This would be a welcome UI change in macOS. I keep thinking about older operating system UIs and I miss that more chiseled look. I’ve also always loved the color versions of Mac icons and the angle they’re drawn.
I think I’m just feeling nostalgic but I’d love to see a modern take on this older MacOS look.
Seeing this right after a friend died is a real gut punch. So many folks just don’t know they’re gone. 😔
This is pure murder. Zero doubt.
These “agents” need to be brought up on murder charges, especially the first one to fire. What a coward. They cannot be trusted to serve the public much less carry a firearm.
Shut this mess down. Disband ICE and put someone in charge of Border Patrol who will conduct themselves with honor and integrity.
These “agents” are going to start being killed if they keep murdering peaceful protesters trying to help their fellow citizens.
Our democracy is lost. How do we take it back?
War.
⚠️ Before reading any further I’m posting links from writers I really respect who have chosen to use a service that supports and publishes Nazi content. I won’t mention the name here but if you’ve followed me on this blog or on Mastodon you’ve heard me mention it.
I’ve encouraged both of them to leave and find better places to write but I’m a nobody so my begging goes unanswered (by unanswered they don’t interact with their audience much.)
I’ve made a rule not to link to these writers and others as long as they’re using this despicable service but with the murder of Alex Pretti I felt it necessary to ignore my own rule for the moment.
It has been clear for a long time, to anyone willing to see, that the people running the federal government — Trump, Miller, Noem, Bovino and more — are monsters.
He’s coming after all of us who oppose his tyranny and brutality. All of us who defy his dictatorship. All of us who challenge his out-of-control, murderous goons.
Murder. Alex Pretti was murdered in cold blood for what? Filming ICE agents and trying to pick a woman up off the ground.
The man was shot 10 times. If that’s not an intentional act meant to kill him, I don’t know what is.
Our democracy is collapsing. When future generations of Americans and other countrymen write about the Second American Civil War they will name Minneapolis the event that catalyzed Americans to act. To use violence against violence.
Donald J. Trump, you are a thug, racist, pedophile, and rapist. You can now add murderer to that list.
It’s a dark time in the world and to have a once great nation fall this quickly is gut wrenching.
But I want to add another note. The main footage here comes from bystander Caitlin Callenson. Here’s her full 4m:25s footage, uncensored, hosted — with credit, and I hope, permission — on the YouTube account of Minnesota Reformer. Be warned that it shows Good being shot to death (albeit sans gore), and contains many loud profanities. This is very good and clear footage. It is difficult viewing but you should watch it. Callenson was very close to Good’s vehicle. I’d say about 30 feet or so. You can see why she thought to start filming before the murderous agent drew his gun and fired.
Go watch that video. When the ICEholes get out of their vehicles you can hear Ms. Good tell them “go around.” One agent approaches aggressively and tries to open the door. The other one is saying something but it’s hard to make out.
Then the asshole agent shoots her on the face. Once he does that he walks to the SUV, checks it out, turns around and walks away, ultimately LEAVING THE SCENE.
That man needs to get out of this kind of work if he’s that afraid.
He also needs to be brought up on murder charges, which he won’t, because the Trump administration is full of sissies who must’ve been bullied on their grade school playground so they hate everyone and have to carry a gun to feel safe.
In an email today from RetroSnap. (This site for this link may disappear soon.)
Alex here, founder at RetroSnap and the geekiest geek of retro gadgets. You may be receiving this message as part of a store-wide notification. If you have already received your order, please disregard this email.
We’re writing to share an important update regarding our store.
Due to recent increases in international import tariffs and related cross-border compliance costs, we’ve been forced to make the difficult decision to close our store and discontinue operations. These tariff changes are outside of our control and have made it impossible for us to continue operating sustainably. Please note that our business email will also be deactivated shortly.
So, I ordered one of these for Kim in early December, for Christmas. It still hasn’t arrived and I was really worried it wouldn’t get here, but I just checked and it’s due in Richmond, VA today. That’s a relief.
Also, thanks you damned Jackass in the White House whose last name rhymes with Dump. Those tariffs have been a real boon to the economy, right? 🤬
Jackass.
