2026-08-25 05:00:00
We did 113 episodes of Comfort Zone, and it's been incredibly rewarding to work on and a joy to record with Chris and Niléane. It must also be said, I greatly appreciate Federico and John investing in our show, giving us a platform, and handling some of the back-end bits that we didn't particularly want to do ourselves. From a content perspective, MacStories was wonderfully hands-off. There were no directives on what to talk about and no rules on what we could or couldn't say. We got to make the show we wanted, and that was great.
I don't know if you've heard…but MacStories is posting on X again, as a Federico and John with their personal accounts. This has led to a bit of unrest, to say the least, amongst their audience and the MacStories contributors. Over the weekend, I wrote up a member's post explaining some of my thoughts on the matter, and I'm opening it up to everybody today who's curious. The TLDR is that I understand and respect the outrage some felt, but I think it's complicated and I don't have nearly as strong feelings about the move as others in our community.
One of the things I love about Comfort Zone is that while Chris, Niléane, and I agree on a lot of things, we don't agree on everything. While there were varied responses to this in the community, there were also among the three of us. An unwritten but rigorously followed rule of Comfort Zone is that if all three of us aren't into doing something, we don't do it. This meant that as a team, we did not think that MacStories was the right home for Comfort Zone anymore.
This basically meant we had two options: we could end the show or we could keep doing it, but on our own. And friends, let me let you in on a little secret…a clever hack to keep up with your friends all the time is to have a podcast with them. The show had to go on!
We appreciate Federico and John for both encouraging us to keep the show going as well as helping with the transition to this new era. Comfort Zone is a MacStories podcast, and they didn't strictly have to help here, so we very much appreciate their support.
We're taking a short break as we sort out the details, but we plan on being back in your earbuds soon! I'll of course talk about it here when we've got more, but you can follow the new Comfort Zone Mastodon account if you'd like to keep up with us.
Also don't tell anyone, but we are looking to shake up the format a little bit to keep it fresh. 🤫
2026-08-25 04:00:00
Guys, I love the web. I love using the web. I love developing for the web. I just think the web is awesome. As such, new features for Quick Reads tend to release on the web first, with the iOS features following later. I'm happy to say that a new update is out now for iPhone and iPad that make a lot of improvements to the experience.
Over the weekend, I completely revamped how feeds work on the web. Instead of adding every single item to your reading queue, these will now populate a river of news that you can go to whenever you want and save things to your queue for later. This isn't a full RSS app, but I think it will work for folks who have a smaller number of feeds that they can check in on on a regular basis.
You can now also manage your subscribed feeds from the app rather than doing this on the web.
I'm really proud of and happy with the UI of the web app. I think it's playful and distinct and just a breath of fresh air in the space. None of that playfulness or tactility carried over to the iOS app, which is a 100% native app. That lets it stand out from others in the space, but it's also meant that it looks like a collection of stock UI components. Some people like that, but I wanted to bring some of the character of the web app into the iOS app.
With this update, you'll immediately notice that all of the article lists and feeds align much more with the web experience.
When saving a new feed, you are allowed to mark it as a podcast, in which case it will get a custom audio player complete with chapters and show notes. This now applies to the app as well. So when you listen to a podcast episode, you can get a full screen, now plain view, and you can swipe over to see chapters and skip to them quickly.
Quick Reads comes with six voices you can choose from for text-to-speech, and now you can choose your voice in the app. This was previously exclusive to the web.
Word highlighting is purple rather than gray now, which makes it stand out a bit better.
Backend changes have been made to try to reduce the latency from tapping play to having the first word spoken to you (web users will reap these benefits as well).
By default, your reading queue is sorted with the newest stuff at the top, but there are alternate sorting options available now. If you'd prefer, you can sort by reading time or alphabetically.
You can swipe left and right on articles to do things like archive, delete, or open them in your browser. But if you want to do something else, you can now customize your swipe actions in the app settings. I think I got pretty much everything people could want, but if anything's missing, please let me know.
Performance isn't a problem until it is, and a few inefficiencies in how I was pulling data for things like the archive in the app were fine when the service was new and users didn't have a lot saved, but now that some users have upwards of 10,000 links saved to their account, a few things needed to be optimized. I won't bore you with the details, but a combination of updates to the backend query logic as well as updates to take advantage of those improvements in the app itself combine for much improved performance as you switch from tab to tab, even when you have a really large account.
All of this is available now in Quick Reads for iOS. Check it out!
2026-08-23 03:00:56
Let's start today with some comfortable truths. Here are a few things I believe.
I believe that Elon Musk is a very bad person. He is easily swayed by misinformation which confirms his preexisting biases about how the world works, and I think he is a dumb person's idea of what a smart person is. I think he supports racism, transphobia, and disinformation at a scale few human beings on Earth have ever managed. He's probably second to only one…
I despise Donald Trump. I think he is the worst of us. He makes this country worse, and I think we will be studying and reckoning for decades with how one of the least successful and least popular US Presidents of all time, who was resoundingly beaten in 2020, somehow became the choice for Americans 4 years later. I think he has done immense, lasting damage to the United States. I think he is the number one purveyor of hate and misinformation on the planet. I think it is macabre that so many Americans decided they could overlook his coup attempt in 2021, his brashness, his lies, his affairs, his harassment, his felonies, and his overall failure in his first term to deliver what he said he would…and yet they could cast all of it aside because they thought he would balance the budget (he's made it worse).
I believe that open social networks are how all social networks should work. I think email and RSS are the GOATs of the open internet, and it's a shame that the internet has moved away from open technologies like these. I believe Mastodon comes closest to that ideal.
I believe X is too permissive with what it allows on its platform, and I think that makes lots of people feel unsafe and makes using the platform unenjoyable, to say the least.
It is also hilarious that the Grok AI pretends to be politically neutral when all the evidence shows that it presents more right-wing opinions than left-wing opinions. When left to their own devices, these models do tend to lean a little to the left, which, as a wise man once said, is because reality happens to have a liberal bias.
I am extremely uncomfortable with the rightward shift in politics among the major nations over the past decade. It is a serious problem and has led to countries dipping into fascism, which has been cheered on by those on the right. It turns out that fascism is okay when it is owning the libs.
I endorse the safety and rights of LGBTQ+ people. I do this by speaking out on their behalf, by trying to persuade those in my life who do not feel the same way, and by donating to causes that try to improve the lives of these people.
Let's do something uncomfortable, please. As someone who shares these opinions, I can see that there are more people who share most, if not all, of those opinions on X than there are on Mastodon. I am not saying this is a good thing.
Like many other readers of this blog, I left Twitter almost 4 years ago. It was both a statement and an attempt to move the needle in public discourse. I gave up an audience and more than a decade of posts, and started over on the fediverse. I also really wanted Twitter to fail. By using whatever level of a platform I have, I tried to inspire people to do the same. That certainly worked to some effect.
However, I keep coming back to this uncomfortable truth: most people did not leave Twitter, even amongst those who agree with all the statements I made above. Others left for a while, before deciding the other networks weren't any better for them, so they went back.
I obviously bring this up because of what happened this week, when Federico Viticci and John Voorhees brought the MacStories brand, as well as their personal accounts, back to X. This immediately became the drama of the week on Mastodon.
Most Mastodon users agree on most of the big things, but what they agree most about is that thou shalt not use X. I do not particularly love the decision, either, and I do not think there was any way they could have done this that would have gone well, either on Mastodon or among their contributors. But I think it was made worse by springing it as a surprise on everyone. As Federico said in his oddly-not-on-MacStories post, the decision was his and John's to make, which is completely within their right, but they should have let their contributors know ahead of time that and why they were doing it. Since they did not, it felt like one of those situations where you find out you're getting fired because your CEO tweeted it out to the world.
I think the move hurt people on Mastodon even more because MacStories had so prominently embraced the Fediverse and spun up their own Mastodon server. It had generally been all in on the platform for several years, so for them to say that being Mastodon-only is untenable as a business hurts.
At the same time, I am generally uncomfortable with a lot of the conclusions people on Mastodon have drawn from this move. I have seen everything from, “This is proof that MacStories is fascist,” because anyone who uses X is a fascist, to that anyone who uses X doesn't have any morals.
I am personally less of a hardliner here, and it all comes back to that uncomfortable truth. There are many people in the world who feel very similarly to me about the issues I discussed in the first half of this post, and more of them choose X than Mastodon. I simply cannot support the idea that only people who use Mastodon are good and everyone else is irredeemably bad.
This also touches on my general anxiety about the left's tendency to disengage from wide and popular platforms. When they do not get everyone else to follow, they have siloed themselves off into a niche and lost impact in more influential places. Sometimes it's worth it, but I think we're too eager to do it in some cases, and it ends up marginalizing our impact.
All of this is to say that I think it is completely valid to be upset with MacStories, and to stop following it if you find this decision to be crossing the line. X is bad for many reasons. Elon Musk is bad for many reasons. I just think it is a messy situation when 4 years after Musk took over the company, more people who feel those things use X than use the competing social networks I spend time on.
P.S. This is an extremely touchy subject, and even though I feel this post was very fair and grounded, I'm still worried that even my suggestion that not everyone on X is a fascist will draw ire.
2026-08-23 02:40:33
Walmart: More Ways to Pay: Tap to Pay Is Coming to Walmart and Sam’s Club
beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to our payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, with plans to roll it out to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and to fuel stations by mid-2027.
Maybe I'm just too close to this because I actually work in payments and know how this works, but I find the lack of specificity in the reporting this week, from the tech blogs I follow, to be kind of frustrating. Maybe I’m just annoyed by the reporting around how Apple Pay works often being about as accurate at the “Christopher Nolan doesn’t use CGI,” reporting on social media.
Sure, Apple Pay will work, but so will Google Pay and Samsung Pay, other niche digital wallets, as well as just tapping your plastic card to the reader. This is because what Walmart is specifically implementing is Tap to Pay, a long-time industry standard that Apple, Google, and a few other companies package up in their own proprietary ways (they get a tiny fraction of the transaction if you choose to play that way).
All that said, I can't be mad about this news, as it's a great development for consumers, no matter how they choose to tap to pay.
2026-08-20 20:30:00
I've been using Samsung's new Galaxy Fold8 for the last week (More Birchtree members can read my initial impressions here). The reason I got this phone should be no surprise – rumors are very strong that Apple will be releasing a folding phone next month that has very similar dimensions. I wanted to get a feel for it, as well as having more insightful takes than most about how Apple does or does not do things with folding phones better than the competition.
Here's the deal, though: this thing is small. Like really small.
I've put a physical size comparison at the top of this post to show how the screen size compares to Apple's iPhone 17 Pro Max and 13 mini. As you can see pretty plainly, the Fold8 is even shorter than the tiny (by modern standards) iPhone 13 mini. Sure, it's a little wider, but the vast majority of the stuff we look at on our phones are vertically scrolling lists, and that content rarely benefits from a wider screen.
This means that when you use this device as a phone, it is the smallest phone you've probably used in a decade or more. Obviously it functions, and there are certainly some people who like that sized screen, but I think it's fair to say based on sales numbers, that most people prefer a larger display for their phone. For me, what this has meant is that while I can use the outside screen on this device, I don't particularly love it, and I find the experience to be less pleasant than using any normal-sized smartphone from the last ten years.
But the beauty of folding phones is that they can unfold and give you a larger screen when you want it. Unfolding this thing into a nearly 8-inch tablet that has a screen of a quality the iPad mini could only dream of is really cool. However, at that point, you're not using a phone anymore, you're using a tablet, and that's a different experience. Suddenly, it's a two-handed device, for example. This isn't a case where you have a small phone that can turn into a big phone…you have a small phone that can turn into a small tablet.
