Apple Vision Pro: A Watershed Moment for Personal Computing - MacStories:

I’m convinced that Vision Pro and the visionOS platform are a watershed moment in the arc of personal computing. After trying it, I came away reflecting that we’ll eventually think of software before spatial computing, and after it. For better or worse – we can’t know if this platform will be successful yet – Apple created a clear demarcation between the era of looking at a computer and looking at the world as the computer. Whether their plan succeeds or not, we’ll remember this moment in the history of the company.

Daring Fireball: The Savings Account Is Half Empty:

This is just looking to piss on Apple no matter what the story. A digital state ID stored in Apple Wallet is more secure than a printed card stored in your physical wallet. If one thief takes my iPhone, and another takes my wallet and keys, the first thief needs my device passcode to get anything. The second thief instantly knows everything that’s printed on my driver’s license and credit cards — including the address of my home, where the keys will unlock the doors. The digitization of banking does carry risks, but the pre-digital world of banking revolved around paper checks and signatures.

There’s nothing hard to square about Apple’s initiative in this regard at all. I’ll bet Tim Cook has his driver’s license in Apple Wallet — and I practically guarantee that he has his credit cards in Apple Wallet. Apple Wallet really is more secure that a physical wallet and cards. And the new savings accounts simply offer Apple Card customers a way to earn interest on cash accounts that heretofore did not pay any interest at all. There’s nothing to be cynical about with this.

Spelunking Apple’s Open Source | Bitsplitting.org:

Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page.

This resource is useful primarily to developers, but may also interest curious technophiles who want to take a peek “behind the curtain” to see how much of the magic just beneath our fingertips is made.

If you visit the page today, you’ll see a new emphasis on Apple’s high-level projects, such as Swift and WebKit. At first glance you might wonder if the extensive list of all the open source projects has been removed from the site.

There’s no need to worry: the whole list, indexed by the pertinent platform and OS release to which they belong, is still available on a separate Releases page. Even better, each of these releases now has a corresponding GitHub repository, hosted in a dedicated organization reserved exclusively for open source distributions.

The Practicality of Art in Software - MacStories:

In bringing this back to software, it’s evident that – again, historically – Apple doesn’t believe in art as a veneer to make something “look good”. Art – whereby “art” we refer to the human care behind the design of software – is intrinsically tied to the technology that powers the computer. It’s the intersection of technology and liberal arts: skew toward one side more than the other, and you risk of losing the balance many of us like about Apple. Art in Apple’s software isn’t some secret ingredient that can just be added at the end of the process, like a spice: great design is the process itself. Case in point: the Dynamic Island.

• via Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball: Report It All, See What Sticks:

I am once again reminded of the fact that, two weeks prior to its unveiling, Gurman reported that 2021’s Apple Watch Series 7 would be “all about a new design with a flatter display and edges”, when in fact the Series 7 was more rounded.

I suspect some of these wildly wrong reports are Apple floating differential details to certain parties to see what makes it to the media, to help resolve who’s leaking what.

Thought - Apple’s approach to services/Siri is hybrid cloud… Empower devices, though smart software and hardware, to do what is possible local, and only reach out to the cloud when necessary.

The real secrets of iOS and accessibility – Six Colors:

There’s a joke I tell a lot: if you encounter an article whose headline includes the words “secret features” and “iOS”, chances are you’re about to be taken on a whirlwind tour of your phone’s accessibility settings. “Did you know you could….?” Or. “Buried deep in iOS settings, you’ll find…”

Truth is, these aren’t secret features at all; they’re just unfamiliar to people whose eyes, ears and hands operate in a typical way. And these “secrets” are rarely written about, even in comprehensive coverage of iOS. “Invisible” might be a more honest way to describe these tools.

Apple’s products make Accessibility a first-class feature, though often below the bar of easy discoverability.

Cryptex: how a custom iPhone is changing macOS updates – The Eclectic Light Company:

Big Sur brought us the immutable boot volume, signed and sealed, with the SSV. This makes it almost impossible for malicious software to change anything in the System, as it’s a snapshot with every last bit verified using its tree of hashes. Its downside is that making wanted changes to update macOS or any components on the SSV is cumbersome: changes have to be written to the System volume, a snapshot made, the tree of hashes rebuilt and verified against Apple’s setting for that build of macOS, and macOS rebooted from the new snapshot.

Initially, the solution for apps like Safari, security data such as that for XProtect, and other components like Rosetta 2 that need to be installed separately from macOS, was to store them on the Data volume, where they can only be protected by SIP. That’s how Big Sur and Monterey worked, but this started to change in late versions of Monterey (in 12.6.1, if not before), and Ventura, with the introduction of the cryptex.

