A few high-profile app updates have recently gone down like a lead balloon. I have a lot of sympathy for the developers involved, and today I wanted to explain what I think happened with Overcast specifically. | Continue reading
John Gruber: Nick Heer on Patreon Creators Paying the Full 30 Percent App Store Rate for New Subscriptions The whole notion of a platform like Patreon just doesn’t fit with the App Store’s model of taking a fee out of every single transaction for digital goods | Continue reading
Not going to make a big deal of it, but today I decided to officially close my Twitter (sorry, X) account. I know, I know, someone could take my username if they want and yes I know this means I’ll have to start a new account if somehow | Continue reading
John Gruber: The Mac Is a Power Tool Safety by default, but don’t get in the way of power users doing their jobs. And when the user needs an override for the safety features, there is an override, and the situation will make clear to the user that | Continue reading
From the Patron blog today: As we first announced last year, Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024. This has two major consequences for creators: 1. Apple will be applying … | Continue reading
M.G. Siegler: A Time to Kill... Xitter This has all been instituted under the guise of free speech, but that is, of course, bullshit. If Xitter wants to be the haven of truly free speech, it should be a completely open source and un-monetized network that no single company | Continue reading
Ezra Klein back in February 2024: Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden Everybody I have talked about this, literally everybody, has brought up the same fear. Call it the Kamala Harris problem. In theory, she should be the favorite. But she polls slightly worse than Biden. De … | Continue reading
M.G. Siegler on his relatively new Spyglass blog (running on Ghost, which always makes me happy): Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Fees for EU Developers Basically it feels like Apple is making the changes that the EU clearly is angling for, but doing so in the most pedantic wa … | Continue reading
Apple: Updates to the StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement Developers can communicate and promote offers for purchases available at a destination of their choice. The destination can be an alternative app marketplace, another app, or a website, and it can be accessed outsi … | Continue reading
Jason Snell on Six Colors: Apple’s permissions features are out of balance But what Apple’s testing in the latest macOS Sequoia betas is brutal because there’s no end to it. It’s a subscription you didn’t buy and can’t | Continue reading
Benj Edwards: Major Shifts at OpenAI Spark Skepticism About Impending AGI Timelines The moves have led some to wonder just how close OpenAI is to a long-rumored breakthrough of some kind of reasoning artificial intelligence if high-profile employees are jumping ship (or taking lo … | Continue reading
Samantha Cole on the always lovely 404 Media: Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI When asked about legal and ethical aspects of using copyrighted content to train an AI model, Nvidia defended its practice as being “in full | Continue reading
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…a Mac user wants to use an iPad but they can’t because of some list of requirements that iPadOS simply doesn’t achieve. They love the iPad hardware and think it’s more than powerful | Continue reading
What makes a product last forever? What tech products do you own that you'll never have to replace? | Continue reading
David McCabe writing for the New York Times: Google Violated Antitrust Laws in Online Search, Judge Rules The government argued that by paying billions of dollars to be the automatic search engine on consumer devices, Google had denied its competitors the opportunity to build the … | Continue reading
Kev Quirk: Three Years With My M1 MacBook Air Question is, will I upgrade? Well, no. Not any time soon anyway. The M1 Air still does everything I need it to extremely well. So why upgrade? Why drop another £1,000 or so on the latest version of the | Continue reading
This is a simple appreciation post for the AeroPress coffee maker. If I want to make a single cup of coffee and I want it to be as good as possible, I’ll reach for the AeroPress every time. For some people, that’s enough to win the | Continue reading
I’ve started rewatching The Rings of Power in preparation for the second season, and just 2 episodes in I’m reminded how wonderful it is. I also can’t forget how deranged the discourse over this show was when it came out, Here’s famously | Continue reading
Epic Games in a press release today: Epic's New Game Strategy for Mobile Stores In exciting news, we are announcing that our mobile games will come to AltStore on iOS in the EU, and we expect to announce support for at least two other third-party stores soon. That& | Continue reading
James Mangold, director of films like Logan, Ford v Ferrari, and Walk the Line, on the MCU-ification of most of big cinema in an interview with Rolling Stone: It’s weird that I’ve even worked in the world of IP entertainment because I don’t like | Continue reading
Brendon Bigley on his Wavelengths blog: EarPods Rule I’m not about to wax poetic about all of the ways using wired headphones in 2024 “changes everything” like a clickbaity YouTube video, but I will say that the proliferation of USB-C on pretty much every device is | Continue reading
Lucas Shaw for Bloomberg: Apple Tries to Rein In Hollywood Spending After Years of Losses All told, the cost of[Severance] ballooned to more than $20 million an episode, making it one of the most expensive projects on TV. Severance costing way more per episode than the famously e … | Continue reading
This one is members-only largely because I don't want it to get too much reach, but it's a true story of how I did great work as a seasoned pro and some folks assumed I had to have used AI features to shortcut my way to the finish line. I'm happy to say it was all me. | Continue reading
Steve Peoples for the Associated Press: Kamala Harris smashes fundraising record with stunning $81 million haul over 24 hours Kamala Harris is smashing fundraising records as the Democratic Party’s donors — big and small — open their wallets for the vice president in the immediat … | Continue reading
