RSS Reader Shootout

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, remains the backbone of digital newshounds across the web. Podcasts, too, depend upon RSS for distribution. Google used to maintain one of the most popular and best RSS readers, Google Reader, but scuttled it in 2013. Via Nicolas Magand, here’s Cory Doctorow on RSS:

Your RSS reader doesn’t (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you’ll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

If you ever bristled at how your social media feeds have targeted the content you see, you should check out RSS instead. The Mac and iOS/iPadOS ecosystem remains a great place to use an array of RSS reader apps.

Here are some of my favorites.

NetNewsWire

NNW is the GOAT! I remember using NetNewsWire Lite back when spending money on software was extravagent, and discovering that you could make your own CSS sheets to style the entries. That was a long time ago; NetNewsWire disappeared for a while after Brent Simmons sold it to NewsGator, where nothing happened to it, but he resurrected it after gaining the rights back to it (NewsGator sold it to Black Pixel).

NetNewsWire is a great RSS reader, and it’s free; Brent won’t even take money for it. It supports a number of RSS feed reader services, but also supports local-only accounts and iCloud sync. It looks like a Mac-assed Mac app, with a menu of feeds to the left, articles list in the center, and the articles themselves on the right side. This layout makes pretty good sense on a Mac, but it’s not necessarily the best option for smaller devices (or form factors). If your preferences in RSS reading are to focus on the articles list and article bodies only, or even just swiping from article to article, you can set up NetNewsWire that way too.

Unread

Unread, since its debut, has always been an iPad and iPhone-first product. It places a premium on look and feel, and presents your feed to you in a clean list, but once you click in to a story, it feels very natural to page from article to article instead of returning to the articles list. It’s a tap- and gesture-based interface, which makes perfect sense on the iPad (which is how I first started using it). The larger the screen, though, the less sense Unread makes. 13” iPad users take note.

Unread is available as a free version, and it’s incredibly full-featured in its free mode as long as you’re connecting it to a third-party service, such as FeedBin. You can use the free version to sync your RSS subscriptions between devices, but if you want to take advantage of read-it-later service integration, change the icon, and have a faster (cached) reading experience, the subscription is a good option. Plus, you’re supporting an independent software developer.

Navigating in Unread is a gesture-rich experience, full of swipes between panels instead of buttons and controls exposed in the UI. With Unread, you swipe from screen to screen (folders, feeds, articles), and to get to share menu items , adding subscriptions, searching, and settings. It’s a touch-driven interface in a way that’s uniquely iPad and iPhone. It can feel a bit mysterious swiping around for preferences or other controls, but it’s a great way to read on an iPhone or smaller touchscreen. The interface does not scale well to 13” iPads, though.

I have been a longtime Unread user and favor it on the iPad. Its interface allows the reader to effortlessly focus on one article at a time, and it stands apart in terms of look and feel.

Interestingly, there’s a Mac version of Unread. Contrary to the iOS version’s strong opinion on design and presentation, Unread for the Mac is more standard experience compared to the iOS version. For this, I am glad: what makes Unread work on a touchscreen would make it weird on a Mac. It has the most interesting theme collection of any of the Mac apps in this post, and I do find myself using it on the Mac. (I will confess, though, that I don’t read RSS on the Mac very much.)

Even if you don’t use Unread, the share extension is incredibly useful. If I am on a page that offers an RSS feed, I can use the extension to subscribe in Unread, and even file into the FeedBin tag or tags for focused reading.

ReadKit

ReadKit, when it came out, put me in mind of Vienna when it first came out. It was pretty bare bones at first, and I didn’t give it much of a spin before bonding it for other applications. But version 3 on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad is great, with a tasteful theme implementation and support for lots of third-party services. ReadKit has the cleanest minimal layout, and is my favorite on the iPad mini.

Reeder

There’s a new version of Reeder out for Mac/iPadOS/iOS that varies from what is now known as Reeder (Classic); the latter app is a great version of an RSS reader, and was one of the first killer apps for iOS. I can’t ignore Reader Classic in this article, as it’s still supported and available, and possibly my favorite on iPad.

Reeder Classic was one of the first must-have apps for the iPhone for nerds. Developer Silvio Rizzi has continued to update the app, and offers Mac and iPad specific versions that are excellent.

Reeder Classic on iPad is a delightful whoosh of animation in the user interface. Of the apps featured here, it’s the most bespoke in its use of custom animation. Compared especially to NetNewsWire and ReadKit, Reeder has a design language all its own.

Reeder Classic only has light and dark modes, with some toggles in between to customize your experience; you can tweak font and font size and a few other details, but unlike ReadKit or Unread, themes are less transformative.

A word about Reeder’s new incarnation: it is looking to be more than your RSS reader. It wants to be your hub for everything you read on the internet. And I think that’s a laudable, if lofty, goal. Going to one app to see all of your news and interests is compelling in theory, but that app has to be feature-rich and be a preferable way to consume said content. Reeder will grab all of the links you throw at it and treat them as a bookmarking service, read it later service, RSS service, YouTube aggregator, and Reddit aggregator. It doesn’t do this using your accounts, however; you point it towards a favorite subreddit, for example, and browse the postings. You can’t interact with the content using the platform’s affordances (ie upvoting Reddit posts). If you’ve tried Icon Factory’s Tapestry, you are familiar with Reeder’s feature set.

