By John Gruber

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Saturday, 10 January 2026

MAGA’s Foundational Lie ★

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic (gift link), on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection and the first year of the second Trump presidency:

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander — they were actually aroused by it — and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

Friday, 9 January 2026

Jim Moylan and the Moylan Arrow ★

Ben Cohen, writing last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

One rainy day 40 years ago, Moylan was headed to a meeting across Ford’s campus and hopped in a company car. When he saw the fuel tank was nearly empty, he stopped at a gas pump. What happened next is something that’s happened to all of us: He realized that he’d parked on the wrong side.

Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t infuriated. He was inspired. By the time he pulled his car around, he was already thinking about how to solve this everyday inconvenience that drives people absolutely crazy. And because the gas pump wasn’t covered by an overhead awning, he was also soaking wet. But when he got back to the office, Moylan didn’t even bother taking off his drenched coat when he started typing the first draft of a memo.

“I would like to propose a small addition,” he wrote, “in all passenger car and truck lines.” The proposal he had in mind was a symbol on the dashboard that would tell drivers which side of the car the gas tank was on. [...]

As soon as they read his memo, they began prototyping his little indicator that would be known as the Moylan Arrow. Within months, it was on the dashboard of Ford’s upcoming models. Within years, it was ripped off by the competition. Before long, it was a fixture of just about every car in the world.

What a fantastic story. I’m old enough that I remember learning to drive on cars that didn’t have the Moylan Arrow. Then I remember spotting one sometime in the 1990s, and wondering if I’d just never noticed them before. But no: this seemingly incredibly obvious design element had only recently been invented. The Journal has a copy of Moylan’s original memo, and it’s a delight to read. Clear, concise, persuasive.

“Society loves the founder who builds new companies, like Henry Ford,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told me. “I would argue that Jim Moylan is an equally compelling kind of disrupter: an engineer in a large company who insisted on making our daily lives better.”

These days, there are two types of drivers: the ones aware of the Moylan Arrow and the ones who get to find out.

Rest in peace, Jim Moylan.

Thursday, 8 January 2026

The New York Times Profiles John Ternus ★

Kalley Huang and Tripp Mickle, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

Threading the needle between adding new bells and whistles to Apple’s products while watching the bottom line has defined the careful, low-profile style of Mr. Ternus, who joined Apple in 2001. He is now considered by some company insiders to be the front-runner to replace Tim Cook, Apple’s longtime chief executive, if Mr. Cook decides to step aside.

Apple last year began accelerating its planning for Mr. Cook’s succession, according to three people close to the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity about Apple’s confidential deliberations. Mr. Cook, 65, has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload, the people said. Should he step down, Mr. Cook is likely to become the chairman of Apple’s board, according to three people close to the company.

Cook may well be preparing to retire as CEO. He is 65! But it doesn’t ring true to me that he’s telling “senior leaders” that he’s tired. First, I’ve heard otherwise from actual senior leaders at the company. Second, any senior leader he’d tell that to, if true, wouldn’t share it.

It seems to me that aside from the utterly normal and plainly obvious speculation that, at age 65, he might be on the cusp of retiring as CEO, there’s something going on where a narrative is being spread that Cook is in poor health. Mark Gurman included two paragraphs about a tremor in Cook’s hands in his colossal fuck-up at Bloomberg a month ago, falsely reporting that Johny Srouji was unhappy and on the cusp of leaving Apple for a competitor.

Despite his low profile, Mr. Ternus appears to have shot to the front of the pack to be Apple’s next C.E.O., according to four people close to the company.

The Times report describes Ternus as “low-profile” three times. This makes no sense. Ternus is one of Apple’s highest-profile executives. I would guess that over the last five years he’s appeared in more keynotes, for more time, than anyone but Cook and Craig Federighi.

But Mr. Cook is also preparing several other internal candidates to be his potential successor, two of the people said. They could include Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software; Eddy Cue, its head of services; Greg Joswiak, its head of worldwide marketing; and Deirdre O’Brien, its head of retail and human resources.

I don’t think there’s any chance that Cook’s successor will be someone who isn’t a frequent presence in Apple keynotes. I can’t recall O’Brien ever appearing in a keynote, and Cue hasn’t appeared in one for several years. Also, Cue is 61 and Joz is 62. Neither is that much younger than Cook.

Two interesting tidbits re: Ternus:

Within about three years, he became a manager, said Steve Siefert, Mr. Ternus’s first boss at Apple. During that time, their team moved office floors, switching from a closed office plan to mostly open seating with a few offices. When he was promoted, Mr. Ternus had the option to move into one of those offices but declined.

Mr. Ternus was “a man of the people,” Mr. Siefert said, adding that the decision to sit with his team likely helped Mr. Ternus manage and motivate his staff. When Mr. Siefert retired in 2011, freeing up his office, Mr. Ternus once again said he wanted to remain in the open space.

