FeedCity: Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball
06 Jul 22:42 • John Gruber

★ Apple Should Eliminate the App Icon ‘Squircle Jail’

Paul Kafasis, in a post at Rogue Amoeba’s blog titled “Free the Icons”: Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive. But there’s n...

Daring Fireball
06 Jul 21:09 • John Gruber

Markdown Now Has a Uniform Type Identifer (UTI) in Apple’s Version 27 OSes

developer.apple.com/documentation/uniformtypeidentifiers/uttype-swift.struct/markdown

The third developer betas of Apple’s 27 OSes dropped today, and this new page in Apple’s developer documentation drew my attention — a built-in Uniform Type Identifier for Markdown data:

The identifier for this type is net.daringfireball.markdown.

This type conforms to [utf8PlainText].

My main link here is to the Swift documentation, but it’s available in good old Objective-C too.

I had previously recommended conforming to public.plain-text but stated that the text encoding should be UTF-8. I’ve updated my own recommendation to public.utf8-plain-text to enshrine the UTF-8 encoding. (Back in 2004 UTF-8 support was far from universal. Today it is.)

Link: developer.apple.com/documentation/uniformtypeidentifiers…

Daring Fireball
06 Jul 18:39 • John Gruber

Backblaze Versus Dropbox

mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/19/backblaze-no-longer-backs-up-dropbox/

There’s a been a lot of (justified) concern and consternation over the last year regarding Backblaze — an online backup service whose simple pitch is that it backs up your entire computer, including the startup drive and external drives — and online file storage services lik...

Daring Fireball
06 Jul 17:39 • John Gruber

Allen Pike, Back in November: ‘Why Is ChatGPT for Mac So Good?’

allenpike.com/2025/why-is-chatgpt-so-good-claude/

Allen Pike, back in November (and corresponding Hacker News thread): Still, I wouldn’t count out the possibility of a change in course here. While mobile is king, desktop is still where work happens. While OpenAI has acquired Sky to double down on desktop, Google has lon...

Daring Fireball
06 Jul 17:39 • John Gruber

ATP Member Special: Mac-Assed Mac Apps

atp.fm/atp-dev-mac-assed-mac-apps

A banger of an Accidental Tech Podcast members-only special, right on time. ATP memberships are just $8/month or $88/year, and the members-only episodes alone are worth the price.

They do a great job explaining what makes for a Mac-assed Mac app, but an even better job talking about why users and developers should care about them.

Link: atp.fm/atp-dev-mac-assed-mac-apps

Daring Fireball
06 Jul 17:09 • John Gruber

Maestral, the Open Source Splendidly Simple Mac Dropbox Client, Has Been Retired

maestral.app/

Maestral developer Sam Schott, on the Maestral website: As of June 2026, Maestral is no longer actively maintained. The current version will continue to work until certificates expire. Schott, on Maestral’s GitHub project page: As of 2026-07-28, this project is arc...

Daring Fireball
06 Jul 15:00 • John Gruber

Jason Snell Ends His Column, and 28-Year Run, at Macworld

macworld.com/article/3175482

Jason Snell, at Macworld: My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turna...

Daring Fireball
04 Jul 21:18 • John Gruber

Day One Journal

dayoneapp.com/blog/introducing-daily-chat/

My thanks to Day One Journal for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Day One first launched in 2011 and has been the stalwart of journaling apps on Mac and iOS ever since. Day One’s apps exhibit a commitment to technical and design excellence, and, more importantly, every...

Daring Fireball
04 Jul 19:30 • John Gruber

From the DF Archive: ‘Electron and the Decline of Native Apps’

daringfireball.net/2018/12/electron_and_the_decline_of_native_apps

Yours truly, back in 2018: I don’t share the depth of their pessimism regarding native apps, but Electron is without question a scourge. I think the Mac will prove more resilient than Windows, because the Mac is the platform that attracts people who care. But I worry. I...

Daring Fireball
04 Jul 17:06 • John Gruber

Fantastical 4.1.15 Adds Calendar Mirroring

flexibits.com/blog/2026/06/double-booked-never-heard-of-it-meet-calendar-mirroring-in-fantastical/

Flexibits: Calendar Mirroring allows you to connect two separate calendars (like work and personal) so that events from one automatically show up on the other. The best part? No event information is sent to Flexibits servers or saved outside of your device. You can cho...

