2026-04-14 08:30:46
The Playlist:
The first pitch, he said, goes back to 2008, and it was already pretty radical by Bond standards. “I had pitched in 2008 the idea to Barbara Broccoli of a parallel franchise,” Soderbergh said. “Set in the ’60s, R-rated, violent, sexy. Fictional backstory to real historical events, different actor, different universe.” [...]
That version was designed to open up a different, more lo-fi, stripped-down, and cost-effective way of making Bond movies, but not a replacement for them. “[It would be] cheaply made, where you get people like me, who are interested in that approach to do one of these things,” Soderbergh explained. “It’s just another lane that exists totally separate from the normal Bond movies.”
Broccoli and company, he said, were at least open enough to hear it out. “They were intrigued,” Soderbergh said. “But didn’t move forward.”
This hurts — it hurts to ponder what could have been.
2026-04-14 07:55:46
Federico Viticci:
Today, I’m very happy to introduce Apple Frames 4, a major update to my shortcut for framing screenshots taken on Apple devices with official Apple product bezels. Apple Frames 4 is a complete rethinking of the shortcut that is noticeably faster, updated to support all the latest Apple devices, and designed to support even more personalization options. For the first time ever, Apple Frames supports multiple colors for each device, allowing you to mix and match different colored bezels for each framed screenshot; it also supports proportional scaling when merging screenshots from different Apple devices.
But that’s not all. In addition to an updated shortcut, I’m also releasing the Apple Frames CLI, an open source command-line utility that lets developers and tinkerers automate the process of framing screenshots directly from the Mac’s Terminal. And there’s more: the Apple Frames CLI is also designed to work with AI agents, and it comes with a Claude Code/Codex skill that lets coding agents take care of framing dozens or even hundreds of screenshots in just a few seconds, from any folder on your Mac.
I’ve been using this recently and it is super helpful. I must frame dozens of screenshots a week and always looking for more efficient workflows for it.
2026-04-14 07:46:10
Welp, turns out I wrote an entire post about the Control-scroll zoom-in-and-out feature all the way back in 2006, when it was a new feature in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Somehow, between 2006 and last year, I completely forgot about it. I don’t think it helps that the settings moved from the Mouse panel to the Zoom sub-section inside Accessibility. But I’ve used it so much in the last year, since rediscovering it, that I can’t believe I ever forgot it. Anyway, after I posted about it earlier today, a few people told me they could swear they learned about it here, long ago. They were right!
2026-04-14 05:18:07
Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.
The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features.They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions.
2026-04-14 04:56:15
Tuomas Hämäläinen, on Mastodon:
We’re at Mac OS 26.4 and seems like the accessibility toggles should be way more considered than they are.
Here’s a comparison between “Reduce transparency” off and on. How does it make sense that turning this setting on actually reduces contrast between the background and the UI elements? Buttons and sidebars get this grey cast, which makes them almost blend in with the drop shadows.
Tahoe looks like Huawei’s rushed rip-off of what Tahoe should be.
2026-04-14 03:49:32
Bryan Chaffin, two weeks ago:
John Martellaro was good man. He was not only a better man than me, he was one of the best people I knew. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you Mr. Martellaro passed away today.
He rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and he was a NASA scientist. He worked for years at Apple, and most importantly to me, he was a columnist and the voice of reason and humanity at The Mac Observer. He wrote SciFi and a variety of tech columns for several other Mac sites, too.
He wrote for many Mac publications. Just his author page at TMO has 83 pages of article summaries.
One of Martellaro’s columns I most remember was one I linked to in January 2010, “How Apple Does Controlled Leaks”:
Often Apple has a need to let information out, unofficially. The company has been doing that for years, and it helps preserve Apple’s consistent, official reputation for never talking about unreleased products. I know, because when I was a Senior Marketing Manager at Apple, I was instructed to do some controlled leaks.
The way it works is that a senior exec will come in and say, “We need to release this specific information. John, do you have a trusted friend at a major outlet? If so, call him/her and have a conversation. Idly mention this information and suggest that if it were published, that would be nice. No e-mails!”
Inexplicably, the original piece is no longer hosted at The Mac Observer, but thankfully the Internet Archive has it. What’s interesting about this particular leak, to The Wall Street Journal, is that it came just three weeks before the introduction of the first iPad, and this was the story that pegged the price of the “new multimedia tablet device” at “about $1,000”.
The actual starting price of the iPad was $500, which made the purpose of the leak — if indeed it was a deliberate strategy from Apple leadership — pretty obvious. A $500 price looks pretty good if everyone were expecting a $500 price. But a $500 price is cause for celebration if everyone is expecting it to cost $1,000. It’s a way of under-promising and over-delivering without ever having promised a damn thing.
Another one worth revisiting is this post from December 2011, where I linked to a Martellaro column in which he declared that the success of the Amazon Kindle Fire necessitated that Apple build a 7-inch iPad. “Noted for future claim chowder,” I wrote. Well, Apple debuted the iPad Mini in October 2012.
I never did revisit Martellaro’s accurate prediction. Rest in peace, and enjoy the posthumous Being Right Point.
