Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen shared another fireside tale – one to strike fear into the hearts of engineers everywhere: the bug that can't be replicated in the debugger. The story begins near the end of the Word 97 release cycle, when a defect surfaced in the test labs but vanished the moment engineers reached for a debugger. It was maddening. A script could trigger the crash fairly reliably, yet the instant anyone tried to hunt it down, the bug ducked out of sight. Chen recalled: "The development team was very anxious, because a bug that appears only sporadically in the lab is going to occur regularly in the wild. But how do you debug a problem that resists debugging?" It is every developer's nightmare, even for those smug types who lean back in their chairs and tell testers "works alright here, mate." There is a special place reserved in the afterlife for these developers. With the bug refusing to cooperate, talk turned to an ICE (an In-Circuit Emulator, not the immigration agency), which could stand in for the CPU and allow breakpoints inside the emulated chip itself. "To most software developers," said Chen, "in-circuit emulators existed only in myth, and the possibility of acquiring one and using it was met with the excitement of a five-year-old boy who learns that he might get to ride on a fire truck." Eventually the team traced the problem to a specific manufacturer, and from there to a CPU erratum. The compiler in use at the time had been updated to dodge the problematic code sequence. However, by then the toolset had already been locked. Swapping in a new compiler risked introducing fresh, unknown bugs, so that was off the table. The solution? Scour the binaries to find instances of the code that might upset CPUs. One was found. "To avoid introducing any new problems as a side effect of the fix, the team opted to do a binary patch to the binary to insert a nop into the offending code sequence." Word 97 introduced plenty of headline features. There was the arrival of Clippit (aka Clippy) and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). And then there was a binary patch produced by determined engineers, which received far less attention. But without it, Word 97 could have been distinctly wobbly. ®
Google has declared that Android apps distributed through Google Play will have to meet new memory performance thresholds, starting in early 2027. Google is cracking down on poorly optimized code that might otherwise squander what's now a precious commodity, as RAM prices skyrocket and consumers choose phones with leaner specs. "An ecosystem-wide memory crisis is imminent due to rising RAM costs," the Chocolate Factory explains in its technical documentation. "Inefficient memory use, such as a single app with a runaway memory leak that consumes most of the device memory, causes the device to stutter and kill other well-behaving apps in the background. Android has announced strict memory limits, and Play wants to ensure your app’s fall within this and minimize the chances that the device needs to terminate your app." On-device AI probably isn't helping. The new app quality requirements represent an expansion of the Android memory efficiency push announced in June, aimed at "[preventing] 'one bad actor' from destroying the multitasking experience and stability of the user’s entire device." Technical scrutiny is scheduled to take effect in two stages: In February 2027, bad behavior thresholds and code optimization thresholds will come into effect. And in April 2027, the device migration experience – onboarding – will need to support zero-tap credential restoration. The former covers memory usage (Anonymous Resident Set Size + Swap), bitmap memory usage, and DEX code optimization – DEX (Dalvik Executable) files represent a compressed version of an application's Java bytecode. The specific memory requirements depend on the amount of physical RAM available on the device. For a device with 8 GB, an app can use no more than 2.25 GB in the foreground, 1.5 GB for user-perceived services, and 1.5 GB in the background. Devices with more than 16 GB are mostly exempt. Bitmap memory usage is capped at 200 MB in user-perceived services and in background, and 400 MB cached, for all devices. The limits differ somewhat for games. And DEX code optimization is being required to ensure modest memory usage, rapid app launches, and better runtime performance. The second stage requirement, Zero-tap Sign-In, aims to make device migration easier and more secure. As Google's documentation states, "Manual sign-ins during device setup doesn't just create onboarding friction and decrease user retention, it actively exposes apps to critical security vulnerabilities like phishing and credential theft during setup." So as of April, Android devs are advised to use the Android Restore Credentials API to help move user credentials from one device to another. ®
