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One of the benefits to being part of the Apple ecosystem is the plethora of apps that work across all of Apple’s devices so that you can access them whether you’re sitting in front of a Mac, out and about with your iPhone or even strapping on a Vision Pro headset. Come on — somebody out there has to be wearing one of those things.

This week’s look at interesting apps features four such multiplatform wonders that let you do everything from type with your voice, post on a social network or jot down random thoughts on at least two different Apple devices. And our lone macOS-only app should prove pretty useful in its own right.

If you’ve come across an app that you find useful no matter what device it works on, let us hear about it at apps@sixcolors.com.

Voice Keyboard Pro

My high school typing teacher would frown upon hearing this, but typing sometimes feels like it’s more trouble than it’s worth. And since I’m the type of person who tends to speak aloud the words as I type them, why am I even bothering with the middleman of a keyboard and not just letting my voice handle all the work?

Voice Keyboard Pro lets me do just that, allowing me to press and hold a key on my MacBook Air keyboard — the Control key, by default, to be exact — and dictate into any app that allows for text entry. I’ve used Voice Keyboard Pro to enter text into BBEdit, the built-in Notes app, and the Gmail web page in Safari, all without any fuss.

Transcription is fairly accurate — Voice Keyboard Pro knew enough to properly capitalize “BBEdit,” for example. But it’s not flawless, as my efforts to dictate a message to Jason Snell kept turning his first name into “JSON.” I imagine that’s something the app would learn to correct over time.

Voice Keyboard Pro isn’t just about dictation, as the app offers a Meeting mode that not only records what’s said in one-on-ones, standup sessions and sprint planning, but also offers a nice summary of what you talk about afterwards.

You can try out Voice Keyboard Pro for free on a limited basis with five transcriptions per day. A $4.99/month Pro subscription unlocks the app and adds custom vocabulary and offline modes.

Play

I cannot tell you how many times this scenario plays out: I will be scrolling through my YouTube feed when I see a video and think “My wife will probably enjoy watching this, I’ll have to remember it for later.” Of course, I will not because my brain is too crowded to remember random YouTube videos upon command.

The simply-named app Play now does the remembering for me. Copy a YouTube link into Play, and it’s kept in a watchlist complete with metadata — you can even watch YouTube videos directly in the app. In addition to YouTube, Play also supports Vimeo, TikTok and Instagram Reels; I’ve also posted Bluesky links with embedded video into Play, though I have to click through to the website to play back the video.

Play has a tagging feature that helps you organize videos. For instance, I can tag videos containing recipes with a Cooking tag for easy reference later on. Other bookmarking and customization features let you organize and annotate your video playlists as much or as little as you like.

You get to try out Play for seven days to get a feel for the app. After that, a $2.99/month subscription unlocks all the features. Though I’ve used Play primarily on my Mac, the app also works on iPhones, iPads, Apple TV and Vision Pro headsets.

Skyscraper

After the social network formerly known as Twitter followed its owner straight into the sewer, I’ve found that I’ve transitioned to Bluesky rather nicely. What I have yet to do is find a satisfying Bluesky client app, though Skyscraper looks like it might change that now that the version 1.6 update has delivered a native macOS version.

Skyscraper lets you scroll through your timeline, remembering where you left off across all your devices. (The app also comes in iOS/iPadOS, watchOS and visionOS versions.) It’s easy enough to switch between my curated feed and the different Discover and Popular with Friends feeds through a drop-down menu. I also find the stats included in the Notifications view showing how many people have replied, reposted or favorited my Bluesky posts to be a nice balm for my ego (or a devastating blow, based on the vagaries of my popularity).

The free download delivers enough features to get by, though some users will want to pay up for a $2.99/month Pro account that adds support for multiple accounts, notification customization and other niceties.

Einfall

My deep dive into the world of apps has revealed that there are a lot of options out there if you want something that helps you quickly jot down your thoughts. Einfall takes things a step further, not just by providing a quick way to jot down ideas as they occur to you, but to take action on them as well.

Once you’ve created an entry in Einfall — it could be anything from a list of to-dos to an idea for a story — you can then use the app to route it elsewhere, whether that’s creating a reminder or calendar entry, or even using AI tools to expand on your thought. Because Einfall works across multiple devices — there are macOS and iOS versions — you can store ideas that occur to you just about anywhere. I especially like the fact that there’s a lock screen widget for the iOS version so that you don’t even have to unlock your phone to get an idea down.

I don’t think the app is for everyone, as the actions interface is taking me some getting used to, but people who will find Einfall useful will likely realize that right away. At any rate, you can download the app for free and jot down ideas in it to your heart’s content. You can try 15 actions before you need to unlock Einfall for good with a one-time $29.99 payment.

Eyes Forward

If you have never longed for an app that turns your Mac into a teleprompter, then you can stop reading this column early today. But for podcasters who have to read tricky ad copy while on camera, actors who record their own auditions or anyone else who needs to stay on script without breaking eye contact, a teleprompter app becomes a very handy tool. And Eyes Forward — a $1.99 one-time download — offers an easy-to-use solution.

You enter in a duration or words per minute into Eyes Forward to set the scrolling speed for your text. You can also move the floating Eyes Forward window to just below your Mac’s camera, with developer Robert Hirsch recommending that you narrow the window to help make your eye contact seem more natural.

From there, it’s a matter of formatting the script — you can bold words, for example, if you want to remember to emphasize what you’re saying — saving it, and loading it into the virtual teleprompter. The ability to toggle between light and dark modes as you prefer adds an extra level of polish to an app that delivers exactly what it promises.

If you have HomeKit-compatible security cameras, you may have heard that Apple was going to ship an Apple Intelligence upgrade with the version 27 operating system releases. Apple Home would now provide an analysis in words of what was happening in a clip, making it easier to search for things that had occurred, instead of “animal” or a person’s name.

But it’ll cost you. Maybe more than you expected. Apple had said it would require an iCloud+ subscription, its name for what used to be simply extra storage. Starting at $0.99 a month (in the United States) for 50 GB of extra storage—barely enough for any purpose—options range all the way to $59.99 a month for 12 TB of storage. With an Apple One plan, you can increase that to 14 TB.

Over time, Apple added additional features: iCloud Private Relay, Hide My Email, a custom email domain name, Apple Invites, and HomeKit Secure Video. A 50 GB tier supported one camera, 200 GB ($2.99 a month) supported up to five, and the 2 TB ($9.99 a month) and higher tiers supported unlimited cameras.

In a support note updated September 9, Apple dropped the price bomb. Because video summaries require higher usage of Apple Intelligence, your iCloud+ subscription has to be at an even higher level than the basic secure video offering:

• 1 camera in the 2 TB tier
• 2 cameras in the 6 TB tier ($29.99 a month)
• 5 cameras in the 12 TB tier ($59.99 a month)

You also need an Apple TV 4K or 2nd-generation HomePod. Make sure they’re upgraded before you try to work with the new feature. To enable it, go to the Home app in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, or macOS 27 Golden Gate. Tap or click the settings icon, then choose the new Apple Intelligence menu. Enable Summarize Videos. You can select as many cameras as your iCloud+ tier supports. Once you flip the switch for that many, the rest are grayed out.

There’s definitely a pricing mismatch here. I don’t think there’s a case for video summaries for 2 to 5 cameras costing $30 to $60 a month if you don’t need the storage. I’ve stayed comfortably at the 2 TB tier for many years—now paid via an Apple One bundle—for personal and family storage, and for the number of cameras we have.

However, I also accept that video processing is computationally intense. Apple can’t throw open the doors. But having advertised a feature as something it feels is useful, this service price tag seems too high. Apple rarely lowers service prices; I can’t think of a time it did. But it also can’t underprice the server capacity required to manage this task. The company may have painted itself into a corner.

By now you’ve probably heard the promise of iOS 27: it’s a Snow Leopard-like year where Apple spent a lot of time not on big marquee features, but on smaller fixes and enhancements throughout the operating system. And that’s largely true—and largely to the benefit of the platform—but it’s also not the whole story. Because there is, of course, at least one major feature that comes to iOS 27 (and Apple’s other platforms) this year, and it’s a doozy: Siri AI.

The result is an OS that feels like a marked improvement over its predecessor, in everything from design to performance to capabilities. That’s not to say there isn’t still room for improvement—software is a living thing, and those of us who have been using it throughout the beta period this summer can attest to the fact that Apple is constantly at work trying to refine its experiences.

The promise of iOS 27 is that it’ll not only unlock new capabilities but also make your existing workflows smoother and quicker. That’s not a bad proposition for the device that many of us carry more than any other—as long as it can deliver.

Siri & AI: Two okay tastes that taste great together?

The call for Apple to do a major overhaul of Siri has existed almost as long as Siri as existed. Heck, I wrote a story about it back in 2015, more than a decade ago and only four years after the first version of Siri debuted. But even as competitors emerged and Siri moved to more Apple platforms, the voice assistant improved only in relatively small, targeted ways—a testament, perhaps, to the limitations of its underlying technology. With the recent rise of chatbots backed by large language models, it quickly became apparent how much Siri had fallen behind, and so drastic measures were necessary to bring it up to speed.

The good news is that Siri AI is capable: impressively so, at times. In the lowest of low bars, it certainly beats the pants off the previous incarnation of Siri, but its access to your own personal data and all of the apps on your phone also unlocks a host of new possibilities.

But it’s also not without the pitfalls that underlie all LLM-powered chatbots: errors in understanding, hallucinations, and so on. Perhaps the biggest challenge of Siri AI will be getting people who have written off Siri as a limited feature, only to be used for trusted tasks—setting timers, checking the weather, playing music—to be more ambitious about what they ask the assistant.

New Siri is integrated throughout iOS, whether you access it via the traditional press-and-hold of the side button or by saying the wake word, or in its new home integrated with the Spotlight search when you swipe down on the home screen. That last interface is available systemwide, in any app, by swiping down from the center of the top of the screen. The search interface has a new look too: a black liquid glass bubble with silver overtones. You can ask Siri questions by voice, or by simply typing to it.

There’s also a new standalone Siri app that stores all your conversations (with some exceptions). The app itself is pretty barebones, letting you view those conversations in List or Grid layouts, select multiple conversations to delete them, and pin or rename any single conversation. In Settings : Siri, you can choose to either open to the overview or to a new conversation and decide whether old conversations are kept for 30 days, 1 year, or forever. It’s a little strange that one-off queries (“What’s the average height of the Norwegian World Cup team?”) are stored alongside more involved conversations (“Can you help me build a specific RSS feed for this site?”); I also tend to end up with a few orphan blank “New conversation” and “New photo” entries, but it’d be nice if you could filter to find those. Conversations are fully searchable and sync between devices via iCloud.

I’ve had a couple of real “wow” moments with the feature in the months that I’ve spent with the beta. For example, early on I was on a rare long solo car trip when I realized that I wanted to listen to a specific episode of a podcast. This wasn’t a podcast that I listen to regularly or even subscribe to, and to make matters more challenging, it was an older episode. Hard enough to find in the Podcasts app when you’re not driving down the highway, but something I would never have even attempted with old Siri. But hey, now’s the time to give it a shot, so I asked Siri AI, via CarPlay, to play the episode of “The Rest is History” about the American Revolution.

After a moment of chugging—like most of those AIs, the process isn’t exactly fast—Siri came back to report that it had found one episode of the podcast about the American Revolution. “Play that,” I said…and it did. No need to specify the precise title of the episode, which I certainly would not have remembered from earlier in our conversation.

Moments like that make me feel like a Star-Trek-computer-like voice interface is here now. In large part because it does leverage the great strength of Apple’s AI implementation (and I’m not going to spend the time dithering about models and distillation and all that jazz, because the question to me is how do people use it and how does it work). But that strength is that the AI isn’t siloed off in its own website or app, but on your device with all the information that entails.

The same went for when I asked it about the date for a pool party my wife had texted me about, and who would be there. (It even correctly identified an attendee with an ambiguous name based on proximity to their partner’s name.) And when I was viewing a webpage with an upcoming flight that I asked it to add to my calendar. It was also able to identify a movie from an image in a brochure for a local movie theater, give me the performance of the Red Sox over their last ten games¹, and help me figure out which model of IKEA curtain rods I was dealing with. None of them things that I would have even thought about using Siri for prior to this incarnation.

And because of Apple’s integration, your Siri AI experience works right via your AirPods. As I was walking down a hill near my house, I found myself wondering how far away the downtown skyscraper I could see was. Without even pulling out my phone, I asked Siri via my AirPods. After a moment, it gave me back an answer, but I realized it had plotted directions, so I replied “How about as the crow flies?” and it not only understood me, but gave me back a reasonable-sounding answer. And even better, it was completely correct.

