2026-08-31 23:00:00
I've joked here and there that I should make an RSS app. I genuinely didn't really mean it, but a couple months ago, after doing some work with RSS in Quick Reads, I thought, hey, I think I could do this better in a few ways, so why not? The foundation of an RSS syncing service isn't really something you can differentiate on, but there are some things I think can be better and I wanted to explore it.
I'm not going to go on and on about this, but here's the gist of what Birchfeed is.
I love the open web, and because RSS came to prominence in the pre-web 2.0 era, a lot of the basics are effectively open standards. This means that a lot of RSS apps allow you to connect any service that uses a couple standards. Google Reader and Fresh RSS are the big ones, and some apps allow you to do it through Fever (god, Fever was cool back in the day…feed a fever!).
As such, I've built Birchfeed in a way that it complies with all three of those standards. So if the RSS app you use today supports generic connections on those standards, you can use Birchfeed in those apps right now. Not theoretically, literally now. I personally have been using Reader Classic the entire time I've been developing this app as my client on my devices, and it works completely flawlessly. I switched from my previous sync service provider to Birchfeed and genuinely forgot about the change when I was checking my feeds.
I have not tested every app. However, I have confirmed that it works well with Reader Classic, NetNewsWire, and Unread. There are plenty of other RSS apps out there, and I would expect most of them to work fine, but your mileage may vary.
The place I feel most RSS apps fall down is in the web reader experience. Sure, you can read there and they typically have some additional features you can utilize, but they don't seem to be very fast in my experience, and they tend to be mouse-driven rather than keyboard-driven. One of the things I really love about apps like Reader Classic is that I can navigate the app quickly and get through my feeds, all with a few keys on the keyboard. This experience was completely absent from the web.
I don't know if everyone's going to love the web experience as much as I do, but I genuinely think it is fantastic and the best web reader I've personally ever used. It's not outrageously gorgeous, but it's got a stark minimalism that I think aligns with its general purpose as a sync service. But also, I wanted everything you do in the app to feel as though you are interacting directly with the database. I do not have superfluous animations, I don't use too much white space, and most actions are accessible via keyboard shortcuts.
The news stream is my tool for news obsessives. The idea of this is that instead of just opening your reader, you can open this dedicated window and you'll get a live stream of all the news happening across your feeds. Put this on a second monitor, toss it in the background, whatever. Set it and forget it, and just pop in to see what's happened in the last few minutes.
RSS fundamentally has a bit of a delay, so this may be a bit slower than a social media timeline, but it's going to be pretty darn good most of the time.
Birchfeed supports some automations that can streamline your RSS life. It's a relatively straightforward if this then that setup, and you can watch specific feeds, folders, or your entire collection for specific words that appear anywhere in the title, in the author field, or the article itself. If something matches your conditions, you can receive an email notification about that article. You can automatically star it or you can automatically mark it as read. Some use cases for this include:
This feels like an inevitable place where functionality will expand as more people start using it, so definitely provide feedback if you'd like to automate something that's not possible right now.
I follow a bunch of feeds and I try to keep up with the news. However, some days I'm just too busy and I literally never look at my feeds during the workday. I've used the daily briefing feature to create an email that's sent out to me at 4 p.m. every day that includes a summary of the biggest news stories from my feeds in the past eight hours.
I freaking love this feature.
But if that's not what you want for your daily briefing, that's fine. Maybe you want to wake up to an email with all the things that happened overnight. No problem. Set your briefing to arrive at 5:00 a.m. and show the last 12 hours of news. Maybe you don't check your feeds really at all, and you just want to get one email a day telling you what happened over the last 24 hours. All of these are possible with the daily briefing.
These emails are generated with an AI model in the background and are opt-in. So if you're not into that sort of thing, you don't have to use it. Because the model has a real cost, I am also not able to currently offer more than one daily email. Yes, I've also had the thought that a morning briefing and an evening briefing would be kind of nice, but as ever, I am very concerned about costs spiraling out of control, so I am limiting this for the time being.
I learned my lesson with Quick Reads. People love to get their newsletters delivered to their Read Later service and their RSS service. As such, on day one Birchfeed includes the ability to subscribe to newsletters and have them delivered inside your RSS app.
What's the number one action you take in your RSS app? Well, it's probably mark has read, but besides that, the next most likely action you probably do is sharing articles to read later (if it's something else, let me know. I'd actually be curious about other use cases).
Well, this is where you can call me biased because right now the only sharing option is to Quick Reads. That said, if you have a Quick Reads account, then sharing from this app is super simple. You can connect with two clicks and from then on you'll see a "save to Quick Reads"
You can do all the feed management you would expect, putting them in folders, getting their feed URLs, unsubscribing, but you can also go to a dedicated settings page for your feeds and perform bulk actions. You can also use this page to filter for feeds that haven't updated in a while to see if you want to clean up abandoned feeds.
There's also a Feed Doctor tool that will show you any of your feeds that aren't resolving and helps you try to fix them.
RSS feeds are sticky things at times, and I've learned there are a ton of ways feeds can be configured wrong, have errors, or be positively massive, but users expect them to work. If you have any issues with feeds, the feed doctor can usually help, but if you're stuck, please feel free to use the support
As you might expect from my other projects, Birchfeed is completely password free. You sign up with a magic link in an email, and then I'd highly recommend creating a passkey to make logging in in the future seamless.
Authenticating with other apps requires generating API keys, which also, per my typical policy, are only visible once to either you or me. My database has hashed versions of the keys, which I can't even reverse engineer.
