FeedCity

BTW, people make the same mistake with AI that we make with every new tech. We focus on the creators not the users. As users we are learning a new skill, how to specify our needs precisely. Whether this is good or bad, I don't know.

Back when I ran a software company I'd help the team understand why they should be very very nice to our customers. "They have our money in their pockets." It generally got a laugh partially because I was their boss, but I like to think also because it's the truth.

Yesterday, I had to ship an envelope to the UK and got caught in dead ends at the Fedex and DHL sites. One of them said my zip code wasn't in the town I live in. How do you get past that?? These companies are losing business because their systems are broken. Maybe they worked at one time. I used ChatGPT as I often do to get help on one of these antiquated sites. And while ChatGPT has the technology and the Fedex has the info, they just have to get together and upgrade the user experience, and eventually of course is the AI version of the UI becomes the real one.

Paywalls that require you to subscribe to an Atlanta news org when you don’t live in Atlanta prob don’t generate much revenue. Why not instead charge per article. Like a toll you pay on a road you drive on once every few years. I wouldn't even have an exception for Atlanta residents. If they start spending more money than a subscription costs, you could offer a subscription then, as a way to save money. Kind of the way Amazon lets you buy a certain amount of coffee beans without requiring you to sign up for monthly delivery. They do tell you how much you'd save if you subscribed. Everyone appreciates a chance to save money, but still might not want the commitment. And asking someone from upstate NY to subscribe to the Atlanta Journal Constitution is a total bullshit. An insult to both our intelligences.

Aram Zucker-Scharff writes "I don't want to read one more thinkpiece about blackbox AI code factories until you can show me what they've produced." I've made the same request, and there was very little even brilliant programmers could show, including some who have become in...

My Twitter account is owned. I can't even see what people are doing with it because you have to be signed on (apparently) to read stuff on Twitter nowadays. I wish current Twitter management would put it out of its misery. Served me well for approx 20 years. Let's clean up the mess. Thanks for your attention this matter.

How Protocols for Publishers points to the future of journalism – and the web

I don’t like magic. I’m not talking about acts of prestidigitation and illusion. I mean the kind of magic that’s used to market technologies. It’s magic. It just works. Don’t think about it. I’ve written about seamless and seamful design before. Seamlessness is often toute...

Watching more of the Winter Olympics. Imagine if as developers we only had one try… Shipped a new app that had some bugs? Oh well, I guess improve it with an app update in four years.

Maurice Parker has released version 4.0 of his outliner Zavala. In a new blog post, he writes about sync, localization, and the decision to require iOS 26 and macOS 26.

Lovely evening spent in a local pub, drinking beer, eating pie and mash and coming fifth (out of seven teams) in the pub quiz with my fellow quizzer, Becky. A truly wonderful way to start the week.

9to5Mac blogging about a change in the iOS 26.4 beta:

In the App Store, the Search bar has been moved back to the top of the search tab. The search tab is also now integrated into navigation bar at the bottom instead of being separated in its own floating circle.

Good change. I think some Liquid Glass apps had gotten a little wonky with their tab bars, requiring extra taps to switch between modes.

Bullet items for the Fediforum conference in March. Subscribing must be easy. Some things will work better if they're slightly centralized, esp subscribing. Use DNS for naming people. Support RSS in and out, and test it once you add the feature, so many easy things to fix...

I shouldn’t be so harsh, but it’s disappointing to see that for every podcast platform with real power, one by one they come up with their own proprietary solution for video. There’s already a perfectly good RSS-based spec for how to handle this. I’ve been planning to support it in Micro.blog.

This thread started by John Spurlock has context for Apple’s HLS announcement. It appears to not use RSS at all, making it no better than YouTube or Spotify shows. Apple had a chance to lead on openness and they blew it… Cynically I wonder if it’s because they’re skimming ad revenue from the deal.

Joshua Rothman writing at The New Yorker about writers creating spaces to focus and inspire:

Having access to these spaces and resources has been a privilege. There’s no question that they’ve helped me write. And yet, if I look back over my career as a writer, the value I’ve derived from carefully controlling my environment has paled in comparison to my main source of motivation: scary e-mails from editors.

I would get nothing done without deadlines.

I use dark mode on my phone, but light mode on my Mac. So when I’m developing an app that will mostly be used from a computer, dark mode is unfortunately an afterthought. I came up with a theme system for the new RSS thing, but now considering throwing it out and just having good defaults.

On March 2nd, FediForum is hosting a special Growing the Open Social Web workshop. As part of registration, attendees are encouraged to submit a position paper with ideas for growing the social web. I have a very specific proposal: we should move away from email-like user ha...

The new RSS reader is mostly done. A few bug fixes and polish to finish. I think for a 1.0 it’s very good. It does a few new things that I’ve never seen in a feed reader before.