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.

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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.)

Apple TV’s New Fanfare

Tuesday, 16 December 2025

Tim Nudd, writing at Ad Age a few weeks ago (paywalled, alas):

As we mentioned in roundup yesterday, Finneas (aka, Finneas O’Connell) has developed a new sonic logo for Apple TV, the streaming service previously known as Apple TV+. However, the rebrand, created with Apple agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab, goes beyond the audio mnemonics to include a striking new visual look as well.

The visual branding centers on layers of shifting colored light, a metaphor for the range of genres and emotions that Apple TV has cultivated since its 2019 debut.

I held off on posting about this new Apple TV fanfare (a.k.a. sonic logo, a.k.a. mnemonic ) until I’d experienced it a few times, and after a few weeks, watching a bunch of episodes from a few Apple TV series — Mr. Scorsese, a 5-star five-part documentary by Rebecca Miller, absolutely riveting; Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s excellent new the-less-you-know-about-it-before-you-start-watching-the-better series starring Rhea Seehorn; and The Morning Show season 4, a series that’s skirting just above the good-enough-to-keep-watching line for me — I’m willing to render a verdict.

I love it.

The old one was not bad. But “not bad” should never be good enough for Apple. I can’t find anyone from Apple stating so explicitly, but it seems pretty obvious that the piano chord accompanying the old fanfare was meant to evoke the Macintosh startup chime. That’s a neat idea. And no one is more a fan of the Macintosh than me. I’d argue that the Mac remains the definitive Apple product, the one that best exemplifies everything the company does and should stand for. So harking back to the Macintosh was an interesting idea for the Apple TV fanfare/sonic logo/mnemonic.

But: it just wasn’t great. What makes that chord great for a computer booting up doesn’t make it great for a cinematic sonic logo. Netflix’s “tudum” is so iconic that it’s the name of their company blog. HBO’s static + chanted om is the OG standard-setter. I suspect the new Apple TV fanfare will be seen in that class. The old one was not.

The new one feels like a branding stroke unto itself. Sonically, it doesn’t evoke anything else. It just sounds rich and cool. Visually, with its rotating prism effect, it does evoke the classic six-color Apple logo. Thus, despite moving away from a sonic callback to the Macintosh, the overall effect feels more rooted to Apple’s on-the-cusp-of-a-half-century history. The change makes Apple TV original content feel more like a part of Apple, less like a possible passing fancy (which is what many in Hollywood fear).

That prism effect was created practically. From a LinkedIn post from Apple’s longtime agency partner TBWA Media Arts Lab (no clue why they posted this on LinkedIn, of all places):

Built from real glass and captured entirely in camera, the new identity explores reflection, color, and light to express the cinematic spirit at the heart of Apple TV. Every shimmer was made for real, no CG shortcuts, a nod to Apple’s belief that craft should be felt, not faked.

The work spans the entire platform, from a sharp five-second show open to a full-length cinematic version for films, paired with a new sonic logo composed by Oscar winner Finneas and a custom typeface, SF TV, developed with Apple’s design team.

They include a very short video showing behind the scenes of its creation. It matters not to me that they photographed this practically, rather than via computer-generated graphics, but the bottom line is that it looks cool, timeless, and Apple-y.

Chris Willman at Variety has an interview with Finneas (O’Connell) regarding the music:

Mnemonic, Finneas says, “is sort of a beautiful word for a logo” accompanied by sound. “The things that I think of as real classic mnemonics are NBC — you can hear that in your head — or HBO has its static.” Finneas is well aware of how modern streaming consumption might make this especially ubiquitous, household by household. “If you’re binge-ing the whole season of Ted Lasso or Severance or Disclaimer” (the last of those being the limited series that he composed the score for himself), “you’re going to hear the mnemonic 10 times in one day. So it’s gotta be something that’s like the bite of ginger between rolls or something, you know?”

See and hear for yourself. Here’s the old Apple TV mnemonic:

Here’s the new 5-second version, shown at the beginning of each episode of Apple TV original series:

And here’s the full 12-second version, shown before Apple Original Films:

Bravo. 

