Jason Snell, writing at Macworld: In that first event (which you can relive in the YouTube video below), Apple announced its first wave of M1 Macs: the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The Macs themselves all used the same design as their Intel predecessor...

Marco Arment and David Smith:

In our final episode, we reflect on how indie app development has changed over the past decade. Thanks for listening, everyone!

Michael Tsai:

I really liked the 30-minute format and the breadth of topics: everything from API details to broader design considerations, stats from their own businesses, and postmortems, plus all the stuff he mentioned.

Ricky Mondello:

I’ve never been an indie software developer, but I found the podcast extremely insightful. It’s influenced how I’ve thought about my non-indie software development career, not just as someone delivering bits that indies use, but also as a product person who writes software as a means to an end.

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern video should be simple to ship and scale. Mux makes it easy to build live and on-demand video into anything from websites to platforms to AI workflows.

Upload a video, get back a playback URL. No transcoding headaches. No CDN setup. Go further with video building blocks — thumbnails, transcripts, storyboards — to create exactly what you want.

Now, Mux is shepherding Video.js, the web’s most-trusted open-source player, and reimagining it for the modern developer experience. Future-proof your video with infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Synthesia. Get started free, no credit card required. Use code FIREBALL for an extra $50 credit.

Don Van Natta Jr. and Adam Schefter, reporting for ESPN: President Donald Trump wants the Washington Commanders to name their planned $3.7 billion stadium after him, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told ESPN. A senior White House source said there have ...

Gabe Rivera, back in September: A milestone such as this demands that we reflect and generate pithy takeaways, for the fans or at least for the perpetual gaping maw of AI models. Fortunately, our 20 years of existence offers no shortage of fodder. Perhaps the one major a...

Following up on the previous item, here’s Fred Vogelstein, at Crazy Stupid Tech: Rivera says that he’s not naive about the long term, however, “given the astonishing rate of improvement in AI capabilities we’ve seen. So we just have to improve our own stuff. And a major ...

Paul Kafasis, writing at One Foot Tsunami: While Apple had previously urged developers to use squircle icons on our apps, they’ve now taken things much further to ensure compliance. It’s a shame. Apple updated their own app icons on Tahoe, for both the squircle shape as...

Tyler Hayes, writing for This Week The Trend: The Razr+ 2024 model measures 3.46 inches tall, but still has a 4-inch diagonal screen size. For comparison, the smallest modern (2021) iPhone is the 13 mini, and that one is 5.18 inches tall. The Razr foldable is a legitimat...

“Here you go, you’re OK. I’m right here.”

An even better, more iconic, metaphor for this administration than the images of the East Wing being razed. When you watch the video, take note of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. performing his family’s signature dance move, “The Chappaquiddick”.

Before all the excitement, Trump fell asleep, right in front of the press.

It makes sense in this scenario for neither company to want to publicize a white-label version of Gemini behind Apple Intelligence.

Benjamin Mayo, on X:

The Tinted glass option generally has a relatively subdued impact inside apps, making bars a bit frostier. But on the lock screen, it transforms all the notifications into grey opaque blobs. I would never choose this mode because that effect is just too ugly.

Now that I think about it, this is almost entirely why I don’t prefer the new “Tinted” option for Liquid Glass in iOS 26.1 — notifications look orthopedic, like an extra-high-contrast accessibility option for the vision impaired. Here’s a good side-by-side comparison in a post on Reddit. But as the top Reddit commenter points out, this severe over-correction from iOS 26.0 (where “Clear” was effectively the only option) is only with Light mode — in Dark mode, notifications in iOS 26.1 look good with the Tinted option.

Hannah Knowles, writing for The Washington Post (via Taegan Goddard): Mamdani won two-thirds of voters under 45 in preliminary exit polls, while Cuomo led him by 10 points with voters 45 and older. The polls also showed an education divide: College graduates backed Mamda...

WhatsApp: In addition to reading and responding to messages, for the first time WhatsApp on Apple Watch will now support many requested features: Call notifications: You can see who’s calling without needing to look at your iPhone. Full messages: You can read full Wh...

News from Apple’s Podcasts for Creators site, regarding new features in the iOS 26.2 beta releases:

When you supply chapters in your episode description or in your RSS feed, they display in Apple Podcasts. If you submit chapters through your hosting provider, you can include images. For shows in English, when chapters aren’t provided, Apple Podcasts generates them for you and an “Automatically created“ label appears in the chapter list. If you prefer not to use automatically created chapters, you can disable this feature in Apple Podcasts Connect. Learn more about chapters.