And:

“If you want to make an iPhone every year, Ternus is your guy,” said Cameron Rogers, who worked on product and software engineering management at Apple from 2005 to 2022. [...]

“He’s a nice guy,” Mr. Rogers said. “He’s someone you want to hang out with. Everyone loves him because he’s great. Has he made any hard decisions? No. Are there hard problems he’s solved in hardware? No.”

This guy Cameron Rogers sounds like a real asshole.

What complaints does anyone have about Apple hardware over the last five years? Off the top of my head I can’t think of any that are serious. Ternus has overseen what I’d argue is the best sustained stretch of Apple hardware, across more product lines than ever, in the company’s 50-year history. But he didn’t make any hard decisions or solve any hard problems. Sure. Hardware is easy.

Know Your Rights: Filming and Photographing the Police ★

The ACLU:

Taking photographs and video of things that are plainly visible in public spaces is a constitutional right — and that includes police and other government officials carrying out their duties.

However, there is a widespread, continuing pattern of law enforcement officers ordering people to stop taking photographs or video in public places and harassing, detaining, and arresting those who fail to comply.

Here’s their advice on what to say and do if you are stopped or detained for taking photographs or video.

Also, as good a time as ever for one of my periodic reminders to remember how to hard-lock your iPhone to temporarily disable Face ID: press and hold the side button and either one of the volume buttons at the same time for a few seconds.

Chase to Become New Issuer of Apple Card ★

Apple Newsroom:

Today, Apple and Chase announced that Chase will become the new issuer of Apple Card, with an expected transition in approximately 24 months.

Apple Card users can continue to enjoy the award-winning experience of Apple Card, which includes up to 3 percent unlimited Daily Cash back on every purchase, easy-to-navigate spending tools, Apple Card Family, access to a high-yield Savings account, and more. Mastercard will remain the payment network for Apple Card, and Apple Card users can continue to access Mastercard’s global acceptance and benefits. [...]

During this transition, Apple Card users can continue to use their card as they normally do. More information, including FAQs, is available at learn.applecard.apple/transition. Additional details will be shared with users as the transition date approaches.

In the press release, Apple’s only mention of the current issuer, Goldman Sachs, is in the small gray fine print footnotes. (Goldman is mentioned prominently in the linked FAQ.)

Why Are Grok and X Still Available in App Stores? ★

Caroline Haskins, writing for Wired (News+ link, in case Wired’s paywall blocks you):

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is being used to flood X with thousands of sexualized images of adults and apparent minors wearing minimal clothing. Some of this content appears to not only violate X’s own policies, which prohibit sharing illegal content such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but may also violate the guidelines of Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store.

Apple and Google both explicitly ban apps containing CSAM, which is illegal to host and distribute in many countries. The tech giants also forbid apps that contain pornographic material or facilitate harassment. The Apple App Store says it doesn’t allow “overtly sexual or pornographic material,” as well as “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content,” especially if the app is “likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group.” The Google Play store bans apps that “contain or promote content associated with sexually predatory behavior, or distribute non-consensual sexual content,” and well as programs that “contain or facilitate threats, harassment, or bullying.”

Over the past two years, Apple and Google removed a number of “nudify” and AI image-generation apps after investigations by the BBC and 404 Media found they were being advertised or used to effectively turn ordinary photos into explicit images of women without their consent.

But at the time of publication, both the X app and the standalone Grok app remain available in both app stores. Apple, Google, and X did not respond to requests for comment.

I just browsed through the last five minutes of replies generated by Grok on Twitter/X, and saw both seeming CSAM (all young Asian women) and just outright hardcore pornographic video (that, for what it’s worth, seemed to feature adults, whether real or generated).

It was a barely concealed secret before Musk bought Twitter that Twitter had an active dark underbelly of pornographic content. But you had to know where to look for it. It really wasn’t something you might just stumble upon. Now you get hardcore porno just by looking at the profile page for Grok. And any user can send any photo they want to @grok and tell it to change or remove the subject’s clothing and change their pose. Lord only knows what people are generating privately using the standalone Grok app.

If a new social network app launched featuring this content, it surely would be removed from the App Store and Play Store. X is seemingly untouchable for political reasons.

Update: Recall that Apple pulled the Tumblr app from the App Store in 2018 for similar content.

The Gold Trump Phone Still Hasn’t Shipped ★

Maybe “next year” meant “next next year”?

(They’re still accepting $100 deposits for pre-orders.)

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Wednesday, 7 January 2026

The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible ★

This 2021 post from Jason Fried is a good chaser to his “The Big Regression” this week (which I linked to yesterday):

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful.

Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing — like a paperclip, for example — everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen, etc) does, the more calls you have to make.

This isn’t the same as prioritizing things. High, medium, low priority doesn’t tell you enough about the problem. “What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high priority?” Further, priority doesn’t tell you anything about cost. And the first thing to internalize is that everything has a cost.

Obvious / easy / possible is a good filter through which to create — and critique — designs. To borrow an example from yesterday: old-fashioned analog light switches are exemplars of obviousness; most new-fashioned smart switches are exemplars of possibility.

