IndieWeb
9to5Mac blogging about a change in the iOS 26.4 beta:
In the App Store, the Search bar has been moved back to the top of the search tab. The search tab is also now integrated into navigation bar at the bottom instead of being separated in its own floating circle.
Good change. I think some Liquid Glass apps had gotten a little wonky with their tab bars, requiring extra taps to switch between modes.
I shouldn’t be so harsh, but it’s disappointing to see that for every podcast platform with real power, one by one they come up with their own proprietary solution for video. There’s already a perfectly good RSS-based spec for how to handle this. I’ve been planning to support it in Micro.blog.
This thread started by John Spurlock has context for Apple’s HLS announcement. It appears to not use RSS at all, making it no better than YouTube or Spotify shows. Apple had a chance to lead on openness and they blew it… Cynically I wonder if it’s because they’re skimming ad revenue from the deal.
Joshua Rothman writing at The New Yorker about writers creating spaces to focus and inspire:
Having access to these spaces and resources has been a privilege. There’s no question that they’ve helped me write. And yet, if I look back over my career as a writer, the value I’ve derived from carefully controlling my environment has paled in comparison to my main source of motivation: scary e-mails from editors.
I would get nothing done without deadlines.
I use dark mode on my phone, but light mode on my Mac. So when I’m developing an app that will mostly be used from a computer, dark mode is unfortunately an afterthought. I came up with a theme system for the new RSS thing, but now considering throwing it out and just having good defaults.
The new RSS reader is mostly done. A few bug fixes and polish to finish. I think for a 1.0 it’s very good. It does a few new things that I’ve never seen in a feed reader before.
Watched: Song Sung Blue. Good movie for a lazy Sunday night. Enjoyed it. 🍿
Good first game at the all-star game(s). Wemby’s upset! He wanted that one. I had to root for World too. 🏀
Simon Willison blogs about Adam Leventhal coining “deep blue” to refer to programmers who are feeling a loss of purpose with new AI coding agents.
Shoutout to Tower version 2.6.7 which is still solid even though it hasn’t been updated in years. I decided not to update to the newer subscription-based versions, even when they sponsored @coreint, because “if it ain’t broke”… So rare to have an app that just works nearly forever.
Watched the 3-point contest and dunk contest. Carter Bryant had the best dunk of the night, just couldn’t quite finish the last dunk. Can’t wait for the season to resume! 🏀
Hope folks are having a nice Valentine’s Day. A big thank-you to everyone who hosts their blog on Micro.blog or participates in the community. ❤️
Dave Winer blogs about not hiding RSS feeds from users:
I always objected to browsers trying to hide the feeds. I come from NYC and rode the subway to school every day in high school. The things you see! It’s all out there for the looking and breathing.
When you click on an RSS feed, your browser should preview it and offer a list of apps and services to subscribe to the feed in. I don’t think we’ve made much progress on this in 20 years.
Usually my Git branches are for a specific feature or bug fix, but sometimes it’s a mood. Just created branch fix/rainy-saturday-changes to work on a few things. 🌧️
Austin skyline with the Capitol.
Now that I’ve been living with the new RSS reader for a while, I’m itching to post a screenshot or video preview. Still thinking through the best way to roll it out. I had considered making it independent of Micro.blog, but it relies on too much of the plumbing we already have set up.
Stunning quote in this report from The New York Times about Meta’s plans to add facial recognition to their Ray-Bans:
We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.
Spark is indeed fast. I don’t think I’ll use it often. I’m not usually in a hurry. I’d rather AI be more thorough.
I talked to a couple friends last night at Clawstin about the frenetic pace of AI-assisted development. We should probably slow down. It’s harder to be thoughtful at this pace.
This stuffed animal is my favorite thing to come out of the Mastodon project. Adorable. I want to order one but we already have too much stuff.
Some of us are hopeful. Some of us are terrified. Most of us are both, often in the same hour. And into that vacuum of uncertainty there is a torrent of speculation dressed up as prophecy.
Austin sunset behind buildings, from 26 floors up, at Clawstin. 🦞
Anthropic has another funding round and highlights their growing revenue for Claude Code. Not surprised. Claude Code was first, people like it, and Opus 4.6 is really expensive. I think Codex 5.3 will continue to slowly peel developers away.
It’s so unsettling watching our 250 year-old democracy decay into dictatorship while the most disruptive technology since steam power is evolving at superhuman speed. It’s like watching a locomotive barrel headlong into a tornado. I have a bad feeling about this.
I like this post from Justin Jackson about the impact on RSS if browsers remove XSLT support, which some bloggers use to make RSS more accessible. There has never been a good answer to “what do normal people do with an RSS link?”… We really need to solve this.
Daniel Jalkut blogging a story about getting a job at Apple in the 1990s:
The moment I got my foot in the door, I let management know that I was really after an engineering job. “I’m going to be the best QA engineer you’ve ever seen, but I really want to write code for the Mac.” Or something like that. Having the gall to say something affected things.
We’ve talked about Daniel’s time at Apple a bunch over the years on Core Intuition, but there are fun details here I didn’t know about.
Mark Gurman reports that the new Siri is delayed again, from iOS 26.4 next month to 26.5 or later:
As recently as late 2025, internal versions of the new Siri were so sluggish that people involved in development believed the company would need to delay the introduction by months.
Apple is very set in their old processes and release cycles. But OpenAI ships major new features multiple times a month. I don’t see how Apple can be competitive in AI unless they rethink how they work and release software.
