John Gruber (MacRumors):
The first is an entire BlackBerry-style phone: Clicks Communicator. It runs Android but ships with a custom launcher that emphasizes messaging and notifications; it has a hardware mute switch and a side button with a color-coded alert light they call the Signal LED.
[…]
The second is the Clicks Power Keyboard. It’s a MagSafe-compatible battery back with a keyboard that slides out, underneath your phone. (Reminiscent of the Palm Pre?) It’s a Bluetooth keyboard, and you can pair it with up to three devices. Examples they cite include pairing with an iPad, Apple TV, and, intriguingly, a Vision Pro. (I’d rather type with my thumbs on a device like this than peck at the virtual keyboard in VisionOS, I think.) This strikes me as a much better idea for a hardware phone keyboard accessory than a case.
The Power Keyboard looks great. An easily detached battery pack with a keyboard is way more appealing than a case that makes your phone huge. Unfortunately, my phone is just not a good fit for most of the work I do (code and e-mails/HTML that pull together links and content from multiple places). The software and small screen can’t be overcome by a keyboard, though I guess it does make the useable screen a bit larger. But if I did more pure writing I would definitely try one of these.
Maybe I will, anyway. There are a bunch of longer blog posts that I think I could make more progress on during deadtime when I only have access to my phone. Part of what’s stopping me is that I find typing on the screen unpleasant. But the other part is that there’s no MarsEdit for iOS, so I’d need to move certain drafts to another app ahead of time and then bring them back.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-07): Roberto Mateu:
I returned my new iPhone 17 Clicks keyboard case and preordered the Power keyboard on the same day. The new keyboard basically addresses all my issues about the case: portability, flexibility being the main ones. However, another big one I haven’t seen mentioned, is my hope that the new keyboard allows for a better weight distribution by making the bottom heavier.
Android Bluetooth Clicks iOS iOS 26 iPhone Keyboard MagSafe MarsEdit Power This Blog
Apple (Hacker News):
In iOS 26.2 and later, browser engines other than WebKit can be used in two types of apps for users in Japan: Dedicated browser apps that provide a full web browser experience, and apps from browser engine stewards that provide in-app browsing experiences using an embedded browser engine.
[…]
To help keep users safe online, Apple will only authorize developers to implement alternative browser engines after meeting specific criteria and who commit to a number of ongoing privacy and security requirements, including timely security updates to address emerging threats and vulnerabilities.
Previously:
Antitrust BrowserEngineKit iOS iOS 26 Japan Legal
Paul Thurrott (Slashdot):
“My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’ To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding.”
Mayank Parmar (Hacker News):
Microsoft told Windows Latest that the company does not plan to rewrite Windows 11 using AI in Rust, which is a programming language that is more secure than C and C++.
[…]
I also screenshotted the LinkedIn post before it was edited out by the top-level Microsoft engineer[…]
[…]
Honestly, most people would not have taken this seriously if it did not come from a top-level Microsoft engineer. When someone with that kind of title and long history at the company talks about eliminating C and C++ and using AI to rewrite large codebases, it sounds less like a random idea and more like something Microsoft is at least exploring.
Miguel de Icaza:
It bothers me that the clarification was not “sorry I misled you”, but “you folks are dumb by parsing my words the way I wrote them”
Meanwhile, here’s the actual www.office.com site matter-of-factly rebranding Office as Copilot (via Hacker News):
The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) lets you create, share, and collaborate all in one place with your favorite apps now including Copilot.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-08): Jesper:
Ignoring hype and corporate arrogance, having been conversant in .NET for a significant portion of my life, my thoughts go to Midori. Midori was a legendary ground-up implementation of an operating system, object capability model and asynchronous programming in pure managed, memory-safe code that went as far as to power production code. It directly birthed the concepts behind async and await, which has now spread to pretty much every language in the decade since its introduction, as well as brought the concept of contiguous memory-safe slices, christened Span<T> to C# and .NET, where it now infiltrates all levels of the stack and brings down memory allocations and by extension garbage collection.
I don’t know what Mr Hunt is up to, but it does have the ring of a similar project.
[…]
My hope is that this project, alongside the current effort to only allow new codebases in Rust in the Windows kernel, helps push on the state of the art by trying to do what research projects do best - which is to start with an oft-absurd idea and then take it, over time, with purpose and still with connection to what the real world wants to accomplish, to a logical conclusion.
Artificial Intelligence Copilot AI Microsoft Microsoft Office Programming Rust Programming Language Software Rewrite
