512 Pixels

Devin Davies has a new app out, and it’s fantastic.

Cassette is in the App Store now. I was delighted when I saw it in TestFlight; I suspect the $7.99 to unlock all of its features will fly out of your hands.

I’ve been running iOS 26 for a while now, and there’s something that has been bugging me. The Messages app in CarPlay is a disaster:

I took some time to edit my friends and family out of this screenshot, but the layout and conversation names are exactly as they appear in real life.

Here are some of my issues:

• It’s great that CarPlay’s Messages app now respects pinned conversations, but displaying them in anything but the 3-across grid from iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS breaks muscle memory in the one context where muscle memory is the most important.
• Truncated names look terrible. I understand it on the Apple Watch, but even on the 7-inch screen in my Tacoma, there should be room to see first and last names. Making the favorites larger — and preserving their order — would help fix this.¹
• The unread badges should be in a consistent location. CarPlay shows badges for favorites to the upper-right of the image, whereas conversations in the list below have them on the left. This is something done only in CarPlay; every other Messages app shows unread dots to the left of the conversation name.
• The “Messages” label at the top of the screen is off-centered.

All of this adds up to an interface that feels mostly forgotten. Messages should be consistent across platforms, and I hope Apple takes some time to readdress this before shipping iOS 26 this fall. Right now it looks like an Android phone app that got installed on a tablet.

I believe the Messages UI could more or less copy what the folks working on Phone have done. A place for favorites and recents, in two different views, could work nicely:

This was filed with Apple as Feedback FB18960216.

Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge:

Elon Musk says that his artificial intelligence company xAI “will take immediate legal action” against Apple for allegedly manipulating its App Store rankings to the advantage of rival AI apps. In a series of X posts on Monday night, Musk suggested that Apple was “playing politics” by not placing either X or xAI’s Grok chatbot in the App Store’s list of recommended iOS apps, and that he had no choice but to file a lawsuit.

“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation,” Musk said. “Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your ‘Must Have’ section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?,” the xAI CEO asked Apple in another post, which is now pinned to his profile.

I’m sure none of these things are factors when it comes to the app’s ranking and this lawsuit:

• OpenAI’s recent release of GPT-5, or the fact that it’s been at the top of the App Store for months.
• Elon’s long and complex history with Sam Altman.
• X’s declining usage and importance.
• The whole MechaHitler thing, or white genocide thing, or fake nudes thing.

Personally, I’d like to see Apple enforce its own App Store rules here. Currently, the Grok app has a 12+ age rating. Given the sexual content that is so easily accessible through the chatbot, that sure seems low to me.

We’re all dealing with more information than ever, and it’s becoming increasingly complex. You need bulletproof financial documents for audits, collaborative tools for your team, and AI that can actually help.

DEVONthink 4.0 Copernicus ¹ is here, and it’s designed to work with you, not against you. Its AI integration is incredibly useful — it can analyze your documents, write summaries, suggest tags, and you can even create AI-based automations for specific tasks.

If you keep financial records or other documents that need to be audit-proof, then DEVONthink 4’s new audit features have you covered.

Working with a team? The new web interface lets everyone access shared databases and collaborate instead of just emailing files back and forth. Automatic versioning means you’ll never accidentally lose an important change, and the enhanced automation handles the boring stuff so you don’t have to.

Don’t spend another year fighting with your documents. Download DEVONthink 4.0 Copernicus and see how AI-powered document management can make your work easier.

polymatt’s newest project blew my mind:

This week on the podcast:

Kagi is a search engine and browser company offering an alternative to products offered by the tech giants. This week, its CEO Vladimir Prelovac talks with David and Stephen about what Kagi offers its customers.

MLGW CEO Doug McGowen was recently interviewed on our local PBS affiliate about the utility company’s role in xAI’s newest Memphis data center, as reported by The Daily Memphian, whose CEO interviewed McGowen:

McGowen said the company had initially discussed with MLGW a 1.1 gigawatt load for the project — or the equivalent of 33% of MLGW on a peak day. He said MLGW does not have that amount of power available, and no utility nationwide does either.

That fact likely pushed xAI toward a potential natural gas plant.

xAI and its partners just received approval to run up to 12 gas-powered turbines in Southaven, which is about a mile south of the new datacenter, just over the Tennessee/Mississippi state line.

The company uses similar units to power Colossus 1. At that site, the company is (or was) reportedly relied on roughly 35 turbines, despite local leaders and permitting paperwork saying just 15 were in use. xAI is currently being sued over this issue.

McGowen’s interview comes after a July 22 statement from MLG&W stating that it was providing no power to Colossus 2, and after reports as early as June that xAI was starting to collect turbines for the site.

It also comes after a press release issued by the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce on May 8:

xAI is demobilizing turbines in Shelby County and has no plans to site any turbines at its Tulane [Colossus 2] location. The company continues to evaluate various power solutions for its Memphis facilities while working within all applicable regulatory frameworks.

As I wrote at the time, this statement is plainly untrue, and even in May, xAI was working toward the situation that is now unfolding.

Back to the interview:

“Our responsibility before we connect any new customers is to ensure the reliability and availability of power for our existing customers. And if we can’t guarantee that, then we will not allow anybody to connect to the grid,” McGowen said. “The practical reality of things is we just don’t have 1,000 megawatts of power lying around. So if you want to put your data center here, you’re going to have to generate power on your own and connect it to your system.

“The question then becomes if you want to be connected to the larger grid for when your power plant goes down, and that is the technical challenge that TVA is working on today,” McGowen said.

TVA, in a statement, did not say whether the federal agency would be serving xAI at all.

With Colossus 2 expected to be at least twice as big as the Colossus 1, residents in Southaven and nearby areas are going to be subjected to the same pollution concerns as the folks around xAI’s first set of turbines are.

Richard Goldstein at The New York Times with some sad news for fans of the early space program or amazing stories in general:

James A. Lovell Jr., the commander of the three-man Apollo 13 spacecraft that survived a near catastrophic explosion as it approached the moon in April 1970, before safely returning to Earth in an extraordinary rescue operation, died on Thursday in Lake Forest, Ill. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law, Darice Lovell. He lived in Lake Forest.

Captain Lovell, a former Navy test pilot, flew for some 715 hours in space, the most of any astronaut in the pioneering Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs forged by the United States as it vied with the Soviet Union to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

He took part in two Gemini missions that orbited Earth and was one of the three astronauts aboard Apollo 8, the first spaceflight to orbit the moon, before he was chosen by NASA for Apollo 13.

Tom Warren’s headline is incredible:

Microsoft is cautiously onboarding Grok 4 following Hitler concerns

This week on the show:

Jason joins Stephen and Myke to talk about hard drives, window management, and charts.

“The problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste.”

I recently stumbled across a promotional document for the Lisa, dating back to 1983. It’s a real gem: