Search Results for: "color"

Scam ‘A.I.’ Apps and Shady Developers in the App Store ⇥ privacyis1st.medium.com

Alex Kleber:

In the last 30 days, I have been closely monitoring the Mac App Store and have made a disturbing discovery. In the midst of the OpenAI frenzy, several apps have surfaced that are copying the iconic OpenAI logo and color scheme in order to mislead unsuspecting MacOS App Store users. But that’s not all — I also found that some developers are abusing Apple’s Developer Agreements by spamming multiple accounts and flooding the store with nearly identical applications. […]

Kleber notes these apps are paywalled with “no close button”. That is not quite true: in very small text, the developer offers the option to “Continue with free plan”, but it is highly misleading. This should be the sort of thing Apple polices against in the App Store. These apps ride a rising tide of interest in a specific product, they offer in-app purchases, and they appear to be duplicative.

These apps are all still available in the Mac App Store, by the way, and this is not the first time fake ChatGPT apps have climbed the charts. In fact, upon opening the App Store on my iPhone, the first thing I saw was an ad on the search page for an app which looks, at first glance, like an official OpenAI app — same colours, similar logo, and a description with a conspicuous use of the word “Open”. As of writing, it is the ninth most popular app in the Productivity category — and, yes, of course it offers paid subscriptions.

Dril Is Just This Guy Named Paul ⇥ theringer.com

Nate Rogers interviewed Paul Dochney, better known to everyone as dril, for the Ringer:

Perhaps no artist has done more to push forward the conversation about how social media can exist in the artistic realm than Jacob Bakkila, who ran Horse_ebooks as part of a larger artistic collaboration with Thomas Bender. The Horse_ebooks project was deliberately ended in 2013 — “No one wants to work on a painting forever,” Bakkila said at the time — and Bakkila, who now works in advertising in addition to his ongoing work as a multimedia artist, spoke thoughtfully to me over video call about the promise of art in the digital landscape. But of anyone I talked to, he was the most concerned about the risk of overintellectualizing Dril’s act — of being the type of person who, in his analogy, would study photosynthesis but forget to watch “the leaves change color.”

“He’s a poster,” Bakkila said. “And I think that there’s a great beauty to that because it’s also the native language of the internet. … It’s what the internet is designed to do, is to let you post on it. And it goes deeper — in that sense, it’s more profound than comedy, although obviously he’s very funny. And it’s more profound than art, although obviously he’s artistic. But I think first and foremost, he’s a poster. And he’s the best one we have.”

Agreed, obviously. Do not miss the deranged New Yorker-esque cartoons based on classic dril tweets.

A Vatican-Sized Flag Mystery

Reddit user “horizontalhole” discovered something curious:

From 2017–2022 the Vatican flag SVG on Wikimedia Commons contained a mistake. You can now tell which flag manufacturers/emoji platforms used the file.

I found this post via the Depths of Wikipedia Twitter account. Once you see the most noticeable difference — the tiara in the Wikimedia Commons version is filled red while the official flag is white — you begin to see examples everywhere. It seems like a bunch of people in Iraq in 2021 were waving the Wikimedia version because a print shop made a bunch of them. It is also present in images from Thailand, Switzerland, and crowds at the Vatican itself.

But here is where things got weird: the version with a red filled tiara is also present on the Popemobile in a visit to Peru, held outside the Pope’s plane in Rome, was raised outside the Vatican embassy in Italy, and hung at a Catholic Conference building in the United States. In addition to the red tiara, they also have the brighter yellow fill in the key of the 2017 Wikimedia variant. While members of the public may have purchased a faulty flag, it seems unlikely to me for representatives of the Vatican to be using a knockoff. And if you go back far enough in the Getty Images archive, you will see the red variant in photos from Mexico City in 2016 and outside the United Nations in 2015 — both taken before the flag on Wikimedia was changed to the apparently incorrect version.

It gets stranger still. The flag shown on one official Vatican webpage about its history shows only the white-filled tiara, but the cord element below the keys is shown in red, which differs from another official Vatican page where it is shown in white. A translated version of the latter page says nothing about what colour each element is supposed to be aside from the yellow and white field.

Luckily, there is a definitive book by Rev. William M. Becker about the flags of the Vatican. On page 99, there is a picture of the flag from an appendix to the Vatican’s 2000 Fundamental Law, about which the Vatican says:

The flag of Vatican City State is constituted by two fields divided vertically, a yellow one next to the staff and a white one, and bears in the latter the tiara with the keys, all according to the model which forms attachment A of the present Law.

