★ Daring Fireball the unofficial mobile version

“Overtired Newsroom” and “English Tutor Hoedown” are both amazing, in their own ways. Whole thread is very fun, including great poster art.

Dustin Curtis:

Apple TV is a hardware device.

Apple TV is an app on Apple TV that curates content you can buy from Apple and also content you can stream through other installed apps (but not all apps, and there is no way to tell which ones).

Apple TV is an app on iOS/iPadOS devices that operates similarly to Apple TV on Apple TV. Apple TV on iOS/iPadOS syncs playback and watch history with Apple TV on Apple TV, but only if the iOS/iPadOS device has the same apps installed as the Apple TV — and not all apps are available on all platforms. Apple TV is also an app on macOS, but it does not show content that can only be streamed from external apps on an Apple TV or iOS/iPadOS device.

When you spell it all out, as Curtis does here, it really does expose how confusing a lot of this is.

Michael Tsai:

So there are a multiple problems here:

1. It’s (apparently) impossible for Chromium to get competitive performance and battery life without using private API, which Safari freely uses.

2. Apple probably has good reasons for keeping these APIs private.

3. Private API has always been banned, but Apple has been accepting these apps for years and then abruptly stopped without any notice.

4. Apps using Electron probably didn’t know that they were even using private API. Neither Xcode nor Application Loader reports this, and App Review was accepting the apps.

5. The rule is not being enforced equally.

Doesn’t seem clear yet if this is a new policy, or just random App Store approval capriciousness. If enforced, this will require significant changes to Chromium, the rendering engine of Google Chrome that’s the foundation of Electron.

Gus Mueller:

Sure, it’s one of the fastest ways to crop, resize, and add text to an image. And yes, it offers more than 100 photo effects as well as nondestructive filters. But the appeal of Acorn has always been that it doesn’t overwhelm you. In fact, Mueller’s inspiration for coding the app was largely creative. “I was curious what it would take to write an image editor,” he says.

Nice little feature. Acorn remains one of my very favorite and most-used apps.

My thanks to Guardian Firewall for sponsoring this week at DF. Guardian Firewall is a personal data protection solution for iOS devices that offers system-wide blocking and detection of user location tracking, email receipt tracking, and other forms of undesired information collection, and additionally secures all network traffic using a VPN coupled with a lightweight custom-designed firewall.

Sounds complicated, right? Well, behind the scenes, it is. Guardian Firewall is doing a lot of clever stuff to block all these trackers and keep your network speeds super fast. From the user’s perspective, it couldn’t be simpler. It’s a simple app that starts with one big button to toggle Guardian protection. That’s all you need to do. In the second tab, Guardian keeps a log of all the trackers it identified and blocked. My list is hundreds long just from today. Guardian does one thing and does it really well.

Guardian is a small but fast-growing startup aiming to help users fight back against ubiquitous data collection by entities attempting to monetize and/or exploit their personal data. Over the next 90 days, Guardian plans to launch new features for power users, including custom firewall rules, as well as support for additional platforms. Founder and CEO Will Strafach has been a longtime mainstay in the iOS security community.

I’ve been running Guardian Firewall for weeks on my iPhone. It’s everything you’d want it to be: invisible, seamless privacy protection. Nothing breaks, nothing feels slow. It’s a service I’m happy to pay for and a company I’m happy to support. You can try it for free — and read their excellent FAQ for details on how everything works.

Mike Rundle, on Twitter:

The killer feature of the AirPods Pro is the interchangeable silicone tips that click into place and don’t have to be mashed and misshapen to reattach like every other stupid pair of earbuds on the market.

On the other side, Juan Carlos Bagnell:

iFixit confirming my fears. AirPod Pros are un-repairable. Apple will only replace buds for “service”. Worse, they use a proprietary ear tip design, so you can’t swap to aftermarket tips (NO FOAM FOR YOU) until the grey market rips off the design.

Quinn Nelson, responding to Bagnell:

Replacement tips are $4 for a six pack. This design is vastly superior to the universal barrel design which for people with small ear canals (like me) hurts a ton. This is not something to criticize, imo. It’s okay to deviate from the norm if you can improve on it.

That really is the crux of it. Better necessarily implies different. Complaining that the AirPods Pro tips are custom-designed by Apple is like complaining back in 2015 that Apple Watch used custom strap connectors. It’s a better connector and there will be dozens of third-party options soon — by the end of this month, I bet.

Rachel Siegel and Tony Romm, reporting for The Washington Post on Google’s acquisition of Fitbit:

The deal puts Alphabet, Google’s parent company, in a race against Apple when it comes to tracking fitness and health data.

Somehow, if it were the other way around — if Google’s wearable devices had the sales and cultural ubiquity of Apple Watch and AirPods, and Apple’s five-year wearable efforts had the market share and brand-awareness of Google’s — I highly doubt that The Post would posit Apple’s acquisition of Fitbit at a garbage bin price as their entry into the fitness tracking race against Google.

Android Wear launched over five years ago. Google has been in this race against Apple for close to a decade and they’ve gotten their ass handed to them.

CNBC:

Google will pay $7.35 per share in cash for the acquisition, Fitbit said. Fitbit’s all time high share price was $51.90 on Aug. 5, 2015, a couple months after its stock market debut at $30.40. The deal is expected to close in 2020, according to the announcement.

Apple is showing that wearables are a huge market moving forward, and Apple is the only one getting it right so far. I don’t see Fitbit helping Google here.

Daisuke Wakabayashi:

The hardware business is very hard. Even if you “make it” and avoid burning all your cash, the best you can hope for is to be gobbled up by a giant. Nest (Google), Ring (Amazon), Eero (Amazon), Beats (Apple) and, now, Fitbit (Google).

Off the top of my head the only hardware startup of this era that’s seemingly standing on its own is Tesla — and its future remains questionable.

Ben Bajarin:

Fitbit 2019 revenue estimates are $1.45B so Google buying for $2.1B is not even 2x revenue.

When negotiating an acquisition 3x revenue is usually the baseline. This is telling about the state of Fitbit.

I don’t know anyone who’s bought a Fitbit device recently. I know runners and cyclists with Garmin watches, but I don’t know anyone still wearing a Fitbit.

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Consider the soul-sucking term ARPU. It stands for Average Revenue Per User (or, alternately, Unit), and it’s a useful-yet-noxious lens through which businesses can view their customers. Of course, businesses should be aware about how much revenue their customers are generating — the issue is more that focusing on ARPU is often a sign that a business is on a path that will attempt to wring every last penny out of its customers. It’s a sign of nickel-and-diming, sliding in hidden fees, and all sorts of other questionable practices that make sense if you’re looking at a balance sheet — but are so infuriating if you’re a customer.

Apple doesn’t do hidden fees. And its media subscription services are all good deals. Music and News have fair prices, and both of those require Apple to pay the content providers. $5/month for TV+ —  including family sharing — is a lower price than most people expected, and the free-first-year-with-hardware-purchase makes it even better. And Apple Arcade is an undeniable bargain at $5/month — again, including family sharing.

To me, every one of these feels exactly in line with putting the customer experience first. Compare and contrast with the high prices and bullshit tack-on fees from your cable and cell phone providers.

But then there’s iCloud storage — Apple’s original subscription service. The prices for iCloud’s storage tiers compare OK against competitors like Google, but I’d still like to see a significantly higher free base tier (Google offers 15 GB vs. Apple’s 5 GB). That miserly 5 GB free tier is emitting an evermore pungent nickel-and-diming aroma.

Nothing surprising overall. What struck me looking at the numbers is that while everyone is talking about Services, the “Wearables, Home, and Accessories” category — driven primarily by Apple Watch and AirPods — is growing fast too:

• iPhone: $33.4B
• Mac: $7.0B
• iPad: $4.7B
• Wearables: $6.5B
• Services: $12.5B

Wearables are now bigger than iPad and will soon be bigger than the Mac. And the glasses are supposedly coming next year, and the $250 AirPods Pro just shipped.

The best charts for visualizing these results, as usual, are at Six Colors.

Wait for it.

