Brent Simmons’s linkblog
From open web champion Manton Reece comes a new RSS reader Inkwell:
Inkwell is built around three main tabs: Today, Recent, and Fading. Today is for the latest blog posts. Recent is for posts yesterday or the day before. And Fading is for posts up to a week old. After a week, posts fade out of Inkwell, so you’ll never be overwhelmed with unread posts. If you missed them, it’s okay.
It already syncs with Unread and we’d like to add Inkwell syncing for NetNewsWire too.
Congratulations, Manton! 🎉🎩
Jeff Johnson notes that different types of windows on macOS Tahoe have different corner radiuses.
If this isn’t the stupidest user interface “feature” ever invented, I don’t know what is. The Mac used to be famous for consistency; now it’s becoming infamous for inconsistency.
Gazette by Colin Weir is
a lightweight Gmail-to-RSS bridge designed specifically for reading newsletters in standard RSS readers (like NetNewsWire, Reeder, or FreshRSS). It polls your Gmail for newsletters, strips out the tracking scripts and complex CSS, and serves them as a clean, readable feed.
Marcin Wichary reminds us, in “Our programs are fun to use”, of the great Beagle Bros, the inspiration for so many indie app developers — of indies who went on to inspire other indies. Without their leadership by example the indie app world would be smaller and far less colorful.
I didn’t have a new or new-to-me RSS reader to link to today — so consider this your periodic reminder about how awesome Unread is. 🎸
FeedCity by Daniel Pietzsch says that it’s “Your feed reader for a stress-free way to follow websites. Encouraging exploration and sharing.”
In the launch announcement from May 2025, Daniel writes:
The main reason for adding yet another feed reader to the already huge pile, is that I couldn’t find an existing one with the features I’d like to have. Here’s how FeedCity is different, I believe:
- No unread count.
- Making feeds visible.
- Feed exploration and management.
- Lists: Following sites without a subscription.
- Sharing & discovery: create public lists to share with others.
- Openness.
This is more evidence that we’re seeing growth in number of RSS readers and we’re seeing different approaches and different emphases. This one is not just no-unread-counts but also social, with outbound RSS. Very cool!
Jake Spurlock writes of his new RSS reader in Today Comes to the Mac:
Today on Mac uses a three-column layout: your feeds in the sidebar, articles in the middle, and the full article on the right. It’s the kind of layout that just makes sense when you have the screen real estate, and it makes triaging a busy morning of feeds feel effortless.
I note that it includes (local) AI summaries of articles, which is a feature we don’t have in NetNewsWire. It’s an interesting one — some people are very eager to see us add that feature, and there are other people who would abandon the app entirely the second we add any AI feature, no matter if optional and unobtrusive.
But that’s a side note — Today looks very cool! Congratulations to Jake on shipping the Mac app!
Terry Godier announces his new RSS reader Current:
The impulse was simpler than a philosophy: every RSS reader I tried made me feel bad. Not because the apps were ugly or broken (most were quite good) but because they all seemed to agree on something I didn’t. That reading the internet was a task.
The UI of Current is based on that premise — and it joins a small but awesome number of RSS readers that are doing something besides the usual (see Tapestry and Feedland for other great examples).
Because RSS is an open protocol, and because there are so many different possible ways to follow and read the news, RSS readers ought to be a UI playground in the way Twitter clients once were, where innovation and experimentation are normal and celebrated.
From the author of one of the oldest RSS readers to the author of one of the newest: Cheers! And thank you, and keep making things new.
If you use NetNewsWire you know Maurice Parker’s work — so much of NetNewsWire, from Feedbin and iCloud syncing to the iOS app itself, was written by him. He’s up to version 4.0 of his cool outliner app Zavala and he writes on his blog about the decisions and tradeoffs that went into it. (I love this kind of thing. Every developer should write like this after shipping a major release. Me too.)
One of the questions Apple-ecosystem developers all have to wrestle this these days is how to handle Liquid Glass. Maurice:
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to have a Liquid Glass version of your interface along side the legacy look and feel of previous OS versions. This is because you have to update to the latest API’s to correctly use Liquid Glass and some things, like the spacing of elements have been changed. Basically to keep backwards compatibility for OS’s before the version 26 ones, you need to maintain two different versions of the user interface code.
So I made the difficult decision drop support for previous versions of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
I know what that decision is like, and I know Maurice is understating it a lot when he calls it difficult.
Joe Heck writes, in Navigation Notes – Agentic coding:
The latest “frontier” models are north of 1.2 trillion parameters today, maybe bigger… Even with the breadth of data, it can only predict patterns that it’s seen before. The generalization jump at 100 billion parameters means that it can start to apply patterns it’s seen in one place to another, but it still has to have seen it somewhere.
