Monday, June 3, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

SwiftUI and Combine

SwiftUI:

SwiftUI is an innovative, exceptionally simple way to build user interfaces across all Apple platforms with the power of Swift. Build user interfaces for any Apple device using just one set of tools and APIs. With a declarative Swift syntax that’s easy to read and natural to write, SwiftUI works seamlessly with new Xcode design tools to keep your code and design perfectly in sync. Automatic support for Dynamic Type, Dark Mode, localization, and accessibility means your first line of SwiftUI code is already the most powerful UI code you’ve ever written.

I guess this is project Amber. I don’t know the details well enough to say much yet. But I think building UIs in code with a functional/declarative style is fundamentally the right approach. The code snippets look similar to (but better than) the newer UI code I’ve been writing using my own layer on top of AppKit.

As you work in the design canvas, everything you edit is completely in sync with the code in the adjoining editor. Code is instantly visible as a preview as you type, and any change you make to that preview immediately appears in your code. Xcode recompiles your changes instantly and inserts them into a running version of your app, visible and editable at all times.

The Swift compiler and runtime are fully embedded throughout Xcode, so your app is constantly being built and run. The design canvas you see isn’t just an approximation of your user interface — it’s your live app. And Xcode can swap edited code directly in your live app with “dynamic replacement”, a new feature in Swift.

At first I thought SwiftUI was a wrapper layer on top of AppKit and UIKit.

Robert Clegg:

It really isn’t. It’s built from the ground up and is all Swift code.

If so, this is really interesting as it introduces a separate UI stack and really makes Objective-C a second-class citizen. But it is also a chance to have a unified framework that can apparently coexist with legacy views in the same window.

Nate Cook:

SwiftUI works great with UIKit, AppKit, and more! This tutorial shows how you can host SwiftUI views inside view controllers, and then embed those view controllers in SwiftUI

Jack Lawrence:

Remember all those awesome UX #WWDC talks about interruptible animations, and how they make your app feel far more responsive? Getting it right used to be incredibly hard. #SwiftUI does it all for you with One. Line. Of. Code.

Combine:

The Combine framework provides a declarative Swift API for processing values over time. These values can represent user interface events, network responses, scheduled events, and many other kinds of asynchronous data. Combine declares publishers to expose values that can change over time, and subscribers to receive those values from the publishers.

This is Apple’s reactive framework (finally) and the successor to Cocoa Bindings and KVO.

Previously:

Mac Pro 2019

Apple:

Power to change everything. Say hello to a Mac that is extreme in every way. With the greatest performance, expansion, and configurability yet, it is a system created to let a wide range of professionals push the limits of what is possible.

Function defines form. Every aspect of Mac Pro is designed in pursuit of performance. Built around a stainless steel space frame, an aluminum housing lifts off, allowing 360-degree access to every component and vast configuration. From there anything is possible.

I thought Apple wouldn’t listen and would find a way to screw this up. But this looks really great. Besides the core features like lots of processor cores and PCI slots, there are so many nice touches, from a couple USB-A ports to the rounded handles and the height-adjustable stand for the 6K matte display.

Joe Rossignol:

The new Mac Pro will start at $5,999 with an eight-core Intel Xeon processor, 32GB of ECC RAM, AMD WX 7100 graphics, and 256GB of SSD storage.

However, it’s way more machine—and price—than developers need. (And only 256 GB of storage for the $6K base model?) Similarly, the Pro Display XDR looks amazing, but I would like to have a more affordable 5K one to put next to my iMac.

I’m also not exactly sure what the situation is for internal storage. It looks like there are two slots, but I don’t know whether they are proprietary or can be upgraded after purchase.

Previously:

Update (2019-06-03): Drunken Dogcow:

The PowerMac G5 base price was $1,999 (or around $2,700 adjusted for inflation). $6,000 is incredibly insane.

WWDC 2019 Links

General:

Customer Stuff:

Documentation:

What’s New:

Release Notes:

Key Sessions:

Podcasts:

This post will be updated as I find new links. If you see anything good that I missed, please tweet or e-mail me.

Previously:

Final Marzipan Thoughts Before WWDC 2019

Neil Sardesai:

“AppKit is our primary native framework and it takes full advantage of all the Mac has to offer. And in no way are we de-emphasizing that.” —WWDC 2018, Platforms State of the Union

Craig Hockenberry:

Cross-platform frameworks have a long history of sucking. If you ever used a Java app during the early days of Mac OS X, you know immediately what I’m talking about: the interactions were from a different universe. The design of the system was a “least common denominator” where only a limited set of capabilities was exposed. It just felt wrong.

[…]

Apple’s been down this road before and I don’t see them making the journey again. Instead, I see them taking a new and forward thinking direction. A bold and pragmatic change that Apple is famous for: they’d be setting themselves up for the next decade of user interaction.

[…]

I’m not going to predict how this would be accomplished. Yes, it could draw inspiration from React or other similar technologies. The only thing I’m confident of at this point is that Apple knows it has a problem and is working actively to solve it in a platform-independent fashion.

Marzipan is our first step. And what I’ve described above is Amber, the next step.

Brent Simmons:

I’m kind of unsure that leadership at Apple understands what’s great and important about Macs that we should not lose.

Evolve, change, yes — but not become a supercomputer with its arms tied behinds its back. That’s what I worry about it.

Riccardo Mori:

Also, as a consequence, I fear that the Mac App Store is going to become more like iOS’s App Store in every way — with thousands of crappy apps, and terrible pricing trends. Where by ‘terrible pricing trends’ I mean the race to the bottom on the one hand, and on the other hand an increase in subscriptions as the only payment method even for simple utilities and single‐purpose apps. (I hope more people realise how subscriptions aren’t sustainable on a large scale for customers).

I fear that iOS is going to become the new model that dictates how the Mac user interface has to behave. That Macs are going to be considered just as ‘big iPads’, and that paradigms and behaviours that are tailored for iOS and belong to iOS come to replace those paradigms, principles, and behaviours that made the Mac’s user interface great.

[…]

I’m all for change if it brings unequivocal progress. But I’m afraid that Mac OS is getting repurposed and repackaged more to fit inside an agenda than to keep thriving as a platform with its history, characteristics, and unique features.

I’ve experienced firsthand all the transitions the Mac platform has gone through, and this is the one that’s leaving me the most apprehensive. Because all past transitions brought clear advantages to the Mac, either from a hardware or software standpoint. The signals were of progress for the Mac platform; or, at the very least, of having to take a step sideways to then take two steps forward. This time it feels that things have to change simply to benefit the advancement of another platform.

Dieter Bohn:

The apps are not good. I think Apple should make more of them.

In fact, I think Apple should do more than double down on these iPad-style apps on the Mac. I think Apple should go all in and make nearly all of its consumer Mac apps with the new UIKit / Marzipan frameworks, including Mail, Notes, Messages, FaceTime, Photos, Reminders, and Calendar. Apple should just go for it, sooner rather than later, and ideally right now.

My reasoning is pretty simple: whether you think these apps should be the future of macOS development, they’re absolutely coming either way, and Apple should want to ensure that they’re great.

[…]

I worry that Apple could find itself facing an analogous (though not parallel) quandary to what Microsoft has faced with its own next-generation Windows app framework. Called the “Universal Windows Platform,” it has been fraught with changes in direction and complaints that it was too limiting. It took the company nearly half a decade just to decide what to call them. Worst of all, UWP saw very little adoption as developers stuck with the old way of making apps. Now, even Microsoft might not be very committed to them anymore. The best way to avoid that kind of confusion is to be clear and decisive from the start.

I’m also hopeful (perhaps naively so) that this new Mac framework will be powerful and flexible enough for many different kinds of apps.

Jason Snell:

Sort of like jumping into a cold swimming pool. I’m not sure Apple’s really that kind of company, but I hope that behind the scenes, Apple is ceasing development on the Mac-only versions of all of its consumer apps and instead pushing all future development to be done with Marzipan in mind. We might not get a Marzipan version of Mail or iMovie or Pages this year, but those need to be in the works.

Like it or not, Marzipan apps are the future of macOS—and they need to be good, or macOS won’t be.

If that’s in fact the future, it’s only because of Apple’s choosing. I simply don’t see the situation without Marzipan as dire. Mac are selling well. And what problems there are could be fixed in other ways—they’re not that the apps aren’t iOSy enough, more the opposite. Part of my pessimism is with the general idea of write-once-run-anywhere. But also, at the present time, I have low confidence in Apple’s ability to implement good rewrites of Mac software. What in theory may seem like an OK unification strategy, is actually quite risky because if they don’t do it well we’ll end up much worse off than if they’d just kept the Mac in maintenance mode for a while.

Damien Petrilli:

I see some tweets about electron Apps and marzipan.

But Apple is mainly responsible for it:

- driving quality of App down (and leading the way since iOS 7)
- making the app market unsustainable
- bad dev tools / documentation making it costly to do native dev

Marzipan is seen as one way to tackle this, but unless all the points above are addressed today, this isn’t going to change and could even get worst.

Steve Troughton-Smith (tweet):

I have been very vocal about why I think UIKit coming to the Mac is something to be excited about. There is so much potential in unifying the software ecosystem across Apple’s platforms, but to do it right you can’t stay on the fence like Microsoft did. For this to work, you need to own it, and you need to make it so good that it’s hard to imagine wanting to use or write any other kind of software. That is how iOS makes me feel, and that is how the Mac should make iOS users feel.

[…]

I really don’t think there will be a viable future for the Mac if Marzipan falls flat on its face. Apple’s dominant ecosystem is iOS — that ship has sailed. No new UI framework or declarative layer on top is going to change the arithmetic; any new app framework for the Mac will by definition have to be shared across iOS and Mac, or we’ll be right back where we started. By the time we’ve got to that point, there may not be any native desktop apps left, and iOS will still be accelerating into the future with new form-factors, augmented reality or whatever comes next. Even native app development titans like Adobe have a version of Photoshop in development for WebAssembly, and it’s hard to not see the appeal for developers. The web is amazing; WebGL and WebAssembly will enable all kinds of powerful new platforms.

Tanner Bennett:

Geez, I don’t know what planet Steve TS lives on, but just because one platform is more “dominant” than another (iOS vs macOS) doesn’t mean one is or should be totally left behind.

That’s like saying cars are the dominant form of transportation and we should just abandon boats.

Rob Griffiths:

I honestly wish Apple were bringing the Mac and iPad closer together by bringing more of the Mac to the iPad than by bringing more of the iPad to the Mac.

Jesper:

Apple is supposed to complete the curveball it threw all of us for in last year’s WWDC, when it started to say that iOS apps are not coming to Mac, and following it up by saying that instead, UIKit is coming to the Mac, presenting four new apps that looked like straight-up ports from their new iOS incarnations that had in fact not even been ports.

[…]

The reason I’m not wild about Marzipan is because wanting to use a Mac in the first place has always been about liking the way things are subtly different and subtly better. The Marzipan apps so far have been completely bled of this quality. They make the same mistake “Universal” Windows applications did, which is to believe that taking a touch interface and sprinkling keyboard-and-mouse adaptiveness on top of it is “enough”. It is “enough” for a dropdown menu to be one of those scrollable list pickers - the ones designed for a finger to swipe through on a constrained display, with haptic feedback guiding you. (This was UI that Apple actually shipped in an app that wasn’t just a major feature of an OS update but a flagship app of a new framework.) At least the UWP applications can more readily expect the screen on a laptop to respond to touch.

