2026-05-13 00:56:23
My belated thanks to ZenStand for sponsoring Six Colors last week.
ZenStand is a charger that doesn’t feel like a tech product. It sits on a desk or nightstand the way normal stuff does, without announcing itself. It’s made from real wood, solid dark walnut that looks nice in a way that molded plastic never will. It’s got a weighted and adhesive base, so your phone lifts off cleanly with one hand. There are no LEDs, on purpose. A charger doesn’t need to show off that it’s a charger.
What you end up with is a MagSafe stand that does its job properly and then gets out of the way. Which, in ZenStand’s view, is what good objects are supposed to do.
Shop the ZenStand. Use code SixColors2026 for 15% off.
2026-05-13 00:00:10
Recently, I tripped over a headline for an article I wrote for Six Colors in 2015: “How I stopped using RSS and didn’t even notice.”
I could hardly remember writing it. But write it I did, at a time when we were deep in a news-aggregation desert. It seemed like RSS had experienced a conceptual death, through neglect and intent. Google first hijacked usage by creating Google Reader during RSS’s heyday in 2005, which sank the market for paid RSS apps and led to near hegemony for Google.
Then, typical of fickle Google, the company killed off Google Reader in 2013. Because Google Reader was web-based, its loss revealed a barren marketplace. Small developers tried to fill the gap, but the pattern of usage for many people had ended.
Couple that with the emergence, by that time, of the expectation of very low prices for single-purpose apps, and little chance yet of convincing people to pay for a recurring subscription. RSS readers persisted, but it seemed like their time had come and gone.
But I was too pessimistic! Today, I’m back to daily—or multiple-times-per-day—use of a newsreader, the same one that got me addicted back in the early 2000s. Hurray, I’m an RSS news junkie again!?
For those of you too young to remember RSS (Really Simple Syndication), or who have buried the memory of what we lost, it’s an open syndication standard.1 Any Web-reachable resource, whether a website or a service endpoint that could deliver a file in the RSS format over a web connection, could publish items that RSS newsreaders could parse and display, like articles or entries. RSS became—and remains—the basis for podcast distribution.
RSS embodies what was once the primary ethos of the Internet. No, not “information wants to be free.”2 Rather, wherever possible, produce protocols that allow decentralized use of the same kind of thing: HTML, web servers, email, and so forth. Nobody owned RSS; no central RSS system dispensed RSS; nobody could get tired of running RSS and turn it off for everyone.
The joy of RSS was that you could subscribe to tens or thousands of feeds, and get a chronological view, like an inbox, of the latest “news.” News could include blog entries, stories from major newspapers, price updates for a retail item, podcasts, service alerts, “diffs” when something is updated (such as changes to the text of a New York Times article or a Wikipedia entry), search results that changed over time, and much more. Back then, I even offered an RSS feed for any book by its ISBN through my price-comparison service, isbn.nu.3Yahoo’s Pipes service, of the mid-oughties, let you combine and filter webpages, RSS feeds, and other sources, and then output the results as another RSS feed.
For some people, a second inbox was a nightmare: more unread things that piled up like the unblinking eye of unwatched Netflix DVDs sitting on their red envelopes! I, however, liked to scan through the latest headlines or results, and then mark everything as read. Using RSS like this gave me a snapshot of what was happening. When I was actively writing regular columns and pitching articles for several publications, RSS was a way to get leads on breaking news, obscure topics, and product updates.
My favorite newsreader for the Mac, NetNewsWire, went through a couple of owners, and updates were delayed significantly, making it less appealing to use. I switched to another RSS reader. Meanwhile, after spending more time on Twitter, I found it to be a better source of up-to-date information.
In that 2015 article, I wrote:
I haven’t checked RSS for more than a few minutes here and there in the last year, and I don’t think I’ve looked at the aggregator I use at all in a couple of months. It’s not intentional; the need seems to be gone. It’s been replaced by a change in my needs and a combination of other sources.
I made this claim, too:
In the meantime, despite the amount of time I spend on Twitter, I enjoy the feeling of less pressure to keep up with what’s going on. I can walk away for hours or days, and put my toes in and get a read on what the world and my friends and colleagues are saying without the tick-tock tick-tock of hundreds of headlines dropping hourly upon me.
