Birchtree

Juli Clover: iOS 26.4 Beta Adds End-to-End Encryption for iPhone-to-Android RCS Texts

iPhone‌ users will need to install the second beta of iOS 26.4 to exchange encrypted messages with Android users, while Google users need to have the latest version of Google Messages.

You love to see it […]

Joe Rossignol: Apple's Upcoming Studio Display 2 Rumored to Have an Unusual Feature

The tipster believes that a 90Hz refresh rate would make sense due to bandwidth considerations. Thunderbolt 5 can support 5K resolution at 120Hz without any compression, but they think Apple likely wants to […]

Steve Troughton-Smith on Mastodon:

A $499 MacBook Neo with the brains of a couple-year-old iPhone can run Xcode, Photoshop, Blender, Terminal, and pretty much everything else you can think of, yet your $3,200 iPad Pro, with a desktop-class chip, cannot 😑

What are we doing here?

I've been […]

When I started doing YouTube in 2020, I was in the middle of my iPad era, and the only Mac in my life was a 2012 Mac mini. I don't remember its exact specs, but suffice to say it positively sucks by 2026 standards. And while it was very slow, it did technically handle everything I could throw at […]

New wallpaper generator just dropped ColorFlow is a really cool new wallpaper and animation generator from the folks over at ls.graphics, and it's pretty rad (and it's totally free).

ColorFlow is a really cool new wallpaper and animation generator from the folks over at ls.graphics, and it's pretty rad (and it's totally free).

Micro app 12: Benchmark Studio This micro app is pretty simple; it's just a nice, single-page website for uploading benchmark scores and getting nice-looking charts for them, like the one above. The UI for adding tests and devices is simple, allowing you to create tests and add devices with categories, so that things like laptops and phones can be separated. You can also drag to reorder them or toggle their visibility. There's a simple table for entering the scores for each device, and you can import or export the current page's values as JSON. All data is stored in your browser's localstorage and never leaves your device. Good for privacy, and good for my back end costs 😉 Benchmark Studio is available here, and you can see the full project on GitHub.

This micro app is pretty simple; it's just a nice, single-page website for uploading benchmark scores and getting nice-looking charts for them, like the one above.

The UI for adding tests and devices is simple, allowing you to create tests and add devices with categories, so that things like […]

Terraink makes rad maps on demand Terraink is a cool new website that lets you create cool maps of whatever location you want to. That's it, and that's pretty rad.

Terraink is a cool new website that lets you create cool maps of whatever location you want to. That's it, and that's pretty rad.

From the video:

I've been complaining for years that it feels like nothing has really changed since smartphones came along. And I think that maybe, maybe I should have been careful what I wished for.

It's been 2 years since Tom Scott stopped posting weekly videos on YouTube, but he was still […]

Apple releases the MacBook Mini Apple's MacBook Mini is such an awesome computer. No, it's not the most powerful machine Apple makes, but it is very affordable, which makes it appeal to at least two separate groups. The first group is people who would like a desktop Mac, but would not like to spend typical Mac prices. Because it's so inexpensive, at least in the starting configurations, it also is very compelling as a secondary computer for a lot of people who already have a higher-end Mac or a Mac laptop. Today, Apple announced the MacBook Neo, although I would suggest the MacBook Mini would be an even better name because I feel like this computer is doing the same exact thing as the Mac Mini. At the same $599 starting price, this laptop achieves both appeals that the Mac Mini has as well. For those who are price conscious, it gives you a brand new, high-quality MacBook at basically half the price of the MacBook Air. I really think it's worth sitting on that for a second. Apple didn't just make this a little less expensive than the MacBook Air, they made it in a completely different price category and a price category that Apple hasn't been in for decades. But I think it will also appeal to people who own higher-end Macs already. I'm including myself in that camp. I have a 14-inch M4 Pro MacBook Pro, and this thing is a beast. It tears through 4K video editing and literally any task I can give it. It's an awesome machine, but it is a little chunky, especially when I travel. I'm often traveling for work, which means I need to bring my work laptop and my personal laptop. And let me tell you, carrying two 14-inch MacBook Pros in your backpack is weight you definitely notice. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I think I am going to pick up one of these to use as my travel computer and maybe some other things that I want to do with it around the house. And they did this in a computer that is a far cry from the lazy M1 MacBook Air component swap that some people were expecting from them. And let me reiterate, this thing is half the cost of the MacBook Air…there are compromises for sure, but it's **half the price**. * * * Before we get into the weeds, here's the highlights Apple calls out on their marketing page (aka, what they think will appeal to a wide audience): 1. They come in fun colors 2. Long battery life 3. Great screen 4. Apple Intelligence 5. Pairs with your iPhone 6. Works with all your apps 7. Privacy built in I'll start by saying I think the colors are a brilliant move, and I'm glad they decided to do it instead of making these boring colors only. I also think it's critical that this does not look like an old Mac. It looks very much exactly like the other current Macs, so it doesn't feel like you're buying an old computer. Moving on to the specs. I do think people need to set their expectations appropriately. The A18 Pro chip is no slouch, but in the testing I've done, it performs worse than an M1 in some tasks. I'm sure there'll be some things where it's quicker, but I do think that people might be surprised how it performs under load. We'll see how it performs once people have these in hand, but I do worry that some folks expect this to perform like an M4 or an M3, when in fact it could very well be the slowest Apple silicon Mac ever released. Getting a Mac down to half the price of an Air means making a lot of cuts that are painful, but the removal of Touch ID from the baseline model is the thing that surprised me the most. It's not the end of the world, and honestly, my wife has an M3 MacBook Air, and she literally never uses the Touch ID sensor. She always enters her password anyway. So there certainly are people who will not miss this, but I certainly would. 8 gigabytes RAM is going to be tight. This is definitely a device for light uses, and you're going to start to feel the pain if you try to do too much. 256 starting storage with a single upgrade to 512 gigabytes seems about right to me. I'll be interested to see the screen in person. The resolution and brightness seem fine and are effectively the same as the Air, but they don't advertise P3 color, it's just RGB. I assume it will be fine, but the absolutely atrocious display in the baseline iPad makes me recognize how terrible a screen Apple is willing to ship in its budget devices, and I hope this is a large margin better than that. I assume it will be. Despite the smaller footprint, it is exactly as heavy as the MacBook Air, so it's not the mythical return of the ultra-thin MacBook, unfortunately. The keyboard is not backlit, which I guess is a bummer, but honestly, I don't think I ever use my keyboard's backlight. Honestly, I'm not totally sure why other people use it either. Does your screen not light up the keys already? I understand that it would cost more, but I do wish that they could have put one USB-C cable on either side of the device. Going back to my wife, her biggest complaint with the MacBook Air is that it only charges from the left side when it would be so much more convenient for every single place she uses her computer to be able to charge from the right. * * * I'm writing this very quickly on my break at work, and when I go home, I'm going to find my Apple Watch Ultra, see what Apple will give me for a trade-in, and if it gets me close to half the cost, I'll be ordering one when I get home. At a minimum, this will be my travel computer, and at best, it will be my putzing around the house device.

Apple's MacBook Mini is such an awesome computer. No, it's not the most powerful machine Apple makes, but it is very affordable, which makes it appeal to at least two separate groups. The first group is people who would like a desktop Mac, but would not like to spend typical Mac prices. Because […]

M83’s Midnight City is one of my favorite songs of all time, and this video recreating it is brilliant.

