Latest posts
- ★ David Pierce Tried a Bunch of Android Phones and Then Bought an iPhone AgainApr 15, 2026John Gruber
David Pierce, writing at The Verge (gift link): The Pixel 10 Pro solidified a feeling I’d been having through all of my tests: Android is a better operating system than iOS. [...] If all you got from your phone was the out-of-the-box experience, I’d have picked the Pixel. But unfortunately for Android, app stores exist. And the App Store absolutely wipes the floor with the Play Store. Lots of the
- Screen Zooming on iOSApr 15, 2026John Gruber
Steven Troughton-Smith: If you want to pixel-peep on iOS or iPadOS, it also has the Zoom accessibility setting, and can be controlled via touch, keyboard, or trackpad. It works for display mirroring too, and has other options like a minimap and HUD (‘Zoom Controller’). These settings are in Settings → Accessibility → Zoom. I prefer switching the Zoom Region from the default Window Zoom (which give
- Fraudulent Cryptocurrency App in Mac App Store Stole $9.5 Million From 50-Some UsersApr 14, 2026John Gruber
Molly White, at Web3 Is Going Just Great: After a fake version of the Ledger cryptocurrency wallet app made it onto the normally highly curated Apple App store, customers lost $9.5 million dollars to the malicious product. Believing it was a genuine Ledger product, people entered their seed phrases into the app, then discovered their wallets were immediately drained. One victim, a musician who goe
- On the Name of Apple’s Foldable iPhoneApr 14, 2026John Gruber
Tim Hardwick, last week at MacRumors: Apple’s first foldable iPhone may not carry the speculative media-derived “Fold” branding after all, according to Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station. In a new post on Weibo, the oft-accurate leaker claimed that Apple’s book-style foldable could launch as the “iPhone Ultra.” Meanwhile, domestic Chinese manufacturers are allegedly deciding whether to follow App
- Speaking of TipsApr 14, 2026John Gruber
The Houston Chronicle: Kristin Tips, the longtime presiding officer of the embattled Texas Funeral Service Commission, is no longer on the board. “Governor Abbott appreciates Kristin Tips’ service,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, said in an email Tuesday. “An announcement on a replacement will be made at a later date.” [...] Tips, who has run San Antonio’s prestigious Mission Park Fun
- Apple Has Hidden the Pre-Creator-Studio Versions of Keynote, Numbers, and Pages in the Mac App StoreApr 14, 2026John Gruber
Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac: On the iPhone and iPad, Apple made the new Creator Studio features available as updates to the existing App Store releases. On the Mac though, the rollout was a lot more confusing. Apple kept the old iWork apps for Mac available on the App Store and launched entirely separate iWork versions with the Creator Studio features. Starting today, though, that oddity is no more.
- Google Will Finally Begin Punishing Sites for Back-Button Hijacking in JuneApr 14, 2026John Gruber
Google, on their Search Central Blog: Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions. What is back button hijacking? Why are we taking action? Good for Google to penalize sites playing such dirty tricks, but, if they b
- Amazon to Acquire Globalstar, Announces Agreement With Apple to Continue Service for iPhone and Apple WatchApr 14, 2026John Gruber
Amazon: Today Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add direct-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite network and extend cellular coverage to customers beyond the reach of terrestrial networks. In addition, Amazon and Apple announced an agreement
- John Calhoun on Steve LemayApr 14, 2026John Gruber
Speaking of John Calhoun, he chimed in on a Hacker News thread last month regarding his experience working with Steve Lemay at Apple: I think Steve Lemay is a good guy. I kind of fought with him when I was an engineer, he was a young, new designer (at Apple). But I always respected his point of view — even when we argued. When Jobs came back to Apple in the latter 1990’s “Design” slowly came to ha
- Richard Moss’s 2010 Interview With John Calhoun on the Origins of GliderApr 14, 2026John Gruber
Richard Moss, back in 2010: John Calhoun’s Glider games hold a special place in the history of Mac gaming, acting almost as an icon of the platform through much of the 1990s. They spawned a hugely dedicated fan base, which produced a ridiculous amount of original content both for and about Glider — especially Glider 4 and Glider PRO, the later versions. I caught up with Calhoun over email recently
- Glider Is Back in the Mac App StoreApr 14, 2026John Gruber
John Calhoun, on Bluesky (and also a new blog): I re-made Glider some years back for MacOS/iOS. It broke at some point (perhaps an Apple change for Retina displays?) so I pulled it from the App Store. (Claude looked at the code — found some minor coordinate issues. Thanks!) Glider Classic for MacOS is back on. 11 years between version 1.0.4 and yesterday’s 1.1 looks like a long time. But when you
