Retrobatch 2.3 has been released. Some of the highlights: Image Diffing: You can now compare your modified image against the original image using new handy new toolbar modes, or keyboard shortcuts. PDF Rasterizer (Pro only): Convert all vector and text components of a PDF to full page images (handy for folks who want to "bake" their PDFs so text or elements can't be removed to find hidden information). Send Notification node: Does what it sounds like — send out system notifications for when...| The Shape of Everything
From a post on Zed.dev: Introducing DeltaDB: Operation-Level Version Control: Our vision is turn your IDE into a collaborative workspace where humans and AI agents work together across a range of time scales, with every insight preserved and linked to the code forever. To make this possible, we're building DeltaDB: a new kind of version control that tracks every operation, not just commits. DeltaDB uses CRDTs to incrementally record and synchronize changes as they happen. Its designed to inte...| The Shape of Everything
My mind went back to a statement from a street performer in Cape Town the previous day: “Check this out, I’m about to be amazing!” At the time I had joked about using his catch phrase for my climbing, but I hadn’t really meant it because this whole time I’d been so focused on the opposite: staying humble, no egos allowed. What if that was the kind of energy I needed right now though? What if there was something in between my meek humility on this trip and the toxic rage from my yout...| The Shape of Everything
Dan Hollick on Making Software: What is a color space?: In which we answer every question you've ever had about digital color, and some you haven't. He's not kidding. Your computer has an operating system, which uses a color space. But your computer also runs applications, which might use a different color space. Those apps can render content, like images and videos, which might be in yet another color space. And then your monitor has its own color space, which might not even match the color ...| The Shape of Everything
Acorn 8.2 and macOS 26 Tahoe + Liquid Glass Plans| shapeof.com
I don't have a need for this app, but I saw the UI and instantly wanted to play with it. It's a nice throwback to the MacAmp or Winamp days.| shapeof.com
Tim Wood on Mastodon: OK, OK, ok, story time. Way back when (early 90s), when Omni was consulting for McCaw Cellular (or AT&T Wireless, not sure which it was at the time), we were working on apps for NeXTSTEP for sales, customer care, and such for cell phones, nation wide. We'd occasionally get a crash reports and I don't even remember how those got back to us back in the day before automated collection and reporting, but eventually we were able to reproduce it. I won't spoil the punchline as...| The Shape of Everything
The Talk Show: Ep. 427 ‘THE SHIFT-2 CROWD’,, With Jason Snell: Jason Snell returns to the show to talk about the early PC platform rivalries of the 1980s, iOS 26 leaks (and Apple suing YouTuber Jon Prosser), the various Apple OS 26 public betas and the state of Liquid Glass, and more. I thought the discussion on Liquid Glass, especially the state of it on the Mac, was pretty good. Like Gruber and Snell, I worry that the Mac is more of an afterthought when it comes to the new UI. One can h...| The Shape of Everything
I still get on well with the folks in Apple Developer relations, and I guess I always have. Maybe because I've been developing on the Mac for so long, and I tend to keep a cool head about things? Of course there's always ups and downs, but I try to remember there are very different divisions in Apple, with different opinions on how things should be. "Apple" isn't really a single entity anymore, at least from my perspective.| shapeof.com
So a little before WWDC I got a chance to fly down to Cupertino in the dead of night, to secretly adopt Acorn's UI to use the new look and feel of Apple's forthcoming Liquid Glass. NDAs were signed and I can't say much—other than it was super quick to adopt for Acorn's main canvas window. Acorn is a mostly Objective-C app¹ with a codebase that's effectively 20 years old now, so that speaks to how relatively smooth this transition should be.| shapeof.com
Script Debugger Retired| shapeof.com
Christopher Nguyen: Edit is a new command-line text editor in Windows. Edit is open source, so you can build the code or install the latest version from GitHub! … Edit is a small, lightweight text editor. It is less than 250kB, which allows it to keep a small footprint in the Windows 11 image. I'll probably never use it, but I find Edit delightful. It's a new 64 bit CLI editor, with curses like menus. It's 2025, and … just look at it!| The Shape of Everything
Brent on Biases and Retirement| shapeof.com
Going Back to the Old Gym| shapeof.com
With the release of Acorn 8 last December, I published "ACTN002 Acorn's Native File Format" as part of the documentation updates, which is exactly what it sounds like. Without going into details (that's what the technote is for), Acorn's file format is a SQLite database, with a simple three-table schema, containing TIFF or PNG bitmaps to represent bitmap layers, and a plist to represent shape layers. Acorn has kept this simple format since version 2.0 back in 2009. And since the format is a S...| The Shape of Everything
Geoffrey Litt: Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs The assistant is called Stevens, named after the butler in the great Ishiguro novel Remains of the Day. Every morning it sends a brief to me and my wife via Telegram, including our calendar schedules for the day, a preview of the weather forecast, any postal mail or packages we’re expected to receive, and any reminders we’ve asked it to keep track of. All written up nice and formally, ju...| The Shape of Everything
Alex Harri: A Flowing WebGL Gradient, Deconstructed: This effect is written in a WebGL shader using noise functions and some clever math. In this post, I’ll break it down step by step. You need no prior knowledge of WebGL or shaders — we’ll start by building a mental model for writing shaders and then recreate the effect from scratch. This was an absolutely wonderful read on constructing a nice looking animated WebGL shader, from the very basics up to the end product. New to me in this ...| The Shape of Everything
Gabriel Nicholas at Wired: The Subjective Charms of Objective-C But the longer I spent writing Objective-C, the more I felt it hid rather than revealed. Long, sentence-like function names buried the most pertinent information under a fog of dependent clauses. Small features required long-winded pull requests, making it easy for engineers to get distracted during reviews and to miss bugs. Objective-C’s excess words, multiplied across thousands of files and millions of lines of code, made for...| The Shape of Everything
How to Bake in PDF Redactions Using Retrobatch| shapeof.com
This Amazing Little Machine| shapeof.com