2026-04-23 08:00:00
The iPad should be radically (though obviously) touch-only. No keyboards. No pointers. No mice. No trackpads. Just your disgusting fingers flopping over the screen and mooshing into icons. It should not have any window’d modes. Each app should fill the whole screen and only the whole screen.
iPad apps should be weird as hell, unlike anything you find on a desktop operating system. PushPopPress began to illuminate this path fifteen years ago, and then they got slurped up — like so many other promising, young, talented designers and companies around that time — by Facebook, only to disappear into the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s electric hydrofoil surfboard. Using an iPad should feel like a finger ballet. Your hands should be swooping and swiping and the whole OS should feel like skipping across a taut slackline, a bit bouncy and pleasing and physical but also precise and quick and focused taking you where you need to go, across some creative gulf. There should be no “hard edges” anywhere. iPadOS shouldn’t be anything like Windows or macOS or Linux, it shouldn’t be iOS made big, it should be only like iPadOS — a singular thing of finger-poking joy. When you pick up one of those magic slabs (and truly, the amount of engineering and power in those thin-as-heck slabs is something else) you should feel giddy, like you’re about to enter a whole ’nother computer-ing universe, one that is all about elegant multitouch tactility, worlds apart from your phone or your laptop.
2026-04-14 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers —
We were lucky. Maybe the luckiest group walking the Portuguese coastal Camino. (Certainly the second luckiest.) All the things conspired in our favor: The weather, the food, the quality of the path (lots of great seaside boardwalk walking for miles and miles), the kind old café owners who suffered our group’s order-chaos with inspired equanimity.
A Walk and Talk was afoot. Kevin and I have run a bunch of these things now. We’ve walked:
2026-03-24 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers —
I love Nagasaki. The more I visit, the more I love it. It’s a city with a historical and cultural depth and complexity you don’t find in most big cities, let alone mid-sized cities. It rewards multiple explorations, and I look forward to exploring more of the city and prefecture at large in future trips.
If you’ve never been to Nagasaki, you should go. And if you haven’t been in a while, you should head back!
2026-03-21 08:00:00
Roden Readers —
Hello! It’s me, Craig Mod. Author of TBOT (amzn | bkshp). Poking my head out into newsletter land. This? Roden, a newsletter you signed up for at some point. Perhaps last week, perhaps fourteen years ago, when I started shooting these out.
I’ve been busy. I’ve been doing something that I’m bad at and am trying to get better at: I’ve been having fun (and trying not to be crushed by the guilt of having fun). I went to LA and then Santa Fe and then Hokkaido with the binding agent of: eating great food with people I love. In Santa Fe I spent a few days meditating at Mountain Cloud Zen Center (more on that below; also, yes, fly from Japan to Santa Fe for Zen; also also, turns out the headquarters of their school is around the corner from my home ha ha ha). My body loves Santa Fe. Loves the crispness of the air. The elevation (once it gets used to it). The sharp light. The salsa. I spent a few mornings writing in Collected Works and generally came away from the whole visit thinking: I’d like to head back, eat More Salsa, spend more time in that corner of the US. In LA, I went deep on LLMs and Claws and all that with Kevin Rose (and also met some Hollywood-adjacent folks about book optioning), eating lots of Doordash’d Gwyneth Paltrow slop bowls and making software. I have to say, these three weeks of doofery have been some of the most fun weeks I’ve had in years. So, thanks for indulging me a bit of newsletter silence as I pretended to be a human out in the wild.
2026-03-13 08:00:00
I’m software bonkers: I can’t stop thinking about software. And I can’t stop building software.
I’ve always been opinionated about how software should work. Mainly, it should be fast. The bounds of it should be “knowable.” The contract you have with it should be “sane” (i.e., you just own it). But I’m busy, and I’m an OK-but-not-great coder. So all of these software opinions largely stayed locked in my noggin. Then, a year ago, Claude Code appeared.
2026-03-12 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers —
Hello from Toyohashi, a city between nowhere and somewhere else. A Tōkaidō city I’ve walked through on my two trips back and forth between Kyoto and Tokyo. A city with a space shuttle on top of a building and the letters USA strangely emblazoned below.
On both of my Tōkaidō walks, one particular bit of Toyohashi has stood out to me and has intrigued me in ways few other little bits along the old road have: A stretch of shotengai called (variously) Daiho Shoten or the Suijyō Buildings — literally, “Above the water.”