Archive for June 2025

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

EagleFiler 1.9.17

EagleFiler 1.9.17 is a maintenance release of my digital filing cabinet and e-mail archiving app. This version improves capturing Web pages from Orion and Safari, works better with different font sizes, and improves tag auto-completion and searching.

Some interesting issues were:

Previously:

SwiftUI macOS Sheet Buttons

Sam Rowlands:

Sheet dialog buttons don’t meet the macOS human interface guidelines by default, I’ve tried some solutions in the past, but then I stumbled across a really simple way to do it and I’m sharing that now.

[…]

Yes, it’s that simple, use a toolbar and the placement attributes to specify which buttons perform which action and SwiftUI will not only place the buttons correctly, but will resize the default and cancel buttons to match the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

Except now the window shows a horizontal line for the toolbar. Still, this is the easiest way I’ve seen so far.

Previously:

OmniFocus 4.6

Ainsley Bourque Olson (release notes):

Notes are a great way to add additional context to an item in OmniFocus, and OmniFocus 4.6 makes it easier than ever to add content from outside of OmniFocus to a note, without bringing unnecessary font styles along for the ride. With this update, OmniFocus now defaults to an improved “Merge Styles” paste behavior, preserving only essential styles like bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough, as well as links with titles, and attachments.

While we think the “Merge Styles” paste behavior will be a great fit for most workflows, OmniFocus 4.6 also allows for customization of this behavior with a new paste behavior setting. And the default paste behavior is now context aware, only stripping styles when pasting text copied from an external source—styles are retained when pasting text copied from within OmniFocus, allowing you to move styled note text between OmniFocus items with ease.

It also fixes a really annoying sync bug that could make the window move between spaces.

Previously:

The iPhone 15 Pro’s Depth Maps

Mark Litwintschik (Hacker News):

Finn Jaeger, who is the head of VFX at Replayboys, a film production firm in Hamburg, Germany, posted a screenshot a few weeks ago showing how multiple depth maps were being produced by his iPhone.

He announced he was working on a project called HEIC Shenanigans. This project contains scripts to separate out images and their metadata from HEIC containers as well as convert them into EXR Files. As of this writing, the project contains 374 lines of Python.

In this post, I’ll walk through Finn’s codebase with an example image from an iPhone 15 Pro.

Uncorrelated:

Other commenters here are correct that the LIDAR is too low-resolution to be used as the primary source for the depth maps. In fact, iPhones use four-ish methods, that I know of, to capture depth data, depending on the model and camera used. Traditionally these depth maps were only captured for Portrait photos, but apparently recent iPhones capture them for standard photos as well.

Tuesday, June 3, 2025

Sky Preview

Sky (MacRumors):

Introducing Sky for Mac.

[…]

Sky floats over whatever you’re doing so you can:

  • Ask questions from anywhere on your Mac
  • Take action in your apps (send a message, schedule an event, etc)
  • Use your own custom tools by adding prompts, scripts, shortcuts, or MCPs

Federico Viticci (Mastodon):

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.

[…]

Sky is an AI-powered assistant that can perform actions and answer questions for any window and any app open on your Mac. On the surface, it may look like any other launcher or LLM with a desktop app: you press a hotkey, and a tiny floating UI comes up.

[…]

What sets Sky apart from anything I’ve tried or seen on macOS to date is that it uses LLMs to understand which windows are open on your Mac, what’s inside them, and what actions you can perform based on those apps’ contents.

Matthew Cassinelli:

Pressing ⌘⌘ to grab your current context is a delightfully natural interaction.

Sky saves the current window or file as well as its metadata, so you can ask AI about it right away.

[…]

To go further, you can add Custom Tools – which can include custom instructions, MCPs, AppleScripts, & shell scripts – and yes, Shortcuts!

You can extend Sky’s capabilities however you want – and designing them is easy with prompting built right into the editor interface.

Nick Heer:

This feels like the so-far-unfulfilled promise of Apple Intelligence — but more. The ways I want to automate iOS are limited. But the kinds of things I want help with on my Mac are boundless.

As with Grammarly, it’s amazing that they seem to be doing more than what Apple promised, yet without requiring the apps to rearchitect everything around intents.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

The Apple Intelligence team meeting after seeing Sky, after very publicly failing to ship their own version of this stuff.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

The real question is why couldn’t the founders of Shortcuts build this stuff at Apple, and what were the systemic failures that pushed them out to go it alone.

