Birchfeed is fundamentally a backend service that you will mostly use through a third-party client, such as Unread, Reader Classic, or NetNewswire. I always want that primary use case to be really solid, and I think it is right now. However, one of the reasons I wanted to build

Lex Friedman: The App Store review process needs fixing Every single app and app update released in the App Store goes through this review process, and the review process is largely a black box. Developers submit, and then wait. They are given no specific timeline or indication of how long

Cory Dransfeldt: Become worthless (to tech companies) I'm not arguing for boycotts, I know that people are bound to different platforms for different, compelling reasons. What I am arguing for is that, given the opportunity, you try and reduce the value they can extract from you. That's very

As of today, you nerds who like to read later can do so from your terminal with the Quick Reads CLI. Install it with: brew install mattbirchler/tap/quickreads And from then on, it will update with brew upgrade like everything else. Okay, what does it do? It does a

Best-o-Masto is my website for finding the best stuff from your Mastodon and Bluesky feeds quickly. It's not an algorithmic feed like you'd see on something like X or Threads. It's a very simple thing that finds the post getting the most engagement in your

Nonogame has become my obsession lately, and I'm happy to see hundreds of people coming back daily to play it. If you haven't checked it out yet, I hope you do. And even if you have and bounced off, I think there's a few things changed since

We live in a world where sometimes you'll see an old app get revitalized, but it's not from the same people who made the original, and other times it's not even authorized. It's just picking up on nostalgia and hoping to make a quick buck. That

Brandon Vigliarolo: iPhone 18 Pro benchmark boosted by giving it a cold drink To make a long story short, a cold can of La Croix (in Birchler’s case – the cooling potential of an aluminum can isn’t limited to name-brand sparkling “naturally essenced” water) takes an already beefy

Riley Hill: Galaxy Z Fold 8 Review: Worth Buying in Years As for the crease, it’s not something you see when looking at the larger display head-on. Tilt the phone slightly off-angle, and you see it. It’s minimal, but it’s there. Not a big deal.

I've had two incidents in the past weekend that proved to me that my iPhone was listening. We were visiting a friend out of state, and we were talking about all sorts of things we don't generally discuss, but based on what I'm seeing on my phone,

God, it's rewarding working on indie software.

I'm sure someone likes this "ask Siri about active window" shortcut, but I hate it, and it conflicts with the default 1Password quick access shortcut. Thankfully, it can be disabled by going to: 1. System Settings 2. Keyboard 3. Keyboard Shortcuts 4. Screenshots If you use an alternate screenshotting

For the past four years, I have maintained that AirPods Pro 2 are the best AirPods ever made. They had great noise cancellation, all the stem controls I could ever want, good battery life, and while I didn't personally prefer in-ear earbuds, they were comfortable enough. I love

Michael Cripe: Resident Evil Defies Expectations as Zach Cregger Adaptation Collects $108 Million Globally After First Weekend in Theaters It's a franchise-best opening for the horror-comedy hybrid that saw it bring in $60 million domestically and $48.3 million internationally. That's a good hunk of change

I put together as much of Apple's iPhone Duo documentation as I could into a skill that I'm using to audit my apps for the new layouts and features. You can get it here if you're in a similar boat.

Leading up to the iPhone Duo's announcement, I suggested that Apple's big advantage here compared to other folding phones on the market that are based on Android was the iPad ecosystem. Not all apps run on both the iPhone and the iPad, but a lot do, and so

Quick Stuff is my website with a bunch of little utilities to get things done. There are currently 13 tools, but most people use the same one or two things every time they come to the site. I've had a few UIs for pinning or prioritizing specific apps in

Nonogame for the iPhone and iPad is out now, and I'm really excited about it. However, if I'm being honest, I have mostly played on my Samsung Galaxy Fold8 for the past few weeks because the experience is simply better there. It's not because the web app

I did some benchmarking today and saw how the newest iPhone thermal throttles, which isn't severe, but does happen. I know from experience that if you put a cold beverage on the back of your phone, it will cool down really quick, so I thought…the test is obvious.

Apple made a big deal out of the AI capabilities in their new A20 Pro processor in their new iPhone marketing. They've doubled the number of cores in the neural engine, and this made me immediately wonder how much better that makes this device for transcriptions. This is exactly

It turns out my memory was actually being far too kind to this game.

Apple released new developer betas for OS 27.2 today, which is not quite what I expected. Us developers have been waiting for Xcode 27.1 since last week, so I was excited to see that we somehow jumped even further into the future, but my joy was tamped down

There is a very specific thing you see quite often in online discourse around Apple, which is that people think Apple claims they invent everything or Apple says every little update will change your life. Apple does get excited about things that they release, and they speak highly of them,

This is gonna be a short one, but I made a simple Obsidian theme. It's called Bircharoo and it's the theme I've wanted for myself. There are over 700 themes out there already, and surely one of them would get me close to what I wanted. But

I hit a pretty fun milestone in nonogame today: 1000 hours played. No, not by me, but by the community of people who come and play this game every day. I know this is small potatoes compared to whatever other games you can think of off the top of your

Am I biased? Sure. This is still the best overview of what's new in iPadOS this year for normal people.

