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I’ve got iOS 26 installed on a spare phone already, and I like the new UI a lot. In addition to just plain looking cool, Apple has tackled a lot of longstanding minor irritants.

For example, the iOS contextual menu for text selections — the one with Cut/Copy/Paste. For years now there have been a lot of other useful commands in there, including “Share…” at the very end. But to get to the extra commands, you had to tediously swipe, swipe, swipe. Now, with one tap you can expand the whole thing into a vertical menu. Elegant.

There’s some stuff in MacOS 26 Tahoe I already don’t like, like putting needless icons next to almost every single menu item. But overall my first impression of Liquid Glass on MacOS is good too. It’s fun, and lots of little details are nice — joyful and useful in an old-school Mac way.

Stephen Hackett, noting the biggest news of the day:

Something jumped out at me in the macOS Tahoe segment of the WWDC keynote today: the Finder icon is reversed. […]

The Big Sur Finder icon has been with us ever since, and I hope Apple reverses course here.

I’m obviously joking about this being the biggest news of the day, but it really does feel just plain wrong to swap the dark/light sides. The Finder icon is more than an icon, it’s a logo, a brand.

Idea for teachers. Allow students to use ChatGPT to write their papers, as long as they submit a log showing how they did it. Maybe they're getting help with writing, but the ideas are theirs? It might be possible to fake that part too, but for now, that's probably a bit too hard.

I use ChatGPT for all kinds of work problems, and for a lot of other stuff too. It can collaborate, and it has much more broad and deep knowledge than I do, than any human. No one knows whether it thinks or is self-aware, any more than we know whether humans think or are self-aware. For that reason, I think, ironically, there's no point discussing it, we'll never get an answer, because we have no idea what intelligence or thinking is. But it is every bit as thoughtful as any human I have ever worked with. And the whole business about pattern-recognition is imho bs. People who say that are just repeating what they heard from someone else. From a user standpoint, it's absolutely nothing like pattern recognition.

With WWDC25 bringing the biggest design overhaul since iOS 7, you’ll want to prototype your new interfaces fast. DetailsPro lets you build real SwiftUI layouts directly on your iPhone — no Mac required, no code needed. Mock up your WWDC-inspired designs during coffee breaks. Export clean SwiftUI code straight to Xcode when you’re ready. While everyone else is still thinking, you’re already building. Free to use, with pro features if you need them. Perfect for the design renaissance.

I went to the DNC in 2004 and 2008. Both times I heard from friends later that TV had been focused on riots, which confused the hell out of me, because I didn't see anything. There was some obnoxious stuff at the 2008 convention in Denver, we had to walk a gauntlet of ugly pictures of dead fetuses going in and out of the convention center. But in neither case were there any disturbances. I see the same sort of thing happening in LA now.

Some random thoughts about wealth. Suppose you're an average middle-class person who works for a tech company when the company is bought out for a huge amount of money and your stock is now worth $10 million. It's liquid today. You just received a check for $10 million. What...

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 10 June 2025, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): Indeed
Price: $50

A different type of show this year, and I’m excited for it. If you can make it, you should come. You’ll even enjoy the prelude, mingling with fellow DF readers and listeners.

Filipe Espósito, in a scoop for 9to5Mac all the way back in October: 9to5Mac has learned details about the new project from reliable sources familiar with the matter. The new app combines functionality from the App Store and Game Center in one place. The gaming app is no...

Scharon Harding, writing at Ars Technica: “Just disconnect your TV from the Internet and use an Apple TV box.” That’s the common guidance you’ll hear from Ars readers for those seeking the joys of streaming without giving up too much privacy. Based on our research and t...

Parshin Shojaee, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh, Maxwell Horton, Samy Bengio, and Mehrdad Farajtabar, from Apple’s Machine Learning Research team: Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking...

If it takes Apple as long to have its own competitive LLMs as it did to have its own competitive web browser, I suspect they’ll soon be paying to use the LLMs that are owned and controlled by others, not charging the others for the privilege of reaching Apple’s platform users.

A thread on Bluesky this morning about what we need to hear incumbent Dems say before they step aside as part of the future of the party. We can't be lead by Democrats who didn't do everything in their power the four years of the Biden presidency to shut the door on autocracy. They argued the niceties of filibusters, and letting the DoJ procrastinate on cleaning up the mess, as if everything had snapped back to normal. There was huge unfinished business. We never shut down the insurrection that started on January 6. Otherwise we will wait until the whole system falls down for the Democratic Party to reform probably around someone who comes from MuskLand.

Experience managing developers makes me a better ChatGPT user.

With ChatGPT there's no excuse for a congressperson not validating every word in every bill. They could ask the bot to read the bill and call out any provisions that contradict your previous positions. It knows where you stand even if you've never written it down. I've found it can do that for my work. I'm sure it could do it for a legislator.

Kyle Hughes, in a brief thread on Mastodon last week: At work I’m developing a new iOS app on a small team alongside a small Android team doing the same. We are getting lapped to an unfathomable degree because of how productive they are with Kotlin, Compose, and Cursor. ...

Thomas Ptacek: LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they do...

I don’t use the web interface to Movable Type, my moribund-but-works-just-great CMS, very often. But I was using it today and noticed something odd. Next to the small-text metadata that says I’ve written 35,086 entries in total, it said I had one draft. One. I don’t use the ...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last 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.

New features they launched just last month 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.

Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel.

From his family, on Atkinson’s Facebook page: We regret to write that our beloved husband, father, and stepfather Bill Atkinson passed away on the night of Thursday, June 5th, 2025, due to pancreatic cancer. He was at home in Portola Valley in his bed, surrounded by fami...