Cryptexes first appeared on Apple’s customised iPhone, its Security Research Device, which uses them to load a personalised trust cache and a disk image containing corresponding content. Without the cryptex, engineering those iPhones would have been extremely difficult.

MarsEdit 5 - Powerful web publishing from your Mac.:

Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online just to use them. Web browsers are wonderful for reading articles, but not for creating them. If you're writing for the web, you need a desktop blog editor. And if you're lucky enough to have a Mac, nothing is more powerful, or more elegant than MarsEdit.

Marsedit is such a great app for interacting with weblogs. On every other platform I’ve touched - Windows, Linux, even iOS and iPadOS - I have searched for something similar, or even close, and fallen short.

My only wish in relation to this is that there was an iOS/iPadOS version so I can keep up my workflow across my more personal devices. It would be an insta-buy for me, and I’m sure many others.

Neuromancer: Miles Teller Eyed For New Apple+ Sci-Fi Series: Exclusive - The Illuminerdi:

Daring Fireball: Report: Amazon Alexa Is a ‘Colossal Failure’ on Pace to Lose $10 Billion This Year:

The thing about Siri is that it was always at heart about making Apple’s platforms more accessible. Siri is there to make iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple TVs, Apple Watches, and even AirPods better. And Apple isn’t losing money on any of those. Siri will serve the same purpose on future platforms from Apple, too. Apple’s investments in Siri are part and parcel investments in their OS strategy for everything they make.

I’ll probably update this post over time as I do more work with both…

I’ve loved MarsEdit for years as the best blog editor, through generational shifts in what blogging meant and how it fit into the landscape. It is, however, a Mac only tool, which in itself isn’t bad but it doesn’t include iPad or iPhone… And it doesn’t expose it’s moving parts to be extended (I’d love to know how to make emacs the external editor for marsedit for example.)

org2blog as an extension of orgmode makes it unique, as it leverages a format and style I adore, and uses barely marked up plaintext… So I’ll be seeing if I can make Shortcuts which can take a subtree or orgmode file and post to Wordpress out of band from emacs itself.

In-app browsers that act as keyloggers – Six Colors:

Krause’s tool lets anyone investigate what might be leaking through in-app browsers. Apps that use Apple’s SafariViewController are all pretty safe, but apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook are using their own in-app browsers that modify pages with JavaScript.

TikTok, in particular, is monitoring all keyboard inputs and taps. “From a technical perspective, this is the equivalent of installing a keylogger on third party websites,” Krause writes.

Any program that forces me to use the in-app browser gets deleted by me.

via Six Colors

New Google site begs Apple for mercy in messaging war | Ars Technica:

Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way. If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one. Google has an RCS API already, but only Samsung is allowed to use it because Samsung signed some kind of partnership deal.

If you want to implement RCS, you’ll need to run the messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google. Google bought Jibe, the leading RCS server provider, in 2015. Today it has a whole sales pitch about how Google Jibe can “help carriers quickly scale RCS services, iterate in short cycles, and benefit from improvements immediately.” So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn’t just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it’s also about running Apple’s messages through Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and data acquisition.

Finally, RCS as a messaging platform just isn't that good. The end result of a 2008 standard with a bunch of extra features slapped onto it is still sub-par compared to platforms like iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram. Other than Google being desperate for one of the few messaging solutions it hasn't exhausted with mismanagement, there's no clear argument for why RCS is worth this effort. In the dreamworld utopia where Apple wants to work with Google and Samsung on a message standard, those three companies working together could do much better than a neglected carrier messaging standard.

The Apple Store Time Machine:

It’s where you bought your first iPod. It’s where you camped at 5 a.m. It’s where the iPhone came to life. It’s where the magic of technology made your world glow a bit brighter, if only for a moment.

There is magic involved here, time travel… None of “my” stores are here, but they’re close enough to feel like home in a way I couldn’t have imagined.

via Daring Fireball

Swift Playgrounds I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but it looks like Swift Playgrounds just added all the necessary thing to become a full-on SwiftUI IDE…

Review: Level Bolt is a stealthy smart lock contending with an imperfect world – Six Colors:

The Bolt is unlike most other smart locks in that it doesn’t replace your existing deadbolt. Instead, it fits inside your door, basically sandwiched in between the exterior keyway and the interior thumb turn. Inside sits a small motor with a Bluetooth chip, which can turn to shoot the bolt itself.

The engineering and design of this device is extremely clever. From the outside, the Bolt is completely invisible. The only place you can even see the device is the bolt itself, where Level’s logo is embossed on the end. (In another particularly ingenious piece of engineering, the bolt also contains a replaceable CR2 battery that powers the whole assembly. Swapping it out just requires unscrewing the end cap.) Another plus: the existing key and thumb turn for the deadbolt work exactly as before, and don’t interfere with the smart lock, or vice versa.

Great review of the one smart-lock I’ve tried myself… The design is fantastic, and if anything simpler than the original hinge mechanism that came with my deadbolt, and fairly reliable for my bluetooth usage.

Daring Fireball: T-Mobile Has Started Blocking iPhone Users From Enabling iCloud Private Relay in the U.S.:

This is some serious bullshit. It has nothing to do with improving network quality and everything to do with T-Mobile selling your usage data. Curious how Apple will respond. I’d say switch carriers if you’re on T-Mobile, but if they get away with this, I fear Verizon and AT&T will follow.

I can be fairly confident that Mint won’t follow suit, but who knows… I do hope Apple holds firm on the offering and pushes back, because this is about as anti-consumer as it gets.

Inside Apple Park: first look at the design team shaping the future of tech:

In the distance is a rectangular frame of foliage. In the foreground, a conference table, placed with architectural rigour so that the focal point is dead centre of the screen. The scene is a tiny cross section through Apple Park, the tech giant’s mighty circular HQ in Cupertino, by Foster + Partners. There are 12,000 employees on site here, including the Apple Design Team. This agile but hugely significant department thinks in terms of scope, not scale.

Launch: Vinegar - And a Dinosaur:

YouTube5 was a Safari extension back when Flash was still a thing and hated by everyone. It replaced the YouTube player (written in Flash) with an HTML

I’ve had a creeping distaste for the Youtube site experience for a while, to the point that I’d grab videos to offline to watch them and then delete them over spending time with their video player. This extension fixes that. Worth every penny.

App Store link here

Andy To’s gorgeous 4K iPhone 13 Pro video shot in Mexico City:

This is some breathtaking footage. Make sure you watch in full screen, at the highest resolution your setup will support.

The Old Last-Minute Hardware Design Switcheroo:

My suspicion is that, given how much Apple has been trying to flush-out leaks, that these were designs with A/B access internally to see which things made it to the press…

Killian Bell, writing at Cult of Mac:

Apple Watch Series 7 is not the upgrade most of us expected to see from Tuesday’s Apple event. The new model doesn’t sport the big design refresh multiple sources said was coming. It doesn’t even pack a new chip.

Is this the upgrade Apple wanted to deliver this year? Or is it a last-minute substitution that Cupertino had to settle on because the refresh it really wanted to deliver just wasn’t ready to roll out?

Based on the evidence, we’re going to say it’s the latter.

The only way this could be funnier is if Bell included the theory that perhaps Apple changed the hardware at the last minute because the flat-edge designs leaked.

This is not how hardware works. These designs are set long in advance. In fact, from what I’ve heard, the flat-edge watch designs might be legitimate leaks, but they’re next year’s designs. That’s how far in advance Apple works on hardware — they were already in the advanced stages of designing the 2022 Apple Watches months ago. (Aesthetically, I am not sold on a flat-edge design for the watch. The round edges are iconic and organic.)

You can argue that Series 7 is a marginal upgrade over Series 6, but with an all-new screen (brighter and bigger), all-new crystal (more durable), and 33 percent faster charging, there are upgrades, and none of them could be slapped together.

 ★ 

CODA - Apple TV+ Press:

Seventeen-year-old Ruby (Emilia Jones) is the sole hearing member of a deaf family – a CODA, child of deaf adults.

This is on my to-watch shortlist… But everything I hear about it is amazing.

Apple TV+ has been punching way above its weight on delivering great content.

Netflix Rolling Out Spatial Audio Support - MacRumors:

Netflix is rolling out support for Spatial Audio on the iPhone and the iPad, based on reports shared by MacRumors readers and on Reddit. A Netflix spokesperson also confirmed to MacRumors that the rollout is underway.

More of this please…

Have an iPhone? Here’s why you shouldn’t close apps | Boing Boing:

People have told me I should shut down apps on my phone to conserve the battery charge and improve performance. But this video says the phone's operating system is designed to manage open apps to optimize memory, performance, and battery charge and that I should let it do its thing. The only time to close an app, according to this video, is when the app is frozen or is not running properly.

The embedded Youtube video link