Unfortunately, not every moment is like that. Like any LLM-based chatbot, Siri AI sometimes misunderstands or gives confidently wrong answers. For example, when I asked it about when my neighbor said they’d be back from vacation, it found the relevant text message but said that no return date had been mentioned, despite the fact that it was right there in the message. I took a screenshot and asked it to add a bunch of listed panels that I was speaking on to my calendar, and it added only one of them, at the wrong time and in the wrong timezone.² Sometimes it mishears things, as the time I was using my AirPods to tell my wife I was walking past Dunkin’, and it asked me if I meant Duncan.

It’s at times unsettling to realize this is the new normal for dealing with computers in 2026. Is that better or worse than having old Siri’s frequent habit of shrugging at things it simply couldn’t do? I’m not sure that’s an easy qualitative call. In the end, it’s a mode shift: a different experience of how we interact with our voice assistants and chatbots, and we’ll have to see how people adapt.

All of that said, one thing I do appreciate about Siri AI’s implementation is that Apple has done a good job of, for the most part, making sure that the traditional things that Siri has always been good at—setting timers, playing media, adding reminders, controlling smart home accessories, and so on—are, in my experience, no worse than under old Siri. From what I can tell, Siri is mediating these requests and handling those things locally rather than handing them off to the cloud. That also means not every request to turn on lights or play your podcast gets logged into the Siri app as a separate conversation, which is I think the right approach: I certainly don’t need to save a dozen conversations where I’m setting my five-minute tea timer.

In general, I’m bullish on the future of this new enhanced Siri, and fascinated to see what happens as it rolls out to more and more users. Will it be able to sway the habits of those who’ve been using Claude and ChatGPT? Perhaps not for advanced uses like coding—though Siri AI will whip up a Python script for you if you ask it—but for your run of the mill world knowledge queries? That seems eminently plausible. And, more to the point, for questions about your life, contacts, and data? As newly minted CEO John Ternus pointed out as this year’s iPhone event, to get the same results from one of those competing AI chatbots, you’d need to hand it access to all your data. Is that really a better alternative?

One caveat, however. As always, the future is not evenly distributed: on the iPhone side, Siri AI’s only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max or later and the iPhone 16 or later. And, of course, due to Apple’s ongoing disagreement with the European Union, it won’t be available there.

All roads lead to Siri

While Apple Intelligence is still apparently a going concern, much of that brand has been subsumed by the “Siri” identity in iOS 27. For example, any time you put a blank cursor in a text field, you’re prompted with a Write with Siri button hovering aboard the keyboard. (Once you start typing, you get the usual word suggestions, and Siri is reduced to just an icon.) As someone who is perfectly happy writing their own text messages and emails, this prompt sometimes feels a little bit aggressive, and I wish you could disable it without turning off all of Siri.

There’s also a Siri mode in Camera, which replaces the previous Visual Intelligence interface. Now it’s just something you swipe to, like Video or Photos. In this mode, the Siri icon replaces the shutter button; snap a picture with that and it’ll attempt to tell you what you’re looking at; there are also image search and ask buttons which, respectively, query a search engine for image results and attach an image of what you’re looking at to a more targeted Siri query. But this mode essentially is just a front end for the Siri app—you can attach an image in a new conversation there too, including snapping one with the camera.

It’s also worth noting that Apple has also ramped up Siri’s vocal stylings, if you’re on an iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro or later and use the English voices with either the American or British accents. You can now tweak both the pace and the “Expressivity” of the voices with sliders, choosing the ones that sound best to you.

I’ve stuck with my standby British Voice 4 at the default “middle” pace, but I dialed the expressivity way up. Does that make me a sicko? Maybe! The good news is it’s my Siri, not your Siri, so I can do whatever I want. As can you. In general, I don’t find the new voices to be groundshakingly better, but there are improvements, and I hope the company quickly rolls out this option for other languages and accents.

Liquid Glass half full

To call iOS 26’s Liquid Glass redesign contentious is an understatement on the proportion of saying that Lionel Messi is good at kicking a ball. In iOS 27, Apple has made two major moves: first, tweaking the overall look and feel of Liquid Glass, and second, providing a way to further fine-tune that look yourself.

In general, the iOS 27 incarnation of Liquid Glass is far easier on the eyes, dialing down the transparency in favor of legibility. Apple’s also imposed some distinction between user interface elements and content. For example, in list views like in Messages and Mail there are now much clearer “toolbar” areas at the top when you start scrolling, even if they still have some degree of translucency. App icons have also gotten a face lift; they’re sharper, and feel more vibrant.

In case you still aren’t happy with the default look, Apple also offers an option for adjusting the glass effect without resorting to the classic accessibility tweaks that can often have unintended design consequences. Settings: Appearance: Liquid Glass offers a slider that goes from More Clear to More Tinted, with a stop at the Default or anywhere in between. You can see right in the scrollable pane above the slider how your choice will look in a live interface, which is a nice touch.³

It’s a rare concession from Apple that there is no one true way that the UI should appear, but given that the company has in recent years allowed far more interface choices (for example, Mail, Safari, and Phone all offering toggles between older styles and newer interfaces), this feels like par for the course. While the most stringent Liquid Glass detractors will likely never be satisfied, the improvements and ability to tweak further thus far feel as though they will satisfy most users.

Performance, no anxiety

Tempting as it might be to spend this entire preview piece talking about Siri AI, there are indeed other things in iOS 27 that are worth your time. Exactly which improvements they are depends on how you use your phone.

That’s because one of the odd things about looking at iOS 27 is that there’s just a ton of small stuff—those “quality of life” improvements that chip away at little frustrations and annoyances. Being able to send a text message while a photo or video attachment is still sending. Faster switching from Wi-Fi to cellular when you walk out of range of your house. The ability to change volume on your alarms independently from system volume.

All of these are just nice enhancements, sanding off rough edges and just generally making things work better. But because they’re so niche, lots of people are going to have different experiences with iOS 27, because it depends on what’s important to them. For example, is anybody going to be as excited as I am that Shortcuts now offers an “else if” option? No, probably not! But that’s okay, because I’m happy enough for all of us.

