Barry Schwartz:
When you are browsing a web page in the Google App native browser, Google can “extract interesting entities from the webpage and highlight them in line.” When you click on them, Google takes you to more search results.
I don’t think this is a new feature, I mean, I’ve heard of this before from Google. I just can’t find my write up on it. Maybe it was only Android before and it was named something else. That being said, this will lead to people going to your site, then Google injecting links on your site that will lead your website visits to Google Search.
[…]
Hate it? Well, Google added a new opt out form - the only issue, it can take up to 30 days for the opt out form to work.
This is for individual Web sites to opt out. I guess there’s no way for users to opt out for all the sites they visit.
Via Nick Heer:
The results from a tapped Page Annotation are loaded in a floating temporary sheet, so it is not like users are fully whisked away — but that is almost worse. In the illustration from Google, a person is apparently viewing a list of Japanese castles, into which Google has inserted a link on “Osaka Castle”. Tapping on an injected link will show Google’s standard search results, which are front-loaded with details about how to contact the castle, buy tickets, and see a map. All of those things would be done better in a view that cannot be accidentally swiped away.
Maybe, you are thinking, it would be helpful to easily trigger a search from some selected text, and that is fair. But the Google app already displays a toolbar with a search button when you highlight any text in this app.
This is not cool, though I have to say that I don’t recall ever hearing about anyone using the Google app instead of just Safari or a third-party browser. But now I see that it’s #1 in the App Store in the Utilities category (beating Chrome at #2). Are people really using it now? Because of Gemini?
Previously:
Google App Google Gemini/Bard Google Search iOS iOS 18 iOS App Web
Balazs Varkonyi:
Added Smart Folder Actions, enabling matching items in a smart folder to be marked as read or starred and to be used for advanced content filtering.
Enhanced folder/tag selection in relevant management interfaces with powerful search capabilities. Filter folders/tags using a search field for quicker navigation, select matching items directly by pressing Return, and use ⌘ + Return on hardware keyboards to autocomplete partial matches or select the single match automatically.
[…]
Added an image viewer on macOS.
Previously:
iOS iOS 18 iOS App Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia ReadKit RSS
Momentarium:
- Easy Data Inspection: Quickly browse and inspect your CoreData data models with our intuitive interface.
- Customizable Layout: Tailor the layout to your needs, with adjustable column widths, row heights, and more.
- Relationship Visualization: Visualize complex relationships between entities with our interactive graph view.
- Support for Multiple CoreData Versions: Compatible with CoreData versions from iOS 10 to the latest releases.
- Powerful Search: Instantly find any record by searching its content, so you can quickly locate the data you need.
- DB Live Editing: Ability to save update and changes
- Data Track Changes. Track and trace changes in your SQLite database.
This sounds cool, and it’s only $4.99, but I wasn’t able to get it to work for me. It seems to need an uncompiled model file, which I don’t have for any of the third-party apps whose data I want to inspect or for my own apps (since they build the models in code). SwiftData apps would have the same problem.
Previously:
Core Data Developer Tool Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Programming
Tim Hardwick:
In its report, the CMA’s independent inquiry group determined that Apple’s Safari browser policies prevent competing browsers from implementing certain features, such as faster webpage loading technologies. The investigation also revealed that many UK app developers would prefer to offer progressive web apps as an alternative to App Store distribution, but Apple’s current iOS limitations make this impractical.
Adding to competitive concerns, the regulator highlighted a revenue-sharing agreement between Apple and Google that “significantly reduces their financial incentives to compete” in the mobile browser space on iOS. The CMA also found that both companies can manipulate how users are presented with browser choices, making their own offerings appear as the clearest or easiest options.
[…]
In its summary of provisional decision, the regulator is recommending that these findings be addressed through the UK’s upcoming Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, which takes effect in January 2025. This legislation will give the CMA new powers to designate firms as having “Strategic Market Status” and impose appropriate interventions to promote competition.
Previously:
Antitrust App Store iOS iOS 18 Legal United Kingdom
PPSSPP:
PPSSPP is an open source PSP emulator, that lets you run your own PlayStation Portable games on your various devices. PPSSPP is officially available on Android through Google Play, PC, Mac, and recently iOS through the App Store. There is also a Linux flatpak build. The project is ongoing for more than 11 years now, and has been downloaded over 100M times. It has millions of active users on Android.
[…]
For some time now, I have simply not been able to update the paid iOS version on Apple’s App Store. The free version flies through review in a few hours, while the near-identical paid version is just stuck.
[…]
Below is an authentic conversation with App Store Review.
[…]
I tried appealing the previous conversation to the App Store review board, with no result.