So it is settled, right? The version shown — which has a tiara in white, red-filled corded elements, and gold colours which differ from the yellow of the field — is the only official flag of Vatican City. Case closed?

Nope. On page 103, Becker writes:

State flags flown by Vatican buildings follow the basic constitutional design, but vary widely in details such as proportions, color shades, and emblem details. […]

Indeed, Becker includes a series of flags with variations in the colour used for the keys, the cord element, and the tiara, in the 1980s through 2013. Even well past the publication of what the Vatican deemed its official flag, versions shown in and around Vatican City have differences in the shading of each of these elements. Becker goes on to write that these “variations suggest that Vatican authorities could clarify the flag’s details more precisely”, and laments how “local flagmakers often rely on questionable sources (e.g., Wikipedia)” (106).

It does seem that, officially, the version of the Vatican flag with a white-filled tiara is the most correct option. But even within Vatican City itself and in official use, there is considerable variation. Perhaps most relevant to the original post, it is not necessarily true that a Vatican flag with a red-filled tiara is derived from the 2017–2022 Wikimedia image. However, with a more correct version in the world’s most-used encyclopaedia, it may be a productive case of citogenesis.

Colorado Catholic Group Bought Data to Out Priests Using Dating Apps ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Michelle Boorstein and Heather Kelly, Washington Post:

A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country.

[…]

One report prepared for bishops says the group’s sources are data brokers who got the information from ad exchanges, which are sites where ads are bought and sold in real time, like a stock market. The group cross-referenced location data from the apps and other details with locations of church residences, workplaces and seminaries to find clergy who were allegedly active on the apps, according to one of the reports and also the audiotape of the group’s president.

Boorstein and Kelly say some of those behind this group also outed a priest two years ago using similar tactics, which makes it look like a test case for this more comprehensive effort. As they write, a New York-based Reverend said at the time it was justified to expose priests who had violated their celibacy pledge. That is a thin varnish on what is clearly an effort to discriminate against queer members of the church. These operations have targeted clergy by using data derived almost exclusively by the use of gay dating apps.

Data brokers have long promised the information they supply is anonymized but, time and again, this is shown to be an ineffective means of protecting users’ privacy. That ostensibly de-identified data was used to expose a specific single priest’s use of Grindr in 2021, and the organization in question has not stopped. Furthermore, nothing would prevent this sort of exploitation by groups based outside the United States, which may be able to obtain similar data to produce the same — or worse — outcomes.

This is some terrific reporting by Boorstein and Kelly.

More Fulsome 2022 Report Card Comments ⇥ mjtsai.com

I may have already linked to this year’s instalment of the Six Colors Apple Report Card, but I did not expand my commentary beyond what Jason Snell quoted in the piece, or even reveal what I graded each category. I am still not going to do that in full — see if you can guess which of these is mine — but there are a couple of things I think are worth expanding upon.

Michael Tsai:

Software Quality: 1 Most things feel kind of buggy, and the Mac is in a particularly bad state, with a large number of small bugs (many persisting for years) and some debilitating larger ones. I’ve documented some of them here.

Federico Viticci gave software quality two points and was similarly underwhelmed:

Most of my concerns about Apple’s software quality this year are about the poor, unfinished, confusing state they shipped Stage Manager in. I’m not going to rehash all that. Instead, I’d also point out that I was hoping to see more improvements on the Shortcuts front in 2022, and instead the app was barely touched last year. It received some new actions for built-in apps, but no deeper integration with the system. I continue to experience crashes and odd UI glitches when working on more complex shortcuts, and I’d like to see more polish and stability in the app.

I gave software quality three points out of five, and I was being generous to a perhaps unfair extent. I have a hard time knowing how to grade this category and I always regret whatever score I choose because it is a mixed bag within Apple’s ecosystem and across all software I use regularly.

