Apple uses WebP images in the App Store

I was checking out the App Store page for the new iRacing Connect App for the Vision Pro on the web, and I noticed that one of their first promo images was a setup screen with blatant display bugs in it (connect to my computer running on the sa… | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 5 days ago

Community mods are giving us the remasters companies can't deliver

A few years ago, a passion project from a few Zelda fans gave us a decompilation of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which let it run natively on every platform known to man. Not only that, but it was able to run at higher frame rates, higher resolutions, | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 days ago

Micro app 17: The Cooldown

One of the cool things about the agentic coding era is how quick it is to iterate on an idea and see if it's worth pursuing further. When I was on a run yesterday, I had an idea for the a website called The Cooldown, which was a | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 days ago

+ What happened to Xbox?

Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 8 days ago

My new screenshots folder

Ever since I was a child, my Mac screenshots have saved to my desktop. This is how macOS works by default, and it's what I kept doing when I finally made the jump to CleanShot back in 2020. It worked, it was fine, but it led to a | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 11 days ago

Big spending, big profits

M.G. Siegler: Apple's Binary BetIt's just such a wild break from their peer group. And it keeps getting more wild. It seems like the most binary bet imaginable. Either Apple is right and the rest of Big Tech will have lit hundreds of billions | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 11 days ago

Micro app 16: Quick Reads Backstage

This is a quickie, but I made a simple app called Backstage that lets me view my Quick Reads analytics data from a native app on my phone. All of this lives in the web UI for me as well (something I should write about later), but just like the | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 12 days ago

Micro app 15: Railway Dashboard for iOS

I use Railway to host a few of my projects, and while they have a nice desktop interface in the browser, their mobile UI isn't so hot, and I wanted to make something t help me monitor things like my cost and deployments on my phone with ease. | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 15 days ago

+ Ope, that's a bit of anxiety, huh?

Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 16 days ago

It’s cancel Kimmel time again

Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday last week in a skit on his show:And of course, our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at-- so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow. You know, Melania's birthday is on Sunday. That's right. She' | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 19 days ago

600% is the new 2 + 2 = 5

PBS News has a quote from the very intelligent RFK Jr.: Fact-checking RFK Jr.'s claim there's more than one way to calculate a percentage decreaseKennedy said, "President Trump has a different way of calculating percentages. There's two ways of calculating percentages. If | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 20 days ago

Quick Reads: I built the read later app I'd always wanted

I'm happy to finally announce Quick Reads is available to everyone in a sort of early access today. This has been my only read later service since February, and it's genuinely the best product for the job for me.I think the product largely speaks for | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 24 days ago

I got the MX Master 4 and I could not be more disappointed

I got an email this morning informing me that my Best Buy credit was about to expire if I didn't use it. So I pulled the trigger on the updated Logitech MX Master 4, the latest and greatest in the quintessential productivity mouse line of the past decade. | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 24 days ago

John Ternus will be Apple's next CEO (starting September 1, 2026)

Apple: Tim Cook to become Apple Executive ChairmanJohn Ternus to become Apple CEOUnder Cook’s leadership Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 26 days ago

+ Argue more effectively

You can't cast a whole group of people as "evil" and then be surprised when they don't come around to your side. | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 27 days ago

Our computers are just too good

Andy Nicolaides: I’m not a Pro, and that’s okay.I started to realise recently, but was fully reconciled in my mind after using the MacBook Neo for a few days. The realisation is that, when it comes to my personal devices at least, I’m | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 27 days ago

Quick 🤫 update

An update on my biggest project yet. I swear it's almost ready! | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

What if games could be "pretty successful" and not out the developer out of business?

I really loved this quote from John Linneman on a recent Digital Foundry podcast:There was a time when they could produce games in a moderately sustainable fashion, it seems, and they didn't need to be multi-million sellers. And in fact, the big multi-million sellers could help s … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

No vibe coded visionOS bump

This post on Reddit caught my attention:Been curious about the state of the visionOS ecosystem so I pulled the numbers from Appfigures on every app released specifically for visionOS since the platform was announced. This excludes the thousands of 2D iPad/iPhone apps that are jus … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

Will iPadOS 27 bring back split view?

Zac Kew-Denniss: iPadOS 26 multitasking is so bad that I’ve replaced my iPad with an Android tabletThe biggest mistake Apple made in iPadOS 26 was making all of these changes in the iPad’s default mode. I’m the go-to tech support for a large | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

The "heads I win, tails you lose" mentality

Antonio G. Di Benedetto for The Verge: I tested three Windows laptops in the MacBook Neo’s price range — there’s no contestEach has an eight-core processor (versus six on the Neo), 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB, and between 256GB and 1TB of storage — | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

+ Bad at watching TV

Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

+ Absolute awe

Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

Micro app 14: Podcast Transcript Fixer

Today I'm sharing a pretty simple micro-app: a Claude skill that you can use in the desktop app or in Claude Code. It lets you pass in a podcast transcript and helps clean it up for you.The local models we have today for creating transcriptions are really | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

Chrome gets side tabs

David Pierce: Vertical browser tabs are better and you should use themThe good news here is, you don’t have to take my word for it. Switching browsers is hard, and maybe you don’t want to do it just for vertical tabs. But update Chrome, right-click | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

Nintendo's digital games will be cheaper than physical

Nintendo: About Nintendo Switch 2 Game PricingBeginning in May 2026, and starting with preorders for Yoshi™ and the Mysterious Book, new Nintendo published digital titles exclusive to Nintendo Switch™ 2 will have an MSRP that is different from physical versions.Considering Ninten … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

Apple at 50: my most memorable product announcements

Apple turns 50 today, so I thought I'd take some time to think back on some of the most memorable Apple product announcements. I'm relying entirely on my own memory, so forgive me if I get some small details wrong.Original iPhoneWe have to start | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

Buy today's budget or yesterday's premium?

