Linked List: June 13, 2022

Monday, 13 June 2022

Inside Apple’s Redesign of the iOS Lock Screen ★

Lance Ulanoff, in a detailed interview with Craig Federighi and Alan Dye regarding the new lock screen features in iOS 16:

“From a Design Team perspective, our goal was to create something that felt almost more editorial, and to give the user the ability to create a Lock Screen that really … ends up looking like a great magazine cover or film poster but doing it in a way that’s hopefully really simple to create, very fun, and even with a lot of automation there,” said Dye. [...]

Instead of a set collection of filters you can apply to images, Apple is using that segmentation knowledge to offer up a bespoke set of looks.

“These styles are so much more than filters,” said Dye. “We’re actually using segmentation, tonal values, all of our scene understanding to really help us determine how we can intelligently offer a variety of treatments for each photo. Which is also really cool because it’s very much Apple at its best. Design and engineering technology all working together to offer something, really, I think, quite beautiful.”

Instead of eight or a dozen set filters, you might only be offered two styles for a photo, and they’re unlikely to be the same two if you chose a different Lock Screen photo. Dye told us that if the system doesn’t think the photo will look great, it won’t suggest it, a point of care and attention that helps guide the user towards more visually arresting Lock Screens.

It’s rough in developer beta 1, but I’m pretty sure this is my favorite new feature in iOS 16.

Matthew Panzarino Talks With Craig Federighi About Stage Manager ★

Matthew Panzarino, writing at TechCrunch:

“It’s only the M1 iPads that combined the high DRAM capacity with very high capacity, high performance NAND that allows our virtual memory swap to be super fast,” Federighi says. “Now that we’re letting you have up to four apps on a panel plus another four — up to eight apps to be instantaneously responsive and have plenty of memory, we just don’t have that ability on the other systems.”

It was not purely the availability of memory that led Apple to limit Stage Manager to M1 iPads though.

“We also view stage manager as a total experience that involves external display connectivity. And the I/O on the M1 supports connectivity that our previous iPads don’t, it can drive 4K, 5K, 6K displays, it can drive them at scaled resolutions. We can’t do that on other iPads.”

Graphics performance, too, was a limiter.

“We really designed Stage Manager to take full advantage [of the M1]. If you look at the way the apps tilt and shadow and how they animate in and out. To do that at super high frame rates, across very large displays and multiple displays, requires the peak of graphics performance that no one else can deliver.

“When you put all this together, we can’t deliver the full stage manager experience on any lesser system,” Federighi says. “I mean, we would love to make it available everywhere we can. But this is what it requires. This is the experience we’re going to carry into the future. We didn’t want to constrain our design to something lesser, we’re setting the benchmark for the future.”

Good interview that really digs into the why of Stage Manager, especially for iPad.

As for the “only for M1 iPads” things, the key thing to glean from this is that it’s not just that M1 iPads have more RAM, but also the hardware pieces to enable virtual memory swap on an iOS device for the first time. You usually don’t hear nerdy comp-sci terms like “virtual memory swap” in the morning keynote or in the main press release for the platform — that sort of stuff is usually reserved for the afternoon State of the Union. But “swap” made it into the morning keynote because it’s a big deal.

Samsung Caught Cheating in TV Benchmarks ★

Rasmus Larsen, writing for FlatpanelsHD:

Reviewers, calibrators and certification bodies typically use a 10% window for HDR testing, which simply means that it takes up 10% of the screen. In this window multiple steps from black to white as well as a set of colors are measured. Samsung has designed its TVs to recognize this and other commonly used window sizes, after which the TV adjusts its picture output to make measurements appear more accurate than the picture really is. When using a non-standard window such as 9% (everything else equal), the cheating algorithm can be bypassed so the TV reveals its true colors.

This is deliberate cheating, an orchestrated effort to mislead reviewers.

Vincent Teoh of HDTVTest first identified and documented the issue on Samsung’s S95B QD-OLED TV. FlatpanelsHD has since identified and documented the issue on Samsung’s QN95B ‘Neo QLED’ LCD TV where it gets even worse.

Shocker.

Texas Police Want Uvalde Bodycam Footage Suppressed Because It Could Expose Law Enforcement ‘Weakness’ ★

Jason Koebler, reporting for Vice:

The Texas Department of Public Safety has asked the state’s Office of the Attorney General to prevent the public release of police body camera footage from the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in part because, it argues, the footage could be used by other shooters to determine “weaknesses” in police response to crimes. [...]

“Revealing the marked records would provide criminals with invaluable information concerning Department techniques used to investigate and detect activities of suspected criminal elements; how information is assessed and analyzed; how information is shared among partner law enforcement agencies and the lessons learned from the analysis of prior criminal activities,” the department wrote in a letter to the Office of the Attorney General that asked the office to prevent the release of the public records. “Knowing the intelligence and response capabilities of Department personnel and where those employees focus their attention will compromise law enforcement purposes by enabling criminals to anticipate weakness in law enforcement procedures and alter their methods of operation in order to avoid detection and apprehension.”

Translation: The bodycam footage will further reveal the cowardice and ineptitude of the police, so we’re begging you to let us suppress it.

As Darth notes, the footage is mostly going to show the school parking lot.

Why Stage Manager Requires an M1 iPad ★

Apple, in a statement to Rene Ritchie:

Stage Manager is a fully integrated experience that provides all-new windowing experience that is incredibly fast and responsive and allow users to run 8 apps simultaneously across iPad and an external display with up to 6K resolution. Delivering this experience with the immediacy users expect from iPad’s touch-first experience requires large internal memory, incredibly fast storage, and flexible external display I/O, all of which are delivered by iPads with the M1 chip.

Stephen Hackett:

A lot of folks with 2018 iPad Pros and 2020 iPad Airs are pretty upset about this move, especially given the fact that the Apple silicon DTK ran on an A12Z. My guess is that the company just wasn’t happy with the performance of Stage Manager on those older iPads.

If Stage Manager ran well on older iPads, Apple would enable it on them. It might just come down to RAM — the M1 iPads start at 8 GB, but older iPad Pro models start at just 4 (2018 with A12X) or 6 GB (2020 with A12Z).