Pixel Envy – Page 4

November 12, 2024 ⌥

Old iPhone Videos Hidden in Plain Sight ⇥ ben-mini.github.io

While Send to YouTube can be thoroughly analyzed as a milestone on the “frenemy” timeline between Apple and Google, I want to explore a pleasant consequence of this moment. Apple uses the ‘IMG_XXXX’ naming convention for all images and videos captured on iOS devices, where XXXX is a unique sequence number. The first image you take is named “IMG_0001”, the second is “IMG_0002” and so on. During the Send to YouTube era of 2009 and 2012, the title of one’s YouTube video was defaulted to this naming convention. Unwitting content creators would then upload their videos on a public site with a barely-searchable name. To this day, there are millions of these videos.

Like sharing Strava routes, this feels like a throwback to a different time. I found some videos shot on the fifth-generation iPod Nano, too, which used the same naming scheme.

November 11, 2024 ⌥

Apple’s ‘Best Albums’ List Available in $450 Coffee Table Book Form ⇥ assouline.com

I am not sure what amuses most about this book, as there is so much to choose from. The $450 price tag, perhaps, for what appears to be the same short essays featured in Apple Music. Maybe it is the lack of anything released before 1959. Perhaps it is in celebrating the hollowness of Apple’s ranking.

For me, though, it is that this book, which features the covers of the hundred best albums of all time, contains — according to this product page — exactly 97 illustrations. Which three album covers are missing, I wonder?

(Via Christina Warren.)

November 8, 2024 ⌥

Apple Quietly Introduced iPhone ‘Inactivity Reboot’ ⇥ 404media.co

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

On Thursday, 404 Media reported that law enforcement officials were freaking out that iPhones which had been stored for examination were mysteriously rebooting themselves. At the time the cause was unclear, with the officials only able to speculate why they were being locked out of the devices. Now a day later, the potential reason why is coming into view.

“Apple indeed added a feature called ‘inactivity reboot’ in iOS 18.1.,” Dr.-Ing. Jiska Classen, a research group leader at the Hasso Plattner Institute, tweeted after 404 Media published on Thursday along with screenshots that they presented as the relevant pieces of code.

The way this was explained in the original article does not appear to be accurate:

[…] The law enforcement officials’ hypothesis is that “the iPhone devices with iOS 18.0 brought into the lab, if conditions were available, communicated with the other iPhone devices that were powered on in the vault in AFU. That communication sent a signal to devices to reboot after so much time had transpired since device activity or being off network.” They believe this could apply to iOS 18.0 devices that are not just entered as evidence, but also personal devices belonging to forensic examiners.

None of this appears to be true. It only seems as though iPhones reboot automatically after inactivity, making them harder to crack. It seems the cops believed iPhones were secretly communicating with each other because some of them were running older iOS versions, forgetting the explanation that satisfies Hanlon’s razor: iOS is kind of buggy.

It is impossible to differentiate between improving the security of user data on an iPhone that has been stolen, and locking out police as a phone sits in an evidence locker. The former is worth pursing, and sorry about the latter.

November 7, 2024 ⌥

Wonder Has Raised Over a Billion Dollars to Be a Maker of Generic Food ⇥ grubstreet.com

Matthew Schneier, Grub Street:

What even is Wonder? Founded in 2018, it is, according to its own marketing copy, “a new kind of food hall.” More of a Potemkin food hall, really. Under its green shingle, Wonder comprises some 30 “restaurants,” which are really more like sub-brands. […]

[…] The company partners with chefs or restaurateurs for an up-front fee and equity, and its team of “culinary engineers” works with the chefs for months to develop a scalable, deliverable menu. New ideas are then piloted at a Wonder location — Downtown Brooklyn and Westfield, New Jersey, are both pilot stores — after which the food is rolled out to many more. Once items make it to the larger menu, they’re prepped in a centralized commercial kitchen in New Jersey and sent daily, mostly as kits, to Wonder’s stores, where everything is finished to order. […]

So it is a bunch of styles of food assembled — not made or cooked — in the same kitchen by the same people. Like on an airplane, famously the best cuisine you are able to get when you are stuck ten kilometres in the sky, and by no other metric.

Rebecca Deczynski, Inc, in March:

Wonder, [Marc] Lore’s New York City-based food delivery startup, which currently has 11 brick-and-mortar locations that serve fast-cooked meals by chefs including Bobby Flay and Michael Symon, has completed a $700-million funding round, the company announced today.

Wonder has raised, according to Deczynski, $1.5 billion. To be clear, neither Flay nor Symon is making your dinner.

