Linked List: November 2024

Saturday, 30 November 2024

My thanks to Crunchy Bagel — the company of developer Quentin Zervaas — for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Streaks, their excellent app for iPhone and Apple Watch. Streaks is a to-do list that helps you form good habits. The point is to motivate you to tackle the things you want to do: anything from daily exercise goals, learning a new language, taking your vitamins, or quitting a bad habit. Anything. I’ve brushed my teeth daily since I was a child but I’ve never been good about flossing — until, generally, a few days before a scheduled dental cleaning. I’ve been using Streaks lately to groove a daily flossing habit. (I expect a pat on the back the next time I’m at the dentist.)

Streaks first sponsored DF back in 2016 and everything I wrote about it then remains true today. It’s a brilliant design, both visually and conceptually. I’ve tried a few apps like this over the years — including a few new ones in recent years — and what kills most of them is friction. If it takes too many fiddly steps to mark off the things you do, you stop using the app. Streaks makes it incredibly simple and fast to mark things done. For anything activity-related, you don’t have to do anything at all — it just tracks information from HealthKit (with your permission, of course) automatically. And in terms of the visual design, Streaks is both highly distinctive and very iOS-y — it doesn’t look like a stock iOS app, but it very much looks and feels like a good native iOS app. That’s a combination that takes a great eye to pull off. (Unsurprisingly, Streaks won an Apple Design Award a few years ago, and has often been featured by Apple in the App Store.)

iOS has not been standing still over the last 8 years and neither has Zervaas. Streaks supports all the latest stuff you’d hope for in an iOS app, including interactive widgets. Streaks’s interactive widgets reduce even further the friction of marking things done — interactive widgets were practically made for apps like Streaks. Streaks also has a great Apple Watch companion app.

I only accept sponsorships for products or services that I’m proud to support. But Streaks is so good that I want to go out of my way to draw attention to it (again). I’m not praising it with superlatives because it’s my sponsor; I’m doing so because it’s superlatively good. It’s a one-time purchase, and the latest update has added seasonal themes, just in time for Christmas (and your New Year’s resolutions).

If you have any sort of interest in an app to help reinforce daily habits (or an interest in great UI design), go check Streaks out.

If you have young children, be sure to also try Little Streaks. It’s a great way to help kids focus on routines: meal time, bedtime, learning to ride a bike, brushing their teeth (and flossing!) — anything. Little Streaks is free for one routine, or use code “DARING” for 50% off the first year of a subscription for unlimited routines.

Friday, 29 November 2024

‘Building LLMs Is Probably Not Going to Be a Brilliant Business’ ★

Cal Paterson:

Large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT and Claude.ai are whizzy and cool. A lot of people think that they are going to be The Future. Maybe they are — but that doesn’t mean that building them is going to be a profitable business.

In the 1960s, airlines were The Future. That is why old films have so many swish shots of airports in them. Airlines though, turned out to be an unavoidably rubbish business. I’ve flown on loads of airlines that have gone bust: Monarch, WOW Air, Thomas Cook, Flybmi, Zoom. And those are all busts from before coronavirus - times change but being an airline is always a bad idea.

That’s odd, because other businesses, even ones which seem really stupid, are much more profitable. Selling fizzy drinks is, surprisingly, an amazing business. Perhaps the best. Coca-Cola’s return on equity has rarely fallen below 30% in any given year. That seems very unfair because being an airline is hard work but making Coke is pretty easy. It’s even more galling because Coca-Cola don’t actually make the Coke themselves - that is outsourced to “bottling companies”. They literally just sell it.

This is such a crackerjack essay. Clear, concise, and uncomplicated. I find it hard to argue with. I’ve repeatedly mentioned an internal paper that leaked out of Google last year, titled “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI”. The fact that OpenAI has lobbied for stringent AI regulation around the globe suggests that they fear this too — their encouragement of regulation could be explained by seeking a regulatory moat because there is no technical or business model moat to be had.

Paterson, expounding on his comparison to the airline industry, observes that commercial airlines have only two suppliers: Boeing and Airbus. He continues:

LLM makers sometimes imply that their suppliers are cloud companies like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, etc. That wouldn’t be so bad because you could shop around and make them compete to cut the huge cost of model training.

Really though, LLM makers have only one true supplier: NVIDIA. NVIDIA make the chips that all models are trained on — regardless of cloud vendor. And that gives NVIDIA colossal, near total pricing power. NVIDIA are more powerful relative to Anthropic or OpenAI than Airbus or Boeing could ever dream of being.

At this moment, there are three companies in the world with market caps in excess of $3 trillion: Apple, Nvidia, and Microsoft. There are only two more with market caps in excess of $2 trillion: Amazon and Google. Engineering, training, and providing LLMs isn’t the business with a moat. The business with a moat is making the cutting-edge computer hardware that trains LLMs, and that belongs to Nvidia.

I have more to say about Paterson’s essay, but I really just want you to read it for now.

Welcome to Aperture 3 ★

Kind of wild that this entire sub-site is still standing on Apple.com, including working video. (Fingers crossed that my linking to it doesn’t bring it to the attention of someone who decides to 404 it.)

Nathan Edwards Reviews the iMac M4 for The Verge ★

From Nathan Edwards’s 6/10 review of the M4 iMac for The Verge:

I also do not love that the stand has no height adjustment, and you can’t swap it for a more ergonomic option without buying an entirely different computer. Apple sells a version of the iMac with a VESA mount, but it doesn’t come with a stand at all, and most height-adjustable VESA mounts are not as pretty as the iMac. The Studio Display has a height-adjustable stand option, so we know Apple can make one it’s willing to put out into the world. It just hasn’t done so here. But whatever. I have hardcover books. It’s fine.

It wasn’t Edwards, but Nilay Patel, who reviewed the Studio Display for The Verge, but in that review the $1,600 cost — which called out the $400 surcharge for the optional adjustable stand — was one of the three bullet items under “The Bad”. So it’s not hard to guess that if the M4 iMac had an optional adjustable stand, it would still be listed a con, because surely that option, from Apple, would cost at least $300.

(I’ve used a Studio Display with the pricey options for nano-texture and adjustable height ever since it came out, and consider both options well worth the cost.)

But the weird thing about Edwards’s review is that the whole thing is predicated on his not seeing the appeal of an all-in-one computer. I feel the same way, personally. My primary computer is a MacBook Pro that I connect, lid-closed, to the aforementioned-in-parenthetical-aside Studio Display most of the time. If I were to buy a dedicated desktop Mac I’d get either a Mac Mini or Mac Studio and connect that to a Studio Display. But the iMac is obviously intended for people who want an all-in-one.

It makes for a very strange, dare I say pointless, review. It’s like a bicycle review from someone who admits that they only ever walk or drive a car and don’t see why anyone else doesn’t walk or drive everywhere. In theory, someone who doesn’t care for genre X can write a review of something from genre X, and their dislike of the genre might provide a unique perspective. (David Foster Wallace wrote a masterpiece of the genre with the title essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again regarding a weeklong Caribbean cruise.) But the review still needs to gauge the product accordingly, for what it is. Does anyone make a better all-in-one PC than the iMac? If so, who? If not, why is this a 6/10?

Space/Time: Black Friday Mac Apps Collection 2024 ★

Holiday shopping bundle of 13 excellent Mac Apps, with two ways to buy. Get the whole bundle of 13 apps for $74 (a 76 percent discount from the combined regular prices), or, pick and choose a la carte and buy apps at 50 percent off.

Included in the promotion is Stairways Software’s astonishingly powerful and useful Keyboard Maestro, which almost never goes on sale. There are many longstanding Mac apps and utilities that I enjoy, appreciate, and recommend. There are very few that I can say I’d feel lost without. Keyboard Maestro is one of those.

Other apps in the Space/Time bundle that I use: TextSniper (instantly OCR any text you see on screen), DaisyDisk (disk space visualizer/cleanup), CleanShot X (advanced screenshot utility), and Bartender (menu bar item manager).

Thursday, 28 November 2024

The UX of Lego Interface Panels ★

Fun interaction design treatise from George Cave.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Wednesday, 27 November 2024

AirPods Pro 2 for Just $154 at Amazon ★

Borderline incredible discount on AirPods Pro 2 at Amazon. This is just short of $100 off the retail list price of $249. (Buy through this link and I’ll get rich on the affiliate commission.)

