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The first look at Personal Context for Apple Intelligence is here as APIs available in the iOS 18.4 developer betas allow apps to further their content for the system to understand. This sets the stage for the most significant update to Siri so far, where all your apps can provide Siri with the available views and content to work with – in a secure and private manner, too.
As first mentioned by Prathamesh Kowarkar on Mastodon, there is now a suite of APIs in beta that associate an app’s unique content, called an entity, with a specific view – this allows Siri to read what’s indexed on-screen and use it with other app’s actions when triggered by a command.
APIs like this are necessary for the coming Siri update to actually do what Apple says Apple Intelligence is capable of – now that the functionality is here, however, it’s up to developers to implement everything to make sure the experience works well.
Here are the new pages:
- appIntentsDataSource
- NSCollectionViewAppIntentsDataSource
- UICollectionViewAppIntentsDataSource
- appEntityIdentifier(forSelectionType:identifier:)
- appEntityIdentifier(_:)
If these APIs are in beta now, it stands to reason they’ll leave beta after iOS 18.4 releases in full – which means Personal Context might be coming as early as iOS 18.4.
Check out the post from Kowarkar on Mastodon.
From the Apple Newsroom:
Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip. The ultimate pro desktop delivers groundbreaking pro performance, extensive connectivity now with Thunderbolt 5, and new capabilities in its compact and quiet design that can live right on a desk. Mac Studio can tackle the most intense workloads with its powerful CPU, Apple’s advanced graphics architecture, higher unified memory capacity, ultrafast SSD storage, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine.
My M1 Mac mini from 2020 is also way overdue for an upgrade…
From the Apple Newsroom:
Apple today announced the new MacBook Air, featuring the blazing-fast performance of the M4 chip, up to 18 hours of battery life, a new 12MP Center Stage camera, and a lower starting price. It also offers support for up to two external displays in addition to the built-in display, 16GB of starting unified memory, and the incredible capabilities of macOS Sequoia with Apple Intelligence — all packed into its strikingly thin and light design that’s built to last.
I’ve been rocking the M1 MacBook Air from 2020, but it’s beyond time I upgraded…
New in iOS 18.4, Apple is making a new Food section available to Apple News+ subscribers, creating a curated browsing and recipe experience within the app. Located on iPhone under the Following tab and Food section, or in the Food section of the sidebar on iPad and macOS, this new category curates stories for you based on your chosen interests and browsing history, plus provides an entire Recipe Catalog and cooking experience for recipes with ingredients & instructions.
The entire experience for News+ Food is fantastic, albeit somewhat buried inside the News app – that’s why I’ve built a set of shortcuts to quickly access the sections from anywhere. In my folder of Apple News Food shortcuts, you can find shortcuts to access the main Food section, the Recipe Catalog, and two curated sections that are shown within the category for Healthy Eating and Kitchen Tools & Techniques.
You can use these with Siri, place them in a Medium widget, or even add them as Controls in Control Center or the Lock Screen – the Recipe Catalog would work great using Add to Home Screen as well, as Stephen Robles demonstrated in his video that highlights the Food feature.
So far, the News team at Apple has only ever created the Show Today Feed and Show Topic actions, and relied on the concept of “donations” (where an action only becomes available after the user interacts with a particular section) for sections like Magazines, Puzzles, and now the Recipe Catalog. Along this route, I’d love to see the Saved Recipes section available as a donated action, as well as being able to open directly to a saved recipe would make a lot of sense. But, going further, I wish the News team would adopt a full suite of actions like Get Recipes, Find Recipe, Save/Unsave Recipe, Cook Recipe, and Read The Story (for a recipe).
Get the folder of Apple News Food shortcuts in my Shortcuts Library (requires iOS 18.4).
I've just added a new folder to the Shortcuts Library — my set of Apple News Food shortcuts for the new Food section in Apple News+, available in iOS 18.4.
Use these shortcuts to browse stories from the Food, Healthy Eating, and Kitchen Tools & Techniques sections, as well as open directly to the Recipe Catalog.:
- Open Food in News+: Opens to the new “Food” section in Apple News+ that curates stories and recipes for you.
