Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
This week seems to have had equal parts slow and fast days. Strange how we perceive time, isn’t it? As I’ve aged time seems to have sped up with exceptions thrown in here and there.
Since I’ve started doing React Native work I’ve tended toward fixing bugs and working on non UI code because I kind of prefer it. This week I started on my first real UI code and I’m actually enjoying it. I’m moving slow but enjoying it. It feels very much like doing SwiftUI but the syntax is more HTML like. And the one really nifty thing about it is hot loading it right inside the app as you code.
Anywho, here are some links. Enjoy.
Kiki Intarasuwan, Kerry Breen • CBS News
UPS plane crashes near Louisville airport, at least 3 killed, Kentucky governor says
What a tragedy. I feel terrible for the souls lost on the ground, in the plane, and for family and friends. 🪦
Yesterday, Apple launched a new web interface for the App Store, complete with dedicated pages for each of its platforms, app categories, and search.
This is an interesting turn of events for Apple. Why are they creating a web based App Store? While I think it’s a good idea it feels against their DNA.
Apparently it’s a React based app. If they wanted they could bring that to iOS and Mac by using React Native. I definitely don’t see that happening, but it’s totally possible.
Cecilia Mould • The Cavalier Daily
The University Police Department said there was no evidence of an active shooter on Grounds at 4:43 p.m. Monday after the University previously shared a “RUN, HIDE, FIGHT” alert with community members at 3:05 p.m. The alert had stated that there was an active attacker with a gun in the area of Shannon Library, but an extensive search by police later confirmed no attack had taken place.
Many of my WillowTree co-workers are University of Virginia graduates. That alert went out on our company Slack right away. It’s gut wrenching to hear about a potential shooting in progress. A true American disease we do nothing to exterminate. 😔
Thankfully it was a false alarm.
See, the truck nobody else wanted had been my office. I’d built a portable desk inside it. My truck desk, I called it. A couple of planks screwed together, our union sticker slapped on, the whole deal sealed with shellac. I’d built the desk so it slid into the bottom of the steering wheel and sat across the armrests. I used to hang back at the job and sneak in some creative work while the rest of the crew went to break.
I love stories like this. Mr. Smith is a very creative man. He works with his hands all day and writes his novels as he has the time, making great use of the environment around him. Need a desk? No problem. Just make one that fits in your truck so you can lean your iPhone against the steering wheel and use a Bluetooth keyboard to record your thoughts or write for your book.
Bravo! 👏🏼
The first is that as a product class, “AI” isa failed technology. I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that LLMs haven’t measured up to any of the loftypromises made by their vendors. But in more concrete terms, consumers dislike “AI” when it shows up in products, and it makes them actively mistrust the brands that employ it. In other words, we’re some three years into the hype cycle, and LLMs haven’t met any markers of success we’d apply to, well, literally any other technology.
I have no idea how all of this is going to play out. I’d imagine we will see a great consolidation of companies at some point. Many smaller players will fail and a few leaders will emerge at great expense to the world. I also expect to see abandoned data centers become the new abandoned mall.
I can also empathize with folks hatred of everything getting AI’ified. I don’t want or need AI in my browser or at the OS level. Let those tools stay lean and let me decide how I’d prefer to use LLMs.
If you haven’t heard, in an episode of “The Kardashians”, she is recorded talking about how she thinks the Apollo Moon landings were faked — you can watch video of it here. Ms. Kardashian pulls out the hoary old canards about there being no stars in the sky in the photos and the flag waving (yawn), and also claims there’s no gravity on the Moon, which… Well. I’ve seen people say this before, and I think they’re confusing the lack of atmosphere with gravity. It’s a weirdly common misconception. — the Moon does have gravity, about 1/6th as strong as Earth’s. That’s how the astronauts were able to land there and walk around at all.
And the world is flat, right? It’s not great when famous people with a big following spread a conspiracy theory.
We have a lot of that in our country today. It’s really quite sad.
“Guillermo invited me for breakfast and he said: ‘Listen, we’re doing Frankenstein. If you’re not doing it, then I’m not doing it, so it depends on you right now. Eat your eggs and tell me at the end of it if we’re doing the movie.’”
I’ve been looking forward to del Toro’s interpretation of Frankenstein and his Monster.
It hit Netflix yesterday and we’re definitely watching it tonight or tomorrow night. 👍🏼
Thomas Ricouard • TelemetryDeck
I found TelemetryDeck via Mastodon (of course). If you’re an indie developer and not yet on Mastodon, I highlyrecommend it. The developer community there is a vibrant mix of open-source enthusiasts, indie devs, and curious minds who value privacy, transparency, and genuine conversation. It feels more like an old-school forum than a social network: focused, thoughtful, and refreshingly free of algorithms or engagement bait.