Tuesday, 6 January 2026

Howard Oakley on the MacOS 26 Tahoe UI ★

Howard Oakley, writing at The Eclectic Light Company

macOS Tahoe’s visual interface:

• Fits largely rectangular contents into windows with excessively rounded corners.
• Enlarges controls without any functional benefit.
• Results in app icons being more uniform, thus less distinguishable and memorable.
• Fails to distinguish tools, controls and other interface elements using differences in tone, so making them harder to use.
• Makes a mess where transparent layers are superimposed, and won’t reduce transparency when that’s needed to render its interface more accessible.

Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality.

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, search fields, and window titles are rendered completely illegible.

‘Icons in Menus Everywhere — Send Help’ ★

Jim Nielsen:

It’s extra noise to me. It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful (more on that below). It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.

This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of an icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”

The former doesn’t require thinking. It’s just templating — they all have icons, so we need to put something there. The latter requires care and thoughtfulness for each use case and its context.

To defend my point, one of the examples I always pointed to was macOS. For the longest time, Apple’s OS-level menus seemed to avoid this default approach of sticking icons in every menu item.

That is, until macOS Tahoe shipped.

Nielsen’s post on MacOS 26 Tahoe’s tragic “icons for every menu item” design edict was published a month ago, before Nikita Prokopov’s post on the same subject yesterday. Both posts are crackerjack good, and complement each other. Nielsen makes the point that the Mac stood as a counter to platforms and systems that put icons next to every menu item. Of course Google Docs has icons next to every menu item. It sucks. Google sucks at UI design. We Mac users laugh at their crappy designs.

Well, who’s laughing now? It might sound hyperbolic but this change is the reason why I’ve decided not to upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe. I could put up with the rest of Liquid Glass’s half-baked who-thought-this-was-OK-to-ship? nonsense, but not the whole menu bar. I can tolerate being angry about UI changes Apple makes to the Mac. But I can’t tolerate being heartbroken.

‘The Big Regression’ ★

Jason Fried:

My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented them a house nearby.

It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. You know, the ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard.

And it’s terrible. What a regression.

Examples include: light switches that require a demo to use, a Miele dishwasher that requires the use of a companion phone app, a confusing-to-use TV (of course), inscrutable thermostats, and:

And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem.

Now look... I’m no luddite. But this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can’t see in these cases. I’ve heard the pitches too — you can set up scenes and one button can change EVERYTHING. Not buying it. It actually feels primitive, like we haven’t figured out how to make things easy yet.

In this period of the computerization of everything, so many systems have lost the innate intuitiveness from their analog counterparts. Light switches were easy and obvious. Flip the switch. Thermostats were easy and obvious. Turn the dial until the indicator points to the temperature you want. Light switches and Honeywell thermostats were so simple they seemed like they weren’t “interfaces” at all, which is why they were such great interfaces. The best interfaces almost literally disappear.

One of the mottos of the Perl programming language is that easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible. That’s the ideal when designing anything. But the more important part is keeping easy things easy. A house full of old-fashioned analog light switches is better than a house full of smart switches that need a demo to use at all, even though with the old-fashioned switches, you can’t do hard things like turn off the lights remotely, or turn off every light in the house with one action. The smart switches might seem like an improvement because they make possible hard things that were previously impossible. Making possible the impossible is surely a win, right? But not necessarily. Making possible the heretofore impossible isn’t axiomatically a win. It’s a loss if it comes at the expense of keeping the easy things easy, consistent, reliable, and intuitive. Nothing exemplifies that more than the decline in user experience of watching TV, and attempting something as previously simple as flipping between two games on two different channels.

The guiding principle when creating computerized versions of analog systems ought to be “First, do no harm.” Everything should be as easy, obvious, reliable, and intuitive as in the old system. Only add to that what doesn’t introduce any regressions on those fronts.

Alas, that’s not how the world has proceeded.

‘Who’s Who at X, the Deepfake Porn Site Formerly Known as Twitter’ ★

The Financial Times has a nice illustrated guide to the leadership team at Twitter/X, where things are going about as you’d expect.

Don Mattingly Joins Phillies as Bench Coach ★

Welcome to Philadelphia, Donnie Baseball.

Monday, 5 January 2026

‘It’s Hard to Justify Tahoe Icons’ ★

This essay from UI critic Nikita Prokopov is just devastatingly good. If you’ve looked at MacOS 26 Tahoe, you’re surely appalled by the new UI guideline that recommends putting icons next to every single menu item. Prokopov argues — with copious screenshot illustrations every step of the way — that this is a terrible idea in the first place, and that Apple has implemented it poorly. There’s no defense for any of this. Don’t make the mistake of thinking Apple just needs better, more consistent icons. The fact that Tahoe’s menu item icons are glaringly inconsistent and often utterly inscrutable is the fudge icing on a shit cake, but the real embarrassment is that the idea ever got past the proposal stage. No real UI or icon designers think this is a good idea. None.

A shitty idea that works against usability, inconsistently implemented, all in the name of adding some ugly visual bling to the UI. Perhaps the epitome of a Dye job.

Simply a must-read piece. I have much more to say about the menus in Tahoe, but thanks to Prokopov, I don’t have to say it all.

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Sunday, 4 January 2026

NFL Playoff Scenarios ★

What a great site (and Bluesky account) this is. Just what it says on the tin: all the scenarios for how the NFL playoff seedings can shake out, presented very plainly but clearly. The old-school World Wide Web still has a beating heart.

Saturday, 3 January 2026

Listen Later ★

My thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring this week at DF. Listen Later is a super simple, super useful service that turns articles into podcast episodes. When you sign up, you get a custom email address to send articles to; every article you forward to your Listen Later address is transformed into very human-like narration, and gets delivered to your private podcast feed. You can subscribe to your private Listen Later podcast feed in any podcast app.

In addition to the email gateway, there’s a Shortcut for sending articles from Safari (on Mac or iOS), a web extension for Chrome, and a simple web interface for submitting new articles. It’s very simple and the narrated versions sound great.

Sign up for free and start listening today. New users get $2 in credits to try it out — no commitment. And if you like it, you simply prepay for credits as you go. There’s no subscription — you simply pay for what you use. I wish more services had a pay-as-you-go model like Listen Later’s.

Matthew Dowd Exposes the Pickle 1 XR Glasses as a Preposterous Fraud ★

Matthew Dowd, in a long, devastatingly careful post on Twitter/X:

If they’re suggesting their waveguide displays are bright enough and vibrant enough to see clearly in direct sunlight, that would be yet another innovation they’ve discovered that every other player in the market (including the Chinese manufacturers where the waveguide displays come from) has missed.

Meta has access to every display manufacturer and their Display Glasses’ peak brightness is ~5,000 nits, itself very power heavy. These glasses came out just last fall and there is no sign of significantly brighter waveguides shipping for commercial products since then. It’s also worth noting that Meta Display Glasses users have noted poor readability in direct sunlight, suggesting a greater leap would be necessary to meet Pickle’s claims.

Put simply, Pickle having much brighter waveguides that also have a 30-degree FOV is extremely unlikely. It would mean that some waveguide manufacturer out there (there aren’t many) recently achieved a breakthrough and has chosen Pickle to be the first device it’s found in. Oh, and it’s going to ship next quarter.

I don’t know what these scammers at Pickle think is going to happen, but they sure as shit aren’t going to ship a product that does anything vaguely close to what they claim they’re on the cusp of shipping. I doubt they’re going to ship anything at all, ever. The whole thing is like the Big Lie, but for technology not politics.

One of two scenarios is true:

1. Pickle, a 15-person startup founded in 2024 that has raised less than $10 million, is the most advanced personal computer hardware company in the world, on the cusp of launching multiple hardware and software technologies that put the company 5-10 years ahead of established rivals like Apple, Meta, Samsung, Google, Sony, and Zeiss. The Pickle 1 glasses are the most amazing consumer electronics device since the original iPhone. CEO Daniel Park will go down in history as one of the most innovative leaders and inventors in the history of the world. Or:

2. Pickle is a complete and utter sham that is accepting $200 pre-orders for a product that exists only as a fabricated fake in its launch video. CEO Daniel Park is a liar and fraud, and, depending upon what they do with the pre-order payments they are now collecting, perhaps a thief.

Either (a) is mostly true or (b) is mostly true. Given that there exists not one single independent person other than Park himself who vouches that the Pickle 1 actually exists and functions in prototype form, I think it’s pretty obvious which scenario is the case. Which makes me wonder what the hell is going on at Y Combinator these days.

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Wednesday, 31 December 2025

The Talk Show: ‘2025 Year in Review’ ★

A look back at Apple’s 2025, with special guest Rene Ritchie.

Sponsored by:

• Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off.
• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.

Photoshop 1.0 and the Early Macintosh HIG ★

After posting a link to the Computer History Museum’s release of the Photoshop 1.0 source code last week, I spent some time paging through the original Photoshop manuals. I found a screenshot of the dialog box where you entered your serial number, and posted it to Mastodon, writing:

If you’re annoyed by something that is obviously wrong about this dialog box from Photoshop 1.0, you’re my type of person. (Even more so if, like me, you remember being annoyed by this at the time, when you were entering your cracked SN.)

What a lovely thread it generated, replete with screenshots from early versions of the HIG.