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.
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.
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.
There are two things I really like about the new iPhone Pro.
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.
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 don’t know what to make of Sleep Token. I like them, a lot, but what genre do they fit into? I’ve heard metal, and I can see that, but it’s a different type of metal, don’t you think?
I’ve thought of some names but they’d be new, I think? Operatic Metal or Theatrical Metal?
To me there is no doubting their musicianship.
You can hear the metal in songs like The Summoning but their new album, Even in Arcadia, is very melodic, not very metal. I know opinions will vary, that’s fine. Like I said, I like them, a lot.
They’re a melodic metal band. At times I’ve heard some Polyphia, at other times I hear grinding metal, and soaring lyrics, but it’s just great musician doing their thing.
Oh, I also love the look! If they haven’t said who they are they should definitely keep it a secret for as long as they can. I love the mystery of it. 🎭
Like Tool, they’re their own thing. At least that’s what I see.
ChatGPT and other AI services are basically killing @Iconfactory and I’m not exaggerating or being hyperbolical.
Reading this sent chills down my spine.
Iconfactory has a very long history of creating beloved applications and designs for Mac and iOS.
Their designers craft beautiful interfaces, icons, and other illustrations.
To think they could go away because people are using AI generated slop designs and icons is gut wrenching.
I’m a huge fan of Iconfactory work. I use their apps everyday. Two in particular; Tot and Tapestry.
I’m writing this blog post using Tot. It’s perfect for it. Simple text editor with Markdown support and automatic save that syncs with iCloud. It’s an example of simplicity that is absolutely useful. I’ve been using Tot for years to write all of my blog posts, including Saturday Morning Coffee. ☕️
Tapestry is a new app. It is a new take on feed readers. Sure, it’s a competitor to Stream but it’s beautifully designed and implemented.
I’m a Wallaroo and xScope user and I’ve heard wonderful things about Linea Sketch.
Their craft is second to none.
Stream had the honor of being featured in the App Store in October of 2023. I worked with Iconfactory to create the banner Apple needed for the feature. It was a completely painless process and the results were beautiful and better than I could’ve imagined.
If you need someone to design your app, icon, or other materials, give Iconfactory a shout you will not regret it. ❤️
“A federal court cannot force Apple to permanently give away free access to its products and services, including intellectual property,” Apple’s lawyers wrote in the motion.
I don’t like it when Apple makes claims like this. I know my software uses their SDK but I wrote the code that is the app, it’s not theirs.
Sure, the operating system is theirs, the tooling is theirs, and the software that gives our software access to the operating is theirs. But me selling an app using a different payment system denies them money and doesn’t jeopardize their “products, services, and intellectual property.” They’re worried about the, potentially billions, of dollars they could lose.
Just say that. Say “we’re going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars if people choose different payment methods.”
Or, or, how about this! Change your percentage to 5% and call it a day. I’ll bet folks wouldn’t change their payment mechanism then, because it would be competitively priced.
I’m happy for developers who want to take advantage of the new rules. Good for them and their bottom line.
I don’t make much off of Stream and RxCalc so I’ll probably continue to use Apple’s payment system.
The one that would really open them up is inbound RSS, the protocol that all the other twitter-like systems refuse to support. Want to blow the doors off now instead of some vague time in the future? Support outbound and inbound RSS. Let the trains come into the station and leave the station on a well established protocol. It could be done in a few weeks, really. Maybe the very intelligent and curious people who read this blog would like to take the time to understand what this means and the doors it would open? It’s a way to change the subject from “good idea but hopeless” to “hey we can have freedom now."#
When I first saw Dave mention inbound and outbound RSS I thought he was taking about a mechanism to do threaded replies using RSS so we could have something akin to Mastodon or Bluesky.
I was wrong. He would like to have the ability to not only subscribe to an RSS feed but also populate a social service timeline with an RSS feed. That’s a good idea.
