Future of Siri and Spotlight Integration

Hello and welcome back to another episode of A Stories. Today's episode is brought to you by Steam Clock. I'm John Vores and I've got Federica Vitachi with me. Hey, Federica. Hello, Hello, John. How are you? Oh, I'm doing well. We boy, we're in that sprintit time and I love this time of year. I mean, it's exhausting, but I have a lot of fun. I mean, it's like Simultaneously, every single developer in the world is either putting out a new app or doing their final big release before the beta season. dealing with WWC, getting ready for that. We're finishing up big projects like Short Guts Playground, which we're going to talk about a little more in the post show, some of the technical behind the scenes stuff. Today's topic is a continuation of our wish lists. But before we get that, I know you have a mini topic because you've been using something that I don't think a lot of people either are aware of yet or maybe aren't full utilizing, but you've had access to it for a while and you've been doing a lot with the Notion Dev platform, which was I think it was announced officially by Notion roughly a week ago. Yeah. Yeah. So Notion launched a developer platform. It's called the Notion Dev platform You can just go to Nion. dev to see all the products that they have. And I've been testing parts of these products for , I want to say like four months or so. Its It's been a while And I wanted to talk about it because I think it's such a fascinating transformation of this company from a note taking product collaborative note taking product to a platform that's sort of based on not taking But they are extending that with AI agents and developer tooling. So the short version of this is that there's always the notion that you know and love. so not taking databases, you can share that, collaborate with people.. This year they have launched a lot of more fine grained collaboration settings for database access, that sort of thing On the side, you may have heard that Notion also went big on Notion AI and custom agents which is part of the developer platform story haven't stopped at agents Recently, they rolled out officially the Notion command line interface, so the Notion CLI That is a command line interface that basically bridges the gap between an agent like Cloudcode or Codex or OpenCloud, whatever you're using, and the Notion API. It's more extensible. It's a little more versatile than using the Notion MCP, for example. Famously, the Notion MCP doesn't let you upload media or images or files Whereas with an Notion API or even better, the CLI that comes bundled with agents instructions, it lets you do that. So the CLI is part of it. Custom agents, as I mentioned before are also part of it. They are now officially rolled out, which means you got to pay for them They are using a credit based system that I know John doesn't really like. It's not that I love it. I'm okay with it because I understand that you know And they got to pay for that kind of AI access? Yeah, I'm okay with it in that sense. and I think I also feel better about it once I have a better feel for what the burn rate is, you know what That's how because its with credits, it's very hard to understand how expensive a thing really is. Yeah, it's hard to put a like to translate the financial cost into to this unit of credit. I think that's what's a little strange So custom agents were part of it what they also announced is workers. So you may be familiar with this idea of cloudflare workers, which are basically like little type script programs that Run in a cloud Cloudflare workers are really popular because you can use them for free up to a certain level. And they're basically code that runs in a sandbox environment in the cloud. And it can be any code. So you can create a worker on Cloudflare for do things like, I don't know, call the Spotify API or call the to doist API Yeah or pull like things out of an RSS fee It's arbitrary code. Now you can do the same with Nion workers And they live in a sandbox environment in your Notion account They're still labeled as beta they will officially launch this summer But what's really fascinating here, I think, is that Nion workers, which I've been testing for a while back when they were in alpha It's not just, I mean, the tyyppecriript, they can run code. can you can ask Codeax to spin up a worker in your account and it's going to deploy it in your account. But these workers can do stuff in your notion And I've been using them for two Two main goals, I would say The first thing they can do is they can run code that's arbitrary code that can sync content into an Ocean database. So for example, something that I have is a worker that monitors the Mac sor' RSS feed and takes any new article from Max Stories runs code to turn that HTML from the RSS feed into markdown, sanitizes the markdown for things like footnotes or horizontal breaks or image captions and resaves that. so creates a backup article in an ocean database in my account. So I have a running log of every new M Stories article since the beginning of twenty twenty six when I got access to workers backs up any new article in an oion database. And since it's arbitrary code I even rolled out a push overver API integration so that when the worker, which runs every ten minutes, I believe finds a new Mac Stories article and syncs it to my database. It also sends me a pushover notification All of those environmental variables like my pushover API key, are stored securely in the Nion worker sandbox, really nicely done. Let me ask you this. Wh would you do that as opposed