The thought of Marzipan being capable of delivering something Mac users will recognize and praise as Mac-like is laughable; the thought of it subsuming Cocoa to become the recommended default is offensive. Cocoa eclipsed Carbon because it was better at providing a Mac-like experience. For all the recent iOSsification of macOS, I still don’t see this being the case without extensive surgery. If anything, the way forward should have been a “Cocoa X”, designed from scratch with the learnings of both UIKit and AppKit/Cocoa in mind.

See also: The Talk Show.

Colin Cornaby:

Ok, final pre-Keynote Marzipan hot take: I find it funny when it’s put in terms of some emotional fight over legacy vs modern and looking down on people. I just want a tool that’s able to get the work done I need it to get done. Mac, iPad, whatever.

When there is a possibility or an actuality of the platform preventing you from getting your work done, or making it a lot more difficult, that’s a problem.

People who use their Macs to get a job done that they couldn’t do with another tool don’t care about opinions about legacy or whatever. A hammer is a legacy tool but people get important things done with them every day.

Previously:

Samsung Notebook 7

Cameron Faulkner:

Of the two sizes, the 13-inch model bears the closest resemblance to Apple’s MacBook Pro, with its keyboard arrangement and center-aligned trackpad, and well, just about everything else about it. The 15-inch laptop’s design dashes the illusion completely with a numpad on its keyboard, which shoves all of the keys and its trackpad left-of-center.

The Notebook 7, unlike Apple’s MacBook Pro, features a load of useful ports, including two USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C port, HDMI, and a microSD slot. So, no dongles are necessary if you want to hook it up to an external monitor, or connect multiple accessories — though it can’t connect via Ethernet.

Samsung’s homage to the MacBook Pro starts at $999.99 and will release in the US on July 26th on Amazon and Samsung’s own online store.

Lots of aspects that I wish Apple would copy. They even have inverted-T arrow keys.

Previously:

Proposed Screen Time API

Joe Rossignol:

Over a dozen parental control app developers have come together with a shared message for Apple: it’s “time to put kids first.”

Together, they have launched a new website called Screen Time API that urges Apple to release a public API granting developers access to the same functionalities that iOS 12’s Screen Time feature uses. The developers have even proposed their own API, complete with samples of code and a diagram of how it would work.

[…]

The developers were encouraged to act by Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive known as the “Father of the iPod.” Fadell backed the developers in a series of tweets, and according to The New York Times, he also said he would help “push” their message “out to the world,” adding “just make sure it’s done BEFORE WWDC.”

Previously:

Friday, May 31, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

The End of iTunes

Mark Gurman:

iTunes has been the way Apple users listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, hear podcasts, and manage their devices for almost two decades. This year, Apple is finally ready to move into a new era. The company is launching a trio of new apps for the Mac – Music, TV, and Podcasts – to replace iTunes. That matches Apple’s media app strategy on iPhones and iPads. Without iTunes, customers can manage their Apple gadgets through the Music app.

Joe Rossignol:

This information lines up with a recent report from 9to5Mac’s Guilherme Rambo, who claimed that iTunes will be renamed to “Music” on the Mac. In other words, iTunes is going away and will be replaced by the new Music app, which is expected to become the new utility for syncing and managing Apple devices.

Allen Pike:

Surprisingly, this new app is said to be based not on the iOS app or a new codebase, but on the venerable iTunes itself.

There will surely be naysayers that claim iTunes should have been tossed entirely. And admittely, if the new Music app ditches iTunes’ interface but can’t cure its deep and baffling love for obtuse modal error dialogs, I too will bemoan its preservation. But arguing for code to be rewritten just because it’s old has never been the right way to build systems that work.

He has a great collection of iTunes error messages.

See also: Stephen Hackett.

Previously: macOS 10.15 to Break Up iTunes.

Update (2019-06-03): Craig Hockenberry:

I haven’t seen it reported elsewhere, but as of last weekend all http://itunes.apple.com links redirect to http://music.apple.com — a likely indicator that the brand is done (the app will be fine for those of us who need it.)

Joe Rossignol:

As noted on Reddit, Apple has abruptly removed all social media content from its iTunes page on Facebook, including posts, photos, and videos. This appears to have happened within the past 24 hours, as a cached version of the iTunes page on Facebook still had content available as of May 31.

See also: Hacker News.

Browser Vendors Win War With W3C

W3C:

Today W3C and the WHATWG signed an agreement to collaborate on the development of a single version of the HTML and DOM specifications. The Memorandum of Understanding jointly published as the WHATWG/W3C Joint Working Mode gives the specifics of this collaboration. This is the culmination of a careful exploration of effective partnership mechanisms since December 2017 after the WHATWG adopted many shared features as their work-mode and an IPR policy.

Catalin Cimpanu:

Known as the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), this group was formed in 2004 as a response to the W3C’s slow pace of developing a more modern HTML standard, and the W3C’s plans to move HTML towards a variant known as XHTML, with an XML-like structure, which browser vendors at the time did not agree with.

[…]

In many cases, proposed standards would often ship in Chrome or Mozilla even before they were finalized and formally approved by the W3C, showing that most of the time, browser vendors considered getting W3C approval as only a formality, which had little impact on the standards they decided among themselves at the WHATWG.

The two organizations had an official fallout in April 2018, when all WHATWG members -- Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla -- vehemently and unequivocally opposed the W3C’s plans for approving version 4.1 of the DOM standard.

Laurie Voss:

The W3C has officially acknowledged that it lost control of HTML standards to the WHATWG many years ago.

[…]

[It] essentially just admits what happened already, which is that the major browser makers decide what the web can do. As long as all four are roughly equally powerful I don’t see it being that big an issue.

Gab Will Become a Mastodon Fork

Gab (Hacker News):

Progress on our new codebase is going well. For those who don’t know, our plan is to fork existing open source software, Mastodon, which is based on the ActivityPub social networking protocol.

[…]

You’ll be able to log into and use dozens of existing mobile apps that exist on both App Stores with your Gab account and use Gab through these apps.

[…]

Moving to the ActivityPub protocol as our base allows us to get into mobile App Stores without even having to submit and get approval of our own apps, whether Apple and Google like it or not.

App Review’s previous stated rationale for rejecting the Gab app was that the service didn’t do a good enough job of moderating the user-generated content. Gab claimed that they try their best to do this but that Apple’s requirements are impossible to meet. Clearly, Twitter and other social networks don’t always meet them, either. But Twitter is too-big-to-reject, and Gab has a reputation for offensive content, attracting a community of users that were banned or had their posts deleted from Twitter.

This new move is interesting because Mastodon is federated, and as far as I can tell, each sub-community has its own rules. Some of them are probably already less moderated than Gab was, yet they haven’t attracted similar attention, and so the various apps were in no danger of being banned.

I wonder how Apple and Google will respond. I could see them not caring, so long as accessing the Gab content requires typing in a server address. I could also see them requiring apps to actively block that address.

Previously:

@autoreleasepool Uses in 2019 Swift

Bruno Rocha:

To put it short, autoreleasepool is still useful in iOS/Swift development as there are still legacy Obj-C classes in UIKit and Foundation that call autorelease, but you likely don’t need to worry about it when dealing with Swift classes due to ARC’s optimizations.

Presumably, pure Swift objects can also be autoreleased when manipulated by Objective-C code. I still find autoreleasepool to be useful, both to reduce peak memory use and to ensure that resources associated with objects will be cleaned up at a particular time.

One pain point has been that XCTestCase doesn’t seem to use pools around its setUp() and tearDown() methods. This led to log messages from Core Data complaining that the SQLite database had been deleted out from under it when the test was over. An autoreleased controller had been retaining the persistent store coordinator.

I ended up making a subclass of XCTestCase with its own lifecycle methods that run inside autorelease pools and are allowed to throw errors.

Thursday, May 30, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

App Store Competition

Mark Gurman (tweet, 9to5Mac):

Apple Inc.’s former head of App Store approvals said he’s worried about competition between the company and developers, and even recalled board member Al Gore asking about a controversial app approval.

Phillip Shoemaker, who ran app reviews from 2009 to 2016, made the comments in the latest episode of Bloomberg’s Decrypted podcast ahead of Apple’s annual developers conference in early June.

It’s worth listening to the episode.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Apple was always “embarrassed” about the numbers of developers supporting watchOS? It’s 👏 because 👏 nobody 👏 wants 👏 to 👏 build 👏 apps 👏 with 👏 WatchKit! And by far the biggest potential Apple Watch software market is always going to be custom watch faces

James Vincent (Hacker News):

In the interview, Shoemaker says that Apple has long feared that rival apps from companies like Google and Facebook would replace core iOS features like calling and messaging. He notes that this fear is “absolutely the reason” that the company still doesn’t let users set third-party apps as the default service for these primary functions.

“That was a real thing. I mean the fear that somebody would come along, a Facebook, a Google, whomever and wipe off and remove all of our items,” says Shoemaker.

Apple:

A store that welcomes competition.

We believe competition makes everything better and results in the best apps for our customers.

[…]

Here’s a look at a variety of categories we’re competing in, and who we’re competing with, on our App Store.

Benoit Letondor:

I’ve seen a lot of BS from tech companies, but @Apple branding it’s @AppStore “A store that welcomes competition” is by far the biggest bullshit I’ve seen in years!

Nilay Patel:

Apple: Look at how competitive and open the App Store is!

Also Apple: Here is an infographic of apps that are forced to compete with us on an uneven playing field

I think it is extremely important for everyone to look at Apple’s proffered evidence of competition for FaceTime and then let loose a hearty chuckle of despair

Jason Snell:

Among the things on the page that made me raise an eyebrow is the segment about how Apple allows competition to Safari in web browsers. That’s only technically true, since different web rendering engines are barred from iOS.

Apple’s apps also get to use private APIs and daemons, have greater access to public APIs, act as default apps, and have privileged access to the lock screen, Control Center, and Siri. They’re also not subject to App Review limbo, the normal rules for push notifications and subscriptions, or the App Store tax.

Damien Petrilli:

That’s the thing, with a 30% tax, you can build anything. And what is messed up is that it scales.

So if your App is very successful, it doesn’t even protect you because Apple is getting more money from it to build a competitor.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I actually like App Review, & the review process 👀 But I do think there needs to be external, independent oversight, because the App Store is too important to society for any one person to be the sole arbitrator

Apple:

The five pillars of the guidelines — Safety, Performance, Business, Design, and Legal — require that apps offered on the App Store are safe, provide a good user experience, adhere to our rules on user privacy, secure devices from malware and threats, and use approved business models.

Jeff Johnson:

Five months ago I wrote about a scammer named “Emanuele Floris” who has an absurdly large number of apps in both the iOS and Mac App Store. At the suggestion of someone who works for the App Store, I also reported this scammer to Apple’s App Review via email. And I reported the scammer to Apple Product Feedback. As of this writing of this blog post, this scammer’s apps are all still in the iOS and Mac App Store. No action has been taken by Apple.

Recently I found another enormous scam in the Mac App Store. As a Mac developer, I’m primarily concerned with the Mac side. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that scams are primarily a Mac App Store problem, though. As I said, Emanuele Floris has a large number of apps in the iOS App Store. If you want to read more about scams in the iOS App Store, take a look at Apps Exposed.

[…]

I want the App Store to be safe. I want the App Store to be a good experience. I sell my own apps in the App Store, and I hate that shoppers get scammed, I hate that legitimate developers have to compete against scammers. I hate that Apple sometimes even features scammers in the App Store.

Rory Prior:

The idea that the App Store is a ‘safe and trusted’ place is also problematic. We know full well that scam apps get on to the store all the time, the veneer of ‘it’s safe because it’s Apple’ actually puts users at more risk than if they treated everything with suspicion.

Apple:

84% of apps are free, and developers pay nothing to Apple.