That didn’t last.
The founder of Friendster launched a beta of a news aggregator, Nuzzel, that pulled from your Twitter and Facebook social graphs—the people you followed, specifically—to rank stories people were talking about. Jason Snell inserted into the article an aside as an editor’s note, that he was using Nuzzel, and I soon followed. While it lacked the breadth and coverage of an RSS reader, it scratched most of my itches and reduced that feeling of “less pressure.” (I think we were all delusional in the maximum Twitter period.)
Of course, all good tools are acquired and die, and Nuzzel was no exception. A company called Scroll bought it in 2018, and then Twitter purchased Scroll. Instead of using it to increase engagement and stickiness, and offer a premium flavor, they shut it down on its acquisition in May 2021, during a high-demand period by us pandemic-constrained people dying for news, nearly a year before Elon Musk’s purchase bid.
In a tweet—later deleted—I wrote (and was quoted via the above link by John Gruber):4
Nuzzel has been since it launched nearly the only app I’ve ever let put notifications on my lock screen, and something I consult 20 to 50 times a day. I don’t blame Twitter, though: the model didn’t pan out (though I would have paid $25–$50 a year as a service!).
Fortunately, a few years after my article, NetNewsWire’s creator, and first and fourth owner of the name, revived the app.5 In 2018, Brent gave us new hope with version 5.0d1, which was an open-source RSS reader he was developing. He was able to rename this fresh take as NetNewsWire. Brent has since released versions 6 and, recently, 7 for macOS and 7 for iOS.6
I started playing with NetNewsWire again following the 5.0 release. I discovered that my old file of feeds still existed, and I was reading many of the same blogs and news sources. I started trying to add sites I wanted to read and services that seemed useful—most turned out to have a straightforward RSS option or a way to acquire it.
You can also track most webpages using tools or services dating back to the early 2000s: feed extractors or converters. For instance, Boston University, where my older child attends college, has a so-called BU Today news page with no RSS feed. I dug around and wound up at Fetch RSS, which has a nice free tier and several paid upgrade options. Several other sites offer similar services, which can fill gaps for websites that aren’t up to date with 25-year-old standards.
I don’t know if RSS is good or bad for my mental health. I believe it prevents me from obsessively visiting lots of sites and scanning them for changes, reduces the number of notifications in my inbox, and gives me a good sense of what’s happening in the world. It’s also let me tune into new blogs—yes, new blogs in the 2020s—like Nick Heer’s excellent Pixel Envy.
Jason recently went through an RSS re-examination and came away with a different conclusion: maybe some of his feeds he should stop viewing in a newsreader and instead read as email newsletters, and maybe some feeds should aggregate their multiple items into a newsletter. He’s done this with Six Colors, offering members a newsletter that’s derived from the site’s posts.
I’m trending the opposite way from Jason, I think. Anything that I don’t need to know about on a timely basis, I want to have appear as an item in NetNewsWire, where I can approach it as something I might scan and then read and skip over.
2026-05-12 23:00:51
The battle for the Mac menu bar has raged for decades, and shows no signs of letting up.
As the number of apps and controls in the menu bar have continued to proliferate, users have had to constantly find ways to keep them in check. For years, the de facto solution was the Mac app Bartender, but after an awkwardly managed ownership transition in 2024, a slew of alternatives sprouted up to take on the venerable utility and vie for the crown.
The team behind Bartender has continued to plug away, however, and the latest release is Bartender 6, which not only continues the app’s legacy of menu bar management, but also extends into an interesting new area: the omnipresent notch of the MacBook.
The menu bar management options haven’t changed much from Bartender 5 to 6; you’ll find all your usual options, including the ability to customize layout, behavior, and look and feel.
There’s also beta feature called Widgets, which lets you make your own menu bar items with a plug-and-play interface that feels like a combination of Shortcuts and Yahoo Pipes. It’s interesting but feels more than a little underbaked at present; I had a hard time getting it do anything that it was supposed to do, including simply showing the current CPU usage. With some more work, it might be more competitive with the likes of SwiftBar, but right now, it’s a beta in the classical sense.