Mastodon or Bluesky could add the ability to have your timeline subscribe to an RSS feed. When that feed changes it could publish the content into the timeline. There would be some intelligence baked in to know if it’s already posted the feed, and I’d imagine some other niceties, but the idea is really good!
The problem is the platform folks tend to say “use our API.” Which makes sense, but most API’s are painful in some way because of authentication or some hoop you have to go through. If the platform natively supported inbound RSS it would greatly simplify the developer and user experience. Let me pick an RSS feed to follow and use it! BOOM! 💥
Dave also believes Bluesky is leading us down the same path as Twitter. We’re all jamming our content into a centralized system. That’s not great. By having your own site with a weblog and the ability to publish RSS and have that content or link to that content published to Bluesky you’re not so locked in. Your blog is the primary source. A source you control.
To date I believe Micro.blog is the best at doing this. It supports ActivityPub so your @micro.blog account can be used as a Mastodon account and show up in your timeline. It also has its own timeline and it’s a full on blogging system. The post you’re reading now is a Micro.blog managed blog!
The other great thing it does is publish to other systems. My blog post text is either fully published to Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky or a link to the post is published if it has a title and goes over a certain character count. I believe this is the perfect solution to the limited character count issue on the various social networks.
E.G. when I publish Saturday Morning Coffee that post goes to this blog. Here’s what it looks like on Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky.
The main source is my blog. It’s then distributed to these secondary sources. Mastodon and Bluesky get links and Tumblr gets a full copy. 👍🏼
Now, Micro.blog goes to all the trouble to connect to those API’s so it can publish to each platform. That’s a royal pain for the team at Micro.blog. I am grateful they support all these platforms, but wouldn’t it be cool if Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr let me, the user, go to a settings screen and tell it to use my RSS feed instead? Yes, yes it would! 😃
Another great post from Dave.
Developers: This is the WordPress API. Compare it to AT Proto and ActivityPub. It's got a lot of advantages. It does the basics of social media. It scales, is mature and stable, and well-managed. A better foundation imho to build on than the others. developer.wordpress.com
It’s a real shame Substack loves Nazis so much. I thought it was a great platform up to that point.
Their iOS app is really quite nice and the styling of the website and app are fantastic. It gets out of the way and lets you do what you’re there for, reading.
I feel bad for the folks who made a living on TikTok. I’m hoping they’ll find another job to take the place of being an influencer or whatever they did on TickTok to make a living.
As for the folks who are bummed because they liked watching it. You’ll get over it. I wasn’t happy when Space Karen took over Twitter and shut down the API so I stopped using it, exported my tweets, and deleted my account. I don’t miss it because Mastodon is even better and isn’t controlled by a single company.
I suspect it will be back soon. Hang in there.
Chiefs over Texans Lions over Commanders Bills over Ravens Eagles over Rams
The Bills/Ravens game is gonna be a great game.
President-elect Donald Trump said his inauguration on Monday will take place inside the U.S. Capitol rather than outdoors because of severe cold, the first time in 40 years that U.S. presidential inaugural ceremonies will be moved indoors.
The reason is simple. Through all the bluster, Donald Trump is just a big sissy boy. He’s afraid he’s gonna get a little cold sitting outside. A real man would suck it up and enjoy the moment.
Well, there’s that, and he’s terrified his crowd size will, once again, be much, much, smaller than previously. Remember how tiny his crowd was in 2017? Yeah, it was tiny compared to the mass of folks who went for President Obama or President Biden who followed him.
He’s so hated I’d imagine most of the CEO’s he’s somehow gotten to be there would rather be sitting alone in the cold than be seated behind him.
At work we’ve started using Bruno. It’s nice but it’s also an Electron App. I’m already learning React Native on iOS because we are getting a lot of requests for applications written using React Native. We build apps for clients so it makes sense for their apps to be written once so they work on both Android and iOS. They get their money’s worth, I suppose. It’s all about squeezing more out of us. But what does that say about craft? To me it says it doesn’t matter. We’ve fallen into the Accenture trap. We are hired guns who need to pound out code everyday at the fastest possible pace, with high quality of course, and use the lowest common denominator toolset. 🤢🤮
Anyway, I’m feeling a bit spicy this morning for some reason. I really need to improve my SwiftUI and pound all the new concurrency stuff into my tiny brain but I’m torn because to be useful to my company I need to become a React Native expert.