I get how this allows a group of people to each get the kind of food they want, all in one order. But we already have restaurants that do that, and they usually suck. If you have ever dined at a place offering sushi, wings, fettuccini Alfredo, and seafood, you already know none of those things will be as good as a cheap and unfussy cuisine-specific neighbourhood joint.

This is an evolution of the ghost kitchen concept. Like those, I can see this sort of thing fragmenting communities as supporting a local restaurant is replaced with this mediocre and inexpensive — for now — venture capital-funded alternative.

November 7, 2024 ⌥

The MacBook Pro Nano-Texture Display Is Matte From the Inside ⇥ petapixel.com

Jaron Schneider, of PetaPixel, reviewed the new MacBook Pro:

The only other major change to the design of this laptop is the choice to add Apple’s nano-texture display which significantly reduces glare. The MacBook Pro has been very prone to glare over the years and would have to rely solely on pure brightness to overcome it. Now it has another tool in its arsenal although the implementation is slightly different than nano-texture has been on previous Apple devices like the Pro Display XDR and iPad Pro. While those two devices have a layer of glass which is then etched with the nano-texture, the MacBook Pro doesn’t use that same glass cover. The nano-texture is, therefore, instead embedded on the inside of the display. The effect is the same, or similar enough, and Apple includes its special polishing cloth too, but it’s not strictly “necessary” to use to clean the MacBook Pro display (although it is recommended).

I have not seen it mentioned anywhere else that the texture layer is on the inside of the display. It feels like it would be more appropriate for a portable product as it would be easier to clean. But the iPad Pro is available with a matte display, too, and its texture is on the outside. If an iPhone model becomes available with a nano-texture display option, I would bet its texture is on the inside, like the MacBook Pro.

Also, notable to me is the vast price gap in nano-texture options. Choosing that option on the iPad Pro costs $100 more than the standard glass in U.S. pricing; on the MacBook Pro, it is $150; on the iMac, $200. On the Studio Display, it is $300. And, still — five years later — it remains a $1,000 upgrade on the Pro Display XDR.

The Fight

November 6, 2024 ⌥

You might want to skip this one.

From the perspective of this outsider, the results of this year’s U.S. presidential election are stunning. I feel terrible for those within the U.S. who will endure another four years of having longtime institutions ripped apart by a criminal administration and its enablers in the legislative and judicial branches. This is true of just about everybody, but the brunt of the pain inflicted will — again — be directed toward the LGBTQ community, immigrants, visible minorities, and women.

As the world’s sole superpower, however, the effects of U.S. lawmaking will be felt everywhere. The incoming administration’s actions will, at best, disregard consequence. Again: at best. The rest of the world will attempt to govern itself around the whims of an unstable sex abuser, his dangerously feckless cabinet, and a host of grovelling billionaires whispering in his ear.

While the oligarchs and authoritarians of the world will have influence over what happens next in the U.S., us normal people will not. The best we can do is prevent a similar catastrophe befalling our communities. Democracies around the world have elected a raft of far-right ideologues and strongmen — in Austria, Belgium, France, Indonesia, Italy, and the Netherlands. Nationalist ideologies in Europe are now the “establishment”.

Here at home, Canada’s Conservative Party leader is more popular than his rivals and he is itching for an election. Though not our farthest-right party, his policies are of the slash-and-burn variety; his party uniformly voted against those new privacy laws.

Closer still, our provincial government is enacting massive reforms aligned with some of the most conservative U.S. states. At their recent conference, they embraced carbon dioxide as a token principle. Like many conservative governments, they are targeting people who are transgender with restrictive legislation opposed by medical professionals. These policies got the attention of Amnesty International when they were announced.

A predictable response from centrist parties is that they will move rightward to present themselves as a moderating alternative to the more hardline conservatives. I am not a political scientist, but it does not seem that growing the size of the tent will be inviting to a electorate increasingly comfortable with far-right ideas. There are thankfully still places where democracies in recent elections have not embraced a nationalist agenda, and where elections are not between shades of conservatism. Our politicians would do well to learn from them.

We each get to choose our societal role. At the moment, for those of us who do not align with these dominant forces, it can feel pretty small. This is not an airport book; I am not ending this thing on a hopeful note and a list of to-dos. I am scared of what this U.S. election means for decades to come. I am just as worried about policies close to home, and those are the ones I can try to do something about.

I am not giving up. But I am overwhelmed by how far democratic countries around the world have regressed, and how much further they are likely to go.

November 6, 2024 ⌥

Canadian Government Bans TikTok’s Canadian Operations, but Not Its App ⇥ cbc.ca

Catharine Tunney, CBC News:

Citing national security concerns, the federal government has ordered TikTok to close its Canadian operations — but users will still be able to access the popular app.

