Tuesday, January 27, 2026

iOS 26.2.1

Juli Clover (release notes, no security, no enterprise, no developer):

iOS 26.2.1 adds support for the next-generation AirTag that Apple introduced today.

[…]

The update also includes unspecified bug fixes, according to Apple’s release notes.

Juli Clover:

The iOS 26.2.1 update that Apple released today further addresses an issue preventing some older mobile phones from being able to make emergency calls.

Adam Engst:

Apple claims there are also bug fixes, but doesn’t deign to clarify what they might be.

More intriguingly, the company also released updates to four older versions of iOS and iPadOS, dating back to iOS 12. The updates include:

  • iOS 18.7.4 and iPadOS 18.7.4
  • iOS 16.7.13 and iPadOS 16.7.13
  • iOS 15.8.6 and iPadOS 15.8.6
  • iOS 12.5.8

Usually, when Apple updates much older operating systems, it’s because of a particularly problematic security vulnerability, though even then, the company seldom goes back more than two releases. However, something else is going on this time, as indicated by the security notes, which state that none of the releases have any published CVE entries.

Apple seems to be doubling down on encouraging users to update to iOS 26. These bug fix updates for iOS 18 and earlier are only available for users with older iPhones. If your phone can run iOS 26, you have to update to it or be stuck with known security vulnerabilities.

Previously:

watchOS 26.2.1

Juli Clover (no release notes, no security, no developer):

Today’s update enables Precision Finding for the new AirTag 2 on the Apple Watch Series 9 and later and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. Prior to now, Precision Finding for the AirTag has been limited to the iPhone.

It is not yet clear if the update enables Precision Finding on Apple Watch for the original AirTag, or if this is a feature limited to the new AirTag 2.

Previously:

Swift Pitch: Borrowing Sequence

Ben Cohen:

A sequence provides access to its elements through an Iterator, and an iterator’s next() operation returns an Element?. For a sequence of noncopyable elements, this operation could only be implemented by consuming the elements of the iterated sequence, with the for loop taking ownership of the elements individually.

While consuming iteration is sometimes what you want, borrowing iteration is equally important, serves as a better default for noncopyable elements, and yet cannot be supported by the existing Sequence.

[…]

Instead of offering up individual elements via next() as IteratorProtocol does, BorrowingIteratorProtocol offers up spans of elements. The iterator indicates there are no more elements to iterate by returning an empty Span.

[…]

Note that in the case of Array, the new protocol results in much less overhead for the optimizer to eliminate. Iterating a Span in the inner loop is a lot closer to the “ideal” model of advancing a pointer over a buffer and accessing the elements directly. It is therefore expected that this design will result in better performance in some cases where today the optimizer is unable to eliminate the overhead of Swift’s Array.

[…]

For this reason, it may not be appropriate to switch all for iteration to use BorrowingSequence when Sequence is available. How to determine which cases are better (such as Array is expected to be) and which are worse (such as the UnfoldSequence example above) needs further investigation. […] For now, if a Sequence conformance is available, it will be used even if BorrowingSequence is also available.

I haven’t had a need for noncopyable types, but I’m interested in reducing ARC overhead when traversing objects. Most of the time I don’t actually need to retain and release an object just to look at it briefly because I know that it’s not going to be removed from the collection.

Previously:

curl Removes Bug Bounties

Jan Tångring (Hacker News):

“AI slop and bad reports in general have been increasing even more lately, so we have to try to brake the flood in order not to drown”, says cURL maintainer Daniel Stenberg to Swedish electronics industry news site etn.se.

Therefore, cURL is terminating the bounty payouts as of the end of January.

[…]

Not all AI-generated bug reports are nonsense. It’s not possible to determine the exact share, but Daniel Stenberg knows of more than a hundred good AI assisted reports that led to corrections.

curl (Hacker News):

We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports.

Previously:

Monday, January 26, 2026

AirTag 2026

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors):

Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip — the same chip found in the iPhone 17 lineup, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watch Series 11 — powers the new AirTag, making it easier to locate than ever before. Using haptic, visual, and audio feedback, Precision Finding guides users to their lost items from up to 50 percent farther away than the previous generation. And an upgraded Bluetooth chip expands the range at which items can be located.

[…]

With its updated internal design, the new AirTag is 50 percent louder than the previous generation, enabling users to hear their AirTag from up to 2x farther than before.

Works better, same price, sounds good.

Update (2026-01-27): Unfortunately, the new AirTags require iOS 26.2.1 or later.

Joe Rossignol:

Apple offers a Share Item Location feature in the Find My app that allows you to temporarily share the location of an AirTag-equipped item with others, including employees at participating airlines.

[…]

Below, we have listed most of the airlines that support the feature[…]

Adam Engst:

Have AirTags made a difference in your life? Do you plan to replace existing ones with these new models?

UK Age Verification for VPNs

Cindy Harper (via Hacker News):

The UK House of Lords has voted to extend “age assurance” requirements, effectively age verification mandates, to virtual private networks (VPNs) and a wide range of online platforms under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

The decision deepens the reach of the already-controversial Online Safety Act, linking child safety goals to mechanisms that could have severe effects on private communication and digital autonomy.

[…]

In effect, most interactive online platforms would now need to collect and verify age data from users, even where those services are not primarily aimed at children.

[…]

Two other amendments, both more technologically intrusive, were discussed but rejected.

It’s not yet law.

Previously:

Microsoft Sharing BitLocker Keys With FBI

Zac Bowden (via Hacker News):

Microsoft has confirmed in a statement to Forbes that the company will provide the FBI access to BitLocker encryption keys if a valid legal order is requested. These keys enable the ability to decrypt and access the data on a computer running Windows, giving law enforcement the means to break into a device and access its data.

The news comes as Forbes reports that Microsoft gave the FBI the BitLocker encryption keys to access a device in Guam that law enforcement believed to have “evidence that would help prove individuals handling the island’s Covid unemployment assistance program were part of a plot to steal funds” in early 2025.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (Hacker News, Slashdot):

But, by default, BitLocker recovery keys are uploaded to Microsoft’s cloud, allowing the tech giant — and by extension law enforcement — to access them and use them to decrypt drives encrypted with BitLocker, as with the case reported by Forbes.

[…]

Apart from the privacy risks of handing recovery keys to a company, Johns Hopkins professor and cryptography expert Matthew Green raised the potential scenario where malicious hackers compromise Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure — something that has happened several times in recent years — and get access to these recovery keys.

It’s not surprising or improper that Microsoft would cooperate with law enforcement, but it may be surprising to many users that they had shared their recovery keys with Microsoft.

Eric Schwarz:

Microsoft has made it increasingly harder for individual consumers to set up a new PC without creating a Microsoft account. Between closing loopholes and fighting users who want to make local accounts, this means most people are unknowingly uploading their BitLocker keys to Microsoft’s servers. Whether intentional or not, the fact that Microsoft hasn’t designed a way to be out of the encryption key business is concerning.

Apple also strongly and repeatedly encourages users to store the FileVault recovery key on Apple’s servers. I was not able to find information about this in their security guide, but the situation should be better than with Windows because the recovery key is now stored in iCloud Keychain, which is end-to-end encrypted.

Previously:

Friday, January 23, 2026

Improving the Usability of C Libraries in Swift

Doug Gregor:

The Swift code above has a very “C” feel to it. It has global function calls with prefixed names like wgpuInstanceCreateSurface and global integer constants like WGPUStatus_Error. It pervasively uses unsafe pointers, some of which are managed with explicit reference counting, where the user provides calls to wpuXYZAddRef and wgpuXYZRelease functions. It works, but it doesn’t feel like Swift, and inherits various safety problems of C.

Fortunately, we can improve this situation, providing a safer and more ergonomic interface to WebGPU from Swift that feels like it belongs in Swift. More importantly, we can do so without changing the WebGPU implementation: Swift provides a suite of annotations that you can apply to C headers to improve the way in which the C APIs are expressed in Swift. These annotations describe common conventions in C that match up with Swift constructs, projecting a more Swift-friendly interface on top of the C code.

[…]

The problem of needing to layer information on top of existing C headers is not a new one. As noted earlier, Swift relies on a Clang feature called API notes to let us express this same information in a separate file, so we don’t have to edit the header.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-26): Tony Arnold:

I am really happy to see API notes documented here.

I used this on a shared C++/Swift project a few years back, and it massively improved the experience of writing code against the C++ types. It’s well worth the investment of your time to do this if you’re in a similar spot.

TikTok US Joint Venture

David McCabe and Emmett Lindner (MacRumors, The Verge):

TikTok said on Thursday that its Chinese owner, ByteDance, had struck a deal with a group of non-Chinese investors to create a new U.S. TikTok, concluding a six-year legal saga that saw the app banned by Congress and ensnared in politicking between two global superpowers.

Investors including the software giant Oracle; MGX, an Emirati investment firm; and Silver Lake, another investment firm, will own more than 80 percent of the new venture. That list also includes the personal investment entity for Michael Dell, the tech billionaire behind Dell Technologies, and other firms, TikTok said. Adam Presser, TikTok’s former head of operations, will be the chief executive for the U.S. TikTok.

[…]

The agreement, which was hammered out over more than a year, resolves existential questions about TikTok’s future. The app — with its unceasing feed of lip-syncs, political endorsements, conspiracy theories and skin care tutorials — would have had to leave the American market if it did not separate from ByteDance.

Ashley Belanger:

The law requires the divestment “to end any ‘operational relationship’ between ByteDance and TikTok in the United States,” critics told the NYT. That could be a problem, since TikTok’s release makes it clear that ByteDance will maintain some control over the TikTok US app’s operations.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-26): Reece Rogers (Hacker News):

Now that it’s under US-based ownership, TikTok potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data.

Nick Heer:

Whether this represents an actual change in the data collected or merely a difference in description is something it seems Rogers cannot answer.

Lily Jamali:

TikTok already collects similar data from users in the UK and Europe as part of a new “Nearby Feed” feature that lets users find events and businesses near them.

A Lament for Aperture

Daniel Kennett (BasicAppleGuy):

An exception to that, however, is Apple’s Aperture. I’m still grumpy that Apple discontinued it back in 2015, and I’m not alone. Start spending time in the online photography sphere and you’ll start to notice a small but undeniable undercurrent of lament of its loss to this day. Find an article about Adobe hiking their subscription prices because they added AI for some reason, and amongst the complaining in the comments you’ll invariably find it: “I miss Aperture.”

[…]

So, I dug out the ‘ol Trashcan Mac Pro I lovingly reviewed here on this very blog over eleven years ago and fired up Aperture to document — at least partially — just why it was so special.

[…]

This sort of design is common in apps like Photos, and especially in “shoebox” apps. Every feature is in its own place, and if you want to use that feature you need to pick up your thing (in this case, a photo) and take it over to where the feature is. In this example, the journey from the map to the editor is through a separate list of images, the fullscreen viewer, then finally to the editor.

In contrast, Aperture comes to you.

[…]

In Aperture, the loupe is a little round zoomy thing you can either drag around to view a zoomed-in portion of the image it’s on top of, or attach to the mouse so you can just point at stuff to zoom in. […] Aperture’s technical brilliance is remarkable in how quiet it is.

Nick Heer:

The 2015 discontinuation of Aperture continues to break my heart for two reasons: the loss of support for a tremendous piece of software, of course, and also for what it represents. It was, for reasons Kennett writes about and plenty more, a pinnacle of software design and engineering. It felt like it was built by people who took two crafts — software and photography — very seriously.

John Gruber:

This week’s announcement of the Creator Studio bundle included no news about the future of Photomator. However, my spidey-sense says this is a case where no news might be good news.

[…]

Perhaps the biggest omission in this first release of Apple Creator Studio is the lack of a Lightroom rival, which is exactly what Photomator is — and Aperture was. My guess is that Apple and the acquired Pixelmator team are hard at work on a new Creator Studio version of Photomator, including a version for iPad, and it just isn’t finished yet.

I doubt this would be a Pro tool like Aperture was, though.

Joe Rosensteel:

Why not forecast that possibility by telling us what will happen with the multi-platform app Photomator? It’s the direct analog to Lightroom, making it the most obvious missing piece in Apple’s bundle. If it’s because there are no updates to announce for Photomator after over a year, then I would ask, “Why is Apple charging $30 a year for the existing version of Photomator?”

If it’s because Photomator will instead be a $30 a year freemium unlock for the Photos app, then I would ask, “What’s the Creator Studio bundle for if it doesn’t include photography? And why is Apple still charging $30 a year?”

Previously:

Update (2026-01-26): John Gordon:

I have wanted Cook gone ever since 2013. Not so much for killing Aperture without a replacement, but for not giving Aperture users a reliable way to migrate to anything else.

See also: Hacker News.

Bugs Apple Loves

Nick Hodulik (via Hacker News):

You need to find an email. You type in the sender’s name. Nothing. You try the subject line. Nothing. You try a unique word you know was in the email. Nothing.

[…]

You type a word. Autocorrect changes it. You delete it and type what you meant. Autocorrect changes it again. You fix it AGAIN. It changes it AGAIN. You’ve now manually corrected this word twice, clearly signaling you want it this way. Autocorrect doesn’t care. It will die on this hill.

[…]

You’re checking out and need to change your card. You see a button with a credit card icon and your address. You tap it. It changes your address. Not the card. To change the card, you need the other button that says ‘Change Payment’. The one without the card icon.

[…]

AirDrop is on. They’re in your contacts. Nothing. You both toggle WiFi. Nothing. Toggle Bluetooth. Nothing. Turn AirDrop off and on. Sometimes it works. Usually you just text it instead.

[…]

You took some photos. iCloud says ‘Uploading 847 items’. You wait. Next day: ‘Uploading 847 items’. Week later: ‘Uploading 847 items’. Is it stuck? Is it working? Is there an error?

Previously:

Update (2026-01-26): Rui Carmo:

“Total time wasted by humanity because Apple won’t fix these” is a wonderfully blunt premise, and the math is… lovely: Base Impact is Users Affected × Frequency × Time Per Incident was enough of a zinger, but the Power User Tax (Σ (Workaround Time × Participation Rate)) and the Shame Multiplier (Years Unfixed × Pressure Factor) just pile it on.