Sidenote: I would eat my hat if Alan Dye knew what was wrong and gross about this dialog box. This is exactly the sort of sweating the idiomatic usability details thing that has frequently been wrong in Apple software in the last decade. The response from Dye and those in his cohort would be, I’d wager, to roll their eyes with a “Who gives a shit what the UI guidelines were forty fucking years ago?” dismissal. Here’s the thing. Styles have changed as time has marched on. Technical capabilities — screen resolution, color — have marched on. But the fundamental idioms of good Macintosh UI design are timeless (and many of them ought to apply to Apple’s other platforms). These idioms are like grammar. Slang changes. Language forever moves forward. But many important idioms are so fundamental they do not change. Styles and technical advances have advanced over time in filmmaking and print design too, but the basic principles of good cinema and graphic layout are timeless. Only a fool dismisses the collective knowledge passed down by those who came before us.

‘The Strange Death of Make America Great Again’ ★

Matthew Walther, in an opinion piece last week for The New York Times (gift link):

MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate. Those who counsel de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation; prudential disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry. Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even when exacerbation forecloses coalition building.

There is also a related problem: The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune. The disappearance of the informal gate-keeping function once performed by conservative luminaries such as William F. Buckley Jr. is probably permanent. In the absence of such authority, informed argument exists alongside phony outrage, profiteering, self-aggrandizement and saying things for the hell of it. The result is not merely the radicalization that Mr. Buckley feared but a kind of omnidirectional incoherence.

“A kind of omnidirectional incoherence” is as perfect a description as I’ve seen regarding the whole Trumpist movement in this second administration.

Tuesday, 30 December 2025

‘I’m in Charge at This Hertz Location, and Buddy, You’re Not Getting a Car Today’ ★

Emily Delaney, at McSweeney’s:

Okay, now you’re getting upset. You’re getting upset despite the fact that we have strict rules against getting upset at this Hertz location. But tell me, honestly, when you reserved a rental car through Hertz, you thought… what? That we were going to set aside a special little car just for you? Seriously? Oh my god.

(Via Kottke.)

The U.S. Conservative Aggrieved Mindset, Explained ★

Jason Pargin is — well, to my tastes — a master of the TikTok video format. This one is so good, and ends with a mic-drop closing line.

Using AirPods Live Translation in Japan ★

Ruffin Prevost, writing at The New York Times:

As everyone filed out, I repeated, in English, some of the priest’s comments to my guide, Keiko Hatada, who taught English for 30 years and has led custom tours of Tokyo for the past decade. I wanted to make sure I had understood things correctly.

I recounted the priest’s admonition to set aside unwholesome feelings of anger and greed, and work instead to show compassion and generosity, as well as his reminder that his temple was still accepting donations for those affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

“You told me you didn’t speak Japanese,” my guide said, pleasantly surprised.

Beyond a few basic greetings and food terms, I don’t.

I wrote the following two years ago in my AirPods Pro 2 review:

The new AirPods Pro are the best single expression of Apple as a company today. Not the most important product, not the most complicated, not the most essential. But the one that exemplifies everything Apple is trying to do. They are simple, they are useful, and they offer features that most people use and want. Most people use headphones. A lot of people use them every day — in noisy environments. AirPods Pro are — for any scenario where big over-ear-style headphones are impractical — the best headphones in the world.

That was before Live Translation, a feature that until recently existed only in science fiction.

ICEBlock App Sues Trump Administration for Censorship ★

Bobby Allyn, reporting three weeks ago for NPR:

The developer of ICEBlock, an iPhone app that anonymously tracks the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, has sued the Trump administration for free speech violations after Apple removed the service from its app store under demands from the White House.

The suit, filed on Monday in federal court in Washington, asks a judge to declare that the administration violated the First Amendment when it threatened to criminally prosecute the app’s developer and pressured Apple to make the app unavailable for download, which the tech company did in October. [...]

To First Amendment advocates, the White House’s pressure campaign targeting ICEBlock is the latest example of what’s known as “jawboning,” when government officials wield state power to suppress speech. The Cato Institute calls the practice “censorship by proxy.”

Good on developer Joshua Aaron for filing this suit and defending his work.

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Sunday, 28 December 2025

Copilot Money ★

My thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring last week at DF. Copilot is a personal finance app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’ve always deeply believed in the value of embracing the design idioms and technical features of truly native apps for Apple platforms. Apple has noticed, awarding Copilot an App Store Editor’s Choice and featuring Copilot earlier this year on Apple Developer for their use of Swift Charts.

Copilot’s big news this week is they’ve launched a new web app, bringing access to Copilot from any device, anywhere. It’s designed with all the attention to detail — and concern for privacy and security — as their native apps.

Copilot Money brings all your spending, budgets, investments, and net worth into one organized dashboard, with intelligent categorization and insights that help you stay on track without spreadsheets or app-hopping. Designed to feel calm and intuitive, Copilot makes it easy to understand your finances across all your devices.

Copilot first sponsored DF back in 2021. My wife and I started using it then to track our finances, and we haven’t looked back. Copilot Money isn’t just better than anything we’d used before, it absolutely blew everything else away. It’s easy to connect to your financial accounts, and once you do, you don’t need to spend any effort at all to enter transactions. Copilot just tracks it all automatically, and most importantly, presents it to you in clear, intuitive ways. It’s so good. I’m not saying that because they sponsored DF last week — I’m saying that as a happy paying customer for over four years now.

