This week, in addition to the usual links, app debuts, and recap of MacStories' articles and podcasts:

Throughout 2026, Federico and I have been working on a series of software projects and apps with the help of tools like Codex and Claude Code. Some of those are internal tools, but others are the sort of productivity apps from which anyone can benefit. It’s taken a while because we’re picky (and careful), but the time has come to start releasing the apps we’ve been working on.

Federico actually kicked things off earlier this year with RemCTL, an open-source command-line tool that makes every feature of Apple’s Reminders app available from a terminal. That makes it easy to integrate with automation workflows and agents. I’ve been using RemCTL since before it launched publicly, and it’s now deeply embedded in my everyday Codex workflow.

Today, Federico released a Club MacStories+ and Premier preview of NotesCTL, a command-line tool for Apple’s Notes app that is available in the Club Discord community and on the Club Downloads page. Over the past couple of months, he’s reverse-engineered every aspect of how Notes works from the ground up. The result is a command-line tool for power-users that exposes every Notes feature for use with scripts, Shortcuts, and, of course, agents, including:

tags,
subfolders,
pinning,
rich links,
attachments,
checklists,
headings,
tables,
audio recordings, and
highlights.

With the help of an agent, NotesCTL is great for assembling deep research reports. And with its PencilKit support, you can turn SVGs into native drawings that you can edit and color with an Apple Pencil. It’s great for simple mockups and coloring pages for kids. NotesCTL can also transcribe audio recordings from the Notes app and then search the results. Plus, writers will appreciate the app’s Markdown Exporter.

NotesCTL is nearly ready for public release, but if you don’t want to wait, you can access it today by joining Club MacStories+ or Premier. NotesCTL is the first software project that we’ll be releasing as a beta preview exclusively for Club members, but it won’t be the last. Software never seems ready to ship until, suddenly, it is, and we’ve been working on multiple parallel projects all year that are coming together nicely and will also be released early to Club MacStories+ and Premier members.

We’re excited to share everything we’ve been working on at MacStories for the past several months. NotesCTL is the perfect place to start, especially after RemCTL. Apple’s system apps are excellent, but for power users, they can sometimes feel limiting. Federico’s growing collection of CLIs is MacStories’ answer to those frustrations, one that lets power users enjoy the day-to-day elegance of Apple’s system apps, while extending the apps’ utility when you need it.

NotesCTL is currently available in the MacStories Software section of Discord and on the Club Downloads page where you’ll find it listed under “(2026) NotesCTL Beta Preview” for Club MacStories+ and Premier members and will be released publicly later this fall as an open-source project.

Today, Relay kicked off its annual fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to help combat childhood cancer. In the seven years since the fundraiser began, Relay and its dedicated community of listeners have raised over $4.8 million; a truly amazing figure.

We’d love it if readers joined us in supporting this cause again this year. You can make a donation by visiting here.

The Podcastathon is a big part of the annual fundraiser as Myke Hurley explains on The Enthusiast:

Every year, the Podcastathon for St. Jude is a huge part of our fundraising mission, and we’ve decided that this year we want to turn it into a full-on celebration by having the 12-hour event close out our campaign. So this year we’ll be streaming live on Friday, October 2nd, from the campus of St. Jude.

Also, if you’re not familiar with the story behind Relay’s annual St. Jude Fundraiser, be sure to visit 512 Pixels for the details.

Thanks in advance for checking out Relay’s fundraiser for St. Jude and to all who donate.

Hot on the heels of OpenAI’s addition of a cloud-based browser to ChatGPT Work, Anthropic has added an in-app browser to Claude Cowork in its desktop app. What’s interesting about the two browser implementations is that while both ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are meant to be used for general knowledge work, Claude Cowork’s browser is something of a hybrid that mixes aspects of OpenAI’s Codex built-in browser with its ChatGPT Work cloud-based browser.

First of all, I do not yet have access to Claude’s in-app browser, so the following is based solely on Anthropic’s announcement and other documentation. Still, the differences are worth understanding since the tools are aimed at different workflows.

Like Codex’s in-app browser, Claude Cowork’s in-app browser is built into the desktop app itself. That ties Claude’s browser to the instance of its app running on your Mac. Turn your Mac off or close the Claude app, and the browser becomes unavailable. Leave the Claude app running, and you’ll be able to control the browser session remotely through the Claude mobile app or the web.

From there, however, the browsers diverge. As you’d expect, the Codex implementation is developer-oriented, with tools to build, inspect, and annotate web pages along with access to a terminal, repos, and diffs. In contrast, Claude Cowork’s in-app browser opens automatically as needed for general-purpose web tasks instead of development tasks.

Also, while both ChatGPT Work’s and Claude Cowork’s browser implementations benefit from being isolated from your other day-to-day browser use outside those apps, their handling of login credentials is a little different. As I wrote in greater detail yesterday, ChatGPT separates the login process from the model’s activity and evaluates the login page for things like phishing schemes. Claude Cowork’s in-app browser offers two ways to log in: manually, or by importing cookies from logged-in sessions in another browser. Currently, Claude supports cookie imports on the Mac from Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, but not Safari. In addition to the security benefits that come with a browser that runs isolated from your everyday browser, Claude also requests permission before acting on a site for the first time, blocks high-risk sites, checks actions against the your requests, and uses the same prompt injection protections as its Chrome extension.

My first-run experience with ChatGPT Work’s cloud browser was a mixed bag but showed promise. Although I haven’t tried Claude Cowork’s browser yet, I’m glad to see Anthropic moving in the same direction as OpenAI here. Isolating agent browsing by bringing the browser into Claude and ChatGPT doesn’t solve every security issue, but it’s a good starting point. I expect we’ll see both Anthropic and OpenAI iterate quickly on this theme in the coming months.

