Guess What Apple Paid to "Buy" the Firefox Extension for iCloud Keychain
Good news! As of today, there’s an official Firefox extension for Passwords.app / iCloud Keychain.
“What? There wasn’t one already?" you might say.
Fair question! Maybe it was a bit much to ask of the famously cash-strapped company to take care of those of their users who want to use the only* independent* browser. (To me, this reveals one of the reasons why I think you should rather store your passwords with a third party you trust.)
Luckily, the lonely lad (or lady) Aurélien has been maintaining an unofficial add-on for years! 🫡
“But now Apple has managed to scrape together the cash to build one themselves??"
Not quite… Apple reached out to Aurélien, through Mozilla, to ask if Apple could simply get the code of the unofficial plugin. (Source)
“Ah, so instead of starting from scratch, they instead bought a good starting-point. Smart."
Well, not quite… From the GitHub thread linked above:
✉️ Feedback on the The Verge Subscription
The excellent tech website, The Verge, just launched a subscription – which I know they’ve worked on for a while.
Generally, I think the way they’ve approached it seems pretty sensible – but I still have some feedback. And hopefully, the fact that I’ve subscribed for a year will increase the odds of it getting better, and not decrease it.
Some quotes from the launch, to get you up to speed
All the emphasises are mine – meant to guide you towards the most important parts.
Today we’re launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It’ll cost $7 / month or $50 / year — and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we’ll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design.
At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free. We also think our big, popular homepage is a resource worth investing in. So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage, core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts, Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free.
Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay. Subscribers will also get full access to both Command Line and Notepad, our two premium newsletters from Alex Heath and Tom Warren, which are packed full of scoops every week.
Our vision has always been to build The Verge like a software product, and we have a big roadmap of features to come, like a true dark mode toggle, the ability to personalize the homepage feed, and a lot of wacky ideas about what it might mean to follow authors, topics, and streams across the site and — eventually — decentralized social platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.
In general, it seems OK
I'm Getting a New Car, and I Don't Care About CarPlay
Am I insane?
Time and time again, I’m hearing people say that they wouldn’t buy a new care without Apple CarPlay/Android Auto.1 (The after-show on the latest episode of Mac Power Users was the last example.) I also hear how stupid some companies are for not including these systems in their cars. And I just don’t get it. Or, to be honest: I think I know some reasons why my opinion seems to differ from most people’s.
I live in the land of EVs
Norway has been subsidising EVs heavily for many years. And I think this statistic shows the effect well:
| Year | EV market share |
|---|---|
| 2020: | 54.3% |
| 2021: | 64.5% |
| 2022: | 79.3% |
| 2023: | 82.4% |
| 2024: | 88.2% |
To put things into perspective: The EV market share in the US is currently at 8.9%, which is well below the 13% we had all the way back in 2014 – ten years ago.2
A welcome effect of this, is that we also have a healthy used-market for EVs – so I literally can’t remember the last time I talked to someone who weren’t buying an EV.3 I’ll come back to why this is important!
My experience
The car I’ve had for the last 3 years, is a 2019 Tesla Model 3, which I bought used. My wife and I are expecting our first kid in May, and we have a large dog – so we need something larger in the next 6 months. That’s why I’ve been looking at new cars again.
I’m pleased with my Model 3! And the Model Y would probably be the best purchase for us. But I simply don’t want to buy one, due to *gestures in the general direction of Elon Musk*. Luckily, we have tons of options over here. But when I started doing my research, I found myself not caring about whether the cars had CarPlay – even though I’m heavily entrenched in the Apple ecosystem.4
The reasons I haven’t missed CarPlay
✉️ A Recommendation for the Great Note-Taking and Task Management App, NotePlan
In the latest episode of AppStories, Brendon Bigley filled in for Federico Viticci. Among other things, they discussed the apps he used, and he said he had research (and some writing) in Obsidian, while using the neat little post-it app Tot for “task management”. By task management, he meant that he kept his daily tasks in a note, and just deleted it at the end of the day.
This workflow made me want to recommend an app I like: NotePlan. And this post is a letter to him, about why I recommend that he takes a look.
Hi, Brendan! I’ve been listening to NPC on and off – but as I’m slightly more interested in the stuff AppStories focuses on, I’m glad you got the chance to bring your voice there as well. I enjoyed the episode!
When listening to your workflows and tastes in apps, I felt the need to throw a recommendation your way (which might also fit someone else who stumbles upon this letter): NotePlan. I think this app would be a nice upgrade over the way you use Tot, while, at the same time, also having the potential of replacing Obsidian. The writing experience is nicer than Obsidian’s – so it might even creep up on iA Writer! However, the writing experience isn’t absolutely top-tier, so I have to admit that I write my blog posts in a different app – while the files are in the NotePlan folder. (My favourite writing Markdown experience is Paper, which I wrote a review of here.)