This is a piece about TelemetryDeck but Thomas gives Mastodon a seal of approval. And why not! It’s a great platform if you don’t like Nazi’s. The one issue it has is discoverability. There is not algorithm, which I like, pushing you to follow people. I’ve managed to find a lot of really lovely folks through reposts. I’ve been here a fairly long time so the original group of folks I met were in the LGBTQ+ community and I still follow them to this day. It is a super diverse place.
Timothy Snyder (☢️ WARNING: Substack post)
Six months ago I wrote this post about “the next terrorist attack.” I republish it now (lightly updated) because my fear of this scenario has recently grown much greater. All of the factors described below still apply, and indeed more strongly than before. More good people have departed from the crucial agencies. Many of those who remain are disoriented and angry at what they rightly see to be the total disregard of real threats to national security or indeed the total indifference to US interests that is the hallmark of this White House. More unqualified people are at the top.
I try not to link to Substack pieces but Dr. Snyder is an authority on tyranny and we should listen to him.
Amelia Hansford • The Pink News
Robert De Niro’s trans daughter, Airyn De Niro, has said the actor’s support for her has been “non-stop” in a heartwarming new interview.
The 29-year-old said her 82-year-old father, known for his performances in Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, has been incredibly affirming since she came out earlier this year.
Robert DeNiro seems like a really good fella, or perhaps, a great fella. He’s been a very vocal critic of the Orange Sphincter in the White House and it stands to reason he’d be supportive of many different groups of folks.
Explore a new visual gallery to find how teams of all sizes are taking advantage of the new design and Liquid Glass to create natural, responsive experiences across Apple platforms.
It’s nice to see Apple do these little features. They also kind of need to do them because Liquid Glass has been very controversial among the developer crowd. Apple really needs to sell it so devs do the work to support it.
On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail.
Many developers dislike the new design language but there seems to be a lot of disdain toward the new icon requirements. I don’t blame them. I’m not a huge fan of them myself. I only converted one of my icons because I wanted to give better choices to folks not using iOS 26. I would do the same for macOS 26 if I could.
It would be nice of Apple to allow a pre-rendered property on the new icon format so designers and developers can offer different variations of icons with a personality.
Someone needs to put grandpa to bed. Sleepy Don needs his shuteye.
Feeling a bit distracted today. It happens.
Its been a couple weeks since I’ve written anything and I missed it. But, on the plus side I spent time with our grandkids and protested our horrible government. Both were time well spent away from the keyboard.
It’s very obvious I love me some RSS and what it means to the open web. Dave continues to do interesting experiments with blogging, RSS, and social media sites. Then we have Manton Reece at 
This week felt very productive Monday through Thursday. Then Friday came. 😂 It was just one of those days I couldn’t get rolling. It happens from time to time and I’ve learned not to worry about it. I used to worry until I was sick to my stomach. Now? Not so much. I’ve been through it enough to know it’s a temporary state and I’ll get back in the groove, or flow as people like to calll it.
This week was exciting at the beginning with the release of 
It’s been a big week for the Apple ecosystem. All the new Apple gizmos and gadgets were announced on Tuesday. I no longer get excited about these events, especially since they became highly produced marketing commercials. But, there was one thing I really liked: the orange iPhone 17 Pro.
The week started off a bit stressful for me. Stream was stuck in Waiting for Review hell at the beginning of the week. I finally pulled it from review and submitted a new build. That worked and some folks were able to look at the latest release. I even got some bug reports (nasty crasher on an iPad Mini I haven’t sorted yet) and found some terrible bugs running Stream on the new iPadOS 26 windowing support. Ack! 😲
The new concurrency support for Swift sounds extremely complicated, even for the best of developers. Matt seems to be an authority on the matter so I hope to read more of his stuff once I get to a new app that needs it. For now Stream is what it is. It uses closures/callback blocks to update models and the UI after pulling new feeds. It works as is and changing it just to change it feels like a waste of time. I really want to finish the Mac version and I do have another app to build. That seems like a good time to do SwiftUI and proper concurrency work. Like a dummy I’ll try to do both at once. 🤣
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My opinion? OpenAI lead the charge for marketing what they, and the industry, refer to as “AI.” I suspect the company known as OpenAI will cease to exist, Altman and the VC’s will make a shit ton of money and move on to whatever is next. That’s why Altman wants to keep his people. He wants that hojillion dollar exit. If you believe he’s doing this for humanity’s sake I have a bridge to sell you in New York City.
I like all kinds of stuff but most of it boils down to tech related stuff. I read old timers like 
I used our AI product this week and while it gave me good answers it didn’t provide me with a solution to my problem around publishing npm packages to GitHub. It gave me great information on how to setup part of my GitHub Actions script but I’ve never done it before and was hoping it would “just work.” It didn’t.
They could help local Community Colleges and Universities spin up training programs to teach the skills necessary to build iPhones, IPads, and other products, but that would take years and years to do and take lots of cash to pull it off.
