By John Gruber

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Box Office Expectations for ‘Melania’ ★

Jeremy Fuster, reporting for TheWrap:

But save for some theaters in Republican-heavy states, the film is unlikely to leave much of an impact at a slumping box office, with theatrical sources telling TheWrap that “Melania” is projected for an opening of around $3 million this weekend.

That would put it below the last right-wing documentary, the Daily Wire-produced Matt Walsh film “Am I Racist?,” which opened to $4.5 million from 1,517 locations in September 2024, finishing with a $12.3 million total that made it the highest-grossing doc that year. The highest projections are coming from NRG with an estimate of around $5 million, though audience interest polls from the company have 30% saying they are “definitely not” interested in watching the film, an unusually high count for any wide release.

These projections are with a $35 million promotional campaign, for a movie Amazon paid $40 million to purchase. (Via Taegan Goddard.)

Amazon’s Spending on ‘Melania’ Is a Barely Concealed Bribe ★

Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes, reporting for The New York Times:

Amazon paid Ms. Trump’s production company $40 million for the rights to “Melania,” about $26 million more than the next closest bidder, Disney. The fee includes a related docuseries that is scheduled to air later this year. The budget for “Melania” is unknown, but documentaries that follow a subject for a limited amount of time usually cost less than $5 million to produce. The $35 million for marketing is 10 times what some other high-profile documentaries have received.

All of which has a lot of Hollywood questioning whether Amazon’s push is anything more than the company’s attempt to ingratiate itself with President Trump.

This is a good story, with multiple industry sources with experience making political documentaries, but the Times’s own subhead downplays Amazon’s spending on the film: “The tech giant is spending $35 million to promote its film about the first lady, far more than is typical for documentaries.” They’re spending $35 million now, to promote it, but they already paid $40 million for the rights to the film, $28 million of which is believed to have gone to Melania Trump herself. A $35 million total spend would be a lot compared to other high-profile documentaries, but it’s a $75 million total spend. This is not just a little fishy — it’s a veritable open air seafood market.

Back to the Times:

To grasp just how uncustomary Amazon’s marketing push for “Melania” is, consider how Magnolia Pictures handled “RBG,” a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg during her 25th year as a Supreme Court justice, in 2018.

CNN Films produced “RBG” for around $1 million. The promotional budget, including an awards campaign that helped it land two Oscar nominations, totaled about $3 million. The film debuted in 34 theaters and expanded into 432 locations over several weeks. It ultimately collected $14 million, enough to rank as the year’s No. 1 political documentary.

And:

On Friday, “Melania” will also be released in 1,600 theaters overseas, where FilmNation, a New York company, is handling distribution in more than 20 countries. International ticket sales are expected to be weak, according to box office analysts.

Shocker.

Kickstarter for Ollie’s Arcade Expansion ★

Ged Maheux, The Iconfactory:

This week we announced a new Kickstarter that’s aimed at expanding the game offerings of Ollie’s Arcade, the fun, ad-free retro gaming app we introduced back in 2023. Ollie’s Arcade has always been a great way to escape doomscrolling, even if just for a little while, and now we have an opportunity to bring these retro games to even more people on iOS.

The Kickstarter aims to raise enough money to make all of the in-app purchase games in the app completely free for everyone to enjoy. We also want to bring our beloved puzzle game, Frenzic, to life once again. Frenzic was one of the very first games available on iOS back in 2008, then was reborn as Frenzic: Overtime on Apple Arcade. Since it left, people have been asking us for a new version that they can just pick up and play. We couldn’t agree more!

I linked to the Kickstarter for the original Ollie’s Arcade project back in 2023, which was a big success. And I first linked to Frenzic all the way back in 2008, when the App Store was only a few months old. It’s just a great concept for a casual game on a small screen, implemented with all of The Iconfactory’s exquisite attention to detail. That’s true for all the games in Ollie’s Arcade, but Frenzic is special.

This new Kickstarter for the Ollie’s Arcade expansion has already hit its funding goal, but it’s approaching the stretch goal for an additional game. There are a zillion games for iOS, but it’s sad how few are ad-free and don’t require a subscription. If you think well-crafted fun games that you can pay for once (for a very reasonable price) should be rewarded, you should join me (and others) in backing this Kickstarter.

Wednesday, 28 January 2026

Comparing the Classic and Unified Views in iOS 26’s Phone App ★

Adam Engst, back in November, at TidBITS:

Did you know that, regardless of view, you can now swipe left on any call to reveal a blue clock icon that lets you create a reminder to call back in 1 hour, tonight, tomorrow, or at any custom time (below left, slightly doctored)? Reminders appear at the top of the Calls list and in your default Reminders list. You can also touch and hold a call associated with a contact to connect with them in other ways (below right), or touch and hold a call from an unknown caller to add them to Contacts.

I did not know this, until I read Engst’s article.

One criticism I’ve seen a few times (but to be clear, not from Engst) ever since Apple debuted the new Unified interface for the Phone app back at WWDC, is that it’s somehow wrong that Apple offers it as option alongside the Classic interface. “When does Apple ever offer options like this?”

I’d argue that Apple used to offer options like this all the time. The Music app on the original iPhone (which app was actually named “iPod” for a while) let you customize all the tabs at the bottom. All of Apple’s good Mac apps (the AppKit ones, primarily) still let you customize the entire toolbar. The problem isn’t that Apple now offers two very different interfaces for the Phone app. The problem is that Apple stopped offering users ways to significantly tailor apps to their own needs and tastes — and the proof that they stopped is that so many people now think it’s so strange that they’re offering two options for how the Phone app should look and work.

