Rob Fahrni

I just can’t. 🤣

Newsom’s troll game is tops.

I was slow to start today. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to work on at first. It took me a couple hours to really get rolling.

So, what I did was fix a refresh bug that was bugging me. When I added a new blog the blog table view didn’t update. It took me a long time to decide how I wanted to fix it. I went through a bunch of ideas then I noticed that I’d already had some stuff in place that would allow me to fix it pretty quickly. Unfortunately it took me forever to get to that point. That’s now fixed. ✅

I had another bug that was really bugging me but I keep forgetting what it is until I run into it again. This week I decided to save the offending Atom feed into my collection of test feeds so I’d get it fixed. Bug exterminated. ✅

I have a small list of things to do before making a 1.0 release. Once I get those items completed I’ll put together a limited beta and collect some feedback. I need to do a lot of polishing. My tables flicker too much during updates because I reload everything and force the UI to render. Yeah, very heavy handed. If I can minimize the flicker I may ship it like that. Once the Mac version is out I can focus on catching it up to the iOS version and start adding new things to both at the same time. I have so much work ahead of me but that’s perfectly fine!

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Feeling a bit distracted today. It happens.

I hope you enjoy the links.

Oh, today is our sixth anniversary of our move to Virginia. It’s hard to believe we’ve been here that long. Twelve more years to retirement if everything works as we hope. That’ll happen in the blink of an eye.

Starbucks

A half-day’s drive from the gray drizzle of Starbucks headquarters in Seattle – over the Cascade Mountains and into the bright sunshine of Walla Walla Valley – you’ll find rolling green fields dotted with little orange pumpkins that may one day be in your Pumpkin Spice Latte.

I like it when companies do these types of profiles. We get to see the real people who make the day to day work, plus I have a soft spot for farmers.

Chance Miller • 9 to 5 Mac

Apple might have a big expansion of its iPad apps in store. A new report today says that Apple could soon release four new iPad apps: Pixelmator Pro, MainStage, Motion, and Compressor. These apps would join Apple’s existing pro-level apps Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, which came to the iPad last year.

It’s nice to see Apple giving some attention to their Professional apps.

Greg Bensinger • Reuters

Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The job market is already tough enough. I can’t imagine how difficult it’s gonna be to find a new job. These poor folks. 😔

Charlie Cheever and James IDE • Expo

React and React Native now belong to the React Foundation, a new independent home for the ecosystem. Expo is proud to be a founding member.

I still think Apple should get involved with this project. It runs on their platforms and is used by a lot of developers. Why not make sure it’s really good on iOS and Mac?

Jeffrey Zeldman

They say AI will replace the web as we know it, and this time they mean it. Here follows a short list of previous times they also meant it, starting way back in 1997.

When I hear replace the web it’s hard for me to imagine what that would look like. I like the web.

Matt Massicotte

Look, I’m not a fan of singletons and I think you should avoid them. I really like the composition root pattern, or the more technical term of “passing arguments to functions”. There are a million similar, more sophisticated options.

Yes, passing arguments to functions is a great way to avoid having singletons. 🤣 I love that we have to come up with a fancy term for that.

Don’t get me wrong the singleton pattern has its place but I’ve seen it abused to the tune of tens in an app and it makes for a terrible mess.

Python Software Foundation

In the end, however, the PSF simply can’t agree to a statement that we won’t operate any programs that “advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion, as it would be a betrayal of our mission and our community. 

Good on the Python Software Foundation. Supporting racist initiatives by the American government is something we should all avoid.

Virginia Brown • Atlas Obscura

As old as the country itself, the Dobbin House has stood on the same Gettysburg soil since 1776. The oldest building in Gettysburg, the Dobbin House was built by Reverend Alexander Dobbin, an Irish-born early frontiersman, minister, and community leader. Dobbin studied at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow before coming across William Penn’s advertisements of new land and free worship in the New World. 

We’ve eaten at the Dobbin House Tavern! It’s neat. Employees are in period dress and the food was pretty good.

Be careful with the mixed drinks however! I had a Rum Bellies Vengeance and it just about knocked me on my butt! 🤣

Daring Fireball

After giving it a try over the last week, to me Atlas feels like Chrome with a chat button bolted on. I do not see the appeal, at all, despite being a daily user of ChatGPT. Atlas offers nothing of any appeal to me that’s better than using Safari as a standalone browser and ChatGPT’s excellent native Mac app as a standalone AI chatbot. But, for me, my browser is not “where all of [my] work, tools, and context come together”. I use an email app for email, a notes app for notes, a text editor and blog editor for writing and programming, a photos app for my photo library, a native feed reader app for feed reading, etc. My web browser is for browsing pages on the web. Perhaps this sort of browser/chat hybrid appeals only to people who live the majority of their desktop-computing lives in browser tabs.

Nowadays a lot of folks refer to web based apps as “desktop apps.” The web has been taking over the role of desktop apps for a very long time. Web technologies are extremely arcane but they are the most popular tooling in the world of software development. I don’t feel like desktop apps will cease to exist anymore than the web will cease to exist but the web is definitely a way more popular way to make applications accessible from multiple platforms than are native apps.

Trying to keep the desktop relevant was a battle Microsoft waged in the late 90’s and early 2000’s before deciding to embrace the web. Now Apple is fighting the fight to keep its platforms relevant to native developers. I believe this is partly why SwiftUI was created.

Bob Pockrass • Fox Sports

With the race on the flat 1-mile Phoenix Raceway, neither the Joe Gibbs Racing drivers (Hamlin and Briscoe) nor the Hendrick Motorsports drivers (Byron and Larson) has a clear advantage as both organizations have won races there in the last six events and all four drivers have at least one Phoenix win on their resume.

Trying to pick a winner among the four is challenging. But the feeling here is to go with Kyle Larson.

While I love the idea of Larson winning his second Cup Championship my heart is with Denny Hamlin winning. He’s one of the winningest NASCAR drivers in the history of the sport but doesn’t have a Cup Series Championship. He’s an instant hall of famer even if he doesn’t win but I’d like to see him get one, even if that means Larson has to wait a while for his second.

We’ll find out tomorrow. The Cup Series Championship from Phoenix airs tomorrow at 3PM eastern on NBC.

Stephen Hackett

I hadn’t used ReadKit in over a decade, and when I checked it out again, I was impressed. It’s looks modern with Liquid Glass support, works with Feedbin, and works as well on the Mac as it does on iOS and iPadOS. I’ve been running it this week and so far, so good!

There are so many great feed readers on the market today and ReadKit looks to be one. Besides using Stream daily — even my alpha quality Mac version — I’ve found Unread to be a beautiful option and its read later feature is really good. I’ve started using it to collect articles for Saturday Morning Coffee, until I can get the read later feature of Stream working, but that’s a story for another day. 😀

StreetInsider

TELUS Corporation (NYSE: TU) announced the completion of its acquisition of all outstanding shares of TELUS Digital (NYSE: TIXT) (TSX: TIXT) not already owned by the company for $4.50 per share in cash or TELUS common shares. The transaction totaled approximately $539 million and gives TELUS 100% ownership of TELUS Digital.