- Steven Soderbergh Twice Pitched James Bond ProjectsApr 14, 2026John Gruber
The Playlist: The first pitch, he said, goes back to 2008, and it was already pretty radical by Bond standards. “I had pitched in 2008 the idea to Barbara Broccoli of a parallel franchise,” Soderbergh said. “Set in the ’60s, R-rated, violent, sexy. Fictional backstory to real historical events, different actor, different universe.” [...] That version was designed to open up a different, more lo-fi
- Apple Frames 4Apr 13, 2026John Gruber
Federico Viticci: Today, I’m very happy to introduce Apple Frames 4, a major update to my shortcut for framing screenshots taken on Apple devices with official Apple product bezels. Apple Frames 4 is a complete rethinking of the shortcut that is noticeably faster, updated to support all the latest Apple devices, and designed to support even more personalization options. For the first time ever, Ap
- Memory, They Say, Is the First Thing to GoApr 13, 2026John Gruber
Welp, turns out I wrote an entire post about the Control-scroll zoom-in-and-out feature all the way back in 2006, when it was a new feature in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Somehow, between 2006 and last year, I completely forgot about it. I don’t think it helps that the settings moved from the Mouse panel to the Zoom sub-section inside Accessibility. But I’ve used it so much in the last year, since redisc
- [Sponsor] WorkOS FGA: The Authorization Layer for AI AgentsApr 13, 2026Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius. The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features.They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permiss
- Tahoe Nitpick of the Day: ‘Reduce Transparency’ Makes Layers Harder to See, Not EasierApr 13, 2026John Gruber
Tuomas Hämäläinen, on Mastodon: We’re at Mac OS 26.4 and seems like the accessibility toggles should be way more considered than they are. Here’s a comparison between “Reduce transparency” off and on. How does it make sense that turning this setting on actually reduces contrast between the background and the UI elements? Buttons and sidebars get this grey cast, which makes them almost blend in wit
- John Martellaro, RIPApr 13, 2026John Gruber
Bryan Chaffin, two weeks ago: John Martellaro was good man. He was not only a better man than me, he was one of the best people I knew. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you Mr. Martellaro passed away today. He rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and he was a NASA scientist. He worked for years at Apple, and most importantly to me, he was a columnist and the voice of reason and h
- Marcin Wichary Visits the Large Scale Systems MuseumApr 13, 2026John Gruber
I’d never before heard of this museum, but now that I’ve seen Wichary’s photos, I want to go. Unsurprisingly, a lot of his shots are details of vintage keyboards. I keep pausing on this one, a “RE-START” key with the word broken across two lines. It’s clearly wrong but somehow feels right. I’m linking to his album at Flickr, but he posted a long thread of images to Mastodon too. ★
- MacOS Tip: Enable the Zoom ‘Peek’ GestureApr 13, 2026John Gruber
Marcin Wichary, at Unsung: Go to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.” Then, at any moment, you can hold Control and swipe with two fingers (or use a scroll wheel) up or down to zoom the entire screen. I’d also recommend turning off “Smooth images” under “Advanced…” so you see individual pixels better. This is one of the very best MacOS
- FT: ‘Meta Builds AI Version of Mark Zuckerberg to Interact With Staff’Apr 13, 2026John Gruber
Hannah Murphy, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, but Ars Technica has a no-paywall syndicated copy): The company recently began prioritising a Zuckerberg AI character, three of the people said. The Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing his animated AI, which could offer conversation and feedback to employees, according to one person. They added that the character is
- Zed — A Font SuperfamilyApr 12, 2026John Gruber
My thanks to Typotheque for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Zed, their incredible new font superfamily. Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the widest possible range of readers. Typotheque tested Zed with visually impaired patients at a French ophthalmology hospital and fo
- Viktor Orban Loses Election in Hungary, Concedes Defeat, Congratulates Opposition WinnersApr 12, 2026John Gruber
The New York Times: In a surprisingly early and gracious concession speech in Budapest, Mr. Orban congratulated the opposition saying, “The responsibility and opportunity to govern were not given to us.” But, he also made a vow: “We are not giving up. Never, never, never.” His defeat paves the way for Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist and the leader of the main opposition party, to take over a
- Golden TicketsApr 12, 2026John Gruber
