Michael Tsai - Blog
James Heppell (via Hacker News): A week ago today I had the pleasure of attending both the Apple and Google DMA compliance workshops in Brussels. More detailed articles on the questions and answers, technical and legal analysis etc will be published over at the OWA blog, where we’ve just done the first write-up on the […]
I recently got a new SSD on Prime Day to replace one of my main hard drives. As this drive was included in Time Machine, I wanted the SSD to “adopt” the hard drive’s backup history. This way I could avoid recopying lots of data that was already backed up, which would also require pruning […]
William Gallagher: It’s not like it’s going to take you long, since there are just two elements to this: Changing a folder’s colorAdding either an icon or an emoji to the folderIn this case, icons and emoji don’t sound all that different — whichever you choose, you end up with a symbol appearing on the […]
Hartley Charlton: Apple has successfully secured the dismissal of a federal lawsuit accusing it of conspiring with Visa and Mastercard to suppress competition in the payments network industry and inflate merchant transaction fees (via Reuters).[…]The plaintiffs claimed that Visa and Mastercard made ongoing payments to Apple, described as “a very large and ongoing cash bribe,” […]
John Calhoun: It was frankly a thing I liked about working for Apple in those days. The engineers were the one’s driving the ship. As I said, I wrote an HSV picker because it was, I thought, a more intuitive color space for artists. I wrote the HTML color picker because of the advent of […]
John Voorhees: I never expected my game controller obsession to pay automation dividends, but it did last week in the form of the tiny 16-button 8BitDo Micro. For the past week, I’ve used the Micro to dictate on my Mac, interact with AI chatbots, and record and edit podcasts. While the setup won’t replace a […]
Samantha Subin and Kif Leswing (via Hacker News): Nvidia stock rose on Wednesday lifting the company’s market cap briefly past $4 trillion for the first time as investors scooped up shares of the tech giant that’s building the bulk of the hardware for the generative artificial intelligence boom.[…]Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, surpassing […]
Carlo Zottmann: Google offers an OpenAI-compatible API for Gemini, and while working, it is not what Xcode expects in terms of URL layout. In Xcode’s LLM provider config, the custom “URL” parameter is the API’s base URL up to but not including the v1/ path segment, e.g. https://api.openai.com/ instead of the full https://api.openai.com/v1/. When making […]
Mothers Ruin Software: macOS uses many different binary file formats.Some — like binary property lists — have broad tool support and are relatively easy to inspect…Some — like X.509 certificates, configuration and provisioning profiles or App Store receipts — use standard formats, but lack macOS-native inspection tools, or only have command-line tools that can be […]
Apple (MacRumors, 2, Hacker News): Jeff Williams will transition his role as chief operating officer later this month to Sabih Khan, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations, as part of a long-planned succession. Williams will continue reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook and overseeing Apple’s world-class design team and Apple Watch alongside the company’s Health […]
When I went to download the new Xcode beta, I again ran into an annoying Safari behavior, which seems to be specific to Apple’s sites. It pops up an Apple Account sheet offering to sign me in. But it can only sign in with my personal Apple ID, not my developer one. I have to […]
Apple: Removed support for creating new Style Transfer projects. This is the only change that’s noted as being in beta 3. Why can’t Apple write release notes that tell us what’s actually new in this build? Ryan Ashcraft: The Beta 3 SDK adds support for Glass.clear, which looks like the glass material used more commonly […]
Barijaona Ramaholimihaso: After some minor fiddling, I got the initial version of Vienna running on VirtualBox on my retro hack.[…]Founding father of Vienna, Steve contributed mostly from 2004 to 2008, made a short comeback in 2010, and is definitely at the root of Vienna’s ethics: making a clean, spartan, and highly useful app.He almost never […]
Steve Hayman: Apple has spent a ton of money getting AirPods Pro approved by the FDA and other regulators to work as over-the-counter hearing aids, including providing a hearing test app on the iPhone that tweaks the audio profile on the headphones. This feature is available in a whole lot of countries, not yet including […]
Juli Clover: In some apps like Apple Music, Podcasts, and the App Store, Apple has toned down the transparency of the navigation bars. The look is more opaque to make the buttons more legible.[…]Apple added new color options for the default “iOS” wallpaper that it designed for iOS 26 , so now we have Halo, […]
Federico Viticci: How much has Apple really “nerfed” Liquid Glass in the latest beta? Here’s a comparison between iPadOS 26 developer beta 2 (first image) and beta 3. Steve Troughton-Smith: Wow they kinda did the thing? Fullscreen apps on iPadOS work a lot more like fullscreen apps on macOS now — they generate a new […]
Juli Clover (Mr. Macintosh, 9to5Mac): Right now, there is a bit of a bug with the beta that is preventing Apple silicon Macs from being able to download it. Intel Macs can be updated with no issue, but Apple will need to address the server side bug before it will be available to everyone. I […]
