A Uber anunciou hoje no Brasil o lançamento de um recurso que dará a pais e responsáveis a possibilidade de monitorar por vídeo as corridas solicitadas por adolescentes, segundo informações do Tecnoblog.

Disponível nos Estados Unidos desde o mês passado, a novidade será disponibilizada gradualmente na modalidade Uber conta Teens, que é feita para usuários entre 12 e 17 anos de idade.

Assim que a corrida for solicitada, pais e responsáveis serão notificados sobre a possibilidade de acompanhar uma transmissão ao vivo, que é encerrada automaticamente ao final do trajeto. As imagens capturadas também ficarão disponíveis na forma de uma gravação criptografada.

Há, no entanto, uma limitação importante: a disponibilidade da transmissão dependerá das condições técnicas do celular do motorista, o que dá a entender que o recurso não poderá ser ativado em certas situações mesmo que o usuário já o tenha configurado (outro requisito da novidade).

A Uber também aproveitou o anúncio para reforçar que as viagens solicitadas por adolescentes são oferecidas apenas para motoristas experientes, além de contar com todos os recursos disponíveis nas corridas para adultos (U-Áudio, U-Ajuda e U-Acompanha). Adolescentes do sexo feminino, inclusive, podem solicitar viagens apenas com motoristas mulheres (U-Mulheres) — algo já disponível para usuárias adultas.

As corridas para adolescentes passam a ficar disponíveis depois que o usuário configura um perfil familiar no app da Uber — algo que pode ser feito em Conta » Família.

Depois de ganhar o Liquid Glass, a versão do WhatsApp para iPad começará a receber outra novidade de design para parte dos seus usuários: uma nova barra lateral.

A reformulação da interface aproximará a versão de iPad daquilo que é visto no macOS, com a nova versão da barra lateral abrangendo conversas, atualizações, comunidades, chamadas e Meta AI, além da seção “Mais” (que engloba conversas favoritadas, trancadas e arquivadas, bem como os status do mensageiro da Meta).

WhatsApp is rolling out a redesigned navigation interface for iPad!

WhatsApp is bringing the same sidebar from the Mac app to iPad, making it easier for users to navigate the interface on a larger screen. The update is also compatible with Liquid Glass.https://t.co/vVfpctrXul pic.twitter.com/uUYQ8cPak5

— WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) September 8, 2026

A quem desejar que a conversa ocupe mais espaço da tela, será possível ocultar a barra lateral por meio de um botão localizado no canto superior direito da interface. Para exibi-la novamente, bastará tocar no botão da barra lateral na barra de guias superior, exibido quando a barra lateral é ocultada.

Por ora, a novidade está sendo testada com os usuários da versão beta do WhatsApp via atualização mais recente do TestFlight, além de alguns usuários da versão mais recente do aplicativo da App Store. É provável que não demore muito para que a funcionalidade chegue a todos os usuários.

Pré-visualização de miniaturas em conversas

Para os usuários de iOS, a Meta também implementou um recurso que já vinha sendo testado na versão de Android: a pré-visualização de mídias e figurinhas em uma miniatura exibida na própria seção de conversas.

Até o momento, a única forma possível de pré-visualizar mídias e figurinhas no WhatsApp era segurando a conversa, caso contrário o aplicativo só fazia uma menção textual ao material enviado.

O recurso já foi disponibilizado para uma parcela dos usuários que instalaram a versão mais recente do WhatsApp na App Store.

via WABetaInfo [1, 2]

British American Tobacco is expanding its Vuse business in the United States with a new version of the Vuse Pro vaping system and four flavored pod options. The rollout is notable not only because of the return of fruit-flavored Vuse products in selected U.S. markets, but also because the device incorporates age verification and Bluetooth connectivity into the activation process.

The new Vuse Pro pods are available in Peach, Berry, Watermelon and Fresh Mint. Vuse’s U.S. website lists the pods at 5.0% nicotine by weight (NBW) and identifies them as nicotine-salt products.

The products have begun appearing in Ohio and selected U.S. markets. However, they have not received FDA marketing authorization, making the launch an important development in the country’s changing regulatory environment for flavored vaping products.

Vuse Pro Makes Age Verification Part of Device Activation

The biggest difference between the new Vuse Pro system and a conventional closed-pod vape is the role played by the smartphone app.

Instead of treating age verification solely as a retail requirement, the Vuse Pro setup connects the process with the device itself. Users must complete the required age-verification process through the Vuse Pro App, enable Bluetooth and pair the smartphone with the device before the vape can be activated.

This creates an additional access-control layer after the purchase.

The app is also designed to provide several device-management functions, including:

• Manual locking and unlocking
• Automatic locking
• Find My Vape
• Battery-related reminders
• Bluetooth device management
• Factory reset

The system can also use Bluetooth proximity as part of its locking function. When the device moves outside the configured Bluetooth range, Auto-Lock can prevent further use until the paired smartphone is used to unlock it.

That makes the Vuse Pro more than a conventional rechargeable closed-pod system. Software becomes part of the product’s access and security architecture.

Four Flavored Vuse Pro Pods Are Now Listed in the U.S.

The new Vuse Pro flavor lineup consists of Peach, Berry, Watermelon and Fresh Mint.

• Peach
• Berry
• Watermelon
• Fresh Mint

Vuse lists these products at 5.0% NBW, meaning nicotine by weight. The company also confirms that its closed-system products use nicotine salts.

The four flavors give Vuse a broader U.S. lineup than a product strategy focused only on traditional tobacco and menthol profiles.

The timing is significant. BAT had already indicated that it planned a phased expansion of flavored Vuse products in the U.S. during the third quarter of 2026. In its 2026 first-half communications, the company said it was strengthening age-verification controls while preparing to commercialize flavored vapor products.

The current rollout therefore appears to be part of a broader strategy rather than a one-off product launch.

Closed-Pod Design Keeps the User Experience Simple

Vuse Pro remains a rechargeable closed-pod system.

Instead of requiring users to fill a tank manually, the system uses prefilled pods that are inserted into the device. The device is draw-activated, while the app handles additional connected functions.

This approach is different from open-pod systems that allow users to select their own e-liquid and refill the cartridge.

For Vuse, the closed architecture also provides tighter control over the consumable used with the device. Users choose from the available Vuse Pro pods rather than mixing or filling e-liquid themselves.