More vintage graphic-design weekend fun — this time, a collection of Milwaukee bus tickets from the late 1940s to early 1950s, collected on the Present & Correct blog. So much variety in the colors and typography, but yet they all feel branded together. Think about the care and thought here. Whoever was making these was designing one for each week, every week — and it’s so clear they loved making
- Pan American Luggage LabelsApr 11, 2026John Gruber
Some graphic design fun for the weekend: achingly gorgeous art pieces recreating vintage Pan Am luggage tags, by Ella Freire. I love them all. The colors, the type, the shapes — sublime. (Via Dan Cederholm’s Studio Notes.) ★
- ★ Let Us Learn to Show Our Friendship for a Man When He Is Alive and Not After He Is DeadApr 10, 2026John Gruber
For The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz go deep profiling Sam Altman under the mince-no-words headline “Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted?” 16,000+ words — roughly one-third the length of The Great Gatsby — very specifically investigating Altman’s trustworthiness, particularly the details surrounding his still-hard-to-believe ouster by the OpenAI board in late 2023,
- Ed Bindels’s Apple Museum in Utrecht, NetherlandsApr 10, 2026John Gruber
This new museum in Utrecht (about 30–40 minutes south of Amsterdam) seems just astonishing. The rainbow wall of iMacs alone is incredible. (Via Juli Clover.) ★
- MacOS Seemingly Crashes After 49 Days of Uptime — a ‘Feature’ Perhaps Exclusive to TahoeApr 09, 2026John Gruber
Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major bug: Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) kee
- Adobe Diddles With Your /etc/hosts FileApr 09, 2026John Gruber
“thenickdude”, on Reddit: They’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed when you visit on their website. When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript: https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png If the DNS entry in your hosts file is present, your browser will therefore connect to their server, so they know you have Creative Clo
- Lickspittle of the Week: Todd BlancheApr 09, 2026John Gruber
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking of the president of the United States in a totally normal way: I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime. And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I’ll say, “Thank you very much, I love you, sir.” The phrase Blanche was looking for is “Thank you sir, may I have anothe
- Anthropic’s New Claude Mythos Is So Good at Finding and Exploiting Vulnerabilities That They’re Not Releasing It to the PublicApr 08, 2026John Gruber
Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team: Earlier today we announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new general-purpose language model. This model performs strongly across the board, but it is strikingly capable at computer security tasks. In response, we have launched Project Glasswing, an effort to use Mythos Preview to help secure the world’s most critical software, and to prepare the industry for the practices
- Solar Eclipse From the Far Side of the MoonApr 07, 2026John Gruber
Kottke: This shot from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun is one of the most breathtaking astronomical photos I’ve ever seen. Holy shit. Follow NASA on Flickr for more. Update: In a follow-up post, Kottke has assembled a slew of great iPhone wallpapers from Artemis II photos, along with links to other collections, like Basic Apple Guy’s. Also, The Iconfactory has added a bunch of these image
- Sam Altman, in a Video Released by OpenAI, Apparently Thinks AGI Is Going to Hit Society Like a Once-a-Century PandemicApr 07, 2026John Gruber
Not sure why they think this comparison is reassuring rather than terrifying. I also have to say that Altman’s claims, today, that OpenAI employees were obsessed with COVID weeks ahead of the rest of the world feels more than a little like Donald Trump’s repeated false claim that he predicted, pre-9/11, that Osama bin Laden would attack the U.S. ★
- ★ OpenAI Announces $122 Billion Additional ‘Committed Capital’, and Announces Their ‘Superapp’ Plan for the FutureApr 07, 2026John Gruber
OpenAI, one week ago, in an unbylined post on the company blog: Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion. For comparison, here are the current market caps and 2025 annual profits for public companies in that valuation range: .table-6BC6F0DB-597A-48A9-8793-B6C02805510C th:nth-child(1) { text-align: left } .table-6BC
- Om Malik and Ben Thompson on OpenAI Buying TBPNApr 07, 2026John Gruber
Om Malik: “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, which means truth in Russian. “The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company. We’re drivi
- Flighty Airports Meltdown MapApr 07, 2026John Gruber
Live data with major airport delay times for North America. Available on the web — with a nice “TV Mode” too — and, of course, within the app. ★
- The Data Drop: Every iPhoneApr 07, 2026John Gruber
