Rob Fahrni

More work on Stream for Mac today.

I renamed some stuff because I had Feed and FeedItem used in various places. A Feed represents the Blog’s RSS Feed information. A FeedItem is a single entry from an RSS feed for a particular feed.

Those are accurate names in my opinion but just glancing at them can be confusing in their use in the code. So, what I did was rename the table view BlogListTableView and the view model for it BlogViewModel. I also added new classes for table views called BlogItemCellView and BlogItemTableCellView. It made things a lot easier for me to read and understand. The base models of Feed and FeedItem remain as they were.

I finally got around to filling in the left side table view of the three columns. This is a simple list of blogs. I also added a little code to allow me to filter the list of feed items based on the selected row in the blog list. Simple, expected, stuff.

After doing that I adjusted the blog cell and feed item cell to use a different font for the blog title and feed item title. They look a lot better now. I also added some padding around the outer edge to space things out so they’re not all jammed together.

The final task was fetching and caching the favicon for each blog. That’s where I wrapped up for the day.

I can now display a list of blogs. By default all feed items display in the middle column. When you select an individual blog the middle column displays just the items for that blog. I still have to add a new top level item to the blog list to allow you to select All items, but not today.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Ged Maheux • The Iconfactory

We’re pleased to announce the arrival of Iconfactory Tapestryon iOS 26 with stunning support for Liquid Glass, visual improvements up and down the timeline, and a new native app for macOS. 

Y’all know what a huge fan I am of The Iconfactory. They’re an excellent example of great design meeting excellent engineering and I’m always happy for them when they release a new version of something.

I can see Tapestry turning into the ultimate social and blogging viewer plus editor of both! I know, I know, this directly competes with Stream but it’s so much more and I love how it brings so many services together. It may be read-only now, but I can imagine read-write in its future. Keep an eye on it.

Congratulations, y’all!❤️

Maggie Boccella • Fangora

Ever wanted to peek into the mind of one of horror’s greatest authors? Well, now you can, courtesy of Penguin Random House. The publisher has just announced their latest horror nonfiction title, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, a new book by University of Maine professor Caroline Bicks that explores never before seen access into King’s private archives.

This is a book I’ll be picking up. Who knows if I’ll get around to reading it but I’ll definitely have one. Kim can read it. I know she will.

Stephen King has always been a fascinating character to me. He’s such a prolific writer and the few novels I’ve read have been extremely good in my eyes.

Daniel Jalkut

I achieved a major development milestone for my biggest app, MarsEdit, today. I can now build against Swift 6 with strict concurrency, and no warnings

Wow! That is pretty major! Congratulations, Daniel. I hope you share more of your adventures in Swift Concurrency as you progress!

Aimee Hart • Polygon

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein has been on Polygon’s list as one of the most anticipated movies of 2025. A collaboration with Netflix, Del Toro’stake on the Gothic tale is a direct adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 19th-century novel, Frankenstein. With the creature (not monster) teased on Sept. 30, we’ve just had one question: when can we expect to see the Frankenstein trailer?

I’m so excited to see this in theaters! I’ll see y’all there! I’ll be the dude with the huge bucket of popcorn with my eyes glued to the big screen! 🍿

Kev Quirk

After flip-flopping about what I’m going to do with this site, I decided to flip to Jekyll and build my own little CMS while I’m at it. Because why not?

I love watching folks bounce around building new tooling for their weblogs. It’s not something I’m willing to take on at the moment but it is something I think about it a lot given Stream is weblog adjacent.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Windows is coming back together. Microsoft is bringing its key Windows engineering teams under a single organization again, as part of a reorg being announced today. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri, who was just promoted to president of Windows and devices earlier this month, shared the changes to Microsoft’s Windows teams in an internal memo.

As a fan of Windows I think this is a good idea. Get everyone moving the same direction. Bring codebases back together and make sure Windows continues to run great on the desktop as well as the backend.

I know it gets a lot of crap but it’s still a great OS and runs so much of the worlds computers we need it to continue to be great.

One of these days I’ll get another Windows box. I hope to bring Stream to Windows someday. Gotta finish the Mac version first! But when/if it comes to Windows it’ll be all, or mostly, Swift. It’s doable.

Justin Hughes • Jalopnik

The Eaton fire burned down more than 9,400 structures and killed 17 people this past January, mainly in the Altadena community just north of Pasadena, California. The massive clean-up is still underway, and some residents have moved into RVs parked on their property until their permanent residences can be rebuilt.

There are so many sad and disgusting things happening in our once wonderful nation. To see folks lose their homes to a huge natural disaster and not be in a position to rebuild is just another tragedy in a nation, not to mention a world, of tragedies.

Konstantin

While using Instruments is always a good idea (and current Xcode 26 has amazing tooling for observing concurrency related issues), there are several opportunities to improve this even more in the editor itself. let’s break down some features Xcode could introduce in order to make it easier to anticipate issues, befor they become a bug for the instruments.

I’ve been collecting articles to read about Swift Concurrency for quite a while. One of these days I need to sit down and read them. I’m afraid my knowledge of Actors and Concurrency is near zero. I think I understand the concepts but putting them to use is another matter that will require some quiet contemplation and lots of experimentation along with notes, copious notes. 😃

Joel Drapper

If you really want a full-stack Ruby framework that doesn’t have a bigot with poor reasoning skills in charge, you need to make one. And to succeed, it needs to be better than Rails in every way.

That Ruby on Rails guy has really shown what a white nationalist Nazi type he is. I know many folks use Ruby on Rails and it’s difficult to pull away from that infrastructure if you’ve built on top of it. But, when you start something new you can move on from it. Leave that legacy code alone and build on Swift, Rust, or Node. There are many great options available to you. Heck, you could use Sinatra or keep an eye on Yippee. You have choices.

daveverse

Linux wasn’t the first Unix. WordPress was built out of a fork of another blogging system. RSS was the result of work Netscape did building on work I did, and then needed protection from an incompatible fork. None of these things are simple, but the result is — interop, no lockin, no billionaires owning the result.

It’s very obvious I love me some RSS and what it means to the open web. Dave continues to do interesting experiments with blogging, RSS, and social media sites. Then we have Manton Reece at Micro.blog who I believe has nailed the Social blogging, or Micro blogging, nail directly on the head. They’re working hard every day to keep us and our content out of the big billionaire corporate silos.

I was messing around with WordPress the other day and it’s so close to being kind of perfect. I have more thoughts on the matter that need to be a standalone blog post and I hope to pull it together soon and describe my perfect system. 👀

Kauy Ostlien • The Daily Downforce

On Tuesday, the NASCAR industry learned via the Dale Jr. Download that Legacy Motor Club’s purchase of a Rick Ware Racing charter was record-breaking. While this was surely newsworthy, Dale Earnhardt Jr., co-host of the show, seemed to have mixed emotions about the implications of these rising charter costs.

NASCAR Cup charters are a strange beast. They’re stupid expensive and have to be renewed every year, which I think is really dumb. It should be a one time purchase, a franchise like the NFL, but I digress.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. is, without a doubt, the biggest fan and supporter of NASCAR. He’s very involved from owning an Xfinity team to podcasting to being in the broadcast booth. He’s an incredible dude in my book and even he has been priced out of Cup team ownership. For now charters are in the 10s of millions, how long before they’re hundreds of millions of dollars?

If her wants to buy a charter now is the time. There are only so many available.

Last year Jr. Motorsports ran an open car at the Daytona 500 and finished in the top 10. It would be incredible to see a Jr. Motorsports Cup car week in and week out.

I hope he can manage it without driving his company to bankruptcy.

Cliff Schecter • BlueAmp

Help us, Dear Souls: We’re Trapped in “War Ravaged” Portland

I saw so many Mastodon, Bluesky, and blog posts dripping with sarcasm and Portland’ism last week after the Orange Man announced he was sending troops to ”War ravaged Portland”.

Yeah, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. It’s Portland. They’re too busy gathering at Powell’s Bookstore, sipping a latte, or downtown in the evening at a food truck having an IPA with friends.

