Search Results for: "color"

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.

What a High-Quality Social Platform Looks Like ⇥ newpublic.substack.com

Josh Kramer, writing at New Public:

What separates a forum like MetaFilter from Quora, Reddit, or even 8chan? The answer is culture — rules and expectations, developed over a long time. To be clear: MetaFilter isn’t good because it has a lot of old rules, it’s good because it has the right old rules. Below, I lay out some unique, interesting qualities that have developed at MetaFilter over the years and how they’ve contributed to a culture that is still thriving after two decades.

Not only does MetaFilter have many rules, its moderators earnestly enforce them; but they do not always get it right and are subject to their own biases. While I generally favour the idea of larger social networks moving their moderation policies closer to those offered by MeFi, the sorts of stories linked to by a commenter on Kramer’s article paint a picture of moderators who sometimes struggle to identify bigoted conversations when it is not immediately obvious.

Going through some of those older threads, another thing becomes clear: complaints about the sensitivity of moderators are as commonplace then as they are now. There are plenty of complaints from users who feel moderators are oversensitive; there are also plenty from people who feel they are not taking an active-enough role. Even the places on the web where conversations are pretty good have a hard time keeping them that way, as a wander through the etiquette and policy feedback area makes clear.

MetaFilter occupies an increasingly niche part of the web — last year, it was forced to cut back on moderation — and I wonder if its approach can be replicated or improved upon elsewhere. It sounds like Twitter’s Birdwatch is an attempt to do something similar.

The Latest MacOS Beta Improves Studio Display Camera Quality, but Not by Much ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

Apple has released both developer and public beta versions of macOS 12.4 that include within them a beta version of the firmware for the Apple Studio Display. This is the first update to the Studio Display firmware since it shipped, and Apple says that it “has refinements to the Studio Display camera tuning, including improved noise reduction, contrast, and framing.”

[…]

In terms of image quality, beyond having access to extra pixels due to framing, it looks like the camera is being a bit less aggressive when it comes to softening the image and in trying to decrease contrast. In some of the lighting conditions I tested, the dynamic range of the image seemed to be a little wider—highlights weren’t as crushed down, though blacks were still a little more of a gray. Compare it to another Apple webcam like the iMac Pro and you can really see how much less contrast this camera provides.

James Thomson’s comparison between different versions of Studio Display firmware and a four year old iMac Pro is something to behold. One of those pictures is clearly better than the other two. Normally, this would not be such a blemish; except Apple is usually great at making cameras perform well and its marketing emphasizes the new camera system in this display. Something is going very wrong here.

A Tour of Apple’s External LCD Displays ⇥ 512pixels.net

A nice thing about writing this website by myself and as a hobby is how I do not feel like I need to cover today’s insanity.

Here is a nice post from Stephen Hackett covering Apple’s history of standalone displays. Maybe the most interesting one to me was 1998’s Studio Display:

This Studio Display would end up spanning the change from beige plastic to more colorful designs, and would ship in three distinct Revisions:

  • Rev. A: Used a DB-15 connector and came in a graphite finish. Included ADB ports, as well a RCA jack for extra connectivity.

  • Rev. B (January 1999): Used VGA and came in new styling to Match the Blue and White G3, as seen below. Came with a price cut to $1,099.

  • Rev. C (August 1999): Used DVI and included 2 USB ports and was styled to match the early Power Mac G4

It launched at $1,999, so the $900 price cut less than a year after its launch seems notable. Also notable is how I have never seen one of these displays in the wild. I was probably too young at the time of its release, but I do remember seeing its transparent tripod-like successor.

The 2004 era of Cinema Displays remains my favourite, if only because the 30-inch model made such an impression on me at a young age. A good working model still fetches hundreds of dollars on eBay — a testament to its quality and longevity. I still love those aluminum enclosures with the glossy white plastic side panels and soft edges on the top and bottom. They were professional products, but approachable, too.

The Missing Mid-Range Desktop Mac ⇥ sixcolors.com

Killian Bell, Cult of Mac:

The larger iMac probably isn’t gone for good. Apple is rumored to be working on a new model with a revamped design that will be powered by its latest and most powerful M1 chipsets, likely including the incredibly new M1 Ultra.

John Gruber:

I can’t speak to the rumors, but product-fit-wise, I think the 27-inch iMac doesn’t have a spot in the lineup anymore. I think the Mac Studio and Studio Display fill that spot. It even makes sense in hindsight that the consumer-level iMac went from 21 to 24 inches, if it’s going to be the one and only iMac.

Dan Moren, Six Colors:

But what if you’re someone who falls in the middle, what once was called the “prosumer” market? There’s actually a surprising dearth of options on the desktop side. The Mac mini and iMac offer only the 8-core CPU/8-core GPU M1 processor — even in the top of the line iMac, starting at $1699. To get anything more than that, you’d have to jump to a $1999 Mac Studio, and then add a display like Apple’s new $1599 Studio Display. That’s $2000 more than that top of the line iMac.

Moreover, because of the limitations of the M1 chip, the iMac and the Mac mini offer only a maximum of 16GB of RAM and two Thunderbolt ports—the same as an M1 MacBook Air.

I think Moren is more right than Gruber on this one. The Mac Studio occupies a position more akin to the old iMac Pro. In fact, if you build a cart today with the base M1 Ultra Mac Studio model, a Studio Display — standard configuration — a Magic Keyboard, and a Magic Mouse, it is within $200 of the inflation-adjusted price of a base iMac Pro from its launch in 2017. That seems right to me.

The Mac Studio may start with an M1 Max configuration at half the price of the M1 Ultra model, but it is $200 more than the base price of the Intel 27-inch iMac. The Mac Studio’s lowest possible configuration is way better than the Intel model used to offer — 32 GB of RAM compared to just 8 GB, twice the storage, and a better port selection — but you need to buy a 5K display, too. Good luck with that.

I think a mid-range iMac is still a welcome addition to the line. Apple has been extolling the virtues of an all-in-one for decades, and its computers have a greater lifespan — how many people do you know who still used an early 2000s Mac in the late 2000s? There still seems to be space to offer something to a midrange user who has outgrown the M1 iMac, but does not need the raw performance of the Mac Studio. It seems possible to me this could take the form of a different-sized iMac as much as it could a higher-specced version of the 24-inch model.

The Magical Disappearing 27-Inch iMac ⇥ sixcolors.com

Dan Moren, Six Colors:

However, as the dust of the event cleared, the existing 27-inch iMac was nowhere to be found: it’s no longer displayed on the Mac section, nor is it obviously available for purchase on Apple’s website. Putting it in the Compare tool shows no price, nor Buy button.

The M1 iMac continues to be branded the “iMac 24″” which seems to leave the door open for a different-sized model. That suggests to me that a hypothetical 27-inch would be viewed more like a size variant and have more in common with the 24-inch model, treating today’s announcement of the Mac Studio as the heir to the iMac Pro role in the line — display, keyboard, and mouse sold separately.

Apple’s 2021 Report Card ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple.

This is the seventh year that I’ve presented this survey to a hand-selected group. They were prompted with 12 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 to 5 and optionally provide text commentary per category. I received 53 replies, with the average results as shown below: […]

I love that Snell puts this survey together every year. It is such a good indicator of the way the winds are blowing for the world’s most valuable company. I am pleasantly surprised the Mac is recording its second year in a row as the highest scoring category, showing quite the turnaround from just a few years ago.

Federico Viticci posted a full copy of his survey comments and scores, and I am sure others will shortly as well. Mine was pretty close to the overall averages for the categories in which I graded — I did not score for HomeKit, Apple Watch, or wearables — so I do not want to post everything I wrote. But there were a couple of areas where my scores differed from the panel’s average that I wanted to highlight.

When I started putting this together, I remembered the new iPhones and Macs and iPads, and assumed I would assess a more pleasant year for Apple than I ultimately graded. I always write the paragraphs first and, in digging around for that information, my optimism started to unravel. I am not sure if I am being particularly harsh this year, but it feels from my more distant perspective like a bunch of things did not come together smoothly on Apple’s end. Product-wise, a brilliant year; but in software, developer relations, and social responsibility, a disappointing one.

Software Quality — 2

My experience with Apple’s software over the past year has been unpleasant. To be entirely fair, it has been that way for a while, and I think I was too generous with my grading last year. For years, there seems to have been a tick-tock cycle to Apple’s software cycle: some years are more feature-heavy, and some years are about quality and stability. This year felt like neither; more like engineers being pressured to deliver under extraordinary circumstances for the second year running.

There were big problems: MacOS Monterey bricked some Macs, a software update overheated some HomePod models to the point where they stopped working, Siri is still Siri, and Shortcuts shipped in an unusable state across all platforms. But there are little things that also do not work correctly that are as aggressively grating. On my Mac, every Quick Look preview flashes bright red. When I use CarPlay, audio sometimes does not initiate and I have to reconnect my phone. Nine of the bugs I filed in 2021 were about scroll position not being maintained in several high-profile applications. Searching Maps still returns locations thousands of kilometres away, even when there is a matching result around the corner. Apple’s Podcasts service became a mess. Mail does not return accurate search results for my inbox, let alone any other folder. Album artwork does not sync properly to my iPhone. If I resume playing music I have paused on my Mac, it will sometimes play with no audio, and I have to change tracks to force it to re-download. iOS’ autocorrect changes “can” to “can’t”, which is an open problem with “more than 10” reports. Media keys do unexpected things in MacOS. Dragging tracks to the bottom of the play queue in Music reverses their play order. There are a hundred more problems like these which I have reported in the last year. 
Apple is far from the only software vendor where it feels like products are rushed and bugs accumulate. But this is the Apple report card, not the one for Microsoft or Adobe. From nearly every vendor, including Apple, it feels like users’ continued patronage is taken for granted. To some degree that is probably true. Even so, I wish it still felt like there was a fight for my business.

I am sometimes running beta releases, but my main Mac is almost always on the latest public release. Right now, Music often crashes when switching between Apple Music, local library, and search views — on the very latest released version. A common response is that Apple needs time to fix bugs after release but, even if these operating systems mostly stabilize by about February, it is not fair that even typical users on the public release track have four or five months of frustrating bugs every year.

I am begging software vendors to please, please prioritize quality and stability.

Environmental and Social Issues – 2

2021 was rough for Apple’s social commitments. Even its calling card, privacy, was hampered. Yes, iCloud Private Relay was sort-of launched, and App Tracking Transparency debuted to the chagrin of ad tech companies. But a third-party experiment in the autumn found that many name-brand apps simply ignore users’ tracking preferences.