Joe’s explanations and details are good and helpful to me — there’s so much I don’t know. But I think we all need to know and understand this stuff, whether we’re LLM users or not.
It is deeply annoying that this is such a huge topic right now. There’s a ton of other stuff going on and I don’t want to have to deal with this too. But we don’t have a choice.
Sure, it’s been a while, but why not bring back the ol’ linkblog. 🐣🐥
I gave it a design very much inspired by what it used to look like in the mid-2000s — the idea was to make it look like I just started posting to it again. Easy as that.
The new/old design uses gradients. And Verdana! Love Verdana.
Ranchero Software doesn’t have a new app — but Ranchero Software’s sister company Q Branch released Vesper. For iPhone.
So I can simplify things for myself and make it more likely I’ll actually post to my weblog, I’ve decided to put this weblog on hiatus and post everything on inessential.com.
That little bit of friction — answering the question of which weblog to post to — was enough to make posting seem like too much of a chore. So now I don’t have to answer that question.
Hopefully that means I’ll post more often. I’d like to.
Click on the picture of the FAMOUS BAND FROM THE NINETEEN-SIXTIES.
Today’s a day you’re never going to forget, ever.
Or, well, okay, maybe that’s not quite true — but maybe you’ll save some money, which is cool, too.
360 MacDev is the last Mac conference before the Mac App Store — and you can get 25% off. Details on my weblog.
Somehow I missed this news last week (and maybe you've already seen it) — my friend Patrick Burleson (BitBQ head bit-barbecuer) released QueueUp (iTunes link) on the App Store.
It's an app for quickly adding a movie to your Netflix queue. That's what it does.
I'm not a Netflix subscriber — but, if I was, I'd get this app right away. I love iPhone apps like this, that do a thing, that make it easy to not procrastinate and forget — and that make it fun.
Riverfold Software — my friend Manton Reece — just released Tweet Library (iTunes link) on the iPad.
It's another Twitter client, yes — but it does a bunch that the other ones don't. It archives your tweets and provides filters and collections. Is Twitter important to you? You may need this.
There's a website that talks more about it — with screenshots and an intro video.
One of the cooler features: you can publish a collection of tweets to tweetlibrary.com. Lately I've been thinking about web-based features like that for my own software — so it will be interesting to watch tweetlibrary.com and see how it goes.
Congrats, Manton!
TouchUp (iTunes link) is a gorgeous new photo editing app from my friends at RogueSheep. Introductory price is 40% off, just $2.99.
I love it. Totally fun app. I had seen betas, but hadn't had the chance to use it much until just today. I'm impressed by their work, as usual — the attention to detail, to the sense of fun and delight, and to the generosity. The app even comes with screencast tutorials!
Before they released it, I figured the app would be $20 or $30. It's worth it. (And part of me wishes they had priced it like that, but I don't pretend to know their market they way they do, and so of course I respect their decision.) In other words — for $2.99, sheesh, just buy it.
Buy it even if you don't have a big need for a photo editor on your iPad. If you're an iPad developer, think of this is a tutorial app, like Postage (also from Rogue Sheep) — there's a lot to learn from this app, and I'm actually going to sit down with it and take some notes.
In RogueSheep's recent post on Scholarly Shepherding, Chris talks about the UW Extension course on Cocoa. Though I'm not one of the teachers, I'm on the board — and I'm hugely proud of the teachers and students and folks at UW who made the first year such a success. Year two is starting soon, and there are still slots open for the eastside class. (Westside is on waiting list.)
Chris also mentions Jake Carter's HTML5 class. (Jake also does a lot of work on the UW class.) While I knew this was coming up, I didn't know it was a free online-video course from O'Reilly.
I signed up!
As developers we know that the more well-understood tools we have in our tool belt, the better craftsmen we are.
But the technology world is always uncertain — which tools should I learn? Which languages, which frameworks? How do I stay current? What would be most useful?
You might have trouble picking between SproutCore and Cappuccino, say, or Cocoa and the Android SDK.
But one thing is a no-brainer: you need to know HTML. And HTML5 is the new one, and Jake'll teach it to you. (And it's free.)
I've very much enjoyed the previous 360 iPhone conferences — and the first 360 Mac conference is coming up this December. There's a call for papers — I'll be there, and I'd love to see a great line-up.
One thing that excites me about this is that the Mac doesn't have the restrictions that iOS development has. The Mac is the playground. It's where we get to have fun, where we get to try things, where things like JSTalk and MacRuby appear.
The anarchist in me remains enamoured of the Mac platform, more so than ever, and I'm super-excited for the future of Mac software. The conference could reflect that — with your help.