Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Its been a week alone for Rob at the Fahrni household. Kim and Taylor have made their annual pilgrimage to California so I’m in charge at home. That means the house is a bit messier than usual and I do not attempt to make my side of the bed. 😁
Earlier in the week I managed to get a small Stream release out the door. You can read about it here.
I had Monday off and I used that time to submit my Stream release for review, write the blog post, and just do general stuff related to the app. It was so nice to sit at the coffee shop and do those release day things. I wish I could make a living at it.
Have you ever considered how many of the apps you use are projects by folks who make little to nothing from them? Sure, some make a living, but I’d imagine most supplement their app income by consulting or working a full time job somewhere else. Please, support indie development.
Ben Sarig didn’t question the mysterious wooden bench that popped up at his bus stop on Mission Street in the city’s Mission District. He simply sat on it and gave his tired dogs a rest — no questions asked.
I really love hearing about things like this. It’s heartwarming to hear people still care about others and take time out of their busy lives to enhance the lives of others. ❤️
We like being on the cutting edge, but prior to OmniFocus adopting SwiftUI there weren’t many serious productivity apps trying to do major work with it! It’s gratifying to see SwiftUI make improvements each year which directly address some of our concerns and feedback and make it easier for us to build the kind of apps we build.
Seeing this makes me wonder how much SwiftUI is being used in Omni apps? Is it a smattering of dialogs and minor features or is it the main window, where all the important work takes place?
Rewrites are extremely costly so it would be illogical to rewrite large codebases. In the past I’ve advocated for Apple to make the Safari shell around WebKit 100% SwiftUI to prove it was useful. Of course that doesn’t make sense. Again, too costly.
What would be nice is for Apple to find a new productivity app to build and do it all in Swift and SwiftUI. Prove it’s really excellent for building major applications. Fix the performance problems and make it feel like it belongs.
So far it seems to be really great for little apps, I’m thinking of the Overcast rewrite or apps like Tapestry from Iconfactory. Small apps are one thing. Large apps are an entire other category. Things like Pages, Keynote, and Numbers.
Then again I can’t see new, major apps, being written for a specific platform. New apps are targeting the web. The most useful productivity app I can think of is Figma. I’d call it large app and it runs on anything with a certain level of browser support! Heck, it even works in Safari! 😁
Myank Paymar • BleepingComputer
Notepad now lets you use markdown text formatting on Windows 11, which means you can write in Notepad just like you could in WordPad.
Why shouldn’t all editors support Markdown? Seriously. It’s just text. Rendering the formatting is the most difficult part but the basic support requires nothing more than some help formatting. E.G. If I want a bold element make a button in your UI that adds the bold Markdown element around selected text. Easy peasy! 👍🏼
The First Time I Was Almost Fired From Apple
Great story from a former Apple employee who worked on Mac OS settings, in particular the color control panels. We can all thank him for his beautiful work. Thanks, John!
Open + web == lost cause?
Dave has done so much for the web and is constantly pushing new apps and ideas into public view hoping to get traction in certain directions.
He’s done what he refers to as Textcasting and built a really nice, simple, web based writing tool on top of WordPress.
He is certainly the biggest fan and proponent of RSS. Why not, he is the author/co-author of it. It’s the basis of podcasting. Why not take it to new places?
To that end Dave has been pushing for what he calls two way RSS or inbound and outbound RSS.
He’s frustrated by the complexity of ActivityPub and AT Protocol. I can’t blame him. He’s always pushed for simplicity and why not? If it can be done simply why make it difficult?
Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.
The evolution of the Mac Control Panel. What a nice bit of history and a lesson in the evolution of design.
At approximately 12:38 p.m. Eastern time, July 8, 2025, Grok became unwoke. But Musk may have overshot a little, as the chatbot posted a vile antisemitic reply regarding a vile troll account pretending to be a Jewish person celebrating the flash flood deaths in Texas. Grok soon began to shitpost at a geometric rate. In a frenzy of enthusiasm, shitlords quickly got it to state that Adolf Hitlerwould know what to do with these pesky Ashkenazi Jews, and as Twitter staff started deleting posts in a panic, Grok soon denied that it had said that at all — oh, it had! — and then started calling itself “MechaHitler.”
It’s safe to say Space Karen is 100% a Nazi piece of crap. How can you not come to that conclusion given his behavior? Nazi salute. LLM that spews antisemitic tropes.
Dude is dangerous and needs to be shunned by all of humanity.
Please, ship yourself to Mars so we don’t have to listen to you or hear about you any longer.
Just go away.
In this project, we will be building a JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler for a very small subset of C that I nick named μCto gain confidence in recursive descent parsing and generating machine code programmatically.
I’m so impressed by folks who can build stuff like this. I’ve never tried it but always wanted to. With tooling like LLVM it’s easier than ever to build a new language.
Personally, I’d love to do a compiler based on Microsoft Professional Basic.
Automatically Packaging a Haskell Library as a Swift Binary XCFramework
Why not Haskell? React Native embeds JavaScript into native apps and uses native JavaScript runtimes to execute code. It makes sense to pull interpreted language runtimes into your apps if it’s something you’re familiar and productive with. Do it!
I hate CSS
Don’t we all? 😃
