Friday, July 18, 2025

Xcode Key Bindings to Make Refactoring Less Painful

Jon Reid:

Xcode supports automated refactoring. Supposedly.

In practice, the options are limited and often unavailable. You’ll right-click something, navigate to the Refactor submenu… only to find that the command you want is grayed out. It’s a waste of time.

[…]

With these shortcuts, I can try an automated refactoring in less than a second. If it’s not available, I get feedback right away — no wasted mouse clicks. And when it is available, I stay in the flow.

The one I’ve had the best luck with is Edit All in Scope (Command-Control-E), which isn’t in the Refactor menu.

Previously:

Study on AI Coding Tools

METR (Hacker News):

We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI acceleration from AI R&D automation.

See the full paper for more detail.

Via Thomas Claburn:

Not only did the use of AI tools hinder developers, but it led them to hallucinate, much like the AIs have a tendency to do themselves. The developers predicted a 24 percent speedup, but even after the study concluded, they believed AI had helped them complete tasks 20 percent faster when it had actually delayed their work by about that percentage.

[…]

The study involved 16 experienced developers who work on large, open source projects. The developers provided a list of real issues (e.g. bug fixes, new features, etc.) they needed to address – 246 in total – and then forecast how long they expected those tasks would take. The issues were randomly assigned to allow or disallow AI tool usage.

I’m skeptical about the experimental design, and I suspect there’s huge variance in how much developers in the real world get out of AI.

Ruben Bloom:

I was one of the developers in the @METR_Evals study. Thoughts:

1. This is much less true of my participation in the study where I was more conscientious, but I feel like historically a lot of my AI speed-up gains were eaten by the fact that while a prompt was running, I’d look at something else (FB, X, etc) and continue to do so for much longer than it took the prompt to run.

I discovered two days ago that Cursor has (or now has) a feature you can enable to ring a bell when the prompt is done. I expect to reclaim a lot of the AI gains this way.

[…]

4. As a developer in the study, it’s striking to me how much more capable the models have gotten since February (when I was participating in the study)

[…]

5. There was a selection effect in which tasks I submitted to the study. (a) I didn’t want to risk getting randomized to “no AI” on tasks that felt sufficiently important or daunting to do without AI assistance. (b) Neatly packaged and well-scoped tasks felt suitable for the study, large open-ended greenfield stuff felt harder to legibilize, so I didn’t submit those tasks to study even though AI speed up might have been larger.

Previously:

Some of the Apps in the App Store

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

This blog post is about an app named Chatbot: Ask AI Chat Bot, subtitled “Built on ChatGPT OpenAI, GPT-4", by the developer Tuqeer Ahmad. If you’re not familiar with Tuqeer Ahmad, well… neither am I. Nonetheless, Chatbot: Ask AI Chat Bot is currently #23 top grossing in the Mac App Store and the #64 top “free” download according to AppFigures.

Believe it or not, the app is in the Education category of the Mac App Store. In fact, it’s #1 top grossing and the #3 top download in Education. (I would guess that’s because students are looking for ways to cheat on their homework, sigh.)

[…]

The app does include IAP, and as I’ve already noted, makes a significant amount of revenue (more than my apps!), so it seems difficult to dispute that the developer is a trader. Thus, the developer’s self-assessment appears to be inaccurate and indeed illegal in the EU.

[…]

Anyway, that’s what it takes to become one of the top grossers in the Mac App Store. On the web, I can find no media coverage, word of mouth recommendations, or even advertising for this app. Tuqeer Ahmad is effectively anonymous. And unlike the iOS App Store, the Mac App Store has no search ads. So how does this developer find customers? Honestly, I don’t know, other than stuffing the app title, subtitle, description, etc., with popular search keywords.

Paul Haddad:

WTH? How does something like [BrightScreen] even make it into the Mac App Store?

Marcus Mendes:

You know it’s a day that ends in “y” when there’s a new App Store lawsuit. This time, the issue isn’t antitrust or developer rejection complaints, but rather a class action accusing Apple of facilitating the spread of cryptocurrency scams by allowing a fake trading app onto the App Store.

[…]

Lead plaintiff Danyell Shin says she downloaded Swiftcrypt onto her iPhone in late 2024, after being introduced to the app through an online investment group. Believing the app was trustworthy, partly because it came from Apple’s App Store, she ended up transferring more than $80,000 into the platform. Then, the funds vanished.

[…]

The filing paints a detailed picture of how Apple’s own rules for crypto apps, requiring licensing, regulatory compliance, and developer verification, were supposedly not enforced in this case.

Here’s an app called School Assistant that offers an IAP called “Tip Jar - $0.99” that actually costs $400. It’s been like that in the store for at least 6 months.

Arin Waichulis (via Jeff Johnson):

It’s the same early-day digital scareware we’ve all seen before: “Your iPhone is infected with (310) viruses. Click here to remove them.” These pop-ups, seemingly always 280p quality and slapped together with stock graphics from a different reality, usually appear on shady websites as malicious ads or junk software, urging people to install a “fix” or be doomed. But one was recently spotted running as an ad on YouTube for a sketchy iPhone clean up app.

[…]

It states, “Your iphone is severely damaged by (247) virus! We have detected that your iPhone has been infected with viruses. If you don’t take any action, it will soon corrupt your SIM card, data, photos and contacts.”

[…]

From a few minutes of research, I learned the clean up application is operated by a newly formed Chinese-based company with very weak and broad privacy policies, likely created using LLMs, and ranked 50th on Top Charts in Productivity.

Thomas Clement:

The App Store is also such a cesspool. I was looking for a simple solitaire game, you’d think in 2025 the App Store would make it easy to find a simple solitaire game that isn’t a 300MB app with ads, subscriptions and extremely dubious privacy labels, but apparently no…

Previously:

App Store Study Shows 90% of What?

Apple:

Apple today announced the global App Store ecosystem facilitated $1.3 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2024, according to a new study by economists Professor Andrey Fradkin from Boston University Questrom School of Business and Dr. Jessica Burley from Analysis Group. For more than 90 percent of the billings and sales facilitated by the App Store ecosystem, developers did not pay any commission to Apple.

The Analysis Group always comes to the right conclusions.

Juli Clover:

Following a study looking into the success of the App Store ecosystem in the United States, Apple has sponsored a second study that covers the global App Store in 2024.

[…]

Developer billings and sales of digital goods and services hit $131 billion, primarily from games and photo and video editing apps like those from Adobe. Sales of physical goods and services facilitated by App Store apps exceeded $1 trillion.

How unfair it is that Apple isn’t getting paid when you buy physical goods from Amazon or get food delivered by Domino’s or Instacart. And the study points out that Apple isn’t even counting all the commerce that happens through Safari or Google Chrome! Think of how different things might be if Apple had invented the Web browser.

Apple always releases these studies before WWDC. You might think the idea is to make developers feel good about their position, but that doesn’t make much sense given the contents of the studies. On the one hand, the inflated numbers from physical goods and services are irrelevant to us. It seems like they’re padding the numbers to confuse and get the desired result. On the other hand, if you take Apple at its word that this is what we should focus on, the takeaway is basically that we’re paying huge commissions to Apple for terrible service, but they really want us to know that the giant companies pay nothing. Thanks, that helps a lot. The real audience for these studies is regulators. It’s basically FUD: be careful or you’ll screw up $1.3 trillion of the economy.

Chance Miller:

This marks the fourth report that Apple has released on the App Store ecosystem in the last week. Last Tuesday, Apple shared a report noting that the App Store prevented over $2 billion in fraudulent transactions in 2024. Two days later, Apple highlighted that the App Store ecosystem in the U.S. facilitated $406 billion in developer billings and sales in 2024.

Finally, the company released its full App Store Transparency Report with details on things like App Store user traffic, fraud prevention, and more. The emphasis on the App Store’s ecosystem comes as Apple continues to face pushback from regulators around its App Store practices.

Jeff Johnson (Hacker News):

In the same announcement, Apple brags at length about its “Investment in Developers”:

Apple invests in tools and capabilities that make it easier for developers to distribute their apps and games, be discovered by users around the globe, and grow successful businesses.

[…]

The positive tone of today’s announcement is in stark contrast to an Apple statement from 2019 addressing Spotify’s claims:

After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem — including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers — without making any contributions to that marketplace.

[…]

Whenever Apple or Apple apologists claim that App Store commissions are required in order to finance the iOS platform, it’s nonsense. To be clear, I have no objection to Apple having an App Store, and for placing requirements on App Store developers. What’s unique about the iOS platform, though, is that the App Store is the sole method of distribution for third-party software.

[…]

The IAP mandate applies only to a small minority of developers, who are forced to (allegedly) support the ecosystem for the benefit of the majority, who are free riders.

Nick Heer (Mastodon):

The purpose of this study — also produced in 2020, 2021, and 2023, though not last year — is two-fold. First, it indicates to lawmakers the footprint of the App Store and suggests any further regulatory action would seriously compromise the economy as a whole. The second reason it exists is to soften the impression of Apple’s commission on digital purchases, hence this part of the study and press release, emphasis mine[…] A big amount, but measured against the total estimated economy of $1.3 trillion, it is supposed to be seen as a small fraction — “less than 10%”.

[…]

The thing about the Analysis Group’s report is that it is very broad. While it does not include transactions made through Safari on iOS, things like shopping in Amazon’s app or buying airfare in Kayak’s app are factored in. Whether these purchases were actually facilitated by the App Store ecosystem is questionable to me — would someone have not bought that flight if not for their iPhone?

[…]

Apple has argued in court this commission is for App Store upkeep, developer relations, API development, and for intellectual property licensing. These are things common to all apps. Yet only those facilitating transactions for digital services are expected to pay? How is Uber — with its half-gigabyte client app updated once or twice weekly for tens of millions of users — not paying for App Store hosting and bandwidth, but indie developers are?

Previously:

Thursday, July 17, 2025

A History of Mac Settings

Marcin Wichary:

As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I do this out of curiosity – what was added since the last time I looked? – but also because I love this way of getting to know software: peeking under the hood, walking the back alleys, learning what has been tricky or important enough to be equipped with a checkbox.

[…]

Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.

Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.

Adam Engst:

Wichary is best known for Shift Happens, his multivolume masterwork about keyboards, edited by TidBITS contributor Glenn Fleishman. While Shift Happens is a visual tour de force, it is limited by the constraints of paper.

In contrast, Frame of Preference animates these historical interfaces in a charmingly interactive way. Each illustration is actually a fully emulated Mac from that era, thanks to Mihai Parparita’s Infinite Mac project. So you don’t just read about Susan Kare’s original Control Panel; you open it on the virtual Mac’s screen. Instructions in the text are shown with odd squares that turn out to be empty checkboxes—complete the action described, and you get a highlight and checkmark. If you click the Details button on the label by the emulated Mac, you’ll find “extra stuff to play with.” As you work your way through the evolution of control panels, you’ll encounter nine Macs and a NeXT Cube.

Dr. Drang:

Last week, I was going to be out with my MacBook Pro all day, and I wanted to make sure it was fully charged. I had noticed that it was typically charging up only to about 80%, and I assumed that was because Sequoia was doing some clever battery-life-lengthening thing. I wanted to turn the clever thing off so I could get the battery to 100% just for that day.

You will probably not be shocked to hear that I didn’t find the solution by simply opening System Settings and scanning the Battery panel—I had to do a Kagi search for it. It wasn’t that the toggle was buried several layers deep or that it was outside the Battery hierarchy. No, the problem was that Apple had put the toggle in a place where toggles—or any kind of control or data entry field—don’t belong.

Marco Arment:

I still can’t find anything in the System Settings app.

Previously:

Fixing “Optimize Storage”

Ryan Jones:

I am so out of patience for “Optimize Storage” on Apple devices.

Now I have to take half my day to figure out how to reduce Photos and Messages without nuking them.

My best solution: Disconnect iCloud Photos. That will delete all local photo copies. Then reconnect it. 🤷‍♂️

That worked. All local photos were offloaded.

Except for the Shared With You stuff from Messages.

Alex Greenland:

Yesss! My biggest gripe. With Photos and iCloud Drive on macOS and iOS.

“Optimise Storage” should leave me with comfortable space, not just leaving me a few gigs of headroom.

It’s like it tries to fill up your disk first, then takes files away, but never enough.

I think both Photos and Messages should have settings to specify the number of GB to cache locally.

Nick Spreen:

I feel like that’s not really a problem in comparison to 300gb system data

Previously:

Notarized Atomic Stealer (AMOS)

Jamf Threat Labs:

After downloading and inspecting the binary, we confirmed that it was indeed both code-signed and notarized — a detail that raised immediate concern given its malicious nature.

[…]

The application itself is named “Gmeet_updater.app,” though there’s little effort to align that branding with the user experience, suggesting a rushed or careless repackaging process.

After confirming that the Developer Team ID was used to distribute malicious payloads, Jamf Threat Labs reported it to Apple. Since then, the associated certificate appears to have been revoked.

[…]

Jamf Threat Labs identified at least three distinct macOS infostealer samples that were successfully signed and notarized using the same Team ID (A2FTSWF4A2) and later distributed in the wild.

Thomas Clement:

Notarization is a sad story. It doesn’t provide great security and is a barrier for many groups of people (young, indie, game developers, developers whose primary platform is not the Mac, etc…) to publish an app on the Mac. If Apple wants more games on the Mac, the first step is to make notarization free. Just make it free.

Or just get rid of it? It’s still a major pain, adding time and friction to each build. The notarization server still goes down at the most inconvenient times. There are some basic package structure and code signing checks that are useful, but these would be better if made available locally as part of Xcode. It’s not clear to me that the malware checks are adding much value over what we already get from code signing and macOS’s built-in malware detection.

rameerez:

I’ve lost this week trying to get my macOS app notarized

Notarization jobs would just stall and get stuck on Xcode for days!

So I wrote an email to Apple Developer Support

And the next thing I know is they TERMINATED my entire Developer Account?!

Previously:

Update (2025-07-18): See also: Hacker News.

