FeedCity

BTW, I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm working on the reading interface for my blog. What you see when you go to scripting.com. I'm putting the same kind of attention into it that I did for the blogroll earlier this year. And there are a few unreleased products that use the same approach. There are many new things in this work -- the way we read the web hasn't been worked on in a long time. We've settled for a pretty awful way of reading. I want to fix writing too, and have plans for this, but I thought I should do some work on reading as well. I wish I could show you all the new ideas, but I'm saving that for a big reveal at some point. I've changed the way I develop, again. For the better, I believe.

I've fallen behind on my Podcast0 feed. This is the episode for Sept 27, 2004. And there were two podcasts on the next day, the 28th, and I'm going to re-release those over the next couple of days. Today's episode is a review of an RSS reader that Yahoo came out with. I wasn't happy with it. The next one actually kind of historic, it's about the open source release of Frontier. It's still out there, and I really want it running on Linux if anyone is interested. More later.

Every September, the whole extended family at Relay FM raises money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, one of the most amazing institutions in the world. St. Jude is dedicated to curing childhood cancer and helping families affected by it. Since 2019 Relay has raised over $3 million, and their best-ever single month was just north of $775,000.

This year they’re already at $925,000, within earshot of a cool million, with three days to go in the month. Let’s make that happen.

Update, 30 September: And, boom, they hit it: $1,041,913.31 and still counting.

In the midst of recording last week’s episode of The Talk Show with Nilay Patel, I offhandedly mentioned the age-old trick of holding down the Shift key while minimizing a window (clicking the yellow button) to see the genie effect in slow motion. Nilay was like “Wait, what? That’s not working for me...” and we moved on.

What I’d forgotten is that Apple had removed this as default behavior a few years ago (I think in MacOS 10.14 Mojave), but you can restore the feature with this hidden preference, typed in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock slow-motion-allowed -bool YES

Then restart the Dock:

killall Dock

Or, in a single command:

defaults write com.apple.dock slow-motion-allowed -bool YES; killall Dock

Or, if you prefer a proper app to a command-line invocation, Marcel Bresink’s excellent TinkerTool.

Tom Pritchard, writing at Tom’s Guide:

We put the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro Max through the Tom’s Guide battery test, which involves surfing the web over 5G at 150 nits of screen brightness. The iPhone 16 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Plus have risen to the top with some incredibly impressive results — making our best phone battery life list in the process. Here’s how the new iPhone 16 models’ battery life stacks up against their iPhone 15 counterparts, and rival flagships.

Tom Dotan and Berber Jin, reporting late last night for The Wall Street Journal (News+): Apple is no longer in talks to participate in an OpenAI funding round expected to raise as much as $6.5 billion, an 11th hour end to what would have been a rare investment by the iPh...

I should put a dollar in a jar every time ChatGPT saves my ass. I thought I had boxed myself into a corner regarding the hash value for a web page, then I asked a question I wasn't sure there was an answer to. "In JS in the browser, I have the name of an anchor element and I want the browser to vertically scroll to it," to which it said: "Here's an example." I would definitely pay $1 for that. :-)

Molly White wrote a great piece on the problem we're all facing now that so many of us are trying to maintain a presence on a few different social web sites. She describes a situation I've been writing about since the mid-late 00s, with the inception of Twitter and Google Re...

Guy Kawasaki sent a summary of my career created by his new chatbot. Very flattering. :-)

No I don't have an assistant.No I don't have anyone (or AI) reading or answering my emails or posts on my behalf.Yes, my email address is very public.Yes I get as many emails as you do, probably more.Yes I have time to get back to people who write me. Not instantly, but ev...

I've had the same thought as Dan Froomkin, of course -- esp given how much voodoo is in weighting various things, the polls are junk. But, she could be winning much bigger than the polls say. And wouldn't that be nice. ❤️ But do you remember part of the 2016 postmortem was...

iA, which has been shipping a version of iA Writer for Android for 7 years: By September, we thought we had honored our side of the new agreement. But on the very day we expected to get our access back, Google altered the deal. We were told that read-only access to Goog...

When markets have dominant products, evolution freezes. Google search, for example. I should have great search for my blog by now, powered by Google. It has been here for 26 years. They should have been doing R&D on how they can be part of a better reading environment on...

An idea for a news org. I want a for-pay site where I can ask a question about the news and get the most up-to-date answer. I'd like to link to that page from a blog post, and have it either be frozen, to document where we were on that day, or dynamic, so that it changes over time. I'm sure this product will be here soon, so obvious.

Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting for The Verge:

X is preventing users from posting links to a newsletter containing a hacked document that’s alleged to be the Trump campaign’s research into vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The journalist who wrote the newsletter, Ken Klippenstein, has been suspended from the platform. Searches for posts containing a link to the newsletter turn up nothing.

Posting this just in case there remained an iota of a thought in your head that Elon Musk is actually a radical “free speech” absolutist and not just someone who blew $44 billion buying Twitter to warp the entire platform in the direction of his own weird un-American political agenda.

Nilay Patel returns to the show to consider the iPhones 16.

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Deepa Seetharaman, Berber Jin, and Tom Dotan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+): OpenAI is planning to convert from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit company at the same time it is undergoing major personnel shifts including the abrupt resignation Wedn...

Rasmus Larsen, writing for FlatpanelsHD: While reviewing LG’s latest high-end G4 OLED TV (review here), FlatpanelsHD discovered that it now shows full-screen screensaver ads. The ad appeared before the conventional screensaver kicks in, as shown below, and was localized ...

Gerald Lynch, editor-in-chief:

Dig out your old iPod and fire up your ‘Songs to cry to’ playlist, I come bearing sad news. After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore.

I want to kick off by thanking you all for your support over the many years and incarnations of the site. Whether you were a day-one early adopter in the ‘PhoneDifferent’ days, came on board with ‘The iPhone Blog,’ or recently started reading to find out what the hell Apple Vision Pro is, it’s been a privilege to serve you a daily slice of Apple pie.

So it goes. Nice remembrances from Rene Ritchie (now at YouTube) and Serenity Caldwell (now at Apple).

Why do I care about what social web means? Because I plan to add functionality to this space. I'm tired of all the stupid limits these products have. Titles or no titles. 300 character limits. No links, etc etc and on and on. Where did they get the idea that taking features out of writing was something they could do. What a wrong turn we took there. And now that once we have a chance to erase the limits, maybe -- none of the companies running their products are doing it. I don't want the way they do it to be the only way, the products are deliberately incompatible. Social web is the best name for what I'm working on. So I need to reserve this space. They didn't ask for my opinion, the first I heard of it was a press release. When I ship my thing I want to point back at this and say look -- I did tell you this was going to be a problem.