Overall, I like the new Unified layout in the Phone app. But what I love is there remains an option for those who don’t, and that you can switch between the two in a very obvious, easily discoverable (dare I say, hard to miss) way right in the app itself. No need to dig two or three levels deep into the Settings app. You can just switch right there in the main screen of the Phone app itself. It’s things like this that keep me optimistic that Apple is still capable of great new work in UI design.

Aeronaut 1.0 ★

New Mac app by Mikey Clarke, and it’s just what it says on the tin: a “lovingly crafted Bluesky app designed and built just for the Mac”. I’ve been beta testing Aeronaut for months, and it’s the only interface to Bluesky I actually like. It’s a real Mac app — written mostly in AppKit, supporting all the right UI idioms and platform integrations. It’s not just the best Bluesky client I’ve seen, for any platform, but maybe the best new Mac app I’ve seen in years, period. Certainly the one whose very existence has made me happiest. Next time someone tells me no one makes good new native apps for the Mac anymore, I’m going to tell them Mikey Fucking Clarke does.

$2/month or $15/year. A veritable bargain for an app so nice.

Bruce Springsteen: ‘Streets of Minneapolis’ ★

Bruce Springsteen:

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Best line from the lyrics:

Their claim was self-defense,
Just don’t believe your eyes.
It’s our blood and bones and these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies.

Whistles, phones, and birds.

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Wednesday, 28 January 2026

Tim Cook Wrote a Memo on the ‘Events in Minneapolis’ ★

Tim Cook, in a company-wide memo (first published by Mark Gurman):

Team,
I’m heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis, and my prayers and deepest sympathies are with the families, with the communities, and with everyone that’s been affected.

This is a time for deescalation. I believe America is strongest when we live up to our highest ideals, when we treat everyone with dignity and respect no matter who they are or where they’re from, and when we embrace our shared humanity. This is something Apple has always advocated for. I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views, and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all.

I know this is very emotional and challenging for so many. I am proud of how deeply our teams care about the world beyond our walls. That empathy is one of Apple’s greatest strengths and it is something I believe we all cherish.

Thank you for all that you do.
Tim

“Events” is doing a lot of work there, to describe what has happened and is happening in Minneapolis.

Trump’s “openness” on this particular “issue” has been to replace Greg Bovino — the diminutive Himmler-cosplaying “commander at large” of Border Control, who insisted, adamantly, that the real victims in Alex Pretti’s murder were the Border Patrol agents who shot him — with “border czar” Tom Homan, a man who took a $50,000 cash bribe from undercover FBI agents in exchange for a promise to award them government contracts if Trump were reelected.

Zac Hall, on Twitter/X:

Cook took three days to not name Alex Pretti in his not public statement and 20 days to not name Renée Good in his not public statement. [...]

2020 Tim Cook on Apple’s homepage: “Right now, there is a pain deeply etched in the soul of our nation and in the hearts of millions. To stand together, we must stand up for one another, and recognize the fear, hurt, and outrage rightly provoked by the senseless killing of George Floyd and a much longer history of racism.”

Quite the different message (and medium — this time with nothing on Apple’s website, let alone their homepage) from 2020, for what I consider far more outrageous and alarming killings.

Meta’s Response to Reuters Report on ‘Romance AI Chatbots’ for Teenagers ★

Andy Stone, VP of communications at Meta, responding, in a series of tweets on Twitter/X, to Jeff Horwitz’s report at Reuters yesterday, linked here last night, which claimed that “Zuckerberg blocked curbs on sex-talking chatbots for minors”:

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, eh, @Reuters, @JeffHorwitz!

The documents you cite in the story itself contradict this headline.

The headline says “Zuckerberg blocked curbs on sex-talking chatbots for minors”

But the story cites a document that says “Zuckerberg believed that AI companions should be blocked from engaging in sexually ‘explicit’ conversations” w young people.

Huh?!

After my post last night, a friend of mine, with a career of experience working in a large company, sent me this:

A word of caution. “Scumbag middle manager says CEO said” is not the same as “CEO said.”

I could believe Zuck shitcanned parental controls, but I am certain there are thousands of snakes inside that company who would lie about it to get what they want.

That’s a good and fair point, and I think it’s what Stone is trying to emphasize above. The New Mexico lawsuit filing doesn’t contain evidence that Zuckerberg nixed parental controls for teens engaging in chats with AI bots; it contains evidence that other (unnamed employees) claimed in internal discussions that Zuckerberg had nixed them. That is different.

But so let’s take Zuckerberg out of it personally. It’s still the case that Meta shipped these chatbots for teens to use. And the buck, presumably, stops at Zuck’s desk. Read Horwitz’s report from back in August, detailing a leaked internal document listing Meta’s content guidelines for generative AI chat.

Sidenote: Why in the world is Meta’s VP of comms doing this on Twitter/X, not Threads, which continues to grow?

Tuesday, 27 January 2026

Court Filing Claims Zuckerberg Blocked Curbs at Meta on Sex-Talking Chatbots for Minors ★

Jeff Horwitz, reporting for Reuters:

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg approved allowing minors to access AI chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions, according to internal Meta documents filed in a New Mexico state court case and made public Monday.

The lawsuit — brought by the state’s attorney general, Raul Torrez, and scheduled for trial next month — alleges that Meta “failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions delivered to children” on Facebook and Instagram. [...]

Messages between two employees from March of 2024 state that Zuckerberg had rejected creating parental controls for the chatbots, and that staffers were working on “Romance AI chatbots” that would be allowed for users under the age of 18. We “pushed hard for parental controls to turn GenAI off — but GenAI leadership pushed back stating Mark decision,” one employee wrote in that exchange.

Horwitz was with The Wall Street Journal for a long time; his is a byline worth paying attention to.

