Being Productive with ChatGPT: 5 Facts About the New “Work with Apps” Feature Introduction

OpenAI has enhanced its ChatGPT desktop application for macOS by introducing the “Work with Apps” feature, enabling seamless integration with various desktop applications. This functionality allows ChatGPT to access and interpret content from compatible apps, such as VS Code, Xcode, TextEdit, Terminal, and iTerm2, thereby providing more contextually relevant and accurate responses.

To use this feature, users must have the compatible application running. Within the ChatGPT chat interface, clicking the “Work with Apps” button and selecting the desired application allows ChatGPT to include content from that app in its responses. For instance, when working with code editors, ChatGPT can analyze the full content of open editor panes, focusing on selected text to offer precise assistance.

This integration is currently available to ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers, with plans to extend access to Enterprise and Education users in the coming weeks.?

Key Take Away: The new “Work with Apps” feature in ChatGPT is a significant step toward creating more agentic AI systems capable of interacting with various desktop applications to enhance user productivity by streamlining workflows for developers and other professionals.?

Getting Started

Before you begin, make sure you are running the latest version of the macOS ChatGPT desktop app. In my case, I had to download the new version and replace the version I had installed. At this time, the “Work with Apps” feature will not work with the new Windows version of the ChatGPT desktop. Before you begin, go into Settings and ensure the? Enable Work with Apps is on, as shown below.?

Note: At the time of writing, the “Work with Apps” feature is currently available to ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers, with plans to extend access to Enterprise and Education users in the coming weeks.

When you bring up the ChatGPT desktop app, the minimized view should look like this. You should see a new button, this is the Works with Apps button.?

When you click on the “Works with Apps” button, you should see the apps that you have available in a list like the one shown below. At this time, I did not have apps like VS Code or XCode installed, so they did not appear here.

Insight 1: You can use the “Work with Apps” feature with any of the GPT-4o or O1 series of models.?

You can select the AI model by clicking on the model name next to the “Work with Apps” button as shown in the previous screenshot. I can work with any of these AI models (shown below), including 01-Preview and it will work with Web Search enabled as well.

Insight 2: Create, save and manage you most complex prompts in a plain text file and execute them directly with ChatGPT. No more cut and paste between your text editor and ChatGPT.?

You simply click on the plus sign next to one or both of the apps shown in your list. In the example below, I am working with TextEdit. What this means is that once Text Edit is open on my desktop, ChatGPT can read the contents of any text file I have open.?

Insight 3: : “Work with Apps” reads the entire file. It does not rely on just a screenshot.

For this example, let’s use the TextEdit?app, as a means to compose and manage prompts that I want to use repeatedly.?

It is important that if you have other apps open on your desktop, the desktop focus needs to be on the window with the file that you are interested in working with — the? window buttons will be in colour, not greyed out.? In the example below, I created a text file with three questions about grommets. Well, why not grommets??

In the screen shot below, you can only see two of the three questions you have to scroll down for the third. I wanted to be sure that “Work with Apps” was not? using a screenshot and that it was actually reading the entire file contents.?

I have already linked to the TextEdit app, so all I have to do now is prompt it with the following:?

Address all of the instructions in the file?        

See the screenshot below.?

ChatGPT then answers all the questions I have about grommets in my file, one after another including the third question, the one that was not visible on the desktop.?

Insight 4: You can find a particular part of the file and work with that part. For example, you may have a text file with all the prompts you have developed for a given subject.?

Let’s use the same file that contains three prompts about grommets and ask for only the second prompt in the file. The prompt I used is shown below.

Address the second point in the file        

ChatGPT responded by answering only the second question in the file.? This means that large complex prompts that you need to use repeatedly can now reside in text files and to use them, there is no longer any need to cut and paste into ChatGPT.? For those that have invested a lot of time crafting prompts, this is going to streamline their workflow considerably.?

Insight 5: You can work with a very large text file. For example, you have a large file of notes on a particular subject that you want to work with.?

I opened the plain text version of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island in the TextEdit app. The word count is a little over 196,000 words, then I asked ChatGPT to:?

Summarize Chapter 9 of the file        

You can see some of the response below. At the top of this image is the TextEdit app with the text of Mysterious Island by Jules Verne and ChatGPT opened at the bottom. ?

We can take this further.? While I can’t update the source file, I can ask ChatGPT to create a plain text file for downloading. After that I opened the Chapter 9 Summary file in TextEdit. I asked ChatGPT whether it could see the file in TextEdit — an unnecessary step but interesting.?

Subsequently, I asked ChatGPT to rewrite the content of the file in French. Finally, I asked ChatGPT to save the French summary as text file for downloading which it did (not shown) and named the file accordingly, “Chapitre_9_Resume.txt”.

Summary?

Key Take Away: "The Work with Apps" even in its present form allows for streamlined workflows for text-based content.

Before this feature you could upload hand-written notes, text images like newspaper headlines and so on and have ChatGPT transcribe them to text and then have ChatGPT save the text as a text file. Now you work with those transcriptions directly by opening a TextEdit window and enabling the "Works with Apps" feature.

Linking to apps like TextEdit in a read-only mode is only the beginning. What this feature does now, is stream line the workflow with one or more apps that have dedicated functionality such as a rich text editor like TextEdit or a code editor like VS Code or Xcode. ?

I have only shown the productivity improvements that come with linking the TextEdit app with ChatGPT. There are many more possibilities with linking ChatGPT to your terminal window or VS Code for example and as one final insight: you can have more than one app linked to ChatGPT at a time.?

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