Apple’s biggest controversy in 2021 was its announcement of a new Child Sexual Abuse Materials detection system that was supposed to be baked into iOS but, Apple said, would only affect photos and video uploaded to iCloud. But the idea of locally checking files against an opaque database was torn apart. Apple said it has postponed that part of its CSAM mitigation plans as it reworks it, but the damage to its reputation has been done.

There are lingering geopolitical issues, too, like Apple’s dependency on manufacturing in China and antitrust-related cases around the world. Like, we learned in 2021 that a disputed archipelago in the East China Sea appears at a different scale for Apple Maps users in China. That’s still very weird!

I do not mean to accentuate the negative and ignore the positives — of which there were many — but these are two areas where I see Apple’s biggest liabilities. The third is developer relations, to which I also gave a score of 2. I am so impressed by the quality of hardware Apple has been shipping, and the company’s fast adoption of its own processors. But I remain frustrated by software that never seems to feel solid enough, developers taken for granted, and a mixed bag of social repercussions that come with being a corporate giant.

Consistency Sin ⇥ furbo.org

Craig Hockenberry:

My answer is something I call “consistency sin”. Understanding the cause lets us avoid similar situations in the future.

Your first reaction to this nomenclature may be, “Isn’t consistency a good thing in user interfaces?”

Absolutely! Colors, fonts, and other assets should be similar within an app. Combined they help give the user a sense of place and act as a guide through an interface. And in many, cases these similarities should be maintained across platforms. There’s no sin there.

But you can get into trouble when this consistency starts to affect the user experience.

There is an article about consistency I have been putting together for months and have not figured out a great angle. I think Hockenberry’s piece is what I was trying to write.

Consistency exists on so many levels: within a particular window or area of an application, within the application, between applications from the same company, between applications on the same platform, within the platform, and between platforms — and then, consistency between how elements look and how they work. MacOS would be worse if every button looked completely different, and it would also be worse if everything looked and worked the same as it does in iPadOS. I feel like the era of MacOS we are in now has strayed over that line. Dialog boxes are harder to read; notifications are worse; translucency makes things harder to read. I have not heard a satisfactory justification for any of these changes, but all of the excuses I have seen boil down to consistency. All of these elements have been updated to be more like the way things look and work on iOS and iPadOS, but I do not think that is a laudable goal unto itself.

The Effects of Four Years Without Net Neutrality Rules in the U.S. ⇥ techdirt.com

One of the bizarre by-products of the Trump administration is the rehashing of hysterical media coverage while ignoring real, proven consequences. CNN is notoriously terrible — remember their 2014 coverage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370? — but apparently the headline of the repeal of net neutrality rules four years ago is ripe for mockery on every anniversary. Nathan Leamer, a former advisor to then-FCC chair Ajit Pai:

CNN called this the End of the Internet as We Know It.

This headline should be in the hall of fame for misinformation. Complete fake news, But of course there has been no accountability from other blue checks and media institutions for the lack of truthiness.

Setting aside Leamer’s complete misunderstanding of truthiness, this headline is awful, even on a purely journalistic level. It tells readers nothing about the contents or context of the story. The story itself is, thankfully, more substantive and presented under a sober banner.

In that thread, Leamer presents a few other examples of bad guesses of what the end of net neutrality in the U.S. could look like. An unfortunate number of people believed that the internet would get slower as a direct result, loading “one word at a time” according to Senate Democrats. That take was so divorced from reality that I felt embarrassed for them in the snow-covered refrigerator I call home. And Leamer was not the only one: Fox News and the libertarian publication Reason dutifully covered the missing annihilation of the internet without acknowledging any effects of the end of net neutrality. That is not because there were none.

Karl Bode, writing in Techdirt in 2019:

One common refrain by Pai and and the industry (and many folks who don’t understand how the broken telecom market works) is that because the internet didn’t immediately collapse upon itself post-repeal in a rainbow-colored explosion, that the repeal itself must not be that big of a deal. That ignores the fact that ISPs are only largely behaving because they’re worried about the numerous new state level net neutrality laws passed in the wake of the federal repeal. Not to mention the 23 state AG lawsuit against the FCC (which, if victorious, would restore some or all of the rules).

[…]

Meanwhile, claims that nothing happened in the wake of the repeal aren’t even true. Giants like AT&T have quietly started using broadband usage caps to disadvantage competitors like Netflix. ISPs like CenturyLink have blocked internet access to sling ads. Mobile carriers now charge you more just to stream in HD as intended. And the repeal of net neutrality didn’t just kill net neutrality, it eroded the FCC’s ability to police the sector, leaving us with revolving door regulators totally unwilling to do anything about numerous sector scandals including the collection and sale of user location data or hurricane recovery failures.

Last June, AT&T excused its recently acquired HBO products from data caps. Then, during an earnings call last November, Comcast’s CEO was effusive about how the company privileged Peacock subscribers. 2020 capital expenditures among U.S. ISPs dropped during a time when Americans relied on high-speed internet more than ever, even while consumer spending increased.

Many tweets about 2017’s coverage of the end of net neutrality rules were clearly inaccurate and hysterical — that is for certain. But the loss of those rules has not magically solved U.S. broadband problems, either; on the contrary, it has exacerbated the worst tendencies of telecommunications conglomerates as many people — including yours truly — predicted. U.S. ISPs, which should be mere utility providers, are abusing their positions to advantage their own products and services. Net neutrality rules should be restored and, just as importantly, ISPs should not be excluded from antitrust discussions.

The Trials and Travails of Digital Vaccine Cards

Dan Moren, Six Colors:

Apple’s added a few features over the last couple years that help us cope with our current world situation, whether it be unlocking our iPhones with our Apple Watches or improvements to FaceTime. In iOS 15.1 last month, it rolled out the ability to store a digital version of your vaccine record in the Wallet app.

With more and more places requiring proof of vaccination, it seems like digital vaccine records would be the way to go — way better than trying to cram that huge card into your wallet. So I decided to give it a whirl.

Coincidentally, I just returned from a much-needed vacation and I had been meaning to write a similar article. So allow me to piggyback on Moren’s observations as I write about the experiences me and my partner had with our digital vaccine cards.

We arrived in Vancouver last Tuesday, October 26, which could not have been timed any better. On October 24, the British Columbian provincial government mandated full vaccination for patrons to be admitted at restaurants and bars. It would have been a little inconvenient if we had to pull up the PDF proof we had saved to our phones but, luckily, Apple released iOS 15.1 the day before we travelled, and the Alberta government began correctly signing records, both of which allowed us to add a vaccine card to Wallet.

That is the good news. The bad news is that QR codes for vaccine records from Alberta do not seem to be compatible with the scanners used in British Columbia. I do not know which party is at fault here, or if this is a temporary glitch in the early stages of this rollout. An App Store search for “QR vaccine scanner” reveals several province-specific verification apps, but plenty of others that seem to be more universal.

In practice, this incompatibility meant explaining to restaurant greeters that our barcodes could not be scanned, and presenting our driving licenses to prove our identity. We did not encounter any problems and every place we visited happily accepted this as proof of vaccination.

Is this a fraud-proof system? Probably not. In an ideal world, a record that cannot be verified should be assumed to be fraudulent. But there are enough edge cases that such a system might be impractical, especially since proving vaccination status is a temporary measure that allows a return to near-normalcy for most people and encourage holdouts. It is not a permanent measure that necessarily needs a permanent solution. Please spare me any conspiracy theories.

A return to near-normalcy is decidedly what it engendered. When we sat down, we could take off our masks and enjoy the company of those around us knowing that the likelihood of catching or spreading COVID-19 was reduced to an exception rather than a rule. Waitstaff continued to wear masks, which was the only thing to break the illusion. I worry about their ongoing exposure, and hope that these measures are enough to ensure their safety.

We flew back just a couple days after the federal government began requiring vaccinations aboard aircraft. This is where we again encountered some fracturing in the system. As of writing, Alberta is just one of two provinces without compatibility with the nationwide proof of vaccination. Right now, the provincial proof is still being accepted. However, we were not asked for any proof to board our flight; we were only asked to confirm our health status, not vaccinations, when checking in.

Moren:

This does, however, raise a second obstacle: uncertainty. I haven’t tried to use this digital vaccine card anywhere yet. Because even though the record is is verifiable using a freely available app, it’s unclear which places are actually going to be checking digital records. […]

Of course, this isn’t all on Apple — after all, people on other platforms will surely have digital vaccine readers, and all those entities that want to check people’s vaccination status have a vested interest as well. But, again, that fractured system is what makes it so tough.

It looks like things are quickly coalescing around agreed-upon standards to prove vaccination, at least around here.

I am hopeful these restriction-easing procedures are effective in reducing this disease’s presence in our lives without sacrificing public health. As eager as I am for socializing in the way things once were — I really miss live music — I want to do so with care and without urgency. Being able to sit in the company of equally vaccinated people enjoying a meal and conversation truly feels good again, albeit with these reservations. It is imperative to make sure everyone can enjoy that, too. Vaccinations and proof of immunity are interlinked ways of getting there.

Mashable: Monday’s Product Launch Was the ‘Worst Apple Event Ever’ ⇥ mashable.com

Chris Taylor, in a Mashable article that will age with all the grace of a freshly cut avocado:

But the fun came to a screeching halt during Monday’s Apple event, in which there was precious little to announce (new Apple Music price tier, new HomePod colors, barely new AirPods) and enough tech specs from a confusing couple of laptop chips to send a Mac nerd like me to sleep. The $19 screen cleaner — this year’s iPod socks — didn’t even rate a mention. And not for lack of time. The keynote lasted 50 minutes, making it Apple’s shortest ever, and didn’t so much end as gave up the ghost.

This isn’t about entertainment value; it’s an indicator that the company is running out of creative steam. Apple was widely criticized, even by the Macworld faithful, for having little actual new technology to wow us with at September’s iPhone 13 launch event. But at least it covered that fact up with a vibrant love letter to the state that birthed it. A month later, the marketing department has nothing left in the tank. If I was an investor looking for signs of the company’s long-term health, this would be a troubling one.

Try to get past the factual errors in this piece, like Taylor’s claim that Craig Federighi showed up at an Apple event for the first time since 2020 with “under a minute of screen time”, despite playing a starring role in the WWDC 2021 keynote. Pay no attention to the widespread praise for the new MacBook Pro lineup, and demand so strong it made Apple’s online store creak under the pressure. Forget that this is Taylor’s sixth review of a pandemic-era Apple event and is resorting to the same cynical tropes. Never mind that the memorably vacant WWDC 2007 keynote contained some of the most unpleasant moments of the modern Apple era.

The thing that got me is that Taylor already wrote this article back in 2016. Taylor’s complaint was that the then-new iPhone SE was just recycling bits — that Apple was doing nothing new or innovative, just reconfiguring iOS in different boxes and selling it as something new.