TELUS International purchased WillowTree a couple years back. At some point after the acquisition TELUS International was rebranded as TELUS Digital. Eventually the WillowTree name went away and we all became part of TELUS Digital.

Now our parent company, TELUS, has acquired TELUS Digital.

All that to say I’m now a TELUS employee, by way of TELUS Digital, TELUS International, and WillowTree. 😳

Worked on Stream for Mac today since we’re celebrating our granddaughters birthday tomorrow, should be a super good time. Looking forward to it.

So, today when I started I had to fix a couple of outlets in my Mac NIB for the main window. How this got busted I’ll never know but it was and it caused the app to crash at startup. I do this so rarely that I forget how to do it, so it sucked to have to start off that way. Fixed. ✅

Next thing on the fix it list was a bug I’d introduced three weeks back. When I’d refresh the blog list using a pull to refresh on the iOS build or Cmd+R for the Mac build it would make all the network requests and tell the view controller to do its thing, however I messed up my view model when I added the ability to filter down to single blog selection in the UI, whoops! That was a simple fix. ✅

I decided, with the time I had left, to add some keyboard support. Doing a Cmd+A will now select all feeds. I need to add an All item in the blog list so folks can click on it if they’d prefer to select to display all feed items for all blogs that way. Maybe next time.

I also added support for using the up and down arrows to navigate through the list of blogs or the list of feed items. That went together pretty quickly and I really like the results. Done. ✅

I’m going to add some vi support to the keyboard to do some navigating as well as making the space bar scroll the through the article you’re viewing or moving on to the next item once you reach the bottom of an article. Stuff like this are kind of table stakes in existing feed readers. Future addition.

Until next weekend I’ll have some new features to play with on my Mac. I’m tempted to start a TestFlight but it’s still so early days. Reach out if you’d like to try it now. It may crash and misbehave but it’s kind of fun to play with, if you can tolerate it. 😄

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

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.

Work has been cruising along. We’re approaching the end of our two-plus year effort to move native iOS and Android apps to React Native. It’s about to pay off and I’m so excited to see it hit the streets.

Little plug for work. If your company would like to develop a cross platform app or integrate React Native into an existing app TELUS Digital — formerly WillowTree — have the chops to pull that off.

Time to work on Stream for Mac. Our granddaughter is celebrating her birthday tomorrow so we’ll be off having fun with her.

Have a great weekend and enjoy the links!

Mandalit del Barco • NPR

Diane Keaton, who remained one of Hollywood’s quirkiest and most beloved actors decades after her Academy Award-winning performance in the movie Annie Hall, has died at age 79.

My favorite Diane Keaton movie is Baby Boom. I love the story of the successful type-a personality finding a much better life in becoming a mother in a small town. Great film and she was great.

Another great film is The Family Stone. Unlike Baby Boom it’s very serious and Ms. Keaton is amazing.

RIP 🪦

Bhaskar Sunkara • Talking Points Memo

While some aspects of Substack may harken back to an older form of political publishing,  it doesn’t seem to be reviving the sturdy communities that made the best political blogs feel special. If Crooked Timber today is a living remnant of that order, it looks like Byzantium in its last century: storied and cultured, but a city-state that was once an empire.

I will continue to harp on Substack’s embrace of Nazism. It’s not a good choice for writers. Leave now.

Hartley Charlton • MacRumors

Apple is interested in buying Warner Bros. Discovery’s extensive back catalog of content for Apple TV, Bloomberg reports.

This could be a really interesting pickup for Apple, don’t you think? It’s not like they don’t have a hojillion dollars to spend on some “tiny” acquisitions, right?

Joe Rosensteel • Six Colors

One of the things that I think about from time to time is Apple’s collection of apps. Some are the crown jewels, like Apple’s pro apps, and others help an everyday consumer to tackle their iLife. All are pretty starved for attention and resources, outside of infrequent updates aligned with showing off the native power of Apple Silicon, Apple Intelligence, or demos of platform integration that never quite get all the way there.

I keep waiting for Apple to really eat their own dog food and creat a real productivity app in 100% SwiftUI.

Pages, Numbers, or Keynote would suffice but rewriting software just because is expensive. Perhaps they could do a direct port to SwiftUI using AI as a starting point and fix it up? Perhaps that’s also a really dumb idea. 😀

[John DiLlilo • Tadum by Netflix] (https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/a-house-of-dynamite-kathryn-bigelow-release-date-cast-news)

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE is the latest dramatic thriller from the Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, and more — and it’s streaming on Netflix right now.

I watched this last night. It was good but don’t expect it to be Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty.

It’s the same story shot from multiple perspectives, that I liked. The ending left me wanting but it was a great choice. That’s all I’ll say. 😬

Joannis Orlandos • Swift.org

The Android workgroup is an open group, free for anyone to join, that aims to expand Swift to Android. Today, we are pleased to announce nightly preview releases of the Swift SDK for Android.

I wonder how many iOS App ports we’ll see on Android now? Or perhaps some shared code between the platforms like we see with Kotlin Native?

Tonsky

Syntax highlighting is a tool. It can help you read code faster. Find things quicker. Orient yourself in a large file.

Like any tool, it can be used correctly or incorrectly. Let’s see how to use syntax highlighting to help you work.

I keep looking for a reason to like Visual Studio Code. It just feels wrong to me. Especially keyboard shortcuts. I’m spoiled by Xcode just as I was by Visual Studio when I was using that for 20+ years while writing Windows apps.

Personally, I’d rather use Nova but I’m choosing to use VS Code because it’s what my team uses and the project is suited to it. It’s just not for me.

So, in an attempt to feel more at home, I’ve switched to his theme. It’s not bad and it’s light, which is my preference.

Greg Poggiali • Jalopnik

There are certain truths in the automotive world. A Porsche 911 has its engine in the rear, old Land Cruisers have worse aero than bread, and Mazda’s Soul Red Crystal paint will make you look twice.

I’ve never really paid attention to Mazda’s custom red paint but it is quite beautiful. Maybe I should paint my truck that color? 🤔

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

Amazon is reportedly leaning into automation plans that will enable the company to avoid hiring more than half a million US workers. Citing interviews and internal strategy documents, The New York Times reports that Amazon is hoping its robots can replace more than 600,000 jobs it would otherwise have to hire in the United States by 2033, despite estimating it’ll sell about twice as many products over the period.

This notion is all fine and good if means people don’t have to work to survive. Provide for our basic health care, food, clothing, and shelter and doing this doesn’t seem so bad, right?

The reality is much, much, darker. This is meant to make the rich, richer at the expense of everyone else.

Reuters

Spire Motorsports will dismiss Justin Haley, driver of its No. 7 Chevrolet, at the end of the NASCAR Cup Series season.

Just one season after dismissing Cory LaJoie for Justin Haley, Spire is doing it again. It’s puzzling to me. Why not give him another year? His team hasn’t exactly been stable. Spire dismissed his highly regarded Crew Chief early in the season. But nope. He’s out.