It’s not unlike Steve Jobs’ argument about saving seconds off the Mac’s boot time.

Wade Tregaskis:

The externalities cost estimates might be a little tongue-in-cheek, but honestly, are they all that wrong? One small irritation at the wrong moment can ricochet my happy mood off into the doldrums, and Apple’s products produce a hundred “small” irritations every day – which compound in their irritation when you see them software update after software update, year after year, product after product. It’s hard not to take it personally. Like Apple is deliberately being cruel.

[…]

There is a point at which mere indifference or incompetence transitions into negligence, and it’s long before you become one of the wealthiest companies on the planet with a veritable army of engineers.

Having worked at Apple – among other big tech companies – I can say with confidence that there’s no valid reason why they cannot fix long-standing, infamous bugs.

This was my first thought as well. I get that there’s a huge backlog of bugs. I think that should be prioritized, but I can see why various layers within Apple would prefer to work on new features and redesigns instead. But why not knock off a handful of bugs each year that are longstanding and widespread? This would reliably garner applause at the keynote. Apple can’t or won’t do that, but it had no trouble assigning 2,000 employees to work on the car.

Becky (Hacker News):

I’m trying to get on with the new OS, but there’s so many little bugs that Apple software no longer feels like it just works. It seems less intuitive and like nobody has really tested it thoroughly. Do Apple staff even use their products anymore, or are they all secretly harbouring Android devices?

Here’s a few issues that annoy me regularly, this list is far from exhaustive[…]

Joachim Kurz:

People had hundreds or thousands of bugs assigned. But of course they didn’t actually look at them. The assignment didn’t mean anything. A „not assigned“ would at least have been honest and then you could have looked at all the unassigned bugs regularly.

[…]

There were radars assigned to people in a „Future“ Milestone with P1. Which basically says „hey, it’s really important you do this. Well, not now. But some unspecified time in the future.“

Even though there were two „Future“ milestones, a lot of radars simply got moved from the current milestone to the next, when the current milestone was over. Over multiple years!

People who joined Apple got really stressed because they got assigned a lot of radars on the current milestone by their managers and had no way to actually finish them in time. Until someone explained to them „no worries, we don’t actually expect you to finish those, we just need to assign them to someone“.

Thursday, January 22, 2026

LosslessCut 1.13

Jason Snell:

There was a time when QuickTime was more than just a playback utility; I used it frequently to perform simple video edits, like removing commercials from an off-air recording or tacking the contents of one file on the end of another.

Since those days ended with the deprecation of classic QuickTime, I’ve never really had a go-to utility for these kinds of trims.

[…]

Apple [eventually] added editing features back to QuickTime Player. […] The issue is that the final file you save is a MOV container featuring those clips, which […] means that in the end you have to re-encode the video to get a seamless mp4 file for a video podcast.

[…]

This time, I decided to look for a visual utility (i.e., not something I have to drive from Terminal) that could solve this problem. And I found it: the open-source app LosslessCut, which provides a nice interface atop the powerful FFmpeg command-line app.

Previously:

Clawdbot

Clawdbot (Twitter, Showcase, Documentation, GitHub):

Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use.

Federico Viticci:

To say that Clawdbot has fundamentally altered my perspective of what it means to have an intelligent, personal AI assistant in 2026 would be an understatement. I’ve been playing around with Clawdbot so much, I’ve burned through 180 million tokens on the Anthropic API (yikes), and I’ve had fewer and fewer conversations with the “regular” Claude and ChatGPT apps in the process. Don’t get me wrong: Clawdbot is a nerdy project, a tinkerer’s laboratory that is not poised to overtake the popularity of consumer LLMs any time soon. Still, Clawdbot points at a fascinating future for digital assistants, and it’s exactly the kind of bleeding-edge project that MacStories readers will appreciate.

Clawdbot can be overwhelming at first, so I’ll try my best to explain what it is and why it’s so exciting and fun to play around with. Clawdbot is, at a high level, two things:

  • An LLM-powered agent that runs on your computer and can use many of the popular models such as Claude, Gemini, etc.
  • A “gateway” that lets you talk to the agent using the messaging app of your choice, including iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp and others.

[…]

Given the right permissions, Clawdbot can execute Terminal commands, write scripts on the fly and execute them, install skills to gain new capabilities, and set up MCP servers to give itself new external integrations. Combine all this with a vibrant community that is contributing skills and plugins for Clawdbot, plus Steinberger’s own collection of command-line utilities, and you have yourself a recipe for a self-improving, steerable, and open personal agent that knows you, can access the web, runs on your local machine, and can do just about anything you can think of.

Peter Steinberger:

Apps will melt away. The prompt is your new interface.

Jonah H.:

It’s the fact that clawd can just keep building upon itself just by talking to it in discord is crazy. The future is already here.

Subhrajyoti Sen:

I can understand why people love @clawdbot so much.

I wanted to automate some tasks from Todoist and clawd was able to create a skill for it on its own, all within a Telegram chat.

Max Reid:

Now it:

  • Logs my sleep/health/exercise data and tells me when I stay up too late
  • Writes code and deploys it
  • Writes Ralph loop markdown files that I deploy later
  • Updates Obsidian daily notes
  • Tracks who visits MenuCapture and where they came from
  • Monitors earthquakes in Tokyo
  • Researches stuff online and saves files to my desktop
  • Manage memory across sessions by remembering my projects, patterns and preferences
  • Reminds me of my schedule, including holidays/accommodation
  • Checks on me (on Telegram!) if I’m quiet too long

Conrad Sasheen:

I’m literally on my phone in a telegram chat and it’s communicating with codex cli on my computer creating detailed spec files while out on a walk with my dog.

Dave Morin:

At this point I don’t even know what to call @clawdbot. It is something new. After a few weeks in with it, this is the first time I have felt like I am living in the future since the launch of ChatGPT.

Previously:

Backseat Software

Mike Swanson (via Brent Simmons):

And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.

I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.

[…]

And that’s when the vocabulary starts to creep in. DAU. MAU. Retention. Funnels. Stickiness. Cohorts. Conversion. Gamification. Oh my!

If you’ve worked inside a modern product organization, you’ve heard these words so often they start to feel unavoidable.

[…]

The analytics didn’t prove the feature was unwanted. The analytics proved that we buried it.

Previously:

Lessons From 14 Years at Google

Addy Osmani (via Hacker News):

User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock.

I wonder how much this happens at Google and Apple these days.

The quest for perfection is paralyzing. I’ve watched engineers spend weeks debating the ideal architecture for something they’ve never built. The perfect solution rarely emerges from thought alone - it emerges from contact with reality. AI can in many ways help here.

[…]

Your code is a strategy memo to strangers who will maintain it at 2am during an outage. Optimize for their comprehension, not your elegance.

[…]

With enough users, every observable behavior becomes a dependency - regardless of what you promised. Someone is scraping your API, automating your quirks, caching your bugs.

This creates a career-level insight: you can’t treat compatibility work as “maintenance” and new features as “real work.” Compatibility is product.

Previously:

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

Why Walmart Still Doesn’t Support Apple Pay

Chance Miller (Hacker News):

Walmart doesn’t accept any form of NFC payment in the United States. It’s not just a limitation on Apple Pay. The retailer doesn’t take Google Pay, Samsung Pay, or even let you tap your contactless physical card to pay.

[…]

When you use Walmart Pay, it’s incredibly easy for Walmart to build that customer profile on you. When you use Scan and Go, all of that same information is handed over.

[…]

One common theory is that Walmart doesn’t support Apple Pay because it doesn’t want to pay fees to Apple. This isn’t true. There are no additional fees for a business to accept Apple Pay. They only pay the standard card processing fees regardless of whether the transaction is contactless or not. Apple’s fee is typically charged to issuing banks.

jameskilton:

The article misses the other reason that Walmart has invested in multiple attempts at electronic payments: not paying merchant fees to Visa and Mastercard. That’s why their system requires you hooking up to your bank account directly.

All of Walmart’s attempts at this have been focused on making Walmart’s bottom line better, which is why every one of them has failed, whereas Apple Pay is making my payment experience better, and why I use it all the time.

You can pay via bank or debit card, which Walmart likely prefers, but Walmart Pay does work with credit cards. It seems like the main benefit to them is getting you to install their app.

mrandish:

While TFA is correct that Apple Pay (or Google/Samsung/whatever pay) doesn’t cost WalMart more than a physical credit card - TFA doesn’t mention a highly relevant detail: a phone-app payment company can act as the ‘issuing bank’ and make a tiny fraction of a percent more (like ~0.3%) for being the clearinghouse. Not all phone-pay apps set up as an issuing bank as there’s some overhead but it’s more than worth it if you’re the world’s largest retailer. Note: this fee is not the same as the 2-3% “merchant fee”. The clearinghouse fee is much smaller and never goes back to the merchant - unless the merchant IS is the phone-app company.

ehhthing:

Walmart does accept Apple Pay and contactless payments in Canada. I suspect this is because Canadians pretty much expect contactless to be accepted anywhere they shop, compared to in America where there are still many places (restaurants mostly) that have limited support for it.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-23): John Gruber:

I think the situation with Walmart and Apple Pay is a lot like Netflix and Apple TV integration. Most retailers, even large ones, support Apple Pay. Most streaming services, even large ones, support integration with Apple’s TV app. Walmart doesn’t support Apple Pay because they want to control the customer transaction directly, and they’re big enough, and their customers are loyal enough, that they can resist supporting Apple Pay. Netflix doesn’t support TV app integration because they want to control the customer viewing experience directly, and they’re big enough, and their customers are loyal enough, that they can resist supporting Apple’s TV app.

Amazon — which is also very large, whose customers are also very loyal, and which absolutely loves collecting data — does not support Apple Pay either.

AppleEvent Recording Bug

Olof Hellman:

My AppleScriptable macOS app is recordable. Occasionally, I have a UI action performed by the user that I handle internally, and I send a corresponding AppleEvent with the SendOptions flag .dontExecute (was kAEDontExecute) so that AppleScript recording will see the action and record it.

With Sequoia 15.7.3 and Tahoe 26.1, I am seeing events sent with the .dontExecute flag delivered back to the application invoking the appropriate AppleEvent handler as if the .dontExecute flag was not specified.

I wonder how that happened.

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Notes on Apple’s Nano Texture

Jonathan Borichevskiy (via Peter Steinberger, Hacker News):

In the four months I’ve had it I’ve told at least a dozen people about it, and I’m gonna keep telling people. Being able to take my entire computing environment to places without being worried about glare has expanded the range of environments I can create in. It means I get to be in environments that are more interesting, fun, and in tune with my body.

What follows are some thoughts about how this display has fit into my day to day life in the couple of months I’ve had it.

[…]

fingerprints, splatters, and smudges are mildly annoying indoors but almost fluorescent outdoors

[…]

Closing the MacBook results in slight rubbing on the screen at the bottom of the keyboard / top of the trackpad, leaving scratches on the screen. So far this isn’t detrimental when the brightness is up; it’s only visible with the backlight off

I rarely use mine outdoors, but it even makes a big difference indoors when you don’t have control over windows and other places glare might be coming from. It’s really great on airplanes.

Previously:

Mac Code Signing at 20

Howard Oakley:

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Apple’s announcement of the introduction of code signing, although it wasn’t unleashed until Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard the following year (2007).

[…]

Apple had long maintained that users would remain able to run unsigned code in macOS, but that changed in November 2020 with the first Apple silicon models. Since then, all executable code run on those new Macs has to be signed. What hasn’t been mandatory is the use of a developer certificate for the signature.

[…]

Unlike some other operating systems, the only developer certificates recognised by macOS are those issued by Apple, but they’re provided free as one of the benefits of its $99 annual subscription to be a registered developer, as are unlimited notarisations.

Code signing makes a lot of sense in theory, but the developer experience still leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a constant source of annoying errors and failures, even when you aren’t changing things or doing anything non-standard. Last week, my apps stopped building because all the Developer ID certificates were expired. I have no idea why; I previously had a certificate installed that was good until June of this year.

Opening Keychain Access (which the alert at launch tries to discourage me from using) showed that that certificate was nowhere to be found. I used to keep a separate keychain file with just my developer certificates, but I’ve had to give up on that recently because Keychain Access will no longer copy items into it. It’s been unreliable at that sort of thing for years but now no longer seems to work at all.

Howard Oakley:

The general rule with security certificates is that they’re only valid until their expiry date. When the certificate for a website expires, your browser should warn you if you try to connect to that site, and it will normally refuse to make the connection as a result. Thankfully, Apple’s signing certificates generally work differently.

When Apple adopted code signing using certificates that it issues, it recognised that applying that policy would result in apps having expiry dates enforced by their certificates, so applies a different rule. When a developer signs an app using their Developer ID Application certificate, a trusted timestamp is included to verify when that signing took place. Provided the certificate was valid at that time, and hasn’t been revoked since, the certificate is deemed valid by macOS.

Apple changed that several years ago, since when installer packages have normally been given trusted timestamps, so they now work the same as Developer ID Application certificates, and can still be run successfully after their certificate has expired, provided that it was valid at the time in their trusted timestamp, and hasn’t been revoked since. However, this has only recently been reflected in Apple’s guidance to developers, and is different from the account I gave here last week.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-22): Jeff Johnson:

Worst. Anniversary. Ever.

“Unlike some other operating systems, the only developer certificates recognised by macOS are those issued by Apple, but they’re provided free as one of the benefits of its $99 annual subscription to be a registered developer, as are unlimited notarisations.”

Wow is that an Orwellian sentence.

Howard Oakley:

For reasons unknown, Apple doesn’t sign App Store apps with trusted timestamps. As a result, when its certificate expires, that app’s signature should no longer be valid, and macOS should refuse to run it on that basis. What happens in practice is that it turns a blind eye to the certificate expiry, and runs the app regardless.

Jeff Johnson:

I think I figured out my code signing problem:

Normally I have Little Snitch deny Xcode connections to developerservices2.apple.com, except when I’m uploading a build to App Store Connect. However, I allowed connections in order to renew my expired Apple Developer certificate.