JSON Editor and PlistEdit Pro

VDT Labs (via Dave DeLong):

View and edit your JSON files in “tree” or “text” mode. “Tree” mode offers a great and error proof way to manipulate your JSON, by allowing you to easily add, reorder, delete, copy & paste the items. The “text” mode offers a quick way to interact with the raw text which makes up the JSON and to investigate invalid JSONs.

[…]

The powerful HTTP Client included in the app, at no additional costs, allows you to easily create and perform HTTP requests. While its main purpose is to ease the fetch of JSON content from a server, it can be used to get or upload any content, including binary.

Fat Cat Software:

Mac and iOS developers must edit a variety of property list and JSON files while developing their applications. PlistEdit Pro makes editing these files easier by providing an intuitive and powerful interface. In addition to being able to copy and paste or drag and drop property list data around, PlistEdit Pro also offers powerful find and replace functionality, as well as structure definitions which provide easy access to commonly used keys in various standard property list files.

Previously:

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Longplay for Mac

Adrian Schönig (2023, via Nick Heer):

Longplay 1.0 was released in August 2020. I had used the app for years before that myself, but I didn’t know how it would be received by a wider audience. I loved the kind of feedback that I got which helped me distill the heart of the app: Music means a lot to people, and Longplay helps them reconnect with their music library in a way that reminds them of their old vinyl or CD collections. It’s a wall of their favourite albums that has been with them for many years or decades. It’s something personal. The UI very much focussed on that part of the experience, and I wanted to keep that spirit alive, keep the app fun, while adding features that people and myself found amiss.

The main idea behind 2.0 was to focus on the playing of music beyond a single album. 1.0 just stopped playback when you finished an album, but I wanted to stay in the flow – to either play an appropriate random next album or the next from a manually specified queue.

Adrian Schönig (Mastodon):

I am thrilled to be finally releasing Longplay for Mac today. Longplay is all about the joy of listening to entire albums and marvelling at their beautiful album artwork. It is built from the ground up for the Mac, with the familiar pretty album wall, a dedicated mini player, all the main features from iOS, plus Mac exclusives like AppleScript and a nifty MCP server.

[…]

Meanwhile, Apple announced in June 2023 that playback support for Apple Music tracks through MusicKit was coming to the Mac in macOS 14. I restarted work on the Mac app, and while it was working, I encountered pesky playback glitches, where Apple Music playback would often but not always start stuttering after a couple of tracks. I wouldn’t launch the app like that. However, the app worked reliable already for DRM-free tracks, which is how the “Early Access“ version of Longplay for Mac was born, as I knew some people who’d only or primarily use that (including myself).

On the glitches, I tried various workarounds that I could think of, kept lots of notes on when it happened and when it didn’t, filed a TSI (which got rejected due to no known workarounds), filed comprehensive radars including a demo app to reproduce, and reached out to Apple contacts. I did get some responses and am thankful for the support, but was still blocked. macOS 14 launched with the same glitches later in 2023. End of 2024, macOS 15 launched with the same issue still present.

I kept chipping away at the Mac app in the meantime, hoping that those glitches would be resolved at some stage. I focussed on the technical details, adding polish, hitting SwiftUI dead ends and opting AppKit in more places. Then, in late in 2024, CoverSutra relaunched for the Mac and it didn’t have the playback issue. I was stunned. So I dug in again and finally came across a workaround that worked for Longplay: Updating the dock icon every second.

It’s $6 (currently $2.99) for iOS and $25 for macOS.

John Voorhees:

However, the most interesting of all of Longplay’s automation integrations is its built-in MCP server. MCP is a protocol that allows AI chatbots like Claude to interact with apps. With Longplay’s MCP server, you can do things like create Collections and Smart Collections and queue albums for playback from inside a chatbot. What makes the integration so powerful is the ability to perform those actions with the sort of natural language requests that are the bread and butter of chatbots.

For example, the other day I asked Claude Sonnet 4 to compile a list of the top 100 alternative and indie albums of the ’80s. After consulting several sources, Claude generated a list, which I then asked it to use to create a Longplay Collection using my Apple Music library. Claude got to work and created my Collection after comparing its list with my Apple Music library for a couple of minutes.

Longplay is the first app I’ve tried that uses a built-in MCP server, and I’m sold. The combination of a chatbot’s research strength and Longplay’s actions makes its MCP integration a compelling way to explore your music.

Federico Viticci:

I expect more and more developers to do this, especially now that Anthropic has a new file format and easier experience for Claude desktop extensions.

(Meanwhile, in Shortcuts, none of this is happening…)

John Appleseed:

Why isn’t the UI getting out of the way of the content by overlapping, obscuring and blurring the content?

Previously:

NameQuick 1.9.29

NameQuick:

AI-powered file renaming that just works.

[…]

Rename legal documents, research articles, and scans automatically with clear, informative filenames.

Automatically organize invoices and receipts by extracting key details like vendor names, dates, and amounts.

Instantly rename photos with descriptive labels derived from image content or metadata for easy reference.

[…]

Use local models from Ollama for faster, offline renaming with full control over your data.

The developer says that Apple’s Foundation Models Framework is currently too unreliable and not powerful enough with its limited context window, so you need to use either Gemini, OpenAI, or Ollama. I tried it with Gemini and found that it was much better and faster than ScanSnap at pulling out names and dates from receipts, even finding some text that I could barely read myself.

I found the app itself a little hard to use. You can’t just drag and drop files onto its Dock icon, and dragging and dropping into the window didn’t properly apply the name template that I’d created and chosen. What worked best was setting up a Watch Folder. I wish it were sandboxed and supported AppleScript. NameQuick is $19 (one-time, bring your own API keys) or you can pay $5 or more per month with managed AI credits included.

Previously:

Shortcuts in macOS Tahoe

Jason Snell:

In macOS 26, there’s a built-in clipboard manager that can be accessed from the Spotlight interface, and a new set of Shortcuts triggers let you run automations when events occur on your Mac or at specific intervals.

Simon B. Støvring:

“Folder” and “File” seem like interesting automation triggers in Shortcuts for Mac. You can do things like “When a file is moved to this folder, process it with on-device AI”.

Jason Snell:

Of all the features I’m excited about using in macOS 26, the one that most intrigues me is the Use Model action in Shortcuts. Use Model does exactly what you think it does: you toss data into it, and an AI model somewhere (on your Mac, on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, or even at an OpenAI server farm) will take that data and turn it into… something.

The other day, I realized that this new feature would allow me to expand my existing automation that uploads images to the Six Colors web server by adding a description of the image.

Dan Moren:

But pulling information out of a document—especially information that might appear anywhere in a variety of forms—seems like something an AI model would be good at, so I decided to take another crack at it with Shortcuts’s new AI capabilities.

I started out my workflow by grabbing all the text from a PDF or web page, then passing it to the Private Cloud Compute model. (I attempted to use the On-Device model at first, but it was both very slow and not quite as good at formatting the response in the manner I wanted.)

[…]

And therein lies the rub with all of this. The results are neither reliable nor necessarily repeatable. The same data run through this shortcut multiple times provides different answers: I’d think that anathema (not to mention madness inducing) to the sensibilities of any programmer. Given the same data, the algorithm should yield the same thing every time, but the non-deterministic nature of AI models throws that out the window.

Federico Viticci:

So, the ChatGPT integration in Shortcuts’ Apple Intelligence action for iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 appears to be the really old GPT 4 Turbo with a knowledge cutoff date of November 2023…?

Federico Viticci:

The greatest threat to Apple Intelligence’s App Intents adoption isn’t the underlying lack of an LLM (Apple can fix that sooner or later): it’s web apps and the rise of MCP. The automation and inter-app model is shifting from local extensions to web-based ones.

I’m imagining an Apple-made MCP bridge that runs in Private Cloud Compute 🤔

Previously:

Weak Ubiquitous Linking in Apple’s Apps

Luc Beaudoin:

If you are like many knowledge workers, on a typical day you access over dozens of information resources. If you have to use search or navigate through folders to get to them, you’re taking a big hit on productivity. It’s much easier to access a resource by clicking on a contextually placed link than it is to search for it or navigate to it through folders. For instance, if your task list contains links to the resources (drafts, emails, notes, PDFs, etc.) you need to process today, then you can use your task list becomes a hub from which you can quickly jump to what you need.

Luc Beaudoin (Mac Power Users):

Despite its polish and promise, macOS still lacks overt support for robust, user-friendly linking. This violates both the spirit and the practical recommendations of the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking, which I authored to encourage software platforms and developers to address what I call the meta-access problem: the difficulty of re-accessing information that is related to your contextual focus.

[…]

Take Apple’s own macOS apps. In Notes, Messages, Reminders, Freeform, and even Mail, there is no “Copy Link” menu option that would let users create a persistent, shareable link to a specific item. This is a fundamental limitation for anyone who wants to organize information across documents and applications. In many cases, there’s no straightforward way — via the UI or automation — to get reliable, cross-device links.

Even when underlying identifiers do exist — and clearly they must — Apple keeps them hidden. For example, when you receive a date in a text via Messages on macOS, you can click it to create a Calendar event. That event includes a hidden link back to the original message, something like: sms://open?message-guid=ABCBB940-08A7-4FC8-8FDF-DF32CEB4234E But this linking mechanism is entirely private. There is no public API or automation hook to retrieve message GUIDs. So while Apple engineers can build this feature into Calendar, third-party developers and users are locked out.

[…]

There’s no AppleScript or Shortcuts action to [copy Music or Podcast links] either. One couldn’t add more hurdles to linking if one tried. And without a Copy Link menu item in the app’s menu bar, even UI scripting is impossible.

Previously:

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Apple’s Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA

Jess Weatherbed:

It’s been 16 months since a DMA ruling allowed iOS developers like Google and Mozilla to use their own browser engines in the EU, so… where are they?

Open Web Advocacy (Hacker News):

Apple’s compliance did not start well. Faced with the genuine possibility of third-party browsers effectively powering web apps, Apple’s first instinct was to remove web app support entirely from iOS with no notice to either businesses or consumers. Under significant pressure from us and the Commission, Apple canceled their plan to sabotage web apps in the EU.

Both Google and Mozilla began porting their browser engines Blink and Gecko respectively to iOS. […] However there were significant issues with Apple’s contract and technical restrictions that made porting browser engines to iOS “as painful as possible” for browser vendors[…]

[…]

At the DMA workshop last week, we directly raised with Apple the primary blocker preventing third-party browser engines from shipping on iOS. Apple claimed that vendors like Google and Mozilla have “everything they need” to ship a browser engine in the EU and simply “have chosen not to do so”.

Apple has been fully aware of these barriers since at least June 2024, when we covered them in exhaustive detail. Multiple browser vendors have also discussed these same issues with Apple directly. The suggestion that Apple is unaware of the problems is not just ridiculous, it’s demonstrably false. Apple knows exactly what the issues are. It is simply refusing to address them.

Previously:

Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac Mini’s Storage for Half the Price

Jeff Geerling (via Hacker News):

I documented the entire upgrade—along with taking my old M4 mini 1TB SSD and putting it in my Dad’s M4 mini—in today’s video[…]

[…]

Speaking of standards… you have to do a full DFU (Device Firmware Update) restore, because unlike conventional M.2 NVMe storage, the M4 uses a proprietary connector, a proprietary-sized slot, and splits up the typical layout—the card that’s user-replaceable is actually just flash chips and supporting power circuits, while the storage controller (the NVMe ‘brains’) is part of the M4 SoC (System on a Chip). Apple could use standard NVMe slots, but they seem to think the controller being part of the SoC brings better security… it certainly doesn’t bring any cost savings, resiliency in terms of quick recovery from failure in the field, or performance advantage!

[…]

The upgraded 4TB module performed noticeably better in writes, likely because it has more flash chips on it to spread out the write activity. Reads were pretty close to the same, with minor variance in performance across different file sizes and access patterns.

[…]

I was provided the $699 M4 Pro 4TB SSD upgrade by M4-SSD. It’s quite expensive (especially compared to normal 4TB NVMe SSDs, which range from $200-400)…

But it’s not nearly as expensive as Apple’s own offering, which at the time of this writing is $1,200!

Note that this particular upgrade doesn’t work with a non-Pro M4.

Previously:

utiluti 1.2

Armin Briegel:

I have also released an update to my CLI tool to set default apps for urls and file types (uniform type identifiers/UTI). utiluti 1.2 adds a manage verb which can read a list of default app assignments from plist files or a configuration profile. You can see the documentation for the new manage verb here and download the latest pkg installer here.

Note, that while you can set the default browser with utiluti, whether you are using the manage option or not, the system will prompt the user to confirm the new default browser.

Previously:

Gatekeeper Change in macOS 15.4

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

On macOS 15.2, I was able to drag the exact same downloaded WebP file to TextEdit and BBEdit with no Gatekeeper alert! Thus, it appears that the Reddit poster was correct, and something did change recently.

[…]

I perused the unusually long Apple support document About the security content of macOS Sequoia 15.4, but nothing in there jumped out at me as the probable cause of the Gatekeeper change.

[…]

The appearance or nonappearance of Gatekeeper alerts depends entirely on the downloaded file’s extension. I edited the WebP file with a hex editor to make it into a plain text file, but it still triggered a Gatekeeper alert on opening in an app. On the other hand, when I kept the file contents the same, in WebP format, but changed the file extension to .txt, the Gatekeeper alert no longer appeared.

Overall, this feels like more security theater in macOS.

[…]

My test app will open any and every file type without a Gatekeeper alert, as far as I’ve seen, when the CFBundleDocumentTypes has a single entry declaring the generic public.data in its LSItemContentTypes. The Gatekeeper alerts begin when I add a second entry with certain types, such as com.apple.webarchive or public.unix-executable. With just two declarations, one “safe” type such as public.data and one apparently “dangerous” type such as com.apple.webarchive, I see Gatekeeper alerts when trying to open any file, with any extension: .webp, .png, or even .txt.

He thinks the change in behavior may be a bug.

Thomas Tempelmann:

The problem (which has been around since macOS 10.0) is that it considers any file without a recognized extension to be an executable instead of being conservative and considering it something less. I always thought that to be a bad assumption. You cannot launch such executables directly from Finder anyway, so what’s the use case for this?

