Adrian Schönig (2023, via Nick Heer):
Longplay 1.0 was released in August 2020. I had used the app for years before that myself, but I didn’t know how it would be received by a wider audience. I loved the kind of feedback that I got which helped me distill the heart of the app: Music means a lot to people, and Longplay helps them reconnect with their music library in a way that reminds them of their old vinyl or CD collections. It’s a wall of their favourite albums that has been with them for many years or decades. It’s something personal. The UI very much focussed on that part of the experience, and I wanted to keep that spirit alive, keep the app fun, while adding features that people and myself found amiss.
The main idea behind 2.0 was to focus on the playing of music beyond a single album. 1.0 just stopped playback when you finished an album, but I wanted to stay in the flow – to either play an appropriate random next album or the next from a manually specified queue.
Adrian Schönig (Mastodon):
I am thrilled to be finally releasing Longplay for Mac today. Longplay is all about the joy of listening to entire albums and marvelling at their beautiful album artwork. It is built from the ground up for the Mac, with the familiar pretty album wall, a dedicated mini player, all the main features from iOS, plus Mac exclusives like AppleScript and a nifty MCP server.
[…]
Meanwhile, Apple announced in June 2023 that playback support for Apple Music tracks through MusicKit was coming to the Mac in macOS 14. I restarted work on the Mac app, and while it was working, I encountered pesky playback glitches, where Apple Music playback would often but not always start stuttering after a couple of tracks. I wouldn’t launch the app like that. However, the app worked reliable already for DRM-free tracks, which is how the “Early Access“ version of Longplay for Mac was born, as I knew some people who’d only or primarily use that (including myself).
On the glitches, I tried various workarounds that I could think of, kept lots of notes on when it happened and when it didn’t, filed a TSI (which got rejected due to no known workarounds), filed comprehensive radars including a demo app to reproduce, and reached out to Apple contacts. I did get some responses and am thankful for the support, but was still blocked. macOS 14 launched with the same glitches later in 2023. End of 2024, macOS 15 launched with the same issue still present.
I kept chipping away at the Mac app in the meantime, hoping that those glitches would be resolved at some stage. I focussed on the technical details, adding polish, hitting SwiftUI dead ends and opting AppKit in more places. Then, in late in 2024, CoverSutra relaunched for the Mac and it didn’t have the playback issue. I was stunned. So I dug in again and finally came across a workaround that worked for Longplay: Updating the dock icon every second.
It’s $6 (currently $2.99) for iOS and $25 for macOS.
John Voorhees:
However, the most interesting of all of Longplay’s automation integrations is its built-in MCP server. MCP is a protocol that allows AI chatbots like Claude to interact with apps. With Longplay’s MCP server, you can do things like create Collections and Smart Collections and queue albums for playback from inside a chatbot. What makes the integration so powerful is the ability to perform those actions with the sort of natural language requests that are the bread and butter of chatbots.
For example, the other day I asked Claude Sonnet 4 to compile a list of the top 100 alternative and indie albums of the ’80s. After consulting several sources, Claude generated a list, which I then asked it to use to create a Longplay Collection using my Apple Music library. Claude got to work and created my Collection after comparing its list with my Apple Music library for a couple of minutes.
Longplay is the first app I’ve tried that uses a built-in MCP server, and I’m sold. The combination of a chatbot’s research strength and Longplay’s actions makes its MCP integration a compelling way to explore your music.
Federico Viticci:
I expect more and more developers to do this, especially now that Anthropic has a new file format and easier experience for Claude desktop extensions.
(Meanwhile, in Shortcuts, none of this is happening…)
John Appleseed:
Why isn’t the UI getting out of the way of the content by overlapping, obscuring and blurring the content?
Previously:
Apple Music AppleScript Bug Claude Cocoa iOS iOS 18 iOS App Longplay Mac Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma macOS 15 Sequoia Model Context Protocol (MCP) Music MusicKit Programming SwiftUI
NameQuick:
AI-powered file renaming that just works.
[…]
Rename legal documents, research articles, and scans automatically with clear, informative filenames.
Automatically organize invoices and receipts by extracting key details like vendor names, dates, and amounts.
Instantly rename photos with descriptive labels derived from image content or metadata for easy reference.
[…]
Use local models from Ollama for faster, offline renaming with full control over your data.
The developer says that Apple’s Foundation Models Framework is currently too unreliable and not powerful enough with its limited context window, so you need to use either Gemini, OpenAI, or Ollama. I tried it with Gemini and found that it was much better and faster than ScanSnap at pulling out names and dates from receipts, even finding some text that I could barely read myself.
