Sponsor: DEVONthink: Store, Organize, and Work the Smart Way ⇢

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Today more than ever we’re all drowning in a flood of information. News, research, social media. And while most of it is probably less important, we need to identify what actually is, keep it, and organize it. Only then it becomes “knowledge” that we can work with to create something new.

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DEVONthink

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Skype to Drop Its Final Call on May 5 ⇢

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Tom Warren, writing at The Verge:

It’s the end of an era. Microsoft is shutting down Skype in May and replacing it with the free version of Microsoft Teams for consumers. Existing Skype users will be able to log in to the Microsoft Teams app and have their message history, group chats, and contacts all automatically available without having to create another account, or they can choose to export their data instead. Microsoft is also phasing out support for calling domestic or international numbers.

”Skype users will be in control, they’ll have the choice,” says Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, in an interview with The Verge. “They can migrate their conversation history and their contacts out and move on if they want, or they can migrate to Teams.”

Framous ⇢

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It’s not every week that I get to link to two new Mac apps, but turns out there is some good in this world yet.

Dark Noise developer Charlie Chapman has a new app out for creating those fancy in-device screenshots you see on fancy blogs. Here’s how he described Framous to Chance Miller:

Framous 1.0, the easiest way to quickly add device frames around your screenshots on the Mac, just released to the Mac App Store today.

Drag and drop or copy and paste to throw your screenshots in and yank them back out perfectly set into device frames to make them look great. And with Shortcuts support you can even automate the process to make framing your screenshots even easier!

Chance has also details about the app’s monetization strategy:

You can download Framous from the Mac App Store for free and use generic device frames. To unlock all current frames and additional frames released in 2025, there’s a one-time purchase of $19.99. Alternatively, there’s a $9.99 yearly subscription to unlock all frames as they are released.

Hyperspace ⇢

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John Siracusa has a new Mac app out today that can scan your drive and reclaim space taken up by duplicate files. It works atop some clever features of APFS and has an excellent icon. In the app’s documentation, he writes:

Hyperspace searches for files with identical contents within one or more folders. If it finds any, it can then reclaim the disk space taken by all but one of the identical files—without removing any of the files!

You can learn more about how this is done, if you’re interested, but the short version is that Hyperspace uses a standard feature of the macOS file system: space-saving clones. The Finder does the same thing when you duplicate a file.

I just ran it against the SSD in my MacBook Pro and it reclaimed nearly a gigabyte of space.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: Incredibly Private and Secure Safari Web Browsing ⇢

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Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect. You should ensure your browsing history stays private and is not harvested by ad networks.

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Apple Disabling Advanced Data Protection in UK to Avoid Building Government-Mandated Backdoor ⇢

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Earlier this month, the UK government demanded access to encrypted data stored on Apple servers. This demand was worldwide in scope, and would have required Apple building a backdoor into its encryption scheme for iCloud and related services.

Today, Apple has responded by announcing it will disable Advanced Data Protection in the UK. ADP is the optional setting that adds end-to-end encryption for iCloud data, device backups, message backups, and more.

Mark Gurman has more at Bloomberg:

“We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy,” the company said in a statement. “ADP protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it, and only on their trusted devices.”

Apple previously called a bill from the UK Parliament that sought access to user data “unprecedented overreach by the government.” At the time, the company said that “the UK could attempt to secretly veto new user protections globally preventing us from ever offering them to customers.”

Customers already using Advanced Data Protection, or ADP, will need to manually disable it during an unspecified grace period to keep their iCloud accounts. The company said it will issue additional guidance in the future to affected users and that it does not have the ability to automatically disable it on their behalf. The move to pull its encryption feature — rather than complying and building a backdoor — is a clear rebuke of the government’s order.

This leaves users in the UK without a way to fully encrypt their iCloud data, meaning the government can request — and receive — that data. I suspect other governments will follow its lead.

More on the C1 ⇢

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Stephen Nellis at Reuters, writing about Apple’s new cell modem:

The C1 subsystem is the most complex technology Apple has ever built, with a baseband modem manufactured with advanced 4-nanometer chipmaking technology and a transceiver made with 7-nanometer technology, Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, said in an interview at one of Apple’s silicon labs in Sunnyvale, California.

The chips had to be tested with 180 carriers in 55 countries to ensure they will work in all the places Apple ships iPhones.

“We build a platform for generations,” Srouji said. “C1 is the start, and we’re going to keep improving that technology each generation, so that it becomes a platform for us that will be used to truly differentiate this technology for our products.”