Today I worked on some refactoring so I could support another column in the Mac version of stream and I migrated away from my singleton instance of the database because it just felt gross.🤮

That removes the only singleton in the app and I feel a lot better about it.

I’m splitting some functionality out of a view model and putting it into a different view model to better support the third column Stream will now have.

Yes, I’m adding a feed column. Stream for Mac is the only version that will have that extra column because it feels natural for the “Big Dog” app to have it.

I still plan on keeping the app extremely simple and will provide a Timeline Mode that hides the feed column so it behaves just like the Stream we’re accustomed to.

More to come. Today was a lot of infrastructure work and rebuilding the iOS to make sure it still works as expected.

The Mac version is in a bit of a busted state because I ran out of time today. But I’ll get it fixed ASAP. 😃

Until next week, take ‘er easy.

This is so pathetic.

Also, orange asshole dude, being antifascist, or antifa, is a good thing. Thousands and thousands of Americans died to stop fascism on June 6, 1944, AKA D-day.

So, shame on you for calling antifascists a terrorist group. If you believed in democracy you’d be for antifa.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This week felt very productive Monday through Thursday. Then Friday came. 😂 It was just one of those days I couldn’t get rolling. It happens from time to time and I’ve learned not to worry about it. I used to worry until I was sick to my stomach. Now? Not so much. I’ve been through it enough to know it’s a temporary state and I’ll get back in the groove, or flow as people like to calll it.

You know where I find tremendous flow? Working on Stream. No pun intended. No meetings, just me, Xcode, and whatever my 🧠 decides it can do that day.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow. It’s focus on Stream morning at Grit. See you there! ☕️

Matt Birchler

It’s amazing how easy it is to be driven mad by the App Store and app review.

I’m certain every iOS Developer has been where Matt is. App Review has always seemed like a bit of a crapshoot from the beginning. Hell, RxCalc took over 20 days to get a review in 2009. We’ve come a long way but it doesn’t mean the experience can’t be improved.

Sorry that’s happening, Matt. I hope it’s resolved soon! ❤️

Iconik

WordPress runs 43% of the internet, but try mentioning it in a design Discord and watch the cringe reactions. While WordPress quietly powers The New York Times and Microsoft, design Twitter celebrates every exodus to Webflow like it’s a prison break.

Drama aside, WordPress is a great piece of technology and the folks who work on it each and every day care deeply about it. That kind of dedication is necessary to create a beloved, stable, product.

Here’s hoping WordPress has many wonderful years ahead of it.

As an aside I’d love to see something built on top of WordPress that outputs static HTML with a minimal UI just for bloggers. It’s something I’ve wanted for a really long time. I know I’ve been posting about it since around 2012, or so?

Please, someone, get to it! 😄

Ars Technica

As of October 21, Disney+ will cost up to 20 percent more, depending on the plan you have. Disney+ with ads is increasing from $10 to $12 per month, while the ad-free plan is going from $16 to $19 per month. The annual, ad-free plan will go from $160 to $190.

When I fired up Hulu last night I was met by a message warning me prices were increasing. I’m starting to miss cable bundles. 🫠

Dave Rogers

Rob’s idea of using RSS is fine, but you still have to have someplace to upload the video files, which are far larger than just photos or text. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure what my storage limits are at my host, but I’m sure I’d have to upgrade to a higher tier of some kind if I wanted to start sharing a lot of videos.

I hadn’t considered Vimeo. They have always had a good reputation as a high end service for video but they recently sold to Bending Spoons who have a terrible reputation for ruining everything they touch. (Hey, Bending Spoons, get in touch. I’ll sale you Stream for a few million buck! What a bargain! 😂)

The issue is silos. It’s something we all gravitate towards, especially when they make it easy as a user. We have the Nazi loving Substack attracting great writers who don’t care they’re supporting fascists and YouTube who make it easy to monetize video but have complete control over your content and who can view it.

In a nutshell that’s why I’d like to see folks use their own sites and RSS to start a video publishing revolution just as podcasts did.

As for storage, I see where you’re coming from. My hosting service, DreamHost, provides services that have unlimited storage that could be good for this, or folks could use Amazon S3, or services like Libsyn who target hosting for podcasters. Search around for S3 alternatives, there are a lot to choose from. I also believe file hosting services targeting audio and video would spring up to serve this kind of move to self hosted video.

I think the thing that stops this is folks seeing they can start publishing as soon as they make an account with a service, even if it’s Nazi loving.

Finding a blogging tool, getting file storage, adding accounts, and payment systems, and on and on. Most folks just don’t want to mess with all that. That’s the big barrier to entry.🌻

Daring Fireball

Live Translation with AirPods and iPhone Mirroring are both amazing features. And EU users are missing out on them. I think Apple structured this piece exactly right, by emphasizing first that the most direct effect of the DMA is that EU users are getting great features late — or never. And that list of features is only going to grow over time.

If folks didn’t see regulation coming for Apple they haven’t been paying attention. Is it fair? No, not if you’re Apple or an Apple fan, but it was bound to happen given Apple’s position in the market. Sure, Android exists, and is doing really well in the market, but Apple has tied so many things into their OSes it was bound to happen.

I think I’m not surprised because I watched the Microsoft trial with great interest because I was a Windows developer at the time. Their dominance allowed them to make, or force, deals with OEMs and sellers that favored them only. They were the 800lb gorilla of the time. They had to protect that Windows and Office dominance in the wake of the internet gaining steam. Hell, they were criticized for Internet Explorer being included in the OS. Apple is now dealing with that many years later, so it’s no doubt they’ve been singled out.

From a competition angle it’s not so much they don’t have competition in phones, they do. Android outsells them worldwide. I think the competition is at the OS services level.

Folks should be able to pick a storage service or music provider or insert your favorite thing here and have it integrate deeper with the OS to give users better choices and give Apple some competition. Why should I have to purchase iCloud storage? If I could get more storage for less and it was integrated just like iCloud is integrated, that would benefit the user.

Sure, there’s the whole security angle and the sync angle but Apple would be in charge of defining the specification and provide the integration points and also qualify the storage provider as compatible. Yes, it would be expensive and time consuming, but if someone else has the chops to pull it off and wants to do it, why not let them? Leave the choice to the consumer.

As an aside, I could see Firebase providing such a service. It already supports syncing, is really fast, and is very stable.🔥

Johan Halse

Let’s be realistic: DHH isn’t going anywhere. He owns the trademarks, he controls the Rails Foundation, he sits on the board of Shopify, and he doesn’t give a shit about you. In fact, he seems positively giddy at the idea of people being driven away by his occasionally repugnant blog posts and xeets. I’m sure he’d very much like an ideologically pure userbase for Rails, the same way he’d love for Britain to only contain native brits, wink wink. If that means the “Rails community” becomes a small stagnant pool of people getting paid to cheer for him and Tobi, that’s clearly a price he’s willing to pay! He’ll be staying on, whether you like it or not.

It’s too bad the Ruby community is being sucked into the fascist world of David Heinemeier Hansson.

Thankfully Ruby isn’t his creation or run by him so developers could move to something like Sinatra or build something new to get away from him. Sure, old code won’t move, but new works could move off of Rails, right? Heck, you could move to Rust, Swift, or, heaven forbid, Node. You have choices.

Zach Sturniolo • NASCAR

A junction of Joe Gibbs Racing teammates during Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Playoff event at New Hampshire Motor Speedway has left Denny Hamlin seeking assistance from his team’s leadership.

I watched this race of course and it wasn’t obvious to me Hamlin wrecked Gibbs, but Hamlin admitted to moving him in later interviews.

Here’s the thing. Hamlin, Bell, and Briscoe are racing for a championship. Gibbs, their teammate, didn’t make the playoffs. In my opinion he should move out of the way for his teammates. Race everyone else, but get out of their way. What if he’d wrecked Hamlin and Bell at that time? It absolutely could’ve happened given how hard he was racing them and how close they were to him.

I will freely admit I’m not a fan of Gibbs. He comes off as a spoiled, entitled, rich kid. Oh, and Grandpa Joe (yes, Joe Gibbs former NFL coach and Super Bowl winner) is the owner of the team.

Maybe it time to find grandson Ty a new racing home for the sake of the organization? He’s good enough to get a seat elsewhere. 🤔

Craig Dalzell • Common Weal

A new study from the Social Market Foundation presents the results of several Housing First pilot schemes, including one in Scotland, and finds that providing free housing to people suffering homelessness results in better outcomes than current services and is cheaper than not doing it.

Take this for what it is. Yes, I support all kinds of social programs like this. We could do this if only America was willing to become truly great again.

Tom Chivers • Semafor

Global health authorities rejected the US government’s claim that the popular painkiller acetaminophen, better known as Tylenol in America, causes autism when taken during pregnancy.

Not a surprise. RFK Jr. is a complete nutter and is driving our nation back into the early 19th century. Let’s use leeches to cure disease! I should say crap like that, someone may tell him it works. 🤣

Politics

Benjamin Mullen • New York Times

The Daily Caller, a prominent conservative online publication, published an opinion column on Friday explicitly calling for violence in response to physical assaults on conservatives in America.

Let’s lower the temperature, riiiight… We’re moving closer and closer to a full dictatorship and it’s showing in folks anger toward it. Some want it, others, like me, do not.

See you October 19 in Washington D.C.

Mark Hertling • The Bulwark

WHEN I SAW THE NEWS that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had ordered all U.S. military flag officers (generals and admirals) to gather at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, next week along with their senior enlisted advisors, my first response was disbelief. Not disbelief that the secretary of defense might want to deliver a strong message to the senior leaders of the force, but disbelief at the method.

So, will the leadership of all of our branches be asked to give their full allegiance to Marmalade Messiah? I hope not. If they are asked, how many will resign, weakening our defenses and opening the door to a full fascist takeover by the “government?”

Arianna Coghill • Mother Jones

On September 17, Pete Hegseth—newly dubbed our Secretary of War—announcedthat any member of the US military who needs a shaving exemption for more than a year will be forced out of the service, tossing out a decades-old policy created for mainly Black and brown troops with pseudofolliculitis barbae, a skin condition that makes daily shaving lead to cuts, sores, and scarring.

Y’all just need to admit it, now. This administration wants an all white nation. Run the leadership of the military out then get all the black and brown people to leave.

We’re just driving for that cliff. Car on fire. Everyone partying like nothing is happening.

It’s happened. We’ve arrived at the beginning.

Let’s save democracy. 🇺🇸

Daring Fireball

The big problem is YouTube. With YouTube, Google has a centralized chokehold on video. We need a way that’s as easy and scalable to host video content, independently, as it is for written content. I don’t know what the answer to that is, technically, but we ought to start working on it with urgency.

I believe the answer is as straight forward as using RSS, just as we use it for Podcasting. The RSS enclosure element isn’t limited to audio.

You can embed video like this:

<item> <title>Video Episode Title</title> <link>http://www.example.com/video/episode-1</link> <pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400</pubDate> <description>This is a brief summary of the video episode.</description> <enclosure url="http://www.example.com/video/episode-1.mp4" length="123456789" type="video/mp4" /> </item>

If feed readers and podcast players would recognize these as an MP4 video file, by using the video/mp4 mime type they should be able to load them as a <video> element and play them.

Same thing for embedding them on your web page. Just use the <video> element. The distribution mechanism is there, just use it.

Now, if you’re looking for a YouTube like experience I think that’s where the feed readers and podcast players come in. By subscribing to feed you can bring the video right to you instead of keeping an eye out for it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This week was exciting at the beginning with the release of Stream 1.6 and became pretty boring, pretty quickly.😀

It’s really nice to finally boot a new release of Stream out the door. It’s the first time I’ve ever released anything to coincide with the release of a new operating system. I don’t make a lot of noise about it, because I don’t really know how to! 😂

Anywho, it’s out there and I’m excited about it even if it only got one new feature and some tweaks to support iOS 26. If you’re a Stream user, thank you. 🙏🏼 I hope you’re enjoying it.

Tricia Escobedo • CNN

“Robert Redford passed away on September 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah–the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly,”

SETEC ASTRONOMY… TOO MANY SECRETS.

RIP, Mr. Redford. 🪦

James Hibbard • The Hollywood Reporter

Jimmy Kimmel‘s latest monologue has ignited a political firestorm and resulted in ABC suspending the show.

I know folks don’t like it when I include politics, but this is some serious stuff. It’s trampling on our First Amendment rights and has to stop.

Holly Borla • Swift.org

We’re excited to announce Swift 6.2, a release aimed at making every Swift developer more productive, regardless of where or how you write code. From improved tooling and libraries to enhancements in concurrency and performance, Swift 6.2 delivers a broad set of features designed for real-world development at every layer of the software stack.

I still haven’t had the opportunity to look into strict concurrency but I do hope to at some point.

I was so happy to have done a bit of SwiftUI in Stream that I shred it with a colleague. She instantly found all the dumb things I’d done and straightened me out.😃

Thanks, Ms. Iryna! 🙏🏼

Reuters via Yahoo! Tech

Israel-based Fiverr International is laying off 30% of its workforce, a company spokesperson said on Monday, as the online services marketplace doubles down on artificial intelligence to automate systems and streamline operations.

This experiment hasn’t worked for some companies. It’s darned useful, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a be all end all. It’s like the next evolution in the hammer or a fancy screw driver that doesn’t strip screws. It just helps us get our jobs done.

Geoff Perlman • Xojo Blog

Supporting Liquid Glass and the underlying system changes is a big undertaking and we still have more work to do. Since we build Xojo with Xojo, this means updating not only the Xojo framework but also parts of the IDE itself so it looks and behaves correctly on macOS 26 with Liquid Glass. Our goal is to let you use Liquid Glass in both built-in Xojo controls and third-party party plugins as soon as possible. That’s why the next release of Xojo, 2025r3, will be built for macOS 26 and iOS 26, giving your apps the latest look and feel while still allowing them to run on older versions of macOS and iOS.

Wow, I didn’t expect Xojo to be built with Xojo, but it makes sense. Here’s putting your money where your mouth is. I think that’s really impressive and to me it proves Xojo is industrial strength enough to build native apps for macOS, iOS, and Windows from a single source base. Kudos! 🤩

John Brayton

I just released Unread 4.6 with improvements to support Apple’s operating system updates.

A big congratulations to my friend, John! 🥳

Booting updates of your software out the door is always exciting.

I still use Stream on the Mac, even though it barely works, but I use Unread a lot. It’s a beautiful app and works how I’d expect it to work. Try it! It’s really good!

Cody Hamman • JoBlo

Trick ‘r Treat is getting its first nationwide theatrical release this October

This is something we watch every Halloween, a few times. We absolutely love it! When it hits theaters I’m gonna drag Kim out to see it with me on the big screen.

Bogden Ionescu

The idea of hosting a web server on a vape didn’t come to me instantly. In fact, I have been playing around with them for a while, but after writing my post on semihosting, the penny dropped.

So, yeah, a vape pen hosting a website is kind of awesome. Why? Because, that’s why! If you have the skill to pull it off, do it.

I’d still love to host a site on an old iPhone. They’re more than powerful enough to pull it off.

Uros Popovic

I recently implemented a minimal proof of concept time-sharing operating system kernel on RISC-V.

There are so many smart, determined, folks out there in the world.

This kernel project is written in Zig, which I don’t know much about.

When is someone going to do this in pure Swift? The new low level language of choice seems to be Rust, but it could be Swift, right? Maybe? 🤔

Part of Chris Lattner’s vision for Swift was to use it as a systems level language. What happened to that goal?

Apple, of all people, should spend a little time creating a 100% Swift based OS to use on their backend.

I know, I know, it’s a lot of work and Apple already has an OS. But they still need to make better use of the language they’re pushing on developers. It should be a great way to build a more secure operating system.