My position is that TikTok should not be banned; instead, governments should focus on comprehensive privacy legislation to protect users from all avenues of data exploitation. So it is kind of a good thing the Canadian government is not prohibiting the app or users’ access — except the government’s position appears to be entirely contradictory. It is very worried about user privacy:

Former CSIS director David Vigneault told CBC News it’s “very clear” from the app’s design that data gleaned from its users “is available to the government of China” and its large-scale data harvesting goals.

But laws drawn up in 2022 which would restrict these practices have been stuck in committee since May. So there is an ostensibly dangerous app posing a risk to Canadians, and the government’s response is to let people keep using it while shutting down the company’s offices? The Standing Committee on Industry and Technology had better get moving.

November 5, 2024 ⌥

The Powerful Density of Hypertextual Writing ⇥ kottke.org

Please forgive me for quoting this New York Times editorial board piece in its entirety:

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

This is arresting, and not just because of how direct it is. It makes the best of the medium of the web in a way that would simply be impossible in print: by stacking link upon link.

Jason Kottke:

A simple list of headlines would have done the same basic job, but by presenting it this way, the Times editorial board is simultaneously able to deliver a strong opinion; each of those links is like a fist pounding on the desk for emphasis. Lies, threat, corruption, cruel, autocrats — bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! Here! Are! The! Fucking! Receipts!

John Gruber:

The way I’ve long thought about it is that traditional writing — like for print — feels two-dimensional. Writing for the web adds a third dimension. It’s not an equal dimension, though. It doesn’t turn writing from a flat plane into a full three-dimensional cube. It’s still primarily about the same two dimensions as old-fashioned writing. What hypertext links provide is an extra layer of depth. Just the fact that the links are there — even if you, the reader, don’t follow them — makes a sentence read slightly differently. It adds meaning in a way that is unique to the web as a medium for prose.

Both these pieces are so good, I just had to point to them and add my own stance: link often, and link generously. Writing on the web is not like print, where too many citations can feel interruptive. On the web, it is just part of the visual vocabulary. It encourages a more expansive tapestry where references can be used for more than just acknowledging source material. One can also point to definitions, tangential pages, or jokes. The hyperlink is among the singularly magical elements of the web.

The Times is among the worst offenders for not crediting others’ past reporting by linking to it. You will notice every one of the links in its paragraph is to another Times story, which makes sense in this context. (It would be perhaps slightly more powerful if each was to a different publication to capture the breadth of this uniquely odious man, but then the Times runs the risk of pointing readers to something outside its known editorial context.) In other reporting, there is simply no excuse for the Times to not link to someone else’s preceding work.

Link often, link generously.

We Are Cursed to Have More Connector Standards and, Also, Articles About Connector Standards

November 4, 2024 ⌥

In short.

In long:

Ten years ago, the USB Implementers Forum finalized the specification for USB-C 1.0, and the world rejoiced, for it would free us from the burden of remembering which was the correct orientation of the plug relative to the socket. And lo, it was good.

And then we all actually got around to using USB-C devices and realized this whole thing is a little bit messy. While there was now a universal connector, the capabilities of the cable can range from those which support only power with maybe a trickle of data, all the way up to others which carry data at USB4 speeds. But that is not all. It might also support various Thunderbolt standards — 3, 4, and now 5 — and DisplayPort. That is neat. Again, this is all done using the same connector size and shape, and with cables that look practically interchangeable.

Which brings us to Ian Bogost, writing in the Atlantic — a requisite destination for intellectualized lukewarm takes — about his cable woes:

I am unfortunately old enough to remember when the first form of USB was announced and then launched. The problem this was meant to solve was the same one as today’s: “A rat’s nest of cords, cables and wires,” as The New York Times described the situation in 1998. Individual gadgets demanded specific plugs: serial, parallel, PS/2, SCSI, ADB, and others. USB longed to standardize and simplify matters — and it did, for a time.

But then it evolved: USB 1.1, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, USB4, and then, irrationally, USB4 2.0. Some of these cords and their corresponding ports looked identical, but had different capabilities for transferring data and powering devices. I can only gesture to the depth of absurdity that was soon attained without boring you to tears or lapsing into my own despair. […]

Reader — and I mean this with respect — I am only too willing to bore you to tears with another article about USB-C. Bogost is right, though. The original USB standard unified the many different ports one was expected to use for peripherals. It basically succeeded for at least two of them: the keyboard and mouse. Both require minimal data, so they work fine regardless of whether the port supports USB 1.1 or USB 3.1. Such standardization also came with loads more benefits, too, like reducing setup and configuration once necessary for even basic peripherals.