With those connections allowed, Xcode seems to update the provisioning on every build, which for some damn reason is deleting the provisioning profiles and breaking non-clean builds.

Blurring App Store Ads and Search Results

Benjamin Mayo (Hacker News):

Apple is testing a new design for App Store search ads on iPhone. Some users on iOS 26.3 are noticing that the blue background around sponsored results is no longer shown, blurring the line between what paid ad results look like and the real search results that follow.

This means the only differentiator between organic results and the promoted ad is the presence of the small ‘Ad’ banner next to the app icon.

[…]

Of course, this also has the effect of making it harder for users to quickly distinguish at a glance what is an ad and what isn’t, potentially misleading some users into not realising that the first result is a paid ad placement.

“Phenomenal customer experience.”

Previously:

Friday, January 16, 2026

My Apple Watch SE 3 Experience

I’d been anticipating the Apple Watch SE 3 for a while because I wanted:

I was pleased to see that it delivered on all of these. Everything feels so much faster, even Siri. Battery life is no longer a concern at all, even when using the Always On display (though I prefer to turn that off). And complications for third-party apps seem to work better.

Some scattered early impressions:

There are two main problems I’ve encountered so far: charging and the setup/backup/restore process.

When I first got the watch, it worked great. But after several days (without any software update during that time) it would no longer charge using a third-party charger. (I tried four different chargers from multiple brands.) The watch would show that it was charging, and it would seem to for a while, but no matter how long I left it on the charger it would always plateau at somewhere between 41% and 69%. It’s as if it would reach a certain point and then stop charging. The watch would show its normal face instead of the green Nightstand Mode, and the iOS battery widget would show that it was no longer charging. Then it would occasionally charge a little bit to get back up to that point but never go beyond it. It continued to charge normally with multiple Apple charging cables.

At first, restarting the watch would help. It would then charge normally for a few days, at which point I’d have to restart it again. But then this workaround stopped working. Because restarting had helped, this seemed to me like a software issue. Around this time, Apple released a software update, but unfortunately it didn’t help. At this point I decided to contact AppleCare.

The Apple support person ran some diagnostics which showed no problems. But he said the diagnostics did not include the history shown in the battery settings, which clearly demonstrated the problem I was having. He wanted me to unpair and re-pair the watch to my phone, assuring me that everything would be backed up and restored. I was skeptical because updating to the SE 3 had lost my app icon arrangement in Springboard and required a long process to activate all my credit cards with Apple Pay. He assured me not to worry.

The first sign of trouble was that the auto-pairing banner didn’t pop up. It hadn’t done so when the watch was new, either. I had to go to the Watch app to initiate the process.

When I did so, sure enough, the promised settings were lost when restoring the watch. It didn’t even remember the watch’s name. He said there would be an option to choose to restore from backup and that I would be able to choose the backup for either my old watch (which was still paired with the phone) or my new one. It never gave me this choice and just restored something. It remembered the apps and complications and most settings but lost Apple Pay (which I think is as designed, despite what I was told) and my home screen. It also lost my shortcuts, which I restored by going to the iOS app and toggling (for each one) that it should be shown on the watch (even though that was already selected).

Another frustrating part of the restore process is that there’s no indication of progress. You see blank spaces where complications or apps should be, and they gradually fill in. At no point does it report that it’s done.

More talking with AppleCare. I explained the backup/restore situation and wondered if there was a way to preserve my old backup so that it wouldn’t get overwritten by a new backup of the restored watch (where the settings are wrong). He told me that the Apple Watch is backed up to iCloud (rather than to my phone) and that the backup should appear in my device list on the Apple Account Web site. I can have multiple backups per watch. These are also shown in Settings ‣ General on the watch and I can choose which to restore from after unpairing my watch. As far as I know, none of this is true.

Actually, it seems like we have virtually no control over watch backups. I don’t see any way of accessing an old watch backup other than by wiping my phone and restoring it from an old backup. With a Mac, if my Dock layout were messed up, perhaps I would have been able to find and restore an individual plist file, but there’s no such access on watchOS.

AppleCare continued to insist that my home screen would be restored but that there was no way to know how long this would take (there being no progress indicator). I should just wait several more hours. I did, but nothing happened. It was also clear by this point that the charging problem wasn’t fixed. They wanted to set up a call with a senior advisor who they assured me would be up to speed on my case and know how to fix all this. This seemed doubtful, but it was worth a try.

The senior advisor started out by asking what the problem with the watch was. She had not read any of the case history but—in possibly a first in my interactions with AppleCare—she did have access to it. After reading the notes, she had no idea what was going on with the icons or the charging. It must be a hardware problem, so I should send the watch in for service.

The first step, I was told, was to remove my iPhone from Find My. I confirmed that she didn’t mean the watch. That didn’t seem right, but it also seemed harmless, so I did it. Then it was time to erase the watch. This took a really long time—more than 5 minutes. I thought the watch was encrypted and so it only had to delete the encryption keys?

I mailed in the watch and soon received an e-mail saying that Apple had received it and found nothing wrong. I had doubted there was a hardware problem, anyway. Apple said that when I received my watch back there would be a letter explaining in detail what the repair depot had done. The actual letter was non-specific. It did not say whether Apple had actually tested the watch with third-party chargers. And it said that they might have updated the software. Judging from the the version number, they hadn’t.

I went through the pairing and restore process again, which again lost my home screen layout. By this time I had realized that you can also move the icons around using App View in the Watch app on the iPhone, which is much faster. But the big surprise was that, even though Apple seemingly hadn’t repaired anything, charging now worked. I still don’t know why it works. My only guess is that it was caused by a software problem and that fully erasing the watch was a deeper reset than just unpairing. I keep wondering whether the charging problem will come back, but so far it’s been working properly for almost two weeks, far longer than the honeymoon period when the watch was new. If it recurs, I guess I’ll try erasing it again.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-22): A significant difference between the Apple Watch SE and the Series 11 is that the SE doesn’t have an on-screen keyboard. Strangely, this isn’t mentioned in Apple’s comparisons or in most of the reviews that I’ve seen. I’m not sure how well it works, so I don’t really know what I’m missing. I usually use dictation because I find that Scribble often misinterprets what I was trying to “type.” I wish it worked more like Graffiti.

Thursday, January 15, 2026

Closing Setapp Mobile Marketplace

Tim Hardwick:

The service will officially cease operating on February 16, 2026. Setapp Mobile launched in open beta in September 2024.

In a support page, MacPaw said Setapp Mobile is being closed because of app marketplaces’ “still-evolving and complex business terms that don’t fit Setapp’s current business model,” suggesting it was not profitable for the company.

[…]

These alternative app marketplaces, as Apple calls them, are a relatively new frontier for app distribution on iOS, but they face hefty challenges, such as navigating Apple’s controversial Core Technology Fee, and competing with its established App Store ecosystem.

Epic Games currently pays the Apple fees that EU developers incur when distributing their apps through the Epic Games Store. However, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has said it is “not financially viable” for Epic Games to pay Apple’s fees in the long term, but it plans to do so while it waits to see if the European Union requires Apple to further tweak its rules for third-party marketplaces under the DMA.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Clear indicator that Apple’s DMA implementation never actually met its obligations under the DMA in the first place. Apple scared developers away from ever signing up to their poison pill Core Technology Fee terms, so alternative app stores simply have no apps to offer.

It’s kind of the same situation as BrowserEngineKit. Apple is going to say that they did all this work and there was no adoption, so that proves the EU was wrong; there’s no demand because customers prefer Apple’s “protections.” The developers will say that Apple designed third-party browsers and marketplaces to fail, or at least didn’t care very much about solving the reported problems; they tried their best in spite of this, but it wasn’t enough. I guess at some point the EU will decide whether it thinks there was malicious compliance.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-22): Guy English:

A third party App Store closes shop and everyone wants to read the tea leaves to confirm their priors.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

The core problem with these mandates from the EU is that they’re not based on demand from users. Users don’t care about third-party browser rendering engines. Users don’t even know what third-party browser rendering engines are. Users, by and large, not only are not asking for third-party app marketplaces for iOS, they in fact prefer the App Store’s role as the exclusive source for third-party software.

I think this is true in the narrow sense that there really isn’t much demand right now. But that could be because the users don’t know what they’re potentially missing. They have no basis for comparison. It’s like the apocryphal Henry Ford quote; they think a faster horse is just great. Users initially weren’t clamoring for something like the iPhone, either, because they didn’t imagine that such a thing could even be possible.

But if you look at a platform like the Mac, where there’s choice, Chrome has more market share than Safari even though Safari is bundled with the operating system. The Mac also had massively popular, innovative apps like Dropbox that would not have been possible in an App Store–only world. I think the App Store monopoly is holding back all sorts of innovation on iOS and long-term pushing more development to the Web.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

If users don’t care about alternative app distribution methods and things like third-party web browsers, we should remove them from macOS too, see how that goes

The fact of the matter is Apple’s rules precluded any chance of a mainstream alternative marketplace people might care about, like Steam, from ever existing.

If iOS were as open as macOS to app stores like Steam, enabling things like cross-buy and save sync of all your favorite games between Windows, Mac, Steam Deck and iOS, you bet your ass millions of people would want to use it

Sam Clemente:

Removing Chrome support in macOS may just kill the Mac

Which really just proves how insane it is that they’ve managed to go this far without expanding past WebKit on iOS

Previously:

Update (2026-01-23): Juli Clover:

The European Commission is gearing up to blame Apple for Setapp’s EU shutdown, according to information viewed by Bloomberg. “Apple has not rolled out changes to address the key issues concerning its business terms, including their complexity,” the EC reportedly plans to say.

Apple says that it has not simplified its EU business terms as expected because of the European Commission’s refusal to let it implement the changes.

Tahoe Broke Resizing Finder Columns View

Jeff Johnson:

At the bottom of each column is a resizing widget that you can use to change the width of the columns. Or rather, you could use it to change the width of the columns. On macOS Tahoe, the horizontal scroller covers the resizing widget and prevents it from being clicked! Compare with macOS Sequoia, where the horizontal scroller and scroll bar are below the column and allow access to all of the resizing widgets.

[…]

Notice what happens when you use the default value: not only do the scrollbars disappear, the resizing widgets also disappear.

You can still resize the columns, though, by hovering over the horizontal column border lines. Thus, it appears that the Finder team did not even test with the combination of columns view and always show scroll bars.

That’s the problem with settings like Show Scroll bars: Always and the accessibility display options. They’re there because a vocal minority wants them and Apple feels it has to offer them in order to check a box, but it’s clear that its heart isn’t in making them great. Another one I’d put in this category is Natural scrolling. There’s nothing wrong with its behavior, as far as I know, but you can tell from the name that Apple doesn’t want you to turn this off. The Smooth scrolling checkbox was removed long ago, though thankfully the user default to turn it off still works in most cases.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-23): John Gruber (Mastodon):

I joked last week that it would make more sense if we found out that the team behind redesigning the UI for MacOS 26 Tahoe was hired by Meta not a month ago, but an entire year ago, and secretly sabotaged their work to make the Mac look clownish and amateur. More and more I’m wondering if the joke’s on us and it actually happened that way.

Jeff Johnson:

Another change from Sequoia to Tahoe, brought to my attention by Gruber, is that the Finder scrollbar on Tahoe is darker than on Sequoia, the latter shown below.

I believe the difference is due to the lack of a scroller hover state on Tahoe. On Sequoia and earlier, the scroller becomes darker when you hover the mouse pointer over it.

[…]

Both Gruber and the tipster mentioned to me that my inaccessible column resizing widget bug is “fixed” on macOS 26.3.

[…]

Returning to the inaccessible resizing widget issue, on further investigation it turns out that the issue does not occur on macOS 26.2 if you hide the path bar and hide the status bar in Finder.

He also discusses the new Resize columns to fit filenames option, which unfortunately only considers the filenames that are currently in view, not all the ones in the folder.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-26): John Gruber (Mastodon):

This new feature in the Tahoe Finder attempts to finally solve this problem. I played around with it this afternoon and it’s … OK. It feels like an early prototype for what could be a polished feature. For example, it exacerbates some layering bugs in the Finder — if you attempt to rename a file or folder that is partially scrolled under the sidebar, the Tahoe Finder will just draw the rename editing field right on top of the sidebar, even though it belongs to the layer that is scrolled underneath.

[…]

I wish I could set this new column-resizing option only to grow columns to accommodate long filenames, and never to shrink columns when the visible items all have short filenames. But the way it currently works, it adjusts all columns to the width of the longest visible filename each column is displaying — narrowing some, and widening others. I want most columns to stay at the default width. With this new option enabled, it looks a bit higgledy-piggledy that every column is a different width.

Also, it’s an obvious shortcoming that the feature only adjusts columns to the size of the longest currently visible filename. If you scroll down in a column and get to a filename that is too long to fit, nothing happens. It just doesn’t fit.

Update (2026-01-27): John Gruber notes that there’s a hidden preference to auto-resize columns on macOS 14 and 15.

How Markdown Took Over the World

Anil Dash (Hacker News, Mac Power Users):

If mark_up_ is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… mark_down_. This kind of solution, where it’s so smart it seems obvious in hindsight, is key to Markdown’s success. John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet.

[…]

After being nagged about it by users for more than a decade, Google finally added support for Markdown to Google Docs, though it took them years of fiddly improvements to make it truly usable. Just last year, Microsoft added support for Markdown to its venerable Notepad app, perhaps in attempt to assuage the tempers of users who were still in disbelief that Notepad had been bloated with AI features. Nearly every powerful group messaging app, from Slack to WhatsApp to Discord, has support for Markdown in messages. And even the company that indirectly inspired all of this in the first place finally got on board: the most recent version of Apple Notes finally added support for Markdown.

Alas, Apple Notes’ Markdown support does not extend to AppleScript. So there’s still no built-in way to automate getting your data out of the app in a good format.

But it’s not just the apps that you use on your phone or your laptop. For developers, Markdown has long been the lingua franca of the tools we string together to accomplish our work.