David Pierce • The Verge

There’s just one ongoing problem with Liquid Glass: it’s the wrong idea. Apple is trying to make a single interface metaphor work absolutely everywhere, and it just doesn’t. Frankly, I’m not sure any all-encompassing design language could feel right on everything from a watch to a phone to a TV to a headset. But I do know that Liquid Glass in particular, which is hell-bent on making everything feel deep and physical and layered, often just feels like clutter. And it feels least at home on Apple’s most important and popular devices.

I’ve been using iOS 26 on a test device since WWDC. It’s been fine. Did I see some oddities, yes, I did. Was it completely unusable? No, it wasn’t.

I have it on my daily driver now, I’m typing this post on it, and it’s been perfectly serviceable. On occasion I have lost a button in a background but it doesn’t happen often.

At the day job we haven’t upgraded to Tahoe, macOS 26, so I can’t say how it looks or works. We haven’t deployed it because some software folks use has been a bit janky. Our poor IT is tasked with getting all that squared away before we’re allowed to move forward.

I decided to go with working on Stream for Mac today.

The feed item cell has been a complete mess for years, yes, you read that right. It’s been a complete wreck for years now. I kept on insisting I do all the work using AppKit.

Today that changed. I needed to make progress and even though my SwiftUI experience is very limited I was able to get the general layout working the way I’d like it. It’s not complete by any means but each UI element is displaying in the place I want it to (mostly) and the cell resizes properly, oh, and the date label/text remains pinned to the right side of the cell. That was a big issue with my AppKit NIB attempt.

Polish, polish, polish is the next course of business with the new cell. It needs spacing updates, text size fixes, color changes, highlighting support, keyboard support, so many things. But, now that it lays out the way I want I can move forward.

This is the first SwiftUI code introduced to the Stream codebase, which began life in 2018.

I was so focused on getting a single feature done for Stream 1.6, and add a little Liquid Glass support that I don’t know what I want to work on today. 🤣

I want to get back to the Mac version but it feels like so much work. I need to get my table view cells to behave properly. Perhaps I’ll punt on having the date attached to the right side of the cell and put it somewhere on the left just to make some progress today. 🤔

Would different cell layouts between iOS and Mac versions put folks off?

Something else I’ve been considering is adding a third column to Stream for Mac! Yes, it would make it behave just like every other feed reader on the market. Going 100% against what Stream was built to be. My reasoning? It’s strange, at best. On iPhone it has a single column, on iPad it has two, so it makes sense that the Mac — being the big dog — would have three, right? RIGHT!?

Should I add keyboard shortcuts to better support iPad? That would also make the iPad app a better citizen on the Mac!

Do I being my journey into SwiftUI by replacing some of the lazy UI I threw together just to get 1.0 out the door?

Oh, how about that new subscribing UI I wanted to do? I got some lovely feedback from a friend about onboarding! I’ve been thinking about that a lot myself. It’s a great idea and I need it! Perhaps that’s my first SwiftUI code? I think y’all would like it, at least I hope you will.

Anywho. Lots of thoughts spinnging around in my brain. 🧠

I was thinking about what the definition of a core Feed Collecting Service Specification would look like and authentication is such a PITA. Of course what I’d specify wouldn’t include auth, but it’s still painful to think about.

What would a minimal feed collecting service need?

Add Feed Remove Feed Get Feeds Get Feed Add Category Remove Category Add Category to Feed

Now, I may be missing something that should be in a core specification but that seems kind of like a minimum to me. Even the Category functions may be too much for the core of it. Of course the service could still have their own proprietary way of managing feeds. They could choose to build that on top of this core set of features or next to it or add this spec on top of their existing API. You know what I’m saying. 😄

Dave Winer’s FeedLand got me thinking about this. There is also this great podcast episode where he explains what he wants to do. His tool could implement this specification if he wanted it to. I don’t think there’s an API to it but a very generic specification, implemented by multiple third parties, would open up feed readers to supporting multiple feed services without having to do special client side work to support each service. Just do it once and connect to any. Specs aren’t ever perfect but they 100% allow for interop between clients and other services.

I’d love to be part of a group working through something like this. Specifically I’d love to get it added to the same collective that includes ActivityPub and ActivityStream, perhaps what I’m after is WebSub? I haven’t read through it yet. I also need to read Social Web Protocols.

I think what I’m looking for is less social protocol and more simiple, agreed upon, API implementation. It is, of course, kind of selfish because I work on a feed reader and would love to be able to connect through a well specified API.

Oh, one more thing! I listened to Dave’s latest podcast episode on the way into the coffee shop this morning and he put the final touches on his vision for a rebooted weblogging system. He’s now covered writing, feed subscription, and finally, discourse. His idea is quite good because it would really make folks who reply to your post think before posting. Listen to the podcast and it will become obvious — I think — why.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s been a big week for the Apple ecosystem. All the new Apple gizmos and gadgets were announced on Tuesday. I no longer get excited about these events, especially since they became highly produced marketing commercials. But, there was one thing I really liked: the orange iPhone 17 Pro.

Stream was approved earlier this week and I’ll be pushing the button to release it sometime Monday night, I think, because iOS 26 is supposed to hit the streets on Tuesday.

Like all of my releases, this one is small. One new feature, a small tweak for the UI on iOS 26, and some bug fixes. I hope folks enjoy it.

Here are some links and bad opinions. Enjoy!

Apple Newsroom

Apple unveils iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, the most powerful and advanced Pro models ever

The color of the week was definitely orange! My Mastodon timeline was full of orange iPhone 17 Pro orders.

I don’t update often, I went from an iPhone 11 to an iPhone 16 last year, but if I were to upgraded this year that orange Pro would be the one. I’m still tempted but can’t justify it. 😍

Joel Dare

Imagine a web page that loads instantly, deploys effortlessly, and never needs a security update. I’m using pure HTML and CSS to accomplish all that and to build things in a fraction of the time.

This website loads so fast! We’ve all become accustomed to slow loading CMS based blogs like WordPress or Ghost or add your favorite blog here. I don’t mean to pick on those amazing products but raw HTML is blazing fast and I love it!

Ashley Belanger • Ars Technica

Free for any publisher to use starting today, the RSL standard is an open, decentralized protocol that makes clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation of any content used to train AI, a press release noted.

The RSL Collective has put together a very low tech solution to the problem of AI servers hammering websites and taking content for training their LLMs. I like this idea, a lot, and will be deploying it to this blog. Going forward all transactions here will cost an AI company a hojillion dollars.

No, it’ll remain free because nobody reads it anyway and if you want to train your AI on my crappy writing, good luck! 🤣

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

Mastodon, an open source, decentralized alternative to X, is rolling out a somewhat controversial feature by adding quote posts, which will launch next week. The feature, which allows a user to quote someone else’s post and reshare it with their own response or commentary, has contributed to a culture of “dunking” on X, where users often deride other people by responding with snark or insulting humor.

To address this concern, Mastodon says it’s implementing quote posts with safety controls.

I’m looking forward to trying this out but I wonder how long it’ll be before all the amazing Mastodon apps are updated to support it?

Barn Finds

Go Bullitt if you must, but I’d rather see this potentially handsome 1968 Mustang Fastback restored to its showroom glory.

What a beautiful car! I always thought I’d retire and have a project like rebuilding a car. I don’t think that’ll happen but I still like the thought of it. Instead I’ll probably sit behind a keyboard and continue coding until I die. 😄

Dan Goodin • Ars Technica

A prominent US senator has called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for “gross cybersecurity negligence,” citing the company’s continued use of an obsolete and vulnerable form of encryption that Windows uses by default.

I’m surprised Microsoft would allow something like this to go on. Here we have Apple doing everything they can think of to lock down their OS’es and Microsoft’s is vulnerable. 😲

Ben Werdmuller

There are two CMS choices that I think are particularly well-suited for newsrooms. The first, Ghost, is perfect for smaller newsrooms with a newsletter-centric distribution model. (I love Ghost’s elegance and use it for my own site and newsletter.) The other is, indeed, WordPress.

If you’re part of a small or large newspaper, Ben has a recommendation just for you.