The U.S. Vuse website currently identifies Vuse Pro as a 5.0% NBW nicotine-salt system.

Bluetooth Has a Bigger Role Than Simple Connectivity

Bluetooth is often included in connected consumer electronics as a convenience feature. With Vuse Pro, its role is more closely connected to device access.

Pairing the vape with the Vuse Pro App is part of the initial activation process. Bluetooth also supports functions such as device locking, unlocking and locating.

That makes the smartphone an important part of the overall user experience.

The concept is different from simply adding an app that displays battery information or usage statistics. In this case, the connected software is integrated into how the hardware is accessed.

This could become an important direction for regulated nicotine products as manufacturers look for additional ways to combine age controls with connected hardware.

Vuse Pro Adds Flavors While U.S. Regulations Remain Complex

The rollout is taking place against a complicated U.S. regulatory background.

Current reporting indicates that the new Vuse Pro flavored products have appeared in Ohio and selected other markets even though they have not received FDA marketing authorization. Reynolds American has said the products are being sold in accordance with applicable state regulations and that the company is using measures such as identification requirements and purchase limits to address underage access.

State rules remain important because flavored-vape restrictions differ across the country. Some states and jurisdictions have enacted restrictions or bans covering flavored vaping products.

As a result, availability of the new Vuse Pro flavors should not be interpreted as nationwide authorization or nationwide availability.

BAT Is Building on Vuse’s Existing U.S. Position

The new product also arrives from a strong position in the U.S. closed-system market.

BAT reported that Vuse held a 55.9% value share of tracked rechargeable closed-system vapor channels in the first half of 2026, representing a 4.1-percentage-point increase from the end of 2025. The company said Vuse’s share was more than twice that of its closest competitor.

BAT has therefore been expanding the Vuse portfolio from an established base rather than attempting to introduce an entirely new brand.

The company’s 2026 strategy also calls for a phased distribution of new Vuse Pro flavored pods. Reporting from 2Firsts indicates that BAT planned approximately 25,000 retail outlets during the third quarter and another 25,000 in the fourth quarter, although the company has not disclosed the number of stores currently carrying the products.

Vuse Pro Specifications and Product Details

Feature	Vuse Pro
Company	Reynolds American / R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company
Parent Company	British American Tobacco
Brand	Vuse
Product	Vuse Pro
Category	Rechargeable closed-pod vaping system
Pod Type	Prefilled Vuse Pro Pod
Activation	Draw-activated
Initial Setup	Vuse Pro App, age verification and Bluetooth pairing
Connectivity	Bluetooth
App Functions	Lock/unlock, Auto-Lock, Find My Vape, battery reminders
Water Resistance	IPX4
Charging	USB rechargeable
Full Charging Time	Approximately 50 minutes
Flavors	Peach, Berry, Watermelon, Fresh Mint
Nicotine Strength	5.0% NBW
Nicotine Type	Nicotine salts
Market	United States
FDA Marketing Authorization	Not authorized

Public U.S. product information does not currently provide a complete set of technical specifications such as battery capacity, e-liquid volume, coil construction or an official puff-count rating. It is therefore better not to treat those figures as confirmed specifications.

Why the App Matters to the Vuse Pro Launch

The most interesting aspect of the new Vuse Pro is not necessarily the hardware.

The larger change is the relationship between hardware, software and age control.

Traditional age verification normally happens when a customer buys a regulated product. Vuse Pro introduces another step by connecting device activation with an age-verification process through a smartphone application.

That creates a product ecosystem in which the device can remain connected to a specific smartphone while offering functions such as Auto-Lock and Find My Vape.

For manufacturers, this approach could provide additional tools for managing access. For consumers, however, it also means that the vape is less independent from the smartphone than a conventional closed-pod device.

FDA Status Should Be Clearly Distinguished From Enforcement Policy

One point is particularly important when discussing the U.S. Vuse Pro launch: FDA enforcement policy and FDA marketing authorization are not the same thing.

Current reports state that the Vuse Pro flavored products being sold in selected U.S. markets have not received FDA marketing authorization.

At the same time, the FDA’s 2026 enforcement approach has changed the regulatory environment for certain unauthorized vaping products. That change in enforcement priorities should not be described as equivalent to formal authorization.

This distinction matters because consumers and retailers may otherwise interpret market availability as evidence that a product has completed the FDA’s marketing authorization process.

What the Vuse Pro Launch Means for the U.S. Vape Market

The new Vuse Pro rollout combines two developments that have become increasingly important in the U.S. vaping market: flavored products and stronger age-access controls.

Peach, Berry, Watermelon and Fresh Mint expand Vuse’s current flavor offering, while the app-based activation system gives the company a way to connect age verification with the device itself.

BAT’s broader strategy suggests that this is part of a planned expansion of Vuse rather than an isolated experiment. The company has publicly discussed phased flavored-pod commercialization and stronger age-verification measures as part of its U.S. strategy.

The result is a Vuse Pro system that is increasingly defined not just by its pods and battery, but by the software surrounding the device.

For the U.S. market, the more important question may be whether app-based age verification, Bluetooth access controls and regulated flavored pods become a more common model for next-generation vaping products.

For now, Vuse Pro represents a notable example of how nicotine-device manufacturers are combining connected technology with age-access measures while navigating a rapidly changing U.S. regulatory landscape.

The post BAT Expands Vuse Pro in the U.S. With App-Based Age Verification and Four Flavored Pods appeared first on IGeeKphone China Phone, Tablet PC, VR, RC Drone News, Reviews.

HomeKit’s Biggest Update in Years iOS 27 is built around Siri AI and general polish, but HomeKit owners

O AirPlay é a maneira mais fácil de transmitir conteúdos de um iPhone, iPad ou Mac para smart TVs compatíveis ou Apple TVs — sejam eles vídeos ou músicas.

Indo mais além dos aplicativos nativos da Apple que permitem isso, há os apps de terceiros que também podem suportar a tecnologia. Um deles é o TikTok, rede social de vídeos curtos. A partir de qualquer post, basta alguns toques para transmitir os conteúdos da rede no aparelho compatível.

Veja como! 📺

Antes de mais nada, certifique-se de que o TikTok possui acesso à rede local. Para isso, abra os Ajustes (Settings), toque em “Apps” e em “TikTok”. Depois, marque a chave ao lado de “Rede Local”.