John Siracusa’s Review of Delicious Library 1.0 ★

John Siracusa, in his inimitable style, reviewed Delicious Library 1.0 upon its release, 20 years ago this month:

Part of what makes the Mac community so special is that so many Mac developers have itches — and, more importantly, corresponding talents — that have little or nothing to do with computers. I invite you to look again at some of the screenshots and artwork in this application. Someone loved those graphics. Someone sweated over every pixel of that application window. Someone knows what it means to be a lover of art, music, books, video games. This is in addition to (not instead of) the ability to write great code.

All of these human facilities and experiences have been harnessed to create not just a mere “program”, “application” or (God forbid) “executable”, but a digital love letter to collectors. Delicious Monster, from its products to its web site, exudes a spirit of passion and fun. “I’ve never been happier at work”, Wil Shipley told me in an email. “I think it shows in the finished product.”

I think so too. It may only be version 1.0, but it’s delicious.

Re-reading this review — which I first linked to, with little comment, upon publication — reminded me of several things. First, Siracusa is one of the few writers I’ve ever felt competitive with in this racket. This whole thing is so fucking good, and touches upon so many subtle points that are so hard to convey in words. (In some ways it’s better to read in its original multi-page layout, via Internet Archive, but those archived versions are inexplicably missing some, but not all, of the screenshots, and for a review of an app as visually ambitious as Delicious Library, the screenshots are essential. But the current Ars Technica version of the review, although it has all the inline images, is missing this “larger version” of Delicious Library’s main window. Open the version I’m hosting in a tab for reference. Note too that “larger version” meant something different 20 years ago — it’s only 183 KB, but is the largest image in the review.)

Second, I had forgotten just how ambitious Delicious Library 1.0 was, right out of the gate. I remembered that Delicious Library eventually supported barcode scanning via webcams, but that feature was in fact present in version 1.0. It worked incredibly well. And the feature was so far ahead of its time. In 2004, no Mac had yet shipped with a built-in camera. Instead, we all bought Apple’s standalone $150 iSight camera, which connected via FireWire. (What a gorgeous device.) By the end of his effusive review, Siracusa (unsurprisingly) has a wishlist of additional features, but what was in Delicious Library 1.0 comprised far more than a “minimal viable product”. It exemplified Apple’s — and Steve Jobs’s — own ethos of debuting with a bang, right out of the gate. It made you say “Wow!” And then you’d think, “Oh, but it’d be cool if it...” and, it turns out, it did that too.

Delicious indeed.

Tuesday, 26 November 2024

The End of the Line for Delicious Library ★

Wil Shipley, on Mastodon:

Amazon has shut off the feed that allowed Delicious Library to look up items, unfortunately limiting the app to what users already have (or enter manually).

I wasn’t contacted about this.

I’ve pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the website so nobody accidentally buys a non-functional app.

The end of an era, but it’s kind of surprising it was still functional until now. (Shipley has been a full-time engineer at Apple for three years now.)

It’s hard to describe just what a sensation Delicious Library was when it debuted, and how influential it was. Delicious Library was simultaneously very useful, in very practical ways, and obsessed with its exuberant UI in ways that served no purpose other than looking cool as shit. It was an app that demanded to be praised just for the way it looked, but also served a purpose that resonated with many users. For about a decade it seemed as though most popular new apps would be designed like Delicious Library. Then Apple dropped iOS 7 in 2013, and now, no apps look like this. Whatever it is that we, as an industry, have lost in the now decade-long trend of iOS 7-style flat design, Delicious Library epitomized it.

They were even clever and innovative in the ways they promoted the app. The first time Delicious Monster sponsored Daring Fireball for a week, their sponsorship message read, in its entirety:

Organize the shit you like.
Get rid of the shit you don’t.
Delicious Library 2.

When they created an iPhone version of Delicious Library, they announced it via this delightfully intricate but decidedly lo-fi stop-motion-animated video.

20 years go by and there’s some inevitable nostalgia looking back at any art form. But man, Delicious Library exemplified an era of indie app development that, sadly, is largely over. And make no bones about it: Delicious Library was a creative work of art.

‘It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty to Endanger the Lives of as Many Trans People as Possible’ ★

The Onion Editorial Board:

All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the point of reporting to illuminate the world around us, so that we may make meaning of it? Or is it to cause people in minority groups to question their humanity and persuade others to demonize them? We know where we stand, proudly dreaming of genitals.

Research shows that trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victim of a violent crime. We salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly to make that number even higher.

This was published in 2023, but seems particularly apt post-election.

OpenAI Might Be Making a Web Browser ★

Erin Woo, Sahil Patel, and Amir Efrati, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas):

OpenAI is preparing to launch a frontal assault on Google. The ChatGPT owner recently considered developing a web browser that it would combine with its chatbot, and it has separately discussed or struck deals to power search features for travel, food, real estate and retail websites, according to people who have seen prototypes or designs of the products. [...]

Making a web browser could help OpenAI have more control over a primary gateway through which people use the web, as well as further boost ChatGPT, which has more than 300 million weekly users just two years after its launch. It isn’t clear how a ChatGPT browser’s features would differ from those of other browsers.

In a signal of its interest in a browser, several months ago OpenAI hired Ben Goodger, a founding member of the Chrome team at Google. Another recent hire is Darin Fisher, who worked with Goodger to develop Chrome.

But OpenAI isn’t remotely close to launching a browser, multiple people said.

Goodger and Fisher’s hirings weren’t secret — both keep up-to-date profiles on LinkedIn — and just because two people have previously created new web browsers (even multiple times) that their new gig is creating a new web browser. But it sure feels like a good guess.

Fisher most recently was at The Browser Company for two years, working on Arc, an innovative browser that I admire for its originality but which simply did not click for me at all. The Browser Company is in flux, too, working both on Arc 2.0 and an as-yet-unnamed second project that might be a more traditional web browser.

Combine this with regulatory pressure on Apple’s Safari and especially Google’s Chrome, and it’s an exciting time for web browsers. It’s kind of wild how every few years the web browser market gets shaken up. The pattern that’s repeated several times is that just when the browser market seems settled — like the markets for, say, spreadsheets and word processors — there’s a period of flux and new entries shake up the market. There was a point when it seemed like Internet Explorer would be dominant forever; today it doesn’t even exist. There was a point when Firefox seemed entrenched on Windows; today it’s an afterthought. Today Chrome seems entrenched, as dominant as IE once was. Maybe not?

Monday, 25 November 2024

Apple TV’s Hardware Situation Is Fine ★

Mark Gurman, in his weekly Power On column:

The best scenario for Apple in TV hardware would be a cheap stick (perhaps with no physical remote — use your iPhone instead). It’s an idea that Apple marketing executives detest, but it would help the company quickly expand its presence. If consumers want more power and storage, they can opt for the current box.

At the top of the line, Apple could offer something like the new Mac mini, providing the best streaming quality and gaming options. For this exercise, let’s call these three tiers the Apple TV SE, Apple TV and Apple TV Max. It would use the same “good, better, best” strategy employed by the iPhone, Mac, iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch and even the Apple Pencil.

Neither of these suggestions makes any sense. The only interesting thing about either idea is trying to decide which one is worse.

Streaming sticks are crap, and Apple doesn’t make crap. I also think streaming sticks are fast going the way of the dodo — they were a stopgap low-cost solution for when TV sets didn’t have “smart” experiences with built-in integration for major streaming platforms. Those built-in integrations obviate the need for streaming sticks, and Apple TV is now built into TVs from all major brands, including Samsung, Sony, LG, and Vizio. That’s the Apple TV app, not the full Apple TV tvOS platform, but that serves Apple’s needs. I don’t think it’s possible to provide a full-fidelity tvOS experience via a stick-sized computer that draws power from an HDMI port, and it’s certainly not possible to do so by omitting the goddamn remote control. Arguing that Apple needs to or even ought to build a cheap TV stick today is like those dumb columns from 2009 arguing that Apple needed to make a netbook to compete against shitty $300 laptops. Apple TV is to set top boxes as the Mac is to PCs — it’s never going to get a large share of the overall market, but it dominates the high-end of the market catering to people who actually care.

As for Gurman’s high-end hardware idea, a Mac Mini starts at $600. What would be the point of connecting such hardware to your TV? A Mac Mini wouldn’t offer better streaming quality than the existing Apple TV 4K offers. 4K is 4K, and even older Apple TV hardware streams it perfectly. And while in theory an M4-powered Mac-Mini-caliber Apple TV could offer better gaming than the iPhone-13-era A15 Bionic chip in the current Apple TV 4K hardware, there are zero tvOS games today that target hardware like that, and there’d be little reason for game developers to target such an “Apple TV Pro” device because almost no one would buy one. Whatever the reasons are for gaming not being a big deal on tvOS today, the lack of a “pro” $500 or $600 hardware tier is not one of them.