As Taylor said this year, “get some new material”, which is just a different way of saying that his articles need something, as he said in 2016, “truly, categorically new”.

Exile From Dongletown ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell reacts to Apple’s newfound port generosity:

If Mac laptops come in eras, one just ended.

It started in 2016 with the release of MacBook Pro models featuring butterfly keyboards, the Touch Bar, and a minimal selection of USB-C ports. It ended on Monday with the announcement of new MacBook Pro models that roll back most of the major changes introduced in 2016, putting the MacBook Pro in a new state of grace that recalls the middle of the last decade.

I have no need for one of these new MacBook Pros, but if I had to replace my nearly ten year old MacBook Air, the 14-inch model would be hard to resist — in silver, please. Its industrial design is a modern unibody interpretation of the Titanium PowerBook, Apple says it is ludicrously powerful, and it rights a bunch of the wrongs of the Touch Bar-era MacBook Pro lineup. MagSafe makes a much-appreciated return; its inclusion in my old Air saved it from falling off the counter just this week. For my money, the best port making its return is the SD card slot.

Snell:

SD slot: Apple’s argument for getting rid of the SD slot was that the future would be wireless, and we wouldn’t need to use cards to transfer data anymore. It wasn’t true back in 2016, and it’s still not true. Sure, some devices equipped with SD cards now offer wireless data transfer, but let me tell you — it’s not as fast or reliable as just plugging in a card and transferring the data! And a lot of our non-Apple devices still rely on slow USB ports to transfer data if you have to copy the data directly. The SD slot is just convenient whether you’re a pro transferring photos, audio, or video.

My MacBook Air is my travel computer, and I use the SD card slot constantly. In 2016, Phil Schiller attempted to justify its removal to the Independent’s David Phelan:

Because of a couple of things. One, it’s a bit of a cumbersome slot. You’ve got this thing sticking halfway out. Then there are very fine and fast USB card readers, and then you can use CompactFlash as well as SD. So we could never really resolve this – we picked SD because more consumer cameras have SD but you can only pick one. So, that was a bit of a trade-off. And then more and more cameras are starting to build wireless transfer into the camera. That’s proving very useful. So we think there’s a path forward where you can use a physical adaptor if you want, or do wireless transfer.

Schiller paints a picture of a future that we are still waiting on in 2021. Sure, some cameras have wireless transfer modes, but most everyone I know still transfers images via a cable connected to the camera or by inserting the SD card into their computer. And if the “cumbersome” qualities of the reader were unacceptable, it is hard to believe that the alternative could be described as elegant or simple.

As far as general peripheral ports, there is still only a series of USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports. Thankfully, the USB-C device landscape is almost standardized. It has taken several years and most people still need a USB-A dongle from time to time, but it is so much better than it used to be. All of the other changes show that Apple really is listening to the users who are most drawn to the MacBook Pro’s capability and portability. This Mac is a sensation: I noticed Apple’s preorder page crawled to a halt for several hours after yesterday’s launch.

Truth be told, while I wish I could get one of the new 14-inch MacBook Pro models, I have no need for its power. I hope that some of these features will trickle down to the MacBook Air, and that the Air will be available in iMac colours. That is my perfect notebook. When this Air somehow stops working, it is what I will order — in teal.

Safari 15 Watch: Old Tabs Edition ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell:

It’s official: As of the latest macOS Monterey beta — version 12.0.1, which makes me wonder if they’ve locked version 12.0 on the new MacBook Pro models and everyone else will jump straight to 12.0.1 — Safari tabs have been reverted to their original “tab” appearance, instead of being a bunch of floating lozenges.

I share Snell’s sympathy for a team that obviously worked hard to try something new, but I am thrilled there is a choice between a more compact tab interface and one that actually looks like tabs. That is true for Monterey, it is true for iPadOS, and I imagine a new seed of Safari 15 will be released for Big Sur to complete the set.1

While the capsule layout shipped, I am glad to see that it was reverted. I wish that were done earlier, but the result is the same. Today is a good day.

  1. The Safari 15 build for Catalina has not received the “compact” layout, nor — thankfully — does it have the option to use the weird capsule tab format. ↥︎

Apple Introduces a Siri-Only Apple Music Plan ⇥ apple.com

Maybe the oddest thing Apple introduced today is this $5 per month Siri-only Apple Music plan:

The Apple Music Voice Plan will be available later this fall in 17 countries and regions, including Australia, Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This is the same list of regions where Apple sells the HomePod Mini. If you have a HomePod and, I guess, only listen to music on that device and no other, perhaps this is a compelling offering? I am not sure I buy that. Along similar lines, I wondered if this was perhaps a low-cost way to encourage Spotify users to try Apple Music on their HomePods, but even though it is possible, Spotify still has not added HomePod support.

Whatever the case, I cannot imagine saving $5 per month is worth having to use Siri.

Update: Looks like this plan is a direct competitor for Amazon Music’s “Unlimited Single Device” plan (hat tip to Mitsuhara Mussina).

Google Is Moving Its iOS Apps Toward Platform UI Conventions and Away From Material Design ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jeff Verkoeyen runs Google’s design team for products on Apple’s platforms:

So at the beginning of this year, my team began a deep evaluation of what it means to build a hallmark Google experience on Apple platforms by critically evaluating the space of “utility” vs key brand moments, and the components needed to achieve either.

Does a switch really need to be built custom in alignment with a generic design system? Or might it be sufficient to simply use the system solution and move on?

