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Meet the New Boss

Apple’s response to the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act has arrived. In theory, this is the biggest ever change to the way native apps are distributed and sold on iOS. Between the complexity and caveats, however, this is not a Mac-like software experience on the iPhone — though I am not sure I fully understand what it is.

Let me back up to December 2022. I hate quoting myself but, well, here is something I wrote in response to a Bloomberg report from Mark Gurman about Apple’s Digital Markets Act preparations:

It will be interesting to see how Apple frames this shift for its European customers. It has spent years claiming its first-party App Store policies are a reason why people buy iPhones. While it can continue to promote its own App Store as the best option, it would look silly if it created the impression of reducing security for European users while rolling this out. The same is true of its privacy stance if, as also reported by Gurman, it makes its Find My network more permissive to third-party trackers. Apple may also want to preserve its existing strategy wherever regulators do not require its software and services to be more interoperable, but that could make it look like European customers have more choices than users in, say, the United States — which they probably will.

The answer to this public relations conundrum is found in a bitter press release. The tone is not really a surprise; I guess I would also be frustrated if I were required to change the way my platform has worked for sixteen years. But, still, it is quite something to read paragraphs like this one:

The new options for processing payments and downloading apps on iOS open new avenues for malware, fraud and scams, illicit and harmful content, and other privacy and security threats. That’s why Apple is introducing protections — including Notarization for iOS apps, an authorization for marketplace developers, and disclosures on alternative payments — to reduce risks and deliver the best, most secure experience possible for users in the EU. Even with these safeguards in place, many risks remain.

Or these two sentences describing how Safari will present a list of third-party browsers on first launch:

This change is a result of the DMA’s requirements, and means that EU users will be confronted with a list of default browsers before they have the opportunity to understand the options available to them. The screen also interrupts EU users’ experience the first time they open Safari intending to navigate to a webpage.

To be fair, confirmation screens are probably not the best way to drive browser diversity. The status quo also sucks: arguably the only reason why Google Chrome is not wholly dominant is because of decisions made by platform vendors like Apple and Microsoft. Then again, the state of the browser market is evidence of how little competition matters when people have familiar choices.

Back to the App Store; Apple is making several changes in the E.U., including:

  • Third-party payment processors can be used within apps, and developers can also link to external payment destinations from within an app.

  • Lowered commission of 10–17%, down from 15–30%, with an optional use of Apple’s payment processor at an extra 3%.

  • Third-party browsers can now use different browser engines.

In addition to these and other E.U.-specific changes, Apple is permitting streaming game apps worldwide.

The headline announcement is the addition of third-party app stores in iOS — and, it seems, only iOS. Apple has built MarketplaceKit to facilitate this, will require Notarization of all applications regardless of distribution channel — which sounds different than the MacOS Notarization process because it involves real people — and has an extensive explanation of its rationale for this system. This is not really “sideloading” or the Mac-esque experience some have been envisioning because these “marketplace apps” — as Apple is calling them — will be the only other way of installing native iOS apps. The way you will get the marketplace apps themselves, Apple says, is via the web, but other kinds of third-party software are not able to be installed on an iPhone this way. In other words, you can download apps from an app store or the App Store.

In the questions-and-answers section near the end, it says its “traditional business model has reflected the value” of the platform, and these new E.U. rules have “separate[d] out the many ways Apple creates value for developers”. To bridge the gap, it will charge a Core Technology Fee of €0.50 under certain conditions, which is in line with what I expected would happen. In its press release today, Apple says almost all developers will pay the same or less, and less than one percent will need to pay the Core Technology Fee. Many of those are probably the massive developers you can immediately think of. Notably, this is the first time entirely free applications will pay any kind of per-user fee to Apple, and it is not cheap.

Developers are not automatically opted into this new arrangement. They will be able to choose whether they stick with the current terms, or agree to the new terms — but the new contract is required to distribute an app through a different marketplace, or to use a different payment processor. In return, developers get lower commission, but must pay the Core Technology Fee if they exceed one million annual E.U. installs of their app.