Bartender 6 is available as a four-week trial; after that time you’ll need to buy a full license for $20, though generous upgrade pricing is available for owners of previous versions. If you purchased Bartender 5 in 2025, you can even upgrade for free. Note that Bartender 6 does require macOS Sonoma or later and that if you do update from 5 to 6, your settings won’t transfer—the developers say this is because of changes in Tahoe, but it’s a shame they didn’t provide an export/import option.
If that were the whole story, it might make Bartender 6 an unremarkable update. However, in addition to all of those features, there’s also Bartender Pro, a $15/year subscription that promises not only all future Bartender updates, but also advanced features, starting with what it dubs Top Shelf.
Top Shelf is part Dynamic Island, part clipboard manager, part file utility. Frankly, much of it also feels like the kind of feature Apple should building itself, because my experience over the last year or two with the notch in the MacBook displays continually makes me annoyed at just how user-unfriendly it is.
To trigger Top Shelf, you bring the cursor up to the notch; the interface expands outward from there, just like the Dynamic Island on the iPhone. By default, the first screen contains a pair of customizable widgets for common features like Calendar, Weather, and Music. There’s also a second media-playing widget called Vinyl, though I’m had-pressed to tell you what the difference between the two is beyond aesthetics.
The media playing controls can work with Apple Music or Spotify directly, once you give them permission, but they’re also compatible with any other media-playing app on your system, including web browsers. I did occasionally find it a bit aggressive about controlling playback from those, including times when it wouldn’t “let go” of, say, a YouTube clip even after I’d closed the tab.
Top Shelf offers two other panes, which you can switch to using icons in its top left when it’s expanded: Files and Clipboard.
Files allows you to temporarily store, yes, files that you might want to move between apps. Drag and drop a file in there and then you can drag it back out of Top Shelf into another app. That pane also has an AirDrop section; drop a file there, and it will trigger the system’s AirDrop feature, with the file already pre-populated.
Files can store up to six items, and you can clear them all from Top Shelf’s settings, as well as choose how long items stay in the Files palette, define a keyboard shortcut that brings you directly to this section, and decide whether the AirDrop option is present or not.
Clipboard, as you might expect, is a clipboard manager, showing you thumbnails of text or images that you’ve copied. You can choose the max number of items, how long they’re kept for, whether they’re deleted when you drag them out, and even if it will filter out sensitive info like copied passwords. If that’s not enough security for you, Top Shelf’s settings let you pick apps for the clipboard manager to explicitly ignore.
And, in another example of a feature that Apple bafflingly does not currently offer, you can use a single user-definable keyboard shortcut to summon a floating window to search through the Clipboard shortcut and move the selected item to the clipboard. (Alas, however, it does not automatically paste the result when select it—you still have to hit command-v.)
While Top Shelf would seem to make most sense on a notched display, it doesn’t require one. When not in use on my Apple Studio Display, for example, it simply sits in the center of the menu bar as a little capsule-shaped blob, not unlike on the iPhone. If you run a multiple monitor setup, you can choose where it appears with more granularity, including only on screens with a notch.
I don’t find it generally obtrusive, though I will note that on my Studio Display it doesn’t always play well with my use of multiple desktops in Mission Control—really, it should hide itself when you trigger that feature, otherwise it risks colliding with UI elements there and just generally doesn’t look great.
I also ran into some issues on my Studio Display where Bartender would get confused about whether I was trying to hover over the menu bar and bring up my hidden menu bar items or trigger Top Shelf. Some refinement there could be helpful.
With Top Shelf, however, Bartender also attempts to mimic a lot of the behaviors of the Dynamic Island on iPhones. For example, when you adjust the volume or brightness of your Mac, the capsule expands slightly and shows your changes; it can do the same for battery notifications when you’re charging or the battery hits a specific level.
But more than that, it also works as an area to show what else is happening on your Mac. For example, if you’re playing music, the notch gets expanded just slightly to show a thumbnail of the album art and a waveform animation. If you hover over the album art, it’ll expand to show playback controls.
If you have the calendar widget available, you’ll get meeting alerts at a specified amount of time before, as well as the ability to click and join a remote meeting (assuming you’ve got a corresponding URL in the event). The Weather widget taps into Apple’s own system and can show precipitation alerts.
