The only apps in the top 10 not from Google or Meta are ChatGPT (#1) and TikTok (#4).

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors): Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip — the same chip found in the iPhone 17 lineup, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watch Series 11 — powers the new AirTag, making it easier to locate than ever before. Using haptic, visual, and audio feedback, Precision Finding guides users to their […]

Cindy Harper (via Hacker News): The UK House of Lords has voted to extend “age assurance” requirements, effectively age verification mandates, to virtual private networks (VPNs) and a wide range of online platforms under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. The decision deepens the reach of the already-controversial Online Safety Act, linking child safety goals […]

Zac Bowden (via Hacker News): Microsoft has confirmed in a statement to Forbes that the company will provide the FBI access to BitLocker encryption keys if a valid legal order is requested. These keys enable the ability to decrypt and access the data on a computer running Windows, giving law enforcement the means to break […]

Yours truly back in 2009, hitting upon the same themes from the item I just posted about TextEdit vs. Apple Notes:

This, I think, explains the relative popularity of Mac OS X’s included Stickies application. For years, Stickies’s popularity confounded me. Why would anyone use a note-taking utility that requires you to leave every saved note open in its own window on screen? The more you use it, the more cluttered it gets. But here’s the thing: cluttered though it may be, you never have to save anything in Stickies. Switch to Stickies, Command-N, type your new note, and you’re done. (And, yes, if you create a new sticky note, then force-quit Stickies, the note you just created will be there when next you launch the app. Stickies’s auto-save happens while you type, not just at quit time.) It feels easy and it feels safe. Stickies does not offer a good long-term storage design, but it offers a frictionless short-term jot-something-down-right-now design.

Here we are in 2026, 17 years later, and, unsurprisingly, some things have changed. Apple Notes didn’t get a Mac version until Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion in 2012. And Apple Notes didn’t really get good until 2016 or 2017. I still use Yojimbo, the library-based Mac app I wrote about in the above piece in 2009, but I don’t use it nearly as much as I used to. I use Apple Notes instead, for most notes, because it has good clients for iPhone and iPad (and Vision Pro and even Apple Watch).

Other things, however, have not changed since 2009. Like the Stickies app, which is still around in MacOS 26 Tahoe, largely unchanged, except for a sad Liquid Glass-style icon. If you still use Stickies, you should consider moving to Apple Notes. There’s even a command (File → Export All to Notes...) to import all your notes from Stickies into Apple Notes, with subfolders in Notes for each color sticky note. Apple Notes on the Mac even supports one of Stickies’s signature features: the Window → Float on Top command will keep a note’s window floating atop the windows from other apps even when Apple Notes is in the background.

(Stickies has another cool feature that no other current app I know of does: it still supports “window shading”. Double-click the title bar of a note in Stickies and the rest of the window will “roll up”, leaving only the title bar behind. Double-click again and it rolls down. This was a built-in feature for all windows in all apps on classic Mac OS, starting with Mac OS 8, but was replaced in favor of minimizing windows into the Dock with Mac OS X. Window shading was a better feature (and could have been kept alongside minimizing into the Dock). With the Stickies app, window shading works particularly well with the aforementioned Float on Top feature — you can keep a floating window available, atop all other windows, but while it’s rolled up it hardly takes up any space or obscures anything underneath.)