Agree, and a lot of software on Mac tends to do the same thing: Codex, Claude Code, and so on. Fortunately, it’s just one of many options, and we can use Homebrew in 95% of cases.

P.S. Installing Homebrew is also officially done by running a shell script from GitHub.

Created the same tool some time ago for Codex and Claude code: showing percents for both in the menu bar and detailed stats when you click on it. Using it literally every day, feel free to try: https://github.com/max2697/RateLimited Feedback greatly appreciated!

Hm, second try? And Siri AI again without dates. First time it was also “later” but was postponed for how many years?

But they already have an AI mode tab… What is the innovation here, making it default instead of search?

Also thought about it. It’s possible, but requires enabling hotspot on the phone. Without it, it will not share internet via BT.

The author probably means CarPlay and Android Auto. In wireless mode they share the phone's internet connection. The adapter linked in the article is a CarPlay adapter, not plain BT.

Seems like this way of using CarPlay isn’t documented. Bluetooth is used for discovery and WiFi/USB for CarPlay communication but not for providing car and internet access. Using users’ phone data without notice could be noticeable by users as well…

That doesn't seem right at all, since my phone doesn't have tethering plan and I can still use CarPlay.

It would also require that my phone not show my car using the hotspot, when it does show my laptop, and also for my cellphone plan to not show that usage (I have limited hotspot data), which is theoretically possible, but now we're talking three companies having to collude in a totally undetectable fashion, which seems a little far fetched.

So, should there be apps that use it to transfer files between iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac without requiring them to be on the same network?

Google's QuickShare contains a reverse-engineered AWDL implementation that works on Pixel and a few other phones.

As for WiFi NAN: support for it seems rather limited outside of iOS and Android. From what I can tell the feature is barely tested on Linux and I can't find any generic Windows APIs for it either.

No WiFi cards for pcs support it.

That's not quite accurate, I don't think.

I've definitely used STA and AP modes concurrently on my Windows laptop with the operating system's built-in internet connection sharing function to help troubleshoot a problem in the field.

That was around a decade ago. It didn't take any extra effort on my part; I just told it to do the thing, and then it did that thing.

Researched this for a bit: there is some hardware for PCI supporting it, but Windows 10/11 not, and Linux is still work in progress, so no real support on OS level, only for some iOS/Android devices.

Afaik the hardware supports it for a while now, but there is no firmware to expose the functionality.

it might be interesting to use unused or extra wifi cards to support this. My pc motherboard has both wifi and ethernet and I only use the ethernet. That card does absolutely nothing at all.

Airdrop is also pretty weird: sometimes it can’t find other phones (probably when a previous transfer failed silently in the background). Also, it had some issues searching for contacts when there was no mobile/Wi-Fi connection (tried to send photos to another phone in the mountains). Sometimes it could just freeze and not work… Apple magic here isn’t really useful.

Using LocalSend to send files across iOS, Mac and Windows. When everything is on the local network, it works pretty nicely.

Well, another confirmation that security policies, release strategies, and guardrails, which before used to prevent accidents like “Our junior developer dropped the prod database,” still need to be used as agents aren’t any magical solutions for everything, aren’t the smartest AI that knows everything and knows even more than it had in context. Rules are the same for everyone, not only humans here.

Just a week ago, I asked ChatGPT to find me something and found Drive Weather iOS app, which I started using. I was also thinking of building something myself, but this one is good enough. Have you tried it or any other similar apps? Why did you decide to build a new one and why is it better? (Building just for fun is an option as well!)