Rafa Conde put together a cool little project and outlined it on Mastodon:
Today I decided to open up my Opal Tadpole webcam, because I was curious to see how they managed to make it so small… and to my surprise the camera was not installed directly to the board, but with a cable instead!
MarsEdit 5 is a major upgrade to the preeminent Mac app for editing WordPress, Micro.blog, Tumblr, and many other types of blogs.
The new microposting feature makes it as easy to post to your own blog as it is to post to social media. When MarsEdit 5 is running on your Mac, just press a configurable global keyboard shortcut, write out your latest thoughts, and instantly publish to your blog.
MarsEdit supports editing posts in rich or plain text, and the latest update is especially great for Markdown fans. Now when you’re writing Markdown in plain text mode, MarsEdit applies live, beautiful syntax highlighting to make it easier to focus separately on the content and style of your posts.
MarsEdit is used by top bloggers to maximize their productivity and enjoyment of blogging. It’s great for pros like John Gruber of Daring Fireball, and yours truly:
This app isn’t just for pros — it is also simple enough to remove the mystery of blogging for everyday folks who just want to share their thoughts with the world.
MarsEdit also supports for publishing to Mastodon! Now you can use the same app you use to write and publish to your main blog, to write and publish to your Mastodon microblog. Check out that announcement at this link.
One app, limitless publishing opportunities.
Download MarsEdit today, and see what all the hype is about. It’ll make you a better blogger!
Another fun old Apple video to kick off the week:
On this feedback episode, David and I answer listener questions about Apple’s current betas, then revisit networking, dictation, email, going paperless, and more. This one really hits all the classic MPU topics.
Andrew Yaros has rebuilt the Lisa’s user interface on the web, and it is glorious:
LisaGUI is a web OS inspired by the Lisa Office System, Apple’s first graphical user interface (GUI). It aims to perfectly recreate the Lisa’s iconic 1-bit UI directly in your browser.
My pals over at Snailed It Development have shipped a new iPhone app that I have really come to appreciate over the last several months I’ve had access to the beta. It’s called Capsule, and it’s a medication tracking app built with the attention to detail only a group of indie developers could deliver.
For years, I’ve used Due to remind myself to take my medication. Due’s flagship feature is its ability to remind you over and over until you mark an item done. While that’s a fantastic feature, Due is a general-purpose to-do application, not a medication tracker.
When Apple added medication tracking to Health, I gave it a shot and quickly realized I liked having my medications listed and tracked separately, but that I also needed the nagging notifications from Due.
Capsule takes the best of both and puts them into an iPhone app that’s lightweight, modern, and flexible. In addition to the ability to have repeating notifications, Capsule offers lots of customization at the medication level. This means that if you take one medication every 6 hours, but another just once a day, it can handle that. You can also set a dose interval for medications that have a minimum amount of time you must wait between taking doses.
Capsule supports tagging medications, which is great if you use the app to keep track of medication for more than one person. It also ships with flexible and handsome widgets, robust Shortcuts support, alternative icons, and more.
Capsule is $14.99/year or $1.99/month, but if you sign up before July 25, you can get an annual subscription for $12.99/year. It is in the App Store today..
This week on the show: Samsung has new folding phones, Liquid Glass has a new look, and Apple has a new COO.
I had only seen parts of this old WWDC session before this week, but it’s a fascinating one. The iMac segment in particular is fun, and the Macintosh Portable’s appearance caught me by surprise:
Marcin Wichary had put together something insanely great:
As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I do this out of curiosity – what was added since the last time I looked? – but also because I love this way of getting to know software: peeking under the hood, walking the back alleys, learning what has been tricky or important enough to be equipped with a checkbox.
During the last Settings Day, I had a realization that the totemic 1984 Mac control panel, designed by Susan Kare, is still to this day perhaps the only set‐tings screen ever brought up in casual conversation.
I kept wondering about that screen, and about what happened since then. Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early his‐tory and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.
Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.
Do yourself a favor and enjoy this website slowly, and on a Mac.
Kate Conger at The New York Times:
In its dedicated account on X, which Mr. Musk owns, the chatbot praised Hitler, suggested that people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate and said a Holocaust-like response to hatred against white people would be “effective.” X deleted some of the posts on Tuesday evening.
Grok, which Mr. Musk has put few limits on, has veered into controversy before. But its comments on Tuesday stood out because it weighed in on the deadly floods in Texas, which have killed more than 100 people, including more than two dozen children and staff members at a Christian summer camp.
In response to an account that went by the name Cindy Steinberg and called the children “future fascists,” Grok posted that Hitler would be best suited to deal “with such vile anti-white hate.”
“Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time,” the chatbot wrote in a post.
Peter Hoskins & Charlotte Edwards at the BBC:
Screenshots published on social media show the chatbot saying the Nazi leader would be the best person to respond to alleged “anti-white hate.”
“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,” the company said in a post.
ADL, an organisation formed to combat antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, said the posts were “irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic.”
“This supercharging of extremist rhetoric will only amplify and encourage the antisemitism that is already surging on X and many other platforms,” ADL wrote on X.
Matt Novak at Gizmodo:
Social media users first started to observe that Grok was using the phrase “every damn time,” on Tuesday, something that seems innocuous enough. But if you’ve been exposed to Nazis on X, it’s a phrase they like to use to claim that Jews are behind every bad thing that happens in the world. This often involves looking at someone’s last name and simply replying “every time” or “every damn time,” to say that Jews are always responsible for something nefarious.
It seems that X has taken Grok offline for now.
Another horrifying moment powered by the Digital Delta.
If you’ve been wondering why so many of us are sad about the end of FireWire — despite it being well past its prime — you have to go back to its start.
FireWire was first introduced with the “Blue and White” Power Mac G3 back in 1999. This is mine, a machine I used way back at my high school job. It now lives in my studio:
At about 28 and a half minutes into his keynote at Macworld San Francisco that year, Steve Jobs started to discuss the IO the machine would have.
Gone were the legacy Macintosh ports, minus a single ADB port. In their place were a set of USB ports and a set of FireWire ports. USB had appeared on the iMac the year before, but FireWire was something new. The standard had been supported by Mac OS since 1997, but this was the first time the ports had been built onto the logicboard of a Mac. (It had previously been available as an add-on.)
FireWire replaced the older, slower, and crankier SCSI. It’s speed and ease-of-use led to an explosion of digital video that led to a zillion home videos being made with iMovie and even earned Apple an Emmy.
While it did appear on other computers, FireWire was one of those things that made the Mac special in the 2000s and early 2010s. From video cameras to hard drives, audio equipment to scanners, FireWire served the ecosystem well, starting with the Blue and White G3 and for years thereafter.
Apple today announced Jeff Williams will transition his role as chief operating officer later this month to Sabih Khan, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations as part of a long-planned succession. Williams will continue reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook and overseeing Apple’s world class design team and Apple Watch alongside the company’s Health initiatives. Apple’s design team will then transition to reporting directly to Cook after Williams retires late in the year.
“Jeff and I have worked alongside each other for as long as I can remember, and Apple wouldn’t be what it is without him. He’s helped to create one of the most respected global supply chains in the world; launched Apple Watch and overseen its development; architected Apple’s health strategy; and led our world class team of designers with great wisdom, heart, and dedication,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “I am and will always be beyond grateful for his numerous contributions to Apple over the years and his loyal friendship. Jeff’s true legacy can be seen in the amazing team he’s created and, while he’ll be greatly missed, he leaves the work of the future in incredible hands.”
“Sabih is a brilliant strategist who has been one of the central architects of Apple’s supply chain,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “While overseeing Apple’s supply chain, he has helped pioneer new technologies in advanced manufacturing, overseen the expansion of Apple’s manufacturing footprint in the United States, and helped ensure that Apple can be nimble in response to global challenges. He has advanced our ambitious efforts in environmental sustainability, helping reduce Apple’s carbon footprint by more than 60 percent. Above all, Sabih leads with his heart and his values, and I know he will make an exceptional chief operating officer.”
It looks like Williams is going to be fully leaving Apple, unlike other recent departures. In 2020, Phil Schiller “advanced to Apple Fellow” and when Luca Maestri “transitioned from his role” as CFO in 2024, it was clear he was staying at Apple, at least for the time being. Of the three announcements, only today’s mentions retirement. Aging Apple executives love hanging onto parts of their jobs, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here.