to writing a Python script put it on like a launch D crun job type of situation on. I I could do that. I could do that. I guess the benefit is that it's in the cloud. you don't have to have the always on Mac and all that kind of thing. Yeah The other thing which I think is a lot more interesting is you can create workers to create custom tools for Notion agents So Notion agents can be connected to MCP servers. So you copy the MCP server of a service like to doist And you give the agent access to do his tools, right But what if the worker What if you want to have an agent? has a functionality that doesn't exist out of the box from a popular service or in Notion itself you can write code or you can have your agent write code to deploy custom tools for agents in your account. For example I have an agent that's called my Web clliipper bot that reformats and organizes my bookmarks in notion, again, in a Nion database And it does things like scraping the article to extract a summary, the hero image But I also wanted to be able to, if I'm saving an Apple Music or a Spotify music link, I wanted to be able to extract the album artwork. Now neither Apple Music nor Spotify, they have an MCP servers I deployed custom tools with a worker that tells my Notion agent how to talk to the Apple Music web API or the Spotify web API to retrieve metadata about albums, artwork, track list, release date, artist name, stuff like that And I think that's a really powerful idea where you have your custom agents that you can manage with a really nice UI inside Notion itself If you want to tinker with them, you can because there's a platform now behind it that allows you to deploy custom code and that custom code can become a native tool for the Notion agent to call and do something I can think of one use for this that I think would be really great, which is your upcoming rememinders CLI because you can use MCP with Event Kit to add things to Apple Reminders, but there's a lot of things that Reminders does that aren't part of MCP servers because they aren't part of Event Kit, but with to your CLI, you could do all of those things that are on top of that. The problem there is creating a tunnel between my mac. And the Notion Coud, which I which I could do with Cloudflare fununnel or stuff like that. but I don't really want to do that because you're poking a hole in your network for that to happen because the Notion server' running on AWS or something. I see. So to access the CLI on my Mac. So it's much better served to do web services and that kind of thing G So overall, I wanted to mention this because I think it's really interesting if you are working with agents and if you're tinkering with agents, you can do a lot of things with Notion Now. And broadly speaking, I find this to be so fascinating for this company to be in itself from a note ticaking product to a collaborative note ticaking product to the sort of dipping the first toes in the water with agents and custom agents and now having workers that can sync that can run code, sync to a database, expose custom tools to agents and They also have something else coming later on, which is external agents. So you will be able to run like native codex or clot code agents. Inide Notion. So in that case, I believe it's based on the anthropic API for managed agents. anthropic will be running the hardness, but the agents will be running inside Notion. It's kind of hard to wrap your head around that concept.. We'll see there's a waiting list. I don't have access to that yet So we'll see, but overall, I think this is a this is a really good example of Notion has always been this kind of malleable software that you can customize and build stuff on top of But now they're doing that plus making that agent first with custom code. I think it's really I think it's really interesting Yeah, I do too. And I think what I really appreciate is the philosophy behind all of this, which is One thing that Notion is not is a silo. because you know, the problem I have with a lot of software service businesses is that they expect everything to happen inside their app both creation and using of information. But notion is both, you know, embracing the notion of bringing things in from the outside, but also letting you get it out and agents are just another way of doing that. And I think that that's what really from my perspective makes notion so powerful is that I don't feel It's like It's kind of a counterintuitive lock in and that I want to use Nion more because I know I always have the ability to get things out of it and use it in a way that's flexible in the way that I want to work without forcing me to stay entirely within notion, which I think is pretty cool. This episode of Abssteries is brought to you by SteamClock A lot of mobile apps are mediocre. They're not exactly broken, but they're just okay The thing is that you notice the difference the moment you use something good Steam Clock software builds mobile apps for companies that care about taste They're a design and development studio based in Vancouver, Canada, and they've been shipping iOS and Android apps for over fifteen years. Their clients are growing tech companies that care about mobile, but don't have the in house team to build something great Steam Clock works with companies to level up their apps so they can go from it's holding us back it's something that's pulling its weight. some of their clients discovered the hard way Some of their clients have learned the hard way that vibe coding your way to the app store isn't a product strategy What makes Steam Clock worth calling isn't