Manton Reece

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:31:01 -0500

Terry Godier blogs about the growing disconnect between the traditional paid-up-front App Store and all the new features that free with in-app purchase apps get:

Apple offers you no mechanism for what is arguably the most natural transaction in software: paying for major upgrades. The only option is to create a new app listing or to use an IAP. There’s a strong disadvantage to creating a new app listing, namely losing your accumulated reviews and visibility.

It’s a theme that reminds me of Marco Arment’s blog post from 2009, although that post was focused on cheap quick-hit apps.

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:24:45 -0500

I walked so much in Europe. Trying to stick with walking more places now that I’m back home. Cars are embedded into every part of life in Texas.

Related, watched a video this morning about high-speed rail progress in California. As a country we should be embarrassed about this. Come on already. 🚂

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:07:07 -0500

Talisman Coffee.

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:20:04 -0500

This new TED Talk from Peter Steinberger is a great introduction to why OpenClaw exists and what impact it might have. He’s having a lot of fun and I think that excitement rubs off on everyone in the community. 🦞

Playdate and AI

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 09:31:02 -0500

Panic announced that the Playdate Catalog will no longer accept games that use generative AI for content such as art and dialog. AI for coding is okay, for now, but you can tell Panic isn’t happy about it:

For the time being, we will allow Catalog titles that have used AI assistance in the coding process, but we will flag any title as such and specify the extent that it was used (for example, “Lua debugging”) so the customer can decide whether to support it or not.

I’ve been a huge fan of Panic for what, 25+ years? I remember what office I was working in back in the late 1990s when I was using some version of ~~Transit~~ Transmit on my Power Mac 7500. Just to set the context that I love the Panic folks.

A lot of people are struggling with how to adapt to a world with abundant content, free code, and helper robots sitting (virtually) on our shoulders influencing our work for the better and the worse. Some people feel a loss of creativity. Some feel empowered.

Panic is principled. They’ve created a fun, opinionated little gaming device that people love. So why shouldn’t the distribution rules be opinionated too? Personally, I think it’s swimming upriver. In the future, artists will seamlessly blend generative AI with their own drawings and paintings, creating something new that is still art, still an expression of human creativity.

The other aspect of the Playdate is that Catalog is not like the App Store. It’s one distribution channel, but you can still create your own games and put them on Itch.io, letting users sideload them. Use all the generative AI you want!

In 2011, I blogged about exclusive distribution in the App Store:

Apple, want to charge 30%? Go for it. Want to make the submission rules more strict? Fine. Want to adjust how you run the App Store to reflect what’s happening in the market? No problem. Just give developers an out. We are going to be back here year after year with the latest controversy until exclusive app distribution is fixed.

Panic has achieved that balance with the Playdate. Catalog is a curated store. Seasons are even more limited, only the select games Panic wants everyone to have. Developers who don’t want to play by Panic’s rules can distribute games elsewhere. If only Apple would adopt the same approach.

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:19:23 -0500

First beta of Inkwell for Android was rejected by Google, re-submitted. But good news they’ve approved a round of bug fixes in the Micro.blog app for Android.

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:00:00 -0500

Ben Thompson on the latest Dithering:

I do feel one of the challenges I have with people talking about how AI is making them so much more productive, is because these were some of the most unproductive people in the world previously.

🤣

Codex and Sky polish

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:38:11 -0500

Federico Viticci blogs about the new Codex app from the perspective of his early preview of Sky last year:

It also helps that computer use in Codex is exquisitely designed – not a surprise given OpenAI’s design team and the pedigree of the team behind this feature. The flow for granting permissions to the plugin is the best I’ve ever seen in a third-party Mac app – and it comes directly from Sky, which had the same onboarding experience. What Sky didn’t have is the new virtual cursor: the Codex team designed an entire system for it where the cursor can wiggle to show when the model is thinking, takes playful paths, and derives its color from the system’s wallpaper.

I’m impressed with both the design and functionality. I’ve been experimenting with using it to test features by letting it click around in the iOS Simulator. It works perfectly.

The virtual cursors are clever too. You can have multiple Codex tasks busy automating work behind the scenes while you use your Mac’s real cursor for whatever you’re normally doing.

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:59:59 -0500

John Gruber commenting on a blog post from Terry Godier:

Imagine being in a restaurant, and in the middle of your entree, the server comes to your table and hands you an iPad and asks you to rate the joint on Yelp. That’s what using most apps is like.

We are pretty close to that restaurant reality already! Rating prompts are out of control.

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:26:34 -0500

I’m bringing a new server online today to improve background queue performance. If you see Lilly in the logs, that’s it. Follows our train naming theme.