John Voorhees:

This week on @appstories, I share my first impressions of Sky and we share our wishes for Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-04): Rui Carmo (Hacker News):

I mean, people have free will and all, and can choose to work wherever they want, but this makes my earlier rant about their having neglected automation feel like the first clue to a corporate culture murder scene.

Not having made it possible for them to thrive feels like vanilla corporate politics, but having brilliant people leave Apple and ship something that is, even in preview, much better than anything that Apple Intelligence promised (including the made up bits they paraded as marketing material) is just gross mismanagement (now you know why I held back on this draft).

[…]

I can see Apple balking at doing something like Sky (if they ever even considered it) because it not only has to share bits of your screen with an LLM, but also because it would have to open up the Mac to third-party automation in a way that it has never done before, and that would be a huge departure from their current approach.

[…]

But the privacy angle is interesting, because Apple was in a perfect position to do something exactly like Sky and ensure that it was done in a way that respected user privacy. Even though local models are still not quite there yet (remember that RAM requirements are still very high as far as running truly useful models are concerned), they do have the confidential computing tech to run inference in a privacy-preserving way–which might be the only bit of Apple Intelligence that actually works at this point.

Compare Pages Documents in Kaleidoscope

Florian Albrecht:

Need to compare two versions of a Pages document? We previously provided a solution based on Shortcuts, but recent updates to Pages (version 14.4 at the time of writing) have rendered that workflow unusable. Specifically, the AppleScript command Pages offers to export unformatted text—an essential part of our shortcut—no longer produces any text output.

They have a workaround that uses more steps to send the data to Kaleidoscope’s share extension. But this is emblematic of how AppleScript support continues to break or work worse than it used to. Apple’s official position is that AppleScript isn’t the future, but they have nothing that’s close to being able to replace it.

Previously:

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Tools for Mac

macOS Automator MCP Server (tweet):

This project provides a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, macos_automator, that allows execution of AppleScript and JavaScript for Automation (JXA) scripts on macOS. It features a knowledge base of pre-defined scripts accessible by ID and supports inline scripts, script files, and argument passing. The knowledge base is loaded lazily on first use for fast server startup.

Peter Steinberger:

Cursor/Gemini is now using AppleScript to talk to Claude to run it's own mcp and see if the default responses work well and then uses the ax tool to get text back to verify how Claude's doing + to debug it's own project.

Terminator MCP:

Terminator is an npx-installable Model Context Protocol (MCP) plugin designed to provide AI agents with robust, simplified, and intelligent control over macOS terminal sessions. It uses a Swift-based command-line interface (CLI) internally to interact with terminal applications like Apple Terminal, iTerm2, and Ghosty.

Matt Birchler:

What we just watched was me ask Claude for the Mac to look at my email inbox, find the emails with feedback on my iOS app, and create reminders to work on those in Apple Reminders. Given it took about 45 seconds to do this and that it required me to manually key in what I wanted it to do, this is a proof-of-concept more than something I can immediately use day to day, but I'm really excited about this.

To get this working, all I had to do was install Hypercontext on my Mac, give it access to my email and Reminders, and it was good to go. I believe what this app does is set up a local MCP server on your Mac which can then be used by any app that can work with MCP. In this video it’s Claude, but it could be any LLM (including local models) that works with tooling like this.

Peter Steinberger:

After developing several MCP tools, I’ve compiled this comprehensive guide to best practices that ensure your tools are reliable, user-friendly, and maintainable.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-04): Longplay:

Longplay for Mac 0.8.0 is available in Early Access.

🤖 Standout feature is a built-in MCP server to control playback, create smart collections, and interact with your music library from other apps, notably Claude Desktop.

The Automation Gap

John Voorhees:

Yes, we each share some shortcuts we’ve built, but there’s also a healthy dose of third-party automation apps, services, and AI projects sprinkled throughout. I take that as a sign that automation is alive and well on Apple platforms. At the same time, though, it’s also a symptom of a bigger issue, especially on the Mac, that I don’t think can be ignored given Apple’s push to make apps interoperable via Apple Intelligence.

Nearly three years ago, I wrote AppleScript: Shortcuts Bridge or Crutch?, questioning whether accessing AppleScript via Shortcuts on the Mac was a feature to be celebrated or a red flag, fearing that Apple would use the integration to postpone or never release many of the system-level actions that were missing from Shortcuts’ debut on the Mac.

[…]

Shortcuts’ progress on the Mac has been anything but steady and yearly.

