Our OS 26 Experiments: iPad Podcasting, Reminders, and More
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Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. I'm John Voorhees and with me is Federico Vittici coming hot and live from an iPad in Rome, Italy. Hot and live. That's where you're coming from. Yeah, okay. Hi. Hi. It's warm there. It's warm there. It's warm here, I know. Yes, it's warm. It is hot and live.

So this kind of describes the vibe of this episode. This episode is going to be all about our experiments with the current set of betas, developer betas for the 26 series of operating systems. And as part of that,

For the first time, I am trying to record this very podcast using my iPad Pro, which you don't see. It's right here. But I'm using my usual camera. I'm using my usual microphone with my audio interface. And I'm taking advantage of the local capture mode in iPadOS 26.

I have warned Federico not to touch anything because we did have a little experiment on MPC that was unrelated that caused a little bit of a glitch, but yeah, we're doing fine. It seems to be working really well. So let's talk about that immediately, right? So this is a new feature in iPadOS 26 that allows podcasters like me to finally record a

podcast while being on a Zoom call because you just did the episode, but John and I right now, we are live on a Zoom call. We're talking to each other and we're seeing each other. And it used to be in iPadOS before that if I tried to record myself while also being on a Zoom call, everything would just stop because the iPad couldn't record anything.

the local audio and the video while also being on a call. Now, thanks to this new feature, it is possible. And hopefully it's going to work for this episode. So if you see this episode, if you see me right now talking, it's because it worked. And the way that it works is, it's kind of strange. There's a, like this feature is a toggle in Control Center. So there's a new toggle called Local Capture.

that can operate in a couple of different ways. If you press it before going on a call and then you go on a call, it'll start recording immediately. Or you can do what I did, which is I jumped on a call with John, then I opened Control Center and I tapped on local capture, gave me a little countdown, three, two, one, and it started recording. Now,

This is where it gets kind of complicated. Now, in theory, the recording is still going. The Control Center control is supposed to show you a live thumbnail preview of the recording, which I saw when I did my first recording.

demo with John. Now it doesn't show the thumbnail anymore, but it still saves the file. The file... Theoretically, if you're hearing this. Theoretically, if you're hearing this, it did save the file. The file gets saved...

This is kind of confusing because when you press stop, you just get a notification that says your recording has been saved in files. And it doesn't tell you where. No, it's in downloads. It's in downloads. I discovered on my own that it's in downloads. This is feedback that I've shared with Apple that it should be a little more.

clear in terms of what it's doing behind the scenes. Where did it go? Yeah. And also it's not like it's giving you a video file and an audio file. It's combining both the local audio capture and the local video capture into one MP4 file.

So it's going to be up to John, I guess, to take the MP4 and take out the audio track from inside of it and combine the two or something. I don't know how these things work. John does it. Yeah.

- You very conveniently don't know how these things work, Federico. That's what I would say to the audience. He does not want to learn. - I do not want to. Now, for context, this is also the first time that I'm doing some production work with the finalized version of my desk. This has been a recurring topic over the past couple of weeks on all my shows, on App Stories, on Connected, and on MPC, because it's been a work in progress.

But now I am at my desk using my monitor, which also acts as a KVM, using my magic keyboard and magic trackpad in wired mode because...

These accessories do not support multi-connections between the Mac and iPad. I am not using my Mac Studio right now. The Mac Studio is here, but I'm using the iPad Pro. With all of the accessories and Ethernet and the monitor, everything going into the iPad Pro. Hopefully, this iPadOS feature will work. And I can see that it's, you know, I'm using my monitor. I can see my windows. I am not touching anything out of a...

some extra precaution. But I see that I'm getting my emails. I'm getting my notifications. The iPad is working. On the monitor, I see my windows. And on the iPad, I left Control Center with the local capture going. I'm afraid to touch the iPad screen until I'm done. So we'll see.

Yeah, I think it's probably a good policy to not fool around on your iPad while you're recording a show because you never know. Something could switch your inputs on its own, something like that. But from my perspective, sitting here watching you on Zoom and listening to you, it's just like you were connected to the Mac. I mean, there is absolutely no difference in the Zoom call from my perspective. Now, Federico has been...

