Steve Troughton-Smith on Mastodon:

If Apple isn’t stopped, there will come a point where Apple slaps a 30% tax on all VISA transactions made on iOS (unless you use Apple Pay, of course!)

It could happen. Related, I’d love the option to use Apple Pay in iOS apps instead of in-app purchase. Apple would still skim off their small fee as part of the card transaction, but it wouldn’t hit developer revenue.

About 25 years after first learning JavaScript, I think I’m almost starting to get the hang of it. 🤪

According to Mark Gurman, the iPhone 16 Pro will have a new button for the camera. This is very interesting:

Speaking of buttons, there will be a new camera control on the right side of the phone (at least on the new Pros). It will operate like a button on a DSLR camera, allowing you to press in slightly to trigger autofocus. A harder press will take the picture. You can also swipe along the button to zoom in and out while shooting photos and videos.

Because I don’t have an iPad anymore, thinking about getting the Pro Max next time. Will need to hold it.

The back and forth ranking changes for Jordan Chiles and Ana Barbosu is a mess. If there’s no fair solution, give them both the bronze medal. Just a couple days ago we watched the pole vaulters share the gold. The floor exercise wasn’t a tie but it might as well have been.

Continuing to make progress with the new editor. Fixed several things, added support for @-mentions, better styling. There are still a couple quirks with the insertion cursor. If I can work through those, will ship this as soon as I can.

Manuel Moreale wraps up his first 50 interviews with bloggers, with a nice summary here. I was happy to participate and still read it every week (in my RSS reader of course).

Shoutout to @vincent who has finished a major rewrite of the navigation in our main mobile app. It’s probably not the most fun thing to work on (hey it looks exactly the same!) but sets us up nicely for the future.

Incredible gold medal game, USA vs. France women. So close to going to OT. 🏀

This post from John Gruber really hits the key problem with macOS becoming more locked down and even (sometimes) dumbed down, and the balance between the Mac and iPad in Apple’s product line:

But at a certain point, a hammer needs to hammer whatever it strikes, and sometimes, alas, that’s the user’s thumb. That’s the Mac. It’s a Unix workstation that’s friendly enough to be used by the mass market. It is not an appliance intended to prevent any possible malware or scamware from running.

Apple says they don’t want macOS and iPadOS to converge, but it often feels like we’re inching that way.

Buescher State Park at lunchtime. Had a picnic, then started listening to USA vs. France on the drive back before we watched the second half back at home.

Enjoying USA vs. France. Love watching Wemby play and cannot wait for the Spurs season to start. Gotta root for USA, though, a truly great team. 🏀

Really wish React Native didn’t use Ruby and CocoaPods. It’s past time for a cleaner build toolchain with fewer dependencies.

More movies lately, getting the most from the Alamo Drafthouse season pass… Borderlands is exactly what it looks like from the trailer. Also saw Twisters again and it holds up on repeat viewings. The Instigators on TV+ was a lot of fun too. 🍿

Now that we’ve got breakdancing, I think the Olympics officially has enough events. I don’t want to say “no” to anyone’s sport, but at some point it feels like there are so many events it will become overwhelming to coordinate for future cities, and viewers. Good thing TV now has infinite channels.

One of these years I’d like to make it out to D23. Seems like a fun weekend. There is so much to work on right now, really feeling the need to get away for a couple days and reset.

New episode of Core Int out today. We talk about the antitrust verdict against Google search, the potential impact on Apple and Mozilla, whether Apple Intelligence will ever be something third-party developers can build on, and the general disappointment of Apple platforms becoming more closed.

I haven’t read every word of the GPT-4o safety card, but I’ve read a bunch of it and skimmed most of the rest. It’s fascinating. OpenAI has a fairly bad reputation around safety, but I wouldn’t be able to guess that just reading this report card, which seems thoughtful and c...

Catching up on more track and field from today. Noah Lyles has COVID. Good column about it here:

On a night that could have transformed Lyles into a legend, he instead became a throwback to a time we’ve quickly forgotten.

Sort of amazing he could run at all.

Wow. I was losing my mind when USA came back and took the lead. Steph Curry doing his thing. Huge points late from Embiid, KD. Let’s go! 🏀

Worried about USA vs. Serbia. There was a good run in the 3rd quarter but it’s now like it didn’t happen. Everything going in for Serbia, lucky bounces, second-chance points. 🏀

I guess I was wrong about the topic of Trump’s press conference. There was no topic or focus, just a bunch of random gripes. I had it on in the background because apparently I hate happiness. He makes so many ludicrous statements, it’s almost funny but also tragic and a waste of time. 🇺🇸

I recorded a short video as a status update on the new web-based text editor for Micro.blog that I’ve been working on. Finally on a path that feels like it’s going to work and be a big improvement, while retaining the Markdown-centered approach that we’ve always used.

The Performa series at 512 Pixels continues, today arriving at the Quadra 605, which was my first color Mac. I loved that dumb underpowered computer, from playing Myst and programming, to the crashes when apps expected an FPU.

New rules and fees from Apple today for the EU. It’s getting ridiculous. This page has the fees and it might as well be a spreadsheet.

Is waiving the CTF for iPad apps new? I don’t rememberer that. But paying Apple for external payments is still there, still a no-go for me.

Apparently Trump’s press conference is going to be about Walz’s military service. There’s a detailed story here for background. I’ve never served. I only have gratitude for those who have, whether it was months or years, regardless of politics. We aren’t perfect, but Trump is the worst of us. 🇺🇸

Nice icon set on We Distribute with icons for many platforms and fediverse apps.

On the latest episode of Upgrade, Jason Snell and Myke Hurley covered an important part of the Apple Intelligence beta that I’d like to highlight. Leading up to WWDC, Daniel and I talked on Core Intuition about how great it was going to be to have a small on-device LLM avail...

This week we posted a short survey for Micro.blog customers to provide feedback about the service. I was particularly interested in some of our extra features like bookmarks, bookshelves, and notes. These aren’t necessarily well-known and I’ve been thinking about how to bett...

Really strong intro for Tim Walz with the speeches in Pennsylvania today. I’m so impressed with how well Kamala Harris and her campaign have kicked things off. Clear message, but also they are having fun and it’s contagious. 🇺🇸

Love a blog post that starts with a history lesson. Ben Thompson writes about antitrust and the case against Google search. If the cash to Apple goes away, I think Apple will be better off. Just focus on what’s right for users and let search competition happen naturally. But Mozilla will be hurt badly.