[…]

Because Markdown’s format was frozen in place (and had some super-technical details that people could debate about) and people wanted to add features over time, various communities that were implementing Markdown could add their own “flavors” of it as they needed. Popular ones came to be called Commonmark and Github-Flavored, led by various companies or teams that had divergent needs for the tool. While tech geeks tend to obsess over needing everything to be “correct”, in reality it often just doesn’t matter that much, and in the real world, the entire Internet is made up of content that barely follows the technical rules that it’s supposed to.

I’m pleasantly surprised at how ubiquitous Markdown has become, though strangely it’s still not built into WordPress. I actually don’t love it for blogging—since it can’t express a cite attribute and also I’m starting with chunks of text that are already HTML. I don’t see much benefit in mixing the two, so I continue to use plain HTML. I also continue to use reStructuredText for my product manuals. But pretty much everywhere else I use Markdown.

Previously:

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Bulk Setting “Catch Up Automatically” in OmniFocus

It turns out that one of my favorite new features in OmniFocus 4.7 is the Catch Up Automatically option for repeating actions:

With this setting turned off, completing an item will create the next occurrence following the schedule you have set, even when the next occurrence is in the past.

With this setting turned on, completing an item will create the next occurrence following the schedule you have set, skipping any occurrences in the past.

I have lots of repeating actions (e.g. for grocery shopping) that I want to do once every week or two. After I complete an action, I want it to disappear temporarily, but then I want it to reappear the next day for planning purposes. Setting the Defer Date to tomorrow and the repeat interval to just one day will make the action reappear as desired, but then when I complete it a week later I’ll have to tap it six times, because a new action will be created for each intervening day.

With Catch Up Automatically, only one new action will be created, and it will again be deferred until the next day. This exactly what I want. I can control which actions are available by bumping the Defer Date by one or two days, or a week, complete an action with a single tap, and have it come back the next day. (I suspect there may also be a way to solve this problem using the new Planned Date feature and a custom perspective that filters based on that, but I like the Defer Date because it works consistently across views.)

The problem with Catch Up Automatically is that it’s awkward to set. There’s no menu command. You have to open the inspector, open a popover, and click a checkbox. This does not work with a multiple selection (unless, I guess, the repetition parameters are identical) so it has to be repeated for each action. What I wanted was a way to set Catch Up Automatically in bulk, with just a keyboard shortcut. Naturally, I thought of writing an AppleScript and invoking it with FastScripts. Here’s the script I ended up with.

There’s a bunch of boilerplate in order to iterate over the selected actions. The meat of the script is just setting the catch up automatically property to true. Unfortunately, there’s a bug where this change doesn’t get saved. Fortunately, an Omni support person showed me that it does get saved if you set it using the JavaScript API (a.k.a. Omni Automation). I should probably start writing all my scripts in JavaScript, anyway, because then they’d work on iOS, too. But it’s cool that on the Mac you can mix and match, calling JavaScript from within an AppleScript, as shown in this script.

In some ways, e.g. iterating over the selection, the JavaScript API is much more compact, but AppleScript is nicer in that you can just mutate a property of the repetition rule. With JavaScript, you have to create a new rule and pass in all the properties as unlabeled parameters.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-23): I have to advise against using this script for now, because it seems to trigger a bug in OmniFocus that will add a due date to the action where there was none before.

Update (2026-01-25): I’ve fixed the script to avoid that bug.

India May Want iOS’s Source Code

Tim Hardwick (Hacker News):

Apple and other smartphone manufacturers are resisting an Indian government proposal that would require them to hand over source code for security review, reports Reuters.

[…]

Apple, Google, Samsung, Xiaomi, and industry group MAIT have all reportedly objected, citing a lack of global precedent and concerns about revealing proprietary details.

[…]

The country’s IT ministry also said it “refutes the statement” that it is considering seeking source code from smartphone makers, despite the requirement appearing in the government documents reviewed by Reuters.

Simon Sharwood:

India has had similar fights with big tech companies in the past, and nearly always backed down.

Last December India’s Department of Telecommunications demanded that smartphone makers pre-install government apps on all handsets. Civil rights groups and tech industry lobbies both opposed the measure, leading India’s government to first water down the proposal and then abandon it in less than a week.

In 2022, India introduced a directive requiring organizations operating locally to disclose any cybersecurity incidents within six hours of detection, and framed it so cloud operators would have to report on activities conducted by their tenants. Vendors and tech lobby groups pushed back, India’s government eased the requirement, and has scarcely mentioned it since the 2023 revelation that compliance with the law was very low.

Previously:

Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Apple Creator Studio

Apple (Hacker News, ArsTechnica, MacRumors, 9To5Mac, MacStories, Reddit, Mac Power Users):

Apple today unveiled Apple Creator Studio, a groundbreaking collection of powerful creative apps designed to put studio-grade power into the hands of everyone, building on the essential role Mac, iPad, and iPhone play in the lives of millions of creators around the world. The apps included with Apple Creator Studio for video editing, music making, creative imaging, and visual productivity give modern creators the features and capabilities they need to experience the joy of editing and tailoring their content while realizing their artistic vision. Exciting new intelligent features and premium content build on familiar experiences of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform to make Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite to empower creators of all disciplines while protecting their privacy.

Apple Creator Studio will be available on the App Store beginning Wednesday, January 28, for $12.99 per month or $129 per year, with a one-month free trial, and includes access to Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad; Motion, Compressor, and MainStage on Mac; and intelligent features and premium content for Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. College students and educators can subscribe for $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. Alternatively, users can also choose to purchase the Mac versions of Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage individually as a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store.

[…]

For the first time, Pixelmator Pro is coming to iPad, bringing an all-new touch-optimized workspace, full Apple Pencil support, the ability to work between iPad and Mac, and all of the powerful editing tools users have come to appreciate on Mac.

[…]

In addition to Image Playground, advanced image creation and editing tools let users create high-quality images from text, or transform existing images, using generative models from OpenAI.

It does not seem to include Photomator. I don’t really use any of these apps—preferring Microsoft Office and Acorn—and nothing announced here sounds like it would change that.

Dan Moren:

As for the productivity apps, the Apple Creator Studio adds a Content Hub for what Apple describes as “curated, high-quality photos, graphics, and illustrations.” There are also new premium templates and themes for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers and integration with image-generation tools from OpenAI. Apple is also, in an unusual move, including beta features as part of the bundle: the company mentions one that can create a draft of a Keynote presentation from a text outline and one called “Magic Fill” for Numbers with lets you “generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition.” Freeform’s premium features aren’t yet ready to roll out but will come later this year.

Joe Rossignol:

This means that if you bought Final Cut Pro or Pixelmator Pro via one-time purchase, which will still be an option going forward, you will no longer have access to all new features. However, Apple promises the apps will continue to receive updates.

Kirk McElhearn:

Apple is becoming Adobe. There are two types of apps in this suite: pro media apps and office apps. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are not used by the same people as Logic and Final Cut. There should be a separate iWork subscription.

Christina Warren:

On the one hand, I fully understand why Apple is finally going Adobe and doing a subscription for the creative apps. On the other hand, I don’t know if I can see this as having enough value for me to want to pay $130 a year when I use these apps almost entirely on the Mac.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

My hope is that the UI shown today for Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, and MainStage is a flat-out rejection of Liquid Glass for “serious” apps. My fear is that it’s only a result of their continued support for MacOS 15 Sequoia. (But I think they need to continue supporting MacOS 15 Sequoia because so many pro users are rejecting MacOS 26 Tahoe.)

Rui Carmo:

But… how viable is it, really? I have my doubts, especially given that I recently tried Final Cut Pro and found it lacking in several areas compared to freemium competitors like DaVinci Resolve. And I have been using Logic Pro for years. It’s a solid DAW, but it faces stiff competition from Ableton Live and an increasing number of free or low-cost alternatives. But that’s my personal experience; I wonder how this will play out for the broader market, where there’s stuff like Affinity Suite, which has recently surfaced after the Canva acquisition as a free alternative Pixelmator Pro (with paid add-ons).

BasicAppleGuy:

Icon History

Marc Edwards:

The Logic Pro app icon, before and after being part of Apple Creator Studio.

Mr. Macintosh:

Look at how they massacred my boy...😭

Michael Flarup:

We lost something here

Benjamin Mayo:

the ultimate icon downgrade

Previously:

Update (2026-01-14): Joe Rossignol:

Alongside the news that Pixelmator Pro is coming to the iPad, Apple has confirmed that the more basic Pixelmator app for the iPhone and iPad will no longer be updated.

Matt Birchler:

I’m just calling this out because I think it speaks to the massive influence the AI industry has had over the past three years. A couple years ago, many of us thought that Apple would never use the word “AI” to describe what they were doing. It would be “machine learning” or stuff like “Apple Intelligence”, but they’re just calling it AI now like everyone else.

[…]

These new icons remind me of when Google normalized all their icons to the point that they all look the same…no soul…no joy…just the same icon with a few shuffled pixels.

Vidit Bhargava:

Today’s app icons look as if they came out of an assembly line. All looking the same, designed for maximum scale, and devoid of any identity or soul.

Héliographe:

If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design.

See also: Apple Design and BasicAppleGuy.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Final Cut Studio used to cost $1,300 at one point, and now it’s available to students for $2.99 a month. That’s a huge win in my books.

Update (2026-01-15): Michael Flarup (Mastodon):

When everything looks the same, nothing feels loved.

Update (2026-01-20): Adam Chandler:

It’s been like this for a year and I still absolutely HATE that Final Cut Pro just doesn’t open an import dialogue box anymore and thinks there’s a universe where a video editor would want to import an image from Image Playground into Final Cut Pro.

Ray Wong (Hacker News):

Someone actually fixed the terrible Apple Creator Studio icons

John Gruber (Mastodon):

The problem isn’t with these icons in and of themselves. The problem is with the rules Apple has imposed for Liquid Glass app icons, along with their own style guidelines for how to comply with those rules. Given Apple’s own self-imposed constraints for how icons must look (with the mandatory squircle) and how Apple has decided its own app icons should look (a look which can best be described as crude), I actually think the icons in the Creator Studio are pretty good, relatively speaking. But that’s like saying one group of kids has pretty good haircuts, relatively speaking, at a summer camp where the rule is that the kids all cut each others’ hair using only fingernail clippers.

[…]

What Ive told me is that Apple didn’t change things just for the sake of changing them. That Apple was insistent on only changing things if the change made things better. And that this was difficult, at times, because the urge to do something that looks new and different is strong, especially in tech. “New” shows that you’re doing something. “The same” is boring. What’s difficult is embracing the fact that boring can be good, especially if the alternative is different-but-worse, or even just different-but-not-better.

[…]

I don’t think it makes sense to gate useful new features of these apps behind the Creator Studio subscription. Smarter autofill in Numbers, generating Keynote slides from a text outline, and Super Resolution image upscaling all sound like great features, but they sound like the sort of features all users should be getting in the iWork apps in 2026. Especially from on-device AI models. I could countenance an argument that AI-powered features that are processed on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers should require a subscription. But it feels like a rip-off if they’re running on-device. […] But it seems wrong for someone who just wants the new AI-powered features in Numbers and Keynote to need to pay for a subscription bundle whose value is primarily derived from Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, and Pixelmator Pro — apps that many iWork users might never launch.

Update (2026-01-23): Joe Rosensteel (post):

  1. It’s weird that a software bundle aimed at “Creators” has no iPhone apps at all.
  2. It’s even weirder when Apple acquired a software company that made creative apps for the iPhone.
  3. Weirder still when you consider they end-of-lifed a piece of that software with no hint it will be replaced
  4. The weirdest part of all is that one piece of software has received no updates, and is not part of the bundle, but you can still pay $30 a year to use separately.

Gmail Ending Support for Gmailify and POP Fetching

Google (via Adam Engst):

Starting in January 2026, Gmail will no longer provide support for the following features:

  • Gmailify: This feature allows you to get special features like spam protection or inbox organisation applied to your third-party email account. Learn more about Gmailify.
  • Check mail from other accounts: Fetching emails from third-party accounts into your Gmail account, with POP, will no longer be supported.

Previously:

Apple Services in 2025

Eddy Cue (MacRumors):

2025 was a record-breaking year for Apple services, marked by remarkable growth, global expansion, and continuous innovation. From Apple TV, Apple Music, and Apple News, to daily essentials like Apple Pay and iCloud, we delivered enriching experiences to users worldwide. Reflecting on 2025, we remained committed to enhancing our users’ daily lives, with incredible engagement during the holiday season.

[…]

As we look ahead, we’ll continue to bring innovation and intelligent enhancements to Apple services, always guided by our commitment to privacy and a phenomenal customer experience.

I’m not sure any Apple service has a phenomenal customer experience these days. Looking at the ones he mentioned, I was thinking maybe Find My. But then I remembered how it pretty much no longer works at all on my Apple Watch SE that’s limited to OS 10. And how the Mac version doesn’t let you open more than one window.

Apple Pay does “just work” except that it often doesn’t work at gas pumps, and it’s a major pain to upgrade your watch or phone, with each card taking multiple steps (and often a phone call). Apple Cash remains less convenient than Venmo, requiring more steps to transfer funds and without e-mails for reliable notifications and record keeping. You can request a PDF statement via e-mail, but it doesn’t include the names of the people, nor any descriptions of what the transactions were for.

See also: John Gruber:

Previously:

Update (2026-01-22): Nick Lockwood:

The problem with Cook is that he seems hell bent on turning the world’s best product company into a mediocre service company.

UK Child Protections and Messaging Backdoor

Tim Hardwick:

Apple and Google will soon be “encouraged” to build nudity-detection algorithms into their software by default, as part of the UK government’s strategy to tackle violence against women and girls, reports the Financial Times.

Jon Brodkin:

If the UK gets its way, operating systems like iOS and Android would “prevent any nudity being displayed on screen unless the user has verified they are an adult through methods such as biometric checks or official ID. Child sex offenders would be required to keep such blockers enabled.” The Home Office “has initially focused on mobile devices,” but the push could be expanded to desktops, the FT said. Government officials point out that Microsoft can already scan for “inappropriate content” in Microsoft Teams, the report said.

