Microsoft has finally (*finally*) updated their photogrammetry for California, bringing Apple Park into Flight Simulator 2024. You can practice your aerial fly-bys of WWDC now

I have spent my career leaning on Apple's excellent design chops when building my own apps.

Now they've broken the design language of their operating systems so badly that it's not possible to build excellent, bug free user experiences.

I've lost a north star here, and it's heartbreaking because there's no real way for them to turn this around for a very long time.

Funny that after decades of sci-fi asking “what if we made an AI that was actually alive but nobody believed it was?”, we instead seem to be dealing with “what if we made an AI that was definitely not alive but lots of people believed it was?”

RE: https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/115980695906183274

This is a plea to all the third-party developers out there to include some sample content in your apps. 'Look at all the cool stuff I can do' does wonders for the window shoppers or casual downloaders, and it makes it so much easier to share, demo, or review apps. Don't hide it away in a press pack — put it in the app!

Funny how for years many iPad users (including me) asked Apple to create a shell/Terminal app for iPadOS. We were told that nobody cared, was unnecessary, no developer wanted to work on iPadOS anyway.

Guess where you CAN'T use Claude Code today?

Apple Creator Studio would have been compelling with just Apple's pro apps; it really seems as though the only reason iWork has been bundled into this is to scoop up a bunch of users into this subscription that wouldn't otherwise want Final Cut Pro et al. Your two options in iWork are subscribe, or suffer ads all throughout the UI, so the coercion is strong — and so everybody gets to pay another €120/yr to Apple in perpetuity

I can’t recommend this interview with @steipete enough. As someone who has followed their work since basically the beginning, it was both a lovely walk down memory lane and a deeply insightful tour of where software development is heading. 👍

(And just a wild story of Clawdbot’s rise)
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-clawd-i-ship-code

Pixelmator Pro somehow makes Liquid Glass look viable for a pro app. I think we all know just how much effort must have been poured into this. More of Apple needs to learn from this, especially its pro tools.

Feature-wise, I've been using it for all the little things I usually open Photoshop for, and I've been really impressed. My need for an image-based design tool has definitely decreased over the past decade, but it's nice to have one, especially one this good, when you need it

Apple ‘runs on Anthropic,’ says Mark Gurman https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/30/apple-runs-on-anthropic-says-mark-gurman/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

No clue why but I nerd-sniped myself into making a Minecraft mod with #Swift using swift-java interop

OpenAI shipped a HUGE upgrade to ChatGPT Code Interpreter and failed to document it (even in the release notes) - but ChatGPT can now pip/npm install packages and run code in Python, Node.js, Bash, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C and C++! https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/26/chatgpt-containers/

Some shots from around the Hytale world map and pocket dimensions. So much potential here for both future gameplay and jumping-off points for mods

Running several coding agents is the developer’s equivalent of the “one more turn” button in the Civilisation games.

You keep jumping from one task to another managing your little robots & then suddenly 6hrs has gone and you don’t know how that just happened!

I wrote a blog post about why we in the photography space *still* complain about Apple's Aperture going away over a decade later.

It was a *really* good app.

New blog post: A Lament For Aperture, The App We'll Never Get Over Losing

https://ikennd.ac/blog/2026/01/old-man-yells-at-modern-software-design/

@helge It has some good points, but the main one everyone likes is actually just the layout system.

Which you could just have given to UIKit (as lots of 3rd party SDKs and libraries now have).

Pretty much everything else has big issues and annoyances for doing any major work with it.

@helge I think a major problem with SwiftUI is it is a single high level black box.

It doesn't expose any lower layers or building blocks.

In UIKit you can drop down to CoreAnimation. UIButton subclasses UIControl, which subclasses UIView, etc...

There are layers, buttons not working for you? Subclass UIControl.

UIView doesn't expose what you need. CALayer (can even swap the CALayer a view subclass uses).

SwiftUI is more "you get what we give you", "Need more? tough".

it’s really cool and awesome that App Store outages prevent me from releasing app updates on my own completely separate app marketplace
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/20/app-store-apple-tv-down/

Apps will melt away. The prompt is your new interface.

"when you’ll eventually be able to ask Claude or ChatGPT to do or create anything on your computer with no Terminal UI – what will become of “apps” created by professional developers?" https://www.macstories.net/stories/clawdbot-showed-me-what-the-future-of-personal-ai-assistants-looks-like/

This guide from OpenAI for how to build AI native teams is a fascinating look into how many teams will be working soon. I know from friends who work at OpenAI that this is in fact how they’re working, and as an indie I’m basically doing a version of this as a one-person team. https://cdn.openai.com/business-guides-and-resources/building-an-ai-native-engineering-team.pdf

Many technical people are missing that regular people have discovered Claude Code and are using it to build amazing things. This is an incredibly important moment — and I don't want people to underestimate how many assumptions about code and who can code are about to change.

Read here: https://build.ms/2026/1/19/the-claude-code-moment