Rob Fahrni

Hayseed

Stream for Mac is a very minimal Mac application, just as the iOS app is for mobile devices. It syncs locally based on feeds you add yourself or import using OPML. It includes keyboard shortcuts that should feel familiar and uses the same core set of code used in Stream for iOS. If you run across a blog in your browser and you’d like to subscribe to it just tap the share icon and select Subscribe In Stream to add your feed. Easy peasy.

Stream for Mac finally made it’s way to the store, along with a slightly updated Stream for iOS.

I wanted to learn how to build a mac application from scratch so I got started on it about five years ago, maybe six. 😳 In that time I scrapped what I had and restarted it too many times to count. The UI went from AppKit to SwiftUI and eventually back to AppKit where it stayed.

Those types of details do not matter for announcements, but this is my personal blog so I can mention them here. 😁

It’s been a lot of fun and frustration along the way. I shared a lot of what was happening in the Work Notes series of blog posts. Creating a truly great Mac App is extremely difficult (I’m not saying Stream is great, but I’d like it to be.) One day I want a true Mac Head to say “Stream is a Mac-assed-Mac-app.” That will bring a tremendous amount of joy to my heart and make the effort of building Stream all the more worth it.

I’m glad I decided to do this version of Stream in AppKit even though it would’ve probably been better to do the entire application in SwiftUI. As it stands there is one bit of SwiftUI in the Mac app and I’ll be removing that in favor of a newly developed AppKit version. I did the table view cell in SwiftUI because I was struggling with getting the exact layout I was after using AppKit. After many hours, days, months of frustration I finall have something in AppKit that does exactly what I’m after. I hope to get this release out the door soon (who knows how soon, soon is, but there you go.)

All supporting UI features around the application will be written in SwiftUI moving forward so I can share more UI code between the two apps. I say that but I’m not sure if it’ll be shared straight across? I’m thinking about the Settings dialog. On iOS it’ll be one way, on the Mac it’ll be like a Mac Settings dialog. So, mostly shared? 😄

Stream is, just like its iOS sibling, FREE. This release does not include a Tip Jar like the iOS version does but that’s coming when I have some time to make it. I need to add a Settings menu to the app and it’ll go there.

Thanks

I’d also like to give a big thank you to everyone who supported me in one way or another along the way.

I have to start with my family of course! Kim, Haileigh, and Taylor for putting up with me all these long years. I love you all dearly and couldn’t live without you.

I’m going to try to get everyone listed, if I forget you, I’m very sorry. Let me know and I’ll do an update! You know who you are!

• Ashur Cabera - Ashur has been such a huge help to me over the years with HTML help and reporting bugs. He’s the reason we have support for Custom URL Schemes. It was his idea! Thank you, Ashur! ❤️
• John Brayton - Yep, that John Brayton, developer of the incredible feed reader, Unread. John is extremely kind and supportive and has not only inspired me with Unread, he’s also given me tips along the way to make me a better developer. John is a fantastic developer and incredible human being! Thank you, John! ❤️
• Iryna Rivera - I work at WillowTree Apps with Ms. Iryna Rivera. She is a kind, thoughtful, compassionate person who just so happens to be an incredible software engineer! I call her The Queen of UI because she’s so good at it. Great eye for details and SwiftUI expert! Thank you, Iryna. ❤️
• Marc Palmer - Marc has been a friend for at least 10-years now. He’s given me some excellent development advice and feedback along the way. Thank you, Marc! ❤️
• Steven Vore - Steven is an OLD friend and early blogger. He’s selfless, super smart, and all around amazing human. Thanks, Steven. ❤️
• Bill Lazar - Another longtime friend and early blogger. I also consider Bill a philosopher who’s extremely compassionate for others, smart, and loves soccer to an extreme. Thanks, Bill! ❤️
• Lucien Dupont - Lucien has been a big supporter of my efforts to deliver Stream for Mac and he helped me to fix a long standing bug in Stream for iOS I had no idea I had. Thank you, Lucien! ❤️
• Joshua Nozzi - Joshua became a friend a few years back via Mastodon. He is one of the smartest folks I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. Thank you for all of your Stream feedback and support, Josh! ❤️
• Thomas Brand - What can I say about Thomas. He is a real joker who adds a lot of levity to Mastodon. I appreciate that. Maybe someday we’ll meet in person, Thomas. I’d like that. Please, do yourself a favor and check out Thomas’ website. It’s what the web is all about! Thank you! ❤️
• Mark Wyner - Mark and I are mutual follows on Mastodon and he’s very quietly supported Stream for Mac all along the way. Thank you, Mark! ❤️
• Scott Wright - Scott describes himself as “Husband, father, retired, software hack, and Apple nerd.” No wonder I like him so much! Thanks you, Scott! ❤️
• Ged Maheux - I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Ged in person but I’d love to. He is a kind soul, friend, and amazing designer at the shop he co-founded: The Iconfactory. Thank you, Ged! ❤️
• Sean Heber - Sean another kind, compassionate, human who makes incredible software at The Iconfactory. You’ll know him from his work on Twitterrific and Tapestry. Thank you for your encouragement, Sean! You’re a great software engineer! ❤️

The Iconfactory

I cannot say enough good things about The Iconfactory. They’re the folks behind Twitterrific which was my Twitter client of choice for years and years. I loved me some Ollie! LONG LIVE OLLIE!

A very special thanks to Ged, Cheryl, and Anthony. They did the incredible marketing illustration for Stream’s feature in the App Store a few years back — has it been that long? — and most recently they reimagined Stream’s icon for Apple’s Liquid Glass.

I’ve always loved Stream’s icon. The original was done by master designer Tim Van Damme and I absolutely adored it. I think it’s the best thing about Stream. You should get it just for the icon!