Where things got complicated is when data transfer speeds actually matter. USB 1.1 — the first version most people actually used — topped out at 12 Mbits per second; USB 2.0 could do 480 Mbits per second. Even so, the ports and cables looked identical. If you plugged an external hard drive into your computer using the wrong cable, you would notice because it would crawl.

This begat more specs allowing for higher speeds, requiring new cables and — sometimes — new connectors. And it was kind of a mess. So the USB-IF got together and created USB-C, which at least solves some of these problems. It is a more elegant connector and, so far, it has been flexible enough to support a wide range of uses.

That is kind of the problem with it, though: the connector can do everything, but there is no easy way to see what capabilities are supported by either the port or the cable. Put another way, if you connect a Thunderbolt 5 hard drive using the same cable as you use to charge new Magic Mouse and Keyboard, you will notice, just as you did twenty years ago.

Bogost, after describing his array of gadgets connected by USB-A, USB-C, and micro-HDMI:

This chaos was supposed to end, with USB-C as our savior. The European Union even passed a law to make that port the charging standard by the end of this year. […]

Hope persists that someday, eventually, this hell can be escaped — and that, given sufficient standardization, regulatory intervention, and consumer demand, a winner will emerge in the battle of the plugs. But the dream of having a universal cable is always and forever doomed, because cables, like humankind itself, are subject to the curse of time, the most brutal standard of them all. At any given moment, people use devices they bought last week alongside those they’ve owned for years; they use the old plugs in rental cars or airport-gate-lounge seats; they buy new gadgets with even better capabilities that demand new and different (if similar-looking) cables. […]

If the ultimate goal is a single cable and connector that can do everything from charge your bike light to connect a RAID array — do we still have RAID arrays? — I think that is foolish.

But I do not think that is the expectation. For one thing, note Bogost’s correctly chosen phrasing of what the E.U.’s standard entails. All devices have unified around a single charging standard, which does not demand any specialized cable. I use a Thunderbolt cable to sync my iPhone and charge my third-party keyboard, because I cannot be tamed.¹ The same is true of my laptop and also my wife’s, the headphones I am wearing right now, a Bluetooth speaker we have kicking around, our Nintendo Switch, and my bicycle tire pump. Having one cable for all this stuff rules.

If you need higher speeds, though, I would bet you know that. If the difference between Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 5 matters to you, you are a different person than most. And, I would wager, you are probably happy that you can connect a fancy Thunderbolt drive to any old USB-C port and still read its contents, even if it is not as fast. That kind of compatibility is great.

Lookalike connectors are nothing new, however. P.C. users probably remember the days of PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, which had the same plugs but were not interchangeable. 3.5mm circular ports were used for audio out, audio in, microphone — separate from audio in, for some reason — and individual speakers. This was such a mess that Microsoft and Intel decided PC ports needed colour-coding (PDF). Even proprietary connectors have this problem, as Apple demonstrated with some Lightning accessories.

We are doomed to repeat this so long as the same connectors and cables describe a wide range of capabilities. But solving that should never be the expectation. We should be glad to unify around standards for at least basic functions like charging and usable data transfer. USB-C faced an uphill battle because we probably had — and still have — devices which use other connectors. While my tire pump uses USB-C, my bike light charges using some flavour of mini-USB port. I do not know which. I have one cable that works and I dare not lose it.

Every newer standard is going to face an increasingly steep hill. USB-C now has a supranational government body mandating its use for wired charging in many devices which, for all its benefits, is also a hurdle if and when someone wants to build some device in which it would be difficult to accommodate a USB-C port. That I am struggling to think of a concrete example is perhaps an indicator of the specificity of such a product and, also, that I am not in the position of dreaming up such products.

But even without that regulatory oversight, any new standard will have to supplant a growing array of USB-C devices. We may not get another attempt at this kind of universality for a long time yet. It is a good thing USB-C is quite an elegant connector, and such a seemingly flexible set of standards.

I still use a Lightning Magic Trackpad which means I used to charge it and sync my iPhone with the same cable, albeit more slowly. Apparently, the new USB-C Magic Trackpad is incompatible with my 2017 iMac, though I am not entirely sure why. Bluetooth, maybe? Standards! ↥︎

November 3, 2024 ⌥

Humane Is Trying to License Its Operating System, a Move It Swears Was the Strategy All Along ⇥ crazystupidtech.com

Om Malik, at his new Crazy Stupid Tech publication — which, according to its mission statement, is a compliment — interviewed Humane founders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri about how things are going:

Lost in the barbs about the botched hardware was the fact that a new kind of operating system powered the AI Pin. It was clear that AI Pin wasn’t merely a hardware wrapper for ChatGPT; it was software developed for the oncoming AI future.

Sitting across from me, Chaudhri is sharing details about lessons learned and his company’s core product, CosmOS, the AI operating system. The company now plans to license the software to those interested in AI-powered devices.

There is a diagram in this article illustrating the difference between the architecture of a “traditional O.S.” and that of this “A.I. operating system”, and I think I understand it — but only kind of. The way I interpret Malik’s explanation is that it works almost like a mix of plugins and a sort of universal data layer.

The way this was demonstrated to Malik was as though it was a car’s operating system. Malik says it was “much more intelligent than, say, an Alexa device”, which might very well be true. But the skills which were demonstrated are nominally possible with assistants that already exist in smartphone operating systems, albeit in a way that sounds far less sophisticated than Humane is able to deliver. If you have a relatively recent car, you can plug in your phone and get very close to that capability today.

I am reminded of Jason Snell’s article from the week of the A.I. Pin’s launch, in which he pointed out “how much potential innovation is strangled by the presence of enormously powerful tech companies”. The hard part for Humane — whether pinned to your shirt or installed in your car’s dashboard — is that it wants you to maintain an entirely new digital space in a world of far bigger companies that want to keep you in their insular environments.

Malik:

Licensing an operating system can be a lucrative business. Microsoft’s Windows windfall is legendary. However, there are other less obvious examples. In 1998, I wrote about a company called Integrated Systems that made an OS for devices ranging from dishwashers to microwaves. In 2000, it merged with Wind River Systems, and their OS powered all these devices that are computers but don’t look like computers — washing machines, for example. Wind River is now owned by Intel.

Wind River was sold by Intel in 2018 to TPG, a private equity firm, nine years after buying it for $884 million. The financial terms of TPG’s purchase were not disclosed, which does not suggest Intel made a killing and kind of implies it lost money. Just four years and predictable layoffs later, it sold the company for $4.3 billion. This is not really a correction to Malik’s point; more of an addition.

Update: If the idea behind an A.I. operating system is that it can figure out just the right process for the current task, and Danny Gonzalez’s experience is anything to go by, count me out. No thank you.

November 1, 2024 ⌥

Apple Intelligence Is Coming to the E.U. In April ⇥ apple.com

Apple on Monday in the Irish press release for this week’s operating system updates:

Mac users in the EU can access Apple Intelligence in U.S. English with macOS Sequoia 15.1. This April, Apple Intelligence features will start to roll out to iPhone and iPad users in the EU. This will include many of the core features of Apple Intelligence, including Writing Tools, Genmoji, a redesigned Siri with richer language understanding, ChatGPT integration, and more.

This timeline coincides with additional language availability. In December, Apple will roll out support for some non-U.S. versions of English; in April, it will add other languages like French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. So there is functionally no delay in the availability of Apple Intelligence for many E.U. users — at least, not if they would like to use these features in their first language.

I would not go so far as to argue this has all been a charade designed to turn public sentiment against E.U. regulators. By cautioning users — and shareholders — back in June, Apple indicated this rollout would not entirely be on its own schedule, just as it did in September when it needed regulatory approval for sleep apnea notifications and the AirPods hearing aid feature. It is not really a problem. Besides, Apple has not meaningfully location-gated Apple Intelligence in the same way as it has, say, E.U.-specific features.

Romain Dillet, TechCrunch:

From this list, it turns out all Apple Intelligence features are coming to the EU, except … notification summaries? We’ve reached out to Apple for more details about what’s not coming to the EU and an Apple spokesperson sent us the following statement: […]

The statement is not particularly illuminating, only repeating the bullet point from the press release and saying the company is still working through DMA compliance questions. It is not even clear that notification summaries are not part of the feature set rolling out in April.

All we know right now is that Apple’s E.U. rollout of Apple Intelligence coincides with the availability of a bunch of European languages. The April language pack notably also adds support for two other English languages — Indian and Singaporean — plus Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. No word on availability in China, but Tim Cook is working on it.

November 1, 2024 ⌥

Apple Ends a Week of Announcements by Acquiring Pixelmator ⇥ pixelmator.com

Pixelmator:

Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.

Congratulations to the Pixelmator team.

I have to say this is a little unsurprising. Pixelmator’s whole vibe is very Apple, but not; I cited the company’s website as an example of one aping Apple’s own.

I am also a touch worried. The first thing I thought of was Apple’s purchase of Workflow, now Shortcuts. In the past seven years, the capability of Shortcuts has been expanded tremendously, but it has also been routinely broken in iOS updates. There are frequent errors with syncing, actions stop working without warning, and compatibility does not always feel like a priority in new first-party software releases.