- Open Recipe Catalog in News: Opens the News app to stories from the Recipe Catalog feature, new in the new Food section in Apple News+.
- Show Kitchen Tools and Techniques: Opens the section for Kitchen Tools & Techniques in the new Food section for Apple News+ subscribers.
- Show Healthy Eating stories: Opens the News app to stories about Healthy Eating, located in the new Food section for Apple News+ subscribers.
Check out the folder of Apple News Food shortcuts on the Shortcuts Library.
From Stephen Robles on YouTube:
First beta of iOS 18.4 is here and it brings some exciting new features including ambient music controls, Apple News recipes, and a lot more. Plus, we dive into a feature that might hint at Apple’s upcoming smart home device.
I’ve linked directly to the chapter on the new Shortcuts actions 🤓
Framous is a new design tool for Mac from developer and podcaster Charlie Chapman aimed at making it easy to wrap iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac screenshots in device frames, turning a boring rectangular screenshot into a rich preview of what that screen would actually look like on a real device.
Framous is built to auto-detect the device, let you automatically combine several images with custom spacing, or bulk-export multiple images at once – the latter clearly being helpful for app developers who are trying to design images for the App Store. But using device frames isn’t just for developers – anyone sharing their screenshots can clean them up and make a much nicer presentation by processing their screenshots through Framous.
Thankfully, Framous makes the process of framing your screenshots even easier thanks to Shortcuts support, with an action that lets you pass screenshots in, choose spacing, and pass out device-wrapped images as a result. Over on Bluesky, Charlie shared an example shortcut that takes advantage of Shortcuts for Mac’s Quick Action functionality, which lets you select files directly from Finder, run the shortcut, and replace the files with updated assets inline, placing the new files alongside the original:
Whoa 😯 Now with this basic Shortcut setup I can select a couple screenshots in Finder, hit ctrl+opt+cmd+F, and it'll prompt for a save location and create framed screenshots for each and combine into a single image (with custom padding)
— Charlie Chapman (@charliemchapman.com) February 17, 2025 at 7:45 PM
Merging screenshots with devices has long been a part of Shortcuts’ history, with Federico Vittici of MacStories releasing a regularly-updated Apple Frames shortcut (for free) that performs a similar operation using Shortcuts’ Scripting actions. I’ve almost always taken Federico’s shortcut and modified it for my own needs, adding a Combine Images step and separating out the spacing according to my style – exactly what Framous adds on top of the strongly-proven use case.
While Framous is Mac-only, it provides complete UI with features like drag-and-drop makes the task much more approachable to an everyday Mac user. Plus, having a native action built into Shortcuts gives Framous the ability to change things like spacing or how to handle multiple devices as a simple parameter on the action itself, rather than building menus or prompts into a custom shortcut. That being said, I'd also love to see Framous continue to strengthen the Shortcuts support and features like controls for the generic frames.
Other features of Framous include customizing the generic device frames to show or hide side buttons, move their placement, or control the camera cutout. You can also toggle whether the screenshot fills edge-to-edge, change the frame color, and adjust the corner radius, plus scale up the image for lower-resolution screenshots.
Get Framous on the Mac App Store for free, with in-app purchases. The free download comes with generic frames – to unlock more, a one-time fee of $19.99 gets you all frames released in (and up to) 2025. If you want all frames as they come out in the future, you can subscribe for $9.99 per year.
I’ve added two more products to my desk setup today thanks to my Elgato partnership – a pair of the CamLink 4K, the HDMI-to-USB converter for dedicated cameras.
A few years ago, I bought a second Panasonic GH-5 to go with my first camera, allowing me to have both a dedicated A-Roll and top-down camera set up at all times. For the longest time since then, I’ve relied on the USB-C port and the LUMIX Tether app to bring in the feeds for both cameras – however, it required launching the tether app, doing a special combination of previewing and minimizing the app to get the full-quality feed, and then using that footage for my streams.