But I digress. This is about The Iconfactory.

What I love about the work they did on the Stream icon is how lovingly they treated it. It is the face of Stream afterall and they treated that face is a very kind way by taking what I see as great and elevating it to feel at home in our new Liquid Glass world, whithout taking away its identity. Compare the original to the updated version and you’ll see how nuanced the work really is!

It’s just gorgeous and I couldn’t be happier.

They’re a tiny company of extremely talented folks. They do everything from award winning Mac and iOS Applications to Award Winning Design. Marketing, Branding, Illustration, App Design, you name it, they have the talent to do it!

Hire them. You will not regret it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Well, well, well, it’s been a couple weeks since my last post, I think? Life is busy around the Fahrni household from early October through the end of the year. We love Halloween, host Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and have grandkids we love to hang out with.

Our youngest daughter has been living with us for the last five years. She finally decided she’s had enough of Mom and Dad and moved back to California. Of course we miss her but she has her own life to live.

We’re still moving stuff out of our storage unit and I have some lumber to pick up at the old house today, but we’re pretty much done, and now I can start organizing our shed out back with the storage unit stuff. Busy, busy, busy.

Work has been crazy for the last few months right on top of our moving busyness. I’m looking forward to enjoying a quite day on the weekend. Getting back to working on Stream on Sunday morning is going to be incredible. I have so much to do and hope to ship minor updates as often as I can. Stream for Mac has been an obsession for me and it’s going to go out the door, soon, I hope. 🤞🏼

I have a couple of catch-up things to do with Stream for iOS, then I can hopefully get some parity in them, where it makes sense.

Aaron Couch • The Hollywood Reporter

Patrick Stewart, the sophisticated actor who brought a Shakespearean touch to Star Trek and X-Men as he made an otherworldly transformation from British stage veteran to sci-fi icon, has died. He was 86.

Godspeed, Captain. 🪦

Paul Krugman

⚠️ WARNING: The link above goes to Substack, yes, that Substack, the one that supports Nazi’s and white supremacists. I wouldn’t normally link there but I think Krugman’s message is important. I really wish all these great writers would go somewhere else.

Which reinforces the point that control of Starlink must, one way or another, be taken away from Elon Musk. It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy, and it would be totally irresponsible to leave a crucial military asset in the hands of a racist, authoritarian conspiracy theorist.

I’ve heard a number of folks, from journalists to podcasters, say the government should take over SpaceX. If Space Karen continues to behave this way it seems like a decent option once we have an actual real government back in place.

Stevie Bonifield • The Verge

Asked about supply chain shortages, like the ongoing RAM shortage, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview that it’s “terrible” to have RAM in personal PCs instead of data centers.

Kiss my butt, Sam. Y’all drove the price of RAM through the roof and it’s not all yours to have. Us little folks need to get some scraps once in a while.

It’s crap like this that will have the peons — like me — outside your gates with pitchforks, tar, feathers, and a rail to ride you out on.

Start your own damned RAM manufacturing plant right next to OpenAI and make your own RAM. AI can fix it, right? Get going.

Craig Hockenberry

You hear folks say chemotherapy sucks, but until you go through it yourself, you don’t really know how bad it can be. It remains a popular activity only because it’s better than the alternative.

It’s nice to hear Craig is doing better. Cancer sucks and so does the treatment. Also, at some level, aging sucks.

GOOD TO HAVE YOU BACK OLD TIMER.

Jordan Novet • CNBC

Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees as AI leads to efficiency push

More scary stuff with AI at the center. Potentially 60,000 people out of work. How the heck do you fix that? If AI is going to result in computers taking over all these things then we need social safety nets that pay folks so they can survive.

Someone better come up with a good plan, and soon. I listened to a great episode of Decoder with Nilay Patel and Bill Gates, and Gates kept talking about abundance. What abundance? Folks will lose everything if AI takes their jobs. That’s not abundance, it’s cruelty.

I suppose I can get a job at Starbucks, which I’d be perfectly happy to do, but what if I have to compete with a few thousand other unemployed folks for one job? Yeah, it’s something I, unfortunately, think about often. I have survived at least five rounds of layoffs at my job. It’s not fun worrying about this every day. Yes, I do that, and it sucks.

Rant off.

Sean Heber via Mastodon

I sped up the Tapestry timeline by over 350% by getting rid of SwiftUI.

As a developer it feels amazing when you pull off something like this. It’s a time to feel smart and puff out your chest if only for the moment — because in 10 minutes’ time you may feel like the biggest idiot the world has ever seen.

Congratulations, Sean! That’s a big accomplishment.

I’ve decided that Stream is going to remain UIKit and AppKit for the main timeline view, which is a UITableView and NSTableView for their respective OS’es, and everything surrounding the UI in service of its main function will become SwiftUI.

For Thunder Chicken I’m going all in on SwiftUI.

Tapestry is a really great choice for a Unified Timeline style application that works with a number of services like Mastodon and Bluesky. It even works great with RSS, but you should use Stream for that. 😁

Tapestry runs $39.99/year and is worth every penny. It’s my daily Mastodon and Bluesky driver and gets better day-by-day because of Sean. ❤️

I hope to someday be as good as the people at The Iconfactory. Until that day comes I’ll keep plugging away at my craft. 🔨

Bruno Ferreira • Tom’s Hardware

Concerns have been mounting everywhere about the environmental impact of data centers, with alarms ringing at various environmental think tanks. The Sierra Club, one of the oldest environmental preservation organizations in the U.S., has now put forth an estimate that by 2030, U.S. data center buildouts will be outputting as much carbon dioxide as the entirety of Mexico, pushing back progress on greenhouse gas reduction by 15 years, Bloomberg reports.