I think this new version of Reeder shows a lot of promise. It’s not for me by itself right now (I don’t think it’s a better RSS reader than either NetNewsWire or Unread), but it’s an exciting rethinking of what a news reader can be. One of my favorite features is being to shunt content (such as links) using a share sheet action from Safari to drop articles into Reeder for later review.

Fiery Feeds

Fiery Feeds is an interesting RSS reader. Like the others mentioned, it supports Feedbin and other backend services. It offers its own smart searches recipe system as well, and a couple of the demo searches–“Hot Links” and “Low Frequency”–are interesting presentations of your feeds.

Fiery Feeds has some of the most interesting layout options available on the iPad, and for that reason alone, is worth a download.

Actions and Extensions

Finding a new feed is always exciting, and adding it to your RSS readers is, ideally, a low-friction event. The manual way–long-pressing on the link and copying the URL, switching to your RSS reader, and pasting in the URL–is a fine way to collect new feeds, but some of the RSS apps I’ve been using include either Actions or Extensions to automate the process.

Both NetNewsWire and Fiery Feeds reveal their application as a Favorite in the Sharing Actions list when you long-press on a feed URL; Unread offers to subscribe to the feed for you using a share extension. Unread will also allow you to save an article to its read it later service, which requires a paid subscription. Readkit offers something similar, but I don’t use read-it-later services in my RSS applications (I like Safari’s just fine).

Themes

Unread brings its iOS-style color themes over to the Mac; there are a bunch of dark and light themes with different colors to suit just about any taste. NetNewsWire and Reeder use macOS’s light and dark themes, but NetNewsWire supports separate themes for the article pane (where you read an article). This invokes the original’s support for CSS and fond memories of goofing off during meetings cobbling themes. Inspecting the .nnwtheme package reveals that this is exactly what they are. The other readers feature a variety of color schemes in their appearances panes, but they’re more subtle than Unread’s visual overhauls. Fiery Feeds stands out, however, not only because of the themes supported (you can create your own or download themes from their directory), but because of the number of inventive layouts you can specify for your device. It’s a great affordance to scale from larger devices to smaller devices.

Syncing

All of the RSS readers I’ve tried support syncing with a number of popular RSS services (I use Feedbin) if you like to use a back-end service. iCloud sync is also included. If you wanted a completely free solution across all of your Apple devices, NetNewsWire and Reeder Classic will do the trick.

Freemium

ReadKit only allows you to subscribe to up to 20 feeds on the free tier. Unread offers a wealth of customization options with a sub, but it’s very full featured without one. You can’t pay for NetNewsWire even if you wanted to, and while that would normally give me pause, knowing the developer, Brent Simmons. I suspect it will be around for a long time.

Feature	NetNewsWire	Unread	Reeder	ReadKit	Fiery Feeds
Sharing Action or Extension	Action	Extension	No	No	Action
Hookmark	Yes	No	No	Yes	No
iCloud Sync	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Mac & iOS	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pricing	Free	Freemium	Free	Freemium	Freemium
Themes	Yes (Articles)	Yes	Light/Dark	Yes	Yes
Timeline Sync	No	No	Yes	No	No
Widgets	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes

Conclusions

I ultimately don’t like any one RSS reader more than another enough to declare One Reader to Rule Them All; I do like NetNewsWire on the Mac best of all, but Unread’s Mac version is a solid implementation of a more traditional Mac app interface, too, and I often find myself using it. On the iPad Mini and iPhone, I probably like Unread the most, because it’s the most expressly designed for a touchscreen, but on a larger iPad, I find myself gravitating towards Reader Classic; on a large screen, Unread doesn’t scale and there’s a lot of wasted space. ReadKit is solid on any iOS screen.

The New Reeder is perhaps the most interesting and adventurous design in that it supports more than just RSS. It is, it a sense, a post-RSS reading app: it’s designed to be a central hub for a variety of information sources, including Reddit and YouTube in addition to RSS. It’s a more manual curation process of disparate streams you want to follow; it breaks out of the mode of consuming content via singular apps connected to specific services.

Sunday Serial: The Week Between 2025

It’s been a quiet few days since Christmas here in our bucolic corner of South Jersey. Friday was just lazing about, and yesterday was a quick trip to Bellview for some wine and cheese before sushi with Aaron (Joe was working). My morning have been punctuated by reading a bit and then farting around with my Mac before exercising. We’re going to cook our “free” ham from Shop Rite today, since we didn’t need the turkey when we qualified for that.

Fishwife Slow-Smoked Mackerel with Chili Flakes

I’ve been grabbing all manner of canned fish for our winery trips; it’s a chance to pile on some protein and avoid some of the carbs that might otherwise tempt me. I’ve see this Fishwife brand at ShopRite a bunch of times, and while the art on the box is fetching, the price has put me off. They’re on sale right now and I grabbed a can of the mackerel and the sardines; Aaron and I split the mackerel yesterday at Bellview while Rhonda watched in horror. Simply the best canned fish I’ve had to date. I’m going to stock up today when we run over for some provisions.

Apple Fitness+ Yoga

I have an estranged friend who used to swear by yoga for both fitness and mental health. I tried it a few times by awkwardly watching workouts on my iPad in the basement, and I liked it enough to get a cheap yoga mat. I tried a few workouts back in 2022, and the idea hit me a couple of weeks ago–this would be a nice diversion from the usual rowing grind. I tried a 40-minute workout and loved every second of it.

I recalled being impressed at the reported calorie burn back in 2022 when I tried some Yoga workouts, and was disappointed with the report from my most recent workouts. Maybe being 230+ pounds makes that kind of exercise more calorically intensive. Still fun though.

Fitness app screenshot showing workout sessions and calorie burn for December 2022 and November 2022.

Fitness app screen showing workout sessions and calorie burn for December 2025 and November 2025.

Melty Brie Plates

Rhonda’s been making these melty brie plates since we had one at Cedar Rose winery not long ago. It was our favorite at Bellview until they stopped serving it. We got some brie at Bagliani’s yesterday, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we had one later today.

Shortcut to Rename a File Using Private Cloud Compute

I leaned on this macmost video to set up this shortcut:

A Shortcut to Automate Naming Files for my Website

I spend a lot of time resizing and renaming pics for posts here on Uncorrected, and it’s exactly the kind of grunt work computers are good at automating. I get a kick out of using Private Cloud Compute for this. I generally try to name the files as descriptively as I can, and append the ISO date.

TWB25 Commences

It’s the day after Christmas, so that means The Week Between has commenced. December 26th for us is usually just hanging around the house, eating leftovers, and watching TV.

We hosted dinner last night and I was annoyed with myself for forgetting to take a pic of the rib roast after it came off the grill. But I just check my E-PL5 and that was not, in fact, the case: I did take a pic! Thanks afternoon drinks!

My dad has been ordering from Pat LaFrieda for a long time, and even when we switched over to Rhonda and I hosting the holiday dinners, he continued to buy the star of the show in the form of an aged roast. This was a 30-day aged roast, and I can see from previous entries in Day One that this has been our go-to roast for years. I will confess to wanting to try it low and slow in the spare oven upstairs next time; I’ve been sous viding and grilling the roast, which I like, but I would really like those chewy, well-done bits that you get with a dry roast. They are also hard to wrestle into a bag. I split the roast and the bones into two bags and everything worked out fine! I will say that this is surely the best meat I’ve eaten. We’re lucky to be able to host with such a superstar centerpiece!

I always make breakfast on the griddle for the family on Christmas Day; our tradition has been pancakes forever, and it’s nice to be able to use all the space on the Blackstone to make a big pile of pancakes at once. Bacon too, of course.

Aaron said something about making egg nog earlier in the week, so I looked up a recipe on Serious Eats and gave it a shot. The first batch I made featured some cheap cognac we’d gotten for making sidecars; Aaron really liked it. I made a bigger batch yesterday, and made a virgin portion for Joe and Sorayah, and then used Goslings Black Seal Rum for the big-kid version. Aaron preferred the rum version, and it was also very good.

Aaron and I were talking about photography a bit yesterday since we got him a cheap point-and-shoot. He asked about aperture and I snuck this pick while grilling because of the sun and its angle against the cars, and what the whack TT Artisans might do with all that sidewise light. Serious lens flare but interesting in its way.

Bellview Winery had, for a long while, a melty brie platter on their menu. It featured DiBruno Bros brie, and we loved it and ordered it many times. They don’t offer that one anymore, which is heartbreaking, but we manage. Our recent trip to Cedar Rose winery, however, revealed their take on the dish.

Rhonda’s been making a version ever since we went there, and made it at home both Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

Essential Software for 2026

Looking back at the applications I rely on for work and personal things, here’s at list of the Mac, iPad, and iPhone applications I see myself using going into 2026. I’ve been cobbling these lists together for years! Stalwarts and new apps abound.

Ulysses

I tried Ulysses again after a couple of trials that never resulted in me subscribing. I realized that it’s close to perfect for my needs for writing here on Uncorrected. I resisted the idea of a database-based app instead of just using whatever I wanted (iAWriter, Typora, BBEdit) organized into folders in the Finder, but it does a good job of posting with pictures to WordPress. I had to learn the hard way that something breaks down on the trip from Ulysses to WordPress if I don’t reduce the file sizes, a problem I don’t have using MarsEdit on the Mac. There’s a Shortcut I discovered that I can use to get photos out of Photos and resize/covert them for WordPress. Pretty great. Ulysses also looks awesome and feels at home on the Mac and the iPad. It has useful organization features. I love this app from tail to snout.

Notes

So. Many. Notes. Apps. I’ve tried so many: Bear, iAWriter, DevonThink, Drafts, OneNote, EverNote, Alternote, Editorial, NVAlt… Along wit to-do apps, notes apps are their own entertainment industry masking as productivity. That’s not to say a good notes app can’t help you be productive; they absolutely can. Commitment is the key.