A lot of these options are, of course, reduplicative of features available elsewhere in the system. But they are less obtrusive here, in this space that is frankly not being used for anything else, than with, say, your typical Mac notifications. That’s a benefit in the same way as the Dynamic Island in iOS takes the pressure off notifications there.
In some ways Top Shelf feels like a whole new app injected into Bartender—that’s not bad, per se, but I can see why the developers found this a solid way to set their menu bar manager apart from the slew of competitors that have emerged in the past couple years.
Do I use all of Top Shelf’s features? I do not. But that’s okay, because I don’t use all of Bartender’s features either. I appreciate that, in either case, there’s a broad level of customization available, so you can really just use the features that you want.
The first MacBook with a notched display came out in 2022 and four years later, the company’s approach seems to remain just pretending it doesn’t exist. Menus that run into the notch simply get shoved to the other side. Menu bar items that don’t fit on the right hand side often just seem to vanish. Apple may be trying to improve matters with its new menu control API in macOS Tahoe, but the result has been lackluster thus far, to say the least.
To the Bartender team’s credit, its Top Shelf feature does what Apple already does on the iPhone and, more importantly, should have done all along on the Mac: embrace the notch. Turn it from a weakness into a strength.
There’s an element of Top Shelf that feels like the old adage about skating to where the puck will be. Even if Apple does end up building a Dynamic Island like feature into macOS—and that’s no guarantee—it will surely not offer everything that Top Shelf does; in that way, it feels a bit like the team behind Bartender is trying to Sherlock-proof themselves. And if Apple never goes there, well, then Top Shelf can claim that island all to itself.
2026-05-12 05:24:25
We revisit the Ultra and Neo names, consider the future of Apple’s processor manufacturing strategy, and try to imagine why possible use case there could be for AirPods with built-in cameras.
2026-05-12 03:44:25
Your Mac doesn’t have one kind of sleep—it has several. That fact is generally uninteresting until you find you can’t easily put your Mac into display sleep or system (idle) sleep automatically when you walk away from it or close a laptop’s lid. Let me help you help your Mac drift into the arms of Morpheus by digging beneath the surface.
Recently, I got frustrated with this recurrent problem on the Mac in my studio. Generally, I want this Mac’s displays to sleep and the system to lock, but to remain active, since I access it remotely and it handles networked Time Machine backups. I thought I’d correctly configured the various System Settings, scattered across different panes, several releases ago.
There are three settings to be aware of:
Lock Screen. In the System Settings app, select Lock Screen, note the “Turn display off… when inactive” setting or settings: “on battery” and “on power adapter” appear on a laptop; nothing on a desktop.1 You can choose an interval here. Never is an option, and could be your problem.
Battery. On a laptop, go to the System Settings app and select Battery and click Options. There, you can enable “Wake for network access,” which is set to “Only on Power Adapter” by default, to wake your Mac as needed for certain incoming network traffic. Your Mac will wake up—and sometimes your display will, too. If set to Always, this can wake your laptop while it’s on battery power, and potentially leave its display active, which could drain your battery.
Automatic sleeping. Apple enables a setting by default that keeps your Mac active when the display goes to sleep. The location and phrasing are slightly different between laptops and desktops. On a laptop, the setting is in Battery’s Options dialog, as above, and reads “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off.” On a desktop, find it in the Energy preferences, where it’s called “Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off.” Disable this switch if you want your Mac to sleep when the display powers down.
Conversely, if you’d like a quick, manual way to put your display to sleep, you’ve got two options:
Unfortunately, tweaking these settings didn’t help my situation. The answer lay in Terminal, where I ran commands to reveal low-level information about what was keeping my Mac from display sleep.