What a terrible thing to think of. Hey, at least we’ll have great shareholder value as the world burns, right, RIGHT!? 🤬

One of these AI folks is going to get hurt or killed over this at some point. People will eventually have enough and we’ll see another Luigi Mangione emerge.

I’m not looking forward to that world, in either regard.

Allie Benegar • The Sun Gazette

EXETER – A new space for entrepreneurs and remote workers has come to the hub of Exeter.

The Colab opened in Exeter on Oct. 29 at 122 S. E St., bringing a space where entrepreneurs, remote workers and more can gather downtown. There, they’ll have a place where they can connect with others through a lively work environment or make use of the quiet spaces available at the site.

This is wonderful news for the little town of Exeter, my hometown! I was raised there, graduated high school there, and we raised our kids there, with little stints in Seattle and San Luis Obispo in between.

It’s a great little town and having a place like this would’ve been perfect for me if we were still living there, alas, we are not. But I hope some Exeter’ites take advantage of this lovely shared space and help it thrive.

I’ll be dropping by some day to say “Hi!” to y’all! ❤️

Sarah Jones • HS2 Media

Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds on 13 November and shutting its public API entirely by March 2027. The announcement went up on 30 September in r/redditdev.

Reddit’s stated reason is that RSS has become a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.

This is pretty sad for those of us that love using RSS to read news. Stream and all other feed readers could easily grab RSS from your favorite subreddit and display it. I used it for the NASCAR subreddit.

Not any more. C’est la vie. 😔

Jason Torchinsky • The Autopian

Wait, what? Discovery has an upside-down ‘s’ in its name? How the hell did that happen? Discovery was usually considered, by astronauts and NASA people, the jewel in the Space Shuttle crown.

As Jason says, once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and it’s only on one side of Discovery! Obviously a mistake! 🤣

But, this makes the legend of Discovery even more fantastic! Little mistakes like this make for great stories and the history of our once great space program.

Sally Ward-Foxton • EE Times

But according to Chris Lattner, CEO of AI software startup Modular (recently acquired by Qualcomm, where he now serves as executive VP of software engineering), chip companies should be wary of the limits of AI code generation. Making a kernel run fast is a very different problem from building software infrastructure we can depend on, he told EE Times in an exclusive interview.

It’s neat to see Chris Lattner’s name in the news again. I’m not sure if he likes that, but it’s nice to see he’s still doing interesting things.

When Chris left Apple for Tesla and left not long after joining Tesla I always thought he bailed because Musk was a bully and an idiot who was also a micro-manager telling Chris how to do his job. I’d put money on Mr. Lattner being a whole lot more intelligent than that con man Space Karen.

Hell, I’m an idiot and I think I’m probably smarter than Space Karen. 🤣

Louie Mantia

Despite being a Mac person since 2005, I’ve got a fair amount of nostalgia for Windows XP. The original “Bliss” wallpaper was a photo shot by Charles O’Rear in Sonoma, but there was also a modified version with a lower hill, punchier colors, and a lens flare dubbed “Energy Bliss” which shipped with Media Center Edition. Now, more than 20 years later, I thought it deserved another update.

Nifty! If you long for a little Windows in your life checkout Louie’s latest creation! Oh, and while you’re there check out his amazing collection of hand-crafted wallpaper and give him a tip. Tip Jars make the world go ‘round. 💰

Terry Chea • Associated Press

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. (AP) — When fall arrives and leaves start changing color, Mike Valladao, a systems engineer at a cybersecurity company, slips into his alter ego, “Farmer Mike,” also known as the “Picasso of Pumpkin Carvers.”

Folks who can turn pumpkins into art are amazing in my book. I wish I had the talent to do this kid of stuff. I’ve done some cool pumpkins in my lifetime, but these are absolutely incredible! 🎃

Marisa Kabas • The Hand Basket

Tom Hoyle knew he had a chiropractor appointment on Thursday, and when he remembered the office was halfway between his home in Charlotte, North Carolina and Trump’s rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina, he figured he might as well attend. He planned to make some good trouble at the event, but he never expected a Fox News reporter would hand him a microphone.

If you didn’t see the short viral video of Mr. Hoyle talking to a Fox News reporter go read this article and watch the video. It’s hilarious. 👍🏼

Karl Bode • Tech Dirt

Brendan Carr is a silly, hypocritical fascist who splits his time between destroying U.S. consumer protection standards and media consolidation limits, and abusing his position as FCC boss to threaten broadcast networks for airing stuff like comedy. Or journalism. Or politicians that the increasingly-unpopular President is clearly afraid of.

There’s a segment on The Vergecast called “Brendan Carr is a dummy” with its own little jingle and I’m here for it! 🤣

Stream for Mac is coming soon! I swear! It’s only been like, what, eight years in the making? 😳

Hot take on the Apple Music — iTunes — icon in iOS 27.2.

It doesn’t bother me. Do I like other designs? Yep. Sure do. Do I hate this one? Nope. I don’t.

This is going to sound really weird coming from me but it doesn’t look weird, or bad, to me because musical notes are usually displayed on paper. White paper.

I know, I know, it’s digital.

Also, look at that beautiful Daft Music and MusicBox icon. 😍

Yeah, they‘re amazing!

I love this Red Maple in our yard.

Miss Priss

Thank you to whoever left the Enormous Tip in Stream! ❤️

This means a lot to me! Thank you! 🙏🏼

Lucky Duck loves a good sink.

Chillin’ on the porch

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s been an eon since I posted! Moving as an older couple — no, I’m not that old — is a bit more difficult than when we were 20, 30, or even 40. I’m in such bad physical condition it doesn’t help. Shame on me for allowing myself to become this way.