John Gruber (tweet):

Any developer distributing an app through the App Store, free or paid, must pay Apple $99 per year for a developer account. You can build apps using Xcode free of charge, but you need a paid developer account to distribute them through the App Store.

This was never the case with the Mac, until the notarization requirement.

Rui Carmo:

The $99 developer tax is the sole reason I only developed mobile apps for Android even though I use Apple devices first and foremost–not because I can’t afford it, but because I find a lot of it purely insulting (the limitations in sideloads, the hassle of having to rebuild your personal apps periodically, and, of course, the “added value” of the largely inhospitable developer documentation).

[…]

Honestly, I don’t think the fee is even a good deterrent against junk apps, since the App Store is already full of them and the app review process (which is a legend unto itself) seems wide off the mark there.

Michael Love:

It’s a sign of the cutthroat / disorganized nature of the Android indie developer community that we haven’t all gotten together by now and started our own open-source App Store with 5% commissions and offered it to OEMs for free.

Previously:

Update (2019-05-31): Jim Dalrymple (in 2012):

Farouk told The Loop that Apple rejected an update to the app this week claiming that showing the “iTunes ‘now playing’ or track changes is a misuse of Notification Center.”

[…]

Here’s the funny thing. The app was already approved and in the Mac App Store for some time with the notification functionality working perfectly. Apple rejected the app when Farouk submitted an update adding a preference to remove the menu bar icon. No changes were made to the notification functionality in the update, according to Farouk.

Soon after that, Apple released an update for iTunes itself to post track changes to Notification Center.

Another example of this type of behavior is Apple rejecting a camera app for using the hardware volume button to control the shutter, a feature which it built into the iOS Camera app just months later.

Sash Zats:

Let’s take iMessage for example. Shipped with OS, has in-app AppStore UI (Messenger was rejected for putting games into groups, cause it resembles AppStore too much), conveniently entangled with SMS: oh you can’t send it as iMessage? Let’s send it SMS!

Chaim Gartenberg (via Nilay Patel):

But Apple’s defense is full of holes. Yes, Apple has its guidelines for the App Store and a review process, but after a decade, it’s clear that the company doesn’t consistently enforce them or often chooses to enforce them when it profits Apple. Even for the apps that are allowed on the store, developers still have to fight an uphill battle against Apple’s own services.

[…]

Meanwhile, Apple still allows plenty of MDM apps on the App Store, like the business-focused Jamf Now or any number of MDM solutions available on an academic level for managing iOS devices for students. Why does Apple allow employers to leave their customers data vulnerable or schools to put their students’ data at risk, but not allow parents to make similar decisions with devices they’ve purchased for their kids?

See also: Paul Thurrott.

Update (2019-06-03): Paulo Andrade:

Listening to the Shoemaker interview about app review process I can’t help but notice his main concern was about whether approving an app would make the “stock price go down”…

Kyle Howells:

All these articles about AppStore competition and nobody manages that Apple had an AppStore rule not to compete with(duplicate) built in OS features (which they used against Google Voice years ago).

Which makes that section on their website pretty funny.

Tuesday, May 28, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Apple Expected to Remove 3D Touch

Joe Rossignol:

Last week, in a research note shared with MacRumors, a team of Barclays analysts “confirmed” that 3D Touch “will be eliminated” in all 2019 iPhones, as they predicted back in August 2018. The analysts gathered this information from Apple suppliers following a trip to Asia earlier this month.

[…]

Apple already replaced 3D Touch with Haptic Touch on the iPhone XR in order to achieve a nearly edge-to-edge LCD on the device, and it is likely the feature will be expanded to all 2019 iPhones. Haptic Touch is simply a marketing name for a long press combined with haptic feedback from the Taptic Engine.

Haptic Touch works well, but it isn’t a replacement for 3D Touch because it’s just about feedback, not input. 3D Touch had the potential to be like modifier keys on the Mac, a way to provide an additional “dimension” of input. iOS really needs something like that. I’m not sure why Apple never really did much with it, but the potential was wasted. Given that, and the fact that it never made it across the iPhone product line or to any iPads, I can certainly see why they would get rid of it and doubt most people will miss it (or even knew about it in the first place).

Kyle Howells:

3D Touch should have replaced/been the same as long press in almost all situations. It eliminates wait times and makes everything faster.

Instead Apple confused everything by having 3 different things happen depending on how you tap an app icon.

Neil Sardesai:

Man that’s a shame. Especially on iPad where long press is a super overloaded gesture, 3D Touch would really alleviate that

Russell Ivanovic:

Unpopular opinion I suspect, but 3D touch is one of the worst usability mistakes Apple ever made (IMHO). Difficult gesture that in places like the home screen conflicts with other gestures. I shouldn’t have to be the Lionel Messi of fingers to rearrange my icons 😂

Nick Lockwood:

Damn. 😔 3D touch is great, especially for games - there’s nothing wrong with the tech itself, only the dreadful way Apple chose to integrate it into the UI.

If it had just been introduced as a universal contextual menu shortcut it could’ve been so powerful.

Steven Aquino:

What concerns me is the Touch Bar (and 3D Touch, another thing I like) kind of exist in the netherworld. Limited in availability and largely unrefined.

Previously:

Update (2019-05-30): Vatsal Manot:

Simply put - it failed to become an idiomatic element of the iPhone’s UX language.

[…]

Haptic Touch over 3D Touch is clearly a degraded user experience. Do not let anyone trick you into believing otherwise, Apple most of all.

[…]

As a developer, Apple has not made it easy for me to implement a 3D Touch action. Instead of creating a canonical UIGestureRecognizer sublcass for 3D Touch (as they so easily could have), they decided to leave it up to the developer to implement.

John Gruber:

3D Touch is a great idea but Apple never rolled it out well, and it was never discoverable.

[…]

I think it should have always been a shortcut for a long-press, pure and simple. Just a faster way to long-press. But because 3D Touch is not just a shortcut for a long-press, but is not available on any iPad nor many iPhones, developers could never count on it, so they never really did anything with it. It doesn’t get used much because there’s not much you can do with it.

Kyle Howells:

Either way without universal support across all iOS devices Apple’s never been able to rely on 3D Touch being there.

This means either they use long press to reveal the same action (as with control centre), or the feature just isn’t available (home screen 3D touch widgets on iPad).

Lily Ballard:

I really hope the rumors are wrong and 3D Touch isn’t going away. Apple hasn’t done enough with 3D Touch but what they have done is irreplaceable. For example, you can peek at Today widgets from Springboard with it! I miss being able to do that on my iPad.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Should iOS have any pro features if users aren’t going to find them? …should macOS have any pro features if users aren’t going to find them? 🧐

Nick Heer:

I would prefer to see improvements to 3D Touch; but, because it hasn’t changed much or been more thoroughly applied in the nearly four years since it was introduced, I think the digital scrap heap is probably best. This rumour, of course, leads to the question of what to do with its dependencies on the iPhone. The biggest question, for me, is what happens to notifications: since they were adjusted in iOS 10 to make use of 3D Touch, they’ve never felt at home on non-3D Touch devices.

Update (2019-05-31): A. Lee Bennett Jr.:

Man that would suck. I agree with many that it isn’t well implemented, but I do use it frequently. I hate that FB actually chose to drop support. I used it to quickly post a photo via 3D Touch on the app icon. And I use it to edit the latest photo with Instaflash ALL the time.

Wojtek Pietrusiewicz:

Can’t imagine going back to a world without 3D Touch. I use it multiple times a day and continue to miss it on the iPad. A long press is not a good substitution.

iPod touch 7th Generation

Joe Rossignol:

Apple today announced a new iPod touch with headline features being a faster A10 Fusion chip and a new 256GB storage option.

That’s the same processor as the iPhone 7, up from the iPhone 6–era A8. It has the same 4-inch screen size as the iPhone SE, but with just 3/4 the weight and a worse camera and less comfortable shape. Unless you really want the small size, I think most people would prefer a used iPhone SE or iPhone 7, which would likely also be cheaper.

Rob Griffiths:

Of course, to find it on Apple’s site, you need to know that an iPod touch is categorized as Music.

Even on the day of its release it doesn’t get a spot on Apple’s homepage.

Michael Love:

Actually this is very good news for iPhone SE fans, because if they’re launching a brand new 4-inch device now - which is therefore going to have to be supported by iOS until at least 2022 or 2023 - it seems like 4-inch screens aren’t going anywhere.

Also, the article’s theory that Apple is about the drop the A8 - and therefore the iPhone 6/6+ along with the 5s - makes sense; those are the last devices left with only 1 GB of RAM, not to mention that the A9 was a huge performance leap over the A7/A8.

So as of this summer, the new baseline is going to be an A9 and 2 GB of RAM. Which means that the oldest supported iOS device will have about the same CPU performance that the 2018 Android flagships did.

Manton Reece:

It’s best to think of the iPod Touch as a very small, $199 iPad. I think the value for that price is better than any other Apple product. Good to see it updated.

John Gruber:

In the early years, I think a lot of iPod Touches were sold for use by kids. But today, most kids use hand-me-down iPhones. I think a lot of new iPods Touch are sold for enterprise purposes — warehouse scanning, point-of-sale, that sort of thing.

Update (2019-05-30): Kirk McElhearn:

The iPod touch is still a great device if you have a large music library, and it’s perfect for a kid who wants to play games on a small device yet not have cellular access. Or let a kid use it to take photos; while it’s not the best camera in an Apple device, and it’s only 8 Mp, it’s still a great way for kids to get into photography.

[…]

It’s widely used in industry, in warehouses, as point of sale devices, and in health care. Even Apple’s retail stores uses iPod touch devices (at least in the UK).

Tambourine Man:

A celular chip can’t possibly cost much these days. Slap one in and you’ve got a US$ 200 iPhone that would sell like hot cakes. Make a larger version and rule the world.

Monday, May 27, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Wish for a Return of Vibrant Tapdown States

John Gruber:

I don’t know why, but one of those things has been bugging me a lot in recent months: the drab gray color that indicates tapdown state for list items and buttons. Putting aside skeuomorphic textures like woodgrain and leather and the 3D-vs.-flat debate, the utter drabness of tapdown states is just a bad idea. I didn’t like it when iOS 7 debuted, and I like it even less 6 years later.

In classic iOS, when you tapped down on list items or buttons, they’d instantly light up in vibrant color. The standard color was a bright cheerful blue. In iOS 7 through 12, the tapdown state is the color of dirty dishwater.

Steven Aquino:

John talks about delight being sapped from iOS post-iOS 7, which is true in many ways. But the tap down state he calls out here is an accessibility issue too. iOS 6 blue was better—more visually concrete and contrasting.

Andy Lee:

Related: a key principle of graphical user interfaces is the notion of direct manipulation, which necessarily means clear and immediate visual feedback. More than once I’ve seen Apple fail in this respect.

Ryan:

Skeuomorphism was a visual device used to train users on how to use phones when we transitioned from the physical form to digital. It was a solution of the time and that’s all.

Kyle Howells:

I see this point of view a lot. That skeuomorphism was a crutch we as society needed but have now outgrown.

I think this sort of thinking is incredibly misguided and damaging.

Dan Masters:

Some joyful Apple software highlights

Benjamin Mayo:

The standard set by iOS 7-12 is much more drab, almost clinical. It’s a flat, nondescript, grey that seems like it was chosen specifically because it would not draw the eye. The grey is close enough to white that anything white would not have sufficient contrast, so the illumination effect is also no longer present. Cell content no longer reacts in tandem. The whole interaction is a lot more lifeless. Rather than the UI egging the user on to complete the tap action, today’s iOS drearily yawns and says “okay, if you must”.