People who listen to app stories, Unwind, Connected, they all know, NPC even, they all know that Federico has been fine-tuning this desktop setup for months. People get a slice of my life throughout the week. A slice of your obsessive life. And, you know, the...

iPad OS 26 kind of took what was a fairly settled setup and threw it into the air again. And you've been working on it. Yes. And I decided for this episode, well, if Federico is going to potentially screw up this entire recording, maybe I'll potentially screw it up too. I will.

So I started to see if I could record on the iPad and I actually abandoned it because we do have kind of a hard out in terms of our time today and I wasn't able to get it set up quickly enough. The problem for me, it's not that the iPad setup is difficult to do. It's that my desk is not set up that way. My camera is on one end of the desk. My microphone is on the other end of the desk.

i didn't have a hub i had to go digging around for a hub i usually use an iphone 16e as my camera and as far as i can tell that setup you know with um final cut pro camera and remote multi-cam like that that doesn't really work with this setup so i you know then i started digging for another webcam in my closet and by then it was just too much so

Instead, here I am with my usual setup of the Mac and the iPhone 16E and my regular microphone right here. But look, I think it's a great thing. I'm actually going to mess around with it some more. Not at my desk because there's no reason for me because I use a Mac most of the time to have that setup on my desk. But I do want it for if I'm traveling, for instance.

because this feature works not only with the iPad, but also with the iPhone. I could conceivably have a little tripod in a backpack with this iPhone 16. Well, maybe it won't work with the iPhone 16, but with a webcam and my iPhone, and that's all I need to record a show. So, you know, it's a good thing to have. It'll allow us to travel or to have different setups, more flexibility. And I don't know, I'm

I'm happy with it so far. Yeah, it's too bad that the iPad's built-in webcam is not that great because I could see a scenario in which I could go to the beach or something, just get my iPad and that USB microphone that you recommended to me and just put that up on the tripod or just hold it like this, like Brandon does on MPC.

and just record the video of the iPad's front-facing camera and the local capture, right, with the microphone. But I think the front-facing camera of the iPad is kind of... No, it's not great. I mean, the rear-facing one you could probably get away with. But then I won't see the screen. But then you won't see the screen. Unless... Unless I also bring an external monitor.

Maybe you get what you get. You get one of those little tiny external monitors that the camera people use, the video people use, that connects by USB and flips up and you get a bracket for the top of your... This is... You're going to have another kickstand, Federico. You're going to have something that attaches to the top of your iPad and shows you the video that way. I don't know. Think about it. Think about it. This is your weekend project. Hmm.

As if you don't have enough weekend projects already. So I am on iPadOS 26. Are you on Mac OS Tahoe right now? I am. Okay. So what have you been doing in Tahoe?

I've been doing a lot of things. It's been, you know, it's been pretty good so far. I will say that there are bugs. There are some apps that don't work, but it's only developer beta two. I think the one that's the most difficult for me at the moment is that logic pro does not work, but I have a laptop. So that's not a big deal. I just edit the shows that way on Tahoe. One of the things that I did was,

right out of the box is I switched all in on Spotlight as my launcher, both for apps and for shortcuts. And so, you know, I have been using before this, I had, it's been a progression over the last few months. At first it was Raycast command space triggered Raycast alt space went straight to the Raycast clipboard. Okay.

With then, we got the preview of Sky. Yes. And I switched that to Command Space. Right. And been using that for a while. But with Tahoe, I've got Command Space back where Spotlight always was, I guess. You know, it's kind of the default keyboard shortcut for Spotlight. So it's back there, front and center, muscle memory, hit it.

launch things. And I've really been enjoying it. I mean, it's, uh, it's really nice to be able to launch apps that way. The clipboard history is limited. I think I read it's limited to eight hours. Uh, I think that that looks about right judging from the look, you know, scrolling back through my, my clipboard history. That's not perfect because sometimes you do want to find something older, but I would say that it covers like 90% of the use cases. Um,

It also doesn't have some features that a lot of clipboard managers have, like pinning items. You know, there are certain things that I send to people by email all the time. Right. So I haven't gotten rid of Raycast's clipboard manager. I just moved it off to a secondary shortcut. So when I need those things, they're available. But most of the time, Spotlight has been doing the trick.

