2026-04-24 05:50:42
I neglected to mention it in the announcement post, but another thing I'm really excited about with Quick Reads is that it's the first app I've made so far that requires users to sign in. I decided if I was going to do it, I was going to do it the right way, so I've implemented what I think is a pretty good system.
The headline here is that Quick Reads is 100% password-free. This is convenient for users because there's nothing to forget, and it's even more convenient for me as I have no password data to secure. When you sign up for Quick Reads, you simply need to provide your email address. Assuming you pass the CAPTCHA, I'll send an email to that address with a magic link for you to sign in for the first time. From there, you'll just stay logged in effectively forever, but if you ever want to log into a different device or another browser, you just key in your same email address, and I'll send you another magic link.
However, sometimes magic links are annoying, so I bucked up and I figured out how to do passkeys, and it turns out it's really not that hard. So after you get signed into your account and sign up for a free trial, you can go into settings and create a passkey. You can create multiple passkeys, and you can name them, and from then on you can just use your passkey to sign in to the web interface.
What I personally find exciting about this is that one of my frustrations with passkeys in general is that they are a technology that was pitched as an alternative to passwords, and a lot of their benefits only apply if the password is taken out of the equation. However, I'm yet to find a single service that lets me rely entirely on a passkey. There's always a password in the mix. I guess one of the benefits of having a purely greenfield solution is that I was able to omit passwords from day one and create the passkey future many people dream of.
2026-04-24 00:45:42
I'm happy to finally announce Quick Reads is available to everyone in a sort of early access today. This has been my only read later service since February, and it's genuinely the best product for the job for me.
I think the product largely speaks for itself, so I'm not going to get too into the weeds here. But first, I did want to mention what this product is and what it isn't. This is a service specifically for people who want to read things, not necessarily those who want to save random links. You can save any URL you want, but it's absolutely optimized around saving blog posts, news articles, and social media posts. This is much more Matter or Instapaper rather than Raindrop or Pinboard.
The web interface is good to go, and I'm really happy with it. However, a read later service needs more ways to save content into it, so I've had to build out a good number of other products as well. Both the Chrome and Safari extensions are available now through the official storefronts for each platform, and the Firefox extension is working on my personal computer. However, I need to distribute it through Firefox directly, which I simply haven't been able to do yet.
The iOS app is not fully there yet, but it is functional and works best on the iPhone. You can join the public TestFlight from the link in the integrations page on the web app.
Finally, there is an Obsidian plugin that is available on GitHub at the moment, and I'm working to get it approved to distribute through the community plugins marketplace directly in Obsidian.
To be clear, the Safari extension is for the Mac only. If you're on iOS, install the iOS app from TestFlight and websites will be able to be shared from the share sheet from any app.
I'm actually really excited about the API that is available for Quick Reads. From the beginning, I made this product API first so that effectively everything you are doing in the official apps is just as easy to implement for anyone. If you don't like the Chrome extension, build your own. If you don't want to wait for the iOS app to reach its official 1.0 release, no problem. If you want to make an Android app, go right ahead! If you want to integrate this into shortcuts, it totally works.
I've also made sure that people using coding agents can get the most out of this API since it's brand new and isn't in any training data. You can copy the full documentation with a single click near the top of the page, or if there's a specific endpoint you want to use, you can copy just that documentation from that section.
One really important feature to me in read later services is the ability to listen to my articles. I very often am walking the dog or doing a workout and would love to just listen to the article that I saved. Services like Readwise and Matter have this already, and it's great. I actually considered not doing this feature because it is both the hardest to implement and the most expensive feature, but it's a core piece of functionality for me. So I felt I really couldn't make this product something I would use if it wasn't there.
I've chosen to go with a service called Async, which gives me the functionality that I want at a price that I can make work and with voice quality that is sufficient. I may do a technical deep dive on how I did this at a later date, but I've basically worked out what the costs are associated with this feature, and I've limited users to three hours of text-to-speech generation per month. If you use all three hours, I'm basically making no money on you, but less than that seemed too restrictive.
As a side note, ElevenLabs has an awesome app called ElevenReader, which is available on iOS and Android, which lets you paste in a URL or whatever random text you have, and it will turn that into audio for free (ah, the joys of being VC funded). Conveniently, QuickReads has the ability to easily copy the URL or article text for whatever article you're looking at. So if you're on your phone, you can just copy either of those to your clipboard. Open ElevenReader and paste it there, and you'll get an audio version.