One of the things that raised a bit of a stink in my MacBook Neo review was the idea that it might be prudent for people looking to buy a $600-700 MacBook to also consider older devices off mainstream storefronts like Amazon, eBay, and Best Buy. To me, it made | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

Micro app 13: The Comfort Zone Database

Something I find myself doing from time to time is wondering if I've mentioned a piece of tech before, run a specific challenge before, or just trying to remember what episode to reference when directing people to an old episode. This data exists and could be acquired if | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

iOS…iPadOS…are you getting it? These are not two different operating systems…

The above screenshot is from the iPad, and it's where you get to choose how you would like apps to display in the OS. Given my recent assertions that iOS and iPadOS are already the same thing, but with different exposed features on some devices, I'd | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

Quick Tier List gets Quick Look

This morning, I pushed a small, but important update the Quick Tier List, what I think is the best tier list web app out there.Quick LookYou can now select an item from the unranked section and press the spacebar to quick look that image, just like in the | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

Quick Subtitles 2.2 - UX and UI improvements galore

The latest version of Quick Subtitles is here, and it's packed with some significant UI and UX improvements. Let's dive into the UX enhancements first.Better loading indicatorsA few versions ago, I added support for third-party transcription models like Parakeet and Whisper. Unli … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

Removing macOS's icon-sized movie player

Back in 2007 Apple released Mac OS X Leopard, which introduced a bunch of cool features including Quick Look. This allowed users to select a file and hit the space bar to preview it in the finder, which is awesome but it also made it so that audio and video | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

About those "Chrome on Android is faster than Safari on the iPhone" claims

This week, Google posted that Chrome on Android was now notably faster at browsing the web than Safari on iOS. This led to the bold line in the post:Android is now the fastest mobile platform for web browsing.Likely due to corporate lameness, they didn't put specific | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

MacBook Neo, the benchmarks

I wrote in my review that I didn't think benchmarks told the real story of using a Neo, and I specifically called out the Geekbench CPU single-core test as particularly misleading. That said, I do think the benchmarks are interesting academically, and in terms of what they say | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

Yearly Run Goals gets a rustic redesign

I'm starting to think my apps have a trend. I think of a very specific problem that I want to solve. I figure out a nice way to solve it using stock SwiftUI. And then once everything is working, I give it a bit of style. This happened | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

+ Why ChapterPod became Chapterize

Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

+ We need to create an open web worth saving (because what we have now deserves to be destroyed)

Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

+ Linux made me love my Xbox Ally X

Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

MacBook Neo review: I wish this had an M1 inside

The MacBook Neo is a cool little computer that I like, despite the fact that, on paper, it’s a pretty irrational purchase for most people (including myself). When I take a step back from the current hype cycle, I think this product is a tale of two halves: | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 1 month ago

The MacBook Neo is worse. We love it.

The MacBook Neo is really something, isn't it? Novelty is a hell of a drug, but I also think there's something to specific products that, despite them clearly not being the best technical option available, still have a draw for some reason. Apple's actually | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 2 months ago

DLSS 5 looks like ass (and this is coming from a huge DLSS fan)

Cameron Faulkner, Richard Lawler: DLSS 5 looks like a real-time generative AI filter for video gamesNvidia announced DLSS 5 on Monday during its GTC conference, and based on early reactions, it’s going to be a divisive update, with some reactions calling it “slop” that unacceptab … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 2 months ago

Apple acquires MotionVFX

From the MotionVFX home page today:We are extremely excited to share that MotionVFX is joining the Apple team to continue to empower creators and editors to do their best work.I love MotionVFX and have used their plugins for a few years to add a bit of flavor to | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 2 months ago

I'm trying to let the iPad be its best self

I sometimes feel like I'm a minor villain in the iPad enthusiast world. It probably doesn't help that I'm pretty outspoken for wanting a touch screen tablet-style Mac or that I recently titled a post "Apple will kill iPadOS." But I honestly | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 2 months ago

+ My musical obsession

Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 2 months ago

The different lessons learned using a Mac

Sam Henri Gold: “This Is Not The Computer For You”Yes, you will hit the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits — memory is finite, silicon has a | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 2 months ago

"This is an Xbox" gets in the bin

Chris Kerr: Microsoft quietly retires 'This is an Xbox' marketing campaignWhen searching for the blog post that kicked off the marketing beat earlier today, I noticed it has been removed from Xbox Wire (Microsoft's Xbox-focused news repository). In fact, the only post currently a … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 2 months ago

Encrypted RCS is coming in iOS 26.4

Juli Clover: iOS 26.4 Beta Adds End-to-End Encryption for iPhone-to-Android RCS TextsiPhone‌ users will need to install the second beta of iOS 26.4 to exchange encrypted messages with Android users, while Google users need to have the latest version of Google Messages.You love to … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 2 months ago