The only good thing to come out of it is the signing of Daniel Suarez to pilot the 7.

WARNING: Talk of sexual abuse follows

Virginia Roberts Giuffre • The Guardian

In an extract from her posthumous memoir, Virginia Roberts Giuffre remembers the day an ‘apex predator’ recruited her from Mar-a-Lago, aged just 16; how she was trafficked to a succession of wealthy and powerful men – and how everyone knew what was going on

Everyone involved in Epstein and Maxwell’s trafficking scheme is a monster and should be treated as such. That includes Trump.

They’re all pedophiles and sexual predators. Throw them all in a hole and let them fend for themselves.

Some pictures from No Kings DC.

The GOP is scared. They keep calling it the “Hate America Protest.”

It was a Love America, Hate Trump, Protest. ❤️

Robert Reich - warning: Substack Link

Where’s Trump?

Depending on the day and the issue, Trump wafts around the power map. Because he is not a decision-maker and is pursuing little other than power, money, and praise, no one actually reports to him. They listen to him rave, laud him, tell him how wonderful he is and that he’s right about everything, and then report to the people with real power.

Trump will be out in front on an issue that’s likely to get a lot of positive attention, generate him a lot of money, or enlarge his power. Otherwise, he’s off the map, watching television and playing golf.

I’m sorry for the Nazi loving Substack link but it’s the only place I know of that Robert Reich writes and he always has something really great to say. He has a Tumblr account but he only publishes links there, not the entire article. If there’s another place to find him please let me know and I’ll point there! Thanks!🙏🏼

Anyway, the article is a really great read and he outlines where all of Marmalade Messiah’s lick spittle toadies fall in the Trump Power Map.

Let’s all hope we can get that bum out of office in 2028.🤞🏼

More work on Stream for Mac today.

I renamed some stuff because I had Feed and FeedItem used in various places. A Feed represents the Blog’s RSS Feed information. A FeedItem is a single entry from an RSS feed for a particular feed.

Those are accurate names in my opinion but just glancing at them can be confusing in their use in the code. So, what I did was rename the table view BlogListTableView and the view model for it BlogViewModel. I also added new classes for table views called BlogItemCellView and BlogItemTableCellView. It made things a lot easier for me to read and understand. The base models of Feed and FeedItem remain as they were.

I finally got around to filling in the left side table view of the three columns. This is a simple list of blogs. I also added a little code to allow me to filter the list of feed items based on the selected row in the blog list. Simple, expected, stuff.

After doing that I adjusted the blog cell and feed item cell to use a different font for the blog title and feed item title. They look a lot better now. I also added some padding around the outer edge to space things out so they’re not all jammed together.

The final task was fetching and caching the favicon for each blog. That’s where I wrapped up for the day.

I can now display a list of blogs. By default all feed items display in the middle column. When you select an individual blog the middle column displays just the items for that blog. I still have to add a new top level item to the blog list to allow you to select All items, but not today.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Ged Maheux • The Iconfactory

We’re pleased to announce the arrival of Iconfactory Tapestryon iOS 26 with stunning support for Liquid Glass, visual improvements up and down the timeline, and a new native app for macOS. 

Y’all know what a huge fan I am of The Iconfactory. They’re an excellent example of great design meeting excellent engineering and I’m always happy for them when they release a new version of something.

I can see Tapestry turning into the ultimate social and blogging viewer plus editor of both! I know, I know, this directly competes with Stream but it’s so much more and I love how it brings so many services together. It may be read-only now, but I can imagine read-write in its future. Keep an eye on it.

Congratulations, y’all!❤️

Maggie Boccella • Fangora

Ever wanted to peek into the mind of one of horror’s greatest authors? Well, now you can, courtesy of Penguin Random House. The publisher has just announced their latest horror nonfiction title, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, a new book by University of Maine professor Caroline Bicks that explores never before seen access into King’s private archives.

This is a book I’ll be picking up. Who knows if I’ll get around to reading it but I’ll definitely have one. Kim can read it. I know she will.

Stephen King has always been a fascinating character to me. He’s such a prolific writer and the few novels I’ve read have been extremely good in my eyes.

Daniel Jalkut

I achieved a major development milestone for my biggest app, MarsEdit, today. I can now build against Swift 6 with strict concurrency, and no warnings

Wow! That is pretty major! Congratulations, Daniel. I hope you share more of your adventures in Swift Concurrency as you progress!

Aimee Hart • Polygon

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein has been on Polygon’s list as one of the most anticipated movies of 2025. A collaboration with Netflix, Del Toro’stake on the Gothic tale is a direct adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 19th-century novel, Frankenstein. With the creature (not monster) teased on Sept. 30, we’ve just had one question: when can we expect to see the Frankenstein trailer?

I’m so excited to see this in theaters! I’ll see y’all there! I’ll be the dude with the huge bucket of popcorn with my eyes glued to the big screen! 🍿

Kev Quirk

After flip-flopping about what I’m going to do with this site, I decided to flip to Jekyll and build my own little CMS while I’m at it. Because why not?

I love watching folks bounce around building new tooling for their weblogs. It’s not something I’m willing to take on at the moment but it is something I think about it a lot given Stream is weblog adjacent.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Windows is coming back together. Microsoft is bringing its key Windows engineering teams under a single organization again, as part of a reorg being announced today. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri, who was just promoted to president of Windows and devices earlier this month, shared the changes to Microsoft’s Windows teams in an internal memo.

As a fan of Windows I think this is a good idea. Get everyone moving the same direction. Bring codebases back together and make sure Windows continues to run great on the desktop as well as the backend.

I know it gets a lot of crap but it’s still a great OS and runs so much of the worlds computers we need it to continue to be great.

One of these days I’ll get another Windows box. I hope to bring Stream to Windows someday. Gotta finish the Mac version first! But when/if it comes to Windows it’ll be all, or mostly, Swift. It’s doable.

Justin Hughes • Jalopnik

The Eaton fire burned down more than 9,400 structures and killed 17 people this past January, mainly in the Altadena community just north of Pasadena, California. The massive clean-up is still underway, and some residents have moved into RVs parked on their property until their permanent residences can be rebuilt.

There are so many sad and disgusting things happening in our once wonderful nation. To see folks lose their homes to a huge natural disaster and not be in a position to rebuild is just another tragedy in a nation, not to mention a world, of tragedies.

Konstantin

While using Instruments is always a good idea (and current Xcode 26 has amazing tooling for observing concurrency related issues), there are several opportunities to improve this even more in the editor itself. let’s break down some features Xcode could introduce in order to make it easier to anticipate issues, befor they become a bug for the instruments.

I’ve been collecting articles to read about Swift Concurrency for quite a while. One of these days I need to sit down and read them. I’m afraid my knowledge of Actors and Concurrency is near zero. I think I understand the concepts but putting them to use is another matter that will require some quiet contemplation and lots of experimentation along with notes, copious notes. 😃

Joel Drapper

If you really want a full-stack Ruby framework that doesn’t have a bigot with poor reasoning skills in charge, you need to make one. And to succeed, it needs to be better than Rails in every way.