I also like that you can assign little keyboard shortcuts to things in Spotlight to your shortcut actions. And I have only started exploring that stuff, but I think that given that I was already a pretty light user of something like Raycast, I think Spotlight is actually going to

fill this void for me. And I've got right next to it with alt space now, I've got sky. So between those two things, I have a launcher and a clipboard manager and kind of an AI automation tool, all kind of rolled into a couple of different keyboard shortcuts that are, you know, right there. Nice. Yeah, I'm very jealous of the new spotlight because it's not an iPadOS. I think we both switched back to reminders. We

Yes, we did. We should talk about that.

Right? Right within the share sheet, you're going to see an Apple Intelligence loading indicator, and it's going to take a look at the actionable items that you shared with the extension. This even works because I did some tests. So one of the other things

I play around with this week was I installed the beta firmware on my AirPods 4, right? Yeah, I did that too. Yeah, the AirPods 4 now, and the AirPods Pro 2, thanks to the H2 chip, now have this really, really good local recording quality, which was one of the worst aspects.

of the AirPods family before. Now they actually do record pretty good audio. So I've been, you know, doing this thing where I record my own voice memos, just me talking out loud, sort of like as a brainstorming thing when I'm driving or doing things around the house. And I used to have, I used to have this very like complex thing

workflow for taking that transcript and calling an LLM, like a cloud-based, to process the transcript, find the actionable items, and create a node in Obsidian. You know what I did? I did the same thing. I talked to myself while wearing the AirPods in Apple Notes. So I recorded myself in Apple Notes. You can do the same thing in voice memos, by the way. I copied the transcript. I created a shortcut with two actions.

get the clipboard and share the clipboard with the share sheet.

selected the reminders extension and it found all of my actionable items from my transcript that I recorded with the AirPods 4. So I turned that complex thing that involved the Mac mini server and the terminal and the LLM command line tool and chat GPT and Gemini to recording myself in voice memos or notes and sharing the text with a share sheet. That's it. And yeah,

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I tried it the other day too. I did the same upgrade on the AirPods. I went out for a walk around the block talking to myself. I probably looked like a little bit of a crazy person mumbling to myself as I walked down the street. But I walked around the block a couple of times, made some notes about things that I wanted to write about, things I had to do. I was using voice memos, came back,

did the same thing, took the transcript, ran it through shortcuts the same way, and it does a remarkably good job. And then what nice thing about it is you can, I really like the UI that Reminders is using in shortcuts because it suggests actionable things. You don't have to add them all. You can pick and choose because you can swipe on them and expose a delete button, for instance, to get rid of the ones that you don't need, which I think is a really nice touch.

And at the end of a process like this, not only do you have a neat transcript of everything you said, if you want to keep that for some reason, you know, put in your notes, but you've got the actionable items to drop into reminders too. So it really, it's one of those things where you've gone from like the shortcut that you built, which was complicated and relied on the cloud and on a Mac,

and reduced it down to like three action items. I mean, there's really not much to it, really. Yeah, and now the other thing that is new compared to the last time we were using reminders, both of us, is MCP now exists on macOS. So it's this, the model context protocol is, it's been described as USB 4K.

for AI in the sense that it's this universal connector for third-party services that can be connected to an AI model. Cloud popularized this feature since MCP was created by Anthropic, but MCP is now supported in a wide variety of major AI services. OpenAI is working on adding native MCP support to JGPT. Google is going to add MCP support

to Gemini, and obviously MCP is native to cloud on macOS now. Now, what's interesting is that since MCP connectors can be cloud-based or can be local on your computer. If you're a developer, you can create a local MCP server, which is just a bunch of files that spin up a little, usually like Node server or something in the background, and allow cloud, for example, to interact with things on your computer.

There's a permission system, and especially the latest MCP spec has introduced some additional security checks, which is nice. But one of the things that is possible on macOS is that there is a vibrant community of third-party developers who have created open-source MCP connectors for native Apple stuff.

For example, Anders Borum, the developer of Working Copy, one of the apps that we've been using for years on our iPhones and iPads, created HyperContext. HyperContext is a free macOS utility that exposes native integrations from Apple apps, like Reminders, the Calendar, and Apple Mail, for example, as integrations.

features in MCPE that Claude can use. In

In addition to hypercontext, there's a popular one called iMCP, which is based on a similar idea. It's a menu bar app that gives you access to reminders, to Apple Maps, to messages. And I saw just by browsing around, I haven't played around a lot with this, but I saw that people reverse engineered the notes, Apple Notes database system and have created MCP connectors for Apple Notes.