Abra então o TikTok e localize a postagem que deseja enviar. Mantenha o dedo pressionado por alguns segundos em cima dela, role pela lista e toque em “Transmitir”.

Por fim, basta selecionar o dispositivo desejado.

Se você costuma trocar mensagens e/ou vídeos com os seus seguidores no TikTok, sabe o quão útil e divertido pode ser isso.

Para personalizar ainda mais esses chats, é possível alterar os sons de alerta de um contato específico (ao todo, são oito opções de toques diferentes).

Veja como é supersimples alterar isso! 💬

1. Com o app do TikTok aberto, toque em “Mensagens”, na barra inferior.
2. Selecione o contato desejado para abrir a conversa.
3. Vá até o botão com três pontinhos (no canto superior direito).

4. Escolha “Sons de alerta” e toque em uma das opções para escutá-la e selecioná-la.

Battery installations hit a new record in the US in the second quarter of 2026. In total, 20.2 gigawatt-hours of new capacity came online, according to a new report. That’s enough to supply the daily electricity needs of about 700,000 homes.

The surge is putting the country on a trajectory to see 71 gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in 2026, a 20% increase over last year. This growth is being driven by a combination of cheaper batteries and an urgent need for more energy storage capacity as renewables such as solar and onshore wind power are added to the grid. 

Massive, utility-scale systems are leading the way; they’re responsible for most of the record-setting quarter. Seven new gigascale battery installations (those with a capacity of over one gigawatt-hour) came online during the three-month stretch, according to the report, published by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the Solar Energy Industries Association.

“It really came down to a handful of big projects,” says Shan Tomouk, energy storage and energy lead for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

But there was also growth in the category of so-called behind-the-meter batteries, which include both residential and industrial battery storage systems. These projects, generally smaller than utility-scale installations, are typically owned and operated by homeowners or businesses rather than utilities or power providers. 

In the behind-the-meter category, data centers led the way, making up about three-quarters of new batteries in the commercial sector. But residential batteries saw a sharp slowdown. These systems are often installed in homes to store power from solar panels or serve as a backup source in case of a blackout. Home installations are projected to drop by 16% in 2026 compared with last year, according to the report.

That drop happened largely because a tax credit that helped subsidize home battery systems ended in 2025, Tomouk says. Home installations should recover by the end of the decade, he adds. And tax credits for nonresidential batteries have largely survived.

Overall, batteries are a bright spot in energy right now. “This is one of the strong sectors in the US,” says Isshu Kikuma, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF, an energy consultancy.

As the battery market continues to grow, one major trend to keep an eye on is a move toward US-made technology. Today, nearly all the systems coming online use cells made in China, though some are put together into complete energy storage systems in the US.

Tariffs were already pushing the US energy storage industry toward domestic production. And beginning this year, energy storage tax credits required projects to limit their reliance on batteries imported from China. There’s a lot of manufacturing capacity set to come online in the US, though these factories probably won’t be able to meet demand until at least 2030 or so, Tomouk says, so prices could tick up.

OpenAI’s latest mathematical milestone has quickly become mired in controversy. Today, the company announced that its agents have solved one of the Millennium Prize Problems, some of the most important open problems in mathematics. Under normal circumstances, that solution would be a huge feather in OpenAI’s cap.

But the announcement has been overshadowed by accusations that OpenAI used NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster’s and Anthropic employee Levent Alpöge’s AI-assisted work on the problem as a jumping-off point and failed to credit them. OpenAI has denied the accusations.

It remains uncertain if OpenAI’s models made use of the work completed by Buckmaster and Alpöge, though Sébastien Bubeck, a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, said in a press briefing that the team was inspired to pursue the problem after hearing a rumor about Buckmaster and Alpöge’s efforts. But whether or not OpenAI’s models took advantage of Buckmaster and Alpöge’s research, this episode may mark a turning point in the history of mathematics.

AI models now seem essential for making progress on the most important mathematical problems of our time, and solving them may demand resources only available at a couple of frontier AI companies, which often defy the norms of academic collaboration that undergird most mathematical progress. If that’s the future we are headed for, it is unclear how human mathematicians will fit into it. 

The problem that OpenAI claims to have solved is known as the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem. It is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Solutions come with a one million dollar prize; before today, only one other Millennium Prize Problem had been solved. 

The Navier–Stokes problem concerns a set of equations that describes how fluids, such as water and air, flow over time. The equations are widely used in the field of fluid dynamics, and they have proven powerful, but physicists and mathematicians didn’t understand them completely. In particular, it was unknown until today whether the equations might, under some conditions, break down and predict an impossible state of affairs—such as a fluid having infinite velocity.

On Monday, NYU’s Buckmaster posted a proof on the social media site Mastodon showing that a simplified version of the Navier–Stokes equations can indeed break down—a major step forward on the Millennium Problem. He and Alpöge had worked on the problem for almost a year, using publicly available models from both OpenAI and Anthropic.

Then today, OpenAI presented a proof showing that the full Navier–Stokes equations can break down as well. The proof was obtained using an internal model that dramatically outperforms the already-impressive Astra model, which was only released last week. The company says it does not plan to claim the million-dollar prize for solving the problem.

These mathematical achievements are indisputably impressive, but they have attracted far less attention than the controversy about their origins. Along with the proof, Buckmaster posted a document detailing his interactions with OpenAI employees after he heard rumors about their work and reached out to one of them. According to him, OpenAI employees presented two possibilities to him: Either he and Alpöge could post their work and OpenAI would post their Navier-Stokes solution the following day, or he could work with OpenAI on a Navier-Stokes paper that excluded Alpöge from authorship, due to his affiliation with Anthropic, OpenAI’s biggest rival.

Buckmaster also wrote that he asked the employees whether the agents had obtained access to transcripts of the work that he and Alpöge had done with OpenAI models, which they denied; and whether OpenAI models had been trained on those transcripts, to which they offered no response. MIT Technology Review reached out to Buckmaster for comment, but didn’t hear back before publication.

The clear implication of the document is that OpenAI’s models somehow made use of Buckmaster and Alpöge’s work. That scenario is plausible on its face. The Buckmaster/Alpöge and OpenAI proofs both make use of an approach to the Navier-Stokes problem pioneered by the mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa.

