I built a new app because I was tired of scrolling past jokes, quote-posts, and the same article six times on social media. I also didn’t want to miss great articles from sources not in my RSS feeds when I wasn’t plugged in for a while. When I’m ready to read, I want the links. Just the links, and all the links.

Just the Links is a native app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It reads your Mastodon and Bluesky timelines and turns them into one feed of articles people actually shared.

Not to step too much on Murmel’s toes, mind you, I just wanted a native app with bookmarking and cloud sync. Murmel is still a great option with RSS feeds and digest emails, neither of which Just the Links provides. I’m using both.

What it does

Sign in to one or more accounts. Pull home, lists, or public/explore sources. The app grabs destination URLs from post text and link cards, throws out mentions, hashtags, and platform profile links, then groups the rest by URL.

One row per article. The face of the row is the social post that pushed it hardest, with a card underneath for the link. Expand the row if you want to see everyone else who posted it, and boost or repost from there.

Why I wanted this

I like Mastodon. I like Bluesky. I do not like treating either one as a reading list. By the time I tap through, I have already seen the same Verge piece from four people and still have not opened it.

I see an app like this as a modern RSS reader for people who don’t have time to keep up with a bunch of RSS feeds. Follow the right people/news outlets and get all of the links they post, in order, in one place.

This app is closer to a focused cousin of a timeline client than it is to a bookmark manager. The post stays in front. The link is nested. Filters sit on top if I only want things that showed up more than once, or that picked up some likes.

Accounts and filters

With a paid subscription, you can add unlimited accounts across Bluesky and Mastodon. For each account you can choose what to pull: home, lists, federated, or local feeds. If you’re following people that post links of interest to you, you can just watch your home feed or a list. If you want to see a broader selection, choose local or federated. That will show you all of the links on your Mastodon server or wider federated links.

There’s one set of filter options that applies to all accounts. You can determine a minimum number of likes, reposts, or appearances that a link has to have to show up in the feed. I like to set likes/reposts to 3, and appearances to 1, which often surfaces blog posts from people I follow without requiring a bunch of people to have linked to it, while keeping my list fairly tidy.

Reading, saving, and sharing

Tap a card and it opens in an in-app reader. You can send it to Safari, archive.is, or bookmark it to your Read Later view. It even integrates with Read Later services like linkding, Pinboard, Instapaper, and Marked Share. Read Later syncs with iCloud, along with accounts and filter settings. Tokens live in the Keychain. There is no server of mine in the middle.

On a Mac or landscape iPad you get a split view: the list on one side, the article on the other. That’s the version I’ve been using the most.

You can boost or repost right from the app. Just The Links will show the “heaviest” appearance of the link (most shares, most popular account, etc.). Tap the “X Posts” at the bottom or the user icon at the top and you’ll see all of the accounts that have shared it, each with boost and repost buttons. I don’t have Quote Posting enabled yet, but you can also click the Mastodon or Bluesky icon on the individual post to open it on Bluesky or Mastodon, where you can interact with it as usual.

Full keyboard support

As with all things I make, attention to keyboard shortcuts is a big deal. You can navigate lists with arrow keys or vim-style j/k, open links with a right arrow or o, save to Read Later with ⌘+D, and more.

Readability and Apple Intelligence

Mozilla Readability is built in. Whenever the browser is focused, you can hit ⇧+⌘+R (or the toolbar icon) to open the article without any menus, ads, cookie popups, etc. This works with any article you can load, even if it requires a login.

If an article is paywalled and you don’t have an account, you can try the Archive button to see if it’s been saved to the Wayback Machine. If it has, you can read it in full. If it hasn’t, you can submit it for archiving.

Hit the Apple Intelligence “sparkle” button (or press ⇧+⌘+A) to get an AI summary of an article, along with a chat box where you can ask questions. Available on any device that has Apple Intelligence enabled.

Join the Newsletter

You can sign up for the Just The Links mailing list on the site. This list will be used to announce the release, as well as development news.

I do tend to use these individual app lists to promote my other apps and offer discounts, but I’ll never sell the list and you’ll only ever hear from me.

Try it

It is a small subscription: $1.99 a month with a week of trial, or $19.99 a year. Family Sharing is on. It will work for free with one account and no read later list. I am not asking you to trust a backend; the work happens on the device.

