Linked List: August 24, 2026

Monday, 24 August 2026

Apple Rethinks Plan to Merge ‘Hide My Email’ Domain Name With ‘Sign In With Apple’ ★

Apple Developer News:

Starting later this year, new Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com. Existing addresses on privaterelay.appleid.com will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.

After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.

Back in June, Apple announced plans to merge both systems onto the new private.icloud.com domain. The objection to this plan was rather obvious: it’s fine for Sign In With Apple to use an easily distinguishable domain name, because the only sites that see such email addresses are those that support Sign In With Apple (SIWA). The problem with moving Hide My Email (HME) addresses to a distinguishable domain name is that we often want to use such hidden email addresses on sites that would prefer to block those addresses and try to force us to use our “real” addresses. A little birdie suggested to me after I wrote about it in June that there were strong objections to the merger internally all along, from the HME side. Seems like those objections have won out.

BitCam: The 1-Bit Camera App Turns 2.0 ★

10 years ago I wrote about BitCam 1.0:

Gorgeous, unbelievably faithful one-bit camera app for iPhone done in the style of the original Mac. A lovely tribute to Bill Atkinson’s remarkable dithering algorithm. “Catnip for old-school Mac users,” says John Siracusa. Check out the fun recent-hire-at-Apple Chris Espinosa is having with it.

Originally a creation of The Iconfactory, BitCam is now in the good hands of Héliographe (coiners of the best icon-design zinger ever). Version 2.0 has everything great about BitCam 1, and so much more. Just a wonderful ode to the original Mac, with so much extraordinary attention to detail. Great fun on the iPhone (especially as a camera), and great fun on the Mac (especially to explore the details of its OG-style UI). Free to download on the App Store, and a one-time purchase of just $10 to unlock the full feature set.

If BitCam doesn’t speak to you, you’re not hooked up right.

More on TestFlight’s Screwy Sort Order ★

I complained last week that starting with an update last month, the list of apps I’m testing in Apple’s TestFlight app has been sorted alphabetically, rather than by recency. Whatever is going on with this sort order, it isn’t affecting everyone. John Siracusa, amongst many others, has the same problem I do — his list is now alphabetical, and it’s driving him nuts too. Ryan Booker, amongst many others, still has his list sorted by recency.

The weird thing is, back on August 13, the iPhone version of TestFlight started showing my lists in recency-of-last-update order once again. There was no update to the TestFlight app itself. I just started seeing the list in the correct order once again. It was only on my iPhone though — on my Macs and iPad, TestFlight continued to sort apps alphabetically. Then, two days later, my iPhone went back to alphabetical order, and it’s been stuck there ever since.

When the list is sorted by recency, there’s also a “Currently Testing” header at the top of the list, and there are other (disclosable) categories like “Incompatible” and “Previously Tested” at the bottom of the list. When the list is sorted alphabetically, none of these category headers are visible.

Update: The bug was seemingly fixed in v4.3.1 on September 3.