Even my old hometown newspaper, The Sun-Gazette, uses WordPress. 📰

Apple Security Research

For Apple, improving memory safety is a broad effort that includes developing with safe languages and deploying mitigations at scale.

If you’re a nerdy computering type person who writes software this article is a really good read.

Apple has gone to great lengths to make the OS’es even more secure and that includes hardening their developer tools!🛠️

Adam B. vary • Variety

Henry Cavill has sustained an injury while preparing for the Amazon MGM remake of “Highlander,” which will delay production on the Chad Stahelski film likely until early 2026, Variety has confirmed.

I ask you, how can Superman get injured?🦸🏻‍♂️

Here’s hoping Mr. Cavill recovers quickly and the film is a big hit.

Do it justice MGM!🎬

Annie Palmer • CNBC

“There’s 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don’t know what most of them do. We don’t need more than 200 of them,” Rabois told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday.

What a crazy statement. I’ll bet the employees are putting out feelers into the world to get ahead of the inevitable.

Jobs are so hard to come by today.😞

There are two things I really like about the new iPhone Pro.

1. I can get it in orange
2. It has an aluminum body

Aluminum is my favorite material. It’s light, easy to recycle and reuse, and I love the way it wears. The little scratches it collects make it unique. My old iPhone 7 looks amazing because of it.

No, I will not be getting one. I’ll most likely have to purchase a used one down the road because they will, of course, not have an orange one next year or the year after or the year after that when I’m ready to get a new one.

I have such a huge list of things I want to add to Stream. Like full page parsing and stripping of formatting, fix some things that annoy me, syncing, connection to feed services like feedbin, recommendations (curated and LLM recommended), a Mac version, and the list goes on and on and on. 😃

I’d done some work on a function last week that determined if a certain permission level was valid for a particular type of user account in our app. The requirements depended on multiple different factors including account type, language, and some other sub data types. I paired with some other devs on the team because they knew way more about the account types than I did, yes, they were convoluted and a few special cases had to be accounted for and even included a check for language spoken and region of a country.

This function had been a lot more straight forward but we were expanding the application to work with more account types so the unit test requirements doubled. When I went to update them I was struggling a bit, remember, I’m using TypeScript and I’m still really bad at it.

After scratching my head for a bit I opened Cline in Visual Studio Code and asked it to “write unit tests for [filename].ts” and it got to to work. It churned away for a while then started outputting new code. After checking some outputs and clicking Save a few times my brand new unit tests were complete.

It worked. Color me shocked. 😳

I can now see doing this for most, if not all, of my unit test needs on this project and probably others. As much as I enjoy writing unit tests, no, seriously, I do enjoy it, this saved me quite a bit of time. Just incredible.

Brent Simmons

And it seems retro in the worst way that we’re still using anything other than a scripting language for most of our code. We should be using something simple and light that can configure toolbars, handle networking callbacks, query databases, manage views, and so on. And maybe with a DSL for SwiftUI-like declarative UI.

Almost none of that code needs to be in a lower-level language like Swift or Objective-C. It really doesn’t. (I say this as a performance junkie!)

It could be in Ruby, Lua, Python, or JavaScript. Better still would be a new language invented specifically for the problem of writing apps, something designed to make the common challenges of app writing easier.

We did have this stuff decades ago. Not for app making in general, sure — but now it’s 25 years later, and a company like Apple could make this real for all its app makers.

Where to start? Let’s start by saying I agree 100% with Brent. Having a built in scripting language with dynamic UI updating and easier ways to build code and UI would be absolutely incredible! And, like Brent says, I’d love to see Apple make this happen.

A hojillion years ago when I worked at Visio we had VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) integrated right into Visio. It was a fantastic way to build custom Add-Ons for Visio. You could embed your VBA solution right into your template or document so folks could invoke it right from the app. This allowed folks to make fancy automation to fit their particular need and do it in a high level scripting language that could control Visio in all kinds of ways! I loved it! I spent a lot of time working on Add-Ons to Visio in C and C++ but I used VBA to test things before implementing them as an Add-On — Add-Ons had the advantage of being usable app wide.

I’m not sure how VBA is used in Visio today but before I left Microsoft had added a way to build your solution code into binary form so it could be signed before including it as a part of your solution package. It was such a marvelous development environment.

Now, if you’ve ever used VBA in Visio, Excel, or Word you know exactly how powerful it is. Could you imagine having access to something like that within your Xcode dev environment that was fully integrated, or even supported like VBA in an application? Yes, it’s a lot of work to make something like VBA work but it is so worth it.

Brent mentions Ruby, Lua, Python, and JavaScript as the scripting languages but I have to say Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications is so much easier to understand and use than any of those languages and it was easy to open functionality to it using Microsoft COM, IDispatch specifically, in the app. I know, COM has a bad reputation for being difficult. Yes, like I said earlier, it’s a LOT of work, but it’s so worth it when you can open all that power to your users and yourself! Taking that to the next level, like Brent’s talking about, would be a huge boon to Apple Platform Developers. AppKit, UIKit, SwiftUI, Objective-C, and Swift are still too deep to move quickly. If developers creating code for any of Apple’s platforms ever took some time to use VBA they’d see what I’m talking about. The paradigm is a bit different than they’re used to but, hell, I was so confused when I came to iOS development! They’d get used it after a time.

Building UI and code behind VBA forms is so easy. Drag and drop a UI, double-click on the element you’d like to add code for, and write your code. That’s it. It’s that easy! I would totally embrace this idea for application development on Apple platforms.

You can build at a higher level today using awesome tools like Xojo that give you a very Visual Basic like experience complete with a drag-and-drop forms builder just like Visual Basic!

Psst, did you know that folks have been scripting applications for iOS, complete with dynamic UI updating, with React Native? Yeah, it’s true! I’ve been working on an application like that for the last two years. We’ve almost completely rewritten the application in 100% React Native, which uses JavaScript as its backing language and a way to build UI in a very HTML/CSS manner. Think SwiftUI with web technologies. It works.

I know of many applications using Electron to deliver cross platform apps, like 1Password. They used Rust for mission critical code and put an Electron “front end” on top of it. Microsoft has fully embraced React Native. They like it so much they’re the primary maintainer of React Native for Windows!

Am I saying React Native is a perfect solution? Hell no! It’s a terrible developer experience in my opinion. Most folks use Visual Studio Code — I prefer Nova myself — as their editor and don’t have a nice debugger to fall back on. Nothing is integrated. It’s a bunch of tools losely hung together by duct tape that let you kind of see what’s happening in your app. Hey, if you think console.log is the height of debugging then this environment is for you! 🤣

In the end I, like Brent, would love to see a modern scripting environment that’s embedable or standalone that is fully supported by and used by Apple internally to create applications. The embedded environment is very enticing to me. Something like Visual Basic for stand alone development and Visual Basic for Applications for embedded scripting would be absolutely incredible!

Modern means easy to use UI builder and code behind that is a super simple language like BASIC and on top of it make it easy for third-parites to make extensions to the environment and provide code modules that give developers the power they need for specialized applications.

Look at Xojo. That’s it. Apple, buy it and make a version that’s 100% built for your platforms and is embedable in applications.

I’ve managed to kick nine builds of Stream out to beta testers. That’s the most I’ve ever done! I owe this all to the four hours of time I’ve reserved on Sunday morning for working on Stream. It’s been seven weeks of work. Like I said in my last Stream Work Note I’m overjoyed at having this time to focus work on Stream and, of course, have a really great Mocha while I do it. 😄

During my testing I noticed that the one new feature I’ve been adding to the app would fail when Stream was tiled with another app. That really stunk because otherwise it looked great to me! Today I managed to fix that outstanding critter and it feels really great!

I’ve had two other bug reports come in specifically for my iPad support — thanks Lucian and Sean!

The first bug was occuring when you’d pick a feed to subscribe to. That porting of the code has been synchronous since day one. I figured why do it asynchronously when the UI was going to be blocked while I added the feed to your list and parsed it. Well, newer versions of iPadOS didn’t like that and the app would crash hard. Yikes! Can’t have that. I fixed that bug earlier in the week or maybe last week, I don’t remember, but it’s out of the way and now asynchronously updates the app, be it iOS or iPadOS.