[…]

Shortcuts on the Mac was plagued by design and technical issues that had nothing to do with the actions themselves. It was a rocky start that Shortcuts for Mac has mostly recovered from, but almost four years later, it’s pretty clear that Shortcuts is not the future of Mac automation that Craig Federighi claimed it would be.

He also said that the Catalyst apps, System Settings, and SwiftUI were really great on the Mac.

Jason Snell (Hacker News):

A few days ago, while writing my Podcast Notes update, I realized that I had (inadvertently?) created an automation that begins with a Stream Deck keypress that executes a Keyboard Maestro macro that kicks off a JavaScript script in Audio Hijack that runs an AppleScript applet that executes a Shortcuts shortcut. In recent days I’ve also edited shortcuts that run Python and AppleScript scripts, including some where the shortcut is really nothing more than a Mac UI-friendly wrapper around a bare script, much in the same way you can use Automator as a simple wrapper around AppleScript scripts.

That all these things are possible on the Mac is amazing, and it’s a testament to how flexible and powerful the Mac can be. But it also says something quite profound about how little progress Apple has made with Shortcuts on the Mac (or in general) in the last few years. (And of course, all these workarounds fail on iOS entirely.)

Maybe the drive toward App Intents will help make Shortcuts more powerful and less reliant on tools like AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro, and the rest. But even that isn’t enough, since the Shortcuts app is way too rickety and limited.

John Gruber:

Just debugged a longstanding issue with a shortcut that regexes the <title> out of the HTML source for a URL. The issue is that, believe it or not, there are a lot of websites out there that have many <title> elements per page. The Verge has 40 per article. (View Source on a Verge article and stare too long and you risk going blind.)

Trying to debug this sort of thing in Shortcuts is like trying to tie your shoelaces with chopsticks.

Anyway, I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

John Gruber:

To me it really paints a picture where the people working on Shortcuts.app do not themselves create even moderate complex shortcuts for themselves. I suspect they sit there and read and address radars but they don’t themselves really use Shortcuts. If they did it would be so much better.

John Gruber:

Shortcuts on Mac has always looked and felt like it was made and designed by people who never used a Mac. Obviously that’s not true because Xcode only runs on a Mac but there’s no point pulling punches on this.

Greg Pierce:

I think there is a strong bit of this being that the Shortcuts team had to dog food SwiftUI on the Mac way before it was ready. As if it even is now.

Scott Willsey:

There are so many issues with shortcuts in general it really doesn’t matter to the end-user the specific reasons, Apple is whiffing it big time. I constantly get sync issues undoing changes or just bizarre logic/capability issues that make me push it aside and write a python script instead.

Greg Pierce:

Ultimately, it’s another indictment of the bean counters, in my mind, who see the analytics and don’t know why they’d give more resources to what is, and will always be, a small user base.

Matthew Cassinelli:

There’s as much wrong with SwiftUI as there are ways for Shortcuts to go wrong.

I think it’s also a larger story where all of us see it as the Workflow programming language, not Siri Shortcuts the feature or their solution for AI.

Until they notice that they have a programming language for an app, it can’t get the level of resources to make it scale.

FlohGro:

If you want to build complicated shortcuts you have to use the graphical editor which is a pain especially for bigger shortcuts. This is freaking annoying and as a software developer myself I prefer writing code above dragging boxes. A language that could transfer into the graphical UI would also be easy to integrate with AI tools so inexperienced uses could create shortcuts with it.

Matthew Cassinelli:

I don’t think I can afford to use Shortcuts for iPad anymore without copy-and-paste for multiple actions.

Just enough of a blocker that I’ll always be better off using my Mac.

Jimmy:

Which is saying a lot, because the Mac app is hot garbage.

The amount of regressions I find in every update is astounding. Forgetting properties, resetting custom date formats, etc.

And why in 2025 is drag and drop of actions so hopelessly janky?

I generally edit big Shortcuts on my Mac as well, but it’s like playing with a proof-of-concept sometimes.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-04): Mark Gurman (via Matthew Cassinelli, MacRumors):

A revamped version of its Shortcuts app, which today lets users create actions such as launching certain features within apps or playing a particular playlist. The new version will let consumers create those actions using Apple Intelligence models. (This had long been planned for 2025, but delays may push it to 2026.)”

Pierre Igot:

As long as they don’t break AppleScript and GUI scripting, I am happy with Apple wasting their time and resources on trying to use so-called “Apple Intelligence” to improve macOS features that I don’t use and have no need for.