That Ruby on Rails guy has really shown what a white nationalist Nazi type he is. I know many folks use Ruby on Rails and it’s difficult to pull away from that infrastructure if you’ve built on top of it. But, when you start something new you can move on from it. Leave that legacy code alone and build on Swift, Rust, or Node. There are many great options available to you. Heck, you could use Sinatra or keep an eye on Yippee. You have choices.

daveverse

Linux wasn’t the first Unix. WordPress was built out of a fork of another blogging system. RSS was the result of work Netscape did building on work I did, and then needed protection from an incompatible fork. None of these things are simple, but the result is — interop, no lockin, no billionaires owning the result.

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 Micro.blog who I believe has nailed the Social blogging, or Micro blogging, nail directly on the head. They’re working hard every day to keep us and our content out of the big billionaire corporate silos.

I was messing around with WordPress the other day and it’s so close to being kind of perfect. I have more thoughts on the matter that need to be a standalone blog post and I hope to pull it together soon and describe my perfect system. 👀

Kauy Ostlien • The Daily Downforce

On Tuesday, the NASCAR industry learned via the Dale Jr. Download that Legacy Motor Club’s purchase of a Rick Ware Racing charter was record-breaking. While this was surely newsworthy, Dale Earnhardt Jr., co-host of the show, seemed to have mixed emotions about the implications of these rising charter costs.

NASCAR Cup charters are a strange beast. They’re stupid expensive and have to be renewed every year, which I think is really dumb. It should be a one time purchase, a franchise like the NFL, but I digress.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. is, without a doubt, the biggest fan and supporter of NASCAR. He’s very involved from owning an Xfinity team to podcasting to being in the broadcast booth. He’s an incredible dude in my book and even he has been priced out of Cup team ownership. For now charters are in the 10s of millions, how long before they’re hundreds of millions of dollars?

If her wants to buy a charter now is the time. There are only so many available.

Last year Jr. Motorsports ran an open car at the Daytona 500 and finished in the top 10. It would be incredible to see a Jr. Motorsports Cup car week in and week out.

I hope he can manage it without driving his company to bankruptcy.

Cliff Schecter • BlueAmp

Help us, Dear Souls: We’re Trapped in “War Ravaged” Portland

I saw so many Mastodon, Bluesky, and blog posts dripping with sarcasm and Portland’ism last week after the Orange Man announced he was sending troops to ”War ravaged Portland”.

Yeah, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. It’s Portland. They’re too busy gathering at Powell’s Bookstore, sipping a latte, or downtown in the evening at a food truck having an IPA with friends.

Today I worked on some refactoring so I could support another column in the Mac version of stream and I migrated away from my singleton instance of the database because it just felt gross.🤮

That removes the only singleton in the app and I feel a lot better about it.

I’m splitting some functionality out of a view model and putting it into a different view model to better support the third column Stream will now have.

Yes, I’m adding a feed column. Stream for Mac is the only version that will have that extra column because it feels natural for the “Big Dog” app to have it.

I still plan on keeping the app extremely simple and will provide a Timeline Mode that hides the feed column so it behaves just like the Stream we’re accustomed to.

More to come. Today was a lot of infrastructure work and rebuilding the iOS to make sure it still works as expected.

The Mac version is in a bit of a busted state because I ran out of time today. But I’ll get it fixed ASAP. 😃

Until next week, take ‘er easy.

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.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

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.

You know where I find tremendous flow? Working on Stream. No pun intended. No meetings, just me, Xcode, and whatever my 🧠 decides it can do that day.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow. It’s focus on Stream morning at Grit. See you there! ☕️

Matt Birchler

It’s amazing how easy it is to be driven mad by the App Store and app review.

I’m certain every iOS Developer has been where Matt is. App Review has always seemed like a bit of a crapshoot from the beginning. Hell, RxCalc took over 20 days to get a review in 2009. We’ve come a long way but it doesn’t mean the experience can’t be improved.

Sorry that’s happening, Matt. I hope it’s resolved soon! ❤️

Iconik

WordPress runs 43% of the internet, but try mentioning it in a design Discord and watch the cringe reactions. While WordPress quietly powers The New York Times and Microsoft, design Twitter celebrates every exodus to Webflow like it’s a prison break.

Drama aside, WordPress is a great piece of technology and the folks who work on it each and every day care deeply about it. That kind of dedication is necessary to create a beloved, stable, product.

Here’s hoping WordPress has many wonderful years ahead of it.

As an aside I’d love to see something built on top of WordPress that outputs static HTML with a minimal UI just for bloggers. It’s something I’ve wanted for a really long time. I know I’ve been posting about it since around 2012, or so?

Please, someone, get to it! 😄

Ars Technica

As of October 21, Disney+ will cost up to 20 percent more, depending on the plan you have. Disney+ with ads is increasing from $10 to $12 per month, while the ad-free plan is going from $16 to $19 per month. The annual, ad-free plan will go from $160 to $190.

When I fired up Hulu last night I was met by a message warning me prices were increasing. I’m starting to miss cable bundles. 🫠

Dave Rogers

Rob’s idea of using RSS is fine, but you still have to have someplace to upload the video files, which are far larger than just photos or text. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure what my storage limits are at my host, but I’m sure I’d have to upgrade to a higher tier of some kind if I wanted to start sharing a lot of videos.

I hadn’t considered Vimeo. They have always had a good reputation as a high end service for video but they recently sold to Bending Spoons who have a terrible reputation for ruining everything they touch. (Hey, Bending Spoons, get in touch. I’ll sale you Stream for a few million buck! What a bargain! 😂)

The issue is silos. It’s something we all gravitate towards, especially when they make it easy as a user. We have the Nazi loving Substack attracting great writers who don’t care they’re supporting fascists and YouTube who make it easy to monetize video but have complete control over your content and who can view it.

In a nutshell that’s why I’d like to see folks use their own sites and RSS to start a video publishing revolution just as podcasts did.

As for storage, I see where you’re coming from. My hosting service, DreamHost, provides services that have unlimited storage that could be good for this, or folks could use Amazon S3, or services like Libsyn who target hosting for podcasters. Search around for S3 alternatives, there are a lot to choose from. I also believe file hosting services targeting audio and video would spring up to serve this kind of move to self hosted video.

I think the thing that stops this is folks seeing they can start publishing as soon as they make an account with a service, even if it’s Nazi loving.

Finding a blogging tool, getting file storage, adding accounts, and payment systems, and on and on. Most folks just don’t want to mess with all that. That’s the big barrier to entry.🌻

Daring Fireball

Live Translation with AirPods and iPhone Mirroring are both amazing features. And EU users are missing out on them. I think Apple structured this piece exactly right, by emphasizing first that the most direct effect of the DMA is that EU users are getting great features late — or never. And that list of features is only going to grow over time.

