Krystal Hu:
Grammarly has raised $1 billion in non-dilutive financing from General Catalyst to expand its artificial intelligence (AI) offerings, aiming to grow into a comprehensive productivity platform, the companies said on Thursday.
Grammarly, known for its popular writing assistant tool, plans to use the capital to fund sales and marketing costs and strategic acquisitions. It looks to use AI to build more communication-based productivity tools and even hosts third-party tools on its platform by leveraging access to its 40 million daily users.
[…]
General Catalyst doesn’t receive an equity stake in Grammarly, but will get a capped return linked to revenue generated through using this capital. This is structured as a percentage of the revenue generated from the fund being used in customer acquisition.
Kirk McElhearn (Bluesky):
The writing tools, one element of Apple Intelligence, were the only part of this group of features that was ready on day one. These tools can proofread, rewrite, and summarize texts, and similar features are available from every AI tool and grammar-checking website. These writing tools are the lowest common denominator of generative AI. There’s nothing special about them, and there’s nothing Apple about them.
[…]
I would never use these tools to actually rewrite something. The tone and style of the writing are so bad that I would be embarrassed to put those words under my byline.
Aside from the quality of the AI, integration really matters for features like this. It seems like Grammarly has done a better job there, despite the disadvantage of not controlling the OS. I don’t see it being Sherlocked.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Business Grammarly Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Writing Tools
John Gruber (Mastodon, MacRumors, Hacker News, Steve Troughton-Smith):
But in recent years the guests have seemed a bit predictable: senior executives from Apple. This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.
I think this will make for a fascinating show, but I want to set everyone’s expectations accordingly. I’m invigorated by this.
I think this is actually good for the show. Though I appreciate the opportunity to glean some information from the Apple executives, I usually find the live shows frustrating. Gruber wisely avoids wasting time with questions that they obviously won’t answer. But there are also plenty of on-topic, respectfully phrased questions that the executives mostly dodge. They’re just not going to tell us what we (I?) really want to know. Like politicians, they’re too good at staying on message. I think there are more interesting ways of using the time than giving space for talking points that didn’t make it into the keynote. I generally found the live episodes with Cabel Sasser and the ATP guys more entertaining and informative. If I were in Gruber’s position the last few years, I would have been thinking: maybe it’s time for something different. But people like watching Federighi, and it would be hard to pass up the opportunity if an Apple SVP wants to participate. Now, problem solved. I can see why he’s invigorated.
I do wonder what the thinking was from Apple’s side. Revenge for something he wrote? Pour encourager les autres? Lack of courage to defend their recent record or future plans, even with a fair interviewer? If I were Apple, I would see The Talk Show as a great opportunity to mend some fences with the developer community. But maybe Apple doesn’t care about that. Whatever the actual reason, the decision was sure to send a message, and I struggle to see how it could be a good one.
M.G. Siegler:
This is wild. Both because they declined – again, for the first time in a decade – but more so because they have to know the signal it sends in declining. At best, it looks like they’re trying to avoid answering any non-staged questions about how things are going. At worst, it looks like they’re freezing Gruber out for a few recently critical posts about the company – notably, his “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” post about the Apple Intelligence shitshow back in March.
Even if that’s not explicitly what Apple is doing here, they simply must know that’s what it looks like. And it’s just about the worst look imaginable.
Marco Arment (Mastodon):
No executive ever said something they shouldn’t have (they’re pros), no sensational or negative news stories ever resulted from them, and Apple’s enthusiastic fans and developers felt seen, heard, and appreciated.
[…]
In the absence of any other information, it’s easy to assume that Apple no longer wants its executives to be interviewed in a human, unscripted, unedited context that may contain hard questions, and that Apple no longer feels it necessary to show their appreciation to our community and developers in this way.
See also: 15 Years Later: ‘Very Insightful and Not Negative’.
Previously:
Apple iOS Mac The Media WWDC
Apple (downloads):
Fixed: Users may see excessive CPU utilization from diskimagesiod which reduces simulator performance, increasing boot time, process launch times, and test execution times.
[…]
The command devicectl diagnose now obtains a sysdiagnose from your Mac and all available devices by default.