So, good for Pixelmator for attracting Apple’s attention and delivering quality software for years — software which can go toe-to-toe with offerings from companies far larger and richer. I hope this acquisition is great news for users, too, but I think it is fair to be apprehensive.

October 31, 2024 ⌥

When Does Instagram Decide a Nipple Becomes Female? ⇥ 404media.co

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

For the past two years an algorithmic artist who goes by Ada Ada Ada has been testing the boundaries of human and automated moderation systems on various social media platforms by documenting her own transition.

Every week she uploads a shirtless self portrait to Instagram alongside another image which shows whether a number of AI-powered tools from big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft that attempt to automatically classify the gender of a person see her as male or female. Each image also includes a sequential number, year, and the number of weeks since Ada Ada Ada started hormone therapy.

You want to see great art made with the help of artificial intelligence? Here it is — though probably not in the way one might have expected.

In the first post to be removed by Instagram, Ada Ada Ada calls it a “victory”, and it truly sounds validating. Instagram has made her point and, though she is still able to post photos, you can flip through her pinned story archives “censorship” and “censorship 2” to see how Meta’s systems interpret other posts.

October 31, 2024 ⌥

StopTheMadness Pro Version 11 ⇥ underpassapp.com

Jeff Johnson:

First, StopTheMadness Pro 11.0 adds the ability to copy a text fragment link from selected text in Safari, using a contextual menu item on macOS or Show Menu on Tap on iOS. The previous two links are themselves examples of text fragments; the first link, when clicked, scrolls to and highlights the text “Contextual Menu Items (macOS Safari)” on the linked page.

[…]

I was inspired to add this feature by Nick Heer’s blog post about text fragments.

I promise to use this overwhelming power for good.

These and other features await in a great update to one of my very favourite extensions. Unfortunately, the VisionOS version is stuck in App Review hell. But if you use any of Apple’s other platforms, good things await.

October 30, 2024 ⌥

All Macs Except the Walmart M1 MacBook Air Now Have a Minimum of 16 GB of RAM ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

It’s officially the end of an era. Apple on Wednesday held the last day of its super week of Mac announcements, this time with the launch of a new generation MacBook Pro with an M4 chip. But the company also did something else: it upgraded all Macs with 16GB of RAM as standard, putting an end to 8GB Macs.

A legitimate finally, and good news. 8GB of RAM has been standard on MacBook Air models since 2017, and on retina MacBook Pro models and iMacs since 2012.

For completeness, you can still buy a new Mac with 8GB of RAM: the Walmart-exclusive M1 MacBook Air which, nevertheless, still supports Apple Intelligence. Not that I would have expected Apple’s volume sales discount Mac to get this bump but, still, it is not yet the end of an era.

October 29, 2024 ⌥

Calgary Public Library Says It Is Slowly Resuming Services After Attempted Ransomware Attack ⇥ calgarylibrary.ca

A press release from Calgary Public Library:

The Library’s Technology Team and existing cybersecurity partners engaged a Microsoft Incident Response team to support containment procedures and complete a thorough investigation. The findings of the investigation confirm that while servers were compromised, no business, employee or membership data was affected. The incident was identified as an attempted ransomware attack, which the Library’s monitoring systems successfully blocked. The Library was not in communication with any threat agent during this period and has provided information to appropriate authorities to support further investigation.

This comes just over two weeks after the library announced it was targeted. It is not offering many further details yet, such as an estimate for its staged return to normal service, but it sounds like it will be on a faster track than the attacks which affected libraries in London, Seattle, and Toronto. If serious damage has been avoided, I am thankful given those comparable situations.

October 29, 2024 ⌥

World Leaders’ Security Personnel Are on Strava ⇥ apnews.com

Sébastien Bourdon, Antoine Schirer, and Sinead McCausland, of Le Monde, are in the middle of a three-part investigation into how Strava compromises the travel activities of world leaders. It is paywalled, but two videos, in English, have been published on YouTube.

Sylvie Corbet, with an AP summary which, despite citing Le Monde, does not link back to the publication:

Le Monde found that some U.S. Secret Service agents use the Strava fitness app, including in recent weeks after two assassination attempts on Trump, in a video investigation released in French and in English. Strava is a fitness tracking app primarily used by runners and cyclists to record their activities and share their workouts with a community.

Le Monde also found Strava users among the security staff for French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one example, Le Monde traced the Strava movements of Macron’s bodyguards to determine that the French leader spent a weekend in the Normandy seaside resort of Honfleur in 2021. The trip was meant to be private and wasn’t listed on the president’s official agenda.

In statements from the GSPR and U.S. Secret Service, officials disputed the likelihood this is meaningfully harmful. World leaders’ trips are usually public information and, while there is minor risk in the advance disclosure of where the leader is staying, officials say there are enough layers of security. That seems right to me. What Le Monde identified is a theoretical concern, but it has not demonstrated an actual problem.