Announcing upbeat financials and a new offering with AI posterchild Anthropic, Salesforce has begun to drip-feed plans for how it might get customers to spend more as they deploy AI. The CRM giant has been among the victims of the so-called SaaSpocalypse, which sees widespread business application software replaced or diminished by AI models which interact directly with business data. Flawed or not, the notion has tanked Salesforce’s share price by more than 20 percent this year, but its Q2 results, for the period ending July 31, caused some cheer, at least among shareholders. As well as trumpeting revenue of $11.3 billion, up 11 percent on a year ago and beating analysts' expectations, the CRM giant announced a new tie-in with AI model builder Anthropic. The two companies have teamed up to announce Claudeforce, which claims to bring Claude’s services together with Salesforce’s enterprise data, workflows, governance and business logic. It offers a Plugin with 37 prebuilt “sales skills” the companies say help sellers and agents automate sales pipelines for example. As well as using Claude for the UI, it can be embedded in Salesforce products AIforce, Headless 360, Data 360, Tableau, and Slack. Together with the financial results, the news caused a 12 percent jump in the company’s value. That’s all very well for investors, but customers will be asking whether it works and how much they pay for it. Both will depend on the implementation strategy, but Salesforce did offer some clues about its expectations while speaking to investment analysts. For a start, there are so many products which seem to overlap, customers may be forgiven for being a little confused. Co-CEO and founder Marc Benioff said products would use “not only Claudeforce, but a new version of Slack, as well as Coworker,” an AI powered assistant built in its Agentforce platform. That adds to the Headless 360, which allows customers to access all of their Salesforce data from Cursor, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Claude, or a terminal. Slack is also being reworked as the UI for CRM and other applications through SlackBots, which can fetch and query data from a range of applications. Consumption-based How are users expected to pay for this menagerie of product types? Bundles is the answer. Robin Washington, Salesforce President and Chief Operating and Financial Officer, told investors, “bundles give our customers access to our innovation in real time.” Benioff said customers would have the option to pay by consumption, basic usage, or by outcome, such as a transaction outcome or a business outcome. “Customers want that kind of diversity in pricing, we have created a high level of flexibility, and that has really expanded our ability to sign very large transactions with our customers,” he said. Also underscoring this approach was the importance of consumption-based payment model Flex Credits in Salesforce's plans to get customers to adopt its various AI agent-led approaches to business processes. Miguel Milano, also President and Chief Operating Officer at Salesforce, told analysts: “When you look just at bookings — not just the cumulative annual recurring revenue — [they] grew triple-digit. We doubled year on year. Fifty percent of the bookings came from customers refilling the tank: they consume Flex Credits, they want more.” In October last year, Gartner warned users about the unplanned consumption of Flex Credits, alongside similar concepts in Microsoft and ServiceNow’s commercial portfolio. “These often require upfront usage commitments and can be credit-based, with rates that may change unilaterally by the vendor, exposing buyers to unexpected cost increases. While buyers may expect costs to decrease as usage scales, Gartner has seen no evidence of vendors lowering prices. Volume discounts must be negotiated upfront,” it said. The Register asked Salesforce to comment on Thursday Washington added that the company was “really comfortable with” the way it was working “through headless monetization.” “We ultimately think predictability and flexibility are what's important to customers. With our new platform, Agentforce, we are going to unlock the potential for knowledge workers in great ways. That's going to be pretty impressive. “That is an early stage for us relative to our installed base, or our opportunity to continue to upgrade our customers to those premium editions that give them instantaneous access to this innovation... We feel really comfortable with the monetization strategy that we have, and most importantly, the flexibility that we are giving our customers that allows us to capture that,” she said. Separately, Gartner has previously predicted that Salesforce’s all-you-can-eat model, the Agentic Enterprise License Agreement (AELA) announced last October, will not be available to all customers forever. Hannah Decker, Gartner director analyst for IT sourcing and procurement, told The Register in January it was critical that users understood the exit terms of AELAs before signing up for them. "Gartner believes that these are going to be converted into defined quantity contracts at the end of the agreement," she said. At the time, Salesforce denied that was the case. In a statement, Bill Patterson, Salesforce EVP, Corporate Strategy, said: "The claim that we are moving away from capped agreements is inaccurate. Renewals remain flexible, and because AI compute costs may actually shift over time, we focus on tailoring terms so each customer can get the maximum value from their usage.” ®