Copilot is offering DF readers two months free with code DARING, plus 26% off your first year for a limited time, available through this link.

SoundSource 6 ★

Major update to Rogue Amoeba’s essential audio utility for the Mac. I’ve written about versions 5 and 4 previously, and everything I wrote then remains true. SoundSource remains the system-wide audio menu item that ought to be built into MacOS, giving you easy, intuitive control over every audio device (input and output), and easy, intuitive control over every app in which you play or record audio. That one seemingly-simple app does both those things is quite the remarkable design achievement. And aside from that usability, SoundSource remains an exemplar of UI design stylistically — distinctive and branded, while looking and feeling in every way like a standard Mac app.

New tentpole features in version 6 include fine-grained AirPlay support (e.g. route output from one app over AirPlay while leaving the rest of your system’s audio output local to your Mac), groups for output devices, and a new “Quick Configs” feature for saving and switching between, well, quick configurations. $49 for a new license, $25 to upgrade from a previous one.

Saturday, 27 December 2025

Tim Cook Posts AI Slop in Christmas Message on Twitter/X, Ostensibly to Promote ‘Pluribus’ ★

The whole illustration is just weird looking, for one thing. As for sloppy details, the tree is in soft focus but somehow has a crisp edge, the carton is labeled both “Whole Milk” and “Lowfat Milk”, and the “Cow Fun Puzzle” maze is just goofily wrong. (I can’t recall ever seeing a puzzle of any kind on a milk carton, because they’re waxy and hard to write on. It’s like a conflation of milk cartons and cereal boxes.)

[Update, 29 December: Turns out, the “lowfat” milk carton props from the actual show have the same mistake with “whole milk” printed above. That doesn’t change that it’s a stupid mistake to copy, or that there are a slew of other telltale signs that the image was generated by AI.]

The Apple TV X account retweeted Cook, and added a credit: “We thought you might like this festive artwork by Keith Thomson, made on MacBook Pro.”

Apple didn’t tag the “Keith Thomson” who supposedly created this artwork for them, but if it’s this Keith Thomson, Apple must have somehow fallen for a scam, because that Keith Thomson’s published paintings are wonderful. It does seem to be that Keith Thomson’s signature on Apple’s sloppy illustration, though. (I like a bunch of the paintings from that Keith Thomson, and love a few of them, but this one in particular feels like it was made just for me. It’s perfect.)

Thursday, 25 December 2025

A 3D Tour Inside Trump’s Oval Office ★

Terrific interaction design from The New York Times. Not so terrific interior design from the president.

Wednesday, 24 December 2025

The Talk Show: ‘A Naughty Citizen’ ★

Special guest Quinn Nelson returns for a two-topic holiday spectacular: the iPad in the wake of iPadOS 26, and Apple’s executive changes as Tim Cook seemingly nears the end of his time as CEO.

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Quinn Nelson on Apple’s Executive Shuffling ★

Another great video from Quinn Nelson. If your dumb cousin who knows you’re an Apple nerd approaches you on Christmas and says “Hey what’s going on at Apple, Bloomberg says it’s rats leaving a sinking ship over there?” and you don’t feel like explaining, just tell him to watch this video. Just the perfect explanation.

‘The iPad’s Software Problem Is Permanent’ ★

Smart, fair video from Quinn Nelson on the gap that remains between iPadOS 26 and desktop OSes. I think it’s right that there is a gap there. Apple has the Macintosh, the best desktop/workstation platform in the industry. So whatever the ideal is for iPadOS, it ought to fall short of MacOS in terms of technical capabilities, and instead offer a degree of simplicity and can’t-screw-it-up-edness that the Mac can’t match. But, some of the limitations that remain in iPadOS are just frustrating. iPadOS 26 is a huge leap forward, and I think sets the stage for Apple to address those limitations.

Tuesday, 23 December 2025

I Guess Nothing Is Foolproof ★

From a 2023 report at The Verge:

Sony highly confidential information about its PlayStation business has just been revealed by mistake. As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games.

It looks like someone redacted the documents with a black Sharpie — but when you scan them in, it’s easy to see some of the redactions. Oops.

This is sort of the exception that proves the rule regarding redactions. If you redact a document digitally, you have to know what to look for (e.g. metadata) to be certain you’ve redacted everything you want to redact. If you redact a document on paper, you can just look at it, with good light and sharp eyes.

‘Terrence Malick’s Disciples’ ★

Splendid essay by Bilge Ebiri for The Yale Review, a meditation both on the films of Terrence Malick and several filmmakers he’s deeply influenced.

The White House’s Belligerent, Ignorant Statement on the ‘60 Minutes’ CECOT Story ★

CNN media analyst Brian Stelter, on Bluesky:

As “60 Minutes” finalized its “Inside CECOT” report last Thursday, CBS sent the White House a request for comment. A WH spokesperson responded within a few hours. The quote was not included in the “60” report — so, judge for yourself whether it should have been included or not.