[…]

The push for device-level blocking comes after the UK implemented the Online Safety Act, a law requiring porn platforms and social media firms to verify users’ ages before letting them view adult content. The law can’t fully prevent minors from viewing porn, as many people use VPN services to get around the UK age checks. Government officials may view device-level detection of nudity as a solution to that problem, but such systems would raise concerns about user rights and the accuracy of the nudity detection.

Dare Obasanjo:

Maybe this explains why Apple is hesitant to add age verification at the OS level if it opens the door to requests like these.

Paige Collings:

In his initial announcement, Starmer stated: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.” Since then, the government has been forced to clarify those remarks: digital ID will be mandatory to prove the right to work, and will only take effect after the scheme’s proposed introduction in 2028, rather than retrospectively.

The government has also confirmed that digital ID will not be required for pensioners, students, and those not seeking employment, and will also not be mandatory for accessing medical services, such as visiting hospitals. But as civil society organizations are warning, it’s possible that the required use of digital ID will not end here. Once this data is collected and stored, it provides a multitude of opportunities for government agencies to expand the scenarios where they demand that you prove your identity before entering physical and digital spaces or accessing goods and services.

[…]

Digital ID systems expand the number of entities that may access personal information and consequently use it to track and surveil. The UK government has nodded to this threat. Starmer stated that the technology would “absolutely have very strong encryption” and wouldn’t be used as a surveillance tool. Moreover, junior Cabinet Office Minister Josh Simons told Parliament that “data associated with the digital ID system will be held and kept safe in secure cloud environments hosted in the United Kingdom” and that “the government will work closely with expert stakeholders to make the programme effective, secure and inclusive.”

But if digital ID is needed to verify people’s identities multiple times per day or week, ensuring end-to-encryption is the bare minimum the government should require. Unlike sharing a National Insurance Number, a digital ID will show an array of personal information that would otherwise not be available or exchanged.

Cam Wakefield (Hacker News):

Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom has been handed something called Section 121, which sounds like a tax loophole but is actually a legal crowbar for prying open encrypted messages.

It allows the regulator to compel any online service that lets people talk to each other, Facebook Messenger, Signal, iMessage, etc to install “accredited technology” to scan for terrorism or child abuse material.

The way this works is by scanning all your messages. Not just the suspicious ones. Not just the flagged ones. Every single message. On your device. Before they’re encrypted.

[…]

“We have set a date of April 2026,” [Lord Hanson] said, presumably while polishing his best ‘nothing to see here’ smile, “and we expect to act extremely speedily once we have had the report back.”

Cindy Harper (Hacker News):

The government’s new Online Safety Act 2023 (Priority Offenses) (Amendment) Regulations 2025, which came into force on January 8, 2026, designates “cyberflashing” and “encouraging or assisting serious self-harm” as priority offenses, categories that trigger the strictest compliance duties under the OSA.

This marks a decisive move toward preemptive censorship. Services that allow user interaction, including messaging apps, forums, and search engines, must now monitor communications at scale to ensure that prohibited content is automatically filtered or suppressed before users can even encounter it.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-15): Lindsay Clark (BBC):

The UK government has backed down from making digital ID mandatory for proof of a right to work in the country, adding to confusion over the scheme's cost and purpose.

Jess Weatherbed:

Policymakers and the UK public expressed privacy and civil rights concerns following the announcement, with a parliamentary petition opposing the introduction of digital ID attracting almost three million signatures.

Monday, January 12, 2026

Apple Picks Gemini

Google (CNBC, MacRumors, AppleInsider, Hacker News):

Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.

After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.

Jeff Johnson:

How much did Apple have to pay to get Google to say, “Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards”?

Dan Moren:

Gurman has also previously reported that those delayed Apple Intelligence features are likely to make their debut in iOS 26.4 this spring.

It’s unclear exactly where in the timeframe we are. Given that 26.3 is already in beta, and 26.4 is expected in a few months, it’s possible that work has long since started on this, even if it’s only being officially announced now. Even with the leg-up provided by Google’s models, it seems unlikely the company could simply roll in that tech for a feature due out in short order.

M.G. Siegler:

Sort of weird that they would announce such a big deal this way rather than official releases/interviews/etc, then again, the talk has been – at least on Apple’s side – to downplay the partnership. We get it, it’s sort of embarrassing to have to outsource your work in such a key aspect of technology, let alone one you believed you were at the forefront of not that long ago, at least with regard to Siri.

Kyle Hughes:

The Google deal is now necessary because of past mistakes but it is far from ideal—Apple needed this all in-house for years. It will be very difficult to compete with Google on integrated, optimized software products, and they will be paying Google for the opportunity to compete with them at all. Knowledge work is going to look fundamentally different once Google does Claude Code for Google Workspaces.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-13): John Gruber:

This phrasing, in both Apple’s statement to Cramer and the joint Apple/Google statement released by Google, is, I think subtly telling about how significant this news is: “Google’s AI technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models”. There’s a slight redundancy with foundation appearing twice in the span of four words. Imagine if WebKit had been named “Safari Rendering Engine” — there would be times when one might need to write “the rendering engine is Safari Rendering Engine”, because that’s what it is, and that’s the name. But in this case, it’s a bit incongruous. A foundation is a foundation; it doesn’t have a foundation. So this brief bit of phrasing reveals the obvious, awkward truth that Apple Foundation Models didn’t actually have a foundation.

I wonder whether the behavior of existing code that relies on the foundation models will change significantly.

Update (2026-01-22): Hartley Charlton:

Apple is considering a significant shift in how it operates Siri by potentially running its next-generation chatbot on Google’s cloud infrastructure rather than entirely on its own Private Cloud Compute servers, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

The Struggle of Resizing Windows on Tahoe

Norbert Heger (Mastodon, Hacker News):

Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.

This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden?

It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19 × 19 pixels, located near the window corner.

[…]

But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it – about 75% – now lies outside the window[…]

Jason Snell:

That’s right, folks, the solution to resizing the corner of a window in Tahoe is to click outside the edge of the window. I can’t even.

Jason Anthony Guy:

The accompanying gif of him grabbing a plate captures the experience perfectly.

Rui Carmo:

The annotated images (green “expected” area, blue dot, and the “accepted target area” sitting in empty space) make the point better than any amount of hand-waving, and we need more of this to make it obvious that Apple needs to reverse course on the whole thing.

Gui Rambo:

Yes! All the time. The opposite also occurs: trying to click something behind a window and accidentally resizing the front most window instead.

Tony Arnold:

I’ve noticed that resizing windows on macOS Tahoe seems to fail 2-3 times each time I perform the action. How did Apple break so many interactions in a single release?

Garrett Murray (Mastodon):

I have struggled with this every single day since Tahoe was released. I fail on nearly every first attempt at resizing a window.

[…]

Imagine taking one of the most core, we-take-this-for-granted features of a windowing system and throwing it away. And why? Oh, because iPhones have rounded corners and therefore so should all windows on every Apple platform.

Joachim Kurz:

Things like this make me want to switch to Linux and build my own Desktop environment and window manager.

Like, gather all the macOS devs who still understand how desktop UX is supposed to work, take an Apple HIG from the 90s or and let’s build ourselves a new home.

And when we are done with that (shouldn’t take longer than a couple decades, right?), we fork the open source component from Android and do the same for mobile UX.

Mario Guzmán:

ugh this is one of the things that drives me most insane in #macOSTahoe. Basic desktop-isms are just so broken. I fear that more and more folks who don’t understand the history of the desktop are running the show at Apple. I hope I am wrong but then what explains this mess?

John Gruber (Mastodon):

One can argue with the logic behind these changes, 15 years ago. I’ll repeat that I think it was a grave error to make scrollbars invisible by default. I would argue that while the visible grippy-strip isn’t necessary, it’s nice to have. (As noted above, its presence showed you whether a window could be resized.) But there was, clearly, logic behind the decisions Apple made in 2011. They were carefully considered. The new logic was that you no longer look for a grippy-strip to click on to resize a window. You simply click inside the edge of a window. And of course Apple added a small affordance to the hit target for those edges, such that if you clicked just outside the window, that would count as “close enough” to assume you intended to click on the edge. Most users surely never noticed that. A lot of nice little touches in UI design go unnoticed because they’re nice little touches.

Until MacOS 26, most of the hit target for initiate the resizing of a window was inside the window. Because, of course, right? Even though MacOS (well, Mac OS X) stopped rendering a visible resize grippy-strip 15 years ago, the user could simply imagine that there was still a grippy area inside the lower right corner of every resizable window. It would make no sense whatsoever for the click target to resize a window to be outside the window. Why would anyone expect that? It would work against what our own eyes, and years of experience, are telling us. You pick up a thing to move it or stretch it by grabbing the thing. Not by grabbing next to the thing.

diskzero:

I worked on Finder/TimeMachine/Spotlight/iOS at Apple from 2000-2007. I worked closely with Bas Ording, Stephen Lemay, Marcel van Os, Imran Chaudry, Don Lindsey and Greg Christie. I have no experience with any of the designers who arrived in the post-Steve era. During my time, Jony Ive didn’t figure prominently in the UI design, although echoes of his industrial design appeared in various ways in the graphic design of the widgets. Kevin Tiene and Scott Forstall had more influence for better or worse, extreme skeumorphism for example.

[…]

Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don’t you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn’t push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.

I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen’s ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve’s death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-13): John Gruber:

If you turn on always-visible scrollbars (which you should) and scroll to the bottom, they look like this[…]

Mac Screenshot Utilities

Adam Engst:

Here are the unique features that keep me using multiple apps for my screenshots.

[…]

Most of the time, I dismiss floating shot windows immediately, but they can be useful for referring to a screenshot—such as the contents of a menu that I can’t keep open—while writing. Floating shots are also handy for making simple edits and annotations without opening the file in Preview. The feature I value most, though, is one that ScreenFloat developer Matthias Gansrigler added last year—the option to export an image with an added border.

[…]

CleanShot X is a thoroughly capable screenshot utility with editing and annotation features, but it also offers a feature I haven’t seen elsewhere: the ability to combine screenshots.

[…]

I still occasionally press Command-Shift-5 and use the built-in macOS screenshot utility to create a screenshot of a window with an open menu. In these screenshots, I don’t want shadows around the window, but I do want them around the menu, which otherwise looks weird. This requires a multi-step process that involves capturing two separate screenshots and compositing them in Preview[…]

Previously:

Update (2026-01-13): Jack Brewster:

Shout out for Shottr, which I switched to from CleanShotX a few years ago.

Cloudflare Defies Italy’s Piracy Shield

Jon Brodkin:

Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country’s communications regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.

AGCOM issued the fine under Italy’s controversial Piracy Shield law, saying that Cloudflare was required to disable DNS resolution of domain names and routing of traffic to IP addresses reported by copyright holders. The law provides for fines up to 2 percent of a company’s annual turnover, and the agency said it applied a fine equal to 1 percent.

The fine relates to a blocking order issued to Cloudflare in February 2025. Cloudflare argued that installing a filter applying to the roughly 200 billion daily requests to its DNS system would significantly increase latency and negatively affect DNS resolution for sites that aren’t subject to the dispute over piracy.

Matthew Prince (Hacker News):

Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests. No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency. It required us to not just remove customers, but also censor our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver meaning it risked blacking out any site on the Internet. And it required us not just to censor the content in Italy but globally. In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online.

[…]

In addition, we are considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country.

Ernesto Van der Sar (Slashdot):

Launched in 2024, Italy’s elaborate ‘Piracy Shield’ blocking scheme was billed as the future of anti-piracy efforts.

To effectively tackle live sports piracy, its broad blocking powers aim to block piracy-related domain names and IP addresses within 30 minutes.

While many pirate sources have indeed been blocked, the Piracy Shield is not without controversy. There have been multiple reports of overblocking, where the anti-piracy system blocked access to legitimate sites and services.

Previously:

Friday, January 9, 2026

Slow iOS 26 Adoption

Hartley Charlton (Slashdot):

Usage data published by StatCounter (via Cult of Mac) for January 2026 indicates that only around 15 to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running any version of iOS 26 . The breakdown shows iOS 26.1 accounting for approximately 10.6% of devices, iOS 26.2 for about 4.6%, and the original iOS 26.0 release at roughly 1.1%. In contrast, more than 60% of iPhones tracked by StatCounter remain on iOS 18, with iOS 18.7 and iOS 18.6 alone representing a majority of active devices.

Historical comparisons highlight how atypical this adoption curve appears. StatCounter data from January 2025 shows that roughly 63% of iPhones were running some version of iOS 18 about four months after its release. In January 2024, iOS 17 had reached approximately 54% adoption over a similar timeframe, while iOS 16 surpassed 60% adoption by January 2023.

[…]

In the first week of January last year, 89.3% of MacRumors visitors used a version of iOS 18. This year, during the same time period, only 25.7% of MacRumors readers are running a version of iOS 26 . In the absence of official numbers from Apple, the true adoption rate remains unknown, but the data suggests a level of hesitation toward iOS 26 that has not been seen in recent years.

I want to believe this is because people are choosing to avoid Liquid Glass, but the difference in curves is so stark that I assume it must be due to a measurement problem or a change in how strongly iOS’s Software Update is pushing new versions.

Dave Polaschek:

This, even given that Apple has made the 18.7.3 installer [and its security fixes] unavailable for anyone not an Apple Developer and in the beta program.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-12): Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

The MacRumors stats appeared to provide some independent support for the StatCounter data. I made the mistake of starting to believe the story based on this, without checking the facts myself. In my defense, I’m not a news media outlet, so that’s not my job, and moreover I didn’t publish an article about iOS 26 adoption, until now.

The only site that got it right, eventually, is Pixel Envy by Nick Heer, who pointed out that the Safari browser User-Agent was partially frozen on iOS 26, as discussed in a September WebKit blog post[…]

[…]

Although Apple forces all web browsers on iOS to use WebKit, the User-Agent OS version is frozen only with Safari, not with other browsers, so third-party browsers still accurately report the iOS version.

[…]

By the way, I’m a bit puzzled by Apple’s partial freezing of the Safari User-Agent on iOS, because Safari is always inseparable from the OS, so it’s possible to derive the iOS version from the Safari version, which continues to be incremented in the User-Agent.

