Juli Clover (no iOS/iPadOS release notes, no security, no enterprise, no developer):
According to Apple’s release notes, iOS 18.2.1 addresses important bugs, and it is recommended for all users.
Apple is also testing iOS 18.3 and iPadOS 18.3, updates that we expect to see launch sometime in late January.
Adam Engst:
Without release notes or the threat of security vulnerabilities, it’s impossible to generate urgency around these new versions. However, the rapid release after the holiday break suggests that the bugs fixed were significant enough to warrant interrupting the engineers’ holiday vacations.
Previously:
iOS iOS 18 iOS Release iPadOS iPadOS 18 iPadOS Release
Keith Harrison:
Swift Testing calls the test function once for each value in the arguments collection. […] If you pass a second argument, Swift Testing generates test cases for all combinations of the two arguments. […] You’re limited to at most two arguments. If you don’t need every combination you can zip the arguments to pair them.
Why use a parameterized test instead of just writing a for loop?
Each call of the test function with a different argument is an independent test case than can run in parallel. It’s much clearer when a test case fails. You can also rerun just the failing argument from the test navigator by clicking on the red failure icon[…]
Previously:
iOS iOS 18 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Programming Swift Programming Language Testing Xcode
Michael Burkhardt:
Sonuby is a different kind of weather app, designed for users who often partake in outdoor activities. For example, if you often snowboard, you can have a weather forecast that places snow conditions front and center. Weather needs can be very individualistic, which is why Sonuby allows you to tailor the app to what you care about.
I like that Sonuby lets you customize the display to choose which data to emphasize. My favorite feature is that you can make collections of locations and then easily switch between locations within one of these subsets. Most other apps offer a flat list that becomes unwieldy or has a limit, so that I have to keep deleting and re-adding locations depending on which are most important at any time.
The data is from a combination of sources provided by meteoblue, which I don’t think I’ve used before, so I don’t know how accurate it is.
The app’s overall design is not really my cup of tea, and I ran into some problems adding locations. Some names that I searched for were not available, and others did show up but were lower in the list of matches—the app prioritized similar names that were thousands of miles away from me.
None of the weather apps I’ve tried, including Sonuby, really offers the kind of workflow I’d like for planning an outdoor activity. It’s not just that I want to know the forecast for a certain location on a certain day. I also want to compare several potential mountains to decide where to go based on the weather. Bonus points if it can also compare multiple weather data providers.
Weathergraph is my preferred app for home, and it lets me switch data providers without having to dig into the settings, but it’s useless for this purpose since it only supports one location. Apple Weather and Mercury Weather require a bunch of taps to switch locations and then get back to the right screen. I wish I could navigate to the display I want—say, precipitation next Saturday—and then swipe to see that exact data but for different locations and data providers. (Or, wild idea, how about showing the same data for multiple locations on the same screen at the same time?)
Previously:
iOS iOS 18 iOS App Mercury Weather Sonuby Weather Weather.app Weathergraph
James Thomson (Mastodon):
On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo.
[…]
The version he showed was quite different to what actually ended up shipping, with square boxes around the icons, and an actual “Dock” folder in your user’s home folder that contained aliases to the items stored.
I should know – I had spent the previous 18 months or so as the main engineer working away on it.
[…]
I didn’t design the dock – that was Bas Ording, a talented young UI designer that Steve had personally recruited. But it was my job to take his prototypes built in Macromind Director and turn them into working code, as part of the Finder team.
[…]
I figured if anybody was finally going to kill off DragThing, it might as well be me.
After DP3, he resigned because Apple wanted him to move to Cupertino. Apple fired all the software engineers in Cork, and then they rewrote all his code before shipping Mac OS X 10.0. It’s remarkable how little the Dock has outwardly changed in the years since.
Jason Snell:
The timeline is interesting. James wrote his classic Mac utility DragThing before working at Apple, then was hired by Apple, then ended up working on the Dock, and then left Apple… to resume working on DragThing.
Also: James’s story about Apple trying to hide James’s location from Steve Jobs is an all-time classic.
Jason Snell:
When I watch the video back, it’s almost surreal how Steve Jobs keeps doing utterly normal, boring things in Mac OS X while the crowd completely loses its collective mind. Viewed by someone without any historical context, it would seem like a cult being whipped into a frenzy by its leader.
But I was there, and I can tell you that it wasn’t that. This was the moment, after 16 years of classic Mac OS–and let’s face it, the last five of those were pretty rough–when all the failings of the Mac were swept away and replaced with something modern, ready for the challenge of the 21st century.
[…]
It’s a bit of a head trip to watch Jobs explain how windows now have three buttons in the top left corner, colored “like a stoplight,” with symbols that appear when you roll the mouse pointer over them. Those buttons have become as much symbols of the Mac as the menu bar itself, but this was the first time anyone saw them.
Joe Groff:
In honor of the 25th anniversary of Mac OS X DP3 and the first public reveal of Aqua, this year’s MacBooks will feature an Apple-logo-shaped notch in the center of the menu bar.
Mario Guzmán:
Full height sidebars and inspectors also contribute to unnecessary waste of space in the toolbar. Also dividing toolbars to match column widths (like Mail and Notes) further makes unnecessary waste of toolbar space.
I’m ready for a Mac OS UI redesign that raises the bar for Desktop OS design. The way Aqua did.
Even going back to the old Aqua toolbar design would be fine. The new Big Sur way—where there’s lots of empty space, yet the window title gets truncated and important buttons, and sometimes even the search field, get stuffed into the overflow menu—is a regression.
See also: John Siracusa (in 2000), Stephen Hackett, Nick Heer.
Previously:
Anniversary Design Dock DragThing History Mac Mac OS X DP 3 macOS 11.0 Big Sur macOS 15 Sequoia Steve Jobs