The good news is there are some places where things are just better across the board. In general, iOS 27 feels peppy. I know, we always talk about snappiness, but given the time Apple has spent on improving performance and removing bugs with this release, it’s reassuring to see that it’s borne out by my experience. Apps launch quickly, photos sync faster via iCloud, AirDrop transfers are especially rapid, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.

Apple also touted improvements to search, particularly in Mail, an app that I use daily, which has always been a bit lackluster in that regard, especially when compared with Gmail. I do find it improved in iOS 27, even though I do have an inbox of more than 144,000 messages going back nearly 25 years. I have mostly been able to locate emails, even obscure and old ones, within a relatively short amount of time, which is definitely a nice improvement. (That’s also one place that I find Siri AI particularly handy, since it can often find emails that I struggle to locate.)

I’m most intrigued to see how this affects the experience of those using older iPhone models. Apple says that it’s brought its optimized CPU scheduler to devices all the way back to the iPhone 11, which ought to noticeably improve performance even for those who don’t have one of the latest and greatest iPhones.

Photo fit and finish

If there’s one app that always seems to get some love from Apple in its yearly updates, it’s Photos. No surprise there: our cameras document everything about our lives and we take pictures constantly.

The filter menu now lets you choose between sorting by when photos were added versus when photos were captured, as well as providing quick access to photos that were captured by you (as opposed to photos taken by others that you imported). I’m not exactly sure what the rubric there is—when I used that filter, it only showed me images back to 2017, when I have surely been capturing photos—and even just iPhone photos—for a decade before that.

There are some big improvements, particularly in Shared Albums, which now let you share pictures as full resolution, quickly download all photos from an album, and even respond with emoji other than just thumbs up. Keep in mind, though, that all members of a Shared Album will need to be upgraded to iOS/iPadOS/macOS 27 in order for anyone to use the new features.

Ad hoc slideshows have gotten improvements too. When you select a bunch of photos and play them as a slideshow, you can adjust timing and duration as well choose the transition.

For those who missed being able to assign star ratings and keywords to their pictures (shades of iPhoto!), good news, they’re both back. Keywords are accessible by swiping down in the detail view, whereas star ratings need to be specifically turned on in Settings: Photos: View Options, where you’ll find a Show Rating Controls options. To assign a rating, you’ll need to look for a tiny star icon at the top right while looking at a photo (if you have the spatialize feature on, it’s next to that).

There are some smaller niceties too. For example, you can now save out a frame of a video as an image, rather than jumping through hoops of screenshotting or exporting it to a Mac. And you can adjust the metadata on photos both individually and in bulk, if you need to correct the date, time, or location.

And, although Apple has touted that photos will upload to iCloud faster, there’s a new option for those of us for whom that still might not be fast enough. In Settings: Photos: Sync Immediately, you can tell Photos to prioritize syncing new photos over conserving battery life—for the day. Not unlike the AirDrop “Everyone for 10 minutes” option, it’ll turn the feature back off after the day is over. (In a nice touch, when you turn it on, it shows a counter of how many hours are left before it deactivates.)

But of course, Photos isn’t immune to the expansion of AI, either. Previously we got Clean Up, the tool that lets you remove unwanted elements from your photos. Apple says it’s improved that in iOS 27: you can now choose between Fast and High Quality modes, the latter slower but more powerful. The default Auto mode chooses the best option for you based on what edits you’re making.

There are also a pair of new AI features: Extend and Reframe. The former is easier to understand: if you want to zoom out of a photo, whether because you’re trying to fit in a particular shape or simply to tweak the framing of a shot, Extend can generate a little more background, extrapolating from what’s already there. It works best on smaller adjustments with backgrounds that are uniform or predictable. Go too far and you’ll end up with totally invented elements, which can look strange or out of place.

Reframe is a bit harder to grok. Think of it as being able to move the camera after the picture’s been taken. Using the same features the company leverages for creating spatial scenes, it tries to separate out the foreground subjects and the background, and then adjust the perspective. Some pictures work better than others; it seems to help if there’s a clear delineation between foreground and background. Like Extend, it tends to work best for smaller adjustments; go too far and you can end up with some odd-looking artifacts. As tools, they have their utility, though it’s perhaps best used sparingly.

Just browsing

Having had a big year in iOS 26, Safari’s updates are somewhat more modest this year. It has not escaped the application of AI-powered features, with a new automatic tab organization scheme that can group your tabs based on similar themes. The good news is, this is a feature you can turn on or off, though you might have to poke around to find it. When viewing all your tabs, tap the Filter button in the top left. That’ll give you a list of topics it thinks it detects; tap any of those to just see the relevant tabs. Below that in the filter menu, you’ll see an Organize Tabs sub-menu that lets you turn on the automatic grouping.

I found it somewhat helpful, but also kind of random in its groupings. For example it described one set of nine tabs as “Crossword Puzzles,” despite the fact that only one of them was actually a crossword puzzle (all nine, however, were from the New York Times or affiliated sites). Occasionally, I have seen groups rearranged or renamed as you add or remove tabs, which is odd. But I do appreciate that you can quickly close all the tabs in a single group or move them all to a different Safari Tab Group⁴; you can also just drag any tab into or out of one of the automatic groups if you don’t agree with Safari’s decisions. You cannot, however, change the name of an automatic tab organization group.

A new Notify Me feature allows you to set an alert on a page for when content changes. This is a really handy feature, and I like the way Apple implemented it: when you set up an alert, it asks you what it’s looking for. So, for example, if you want to know when tickets go on sale for an event, or an item is back in stock, you just type that in. Then you can choose how often it checks, from hourly to monthly, including on what day or days of the week and what time. That’s it; you’ll get an alert when the thing happens. The only downside is that hourly being the option that checks the most frequently, it might not be fast enough to catch certain high-demand items. I appreciate, though, that whenever you visit the page for which you’ve set an alert, it shows it in a little banner at the top, along with an Edit button. You can also see a full list of the items you’ve got notifications for in Settings: Safari: Notify Me, along with the ability to edit them and, handy, information on the last time it checked.

Finally, there’s a big new Describe an Extension feature in Safari that allows you, as the name suggests, to create an extension just by typing a few lines. It’s a powerful application for bespoke needs—that website that never quite displays the way you want it to, or that feature that nobody’s ever implemented. I appreciate that if you describe functionality offered by an existing extension in the App Store, Safari will suggest that to you to check out—always nice to give a nod to third-party developers. I honestly struggled to find a need for an extension, but that may be just because I’ve already developed most of my own workarounds over the years; but I’m glad this feature exists and that Apple is recognizing that users want to take their customization to an additional level.

