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John Gruber
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• John Gruber

On the Name of Apple’s Foldable iPhone

macrumors.com/2026/04/07/foldable-iphone-fold-iphone-ultra/

Tim Hardwick, last week at MacRumors: Apple’s first foldable iPhone may not carry the speculative media-derived “Fold” branding after all, according to Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station. In a new post on Weibo, the oft-accurate leaker claimed that Apple’s book-style fo...

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• John Gruber

Speaking of Tips

houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/kristin-tips-out-texas-funeral-22206178.php

The Houston Chronicle:

Kristin Tips, the longtime presiding officer of the embattled Texas Funeral Service Commission, is no longer on the board. “Governor Abbott appreciates Kristin Tips’ service,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, said in an email Tuesday. “An announcement on a replacement will be made at a later date.” [...]

Tips, who has run San Antonio’s prestigious Mission Park Funeral Chapels, Cemeteries & Crematories with her husband, Dick Tips, was appointed to the board by the governor in 2017 and made the presiding officer in May 2024. Tips did not respond to a request for comment.

I don’t have any questions for her, but I have at least one for her husband.

Link: houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/kristin-tips…

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• John Gruber

Apple Has Hidden the Pre-Creator-Studio Versions of Keynote, Numbers, and Pages in the Mac App Store

9to5mac.com/2026/04/13/apple-removes-old-pages-keynote-numbers-apps-for-macos/

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac: On the iPhone and iPad, Apple made the new Creator Studio features available as updates to the existing App Store releases. On the Mac though, the rollout was a lot more confusing. Apple kept the old iWork apps for Mac available on the App Sto...

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• John Gruber

Google Will Finally Begin Punishing Sites for Back-Button Hijacking in June

developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/04/back-button-hijacking

Google, on their Search Central Blog: Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions. Wh...

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• John Gruber

Amazon to Acquire Globalstar, Announces Agreement With Apple to Continue Service for iPhone and Apple Watch

aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-globalstar-apple

Amazon: Today Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add direct-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite network and ext...

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• John Gruber

John Calhoun on Steve Lemay

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47297653

Speaking of John Calhoun, he chimed in on a Hacker News thread last month regarding his experience working with Steve Lemay at Apple: I think Steve Lemay is a good guy. I kind of fought with him when I was an engineer, he was a young, new designer (at Apple). But I alway...

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• John Gruber

Richard Moss’s 2010 Interview With John Calhoun on the Origins of Glider

macscene.net/d/4678-interview-john-calhoun-on-the-origins-of-glider-part-1

Richard Moss, back in 2010: John Calhoun’s Glider games hold a special place in the history of Mac gaming, acting almost as an icon of the platform through much of the 1990s. They spawned a hugely dedicated fan base, which produced a ridiculous amount of original content...

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• John Gruber

Glider Is Back in the Mac App Store

bsky.app/profile/engineersneedart.com/post/3mjf3ldjbp22k

John Calhoun, on Bluesky (and also a new blog): I re-made Glider some years back for MacOS/iOS. It broke at some point (perhaps an Apple change for Retina displays?) so I pulled it from the App Store. (Claude looked at the code — found some minor coordinate issues. Than...

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• John Gruber

Steven Soderbergh Twice Pitched James Bond Projects

theplaylist.net/steven-soderbergh-says-he-pitched-two-different-james-bond-plans-including-a-twofer-that-would-have-created-an-new-auteur-lane-for-the-franchise-20260409/

The Playlist: The first pitch, he said, goes back to 2008, and it was already pretty radical by Bond standards. “I had pitched in 2008 the idea to Barbara Broccoli of a parallel franchise,” Soderbergh said. “Set in the ’60s, R-rated, violent, sexy. Fictional backstory to...

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• John Gruber

Apple Frames 4

macstories.net/stories/introducing-apple-frames-4-a-revamped-shortcut-support-for-frame-colors-proportional-scaling-and-the-apple-frames-cli-for-developers/

Federico Viticci: Today, I’m very happy to introduce Apple Frames 4, a major update to my shortcut for framing screenshots taken on Apple devices with official Apple product bezels. Apple Frames 4 is a complete rethinking of the shortcut that is noticeably faster, update...