If folks didn’t see regulation coming for Apple they haven’t been paying attention. Is it fair? No, not if you’re Apple or an Apple fan, but it was bound to happen given Apple’s position in the market. Sure, Android exists, and is doing really well in the market, but Apple has tied so many things into their OSes it was bound to happen.

I think I’m not surprised because I watched the Microsoft trial with great interest because I was a Windows developer at the time. Their dominance allowed them to make, or force, deals with OEMs and sellers that favored them only. They were the 800lb gorilla of the time. They had to protect that Windows and Office dominance in the wake of the internet gaining steam. Hell, they were criticized for Internet Explorer being included in the OS. Apple is now dealing with that many years later, so it’s no doubt they’ve been singled out.

From a competition angle it’s not so much they don’t have competition in phones, they do. Android outsells them worldwide. I think the competition is at the OS services level.

Folks should be able to pick a storage service or music provider or insert your favorite thing here and have it integrate deeper with the OS to give users better choices and give Apple some competition. Why should I have to purchase iCloud storage? If I could get more storage for less and it was integrated just like iCloud is integrated, that would benefit the user.

Sure, there’s the whole security angle and the sync angle but Apple would be in charge of defining the specification and provide the integration points and also qualify the storage provider as compatible. Yes, it would be expensive and time consuming, but if someone else has the chops to pull it off and wants to do it, why not let them? Leave the choice to the consumer.

As an aside, I could see Firebase providing such a service. It already supports syncing, is really fast, and is very stable.🔥

Johan Halse

Let’s be realistic: DHH isn’t going anywhere. He owns the trademarks, he controls the Rails Foundation, he sits on the board of Shopify, and he doesn’t give a shit about you. In fact, he seems positively giddy at the idea of people being driven away by his occasionally repugnant blog posts and xeets. I’m sure he’d very much like an ideologically pure userbase for Rails, the same way he’d love for Britain to only contain native brits, wink wink. If that means the “Rails community” becomes a small stagnant pool of people getting paid to cheer for him and Tobi, that’s clearly a price he’s willing to pay! He’ll be staying on, whether you like it or not.

It’s too bad the Ruby community is being sucked into the fascist world of David Heinemeier Hansson.

Thankfully Ruby isn’t his creation or run by him so developers could move to something like Sinatra or build something new to get away from him. Sure, old code won’t move, but new works could move off of Rails, right? Heck, you could move to Rust, Swift, or, heaven forbid, Node. You have choices.

Zach Sturniolo • NASCAR

A junction of Joe Gibbs Racing teammates during Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Playoff event at New Hampshire Motor Speedway has left Denny Hamlin seeking assistance from his team’s leadership.

I watched this race of course and it wasn’t obvious to me Hamlin wrecked Gibbs, but Hamlin admitted to moving him in later interviews.

Here’s the thing. Hamlin, Bell, and Briscoe are racing for a championship. Gibbs, their teammate, didn’t make the playoffs. In my opinion he should move out of the way for his teammates. Race everyone else, but get out of their way. What if he’d wrecked Hamlin and Bell at that time? It absolutely could’ve happened given how hard he was racing them and how close they were to him.

I will freely admit I’m not a fan of Gibbs. He comes off as a spoiled, entitled, rich kid. Oh, and Grandpa Joe (yes, Joe Gibbs former NFL coach and Super Bowl winner) is the owner of the team.

Maybe it time to find grandson Ty a new racing home for the sake of the organization? He’s good enough to get a seat elsewhere. 🤔

Craig Dalzell • Common Weal

A new study from the Social Market Foundation presents the results of several Housing First pilot schemes, including one in Scotland, and finds that providing free housing to people suffering homelessness results in better outcomes than current services and is cheaper than not doing it.

Take this for what it is. Yes, I support all kinds of social programs like this. We could do this if only America was willing to become truly great again.

Tom Chivers • Semafor

Global health authorities rejected the US government’s claim that the popular painkiller acetaminophen, better known as Tylenol in America, causes autism when taken during pregnancy.

Not a surprise. RFK Jr. is a complete nutter and is driving our nation back into the early 19th century. Let’s use leeches to cure disease! I should say crap like that, someone may tell him it works. 🤣

Politics

Benjamin Mullen • New York Times

The Daily Caller, a prominent conservative online publication, published an opinion column on Friday explicitly calling for violence in response to physical assaults on conservatives in America.

Let’s lower the temperature, riiiight… We’re moving closer and closer to a full dictatorship and it’s showing in folks anger toward it. Some want it, others, like me, do not.

See you October 19 in Washington D.C.

Mark Hertling • The Bulwark

WHEN I SAW THE NEWS that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had ordered all U.S. military flag officers (generals and admirals) to gather at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, next week along with their senior enlisted advisors, my first response was disbelief. Not disbelief that the secretary of defense might want to deliver a strong message to the senior leaders of the force, but disbelief at the method.

So, will the leadership of all of our branches be asked to give their full allegiance to Marmalade Messiah? I hope not. If they are asked, how many will resign, weakening our defenses and opening the door to a full fascist takeover by the “government?”

Arianna Coghill • Mother Jones

On September 17, Pete Hegseth—newly dubbed our Secretary of War—announcedthat any member of the US military who needs a shaving exemption for more than a year will be forced out of the service, tossing out a decades-old policy created for mainly Black and brown troops with pseudofolliculitis barbae, a skin condition that makes daily shaving lead to cuts, sores, and scarring.

Y’all just need to admit it, now. This administration wants an all white nation. Run the leadership of the military out then get all the black and brown people to leave.

We’re just driving for that cliff. Car on fire. Everyone partying like nothing is happening.

It’s happened. We’ve arrived at the beginning.

Let’s save democracy. 🇺🇸

Daring Fireball

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.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This week was exciting at the beginning with the release of Stream 1.6 and became pretty boring, pretty quickly.😀

It’s really nice to finally boot a new release of Stream out the door. It’s the first time I’ve ever released anything to coincide with the release of a new operating system. I don’t make a lot of noise about it, because I don’t really know how to! 😂

Anywho, it’s out there and I’m excited about it even if it only got one new feature and some tweaks to support iOS 26. If you’re a Stream user, thank you. 🙏🏼 I hope you’re enjoying it.

Tricia Escobedo • CNN

“Robert Redford passed away on September 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah–the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly,”

SETEC ASTRONOMY… TOO MANY SECRETS.

RIP, Mr. Redford. 🪦

James Hibbard • The Hollywood Reporter

Jimmy Kimmel‘s latest monologue has ignited a political firestorm and resulted in ABC suspending the show.

I know folks don’t like it when I include politics, but this is some serious stuff. It’s trampling on our First Amendment rights and has to stop.

Holly Borla • Swift.org

We’re excited to announce Swift 6.2, a release aimed at making every Swift developer more productive, regardless of where or how you write code. From improved tooling and libraries to enhancements in concurrency and performance, Swift 6.2 delivers a broad set of features designed for real-world development at every layer of the software stack.

I still haven’t had the opportunity to look into strict concurrency but I do hope to at some point.