The Dropbox company blog, giving thanks to Python creator Guido van Rossum:

“There was a small number of really smart, really young coders who produced a lot of very clever code that only they could understand,” said van Rossum. “That is probably the right attitude to have when you’re a really small startup.”

But as the company grew, new engineers who joined couldn’t understand the code. Clever code is usually short and cryptic, written by and for the individual who came up with it, but is hard for anyone else to understand — and nearly impossible to maintain. Guido called this “cowboy coding culture”. He recognized its value in our early stages of trying to implement things quickly, but knew it wouldn’t be sustainable over time, so he decided to speak up in his own quiet way.

“When asked, I would give people my opinion that maintainable code is more important than clever code,” he said. “If I encountered clever code that was particularly cryptic, and I had to do some maintenance on it, I would probably rewrite it. So I led by example, and also by talking to other people.”

My very favorite quote along these lines is from Brian Kernighan: “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”

That’s right, another new episode of America’s favorite 3.5-star podcast, this time with first-time special guest Dave Mark. Topics include AirPods Pro, the subscription streaming war, and the Washington Nationals’ then-impending triumph over the Houston Astros in the World Series.

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Marco Arment, on Twitter:

Major new bugs introduced in iOS 13.2:

• background downloads often hang forever and never run

• apps get killed in the background so aggressively that iOS effectively doesn’t offer multitasking anymore

… continuing the iOS 13 pattern of breaking long-held basic functionality. I’m sure Apple has good excuses about why their software quality is so shitty again. I hear the same thing over and over from people inside: they aren’t given enough time to fix bugs.

Your software quality is broken, Apple. Deeply, systemically broken. Get your shit together.

This bug where apps are getting killed soon after they’re backgrounded is driving me nuts. Start a YouTube video in Safari, switch to another app, go back to Safari — and the video loads from scratch and starts from the beginning.

If I could downgrade to 13.1.3 I probably would, even though it’d mean losing AirPods Pro support until 13.2.1 comes out — which perhaps erroneously presumes that this overzealous process reaping is a bug and not a “feature”.

Jack Dorsey, in a tweet thread:

For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad… well… they can say whatever they want!” […]

This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.

Political advertising is a drop in the bucket of Twitter’s overall revenue, but that’s true of Facebook too. “The money matters to us” would be a terrible justification for Facebook’s policy of allowing political ads to spread falsehoods, but the money doesn’t even matter to them. Facebook is allowing political ads to spread falsehoods because Facebook wants political ads to spread falsehoods. There’s no other explanation.

Ryan Jones, on Twitter:

You can FEEL the pressure equalize when you put in AirPods Pro, wow.

You can really feel the difference between AirPods Pro and other ear-canal-sealing earbuds when you chew something with them on. Totally different experience.

But my favorite is Transparency Mode. It’s like a personal soundtrack to the world. Nothing changes, just an extra audio layered added. Holy hell.

This comment crystalized a thought that I couldn’t quite put my finger on while trying to describe transparency mode: it is audio AR. That’s it.

Ryan Block, on Twitter:

AirPods Pro update: brought them to a relatively (but not ridiculously) noisy cafe, and compared them with my daily driver Bose QC 35 II (v4.5.2).

Thus far, the AirPods Pro are, for me, noticeably better at both noise cancelation and sound isolation. I’m pretty surprised!

I’ve swapped back to the Boses a few times over the last hour. Each time the cafe music and noise has been significantly worse with the Boses over the AirPods, and I’ve had to listen to music at much higher volumes to drown it out. I was not at all expecting this outcome, tbqh.

I have the same Bose headphones, and I agree. AirPods Pro noise cancellation isn’t just good for earbud-style headphones — it’s very good noise cancellation period.

Anyone want to buy my Bose headphones? They’ve got a nice case.

Special guest John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include the just-released AirPods Pro (and the pluralization thereof), the history of remote controls, the impending launch of Apple TV+, and the undisputed highlight of the 2019 World Series.

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The question: What does Xiaomi’s first smartwatch look like?

Looks like an Apple Watch and an iPad Pro had a very ugly baby.

Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge:

The Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL are the best argument that specs don’t tell you everything you need to know about a phone — because the experience of using a Pixel 4 is better than any other Android phone.

There is a nuanced difference between saying “specs don’t tell you the whole story” and “specs don’t matter,” because they absolutely do — if only because the wrong ones can ruin the whole thing. There are a few places where Google could have done better, especially with battery life. But overall the Pixel 4 hits enough of the marks to pass, and it’s a few new features from Google that push the experience ahead of the pack.

I’ve always thought, and still think now, that the best description of the Pixel phones is that they’re for people who want to use a Google-centric version of Android on iPhone-like hardware. Even the argument that “specs don’t tell you the whole story” sounds like the lede of an Apple product review.

The good:

Voice. Ah, my true love: the Recorder app. Hit record, and in real-time it instantly transcribes what’s being said. Unlike with many competing dictation apps that require connection to the cloud, this process happens entirely on the Pixel device. Even when you cut the Wi-Fi and cellular connections, it works — and works super well, as you can see in the video.

I recruited people with different voices, including one of the world’s fastest talkers. It struggled when transcribing Shakespeare, and stumbled on an Irish accent, but it held its own, especially on speed, against a court stenographer. None of the recordings or transcripts are shared with Google; no other apps have access to the recordings, unless you explicitly choose to share them.

Truly seems like an amazing feature — especially so that it’s entirely on-device. This puts iOS’s transcription to shame.

The bad:

The battery life is unforgivingly so-so. In my testing of the Pixel 4 XL, I was often in the red by 9 p.m. — substantially earlier than with the new iPhones. On the days I tested the Recorder app, I had to charge around 5 p.m. (Google warns that transcription and captioning can tax the battery.) The regular-size Pixel 4 has an even smaller battery, rated for even shorter battery life.

Keith Broni, writing for Emojipedia:

Today Apple has released iOS 13.2, introducing the likes of a white heart, yawning face and flamingo to the emoji keyboard. A more diverse keyboard adds options such as people holding hands with a mix of skin tones, people in wheelchairs, with a hearing aid or cane.

A lot of changes — including a bunch with gender-neutral defaults. I like the UI for choosing skin colors for both sides of the people-holding-hands emoji.

Brent Simmons:

The only reason anything ever ships is because people just keep working until it’s ready.

From a letter signed by 250 employees, obtained by The New York Times:

We’re reaching out to you, the leaders of this company, because we’re worried we’re on track to undo the great strides our product teams have made in integrity over the last two years. We work here because we care, because we know that even our smallest choices impact communities at an astounding scale. We want to raise our concerns before it’s too late.

Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing.

Many are noting, correctly, that Facebook has 35,000 employees (which sounds like too many to me), so 250 signatures is a small percentage. But if this accurately reflects a large number of employees’ thoughts, it could be trouble for Facebook.

See also: Mike Isaac’s report for the NYT on the letter.

Judd Legum, writing for Popular Info:

The Daily Wire, the right-wing website founded by pundit Ben Shapiro, is a cesspool of misogyny, bigotry, and misinformation. Its toxic content is also fantastically successful on Facebook, with each story reaching more people than any other major media outlet. A Popular Information investigation reveals some of this success is attributable to a clandestine network of 14 large Facebook pages that purport to be independent but exclusively promote content from The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion.

This kind of “inauthentic coordinated behavior” violates Facebook’s rules. Facebook has taken down smaller and less coordinated networks that promoted liberal content. But Facebook told Popular Information that it will continue to allow this network to operate and amplify The Daily Wire’s content.

As a complete sidenote to the main point of this — that Facebook is a right-wing company — notice how nice and clean and fast the Popular Info website is. The best websites these days aren’t from web publishers — they’re from mailing list publishers with websites.

MacRumors, two days ago:

“AirPods Pro” will come in as many as eight colors, including White, Black, and a new Midnight Green finish to match iPhone 11 Pro models, according to a Chinese-language report from the Economic Daily News.

Turns out you can get AirPods Pro in any color you want, so long as it’s white.

I’m genuinely curious why Apple doesn’t offer AirPods in more colors. Seems like something people would enjoy, especially black. My best guess is that Apple considers white earbuds to be iconic and part of the Apple brand.