My aim with this product is to find the right balance between satisfying users' expectations without turning it into some sort of paywall workaround. As such, QuickReads plays nicely with paywalled content, and it does it in a way I think is fair to both writers and readers.
When you add an article from the Quick Reads app itself, the server fetches the page and parses the text from there. It is not logged in, and it can not get through paywalls. However, as you will see in the API, the browser extensions and iOS app share button parse the page content themselves and pass that through the API to the service.
What this means in plain language is that if you are logged in to a website and are looking at a paywalled article, if you save it with any of the browser extensions or the iOS share extension, it will capture the full text of the article.
Of note, I do not cache articles and share the same text between different users of the service. This is what some other services do, and it allows people to get around paywalls. It's a nice little surprise when it works, I guess, but it is not really what I am going for.
Also, for those curious, the parsing is done with the quite excellent defuddle library. And in the rare event that a website can't be parsed with defuddle, I fall back to Readability. I'm also doing some custom parsing for social media posts (Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and X).
One of the reasons I made this app is because I was frustrated that it seemed like ReadLater services were either free and shutting down or rising in cost with all the good ones costing at least $10 per month. I really enjoy a lot of these services, but they offer way more than I felt I needed. And because they had so much functionality, some of it powered by AI, they had to increase their costs to match.
Quick Reads has two subscription plans, Basic and Pro. The basic plan is $3.99 per month and lets you save unlimited articles and use all the integrated apps mentioned above, but you don't get text to speech. The pro plan is $5.99 per month or $59.99 per year and also includes text to speech, both on the web and in the iOS app. All plans come with a 7-day free trial.
It should go without saying to the audience reading this blog, but I have zero outside funding for this app, so this product needs to be profitable, and I think I've found a good balance of providing a very competitive price while ensuring that I'm able to not turn this into a money pit.
I can say with absolute sincerity that I really enjoy using this product. I do not pretend that it is as full-featured or as polished yet as some of the other services that have been around for much longer and are built by much larger teams, but I think it's a genuinely good service that people will get value from.
Quick Reads is a completely indie read later service that cares about your privacy, tries to do one thing very well, and has a business model that I think is fair and sustainable. I hope you like it!
2026-04-23 09:37:46
I got an email this morning informing me that my Best Buy credit was about to expire if I didn't use it. So I pulled the trigger on the updated Logitech MX Master 4, the latest and greatest in the quintessential productivity mouse line of the past decade. I owned the MX Master 2 as well as the 3, and the 3S. I love these mice.
However, I wasn't particularly drawn to the marketing for the new model, and I also got this really nice little mouse last year that I unexpectedly love using, so I didn't get the 4th gen, but I did keep the 3S around, because there are times where I'm doing things like video editing where being able to scroll side to side is important, and my favorite mouse in every other way simply doesn't have that. So yeah, why the heck not? Let's give the newest one a shot.
After one day of using this mouse, I kind of despise this product. I expected to be lukewarm on it at worst, so finding myself actively antagonistic toward it is quite the surprise. In fact, I actually can't think of a single mouse I've ever felt this way about, but this one really rubs me the wrong way.
First, I find this mouse incredibly uncomfortable to hold, which is a shame because that was literally the main draw of these mice previously. The issue is that they have adjusted the angles around the device in a way that, if you're lifting the mouse off your desk, which is a thing I constantly do, the point that your fingers hit when lifting it are the two backwards and forwards buttons on the side. Apparently that's just where my fingers naturally hold the mouse, and I'm constantly rubbing up against those buttons, and it's uncomfortable. It makes me feel like I have to treat the mouse delicately because if I squeeze too hard, I'm going to depress that button. That would be enough on its own to make this a really disappointing purchase for me, but fear not, it gets even worse because the software on this product is something I truly despise.
As someone who has never really used the Logi Options+ app, I wasn't really bothered by it before, but I got it set up for this one because I wanted to use the new Bolt dongle, and my word, it's awful. It requires quite a few permissions to function, and that's all fine, whatever. I've used it in the past, and it just kind of lives in the background and you never really notice it. But what kills me is one of the main selling points of this new device, which is the stupid radial menu that comes up when you click down the haptic pad thing on the left side of the device. You get this low-res, cheap-looking grid of actions that, the moment I saw them, I already knew would be something I never wanted to do and ideally would never see again.
Of course I can go into the software and customize it to do something else, but this kind of button was available on the 3S, and I never used it there, and I don't know what I would use it for here either. If you think this is awesome, or this is me being too biased in my review, then yes, I am biased. It's my review. Go write your own if you disagree.
