2026-04-23 03:10:23
Our app launchers of choice, the software makers we love and those we’ve lost faith in, our browser preferences, and forgotten automations causing inexplicable behaviors.
2026-04-22 23:53:34
As a part of the process of reviewing macOS Tahoe, I stopped using my longtime launcher LaunchBar and forced myself to use Apple’s new and improved version of Spotlight.
The surprising thing is, I never went back to LaunchBar. Spotlight in Tahoe was responsive, well integrated, and finally supplied me with the OS-native clipboard history feature I’ve wanted for years. While there were a few features from LaunchBar I missed—most notably, the ability to bring up an app in the launcher window and then drag a file onto it from the Finder—I was able to adapt quickly.
My friend Dr. Drang gave Spotlight in Tahoe a go recently and had a much worse experience, most notably reporting that it was terribly slow. He quickly retreated to LaunchBar (and, for clipboard history, Keyboard Maestro).
I have to agree with Dr. Drang here: I don’t know when, and I don’t know why, but over the last few months, as macOS Tahoe has gone from 26.3 to 26.4 to 26.5 beta, Spotlight has gotten progressively worse. It’s sometimes incredibly slow, making me wait to launch an app. Sometimes it misses entire categories of items. (I frequently launch items saved in my Safari favorites, and on several occasions, Spotlight just refused to show any of them.)
Also, my months of using Spotlight revealed another weakness: It’s just not as good as LaunchBar is at intuiting which items are more important to me. In Spotlight, if I type home and accidentally select an app like HomeControl or HomeBot instead of the regular old Home app, I am then prompted to launch that other app, seemingly forever. In LaunchBar, not only does it seem to recognize that the app I’ve launched hundreds of times is more likely to be my choice than the app I’ve launched once or twice, but LaunchBar will also let the user define a text shortcut that is hardwired to a particular item.
Spotlight in Tahoe will let you define text shortcuts, which it calls “Quick Keys”—but only for Actions, one particular class of item. Why that functionality isn’t available for all items is completely beyond me. But the result is that I end up launching the wrong thing, and I have no real recourse except to try to remember to launch the right thing again and again until it figures it out.
(A sad admission: On several occasions, I have renamed bookmarks and even deleted some installed apps just to stop Spotlight from recommending the wrong thing.)
In any event, Dr. Drang reminded me that there’s an easy solution to my quibbles about Spotlight: Just go back to LaunchBar.
One reason I had been willing to stop using LaunchBar was that it had been increasingly unstable for me, indexing files slowly after startup, failing to find recent changes, and throwing indexing errors. It also hadn’t been updated very much recently, making me wonder if the developer was more interested in its app Little Snitch and had put LaunchBar in maintenance mode. Fortunately, there was a substantial update in March, so maybe there’s life left in the ol’ girl after all.
So, for now, my dalliance with Spotlight is over, and I’ve returned to the familiar floating launcher window of LaunchBar. However, I’m going to keep an eye on Spotlight. If Apple can make it faster, more reliable, and a bit more customizable in macOS 27, it might be on to something.
2026-04-22 22:00:00
Guy English joins Lex and Moltz to discuss Tim Cook movin’ on up and his legacy as CEO (Tim’s not Guy’s) before we start telling John Ternus how to do the job he doesn’t even have yet.
2026-04-22 07:10:37
I don’t have a dog for the same reason it’s hard for me to get excited about email apps: the short, sweet lifespans make you love them so intensely and miss them forever when they’re gone. You’re never sure whether you’ll spend several years with a favorite pup or mail client, or get lucky and have 15 or more. Eventually, in my experience with dogs and email clients, they grow old, fade, and are no more. This is the cycle of life and the software business cycle for many apps.1
While I love dogs and seek permission to pet from the owner of nearly every dog I encounter, I have gone cold on new email apps after decades of losing my greatest loves.
I can’t remember which horrible mainframe program I used first, in the 1980s, but pine—developed at nearby University of Washington—was a standby in my early Unix-plus-Internet days. I adopted Eudora as soon as I found it and used it for many, many years because it only offered text-based email—no HTML! When it petered out around 2002, Mailsmith arose from Bare Bones, with the same text-only front end. Despite friend Rich Siegel and other developers keeping it alive long after its commercial utility had ended, I eventually shifted to Postbox in 2019. Guess what happened in 2024.2
Thus did I approach the relatively newly released MailMaven version 1 with some fear, even as I smoothed its fur, patted its back, and said, “Good mail app! Good mail app!” I’m happy to say that MailMaven gave me the puppy experience: I’m so excited to meet it and get to know it, and I’ll be even more so as it calms down and matures, and I get to live alongside it for what I hope is a long time.
