The Talk Show: ‘2025 Year in Review’ 

A look back at Apple’s 2025, with special guest Rene Ritchie.

Sponsored by:

  • Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off.
  • Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
Photoshop 1.0 and the Early Macintosh HIG 

After posting a link to the Computer History Museum’s release of the Photoshop 1.0 source code last week, I spent some time paging through the original Photoshop manuals. I found a screenshot of the dialog box where you entered your serial number, and posted it to Mastodon, writing:

If you’re annoyed by something that is obviously wrong about this dialog box from Photoshop 1.0, you’re my type of person. (Even more so if, like me, you remember being annoyed by this at the time, when you were entering your cracked SN.)

What a lovely thread it generated, replete with screenshots from early versions of the HIG.

Sidenote: I would eat my hat if Alan Dye knew what was wrong and gross about this dialog box. This is exactly the sort of sweating the idiomatic usability details thing that has frequently been wrong in Apple software in the last decade. The response from Dye and those in his cohort would be, I’d wager, to roll their eyes with a “Who gives a shit what the UI guidelines were forty fucking years ago?” dismissal. Here’s the thing. Styles have changed as time has marched on. Technical capabilities — screen resolution, color — have marched on. But the fundamental idioms of good Macintosh UI design are timeless (and many of them ought to apply to Apple’s other platforms). These idioms are like grammar. Slang changes. Language forever moves forward. But many important idioms are so fundamental they do not change. Styles and technical advances have advanced over time in filmmaking and print design too, but the basic principles of good cinema and graphic layout are timeless. Only a fool dismisses the collective knowledge passed down by those who came before us.

‘The Strange Death of Make America Great Again’ 

Matthew Walther, in an opinion piece last week for The New York Times (gift link):

MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate. Those who counsel de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation; prudential disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry. Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even when exacerbation forecloses coalition building.

There is also a related problem: The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune. The disappearance of the informal gate-keeping function once performed by conservative luminaries such as William F. Buckley Jr. is probably permanent. In the absence of such authority, informed argument exists alongside phony outrage, profiteering, self-aggrandizement and saying things for the hell of it. The result is not merely the radicalization that Mr. Buckley feared but a kind of omnidirectional incoherence.

“A kind of omnidirectional incoherence” is as perfect a description as I’ve seen regarding the whole Trumpist movement in this second administration.

Tuesday, 30 December 2025

‘I’m in Charge at This Hertz Location, and Buddy, You’re Not Getting a Car Today’ 

Emily Delaney, at McSweeney’s:

Okay, now you’re getting upset. You’re getting upset despite the fact that we have strict rules against getting upset at this Hertz location. But tell me, honestly, when you reserved a rental car through Hertz, you thought… what? That we were going to set aside a special little car just for you? Seriously? Oh my god.

(Via Kottke.)

The U.S. Conservative Aggrieved Mindset, Explained 

Jason Pargin is — well, to my tastes — a master of the TikTok video format. This one is so good, and ends with a mic-drop closing line.

Using AirPods Live Translation in Japan 

Ruffin Prevost, writing at The New York Times:

As everyone filed out, I repeated, in English, some of the priest’s comments to my guide, Keiko Hatada, who taught English for 30 years and has led custom tours of Tokyo for the past decade. I wanted to make sure I had understood things correctly.

I recounted the priest’s admonition to set aside unwholesome feelings of anger and greed, and work instead to show compassion and generosity, as well as his reminder that his temple was still accepting donations for those affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

“You told me you didn’t speak Japanese,” my guide said, pleasantly surprised.

Beyond a few basic greetings and food terms, I don’t.

I wrote the following two years ago in my AirPods Pro 2 review:

The new AirPods Pro are the best single expression of Apple as a company today. Not the most important product, not the most complicated, not the most essential. But the one that exemplifies everything Apple is trying to do. They are simple, they are useful, and they offer features that most people use and want. Most people use headphones. A lot of people use them every day — in noisy environments. AirPods Pro are — for any scenario where big over-ear-style headphones are impractical — the best headphones in the world.

That was before Live Translation, a feature that until recently existed only in science fiction.

ICEBlock App Sues Trump Administration for Censorship 

Bobby Allyn, reporting three weeks ago for NPR:

The developer of ICEBlock, an iPhone app that anonymously tracks the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, has sued the Trump administration for free speech violations after Apple removed the service from its app store under demands from the White House.

The suit, filed on Monday in federal court in Washington, asks a judge to declare that the administration violated the First Amendment when it threatened to criminally prosecute the app’s developer and pressured Apple to make the app unavailable for download, which the tech company did in October. [...]

To First Amendment advocates, the White House’s pressure campaign targeting ICEBlock is the latest example of what’s known as “jawboning,” when government officials wield state power to suppress speech. The Cato Institute calls the practice “censorship by proxy.”

Good on developer Joshua Aaron for filing this suit and defending his work.

‘Do a Better Job on the Wings’

Tuesday, 30 December 2025

Randy Walters wrote a lovely little story, “Christiane’s Gift”, originally published back in 2012, about a visit to a Frankfurt museum hosting an exhibit from Stanley Kubrick’s personal archives in 2004. I toured the same exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco in 2016; it was remarkable. Included in the exhibit was the famed ƒ/0.7 Zeiss lens (designed for use by NASA for satellite photography in space) and the jury-rigged Mitchell BNC camera Kubrick commissioned so he could use that lens to shoot scenes by candlelight in Barry Lyndon.

In the preface to his story, Walters references this quote from Kubrick, from his acceptance speech for the D.W. Griffith lifetime achievement award from the Director’s Guild of America in 1998:

I’ve compared Griffith’s career to the Icarus myth, but at the same time I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, “Don’t try to fly too high,” or whether it might also be thought of as “Forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.”

That Zeiss lens/Mitchell BNC was a better job on the wings. 

Slop Is Slop

Monday, 29 December 2025

Some follow-up on the looks-like-AI-slop “painting” Tim Cook posted on Twitter/X on Christmas Eve to promote the Pluribus season finale. Slashdot contacted the credited artist, Keith Thomson, and quoted this interaction with him:

Slashdot: I just wanted to confirm that that’s your work... If it is your work, can you say anything about what software you used when creating the image?

Thomson: I’m unable to comment on specific client projects. In general, I always draw and paint by hand and sometimes incorporate standard digital tools.

That is a non-denial denial that he used generative AI to create the image.

Dwayne Cubbins at PiunikaWeb also contacted Keith Thomson and got this statement:

The artist, Keith Thomson, responded to my request for a comment, stating that they “always draw by hand and sometimes incorporate standard digital tools.”

That is the same non-denial denial, because “standard digital tools” might include generative AI.

MG Siegler wonders if it’s a deliberate allegory to some of the themes from the show, writing:

Keith Thomson using AI to produce art that’s like Keith Thomson’s art because it’s trained on Keith Thomson’s art. How’s that for a mindfuck?

I’m sure I’m reading wayyyy too much into that tweet (and retweet), but given my previous post about Pluribus as an AI allegory, I think it’s sort of interesting to think about in that context.