All of this is a shame because much of the rest of the product is quite good. I love the ability to be able to easily pair and switch between three wireless devices, mixing and matching between the USB-C dongle and Bluetooth. I love that if I install the software on each device, the settings change to match the device if I want things to behave differently between them. I actually like the materials more than I thought I would, and it seems like they'll be easier to clean than the soft-touch material of the 3S. I love the silent buttons, which could be a placebo, but actually feel even more quiet than they were before. I like the frosted look on the mouse buttons, they look quite premium. Not to bring up a sore subject, but I like that I can charge it while I use it. I love the magnetic scroll wheel, which is still outstanding to this day. I love the feel of the buttons in general, and I love the position and feel of the side scroll below.
Here's the thing: basically everything I like about this mouse is a carryover from the 3S that came before. Effectively, everything new is something I think has made it worse. Even some of the things that I complimented, like the materials being better than I expected and the frosted button being pretty nice, I actually think those are worse than the 3S as well, because when I look back at the 3S, it doesn't look old and busted. It actually looks more futuristic to me; it looks more like a unified device rather than this new thing clearly constructed from many pieces of plastic.
The other problem this mouse has going for it is that I've got a mouse from last year that I really freaking like. It has far less functionality than the Logitech, but it feels so good in the hand. It's so incredibly light, it's so accurate, and I love how it looks. In terms of raw functionality and compatibility with my multi-computer desk setup, the Logitech is objectively a better fit, but I love this mouse so much that I use it anyway. In a similar vein, a wireless keyboard that could pair to my three computers with a press of a button would be more convenient, but I use a wired keyboard that only works with two of my three computers because I like it so much.
So that's where I am. I know this is a day-one review, and I know you shouldn't necessarily review things right away, so let's call this first impressions. But I am shocked at how much I actively dislike this product. I really appreciate the functionality that it has, but a combination of the less comfortable feel in the hand and the incredibly frustrating software add up to a product I just cannot recommend to anyone with similar preferences to me. I would still highly, highly recommend the MX Master 3S, and in fact, I may return this one and stock up on a few of those so I have them for years to come.
2026-04-21 07:17:34
Apple: Tim Cook to become Apple Executive ChairmanJohn Ternus to become Apple CEO
Under Cook’s leadership Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025.
From a business perspective, it's undeniable that Tim Cook has been massively successful. Apple was big when he took over, but it wasn't the behemoth it is today. At a very core level, he has been remarkably good at his job. Big Business Boy Birchler has got to respect that.
Cook has also stood by some beliefs that I think are genuinely laudable. Apple's commitment to user privacy leveled up when he was in charge, and his drive to sustainability and the environment is worthy of praise.
That said, while his tenure has been financially successful, I think a lot of people feel like Apple isn't quite the company they originally fell in love with, and I hope Ternus can make us feel more that way again. I recognize that's hard when you're not the scrappy underdog, you're one of the biggest companies in the world, but I do think it's important for Apple to keep that "we do whatever is right for the user" energy and less of that "we extract as much as we're legally allowed to from every user and developer" energy. Insert something here about the shareholders' "bloody ROI".
2026-04-20 19:00:31
You can't cast a whole group of people as "evil" and then be surprised when they don't come around to your side.
2026-04-20 07:21:43
Andy Nicolaides: I’m not a Pro, and that’s okay.
I started to realise recently, but was fully reconciled in my mind after using the MacBook Neo for a few days. The realisation is that, when it comes to my personal devices at least, I’m not a pro and I don’t need the best / top of the range of every product I get to get a lot of joy, and productivity out of them. This is a completely obvious statement to most people reading this I imagine, and it’s kind of blown my mind it took me so long to realise it.
Other than my spell check really not liking the "realise" spelling my British friend uses here, I love this article. Andy points out something I've been wresting around with for a while as well: our computers are better (way better?) than they need to be.
The MacBook Neo is a fuckin' irresistible (I saw two in first class on a recent flight!) and the iPhone Air isn't lighting up the sales charts, but even I can't help but enjoy using this single-camera, okay-battery phone sometimes. By all accounts, the 17 Pro iPhones are selling quite well too, and part of that is because they're technically very good, but I can't help but also think that the colors and the design really hit with a lot of people.
For better or worse, I think that I remain a "pro" user. I was at a few concerts and a wedding recently, and I did regret not having the best cameras at a few of those, and while I am traveling with my Neo and using it as my "couch computer", every time I use my MacBook Pro, I go, "hot damn, that's amazing."
I still love the Neo, though. It's got…something…