Furthermore, it’s a bit expensive on its own, so if you don’t already already subscribe to Setapp 🖇️ (where the app is included), it might not be worth it, depending on which apps (if any) it manages to replace.
These are the ingredients the app is made up of:
At its core, it’s an Obsidian-like, as in just-a-folder-of-Markdown-files.
It does have plugin support, but it’s still far from as customisable as Obsidian.
However, if you’re mostly on Apple devices, it’s much more native-feeling than most Electron apps.1
As I heard you use Windows at work, it could be valuable that NotePlan has a web app as well – even though it’s not as good as the native experience.
It offers powerful note-taking features, like
- templates (with Javascript support!),
- backlinks,
- embedded images,
- code syntax highlighting,
- foldable headers and list items,
- synced lines,
- (light) front-matter support,
- voice notes,
- sketching and hand-writing transcripts,
- sharing live links to notes with others, and more.
I also like that it has a command-bar interface (with a fast search), and powerful custom themes.
But the Secret Sauce is the way it handles tasks and calendar notes! But before I go into that, I wanted to touch on …
How you can use it in conjecture with other apps, like Obsidian:
As mentioned, the NotePlan library is just a folder, that looks like this:
The Notes folder holds your regular notes, while the Calendar folder holds the calendar notes. If you wanted to dip your toes into the app, while using Obsidian in parallell, you could just add your Obsidian vault to the Notes folder. Then you just point Obsidian to either just folder, or the whole NotePlan folder (so you’ll get access to the Calendar folder as well). I think note links are cross-compatible between Obsidian and NotePlan.
"Julie", a New Single From My Band
I play bass in a band – and today we released a new single.
It’s called Julie, and I would love it if you gave it a whirl! 🫶🏻 It includes a modulation, an outrageous guitar solo, a fade-out, and good vibes.
Please Care About the Factory's Effect on the River
No Matter Where You Live
Let’s imagine a town, where the river is the main source of fresh water for everyone. Then, one day, someone builds a factory, near the middle of the river. A side effect of what the factory produces, is that it releases toxic waste into the river. The owners are aware of this – but they won’t do what’s needed to clean it up, as it would cut into their profits.
- How would you feel about buying the factory’s products?
- And would it matter if you lived upstream or downstream from it?
Blog posts about Substack
Today I read John Gruber’s blog post Regarding – and, Well, Against – Substack, which also linked to Anil Dash’s post “Don’t Call It a Substack”.
We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.
Anil Dash
This is a great point – and all three of us are in agreement here!
A slight disagreement
However, while I have a slight (and perhaps unimportant) disagreement with the next quote from Dash, I strongly dislike Gruber’s comments on it.
Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down… four of the Nazis. Four. There are countless more now, and they want to use your email newsletter to cross-promote that content and legitimize it. Nobody can ban the hateful content site if your nice little newsletter is on there, too, and your musings for your subscribers are all the cover they need.
Anil Dash
Substack is the factory in my simple analogy at the top. And “normalizing a radical, hateful agenda” is the toxic waste in the river. My small disagreement, is that I don’t think the factory was made with the purpose of polluting the river.
Some might say that’s an unimportant distinction, and that what matters is that they don’t care that they’re doing it. And I get that! My point is that I don’t want to give people the opportunity to think, “Of course they didn’t create an entire factory just to pollute 🙄 – so let me disregard all the points about the factory’s effect on the river."1
Gruber’s post also shows another way this type of hyperbole can be unhelpful:
I think Substack sees itself as a publishing tool and platform. They’re not here to promote any particular side. It makes no more sense for them to refuse to publish someone for being too right-wing than it would for WordPress or Medium or, say, GitHub or YouTube. Substack, I think, sees itself like that.
John Gruber
Technically, I think he’s right here.2 But Dash’s (I believe, exaggerated comment) allowed the discussion to be dragged into Substack’s intent rather than effect – which is not unimportant, but way less important.3
A large disagreement
However, I really don’t like where Gruber goes next:
What I can say, personally, is that I read and pay for several publications on Substack, and for the last few weeks I’ve tried using their iOS app (more on this in a moment), and I’ve never once seen a whiff of anything even vaguely right-wing, let alone hateful. Not a whiff. If it’s there, I never see it. If I never see it, I don’t care.
John Gruber
Gruber doesn’t even try to dispute that the factory is poisoning the river. The only thing he’s saying is that, as someone who lives upstream from it, he doesn’t care whether it pollutes. His water tastes good, so why should he care?4