2026-02-13 01:24:34
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:
After planning to include the new capabilities in iOS 26.4 — an operating system update slated for March — Apple is now working to spread them out over future versions, according to people familiar with the matter. That would mean possibly postponing some features until at least iOS 26.5, due in May, and iOS 27, which comes out in September. [...]
In recent days, Apple instructed engineers to use the upcoming iOS 26.5 in order to test new Siri features, implying that the functionality may have been moved back by at least one release. Internal versions of that update now include a notice describing the addition of some Siri enhancements. One feature is especially likely to slip: the expanded ability for Siri to tap into personal data. That technology would let users ask the assistant to, say, search old text messages to locate a podcast shared by a friend and immediately play it.
Internal iterations of iOS 26.5 also include a settings toggle allowing employees to enable a “preview” of that functionality. That suggests Apple is weighing the idea of warning users that the initial launch is incomplete or may not work reliably — similar to what it does with beta tests of new operating systems.
When Gurman began reporting about personalized Siri delays a year ago, his reporting turned out to be exactly right. If these features are going to drop in iOS 26.4, they should be in pretty good shape right now internally. If they’re in bad shape right now in internal builds, it’s really hard to see how they could drop in iOS 26.4. And once you start talking about iOS 26.5 (let alone 26.6), we’d be getting really close to WWDC, where Apple’s messaging will turn to the version 27 OSes.
Something still seems rotten.
2026-02-13 01:13:31
Jeff Johnson:
In today’s macOS 26.3 update, Apple implemented a “fix” for an issue I blogged about a month ago, macOS Tahoe broke Finder columns view. (At the behest of John Gruber and the Apple Style Guide, I’m now using the term “column view” rather than “columns view.”) Specifically, the issue was with the system setting to always show scroll bars. [...]
Without the path bar, the columns are now taller, but the vertical scrollers remain the same height as before, leaving vertical gaps, a ridiculous amount of space between the bottom of the scrollers and the bottom of the columns, looking silly and amateurish.
Did nobody inside Apple test this configuration either? Or do they simply not care?
In one sense, this whole issue with column view in the Finder with scroll bars set to always show is a little thing. It was downright broken in earlier versions of MacOS 26 — you literally could not resize the columns. So now it’s not broken. But as Johnson says, it looks silly and amateurish.
This is the sort of detail that Apple used to strive to get pixel-perfect, all the time, for all settings. “Whatever, good enough” instead of “insanely great”.
2026-02-12 05:04:07
Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica at the end of January:
Apple also outlines a number of usage restrictions for the generative AI features that rely on external services. Apple says that, “at a minimum,” users will be able to generate 50 images, 50 presentations of between 8 to 10 slides each, and to generate presenter notes in Keynote for 700 slides. More usage may be possible, but this depends on “the complexity of the queries, server availability, and network availability.”
Steven Troughton-Smith, last week, after creating an entire app with OpenAI’s Codex:
This entire app used 7% of my weekly Codex usage limit. Compare that to a single (awful) slideshow in Keynote using 47% of my monthly Apple Creator Studio usage limit 👀
Something feels off here, by at least an order of magnitude (maybe two?), that creating an entire good app costs way less than creating one shitty slide deck in Keynote. It should be the other way around.
2026-02-10 09:43:40
Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks.
WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your backend requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh.
2026-02-04 09:40:24
Simon Willison:
OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I’ve had a few days of preview access — it’s a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills, and Automations for running scheduled tasks.
Interesting, for sure. But super-duper interesting? I don’t know.
2026-02-04 09:34:54
Apple Newsroom:
Xcode 26.3 introduces support for agentic coding, a new way in Xcode for developers to build apps using coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex. With agentic coding, Xcode can work with greater autonomy toward a developer’s goals — from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture and using built-in tools.
I don’t know if this is super-duper interesting news, but I think it’s super-duper interesting that Apple saw the need to release this now, not at WWDC in June.