It’s unclear to me whether this feature is actually exclusive to iOS/iPhone, or will be available across Apple’s 26.2 OS releases. This strikes me as a great use of AI, but I also think most multi-topic podcasts should include human-created chapters.

John Dvorak back in 2014, two months before Apple Watch was announced:

I got a lecture from a potential buyer, who will only purchase an iTime as a replacement for the iPhone rather than an accessory. But all evidence leads me to believe this device will be an accessory.

Doing that limits the appeal to people who were promised a sleeker gadget profile, which they desperately need, because they never manage to pare down anything. It’s tablet computing all over again.

If he’d meant that Apple Watch would be like the iPad, in terms of being a durable long-term many-billion-dollars-in-sales-per-quarter platform, he’d have been correct. But he meant that both were duds.

Dvorak is still writing, but alas, only occasionally.

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge: The details of how, when, and where Google would charge its fees are complicated, and they seem to be somewhat tailored to the needs of a game developer like Epic Games. Google can charge 20 percent for an in-app purchase that pro...

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Apple has launched a dramatic new web interface for the App Store. You can now get the full App Store experience right in your browser, with dedicated pages for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision, Watch, and TV app libraries.

Previously, Apple’s “apps.apple.com” domain simply redirected you to a generic page about the App Store on Apple’s website. Now, it takes you to a full-fledged version of the App Store you can browse on your computer.

This new website is nice, but it’s not the “full” App Store experience, insofar as you can’t buy or download apps from it. It’s more like a full website mirror of the App Store than a web version of the App Store.

John Voorhees, writing at MacStories: With iOS 26, Apple placed two big buttons onscreen when an alarm went off. One was for stop and the other snooze. That wasn’t a big deal for many of the alarms you set throughout the day, but when you’re waking up in the morning blur...

Video should be simple to ship and scale. Mux makes it easy to build live and on-demand video into anything from websites to AI workflows.

Upload a video, get back a playback URL. No transcoding headaches. No CDN setup. Go further with video building blocks – thumbnails, transcripts, storyboards – to create exactly what you want.

Now, Mux is shepherding Video.js, the web’s most-trusted open-source player, and reimagining it for the modern developer experience.

Future-proof your video with infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Synthesia. Get started free, no credit card required. Use code FIREBALL for an extra $50 credit.

Mark Gurman, in his weekly Power On column for Bloomberg (paywalled, alas): Even with the rosy sales forecast, the road ahead won’t be easy. Apple is betting heavily on the new Siri, which will lean on Google’s Gemini model and introduce features like AI-powered web sear...

Anthony Castrovince, writing for MLB (News+ link): Behind a stunning, game-tying swat from Miguel Rojas in the top of the ninth, a first-of-its-kind, go-ahead blast from Will Smith in the top of the 11th and the absurd extra work World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto provi...

Paul Lukas, founder of Uni Watch: Due to a perfect storm of negative developments, I have reluctantly come to the unfortunate conclusion that continuing to publish Uni Watch is no longer viable. This will be the site’s final post. Yes, I’m serious. And no, this isn’t a ...

The president of the United States, on his blog: Seth Meyers of NBC may be the least talented person to “perform” live in the history of television. In fact, he may be the WORST to perform, live or otherwise. I watched his show the other night for the first time in years...

My thanks to Jaho Coffee Roaster for sponsoring this week at DF. Jaho has been family-owned since 2005, and they’re guided by their slogan: “Live Slow”. Jaho knows that great coffee takes care. From sourcing small-lot single origins to blending coffees for balance, they smal...

Special guest Brian Mueller, developer of Carrot Weather, joins the show to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his utterly ridiculous but totally serious weather app.

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Tim Bray: Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia. Here are early impressions. My Grokipedia entry has over s...

Jason Koebler, writing at 404 Media: Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he does not like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a fully AI-generated “encyclopedia” that serves no one and nothing other than the ego of the world’s richest man...

Apple Support:

This update includes enhancements to the Shortcuts app across all platforms, including new intelligent actions and an improved editing experience. Shortcuts on macOS now supports personal automations that can be triggered based on events such as time of day or when you take actions like saving a file to a folder, as well as new integrations with Control Center and Spotlight.

Via Matthew Cassinelli.

Claudie Moreau, reporting for Euractiv:

Earlier in their presidency, Denmark had revived a controversial provision in the draft law that would mean online platforms — such as messaging apps — could be served with mandatory CSAM detection orders, including services protected by end-to-end encryption. However opposition from several other EU countries derailed any agreement in the Council.

Today, Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard told local press that the Council presidency would move away from mandatory detection orders — and instead support CSAM detections remaining voluntary.

Sanity prevails.