MailMaven can be a good pal to a casual user, someone who wants something better than a Web app, like Gmail, and might have multiple email accounts. It’s friendlier and easier in its default setup than Apple’s Mail—less frustrating and more customizable, but you don’t have to make any substantial tweaks to start using it.
For the true mail nerd, of which I number myself, MailMaven could become your best friend. It has a cornucopia of options that let you wrap MailMaven around your particular needs. And we’re only at version 1.0.
It’s here I should note that I have no financial interest in MailMaven’s success, but I did edit the Take Control of MailMaven book, written by publisher Joe Kissell, who has advised SmallCubed, the developer, and also wrote the regular user manual.3 This was in my paid capacity as executive editor at Take Control Books.
During the late development process and early 1.0 bug-fixing release schedule, I worked with the app quite a lot, reported a number of issues (which were fixed), and had planned to transition to MailMaven last fall. I wound up holding off—part of that was on me, and part on them. I’m glad I waited, because I can give the app a clean look after solving my problems and after the developers have given themselves a good shake and reached release 1.0.14.
MailMaven emerged, like V’ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, from what was originally SmallCubed’s MailSuite, a series of components to improve Apple’s Mail for macOS.4 When Apple changed its plug-in architecture, the folks at Small Cubed set out to build the mail client they were trying to tweak Mail to be.
You can tell! So many of the frustrations and non-configurable parts of Mail are easily dealt with in MailMaven. And they’ve added sophisticated rule-based processing and a host of other features that came over in part or in whole from their previous add-ons.
This isn’t a copy of Mail, though—neither for copyright nor look-and-feel purposes. MailMaven has its own nature, which I would describe as colorful. It’s not garish, but you wouldn’t accuse the developers of working with a bland palette. They use color as ably and extensively as they do interface design elements. You can change nearly everything related to color, so you’re not limited to the defaults. This is true in many ways throughout the interface.
Like nearly all email clients, MailMaven structures itself around accounts, mailboxes, messages, and threads. Since this is how you set up, store, and read email, that makes sense. By default, the accounts sidebar shows your email accounts, with mailboxes organized beneath each. With a mailbox selected, you see messages in the main view. It uses some elaborate arcs to show you the connections among threaded messages, a step up (if not a step too far for some potential users) from the low-key or hard-to-follow threading in many other apps.
From there, however, I feel like we move into new territory. That account/mailbox view is just one option. The sidebar has four others:
Tags deserve even more explanation, even though I haven’t started using them yet! A number of non-email apps offer forms of tagging that let you cut across other kinds of organization. MailMaven might have the most sophisticated version available. Tags aren’t just metadata—they’re almost supradata? Data that sits above metadata as an organizational scheme.
Without turning this review into a book, I’ll note three important aspects about tags:
Note just above that I mentioned a rule for your outbox: that’s right—you can trigger rules before and after sending messages. You can write a rule that prompts you to make sure you attached a file promised in the email! Or ones that file outgone messages in folders corresponding to the same topics in which you file inbound ones—or that delete certain messages after sending.
You can see that MailMaven has a lot of automation, processing, grouping, and review concepts at its heart. I would argue that if none of that sounds appealing, like you had an “oh, thank goodness!” reaction to the above, I’m not sure MailMaven’s general functionality will overwhelm you enough compared to email apps already out on the market—not Mail, particularly, but others.
However, you might still give it a spin just because it’s fun and easy to use.
Apparently, I have 700,000 stored emails. Do I need all these? Certainly not. Am I going to spend a sizable amount of time pruning these by hand? Can an algorithm help? It already did, dropping 100,000s of duplicates and old automated messages of no value.
When I first attempted to switchover to MailMaven, I was stymied. I don’t need that much email actively online, but I don’t want to lose access to it or the ability to search my archives. MailMaven offers effective import options, so it wasn’t hard to start importing mailboxes. The app can import the standard mbox format, as well as individual email messages in the also standard eml and emlx formats. But it looked like we might be talking several days, if not weeks, of uninterrupted import action. Seemed apt to fail due to entropy, and then I’d have to figure out what was left to do.
So I put this off for a while.5 A couple of weeks ago, I strategized: what if I dumped old email into a searchable database that wasn’t part of an email app? With a little heavy lifting, I imported everything, with a lot of parsing, from the early 1990s to the present.6 I have this database update nightly with the last 24 hours of filed email.
I then trimmed the email to import into MailMaven to just a year’s worth and imported only the folder structure from that period—about 18,000 emails—which was ready to go in minutes. MailMaven can’t import folders of mailboxes, but it can import the contents of multiple mailboxes at once. I re-created folders, then imported the mailboxes for them.7
Because I’d either used a series of modestly featured email apps or I’d used a modicum of features in more heavily built-out programs, the rest of my migration involved just two things:
With only a few dozen mailboxes organized thematically, I quickly figured out which dozen or so I had manually filed emails into. I am absolutely sure I could make better use over time of keystrokes and keystroke rules. The former requires learning and training my muscle memory; the latter means figuring out what I do repetitively, writing a rule, and then assigning a keystroke. Am I reading an email from Jason Snell, then always filing it in my Six Colors mailbox? I could assign a keystroke! Rules can be just as complex as those for incoming and outgoing email.