I found the app itself a little hard to use. You can’t just drag and drop files onto its Dock icon, and dragging and dropping into the window didn’t properly apply the name template that I’d created and chosen. What worked best was setting up a Watch Folder. I wish it were sandboxed and supported AppleScript. NameQuick is $19 (one-time, bring your own API keys) or you can pay $5 or more per month with managed AI credits included.
Previously:
AppleScript Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Foundation Models Framework Google Gemini/Bard LLaMA Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia PDF Sandboxing
Jason Snell:
In macOS 26, there’s a built-in clipboard manager that can be accessed from the Spotlight interface, and a new set of Shortcuts triggers let you run automations when events occur on your Mac or at specific intervals.
Simon B. Støvring:
“Folder” and “File” seem like interesting automation triggers in Shortcuts for Mac. You can do things like “When a file is moved to this folder, process it with on-device AI”.
Jason Snell:
Of all the features I’m excited about using in macOS 26, the one that most intrigues me is the Use Model action in Shortcuts. Use Model does exactly what you think it does: you toss data into it, and an AI model somewhere (on your Mac, on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, or even at an OpenAI server farm) will take that data and turn it into… something.
The other day, I realized that this new feature would allow me to expand my existing automation that uploads images to the Six Colors web server by adding a description of the image.
Dan Moren:
But pulling information out of a document—especially information that might appear anywhere in a variety of forms—seems like something an AI model would be good at, so I decided to take another crack at it with Shortcuts’s new AI capabilities.
I started out my workflow by grabbing all the text from a PDF or web page, then passing it to the Private Cloud Compute model. (I attempted to use the On-Device model at first, but it was both very slow and not quite as good at formatting the response in the manner I wanted.)
[…]
And therein lies the rub with all of this. The results are neither reliable nor necessarily repeatable. The same data run through this shortcut multiple times provides different answers: I’d think that anathema (not to mention madness inducing) to the sensibilities of any programmer. Given the same data, the algorithm should yield the same thing every time, but the non-deterministic nature of AI models throws that out the window.
Federico Viticci:
So, the ChatGPT integration in Shortcuts’ Apple Intelligence action for iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 appears to be the really old GPT 4 Turbo with a knowledge cutoff date of November 2023…?
Federico Viticci:
The greatest threat to Apple Intelligence’s App Intents adoption isn’t the underlying lack of an LLM (Apple can fix that sooner or later): it’s web apps and the rise of MCP. The automation and inter-app model is shifting from local extensions to web-based ones.
I’m imagining an Apple-made MCP bridge that runs in Private Cloud Compute 🤔
Previously:
Apple Intelligence Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Numbers.app Shortcuts
Luc Beaudoin:
If you are like many knowledge workers, on a typical day you access over dozens of information resources. If you have to use search or navigate through folders to get to them, you’re taking a big hit on productivity. It’s much easier to access a resource by clicking on a contextually placed link than it is to search for it or navigate to it through folders. For instance, if your task list contains links to the resources (drafts, emails, notes, PDFs, etc.) you need to process today, then you can use your task list becomes a hub from which you can quickly jump to what you need.
Luc Beaudoin (Mac Power Users):
Despite its polish and promise, macOS still lacks overt support for robust, user-friendly linking. This violates both the spirit and the practical recommendations of the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking, which I authored to encourage software platforms and developers to address what I call the meta-access problem: the difficulty of re-accessing information that is related to your contextual focus.
[…]
Take Apple’s own macOS apps. In Notes, Messages, Reminders, Freeform, and even Mail, there is no “Copy Link” menu option that would let users create a persistent, shareable link to a specific item. This is a fundamental limitation for anyone who wants to organize information across documents and applications. In many cases, there’s no straightforward way — via the UI or automation — to get reliable, cross-device links.
Even when underlying identifiers do exist — and clearly they must — Apple keeps them hidden. For example, when you receive a date in a text via Messages on macOS, you can click it to create a Calendar event. That event includes a hidden link back to the original message, something like: sms://open?message-guid=ABCBB940-08A7-4FC8-8FDF-DF32CEB4234E But this linking mechanism is entirely private. There is no public API or automation hook to retrieve message GUIDs. So while Apple engineers can build this feature into Calendar, third-party developers and users are locked out.
[…]
There’s no AppleScript or Shortcuts action to [copy Music or Podcast links] either. One couldn’t add more hurdles to linking if one tried. And without a Copy Link menu item in the app’s menu bar, even UI scripting is impossible.
Previously:
Apple Mail Apple Podcasts AppleScript Calendar Hook Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Messages.app Music.app Notes Reminders Shortcuts URL
