Mr. Liss Goes to Memphis ⇢

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For the second year in a row, Casey Liss joined us for the Podcastathon. He just published an amazing piece about the show and his time at St. Jude:

This was my fourth time in Memphis; it’s staring to feel — to a degree — like a home away from home. Having been on campus several times now, not a ton about St. Jude surprises me. I’ve known for many years that St. Jude is dedicated wholly and completely to curing childhood cancer. ALSAC — St. Jude’s fundraising arm — is dedicated wholly and completely to funding that mission.

What struck me this year — as I toured the Domino’s Village, as I worked with the incredible team at ALSAC, as I spoke with people on the far periphery of the Podcastathon — is that everyone gives a crap. Top-to-bottom. Inside-and-out. They really give a crap. About everything they touch.

This really crystallized in me as I toured Domino’s Village. Domino’s Village is longer-term housing right on campus at St. Jude. It gives patients and their families a home base for their time in Memphis. And it isn’t just one-bedroom apartments. Cancer affects an entire family, not just the patient. Often, that means patients, caregivers, and even siblings are making Memphis their home, for months at a time. Domino’s Village has two- and three-bedroom apartments for exactly this reason. They’re beautiful, and nicely furnished.

But it doesn’t end there.

My Interview with Coding in Public ⇢

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Chris Pennington over at Coding in Public has been running a community fundraiser with Relay for St. Jude for a few years, and yesterday, we sat down to talk about my St. Jude story, and how the hospital is serving sick kids — and their families — around the world.

Speaking for our St. Jude fundraiser, we have passed $540,000 raised this year, and there are several days to go! I would love to have you join us in giving families facing childhood cancer more tomorrows.

Federal Goverment Partners with xAI

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Amrith Ramkumar at The Wall Street Journal (Apple News), writing about a new partnership between the Trump administration and his on-again, off-again bestie Elon Musk:

Under the agreement with the General Services Administration, which oversees technology procurement for the federal government, agencies will get access to models such as Grok 4 and a new fast version called Grok 4 Fast for a nominal fee of 42 cents, the GSA said in a news release Thursday.

The deal follows similar arrangements with Alphabet’s Google; the ChatGPT maker, OpenAI; and Anthropic, a model developer that has clashed with the White House. The arrangement means the government is now working with the four U.S. companies making the most-advanced AI systems. OpenAI and Anthropic agreed to provide their models for $1, while Google is charging 47 cents. Musk likes the number 42 because it is a reference to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the sci-fi novel.

Hayden Field reported on this for The Verge a couple of weeks ago, recapping just some of the controversies around xAI:

The height of Grok’s power, up to now, has been posting answers to users’ queries on X. But even in this relatively limited capacity, it’s racked up a remarkable number of controversies, often resulting from patchwork tweaks and fixed with patchwork solutions. In February, the chatbot temporarily blocked results that mention Musk or President Trump spreading misinformation. In May, it briefly went viral for constant tirades about “white genocide” in South Africa. In July, it developed a habit of searching for Musk’s opinion on hot-button topics like Israel and Palestine, immigration, and abortion before responding to questions about them. And most infamously, last month it went on an antisemitic bender — spreading stereotypes about Jewish people, praising Adolf Hitler and even going so far as to call itself “MechaHitler.”

Musk responded publicly to say the company was addressing the issue and that it happened because Grok was “too compliant to user prompts. Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially.” But the incident happened a few weeks after Musk expressed frustration that Grok was “parroting legacy media” and asked X users to contribute “divisive facts for Grok training” that were “politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true,” and a few days after a new system prompt gave Grok instructions to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased” and “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect.” Following the debacle, the prompts were tweaked to scale back Grok’s aggressive endorsement of fringe viewpoints.

The whack-a-mole approach to Grok’s guardrails concerns experts in the field, who say it’s hard enough to keep an AI system from veering into harmful behavior even when it’s designed intentionally, with some measure of safety in mind from the beginning. And if you don’t do that… then all bets are off.

The A19 Pro ⇢

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Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

One of the first things I did when I got the new iPhones into Six Colors global HQ was to get the iPhone 17 Pro Max up and running and run Geekbench 6. (I know there are a lot of Geekbench scores out there, but I like to run my own, just because.) Because I’m curious about the pace of Apple silicon innovation.

