2026-07-16 21:00:00
I was at the theater this week seeing Minions and Monsters, and I had this feeling over and over, which was I would hear a voice and not quite be able to place the actor. It was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't quite figure it out. If I was watching this at home, I'd pick up my phone, pull up the movie, and figure it out in a few seconds. But I will never take out my phone in a movie theater, so I was stuck.
Of course, 2026 is the year of the micro app, and I decided that I would take this opportunity to try and solve this problem for myself. A couple days later and I have a new app on my Apple Watch called That Guy, which does exactly what I wanted.
When you sit down in your seat, you open That Guy on your watch, type in the movie you're watching, and it downloads the cast in a simple to navigate, minimal UI on the watch itself. For the rest of the movie, if you ever have a moment where you're wondering, "hey, who's that guy?" you can glance down at your watch, scroll through the cast with the digital crown, and satisfy your curiosity so you can get back to enjoying the movie.
I've also added the ability to tap into an actor to see their most notable credits if you need assistance figuring out where you may know them from.
And to make this easy to pull up in the theater, I've of course included a complication you can put on your watch face for easy access.
This is the 19th micro app I've talked about in this series, and obviously not all of them have gotten released publicly, and honestly, that's kind of the point. I'm exploring the concept of identifying problems and solving them with software for yourself. it's cool when one of them can be turned into something useful for more people, but it's not the expectation.
Also, this feels like the sort of feature that should be in an app like Callsheet, Letterboxd, or IMDB, so I'm not sure if I should release this, or just hope that Casey Liss notices this post and agrees this would be a nice thing to have in his app.
That said, if there's enough interest from this post, I'll of course consider it.
2026-07-15 06:00:00
Stevie Bonifield: X admits its broken algorithm made the site feel like a ‘battleground’
X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, admitted in a post on Monday that X’s algorithm was “missing” data about surfacing posts from people who you’ve followed back. Now, he says a tweak will “boost visibility of your posts to your mutuals,” hopefully enhancing the sense of community instead of highlighting and spreading random arguments, but didn’t explain how the data went missing in the first place.
I’ve used X a little bit here and there over the past few months, and one of the things that became very clear to me very quickly is that it is a platform built for combat. Sure, the nature of social media, especially ones with algorithmic timelines is that you’re going to see content you disagree with and you’re going to want to argue with people, but it truly is to a different level on X. Apparently, there was a very specific reason for that.
2026-07-15 05:00:00
Tim Hardwick: Upcoming OLED iPad Mini Allegedly Uses 60Hz 8.4-Inch Display Panel
Apple is allegedly using a 60Hz 8.4-inch display panel in the upcoming OLED iPad mini, which is expected to be released later this year.
I obviously don’t love that they’re sticking with 60Hz for this device, but more importantly, I don’t understand why they keep pushing this product up market. Especially when the highest end iPhone is expected to be close to this size, not to mention Max iPhones already being pretty close to it already (and with massively better screens), I just don’t understand why they keep pushing up the price of this product.
I’m sure Apple has their reasons, but to me it really feels like this product should be like $249 and it’s kind of like the Mac mini where almost everyone can find a use case for it because it’s so cheap. The iPad mini already starts at $599, and how much do you want to bet that this new model will push the starting price up even more? As far as I can remember, every time Apple has added OLED to a device they sell, the price has gone up at the same time.
And just to get ahead of it, you might ask why I think it’s dumb that they’re limiting the refresh rate while also complaining about the price. As we’ve seen with the MacBook Neo, a lot can be forgiven if you hit the right price. I think if they’re gonna sell the iPad mini as a premium tablet, then it should have premium specs. Like I said, I don’t understand why that product needs to be premium, and therefore I think they can skimp on some specs to make it a great impulse buy for folks.
2026-07-15 03:58:37
Quick Reads has been obsessed with being the best way to save articles you mean to read later, and I think it's done a good job of that. However, there are links I come across that I want to save for later, but they're not for reading, they're something else. For me, they're often a dev tool I want to look at later — like yes, I want to have this link handy later, but I don't need it cluttering up my reading list.
Of course, I could save these links somewhere else, like Reminders, another task manager, or another bookmarking service, but that's not ideal, because now I have multiple places where I need to remember I have links for later saved.
Now, when saving an article to Quick Reads, you can flag it as a "todo" item, which places it in its own list, separate from your reading queue. These links don't get a reading view, they're just links you can mark as complete when you're done with them. These links still appear in your archive and are searchable like anything else. And if you accidentally save something as the wrong format, you can move links back and forth (web UI only for now).
For my API integrators out there, these todo items are just "articles" and are backwards compatible with any existing integration. There is simply a new list value that will show todo for articles that are actually todos. Check it out in the docs.
As far as the saving experience goes, I've tried to make it as seamless as possible. By default, everything still saves as an article to read later. However, on the iOS app (in TestFlight now, coming in the next few days to the public release), you can enable todos on the share sheet in the app settings, which will make it so that when you save something, you'll be asked if it's something to read or a todo item.
The Chrome extension, meanwhile, saves as an article, but you can hit the "todo" button to switch it over if you'd prefer.
There's also no way to demo this here, but I've tried to make the experience of checking off tasks feel nice, so there is a subtle sound effect on the web app and a nice haptic tap on iOS.
Oh, and if you don't want to see todos, you can go to your Reading settings page on the web and hide todos entirely.
And disclaimer, this is not making a Pinboard-style archive of the web page, it is just saving the URL to check out later.
Todos are now available on the web and the Chrome extension for all Quick Reads users. iOS users on the TestFlight also see it now, and both the iOS app and Safari extension will get this as soon as app review lets those updates through.
2026-07-13 06:00:00
2026-07-13 05:41:36
We're just over halfway through 2026, and by my count, I've see 15 2026 releases so far. Here's a from-the-hip ranking what I liked the most to least.