BREAKING NEWS: As I composing this, Gracie, one of our puppers, needed to go outside. Off to the left I notice a light I’d never noticed before. That’s because it wasn’t a light, it was a transformer on fire! It blew. Now we’re without power. Luckily my Air can run on battery for quite a while. Since I can’t make coffee I may have to run to the closest Starbucks! 😂

Anyway, I hope you have a nice piping hot cup of coffee or tea in your hand as you’re reading this. Enjoy the links. 😃

NOTE: After going out and getting my coffee I came home and fell back to sleep, I’m tired, and don’t feel well. I woke up just after noon. So, this is going to be an afternoon edition of Saturday Morning Coffee. 😃

Associated Press

Mike Ditka, who won NFL titles as a player and coach with the Chicago Bears, has died. He was 86.

R.I.P. Iron Mike. 🐻

Stevie Bonifield • The Verge

Delivery estimates for the iPhone Duo slipped into next year in less than an hour after Apple opened preorders for it at 8AM ET on Friday.

The first question I asked myself was “Did they run out because they didn’t expect sales to be this high or was there a shortage of components?” I suppose either is likely.

I was never going to buy one because they’re just too rich for my pocketbook, but I sure do want one. 😃

Amy Worrall

For all my Mac apps of any notable complexity, I like to include a comprehensive (hand-written!) user manual. See the Octavo user manual and McKinley user manual for examples.

Amy knows how to ship software. I purchased McKinley because she’s an Indie and needs to be rewarded for her hard work and dedication to craft. McKinley is a beautifully built piece of software. It’s just the kind of software Mac users expect. To top it off Amy took the time to fully document it. That’s amazing! I don’t even think about manuals or help books. Shame on me! Good on Amy!

After reading the article go checkout her software.

[Liliana Fannin • Fresno Bee]

Fresno offers much cheaper housing prices than areas along the coast, with an average home price of $400,000, and was recently ranked as one of the 10 cities in the United States that have seen job opportunities increase.

You see these kinds of articles surface every few years, especially as home prices skyrocket in the Silicon Valley. Yes, it is a LOT easier to purchase a home in Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley of California but you have to be willing to pay in other ways. It’s extremely hot from May to October. It has air quality problems and if you’re an asthma sufferer you’ll struggle.

I grew up in Exeter, south of Fresno, and I love the valley but it’s not for everyone. If you’re ok with a nice dry heat you’ll do fine. You’ll just spend time in the Sierra or head to the beach on the Central Coast like most valley residents do. If you’re lucky you’ll have your own pool, but who knows how long that’ll be allowed given the constant drought situation?

Unlike Kim and I, my brother has been planted in his Fresno home for well over 20 years and he lives in a very nice neighborhood. One I’d love to live in if we were to move back.

Bruno Ferreira • Tom’s Hardware

Linus Torvalds posts his first AI-assisted patch to the Linux kernel, synthetic test clocks 23x performance leap — the bossman makes use of AI tooling himself after issuing clear pro-AI directives

LLMs are a very useful tool, that’s it, they’re tools, just like an editor or a debugger. There are many upsides as well as many downsides to their use. On the positive side they allow developers to do the same work much more quickly. I am still on an AI First team and using an LLM allowed us to move faster. It didn’t replace us, it just augmented our ability to produce code at a faster pace. I review all the code produced and I’ve hand made changes where I thought it was necessary, especially early on, but with the latest models and the addition of our own skills targeting the project it’s become very good at producing features that fit right into the existing codebase as if it were written by any one of the developers on the project. Granted, it was an existing project, with a team of developers who set the tone and rules of the road for the project. Claude adopted those rules fairly quickly and the skill reinforced them.

I’m not surprised to see Linus Torvalds trying LLMs on Linux. They’ve been trained on Linux and any other operating system they can get their hands on plus all the software in the world they have access to. They’re just a library of coding excellence as well as coding garbage but they have humans to keep them on the straight and narrow.

I’m also not surprised it was able to make a change that resulted in a 23x performance improvement. It’s still to be seen if that holds up under real world usage but it’s an interesting test case, isn’t it?

On the downside I hate a number of things about LLMs and their corporate masters. This is a very powerful technology run by greedy humans. Humans who want to be ultra wealthy and that’s extremely bad for the rest of us. I don’t want oligarchs in America running the country. Not to mention some believe LLMs will eventually kill us.

If reporting is to be believed AI companies are building data centers at such a fast pace they’re not considering the environmental impacts. Some states like Texas and Tennessee don’t seem to care so much about the average citizen and have allowed Space Karen and his ilk to operate disel powered generators to drive their data centers. That’s downright shameful. And then you have the water usage. I’ve heard they’ve solved for this by using closed systems. But those closed loop systems also pollute the water because they include a type of coolant. Also, shameful. It should be people before machines and these data center companies should be required to bring their own green / clean power and have a solution for water usage and pollution of that water. Not to mention the noise and light pollution issues associate with them.

Wendy Lee • Los Angeles Times

That was underscored this week when the streaming giant Netflix began shedding 6% of its workforce, or about 1,000 jobs — believed to be the largest layoff in the company’s history and exceeding the last round of job cuts in 2022, when it reported subscriber declines.

It seems all big companies eventually run into some kind of disruption that requires scaling back but the number of layoffs in tech in the last few years has been staggering.

I’m so grateful to still be employed.

NetNewsWire Blog

We’ve released NetNewsWire 7.2 for Mac with a new column view layout: choose View > Use Column Layout to switch. (Choose it again to switch back.)

Congratulations to the NetNewsWire team and Brent Simmons! This is a beautiful new(old) feature. The columns are really nice and are really bring a sense of organization to the app. I like the look but I still find a vertically oriented UI more to my liking.