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

As someone who hasn’t invested into AirPods because of concerns about fit, I’m most interested in the “Ear Tip Fit Test” that Apple says uses an algorithm to figure out whether the ear tip you’re using is the right fit for your ear, based on the sound level in your ear versus what the drivers are actually outputting.

I’ve had a few earbuds before that came with multiple tips, and I’ve never felt certain whether I chose the best ones for me. Some people might prefer a different size than the one recommended by this algorithm, but it’s a welcome feature for someone like me, who’s often paralyzed by a choice like this.

The AirPods Pro “overview” web page is a strange beast. It pegs my 2015 MacBook Pro’s CPU — even when I’m not scrolling. I closed the tab a few minutes ago and my fan is still running. The animation is very jerky and scrolling feels so slow. There’s so much scrolljacking that you have to scroll or page down several times just to go to the next section of the page. The animation is at least smooth on my iPad and iPhone, but even there, it feels like a thousand swipes to get to the bottom of the page. It’s a design that makes it feel like they don’t want you to keep reading.

Disable JavaScript (easily toggled if you enable Safari’s Develop menu) and the page is easy to read and looks great. I can’t recall an example where scrolljacking makes a website so much worse.

Update: Nick Heer (of Pixel Envy fame) messaged me to point out that the iPad Pro product page gives the AirPods Pro page a run for its money for top spot in the Scrolljacking Hall of Shame. The iPad Pro page doesn’t peg my MacBook Pro’s CPU, but it scrolls the view horizontally while you scroll vertically.

Apple Newsroom:

Transparency mode provides users with the option to simultaneously listen to music while still hearing the environment around them, whether that’s to hear traffic while out for a run or an important train announcement during the morning commute. Using the pressure-equalizing vent system and advanced software that leaves just the right amount of noise cancellation active, Transparency mode ensures that a user’s own voice sounds natural while audio continues to play perfectly.

Switching between Active Noise Cancellation and Transparency modes is simple and can be done directly on AirPods Pro using a new, innovative force sensor on the stem. The force sensor also makes it easy to play, pause or skip tracks, and answer or hang up phone calls. Users can also press on the volume slider in Control Center on iPhone and iPad to control settings, or on Apple Watch by tapping on the AirPlay icon while music is playing.

• Transparency mode seems like a very cool feature.
• The “force sensor” seems like a cool feature too. Not sure how many times Apple has to learn this, but one button is better than zero buttons.
• The Pro earbuds have stems that are quite a bit smaller than regular AirPods, but the Pro case is about 15 percent larger by volume.
• I wonder why Apple didn’t announce these last month at the iPhone event? I suppose the AirPower debacle has made them gun-shy about pre-announcing anything that isn’t ready to ship, but these were clearly very close to ready a month ago.

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Both their website and iOS app are very well designed, their Apple Watch integration is perfect for the DF audience, and you can try Future risk-free for your first 30 days.

Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge:

All four major US carriers — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint — have each issued the same joint press release announcing the formation of “a joint venture” called the “Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative” (CCMI). It’s designed to ensure that the carriers move forward together to replace SMS with a next-generation messaging standard — including a promise to launch a new texting app for Android phones that supports the standard by next year.

Yes, an Android-only app created by a consortium of the four U.S. carriers will surely be a good app, and will surely succeed worldwide.

Google was unable to immediately provide comment on the CCMI. That in and of itself is telling — as is the fact that the word “Google” appears precisely zero times in the carriers’ press release.

Bodes really well for the quality of that Android app.

If you’re not familiar with all the ins and outs of RCS, let’s quickly catch up. There are four critical problems with RCS:

1. Not enough carriers have adopted it.
2. Those that have adopted it sometimes did so without adhering to the international standard for interoperability called the “Universal Profile”.
3. It is not end-to-end encrypted, so it’s easy for governments to demand the contents of text messages sent using it.
4. Apple has had precisely zero to say about it, which everybody has interpreted as code for “lol we have iMessage good luck with that RCS thing bye!”

1 and 2 can be fixed by time and effort. 3 sucks but SMS isn’t encrypted either. Ideally an SMS successor would be E2E, but I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker that it isn’t. 4, though, is a deal-breaker. The role of SMS as the standard platform/carrier-independent mobile messaging system isn’t going to change if Apple doesn’t support RCS.

Something’s clearly wrong here: “Amazon” is mentioned 11 times and “Apple” not even once.

Derek Thompson, writing for The Atlantic:

By 2016, Neumann was telling friends that he was intent on becoming the first trillionaire. Perhaps, he said, somewhere along the way to eternity, he might become the “president of the world.”

With his ignominious departure from WeWork this week, Neumann’s Earth-emperor ambitions may have taken a blow. But he can find solace in suddenly becoming one of the richest people on the planet. On Tuesday, Softbank offered to pay him a king-size ransom in exchange for wresting control of the company. The Japanese conglomerate offered to buy up to $1 billion worth of Neumann’s WeWork shares in addition to giving him a short-term loan of $500 million to pay off a credit line from several banks. Finally, Neumann will receive $185 million over the next four years in exchange for his advice.

At $46 million a year, Neumann’s annual “consulting” fee alone is higher than the total compensation of all but nine public CEOs in the United States.

Like a legalized ponzi scheme. Meanwhile, the company is so cash-strapped that it delayed laying off thousands of employees because it doesn’t have the money to pay them severance.

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors:

The plan is for Apple to help United reconfigure areas in the airport, though what that specifically means is unclear. Linda Jojo, executive vice president of United Airlines Holdings, mentioned spots Apple employees specifically visited as a hint to what might see a redesign.

“The Apple team in San Francisco has been in our baggage hold areas, customer service and the lobbies,” she said. “I’m being deliberately vague,” she added.

Earlier this year, United Airlines accidentally revealed that Apple is its biggest customer in San Francisco, spending $150 million on airline tickets each year and purchasing an average of 50 business class seats on flights to Shanghai on a daily basis.

Reading between the lines, my guess is that Apple wants to redesign every bit of the experience from curbside to boarding for United passengers out of SFO. They might even be able to improve the security line — SFO uses a private security contractor, not TSA. Should be nice.

From an interview with Armando Correa for People en Espanol:

Correa: I remember when I read your column, one of the sentences that most surprised me was: “I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.”

Cook: Yes, I strongly believe that. I think there’s many meanings behind this. One is, it was his decision, not mine. Two, at least for me, I can only speak for myself, it gives me a level of empathy that I think is probably much higher than average because being gay or trans, you’re a minority. And I think when you’re a majority, even though intellectually you can understand what it means to be in a minority, it’s an intellectual thing. It’s not intellectual for me to be in a minority. I’m not saying that I understand the trials and tribulations of every minority group, because I don’t. But I do understand for one of the groups. And to the degree that it helps give you a lens on how other people may feel, I think that’s a gift in and of itself.

Christopher McQuarrie:

After twenty five years in the craft, I’ve learned the secret to making movies is making movies — starting with little movies no one will ever see.

The secret to knowledge is doing and failing — often and painfully — and letting everyone see.

The secret to success is doing what you love, whether or not you’re being paid. The secret to a rewarding career in film (and many other fields) is focusing entirely on execution and not on result.

McQuarrie is writing from the field he knows best — movies — but I really do believe this advice is universal. You want to be a writer? Write. You want to make apps? Create apps.

There’s not much similar between football and filmmaking, but I recently heard Alabama head coach Nick Saban give the same advice to a younger coach: focus on execution, not results. The results you deserve will follow from the quality of your execution.

Special guest Rene Ritchie returns to the show. Topics include Google’s new Pixel 4 phones, Apple’s travails in Hong Kong and China, whether there will be another Apple event this year, and MacOS 10.15 Catalina.

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Nice roundup of Zuckerberg’s testimony from Nick Heer at Pixel Envy.

Tyler Hall, on his wife’s inability to save an image from Messages after upgrading to iOS 13:

At this point there were a few seconds of silence before she yells “Oh my god! This is just like the dumb new Music app. I didn’t even know I could scroll down!”

Why didn’t she know there were options further down the share sheet? Because she’s using an iPhone 8, which happens to be just the right height to perfectly crop the share sheet. Take a look again at the first screenshot she sent me.