Yesterday, I saw a variation on this dialog that was new to me. I was trying to open a compiled nib file with Archaeology, and it said:

Apple could not verify “[file].nib” is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy.

The only two buttons were Done and Move to Trash. This is a document file, not executable code, and the only way I could open it was to delete the com.apple.quarantine xattr.

Previously:

Monday, July 14, 2025

Google “Acquires” Windsurf

Katie Roof and Rachel Metz (in May, via Hacker News):

OpenAI has agreed to buy Windsurf, an artificial intelligence-assisted coding tool formerly known as Codeium, for about $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, marking the ChatGPT maker’s largest acquisition to date.

Nickie Louise:

Windsurf, founded in 2021 by Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, built a loyal developer base with its AI-native coding platform. The company’s flagship product, Windsurf Editor, supports enterprise-grade workflows and enables what co-founder Andrej Karpathy once called “vibe coding”—a kind of low-friction, AI-driven software creation process that’s reshaping how code gets written.

[…]

But OpenAI had a problem: Microsoft.

The tech giant—one of OpenAI’s largest investors with over $13 billion poured in since 2019—has rights to much of OpenAI’s IP under a sweeping 2023 agreement. That includes access to model weights, code, and yes, any IP OpenAI gains through acquisitions. In this case, Windsurf’s technology would fall into Microsoft’s lap by default.

That didn’t sit well with OpenAI—or Windsurf. Mohan reportedly made it clear he didn’t want Microsoft anywhere near the startup’s tech, given GitHub Copilot’s position as a direct competitor.

Hayden Field (via Hacker News):

OpenAI’s deal to buy Windsurf is off, and Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, Google and Windsurf announced Friday.

Mohan and the Windsurf employees will focus on agentic coding efforts at Google DeepMind and work largely on Gemini. Google will not have any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf’s technology.

Sheel Mohnot:

One oddity of prediction markets: the fine print matters.

Polymarket had a contract on whether OpenAI would acquire Windsurf before August. They didn’t, but they announced an acquisition, so the market still resolved as “yes.”

Dave Pack (via Dare Obasanjo):

Talked to a senior employee at windsurf and current employees are getting no pay out and are left with shell of a company to “run”. All the cash is going to founders and preferred equity holders.

See also: Hari Raghavan.

Balaji Srinivasan:

After looking into this, I think the original intent was for that $100M+ cash balance to indeed be used to give employee distributions via a dividend. It corresponds very closely to the unvested equity number.

But due to the legal overhead that attends any Big Tech acquisition nowadays, the founder was muzzled and couldn’t say this outright. He could only say “dividending out the balance is an option.”

So: the remaining Windsurf shareholders can take that option, dividend out the $100M to employees, and then choose to shut down the company. The outcome is then similar to an acquisition.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-15): Ashley Capoot (Hacker News):

Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.

Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal.

[…]

Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The Iconfactory vs. AI

Sean Heber:

ChatGPT and other AI services are basically killing @Iconfactory and I’m not exaggerating or being hyperbolical.

First Twitter/Elon killed our main app revenue that kept the lights on around here, then generative AI exploded to land a final blow to design revenue.

Pieter Omvlee:

They’ve been such a staple of the Mac indie scene that I can’t imagine them going away. At Sketch we do all our design in-house but if we weren’t, they’d have been the first at who’s doors I’d be knocking.

I would have assumed they’d be booked solid this summer, with all the design work necessitated by Apple’s announcement of Liquid Glass. I’m sorry to hear that’s not the case. If you need your icons refreshed for the 26 cycle, here’s your chance to work with some of the best designers in the business.

Eric Schwarz:

I think what’s especially disheartening and frustrating is that AI-generated “design” is taking over and seen by bean counters as “good enough” even though it lacks humanity and skill. Anyone with an eye for detail will notice flaws or an uncanniness, no matter how “perfect” it is.

Christian Tietze:

In preparation of macOS Tahoe, is a design resistance movement on the horizon?

Like, I don’t want to be part of the “icon jail evasion. Can we play within the jail?

Previously:

LisaGUI

Andrew Yaros (via Marcus Mendes, Hacker News):

LisaGUI is a “web OS” - a website that mimics the look, feel, and functionality of an operating system. More bluntly, it’s a giant JavaScript program which fully recreates the Apple Lisa’s user interface from scratch (to the best of my ability). The Lisa was Apple’s first computer with a graphical user interface (known as the Lisa Office System, or “LOS”).

[…]

Aside from Gulp.js, which I use as a simple build tool to produce a minified JS file, no third party libraries or frameworks are utilized. LisaGUI contains no code from the Lisa Office System’s source code (or any code written by Apple), and doesn’t utilize any component of any emulator, like LisaEm or IDLE.

Previously:

Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android

Local Mess (via Dan Goodin):

We disclose a novel tracking method by Meta and Yandex potentially affecting billions of Android users. We found that native Android apps—including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser—silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes.

These native Android apps receive browsers’ metadata, cookies and commands from the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts embedded on thousands of web sites. These JavaScripts load on users’ mobile browsers and silently connect with native apps running on the same device through localhost sockets. As native apps access programatically device identifiers like the Android Advertising ID (AAID) or handle user identities as in the case of Meta apps, this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users’ visiting sites embedding their scripts.

This web-to-app ID sharing method bypasses typical privacy protections such as clearing cookies, Incognito Mode and Android’s permission controls. Worse, it opens the door for potentially malicious apps eavesdropping on users’ web activity.

Jorge García Herrero (via Hacker News):

Meta faces simultaneous liability under the following regulations, listed from least to most severe: GDPR, DSA, and DMA (I’m not even including the ePrivacy Directive because it’s laughable).

[…]

The Pixel script in your browser tries to send information to the Facebook/Instagram app that’s “listening” in the background.

It uses a technique called WebRTC, normally used for voice or video calls (like Zoom or Google Meet), but here it’s being used to secretly transmit data between the browser and the app.

Additionally, a technical trick called “SDP Munging” allows the browser to insert data (like the _fbp cookie identifier) into the WebRTC “initial handshake” message.

John Gruber:

What they’ve done here may not have broken any laws, but there certainly should be laws against it. And in terms of simple common sense, the entire elaborate scheme only exists to circumvent features in Android meant to prevent native apps from tracking you while you use your web browser.

Nick Heer:

The difference between targeted advertising and spyware is there is no difference.

After Girish, et al., disclosed this behaviour, Meta’s apps ceased tracking users with this method, and Goodin said Yandex will also stop.

John Gruber:

I’ll note that among the so-called “interoperability” requirements the European Commission is demanding of iOS is for third-party apps to run, unfettered, in the background, because some of Apple’s own first-party software obviously runs in the background.

I think the problem is the IPC, not the running in the background. The user should have control over whether apps can open up ports for listening and whether Web sites can connect to 127.0.0.1.

Every one of the sites that includes these tracking scripts is complicit to some extent in the theft of hundreds of millions of Android users’ web browsing privacy.

Andrew Abernathy:

This sort of bullshit is why I use the web instead of native apps from Meta/Facebook/Instagram.

Previously:

Friday, July 11, 2025

Apple vs. the Law

James Heppell (via Hacker News):

A week ago today I had the pleasure of attending both the Apple and Google DMA compliance workshops in Brussels. More detailed articles on the questions and answers, technical and legal analysis etc will be published over at the OWA blog, where we’ve just done the first write-up on the Google part. Here though I’d like to focus more on my own experience and personal opinions, and how I feel about some of the gatekeepers’ approach to the law…

[…]

John and I asked a couple questions on Apple’s process, specifically on why the absolute best tracker system they could come up with in ~6 months was a link to a static, once-a-week-updated PDF, hidden behind an Apple developer account. They assured us it was all that they could do in time to meet the EC’s specification, ignoring the part asking why they didn’t simply use GitHub or Bugzilla like in their other projects.

[…]

Roderick asked about Apple’s absurd requirement that anyone who wants to ship their own browser engine has to release it as a new app, and so re-acquire all their users. Mike from CODE (Coalition for Open Digital Ecosystems - 13 members including Google, Opera, Qualcomm, Meta) asked why Apple doesn’t provide a system prompt to switch default browsers, and why they’ve placed so many onerous contractual requirements around launching an alternative engine.

[…]

The TLDR is users with “Age Restrictions” parental controls (11-15% of EU users) can only use Safari. All browsers - including Safari - get a 17+ rating on iOS. Which makes no sense, as the separate “Web Content Restrictions” manages all web content on iOS. […] I followed up asking Apple why they don’t allow web developers outside the EU to test 3rd party browser engines on iOS, bringing up their own point that EU iOS will “experience unique vulnerabilities and bugs”, and so it’s crucial that all web devs serving EU users can test the browser engines currently unique to it, to not put them and their users at a disadvantage compared to Safari.

Apple apparently accused multiple groups who have nothing to do with Spotify of receiving funding from them.

Something which was very hypocritical of Apple is that, despite making a lot of noise about some of their competitors being in the room, and insisting on all questions having a person and organisation, there were a lot of people attending who were paid to be there by Apple. Last year the EC did an investigation into this after the workshop, found there were a lot of hidden links, and so said that this year everybody had to disclose if a gatekeeper or other relevant party funded them. Unfortunately though it wasn’t always enforced. The most notable example of a pro-Apple group was the App Association

[…]

John brought up data portability, how Apple Photos doesn’t do proper photo export - except with Google Photos, and how it doesn’t allow users to choose which cloud provider they want to store their data with.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-14): Saagar Jha (via Jeff Johnson):

I attended the workshop remotely (one of my questions is in the recording, if you watched it) and IMO it was mostly a waste of time. I didn’t even stick around past the App Store section. Partly because it was daytime CEST but mostly because the format was awful. Apple would spend half the time talking about how the EU was forcing them to make their OS worse and then the EC thought it was a good idea to make Q&A a batched thing so Apple could just talk for five minutes about none of the questions instead of actually being forced to answer anything. I was thinking the EC would ask questions like why nobody actually used the provisions that Apple so generously provided third party developers (obviously, because Apple designed them to be unworkable) but they mostly just stayed silent and let the Apple lawyers talk the entire time :(

Using “tmutil associatedisk” With APFS Destinations

I recently got a new SSD on Prime Day to replace one of my main hard drives. As this drive was included in Time Machine, I wanted the SSD to “adopt” the hard drive’s backup history. This way I could avoid recopying lots of data that was already backed up, which would also require pruning older snapshots.

When you get a new Mac and want to adopt the old Time Machine backup, you want tmutil inheritbackup. When you keep the same Mac but get a new source drive, you want tmutil associatedisk.

The command is documented as:

tmutil associatedisk [-a] mount_point snapshot_volume

The -a tells it to find all the snapshots for that volume on the destination, not just the specific one that you pointed it to.

mount_point is just the source volume’s path (in /Volumes, not the device path).

snapshot_volume is the destination within your Time Machine backup. The example shows this as being within the Backups.backupdb folder, but there’s no such folder when using an APFS destination. My first thought was to drag the latest snapshot from Finder into Terminal:

sudo tmutil associatedisk -a /Volumes/Aux /Volumes/.timemachine/C2E8322E-A7EA-44F8-904F-3232671E1412/2025-07-11-091237.backup/2025-07-11-091237.backup/Aux

This does not work. Instead, you need to find the path using Terminal:

sudo tmutil associatedisk /Volumes/Aux /Volumes/TM\ 7/2025-07-11-091237.previous/Aux

It’s important not to have any trailing slashes. And, also, it will fail if you use -a with an APFS destination. But I guess that’s OK because there’s only one .previous folder to point it at, anyway, and APFS itself should know the chain of parent snapshots…

Previously:

Update (2025-07-15): associatedisk worked with one of my drives. However, with another one, it didn’t. I first thought it was working because the amount of data copied and the estimated percent remaining looked right, but it ended up recopying all of the data, and deleting all my old snapshots in order to do that. In the end, the backup failed, as has happened to me with several other APFS Time Machine backups recently. It claimed there wasn’t enough space even though all the snapshots had been pruned and the destination drive was almost twice as large as the sources.

macOS Tahoe’s Folder Icon Customization

William Gallagher:

It’s not like it’s going to take you long, since there are just two elements to this:

  • Changing a folder’s color
  • Adding either an icon or an emoji to the folder

In this case, icons and emoji don’t sound all that different — whichever you choose, you end up with a symbol appearing on the folder. But there are differences, and at the least, having a choice of both gives you scope to go crazy with customizing everything.

Sam Henri Gold:

Figured out how to apply any arbitrary SF Symbol to a folder in Tahoe.

xattr -w 'com.apple.icon.folder#S' '{"sym":"camera.viewfinder"}' some/folder/here

This also works with private symbol names.

also because emoji labels are just handled as strings, you can put anything in the emoji config thing.

For example:

xattr -w 'com.apple.icon.folder#S' '{"emoji":"HIMOM"}' some/folder/here

Previously:

Apple Wins Dismissal in Payments Conspiracy Lawsuit

Hartley Charlton:

Apple has successfully secured the dismissal of a federal lawsuit accusing it of conspiring with Visa and Mastercard to suppress competition in the payments network industry and inflate merchant transaction fees (via Reuters).

[…]

The plaintiffs claimed that Visa and Mastercard made ongoing payments to Apple, described as “a very large and ongoing cash bribe,” to ensure Apple would not build its own rival payment network.

[…]

The court concluded that the plaintiffs had failed to provide sufficient factual allegations to support their claims, saying that they were largely circumstantial and speculative. The judge noted that Apple’s existing agreements with Visa and Mastercard included language that explicitly preserved Apple’s right to compete with them.

I’ve thought all along that the 0.15% is a really sweet deal for Apple. As far as I’m aware, Google Wallet gets 0%. Of course they wouldn’t put the no-compete stuff in writing, just as the Safari agreement with Google doesn’t specifically prohibit Apple developing its own search engine. In both cases, it probably doesn’t make sense for Apple to do it, and they’re getting paid—one oligopoly to another—for the status quo, so why bother?