‘The Secret Fear of the Morally Depraved’ ★

Adam Serwer, reporting from the streets of Minneapolis for The Atlantic, “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” (gift link):

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive — because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

‘A CEO, Captured’ ★

Om Malik:

Cook is not stupid. He is not evil. He is trapped. The iron clasp of market expectations has turned him into what he never meant to be: a man who goes to parties at the White House while nurses die.

In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Roy Bland captures a cynical, post-ideological, corrupt English society: “You scratch my conscience; I’ll drive your Jag.” You could say the same of today’s Silicon Valley. It used to believe it could change the world. Now it just hopes the world won’t change its stock price.

Amy Jane Gruber:

If I ever meet Tim Cook I’m going to ask him if Mike Tyson enjoyed the movie.

‘Aside From That, Mr. Cook, What Did You Think of the Movie?’ ★

MG Siegler:

Tim Cook is captured. There is simply no other explanation for his actions over the past year or so. But it perhaps culminated this weekend when Cook went to a special private showing of the documentary Melania at the White House. Yes, that Melania. That in and of itself would have probably been fine. I mean, it’s potentially problematic for a host of reasons that I’ll get to, but such is our world right now. Then one shot — a gunshot — turned attending that movie screening into a statement...

While Cook was enjoying his popcorn and champagne with the likes of Mike Tyson, Tony Robbins, and other “VIPs”, it was complete and utter chaos on the streets of Minnesota. Just hours earlier, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by ICE agents. Maybe, just maybe, postpone the movie premiere?

‘Whatever’ ★

Ben Terris, writing for New York Magazine:

Fred Trump died in 1999 at age 93. He had, Trump said, a “heart that couldn’t be stopped” with almost no health conditions to speak of throughout his long life. “He had one problem,” Trump said. “At a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting, what do they call it?” He pointed to his forehead and looked to his press secretary for the word that escaped him.

“Alzheimer’s,” Leavitt said.

“Like an Alzheimer’s thing,” Trump said. “Well, I don’t have it.”

“Is it something you think about at all?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think about it at all. You know why?” he said. “Because whatever it is, my attitude is whatever.”

Clawdbot Is Now Moltbot ★

From the footer on the project’s website:

Moltbot was formerly known as Clawdbot. Independent project, not affiliated with Anthropic.

Makes sense, to be honest, that Anthropic would object to naming it a homonym for Claude.

One additional followup to my post the other day. In his terrific introduction to ClawdMoltbot, Federico Viticci wrote:

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.

Those tokens aren’t free. I asked Viticci just how much “yikes” cost, and he said around US$560 — using way more input than output tokens.

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Tuesday, 27 January 2026

What It’s Like to Get Undressed by Grok ★

Ella Chakarian, writing for Rolling Stone (News+):

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Kendall Mayes was mindlessly scrolling on X when she noticed an unsettling trend surface on her feed. Users were prompting Grok, the platform’s built-in AI feature, to “nudify” women’s images. Mayes, a 25-year-old media professional from Texas who uses X to post photos with her friends and keep up with news, didn’t think it would happen to her — until it did.

“Put her in a tight clear transparent bikini,” an X user ordered the bot under a photo that Mayes posted from when she was 20. Grok complied, replacing her white shirt with a clear bikini top. The waistband of her jeans and black belt dissolved into thin, translucent strings. The see-through top made the upper half of her body look realistically naked.

Hiding behind an anonymous profile, the user’s page was filled with similar images of women, digitally and nonconsensually altered and sexualized. Mayes wanted to cuss the faceless user out, but decided to simply block the account. She hoped that would be the end of it. Soon, however, her comments became littered with more images of herself in clear bikinis and skin-tight latex bodysuits. Mayes says that all of the requests came from anonymous profiles that also targeted other women. Though some users have had their accounts suspended, as of publication, some of the images of Mayes are still up on X.

And:

Emma, a content creator, was at the grocery store when she saw the notifications of people asking Grok to undress her images. [...] Numbness washed over Emma when the images finally loaded on her timeline. A selfie of her holding a cat had been transformed into a nude. The cat was removed from the photo, Emma says, and her upper body was made naked.

Emma immediately made her account private and reported the images. In an email response reviewed by Rolling Stone, X User Support asked her to upload an image of her government-issued ID so they could look into the report, but Emma responded that she didn’t feel comfortable doing so. [...] In our call, she checked to see if some of the image edits she was aware of were still up on X. They were. “Oh, my God,” she says, letting out a defeated sigh. “It has 15,000 views. Oh, that’s so sad.”

This fun app is available, free of charge, on the App Store, which means you know it’s safe and approved by Apple. Get it today.

Monday, 26 January 2026

The Talk Show: ‘A Mitigated Disaster’ ★

Daniel Jalkut returns to the show so we can both vent about MacOS 26 Tahoe.

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There’s a Hidden Preference to Auto-Resize Columns in the Finder on MacOS 14 and 15 ★

Good tip from “DifferentDan” on the Realmac customer forum, posted back in November:

I saw on macOS Tahoe 26.1, Apple finally added an option in the Column View settings to automatically right size all columns individually and that setting would persist, but I don’t really like Liquid Glass (yet) so I haven’t updated to Tahoe.

Looks like someone found a workaround however for those that are still on Sequoia. Just open up Terminal on your Mac, copy in the below, and press return.

The one-line command:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXEnableColumnAutoSizing -bool YES; killall Finder

(Change YES to NO if you want to go back.)

Marcel Bresink’s TinkerTool is a great free app for adjusting hidden preferences using a proper GUI, and it turns out TinkerTool has exposed this hidden Finder preference for a few years now. You learn something every day. I enabled this a few days ago on MacOS 15 Sequoia, and it seems exactly like the implementation Apple has exposed in the Finder’s View Options window in Tahoe, which I wrote about Friday. No better, no worse.