The “Copy” action is perfectly spaced from the bottom of the screen to appear like it’s the only option. And since iOS (and in some places now macOS, too) doesn’t offer visual affordances like scroll indicators, she had no idea there was any content further below.

In the early era of GUI design, we celebrated affordances. Any view that was scrollable was very clearly scrollable. We, as an industry, got away from that as the basic concepts of using a GUI became part of daily life for everyone. In the post-iOS 7 era, though, Apple seems outright opposed to affordances. Hall’s wife’s assumption that she was looking at the entire share sheet — that it ended with the “Copy” button at the bottom, was perfectly reasonable. Just by looking at it, there’s no reason to think there’s more. But “just by looking at it” is the way user interfaces should be designed.

Terrific piece for TidBITS from David Shayer, who worked as a software engineer at Apple for 18 years:

Remember what I said about changes causing new bugs? If an engineer accidentally breaks a working feature, that’s called a regression. They’re expected to fix it.

But if you file a bug report, and the QA engineer determines that bug also exists in previous releases of the software, it’s marked “not a regression.” By definition, it’s not a new bug, it’s an old bug. Chances are, no one will ever be assigned to fix it.

Not all groups at Apple work this way, but many do. It drove me crazy. One group I knew at Apple even made “Not a Regression” T-shirts. If a bug isn’t a regression, they don’t have to fix it. That’s why the iCloud photo upload bug and the contact syncing bug I mentioned above may never be fixed.

Not the best timing for this, I think we can all agree.

Bipartisan letter from the U.S. Congress to Tim Cook:

In promoting values, as in most things, actions matter far more than words. Apple’s decisions last week to accommodate the Chinese government by taking down HKMaps is deeply concerning. We urge you in the strongest terms to reverse course, to demonstrate that Apple puts values above market access, and to stand with the brave men and women fighting for basic rights and dignity in Hong Kong.

It’s a strong letter, but unfortunately it conflates apps censored in mainland China with apps censored in Hong Kong — these are very different things. When China declares an app illegal in mainland China, Apple has no choice but to comply. The HKMaps decision was different — it was a political decision, not a legal one — and that difference is worth emphasizing. Apple could have chosen to fight for the HKMaps app.

Lucas Shaw, reporting for Bloomberg:^*

One company that probably won’t be bidding is Apple Inc., the people said. The tech giant has eschewed controversial programming that could damage its brand, and it’s wary of offending China, where it sells a lot of iPhones. “South Park” was just banned in China after an episode mocked the country’s censorship of Western movies and TV.

It makes no sense to inject Apple into this story. Shaw is trying to paint Apple’s abstention from bidding for “South Park” as a combination of the company’s prudishness regarding adult content and obsequiousness toward China. He’s probably right about the branding implications of “South Park” — Apple wouldn’t get near “South Park” as an Apple-owned brand. But the China angle is a potshot. “South Park” could be Xi Jinping’s very favorite show in the world and Apple would not be bidding for the streaming rights to its back catalog, for the very obvious reason that Apple doesn’t offer a streaming service that includes the back catalogs of old shows. Apple isn’t bidding on shows like “Friends” or “Seinfeld” either. This has nothing to do with China. It’s simply the nature of Apple TV+ — it’s all original content.

And, Apple does offer “South Park” in the iTunes Store. If you want to buy episodes or entire seasons, it’s right there. And if you search for “South Park” in the TV app, it’ll helpfully point you to Hulu, which currently holds the streaming rights.

* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and see

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Kirk McElhearn:

Screen Time was also added to macOS Catalina, with the same features. However, it doesn’t seem to work correctly. Rather than showing which apps are frontmost when you work, it shows how long apps are open. […]

I keep a number of apps open all the time: Mail, Messages, Fantastical, OmniFocus, Music, and a few others. So counting them as actual “screen time” makes no sense.

In the above example, all these apps were open all day — obviously, the Finder is always “open” — so the data is essentially useless. Is this a bug or a feature? I would think that Screen Time should only record that time when apps are frontmost.

I can’t see the point of this feature on the Mac other than as a parental control. It seems like Apple just copied the de

Hard not to choke up watching Girardi talk about Sabathia.

Sarah Frier:

Behold Mark Zuckerberg’s revised origin story for Facebook, as a way to give people voice during the Iraq war.

(And compare to the Harvard Crimson on Zuckerberg’s hot-or-not tool in 2003.)

“I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy” holds up as a description of Facebook, 16 years later.

Nice find by French site MacGeneration. Looks very similar to the current 15-inch MacBook Pro, but with smaller bezels around the display. As rumors have suggested, it even looks like it has a nice big physical Esc key.

(Via MacRumors.)

Aimee Green, reporting for The Oregonian (via Dave Mark at The Loop):

Police wanted to search the contents of an iPhone they found in Catrice Pittman’s purse, but she never confirmed whether it was hers and wasn’t offering up a passcode. Her defense attorney argued forcing her to do so would violate her rights against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Article 1 Section 12 of the Oregon Constitution.

But a Marion County judge sided with police and prosecutors by ordering Pittman to enter her passcode. On Wednesday, the Oregon Court of Appeals agreed with that ruling — in a first-of-its-kind opinion for an appeals court in this state.

This is bullshit — being forced to produce a password is clearly a violation of the Fifth Amendment. If you’ve got the password written down on a sticky note and the police get a warrant to search your home and find it, that’s evidence. But being compelled to produce something in your mind is the definition of self-incrimination.

A password is different than biometric authentication. There are debates on whether law enforcement should be able to compel someone to provide their fingerprint or look at a facial recognition scanner to unlock a device. Are they allowed to just wave your phone in front of your face? (With a Pixel 4, closing your eyes won’t protect you.)

As a reminder, you can temporarily disable Touch ID and Face ID just by going to the power-down screen. On a X-class iPhone, that means pressing and hold the power button and either volume button for a second or two. Once your phone is at this screen, even if you tap “Cancel”, you must enter your passcode to unlock the phone. If you’re ever worried about anyone — law enforcement or otherwise — taking your phone from you and unlocking it with your face, just squeeze those two buttons. You don’t even need to take it out of your pocket or purse — you’ll feel haptic feedback once you’ve held the buttons long enough. And, if you keep holding the two buttons down for five seconds, your iPhone will call emergency services and contact your emergency contacts.

Joseph Keller, writing at iMore:

Something to keep in mind about quick video: it doesn’t record in 4K. No matter what resolution you’ve set for taking video on your iPhone, whether above or below 4K, quick videos on the iPhone 11 series of phones will always record at a resolution of 1920 × 1440.

“HD” video is usually 1920 × 1080, but Quick Video shoots 1920 × 1440 because it always record

Jason Snell, in a lovely piece at Six Colors that feels like it was written just for me:

And then there are the out dots.

This is one of the delightfully stupid controversies that comes up when you write about baseball graphics. In a nod to skeuomorphism and old ballpark scoreboards, many networks display the number of outs in an inning not as a numeral, but as dots. These dots generally appear as gray circles that are filled in with a bright color as the inning progresses.

The controversy is this: How many dots should there be? There are three outs in an inning, so you’d think the answer would be three. But some folks will point out that since getting the third out ends the inning, having a third dot would be superfluous. Once the third out is made, the inning is over and there are no outs at all.

I get the argument, but I firmly reject it. Outs come in threes, not twos. If you must represent it by a series of faux light bulbs, you should have three bulbs. Better, I think, to light up that third bulb momentarily, then turn it off and indicate the end of the inning. It improves the clarity of the graphic at the expense of a few pixels — and gives you the opportunity to make a fun animation at the end of the inning.

I strongly agree with Snell on this: if you’re going to use dots to represent outs, there should be three. When there are two outs, the batting team still has an out to give — the empty third dot represents that out. And when the third out is made, fill it in for the few seconds before the telecast cuts to the commercial break.

Another note: nearly all modern baseball telecasts show the strike zone live. This box, though, should be subtle. When you look at Snell’s screenshots, compare ESPN’s live strike zone (far too prominent) with Fox’s (perfectly subtle).

Here’

Interesting take on the Pixel 4, but what really grabbed my attention was

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Luna Display:

We’re always looking for ways to give our users the freedom and flexibility that their workflow deserves. Luna Display’s launch in the fall of 2018 blasted us off into an arena that no company had successfully played in before — we’d created a device that could turn your iPad into a second display for Mac.

Since then, we’ve continued to ask ourselves, “Is there more that we could be doing with Luna Display?” The answer was sitting right under our noses in the form of all the idle Macs we had laying around our development space. What if we could turn people’s e-waste into extra screen space!

What a great idea — a fantastic use case for older 5K iMacs that would otherwise be put out to pasture. Here’s how Luna Display co-founder and CEO Matt Ronge introduced it on Twitter:

After Apple “sherlocked” @LunaDisplayHQ, we put our heads together on how we could make Luna even better

So I’m excited to announce today… Mac-to-Mac Mode for Luna Display! Turn any extra Mac into a second display. Apple zigs, we zag.

The “sherlocking”, of course, is the new Sidecar feature in iPadOS 13 and MacOS 10.15 Catalina that allows recent Macs to use iPads as external displays. Zigging when Apple zags is exactly the right attitude for third-party developers.

Toluse Olorunnipa, David A. Fahrenthold, and Jonathan O’Connell, reporting for The Washington Post:

President Trump has awarded the 2020 Group of Seven summit of world leaders to his private company, scheduling the summit for June at his Trump Doral golf resort in Miami, the White House announced Thursday.

That decision is without precedent in modern American history: The president used his public office to direct a massive contract to himself.

Trump’s Doral resort — set among office parks near the Miami airport — has been in sharp decline in recent years, according to the Trump Organization’s own records. Its net operating income fell 69 percent from 2015 to 2017; a Trump Organization representative testified last year that the reason was Trump’s damaged brand.

Now, the G-7 summit will draw hundreds of diplomats, journalists and security personnel to the resort during one of its slowest months of the year, when Miami is hot and the hotel is often less than 40 percent full. It will also provide a worldwide spotlight for the club.

We’ve now reached the point where Trump’s kleptocracy is just out in the open. Any true believer in democratic norms would agree that the same ethical standards — not to mention laws — apply equally to everyone, regardless of their party. Democrats still believe this; there’s no way Democrats would stand for a president from their own party who used the office to line their own pockets. Nor would they stand for a president who used foreign policy as a cudgel to persuade other countries to open investigations into the president’s political rivals here in the U.S. Republicans’ continuing support for Trump is a rejection of democracy and the rule of law. It really is that simple.

Serious question: Shouldn’t the other G-7 nations refuse to attend? Attending — and spending their nation’s money at a Trump resort — will make them complicit in Trump’s kleptocracy. This is as much a violation of ethical norms — and the Constitution’s emoluments clause — as it would be if the summit were held at a neutral location but the other world leaders were expected to hand Trump envelopes stuffed with cash. Even if Trump were willing to foot the bill for the entire summit out of his own pocket — which, let’s face it, is not his style — it would still be grossly inappropriate and illegal on the grounds of the event’s significant promotional value alone.

Not quite as serious question: What happens if Trump is impeached (which is very likely) and removed from office before June? Do they still hold the summit at Doral? What a delightful problem that would be to have.

Chris Fox, writing for BBC News:

On Tuesday, BBC News tested the Face Unlock feature on the new Pixel 4. Using the default settings, the phone still unlocked if the user pretended to be asleep. The test was repeated on several people, with the same result.

It’s right there in Google’s own support document for the Pixel 4: “Your phone can also be unlocked by someone else if it’s held up to your face, even if your eyes are closed.”

Speaking before the launch, Pixel product manager Sherry Lin said: “They are actually only two face [authorisation] solutions that meet the bar for being super-secure. So, you know, for payments, that level — it’s ours and Apple’s.”

Sounds like it’s still only Apple’s, which is now in its third-generation of devices. Biometric authentication is an area where Apple has been, and remains, several years ahead of all its competitors.

BBC News:

After buying a £2.70 gel screen protector on eBay, Lisa Neilson registered her right thumbprint and then found her left thumbprint, which was not registered, could also unlock the phone.

She then asked her husband to try and both his thumbs also unlocked it. And when the screen protector was added to another relative’s phone, the same thing happened. […]

Samsung said it was “aware of the case of S10’s malfunctioning fingerprint recognition and will soon issue a software patch”.

When the iPhone 5S debuted with Touch ID, we we

Joanna Stern, in her review of the Samsung Galaxy Fold:

The Fold’s hardware gets lots of attention, but its Android software tricks deserve some, too. Open an app on the small screen, unfold the phone, and the app automatically supersizes. (In some cases, I got a pop-up that the app needed to restart.) Samsung has also worked directly with Android app makers, including Instagram and Spotify, to refine the apps for the squarish tablet.

The sized-right-for-the-display version of Instagram caught my eye after watching Stern’s (outstanding) video review of the Fold. So Instagram is willing to update their Android app to adjust to the extraordinarily niche Galaxy Fold, but still hasn’t updated their iOS app to adjust to the extraordinarily popular and much-used iPad?

It makes no sense to me why Instagram doesn’t support the iPad natively. As far back as 2014 it seemed hard to believe that the best way to use Instagram on an iPad — an ideal device for scrolling through photos — was “still” the iPhone app in 2× mode. And yet here we are in 2019, with Instagram already supporting dark mode (nicely, too) but still without proper iPad support. At th

Seth Stevenson, writing for Slate:

Fiedel was at heart an improviser. To create the Terminator theme, he first set up a rhythm loop on one of the primitive, early-’80s devices he was using. (In those days, Fiedel was firing up a Prophet-10 and an Oberheim.) He recorded samples of himself whacking a frying pan to create the clanking sounds. Then he played melodic riffs on a synthesizer over the looped beat. Amid the throes of creation, what he hadn’t quite noticed—or hadn’t bothered to notice—was that his finger had been a split-second off when it pressed the button to establish that rhythm loop. Being an old machine, there was no autocorrection. Which meant the loop was in a profoundly herky-jerky time signature. Fiedel just went with it. The beat seemed to be falling forward, and he liked its propulsiveness. He recorded the score that way and (not being classically trained) never wrote down any notation. The music he’d improvised went straight into the film. With its collaboration between fallible humanity and rigid machinedom, the score was especially well-suited to the material at hand.

A great little story about a great and memorable score.

Jared Newman, writing for Fast Company:

In reality, these auto-delete tools accomplish little for users, even as they generate positive PR for Google. Experts say that by the time three months rolls around, Google has already extracted nearly all the potential value from users’ data, and from an advertising standpoint, data becomes practically worthless when it’s more than a few months old.

“Anything up to one month is extremely valuable,” says David Dweck, the head of paid search at digital ad firm WPromote. “Anything beyond one month, we probably weren’t going to target you anyway.” […]

“I feel like them auto-scrubbing data every three months is really lip service,” Dweck says. “It’s not some massive change, because the reality is that no one was really buying that data.”

That was

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What a facile, bullshit article from Bloomberg. Where is the proof that the lack of 5G is “stinging” Apple in any way? By all reports, iPhone 11 sales are up over last year, not down. 5G is a niche technology this year, and the only phones that support it are niche phones. What Bloomberg doesn’t even mention is that Apple does not make niche phones. If they went the Samsung route they’d sell an “iPhone 11 Pro 5G” for $1,600 in addition to all the existing iPhone 11 models, just to check the “We sell a 5G phone” box.

Apple doesn’t do that.

And even if Apple could have made all 2019 iPhone 11 models 5G, there’s no way carriers would have let them, because there’

Nilay Patel:

I just spent a few minutes with the new Google Pixel Buds hardware — the $179 truly wireless earbuds aren’t shipping until Spring 2020, and the units at Google’s fall hardware event aren’t actually turned on and working. So there’s no way to tell how they’ll actually sound, and how Google’s various software tricks work in practice.

Not shipping for six months is one thing; not even having usable prototypes now is another. They must have felt like they had to show them anyway — Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are already in the game.

Apple isn’t usually first in a product category, but AirPods established a template all the other tech giants (other than Facebook, so far) are following.