To illustrate: one example the journalists showed was a meeting between hopefully-just-one-time president Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un at a hotel in Singapore. The trip was public knowledge and announced a week before it occurred. Five days prior, however, a Secret Service agent was preparing the hotel for Trump’s arrival. Anyone monitoring this Secret Service agent’s activity might at most infer Trump would be travelling to Singapore, or perhaps that this agent is on holiday. Now, if Le Monde had found similar Strava activity from Singaporean police and North Korea’s Supreme Guard Command, that would be more notable. Small amounts of quasi-private information are rarely valuable, but the combination of several sources can be.

If this feels familiar, it is because Nathan Ruser and other researchers found secret military bases in 2018 using data from Strava. All these cases feel like a legacy of decisions made at a time when public social activity was seen as inherently good.

Sorry Siri

October 28, 2024 ⌥

If software is judged by the difference between what it is actually capable of compared to what it promises, Siri is unquestionably the worst built-in iOS application. I cannot think of any other application which comes preloaded with a new iPhone that so greatly underdelivers, and has for so long.

Siri is thirteen years old, and we all know the story: beneath the more natural language querying is a fairly standard command-and-control system. In those years, Apple has updated the scope of its knowledge and responses, but because the user interface is not primarily a visual one, its outer boundaries are fuzzy. It has limits, but a user cannot know what they are until they try something and it fails. Complaining about Siri is both trite and evergreen. Yes, Siri has sucked forever, but maybe this time will be different.

At WWDC this year, Apple announced Siri would get a whole new set of powers thanks to Apple Intelligence. Users could, Apple said, speak with more natural phrasing. It also said Siri would understand the user’s “personal context” — their unique set of apps, contacts, and communications. All of that sounds great, but I have been down this road before. Apple has often promised improvements to Siri that have not turned it into the compelling voice-activated digital assistant it is marketed to be.

I was not optimistic — and I am glad — because Siri in iOS 18.1 is still pretty poor, with a couple of exceptions: its new visual presentation is fantastic, and type-to-Siri is nice. It is unclear exactly how Siri is enhanced with Apple Intelligence — more on this later — but this version is exactly as frustrating as those before it, in all the same ways.

As a reminder, Apple says users can ask Siri…

…to text a contact by using only their first name.
…for directions to locations using the place name.
…to play music by artist, album, or song.
…to start and stop timers.
…to convert from one set of units to another.
…to translate from one language to another.
…about Apple’s product features and documentation, new in iOS 18.1.
…all kinds of other stuff.

It continues to do none of these things reliably or predictably. Even Craig Federighi, when he was asked by Joanna Stern, spoke of his pretty limited usage:

I’m opening my garage, I’m closing my garage, I’m turning on my lights.

All kinds of things, I’m sending messages, I’m setting timers.

I do not want to put too much weight on this single response, but these are weak examples. This is what he could think of off the top of his head? That is all? I get it; I do not use it for much, either. And, as Om Malik points out, even the global metrics Federighi cites in the same answer do not paint a picture of success.

So, a refresh, and I will start with something positive: its new visual interface. Instead of a floating orb, the entire display warps and colour-shifts before being surrounded by a glowing border, as though enveloped in a dense magical vapour. Depending on how you activate Siri, the glow will originate from a different spot: from the power button, if you press and hold it; or from the bottom of the display, if you say “Siri” or “Hey, Siri”.

You can also now invoke text-based Siri — perfect for times when you do not want to speak aloud — by double-tapping the home bar. There has long been an option to type to Siri, but it has not been surfaced this easily, and I like it.

That is kind of where the good news stops, at least in my testing. I have rarely had a problem with Siri’s ability to understand what I am saying — I have a flat, Canadian accent, and I can usually speak without pauses or repeating words. There are writers who are more capable of testing for improvements for people with disabilities.

No, the things which Siri has flubbed have always been, for me, in its actions. Some of those should be new in iOS 18.1, or at least newly refined, but it is hard to know which. While Siri looks entirely different in this release, it is unclear what new capabilities it possesses. The full release notes say it can understand spoken queries better, and it has product documentation, but it seems anything else will be coming in future updates. I know a feature Apple calls “onscreen awareness”, which can interpret what is displayed, is one of those. I also know some personal context features will be released later — Apple says a user “could ask, ‘When is Mom’s flight landing?’ and Siri will find the flight details” no matter how they were sent. This is all coming later and, presumably, some of it requires third-party developer buy-in.