Previously:

Thursday, July 10, 2025

Almost Fired for Color Picker Poetry

John Calhoun:

It was frankly a thing I liked about working for Apple in those days. The engineers were the one’s driving the ship. As I said, I wrote an HSV picker because it was, I thought, a more intuitive color space for artists. I wrote the HTML color picker because of the advent of the web. And I wrote the crayon picker because it seemed to me to be the kind of thing Apple was all about: HSL, RGB — these were kind of nerdy color spaces — a box of crayons is how the rest of us picked colors.

[…]

And it turned out, to my surprise, Apple shipped all the color pickers. No marketing or design person ever asked for them. But we, engineers, were not only programmers, we were also users and often had an intuitive sense of what other Macintosh users wanted. We knew what we wanted anyway. I was creating the things I would have wanted.

[…]

It seemed like a humble and discreet Easter egg. I mistakenly assumed the poem was in the public domain but, regardless, a single stanza would seem to me to be “fair use”. Still, it should have been obvious to me that Apple Computer Inc. was going to be very much copyright-violation averse.

[…]

A few other Easter eggs that had nothing to do with intellectual property rights were in the color pickers as well. In time, the crayons in the crayon color picker would appear worn down or broken. This had no effect on the functionality of the color picker but was kind of … cute? I believe the crayons were all restored though on Christmas Day (a new box of crayons!).

Mac Automation With a Tiny Game Controller

John Voorhees:

I never expected my game controller obsession to pay automation dividends, but it did last week in the form of the tiny 16-button 8BitDo Micro. For the past week, I’ve used the Micro to dictate on my Mac, interact with AI chatbots, and record and edit podcasts. While the setup won’t replace a Stream Deck or Logitech Creative Console for every use case, it excels in areas where those devices don’t because it fits comfortably in the palm of your hand and costs a fraction of those other devices.

[…]

As I suspected, the 8BitDo Micro works just as well with any app that supports keyboard shortcuts as it does with Anki. What’s curious, though, is that even though medical students have been using the Micro and Zero 2 with Anki for several years and 8BitDo’s website includes a marketing image of someone using the Micro with Clip Studio Paint on an iPad, word of the Micro’s automation capabilities hasn’t spread much. That’s something I’d like to help change.

[…]

The buttons on 8BitDo’s controllers can be remapped, like on many others. 8BitDo’s free Ultimate Controller app, which is available on the App Store for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, can remap every button on the Micro. The Micro doesn’t have thumbsticks, but it does have a D-pad; A, B, X, and Y buttons; four other face buttons; and L, R, L2, and R2 buttons. That makes for a total of 16 programmable buttons, an impressive number for such a tiny device.

Update (2025-07-11): Matt Sephton:

An obvious choice for a device with multiple buttons is a game controller. In modern macOS it’s easy to pair Nintendo Switch controllers, and the JoyCon (left or right) is an ideal candidate for a hand-held shortcut device. Xbox and PlayStation controllers can also be paired but they are much larger. Wired or wireless controllers will work.

You can even use a Wii remote using an adapter like the Mayflash MAGIC-NS Lite. Or you might use more esoteric controllers with an adapter from Robert Dale Smith’s Controller Adapter store. In fact, I use one of his adapters to get an old Sony Jog Controller to act like a GameCube controller, which I then map to keyboard shortcuts using the methods below. The sky’s the limit!

Nvidia’s Market Cap

Samantha Subin and Kif Leswing (via Hacker News):

Nvidia stock rose on Wednesday lifting the company’s market cap briefly past $4 trillion for the first time as investors scooped up shares of the tech giant that’s building the bulk of the hardware for the generative artificial intelligence boom.

[…]

Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, surpassing Microsoft and Apple, both of which hit the $3 trillion mark before Nvidia.

These numbers are hard to comprehend. Nvidia is now worth about the same as Apple plus half of Meta—or, alternatively, Alphabet plus Meta—and it’s doubled in the last year.

Mike Rogoway:

New CEO Lip-Bu Tan told employees this week that he doesn’t consider Intel among the leading chip companies, a bracing message as the chipmaker began expansive layoffs in the face of severe technical and financial challenges.

[…]

Customers are giving Intel failing grades, Tan said, and the company is too far behind to catch up with industry leader Nvidia in developing technology to train artificial intelligence.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-11): See also: Kirk McElhearn, Trung Phan, and Dare Obasanjo.

Update (2025-07-14): Jeff Johnson:

NVIDIA net income the past 12 months is a stunning $77 billion on only $149 billion revenue.

In comparison, Apple had $97 billion net income, but that required $400 billion revenue.

Apple “services” revenue is pure profit, but for NVIDIA the entire company is almost pure profit.

How to Use Google Gemini in Xcode 26 Beta

Carlo Zottmann:

Google offers an OpenAI-compatible API for Gemini, and while working, it is not what Xcode expects in terms of URL layout. In Xcode’s LLM provider config, the custom “URL” parameter is the API’s base URL up to but not including the v1/ path segment, e.g. https://api.openai.com/ instead of the full https://api.openai.com/v1/. When making calls to the provider later on, Xcode will automatically append the endpoint path (e.g. v1/models etc.) to that URL.

Now, the Gemini URL structure breaks with the v1/ convention: its URL is https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/openai/ instead of https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1/. You can see why this might be a problem.

So here’s how to set up both Xcode and a proxy app to use Google’s offerings.

Previously:

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Archaeology 1.3

Mothers Ruin Software:

macOS uses many different binary file formats.

Some — like binary property lists — have broad tool support and are relatively easy to inspect…

Some — like X.509 certificates, configuration and provisioning profiles or App Store receipts — use standard formats, but lack macOS-native inspection tools, or only have command-line tools that can be awkward to use…

Some — like compiled nibs, keyed archives, code signatures or URL bookmarks — use Apple-proprietary formats that are not documented and that have no (public) inspection tools.

Even a file in a well-known format often contains data blobs encoded in one of the other formats — such as an app’s preferences property list, which might contain URL bookmarks or an archive of serialized objects.

Archaeology gives you a way to dig into a number of these binary files.

This is a delightful app from the developer of Apparency and Suspicious Package. Aside from what’s mentioned above, it supports more formats such as notarization tickets and Mach-O binaries (showing embedded Info.plist files, SDK info, and linked libraries).

Previously:

Jeff Williams Retiring as Apple’s COO

Apple (MacRumors, 2, Hacker News):

Jeff Williams will transition his role as chief operating officer later this month to Sabih Khan, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations, as part of a long-planned succession. Williams will continue reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook and overseeing Apple’s world-class design team and Apple Watch alongside the company’s Health initiatives. Apple’s design team will then transition to reporting directly to Cook after Williams retires late in the year.

Benjamin Mayo:

I like how the press release says this succession is long planned, and yet they aren’t ready to say who is taking over Apple Watch and Health initiatives.

Also, Cook (himself set to retire in the foreseeable future) has so many direct reports now lol.

John Gruber:

What’s intriguing about the announcement is the design part — a functional area where, especially on the software side, Apple’s current stature is subject to much debate. While Williams is staying on until “late in the year” to continue his other responsibilities — Watch, Health, and serving as the senior executive Apple’s design teams report to — Khan isn’t taking over those roles when Williams leaves. And so by the end of the year, Apple’s design teams will go from reporting to Williams to reporting directly to Tim Cook.

I’ve long found it curious, if not downright dubious, that Apple’s design leaders have reported to Williams ever since it was announced in 2019 (the very same day that Khan was promoted to SVP of operations) that Jony Ive would be stepping down as chief design officer and leaving Apple to found the (as-yet-unnamed) design firm LoveFrom. Williams had no background in design at all.

[…]

I’m of the mind that, in hindsight, it was a mistake for Jony Ive to bring HI (software human interface design) under the same roof as ID (hardware industrial design). That arrangement made sense for Ive’s unique role in the company, and the unique period in the wake of Steve Jobs’s too-young demise. But it might have ultimately made Ive more difficult to replace than Steve Jobs.

I don’t think it ever made sense because it doesn’t seem like Ive really understood software design. And Alan Dye’s background is in advertising and web/print design.

Jeff Johnson:

We’ve come to accept the myth that there’s such a thing as “design” in the abstract, as if some one person were qualified to design anything and everything. That’s ridiculous and nothing but a product of Jony Ive’s hubris.

Mark Gurman:

Apple didn’t announce what will happen to the Watch and Health teams but here’s the likely outcome: Apple never said this but Watch HW was already given to Ternus years ago. You can bet watchOS and health software will go to Federighi. Fitness+ will obviously go to Services.

M.G. Siegler:

Williams joined Apple in 1998 (from IBM), the year after Steve Jobs returned. The same year Cook joined (from Compaq, though he had also been at IBM for a dozen years before that).

Khan joined Apple in 1995, which was obviously before Jobs returned.

The only members of the leadership team that have been at Apple longer are: [Cue, O’Brien, and Joswiak]

[…]

It’s certainly possible that Apple is going to try to spend these next five months finding that design executive. It’s also possible that they promote Dye to such a role – he did have one of the most prominent slots at the WWDC keynote this year thanks to “Liquid Glass” – though as Gruber notes, in hindsight, it may have been a mistake to have one person overseeing hardware and software design – something that only happened because Ive stepped in on the software side after Scott Forstall was forced out in 2012.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-10): John Gruber:

Design — software at least — has already become a concern in the six years since Jony Ive left Apple, which is when design teams started reporting to Williams. And, frankly, it’s been a concern for many of us ever since Scott Forstall was fired and Ive put all design — HI and ID — under the same roof.

Apple did announce yesterday that after Williams fully retires at the end of this year, design leaders will start reporting to Tim Cook directly. Left unsaid in Apple’s announcement is who will take over Williams’s roles overseeing Apple Watch and Health. I presume Watch will simply fall under John Ternus (SVP hardware) and that Sumbul Desai, who already has the title VP of health and frequently (always?) appears during the Health segments of Apple keynotes, will report directly to Cook.

Downloading Xcode With a Passkey

When I went to download the new Xcode beta, I again ran into an annoying Safari behavior, which seems to be specific to Apple’s sites. It pops up an Apple Account sheet offering to sign me in. But it can only sign in with my personal Apple ID, not my developer one. I have to click the blue text “button” to pick a different account, and there’s no keyboard shortcut for that.

Signing into Apple sites normally requires Apple’s special 2FA, which doesn’t work with Safari autofill. So I thought I’d try the Sign in with Passkey button to log in with one step. This should be an ideal use case: Apple’s browser, Apple’s Web site, Apple’s password manager. The first time I clicked the button it showed a progress spinner, and nothing happened for 30 seconds. I reloaded the page and tried again. After 5 seconds, it showed a Sign In sheet, but like the first one it wanted to use my personal Apple ID. I clicked Other Sign in Options, but that only let me use a passkey from a different mobile device or a hardware key.

I thought it was supposed to let me choose from multiple passkeys. Maybe the problem is that I don’t have one for my developer account? I opened the Passwords app, and the Passkeys section showed nothing for Apple. How could this be when account.apple.com does let me sign into my personal account with a passkey? I’m losing hope for the new credentials exchange feature if the app doesn’t even show all of my passkeys.

It seems like I need to create a passkey for my developer account, but I don’t see how to do that. I see nothing about passkeys at account.apple.com or at developer.apple.com/account/. The documentation is almost comically unhelpful:

  1. From anywhere on the Apple Developer website, click Account on the top right.

  2. Sign in to your Apple Account.

Stack Exchange has no idea, saying only that passkeys are created automatically.

Previously:

Xcode 26 Beta 3

Apple:

Removed support for creating new Style Transfer projects.

This is the only change that’s noted as being in beta 3. Why can’t Apple write release notes that tell us what’s actually new in this build?

Ryan Ashcraft:

The Beta 3 SDK adds support for Glass.clear, which looks like the glass material used more commonly throughout the system in Beta 1 and 2 of iOS 26. Less contrast, more glass-like.

Xcode Releases:

The download page says it requires macOS 15.4 or later, but Xcode’s Info.plist says it requires 15.5. The Info.plist is always correct.

[…]

Most importantly, #Xcode 26.0 beta 3 sees the return of the “BETA” badge on its app icon!

Malin Sundberg:

Whoop whoop! Now we can finally find a workaround for this 😬

John Siracusa:

I still can’t create a release build of my app in Xcode 26 beta 3 on Tahoe beta 3 due to a “swift-frontend” error. After three betas of this, I’m starting to worry that I won’t be able to release an updated build for Tahoe!

It looks like beta 3 may have fixed a problem I was having with Swift Testing, but it also brought a flurry of SourceKit crashes when editing code.

Sean Heber:

My Xcode beta 3 installed yesterday seemingly forgot I had the iOS 26 SDK installed today and I had to reinstall it.

Kinda feels like nothing on my computer is mine, ya know? It’s all being managed externally by unknown entities and changes on a whim. Can’t trust anything to just…. be left alone.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-10): Matt Gallagher:

Following up on this: all but one of the hundreds of these warnings I had in Xcode 26 beta 2 are gone in Xcode 26 beta 3.

I think a Swift bug failing to detect a Task was MainActor isolated was the biggest cause.

Update (2025-07-11): Howard Oakley:

If you’re building apps using Xcode 26 beta on macOS 26 beta, you should beware of the combination of their third betas. If you’re unlucky like me, you’ll discover those shiny new app icons generated by Icon Composer no longer work on any older version of macOS. This is mentioned in the Xcode 26 b3 release notes, and the workaround given is “none”.

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Vienna RSS at 20

Barijaona Ramaholimihaso:

After some minor fiddling, I got the initial version of Vienna running on VirtualBox on my retro hack.

[…]

Founding father of Vienna, Steve contributed mostly from 2004 to 2008, made a short comeback in 2010, and is definitely at the root of Vienna’s ethics: making a clean, spartan, and highly useful app.

He almost never publicized his bio, but I finally found an “About me” (he was from the UK and a software developer working in the US for Microsoft Business Solutions), and some reflexions on writing software : part 2 and part 1.

[…]

While I was finishing the Google Reader support started by Adam Hartford and Salvatore Ansani, Google announced it would end Google Reader… That is far from being the single reason why Vienna 3 had 20 beta versions and 9 release candidate versions before being released in November 2014!