What’s the matter, never taken a Shortcut before?

It’s been a little while since Shortcuts got some time in the limelight, but iOS 27 brings a few much appreciated improvements to the automation system, along with one big new feature.

Let’s start with the big news: Describe a Shortcut. Like Safari’s extension feature, this simplifies the process of making shortcuts by allowing you to describe in plain language what you want it to do—Shortcuts then goes and builds it. I’ve been impressed what it can manage for simple workflows, which it can build more or less on its own. I particularly like that the system will ask you questions if it needs clarification, and that it can refine the shortcut with further prompting.

For more complicated Shortcuts, or ones that involve actions from third-party apps, the describe system doesn’t really work, but it can still provide a good jumping-off point. I wanted to see how much of one of my more complex automations it could duplicate, and the resulting basic functionality was much more straightforward in some ways that what I’d designed⁵, so I ended up rebuilding my automation around what Shortcuts had generated.

Despite its limitations, some of which I imagine will be eliminated in future updates, I think this is a great tool that hopefully broadens the appeal of making shortcuts—which, in turn, will hopefully mean more time and attention spent on improving Shortcuts.

Speaking of which, there are a number of smaller improvements too. I already mentioned the existence of an Otherwise If option, which is huge for those of us with complex shortcuts; the editor itself is also speedier and more usable. And automations are now directly integrated into the shortcuts themselves, rather than just being isolated in a separate part of the app. That makes those shortcuts easier to understand and troubleshoot.

Apple’s also added the ability to store persistent data, which even syncs across iCloud, a huge boon to those who want to make more complicated shortcuts without relying on third-party tools. And, in another much appreciated move, there’s a streamlined approach to privacy and permissions, which are now all viewable in a single place within the shortcuts info panel. This should help avoid the pesky repeated prompts for access that could make shortcuts fail.

While there are still issues left to address in Shortcuts, I’m very pleased by the improvements in iOS 27, and even more heartened by the fact that they happened. Shortcuts feels like it’s been lying fallow for some time, and I’m glad to see that Apple has remembered it’s a vital and useful part of its operating systems.

Other features

Apple’s made a big push on child safety across its product lines for the 27 updates. Some small improvements ought to really make the process more usable, such as the ability to convert an Apple account to a child account, default settings for time limits developed in conjunction with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a much-requested option to lock the Screen Time section of Settings on a device. Taking advantage of some of these features will require you to update all the compatible devices in your family, but you can still use the on-device improvements.

I really love the new button above the keyboard that appears when you’ve copied something to your clipboard, showing you a preview and letting you tap to paste it, though it’s taken me some time to circumvent my deeply ingrained muscle memory of holding to bring up the context menu to paste. (It’s also vastly more useful than the overly aggressive “Write with Siri” prompt that appears when above an empty entry field. I’m not that desperate when I’m writing a text message, guys.)

While Apple announced new Pro photo features for the Camera app on the recently introduced iPhone 18 Pro, the rest of us do still get a nice feature update: you can now edit the controls you want to appear at the top of the app. By default, you get Flash, Live Photo, and Shared Library, but if you tap the controls button to the right of the shutter, you’ll see an Edit button appear at the top of the screen. Tap that, and you’ll be able to remove items from the top menu, or add any of the others for quick access. It’s a nice way to streamline the app or to make sure the features you want available are always there.

Image Playground now has improved image generation and the ability to generate photo realistic images. While some of those results are better, many of them are…unsettling. Even after a couple years, I personally find this feature misguided and off-putting.

During the beta period, Passwords offered an agentic AI feature that would scan your list of compromised passwords and then present you with a list of the ones it believes it can update for you. Apple’s removed that feature for the 27.0 release, saying it will return later. That’s good because, in my experience, it needed a little more time in the oven. Only a handful of the ones it found could be successfully updated. That said, it’s a very cool utility, and should hopefully see improvements as the technology progresses.

If you’ve ever been on a customer service phone call and needed to look up salient details like a flight confirmation number, the Phone app will now surface relevant info during the call. I haven’t been able to thoroughly test this yet, but it seems to be a real potential timesaver. And fun fact: if you call someone on their birthday (assuming you have it in Calendar or Contacts), you’ll get a little animation and note about it.

In a “better late than never” improvement, Calendar now has natural language input when creating new events. Third party apps like Fantastical and Google Calendar have done this for years. I would appreciate if it were a little smarter about some things, such as picking up timezone from a specified location. If you see the event I’m scheduling is in San Francisco and I’m in Boston, maybe at least prompt for which timezone I’d like to use. But I get it: timezones are hard.

For those who love endlessly looking at 3D imagery of cities, Maps gets an improved flyover view with better 3D modeling of buildings and landmarks. Buildings do admittedly look less warped when you get in close, with sharper detail. For some reason, though, the new maps in Boston appear much, much darker than the iOS 26 counterparts; I didn’t see the same results in New York City, for example. Not sure what’s going on there.

FaceTime now lets you show the person you’re talking to your front and back cameras simultaneously. No more endlessly flipping back and forth!

You can also now put an extra large widget—i.e. one that takes up an entire screen—on your home screen. I tried this with Weather for a while and it was…interesting, but ultimately not for me. Still, it feels like the age of the home screen that’s just app icons is slowly dying off.

Conclusion

Every year, I come to the end of the review and have a moment of introspection. Who precisely is such a review for in this day and age? People don’t really need to know if an update is worth installing. Apple’s own stats say 86 percent of iPhones introduced in the last four years are on iOS 26, and 79 percent overall. (And that was for a very divisive year.) For better or worse, the vast majority of people just hit update.

So I think the role of the reviewer has evolved. Consider this less of a review of whether you should get iOS 27, and more as an overview of what to look for, what to try—what works well, what could still use some tweaking. In an update like iOS 27, which has a lot going on, that’s more important to ever. Even I’ve missed features here and there, or found ones that I just haven’t had the time or opportunity to try.

Despite being put forth as a year of small updates, there’s quite a lot in iOS 27, even without including the massive overhaul that is Siri AI. Apple had found itself on its back foot after its first attempt to integrate Apple Intelligence, but my experience is that Siri AI largely delivers on what the company promised—albeit a couple of years later than intended.