I like MailMaven quite a lot. And each day I use it, I tweak something that makes me like it more. The developers fixed a synchronization bug that seemed entirely to affect my workflow just after I installed 1.0.12. They suggested I get on the beta track—which you can enable in the app—and the next release, 1.0.13, solved the problem. (In brief: I read email on two Macs, but only filed on one. An automated rule, mentioned above, redirects book receipts. However, it failed to mark messages as synchronized, so my “reading” Mac removed them from its inbox after retrieval. Receipts would still pile up even though they had already been deleted from the server inbox. It works great now.)
SmallCubed offers MailMaven for a flat fee of $75 for perpetual use of the version you purchase, including a year of updates and tech support. After a year, you can pay $75 (at current pricing) to renew the license to receive further updates and support, or you can continue indefinitely to use the latest version included in your original year of updates.
Is $75 a year too much? (Or $75 for the first year, and then when you are annoyed enough to pay for another year?) Given how much I use email, and how much of an improvement MailMaven is over Mail, not to me.8 You can try MailMaven free for 15 days.
The bigger question is the issue I mentioned at the outset. How long will MailMaven abide? It’s a small, scrappy company that persisted past Apple pulling the rug out from under plug-ins. It’s not a startup, and they invested years to get to this point.
But the market is cruel. Will MailMaven be around in six months, a year, five years—dare I hope for 10 or 20? Having developed a better pathway for migration for my archives, it might be that I have to think of MailMaven as a foster dog, rather than me providing a forever home.
Nonetheless, I open my heart as I do to all household animals, and recommend MailMaven as something you try to see if it fits you now, and hope that it grows with us all.
2026-04-21 08:40:50
Tim Cook didn’t get to be a part of a “thoughtful, long-term succession plan” in 2011. After stepping in for Steve Jobs multiple times during the Apple co-founder’s fight with cancer, Cook became CEO, and Jobs became executive chairman just 43 days before Jobs died. Apple didn’t dictate the executive transition. Jobs’s cancer did.
I get the sense that Cook wanted to give his own successor the thoughtful, long-term plan that Jobs couldn’t give to him. Nearly two years ago, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggested that Ternus could be Cook’s planned successor. By the time the Financial Times reported that Ternus was likely to succeed Cook last November, it was clear things were already headed in that direction. I doubt there was a single person at the March unveiling of the MacBook Neo who didn’t know that John Ternus, who spoke to the crowd, was likely to be Apple’s next CEO.
Tim Cook knows he can’t stay at Apple forever. The longer he lengthened his tenure as CEO, the shorter he risked making the transitional period. I’d actually be surprised if Cook isn’t in the executive chairmanship for a lot longer than people expect. I don’t think he’s ready to put Apple in the rearview—but I do think he’s trying to get the timing on this exactly right.
And here it is: Cook will give Ternus the CEO job in a little over four months. (Wall Street has ten days to digest that news before Apple reports its latest financial results.) Then Cook will become Apple’s executive chairman, able to provide advice and support to his successor while presumably allowing him to forge his own path. Ternus gets a runway, mentorship, and a trusted adviser at a particularly stressful moment. I’m sure Cook wishes he’d been able to talk to Steve Jobs during his first year as CEO.
Oh, and Cook will apparently be taking one very specific job with him to the boardroom, according to the press release:
Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
It doesn’t take a magnifying glass to read between those lines. Cook is keeping one of the stickiest jobs he’s had to do the last decade for himself, for now: connecting with the representatives of various governments in ways that advantage Apple, whether that’s easing China’s worries about Apple’s focus on diversifying its supply chain, or convincing the Trump administration that Apple is investing in the U.S. while also needing tariff relief. Not only does Cook have the personal connections there, but it’s a messy business that perhaps Ternus is best insulated from—for now.
There’s going to be ample time to ponder the highs and lows of the Tim Cook era at Apple. The company is impossibly larger than the one Cook took over from Jobs. The explosive growth of the iPhone, especially from 2014 on, has changed the fundamentals of the company. When iPhone growth finally slowed, Cook swapped in a growing wearables business (led by what I assume is the product Cook is most proud of, the Apple Watch) and a dramatically growing set of subscription services. Those growth lines keep Wall Street happy.
When you’re the CEO, you’re the CEO of the whole company—but I do believe that CEOs come to the job with their own strengths, which reflect on their priorities as CEO. Cook’s focus on efficiency, owing to his background in operations, also served Apple well during this period. Realizing that product margins increase over time, he allowed Apple to sell iPhones at lower prices by keeping older models on sale for much longer.
