Linked List: July 6, 2026

Monday, 6 July 2026

Markdown Now Has a Uniform Type Identifer (UTI) in Apple’s Version 27 OSes ★

The third developer betas of Apple’s 27 OSes dropped today, and this new page in Apple’s developer documentation drew my attention — a built-in Uniform Type Identifier for Markdown data:

The identifier for this type is net.daringfireball.markdown.

This type conforms to [utf8PlainText].

My main link here is to the Swift documentation, but it’s available in good old Objective-C too.

I had previously recommended conforming to public.plain-text but stated that the text encoding should be UTF-8. I’ve updated my own recommendation to public.utf8-plain-text to enshrine the UTF-8 encoding. (Back in 2004 UTF-8 support was far from universal. Today it is.)

Backblaze Versus Dropbox ★

There’s a been a lot of (justified) concern and consternation over the last year regarding Backblaze — an online backup service whose simple pitch is that it backs up your entire computer, including the startup drive and external drives — and online file storage services like iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. Backblaze stopped including the contents of such services in its backups. Michael Tsai (as usual) collected a long list of links regarding this.

The whole thing is complicated and confusing. The basic gist, I think, is that Backblaze has stopped trying to back up the contents from these services because sometimes the files aren’t really there on your local file system, but they sorta kinda look like they’re there. That’s what I meant in my post earlier today about Maestral regarding Apple’s modern File Provider APIs. You know how sometimes in iCloud Drive — or Dropbox or OneDrive or anything else that might use these APIs — you can see a file or folder in the Finder, but there’s a “cloud” icon next to it, and you have to click the cloud icon to actually download it? That.

With Maestral none of that comes into play. Maestral just keeps a folder on your local computer in sync with the contents of your Dropbox account. Just like the original Dropbox first-party app back in the day. So if you use Maestral, Backblaze does back up your Dropbox folder, because your Dropbox folder is just a regular folder (albeit, probably, a big one). It’s not a magic folder. Just a regular folder. And the Maestral software keeps its contents in sync. With software that uses Apple’s File Provider APIs — which effectively includes iCloud Drive — what you see as a user are magic folders, and the magic is undocumented.

Now, it turns out that Dropbox’s own first-party Mac client still has an available mode that doesn’t use the File Provider APIs. Some people who use that old-school mode report that Backblaze still backs up their Dropbox folder. Some people say it doesn’t. Like I said, it’s confusing and complicated and undocumented on all sides. I would rather not worry about it. And with Maestral, I haven’t had to worry about it. When Maestral stops working, I might have to start worrying about it.

The first item Tsai links to is this post from Rob Halliday to the venerable TidBITS-Talk forum.

Allen Pike, Back in November: ‘Why Is ChatGPT for Mac So Good?’ ★

Allen Pike, back in November (and corresponding Hacker News thread):

Still, I wouldn’t count out the possibility of a change in course here. While mobile is king, desktop is still where work happens. While OpenAI has acquired Sky to double down on desktop, Google has long been all-in on the browser. That leaves Anthropic as the challenger on desktop, with their latest models begging to be paired with well-crafted apps.

A few months ago Google launched a native Gemini app for the Mac. A month ago I wrote about why it’s not that great, and annoyingly presumptuous. Almost all good Mac apps are native; not all native Mac apps are good.

What keeps me using ChatGPT and keeps me away from using Claude is not that ChatGPT happens to be written using native APIs like AppKit. It’s that it looks and feels like a Mac app — you know, with a Settings window that is ... a window. And even more so, with very cool features like its ability to attach a chat to an open document in BBEdit or Notes. When ChatGPT is attached to an open document in another app, it’s not a snapshot at the moment of attachment, like what you’d get by copying and pasting the whole thing into the chat, or by dragging the current version of the file into the chat. It’s a live ongoing attachment, so as the attached document/note changes, ChatGPT sees the changes. It’s such a great feature, and I don’t think it exists on any platform but the Mac. And it couldn’t exist on iOS, which, because of its kindergarten-safety-scissors design, doesn’t allow for inter-application communication.

I worry for ChatGPT’s future, though.

While Anthropic could surprise everybody by dropping a native Mac app, I would bet against that. There’s a lot of headroom available to them just by investing in doing Electron well, mixing in bits of native code where needed, and hill-climbing from “website in shell” to “great app that happens to use web technology”.

Just as ChatGPT’s unexpected success woke OpenAI to the opportunities of being more product-centric, the breakout hit of Claude Code might warm Anthropic to the importance of investing in delightful tools. Last year they brought on Mike Krieger as CPO, who certainly seems like he could rally a team in this direction given the chance.

I don’t know what Krieger is doing there, but it sure doesn’t seem like he’s focused on creating delightful tools.

See Also: In December 2024 Allen Pike was my guest on The Talk Show, for an episode largely focused on AI.

Update: I was correct — Krieger is still at Anthropic but at the start of this year he left his role as chief product officer to head up their “Labs” team, where they’re building new product experiments. Krieger spoke about the role shift briefly during an interview last week at the “AI Engineer World’s Fair” conference.

ATP Member Special: Mac-Assed Mac Apps ★

A banger of an Accidental Tech Podcast members-only special, right on time. ATP memberships are just $8/month or $88/year, and the members-only episodes alone are worth the price.

They do a great job explaining what makes for a Mac-assed Mac app, but an even better job talking about why users and developers should care about them.

Maestral, the Open Source Splendidly Simple Mac Dropbox Client, Has Been Retired ★

Maestral developer Sam Schott, on the Maestral website:

As of June 2026, Maestral is no longer actively maintained. The current version will continue to work until certificates expire.

Schott, on Maestral’s GitHub project page:

As of 2026-07-28, this project is archived. It’s been a fun challenge to develop a syncing client, but unfortunately, I find too little time to invest in Maestral these days. I’ve also moved away from using Dropbox myself.

Maestral will still remain usable in the medium term, but will no longer be actively maintained or receive updates.

You get what you pay for, and Maestral is free of charge and open source. But man, this is a real bummer. I absolutely love Maestral. It restores Dropbox to its original vision — a folder on my Mac that syncs. Nothing at all like the bloated app that Dropbox’s first-party Mac client has grown into. And it doesn’t use any of MacOS’s modern File Provider APIs, which in my experience provide me with no benefits that I want, and saddle me with much needless complexity that I don’t. With Maestral, it’s just a quiet app that runs in the background, consumes preciously few CPU and memory resources, and just syncs a folder of your choosing to your Dropbox account. I of course chose ~/Dropbox/. It’s always been super robust for me. It’s not a hack — it syncs to Dropbox using Dropbox’s APIs.

As of today Maestral continues to work just fine. I don’t know when these certificates are expiring. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when they do. I might try moving everything from my Dropbox account to iCloud Drive. That certainly seems worth trying before I resort to going back to Dropbox’s own monstrosity of a Mac client.

In theory, because Maestral is open source, someone could fork it and keep it going. But my impression has always been that it was a one-man show from Schott, and if he’s personally no longer using Dropbox, it’s easy to see why he’s lost interest in maintaining Maestral.

So it goes.

Jason Snell Ends His Column, and 28-Year Run, at Macworld ★

Jason Snell, at Macworld:

My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turnaround in terms of products at all. Beyond the release of the iconic “Think Different” ad campaign, there was nothing.

Apple’s survival hung by a thread. Steve Jobs asked everyone to trust him. At Macworld Expo, he had enlisted Bill Gates–Bill Gates, of all people!–to help him instill belief in the world that Apple would find a way to survive.

The world was skeptical, to say the least. My family asked what job I thought I’d get once Apple went out of business. The magazine I had worked at for four years, MacUser, had folded, and some of us had been transferred over to our rival, Macworld, presumably to publish issues until Apple finally gave up the ghost and died. We existed to minimize the loss exposure of our respective publishing companies.

1997 was weird, folks. And that’s how my tenure at Macworld started.