I think Apple should get the entry price down to $99 (currently $129), and sooner or later they need to update the hardware, if only to support Apple Intelligence. (Perhaps to the A18 or A18 Pro next fall — the current A15 Bionic Apple TV 4K models came out one year after the chip debuted in the iPhones 13.) But the hardware story for Apple TV is fine.

Perhaps Acquiring Pixelmator Is Not About Competing With Photoshop and Lightroom, Per Se, but the Adobe Creative Cloud Bundle ★

Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac back in May 2023:

Now that Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad are official, let’s talk about pricing. These apps coming out on a random day in May is surprising. Subscription pricing? Not so much. Nevertheless, pricing for these long overdue apps is interesting when you consider their Mac counterparts and the Apple One bundle.

First, let’s address the Mac apps.

How would Apple price Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for Mac if they were released today? In the era of service revenue, Apple would almost certainly charge a subscription fee for access rather than a one-time fee.

Mac users have had years of free updates to Logic and Final Cut Pro after paying once for each app. In fact, Logic Pro X will be a decade old in July, and Final Cut Pro X turns 12 next month. The price of Logic Pro for Mac today ($199.99) is the same as four years of subscribing to Logic Pro for iPad, and Final Cut Pro for Mac ($299.99) will equal six years of paying for the iPad version.

The iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are both priced the same: $5/month or $50/year. There is no bundle to get both at a discount.

I was a little surprised when Apple announced Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac two weeks ago and didn’t announce a switch to subscription pricing. Instead, it remains a $300 one-time purchase, and for existing users version 11 is a free upgrade. Whether you like it or not, subscription pricing is no longer the future, it’s the present, and it’s the dominant model for professional creative tools today.

Adobe made this switch years ago, with a particular emphasis on the Creative Cloud bundle that includes their entire suite of apps — Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Audition, Acrobat Pro, and more. You get access to Adobe’s entire suite for $90/month, or $60/month if you pay annually ($720/year). They currently offer a first-year 50 percent discount if you pay annually. A la carte, subscriptions to each app cost $20–$23/month, so the Creative Cloud bundle is a good deal if you use three of them, and a great deal if you use more than three.

Apple clearly understands the appeal of subscription bundles too, with Apple One. Despite the fact that Apple didn’t switch to subscription pricing for Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac, I still expect them to sooner rather than later, and if they do, I further expect a bundle. Apple is never going to offer a swath of creative tools as broad as Adobe’s, but the biggest missing pieces right now would be alternatives to Photoshop and Lightroom. My gut feeling is that’s why they acquired Pixelmator and Photomator. They could sell a bundle for, just spitballing here, $20/month or $200/year that would include the Mac and iPad versions of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator, and possibly Photomator. Maybe throw in some extra iCloud storage.

Sunday, 24 November 2024

WorkOS ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow. For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Check out WorkOS’s Launch Week announcements to see their latest.

Friday, 22 November 2024

Shazam Hits 100 Billion Song Recognitions ★

Apple Newsroom:

Shazam has now officially surpassed over 100 billion song recognitions since it launched. To help put that into perspective:

That’s equivalent to 12 songs identified for every person on Earth.

A person would need to use Shazam to identify a song every second for 3,168 years to reach 100 billion.

Shazam launched in 2002 as an SMS service in the UK, and back then, music fans would dial 2580, hold up their phones to identify music, and receive the song name and artist via text message. Shazam’s following and influence continued to grow in the years that followed, but it was the 2008 debut of the App Store and introduction of Shazam’s iOS app that brought its music recognition technology to millions of users. By the summer of 2011, Shazam had already recognized over 1 billion songs.

I had no idea Shazam started in the pre-iPhone era of mobile phones, getting audio via a phone call, and sending results via SMS. Clever! That takes me back to Moviefone — the service we’d dial in the 1990s to get theater listings and showtimes. You’d call your city’s local Moviefone number — almost certainly using your landline — navigate a menu (“Press 1 if you know the name of the movie you’d like to see...”), and Moviefone would tell you which theaters were showing it, at what times. It sounds archaic but it was great, and they did a great job with the phone menu user interface so you could navigate it quickly.

It also reminds me of the very early days of IMDB, which preceded the web. You could send an email to IMDB with the name of a movie in the subject, and IMDB would email you back with all the information it had about that movie.

Android Authority Reports Google Has Cancelled the Pixel Tablet 2 ★

Mishaal Rahman, reporting yesterday for Android Authority:

Android Authority has learned that Google has canceled the Pixel Tablet 2, the presumed name of Google’s second-generation Pixel Tablet. This is disappointing for Pixel fans who were waiting for Google to refresh its first-generation Pixel Tablet with a newer chipset, a better camera, and, more importantly, an official keyboard accessory. [...]

Last week, I shared what I learned about the Pixel Tablet 2 from a source within Google. I deemed this source to be very credible given my past history with them as well as the fact that they were able to share unreleased images of the device with me (which I obviously did not publish to protect their identity). After the publication of this article, however, I learned from my source that Google had decided to cancel its plans to release the device, citing concerns that the company would lose money on it.

“Concerns that the company would lose money on it” and 9to5Google’s framing of the same news as “profitability concerns” are fun euphemisms for “no one wants an Android tablet”.

This comes on the heels of news just this week that Google is supposedly “fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android” — but somehow not “merging” them — with the specific goal of better competing against the iPad. So a generous read might be that Google is scrapping the Pixel Tablet 2 because that device was planned to run Android (as the existing Pixel Tablet does) but now Google is rejiggering their tablet and laptop hardware roadmaps with the upcoming ChomeOS-migrated-to-not-merged-with-Android OS in mind.

A less generous read is that Google is afflicted with institutional ADHD and generally acts with no apparent strategy. They’ve kept their focus on annual updates to the well-regarded Pixel phones for 8 years now, but haven’t managed to make them hit products. With the rest of their hardware, their strategy has been about as coherent as their comically chaotic efforts in messaging apps.

Thursday, 21 November 2024

‘The Blurred Line Between X and the Trump Administration’ ★

Mike Masnick, writing for MSNBC:

Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the creeping.

Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching out to social media companies about election misinformation was a democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’s richest man has openly used his platform to boost one candidate, ridden that campaign’s success into the White House himself, and ... crickets. The silence is deafening.

There isn’t even a suggestion that Musk should have to divest from his ownership of X. No one expects that. There is no discussion of how Musk set up an entire account on his own platform for his own “Department of Government Efficiency” and gave it a “gray” check mark — denoting it as a verified government entity.

The silence or cheers from “Twitter Files” writers and boosters over this merging of private and public interests — which they deemed a threat to Western civilization, when it wasn’t even happening — is credibility-destroying. They were simply a convenient political cudgel, quickly abandoned as soon as an actual government-social media alliance benefited their side.

A man named Frank Wilhoit coined an oft-cited adage in 2018 that I find profound, particularly when it comes to the absurd hypocrisies of the Trump era in American politics: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

But it’s not just laws, although laws are where the stakes are highest. It’s everything, including conventions and norms.

Whatever it is you think the Biden administration did to nudge Twitter (and other social media platforms, but let’s stick to Twitter/X) to clamp down on what the administration perceived as “misinformation”, it pales in comparison to Musk taking ownership of the platform and turning it into a clear pro-Trump platform for this election. I’m not saying that was illegal, or should be made illegal. I’m saying that the entire argument over “The Twitter Files” was that the former leadership of Twitter put their thumb on the scale to comply with the wishes of the Biden administration. I’m with Masnick — I don’t think that even happened, really. But even if you buy into “The Twitter Files” thesis, it was about a thumb on one side of the scale. And then Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and dropped an anvil on the other side of the scale. The “Twitter Files” argument wasn’t that the wrong side of the scale was advantaged by a bias, it was that platform owners should scrupulously avoid any vague hint of a bias at all. But now here we are with Elon Musk serving as a de facto member of Trump’s 2.0 administration and none of the same critics even see a problem.

The hypocrisy is baked into their worldview. So however we counter it, it can’t be by merely pointing out their hypocrisy, because they don’t see it and they don’t care. My biggest quibble with Masnick’s piece is in the headline (which, perhaps, he didn’t write): the line between X and the incoming Trump administration hasn’t been blurred — it’s been erased.