That is my rundown of these changes and I think I got everything right, but there is a lot I missed out on. I think David Barnard has a very good Twitter thread with more details, and Jason Snell at Six Colors has a good overview. I thought this was a particularly keen observation by Snell:

I have to think that Apple will have a team of security people watching carefully as these features roll out across the EU. But there will also be a team of PR people ready to publicize any incident that feeds into Apple’s narrative about the DMA endangering EU citizens.

I fully expect unscrupulous people will take advantage of this new arrangement and Apple will spread the word. But it is not as though the App Store itself is free of scams; Michael Tsai has an entire category of posts dating back more than a decade. Even if scams make their way into third-party marketplace apps, a real person at Apple has seen and approved them, as explained in the question-and-answer segment:

The Notarization process involves a combination of automated checks and human review to help ensure apps are from credible parties, free of malicious content like malware, function as promised, and don’t expose users to egregious privacy and security risks or fraud.

This is still Apple’s platform and it still wants it to be safe. It remains to be seen whether the E.U. will view today’s announcements as sufficiently compliant with the letter and spirit of the DMA, and I suspect there will be questions about the amount of control Apple will retain, and the Core Technology Fee it will charge.

I have two questions:

  1. Will any of this be worthwhile for developers? If Apple’s numbers are accurate, it makes the E.U. look like a more desirable region for iOS app distribution. At least there are options and choices.

    On a related note, one wonders if it will be beneficial for users. As I wrote in my self-quote above, Apple says the App Store is part of users’ buying decisions. That is, it seems to believe people use iPhones in part because of the way it controls its available software. The problem is that it will be difficult to get a sense of whether users actually value the App Store on its merits if these new features are not popular amongst developers.

  2. Is this foreshadowing similar changes to Apple’s other restricted platforms, or perhaps expanding them worldwide? Earlier today, I would have thought this is a plausible take. But the more I think about it, the more I believe Apple will continue its established path until other governments force a change. I would be happy to be proven wrong, especially if this policy change is ultimately beneficial to developers.

So, knowing all of that, how would one go about getting their hands on these updates? Apple says all of these things will be rolling out in March, and the new APIs and frameworks are included in the iOS 17.4 beta seed released to developers earlier today.

These features are only available to E.U. users, and Apple is being as restrictive with these changes as it is for censorship in China. One cannot simply change their iPhone’s region in Settings to an E.U. member state. As previewed last year, there is a new process that validates feature availability based on, according to Filipe Espósito of 9to5Mac, the billing address on file and the device location, among other qualities.

Still, if Apple can be an Irish company for tax reasons, my iPhone should be able to become Irish for device control reasons.

It does leave me with one final question: how are developers outside the E.U. able to test compliance with these new capabilities? Perhaps I missed this in the documentation, but it seems like this may be one additional restriction to keep these alluring features geographically gated. Pity.

Even if this is not everything developers and advanced users may have hoped for, it is a radical shift for Apple’s non-Mac platforms. There is much to look forward to, and some things to be worried about. Mostly, though, this leaves many questions because of the cautious and confusing approach Apple is taking. There are perhaps good, well-founded reasons for doing so, and I do not think it is always intending to be as brutal as its decisions appear. But Apple’s relationship with developers has been on rocky ground for years and its latest policies are a reminder of the company’s control. Meet the new boss? Well, you know how that goes.

Sleeve, a Now Playing and Last.fm Scrobbler for MacOS ⇥ replay.software

Unnecessary backstory: in this year’s instalment of “Classics Week”, Anthony Fantano highlighted the excellent Gorillaz album “Demon Days”. It has been a while since I last played it, so I gave it a spin and it was an instant nostalgia tunnel to 2005. I joked about needing a glassy album cover on my desktop and Christopher Downer pointed me to Sleeve.

Sleeve is a simple but useful widget for your desktop, similar to Bowtie. It shows your currently-playing song and it is a Last.fm scrobbler. As it happens, Sleeve was updated a few months ago. Just six U.S. dollars for a lovely piece of indie software that does a handful of things very well. My only complaint is a lack of wet floor effect.