Previously:

Hearing Aids vs. AirPods Pro

Steve Hayman:

Apple has spent a ton of money getting AirPods Pro approved by the FDA and other regulators to work as over-the-counter hearing aids, including providing a hearing test app on the iPhone that tweaks the audio profile on the headphones. This feature is available in a whole lot of countries, not yet including Canada, but, um, … I don’t work there any more so I guess I can say “it’s not too hard to work around that.” So I’ve had my AirPods Pro 2 set up as hearing aids for a few months now and have been trying them sporadically for hearing assistance (and more frequently just for listening to music or podcasts or whatever.)

[…]

The hearing aids cost 25 times as much as AirPods Pro. Are they 25 times better? No. Maybe for some people. Not for me. AirPods might still be good enough in some situations. I have only mild hearing loss, so I’m probably on the edge of hearing aid utility here.

[…]

If you’ve got your AirPods in, it’s totally obvious to everyone, and they all assume you’re listening to music and not paying attention to them. Kind of a stigma there. Conversely, these hearing aids are pretty inconspicuous, especially because they match the colour of the wire to the colour of your hair.

[…]

I already miss the tight integration between AirPods and my phone. Apple is doing some proprietary Bluetooth things that these hearing aids can’t match. The hearing aids do let you answer phone calls or adjust volume by tapping a button, but they’re sure not as tightly integrated as AirPods+iPhone are.

Previously:

iOS 26 Developer Beta 3

Juli Clover:

In some apps like Apple Music, Podcasts, and the App Store, Apple has toned down the transparency of the navigation bars. The look is more opaque to make the buttons more legible.

[…]

Apple added new color options for the default “iOS” wallpaper that it designed for iOS 26 , so now we have Halo, Dusk, Sky, and Shadow.

[…]

Apple tweaked the blue and green colors for the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, AirDrop, and Cellular Toggles. The colors are brighter and more in line with the other colors in Control Center.

Emma Roth:

Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language just got a little more… frosted. In the third iOS 26 developer beta, Apple dialed back the transparency of navigation bars, buttons, and tabs that once allowed you to clearly see the content beneath them.

Zac Hall:

Here are just a few more examples of iOS 26 beta 2 and iOS 26 beta 3 visual changes[…]

Steve Troughton-Smith:

It’s subtle…

Brandon Butch:

iOS 26 Beta 2 vs iOS 26 Beta 3 Music nav bar.

Matt Birchler:

I’ve collected a few that stand out to me.

Nick Heer:

Liquid Glass officially has two appearances: clear and “regular”, which is frosted. If there have been any changes to the clear style in any of the betas, I cannot say I have noticed them. But the frosted style has become steadily more opaque since the first developer build of iOS 26 in some places. In particular, when iOS is in light mode and the screen is predominantly white, like the buttons in a Mail message, the effect is now extremely subtle, to the point where I wonder if there is a third Liquid Glass appearance.

Benjamin Mayo:

I know a lot of people are going to be disappointed it isn’t as flashy as the first beta, but it still looks nice and readability is way up.

Also, there’s a fair few places where stuff is now completely opaque which I think is probably a bug.

Federico Viticci:

Apple significantly toned down Liquid Glass in iOS 26 beta 3 and, honestly, I’m a fan.

Looks modern without feeling like a gimmick with (unfixable?) legibility issues. Still not perfect, but better IMO.

It’s better, but I still think the entire concept is wrong and that at the very least they should tone it down even more.

Riley Testut:

Seems iOS 26 beta 3 is the equivalent of iOS 7 beta 3 where the most extreme design elements are finally dialed back — remember Helvetica Neue Ultra Light?

Nick Heer:

One of the stranger qualities of this year’s Liquid Glass visual update is how much it is changing within just a few weeks. One would assume some designers with power at Apple would have recognized the illegibility of the first version before it was made available in June. Alas, it seems Apple is working things out in public now.

[…]

Though I know there were changes in different releases of the iOS 7 development cycle, the first thing I thought of was the progression of Aqua in early builds of Mac OS X, first revealed in the second developer preview of 10.0. The most noticeable changes happened in the dock which, in the second and third previews, looked like a set of individual sometimes-underlined tiles. Those builds were released in January and February 2000; by the fourth preview, in May, the dock was closer to the version which eventually shipped. But those changes took place over many months; Mac OS X 10.0 did not ship to the public until March 2001. Complaints about the legibility of various translucent elements, however, were whittled away at for years to come.

[…]

But, also, you would think a company that has been working with transparent interfaces for twenty-five years would have some institutional memory and know what to avoid.

Louie Mantia, Jr.:

I repeat—anyone who has tried to make translucent UI is familiar with the story being played out right now. The core issue is that translucent UI is fundamentally flawed. You cannot make it too translucent without sacrifice. But every sacrifice you make makes it less cool. That’s why they started where they did. That’s why they are where they are now. It’s embarrassing to re-tread known issues like this. This could have been an exercise internally that no one ever saw.

The thing that kills me is that this is not Alan Dye’s first rodeo. That was iOS 7. His first go at doing software design was fixated on this same thing: translucency. It’s as if he can’t let it go, forcing everyone else to tag along while he makes discoveries the rest of us have known for quite some time. It’s awful being the end user of a product designed by someone who is effectively saying, “Oh, it’s illegible? Interesting. I didn’t know that.”

Konrad Kołakowski:

I think Microsoft kind of nailed it with Aero almost 15-20 years ago (especially when in matured with Windows 7)

I don’t remember any legibility issues back then - but because they used this glass material only as a “chrome” - window borders, backgrounds - on top of this „glass” we had placed “normal” opaque controls.

Limiting it to the chrome is certainly better, but I still don’t see what the point of a transparent title bar is Who wants to read skinny text atop crazy background?

Riccardo Mori:

You know what this is? iOS 15. Technically, 4 years old. Visually, absolutely fine. Why not work on bettering the parts of the UI that can be improved, while maintaining an organic look that ‘ages well’ and remains fresh, instead of doing a shallow facelift that really looks like the facelift certain Hollywood stars make to keep looking young, while ending up actually looking weird?

Previously:

Update (2025-07-09): Michael Flarup:

Is this better?

Juli Clover:

There was little outcry over the updates that Apple made in the second beta, but the third beta’s design updates have frustrated some users who feel that Apple is removing too much of the Liquid Glass aesthetic.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

There are some really poor Liquid Glass comparison shots going around comparing between dark mode and light mode that have convinced the normies and YouTubers that Apple has turned off the effect completely, which is nonsense. Beta 3 is still glassy af.

Update (2025-07-10): Federico Viticci:

The more time I spend with Liquid Glass, the more I don’t understand Alan Dye’s and the design team’s obsession with minimizing UI chrome and “prioritizing content” instead.

With collapsed tab bars in iOS 26, it now takes me two taps to switch between Library and Music.

Is that…better? The animations are gorgeous, sure. But does it actually work better? 🤔

Marco Arment:

Alan Dye doesn’t design UI.

He hides it.

Joe Rossignol:

In March, Apple said that it planned to add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to the Messages app in future iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS software updates, and we are still waiting for that to happen. As of the third developer beta of iOS 26 released this week, the upgrade has yet to be implemented on iPhones.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-11): Aaron Pearce:

Really hope Apple fixes this Liquid Glass bug where it ignore the actual background and goes to the scroll view content behind it.

Update (2025-07-15): Mario Guzmán:

I know this is still in beta but I assume that I should be able to read the number labels in each button… right? /s #liquidglass

Looks like they were able to achieve this but using that new view that mirrors the content on the edges in order to extend it outward… sorta like what macOS does to extend shit under the fLoAtiNg sidebar.

You’re telling me that there was 1,000 “nos” before this “yes”???

iPadOS 26 Developer Beta 3

Federico Viticci:

How much has Apple really “nerfed” Liquid Glass in the latest beta?

Here’s a comparison between iPadOS 26 developer beta 2 (first image) and beta 3.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Wow they kinda did the thing? Fullscreen apps on iPadOS work a lot more like fullscreen apps on macOS now — they generate a new ‘space’, and you can swipe between them.

Federico Viticci:

Truly another S-tier iPad multitasking change.

You can swipe back and forth between full-screen and windowed "spaces" AND if you re-resize a full-screen app, it automatically goes back to the windowed space.

Love this.

Ryan Christoffel:

10 years ago in macOS El Capitan, Apple added a convenient and fun new feature for the system cursor.

Shake the cursor back and forth rapidly and it would enlarge, making it easier to locate.

[…]

And now in iPadOS 26 beta 3, the same feature is coming to the iPad.

The iPad is already getting a more Mac-inspired cursor in iPadOS 26. It now looks like a proper pointer, rather than the circle that was available in iPadOS 18.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

They’re really all-in on stealing all the good ideas this cycle

Craig Hockenberry:

“Concentricity.”

Previously:

Update (2025-07-09): John Gruber:

This is not a thoughtfully spaced-out dialog box. (Journal app, iPadOS 26 b3.)

Update (2025-07-10): Steve Troughton-Smith:

While the new Liquid Glass sidebar design looks great in a window when picking up the wallpaper background, it looks kinda awful in fullscreen over white, which is the default mode for iPad apps. It's a very weak comparison with what you got before, in iOS 18

Matt Birchler:

This one’s tough to objectify, but going from using the web on my Mac to the M4 iPad Pro just feels slow to me. Part of this is what I mentioned above where I’m locked to 60Hz output compared to my Mac using the same display to render the web at 240Hz, but it’s also raw performance – websites just feel like they load slower than on my Mac. This is true on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro as well as my M1 work Mac.

Monday, July 7, 2025

macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 3

Juli Clover (Mr. Macintosh, 9to5Mac):

Right now, there is a bit of a bug with the beta that is preventing Apple silicon Macs from being able to download it. Intel Macs can be updated with no issue, but Apple will need to address the server side bug before it will be available to everyone.

I can confirm that, once again, Software Update isn’t working. But you can download the full installer manually.

Again, the release notes don’t seem to say what’s new.

Howard Oakley:

Apple’s operating systems provide support for encryption and related techniques in CryptoKit, making quantum-secure methods available to third-party apps as well. For OS 26, CryptoKit gains Module-Lattice based key encapsulation or ML-KEM, part of the FIPS 203 primary standard for general encryption. Signatures gain the Module-Lattice based digital signature algorithm or ML-DSA, part of FIPS 204.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I’m very ready for a beta 3 of the new OSes; beta 2 has been mostly usable, but has lots of little blockers getting in the way of progressing my apps

Previously:

Update (2025-07-07): The full installer didn’t work for me, either. After a long time, it reported an error failing to prepare the update.

Update (2025-07-08): The same installer worked this morning.

Mr. Macintosh:

This is the new macOS Tahoe Installer

Mario Guzmán:

After installing #macOSTahoe b3, I got a new wallpaper! :)

[…]

I think these icons are also new/updated in #macOSTahoe b3…

Mr. Macintosh:

Apple has added the new Tahoe wallpaper via image and active video .heic for both the blue background and beach background wallpaper images.

Marcus Mendes:

Much like on tvOS, Apple recently introduced native video screen savers on macOS that transition smoothly into the wallpaper upon unlocking.

With today’s beta seed, Apple included a new “Tahoe Day” screen saver that glides across the surface of Lake Tahoe’s rocky shoreline, with snow-capped mountains in the background.

This is pretty nice, but I had to turn it off on my Tahoe Mac because I mostly control it via Screen Sharing, and this makes it really slow.

Marcus Mendes:

One of the most common complaints in macOS Tahoe 26 betas 1 and 2 was the new tab UI in apps like Safari and Terminal, which added a black bar to the bottom of inactive tabs.

[…]

Now, Apple has increased contrast and eliminated the black bar, making it much easier to spot the active tab at a glance.

Mario Guzmán:

Native Tabs in #macOSTahoe still suck but at least they have fixed a lot of the visual issues from beta 1 and 2.

Thomas Brand:

Since the earliest rumors of transparent UI, I thought Tahoe would adopt the “frosted” look of visionOS.

With the release of Tahoe beta 3 I could be convinced frosted was Apple’s plan all along, and the initial renders of liquid glass were merely a faint to get an extreme reaction.

Craig Grannell:

Someone – probably multiple people – at Apple signed this off. The ‘glass’. The lack of clarity. The absurd floating back/forward buttons that become the most visually prominent thing in the window. All of it.

Reduce Transparency makes things slightly less awful but it still weird and ugly. Best bet appears to be Reduce Transparency + a solid colour (ideally grey) for wallpaper.

(This is dev beta 3.)

We’re, what, about eight weeks and counting now?

Jonathan Wight:

So i guess now that we’re at b3 the blurry icons are here to stay…

Now we can all experience what it is to have old person eyes.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

It’s beta 3 of macOS and Apple still seems to be really struggling to deal with the floating sidebar in AppKit. It still has hard cut offs in various apps, and now it renders under a toolbar in fullscreen mode.

Stephan Michels:

I noticed a similar cut-off in my app. The glass effect have a very wide shadow, which doesn’t not spread across containers, in my case a scroll view without background. Ugly 🧐

Steve Troughton-Smith:

🤔 [System Settings]

Riccardo Mori:

Glass and transparency can be fun when used meaningfully. Look at the battery indicator in Mac OS X 10.0.3. It wasn’t a menu extra, but a live indicator in the Dock (called ‘dockling’).

Sindre Sorhus:

Menu item icons in macOS 26 reduce usability – should be optional

Update (2025-07-09): hyperjeff:

And we’re all agreed that this image of a loupe has almost nothing at all to do with the functionality of Preview, right? I have a loupe irl, and never use it to read an article, no matter how small the font. (I never really noticed the loupe in the previous icons, because it was just a small added element, but now I’m confused why it was ever used.)

Isaiah Carew:

the old HIG said document based apps should have icons with a top down image to symbolized the doc. And a tool that one might use on with type of thing.

Xcode uses a blueprint and a hammer. Obviously those are not used in coding, they’re symbols for design and building.

Liquid Glass took away the document and left only the tool. Preview is a great example of why that’s nuts. Without the document the tool makes no sense.

