This week
- I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book. The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS version of that chapter (which Michael ultimately ended up writing). At the time, I didn’t know what to write. I mean, how...
- Pete Millspaugh has a lovely article over on WIRED that peers into the world of domains. (If you’re as interested in the esoteric details of domains as I am, follow Pete’s writing at Dot Com Press.) You should just read the article, but here are a few things that stood out to...
Last week
- After using the same few image formats for 20+ years, I’m now on the WebP bandwagon. That isn’t something I thought I’d ever say. Now I’m wondering how soon it’ll be before I can use a couple more. When Google announced the WebP format in 2010 it was interesting, but only...
- It’s been a couple of weeks since I got my Apple Watch Ultra 4. I’ve written about some upcoming features that I’m not psyched about, but I’ve otherwise been very happy with the upgrade. There’s just one issue: the new walking distance estimation is completely busted for me....
- I wrote a specification for a new terminal escape sequence: OSC 7501, the Program Status Protocol. It lets any program tell the terminal what it's doing: idle, working, waiting on the user, finished, or failed, and why.
About a month ago
- After a GPU shortage and memory shortage driven by AI companies, we’re now experiencing a CPU shortage, thanks to AI agents using a lot more CPU with tool usage....
- John Gruber makes his picks for the iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone 5S iPhone X iPhone 17 Pro Ok, my turn. Here’s my iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone X iPhone 12 Mini iPod Touch Notes: How do you not put the OG iPhone at the top spot?...
about 1 month ago
- A handful of people I follow and know about have announced their recent departure. Not from a job (although plenty of that going around), but from social media, AI usage, or in more extreme cases the Internet entirely. In Goodbye, Forever, Probably, Salma announced her...
- Apple held its iPhone event on Wednesday, and the hardware announcements were exactly as rumoured. As usual, the surprises were in the software. I’d been planning for months to replace my first-generation Ultra, and was excited to see what new features the new Ultra might have....
- A quick survey of recent engagement of my posts on social media, indicating which service has by far the most engagement, and which service has seen a precipitous decline since early 2025. more…...
- I’m Robin Sloan, a writer, printer, & manufacturer. The best thing to do here is sign up for my email newsletter: This website doesn’t collect any information about you or your reading. It aspires to the speed and privacy of the printed page. Don’t miss the colophon. Hony...
- I really enjoy John Gruber’s podcast The Talk Show. However, I’ve noticed that it’s been a while since it was in my feed. I decided to chart previous episode dates to check some of my assumptions about release frequency. Cutting to the chase, here’s a link to The Talk Show...
- The Open and Async audiobook is out. It's read by a synthetic narrator who says 'jif,' correctly. For the hard-G crowd who insist that's heresy, I re-recorded an entire chapter in their (wrong) pronunciation and posted it free. One chapter the wrong way, or eleven and a half...
- TLDR: Download the best disk cleanup app in existence from diskspace.io. A fun experiment in writing the same app three times (well kind of 4 times) with AI, and being as optimised and OS native as possible. My Mac recently filled its 1TB drive and my quest to find out where the...
- Agents use sandboxes for reading and writing files, running shell commands, spawning background processes, or operating a real computer. Sandbox lifecycles are ......
about 2 months ago
- Your Mastra agents can now control a real Linux desktop with computer tools. Browse the web, fill in forms, download files, take screenshots, and run programs f......
- It was a good month for me. Very productive, slower than usual. When the rest of the world races, folks go faster, produce more than ever with all these modern tools, I find more joy in doing precisely the opposite. My friend inspired me to re-watch a decades-old conference talk...
- Modern IDEs let you jump from project to project with ease. Neovim doesn’t have this feature, so folks usually keep a few terminal windows or tabs open or jump between Zellij or tmux multiplexer panes. As you can imagine, there are also a gazillion plugins to fill this gap. None...
- Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It's a style that I advocate, and my contributors mostly follow. Jim decided it was important to give it a name, and identify what makes...
2 months ago
- August 13, 2026 How delightful to follow a link to the new RSS reader and article archive called Cove, only to discover, right there on the front page, peeking out of the big beautiful demo screenshot … Good crew … some very good feeds already loaded 😉 Sincerely, very fun to...
- I mostly use my web stats service because I get a lizard-brain kick from watching numbers go up, but it also provides some fun insights. For example, it’s how I found out about bubbles.town. At first I thought this might be a Mastodon instance. I get a lot of referral traffic...
- Blog About Moonbound This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. August 8, 2026 Apropos of David Bushell’s post, I thought I’d just mention, I still use Sublime Text for all of my programming AND all of my...
3 months ago
- I have come to understand four very different time scales for development of technologies and their deployments. And I think people often jump between them and end up making outrageously wrong, and sometimes damaging, predictions of when in the future a technology is going to be...
- IntroductionIt’s possible to set up Time Machine drives from the command line. This is way more convenient and becomes scriptable (there’s one GUI checkbox at the end if you encrypt, so the drive can unlock itself). Also, based on my own personal experience, the Time Machine GUI...
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