I’m sure this new view will have a huge following. Great work y’all! ❤️

Lewis Wallace • Cult of Mac

In iOS 27.2 beta 4, Apple changed the Apple Music app icon from white musical notes on a vibrant red background to similar black notes on a white background.

The reaction was immediate and overwhelmingly negative after the beta came out Tuesday. Apple Music fans slammed the change, with some calling it one of the company’s worst design choices ever.

My gut reaction to this change was “Oh, I don’t like that at all!” After reading a few articles about the hate it’s been receiving and thinking about it for a bit, I came to the conclusion it’s not so bad. When you read sheet music what do you see? Black notes on a white background and this new design breks Music out of the blue and white icon hell that’s become Apple applications.

My favorite version is still the Apple rainbow on a white background. 🌈

Paul Brannigan • Louder Sound

“We had six different doctors and they advised us not to do the show. They said it would kill him. Ozzy said, I know I’m dying. If I miss a few months of my life, I want to go this way.” Sharon Osbourne on Ozzy’s farewell live performance

I’m always a little puzzled by statements like “They said it would kill him.” It makes me wonder what kind of evidence they have to tell someone if you sit in this chair on a stage and sing, it will kill you. How bad off was the man? It must’ve been really bad.

Anyway, the man got to go the way he wanted. That’s more than most of us will get. 🦇

Caleb Hailey

Introducing @socialspec.org: APIs for social engagement on the World Wide Web (of websites). Built on open standards.

I am absolutely fascinated with this little group of specifications. They’re all using open web standards to create a social like experience for websites. You’ll have to go read them to understand what I’m saying but I can tell you this, I want to implement this in Stream and I’d encourage other feed reader developers to do the same. It’s genius! Really excellent work, Caleb! 🙏🏼

Luca Versari, Moritz Firsching, and Philip Jägenstedt • Chrome Developer Blog

We’re excited to announce that Chrome is shipping decoding support for the JPEG XL (.jxl) image format starting from Chrome 155. JPEG XL is a next-generation image format designed to meet the needs of modern web developers and photographers. It offers 30-50% better compression than JPEG, lossless compression, built-in HDR support, lossless JPEG transcoding, and more.

I don’t have anything to say about this but web developers are probably going to love it, right? 🤔

Retool

Visual Basic’s initial release in 1991 was followed by five major versions (not including an ill-fated version for DOS). By the time Visual Basic 6.0 was released in 1998, its dominance was absolute: two-thirds of all business application programming on Windows PCs was done in Visual Basic. At its peak, Visual Basic had nearly 3.5 million developers worldwide, more than ten times the number of C++ programmers.

I LOVE VISUAL BASIC. I especially love the original, old school, version. The pre .NET Visual Basic, Classic Visual Basic as some call it. The story of how it came to be is even more interesting than I’d heard. Go read the linked story if you’d like to learn a bit about it.

I was a BASIC developer working on Accounting software when Visual Basic 1.0 was in Beta and we were lucky enough to get our hands on it, yes, through official channels if you must know! 😂 As a DOS mode developer it blew my mind that I could click on a button control in the palette, it would appear on the form, and I could double click it to write code for various different types of events supported by that control. It was absolutely genius. I have no idea how the current incarnation of Visual Basic.Net does it but I have a feeling it’s not as cool as Classic Visual Basic was.

Microsoft took Basic and this notion of programming for normal folks to the next level by embedding it into Excel and using it as the language behind Access. Then taking that experience and building Visual Basic for Applications. That opened the door to all kinds of amazing development for all the Office Apps and Visio. We were able to do really cool things with VBA and it allowed our users to do really cool things.

It’s surprising to me Microsoft let that whole idea get away from them. They stopped shipping and updating VBA 20 years ago and only touch the code if they need to. It’s still shipping in Microsoft’s Office apps, Visio, and other Windows Applications, like little known IntelliCAD, which was also a Visio product.

If you’d like to build a native Mac version of IntelliCAD, using native tooling, reach out, I’d love to chat about it. 😃

Alex Brown, Ashley Murray, Jennifer Shutt, Amanda Watford • Virginia Mercury

In the course of a single election cycle, the backlash against data centers has grown from an issue at local planning commission and city council meetings to become a flashpoint in state and federal races across the country.

Well, I alreaydy went off on my data center rant earlier. Suffice it to say I’m torn over our new technology. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon but I sure wish it had been pursued as OpenAI was originally pursuing it. Having commercial software teams, university teams, and government oversight and support, I think, would’ve been a good idea. Do we need more hojillionaires running the world? No. Could we use a regulated LLM to help us build things and be responsible about it? Yes.

It’s been over a month since I last posted Saturday Morning Coffee.

I have no idea when I’ll have time to do it again. 🤣

I can’t say what I’ve been working on since the beginning of the new year, but we rolled out to a small percentage of iOS and Android users today.

I will say it was a React Native Application that’s taken a year-and-a-half to complete. A full rewrite of the companies mobile applications as well as a redesign.

I’m so happy to get this out the door. Now we have to fix some bugs, make sure it works with the iPhone Duo, and add some additional features to make the user experience even better. 💃🏻

Ged Maheux • The Iconfactory

Today’s update of our personal timeline app, Tapestry, is the one you’ve been waiting for and pushes the app to a whole new level. Bring together your social media, RSS feeds, podcasts, YouTube and more in one chronological timeline—with no algorithm deciding what you see. Version 2 most notably enables subscribers to reply and post directly to Bluesky and Mastodon from within Tapestry along with loads of other improvements.

I love that Ged calls Tapestry a personal timeline app. That captures what Tapestry really gives you. It’s personal. You want to see your Mastodon timeline? Add it. You want to see a blog’s RSS feed? Add it. If you like Bluesky you can add that too! But Tapestry 1.0 shipped with those features. No big deal, right? Right.

