FeedCity

WhatsApp, on their official blog back in April 2023: Last year, we introduced the ability for users globally to message seamlessly across all their devices, while maintaining the same level of privacy and security. Today, we’re improving our multi-device offering furthe...

A brief follow-up to my love letter to Apple’s discontinued MagSafe Battery Pack this week. I wrote: They’re the only Lightning devices left in my life and they’re so good I’m happy to still keep one Lightning cable in my travel bag to use them. Among its other unique ...

I'm looking for bloggers who cover the community around the FediForum conference. I want to add them to my blogroll, which does a pretty good job of keeping me current with developments.

I was moved by this Scientific American piece on mathematicians studying the limits of ChatGPT-like systems doing mathematics and basically not finding any. Mathematical proofs creative things, not algorithmic. That has not been my experience with ChatGPT and creating software. I find that when I want to talk about software I'm working on, it understands what I'm saying, but I've never had it come up with an original idea on its own. A human who captivated my attention as it does, and who I spent as much time with as I do with ChatGPT would have stimulated some original ideas by now. If I talk with a friend for even a few minutes there will be at least one aha moment.

Stuff I've written about Julia Child. Came up in a conversation about Jerry Garcia and bloggers before there was blogging.

Why I want a new feed validator. I am doing new things with feeds. If I do a validator, it will tell you if a feed will work with what I'm doing. I want to boot up a new layer, build on RSS, the way that not all TCP messages are HTTP (analogously), and not all XML is RSS. The differences will be minimal, and backward compatible. Scripting News will work very well with it, so there will be a solid example out there to crib from.

I posted this update a bit ago, but it’s worth making a separate post so you don’t miss it if you read the original post before I added the update:

It goes without saying that any consumer survey is only as good as the surveyor. But CIRP, in particular, has posted some dubious ones, to say the least. Jeff Johnson pointed out on Mastodon that back in 2023, CIRP published a survey that claimed the Mac Pro accounted for 43 percent of all Mac desktop sales, with the Mac Mini and Mac Studio each accounting for only 4 percent each. That’s just bananas. That’s not like maybe wrong, that’s not gotta be a little wrong, that’s how could anyone publish this? wrong. It’s hard to believe anything from CIRP after they published that.

Tom Warren, writing for The Verge: “The experience supports Markdown style input and files for users who prefer to work directly with the lightweight markup language,” explains Dave Grochocki, principal product manager lead for Microsoft’s Windows inbox apps. “You can sw...

I think it’s become tradition for Mark Gurman to run a mega spoiler report on the WWDC keynote the Friday before. Don’t read it if you don’t want to see a lot of genuine spoilers. But here are a few non-spoilers: The AI changes will be surprisingly minor and are unlikely...

I was an active software developer when the web came online in the early 90s. I knew what closed systems were like, and open systems. The web was open, and a miracle because of its radical simplicity. We were so lucky. We developed all kind of stuff that was only possible wh...

A new acronym for people of a certain age. "WWWCS" or What Would Walter Cronkite Say? Now answer that question about the back and forth between Musk and Trump. I think he would only be talking about the on-the-record public confessions we were hearing. We knew about the grift before, but we didn't have such clear evidence.

Truth Social is exceedingly unpopular when judged as a social network; but it’s exceedingly successful as a blog. All the other people using Truth Social are effectively reading his blog and shitposting comments and memes in response to his posts.

Ryan Christoffel, writing at 9to5Mac regarding a paywalled survey report from CIRP: CIRP recently performed a survey of Apple customers to get a sense of how the company’s three tentpole products — iPhone, iPad, and Mac — are performing. One focus was on understanding th...

I wrote in my love letter to my colleagues at Audible that retirement is coming up — and now it’s here. Today’s the day! I’ve attended my last meetings. I’ve said my goodbyes. My laptop’s ready to ship back to Audible HQ. * * * I started working in 1984, while in h...

This was an email I sent to one of the people I'm working with at Automattic, and realized I was actually writing a blog post. I was watching on the FediForum session yesterday, and heard all this stuff about Bluesky and Mastodon, but these are products that are poorly prep...

I am totally overwhelmed by the new capabilities of all the ChatGPT-likes out there. I can't imagine turning my whole workspace over to them, and I certainly couldn't do it to two. I think I might recognize some of the applications based on the scripting functionality we developed in apps on the Mac and Windows in the 90s. I might have one of the largest codebases written by one human that hasn't yet been touched by an AI. Maybe it could be some kind of artifact from ancient times? Like, last week?

A list of ten random country names

• Brazil
• Japan
• Kenya
• Norway
• Peru
• Thailand
• Morocco
• Chile
• Ireland
• Bangladesh

Jake Schumacher, director of the 2017 documentary App: The Human Story, sent me a note that Sebastiaan de With’s post this week, “Physicality: The New Age of UI” (my thoughts here), reminded him of a clip from the movie where Neven Mrgan compared Skeuomorphic design to classic cars from the 1940s and ’50s. So true. If you’ve got two and a half minutes to spare, watch this.

Jérôme Marin, writing at Cafétech: The disagreement between Apple and Brussels centers on Article 5.4. In its English version, the article states that the gatekeeper — the term used by the Commission for the seven major tech companies subject to the DMA — “shall allow bu...

Nice write-up from Zac Hall at 9to5Mac: Theater for visionOS premiered a year ago with a clever software launch campaign: exclusively streaming John Gruber’s The Talk Show post-WWDC event live with 3D video. The Apple Vision Pro app has continued to mature since its deb...