I was so happy to have done a bit of SwiftUI in Stream that I shred it with a colleague. She instantly found all the dumb things I’d done and straightened me out.😃

Thanks, Ms. Iryna! 🙏🏼

Reuters via Yahoo! Tech

Israel-based Fiverr International is laying off 30% of its workforce, a company spokesperson said on Monday, as the online services marketplace doubles down on artificial intelligence to automate systems and streamline operations.

This experiment hasn’t worked for some companies. It’s darned useful, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a be all end all. It’s like the next evolution in the hammer or a fancy screw driver that doesn’t strip screws. It just helps us get our jobs done.

Geoff Perlman • Xojo Blog

Supporting Liquid Glass and the underlying system changes is a big undertaking and we still have more work to do. Since we build Xojo with Xojo, this means updating not only the Xojo framework but also parts of the IDE itself so it looks and behaves correctly on macOS 26 with Liquid Glass. Our goal is to let you use Liquid Glass in both built-in Xojo controls and third-party party plugins as soon as possible. That’s why the next release of Xojo, 2025r3, will be built for macOS 26 and iOS 26, giving your apps the latest look and feel while still allowing them to run on older versions of macOS and iOS.

Wow, I didn’t expect Xojo to be built with Xojo, but it makes sense. Here’s putting your money where your mouth is. I think that’s really impressive and to me it proves Xojo is industrial strength enough to build native apps for macOS, iOS, and Windows from a single source base. Kudos! 🤩

John Brayton

I just released Unread 4.6 with improvements to support Apple’s operating system updates.

A big congratulations to my friend, John! 🥳

Booting updates of your software out the door is always exciting.

I still use Stream on the Mac, even though it barely works, but I use Unread a lot. It’s a beautiful app and works how I’d expect it to work. Try it! It’s really good!

Cody Hamman • JoBlo

Trick ‘r Treat is getting its first nationwide theatrical release this October

This is something we watch every Halloween, a few times. We absolutely love it! When it hits theaters I’m gonna drag Kim out to see it with me on the big screen.

Bogden Ionescu

The idea of hosting a web server on a vape didn’t come to me instantly. In fact, I have been playing around with them for a while, but after writing my post on semihosting, the penny dropped.

So, yeah, a vape pen hosting a website is kind of awesome. Why? Because, that’s why! If you have the skill to pull it off, do it.

I’d still love to host a site on an old iPhone. They’re more than powerful enough to pull it off.

Uros Popovic

I recently implemented a minimal proof of concept time-sharing operating system kernel on RISC-V.

There are so many smart, determined, folks out there in the world.

This kernel project is written in Zig, which I don’t know much about.

When is someone going to do this in pure Swift? The new low level language of choice seems to be Rust, but it could be Swift, right? Maybe? 🤔

Part of Chris Lattner’s vision for Swift was to use it as a systems level language. What happened to that goal?

Apple, of all people, should spend a little time creating a 100% Swift based OS to use on their backend.

I know, I know, it’s a lot of work and Apple already has an OS. But they still need to make better use of the language they’re pushing on developers. It should be a great way to build a more secure operating system.

David Pierce • The Verge

There’s just one ongoing problem with Liquid Glass: it’s the wrong idea. Apple is trying to make a single interface metaphor work absolutely everywhere, and it just doesn’t. Frankly, I’m not sure any all-encompassing design language could feel right on everything from a watch to a phone to a TV to a headset. But I do know that Liquid Glass in particular, which is hell-bent on making everything feel deep and physical and layered, often just feels like clutter. And it feels least at home on Apple’s most important and popular devices.

I’ve been using iOS 26 on a test device since WWDC. It’s been fine. Did I see some oddities, yes, I did. Was it completely unusable? No, it wasn’t.

I have it on my daily driver now, I’m typing this post on it, and it’s been perfectly serviceable. On occasion I have lost a button in a background but it doesn’t happen often.

At the day job we haven’t upgraded to Tahoe, macOS 26, so I can’t say how it looks or works. We haven’t deployed it because some software folks use has been a bit janky. Our poor IT is tasked with getting all that squared away before we’re allowed to move forward.

I decided to go with working on Stream for Mac today.

The feed item cell has been a complete mess for years, yes, you read that right. It’s been a complete wreck for years now. I kept on insisting I do all the work using AppKit.

Today that changed. I needed to make progress and even though my SwiftUI experience is very limited I was able to get the general layout working the way I’d like it. It’s not complete by any means but each UI element is displaying in the place I want it to (mostly) and the cell resizes properly, oh, and the date label/text remains pinned to the right side of the cell. That was a big issue with my AppKit NIB attempt.

Polish, polish, polish is the next course of business with the new cell. It needs spacing updates, text size fixes, color changes, highlighting support, keyboard support, so many things. But, now that it lays out the way I want I can move forward.

This is the first SwiftUI code introduced to the Stream codebase, which began life in 2018.

I was so focused on getting a single feature done for Stream 1.6, and add a little Liquid Glass support that I don’t know what I want to work on today. 🤣

I want to get back to the Mac version but it feels like so much work. I need to get my table view cells to behave properly. Perhaps I’ll punt on having the date attached to the right side of the cell and put it somewhere on the left just to make some progress today. 🤔

Would different cell layouts between iOS and Mac versions put folks off?

Something else I’ve been considering is adding a third column to Stream for Mac! Yes, it would make it behave just like every other feed reader on the market. Going 100% against what Stream was built to be. My reasoning? It’s strange, at best. On iPhone it has a single column, on iPad it has two, so it makes sense that the Mac — being the big dog — would have three, right? RIGHT!?

Should I add keyboard shortcuts to better support iPad? That would also make the iPad app a better citizen on the Mac!

Do I being my journey into SwiftUI by replacing some of the lazy UI I threw together just to get 1.0 out the door?

Oh, how about that new subscribing UI I wanted to do? I got some lovely feedback from a friend about onboarding! I’ve been thinking about that a lot myself. It’s a great idea and I need it! Perhaps that’s my first SwiftUI code? I think y’all would like it, at least I hope you will.

Anywho. Lots of thoughts spinnging around in my brain. 🧠

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.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

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.

Stream was approved earlier this week and I’ll be pushing the button to release it sometime Monday night, I think, because iOS 26 is supposed to hit the streets on Tuesday.

Like all of my releases, this one is small. One new feature, a small tweak for the UI on iOS 26, and some bug fixes. I hope folks enjoy it.

Here are some links and bad opinions. Enjoy!

Apple Newsroom

Apple unveils iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, the most powerful and advanced Pro models ever

The color of the week was definitely orange! My Mastodon timeline was full of orange iPhone 17 Pro orders.

I don’t update often, I went from an iPhone 11 to an iPhone 16 last year, but if I were to upgraded this year that orange Pro would be the one. I’m still tempted but can’t justify it. 😍

Joel Dare

Imagine a web page that loads instantly, deploys effortlessly, and never needs a security update. I’m using pure HTML and CSS to accomplish all that and to build things in a fraction of the time.

