Memos — Photographic Memory 

My thanks to Memos for sponsoring last week at DF. Memos lets you search, copy text from, and annotate your photo library.

This means you can quickly find and copy text from insurance cards, instruction manuals, serial numbers, receipts, screenshots, and whatever else is buried in your photo library.

  • Search for text across your photos — including from Spotlight.
  • Copy text by tapping the green boxes.
  • Add a title and notes to each photo — these are also searchable.

Memos is a new app, and works amazingly well. I’d love to see it jump up the paid app chart. Check it out at memos.org.

Saturday, 1 June 2019

The Talk Show: ‘An Italicized “Finally”’ 

That’s right, another new episode of my podcast, The Talk Show. Special guest Rene Ritchie returns for a look at what we expect — and hope — to see from Apple at WWDC next week.

Brought to you by these fine sponsors:

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Friday, 31 May 2019

WSJ: ‘Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google‘ 

Brent Kendall and John D. McKinnon, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The Justice Department is gearing up for an antitrust investigation of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, a move that could present a major new layer of regulatory scrutiny for the search giant, according to people familiar with the matter. […]

It couldn’t immediately be learned whether Google has been contacted by the department. Third-party critics of the search giant, however, already have been in talks with Justice Department officials, some of the people familiar with the matter said.

Stock up on popcorn now.

Facebook Lawyer Says Users ‘Have No Expectation of Privacy’ 

Mikael Thalen, writing for The Daily Dot:

A lawyer for Facebook argued in court Wednesday that the social media site’s users “have no expectation of privacy.”

According to Law360, Facebook attorney Orin Snyder made the comment while defending the company against a class-action lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

“There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy,” Snyder said.

Get them in court and all of sudden they’re honest.

Mark Gurman Interview With Former App Store Approval Chief Phillip Shoemaker 

Excellent episode of Bloomberg’s Decrypted podcast, with Mark Gurman interviewing former App Store approval chief Phillip Shoemaker. Tons of insight into the early days of the App Store. It’s quite rare for a former Apple employee to be so forthcoming.

(No word, though, on Shoemaker’s own foray into selling apps back in 2010, which always struck me as a very odd story given his position at Apple at the time and the nature of the apps.)

Thursday, 30 May 2019

Tickets for The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2019 

The first batch of 500 tickets for The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2019 are now available. These usually go fast. Update: Sold out in 90 seconds.

The second batch will go on sale tomorrow at 1:00pm ET. Update: Sold out.

The Talk Show: ‘The Dustin Egress Problem’ 

Special guests Cabel Sasser, Steven Frank, and Greg Maletic join the show to talk about Playdate, Panic’s exciting and surprising new handheld gaming system.

Brought to you by these fine sponsors:

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Also, if all goes well, the first batch of tickets for The Talk Show Live From WWDC should go on sale at 9:00pm 10:00pm ET tonight.

Point-of-Sale Malware Found at 102 Checkers Restaurant Locations 

Lindsey O’Donnell, reporting for Threatpost:

The security incident stemmed from cybercriminals breaching Checkers’ systems and installing malware on point of sale systems across more than 100 of its stores. The malware is designed to collect data stored on the magnetic stripe of payment cards, including cardholder name, payment card number, card verification code and expiration date. […]

The incident impacted 102 stores Checkers across 20 states — which were all exposed at varying dates, including as early as December 2015 to as recently as April 2019 (a full list of impacted stores is on Checkers’ data breach security advisory page).

Can you imagine having to admit this has been going on since 2015 without detection?

Also: magnetic stripes need to be retired.

WWDC by Sundell 

John Sundell:

However, not everyone is able to actually attend WWDC in person. Not only do you have to win the “lottery” in order to qualify for purchasing a ticket, you also need to have the monetary means to be able to fly to, stay at, and attend the conference. So for a huge amount of people, WWDC can feel a bit out of reach.

I wanted to do something about that. This website is for everyone who wants to closely follow WWDC, but from anywhere in the world. Starting right now, this site will be updated daily with articles, videos, podcasts, and interviews, covering all things WWDC — from recommendations on what session videos to watch, to in-depth looks at new APIs, to interviews with people from all over the Apple developer community.

A lot of great content here already. And the site is very fast — no JavaScript, no tracking, no nonsense.

‘Putting the Soul in Console’ 

Anil Dash gets it:

I don’t know if Playdate will succeed in the market. I don’t know what kind of risk it represents for Panic as a company. But I know that people see this cute little device, and are reminded that they used to get excited when they saw cool new technology, instead of wondering how it would warp their reality, or steal their information. Here’s hoping for a return to tech that’s fun, that’s thoughtful, and that’s created with a little bit of soul.

Wednesday, 29 May 2019

NYT: ‘In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks Havoc’ 

Remember when the FBI wanted Apple to build backdoors into iPhones, arguing that Apple could trust them with the encryption keys because they would keep them safe? Good times.

Analysts Claim 3D Touch Is Going Away in All 2019 iPhones 

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors:

Last week, in a research note shared with MacRumors, a team of Barclays analysts “confirmed” that 3D Touch “will be eliminated” in all 2019 iPhones, as they predicted back in August 2018. The analysts gathered this information from Apple suppliers following a trip to Asia earlier this month.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this rumor. The Wall Street Journal said the same thing back in January.

Michael Tsai:

Haptic Touch works well, but it isn’t a replacement for 3D Touch because it’s just about feedback, not input. 3D Touch had the potential to be like modifier keys on the Mac, a way to provide an additional “dimension” of input. iOS really needs something like that. I’m not sure why Apple never really did much with it, but the potential was wasted. Given that, and the fact that it never made it across the iPhone product line or to any iPads, I can certainly see why they would get rid of it and doubt most people will miss it (or even knew about it in the first place).