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:38:01 -0500

The new Codex for Mac update is really good. There are a bunch of new features, but computer use is particularly well done. Some great Mac-specific touches. Ari Weinstein worked on it — from the original Workflow team, and Shortcuts at Apple.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:36:00 -0500

Jeffrey Zeldman blogs about taking time to edit now that text is free and abundant:

Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:27:51 -0500

Updating version strings today, so here’s my official guide to acceptable version numbers:

❌ 0.1
❌ 1
❌ 1.0.0
✅ 1.0b1
✅ 1.0
✅ 1.0.1
❌ 2
✅ 2.0
✅ 2.0.1
✅ 2.1
✅ 2.1.1
❌ 2.1.10
❌ 2.123
❌ 2026.1.2
❌ 2026.123456789

I’ve been versioning apps like this for 30 years. It’s just how it is. 🙂

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:39:05 -0500

Inkwell beta for Android is now in review over at Google. Feeling good about 1.0 on both mobile platforms, will ship fairly soon. All the client apps are open source too — web, mobile, Mac.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:21:56 -0500

Time for a home screen update. A few recent changes: Inkwell beta, Duolingo, Orion. Dock row is Hey plus our Micro.blog suite of apps: Epilogue, Strata, and Micro.blog.

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:30:00 -0500

Inkwell for iOS is now available as a beta! You can join TestFlight here. We’ll be improving a few things this week, getting it ready for an official release on both iOS and Android.

Sam Altman profile misses the mark

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:37:53 -0500

This profile of Sam Altman in The New Yorker is extremely long. I read it on the train and while standing in line at Disneyland Paris. But for all the research the reporters did, it’s essentially just a rehashing of the “not consistently candid” argument against Sam from over two years ago.

Last year I put a stake in the ground with my essay on Sam Altman. I’ve yet to see anything to convince me I was wrong.

I think talented journalists like Ronan Farrow had a chance to do some new reporting on where AI is now, what impact it will have on the economy and society, and they instead wrote an article about personality quirks and office drama. The article is so focused on finding flaws in Sam Altman that it glosses over all the bigger picture themes about what is happening in the AI industry.

People who already dislike Sam or OpenAI will point to it as confirmation. Yet there is very little new here. The real news in the article feels out of place because it’s framed as a backdrop for this initial narrative about Sam and the blip. And some of the most interesting tidbits in the article — like that Fidji Simo might eventually succeed Sam as CEO — are dismissed as rumor just as quickly as they are introduced.

The New Yorker is the only journalism I currently pay for. Not everything they publish resonates with me, but at least once a week there is a story that I really enjoy. I don’t think this one comes together in a cohesive way.

I wrote the above last week, then scrapped the draft, deciding not to publish it. I changed my mind after reading Sam Altman’s blog post where he mentions someone throwing a Molotov cocktail at his house. A couple days later, his home was struck by gunfire.

The rhetoric around AI is too extreme. People feel very passionately about it, of course. I’ve tried to have a balanced take, with dozens of blog posts that highlight the value of AI while recognizing the risks and potential divisiveness. No personal attacks. No vilifying leaders in the industry.

But some of the blog posts I’ve read over the last year have taken the debate about AI way too far, twisting it into exaggerations that assume the worst about people. That is at best unhelpful, because it spreads misinformation, and at worst perhaps even dangerous.

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:11:43 -0500

First coffee back in Austin in about a month! Glad to be home. Still miss Europe a little too.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:56:19 -0500

Internet Archive quietly continues to do great work. TechCrunch reports on digitizing Aadam Jacobs’s personal collection of taped concerts:

Within the collection, you can also find previously unknown recordings from influential artists like Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Phish, Liz Phair, Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel, and a whole bunch of other punk groups.

So cool to see this kind of thing preserved.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:15:50 -0500

Another very good analysis of the AI market from Ben Thompson. OpenAI has invested heavily in compute, which will help them, but they are also squeezed by Anthropic on the enterprise side and Meta on the consumer side. It’s hard to compete with everyone.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:51:29 -0500

Back in the United States after my extended trip across the ocean by ship, around Spain and France by train, and back to Malaga for Release Notes. Had an incredible time. I feel very lucky to be able to do this.

I also got a bunch of work done. Inkwell for mobile is looking great, beta this week.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:40:39 -0500

Early morning in Madrid. The moon still out and train station on the left.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:38:25 -0400

Steve Troughton-Smith posts about Apple’s software quality:

The story around the decline in software quality around macOS is the same as it’s been for years: Apple doesn’t have the bandwidth to maintain two copies of every app, one for macOS and one for iOS, and keep feature parity. That’s why they embarked down the road of Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI.

A related question: why does Apple have so many apps? Certainly they should have Safari, Mail, and Pages. But what about Journal, News, and Freeform? A bloated lineup of apps is like an app with too many features — difficult to maintain.

Optimism by default

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:37:06 -0400

This new essay by JA Westenberg about pessimism comes at just about the perfect time, relating to many things in the current tech world:

Whoever can list the most reasons something won’t work gets treated as the smartest person in the room. If you say “I think this could go well,” you get ~the look. That slight tilt of the head. Optimism is treated like a belief in astrology.

And:

When pessimism becomes the default in public conversation, it starts building the world it claims to be describing. People who believe nothing can be different don’t vote, don’t volunteer, don’t start companies, don’t run for office, don’t build the thing that might have mattered.

I always want to be the naive optimist who believes in people and believes in ambitious new projects that probably won’t work. Everything good I’ve done is a result of that.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 05:47:46 -0400

Another view from Malaga. Had an amazing time here for Release Notes. @DazeEnd has also shared some fun photos from the last couple of days.