The most recent update to the ChatGPT app for iOS has introduced a new feature that will make those who rely on the company’s AI assistant for work-related tasks quite happy: a customizable widget that lets you control which shortcuts can be placed for convenient access on the Home Screen.

Today, Apple announced that it will host an event it calls “Surprise and Shine” on September 9, 2026, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. The company is expected to announce the iPhone 18 Pro line, the highly-anticipated iPhone “Ultra”, as well as new Apple Watches and potentially new AirPods and HomeKit devices.

The event will be streamed live globally on Apple’s Events page as well as on YouTube and in the Apple TV app. Some members of the media were invited to watch the event in person at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park.

MacStories will be covering all the details of the event, so stay tuned and get ready for September 9.

Yesterday, OpenAI introduced a new ChatGPT Work feature designed to let it navigate websites that require a login without revealing your credentials to the model.

Like a lot of people, I spend far too much time clicking around websites that require a login, looking at analytics and other data, checking whether new sponsors have been booked for our podcasts, and more. It’s a tedious but necessary part of my week that slows me down and takes me away from writing and other creative work. ChatGPT’s new Work feature is designed to handle that sort of work for you.

The feature works by signing into websites using a virtual, cloud-based computer. That separates the browsing session from any browsing session on your local computer, walling the agent’s computer use off from your open tabs, cookies, browsing history, passwords, and other data. Because the login and browsing happen in the cloud, that also means work can continue whether you close the ChatGPT app or power down your computer.

According to OpenAI, an additional review model checks the sign-in request and credential destination for signs of phishing or deception. ChatGPT Work then pauses while the user signs in. Credentials entered through its secure sign-in form go directly to the cloud browser and are not visible to the model. After the user authenticates, ChatGPT resumes its work.

OpenAI also explains that its cloud-based browser doesn’t store your username and password. Instead, it saves cookies that allow you to return to a previously authenticated session. If you don’t want to remain logged in, ChatGPT’s cloud browser settings allow you to clear browser data for individual websites or all sites.

Similar to other features in ChatGPT and Codex, users have choices when it comes to which sites ChatGPT Work can access. “Always ask” is the default, requiring the agent to check with the user before using a website, but the permission level can also be set to “Auto approve” after ChatGPT checks a site for relevancy and risk or “Always allow,” which OpenAI discourages. Individual websites can also be allowed or blocked. These settings control website access, but consequential actions require separate confirmation.

I gave ChatGPT’s browser use a try and the results were mixed. I wasn’t able to get the feature to work at all using ChatGPT Work in Safari on my Mac. Some websites had security measures in place that prevented me from logging in. Other times, the cloud browser asked me to take over manually, but I was unable to do so because the UI was frozen or login panels didn’t appear.

I had better luck using my iPhone. On one site with a simple username and password system, a login sheet appeared. I entered my credentials, was logged in, and the agent navigated the site to answer my queries. On Apple’s affiliate link dashboard website, I had to take over the browser interaction manually to satisfy a CAPTCHA, which worked after several challenges. Once logged in, the agent pulled and analyzed the data I requested. Also, after I’d signed in to both of those sites on my iPhone, I remained logged in to ChatGPT’s cloud browser, which meant I could also use them from my Mac.

In its current form, the idea of having ChatGPT Work browse signed-in websites on your behalf is better than its implementation. If you can get logged in, having an agent collect and analyze things like analytics data is fantastic. However, getting past the initial login screen is still too frustrating. That said, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the feature, which is available on eligible plans depending on rollout and workspace settings, for future use collecting and analyzing data that would otherwise require a lot of clicking around.

The Magic Keyboard isn’t the only accessory Apple updated today. As Juli Clover reports for MacRumors, the 40W Dynamic Power Adapter that can charge up to 60W was also updated for users in Europe and Vietnam:

The updated variant of the power adapter has a retractable two-prong design. The prongs pop back into the power adapter’s enclosure, making it easier to tuck into a bag or a pocket. Apple previously debuted a standard U.S. variant in September 2025 alongside the iPhone 17 models, and a type G plug version in November 2025.

Plus, as Chance Miller covered for 9to5Mac, there’s a new Apple Polishing Cloth. It’s not clear whether the new cloth is different from the one that came before it, but in one respect it’s a big improvement. The updated Polishing Cloth has dropped in price to $9 from $19. In a world of high-priced memory and storage, I’ll take the pricing wins where I can get them.

Earlier today, Apple unveiled the new generation of Mac mini and Mac Studio, featuring the latest entries in the Apple silicon family of chips: the M6, available in the Mac mini, and the M5 Ultra, exclusive to the Mac Studio. You can read more details about the announcement and related specs in John’s overview.

As someone who’s been working with an M3 Ultra Mac Studio (on loan from Apple) with 512 GB of RAM for the past year (plus two separate M4 Mac minis) with a particular focus on local AI models and performance gains enabled by Apple’s MLX framework, I obviously am very interested in these new machines. To give you some context: my current workspace for my upcoming iOS and iPadOS 27 review, which lives in Notion, is entirely managed by a series of local agents running the latest DeepSeek-V4-Flash via MLX on the Mac Studio, which continuously scan the project for new notes, sources, and research material that is automatically categorized and linked in the chapters that I’m writing. So, yes, I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on the new Mac minis and Mac Studios soon. In the meantime, I thought it’d be fun to break down the local AI-related details from Apple.