There's an Email Conspiracy! — Mac Geek Gab 914

Dave seems to think there’s an email conspiracy, and he explains how to avoid it to you and John. That’s not all, of course. Your Quick Tips help everyone use markup better, create a “Start the Day” shortcut, use Focus better, and more. Press play and listen as your two geeks share all of this and much, much more. Have fun…and don’t get caught!

Malware? Not Malware — Mac Geek Gab 841

Sometimes you feel like … a malware. Sometimes you don’t. That’s not how it goes, but that’s exactly how it felt for a lot of you this week! John and Dave talk through this and get to the bottom of it all. That’s hardly half of it, though. You know how Mac Geek Gab goes… your questions answered, your tips share, all with the goal of learning at least five new things along with your two favorite geeks!

Neato Robot Vacuums Can Be Controlled With Siri Shortcuts

Neato Robotics announced today that it added support for Siri Shortcuts within its app. This means you can start controlling your robot vacuum with your voice.

By connecting your Neato to Siri Shortcuts, Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, you can simply start cleaning just by using your voice.

I’d love to get a robot vacuum some day. In the meantime, if you have one of these products, try controlling it with a shortcut on your HomePod, Apple Watch, or iOS device.

Neato Robot Vacuums Can Use Siri Shortcuts

Neato robotic vacuums can use Siri Shortcuts and HomeKit, like starting, pausing, and stopping cleaning later this year.

Zone cleaning lets you deploy the vacuum to specific, targeted areas of your house so they get cleaned more readily, and it sounds like you’ll be able to set up Siri shortcuts for specific zones. That should let user use voice commands to send the vacuum to different parts of the house, a pretty handy feature. And if you’re not so much into the voice commands, Siri Shortcuts will enable the Neato app to learn and suggest times to send out your vacuum with lock screen suggestions.

Get Apple News Original URLs Using This Shortcut

A Mac app called StopTheNews has been making the news rounds lately. It lets you open Apple News original URLs directly in Safari. I wanted to share a shortcut that does the same thing on iOS.

Share an Apple news article to this shortcut, and get the original URL back. Prompt at the end lets you pick between copying the URL to your clipboard or sharing it somewhere else.

Unlike macOS, you can open an Apple News article in Safari on iOS. Then from Safari you can copy the URL. But this shortcut removes that step, so you can share the article to the shortcut, then copy the URL to the clipboard or share it elsewhere.

Here's a Wallpaper Generator Shortcut For Those Apple Logos

Redditor u/wexford001 made a neat wallpaper generator shortcut. It uses the Apple logos (all 370 of them) that Apple created for tomorrow’s event. Every time you tap the shortcut it generates a random image based on your device. There are both white and black versions, in case you have an iPhone with an OLED screen.

All the code to actually get the image from imgur was the work of u/hinapupina in his “imgur downloader” shortcut. I modified it a bit, but i don’t understand it well enough to have done this on my own. Thanks!

You can download the shortcut for white wallpapers here, and the black version here.

WIN an iPhone 16 Pro!