Berber Jin and Anissa Gardizy, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s No. 2 executive, plans to step down from her
full-time role after an extended medical leave. She communicated
her decision in a note to staff Thursday, saying that her ...
Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac about OpenAI’s sprawling product announcements today:
To summarize today’s desktop app changes:
The existing ChatGPT app is now ChatGPT Classic.
Codex is now the new ChatGPT desktop app. It still looks like
Codex and includes the Codex icon...
Some historical follow-up regarding just-click-it launching and apps as tiled buttons with a uniform square shape. Back in the System 7 era in the 1990s, Apple sold (sold!) a product called At Ease (via Nathan Lineback’s venerable GUI Galley):
I don’t recall ever usin...
In September 2014, in the wake of a series of hacks that stole private photos from the iCloud accounts of multiple celebrities, Tim Cook wrote an open letter to customers that was published at apple.com/privacy. Apple seemingly no longer hosts a copy of the letter. (That ten...
Eli Tan, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):
The company’s new A.I. image generator has a surprising twist: It
allows people to use images from public Instagram accounts.
When Meta unveiled an artificial intelligence image generator
called Muse Image on Tuesda...
Tobias Steinke, replying on Mastodon to my “Apple Should Eliminate the App Icon ‘Squircle Jail’” piece:
But iOS app icons (and iPadOS) were always in squircle shape. Why
is and was this okay for you, but it’s not for macOS?
This is a good and fair question. But I not o...
Back in the primordial days of AI, Parry was an ELIZA-style chatbot created by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby to simulate the words of a paranoid schizophrenic. Someone had the genius idea to connect it to Eliza (a.k.a. “Doctor”). Vint Cerf published the transcript as an RFC in 1973, and I laughed my ass off reading it. A taste:
Do you know anything about bookies?
What makes you think I know anything about bookies?
A bookie didn’t pay me off once.
What does that suggest to you?
I beat up the bookie who did not pay off, and I thought he might use his friends in the underworld to get even with me.
If you’re lucky enough to distribute an app outside the Mac App
Store, you can break free of squircle jail using
NSDockTilePlugIn. It’s not strictly the intended use-case of
that API. And it’s not allowed in the Mac App Store, either. But
it can solve the problem.
So today’s release of Iris adds three additional app icons to
choose from in the app’s Special Preferences Settings pane.
And since they use the NSDockTilePlugIn API, the custom icon
remains even when you quit the app.
Iris is far from the only app using this or other techniques to sort-of escape squircle jail. All the apps I’m aware of doing something like this are Mac-assed apps. It’s a good litmus test.
After reading my posts earlier today about Eliza, the first “hit” chatbot from the 1960s, DF reader AP sent me a link to the Kickstarter page for Searching for SmarterChild, a project from documentary filmmakers Lindsey Sitz and Zan Gillies to make a movie about SmarterChild, an AOL Instant Messenger chatbot that once had 30 million “friends” (a.k.a. users). I don’t recall ever hearing of SmarterChild before, let alone using it. (I think I was on a very different level of the Internet back then.)
But this looks like a great indie nerd documentary. The Kickstarter campaign has just one week left and they’re a wee bit short of their primary goal, and quite a bit short of their stretch goals. I just chipped in.
I vaguely recall first trying some version of Eliza back in the 1990s. I never found it all that impressive nor understood its stature in the AI literature. It’s better than a bunch of if/then statements but not by much. There’s some natural language grammar parsing that is ...
The Eliza Archaeology Project:
ELIZA is the original and highly influential chatbot that launched
the genre of human-computer interactions using text-based agents.
It was created at MIT in the 1960s as part of Project MAC by it’s
[sic] designer and programmer, Joseph Wei...
Dr. Drang, in a post replete with examples of icons of popular apps from the original Macintosh, in their one-bit glory:
You can see that Apple liked the idea of app icons being a
tilted rectangle with some image inside the rectangle to
indicate what the app did. The han...
Users expect apps and agents to reach the tools they already work in. Every integration that gets you there is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of infrastructure before you write a line of product code.
