My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks. WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your back end requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh. That’s it.
After 12 years with The Wall Street Journal, this is my final
column and video as a full-time employee. I’m off to build
something new and independent. I’ll still pop up on these pages
and at WSJ events from time to time. Can’t get rid of me that
easily! Before I go, I wanted to reflect on the past dozen years
in tech — in a letter to my first-month-on-the-job self.
The video version of her sign-off column is worth it for the Velveeta gag alone.
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:
After planning to include the new capabilities in iOS 26.4 — an
operating system update slated for March — Apple is now working
to spread them out over future versions, according to people
familiar with the matter. That would mean po...
Jeff Johnson:
In today’s macOS 26.3 update, Apple implemented a “fix” for an
issue I blogged about a month ago, macOS Tahoe broke Finder
columns view. (At the behest of John Gruber and the Apple
Style Guide, I’m now using the term “column view” rather
than “columns view....
Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica at the end of January:
Apple also outlines a number of usage restrictions for the
generative AI features that rely on external services. Apple says
that, “at a minimum,” users will be able to generate 50 images, 50
presentation...
Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks.
WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your backend requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh.
OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I’ve had a few days of preview access — it’s a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills, and Automations for running scheduled tasks.
Interesting, for sure. But super-duper interesting? I don’t know.
Xcode 26.3 introduces support for agentic coding, a new way in Xcode for developers to build apps using coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex. With agentic coding, Xcode can work with greater autonomy toward a developer’s goals — from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture and using built-in tools.
I don’t know if this is super-duper interesting news, but I think it’s super-duper interesting that Apple saw the need to release this now, not at WWDC in June.
Apple Newsroom, yesterday:
“Today, Apple is proud to report a remarkable, record-breaking
quarter, with revenue of $143.8 billion, up 16 percent from a year
ago and well above our expectations,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.
“iPhone had its best-ever quarter driven by unpr...
Mike Swanson:
What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving
somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few
minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the
road and asks:
“How are you enjoying your drive so far?”
Annoyed by the int...
When I wrote last week about the false narrative that iOS 26 is seeing bizarrely low adoption rates compared to previous years, I neglected one source: Apple itself. Apple’s Developer site publishes a page with iOS and iPadOS usage for devices that “transacted on the App Sto...
Jeremy Fuster, reporting for TheWrap:
But save for some theaters in Republican-heavy states, the film is
unlikely to leave much of an impact at a slumping box office, with
theatrical sources telling TheWrap that “Melania” is projected for
an opening of around $3 million ...
Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes, reporting for The New York Times:
Amazon paid Ms. Trump’s production company $40 million for the
rights to “Melania,” about $26 million more than the next closest
bidder, Disney. The fee includes a related docuseries that is
scheduled t...
Ged Maheux, The Iconfactory:
This week we announced a new Kickstarter that’s aimed at
expanding the game offerings of Ollie’s Arcade, the fun, ad-free
retro gaming app we introduced back in 2023. Ollie’s
Arcade has always been a great way to escape doomscrolling,
even if...
Adam Engst, back in November, at TidBITS:
Did you know that, regardless of view, you can now swipe left on
any call to reveal a blue clock icon that lets you create a
reminder to call back in 1 hour, tonight, tomorrow, or at any
custom time (below left, slightly doctored...
New Mac app by Mikey Clarke, and it’s just what it says on the tin: a “lovingly crafted Bluesky app designed and built just for the Mac”. I’ve been beta testing Aeronaut for months, and it’s the only interface to Bluesky I actually like. It’s a real Mac app — written mostly in AppKit, supporting all the right UI idioms and platform integrations. It’s not just the best Bluesky client I’ve seen, for any platform, but maybe the best new Mac app I’ve seen in years, period. Certainly the one whose very existence has made me happiest. Next time someone tells me no one makes good new native apps for the Mac anymore, I’m going to tell them Mikey Fucking Clarke does.
$2/month or $15/year. A veritable bargain for an app so nice.
I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released
it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on
the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of
Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of
Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
Best line from the lyrics:
Their claim was self-defense,
Just don’t believe your eyes.
It’s our blood and bones and these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies.
Patrick McGee (author of last year’s bestseller, Apple in China, and guest on The Talk Show in May), commenting on Twitter/X re: Tim Cook’s company-wide memo regarding the “events in Minneapolis”:
This literally says nothing, via intention and cowardice.
It’s the kind o...
Tim Cook, in a company-wide memo (first published by Mark Gurman):
Team,
I’m heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis, and my prayers and
deepest sympathies are with the families, with the communities,
and with everyone that’s been affected.
This is a time for deescala...
Andy Stone, VP of communications at Meta, responding, in a series of tweets on Twitter/X, to Jeff Horwitz’s report at Reuters yesterday, linked here last night, which claimed that “Zuckerberg blocked curbs on sex-talking chatbots for minors”:
Never let the facts get in t...
Jeff Horwitz, reporting for Reuters:
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg approved allowing minors
to access AI chatbot companions that safety staffers warned
were capable of sexual interactions, according to internal Meta
documents filed in a New Mexico state court case...
Adam Serwer, reporting from the streets of Minneapolis for The Atlantic, “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” (gift link):
The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually
common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all
of the ideological co...
Cook is not stupid. He is not evil. He is trapped. The iron clasp
of market expectations has turned him into what he never meant to
be: a man who goes to parties at the White House while nurses die.
In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Roy Bland captures a cynical,
post-ideological, corrupt English society: “You scratch my
conscience; I’ll drive your Jag.” You could say the same of
today’s Silicon Valley. It used to believe it could change the
world. Now it just hopes the world won’t change its stock price.
Tim Cook is captured. There is simply no other explanation for his
actions over the past year or so. But it perhaps culminated this
weekend when Cook went to a special private showing of the
documentary Melania at the White House. Yes, thatMelania. That in and of itself would have probably been
fine. I mean, it’s potentially problematic for a host of reasons
that I’ll get to, but such is our world right now. Then one shot — a gunshot — turned attending that movie screening into a
statement...
While Cook was enjoying his popcorn and champagne with the likes
of Mike Tyson, Tony Robbins, and other “VIPs”, it was complete and
utter chaos on the streets of Minnesota. Just hours earlier, Alex
Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by ICE
agents. Maybe, just maybe, postpone the movie premiere?
Fred Trump died in 1999 at age 93. He had, Trump said, a “heart
that couldn’t be stopped” with almost no health conditions to
speak of throughout his long life. “He had one problem,” Trump
said. “At a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting, what do
they call it?” He pointed to his forehead and looked to his press
secretary for the word that escaped him.
“Alzheimer’s,” Leavitt said.
“Like an Alzheimer’s thing,” Trump said. “Well, I don’t have it.”
“Is it something you think about at all?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think about it at all. You know why?” he said.
“Because whatever it is, my attitude is whatever.”
I’ve been playing around with Clawdbot so much, I’ve burned
through 180 million tokens on the Anthropic API (yikes), and
I’ve had fewer and fewer conversations with the “regular” Claude
and ChatGPT apps in the process.
Those tokens aren’t free. I asked Viticci just how much “yikes” cost, and he said around US$560 — using way more input than output tokens.
Jonathan Rauch, writing for The Atlantic, “Yes, It’s Fascism” (gift link):
Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe President
Trump. For one thing, there were too many elements of classical
fascism that didn’t seem to fit. For another, the term has been
ov...
Ella Chakarian, writing for Rolling Stone (News+):
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Kendall Mayes was mindlessly
scrolling on X when she noticed an unsettling trend surface on her
feed. Users were prompting Grok, the platform’s built-in AI
feature, to “nudify” women’s ima...
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