URedditor:

Fun fact:

Apple had another installer icon ready before they went with this. It was much darker & the arrow was basically just a hole in the icon.

Looks like there’s a some waffling — a lack of confidence, which is also apparent if u look at the blur effects in iOS 26 beta 3.

Thomas Brand:

The best part of Tahoe Beta 3 is that it no longer tries to give me a seizure when I scroll content under the toolbar in the Finder.

Pierre Igot:

At this point, it might be worth wondering if the Apple engineers working on macOS Tahoe are using Retina screenshots (i.e. double size) to review their own work, instead of looking at things at actual size on actual Retina displays. I have Retina displays exclusively, and at actual size the 2025 icon looks like it has fuzzy coloured bullets, not the snazzy, highly detailed thing that I see when I look at the Retina screenshot in double size.

Update (2025-07-10): Cabel Sasser:

Quick Look in Tahoe wants to preview your image in a very significant round rect — and so, when you preview a tiny little 32 × 32 square icon, it becomes round! 🫥

Update (2025-07-14): Mario Guzmán:

The standard/off state for #macOSTahoe controls are so pale and lack so much detail that they straight up look like disabled controls.

Liquid Glass styles got an over-correction in detail and realism while everything else got flatter and more basic.

This is as bad as Windows 8.

Steve Streza:

I get that the change to Apple Silicon is a once-in-a-blue-moon change that was pretty drastic in terms of performance, but wow, does macOS Tahoe feel like shit on a then-top-of-the-line Intel MacBook Pro. Even doing nothing, with nothing open, stuff just lags.

This was the “we’re taking pros seriously” notebook they came out with in 2019. I don’t expect it to sing like a new M4, but this is… so unpleasant.

Michael Flarup:

Apple is making subtle tweaks to reduce fuzziness in Liquid Glass icons by increasing stroke thickness and contrast. Beta 2 vs Beta 3[…]

Mario Guzmán:

I know this is still beta and this is a bug. There is no need to get angry about it. But this is pretty fun to do.

Update (2025-07-15): Mario Guzmán:

I know I keep calling things out but Liquid Glass has to be the most distracting style of UI I have ever used.

I have to scan icons and labels more than ever before because everything is just blended together with soft gradient masks and blurry backgrounds.

Any designer think that Spotlight now is impossible to read? Holy hell… this is good design?

Collin Donnell:

Fundamental GUI decisions on the Mac came from deep thought and even formal research. Has that hard earned knowledge been thrown out over time by people who didn’t deeply understand it? Someone smarter than me would know.

The obsession the last few years with lowering information density, hiding UI behind hover in things like toolbars where there’s no space gained, and showing blurred versions of content behind controls doesn’t make any sense to me.

Update (2025-07-16): Jeff Johnson:

Above is the popup window of my Safari extension ChangeTheHeaders on macOS 26. Notice that the scroll bar is clipped at the top! This is why corner radius matters. It's not just an aesthetic choice. Design is how it works, and Liquid Glass does not work right.

Dave Nanian:

So, what exactly is, say, your Mom supposed to do with a notification like this?

Update (2025-07-17): Mario Guzmán:

I really hope the Music team addresses this but if you look ahead the music track progress bar, it is so blurry. If you zoom in, you can see that nothing is pixel-aligned in either state.

I don’t even know how this happens. Shouldn’t happen using a native control. If you’re custom drawing, you should know to check that the bounds/frame you’re drawing in is using whole numbers…

Actually even some of the buttons still aren’t pixel-aligned.

Menu Bar Madness in macOS 26 and iPadOS 26

Craig Grannell:

In beta 2, Apple added an option to restore the menu bar background. Which is good. Except it also makes me question Apple’s confidence in its design work. When Apple starts hedging its bets, it signals that it knows something is wrong, but lacks the conviction to course-correct. Or perhaps such settings are a means to temporarily shut people up, while default choices reveal the true intent and direction of travel.

On iPad, things are even worse. I’m a fan of the new windowing system, but the menu bar implementation is dreadful. The problem isn’t its auto-hide behaviour – the Mac has had something similar (although off by default) since 2015. Again, the issue is that Apple is so enamoured with transparency that it’s sacrificing visual clarity.

Unfortunately, the ‘fix’ on iPad isn’t yet anywhere near as full as the Mac one. In beta 1, a two-up window view could see menu bar text vanish entirely. In beta 2, Apple added a subtle gradient, which barely helps. Honestly, this is embarrassing – the sort of thing a design student wouldn’t hand in as part of a project. A menu bar coming to iPad is great, but not if you can’t read its text.

Pierre Igot:

You do wonder what the internal processes are[…]

They’ve been trying to get rid of the Mac menu bar’s bar for about 18 years now. I don’t understand why.

Matt Birchler:

In this case, the Mac actually has notably larger touch targets than the iPad version. This one is particularly notable for me because the menu has long been the go-to example for why touch on the Mac would not work, and yet the iPad has an even smaller one.

Previously:

The Curious Case of the Responsible Process

Tor Arne Vestbø:

As it turns out, permissions are inherited by child processes. And when a process is about to access some protected resource, the TCC subsystem figure’s out which process is the responsible one, and uses that as basis for requesting and persisting the result.

[…]

In the case of an application embedding and launching helper executables this behavior of course makes sense, but it can be a bit surprising in cases such as launching apps from the terminal.

[…]

As it turned out, since Qt Creator was launching user applications when running and debugging, it was effectively becoming the responsible process for all these user applications. And if one of them required a permission that needed a corresponding usage description, then the only way to make the application work was to add the description to the responsible process; Qt Creator.

[…]

Somehow lldb was circumventing the logic that was deciding which process was the responsible one.

Luckily LLDB is part of the open source LLVM project, so I was able to track it down to this change, with the magic formula:

int responsibility_spawnattrs_setdisclaim(posix_spawnattr_t attrs, int disclaim);

He says it “just works” with Xcode, though he isn’t sure why, but my experience is that often neither Xcode nor the app prompts for Automation or Contacts access when running an app or testing and so the APIs just fail.

Via Peter Steinberger (tweet):

If you’re building a macOS CLI that uses AppleScript, you need to embed an Info.plist into your binary, sign it with proper entitlements, and optionally use the undocumented responsibility_spawnattrs_setdisclaim API to avoid permission dialogs that blames the hosting app.

[…]

Getting AppleScript to work in a CLI tool turned out to be a maze of undocumented APIs, security permissions, and macOS quirks that nobody warns you about.

Previously:

Fixing mediaanalysisd Storage and CPU Use

OSXDaily:

If you have discovered your Mac disk space has reduced since installing or updating to MacOS Sequoia, the inordinately large com.apple.mediaanalysisd cache file issue could be to blame. A variety of Mac users have reported the directory being filled with 15GB+ of data, with some users noting 50 GB, 80 GB, even 140GB of cache files, filling users entire disk drives with the cache bundle files.

Let’s review what the directory is, and how to recover your disk storage space.

[…]

With one user on Apple discussions reporting up to 140 GB of medianalysisd cache files on their Mac, and another on Rumors Forums reporting 80GB of caches, there are also multiple other mentions of this on everywhere from stackexcahgne, reddit, MacRumors Forums, and the official Apple support forums. How widespread the issue is is not clear, and if any particular feature or combination of settings triggers the huge medianalysisd cache folder, or if it’s just a bug, is currently unknown.

Via Full Report Below:

On my machine, com.apple.mediaanalysisd is using no less than 143GB. For a 27 GB photo library.

Paul Hudson:

mediaanalysisd has regularly been sitting on ~100% CPU for over a week now. My laptop is hot to the touch, and I have no idea why. Rebooting didn’t help. Suggestions?

Daniel Berezhnoy:

I think I be had the same problem the last 2 weeks. Can’t figure out why!

See also: Apple’s forums.

Previously:

Friday, July 4, 2025

DOJ’s iPhone Monopoly Case Moves Forward

Juli Clover:

Apple failed in its attempt to get the antitrust lawsuit that the U.S. Department of Justice filed against it dismissed, reports Reuters. U.S. District Judge Julien Neals, who is overseeing the case, today denied Apple’s motion for dismissal.

[…]

The DOJ accused Apple of a smartphone monopoly in the United States, citing Apple’s restriction of third-party access to Apple services and features and claiming that consumers are “locked” into Apple’s ecosystem. Apple argues that the DOJ is attempting to force it to spend money on enriching its competitors, and that it is not a monopolist because it faces competition from companies like Samsung and Google.

[…]

The case is unlikely to make it to trial until 2028 or even later.

Previously:

iOS 26 Recovery Assistant

Joe Rossignol:

iOS 26 adds a new Recovery Assistant feature to all compatible iPhones, and it can help return the device to a working state, with no Mac or PC required.

[…]

According to a Reddit post, Recovery Assistant can help you return an iPhone to a working state with help from another Apple device, such as an iPad. This process can be initiated through the menu in the top-right corner of the Recovery mode on the affected iPhone. On the other Apple device, you can follow the on-screen steps to download and install a newer iOS version on the iPhone that is in Recovery mode, to help revive it.

It sounds like iOS automatically opens Recovery, if needed, but there’s no way to manually bring it up like with macOS Recovery.

Previously:

iOS 26 Information Density

Nate Parrott:

didn’t realize everything in iOS 26 is just a little bigger and way less stuff fits on screen now?

Riccardo Mori:

Let’s make a fun comparison about information density across various versions of iOS and device screen sizes.

In reverse chronological order.

Corollary: iOS 26 kinda sucks at information density.

Riccardo Mori:

[Apple:] To give content room to breathe, organizational components like lists, tables, and forms have a larger row height and padding. Sections have an increased corner radius to match the curvature of controls across the system.

Which is largely unnecessary. It reduces the amount of information displayed on screen, and you’ll have to scroll more as a consequence. Look at the Before and After layouts: the Before layout doesn’t need solutions to increase its clarity. You’re just injecting white space everywhere. It’s also ironic that where more space and ‘breathing room’ are actually necessary, the header (“Single Table Row” in the figure) is pushed even nearer to the status bar.

Previously:

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Funding

Cynthia Brumfield (via Hacker News):

After DHS did not renew its funding contract for reasons unspecified, MITRE’s 25-year-old Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program was slated for an abrupt shutdown on April 16, which would have left security flaw tracking in limbo.

Gavin D. Howard (via Hacker News):

The CVE system has been less good about securing our infrastructure than they have been about giving headaches to some of the most important projects. Curl gets bogus CVEs all the time and has to spend precious time dealing with them. Postgresql does too. The Linux kernel went a different route and just spams CVEs so that kernel CVEs essentially become worthless.

Worthless? Does that mean that CVEs were actually worth something to people?

Yes, absolutely. Script-kiddies that consider themselves “security researchers” try to find bugs in big projects and then get them labeled as CVEs so they can add those CVEs to their résumés. As one user on Hacker News said, “Unfortunately, the CVE database(s) are too noisy to be useful.”

In fact, it got so bad that Curl decided to do extra work to become a CNA, just so they can reject spurious reports and avoid the NVD from giving excessively high vulnerability scores.

CVE Foundation (via Hacker News):

The CVE Foundation has been formally established to ensure the long-term viability, stability, and independence of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Program, a critical pillar of the global cybersecurity infrastructure for 25 years.

Jessica Lyons:

Earlier this week, the widely used Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program faced doom as the US government discontinued funding for MITRE, the non-profit that operates the program. Uncle Sam U-turned at the very last minute, and promised another 11 months of cash [via CISA] to keep the program going.

Meanwhile, the EU is rolling its own.

The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) developed and maintains this alternative, which is known as the EUVD, or the European Union Vulnerability Database.

Previously:

Thursday, July 3, 2025

SummerFest 2025 for Indie Mac Apps

SummerFest:

Your inspiration doesn’t come from a factory. Neither does artisanal software. For a limited time, we’re all offering you a great price on great software, right at the workshop door. No ridiculous bundles, no silly gimmicks. Great software, great support, great (but sustainable) prices.

[…]

These are terrific tools for thinking, writing, organizing, and delivering your ideas. Sure, you can manage with less – but why would you want to? Each of these tools is carefully crafted and maintained by a small, dedicated team with vision and determination.

I’m listing all of the apps below, most with direct links that automatically apply the discount, but for some you’ll need to enter the coupon code SUMMERFEST2025.

Alifix 1.4

Howard Oakley:

If you have old Finder aliases that need to be checked and repaired, Alifix will do that job with you. Use it to scan a folder containing those aliases, and it will warn you which can’t be resolved any longer, and can rewrite those that need to be updated.

I’d forgotten about this utility, which just added support for macOS Tahoe, but it’s a good tool to have in your belt, as aliases sometimes break when copying between volumes or restoring from backup.

See also: more about aliases and bookmarks.

Magic Lasso Adblock 5.0

Matthew Bickham:

Magic Lasso Adblock v5.0 now lets you block ads and trackers across all apps on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac — not just in Safari.

[…]

Whether you’re scrolling through social media, playing games, or reading the news (including Apple News), ads are blocked automatically — creating a cleaner, faster experience across your device.

[…]

Many apps secretly track your activity and sell your data to third parties. App Ad Blocking helps shut down these trackers before they load, giving you stronger privacy everywhere.

My concern with ad blocking is always that it will accidentally block something that isn’t an ad and break a site (or, with the new version, an app). However, in my testing so far, that hasn’t happened. For blocking outside of Safari, it uses a network extension, and this currently doesn’t support the same fine-grained control as the Safari extension; but, if necessary, you can quickly toggle all of the blocking on/off from the Magic Lasso Adblock app.

Nick Heer:

After iOS began registering taps immediately, I found scrolling apps with interstitial ads — particularly news apps like those from CBC News and the New York Times — to be particularly hostile. I would scroll and then, while intending to stop the scroll, often tap on an ad which would send me to Safari. Irritating. Not all ads are blocked in these apps, but enough are that it has improved my news reading.

Previously:

CodableWithConfiguration

John Sundell:

When a type conforms to either EncodableWithConfiguration or DecodableWithConfiguration, it requires an additional configuration value to be passed when either encoding or decoding it (and the compiler will enforce that requirement).

