Month: June 2022

A Visit From CarPlay Future ⇥ theguardian.com

Apple:

CarPlay has fundamentally changed the way people interact with their vehicles, and the next generation of CarPlay goes even further by deeply integrating with a car’s hardware. CarPlay will be able to provide content for multiple screens within the vehicle, creating an experience that is unified and consistent. Deeper integration with the vehicle will allow users to do things like control the radio or change the climate directly through CarPlay, and using the vehicle data, CarPlay will seamlessly render the speed, fuel level, temperature, and more on the instrument cluster. Users will be able to personalize their driving experience by choosing different gauge cluster designs, and with added support for widgets, users will have at-a-glance information from Weather and Music right on their car’s dashboard. More information about the next generation of CarPlay will be shared in the future, and vehicles will start to be announced late next year.

Such an advanced preview — perhaps eighteen months before the first products will become available — is uncharacteristic for Apple, but makes some sense in this case. Some commentators have speculated why automakers would permit Apple to take over every display surface in their vehicles. Early notice could help put pressure on manufacturers who have not yet committed support while ensuring Apple controls the narrative about this unveiling.

Andrew J. Hawkins, the Verge:

This isn’t the first time Apple has promised multiscreen CarPlay interoperability. When it unveiled iOS 13 in September 2019, the company promised a major overhaul of CarPlay to bring it more in line with Google’s Android Auto.

This included the ability to support various-sized screens and display information on two different screens in the vehicle at the same time. “Automakers can develop CarPlay systems that show information in a second screen, such as in a cluster or HUD [heads up display],” the company said at the time. (Although that sentence no longer appears on Apple’s iOS 13 support page.)

Alex Hern, the Guardian:

The old joke was that cars were sold on the feel of the door slamming shut, rather than passenger safety or fuel economy; the new truth appears to be that more important than either of those are the size and shape of the in-car entertainment system — a fact that Apple is pleased to promote, noting that: “CarPlay is available on over 98% of cars in the US [and] 79% of US buyers would only consider a car that works with CarPlay.”

But not one word of Schubert’s presentation addressed the safety ramifications of fitting ever-larger screens in cars, nor opening up a bevy of customisation options for users. (Apple sent me a holding email and ignored my questions asking if the company had researched the issue before embarking on development.)

I am optimistic about many things that were announced at WWDC this year, but this CarPlay update has me concerned.

I most often walk in Calgary, driving a couple times per week and cycling occasionally in the spring and summer. Frequently, I find myself dodging drivers who are too distracted to be able to remain moving in a straight line, maintain speed, or watch out for others. I am especially aware of this as a pedestrian. I nearly get killed or injured more often than I would like, no matter how safe I am.

There are only a handful of studies that have attempted to assess the safety of phone mirroring software. One in 2018, with just twenty-four participants, found CarPlay and Android Auto to be safer than carmakers’ own systems for things like changing songs or getting directions, but a 2020 study with forty participants found phone-based systems impair drivers as much as legal alcohol limits. At best, these systems are probably better than manufacturers’ own, but still create significant distraction for drivers and elevated risk for others.

I have noticed this for myself, too. I use CarPlay in a car with a touch screen located in the centre stack. It is nice to be able to play music from my own library instead of listening to the radio or fiddling with a CD changer. But actually finding music in my moderately large library or on Apple Music is a task I reserve for a passenger or when I am parked. It is simply too dangerous to be glancing at artist and album titles while driving in most normal conditions.

Please do not text and drive.

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.

WeatherKit ⇥ developer.apple.com

Like you, I suspect, I am still digesting today’s biggest announcements. But one little one that may have slipped between the cracks is a new API called WeatherKit. It is a privacy-friendly way of displaying local weather information built around Apple’s acquisition of Dark Sky, which Apple announced today will completely shut down on March 31, 2023; it has made available transition instructions.

Apple previously announced Dark Sky would be shut down at the end of this year, so it is giving developers a few more months to complete their work. I want my points for being right about WeatherKit last June; I think I was the first to write about the existence of that private framework.

Missed Payments, Rising Interest Rates Put ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ to the Test ⇥ wsj.com

AnnaMaria Andriotis and John Stensholt, in a Wall Street Journal article published last week:

Payment plans that allow shoppers to split up the cost of things such as clothing, makeup and home appliances were all the rage last year. The companies behind the plans saw their valuations surge. Scores of retailers rushed to add them at checkout. Block Inc. (formerly Square Inc.) in August announced a roughly $29 billion all-stock deal for Afterpay, one of the biggest companies in the business.

But late payments or related losses are piling up for the industry’s biggest players — Affirm Holdings Inc., Afterpay and Zip Co. Their borrowing costs, meanwhile, are rising. Buy-now-pay-later companies sometimes rely on credit lines whose rates rise and fall along with the Federal Reserve’s benchmark rate, which has risen 0.75 percentage point so far this year and is poised to go up even more.

