By John Gruber
Q1 2025 openings for ads on Daring Fireball just like this one. Email for info.
Linked List: November 12, 2021
Friday, 12 November 2021
- ‘The iOS App Icon Book’ by Michael Flarup ★
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Michel Flarup:
I simply love app icons — they continue to be everything that excites me about visual design. App icon design is a carefully balanced discipline with the goal of producing a memorable graphic that sits at the intersection of art and utility. At their best, app icons are design, distilled. This book is a celebration of the art and craft of app icon design and the golden age of icon design that has lived and evolved on our devices this past decade.
It’s a Kickstarter project, with books expected to ship in April. Take my money — I can’t wait to devour this book. It looks so good.
- John Hanke: ‘AR Is Where the Real Metaverse Is Going to Happen’ ★
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Steven Levy, writing for Wired:
As the CEO and founder of Niantic Labs, Hanke launched Pokémon Go in 2016, and he remains obsessed with a vision of a physical world enhanced by digital objects, the concept now called augmented reality. He has been pursuing this vision since at least 2010, when he founded Niantic as an internal startup at Google, then spun it out and launched Go. The game, in which players wander the streets with phones held to their faces trying to capture Weedles, Squirtles, and Nidorinas, was both a cultural phenomenon and a financial success, reaping over a billion dollars in revenue. Like Wendy sewing Peter Pan’s shadow to his foot, Hanke has been gradually binding the ephemeral to the real, providing a substrate for the merger of pixels and atoms that he sees as the future. [...]
He’s read all the science fiction books and seen all the films that first imagined the metaverse — all great fun, and all wrong. He believes that his vision, unlike virtual reality, will make the real world better without encouraging people to totally check out of it.
Terrific interview.
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YouTube:
As part of this experiment, viewers could still see and use the dislike button. But because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior. We also heard directly from smaller creators and those just getting started that they are unfairly targeted by this behavior — and our experiment confirmed that this does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.
Based on what we learned, we’re making the dislike counts private across YouTube, but the dislike button is not going away. This change will start gradually rolling out today.
This is an interesting middle ground. Sounds good to me. Marking something as disliked obviously can be useful, but hiding the dislike count apparently diminishes the pile-on mob mindset.
Twitter has been experimenting with a “dislike” button as well. Not sure where that stands, but if they go forward with it, they should keep the dislike counts private too.
- Judge Denies Apple’s Motion to Stay App Store Antisteering Policy Changes in Epic Case ★
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Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, in a ruling earlier this week:
The Court is in receipt of Apple Inc.’s Motion to Stay part of the Court’s injunction pending resolution of all appeals, specifically that portion prohibiting developers from including “in their apps and their metabuttons, [sic] external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing [“IAP”].” (See Dkt. No. 821.)
Having considered all the filings, and oral argument, the Court finds Apple has failed to satisfy its burden, and the request as framed is DENIED. In short, Apple’s motion is based on a selective reading of this Court’s findings and ignores all of the findings which supported the injunction, namely incipient antitrust conduct including supercompetitive commission rates resulting in extraordinarily high operating margins and which have not been correlated to the value of its intellectual property. This incipient antitrust conduct is the result, in part, of the antisteering policies which Apple has enforced to harm competition. As a consequence, the motion is fundamentally flawed. Further, even if additional time was warranted to comply with the limited injunction, Apple did not request additional time other than ten days to appeal this ruling. Thus, the Court does not consider the option of additional time, other than the requested ten days.
“Metabuttons” is a typo — the original ruling used the (already technically ambiguous) term “metadata buttons” there.
It’s a near-certainty that Apple is going to appeal this. But if the appeal doesn’t work, December 9 is just four weeks away.
- Concepts to Redesign the New York City Street ★
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Justin Davidson, writing for Curbed:
Our efforts yielded two big lessons. The first is that every improvement is a trade-off. Protecting bus lanes with concrete barriers, for example, would keep cars out, but it would also keep limited-stop buses from passing local ones. Our street incorporates a possible set of compromises. The second is that even simple tweaks imply a far-reaching organizational overhaul. Enclosed trash bins would push the Department of Sanitation to update some of its trucks and pickup procedures.
There are a lot of good ideas here. Drastically reducing curbside parking and using that space to widen sidewalks and increase outdoor eating areas is something that’s happened in a lot of cities during this pandemic. It’s been a huge win here in Philly.
But to nitpick one of the ideas: enclosed trash bins are terrible. Philly replaced its old-fashioned open-top trash bins with enclosed ones several years ago, and they’re just awful. They sound like a fine idea, but in practice they’re disgusting. You have to touch them to put anything in them, and, well, they’re covered with garbage. They’re really hard to use one-handed, like when you’re carrying, say, a grocery bag with your other hand. They tend to break, too. It’s been a huge step backwards here.
- Jamf CEO Welcomes Apple Business Essentials ★
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Jonny Evans, writing for Computerworld’s Appleholic:
“When Apple innovates, Jamf celebrates,” Jamf CEO, Dean Hager said, on learning about Apple Business Essentials. “We believe this expected announcement is good news and presents Jamf with a terrific opportunity.” [...]
Jamf, which announced an impressive set of Q3 results Nov. 11, has always existed alongside Apple. Hager noted several times during the last decade when industry watchers thought Apple moves might damage his business: Once when Apple introduced MDM in 2010, again in 2011 with Profile Manager, later with Apple Configurator, and more recently with Apple Business Manager.
Brings to mind Apple’s famous “Welcome IBM. Seriously.” ad from 1981. I don’t mean that to be snarky. Apple was ready for the IBM PC in 1981, and it sounds like Jamf and similar companies have been ready for Apple to enter this market ever since they acquired Fleetsmith a year ago.
- FastScripts 3 ★
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Daniel Jalkut, writing at the Red Sweater blog:
This update is the culmination of years of work on various aspects of the app, many of which are not “headline” level changes. Little things, like the ability of the app to detect when you attempt to assign a shortcut that is already being used for another script, to improvements to the appearance of the app’s built in “display message” panels, to the long-awaited support for symbolic links in the script folder, will perpetually surprise and delight you!
All sorts of cool new stuff in this update, including new (and much improved) icons, parallel script execution, and more. One of my favorite small features in FastScripts is the above-mentioned “display message” command. It’s a nicer way to briefly show a message on screen than Notification Center. Anyone who uses scripting on their Mac should be using FastScripts. Hall of Fame Mac utility.