Dieter Bohn:

The other feature this local model enables is a new app: Recorder. It’s a voice recorder, but it also does real-time transcription right there as it records without needing to send anything to the internet. In a couple of tests, I found it to be much more accurate than the other real-time transcription app I’ve used, Otter. You can also do searches for anything in those transcripts later.

There’s a lot more that’s new, of course, but instant accurate transcripts in the voice recorder app is a killer feature.

Matthew Green, writing at Cryptographic Engineering:

When Apple wants to advertise a major privacy feature, they’re damned good at it. As an example: this past summer the company announced the release of the privacy-preserving “Find My” feature at WWDC, to widespread acclaim. They’ve also been happy to claim credit for their work on encryption, including technology such as iCloud Keychain.

But lately there’s been a troubling silence out of Cupertino, mostly related to the company’s interactions with China. Two years ago, the company moved much of iCloud server infrastructure into mainland China, for default use by Chinese users. It seems that Apple had no choice in this, since the move was mandated by Chinese law. But their silence was deafening. Did the move involve transferring key servers for

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Via Dino Dai Zovi, a user on Hacker News disassembled the code for Safari’s Fraudulent Website Warning feature and verified that it only uses Tencen

David Sanger, writing for The New York Times:

President Trump’s acquiescence to Turkey’s move to send troops deep inside Syrian territory has in only one week’s time turned into a bloody carnage, forced the abandonment of a successful five-year-long American project to keep the peace on a volatile border, and given an unanticipated victory to four American adversaries: Russia, Iran, the Syrian government and the Islamic State.

Rarely has a presidential decision resulted so immediately in what his own party leaders have described as disastrous consequences for American allies and interests. How this decision happened — springing from an “off-script moment” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in the generous description of a senior American diplomat — likely will be debated for years by historians, Middle East experts and conspiracy theorists.

But this much alr

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Apple, in a statement to iMore:

Apple protects user privacy and safeguards your data with Safari Fraudulent Website Warning, a security feature that flags websites known to be malicious in nature. When the feature is enabled, Safari checks the website URL against lists of known websites and displays a warning if the URL the user is visiting is suspected of fraudulent conduct like phishing. To accomplish this task, Safari receives a list of websites known to be malicious from Google, and for devices with their region code set to mainland China, it receives a list from Tencent. The actual URL of a website you visit is never shared with a safe browsing provider and the feature can be turned off.

After quoting Apple’s statement, Rene Ritchie has more details on how the feature works, including the fact that the URLs you visit aren’t sent to Google (or Tencent) — hashed prefixes of the URLs are sent. This became a story over the weekend when a story by Tom Parker at Reclaim the Net ran under the alarming headline “

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My thanks to Kolide for again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Kolide is a new Slack app that messages employees when their Mac, Windows, or Linux device is not compliant with security best-practices or policy. If your team uses Slack, you should look at Kolide.

With this app, Kolide will notify users or groups when a device is out of compliance along with clear instructions about what is wrong, and step by step instructions to remediate the issue themselves. They can even confirm in real-time that they resolved the problem with an interactive button inside the Slack message!

Unlike most endpoint security solutions, Kolide was designed with user privacy in mind. Your users will know what data is collected

Alex Kantrowitz and John Paczkowski, reporting for BuzzFeed News:

In early 2018 as development on Apple’s slate of exclusive Apple TV+ programming was underway, the company’s leadership gave guidance to the creators of some of those shows to avoid portraying China in a poor light, BuzzFeed News has learned. Sources in position to know said the instruction was communicated by Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP of internet software and services, and Morgan Wandell, its head of international content development. It was part of Apple’s ongoing efforts to remain in China’s good graces after a 2016 incident in which Beijing shut down Apple’s iBooks Store and iTunes Movies six months after they debuted in the country.

Judd Apatow:

Hey and don’t mention that Turkey is bad. We sell a lot of watches there. And don’t mention Saudi Arabia murdering journalists — they love the iMac and don’t mention Russia — big iPad market.

Apple’s far from alone here. Making big-budget movies and TV shows China-friendly is de rigueur in Hollywood today, and Apple TV+ is now a player in Hollywood. But how is this not a victory for the stifling of free speech?

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Peter Kafka, writing at Recode:

Unlike tech companies that haven’t broken into the country or only do minor business in it, Apple is now so deep in China that leaving it could be catastrophic. Even if the company was willing to forgo the $44 billion a year in sales it makes in China, it can’t leave the deep network of suppliers and assemblers that build hundreds of millions of iPhones every year.

Earlier this year, in response to the escalating US-China trade war, Apple floated the idea that

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Two features stand out to me (I’m already running the 13.2 betas on my daily use iPhone — feel like I have nothing to lose on this front given the de facto beta-y state of 13.1.2):

• 13.2b2 introduces two important Siri privacy features. First, you can opt in and out of “Improve Siri & Dictation” in Settings → Privacy → Analytics & Improvements. Second, you can delete your Siri and dictation history in Settings → Siri & Search. In a briefing with Apple, I was told that even if you opt in to “Improve Siri & Dictation”, no one at Apple will ever review a Siri interaction until 24 hours have passed. So if you ever do say anything to Siri you don’t want reviewed, you have a full day to delete your history. Also, I was told that Siri interactions will henceforth only be reviewed by Apple employees — no more contractors. All told, these changes are a solid response to the Siri “grading” controversy.

• The camera app now lets you change the frame rate (24/30/60 FPS) and resolution (720p, 1080p (HD), 4K) right in the viewfinder when you’re in video mode. Previously these could only be changed by going to Settings → Camera — a real pain in the ass when you’re ready to shoot a fleeting moment. But I find this interface a bit fiddly at the moment, because there’s no feedback on tap down. It’s hard to tell even that these are two separate buttons — one for the frame rate and one for the resolution. I’d rather have the whole thing be one button that opens a picker like the iPhone 11 zoom wheel.

We know for a fact, with ARKit, that Apple has a strong interest in augmented reality. We also know that phones and tablets are not ideal AR devices. They’re not bad, but they’re not ideal. So you don’t need a weatherman to tell you the wind is blowing toward Apple working on AR-dedicated hardware — glasses or goggles or something. Now we have Kuo saying it’s coming in the first half of 2020. That’s pretty close.

But if true, no one thus far seems to have any idea what exactly Apple has in mind. Are they glasses you’re supposed to wear all t

Ryan Mac, reporting for BuzzFeed News:

Rubin’s departure from Playground was also accompanied by a payout, with a source familiar placing the amount at more than $9 million. Documents related to his exit, which were seen by some investors and the company’s leadership, but not all of Playground’s staff, were reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

“Effective May 31, 2019, Playground Global ended our business relationship with Andy Rubin,” read one internal document. “While Andy is still a good friend of Playground, he no longer has any economic interest in or any ongoing roles at Playground Global or the related funds.”

“Quietly” is overused, especially in headlines, but here’s a case where something really was done quietly. Rubin founded the firm and its own staff wasn’t aware he left?

Rubin, however, is still using Playground’s money to build Essential. The two are heavily linked, with Playground investing in both of Essential’s fundraising rounds that have raised a collective $330 million and the two companies sharing the same address, according to their websites.

That’s quite a racket Rubin has going here.

It’s not clear why Rubin, Playground’s founder and figurehead, departed the venture firm, but the nimbus of persistently negative publicity around him may have played a role.

Yeah, maybe that’s it.

Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg¹:

But the first iteration, which appears to still be quite raw and in a number of ways frustrating to developers, risks upsetting users who may have to pay again when they download the Mac version of an iPad app they’ve already bought.

I get this, and Gurman has reported previously that one goal of the Marzipan/Catalyst project is have universal apps that work across iOS/iPadOS/MacOS, the way that the exact same app can work on both iOS and iPadOS today. But Catalyst is a developer technology. Users have no idea what it is and shouldn’t need to. “You have to pay for iPad and Mac versions separately” doesn’t seem like a big deal to me because it’s been that way all along, regardless of Catalyst.

Worse, the expectation that you should pay only once for both iPad and Mac versions of an app makes it hard for developers of commercial software to justify doing a Mac app, period. The rest of Gurman’s article is about how much work it takes to create a good Mac app even with Catalyst.