This is just one of the laundry list of things that people railed against in 2013. Criticism died down as people acquiesced to what was given to them. Many critics, myself included, accepted the iOS 7 design as a rush job and thought that Apple would obviously catch their breath and ‘fix it’ over the next couple of OS versions. I don’t think anyone at the time expected us to still be stuck with these missteps six years later.

Previously:

Gatekeeper Symlink/Automount Bypass

Filippo Cavallarin (Hacker News):

To better understand how this exploit works, let’s consider the following scenario: An attacker crafts a zip file containing a symbolic link to an automount endpoint she/he controls (ex Documents -> /net/evil.com/Documents) and sends it to the victim. The victim downloads the malicious archive, extracts it and follows the symlink.

Now the victim is in a location controlled by the attacker but trusted by Gatekeeper, so any attacker-controlled executable can be run without any warning. The way Finder is designed (ex hide .app extensions, hide full path from titlebar) makes this tecnique very effective and hard to spot.

[…]

The vendor has been contacted on February 22th 2019 and it’s aware of this issue. This issue was supposed to be addressed, according to the vendor, on May 15th 2019 but Apple started dropping my emails. Since Apple is aware of my 90 days disclosure deadline, I make this information public.

Howard Oakley:

These checks are in any case only performed when an app is run via LaunchServices, i.e. the Finder. So a user shouldn’t be able to run an app with a broken signature from a new location using the Finder, but they can run an app with no signature at all, and any malicious script or process can execute code from an app with a broken signature without any signature checks being performed, unless it’s kind enough to ask for them.

Previously:

Movist Removed From the Mac App Store

Movist (via Leo):

This is because Apple has refused to update the app, and they have also removed from the App Store the already accepted version.

What Apple pointed out was that Movist has a feature of “downloading 3rd party media”. So we removed the Safari Extension to allow YouTube videos to be played in Movist and removed the feature from Movist too. But Apple still refused to update because Movist has that feature yet. After all, we had no choice but to remove all streaming functionality from Movist.

Apple:

5.2.3 Audio/Video Downloading: Apps should not facilitate illegal file sharing or include the ability to save, convert, or download media from third party sources (e.g. Apple Music, YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, etc.) without explicit authorization from those sources. Streaming of audio/video content may also violate Terms of Use, so be sure to check before your app accesses those services. Documentation must be provided upon request.

It doesn’t look like the app is intended for saving media. I don’t see what would be objectionable about streaming—any app with a Web view can already do that.

Previously: IINA 1.0.

Apple Developer Survey

Felix Krause:

If you get the email, this is your chance to give feedback about:

- Binary processing time
- Code signing
- Lack of API endpoints
- Inconsistent rejection reasons
- Managing app metadata and screenshots
- TestFlight review times

Tyler Hall:

Also, in general, the Mac App Store is a kafkaesque hellscape full of scam artists that erode customers’ trust in the overall system and shitty apps that are nowhere near the level of quality that long-time Mac users expect from 3rd party software.

Add to that the arbitrariness of App Review, which seems more interested in penalizing legitimate developers for the most insignificant of reasons, while big name companies get away with flaunting the rules, and fly-by-night developers actively ship malicious, misleading, predatory, and outright-broken software.

Previously: Apple Pulling High-Grossing Scammy Subscription Apps Off the App Store

Friday, May 24, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Why Does Windows Use Backslash As the Path Separator?

Michal Necasek (via Hacker News):

Microsoft reportedly wanted to use the forward slash as path separator, but IBM nixed the idea because it would have created an incompatibility with DOS 1.x, which already used the forward slash as a switch character, separating command options.

[…]

Changing the slash semantics had a clear potential for destroying data, especially when running batch files written for DOS 1.1. Something like ‘COPY FOO + BAR /A’ has rather different semantics when /A is a switch vs. when /A is a file or directory in the disk’s root directory.

[…]

There have Microsoft’s own word that the forward slash came not from CP/M, not from IBM, but from DEC, and there’s an explicit mention of TOPS-10.

How Effective Is Basic Account Hygiene at Preventing Hijacking?

Google (via Kevin Beaumont):

We found that an SMS code sent to a recovery phone number helped block 100% of automated bots, 96% of bulk phishing attacks, and 76% of targeted attacks. On-device prompts, a more secure replacement for SMS, helped prevent 100% of automated bots, 99% of bulk phishing attacks and 90% of targeted attacks.

[…]

Given the security benefits of challenges, one might ask why we don’t require them for all sign-ins. The answer is that challenges introduce additional friction and increase the risk of account lockout. In an experiment, 38% of users did not have access to their phone when challenged. Another 34% of users could not recall their secondary email address.

Facebook Sharing Data With Phone Carriers

Sam Biddle (via John Gruber):

Offered to select Facebook partners, the data includes not just technical information about Facebook members’ devices and use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, but also their past locations, interests, and even their social groups. This data is sourced not just from the company’s main iOS and Android apps, but from Instagram and Messenger as well. The data has been used by Facebook partners to assess their standing against competitors, including customers lost to and won from them, but also for more controversial uses like racially targeted ads.

[…]

The source, who discussed Actionable Insights on the condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak to the press, explained that Facebook has offered the service to carriers and phone makers ostensibly of free charge, with access to Actionable Insights granted as a sweetener for advertising relationships. According to the source, the underlying value of granting such gratis access to Actionable Insights in these cases isn’t simply to help better service cell customers with weak signals, but also to ensure that telecoms and phone makers keep buying more and more carefully targeted Facebook ads. It’s exactly this sort of quasi-transactional data access that’s become a hallmark of Facebook’s business, allowing the company to plausibly deny that it ever sells your data while still leveraging it for revenue.

Previously: A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking.

Understanding Real-World Concurrency Bugs in Go

Tengfei Tu et al. (PDF via Susan Potter):

In this paper, we perform the first systematic study on concurrency bugs in real Go programs. We studied six popular Go software including Docker, Kubernetes, and gRPC. We analyzed 171 concurrency bugs in total, with more than half of them caused by non-traditional, Go-specific problems. Apart from root causes of these bugs, we also studied their fixes, performed experiments to reproduce them, and evaluated them with two publicly-available Go bug detectors. Overall, our study provides a better understanding on Go’s concurrency models and can guide future researchers and practitioners in writing better, more reliable Go software and in developing debugging and diagnosis tools for Go.

Thursday, May 23, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution For the Web

John Wilander:

The combination of third-party web tracking and ad campaign measurement has led many to conflate web privacy with a web free of advertisements. We think that’s a misunderstanding. Online ads and measurement of their effectiveness do not require Site A, where you clicked an ad, to learn that you purchased something on Site B. The only data needed for measurement is that someone who clicked an ad on Site A made a purchase on Site B.

Today we are presenting a new technology to allow attribution of ad clicks on the web while preserving user privacy.

[…]

The browser should act on behalf of the user and do its best to preserve privacy while reporting on ad click attribution. We achieve this by:

  • Sending attribution reports in a dedicated Private Browsing Mode even though the user is in regular browsing mode.
  • Disallowing data like cookies for reporting purposes.
  • Delaying reports randomly between 24 and 48 hours.
  • Not supporting Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution at all when the user is in Private Browsing Mode.

[…]

Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution is in the early stage of being proposed as a standard through the W3C Web Platform Incubator Community Group (WICG). Please join the discussion and file issues to discuss how this technology fits with your use cases.

See also: John Gruber.

Previously:

Update (2019-05-27): See also: Hacker News.

makomk:

Alternatively, once the ad fraudsters have decided to scam an advertiser using this system, their ad fraud programs make a series of POST requests to the same well-known location pretending to be copies of Safari that have seen conversions from this ad campaign. The only way to detect this fraud would be to match up actual orders with claimed conversions from a particular site, completely bypassing the intended privacy protections. (Which probably wouldn’t be that hard in some circumstances, but fraudsters would of course get to target the scenarios where matching up orders is hardest.)

Like, as far as I can tell, this completely fails to provide attribution data that advertisers can trust at all because it relies totally on the honesty of software installed on end-user devices. It will also fail to provide the stated privacy level in many situations, such as when the user keeps the same unique-ish IP address for several days. The only thing it seems to achieve is good PR for Apple, who will get a bunch of stories from credulous reporters about how they’re trying to improve user privacy and the evil adtech industry is thwarting them because it wants to know everything about you.

Playdate

Cabel Sasser:

After more than 20 years of making quality apps you love for Mac and iOS, Panic was ready to try something new…

…and that something was hardware.

Playdate (tweet, Hacker News, MacRumors):

It’s yellow. It fits in your pocket. It’s got a beautiful black and white screen. It’s not super cheap, but not super expensive. It includes brand new games from some amazing creators. Plus it has a crank.

FAQ:

Panic built every part of Playdate from scratch, starting with early board designs (using the hotplate in our kitchen to flow solder), our own Playdate OS, a full-featured SDK supporting C and Lua development, a Mac-based simulator and debugger, and more.

We then brought Playdate to one of our favorite companies on the planet — Teenage Engineering, the Stockholm-based creator of synthesizers and so much more — to begin a cross-company collaboration, designing and engineering Playdate’s look.

No, it’s not April 1st. They’re really building this. I don’t play video games, but I’m so happy to see Playdate. I love the ambition to try something new of this difficulty and seeing the care and craft that’s gone into it. So often we think of technology at massive scale. It can be powerful and useful and even dangerous. But this is like a statement that it can also be a little product, not intended for everyone yet not elitist, that exists because some people wanted to have fun trying to brighten your day.

John Gruber (tweet):

In today’s world all the new computing devices and platforms come from huge companies. Apple of course. All the well-known Android handset makers building off an OS provided by Google. Sony. Nintendo.

Panic is almost cheating in a way because they’re tiny. The Playdate platform isn’t competing with the state of the art. It’s not a retro platform, per se, but while it has an obviously nostalgic charm it is competing only on its own terms. Its only goal is to be fun. And aspects of Playdate are utterly modern: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, apps and software updates delivered over-the-air.

Anil Dash (tweet):

You can read up on all the details elsewhere, but suffice to say, this little game machine looks like one of the most fun and joyful new efforts that any company has done recently, and that a tiny indie software company in Oregon has the ambition to even attempt such a thing makes it only more endearing.

[…]

I don’t know if Playdate will succeed in the market. I don’t know what kind of risk it represents for Panic as a company. But I know that people see this cute little device, and are reminded that they used to get excited when they saw cool new technology, instead of wondering how it would warp their reality, or steal their information. Here’s hoping for a return to tech that’s fun, that’s thoughtful, and that’s created with a little bit of soul.

Eli Schiff:

Almost no one realizes that @panic’s @playdate has @Kenichi Yoshida’s fingerprints all over its design. It wasn’t just Teenage Engineering @jugendingenieur.

Icon designers deserve more credit in this world.

Update (2019-05-24): Jesper:

What I love about it is a recently recurring theme that’s, amidst a polarized and increasingly de-humanized society, been easy to disregard: the glimmers of hope. A group of under a dozen people can still create a little thing like this, including its own damn OS, just because they love the feel of technology built by those who care.

There were a thousand reasons to not build it. There were a thousand reasons to run in the opposite direction, to give up, to completely cede the ground to consoles and touch and game streaming, to things that can be screen captured to Twitch.

Pádraig Kennedy:

My connection with Apple is largely thanks to Panic; back in 2003 their lovely polished apps are what made me want to make Mac software.