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 was protected in any way, so you could do what I did and delete the Marker Felt font (Merlin Mann: “Comic Sans with a shave and a breath mint”) and then use a hex editor to modify the Mobile Notes app so it would fall back to Helvetica instead of cursed Arial after Marker Felt was deleted. Good times.

A Note on Current SMS Marketing Practices 

Back on November 28, I bought a new cap from New Era’s web store. They offered a discount of some sort if I gave them a phone number and permitted them to send me marketing messages. That got me curious about what they’d do with my number, and it was a 50-some-dollar cap, so I took the discount and gave them my Google Voice number. That was 17 days ago. They sent me 19 SMS marketing messages since then, before I’d seen enough today and called it quits on this experiment. (Or called “STOP”, perhaps, which was the magic word to opt out.) They didn’t send a text every day, and on some days, they sent more than one. But the overall effect was relentlessly annoying.

I’m sure some of the people who sign up for these texts in exchange for a discount code wind up clicking at least one of the offers sent via SMS and buying more stuff, and the marketing team running this points to those sales as proof that it “works”. You can measure that. It shows up as a number. Some people in business only like arguments that can be backed by numbers. 3 is more than 2. That is indeed a fact.

But there are an infinite number of things in life that cannot be assigned numeric values. Many of these things matter too. Like the fact that in my mind, after experiencing this, the New Era company smells like a sweaty hustler in a cheap polyester suit. If their brand were a man, I’d check my pants pocket for my wallet after interacting with him.

Disney, Immediately After Partnering With OpenAI for Sora, Sends Google a Cease-and-Desist Letter Accusing Them of Copyright Infringement on ‘Massive Scale’ 

Todd Spangler, reporting last week for Variety:

As Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale” using AI models and services to “commercially exploit and distribute” infringing images and videos. On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement in its AI systems. [...]

According to the letter, which Variety has reviewed, Disney alleges that Google’s AI systems and services infringe Disney characters including those from “Frozen,” “The Lion King,” “Moana,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Deadpool,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Toy Story,” “Brave,” “Ratatouille,” “Monsters Inc.,” “Lilo & Stich,” “Inside Out” and franchises such as Star Wars, the Simpsons, and Marvel’s Avengers and Spider-Man. In its letter, Disney included examples of images it claims were generated by text prompts in Google’s AI apps, including of Darth Vader (pictured above).

It’s very Disney-esque to embrace a new medium. Alone among the major movie studios in the 1950s, Disney embraced television. TV was a threat to the cinema, but it was also an enormous opportunity. The other studios only saw the threat. Walt Disney focused on the opportunity. But Disney did this not by giving their content to television on the cheap or for free. They did it by getting paid. That’s what they’re doing with generative AI.

Here’s the Gemini-generated Darth Vader image. Note the blood splatter — which was un-Star Wars-like even before Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm. Also, even worse, his lightsaber is totally wrong.

Roomba Maker iRobot Declares Bankruptcy, Falls Into Chinese Hands 

John Keilman, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

The company that makes Roomba robotic vacuums declared bankruptcy Sunday but said its devices will continue to function normally while the company restructures.

Massachusetts-based iRobot has struggled financially for years, beset by foreign competition that made cheaper and, in the opinion of some buyers, technologically superior autonomous vacuums. When a proposed sale to Amazon.com fell through in 2024 because of regulatory concerns, the company’s share price plummeted.

Founded in 1990, iRobot’s autonomous vacuum cleaners helped pioneer robotics for consumers. Many recent versions of the Roomba have features that are controlled through the brand’s app. Some owners have worried that, similar to other products tied to the internet, their Roombas could “brick” — or stop working — if the company went under. iRobot said it anticipates no disruptions to its product support or app functionality.

Matt Stoller, author of the (generally excellent) website Big, on Twitter/X today:

iRobot is selling itself to Chinese manufacturers, a result of hedge fund attack a decade ago that gutted the company. Wall Street is a threat to our national sovereignty.