This website loads so fast! We’ve all become accustomed to slow loading CMS based blogs like WordPress or Ghost or add your favorite blog here. I don’t mean to pick on those amazing products but raw HTML is blazing fast and I love it!

Ashley Belanger • Ars Technica

Free for any publisher to use starting today, the RSL standard is an open, decentralized protocol that makes clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation of any content used to train AI, a press release noted.

The RSL Collective has put together a very low tech solution to the problem of AI servers hammering websites and taking content for training their LLMs. I like this idea, a lot, and will be deploying it to this blog. Going forward all transactions here will cost an AI company a hojillion dollars.

No, it’ll remain free because nobody reads it anyway and if you want to train your AI on my crappy writing, good luck! 🤣

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

Mastodon, an open source, decentralized alternative to X, is rolling out a somewhat controversial feature by adding quote posts, which will launch next week. The feature, which allows a user to quote someone else’s post and reshare it with their own response or commentary, has contributed to a culture of “dunking” on X, where users often deride other people by responding with snark or insulting humor.

To address this concern, Mastodon says it’s implementing quote posts with safety controls.

I’m looking forward to trying this out but I wonder how long it’ll be before all the amazing Mastodon apps are updated to support it?

Barn Finds

Go Bullitt if you must, but I’d rather see this potentially handsome 1968 Mustang Fastback restored to its showroom glory.

What a beautiful car! I always thought I’d retire and have a project like rebuilding a car. I don’t think that’ll happen but I still like the thought of it. Instead I’ll probably sit behind a keyboard and continue coding until I die. 😄

Dan Goodin • Ars Technica

A prominent US senator has called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for “gross cybersecurity negligence,” citing the company’s continued use of an obsolete and vulnerable form of encryption that Windows uses by default.

I’m surprised Microsoft would allow something like this to go on. Here we have Apple doing everything they can think of to lock down their OS’es and Microsoft’s is vulnerable. 😲

Ben Werdmuller

There are two CMS choices that I think are particularly well-suited for newsrooms. The first, Ghost, is perfect for smaller newsrooms with a newsletter-centric distribution model. (I love Ghost’s elegance and use it for my own site and newsletter.) The other is, indeed, WordPress.

If you’re part of a small or large newspaper, Ben has a recommendation just for you.

Even my old hometown newspaper, The Sun-Gazette, uses WordPress. 📰

Apple Security Research

For Apple, improving memory safety is a broad effort that includes developing with safe languages and deploying mitigations at scale.

If you’re a nerdy computering type person who writes software this article is a really good read.

Apple has gone to great lengths to make the OS’es even more secure and that includes hardening their developer tools!🛠️

Adam B. vary • Variety

Henry Cavill has sustained an injury while preparing for the Amazon MGM remake of “Highlander,” which will delay production on the Chad Stahelski film likely until early 2026, Variety has confirmed.

I ask you, how can Superman get injured?🦸🏻‍♂️

Here’s hoping Mr. Cavill recovers quickly and the film is a big hit.

Do it justice MGM!🎬

Annie Palmer • CNBC

“There’s 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don’t know what most of them do. We don’t need more than 200 of them,” Rabois told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday.

What a crazy statement. I’ll bet the employees are putting out feelers into the world to get ahead of the inevitable.

Jobs are so hard to come by today.😞

There are two things I really like about the new iPhone Pro.

1. I can get it in orange
2. It has an aluminum body

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.

I have such a huge list of things I want to add to Stream. Like full page parsing and stripping of formatting, fix some things that annoy me, syncing, connection to feed services like feedbin, recommendations (curated and LLM recommended), a Mac version, and the list goes on and on and on. 😃

I’d done some work on a function last week that determined if a certain permission level was valid for a particular type of user account in our app. The requirements depended on multiple different factors including account type, language, and some other sub data types. I paired with some other devs on the team because they knew way more about the account types than I did, yes, they were convoluted and a few special cases had to be accounted for and even included a check for language spoken and region of a country.

This function had been a lot more straight forward but we were expanding the application to work with more account types so the unit test requirements doubled. When I went to update them I was struggling a bit, remember, I’m using TypeScript and I’m still really bad at it.

After scratching my head for a bit I opened Cline in Visual Studio Code and asked it to “write unit tests for [filename].ts” and it got to to work. It churned away for a while then started outputting new code. After checking some outputs and clicking Save a few times my brand new unit tests were complete.

It worked. Color me shocked. 😳

I can now see doing this for most, if not all, of my unit test needs on this project and probably others. As much as I enjoy writing unit tests, no, seriously, I do enjoy it, this saved me quite a bit of time. Just incredible.

Brent Simmons

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’ve managed to kick nine builds of Stream out to beta testers. That’s the most I’ve ever done! I owe this all to the four hours of time I’ve reserved on Sunday morning for working on Stream. It’s been seven weeks of work. Like I said in my last Stream Work Note I’m overjoyed at having this time to focus work on Stream and, of course, have a really great Mocha while I do it. 😄

During my testing I noticed that the one new feature I’ve been adding to the app would fail when Stream was tiled with another app. That really stunk because otherwise it looked great to me! Today I managed to fix that outstanding critter and it feels really great!

I’ve had two other bug reports come in specifically for my iPad support — thanks Lucian and Sean!

The first bug was occuring when you’d pick a feed to subscribe to. That porting of the code has been synchronous since day one. I figured why do it asynchronously when the UI was going to be blocked while I added the feed to your list and parsed it. Well, newer versions of iPadOS didn’t like that and the app would crash hard. Yikes! Can’t have that. I fixed that bug earlier in the week or maybe last week, I don’t remember, but it’s out of the way and now asynchronously updates the app, be it iOS or iPadOS.

The second bug was a bit more difficult to fix only because I couldn’t reproduce it. It turns out it was happening consistently on iPadOS 16.8.2. So, I added that simulator setup and kerpow! 💣 It happened right away. YAY! 🥳 It turns out I’ve been stacking two navigation controllers on top of each other since I added iPad support a few years back. DOH! The OS was just tolerating it so I didn’t know. Well, it looks like Apple decided it wouldn’t allow that any longer, and rightfully so! I fixed that issue yesterday.

This morning was spent fixing the tiling bug and it’s now done and a new TestFlight build it up. If everything goes well with that build it could be my final build before Tuesday’s Apple Awe Dropping event. 🤞🏼

Have I ever mentioned I’d love to work on Stream full time? I didn’t think so. 😄

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

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! 😲

I’m hoping I can fix them during my Grit development time tomorrow. 🤞🏼

This release of Stream does the minimum amount of work to support Liquid Glass in iOS 26, but it’s a start.

Jack Dunn • Variety

Graham Greene, the Canadian actor best known for his Oscar-nominated turn in the 1990 film “Dances with Wolves,” died on Monday in Toronto after a battle with long illness. He was 73.

This was really sad to see. I loved his performance in Wind River. I thought the film was incredibly good but I don’t think it did well in theaters.

As an actor his performances always felt real, like he was just living life, not reading from a script. I always appreciated that. 🪦

Jordan Novet • CNBC

Atlassian said it has agreed to acquire The Browser Co., a startup that offers a web browser with artificial intelligence features, for $610 million in cash.