WH spokesperson Abigail Jackson said “60 Minutes should spend their time and energy amplifying the stories of Angel Parents, whose innocent American children have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens that President Trump are removing from the country.”

Despite the fact that it doesn’t address a single aspect of the report, 60 Minutes should have included that statement, both to reveal the belligerent callousness of the administration, and to highlight the glaring grammatical error. In its way, the statement speaks volumes.

Amateur Codebreaker May Have Solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac Killings ★

Christopher Goffard, reporting for the Los Angeles Times (News+ link):

When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short — who became known as the Black Dahlia — he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill.

Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who had expressed an eagerness to practice surgery. He was “a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression,” a military psychiatrist had concluded.

At first, Margolis did not tell detectives that he had lived with Short for 12 days at a Hollywood Boulevard apartment, three months before her January 1947 murder. [...]

A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with five seemingly random murders from 1968 to 1969, taunting police and media for years with letters and cryptograms.

The toughest to decipher was the letter he sent in April 1970 to the San Francisco Chronicle, with the words “My name is —” followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols. It came to be called the Z13 cipher, and its brevity has stymied generations of PhDs and puzzle prodigies.

Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer’s identity — and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well.

“It’s irrefutable,” said Baber, obsessive, hyperfocused and cocksure in manner, his memory encyclopedic and his speech a firehose of dates, locations and surprising linkages.

What a story. The circumstantial evidence pointing to Margolis seems pretty strong. What I can’t find is an explanation of Baber’s solution to the Z13 cypher. The “irrefutable” description hinges on that. There’s a new podcast, “Killer in the Code”, from author Michael Connelly that details Baber’s supposed solution tying both cases to the same guy. All the publicity about this today stems from the debut of that podcast yesterday.

Trump Justice Department Dopes Made the Rookiest of Rookie Mistakes Attempting to Redact Some Epstein-File PDFs ★

Everyone who works with official PDFs in any capacity should know that if you start with a PDF containing text you want to redact, and you just place black bars atop that text and resave the file, the original text is all still there in the new PDF file. It’s the digital equivalent of putting sticky notes atop the text. You don’t even need to crack open the new PDF in a text (or hex) editor and hunt for the original text within non-human-readable PDF formatting code. You just open the PDF in Preview or Acrobat or any other PDF viewer, use the regular text selection cursor to select the text under the black bars, copy, and then paste into any other app. Everyone should know this but it keeps happening. Now it’s happened with the new batch of Epstein files released by the DOJ.

There are major differences between the Trump 1.0 and 2.0 administrations. In the Trump 1.0 administration, many of the most important officials were very competent men. One example would be then-Attorney General William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file. There are ways to properly redact a PDF digitally, but going analog is foolproof.

The Trump 2.0 administration, in contrast, is staffed top to bottom with fools.

Monday, 22 December 2025

‘Bari Weiss Steps Onto the CBS News Glass Cliff of Doom’ ★

Elizabeth Lopatto, back in October, after Bari Weiss was first named editor-in-chief of CBS News by David Ellison after his acquisition of Paramount:

This is the glass cliff to end all glass cliffs. You’re Marissa Mayer at Yahoo without the Googler street cred. You’re Nancy Dubuc at Vice without the string of hit TV shows. You’re Linda Yaccarino at Twitter without the advertiser relationships. You have been hired as a sop to a Trump administration that is actively hostile to the actual free press, and you will be made to oversee wave after wave of layoffs until you quit or get fired and the entire news division is shut down in a final spasm of cost-cutting after the next inescapable media merger.

The only thing Lopatto missed in her prescient piece is that Weiss might not last long enough to still be leading CBS News by the time Ellison gets to layoffs. It’s simply untenable for a partisan propagandist to be leading a legitimate news organization. Two months into the job and Weiss has already made a complete fool of herself. Her ham-fisted (but failed) attempt to censor a fair and well-reported piece critical of the Trump administration’s deportation policies comes just one week after a televised town hall with Erika Kirk (widow of Charlie Kirk), which Weiss herself hosted, for which the commercial spots were filled by direct marketing dietary supplements and, I swear, Chia Pets.

It’s been an inauspicious two months on the job for Weiss, to say the least.

The ‘60 Minutes’ Report on CECOT That Bari Weiss Censored Is Now Internet Contraband ★

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge:

60 Minutes had already begun promoting the now-censored segment online. Because it was pulled so late, it seems that CBS missed at least one platform for distribution: Canada’s Global TV. Some people used a VPN to watch it; at least one person recorded it, distributing it through an iCloud account.

