ChatGPT maker OpenAI has acquired Software Applications Inc., a company founded by former Apple employees who worked on Workflow, the software Apple acquired in 2017 and renamed “Shortcuts.”
At Software Applications, the team has been hard at work on Sky, an AI-powered assistant that can perform actions across any app on your Mac. The acquisition should give OpenAI a leg up when it comes to integrating ChatGPT into Macs.
With every new iOS and macOS release, Apple deepens the integration between its mobile and desktop operating systems. iOS 26 is no different, building on the iPhone Mirroring feature introduced in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia.
Check out all the new cross-device features and integrations that iOS 26 and macOS 26 (aka Tahoe) bring.
Vocal Shortcuts let you control your phone by speaking a command out loud. Think “Hey Siri,” but for running your own custom actions from Apple’s Shortcuts app. (Here’s a quick rundown on Shortcuts, if you’re not familiar with this powerful tool.)
Using Vocal Shortcuts is a versatile way to automate tasks on your iPhone with the power of your voice alone. You don’t need to make space on your Home Screen for a Shortcuts widget, type anything into Spotlight or, god forbid, open the Shortcuts app.
You can create a Vocal Shortcut that opens an app you use often, like the Apple TV remote, for instant access with your voice.
You can even use this feature as a roundabout way to use “OK Google” — or whatever your favorite alternative voice assistant may be — instead of Siri.
Watch our quick video or keep reading.
iOS 18.4 will be one of Apple’s biggest updates to iOS 18 since the operating system’s public release last September. It will pack plenty of changes and improvements, like a Vision Pro app, Apple News+ Food and new emoji.
That all sounds great, but these are the five iOS 18.4 features that I am most excited about.
iOS 18 is getting a bunch of cool new accessibility features this year, including bringing eye tracking to the iPhone for the first time. You also can feel haptic music, control your phone with custom voice commands, use your phone in the car without suffering from motion sickness, and improve the accuracy of Siri and dictation.
Check out our video to see it in action or keep reading below.
You can go beyond the basics if you customize the iPhone’s Action button with shortcuts. You can make a fart sound, or get ChatGPT to help you write an email, or just about anything else you dream up.
Apple lets you assign the iPhone’s Action button to one of eight preassigned things — but if you choose Shortcut, you can do much more. Shortcuts offer a way to reach inside an app and automatically run a feature without opening it. With the iPhone 16’s Action button, you have a physical button you can press no matter what you’re doing on your phone, adding quick access to custom actions.
Some power users use the Action button to do incredibly useful (or frivolous) things. I’ll show you how to do the same — and also how you can trick your phone into assigning two or more shortcuts to the single Action button.
If you’ve never tried making your own Siri Shortcuts, I’ve compiled a short list of the best shortcuts for iPhone to introduce you. Shortcuts can quickly run automated actions on your phone (and on your iPad or Mac). They’re made using Apple’s Shortcuts app, where you can visually piece together actions offered by the apps installed on your device.
You can run a shortcut by asking Siri or by putting a widget on your iPhone’s Home Screen. Not a lot of people know this powerful feature exists — or what it can do for them. For eight examples of what you can do with shortcuts, keep reading or watch our video.
If you miss the Twitter icon, you’re not alone. But there’s good news: You can easily change the app’s new X icon back to Twitter’s blue bird on your Home Screen by using a shortcut.
While it’s too late for Elon Musk to backtrack on many of the questionable business decisions he made since buying Twitter, you can at least patch over this latest one using my free downloadable Shortcut.
If you’re still using X, née Twitter, you might want the bright blue bird back on your Home Screen. I’ll show you how to get it.
It’s no longer necessary to jailbreak your iPhone to completely overhaul the appearance of its Home screen. All you need is the Shortcuts app in iOS 14, and you can use custom icons for any app you have installed.
With some simple tweaks and plenty of spare time, you can make your iPhone feel like a brand-new smartphone with a completely different operating system designed just by you. We’ll show you how.
Ever wanted to make your brand-new iPhone look like it’s running Windows 95? That’s the outrageously novel idea that sprang into the mind of Ashley, an 18-year-old from Indiana who wants to work as a graphic designer, after she upgraded to iOS 14 last week.
Taking advantage of iOS 14’s new Home screen widgets feature, and a clunky workaround that employs the built-in Shortcuts app, she gave her iPhone 11 a vintage Microsoft-style makeover that screams retro cool and picked up 4.4 million views and 664,000 likes on TikTok.
“As someone who wasn’t even alive in the ’90s, other operating systems, such as Windows XP, are more nostalgic to me, but I went with Windows 95 because it furthered the contrast between old and new,” Ashley, who did not want her last name revealed, told Cult of Mac.
Apple’s Shortcuts app is already a very powerful tool for automating stuff on your iPhone and iPad, and for creating your own push-button mini-apps. But what if it also could use the deep tools that Apple builds into iOS for app developers? What if Shortcuts could use Face ID, or analyze your photos using iOS’ crazy-powerful machine learning? Or if you could use the OCR to pull text out of photos, all inside Shortcuts?
Thats what Toolbox Pro does. It opens up many of Apple’s amazing under-the-hood technologies, and lets you use them just by dragging a new step into your Shortcuts workflows. Let’s see what it can do.
Shortcuts has gotten so many amazing new tricks in iOS 13 that it’s going to take a while for us to cover them all. So, how about starting with the new NFC automations? This lets you tap your sleeping iPhone onto an NFC sticker or tag, and your iPhone will run a shortcut. This is pretty amazing, because you can walk around you home (or office), and just tap your iPhone onto objects to perform tasks: open apps, set timers, play music, dim the lights — in fact, you can do anything a regular shortcut can do.
Here are two great examples of using NFC shortcuts in iOS 13.