It’s just so frustrating. I want to get a bugfix update out, and I can’t.
App Review is continually complaining about things that either aren’t true or that were allowed for other apps, including from the same developer.
Via Craig Grannell, who terms the situation “kafkaesque” (Mastodon):
Apple never wanted emulators on the App Store. I imagine it felt strong-armed into allowing them, due to EU regulators getting antsy, or as a means to attempt to derail third-party app AltStore, which an awful lot of people primarily cared about due to Nintendo emulator Delta. Even with that, Apple first authorised a terrible rip-off over Delta, and everything since has been at best a crapshoot.
[…]
These aren’t the only issues emulator authors have faced. Last I checked, MAME4iOS was in limbo. Several other emulator authors have given up. Meanwhile, Apple merrily approves emulators that barely work and are exploitative crap. A cynic might wonder whether this is intent, to showcase the worst of emulation and put people off.
Craig Grannell:
Increasingly feels like they were only allowed to blunt AltStore and Delta. Now that’s over with, several emulator authors are having trouble with approvals or updates.
Francisco Tolmasky:
Imagine you’re the most valuable company on Earth. Billions of dollars of cash on hand. Best engineers in the world. You could legitimately leave an impact on anything you work on. And one of the primary things you choose to focus on is stubbornly policing fucking game emulators. Like forget about whether it’s good or bad, it is just so unbelievably small minded. An Apple running on all 8 cylinders wouldn’t have time to give a shit about stuff like this.
Take a moment to wrap your head around the fact that Apple fought a multi-year court battle to try to prevent you from putting links in your app. I get that that may have significant revenue effects — but the point is that a company with Apple’s resources should have way more interesting and impactful ways of generating revenue. There is something deeply broken from a creativity perspective if “don’t let app devs talk to users” represents the state of the art in business strategy at Apple.
[…]
No one is even asking Apple to do anything. No one is asking Apple to make sure old apps run. There’s no maintenance burden being requested. Just don’t literally devote time to 1) stopping these projects and then 2) in an act of truly bizarre pettiness, approving a weird competing copycat emulator? Like honestly, would love to hear the reasoning on this move. Only shady ripoff emulators are allowed? This is all so clearly in bad faith that I can’t understand any defense of it.
Previously:
App Review App Store App Store Rejection Emulator Game iOS iOS 18 iOS App PPSSPP Sony PlayStation
Dave Winer:
We’re losing the word “podcast” very quickly. It’s come to mean video interviews on YouTube mostly. Our only hope is upgrading the open platform in a way that stimulates the imagination of creators, and there’s no time to waste. If you make a podcast client, it’s time to start collaborating with competitors and people who create RSS-based podcasts to take advantage of the open platforms with no silo walls, otherwise having a podcast will mean getting distribution deals from Google, Apple, Spotify and Amazon. And they, as we know, are nuzzling up to the government leaders, who will want to impose severe limits.
Previously:
Update (2024-12-04): Ben Cohen:
But this year, YouTube passed the competition and became the most popular service for podcasts in the U.S., with 31% of weekly podcast listeners saying it’s now the platform they use the most, according to Edison Research.
Via Nick Heer:
Cohen omits key context for why YouTube is suddenly a key podcast platform: Google Podcasts was shut down this year with users and podcasters alike instructed to move to YouTube. According to Buzzsprout’s 2023 analytics, Google Podcasts was used by only 2.5% of global listeners. YouTube is not listed in their report, perhaps because it exists in its own bubble instead of being part of the broader RSS-feed-reading podcast client ecosystem.
But where Google was previously bifurcating its market share, it aligned its users behind a single client. And, it would seem, that audience responded favourably.
[…]
Of the top twenty podcasts according to Edison Research, fifteen have what I would deem meaningful and regular video components.
[…]
Also, YouTube channels have RSS feeds, though that is not very useful in an audio-only client like Overcast.
Previously:
Podcasts RSS Video Web YouTube
CNBC (MacRumors, Hacker News):
Intel ousted CEO Pat Gelsinger over the weekend, capping a tumultuous nearly four-year tenure at what was America’s leading semiconductor company before its stock price and market share collapsed.
The company announced Gelsinger’s resignation Monday morning, which a person familiar with the matter said came after a contentious board meeting last week over Gelsinger’s perceived failure to respond to Nvidia’s competitive edge and a lack of confidence in Gelsinger’s turnaround plans.
[…]
Gelsinger set out an audacious plan when he arrived in 2021 to transform the languishing company into a chipmaking juggernaut. He sought to achieve parity with the two leading chipmakers, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. He pursued big buildouts in the U.S. and around the world, a costly endeavor that weighed heavily on Intel’s free cash flow and increased the company’s debt load.
