The most unpopular popular websites

Screenshot of the Kagi Search home page, showing a very clean, simple page with essentially just the logo, the mascot Doggo, a text field, and a Search button. Very reminiscent of what Google Search's home page used to look like a long time ago.

Tonight I decided to give Kagi a try, after hearing John Gruber mention it a few times on Daring Fireball. I’ve used a mix of DuckDuckGo and Bing for over a decade now, and occasionally will still try Google in desperation. What I’ve noticed is a decade-long trend – accelerating in the last year or… Read more

Secret Sonoma design lead: Barbie

macOS Sonoma is in so many ways a dumpster fire. It’s the worst Apple OS update I can remember (although admittedly there’s been some real stinkers over the years, so maybe I’m overlooking some repressed memories). There was of course the bug whereby encrypted external drives no longer mounted automatically. That was pretty special, because… Read more

Apple’s timing problem

The M1 was announced in November 2020. The M1 Ultra wasn’t announced for another sixteen months, in March 2022. It was clearly late. Very late. The M2 was presumed right around the corner (and it was, released just four months later). Why would anyone buy an M1 Ultra, using a two year old CPU architecture… Read more

People vs Products

I’ve experienced an interesting arc over my twenty or so years (thus far) of software development. I started out as a one-person shop, doing my own things, selling shareware. I had no manager nor technical lead. I had to make all my own decisions, in all aspects, without guidance or assistance. Subsequently, during my four… Read more