MG’s posts have some spoilers re: Pluribus, so follow those links at your own risk. Pluribus is best enjoyed if you start watching it knowing as little about it as possible. But without spoiling anything, I think MG didn’t put enough y’s in the wayyyy in “I’m sure I’m reading wayyyy too much into that tweet”. There is no 3D chess being played here.

I wrote just a few months ago that I firmly believe generative AI tools not only can be, but already are, used to create genuine art. My problem with AI slop isn’t the AI, it’s the slop. Whatever “standard digital tools” Keith Thomson used to create this, the result is a turd.

Pluribus, among numerous other merits, is a beautifully filmed show. Thomson’s published paintings are beautiful. The image Tim Cook posted on Twitter/X (and which the Apple TV account retweeted) is ugly and awkward. It either is AI-generated slop or it looks like AI-generated slop for no artistic or thematic reason whatsoever. Occam’s razor would suggest the conclusion that it simply is AI-generated slop, and Keith Thomson suckered Apple into paying for it. 

Sunday, 28 December 2025

Copilot Money 

My thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring last week at DF. Copilot is a personal finance app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’ve always deeply believed in the value of embracing the design idioms and technical features of truly native apps for Apple platforms. Apple has noticed, awarding Copilot an App Store Editor’s Choice and featuring Copilot earlier this year on Apple Developer for their use of Swift Charts.

Copilot’s big news this week is they’ve launched a new web app, bringing access to Copilot from any device, anywhere. It’s designed with all the attention to detail — and concern for privacy and security — as their native apps.

Copilot Money brings all your spending, budgets, investments, and net worth into one organized dashboard, with intelligent categorization and insights that help you stay on track without spreadsheets or app-hopping. Designed to feel calm and intuitive, Copilot makes it easy to understand your finances across all your devices.

Copilot first sponsored DF back in 2021. My wife and I started using it then to track our finances, and we haven’t looked back. Copilot Money isn’t just better than anything we’d used before, it absolutely blew everything else away. It’s easy to connect to your financial accounts, and once you do, you don’t need to spend any effort at all to enter transactions. Copilot just tracks it all automatically, and most importantly, presents it to you in clear, intuitive ways. It’s so good. I’m not saying that because they sponsored DF last week — I’m saying that as a happy paying customer for over four years now.

Copilot is offering DF readers two months free with code DARING, plus 26% off your first year for a limited time, available through this link.

SoundSource 6 

Major update to Rogue Amoeba’s essential audio utility for the Mac. I’ve written about versions 5 and 4 previously, and everything I wrote then remains true. SoundSource remains the system-wide audio menu item that ought to be built into MacOS, giving you easy, intuitive control over every audio device (input and output), and easy, intuitive control over every app in which you play or record audio. That one seemingly-simple app does both those things is quite the remarkable design achievement. And aside from that usability, SoundSource remains an exemplar of UI design stylistically — distinctive and branded, while looking and feeling in every way like a standard Mac app.

New tentpole features in version 6 include fine-grained AirPlay support (e.g. route output from one app over AirPlay while leaving the rest of your system’s audio output local to your Mac), groups for output devices, and a new “Quick Configs” feature for saving and switching between, well, quick configurations. $49 for a new license, $25 to upgrade from a previous one.

Saturday, 27 December 2025

Tim Cook Posts AI Slop in Christmas Message on Twitter/X, Ostensibly to Promote ‘Pluribus’ 

The whole illustration is just weird looking, for one thing. As for sloppy details, the tree is in soft focus but somehow has a crisp edge, the carton is labeled both “Whole Milk” and “Lowfat Milk”, and the “Cow Fun Puzzle” maze is just goofily wrong. (I can’t recall ever seeing a puzzle of any kind on a milk carton, because they’re waxy and hard to write on. It’s like a conflation of milk cartons and cereal boxes.)

[Update, 29 December: Turns out, the “lowfat” milk carton props from the actual show have the same mistake with “whole milk” printed above. That doesn’t change that it’s a stupid mistake to copy, or that there are a slew of other telltale signs that the image was generated by AI.]

The Apple TV X account retweeted Cook, and added a credit: “We thought you might like this festive artwork by Keith Thomson, made on MacBook Pro.”

Apple didn’t tag the “Keith Thomson” who supposedly created this artwork for them, but if it’s this Keith Thomson, Apple must have somehow fallen for a scam, because that Keith Thomson’s published paintings are wonderful. It does seem to be that Keith Thomson’s signature on Apple’s sloppy illustration, though. (I like a bunch of the paintings from that Keith Thomson, and love a few of them, but this one in particular feels like it was made just for me. It’s perfect.)

Thursday, 25 December 2025

A 3D Tour Inside Trump’s Oval Office 

Terrific interaction design from The New York Times. Not so terrific interior design from the president.

Wednesday, 24 December 2025

The Talk Show: ‘A Naughty Citizen’ 

Special guest Quinn Nelson returns for a two-topic holiday spectacular: the iPad in the wake of iPadOS 26, and Apple’s executive changes as Tim Cook seemingly nears the end of his time as CEO.

Sponsored by:

  • Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together.
  • Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
Quinn Nelson on Apple’s Executive Shuffling 

Another great video from Quinn Nelson. If your dumb cousin who knows you’re an Apple nerd approaches you on Christmas and says “Hey what’s going on at Apple, Bloomberg says it’s rats leaving a sinking ship over there?” and you don’t feel like explaining, just tell him to watch this video. Just the perfect explanation.

‘The iPad’s Software Problem Is Permanent’ 

Smart, fair video from Quinn Nelson on the gap that remains between iPadOS 26 and desktop OSes. I think it’s right that there is a gap there. Apple has the Macintosh, the best desktop/workstation platform in the industry. So whatever the ideal is for iPadOS, it ought to fall short of MacOS in terms of technical capabilities, and instead offer a degree of simplicity and can’t-screw-it-up-edness that the Mac can’t match. But, some of the limitations that remain in iPadOS are just frustrating. iPadOS 26 is a huge leap forward, and I think sets the stage for Apple to address those limitations.

Tuesday, 23 December 2025

I Guess Nothing Is Foolproof 

From a 2023 report at The Verge:

Sony highly confidential information about its PlayStation business has just been revealed by mistake. As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games.

It looks like someone redacted the documents with a black Sharpie — but when you scan them in, it’s easy to see some of the redactions. Oops.

This is sort of the exception that proves the rule regarding redactions. If you redact a document digitally, you have to know what to look for (e.g. metadata) to be certain you’ve redacted everything you want to redact. If you redact a document on paper, you can just look at it, with good light and sharp eyes.

‘Terrence Malick’s Disciples’ 

Splendid essay by Bilge Ebiri for The Yale Review, a meditation both on the films of Terrence Malick and several filmmakers he’s deeply influenced.

The White House’s Belligerent, Ignorant Statement on the ‘60 Minutes’ CECOT Story 

CNN media analyst Brian Stelter, on Bluesky:

As “60 Minutes” finalized its “Inside CECOT” report last Thursday, CBS sent the White House a request for comment. A WH spokesperson responded within a few hours. The quote was not included in the “60” report — so, judge for yourself whether it should have been included or not.