Nvidia Set to Supplant Apple as TSMC’s Largest Customer ★

Kif Leswing, CNBC:

Nvidia will become TSMC’s largest customer this year, according to analyst estimates and Huang himself. Apple is believed to currently be TSMC’s largest customer, mostly to manufacture A-series chips for iPhones and M-series chips for PCs and servers.

The positional swap will mark a fundamental shift in the semiconductor industry, reflecting Nvidia’s growing importance amid the artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out. [...]

Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, said he projects Nvidia to generate $33 billion in TSMC revenue this year, or about 22% of the chip foundry’s total. Apple, by comparison, is projected to generate about $27 billion, or about 18% of TSMC’s revenue.

Airlines That Support Shared Item Location for Luggage With AirTags ★

Joe Rossignol, writing at MacRumors:

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. This way, if you put an AirTag inside your bags, the airline can better help you find them in the event they are lost or delayed at the airport. [...] Below, we have listed most of the airlines that support the feature.

Apple’s announcement claims that 36 airlines support it today, and 15 more are coming soon.

Apple Introduces Second-Generation AirTags ★

Apple Newsroom:

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. For the first time, users can use Precision Finding on Apple Watch Series 9 or later, or Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, to find their AirTag, bringing a powerful experience to the wrist.

Solid update to the original AirTags, which debuted five years ago. Better range, louder speaker, increased precision. The form factor remains unchanged, so second-gen AirTags will fit in keychains or holders designed for the first-gen model. They even take the same batteries. Pricing also remains unchanged: $29 for one, $99 for a four-pack.

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Monday, 26 January 2026

From the DF Archive: ‘Untitled Document Syndrome’ ★

Yours truly back in 2009, hitting upon the same themes from the item I just posted about TextEdit vs. Apple Notes:

This, I think, explains the relative popularity of Mac OS X’s included Stickies application. For years, Stickies’s popularity confounded me. Why would anyone use a note-taking utility that requires you to leave every saved note open in its own window on screen? The more you use it, the more cluttered it gets. But here’s the thing: cluttered though it may be, you never have to save anything in Stickies. Switch to Stickies, Command-N, type your new note, and you’re done. (And, yes, if you create a new sticky note, then force-quit Stickies, the note you just created will be there when next you launch the app. Stickies’s auto-save happens while you type, not just at quit time.) It feels easy and it feels safe. Stickies does not offer a good long-term storage design, but it offers a frictionless short-term jot-something-down-right-now design.

Here we are in 2026, 17 years later, and, unsurprisingly, some things have changed. Apple Notes didn’t get a Mac version until Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion in 2012. And Apple Notes didn’t really get good until 2016 or 2017. I still use Yojimbo, the library-based Mac app I wrote about in the above piece in 2009, but I don’t use it nearly as much as I used to. I use Apple Notes instead, for most notes, because it has good clients for iPhone and iPad (and Vision Pro and even Apple Watch).

Other things, however, have not changed since 2009. Like the Stickies app, which is still around in MacOS 26 Tahoe, largely unchanged, except for a sad Liquid Glass-style icon. If you still use Stickies, you should consider moving to Apple Notes. There’s even a command (File → Export All to Notes...) to import all your notes from Stickies into Apple Notes, with subfolders in Notes for each color sticky note. Apple Notes on the Mac even supports one of Stickies’s signature features: the Window → Float on Top command will keep a note’s window floating atop the windows from other apps even when Apple Notes is in the background.

(Stickies has another cool feature that no other current app I know of does: it still supports “window shading”. Double-click the title bar of a note in Stickies and the rest of the window will “roll up”, leaving only the title bar behind. Double-click again and it rolls down. This was a built-in feature for all windows in all apps on classic Mac OS, starting with Mac OS 8, but was replaced in favor of minimizing windows into the Dock with Mac OS X. Window shading was a better feature (and could have been kept alongside minimizing into the Dock). With the Stickies app, window shading works particularly well with the aforementioned Float on Top feature — you can keep a floating window available, atop all other windows, but while it’s rolled up it hardly takes up any space or obscures anything underneath.)

‘TextEdit and the Relief of Simple Software’ ★

Perhaps at the opposite end of the complexity and novelty spectrum from Federico Viticci’s intro to Clawdbot is this piece by Kyle Chayka, writing at The New Yorker, from October:

Amid the accelerating automation of our computers — and the proliferation of assistants and companions and agents designed to execute tasks for us — I’ve been thinking more about the desktop that’s hidden in the background of the laptop I use every day. Mine is strewn with screenshots and Word documents and e-books. What I’ve accrued the most of by far, though, are TextEdit files, from the bare-bones Mac app that just lets you type stuff into a blank window. Apple computers have come with text-editing software since the original Mac was released, in 1984; the current iteration of the program launched in the mid-nineties and has survived relatively unchanged. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself relying on TextEdit more as every other app has grown more complicated, adding cloud uploads, collaborative editing, and now generative A.I. TextEdit is not connected to the internet, like Google Docs. It is not part of a larger suite of workplace software, like Microsoft Word. You can write in TextEdit, and you can format your writing with a bare minimum of fonts and styling. Those files are stored as RTFs (short for rich-text format), one step up from the most basic TXT file. TextEdit now functions as my to-do-list app, my e-mail drafting window, my personal calendar, and my stash of notes to self, which act like digital Post-its.

