Ivan Mehta (Hacker News):
Safari’s newest feature, Distraction Control, can remove distracting elements from a website. The feature follows Arc Browser’s addition of Boosts last year, which similarly lets users remove features from a site and further customize its appearance.
Apple is rolling out the early version of the feature this week through new developer betas of iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia.
Users can access the Distraction Control tool from the Page Menu in the Smart Search field. They then select the item on the website they want to remove. Safari will remember to remove the elements the next time they visit the site. The choice doesn’t currently sync across hardware, however, so users will have to hide the elements on each new device.
Chance Miller (Slashdot):
Apple also emphasizes that this feature is not meant to serve as an ad blocker. While a user can technically use Distraction Control to hide an ad on a website temporarily, that ad will re-appear when the page is refreshed or otherwise reloaded. In fact, the first time a user activates Distraction Control, Safari will display a pop-up that emphasizes the feature will not permanently remove ads or other areas of a website that frequently change.
If a user chooses to hide something like a GDPR banner or a cookies request pop-up, Distraction Control behaves in the same way as if the user manually clicked to dismiss that pop-up. This means Distraction Control will serve as neither an “Accept” nor “Decline” for that cookies request.
Jeff Johnson:
I discovered that if you hide distracting items in a private window, your settings will be preserved in memory after closing the private window and applied to other private windows, but your settings won’t be applied to non-private windows or saved to disk.
However, if you hide distracting items in a non-private window, your settings will be saved to disk and also applied to private windows.
Your hidden item settings are stored on disk in ~/Library/Safari/UserDefinedContentBlockers.db on macOS. This is an SQLite database.
[…]
It appears to be using the Safari content blockers API. The db saves a website domain, a CSS selector, and a binary plist containing various other data[…]
Previously:
Update (2024-08-08): Marko Zivkovic:
Web Eraser was Apple’s built-in content-blocker, found in pre-release development builds of Safari 18. In speaking with people familiar with the matter, we learned that Web Eraser allowed users to select any page element on-screen, and “erase” it.
[…]
We were told that Web Eraser enabled the removal of virtually anything on-screen, from distracting banner ads to articles or even entire page sections.
So, why did Apple remove a Safari feature that was fully functional?
[…]
After AppleInsider’s original article on the subject was published, it caught the attention of major industry associations in the publishing and advertising sector. Following our reveal of the feature, mainstream media websites The Financial Times and Business Insider reported that the UK’s News Media Association and a group of French publishers had both sent complaints to Apple about Web Eraser in May.
Update (2024-09-20): John Voorhees:
My concerns about Distraction Control are twofold. First, static ads – like the kind of ads we display on MacStories – are often chosen because they are less disruptive than dynamic ads. Effectively, Apple is penalizing sites that use less distracting ads by making them easier to block long-term than the dynamic variety.
[…]
Second, Distraction Control is not very precise. If you try to hide the banner ad at the top of MacStories, it will wipe out the masthead and site navigation along with the banner. That’s a potential support nightmare we (and I suspect other sites) will have to deal with.
Advertising GDPR iOS iOS 18 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Safari Web
Neil Long:
- Some studios now wait up to six months to get paid, which almost put one indie dev out of business
- The Apple Arcade team do not respond to routine emails for weeks or even months, if they respond at all
- One developer who had semi-regular meetings with the tech giant said that “half the Apple team won’t turn up and when they do they have no idea what’s going on and can’t answer our questions”
- Apple’s tech support was also described as “miserable” and “the worst I have seen anywhere”
- Vision Pro struggles to run “complex games” and developing for it is “like going back in time 10 years” due to the lack of tech support
- Apple engineers are “unable to offer any insights” into how Vision Pro’s hardware or software works, or “how essential middleware is meant to work with it”
- Discoverability on Arcade is so poor that one person said it was like their game “was in a morgue”
Amber Neely:
One particularly frustrated developer spoke out against Apple Arcade, saying, “It’s like an abusive relationship where the abused stays in the relationship hoping the other partner will change and become the person you know they could be.”
In April, Apple executive Alex Rofman said Apple Arcade was not set up to make the company money, but also insisted that game developers were getting fairly compensated.
Hartley Charlton:
Developers also pointed out issues with quality assurance and updates, claiming that a prolonged discussion with Apple over a single update cost their team two months of work. “Submitting updates is so painful our developers started trying to avoid it,” they said.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
Absolutely brutal. This is a microcosm of Apple’s developer relations in the modern era.
Jesper:
Apple does not get games. Apple does not respect developers. Apple ships a dictionary defining the word “symbiosis”, but chances are the many Apple employees who understand it are not in a position to effect it.