Wednesday, 20 November 2024

Apple Is Selling Apple News Ads Directly for the First Time ★

Sara Fischer, reporting for Axios:

Apple has started selling its own advertising inventory for Apple News, two sources familiar with the effort told Axios. It’s pitching new ad units that it hopes will maximize revenue for itself and its publishing partners. [...]

Publishers will get a 70% cut of the ad revenue sold by Apple within their articles.

They will get a percentage of the ad revenue sold by Apple within the Apple News feed, dependent on engagement with their content.

Apple News publishers will continue to receive 100% of the revenue from the advertising that they sell against their content in the app.

Apple News+ is a really good product. Scanning its main Today tab in the morning has become my modern-day equivalent of scanning the front page of a printed newspaper — a way to get a sense of what’s going on in world news. There’s a level of editorial curation and presentation in Apple News that I don’t think has a peer. Apple News itself doesn’t publish or report anything, but there’s clearly a talented, level-headed editorial team that is picking and choosing the most important and most interesting (which are often very different things) stories from a wide variety of sources. So maybe a better analogy to the bygone era of print isn’t scanning the front page of a newspaper, but rather stopping at a good big-city newsstand where you could scan the front pages of a slew of newspapers from around the country (and world).

I don’t look to Apple News for anything related to tech. I definitely want to do that via RSS (which for me means NetNewsWire), the web (Safari), and social media. But for national, world, and general interest news, Apple News is really good. I don’t know what it’s like without a News+ subscription, but with one, it’s truly excellent. And a News+ subscription gets you access to a bunch of great publications with paywalls on the web.

If you cemented your opinion of Apple News years ago and tuned out, you should give it a fresh look — especially if you have a “free” News+ subscription via Apple One.

But, my god, the ads suck — low-rent and highly repetitive. I posted screen recordings over the summer illustrating this. It seems like recently, though, I’ve seen fewer ads, and they’ve gotten less repetitive. I just spent a few minutes now perusing the Today tab while writing this post, and I read a bunch of articles without seeing any ads at all. For me at least, the Apple News ad experience seems to be getting better already. But there’s still so much room for improvement.

Whenever I write about this, some readers will comment that, to their minds, a paid subscription like Apple News+ should bestow a completely ad-free experience. That’s how streaming video and music subscriptions tend to work, but even there — as I just posted regarding Disney+ — many people are choosing lower-priced streaming subscriptions subsidized by ads. The economics for ad-free news just don’t work, and never have. News+ isn’t like TV+, where Apple owns or has paid for the rights to all of the content.

Bob Iger Inadvertently Reveals Percentage of Disney+ Subscribers on Ad-Supported Tier ★

Dade Hayes, reporting for Deadline:

Fielding a question from a Wall Street analyst about the growth outlook and pricing strategy of Disney+, Iger divulged how many Disney+ subscribers take the ad-supported tier in the U.S. (37%) and globally (30%). The disclosure was unusual in the streaming sector. Netflix, for instance, has never broken out a similar percentage, preferring instead to report monthly active users of its ad tier (as it did earlier this week).

When the Q&A with analysts moved to the next question and CFO Hugh Johnston was giving his answer, Iger’s voice suddenly could be heard on the call. “I don’t know if I was supposed to disclose those AVOD numbers,” he said, before Johnston continued speaking.

Looking at Disney+’s pricing page (and ignoring the wide assortment of bundle offers), their ad-supported “Basic” tier costs $10/month; their ad-free “Premium” tier costs $16/month or $160/year.

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

‘Can You Take a Photo of Us?’ ★

Delightfully clever sketch from Tiny Idea.

‘Inside the Rather Bizarre Relaunch of Jaguar’ ★

James Baggott, writing for Car Dealer Magazine:

Jaguar unveiled a new look, logo and direction for its cars at what was quite possibly the most bizarre automotive media launch I’ve ever attended — here’s what happened.

Embargoed until today, the event felt like a hallucinogenic sci-fi movie where the presenters were only allowed to speak in marketing babble. Unveiling a new concept car — the details of which are still under embargo until December 3 — Jaguar’s passionate team spoke for most of the day about how they plan to ‘delete ordinary’ and ‘live vivid’. Whatever that means…

In what, at times, felt like a drunken dream, Jaguar personnel walked journalists through its plans to ‘reimagine’ the much-loved brand over the next few years. Calling it a ‘complete reset’, McGovern at one point told journalists that his team had ‘not been sniffing the white stuff — this is real’.

Translation: they’ve all been sniffing a metric ton of the white stuff. This looks like the identity for a women’s razor brand or something. Certainly not the identity for a longstanding British sports car company.

Lulu Cheng Meservey:

Jaguar already nailed their marketing decades ago, and given the demand for nostalgia, now would’ve been the perfect time to revive it.

Instead, the sad irony is that their “Copy nothing” campaign abandons their own originality in favor of a fad that peaked during the pandemic.

Texas Education Board to Vote on Bible-Infused Lessons in Public Schools ★

Troy Closson, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

The optional curriculum, one of most sweeping efforts in recent years to bring a Christian perspective to more students, would test the limits of religious instruction in public education.

It could also become a model for other states and for the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has promised to champion the conservative Christian movement in his second presidential term. [...]

Religion makes up a relatively small portion of the overall content. But the lessons delve into Christianity far more often and in depth than they do into other faiths, religious scholars say and a review of the materials by The New York Times found. In kindergarten, for example, children would be taught that many religions value the Golden Rule, but the lessons would be focused on the Christian version, and introduce students to Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount.

The Times runs an excerpt from the curriculum, which reads:

The Sermon on the Mount included many different lessons. Some of these included do not judge others; do not seek revenge, or try to get even with someone; and give to the needy. Beyond the Sermon on the Mount, there are many rules included throughout the Bible. Jesus said that the Golden Rule sums up all of the important teachings from scripture. “So in everything, do unto others as you would have done unto you.”

“Do not judge others; do not seek revenge, or try to get even with someone; and give to the needy” — the very words that Donald Trump himself lives by.

See Also: Related coverage from The Onion: “Christian Right Lobbies to Overturn Second Law of Thermodynamics”.

Airport – A Typeface Revival ★

Lukas Schneider:

On 13 November 1961, the Oceanic building at London Airport opened to handle long-haul flight departure. In 1979, German publisher Ravensburger brought out a game designed to help children learn to count. Around Christmas 2023, I stumbled across a copy of that vintage game. The type on the box caught my eye, and that’s where this story began.

The letterforms resembled those of Helvetica. As the corners were soft, I initially thought it might be its Rounded version. However, the typeface featured a much larger x-height, the capitals were less wide, and the glyphs also had white bits in some places, yielding a highlight effect. I had never seen this design before. My first suspicion was that it might be a Letraset face, as this would have fitted in well with the release date of the game. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a match in a catalog by this manufacturer of rub-down type, so I contacted Florian Hardwig, who had often helped me with type research in the past. Florian was able to identify the mystery typeface. He found it in a catalog published in 1985 by Layout-Setzerei Stulle, a typesetting service in Stuttgart, Germany. Named Airport Spotlight, it’s a derivative of Airport, a typeface that Matthew Carter had designed in the early 1960s for signs at London Airport.

What a gift that Matthew Carter is still with us today. How’s this tidbit strike you, regarding the speed at which the world worked just decades ago:

In many regards, the adaptations made to Akzidenz echo the considerations made in the design of Helvetica. In an interview for Computer Arts, Carter comments: “[I]f you look at it today, you’d think was a rip-off of Helvetica. But we’d never seen Helvetica in 1961 in London, although it had been produced in Switzerland near Basle at the Haas foundry in 1957. Even if we had seen it, and wanted to have it typeset in London, we’d have had to get on a plane and fly to Basle and have it typeset there, because the British typesetting trade was so conservative that typefaces like that were simply unobtainable.”

Via Typographica.

Android Authority: ‘Google Is Transforming ChromeOS Into Android’ ★

Mishaal Rahman, reporting for Android Authority:

While both Android and ChromeOS have seen huge success in different markets, they’ve struggled to compete in one product category where they overlap: tablets. The high-end tablet market is dominated by the Apple iPad, and no matter what Google has tried, it has failed to change that. However, a source tells Android Authority that Google is working on a multi-year project to fully turn ChromeOS into Android, and the end result could be a platform that finally bests the iPad.

Probably not. Frankly it’s kind of weird that Android is a peer to iOS when it comes to phones, but not at all when it comes to tablets, even though iPadOS remains just a big-screen version of iOS. There are zillions of tablets out there that run Android, but they’re all crap and everyone knows it. “Flagship Android phones” are a thing; “Flagship Android tablets” are not. And iPads are a huge business for Apple, and the iPad is now solidly established as a piece of our cultural firmament. Everyone knows what an iPad is.