Craig Grannell: In beta 2, Apple added an option to restore the menu bar background. Which is good. Except it also makes me question Apple’s confidence in its design work. When Apple starts hedging its bets, it signals that it knows something is wrong, but lacks the conviction to course-correct. Or perhaps such settings are […]
Tor Arne Vestbø: As it turns out, permissions are inherited by child processes. And when a process is about to access some protected resource, the TCC subsystem figure’s out which process is the responsible one, and uses that as basis for requesting and persisting the result.[…]In the case of an application embedding and launching helper […]
OSXDaily: If you have discovered your Mac disk space has reduced since installing or updating to MacOS Sequoia, the inordinately large com.apple.mediaanalysisd cache file issue could be to blame. A variety of Mac users have reported the directory being filled with 15GB+ of data, with some users noting 50 GB, 80 GB, even 140GB of […]
Juli Clover: Apple failed in its attempt to get the antitrust lawsuit that the U.S. Department of Justice filed against it dismissed, reports Reuters. U.S. District Judge Julien Neals, who is overseeing the case, today denied Apple’s motion for dismissal.[…]The DOJ accused Apple of a smartphone monopoly in the United States, citing Apple’s restriction of […]
Joe Rossignol: iOS 26 adds a new Recovery Assistant feature to all compatible iPhones, and it can help return the device to a working state, with no Mac or PC required.[…]According to a Reddit post, Recovery Assistant can help you return an iPhone to a working state with help from another Apple device, such as […]
Nate Parrott: didn’t realize everything in iOS 26 is just a little bigger and way less stuff fits on screen now? Riccardo Mori: Let’s make a fun comparison about information density across various versions of iOS and device screen sizes. In reverse chronological order. Corollary: iOS 26 kinda sucks at information density. Riccardo Mori: [Apple:] […]
Cynthia Brumfield (via Hacker News): After DHS did not renew its funding contract for reasons unspecified, MITRE’s 25-year-old Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program was slated for an abrupt shutdown on April 16, which would have left security flaw tracking in limbo. Gavin D. Howard (via Hacker News): The CVE system has been less good […]
SummerFest: Your inspiration doesn’t come from a factory. Neither does artisanal software. For a limited time, we’re all offering you a great price on great software, right at the workshop door. No ridiculous bundles, no silly gimmicks. Great software, great support, great (but sustainable) prices. […] These are terrific tools for thinking, writing, organizing, and […]
Howard Oakley: If you have old Finder aliases that need to be checked and repaired, Alifix will do that job with you. Use it to scan a folder containing those aliases, and it will warn you which can’t be resolved any longer, and can rewrite those that need to be updated. I’d forgotten about this […]
Matthew Bickham: Magic Lasso Adblock v5.0 now lets you block ads and trackers across all apps on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac — not just in Safari. […] Whether you’re scrolling through social media, playing games, or reading the news (including Apple News), ads are blocked automatically — creating a cleaner, faster experience across your […]
John Sundell: When a type conforms to either EncodableWithConfiguration or DecodableWithConfiguration, it requires an additional configuration value to be passed when either encoding or decoding it (and the compiler will enforce that requirement). […] CodableWithConfiguration is really quite useful when using Swift’s built-in serialization API to encode and decode types that require additional data in […]
Matthew Prince (Hacker News, Slashdot): The problem is whether you create content to sell ads, sell subscriptions, or just to know that people value what you’ve created, an AI-driven web doesn’t reward content creators the way that the old search-driven web did. And that means the deal that Google made to take content in exchange […]
Thomas Claburn (Figma, Hacker News): The company prospectus mentions AI more than 150 times, characterizing it both as a creative accelerant and a potential threat.[…]Back to Figma, whose prospectus says that as of the first three months of 2025 it has 13 million monthly active users.For the year that ended on December 31, 2024, Figma […]
Bryson Thill (via Hacker News): Fakespot’s technology revealed some eye-opening statistics. About 43% of the best-selling Amazon products had reviews that were unreliable or fabricated, according to a study by app company Circuit. The problem was even worse in certain categories. Clothing and jewelry led the pack with a staggering 88% of reviews deemed unreliable.[…]As […]
Joe Rossignol: The first macOS Tahoe developer beta does not support the legacy FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 data-transfer standards, according to @NekoMichi on X, and a Reddit post. As a result, the first few iPod models and old external storage drives that rely on FireWire cannot be synced with or mounted on a Mac […]
Hartley Charlton: The recommendation was issued by the General Superintendence of Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (SG/CADE), the technical body of the federal antitrust authority. In a public statement translated from Portuguese, SG/CADE determined that Apple’s conduct with iOS constitutes a violation of Brazilian competition law and urged CADE’s internal tribunal to impose penalties, […]