You can join the TestFlight from justthelinks.app right now. iPhone, iPad, and Mac. If you’re interested in seeing the most popular links from people you actually follow (or want to discover), check it out.

Like I said, if you’d rather wait to hear when it’s released, or want to keep up with major developments, join the mailing list.

About the TestFlight

I don’t intend to test this one for long, but I’d love your feedback before release. Join the TestFlight for free and get full functionality. You can use the Purchase buttons with any subscription type to test, you won’t actually be charged. As with any TestFlight app, purchase buttons are there just for testing and don’t really subtract anything from your account. Give it a shot on Mac and iOS and report any issues. You can also send feedback directly to me using the support email.

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Find Brett on Mastodon, Bluesky, GitHub, and everywhere else.

The latest macOS is a nice step toward a good-looking Mac UI, but I do wish it had gone farther.

I am in particular not a fan of how Mac toolbars look. I don’t like the full-height sidebars and I especially don’t like the Liquid Glass buttons.

I looked around at what other Mac apps are doing. I asked on my microblog which gets syndicated to Mastodon and I also looked at replies to Isaiah’s similar question from a few days ago.

What I found should be no surprise: many of the apps people think look good are not using stock UI.

You already know this. I don’t think I need to prove it. But one app may serve as an illustration: Things.

Things is a perennial callout for its design and for its Mac-like-ness. But it is not really a stock Mac app at all. The toolbar is not at the top of the window (not an NSToolbar) and it’s not customizable. There is no hint of Liquid Glass style translucency anywhere in their main UI. The content doesn’t slide under the sidebar, for instance. (The one place I can find anything obviously Liquid Glass is the toolbar buttons in the settings window.)

I’ve long been a devoted proponent of using stock Mac UI for, I always thought, good reasons: users are already familiar with that UI and it’s less work to create and update every year.

Plot twist

I think those reasons (user familiarity and developer effort) may not stand up entirely. At least not these days.

Users have shown — again, I don’t need to prove this — that they don’t think about a stock Mac app vs. custom. Do they dislike Things for not having a toolbar at the top of the window that they can customize in the usual way? No. (The only people who think that way are longtime Mac developers like me.)

Are users able to understand the UI to popular Mac apps — to Things, Slack, Craft, OmniFocus, NotePlan, Bear, Reeder, Telegram, Acorn, Tapestry, Obsidian, Audio Hijack, etc. — without much trouble, no matter how stock or not-stock they are? Yes.

Do they know when an app is an Electron app? Nope: they don’t even have a concept of Electron apps and they wouldn’t care if you explained it to them. (Why should they?)

Users may be already familiar with stock Mac UI (and maybe not, actually, depending on what apps they use) — but I don’t think that matters at all anymore.

So what about developer effort

The idea was that by using stock Mac UI you the developer would be carried along — you’d get most of the macOS changes every year mostly for free or with not that much work, since you’d kept up every year.

But my app NetNewsWire has a very stock Mac UI, and Liquid Glass adoption last year was a lot of work. Using stock Mac UI didn’t save us much — in fact, we had more work to do compared to the apps with more custom UI.

I’ll go back to Things. I’m not picking on them, to be clear. Quite the opposite! I very much respect their work, even though I have in the past wished it were more Mac-like (again, in the way only a longtime Mac developer would).

Here’s their blog post from a year ago on adopting Liquid Glass. They did some work, for sure, at their usual high level of quality. And I’m not denigrating that. But it looks like a lot less work than we had to do on NetNewsWire.

And that’s my point: the level of developer effort was higher for the stock Mac app.

The secret third reason for using stock Mac UI

To recap: the reasons for using stock Mac UI are 1) user familiarity, which we’ve known for a while just isn’t a thing, and 2) hoping to be able to expend less developer effort, which we’ve seen can work against you.

But there’s another reason: the stock Mac UI is designed by Apple, the best designers in the world, and do you really think you can do better? Really?

The app world is full of people who think they’re better and they’re really, really, really not.

Well, I still think Apple has the best collection of UI designers in the world, but, for whatever reasons, the guidance from above on how the Mac UI should look is missing the mark. I’m not blaming the people doing the work — they’re doing great work with the direction they’re given.