I'll reiterate now that I do think this is cool. However, I also think that there will be people who find this experience a bit lacking. They'll want a phone experience that feels more like what they're used to, and this passport-style device doesn't really deliver that. Samsung solves for this by simply having a larger version of this phone in their lineup as well. The Fold8 Ultra is a bigger device with a 6.5" outside display that sits in between the sizes of the current iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max. All the while, it manages to be 0.1mm thicker and 7% lighter than the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
As for my prediction, I think that using this passport-sized phone made it immediately clear to me that this is not a one-size fits all device category, and that a larger model is surely coming in the next couple years from Apple. I believe there will be Apple pundits in the first week of owning this device saying Apple completely nailed it and this is the perfect size for a device like this, and I think they will all eat their words. You may instinctually be reading this and thinking this can't be the case, but I'll point you to just a few Apple products with 2 size options: iPhone Pro, iPad Air, iPad Pro, MacBook Air MacBook Pro, Apple Watch…if Apple's got a hit product, they're gonna make 2 sizes of it.
As a bonus prediction, there seems to be a lot of momentum around the name iPhone Ultra, but I’m a little skeptical of that. I know it’s dangerous to make any predictions about Apple naming things, but I really just don’t think this one makes sense. This phone will be ultra in price, but it will not have the best specs or features in quite a few other ways, and when you add on top of that the expectation that there will be a second larger model in the next year or two, what’s that one gonna be called? The iPhone Ultra Max? If they do, I’m prepping my headline now: iPhones used to be a walled garden, now they’re an ultra max prison.
2026-08-20 19:00:00
Quick Subtitles 3 is out now for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. While this is not the biggest update ever, there's some really good stuff here. More than any of my other apps, this is an app for professionals who just want things to work reliably and quickly. This update aims to improve things on both fronts. It is a free update for all paid users.
Since version two, Quick Subtitles has had a cleanup and analyze feature, both of which rely on GPT or Gemini models in the cloud. You are able to use these features by either bringing your own API key and paying for your own usage, or you could pay for a cheap in-app subscription.
Starting in version three, all paid users get to use the cleanup and analyze features at no additional cost. This is powered by GPT 5.6 Luna. There is a cap. You are only allowed to perform 20 AI actions per month, but for most YouTubers and podcasters, that should be sufficient. The limit is there mostly to avoid any sort of abuse situations.
If you'd prefer to use a different model or to have unlimited use, you can still bring your own API keys, and that all works just as well as it always has.
I'm not able to support this yet, but I think that once the OS 27 updates are released, I'll be able to adopt the Apple Foundation model in the cloud. That will allow me to provide unlimited usage as long as that model proves to be good enough.
This is the summer of Matt adding iCloud Sync to all of his apps, apparently. Now, when you transcribe something on your Mac, your iPhone and iPad will immediately get that transcription. The AI features sync as well.
Another minor thing in this update is that you can drag to reorder the document list on the left, and of course those will sync over iCloud as well.
Like all of my apps, Quick Subtitles is built on SwiftUI, and SwiftUI has interesting ideas on how setting screens should work. They're very clearly built for iPhones and iPads, and you need to go out of your way to make them work even remotely well on the Mac.
As of version three, the Mac app has a completely separate settings window that behaves exactly how you expect a Mac settings window to work. It will never be sized awkwardly or have weird inputs. Cards on the table. I don't think it's a great settings screen yet. I think it's totally cromulent, but hey, you gotta have something for the V4. 😉
Depending on how you use the app, you may have run into situations where you drag in a new file to transcribe with the Whisper model, and it would take a minute or two for the model to get ready to actually start the job. This was caused by a quirk of how macOS stores the model data, and I have since revamped this in a way that should make the Whisper model load in a second or two every time.
This is the low-key hero feature in this update.
Listen, I'm not going to do an update without tweaking the UI at least a bit. It's not the main point of this update, but you gotta have a little fun, right?
The drop zone and model picker in the sidebar are now made of a glass material, and your list will elegantly slide beneath it (without killing legibility). All of the empty states have been updated to be a little nicer. The AI features now have more animations that play while they're loading. I've toned down the yellow a bit. Yellow is still the accent color of the app, but it's much more of an accent now rather than dripping over everything.
Quick Subtitles is a free update for all existing users. If you haven't purchased the app already, it is a one-time $24.99 purchase to get it for life. The price will be increasing on September 1st, 2026, so if you are looking to get this app, now's the cheapest time to do so.