Linked List: June 10, 2021

Thursday, 10 June 2021

Holy hell this new project from Zane Kleinberg, a talented 17-year-old developer who just dropped this out of the blue yesterday. It’s available via TestFlight (the first one is full already, though) and as open source code you can build yourself.

It’s exquisitely well done, very fun to play with, and surprisingly usable. And what a remarkable testimony to the expressiveness of Swift UI.

Once you get past the surface aesthetic differences, it’s also interesting as a way to remember how many little things iOS has added over the years. iOS is so much richer now. You couldn’t do anything in list views back then. E.g., if you wanted to delete a note in Notes, you had to open the note and tap the Trash button. In a view hierarchy, you couldn’t go back just by swiping from the left edge of the display — you had to tap the Back button in the navigation bar at the top of the display. Going back to this simulacrum of iOS 4 reminds me of what it felt like going back to, say, System 6 (1988) after taking for granted all the various little things added to the Mac between then and Mac OS 8.6 (1999).

A decade is a long time. Even the 1990s — the most dysfunctional decade of Apple’s corporate existence — was a productive one for the Mac. Now, though, with Apple firing on all cylinders throughout the 2010s, iOS 4 feels joyful but crude, barren of small conveniences.

A Linus Torvalds Rant We Can All Get Behind ★

Linus Torvalds, on the Linux Kernel mailing list:

Please keep your insane and technically incorrect anti-vax comments to yourself.

You don’t know what you are talking about, you don’t know what mRNA is, and you’re spreading idiotic lies. Maybe you do so unwittingly, because of bad education. Maybe you do so because you’ve talked to “experts” or watched youtube videos by charlatans that don’t know what they are talking about.

But dammit, regardless of where you have gotten your mis-information from, any Linux kernel discussion list isn’t going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me.

A shrinking violet, as ever.

Our Long National HBO Max Apple TV Nightmare Is Over ★

Screen Times:

At the end of last week we detailed an update to the HBO Max Apple TV app that introduced a whole host of issues, making the app almost unusable. Check out our article for the very long list. The issues were so bad that HBO exec Andy Forssell even addressed them in a reply to John Siracusa on Twitter.

Thankfully, HBO has now issued a software update that reverts the playback UI to the original tvOS version. I’ve verified this in the 50.30.2 update and can confirm everything is back to normal from skipping ahead to asking Siri ‘What did they say?’ and everything in between.

You make a mistake, you fix it as fast as you can. Kudos, HBO Max tvOS team.

Someone should send this to the new team behind the MLB app.

Blade Runner: The Animated Series ★

Fun work by Tom McWeeney.

Some New MacOS 12 Monterey Features Are Unavailable on Intel-Based Macs ★

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors:

On the macOS Monterey features page, fine print indicates that the following features require a Mac with the M1 chip, including any MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac model released since November 2020:

Portrait Mode blurred backgrounds in FaceTime videos

Live Text for copying and pasting, looking up, or translating text within photos

An interactive 3D globe of Earth in the Maps app

More detailed maps in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London in the Maps app

Text-to-speech in more languages, including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish

On-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline

Unlimited keyboard dictation (previously limited to 60 seconds per instance)

Apple has not explained why any of these features are not available on Intel-based Macs. For what it’s worth, Google Earth has long offered an interactive 3D globe of the Earth on Intel-based Macs both on the web and in an app.

I don’t think Apple has to explain. These features all clearly are built on code that uses features exclusive to Apple Silicon. E.g. for Portrait Mode in FaceTime, it uses the M1 imaging pipeline — the same thing that makes all FaceTime footage on the M1 MacBooks look so much better than on any Intel MacBook, even though the camera hardware is the same. The speech/dictation features on this list are surely using the Neural Engine, something Intel Macs don’t even have.

Digging Into Apple’s iCloud Private Relay ★

Good overview of one of this week’s biggest announcements from Dave Hamilton for The Mac Observer:

Apple’s iCloud Private Relay works similar to a VPN in that it routes your traffic through other servers, hiding your IP address from the websites you visit, and hiding your traffic from whomever manages your local network. Where it differs is that a VPN is generally just one server between you and the website you’re visiting. With a VPN, your traffic takes the route of You ↔︎ VPN Server ↔︎ Website. Private Relay adds another server to the mix, which ensures that no one in the chain — not even Apple — can see the whole picture: You ↔︎ Apple’s Ingress Server ↔︎ Content Provider’s Egress Server ↔︎ Website.

This is, as Apple calls it in their “Get Ready for iCloud Private Relay” WWDC Session on the topic, “Privacy by Design.”

Apple made specific mention that while the “Ingress Proxy” servers are run by Apple, the “Egress Proxy” (aka the server which communicates with the websites you visit) is not controlled by Apple and is under the control of “a (trusted) content provider”. This means that Apple doesn’t know what site(s) you’re visiting, and the third-party content provider doesn’t know who you are.

I’m using this on both an iPhone and iPad running the new OS betas, and it doesn’t seem to slow anything down. I did run into a problem where initially, both devices were saying I needed to upgrade to a paid iCloud account to enable the feature in Safari (also for Mail’s new tracker privacy protection), even though I’ve got an Apple One family account. I “fixed” that by restarting both devices after poking around the iCloud section in Settings. Not a bad bug for a developer beta 1 — just figured I’d mention it here in case anyone else runs into it.

What’s New in the App Store Review Guidelines ★

Not a lot new this year, but this one jumped out to me:

5.1.1(v): Apps supporting account creation must also offer account deletion.

I don’t see how anyone could disagree that this is a good rule. There’s a lot to complain about in the App Store Guidelines but there’s also a lot that’s unambiguously pro-user.