The A19 Pro chip in the iPhone 17 Pro is presumably using the next generation of CPU and GPU cores that will also appear later this year or early next year in the M5 processor, as well. So it’s not just a view into how the chips have progressed for the iPhone, but also an indication about where gains will be made in the next generation of Macs.

According to his charts, the future looks very exciting.

‘Benjamin Button Reviews macOS’ ⇢

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Rakhim Davletkali has written a delightful blog post, reviewing macOS releases in reverse:

Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface — was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple’s first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for kids or perhaps light users or elderly people.

Credit where credit is due: Apple had listened to their users and the next version – macOS Sequoia — shipped with lots of fixes. Border radius was heavily reduced, transparent glass-like panels replaced by less transparent ones, buttons made more serious and less toyish. Most system icons made more serious, too, with focus on more detail. Overall, it seemed like the 2nd version was a giant leap from infancy to teenage years.

You have to read the whole thing.

Sponsor: Quip: A Supercharged Clipboard Manager with Apple Intelligence ⇢

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Clipboard managers are one of those utilities you don’t realize you need until you try one. And for years, they’ve all felt the same—catch-all junk drawers where your copy/paste history goes to die.

Quip takes a different approach. It’s a clipboard manager and text expander for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, built to feel native, private, and actually enjoyable.

Quip

With the new Liquid Glass design in macOS and iOS 26, Quip looks like it belongs in Apple’s world of apps. Smooth animations, frosted transparency—it’s modern and responsive in a way most utilities never are.

And now, with Apple Intelligence, Quip can do things no other clipboard manager can:

  • Summarize long text into quick, scannable previews right inside your history.

  • Suggest the right collection for new items, based on your existing setup.

  • Learn your patterns over time to filter out the junk you don’t want—like 2FA codes, random strings, or boilerplate text.

All of it happens on-device, privately and securely.

Quip has even more features: iCloud sync, a beautiful searchable history, OCR text capture on macOS, and Super Shortcuts for fast text expansion anywhere.

If you live in copy and paste, Quip makes it smarter.

Try it free on the App Store or learn more at bzgapps.com/quip.

Five Years of Widgetsmith ⇢

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Underscore, writing last week:

Five years ago, a TikTok video changed my life.

And I can say that without any hyperbole.

I remember watching Widgetsmith rocket to the top of the App Store, and I could not have been more excited for Dave as it was happening. It’s a thrill to work on such a large project now.

Our iOS 26 Updates

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Today, Apple launched iOS 26. Over at Cross Forward, we’ve got major updates to three of our apps today:

Widgetsmith 8

Widgetsmith 8

This is a big one. Widgetsmith’s design has been updated for Liquid Glass, but we took that opportunity to make meaningful improvements across the app:

  • New main screen that makes it easier to find your existing widgets and create new ones.
  • Search is now implemented across the app to make searching for a widget type or theme much faster.
  • It’s now easier to take an existing theme and apply it to other widgets.
  • You can now apply a theme based on a wallpaper to multiple widgets at once.

Widgetsmith 8 is in the App Store now.

Pedometer++ 7

Pedometer++ 7

Pedometer++ 7 sports an updated design that I really love. My favorite little touch is that the main screen with your step count gets a tinted background to reinforce where you are in comparison with your goal for the day.

Maps are much improved in this release as well, with an updated color palette for the light map tiles, and the addition of a new dark mode tile set. We worked with an actual cartographer (!!!) on these, and it shows.

Pedometer++ 7 is in the App Store now.

Sleep++ 4.7

In addition to the updates to Widgetsmith and Pedometer++, Sleep++ has also been updated for Liquid Glass, and I think it looks great:

Sleep++ 4.7

Jason’s Tahoe Review ⇢

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I think Snell nails it:

macOS 26 Tahoe is two things at once: It’s the broadest and most productivity-focused update for macOS in years, while also taking collateral damage from Apple’s broader design ambitions on its other platforms.

It features the biggest update to Spotlight ever, including direct access to app actions and Apple’s first-ever built-in clipboard manager. Shortcuts adds deep automation support and direct access to AI models, changing the game for many aspects of Mac automation productivity. These are features that will delight Mac users and help them work better.

Unfortunately, they’ll be productive while using a tweaked design that’s not nearly as prominent as it is on the iPhone and iPad, but still has to be labeled as a net loss for the Mac.