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.
Posts tagged with "featured"
A Dictation App with a CLI Is Exactly What I Needed
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.
Astropad Workbench Rethinks Remote Mac Control for AI Agents
There are a lot of ways to connect remotely to a Mac, and I’ve tried most of them. Today, though, I want to focus on one in particular: Astropad Workbench, an app and service for remotely connecting to your Mac that includes unique features that make it a compelling choice on the iPhone and iPad, but less so when connecting from one Mac to another.
Pedometer++ 8: Glimmers of an Apple Wrist Renaissance
Today, when you mention David Smith’s name, most people probably think of Widgetsmith, his runaway success that caught fire on TikTok and is still going strong today. But for me, Pedometer++ is what comes to mind first. Still a couple of years away from releasing my own apps or writing at MacStories, I was fascinated by the dynamics that made the app a success when it debuted in 2013. Part of that success was how quickly David got it onto the App Store in the wake of the iPhone 5s and its M7 coprocessor that made step counting possible.
It didn’t hurt that Pedometer++’s initial release was also free (and the core features still are), but the app’s elegant, simple design played a big part, too. Pedometer++ appealed to a wide audience who appreciated its focus and frequent updates that systematically took it from basic step counting to badges, confetti, workouts, maps, and more. It’s a great example of a developer who jumped on a new hardware feature quickly with a focused initial release and then relentlessly iterated year after year without sacrificing what made that first version a favorite of so many people.
Today’s 8.0 release is focused first and foremost on the Apple Watch, which is the other aspect of so many of David’s apps that I appreciate. Few people know the ins and outs – and frustrations – of watchOS (née WatchKit) development like David does. But despite the platform’s rudimentary beginnings, David has stuck with it, making the best watch version of Pedometer++ that was possible with each turn of the SDK and, later, OS. That’s as true with version 8.0 of the app as it has ever been.
Introducing Apple Frames 4: A Revamped Shortcut, Support for Frame Colors, Proportional Scaling, and the Apple Frames CLI for Developers
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.
Hour by Hour: Reverse Engineering Your Schedule
Hour by Hour is a clever new approach to scheduling your time from Joe Humfrey of Selkie Design that took me a little while to get used to, but has really grown on me.
The app was inspired by travel planning and the age-old question, “When should I leave for the airport?” You’ve probably been there before. You have a flight at, say, 2:00 pm, but you need to drive 30 minutes to the airport, add some time to park, take a shuttle to the terminal, get through security, and build in a little extra wiggle room just in case traffic is bad or something else goes sideways. Suddenly, 2:00 pm becomes an exercise in mental gymnastics as you work your way back to when you should walk out the door.
Hour by Hour solves this sort of scheduling, but for every type of event, by using the same kind of reverse planning. At the same time, it’s not really a calendar app so much as a scheduling companion for your calendar. You can pull your calendar events into Hour by Hour, but you don’t have to, and if you dive into the app expecting to use it the same way you use a traditional calendar, the assumptions you bring with you will probably trip you up.
On This Day: My New Favorite Way to Revisit Old Photos
If you’ve followed my work for long, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that I’m a nostalgic person. I love to relive old memories, share old stories, and look at old pictures. It’s just the way I am.
That’s why I’m a big fan of Apple’s Memories feature built into the Photos app. You’re telling me my phone can deliver a slideshow of great pictures from my library anytime I want, and with a cheesy soundtrack to boot? Count me in. Photos is an amazing app for resurfacing pictures that otherwise might have been forgotten.
But there’s always been one feature I felt was missing from Photos: a roundup of every picture you’ve taken on a particular date in past years.1 While automatically-generated memories are great, I don’t want to limit my nostalgic photo viewing to the pictures my phone thinks are the best. I want a way to review all my pictures from the past, and an “on this day” approach is one that works well in other contexts, like journaling. Why not photos?
Enter a new app for the iPhone and iPad from developer Florian Grossmann fittingly called On This Day. It’s a simple, nicely-designed way to revisit photos you took on a particular date in previous years, and it’s quickly become a go-to for me. In fact, On This Day is now a part of my regular morning routine because it enables me to quickly do something I love to do: look at old photos and reminisce about fun moments, amazing trips, and milestones in the lives of myself and my loved ones.
