for macOS and AI Agents
Today, I’m pleased to release my latest free and open source project: RemCTL, a power-user Reminders CLI that, unlike others, exposes all the latest Reminders features as of iOS and macOS 26. RemCTL supports reading and writing subtasks, tags, sections, rich links, image attachments, grocery lists, and even templates.
It’s available on GitHub here, and it comes bundled with a skill for desktop agents.
Introducing Shortcuts Playground: Create Apple Shortcuts with Claude Code or Codex
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.
A Dictation App with a CLI Is Exactly What I Needed
As I mentioned in a recent issue of MacStories Weekly for Club members, I believe that reliable dictation and text-to-speech are largely solved problems in the AI industry right now for most languages. There are certainly subtle differences between the latest models and not-so-subtle discrepancies when you consider local (and free) transcription models versus cloud-hosted (and often expensive) solutions, but by and large, LLMs have “fixed” the problem of fast and high-performance speech-to-text transcription. Whether you’re using Superwhisper, Wispr Flow, Aqua Voice, or a local wrapper for Parakeet or Microsoft’s VibeVoice, chances are that your transcribed text will be more than good enough these days. Just like with regular chatbots, benchmarks matter less and less: it’s the overall user experience that defines products that are otherwise very similar to each other.
Spark Mail Adds a Mac CLI and Agent Skills
About two weeks ago, Spark, the email app by Readdle, was updated with a CLI and a set of agentic skills for Claude Code, Codex, and other agents, allowing them read-only access to messages, calendar events, contacts, and meeting notes. These features were extended again a few days ago with new abilities that added email triage actions and more skills. The approach is clever in its local architecture, which keeps your message data on your Mac while making it available to agents.
CLIs are one of this year’s top app trends, with a wide variety of productivity apps adding them. The reason is simple: agents that work in the Terminal like Claude Code and Codex can use local CLIs, which keeps token usage down because the agent only sees a command’s text output instead of carrying tool schemas with it the way MCP servers do.
Spark isn’t the first to create an email CLI. The Google-created, but “not an official product,” googleworkspace CLI interfaces with Gmail and a bunch of other Google services, offering over 100 skills. The difference is that a CLI like googleworkspace contacts Google’s Gmail servers and acts on your messages in the cloud, whereas Spark’s CLI acts as a remote control for the Spark app itself, managing the messages locally on your Mac and then syncing them back to Gmail via the desktop app.
I’ve worked with both the googleworkspace CLI and Spark’s, and Spark’s is by far the easier one to use because you don’t need to set up a Google Cloud project or deal with OAuth. The only drawback is that the Spark app needs to be open for its CLI to work because everything happens on your Mac. However, as a practical matter, that’s not a limitation that has impacted me since my email app is open when I’d want to use Spark’s CLI or skills anyway.
There are two levels to what Spark offers. The read-only CLI and skills are available to all users, whether or not they subscribe to Spark Pro. Those actions include the ability to search and summarize messages, fetch context, read threads, and view your calendar, contacts, and meeting notes. A Pro subscription adds message drafting, replying, snoozing, pinning, labeling, moving, and archiving, along with team commenting. It’s an excellent set of actions that uses syntax similar to Gmail, which means it should be familiar to many long-time Gmail users straight out of the box.
And there’s more. Readdle has also released a set of recipes and personas, which are open-source skills. The recipes include instructions for morning and end-of-day email reviews, reviewing of new senders, catching up on messages after vacation, and more. Personas are more holistic approaches to your inbox that apply to an entire email session and have modes. For example, the Founder persona has Rapid Triage, Aggressive Delegation, and Cross-Team Oversight modes. Other personas include Executive Assistant, Freelancer, and Team Lead. Full details of every recipe and persona are available on Readdle’s GitHub page.
I’ve spent time using the read-only actions of Spark’s CLI with Claude Code, and it’s an excellent option for automating your email. Setup is simple and fast, and it works well. I’m not sure personas are for me, but there are a bunch of interesting ideas among the recipes, which I intend to explore more and use to create my own skills.
Spark Mail is available as a free download on the Mac App Store. The CLI’s triage actions are exclusive to users who subscribe to Spark Pro, which costs $20/month or $200/year.