But who reads and remembers the release notes? What we all see is a brand-new Siri, and what we hear about is Apple Intelligence. Surely there must be some improvements beyond being able to ask the Apple assistant about the company’s own products, right? Well, if there are, I struggled to find them. Here are the actual interactions I have had in beta versions of iOS 18.1 for each thing in the list above:

I asked Siri to text Ellis — not their real name — a contact I text regularly. It began a message to a different Ellis I have in my contacts, to whom I have not spoken in over ten years.

Similarly, I asked it to text someone I have messaged on an ongoing basis for fifteen years. Their thread is pinned to the top of Messages. Before it would let me text them, it asked if I wanted it to send it to their phone number or their email address.
I was driving and I asked for directions to Walmart. Its first suggestion was farther away and opposite the direction I was already travelling.
I asked Siri to “play the new album from Better Lovers”, an artist I have in my library and an album that I recently listened to in Apple Music. No matter my enunciation, it responded by playing an album from the Backseat Lovers, a band I have never listened to.

I asked Siri to play an album which contains a song of the same name. This is understandably ambiguous if I do not explicitly state “play the album” or “play the song“. However, instead of asking for clarification when there is a collision like this, it just rolls the dice. Sometimes it plays the album, sometimes the song. But I am an album listener more often than I am a song listener, and my interactions with Siri and Apple Music should reflect that.
Siri starts timers without issue. It is one of few things which behaves reliably. But when I asked it to “stop the timer”, it asked me to clarify “which one?” between one active timer and two already-stopped timers. It should just stop the sole active timer; why would I ask it to stop a stopped timer?
I asked Siri “how much does a quarter cup of butter weigh?” and it converts that to litres or — because my device is set to U.S. localization for the purposes of testing Apple Intelligence — gallons. Those are volumetric measurements, not weight-based. If I ask Siri “what is the weight of a quarter cup of butter?”, it searches the web. I have to explicitly say “convert one quarter cup of butter to grams”.
I asked Siri “what is puente in English?” and it informed me I needed to use the Translate app. Apparently, you can only translate from Siri’s language — English, in this case — to another language when using Siri. Translating from a different language cannot be done with Siri alone.
I rarely see the Priority Messages feature in Mail, so I asked Siri about it. I tried different ways to phrase my question, like “what is the Priority Messages feature in Mail?”, but it would not return any documentation about this feature.

Maybe I am using Siri wrong, or expecting too much. Perhaps all of this is a beta problem. But, aside from the last bullet, these are the kinds of things Apple has said Siri can do for over a decade, and it does not do so predictably or reliably. I have had similar or identical problems with Siri in non-beta versions of iOS. Today, while using the released version of iOS 18.1, I asked it if a nearby deli was open. It gave me the hours for a deli in Spokane — hundreds of kilometres away, and in a different country.

This all feels like it may be, perhaps, a side effect of treating an iPhone as an entire widget with a governed set of software add-ons. The quality of the voice assistant is just one of a number of factors to consider when buying a smartphone, and the predictably poor Siri is probably not going to be a deciding factor for many.

But the whole widget has its advantages — you can find plenty of people discussing those, and Apple’s many marketing pieces will dutifully recite them. Since its debut in 2011, Apple has rarely put Siri front-and-centre in its iPhone advertising campaigns, but it is doing just that with the iPhone 16. It is showcasing features which rely on whole-device control — features that, admittedly, will not be shipping for many months. But the message is there: Siri has a deep understanding of your world and can present just the right information for you. Yet, as I continue to find out, it does not do that for me. It does not know who I text in the first-party Messages app or what music I listen to in Apple Music.

Would Siri be such a festering scab if it had competitors within iOS? Thanks to an extremely permissive legal environment around the world in which businesses scoop up vast amounts of behavioural data to make it slightly easier to market laundry detergent and dropshipped widgets, there is a risk to granting this kind of access to some third-party product. But if there were policies to make that less worrisome, and if Apple permitted it, there would be more intense pressure to improve Siri — and, for that matter, all voice assistants tied to specific devices.

The rollout of Apple Intelligence is uncharacteristically piecemeal and messy. Apple did not promise a big Siri overhaul in this version of iOS 18.1. But by giving it a new design, Apple communicates something is different. It is not — at least, not yet. Maybe it will be one day. Nothing about Siri’s state over the past decade-plus gives me hope that it will, however. I have barely noticed improvements in the things Apple says it should do better in iOS 18.1, like preserving context and changing my mind mid-dictation.

Siri remains software I distrust. Like Federighi, I would struggle to list my usage beyond a handful of simple commands — timers, reminders, and the occasional message. Anything else, and it remains easier and more reliable to wash my hands if I am kneading pizza dough, or park the car if I am driving, and do things myself.