Matt Stoller, author of the (generally knee-jerk anti-acquisition) website Big, on Twitter back in 2022, when Amazon announced its intended acquisition:

Amazon just bought iRobot, which has immense amounts of data about people’s physical homes. It never ends. Congress should have passed @TomCottonAR’s bill to bar big tech mergers.

[Press release: “Amazon and iRobot sign an agreement for Amazon to acquire iRobot”]

You can’t have it both ways. If Amazon’s proposed acquisition would have gone through, iRobot, an American company, would now be a (small) subsidiary of Amazon, another American company. The acquisition did not go through, which is what Stoller wanted, and now here we are with iRobot — which in Stoller’s own description “has immense amounts of data about people’s physical homes” — in the hands of a Chinese company.

iRobot’s demise wasn’t caused by hedge fund investments a decade ago. The hedge fund vultures swooped in after the Amazon acquisition collapsed in early 2024. Here’s Connie Loizos, writing yesterday for TechCrunch:

It seemed like a fairy tale ending — the scrappy MIT spinoff absorbed into the Everything Store’s sprawling empire.

Except European regulators had other ideas. Indeed, amid threats they would block the deal — they believed Amazon could foreclose rivals by restricting or degrading access to its marketplace — Amazon and iRobot agreed to kill the deal in January 2024, with Amazon paying a $94 million breakup fee and walking away. Angle resigned. The company’s shares nosedived. It shed 31% of its workforce.

What followed afterward was a slow-motion collapse. Earnings had been declining since 2021 thanks to supply chain chaos and Chinese competitors flooding the market with cheaper robot vacuums.

iRobot didn’t get big enough on its own quickly enough. It was under fierce competitive pressure from Chinese robot vacuums. Roombas seemed groundbreaking and innovative at first, but technical progress stalled. Amazon’s hands aren’t exactly clean in terms of putting the squeeze on iRobot: the primary place where the cheaper Chinese robot vacuums were being sold was, of course, Amazon.

By 2022, the Amazon acquisition was iRobot’s lifeline. EU regulators wanted it shot down, and despite the fact that it was one American company trying to acquire another, the anti-big-tech Biden administration clearly preferred to let the deal collapse. The US should have told the EU to mind their own companies.

Now iRobot is in Chinese hands, the worst possible outcome. The Amazon acquisition wasn’t anti-competitive — it was iRobot’s last chance to remain competitive.

Jaho Coffee Roaster 

My thanks to Jaho Coffee Roaster for sponsoring last week at DF. Great coffee changes the day. Since 2005, Jaho’s family-owned roastery has taken the slow and careful approach, sourcing small-lot coffees, roasting in small batches and shipping every bag fresh. Award-winning coffee delivered to your home or office, shipped fresh nationwide.

Jaho was kind enough to send me a few bags of their beans, and I can vouch that they roast excellent coffee — the kind of tasty beans where, when I finish my last morning cup, I’m tempted to brew a little more even though I know I’m fully caffeinated.

Holiday gifts? Fresh coffee is a gift that never misses, easy to give, even better to receive. Give better coffee this season. Even better: DF readers get 20 percent off with code DF.

Sunday, 14 December 2025

Rob Reiner and Wife Found Stabbed to Death at Home 

Deadline:

The bodies of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Reiner have been found in their Brentwood home, sources confirmed to Deadline.

It appears the acclaimed director and his wife were slain by knife wounds.

The LAPD are on the scene, but have not issued an official confirmation yet. A press conference is expected to take place tonight.

People:

Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed by their son, Nick, multiple sources confirm to People.

So it goes.

Saturday, 13 December 2025

‘Pluribus’ Becomes Apple TV’s Most Watched Show Ever 

Marcus Mendes, 9to5Mac:

Now, on the same day that F1 The Movie debuted at the top of Apple TV’s movie rankings, the company confirmed that Pluribus has reached another, even more impressive milestone: it is the most watched show in the service’s history. Busy day. [...]

Apple doesn’t share viewership numbers, so it is hard to quantify what exactly this means.