Brent Simmons:

I was curious about iOS 26 adoption for NetNewsWire. I looked at the 30-day-active-users numbers, separated by iOS version.

Current adoption is 84% for iOS 26.

René Fouquet:

I’m slowly getting to the point where I realize that it’s close to impossible to have an app that works reliably both on iOS 18 and 26. Something is always broken. You fix one thing, it breaks something else. Apple’s solution is obviously to support 26 only, but I’m not doing them this favor.

Update (2026-01-14): Nick Heer:

Even though third-party browsers are available on iOS, most users browse the web through Safari. And that means StatCounter is almost certainly counting the vast majority of people on iOS 26 as iOS 18.7 users. I retrieved those user agent strings using StatCounter’s detection utility, which is how it says you can validate the accuracy of its statistics. And it seems they are not. (I asked StatCounter to confirm this but have not heard back.)

The actual rate of iOS 26 adoption is difficult to know right now. Web traffic to generalist websites, like the type collected by StatCounter, seems to me like it would be a good proxy had its measurement capabilities kept up with changes to iOS. Other sources, like TelemetryDeck, indicate a far higher market share — 55% as I am writing this — but its own stats reported nearly 78% adoption of iOS 18 at this time last year, far higher than StatCounter’s 63%. TelemetryDeck’s numbers are based on aggregate data from its in-app analytics product, so they should be more accurate, but that also depends on which apps integrate TelemetryDeck and who uses them. What we can see, though, is the difference between last year and this year at the same time, around 23 percentage points. For comparison, in January 2024, TelemetryDeck reported around 74% had updated to iOS 17 — iOS 26 is 19 points less.

If its reporting for this year is similarly representative, it likely indicates a 20-point slide in iOS 26 adoption. Not nearly as terrible as the misleading StatCounter dashboard suggests, but still a huge slide compared to prior years. Apple will likely update its own figures in the coming weeks for a further point of comparison.

Jeff Johnson:

I don’t think 15% is remarkably high for third-party browsers on iOS 26. Heer pointed me toward the Cloudflare statistics for market share by OS, which put Safari at 78%, leaving 22% for other browsers, led by Chrome. If 68% of those users have updated to iOS 26, that would amount to a 15% market share for third-party browsers on iOS 26.

Update (2026-01-23): Nick Heer:

On Friday, I received an email from Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, confirming iOS 26 users had been incorrectly counted as iOS 18.x in its analytics software and, accordingly, in its public trends. Cullen said the company was working on a patch. According to a note pinned today to the top of its iOS version chart, corrected reporting only began rolling out yesterday. However, because this chart represents a version share breakdown for a month that is mostly behind us, more accurate figures will start becoming noticeable in February.

[…]

The second is by way of Timo Tijhof, principal engineer at Wikimedia, who points me to Wikimedia’s network-wide stats showing, as of 11 January, around 50% of “Mobile Safari” visitors were using iOS 26, compared to 41% using iOS 18. […] In the week of 12 January 2025, for example, nearly 72% of visitors were using some version of iOS 18, then the most recent. The week of 14 January 2024, over 65% were using iOS 17.

Update (2026-01-26): John Gruber (Mastodon):

Statcounter completely dropped the ball on this change, and it explains the entirety of this false narrative that iOS 26 adoption is incredibly low.

[…]

iOS 26 adoption isn’t at just 15 percent, which only a dope would believe, but it’s not as high as previous iOS versions in previous years at this point on the calendar. Something, obviously, is going on.

[…]

What’s going on, quite obviously, is that Apple itself is slow-rolling the automatic updates to iOS 26. For years now Apple has steered users, via default suggestions during device setup, to adopt settings to allow OS updates to happen automatically, including updates to major new versions. Apple tends not to push these automatic updates to major new versions of iOS until two months after the .0 release in September. This year that second wave was delayed by about two weeks, and there’s now a third wave starting midway through January. It’s a different pattern from previous years — but it’s a pattern Apple controls. A large majority of users of all Apple devices get major OS updates when, and only when, their devices automatically update. Apple has been slower to push those updates to iOS 26 than they have been for previous iOS updates in recent years. With good reason! iOS 26 is a more significant — and buggier — update than iOS 18 and 17 were.

Jeff Johnson:

Apple already intentionally discontinued iOS 18 security updates for devices that support iOS 26, so if Gruber’s claim is true, then Apple is also slow-rolling the security updates included in iOS 26, thereby 0daying its own customer base.

swingerofbirch:

In the last week or so, I’ve been getting pop-ups to upgrade to iOS 26 with nearly every interaction with my iPhone. Pick it up: pop-up. Swipe up to go to the home screen: pop-up. […] It really was quite importunate, to the point that it felt like spam. I can’t recall that happening before. Maybe in the past it would have popped up once a day, or every two days, but not with every single interaction.

nizmow:

This is the first time I can remember that I’ve heard multiple non-technical people complain to me about the iOS upgrade. Top complaints are, my battery life sucks now, it’s really slow, they moved everything around and it looks weird.

Search vs. Primary Action in the iOS 26 Tab Bar

Ryan Ashcraft:

Up until iOS 26, tab bars were fixed on the bottom of the screen and spanned the full horizontal space. Now, tab bars are capsule-shaped and inset from the screen edges.

[…]

Search tabs are separated visually from the rest of the tab bar and have a circular shape. When switching to the search tab, there’s a morph animation from the circle to the search field, which is now on the bottom of the screen. The new placement is convenient for reachability, a major selling point of the new design system.

[…]

Since the search tab looks like a button, developers and designers are treating it like one. Specifically, they’re using it (or emulating it) for their app’s primary action: the single most important action in an app, like composing a message or adding a new entry.

[…]

Apps have solved this in two ways for over a decade: embedding buttons in the tab bar (like Instagram’s 2011 camera button) or floating them above it (formalized by Google in Material Design 2014). Apple has never officially supported either. The Apple Human Interface Guidelines says tabs are for navigation, not actions. Yet these patterns are near-universal in successful iOS apps.

Previously:

Choosing a Driving Route in CarPlay

Dr. Drang:

That the default route’s Go button is gray while the alternates are green is a stupidity addressed by Sage Olson and Joe Rosensteel, so I won’t bother.

What I will address is that whichever route you choose, you have to tap its Go button. Even though the full description of each route looks like a button, the only part that’s tappable is the part that looks like a button inside another button.

Is this just as stupid as having a dull color as the default and a bright color as the alternate? Yes. And Apple has known that descriptions should be click/tap targets since the very beginning of the Mac. Here, courtesy of Infinite Mac, is MacWrite 1.0 running on a simulation of an original Macintosh.

Previously:

David Rosen, RIP

Keith Stuart (tweet, Hacker News, Reddit, Wikipedia):

The co-founder of Sega, who remained a director of the company until 1996, was instrumental in the birth and rise of the video game business in Japan, and in the 1980s and 90s oversaw the establishment of Sega of America and the huge success of the Mega Drive console.

[…]

For the next 15 years, Sega innovated in the arcade sector, switching from importing games to designing its own, and moving on from jukeboxes and pinball tables to electromechanical arcade games such as the submarine shooting sim Periscope and, in 1972, Killer Shark, a shark hunting game which would briefly feature in Jaws. Sega also began to set up its own arcades allowing the company close control over every facet of its business.

[…]

While Nintendo was all about family entertainment, the titles doing well on the Master System were teen-focused brawlers, such as Golden Axe and Shinobi. When it came to release the new Sega Mega Drive console in Japan in 1988, Rosen insisted on changing its name to Genesis for the US launch, emphasising a new beginning and a more mature outlook.

[…]

Spurred on by Rosen’s vision, Katz marketed the Genesis as a games console for teenagers, not children, using TV ads which combined video game visuals with flashing images and rock music and the immortal phrase: Genesis does what Nintendon’t.

Previously:

Thursday, January 8, 2026

Anker Soundcore Sleep A30 Special Earbuds

Juli Clover:

The $200 Soundcore Sleep A30 Special earbuds feature a triple noise reduction system that blends Active Noise Cancellation, passive isolation, and adaptive snore masking to cut down on sleep interruptions. Anker is partnering with Calm to make Calm Sleep Stories available through the Soundcore app.

I’m a big fan of the previous A20 model (Amazon). They’re comfortable (even for side sleepers), they effectively mask noise so I can sleep, they can be easily controlled with taps (no need to go into the app), and the battery lasts a long time because the sounds can be stored on-device rather than streamed via Bluetooth. The A30 (Amazon) adds support for “AI Brainwaves,” which I remain skeptical of, but it should be a good improvement due to the ANC alone.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-09): My thanks to the commenters for pointing out that the A30 was already shipping months before CES. What’s new is the A30 Special:

Soundcore is refreshing its Sleep A30 earbuds with a new “Special” edition that addresses two of the original model’s key weaknesses: battery life and price.

The Sleep A30 Special maintains the active noise cancelation that set the original apart from the A20, but extends battery life significantly while dropping to $199.99—$30 less than the original’s launch price. According to Soundcore representatives at CES 2026, this updated model will eventually phase out the first-generation Sleep A30.

Bose Opens SoundTouch API

Stevie Bonifield (via Hacker News):

In a surprisingly user-friendly move, Bose has announced it will be open-sourcing the API documentation for its SoundTouch smart speakers, which were slated to lose official support on February 18th, as reported by Ars Technica. Bose has also moved that date back to May 6th, 2026.

When cloud support ends, an update to the SoundTouch app will add local controls to retain as much functionality as possible without cloud services.

[…]

Usually when products lose support for cloud services, they end up bricked, and occasionally users step in themselves to fix things. For instance, when Pebble originally shut down in 2016, users kept their watches functional by creating the Rebble Alliance, a community-run replacement for the watches’ cloud services, firmware, and app store.

Previously:

Wednesday, January 7, 2026

Duolingo Dynamic Island Ads

Juli Clover:

Language learning app Duolingo has apparently been using the iPhone’s Live Activity feature to display ads on the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island, which violates Apple’s design guidelines.

According to multiple reports on Reddit, the Duolingo app has been displaying an ad for a “Super offer,” which is Duolingo’s paid subscription option.

Just like with notifications, another guideline that Apple doesn’t enforce. You have to fill out a privacy manifest to justify reading your own preferences file or displaying a timestamp to a user, but there are no such restrictions on Live Activities or notifications, nor even an API to tag them with a type so that users could choose to filter out ads and promotions.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-08): Nick Heer:

I saw this, too.

[…]

But the HIG is not the App Store Guidelines, and there is nothing in there expressly prohibiting this behaviour, as far as I can see.

Logitech Certificate Expiration Breaks App

Tim Hardwick (Slashdot, Hacker News):

Logitech users on macOS found themselves locked out of their mouse customizations yesterday after the company let a security certificate expire, breaking both its Logi Options+ and G HUB configuration apps.

Logitech devices like its MX Master series mice and MX Keys keyboards stopped working properly as a result of the oversight, with users unable to access their custom scrolling setup, button mappings, and gestures. It wasn't long before the Logitech subreddit was awash with frustrated reports as people discovered their configured peripherals had suddenly reverted to default settings.

Jeff Johnson:

This article is technically inaccurate, sigh.

All Developer ID code signing certificates expire eventually, and macOS does NOT prevent software with an expired certificate from running, otherwise all of your older apps would be dead now.

Logitech was doing some ADDITIONAL validation of their own design, and that's where the problem occurred.

Logitech:

Because the certificate also affected the in‑app updater, you will need to manually download and install the updated version of the app. Please do not uninstall the app and follow the steps below.

[…]

The certificate that expired is used to secure inter-process communications and the expiration resulted in the software not being able to start successfully.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-08): Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

The news reporting on this incident included misinformation about how macOS Developer ID code signing works.

[…]

These stories place the blame on macOS for refusing to run apps with expired Developer ID code signing certificates, but this is false! Apple documents the behavior on its certificates support page:

If your certificate expires, users can still download, install, and run versions of your Mac applications that were signed with this certificate. However, you’ll need a new certificate to sign updates and new applications.

[…]

In other words, there’s nothing to worry about until the year 2035 at the earliest, though admittedly it’s a bit troubling that these apps have a ticking time bomb, so to speak. On the other hand, Developer ID provisioning profiles are optional, used only for a few features such as iCloud support, so many or even most Developer ID signed Mac apps have no provisioning profile, and thus no expiration.

Connor Jones:

A Logitech spokesperson replying to angry Redditors said the company was sorry for the issue and resulting disruption.

They wrote: “We dropped the ball here. This is an inexcusable mistake. We’re extremely sorry for the inconvenience caused.”

1Password Browser Extension Code Injection

Claudio Wunder (Hacker News):

Any Engineer at @1Password here? Your Chrome Extension seems to recently started breaking HTML from certain pages. For example, the Node.js website code snippets break when 1Password Extension is enabled.

Evan You:

1Password browser extension is injecting Prism.js globally on every page, which then applies its syntax highlighting logic on all <code> blocks matching [lang=*] regardless of whether it’s meant to be compatible, thus breaking original highlighting.

As I’ve said, I dislike this whole architecture where you need a browser extension that can read and write to the page in order to enter your password. I would hope that as little code as possible is injected and that it’s all been vetted by 1Password, not just pulled down as a dependency.

1Password:

We’re aware of an issue in recent versions of the 1Password browser extension that can interfere with syntax highlighting on some pages.

The team is actively working on a fix. We don’t have a timeline to share yet, but keeping the extension up to date will ensure you receive it once it’s available.

Robert Menke:

Sorry this bug slipped through our release process. I just raised this issue again in our internal Slack. We are working on getting a fix out.

[…]

The fix has already been merged into our main branch. We’ll be putting out a release with just this fix. I’m hoping to have it submitted to the browser extension stores today [December 30].

It’s unclear to me whether this is fixed. The latest Mac version still seems to be 8.11.22 from December 9. When I go to the page for the browser extension and click “what’s new” it takes me here, which is a release from December 30 that talks about passkeys and then says only:

We’ve made general improvements and fixed various bugs for a better 1Password experience.