There Have Been Twenty Zero-Days Patched in Apple’s Operating Systems This Year ⇥ bleepingcomputer.com

Sergiu Gatlan, Bleeping Computer:

Apple released emergency security updates to fix two zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in attacks and impacting iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices, reaching 20 zero-days patched since the start of the year.

Both of these are WebKit bugs.

According to Project Zero’s spreadsheet, Apple patched ten zero-days in 2022, thirteen in 2021, three in 2020, two in 2019, three in 2016, and none in 2018, 2017, 2015, and 2014. It seems like a similar story across the board: the 2014 spreadsheet contains just eleven entries total, while the 2023 sheet contains fifty-six so far.

It is surely impossible to know, but one wonders how much of this is caused by vendors and exploiters alike getting better at finding zero-days, and how much can be blamed on worsening security in software. That seems hard to believe with increased restrictions on how much data is simply laying around to be leaked, but perhaps that is a driver of the increasing number of reports: when you build more walls, there are more opportunities to find cracks.

Patrick Howell O’Neill reported for MIT Technology Review in 2021 that the escalating number of exploits is primarily driven by state warfare, then criminals, and that it seems like a combination of increased vigilance and bug bounty programs have improved discovery. Kevin Poireault, in Infosecurity Magazine earlier this year, reports that it is a sign of better security for more straightforward exploits, necessitating the use of more advanced techniques by adversaries.

For a Deeper Look at Your Music Listening Habits, Try Last.fm ⇥ macstories.net

Harley Charlton, MacRumors:

Apple today rolled out the Apple Music Replay experience for 2023, allowing subscribers to see their top artists, songs, albums, genres, playlists, and stations of the year.

[…]

‌Apple Music‌ Replay is Apple’s answer Spotify Wrapped, but ‌Apple Music‌ Replay remains a web browser only experience. The Music app itself can only show and play a basic playlist of your top songs for the year, ranked by most played, once it has been added via the Replay webpage.

Every year, millions of people give Spotify free marketing by sharing their music listening habits, and that must drive someone at Apple absolutely bananas. It is still a website, unlike Apple Books, and based on my searches of Twitter and Instagram, it seems many people miss the sharing button below each Replay section and just screenshot the page. Spotify Wrapped is an obviously better and more sharing-friendly product.

But you know what is cooler than either of these things? It is when you separate analyzing your music habits from how you listen to music.

John Voorhees, MacStories:

Spotify does a better job at surfacing interesting data with Wrapped, but if you’re like me and prefer other aspects of Apple Music, sign up for Last.fm, use one of the many excellent indie apps, like Marvis Pro, Soor, Albums, Longplay, Doppler, and Air Scrobble that support the service, and then enjoy your weekly, monthly, and annual reports in Last.fm’s app or on its website.

When I like a record, I buy it — often from Bandcamp, but sometimes from iTunes or elsewhere — and, in the process, cut off the Apple Music connection, which makes my Replay stats non-reflective of my actual listening habits. I am not someone who feels the need to quantitively analyze my entire life, but I do appreciate the way Last.fm collects information from many of the places I listen to music: in Music on my Mac, and in a variety of apps on my iPhone. And Voorhees points to AirScrobble as a way to fill in the gaps for when I am listening to a record or one of the mixes in each edition of Web Curios on my stereo.

If Apple Music Replay or Spotify Wrapped work for you, that is great; I have no reason to try to change your mind. But if you want to move between different listening sources and retain some control of what you entrust to any one service, I think Last.fm remains a great option.

Update: Joe Rosensteel:

This whole thing feels like someone was very excited to animate things, move album artwork around, and transform data, but no one really gave much thought to what this whole thing is supposed to mean to someone. How it makes someone feel.

Could not have written this any better myself. For anyone who loves music, seeing an album cover probably conjures up memories of a time when it was playing. It should transport me through a year of what I put into my ear. Does Apple love music? It used to.