To better compete with the iPad as well as manage engineering resources more effectively, Google wants to unify its operating system efforts. Instead of merging Android and Chrome OS into a new operating system like rumors suggested in the past, however, a source told me that Google is instead working on fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android. While we don’t know what this means for the ChromeOS or Chromebook brands, we did hear that Google wants future “Chromebooks” to ship with the Android OS in the future. That’s why I believe that Google’s rumored new Pixel Laptop will run a new version of desktop Android as opposed to the ChromeOS that you’re likely familiar with.

So they’re not “merging” the two OSes as rumored, many times, in the past, but they’re “fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android”. The only way that really makes a lick of sense is that they’re shitcanning ChromeOS and working to make Android not suck on devices other than phones, like laptops and tablets. Good luck with that, given that even Apple has struggled to make iOS/iPadOS a good laptop OS. OS platforms are just hard — hard to design, hard to engineer, hard to evolve. And Apple, for one, seems more committed than ever to the idea that MacOS and iPadOS remain very different platforms.

And, somehow, there’s no mention of Fuchsia in Rahman’s piece. Fuchsia is supposedly Google’s OS of the future, but which more and more is smelling like Google’s Copland or Pink — a sprawling “next-gen” OS project that collapses under the weight of its own ambition and lack of practical focus, spinning its wheels for years “in development” whilst the world moves on.

Inside ISIS’s Graphic Design Team ★

Jason Koebler, writing for 404 Media:

According to the filing, which was first reported by our friends at Court Watch, Said was an aspiring ISIS graphic designer who was working with ISIS’s second-in-command graphic designer. That person told Said that ISIS’s chief designer gave him the nickname The Nightmare because of the extensive notes and revisions that were required before any piece of propaganda he worked on was pushed out. The DOJ document suggested that The Nightmare himself had many revisions for Said’s graphic design work.

“You can call me the Dawlawi [ISIS] designer or you can call me as the brother used to before. He used to send his designs for me to modify and because of the many changes, he used to be scared of me so he would call me ‘the nightmare,’” a message from The Nightmare to Said published by the DOJ said. [...]

The FBI obtained what it says are notes on one propaganda image allegedly created by Said and which The Nightmare tore apart because it had so many design elements that it was not very legible or effective as a piece of propaganda, and suggested that Said should both simplify it and add blood effects to parts of it to better get the point across.

If the Trump 2.0 administration goes full fascist, I think I’ve found my role in the resistance.

Apple Devices May Learn to Ignore ‘Hey Siri’ Command From TV Ads ★

Filipe Espósito, writing at 9to5Mac:

Apple introduced the “Hey Siri” command with iOS 8 to let users easily interact with the virtual assistant without having to press any buttons. However, over the years, this has resulted in Siri being mistakenly triggered when the command is spoken on a TV ad. But Apple is finally working on a fix for this. [...]

The new AdBlocker framework is linked to ShazamKit, which is the API for apps to use Shazam — the song identification platform acquired by Apple in 2018. At the same time, the framework also links to the process responsible for managing the “Siri” and “Hey Siri” voice commands on Apple devices.

Code suggests that “AdBlocker” will download audio fingerprints from Apple’s servers and then use the Shazam API to match them against audio captured by the device’s microphones using the Hey Siri API. When certain audios match, the new framework will temporarily disable Siri’s trigger commands.

Clever clever.

Monday, 18 November 2024

The Talk Show: ‘Annoying Friendliness’ ★

Joanna Stern returns to the show to talk about our new best friends, AI chatbots, and I chime in with how the Voight-Kampff test got it all wrong.

Sunday, 17 November 2024

Netflix Claims 60 Million Households Streamed Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul Fight Friday Night, Straining Quality to Breaking Point for Many ★

Dominic Patten, reporting for Deadline Friday night:

Netflix’s much hyped and much delayed live fight tonight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul is taking some hits even before the former heavyweight champion and the YouTuber turned boxer have climbed in the ring.

From nearly the start of the undercard bouts from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the streamer has been freezing, losing sound and proving slow to reload. While not totally crashing as Netflix did when Luke Cage launched on the streamer in October 2016, the audio on the feed cut out over and over and the quality of the image was reduced to smeared pixels repeatedly.

We watched the whole fight card, and the stream started flaking out early. We had a couple minutes-long segments with what looked like 320p quality, and at other points, the audio completely dropped out for minutes-long stretches, as though the TV were muted. Some people in some places didn’t see any glitches, but it seems like most viewers experienced some.

I thought this boded poorly for Netflix’s upcoming Christmas Day NFL games (and gave them some shit about it on social media) but I vastly underestimated just how many people would watch the Tyson-Paul fight. I was thinking the Christmas NFL games would have more viewers than the fight, but it’s the other way around. Thanksgiving and Christmas NFL games get about 30 million viewers, but Netflix announced they had 60 million “households” for the fight, peaking at 65 million (and with 50 million watching the great women’s title fight that preceded the main event).

That said, the streaming glitches I saw Friday night began early in the evening, during the first fight on the card, a few hours before the main event. It didn’t feel to me to like Netflix’s live event streaming architecture could handle 30 million viewers, either.

It’s easy to forget just how amazing it is that traditional cable TV can deliver a live event to as many people as possible simultaneously. For context, the Super Bowl gets about 100–120 million viewers. Streaming is altogether different. Netflix didn’t fall down on this big fight night, but they stumbled.

Friday, 15 November 2024

‘Here’s Why I Decided to Buy “InfoWars”’ ★

Bryce P. Tetraeder, Global Tetrahedron CEO, in an op-ed for The Onion:

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society — values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.

Make no mistake: This is a coup for our company and a well-deserved victory for multinational elites the world over.

What’s next for InfoWars remains a live issue. The excess funds initially allocated for the purchase will be reinvested into our philanthropic efforts that include business school scholarships for promising cult leaders, a charity that donates elections to at-risk third world dictators, and a new pro bono program pairing orphans with stable factory jobs at no cost to the factories.

Have I mentioned that under its new ownership, The Onion is once again in good old print, delivered by mail to annual subscribers? I signed up at the end of September, still looking forward to my first issue.

Thursday, 14 November 2024

Mike Tyson Slaps Jake Paul in Face During Weigh-In ★

The winner of tomorrow night’s fight gets to be Secretary of the Treasury in the second Trump administration.

The Onion Buys Alex Jones’s Infowars in Bankruptcy Auction ★

Brandy Zadrozny and Erik Ortiz, NBC News:

The Onion, the satirical news company that repeatedly spoofed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, has won the bankruptcy auction for control over his media empire — most notably Infowars, the far-right, conspiracy-minded website that served as Jones’ primary online platform.

Jones announced the sale on X on Thursday morning.

“I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the U.S. trustee over our bankruptcy this morning and they said they are shutting us down even without a court order this morning,” Jones said. [...]

The Onion plans to shutter Jones’ Infowars and rebuild the website featuring well-known internet humor writers and content creators, according to a person with knowledge of the sale. About an hour and a half after the announcement of the sale, Infowars’ website was shut down.

If you’d told me, say, eight years ago, that in 2024 one of two things would happen: Infowars would buy The Onion or The Onion would buy Infowars, I don’t know which I’d have considered more likely. But I know which outcome I’d have rooted for. This is just delightful. I think what makes it so amazing is “The Onion Buys Infowars” feels like a perfect Onion headline.

Wednesday, 13 November 2024

Bill Atkinson Has Pancreatic Cancer ★

Bill Atkinson, on Facebook, “Request for Prayers”:

On October first, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Because of vascular involvement, surgery is not possible. I am taking weekly chemo treatments to shrink the tumor before surgical resection. I am tolerating the chemo pretty well, and I am in good spirits. Every day I make a point of getting out in the sun and walking with Cai and Poppy. [...]

At 73 years, I have already lived an amazing and wonderful life. I have loved and been loved, beginning with my remarkable mother who believed in me. With my work at Apple and General Magic I am grateful that I could make positive contributions to the lives of many millions of people, and even affect the course of human evolution.

But I want more quality time to share life and experiences with Cai and with my friends and family. My bucket list is not filled with places to travel, but instead with quality time with those I love and those who love me.

I am living my life filled with gratitude. Each day is a special gift to be unwrapped, enjoyed, and cherished.

