I’m in Los Angeles for Airbnb’s 2025 Summer Release, where the company just announced a major expansion to its offerings, paired with an entirely redesigned app. It’s an ambitious update that I’ll be trying and covering more soon, but for now, let’s dig into an overview of what’s been announced.
The Swift Student Challenge Interviews and watchOS and tvOS Wishes
Federico
JohnThis week, Federico and John interview Apple’s VP of Developer Relations, Education, and Enterprise, Susan Prescott, along with Amy Key and Omar Firdaus, Distinguished Swift Student Challenge Winners. Then, they also share their 2025 wishes for watchOS and tvOS.
On AppStories+, John leads a philosophical discussion about art, culture, and creativity and where it’s heading in an AI world.
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AppStories Episode 435 - The Swift Student Challenge Interviews and watchOS and tvOS Wishes
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Links and Show Notes
Swift Student Challenge Interview
This week, Federico and John interviewed Apple VP of Developer Relations, Education, and Enterprise, Susan Prescott along with Distinguished Swift Student Challenge Winners Amy Key and Omar Firhaus.
Our 2025 watchOS Wishes
- Federico shares wishes based on his use of a wearOS watch, and John hopes for faster connections, file transfers, and smarter workout tracking.
Our 2025 tvOS Wishes
- Federico wants to customize the Siri Remote’s TV button, John wants new ways to manage the apps on his Apple TV, and more.
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Podcast Rewind: An App Extravaganza, a Pair of Famous Seagulls, and an Audiobook Pick
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
Comfort Zone
The gang gets to work defending their Mac login items. Who has the most minimal startup? Who has the craziest apps? This episode has more new apps mentioned in any episode of Comfort Zone ever!
MacStories Unwind
This week, find out if we successfully podcasted our way to a new Pope. Learn just how poorly AI can spell Voorhees and Viticci. And, enjoy an audiobook pick, thoughts on Friends, and a Marvel movie bundle deal.
Also available on YouTube every Friday here.
App Debuts
[[federico]] Xogot - Make Games Anywhere After a long development time, Xogot for iPad has launched and it brings the popular open-source Godot game engine to iPadOS with a touch-first interface that lets you create both 2D and 3D games. The app comes with built-in templates for various game genres, tutorials, and documentation to help...
Three Todoist Tips and a Bonus
I’ve been using Todoist for a while now, and one of my favorite aspects of the app is its flexibility. It’s easy to scale the app from a simple Reminders-style list of tasks to a full-blown project management system. Today, I thought I’d share a few tips on ways to expand Todoist beyond the basics....
Federico’s Latest Automation Academy Lesson: Building a Better Web Clipper with Shortcuts and AI→
I share Federico’s frustration over saving links. Every link may be a URL, but their endpoints can be wildly different. If like us, you save links to articles, videos, product information, and more, it’s hard to find a tool that handles every kind of link equally well.
That was the problem Federico set out to solve with Universal Clipper, an advanced shortcut that automatically detects the kind of link that’s passed to it, and saves it to a text file, which he accesses in Obsidian, although any text editor will work.
Universal Clipper, which Federico released yesterday as part of his Automation Academy series for Club MacStories Plus and Premier members, is one of his most ambitious shortcuts that draws on multiple third-party apps, services, and command line tools in an automation that works as a standalone shortcut or as a function that can send its results to another shortcut. As Federico explains:
I learned a lot in the process. As I’ve documented on MacStories and the Club lately, I’ve played around with various templates for Dataview queries in Obsidian; I’ve learnedhow to take advantage of the Mac’s Terminal and various CLI utilities to transcribe long YouTube videos and analyze them with Gemini 2.5; I’ve explored new ways to interact with web APIs in Shortcuts; and, most recently, I learned how to properly prompt GPT 4.1 with precise instructions. All of these techniques are coming together in Universal Clipper, my latest, Mac-only shortcut that combines macOS tools, Markdown, web APIs, and AI to clip any kind of webpage from any web browser and save it as a searchable Markdown document in Obsidian.
Although the shortcut may be complex, the best part of Federico’s post is how easy it is to follow. Along the way, you’ll learn a bunch of techniques and approaches to Shortcuts automation that you can adapt for your own shortcuts, too.
Automation Academy is just one of many perks that Club MacStories Plus and Club Premier members enjoy including:
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Apple Spotlights Four of the Distinguished Swift Student Challenge Winners
Earlier this year, Apple selected 350 students from around the world as winners of its annual Swift Student Challenge. From that talented pool, Apple picks 50 Distinguished Winners whose projects stand out from the others. Today, Apple highlighted the work of four of them: Taiki Hamamoto, Marina Lee, Luciana Ortiz Nolasco, and Nahom Worku.
Taiki Hamamoto built an app playground to teach people about the Hanafuda, a Japanese card game that he discovered many of his friends didn’t know. According to Apple’s press release:
While Hamamoto stayed true to the game’s classic floral iconography, he also added a modern touch to the gameplay experience, incorporating video game concepts like hit points (HP) that resonate with younger generations. SwiftUI’s DragGesture helped him implement dynamic, highly responsive effects like cards tilting and glowing during movement, making the gameplay feel natural and engaging. He’s also experimenting with making Hanafuda Tactics playable on Apple Vision Pro.