WorkOS Pipes handles it with one API call. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential storage. You call the real provider API with a fresh token, every time.
Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
With the latest iOS 27 developer beta, Apple is giving testers an
early look at one of the upcoming improvements to its AI-powered
Siri: the ability to adjust how quickly and expressively
the AI assistant speaks. In iOS 27 beta 3, out...
Paul Kafasis, in a post at Rogue Amoeba’s blog titled “Free the Icons”:
Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both
usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to
distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive.
But there’s n...
The third developer betas of Apple’s 27 OSes dropped today, and this new page in Apple’s developer documentation drew my attention — a built-in Uniform Type Identifier for Markdown data:
The identifier for this type is net.daringfireball.markdown.
I had previously recommended conforming to public.plain-text but stated that the text encoding should be UTF-8. I’ve updated my own recommendation to public.utf8-plain-text to enshrine the UTF-8 encoding. (Back in 2004 UTF-8 support was far from universal. Today it is.)
There’s a been a lot of (justified) concern and consternation over the last year regarding Backblaze — an online backup service whose simple pitch is that it backs up your entire computer, including the startup drive and external drives — and online file storage services lik...
Allen Pike, back in November (and corresponding Hacker News thread):
Still, I wouldn’t count out the possibility of a change in course
here. While mobile is king, desktop is still where work happens.
While OpenAI has acquired Sky to double down on desktop,
Google has lon...
A banger of an Accidental Tech Podcast members-only special, right on time. ATP memberships are just $8/month or $88/year, and the members-only episodes alone are worth the price.
They do a great job explaining what makes for a Mac-assed Mac app, but an even better job talking about why users and developers should care about them.
Maestral developer Sam Schott, on the Maestral website:
As of June 2026, Maestral is no longer actively maintained. The
current version will continue to work until certificates expire.
Schott, on Maestral’s GitHub project page:
As of 2026-07-28, this project is arc...
Jason Snell, at Macworld:
My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to
going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had
returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as
CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turna...
My thanks to Day One Journal for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Day One first launched in 2011 and has been the stalwart of journaling apps on Mac and iOS ever since. Day One’s apps exhibit a commitment to technical and design excellence, and, more importantly, every...
Yours truly, back in 2018:
I don’t share the depth of their pessimism regarding native apps,
but Electron is without question a scourge. I think the Mac will
prove more resilient than Windows, because the Mac is the platform
that attracts people who care. But I worry.
I...
Flexibits:
Calendar Mirroring allows you to connect two separate calendars
(like work and personal) so that events from one automatically
show up on the other.
The best part? No event information is sent to Flexibits servers
or saved outside of your device.
You can cho...
Anthropic released the first version of the Claude “desktop” app for MacOS in October 2024 — an Electron clunker that did not impress UI designers. When it came out, I wrote:
ChatGPT’s native Mac app, on the other hand, is a truly
native Mac app. It looks like a Mac app ...
Mike Dano, in a long (too long, I say) report for Ookla (makers of the nifty Speedtest app):
Further, few other countries in the world followed in the mmWave
footsteps of the U.S., with international spectrum regulators
instead putting a focus on releasing mid-band spect...
Saron Yitbarek, writing on the WebKit blog, with a nice post-WWDC surprise:
In Safari Technology Preview 247, we’re introducing the
Safari MCP server — a Model Context Protocol server for web
developers that makes your web development and debugging workflow
faster and mo...
EveryMac:
Thirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since
then — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been
there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the
original 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your
support ...
Back in March 2022, Nicole Nguyen of The Wall Street Journal compared the battery life effects of 5G vs. LTE by streaming videos on several iPhone and iPad models. She found that using LTE saved significant battery life. (It would be nice if someone re-ran similar tests on m...
After I linked to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posting on Twitter/X about the Trump administration allowing Anthropic to once again release Claude Fable 5, I was reminded once again that no one else in the Trump administration uses Truth Social other than Trump himself....
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