Just lovely data visualization work from Sheets.works — a consulting firm that specializes in, I swear, Google Sheets. ★
- [Sponsor] Zed, a Font SuperfamilyApr 06, 2026Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the widest possible range of readers. We tested Zed with visually impaired patients at a French ophthalmology hospital and found that Zed Text outperformed Helvetica in terms of reading speed across all patient groups. Designed from scratch to
- Anthropic Accidentally Leaked the Entire Claude Code CLI Source CodeApr 06, 2026John Gruber
Samual Axon, reporting last week for Ars Technica: Early this morning, Anthropic published version 2.1.88 of Claude Code npm package — but it was quickly discovered that package included a source map file, which could be used to access the entirety of Claude Code’s source — almost 2,000 TypeScript files and more than 512,000 lines of code. Security researcher Chaofan Shou was the first to publicly
- Little Finder Guy Stars in Nine New Videos on TikTok and YouTubeApr 06, 2026John Gruber
Juli Clover, at MacRumors: Apple has shared nine Little Finder Guy videos this week, and on TikTok, the thumbnails for the videos come together to make a Little Finder Guy mosaic on the Apple TikTok page. I hope this doesn’t jinx the negotiations, but I’m working on getting Little Finder Guy as my guest for The Talk Show Live From WWDC this June. ★
- An Easter Morning Message of Hope From the Winner of the FIFA Peace PrizeApr 05, 2026John Gruber
Donald Trump, sitting president of the United States, on his blog: Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP The Iranian embassy in Japan, quoting Trump: This low level of civility and intelligen
- Material SecurityApr 05, 2026John Gruber
My thanks to Material Security for sponsoring this week at DF. Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time job. Material Security unifies your cloud workspace, bringing detection and response for email, files, and accounts into one place. It’s security tha
- Sponsorship Openings for Daring FireballApr 05, 2026John Gruber
Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the very end of July. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. After that, the next opening remains the week starting July 27. If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality a
- iOS 26 Feels Faster Than iOS 18Apr 05, 2026John Gruber
One more follow-up point after I spent two days using an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone. At some point late in the iOS 26 beta cycle last summer, it became obvious that Apple had sped up a bunch of system-level animations. Prime example: the animation when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to go back to the Home Screen. People noticed. But it hasn’t gotten a lot of atte
- Class Action Lawsuit Says Perplexity’s ‘Incognito Mode’ Is a ‘Sham’Apr 05, 2026John Gruber
Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica: Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse for non-subscribed users, the complaint alleged. Their initial prompts are shared with “a URL through which the entire conversation may be accessed by third par
- Apple Releases iOS 18 Security Updates for iOS 26 HoldoutsApr 03, 2026John Gruber
Jason Snell: Last December I complained that Apple was withholding iOS 18 security updates from iPhones capable of running iOS 26, leaving users who didn’t want to upgrade to Apple’s latest OS version yet in some security peril. Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news: As of Wednesday April 1, Apple is pushing out iOS 18.7.7 to all devices running iOS 18. This update, released last mont
- ★ David Pogue’s ‘Apple: The First 50 Years’Apr 02, 2026John Gruber
Pogue was my guest on The Talk Show a few weeks ago to talk about his new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, and the show was a lot of fun. But the book is so good, so comprehensive, so fun that it feels essential to link to it whilst we celebrate Apple’s 50th year. I’m a print guy, generally, but the print edition of this book is especially good — it’s a gorgeous book printed in full color througho
- ★ Apple Giveth, Apple Taketh AwayMar 27, 2026John Gruber
The Good News First Just this week I wrote about a hidden defaults preference you can set to turn off most of the insipid menu item icons in most of Apple’s first-party apps in MacOS 26 Tahoe. I bemoaned the fact that Safari — generally an exemplar of what makes a great Mac app a great Mac app — generally ignored this setting, leaving most of its menu item icons in place. I am delighted to report
- ★ What to Do About Those Menu Item Icons in MacOS 26 TahoeMar 24, 2026John Gruber
Steven Troughton-Smith, over the weekend: Here’s one for the icons-in-menus haters on macOS Tahoe: defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO It even preserves the couple of instances you do want icons, like for window zoom/resize. You do not need to restart or log out after applying this setting, but you will need to quit and relaunch any apps that are currently running for it to take e