OpenAI is planning to unify its apps into a single app. I don’t love this. Codex is excellent on its own, and Atlas already feels cluttered. From the WSJ:

OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex and browser into a desktop “superapp,” a step to simplify the user experience and continue with efforts to focus on engineering and business customers.

Chief of Applications Fidji Simo will oversee the change and focus on helping the company’s sales team market the new product.

My NCAA bracket could’ve started off better, but caught the last couple minutes of Spurs/Suns, so good. Officially back in the playoffs. 🏀

Just realized today that we hadn’t released the Epilogue update for Android that improves book search. It has been done for a while. Finally out now! Lots of apps and versions to juggle right now.

Just released Inkwell for Mac 1.0.2, improving a few things and fixing bugs, especially a potential hang on launch. There’s also a help page with full release notes for each version.

Expanding on my short post this morning about AI-assisted coding style, I think the reason I like this iterative approach is that I don’t always know what I want the UI to look like until I build it. UI design is a bit like sculpting, slowly revealing the shape of everything...

Wondering if I use AI-assisted coding differently than a lot of developers. I don’t chat with AI forever to come up with a perfect plan and then have it execute it. I use AI the same way I would code traditionally, iterating quickly with dozens of quick changes. Still feels like programming.

I’m testing GPT-5.4 via the API. The pricing is interesting. 5.4-mini and 5.4-nano are about 3x as expensive, but they are apparently much better, so I switched one call from 5-mini to 5.4-nano.

Meanwhile for coding I use 5.4 high with /fast and can’t burn through tokens fast enough. Really good.

Marco Arment posted to Reddit with details on the first Overcast beta that includes transcripts. Very nicely done. The transcripts UI feels cleaner and less finicky than Apple Podcasts.

That’s a lot of green Ws. Spurs have won their last 18 of 20 games. 🏀

Really cool set of upcoming Micro.blog plug-ins from @rscottjones for putting different kinds of travel maps on your blog. I bet this’ll work great for my attempt to visit all Texas state parks.

Federico Viticci blogs about using Android foldables, thinking about the upcoming iPhone foldable:

Anyway, what every foldable has also taught me is that it’s just so nice to realize you can open your phone and be taken into a quasi-tablet environment without having to go grab a separate device. This happens to me all the time: I’m doing some research and realize I want to keep my browser next to, say, ChatGPT; without interrupting what I’m doing, I can open the Z Fold and continue the task, now with two apps shown on screen.

Also I love the name iPhone Duo.

Like the native Micro.blog client apps, Inkwell for web and macOS are open source. We aren’t great at incorporating contributions into the shipping versions, but it feels right. With AI-assisted development, the code itself is not as valuable as the whole package — design, infrastructure, etc.

Inkwell 1.0.1 is out for Mac with several bug fixes, especially for dark mode. Choose “Check for Updates” from the application menu to get the latest version.

If you missed the announcement, I posted a video about Inkwell yesterday.

Gulf of Mexico. Heading out on a kind of crazy adventure that I’ll blog more about later. As usual with my travel, I’ve devised the most complicated trip possible. Boat, trains, planes!

Last we shipped Inkwell, our new feed reader for Micro.blog. Today I’m releasing a native Mac app for Inkwell.

You can download Inkwell directly here.

I also recorded a 3-minute video demo of the Mac app. That’s the best way to understand the app. I’ll be updating documentation and other things soon.

Wooden rollercoaster at the Kemah Boardwalk. Walking around earlier before dinner.

They did a great job with the in memoriam this year at the Oscars. Longer and more personal stories. So many incredible people to highlight.

Inkwell for Mac will ship tomorrow. It’s my first Mac app that is sandboxed. I have to admit it is nice to do things like delete files without being extremely paranoid about deleting the right thing. It can’t do much damage, and Inkwell is well suited anyway for minimal access to the system.

Looking forward to the Oscars tonight. Managed to see almost all the best picture nominations, and a handful more in other categories. I wonder if the Oscars being later than the Golden Globes, etc. means there are more surprises because it would be “boring” for the same films to win again.

Cracking up watching the emoji bit on SNL tonight. I lost it at orange square. 🚡

Parker Ortolani blogs about the Neo:

The MacBook Neo is the first Mac that is truly, in every sense of the word, a bicycle for the mind. It’s the first Mac that almost anyone can buy and it’s going to unleash a whole new era of creativity because of it.

Writing the app is easy. Configuring Sparkle to verify updated app signatures… Impossible! 🤪

Patrick Rhone interviewed for the People and Blogs series:

…that’s exactly what a blog should be — a reflection of one’s interest and attention over time. A reflection of who one is right now and where they’ve been. Blogs are living things that should grow at the same rate we do.

I picked up Rick Rubin’s book a couple years ago. It sat on my bedside table for months and one day I will actually finish it.

I just recently discovered his podcast Tetragrammaton. There are two episodes with Greg Brockman that are excellent. (Yes, I’m aware Greg gave a bunch of money to Trump and I’m disappointed by it.)

The full interview is 3 hours long. The first episode has the best insight into Sam Altman’s firing that I’ve heard yet, especially around letting internal drama brew instead of resolving conflicts early. Highly recommend both episodes whether you love or hate AI.

Kagi’s Small Web has added categories:

Finding great Small Web content that scratches your browsing itch can feel overwhelming, especially when the feed is a single stream that tumbles through over 30,000 featured sites. That’s why we’ve introduced categories, curated groups of topics that let you dive into the corners of the Small Web that interest you most.

The site list is available as a simple text file, but I haven’t seen if the categories are published anywhere yet.

At my mom’s house taking care of things. All the furniture is gone except the piano, so it’s now a sort of standing desk when I need to work.

I have a draft pull request for Inkwell sync in NetNewsWire. Not totally sure yet what more will be needed or any kind of timeline for merging it. I’ll test over the next few days, but at least the code is out there.

Brent Simmons:

Code is a liquid now.

Movable, shapable, flowing. It’s the first time I haven’t felt trapped by the weight of old code.

John Gruber blogs about the split in reaction to AI-assisted programming: The divide I’m seeing is that the developers who are craftspeople are elated because their productivity is skyrocketing while their craftsmanship remains unchanged. They’re achieving much more, much f...

David Smith developed a clever solution for letting the home screen wallpaper show through widgets:

In Widgetsmith 8.2 we added the ability to give your widgets a ‘clear’ background. This isn’t actually clear (since iOS doesn’t allow that without private API use), but instead just crops part of your home screen wallpaper and uses that as the background.

Very cool.