My super quick process for adding chapters to podcasts Chapters in podcasts are super important, in my opinion, and I make sure to add them to everything that I create. Here's the process I use to get them into my shows faster than ever before. ## 0- Have your chapters ready to go The best thing you can do to speed up this process is to write down what chapter breaks you want as you record. I do this in Obsidian, which is the app I use to write the show notes, and I just have a little section at the bottom as we go where I write down the chapters. We edit the podcast, so I don't know exactly what the timestamps will be when I'm recording them, but just having them in order is helpful. You _can_ ask AI to generate the chapter titles for you as well, but I find it god-awful at that. Put in a little human work, it's worth it. ## 1. Generate subtitles Step one is taking the final audio file and generating subtitles for it. I obviously use my own app, Quick Subtitles, which works great. I personally use the Whisper model as it is much slower, but it is more accurate to the point that it's worth it to me. Paired with the cleanup feature in Quick Subtitles, my transcripts are usually very good with little effort. ## 2. Ask AI to help You certainly don't have to do this if you're not comfortable with it, but this is what I tend to do. I take those chapters I wrote out and use a short prompt to tell Claude what to do with it. Obviously, LLMs are pretty interchangeable, so use whichever one you prefer, including a local model if that's your preference. This will get you a response something like this. Copy that to your clipboard and you're ready to move on. ## 3- Import it all into Chapter Pod Now you can drag your audio and .srt files in ChapterPod, and hit `Command + i` to import chapters from text. That will give you all your chapters ready to go. However, the AI will not be perfect and you will want to go into the transcript view to see exactly where it placed these chapter markers so you can fine-tune it down to the second. In my experience, language models tend to put the chapter marker 5 to 10 seconds later than I would. So it's just a matter of dragging the chapter marker from the transcript view up a little bit. And that's it, you're done! Export the file and you'll have your fully-processed podcast file with chapter markers in less time than ever.

Chapters in podcasts are super important, in my opinion, and I make sure to add them to everything that I create. Here's the process I use to get them into my shows faster than ever before.


0- Have your chapters ready to go

The best thing you can do to speed up this process is to write down […]

Ben Thompson: Technological Scale and Government Control, Paramount Outbids Netflix for Warner Bros.

This is a lot more complicated than the nuclear question, where government control and ownership was a given; the sort of actions taken by the government over the last week fly in the face of […]

Apple's new MacBooks: The pinnacle of the generation Apple announced new MacBook Airs and Pros today, and they’re both boring and mostly excellent. ## MacBook Air This looks like a very basic spec bump, which I’m not mad about. I would like to see this display get an upgrade one day, and I'd love for them to split the USB-C ports to the left and right to add some charging flexibility, but I don't think this design is long enough in the tooth to draw my ire (2027 and 2028 Matt will start to get a little antsy, though). We were wondering what the storage and RAM crunch would mean for the Mac lineup, and thankfully, it seems Apple is handling this well. The starting RAM has remained at 16GB and the starting storage has bumped up to 512GB from 256GB in the M4 model, but that also does come with a $100 starting price increase, up to $1,099. That's technically $100 less than upgrading to 512GB storage version in the previous generation, but yeah, a $100 higher starting price is still a bit of a bummer. ## MacBook Pro The new M5 Pro and Max chips look like killers. As an avowed defender of the Pro line of chips, Apple's suggestions of multiple times faster LLM performance and 40-60% performance jumps over the M4 Pro is really exciting for a single generation upgrade from what was already the best mobile computer chips in the game (the Max chips have similar jumps). What's most impressive to me about this update is that the prices seem to have stayed completely level from last year. I have a 14" M4 Pro model that I bought a year ago. It had the better Pro chip and 1TB of storage, and cost me $2,399 before trade in. Getting that same model (upgraded Pro chip, 1TB storage, 24GB RAM) in the M5 generation would run me the same $2,399. I'm not at all tempted to upgrade myself, as I'm more than happy with the M4 Pro and even with a trade-in I'd be about $1,200 out of pocket, but in a world where everything is getting more expensive and we're in the middle of a supply chain mess, it's good to see Pro Macs holding the line on price. As for the design, I'm still fine with it, but it seems like this will be the last generation of MacBook Pros with this design. Strong rumors swirl of a decent change coming in the M6 generation with a dynamic island and touch input, so we'll see how that turns out. For now, this is just an incredibly fucking fast version of the great product redesign Apple gave the MacBook Pro back in 2021.

Apple announced new MacBook Airs and Pros today, and they’re both boring and mostly excellent.


