FeedCity

WordLand 0.51 is out, with support for featured images and excerpts, and a better designed home page for the app, before you sign in.

I've been putting Markdown support in my feeds -- everywhere -- on both sides, yielding serendipity like this. This is how "it just works" comes about. With a good design and a lot of love.

I don't have a huge problem with platform companies that lock users in. That's a business model, and at this point if users aren't aware of the costs well that's their problem. There have been plenty of opportunities to learn. But when a company markets their proprietary system as somehow fighting lockin, well that's about as much chutzpah as anyone should put up with.

A funny thing. A few months back someone told me that I had been gone from the podcast world for too long for anyone to listen to me. I thought how weird, I didn't go anywhere at all, I stayed exactly where I was, all the time. Virtually every day. If people cared to know wh...

I find that writing about something publicly helps me focus on the idea in a way I can't get by only talking about it privately. That's because I am a Natural Born Blogger. I was born that way.

I am using Bluesky the way I used to use Twitter, to talk openly about product development ideas before they are fully hatched.

How has your week been? My week was ... busy. That includes a new episode of The Talk Show recorded yesterday, dropping in your favorite podcast app soon. Amidst all the writing (and talking) I’ve been doing, I’m also working on filling up open weeks on the sponsorship sched...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF, once again, this last week. This has been WorkOS’s Launch Week, and they’ve got a slew of new features to show. Honestly, though, you should check out their Launch Week page just to look at it — it’s beautiful, fun retro-modern pixel-art goodness. Great typography too. I wish every website looked even half this cool.

New features launched just this week include:

• WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
• WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK)
• AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

Ookla, the company behind the Speedtest download/upload bandwidth testing app: Although it’s early in the adoption curve for the iPhone 16e, we analyzed the performance of the new device from March 1st through March 12th, and compared it to the performance of iPhone 16, ...

It's been exactly one month since WordLand opened to the public.

I keep meaning to write more about Keyboard Maestro, and so I’m just going to start documenting all the little use cases I find for it. Here’s one from today.

Emma Roth, The Verge:

TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday.

Regent is the same company that snapped up Foundry, the firm behind outlets like PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor on Thursday. Founded in 2005, TechCrunch has experienced many shakeups in ownership after AOL acquired the site in 2010.

A lot of shakeups in a lot of media companies’ ownership lately. Steady as she goes here at The Daring Fireball Company, a subsidiary of Fedora World Media Industries.

Matthew Belloni has a very good take on Apple TV+ at Puck (that’s a gift link that should get you through their paywall — but which requires you creating a free account, sorry): All of which fed into the self-centered fears of my lunch date. What, if anything, does the c...

Jill Goldsmith, Deadline: Apple is losing more than $1 billion a year on streamer Apple TV+, according to a report in the Information that cited two people familiar with the matter. The tech giant has spent over $5 billion a year on content since launching Apple TV+ in 2...

Thanks to Ben Werdmuller and Om Malik for their nice writeups of WordLand on their blogs. They're right. It is a small piece that can be hooked into lots of places, as is WordPress a big place that can host lots of apps many of which haven't been written yet. Products that l...

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors last week: With new iOS software updates, Apple has been automatically turning Apple Intelligence on again even for users who have disabled it, a decision that has become increasingly frustrating for those that don’t want to use Apple I...

Ina Fried, reporting for Axios: The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, seeks class action status and unspecified financial damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and other devices. “Apple’s advertisements satur...

Mini-spoilers follow. I'm a Severance lover, it's definitely one of the best shows ever, and I feel even more so after the season 2 finale which I watched last night on AppleTV+. I think there are two types of Severance users. One whose focus is on the evil and the other whose focus is on the love. If you think nothing happened in the finale then you're the first type, if you are the second type, this episode was incredible rich. And we learned what the goats were about and that's not nothing.

Here's something that could be very useful. A link to ChatGPT with instructions on how to help a user overcome problems using WordLand. Try clicking the link and see what happens, esp if you're a regular WordLand user. I discovered the feature first by asking if the bot knew what WordLand was, and it said it did, and got it mostly right. I've been using ChatGPT to develop the product, so it's possible it has retained some of the info. And the docs are on the web. This is one of those times when you really want the AI bot to ingest everything they can find. What I'm worried most about are hallucinations. But with a product like WordLand, which could show up problems in the browser or a WordPress theme, a lot of the help requests we get are not problems with WordLand.

This is beautiful and crazy, and no, I’m not going to buy one, but damn I’m tempted and I’d sure like to try one. I’m glad it exists.