Joe Rossignol (Hacker News): Italy’s Competition Authority (AGCM) has imposed a €98.6 million ($116 million) fine on Apple over its App Tracking Transparency feature. […] In a press release and executive summary today, the AGCM said the App Tracking Transparency rules are “disproportionate,” and “harmful” to app developers and advertisers. Ultimately, it found that Apple […]

John Daniel (via John Siracusa, Reddit): As of 26.1, when you encode a security-scoped bookmark to “file:///”, what you decode will be a bookmark to “file:///.nofollow/”. So the decode method now succeeds, but the value is wrong. I actually preferred the behaviour of the original bug. Kevin Elliott: The “.nofollow” syntax is a new part […]

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon): This morning I reluctantly updated my iPhone SE (3rd generation) from iOS 18.7.2 to iOS 26.2. I had been hoping for Santa Cook to bring me iOS 18.7.3 for Christmas. Apparently, though, we’ve all been naughty. Or maybe Cook himself is not nice. I was aware that it was (previously) possible to […]

Chiara Castro (Hacker News, Reddit): Proton has confirmed the company has begun moving out of Switzerland due to “legal uncertainty” over the newly proposed surveillance law. […] The firm behind one of the best VPN and encrypted email services has been very critical of the Swiss government’s proposed amendment of its surveillance law since the […]

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner — a digital take on traditional paper planners. Its motto: “Most productivity apps help you organize tasks. Finalist helps you finish them.”

One aspect of Finalist that makes it different from most to-do/task apps is that instead of setting due dates for tasks, you add tasks to specific days. This really resonates with me. With most apps in this domain, the top-level items are tasks, and tasks have (optional) due dates. With Finalist, the top-level items are days, and days have tasks and events. This might sound like I’m splitting semantic hairs but it gives Finalist a very different feel, one that’s more natural to me. If you’ve got unfinished items from yesterday, Finalist lets you move them all forward to today with one tap. Or, move some forward, and leave others behind. Or, just leave them all behind and move on. Up to you. I like that.

Finalist integrates with the system in all the ways you’d hope, including with the system calendar APIs and the Reminders app. So events in your system calendar and items from Reminders show up on your days in Finalist. Finalist lets you create events (calendar items), reminders (to-dos that are synced with Reminders), tasks (to-dos that exist only in Finalist), journal entries (like notes to yourself), and section headers if you have a busy day and need to group certain items together. Oh, and “habits”, too — recurring to-dos for habits you want to build or break. It sounds like a lot, but it all fits together neatly, covering the gamut of stuff you’d track in a daily paper planner. And everything in Finalist syncs between platforms (iPhone, iPad, Mac) with iCloud. There’s no account to create — it just uses iCloud, which is private and simple.

It’s not minimalist, but it’s not complicated. I’ve had a lot of fun learning to use Finalist just by exploring it. It’s thoughtful and intuitive. Like any civilized app, Finalist’s tags allow you to include spaces and capital letters in tag names, and don’t start with a stupid # character. And, design-wise, Finalist is very handsome — it offers customizable color themes and makes terrific use of the typographic features of the San Francisco system font.

Subscriptions cost $5/month or $30/year. A lifetime license costs just $60. It supports Family Sharing too.

I’m kind of blown away by how robust and thoughtful Finalist is. It’s not a web app with iOS and Mac clients. It’s a suite of native apps designed with care for Apple’s platforms. Auteur software, with a distinctive brand and vision, while remaining idiomatically native. Bravo to Slaven Radic. I strongly encourage you to check it out.