Come On Apple, Take It!

Manton Reece is struggling with Apple’s efforts to publish Inkwell on the App Store. He shared some details about his recent difficult experience, and I hope he will reveal more once the app is available.

The state of the App Store is astonishing, in a bad way. I recently spent a few minutes browsing the Mac App Store to find an iPhone app and check its compatibility on a Mac. The number of poorly made apps is incredible. It appears Apple no longer recognizes when an app is genuinely well-designed and serves a real purpose.

I use the TestFlight version of Inkwell every day.

Feeling Tired of Apple Keynote?

Since I started making YouTube videos, I’ve used Apple Keynote to design all my thumbnails because I found it approachable, easy to work with, and capable of helping me quickly create acceptable designs. However, this morning I feel that my approach needs reevaluation. I briefly tried Canva, but the free version is too restrictive, and I dislike software with constant subscription prompts, as if I’m using a demo. I also thought about Acorn, but it never really resonated with me. For now, I plan to stick with Keynote unless someone suggests a better alternative I haven’t considered.

App host Vercel says it was hacked and customer data stolen — TechCrunch

Vercel said the hack may affect “hundreds of users across many organizations,” and not just its own system, warning of potential downstream breaches spanning the tech industry.

All my web apps are hosted on Vercel. I got an email this morning to tell me my account wasn’t impacted by the data leak. Should I trust this statement? One thing that blows my mind: how on earth such a serious company don’t have a more restrictive policy as to what employees can download and test?

After several years of loyal service, I finally closed my Mailbrew account. This service was sold by its creators a few years ago, and since then, development had completely stopped. It’s a shame because when Mailbrew first appeared, it was an innovative idea that filled a niche for news and reading enthusiasts. I’ve moved on to something else. My reading workflow evolved around RSS and using the best client for the task.

Gemini App for Mac:

Gus Mueller:

Took a peak at it and … it contains 1,856 Objective-C classes whose class name starts with Java. What in the world are they doing? So I had Gemini analyze Gemini. Looks like there’s a lot of shared Android code in there, but compiled to Objective-C and Swift.

Better consider that 95% of new apps these days aren’t native to the platform.

Business Insider Profiles Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s ‘CEO of Applications’:

People stay on Facebook and Instagram even as the experiences worsen because everyone they know is also still on those apps. There’s no network effect like that for ChatGPT. Claude is already rising to near-equal status in popularity, and Gemini isn’t far behind, and Simo hasn’t even started enshittifying ChatGPT yet. People will just switch.

I don’t use my Facebook account, Messenger, yes, because of others who refuse to let go and don’t understand alternatives. I already switched to Claude. I couldn’t be happier. I didn’t have to wait for the obvious to come.

Successful products — Manuel Moreale

A product being popular is an indication of a lot of people using it. Doesn’t necessarily mean that the product is good. Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s successful.

Exhibit A: all Microsoft 365 products, which contain so many paper cuts.

Micro.blog News:

Added new “OPML Sync…” button on Account for Inkwell users. This lets you set an external OPML file (for example from FeedLand or another feed platform) that Inkwell will automatically import feeds from.

Oh, cool! I updated my RSS reader to generate such a consumable file, making it the single source of truth.

Untitled — Manton Reece

NetNewsWire via AppleScript via MCP… I wonder what the future of scriptability is. We’ve got AppleScript, Shortcuts, App Intents, and MCP. But meanwhile you have agents which are fine just firing up command-line tools.

One day, I would argue that most apps will come with their MCP endpoint.