Linked List: May 19, 2022

Thursday, 19 May 2022

The Information: ‘The Inside Story of Why Apple Bet Big on a Mixed-Reality Headset’ 

From the first of a two-part report for The Information by Wayne Ma (paywalled, alas):

Rockwell, Meier and Rothkopf soon encountered pushback from Ive’s team. The three men had initially wanted to build a VR headset, but Ive’s group had concerns about the technology, said three people who worked on the project. They believed VR alienated users from other people by cutting them off from the outside world, made users look unfashionable and lacked practical uses. Apple’s industrial designers were unconvinced that consumers would be willing to wear headsets for long periods of time, two of the people said.

Count me on the design team’s side. Near the end of Ma’s report is this sentence: “Rockwell’s team also wanted users to be able to wear the headset for as much as eight hours a day.” Perhaps I simply lack imagination, but I can’t see myself wearing something like that for eight hours a day. (I imagine someone a few decades ago saying the same thing about sitting in front of a computer monitor for eight hours a day, which I’ve done for my entire adult life, so as ever, I’m keeping an open mind.)

The men came up with a solution to address the concerns of Ive’s team. For example, they proposed adding cameras to the front of the headset so that people wearing the device could see their surroundings, said the three people. But the feature that ultimately sold the industrial designers on the project was a concept for an outward-facing screen on the headset. The screen could display video images of the eyes and facial expressions of the person wearing the headset to other people in the room.

These features addressed the industrial design group’s worries about VR-induced alienation — they allowed other people in a room to interact and collaborate with a person wearing a headset in a way not possible with other VR gear. For years, the existence of such a display, internally code-named T429, was known only to a small circle of people even within Rockwell’s group.

Again, perhaps I lack imagination, but this outward display, showing the headset wearer’s eyes, sounds bizarre to me. Scratch that, it sounds nightmarishly ghoulish. I’m thinking something like this, but live, like this horror show Facebook actually bragged about. Apple’s not going to ship something ghoulish or goofy, of course. So if something matching Ma’s description ships, it’ll be nothing like what his description has made me imagine. Weird!

Update: Apt comic from Robert Black’s The Sharp End.

Markdoc 

I’ve long heard from friends that Stripe’s developer documentation is not just excellent, but perhaps the best developer documentation in the world. They do all sorts of neat things to help developers, like putting your API key into snippets you copy from the website. Clever. It’s also just a great looking website with good navigation.

Markdoc is Stripe’s own content authoring system, implementing a rich superset of Markdown, and released this week as an open source project. It looks wonderful. I love their syntax extensions — very true to the spirit of Markdown. They use curly braces for their extensions; I’m not sure I ever made this clear, publicly, but I avoided using curly braces in Markdown itself — even though they are very tempting characters — to unofficially reserve them for implementation-specific extensions. Markdoc’s extensive use of curly braces for its syntax is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about.

The Markdoc site itself is, of course, splendidly documented and fun to play with. You can try it out right in their example dingus on the homepage.

Warms my heart to see Markdown continuing to grow like this.

Gurman: ‘Apple Shows XR Headset to Board in Sign It’s Reached Advanced Stage’ 

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. executives previewed its upcoming mixed-reality headset to the company’s board last week, indicating that development of the device has reached an advanced stage, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The company’s board, made up of eight independent directors and Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, convenes at least four times a year. A version of the device was demonstrated to the directors during the latest gathering, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the meeting was private.

Not a surprise given how widely it’s been reported — largely by Gurman — that Apple had originally planned to release its first headset this fall, and still might announce it this year. But goddamn I’d love to know who leaked this demo to Gurman.

Research Paper on the Potential for iPhone Malware That Runs in Low Power Mode 

Bruce Schneier:

The research is fascinating, but the attack isn’t really feasible. It requires a jailbroken phone, which is hard to pull off in an adversarial setting.

Apple Responds to ‘Final Cut Pro in TV and Film’ Open Letter 

Apple, responding to last month’s open letter from industry professionals concerned about Final Cut Pro’s also-ran status in Hollywood production:

While we believe we have plans in place to help address your important feature requests, we also recognize the need to build on those efforts and work alongside you to help support your film and TV projects and keep you posted on important updates.

That Apple responded at all is the story. Sounds like Apple does want to address the group’s concerns.

Update: A pal just sent me this clip from 10 years ago on Conan O’Brien’s show, in which the show’s editing team sings the praises of the (then) all-new editing interface in Final Cut Pro X. Can’t believe I never saw this before.

Update 2: Welp, turns out I was right not to believe I hadn’t seen it before.