So this — bad direction — is where the secret third reason falls down. And we’re left with no real reason to stick with stock Mac UI (except for wanting approval from longtime Mac people like me, and you really shouldn’t care about that at all).

Messing around last night

With this in mind I wondered how far I could get in removing the parts of Liquid Glass I don’t like in NetNewsWire. Turns out I could get pretty far, though it comes at the expense of using NSToolbar (as predicted).

Note: this stuff is just on a branch. One night of play, not real design or consideration. (But this is code, not mockups.) It’s not about to ship this way. But I’ll share anyway, because it does hint at some possible ideas for NetNewsWire’s future.

Click the small version to get the big version.

(Note that the column view in the second screenshot is going to ship in 7.2. That part’s already done, and it has nothing to do with Liquid-Glass-or-not. Also note: the article theme in use is part of the standard NetNewsWire app right now, not a new thing.)

The obvious first best thing I could do to improve this is to add some color to the toolbar icons and spread them out better. Maybe add some ability to customize, even though it’s not a standard Mac toolbar.

Of course you might look at this and think “Blech! Looks so old! Spare me!” Totally fair!

But it felt cute. Might delete later

Life is full of trade-offs. I often think about this in terms of vehicles. If you have a big family, a minivan is probably the right call, even if it means sacrificing performance. A luxury sedan may be nice to sit in, but it will cost you big bucks. You can drive a pickup truck, but you will probably pay for it at the pump.

In the world of technology, trade-offs change nature over time. The first iPhone was amazing, but it was expensive and only ran on AT&T. The original MacBook Air was an incredible piece of engineering, but it ran hot and slow.

After a product matures, those trade-offs begin to shift, especially when it becomes a family of products.

When there was just one iPod, it was easy to know which one to get. Once the iPod mini came along, it changed the equation for many people. For the last several years, iPhone customers have faced similar questions when looking at the Pro and non-Pro models.

The trade-offs between those two devices have always been pretty clear. The Pro has a better camera system and other nice-to-haves, but you have to be willing to pay for them. I think most iPhone buyers knew what camp they fell into and were mostly okay with it.

Last year, the iPhone Air upset the apple cart, adding a new third option that was both better and worse than its more established siblings.

I’ve been using one for the better part of a year, and the trade-offs aren’t as bad as you may think.

What You Know

Right off the bat, I should note that the iPhone Air has not sold well. Compared to its more mainstream siblings, its numbers are downright embarrassing. There are several reasons for that.

First, Apple hasn’t advertised the Air; last cycle’s marketing focused on the cosmic orange 17 Pro. Given how people have reacted to seeing my iPhone Air, I feel like most consumers don’t even know Apple sells it. I’ve had more “Is that an Android?” than “Oh, is that the iPhone Air?” over the last 12 months.

Then there’s the Curse of the Fourth iPhone. Apple has sold two sizes of Pro phones successfully, but finding that same success with non-Pro phones has proven elusive. The Mini and Plus were both on sale for just two years, then Apple took them off the market.

The iPhone Air is very different from those older devices. They were the regular iPhone in a different size; the Air is wholly different from the iPhone 17, yet the curse remains.

Third, Apple made some big trade-offs to make the iPhone Air a mere 5.64 mm thick. The battery life isn’t up to par with other modern iPhones, and the single camera can leave you without the reach of the iPhone Pro. The thin Titanium chassis can become quite warm under load. The single loudspeaker is … not great.

How I Feel

Here’s the thing — I’ve found I can live with all those limitations to have such a thin phone in my hand and in my pocket.

That’s not to say the last year has been perfect.

On days I am at my desk, I can top up the battery, but on weekends or travel days, I’ve had to rely on the Air’s external battery. This isn’t a big deal, but it does require some thinking ahead.

The camera has been my biggest pain point. The 1x lens isn’t bad, but the lack of flexibility is pretty limiting. This is true on both ends of things — the lack of a true macro mode and the limited zoom limit what the Air can capture.

The Air is not a bad phone today, just an imperfect one. It’s not the best phone Apple sells, but it’s the next best thing.

Parts of it are magical.

Remember how light the iPhone 5 felt back when it was new? The Air feels that impossible at first, and it hasn’t really worn off in the months since. I never got into the whole Marie Kondo thing, but this iPhone does spark joy for me.

