Amazing. You can tell they sweat the details.

We're testing this new intro to play when you first launch Retro ✨

The idea is to "set the mood", communicate what Retro is about, and slow you down:

• Plays haptics on every photo beat, decreasing in intensity and sharpness, so you "feel" it calm down.
• The script is dynamic, it adapts to the apps that you have installed on your device.
• The soundtrack starts with noise that we turn down to focus on what matters.
• We're gonna ask for some iOS permissions, hopefully this creates some trust

Matt Birchler: ‘iOS…iPadOS…are you getting it? These are not two different operating systems…’

I expect that in iPadOS 27, these 3 options will remain, but the full screen apps option will bring the return of split screen that does not involved free-floating windows like we have now in iPadOS 26. In June, this will make a lot of iPad users happy who didn’t love needing to opt into full windowing to get the split views they used to love.

Gosh, I hope so. The windowed apps have not been an improvement on my iPad mini. I wish I could go back to iOS 18 with traditional Split View and Slide Over.

Getting to spend multiple days with a client is always just the best! We can learn so many skills, and them put into practice on real climbs. Rock season is nearly here. Time to get your sessions booked!

After watching episodes of Shrinking and Rooster back-to-back, I can confidently conclude that this Bill Lawrence guy really knows how to write and produce a TV show! 📺 👍👍

🆕📝 I’m returning my Studio Display XDR and buying another one

I thought I’d like the nano-texture display, and while it’s impressive, it’s not for me.

Lil Finder Guy has escaped from TikTok and is now also featured on Apple’s YouTube channel in a series of three new shorts!

I use very little of Raycast’s vast feature set, so I’ve considered switching to Spotlight and just keeping Raycast around just for its excellent emoji picker.

Enter @nileane@nileane.fr’s new TinyStart app. It’s a way more focused launcher that also comes with a great emoji picker — way faster than Spotlight too:

Unlike Spotlight, TinyStart is super fast at showing results and launching apps. It never becomes overcrowded with search results you don’t need, and it lets you open URLs, perform web searches with custom search engines, and quickly open folders in Finder.

I’m gonna give it a go!

Watched: For All Mankind S5E1, First Light 📺

We are so back! These season openers have ever-more stuff to catch us up on with their decade-long jumps, so it dragged a little bit. But I have no doubt that it’ll pick up. Can’t wait to see what this season’s heart-racer scene will be.

At long last, I’m jumping into a smart lock and doorbell. I’ve been waiting patiently for years for the right features (UWB, battery-powered, Apple Home) at a decent price, and Aqara’s finally done it. Get ‘em on sale through tomorrow.

Smart Lock U400 ($270 $230)

Doorbell Camera G410 ($145 $100)

He’s less bananas about this one, but I’d say it’s equally surprising! 😆

Here's a take:

The "new" compact tab bar in iPadOS 26.4 is good and I like using it with vertical tabs in Safari (which, yes, you can enable).

https://www.macstories.net/notes/well-i-guess-i-like-safaris-compact-tab-bar-in-ipados-24-also-using-vertical-tabs-in-safari-for-ipad/

😳 @viticci@macstories.net is a mad lad for this, but I can’t help but appreciate the Shortcuts wizardry to solve one’s own problem.

You probably shouldn't do this.

I really like Claude Code in iMessage, but I hate its permission prompts. So, I figured out how to automate them with Shortcuts.

Here's how: https://www.macstories.net/tutorials/automatically-approve-claude-code-permissions-in-imessage-with-shortcuts/

I’m no kitchen connoisseur, but I do appreciate a good gadget. Looks like a worthy update — the biggest since 1955! — to the classic KitchenAid stand mixer. Per The Verge, it adds fine-grained speed control, a bowl light, auto-off, and (!) a new mixer head that scrapes the bowl with a friction sensor!

Watched: Zootopia 2 🍿

A bit of a slow start, and it followed a lot of the same paths as the first movie… buuuuut by the end, I was into it and laughing along. Overall a good message again, too. 👍 (Lots of familiar voices — great cast!)

Managed to squeeze in my 37th (maybe last?) ice day of the season on Central Pillar, NSOP — what a delight, and so many options to climb! I led two new lines, including a thrilling thin overhanging pillar. Perfect weather and awesome company with Don Mellor. If this is it, the cup is full!

🆕📝 7 Things This Week [#184]

An iWeb revival, a nostalgic letter from Greece, a thought-provoking water story, the origin of “Wendy”, comprehensive Apple charging data, a baseball score critique, and a delicious Midleton Mule.

I hope, someday, we get to where our identities around the web are all based on unique domain names. When mentioning someone in a post, I always need to decide if I’m going to mention/link them by name, by their social media handle, or by their site. What if they were one and the same?

.me domains are perfect for this.

Micro.blog is close (you can @-mention a domain to link to it, and follow a site’s RSS feed by following it’s @-domain), but Bluesky is leading the way here:

On Bluesky and the AT Protocol, you can set domains that you own like bsky.team or alice.lol as your username.

Speaking of whimsy, nice tribute to the Mac Pro by @ismh86@eworld.social in the 512 Pixels header. 👌

Man, @matt_birchler@mastodon.social’s Quick Subtitles app looks so cool, well-designed, and thoughtful that I wish I had a use case for it. It’s been fun to follow along with its development journey.

As you can probably tell, I’m catching up on RSS and am reading through the ‘Birchtree’ feed. 😉

Matt Birchler shared a macOS terminal command to remove the play button on icon-sized video files:

defaults write com.apple.finder QLInlinePreviewMinimumSupportedSize -int 99999

Then restart the Finder by running killall Finder and the change will be in place.

And it doesn’t affect Quick Look:

And don’t worry, this does not impact the ability to hit spacebar on an icon to see a large preview of it.

I’ve never been bothered by the ability to watch videos at postage stamp size, and actually thought it made a fun demo of macOS’s whimsy back in the day. But good to know you can turn it off.

John Gruber laments that Apple missed its chance to require apps on tvOS to use the standard video player:

What Apple should have done right from the start with the tvOS-based Apple TV a decade ago is require all apps to use the system video player. No custom video players. It’s too late for that, alas. […]

Apple should use the App Store approval process for the benefit of users. Isn’t that supposed to be the point?

I don’t accept that it’s too late. They should do the necessary engineering to let video be forced into a system player, similar to how the picture-in-picture player works on iOS.

John Gruber: ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’

The Guardian screenshot Bose captured, where only 11 percent of the entire screen shows text from the article, is the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions for other shows on the same channel. Almost no one would watch such a channel. But somehow this strategy is deemed sustainable for websites.

The vast majority of articles I read on the web are through RSS or Instapaper, so no/few ads. Dunno how non-nerds put up with this.

Puppy’s first protest attending Saranac Lake’s No Kings rally today. A great event filled with people who still have hope. 🤞 Bella did very well with it being her first time around a crowd and among the noise and cars. She brought lots of joy herself. 🐾 🇺🇸

Yesterday, I got to add two items to my ‘Bits of Joy’ folder¹ where I save nice notes that people share with me.

A podcaster/writer (who I’ve followed for well over a decade) said he was “eternally envious” of my blog’s design, and the local legend climber (who literally wrote the first guidebooks) complimented me on my relaxed and methodical climbing style. It really made my day — twice! 😁

🆕📝 Launchpad was great for uninstalling apps; Spotlight is not

Uninstalling apps on macOS is not as easy as it should be.

iOS 26.4 fixed the annoying bug that made it take two tries to get the ‘Speak Screen’ accessibility feature to start. Now it’s back to normal and makes listening to my read-later queue with a triple-click of the side button awesome again. 😌