According to Javier Gómez-Serrano, a mathematics professor at Brown University, this approach was one of several that was thought to hold promise for solving the Navier-Stokes problem. So, while it’s by no means impossible that both teams could have arrived at this approach independently, it’s also conceivable that Buckmaster and Alpöge’s work could have influenced OpenAI’s.

In the press briefing, Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, again denied that any agents or OpenAI employees accessed Buckmaster and Alpöge’s transcripts—but given what has been revealed about the Hugging Face hack, it’s clear that OpenAI is not always entirely aware of what its agents are doing. 

If OpenAI’s models did train on Buckmaster and Alpöge’s work, or if its agents somehow gained access to it, then the company’s failure to track down the truth and assign those researchers appropriate credit reflects poorly on it. But there might be a thin silver lining to that version of the story for mathematicians, because it would suggest that the hard work of two humans, one of whom is a prominent expert on Navier-Stokes, was essential to the agents’ ability to solve the Millennium Problem.

Experts have long identified “research taste,” or the ability to choose promising research questions and directions, as a major obstacle for AI in science and mathematics. If the OpenAI agents did indeed choose to follow the Córdoba–Martínez-Zoroa approach because Buckmaster and Alpöge had done the same, then human research taste played an essential role in OpenAI’s success.

Even so, the bigger picture here is sobering. The progress that Buckmaster and Alpöge made over almost a year of collaboration with publicly available models speaks to the promise of human–AI collaboration. But they were not able to achieve a full solution. Meanwhile, OpenAI brute-forced a solution in a few days using an internal model, and their successful solution came at an astronomical cost: In the press briefing, Bubeck and Chen said the team was only able to solve the problem by running about 10,000 agents concurrently, at a cost of millions of dollars.

Over the past few months, I’ve heard from several researchers that mathematicians are becoming depressed, and it’s not difficult to see why. Mathematics is quickly becoming the province of frontier AI companies with impressive internal-only models, money to burn, and a lack of collaborative spirit. “Whether AI companies will decide to spend their money on doing one thing or another, I truly don’t know,” says Gómez-Serrano. “What is clear is that very few mathematicians will have resources of that scale.”

If OpenAI and Anthropic keep striving for more and more impressive mathematical accolades, there might not be any open problems left for human mathematicians outside of those companies to wrestle with. That would dramatically change the field of mathematics.

Last week, UCLA mathematician Terence Tao wrote a Mastodon thread describing how important mistakes, wrong directions, and incomplete solutions are for the field. “In most cases in pure mathematics, the problems are posed not because we desperately want the solution to these problems in and of themselves, but because we have seen from past experience that human-directed efforts to solve these problems tend to spur further development of the field,” Tao wrote.

“Prematurely solving the problem by purely AI-powered methods—particularly without full transparency into the solution process—can contaminate this process to the point where it actually becomes a net negative for the progress of mathematics as a whole.”

Humans might take longer than agents to solve mathematical problems, but in the process, they uncover new mathematical approaches and ideas that might inspire their peers and even birth their own subfields.

But when AI agents solve those problems instead—and when private companies keep the agents’ wrong turns from public view—those benefits disappear. It remains to be seen what else will vanish in the process. 

Abrindo a semana — ontem foi feriado, então não conta! 😛 — de evento da Apple com a nossa seleção de promoções na App Store!

ELOH, criado pela Broken Rules, é um puzzle perfeito para relaxar e se divertir.

Trata-se de um quebra-cabeça no qual você deve escutar o groove e deixar que ele o guie pelas 98 fases. Controles intuitivos, belíssimas animações e uma trilha sonora desenvolvida especialmente por SCNTFC fazem parte deste jogo.

Confira um vídeo:

Aproveite o bom desconto e boa diversão!

---

Abaixo outros jogos/apps que, juntos, somam mais de R$60 em descontos:

Jogos

Puzzles.

Jogo de aventura.

Jogo de ação.

Aplicativos

Calendário com fotos.

Temporizador culinário.

Utilitário para escrita.

---

Aproveite as ofertas e até amanhã, com a nossa cobertura especial dos lançamentos da Maçã! Lembrando que elas são sempre por tempo limitado, então é bom correr. 🦖

A Meta anunciou hoje o Muse, um agente de inteligência artificial generativa pessoal e privado que foi projetado pela empresa para ajudar usuários a explorar novas ideias e cumprir suas metas.

Focado no público em geral, ele é bem simples de usar. Basta dizer ao Muse o que precisa ser feito para que ele execute a tarefa — sem curva de aprendizado ou necessidade de experiência.

Usuários podem pedir-lhe que faça tarefas como enviar um email ou até mesmo reservar uma viagem, graças à capacidade do Muse de abrir o navegador, preencher formulários ou clicar em elementos da tela.

Ele se conecta aos apps e serviços que você usa no dia a dia, um por vez e sempre por sua escolha, em categorias como email e calendário, pagamentos, fitness e saúde, música e eventos ao vivo, restaurantes e compras, e casa inteligente. Os conectores integrados estão disponíveis nas configurações, e outros estão por vir. Se um serviço não estiver lá, mas tiver uma API pública, seu Muse pode configurar uma conexão usando credenciais fornecidas por você; e se não tiver API nenhuma, ele pode usar o serviço por meio de um navegador, do mesmo jeito que você faria.

Com a capacidade de continuar trabalhando mesmo depois de os usuários fecharem o app, o Muse é capaz de realizar pagamentos via Stripe e, futuramente, também suportará o Shop Pay.

Bastante proativo, o Muse se lembra do que é importante para o usuário e pode fazer sugestões sem a inserção de um prompt ou atuar com base em detalhes mencionados apenas uma vez.

Construído com base no Muse Spark, o modelo mais poderoso da Meta, o agente também conta com mecanismos avançados de segurança para proteger a sua interação com o usuário final.

Ele é executado em seu próprio computador dedicado na nuvem — que é onde os dados e credenciais para qualquer serviço conectado a ele são armazenados com segurança.

O Muse foi lançado nos Estados Unidos para a web, iOS e Android. Ele é grátis “para a maioria do que as pessoas precisam”, com planos de assinatura para pessoas que querem “fazer mais”.

Zac Hall (July):

Apple just updated TestFlight for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and more. The new version, 4.3, introduces “a search field to quickly find apps.”