Dan Moren Was Locked Out of iCloud for Exactly Twelve Hours ⇥ sixcolors.com

Dan Moren’s iCloud account was offline for exactly twelve hours for reasons apparently known to somebody at Apple but which cannot be disclosed to Moren:

Moreover, if this was some kind of scheduled procedure, why not warn affected users ahead of time? The idea that my email — which I rely upon for work — and a slew of other services might be interrupted for essentially an entire workday with no notice whatsoever is technological malpractice. My cable company tells me when it’s doing work in my area and there might be service hiccups, and you can bet that the hosting provider I use for my website communicates whenever there might be something that affects my service.

I wrote earlier about expectations of reliability in a different sense, and this is a whole different level of strange. iCloud has become so much better since its launch and it has fewer unexpected failures, so why are the reasons for one localized to Moren’s account so secretive? Only Apple knows, and it is not saying.

CSAM Detection Organizations Are Like Any Other Business ⇥ balkaninsight.com

Today is fitting a theme so far that is, unfortunately, just about the heaviest thing I publish here, but I have a couple things I think I need to add.

Giacomo Zandonini, Apostolis Fotiadis, and Luděk Stavinoha, for Balkan Insight, investigated how CSAM scanning companies have lobbied in favour of a new law to screen everything — including private messages — for illegal media:

Though registered in the EU lobby database as a charity, Thorn sells its AI tools on the market for a profit; since 2018, the US Department of Homeland Security, for example, has purchased software licences from Thorn for a total of $4.3 million.

[…]

ECLAG [the European Child Sexual Abuse Legislation Advocacy Group], which launched its website a few weeks after Johansson’s proposal was announced in May 2022, acts as a coordination platform for some of the most active organisations lobbying in favour of the CSAM legislation. Its steering committee includes Thorn and a host of well-known children’s rights organisations such as ECPAT, Eurochild, Missing Children Europe, Internet Watch Foundation, and Terre des Hommes.

Another member is Brave Movement, which came into being in April 2022, a month before’s Johansson’s regulation was rolled out, thanks to a $10.3 million contribution by the Oak Foundation to Together for Girls, a US-based non-profit that fights sexual violence against children.

These multimillion-dollar numbers pale in comparison to, for example, the $20 billion Apple makes every quarter in digital services revenue alone. Still, though these are non-governmental mission-orientated organizations, they do have products and services to sell, hence the lobbying efforts.

If the name “Oak Foundation” sounds familiar, that is likely because it also funds the Heat Initiative. That is not a surprise: CSAM prevention causes are among the largest beneficiaries of the Oak Foundation’s grants, representing over 10% of its grant-making in 2022. That is an understandable place to spend a lot of money; who can disagree with efforts to fight among the world’s bleakest genres of crime?

But for anyone who remembers the arguments made in the 2000s justifying wholesale invasions of personal privacy in an effort to combat terrorism, this all feels a bit too familiar, and we know the consequences. I do not buy speculative slippery slope arguments but, in this case, there is no need to: we know this kind of surveillance has poor oversight, expands beyond its initial scope, produces post hoc rationalization for crimes, and leads to escalating competition between nations. That the E.U. is proposing on-device scanning is little comfort when, by design, there is little understanding of how any of these systems work and what their limits are.

Dark Mode Usability and Expectations ⇥ nngroup.com

Tanner Kohler and Amy Zhang, of the Nielsen Norman Group:

Dark mode is more popular than ever. You might even think it’s essential — at least if you were to read many of the web-design articles devoted to the topic. However, it takes valuable time and resources to fully support dark mode and “wear it well” because most designs are built in light mode first. To understand how much dark mode impacts users, we recently conducted a survey and some mobile usability-testing sessions in dark mode on mobile.

In all cases, the best thing you can do is mirror a user’s preferences and the system default. On the web, this can be achieved very simply by using CSS variables to define page colours for light mode, and then use a prefers-color-scheme: dark media query to redefine those same variables for dark mode. (Or, if you prefer, the other way around.)

One finding I was surprised by is how many people surveyed by the NNG did not notice when an app violated their preference by showing a light-mode screen when it should have been in dark mode or vice-versa. For many, it seems dark mode is mostly an aesthetic preference, though the NNG notes some possible benefits for those with visual disabilities.

The iPhone 12 Pro: A Three-Year Review

I want to try something a little bit different: a review of a product at what is likely the end of my using it. Early product reviews are great buyer’s guides, but they tend to dwell on the novel, which is understandable for using a product for only a week or two. I have lived with my iPhone 12 Pro for nearly three full years — I got mine on its release day in October 2020 — so I know it very well. Here is what I am still impressed by, what has not held up as well, and what I will be looking for when I replace it this year.

This was one eye-catching phone out of the box. Compared to the standard iPhone 12’s glossy glass back, the bead-blasted glass of the Pro models is a subtly luxurious and almost soft finish. I chose the silver model, which I still think is the nicest of the four colours it was available in at launch — the others being graphite, gold, and a finish Apple insists on calling “pacific blue”, all lowercase — and the flat polished steel of the phone’s edge trim lost its magic after just a few months. I rarely use a case and, so, I was expecting scratches. But I did not anticipate some kind of corrosion or blooming on its top edge, which has made the stainless steel look more like chrome-mimic plastic. I bought a stainless steel wristwatch with similar polished surfaces the same year and, despite being knocked around a fair bit and sitting immediately on my skin, it has held up far better.

The steel body is also pretty heavy. It is only fifteen grams heavier than the iPhone X it replaced in my pocket, which was also a steel phone, but I wish iPhones were trending in the other direction. Thinner and lighter may be widely mocked, but for devices carried every day, it is better for me if they dissolve into my life.

Thankfully, the iPhone 15 Pro is rumoured to be made of titanium which — all else being equal — is considerably lighter than steel. The standard iPhone 15 will likely continue to be made of aluminum, which means either model would likely be a lighter phone than the ones I have carried for the past six years. I do have some questions about the wear-and-tear I will be able to expect with a titanium body. Titanium has a mixed history at Apple, but retrospective reviews of Apple Watches made of the material indicate it is holding up far better.

The battery life of my iPhone 12 Pro has also seen some wear-and-tear. After three years of daily use and an uncareful charging regiment, the Battery Health screen says it has retained 87% of its from-new capacity. That is not too bad, especially considering some iPhone 14 Pro owners are reporting similar capacities after just one year. But this generation of iPhone was notable for a slight regression in battery life expectations compared to its predecessor when it was shiny and new, and I have felt that in particular when it is not connected to Wi-Fi. This has been used almost exclusively as an LTE phone — more on that later — and its cellular radio seems hungry.

I bought the 12 Pro over either of the standard iPhone 12 models primarily because of the 56mm-equivalent camera and the larger RAM package. And I am glad I did — around 43% of photos I shot with this phone are from that telephoto camera, compared to 51% captured with the main camera, and only about 6% using the ultra-wide.

These two cameras — the main and telephoto — have performed well. iPhone photos have leaned toward neutrality, with only a minor warm bias, and the images I have captured with the 12 Pro have been no exception. Images captured outdoors in bright daylight are an accurate representation of the scene, with clean HDR matching my own perception. Where this camera shines most is in low-light scenes indoors, and outdoors at night. This is the area where phone cameras have struggled — small sensors do not capture as much light as bigger sensors, of course — and software advancements have played a key role in creating images which look less noisy, more colourful, and better lit. Automatic Night Mode remains a difficult adjustment for me: three years into owning this phone, I still have not gotten used to the idea of holding it in near-stillness for longer than it takes me to tap the shutter button.

Neither image has been processed apart from straightening and cropping.
Photo at night of a dark hilly street and a taillight streak from a passing car.Photo at dusk of an empty outdoor ice rink with overhead industrial-style lights on cables.

I have also noticed a dramatic improvement in images shot in Portrait Mode. While it is supposed to approximate the foreground and background separation you might see with a larger sensor and a portrait lens, I rarely used it on my iPhone X because subjects looked like they were crudely cut from the scene. It is a night-and-day difference with this iPhone: there is a more natural falloff from in-focus areas to backgrounds, the faux bokeh looks more realistic, and it does a better — though still imperfect — job of understanding glassware. I do not take many pictures of people; here are some photos of food I shot with Portrait Mode:

The food images have been processed; the bottle image has not. I do not know if I am in a position to give advice, but here is what I do for food photos: I use the “Vivid” filter to improve image brightness, colour, and contrast. Then, under Adjustments, I play with the image warmth after increasing the image’s magenta tint; the “Vivid” filter is often too green and cool for food.
Photo of a plate of cut, seasoned beets of various colours.Photo, close-up, of an open glass drink bottle.Photo of a tray of prepared falafel balls before frying.Photo of a dark bowl containing cut tomatoes made very glossy by olive oil.

I still find Apple’s photo processing pipeline too eager to reduce noise and, consequently, detail, though this is somewhat offset by other parts of the pipeline like Deep Fusion. This is exacerbated in Night Mode, of course, because it is beginning with a grainier image. I understand why Apple uses high levels of noise reduction; shooting RAW on an iPhone will reveal what the sensor captures before it is put through that pipeline. A very grainy image is probably not going to be appreciated by most people. But these sensors are very good for their size and, in most lighting conditions, some grain is more tasteful to me.

The other thing I feel compelled to mention about the iPhone 12 Pro’s cameras is how they are not the same as those in the 12 Pro Max — unfortunately. The Pro Max had a much larger sensor in its main camera and better stabilization, and its telephoto camera was a little different as well. It is unfortunate because I am not interested in buying a larger phone; the smaller Pro size Apple has settled on is already too large for my liking. And, while successive model pairings — the 13 Pro/Pro Max and 14 Pro/Pro Max — shared identical camera systems between the smaller and larger sizes, rumours suggest the line will repeat the 12 Pro’s bifurcation. If that is true, I will be disappointed, even if it is for good and practical reasons. Not upset that physics cannot be bent to accommodate my purchasing preferences, mind you, just painfully aware of the compromise I would make with either choice.

The iPhone 12 lineup was the first iPhone to support the MagSafe accessory connector, and the first to support 5G cellular networking. I have used neither extensively. I do have an Apple case which is identified by MagSafe by its colour, but I never purchased a compatible charger or any other accessories. As for 5G, my cellular provider only recently added support on its network. Working from home for most of the past three years has meant little cellular data usage, so I would not have taken advantage of any possible improvements if I had switched to a carrier which adopted 5G earlier. My provider recently added 5G support and, in the interest of being comprehensive, I recently upgraded to a 5G plan to see what it would be like in my area. From my desk, using the Speedtest app, 5G transfer speeds were 129 Mbps down and 39 Mbps up; LTE from the same spot recorded 113 Mbps down and 28 Mbps up. I have seen LTE speeds as high as 156 Mbps down and 45 Mbps up from the same spot. On my balcony, 5G tested at 178 Mbps down and 15 Mbps up, while LTE was 74 Mbps down and 18 Mbps up. Latency and jitter differences are a similar tossup. I was promised life-and-death stakes and all I got was this slightly more expensive phone plan.

Neither of these features holds any weight for my iPhone 15 purchasing decisions. The iPhone 15 line will almost certainly switch to a USB-C port after eleven years of iPhones with slow, proprietary, and unchanged Lightning ports. Alas, that means the cables on my nightstand and desk — and in my bag and car — will need to be swapped, though one will be included in the box. I may have avoided noticing this change had I purchased MagSafe charging cables. But, at $55 Canadian a pop, it would have been an expensive way to make the transition easier.1 Since USB-C is an industry standard connector, I can buy all the cheap and fast cables I need.

The iPhone 12 Pro line was also the first phone from Apple to include a LiDAR sensor on the back, which apparently helps with autofocus in low light scenes, and enables better spatial tracking for augmented reality. It is hard for me to say whether I get faster or more accurate autofocus, but I have found the A.R. enhancements surprisingly useful and fun. It is not something I am using every day. But when I stumble across a furniture website with A.R. options, for example, it is immediately rewarding to see the piece in my space and get a pretty accurate impression of its size, with pretty stable real-world object tracking. The biggest knock against anything using the LiDAR sensor is the hit it takes on battery life, which you can feel by how warm the phone gets. Visually, A.R. experiences are smooth and fast, but the warmth you feel is an indication that this phone is being pushed to some kind of limit.

