My thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring last week at DF. Copilot is a personal finance app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’ve always deeply believed in the value of embracing the design idioms and technical features of truly native apps for Apple platforms. Apple h...
Major update to Rogue Amoeba’s essential audio utility for the Mac. I’ve written about versions 5 and 4 previously, and everything I wrote then remains true. SoundSource remains the system-wide audio menu item that ought to be built into MacOS, giving you easy, intuitive con...
The whole illustration is just weird looking, for one thing. As for sloppy details, the tree is in soft focus but somehow has a crisp edge, the carton is labeled both “Whole Milk” and “Lowfat Milk”, and the “Cow Fun Puzzle” maze is just goofily wrong. (I can’t recall ever se...
Special guest Quinn Nelson returns for a two-topic holiday spectacular: the iPad in the wake of iPadOS 26, and Apple’s executive changes as Tim Cook seemingly nears the end of his time as CEO.
Sponsored by:
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Smart, fair video from Quinn Nelson on the gap that remains between iPadOS 26 and desktop OSes. I think it’s right that there is a gap there. Apple has the Macintosh, the best desktop/workstation platform in the industry. So whatever the ideal is for iPadOS, it ought to fall short of MacOS in terms of technical capabilities, and instead offer a degree of simplicity and can’t-screw-it-up-edness that the Mac can’t match. But, some of the limitations that remain in iPadOS are just frustrating. iPadOS 26 is a huge leap forward, and I think sets the stage for Apple to address those limitations.
Another great video from Quinn Nelson. If your dumb cousin who knows you’re an Apple nerd approaches you on Christmas and says “Hey what’s going on at Apple, Bloomberg says it’s rats leaving a sinking ship over there?” and you don’t feel like explaining, just tell him to watch this video. Just the perfect explanation.
From a 2023 report at The Verge:
Sony highly confidential information about its PlayStation
business has just been revealed by mistake. As part of the FTC v.
Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief
Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the...
CNN media analyst Brian Stelter, on Bluesky:
As “60 Minutes” finalized its “Inside CECOT” report last Thursday,
CBS sent the White House a request for comment. A WH spokesperson
responded within a few hours. The quote was not included in the
“60” report — so, judge for y...
Christopher Goffard, reporting for the Los Angeles Times (News+ link):
When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of
Elizabeth Short — who became known as the Black Dahlia — he lied
about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been
found mu...
Everyone who works with official PDFs in any capacity should know that if you start with a PDF containing text you want to redact, and you just place black bars atop that text and resave the file, the original text is all still there in the new PDF file. It’s the digital equ...
Elizabeth Lopatto, back in October, after Bari Weiss was first named editor-in-chief of CBS News by David Ellison after his acquisition of Paramount:
This is the glass cliff to end all glass cliffs. You’re Marissa
Mayer at Yahoo without the Googler street cred. You’re Na...
Copilot Money — the Apple Editor’s Choice money tracker — is expanding beyond iPhone, iPad, and Mac with the launch of its new web app, available now.
Copilot Money brings all your spending, budgets, investments, and net worth into one organized dashboard, with intelligent categorization and insights that help you stay on track without spreadsheets or app-hopping. Designed to feel calm and intuitive, Copilot makes it easy to understand your finances across all your devices.
Copilot is offering DF readers two months free with code DARING, plus 26% off your first year for a limited time, available through this link.
David Folkenflik, reporting for NPR:
Just a day and a half before it was set to be broadcast, new CBS
News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss pulled a planned 60 Minutes
investigative segment centering on allegations of abuses at an El
Salvador detention center where the Trump a...
Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge:
60 Minutes had already begun promoting the now-censored segment
online. Because it was pulled so late, it seems that CBS missed at
least one platform for distribution: Canada’s Global TV. Some
people used a VPN to watch it; at lea...
My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner — a digital take on traditional paper planners. Its motto: “Most productivity...
Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac this week:
To comply with the Mobile Software Competition Act
(MSCA), Apple has announced a set of major
changes to the App Store and iPhone in Japan. The changes include
new app distribution options for developers and new alternative...
The Computer History Museum:
Thomas Knoll, a PhD student in computer vision at the University
of Michigan, had written a program in 1987 to display and modify
digital images. His brother John, working at the movie visual
effects company Industrial Light & Magic, foun...
Online tipsters have had a mixed record when it comes to providing
information about mass casualty incidents. But Rhode Island
Attorney General Peter Neronha said this Reddit user “blew the
case wide open” after posting about their encounter on Saturday
with the suspect.
“I’m being dead serious,” wrote the Reddit user, identified in an
affidavit as “John,” three days after the shootings at Brown. “The
police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates,
possibly a rental.”
Yesterday I wrote:
For the last 40 years Apple has only gone through three identity
fonts: Garamond → Myriad → San Francisco.
DF reader Cameron McKay emailed to observe: “It strikes me that Apple changes CPU architectures (68K → PowerPC → Intel → ARM) more often than i...
In Juli Clover’s aforelinked rundown of what’s new across the whole system in iOS 26.2, I misunderstood this item regarding the Passwords app:
In the Settings section of the Passwords app, there’s an option to
manage websites where passwords are not saved when signing in...
Apple released all of its OS 26.2 updates a week ago today. A little unusual for Apple to release OS updates on a Friday, but I think they wanted to get these out before Christmas week. And I don’t think it was rushed — for iOS 26.2 at least, there were two release candidate...
Apple, on its Apple Ads site:
Search is the way most people find and download apps on the App
Store, with nearly 65 percent of downloads happening directly
after a search. To help give advertisers more opportunities to
drive downloads from search results, Apple Ads will ...
David Shepardson, reporting for Reuters:
TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said Thursday it signed binding agreements with three major investors to form a joint venture to operate TikTok’s U.S. app led by American and global investors in a bid to avoid a U.S. government...
Michael Bierut, “I Hate ITC Garamond”, for Design Observer back in 2004:
ITC Garamond was designed in 1975 by Tony Stan for the
International Typeface Corporation. Okay, let’s stop right there.
I’ll admit it: the single phrase “designed in 1975 by Tony Stan”
conjures up ...
Katie Deighton, reporting last month for The Wall Street Journal:
Henry Modisett wanted his employer to stand out. Competitors of
the artificial-intelligence firm Perplexity were embracing their
science-fiction roots with futuristic branding that felt cold to
him. So Mod...
Gift Card Database (GCDB) has a guide to spotting tampered gift cards:
Whilst it may seem unusual, you should tear open this version of
Apple gift card before you purchase it so that you can inspect the
redemption code. Look for missing or scratched off characters (it
ma...
You will recall the Apple Account fiasco of Paris Buttfield-Addison, whose entire iCloud account and library of iTunes and App Store media purchases were lost when his Apple Account was locked, seemingly after he attempted to redeem a tampered $500 Apple Gift Card that he pu...
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