In the end, the setup process was too finicky, the frame rate wasn’t ideal once I started loading more devices onto the USB chain, and, at some point, macOS decided to stop recognizing the cameras as two separate devices and thought they were the same camera, leading to more errors and making it impossible to actually pull both feeds in at high quality.
So I started back where I began, with a CamLink 4K – the first Elgato product I bought back in the day, for this exact purpose (at some point I accidentally bent the port…).
Now, with one for each camera, I can speak to the camera while showing what I’m doing on my iPad, iPhone, or other devices at the same time. When I had just one camera, I recorded YouTube videos by speaking the camera, then recording the top-down footage timed to what I’d said; when I had two, I could record it all, but not preview it in real time while still using my Mac – now I can do everything at once.
My thanks to Elgato for sending me the CamLink 4K set – you can check out more on the Elgato website or my Elgato tag.
In the first developer beta of iOS 18.4, Apple has added a new “Open Conversation” action for the Messages app (as first spotted in r/iOSbeta). This allows Shortcuts users to design custom shortcuts and Siri commands to open specific conversations in the Messages app, including group chats.
Found in the App list under Messages, “Open Conversation” contains a single option to choose which Conversation to open. When selected, you’ll be presented with a chronological list of all conversations from the Messages app, from your most recent text alert to your first conversation. Once selected, the Conversation title fills out the field, and, when run, the shortcut will open to that conversation in Messages – quite straightforward.
Currently, there are no additional actions like “Find Conversations,” “Mute Conversation,” “Trash Conversation,” “Rename Conversation,” or “Start Conversation,” which could be useful for filtering the list based on different parameters, managing or removing yourself from busy conversations, and updating group chats with new titles – all actions I hope Apple considers adding in the future.
I’d also like to see the Conversation action accept Contacts as input, so actions like Select Contact or Find Contacts could be used to find the correct people for a conversation, then their contacts data could populate the fields and have Messages open to the correct conversation (or disambiguate if there’s more than one).
Another addition I’d like to see is a toggle for “Open to Detail View” (or something similar) that brings up the extra contact information that you can see within a Messages conversation – having quick access to the locations, photos, and links from a conversation would be excellent and not require fundamental changes to the action.
Further, I hope Apple adopts App Shortcuts support for the Messages conversations, like they’ve done for FaceTime – it’d be great to see your three most-recent conversations in Spotlight when searching for Messages, as well as quick links to conversations like Group Chats across search. Populating the Open Conversation action with app shortcuts to each conversation would also make the Shortcuts experience quicker to set up, as users would see their most-recent conversations already available to select as well.
I’ve set up a handful of demo shortcuts for folks to download, including one that simply prompts you to choose which conversation to open, a menu to open to your pinned conversations, a quick-access tool for your partner and your main group chat, and then containers for any siblings, parents, or family conversations – these work great from the Shortcuts widget, or as Siri commands.
Get the folder of Conversations shortcuts in my Shortcuts Library, and check out the new Open Conversation in Shortcuts once iOS 18.4 releases to the public.
I've just added a new folder to the Shortcuts Library — my set of Conversations shortcuts that take advantage of the Open Conversation action available in iOS 18.4.
Use these to open from any conversation, choose from your pinned chats, or open into any group chat or solo conversation:
- Open a conversation: Prompts you to choose from all your conversations in Messages, listed in chronological order from recent to oldest, then opens your choice.
- Open from my pinned conversations: Presents a menu of nine conversations to open in Messages, matching your list of nine pinned conversations from within the app.
- Show the group chat: Opens the conversation in Messages for your primary group chat, so you can text them all the details.
- Open chat with Mom: Opens the Conversation in Messages with your mother, so you can ask when’s a good time to call her.
- Open chat with Dad: Opens the conversation with your father, allowing you to see your past messages.
- Open chat with Sibling: Opens the Messages conversation with your sibling, so you can stay better-connected.
- Open the Family thread: Opens the conversation for your Family group chat so you can keep up with everyone.
Check out the folder of Conversations shortcuts on the Shortcuts Library.