Long story short, as always, I refuse to store sensitive authentication information in my databases. You're welcome. 😂
This one is short and sweet. RSS is a fundamentally open system, and while I let you import an OPML file you bring from somewhere else, you can also at any point export your entire library as an OPML file so you can bring it somewhere else. You are not locked in to Birchfeed at all.
Birchfeed has a 14-day free trial with no requirement to add a credit card at sign-up. This should give you more than enough time to import your feeds and try out the service with whatever RSS apps you want and see if it works for you.
Through the month of September, you can sign up for an annual subscription for $29 per year, and you will be locked into a discounted rate for the lifetime of the account. Starting October 1st, the annual price will be $39 per year.
I think this pricing is competitive, but also represents that this is a premium product that delivers real value to RSS readers like myself. I hope you give it a shot and enjoy it!
2026-08-31 20:00:00
Maybe I'll regret writing this one day, but it just kind of seems like face computers aren't something that are really going to happen, right? This blog is 16 years old, and for almost all 16 years there have been stories about how VR is "about to take off" and yet it still hasn't. Sure, prices have come down generally and the tech has gotten better, so more people have these headsets than ever before. But I feel like it only means there are more headsets in closets collecting dust, having not been used after the first month or so of ownership. Obviously, some people do use them on a regular basis, but it's absolutely not the mainstream thing that we keep thinking they're about to be.
Meanwhile, it's both better and worse for more subtle glasses with cameras. Google Glass was obviously mocked incessantly from the beginning and labeled "pervert glasses" on the spot. Years later, Meta found some pretty decent success with their Ray-Bans, although the narrative has shifted on those as well in 2026, and they are now also considered pervert glasses. And I don't think this has anything to do with the fact that they are a product made by Meta. People are creeped out not by the privacy policy of the company who makes them, but by the fact that they are subtle cameras that can be recording you at any time without you noticing.
We've seen a leaked video of AirPods with cameras in them, direct from Apple, and there are rumors that Apple is working on a pair of Meta Ray-Ban style glasses as well.
But I go back to the fact that this general category of technology has been trying to break into the mainstream for two decades or so, and the progress is brutal. Apple even got in the game two years ago and released a product that you might think would bring a category like this into the mainstream. But instead, as we sit here in 2026, we live in a timeline that would be exactly the same whether this product existed or not.
Maybe face computers are going to be a huge thing in the future, and maybe somehow AI is the unlock that suddenly makes these compelling in a way that hasn't made previous products compelling and simultaneously made them creepy. Otherwise, it just feels like a technology that we're building because we can, not because anyone in mass really wants it.
And to be clear, if this is destined to just be a niche product category that some people really adore, that's fine. I just think this constant push to make it the next smartphone is unlikely (to say the least) to be successful. Bookmark this for 2036 in case it finally happens.
2026-08-31 06:06:54
I posted this weekend about how cutscene heavy Metal Gear Solid 4 is, and a few people went, "yup, that's Kojima for you!" But I want to stress how insane this game is, even as a seasoned Kojima stan who has played pretty much all of his games several times (a few of them 5-10 times).
Here's how long the cutscenes are in all 5 mainline Metal Gear Solid games, as well as both Death Strandings:
Metal Gear Solid 4 has effectively 2-3x more time spent in cutscenes than any other game in the MGS series, and 60-90 minutes more than in Death Stranding. On it's face, this hopefully illustrates that this isn't just another Kojima game, but let's go further and compare how much of the game time is spent sitting through cutscenes:
Yeah, you spend close to half your time with this game watching it. That's a pretty serious leap from any of his other games, and I think that's what really makes it feel so suffocating to me. Both Death Stranding games technically have quite a bit of cutscene time as well, but those are much longer games where I routinely spent hours at a time just playing the game. Meanwhile, there are moments where you watch a little 3 minute scene in MGS4, you take control, you walk 10 steps, and another 3 minute scene plays.
Oh, and did you know that MGS4 holds the Guinness World Record for the longest cutscene in video game history at 71 minutes?
Now don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be a Kojima fan if I didn't enjoy this stuff, but replaying MGS4 again after so long has reminded me that (a) this game crosses into new territory that I found became too much and (b) this is the game where Kojima was the most self-indulgent he's ever been. I still plan on finishing this game because it's still pretty fun, but it's easily my least favorite of all of Kojima's games I've ever played.
2026-08-29 21:00:00
There are a few interesting tools for making mockups and videos that have come across my radar recently. The first is mckp.live, which is from the fine folks at ls.graphics which I use for a lot of mock ups that I do. It's got a video export option as well as customizable 3D scenes.
The second one is Ultramock, which is similar, but has very different control options. I'm actually really impressed by this one, and I feel like if I was dedicating enough time to use something like this, this would be a no-brainer. I haven't been able to pull the trigger on upgrading to Pro on this one, though.
Finally, we have Raylight. I'll admit I haven't actually used this one myself yet, but it certainly looks interesting and some people seem to be getting really good results with it. I guess I'll add this to my infinite backlog of software I really should try one of these days.
2026-08-29 05:00:00
Ian Carlos Campbell: Panic is refunding tariff fees paid by Playdate owners
Panic, software publisher and creator of the Playdate, is refunding customers for any US tariff fees they paid to purchase its console, Game Developer reports. The Trump administration's tariff regime was confirmed to be illegal following a Supreme Court decision in February 2026, and Panic, like other companies, applied for a refund. Unlike other companies, though, it's not pocketing that money.
Panic is one of the good ones.
