2025-12-29 03:55:51
My thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring last week at DF. Copilot is a personal finance app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’ve always deeply believed in the value of embracing the design idioms and technical features of truly native apps for Apple platforms. Apple has noticed, awarding Copilot an App Store Editor’s Choice and featuring Copilot earlier this year on Apple Developer for their use of Swift Charts.
Copilot’s big news this week is they’ve launched a new web app, bringing access to Copilot from any device, anywhere. It’s designed with all the attention to detail — and concern for privacy and security — as their native apps.
Copilot Money brings all your spending, budgets, investments, and net worth into one organized dashboard, with intelligent categorization and insights that help you stay on track without spreadsheets or app-hopping. Designed to feel calm and intuitive, Copilot makes it easy to understand your finances across all your devices.
Copilot first sponsored DF back in 2021. My wife and I started using it then to track our finances, and we haven’t looked back. Copilot Money isn’t just better than anything we’d used before, it absolutely blew everything else away. It’s easy to connect to your financial accounts, and once you do, you don’t need to spend any effort at all to enter transactions. Copilot just tracks it all automatically, and most importantly, presents it to you in clear, intuitive ways. It’s so good. I’m not saying that because they sponsored DF last week — I’m saying that as a happy paying customer for over four years now.
Copilot is offering DF readers two months free with code DARING, plus 26% off your first year for a limited time, available through this link.
2025-12-29 03:39:53
Major update to Rogue Amoeba’s essential audio utility for the Mac. I’ve written about versions 5 and 4 previously, and everything I wrote then remains true. SoundSource remains the system-wide audio menu item that ought to be built into MacOS, giving you easy, intuitive control over every audio device (input and output), and easy, intuitive control over every app in which you play or record audio. That one seemingly-simple app does both those things is quite the remarkable design achievement. And aside from that usability, SoundSource remains an exemplar of UI design stylistically — distinctive and branded, while looking and feeling in every way like a standard Mac app.
New tentpole features in version 6 include fine-grained AirPlay support (e.g. route output from one app over AirPlay while leaving the rest of your system’s audio output local to your Mac), groups for output devices, and a new “Quick Configs” feature for saving and switching between, well, quick configurations. $49 for a new license, $25 to upgrade from a previous one.
2025-12-28 06:32:01
The whole illustration is just weird looking, for one thing. As for sloppy details, the carton is labeled both “Whole Milk” and “Lowfat Milk”, and the “Cow Fun Puzzle” maze is just goofily wrong. (I can’t recall ever seeing a puzzle of any kind on a milk carton, because they’re waxy and hard to write on. It’s like a conflation of milk cartons and cereal boxes.)
The Apple TV X account retweeted Cook, and added a credit: “We thought you might like this festive artwork by Keith Thomson, made on MacBook Pro.”
Apple didn’t tag the “Keith Thomson” who supposedly created this artwork for them, but if it’s this Keith Thomson, Apple must have somehow fallen for a scam, because that Keith Thomson’s published paintings are wonderful. The “K Thomson” signature is at least sorta kinda like that Keith Thomson’s signature on Apple’s sloppy illustration — but not really the same. (I like a bunch of the paintings from that Keith Thomson, and love a few of them, but this one in particular feels like it was made just for me. It’s perfect.)
2025-12-26 04:42:57
Terrific interaction design from The New York Times. Not so terrific interior design from the president.
2025-12-25 09:31:53
Special guest Quinn Nelson returns for a two-topic holiday spectacular: the iPad in the wake of iPadOS 26, and Apple’s executive changes as Tim Cook seemingly nears the end of his time as CEO.
Sponsored by:
2025-12-25 00:51:00
Another great video from Quinn Nelson. If your dumb cousin who knows you’re an Apple nerd approaches you on Christmas and says “Hey what’s going on at Apple, Bloomberg says it’s rats leaving a sinking ship over there?” and you don’t feel like explaining, just tell him to watch this video. Just the perfect explanation.