Playdate:

Playdate in 24 Hours:

• 70,000+ people on the wait list
• Thousands of interested devs
• Some skeptics (we understand)
• 23k Twitter followers (hi!)
• Most importantly… an overwhelming flood of positivity + excitement from people who also want this weird thing we want (!!!)

Update (2019-05-30): Brent Simmons:

On seeing Playdate, I realized the question we should ask ourselves is: are we working on our own Playdates? I don’t mean hardware necessarily — I mean the thing that seems very difficult, maybe even impossible, that may fail, but is the best expression of our talent and love.

Zhuowei Zhang:

Panic’s @PlayDate console prototype uses a STM32F7 CPU, running at 216MHz with up to 512 KB RAM.

Compared to Game Boy Advance, PlayDate has:

- 62x the CPU power (462 vs 7.65 DMIPS)
- 33% more RAM (512KB vs 384KB).

Linda Dong:

So delighted to have contributed a teeny piece to this enormous beautiful endeavor.

Nathalie Lawhead (via Joshua Nozzi):

Last year I was one of the organizers for Playdate. That year we received an email from Panic basically telling us we can’t use the name anymore because it would be a shame if our event got confused with what they are doing. It came off as incredibly self-important. It left me thinking “Wow, what a dick move.”

Cabel Sasser:

Our goal was to find a way for our two things to coexist. We didn’t want to force them to do anything. We do have a trademark, but only for “handheld game devices”, so we COULDNT make them change anything even if we wanted. It was just a worry about us overshadowing their work.

Update (2019-05-31): The Talk Show:

Special guests Cabel Sasser, Steven Frank, and Greg Maletic join the show to talk about Playdate, Panic’s exciting and surprising new handheld gaming system.

GitHub Sponsors

GitHub (tweet, Hacker News):

Funding developers through GitHub Sponsors is one more way to contribute to open source projects you appreciate. Help developers get the resources they need, and recognize contributors working behind the scenes to make open source better for everyone.

With Sponsors, any GitHub user can sponsor any open source developer in the program.

Owen Williams:

Yes, GitHub is swallowing the cost of those transactions entirely to give the creator as much of the money as possible. But, what’s even wilder is that it’s matching every dollar contributed in the first year, an outrageously bold commitment that’s only possible with the backing of a company like Microsoft.

[…]

Most importantly, this helps to change the open source narrative: you shouldn’t feel like you need to work for free, especially if companies are actually making money off of your work. Sponsorship right there on the page with the installation instructions helps pave the way for companies to actually fund the work they rely on, and that matters.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

I’m sure GitHub had all the right intentions here. And I’m sure this will work out well for a select few developers who will amass enough donations to ignore individual claims to their time. But I think it’s a grave risk to the culture of open source.

If your initial reaction was just “oh, OF COURSE donations are good. End of story!”, then I have a keynote for you to chew on.

Previously:

A New Core Playlist for VLC 4

VLC (Hacker News):

One major design goal is to expose what UI frameworks need. Several user interfaces, like Qt, Mac OS and Android, will use this API to display and interact with the main VLC playlist.

The playlist must be performant for common use cases and usable from multiple threads.

Indeed, in VLC, user interfaces are implemented as modules loaded dynamically. In general, there is exactly one user interface, but there may be none or (in theory) several. Thus, the playlist may not be bound to the event loop of some specific user interface. Moreover, the playlist may be modified from a player thread; for example, playing a zip archive will replace the item by its content automatically.

Wednesday, May 22, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Mac Toolbar Labels and Accessibility

James Riordon:

My Dad (90 yrs old) has developed cognitive issues, including the inability to reconcile symbols. He can’t use Apple Mail anymore as Mail compose window removed the ability to show text labels with buttons. Thanks @tim_cook Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 16

Rob Griffiths:

This continues a depressing trend—Safari hasn’t had text labels available on its buttons for many years now.

Apple may have done this to save vertical space, which is ironic, as using “text only”—when available—takes the least amount of space possible.

I prefer to see both the icons and the text. This is an option in NSToolbar, which the app can set and the user can configure. However, if the window uses NSWindowTitleHidden to hide the title (another accessibility problem) and put the toolbar in the title bar, the toolbar gets locked in icon-only mode.

At first, I thought this title-free design was intended for single-window apps, but Apple also uses it Safari and Xcode. And it’s been appearing in third-party apps like MarsEdit, OmniFocus, and ReadKit—a shame.

Update (2019-05-23): Daniel Jalkut:

Ideally Apple would fix this mode so that some kind of appropriate compromise could be made to support the streamlined title-bar-free mode, while also supporting the display of labels. I’m not holding my breath on that, though. Hopefully this workaround [for MarsEdit] will give those of you who either prefer, or outright depend upon the labels for accessibility reasons, something to tide you over.

Peter Saathoff-Harshfield:

I often find that VoiceOver is the only way to discover what a button with an inscrutable icon does.

Also, these windows with no distinct title bar leave little space for me to click and drag the window, so I’m zooming way in to find a tiny grab spot.

Brent Simmons:

There’s a hugely important aspect to this: developers follow Apple’s lead when it comes to app design. I’m trying to find Apple apps that allow for buttons and titles, and all I’ve found so far is Mail and the iWork apps. (The iWork apps are document-based, which means their windows need titles.)

The most obvious example is Finder, which allows button labels and is not document-based. Automator, Preview, and Script Editor do, too, and are document-based. Then again, Xcode supports multiple windows, and is document-based, yet it doesn’t allow window titles or button labels. I think this style is basically the new brushed metal—used haphazardly by Apple and therefore by third-party developers as well.

OmniFocus is not document-based, but it supports multiple named windows. It puts the titles in giant text below the title bar, so it actually leaves less room for the content than in the previous version that did allow toolbar labels. However, the colored text can help show where you are, and it is visually consistent with the iOS app.

In fact, lots of Apple apps — and third-party apps — don’t even have configurable toolbars at all. This is a shame. At least with Safari — and the apps Michael mentions, and NetNewsWire — you can rearrange items to your liking, and choose the items you want to see.

Simmons’ NetNewsWire is an app that doesn’t use a window title, but it does have a hidden preference to change that, and then you can enable the toolbar labels.

John Gruber:

I think it’s a real accessibility issue, and another instance of something that looks better but, for at least some people, works worse. I also think the problem is exacerbated by the current style where icons are just simple one-color hairline outlines objects, not colorful illustrations of actual objects.

Update (2019-05-24): macOS Human Interface Guidelines:

A title bar should be visible, but can be hidden in an immersive app like a game.

Provide a title unless there’s enough context that one is unnecessary.

[…]

Provide a short, descriptive label for every toolbar item. Users see these labels when they configure the toolbar to show icons and text, or text only.

That seems to be the extent of Apple’s guidance.

Qualcomm Loses U.S. Antitrust Ruling

Ian King and Kartikay Mehrotra (Hacker News, MacRumors):

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh sided with the Federal Trade Commission in a case brought in 2017 accusing the company of anti-competitive practices.

[…]

“Qualcomm’s licensing practices have strangled competition” in certain modem chip markets “for years, and harmed rivals, OEMs and end consumers in the process,” the judge wrote. She also found that Qualcomm’s key role in manufacturing modem chips for smartphones using 5G made it likely that its behavior would continue.

Neil Cybart:

Qualcomm must negotiate or renegotiate licensing agreements, license patents to rival chip makers at fair and reasonable prices, be monitored for 7 years.

Florian Mueller:

What was an even greater failure for Qualcomm was the extreme degree to which its senior executives’ testimony contradicted their own handwritten notes, emails, and presentation slides, including but not limited to the question of whether Qualcomm explicitly threatened device makers with a disruption of chipset supplies unless they agreed to certain patent licensing terms. As a result, “the Court largely discounts Qualcomm’s trial testimony prepared specifically for this litigation and instead relies on these witnesses’ own contemporaneous emails, handwritten notes, and recorded statements to the IRS.”

[…]

Later, Apple had to agree to total exclusivity, where any shipment of a non-negligible quantity of devices with non-Qualcomm modem chips on board would have made them lose certain benefits going forward and entitled Qualcomm to a clawback, and that is the basis for one of the FTC’s monopolization claims.

Previously:

Some Users See More Twitter Ads

Kurt Wagner (via Cabel Sasser):

Some journalists first noticed and started tweeting about seeing more ads on Twitter earlier this week. Not all Twitter users have the same ad load, which means the experiment won’t affect everyone. Some people see more ads than others depending on a variety of factors, including how the number of ads influence their use of the platform. (Facebook and Instagram do something similar.) Three years ago, Twitter shut off ads for some of the network’s most prominent users as part of an effort to keep them engaged. Some users still have an ad-free Twitter.

As I recall, John Gruber has wondered why he doesn’t see any Twitter ads. I guess this clears up that mystery.

I still don’t understand why Twitter doesn’t do more with other revenue models. I think lots of people would pay for an ad-free experience or other extra features.

Update (2019-05-22): Brian:

I think @gruber was actually saying he didn’t see IG ads, not Twitter. But now he does so it’s moot

Intel vs. Qualcomm Cellular Modem Speed

Juli Clover:

In testing on LTE band 4 with good signal, there wasn’t a lot of difference in performance between the iPhone XS Max, the newer smartphones from Samsung and OnePlus, and the LG V40, which PCMag added in because it was 2018's best performing phone in terms of cellular speed.

All of the smartphones performed similarly, but the Samsung Galaxy S10 did see some of the slowest speeds, and at peak signal, the iPhone XS came in behind the OnePlus 7 Pro and the LG V40.

In a test with poorer LTE signal, the iPhone XS Max saw the slowest speeds and was outperformed by all of the Qualcomm chips. The iPhone XS Max was quite a bit slower than the Galaxy S10 and the OnePlus 7 Pro specifically.

Previously: Qualcomm and Apple Agree to Drop All Litigation.

Tuesday, May 21, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

MacBook Pro 2019

Apple (Hacker News, iMore, MacRumors, tweet, The Verge):

Apple updated MacBook Pro with faster 8th- and 9th-generation Intel Core processors, bringing eight cores to MacBook Pro for the first time. MacBook Pro now delivers two times faster performance than a quad-core MacBook Pro and 40 percent more performance than a 6-core MacBook Pro, making it the fastest Mac notebook ever.

Looks like a good speed bump. Longer term, I hope Apple will make the Touch Bar optional, make the trackpad smaller, make the display (optionally) larger, fix the arrow key layout, add more ports, add more thermal headroom, bring back matte displays, and stop charging ridiculous prices for SSDs.

Apple:

Apple has determined that a small percentage of the keyboards in certain MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models may exhibit one or more of the following behaviors[…]

[…]

The program covers eligible MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models for 4 years after the first retail sale of the unit.

The repair program now covers the 2018 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, and even the just-released 2019 MacBook Pro. Some are saying that this shows Apple doesn’t have confidence in the revised keyboard. However, regardless, I think it’s great to know before purchasing that this model will be covered. Previously, you could actually get longer coverage by buying an older model with known problems than a new one! I still think that the keyboard program should cover a lot more than 4 years, though. A new pro Mac bought today should last a long time.

Jason Snell (tweet):

Apple says these new models also feature a fourth version of the butterfly keyboard design, in response to customer complaints that the keyboard would end up in a sad state where key presses were ignored or doubled. While Apple is quick to say that the vast majority of MacBook Pro customers haven’t experienced any keyboard issues, the company still keeps tweaking this design. It claims that the change made in these new MacBook Pro models will substantially reduce the incidence of ignored or doubled characters.

