Archive for August 14, 2025

Thursday, August 14, 2025

The Return of Blood Oxygen for Apple Watch

Apple (MacRumors, Hacker News):

Apple will introduce a redesigned Blood Oxygen feature for some Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update coming later today.

[…]

This update was enabled by a recent U.S. Customs ruling.

Victoria Song:

To get around the ban, blood oxygen data collected on the Watch will now be measured and calculated on the iPhone that it’s paired to. While users won’t be able to view the data on their wrist, they’ll be able to view it in the iPhone’s Health app under the Respiratory section.

If Apple was violating the patents before, I don’t see how using the same sensors but moving the calculation to a different device should make it not a violation. But that determination seems to be ongoing; what’s changed is the interim import ban.

Warner Crocker:

I may be speculating, (I doubt it) but it sounds like a friends in high places who like gifts moment to me.

Previously:

Infinite Canvas

Christian Tietze (Mastodon):

InfiniteCanvas is a simple, delightful “whiteboarding” app. It’s not for fine art, but for conceptual drawings, and gets out of your way so that you can get ideas on the (digital) paper quickly.

[…]

Infinite Canvas is like Prezi (the presentation app) for drawings: you can nest drawings ‘inside’ others by zooming in, then use the space between existing strokes for a whole new drawing.

[…]

Infinite Canvas has a peculiar brush. The stroke width is relative to the current zoom level, so that you get a consistent level of detail of your drawing as you see it at that moment.

There aren’t many features—or even an eraser—but it seems to work well and is really quick and easy to learn and use. It’s free with some optional IAPs to support future development.

Upgrading My Mac’s External SSD

I recently replaced a 4 TB 2.5-inch hard drive with a same-sized SSD, with the goal of making it quieter and faster. Instead, it got much slower. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with the SSD itself (a Samsung T7). The drive tests fine, and I have half a dozen other drives in this family that all work great.

I think the problem is that I put about 3.5 TB of data on it. I was aware that you don’t want SSDs to be super full, but this particular data set grows slowly, so I thought I’d have several hundred GB of free space for the next few years. But I guess that isn’t enough. The drive started out fast at reading and writing, but after filling it up the writes seemed to take forever. Stibium benchmarked them as slow as 1.6 MB/s, but I think they were actually far lower overall.

Samsung doesn’t make a larger T7 or T9, so I ordered an 8 TB SanDisk. That should be plenty of space, and I’ve long used the 2 TB version of that drive. It’s the only non-Samsung SSD that’s worked reliably for me. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the new SanDisk, at least not for use with a Mac. It kept spontaneously unmounting in the middle of copying files, whether connected to a Thunderbolt dock (via the provided cable) or to a USB hub. Some Amazon reviews note the same problem, even though it overall has 4.6 stars from 81K ratings. In light testing, it did seem to work when directly connected to my MacBook Pro, but I only have three ports and don’t want to dedicate one to this drive.

I replaced it with a Samsung T5, which in theory is slower than the T7, but in actual use it’s much faster than what I had before, and it seems to be reliable.

Previously:

Your Mac Game Is Probably Rendering Blurry

Colin Cornaby:

I’ve submitted the issue described in this post to Apple as FB13375033. This issue has been open since September of 2023.

If you game on a MacBook display – your game is probably rendering wrong unless you’ve adjusted your settings. If you’re a developer building a full screen game in AppKit (or Catalyst) – Apple’s APIs have some issues you need to be aware of.

[…]

The problem with Apple laptops is they have a notch at the top of the display. The full screen area your game runs in is not the same resolution as the screen. Most games do not account for this problem. They output frames sized for the entire screen instead of the region they can draw to. This output is height compressed and blurry.

[…]

The problem is that these resolutions [from CGDisplayCopyAllDisplayModes()] are mixed in a single list with no built in way to filter.

Worse yet – most games default to the first resolution on the list.

Previously:

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