John Gruber:

But when Apple implemented this change, they also changed the sort order of the list of apps you’re registered to test. Starting with this update, the list is sorted in alphabetical order. For as long as I can remember — perhaps dating back to when TestFlight was a third-party utility — the list was ordered by recency. The most recently updated app was at the top; the oldest at the bottom. Sorting by recency is really the only sort order that makes sense when you’re registered for dozens (or more) of apps. For me, trying to see if there is an update to a new app whose name starts with U now requires scrolling through over 100 items.

[…]

Also, if I consider the broader view, this really speaks to how much we’ve lost in terms of UI vocabulary. For decades, any list of items with names and dates could be sorted by name or date, ascending or descending, through the standard use of clickable headers at the top of every list. This was true for almost any such list in any app, on any platform — Mac, Windows, Unix, Amiga, whatever. This was just basic GUI stuff.

[…]

iOS in 2007 introduced a simplified UI vocabulary that omitted many of these baseline GUI features. That seemed like a reasonable trade-off for a device with a 3.5-inch display and fat fingers as the only input device. But then iOS became popular and Apple stopped bringing the richer UI vocabulary of the Mac to iOS[…]

And it starting bringing iOS limitations to the Mac.

It certainly shouldn’t have taken until July 2026 to be able to search in TestFlight, either. And being able to search, and see the results sorted alphabetically, shouldn’t mean you can no longer view the full list sorted by recency.

John Gruber:

Whatever is going on with this sort order, it isn’t affecting everyone. John Siracusa, amongst many others, has the same problem I do — his list is now alphabetical, and it’s driving him nuts too. Ryan Booker, amongst many others, still has his list sorted by recency.

John Gruber (September):

For both of us, yesterday’s v4.3.1 update fixes the bug.

But there should still be more sort options.

Previously:

• The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop
• TestFlight for Mac Officially Launches

Update (2026-09-16): John Voorhees:

Returning to reverse chronological order may seem like a small thing, but it’s made a world of difference in keeping up with the apps I test.

Search was near the top of my list of TestFlight wishes for years, and its addition made a meaningful difference to the app’s usability. But I’ve had a lot of TestFlight wishes over the years that are scattered across multiple articles, so I thought I’d share what else I’d like Apple to tackle with TestFlight[…]

Apple has already previewed a more customizable Camera app and a dedicated Siri shooting mode for iOS 27. Code in developer beta 8 points to a second wave of changes that look aimed at photographers who want more than tap-to-shoot.

A deep dive into the beta, first detailed on Reddit, describes five features that are implemented or stubbed in the system but have not been announced. Some appear broadly useful. Others look tied to new hardware expected this week, especially a rumored variable-aperture lens on iPhone 18 Pro.

1. Exposure scopes: waveforms and histograms in the viewfinder

The Camera app contains a full implementation of waveform and histogram displays so you can judge exposure while framing, not only after the shot. The tools would show how pixels fall across shadows, midtones, and highlights. Three presets show up in the code: RGB Composite, RGB Parade, and Luminance. A histogram answers “how much is blown or crushed?” A waveform answers “where in the frame?”

2. Focus peaking and highlight clipping

Focus peaking would outline high-contrast edges that are in focus — a staple of cinema cameras and serious video apps. Highlight clipping (or highlight warnings) would flag areas that are already overexposed. Code reportedly includes options for marker color, sensitivity, and how quickly the overlay appears.

3. Repeating self-timer

Instead of one countdown and one frame, the timer could fire, save, and immediately start the next countdown so you can grab a burst of posed shots without resetting. That is how many dedicated cameras already work; the stock iPhone app has never done it this cleanly.

4. Manual focus — with a hardware gate

Apple tested a focus slider in earlier software. In iOS 27 beta 1 the visible control was pulled, but capability checks remain. Those checks look for a phone whose first supported iOS version is 27 or later — language that, if it ships as written, would exclude every current iPhone and point at new models. The leak ties this to aperture control on iPhone 18 Pro.

5. Aperture-aware lens correction

Processing code can choose and blend lens-correction data based on the current aperture value. That is the kind of pipeline you need if the lens opening actually changes and light falloff / distortion change with it. Combined with rumors of variable aperture on the Pro models, it is one of the strongest software hints that the new camera is not just a software skin.

MacDailyNews Take: As beta strings vanish all the time, none of this is guaranteed to appear on September 9th, or to reach every iPhone that gets iOS 27. Still, the pattern is consistent: Apple is putting tools that used to live only in Final Cut Camera or third-party apps into the default Camera interface, then gating the most hardware-specific pieces to the next Pro generation.

If the event this week is about “Surprise and Shine,” the surprise for photographers may not be another megapixel bump. It may be that the stock Camera app finally grows up.

---

‎
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!

Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.

The post iOS 27 beta shows Apple’s Camera app is getting real pro tools; some likely locked to iPhone 18 Pro appeared first on MacDailyNews.

The popular messaging platform WhatsApp is changing how it handles automated helpers. In the past, people risked getting their accounts banned if they tried plugging outside tools into the service. This strict policy pushed many users toward competing chat applications. Now, the company is changing its approach by testing a native feature that lets anyone […]

The post WhatsApp Will Let Users Chat With Up To Five Third-Party Bots appeared first on The Mac Observer.

Throughout the history of the computer chip, engineers have treated waste heat as an inevitable cost of a calculation. Hannah Earley, however, thinks it’s a design choice. Earley, 31, is cofounder and chief technology officer of Vaire Computing, a startup building chips that recycle energy usually thrown away as heat—a strategy known as reversible computing. Ultimately, she thinks, this approach could help make data centers (and our laptops and phones) much more energy efficient. 

When conventional computer chips perform calculations, they erase the information they no longer need along the way, dissipating energy as heat in the process. Earley compares the approach to racing through a city only to pump the brakes at every intersection: The car loses momentum and must burn more fuel to accelerate again. Reversible computing aims to keep the momentum going—instead of erasing information from the intermediate steps in a calculation, the circuit retains it, making it possible to run the computation backward and recover some of the energy.