Lots of good links and comments on Tsai’s post, as always.

3D Touch is a great idea but Apple never rolled it out well, and it was never discoverable. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people with 3D Touch-enabled iPhones have no idea it exists. In and of itself, the lack of discoverability isn’t necessarily a problem. That’s how power user features often work. Right-clicking on the Mac, for example, is in the same boat. What 3D Touch never got right is that power-user shortcuts should be just that — shortcuts for tasks with more obvious ways to do them. Now imagine if right-clicking only worked on certain high-end Macs, but didn’t work on others. That’s what happened with 3D Touch.

I think it should have always been a shortcut for a long-press, pure and simple. Just a faster way to long-press. But because 3D Touch is not just a shortcut for a long-press, and is not available on any iPad nor many iPhones, developers could never count on it, so they never really did anything with it. It doesn’t get used much because there’s not much you can do with it.

iOS Apps Grossly Abusing Background App Refresh for Tracking Purposes 

Geoffrey Fowler, writing for The Washington Post:

It’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?

Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I’m snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same — and Apple could be doing more to stop it.

On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.

And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address — once every five minutes.

This is all going on via Background App Refresh. You can see which apps have this permission on your iOS device in Settings: General: Background App Refresh (it’s the 8th item in General in iOS 12).

This feature exists for good reasons — it’s how email, messaging, and podcast apps can update in the background. You probably want new podcasts episodes to download in the background overnight. You want current weather information when you wake up in the morning. But anything that can be abused, will be abused, and it looks like a lot of apps are abusing the shit out of Background App Refresh.

I don’t know what Apple can do to make this more transparent — to somehow let you, the user, see what exactly these apps are doing in the background — but I sure hope it’s on their radar. At this point, a lot of these apps — because of the third-party “analytics” libraries they embed — are acting as spyware, pure and simple.

Sniping From Goldman Sachs Rivals on Apple Card 

Hugh Son, writing for CNBC:

Within the industry, the deal is widely perceived as one that’s risky for a bank to take on. Citigroup was in advanced negotiations with Apple for the card but pulled out amid doubts that it could earn an acceptable profit on the partnership, according to people with knowledge of the talks. Other banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Barclays and Synchrony, also bid on the business. Apple and the banks declined to comment on this story.

It turns out that the Apple Card’s consumer-friendly features — no fees of any kind, software that actively encourages users to avoid debt or pay it down quickly, and potentially lower interest rates — make it harder for banks to make money on the product. Even features like the card’s calendar-based billing can impact a lender’s cost of funding and servicing, since customers’ borrowing will be concentrated at month-end, rather than spread out over weeks.

No shit they’re going to make less money than cards that charge fees and higher interest rates. But they’re going to make money — I’ll eat my hat if Goldman and Apple don’t turn a profit on this card. CNBC’s headline — “A Goldman Sachs rival pulled out of the Apple Card deal on fears it will be a money loser” — makes it sound like they’re going to lose money, which is ludicrous. They’ll make money on each transaction and they’ll make money charging interest on any cardholder who carries a balance. Arguing that they won’t make enough money is just usurious greed.

I don’t use the word lightly, but it’s evil to argue against the software Apple is releasing to help cardholders avoid debt and pay down what debt they owe quickly.

Also, this whole CNBC article seems like a way to sell consumers on getting an Apple Card.

The Independent on Apple and Privacy 

Andrew Griffin, in a lengthy piece for The Independent:

“Privacy cannot be a luxury good offered only to people who can afford to buy premium products and services,” Pichai wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times. He didn’t name Apple, but he didn’t need to.

Pichai argued that the collection of data helps make technology affordable, echoing a sentiment often heard about Apple, that their commitment to privacy is only possible because their products are expensive and it can afford to take such a position. Having a more lax approach to privacy helps keep the products made by almost all of the biggest technology products [sic] in the world — from Google to Instagram — free, at least at the point of use.

“I don’t buy into the luxury good dig,” says Federighi, giving the impression he was genuinely surprised by the public attack.

“It’s on the one hand gratifying that other companies in space [sic] over the last few months, seemed to be making a lot of positive noises about caring about privacy. I think it’s a deeper issue than what a couple of months and a couple of press releases would make. I think you’ve got to look fundamentally at company cultures and values and business model. And those don’t change overnight.”

Griffin’s piece is an interesting read, and he was granted rare access to Apple’s testing facilities, but I think it’s a little all over the place, bouncing back and forth between security issues (testing Apple designed chips in extreme temperatures) and privacy issues. I think the above is the main point though — Google and Facebook are both pushing back against Apple, arguing that Apple’s stance on privacy is only possible because they charge a lot of money for their products.

I think the point that needs to be made is that free and low-cost products can be subsidized by privacy-respecting advertising — but privacy-respecting advertising is not as profitable as privacy-invasive advertising, as exemplified on Facebook and Google’s humongous platforms.

‘Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook’s Dirty Tricks’ 

Kara Swisher, writing at The New York Times:

This is ridiculous. The only thing the incident shows is how expert Facebook has become at blurring the lines between simple mistakes and deliberate deception, thereby abrogating its responsibility as the key distributor of news on the planet.

Would a broadcast network air this? Never. Would a newspaper publish it? Not without serious repercussions. Would a marketing campaign like this ever pass muster? False advertising. […]

By conflating censorship with the responsible maintenance of its platforms, and by providing “rules” that are really just capricious decisions by a small coterie of the rich and powerful, Facebook and others have created a free-for-all with no consistent philosophy.

On the Recyclability of AirPods 

Will Oremus, writing at OneZero:

When I contacted Apple for this story, I didn’t expect much of a response. The company is famous for being selective about its press relations. But I found the company more eager than usual to rebut the claim that AirPods are a planetary nightmare — a claim that appears to have caught Cupertino somewhat by surprise. […]

Most of all, Apple wanted to make clear that you can recycle AirPods — or at least important components of them — and you can go through Apple to do it. There’s a link on the company’s website to order a prepaid shipping label, which you can use to send the device to one of Apple’s recycling partners by dropping it in a FedEx box. Apple says that it has accepted AirPods for recycling ever since they were released, although it was only this year that the company added the product as a specific category of return on the website. The company also noted that you can bring your defunct AirPods to any Apple Store for recycling. “As with all of our products, we work closely with our recyclers to ensure AirPods are properly recycled and provide support to recyclers outside of our supply chain as well,” the company said in a statement.

$99 Is Not Nothing 

Apple has published a new “Principles and Practices” page regarding the App Store, which seems clearly in response to this month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing a class action lawsuit alleging the App Store to be an illegal monopoly to proceed. This bit caught my eye:

84% of apps are free, and developers pay nothing to Apple.

Like any fair marketplace, developers decide what they want to charge from a set of price tiers. We only collect a commission from developers when a digital good or service is delivered through an app. Here are some of the ways developers commonly make money on the App Store.

Any developer distributing an app through the App Store, free or paid, must pay Apple $99 per year for a developer account. You can build apps using Xcode free of charge, but you need a paid developer account to distribute them through the App Store.

Pretty good defense of the App Store overall, though, including a list of great third-party apps that compete directly against Apple’s own apps — camera, calendar, email, maps, etc. And of course, music. But one thing iOS users have complained about for 10 years now is that third-party apps can’t be set as the system-wide default in iOS. (They can on the Mac.) I’m not sure how tenable that is.

Update: There are exceptions to the $99 developer fee, for nonprofit organizations in five countries:

You can request to have the 99 USD annual membership fee waived if you’re a nonprofit organization, accredited educational institution, or government entity that will distribute only free apps on the App Store and is based in an eligible country. Apple will review your request and contact you to let you know whether your request is approved.

Eligible countries: Brazil, China, Japan, United Kingdom, United States.

It’d be interesting to know how many of these waivers have been granted.

Tuesday, 28 May 2019

A Few iOS 13 Screenshots 

The most interesting thing to me is the new interface for the screenshot editing tools. Actual depth, color, and shading — these new tools look great.

New A10-Based iPod Touch 

iPod Touch is such an oddball product, but I’m glad to see it updated. The last revision was four years ago. In the early years, I think a lot of iPods Touch were sold for use by kids. But today, most kids use hand-me-down iPhones. I think a lot of new iPods Touch are sold for enterprise purposes — warehouse scanning, point-of-sale, that sort of thing.

Sunday, 26 May 2019

Layers + The Talk Show Live 

My thanks to Layers for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Layers is a 3-day conference about design, technology, and a lot more (including great snacks). It runs Monday-Wednesday June 3-5, at the historic Montgomery Theater, right around the corner from Apple’s WWDC. Monday kicks off with an opening party from 5-8pm (they know everyone wants to watch Apple’s keynote), and the conference proper takes place Tuesday and Wednesday.

This is Layers’s 5th year. Back in 2015, I was on stage to interview Susan Kare — one of the highlights and great privileges of my career.

Use this link to register for Layers and you’ll get admission to the Layers Design Conference, June 3-5, and The Talk Show Live on Tuesday, June 4.

The Talk Show Live From WWDC will be held at the California Theatre. Doors at 6pm, show at 7pm. (General admission tickets for The Talk Show aren’t even available yet, but will go on sale early this week.)

An iOS 13 Wish: A Return of Vibrant Tapdown States

Friday, 24 May 2019

There’ve been a bunch of leaks about iOS 13, nearly all from Guilherme Rambo at 9to5Mac and Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. But one thing we don’t know yet — and I emphasize yet, because leaks often spring very close to keynotes — is what iOS 13 is going to look like. No screenshots, no mock-ups.

Most likely, I’d say, is that visually, iOS 13 will bring what we’ve seen each of the past 5 years — another annual refinement of the iOS 7 look-and-feel that debuted in 2013. But there have been rumblings that something more dramatic is afoot. The original (let’s call it classic) iOS look-and-feel lasted 6 years — it would be fitting for the iOS 7 look-and-feel to last 6 years as well. I don’t really see how Apple could do something as radical as the iOS 6 to 7 transition. But to me there are aspects of the iOS 7 foundation that are tired.

I don’t know why, but one of those things has been bugging me a lot in recent months: the drab gray color that indicates tapdown state for list items and buttons. Putting aside skeuomorphic textures like woodgrain and leather and the 3D-vs.-flat debate, the utter drabness of tapdown states is just a bad idea. I didn’t like it when iOS 7 debuted, and I like it even less 6 years later.

In classic iOS, when you tapped down on list items or buttons, they’d instantly light up in vibrant color. The standard color was a bright cheerful blue. In iOS 7 through 12, the tapdown state is the color of dirty dishwater.

iOS 6 vs. iOS 12:

  

The classic iOS style was both joyful and a perfect visual indication of what you are tapping. It was both aesthetically pleasing and more usable. It’s useful — and accessible — to make crystal clear what exactly you are tapping on. The classic iOS look-and-feel made it feel fun just to tap buttons on screen. I miss that. Again, put aside specific techniques like photorealistic textures and depth effects. To me the fundamental weakness in post-iOS-7 look-and-feel is simply that it’s been drained of joy.1 

  1. The Mac, thankfully, hasn’t lost as much vibrancy. Think about how dull, and how much less usable, the menu bar would be if the selected menu item just got a dishwater-gray highlight instead of a vibrant blue one — or whatever other accent color you’ve chosen if you’re running 10.14 Mojave. Even when using the monochrome Graphite theme, the menu item highlight is a dark gray with inverted white text — it’s deliberately not joyful the way the colorful options are, but it’s still a very distinctive visual state, not subtle like on iOS. ↩︎

Friday, 24 May 2019

YouTube Is the Only Social Platform Taking Down Doctored Pelosi Videos 

Kate Riga, reporting for TPM:

YouTube has taken down videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) doctored to make her seem drunk from its platform, saying that the posts “violated our policies.”

“YouTube has clear policies that outline what content is not acceptable to post and we remove videos violating these policies when flagged to us. These videos violated our policies and have been removed. They also did not surface prominently. In fact, search results and watch next panels about Nancy Pelosi include videos from authoritative sources, usually at the top,” a spokesperson told TPM.

Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, are letting the videos live on their sites.

“We remove things from Facebook that violate our Community Standards, and we don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true,” a company spokesperson said in a statement obtained by Politico.

Shame on Twitter and Facebook. These videos are not parody or satire — they’re being passed off as real, and garnering millions of views. It’s dangerous propaganda.

iFixit Tears Down a New MacBook Pro 

Looks like Apple made two material changes: a different one for the transparent membrane, and (perhaps?) the metal dome switches.

Thursday, 23 May 2019

Edge Magazine’s Cover Story on Playdate 

My own excitement about Playdate aside, Jen Simpkins’s cover story for the new issue of Edge magazine (issue #333) is just a terrific read and an amazing behind-the-scenes look at how a 4-year project comes to life. Edge doesn’t publish on the web — how old-school cool is that? — but there are a few ways to read it:

  • Panic has a brief excerpt on the Playdate website.
  • You can buy a hard copy of Edge #333 for $10.
  • Edge is part of Apple News+, so if you’re a News+ subscriber (or sign up for a trial), you can read the whole thing.

One more thing: if you visit the media page on the Playdate site using an iPhone or iPad, Panic has created two ARKit models of the Playdate hardware. It’s fun to play with, and gives you a good sense of the device’s size.

Mac Toolbar Labels and Accessibility 

Interesting post — and that rarest of all beasts, a good comment thread — on a creeping trend in Mac app design: toolbars that don’t have an option to show text labels under the button icons. I like showing button labels in (a) apps that I use infrequently, and (b) apps which have a lot of buttons, some of which have icons that are similar to each other (Apple Mail comes to mind).

I think it’s a real accessibility issue, and another instance of something that looks better but, for at least some people, works worse. I also think the problem is exacerbated by the current fashion where icons are just simple one-color hairline outline objects, not colorful illustrations of actual objects.

Vice News: Inside Huawei-Land 

Tight 8-minute video tour of Huawei’s campus from Vice News:

“We wanted to invite U.S. media to come ask any questions on behalf of American customers,” said Catherine Chen, Huawei’s corporate senior vice president and director of the board.

VICE News took Huawei up on its offer and found out we were the only news organization that showed up.

I don’t know what Huawei thought this tour would accomplish, but I found it interesting.

Ars: ‘Why the Quirky Playdate Portable Could Succeed Where Ouya Failed’ 

Kyle Orland, writing at Ars Technica:

This is the hipster microbrew of the console world, mixing in weird gaming flavors and unique controller ingredients that the Sony/Budweisers and Nintendo/Millers of the world can’t. Playdate is aiming to be the console you buy more as a statement about your refined and eclectic gaming tastes and less as a workhorse that will be a central point in your gaming life.

I think this is pretty good, but I quibble with the word “hipster”. To me, a hipster handheld would have big fat pixels, a more decidedly retro take. Some microbrews are hipsters, no argument, but most aren’t — they’re just good beers made at a small scale. That’s Playdate.

Playdate

Wednesday, 22 May 2019

“We wanted this thing to come out of nowhere, fully formed, and just blow everybody’s minds.” That’s Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser, in the cover story of the new issue of Edge magazine.

The story is about Playdate, the most amazing and exciting product announcement, for me, since the original iPhone.

Everything racing through your mind right now as “but that’s impossible” is, in fact, not impossible. It’s true. Panic is making a handheld game player. It is adorable and exciting and fun and technically impressive. Go read all about it at Panic’s (also adorable, exciting, fun, and technically impressive) Playdate website, which even has a great domain name.

They’re making their own hardware (in conjunction with Swedish device makers Teenage Engineering). They wrote their own OS (there’s no Linux). It has a high resolution 400 × 240 black and white display with no backlighting. It has a crank.

It’s going to cost only $149 — $149! — and that includes a “season” of 12 games from an amazing roster of beloved video game creators, delivered every Monday for 12 weeks.

The idea of a new upstart, a company the size of Panic — with only software experience at that — jumping into the hardware game with a brand new platform harkens back to the ’80s and ’90s. But even back then, a company like, say, General Magic or Palm, was VC-backed and aspired to be a titan. To be the next Atari or Commodore or Apple.

In today’s world all the new computing devices and platforms come from huge companies. Apple, of course. All the well-known Android handset makers building off an OS provided by Google. Sony. Nintendo.

Panic is almost cheating in a way because they’re tiny. The Playdate platform isn’t competing with the state of the art. It’s not a retro platform, per se, but while it has an obviously nostalgic charm it is competing only on its own terms. Its only goal is to be fun. And aspects of Playdate are utterly modern: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, apps and software updates delivered over-the-air.

They’re taking advantage of an aspect of today’s world that is brand new – the Asian supply chain, the cheapness of Asian manufacturing, the cheapness of CPU and GPU cycles that allows things like Raspberry Pi to cost just $35.

And then there’s the issue of freedom. Last night Steven Frank, Panic’s other co-founder, tease-tweeted a link to Steve Jobs quoting Alan Kay during the introduction of the original iPhone: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

You know that scene in GoodFellas where Tommy is about to be made, and Jimmy and Henry can’t contain their excitement because it’s as close as they themselves will ever get to being made? That’s a bit how I feel about Playdate — I have so many friends at Panic, and this feels as close as I’ll ever get to the makers of a hardware platform. (Let’s please ignore the fact that everything goes to shit in GoodFellas at that point.)

Cabel Sasser let me in on this about two weeks ago, and I don’t think I’ve spent a waking hour since when I haven’t thought about Playdate at least once. I am so excited to get one of these in my hands — and so proud of and happy for my friends at Panic.

This is fucking amazing. 

Wednesday, 22 May 2019

U.S.-China Trade War Puts Huawei in a World of Hurt 

Amie Tsang, reporting for The New York Times:

Google’s decision to cut off support to Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant blacklisted by the Trump administration, is rippling across the globe as companies suspend ties to the handset maker.

In Britain, where Huawei is one of the most popular cellphone brands, two of the country’s biggest mobile networks, EE and Vodafone, announced that they would stop offering Huawei phones to 5G customers as a result of Google’s decision.

In Japan, the three largest cellphone companies also said they were reconsidering plans to sell a new series of Huawei smartphones.

BBC News reports that ARM is suspending all business with Huawei. So: no OS, no CPU, no carrier support in Europe or the U.S. (where Huawei has long been semi-banned over security concerns).

Those are problems I wouldn’t give to a monkey on a rock.

WebKit: Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution for the Web 

John Wilander, WebKit engineer at Apple:

The combination of third-party web tracking and ad campaign measurement has led many to conflate web privacy with a web free of advertisements. We think that’s a misunderstanding. Online ads and measurement of their effectiveness do not require Site A, where you clicked an ad, to learn that you purchased something on Site B. The only data needed for measurement is that someone who clicked an ad on Site A made a purchase on Site B.

Today we are presenting a new technology to allow attribution of ad clicks on the web while preserving user privacy.

This is an amazing proposal, and I really hope it takes off. Safari’s incredible popularity and importance on mobile devices could make this take off. The key idea is this: a web browser should work in the interest of its users.

Critically, our solution avoids placing trust in any of the parties involved — the ad network, the merchant, or any other intermediaries — and dramatically limits the entropy of data passed between them to prevent communication of a tracking identifier.

Anything that relies on voluntary compliance is doomed. If it can be abused or circumvented, ad networks and other web trackers will abuse or circumvent it.

See also: Zack Whittaker’s story at TechCrunch, and this brief thread from Apple’s Maciej Stachowiak with links to other WebKit privacy initiatives.

Tuesday, 21 May 2019

DF Sponsorships for Spring 

The rest of May and June remain largely open on the DF sponsorship schedule. Every week is a good week to sponsor Daring Fireball, if you ask me, but the weeks leading up to and after WWDC are particularly good. Lots of attention because there’s always a lot to write about. If you have a good product or service to promote to DF’s astute audience, I’d love to have you as a sponsor.

This current week remains open, too. If you can move quickly, get in touch today.

Some Good Old-Fashioned Speed Bumps for the MacBook Pro Lineup, and a Tweak to the Butterfly Key Mechanism

Tuesday, 21 May 2019

Apple Newsroom:

Apple updated MacBook Pro with faster 8th- and 9th-generation Intel Core processors, bringing eight cores to MacBook Pro for the first time. MacBook Pro now delivers two times faster performance than a quad-core MacBook Pro and 40 percent more performance than a 6-core MacBook Pro, making it the fastest Mac notebook ever. […]

MacBook Pro is more powerful than ever for compiling code, processing high-resolution images, rendering 3D graphics, editing multiple streams of 4K video and more. The 15-inch MacBook Pro now features faster 6- and 8-core Intel Core processors, delivering Turbo Boost speeds up to 5.0 GHz, while the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar features faster quad-core processors with Turbo Boost speeds up to 4.7 GHz.

Long story short, nice year-over-year CPU speed bumps for the entire MacBook Pro lineup, except for the 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar, which remains unchanged.1

The updates to the 13-inch models are relatively minor. The base model goes from a 2.3 GHz quad-core Core i5 with Turbo Boost up to 3.8 GHz, to a 2.4 GHz quad-core Core i5 with Turbo Boost up to 4.1 GHz. The fastest build-to-order option goes from a 2.7 GHz quad-core Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 4.5 GHz, to a 2.8 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 4.7 GHz. Nothing truly major there, but I think it’s great that they speed-bumped them anyway — and the move from 7th-generation Intel CPUs to 8th-generation is apparently a bigger deal, performance-wise, than the clock speeds suggest.

The updates to the 15-inch models are more significant. And if you’re a pro user whose work is genuinely CPU-constrained, the 15-inch is the model you’re buying. The $2,400 base model goes from a 2.2 GHz 6-core Intel Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 4.1 GHz, to a 2.6 GHz 6-core Intel Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 4.5 GHz. That’s a nice year-over-year bump right there. The fastest configuration goes from a 2.9 GHz 6-core Intel Core i9 with Turbo Boost up to 4.8 GHz, to a 2.4 GHz 8-core Intel Core i9, Turbo Boost up to 5.0 GHz. This is the first time any Apple portable has reached 8 cores or 5 GHz.

The very best model you can configure — the high-end 8-core CPU, with 32 GB of RAM, 4 TB of SSD storage, and the Radeon Pro Vega 20 video card — costs a very professional $6,549.

One word that doesn’t appear in today’s announcement is “keyboard”. Seriously, when the announcement went live at 1pm ET, the first thing I did was search for “keyboard”: “Not found”. But Apple spoke on background to a bunch of folks in the media this morning, including yours truly, and they do have keyboard-related news.

First, these new MacBook Pros still have the third-generation butterfly-switch keyboard that debuted with last July’s updated MacBook Pros. But Apple has changed the mechanism under the hood, using a new material for at least one of the components in these switches. The purpose of this change is specifically to increase the reliability of the keyboards. Apple emphasized to me their usual line that the “vast majority” of users have no problem with these keyboards, but they acknowledge that some users do and say they take it very seriously.

The change to the mechanism is intended to address both problems people are seeing with frequently-used keys: getting stuck, and generating two characters with a single keypress. These updated keyboards look identical — there’s no change to the layout or to the amount of key travel. And according to Apple, the updated keyboards should feel the same when typing — although Apple acknowledged that keyboard feel is highly subjective, and some of us, like the princess and the pea, can detect minor differences and form strong opinions about those differences.

Second, all MacBooks with butterfly keyboards, including the new MacBook Pros released today, are now covered by Apple’s keyboard service program. If a key gets stuck or stops working or starts duplicating characters, you can get it repaired free of charge. No need to guess whether a brand-new model will be added to the program later — if it has a butterfly keyboard, it’s in the program. Also, for existing models with the third-generation keyboard — last year’s new MacBook Pros and the new MacBook Air — if they require a keyboard replacement, they’ll get the new tweaked keyboard with the purportedly more durable mechanism.2

Third, Apple stated that repair times for keyboard service have been greatly improved. How much improved, they wouldn’t say, but they realize it’s a great inconvenience to be without your MacBook for any time at all. Keyboard replacements are now performed in-store, so a process that used to take 4-5 days (or more) might now take just a day or two.

This is all good news. Sure, what many of us would like to see is a truly new keyboard design — something that re-establishes the MacBook lineup as having the best keyboard in the industry. Personally, I’d like to see them add more travel to the keys, go back to the upside-down T arrow key layout, and include a hardware Esc key on Touch Bar models (in that order).3 Apple is always working on new keyboards, of course. It’s just a question of when they’ll ship. Major keyboard redesigns coincide with major redesigns of the entire form factor, and those projects are on years-long time frames.

But of course the biggest issue with these keyboards is reliability. Will this updated mechanism fix or at least greatly reduce the number of reliability problems? Only time will tell, but I’m cautiously optimistic. Apple didn’t have to say anything at all about this mechanical tweak. I mean, if they hadn’t said anything at all about the keyboards, we’d all be asking about it, but Apple often ignores questions it doesn’t want to answer. The folks I spoke to today seem confident these updated keyboards will prove significantly more reliable.

You can also see why Apple decided to announce these updates today, not on stage at WWDC in two weeks. First, they are just speed bumps. Second, there’s simply no way they want to talk about keyboard reliability on stage. As I observed above, they didn’t even mention the word “keyboard” in their Newsroom announcement. Best to get this out of the way ahead of WWDC.

So on the keyboard front, these new models can’t be worse and are likely better. That’s good. The best that we could hope for while waiting for a true next-generation keyboard design — which for all we know might be a year or more out — is a mid-generation tweak. At the very least, talking about this material tweak and including all butterfly keyboard models in the service program is an acknowledgement that last year’s keyboards were not good enough. That was the worst case scenario — that Apple didn’t see a problem.

But what pleases me more is that Apple is updating Mac hardware on an aggressive schedule. I wrote “just speed bumps” a few paragraphs ago, but speed bumps are important in the pro market. Apple shipped new MacBook Pros last July, added new high-end graphics card options to those models in October, and now has updated the whole lineup with new CPUs. They also just updated the non-Pro iMac lineup in March. This seems like an odd thing to praise the company for — updating hardware with speed bumps is something a computer maker should just do, right? The lack of speed bumps in recent years naturally led some to conclude that Apple, institutionally, was losing interest in the Mac.

Last year, a source at Apple admitted to me that they had “taken their eye off the ball on Mac”. Regular speed bumps are a very strong sign that their eye is back on the ball, especially in the pro market, where artists, video pros, developers, and scientists really can use every CPU and GPU cycle they can get.

One More Thing

One Mac Apple hasn’t spoken about in a while — over a year in fact — is the upcoming new Mac Pro. In 2013, Apple previewed the current Mac Pro at WWDC (“Can’t innovate anymore, my ass”), even though it didn’t go on sale until later in the year. I expect Apple to do something similar this year, and I know a lot of other people do too.

In broad strokes, the new Mac Pro is in one of three states:

  1. Ready to ship.
  2. Not ready to ship, but ready to be unveiled.
  3. Not even ready to be unveiled.4

Apple is good at setting expectations in the lead-up to keynotes. Most people waiting for the new Mac Pro think it’s in state #1 or #2, and thus, we’ll get some sort of look at it at WWDC. If it’s #3, though, and it’s still not yet ready even to be previewed, I strongly suspect Apple would get word out in advance so that no one leaves the keynote thinking about something that wasn’t announced instead of all the various things that were announced. That’s Apple’s expectation-setting playbook.

One way to get word out would have been to say something today, on background, along the lines of, “We’re announcing these updated MacBook Pro models today because our WWDC keynote is going to be all about software, not hardware.”

They didn’t say that. Maybe a “no hardware at WWDC” leak is still coming. We still have almost two full weeks until WWDC, and perhaps Apple didn’t want to mix good news on the MacBook Pro front with disappointing news on the Mac Pro front. But they didn’t say anything today. 

  1. What’s the deal with the no-Touch-Bar 13-inch MacBook Pro? It hasn’t been updated in well over a year, and occupies a very similar position to the new MacBook Air in the current lineup. For the base 128 GB models, the MacBook Air costs $1,200 and includes Touch ID, while the MacBook Pro costs $1,300, is a little faster, but lacks Touch ID. That’s the most confusing buying decision in the MacBook lineup today. My guess is that Apple has plans to update the 13-inch no-Touch Bar MacBook Pro, and when they do, it’ll be more clearly differentiated from the MacBook Air by performance. Pay a little more, carry a little more weight in your backpack, but get noticeably faster performance. But until it gets updated, this old model holds the spot in the lineup. ↩︎

  2. MacBooks with the first- and second-generation keyboard will not get the new keyboard, because it just doesn’t work that way. Apple can’t replace one generation of keyboard with another — they’re not swappable like that. And that’s why they’re calling today’s tweaked keyboard an update to the third-generation keyboard, not a new generation. ↩︎︎

  3. Reliability is objective — your keyboard either works properly or it doesn’t. That’s the essential problem Apple must fix. But on the subjective front, the things I dislike about these keyboards — low-travel keys, the full-size left and right arrow keys, and the lack of a hardware Esc key — all share one thing in common. These things all make the keyboards look better but work worse. That, of course, is in direct contradiction to the well-known Steve Jobs axiom: “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

    Again, these factors are all subjective. In particular, I know some people truly prefer the feel of these low-travel keys. But I don’t know of anyone who prefers the full-size left and right arrow keys in place of the old upside-down T, and while most Mac users never even use their Esc keys, among those who do, particularly developers, I honestly don’t know if there’s a single one of them on the planet who doesn’t miss the hardware Esc key on the Touch Bar-equipped keyboards. A small minority of Mac users use their Esc keys all the time, and for them, having it as a soft key on the Touch Bar is downright terrible.

    I admit the full-size left and right arrow keys look better — the gaps in the old upside-down T layout are a little ungainly. And a lone hardware Esc key up in the corner next to the Touch Bar might look a little lonely. But if design is still how it works, Apple should bring these back in its next-generation keyboards. ↩︎︎

  4. If we want to cover all our bases, there’s a fourth possible state for the new Mac Pro: scrapped. Off to a grave next to AirPower in the “Announced but Never Shipped” cemetery. I know some people are worried about that — “How could it take Apple so long just to make a goddamn modular tower?” — but if that were the case, I think Apple would have broken the bad news today. ↩︎︎

Monday, 20 May 2019

Facebook’s Creepy Data Sharing With Phone Carriers 

Sam Biddle, reporting for The Intercept:

Offered to select Facebook partners, the data includes not just technical information about Facebook members’ devices and use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, but also their past locations, interests, and even their social groups. This data is sourced not just from the company’s main iOS and Android apps, but from Instagram and Messenger as well. The data has been used by Facebook partners to assess their standing against competitors, including customers lost to and won from them, but also for more controversial uses like racially targeted ads.

Some experts are particularly alarmed that Facebook has marketed the use of the information — and appears to have helped directly facilitate its use, along with other Facebook data — for the purpose of screening customers on the basis of likely creditworthiness. Such use could potentially run afoul of federal law, which tightly governs credit assessments.

Mark Zuckerberg, last month: “I believe the future is private.”

Pandora for Mac Is an Electron Turd 

Speaking of un-Mac-like apps, Pandora released a Mac client today. I downloaded it just to kick the tires — it’s a bad native Mac app even by the low standards of Electron apps. For example, if you click and drag one of the “buttons” at the top of the window (“Log In”, “Sign Up”, etc.), it both drags the window and gives you a pandora.com URL drag proxy item. I don’t even know how such dysfunction is even possible.

If Marzipan can get more companies to build their Mac apps from their iOS app, that really would be an improvement over these Electron monstrosities. But part of the appeal of Electron is that it gives you an app that works on Windows too. (Pandora’s Windows app isn’t available yet, but is promised soon.) Marzipan won’t solve that problem.

Slack Changed Its Stock Ticker From ‘SK’ to ‘WORK’ Weeks Before IPO 

Becky Peterson, writing for Business Insider:

Slack is not a public company yet, but it’s already gotten tired of its stock ticker.

In an updated version of its IPO paperwork filed on Monday, Slack revealed that it has dumped the proposed “SK” stock ticker it had settled upon a few weeks ago. Instead, in a dramatic pivot, the workplace collaboration company will makes its public market debut with the more descriptive ticker symbol “WORK.”

It’s no big deal, but “SK” was a bad-ass ticker. “WORK” is just corny. I think you ought to be able to look at a ticker and make a good guess what company it belongs to.

(I’ve always wondered why Apple’s ticker is “AAPL”, with two A’s. Searching for an answer, I found this old MacRumors forum thread from 2003. Someone there thought they should change it to “IPOD”.)

Microsoft Edge Preview Builds Now Available for MacOS 

Microsoft:

Last month, we announced the first preview builds of the next version of Microsoft Edge for Windows 10. Today, we are pleased to announce the availability of the Microsoft Edge Canary channel for macOS. You can now install preview builds from the Microsoft Edge Insider site for your macOS or Windows 10 PC, with more Windows version support coming soon.

I’m trying to think how long it’s been since I’ve had a Microsoft web browser running on my Mac. Apple released Safari in 2003, but I was still running classic MacOS on my Power Mac 9600 until 2004 or 2005 I think. So maybe 15 years?