I don’t see anything on the announcements page or Twitter.

Christina Warren:

I’m glad @1Password is taking this seriously now. But this issue was reported on their community forum and to their engineers weeks ago in beta and was not prioritized as a fix until it went viral here. Every company is guilty of this kind of triage, but this is a process failure as much as it is a testing one.

sheng:

really hoping to read a postmortem on this one

Previously:

Update (2026-01-08): Paulo Andrade:

One more reason for dumb extensions. Secrets extension doesn’t do anything to the page before it’s summoned. And even after that, it doesn’t change the DOM in any way (asides from filling input fields).

VS:

Apple does make autofill API available… it’s entirely 1P’s choice to not use it.

Paulo Andrade:

I’d say the API is the preferred way. It works fine, and also works on other native apps.

Update (2026-01-22): It looks like the fix is in the January 19th release, but the release notes downplay it as just a display issue:

We’ve fixed an issue where the 1Password extension could break syntax highlighting for code blocks on some websites.

Tuesday, January 6, 2026

Clicks Communicator and Clicks Power Keyboard

John Gruber (MacRumors):

The first is an entire BlackBerry-style phone: Clicks Communicator. It runs Android but ships with a custom launcher that emphasizes messaging and notifications; it has a hardware mute switch and a side button with a color-coded alert light they call the Signal LED.

[…]

The second is the Clicks Power Keyboard. It’s a MagSafe-compatible battery back with a keyboard that slides out, underneath your phone. (Reminiscent of the Palm Pre?) It’s a Bluetooth keyboard, and you can pair it with up to three devices. Examples they cite include pairing with an iPad, Apple TV, and, intriguingly, a Vision Pro. (I’d rather type with my thumbs on a device like this than peck at the virtual keyboard in VisionOS, I think.) This strikes me as a much better idea for a hardware phone keyboard accessory than a case.

The Power Keyboard looks great. An easily detached battery pack with a keyboard is way more appealing than a case that makes your phone huge. Unfortunately, my phone is just not a good fit for most of the work I do (code and e-mails/HTML that pull together links and content from multiple places). The software and small screen can’t be overcome by a keyboard, though I guess it does make the useable screen a bit larger. But if I did more pure writing I would definitely try one of these.

Maybe I will, anyway. There are a bunch of longer blog posts that I think I could make more progress on during deadtime when I only have access to my phone. Part of what’s stopping me is that I find typing on the screen unpleasant. But the other part is that there’s no MarsEdit for iOS, so I’d need to move certain drafts to another app ahead of time and then bring them back.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-07): Roberto Mateu:

I returned my new iPhone 17 Clicks keyboard case and preordered the Power keyboard on the same day. The new keyboard basically addresses all my issues about the case: portability, flexibility being the main ones. However, another big one I haven’t seen mentioned, is my hope that the new keyboard allows for a better weight distribution by making the bottom heavier.

iOS 26.2: Alternative Browser Engines in Japan

Apple (Hacker News):

In iOS 26.2 and later, browser engines other than WebKit can be used in two types of apps for users in Japan: Dedicated browser apps that provide a full web browser experience, and apps from browser engine stewards that provide in-app browsing experiences using an embedded browser engine.

[…]

To help keep users safe online, Apple will only authorize developers to implement alternative browser engines after meeting specific criteria and who commit to a number of ongoing privacy and security requirements, including timely security updates to address emerging threats and vulnerabilities.

Previously:

Microsoft Rust and Copilot

Paul Thurrott (Slashdot):

“My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’ To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding.”

Mayank Parmar (Hacker News):

Microsoft told Windows Latest that the company does not plan to rewrite Windows 11 using AI in Rust, which is a programming language that is more secure than C and C++.

[…]

I also screenshotted the LinkedIn post before it was edited out by the top-level Microsoft engineer[…]

[…]

Honestly, most people would not have taken this seriously if it did not come from a top-level Microsoft engineer. When someone with that kind of title and long history at the company talks about eliminating C and C++ and using AI to rewrite large codebases, it sounds less like a random idea and more like something Microsoft is at least exploring.

Miguel de Icaza:

It bothers me that the clarification was not “sorry I misled you”, but “you folks are dumb by parsing my words the way I wrote them”

Meanwhile, here’s the actual www.office.com site matter-of-factly rebranding Office as Copilot (via Hacker News):

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) lets you create, share, and collaborate all in one place with your favorite apps now including Copilot.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-08): Jesper:

Ignoring hype and corporate arrogance, having been conversant in .NET for a significant portion of my life, my thoughts go to Midori. Midori was a legendary ground-up implementation of an operating system, object capability model and asynchronous programming in pure managed, memory-safe code that went as far as to power production code. It directly birthed the concepts behind async and await, which has now spread to pretty much every language in the decade since its introduction, as well as brought the concept of contiguous memory-safe slices, christened Span<T> to C# and .NET, where it now infiltrates all levels of the stack and brings down memory allocations and by extension garbage collection.

I don’t know what Mr Hunt is up to, but it does have the ring of a similar project.

[…]

My hope is that this project, alongside the current effort to only allow new codebases in Rust in the Windows kernel, helps push on the state of the art by trying to do what research projects do best - which is to start with an oft-absurd idea and then take it, over time, with purpose and still with connection to what the real world wants to accomplish, to a logical conclusion.

Monday, January 5, 2026

NetNewsWire Moves to Discourse

Brent Simmons:

We’re dropping the Slack group as the NetNewsWire forum and switching to Discourse — here’s the new forum.

Slack’s been pretty great for us, but it does have some limitations: conversations are automatically deleted and they’re not findable on the web in the first place.

It’s a shame that the Slack archives were deleted, but I think this will increase the longevity and accessibility of the information going forward.

Previously:

Python Numbers Every Programmer Should Know

Michael Kennedy (via Hacker News):

For example, how fast or slow is it to add an item to a list in Python? What about opening a file? Is that less than a millisecond? Is there something that makes that slower than you might have guessed? If you have a performance sensitive algorithm, which data structure should you use? How much memory does a floating point number use? What about a single character or the empty string? How fast is FastAPI compared to Django?

I wanted to take a moment and write down performance numbers specifically focused on Python developers. Below you will find an extensive table of such values.

Previously:

Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know

Jonas Bonér (based on work by Peter Norvig and Jeff Dean from 2012):

L1 cache reference                           0.5 ns
Branch mispredict                            5   ns
L2 cache reference                           7   ns                      14x L1 cache
Mutex lock/unlock                           25   ns
Main memory reference                      100   ns                      20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy             3,000   ns        3 us
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network       10,000   ns       10 us
Read 4K randomly from SSD*             150,000   ns      150 us          ~1GB/sec SSD
Read 1 MB sequentially from memory     250,000   ns      250 us
Round trip within same datacenter      500,000   ns      500 us
Read 1 MB sequentially from SSD*     1,000,000   ns    1,000 us    1 ms  ~1GB/sec SSD, 4X memory
Disk seek                           10,000,000   ns   10,000 us   10 ms  20x datacenter roundtrip
Read 1 MB sequentially from disk    20,000,000   ns   20,000 us   20 ms  80x memory, 20X SSD
Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA    150,000,000   ns  150,000 us  150 ms

Colin Scott has a page that helps visualize how these types of numbers have changed over time (Hacker News).

Jon Snader:

Mohammad Zeya Ahmad has an informative post [archive] that answers that question. He has a list of how much time various common operations take. That’s interesting but what make his list stand out is that he draws conclusions from his results.

For example, SSDs are about 30 times faster than HDDs so if you have a high performance disk-based task, it makes sense to use SSDs. Of course, there are reasons to prefer HDDs but if performance is your controlling metric, SSDs are probably your best choice.

For each group of comparable metrics, Ahmad offers an actionable suggestion. Those groups range from CPU versus Cache and Memory speeds to network transfer times.

Previously:

Clearing iOS App Data

Ryan Jones:

Can anyone explain why there’s no “Clear Documents & Data” button?

Reinstalling the app just to clear it is dumb.

I can see why Apple doesn’t want to make it easier for users to accidentally delete data that they meant to keep. But I would like to at least see a standard system button for clearing an app’s caches. It’s backwards that to clear the cache you have to Delete App, which also removes its data, then reinstall it and somehow restore. You might think that Offload App would delete the app as well as the purgeable data, leaving only that which can’t be recreated automatically, but as far as I’m aware it leaves the caches in place.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-06): Craig Grannell:

I have a 130MB health app that’s so far ballooned to 1.5GB due to downloading everything each day. It keeps growing. Natch, there is no way to delete old data. (Nor can you get at the data to get the audio files – which is 99% of it – out of the thing.)

Thursday, January 1, 2026

The Year in LLMs: 2025

Simon Willison (tweet, Hacker News):

This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 and Things we learned about LLMs in 2024.

[…]

Every notable AI lab released at least one reasoning model in 2025. Some labs released hybrids that could be run in reasoning or non-reasoning modes. Many API models now include dials for increasing or decreasing the amount of reasoning applied to a given prompt.

[…]

It turned out that the real unlock of reasoning was in driving tools. Reasoning models with access to tools can plan out multi-step tasks, execute on them and continue to reason about the results such that they can update their plans to better achieve the desired goal.

[…]

Reasoning models are also exceptional at producing and debugging code. The reasoning trick means they can start with an error and step through many different layers of the codebase to find the root cause. I’ve found even the gnarliest of bugs can be diagnosed by a good reasoner with the ability to read and execute code against even large and complex codebases.

Previously:

Ruby 4

naruse (Hacker News):

Ruby Box is a new (experimental) feature to provide separation about definitions. Ruby Box is enabled when an environment variable RUBY_BOX=1 is specified. The class is Ruby::Box.

Definitions loaded in a box are isolated in the box. Ruby Box can isolate/separate monkey patches, changes of global/class variables, class/module definitions, and loaded native/ruby libraries from other boxes.

[…]

ZJIT is a new just-in-time (JIT) compiler, which is developed as the next generation of YJIT. You need Rust 1.85.0 or newer to build Ruby with ZJIT support, and ZJIT is enabled when --zjit is specified.

We’re building a new compiler for Ruby because we want to both raise the performance ceiling (bigger compilation unit size and SSA IR) and encourage more outside contribution (by becoming a more traditional method compiler). See our blog post for more details.

[…]

Ractor, Ruby’s parallel execution mechanism, has received several improvements. A new class, Ractor::Port, was introduced to address issues related to message sending and receiving (see our blog post).

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Apple LLM Generating SwiftUI

Marcus Mendes (PDF):

In the paper UICoder: Finetuning Large Language Models to Generate User Interface Code through Automated Feedback, the researchers explain that while LLMs have gotten better at multiple writing tasks, including creative writing and coding, they still struggle to “reliably generate syntactically-correct, well-designed code for UIs.” They also have a good idea why:

Even in curated or manually authored finetuning datasets, examples of UI code are extremely rare, in some cases making up less than one percent of the overall examples in code datasets.

To tackle this, they started with StarChat-Beta, an open-source LLM specialized in coding. They gave it a list of UI descriptions, and instructed it to generate a massive synthetic dataset of SwiftUI programs from those descriptions.

The paper was published last year, but I didn’t see people talking about it until August. In the interim, Apple started using third-party AI providers in Xcode.

Der Teilweise:

18-25% of the output does not even compile. (The model they started with: 97% of the results FAILED to compile. Even the BEST model fails to produce compilable code in 12% of the cases.)

This lines up with GitHub’s report that typed languages are more reliable for generative AI.

Matt Gallagher:

To be blunt: after testing them out, I have not used LLMs for programming for the rest of the year. Attempting to use an LLM in that way was simply too frustrating. I don’t enjoy cleaning up flawed approaches and changing every single line. I do regularly ask ChatGPT how to use specific APIs, but I’m really just using it as a better documentation search or asking for sample code that is missing from Apple’s documentation. I’m not directly using any of the code ChatGPT writes in any of my apps.

In the meantime, I have watched plenty of presentations about letting Claude Code, and other tools, completely build an “app” but the successful presentations have usually focussed on JavaScript web apps or Python wrappers around small command-line tools. The two times this year that I’ve watched developers try the same with Swift apps have led to non-working solutions and excuses claiming it does sometimes work if left to run for another 20 minutes.

Previously:

Update (2026-01-05): Tas:

My brother is working on an IPTV app in SwiftUI and has a similar experience. Claude Code improved the quality of outputs significantly especially if you download the docs and do spec-driven development. But the chance of one-shotting tasks is still lower than with Typescript for example.

Greg Brockman:

rust is a perfect language for agents, given that if it compiles it’s ~correct

Jonathan Blow:

I understand the motivation, he wants the borrow checker to help make up for the lack of consistent reasoning in LLMs. But the fact he thinks this is a potential solution is nutballs and makes me think he does not understand the problem really.

Update (2026-01-08): Matt Gallagher:

My blog article last week has had some of the most negative feedback of anything I’ve ever published. So many people emailing me to call me out for insulting AI. I’m not sure you need to defend AI, I hear it’s doing fine.

But also, I gave all the major models 7/10 or better and said they’re much better than last year. That’s not a hit piece, calm down.

Update (2026-01-14): Drew Crawford:

Some of us report almost unbelievable engineering feats using AI. Others say they can’t automate even a simple programming task.

[…]

A very reasonable hypothesis is that some confounding factor explains all the contradictions. Maybe some people have good results, and other people have bad results. Often this is hand-waved as a “skill issue.”

I think that’s broadly true. Practice matters.

[…]

What’s actually happening is quieter, messier, and harder to talk about than a hype cycle. The gains are real, unevenly distributed, and tightly coupled to skills we don’t yet have names for, let alone tutorials. The people getting the most value are often the least able—or least willing—to explain how they do it, because explanation is risky, unrewarded, and professionally counterproductive.

Top Programming Languages of 2025

GitHub (tweet):

This surge in activity coincides with a structural milestone: for the first time, TypeScript overtook both Python and JavaScript in August 2025 to become the most used language on GitHub, reflecting how developers are reshaping their toolkits. This marks the most significant language shift in more than a decade.