Apple today announced Apple Pay Later which, like these services, breaks a larger payment over several months with zero added expense for the buyer. Joshua Bote of SFGate reported last month finding these services marketed heavily to younger consumers, some of whom struggled with increasing debt loads.

Choices, Choices

This Washington Post article by Geoffrey Fowler about privacy policies caught my eye. Researchers acknowledge we do not read them and, thus, Fowler argues we should reform laws to encourage abolishing the make-work practice of clicking “I Agree” every time we sign up for anything. I thought this was a promising perspective, closely aligning with my own thoughts. But the more I re-read Fowler’s argument, the more I realized how inconsistent this article is because of its failure to grapple with core truths.

Privacy policies, as Fowler writes, often harbour vague and innocent-seeming language that can give companies wide latitude over the use of private data. Fowler suggests a law of some kind to encourage a reduced level of data collection:

But to protect our privacy, the best place to start is for companies to simply collect less data. “Maybe don’t do things that need a million words of explanation? Do it differently,” said Slaughter. “You can’t abuse, misuse, leverage data that you haven’t collected in the first place.”

Apps and services should only collect the information they really need to provide that service — unless we opt in to let them collect more, and it’s truly an option.

I’m not holding my breath that companies will do that voluntarily, but a federal privacy law would help. […]

Sounds great. There absolutely should be a law that notifies people of how their data will be collected and allows more granular control. Only thing, though — here is what Fowler writes a couple dozen paragraphs earlier in this same article:

Some government efforts have made things worse. Thanks to a recent European law, lots of websites also now ask you to “opt in” to their use of tracking technology, throwing a bunch of dials on the screen before you can even see if it’s worth looking at.

I do not see how Fowler’s proposal, quoted before, materially differs from GDPR, which mandates a similar notify-and-consent policy and encourages data minimization.

GDPR benefits websites which do not collect identifiable information because they do not need to ask for permission. But the ad tech machine is a needy beast, and many websites could not shake their practices and, so, they gave visitors a choice. Fowler:

Many people, including a generation setting up their first tablets and smartphones, just click “agree” to everything because they think privacy is a lost cause. “We’re teaching everyone the wrong thing,” said Mika Shah, co-acting general counsel of the tech nonprofit Mozilla.

There is nothing to suggest another piece of legislation will be any different if its main goal is to allow people to pick-and-choose what they opt into. That the many of the most common kinds of cookie consent forms are not compliant with GDPR is almost besides the point — again, there is no reason to believe a similar American law would be followed more meticulously.

That is not to say that such a law would be useless. European users have their location collected half as often by real-time bidders compared to American users. Should we be happy about that? Sure; I would welcome halving the data available to the ad tech industry worldwide. But it is not as effective as Fowler makes it out to be, and it makes for an internally inconsistent argument.

Fowler’s other suggestion is similarly flawed:

Second, we need to replace the theater of pressing “agree” with real choices about our privacy.

[…]

Even better, technology could help us manage our choices. Cranor suggests data disclosures could be coded to be read by machines. Companies already do this for financial information, and the TLDR Act would require consistent tags on privacy information, too. Then your computer could act kind of like a butler, interacting with apps and websites on your behalf.

Picture Siri as a butler who quizzes you briefly about your preferences and then does your bidding. The privacy settings on an iPhone already let you tell all the different apps on your phone not to collect your location. For the past year, they’ve also allowed you to ask apps not to track you.

As has been repeatedly reported, App Tracking Transparency has been less effective than it initially seemed. Developers flout Apple’s rules and, even when perfectly followed, the policies do not prohibit aggregate tracking.

Fowler writes about other possible solutions for addressing privacy policies. Standardized labels and tables, like those used for App Store apps but legally binding, are one such idea. But this is a way to permit continued unnecessary data collection obscured by simplified language and diagrams.

As long as it is left up to companies to negotiate individually with users and nominally inform them about their privacy sacrifices, this problem will never go away. There is just too much money encouraging the worst behaviour. The only thing stopping this is to require this industry to rebuild, from scratch, with privacy at the core — and the only way that happens is to destroy, with law, any incentives for collecting, merging, and sharing incidental or behavioural user data. Only then can we consider ending the ridiculous practice of requiring a separate, wildly permissive contract for every digital product and service we use.

Google Temporarily Disables RCS Ads in India Due to Spam ⇥ theverge.com

Allison Johnson, the Verge:

The ads in question were delivered by way of RCS’ business messaging feature, which allows verified businesses to send messages to customers that go beyond a typical text, with images and interactive features. Google pitches it as a way for brands to communicate with established customers — messages you might actually want on your phone. But people using RCS in India have experienced it quite differently. They’ve seen frequent messages coming in from businesses pushing credit cards and gambling apps, among other things.

