Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Nothing much to talk about this week. I got a haircut and had a bunch of random thoughts about blogging and feed readers. 🤣
Of course I’d still like to make a living working on Feed Readers and Blogging tools. Someday, oh yes, someday. 😃
That’s my long way of saying that this is my last More Color column at Macworld. Thank you so much to everyone at Macworld for the chance to keep my name attached to this brand for an additional 11 years on top of the 17 I spent in my first life as an editor. Thanks to my editor, Roman Loyola, who was already working at MacUser magazine on my first day there in 1994 and is somehow still working with me. And thanks to all of you for reading my words here over the years. I’ll keep bleeding six colors&xcust=1-0-3175482-1-0-0-0-0&sref=https://www.macworld.com/article/3175482), and I know that you will, too.
The bad news is the Macworld reading crowd will, I’m sure, miss Jason’s work. The good news is, he has Six Colors. As a subscriber I’m hopeful it will continue publishing far into the future.
Thanks for your dedication to the Mac and the Mac using community, Jason!
See you over at Six Colors.
What if, instead, I spend a week testing if Anthropic’s new model can rewrite Bun in Rust?
At first, I didn’t expect it to work. A few days in, a high % of the test suite started passing and I saw how much the new Rust code matched up with the original Zig codebase. My opinion went from “this is worth trying” to “I’m going to merge this”.
Bun is one of those projects that fascinates me. One fella on a mission managed to create a beloved product and continues to love and care for it today, albeit with better resources.
If you’re a software engineer you owe it to yourself to read this article. It goes into great detail how the porting process used Claude Fable to great effect.
Hats off to Jarred for undertaking such a risky port and for teaching us how to use Claude for extremely deep work. It really is impressive.
Ben Gutierrez • Hawaii News Now
Hundreds gathered along Magic Island and Ala Wai Boat Harbor Friday to watch solo rower Kelsey Pfendler complete her record-breaking journey from California to Hawaii.
With all the war and political upheaval in the world it’s nice to see the human spirit of adventure survive and thrive. Congratulations to Kelsey Pfendler on an amazing feat of human strength and endurance. Not only did she make it across she destroyed the prior record of 52 days by nine days, coming in at 43 days to accomplish the feat. Wow! 🥳
We need to stop pretending that “the cloud” is a place. It’s not a place. It’s a promise—and promises are only as good as the entity making them. The web was supposed to be decentralized, resilient, a network of nodes that could route around damage. But in practice, we’ve spent the last decade centralizing our lives into a handful of walled gardens, each with its own exit strategy and its own definition of “forever.”
Mr. Zeldman has been writing a lot more over the last six months and I for one am here for it. I’ve always loved his openness, honesty, beautiful writing, and his technical prowess.
We owe a lot to Mr. Zeldman for his steadfast nurturing of web standards and the open web. Keep on keeping on Mr. Zeldman!
Last week, Luka and I worked with the hosts of Accidental Tech Podcast—Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa—to design new Liquid Glass icons for their apps. Each submitted their own brief, and we created icons to meet their expectations and look exemplary on macOS 27 and iOS 27.
These icons are beautiful! 😍 It’s so nice to see professionals at the top of their craft.
The ATP boys talked about the icons on Episode 699: Not the Correct Squircle
If I had to pick a favorite from the collection it’s a tossup between John’s SwitchGlass and Marco’s Overcast icons. I suppose my absolute favorite is Overcast’s alternate teal icon. The blue circle in the main icon is also really nice!
I wish Apple would remove the squircle jail from macOS so John could use his original SwitchGlass icon. It’s gorgeous.
Oh, and I agree with John’s take that your icon should be better than your app! I honestly think that’s why Stream is downloaded. The icon is gorgeous (yeah, I’m biased. 😃)
(Y’all didn’t think you’d get away scot free of a Stream mention today, did you? 🤣)
Switzerland bolted 5,000 solar panels onto a dam wall 8,000 feet up in the freezing Alps where everyone said solar made no sense, and the plant now makes three times more winter power than any farm down in the valleys
How ‘bout those Swiss? 🤣
I suppose if you’re gonna have a manmade dam high up in the Alps you might as well make good use of it, right?
Bring on the solar! 🌞
Oh, and speaking of the Swiss. They meet Argentina tonight in the World Cup Quarterfinals. They’ll definitely have their hands full! Let’s go!
It’s one thing for Apple to force all of its own app icons into the same identical shape. That would be bad enough, because Apple’s own Mac apps are numerous and popular, and as the platform owner Apple necessarily sets the direction that many third-party apps follow. But it’s just downright spiteful to enforce it platform-wide.