A seminal figure in the history of Apple, and the Macintosh in particular. I’ve not yet had the pleasure of meeting him, but I’ve heard stories about Atkinson from several of his former colleagues. In addition to being a genius programmer, he’s by all accounts a kind and generous person. Everyone was (and remains to this day) in awe of his skills, but they remember him best for being a friend.

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

The Verge’s Compilation of Tech Leaders Congratulating Donald Trump ★

More comprehensive, if less punchy, than my list last week:

Some Big Tech CEOs, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Disney’s Bob Iger, and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew didn’t post a message for Trump. Netflix co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos also didn’t comment.

Also Now In Public Beta: Find My Enables Sharing Location of Lost Items With Third Parties, Including Airlines ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple has introduced Share Item Location, a new iOS feature that helps users locate and recover misplaced items by easily and securely sharing the location of an AirTag or Find My network accessory with third parties such as airlines. Share Item Location is available now in most regions worldwide as part of the public beta of iOS 18.2, which will soon be available to all users as a free software update for iPhone Xs and later. Find My is built with privacy and safety at its core. The shared location will be disabled as soon as a user is reunited with their item, can be stopped by the owner at any time, and will automatically expire after seven days. [...]

Users can generate a Share Item Location link in the Find My app on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Recipients of a link will be able to view a website that shows a location of the item on an interactive map. The website will automatically update when a new location is available and will show a timestamp of the most recent update.

In the coming months, more than 15 airlines serving millions of people globally — including Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Brussels Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Turkish Airlines, United, Virgin Atlantic, and Vueling — will begin accepting Find My item locations as part of their customer service process for locating mishandled or delayed bags. More airlines will be added over time.

What a cool feature. Feels closer and closer to a no-brainer to keep an AirTag in each of your checked bags now.

iOS 18.2 Beta 3 Adds New ‘Require Screen On’ Toggle for Camera Control ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

iOS 18.2 beta 3 adds another new toggle for personalizing the iPhone 16’s Camera Control. Now, you can open the Camera app with a single press of the Camera Control even if your display is off.

If your iPhone 16’s display is off, the default behavior is that you press the Camera Control once to wake the screen and again to open the Camera app. This new toggle in iOS 18 gives you the ability to remove that first press.

If you go to the Settings app and choose “Display and Brightness,” you’ll see a new “Require Screen On” toggle at the bottom. This toggle is enabled by default. If you disable this toggle, however, a single press of the Camera Control will automatically open the Camera app regardless of whether or not your iPhone 16’s screen is on.

This was a significant gripe of mine in my iPhones 16 review, and this new setting is exactly what I was hoping for from Apple. I even agree that it’s probably a good idea for the “Require Screen On” setting to be on by default. I’m already running the iOS 18.2 betas on my personal phone for Apple Intelligence features, so I’ve disabled this new option already. I’m curious if it will result in any inadvertent Camera app launches, but I don’t think it will, for me. If anything, after two months of daily use of an iPhone 16 Pro, I feel like the recessed inset of the Camera Control button makes it a little too hard to click. I sort of wish it were raised, more like the Action and Side buttons. That Camera Control is effectively flush with the sides of the iPhone is protection enough — again, for me at least — against accidental presses.

Monday, 11 November 2024

John Geleynse Retires From Apple ★

John Geleynse, Apple’s longtime head of developer evangelism, on LinkedIn:

Doing anything for 25 years is a pretty big deal. Being a part of Apple for 25 years has been the privilege and experience of a lifetime.

My last day at Apple was exactly a week ago today. I’d always dreamed of being a part of Apple but never imagined it would be a reality. The most productive and exciting years of my career have been with Apple, and I’ll be forever grateful for the opportunity to meet and work with thousands of creative and passionate developers, designers, and students worldwide. [...]

There are no words to describe how grateful I am for the opportunity to work side-by-side with so many great people at Apple. Apple is an immensely special place — far greater than the sum of its parts. Together, we did a lot.

I heard about Geleynse’s retirement through the grapevine a month or two ago. I was hoping he’d post something like this publicly, so I could link to it. It’s a lovely departing message.

Turns out, in all the years I’ve been writing here, I’ve only mentioned Geleynse by name twice, and both times I was quoting what someone else had written. And those two posts were from 2007 and 2008 — a while ago, to say the least. That’s a shame, dare I say negligent on my part. In third-party developer circles, everyone knows John Geleynse. Most prominently, his role as co-host (with Shaan Pruden) and I think effectively co-chief of the Apple Design Awards. But the ADAs are a once-per-year award show. Year-round, year after year, platform after platform, Geleynse has been shaping, guiding, and defining what it means to be a third-party developer for Apple platforms. The point of winning an ADA isn’t to win an ADA; it’s to reward making a great app that moves the state of the art forward. That’s what Geleynse spent his career trying to do. He’s just incredibly well-liked and well-respected.

But, like a typical “bleed six colors” Apple employee, I think Geleynse going all these years operating mostly behind the scenes, with his own name out of the story, taking no personal credit, is just the way he wanted it. He’s going to be missed — things just won’t be the same — both inside Apple, and out.

Testing the New Ultrawide Mac Virtual Display Option in VisionOS 2.2 ★

MacRumors:

With the wide display option, there’s enough screen real estate to use four apps at once without compromising on window size. Ultrawide bumps up the available space even more, and it’s almost too much display space.

Using the ultrawide setting is like having multiple curved Mac displays in front of you to handle your Mac apps, and then you can also add in visionOS apps to better utilize the virtual space around you. The larger screen sizes for the Mac do improve productivity because there’s so much more space to work with.

Note that you still can’t use multiple Mac windows when mirroring your Mac display to your Vision Pro, but the wide and ultrawide provide so much space that it’s essentially the same function. Apple says that the ultrawide mode is equivalent to using two 4K monitors side by side.

If this suits your physical workspace (like, say, if you live and work in a studio apartment) or travel needs, it comes close to justifying the cost of a Vision Pro by itself. A single Studio Display costs $1,600 (without a nicer stand, without the nicer nano-texture coating).

Sunday, 10 November 2024

1Password: The Infinite Loop of Security ★

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired frequent DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that “the human element” (accidental breaches caused by human error, or victimization in phishing attacks and the like) was the number one cause of breaches. The same was true last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.

The single biggest culprit in breaches continues to be weak and stolen credentials. The 2024 DBIR found that “use of stolen credentials” is the number one initial action during a breach, and that credentials are the number one way attackers gain access in non-error, non-misuse breaches, followed by phishing and vulnerability exploits. This needs to change, and the 2024 DBIR offers a clear look at where we’re falling short and where we go from here. To get more insights about the report and its implications for security, read the full post on 1Password’s blog.

The Talk Show: ‘Holiday Party 2024’ With Special Guest Merlin Mann ★

This again. Jiminy. Well, once more, let’s talk around another election, and try, by doing so, to maybe express something about it.

Wednesday, 6 November 2024

The Brutal Clarity of This Result ★

Taegan Goddard, Political Wire:

After last night, it became clear it was a mistake to dismiss Trump’s true political strength. He will win the 2024 election with at least 51% of the popular vote.

His win will not be the result of a constitutional quirk. It was not even the result of a bad campaign by Kamala Harris. His victory was so broad based I’m not sure any Democrat could have beaten him last night.

There’s a brutal clarity in this result.

The majority of Americans are not concerned with Trump’s blatant racism or sexism. They are not concerned with his vows of retribution on his political enemies. They are not concerned with warnings of “fascism” by his former top aides. They are not concerned with his extensive criminal and fraudulent behavior.

If there’s a takeaway from this election, it’s that this is who we are.

Not all of us, to be sure. But it makes clear what the rest of us are up against.

I take some small solace at the moment in Trump’s victory being the clear democratic result. Republicans just fucking won. No mistakes on Harris’s side. There’s no Comey letter. No hanging chads. No margin within the range of woulda-coulda-shoulda recriminations. Just a clear electoral result.

I realized this year — or perhaps over the last four years — that for me, belief in the merits of democracy is quasi-religious. It’s more than a philosophy. It’s a fundamental belief. I have faith in democracy, and part of that is accepting the results of any fair and free election as the will of the electorate — similar, I think, to how actually religious people have faith that unspeakable tragedies can somehow be the will of a just and righteous deity. Through that prism, and with the genuine shock of 2016 giving me a brace, I can accept this. But because of that prism, I will never forgive or forget Trump’s shameful desecration of our democratic ideals in 2020. His winning in 2016 and again now are awful events. But his attempt to overturn the 2020 election — ham-fisted, idiotic, and failed though it thankfully was — was and will always be worse.

