Brent Simmons blogged about why NetNewsWire isn’t a web app, along the way making the case for Apple letting us use our devices as the computers that they are:

What I want to see happen is for Apple to allow iPhone and iPad users to load — not sideload, a term I detest, because it assumes Apple’s side of things — whatever apps they want to. Because those devices are computers.

Watched One Battle After Another. Even though I saw the trailer, didn’t actually know what it was about. Intense, excellent. 🍿

Manu Moreale blogs about posting on social media as a performance:

By doing it publicly, you can be part of the mob of the day, find yourself in the company of like-minded individuals (that you likely don’t know and might as well hate you in real life), and have fun berating someone.

Last week a solicitor came to our door selling the usual house upgrades: new roof, windows, even solar panels. Normally I would say no thanks and they would be on their way, but just the day before I had been thinking about solar, so I figured sure, actually I am interested ...

I think we need to do something fun, so I’m swapping the order of new features rolling out this week. First, movies search and easy blogging about movies. Second, new video hosting plan. 🍿

Nice walk with the dog today. Also digging in the yard and thinking. Here’s my new rule for when online discussions get heated: let’s pay attention to who are the firefighters and who are the arsonists.

That reply I mentioned wanting to delete last night didn’t seem to get synced everywhere. Oh well, I’ll let it stand. If anyone was following along, know that I’m wrong sometimes but I never lie. I try to assume the best in people and sometimes get burned, but thankfully very rarely.

Got so derailed yesterday that I had to stop working on a feature in the middle of a change before I had even committed it. This pushes back the new video hosting support a day or two, but still should be able to launch it next week. Just working through some HDR issues.

Laughed a little when I saw this sign yesterday. I’ve been taking this elevator a bunch over the last week and it always shakes and rattles like maybe you’re lucky when it successfully makes it back to the first floor. Came back at night and it seems fixed. 🤞

Lost my cool today and sent a reply I shouldn’t have. I’m deleting it, which is very unusual for me. I never delete posts! Ironically it was just hours after I blogged that we’re all human and make occasional mistakes.

I wasn’t going to announce this until later, but today feels right… Earlier this week, I hired someone to fill the role of community manager at Micro.blog. I’ll be officially welcoming her in a couple weeks. Thanks everyone for your patience while we figured this out!

I’m exhausted of the attacks. After a nice morning with friends, I had to rush back to my mom’s bedside at rehab to hold her hand, talking to the doctor, all while people online were again questioning my integrity. I’ve said this before: you don’t know what people are going through. Give them space.

Lake Austin from Mozart’s. ☕️

Paul Kafasis with a single-sentence blog post that says everything about Apple removing ICEBlock from the App Store:

Gosh, it’s almost like Apple serving as the exclusive gatekeeper for what software can be installed on the iPhone (and iPad, and Apple TV, and Apple Watch, and Vision Pro) is a bad thing that creates a single point of failure which can be abused by increasingly authoritarian governments.

Really liking The Life of a Showgirl so far. Not through the whole album yet, but it starts great. 🎶

Apparently there was some drama on Bluesky, but to be honest I can’t quite unravel the full extent of it. Just a quick shout-out to the CEO and CTO, who I have a lot of respect for. Strong principles and vision. There will be occasionally missteps because we’re all human. Keep moving forward.

After we added books and bookshelves to Micro.blog, there was a lot of good feedback about expanding it to movies, video games, music, and other collections of media. I think I have a good next step: make it easy to simply search for a movie and blog about it. Planning to wire things up via TMDB. 🍿

WordPress has also added support for Mastodon quote posts. Micro.blog’s support is generally working well — I blogged about it here — but I noticed a couple glitches today adapting for quoted WordPress posts, so I’m fixing those now.

Mark Gurman on Apple shifting resources away from a lighter Vision Pro:

The company had been preparing a cheaper, lighter variant of its headset — code-named N100 — for release in 2027. But Apple announced internally last week that it’s moving staff from that project to accelerate work on glasses, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

They should do both. I’ve been skeptical of Vision Pro all along, but it does need a “Vision Air” hardware update, unless they plan to abandon it. See also: Casey Neistat’s latest video.

Had a weird dream where I was at some kind of festival and ran into other Mac developer bloggers and… Sam Altman. Tried to convince him that Sora borrowed too much from TikTok and other addictive social networks. It’s technically amazing but I think is the wrong product to build, in this form.

Had no idea about this secret album from Mariah Carey, produced with her friend Clarissa Dane. Gina Trapani blogs:

To blow off steam, she writes a grunge rock album inspired by alt-rock bands like Garbage, Hole, and Sleater-Kinney. She records it at night with the band after the Daydream sessions, channeling her frustrations into the music, and picks the most perfect name for such a project: Someone’s Ugly Daughter.

Love this. 🎶

Last month I blogged about the yogurt shop murders. Now they solved it, further exonerating the suspects who were wrongfully charged. One of them was even sentenced to death… What a tragedy upon tragedies if we had accidentally executed an innocent man. Hope the parents and friends find some peace.

Because it’s now in the public domain, I can test video uploads with Steamboat Willie posted to a page on my own blog. Almost 100 years old. Still good.

Really good series. Aces to the finals, but the Fever kept getting back in the game over and over. Fitting to end in OT. 🏀

Congrats to the Iconfactory on releasing Tapestry 1.3. Nice to explore their take on adopting Liquid Glass. Most apps I use haven’t updated yet.

Since I mused last week about expanding the video hosting in Micro.blog, I’ve been working on some behind the scenes changes to make that happen. I’ll post more about it this week. But already in early testing I’m happy to say it is dramatically better.

Sora 2 is invite-only, so not entirely sure the scope of it, but I’m getting the feeling that it’s much more of a move into social than Sora 1. Sam Altman writing on his blog:

Social media has had some good effects on the world, but it’s also had some bad ones. We are aware of how addictive a service like this could become, and we can imagine many ways it could be used for bullying.

The OpenAI team deepfaked themselves in the announcement videos. Bizarre!

The sky and clouds while walking yesterday.

Kagi launches Kagi News. I love this approach of having a single, daily update:

We publish once per day around noon UTC, creating a natural endpoint to news consumption. This is a deliberate design choice that turns news from an endless habit into a contained ritual.

I usually have a few books I’m trying to read and switch between them. This new Kindle feature “Story So Far” seems genuinely useful if a long time has passed since putting a book down. From The Verge:

There will be new AI-assisted reading tools, too, including a feature called Story So Far that generates a spoiler-free recap of a book up to the point you’ve read