I’m unsure who Substack writers aim to reach. In my view, Substack might be the most anti-reader platform I’ve ever seen, even more so than Medium, which is in itself very telling. Today, I wanted to read an article on Substack after following a link in an email from my inbox, but my app wasn’t installed on my iPhone. After reinstalling it, I tried to open the link again, but it didn’t work. I had to log back in, apparently, which I did. The next step? Reading the article? Not quite—now it asks for topics of interest, then requests access to my Contacts. I stopped there, killed and removed the app from my phone and never read that article. Instead, I’m here to vent my frustration.

MacRumors’s article “Anthropic’s New Claude Opus 5 Nearly Matches Flagship Fable 5 at Half the Cost”:

Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5, an upgraded AI model that delivers near-Fable 5 performance at half the cost and is optimized for everyday use. The new model shows significant improvements over its predecessor (Opus 4.8) across multiple benchmarks including coding, problem-solving, and visual outputs, while maintaining the same pricing structure. Opus 5 is now available as the default model on Claude Max and the strongest option on Claude Pro, with an optional faster mode available at double the cost.

It’s fascinating to watch AI companies release their new offerings. It’s all over the place if you compare that to the way Apple releases their flagship products like the iPhone. “Ship it as soon as it’s ready” seems to be the way to go.

From the DF Archive: ‘Electron and the Decline of Native Apps’:

The ironic frustration with Anthropic’s Claude app being an Electron turd is that Claude and especially Claude Code are so capable of helping to create good native Mac apps. It’s one thing for a big company or organization with cross-platform aspirations but no institutional Mac expertise, like Notion or Slack or Discord, to choose Electron to create their Mac client. It’s another when it’s a company like Anthropic, whose only product’s single most impressive ability is generating programming code, including high-quality AppKit and SwiftUI code for the Mac. To return to my hammering-screws-into-the-walls metaphor from yesterday, it’s as though the building into which Anthropic decided to hammer all the screws is a renowned screwdriver factory.

Bingo.

Back home. Rebooted my Mac because of an issue with macOS 27 Golden Gate. Got this warning. Oh well, I didn’t use Atlas anyway. I’m not even sure if Atlas is on OpenAI roadmap for the long run.

I use Inkwell quite often and I like it. While on vacation, I tend to spend less time reading my RSS feeds so my unread count goes up quite a bit. How do I catch up efficiently? I stop for a small reading session, I switch to Inkwell and use the Today tab but also the Recent tab which is super useful to see what I have missed. In extreme case of disconnection, the Fading tab comes to the rescue. If you’re an RSS feeds junkie, you should consider trying Inkwell.

At my job, I spend most of my time on Microsoft 365 office products, especially Teams and Outlook. I spend a lot of time preparing meetings, sometimes with 15 or 20 participants. I don’t understand why Microsoft hasn’t invested in tools to help plan these meetings.

For example: I need to prepare a meeting with 15 participants; if the 4 or 5 must-have participants are available, those time slots should be clearly highlighted to make it easier to spot the best time to schedule the meeting. But that’s not what happens. Although some participants are mandatory, they don’t all carry the same weight.

I wish Microsoft would improve this aspect of their products; in fact, I wish they would show more empathy in their functional design. I feel like today’s Outlook is very similar to the one from ten years ago.

When reading about SwiftUI and how it leads to less than optimal Mac apps, I’m not convinced that rewriting Notion in SwiftUI is a good idea. Why not use Catalyst instead? Craft is a great example of a Catalyst-based app.

I think the time to upgrade to a beefier Mac is coming… maybe this fall. Even if it’s a native Mac app, I think I prefer my custom-built Microblog Poster web app. Now, returning to normal programming.