One of the big questions heading into today’s WWDC keynote was how Apple would address its AI efforts. After a splashy introduction last year followed by a staggered rollout and the eventual delay of the more personalized Siri, it was unclear how much focus the company would put on Apple Intelligence during its big announcement video.
Surprisingly, they came right out of the gate with a segment on Apple Intelligence, even going so far as to mention the fact that the more personalized Siri needed more time; it’s slated to be released “in the coming year.” But SVP of Software Craig Federighi also said that Apple Intelligence had progressed with more capable and efficient models and teased that more Apple Intelligence features would be revealed throughout the presentation. Rather than dedicating a significant portion of the keynote just to AI features, the company returned to a platform-centered structure for the rest of the video and mentioned Apple Intelligence as it related to each OS.
In its second year, Apple Intelligence is set to expand in more ways than one. Perhaps most excitingly, third-party developers will soon have access to Apple Intelligence’s on-device foundation model, enabling them to implement AI features in their apps that work offline in a privacy-respecting way. And because the framework is local, it will be available to developers at no additional cost with no API fees.
Over the course of my career, I’ve had three distinct moments in which I saw a brand-new app and immediately felt it was going to change how I used my computer – and they were all about empowering people to do more with their devices.
I had that feeling the first time I tried Editorial, the scriptable Markdown text editor by Ole Zorn. I knew right away when two young developers told me about their automation app, Workflow, in 2014. And I couldn’t believe it when Apple showed that not only had they acquired Workflow, but they were going to integrate the renamed Shortcuts app system-wide on iOS and iPadOS.
Notably, the same two people – Ari Weinstein and Conrad Kramer – were involved with two of those three moments, first with Workflow, then with Shortcuts. And a couple of weeks ago, I found out that they were going to define my fourth moment, along with their co-founder Kim Beverett at Software Applications Incorporated, with the new app they’ve been working on in secret since 2023 and officially announced today.
For the past two weeks, I’ve been able to use Sky, the new app from the people behind Shortcuts who left Apple two years ago. As soon as I saw a demo, I felt the same way I did about Editorial, Workflow, and Shortcuts: I knew Sky was going to fundamentally change how I think about my macOS workflow and the role of automation in my everyday tasks.
Only this time, because of AI and LLMs, Sky is more intuitive than all those apps and requires a different approach, as I will explain in this exclusive preview story ahead of a full review of the app later this year.
For the past two days, I’ve been testing an early access version of Claude Opus 4, the latest model by Anthropic that was just announced today. You can read more about the model in the official blog post and find additional documentation here. What follows is a series of initial thoughts and notes based on the 48 hours I spent with Claude Opus 4, which I tested in both the Claude app and Claude Code.
For starters, Anthropic describes Opus 4 as its most capable hybrid model with improvements in coding, writing, and reasoning. I don’t use AI for creative writing, but I have dabbled with “vibe coding” for a collection of personal Obsidian plugins (created and managed with Claude Code, following these tips by Harper Reed), and I’m especially interested in Claude’s integrations with Google Workspace and MCP servers. (My favorite solution for MCP at the moment is Zapier, which I’ve been using for a long time for web automations.) So I decided to focus my tests on reasoning with integrations and some light experiments with the upgraded Claude Code in the macOS Terminal.
I love the app’s design and focus as much today as I did when I wrote about its debut in 2023. Today, though, Mercury Weather is a more well-rounded app than ever before. Through regular updates, the app has filled in a lot of the holes in its feature set that may have turned off some users two years ago.
Today, Mercury Weather adds weather radar maps, which was one of the features I missed most from other weather apps, along with the severe weather notifications that were added late last year. It’s a welcome addition that means the next time a storm is bearing down on my neighborhood, I won’t have to switch to a different app to see what’s coming my way.
Zooming out to navigate the globe.
Radar maps are available on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions of Mercury Weather; they offer a couple of different map styles and a legend that explains what each color on the map means. If you zoom out, you can get a global view of Earth with your favorite locations noted on the map. Tap one, and you’ll get the current conditions for that spot. Mercury Weather already had an extensive set of widgets for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but this update adds small, medium, and large widgets for the radar map, too.
A Mercury Weather radar map on the Mac.
With a long list of updates since launch, Mercury Weather is worth another look if you passed on it before because it was missing features you wanted. The app is available on the App Store as a free download. Certain features require a subscription or lifetime purchase via an in-app purchase.
Last week, I was in LA for Airbnb’s 2025 Summer Release. As part of the day’s events, Federico and I interviewed Jud Coplan, Airbnb’s Vice President of Product Marketing, and Teo Connor, Airbnb’s Vice President of Design, for AppStories to talk about the new features and app the company launched. It was a great conversation that you can watch on YouTube:
Last week’s launch was a big one for Airbnb. The company debuted Services and reimagined and expanded Experiences. Services are the sort of things hotels and resorts offer that you used to give up when booking an Airbnb stay. Now, however, you can book a chef, personal trainer, hair stylist, manicurist, photographer, and more. Better yet, you don’t have to book a stay with an Airbnb host to take advantage of services. You can schedule services in your hometown or wherever you happen to be.
Experiences aren’t entirely new to Airbnb, but have been expanded and integrated into the Airbnb app in a way that’s similar to Services. Services allow you to get the most out of a trip from locals who know their cities best, whether that’s a cultural tour, dining experience, outdoor adventure, or something else.
Chef Grace explaining how to serve sadza.
While I was in LA, I prepared a meal alongside several other media folks from around the world. Our instructor was Chef Kuda Grace from Zimbabwe at Flavors from Afar. We made sadza with peanut butter and mustard greens and then sat down together to compare notes from the day’s events, tell stories about our dining experiences, and get to know each other better.
The evening was a lot of fun, but what struck me most about it was something we touched upon in this week’s episode of AppStories. The goal of Airbnb’s redesigned app is to get you to leave it and go out into the world to try new things. It reduces the friction and anxiety of taking the plunge into something new and emphasizes social interactions in the real world instead of on a screen. In 2025, that’s unusual for an app from a big company, and it was fascinating to talk to Teo and Jud about how they and their teams set out to accomplish that goal.
I like Airbnb’s redesigned app a lot. It’s playful, welcoming and easy to use. What remains to be seen is whether Airbnb can pull off what it’s set out to accomplish. It isn’t the first company to try to pair customers with local services and experiences. Nor is it Airbnb’s first attempt at experiences. However, the app is a solid foundation, and if my experience at dinner in LA was any indication, I suspect Airbnb may be onto something with Services and Experiences.
Disclosure: The trip to LA to conduct my half of this interview was paid for by Airbnb.
I share Federico’s frustration over saving links. Every link may be a URL, but their endpoints can be wildly different. If like us, you save links to articles, videos, product information, and more, it’s hard to find a tool that handles every kind of link equally well.
That was the problem Federico set out to solve with Universal Clipper, an advanced shortcut that automatically detects the kind of link that’s passed to it, and saves it to a text file, which he accesses in Obsidian, although any text editor will work.
Universal Clipper integrates with the Obsidian plugin Dataview, too.
Universal Clipper, which Federico released yesterday as part of his Automation Academy series for Club MacStories Plus and Premier members, is one of his most ambitious shortcuts that draws on multiple third-party apps, services, and command line tools in an automation that works as a standalone shortcut or as a function that can send its results to another shortcut. As Federico explains:
I learned a lot in the process. As I’ve documented on MacStories and the Club lately, I’ve played around with various templates for Dataview queries in Obsidian; I’ve learnedhow to take advantage of the Mac’s Terminal and various CLI utilities to transcribe long YouTube videos and analyze them with Gemini 2.5; I’ve explored new ways to interact with web APIs in Shortcuts; and, most recently, I learned how to properly prompt GPT 4.1 with precise instructions. All of these techniques are coming together in Universal Clipper, my latest, Mac-only shortcut that combines macOS tools, Markdown, web APIs, and AI to clip any kind of webpage from any web browser and save it as a searchable Markdown document in Obsidian.
Although the shortcut may be complex, the best part of Federico’s post is how easy it is to follow. Along the way, you’ll learn a bunch of techniques and approaches to Shortcuts automation that you can adapt for your own shortcuts, too.
Automation Academy is just one of many perks that Club MacStories Plus and Club Premier members enjoy including:
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Late yesterday, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued a blistering opinion, concluding that Apple had willfully disregarded the Court’s 2021 injunction, which found that the anti-steering provisions of the App Review Guidelines violated California state law. Judge Gonzalez Rogers also referred Apple’s conduct to the U.S. Attorney to investigate whether criminal prosecution of the company and one of its employees is warranted. For its part, Apple has said it disagrees with the decision and will appeal, but it will comply with the Court’s order in the meantime.
If that all sounds like it’s a big deal, that’s because it is. Judge Gonzalez Rogers’ 80-page opinion and order don’t pull any punches, painting a damning picture of Apple’s response to the Court’s injunction. It’s a unique and unflattering look behind the curtain at how Apple responded to the Court’s 2021 order that’s worth looking at more closely.
The Lost Crown was released at the beginning of last year. Developed by Ubisoft Montpellier in France, the game was released to critical acclaim and won an Innovation in Accessibility Award at The Game Awards in 2024, but Ubisoft was unhappy with the game’s sales. The comeback of the celebrated series sold around 300,000 copies in its opening weeks, totaling around $15 million in revenue. In today’s “blockbuster or bust” gaming world, that wasn’t enough. Ubisoft released the Mask of Darkness story DLC in the fall but disbanded the team behind the game.
However, Ubisoft wasn’t finished trying to recoup its investment in The Lost Crown. The company called on its Da Nang studio to port the game to other platforms, starting with the Mac last December. The same group also adapted the game for the iPhone and iPad.