So, that is my three-year experience with the iPhone 12 Pro. I am not somebody who feels compelled to upgrade every year, and even before Apple announces this year’s iPhone lineup in less than one week’s time, I can already expect big changes based on the models available today: a brighter, faster display; better cameras paired to a better image processing pipeline; macro photography; and emergency rescue features I hope to never need. But there are also plenty of unknowns, like whether the new models will continue to increase battery life, or if the phone will feel more pocket-friendly — the iPhone 13 Pro was heavier than my phone, and the 14 Pro heavier still.

I have occasionally wondered whether the 12 Pro was worth the extra cost over the standard 12 for me. The standard models had way better colour options and a Mini version, and the 12 Pro is 15% heavier than the regular model of the same size. But the camera breakdown speaks for itself: I use the telephoto camera so often that it really is a no-brainer. That is what I am looking for most of all in an iPhone 15 model: a better telephoto camera and better battery life in a model that is lighter than this one.

  1. I will tell you what was expensive, which was the USB-C to Lightning cable I bought last year for my travel bag. I have gotten one year’s very light use out of that $25 cable. ↥︎

Some Men, It Seems, Cannot Handle Drinking Cocktails From Appropriate Glassware ⇥ nytimes.com

Becky Hughes, New York Times:

While efforts to challenge the gender binary are evident in how we talk, dress for work and wear makeup, a visit to the cocktail bar might transport you back to the 1950s. Bartenders say that many men appear as committed as ever to drinking out of “manly” glasses and avoiding glassware they deem too feminine.

“It’s an industry joke that we tend to stereotype people based on their glassware preferences,” said Kaslyn Bos, 30, a bartender at Donna in the West Village. At Donna, the drinks are colorful, sometimes heavily garnished with fruit and cocktail umbrellas and often served in “shapely glasses,” she said.

Ms. Bos has fielded requests — only from men — to transfer a cocktail from one glass to another. She noted that a manly glass, to those asking, is always a rocks glass.

Lest you think this is some isolated or recent phenomenon, a six-year-old video on Playboy’s Indulgence YouTube channel has bartenders commenting on exactly the same thing. Hilarious and tragic.

The iMac Saved Apple ⇥ theverge.com

Jason Snell wrote about the history of the iMac on its twenty-fifth anniversary for the Verge:

While PC makers spent many years trying (and failing, for the most part) to make iMac knockoffs, it was really a transitional device. While Apple still has a nice business selling iMacs to families, schools, and hotel check-in desks, most of the computers it sells are laptops.

Still, I think the iMac pointed the way to the era of ubiquitous laptops. (What is a laptop but an all-in-one computer? Fortunately, laptops don’t weigh 38 pounds like the iMac G3.) From the very beginning, the iMac was criticized as being limited and underpowered. Apple frequently used laptop parts in the iMac, whether it was for cost savings or miniaturization reasons. Today, Mac desktops use more or less the same parts as Mac laptops.

To wit, while Apple’s own Mac chips debuted in two laptops and a Mac Mini which all looked the same as the Intel models they replaced, the M1 iMac was the first of the family to sport a new industrial design language. Unfortunately, it has remained unchanged for 837 days as of writing — the longest delay between iMac updates in years, and one which will have knock-on effects.

New iMacs are expected in October, according to Mark Gurman, as part of the debut of the M3 lineup.

The Fake Wedding Website Request That Undermined LGBTQ Rights in the U.S. ⇥ newrepublic.com

Melissa Gira Grant, the New Republic:

It didn’t make sense to him, [Stewart] told me later via text message. Why would a web designer — as the website the inquiry referenced as his own made clear that he was — living in San Francisco, seek to hire someone in another state who has never built a wedding website, let alone a website for a same-sex wedding, to build his wedding website?

