Joe Miller, reporting for the Financial Times (via Political Wire): Veteran socialist Bernie Sanders and rightwing activist Steve Bannon are joining forces to call for greater guardrails on AI, even as Donald Trump insists concerns about the technology are a hoax that wi...

The keynote, the products, and a new era.

SSO is table stakes for enterprise deals, but building it into your app yourself means writing SAML controllers, parsing XML assertions, and handling IdP-specific quirks for each provider.

Learn how SAML flows work, the tradeoffs between building or buying, and best practices for security, routing, and UX. Or skip the hassle and add SSO with WorkOS.

Read the guide →

Armin Briegel at Scripting OS X has compiled links for all the release notes for all of today’s OS updates (features, developer, security). In addition to the 27.0 updates, Apple also released 26.7 updates and MacOS 15.8 Sequoia. Big day.

Miles Abbott:

Open x.com links in a popup so you can read the one post and leave. Port of the Litterbox Safari extension.

Litterbox is a cleverer name, but Dumpster Fire is funnier.

XCancel:

Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can’t share more details.

Not surprised, and not sure what to make of the “can’t share more details” part. Again, if you want to avoid visiting X but want to see the content posted there linked from other sites (and, let’s admit it at this point: there’s not just a lot posted on X, it is outright resurgent in popularity), install a browser extension like Litterbox (Safari) or Post Peek (Chrome).

My thanks to Glyphs for sponsoring this last week at DF. Glyphs 4 is a truly native Mac app for creating fonts, lettering, icons, and pictograms. Glyphs lets you draw with flexible strokes and efficiently reuse shapes across huge sets of glyphs, and explore variable vector d...

John Brayton:

Unread 5.0 is available now from the App Store. This update adds these improvements and more:

• Improvements around hero images, article list thumbnails, and widget thumbnails
• Syncing with FreshRSS and Miniflux
• The ability to quickly mark old articles read

I’m a NetNewsWire man personally, but I’ve long admired Unread as a different, very good take on a feed reader. Just a gorgeous app. One of the very best things about RSS is that feed readers take such different shapes and approaches.

Tim VanBenschoten:

Post Peek is an independent, open-source project inspired by Litterbox, the Safari extension by Zhenyi Tan (And a Dinosaur).

Paul Ford, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

For a while, I must admit, it looked as if software developer roles like mine were done for. How could we fight against tireless robots? But our industry is slowly realizing that making truly cutting-edge software still requires humans to think and work together, to maximize their skill sets and to practice their respective crafts. A.I. can write very good software, but it also makes it easy to do someone else’s job badly, which is part of why all those projects fail. Now that everyone can code, it’s become clearer why many shouldn’t.

Ford, linking to his own column on Bluesky:

I just want one killer app before we get a killer robot.

My old friend Jim Ray now runs developer relations at Bluesky, and part of that gig is hosting a podcast, Off Protocol (“a show about building a better Internet”). I was delighted to appear as his latest guest. I generally don’t like talking about my career, but I did enjoy talking about it with Jim. He has that effect on people.

T-Mobile, in their iPhone 18 Pro / iPhone Duo press release: Plus, T‑Mobile is one of the first to support Apple’s new iPhone Handoff feature, where customers with two compatible iPhone models can use their T‑Mobile number across both devices and choose which phone is ac...

Tristan Buckmaster, professor of mathematics at NYU, in his own statement, regarding his and Levent Alpöge’s interactions with employees at OpenAI regarding this week’s math-proof controversy: I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not ans...

I have been busy with new-iPhone-week stuff, so I haven’t been able to follow either of these stories closely, but Marcus summarizes them both well. First: the drama regarding OpenAI claiming a solution to the Navier–Stokes math problem. In short, OpenAI continues to prove i...

David Smith, developer of the widely-used Widgetsmith, on Mastodon: The eve of iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders seems a good time to look back at the iPhone 17 family’s adoption. Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith. Generally they followed...

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac: Many have complained that Apple design has been sapped of some of its trademark whimsy in recent years. Well, here’s the latest example of how the tides seem to be changing. Buried in the Settings app on iOS 27, Apple has hidden an easter egg tha...

XCancel:

Following the legal progress as announced in the Nitter GitHub project. The XCancel service is resumed.

More details will be shared on the Nitter GitHub project page.

Glad to hear it and I wish them well, but I think Zhenyi Tan’s Litterbox Safari extension is a much better solution for viewing tweets on X without going to X.

Juli Clover, MacRumors: It’s likely the iPhone Duo doesn’t support the Apple Pencil Pro because there’s no magnetic surface for charging the pencil. The Apple Pencil Pro charges magnetically when connected to a compatible iPad, while the Apple Pencil with USB-C charges w...

9to5 Mac has the iOS 27 release notes too. I haven’t spent much time using Golden Gate, but I’ve been using iOS 27 full-time ever since WWDC. It’s in excellent shape for a .0 release.

Now I need to think about how long I want to still hang onto MacOS 15 Sequoia on my main Mac. I’ll probably skip 27.0 and wait for 27.1, but maybe I’ll bite the bullet and upgrade when a 27.0.1 update comes out.

One thing I learned from this video is that I’m way, way too careful when playing with the hands-on area demo units. I handle them like museum pieces; Stern treats them like hot dog buns.

One year later and it feels like both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air could be announced tomorrow, not a year ago, and would seem fresh and exciting.

There are good Elle Cordova videos, and there are great ones. (Last mentioned here for her “Fonts Hanging Out” trilogy.)

SuperDuper feels like impossibly good software.

Glyphs 4 is here: a Mac-native app for creating fonts, lettering, icons, and pictograms. Draw with flexible strokes and efficiently reuse shapes across huge glyph sets, explore variable vector designs with complex higher-order interpolation. Build and manage massive font families and icon sets with ease, export all modern font formats, SVG, PNG and PDF. Hundreds of refinements and native Tahoe support make designing, testing and shipping your vectors smoother than ever. Glyphs 4: Create. Love the process.

Discover Glyphs 4, and use code FIREBALL to save $30 if you purchase in the next month.

Trackables: There are plenty of health tracking apps. Surprisingly, nearly all of them are bloated, subscription-gated, or blatantly harvesting our data; often all three. We wanted something simpler, less annoying and more fun, that’s where it started. Trackables turns ...

Crackerjack new Mac app for creating and editing custom SF Symbols, from developer Amy Worrall: McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects ...

The Onion:

The Onion: How did you get into the entertainment industry?

Ellison: I remember going to the movies as a kid, and when the houselights went down and that hush fell over the crowd, I’d think to myself: I’d like to build a massive propaganda apparatus one day.

Matt Birchler: So, yeah, I do think that, especially this year, unit sales will far lag behind the 18 Pro models, the normal iPhone 18, and probably the Air 2 and 18e. I think they will lag next year as well for similar reasons. I don’t know if this will ever become the ...

What we want is a system where geographic names are determined democratically, by voting. And that is the system we in fact have.

Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac on August 19: The new Meta AI desktop app is version 1.0 beta at launch and weighs just 16MB once installed. Based on initial inspection, it runs natively on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later, using an AppKit and SwiftUI shell with W...