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• John Gruber

Memory, They Say, Is the First Thing to Go

daringfireball.net/2006/09/zoom_using_scroll_wheel

Welp, turns out I wrote an entire post about the Control-scroll zoom-in-and-out feature all the way back in 2006, when it was a new feature in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Somehow, between 2006 and last year, I completely forgot about it. I don’t think it helps that the settings moved from the Mouse panel to the Zoom sub-section inside Accessibility. But I’ve used it so much in the last year, since rediscovering it, that I can’t believe I ever forgot it. Anyway, after I posted about it earlier today, a few people told me they could swear they learned about it here, long ago. They were right!

Link: daringfireball.net/2006/09/zoom_using_scroll_wheel

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• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce

[Sponsor] WorkOS FGA: The Authorization Layer for AI Agents

workos.com/blog/agents-need-authorization-not-just-authentication?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q22026

Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.

The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features. They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions.

Read the deep dive →

Link: workos.com/blog/agents-need-authorization-not-just…

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• John Gruber

Tahoe Nitpick of the Day: ‘Reduce Transparency’ Makes Layers Harder to See, Not Easier

mastodon.social/@tuomas_h/116397694769738857

Tuomas Hämäläinen, on Mastodon:

We’re at Mac OS 26.4 and seems like the accessibility toggles should be way more considered than they are.

Here’s a comparison between “Reduce transparency” off and on. How does it make sense that turning this setting on actually reduces contrast between the background and the UI elements? Buttons and sidebars get this grey cast, which makes them almost blend in with the drop shadows.

Tahoe looks like Huawei’s rushed rip-off of what Tahoe should be.

Link: mastodon.social/@tuomas_h/116397694769738857

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• John Gruber

John Martellaro, RIP

geektells.com/john-martellaro-remembrance/

Bryan Chaffin, two weeks ago: John Martellaro was good man. He was not only a better man than me, he was one of the best people I knew. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you Mr. Martellaro passed away today. He rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and h...

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• John Gruber

Marcin Wichary Visits the Large Scale Systems Museum

flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/72177720332956990/

I’d never before heard of this museum, but now that I’ve seen Wichary’s photos, I want to go. Unsurprisingly, a lot of his shots are details of vintage keyboards. I keep pausing on this one, a “RE-START” key with the word broken across two lines. It’s clearly wrong but somehow feels right.

I’m linking to his album at Flickr, but he posted a long thread of images to Mastodon too.

Link: flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/72177720332956990/

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• John Gruber

MacOS Tip: Enable the Zoom ‘Peek’ Gesture

unsung.aresluna.org/testing-tip-enable-the-zoom-peek-gesture/

Marcin Wichary, at Unsung: Go to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.” Then, at any moment, you can hold Control and swipe with two fingers (or use a scroll wheel) up or down to zoom the entire screen. ...

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• John Gruber

FT: ‘Meta Builds AI Version of Mark Zuckerberg to Interact With Staff’

ft.com/content/02107c23-6c7a-4c19-b8e2-b45f4bb9ce5f

Hannah Murphy, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, but Ars Technica has a no-paywall syndicated copy): The company recently began prioritising a Zuckerberg AI character, three of the people said. The Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing hi...

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• John Gruber

Viktor Orban Loses Election in Hungary, Concedes Defeat, Congratulates Opposition Winners

nytimes.com/2026/04/12/world/europe/hungary-election-orban-magyar.html

The New York Times: In a surprisingly early and gracious concession speech in Budapest, Mr. Orban congratulated the opposition saying, “The responsibility and opportunity to govern were not given to us.” But, he also made a vow: “We are not giving up. Never, never, never...

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• John Gruber

Zed — A Font Superfamily

typotheque.com/blog/zed-a-sans-for-the-needs-of-21century/?utm_source=df

My thanks to Typotheque for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Zed, their incredible new font superfamily. Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the wide...

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• John Gruber

Golden Tickets

presentandcorrect.com/blogs/blog/golden-tickets

More vintage graphic-design weekend fun — this time, a collection of Milwaukee bus tickets from the late 1940s to early 1950s, collected on the Present & Correct blog. So much variety in the colors and typography, but yet they all feel branded together. Think about the care and thought here. Whoever was making these was designing one for each week, every week — and it’s so clear they loved making them. Even something as mundane as weekly bus passes can be exuberant expressions of fun.