[…]

CodableWithConfiguration is really quite useful when using Swift’s built-in serialization API to encode and decode types that require additional data in order to be initialized, without having to resort to modeling required data as optional, or having to define additional types that are only ever used for decoding purposes.

It’s a shame there’s no way to avoid the boilerplate of encoding/decoding all the properties that don’t come from the configuration.

Previously:

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Cloudflare Creates AI Crawler Tollbooth

Matthew Prince (Hacker News, Slashdot):

The problem is whether you create content to sell ads, sell subscriptions, or just to know that people value what you’ve created, an AI-driven web doesn’t reward content creators the way that the old search-driven web did. And that means the deal that Google made to take content in exchange for sending you traffic just doesn’t make sense anymore.

Instead of being a fair trade, the web is being stripmined by AI crawlers with content creators seeing almost no traffic and therefore almost no value.

That changes today, July 1, what we’re calling Content Independence Day. Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content. That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it’s only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.

thaddeus:

This is pretty cool, but we’re also dangerously close to Cloudflare basically being the whole internet.

Thomas Claburn:

In a separate post, Cloudflare’s David Belson, head of data insight, and Sam Rhea, VP of product, published data illustrating the disparity between what AI crawlers take and the referral traffic they send back to websites.

During the period between June 19 and 26, 2025, for example, “Anthropic’s AI platform Claude made nearly 71,000 HTML page requests for every HTML page referral,” observe Belson and Rhea. We must note that these measures only track traffic from the Claude website, not the app, as the app does not emit a Referer: header. The same goes for the other AI vendors.

Manton Reece:

I’m concerned that this default goes too far. Cloudflare has enormous power to intercept web traffic, because they’ve effectively re-centralized DNS for so many websites. While Matthew’s reasons for doing this are good, it should still be an opt-in feature. The open web should by default be open.

[…]

Cloudflare has a series of blog posts today with more details. In one post, they outline how AI crawlers can use HTTP Signatures (similar to what ActivityPub uses) to identify themselves if they have a relationship with Cloudflare for making payments to web publishers. When enabled, Cloudflare will return an HTTP 402 “payment required” response. There’s a mechanism for crawlers to say how much they will pay or to accept the listed price.

[…]

I can also imagine a harmless bot accidentally getting mislabelled as an AI crawler. Cloudflare has significant control even though they aren’t even the ones hosting your web site. According to a companion press release today, Cloudflare proxies traffic for 20% of the web.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-04): Vladimir Prelovac:

Cloudflare launched pay per crawl service in an attempt to centralize control of AI crawling economy.

Interestingly there is an open source effort by Coinbase which may be a better way to achieve this for publishers (and this could be the first actually useful thing to come out of the crypto world). This banks on existing http 402 response spec and is conveniently called x402.org

Now if only it wasn’t so darn hard to setup a wallet for your grandma in her browser so we could have decent micropayments on the web. Something I think about a lot in the context of Kagi/Orion.

Update (2025-07-08): Adam Engst:

There are undoubtedly numerous concerns with pay-per-crawl, not the least of which is that it would put Cloudflare in a position of even greater power within the Internet ecosystem. It could also hinder academic research and open source projects that lack substantial funding.

However, what I find even more interesting about pay-per-crawl is how it might revive HTTP response code 402 as a more general method of enabling direct transactions between producers and consumers. We’re getting close to some of the micropayment-related ideas in Ted Nelson’s largely theoretical Project Xanadu, which could radically democratize commerce on the Internet (I’ve been beating this drum for decades; see “Xanadu Light,” 29 November 1993).

Figma Files for IPO

Thomas Claburn (Figma, Hacker News):

The company prospectus mentions AI more than 150 times, characterizing it both as a creative accelerant and a potential threat.

[…]

Back to Figma, whose prospectus says that as of the first three months of 2025 it has 13 million monthly active users.

For the year that ended on December 31, 2024, Figma reported revenue of $749 million, up 48 percent year-on-year from the prior year. And for the three months that ended March 31, 2025, the company reported revenue of $228 million, up 46 percent year-on-year.

[…]

Figma cautions that its own use of AI could make its software more complicated to maintain.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-04): Georgia Butler (via Hacker News):

The filing states that Figma entered into a renewed hosting agreement with AWS on May 31, 2025, which commits to “a minimum of $545 million in cloud hosting services over the next five years.”

This works out at $298,466.59 daily in costs to Figma. How this is broken down into storage, compute, or bandwidth costs is not detailed.

Fakespot Shuts Down

Bryson Thill (via Hacker News):

Fakespot’s technology revealed some eye-opening statistics. About 43% of the best-selling Amazon products had reviews that were unreliable or fabricated, according to a study by app company Circuit. The problem was even worse in certain categories. Clothing and jewelry led the pack with a staggering 88% of reviews deemed unreliable.

[…]

As Fakespot gained traction, investors took notice. In November 2020, the company raised $4 million in Series A funding, bringing their total funding to $7 million and signaling strong confidence in their mission to combat fake reviews.

Three years later, Mozilla acquired Fakespot, bringing the startup’s 13-person team into the Firefox family. Mozilla integrated Fakespot’s technology directly into Firefox as the “Mozilla Review Checker” feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.

[…]

Mozilla couldn’t find a sustainable business model for Fakespot despite its popularity, choosing to redirect resources to core Firefox features and AI-powered browser tools.

Previously:

macOS Tahoe Drops FireWire Support

Joe Rossignol:

The first macOS Tahoe developer beta does not support the legacy FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 data-transfer standards, according to @NekoMichi on X, and a Reddit post. As a result, the first few iPod models and old external storage drives that rely on FireWire cannot be synced with or mounted on a Mac running the macOS Tahoe beta.

Unlike on macOS Sequoia and earlier versions, the first macOS Tahoe beta does not include a FireWire section in the System Settings app.

I’ve seen reports that FireWire support has been partially broken since macOS 12.3, anyway.

Mark Sokolovsky:

Take a fine comb and look through the latest developer beta, tell me if you find any mention of FireWire anywhere – not even System Profiler has it anymore. They’re saying on AppleInsider that even with a Thunderbolt Dock, it won’t let you connect any FW device to macOS.

[…]

Macs started carrying FireWire as early as 1997 as a BTO/CTO option, however, was not included onboard on any model until 1999. Even then, not all models carried it. The mid-2012 13″ non-retina MacBook Pro was the last model Mac to carry any sort of FireWire port.

USB continues to improve, but I just don’t think it’s ever been as reliable as FireWire was.

Jack Wellborn:

In honor of FireWire support presumably going away in macOS Tahoe, here’s pictures from when I connected my original iPod to my M1 MacBook Pro.

MacBook Pro to
Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter to
Thunderbolt 2 cable to
Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 2 adapter to
Firewire 2 cable to
External HD with FireWire 2 and FireWire 1 ports to
FireWire 1 cable to
iPod

Previously:

Update (2025-07-04): Adam Maxwell:

Wow, that’s the end of an era. I bought FW drives as long as I was able, as it seemed like performance and reliability was always better. FW > Ethernet > USB > WiFi > Bluetooth in my unscientific aggregate of performance and reliability.

Lee Bennett:

I guess I’m gonna have to keep an older Mac & OS around coz I still periodically use a FireWire bridge to capture VHS tapes.

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Brazil Recommends Sanctions for Apple Over App Store and NFC Rules

Hartley Charlton:

The recommendation was issued by the General Superintendence of Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (SG/CADE), the technical body of the federal antitrust authority. In a public statement translated from Portuguese, SG/CADE determined that Apple’s conduct with iOS constitutes a violation of Brazilian competition law and urged CADE’s internal tribunal to impose penalties, including financial fines and mandatory changes to Apple’s policies.

The investigation started in 2022 after formal complaints were submitted by Latin American e-commerce platform MercadoLibre and other digital service providers. The companies alleged that Apple engaged in anti-competitive practices by requiring in-app purchases to be made exclusively through its own payment system and by restricting developers from informing users about alternative purchasing options — a practice known as anti-steering.

MercadoLibre further argued that Apple abused its control over the iOS platform by denying third-party access to critical technologies such as the iPhone ‘s NFC chip, effectively limiting mobile payment competition in Brazil.

Previously:

Tim Robertson, RIP

Peter Cohen:

Confirmed with the family this morning that @mymac founder Tim Robertson passed away after a recent illness.

Tim was not just a mainstay of Apple blogging, podcasting and smart analysis for decades, but one of the very nicest people I’ve ever met.

Like ATPM, My Mac began in 1995 and was originally published in DOCMaker format. Each issue was a standalone app-document file, downloadable like shareware from AOL and eWorld.

Update (2025-07-08): John Nemerovski:

Tim recruited, inspired, and nurtured the writing of dozens of regular and guest contributors to MyMac.com, publishing thousands of articles over the course of three decades. His MyMac Podcasting Network has also hosted thousands of episodes of shows such as Tech Fan, GeeksPub, Geekiest Show Ever, and The Essential Apple Podcast.

He accomplished it all as a dedicated Apple aficionado, with very little advertising or sponsorship, while working a day job as a car salesman. MyMac contributors, like Tim, have always been unpaid volunteers who create content at a professional level.

[…]

Tim was a one-of-a-kind, fearless leader. We extend our deepest sympathies to his family in Michigan and encourage anyone who knew him to share their stories on his official obituary.

Grammarly Acquires Superhuman

Krystal Hu (via Hacker News):

Grammarly has signed a deal to acquire email efficiency tool Superhuman as part of the company’s push to build an artificial intelligence-powered productivity suite and diversify its business, its executives told Reuters in an interview.

The San Francisco-based companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal. Superhuman, once an exclusive email tool boasting a long waitlist for new users, was last valued at $825 million in 2021, and currently has an annual revenue of about $35 million.

Previously:

iPadOS Windows Mess Up Data Saving

Craig Hockenberry (Mastodon):

From the very beginning, iOS has had a notion of an app being in the foreground or background. When you saw an app on screen it was active and when it was gone it was inactive.

[…]

It was simple system that let you do what you needed to do, when you needed to do it. Now with windows on iPadOS, that’s gotten a lot harder.

That’s because apps stay active even when their windows do not.

If you’re using iPadOS 26 and noticing that the saving/syncing/exchange of data is not happening, there’s a stupid trick you need to do to get things working: Tap on the home screen to hide the windows (they slide off to the sides of the display). That makes all the apps on screen inactive and triggers the work that they need to do.

It seems like there’s a missing API for apps to know what’s happening.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-17): Luc Vandal:

BGContinuedProcessingTaskRequest doesn’t launch when the app is active but not focused—like during a drop in side-by-side multitasking on iPadOS 26.

Apple dev forums? Useless. Google? Merely 10 unhelpful results. Not sure I feel like sinking hours into an Apple Feedback that’ll vanish into the void…

Not exactly having a great summer. Everything feels like a fight. 🤬

Monday, June 30, 2025

Proton v. Apple

Proton (PDF):

We believe that Apple’s conduct, as detailed in the complaint we filed, constitutes further violations of US antitrust law. Without this case, Apple could get away with behavior in the US that is already outlawed in the European Union. If this were to happen, American consumers, and developers focused on the American market, would have to pay higher prices for fewer choices, and be left at a disadvantage.

There is also urgency to act now because of a parallel class-action suit by app developers against Apple on May 23, and any settlement there could be binding on all other developers. By joining that lawsuit, we can ensure that this suit will not only be about monetary damages to compensate app developers for the harm caused by Apple’s conduct, but also changes to App Store policies that will improve the state of the internet. We are seeking to permanently end anti-competitive behavior on the App Store, and we are joining this lawsuit to ensure that any future settlement enforces real changes to Apple’s practices and policies to benefit all consumers, developers, and competition, and not just cosmetic changes.

[…]

Companies that monetize user data in exchange for “free” services that abuse your privacy aren’t affected by this, as they don’t process payments through the App Store. However, privacy-first companies that monetize through subscriptions are disproportionately hit by this fee, putting a major barrier toward the adoption of privacy-first business models. Naturally, these are also the very companies Apple is directly competing with through its disingenuous privacy marketing campaigns.

[…]

Apple argues this control is necessary for security reasons. But the reality is that this has made Apple the single point of failure for free speech and a tool of dictatorships. There have been numerous incidents where Apple has removed or censored apps at the behest of authoritarian governments, in order to continue profiting from those markets.

[…]

In 2020, Apple threatened to take Proton VPN out of the App Store unless we removed language from our App Store description that said the app could be used to “unblock censored websites.” We don’t question Apple’s right to act on behalf of authoritarians for the sake of profit, but Apple’s monopoly over iOS app distribution means it can enforce this perverse policy on all app developers, forcing them to also be complicit. We believe it is critical for the future of the internet to end the monopoly on app distribution, so that developers and companies who are prepared to fight for democracy can do so.

Apple also blocked their security update unless they would change the app’s description. The app description had been previously approved with no issues, and the rejection didn’t point to an actual rule violation. This was all after Apple had said that it wouldn’t block bug fix updates.

Proton is also upset that users can’t set Proton Calendar as the default calendar app and that iCloud Drive gets to do background processing stuff that Proton Drive can’t.

Andrew Orr:

Proton seeks an injunction that would require Apple to open iOS to rival app stores and payment services. It also demands monetary compensation for what it calls excessive commissions and the broader competitive harm imposed on developers.

However, they say they will donate any money received from the lawsuit.

Manton Reece:

At this point, I don’t think there’s any doubt that eventually, all around the world, it will be possible to install third-party apps, or use external payments, with minimal interference from Apple. It might still be a bumpy road to get there. This lawsuit is an unfortunate but likely necessary part of the journey.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-01): See also: MacRumors and Hacker News.

Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton

Adi Robertson:

Age verification is perhaps the hottest battleground for online speech, and the Supreme Court just settled a pivotal question: does using it to gate adult content violate the First Amendment in the US? For roughly the past 20 years the answer has been “yes” — now, as of Friday, it’s an unambiguous “no.”

Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is relatively straightforward as Supreme Court rulings go.