The second bug was a bit more difficult to fix only because I couldn’t reproduce it. It turns out it was happening consistently on iPadOS 16.8.2. So, I added that simulator setup and kerpow! 💣 It happened right away. YAY! 🥳 It turns out I’ve been stacking two navigation controllers on top of each other since I added iPad support a few years back. DOH! The OS was just tolerating it so I didn’t know. Well, it looks like Apple decided it wouldn’t allow that any longer, and rightfully so! I fixed that issue yesterday.

This morning was spent fixing the tiling bug and it’s now done and a new TestFlight build it up. If everything goes well with that build it could be my final build before Tuesday’s Apple Awe Dropping event. 🤞🏼

Have I ever mentioned I’d love to work on Stream full time? I didn’t think so. 😄

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

The week started off a bit stressful for me. Stream was stuck in Waiting for Review hell at the beginning of the week. I finally pulled it from review and submitted a new build. That worked and some folks were able to look at the latest release. I even got some bug reports (nasty crasher on an iPad Mini I haven’t sorted yet) and found some terrible bugs running Stream on the new iPadOS 26 windowing support. Ack! 😲

I’m hoping I can fix them during my Grit development time tomorrow. 🤞🏼

This release of Stream does the minimum amount of work to support Liquid Glass in iOS 26, but it’s a start.

Jack Dunn • Variety

Graham Greene, the Canadian actor best known for his Oscar-nominated turn in the 1990 film “Dances with Wolves,” died on Monday in Toronto after a battle with long illness. He was 73.

This was really sad to see. I loved his performance in Wind River. I thought the film was incredibly good but I don’t think it did well in theaters.

As an actor his performances always felt real, like he was just living life, not reading from a script. I always appreciated that. 🪦

Jordan Novet • CNBC

Atlassian said it has agreed to acquire The Browser Co., a startup that offers a web browser with artificial intelligence features, for $610 million in cash.

My congratulations to The Browser Company! 🥳

I interviewed with this team, I think it was one of their founders? I also think he realized I wasn’t a heavy enough hitter and I wasn’t willing to kill myself for a company again.

We spoke for about 30-minutes. Very nice guy and I’m really happy for him.

Daring Fireball

But this seems like bad news. I just don’t see how Atlassian/Jira DNA can possibly be a good thing to inject into an innovative user-focused web browser.

Arc was adored by its fans and I’m not sure how Dia is doing.

I could see Atlassian merging the two together to form an excellent browser. Both extensible, like Arc, and AI driven like Dia.

My gut says the extensibility and customization features of Arc are really attractive. Atlassian could take advantage of that plus add Dia’s AI support to build up a very compelling Jira App as well as a fantastic browser.

What if all that customization support really opens up the door to better desktop apps built from web technology? Think Electron.

Oh, one more thing. The Browser Company is the first company I know of to stretch Swift the way they have. They built up Swift support for Windows and used that to ship their Windows version of Arc.

Joan Westenberg • The Index

Arc’s exit fits this history neatly. It’s tempting to be cynical: yet another beautiful app sacrificed on the altar of enterprise bundling. But there is another way to read it. Beauty survives by being absorbed. The design DNA of Arc may not persist in its purest form, but elements will filter into the larger ecosystem. That’s how Sparrow influenced Gmail, or how Wunderlist informed Microsoft To Do. Users lose the standalone purity, but the market as a whole advances.

I appreciate Joan’s take on the sale. Hopefully we get a beautiful new browser out of the deal.

Bob Pockrass • Fox Sports

Will Power will move to Andretti Global next season as he replaces Colton Herta, who will move to Europe and serve as a test driver for the Cadillac F1 team.

Wow! This is quite the shakeup both ways. Will Power is an IndyCar legend and Colton Herta is a rising IndyCar star!

I do admit I like seeing Herta going to Cadillac F1. They will be my new F1 team going into 2026. I’d been on the Haas train for some time but they just don’t invest at the levels of other teams. I’m hoping the Cadillac backed team will. It’ll also be really nice to see an American built engine back in F1 in 2028.

Matt Massicotte

Making just one type @MainActor can result in cascade of errors at all usage sites where the compiler now cannot provide that MainActor guarantee. This virality can make it really hard to incrementally adopt concurrency with targeted changes. Perhaps that’s not too big a deal for smaller code bases/teams, but I bet this is a killer for big projects. So what do you do?

I honestly don’t know. 🤣

The new concurrency support for Swift sounds extremely complicated, even for the best of developers. Matt seems to be an authority on the matter so I hope to read more of his stuff once I get to a new app that needs it. For now Stream is what it is. It uses closures/callback blocks to update models and the UI after pulling new feeds. It works as is and changing it just to change it feels like a waste of time. I really want to finish the Mac version and I do have another app to build. That seems like a good time to do SwiftUI and proper concurrency work. Like a dummy I’ll try to do both at once. 🤣

M.G. Siegler’s Spyglass

Almost exactly 15 years after the service first launched to the world – they waited 15 years but couldn’t wait a few more weeks to make for a fun story? – we now have a version of Instagram tailored for the iPad. And… it’s sort of crap.

I had a third-party Instagram for iPad app a very long time ago, at least ten years back. Then Facebook decided they were going to shutter their API and cut off all third-party access. That third-party app, that I can’t remember the name of, was a pure iPad App. It was fast and beautifully designed. The layout would change, as expected, when rotated and would show you a grid of photos you could tap into to view larger. It was beautifully executed.

From what I’ve seen of the new Instagram built version it’s nowhere near that and that’s a real shame.

If you’re looking for a pure, elegant, platform for viewing and posting photos I’d recommend Glass. It’s gorgeous and not full of crummy ads, displays a beautiful stream of pictures, and even has a proper iPad app.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Windows Mixed Reality headsets were left in a non-functional state last year, after Microsoft suddenly discontinued the platform with its 24H2 update to Windows 11. Now, an Xbox engineer at Microsoft is bringing these headsets back to life, thanks to a new driver that enables SteamVR support.

This is extremely cool! Thanks Mr. Microsoft Xbox Engineer for this gift! ❤️

Thank you Microsoft for allowing this! When I was there, there’s no way this could’ve happened.

Dom Corriveau

If you glance over this blog, you will see that I am an avid Android fan. After setting up numerous Linux prootdesktops on phones, I wanted to see if I use a phone as a server and run my blog from an Android phone. Since you are reading this, I was successful.

I absolutely love projects like this! Take a teeny device not at all meant to host a web server and do just that! Incredible work!

I’ve often wondered how you could take a bunch of the same model iPhones and build a blade style bus for them to plug into to act as a kind of super computer. Wouldn’t it be cool to add a web server to an iPhone and use it to host your blog or use a bunch to process data. They’re super fast and amazing computers, why not repurpose them? I mean if folks could build super computers out of 286 chips why not A16 chips?

Anyway. It’s a neat thought experiment.

State of California

Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson announced they will launch a new West Coast Health Alliance to ensure residents remain protected by science, not politics. The alliance represents a unified regional response to the Trump Administration’s destruction of the U.S. CDC’s credibility and scientific integrity.

It’s really wonderful to see the west coast of the United States come together to support common sense science. I miss the west coast. ❤️

Gavin Newsome’s troll game is top notch. 🤣

I’ve been going to Grit, my favorite coffee shop, for the last six Sunday’s to work on Stream. It’s been really rewarding to spend the morning working on it. I typically work from around 8AM to noon, then grab Chipotle for my daughter and I and head back home.

That four hours of time has given me so much joy and recharges me for the week ahead. I cannot imagine how much better Stream could be if I were able to do this five days a week for five to eight hours a day! I might actually be able to make some real progress on the Mac version! 😱

Today I’ve managed to kick a beta build out the door. What I expect to release is version 1.6.0 as soon as Apple opens the door for glassified releases. Now, don’t expect much. Even with my four hours at a time to work on it I’m still very slow and the feature I’ve added isn’t glassy, at all. It’s something I’ve wanted to add for a very long time. It’s a feature meant to make things easier to subscribe to feeds. That’s all I’ll say about it for now.