MacBook Air

This looks like a very basic spec bump, which I’m not mad about. I would like to see this display get an upgrade one day, and I'd love for them to split the USB-C ports to the left and […]

Apple's new Studio Displays Apple updated both of their monitors today, replacing the Studio Display with a new model that's very similar to the old one, and they've discontinued the Pro Display XDR in favor of the new Studio Display XDR. ## Studio Display Starting with the updated Studio Display, honestly, I'm incredibly disappointed. I continue to think the Studio Display is for people who care about everything in a computer monitor besides the display itself. In the newsroom post and the new marketing page, Apple boasts about the new camera, better mics, better speakers, and Thunderbolt 5 ports. When comparing the new and old spec pages, there seems to be literally no difference, which leads me to believe we are once again stuck with the same panel Apple has been shipping for over a decade. There are people who really value physical design, and that's fine, but if you want a great monitor that looks better than this (yes, even at 5K), there are other options, all of which cost a good deal less. ## Studio Display XDR Compared to the $6,000 Pro Display XDR Apple was selling before, this is a steal at $3,300. And truthfully, it looks like a great monitor. 5K 120Hz mini-LED with 2,304 local dimming zones is undeniably a compelling combo. One interesting thing from the press release is that while it's a 120Hz display with variable refresh rates, they don't call it ProMotion like they do on their MacBook Pros and iPhones: > Studio Display XDR features a 120Hz refresh rate, enabling smooth, ultra-responsive motion. Adaptive Sync supports a continuously variable refresh rate between 47Hz to 120Hz, making gaming more fluid with faster frame delivery and lower display latency. Anyway, this monitor looks really great, but the price is still astronomical. I paid 1/3 of that last year for a 32" OLED with 1,300 nits of peak brightness, although admittedly only at 4K resolution. Admittedly, Apple's monitor is going to be more reliable than the cheaper 5K models out there, and the brightness in particular seems properly high end here, so I get why some people would go for this. And hey, it's nearly half the price of the old XDR and it comes with a stand! * * * I think what bums me out about Apple's display lineup is that they are only serving the absolute highest end of the market, they have no truly "consumer" displays. I'm sure they think about the normal Studio Display as that, but it's really in another league compared to what any normal person spends on a monitor. I'll say it again to be super clear, my monitor is way higher end than what most people would buy…I'm considered someone who went overkill on their display…and mine cost $600 less than Apple's "consumer" model.

Apple updated both of their monitors today, replacing the Studio Display with a new model that's very similar to the old one, and they've discontinued the Pro Display XDR in favor of the new Studio Display XDR.


Studio Display

Starting with the updated Studio Display, honestly, I'm incredibly […]

Over the last couple weeks, Anthropic and the Department of War have been engaged in a war of words over something very exciting: terms of use. Anthropic, as a private company, has created a product and reasonably established terms of use for it. However, the Department of War doesn't want to […]

Continuity Camera is so freaking cool, I wish it fit better into my work About a week ago, I switched on my Canon R6 and went to record something on video. I have the camera hooked up to an Elgato 4K capture card, which my Mac sees as a webcam. However, in this instance, the Elgato was convinced there was no video coming from the camera. The setup has been going for several years now and has worked perfectly, so something has gone wrong. My suspicion is my mini-HDMI to HDMI cable is misbehaving, and I need to order a new one. In the meantime, because even Amazon can't deliver in seconds, I started using Continuity Camera. This is the feature that lets you connect to your iPhone and use it as a webcam. It works wired and wirelessly, and I know people swear by it, but I just haven't given it a shot myself because I already had an overkill setup of my own. But when that setup hits a snag, it's nice to have a fallback that should be easy to do. The great news is that this has worked swimmingly for me, and I've actually used it to record this week's upcoming Comfort Zone episode as well as some other video stuff I needed to do. I used my iPhone 17 Pro and it connected magically and the video itself was very high quality and low latency, even when connected wirelessly. For peace of mind, I have run a long USB-C cable from my Thunderbolt dock to the phone just to make sure I am never surprised by a low battery or dropped wireless connection, but it's been rock solid. Even going for hours at a time, my phone didn't warm up at all, which was a bit of a surprise to me. The other thing I wasn't expecting at all, but works shockingly great, is that the video is always perfectly level. It's actually kind of crazy. No matter how you're holding the phone, even if it's completely vertical, the video will be perfectly level 16x9 widescreen. This is low key the coolest thing here. The big downside for me, and anyone who works from home, is that this feature only works between devices signed into the same Apple account. I can use this for YouTube and for Comfort Zone, but I can't use it for work meetings throughout the week because my work Mac is obviously signed into my work Apple account. Every other webcam solution out there works fine in this hybrid setup I have, but not this, and that on its own makes Continuity Camera unfortunately a dud for me. For what it's worth, I don't think there's an easy solution here, as I don't think any random phone around you should be able to be turned into a webcam in an instant. But I also think it's a great example of why I think "dumb" technology is still super valuable in the modern era. We should have tech that doesn't have a flippin' clue what it's plugged into, it just does a job. Personally, I want this for as many peripherals as possible in my desk setup, and I'm honestly in a pretty good place here. My keyboard, mouse, display, audio interface, speakers, and camera setup all don't care what they're plugged into, they just work. They all have some level of software running on them, but they're so universal that I can almost guarantee that whatever computer I'm using 10 years from now will still work fine with all of these peripherals. Anyway, if you have a work setup that is aligned with how Continuity Camera works, then I think it's really an awesome solution. Doubly so if you have an old or alternate iPhone laying around that you can use.