[…]
Fixed: NSURLSession was always timing out and failing in iOS 18.3 simulator runtimes.
Fixed: Some C++ headers were experiencing crashes in syntax highlighting and Quick Help.
Not a lot of changes here. It seems to be working the same as Xcode 16.3 for me—no new problems, but it doesn’t seem to fix all the issues introduced in 16.x, either.
Sarah Reichelt:
I see some people reporting problems with Xcode 16.4 but it solved a problem for me. I was holding off the pre-release of my book “Escape from Tutorial Hell” because 16.3 had a bug that crashed a playground the used JSON decoding. So please don’t try to use Xcode 16.3 with any playground in the book. 16.2 and 16.4 are both fine.
Previously:
C++ Programming Language Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Programming Simulator Xcode
Wes Davis:
The Browser Company has said repeatedly that it’s not getting rid of the Arc browser as it moves onto its new AI-centric Dia browser. But what the company also not going to do is develop new features for it.
Josh Miller:
Back in 2019, it was already clear to us that everything was moving into the browser. My wife, who doesn’t work in tech, was living in desktop Chrome all day. My six year old niece was doing school entirely in web apps. The macro trends all pointed the same direction too: cloud revenue was surging, breakout startups were browser-based (writing blog posts like “Meet us in the browser”), crypto ran through browser extensions, WebAssembly was enabling novel experiences, and so on.
[…]
After a couple of years of building and shipping Arc, we started running into something we called the “novelty tax” problem. A lot of people loved Arc — if you’re here you might just be one of them — and we’d benefitted from consistent, organic growth since basically Day One. But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.
[…]
So when people ask how venture capital influenced us — or why we didn’t just charge for Arc and run a profitable business — I get it. They’re fair questions. But to me, they miss the forest for the trees. If the goal was to build a small, profitable company with a great team and loyal customers, we wouldn’t have chosen to try and build the successor to the web browser – the most ubiquitous piece of software there is. The point of this was always bigger for us: to build good, cared for software that could have an impact for people at real scale.
[…]
Early on, Scott Forstall told us Arc felt like a saxophone — powerful but hard to learn. Then he challenged us: make it a piano. Something anyone can sit down at and play. This is now the idea behind Dia: hide complexity behind familiar interfaces.
M.G. Siegler:
If this sounds familiar it’s because Miller did a similar post – a video, actually – seven months ago. While they weren’t quite ready to talk about the direction of Dia yet, it was pretty clear what it was going to be. And it was also pretty obvious what the ultimate outcome would be, even if Miller didn’t want to admit it at the time: the end of Arc.
[…]
If there’s a problem with Miller’s post today, it’s that he’s still equivocating. He won’t just outright kill Arc even though that’s what they clearly want to do. So instead, he’s trying to crowdsource ideas for how best to keep it going, just not under the management of The Browser Company.
Nick Lockwood:
ARC is a harsh reminder not to get excited about VC-funded products, however nice they may be.
The free money fountain dries up eventually, and sooner or later they’ll either enshittify or pull the plug.
John Gruber:
Like the old “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” adage, how do you commit to a new browser from the same people who just pulled the rug out from under you on their last one?
Josh Miller:
We use a modified version of MVVM that retains many ideas from unidirectional data flow architectures, but avoids state diffing for performance reasons.
[…]
This new architecture is optimized for cross-platform code sharing, making it easier to port Dia to Windows.
[…]
On Mac, we now use AppKit exclusively. We found that any use of SwiftUI (on Mac specifically) consistently regressed performance.
Kyle Howells:
Same with UIKit and SwiftUI on iOS.
Marcin Krzyzanowski:
🤏 this close to rewrite this beautiful view from SwiftUI to AppKit, just because the SwiftUI focus system continues to be utterly broken
alex fazio:
tfw you find out that the start menu in windows 11 is literally a react native application that causes a spike in cpu usage every time you press the start button
Previously:
Arc Browser Artificial Intelligence Chromium Dia Browser Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) Programming Scott Forstall Software Rewrite Sunset SwiftUI Windows Windows 11
