This week, our guest is the ever-delightful Adam Engst of TidBITS. In this episode, he explains what agentic web browsers are and what they are designed to do for you. Adam put five of them through their paces. I don't want to spoil the story, but he uses phrases like "full cuckoo", "daydreams in class", "hapless third graders", requiring "academic integrity referral", and "like a scared, insecure intern". In other words, it doesn't go well.

As always. Adam has a full write-up on TidBITS in his article entitled, Can Agentic Web Browsers Count?

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This week Adam took on a subject I'm guessing pretty close to 100% of the audience will care about; how to tame Liquid Glass on OSes 26. We go through macOS, iOS, watchOS, and even tvOS. This conversation must go hand-in-hand with Adam's article on TidBITS where he has screenshots of everything you'll hear us talk about. I have to say, the most impressive thing about the article IS the screenshots. How he managed to keep such consistency whilst applying each setting is amazing.

How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface - TidBITS

As we were going through tvOS, you'll hear me mention an article I wrote with a tip for how to improve contrast on Apple TV, especially to help you to be able to tell which item is selected. You can find those instructions here:

Tiny Tip – High Contrast Focus Style on Apple TV

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_10_18

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In this week's Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst of TidBITS joins me to talk about his decision process on choosing an iPhone 17 over the 17 Pro. One of the things I like best about Adam is how, just like me, when he starts digging for an answer which should be knowable, he's like a dog with a bone and won't stop until he succeeds.

The main decision point between the 17 and the 17 Pro is whether someone really does care about the 8X telephoto lens vs. the macro lens. We tried to figure out how many photos we really took with the 5X on the iPhone 16 Pro, but that turned out to be a much harder task than you would think. We tried Apple Photos smart albums, but for reasons you'll hear, you can't really do it that way.

Using the open source command line ExifTool from exiftool.org/... (also available through Homebrew) and his able assistant ChatGPT, he was able to create a script that queried our Photos Libraries to determine how many photos we had taken in the last year using the different camera/lens combos on the iPhone 16 Pro. While you hear us talking he hadn't yet perfected his script but he eventually beat it into submission!

Of course, Adam has written up an article describing this descent into madness and even published the script if you care to download it. You can find his article at tidbits.com/....

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_09_25

Join the Conversation:

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Support the Show:

• Patreon Donation
• Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation
• PayPal one-time donation
• Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle
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Referral Links:

• Setapp - 1 month free for you and me
• PETLIBRO - 30% off for you and me
• Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me
• Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me
• Backblaze - One free month for me and you
• Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you.
• PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us
• CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude