Day: 7 June 2022

Parts Unknown ⇥ anthonybourdain.tumblr.com

I have previously linked to this piece from Anthony Bourdain, but I keep coming back to it. It is from 2013 and just eight paragraphs long, without a single wasted word:

That the world is, in fact, filled with mostly good and decent people who are simply doing the best they can. Everybody, it turns out, is proud of their food (when they have it). They enjoy sharing it with others (if they can). They love their children. They like a good joke. Sitting at the table has allowed me a privileged perspective and access that others, looking principally for “the story,” do not, I believe, always get.

Anyone may quibble with the luxury Bourdain enjoyed of showing up to someone’s house or restaurant with a camera crew in tow — of course they were willing to be nice. But “nice” is not substantial. The skill Bourdain had was to engender the trust of telling things as they really were. That often meant confronting the privilege he enjoyed, embodying the kind of political incorrectness anyone honest and self-aware enough ought to. I do not idolize him — I struggle with the concept of having idols at all — but I do think Bourdain at his best is something aspirational for any of us.

And he wrote with stunning lucidity.

Alrighty Then ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Jeff Johnson:

The venerable System Preferences app has been completely redesigned in macOS 13 “The Body” Ventura. Indeed it’s even been renamed to System Settings. The new design of Mac System Settings appears to be based on iPad Settings, and quite frankly, it’s bad. You can say “Ventura is only a beta”, but the problem isn’t some bugs that can be fixed, the problem is the fundamental design that can’t be fixed. I assume if I filed a Feedback asking for the old System Preferences design back, Apple would close my request with the reason “works as designed”. Yet it works badly as designed. To explain why, I’m going to compare Monterey System Preferences with Ventura System Settings.

Some of the changes in this update — like the back button faux hierarchy that I have previously written about — are bumming me out. The mess of layered translucency effects create a muddy visual presence and the number of controls that only reveal themselves on hover are a growing trend. I am not a fan.

I am not as much of a detractor of Apple’s current visual design themes as some, but I worry about stuff like this. They lack the visual clarity and integrity of great Mac software.

So begins another summer of filing dozens of bug reports with the words “insufficient contrast” in each of their titles.

American Data Privacy and Protection Act ⇥ gizmodo.com

Issie Lapowsky, Protocol:

Every single pig in the D.C. metro area took flight Friday when three key bipartisan lawmakers unveiled a draft of their actual, real-life, long-promised, but rarely materializing comprehensive privacy bill.

The draft of the American Data Privacy and Protection Act represents a crucial compromise between Reps. Frank Pallone Jr., Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Sen. Roger Wicker, and would give Americans unprecedented rights over their privacy, including the right to sue tech companies that violate it.

So, has the time for federal privacy law in the U.S. finally come? Come on back down to ground, little piggies. This could take a while.

Shoshana Wodinsky, Gizmodo:

And at least from a brief reading of the 10-pager outlining the bill’s basics, it looks pretty good! Upon a deeper reading though, the thing is… well, it’s not pretty good, or even remotely good. It carves out exemptions for bad bosses and law enforcement officials, while letting data brokers continue buying and selling vast amounts of our personal data with impunity.

I am following U.S. privacy legislation with great interest as it has the potential for worldwide knock-on effects. This bill seems promising on first glance, but Wodinsky documents enough loopholes and flaws to make me question how much it was influenced by anti-privacy industries. It is worrying to see a blanket exemption for data that has been “de-identified”, for example, even though we know that means nothing in terms of privacy protections.

Please try again.

iOS and iPadOS 16 Tidbits ⇥ macstories.net

Federico Viticci of MacStories has written up some first impressions of iOS 16 details. Here is his description of the Home Screen wallpaper settings:

That’s not all though. From the same Settings page, you can click your Home Screen preview and tweak the look of your Home Screen as well. New options for the Home Screen wallpaper include a selection of built-in colors, plus a color picker to choose a different gradient as well as invoke the system-wide color picker. Additionally, for wallpapers that include a texture that may conflict with icon labels on the Home Screen, you can tap a ‘Legibility: Blur’ button to blur the wallpaper and make it easier to read text labels.

I think this is really well done. If you prefer your Home Screen background to be a solid colour or gradients, Apple’s implementation is a nice way of saving you the trouble of keeping that sort of thing in your photo library.

Also:

[…] As I mentioned yesterday, Apple has already implemented Live Activities for Now Playing controls on the Lock Screen, but there’s another one too. Timers on the Lock Screen for iOS 16 are now a Live Activity as well, and they’re displayed as an interactive notification at the bottom of the Lock Screen with buttons to pause and cancel an ongoing timer.

This new timer update looks nice, aside from a hard bounding box around the blur.1 But truly nothing is funnier to me about WWDC every year than not seeing support for multiple timers on iOS. You can set more than one timer on WatchOS and a HomePod — I can set multiple timers on the completely basic oven in my apartment — but the wildly more powerful iPhone? Nope.

  1. FB10042776. ↥︎

Apple Updates Its Human Interface Guidelines ⇥ developer.apple.com

Apple has launched a major update to the HIG, introducing it in a developer news post:

The HIG has merged its platform-specific guidance into a unified document, making it simpler to explore common design approaches while still preserving relevant details about each platform. The overhauled navigation also helps you browse components, technologies, design patterns, and foundational principles: Larger sections include a visual index, while each individual page features links to related resources like videos, articles, and API documentation. You can also search directly within the HIG to find a specific page. And coming later this year, the HIG will sport change logs that record updates and edits as they happen — both for each updated page and for the entire set of guidelines.

While the concept of “merging […] platform-specific guidance” is not comforting to those of us who believe in the right guidance for individual platforms, it is useful for Apple to avoid redundancy. Much of the guidance for text fields, for example, is the same across platforms, so it is clearer to highlight differences rather than repeatedly emphasizing similarities. This should reduce inconsistencies in documentation and improve readability for cross-platform developers.