Apple Newsroom:

WWDC kicks off with the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union on Monday, June 8. The conference continues online all week with over 100 video sessions and interactive group labs and appointments, where developers can connect directly with Apple engineers and designers to explore the latest announcements. The conference will take place on the Apple Developer app, website, and YouTube channel; and on the Apple Developer bilibili channel in China.

I’ve never before heard of Bilibili, which seems to be a Chinese equivalent to YouTube.

As usual, there’s a lottery of sorts to attend the keynote in person.

Link: apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apples-worldwide-developers…

Here’s a post from 2015, linking to Rene Ritchie, then still at iMore, explaining how iMore found itself serving ever worse (and more reader hostile) ads. Not much has changed regarding the state of web advertising in a decade, and iMore — once a truly great site — is defunct.

Link: daringfireball.net/linked/2015/07/09/ritchie-bad-ads

What a lovely thing to drop amidst my recent consternation over the state of web design.

To paraphrase Richard III: A horse, a horse! My kingdom for native app developers with the conviction of the artist-developers in The HTML Review.

Link: thehtml.review/05/

The sitting president of the United States, on his blog:

Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP

As the elderly descend further into dementia, they lose their sense of propriety and simply speak their mind. (They also get confused and think they need to “sign” their text messages and social media posts.) Say what you want about Trump’s truthfulness generally, but here, he’s just being brutally honest. Let’s keep his “Good, I’m glad he’s dead” post bookmarked for when Trump himself finally keels over — after he chokes on a hamburger or whatever it’ll be that finally does him in — and the good people of the world rejoice and celebrate.

Link: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/116268334535345382

Stuart Breckenridge, examining a web page at PC Gamer:

Third, this is a whopping 37MB webpage on initial load. But that’s not the worst part. In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.

This is so irresponsible and unprofessional it beggars belief. Web browsers ought to defend against this. Why not cap page loads by default at, I don’t know, 5 MB? And require explicit consent to download any additional content?

Link: stuartbreckenridge.net/2026-03-19-pc-gamer-recommends-rss…

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Video isn’t just something to watch; it’s a boatload of context and data. Mux makes it easy to ship and scale video into anything from websites to platforms to AI workflows. Unlock what’s inside: transcripts, clips, and storyboards to build summarization, translation, content moderation, tagging, and more.

Mux stewards Video.js, the web’s most popular open source video player. Video.js v10 is a complete architectural rebuild, with the beta now available at videojs.org.

Mux is video infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Synthesia. Get started free, no credit card required. Use code FIREBALL for an extra $50 credit.

Link: mux.com/?utm_campaign=fireball&utm_source=DF

Greg Bensinger, reporting for Reuters: The latest effort, known internally as “Transformer,” is being developed within its devices and services unit, according to four people familiar ​with the matter. The phone is seen as a potential mobile personalization device that c...

Sean Hollister, The Verge (gift link): After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did no...

Regarding my earlier post expressing confusion/discomfort with Bluesky announcing a $100 million funding round almost an entire year after it closed, I had an interesting back-and-forth with Adam Vartanian on Bluesky (natch), where he wrote: If you see press reports that...

Bluesky: In April 2025, Bluesky raised $100 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Knight Foundation and True Ventures. In the months since, we’ve focused on scaling our team to mee...

Quiche Browser is a rather astonishing app from the one-man indie developer Greg de J./Quiche Industries. (What a killer domain name that is.) Quiche Browser is a very robust, exquisitely designed, stunningly handsome web browser exclusively for iPhone. Just iPhone — althoug...

Jeff Johnson, linking to my “Your Frustration Is the Product” piece: My browser extension StopTheMadness Pro stops autoplaying videos and hides Sign in with Google on all sites. It also hides sticky videos and notification requests on many sites. For more extreme measur...

Javier C. Hernández, reporting for The New York Times:

He was responding to a question about why Japan and other allies had received no advance notice of the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran.

“We didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise,” he said. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right?”

There was some laughter from the officials and journalists gathered in the room. “You believe in surprise, I think, much more so than us,” he added.

As Trump sinks further into dementia and his presidency slides further into disarray, his administration, in a sick way, gets funnier and funnier.

Link: nytimes.com/2026/03/19/us/politics/trump-japan-pearl-harbor…

Anne Applebaum, writing for The Atlantic (gift link): Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European official...

Mark Simonson:

Just by coincidence, I discovered a copy of U&lc magazine in the graphics classroom. U&lc was published by ITC, the International Typeface Corporation, a typeface publisher, and the designer and editor was the legendary Herb Lubalin. I’d never seen such beautiful typography and design. It was a motherlode for an aspiring typophile like me. [...]

I decided right then that someday, somehow, I wanted to design typefaces.

Link: marksimonson.com/notebook/view/the-day-i-discovered-type…

Adamya Sharma, reporting for Android Authority: When Google execs previously said sideloading would become a high-friction process on Android, they really weren’t kidding. The company is finally sharing what Android’s new sideloading flow will look like in practice, and ...

One of the most controversial opinions I’ve long espoused, and believe today more than ever, is that it was a terrible mistake for web browsers to support JavaScript. Not that they should have picked a different language, but that they supported scripting at all. That decisi...

Here’s a simple AppleScript I wrote this week — one that solves a minor itch I’ve had for, jeez, 20 years. Almost every item I post to Daring Fireball goes through MarsEdit, the excellent Mac blogging client from Red Sweater Software (my friend Daniel Jalkut). MarsEdit has a...

Shubham Bose, “The 49MB Web Page”: I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker i...

Special guest David Pogue discusses his excellent and amazingly comprehensive new book, Apple: The First 50 Years.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/03/18/ep-443

This support page is a fascinating footnote regarding the recent changes Apple has made to their U.S. key cap labels.

Link: support.apple.com/en-us/102743

Who do you turn to when you’re Christie’s and you want to commission the finest rostrum the world has ever seen? Who else but Jony Ive and LoveFrom. I mean, I’d love to snark about this, but goddamnit, that’s a lovely piece of furniture.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=HLXDxx06_EM

David Heaney, writing for UploadVR:

Meta Horizon Worlds is dropping VR support in June, meaning it will only be available as a flatscreen experience for the web and smartphones.

By March 31, Meta says the Horizon Worlds app will be delisted from Quest’s store, and key first-party worlds such as Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay will no longer be accessible in VR. Then, from June 15, the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from Quest headsets, and all worlds will no longer be accessible in VR.

Yours truly, three months ago: “Meta Says Fuck That Metaverse Shit”.

Link: uploadvr.com/meta-horizon-worlds-dropping-vr-support/

Jake Conley, reporting for Yahoo Finance: If the deal closes, Zaslav will receive $517.2 million in equity that would trigger if and when the sale goes through, along with roughly $34.2 million in cash and $44.2 million in benefits tied to the value of health coverage re...

MacKenzie Sigalos, writing for CNBC, under the misleading headline “Tim Cook Squashes Retirement Rumors, Says He ‘Can’t Imagine Life Without Apple’”: Asked about reports that he was preparing to step aside, Cook told ABC, “No, I didn’t say that. I haven’t said that. I lo...

Fox Sports, on Twitter/X:

Tonight, watch the WBC Final in a full immersive experience on the Fox Sports XR app for the Galaxy XR headset powered by Android XR!

The Fox Sports app in the App Store is native only on iOS (iPhone and iPad), Apple TV, and Apple Watch. So, unless I’m missing something, not only are they not streaming it immersively on VisionOS, they don’t even have a native VisionOS app.

Link: x.com/mlbonfox/status/2033902946174271992?s=46

Jess Weatherbed, The Verge:

Samsung is preparing to axe its first three-panel foldable phone less than three months after launching the device in the US. Sales of the $2,899 Galaxy Z TriFold will first be wound down in Korea and then discontinued in the US once remaining inventory has been cleared, an unnamed Samsung spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Maybe five blades on a razor is too many?

Link: theverge.com/tech/895879/samsung-galaxy-z-trifold…

Stephen Hackett:

I was just going about my day then James Thomson of PCalc and other fine applications dropped these images on me and said I could share them.

Also, something fun for those of you with 3D printers.

Link: 512pixels.net/2026/03/lil-finder-5k-wallpapers/

Video isn’t just something to watch; it’s a boatload of context and data. Mux makes it easy to ship and scale video into anything from websites to platforms to AI workflows. Unlock what’s inside: transcripts, clips, and storyboards to build summarization, translation, content moderation, tagging, and more.

Mux stewards Video.js, the web’s most popular open source video player. Video.js v10 is a complete architectural rebuild, with the beta now available at videojs.org.

Mux is video infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Synthesia. Get started free, no credit card required. Use code FIREBALL for an extra $50 credit.

Link: mux.com/?utm_campaign=fireball&utm_source=DF

Another crackerjack essay on design and attention from Terry Godier. (Note that the Casio in the essay not only shows the actual time, but has functional buttons.)

Link: terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing