I’m a big fan of the Connected podcast. On the face of it, they talk about the Apple news from the past week, but unlike several other similar shows I also enjoy, on Connected they also have much more fun with all sorts of jokes and running gags.
In May 2026 one of the hosts of Connected (Federico) built a command-line program for controlling Apple’s Reminders app. After he discussed his app, named remctl – Reminders Control, one of the other hosts (Stephen) started to end the episode, and as a joke said “connected --exit“, as though he could generate the show’s outro by invoking a command.
This immediately put the idea in my mind that I should build a command-line interface (CLI) program for the Connected podcast. Taking a cue from Federicco, I would call it conctl. Several thousand Claude tokens later, it was born.
It’s open source and available on GitHub – and I’ll try to avoid repeating any of the details here that are on the README there.
Update: I was quite honored when they discussed conctl on the next episode of Connected – around the 5-minute mark.