I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does; it doesn’t hawk new features, and it doesn’t demand I update the app every other week, as Google Chrome does. I’ve tried out other software for keeping track of my random thoughts and ideas in progress — the personal note-storage app Evernote; the task-management board Trello; the collaborative digital workspace Notion, which can store and share company information. Each encourages you to adapt to a certain philosophy of organization, with its own formats and filing systems. But nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking. Using the app is the closest you can get to writing longhand on a screen. I could make lists on actual paper, of course, but I’ve also found that my brain has been so irredeemably warped by keyboards that I can only really get my thoughts down by typing.

Old habits are hard to break. And trust me, I, of all people, know the value of writing stuff — all sorts of stuff — in plain text files. (RTF isn’t plain text, but it is a stable and standard format.) I’ve been using BBEdit since 1992, not just as an occasional utility, but as part of my daily arsenal of essential tools.

But I get the feeling that Chayka would be better served switching from TextEdit to Apple Notes for most of these things he’s creating. Saving a whole pile of notes to yourself as text files on your desktop, with no organization into sub-folders, isn’t wrong. The whole point of “just put it on the desktop” is to absolve yourself of thinking about where to file something properly. That’s friction, and if you face a bit of friction every time you want to jot something down, it increases the likelihood that you won’t jot it down because you didn’t want to deal with the friction.

You actually don’t need to save or name documents in TextEdit anymore. One of the best changes to MacOS in the last two decades has been the persistence of open document windows, including unsaved changes to existing files, and never-saved untitled document windows. Try this: open TextEdit, make a new untitled document, and type something — anything — into the new window. Next, don’t just quit TextEdit, but force quit it (⌥⌘Esc). Relaunch TextEdit, and your unsaved new document should be right where you left it, with every character you typed.

But a big pile of unorganized RTF files on your desktop — or a big pile of unsaved document windows that remain open, in perpetuity, in TextEdit — is no way to live. You can use TextEdit like that, it supports being used like that, but it wasn’t designed to be used like that.

Apple Notes was designed to be used like this. Open Notes, ⌘N, type whatever you want, and switch back to whatever you were doing before. There is no Save command. There are no files. And while a few dozen text files on your desktop starts to look messy, and makes individual items hard to find, you can stash thousands of notes in Apple Notes and they just organize themselves into a simple list, sorted, by default, by most recently modified. You can create folders and assign tags in Notes, but you don’t need to. Don’t make busy work for yourself. And with iCloud, you get fast reliable syncing of all your notes to all of your other Apple devices: iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro, even your Watch now.

Sometimes you just want to stick with what you’re used to. I get it. I am, very much, a creature of habit. And TextEdit is comforting for its simplicity, reliability, and unchanging consistency spanning literally decades. But there’s no question in my mind that nearly everyone using TextEdit as a personal notes system would be better served — and happier, once they adjust to the change — by switching to Apple Notes.

Federico Viticci on Clawdbot ★

Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories:

If this intro just gave you whiplash, imagine my reaction when I first started playing around with Clawdbot, the incredible open-source project by Peter Steinberger (a name that should be familiar to longtime MacStories readers) that’s become very popular in certain AI communities over the past few weeks. I kept seeing Clawdbot being mentioned by people I follow; eventually, I gave in to peer pressure, followed the instructions provided by the funny crustacean mascot on the app’s website, installed Clawdbot on my new M4 Mac mini (which is not my main production machine), and connected it to Telegram.

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.

Overwhelming indeed. Clawdbot is undeniably impressive, and interest in it is skyrocketing. But because of its complexity and scope, it’s one of those things where all the excitement is being registered by people who already understand it. This essay from Viticci is the first thing I’ve seen that really helped me start to understand it.

Sunday, 25 January 2026

Meh ★

My thanks to Meh for sponsoring last week at DF. Meh puts up a new deal every day, and they do it with panache. As they say, “It’s actual, real, weird shit you didn’t know existed for half the price you would’ve guessed.”

Don’t tell any of my other sponsors, but Meh is my favorite longtime DF sponsor. I love the way their orange graphics look against DF’s #4a525a background. And I always love their sponsored posts that go into the RSS feed at the start of the sponsorship week. I’ll just quote theirs from this week in full:

Everything sucks. The whole world’s going to shit, especially our part of it, and it can feel like anything fun or silly is sticking your head in the sand.

And yet. It doesn’t help to just be miserable. If you’re going to last, you’ve got to find your little moments of joy, or as a break from the misery.

Buying our crap at Meh is not how you solve the world’s problems. We’re not that crass. But maybe a minute a day of reading our little write-up, and a couple minutes of catching up with the Meh community, of making a few new online friends, and yes, of occasionally picking up a weird gadget or strange snack you’ve never heard of is just a few minutes you get to take a break, not giving in to how bad everything else is.

Of course we would say that. Of course we benefit from that. But it is also part of why we have a quirky write-up. Why we have a community. Why we’re selling whatever weird thing is over at Meh today.

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Friday, 23 January 2026

OmniOutliner 6 ★

Ken Case, on The Omni Group blog:

The features noted above already make for a great upgrade. But as I mentioned last year, one of the interesting problems we’ve been pondering is how best to link to documents in native apps. We’ve spent some time refining our solution to that problem, Omni Links, which are now shipping first in OmniOutliner 6. With Omni Links, we can link to content across all our devices, and we can share those links with other people and other apps.

Omni Links support everything we said document links needed to have. Omni Links work across all of Apple’s computing platforms and can be shared with a team. They leverage existing solutions for syncing and sharing documents, such as iCloud Drive or shared Git repositories. They are easy to create, easy to use, and easy to share.

Omni Links also power up Omni Automation, giving scripts and plug-ins a way to reference and update content in linked documents — documents that can be shared across all your team’s devices.