just that they execute well It's that they'll help you figure out the right approach and give you an honest read on your situation before you commit to anything Their client apps have been downloaded over ten million times and they've helped five of their clients through acquisitions If you're building something and need a mobile team that cares as much as you do, Steam Clock is where to start. Visit steamclock. com slash app stories to get in touch that steamclock d. com slash A stories. Our thanks to Steam Clock for their support of the show All right, Fo. We need to talk a little bit about our wishes this week for MacOS this year. And I think we've got, you know, we've got a good list. I think we've got a good list U Do you want to kick it off and share one with me? or what do you want to do? I will go first And I will mention that the music app on MacOS is terrible. and Apple shouldree bad for the Apple music experience on MacOS For your It's so weird. Sometimes I'm I want to search for something And it feels like I'm playing Russian rouletes, like sometimes it's searching my library, sometometimes it's searching the Apple Music catalog I think it's time for Apple to to rip off the iTunes legacy compatibility layer because that's, I think what's still holding back the music app for from being an intuitive and full blown apppple music experience. A lot of very old code under the hood there. Very old code hanging in there The mini player design is absolutely bonkers with a thing at the bottom. I There are so many parts of the music apple MechQest that I just don't understand. It's so slow, it's so janky. And I mean, Spotify is not a great experience. He's an electrona. No, but my God feel faster and better than music on the Mac.. It's yeah, it' awful. Yeah, I mean, look here I think From my perspective, I agree completely and from My perspective, I don't even use the music app on the Mac anymore because it's just not that good. So instead, I'll sit with headphones on and use my phone because it's just a better experience overall I think We got to kind of also address liquid glass for our wishes this week to Feder Rico because Liquid glasses I wrote in my Tahoe review I am not as adamantly opposed to it on the Mac as a lot of people B It was also very inconsistently applied on the Mac. In Tahoe, you see a really wide range of implementations. Ething from the very glassy look that you see on the iPhone where I think it it overall looks better in general on that smaller screen to a much more subtle implementation that I think is really where I'd like to see Apple this stuff Whichever direction they go, Whether I like it or not, I'd at least like it to be consistent. And right now It's very uneven across all of the system apps and the UI elements of the OS itself Yeah, I mean, The finder for me is especially Hanna bed I really don't like the sidebar personally. Yeah I don't know. I don't particularly hate the toolbar design, but I think it's kind of weird I think they could use with they could use a lot of polish I think it's overdone in apps like music and phhotos. I'm trying to think what else. There are certain apps that got a very IOS treatment that I think didn't need to have a very IOS treatment. whereas I think things like toolbars, those I don't mind love like you, I'm not as big opposed to those, but it just needs I don't think enough time was spent Baking that one in the oven that it needs a little more Fr you know, a thirty foot thirty thousand foot perspective, an overview taken and figured out a little bit more I will mention Safari Okay I'm using Google Chrome I've been using Google Chrome as my main browser on the Mac for For about a couple of months at this point, sorry Why? I don't know. I don't like Google Chrome at all. I feel I use it too though. I use it too. Re Primarily for two reasons. One, it integrates better with agents. That's why I'm using it. Whether you want to use playlaywright or you want to use Codex or Cloud coding Chrome or you want to use Chrome Dv tools, which is a native feature of Chrome that works great with any agent. It just works better for the modern way of being productive and working with agents on desktop And so I hope to see from Apple some kind of Safari MCP or Safari dev tool integration for D regions The trickier problem is that Safari doesn't work as well as Chrome would tons of modern web apps I don't know what it is, but Chrome for me is usually faster. or if a web page isn't working on Safari I can open Chrome and know that it's going to work. I don't know what it is that Apple does with webkit or maybe they're slow to adopt certain web technologies usually if a web page is broken, it's not really broken. it's that it doesn't work in Safari. And sometimes I find that it sort of locks up the entire saafari if you have a misbehaving web app of some sort and I end up having to restart Safari entirely So I mean, you can hate you know, Chromium as a thing. I think it's a I think it's a really powerful engine. I think it's a It's a bit of a blessing that we have Chromium be open source and that other people can make Chromium browsers. I just feel like I would like to use Safari because I prefer the design, I prefer the integration with the iPhone and iPad and iCloud sync And also Chrome for IiOS and iPadoSs Awfully Uh But on desktop, especially for work, I gott to use Chrome. and I don't want to use Chrome, but I have to And maybe that has to change All right, so My next one is the menu bar really needs some work because Apple did a little bit with Tahoe. They allowed developers to move contontrols