With 2.0 the incredible folks at The Iconfactory have added the ability to post and reply to Mastodon and Bluesky posts. What!? Yep, you heard me. You can now reply to Mastodon and Bluesky posts and even create new posts. Their post editor is simple to use and supports the features you expect from Mastodon and Bluesky.

Tapestry is turning into something really special in our fragmented social media landscape. It has taken over Mastodon and Bluesky timeline duties for my previous dedicated Mastodon and Bluesky apps. Now I have a custom Timeline that combines Mastodon and Bluesky into a single timeline and leaves out the other feeds I follow. Yes, you can also make custom timelines with only the feeds you’d like to see in that custom timeline. Nice!

All-in-all Tapestry 2.0 is an excellent upgrade to an already solid, customizable, timeline application.

Epilogue

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of The Iconfactory’s work. I have been for years. My love for the company began with Twitterrific 1.0 and grew from there. They’re not only incredible engineers, they also have incredible designers. Combine those two things and you get beautifully crafted, solid, software. That’s why I love them so much.

It’s ok to be a professional software developer and also fanboy a bit. I’m not at all ashamed of it. I’ve been a happy fan and user of Iconfactory products for well over 15 year and I’ll continue to use and support their endeavors as long as they’re around.

For me the $39.99 per year subscription to Tapestry is well worth your investment. These folks don’t sit on their laurels. Look through Tapestry’s full version history if you don’t believe me. It’s extensive, and we’re only on version 2.0!

These folks know how to build timeline based software. If you ever used Twitterrific you’ll know what I’m taking about. Tapestry is 100% the spiritual successor to Twitterrific and is taking timeline management to new heights.

Buy it. Help the little guy give a massive🖕🏼to the man who destroyed Twitterrific and help The Iconfactory continue to build lovely, hand crafted, applications.

Finally moving the office.

I forgot I had this. This is what happens when you’re moving.

With today’s prices the way they are this 1TB SSD must be worth a hojillion dollars!

Bids start at $1mm US.

I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the hosts is Jewish. They said that support of Palestinians is antisemitic. There’s the source of my confusion. To me it would be like saying all Americans are racists because the KKK is a hate group, right?

In my mind there is a big difference between Hamas and Palestinians, or are they inseparable? I cannot imagine the answer being “Yes, they’re inseparable.”

The way I see things right now is the Palestinians are being exterminated. How in the hell can a people who were being exterminated by Nazi Germany do the same thing to others? It does not make a lick of sense to me.

I have zero problem with Jewish people. I have zero problem with Palestinians. Zero.

Reach out. Explain it. I really want to understand.

If you’re nasty about it I’ll ignore you.

Thanks.

Sydney Carruth • MS NOW

MS NOW White House reporter Laura Barrón-López and an MS NOW producer were denied access and had their passes confiscated, while another MS NOW producer was granted access. Politico said at least one of their reporters was blocked. CNN said some of its staffers were denied access, but at least one was allowed in.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the Trump administration early Thursday to temporarily restore White House access to journalists from the three national news organizations as litigation on the matter continues.

This man is going full authoritarian and blowing up our Constitution one piece at a time. There’s rumbling he’s going to declare Martial Law before the election. I wouldn’t put it past him.

If that does happen I’d expect some violence in the streets.

I hope Congress and the Supreme Court grow a pair and stop him from his continued destruction of the country I love. I’m not holding my breath.

I wanted to share what Stream would look like in Dark Mode since I use Light Mode all day and take my screenshots there.

It’s the economy, stupid.

Ged Maheux • The Iconfactory

Inktober isn’t about generating the perfect image; it’s about pushing yourself and your creativity, exploring ideas, styles and ways to enjoy the uniquely human process of creating art. Even if you’ve never drawn before, this is a great time to give it a try.

I have an older iPad my wife handed down to me. Maybe it’s time for me to really put my Linea subscription to use and attempt to draw something? 🤔

If I can get my act together I’ll make sure and post my drawings here so y’all can have a good laugh! 😂

I do enjoy drawing and, believe it or not, I could make some pretty cool stuff with Visio! Yeah, that Visio. 🤣

Let’s see if I can improve over the course of the month. Linea has all kinds of interesting tools and tutorials to learn from. 👍🏼

I really need to get back to Stream for Mac. It’s at a point where I’d like to release it, but I do have a couple things I’d like to fix before doing that.

Then I need to take a long hard look at the iPhone Duo. Hoooo boy. 😳 That’s gonna be a bit of work.

I already have so much I’d love to do with Stream. Least of which is supporting a new iPhone layout, especially one that’s changed the APIs. I’m sure it’ll be fine and will make for a better app, but there so much I can do to make Stream the app I really want. It’s just at the tip of the iceberg.

Some day, maybe? Until then, I’ll just keep hacking at it. 😃

Oh, yeah, right, then there’s Thunder Chicken to work on. 😂

Virginia traffic jam.

Are all of Space Karen’s companies poorly managed with terrible customer service?

As far as I’m aware I’m stuck with Starlink out where we live. So we picked a plan and the installer was supposed to be out September 12, that was yesterday. Today, we have no internet service. They rescheduled for September 24.

I knew they’d fail. I didn’t tell Kim how I felt about them because she knows how much I disdain Space Karen and everything he stands for. So yesterday I vented a bit. She was great and listened to me gripe and complain because she knew it wasn’t her I was pissed at. I have a great spouse. She knows I can lose my mind and she listens. 😃

Anyway, when I can finally get a MUCH BETTER option I’m gonna make sure I tell Space Karen’s company to let him know he can shove his internet device straight up his ass. 🤬

No Saturday Morning Coffee today. We’re still pushing hard to deliver some client work so I’m at my desk this morning, at the old place for internet connectivity.