It’s also affected every other iPhone in my house, at least in my mind. They all feel clunky.

What Comes Next

Every once in a while, a product comes along that shows us a glimpse of the future.

There is a phrase that is often used to describe a failed product that ends up being right in the end:

It was ahead of its time.

Think about the Newton, Apple’s PDA from the 1990s. It foretold much of what we have today in the smartphone age, but it couldn’t reach far enough into the future to grasp it.

Of course, the iPhone Air isn’t really like the Newton, but the point stands—the iPhone Air is a little part of the future we can enjoy now.

One day we’ll look back on it and realize it was the start of a new era. This Air may not be a winner, but one of its successors will surely take the crown.

David Smith:

The eve of iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders seems like a good time to look back at the iPhone 17 family’s adoption. Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith.

Generally, they followed the usual adoption pattern and overall did very well, ending at around 20% of total usage.

With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison, the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs. the Air’s 0.3%).

The graph is pretty pretty pretty pretty rough for those of us who love the iPhone Air:

Widgetsmith is huge and is much more representative of real-world performance than apps written for a nerdier audience. I suspect the overall sales of these phones look a lot like this chart.

I believe we’ll see an update to the Air in the spring, with the same rear camera system as found on the iPhone Duo. Past that? I think Apple may pull the plug.

Anti-Muslim sentiment is used as a political weapon. Meanwhile, Muslim American leaders are making a difference for all

It’s been 25 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, and during this time Muslim Americans have learned how to live in that dangerous space between other Americans’ fears and their ignorance.

The fear was clear from the beginning. Immediately following 9/11, Muslim Americans faced what Human Rights Watch called “a severe wave of backlash violence”. A tide of hate rose up against ordinary Muslims and those who appeared to be Muslim, including at least three murders in the immediate backlash after the attacks. The federal government, for its part, began targeting Muslim immigrants in a massive surge of repression that legal experts soon compared with the Palmer Raids of the 1920s.

Apple:

Audio Intelligence is a brand-new class of Apple Intelligence features that use the microphones of Apple Watch, the power of Apple silicon, and on-device and cloud-based AI models to help you detect sounds, identify music, and stay present and engaged — all while protecting your privacy at every step.

Hartley Charlton:

• Siri Recap: Uses ambient listening to generate high-level notes from conversations, such as takeaways from a team meeting or a parent-teacher conference, producing an Apple Intelligence-generated title, summary, and key points reviewable in the Siri app.
• Live Rewind: Lets users “go back in time for 15 seconds,” transcribing and displaying what was just said in a conversation with a double press of the Digital Crown.
• Shazam: Automatically identifies music playing nearby and surfaces the song title and artist on the Music Recognition widget in the Smart Stack.
• Sound Recognition: Brings sound alerts to Apple Watch for users who are deaf or hard of hearing, listening for sirens, alarms, doorbells, a baby crying, and more, even when their iPhone isn’t nearby.

Lily Hay Newman:

Apple is emphasizing that all of them are built to prioritize privacy and security using the extensive infrastructure the company has developed to protect its other Apple Intelligence and Siri services. As more and more of these types of features debut, though, the audio intelligence announcements are a reminder that AI-powered tools are becoming increasingly universal in all areas of computing and life.

“These features do not create or store audio recordings, and raw audio used for processing is completely inaccessible to the operating systems, apps, the user, or Apple,” the company wrote in a report shared with WIRED.

[…]

Apple emphasizes that its on-device capabilities for Apple watches have expanded thanks to the company’s new S11 chips. The chips include a special memory-protected space that Apple calls the Secure Exclave. Designed specifically for sensor data, the exclave is an isolated buffer that is inaccessible to the rest of the operating system where Apple Watch can hold and process audio data in a protected space.

[…]

To try to mitigate blatant privacy violations, Apple says that the watch produces an audible chime when a watch owner initiates a Live Rewind transcript to alert other people in the area—even if it is on silent mode or paired with headphones. And the features are built to omit or filter out potentially identifying information about speakers. But the sheer scope and breadth of the tools is extremely noteworthy.

Zac Hall:

If you want to really take a deep dive on privacy and the new features, Apple has published an 11-page privacy paper that goes even further.

Previously:

• Apple Watch Ultra 4
• Apple Watch Series 12
• Pebble Index