Daring Fireball
03 Jul 21:45 • John Gruber

★ Claude’s Criminally Bad Electron Mac App Is an Inside Job

Anthropic released the first version of the Claude “desktop” app for MacOS in October 2024 — an Electron clunker that did not impress UI designers. When it came out, I wrote: ChatGPT’s native Mac app, on the other hand, is a truly native Mac app. It looks like a Mac app ...

Daring Fireball
02 Jul 22:51 • John Gruber

April Report From Ookla: ‘A Return to mmWave 5G’

ookla.com/articles/a-return-to-mmwave-5g

Mike Dano, in a long (too long, I say) report for Ookla (makers of the nifty Speedtest app): Further, few other countries in the world followed in the mmWave footsteps of the U.S., with international spectrum regulators instead putting a focus on releasing mid-band spect...

Daring Fireball
02 Jul 22:00 • John Gruber

Introducing the Safari MCP Server for Web Developers

webkit.org/blog/18136/introducing-the-safari-mcp-server-for-web-developers/

Saron Yitbarek, writing on the WebKit blog, with a nice post-WWDC surprise: In Safari Technology Preview 247, we’re introducing the Safari MCP server — a Model Context Protocol server for web developers that makes your web development and debugging workflow faster and mo...

Daring Fireball
02 Jul 22:00 • John Gruber

EveryMac Turns 30

everymac.com/whatsnew/

EveryMac: Thirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since then — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your support ...

Daring Fireball
02 Jul 20:42 • John Gruber

I Repeat Myself (5G vs. LTE Edition)

daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/23/5g-battery-life

Back in March 2022, Nicole Nguyen of The Wall Street Journal compared the battery life effects of 5G vs. LTE by streaming videos on several iPhone and iPad models. She found that using LTE saved significant battery life. (It would be nice if someone re-ran similar tests on m...

Daring Fireball
02 Jul 20:00 • John Gruber

Truth Social Is Still Just Trump’s Blog

daringfireball.net/2025/06/truth_social_is_just_trumps_blog

After I linked to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posting on Twitter/X about the Trump administration allowing Anthropic to once again release Claude Fable 5, I was reminded once again that no one else in the Trump administration uses Truth Social other than Trump himself....

Daring Fireball
02 Jul 19:30 • John Gruber

‘A Perfect Reflection of Trump’s Washington’

politicalwire.com/2026/06/19/a-perfect-reflection-of-trumps-washington/

Taegan Goddard, two weeks ago at Political Wire: The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become an almost too-perfect metaphor for Donald Trump’s presidency. He promised a quick, cheap fix. Instead, taxpayers got a no-bid project that ballooned to more than $14 millio...

Daring Fireball
02 Jul 18:42 • John Gruber

Claude Fable and Kayfabe

anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5

Anthropic: On Friday, June 12, the US government applied export controls to our newest models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5. This required us to restrict access to foreign nationals, whether inside or outside the United States. Because the order took effect immedia...

Daring Fireball
02 Jul 17:15 • John Gruber

‘Why Is Meta Destroying Its Engineering Organization?’

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering

Gergely Orosz, writing at The Pragmatic Engineer (which, sadly, is a Substack blog): The biggest problem: people stop caring about real work and focus on performative work. Let’s check the four ingredients that Meta’s leadership has decided to introduce to their workplac...

Daring Fireball
02 Jul 16:39 • John Gruber

MG Siegler Got Banned From WhatsApp for No Reason

spyglass.org/whatsapp-ban/

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass: Yes, that’s right, for a third time in as many years, I’ve been banned by Meta. What for? Do you really have to ask? Nobody knows. My suspicion is that it’s directly tied to the claiming of usernames on WhatsApp, which Meta opened up yest...