What’s next?

Well, I had wanted to create an entire new view for adding and managing your subscriptions. I really need a nice way to populate the app your first time launching it and give you some great options when you pop open the Subscribe view controller. My plan is to create a nice set of hand picked feeds for users and, perhaps, add a set of recommended feeds using Apple’s built in LLM models. We’ll see at some point I hope! As long as I’m able to continue spending my Sunday mornings coding I think I’ll be able to achieve a lot on the app. I have a lot of features to add and bugs to fix! There are a lot of usability things I could do to improve the app and a few bugs I need to take care of.

Where’s the Mac version?

This is a tough one. And it’s only tough because I don’t know AppKit as well as I do UIKit. Yes, Stream is still 100% UIKit and the Mac parts I’ve done are all AppKit. I’m thinking I may do some new features in SwiftUI because I need the practice. I’ve never built anything with SwiftUI.

I’ve struggled to get layout on the Mac working the way I’d like. My table view cells look like crap and even with help from a dear friend — hi, Josh — I haven’t been able to get it right. It’s terribly frustrating and makes me want to jump out a window.🤣 Maybe SwiftUI will let me make those cells work on Mac?🤞🏼

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Craig Hockenberry • Iconfactory

Tot, your tiny text companion, is still tiny. But now, it’s even more mighty.

That’s because we’ve just released Tot 2, with tons of great improvements to let you collect text on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.

Congratulations to my friends at Iconfactory! 🥳

I’m using Tot 2 — as usual, on my iPhone — to compose this post. It’s still an amazing little text editor. It’s reliable, easy to use, and fast. I’ve used it for a few years to compose almost all my blog posts on this site. Highly recommended. ❤️

Robert Reich

So when a friend phoned recently to tell me that my new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, was 1 on the Times nonfiction bestseller list (it’s actually right there at the top in this Sunday’s print edition!) I couldn’t believe it.

Robert Reich is a wonderful man and I’m very happy for him! 🥳

Daring Fireball

I don’t think the old icons for these apps from MacOS 15 were particularly good — Apple has mostly lost its “iconslook cool” game. But the new ones in MacOS 26 Tahoe are objectively terrible.

Tahoe and all the iOS derived OS’es has been universally panned since WWDC. I’ve been using it on my iPhone 11 to test some new features for Stream and I’m getting close to putting it on my daily driver.

It’s not been a horrible experience and I’ve run into some “surprise and delight” moments.

I’m planning on Stream supporting it day one in the most minimal of ways. A basic recompile to pick up the new look and I’ve added a feature I’ve wanted for a very long time.

Ryan Erik King • Jalopnik

The Cadillac F1 Team announced on Tuesday that it signed Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez to race for the team in 2026. The American team’s debut lineup will have a combined 26 seasons of F1 experience and will likely be the oldest driver pairing on the grid. Both drivers will be 36 years old when next season begins in Australia.

I like this combination of drivers! I kind of wish they’d picked up Danny Ricciardo, but I really do like this pairing.

Here’s hoping Cadillac have a great 2026 season! 🥂

Anthropic Blog

We view browser-using AI as inevitable: so much work happens in browsers that giving Claude the ability to see what you’re looking at, click buttons, and fill forms will make it substantially more useful.

I’m not a fan of the current tracking done by some browsers and websites and this sounds very big brother to me. I think I’ll nope out of any browser AI extensions. Good thing I prefer Safari. At least it doesn’t have an AI piece, yet. 😂

Jennifer Ouellette • Ars Technica

The findings confirm that, while Twitter was once the platform of choice for a majority of science communicators, those same people have since abandoned it in droves. And of the alternatives available, Bluesky seems to be their new platform of choice.

It’s a shame more folks didn’t discover how amazing Mastodon really is. It’s not governed by just one company on one big server instance. You have the freedom to start your own! It’s open, no ads, and you can manage it the way you want.

Mr. Shiffman could have started his own scientist based Mastodon Instance and made signing up for it only available to scientists. That’s a good thing! It would still be a part of the overall Mastodon community.

GitHub Community

Over the past few months, Github has been getting slower and slower on Safari. It has now reached a point where it is unusable.

I hadn’t really noticed this since I’ve been using Chrome for a client project but it was recently fixed so I’m hoping we’ll see it in all the 26 versions of Apple OS’es.

Is wonder if it’s fixed in Purple Safari?

Jason Torchinsky • The Autopian

I say this because it’s a no-joke track monster that ran the Nürburgring in 6:52 and yet it’s also shockingly comfortable for a normal, multi-hour road trip that won’t leave you feeling like you spent five hours in an industrial washing machine when it’s done. I’m not speculating when I say this, either: I know from experience, because I rode in Autopian co-Founder Beau Boeckman’s brand-new Mustang GTD as we drove over 300 miles from Los Angeles to Monterey.

I need to go checkout the video of their trip. I’d really like to see more of the car. It sounds like they had a really good time.

Do you think Mr. Boeckman would let me drive it from California to Virginia and back? That would be incredible! 🏎️

America by Design Fail

How did you think people would react when you fired the government’s most talented designers and engineers from 18f and the United States Digital Service and then tried to roll out this shit?

The folks around Marmalade Messiah all seem to be really bad at whatever they do. They’re all just a bunch of grifters.

He’s hoping we’re able to get rid of this administration next cycle and we get the 18f team back together. 🤞🏼

This biting horsefly landed next to me and the darned thing is huge!

I’m tellin’ ya, east coast bugs are scary.

I think it’s planning on eating me. 😳

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Its been a pretty normal type week, nothing exciting to talk about. I did get a haircut! 😁

Work on Stream continues at a blistering pace!🤣 The feature I hoped to complete a few weeks back is nearing completion but I’ve hit a real snag on device only. I think I know what it is. Goodness knows I hope I’m right because I’ll be stuck if my change doesn’t work. Such is the way it goes!

Enjoy the links.

Marina Dunbar • The Guardian

Brent Hinds, the former lead guitarist of the acclaimed heavy metal group Mastodon, was killed in Atlantaovernight.

RIP 🪦

Sean Tilley • We Distribute

CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse

A new payment system based on the Fediverse sounds great but will it catch on and be safe and secure? I’ll be interesting to see who adopts it.

Jason Lalljee • Axios

Cracker Barrel changed its logo this week, a move that was quickly and widely disparaged by MAGA figures who decried the switch as a “woke” gesture.

This has gone so far off the rails. Look, I’m not a fan of the redesign but I’d imagine it wasn’t done for some nefarious reason and the original company has long since outgrown its roots.

I’ll continue going there for breakfast. I like their pancakes. 🥞

Michael Hiltzik • Los Angeles Times

As it happened, GPT-5 was a bust. It turned out to be less user-friendly and in many ways less capable than its predecessors in OpenAI’s arsenal. It made the same sort of risible errors in answering users’ prompts, was no better in math (or even worse), and not at all the advance that OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, had been talking up.

Lots of hubbub over GPT-5. I guess folks really fall in love with certain models? But, like with any other software, big, buggy, changes tend to make folks unhappy.

Paul Klauser • CarMax

If you have six engineers, and everyone’s paired up, you’ve now limited your WIP to three items of work instead of six. That work is being continuously reviewed through the pairing process, and is ready to be merged quickly, without introducing the delays we sometimes associate with code review.

I got to work with Paul at WillowTree. He’s a super smart fella and extremely nice. He was one of those superstars at the company. Technically gifted and extremely kind. CarMax is lucky to have him. WillowTree was unlucky to lose him.

Barry Petchesky • Defector

Ah, but there’s a rub. Microsoft explicitly warns users that its AI function should not be used for things like “doing math” or “anything actually important”

Sorry, this made me laugh. Let’s take Excel, a tool relied on by a hojillion people and make it less useful. 🤣

Please, for the love of Pete, stop shoving AI into everything.