I’m hoping our StarLink, yeah, yeah, I know, installation goes well today so I can work from home tomorrow. Gotta break down this desk tonight before going home this evening. At least that’s my current plan.

I’ve heard we’ll be working next weekend as well but we’ll see. I’m gonna do as much as I can to not have to do that. We still have things to move and Kim needs me at home helping.

Kim just sent me this picture of a little critter behind our house, by the storage shed. It’s difficult to make out but it’s a groundhog and I couldn’t be happier! I love these little fellas! 😍

I wonder if I can pet ‘em? 🤔

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

The word of the month is Tired. We bought what I hope is the final home we will ever have. Our forever home as folks like to say. With that comes boxing up and lugging boxes and furniture from one place to another. We hired bonafide professional movers for a day to get the bulky items to our new place. Now we’re making runs to the old home to pickup stuff and transport it to the new home. It is, quite honestly, exhausting. It took me two days to recover from the initial big push on Wednesday. Today we’re going to be back at it, in the rain no less. 😂

I told Kim — my lovely bride — I’m never moving again. I said I’d just walk into the back yard, lie down, and she could put dirt over me. I’m done. 😂

Once we’re settled I know I’m going to love being in the country. We’ve always talked about having a bit of land in the countryside and we’ve managed to pull that off.

I hope you enjoy the links.

John Scalzi

I’m now back at home after a red-eye, and rather than go to bed in the early afternoon, I’m going to write a post about winning the Hugo Award for Best Series.

I, for one, and very happy for Mr. Scalzi. I’ve only read book one of the Old Man’s War series but I enjoyed it very much, I’d started The Ghost Brigades but haven’t read in quite a while. I also really like his personality and his web presence. He’s had a site since September 13, 1998 and has a great blog.

He also seems to be a very nice human being. I really like that.

Congratulations, Mr. Scalzi! 🥳

Marco Arment

And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything.

The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang out with our friends.

Our casual work friends were just casual work friends. We didn’t expect them to take positions on the world’s most complicated conflicts. We could just talk about weather and TV shows, and maybe sometimes get a beer after work.

And our neighbors were just our neighbors.

Really great piece by Marco. I don’t ask my neighbors their political views but it’s often easy to figure out because of the flags and signs decorating their yards. But most are very kind and welcoming.

I had friends at my old coffee shop of choice who were not aligned with my views. It was ok. We found things to talk about outside of politics. It was fine.

Jowi Morales • Tom’s Hardware

Bill Gates calls for some jobs to be ‘Human Reserved,’ suggests taxing AI tokens and robots — billionaire says that ‘AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history’

It seems to me AI is progressing way too fast and has no rules around ethics. How should we allow it to behave? What kinds of safeguards should be put in place? There’s far too much turmoil in the world today without introducing mass layoffs because one of the many LLMs can be used to replace someone. So far we’ve been using them as a production accelerator, a really fast assistant.

We have seen LLMs go rogue and we have to figure out how to stop that. Yes, stop that. It can’t continue to happen. It’ll turn into the biggest waste of money and resources in history if it continues and who knows where it could ultimately lead. These things can be used for evil, just as they can for good.

The technology is incredible but we should approach it with a bit of fear and trepidation.

Jason Snell • Six Colors

In a bit of a late-August surprise while the world awaits word on the next generation of iPhones, on Tuesday Apple announced two new processors, the M5 Ultra and M6, which help power new iterations of its Mac Studio and Mac mini desktop computers. Both models are available to pre-order now and will ship on September 22 and will run macOS 27 Golden Gate.

For folks who want their Supercar of computers I’m not sure if Apple delivered that with the new Mac Studio or not but they’re very nice, and very pricey for a fully loaded model, just like a Supercar. Thank you LLM builders for the hike in RAM and storage. 🤬

It would be very nice if Apple could make expandable computers but they just don’t do that anymore. I don’t think it’s some kind of money grab. I think it’s all about size and speed. The complete integration of the SOC delivers both but in the end it makes them extremely expensive. Sure, Apple could lower prices but they’re very much into making lots of money so they have to maintain that huge margin they like.

It’s all about shareholder value and idiots like us keep buying them.

TC Sottek and Jacob Kastrenakes • The Verge

1Password faced immediate backlash from customers this week over a $300,000 pledge in support of a Linux distro created by David Heinemeier Hansson, who has regularly published overtly racist blog posts that include comments calling for deportation of ethnic minorities in Europe. The popular password manager is now a “distinguished corporate patron” of Omacom, the nonprofit foundation that oversees a popular Linux distribution known as Omarchy.

Yep, 1Password has stepped in it. They haven’t been the darlings they used to be for many years now. As soon as they made the choice to become an enterprise company and accept investment money the scrappy little Canadian company that could stopped being that.

Seeing anyone from 1Password support a nazi asshole is tough to watch.

Mark Tyson • Tom’s Hardware

Legendary Windows developer Dave W. Plummer has been busy finessing his revamped Task Manager. His latest release, dubbed TMOG (Task Manager OG), was vibe coded by feeding Claude “a 107-page spec,” says the mind behind the original 80KB Task Manager, which debuted publicly in Windows NT 4.0 (1996). TMOG doesn’t just work natively on modern Windows 11 systems though; it struts its neon stuff on macOS and Linux, too.

Now for a bit of fun news. This is a really nice story to read in the midst of all the crap happening in the world. It’s interesting to me because you have an “old school” developer do the old school thing by writing a huge specification. I haven’t seen one in years. Most folks just make drawings and talk about behavior. Anyway, this specification is kind of the perfect prompt for an LLM to go off and make something for you. In the end what did he get? A very niche bit of software that not only runs on Windows but runs on Mac and Linux. Each app is fully native, not some Electron abomination. By using an LLM to do the work he was able to use Swift on Mac, Win32 on Windows, and Qt for Linux with a shared C++ core. What a great piece of work!