While the idea was first proposed more than 50 years ago, it proved impractical to implement with existing transistors and circuits. Earley, though, has completely rethought the hardware needed to make energy recovery work. She designed a patent-pending type of resonator—a microscopic chip component that stores recovered energy for later reuse. “It’s really a glorified pendulum,” she says. Last year, Vaire announced a key breakthrough: a chip with a resonator that recovered more energy than it lost, even after the energy needed to power the component was taken into account. For a subfield that has existed mostly in theory, the result was proof of life.

“It’s clear they have something interesting,” says Igor Markov, a researcher in electronic design automation and a former professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Still, he says, the technology is quite early stage; the company will need “a series of increasingly realistic and convincing demonstrations to attract the industry support needed for commercialization.” 

She gradually became convinced that the connection between information, energy, and heat could change computers forever.

Earley’s journey into chip design started sooner than most. She began programming around the age of nine, starting with high-level coding for the web before digging into other programming languages like Perl and Java. She continued progressing to more and more abstract layers of computing, until she got all the way down to transistors.

She eventually enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Cambridge under the computational biologist Gos Micklem. She started out studying how materials such as DNA could be used to perform calculations, but a few months in, Micklem sent her the 1999 PhD thesis of Michael Frank, a pioneer in reversible computing. Earley read it once, felt skeptical, read it again, and sat with it for a few weeks. She gradually became convinced that the connection between information, energy, and heat could change computers forever.

The fascination completely redirected her PhD work. Earley studied the physical limits of computation and built software that could turn ordinary programs into reversible ones. “Eventually I wouldn’t let her put my name on any of her papers, because I felt that I couldn’t really stand up and give a proper talk about them,” Micklem recalls. “It was her stuff.”

After completing her degree in 2021, Earley met Rodolfo Rosini, a technology entrepreneur and investor. The pair cofounded Vaire that same year, and the company has since raised more than $12 million, hired Frank as a senior scientist, and begun turning the vision of reversible computing into real hardware.

Innovation, however, doesn’t happen overnight. During the winter of 2022 in Grinnell, Iowa, Earley spent weeks in her now-wife’s basement apartment as the wind chill outside reached roughly −40 °F, covering a whiteboard over and over again with schematics for the core piece of circuitry needed to make reversible logic work. By the time the design finally came together, after the couple had escaped the cold for Las Vegas, it felt less like an aha moment and more like a gradual wave of relief. “I’m not completely out of my depth,” she remembers feeling. 

Earley and her colleagues’ next challenge is making their drastically different chip fit into familiar devices and manufacturing systems. She believes that’s where the future lies—not in further refining existing chips but in rebuilding them from the ground up with an eye toward reversibility. “I want to tackle every part of how computers are built,” Earley says, “and rethink it in these terms.” 

Danijar Hafner’s office in San Francisco’s SoMa district sits mostly empty. His brand-new startup is still in stealth mode and doesn’t even have its name on the door. On the day I visit, there’s only one other person there, and little in the way of furniture. But what it lacks in decor, it makes up for in robots. Humanoids of various shapes and sizes hang like marionettes from racks that run down the center of the wide-open space.

While Hafner, 31, won’t say too much about his new venture just yet, he describes it as a continuation of his longtime work to enable AI to navigate environments it has not encountered in training. The humanoids, which he imports from China, are the next evolution of this work—and its physical embodiment. Their ability to react in previously untested scenarios will be key to getting robots into human spaces. Because if you want to send a robot into a person’s home, for example, it needs to be able to handle a floor plan and furniture it’s never seen before. 

To achieve this, Hafner relies on something called model-based reinforcement learning. He develops world models—AI models designed to emulate physical reality—and trains agents within them. The agent essentially treats the model as a real-world simulation and learns how to act there. It then uses those experiences to make predictions (to dream or imagine, Hafner might say) about future outcomes. That allows agents—or the robots they’re embedded in—to navigate unfamiliar situations IRL.

“I get to interact with a lot of really smart people in research at Google, and he easily sits in the top half of 1%.”

Timothy Lillicrap, Google DeepMind

Unlike other efforts, Hafner’s technique enables agents and the robots they control to execute massively complicated tasks without the real-world trial-and-­error training that’s traditionally been used in robotics. 

Hafner grew up in a rural town in northeastern Germany, where his parents were both classical musicians. He learned programming from a neighbor, and in high school he began taking online courses about AI, which quickly developed into a passion. “I was always fascinated with how thinking works,” he says. AI offered him a way to emulate it on a computer.

In 2015, as a second-year under­graduate studying engineering at Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, he won a role as a student researcher at Google Brain. From there, he went on to a dozen internships and other positions at the company, including stints with Google Brain and Google DeepMind (the two have since merged under DeepMind) in the UK, Canada, and the US. He worked with industry legends including Geoffrey Hinton, who is often referred to as one of the godfathers of AI, and Ashish Vaswani, coauthor of the groundbreaking research paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which described the transformer technology used by today’s large language models.

One of Hafner’s former managers and coauthors at Google, Timothy Lillicrap, describes him as a standout among standouts. “I get to interact with a lot of really smart people in research at Google, and he easily sits in the top half of 1%,” Lillicrap says. “In many cases he would build, single-­handedly, things it would take entire teams of engineers to build.”

Over the years, Hafner has honed and proved his approach by pitting agents trained within his world models against popular video games. His first breakthrough was PlaNet, a model that allowed agents to execute actions by planning ahead. His Dreamer 2 was the first agent to hit human-level performance playing Atari 2600 games using a world model. Dreamer 3 was the first one to solve the Minecraft Diamond challenge—successfully mining in-game gems on its own. And Dreamer 4 went a step beyond that by learning to mine diamonds from an offline data set of recorded game-play videos, without ever interacting with the game directly. 

More recently, he’s begun to migrate his agents out of the virtual world and into physical reality. His DayDreamer project used the Dreamer algorithm to let robots operate themselves in novel environments and react to new experiences (such as being pushed over) without any specific training. 

Today, Hafner is working on his new startup, which he left Google DeepMind to form in the fall of 2025. Though he’s coy about his next steps, it’s clear he’s dreaming big: “I was interested in solving a problem,” he hints, “that would change the world.” 

The steel industry isn’t exactly known for innovation. Very little has changed about purifying iron ore since the process was invented and commercialized in the 1850s.

The majority of steelmakers melt solid iron ore at dizzyingly high temperatures inside blast furnaces, where the material reacts with gases to trigger chemical reactions that remove oxygen. It then undergoes further refining to purify it before it is made into products like rebar and car frames.