Daring Fireball
02 Jul 16:09 • John Gruber

Hackers Stole Instagram Accounts Simply by Asking Meta AI to Give Them Access

404media.co/hackers-simply-asked-meta-ai-to-give-them-access-to-high-profile-instagram-accounts-it-worked/

Jason Koebler, a month ago at 404 Media: Over the last several days, Telegram groups for security researchers and hacking groups have been sharing videos and screenshots of the steps taken to steal an account, which appeared to be shockingly easy. One video shows a hacke...

Daring Fireball
01 Jul 23:30 • John Gruber

★ A Tale of Two Modems

Marko Zivkovic, reporting for AppleInsider regarding some of the data revealed by Tata Electronics’s massive data breach: For the U.S. variant of the iPhone 18 Pro, which will feature mmWave compatibility, Apple seemingly plans to use Qualcomm modem hardware. Multiple Qu...

Daring Fireball
01 Jul 19:57 • John Gruber

PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass Subscriptions

daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/01/valve-on-subsidizing-hardware

Following up on my earlier post on Valve’s righteous objection to selling game console hardware at a loss, I should have noted that PlayStation Plus starts at $11/month (and goes up to $20/month) and Xbox Game Pass starts at $10/month (and goes up to $23/month). One draw of ...

Daring Fireball
01 Jul 18:21 • John Gruber

Valve Explains Why It Doesn’t Subsidize Its Hardware Platforms

theverge.com/games/952004/valve-steam-machine-price-not-subsidizing

Valve, in a statement to The Verge, explaining why it doesn’t sell its handheld Steam Deck or new Steam Machine gaming devices at a loss (gift link): While this might seem like an easy solution, it doesn’t align with our beliefs about how healthy ecosystems are built. If...

Daring Fireball
01 Jul 15:57 • John Gruber

The Talk Show: ‘Taking Drugs to Get Fat’

daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/06/30/ep-451

The great John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s hardware price hikes in response to the global RAM/SSD shortage, and some spitballing on what we like about the UI changes in the MacOS 27 Golden Gate beta.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/06/30/ep-451

Daring Fireball
01 Jul 15:06 • John Gruber

404 Media: Vulnerability in iCloud’s ‘Hide My Email’ Reveals Peoples’ Real Email Addresses

404media.co/apple-hide-my-email-vulnerability-reveals-peoples-real-email-addresses/

Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media: 404 Media is not revealing the exact details of the vulnerability because it can still be exploited as of Monday, when 404 Media verified the issue with one of our own hidden email addresses. “Apple Hide My Email is leaking email add...

Daring Fireball
30 Jun 20:57 • John Gruber

Gnome

lexfriedman.com/gnome/

Gnome is a deceptively clever animated GIF app by Lex Friedman: The truest thing about animated GIFs is that they are a critical pillar of modern human communication, and yet getting one into a Slack message or an iMessage thread or an email reply usually requires openin...

Daring Fireball
30 Jun 20:33 • John Gruber

Supreme Court Agrees to Review Apple’s Petition Regarding Civil Contempt Finding in ‘Apple v. Epic Games’

supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/063026zor_3f14.pdf

Speaking of the Supreme Court’s end-of-term rulings, they today agreed to grant certiorari to Apple’s petition from last month, ordering: APPLE INC. V. EPIC GAMES, INC. The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted limited to Question 1 presented by the petition. Q...

Daring Fireball
30 Jun 19:45 • John Gruber

Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship in 6-3 Decision

talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-birthright-citizenship-decision-is-more-evidence-for-court-reform/sharetoken/e2bf9547-fa9b-468c-8af3-aa09e72ca698

Josh Marshall, writing at TPM (gift link): As you’ve seen, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of birthright citizenship by a 6 — or perhaps 5½ — vote margin. See Kate Riga’s report on the majority decision and Josh Kovensky’s piece on the dissenters’ goal of ...

Daring Fireball
30 Jun 19:06 • John Gruber

★ The Supreme Court Rules That Law Enforcement’s Use of ‘Geofence Warrant’ Was a ‘Search’ (But May Be Moot, Technically, Since 2024)

Amy Howe, writing at the ever-excellent SCOTUSblog: The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that when law enforcement officials used a “geofence warrant” — a warrant that instructed Google to provide location data for cellphone users who were near a particular place during a s...