[…]
These reports are particularly interesting, since the perennial defense of app store-encumbered platforms are to refer to them as game consoles but for apps. Apple Arcade games are headliners flying closer to the Apple brand than other games; they should be getting ultra deluxe treatment compared to App Store apps, and yet it doesn’t measure up to the levels delivered by game consoles or independent storefronts like Steam.
John Voorhees:
It’s important to take the complaints of unnamed sources with a grain of salt. However, it’s impossible to look at what’s going on with Arcade and App Store gaming in general – which Brendon and I discussed on NPC: Next Portable Console this week – and not conclude that Apple needs to shake up its approach to videogames.
Federico Viticci:
I never thought I’d say that Netflix understands videogames more than Apple ever did, yet here we are.
Previously:
Update (2024-08-13): See also: Hacker News.
App Store Apple Arcade Apple Vision Pro Business Game iOS iOS 17 iOS App Mac Mac App Mac App Store macOS 14 Sonoma visionOS visionOS 1
Zac Hall:
As noted by Vedant, the official Twitter for Mac app is currently missing from the Mac App Store. While it hasn’t been confirmed, the most obvious guess is that X, formerly Twitter, finally got around to delisting the abandoned software.
Twitter for Mac has been abandoned and rebuilt over the years long before Elon Musk acquired the platform now branded as X.
[…]
X for iPad is now available to run on the Mac. No timeline streaming, of course.
I never liked the Catalyst version of the Twitter app, nor the inability to turn off Universal Links, so I’ve been reading via the Web since Twitter broke Nitter. The main problem with the Web is that it doesn’t remember my position in the timeline. I’m pretty much forced to read reverse-chronologically and keep track of when to stop. The other issue is that, if I get several days behind, Safari can’t handle it. It will either stop loading older tweets or stop allowing text to be selected or stop loading any pages at all (even in other tabs). Google Chrome is much smoother and more reliable.
M.G. Siegler:
I’m both surprise and not at all surprised that nearly two years after Elon Musk took over Twitter, the native Mac client was still there seemingly forgotten about. And I do mean that literally. Not just neglected – as it had long been – but actually perhaps totally forgotten about. Thankfully, whatever API it was using continued to work even as the new Xitter ripped those away from other services. And actually, it continues to work even now, if you installed it previously.
Ricky Mondello:
In my very personal opinion, Twitter for Mac was a triumph. A group of Twitter employees leveraged Mac Catalyst to build an app that management at most companies wouldn’t have cared to build. And they did it by just doing it. They made it happen by making it cheap. And it wasn’t at all bad! Feature-rich, smooth scrolling, and definitely better than the website. I’ll miss ya, buddy.
Ryan Jones:
Don’t lie, why did you think I got suspended?
(Twitter botched their iPad app on Mac rollout is the real answer. 👏)
Christina Warren:
Trying to signal boost:
@rmondello
is still suspended because of problems associated with the shutdown of the old Twitter for Mac client and the failed iPad X client launch on macOS (@rjonesy
and others were caught up but unsuspended)
Ricky Mondello:
Although lots of people have been unsuspended from Twitter, I have not been.
Previously:
I got unsuspended from Twitter.
The “new” X iPad-emulation app is crap. Doesn’t even have ⌘-N mappings for new tweet.
Catalyst (Marzipan) Google Chrome iPadOS iPadOS 17 Mac Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma Safari Sunset Twitter Universal Links
Chris Welch (via John Gruber):
Spotify’s brief attempt at being a hardware company wasn’t all that successful: the company stopped producing its Car Thing dashboard accessory less than a year after it went on sale to the public. And now, two years later, the device is about to be rendered completely inoperable. Customers who bought the Car Thing are receiving emails warning that it will stop working altogether as of December 9th.
Scharon Harding (via Hacker News):
Spotify will refund owners of Car Thing, its Spotify-playing device that mounts to car dashboards, Ars Technica confirmed today.
[…]
As reported by Billboard, on May 28, three people filed a lawsuit [PDF] that seeks class-action certification (and cites Ars) against Spotify. It claims that people “would not have purchased a Car Thing if they knew that Spotify would stop supporting the product within just a few months or years of purchase.” It also states that “Spotify has stated that it will not refund, or replace, the Car Thing.”
Timothy Geigner:
First, the company could have updated the devices it didn’t want to support any longer to open them up to third-party firmware so that these paid-for pieces of hardware had some sort of use other than taking up room at your local landfill, but Spotify is apparently unwilling to do so.
[…]
In fact, the company told tech publications days ago that the whole point of the Car Thing was to serve as market research for the company as to how people listen to content in their cars. In other words, those who bought the devices were paying for the pleasure of serving as Spotify’s lab rats, which is a horrible look for the company when it decided refunds wouldn’t be a thing.
Business Car Lawsuit Legal Spotify Sunset
