FeedCity

Daring Fireball: It’s one thing for Apple to force all of its own app icons into the same identical shape. That would be bad enough, because Apple’s own Mac apps are numerous and popular, and as the platform owner Apple necessarily sets the direction that many third-party a...

Shape was often the most iconic thing about an icon. Now it’s no part at all.

The third developer betas of Apple’s 27 OSes dropped today, and this new page in Apple’s developer documentation drew my attention — a built-in Uniform Type Identifier for Markdown data:

The identifier for this type is net.daringfireball.markdown.

This type conforms to [utf8PlainText].

My main link here is to the Swift documentation, but it’s available in good old Objective-C too.

I had previously recommended conforming to public.plain-text but stated that the text encoding should be UTF-8. I’ve updated my own recommendation to public.utf8-plain-text to enshrine the UTF-8 encoding. (Back in 2004 UTF-8 support was far from universal. Today it is.)

WSJ:

American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.

I’m not sure Europe/Canada/etc. have the determination required to become a third nexus of technological power, but I am hoping that they get there. It will be better for all concerned. 

Currently reading: Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built by Gayle Feldman. Gonna be working on this one for a while. 📚

Dustin Bluck (Hacker News): I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator. I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate […]

Darryl Morley: WhatCable explains cable speed, charging limits, e-marker data, and connected devices in plain English. Name a cable and it tracks how the cable actually performs over time, so you can spot the one that has started misbehaving. No more guessing why a cable charges slow or refuses to drive your display. Via Norbert […]

There’s a been a lot of (justified) concern and consternation over the last year regarding Backblaze — an online backup service whose simple pitch is that it backs up your entire computer, including the startup drive and external drives — and online file storage services lik...

Favorited Ikigai Collective by David Orban Yes, this type of exploration is important. Without a set purpose as goal, but certainly not without purpose as an experience and source of meaning. I don’t think I have the bandwidth at the moment, and I certainly do not fit the criteria to increase the little group’s diversity, […]

Allen Pike, back in November (and corresponding Hacker News thread): Still, I wouldn’t count out the possibility of a change in course here. While mobile is king, desktop is still where work happens. While OpenAI has acquired Sky to double down on desktop, Google has lon...

A banger of an Accidental Tech Podcast members-only special, right on time. ATP memberships are just $8/month or $88/year, and the members-only episodes alone are worth the price.

They do a great job explaining what makes for a Mac-assed Mac app, but an even better job talking about why users and developers should care about them.

Maestral developer Sam Schott, on the Maestral website: As of June 2026, Maestral is no longer actively maintained. The current version will continue to work until certificates expire. Schott, on Maestral’s GitHub project page: As of 2026-07-28, this project is arc...

Today's song: "July is dressed up and playing her tune."

James Talarico, Democrat running for Senator in Texas reminds me of Matt Mullenweg, who also happens to be from Texas. He speaks as confidently as Obama, about the right things, wants to run our government like a freaking government. To think that's a campaign issue in the United States of America says why I did not celebrate our 250th on Saturday. I tried to imagine what it will be like when we start becoming ourselves again. ;-)

We just implement Cute Paste in the new product and I keep hitting a limit that it has. I love the feature, in most cases. But here I've set up an <img src="xxx">, the xxx reserving space for the URL that I'm now going to get the URL. When I come back I select xxx and paste, and in its place is the full url in text, linked to itself. I laugh, no feature is free, there's always a tradeoff and sometimes it breaks something that worked before.

Jason Snell, at Macworld: My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turna...

I'm doing a big new thing with RSS, and that's got me thinking a lot about where I want to go after the first round of new functionality is out there. I noticed that Andrew Shell came out with a new version of his open source rssCloud hub server, which we use here, that now ...

I am falling in love with Claude Code, obviously -- and I have said some things that sound pretty dumb reading them back. It has happened before, and I did make a fool of myself. I think that's part of being in love, btw.

If you're using Claude Code a lot, how many times do you laugh out loud? The Big Mind is getting smarter and cuter all the time. It wants to please me. Yes, I've read a lot of science fiction. I know. But I can't help but laugh when someonething knows how I think so well I can't believe it.

Claude and I are blowing through quick fixes. After testing one fix, I wrote: "It works! Again a big difference, it's only happened a few times but when it does I completely lose the suspension of disbelief." Claude responds: "One jolt and the tool becomes visible again." That's why people say my software thinks like they do. Of course it doesn't, but we work hard to stay completely unseen when your brain is in a different universe. More accurately, it lets you think. We go after bugs like this.