My thanks to Rec League for sponsoring last week at DF. Rec League is a new app/social network for sharing what you’re into. (Get it? The “rec” in “Rec League” is for recommendations. It’s a damn clever name, and sometimes a clever name is half the battle.) It’s really well done, with a great simple brand aesthetic and obvious navigation and mechanics. You can easily use Rec League just to catalog your own collections: restaurants, books, movies, gadgets, whatever. The social aspects are totally low key. You find people whose taste you dig and you follow them. When you see something you like you can favorite or just save it. That’s it. It’s an old-school social network where the point is just fun and surprise and sharing.

Rec League was featured as the “Best New App” in the App Store, and one of their users called it “the only social media I feel better after using”, which feels like a perfect description. It’s just cool people recommending things they think are cool. I’ve already bought some stuff and added some movies to my watch list from using it, and I’ve started a little list of restaurants I recommend in Philadelphia. Download Rec League and check it out. I, uh, recommend it.

Weekly “sponsor the whole week at DF” spots are sold out until August 24. That’s a great sign that sponsorships here work. But it’s not so great if you have a product or service that you’d like to promote now, or soon, to the DF audience — savvy listeners and readers obsessed with high quality and good design.

The good news on that front is that the sponsorship schedule for The Talk Show has openings, including for the next few episodes, starting this week and into next month. The general rule of thumb is that sponsorship spots on The Talk Show cost one-third the rate for the weekly spots on DF. I’m happy to work out deals a little lower than that for first-time sponsors. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to hear pitched on America’s favorite three-star podcast, get in touch.

David Pierce:

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay are joined by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber to talk about their reactions to the news, the (mostly) smooth transition Apple seems to have pulled off, and what we should really make of Tim Cook’s legacy as a product person. Really, the question is: Do we blame Cook for the Touch Bar, or do we blame him for not trying hard enough to make the Touch Bar great?

I know that sounds like a joke but I really do think the biggest problem with the Touch Bar wasn’t that the first crack at it wasn’t good enough, but that they never took a second crack at it. Going back to dumb fiddly F-keys with functional icons printed on them was uncharacteristically lazy for Apple.

It’s really just a coincidence, but it was 20 years ago this week that I went full-time writing Daring Fireball (after writing the site in my spare time for 4 years). That feels like a long time ago. But it feels like yesterday, too. In my announcement, I wrote:

Daring Fireball is what I love to do.

That remains as true today than it was then. Whether you’re a longtime reader or a relatively new one, you might enjoy reading that piece from 20 years ago. So far, so good. (I’ve got some readers who were only small children when I wrote that. I occasionally hear from some who weren’t even born then.)

There might be other ways you can support my work directly in the future. But for now, the best way is to buy t-shirts and hoodies from my periodic sales. The current sale is going to end sometime tomorrow. If you’re seeing this post Sunday night and thinking about making a purchase, act now. If you’re seeing this Monday morning, you should really act now.

Software brain says *Go faster; do more; the only mistake you can’t fix is having gone too slow.* Hardware brain says *Slow down; do less; focus; strive for perfection and never settle for less than excellence; mistakes are forever.*