I shared this a week or two ago with John Gruber because I know how much he hates Electron. This project is everything he appreciates and given some feedback I’m confident TMOG could be a real Mac-assed-mac-app.

Sarah Perez • Tech Crunch

Nitter, an open source project that allowed people to read X posts without logging into or even opening the X app, has received cease-and-desist letters from X demanding that it shut down. The news was shared via a brief message posted to the project’s website, and follows X’s earlier attempts to knock Nitter offline by technical means.

It was bound to happen. Space Karen doesn’t want anyone reading his crappy website without signing up. He, like Facebook, breaks the internet with his walled trash heap.

I don’t know much about Nitter except that I’d find links to it in my Mastodon feed occasionally. There are still folks on that disgusting site I’d like to read but refuse to use the system. Nitter at least allowed me to see what was happening when others linked to it.

Chris Schulz • West Virginia Public Broadcasting

West Virginia is largely untouched by data centers today. When completed, the 1.3 gigawatt Monarch Compute Campus currently breaking ground on the banks of the Ohio River north of Point Pleasant will become the state’s first and likely the largest on Earth. 

This is a real shame. I understand why places want these data centers. They want them for the tax revenue and “jobs” creation. On the flip side you’re going to destroy any good will the town, or jurisdiction, has with its citizenry and drive up the cost of electricity and water. Not to mention any other environmental impacts we can’t see.

The article includes a picture of a man watching a bulldozer build a berm just outside his back yard. No thank you. I’d find a way out of there as fast as I possibly could and I HATE MOVING! 🤬

We need strict regulation on data centers, especially around environmental, water, and energy harms. Oh, yeah, and the people.

Vaibhav Sisinty

Apple is the most important hardware company in AI right now. Without having built a single multi-trillion parameter model. OpenAI bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios. Not for employees. For training computer-use agents through reinforcement learning. Headless machines. No screens. No keyboards. AI agents running thousands of parallel sessions learning how to operate a computer the way you do. Anthropic is doing the same. Renting Mac minis at scale through AWS. Why Macs? Apple’s licensing doesn’t allow macOS on non-Apple hardware. If your agent needs to learn a Mac, you buy a Mac. Thousands of them. The demand got so intense that Apple pulled high-RAM configs from sale.

Can you imagine what’s going to happen with all of these computers when they decide to upgrade them? we should be able to find them for next to nothing. Of course they’ll probably be very outdated by then but could be useful as internet browsing and email computers.

Paul Brannigan • Louder Sound

A lot has changed since 1979. Since firing the singer who fronted the band on their first eight albums, Black Sabbath have hired and parted company with three more vocalists – Ronnie James Dio, Ian Gillan and previously unknown American singer David Donato – and now exist in name only, with original bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward having exited stage left too.

Meanwhile, having been dragged out of the darkness by his wife and manager Sharon, daughter of Sabbath’s hard-nosed manager Don Arden, Ozzy Osbourne is now a major star, his most recent solo record, 1983’s Bark At The Moon, already certified as his third successive multi-platinum US release.

I linked to this because I remember Bark At The Moon so well. It was huge at our high school along with the likes of Iron Maiden. I remember a lot of Ozzy and Eddie t-shirts roaming the halls. That Killers t-shirt is so iconic.

Good times. ❤️

Jennifer Ludden • NPR

On a recent Sunday, 30-year-old Collin Russell was desperately visiting open houses, looking to buy a place in the city that his wife is from. They left two years ago so he could go to graduate school, and they moved back to San Francisco in June, just as the housing market here has exploded.

“I couldn’t have timed it worse, honestly," he lamented after touring a condo in the affluent neighborhood of Presidio Heights.

San Francisco has minted a bunch of new millionaires and billionaires and they’re out on home shopping sprees. It’s hard to imagine a $1.6mm dollar home being inexpensive. Wow. 😳

Eric Berger • Ars Technica

On Tuesday, Johnston and a handful of other entrepreneurs announced the “Fermi Explorer” mission. In concept, it is simple. They seek to raise $15 million to build a small spacecraft, carrying a 1-kg payload, and launch it to Alpha Centauri such that it reaches that system in less than 80,000 years. Why? In conversations about the Fermi paradox, Johnston realized such a mission would knock two “filters” off the list: Species won’t want to send spacecraft beyond their home star, or species will find that interstellar transit is too difficult.

Talk about being patient! An 80,000 year journey? Maybe it will find a civilization capable of travel at the speed of light who could come visit our dead world. No, I can’t imagine this planet being livable in 80,000 years. If it makes it another 100 years I’d be shocked.

Pagecord

Pagecord is a one-man band. I use AI to assist with the running of the business. This page documents where and how AI is used.

TL;DR: Pagecord blogs are not used to train AI models, and Pagecord has no AI features in the product. I use coding LLMs (currently Claude Code) as an assistant when writing code. Pagecord also uses OpenAI’s content moderation service to check for illegal content, as well as spam signups.

I have a Pagecord account but I don’t use it. I supported it because I think we need more blogging systems, not less. Olly, the proprietor and sole developer, is doing an amazing job with the platform. He’s on top of things and is constantly adding new features to make it even better.

If you need a blogging platform Pagecord might be a good choice? Go check it out.

Aidin Vaziri

San Francisco-based Uber plans to eliminate about 3,300 jobs, or 10% of its global workforce, in the company’s largest round of cuts since the coronavirus pandemic. The restructuring was designed to reduce management layers, simplify the company’s organizational structure and free up money for growth, innovation and autonomous vehicles, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a message to employees Wednesday.

More layoffs. 😔 It’s so frightening to think about.