Developers have found several problems with Apple’s tools for bringing iPad apps over to Mac computers. Some features that only make sense on iPad touchscreens, such as scrollable lists that help users select dates and times on calendars, are showing up on the Mac, where the input paradigm is still built around a keyboard and mouse or trackpad.

Troughton-Smith said Mac versions of some apps can’t hide the mouse cursor while video is playing. He’s also found problems with video recording and two-finger scrolling in some cases, along with issues with using the keyboard and full-screen mode in video games. Thomson, the PCalc developer, said some older Mac computers struggle to handle Catalyst apps that use another Apple system called SceneKit for 3-D gaming and animations.

Other than that, how do you like the APIs, Mrs. Lincoln?

Two anticipated Catalyst apps, featured on Apple’s website since June, were abruptly removed this week: the video-playing and comic-book-browsing DC Universe and the car-racing game Asphalt 9. Gameloft, which makes the racing game, said on Tuesday that the title has been “slightly delayed” in order to “polish the experience” and that it will launch later this year.

At WWDC in early June — four months ago — Apple showcased the catalyzed Asphalt 9 port on stage, with the following quote from Gameloft: “We had Asphalt 9: Legends for Mac running on the first day. It looks stunning and runs super fast using Metal on powerful Mac hardware.”

Maybe it’s not so easy, and maybe Catalyst is not good for games.

One last tidbit from Gurman:

However, Netflix Inc., the largest U.S. video-streaming service with the second most popular free iPad app, said on Tuesday that it won’t be taking part.

That’s all Gurman says about Netflix. No quote, no link to a Netflix statement. I know for a fact that Netflix has no plans for a native Mac app, Catalyst or otherwise, but I only know this by way of a knowledgable little birdie. Officially, I was under the impression that Netflix was simply going to remain mum on the matter.

It’s a shame, because there are two features a native Netflix Mac app could deliver that you can’t get through their website using a Mac: downloads for offline viewing (essential for air travel) and 4K video. 4K might eventually get support from WebKit, but there’s no way Netflix could ever allow offline downloads from the website. I’m not sure what Netflix’s calculus is here, but the simple truth is that if Netflix wanted a native Mac app they would have made one long ago.

Craig Mod:

Do you three-finger-tap to get definitions in macOS? Does it drive you bonkers that the lookup overlay tries to access Wikipedia and other random non-dictionary things?

Sysprefs → Spotlight → [uncheck] Allow Spotlight Suggestions in Look up

Enjoy blazing fast definitions.

What a fantastic tip, if, like me, you only ever use this feature to get Dictionary lookups. I didn’t realize how slow this feature sometimes gets until I turned this off. Now it’s always instantaneous, as it should be. Remember: fast software is the best software.

(Remember too that in addition to the three-finger tap, you can use the right-click contextual menu to look up the current text selection, and ⌃⌘D to look up whatever word is adjacent to the insertion point (while editing) or under the mouse pointer (while reading a web page or PDF). These shortcuts work system wide on MacOS.)

John Moltz, at the rejuvenated Crazy Apple Rumors Site:

“Untitled Goose Game represents a clear and present threat to Chinese sovereignty,” said Yang Cheung, a spokesperson for the Chinese government.

Gesturing to a video of Untitled Goose Game gameplay, Cheung explained. “The goose is a lawless force of rampant anti-nationalism. It encourages violence against the state and disrespects authority.”

Keith Bradsher and Javier C. Hernández, reporting for The New York Times from Beijing:

After three days of fanning nationalistic outrage, the Chinese government abruptly moved on Thursday to tamp down public anger at the N.B.

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Charles Mok:

As a long-time user of Apple products and services, I highly appreciate that Apple has been championing freedom of expression as one of the corporation’s tenets. I sincerely hope Apple will choose to support its users and stop banning HKmap.live simply out of political reason or succumbing to China’s influence like other American companies appear to be doing.

We Hongkongers will definitely look closely at whether Apple chooses to uphold its commitment to free expression and other basic human rights, or become an accomplice for Chinese censorship and oppression.

As quoted in Tim Cook’s own Twitter bio:

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” —Martin Luther King Jr.

I’ve seen a copy of Cook’s company-wide memo, and the copy reproduced here is accurate. Maciej Ceglowski — who has been in Hong Kong for weeks — responds:

The first allegation is that “the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”. This makes no sense at all. The app does not show the locations of individual officers at all. It shows general concentrations of police units, with a significant lag.

As the developer and @charlesmok, a Hong Kong legislator, have pointed out, the app aggregates reports from Telegram, Facebook and other sources. It beggars belief that a campaign to target individual officers would use a world-readable crowdsourcing format like this.

Moreover, what are these incidents where protesters have targeted individual police for a premeditated attack? Can Mr. Cook point to a single example? Can anyone? […]

So not only is there no evidence for this claim, but it goes against the documentary record of 18 weeks of protests, and is not even possible given the technical constraints of the app (which tracks groups of police).

The second, related allegation is that the app helps “victimize individuals and property where no police are present”. Again, does Mr. Cook have any evidence for this claim? The app does not show an absence of police, it shows concentrations of police, tear gas, r

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Transcript from journalist Tim McLaughlin:

Reporter: Two questions about the HKmap.live app. Which local laws the HKmap.live app violates and why should Apple remove HKmap.live when apps which allow users to track the location of police checkpoints remain in the app store? Thank you. […]

Chief Secretary for the Administration Matthew Cheung: I suppose the Police have already explained the reasons for it, okay? And, we have nothing further to add.

Secretary for Transport and Housing Frank Chan Fan: Indeed the taking down of the

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Jack Nicas, reporting for The New York Times:

A day earlier, People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, published an editorial that accused Apple of aiding “rioters” in Hong Kong. “Letting poisonous software have its way is a betrayal of the Chinese people’s feelings,” said the article, which was written under a pseudonym, “Calming the Waves.”

“The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement,” Apple said in a statement late Wednesday. “This app violates our guidelines and local laws.”

I still haven’t seen which local laws it violates, other than the unwritten law of pissing off Beijing.

Capitulation is a bad look for

Nick Statt, reporting for The Verge

News organization Quartz tells The Verge that Apple has removed its mobile app from the Chinese version of its App Store after complaints from the Chinese government. According to Quartz, this is due to the publication’s ongoing coverage of the Hong Kong protests, and the company says its entire website has also been blocked from being accessed in mainland China.

The publication says it received a notice from Apple that the app “includes content that is illegal in China.”

The law’s the law. You want to do business in China, you obey the law.

The question is: Why do business in China if this is the type of shit they pull?

Looks like a very cool game for Apple Arcade — a sneak-around puzzle game with a Cold War era spy motif. Looks cool, great music.

Amazingly, developer Spruce Campbell is 14 years old.

Nick Wadhams, Saleha Mohsin, Stephanie Baker, and Jennifer Jacobs, reporting for Bloomberg:^*

President Donald Trump pressed then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to help persuade the Justice Department to drop a criminal case against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was a client of Rudy Giuliani, according to three people familiar with the 2017 meeting in the Oval Office.

Tillerson refused, arguing it would constitute interference in an ongoing investigation of the trader, Reza Zarrab, according to the people. They said other participants in the Oval Office were shocked by the request.

Tillerson immediately repeated his objections to then-Chief of Staff John Kelly in a hallway conversation just outside the Oval Office, emphasizing that the request would be illegal. Neither episode has been previously reported, and all of the people spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the conversations.

Josh Marshall: “Expect a wave of time travel whistleblowers.”

* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Bloomberg’s institutional credibility is severely damaged, and everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract the story or provide evidence that it was true.

Daniel Victor, reporting for The New York Times:

Activision Blizzard became the latest American company to find itself caught between its business interests in China and the values of its core customers after it suspended an e-sports player who voiced support for the Hong Kong protests during a live broadcast.

The decision to suspend Chung Ng Wai, a professional Hearthstone player in Hong Kong, for a year, while forcing him to forfeit a reported $10,000 in prize money, prompted a backlash in the United States similar to the public relations debacle the N.B.A. has faced this week. Gamers posted angrily on social media and in forums, while politicians saw it as another troubling sign of China’s chilling clampdown on speech worldwide.