into contontrol center, which is good The adoption of that has been very uneven. I mean, I looked in it the other day and I have I have a lot of apps on my meac because I'm always testing stuff. And there's a good number of third party apps in there. But it's still a small fraction of the apps that I use on a regular basis. And as a result I have a really overstuffed menu bar and I manage it pretty regularly to try to trim it down. But everybody's making a menu bar app now. I mean, they're just literally everything is either a menu bar app or has a menu bar component And while it's not a huge problem on my thirty two inch display that I'm using with my Mac stududio It's an enormous problem on a MacBook Pro, for instance. and The third party solutions for managing the menu bar straight now Bartender Six just came out with Bartender six Pro. I didn't review it because when I tried it, it's still behaves strangely to me. I still find that it's a little bit buggy and a lot of people abandoned it for that reason And I haven't really found any of the open source projects or other options out there to be great either. So I think it's time for Apple to find a way to manage the menu bar better itself. not just wait for developers to move things into the control center But give people more tools to stack them, do something get the to get the menu bar under control Yeah, I agree Right now I don't use anything. I just trimed my menu bar icons so I don't have to use any Men bar manager Yeah, no, that's what I do too. on my laptop, I just get rid of them all basically. I will mention one that I think we are in agreement on I want to see an apple native version of Game hub Oh yeah. MacOS game emulation layer for PC games and Steam OS It's never going to happen. But I will mention it because there's such a missed opportunity for Apple to Mac gaming more seriously by stopping to pretend that developers are just going to make their support their games from Windows to MacS They have the power the technology and the silicon to make it happen via emulation If a company like Gameser can ship a pretty good product with Game Hub. Imagine what Apple could do if they were serious about it. even and if they could collaborate with Valve on it, maybe I would love to see an official, you know emulator app or you know, whatever they want to call it from Apple that lets me download any game from Steam with varying degrees of compatibility and just play that on my Mac, even though it's not a native MacQS game M. binary. I don't think it's gonna to happen, but I will mention it because that's like my dream Yeah, it's a real gap, I think in gaming for the Mac, which, you know, gaming for the Mac has gotten better overall over the years. And I think that having something like what you're describing doesn't preclude the native Mac games from progressing. I don't think it would conflict with that. It would just fill the large gap of many games that don't actually make it to that sort of that sort of you, recompiling for native Mac software My next one is One that I think I've mentioned a lot in the past, but I really think Apple needs to something with a share sheet. I think that this is one I should have mentioned in iOS and iPad OS too, but especially on the Mac, the Macs shhare menu is different than what's on iPad and iPhone. And that's a problem because a lot of developers just ignore it on the Mac And while and I think it's driven at least in part by the fact that Safari extensions, a lot of develop, especially where URL's are concerned and moving them around the system between apps, a lot of developers make their make a Safari web extension and they're like, oh, that's it, you know they call it a day. Whereas, I mean, you might be in Iivory for instance, and see a URL you want to share too a regater app or you might be using, you know, there's all kinds of different apps you might be using where you want to move a URL another service that doesn't have that. And one that I run into a lot is Matter, which I think is a fantastic app, but they have Safari extension and they have no way to share from the share sheet, which means if you can't find it in Chrome or Safari, you're not going to save it to matter unless you copy the URL manually and paste it into matter, which I don't think is a good good experience at all. So And while I think that part of it, you know, developers are responsible for Meting these kind of things available to users, I also lay it at the feet of Apple a little because I know that the system for doing that is different on the Mac and that's just more work. I mean, there's no reason why the share sheet should have two implementations across all these platforms when If it's unified, it can just kind of come for free whenever you build a Mup Yeah. Um, I will mention a system wide Sure functionality for reminders. So like a quick entry thing for reminders that's similar to the one from things to do is Domini foocus. An serars Mest task manager now offers a way to press a keyboard shortcut and a floating capture window of sorts comes up and lets you quickly enter a task You cannot do that with reminders unless you use some third party utility or shortcuts There should be a way for you to capture quickly into reminders with the Keybo shortcut. I know that they have a control center N reminder thing that's based on App intents. Yeah. So maybe an evolution of that Apple might say spotlight for you on that one You know, our t our Yamy tab and then doesn't really have a UI. I'm thinking like something that is a little more Macquest native Yeah with a proper