Today, The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is available everywhere. It’s on the Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One, PS4 and PS5, Switch, PC, Android, and other platforms, with Android being the latest addition alongside the iPhone and iPad.
If you’re a console or PC gamer, it would have been hard to miss The Lost Crown’s release in early 2024. The game follows Sargon, a warrior in an imagined version of ancient Persia, who is tasked with trekking to Mount Qaf to save Prince Ghassan. Along the way, there are puzzles to solve and a fun combination of platforming and fluid combat. It’s a shame the game didn’t fare better because it’s an absolute gem.
I’ve played at least the opening level of The Lost Crown on an M1 MacBook Air, M4 Max MacBook Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, M4 iPad Pro, and Sony PS5. Ultimately, the game ran well on all five devices, but there were differences. The PS5 was the smoothest of all, and the game looked phenomenal on my OLED TV.
As you’d probably expect, the game runs very well on an M4 Max MacBook Pro and M4 iPad Pro, although both got quite warm, and I could clearly hear the MacBook Pro’s fans when I removed my headphones. In both cases, I noticed a little hitch in the frame rate from time to time when transitioning from one area of the map to another, but it wasn’t a big deal in either case. The Lost Crown’s gorgeous artwork and sound design really shine on both devices, too.
The worst experiences were on the iPhone and M1 MacBook Air, for different reasons. The iPhone 16 Pro Max handled the game well, and it looked great, but the game is a lot more fun on a bigger screen. I noticed more frame rate hitches on the M1 MacBook Air than on any other device, but I didn’t really expect the game to be playable, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that it worked.
Dialogue scenes work better on the iPhone than combat where everything is tiny.
Both the iPhone and iPad versions of the game have been adapted for touch. There are on-screen touch controls, but I’d highly recommend using a controller instead. The onscreen controls are well done, but The Lost Crown’s combat feels much, much better with a controller. If you’re looking for a good controller for iPhone or iPad, check out our Setups page for a few recommendations.
An example of the mobile version’s touch controls.
The mobile versions of The Lost Crown have added automatic parrying and healing potion use, as well as a new option to slow down time during combat, all of which are designed to make the game more touchscreen-friendly. I’m glad those options are there, but again, you really should use a controller with this game. It’s also worth noting that none of the Apple platform versions of the Lost Crown include the DLC, and the Mac version is capped at 60 fps; that doesn’t bother me, but I know it’s an issue for others. The Lost Crown also supports cloud saves if you have an Ubisoft Connect account, but the saves only work Mac-to-Mac or among iOS and iPadOS devices, which stinks.
Finally, we need to talk about the princely price Ubisoft is charging for The Lost Crown on the Mac. The game is $40, which is less than the $60 launch price over a year ago, but now, you can pick it up for as low as $15–$25 on other platforms, depending on whether it comes with the DLC. Given that difference, it’s hard to recommend the Mac version of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown unless you have no other way to play it.
Playing on iPhone with a controller.
The iPhone and iPad versions are much more reasonable. First of all, you can download and play the tutorial level of the game for free to see if The Last Crown is for you, which I appreciate. Second, until May 5, the full game is available for $9.99 – the best deal available anywhere. There’s no guarantee you’ll ever have the option to play the DLC on either device, but $10 is fair for anyone who prefers to play games on their iPhone or an iPad. After May 5, the price is set to rise to $14.99, which is in line with console versions of the game that don’t come with the DLC.
So in the final analysis, there’s not much to commend the Mac version of The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown if you have any other way of playing it because it’s more than double the price of PC and console versions. The iPhone and iPad versions are a closer call, especially while the game is on sale for $10. The Lost Crown looks great on both and plays well (though not perfectly), but any iPhone’s screen is a little small for a game like The Lost Crown. That said, if your preference is for portability or you don’t have the option of a PC or console, The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is worth downloading on your iPhone or iPad to try the free tutorial level.
One aspect of macOS that I truly love is the level of customization that it allows for. Out of the box, Apple’s desktop operating system is easy to use, and its user interface has been streamlined over the years around its core principles: apps, windows, icons, and the mouse cursor. That being said, the Mac differs from Apple’s other platforms when it comes to third-party apps. Apps like BetterTouchTool, Raycast, Moom, and Bartender perfectly illustrate how developers are able to create far-reaching, advanced utilities for the Mac, sometimes to the extent of fundamentally changing how you use your computer.
But I’m not here to talk about these powerful apps today. Rather, I would like to highlight the other reason why I am so thankful for this ecosystem of third-party apps on the Mac: they can simply be a lot of fun. Over the past few months, I have collected and adopted a series of small, whimsical additions to my Mac’s user interface. Most of them are nothing short of pointless – except for the fact that they have made using my Mac an absolute joy, even if only in subtle ways.
From custom icons to unnecessary sound effects, here is a roundup of my favorite additions. My hope is that this can be a starting point for anyone willing to join me in the club of more whimsical Mac setups.