About a week ago, I switched on my Canon R6 and went to record something on video. I have the camera hooked up to an Elgato 4K capture card, which my Mac sees as a webcam. However, in this instance, the Elgato was convinced there was no video coming from the camera. The setup has been going for […]

The M4 iPad Air: an update so small, the Bluetooth version gets a shout out In addition to the new iPhone 17E, Apple also announced a new iPad Air, now powered by the M4 processor. I could almost end the post there because we've basically reached the end of the list of differences. As far as I can tell, the literal only other changes are that we now get Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and you know the updates are sparse when I'm telling you about the Bluetooth version bump. What's notable about this time is that this is actually the second year in a row where I've basically been able to say the same thing. Last year's M3 iPad Air was also just a processor swap over the M2 version. I'm not super annoyed by this, as the iPad Air is already quite good. But there are two things I think really could have used a change. 1. The 128GB base storage is not great for a premium tablet like this. We saw Apple bump their budget iPhone up to 256GB base storage today, so why not their second-highest end iPad? 2. The 60Hz display is getting pretty damn long in the tooth. It's _fiiiiine_ , but at some point it's time to get an upgrade. The Air has had the literal exact screen for 7 years now. For some context, when we got this display in the Air, the latest iPhone on the market was the XS, you were probably still working in an office 5 days a week, and a global pandemic was a whole year away. Anyway, it seems all right enough. But in my opinion, if you can get an M2 or M3 Air for a significant discount, I would highly look into that. * * * As I did with the iPhone 17e, I'm also comparing my takeaways from what Apple thinks are the highlights on their marketing page: 1. M4 (it's faster) 2. iPadOS (it's the same as before) 3. Apple Intelligence (it's the same as before) 4. Works with the Magic Keyboard (it's the same as before) 5. Available in 11 and 13-inch models (it's the same as before) Not to put too fine a point on it, but you know it's a minor release when 4 of the 5 highlights have nothing to do with this specific hardware, and one of them is that it comes in 2 sizes.

In addition to the new iPhone 17E, Apple also announced a new iPad Air, now powered by the M4 processor. I could almost end the post there because we've basically reached the end of the list of differences. As far as I can tell, the literal only other changes are that we now get Wi-Fi 7 and […]