But I’m also very bullish on the enhancements and quality of life updates throughout the operating system. The improvements may be small, but they add up. Every time you don’t have to go searching for an email while you’re on a call or a photo shows up faster in your library or you find exactly what you’re looking for in search, well, I’m not going to say an angel gets its wings, but you get less frustrated. And that’s not nothing. In fact, that’s everything. The goal of technology should be to work for us and make our lives easier.

Last year’s macOS release, macOS 26 Tahoe, was a mixed bag. While it added a bunch of solid new productivity features, it also included a half-baked visual update that muddied the entire interface. While I chose to view the glass as half full and accepted the interface imperfections, I understand that a lot of people just gave Tahoe a pass rather than inflict a visual regression on themselves.

No matter how full you think the (liquid) glass was, I have good news: macOS 27 Golden Gate is here, and it’s good. Not only has Apple addressed most of the visual problems with last year’s release, but if you skipped Tahoe, you’re also going to be dazzled by Tahoe features like Apple’s first native clipboard history, Shortcuts automation and AI access, and an improved Spotlight.

For everyone who spent a year grinding in Tahoe, Golden Gate doesn’t just improve the look of the entire system, but offers a host of other improvements. This is an update nobody will have to apologize for liking.

Design takes a step forward

The fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe design decisions were. Apple describes the design as “even more refined,” because in Apple marketing-speak, broken features are never remedied or fixed—past features are just improved. The truth is, Apple has rolled back numerous missteps and made changes to others to mitigate the issues they caused.

Floating glass sidebars inset from window edges—a choice that made sense metaphorically, but looked awful—are gone, essentially reverted to their previous design, sitting at the left edge of windows, with a darker background for contrast and colored icons to boot.

Toolbars, one of the most important interface conventions of macOS, were flattened and ghostly in Tahoe. In Golden Gate, they pick up better shading and are more legible, though (strangely) the toolbar in inactive windows offers more contrast and legibility than in active ones! In Photos, toolbars are actual bars, not horizontal areas of floating glassy buttons—which means the system no longer has to attempt to add shading behind those areas in order to improve legibility. They’re just legible.

In Golden Gate, windows generally just feel… a bit more square. Apple has made window corners more consistent, and not having the curved corners of the sidebar right inside the curved corners of the window edge also helps make it feel a little less like you’re under the tyrannical rule of the Circle King.

Icons look better across the board in Golden Gate, probably because of a new layered icon compositing approach Apple is taking across its platforms. Unfortunately, apps that dare stick any of their extremities out of the mandated squircle shape are still put in a featureless gray box of shame, which makes it harder to identify icons, especially in appearance modes like Clear and Tinted that remove color as an identifier.

The iconic macOS “stoplight” window controls have even gotten a bit of a glow-up, with some Liquid Glass shading added to the three circles in the top left of windows. I think they’re cute. Not only are they more harmonious with the other Liquid Glass design elements in macOS (and all of Apple’s current operating systems), but they also hearken back to the classic Aqua design language that was introduced along with Mac OS X back in the day. I don’t know if I want to lick these stoplight icons, but they do look a little candy-like, and I’m here for it.

To hear Apple tell it, users are split on the transparency effect of Liquid Glass: some people despise it, and some people can’t get enough of it. As a result, all of Apple’s OS 27 updates introduce a slider—it’s in the Appearances pane of Settings on macOS—that lets you customize the transparency from sort-of-mostly-transparent to sort-of-mostly-opaque. Given that this update rolls back a lot of Apple’s decisions from a year ago, I’m inclined to believe that there really are two camps when it comes to Liquid Glass. Giving users an option to adjust the setting is fine—I think in the end I will adjust it just to the opaque side of center.

Siri AI takes the Spotlight

Siri has been a part of the Mac experience for a decade now, arriving on the platform five years after it debuted on the iPhone. While I’m sure that many Mac users have embraced it over the years, it has always been an afterthought at best for me. When I’m sitting at my Mac, I’ve got a keyboard and trackpad to get my job done, so I don’t generally feel the need to talk to my computer. And while you’ve been able to type to Siri for a while now… well, the other problem with Siri has always been that Siri’s results are rarely as useful as the results of typing those words into a search engine or some other tool.

In macOS Golden Gate, as with all the other OS 27-era releases, Apple has upgraded Siri to become Siri AI, with LLM-derived features that promise much better results. On top of that, Apple has finally done what it should have done long ago and merged Siri and Spotlight, so there are no longer two separate “type to find things” interfaces on the platform.

Apple is labeling this feature as a beta within macOS 27.0, though I’m of the opinion that if you ship a feature in your “final” OS version, it’s fair to judge it. Fortunately for Apple, Siri AI actually works quite well. In terms of general-knowledge queries, it’s very good—good enough that if you previously relied on Google Gemini or ChatGPT for basic questions, you probably can just use Siri and be happy.

But part of the appeal of Siri AI is its integration with your personal on-device data. And here, the results are encouraging—but a bit of a work in progress. Siri AI takes advantage of an updated Spotlight index to search files on your Mac, including data in apps such as Mail and Calendar. I found that asking targeted questions can generate good responses, but you need to be aware of the system’s limitations. Some third-party apps aren’t tied into the Spotlight index, and if there isn’t local searchable data (for example, if you use Gmail and aren’t using Apple Mail) you just can’t search that data at all. I ended up setting up Apple’s Calendar and Mail apps on my Mac, even though I use Fantastical and Mimestream for those purposes, just so I could be sure Spotlight and Siri could search through my calendar items and mail.

Still, there are some magic moments to be had. I asked Siri what episodes I should be watching next for the “Magnum, p.i.” podcast I do with friends—yes, I have my finger on the pulse of today’s culture—and it managed to make an intelligent search of my Messages archive and pull out the relevant message that I sent to the group listing what our next episodes were. That felt like magic. It doesn’t happen like that every time—there’s a lot of “here are a bunch of PDFs that might work, good luck”—but it’s all quite promising.

There’s a new Ask Siri entry that’s been added to the top of every contextual menu, and while I don’t mind the idea that Siri can act on just about any context you can think of on the Mac, I don’t love how it’s implemented. It’s at the top of every single context menu (regardless of applicability) and darker than the rest of the menu. If you click on it, it floats forward, the rest of the menu disappears, and you can type in the resulting box. I don’t mind the impulse, but it feels like Apple is trying too hard to push Ask Siri into places it doesn’t belong.