- I bet that's XML probably, isn't it? - I think notes is actually storing the data in an SQLite database. - Oh, okay. Interesting. - I think. And I thought there's even one that is doing like embedding, like vectorizing the notes database for AI, which is fascinating. I gotta spend some time looking into it. Anyway, I played around with this for like 20 minutes today and there's a lot of potential in cloud when you combine the features of cloud. So the knowledge of cloud, the web access,

the cloud MCP integration, like Zapier, for example, and the local MCP integration, like HyperContext. And I can tell you that as a proof of concept just before the show, I modified an existing prompt that I had so that it looks in my Gmail using Zapier for important and unanswered messages and turns those into tasks in reminders.

Oh, with the link back to the Gmail message. Link back to the superhuman message. You can do Gmail, you can do Gmail, you can do Gmail, you can do MimeStream. Anything that uses the native Gmail ID, because that's what Claude sees, can be turned into a URL scheme.

So this is interesting because you're combining, right, these three different aspects, the AI, the model, the cloud-based Zapier integration, and the integrations, right, of Cloud, because Cloud has built-in Gmail integration with local integration for Apple services. And don't even get me started. I mean, now it would be possible, for example, to create a Cloud project that integrates Cloud

with MCP as well as shortcuts because there are shortcuts. There are MCP connectors for shortcuts on macOS. And I mean, you could, for example, connect Claude to Apple Intelligence if you wanted to. I don't know why you would do it, but it should be possible.

It should be. Yeah, that's kind of wild. That's really wild. There is an entire world that I need to explore more of people who have reverse engineered Apple apps like iMessage, Notes, and Reminders.

To bring those functionalities with private APIs in MCP. And I hope that I will be able to find something that is not possible for Reminders clients on iOS using the native APIs, which is, for example, adding rich links to Reminders. That is not in the Reminders API. I bet that somebody figured it out on macOS how to do it.

Yeah, and if they haven't, I think we have a special projects department that might be able to do that. I was going to ask, can you send Fionn a quick message after this? That's the kind of thing that's right up his alley. No, it absolutely is. Yeah, it's fascinating what you can do with some of this stuff now. It's very hard to keep up just because it's moving so quickly.

I think for me, messages would be a really great one to have because there are all these times where I know I've talked to you about something a week ago and it's just a little hard sometimes in messages to scroll back and find what we were talking about. And the search works pretty well, but not great. And so having something like that that actually goes into the database and pulls things out would be really useful. When I moved

I've now, you know, for the record, I have gone from things, reminders to things to Godspeed to Todoist back to reminders. That's been my last 12 months, roughly, maybe a little bit more than that. I've done things to reminders to Todoist back to things. Back to reminders, sorry. Yes, I had the extra little step of Godspeed there for two or three months. But one of the things that made it easier this time around to move around

from Todoist to Reminders was AI. Because, I mean, Todoist can output a CSV and you can create a shortcut to Reminders

do that to, you know, to, to process that and move it into reminders. But I really didn't want to do that because I wanted to also take the opportunity to kind of clean up my, my tasks and rethink kind of how they're organized. So I wanted it to be a more manual process, but I didn't want it to be a tedious manual process. So what I did was first thing I started with was just using super whisper and dictating a lot of the reminders because it's

It really was a lot faster to just kind of have Todoist on the left, Reminders on the right, and read in the ones that I wanted to keep. And I was doing that for a while, but then I realized, what am I doing? I've got Sky. I took a screenshot of like 12 Reminders that I knew I wanted to keep and