The app’s UI is a simple grid of pictures, much like the one you’re used to seeing in Photos, except instead of showing every picture in your library, the app only includes images and videos from a particular date, which is displayed at the bottom center of the screen. The grid is broken up into years by headings that stick to the top of the screen as you scroll, ensuring you always know which year you’re browsing. By default, scrolling down the screen moves you backwards in time towards older photos, though you can reverse this order in the app’s settings.
Tapping on a picture will open it in a full-screen view that not only allows you to see the photo in finer detail, but also to learn more about it and act on it. I like how much information and functionality is packed into this simple screen. At the top of the screen is the photo’s time and date (as well as a count of how many photos you took on that particular day), and at the bottom of the screen, the app shows the location of where the photo was taken on a map. If you prefer to view your photo without these overlays, a single tap will dismiss them, and you can swipe left and right to move between photos in the full-screen view.
In the upper-right corner of this view, there are four buttons: Info, Favorite, Share, and Delete. Favoriting a picture in On This Day adds it to your Favorites collection in Photos. This can come in handy since the app doesn’t have the ability to actually open an image in Photos; the developer says this is due to technical limitations of the Photos app itself. But at the very least, you can favorite a photo to refer to later in the Photos app as a workaround.
If you want to dig into the technical details of a picture, you can tap the Info button to open the Photo Details pane. There, you’ll find the photo’s resolution, camera and lens information, focal length, and more. It’s great to have this data close at hand when reviewing photos, especially if you want to see which iPhone you were using at a particular time in the past.
This core functionality is all I’ve ever wanted out of this kind of tool. It’s fast, it’s easy to use, and it’s designed well to help me find the photos I want and then get out of the way so I can fully enjoy them. It fits right in with current iOS aesthetics, as well, with Liquid Glass headings and buttons that blend naturally with your photos and adapt to the varying content behind them. The experience of reviewing pictures in On This Day is simply great, and I enjoy opening the app every day to see what memories it has to offer.
If you want to review photos from other days, you can do so by tapping the arrow buttons on either side of the date at the bottom of the screen or by tapping the date itself to open up a calendar to select from. Once you’ve navigated away from the current date, the app will offer a Today button above the calendar to quickly get you back to your starting point.
The app’s settings include a number of customization options, too. There, you can adjust the density of the photo grid, change how images are ordered, disable the optional streak count, and schedule notifications to remind you to review your photos each day. On This Day also offers the unique ability to decide what content the app sends when you share a photo; you can include the date in various formats, customized text, or no text at all. For me, part of the fun of looking at old photos is sending them to other people, so I appreciate the option to customize what gets shared.
Finally, On This Day also offers widgets in small, medium, large, and extra-large sizes so you can see photos from past years right on your Home Screen. You can adjust how many pictures appear within a widget, and photos can be displayed in full color even if, like me, you’re a user of the Clear or Tinted appearance for app icons.
This is the sort of app that I’ve been wanting on my devices for a long time, and the fact that it’s been made with such care and attention to detail just makes the experience of using it that much sweeter. I love revisiting old photos in the app every day, and if you’re the type of person who’s built up years of pictures in your library and delights in having them resurfaced for you, I think you’ll enjoy it, too. I recommend giving it a try.
On This Day is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad as a free download, and the iPad version can also be run on the Vision Pro. The app displays photos from the past three years for free. You can unlock all past years and the app’s full range of customization options with a one-time payment of $4.99 or a $0.99/month subscription.
- You can technically achieve this by entering the current date (e.g., “April 7”) in the search bar and even automate this search with Shortcuts, as cleverly demonstrated to me recently by reader Miles Jefford. Personally, though, I think Photos should just include an On This Day collection. ↩
Moods Faster: Effortless Mood Tracking
I’ve said over and over that the most important feature of any habit tracker is being able to get in and out of the app quickly. For some developers, that doesn’t always come naturally. After all, doesn’t every developer want their customers to use their app more than others? Sure they do, but it’s not always the right instinct.
That’s something Nick Leith has understood for a long time. Leith is the developer of Remind Me Faster, a companion app for Apple Reminders that accelerates task entry. I’ve moved in and out of Reminders annually for my macOS reviews and every time, the first app I download after the move-in is Remind Me Faster because it makes using Reminders much easier.
Leith has been thinking about how to make data entry simple and fast for years thanks to that app, and it shows with his brand new app, Moods Faster (Get it? Moods Faster -> Move Faster). Okay, you probably didn’t need that nudge, but I like the name. It’s fun.
MacStories Setups: Refining and Simplifying
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.
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.