In 2022, I filed something like two bug reports every week solely against Apple’s own applications and operating systems. I am not a developer, so none of these are problems with APIs or documentation; all are from a user’s perspective. Some of them are not so significant, but contribute to a general feeling of unfinishedness — for example, if you initiate Siri in MacOS Ventura, you will see a tiny shadow in the upper-right of the screen, as though there is a window in the foreground.1 Sometimes, it is a goofy bug in Safari that beachballs your Mac. But a lot of the time, I find bugs that make me wonder if anyone actually tested the product before shipping it — “death by a thousand cuts” kind of stuff. Apple News links which point to stories unavailable in News where I live, but which are available on the web, are a dead end;2 AirPlay remains unreliable unless you set your Apple TV to never sleep;3 Siri sometimes asks me which contact details to use for iMessage when asking to send a message to recent contacts.4 These are just a few of the bugs I reported in the past several months. Apple News has used inscrutable URLs since it launched and there is still no way to preview what a channel’s icon or logo looks like — both are bugs I reported eight years ago.

Is all of that deserving of a lower score? Probably, but I have a hard time figuring out whether this is abnormally poor or merely worse than it ought to be. I seem to be living and working in a sea of bugs no matter whether I am using my Macs at home, the Windows PC at work, Adobe’s suite of products, or my thermostat. It is disheartening to realize we have built our modern world on unstable, warranty-free systems.

Stephen Hackett:

Developer Relations: 2/5

It’s harder to think of a harder self-own than Apple’s rollout of additional App Store ads in late 2022. The App Store was instantly flooded with ads for low-brow titles like gambling and hook-up apps.

I am pretty sure I did not score developer relations, but the sentences above gave me some awful flashbacks. One positive developer note this year was the so-called “reader” app link entitlement. That is right: in the year 2022, developers are permitted to show an external link for user registration — if Apple deems them eligible. It is progress, however slow.

  1. FB11897294 ↥︎

  2. FB10908000; this Apple News link still goes nowhere for me. ↥︎

  3. FB10710546 ↥︎

  4. FB11699482 ↥︎

Apple’s 2022 Report Card ⇥ sixcolors.com

Thoughtful commentary this year from a panel of smart people, and I also wrote some things. The year-over-year comparison chart at the top is telling: a couple of bummer categories, a few outstanding ones, and stagnating grades in several.

Update: I missed this at first, but it is my favourite thing in this report card:

Adam Engst wrote: “Everyone involved with System Settings for Ventura should be reassigned to work on fax drivers.”

Good one.

User Stylesheets Are Still Pretty Great and Should Be More Widely Supported

Have you thought about your user stylesheet lately? I cannot blame you if you have not, especially if you have no idea what I mean when I write “user stylesheet”. Here is Jennifer Kyrnin’s great explanation of what that is:

In the past, the internet was filled with bad web design, unreadable fonts, colors that clashed, and nothing adapted to fit the screen size. At that time, web browsers allowed users to write CSS style sheets that the browser used to override the styling choices made by page designers. This user style sheet set the font at a consistent size and set pages to display a specified color background. It was all about consistency and usability.

As Kyrnin writes, web designers usually do a better job these days, and most browsers no longer support user stylesheets by default. Google removed them from Chrome nine years ago and they were made optional in Firefox in 2019. But Safari, my browser of choice, still makes user stylesheets easily visible and, if you have the inclination, I recommend its use for a low-effort way of blocking irritations and overriding bad design choices.

For example, while I frequently use and appreciate the services of the Internet Archive, and the reporting of the Intercept and ProPublica, I find their modal nags to be more intrusive than necessary. So I have this section in my user stylesheet to override those elements:

#donato,
html>body #donato,
#donate_banner,
html>body #donate_banner,
/* same for the intercept */
#third-party--viewport-takeover,
html>body #third-party--viewport-takeover{
    display: none !important;
    height: 0 !important;
    position: absolute !important;
    left: -99999em !important;
}

.InterceptWrapper .Post-body--truncated{
    max-height: none !important;
    overflow: visible !important;
}

.InterceptWrapper .Post-body--truncated:before{
    content: unset !important;
}

/* propublica nag */

body.app iframe.syndicated-modal{
    display: none !important;
}

I pulled these specific selectors by finding the bothersome elements on these websites using Safari’s Web Inspector.

For those of you with some CSS knowledge, the above rules might look like overkill. The logic of including both display: none and left: -99999em seems to make no sense. The only explanation I have is that some of these rules are more applicable to the Internet Archive donation nag while others apply to the Intercept’s email box.

Also, this stylesheet has the cruft of fifteen years of new rules and changing websites, so that may also be a factor.

Here is another example of the power of user stylesheets: you know those awful “sign in with Google” prompts that became more aggressive this year? You can turn them off if you remain signed into your Google account, but you can also style them out of view:

#credential_picker_container,
iframe[title="Sign in with Google Dialog"]{
    display: none;
    position: relative;
}

This is the kind of lightweight solution that I love. It is unnerving to know Google has so much power over the web that it offers users the trade-off of staying logged into their account or be nagged on major websites that offer Google’s login option. It is rewarding to defeat it with five lines of CSS.

But user stylesheets have drawbacks and are evidently from an earlier era of the web. The ways you might employ user styles today are often similar to browser extensions like StopTheMadness or any number of ad blockers. Modern extensions are far more powerful, too, as rules can be tailored to individual websites or run globally. The biggest advantage to the user stylesheet is also its Achilles’ heel: it only works globally, meaning the same rules are applied to all websites. That means your CSS selectors need to be highly specific. If another website has the app class on the <body> element which contains an <iframe> with the syndicated-modal class, it will also get hidden in the same way as it does for me on ProPublica. Finally, many modern websites are built with ugly generated markup which can change any time the code base is updated.

Still, I rely on this user stylesheet to keep my sanity when browsing the web today. Unlike browser extensions, there are no security or privacy questions to worry about, and it is entirely controlled by the user. I saved my stylesheet in my iCloud Drive so it syncs between my Macs; Safari for iOS does not support user styles. It is a feature that will probably be deprecated across all browsers sooner than I would like, but I will be using it until that day arrives. If you have even a passing knowledge of CSS, I encourage you to experiment with its possibilities.

My Social Media Is in an Mac App, or It’s Nowhere ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell:

[…] But if Mastodon gets enough community gravity to make me want to pay more attention, I’ll need an app. There are a lot of Mastodon client apps out there, and I’ve tried several of them, but none of them are really good enough or polished enough for me to use regularly. The truth is that modern Twitter clients have set the bar pretty high.

I am already finding this the biggest limitation to my adoption of Mastodon on the Mac. There are a few great iOS clients — I have been using Mammoth and I like it a lot — but I have not found a delightful native client for MacOS. I have found enough people to follow that my timeline is buzzing. What I am missing is Mac window chrome around it and an icon in my Dock.

Hundreds of Drones to Swarm New York Skyline for Candy Crush Advertisement ⇥ gothamist.com

Jake Offenhartz, Gothamist:

At least 500 drones will depart the shores of New Jersey on Thursday evening, flickering over the horizon in a choreographed dance meant to evoke the experience of swiping colorful treats on a phone screen.

Promising a “surreal takeover of New York City’s skyline,” the fleet will pulse with LED lights as it serves miles of Lower Manhattan with an aerial advertisement for the mobile video game, Candy Crush.

This is not the first time something like this has been done with drones and, as Offenhartz documents, it is not even the first time over New York. Surely little is in the greater public interest than looking up at the night sky and being reminded of Candy Crush.

Apple Is Still Selling About Half Its Macs to People Who Have Never Owned One Before ⇥ sixcolors.com

Tim Cook, via Jason Snell’s transcript of comments made during today’s quarterly earnings call:

[…] Importantly, our investment in the category has attracted both upgraders and customers new to Mac, and helped our install base reach an all time high. In fact, we set a quarterly record for upgraders, where nearly half of customers buying Mac during the quarter were new to the device.

[…]

The other thing that I should mention is that about two-thirds of the Apple Watches that we sold were to customers that had not previously owned an Apple Watch. And so we’re still very much selling to new customers here, which is very, very good for future.

No matter how big Apple gets, it is still a little surprising to me every time the company announces that half its Mac buyers are new. It has said that for years, and it is still true today after racking up its best ever Mac sales quarter. Undoubtably, that is why it just had a record quarter, but it demonstrates how far the Mac user base has grown and can continue to do so.

Two Great MacOS 13 Ventura Reviews ⇥ arstechnica.com

When iPadOS gets released, I read Federico Viticci’s review. When a new version of MacOS is shipped, I rely on Andrew Cunningham of Ars Technica and Jason Snell of Six Colors to tell me the good, the bad, and the buggy.

Choice excerpts from Cunningham’s review:

Suffice it to say that my expectations for the Mac version of Stage Manager — available as an off-by-default optional feature in Control Center or the Desktop & Dock settings — were not high when I finally decided to bite the bullet in a near-final Ventura beta. So imagine my surprise when Stage Manager on a Mac worked — and worked pretty well. And I actually kind of liked it.