Microsoft is dusting off the rebrandogun again, and this time it's aimed at the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. The list of hopes and dreams will henceforth be called the AI at Work roadmap. The notification popped up in the Microsoft 365 admin center earlier this week with the words "The AI at Work Roadmap provides a single destination to discover upcoming innovations across Microsoft 365, Copilot, agents, and related AI-powered experiences." Information for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Dataverse will be added from September. In its announcement, Microsoft stated, "We’re making this change because of how our customers actually work." Other changes include when roadmap information appears. Instead of the twice-yearly release wave 1 and 2 model, Microsoft intends to publish new capabilities as soon as plans are committed. This means, in theory, administrators will have more notice of incoming features and functionality. The full transition will take time. Although the renaming has already happened, and other capabilities will be published to the AI at Work roadmap from September, existing roadmap content in public preview or with a General Availability date of June 1, 2026, or later, will also transition to the "AI at Work roadmap experience." This will take until November 15, 2026. Earlier this month, an enterprising Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) created the Microsoft Rebrand Registry. We look forward to the addition of the Microsoft 365 roadmap. All in all, it's an odd decision, and perhaps a slightly cynical way of shoving AI in administrators' faces. Microsoft 365 Copilot, the company's flagship AI technology, is available as a paid add-on, and adoption has hardly set the world alight, despite the investment poured into it. In June, a sueball was thrown at the company, with the lawsuit alleging "Microsoft had failed to convert a significant percentage of its commercial Microsoft 365 users to paid Copilot subscriptions." For its part, Microsoft told The Register that the claims in the complaint were "without merit." Regardless, renaming a roadmap with which administrators were familiar to something prefixed with AI smacks of marketing desperation on the part of Microsoft. Heaven forbid the company might have better things to do with its time than rename something that users were already happy with, and understood. ®
For years I ran a law practice, and the hardest part of client work was never the work. It was keeping track of it. Where that email went, what we agreed to on a phone call, which version of the document was current, who I owed a call back. Some of it lived in Mail, some in a folder somewhere, and too much of it lived only in my head.
That’s the problem Daylite has been chipping away at for more than twenty years. It pulls your clients, projects, tasks, calendars, and communications into one place, so every email, meeting, note, and follow-up becomes part of an ongoing history of that relationship. Open up a client, and you can see what happened, what’s next, and who is waiting on you.
The newest piece of that is Mail in Daylite, which brings your email inside the app alongside everything else. A message stops being one more thing you have to file. It attaches itself to the person, the deal, and the project it belongs to.
I also like that Daylite is built only for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It isn’t a web app wearing a Mac costume, and you can feel the difference in how it behaves.
If you run a service business and you’re tired of carrying the whole client history around in your head, take a look at Daylite. There’s a free trial.
In a conversation at Macstock 2026, Adam Christianson reflects on retiring the MacCast, joining Mac Geek Gab, and starting the Debut Film Podcast with his daughter. He also explains how his views on AI have evolved, how ChatGPT and Claude support his programming work, why human oversight remains essential, and what AI may mean for […]
From the Flip the Script event in San Francisco, Dmytro Melnyk, Chief Product Officer for MacPaw, discusses his role and the importance of the company’s careful approach to adding AI across products, from both the developer and customer viewpoints.. He explains why some users want frictionless AI while others resist it over privacy, cost, and complexity, and outlines Eney's goal of combining many Mac utility tasks into one assistant with a pay-as-you-go model.
At MacPaw’s Flip the Script event in San Francisco, Junior iOS Engineer Tymofii Bezverkhyi shares how his path from Ukraine’s Kyiv School of Economics to studying in Ireland, winning Apple’s Swift Student Challenge, and attending WWDC led to a role at MacPaw. Tim discusses his passion for Apple development, his work on MacPaw’s AI Eney, and why he appreciate’s the company’s responsibility and growth objectives.
At Flip The Script, Grant Belaire, Chief Marketing Officer for MacPaw, discusses how the company approaches AI, app discovery, and developer support through their trusted products like CleanMyMac, Setapp, Moonlock, and Clear. He explains why AI should be useful rather than forced, how Setapp balances customers and developers, and why long-term commitment matters in building successful app marketplaces.