And I don’t want to soft-pedal the Spotlight improvements, even though they were obviously made to benefit Siri AI. Spotlight is also better in Golden Gate, all around. Suggestions are better, and if you use Apple Mail you will find the search function there much improved. Sometimes upgrades made to benefit AI can benefit regular humans, too!

Touchscreen Macs, at last?

One of the most remarkable features of macOS Golden Gate does not really make sense if you take it at face value: Apple has given a major upgrade to Sidecar, the feature introduced in 2019 that allows Macs to use iPads as external Mac displays. As someone who always travels with a 13-inch iPad Pro, that’s a nice feature, though since the 2022 introduction of Universal Control, which lets me use my Mac’s keyboard and mouse on an iPad still running iPadOS, I’ve found very little use for Sidecar.

The big update is that Sidecar, which previously only supported the Apple Pencil, now works with the iPad’s touchscreen. Apple has updated its own apps and supplied third-party apps with the appropriate tools to support full touchscreen support. You can now scroll Mac browser windows with a finger and drag windows around on screen… but only on that iPad you’re using as an extra display.

It’s not hard to read between the lines: As numerous reports have suggested, Apple is planning on releasing its first touch-enabled MacBooks late this year or early next year. Using Sidecar as a way to demo the technology and allow developers to test their apps in advance is really clever.

Beyond that, this feature is delightfully boring. It just does more or less what you’d expect. Adding touch to macOS isn’t going to be revolutionary—it’s been on Windows for ages, and iPads have had optional trackpads and keyboards for six years now. But it’ll be a nice incremental benefit. I still use touch gestures when I’m working on an iPad in laptop configuration, because sometimes it just makes ergonomic sense. If my hands aren’t on the keyboard and I need to scroll something or tap something, a quick poke with my finger does the job. It feels natural—and once you’ve spent some time with that configuration, it’s jarring to use a Mac laptop and realize that you’re poking the screen to no effect.

After a moment’s glee in being able to scroll a Finder window with my finger, using Sidecar with touch to drive the Mac interface just became… normal. Apple has done a good job implementing the feature. Menus drop down reliably. Buttons are tappable. Scrolling works. There’s just not a lot to report, and that’s just fine. It works.

Shortcuts, reduced and enhanced

The Shortcuts app, the cornerstone of Apple’s cross-platform automation technologies, gets a notable upgrade during this cycle. Most of it is probably due to the needs of Describe a Shortcut, a remarkable new feature that lets you input some text and then watch as your device converts it into a Shortcut.

It is, in some ways, a longstanding dream of the computer industry finally realized. You can literally describe what you want your device to do—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it.

Describe a Shortcut is limited—Shortcuts of great complexity are beyond its ken, as are ones that use actions from third-party apps—but when it works, it’s magical.

Perhaps its best feature is that you can iterate on your Shortcuts. If there’s something it doesn’t do quite right the first time, you can specify changes you’d like to see—”only show me items from my Personal calendar”—and it’ll rewrite the Shortcut to take those changes into account. In that way, it’s emulating the back-and-forth conversations that can make vibe coding so remarkable.

For those of us still building Shortcuts with our own fingers like animals, some of the other improvements will help that work get done. There’s a new Otherwise If statement that can be added to If-Else blocks (you get to it by control-clicking on the Else block and then choosing Add “Otherwise If”), making the structuring of branching shortcuts logic much, much simpler.

There’s also support for persistent data storage, which is kind of huge. You can save data, which syncs via iCloud and is accessible across your devices, and Shortcuts can both access it and update it! That will make Shortcuts capable of behaving more like other apps, all without having to rig up other ways of storing data in iCloud Drive or elsewhere. (Yes, this canonizes Simon Støvring’s Data Jar in Apple’s OS, and that’s a good thing.)

The arrival of Describe a Shortcut has changed the Shortcuts interface a bit. On the Mac, there’s a new three-paned interface, where the third pane is a giant preview of a shortcut’s color, icon, and (this is fun) an AI-generated summary of what the shortcut does. The pane exists because of the text box at the bottom, which lets you type input to Describe a Shortcut to make changes to whatever shortcut you’ve got selected. Fortunately, it’s easy to resize or hide that pane and go back to the more standard Shortcuts look.

New horizons for Photos

There are a bunch of big changes in Photos this year, but the three biggest ones are driven by AI. And they’re a bit of a mixed bag.

Clean Up, which removes unwanted items from the background of photos, has been improved a lot. The new version is much more adept at artfully clipping unwanted items out of an image and filling those areas with in-context backgrounds.

The other two features, Extend and Spatial Reframe, require the use of an advanced diffusion model that’s only available via Private Cloud Compute, and as a result, they take time to execute, since Photos will need to upload your photo, wait for a result, and then download the result.

Extend feels like a good feature, since there are plenty of scenarios where your image needs just a little more headroom or width. However, every pixel you expand the selection increases the jeopardy that what’s going to be generated is weird or fake. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I found that I was much more comfortable expanding a photo a little bit to gain some headroom than doing it a lot, forcing the AI system to invent more objects or scenes. I was occasionally frustrated that I couldn’t slightly extend the bottom of some images, where subjects’ legs or feet were cut off. Also, you have to be aware of incredible fabrications—extending a graduation photo added a gigantic floating tassel and an invented piece of furniture, and extending a stadium shot added a roof where there isn’t one. Judicious use, carefully analyzed, is my advice.

Then there’s Spatial Reframe, which brings together a load of existing Apple technologies, including the spatial scanning algorithm it used to create spatial photos on Vision Pro. This feature works by scanning your photo locally using that algorithm, inferring a depth map that is then used to build a 3-D version of the image that you can pivot a bit, up and down, and left and right. This is the effect that allows you, on the Vision Pro, to feel like you can move your head and see parallaxes shifting, even though, if you look closely, the exposed content behind a subject is just a simple generative fill. It all happens so quickly, and in service of a live 3-D effect, that it’s often not noticeable, and even when it is, it’s not that big a deal.

The bar is a lot higher for a fixed, 2-D photo at full resolution. So after you use Spatial Reframe to slightly move the perspective of a shot, all the data is sent up to Private Cloud Compute, where a new version of your shot is rendered—including much more advanced generation of all of those pixels that are revealed by parallax or at the edges of the frame.