My congratulations to The Browser Company! 🥳

I interviewed with this team, I think it was one of their founders? I also think he realized I wasn’t a heavy enough hitter and I wasn’t willing to kill myself for a company again.

We spoke for about 30-minutes. Very nice guy and I’m really happy for him.

Daring Fireball

But this seems like bad news. I just don’t see how Atlassian/Jira DNA can possibly be a good thing to inject into an innovative user-focused web browser.

Arc was adored by its fans and I’m not sure how Dia is doing.

I could see Atlassian merging the two together to form an excellent browser. Both extensible, like Arc, and AI driven like Dia.

My gut says the extensibility and customization features of Arc are really attractive. Atlassian could take advantage of that plus add Dia’s AI support to build up a very compelling Jira App as well as a fantastic browser.

What if all that customization support really opens up the door to better desktop apps built from web technology? Think Electron.

Oh, one more thing. The Browser Company is the first company I know of to stretch Swift the way they have. They built up Swift support for Windows and used that to ship their Windows version of Arc.

Joan Westenberg • The Index

Arc’s exit fits this history neatly. It’s tempting to be cynical: yet another beautiful app sacrificed on the altar of enterprise bundling. But there is another way to read it. Beauty survives by being absorbed. The design DNA of Arc may not persist in its purest form, but elements will filter into the larger ecosystem. That’s how Sparrow influenced Gmail, or how Wunderlist informed Microsoft To Do. Users lose the standalone purity, but the market as a whole advances.

I appreciate Joan’s take on the sale. Hopefully we get a beautiful new browser out of the deal.

Bob Pockrass • Fox Sports

Will Power will move to Andretti Global next season as he replaces Colton Herta, who will move to Europe and serve as a test driver for the Cadillac F1 team.

Wow! This is quite the shakeup both ways. Will Power is an IndyCar legend and Colton Herta is a rising IndyCar star!

I do admit I like seeing Herta going to Cadillac F1. They will be my new F1 team going into 2026. I’d been on the Haas train for some time but they just don’t invest at the levels of other teams. I’m hoping the Cadillac backed team will. It’ll also be really nice to see an American built engine back in F1 in 2028.

Matt Massicotte

Making just one type @MainActor can result in cascade of errors at all usage sites where the compiler now cannot provide that MainActor guarantee. This virality can make it really hard to incrementally adopt concurrency with targeted changes. Perhaps that’s not too big a deal for smaller code bases/teams, but I bet this is a killer for big projects. So what do you do?

I honestly don’t know. 🤣

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. 🤣

M.G. Siegler’s Spyglass

Almost exactly 15 years after the service first launched to the world – they waited 15 years but couldn’t wait a few more weeks to make for a fun story? – we now have a version of Instagram tailored for the iPad. And… it’s sort of crap.

I had a third-party Instagram for iPad app a very long time ago, at least ten years back. Then Facebook decided they were going to shutter their API and cut off all third-party access. That third-party app, that I can’t remember the name of, was a pure iPad App. It was fast and beautifully designed. The layout would change, as expected, when rotated and would show you a grid of photos you could tap into to view larger. It was beautifully executed.

From what I’ve seen of the new Instagram built version it’s nowhere near that and that’s a real shame.

If you’re looking for a pure, elegant, platform for viewing and posting photos I’d recommend Glass. It’s gorgeous and not full of crummy ads, displays a beautiful stream of pictures, and even has a proper iPad app.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Windows Mixed Reality headsets were left in a non-functional state last year, after Microsoft suddenly discontinued the platform with its 24H2 update to Windows 11. Now, an Xbox engineer at Microsoft is bringing these headsets back to life, thanks to a new driver that enables SteamVR support.

This is extremely cool! Thanks Mr. Microsoft Xbox Engineer for this gift! ❤️

Thank you Microsoft for allowing this! When I was there, there’s no way this could’ve happened.

Dom Corriveau

If you glance over this blog, you will see that I am an avid Android fan. After setting up numerous Linux prootdesktops on phones, I wanted to see if I use a phone as a server and run my blog from an Android phone. Since you are reading this, I was successful.

I absolutely love projects like this! Take a teeny device not at all meant to host a web server and do just that! Incredible work!

I’ve often wondered how you could take a bunch of the same model iPhones and build a blade style bus for them to plug into to act as a kind of super computer. Wouldn’t it be cool to add a web server to an iPhone and use it to host your blog or use a bunch to process data. They’re super fast and amazing computers, why not repurpose them? I mean if folks could build super computers out of 286 chips why not A16 chips?

Anyway. It’s a neat thought experiment.

State of California

Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson announced they will launch a new West Coast Health Alliance to ensure residents remain protected by science, not politics. The alliance represents a unified regional response to the Trump Administration’s destruction of the U.S. CDC’s credibility and scientific integrity.

It’s really wonderful to see the west coast of the United States come together to support common sense science. I miss the west coast. ❤️

Gavin Newsome’s troll game is top notch. 🤣

I’ve been going to Grit, my favorite coffee shop, for the last six Sunday’s to work on Stream. It’s been really rewarding to spend the morning working on it. I typically work from around 8AM to noon, then grab Chipotle for my daughter and I and head back home.

That four hours of time has given me so much joy and recharges me for the week ahead. I cannot imagine how much better Stream could be if I were able to do this five days a week for five to eight hours a day! I might actually be able to make some real progress on the Mac version! 😱

Today I’ve managed to kick a beta build out the door. What I expect to release is version 1.6.0 as soon as Apple opens the door for glassified releases. Now, don’t expect much. Even with my four hours at a time to work on it I’m still very slow and the feature I’ve added isn’t glassy, at all. It’s something I’ve wanted to add for a very long time. It’s a feature meant to make things easier to subscribe to feeds. That’s all I’ll say about it for now.

What’s next?

Well, I had wanted to create an entire new view for adding and managing your subscriptions. I really need a nice way to populate the app your first time launching it and give you some great options when you pop open the Subscribe view controller. My plan is to create a nice set of hand picked feeds for users and, perhaps, add a set of recommended feeds using Apple’s built in LLM models. We’ll see at some point I hope! As long as I’m able to continue spending my Sunday mornings coding I think I’ll be able to achieve a lot on the app. I have a lot of features to add and bugs to fix! There are a lot of usability things I could do to improve the app and a few bugs I need to take care of.

Where’s the Mac version?

This is a tough one. And it’s only tough because I don’t know AppKit as well as I do UIKit. Yes, Stream is still 100% UIKit and the Mac parts I’ve done are all AppKit. I’m thinking I may do some new features in SwiftUI because I need the practice. I’ve never built anything with SwiftUI.

I’ve struggled to get layout on the Mac working the way I’d like. My table view cells look like crap and even with help from a dear friend — hi, Josh — I haven’t been able to get it right. It’s terribly frustrating and makes me want to jump out a window.🤣 Maybe SwiftUI will let me make those cells work on Mac?🤞🏼