FeedCity

Washington, October 2025.

From the video Pushing it a bit too far at the Olympic Peninsula coast.

On the NetNewsWire blog I’ve just announced NetNewsWire 6.2 for Mac and iOS.

This release is almost entirely bug fixes — but it does add a couple small features and one potentially interesting one: it now supports Markdown in RSS (via the source:markdown element). Read all about it on the NetNewsWire blog.

(And now we’re working on NetNewsWire 7, which will adopt the new Liquid Glass UI.)

It makes sense in this scenario for neither company to want to publicize a white-label version of Gemini behind Apple Intelligence.

I went to see a discussion between Matt Mullenweg and John Borthwick, two people from tech who I have worked with, but hadn't seen in a while. I wanted to chat with both of them, and did, which was well-worth the journey. I liveblogged it. My chat with Matt helped me understand what we're doing. One of the things we talked about is an idea I thought he would understand and love. It relates to their podcasting client, Pocket Casts, which I use.

I went to NYC yesterday, drove both ways in the same day, which is a lot of driving. It was exceptional for me, two big cities in three weeks, Ottawa and New York. Had time to sit in Washington Square Park, then I rode a Citibike up to where I used to live near Columbus Circle. On the way I shot a video of a woman on West St with a sign that said Honk For Democracy. I thought it was a nice shot, and typically NYers drove right by her, no honking, unfortunately. I also shot a video in Washington Square Park. NYC is photogenic, interesting, and still where I come from, proudly.

I went to NYC yesterday, drove both ways in the same day, which is a lot of driving. Had time to sit in Washington Square Park, then I rode a Citibike up to where I used to live near Columbus Circle. On the way I shot a video of a woman on West St with a sign that said Honk...

I liveblogged a chat between John Borthwick and Matt Mullenweg tonight in NYC.

Benjamin Mayo, on X:

The Tinted glass option generally has a relatively subdued impact inside apps, making bars a bit frostier. But on the lock screen, it transforms all the notifications into grey opaque blobs. I would never choose this mode because that effect is just too ugly.

Now that I think about it, this is almost entirely why I don’t prefer the new “Tinted” option for Liquid Glass in iOS 26.1 — notifications look orthopedic, like an extra-high-contrast accessibility option for the vision impaired. Here’s a good side-by-side comparison in a post on Reddit. But as the top Reddit commenter points out, this severe over-correction from iOS 26.0 (where “Clear” was effectively the only option) is only with Light mode — in Dark mode, notifications in iOS 26.1 look good with the Tinted option.

Hannah Knowles, writing for The Washington Post (via Taegan Goddard): Mamdani won two-thirds of voters under 45 in preliminary exit polls, while Cuomo led him by 10 points with voters 45 and older. The polls also showed an education divide: College graduates backed Mamda...

Washington, October 2025.

From the video Pushing it a bit too far at the Olympic Peninsula coast.

WhatsApp: In addition to reading and responding to messages, for the first time WhatsApp on Apple Watch will now support many requested features: Call notifications: You can see who’s calling without needing to look at your iPhone. Full messages: You can read full Wh...

News from Apple’s Podcasts for Creators site, regarding new features in the iOS 26.2 beta releases:

When you supply chapters in your episode description or in your RSS feed, they display in Apple Podcasts. If you submit chapters through your hosting provider, you can include images. For shows in English, when chapters aren’t provided, Apple Podcasts generates them for you and an “Automatically created“ label appears in the chapter list. If you prefer not to use automatically created chapters, you can disable this feature in Apple Podcasts Connect. Learn more about chapters.

It’s unclear to me whether this feature is actually exclusive to iOS/iPhone, or will be available across Apple’s 26.2 OS releases. This strikes me as a great use of AI, but I also think most multi-topic podcasts should include human-created chapters.

Don't forget the new WordPress News.

John Dvorak back in 2014, two months before Apple Watch was announced:

I got a lecture from a potential buyer, who will only purchase an iTime as a replacement for the iPhone rather than an accessory. But all evidence leads me to believe this device will be an accessory.

Doing that limits the appeal to people who were promised a sleeker gadget profile, which they desperately need, because they never manage to pare down anything. It’s tablet computing all over again.

If he’d meant that Apple Watch would be like the iPad, in terms of being a durable long-term many-billion-dollars-in-sales-per-quarter platform, he’d have been correct. But he meant that both were duds.

Dvorak is still writing, but alas, only occasionally.

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge: The details of how, when, and where Google would charge its fees are complicated, and they seem to be somewhat tailored to the needs of a game developer like Epic Games. Google can charge 20 percent for an in-app purchase that pro...

And it's undeniable, the voters said no to Schumer and the current theoretical Democratic leaders. They can't be in charge of the future, otherwise we're lost. So the voters figured it out. Let's make sure everyone hears this, they seem to be saying. You better be able to lead us or don't bother applying for the job.

Every FeedLand timeline has a link to its OPML subscription list under the traditional white on orange XML icon.

New release of FeedLand, v0.7.9. It's a Node.js server app, using MySQL, and I think it's stable enough that I can start linking to updates here. It's not for poets, though I do know one who got it running. Check out the feedlandInstall repo.

To people who do WordPress plug-ins -- have a look at the feedlandSocket repo. It sends notifications of news items to any subscriber, via websockets. News items are simple JSON, and contain information in the feed item, and system info like id and when it was received. This makes it easy to stream news to a plug-in running in a WordPress site, that can then do anything with the news they like. It's incredibly simple to use, and we provide all the JavaScript code you need to embed in a browser-based app. Here's a place where you can ask questions.

Democrats swept yesterday's election. A reminder that you should ignore pundits when they say what they've been saying about Democrats since Trump won last year's election. They assume people are stupid and aren't paying attention to the prices in the supermarket. And the price of health insurance. And the mask-wearing storm troopers occupying Los Angeles and Chicago. Heather Cox Richardson said at the end of last night's piece that "politics will be a whole different game." Republican incumbents now know that there better be big change, or they'll all be losing next November. They may find themselves more on the people's side than Trump's, now that they know for sure the two things are different.