The process relies on coal, and it generates roughly 7% of the carbon emissions that drive climate change—about as much as the fashion industry. Decarbonization has proved difficult: Profit margins are tight and furnaces have long service lives, making investment tough to justify.

Now Laureen Meroueh may have found a way to clean up steelmaking without driving up the price. Meroueh, the founder of Hertha Metals, invented a new furnace that simplifies the chemistry behind the process. Her method turns iron ore into refined liquid steel in a single step, and it swaps coal for natural gas. Together, those changes slash emissions by at least half, she says, and cut costs by 25% compared with steelmaking business as usual.

If it catches on, the tech could be transformative. “There’s huge value in reducing the size of this production system,” says Iryna Zenyuk, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine. “They’re massive. They’re inefficient and require a lot of energy input, so even if they just save energy efficiency, that’s already a big step.”

Hertha’s approach focuses on what it can fix about the steel industry now, as opposed to waiting around for a zero-carbon system.

Still, it’s a risky endeavor, but pushing limits isn’t new for Meroueh. At 12 she was accepted into a pilot program to take college-­level courses through Florida Atlantic University in lieu of a traditional secondary education. She was immediately drawn to engineering and explored topics including calculus and ocean wave energy.

Despite the rigorous coursework, she would spend hours sitting in trees and surfing, which fostered a deep appreciation for nature and a desire to safeguard it. “I don’t know how you can’t be drawn toward trying to help protect that,” she says. 

Now 34, Meroueh has let that passion inform her professional goals. After finishing her PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT, she led a green hydrogen startup before founding Hertha in 2022. A first-generation Lebanese-American from an entrepreneurial family, she saw starting her own company as a typical path. “Seeing how common it is to take that jump to start your own business is what made me feel like ‘This is normal,’” she explains on a video call from her office at Hertha’s pilot plant in Conroe, Texas, just north of Houston.

That facility can produce one metric ton of steel per day. “One ton per day is a big metric for steel,” says Rajesh Swaminathan, a partner at Khosla Ventures, one of the company’s investors. (Hertha had raised about $20 million in funding as of July 2026.) 

Swaminathan says the company’s scale-up is “impressive,” especially given how little the team has spent. Competitors, he notes, have created far less steel with $50 million or $100 million in funding.

Hertha’s approach focuses on what it can fix about the industry now, as opposed to waiting around for a zero-carbon system. While other approaches to making green steel center on using hydrogen to free oxygen from iron ore—a method that could one day cut or eliminate emissions—Meroueh says Hertha is content for the time being with a continued reliance on fossil fuels, mainly to keep costs down. The current Hertha plant could eventually switch to a fully decarbonized system without drastically changing the hardware, she says, if hydrogen becomes more affordable. 

In the meantime, plans are underway to expand into a new plant next to the existing one. The facility is slated to produce 10,000 metric tons of high-purity steel per year and should reach full capacity by the end of 2027. By 2030, Meroueh believes, Hertha can up its output to 500,000 metric tons per year with the addition of a third site. That’s only a fraction of the approximately 80 million metric tons of steel produced annually in the US, but Zenyuk says making even one metric ton is still an achievement.

In Meroueh’s mind, the world isn’t going to outgrow its need for steel, so she’s asking another question: “How can we be smarter about how we make things … so that it’s also not going to harm us in the long term?”

Yuancheng (Ryan) Lu is obsessed with aging. And with eyes. As he steps outside the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his aviator glasses darken automatically in the sun. Age-related blindness runs in his family. A great-aunt in China, the story goes, was killed crossing a road because she couldn’t see oncoming traffic. And Lu’s own 23andMe test came back with a mutation for macular degeneration, a top cause of vision loss in old age. Exposure to bright sunlight is another risk factor—thus the shades. “They protect me,” he says. “Plus, they look cool.”

Lu, 34, works on gene therapies to prevent age-related vision loss. “I think the eye is a really unique system to study aging and rejuvenation,” he says. “I could give a whole presentation.” Pushing up my reading glasses, I lean in to listen.

Lu is behind one of the coolest results in rejuvenation science—and in eye research. In 2018, while earning his PhD at Harvard Medical School, he used an age-reversal technique called reprogramming to repair the optic nerves of mice. He crushed the nerves, blinding the animals, and then injected the cells with a gene therapy meant to restore them to a youthful state. Sixteen days later, the nerves were growing back, their axons showing up through a microscope as spidery orange filaments.

As hype around age reversal swirls, Lu has been busy in the lab searching for what he calls “the next generation of rejuvenation therapies.”

The head of that lab, the longevity scientist David Sinclair, remembers when Lu texted him the pictures: “He asked me, ‘What do you see here?’ And I said, ‘I see the future.’” Later tests carried out in a box with rotating bars of light showed the mice were tracking the changes. They could see again.

This year, nearly the exact genetic therapy Lu created for mice entered human clinical trials. On June 9, the startup Life Biosciences, which Sinclair cofounded and in which Lu owns a small stake, announced it had injected the treatment into the eye of a person with glaucoma. The trial has been big news. A headline in the New York Times suggested the technology could “change humanity.” Posters on X gushed, with one declaring that “the fountain of youth is here.”

“It’s remarkable that what he developed as a student is now going into humans,” says Sinclair of the treatment, now called ER-100. “It’s barely even changed since he built it.”

Reprogramming refers to an age-­restoring process that takes place inside an embryo. It’s why babies are born young, not old: The DNA they’ve inherited from their parents has been scrubbed and reset. In 2006, Japanese researchers showed they could cause the process to occur in the lab by introducing just four key genes, known by the acronym OSKM. Add these to a cell from a 100-year-old and it will turn into a stem cell that acts as if it was plucked from an embryo.

That’s powerful stuff. But we don’t want to turn people into blobs of stem-cell protoplasm. Lu figured out a way to control the effect. He trimmed the list of genes to just OSK—leaving out M, for Myc, the one most likely to cause dangerous changes like cancer. His extra flash of insight was that reprogramming could be tested on the optic nerve; the eye is particularly accessible.

Lu’s result, published in Nature in 2020, helped set off an investment rush. Since then, US tech billionaires have placed huge bets on private companies like Altos Labs and NewLimit to explore reprogramming and anti-aging medicine. The day I spoke with Lu, he’d spent the morning meeting with the business magnate Zhong Shanshan, one of China’s richest people.  