design. Yeah, a little window, a little bit like what it's what things does what remind what remind me faster does. Yeah. ye. Yeah. Now I agree, I agree. I think that would be a good one. I'm going to piggyback on that with Spotlight. I think that Spotlight got off to a really good start with Tahoe, but it's been very uneven ever since with the various point releases where at times it's gotten very, very slow In the latest stable release of Tahoe 's not like God very fast again But I still find it occasionally doing massive indexes of my system, which slows it down And I think the thing where it feels the slowest is often with launching apps. If you want to use it as an app launcher, I feel like there should be two systems within Spotlight. O, which is the index of your apps you know, is always up to date and launches very quickly. And the other part that does the searching and trying to find the websites and the documents and the emails and the text messages, you know, that stuff which is a lot it's a lot bigger index. I feel like they should somehow be bifurcated so that launching an app is always instant kind of the way it is in apps like Raycast, for instance. Whereas I could deal with a little bit of lag if I know that I'm looking through every document I've ever saved in my Mac. watching an app It really needs to be super fast and sometimes it just isn't Okay, the last one from me will be obviously a Siri chatbot on the Mac as well. Yeah Obviously Apple is It seems they're about to relaunch Apple intntelligence with a New Si, the Google Gemini Foundation. Um chat b experience, I hope that that's also available on the map that it's not iPhone and iPad only And I want to be able to invoke the new series on MacOS anyywhere with Gibber shortcut As simple questions, but also go into chatbot mode where I can have a conversation I hope that the series happ is also on the Mac has a native Mac design I hope that it's not a Basic catalyst Of sorts. Yeah. I think we're done with Catalyst. I think Catalyst is mostly done. Yeah, I think we're mostly done with it. And I hope that he also integrates with apps on the Mac. Um, I assume it'll be based on app intents I just hope to have feature parity so that the new seri experience is iPhone, iPad. and Mac native to each platform and on the Mac with some nicer things to have like system wide keyboard shortcuts board integration, you know All the things that I would expect from a modern makeup I hope to find it in the new series and I hope that it's not. IUS only So you think it combines with spotlight on the Mac the way I think it's going to be combined with spotlight everywhere. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking too. I actually wouldn't be surprised if the spotlight name is going away. Yeah, that's possible. That's possible. It's a good name though, I think What about you don know't you just typed to Siri on the Mac now, do you No I don't really either. I mostly hit it by mistake every now and then when I type it on my keyboard.. All right. I'm going to close out with one small one, which I kind of like the web apps that you can make in Safari. I make them from time to time. Oftentimes though at some point whatever I feel the need to make a web app for, I find a native solution eventually. and I want to get rid of the web app because here's a good example is that Early on, there were a lot more features in things like Chat GPT and Claude on the web app than there were in the native app That's kind of changed and that for the most part, it's not totally true, but for the most part, there's parity between the desktop apps and the web apps for those services But now I just so now I just run the desktop apps and I have those legacy ones around and sometimes When I would type in Spotlight, Spotlight would want to try to open up my web app and that would get everything kind of mixed up and confused The thing I want is just an easier way to get rid of those web apps. They're not in your applications folder. I know where they are. I can go in and trim that list whenever I want to. But I don't think it's as easy for ordinary people who maybe put this in their dock because that's where it's you, they're deposited normally. You can't right click on it and say deelete. You can remove it from your dock But then it sits down in that folder where it lives forever and Spotlight is indexing it and might bring it up by mistake confusing people. I just feel like there needs to be a better way to like either have a show and findinder Delete in these web apps that you get rid of them and keep things neat and tidy Okay That's a very specific one, don't you think? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. U I think I'm out of items in my list. Okay. All right. Well I think that's a pretty good list. I mean I'm looking forward to what we get with MacOS this year. I think it'll be I think across all the OS, it's going to be an interesting year that's going to probably mean features across OS is more than it means specific to each OS, but we'll see we'll see how it goes this year That's it for today's episode. As I mentioned in the post show for App Stories pllus suubbscribers, Federico is going to talk a little bit more about the details and technical things behind Sortcuts playlayground, which we just launched last week I want to thank our sponsor for this episode. That was Steam Clock And of course, you can find me and Federica over at maxstories. net And on social media where Federico is at Fitici. That's VI TI CCI And I'm at John Fortes JOH N, the VWO R. HWES Tatch you next week, Federico So D