FeedCity

I’m a month late linking to it, but Chance Miller wrote a terrific review for 9to5Mac: The last several releases from Beats, such as the Studio Buds Plus and Solo 4 headphones, have been powered by a custom Beats chip rather than an Apple-designed chip like what’s used i...

Sebastiaan de With, on X, linking to my “Something Is Rotten” piece last week: Ex-MobileMe team here. This was a brutal time. It was so bad that when he presented iCloud onstage, Steve said “I know what you’re thinking: why should I trust them? They’re the ones who gave...

From Drexel’s YouTube channel: But far less recognized is that Drexel made the very bold decision of committing all students to purchase a previously unreleased and untested computer from Apple. This was, of course, the Macintosh (introduced in January 1984), which was u...

Alissa Falcone, in a good piece looking back at (my alma mater) Drexel University’s groundbreaking deal with Apple 40 years ago to provide deeply discounted Macintoshes to all students, and integrate them throughout the campus and curriculums: Drexel was prepared to buy ...

Ten years ago I played two small roles in the release of the aforelinked Becoming Steve Jobs. First, I got to announce the book here at Daring Fireball, after having been sent an advance copy a few weeks earlier. My praise for the book then was glowing, but in hindsight, I think I undersold just how good — and how essential — it is. At the time of its launch, the book remained in the shadow of Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography. Ten years later, I refer back to Becoming Steve Jobs regularly; Isaacson’s book almost never.

Second, the SoHo Apple Store in New York hosted a “Meet the Authors” event, and I had the pleasure of playing host for the interview. It’s still available, both as video and audio. And as I wrote at the time, “I’m kind of proud that it got flagged as ‘explicit’ — but that was Bill Gates’s fault.”

During Friday’s episode of Dithering — a free listen — Ben Thompson reminded me that my headline reference last week, alluding to the well-known line from Hamlet, had been used, to great effect, once before. Brent Schlender wrote a crackerjack piece for Fortune in March 1997...

Palfrey's alarm yesterday was about the Americans who were whisked off to El Salvador. Who they are and what they're accused of is unknown, as if there's any substance to the accusation. No indictment, trial, verdict, appeals, etc. El Salvador wants to be the US dumping ground for undesirables. This is where we have, as Timothy Snyder says, regime change. I thought the elmination of Social Security would have been the moment the light went on for most Americans, but this should be it. Citizens like you and me being disappeared. It's a pretty quick way to get most of the people to behave according to the rules of the government, or off you go.

Poking around on old servers I found this cute little app that jsonifies an RSS feed. Not sure why I did it.

I put out a call for Old School Bloggers, and got back a bunch of notes on Mastodon. Gettin' the band back together! :-)

Pradeep is using WordLand for some of his WordPress blog posts, and has given them a special category. Very smart, good use of categories.

A new feature in our membership CMS (Passport — check it out) lets us make individual episodes of Dithering free for everyone to listen to (on the web). I can’t think of a better way to first use this new capability than to open up Friday’s episode, recapping my “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” article, and the resonance with which it hit. Even the cover art — selected weeks ago — captures how I’ve felt this week.

Give it a listen. Subscribe if you enjoy it.

A lot has changed since the last time we took a serious look at blogging. A few items, as examples.

1. When RSS came along Markdown didn't exist. The two technologies belong together, imho.
2. Websockets have replaced long polling.
3. Servers got cheap! (and easy to deploy).
4. SQL is fast and the tools are much better.
5. The user interfaces of all the Web 2.0+ products didn't exist last time we created new blogging communities. We can borrow ideas from twitter-like systems, even huge products like Facebook and Spotify have innovations that come long after the initial wave of blogging.

But one thing stays the same -- all the components are replaceable. Absolutely zero lock-in. We use simple standard APIs where they exist, and create new minimal formats and protocols where they don't.

Blogging has a simple philosophy that remains constant.

Adding and deleting categories are part of WordLand 0.50, released earlier today. These are the same categories you can edit in the WordPress user interface. But I learned that you need to be able to add categories when you're writing. You want this functionality to be close-by.

Two columns in the Categories dialog. More efficient use of space.

Context menu with two new commands.

Change notes are here.

Thanks to the enterprising and tireless Xcoders organizers (not me — I’m just the PR guy), we’re finally returning to presentation meetings. At long last!

Thursday, April 3. Read all about it on the Xcoders blog.

Adding and deleting categories coming to WordLand, probably later today. These are the same categories you can edit in the WordPress user interface. But I learned that you need to be able to add categories when you're writing. You want this functionality to be close-by.

But I’d feel a lot better about our collective conventional wisdom regarding the nature of this particular all-hands Siri meeting if it had leaked to, and been reported on, by more than one reporter at more than one publication.

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring this week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.

Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales. Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel. Upgrade your auth today.

From Apple’s support documentation: You can generate a report of requests your iPhone has sent to Private Cloud Compute. Go to Settings, then tap Privacy & Security. Tap Apple Intelligence Report, then choose a report duration for the last 15 minutes (default) or ...

Looking for help with wpcom API in Node.js app.

Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge: iPhone and Android users will be able to exchange end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messages in the near future thanks to newly updated RCS specifications. The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE ba...