[…]

Generative AI is now standard in development. More than 1.1 million public repositories now use an LLM SDK with 693,867 of these projects created in just the past 12 months alone (+178% YoY, Aug ’25 vs. Aug ’24). Developers also merged a record 518.7M pull requests (+29% YoY). Moreover, AI adoption starts quickly: 80% of new developers on GitHub use Copilot in their first week.

[…]

TypeScript is now the most used language on GitHub. […] Its rise illustrates how developers are shifting toward typed languages that make agent-assisted coding more reliable in production. It doesn’t hurt that nearly every major frontend framework now scaffolds with TypeScript by default. Even still, Python remains dominant for AI and data science workloads, while the JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem still accounts for more overall activity than Python alone.

Java is #4 and C# is #5.

Previously:

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

“Reasonably Necessary” External Purchase Fee

Juli Clover:

Apple should be able to collect a reasonable commission on purchases made using external links included in iOS apps, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled today (via Reuters). The U.S. Court of Appeals partially reversed sanctions imposed on Apple after Apple was found to have willfully violated an injunction in the ongoing Epic Games vs. Apple legal battle.

[…]

Apple is not going to be able to start charging a commission immediately, though. The case has been sent back to the district court so that a reasonable fee can be determined.

[…]

Apple can restrict developers from making external links more prominent than in-app purchase options. Specifically, Apple can restrict a developer from putting buttons, links, or other calls to action in more prominent fonts, larger sizes, larger quantities, and more prominent places than buttons for in-app purchases. Apple has to allow developers to place buttons in “at least” the same fonts, sizes, and places as Apple’s own.

Kyle Orland (Hacker News, Slashdot):

The ruling, signed by a panel of three appellate court judges, affirmed that Apple’s initial attempts to charge a 27 percent fee to iOS developers using outside payment options “had a prohibitive effect, in violation of the injunction.” Similarly, Apple’s restrictions on how those outside links had to be designed were overly broad; the appeals court suggests that Apple can only ensure that internal and external payment options are presented in a similar fashion.

The appeals court also agreed that Apple acted in “bad faith” by refusing to comply with the injunction, rejecting viable, compliant alternatives in internal discussions. And the appeals court was also not convinced by Apple’s process-focused arguments, saying the district court properly evaluated materials Apple argued were protected by attorney-client privilege.

While the district court barred Apple from charging any fees for payments made outside of its App Store, the appeals court now suggests that Apple should still be able to charge a “reasonable fee” based on its “actual costs to ensure user security and privacy.” It will be up to Apple and the district court to determine what that kind of “reasonable fee” should look like going forward.

Jay Peters (MacRumors):

“If you want to have an app go through review with custom linkouts, maybe there’s several hundred dollars of fees associated with that every time you submit an app, which is perfectly reasonable because there are real people at Apple doing those things and Apple pays them, and we should be contributing to that,” Sweeney says. But he says that the ruling, “completely shuts down, I think, for all time, Apple’s theory that they should be able to charge arbitrary junk fees for access.”

With these two areas that Apple would be allowed to charge for, Sweeney says that “I can’t imagine any justification for a percentage of developer revenue being assessed here.”

[…]

The ruling wasn’t the only big news for Epic and Fortnite on mobile today: the game also returned to Google Play in the US after similarly being booted by Google when Epic added the in-app payments system to Fortnite. Epic and Google announced last month that they have agreed to settle their lawsuit, and while the two sides are still seeking court approval for their settlement, it resolves their disputes worldwide.

Jeff Johnson:

The court ruling is confusing.

It says Apple can charge “necessary” costs for use of its IP but seems to interpret IP extremely narrowly to apply only to external links?

I’m not even sure what that IP is supposed to be.

Previously:

screensizes.app

Screen Sizes is a Web app that shows the display resolution for each iPhone model, and it also has details about the sizes of the home indicator, notch, widgets, etc.

Via Nick Heer:

Something I need to do at my day job on a semi-regular basis is compositing a screenshot on a photo of someone holding or using an iPhone or an iPad. One of my pet peeves is when there is little attempt at realism — like when a screenshot is pasted over a notch, or the screen corners have an obviously incorrect radius. This is not out of protection for the integrity of Apple’s hardware design, per se; it just looks careless. I constantly refer to Screen Sizes to avoid these mistakes.

Previously:

Monday, December 29, 2025

Liquid Glass Disbelief

Howard Oakley (Hacker News):

If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to the interface changes brought in macOS Tahoe with Liquid Glass. After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed. When 26.1 followed on 3 November it had only regressed, and 26.2 has done nothing. Here I summarise my opinions on where Tahoe’s overhaul has gone wrong.

[…]

In real life, whiteouts are dangerous because they’re so disorienting. There’s no horizon, no features in the landscape, and no clues to navigation. We see and work best in visual environments that are rich in colour and tonal contrasts. Tahoe has continued a trend for Light Mode to be bleached-out white, and Dark Mode to be a moonless night. Seeing where controls, views and contents start and end is difficult, and leaves them suspended in the whiteout.

[…]

I’m sure that, in the right place and time, transparency effects of Liquid Glass can be visually pleasing. Not only is this the wrong time and place, but those with visual impairment can no longer remove or even reduce these effects, as the Reduce Transparency control in Accessibility settings no longer reduces transparency in any useful way. That was one of the regressions in 26.1 that hasn’t been addressed in 26.2.

jjice:

I don’t mind how Liquid Glass looks at all. It’s just insane how buggy the system has become. Even Messages will bug out, like deleting my first word if I type too fast after opening a conversation or auto scrolling and not letting me scroll down until I exit and re-enter.

Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for. I hope they get their shit together and start fixing before they continue adding new stuff. 26.2 doesn’t inspire me that they’re on that trajectory.

Previously:

Update (2025-12-30): Craig Grannell:

Sad to see that last pic of an older macOS and see how far things have fallen. (And Howard didn’t even mention the absurd “hovering” buttons.)

Nick Heer:

Oakley reviews several lingering problems with Liquid Glass in MacOS, but the above remains the most — and I use this word intentionally — glaring issue I have with it. It is a problem that becomes entirely clear as you scroll to the bottom of Oakley’s post and find a screenshot from — I think — Mac OS X Mavericks with evident precision and contrast.

Aaron Trickey:

What pushed me over the edge in deciding to chase at least some of it was installing the first beta of macOS Tahoe. It was clear that non-updated apps would immediately stand out, from the radius of the window corners to the look of standard controls, and I wanted to make sure my apps looked well-maintained. I decided on a major (dot-zero) release number to give me a bit more license to update the UI than normal, and dug in.

[…]

This, unfortunately, turned into a surprising time sink. There was a lot of churn, with each macOS beta changing at least something about how glass effects looked or behaved. Different control types applied glass effects inconsistently (and still do, in the released versions). When presented over a white background, glass layers become hard to spot without additional tweaking. This resulted in many hours of experimenting and iterating, far more than the size of these controls would imply. I’m pleased with the final result, but expect to keep revising it over time.

One thing Apple pushed for, which I did not adopt, was to extend blurred document content up under the toolbar. I tried, over many hours, repeating with each new beta, but it never worked out.

Update (2026-01-08): John Gruber (Mastodon):

It’s just remarkable how much better-looking MacOS was 10 years ago, compared to MacOS 26 Tahoe at its best. And it’s equally remarkable just how bad MacOS 26 Tahoe looks in many typical, non-contrived situations, where entire menus or the title of a window are rendered completely illegible.

Gus Mueller:

For me, the first and worst sin of macOS Tahoe is that window backgrounds are 100% white in Light Aqua. Dark Aqua is 8.9% white, which is OK. Black still shows up against it.

Sequoia was and 90.6% and 14.7%, so you could draw white on a window background and see it.

Ken Gruberman:

As the Norwegians say, Liquid Glass is “not so bad” on iPhones and iPads, but on the Apple Watch and the Mac, it’s an abomination.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I understand sentiment of this article, but must note that the specifics of much of what’s mentioned here are the choice of third-party devs. You can’t just flip a switch and turn on Liquid Glass, especially in a traditional Mac app. Tying into what I said earlier this year: traditional Mac apps are not native to this design language — you need to redesign the apps too. That’s why adopting Liquid Glass is such an ordeal, and why many (including Apple) haven’t shipped

I don’t think it works well in the apps have have been redesigned, either.

Mario Guzmán:

This could be a case study on how design at Apple has gotten worse. Take iTunes/Music for Mac:

  1. From Catalina on, full-height sidebars started eating into valuable toolbar real estate.
  2. In Tahoe, not only to stupid big corner radii eats more into you usable area, they now allow the inspector sidebars to cut even more into toolbar space.
  3. The volume & scrub controls are now an extra click away.

Update (2026-01-15): Steve Troughton-Smith:

The parts of Liquid Glass that really suck on macOS are the parts that weren’t designed, left up to the various internal teams to figure out what to do on their own. That includes basically anything that AppKit does that Apple’s other platforms don’t. It’s not that the design language sucks (subjective), but there was clearly no guidance, thought or care given to a whole bunch of Mac-specific behaviors. As close as the platforms have got, macOS is still a special snowflake and suffers for it.

Also a big part of this, on all platforms, is the accessibility modes are all afterthoughts wrt design language, and are visually and mechanically broken on all platforms. Reduced transparency, reduced motion, et al — if you’re using these modes, the OS looks and feels so much worse. It amplifies the negative reaction to all the new stuff, because of course people predisposed to a more stripped-down experience, who might have turned that all on years ago, are being handed something way sub-par.

MailMate License Model: One Year Later

Benny Kjær Nielsen:

I’ve previously described the transition to the new pricing model as a huge gamble because I would no longer be selling license keys for $50. This was the majority of the revenue generated. So far, this gamble has paid off since I’ve had an increase in revenue when comparing 2025 to 2024. It does not correspond to what one (where I live) would expect from a full time job, but it does mean that I’m going to continue full time development in 2026. I believe that is good news for MailMate users and I’m really thankful for all of the, new and old, MailMate development patrons/subscribers.

Some users might have noticed that I haven’t uploaded any test releases of MailMate for quite a while (more than 2 months). This is not because I’ve not been working on MailMate. It’s because I’ve been working on some broad changes to very old core parts of MailMate, in particular, related to parsing/editing of emails and memory management.

Previously:

Friday, December 26, 2025

watchOS 26 Removed Offline Workout Voice Alerts

matthewfromteneriffe (Reddit):

Since updating to WatchOS 26 I no longer receive any alerts (i.e. pace, heart rate zone and splits) - only beeps, no voice alerts. I do not use headphones/iphone while running.

Xiruzero:

What I realized is that the alerts don’t work if the watch is offline, but will work if the watch is connected with the Internet. My watch is Wi-Fi only and I don’t take my phone on my runs, so it’s always offline during workouts.

The issue happens even if the watch disconnects mid workout. It’ll start playing alerts and stop as soon as the watch loses connection.

matthewfromteneriffe:

After a number of calls with a support person (and engineering via that support person), they confirmed verbally that to get voice feedback when not connected to an iPhone/internet, you need to download the voice files to the watch (I think I did this prior to updating to OS26 but had not done this in OS26 as I was not aware this was needed) AND your watch needs to be connected to headphones to play the voice alerts (although the voice alerts play from the watch when the phone is connected). The support person confirmed that this change is by design - naturally I voiced my irrigation and lack of clear communication by Apple that they had made this decision for me.

I did not test this as I do not use headphones when exercising so I am having my watch downgraded to the previous OS.

[…]

If I hadn’t become so ‘addicted’ to tap to pay (and other tap functions) on the watch, I’d be switching to a Garmin.

trail-runner:

In case this helps others experiencing this issue, I’ve spent numerous hours with Apple support on this and finally received an official response from their engineering team:

Workout Voice Feedback was removed on Watch OS 26 for GPS models of Apple Watch. This feature is still available on cellular models of Apple Watch as it now requires a network connection for the feature to operate. This feature applies to normal voice feedback during workouts. It is now expected that if the iPhone and GPS models of the Apple Watch are not within range of each other during the workout, that the voice feedback function will not work.

alexskunz:

I’m experiencing the same thing, and I am completely dismayed by this change. Getting Voice Feedback without having to haul the phone around was the whole reason to get an Apple Watch as my fitness tracker (listening to music via AirPods was just an added benefit).

I have tried everything that is mentioned in this whole lengthy thread (downloading the speech files via Accessibility setting, adjusting the notifications to “all” instead of “Urgent”, Siri settings, etc.) without any improvement.

The Watch with OS26 doesn’t speak when it isn’t connected to an iPhone. The interesting thing is that the iPhone does NOT need to have a network connection — I had mine in my pocket, in airplane mode, and the Watch still gave me Voice Feedback. This is in line with the observations from MajorLeagueSoccer that their Watch with “cellular” doesn’t actually have a cellular connection, but does provide Voice Feedback as well.

This seems to contradict what the engineering team said. I don’t understand whether there’s an artificial restriction or a bug.

Previously:

Update (2025-12-30): Bob O’Shaughnessy:

I’ve been infuriated by this since the release of WatchOS 26. Running without phone has been my main workout For a few years now.

Hopefully this gets the issue some traction with people at Apple who can fix it. The calls to support and the huge Apple Support Community thread haven’t helped.

Texas Age Verification Suspended

Juli Clover (Hacker News, Slashdot):

The Texas App Store Accountability Act (SB2420) requires Apple and other app marketplaces to confirm user age when a person creates an Apple Account. Apple Accounts for users under 18 would need to join a Family Sharing group, with new controls available for parents and restrictions for minors.

In a preliminary injunction that delays the implementation of the act, Judge Robert Pitman said that it violates the First Amendment and is “more likely than not unconstitutional.”

Sarah Perez:

The Texas attorney general’s office noted in a court filing that it plans to appeal the decision, a report from Reuters noted.

Apple:

In light of this ruling, Apple will pause previously announced implementation plans and monitor the ongoing legal process.

[…]

These tools can also be used to help developers with their obligations under laws coming into effect in Utah and Louisiana in 2026. The Declared Age Range API remains available worldwide for users on iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26, or later.

Previously:

Copyright © 2000–2026 Michael Tsai.