Apple has just started rolling out OS 27 across all their devices, and I think they're good updates across the board. As such, I've been working on updates to a bunch of my apps to get them ready for these new updates. Some features are specific to the

As of today, Quick Reads now attempts to save all pages of the multi-page articles you save to the service. This works no matter how you save articles (browser extension, iOS app, API, or pasting into the website). For example, if you're trying to read a long iOS

I found this report from Luminate media to be fascinating. It's called "Release Strategies for Music & TV" and it's a guide for music and TV producers how how to find success in the oversaturated media landscape we find ourselves in today. A few specific things stand out to

Daryl Baxter: Retroid Pocket Nova review: the best 4:3 retro handheld The latest handheld by Retroid answers something that its users have been asking for - give us a handheld as powerful as the Pocket, but with a 4:3 display. That's what the Retroid Pocket Nova essentially is

Joe Rossignol: Apple Says iPhone 18 Pro Max Sold in U.S. Differs in One Way Apple now says the iPhone 18 Pro has a C2 modem worldwide, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max uses the chip in every country except for the U.S. What a weird one.

The iPhone Duo won't sell the most units this year, but I think winning apps should update for it ASAP anyway.

Very often, we in the Apple community expect the bare minimum from Apple. We doubt they'll ever make new product lines, we assume any software feature they lack is actually a choice to omit it, and we predict when they do enter a new market, they'll phone it

David Smith shared some numbers on how many people are using WidgetSmith, his insanely popular, and therefore pretty representative of the overall market, app. He found the iPhone 17 line in general grew quicker than previous lines, but… With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share.

I'm always looking for little ways to make Quick Reads better. Sometimes that means big feature updates. Other times it means subtle quality of life improvements. Today I released one of those small quality of life improvements. A lot of users will keep Quick Reads open in a browser

Today I do the impossible and get through my biggest thoughts about Apple's announcements from yesterday in less than 10 minutes. Here's what I found most interesting about the new iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, Apple Watches, and AirPods 5.

I have a lot more to go through in collecting my thoughts on Apple's new products announced today, but I wanted to dedicate one quick post to the fact that I think the new iPhone Duo is Apple leaning in to what makes them special and what makes people

It's not particularly useful for me, but I really dig this little UI library.

The iPhone Air is a really interesting device, isn't it? It's the first time I can think of where you paid more to get less in an iPhone. The iPhone Air costs a not-insignificant $200 (or 25%) more than the iPhone 17, and in order to achieve

I’m not really doing social media at the moment so I have no idea what the reaction online has been, but I watched The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time trailer today and I was blown away. The original game is an absolute formative video game in my life.

One of the things I love in Birchfeed, my RSS sync service is the news stream feature. This lets you open up a window with new stories streaming into the view as they come in. It's pretty slick, and I use it on big news days (like tomorrow, for

The design bug caught me this holiday weekend, and I've made a few changes to Birchtree. First off, and this will be the least important thing to anybody but me, I switched the subtitle on the headline from "designer and creator" to "developer and creator". I still have my

I've been covering Apple for 16 years (using Apple stuff for 31 years), and not to toot my own horn, but I think I have a pretty good success record predicting the success of their entries into new hardware categories. I'm not always right, but I'm definitely

For the first time in my Mastodon era, I find it's time for me to take a social media break again.

Comfort Zone, the podcast I do with Chris and Niléane is coming back later this month! We've had a little time off, which actually was nice, maybe we should take a break every year for a bit…anyway 😅 Our new website, comfortzone.rocks says it all: Comfort Zone rocks.

Have you ever wanted to play a game of Snake where instead of eating fruit, you took control of a white guy arresting and reporting brown people? Well, the White House website has that for you on their new arcade! The website is just a bunch of knockoffs of other

Have you ever wanted to play a game of Snake where instead of eating fruit, you took control of a white guy arresting and reporting brown people? Well, the White House website has that for you on their new arcade! The website is just a bunch of knockoffs of other

Casey Liss on this week's ATP: To my memory […], this is the best iPhone lineup I think they've ever had. I completely agree with this. The Pro phones are positively outstanding, the 17 normal got some really good updates that were years in the making that elevated it

Casey Liss on this week's ATP: To my memory […], this is the best iPhone lineup I think they've ever had. I completely agree with this. The Pro phones are positively outstanding, the 17 normal got some really good updates that were years in the making that elevated it