Wednesday, 17th June 2026
NetNewsWire Status (via) I find this inspiring. Brent Simmons retired a year ago, and his retirement project is making one piece of software really, really good - free from any commercial pressure.
The software is NetNewsWire - "it's like podcasts, but for reading" - first released in 2002 and made open source in 2018.
I've been using it on Mac and iPhone for several years now and I'm finding it indispensable.
A progressive enchantment Web Component that turns this markup:
<click-to-play>
<a href="URL to GIF">
<img src="URL to first frame" alt="...">
</a>
</click-to-play>
Into a still frame with a click to play button which loads the GIF on demand. For when you don't want big GIFs to be loaded unless people want to play them.
Here's an example that demonstrates the new row editing tools in Datasette - in fact I built this Web Component for that post.
What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight.
— Charity Majors, AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less