Maybe if we make enough noise in the Mac and iOS community Apple will give us the ability to have icons outside of the squircle again?
Me complaining won’t help but if enough of the Mac punditry, well known Mac fans, and Mac developers make enough noise, maybe? 🤞🏼
A new app called HyperTexting is making it as easy to surf the web as it is to scroll through a social media feed, like Facebook or X. The app, newly available for iOS, also aims to make updating your own personal website as simple as sending a text message.
Wow! Yet another beautiful entry in the feed reading family. This is a really nice take on feeds as social timelines and it takes things a bit farther by allowing you to post to your blog. Yes, this is yet another feature on the already extremely long Stream todo list. 🤣
If you’re listening closely, the lyrics of “Born in the U.S.A.” make its subject pretty clear: The 1984 hit by Bruce Springsteen describes a Vietnam War veteran who returns home to desperate circumstances and few options. Listen only to its surging refrain, though, and you could mistake it for an uncomplicated celebration of patriotism. You wouldn’t be the only one.
It’s a high energy song performed by a high energy performer but it’s really depressing if you listen to the lyrics. It’s the experience of a lot of our vets. They come home to nothing without hope. Those transitions have to be brutal in a country that celebrates service but it stops when people need it the most. They need that support when they’re back in civilian life.
From 1 July 2026, energy retailers in NSW, South Australia, and South-East Queensland must give households at least three hours of free electricity every day. No solar panels required. No need to own your home. You just need a smart meter and to opt in through your retailer to have access to free daytime electricity
Ahhhh, more smart use of solar. The older I get the more I’d like socialized medicine and education and I think I’ll add power to that list. We all need power to run our lives. Having a single, stable, protected, shared power grid seems like a natural candidate to socialize. Doesn’t it?
Of course it’ll never happen because ‘murica. 🤣
After muscling its way into the console space nearly 25 years ago, Microsoft’s gaming division is at its lowest point ever. And the fallout from some disastrous decisions is going to get very ugly in the coming weeks and months.
The whole Xbox thing is a real mess. First buy up a bunch of studios, then declare you’re focusing on PCs, then declare Xbox is no more, then name a new head of Xbox who turns around and declares it’s here to stay.
Now we get layoffs and studio spinouts. Wild. I hope the folks who were let go find a good home and the new small studios are able to stay afloat.
Apple, if ever you wanted to do some games work for the Mac now could be a good time to pickup some people to do the work. John Siracusa and Quinn Nelson have made good arguments for it. But this is Apple. They don’t do serious gaming even though they make serious gaming dev tools.
Hey, Mr. Ternus, it could be a way to get into more homes and make more cold hard cash that adds to that “shareholder value.” 🤣
Microsoft is eliminating 4,800 jobs, representing 2.1% of its workforce, with the company’s Xbox division losing about one-fifth of its staff in the software giant’s latest effort to cut costs in the era of artificial intelligence.
More on the Microsoft Xbox debacle. It’s all AI or bust these days. Let’s jam it into everything whether it needs it or not.
Yes, I have thoughts and opinions on AI in everything, but that’s for another day.
Julie Johnson • San Francisco Chronicle
On a historic Santa Rosa street, neighbors have been watching a redwood tree grow like a living monument over years, decades, lifetimes. They’ve seen the slow-motion work as its roots muscled large chunks of concrete sidewalk up from horizontal placings into a nearly vertical, catawampus mess.
The sidewalk is impassable and has been for years. This spring, the city issued the property owner a permit to cut down the tree and restore the sidewalk. It’s the cleanest solution, but one that spurred a passionate neighborhood campaign to save the towering redwood tree with a 4-foot-wide trunk that they now call Rosie.
I’d like to see this tree saved but I can understand why they may need to cut Rosie down. It’s a real bummer of a situation. Too bad they can’t, or won’t, use the Japanese technique of nemawashi to relocate it. See below! 😃
Before a tree is moved, specialists carefully prepare its root system to improve its chances of surviving in a new location. The technique, known as nemawashi, combines centuries of horticultural knowledge with modern engineering and reflects Japan’s long-standing respect for nature and cultural heritage.
This is incredible. The Japanese, like Native American’s, really embrace nature. It’s a beautiful thing and we need more beautiful things in this world.
As one New York financier told Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
Ouch. Yes, we still need to exercise our brains. LLMs are just another tool, not the only tool. Your bain is the best tool you have. Nourish it.