I fed it into Sky and said, add these to reminders. And not only did it add the task titles, but if there was a visible URL, it would add the URL. And it would suggest where it was going to put those, which list it was going to put them in reminders, which was even better. And because Sky lets you, it, it, it,

creates all the reminders and lets you go through them one at a time and confirm that you want to create the reminder, I could go through and make sure it was where I wanted it to be. And if I wanted to switch it, I could change the list very easily right in Sky. So it was a much faster process using those tools to kind of help me get through the process. And so far, I mean, I'm liking reminders a lot. I still find that there's some like

weird things that i think should be there yeah like paper cuts paper cuts essentially yeah yeah it's things like the sections that you can add why you can't have the the sections become head uh columns like you can in todoist or why you can't create those sections you can make them you can make them into columns right oh that's right i was thinking of something else you're right but the thing you're thinking about maybe is that you cannot

create sections from shortcuts and you cannot from shortcuts, if you're creating a reminder from shortcuts, you can put them in a section. You cannot put it in a section. Why is that? Remember when Apple released that

create reminder action like last year and it was in the beta for like two beta versions and it had all of the parameters like sections and a bunch of other things and then they pulled it and they went back to the add reminder action which is worse i don't know what happened yeah yeah it's pretty limited i mean and then it's weird how you have like

add reminder and edit reminder and some of the things that are in edit are things that you can add to the reminder they're like yeah it's almost like an extension of ad in a way i mean i understand that it's edit is whatever it's it's just the design is a little weird with the way shortcuts work with reminders you know now that we're talking you know what's strange about local capture

Now that I'm looking at it, I don't see my recording time. I have no idea how long we've been going because it doesn't show you. We've been going about 25 minutes. That's another comment. Yeah, that's my feedback for Apple. It doesn't show you how long you've been recording. And also the thumbnail is still gone. There's no thumbnail. There's no live preview. Now you're going to have to get yourself a stopwatch.

No, they should add the... Also, why is this a control center thing? This should be, I don't know. It shouldn't be an app. I guess that's the problem. What should it be if not a control center? Right. You don't want to make it an API and have to rely on third parties to include it in their app. I don't know. Like a page in settings? I don't know.

It would be strange. Settings would be weird too. Or maybe just put it in voice memos or something. I don't know. I guess I understand why it's in Control Center, I guess. They should put it in Logic. Why not make it a feature in Logic? Don't make me use Logic. Then they can make their $50 and keep their services revenue up, Federico, on your back. Anything else you've been playing around with, John, before we move on to the post-show?

Yeah, I do want to mention Workout Buddy because, you know, Workout Buddy is a... We love Workout Buddy. Workout Buddy is a work in process. This is kind of feedback for what is obviously a very early beta, but I have found that it... I turned it on for when I went out for walks.

And it took two or three walks before it actually ever said anything. And so by the time it finally said something, it startled me because I was listening to a podcast. And all of a sudden it said, you've been walking for 30 minutes. Great job. I don't know what it was, something like that. And I was like, hmm, all right, well, that wasn't great. And that was kind of the last time I heard it. I haven't heard it since. Now, I don't know if I've had a walking workout since then. But I also turned it on for outdoor runs.

And first of all, you have to have your phone with you. I'm not taking my iPhone 16 Pro Max with me on a run. It's too big. It's too heavy. You don't want that in your pocket. That's why I have an Apple Watch with cellular.

But I had happened to turn it on anyway, and I went for a run. And normally when you use the Apple Watch, you do get Siri prompts when you run. Like when you hit a mile, they can be adjusted. But when I hit a mile, it would tell me what the pace is and that kind of stuff in my ears. If you have workout buddy turned on, it doesn't say anything, which I think is, I don't know if that's a bug or if that just hasn't been thought through. Because it seems to me if your watch isn't connected,

to your phone. It ought to either, it ought to like temporarily toggle off workout buddy, because since workout buddy can't be used, you ought to be able to at least get the existing functionality. But you know, other than that, totally fine. I've been enjoying the Apple watch. It does periodically drain the battery pretty fast, which is pretty typical. I have added,

notes complication to my watch face in place of scratch pad because you know what I wanted to see how the new notes app worked with editing and it's quite nice although I kind of wish they were quick notes I wish I could do a quick note complication so it was in that category and it only had one place to look for little things that I jot down all right well I guess we're going to talk a bunch of other things in the post show right okay yeah yeah

All right, Federico. Well, check us out over at MacStories.net. We did. If you listen to Mac Stories Unwind, you'll know that MacStories.net is all new. Things have changed. May not look like it, but it's all new. It's not what you think it is.

But we have had some changes. And the site is snappier than ever, especially on Safari. You can find the two of us over there riding away. And you can find us on social media where Federico is at Faticci. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I. And I'm at John Voorhees. J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-W-E-S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John. Good, good, good, good.