Some results are more synthetic than others. Unlike Extend, Spatial Reframe changes the entire perspective of the picture, which requires everything visible to be re-rendered at full quality. The result sometimes feels artificial. Again, my first impression is for people to use this feature with care and caution.

Apple has finally updated its Shared Albums feature, which had been compromised since it launched because it didn’t offer the ability to share full-resolution images. Over the years, Apple added other methods of sharing groups of photos via iCloud, and those could include full-resolution images, but this one prominent feature felt stuck in the past.

Now it’s getting a proper upgrade, with support for full-resolution images and allowing for full collaboration with people on other platforms so that everyone can contribute to a shared photo album. I’m relieved that I will soon have to stop explaining the differences among the various ways to share items in Photos and warning people away from Shared Albums.

There are a handful of other nice, new Photos features, including new Captured By Me and Identity Documents sections (quick, find that photo of my passport!), and a triumphant return of star ratings for individual photos if you are the sort of person who wants to assign star ratings to things.

Safari gets organized

Across the 27 OS releases, Safari now sports an AI-driven tab organizer, so if you’re someone who keeps a zillion tabs open, you can have Safari group them into smaller, more navigable clusters. I’m not a zillion-tabs person, so I basically haven’t used this feature. I’m glad it’s there for those who are desperately in need of an injection of tab organization, though.

There’s also a new Notify Me feature that will send you a message if a webpage you’re watching changes. You can specify what kinds of changes you’re looking for using natural language, and it’ll check every hour, day, week, or month. Personally I don’t think I would ever use this feature for anything—nothing has occurred to me in the months I’ve been using the Golden Gate betas!—but if you’re someone who has a seldom-updated site you’re monitoring, maybe something involving a local government or school, I could see it being useful.

What I have found useful, however, is Safari’s exciting new Describe Extension feature. This is essentially “vibe coding” of Safari extensions. The process is fairly simple, kicked off by clicking on the utility icon to the far left of the URL bar and choosing Describe Extension. It works exactly that way: You type out what you want the extension to do, and it’ll build it for you—but first, it’ll also search the App Store to see if there are available Safari extensions that already solve the problem.

If you’re thinking that you don’t know what you’d use this feature for, I get it. But over the summer, I ran into two instances where I was frustrated by what a website was doing, and ended up using Describe Extension to solve my problem. It was extremely satisfying.

I use StrawPoll.com to schedule podcast recording, but the site has two separate scheduling features: Create Poll and Schedule Meeting. Both of them are, of course, tools to create a poll that schedules a meeting. I never remember which one to click on. So I had Safari build me an extension for that website that hides Create Poll from the site’s navigation bar, and redirects all attempts to load the Create Poll page to the Schedule Meeting page instead. It works!

There’s also the Relay podcast networks title-voting page, which offers an archive so I can look back on title suggestions for other shows—but that link appears nowhere in the site’s interface, so I’m always trying to look it up or guess what it is. I had Safari add a link to the page’s nav bar so I never need to look it up again.

When you update to Golden Gate, keep an eye out. There are lots of opportunities for simple customizations to websites you use, once you realize you have the power to describe an extension.

This section is running in the background

In Golden Gate, the Dock now continues to display apps that haven’t quite quit, but are continuing to run in the background, with a note attached to their contextual menu that they are “running in the background” and an option to stop that background processing.

I understand why this might be useful in some circumstances. You might want to know that the app you “quit” is still hanging around. In practice, though, this is entirely contrary to how the Dock is supposed to operate.

The Dock is not a notification board for Apple’s privacy and security systems to warn us about apps doing weird things. It’s a launcher and monitor of apps that are providing a user interface. It’s never been a place to display background apps, and it shouldn’t start being one now.

On top of that, I just can’t figure out why some apps appear in the Dock in this state and some don’t. I understand an app like Photoshop, that sometimes keeps running for a little while after you quit it, being flagged in the Dock until it’s properly quit. (Which it already did, for the record.) I don’t understand fully quitting an app like Shortcuts and having it just sit in the Dock as if it were still running. Is the app misbehaving? Is this a bug? I’m baffled about this choice all the way around.

Wait, there’s more…

There are so many small enhancements in Golden Gate that it’s hard to mention them all, and every time I turn around, I keep bumping into more of them.

• Apple has added some light menu-bar management, specifically to deal with items that overflow the notch on some MacBook models. I’m glad that it’s taken this tentative step, though I wish it were more—it’s okay, Apple, you can sherlock all those menu-bar-management utilities out there—and of course, it should’ve happened back when the notch first appeared (checks notes) three years ago. Better late than never, I guess.

• Both Finder and the document save option in the menu bar will scan the contents of a file and offer up naming suggestions. I didn’t love the suggestions it offered, but your mileage may vary. I’d like to see this feature applied to auto-generated filenames like screenshots, though!

• In June, Apple introduced a feature that injected some agentic AI into the Passwords app, so that the app could automatically change your compromised or easy-to-guess passwords for you. When I tried it, it had about a 8% success rate—not great! Apple has pulled this feature from the first version of Golden Gate, hopefully to make it much better, and will re-introduce it later this year.

• Notes has gotten way more Markdown savvy. You could already import Markdown text format into Notes, but now you can go the other way, copying or pasting the contents of styled notes text as Markdown. As someone who writes everywhere in Markdown, this is a great feature.

Sail through the Golden Gate

The Golden Gate is one of California’s crown jewels, where San Francisco and Marin stand apart and allow the Pacific Ocean to mingle with the San Francisco Bay and the vast river deltas of the Central Valley. And for 89 years it’s been spanned by one of the most recognizable structures in the world.

It’s a lot to live up to. And while macOS 27 can’t possibly do that, it does manage to be a very good update that rectifies macOS 26 Tahoe’s greatest sins, unifies a more useful Siri with Spotlight, and hints at some subtle ways Apple can use on-device models to make using your computer more productive.

Tahoe users will find the entire Mac experience more attractive and cohesive. Those who stuck with macOS 15 Sequoia¹ will pick up those improvements as well as Tahoe’s raft of productivity boosts.

I live about six miles north of the Golden Gate. It’s nice here. And for the next year, It’ll be nice to have the company of a macOS version. Fortunately, it’s shaping up to be a good neighbor that’s focused on beautifying the neighborhood.