[…]

Comparing the night-and-day smoothness and stability of these two features with the same name, it becomes clear that Apple simply bit off more than it could chew with Stage Manager on iPadOS. On the Mac, it’s a new interface on top of a bunch of technologies that already existed. On iPadOS, Apple needed to implement not just the basic Stage Manager interface but a new way for users to interact with “windows” on a “desktop”; a new way for open iPad apps to communicate with each other; and a way for apps to spawn multiple instances, virtual memory swapping, and actual multi-monitor support on a device that has no idea how to handle the idea of “multiple screens” because it has never had them before.

[…]

That [System Preferences] changes in Ventura, which kicks System Preferences to the curb in favor of System Settings, an app with almost all the same functionality that has been rejiggered to more closely resemble the Settings app on an iPhone or iPad. And it’s not just the app — throughout Ventura, the “Preferences” menu item in most first-party Mac apps has been changed to “Settings.”

[…]

When sharing items from the iCloud Drive folder in the Finder, the Share sheet will let you choose whether to send a copy of a selected file or folder to someone or to share it via iCloud so that multiple people can access and edit the file. Weirdly, selecting a folder anywhere else in the Finder also gives you a “Collaborate” option, but when you try to select it, the system tells you to move the folder to iCloud Drive first. I don’t know whether this is a bug or an ad for iCloud Drive that is working as intended.

I will miss “Preferences”; the word “Settings” feels comparatively mechanical. (Update: Apparently, you can revert this change if you are so inclined.)

This year’s Mac hardware compatibility chart is giving me mild anxiety. My Intel iMac is now one of the oldest models officially supported by MacOS Ventura, and I have known it will become unsupported sooner rather than later ever since Apple launched announced the transition to ARM. I bought it less than four years ago and it is still a fast computer. It is hard to believe it will soon be placed on Apple’s vintage Macs list.

And from Snell’s:

Just these choices make System Settings a usability disaster. It’s good that there’s a search box at the top of the settings list, because the best way to use the app is forget that it has any organizational structure and search for what you want. It would actually be less confusing if Apple removed all pretense of a structure and just had the app feature a single pane with a search box and nothing else.

Some of this confusion could have been resolved with a clear re-think about which settings go where. Someone at Apple could have sat down and outlined a sensible hierarchy for settings, but that clearly didn’t happen. Settings are scattered all over the place, in locations that make very little sense, frequently because they got attached there 10 or 15 years ago in System Preferences.

It sounds like many of the individual bugs spotted in beta seeds have been addressed, but the core concept remains fundamentally flawed. I am obviously willing to learn new things and see what I like about the Ventura way, but both these reviews worry me when it comes to an app I use infrequently but urgently.

Great new default Desktop Picture, though. Wait, excuse me — Wallpaper. You know, for the wall that is on your Desktop.

Sponsor: Unread, an RSS Reader ⇥ goldenhillsoftware.com

Unread screenshot

Thank you to Golden Hill Software and Unread for this week’s sponsorship.

Unread is an RSS reader for iPhone and iPad with beautiful typography, comfortable gesture-based navigation, and a variety of color themes.

While great websites like Pixel Envy provide RSS feeds with full article content, some websites have feeds that contain only article summaries. When displaying articles from summary-only feeds, Unread retrieves full article content from the website. You get the full article in Unread’s native article view without needing to open the website.

Pixel Envy readers will appreciate Unread’s handling of link articles. A link article is an article that links to and comments on an article from another website. Unread displays both the link article and the full text of the other article in its native article view. No need to open a web browser.

Unread provides a share sheet extension making it easy to subscribe to feeds offered by the website you are visiting from Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or just about any other web browser.

Unread has great syncing. Create a free Unread Cloud account to keep multiple devices in sync. Unread also syncs with services such as Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, and NewsBlur.

Additional capabilities include great hardware keyboard navigation on iPad, search functionality, widgets, and VoiceOver support. Most functionality is free. Premium features are available with a subscription. Learn more at Unread’s website or download Unread from the App Store.