(Via Ian K. Rogers, who particularly notes the tickets’ integration of hand-lettering with typefaces.)

Link: presentandcorrect.com/blogs/blog/golden-tickets

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• John Gruber

Pan American Luggage Labels

ellafreire.com/collections/pan-american-luggage-labels

Some graphic design fun for the weekend: achingly gorgeous art pieces recreating vintage Pan Am luggage tags, by Ella Freire. I love them all. The colors, the type, the shapes — sublime.

(Via Dan Cederholm’s Studio Notes.)

Link: ellafreire.com/collections/pan-american-luggage-labels

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• John Gruber

★ Let Us Learn to Show Our Friendship for a Man When He Is Alive and Not After He Is Dead

For The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz go deep profiling Sam Altman under the mince-no-words headline “Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted?” 16,000+ words — roughly one-third the length of The Great Gatsby — very specifically investigating Altm...

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• John Gruber

Ed Bindels’s Apple Museum in Utrecht, Netherlands

applemuseum.nl/

This new museum in Utrecht (about 30–40 minutes south of Amsterdam) seems just astonishing. The rainbow wall of iMacs alone is incredible.

(Via Juli Clover.)

Link: applemuseum.nl/

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• John Gruber

MacOS Seemingly Crashes After 49 Days of Uptime — a ‘Feature’ Perhaps Exclusive to Tahoe

sixcolors.com/link/2026/04/macs-crash-after-49-days-of-uptime/

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major bug: Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of ...

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• John Gruber

Adobe Diddles With Your /etc/hosts File

old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1sb6hzk/adobe_wrote_to_my_hosts_file_ive_never_had_an_app/oe1ap9h/

“thenickdude”, on Reddit: They’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed when you visit on their website. When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript: https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png If ...

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• John Gruber

Lickspittle of the Week: Todd Blanche

politicalwire.com/2026/04/09/extra-bonus-quote-of-the-day-1022/

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking of the president of the United States in a totally normal way:

I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime. And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I’ll say, “Thank you very much, I love you, sir.”

The phrase Blanche was looking for is “Thank you sir, may I have another.”

Link: politicalwire.com/2026/04/09/extra-bonus-quote-of-the-day…

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• John Gruber

Anthropic’s New Claude Mythos Is So Good at Finding and Exploiting Vulnerabilities That They’re Not Releasing It to the Public

red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/

Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team: Earlier today we announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new general-purpose language model. This model performs strongly across the board, but it is strikingly capable at computer security tasks. In response, we have launched Project Glasswing,...

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• John Gruber

Solar Eclipse From the Far Side of the Moon

kottke.org/26/04/solar-eclipse-far-side-of-the-moon

Kottke:

This shot from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun is one of the most breathtaking astronomical photos I’ve ever seen. Holy shit.

Follow NASA on Flickr for more.

Update: In a follow-up post, Kottke has assembled a slew of great iPhone wallpapers from Artemis II photos, along with links to other collections, like Basic Apple Guy’s. Also, The Iconfactory has added a bunch of these images to their wonderful Wallaroo app (which is how I’ve switched to one on my own iPhone).

Update 2: Nils Streedain has made wallpapers for the Mac optimized for OLED displays (HEIC native format, pure #000 black background, etc.). Gorgeous.

Link: kottke.org/26/04/solar-eclipse-far-side-of-the-moon

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• John Gruber

Sam Altman, in a Video Released by OpenAI, Apparently Thinks AGI Is Going to Hit Society Like a Once-a-Century Pandemic

x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2041618671236469200?s=20

Not sure why they think this comparison is reassuring rather than terrifying.

I also have to say that Altman’s claims, today, that OpenAI employees were obsessed with COVID weeks ahead of the rest of the world feels more than a little like Donald Trump’s repeated false claim that he predicted, pre-9/11, that Osama bin Laden would attack the U.S.

Link: x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2041618671236469200?s=20

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• John Gruber

★ OpenAI Announces $122 Billion Additional ‘Committed Capital’, and Announces Their ‘Superapp’ Plan for the Future

OpenAI, one week ago, in an unbylined post on the company blog: Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion. For comparison, here are the current market caps and 2025 annual profits for publ...