Google says this feature is intended for “credit card fraud alerts, flight status updates, and package delivery notifications”, but that same page also highlights ad campaigns from a financial services provider and a chain of auto dealerships. While there is nothing preventing businesses from sending mass SMS messages, RCS legitimizes text message ads, with Google boasting engagement rates from twice to seventeen times greater than SMS. In that auto dealership case study, Google boasts:

Not only were the immediate RCS Business Messaging results impressive, but the campaign also provided BodemerAuto with actionable data. The company was able to glean information from message interactions to build customer profiles that they will use to create more precise, personalized ads.

Marketers may be drooling at the possibilities. I doubt many of the rest of us are so thrilled. Maybe there are more reasons beyond its obstinate reputation for Apple’s reluctance to adopt RCS.

The iPad’s Changing Identity ⇥ birchtree.me

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

The iPad’s next major software update, iPadOS 16, will have a redesigned multitasking interface that makes it easier to see what apps are open and switch between tasks, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the changes aren’t yet public. It also will let users resize app windows and offer new ways for users to handle multiple apps at once.

Matt Birchler:

This is why I can sit here and see a rumor that the iPad is getting more powerful multitasking this year and not freak out about the iPad losing its soul. Time and time again, Apple has added feature that used to only exist on Macs, that people insisted should not come to the iPad, and now we love them on the iPad. Absolutely nothing in the history of the iPad tells me that this time will be any different.

Well said.

One reason I think it has taken so long for the iPad to begin feeling like a fully capable device is that Apple has avoided the allure of jamming MacOS interactions into the iPadOS interface. When it added cursor support to iPadOS, it was in a way that fully appreciated the context of the platform. There are many Mac things I wish were implemented in iPadOS, but I do not expect them to mindlessly be jammed into a touch-first system.

Who was ‘The Enemy’ in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’? ⇥ maxread.substack.com

Max Read (there may be spoilers in this article if you are one of the nine people who wants to see “Top Gun: Maverick” but has not yet):

If anything, Top Gun: Maverick takes this wonderfully American indifference even further than the original. While the bad guys in the original Top Gun displayed some recognizable geographical and visual markers — aviators fly Russian planes (fictional MiG-28s) with Chinese markings in the Indian Ocean — the “rogue state” targeted by the naval aviators in Top Gun: Maverick is almost fully generic. We don’t know where in the world it’s located; its jets are never identified by model; and we can’t see or make out any markings. It’s only ever called “The Enemy” by the Navy officers.

This felt to me like the biggest fourth wall breaker in the movie, but I also appreciated how generic “the enemy” was. This is not a real conflict and there is no need to build the plot around today’s geopolitics. Even in the world created by the film, there is only exactly enough depth created to maintain the story. But, notable, and weird. Great piece by Read.

Google Struggles to Explain How It Is Merging Meet and Duo ⇥ arstechnica.com

Javier Soltero of Google:

To support the millions of users who rely on our technology for video calls and meetings, we’ve made deep investments in both Google Duo and Google Meet. For those using Duo as their cross-platform video calling app, we’ve introduced new features like group calls for up to 32 people, the addition of doodles, masks, and fun effects with family mode, and video calling on tablets, foldables, smart devices, and TVs. And for those using Google Meet, we’ve introduced more than 100 features and improvements since we made Meet available to everyone in 2020. This includes a more intuitive interface, virtual backgrounds and effects, live captions and features that help people feel seen and heard, like auto-light adjustments and noise cancelation. We’ve also made quality and reliability improvements as well as introducing new moderation controls to help keep meetings safe and productive. Outside of video conferencing for work, we continue to see millions of people around the globe use video meetings to host game nights, parent-teacher conferences, and gatherings of their community groups.

[…]

In the coming weeks, we’re adding all the Google Meet features to the Duo app, so users can easily schedule a video meeting at a time that works for everyone, or continue using video calling to instantly connect with a person or group. Later this year, we’ll rename the Duo app to Google Meet, our single video communications service across Google that is available to everyone at no-cost.

What a bizarre strategy; then again, it is no stranger than Google’s entire messaging and communications strategy. It seems that Duo has the most modern infrastructure, but Meet has better branding, so the company is taking features and the name from the latter and jamming it into the former. Later in the press release, Google says this is a “transition from Duo to Meet” — why not use that language through the entire thing and save us from such unnecessary obfuscation?

Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica:

The move comes after Google unified its communication teams under Google Workspace VP and GM Javier Soltero (the author of Google’s blog post) in 2020. Google has not clarified which products are being unified, but it should mean that Google Hangouts, Google Meet, Google Chat, Google Messages, Google Duo, and Google Voice will all live under one roof.