He also wooed government investment, positioning Intel as the single-largest beneficiary of the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. Government money has begun to flow to Intel in recent weeks and will aid the company’s chip fabs in Arizona and Ohio.
Rui Carmo:
Pat Gelsinger’s abrupt exit from Intel raises more questions than it answers, especially given the timing right after securing CHIPS Act funding. It feels like a classic case of boardroom drama, where the lack of a smooth transition hints at deeper issues—-perhaps a clash of visions or a failure to deliver on ambitious projects.
Ben Thompson (Dithering):
It seems likely that the board has cold feet about the foundry business, and a split may be forthcoming.
John Carmack:
I’m concerned to see Pat Gelsinger ousted as Intel CEO. He wasn’t a firebrand visionary, and it wasn’t exactly going great, but he was deeply technical, and I don’t expect his replacement to equal him there. “Business harder” isn’t going to return Intel to greatness, only technical achievement will.
Previously:
Update (2024-12-04): Charlie Demerjian (Hacker News):
Our views that Gelsinger did turn the ship are unchanged. Intel had a cultural problem, not a technical one and the one thing Pat did was change the culture for the better. There are green shoots of this popping up here and there if you know where to look with more coming every day. As we described yesterday, the problem is that technical changes happen over a three year timescale, finance looks at one year or less.
[…]
Why was this mess allowed to not only fester but continue and grow? Because the internal incentive structure was so broken that it encouraged employees to lie for profit. Worse yet lies went unpunished. SemiAccurate has many emails, texts, and had conversations about meetings where this happened.
[…]
As SemiAccurate keeps saying, Intel had a cultural problem, not a technical one. The technical problems were a symptom of the underlying culture and could not be fixed without a cultural sea change. Pat did that, or at least did most of it, and it was working. Sure he made some serious missteps and at times cheesed off many folk in the financial world, but he did the right things to fix the company. And he was just fired for it. I don’t have words that can express my disdain for the Intel board that will pass muster in a family publication such as SemiAccurate.
Sean Hollister:
Gelsinger was a lifer who joined the company at age 18 and spent 30 years on the job, from 1979 to 2009, before returning to lead the company in 2021. Even some people who’ve left Intel as a result of Gelsinger’s layoffs tell me they believed he was the right person for the job. They believed in his strategy to regain silicon leadership, they liked that he was an engineer himself, and they liked that he was there to fix long-standing technology problems left (or ignored) by previous CEOs.
Remember the 486, Intel’s 1989 flagship CPU that was the first x86 chip with over a million transistors? Gelsinger was the lead architect. Later, he became Intel’s first CTO, helping push industry standard technologies like USB and Wi-Fi as well as Intel chip design.
[…]
Over a decade ago, Intel spent billions investing in Dutch multinational ASML, which is today the most important company in chips. It’s the only firm in the world that manufactures machines capable of pulverizing a ball of tin, using high-power lasers, such that it emits an extremely tight wavelength of ultraviolet light to efficiently carve circuits into silicon wafers, a process known as EUV.
Intel initially believed in the tech, even carving out a $4.1 billion stake in the company, then decided not to order the pricey machines. But Taiwan’s TSMC did — and went on to become the undisputed leader in silicon manufacturing[…]
[…]
His hunch: Intel’s board may want to split off its foundry business entirely, above and beyond the spinoff that Gelsinger already announced, turning Intel into a company that simply designs chips like its direct rivals.
Oxide Computer Company:
How did Intel get here? Some of the cultural problems may be deep in the DNA. Bryan and Adam have some ideas for what happens next, and who might be the next CEO.
See also: John Gruber.
Business Firing Intel Processors
Adam Engst:
Because CSV is an interchange format, I usually import files into a spreadsheet, make any necessary changes, and then save, print, or export for whatever my next step is. I usually use Excel for processing because it can save an opened CSV without a separate export step, which Numbers requires. Google Sheets would also require exporting and would clutter my Google Drive with temporary documents that I need only briefly.
Please don’t interpret my usage of Excel as an endorsement, though. I have a fractious relationship with Excel, particularly when working with running times, which spreadsheets treat like times of day and often reformat in weird ways.