Via Jason Snell who writes:

This is good news. It’s good for Google’s developers, who no longer have to build that custom code. And more importantly, it’s good for people who use Google’s apps on iOS, because with any luck they’ll be updated faster, work better, and feel more like proper iOS apps, not invaders from some other platform.

Good. I hope Google considers this for the apps it ships on other non-Google platforms, too.

Update: I keep thinking about this tweet in Verkoeyen’s thread:

It’s now been almost ten years now since we set out on this journey, and many of the gaps MDC [Material Design Components] had filled have since been filled by UIKit — often in ways that result in much tighter integrations with the OS than what we can reasonably achieve via custom solutions.

I would love to know what specifically has changed in UIKit that would only now make it possible to build Google’s apps with native components, compared to many years ago.

Facebook and Ray-Ban Collaborated on Some ‘Smart’ Glasses ⇥ buzzfeednews.com

Facebook:

Today we’re excited to launch Ray-Ban Stories: Smart glasses that give you an authentic way to capture photos and video, share your adventures, and listen to music or take phone calls — so you can stay present with friends, family, and the world around you. Starting at $299 USD and available in 20 style combinations, the smart glasses are available for purchase online and in select retail stores in the US as well as Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy, and the UK.

Katie Notopoulos reviewed them for Buzzfeed News:

To make it clear to bystanders that you’re taking a video with your camera glasses, there’s a small white LED light in the frame corner that lights up whenever the camera is on. However, the tiny light is far less obvious than Snapchat’s version, which had a larger swirling light ring while filming.

Although you can’t turn off the light on the glasses or through the app, I was able to do this the old fashion way: I put a tiny piece of masking tape over the LED light and colored the tape black with a Sharpie. It covered it up perfectly.

[…]

Alex Himel, VP of AR at Facebook Reality Labs, informed me over a Zoom chat that taping over the LED light was a violation of the terms of service of the glasses, which prohibit tampering with the device. Be warned.

I love the idea that the terms of service are a law or some kind of incantation that Facebook can recite to prevent people from doing obviously creepy things with these glasses.

Notopoulos reports that Facebook added the LED That Must Not Be Covered on the advice of privacy advocates. Apparently, this was not a thought that had independently occurred to those developing the product. Facebook is not a company that values privacy, and its internal culture reflects that.

Facebook launched a dedicated site that more-or-less acknowledges these risks by pleading with users to “wear [their] smart glasses responsibly” and turn them off in locker rooms and doctor’s offices. Maybe there is a certain amount of personal responsibility here, but maybe there is some corporate responsibility as well. For all of the benefits these kinds of glasses may create, they also make the world creepier for anyone who is not using them. Just because a camera can now fit into the frame of a pair of Wayfarers, that does not mean it should. I know that you can buy spy glasses, but there is a big difference when a corporate giant markets them as a headphone-like everyday gadget. This recontextualizes them in a way that denudes their invasive properties, and transforms them from an illicit-like purchase into something more socially acceptable.

All Facebook had to do was not include a camera.

1Password Goes Electron ⇥ sixcolors.com

Michael Fey of 1Password:

We could support as many versions of macOS as we wanted using Apple’s AppKit framework, but that meant adding another frontend toolkit to the mix. We could go all in on SwiftUI, but that meant reducing the number of operating system versions we could support. We could go all in on the same approach we were using for Linux and Windows, but that made it very difficult to create an app that looked and felt at home on macOS.

Ultimately we decided for a two-prong approach. We would build two Mac apps. One written in SwiftUI that targeted the latest operating systems and another using web UI that allowed us to cover older OSes.

[…]

Ultimately we made the painful decision to stop work on the SwiftUI Mac app and focus our SwiftUI efforts on iOS, allowing the Electron app to cover all of our supported Mac operating systems. We could have started over with AppKit as the UI toolkit for our Mac app, but this would have put us significantly behind schedule and also would have added another frontend toolkit to maintain over the long term. This decision came with a big challenge, however, as we knew we still needed to deliver a top-tier user experience on macOS.

Even as someone who does not currently use 1Password, I first found myself irked by the rationale laid out in Fey’s post. As much as possible, customers should not see the impact of financial decisions on a business. When a restaurant is impacted by rising food and labour costs, it can make choices about how to compensate: it can raise prices, reduce the ingredients that go into each dish, or eliminate items. But when I sit down to my meal, I should not feel like something is incomplete or missing.

As I thought more, I realized that being annoyed at Fey’s arguments was only scratching the surface. Yet another Electron app in the lives of many Mac users should be seen as a reflection of the great demand placed on developers by cross-platform availability, and the poor quality of tools to make that happen. 1Password is not a small company — it has nearly 500 employees — and the history of its product indicates that it cares deeply about a great Mac experience. Years ago, when I was a 1Password user, I remember it being among my favourite apps to use. Who knew that something as boring as a password manager could be fun and beautiful? If a company like 1Password feels like the Mac can share an Electron app with Windows and Linux, that seems like a concerning state of affairs.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I have to read this as a (gently stated) indictment of the current state of SwiftUI. AgileBits was willing to put in the extra work for iOS, because it’s an important platform and SwiftUI is clearly the future there. But implementing it on the Mac required a lot of duplicate work — and what’s worse, SwiftUI apps aren’t compatible with older versions of macOS. AgileBits was planning on covering the older versions with an Electron version, but once it decided the SwiftUI implementation for the Mac was too much work, it pulled the plug — and now plans to ship an Electron version to all Mac users.