Apple’s Parts Bin Mix-And-Match iPad Lineup ⇥ macstories.net

In addition to the aforementioned Apple TV, Apple today announced new versions of the iPad and iPad Pro. Alex Guyot of MacStories rightly describes the resulting product selection as “strange”:

As you’ve probably noticed from the many caveats throughout this article, this iPad lineup has some issues. I’m not sure how this happened, but somehow these product lines just seem all mixed up. The lowest-end iPad (not counting the previous 9th generation iPad, which is currently still for sale) has features that the iPad Pro does not. It also has the same design as all of the other iPads, yet lacks the Apple Pencil 2 support which can be found in the rest of them. The brand-new iPad Pro models do not work with the most feature-rich iPad keyboard that Apple sells. That keyboard costs a full half of the base price of the only iPad that supports it.

Apple probably has the best parts bin of any computer company. Its range of A-series SoCs are powerful and efficient, it has years of great camera modules to pull from, and its bucket of display and materials technologies is second to none. Just about any combination will produce a product its competitors could envy.

So it is bizarre when it appears the teams digging through this bin are not on speaking terms. The flat-sided iPad hardware design feels like it was made to go hand-in-glove with the second-generation Apple Pencil. But the tenth-generation iPad does not support that four year old accessory. The iPad Air is within millimetres of the same size as the tenth-generation iPad, but does not support the new Magic Keyboard Folio accessory because the keyboard relies on a smart connector along the edge instead of on the back.

The iPad product lineup even looks and feels confusing. If you look at pictures of them side-by-side, only the 9th generation sticks out as it retains a home button on the front. The others are all flat-sided slabs of metal and glass and lack consistency in colour choices. And here is a list of current iPads, as of today, as Apple describes them:

  • iPad (9th generation)

  • iPad (10th generation)

  • iPad Mini (6th generation)

  • iPad Air (5th generation)

  • iPad Pro 11-in. (4th generation)

  • iPad Pro 12.9-in. (6th generation)

Are we sure these are the latest generation? The descriptions make the two iPad Pro sizes look like they are not comparable. The iPad Air looks like it could be newer than the 11-inch model, but older than the Mini or either suffix-less model. Or perhaps not. Who can say?

The best differentiator is cost. The list above is arranged from least to most expensive. The two lower-cost models support only the first-generation Apple Pencil, have lower-quality displays that only support an sRGB colour gamut, and have older and slower A-series chips. You have to run all the way up to the biggest iPad Pro if you want the best display. If budget is your sole guidance, you will likely understand this product line better than any names, pictures, descriptions, or blizzard of technical specifications can communicate.

I do not understand this lineup. However, I do understand the appeal of both new iPad models announced today. The new iPad Pros permit users to hover a second-generation Apple Pencil about a centimetre away from the display for pre-touch functionality. It is not the first device to support something like this, but I am looking forward to hearing how it works in practice. The tenth-generation iPad, meanwhile, comes in some of the best colours of any iPad ever, and it does look like great value for many iPad users. It helps bridge the chasm between the lowest-end model and the iPad Air, but I wonder if it also adds confusion by being so similar to both.

I am looking forward to reading the reviews of these that will presumably be published early next week.

Sponsor: Unread, an RSS Reader ⇥ goldenhillsoftware.com

Unread screenshot

Unread is an RSS reader for iPhone and iPad with beautiful typography, comfortable gesture-based navigation, and a variety of color themes.

While great websites like Pixel Envy provide RSS feeds with full article content, some websites have feeds that contain only article summaries. When displaying articles from summary-only feeds, Unread retrieves full article content from the website. You get the full article in Unread’s native article view without needing to open the website.

Pixel Envy readers will appreciate Unread’s handling of link articles. A link article is an article that links to and comments on an article from another website. Unread displays both the link article and the full text of the other article in its native article view. No need to open a web browser.

Unread provides a share sheet extension making it easy to subscribe to feeds offered by the website you are visiting from Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or just about any other web browser.

Unread has great syncing. Create a free Unread Cloud account to keep multiple devices in sync. Unread also syncs with services such as Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, and NewsBlur.

Additional capabilities include great hardware keyboard navigation on iPad, search functionality, widgets, and VoiceOver support. Most functionality is free. Premium features are available with a subscription. Learn more at Unread’s website or download Unread from the App Store.

Most Pantone Libraries Are Being Removed from Adobe Creative Cloud Apps ⇥ helpx.adobe.com

Adobe last month:

Standardized pre-loaded Color libraries, also known as Pantone Color books, will be phased out of Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop in software updates released after August 16, 2022.