Building a “Mac-like” user experience for Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge for macOS will offer the same new browsing experience that we’re previewing on Windows, with user experience optimizations to make it feel at home on a Mac. We are tailoring the overall look and feel to match what macOS users expect from apps on this platform.

I’m glad they put quotes around “Mac-like” because this is not very Mac-like. It looks and feels a lot like Google Chrome, which makes sense, because it’s a fork from Chromium. But even Chrome uses the Mac’s standard contextual menus (what you see when you right-click) — Edge even fakes those.

The whole thing does feel very fast.

Saturday, 18 May 2019

Atoms — Ideal Everyday Shoes 

My thanks once again to Atoms for sponsoring this week at Daring Fireball. Atoms are getting ready to launch their new website and they’re using this sponsorship to give DF readers a sneak peak. It’s a great website, with a custom typeface to boot. (They wanted to get the dot on the i just right.) And you get a chance to pick up the world’s first shoes available in quarter sizes.

That sounds like a pain in the ass. How can you choose the right quarter-size increment ordering over the internet? Easy: Atoms sends you three pairs of shoes in quarter-size increments based on your normal shoe size. You pick the left and right shoe that feels best — a size 9 for your left foot and a 9.25 for your right, for example — and return the rest for free.

Atoms didn’t know this when they chose to sponsor DF, but going back to childhood, my left foot has always been ever so slightly bigger than my right. When trying on new shoes I’m often torn between half sizes. It’s like they made this quarter-size system just for me. No kidding. I’ve had a pair of Atoms for a little bit and have been wearing them a lot. (I got the black and white, but they also have all-black and all-white.) They’re very comfortable and still look near-new.

Friday, 17 May 2019

GB Studio 

GB Studio is “A free and easy to use retro adventure game creator for your favourite handheld video game system”, by which they mean, but don’t want to name specifically, Nintendo’s Game Boy:

Simple visual scripting means you don’t need to have made a game already. GB Studio also hides much of the complexity in building GB games so you can concentrate on telling a great story.

What a fun idea from developer Chris Maltby. You can output ROMs for emulators, play them on actual Game Boy hardware with a flash cartridge, or even export them for the web (which will even work on phones). It’s a remarkably polished IDE.

There’s something about 1-bit (and few-bit) displays that makes me so nostalgic — the original Mac, Game Boy, Newton, PalmPilot, iPod. Those devices all inspired such deep affection. In our current world of ever-cheaper, ever-better color displays, I’d love to see 1-bit displays make a comeback somehow. That doesn’t make any sense, but nostalgia isn’t about sense. “A pain in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone”; “it takes us to a place where we ache to go again” and all.

The Pivot 

Excellent piece from Horace Dediu:

Moving as it does between computers, devices, software, services, retail, logistics and manufacturing means that it’s not classifiable as an “x” company where “x” is an industry sector. Rather, the company should be classified by the set of problems it seeks to solve (e.g. communications, community, productivity, creativity, wellbeing).

This disconnect between what people think Apple sells and what Apple builds is as perplexing as the cognitive disconnect between what companies sell and what customers buy.

This is why so many people, particularly investment analysts, have always missed the point about Apple. They saw Apple as a computer company outside the Wintel world in a Wintel-dominated industry. Now they see Apple as a phone maker in a world where the market is saturated and people are holding onto the phones they already own longer and longer.

“Where’s the next iPhone?” they ask. That’s such a dumb question. As Dediu argues at the start of his piece, the iPhone is the most successful product of all time. What sense does it make to expect the same company to make two of the most successful products of all time within the span of 15 years? It doesn’t really make much sense to expect any other company to make a product as successful as the iPhone soon. I think there’s a good chance the iPhone is a once in a lifetime product.

How AirPlay 2 and the Apple TV App Work on a Samsung TV 

I’m not surprised, but this looks and works almost exactly like the new TV app on an Apple TV set top box. If you have one of these TVs with the Apple TV app built-in, I can’t see many reasons why you’d want an Apple TV device. The new TV app on an actual Apple TV does integrate with apps like Prime Video and Hulu that are not available as “channels”, and of course Apple TV has that wildly popular library of games and its celebrated remote control, but if you mostly use Apple TV for iTunes movie and TV show content, you’re probably better off using the built-in Apple TV app on these TVs.

Update: A couple of readers point to one obvious advantage of Apple TV: privacy. Smart TVs do all sorts of nasty things like tracking what you watch and phoning home that Apple TV does not and never will do. There’s a very strong case to be made never to hook a “smart TV” up to the internet at all.

Gmail Tracks Your Purchase History (Shocker) 

Todd Haselton and Megan Graham, writing for CNBC:

Google says it doesn’t use your Gmail to show you ads and promises it “does not sell your personal information, which includes your Gmail and Google Account information,” and does “not share your personal information with advertisers, unless you have asked us to.”

But, for reasons that still aren’t clear, it’s pulling that information out of your Gmail and dumping it into a “Purchases” page most people don’t seem to know exists. Even if it’s not being used for ads, there’s no clear reason why Google would need to track years of purchases and make it hard to delete that information. Google says it’s looking into simplifying its settings to make them easier to control, however.

I’m sure they’ll get right on that.

Steam Link Finally Available for iOS and Apple TV 

Remember this saga from a year ago? Long story short, Steam is like an app store for PC games. Steam Link is like a LAN-based remote desktop that lets you stream your Steam games to another device, like an iPhone or Apple TV. Apple initially approved it on May 7 last year, Steam announced it, and then Apple un-approved it, “citing business conflicts with app guidelines that had allegedly not been realized by the original review team”.

It seems bizarre to me that it took a year to resolve this, but I’m glad Apple decided it correctly. And I’m interested to see how well it works — my son is an avid player of games from Steam.