I tried Notes’ Smart Script out when it debuted on one of the iPadOS 18 betas and, while I had embraced (or resigned myself) to using Onenote after moving back to the Mac from Windows, Smart Script compelled me to make the move. It turns out, Notes is great in a lot of other ways, too: there’s a wiki link-like function now, and the formatting is limited but focused.

An inspiration for narrowing and focusing, reducing options:

Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it. Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person. –Mark Manson, the Subtle Art…

One thing I hate about Notes is the general indifference to folders. You can next notes up to five levels deep, but Notes won’t search for a folder if you organize that way. It’s terribly painful to file notes if you let them get out of hand for a while. I hope they make it easier one day. I hold up DEVONThink’s filing capabilities in my mind as the gold standard for how you should be able to file in an application.

Safari

In the same vein, I don’t really browser hop much, but I have tried to employ more of Safari’s affordances. First on the list is the Reading List: It’s ubiquitous across your Apple devices, and offers a great reading mode. Using Profiles has made keeping work and home stuff separate. And it’s still fast. I have Shortcuts and AppleScripts and more that automate Safari for me. It’s always running. I confess to having great affection for the old Camino browser, which was I think the first Cocoa browser to debut on Mac OS X back in the early days, when we longed for non-Carbon, pure Cocoa experiences on our Macs. But it eventually went away, and happily, Apple debuted Safari.

Focus Modes

Not an app, I know, but a macOS/iOS feature: in combination with luminaries like Safari, OmniFocus, and Fantastical, I’m able to narrow distractions and, ahem, focus depending upon my context. I have a work focus, personal, weekend, vacation, and sleep focus, all of which I use daily. I’m hoping MailMaven will soon support focus modes.

Focus Modes allow you to set application-level restrictions on notifications you get from applications depending upon the time of day, location, or other criteria. I can make sure that I don’t see work email notifications when I’m on vacation, and likewise hide personal notifications when I’m at work. I can hide my work to-do list in OmniFocus on the weekends, but make sure work items are front and center during the work week. The only thing about Focus Modes that I don’t like is that I waited so long to use them.

MailMaven

I cancelled my Mimestream subscription in June because I was pretty sure that I was going to move to MailMaven. I have been using it for just about everything, home and work. I do still love MailMate, and despite the lure of having all of my email in the thoughtfully crafted MailMaven, I don’t see myself moving away from it for work email. But there’s a lot to like with MailMaven, and I keep it running on my desktop Mac all day.

Moves

I try a lot of Mac utilities when something looks like it would scratch an itch. I tried Moves with little expectation that it would stick, but I have to say, I really miss it when it’s not running (which is never), and one of the first things I miss when I use my iPad docked is Moves.

Moves lets you move and resize windows on your Mac using the trackpad and a keyboard shortcut: no more click and hold to drag and resize. It doesn’t sound like it, but It’s surprisingly useful. Essential, no less.

Kagi Search + Assistant

I knew well before I ran out of “enough searches to get you going” that I liked Kagi enough to consider a subscription. What I didn’t anticipate was how much I like the AI assistant. You can switch AI models, and it is blissfully free of the obsequious compliments Copilot was buttering me up with. I made a shortcut of the URL and saved it as an app on my iPhone and iPad Home Screen, and things are just ducky.

Yoink

I don’t care if it’s been on the list year after year: Yoink is infrastructure for me. I constantly drag files to the shelf and share or otherwise move them. I just love it. I wish I could figure out how to make use of it on iOS and iPad, but it’s enough on its own on the Mac.

OmniFocus and Planned Dates

My strategy with OmniFocus, for a long time, was to flag tasks that I considered most urgent, and ideally to be completed during the week, and the defer those I didn’t think I’d be able to work on that day.

That didn’t always happen, but that’s not the point. A new feature introduced this year, Planned dates, let me continue this practice, but further winnow my list (using a Perspective) by assigning planned dates instead of (mis)using defer dates. OmniFocus users have always known that using defer dates this way was a hack, but it did its trick. Planned Dates rescue the otherwise-useful defer date feature, preserving its utility.

Planned dates aren’t due dates; there’s no suggestion that this task must get done today. It’s exactly as it sounds: I’m planning on doing this today. If I don’t? I can move the Planned date. It’s a great way to plan your day and your week, and you can easily create perspectives that show you your planned tasks, separated by the day you plan to do them. You can hide everything except for your today list, and poof: suddenly, you have the OmniFocus you’ve been wanting for years. It’s such a small thing, but emblematic of the purposeful, thoughtful way that OmniGroup iterates on its applications.

I’ve tried Things, Asana, and ToDoist, to name my most notable digressions, but I always come back to OmniFocus. Planned dates make it hard to imagine leaving ever again. It’s an app that harbors lots of things I don’t necessarily want to do, but am obliged to do; OmniFocus brings peace of mind when you feel overwhelmed, and its a joy to use every day.

TabTab

One of the things I liked about using Edge and Chrome during my Windows phase was tab search; you tap a key command, and either browser will give you a vertically oriented list of your open tabs, which you can search.

Safari has the same feature, but I don’t love it; it shows a tile board of tabs, which takes up way more information than I need. I really just need to see the title of the URL, and a dense list works just fine.

There are a handful of ways to recreate the Chrome or Edge experience in Safari, if that’s your browser of choice, but I really like TabTab the best. You get way more in your search results than just Safari tabs, but it looks great and the search works. It’s got a great animation upon being invoked.

Glass

I signed up for Glass years ago but never subscribed. With my renewed interest in taking pictures and sharing them online, I thought that I should check out Glass again. I love the idea of Glass and its effectiveness of keeping a lid on the photo shitposting you often get with social media. Glass users seem to pick some of their best work to share, and the service itself offers you a chance to see photos categorized (wide angle, landscape, long exposure, for example) without the user necessarily having to tag his or her samples. You can even view pics organized by camera models or lenses, which can be helpful if you’re curious about how a lens or body might meet your wants and needs.

New Reeder

If I recall correctly, the new Reeder came out before Tapestry. I tried it and even subscribed before cancelling the subscription, and then when Tapestry came out, I tried it, too, and realized that it was pretty cool that the developer of one of my favorite RSS readers had come out with a rev to the venerable Reeder before IconFactory released Tapestry.

Both apps enable you to add feeds of many stripes to the app: RSS feeds, sure, but Reddit feeds, YouTube feeds, and more. It’s a more manual configuration experience, but it’s a great way to curate different kinds of feeds. It hasn’t replaced RSS for me, but it’s a cool distillation of RSS feeds and other content I don’t want to miss. Reeder is a steal compared to Tapestry, so I went back and hit the subscription button

Bike

I will always have a text editor of some stripe running on my Mac. I generally try to use Notes for this type of writing, but there are times when I need to start writing from left to write, top to bottom, and a text editor seems like the way to go. It’s been BBEdit, it’s been TextMate, it’s been Drafts… there have been many. Recently, it’s been Bike, because I love to use outliners, but Bike will let you ignore that mode of writing and just scrawl away in rich text. I just love it and I use it all the time. I find Jesse’s stuff fascinating and inspiring and simple.

Typinator

I don’t have a good reason to switch from TextExpander; it’s a fine app. I have an old subscription at the intro rate, back when Smile bought them and suffered the umbrage of a thousand raging nerds who couldn’t believe it went from free to subscription. Smile surely knew what they were doing moving away from it being solely a Mac app (and I appreciated that it was available on Windows when I started using Windows 11), but I don’t feel the same affection for it as I used to. I got Typinator on sale and it’s essentially the same feature set, but it has a Mac-ish feel to it that I appreciate. There’s a beta out now and potentially an iOS version (although I don’t think it will work in a way that’s useful to me).

Hookmark Pro + Hookmark Pal

I’ve been using Hook (now HookMark) for years; It’s a great way to link files, notes, and tasks together. One pain point, though, was that all of the linking I’d do on my Mac disappeared once I was using my phone or iPad. This year’s release of Hookmark Pal changes things, such that links I’ve created on the Mac work on my other Apple devices. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it’s been a nice addition to an otherwise essential feature.

Cleanshot X

I purchased Cleanshot X about a year ago when it was featured in a Bundlehunt deal. I didn’t think, at first blush, that the features would justify switching away from macOS’s default screenshot features, but after using it over the past year, I’ve come to rely on it. I love how screenshot previews hang out in the corner of your window, instead of vanishing just before you get to mouse over it for use, and the editing and markup features are handy.

Fantastical + Cardhop

Fantastical has been my calendar app on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone for a long time. In my current job, I love being able to send meeting proposals to groups of people and let Fantastical sort out the details. Its support for Focus Modes is excellent, allowing me to tune out work when I need some time away, but show my professional obligations based on my when and where.

I wasn’t much of a Cardhop user, but its Google Directory integration is better than Apple’s Contacts app, so I use it all the time to find the email addresses of colleagues and other professional contacts in the organization.

Anylist

Since I’ve joined Rhonda in weekly grocery shopping, I appreciate Anylist more than ever before. The meal plan feature helps me keep track of our dinner plans for the week, and prompt me when we forget about meals we’ve had (or not had) recently. And while we have availed ourselves of the pickup service, which shortens our trips to (and, generally, frustrations with) the grocery store, the grocery list feature is a godsend when we pop into the store to pick up a few items that we like to choose ourselves. It has great Siri integration, too.

Foodnoms

I’ve written a fair amount about losing weight since December of 2022. I lost most of it without logging my food, but my fears of putting it back on let me to understand more specifically how many calories I was eating so that I could get myself back on track. I use FoodNoms to track my calories every day, and measuring my food has helped me understand some larger principles I can apply when I can’t log my calories.

Wallaroo

Searching for iOS wallpaper isn’t a chore, per se, but it’s nice to have an app prompt you with high-quality wallpaper from an accomplished developer with bespoke taste. Wallaroo, from IconFactory, provides a small number of wallpapers according to season, holiday, popular culture, all for a cheap subscription.

Jetpack

Jetpack isn’t exactly exciting; it’s WordPress infrastructure. It’s helpful for seeing the hits on your site and for repairing some goofy damage if you tried to upload some too-large photo assets.

Tally

Related to FoodNoms: I use Tally to summarize my snacks and wine when I’m out so I can log them later on. It’s such an open app, deceptively simple, but infinitely configurable.

Plate Calculator

I got back into weight lifting this summer, just adding squats and the benchpress in on the weekends. This simple app lets me figure out how many plates I have to add to the bar. I still use Wendler 5/3/1 but with a Numbers spreadsheet instead of an app. It’s fun.

Tripsy

You can absolutely plan a trip using Notes, or Craft, or PDFs in a folder, or whatever other version of organization suits your fancy. I love how Tripsy organizes everything for me, and even sucks reservations out of emails and puts them on my calendar. It’s fun to lavish over the details and throw everything at Tripsy.

Preview

Preview has been one of my most used apps on the Mac forever; I use it to read and mark up PDFs all the time. I’m super happy to have it on the iPad now; PDFs were viewable natively only using the Files app, and that never was a good user experience.

Calcbot

Calcbot has been my go-to calculator on iPhone for years. It’s fine for basic calculations that I need, but the conversion features make it a must-have. I miss having it on the Mac.

Die Hard is a Christmas Movie

I was setting up some Private Cloud Compute shortcuts and asked about a non-corny Christmas movie. Here’s what I got:

If you’re looking for a Christmas movie that’s not overly corny, you might enjoy “Die Hard.” While it’s often debated whether it’s a Christmas movie, it’s set during a Christmas party and features many holiday elements. The film combines action, suspense, and humor, making it a unique take on the holiday genre.

Not that I needed to be sold on the idea.

Sunday Serial: Winterfest 2025 Software Deals, Trickster for macOS, and Planning the Week Between

I rolled up to New Brunswick to pick up Aaron Thursday afternoon, and we made it back home in very good time. His little Mini Cooper is a blast to drive, and feels solid on the turnpike at speed. How come no-one understands how to drive on multi-lane highways? I spend the whole ride up bobbing and weaving.

Winterfest 2025

The holiday software deals continue apace, and Winterfest is here again. Many of the stalwart apps are back this year, including Tinderbox, Scrivener, and BBEdit are there, along with some others I’ve been curious about. I’m test-driving Cotypist now.

Trickster for macOS

Speaking of Winterfest, Trickster was on sale, so I purchased a license. I’ve tried Trickster out before, and really liked the app. It’s kind of a Finder smart folder on steroids.

One of the features I discovered is that, when you invoke Trickster, with a click of the mouse, you can restrict the filter results to only show the application you’re working in. Sometimes, you want to see all of the files you’ve worked on in the last 24 hours, but you can restrict the filter to just Word docs, for example. I created a filter to show me all of the Bike and OmniOutliner files I’ve been working on.

I’d love to see support for Safari tabs in Trickster, although I don’t think that’s its intended use.

One critical limitation is that Trickster can’t help you with apps that store files within their own database. For example, you can’t see documents you’ve been working on in Ulysses, or notes in Notes, or maps in MindNode Next. You can see those applications, though.

And: Integrations with Hookmark and Launchbar!

The Week Between, or TWB25

I’ve adopted the naming scheme that I use at work to designate projects and reference materials to the Week Between, one of my favorite times of the year. For matters pertaining to the school year, I’ve been doing “SY26” for this fiscal year, and projections for the next year using SY27.

I like to list things to do for the week between, unsurprisingly, in various software pockets; OmniFocus is an obvious place for list making, but I started last year farting around with MindNode a bit, and I cracked open my plans from last year and updated. MindNode is very much a mind mapping tool, but the overlap between it an a classic outliner is significant; you could easily use it as one of the prettiest outliners around and never venture into mind map mode.

I find OmniFocus is a great place to get a list of things together as they come to mind, but then I use MindNode to organize the activities and ideas I have into specific days of the week. It’s not a hard and fast schedule, but it keeps me from letting the days laze by without any purpose. Not that those kinds of days aren’t rewarding, too.

Grilled Ribeye, Hold the Sous Vide

Rhonda mentioned that she wanted to have grilled steak, a cut that hadn’t spent the afternoon in the sous vide tank, since it had been a while. (It was a veiled complaint for sure.) We happened to have a frozen ribeye on hand, as well as some chicken, and were trying to use up some frozen foods, so onto the meal plan it went.

I gave it a quick trip on the Weber over some hot lump charcoal, and we were both really impressed. Sous vide is nothing if not consistent, but it’s hard to beat the char you get from a nice dry cut of beef. They don’t always come out like this, but I’m glad when they do.

Wide Angle Snowscapes: Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 7-14mm f/2.8 PRO

I took some pics with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 7-14mm f/2.8 PRO, and I have a lot to learn. It was pretty damn cold out yesterday afternoon!

Sunday Serial: TineeOwl Arctic Case foriPad Mini, FastScripts for macOS, and Bellview Winery’s San Marco ’23

There’s a slow, steady fall of snow outside today: it’s a dense, heavy snow. Rhonda and I enjoyed dinner at Greenview Inn Friday night; I had the duck. Yesterday, we check out Bellview’s December cheese plate, which was “Santa and Friends.” We supplemented with some salami from Bagliani’s and some sardines for me.

Greenview Inn’s Game Special–Duck Breast

TineeOwl iPad mini

My general rule of thumb is that an apple-branded case or folio is probably the best for my usage; I’ve largely stuck to Apple iPhone cases (most recently, a Beats case) and Apple’s Magic Keyboards and Folios for iPads. I have a nice green Apple folio for my iPad mini, which I like a lot.

The thing about the mini is, it begs to be carried around and not stuffed in a bag. I like to keep it in the car with me, on the passenger seat when it’s empty, and put it on the counter when I’m making drinks and things.

Apple’s folio has a great texture, but you don’t want to get it wet or stain it. One of the things that make their folios great–magnetic connection to the device–keep it from being reliable protectors in the event of a drop.

Enter the TineeOwl Arctic case. It’s more of a wrap-around phone cover, a clear rubbery plastic case that protects the back and sides of the iPad, with a decent lip to keep the screen from contacting a table or desk surface if you lay it face down.

The TineeOwl Arctic has grooves for the iPad’s TouchID wake/sleep button and the Apple Pencil, so it doesn’t interfere with the Mini’s helpful touch features.

It can feel a little rubbery when you’re reading and holding the device from the side; the edge of the case will pull away from the device, depending upon how you’re holding it. That can feel cheap and one imagines serial removals of the case will one day render it too stretched out to be useful. On the other hand, in a landscape of overpriced accessories, TineeOwl’s pricing is such that you don’t worry about it.

And hey: now I can see the six-color logo sticker on the back!

FastScripts

FastScripts is a utility from Red Sweater Software (purveyor of Mac-assed Mac apps, including the excellent MarsEdit) that collects your AppleScripts and gives you access to them via Finder’s menu bar. You can set a global keyboard shortcut to expose the menu, and even per-script shortcuts, and search your scripts. I’ve tried pushing a lot of my favorite Applescripts to Shortcuts, but in cases where I’m just executing scripts via Shortcuts, why bother?

One of my favorites is this script to create what I call a “classic” Finder window: no sidebar, toolbar, nuthin.

tell application &quot;Finder&quot;
    activate
    if (count of Finder windows) = 0 then
        make new Finder window
    end if
end tell

tell application &quot;System Events&quot;
    tell process &quot;Finder&quot;
        try
            -- Toggle the Toolbar
            if exists menu item &quot;Hide Toolbar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1 then
                click menu item &quot;Hide Toolbar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1
            else if exists menu item &quot;Show Toolbar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1 then
                click menu item &quot;Show Toolbar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1
            end if

            -- Toggle the Status Bar
            if exists menu item &quot;Hide Status Bar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1 then
                click menu item &quot;Hide Status Bar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1
            else if exists menu item &quot;Show Status Bar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1 then
                click menu item &quot;Show Status Bar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1
            end if

            -- Toggle the Path Bar
            if exists menu item &quot;Hide Path Bar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1 then
                click menu item &quot;Hide Path Bar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1
            else if exists menu item &quot;Show Path Bar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1 then
                click menu item &quot;Show Path Bar&quot; of menu &quot;View&quot; of menu bar 1
            end if

        on error errMsg
            display dialog &quot;An error occurred: &quot; &amp; errMsg buttons {&quot;OK&quot;} default button 1
        end try
    end tell
end tell

Bellview Winery’s San Marco ’23

Bellview owner Jimmy Quarella said the ’23 San Marco was just bottled, but it’s not for sale in said vessel as it has to settle a bit. It is, however, on tap at the winery, and after a taste yesterday, I couldn’t help but commit to a growler to take home. It’s a dry red, medium-bodied by my tastes. I’ve had San Marco blended into other reds they concoct, but this is my first time having the pure distillation.

Thoughts on the Future of Liquid Glass After Alan Dye’s Departure

Adam Engst:

Liquid Glass can look elegant, particularly on the iPhone, but iOS wasn’t unattractive before. More importantly, I haven’t yet felt that Liquid Glass’s vaunted transparency does anything to make me more productive. Despite Dye’s departure (which appears to have been a surprise to upper management), Apple is unlikely to reverse course on Liquid Glass. We can hope that Dye’s successor focuses more on enhancing functionality to better align with the Steve Jobs quote that Apple badly misused when introducing Liquid Glass: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Macworld:

I hope that means we see a return to the ideas that made Apple software great in years gone by. A stronger emphasis on user experience, an obsession over small details, and a renewed passion for interfaces and controls. An appreciation of the foundational ideas that helped Apple’s products reach the pinnacle of software design.

Eric Schwarz:

I actually really like how Liquid Glass came out on iOS, although it does need some tweaks to be better from a usability standpoint. I hate it on my Mac and would gladly go back to the Leopard through Mavericks era if I could—there’s so much that feels unpredictable and cluttered, despite every marketing blurb being about clarity and focusing on content.

MG Seigler:

It’s obviously insanely hard to overhaul a UI – let alone across multiple major operating systems – but I’m going to go ahead an guess that Liquid Glass will transform to be both less liquid-y and less glass-y starting in relative short order.

Louie Mantia:

I don’t expect any big changes because I don’t think he or Apple are looking at this as an opportunity to undo Jony and Alan’s influence on the company, but I do sincerely think this will all feel better with Lemay’s leadership.

I like a lot of things about Liquid Glass on iOS and iPadOS, but there are some horsey interface elements that I’d rather see gone for good. The Mac might be the least impacted of those three platforms, but it’s my favorite place to be and necessary for me to get things done, and I generally see it as, at best, as livable, and in some cases a serious regression. And OmniOutliner 6’s beta? Yuck. I’m hoping that the swole interface elements shrink and sharpen.

OmniOutliner 6, with Liquid Glass, on iPadOS

The Inspector Button on Tahoe in OmniFocus

22nd Wedding Anniversary

Rhonda and I got married 22 years today, also on a Sunday. There was a football game on I didn’t care about. We were off to Bermuda the next day. We celebrated today with a spritz and some Chinese takeout. We did plenty of celebrating Friday!

Sprtizing

Us Kids

Nifty Fifty: The Panasonic Lumix G 25mm f/1.7

As is the case with baseball, I have intended to learn about photography for a while now. Since upgrading my Olympus E-PL5 with an OM Systems E-M10 Mark IV, and then subsequently finding a new use case for my E-PL5, I’m starting to pay more attention to gear and technique.

The E-PL5 came with a kit lens, an M.Zuiko zoom that shoots from 14mm to 44. I understood that this was some kind of zoom lens, which to a budget-minded buyer dipping a toe into the prosumer world of digital cameras, makes a lot of sense. I had, in short order, added a 17mm Panasonic Lumix 1.7 pancake lens to the E-PL5, and that was pretty much curtains for the kit lens.

For the rare instances when I might need some serious magnification, I purchased a cheap Olympus 40-150mm 1:4–5.6 Zoom Lens.

The kit lens, though, is neat in that you can switch between focal lengths that equal 35mm and 50mm, a lens shooting at which is referred to as a “nifty fifty.” And having researched lenses a bit, the kit lens actually is well regarded. It is, however, plasticky.

I decided to order a used Panasonic LUMIX G 25mm f/1.7 off of eBay in the interest of experimenting with this length. I have nothing but praise for the 17mm wide angle LUMIX, but the temptation of a “nifty fifty,” with its lifelike perspective, was too irresistible to bear.

Sunday Serial: Cape May, NJ Edition

Rhonda and I celebrated our 22nd wedding anniversary this weekend. We both took off on Friday and headed down to Cape May, NJ, for an overnight. My mom was generous to send us for our 20th anniversary in 2023–we stayed at the comfy but swanky Virginia Hotel, and dined at The Ebbitt Room. We liked it so much that we went back and stayed at Peter Shields Inn and Restaurant the following year, and then again last spring at the Buttonwood Boutique.

Christmas in Cape May is a busy time, and it’s hard to find a room period, let alone one at a reasonable price. Because we decided on this trip a bit late for planning purposes, we ended up staying at the Cape, which is a nicely converted motel on Route 9, just outside of the historic downtown area. I would totally stay there again, especially if Cold Springs, Cape May Winery, and Hawk Haven are your points of interest. If you want the historic downtown experience, it’s a bit of a drive and a crowd to navigate to boot.

Cape May Winery

Our visit to the Cape May Winery was not our first, but we were excited to go back, as we really enjoyed our visit there last April. Sadly, they did not have their excellent rosé available. We ordered the brie plate, which was a menu special. It was kind of disappointing; for eight bucks, you got three pieces of cold bread smeared with an uninspired brie. The charcuterie plate was good, though. We tried their Chardonnay and White Blends, and I preferred the latter. The Chardonnay was pretty bright and tart for a barrel-aged specimen. We took a few bottles with us so that we’d have some choices to take with us to dinner.

Il Riccio

I made a rez at Ił Riccio , which is a BYOB in the heard of the madness that is Cape May at Christmastime. It is a charming old house, a la Peter Shields and the Washington Inn, and we dined in a dim corner of a small back room. We split the fried calamari, and then one of the whole fishes, which was filleted and served table side, with a side of spaghetti. Everything was great, and the dessert we split was excellent as well. Eight bucks will get you some bread, too, which made us roll our eyes. But hey: limoncello shot on the house after dinner.

Home Again Home Again Jiggity Jig

We came back home via Route 47, which is always how I got down to Wildwood when I was younger. We had omelettes at Mel’s Place, a nice diner in Villas. We had some of our own salami and cheese, and Rhonda redeemed yesterday’s brie let down by making her own version. So that was dinner!

Duck and Demeter

I forgot to include this pic in last night’s duck post. We grabbed a growler of Bellview’s Demeter Friday. It’s a dry red, blended from their San Marco, Merlot, Chambourcin and Petit Verdot. Paired nicely.