Something interesting is happening in the app world. With the arrival of more powerful AI, everyone is building their own. We do weekly meetups in the Robot Assistant Field Guide, called the Robot Builders Club. We cover all sorts of angles for the intentional use…
Continue reading →Susan Kare Revisits the Original Mac Icons
Marcus Mendes at 9to5Mac points to Susan Kare’s talk at this year’s Startup School, where she goes back through the icons and graphics she made for the original Macintosh. Y Combinator has the video up on YouTube. Kare drew bitmaps on a grid, one…
Continue reading →This Week in the Labs — August 21, 2026
Here’s what we covered in the MacSparky Labs this week including the week’s new videos and podcasts, a few of the conversations happening in the member community, and what’s coming next week. Most of those links lead straight into the Labs community on Circle,…
Continue reading →TerminalWidget by Brett Terpstra
Brett Terpstra recently shipped TerminalWidget, a useful, nerdy little utility right in line with that we’ve all come to love from Brett. TerminalWidget takes the output from a shell script, a Shortcut, an AppleScript, or a plain URL, and turns it into a widget…
Continue reading →MailMaven Adds AppleScript and AI
MailMaven (an occasional sponsor around here) continues to evolve since their big launch last year. Version 1.2 brings in automation with a full AppleScript dictionary for finding, examining, manipulating, and composing messages. If you’re a robot builder, you can tie that to the MCP,…
Continue reading →Mac Power Users 862: Alfred vs Spotlight vs Raycast
On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I go deep on launchers: Alfred, Raycast, and Spotlight, and which one actually earns a spot on your keyboard shortcut. This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by: Ecamm: Powerful live streaming platform for…
Listen & read notes →Why I Pay for Search
I’ve mentioned a few times in the MacSparky Labs that I pay for web search. That always raises eyebrows. So I thought I’d explain. Even Google now injects AI slop before giving you search results, and there’s a good argument that search is going…
Continue reading →This Week in the Labs — August 14, 2026
It was another fun week in the MacSparky Labs community. Here’s the week’s new videos and podcasts, a few of the conversations happening in the member community, and what’s coming next week. Most of those links lead straight into the Labs community on Circle,…
Continue reading →A Business Card Worth Keeping
This post is sponsored by Hoban Cards. Sponsorship doesn’t influence what I write. Here’s my take. Every time I hand someone a Hoban card, the same thing happens. They stop mid-conversation, run a thumb across the letters, turn it over. That doesn’t happen with…
Continue reading →Intentional AI 6: Sparky’s Email Odyssey
On this episode of Intentional AI, Chris and I get into my email odyssey, the months I spent trying to hand my email over to a robot. First came the Big Swing, where I would never open email again and the robot read everything…
Listen & read notes →