[…]

Even the best age verification usually requires collecting information that links people (directly or indirectly) to some of their most sensitive web history, creating an almost inherent risk of leaks. The only silver lining is that current systems seem to at least largely make good-faith attempts to avoid intentional snooping, and legislation includes attempts to discourage unnecessary data retention.

Previously:

Assorted Notes on Liquid Glass

Riccardo Mori:

I’ve been trying to make sense of Apple’s latest user-interface redesign — Apple calls it Liquid Glass — that will affect all their platforms in the next iteration of their respective OS versions. But it’s hard to make sense of it when, after checking Apple’s own guidance, I’m mostly left with the feeling that at Apple they’re making things up as they go.

[…]

Now take a look at the area I’ve highlighted in the image. Why would you want to “focus on the underlying content” here? Tab bars and toolbars still cover the underlying content, and the more transparent/translucent they are, the worse. When something fades to the background, it literally ceases to be in the foreground, so there’s no point in focusing on it. This is like proposing an interface that helps you focus your sight on your peripheral vision.

[…]

Another thing that irks me about this obsession with icon simplification is that when you abstract things this much, you dilute their meaning instead of distilling it. Take the progressive degradation of the Dictionary icon, for example. In its subsequent iterations (as soon as it loses the ‘book’ shape), it could just be the icon for a font managing app. Because it ends up losing a lot (if not all) of its uniqueness.

Louie Mantia:

People really expected Apple to shift back toward the kinds of things that made us all fall in love with their platforms and products to begin with. […] But the pendulum never swung back. Instead, we got Liquid Glass.

[…]

And so it seems to me that the people who spearheaded both iOS 7 (2013) and iOS 26 (2025) either did not understand that the visually-rich style from 2001–2013 played such a significant role in Apple’s success or they simply did not care that it did.

[…]

Yet as years go by, we seem to lose more of OS X’s good things. Year after year, draggable borders and frames became thinner until they disappeared. Scrollbars vanished. Stronger contrast softened. We lost the visually rich design in applications and icons. And now, we’ve even lost the ability to make unique icon silhouettes that Apple once specifically retained when introducing the iOS 7 aesthetic to macOS because that was a distinct element of its heritage.

[…]

It’s asking a lot. For almost nothing in return. I keep looking at all the changes Liquid Glass brings, and I cannot find one instance where it has markedly improved the experience in any way.

[…]

But what I am now absolutely sure of is that if the last decade represents Alan Dye’s vision for this platform, then I disagree with it. I don’t trust this direction. I didn’t need the last ten years to see that, but I’m disappointed that in ten years he still doesn’t see it.

Riccardo Mori (Mastodon):

In the past, technology used to be my coping space. A place for a knowledge worker like me to nerd about his tools and related passions — user interfaces, UI/UX design, typography, etc. And if I have developed these passions and interest is largely because of Apple. Apple had a huge impact on my life ever since I started using their computers. I carried out my apprenticeship in Desktop Publishing on a workstation that was comprised of a Macintosh SE, a Bernoulli Box external drive, and a LaserWriter printer back in 1989. I’ve always appreciated the care and attention to detail Apple put in their hardware design but also in their UI design.

But it’s true — something important died with Steve Jobs. He was really Apple’s kernel, for better and for… less better. This Apple has been dismantling Mac OS, as if it’s a foreign tool to them. They’ve bashed its UI around. And they seem to have done that not for the purpose of improving it, but simply for the purpose of changing it; adapting it to their (mostly misguided) idea of unifying the interface of different devices to bring it down to the simplest common denominator.

Francisco Tolmasky:

Well I think it is very clear that Apple does not believe there are new ideas to be had. This is a much deeper discussion, but to me all of their actions are representative of a company that believes technology is “mature” and all that is left to do, at best, is polish. Setting aside whether one agrees with Apple’s decisions/taste/whatever, I think it is not up for discussion that while these changes may be disruptive, they are not, nor are intended to be, “transformative”.

Baked into the explanation that Liquid Glass “frees your content from the tyranny of the UI” is the inescapable admission that you have determined that the highest priority item left for iOS is to “return roughly 40px of screen real estate, or 3% of the vertical space of an iPhone, to users”. That is the important part here. Not whether LG does or doesn’t deliver, but rather that Apple did not find, and thus does not believe there exists, anything more interesting to do in all of 2025.

Dave Polaschek:

Also, there are bugs that have been around for more than six years (I was still working when I reported them) that they could have been fixing, but those don’t even get looked at. They’re too busy making new bugs instead.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-04): Francisco Tolmasky:

Fashion is the state an industry degrades to once all the available innovation has been exhausted.

It is the “white dwarf” conclusion for fields with insufficient justifiable change to provide an indefinite source of legitimate novelty. The term we use to identify the fields that defy this destiny is “technology”.

If you want to understand Apple’s insistence on a yearly update schedule, you must first understand that Apple no longer sees their software as technology, but rather as fashion.

This explains the seeming disconnect between Apple and its users: how can Apple remove key features “we depend on” so callously, in fact, oftentimes proudly? The stakes seem high to “us” and low to “them”.

But Apple’s position makes perfect sense if you view each of these features not as a step towards or away from some theoretical target “ideal functionality,” but rather as a “fashion trend” that is either still “in” or “out of” style.

John Gruber:

I have never once gotten the impression that anyone on Alan Dye’s UI team uses serious pro tool apps. They love making beautiful looking things, not solving difficult UI problems with clever solutions. And I suspect when confronted with difficult UI problems, they say “Shut up with that nerd stuff.”

Louie Mantia, Jr.:

You know, I could write a whole blog post about this—and I might—but I think we need to start addressing the very likely possibility that the entire thesis that “UI should get out of the way” and “apps should focus on content” is wrong.

Apps aren’t just for looking at photos or videos. They’re for navigating through these things, organizing them, editing them. The tools to do those things should not get out of the way. They should be clearly defined and separate from the content.

The problem is not the introduction of glass as an element of the visual design language. If used as the Dock background alone, it would be totally fine! But because someone said “UI should get out of the way” and no one challenged it—instead of content literally being the focus, Apple has to intentionally put content out of focus (blurring) to make the glass elements visible. They have to put a gradient behind the glass so you can see it. That should’ve been the “oh, it doesn’t work” moment.

But here we are with a new visual design language that somehow manages to compromise on both the content area and the UI.

Marco Arment:

Liquid Glass’ blurred content everywhere is especially cruel to those of us who use reading glasses or progressives.

The reflex to seeing blurry text on our phones is to adjust our sight angle or distance to sharpen it. But, of course, it’s not our fault, doesn’t sharpen, and just causes eyestrain.

Text on my phone should never be blurry.

Greg Pierce:

I’m still optimistic about some of the elements of Liquid Glass, but, so far, every change I’ve made to adapt to the look has directly reduced the visibility user’s content and the accessibility of important functions.

Having spent the weekend with my parents, less visibility will be a disaster for them. The (…) button scares them.

Jesper:

There are two stages to this, in two different axes (being: icons and the general UI).

The first stage is: I can't believe that Apple is doing their developers and their ecosystem dirty this way. In which way does someone look at all this and imagine that this will be sufficient for developers to express what they want to express? Look at the progression to this point, look at what is given up and look at for what. Negligible wins in screen space even on the most space constrained devices (aside from Apple Watch, where the layering and overlapping is highly limited to begin with), and effects that are technically impressive but not in the apparent service of any particular goal.

The second stage is: I can't believe that Apple is doing this to themselves. To their own icons and their own user interfaces. I have yet to find a single user interface in their own OS, in the most-baked Liquid Glass UIs currently in existence, that is functionally improved. There are loads of them that have been functionally and hierarchically crippled.

[…]

The Bas Ording school sometimes uses a neat effect to enable new functionality (seeing more things with Dock magnification, keeping track of where things go with windows animating in and out of sheets and the dock, shrinking and moving around with Exposé). But the effect was never the point. The visuals were tweaked from version to version and certainly changed over time.

The Alan Dye school always starts with dropping a manifesto. […] None of the interfaces seem like they were iterated on in order to increase usability, readability, utility or understandability in the slightest. […] As far as I can tell, Apple's just lost its sense of UI design priorities completely.

Benjamin Mayo:

In fact, the act of squishing controls into a single row actually exacerbates the relative lack of screen real estate in the horizontal axis. With iPhone dimensions as they are, horizontal space is constrained, and you have to be very selective about what can fit in the bounds of the screen’s width. Inevitably, this means important items must be hidden away.

[…]

Personally, I find the minimisation trend most egregious in the Music app.

Jonathan Wight:

I know zero former coworkers at Apple who actually like Liquid Glass. Every single time it has come up in conversation so far the reaction has been negative.

I am in two group-chats with ex-Apple folks and both chats have devolved into Liquid Glass hate-fests.

Sean Heber:

Pretty frustrated with all of the iOS/iPad/macOS 26… everything.

I feel like suddenly nothing works. I can’t do anything I want to do. And everything is broken. It feels like a giant waste of time churning.

Matt Birchler:

There are plenty of times where the UI looks positively gorgeous. In the Apple Music screenshot above, I think those elements look stunning, and they look even better in motion as content swirls around the background as I scroll. I also really like the address bar at the bottom of Safari, which really comes to life when scrolling sites with fun colors. Tellingly, I have an iPhone still on iOS 18 and it does feel a bit dull in comparison.

But there are also times where it doesn't look great and can be genuinely hard to read. This got better in the second round of betas, but it's definitely not completely fixed yet. And even when it is working right, UI elements bounce from what I can only describe as light mode to dark mode over and over as their background content changes. I find this distracting and visually unpleasant.

Louie Mantia, Jr. (Mastodon):

But my gosh, this is a multi-trillion dollar company that’s getting free design critique from people who love and rely on these platforms the most. For free. Absolutely nothing in return. It’s almost as if we’re all posting about it because of desperation. So many of us are hoping this really isn’t what we have to live with for the next five or ten years. Despite knowing it will take time away from the things we’d much rather be doing, we’re writing blog posts and recording podcasts and posting on social media anyway.

[…]

App icons are all over the place. In some ways, they gained detail, in others, they lost detail. Almost every icon has an unfortunate concession to fit into this Liquid Glass model.

[…]

But what I can’t help but notice for 12 years now is that without visual effects serving to differentiate one control from another, we’ve lost immediate recognition of different UI elements. Title bars merged with toolbars. Toolbars merged with tab bars. Is this icon an action or a tab? Will it open a menu or switch the view? It’s anybody’s guess. The conflation of basically all these UI elements with iOS 7 and a step further with Liquid Glass in the 26 release makes me think someone doesn’t understand there is a difference between these kinds of UI elements. Or maybe they don’t care about the difference.

[…]

Every time I see an issue, I ask, “What problem is this solving?” And every time, there is no answer. There is seemingly no benefit to any of this. That isn’t to say there aren’t good UI changes in this release. It’s just that some of these visual decisions are impacting the UI. Instead of working together, they seem to be at odds with each other.

[…]

At the point when you have to blur the content area to make the UI stand out from it, how can you possibly argue that it gets out of the way? It makes no sense.

Update (2025-07-08): See more screenshots from Louie Mantia, Jr.

Update (2025-07-14): Craig Grannell (Mastodon):

The guidance I – and, I’m sure, others – have provided multiple times to Apple is that motion that cannot be controlled by the user should ideally be removed; which, in reality, has meant being replaced by a crossfade – good enough for most users with vestibular issues. You’ll see this if you activate Reduce Motion on your iPhone. The 3D zoom ‘blast’ when opening folders will be gone. As will other animations, such as when you move through menu hierarchies. (At least in software that doesn’t use its own proprietary animations that ignore Reduce Motion, such as RSS client Reeder.)

What people often don’t realise is that even small/fast pop-out menu animations can be enough to ‘blast’ someone to the point they can be made dizzy. Additionally, transforming static to animated UI via refraction is a potential trigger.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-18): Louie Mantia (Mastodon):

Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power he has, because he simply has no taste. But what’s worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly. And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him, the entire industry suffers the consequences.

[…]

Another reason that the industry is showing signs of reluctance is because Alan Dye did not prove he understood the platform, any platform, before he assumed the role of its lead designer. He’s not just a newcomer to these platforms, but to software design as a whole. He never had any experience creating anything for Apple platforms before he was entrusted with this position. That’s crazy.

[…]

Whatever actually happened, by letting Scott go, Tim significantly altered the course for Apple. It has since become almost a parody of itself as a luxury brand. In my own estimation, Jony didn’t just lack experience in software design, he never respected the profession.

[…]

Apple does not have answers for everything they uprooted. Fundamental UI paradigms have been recklessly reorganized. Carelessly compartmentalized. That any of this has been done without every consideration to the vast amounts of collective work that third-party designers and developers have to do to in their own products is just simply unconscionable.

The Figma design kit is finally available.

Eric Schwarz:

One thing that has really irked me in the past couple of years of the Alan Dye era is this notion of hiding controls so “content can be the focus”—I don’t want my browser to have less controls or usable navigation just so that we can see 1/8” more of a web page (or in some ways, the same amount because of the larger controls and poorer spacing.) Likewise, the content is the controls on some apps. His style seems to focus on what might look good on a product marketing picture, but is cumbersome to actually use.

Look at what’s happened to the Calendar icon.

mitten:

I just do not understand why they are making the icons out of focus and soft. It’s just so bizarre. The new Photos icon is one of the worst in this regard.

Technotes Safari Extension

Zhenyi Tan (via Kyle Howells):

A few months ago, I posted this image on Mastodon, because the Apple documentation website sometimes feel… err, underwhelming. Many people have already pointed this out, so I won’t repeat their complaints. When people complain about Apple’s documentation, they often compare it to php.net, saying that php.net has sample code for almost every function and community notes that explain details when the code alone isn’t enough.

So I thought, what if we just make Apple’s documentation more like php.net? I posted the question on Mastodon, but not many people were interested. Oh no! Anyway, two months later, I decided to give it a shot because I still thought the idea was good enough to try. I then called it Technotes.

Technotes is a Safari extension that adds user-contributed notes to the Apple documentation website. The notes can include sample code, warnings about common pitfalls, and other useful stuff.

Copyright © 2000–2025 Michael Tsai.