There’s lots more in version 6, including a modernized UI, and many additions to Omni Automation, Omni’s scripting platform that works across both Mac and iOS — including really useful integration with Apple’s on-device Foundation Models, with, of course, comprehensive (and comprehensible) documentation.

It’s Omni Links, though, that strikes me as the most interesting new feature. The two fundamental models for apps are library-based (like Apple Notes) and document-based (like TextEdit). Document-based apps create and open files from the file system. Library-based apps create items in a database, and the location of the database in the file system is an implementation detail the user shouldn’t worry about.

OmniOutliner has always been document-based, and version 6 continues to be. There are advantages and disadvantages to both models, but one of the advantages to library-based apps is that they more easily allow the developer to create custom URL schemes to link to items in the app’s library. Omni Links is an ambitious solution to bring that to document-based apps. Omni Links let you copy URLs that link not just to an OmniOutliner document, but to any specific row within an OmniOutliner document. And you can paste those URLs into any app you want (like, say, Apple Notes or Things, or events in your calendar app). From the perspective of other apps, they’re just URLs that start with omnioutliner://. They’re not based on anything as simplistic as a file’s pathname. They’re a robust way to link to a unique document, or a specific row within that document. Create an Omni Link on your Mac, and that link will work on your iPhone or iPad too — or vice versa. This is a very complex problem to solve, but Omni Links delivers on the age-old promise of “It just works”, abstracting all the complexity.

I’ve been using OmniOutliner for at least two decades now, and Omni Links strikes me as one of the best features they’ve ever added. It’s a way to connect your outlines, and the content within your outlines, to any app that accepts links. The other big change is that OmniOutliner 6 is now a single universal purchase giving you access to the same features on Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Vision.

Lolgato 1.7 ★

Free Mac utility by Zendit Oy:

A macOS app that enhances control over Elgato lights, offering features beyond the standard Elgato Control Center software.

Features:

• Automatically turn lights on and off based on camera activity
• Turn lights off when locking your Mac
• Sync light temperature with macOS Night Shift

Lolgato also lets you set global hotkeys for toggling the lights and changing their brightness.

I’ve had a pair of Elgato Key Lights down at my podcast recording desk for years now. Elgato’s shitty software drove me nuts. Nothing seemed to work so I gave up on controlling my lights from software. I set the color temperature and brightness the way I wanted it (which you have to do via software) and then after that, I just turned them off and on using the physical switches on the lights.

I forget how I discovered Lolgato, but I installed back on November 10. I connected Lolgato to my lights, and set it to turn them on whenever the Mac wakes up, and off whenever the Mac goes to sleep. It has worked perfectly for over two months. Perfect little utility.

Playing the Percentages ★

Dr. Drang:

For weeks — maybe months, time has been hard to judge this past year — Trump has been telling us that he’s worked out deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices by several hundred percent. Commentators and comedians have pointed out that you can’t reduce prices more than 100% and pretty much left it at that, suggesting that Trump’s impossible numbers are due to ignorance.

Don’t get me wrong. Trump’s ignorance is nearly limitless — but only nearly. I’ve always thought that he knew the right way to calculate a price drop; he did it the wrong way so he could quote a bigger number. And that came out in yesterday’s speech.

Trump sophistry + math pedantry = Daring Fireball catnip.

Thursday, 22 January 2026

MacOS 26 Tahoe Broke Column View in the Finder ★

Jeff Johnson:

Finder has four view modes, represented by the four consecutive toolbar icons in the screenshot below, if you can even call that free-floating monstrosity a toolbar anymore: Icons, List, Columns, and Gallery. My preference is columns view, which I’ve been using for as long as I remember, going back to Mac OS X.

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!

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. It’s like MacOS, once the crown jewel of computer human interface design, has been vandalized.

Why Walmart Still Doesn’t Support Apple Pay ★

Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac:

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.

When you use Apple Pay or other payment methods, it’s much harder for Walmart (and other retailers) to do this. Apple Pay’s privacy and security protections, like not sharing any information about your actual card with the retailer, makes this type of tracking trickier.

This is why Walmart wants people to use Walmart Pay if they want to pay from their phone. If you check out with Walmart Pay or Scan and Go, everything is linked to your Walmart account. If you had the option to pay with Apple Pay, you’d share a lot less information with Walmart.

Using Walmart Pay gives Walmart more information than a regular credit or debit card transaction does. When you use the same traditional credit card for multiple purchases over time, a retailer like Walmart can build a profile associated with that card number. Charles Duhigg, all the way back in 2012, reported a story for The New York Times about how Target used these profiles — which customers don’t even know about — to statistically determine when women are likely to be pregnant based on purchases like, say, cocoa-butter lotion and vitamin supplements. When you use an in-house payment app like Walmart Pay (or swipe a store’s “loyalty” card at the register), the store doesn’t have to do any guesswork to associate the transaction with your profile. Your Walmart Pay account is your profile.

Using Apple Pay gives a retailer less — or at least no more — identifying information than a traditional card transaction. So if the future is paying via devices, Walmart wants that future to give them more information.

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.

See also: Michael Tsai.

Trump Administration Shares Doctored Photo of Minnesota Activist After Her Arrest ★

Violet Jira, reporting for NOTUS:

The White House communications team posted a digitally altered photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota social justice activist, on Thursday that makes it appear that she was weeping during her arrest by federal agents.

The image is highly realistic, bearing no watermark or other indicator that the image has been doctored. The change is only apparent when compared to a different version of the same image posted by the Department of Homeland Security earlier in the day.

The White House, which has adopted a combative, flippant tone on its widely viewed social media pages, drew some backlash for the post online. In response, White House deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr called the image a “meme.”

It’s not a meme. It’s propaganda — an altogether false image presented as an actual photograph.