WH spokesperson Abigail Jackson said “60 Minutes should spend their time and energy amplifying the stories of Angel Parents, whose innocent American children have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens that President Trump are removing from the country.”

Despite the fact that it doesn’t address a single aspect of the report, 60 Minutes should have included that statement, both to reveal the belligerent callousness of the administration, and to highlight the glaring grammatical error. In its way, the statement speaks volumes.

Amateur Codebreaker May Have Solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac Killings 

Christopher Goffard, reporting for the Los Angeles Times (News+ link):

When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short — who became known as the Black Dahlia — he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill.

Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who had expressed an eagerness to practice surgery. He was “a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression,” a military psychiatrist had concluded.

At first, Margolis did not tell detectives that he had lived with Short for 12 days at a Hollywood Boulevard apartment, three months before her January 1947 murder. [...]

A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with five seemingly random murders from 1968 to 1969, taunting police and media for years with letters and cryptograms.

The toughest to decipher was the letter he sent in April 1970 to the San Francisco Chronicle, with the words “My name is —” followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols. It came to be called the Z13 cipher, and its brevity has stymied generations of PhDs and puzzle prodigies.

Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer’s identity — and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well.

“It’s irrefutable,” said Baber, obsessive, hyperfocused and cocksure in manner, his memory encyclopedic and his speech a firehose of dates, locations and surprising linkages.

What a story. The circumstantial evidence pointing to Margolis seems pretty strong. What I can’t find is an explanation of Baber’s solution to the Z13 cypher. The “irrefutable” description hinges on that. There’s a new podcast, “Killer in the Code”, from author Michael Connelly that details Baber’s supposed solution tying both cases to the same guy. All the publicity about this today stems from the debut of that podcast yesterday.

Trump Justice Department Dopes Made the Rookiest of Rookie Mistakes Attempting to Redact Some Epstein-File PDFs 

Everyone who works with official PDFs in any capacity should know that if you start with a PDF containing text you want to redact, and you just place black bars atop that text and resave the file, the original text is all still there in the new PDF file. It’s the digital equivalent of putting sticky notes atop the text. You don’t even need to crack open the new PDF in a text (or hex) editor and hunt for the original text within non-human-readable PDF formatting code. You just open the PDF in Preview or Acrobat or any other PDF viewer, use the regular text selection cursor to select the text under the black bars, copy, and then paste into any other app. Everyone should know this but it keeps happening. Now it’s happened with the new batch of Epstein files released by the DOJ.

There are major differences between the Trump 1.0 and 2.0 administrations. In the Trump 1.0 administration, many of the most important officials were very competent men. One example would be then-Attorney General William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file. There are ways to properly redact a PDF digitally, but going analog is foolproof.

The Trump 2.0 administration, in contrast, is staffed top to bottom with fools.

Monday, 22 December 2025

‘Bari Weiss Steps Onto the CBS News Glass Cliff of Doom’ 

Elizabeth Lopatto, back in October, after Bari Weiss was first named editor-in-chief of CBS News by David Ellison after his acquisition of Paramount:

This is the glass cliff to end all glass cliffs. You’re Marissa Mayer at Yahoo without the Googler street cred. You’re Nancy Dubuc at Vice without the string of hit TV shows. You’re Linda Yaccarino at Twitter without the advertiser relationships. You have been hired as a sop to a Trump administration that is actively hostile to the actual free press, and you will be made to oversee wave after wave of layoffs until you quit or get fired and the entire news division is shut down in a final spasm of cost-cutting after the next inescapable media merger.

The only thing Lopatto missed in her prescient piece is that Weiss might not last long enough to still be leading CBS News by the time Ellison gets to layoffs. It’s simply untenable for a partisan propagandist to be leading a legitimate news organization. Two months into the job and Weiss has already made a complete fool of herself. Her ham-fisted (but failed) attempt to censor a fair and well-reported piece critical of the Trump administration’s deportation policies comes just one week after a televised town hall with Erika Kirk (widow of Charlie Kirk), which Weiss herself hosted, for which the commercial spots were filled by direct marketing dietary supplements and, I swear, Chia Pets.

It’s been an inauspicious two months on the job for Weiss, to say the least.

The ‘60 Minutes’ Report on CECOT That Bari Weiss Censored Is Now Internet Contraband 

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge:

60 Minutes had already begun promoting the now-censored segment online. Because it was pulled so late, it seems that CBS missed at least one platform for distribution: Canada’s Global TV. Some people used a VPN to watch it; at least one person recorded it, distributing it through an iCloud account.

The segment, which has been reviewed by The Verge, is a little shy of 14 minutes long. It features video of men, chained and bent double, being “paraded in front of cameras, pushed onto buses, and delivered to CECOT,” according to the segment’s narration. One former detainee, who CBS met in Colombia, said he was told he was “the living dead” at CECOT. After trying to seek asylum in the US, he says he was detained by customs and held for 6 months before being deported. He described horrific conditions at the prison, saying he was beaten until he bled and that he was thrown into a wall so hard he broke one of his teeth. He also described sexual assault by the guards. Another interviewed former detainee described what can only be called torture: being forced to kneel for 24 hours, and being put in a dark room, where they were beaten if they moved from the stress position. [...]

Anyway, best of luck to Weiss in playing DMCA whack-a-mole with the video of the story. The segment lives as online samizdat now. Thanks to Weiss’ censorship, it may very well wind up being the most-talked-about CBS News story this year.

There are a bunch of copies on social media, but most are video of the TV broadcast in Canada shot from an iPhone. The Internet Archive, however, has a clean copy that’s a direct screen recording. Watch for yourself.

In addition to being the most-talked-about CBS News story of the year, it’ll almost certainly be the most-watched. But CBS will get none of the views or ad revenue. There’s no better way to make people want to watch something than to tell them they shouldn’t watch it. The Streisand effect is very real.

CBS News Chief Bari Weiss Pulls ‘60 Minutes’ Story on Trump’s CECOT Gulag in El Salvador 

David Folkenflik, reporting for NPR:

Just a day and a half before it was set to be broadcast, new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss pulled a planned 60 Minutes investigative segment centering on allegations of abuses at an El Salvador detention center where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants last March.

Weiss told colleagues this weekend the piece — planned for Sunday night’s show — could not run without an on-the-record comment from an administration official. She pushed for 60 Minutes to interview Stephen Miller, senior advisor to President Trump, or someone of his stature. That’s according to two people with knowledge of events at the network who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing job security.

The correspondent on the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, condemned the decision in an email to 60 Minutes colleagues on Sunday evening, saying she believed it was “not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” [...] Alfonsi wrote that she and her colleagues on the story had sought comments and interviews from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House and the State Department.

“Government silence is a statement, not a VETO,” Alfonsi wrote in the email. “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”

It is not surprising in the least bit that Weiss tried to censor a jarring report on Trump’s illegal torture prison in El Salvador. It is, perhaps, slightly surprising how dumb this attempt is. Of course it’s a good principle of journalism to allow the other side of a story to comment or be interviewed. But the idea that the other side can just decline to participate and that means you can’t run the story is like fingers-in-your-ears “I can’t hear you!” playground nonsense. You run the story and say that they declined to comment.

It’s not just that Weiss kiboshed a solid piece of reporting from 60 Minutes. It’s that the editor-in-chief of CBS News is now on the record as saying that the entire staff of 60 Minutes wanted to run an unfair hit piece on the Trump administration. The decline of CBS as an institution continues.

Sunday, 21 December 2025

Finalist 

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner — a digital take on traditional paper planners. Its motto: “Most productivity apps help you organize tasks. Finalist helps you finish them.”

One aspect of Finalist that makes it different from most to-do/task apps is that instead of setting due dates for tasks, you add tasks to specific days. This really resonates with me. With most apps in this domain, the top-level items are tasks, and tasks have (optional) due dates. With Finalist, the top-level items are days, and days have tasks and events. This might sound like I’m splitting semantic hairs but it gives Finalist a very different feel, one that’s more natural to me. If you’ve got unfinished items from yesterday, Finalist lets you move them all forward to today with one tap. Or, move some forward, and leave others behind. Or, just leave them all behind and move on. Up to you. I like that.

Finalist integrates with the system in all the ways you’d hope, including with the system calendar APIs and the Reminders app. So events in your system calendar and items from Reminders show up on your days in Finalist. Finalist lets you create events (calendar items), reminders (to-dos that are synced with Reminders), tasks (to-dos that exist only in Finalist), journal entries (like notes to yourself), and section headers if you have a busy day and need to group certain items together. Oh, and “habits”, too — recurring to-dos for habits you want to build or break. It sounds like a lot, but it all fits together neatly, covering the gamut of stuff you’d track in a daily paper planner. And everything in Finalist syncs between platforms (iPhone, iPad, Mac) with iCloud. There’s no account to create — it just uses iCloud, which is private and simple.

It’s not minimalist, but it’s not complicated. I’ve had a lot of fun learning to use Finalist just by exploring it. It’s thoughtful and intuitive. Like any civilized app, Finalist’s tags allow you to include spaces and capital letters in tag names, and don’t start with a stupid # character. And, design-wise, Finalist is very handsome — it offers customizable color themes and makes terrific use of the typographic features of the San Francisco system font.

Subscriptions cost $5/month or $30/year. A lifetime license costs just $60. It supports Family Sharing too.

I’m kind of blown away by how robust and thoughtful Finalist is. It’s not a web app with iOS and Mac clients. It’s a suite of native apps designed with care for Apple’s platforms. Auteur software, with a distinctive brand and vision, while remaining idiomatically native. Bravo to Slaven Radic. I strongly encourage you to check it out.

Apple Announces Changes to iOS in Japan for Compliance With the Mobile Software Competition Act

Saturday, 20 December 2025

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac this week:

To comply with the Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA), Apple has announced a set of major changes to the App Store and iPhone in Japan. The changes include new app distribution options for developers and new alternative payment rules for the App Store.

Apple announced the changes in a post on Apple Newsroom today and on its developer website. The company says that Japan’s “MSCA’s requirements for alternative app marketplaces and app payments open new avenues for malware, fraud and scams, and privacy and security risks.” Nonetheless, the company has collaborated with Japanese regulators to strike as best a balance as possible to comply with the law and protect users.

Broadly speaking, Apple says Japan’s MSCA does a better job of balancing openness with security and user protection than the DMA in the EU. For example, Apple does not have to support app downloads from the web in Japan like it does under the DMA. Apple retains ability to protect users from malware and other security risks. This is especially true when it comes to protecting children, as outlined below.

Developers in Japan can now offer their own payment processing within their apps and games, and offer link-outs to the web, but these options must be offered alongside the option to pay using Apple’s own in-app purchase system. Developers are allowed to offer lower prices in alternative payment methods. That strikes me as a decent, but not ideal balance. I think it’s fair for Apple to mandate that its own IAP be offered alongside any form of alternative payment within an app. But, as I’ve long advocated, links to the web — leaving the app for the system’s default browser — should be permitted without having to offer IAP too. But overall, where Japan landed is reasonable.

From Juli Clover’s report on Apple’s MSCA compliance at MacRumors:

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s changing as of today:

  • Side Button — Users in Japan will be able to change what the side button does, and it will be able to activate third-party voice assistants instead of Siri.
  • Payment options — Developers can offer in-app purchases, accept third-party payments in their apps, or direct users to a website to make a purchase.
  • Alternative app marketplaces — Apps can be distributed through alternative app marketplaces instead of the App Store. Users can set an alternative app marketplace as their default marketplace instead of the App Store.
  • Fee changes — New fees range from 5% to 26% depending on distribution method and payment method.
  • Browser choice — Users are prompted to select a default browser at setup.
  • Search engine choice — Users are prompted to choose a default Search engine at setup.
  • Navigation apps — Users in Japan can select a different navigation app.

Apple, in its own announcement, asserted its disagreement:

The MSCA’s requirements for alternative app marketplaces and app payments open new avenues for malware, fraud and scams, and privacy and security risks.

Of course they disagree with Japan’s MSCA on some of these things. If Apple didn’t disagree, they’d implement these features worldwide, not make them specific to Japan. And since they’re not applying these compliance measures worldwide, it’s correct for Apple to explain why.

But on the whole, this is a gentlemen’s disagreement — a polite agreement to disagree, with Apple making their case but then implementing the necessary measures for compliance without complaint. A polite explanation that they see some of these measures as introducing privacy and security risks is not a complaint per se.

This is of a piece with Apple’s longstanding respect for and relationship with the Japanese government. Back in 2021, Apple changed the rules for “reader” apps in Japan to allow linking to websites, in order to comply with a ruling from the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC). In Apple’s announcement, App Store chief Phil Schiller said the following:

“Trust on the App Store is everything to us. The focus of the App Store is always to create a safe and secure experience for users, while helping them find and use great apps on the devices they love,” said Phil Schiller, Apple Fellow who oversees the App Store. “We have great respect for the Japan Fair Trade Commission and appreciate the work we’ve done together, which will help developers of reader apps make it easier for users to set up and manage their apps and services, while protecting their privacy and maintaining their trust.”

You can search, but you won’t find quotes from Schiller, nor any other Apple representatives, speaking of their “great respect for” and appreciation of the work they’ve done together regarding the European Commission and the DMA. Chance Miller, in his above-linked report at 9to5Mac, wrote, “Apple says Japan’s MSCA does a better job of balancing openness with security and user protection than the DMA in the EU.” I was in the same briefing with Apple representatives as Miller, and I’d say Apple was more clear than that. In addition to seeing the MSCA as more aligned with Apple’s own priorities regarding privacy and security than the DMA, Apple repeatedly emphasized that the MSCA respected Apple’s intellectual property in ways that the DMA does not. Complying with the DMA is adversarial and obtuse. An Apple spokesperson confirmed that, in contrast with the DMA, the guidelines that accompany the MSCA provide more clarity on things like privacy, security, safety, and youth protection. (E.g. apps distributed outside the App Store in Japan still require age ratings. There’s no such requirement in the EU.)

Because of the DMA, Apple has delayed and outright withheld major features in the EU. iPhone Mirroring, one of Apple’s best new features in recent years, is still unavailable in the EU. Apple fully expects more features to be delayed or withheld from the EU as time goes on. (With Apple Watch, they’ve now been forced to remove (or perhaps better said, hamstring) a feature that existed since Apple Watch debuted in 2015.) There have been no such feature delays (let alone withholdings) in Japan, nor does Apple expect there to be. The MSCA targets specific issues related to competition: how iOS apps are distributed, and how they are monetized. The MSCA choice-screen mandates for web browsers and search engines are clear, and don’t impose any odious or particularly confusing obstacles to users.1 Apple has made clear that they don’t agree with every aspect of the MSCA, but if you read between the lines, you can see a begrudging acknowledgement from Apple that the MSCA is well-intended, clear, and attempts to strike a balance between user experience, privacy, and security; respect for Apple’s intellectual property; and the anticompetitive aspects of Apple’s control over app distribution and payments that the law was written to address.

There is a mutual respect here between Apple and Japan that is completely absent between Apple and the European Commission. The MSCA, through its focus and clarity, is also more respectful of users. Users in Japan get the benefit of alternative app distribution (AltStore is already there) and alternative payment options with no trade-offs like delayed or withheld features. It’s hard to find anything aside from small nits to complain about in the MSCA. It arguably gives Japanese users a better, more robust iOS experience than what Apple offers to the rest of the world.2 The DMA, in contrast, has given EU users a worse iOS experience.

It’s the practical results of legislation and regulation that matter, not the intentions. The Japanese government seemingly gets that, and acts accordingly. 

  1. I think these mandatory choice screens are rather stupid. They have not proven to be effective in Europe. They’re a feel-good mandate for bureaucrats. Look, here’s a whole screen that we have forced upon every single user — visible, unavoidable proof that we have done something. Who cares whether most people do not know what a “default browser” is, or what a “search engine” is? We’ll make them pick anyway. The end result is that nothing has changed in terms of browser or search engine market share. All they’ve really accomplished is to make first-run onboarding time slightly longer. But — so long as users aren’t forced to face these choice screens repeatedly, they’re only a minor irritation. They’re like a mandatory “you should wear a helmet” warning label on a skateboard. You peel it off and throw it away, and the percentage of skateboarders who wear a helmet remains unchanged. ↩︎

  2. If we had alternative iOS app marketplaces in the US, like they do in the EU and now have in Japan, ICEBlock might still be available for download. I say might because it’s impossible to know whether Apple would attempt to stymie ICEBlock at the notarization level, given some of the cases where they’ve used notarization to block apps in the EU. But if alternative app marketplaces were available in the US, ICEBlock certainly should still be available. Really, it should still be available in the App Store. ↩︎︎

Friday, 19 December 2025

Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code 

The Computer History Museum:

Thomas Knoll, a PhD student in computer vision at the University of Michigan, had written a program in 1987 to display and modify digital images. His brother John, working at the movie visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, found it useful for editing photos, but it wasn’t intended to be a product. Thomas said, “We developed it originally for our own personal use … it was a lot a fun to do.”

Gradually the program, called “Display”, became more sophisticated. In the summer of 1988 they realized that it indeed could be a credible commercial product. They renamed it “Photoshop” and began to search for a company to distribute it. About 200 copies of version 0.87 were bundled by slide scanner manufacturer Barneyscan as “Barneyscan XP”.

The fate of Photoshop was sealed when Adobe, encouraged by its art director Russell Brown, decided to buy a license to distribute an enhanced version of Photoshop. The deal was finalized in April 1989, and version 1.0 started shipping early in 1990.

Along with the 1.0 source code (mostly Pascal, with some 68K assembler), CHM has PDFs of Adobe’s excellent Photoshop 1.0 User Guide and Tutorial. CHM trustee Grady Booch, chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research Almaden, on the source code:

There are only a few comments in the version 1.0 source code, most of which are associated with assembly language snippets. That said, the lack of comments is simply not an issue. This code is so literate, so easy to read, that comments might even have gotten in the way. [...] This is the kind of code I aspire to write.

A little birdie who works at Adobe today told me, regarding the lack of comments, “Let me assure you, that trend continued for the next 35 years.”

Jason Snell, at Six Colors, notes:

The only shame is that this release doesn’t include the code from the MacApp applications library, which Photoshop used and is owned by Apple. It would sure be nice if Apple made that code available as well.

Says my little birdie, “Turns out Adobe got a perpetual license to MacApp and a heavily modified version of it is still the basis of the UI code. It is only recently starting to get replaced. Even more crazy is that parts of that MacApp code are running on iOS and Android and the web versions.”

Quite the legacy for what started as a personal project between two brothers.

Still No Release Date for Apple TV’s ‘The Savant’ 

Apple TV’s press page has stories this month announcing release dates and first looks for a bunch of shows: Imperfect Women (a “psychological thriller”), Beat the Reaper (“dramedy”), a still-untitled Monarch: Legacy of Monsters spinoff, Widow’s Bay (“blends genuine horror with character-driven comedy”), season 2 of the Idris Elba thriller Hijack, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a series from David E. Kelley starring Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicole Kidman, and Nick Offerman (good cast!).

But not a word about Jessica Chastain’s The Savant, which was supposed to debut in September, was postponed after the Charlie Kirk shooting (against Chastain’s wishes), and has been in “At a later date” scheduling limbo ever since.

Anonymous Reddit Tipster Cracked the Brown University and MIT Shooting Cases 

Alexander Smith and Claire Cardona, NBC News:

Online tipsters have had a mixed record when it comes to providing information about mass casualty incidents. But Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said this Reddit user “blew the case wide open” after posting about their encounter on Saturday with the suspect.

“I’m being dead serious,” wrote the Reddit user, identified in an affidavit as “John,” three days after the shootings at Brown. “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental.”

Apple Changes Processor Architectures More Often Than Its Identity Font 

Yesterday I wrote:

For the last 40 years Apple has only gone through three identity fonts: Garamond → Myriad → San Francisco.

DF reader Cameron McKay emailed to observe: “It strikes me that Apple changes CPU architectures (68K → PowerPC → Intel → ARM) more often than identity fonts. They’d sooner re-engineer their products’ deepest technical building blocks than change typefaces. I suspect that’s rare among tech companies.”

I wish I’d thought to mention that yesterday.

I’ll add that I suspect San Francisco might effectively be Apple’s “forever font”. Forever is a long time, but San Francisco, in its default appearance, strives for the sort of timelessness that Helvetica achieved. And San Francisco offers a wide (no pun intended) variety of widths and weights. This is San Francisco. This is too. (Screenshots for posterity, when Apple’s website changes: iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air.)

I also suspect that Apple Silicon is Apple’s “forever architecture”.

A Request Regarding ‘Magic Link’ Sign-Ins and Apple’s Passwords App

Friday, 19 December 2025

In Juli Clover’s aforelinked rundown of what’s new across the whole system in iOS 26.2, I misunderstood this item regarding the Passwords app:

In the Settings section of the Passwords app, there’s an option to manage websites where passwords are not saved when signing in.

This new setting is about managing sites that you have previously excluded from having a password entry saved. (In the Settings app, go to Apps → Passwords and then tap “Show Excluded Websites”.)

What I was hoping this was about is a feature Passwords doesn’t have, but that I want. There are many sites — and the trend seems to be accelerating — that do not use passwords (or passkeys) for signing in. Instead, they only support signing in via expiring “magic links” sent by email (or, sometimes, via text messages). To sign in with such a site, you enter your email address, hit a button, and the site emails you a fresh link that you need to follow to sign in.1 I despise this design pattern, because it’s inherently slower than signing in using an email/password combination that was saved to my passwords app and autofilled by my web browser. My password manager is Apple Passwords and my browser is Safari, but this is true for any good password manager and web browser. It’s not just a little slower but a lot slower to sign in with a “magic link”. It sometimes takes minutes for the email to arrive, and even in the best case, it takes at least 15 seconds or so. Saved-password autofill, on the other hand, happens instantly.2

To make matters worse, when you create a new account using a “magic link”, nothing gets saved to Apple Passwords. I don’t have many email addresses in active use, but I do have several. Sometimes I don’t remember which one I used for my account on a certain site. It doesn’t get autofilled by Apple Passwords because account entries in Apple Passwords require a password. I was hoping the above feature mentioned by Clover was a way to address this — that you could now enable a setting to get Passwords to save just your email address for websites and services that exclusively use “magic links” for signing in. No dice. Apple Passwords team, if you’re reading this, please give this some thought. I can’t be the only person irritated by this.

One workaround I’ve used for a few sites with which I keep running into this situation (Status, I’m looking in your direction) is to manually create an entry in Apple Passwords for the site with the email address I used to subscribe, and a made-up single-character password. Apple Passwords won’t let you save an entry without something in the password field, and a single-character password is a visual clue to my future self why I did this. When I do this, I also put a note to myself in the notes field for the entry. And by using just a single character for the made-up password, I can tell what I did even when the password is displayed using bullets to obscure its actual characters. (Screenshot.) If you feel like I do about “magic links”, the 🖕 emoji is a good “password” for such entries.

Once saved like this, my email address still doesn’t autofill on such sites in Safari, but the list of my saved email addresses in the suggestion list that appears when I click in the Email text field will have a “saved password” label next to the one for which I made this entry in Apple Passwords. This at least solves the problem when I can’t remember which address I used to create my account on a site.

Better would be a way for Passwords to ask if you want to save just your email address for sites with “magic link” sign-ins, and then for Safari to autocomplete that address just like it does for username/password combinations. I can see how this would be a tricky problem for Apple Passwords to solve in a way that makes clear to the user why certain entries do not have passwords, but it’s a problem worth solving. 

  1. This design pattern is common with paywalled subscription content sites, like email newsletters, to cut down on password sharing. Let’s say someone pays $10/month for a subscription-based newsletter. If they can sign in using an email/password combination, they might be willing to share their email/password combination for that particular site with a few friends or colleagues, to give them access to the same paywalled content without paying for their own subscriptions. Same goes for sharing email/password combinations for streaming services like Netflix. Well, you can’t share a password if there is no password to share. If the only way to log in to a subscription-based account is via a magic link that expires within minutes, it’s a lot harder for person A to share their account with person B (let alone with persons C, D, E, and F — nor can persons B through F share the account with others, because they don’t have access to the email). Person B has to tell person A that they’re signing in again, then person A has to wait for the email to arrive, and then person B needs to wait for person A to copy and paste the “magic” link, and hope it arrives before it expires. This pattern adds a significant convenience cost to account sharing — but it also makes signing in more annoying for honest users who aren’t sharing their accounts. ↩︎

  2. Proponents of “magic links” argue that they’re beneficial for technically befuddled users who don’t use a password manager. That’s a good argument for offering “magic links” as an option, but it’s not a good argument for making them the exclusive way to sign in to a site or service. Good password managers are built into modern OSes and web browsers. Those of us who use them should not be punished with a significantly worse experience just because some users do not. When “magic links” are offered as an alternative to a saved password or passkey, there’s a path for all users. When “magic links” are the exclusive method for signing in, all users get the slowest experience.

    (And yes, Passport, the subscription system behind Dithering and the rest of Ben Thompson’s Stratechery media empire, exclusively uses “magic links” for sign-in. I don’t like it, but, in Passports’s defense, once you’re signed in, Passport keeps you signed in for a very long time. Other CMSes tend to expire sign-ins far too quickly, which makes for a particularly frustrating experience with “magic links” because you need to keep using them every few weeks.) ↩︎︎

Friday, 19 December 2025

Apple’s 26.2 OS Updates 

Apple released all of its OS 26.2 updates a week ago today. A little unusual for Apple to release OS updates on a Friday, but I think they wanted to get these out before Christmas week. And I don’t think it was rushed — for iOS 26.2 at least, there were two release candidate builds during beta testing. I suspect Apple had hoped to release them earlier.

I know it seemed weird back at WWDC when Apple announced that they were re-numbering all their OS versions to start with 26. But now that the change has settled in for a few months, it seems very natural. It’s so easy now to remember that the current major version for each OS is 26. It’s also easier to talk about new features that span across OSes. And, in the future, when you see a reference to, say, iOS 26, you’ll know exactly when that version came out without having to think, because it’s right there in the version number itself.

A few other notes:

Lastly, iOS 26.2 seems to be the release that Apple is starting to suggest as an upgrade for users who hadn’t already installed it by choice. Be prepared for questions and complaints from non-nerd friends and family who’ve never even heard of “Liquid Glass”.

Apple Is Adding More Ad Spots to App Store Results 

Apple, on its Apple Ads site:

Search is the way most people find and download apps on the App Store, with nearly 65 percent of downloads happening directly after a search. To help give advertisers more opportunities to drive downloads from search results, Apple Ads will introduce additional ads across search queries. You don’t need to change your campaign in order to be eligible for any new positions. Your ad will run in either the existing position — at the top of search results — or further down in search results. If you have a search results campaign running, your ad will be automatically eligible for all available positions, but you can’t select or bid for a particular one.

The ad format will be the same in any position, using a default product page or custom product page, and an optional deep link. You’ll be billed as usual based on your pricing model: cost per tap or cost per install.

I have a bad feeling about this.

Thursday, 18 December 2025

ByteDance Signs Deal to Divest U.S. TikTok App 

David Shepardson, reporting for Reuters:

TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said Thursday it signed binding agreements with three major investors to form a joint venture to operate TikTok’s U.S. app led by American and global investors in a bid to avoid a U.S. government ban, a significant step toward ending years of uncertainty.

The craziest aspect of this whole saga is that TikTok has been operating illegally since Trump took office. Not some sort of nitpicking technicality. The whole point of the PAFACA act was to ban TikTok in the US until and unless they were sold to American owners. No cloud service. No app store downloads. Trump directed the Justice Department simply not to enforce the law … and the biggest companies in the world just said OK, sure.

This just isn’t normal. There are always edge cases in the enforcement of any law. Political leanings affect priorities. Old laws are often ignored. But PAFACA was a brand new law, with bipartisan support, specifically written to target TikTok, and the Trump administration decided to just ignore it. This wouldn’t happen anywhere in Europe or in, say, Japan. And it wouldn’t have happened under any previous US administration, Democrat or Republican. It’s not the biggest issue or worst wrongdoing of the Trump 2.0 administration, but it’s clearest indication of their disregard for the rule of law.

See also: Techmeme’s roundup of news and commentary on the deal. (Karl Bode at Techdirt: “It’s Somehow The Shittiest Possible Outcome, Making Everything Worse”.)

Michael Bierut Told Us What He Really Thinks of ITC Garamond 

Michael Bierut, “I Hate ITC Garamond”, for Design Observer back in 2004:

ITC Garamond was designed in 1975 by Tony Stan for the International Typeface Corporation. Okay, let’s stop right there. I’ll admit it: the single phrase “designed in 1975 by Tony Stan” conjures up a entire world for me, a world of leisure suits, harvest gold refrigerators, and “Fly, Robin, Fly” by Silver Convention on the eight-track. A world where font designers were called “Tony” instead of “Tobias” or “Zuzana.” Is that the trouble with ITC Garamond? That it’s dated?

Maybe. Typefaces seem to live in the world differently than other designed objects. Take architecture, for example. As Paul Goldberger writes in his new book on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan, Up From Zero, “There are many phases to the relationships we have with buildings, and almost invariably they come around to acceptance.” Typefaces, on the other hand, seem to work the other way: they are enthusiastically embraced on arrival, and then they wear out their welcome. Yet there are fonts from the disco era that have been successively revived by new generations. Think of Pump, Aachen, or even Tony Stan’s own American Typewriter. But not ITC Garamond.

The most distinctive element of the typeface is its enormous lower-case x-height. In theory this improves its legibility, but only in the same way that dog poop’s creamy consistency in theory should make it more edible.

I can’t explain how it is that I’ve never linked to this piece before.

Condensed Serif Typefaces, à la Apple Garamond, Are Back in Vogue 

Katie Deighton, reporting last month for The Wall Street Journal:

Henry Modisett wanted his employer to stand out. Competitors of the artificial-intelligence firm Perplexity were embracing their science-fiction roots with futuristic branding that felt cold to him. So Modisett, the firm’s vice president of design, looked to the past.

He plowed through graphic-design books and tomes of logos featuring obscure examples like Hungarian oil companies from the ’80s. But he kept coming back to a slender, bookish typeface famously used in Apple’s “Think Different” campaign. Modisett in 2023 began slipping a cousin of the font into Perplexity’s software and marketing materials.

“It felt fresh,” he said.

Not anymore.

Apple’s custom variant of ITC Garamond was called, appropriately enough, Apple Garamond. Apple adopted it in 1984 with the introduction of the Macintosh, and continued using it through the early years of the Aqua/iMac aesthetic. For me it evokes the pinnacle of the six-color era. For Apple’s brand identity and marketing materials, after Apple Garamond came Myriad — which Apple commissioned custom variants of from Adobe. And then Myriad was succeeded by San Francisco, which I suspect still has many years ahead of it. For the last 40 years Apple has only gone through three identity fonts: Garamond → Myriad → San Francisco.

That this style of font is back in vogue is fun. It’s a good look. Friendly. Serious but not staid. The typeface a lot of these brands are using for this today is Instrument Serif, which I don’t love. It’s not bad. But it’s not great. Apple Garamond was great.

(ITC Garamond — but not condensed — served, distinctively, as both the display and body text typeface for O’Reilly books in their heyday. That typeface doesn’t look or feel Apple-like at all, nor does Apple Garamond look or feel O’Reilly-like at all.)

GCDB’s Guide to Gift Card Tampering Scams 

Gift Card Database (GCDB) has a guide to spotting tampered gift cards:

Whilst it may seem unusual, you should tear open this version of Apple gift card before you purchase it so that you can inspect the redemption code. Look for missing or scratched off characters (it may be as subtle as changing an L to look like an I).

If you’re satisfied that the redemption code is legible and undamaged, you can purchase the gift card by scanning the barcode on the other side. If staff question your decision to open it first, calmly explain why you were checking it and refer them to the image above if it helps.

The one major downside of this precaution is that it requires you to basically destroy the gift card packaging so if it’s intended as a present you may just have to give them the smaller inner card instead. Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

I’m not bashful, but I’d be very uncomfortable opening gift cards before I purchased them. The whole point of this is that gift card scams are on the rise. If I saw someone opening gift cards in-store before purchasing them, I’d think they were shameless scammers. If you need to destroy the retail packaging for a gift card to feel certain it hasn’t been tampered with, the whole system seems fundamentally broken. (And just eyeballing the redemption code doesn’t prove it hasn’t been tampered with.)

Wednesday, 17 December 2025

Are Apple Gift Cards Safe to Redeem? 

You will recall the Apple Account fiasco of Paris Buttfield-Addison, whose entire iCloud account and library of iTunes and App Store media purchases were lost when his Apple Account was locked, seemingly after he attempted to redeem a tampered $500 Apple Gift Card that he purchased from a major retailer. I wrote about it, as did Michael Tsai, Nick Heer, Malcom Owen at AppleInsider, and Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register. Buttfield-Addison has updated his post a few times, including a note that Executive Relations — Apple’s top-tier support SWAT team — was looking into the matter. To no avail, at least yet, alas.

Adam Engst, writing at TidBITS today:

There is one way the Apple community could exert some leverage over Apple. Since innocently redeeming a compromised Apple Gift Card can have serious negative consequences, we should all avoid buying Apple Gift Cards and spread the word as widely as possible that they could essentially be malware. Sure, most Apple Gift Cards are probably safe, but do you really want to be the person who gives a close friend or beloved grandchild a compromised card that locks their Apple Account? And if someone gives you one, would you risk redeeming it? It’s digital Russian roulette.

I suspect that one part of Buttfield-Addison’s fiasco is the fact that his seemingly problematic gift card was for $500, not a typical amount like $25, but that’s just a suspicion on my part. We don’t know — because key to the Kafka-esque nature of the whole nightmare is that his account cancellation was a black box. Not only has Apple not yet restored his deactivated Apple Account, at no point in the process have they explained why it was deactivated in the first place. We’re left to guess that it was related to the tampered gift card and that the relatively high value of the card in question was related. $500 is a higher value than average for an Apple gift card, but that amount is less than the average price for a single iPhone. Apple itself sets a limit of $2,000 on gift cards in the US, so $500 shouldn’t be considered an inherently suspicious amount.

The whole thing does make me nervous about redeeming, or giving, Apple gift cards. Scams in general seem to be getting more sophisticated. Buttfield-Addison says he bought the card directly from “a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)”. Until we get some clarity on this I feel like I’d only redeem Apple gift cards at an Apple retail store, for purchases not tied to my Apple Accounts. (I’ve still got two — one for iCloud, one for media purchases.)

In addition to the uncertainty this leaves us with regarding the redemption of Apple gift cards, I have to wonder what the hell happens to these Apple Accounts that are deactivated for suspected fraud. You would think that once escalated high enough in Apple’s customer support system, someone at Apple could just flip a switch and re-activate the account. The fact that Buttfield-Addison’s account has not yet been restored, despite the publicity and apparent escalation to Executive Relations, makes me think it can’t be restored. I don’t know how that can be, but it sure seems like that’s the case. Darth Vader’s “And no disintegrations” admonition ought to be in effect for something like this. I have the sinking feeling that the best Apple is able to do is something seemingly ridiculous, like refund Buttfield-Addison for every purchase he ever made on the account and tell him to start over with a new one.

My other question: Were any humans involved in the decision to deactivate (disintegrate?) his account, or was it determined purely by some sort of fraud detection algorithm?

Update: Very shortly after I posted the above, Buttfield-Addison posted an update that his account was successfully restored by the ninja on Apple’s Executive Relations team assigned to his case. That’s great. But that still leaves the question of how safe Apple gift cards are to redeem on one’s Apple Account. It also leaves the question of how this happened in the first place, and why it took the better part of a week to resolve.

The Story Behind Windows 3.1’s ‘Hot Dog Stand’ UI Color Scheme (Which Isn’t Much of a Story at All) 

Wes Fenlon, writing for PC Gamer:

Did Windows 3.1 really ship with a garish color scheme that was dared into being? That was a story I needed to hear, so I went digging for the credits of the Microsoft employees who worked on the user interface back then and found my way to Virginia Howlett, who joined Microsoft in 1985 as the company’s first interface designer, and worked there up through the launch of Windows 95.

Howlett:

I have been mystified about why that particular theme causes so much comment in the media. Maybe it’s partly the catchy name. (Never underestimate the power of a good brand name!)

I do remember some discussion about whether we should include it, and some snarky laughter. But it was not intended as a joke. It was not inspired by any hot dog stands, and it was not included as an example of a bad interface — although it was one. It was just a garish choice, in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow.

The ‘Fluorescent’ theme was also pretty ugly, but it didn’t have a catchy name, so I’ve never heard anything about it.

I remember this color theme, because I had to use Windows 3.1 at a few jobs in the 1990s, and anyone who used it remembers “Hot Dog Stand”. Howlett’s explanation is exactly what I always thought. It wasn’t for accessibility. It wasn’t a dare or a joke. It was something they knew was ugly and they shipped it anyway in case people wanted an ugly UI.

That’s Microsoft.

Tuesday, 16 December 2025

James Cameron’s Instructions to Theater Projectionists Regarding ‘Avatar 3: Fire and Ash’ 

The letter is typeset in Papyrus, the typeface for which James Cameron’s affection inspired not one but two classic SNL shorts starring Ryan Gosling — which Cameron has a good sense of humor about.

Terrence Malick’s letter accompanying Tree of Life in 2011 was plainly and humbly set in Helvetica. David Lynch’s accompanying Mulholland Drive was also in Helvetica, but in a very Lynchian way. And then there is Stanley Kubrick, whose letter to projectionists that accompanied Barry Lyndon was typeset in Futura — quite the feat in 1975. (It was almost certainly IBM’s Mid-Century typeface, a beautiful adaptation of Futura for their Executive line of typewriters.) Cool custom letterhead on Kubrick’s as well.

Typefaces for Dyslexia 

I dare say this post from Adrian Roselli — first published in 2015 and updated 16 times (and counting) since — is the definitive debunking of the pseudoscience claims regarding deliberately ugly fonts being somehow beneficial to readers with dyslexia.

Zara Picken’s ‘Modern Illustration’ 

Modern Illustration is a project by illustrator Zara Picken, featuring print artefacts from her extensive personal collection. Her aim is to preserve and document outstanding examples of mid-20th century commercial art, creating an accessible resource for understanding illustration history.

Glorious collection of mid-century illustrations and graphic design. Also a good follow on Instagram. (Via Dan Cederholm.)

Monday, 15 December 2025

‘A Brief History of Times New Roman’ 

One more from Matthew Butterick, from his Typography for Lawyers, and a good pairing with Mark Simonson’s “The Scourge of Arial”:

Yet it’s an open question whether its longevity is attributable to its quality or merely its ubiquity. Helvetica still inspires enough affection to have been the subject of a 2007 documentary feature. Times New Roman, meanwhile, has not attracted similar acts of homage.

Why not? Fame has a dark side. When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.

As Simonson mentions in “The Scourge of Arial”, regarding Helvetica’s enduring popularity:

As it spread into the mainstream in the ’70s, many designers tired of it and moved on to other typographic fashions, but by then it had become a staple of everyday design and printing. So in the early ’80s when Adobe developed the PostScript page description language, it was no surprise that they chose Helvetica as one of the basic four fonts to be included with every PostScript interpreter they licensed (along with Times, Courier, and Symbol). Adobe licensed its fonts from the original foundries, demonstrating their respect and appreciation for the integrity of type, type foundries and designers. They perhaps realized that if they had used knock-offs of popular typefaces, the professional graphic arts industry — a key market — would not accept them.

To my mind, Helvetica, Times, and Courier are the three canonical “default” fonts. One modern sans, one modern serif, and one for “typewriter”/code. (When I see Courier in print, at display sizes, my mind immediately wonders if the printer was missing the font that the designer specified in the document file.)

The Symbol font is a different story. It existed and was included with PostScript as one of just four defaults because the 8-bit character encodings of the time only had space for 255 characters. You needed a special font like Symbol to access “exotic” characters like Greek letters, math symbols (e.g. × or ÷), or arrows (↑ ↓ ← →). So there were really only three regular “fonts”, for prose, included with PostScript: Helvetica, Courier, and Times.

Courier and Times were eventually superseded in popular use by rivals that Microsoft licensed for inclusion in Windows: Courier New and Times New Roman, respectively. Times was from Linotype, Times New Roman from Monotype. Both versions of Times are legitimate digital interpretations of the 1929 hot metal design of Times Roman, and their differences are minor. Courier New, on the other hand, is so ugly — anemically thin and weak — that it hurts my teeth whenever I encounter it.

‘The Scourge of Arial’ 

Typographer Mark Simonson, all the way back in 2001:

Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world.

Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

This is the exegesis on Arial. There’s also an exemplary illustrated sidebar, “How to Spot Arial”, which shows in detail how to tell the fucking bastard from Helvetica. If you want to be like me, cursed to notice Arial each time it appears in life, study that, and take note how every single way that it’s different from Helvetica is in the direction of making it uglier.

I’ve referenced “The Scourge of Arial” a few times over the years here at DF, but the recent contretemps over Times New Roman’s return at the US State Department has the general topic of “default fonts” at top of mind. For me, at least.

One of the old posts in which I linked to “The Scourge of Arial” was this gem from September 2007: “Hacking the iPhone Notes App for the Admittedly Nit-Picky Purpose of Changing the Text Font to Helvetica”. This was so early in the iPhone era — just three months after the original iPhone shipped — that we were calling its operating system “mobile OS X”, and none of it wa