After November 2022, the only Pantone Color books that will remain are:

  • Pantone + CYMK Coated

  • Pantone + CYMK Uncoated

  • Pantone + Metallic Coated

This change was supposed to happen in March, but I only saw the notice when I opened Illustrator today. Existing files will apparently be unaffected unless spot channels are used. Designers who rely on Pantone will be required to purchase a separate license at $60 per year. No word on whether Adobe will drop its subscriptions by an equivalent amount to compensate.

A classy move, completely in character for both companies, to reach into users’ machines and remove stuff they had paid for and may rely on because of some licensing spat.

Google Duo Is Back, Kind of, and It Launches One of Two Apps Called Google Meet ⇥ 9to5google.com

You may remember when Google announced in June that it was adding Google Meet features to Google Duo, then renaming the app Google Meet, while preserving its original Google Meet app for some time. It turns out that strategy was not as easy to understand as you might think.

Abner Li, 9to5Google:

At the start of August, an update (172) started rolling out that replaced the blue Duo icon and introduced the four-colored Meet version. After updating and opening the app, Duo disappears from the launcher.

Version 173 today brings back the Google Duo icon for some reason. As such, you have both the Duo and Meet logos in your app drawer, with both working to launch the new unified Meet-Duo experience.

This is as clear as Google’s messaging strategy has ever been. The thing I have learned from this is that Google thinks launching Meet when users type “Duo” in the search field is some kind of insurmountable technical obstacles.

A 14-Inch MacBook Pro and a Few Thoughts

The 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro into which I am typing these words is arguably the best computer Apple has ever made. It is not as powerful as the Mac Studio or Mac Pro, not as elegant as the MacBook Air, and not the best value in Apple’s line — which, again, is probably the MacBook Air. But it manages to get nearly everything great about those other Macs in a package that is smaller in profile than the computer it replaces in my world.

That is no small feat, by the way. The 2012 MacBook Air I have been using daily for the past ten years is certainly nowhere near as capable as this MacBook Pro by any stretch. But it was my main Mac for seven of those years, accompanying me from my last years in college on journeys across a few continents. It deserves its high ranking on Six Colors’ 20 Macs for 2020 list.

And it is a good thing, too, I bought such a capable laptop in 2012, because I mostly got to avoid the Mac’s flop years. The Touch Bar? I see why people like it, but Apple’s enthusiasm for it quickly waned and it was not for me. The butterfly keyboard? I would love to learn the inside story of what happened there, which will slowly trickle out as the lawsuit unfolds and knowledgeable people are able to speak out.1

But the Mac is back — or, it has been for quite some time, but I had not experienced it until now. And there have been some notable positive changes in the time since I last bought one of Apple’s laptops. The construction of this Mac is flawless. I thought my MacBook Air had a confidence-inspiring quality to its construction, but this MacBook Pro is in a league of its own. It strikes a balance between feeling durable and delicate. Everything that is supposed to feel solid does not move, not even a little; every part that is interactive, like the keyboard and display hinge, feels like it accomplishes its task without any ill effects.

This display is magnificent. I thought I knew Retina displays — I have a 5K iMac on my desk — but this feels like a fuller expression of that idea. One little thing Apple keeps getting better about is matching the display’s brightness and colour temperature to the environment. My iMac is pretty good about the former — it cannot do True Tone trickery — but this display feels increasingly closer to something that reads more like coated paper than it does a computer screen.

Alas, there is a notch. This is my first Mac with one and I can see why some deride it. I do not like it, but nor do I hate it. It is an obvious compromise for getting a webcam into a portable Mac with the smallest possible footprint. If I could spec this MacBook Pro without a webcam — or if it had Face ID — I would find it more acceptable. My dislike of it is almost entirely cosmetic, but that is also true for the solution to removing it: equalize the displays around the bezel. That would necessitate either a larger device footprint or a smaller display, both of which I regard as less desirable compromises for a portable Mac. It is not the best look, but it is the best compromise for me.

Like Michael Tsai, I have not been completely bowled over by the performance of this Mac, nor have I been amazed by its battery life — but I mean that in the best possible sense. This Mac is like the Swiss train network, of which I am once again envious after watching Jason Slaughter’s latest video: it is so efficient and delightful that it is best expressed because of what it does not do. There are no delays, no hangups, no surprise battery consumption warnings, no stutters, and no ill behaviours. Everything just goes. Even the performance issues I see with Safari’s UI on my top-of-the-line iMac are gone.2 I have by no means been trying to find its limits, but it feels limitless in every application I have thrown at it. That is amazing in its own way.