Apple does provide an excellent tool that shows what’s affecting power management and lets you control it: pmset.3 Even better, you can paste in the following to use that command to extract just sleep-related assertions, or activities that have an impact on sleep:
pmset -g assertions | grep -i sleep
When I typed this just now, I had a modest list, preceded by a summary:
PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep 0
PreventSystemSleep 1
PreventUserIdleSystemSleep 1
pid 507(coreaudiod): [0x00022a4d00018492] 00:36:44 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep"
pid 507(coreaudiod): [0x0001fc3c0001a751] 03:53:17 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep"
pid 64802(Music): [0x00022a4c00018a52] 00:36:45 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.Music.playback"
pid 35328(QuickTime Player): [0x000200bb0001894d] 03:34:06 NoIdleSleepAssertion named: "com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX - disable system sleep"
pid 68171(screensharingd): [0x00022c1e00078cbd] 00:28:59 PreventSystemSleep named: "Remote user is connected"
pid 437(powerd): [0x00022b5900018bb7] 00:32:16 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "Powerd - Prevent sleep while display is on"
The first three lines tell me the off/on status as a 0 (off) or a count (1 per set of connected items) about whether any application or other process affects those categories:
You can see that I have several typical items in the filtered list below. The three lines listing com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep (twice) and com.apple.Music.playback relate to my current situation: I’m listening to the Music app via my Mac’s headphone jack, which is connected to speakers.
I have no idea why QuickTime Player, shown next, would prevent idle sleep—that seems strange, as it was inactive and had no open files. Quitting it removed that assertion. (Apparently, the specific language it uses is a legacy assertion, so it isn’t properly counted in the summary.)
Screen Sharing (screensharingd) is also an odd duck. Normally, if you have a Screen Sharing session connected to your Mac, its display can go to sleep, but the system stays active. In this case, this is a transient state: I use Bartender, which has to use Screen & System Audio Recording, which appears as a form of screen sharing when active, to determine which system menu items are currently visible.
The final item, powerd, is the setting noted earlier: “Prevent sleep while display is on.”
When previously looking through this list, I came across an online reference to a Mac utility called caffeinate. Folks, I’ve said before I have to keep humble despite being a technology writer for what is now nearly 30 years: I had never seen this command-line tool before, to my knowledge, and, according to Google, I have never mentioned it in my archived writing.
caffeinate was introduced 13 years ago by Apple as a cutely named option you can use to keep the display awake. For instance, to keep the display forced awake for an hour, overriding other settings, enter:
caffeinate -d -t 3600
Now, I was aware of Amphetamine (free from the Mac App Store). But I didn’t quite understand—or, let me be honest, maybe have forgotten—that it performed the same function, relying on the same system hooks caffeinate employs, and putting a friendly menu bar wrapper around it.
Finding the caffeinate reference led me to look for Amphetamine, which in turn revealed the problem. Perhaps due to some errant menu bar clicking, I had activated Amphetamine, thus locking my display on. My confusion might stem from three factors. First, I forgot I had it installed. Second, I used Bartender to put the icon in its Hidden list, so it wasn’t displayed in the active bar. Third, I used the icon selection option to change the menu bar picture from a pill to a tea kettle—you know, drinking tea might keep you awake? I regret my decision, as I didn’t recognize what it was when I made that decision, seemingly years ago.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t just turn it off in the app—I had to quit the app, then toggle the active state to turn it off. Sadly, we humans can’t turn off our caffeinated mode to go to sleep.
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
pmset to create limited sleep schedules, a feature available via System Preferences in macOS prior to Ventura. ↩
2026-05-12 01:46:13
Starting today, end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging begins rolling out in beta for iPhone users running iOS 26.5 with supported carriers and Android users on the latest version of Google Messages. When RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they can’t be read while they’re sent between devices. Users will know that a conversation is end-to-end encrypted when they see a new lock icon in their RCS chats. Encryption is on by default and will be automatically enabled over time for new and existing RCS conversations.
Apple first talked about adding this feature more than a year ago, and first beta tested it in a previous version of iOS. With today’s release of iOS 26.5, it’s now available—pending carrier support, of course.
I’m glad to see the company implementing this: while iMessages have always been encrypted, which Apple points out in its press release, security of our messages should be table stakes.
This news does mean encrypted RCS messaging will functionally be available in Messages on macOS as well, since texts and RCS messaging are already facilitated by your iPhone, as long as your phone is running 26.5 and it’s supported by your carrier and your account.
Updated at 2:51pm Eastern.