Guess I’ll have to use Stream and Top Secret Project to learn SwiftUI and Swift Concurrency. 👍🏼
Gotta say it, the Dutch Brothers Coffee app is really well done. It’s beautiful, stable, has a personality, and does exactly what it’s supposed to do. Lets you order and pay for coffee.
I wonder who makes it? Do they do all dev work in house or do they have a studio, like WillowTree, work on it? I’m super curious.
If you know, send a message my way, rob.fahrni@gmail.com.
Jason Herbert • Historians At The Movies
Folks, the Twitter that once was is no longer. It doesn’t fit us anymore. What was once an interesting place to find news, meet people, and share in the human experience is gone, dead, and buried. And Elon Musk is holding the shovel.
It has taken the “normals” a really long time to figure out what a lot of us realized the day Space Karen cut third party access to the Twitter API.
Now if we could convince Mr. Herbert to abandon Substack because of its Nazi problem we will have accomplished something.
A bunch of really great writers have abandoned Substack in favor of Ghost and Beehiiv, you can too Mr. Herbert. 💐
Coke Oreos are not good.
Jennifer Palmer, Paul Monies, Heather Warlick • USA Today
Bids opened Monday for a contract to supply the state Department of Education with 55,000 Bibles. According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.
Oklahoma is on the front line of the war to make Christian Nationalism the norm in America. How they can manage this with a First Amendment clearly stating:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Granted, Republicans are so good at skipping the parts they don’t like, like the Second Amendments inclusion of the need for a well regulated militia being necessary as part of the right to own and carry weapons, maybe they just skipped the part about the separation of church and state?
Hopefully the Supreme Court will strike this abomination of a law down and let folks choose their own religion and how they learn about it.
The Religious Right — Christian Nationalists — have done so much harm to Christianity and the person in Jesus.
They love Trump and all of his hate. Can y’all see Jesus standing at the border to the United States of America with an M-16 turning people away? Maybe you can. I can’t. I picture someone welcoming the tired and sick with open arms, providing them water, food, and a place to stay.
The GOP view of Christianity is a brutal idol in the form of Donald J. Trump and his ilk.
Yeah, your vote really matters to the future of this country. Get out and vote. Let’s stop this evil man and his sycophants dead in their tracks and keep this country great.
I would really love to see NASCAR add a couple international dates to their schedule. Maybe these dates are in place of some track dates that get two races and they’re only done every-other-year?
Regardless, I think it would be good for the sport. Granted I’m a total NASCAR noob but I’ve really come to appreciate the skill, strategy, and excitement of NASCAR.
Yep. I think it’s the most exciting of the three racing leagues I keep an eye on; NASCAR, IndyCar, and F1. Of those F1 is, hands down, the most boring of the three with NASCAR being the most exciting. And, no, it’s not just because of the incredible wrecks it’s because on each weekend you could have a different winner. Sure, there are favorites who will win more races than others but you do have a distribution of winners.
That’s the big question and I have opinions!
Mexico City - Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez
F1 currently runs at Mexico City so they’re ready to host a major car racing series.
The track is 2.67 miles of road course. Not an oval, of course.
Billed as Britain’s Best Loved Circuit, Brands Hatch is a 2.3 mile road course and would be a total blast to see NASCAR compete there.
Who knows, if NASCAR were to have some international events like this perhaps they could run a few European tracks.
I would LOVE to see them run THE LEGENDARY GREEN HELL. It’s huge! Just shy of 13 miles of road course with elevation changes and tricky turns.
If that’s just too much track they could run the F1 track instead. It’s just over 3 miles of road course.
Another course on the F1 circuit that runs 2.6 miles in length.
And that’s that!
Perhaps one of these tracks per year, maybe two or three in Europe while they’re there.
NASCAR is a very different type of organization. They are extremely conservative and that may not translate well to an audience outside America, but I’d love to see them try.