“Recognize what’s happening here. People who don’t live in China must either self censor or face dismissal and suspensions,” Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, wrote on Twitter. “China using access to market as leverage to crush free speech globally.”

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, concurred, saying on Twitter that Activision Blizzard showed “it is willing to humiliate itself to please the Chinese Communist Party.”

No partisan divide on this issue.

Dana Blanton, reporting for Fox News:

A new high of 51 percent wants Trump impeached and removed from office, another 4 percent want him impeached but not removed, and 40 percent oppose impeachment altogether. In July, 42 percent favored impeachment and removal, while 5 percent said impeach but don’t remove him, and 45 percent opposed impeachment.

Now Fox News is getting in on the fake news racket. You really can’t trust anyone other than Breitbart these days.

Geoffrey Fowler, writing for The Washington Post:

If your AirPods are out of warranty, Apple will replace them for $49 per stick — so in reality, $98 total. A replacement for the charging case, which doesn’t wear out as quickly, is also $49. The key phrase to say is “battery service.” (Apple is providing additional training to customer service representatives on that point, but if you still have trouble, show them this link — or this column.)

When you think about it, it is rather ridiculous that once the batteries in AirPods die, they’re disposable. Paul Kafasis and I talked about this back in March on my podcast.

But what’s the alternative? Fowler holds up Samsung’s Galaxy Buds:

Sealing up electronics with glue instead of screws and latches can help make devices lighter and more resistant to moisture and dust. But great ear buds — even ones tiny enough to sit in your ears — don’t have to be impenetrable. iFixit found a way to pop open Samsung’s $129 Galaxy Buds, so replacement batteries can slip in kind of like on a watch. Samsung doesn’t officially offer this repair option, but iFixit sells a pair of replacement batteries for $29.

They’ll sell you the batteries (although at this writing iFixit’s website claims to be sold out), but good luck installing them. iFixit does not have a repair guide for the Galaxy Buds, and the teardown video they do have is expressly labeled “not a repair guide”. There’s a reason why Samsung doesn’t offer a repair option. As for being “great ear buds” — reviewers disagree.

AirPods’s disposability is a problem, and it runs counter to Apple’s staunch pro-environmental messaging, but it’s a problem shared by every set of ear buds in the category. Keep in mind too, that a solution to this problem needs to account for weight, waterproofing, appearance, comfort, and cost. It’s a hard problem to solve, obviously. I’d be happy with next-generation AirPods that solve nothing but this problem.

Maciej Ceglowski, tweeting from Hong Kong:

Tear gas in Hong Kong used to be unheard of. Now I’ve seen HK cops fire tear gas because they were taunted and someone got them good with a zinger. The use of this substance has become absolutely routine, and it can be deployed without warning in densely populated neighborhoods.

A point that needs reiterating is that the @hkmaplive app doesn’t contravene any Hong Kong law that I am aware of. This app helps answer questions like “Will I get shot with a bean bag round if I come out of this MTR station, because the police raised a colored flag I can’t see?”

One of those cases where the headline — from a piece by Laura Wagner for Deadspin — says it all.

ESPN, of course, is owned by Disney. Disney, of course, now owns most of Hollywood.

Owen Churchill, writing for the English-language South China Morning Post:

Chinese state media on Tuesday accused Apple Inc of protecting “rioters” in Hong Kong and enabling illegal behaviour, after the US-based technology giant listed on its app store an application that tracks police activity in the city. […]

The app relies on crowdsourced information to track the location of police presence in the city, alerting users to police vehicles, armed officers and incidents in which people have been injured. The app — a website version is also active — displays hotspots on a map of the city that is continuously updated as users report incidents.

“By allowing its platform to clear the way for an app that incites illegal behaviour, [does Apple] not worry about damaging its reputation and hurting the feelings of consumers?” said a bellicose commentary published on the app of People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece. […]

Such delicate feelings.

The piece made no mention of the fact that the app is also available to Android users via the Google Play store.

For what it’s worth, Google’s services are blocked in China, but they do have business there. Nothing on the scale that Apple does, though.

Avi Wolfman-Arent, reporting for WHYY:

Seeking to bring attention to the issue, Wachs and a companion purchased seats behind the bench of the Chinese team and wore face masks — which have been banned at ongoing protests in Hong Kong. They held up a pair of signs. One read, “Free Hong Kong” and the other, “Free HK.”

“We sat in our seats silently and just held up the signs,” he said. About five minutes into the game, Wachs said, security confiscated the “Free Hong Kong” sign and asked what the second sign meant.

“And I said HK stood for [former Phillies announcer] Harry Kalas,” Wachs said.

“He said, ‘Isn’t Harry Kalas dead?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, free Harry Kalas.’ And he said, ‘Why would you free Harry Kalas?’ And I said, ‘Hey, I just wanna free Harry Kalas.’ And he said, ‘OK.’”

About ten minutes later, Wachs recalled, security returned to take the “Free HK” poster.

This would be funny if it weren’t so utterly symbolic of the NBA’s capitulation to China. In the very city where the First Amendment was drafted and ratified — fans got ejected from a basketball game for the message “Free Hong Kong”, rooting for a team named for the year America declared its own freedom.

It’d be a real shame if NBA fans around the country — especially here in Philadelphia — brought more “Free Hong Kong” signs to NBA games.

Speaking of Ben Thompson, his column this week at Stratechery is so good:

“It” refers to the current imbroglio surrounding Daryl Morey, the General Manager for the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the latter’s dealings with China. The tweet, a reference to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” (a rather frequent occurrence). The Global Times, a Chinese government-run English-language newspaper, stated in an editorial:

Daryl Morey, general manager of the NBA team the Houston Rockets, has obviously gotten himself into trouble. He tweeted a photo saying “fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong” on Saturday while accompanying his team in Tokyo. The tweet soon set the team’s Chinese fans ablaze. It can be imagined how Morey’s tweet made them disappointed and furious. Shortly afterward, CCTV sports channel and Tencent sports channel both announced they would suspend broadcasting Rockets’ games. Some of the team’s Chinese sponsors and business partners also started to suspend cooperation with the Rockets.

There’s one rather glaring hole in this story of immediate outrage from Chinese fans over Morey’s tweet: Twitter is banned in China.

(This whole NBA/China story broke over the weekend, after Ben and I had recorded the new episode of my podcast — otherwise we’d have spent an hour on it, I’m sure.)

The gist of it is that 25 years ago, when the West opened trade relations with China, we expected our foundational values like freedom of speech, personal liberty, and democracy to spread to China.

Instead, the opposite is happening. China maintains strict control over what its people see on the Internet — the Great Firewall works. They ban our social networks where free speech reigns, but we accept and use their social networks, like TikTok, where content contrary to the Chinese Community Party line is suppressed.

Worse, multinational mega corporations like Apple and Disney are put in a bind — they must choose between speaking up for values such as the right to privacy and freedom of speech, or making money in the Chinese market. The Chinese government portrays its citizenry as having such oh-so-delicate sensibilities, that they simply can’t bear to hear an opinion with which they disagree — expressed on a social network banned in China.

This, one can rightly argue, is what we should expect, if we’re looking for leadership from for-profit corporations on this front. But in the meantime, we’re stuck with a president who promised Xi Jinping he’d remain quiet on the Hong Kong protests in exchange for a trade deal, despite protestors’ pleas for our support.

CNN:

A former Drexel University professor used almost $190,000 in federal grants at gentlemen’s clubs and toward other improper purchases, according to a news release Tuesday from the US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Drexel, in Philadelphia, has agreed to pay the amount to resolve potential false claims liability, according to the US Attorney’s Office.

Chikaodinaka D. Nwankpa made improper charges for items such as “personal iTunes purchases and for ‘goods and services’ provided by Cheerleaders, Club Risque and Tacony Club.” The purchases totaling $189,062 were made between July 2007 and April 2017, prosecutors said.

Always good to see my alma mater in the news.

Special guest Ben Thompson returns to the show. Topics include the latest Surface hardware announcements from Microsoft, the state of the iPhone, and bulk purchases of charcoal.

Somehow, we managed to avoid talking about any sports at all.

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