[[federico]] iA’s popular Markdown text editor isn’t appreciated enough by iOS power users. I’m guilty of this, too, and I believe part of underlying misconception is that iA Writer is a minimalistic app that lacks essential functionalities found in more popular alternatives like Ulysses and 1Writer. In practice, not only does iA Writer aptly stack...

Question: I’d like to use a workflow to create a playlist in Apple Music from the latest 20-30 songs I added to my library and renew it every week. So every time I hit the workflow, it would update. (Darío Maestro, @maestruoso) [[federico]] Fetching the last n items added to your Music library is simple...

Question: Is there any way I can access my Drafts notes from iOS on the Mac? (Orin, @orinrezwana) [[federico]] Drafts’ sync is based on CloudKit, which won’t save copies of your notes in iCloud Drive, making them accessible on all your devices. The easiest way to export notes from Drafts to view them on the...

[[federico]] In Issue 56 of MacStories Weekly, I answered a question about Spotify automation that involved looking up lyrics for the song currently playing in Spotify. The workflow was based on a single call to the Spotify web API that returned details for a song ID passed as input. As I wrote, putting together that...

Question: Is there an easy way to download all previous issues of MacStories Weekly as PDFs that I can save to Google Drive (if this is even necessary) to then later import into Evernote or DEVONthink? (Oscar, @omorillon) [[federico]] We don’t need to put Google Drive between Workflow and Evernote for this, as we can...

{.app-collection} Musixmatch Federico: Unlike Apple Music, Spotify doesn’t have a native lyrics feature. Musixmatch – which has been available long before Apple added lyrics to its Music app – provides a good-looking solution in the form of a full Spotify client. With Musixmatch, you can identify songs with a Shazam-like interface but also connect your...

[[federico]] Bear, a new note-taking app for iOS and macOS I reviewed last week, already offers a solid selection of URL schemes with x-callback-url support that can be used to automate different aspects of the app. While waiting for Workflow to implement native Bear actions, we can use these URL schemes “the old way” to...

Question: I’d like a workflow that I can use to get lyrics of the currently playing song in Spotify. I’ve found one that finds the current song by using Last.FM, but it seems to be broken. Or do you know a better way that would use Spotify itself for the current playing song? (Jeroen Schaper,...

[[federico]] If there’s a system I still can’t figure out, it’s email. While Twitter, Slack, and iMessage have supplanted a lot of the interactions I used to have over email until a few years ago, email still is the backbone of my communication with MacStories readers and notifications from web services I use. Last month,...