And I have not once heard it. There are apparently two fans spinning away below this keyboard, but I cannot hear them when I put my ear to the case. When I was transferring files last week, my MacBook Air was doing its best to make a deafening racket, like it was screaming for me that it still had plenty of life left in it. This MacBook Pro? Just quietly sipping electricity and flipping bits on its drive in perfect silence. Any noises made by this MacBook Pro are drowned out by the sound of background radiation. It is that quiet. It is an exquisite experience.

The hardware is amazing — but you already knew that because the first reviews for this computer were published about eight months ago. The software? Well, that is almost exactly the same. Rosetta works fine, though I have waited long enough to upgrade to an ARM Mac that only a handful of apps I use are unavailable in ARM native guise. There also seems to be a single system process — CarbonComponentScannerXPC — that remains an always-running Intel app. Strange.

There are a handful of features in MacOS specific to either this laptop or ARM Macs generally. The menu bar is taller to accommodate the notch. I prefer this style primarily because the rounded rectangle selection highlight has some space between the top and bottom of the menu bar. On a notchless Mac, the rectangle’s edges touch the top and bottom of the menu bar and, thanks to the rounded corners, it looks uncomfortable and cramped. I like how the corners of the selection highlight round more aggressively for the Apple menu and the clock, matching the radius of the display.

Other things specific to ARM Macs include AirPlay receiver support (Update: Nope, just not on my iMac.), a globe in Maps, and support for iPhone and iPad apps on MacOS. The latter reminds me of running iOS apps in the Simulator. These are not blockbuster features yet — at least, not for the way I use my Mac.

Otherwise, it feels familiar. All the stuff I use is here; all the bugs that interrupt my workflow are basically the same.

But all of this is running on hardware that feels familiar but different. A MagSafe connection is back — why Apple got rid of that in the first place I will never know, but those flop years hit them hard. I do not need the HDMI port, but I am thrilled this Mac has an SD card slot, making it a perfect companion for anyone who travels with a digital camera besides their smartphone. TouchID is excellent, the keyboard and trackpad are pretty much perfect, and the speakers sound better than they have any right to in a package this small and thin.

This is a professional product worthy of the “MacBook Pro” moniker. I look forward to spending the next decade with it by my side.

  1. Not necessarily a hint, but not not a hint either. ↥︎

  2. Safari is slow to visually become active or inactive (FB9735993) and dialogs for save, open, and print all drop frames when they draw. Mind you, I should not need to be using one of the fastest Macs ever made to see a print dialog appear smoothly. ↥︎

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. ↥︎

The Apple Services Experience Is Not Good Enough ⇥ bzamayo.com

Benjamin Mayo:

They are built to a passing grade, but nothing more. Basic features found in services from rival companies are either lacking altogether in Apple’s apps, or implemented half-heartedly and performance is sluggish. Browsing in Music and TV is painful, with an over-reliance on the infinite scroll. New content is just tacked on the bottom of already long lists. Meanwhile, the navigation bars are blank when they could include simple shortcut buttons and filters to help users navigate and explore. Moreover, these apps feature too many loading states and too much waiting around. They are akin to janky web apps, rather than richly-compelling responsive experiences.

There is more commentary over at Michael Tsai’s site.

This is something I think about a lot, especially as Apple grows Services revenue and competes in more of these markets. Apple’s native apps on these devices simply are not good enough, and that is bananas. The company’s whole thing is that it makes the entire widget, so hardware, software, and services can work seamlessly together. But they do not. They feel brittle, like I am using prototypes where any deviation from a golden path is a risky endeavour.

There are plenty of engineers working hard on all of these products, and there are evidently people who care. The Music app on MacOS is better than it used to be. Alas, it remains a far cry from how it ought to be, and only managers and executives have the power to set quality as a priority.

Every year for the past few, my main hope for WWDC is a renewed emphasis on stability and higher standards. The growth of this segment of Apple’s revenue is impressive, and its web capabilities are way better than they used to be — remember MobileMe? But there is still so far before Apple’s software and, particularly, services reflect the qualities of its thoughtful and elegant hardware.