Notion recently did this and it started trying to record my meetings. No thank you. I turned off all of its AI capability.

Look. I think it’ll be fine for use in my dev environment but I’d rather be selective about it. Put it in a setting somewhere and let me turn it on. It should be off by default. 🙏🏼

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft and Asus are putting a date on their new Xbox Ally handhelds: October 16th. Both the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X will be available on the same day in a variety of markets worldwide, but Microsoft and Asus aren’t opening preorders yet or revealing pricing.

I don’t really understand these devices. Are they meant to fully replace an XBox? Are they like the Switch and dock to play on the big screen but easy to carry around? It seems like it but it also seems like it can’t play all games?

Someone, please, straighten me out.

Oh, and the rumored price of $699 and $1,049 sounds really expensive.

Paul Krugman

Notice that I said short-term, not long-term. This isn’t about AI causing unemployment by replacing humans. We’re talking instead about the risk of a recession if the current surge in AI-driven investment turns out to be unsustainable.

Mr. Krugman seems a bit bearish on AI. There’s a lot of talk about an AI bubble and I can see that. At some point one or more of these AI only companies is going to fail and disappear or be acquired by someone else. Seems inevitable.

The power situation seems pretty dire to the continued existence of AI companies and they absolutely need to provide their own power and be held to environmental standards. Space Karen’s xAI is such a bad citizen and Tennessee is pathetic state for allowing it to go on.

Shari Sharwood • The Register

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has suggested firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs is “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

I like this. We’ve seen stories of companies firing employees in favor only to ask the employees to come back because AI isn’t really ready for prime time.

One thing LLMs are good for is development. I’ve seen some good work produced by them. You still need an expert to check the work but it can be a handy little helper.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This week Kim and I celebrated our 38th wedding anniversary. Tonight we’re going out for dinner and enjoy some quiet time together.

Work’s been fine. I’ve been spending time on odds and ends, mainly fixing bugs this week, which I enjoy doing. I’m weird that way. I really enjoy tracking down bugs and doing the work other developers would rather not do.

Overall it’s been a great week. 😃

Let’s get to the links and my crummy opinions. 😁

Sergey Tkachenko • Winearo

Recent observations from users on the social platform X have uncovered performance issues tied to the Windows 11 Start Menu, revealing that the component is built using React Native - a framework known for its cross-platform flexibility but criticized for inefficiency in system-level applications.

This is a bit of a puzzle to me. Sure, React Native is fine for building applications. But Mark Russinovich declared Systems level programming should abandon C and C++ and use Rust for new projects. He’s also stated they’re not abandoning C#/.NET as a viable option but Rust should be the preferred language where a garbage collected language isn’t a good choice.

It seems logical to be that Microsoft would use Rust or even C# to build the Start menu, not React Native. C# should perform well and provide the security desired by the Windows team and Russinovich, especially if the React Native based solution is slow and heavy. 🦀

Dan Gillmore via Mastodon

A publication I respected greatly just switched platforms, from Ghost to the odious Substack. I canceled my (paid) subscription and explained why.

It’s all about that cheddar! Dollar signs are driving adoption of the Nazi haven, Substack.

I figured that was the case and why not? We have a fascist government now, why not use a Nazi loving platform to host your newsletter, even if you’re Jewish!

Open Web Advocacy

Readers may recall that Japan recently passed the Smartphone Act, officially the Bill on the Promotion of Competition for Specified Software Used in Smartphones. Among its most important reforms is a direct prohibition on Apple’s long-standing ban on third-party browser engines on iOS.

The big thing holding back browser vendors is Apple’s insistence they create a brand new app. Why can’t they just make their current apps use their own browser engine? It seems malicious compliance things Apple likes to do. It’s silly and they should stop.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft is starting to roll out lightweight taskbar apps for Microsoft 365 users on Windows 11. These taskbar apps will automatically launch at startup and provide quick access to contacts, file search, and calendar straight from the Windows taskbar.

It’s interesting to see these kind of apps spring up. It’s as if the Office Apps are so big they need small helper apps to make the experience better.

I’ll bet they’re written in React Native. 😄

Victor Tangermann • Futurism

And the latest poll conducted by Gallup seems to confirm that Musk has become genuinely hated: a whopping 61 percent of 1,000 randomly selected adult American respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Musk, topping the list of most despised global figures.

Does it surprise anyone that Space Karen is so hated? Not this kid.

I really wish Tesla would fire him so they can begin of process of dragging their reputation out of the gutter.

Maurice Parker

I have every intention of maintaining and updating Zavala for as long as I am able. I’m also committed to keeping it free. I have no intention of getting you hooked on using it and then starting to charge a subscription.

Maurice is a good dude. He spent a bunch of time working on NetNewsWire, all for free of course.

I’m not an outliner type myself but I’ll bet Zavala is really good given Maurice’s talent.

M.G. Siegler • Spyglass

And wait. I’m taking this all way too seriously now. Again, this is clearly a marketing stunt. As it was the first time Perplexity floated it. And just as it was when they floated buying TikTok too. Perplexity loves this shit. And the press eats it up. And now I’m eating up the leftovers! Because guess what? Google is not selling Chrome! So this is like a strawman at an auction.

Yeah, this was, and is, silly. But, we all talked about it for a week or so. Oh, apparently Perplexity has already forked Chromium and built their own browser, called Comet. Who knew! I certainly didn’t.

Steven Vore

In my last post, about test automation, I wrote about using sleep : “Bad, bad, bad. Don’t do this.” But why not? Well, the way I was doing it there — until d.exists? — really wasn’t that horrible. What you really want to stay away from, and what I’ve seen people start out with, is sleep with a hard-coded time value. “But I know the app’s going to take a few seconds to be ready,” they say, “so I just put in a 5-second delay.”

The internet is a marvelous place, isn’t it? This piece is now 12 years old but is still very relevant. See, those old timers know what they’re talking about. 👨‍🌾

The Onion

In a gesture many critics have decried as yet another blatant bribe to secure favorable regulatory treatment, Frito-Lay CEO Steven Williams presented President Donald Trump this week with a 24-karat, solid gold Funyun.

The Onion is kind of a perfect news paper for the times we live in. 🧅

Kim hangs two ferns on our porch every summer. She has to hang new ones because the birds that nest in them destroy them.

As I was taking pictures of the two babies in this shot the one on the left flew away. The other one is still hanging out.

On the other side of the porch we still have two smaller babies hanging out.

Iconfactory • The Breakroom

While the Iconfactory is hard at work on Tapestry, Linea Sketch, Wallaroo, and Tot, we also find ourselves at a crossroads: we have too many apps and not enough time to keep them all up-to-date.

Whoa! Based on my reading here it looks like whoever reaches out is going to get their hands on some good stuff. I’m surprised xScope is not on the list of keepers!

If anyone from Apple happens upon this post. Please, please buy xScope and make it available as a tool for all developers. It’s an amazing piece of software and is darned useful. Oh, also snap up Frenzic and make it a permanent addition to your games collection!

Hell, just buy Iconfactory, it’s a small company and you’d get a bunch of really amazing people and fantastic apps to boot!

Emma Roth • The Verge

Perplexity has just offered to buy Google Chrome for $34.5 billion — a bid that’s far more than the AI search startup itself is valued at, according to reports ~from The Wall Street Journal~ and ~Bloomberg~. The startup sent the unsolicited bid on Tuesday, just months after ~Perplexity said it would buy Chrome~ if the government ~forces Google to sell its browser~.

I’m thinking Perplexity is trying to stay relevant. They’re probably not going to survive as a company when the great AI consolidation comes.

This is almost certainly a way to get them in the news because they could go to the Chromium project and contribute to it as well as forking it and making their very own Perplexity branded browser. Heck they could probably get Brave or The Browser Company for much less. Hey, there’s even WebKit and Firefox if you want to start with a different browser engine, right?

But, there is a very obvious answer to their offer, right? 🤔

Just vibe code your own browser in a type safe language like Swift or Rust and rule the world! 😈