Well, maybe not “happy”, but relieved — relief being the only thing that sensible macOS power users can expect from Apple’s newest moves these days. Everything they touch, they break. So please, do focus on touching stuff I don’t use.

Monday, June 2, 2025

Separate Expressions for +alloc and -init

Ronald Oussoren:

The following code will crash hard when compiled using ARC:

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

int main(void)
{
     NSOutputStream* stream;

      stream = [NSOutputStream alloc];
      stream = [stream initToMemory];

      NSLog(@"%@", stream);
}

This is split calls to alloc and initToMemory are effectively what happens when using NSOutputStream.alloc().initToMemory() in Python.

[…]

This appears to be a genuine bug in macOS, filed as FB17759654.

Apple in China

Issie Lapowsky (Amazon, Reddit, John Gruber):

But Cook was in Beijing that day to do the opposite: to impress upon President Xi Jinping’s government that Apple was so committed to China that it planned to spend $275 billion in the country over the next five years. “I call it a Marshall Plan for China, because I could not find any corporate spending coming close to what Apple was spending,” said Financial Times journalist Patrick McGee, who writes about this and other moments illustrating Apple’s role in enabling China’s rise in his new book Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company.

[…]

Through interviews with more than 200 sources, more than 90% of whom worked for the tech giant at some point, the book traces the history of the company to flip the usual narrative about Apple and China on its head. By expending such exorbitant resources in China and training so many Chinese workers with its novel, hands-on approach to micromanaging foreign factories, Apple facilitated “an epic transfer of knowledge” to China, McGee told Vanity Fair.

[…]

Apple doesn’t just hope that suppliers come up with better, lighter, stronger components and then incorporate them into the next iPhone. It is intimately working in hundreds of factories across China, making those innovations happen, and that’s how the iPhone stays ahead of everybody else.

[…]

My favorite part of the book is about the “yellow cows,” [a slang term to describe organized scalpers] that effectively built a gig economy and distributed iPhones at marked-up prices around the country. The yellow cows found ways to make more money per iPhone than Apple.

The author, Patrick McGee, was recently on The Daily Show, The Talk Show, The AmberMac Show, and CNBC. After listening some of the interviews, this seems like the most interesting Apple book in a long time, with tons of details and anecdotes. I look forward to reading it.

Warner Crocker:

Not only does it hit that crucially important overlay of the story, it provides some fascinating, and at times frightening detail in many of the design, engineering, corporate, and political maneuverings far beneath the surface of all the machinations we read about on our iPhones.

[…]

If there is one big surprise that I think pierces the Apple aura, it’s just how little central control and understanding of what was happening on the ground in China in the helter-skelter days of early iPhone growth. What on the surface may have seemed like, and been adopted almost as mantra-like by the tech press, a giant corporation with a vision pushing buttons in Monday morning executive meetings, often feels like a company reacting to forces beyond its control that it brought into the tent.

Kirk McElhearn:

Apple in China by @patrickmcgee.bsky.social probably the most interesting book I have read about Apple in the 25 years that I have been writing about the company. Beyond the geopolitical issues, it’s really interesting to learn all the details about how their products are built.

Previously:

Sketch Athens

Pieter Omvlee:

In the latest Sketch we’re taking an idea from Apple: Naming our releases.

At Sketch, we’re a proudly European company and we’re naming our releases after European cities from now on.

And we’re starting with Athens.

Sketch (tweet):

Our first update of 2025 is the largest we’ve ever shipped. It introduces an all-new layout tool — Stacks — and some big foundational changes in the form of Frames. It also brings major improvements to the Command Bar, and so much more.

[…]

If you know auto layout in Figma, or stacks in Framer, this is our take on it.

With Stacks, you can create anything from buttons that grow or shrink to fit their labels, to entire interfaces with nested layouts that adapt to container size or content.

[…]

We’re also introducing Frames — a new container that replaces artboards, made for UI design, that works hand-in-hand with stacks.

You can nest Frames, style them with multiple properties (no more background layers!), set resizing constraints for their contents, or give them a stack layout.

They have blog posts with more information about stacks, frames, and the command bar.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-03): Mario Guzmán:

Sketch is one of those few companies that still understands how to make Mac apps with the soul of Macintosh.

Even Apple’s apps don’t feel like that anymore. Looking at you Shortcuts.app. It’s sad.

Previously:

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