Take

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

I have struggled a bit with what to say about WWDC, because there are so many things to say. For Safari especially, it gets complicated.

In one way, it is a design that breaks with the past and moves a bit further away from computer administrative debris (moving it all to the one flank closest to your thumb), and where you don't have to tap the Share button to Find something.

But in another way, it does it by placing nearly everything, including fundamentals like reload (or showing all tabs on iPad), practically in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".

Like Nick says, it's chickenshit minimalism; but beyond that, it's also something ineffable that I can't name that goes beyond looks for the sake of looks and just borders on the unexplainable. For example: the AirPods Max "handbag/bra" charging case, which look like crap, is made out of military-grade Easystainium and doesn't provide any protection at all, or the unsightly iPhone battery case bumps.

You can counter this with the usual suspects: "great design stretches the tastes", "ideas are fragile", sometimes it's hard to see a flower's full bloom in its first month. These are all valid, but also refer to ideas that have underlying depth and that need to be protected as they are figured out or implemented.

Let's take an example: The iPhone X-era all-screen interaction model was probably worked on for years, but we first saw it after many iterations, when it was buttery smooth, paired with hardware to enable it (iPhone X had a 120 Hz touch substrate to increase responsiveness) and I have never noticed any hiccups with it or slowdowns as devices have slid out of favor.

From day 1, it required learning and was different, but it was obvious, dependable and clearly designed with the user as an active participant and fundamental driver of the interactions. It was different not for the sake of being different, but because it could be better, and it increased fluidity, intent and speed of navigation beyond the rigidity of a button press, letting the user interface merge movement and thought to the point where it really is intuitive, because it plays on the fundamental theme of what your brain does and how your body and your senses work. I am gushing, and I still can't get over how brilliant it is. The UI has been tweaked since, but I would have no problem subsisting indefinitely on the version that shipped out of the box on a launch day iPhone X.

But the three examples I mentioned before either are immutable or affect people right now – one is in beta and will hopefully be changed, but the other shipped, and there was never any saving grace discovered; just the Backstreet Boys defense. It boggles the mind.

It's like a desire to pick a controversial decision and, by sheer force of leaning into it hard enough, somehow make it palatable and right and true, without ever needing to tackle or confront the legitimate criticisms. I brought up the iPhone X example to show that it doesn't flow through everything Apple does, not even every big surprising change, but it sure does damage where it shows up, and it completely undoes any pretentions of having the platforms be well thought-out.

(As a footnote, the iPhone X is a good example of the two things mixing — no one requested the removal of the 3.5 mm jack either, and no one's life is improved by it. There were previous phones with 3.5 mm jacks and higher IP ratings.)

John Gruber, in a footnote:

Unless I’m missing something, not one piece of communication entered into evidence — from either Apple or Epic — has been anything other than an email message. Not one message from iMessage or any other messaging service. I find that very surprising. Do Apple executives never use iMessage to discuss work?

I'm guessing they just can't get to them.

Caught in the middle of it all, then, are the lovely Apple employees we know (or are lightly acquainted with) and love. They show us their work with such deliberation and care, such passion and delight.

[..]

I’ve said this before, but I believe one of the single most important leadership qualities is humility, which by definition requires listening. If Apple executives listen to their employees and developers, decide their requests are not in line with the company’s core values, and say as much, that is one thing, because at least it’s honest. If, however, their requests or ideas align with the company’s values, but clash with its traditions or shareholder expectations (or simply aggravate the executives’ hubris) and they dig in their heels and tighten their grips, they are rightly deserving of criticism and, dare I say, scorn. And I think they’ll find, as the winds of change continue to blow, that they’ll eventually be caught in a storm they can’t escape, driven along on a course they did not chart for themselves.

Without our apps, the iPhone has little value to most of its customers today.

[..]

[I]n the common case — and for most app installations, the much more common case — of searching for a specific app by name or following a link or ad based on its developer’s own marketing or reputation, Apple has served no meaningful role in the customer acquisition and “deserves” nothing more from the transaction than what a CDN and commodity credit-card processor would charge.

The idea that the App Store is responsible for most customers of any reasonably well-known app is a fantasy.

I pulled myself out of this in 2008 because I hate the idea of the App Store and have scarcely been able to shut up about it since. It's easy, or at least possible, to imagine that my unending grenades are just sour grapes or fantasies unmoored from reality. Marco ships Overcast, one of the most popular podcast apps in the world.

This is what it comes down to. Epic's inability to use another payment processor is just a symptom of the same disease. Beyond the mobility of huge companies, it affects the everyday lives of developers and customers as being users – this is where we live, and Apple are not being reasonable stewards of this community.

The Supreme Court issued a ruling today that imposes a limit on what counts as a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

[..]

"The parties agree that Van Buren accessed the law enforcement database system with authorization," the ruling said. "The only question is whether Van Buren could use the system to retrieve license-plate information. Both sides agree that he could. Van Buren accordingly did not 'excee[d] authorized access' to the database, as the CFAA defines that phrase, even though he obtained information from the database for an improper purpose. We therefore reverse the contrary judgment of the Eleventh Circuit and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion."