The segment, which has been reviewed by The Verge, is a little shy of 14 minutes long. It features video of men, chained and bent double, being “paraded in front of cameras, pushed onto buses, and delivered to CECOT,” according to the segment’s narration. One former detainee, who CBS met in Colombia, said he was told he was “the living dead” at CECOT. After trying to seek asylum in the US, he says he was detained by customs and held for 6 months before being deported. He described horrific conditions at the prison, saying he was beaten until he bled and that he was thrown into a wall so hard he broke one of his teeth. He also described sexual assault by the guards. Another interviewed former detainee described what can only be called torture: being forced to kneel for 24 hours, and being put in a dark room, where they were beaten if they moved from the stress position. [...]

Anyway, best of luck to Weiss in playing DMCA whack-a-mole with the video of the story. The segment lives as online samizdat now. Thanks to Weiss’ censorship, it may very well wind up being the most-talked-about CBS News story this year.

There are a bunch of copies on social media, but most are video of the TV broadcast in Canada shot from an iPhone. The Internet Archive, however, has a clean copy that’s a direct screen recording. Watch for yourself.

In addition to being the most-talked-about CBS News story of the year, it’ll almost certainly be the most-watched. But CBS will get none of the views or ad revenue. There’s no better way to make people want to watch something than to tell them they shouldn’t watch it. The Streisand effect is very real.

CBS News Chief Bari Weiss Pulls ‘60 Minutes’ Story on Trump’s CECOT Gulag in El Salvador ★

David Folkenflik, reporting for NPR:

Just a day and a half before it was set to be broadcast, new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss pulled a planned 60 Minutes investigative segment centering on allegations of abuses at an El Salvador detention center where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants last March.

Weiss told colleagues this weekend the piece — planned for Sunday night’s show — could not run without an on-the-record comment from an administration official. She pushed for 60 Minutes to interview Stephen Miller, senior advisor to President Trump, or someone of his stature. That’s according to two people with knowledge of events at the network who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing job security.

The correspondent on the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, condemned the decision in an email to 60 Minutes colleagues on Sunday evening, saying she believed it was “not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” [...] Alfonsi wrote that she and her colleagues on the story had sought comments and interviews from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House and the State Department.

“Government silence is a statement, not a VETO,” Alfonsi wrote in the email. “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”

It is not surprising in the least bit that Weiss tried to censor a jarring report on Trump’s illegal torture prison in El Salvador. It is, perhaps, slightly surprising how dumb this attempt is. Of course it’s a good principle of journalism to allow the other side of a story to comment or be interviewed. But the idea that the other side can just decline to participate and that means you can’t run the story is like fingers-in-your-ears “I can’t hear you!” playground nonsense. You run the story and say that they declined to comment.

It’s not just that Weiss kiboshed a solid piece of reporting from 60 Minutes. It’s that the editor-in-chief of CBS News is now on the record as saying that the entire staff of 60 Minutes wanted to run an unfair hit piece on the Trump administration. The decline of CBS as an institution continues.

Sunday, 21 December 2025

Finalist ★

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner — a digital take on traditional paper planners. Its motto: “Most productivity apps help you organize tasks. Finalist helps you finish them.”

One aspect of Finalist that makes it different from most to-do/task apps is that instead of setting due dates for tasks, you add tasks to specific days. This really resonates with me. With most apps in this domain, the top-level items are tasks, and tasks have (optional) due dates. With Finalist, the top-level items are days, and days have tasks and events. This might sound like I’m splitting semantic hairs but it gives Finalist a very different feel, one that’s more natural to me. If you’ve got unfinished items from yesterday, Finalist lets you move them all forward to today with one tap. Or, move some forward, and leave others behind. Or, just leave them all behind and move on. Up to you. I like that.

Finalist integrates with the system in all the ways you’d hope, including with the system calendar APIs and the Reminders app. So events in your system calendar and items from Reminders show up on your days in Finalist. Finalist lets you create events (calendar items), reminders (to-dos that are synced with Reminders), tasks (to-dos that exist only in Finalist), journal entries (like notes to yourself), and section headers if you have a busy day and need to group certain items together. Oh, and “habits”, too — recurring to-dos for habits you want to build or break. It sounds like a lot, but it all fits together neatly, covering the gamut of stuff you’d track in a daily paper planner. And everything in Finalist syncs between platforms (iPhone, iPad, Mac) with iCloud. There’s no account to create — it just uses iCloud, which is private and simple.

It’s not minimalist, but it’s not complicated. I’ve had a lot of fun learning to use Finalist just by exploring it. It’s thoughtful and intuitive. Like any civilized app, Finalist’s tags allow you to include spaces and capital letters in tag names, and don’t start with a stupid # character. And, design-wise, Finalist is very handsome — it offers customizable color themes and makes terrific use of the typographic features of the San Francisco system font.

Subscriptions cost $5/month or $30/year. A lifetime license costs just $60. It supports Family Sharing too.

I’m kind of blown away by how robust and thoughtful Finalist is. It’s not a web app with iOS and Mac clients. It’s a suite of native apps designed with care for Apple’s platforms. Auteur software, with a distinctive brand and vision, while remaining idiomatically native. Bravo to Slaven Radic. I strongly encourage you to check it out.

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