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.
App Intents Apple Intelligence AppleScript Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Claude Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Model Context Protocol (MCP) Privacy Shortcuts Sky
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:
AppleScript Bug Extensions Kaleidoscope Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Pages.app Shortcuts
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.
AppleScript Artificial Intelligence Claude Cursor Google Gemini/Bard HyperContext JavaScript for Automation Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Model Context Protocol (MCP) Open Source
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.
App Intents Apple Intelligence AppleScript Craig Federighi iPadOS iPadOS 18 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Shortcuts SwiftUI