Still, as hype around age reversal swirls, Lu has been notably absent from the public conversation. He’s been busy in the lab searching for what he calls “the next generation of rejuvenation therapies.” With a sigh, Lu describes the grueling effort over the last six years to understand what OSK really does. The treatment remains toxic to many cell types, and he says it’s becoming obvious that different factors drive aging in each kind. This year, for example, he identified a gene responsible for protecting the retina from damage by free radicals—the main cause of age-­related macular degeneration.

While Sinclair, his former boss, believes humans could live to be 200, Lu disagrees. There’s just too much that goes wrong as we age. His work with OSK, he says, was more a proof of concept than a silver bullet. But it did change the conversation. “Six years ago, you couldn’t talk about rejuvenation. We didn’t use that word—there was pushback,” Lu tells me. “But I think people have accepted the concept that you can really reverse molecular age.” 

Amy Worrall (Mastodon):

McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple’s own renderer, and export directly to Xcode, so you never need touch the SF Symbols app again!

[…]

Gone are the days of converting your strokes and shapes to outlined paths before export. Keep everything how you drew it, and let McKinley handle the output.

[…]

Link your project’s asset catalog to your McKinley document. Then when you make a change, hit the Sync keyboard shortcut and it’s immediately populated with your latest version.

[…]

McKinley is a Mac-assed Mac app: a native AppKit UI, Quick Look previews and thumbnails for your documents, a full AppleScript dictionary for batch work, and the whole user guide offline in Help.

$60, no subscription. It’s been a while since I had to deal with custom SF Symbols, but I remember it being a major pain. I haven’t had the chance to try McKinley with a real project yet, but it looks very well done. I love seeing a new app ship with documentation and extensive AppleScript support, including sample scripts that you can install right from its script menu.

Mario Guzmán:

The icon isn’t just a symbol but a whole artistic creation on a canvas.

Look at how your tools are on panels that could be individually opened on their own auxiliary window. I can’t stand the single-window, everything buried into a single-sidebar design we get these days.

Amy Worrall:

SF Symbols rendering does a surprising amount behind your back: it interpolates nine weights from three masters, applies optical size adjustments, resolves hierarchical opacity ladders, and changes some of this between OS releases. Any preview I rendered myself might diverge from the real thing in ways nobody would notice until the symbol was in an app looking subtly wrong. (Obviously I aim to get my canvas rendering with the exact same nuance as Apple’s renderer, but programmers are fallible and the fewer ways things can diverge, the better.)

Apple provides no API for “here’s my SVG, render it as a symbol”. For a normal app using a custom SF Symbol, the symbol is compiled from an Asset Catalog in Xcode into a .car file (a compiled asset catalog) at build time. But there’s no ‘build time’ when I want to update a preview in McKinley.

My workaround involves compiling your symbol into a .car file at runtime, on every edit, by patching bytes into a template, then loading that temporary .car file into McKinley via NSBundle.

Previously:

• Octavo 1.0
• SF Viewer Removed From the App Store
• SF Symbols

Update (2026-09-08): John Gruber:

I mean just look at McKinley. It’s both beautiful and quite obviously a serious professional tool.

Update (2026-09-11): Amy Worrall:

Anyone used any great implementations of dockable palettes? (Adobe’s don’t count, I don’t think they’re great!)

I’m not going to go back to sidebars, but some kind of options/flexibility might work, if it doesn’t get in the way!

Ian Gillespie (2025):

Banktivity has traditionally been what’s known as a document-based app. It lets you create and open independent files (or documents), each with its own data. In contrast, many modern apps—Music, Calendar, Photos—are library-based. These apps typically have a single window and a unified data set.

We’ve long appreciated the flexibility our document model provides. But in practice, most of our customers use only a single file. And more critically, this architecture makes it much harder to integrate Banktivity with the broader Apple ecosystem.

[…]

The shift from a document-based model to the new Organizer framework marks a major step forward for Banktivity. It simplifies how users interact with their data while laying the foundation for deeper system integration, background syncing, and a more seamless multi-device experience.

This follows MoneyWell also getting rid of the document model. From my perspective, it’s a shame. I prefer the flexibility of being able to have different accounts in different documents, choosing where to store the documents, and even splitting the same account across multiple documents for performance reasons.

Ian Gillespie (2025):

Ledgers contain an entire, independent set of accounts, categories, investments, goals, budget and so on. Many customers will only have one Ledger for the finances they manage. But we also know there is a good number of customers out there that manage finances across family members, non-profits and small businesses – for these customers, support for multiple Ledgers is crucial.

[…]

While UI is what you see, most of the hard work has been in the architecture. The Library framework — the backbone that replaces our old document system — is in place. That means we can now reliably connect your Banktivity User Account with all of your Ledgers, whether local or synced to the cloud.

Ian Gillespie:

Refactoring Banktivity from a document-based app into a library-style app was a significant undertaking. It changed some very fundamental assumptions in the code. Ledgers can now be opened and closed in the background, multiple windows and scenes can be active at once, and the Organizer has to coordinate local files, cloud sync, user accounts and application state in ways the old document architecture never had to.

Banktivity 10.0 laid the foundation for that transition. With Banktivity 10.1, a major focus has been strengthening that foundation. We’ve spent a lot of time simplifying the underlying architecture, eliminating race conditions and threading issues, and improving how ledgers are opened, closed and managed.

Previously:

• MoneyWell 2023.01

Chris Barajas:

To spread the word, we announced SoundSource 6 on our blog and sent a mass mailing to our customer list. We also took a more targeted approach, contacting both existing and potential customers who’d previously reached out to us with specific requests. We went back to those folks to let them know about the changes that would interest them most.

[…]

A real live person writes every email response our support team sends, and that human touch takes time. The process is helped along by text snippets, replies that we write once and then reuse and adapt to answer common questions.

[…]

To decide if an email should be sent to a customer, we checked Help Scout’s conversation history, as well as our own custom app for their order history. For example, if someone requested several features across different emails, we’d pick the one that was most impactful, then delete other drafts to avoid inundating them with multiple messages.

Previously:

• Pitching Apps in the AI Era
• Castro’s Customer Support Lessons
• SoundSource 6
• Whither Help Scout?