Rolling out a few improvements to Micro.blog today, including a new “trash” for deleted posts, an “x” button to hide the publish pane, Typepad import, and other tweaks. More to come!

Rough morning for the Micro.blog servers. Woke up to a major problem with hung connections tripping up a few things. I have a few nice feature improvements ready to go, though.

My current concern with iOS 26 is not any of the developer stuff, it’s the Phone app! I consistently see caching problems where the UI is out of sync with the notification badge, and missing voicemails until I force quit. Never seen this many problems in a core Apple app before.

Brent Simmons reminiscing about Frontier and why modern development environments aren’t as good:

I’m not saying apps these days need to be Frontier-like in any details. But it seems absolutely bizarre to me that we — we who write Mac and iOS apps — still have to build and run the app, make changes, build and run the app, and so on, all day long. In the year 2025.

I also used Frontier a lot during that time. It was great. Personally, instead of Swift, I would’ve loved to see RubyCocoa taken to the next level. And with React Native we do have some of the quick iteration Brent blogs about.

Threads is testing long-form text attachments on posts. Not good. It would centralized blog-like content that should be on someone’s own site.

AI might eliminate some programmer jobs. It’s also going to create new programmers, people who don’t have a traditional CS background. I’m not convinced the sky is falling on work.

The greatest challenge is not to the economy but to a fractured society, with AI becoming as divisive as politics.

John Gruber blogging on RFK vs. the CDC:

We really needed the CDC five years ago. We’re in big trouble if we need them again before the US electorate ousts these wingnuts.

There are new vaccines approved by the FDA but the guidance is really confusing. Going to differ to my doctor rather than RFK.

Dave Winer: Think Different about WordPress:

WordPress has a deep and powerful API, well designed, documented, and they don’t break it. Developers who know me know that the last part is the most important. A platform must remain unchanging.

Dave’s work is similar and well aligned with Micro.blog.

Watched The Yogurt Shop Murders on HBO, even though it’s not my kind of show. I was in high school during that time, and the shop wasn’t far away. Just sad and still a little surprising that it could not be solved.

I’ve been wanting to make this change for a while: Micro.blog’s Design page has now been split into separate “design” and “blog settings” pages. This makes more logical sense and keeps each page cleaner.

Doing an inventory of my domain names, just realized tonight that one expired. Luckily no one grabbed it, so I re-registered it. Spread across four registrars, really cumbersome to keep track of everything.

I’m always curious about other blog hosts' pricing. With Typepad shutting down, I took a screenshot of their pricing page. One of the most confusing, “why would I upgrade to Premium or Enterprise?” set of plans.

OpenAI has a long blog post about what more needs to be done to make ChatGPT safer, especially for teens:

We’re also exploring making it possible for teens (with parental oversight) to designate a trusted emergency contact. That way, in moments of acute distress, ChatGPT can do more than point to resources: it can help connect teens directly to someone who can step in.

I didn’t realize it could already escalate potential criminal behavior to human review, so that’s good. In the future will OpenAI need a team of real therapists on call? Using AI as a therapist will have many repercussions.

Typepad is shutting down after an amazing 20+ years. It was spun off of Movable Type back in the very early days of the blogosphere. Seth Godin used to use it too, and I see that his old URLs redirect, which is great.

John Gruber with analysis of the latest lawsuit in the Masimo patent saga:

It reads to me like that same decision would have been made, at the same time, if Kamala Harris had won last year’s election. But that’s the problem with a pay-to-play corrupt government like Trump’s, and Tim Cook’s willingness to play along to any degree, no matter how mild. By currying favor with Trump, it now looks like any decision from the U.S. government that goes in Apple’s favor might be because Apple curried favored with Trump. I genuinely do not believe that’s the case here.

Walked to the coffee shop to pick up a to-go coffee, first time in over a week, since being sick. Covid is everywhere at the moment, so I was trying my best to avoid spreading anything. Really missed working out of the house. 😷

Released a lot of little bug fixes for the Mac app recently, so it’s already up to version 3.6.9. As long-time listeners of Core Intuition know, I don’t do .10 releases, so it’s time to bump to 3.7! But gotta justify that version number. What features to add? 🤔

There’s a short “Apple ❤️ Gemini” segment on the latest Upgrade. Does a good job of covering the pros and cons of Apple partnering with Google on Siri. I’m warming up to the idea.

Anthropic experiments in using a Chrome extension instead of building their own web browser. Also some good notes about safety. I’m still enjoying Dia, but it does seem like a lot for everyone to create a new browser.

An update on offering Micro.blog for free to teachers and nurses, now that it has been a few weeks. It’s going well! We had some previous users take us up on the offer, and some brand new users. Thinking about other ways to get the word out.

Got excited for a minute when I misread this headline: Libby’s library app adds an AI… Thought it was “API”. We sort of reverse-engineered how Libby works, but it’s not reliable.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about using AI for polish. The idea was to let AI help with taking care of lots of little details that can be tempting to skip in the rush to get a new feature out. Lately I’ve been thinking about another good use for AI. Not to finish a...

Big update today for Micro.blog folks who have multiple accounts. The iOS, Android, and Mac apps have long supported multiple accounts, but on the web you could only switch between separate blogs on the same account. Managing multiple accounts on the web was frustrating.

Now you’ll find a popover menu in the sidebar to add a new account and select between your accounts. Here’s a screenshot showing me signed into a couple of our official accounts in addition to my personal account:

And for all users, even if you only have a single Micro.blog account, we now have passkeys! This is the password-less standard for quickly signing in. No more waiting for a confirmation email from Micro.blog.

Tragic story in The New York Times of suicide and ChatGPT. This probably lines up with the “sycophantic” edition of 4o. As more people use chatbots as therapists, there are so many new potential problems. For minors perhaps there should be escalation to humans, even less privacy.

Guess I won’t be deploying this bug fix right away. 🙁 When deploying to the app servers, I roll each server out of the load balancer to avoid downtime. Can’t do that when Linode’s management interface and API are down.

Congrats to the Iconfactory on the Tot 2.0 release. Looks like a good update.

I haven’t forgotten about holding a small Micro.camp this year. The summer has been full of distractions. I think it’s important that we do an event each year, even if it has to be scaled down a little. It’s a time to mark the progress and hear from people.

Bounce from A New Social is now live. Another big step to account portability between platforms. The more tools like this we get, the more it encourages developers to support migration APIs.

With a new iOS beta dropping today, we’re nearing the end, and I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to update Micro.blog on day one. Liquid Glass introduces lots of weirdness with nav button sizes and tap areas. Not going to rush it.

In the 1990s, I had an internship at Apple here in Austin, in a building they were leasing off 183, just east of I-35. They’ve long since expanded to a new campus in northwest Austin, much fancier, reflecting what a massive company Apple has become. I still often drive by th...