Hangouts was finally deprecated in April after years of promises to migrate to Meet and Chat. After Duo’s discontinuation or rebranding — whatever you want to call it — it will mean Google will be left with just four communications apps plus the entirely separate chat feature in Google Photos, down from six or seven just a couple of years ago.

Guardian Reporter Alex Hern’s Identity Was Used to Flog a Cryptocurrency Scam ⇥ theguardian.com

Alex Hern, the Guardian:

On Monday morning I woke up to a pair of odd DMs on Twitter. “Sir, Greetings, Do you have any information about Dejitaru Tsuka token,” asked one “Dr. Joker”; another had a similar question: “Yo dude what do you know about Tsuka.”

I’d not heard about the cryptocurrency, and a quick scan suggested it wasn’t worth my time: it was a classic “shitcoin”, a newly created token with no reason for existence beyond buying low and selling high.

[…]

So I assumed the DMs were the “pump” phase of pump and dump, and ignored them. But then I got a follow-up message, asking me if I was behind an email address “hernalex@proton.me”, that the developer of the Tsuka coin had posted on to the blockchain, with the note “encrypted Guardian contact”. One buyer had emailed the address, and, thinking they were speaking to me, asked if they knew anything about the coin. A one-word reply, “Yes”, helped push a buying frenzy — of sorts.

The way of the future.

Apple Music, Now With Ads ⇥ macworld.com

Jim Dalrymple, retired but not disappeared, on Twitter:

Here is a screenshot of the @AppleMusic ad while playing Apple’s own classic rock station. Make a free tier or get the fucking ads off Apple Music. Apple will say it’s “discovery” or some bullshit. It’s an ad.

Apple:

Are there commercials?

Apple Music has zero ads.

Oh really?

Jason Snell, Macworld:

Now, couldn’t Jim solve this problem by keeping his finger close to the skip button (or the equivalent keyboard shortcut), so that when a promo appeared in his radio show, he could just skip over it? Sure, although I’ll point out that you’re not always in a context where you can immediately force a skip–if you’re nowhere near the remote, or your keyboard, or if you don’t want to be forced to shout at Siri to go to the next track.

But that misses the point entirely. Whether we listen to music to focus while writing, relax at the end of a long day, or anything in between, it’s disruptive to be taken out of the music and forced to listen to an ad. It doesn’t matter if the ad is for other Apple Music programs, or the Kars for Kids song, or even an offer to give away free gold bars – an ad is an interruption no matter its content.

If Apple wants more people to listen to its radio shows, it should start by making them easier to find and subscribe to, not by adding interruptions.

Sheryl Sandberg Is Leaving Facebook ⇥ reuters.com

Katie Paul, Reuters:

Meta Platforms Inc Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, whose close partnership with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg powered the growth of the world’s biggest social network, is leaving the company after 14 years, she said in a Facebook post on Wednesday.

[…]

Chief Growth Officer Javier Olivan will take over as chief operating officer, Zuckerberg said in a separate Facebook post, although he added that he did not plan to replace Sandberg’s role directly within the company’s existing structure.

Sandberg stayed at Facebook through the relentless onslaught of self-inflicted scandals and malfeasance that have marked the company’s recent memory. But the writing was on the wall after Facebook posted its first decline in daily active users earlier this year.

This announcement also comes about a year after Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang published “An Ugly Truth”, their exploration of Facebook’s many failures since the mid-2010s. The book contained little new reporting — its most outrageous moments were mostly public knowledge — but it did contain an exploration of the reportedly fraught relationship between Sandberg and Zuckerberg.

For what it is worth, both executives apparently said nice things about each other in their respective announcements. But both were published behind Facebook’s login wall which means I, and anyone else without a Facebook account, cannot read them. Neither has been filed with the SEC either. I am shocked — shocked — to see behaviour like this from a publicly-traded company.

Tim Hortons App Found to Have Illegally Collected Location Data ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Susan Krashinsky Robertson and Colin Freeze, the Globe and Mail:

Canada’s largest fast-food chain violated privacy laws by tracking people who used its app, gathering their location data hundreds of times a day — even when the app was not in use.

That is the result of a joint investigation by Canadian privacy officials into Tim Hortons’ surveillance of customers through an app installed on millions of mobile phones in this country. But while the coffee-and-doughnuts chain owned by Toronto-based Restaurant Brands International Inc. will have to make changes to its privacy practices, it faces no fines or financial penalties for the breach.

This is the most Canadian story imaginable. Tim Hortons, our crappy coffee franchise that has somehow usurped any semblance of national identity, collected the location information of millions of the country’s most committed customers every few minutes, and its penalty is to say sorry. Embarrassing.