[…]

Where Apple’s laptop keyboard designs go from here is also a question. By extending its repair program and seeking to improve the turnaround of keyboard repairs in Apple Stores, the company is seeking to reassure customers that they won’t get stuck with a laptop with a bad keyboard. But the company also keeps tweaking the design in order to try and make it more reliable—an admirable attempt, but the sheer number of tweaks also send the message that Apple hasn’t really had a handle on the fundamental weaknesses of the design. Whether this new tweak is the one that finally solves the problem, or if it won’t be truly solved until this design is discontinued and fades into memory, remains to be seen.

Matthew Panzarino:

Apple is saying that it is doing 3 things about the MacBook keyboard situation. First, it is changing the mechanism.

Second, it is including all current butterfly keyboards in the new Keyboard Service Program

Third, it is improving repair times at stores and replacing 3rd gen membrane keyboards with the new keyboards.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

TL;DR: we didn’t totally fix the keyboard, the next-gen MBP isn’t ready yet, and we don’t plan to apologize

[…]

Apple still doesn’t mention anything about the keyboard changes nor does it list the keyboard revision on the MBP specs page. Clearly they want to starve this problem of oxygen and pretend it never happened.

Marco Arment:

Important clarification: the new 4th-gen design will be installed during repairs, but only for 3rd-gen-keyboard models: the 2018 Air and the 2018 13/15” with Touch Bar.

Colin Cornaby:

Getting harder and harder for me to justify holding on to my 2010 Mac Pro. But the risky thermals on the MacBook Pro, especially with 8 cores, are a problem. I’d also need to get an eGPU and the only ones that support Thunderbolt output are Blackmagic’s ridiculously priced ones.

There’s also the ongoing problem of putting a large amount of money into a machine where I can never upgrade the RAM or storage. $4000 is a lot for a machine that might run out of internal storage, and doesn’t change with my needs.

Morgan:

I love my 15” 2018 but sticking two more cores in the same body is just insanity. It is way too thermally constrained as it is.

Mark Munz:

My 7 y/o MacBook Pro has never had a keyboard problem EVER.

Now Apple has a keyboard service program that lasts 4 years. I guess I’m supposed to feel more confident. 🤷‍♂️

Would feel a lot better if they had announced a “new” scissor-switch designed keyboard.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I still don’t understand what is so hard about putting out a press release addressing the butterfly keyboard problem, explaining today’s half-fix, explaining repair & replacement program, & saying that a redesigned keyboard is in the works. Apple’s handling has been infuriating

By now, somebody needs to be fired for the handling of the keyboard situation, and the longer it takes, the higher up the management chain they should be looking. You don’t get to 5 years of ignoring it by accident. The reputation damage will last a decade, nevermind support cost

Today’s keyboard materials update could fix the problem in 99% of cases, but we won’t know from anecdata for years. And Apple’s not prepared to stand by in public what it’s telling press in private. If they don’t have confidence in the fix, why would anybody else?

Craig Hockenberry:

I have a 2013 MBP and my only criteria for upgrading is the keyboard. Size is secondary, and speed is a distant third.

In real estate, the things that matter are “location, location, and location.”

With keyboards, it’s “travel, travel, and travel.”

Mathias Meyer:

Good, now I can send in both my 2016 12" MacBook and my 2018 MacBook Air for repairs. Both have become unbearable to type on.

icabiz:

We repair these as part of our business, and to be clear, both the keyboards and the screens are failing on these at an alarming rate.

iFixit detailed the issues with the screens, which (in Apple’s unending quest for “thinness”) use a thinner flex cable to connect the display to the rest of the laptop. This thinner cable is prone to breakage, and we are already seeing 2016-2017 MacBook Pros in our shop regularly for this issue.

Since Apple built the flex cable into the display, the only solution (even from third parties like us) is a new display. At $600-$700 each, this is unacceptable.

And, like the keyboards, this is a part that’s pretty much guaranteed to fail (unless you basically never open your laptop.)

Apple hasn’t announced a fix yet, even with a petition with over 11,000 signatures, and more screens failing by the day.

Marco Arment:

SSDs are so cheap now that 512 GB should be standard on any Mac ending in “Pro”.

Greg Hurrell:

I’m not in the market or a new laptop, but every now and again I check up on the prices. Amazing how easy it is to spec up a MacBook Pro deep into “frickin’ ludicrous” territory.

For the same money you can get an absolutely monstrous machine from System76 to run Linux. Twice the RAM (64GB), more than twice the disk (10.5 TB!), an actual function keyboard…

Previously:

John Gruber (tweet):

Personally, I’d like to see them add more travel to the keys, go back to the upside-down T arrow key layout, and include a hardware Esc key on Touch Bar models (in that order).

[…]

The best that we could hope for while waiting for a true next-generation keyboard design — which for all we know might be a year or more out — is a mid-generation tweak. At the very least, talking about this material tweak and including all butterfly keyboard models in the service program is an acknowledgement that last year’s keyboards were not good enough. That was the worst case scenario — that Apple didn’t see a problem.

But what pleases me more is that Apple is updating Mac hardware on an aggressive schedule. I wrote “just speed bumps” a few paragraphs ago, but speed bumps are important in the pro market. Apple shipped new MacBook Pros last July, added new high-end graphics card options to those models in October, and now has updated the whole lineup with new CPUs. They also just updated the non-Pro iMac lineup in March. This seems like an odd thing to praise the company for — updating hardware with speed bumps is something a computer maker should just do, right? The lack of speed bumps in recent years naturally led some to conclude that Apple, institutionally, was losing interest in the Mac.

Nick Heer:

This year, however, Apple directly addressed keyboard reliability in their conversations with media. Even though they didn’t mention keyboards at all in their press release, I still see it as a noteworthy acknowledgement.

Benedict Cohen:

One more thing for the MacBook wish list: MagSafe

Steve Troughton-Smith:

OK, perhaps it’s just me; let’s do this one: Do you trust Apple’s ‘butterfly’ MacBook/Air/Pro keyboards (before or after today’s update)?

Paul Haddad:

The replacement program for keyboards is still limited to 4 years. Sucks if you bought a MacBook 12” when it first came out in April 2015…

Ellen Shapiro:

GAH, new 13” MBPs still don’t support 32 gigs of RAM.

I travel too much to really want the 15”, and I often run Xcode/Simulator + Android Studio/Emulator at the same time, so on a new laptop I’d be a lot happier with 32GB RAM.

Kyle Howells:

My 2015 15" MacBook Pro slows to a craw when I plug it into a 4K monitor, because of thermal throttling. I have to have a desk fan pointed directly at it at all times to cool it sufficiently to use.

The idea of putting an 8 core i9 into a thinner case design, makes me nervous.

Joanna Stern (tweet):

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Apple Inc. is promising to fix the MacBook keyboard issues. Yes, again.

Ed Bott:

The butterfly keyboard is Apple’s Windows Vista, a reputation-destroying slow-motion train wreck.

Keith Calder:

You know how people with MacBooks have been having keyboard problems where a random key gets stuck? That just happened to my "delete" key while I was in an important email folder, and all the emails were deleted. Fun times!

Colin Devroe:

As I wrote, I want to switch back to the Mac but only after they produce a laptop with an entirely new, reliable keyboard. I’ve seen the current keyboard in action and I think I would have pitched my laptop into the sea out of frustration if I had owned one.

Jason Cross:

To me, the biggest issue here is that it’s terrible reliability may be giving Apple a black eye, but it’s not like it’s good even when it works.

At best, people seem to think it’s just okay. At worst, they HATE it. This as a replacement for the most beloved laptop keyboard ever?

Marcin Krzyzanowski:

I had this crazy idea to get my Macbook for a keyboard repair to Apple Store while in Berlin. To benefit of fast-path announced yesterday

Observations:

1. Apple doesn’t recognize keyboard issue as a frequent issue
2. not a single slot for genius appointment for the upcoming week

Marco Scheurer:

And that ESC key... it is not just inconvenient when you use it but also when you don’t. I keep hitting hit by mistake.

Rui Carmo:

Living in a country that, to this day, still lacks an official Apple Store and where support centers (even if competent) don’t provide anywhere near the same turnaround times as in first world countries, I don’t find it the least bit reassuring.

Jacob Kastrenakes:

Apple will offer free repairs to owners of 2016 MacBook Pros with backlight issues — a problem that’s increasingly started to appear on the laptops as they age. The repair program, announced this afternoon, covers only the 13-inch MacBook Pro model that debuted in 2016, though both the Touch Bar and non-Touch Bar versions are eligible. Repairs will be covered for four years after a laptop was first purchased.

See also: Why are Creators Leaving the MACBOOK PRO ??.

Colin Cornaby:

It’s funny because the MacBook Pro has reached a point where I should seriously be considering not even using a desktop anymore. But the compromised thermals and lack of swappable memory/storage keep the MacBook Pro from really being a desktop replacement.

Update (2019-05-23): Juli Clover:

In a Geekbench benchmark uploaded this morning, the new MacBook Pro with a 2.4GHz Core i9 chip earned a single-core score of 5879 and a multi-core score of 29184.

Comparatively, the high-end 2018 MacBook Pro has earned an average single-core score of 5348 and a multi-core score of 22620. Single-core speeds are up almost 10 percent, while multi-core scores are up an impressive 29 percent.

However, it’s not clear how long the thermals will let it run at that speed.

Update (2019-05-24): Quinn Nelson:

Update: the new i9 MacBook Pro doesn’t throttle under even the most stressful benchmarks. It gets mighty close… but doesn’t ever dip under base clock. Good job, Apple!

iFixit (tweet):

Apple’s newest MacBook Pro is its fastest yet, featuring an optional eight-core processor—a first in a MacBook—and a mysterious new keyboard material. Since it’s unlikely that Apple’s going to expound on this ‘material,’ and we’re never satisfied with an unsolved mystery, it’s time once again to take a closer look at the infamous butterfly keyboard.

Dieter Bohn:

My take: when it comes to consumer trust in Apple’s butterfly keyboard design, different materials won’t make a material difference.

Update (2019-05-31): Dan Counsell:

I’ve just upgraded from a 2.5 GHz 4-core i7 15-inch Mid 2015 MacBook Pro to a top of the line 2.4GHz 8-core i9 2019 MacBook Pro with a Radeon Pro Vega 20 — Apart from the keyboard this is an excellent upgrade.

I ran some quick benchmarks and the results are an impressive increase on all fronts, especially the multi-core and compute scores. I also ran the same tests on my gaming PC that has an RTX 2080 Ti installed for comparison.

See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.

Microsoft Edge for Mac Preview

Microsoft (Hacker News):

Microsoft Edge for macOS will offer the same new browsing experience that we’re previewing on Windows, with user experience optimizations to make it feel at home on a Mac. We are tailoring the overall look and feel to match what macOS users expect from apps on this platform.

[…]

Examples of this include a number of tweaks to match macOS conventions for fonts, menus, keyboard shortcuts, title casing, and other areas. You will continue to see the look and feel of the browser evolve in future releases as we continue to experiment, iterate and listen to customer feedback. We encourage you to share your feedback with us using the “Send feedback” smiley.

John Gruber:

I’m glad they put quotes around “Mac-like” because this is not very Mac-like. It looks and feels a lot like Google Chrome, which makes sense, because it’s a fork from Chromium. But even Chrome uses the Mac’s standard contextual menus (what you see when you right-click) — Edge even fakes those.

The whole thing does feel very fast.

Marcin Krzyzanowski:

Isn’t it ridiculous that soon we’ll end up with Chrome, IE Edge, Firefox, Safari, where 3/4 uses the same engine and none of it is 100% compatible with any other? How did we manage to end in this ridiculous situation?