Rich Siegel, in a lengthy Twitter thread about cross-platform frameworks and app efficiency (I have merged several successive tweets and, with editorial discretion, converted these thoughts into paragraphs to make everything easier to read):

Electron is an *extremely* effective way for developers to rapidly bring up an application. It’s a fully functional application framework. It’s as close an expression of the original ideal of “write once, run anywhere” as I can think of. (That term first came out of Sun’s marketing for Java. A lot of us made fun of it back then, mostly because it wasn’t true at the time.) And of course with Electron, you get a common UI/UX for all of your target platforms, deploy everywhere make use of existing Web design and development resources, etc, etc.

But. All of those upsides come at the cost of everything I’ve just finished laying out. And things start to get really sticky, because if you take a survey of the Electron products that have become entrenched in our daily lives, they almost all come from companies that have specific BUSINESS goals for developing them that way.

Siegel’s thread is not specifically about 1Password and, if anything, Snell’s post uses 1Password’s announcement to frame some of the issues facing developers on MacOS. 1Password is merely a symptom of a greater set of issues; Electron is a weak patch on a leaking tire.

I know that Electron has its defenders who might write to me and tell me that I have always been wrong in disliking it and that I should try using better apps like Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. But I have tried VS Code, and if this is the best that Electron can offer, I do not see why I should retract my criticisms. It is this decade’s Java.

The fact of the matter is that there has never been a good cross-platform framework — not when developers only had to worry about Windows and Mac OS X, and not now when they are trying to cover at least twice as many operating systems. Apple’s attempts — SwiftUI and Catalyst, the latter of which 1Password’s Fey does not mention — have not corrected that problem, and they only cover half of the platforms developers commonly support. When even premiere Mac developers think Electron is the best option they have, it makes me worried.

Matt Birchler: ‘What I Like About the New Safari’ ⇥ birchtree.me

I completely agree with Matt Birchler’s list of genuine improvements made to the new version of Safari in iOS 15. I will even add to it: on some websites — like Defector and Wikipedia — the way that the theme-color status bar blends into the page header looks fantastic on the iPhone, and Tab Groups are a welcome addition. I also appreciate that some of the most glaring complaints about the first build, such as the “⋯” button, have been corrected. But there is still so far to go, particularly for the iPad and Mac versions.

Safari 15 and Chickenshit Minimalism

Stephen Hackett, Six Colors:

Apple seems to be unhappy with the traditional browser design that includes navigation tools at the top, with websites being forced to live in their own view down below, and with Safari 15, it has blurred the line between browser and web content. This goes far beyond the mere splashes of color that Safari users may be used to seeing behind their navigation controls when scrolling a long webpage.

Now, the new tab bar takes on the color of the website, letting the entire window take on the personality of whatever website is visible. Apple says that this lets browsing feel more expansive, as the browser’s UI is now yielding to the content.

If you are running Big Sur, you can get the same UI experience in the latest version of Safari Technology Preview. It is a very big change.

Before I begin with a few high-level criticisms, I should say that this is an early preview that may change significantly or, like the tabs above the address bar in Safari 4, be scrapped altogether. That said, Apple is marketing the new design heavily, so if you are not a fan of this change, don’t get your hopes up. I should also say that I think I use the web differently than many people. As John Gruber and Ben Thompson said on a recent episode of “Dithering”, there are two types of people in the world: those who know that Safari on iPhone has a limit of five hundred open tabs, and those who do not. I am the former.

I am not a fan of the new Safari design. I am not sure I hate it, and I think I get what Apple is trying to do by combining the tab and address bar into a single element and allowing it to inherit the colour of the page. But I do not think it makes sense yet and, worse, I am concerned about some bad design patterns that are emerging. Before I get into that, I wanted to start with the tab bar backdrop colour.

Hackett:

The color the tab bar takes on can be manually set by including setting a meta tag named theme-color in the head of the webpage. (Optionally, different values can be set for light and dark modes.) If this value isn’t set, Safari will choose its own color from the website’s background color or header image. Thankfully, Safari is smart enough to not use colors that interfere with UI elements like standard window controls in macOS.

This meta tag might be familiar to anyone who has built websites with specific support for Android.

This background colour only applies to the currently open tab; it does not persist when switching tabs. If you are on CNet — which has a red accent colour — and then switch to this website, which has a white accent, the CNet tab does not stay red. There is an obvious reason for this: it would become messy and hard to read with many tabs open. But you could make a similar argument if CNet were the only open tab — the red backdrop is jarring and difficult to read in every context.

It also is not a consistent browsing experience if the theme-color is not defined for a website. For example, at the top scroll position of a Markup article, the tab bar backdrop will be a deep blue, selected automatically by the browser. But if you scroll the page a little, the tab will turn grey. Surely it should select a colour and maintain it. And, while Safari is smart enough not to automatically select colours that will make it hard to see window controls, it will accept theme-colors that do. An article page at Rest of World will turn the tab bar a shade of green that is very close to that used for the expand window control in the Aqua MacOS theme.

Condensing the address bar into each tab is also irksome. It is a clever idea, but it means that everything moves around because tabs move. They scroll left to right; they change size as you open and close other tabs.

The small size of a browser tab also means that many controls are hidden by default, including the reload and share buttons. They are all buried into one of those vague “⋯” controls that Apple is obsessed with these days. If you share web links a lot, there is not even a way to add the button back to the toolbar in a more permanent state. This, I think, continues a worrying pattern of bad UI habits.