Rivian’s rejection of CarPlay and physical buttons in favor of voice and AI control sees to question safety, convenience, data control, and long-term car software support. Chuck Joiner, David Ginsburg, Jeff Gamet, Guy Serle, Web Bixby, Eric Bolden, Marty Jencius, and Jim Rea question whether Rivian has other motives, and then dive into Tesla updates, AI voice recreation of Stan Lee, Spider-Man ticket promotions, Dashlane concerns, and Andy Ihnatko’s new site.
MacPaw's Maria Polishchuk, Head of Business Development and and Product Manager Pavlo Haidamak, discuss Setapp's new expansion beyond its traditional subscription model. They explain new individual app purchases, developer subscription options, AI Gateway integration, app review standards, and support for indie and vibe-coded apps. The discussion covers developer challenges such as discovery, monetization, security, and how Setapp aims to help with those factors as well as giving customers more software choices.
Imagine finding a very old family photograph that has faded over time. Parts of the image are missing, the faces are blurry, and years spent inside a cardboard album have erased many details. Restoring such an image traditionally would require painstaking manual work or specialized software trained on thousands of examples.
Para quem possui surdez ou alguma dificuldade de audição, é possível habilitar a exibição das legendas do Gemini Live enquanto estiver usando-o no seu Mac. Veja como! 👨💻
Com o app aberto, acesse as configurações do navegador. É possível fazer isso indo até Chrome » Ajustes…, na barra de menus, usando o atalho de teclado ⌘ command, ou clicando no botão com três pontinhos (no canto superior direito).
Selecione “Inovações de IA” (na barra lateral esquerda) e entre em “Gemini no Chrome”.
Por fim, marque a chave ao lado de “Legenda descritiva”.
Na prática, você poderá conferir as legendas nas conversas do Gemini Live, como no exemplo abaixo:
Com a disponibilização do Gemini no Google Chrome para Macs, ficou muito fácil consultar o serviço de inteligência artificial da empresa para alguma atividade que precisa fazer.
Por padrão, o painel lateral do Gemini fica localizado na parte direita da tela do seu computador. Mas, se preferir, é possível que ele seja mostrado no lado esquerdo.
Com a liberação do Google Gemini no navegador Chrome para macOS, tornou-se possível utilizar a inteligência artificial da empresa de uma maneira rápida, sem precisar abrir um aplicativo separado, por exemplo.
Uma das maneiras de sair ou voltar a navegar pelo Gemini no Chrome é por meio de um atalho de teclado. Apesar de já vir com um pré-configurado, você pode alterá-lo.
Abra as configurações do Chrome, indo até Chrome » Ajustes…, na barra de menus, usando o atalho ⌘ command, ou clicando nos três pontinhos, no canto superior direito.
Selecione “Inovações de IA” e entre em “Gemini no Chrome”. Clique no lápis ao lado de “Atalho para navegação” e utilize o teclado para adicionar o novo atalho preferido.
Fechando esta semana com a nossa seleção de promoções na App Store!
Not Another Weekend, desenvolvido pelo pessoal da Dionous Games, é uma aventura point-and-click cheia de personalidade, humor absurdo e estética retrô — e o nosso destaque do dia.
No game você controla Mike Melkout, um mensageiro de hotel decidido a expulsar todos os hóspedes de um luxuoso estabelecimento durante um único fim de semana. O jogo mistura diálogos exagerados e um clima de sátira dos anos 1980, gerando uma experiência muito interessante.
Os quebra‑cabeças seguem o estilo clássico do gênero: lógicos, mas com aquele toque de maluquice que exige observar bem o cenário e experimentar combinações improváveis. A narrativa é o grande destaque, com personagens excêntricos e situações que parecem saídas de um filme cult.
Confira o trailer:
Aproveite a oferta e boa diversão! 🤩
Abaixo outros jogos/apps que, juntos, somam mais de R$430 em descontos:
Jogos
Jogo incremental.
Simulador de caça.
Torne-se trilionário.
Aplicativos
Utilitário para medições.