Wojtek Pietrusiewicz:

I don’t trust Google or Microsoft’s priorities (Google’s especially), and Chrome needs to lose some market share for our benefit. History has shown that a monopoly in the browser department doesn’t end well. Apple had the unique ability to challenge Google on competing desktop OSes and they forfeited that fight.

See also: Inside Microsoft’s surprise decision to work with Google on its Edge browser (tweet).

Previously:

Beyond the Tablet: Seven Years of iPad as My Main Computer

Federico Viticci (tweet):

My iPad journey began in 2012 when I was undergoing cancer treatments. In the first half of the year, right after my diagnosis, I was constantly moving between hospitals to talk to different doctors and understand the best strategies for my initial round of treatments. Those chemo treatments, it turned out, often made me too tired to get any work done. I wanted to continue working for MacStories because it was a healthy distraction that kept my brain busy, but my MacBook Air was uncomfortable to carry around and I couldn’t use it in my car as it lacked a cellular connection. By contrast, the iPad was light, it featured built-in 3G, and it allowed me to stay in touch with the MacStories team from anywhere, at any time with the comfort of a large, beautiful Retina display.

Today’s MacBook Air is easier to carry around than an iPad Pro with a keyboard, and it has an even larger Retina display. Inexplicably, Apple still hasn’t added a cellular option.

Today, the iPad Pro is my laptop, the iPhone is my pocket computer, and the Mac is the third device that's better at specific tasks.

[…]

At a fundamental level, after seven years of daily iPad usage, I believe in the idea of a computer that can transform into different form factors. The iPad is such a device: it gives me the freedom to use it as a tablet with 4G while getting some lightweight work done at the beach, but it becomes a laptop when paired with a keyboard, and it turns into a workstation when hooked up to an external display, a USB keyboard, and a good pair of headphones. For me, the iPad is the ultimate expression of the modern portable computer: a one-of-a-kind device that morphs and scales along with my habits, needs, and lifestyle choices.

It doesn’t seem like Mac hardware is on track to be able to do all the things iPads can do (cellular, transformable, pencil, fast displays), but neither does it seem like iPad software is on track to be as powerful and flexible as Mac software.

Previously:

Update (2019-05-31): Niko Kitsakis (tweet):

Ask yourself: if the iPad really was that good, wouldn’t that be a rather self-evident fact then? Would you need an article (or several dozen actually, published over the course of nine years) that tried to convince you of the merits of such a device? Or change perspective and ask yourself another question: did you ever need convincing about how the iPhone (or any other post-iPhone smartphone) has advantages “in the real world”? Of course not.

[…]

Now, compare that [Mac] timeline of roughly seven years with what has happened since the introduction of the original iPad in 2010 – nine years ago.

[…]

It would all be well if it wasn’t for the stupid and paternalistic movement inside Apple to align their different computing platforms in terms of functionality and user experience. That basically means overcomplicating iOS to the point (already reached) where features are not easily discoverable anymore and, at the same time, dumbing things down on the Mac to a point (almost reached) where they become barely usable. The main motivation for doing this seems to come from the misguided notion that the iPad is somehow the sole future of computing.

Previously: Disk Utility in El Capitan.

Kitsakis makes a lot of good points, which unfortunately have been overshadowed by a controversy about whether one of his footnotes was accusing Viticci and other pro-iPad writers of being paid shills. Of course, I don’t believe that to be the case. All writers, even those not supported by advertising, have personal biases as well as conflicts of interest (e.g. access). It’s best to focus on the arguments in the writing itself.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

It’s always funny how upset certain computer users get when they see people enjoying something they don’t understand. Without a hint of self-realization, these Mac users look down on iPad users the exact same way Windows users did to them and the Mac back in the 90s. ‘Just a toy’

It also seems like certain iPad users look down on Mac users as being stuck in the past, like DOS fans in the 90s. Why can’t we all just get along?

It shouldn’t be hard to understand that the people who are super-enthusiastic about iPad are so because they genuinely feel it’s the best computer they’ve ever used, despite not doing everything a Mac does. There’s no agenda, no conspiracy. They’ve just moved on

Stefan Constantine:

this is such an astoundingly well written opinion piece on the iPad and the Mac and where they stand in relation to each other

(spoiler: the iPad is cool, but it’s not the future)

Dan Masters:

iPad’s future is looking much brighter than the Mac because Apple is purposefully and artificially eroding it to become just another iOS device – a less powerful, touchscreen-less one, at that.

They’re draining it of life before its time, and then hooking it up to life support.

 Observer:

One of the great post I read in a while regarding the iPad, Apple and... fanatism. From an iPad lover myself.

Matt Birchler:

This is a well-written post, but I would add that this sort of post is precisely why iPad fans feel compelled to remind folks that they do valuable work for them.

Steve Lubitz:

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, it can be true that there are iPad enthusiasts for whom the device fits nearly perfectly into their workflow, and also that, for a lot of people, that paradigm just doesn’t work.

I think a lot of the friction comes from the implication from the iPadosphere that an iPad as a primary device is The Way of The Future, when to the rest of us that just sounds like the year of Linux on the desktop.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Funny when people laugh at the idea of ‘Post-PC’ whilst also decrying ‘dumbing down’ of macOS in favor of iOS concepts. The desktop computer no longer being the center of the computing world is what Post-PC is. It’s not some PC-less scifi fantasy 😂 This is what it looks like

Kyle Howells:

The problem is in your tweet though ‘dumbing down’ of Macs. iOS can get away with being so limited and restricted because the Mac exists to actually get work done on.

Apple’s locking down the Mac without opening up iOS.

But my requirements haven’t ‘dumbed down’ and still aren’t possible on iOS.

Jeff Johnson:

IMO the @nubero article makes a nice distinction between iPad as in the future of computing vs iPad as the sole future of computing.

Mac lovers have no problem with the existence of the iPad. As long as it’s coexistence.

The problem with iPad rhetoric is eliminativism.

[…]

Mac, iPad, and iPhone can all happily coexist and thrive together. There’s no inherent reason why this can’t happen. It’s really the best of all possible worlds.

“The future of computing” is a terrible notion. There ought to be many futures of computing.

Ben Szymanski:

If you’re hoping to convert me from the #Mac to the #iPad, you’re too late as I already have a #Surface. It can actually do things. You don’t care, I know I know, but #seeyanever!

Update (2019-06-03): Jim Rea:

Based on the replies this blog post has really touched a nerve, both pro and con. Mark me down in the “pro” column, I couldn’t have said this better myself. I’ve got nothing against the iPad, I’m writing this on one, but I don’t think it’s my future primary device unless I retire.

Kyle Howells:

I’d be less upset if the Post-PC era was actually more capable than the PC.

Instead it turned out everyone decided we were ‘post-PC’ and wanted to deprecate the PC to achieve it, instead of actually improving the post-PC devices enough to kill the PC naturally.

WWDC 2019 Preview

Becky Hansmeyer:

WWDC is now just two weeks away, so I thought I’d share what I’m hoping for in the way of developer tools/APIs.

Nick Heer:

For old time’s sake, I wanted to put together one of those part-retrospective part-speculative pieces where I point out some of the new things I’d like to see this year. Maybe some of these things will be introduced, and that would be cool; I wouldn’t bet on too much of this list, though. These are just a few things that have been swirling in my head.

Damien Petrilli:

My WWDC 2019 wishlist:

- fix the documentation

Previously:

Update (2019-05-23): Jason Snell:

Here’s what I’m hoping to see in iOS 13 when Apple unveils it on Monday, June 3.

Update (2019-05-24): Jordan Morgan:

At this point it’s all conjecture, so let’s ready up with the fifth annual Swiftjective-C WWDC Pregame Quiz!

Update (2019-05-27): Steve Troughton-Smith:

It seems crazy that in 2019 you are still unable to track raw keyboard events on iOS – there is no way, barring using a private API, for an app to allow you to hold down physical keys as input (like WASD keys for a game), or as modifier keys (like holding Shift while resizing something in an app like Photoshop to maintain aspect ratio).

[…]

MFi might be gone with the USB-C iPad Pros, but developers need public APIs to write user mode drivers for anything you wish to plug in to your iPad. I want to be able to plug in my various EyeTV tuners and have the EyeTV app happily init them like it does on the Mac.

[…]

What I really want to see is a textual interface to Shortcuts that lets you do all the same things without having to navigate and fiddle with a UI filled with actions, so that the class of advanced user who prefers writing scripts can do the things they need.

[…]

We’ve come a long way from the fear that enabling third-party apps on iPhone will bring down the cell networks; trying to actively build the future on iOS today is like having your hands tied behind your back. iOS has for too long relied on the fact that the Mac exists as a fallback to perform all the tasks that Apple isn’t ready to rethink for its modern platforms, but that doesn’t mean these problems aren’t relevant or worth solving.

Tyler Hall:

With WWDC fast approaching, it’s the time of year when everyone posts their hopes and dreams and predictions for Apple’s upcoming software release. There’s tons of great ideas out there, and I certainly have my own feature requests both as a developer and as a consumer, but I just want to write today about one that is especially irksome during this (US) holiday weekend.

Marketing push notifications.

Previously: Push Notifications to Send Promotions.

Jason Snell:

My gut feeling is that Apple doesn’t need to start two major transitions for the Mac simultaneously, which is why it’s more likely that the ARM transition will happen at next year’s WWDC than this year’s.

See also: Rene Ritchie.

Update (2019-05-28): Stuart Breckenridge:

Below is my work in progress list of features I’d like to see.

Update (2019-05-30): Ryan Jones:

My latest iOS 13 wishlist.

Under the Radar:

What we hope to see at WWDC 2019 in Apple’s APIs and developer tools.

Dave DeLong:

There are very few things I want from #WWDC this year, but #1 on my list is:

I want to save an NSUserActivity as an icon on my homescreen.

Then I get an icon to open a specific Numbers doc, or call a person, or have multiple icons for a single app in multiple folders

Update (2019-05-31): WWDC by Sundell:

This website is for everyone who wants to closely follow WWDC, but from anywhere in the world. Starting right now, this site will be updated daily with articles, videos, podcasts, and interviews, covering all things WWDC — from recommendations on what session videos to watch, to in-depth looks at new APIs, to interviews with people from all over the Apple developer community.

Jeff Nadeau:

conference wishlist:

• faster horses

Update (2019-06-03): Daniel Eran Dilger:

Leading up to its 30th Annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif., Apple is channeling its unique hardware savvy to create a future that is powerful, premium, accessible to everyone, and private to yourself. And it’s doing it alone, competing largely against much cheaper copies of its own work that are supported by surveillance advertising. Here’s why that matters.

Carsten:

Something very high, if not on top, of my wish list for #WWDC19 is a better handling of os_log in crash reports.

Andy Lee:

I’ve been a little out of the Cocoa game lately, so my WWDC wishes are not super-fancy:

- improvements to the docs (content/navigation/layout/tooling)
- better Markdown support (I’m thinking Xcode could be a neat notes app)
- don’t render my Cocoa knowledge immediately obsolete

John Sundell:

These are my six biggest Swift-related dreams for this year’s WWDC. They’re not predictions, and they’re not based on any sort of insider information — they’re simply six things that I’d personally love to see introduced when the event begins tomorrow. This, is a Swift developer’s WWDC dreams.

The Talk Show:

Special guest Rene Ritchie returns to the show for a look at what we expect — and hope — to see from Apple at WWDC next week.

See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.

Colin Devroe:

This WWDC, which starts today, seems to be the most important one since the App Store debuted. I wonder if Apple feels it as well or is it just the entire community wondering whether or not they will be using Macs in a decade? Today could tell us that.

Rene Ritchie:

Apple’s WWDC 2019 event is just around the corner and that means there’ll not only be a lot to cover but a lot of people covering it. Here’s who you need to follow.