Remodex Is the Best Codex Remote Client for iOS (Until OpenAI Releases an Official Codex Mobile App)
Various OpenAI employees and members of the Codex team have been hinting at a native Codex app for iOS lately. While I very much hope that’s in the cards – especially if the project involves connecting to a remote Mac running the full Codex app – I wanted to highlight an indie utility I’ve been using a lot lately to access my Codex setup on my Mac Studio server from my iPhone.
The app is called Remodex, and it was created by Italian indie developer Emanuele Di Pietro. Remodex, as the name suggests, acts as a remote for the Codex CLI installed on a macOS computer, and it lets you operate your existing projects and chats with a UI that is reminiscent of the official Codex app for Mac. Even better, Remodex is not based on some hack-y workaround: it’s entirely powered by OpenAI’s official (and open-source) Codex App Server.
OpenAI Targets Coding and Knowledge Work with Its New GPT-5.5 Model
OpenAI announced GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro today, which it says are faster and able to work more autonomously than the company’s previous models. It’s a message that is sure to interest business users whether their goal is accelerating software development or increasing productivity more generally. Some of the areas that OpenAI says GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro excel at include:
- writing and debugging code;
- analyzing data;
- conducting web research;
- creating business documents such as spreadsheets and presentations;
- using apps; and
- juggling multiple tools.
In its press release, OpenAI claims that:
The gains are especially strong in agentic coding, computer use, knowledge work, and early scientific research—areas where progress depends on reasoning across context and taking action over time. GPT‑5.5 delivers this step up in intelligence without compromising on speed: larger, more capable models are often slower to serve, but GPT‑5.5 matches GPT‑5.4 per-token latency in real-world serving, while performing at a much higher level of intelligence. It also uses significantly fewer tokens to complete the same Codex tasks, making it more efficient as well as more capable.
I haven’t tried either model yet, but early reactions seem to support OpenAI’s claims that GPT-5.5 understands user intent better, requiring less precise instructions. The company says it is better at using the tools at its disposal, and checking its own work, too. OpenAI says the Pro model takes that up a notch, working faster on more complex tasks, such as programming, research, and document-intensive workflows. Whether the early hype translates into real-world gains that are noticeable in everday work, remains to be seen, but we shouldn’t have long to wait though, since GPT-5.5 is rolling out to users now.
GPT-5.5 is available in ChatGPT and Codex to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers, and GPT-5.5 Pro is limited to Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers in ChatGPT. Neither model is available through OpenAI’s API, but the company says they will be soon.
Coding Agents Are Reshaping the App Store→
While I think it’s fair to take reports from Appfigures and its cohorts with a large grain of salt, its latest report that the App Store is booming rings true to me. As Sarah Perez reports for TechCrunch, first quarter 2026 app releases were up 60% year-over-year. That’s in line with a surge that occurred at the end of last year and just so happened to coincide with the release of Claude Opus 4.5, the model that ignited a coding boom.
Another interesting tidbit from Appfigures is that the Utilities app category moved up the top five chart and Productivity apps, which were missing from the Q1 2024 and Q1 2025 top fives, made it into this past quarter’s top five.
The working hypothesis here is that AI-powered tools, like Claude Code or Replit, could be behind the surge of new launches. It also seems possible that we’re hitting some sort of tipping point in terms of AI usability, where it’s easy enough for people to leverage these tools to build their own desired mobile apps more quickly — or even build their first apps ever.
That hypothesis lines up well with the deluge of app pitches we’ve received at MacStories since the end of last year. At first, 2025 just seemed like an unusually busy fall. We always see lots of new apps when Apple refreshes its OSes after all. However, this year, the pace never let up. In fact, the pace accelerated into 2026.
From the view on the ground, this is absolutely the result of AI coding tools. Seasoned developers are releasing new apps more often and updating existing ones faster, and there are more new developers releasing their first apps than ever. Lower barriers to entry and tighter development cycles juiced by coding agents are clearly major factors.
What’s most interesting to me, though, is that the mix of quality apps hasn’t suffered meaningfully. We’ve always been sent a healthy portion of poor quality apps. But from where I sit today, the tidal wave we’ve seen so far isn’t slop. Maybe that will change, and perhaps we’re insulated from it to some degree, but I would have thought that at the pace App Store submissions have increased that there would have been a big difference in the pitches we receive. So far, not so much. Weird, right?