[…]
I ran across an intriguing app earlier this year that has become my go-to tool for working with CSV files: Modern CSV. When you launch it, it looks like a spreadsheet, displaying data in rows and columns, but it doesn’t require that you write formulas to manipulate data. Instead, it has an extensive set of data manipulation capabilities that you apply directly to the contents of a CSV file. In essence, Modern CSV uses CSV as its native format and lets you choose common data transformation, conversion, concatenation, and other actions from menus instead of pre-parsing files in a text editor or building formulas and juggling results columns in a spreadsheet app. With CSV as the native file format, you skip all that to work directly with tabular data.
If you need more than what Excel and BBEdit can do, this looks great.
Previously:
BBEdit CSV Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Microsoft Excel Modern CSV
Andrew Ayer (via Hacker News):
A Brazilian certificate authority trusted only by Microsoft has issued a presumably-unauthorized certificate for google.com.
This can used to intercept traffic to Google from Edge and other Windows applications (except Chrome and Firefox). Hug-ops to Google folks.
Microsoft are well aware of the extensive history of problems with this CA - I emailed them my concerns in 2021, and further issues were raised during a public CCADB discussion in 2022 - but they clearly don’t care.
Previously:
Brazil Domain Name System (DNS) Google Microsoft Microsoft Edge SSL/TLS Windows Windows 11
Steven Levy:
[Nadella] tells a story from a few years ago, when a group of tech analysts came from China to take the measure of Silicon Valley. They attended all the key developer’s conferences: Apple’s WWDC, Google I/O, AWS Re:Invent, and of course, Microsoft’s own Build. “They said, ‘God, you know what? For anything that the United States has got, we’ve got equivalents in China. We’ve got ecommerce, search, hardware manufacturers, social networks of our own. But there’s this one company that we visited, Microsoft, that’s pretty different.’” As Nadella tells it, the delegation marveled at the company’s breadth, with everything from the PC operating system to Xbox: “It all comes together as this one systems platform.” And, he now implies, Microsoft’s breadth sets it up to seize the most propitious opportunity in the history of technology.
It was an odd choice of anecdote, considering that Microsoft’s history has been plagued by its eagerness to use its size as a cudgel—and that today it’s under investigation by the European Union and the US Federal Trade Commission for those same tendencies. Nadella skates past that and brings up his greatest triumph, AI. He tells the tens of thousands of Softies around the world that the new goal was to put Copilot—that’s Microsoft’s name for its AI—in the hands of people and organizations everywhere.
Nadella doesn’t say outright what everyone in the room knows: Just a decade ago, pundits had declared the company brain-dead.
[…]
“In a five-minute break, walking to the bathroom and back, we were able to completely change the company strategy around support for Linux and open source,” says Guthrie. When Nadella later told Ballmer, who was in his final days at the company, he simply informed him of the policy shift. Then, two months after Nadella became CEO, Guthrie suggested that they change the name “Windows Azure” to “Microsoft Azure.” It was done on the spot, sending a signal that Microsoft would no longer assess every move based on its impact on Windows.
Previously:
Anniversary Antitrust Artificial Intelligence Business History Microsoft Microsoft Azure Open-source Software Windows
Kyle Wiggers:
The FTC has launched an antitrust investigation into Microsoft, accordingtomultiplereports that corroborate earlier reporting by the Financial Times.
The agency is said to be looking into whether Microsoft violated antitrust law in multiple segments of its business, including its public cloud, AI, and cybersecurity product lines. Of particular interest to the FTC is the way Microsoft bundles its cloud products with its office and security tools, says The New York Times.
Via Dare Obasanjo:
Being “better together” has been Microsoft’s strategy in the enterprise forever and it’s escaped scrutiny mainly because consumer big tech companies like Amazon, Google & Meta took the regulatory spotlight.
Nick Heer:
Obviously, the FTC’s concerns with Microsoft’s business practices stretch well beyond bundling Teams. According to this Bloomberg report, the Commission is interested in cloud and identity tying, too. On the one hand, it is enormously useful to businesses to have a suite of products with a single point of management and shared credentials. On the other hand, it is a monolithic system that is a non-starter for potential competitors.
The government is understandably worried about the security and stability risks of global dependence on Microsoft, too, but this is odd:
The CrowdStrike crash that affected millions of devices operating on Microsoft Windows systems earlier this year was itself a testament to the widespread use of the company’s products and how it directly affects the global economy.
Previously:
Antitrust Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Microsoft Microsoft Azure
Mono (via Hacker News, Slashdot):
The Mono Project (mono/mono) (‘original mono’) has been an important part of the .NET ecosystem since it was launched in 2001. Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016.
The last major release of the Mono Project was in July 2019, with minor patch releases since that time. The last patch release was February 2024.
We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono · GitLab (winehq.org).
[…]
Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork.
Previously:
.NET Microsoft Monodraw Open Source Programming Wine