Six Colors:

Good morning everyone, we’re alive and awake in San Jose, CA, ready for the kickoff of WWDC later this morning. The event starts in just under three hours at 10am local time, that’s 1p ET, 1900 UTC. Jason and Dan will be in attendance. Join us here for analysis + quick headlines!

Manton Reece:

Added a new link at the top of Discover on Micro.blog to point to WWDC-related posts. It’ll be updated throughout the day, and help make sure the main Discover section isn’t overwhelmed with WWDC posts.

Monday, May 20, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Google Pulls Huawei’s Android License

T.C. Sottek (Hacker News 3):

Following the US crackdown on Chinese technology companies, Google has cut off Huawei’s Android license, dealing a huge blow to the besieged phonemaker. Reuters first reported the news, and The Verge subsequently confirmed Google’s suspension of business with Huawei with a source familiar with the matter.

[…]

Speaking to Reuters, a Google spokesperson confirmed that “Google Play and the security protections from Google Play Protect will continue to function on existing Huawei devices.” So while existing Huawei phones around the world won’t be immediately impacted by the decision, the future of updates for those phones as well as any new phones Huawei would produce remains in question.

Horace Dediu:

Huawei is nearly the world’s biggest smartphone vendor. Their exclusion from licensed Android and fork away from Google is the biggest news in smartphones since, well, Android.

Update (2019-05-21): Ben Thompson:

Huawei’s preparation for this moment likely started last year when a similar ban was placed on the sale of American component to ZTE[…]

Update (2019-05-22): Tom Warren (tweet, Hacker News):

Chip designer ARM has suspended business with Huawei, threatening the Chinese company’s ability to create its own chips. BBC News reports that ARM employees have been instructed to halt “all active contracts, support entitlements, and any pending engagements” with Huawei due to the US trade ban. The US has banned any US companies from doing business with the Chinese telecom giant without permission from the American government, but ARM is based in the UK and owned by the Japanese SoftBank group.

ARM is concerned it is affected by the US ban, with an internal memo reportedly revealing that its chip designs include “US origin technology.” ARM develops some processor designs in Austin, Texas and San Jose, California, which could place it under the US restrictions.

Timery for Toggl

John Voorhees:

Time tracking helps me weigh the value of the time I spend on every project, identify inefficiencies in the way I work, and acts as an early warning system to avoid burnout.

[…]

I’m still using Toggl in a Fluid browser on my Mac, but since last summer, I’ve been using the beta of Joe Hribar’s Timery on iOS and loving it. In fact, Timery is so good that even when I’m at my Mac, I find myself turning to it to start and stop timers instead of the web app.

[…]

Timery has helped me make peace with time tracking. Where years ago, it was a tedious process of recording detailed notes by hand, now it’s a simple, streamlined process. Instead of being an interruption and something that fed an invoicing system, time tracking has become a tool that helps me work better than before.

I have been using Hours, which can optionally work completely on-device, without a Web service.

Previously: Timing 2 for Mac.

Beware iCloud Video Syncing

Tyler Hall (tweet):

Get home, back on WiFi, start uploading everything to iCloud and Google Photos. After an hour or two everything’s synced.

Problem: All videos, of any length, stutter, stall, and skip frames in both Photos.app (macOS) and Google Photos on every Mac I try.

[…]

This is a core competency of iOS that should never, ever fucking break for any reason. Apple markets iPhone’s camera as a top selling point – if not THE selling point.

Lucky for me, I’m tech savvy enough to know about Image Capture.app buried inside macOS’s Utilities folder. So I give it one last try using that to transfer the corrupted videos manually off my phone and into Photos.app and Google Photos.

It works. My memories are safe.

Wow, I guess I need to check all our family videos now. It’s possible I’ve been backing up damaged versions, and the good copies would be lost if I pruned our iCloud Photo Library to save space. Hopefully they weren’t already lost when my wife upgraded her iPhone last year. This is not the sort of thing that can be recovered from a backup because iOS cloud backups don’t include the contents of the Photos library if you’re using cloud syncing.

Previously:

The State of Apple’s Developer Documentation

Scott Anguish:

It appears that most of the old iOS conceptual documents have been moved to the documentation archive and are now unsupported.

Is there really no iOS Text Programming concepts? Or are the indexes just that bad?

That is more than a decade of work by dozens, just being abandoned.

I can’t even grasp how that’s any solution.

If this is the case every single iOS developer should be screaming from the rafters. It’s by far the stupidest move I’ve seen in a decade.

You can’t write apps without authoritative docs.

It’s bad enough the reference doc has reached the point it has.

It’s surprising how much of the documentation is marked as legacy, archived, not up-to-date, or was never written in the first place. At first I thought this was because of some sort of internal transition, but it’s been going on for years now and does not seem to be getting any better.

Steve Tibbett:

As far as I can tell, this is the only documentation on IAP receipt validation. This is part of a current system that’s making Apple billions of dollars. There are errors in it, and it’s “no longer being updated”.

Martin Pilkington:

Fun fact: when I was looking up docs for Help Books for my Appreciating AppKit post, one of the few Mac features already supported in Marzipan, it took ages to find as they’re only available in the documentation archive

Matt Stevens:

If you’re struggling to find an Apple developer document you know exists, it’s not just you. http://developer.apple.com’s robots.txt disallows /library/archive/, where all of the old docs now live. Apple’s own “Search Documentation Archive”…doesn’t search the archive.

Previously:

Update (2019-05-21): Wood Borer:

I remember the good old days when people were annoyed that you couldn’t figure out Cocoa bindings without the stuff mmalc posted on his personal website. That was nothing compared to when the doc browser turned into a lousy webpage instead of Cocoa views and Search Kit.

Randy Scovil:

I’m wondering how much has really disappeared. I used to point students there all the time for source code examples and now I find most any search for those comes up empty. Que?

Jonathan Fischer:

For what it’s worth, DuckDuckGo seems to be ignoring that robots.txt entry for /library/archive. I usually find what I’m looking for without much trouble:

Francisco Tolmasky:

Died Apple just not document AppKit anymore? I can’t find anything about NSWindowTab. Is all information just in like WWDC videos?

See also: Hacker News.

X0R:

Sad but true. 10 years ago when I were starting to learn iOS development it was one of the best documentations I’ve ever worked with. And now it’s more like Microsoft’s in it’s dark age.

Update (2019-05-22): macshome:

One of my biggest issues with the new docs page is discoverability. And yes, I’ve filed radars on it.

Kyle Howells:

This is now my number one WWDC wishlist item.

Anything else is a bonus, but Apple’s documentation has fallen so far the knowledge about how the platform works is now being buried in archived documents, old WWDC videos and release notes.

Update (2019-05-28): Kyle Howells:

Apple’s developer documentation doesn’t show what class the method I’m looking at is for anywhere on the page.

Update (2019-05-30): Scott Anguish:

From comments on your post today “Apple’s docs turned downhill fast when they switched to automatically generating docs instead of using human-written, structured, and curated materials.”

Except that’s not what happened. It’s all human-written, structured, and curated.

Friday, May 17, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Three iOS Keyboard Changes Apple Should Make

Dan Moren:

I’ve become more and more puzzled about autocorrect in recent years. In my personal experience, it’s become both worse at fixing legitimate typos and more aggressive about taking actual words and turning them into nonsense. The latter is many times more frustrating; I’ve watched more than a few sentences turn incomprehensible before my very eyes.

[…]

Personally, I’ve been impressed with swipe typing when I’ve used it in other keyboards—the biggest thing holding me back is that it’s not available on the system keyboard. Third-party keyboard support is still limited on iOS, and it’s often buggy and crash-prone.

[…]

Apple already offers a way to search for emoji on the Mac, it’s more than a little puzzling that it wouldn’t make a similar feature available on iOS.

Previously:

Update (2019-05-31): Kyle Howells:

“In my personal experience, it’s become both worse at fixing legitimate typos and more aggressive about taking actual words and turning them into nonsense.”

Couldn’t agree more. It’s been a disaster ever since around iOS 10 when they switched to machine learning.

Raphael Sebbe:

I find SwiftKey has more accurate completion, allows swipe-typing, has better multi-lingual support, is better at emojis.

The only downside is the 3D-touch selection mode: looks like they can’t replicate 2D panning like Apple does (API limitation?). Too bad, so useful…

Previously: Apple Expected to Remove 3D Touch.

Update (2019-06-03): Simeon:

Has iOS autocorrect gotten incredibly bad for anyone else? It used to correct common mistakes but now it just replaces entirely valid words with other similar words turning sentences into nonsense

Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) Mitigation

Ross Mcilroy et al. (via Hacker News):

This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their implications for programming languages. These attacks leak information through micro-architectural side-channels which we show are not mere bugs, but in fact lie at the foundation of optimization. […] As a result of our work, we now believe that speculative vulnerabilities on today’s hardware defeat all language-enforced confidentiality with no known comprehensive software mitigations, as we have discovered that untrusted code can construct a universal read gadget to read all memory in the same address space through side-channels. In the face of this reality, we have shifted the security model of the Chrome web browser and V8 to process isolation.

Liam Tung (via Reddit):

Major slowdowns caused by the new Linux 4.20 kernel have been traced to a mitigation for Spectre variant 2 that Linux founder Linus Torvalds now wants restricted.

PierreLebeaupin:

It’s hard to believe it has now been more than one year since the disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre. There was so much frenzy in the first days and weeks that it has perhaps obscured the fact any solutions we currently have are temporary, barely secure, spackle-everywhere stopgap mitigations, and now that the dust has settled on that, I thought I’d look at what researchers and other contributors have come up with in the last year to provide secure processors – without of course requiring all of us to rewrite all our software from scratch.

Apple (via Benjamin Mayo):

Intel has disclosed vulnerabilities called Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) that apply to desktop and notebook computers with Intel CPUs, including all modern Mac computers.

Although there are no known exploits affecting customers at the time of this writing, customers who believe their computer is at heightened risk of attack can use the Terminal app to enable an additional CPU instruction and disable hyper-threading processing technology, which provides full protection from these security issues.

[…]

Testing conducted by Apple in May 2019 showed as much as a 40 percent reduction in performance with tests that include multithreaded workloads and public benchmarks.

John Gruber:

It’s good that there are no known exploits using these techniques, but even if there were, the overwhelming majority of Mac users — almost everyone — would not need to enable this mitigation. These MDS vulnerabilities enable malware on your computer to do bad things. But these vulnerabilities are not ways for malware to get onto your computer.

However, it sounds like the fix is finally a way to work around the hyper-threading bug that can lead to data corruption on my iMac, amongst other Macs.

Previously:

Update (2019-05-31): Quentin Adam:

FYI, as cloud provider we rawly loss around 25% of CPU performances the lasts 18 months due to different CVE and issues on CPU and mitigation limiting capacity using microcode, so we stuff more CPUs, but prices didn’t go down at all... That’s a kind of upselling. #IntelFail

Dynamic Equality Checking and Equatable

Tanner Bennett (tweet):

Note that the arguments for == are defined as Self rather than Equatable. This has some implications and benefits[…]

[…]

The use of Self as in Equatable’s definition restricts how Equatable can be used. You cannot declare collections or variables as a protocol type, like you can in Objective-C.

[…]

Many APIs vend Any, such as JSONSerialization’s .jsonObject(_:_:) methods. For testing purposes, you may want to compare the output of these methods to one another. You’ll quickly find you can’t[…]

See also: Adding a polymorphic Equatable?, Protocol-Oriented Programming in Swift.

Previously:

Copyright © 2000–2019 Michael Tsai.