The iPhone 17e Last year I was among the more positive people about the iPhone 16e. I spent a couple weeks using it as my primary device, and honestly, it was a pretty fine experience. No, it wasn't as good as my 16 Pro at the time, but it was also half the cost of that phone. I didn't think it was a cutting-edge device, but again, it was not sold at a cutting-edge price. The single camera was kind of annoying, although it must be said that people love the iPhone Air, which has a single camera setup, so it doesn't seem like that's a deal breaker. The 60Hz display was a bummer as well, although at the time, a $1,000 iPhone 16 Plus didn't have that either, so no one was really expecting it on this model. The one thing that really did bum me out was the lack of MagSafe, which felt like a core iPhone feature that we'd gotten used to on five generations of iPhones. Just one year later, Apple's back with a new model, the iPhone 17e. It's a very conservative update, but here's what I think is notable. 1. MagSafe has been added, although it does have slower charging speeds than the other iPhones in the lineup (but it does equal the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro lineup, so not too far behind). 2. Base storage is 256GB (from 128GB in the 16e), which is fantastic. 128GB works, but 256GB is a great starting point. 3. The new "Fusion camera system" looks like it adopts the features high end iPhones have gotten recently to adjust focus in portrait photos after the fact, although photographic styles are still baked in. Based on Apple's compare page, it looks like this might be the exact camera that's in the iPhone Air. 4. The A19 is here, and just like last year, this is the same as the chip in the standard iPhone, but with one fewer GPU core. With the exception of Ceramic Shield 2 on the front glass, everything else is exactly the same. It's the same dimensions, the same wireless modems, the same display tech, and the same advertised battery life. I have no interest in getting one of these this year, but I do think that the upgrades, particularly to the camera, the base storage, and the addition of MagSafe make this an easier pill to swallow at the $599 price point. * * * In my Apple Report Card for last year, I made a prediction about the 17e: > And I would expect the iPhone 17e to be the first iPhone we get in the year, coming in the spring and sporting the A19 processor, MagSafe, and the same design as the current model. Criticisms will remain, the base storage will stay at 128GB, the colors will stay the same, and the $599 price point will be a bit too much for people. Considering a lot of pundits didn't think we were going to get an update every year to this phone, I'll take the point for predicting that we would get this and that it would be the first new iPhone of the year. Everything else was spot on, with the exception of the base storage, which I didn't expect to increase. But hey, if I'm going to get a prediction wrong, I'm happy to have it be in the consumer's favor. * * * One thing that I think is interesting to do is to compare what I think is notable about the new phone to what Apple thinks is notable about the new device. I wrote the above section after pretty much just browsing the iPhone compare page on Apple's site. But if we look at Apple's marketing, what are they bragging about knowing about this phone? I'm using the "Get the highlights" section, which is something they've added to most of their device pages in recent years. 1. Ceramic Shield 2 (it's more durable) 2. MagSafe (it's more convenient) 3. New Fusion Camera (it's a great camera) 4. A19 (it's faster) 5. Apple Intelligence (it's smart(?)) When I read this, I see Apple stressing the reliability and convenience of this phone. It will stand up to more abuse, MagSafe makes it more convenient to use with mounts and other accessories, and it has more performance in the processor and the camera, so you won't feel the need to update for a long time.

Last year I was among the more positive people about the iPhone 16e. I spent a couple weeks using it as my primary device, and honestly, it was a pretty fine experience. No, it wasn't as good as my 16 Pro at the time, but it was also half the cost of that phone. I didn't think it was a […]

Announcing Weave, a native iOS app for Typefully I'm happy to announce the release of my new app, Weave. As is often the case with my apps, I built this one for myself and then decided it was worth sharing with the world. Weave is a native iPhone and iPad app for Typefully users. For those who don't know, Typefully is a web service that lets you cross-post to different social media accounts, and I think it's really great. However, they only have a web interface, they don't have a native iPhone or iPad app. Typefully does have an API, though, and it's pretty simple to use, so I put together a native app that lets you link to your Typefully account and publish however you like. Just go to your Typefully settings, create an API key, put it in Weave, and you're good to go. I've tried to replicate pretty much all of the Typefully web experience, including a nice post editor that makes creating threads really easy. Weave supports media attachments with alt text, scheduling, queuing, posting to specific subsets of accounts, multiple profiles, and editing your scheduled posts. I'm also really proud of the natural language input, which is what I typically use for scheduling. And, hey, if you don't like the green accent color, I also have a Typefully blue theme you can switch to. Again, the app is called Weave, and it's completely free on the App Store. If you're a Typefully user who uses an iPhone, I highly recommend checking it out.

I'm happy to announce the release of my new app, Weave. As is often the case with my apps, I built this one for myself and then decided it was worth sharing with the world. Weave is a native iPhone and iPad app for Typefully users.

For those who don't know, Typefully is a web service that lets […]

Why killing iPadOS isn't what you think it is In the second episode of the A Better Computer podcast, I talk more about how I think "killing iPadOS" is actually making everything more like an iPad. We look at why, from a developer's perspective, there's already literally no difference between iPadOS and iOS software. And then I give a quick update on my ROG Xbox Ally X, which is now running Linux and is so much better than it was when it was running Windows. Watch on YouTube, or listen in your favorite app.