[…]

Maybe it should not be a surprise, though, that this strange fake “request” popped up in a case in which the plaintiff’s main argument rested on the claim that someday, out there, a same-sex couple would want her to design a wedding website. The closest thing Smith had to an actual inquiry — the nonwedding of Stewart and Mike — arrived within 24 hours of her having filed a suit in which said inquiry would be potentially a helpful piece of supporting evidence. […]

This was published yesterday. Today, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its ruling: workers who create new products which can be classified as speech are allowed to discriminate so long as the provider sincerely holds those beliefs.

Update: A followup story from Gira Grant; a discussion of the case.

Mimestream, My Favourite Gmail Client for MacOS, Hits 1.0 ⇥ mimestream.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

[…] Neil Jhaveri, who previously worked on the engineering team for Apple Mail itself, founded a company to build a new email app: Mimestream. After a few years in open beta development, on Monday Mimestream 1.0 was officially released.

If you don’t use Gmail as your mail service or need to use the same app across Mac and iOS, Mimestream isn’t for you—yet. I asked Jhaveri what he meant when he said the company will be “turning its attention a bit broader” in the future, and he told me that while the company needed to focus in order to launch a compelling new app, “our mission is to just be the best general-purpose prosumer email client on the market.” That will take time, and the next step is probably an iOS version.

Neil Jhaveri:

Today’s launch culminates a public beta of over 2 years, with more than 167,000 users joining the beta. During this time, we released 220+ updates, made 2500+ improvements, added 100+ new features, and grew the company from a solo founder to a team of 5. Mimestream is mature, reliable, ready to take on your most serious email workloads, and will continue improving.

I cannot remember how early into the public beta cycle I started using Mimesteam, but I do remember being completely sold on it very quickly. It has been a key reason I have stuck with Google’s email service, and I was only too happy to pay Jhaveri as soon as it was possible to do so in February.

Unlike a lot of email clients which have been released in recent years, Mimestream does not really have any gimmicks to help you manage your email better or read it faster. I consider that a good thing because it means Mimestream is fully compatible with other clients on other platforms. That is important as it is Mac-only right now.

I cannot overstate how great, how polished, and how nice Mimestream feels to use. It is damn good Mac-assed software, and is my favourite mail client for MacOS.

Photomator for Mac ⇥ pixelmator.com

Pixelmator recently announced a new version of its photo editing software, now called Photomator and available for MacOS:

Today’s a big day! Our team has just released Photomator for Mac. From state-of-the-art color adjustments to intelligent AI tools, powerful Repair and Clone tools, and batch editing, Photomator for Mac is a photo editing powerhouse. Built from the ground up for macOS, it runs incredibly smoothly and fast, redefining the photo editing experience on Mac.

It has been a while since I took this app for a spin, and I figured it was time to experiment with it.

As is so often the case, some of these tools did not work as well for me as are shown in demos. For example, the Repair tool is shown to fully remove a foreground silhouette covering about a quarter of the image area. On one image, I was able to easily and seamlessly remove a sign and some bollards from the side of the road. But, in another, the edge of a parked car was always patched with grass instead of the sidewalk and kerb edge. I also found the machine learning-powered cropping tool produced lacklustre results, and the automatic straightening feature only worked well about a quarter of the time.

But, as these are merely suggestions, it makes for an effectively no-lose situation: if the automatic repair or cropping works perfectly, it means less work; if neither are effective, you have wasted only a few seconds before proceeding manually.

The Photos integration is fantastic. If you have ever used a mixed Lightroom and iCloud Photos environment, the simplified workflow is a dream come true. Photomator is also a damn good RAW photo editor. While Photos has some editing tools built in, they are cumbersome for experienced users — there are three modes for white balance editing in Photos, but you cannot select Temperature/Tint as the default, for example. Photomator feels like it has been designed by people who edit photos for people who edit photos. The layering and masking tools are excellent, and the built-in presets are a good starting point, if a little extreme.

The free trial is a full-featured version of the app, but you can only save three photos. It is a great way to give the app a try for your needs. It is priced monthly, with a yearly subscription, or for life. For some people, I could see Photomator being a replacement for Lightroom.

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.