Over the past several releases of MacOS and iOS, Apple has experimented with hiding controls until users hover their cursor overtop, click, tap, or swipe. I see it as an extension of what Maciej Cegłowski memorably called “chickenshit minimalism”. He defined it as “the illusion of simplicity backed by megabytes of cruft”; I see parallels in a “junk drawer” approach that prioritizes the appearance of simplicity over functional clarity. It adds complexity because it reduces clutter, and it allows UI designers to avoid making choices about interface hierarchy by burying everything but the most critical elements behind vague controls.

If UI density is a continuum, the other side of chickenshit minimalism might be something like Microsoft’s “ribbon” toolbar. Dozens of controls of various sizes and types, loosely grouped by function, and separated by a tabbed UI creates a confusing mess. But being unnecessarily reductionist with onscreen controls also creates confusion. I do not want every web browser control available at all times, but I cannot see what users gain by making it harder to find the reload button in Safari.

I just want something in the middle of that continuum. That goes for Safari, but it could just as easily be applied to UI elements that are slowly being hidden behind menus and mouseovers across MacOS like the progress time in Music, the invisible access to Notification Centre, the invisible controls on notifications themselves, and, yes, the proxy icon in document-based applications. These details matter. It is one thing to have a few onscreen elements that have functionality most users are largely unaware of, but it is quite another to hide them with the assumption that if you know, you know.

My opinion might change as I spend more time with this version of Safari on my Mac and iPad, where it is basically the same. But I am adding the “⋯” button to my UI element enemies list. Like the back button, it is a vague excuse to avoid making decisions. It makes application interfaces worse, and the more often I see it, the more concerned I am about Apple’s human interface direction.

WWDC is a Developers’ Conference After All ⇥ apple.com

Apple’s relationship with the developer community has often been fractured, but I am not sure there has been such outright animosity and grief with the company as that expressed in the past year. The arguments expressed on the blogs of many developers — from Marco Arment to Becky Hansmeyer to Michael Tsai — are the norm, not the exception.

The developer community is deeply unhappy. While the opening keynote of WWDC has undoubtably become more of a consumer marketing affair, the rest of the conference is just for developers — and they have long needed to feel heard.

Dan Moren, Six Colors:

Usually, the hours before Apple’s keynote event are filled with speculation and excitement, but this year there is far more frustration and antipathy than I can remember seeing in my decade and a half covering Apple. There’s always been some degree of dissatisfaction, especially amongst developers, but it’s hard to escape that the current story about Apple is less about its products and more about its attitude.

[…]

WWDC marks Apple’s opportunity to take control of the story. Whatever its executives announce when they take the stage later today has the potential to dominate the tech news cycle for days and weeks to come.

But the real question is whether, by sheer compelling nature or simply by volume, it can drown out the existing narrative.

So, how did Apple do?

Well, that depends on which issues you would like to focus on. Fraud is a hot-button problem, with a lengthy story about App Store scams appearing in the Washington Post on Sunday.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Related to this, Apple clarified the language around App Store discovery fraud (5.6.3) to more specifically call out any type of manipulations of App Store charts, search, reviews and referrals. The former would mean to crack down on the clearly booming industry of fake App Store ratings and reviews, which can send a scam app higher in charts and search.

[…]

But a new update to these guidelines seems to be an admission that Apple may need a little help on this front. It says developers can now directly report possible violations they find in other developers’ apps. Through a new form that standardizes this sort of complaint, developers can point to guideline violations and any other trust and safety issues they discover. Often, developers notice the scammers whose apps are impacting their own business and revenue, so they’ll likely turn to this form now as a first step in getting the scammer dealt with.

This could be beneficial to developers who may stumble across fraud, but it does not users, and particularly not those who have found themselves close to becoming victims but did not fall for a scam. While I get that a reporting mechanism could introduce a new vector for misuse by less-knowledgeable users, I still cannot believe there is nowhere for an average person to say that they found a scam.

The long-requested TestFlight for Mac is finally real, as part of the new Xcode Cloud service. It will also be possible to A/B test App Store pages, something else many developers have wanted for a long time. So that’s the good news.

What about the thorny problem of some high-profile developers getting access to platform features and APIs that most do not? For example, it was possible to get a refund for Hulu and Netflix subscriptions bought through in-app purchases from within their apps — something developers are generally unable to offer. While there is a promising new beginRefundRequest method, it just displays the App Store refund request sheet within the app with the same two-day turnaround, still controlled by Apple.

I do not know that there was a single developer who expected Apple to relent on its in-app purchase policy. It remains unchanged, and likely will until lawmakers demand a different policy.

A story today by Jacob Kastrenakes, of the Verge, noted — almost as an aside — that Patreon is allowed to offer third-party payment services in its app. For example, I tried upgrading one of my subscriptions to a level that had entirely digital perks, and Patreon threw up its own payment form. I tried subscribing to a creator account and once again saw Patreon’s own form, not an in-app purchase dialog. You can try it by subscribing to my perk-less Patreon account. I am insufferable and I am sorry.

I do not know that this is enough to cool Apple’s tense relationship with developers. Judging by the number of people I saw taking issue with Apple’s annual payout slide, I doubt it. I imagine all of the presenters this year are thrilled they did not have to talk about how great the App Store is in a room full of people who resent it, but the reasons for their disdain continue.