In the second episode of the A Better Computer podcast, I talk more about how I think "killing iPadOS" is actually making everything more like an iPad. We look at why, from a developer's perspective, there's already literally no difference between iPadOS and iOS software. And then I give a quick […]

Micro app 11: JXR to JPG converter Resident Evil Requiem came out this past week, and I was very excited to start playing it. It genuinely might be my most anticipated game of the year, and I truly relish my first time playing through any Resident Evil game, so I'm trying to really enjoy myself this first playthrough. I'm playing on PC and in HDR, and the game looks absolutely outstanding. Anyway, because I'm playing in HDR, whenever I take a screenshot, we immediately run into a bit of a tricky situation with file formats. When I take a screenshot while playing in SDR, the image format is a simple PNG, which I can easily get onto my Mac and either share directly or convert it to a JPEG. However, when playing in HDR, to capture the high dynamic range of the image, a JXR is captured, which is not a format you may have even come across. In fact, it seems almost no one has, because most apps, and as far as I can tell, nothing really on macOS can even open them in the first place. Truly, I've googled around and searched the App Store for options, and there doesn't seem to be anything really good. This app has got to be the most lazily created app I've made so far, but I don't need it to be complicated at all. All it does is let me drag in my JXR files. I select a destination, I hit convert, it then goes ahead and processes every file, it normalizes the color to SDR color space, and it saves the resulting image as a JPEG. That's really it, there's no other UI, there's no settings, but it does mean that I can post stuff like this to social media, showing off the game. > Post by @matt_birchler@mastodon.social View on Mastodon Without getting too in the weeds, I'm doing this by dropping in the jxrlib library to the project to use its `jxr_decode_to_rgb()` function to convert the image into RGB data, which is then used by some pretty pedestrian Swift code to wrap that in a `CGImage` and export to disk as the file format of my choice. In theory, I could maintain the HDR data by saving the file as HEIC, so I'll probably do that next. _I don't currently have plans to make this available publicly._

Resident Evil Requiem came out this past week, and I was very excited to start playing it. It genuinely might be my most anticipated game of the year, and I truly relish my first time playing through any Resident Evil game, so I'm trying to really enjoy myself this first playthrough. I'm playing […]

I don't have anything to say other than you're welcome for finding the best 5 minutes of YouTube you'll see today.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

The Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to “any lawful use” and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us […]

In a GitHub comment back in January, Blender's Dalai Felinto gave this update on the Blender for iPad project:

FYI I just updated the task description to mention that this project is on hold.

[…] we are putting this project on hold for now. The team will instead focus on the Android tablets […]

Over the weekend, my Apple will kill iPadOS article caused some feelings, to say the least. The post title was meant to catch eyes, and it did, but I also think that it brought people into the article with the wrong energy. They were ready to fight, and read my (admittedly hastily written) post […]

Jack Dorsey on Twitter: we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.

Apparently […]

Chance Miller: New ‘F1: Drive to Survive’ season is coming to Apple TV

Ahead of the first F1 Grand Prix next week, Apple has announced a new partnership with Netflix in the US. Through this deal, Apple will make the entire new season (season eight) of Formula 1: Drive to Survive available on […]

Wesley Hilliard has a new post out which is a bit of a retort to my opinion on touch Macs and iPads: Apple could enter its toaster-fridge era with touchscreen MacBooks

It's not that I think it's a bad idea, it's just an odd one. macOS was not originally designed for touch, and MacBooks have […]

Hassam Nasir: Nearly half of PC gamers prefer DLSS 4.5 over AMD's FSR and even native rendering (emphasis mine)

German outlet ComputerBase has conducted a blind test comparing the image quality of six games across different rendering techniques. The main showdown was between Nvidia's latest […]

I love Rory Alexander's YouYube channel. He streams Gran Turismo for a living and posts a video or two per week that I always enjoy. On my YouTube home feed today I saw this video from 3 years ago:

What I find striking about it is how much different it is from his current videos. Hre's a random […]