Cook’s priorities helped make Apple a manufacturing powerhouse, capable of building products nobody else could—at least, until Apple showed the way. But as Patrick McGee so capably showed in his book Apple in China, Apple was also training up China on being a tech manufacturing powerhouse. Between that and Cook’s policy of engaging with the Chinese in order to gain access to the lucrative and growing Chinese market, Cook reaped benefits with the side effect of empowering a global competitor and not engaging with a government whose core principles do not fit with Apple’s.
The same goes for the United States, where Cook has managed to reduce the impact of tariffs by playing nice with the administration 1, making some made-in-the-USA servers and boasting about its investments in American manufacturing while downplaying its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
For John Ternus, who’s been working at Apple for half his life, to say that this is a huge opportunity is an understatement. Congratulations, dude, here’s the keys to one of the world’s most important and valuable corporations. Don’t break it.
But Ternus’s arrival in the CEO’s office isn’t just an opportunity for him. It’s an opportunity for Apple. Every time a new person takes over, whether it’s in the role of CEO or even just a middle manager, there’s an opportunity for change. Even if you worked for the old boss, once you’re the new boss, you have the opportunity to turn the page. It’s a lot harder for someone to reverse themselves on a decision they made than it is for someone new to come in and see the opportunity to move forward. (Cook re-instituted an employee donation-matching program when he took over from Jobs, just as one small example.)
In spite of its success, or perhaps because of it, Apple has been a company in stasis for 15 or 20 years. When everything’s going great, and all the executives just stick around no matter how rich they get on stock options, it’s really hard to make changes. The arrival of any new person in charge, not just John Ternus in particular, is an opportunity to shake things up. New leaders have the freedom to make their mark. That could be good for Apple.
I’m also struck by the fact that John Ternus comes from a product-focused background. All in all, it was probably for the best that Tim Cook was as different in skill set from Steve Jobs as possible, because that was an impossibly hard act to follow. Cook, as an operations guy, got to put his faith in the product teams that were executing and guided them at a very high level. I think it would’ve been a disaster if Apple’s first post-Jobs CEO had been trying to cosplay as Steve. Cook couldn’t pull off wearing that turtleneck.
But it’s been 15 years, and maybe it’s a good thing for Apple to get a CEO who’s closer to the metal? Ternus knows the ins and outs of product development at a different level than Cook ever could. Given that Apple is, at its heart, a company that makes physical products and sells them, having someone who has spent decades at Apple working on those products feels like an opportunity for a positive change.
As a part of Monday’s moves, Johny Srouji has been named Chief Hardware Officer, reporting to Ternus. This is a new C-suite position for Srouji, previously the senior VP of hardware technologies.
It’s hard to see this move and not consider Bloomberg’s report back in December that Srouji “recently told Cook that he is seriously considering leaving in the near future,” a report defused by Srouji two days later.
Srouji is the father of Apple silicon, and Apple’s chip efforts are one of the company’s greatest assets. When word of Srouji’s potential exit broke, it only underscored to me just how vital Srouji and his team are to Apple. It also struck me that perhaps this was evidence that Apple was negotiating with Srouji in order to retain him, during a period when one of his peers—Ternus—was about to be made his boss.
The moment your boss of more than a decade decides to hang it up seems like a pretty good time to take stock and consider what your own next move might be. If you’re Srouji, you undoubtedly have all sorts of different opportunities out there. Having a fellow SVP like Ternus be promoted over you also has to sting a little bit, even if you didn’t especially want the top job.
You need to retain key employees, and there aren’t many people more key at Apple than Johny Srouji. No matter how it went down, here’s the result: Srouji gets a C-suite title, and he takes over Ternus’s hardware role. Ternus’s lieutenant Tom Marieb is reportedly taking his slot and reporting to Srouji. This is textbook retention, and Apple has to be relieved that Srouji is staying on.
Still, these won’t be the last changes. With Cook on his way upstairs to the boardroom, I would expect many other long-tenured Apple executives to redefine their positions or even depart entirely. Keep in mind, most of these people have been working intensely for decades and have made enough money to retire in style. I have no doubt they do it because they love it, but once the boss changes and some of your old colleagues step away, it’s not the same, is it? It’s a cascading wave of change that is probably going to continue at Apple for some time.
Managing that change, and making it for the better, will be one of John Ternus’s first jobs. At least he’ll have Tim Cook to lean on for advice.
2026-04-21 07:10:03
Breaking news! Apple announces that Tim Cook’s tenure as CEO is ending, and John Ternus and Johny Srouji get promotions. And when that’s done, we finish our Apple at 50 coverage with a vibe-based draft.