Marina Lee, is a computer science student at the University of Southern California. A call from her grandmother who was alerted to evacuate her home because of wildfires in the L.A. area inspired Lee to create EvacuMate to help users prepare an emergency checklist in case of evacuations like her grandmother’s. In addition:
Lee integrated the iPhone camera roll into the app so users can upload copies of important documents, and added the ability to import emergency contacts through their iPhone contacts list. She also included resources on topics like checking air quality levels and assembling a first-aid kit.
Luciana Ortiz Nolasco built BreakDownCosmic:
a virtual gathering place where users can add upcoming astronomical events around the world to their calendars, earn medals for accomplishing “missions,” and chat with fellow astronomers about what they see.
Ortiz Nolasco who is 15 and from Nuevo León, Mexico will attend WWDC with the other Distinguished Student Winners and plans to continue work on BreakDownCosmic when she returns home with the goal of releasing it on the App Store.
Nahom Worku grew up in Ethiopia and Canada and learned to code during the pandemic. Worku’s submission for the Swift Student Challenge app playground, AccessEd, is designed to offer educational resources in places where Internet connectivity doesn’t exist or is spotty.
Built using Apple’s machine learning and AI tools, such as Core ML and the Natural Language framework, the app recommends courses based on a student’s background, creating a truly personalized experience.
Congratulations to all of this year’s Swift Student Challenge winners. I’m always impressed with the projects we’ve learned about through Apple’s press releases and past interviews we’ve done on AppStories. It’s always a pleasure to watch a new generation of kids learn to code and become the developers whose apps I know we’ll cover in coming years on MacStories.
Eddy Cue Causes a Stir for Google
2025 is shaping up to be the year of litigation for big tech. Apple’s been held in contempt and has an antitrust case on the horizon, Meta is in the midst of an antitrust trial, and Google is defending two antitrust lawsuits at once. Every one of these cases is a high-stakes challenge to the status quo, and collectively, they have the potential to reshape the tech industry for years to come.
The ultimate question for Google right now is whether it will be broken up. What will become of its ad tech business, and will it be forced to sell Chrome? That will be decided by the judges in those cases, but along the way, there are plenty of sideshow dramas worth keeping an eye on. This week, it was Google’s turn for a little litigation drama that was prompted not by a judge, but by none other than Apple’s SVP of Services Eddy Cue.
As part of Google’s search antitrust case, Cue testified yesterday that in April 2025, Google searches declined in Safari for the very first time. Cue’s testimony, which was reported on by Mark Gurman, Leah Nylen, and Stephanie Lai of Bloomberg, went on to explain that Apple is investigating AI search as an alternative to traditional search engines, noting that the company has had discussions with Perplexity.
Google’s stock immediately began to fall. By the close of trading, it was down around 7.5% and had caused enough concern internally at Google that the company felt compelled to release a one-paragraph statement on its blog, The Keyword, responding not to the testimony but to “press reports:”
Here’s our statement on this morning’s press reports about Search traffic.
We continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms. More generally, as we enhance Search with new features, people are seeing that Google Search is more useful for more of their queries — and they’re accessing it for new things and in new ways, whether from browsers or the Google app, using their voice or Google Lens. We’re excited to continue this innovation and look forward to sharing more at Google I/O.
It’s not news that Google Search is under threat from AI. However, Cue’s testimony under oath that Google searches in Safari are in decline is the first concrete evidence publicly shared that the threat is not just theoretical, which is a big deal.
Apple’s exploration of AI-based search is not terribly surprising either, but I do hope they cut a broader deal with Anthropic instead of Perplexity. I understand why Perplexity’s product is popular, but its CEO’s contempt for the open web and user privacy is something that I’d rather not see Apple perpetuate through a partnership.
Podcast Rewind: iOS and iPadOS 19 Wishes, Apple Held in Contempt, New Handhelds Despite Tariffs, and More on the Retroid Pocket Flip 2
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
AppStories
This week, Federico and I begin our annual look at what we’d like to see Apple announce at WWDC 2025, starting with iOS and iPadOS 19.
On AppStories+, which was released as a free sample for all listeners, I explain why the recent contempt order entered against Apple is a bigger deal than most people realize, on multiple levels.
NPC: Next Portable Console
This week on NPC, Federico, Brendon, and I chart which handheld makers are still shipping to the U.S. in the wake of steep tariffs, then explore how speedrunners are stress‑testing Breath of the Wild at Nintendo’s Switch 2 hands‑on events. Plus, we update listeners on Nintendo’s release of version 20 of the original Switch’s firmware, how a contempt order against Apple could unlock new business models for developers, the surprising arrival of JIT on the App Store, Nothing’s launch of the CMF Phone 2 Pro, and how Anbernic and Ayaneo are defying economic uncertainty by releasing new handhelds.
This week on NPC XL, Federico, Brendon and I explain how we find time for gaming, where they play, and how they balance work, family, and their videogame hobbies. Federico and Brendon wrap the episode up with some advice for me on improving my Xbox streaming setup.