‘In Defeat: Defiance’ ★

Bill Kristol, at The Bulwark:

The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open.

Donald J. Trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and more states than he did in his two previous elections. After everything — after his chaotic presidency, after January 6th, after the last year in which the mask was increasingly off, and no attempt was made to hide the extremism of the agenda or the ugliness of the appeal — the American people liked what they saw. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.

And Trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy. Yet Trump prevailed, pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. Trump boasted last night, “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” and he’s not altogether wrong. [...]

So: We can lament our situation. We can analyze how we got here. We can try to learn lessons from what has happened. We have to do all these things.

But we can’t only do those things. As Churchill put it: “In Defeat: Defiance.” We’ll have to keep our nerve and our principles against all the pressure to abandon them. We’ll have to fight politically and to resist lawfully. We’ll have to do our best to limit the damage from Trump. And we’ll have to lay the groundwork for future recovery.

To do all this, we’ll have to constitute a strong opposition and a loyal opposition, loyal to the Declaration and the Constitution, loyal to the past achievements and future promise of this nation, loyal to what America has been and should be.

‘Trump Has Won, but Democracy Is Not Over’ ★

Tom Nichols, for The Atlantic:

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states — at least those in the union that will still care about democracy — have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now — not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. [...]

Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.

I wrote last night, “Strong déjà vu as acceptance sets in.” Referring, of course, to watching the results come in on election night in 2016. Now the day after, I still sense some of the same similarities to 2016, but I more feel the differences. I was braced for this result, this time. I wasn’t in 2016. Trump winning in 2016 was like a trapdoor we didn’t even know existed opening suddenly under our feet. But once the unimaginable happens, it’s no longer unimaginable that it might happen again. I was optimistic about this election. But polls are polls, and I knew my optimism was based on some degree of faith that the polls were wrong. I still think, now, that there were good reasons to suspect the polls might be underestimating Harris’s and down-ticket Democrats’ chances. But after 2016, I knew the polls showing Trump’s resiliency could be right.

Trump’s first term in office was disastrous on numerous fronts, and of the few things I feel certain about right now, one of them is that his second will be worse. This is going to be bad. But we shouldn’t be concussed like we were in 2016. This was not unimaginable. We knew this might be the result. And we know how we got through it last time: by going through it, with eyes open, resistance strong, and, as Nichols exhorts, shoulders squared. Truth and justice are the American way. The fight goes on.

Overnight Status Check ★

Josh Marshall, signing off for the night:

If Harris loses, that is obviously a crushing result. There’s no way around that. It’s different from 2016 in that it’s not a shock. We all knew or should have known this was a very possible result. The polls and models were about as close to 50-50 as you can get. A number were literally 50-50. But there’s another dimension of the story, assuming Trump does win. And that’s this: everyone knows who Donald Trump is. He was already President once. We know what that was like. Paradoxically Kamala Harris and he both did a pretty good job reminding us who he was over the last month. So it’s not like 2016 when you could say people didn’t know what they were getting. We know who he is. If he wins, which now looks probable though not certain, that’s a very sobering reality.

Strong déjà vu as acceptance sets in.

Tuesday, 5 November 2024

Apple News Offers an Election Day Live Activity ★

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

It’s Election Day in the U.S., which means you’re likely glued to the latest news about which presidential candidate is currently in the lead. To help with this, Apple has released a Live Activities widget within its Apple News app that will offer real-time election updates directly on your iPhone or iPad’s Home Screen and Lock Screen. [...]

To use the Apple News Live Activity in the U.S., you’ll need to first launch the News app and then tap on the banner at the top of the page offering live updates. After doing so, you’ll get a message saying “Live Activity Scheduled,” which notes that when the event starts, you’ll begin to receive real-time updates on both your Home Screen and Lock Screen.

On Apple Watch and in the iPhone’s Dynamic Island, it shows the Electoral College results for the presidential election; on the Home and Lock screens, it adds the results for the Senate and House of Representatives.

Monday, 4 November 2024

‘Vote to End the Trump Era’ ★

The New York Times editorial board, making deft use of good old-fashioned hypertext, has published a powerful endorsement on the eve of the election that covers so much ground, yet fits entirely in a single concise paragraph. In its entirety:

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

Harrison Ford Endorses Kamala Harris ★

Harrison Ford:

The truth is this. Kamala Harris will protect your right to disagree with her. About policies, or ideas. And then, as we have done for centuries, we’ll debate them. We’ll work on them together. And we’ll move forward. The other guy? He demands unquestioning loyalty. Says he wants revenge.

I’m Harrison Ford, I’ve got one vote, same as everyone else — and I’m going to use it to move forward. I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris.

Ford’s message is a powerful framing of the authoritarian, anti-democracy dynamic in this election. Short, gruff, and to the point. Worth sharing to anyone you think might still be on the fence.

See Also: Same video, on X, if that’s easier for you to share.

Nilay Patel: ‘A Vote for Donald Trump Is a Vote for School Shootings and Measles’ ★

Nilay Patel, endorsing Kamala Harris at The Verge:

But look beyond the locked-in message discipline to her approach to campaigning, and it is clear Harris is deeply, meaningfully committed to solving collective action problems. She has assembled a politically diverse group of people to support her that range from AOC to Liz Cheney to Mark Cuban, and most of her claims about how she’ll run the country differently than Biden come down to putting Republicans in her Cabinet and reaching across the aisle more. She has, for better or worse, made approaches to the crypto community while championing restrictions on price gouging and regulations on banks. She had antimonopoly Senator Elizabeth Warren onstage at the Democratic National Convention while having Google antitrust defense lawyer Karen Dunn serve as her debate advisor.

You might not agree with some of the depressingly averaged-out policy positions produced by this unnervingly big tent. You might have some serious problems with, say, her proximity to the current administration and its approach to the war in Gaza. But this is what happens when the other party in our two-party system can only generate policy ideas that amount to AI-generated blood libel and RETVRN memes on X. Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.

In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.

I still see some friends on the left who are uneasy with Liz Cheney’s full-throated endorsement of Harris. And even more so by her father’s. Back in September, when Liz Cheney declared her endorsement of Harris, I wrote:

But (lowercase ‘d’) democratic politics ought to be viewed very much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are in psychology. Some things matter more than others. And nothing — not climate change or the environment, not reproductive rights, and certainly not fucking tax rates — nothing matters more than support for democracy itself and the rule of law. The only way we’re going to get those other things right — which are really, really important — is through democratic governance and the rule of law.

Everyone who supports democracy, who understands the stakes, who sees who Trump is with clear eyes, is on one side in this election. That side is with Kamala Harris. It certainly makes for some strange bedfellows on the sort of policy disagreements most U.S. elections are waged over. It is terrifying and depressing that so many Americans are seemingly on the other side. But make no mistake, those are the stakes.

The Message That Works: the Republicans Who Know Trump Best Refuse to Endorse Him ★

Bill Kristol, writing last month for The Bulwark:

The Democratic polling and messaging firm Blueprint recently tested the effectiveness of several closing messages for the Harris campaign. (This was before Kelly’s new remarks.) Here’s one message the group put before voters:

Donald Trump doesn’t have the character it takes to be president. He’s erratic and can’t control himself. He denied the results of an election just because he lost and is a threat to the fundamental American principle of democracy. He instigated a riot at the Capitol that left three police officers dead.

This general (and true) statement barely moved the needle on voters’ preferences. It presumably simply sounds like a reiteration of things voters have heard before.

What did move the needle was this message:

Nearly half of Donald Trump’s Cabinet have refused to endorse him. When Trump learned during the Capitol riot that his supporters were threatening to kill his own vice president, he said ‘so what?’ and refused to do anything to assure the vice president was safe. Republican governors, senators, and House members have all said the same thing: We can’t give Trump another four years as president.

As soon as the message turned from an abstract argument against Trump into an unambiguous case that Trump’s own former allies were making against him, it became the single most persuasive line tested by Blueprint. It was stronger even than abortion rights and Social Security. In other words, hearing about Trump’s unfitness from people who worked with him, and from Republicans one would expect to defend him, seems to make a difference.

Sunday, 3 November 2024

Nomorobo ★

My thanks to Nomorobo for sponsoring this week at DF. It’s perfect timing, especially if, like me, you live in an election swing state. The one thing all voters (and, now that I think about it, surely non-voters alike) agree on is annoyance at political robocalls and robotexts.

While every candidate, campaign, PAC, and political party uses robocalls and texts, Nomorobo is tracking them and gives you control over who you want to hear from, and who you don’t.