However, considering that Apple TV has had quite a few hit shows, including Ted Lasso, Severance, The Morning Show, Slow Horses, and, more recently, The Studio, it is still notable that Pluribus has managed to top them all in just a few short weeks.

I love Pluribus. I’d rank it behind Severance and Slow Horses, but it’s a close call between Pluribus and The Studio for third place on my Apple TV favorites list. Great shows all four of them. I don’t think there’s any question that when it comes to prestige series, Apple TV had the best 2025. Which other streamer had four shows of that caliber this year?

Jason Kottke is iffy on it, though, because he’s not seeing the appeal of Rhea Seehorn’s protagonist Carol Sturka. Count me with Max Roberts — I find Carol very compelling, and uncomfortably realistic. She feels to me like a real person, not a “character”. It’s one of the best cinematic explorations of loneliness since Tom Hanks in Cast Away, or WALL-E. Update: A few more that come to mind: The Martian and Moon.

Lucas de Groot, Designer of Calibri, on the State Department’s Switch Back to Times New Roman 

From the LucasFonts account, in a comment on Hacker News:

Professional typography can be achieved with both serif and sans-serif fonts. However, Times New Roman — a typeface older than the current president — presents unique challenges. Originally crafted in Great Britain for newspaper printing, Times was optimised for paper, with each letterform meticulously cut and tested for specific sizes. In the digital era, larger size drawings were repurposed as models, resulting in a typeface that appears too thin and sharp when printed at high quality.

Serif fonts are often perceived as more traditional, but they are also more demanding to use effectively. While a skilled typographer can, in theory, produce excellent results with Times, using it in its default digital form is not considered professional practice.

This echoes my thoughts: the State Department should use a traditional-looking serif typeface, but they should choose — or even better, commission — something far better than Times New Roman.

Also from that Hacker News thread, comes this delightful Easter egg: do a Google search for “Lucas de Groot”, and the results will be set in Calibri. Same thing for common fonts like, yes, Times New Roman.

Pondering Middle East Petrostates as American Media Owners 

Peter Kafka, writing at Business Insider:

And last: It’s possible that Middle Eastern countries are investing in an American media conglomerate solely for a financial return, and would have zero interest in the content that conglomerate makes and distributes. But that’s an assertion that many folks would have a hard time taking at face value. And while lots of American companies have sought Middle Eastern funding for years, there was a pause after 2018, following the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi — a shocking act the CIA concluded was ordered by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself. (He has denied involvement.)

Now bin Salman might end up owning a piece of major American news outlets and other media arms. How’s that going to go over?

David Ellison’s hostile takeover proposal reportedly would have these Middle East partners owning “non-voting” shares, but regardless of their rights in the corporate by-laws, their mere ownership would give them influence. These are profoundly fucked-up countries, where women are a repressed underclass, LGBT activity is punishable by death, and their word is worth nothing when they promise to abide by Western norms.

The Infinite Loop of One LLM Talking to Another 

This is very funny, but also a good indication of just how far away these things are from actual intelligence. First, a reasonable human being would never get caught in a loop like this. Second, only humans can not only recognize what’s going on here, but also see the humor in it.

Paris Buttfield-Addison’s Apple Account Is in Kafka Mode 

Paris Buttfield-Addison:

A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. [...]

I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C series, which Apple themselves used to write, for O’Reilly Media, and then 20+ books following that). I help run the longest-running Apple developer event not run by Apple themselves, /dev/world. I have effectively been an evangelist for this company’s technology for my entire professional life. We had an app on the App Store on Day 1 in every sense of the world.

I am asking for a human at Apple to review this case. I suspect an automated fraud flag regarding the bad gift card triggered a nuclear response that frontline support cannot override. I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success.

I am desperate to resolve this and restore my digital life.

The triggering event, as best he can determine, was his failed attempt to redeem a $500 Apple gift card purchased from a major retail chain. There’s a very active thread on Hacker News about his plight, where Buttfield-Addison himself is commenting. That thread pointed to this description of one form of gift card thievery, in which thieves tamper with the cards in-store to steal the codes, tamper with the code, and then some unsuspecting victim buys the tampered card and the thieves get the credit.