Peter Cohen: Confirmed with the family this morning that @mymac founder Tim Robertson passed away after a recent illness.Tim was not just a mainstay of Apple blogging, podcasting and smart analysis for decades, but one of the very nicest people I’ve ever met. Like ATPM, My Mac began in 1995 and was originally published in […]
Krystal Hu (via Hacker News): Grammarly has signed a deal to acquire email efficiency tool Superhuman as part of the company’s push to build an artificial intelligence-powered productivity suite and diversify its business, its executives told Reuters in an interview.The San Francisco-based companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal. Superhuman, once an […]
Craig Hockenberry (Mastodon): From the very beginning, iOS has had a notion of an app being in the foreground or background. When you saw an app on screen it was active and when it was gone it was inactive. […] It was simple system that let you do what you needed to do, when you […]
Proton (PDF): We believe that Apple’s conduct, as detailed in the complaint we filed, constitutes further violations of US antitrust law. Without this case, Apple could get away with behavior in the US that is already outlawed in the European Union. If this were to happen, American consumers, and developers focused on the American market, […]
Adi Robertson: Age verification is perhaps the hottest battleground for online speech, and the Supreme Court just settled a pivotal question: does using it to gate adult content violate the First Amendment in the US? For roughly the past 20 years the answer has been “yes” — now, as of Friday, it’s an unambiguous “no.”Justice […]
Riccardo Mori: I’ve been trying to make sense of Apple’s latest user-interface redesign — Apple calls it Liquid Glass — that will affect all their platforms in the next iteration of their respective OS versions. But it’s hard to make sense of it when, after checking Apple’s own guidance, I’m mostly left with the feeling […]
Zhenyi Tan (via Kyle Howells): A few months ago, I posted this image on Mastodon, because the Apple documentation website sometimes feel… err, underwhelming. Many people have already pointed this out, so I won’t repeat their complaints. When people complain about Apple’s documentation, they often compare it to php.net, saying that php.net has sample code […]
Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors, MacStories, 9to5Mac, AppleInsider, ArsTechnica): Today, we’re introducing updated terms that let developers with apps in the European Union storefronts of the App Store communicate and promote offers for purchase of digital goods or services available at a destination of their choice. The destination can be a website, alternative app marketplace, or […]
Alex Grebenyuk: I’ve been using Claude chats for a while, but tools like Cursor never clicked for me. I just didn’t want to introduce a separate IDE into my workflow, and I didn’t feel they offered enough value for an experienced engineer. That changed with Claude Code.[…]Claude Code is an agentic coding assistant that runs […]
Marcus Mendes: Almost exactly two years after abruptly pulling the plug on its Apple TV app, Vimeo is making a comeback on the platform with a brand-new experience built from the ground up.[…]For longtime users, this update marks a pretty big reversal. Vimeo discontinued its TV apps, including for Apple TV, Android TV, Fire TV, […]
Ron Elemans: News Explorer 2.1 brings support for Bluesky feeds based on the official API, a large collection of Shortcuts actions, sharing to Readwise, and some other useful features and improvements. Previously: News Explorer 2.0
Y Combinator (transcript, slides, via Duncan Davidson, Hacker News): Drawing on his work at Stanford, OpenAI, and Tesla, Andrej [Karpathy] sees a shift underway. Software is changing, again. We’ve entered the era of “Software 3.0,” where natural language becomes the new programming interface and models do the rest.He explores what this shift means for developers, […]
Marcus Mendes: A bipartisan group of senators has reintroduced the 2021 Open App Markets Act, a bill aimed at curbing the gatekeeper power that Apple and Google hold over the so-called “mobile app economy.” Here’s what they’re going for.If passed, the legislation would effectively force Apple and Google (who are not specifically named in the […]
Brian Croll, quoted by John Gruber: Paula was an employee who you are not going to see profiled in any books on the history of Apple or Steve Jobs. She worked closely with the ops team to ensure CDs and then DVDs shipped on time and correctly packaged in a box. She knew all the […]
Joe Rossignol: Apple says that Adaptive Power Mode can make “small performance adjustments” when necessary to extend an iPhone’s battery life, including slightly lowering the display brightness or allowing some activities to “take a little longer.”[…]Adaptive Power Mode is only available on the iPhone 15 Pro models and newer. This is because the AI-powered feature […]
Nick Heer: App icons across Apple’s three most popular operating systems share a similar rounded square mask, and it is a downgrade. Simon B. Støvring correctly calls out the “expressive, varied app icons, a case of character over conformity” as a highlight of past versions of MacOS. I miss detailed and artistic app icons plenty. […]
Apple (download): Added a new setting that dictates how function names are displayed in C++ frames: plugin.cplusplus.display.function-name-format[…]The span property of UTF8View does not support the small string representation in beta 1, and traps for small String instances. A future version of the Swift standard library will lift this restriction.[…]The packaging tool (ba-package) and the mock […]
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