The Information: ‘With Google Deal, Apple’s Craig Federighi Plots a Cautious Course in AI’ ★

Aaron “Homeboy” Tilley and Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas, and with a miserly gift-link policy):

But there are also potential risks to making Federighi head of AI. Giving oversight of AI to him reflects Apple’s cautious approach to the technology. He is known at Apple as a penny-pincher who keeps a tight rein on salaries and hesitates to invest in risky projects when the payoff from them isn’t clear, according to people who have worked with him. He tends to scrutinize every detail of his team’s expenses, down to their budgets for bananas and other office snacks, those people said.

Meanwhile, Apple’s rivals are pouring vast amounts of capital into AI, building data centers and paying fortunes to woo AI researchers.

I have no idea what Federighi’s stance is on break-room bananas, but it seems a stretch to think it offers clues to Apple’s strategy on data centers.

For years, lieutenants of Federighi would try to get him on board with AI. He often shot those efforts down, former Apple executives said. For example, he rejected proposals from his team to use AI to dynamically change the iPhone home screen, believing it would disorient users, who are used to knowing where their apps are located, said former Apple employees familiar with the proposal.

Jesus H. Christ, thank god Federighi shot this down. I wouldn’t want good AI rearranging my home screen behind my back, let alone Apple Intelligence as we know it.

The Information Says Apple Is Working on an AI Wearable Pin ★

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas):

Apple is developing an AI-powered wearable pin the size of an AirTag that is equipped with multiple cameras, a speaker, microphones and wireless charging, according to people with direct knowledge of the project. The device could be released as early as 2027, they said.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because existing AI pins have sucked (and in one notable case, flopped in spectacular fashion), they’re all going to suck. Google Glass was an embarrassment but glasses are a great form factor. MP3 players used to suck too.

Such a product would position Apple to compete more effectively with OpenAI, which is planning its own AI-powered devices, and Meta Platforms, which is already selling smart glasses that offer access to its AI assistant.

It is very strange to put OpenAI’s upcoming io device(s) in the same sentence as Meta’s glasses, which are a real product you can buy today. None of these things are setting the world on fire though.

Ternus Now Overseeing Design at Apple, Reports Gurman ★

Mark Gurman, reporting at Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. has expanded the job of hardware chief John Ternus to include design work, solidifying his status as a leading contender to eventually succeed Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook.

Cook, who has led Apple since 2011 and turned 65 in November, quietly tapped Ternus to manage the company’s design teams at the end of last year, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That widens Ternus’ role to add one of the company’s most critical functions.

And on Twitter/X:

Ternus is now the “executive sponsor” of Apple’s design team, representing the critical function on Apple’s executive team. The move was under-the-radar: on paper, the teams report to Tim Cook despite Ternus’s role.

Here’s to hoping Ternus is as pissed as the rest of us are about MacOS 26 Tahoe.

Jackass of the Week: Utah State Senate Majority Leader Kirk Cullimore ★

Bridger Beal-Cvetko and Daniel Woodruff, reporting for KSL News:

SB138, sponsored by Cullimore, R-Sandy, would make Android, the world’s most popular mobile device operating system, an official state symbol, joining the ranks of the official state cooking pot (the dutch oven), the official state crustacean (the brine shrimp), and the official state mushroom (the porcini).

“Someday, everybody with an iPhone will realize that the technology is better on Android,” Cullimore told reporters during a media availability on Wednesday, the second day of the legislative session.

But, he added, “I’m the only one in my family — all my kids, my wife, they all have iPhones — but I’m holding strong.” [...]

“I don’t expect this to really get out of committee,” he said.

(Via Joe Rossignol.)

Taegan Goddard: ‘There’s No Going Back’ ★

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire, in a post that pairs perfectly with Om Malik’s re: velocity bestowing authority:

The new Democratic argument isn’t about restoring guardrails. It’s about moving fast — and using power unapologetically — to undo what Trump has done.

New Jersey will inaugurate Mikie Sherrill as governor today, one of the party’s rising stars who steamrolled Republicans in November. She has promised to govern with urgency — leaning on emergency powers, acting decisively, and skipping the old incrementalism. This, she argues, is what voters now expect. She told The New Yorker that if Democrats don’t learn to work at Donald Trump’s pace, “we’re going to get played.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is even more explicit: “In order for us to correct the abuses that are happening now, we have to act in the same capacities that Trump has given himself.”

The only way to counter “move fast and break things” is to move fast and fix things.

Om Malik: ‘Velocity Is the New Authority’ ★

Om Malik:

That’s why we get all our information as memes. The meme has become the metastory, the layer where meaning is carried. You don’t need to read the thing; you just need the gist, compressed and passed along in a sentence, an image, or a joke. It has taken the role of the headline. The machine accelerates this dynamic. It demands constant material; stop feeding it and the whole structure shakes. The point of the internet now is mostly to hook attention and push it toward commerce, to keep the engine running. Anyone can get their cut. [...]

We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic.

Crackerjack essay. Malik is focused here on the ways we’ve changed media and how those changes to media have changed us — as a society, and as individuals. But I think it explains how the Trump 2.0 administration has been so effective (such that it can be said to be effective). They recognize that velocity is authority and are moving as fast as they can. It’s an adaptation to a new media age.

‘Inside Trump’s Head-Spinning Greenland U-Turn’ ★

The Wall Street Journal (gift link; News+ link):

When President Trump arrived in the snow-covered Swiss Alps on Wednesday afternoon, European leaders were panicking that his efforts to acquire Greenland would trigger a trans-Atlantic conflagration. By the time the sun set, Trump had backed down.