Madison in the Puzzmo newsletter: 🃏 We're on the Path to a Trillion Dollars! In this week’s newsletter, I will cover another step in the Puzzmo Cross|word publishing process: incorporation of feedback from test solvers and fact checkers. This was a fascinating read | Continue reading
The New York Times Editorial Board: Biden Made a Courageous Choice. Democrats Must Seize the Opportunity. President Biden’s decision to exit the 2024 presidential election is a fitting coda for a man whose life has been devoted to public service. Mr. Biden has served the nation w … | Continue reading
John Gruber on Daring Fireball: The AT&T Data Breach Shows Why RCS Can’t Be Trusted and the Downside of Apple Adding Support for It in iOS 18 Ihnatko is right, but only if you believe that carrier-based message should remain the baseline. I do not. And | Continue reading
A few weeks ago I blew up my read-later workflow to see if I was actually using the right tool for the job. This week I’m back with a status report on where I’ve landed. | Continue reading
Zack Zwiezen reporting on EA College Football 25 hitting over 700,000 concurrent players in its first 24 hours after release: To put that number in perspective, it handily beats out Helldivers 2, which hit a player count of around 485,000 shortly after launch. It’s also more | Continue reading
Willa Rowe on Kotaku: These Are Kevin Conroy's Final Words as Batman and They're Perfect It’s an undeniably badass line, and it’s made even more poignant by the fact that this is Conroy’s last performance in the role. Click through | Continue reading
Why I think years and years of social networks downranking posts with links in them has done real damage to the open web. | Continue reading
Jeremy Burge: Why eSIM Is My New Best Friend Alternative title: How and why to install an eSIM to save money on data roaming fees when overseas. Especially useful if you have an iPhone 14 with no SIM Tray. I was skeptical about eSIM when it was debuted, but | Continue reading
Warner Bros. Discovery is changing a few more upcoming shows from “Max Originals” to “HBO Originals”: It is part of a strategy to rebrand its highest profile titles into HBO Originals, giving them a linear airing on the premium cable network as well as a streaming | Continue reading
One of the hard parts about sharing one's opinions online like I do is that it's very easy to fall into the trap of mostly complaining about things. Do you like tech? Careful, lest you post mostly about what tech you hate. Do you like movies | Continue reading
Niléane on MacStories: LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads I do have some sincere expectations for you all who are reading this. I expect tech journalists to more systematically report on everything that fits into this pattern. I expect tech podcasters to ackn … | Continue reading
There's a practice very common in software companies of collecting your "net promoter score." This practice is pretty simple, you ask your users how likely they would be to recommend your product to someone else. They give you a score from zero to ten where zero | Continue reading
I've been sitting on writing something about this video from Louis Rossmann where he lays into Marques Brownlee for his admittedly pretty softball interview with Apple about repairability. I found Louis's video pretty absurd, and was really annoyed by it. He spends upwards of 10 … | Continue reading
Benedict Evans: The VR Winter Continues it’s obvious that the devices will get better, lighter and cheaper, but much less obvious whether that’s enough. How many people will care? We should be careful of saying ‘no-one will do that’ - we all do things | Continue reading
Taking a page from the ATP crew, I did a tier list for fun! We'll see how this one goes, but I think it's a lot of fun and will make people go "yes!" and "this guy is nuts!" in equal measure. | Continue reading
Julian Chokkattu writing for Wired: Nothing’s CMF Devices Prove Yet Again Cheap Doesn't Have to Mean Boring What's most remarkable about these devices is the price. I have tested cheap and flagship smartphones for nearly a decade, and after setting up the CMF Phone | Continue reading
Mike Haynes has moved his crashthearcade blog to Ghost: Ghosting WordPress The Ghost editor is really an example for WordPress' Gutenberg editor to follow. It functions largely in the same way but doesn't have any of the jank that makes Gutenberg so frustrating to use. It’ | Continue reading
Louie Mantia: Qualifying Art We are all too different from each other and it is not sustainable for every piece of artwork or every product to reach 100% market saturation . Appealing to a global palate is a surefire way to make the blandest art. Yes, yes, yes! Add this to | Continue reading
Alyssa Mercante for Kotaku: Star Wars: The Acolyte Is Doing a Different Kind of Fan-Service, and It Rocks The Disney+ series ticks many boxes that the more traditional, masculine fans of the franchise have been begging for for years (High Republic lore, rare aliens, wild lightsab … | Continue reading
The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer: To serve his country, Donald Trump should leave the race The debate served as a reminder of what another four years of Trump would look like. More lies, grievance, narcissism, and hate. Supporters say they like Trump because he sa … | Continue reading
I came across this video today where a developer reviews a John Carmack tweet and ultimately comes to the conclusion that it’s obviously better to perform click actions on website with the “mouse down” event rather than the “mouse up” event, like most things do today. The argumen … | Continue reading
Casey Newton interviewed Adam Mosseri on the First Year of Threads. He talks about a lot in here, but Adam brings up the fediverse in an answer, and that is of course the thing people like me are most interested in. Here's what he said: The fediverse is | Continue reading
Cloudflare: Declare Your AIndependence: Block AI Bots, Scrapers and Crawlers With a Single Click We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots … | Continue reading
Eugen Rochko on the official Mastodon blog: Highlighting journalism on Mastodon You will notice that underneath some links shared on Mastodon, the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account, right in the app. This highlights writers and journal … | Continue reading