Linked List: January 26, 2026

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.

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.