Use Nomorobo’s powerful but very easy-to-use tools to identify, block, and report the calls and texts you don’t want to receive anymore, and they’ll handle the rest. Nomorobo integrates with iOS’s built-in functionality for filtering calls and text messages. I’ve been a paying customer of Nomorobo since 2017. My iPhone doesn’t even ring when a call comes in from a known robocaller. It’s a great app and it really works. If you wish you had better options for screening out robocalls and texts, try Nomorobo.

Iowa Poll From ‘Best Pollster In Politics’: Kamala Harris Ahead 47-44 ★

The Des Moines Register:

Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory.

A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states. The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.” [...]

The poll shows that women — particularly those who are older or who are politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris.

No poll guarantees anything, of course, but this one stands out. If it holds up, Harris is on her way to a clear victory. It also explains Harris’s increasingly sunny demeanor down the stretch and Trump’s increasingly erratic and desperate antics, like dressing up as a garbage man last week. Selzer is widely regarded as one of the best pollsters in America, if not the best. Her eve-of-election 2016 Iowa poll was an outlier, predicting Trump would beat Hillary Clinton by 7 points; Trump won Iowa by 9 points that year. In 2020, Selzer’s closing poll had Trump ahead of Biden by 7; he won the state by 8.

The explanation for Harris’s surprise strength in Iowa — that women have had enough of Trump and his shithead revanchist misogynist party — holds water. If this poll is wrong, I still like Harris’s chances. If this poll is right, it’s in the bag for Harris.

Iowa doesn’t get counted as a “swing state”, perhaps because Trump won it by such significant margins in 2016 and 2020, but in recent elections has swung back and forth by large margins:

2020: 🟥 Trump by 8.2
2016: 🟥 Trump by 9.5
2012: 🟦 Obama by 5.8
2008: 🟦 Obama by 9.5
2004: 🟥 W. by 0.7
2000: 🟦 Gore by 0.3
1996: 🟦 Clinton by 10.4
1992: 🟦 Clinton by 6.0

And if you want to go back to what’s effectively now electoral pre-history, Mike Dukakis won Iowa by 10.2 points in 1988.

Keep the faith. Be sure to vote.

Trump, His Remaining Shreds of Both Dignity and Sanity Slipping Away in the Face of Impending Loss, Tells Rally He ‘Shouldn’t Have Left’ White House in 2020 ★

The New York Times:

Reflecting on the state of border security at the end of his tenure, Mr. Trump said he regretted ever leaving office.

“I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “we did so well, we had such a great — ” and then cut himself off. He then immediately noted “so now, every polling booth has hundreds of lawyers standing there.”

I wish he wouldn’t have left the White House on his own (which he did like the complete turd that he is, refusing to attend his successor’s inauguration). Biden was prepared for that, and we’d have all gotten to enjoy seeing him marched out by the military after watching Biden take the oath of office.

No Minced Words From Senator John Fetterman ★

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, on CNN today:

My version of being a man is like, hey, I like rib-eyes, I like Motörhead, and I’m never going to pick on trans kids and gay kids. […] It doesn’t make you tough. It doesn’t make you a man to pick on trans or gay kids. It just makes you an asshole.

Friday, 1 November 2024

Fantastical for Windows — A Glass of Ice Water for Calendar Users in Hell ★

Flexibits:

We’ve spent the last 4 years making Fantastical better than ever across Apple devices, and with version 4.0 we decided to go even bigger by finally bringing the world’s best calendar app to a Windows PC near you. [...]

The best news is that Fantastical for Windows is included in your Flexibits Premium subscription so there are NO extra purchases required!

All the main Fantastical features are there, including the Mini Window with which I pretty much live my calendaring life. On the Mac, the Mini Window lives in the menu bar; on Windows, the system tray.

Flexibits took a lot of arrows in their back when they switched from traditional per-major-version purchasing to subscription-only, but they promised at the time that the predictable, steady revenue from subscriptions would enable them to continue adding value to a Flexibits subscription over time. That started when they added Cardhop, a terrific Mac and iOS contact management app. Now it includes a full-fledged native Windows version of Fantastical.

I’m not sure which is more surprising in this week’s news from first-rate indie Mac apps — Pixelmator getting acquired by Apple, or Fantastical shipping for Windows. I’m trying to think of a similar app — a serious Mac-assed Mac app that eventually was ported to Windows — and I’m coming up empty. It just doesn’t happen. I might go all the way back to Apple bringing iTunes to Windows. Or maybe Instagram expanding to Android after a long initial stretch as iPhone-only.

But even iTunes was oft-criticized by Windows users for lack of adherence to Windows idioms. Especially as the years went on, it seemed like iTunes was used begrudgingly by Windows users (who needed to use it for syncing music, media, and data with their iPods, and later, iPhones), not happily. But the reaction to Fantastical seems overwhelmingly positive from the PC media:

David Pierce at The Verge.
Romain Dillet at TechCrunch.
Jared Newman at FastCompany (“Fantastical is one of the best examples of what a native iOS or Mac app should be. Now, after 13 years of Apple exclusivity, it’s also available for Windows.”)
Laurent Giret at Thurrott.com.
Pradeep Viswanathan at Neowin.

Pixelmator Acquired by Apple; Future of Their Apps Uncertain ★

The Pixelmator blog:

Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple. [...]

Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.

Pixelmator is their longstanding image editor — more or less, a Photoshop competitor. I first wrote about Pixelmator when it was pre-announced at the end of May 2007, and it looked so good I was dubious it would actually ship in a form resembling the amazing app they previewed. But ship it did, at the end of September that year. I have linked to and referenced Pixelmator dozens of times since. It’s a great app, part of the “Best Mac Apps in the World” firmament.

Photomator is more recent, and arguably more ambitious — if it’s possible to be more ambitious than directly competing with Adobe Photoshop. It’s more like a Lightroom competitor, specifically targeting photo editing and photo library management and batch editing. But unlike Lightroom, Photomator builds atop your iCloud photo library, not its own discrete library. That puts Photomator in competition with a few other excellent third-party apps, like Darkroom and Nitro Photo. These are apps for photographers who want the benefits of storing their photos in Apple’s system photo libraries (convenience, cross-app integration, secure and reliable iCloud sync) but with more powerful editing features than Apple Photos provides.

Both Pixelmator and Photomator are the sort of native third-party apps Apple loves to celebrate. Pixelmator won an Apple Design Award in 2011, and Photomator (at the time named Pixelmator Photo) won an ADA in 2019. A year ago Apple named Photomator the App Store’s Mac App of the Year. Pixelmator has also oft been demoed by Apple during event keynotes, as an exemplar of the functional and performance benefits of building atop native frameworks.

They don’t just happen to be exclusive to Apple’s platforms — they’re fundamentally architected around Apple’s frameworks. The way that a small engineering team (or in the case of Pixelmator rival Acorn, a one-person engineering team) can compete against the veritable army of engineers Adobe has working on Photoshop is by building atop the rich, deep frameworks Apple provides in AppKit and UIKit. And from a design perspective, Pixelmator and Photomator already look like Apple’s own “pro” apps. From the get-go, the Pixelmator team hasn’t just followed Apple’s own trends and guidelines for UI design, they’ve helped define those trends.

Does Apple want to fold these advanced features into Photos? Or do they once again see the need for separate consumer/professional first-party apps? Logic, for example, was an acquisition — but that was all the way back in 2002. If Apple keeps Photomator as an actively developed product, it would be a return to the same genre they walked away from when they discontinued Aperture in 2014. And if Apple keeps Pixelmator going, it would be the first time they go head-to-head against Photoshop itself.

Tucker Carlson Claims He Was Mauled by a Demon While He Slept ★

Isaac Schorr, reporting for Mediaite (with video, in case you don’t believe the following was claimed in all seriousness, which it was):

Asked by his interlocutor, John Heers, if he thought “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good?” Carlson answered “That’s what happened to me,” before recounting the story.

“I had a direct experience with it,” said Carlson.

“In the milieu of journalism?” asked Heers.

“No, in my bed at night,” replied Carlson. “And I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

“In a spiritual attack by a demon?” inquired Heers.

“Yeah, by a demon,” affirmed Carlson. “Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”

Carlson, of course, was a headline speaker at Trump’s Madison Square Garden “lovefest” last weekend. As recently as last night, Carlson appeared alongside Trump on stage in Arizona — an event at which Trump suggested Liz Cheney should face a firing squad.

Carlson was never hooked up right. And eventually when you’re not hooked up right and you don’t get help, the loose screws start falling out.