Efeitos para fotos.
Aproveite as ofertas e tenha um excelente final de semana! Vale lembrar que as ofertas são sempre por tempo limitado, então é bom correr. 🏎️
O aplicativo Lembretes (Reminders) da Apple certamente é bem útil para a maioria dos usuários convencionais, mas um tanto quanto limitado para quem tem problemas sérios de esquecimento ou transtornos como o TDAH 1Transtorno do Déficit de Atenção com Hiperatividade..
Isso porque ele não notifica o usuário sobre lembretes definidos com a Siri sem um horário, simplesmente esquece lembretes quando as notificações são descartadas e conta com opções um pouco duvidosas de soneca.
Criado por Marco Arment (desenvolvedor responsável pelo famoso Overcast), o Unforgetful é um app desenhado para resolver esses três problemas. Ele usa os lembretes já cadastrados no app nativo da Apple e adiciona uma camada própria de notificações para ajudar o usuário a lembrá-los sempre.
Com uma filosofia minimalista (nada de pastas), o app entrega notificações que se repetem até que a tarefa seja concluída ou excluída. A soneca, por sua vez, tem intervalos que escalam à medida que o usuário cochila mais.
E tudo isso sem a necessidade de importar ou de cadastrar novos lembretes: basta substituir as notificações do app nativo pelas do Unforgetful para que tudo funcione de fato — inclusive com suporte à criação de lembretes por voz usando a Siri.
Além disso, o app conta com diferenciais como a captura rápida de lembretes com o Ditado, notificações espaçadas, backlogs de tarefas que não acumulam e lembretes baseados em localização com atraso configurável, para não notificar você antes da hora certa.
Disponível para iOS e macOS como um aplicativo universal, a assinatura unificada do app custa R$130/ano e quem baixá-lo tem direito a um teste gratuito de um mês.
Notas de rodapé
1
Transtorno do Déficit de Atenção com Hiperatividade.
Rivalizando com iniciativas como o app Granola ou o assistente Notetaker do Wispr Flow, o recurso era anteriormente restrito aos encontros virtuais ocorridos dentro da plataforma do Google.
Divulgação/Google
Ele permite que o Gemini transcreva conversas e crie resumos da reunião salvos em um documento do Google, criando ainda um relatório encaminhado ao email do usuário com detalhes dos assuntos tratados e uma lista de tarefas da reunião. O Anota pra Mim é compatível tanto com as versões web quanto com o app do Google Meet.
Divulgação/Google
De acordo com o Google, a distribuição ampliada começou hoje para a versão web e iniciará no dia 31 de agosto para o app no iOS. A ferramenta está disponível para os assinantes dos planos AI Pro (além do AI Pro for Education) e Ultra — no caso dos consumidores finais — e nos planos padrão e Plus das soluções Business e Enterprise do Google Workspace.
Quem conta com muitos aplicativos instalados no Mac geralmente pode enfrentar dificuldades para monitorar as versões de cada um deles e até mesmo atualizá-los.
Essa dificuldade aumenta ainda mais para quem conta com muitos softwares instalados fora da Mac App Store, e mais ainda caso você seja um desenvolvedor e faça o uso de vários gerenciadores de pacote. O Version Tracker é um novo aplicativo que atua em todos esses cenários.
Ao estilo do velho MacUpdater (que foi descontinuado no início deste ano), o software faz uma varredura no macOS para monitorar 39 fontes diferentes de apps — desde aqueles disponíveis na Mac App Store, passando pelos que adotaram o frameworkSparkle ou por vários gerenciadores de pacotes.
Desenvolvedores, por exemplo, conseguirão verificar e atualizar (individualmente ou em lote) com facilidade as versões de dependências instaladas por gerenciadores como Homebrew, pip, npm, Docker — que por padrão são fragmentadas em vários mecanismos de atualizações.
O app conta com uma versão gratuita que permite verificar 48 fontes sem limite de tempo. Para mais fontes e atualização com um clique, é preciso assiná-lo (a assinatura custa a partir de 20€) ou comprá-lo por 50€ (essa compra inclui updates para todas as versões 1.x do software).
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