After a meeting with Rutte on Wednesday, Trump called off promised tariffs on European nations, contending that he had “formed the framework of a future deal” with respect to the largest island in the world. [...] During an hourlong speech at the World Economic Forum, the U.S. president said he wouldn’t deploy the military to take control of Greenland. It was a stark shift in tone for Trump, who just days earlier had declined to rule out using the military to secure ownership of Greenland and posted an image online of the territory with an American flag plastered across it.

No need for panic. Alarm, yes. Panic, no. The TACO theory holds. Stand up to Trump and he’ll chicken out.

The Scale of ICE Protests in Minnesota ★

Margaret Killjoy, in a thread on Bluesky (via Kottke):

I came to Minneapolis to report on what’s going on, and one of the main questions I showed up with is “just what is the scale of the resistance?” After all, we’re all used to the news calling Portland a “war zone” or whatever when it’s just some protests in one part of town. [...]

Half the street corners around here have people — from every walk of life, including republicans — standing guard to watch for suspicious vehicles, which are reported to a robust and entirely decentralized network that tracks ICE vehicles and mobilizes responders.

I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what’s happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.

It’s genuinely a leaderless (or leaderful) movement, decentralized in a way that the state is absolutely unequipped to handle. There are a few basic skills involved, and so people teach each other those skills, and people are collectively refining them.

Apple’s “whatever you say, boss” compliance with the Trump administration’s “demand” back in October that they remove ICEBlock from the App Store — with no legal basis, nor any evidence backing the administration’s claims that the app was being used to put members of the ICE goon squads in danger — is looking more and more like a decision on the wrong side of popular opinion. And, ultimately, on the wrong side of history.

ICEBlock was designed for exactly what these protestors are doing.

Wednesday, 21 January 2026

Gurman Scoops ‘Campos’, Apple’s Codename for a Chatbot-Based Siri in Next Year’s Version 27 OSes ★

Mark Gurman, at Bloomberg (gift link):

Apple Inc. plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the digital assistant into the company’s first artificial intelligence chatbot, thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race dominated by OpenAI and Google. [...]

The previously promised, non-chatbot update to Siri — retaining the current interface — is planned for iOS 26.4, due in the coming months. The idea behind that upgrade is to add features unveiled in 2024, including the ability to analyze on-screen content and tap into personal data. It also will be better at searching the web.

The chatbot capabilities will come later in the year, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. The company aims to unveil that technology in June at its Worldwide Developers Conference and release it in September.

Campos, which will have both voice- and typing-based modes, will be the primary new addition to Apple’s upcoming operating systems. The company is integrating it into iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, both code-named Rave, as well as macOS 27, internally known as Fizz.

Apple ought to just go back to calling it “iOS” on both iPhone and iPad, because it’s always been the same system fundamentally. If they really do have the same codename, it sure suggests that Apple’s engineering teams see it that way too.

The 180° turn on chatbots is welcome, and I think inevitable. The chat interface is just too useful. One of the most maddening things about Siri is that even when it’s helpful today, even when it gets things right, you can never refer back to previous interactions. I refer back to previous chats in ChatGPT almost every day.

Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, said in a June interview with Tom’s Guide that releasing a chatbot was never the company’s goal. Apple didn’t want to send users “off into some chat experience in order to get things done,” he said.

I quote this paragraph only to point out that Gurman/Bloomberg could have, but chose not to, link to the interview with Federighi (and Joz) at Tom’s Guide. Every single link in the article goes to another page at bloomberg.com. [Update, next day: As of this morning, Bloomberg’s article now has a link to the interview at Tom’s Guide. Nice.]

The iOS 26.4 update of Siri, the one before the true chatbot, will rely on a Google-developed system internally known as Apple Foundation Models version 10. That software will operate at 1.2 trillion parameters, a measure of AI complexity. Campos, however, will significantly surpass those capabilities. The chatbot will run a higher-end version of the custom Google model, comparable to Gemini 3, that’s known internally as Apple Foundation Models version 11.

In a potential policy shift for Apple, the two partners are discussing hosting the chatbot directly on Google servers running powerful chips known as TPUs, or tensor processing units. The more immediate Siri update, in contrast, will operate on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers, which rely on high-end Mac chips for processing.

A policy shift indeed, if that comes to pass.

More From The Verge: ‘What a Sony and TCL Partnership Means for the Future of TVs’ ★

John Higgins, The Verge (gift link):

As of today, Sony already relies on different manufacturing partners to create its TV lineup. While display panel manufacturers never reveal who they sell panels to, Sony is likely already using panels for its LCD TVs from TCL China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT), in addition to OLED panels from LG Display and Samsung Display. With this deal, a relationship between Sony and TCL CSOT LCD panels is guaranteed (although I doubt this would affect CSOT selling panels to other manufacturers). And with TCL CSOT building a new OLED facility, there’s a potential future in which Sony OLEDs will also get panels from TCL. Although I should point out that we’re not sure yet if the new facility will have the ability to make TV-sized OLED panels, at least to start.

The gist I take from this is that Sony is already dependent upon TCL. I think the mistake Sony made was ever ceding ownership and control over their display technology.

There’s some concern from fans that this could lead to a Sharp, Toshiba, or Pioneer situation where the names are licensed and the TVs produced are a shell of what the brands used to represent. I don’t see this happening with Sony. While the electronics side of the business hasn’t been as strong as in the past, Sony — and Bravia — is still a storied brand. It would take a lot for Sony to completely step aside and allow another company to slap its name on an inferior product. And based on TCL’s growth and technological improvements over the past few years, and the shrinking gap between premium and midrange TVs, I don’t expect Sony TVs will suffer from a partnership with TCL.

I’m heartened by Higgins’s optimism. (And I’ve heard good things already from DF readers who own TCL TVs.)

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