Writing

Essays, research and engineering notes

What we learn building a Mac news ticker and scoring the sources it carries. 6 pieces so far, newest first.

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  1. 30 August 2026

    Signed, notarized, and silently unauthorized: the macOS provisioning trap

    Our ShazamKit feature worked in every debug build and failed in every shipped one. Why Developer ID apps need an embedded provisioning profile for App Services, the two xcodebuild flags that fix it, and the zsh builtin that faked the logs.

  2. 30 August 2026

    The State of Reading the News 2026: what 890 news sites actually load

    We loaded 890 news and expert sites in a real browser and counted ad entities, third-party domains, layout shift and interstitials. Mass-reach sites run a median 39 third parties; the indie tier runs 8. Aggregates, distributions, and the cleanest sites named.

  3. 30 August 2026

    The best Mac apps in 2026, picked by an indie Mac developer

    macOS is most of the way there; these ten apps finish it. Raycast, Ice, CleanShot X, Stats, Maccy, Things 3, NetNewsWire, iA Writer, Fantastical, and FeedsBar (ours, and the entry says so). No affiliate links, no paid placements.

  4. 15 August 2026 · updated 31 August 2026

    How the Signal 500 is measured: method, weights and what is judgement

    How every Signal 500 source is scored: loaded in a real browser with the cookie banner accepted, ad entities and third parties counted, layout shift and reach measured. Which dimensions are measured, which are judgement, and the published weights.

  5. 8 August 2026 · updated 30 August 2026

    Best Mac news ticker: FeedsBar vs menu bar apps, RSS readers and X

    How FeedsBar compares to menu bar RSS apps, full RSS readers and following news on X. A private, one-time-purchase macOS news ticker with topic orbs.

  6. 7 August 2026 · updated 8 August 2026

    A short history of the ticker: from Edison to your desktop

    The stock ticker, the Times Square zipper, the Nasdaq tower and the news crawl that never left after 2001, and what changes when you choose what runs across it.