[..]

But as we wrote in our story on the oral arguments, the government's argument "seems hard to square with past CFAA cases. TicketMaster's website, for example, is available to the general public. People who purchase tickets there aren't 'akin to employees.' Yet people got prosecuted for scraping it. Similarly, JSTOR doesn't hand-pick who is allowed to access academic articles—yet [Aaron] Swartz was prosecuted for downloading them without authorization."

Swartz committed suicide in 2013 when he was being prosecuted under the CFAA for downloading over 4 million academic journal papers from JSTOR over MIT's computer network.

"What the hell is this????" he asked. "How does an obvious rip off of the super popular Temple Run, with no screenshots, garbage marketing text, and almost all 1-star ratings become the #1 free app on the store?"

"Is no one reviewing these apps? Is no one minding the store?" he ranted on, before asking whether people remembered a talk about becoming the "Nordstrom" of App Stores in quality of service.

[.. later, in 2015:]

“[this scam app] is a great example of the stuff we should have automatic tools to find and kick out of the store. I can’t believe we still don’t.”

…

“and PLEASE develop a system to automatically find low rated apps and purge them!!”

Oh, spin me once again a yarn about how the App Store is inherently slathered in discerning curation; so discerning that low effort scams emerge, and so discerning that automated processes are dreamed up to salvage the situation, with automatically triggered removal of already approved applications without consideration for due process or developer impact the inevitable and apparently desirable outcome.

The App Store: Pigheaded, dishonest, ineffective, capricious.

Just over a year ago I started tracking TILs, inspired by Josh Branchaud’s collection. I’ve since published 148 TILs across 43 different topics. It’s a great format!

TIL stands for Today I Learned. The thing I like most about TILs is that they drop the barrier to publishing something online to almost nothing.

If you think this site is just me complaining about stuff, Simon Willison's collected output is pretty much always the opposite — building new stuff and being open about what's going on and what he's learning, both of which are always interesting. (I stayed subscribed to his feed through a hiatus of several years in the hopes that he would return to writing, which he did a few years back.)

Apparently the "M2" has gone into production, hot off the heels of an ExtremeTech piece about how Apple's M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model.

It is a curious phenomenon how the M1 is the same chip in the Mac mini, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13" and now iMac (save for the binned 7-core GPU). It is curious how the chip can still, to some degree, whip even higher-end models; and it is curious which strategy Apple will use going forward for chip differentiation.

Following the iPhone/Apple Watch model, the idea is basically that all models get the latest chip, and then next year, last year's model slide down. The iPads having more models instead use a wider spread of chips, although all pulling from chips that were once the best.

I can't claim to have a firm grip on the future strategy, but considering both the break from the past, the relative performance but also the architectural bummers, M1 to me looks closest to the first Intel CPU Apple shipped in a product, the original Core Duo codenamed "Yonah". It was the product of Intel's backpedaling from the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture which was the inevitable endgame of always chasing CPU frequency at any cost, it equaled or outdid the Pentium 4 in performance, it ran laps around the G4 and G5, but it was also hopelessly 32-bit.

Yonah was the first shot across the bow as Intel recalibrated, and soon led to the Core 2 (with increasing core counts) and later to the i3, i5, i7 and recently the i9 marques, not to mention bleeding the architecture to the Xeon. It was hard at the time to not be impressed by the Intel Core Duo, but there was also a short while where it was everywhere simply due to being the first chip out of the gates.

I don't think Apple will make more chips than they have to, and I think they're likely to keep up their idea of making a chip "this" powerful, and then building a product around that level of performance, rather than providing tiers of increasing capability. But I also think having the same chip in the Mac mini as in the iMac as in the MacBook Pro 13" is a temporal flub; a child of necessity. What they will do is highly dependent on how often they wish to rev their chips, how big those revisions will be and how likely they are to make customizations. Considering the wide-ranging SoC duties, it already is not likely that the M1 in iMac is the exact same as the M1 in the Mac mini.

Bloomberg:

Music-streaming service Spotify Technology SA and Match Group Inc., which operates online dating apps, accused Apple Inc. of squeezing software developers that depend on its App Store to reach customers by extracting monopoly profits and squashing competition.

[..]

Jared Sine, Match’s chief legal officer, told senators that a few years ago, the company wanted to make changes to its app in Taiwan aimed at boosting safety for users by instituting ID verification rules. Apple rejected the app, and when Sine contacted an executive at Apple about the decision, the person “disagreed with our assessment of how to run our business and keep our users safe.”

“He added that we just should be glad that Apple is not taking all of Match’s revenue, telling me: ‘You owe us every dime you’ve made,’” Sine said.

Every dime.

I don't know which is worse: someone going full Prosciutto in terms of intimidation, or someone actually believing this.

In a series of chiefly outdoor vignettes set outside Apple Park, Tim Cook and numerous other Apple executives and managers finally unveiled the long-rumored Air.

Long rumored to be in development, Air is thought to have been held up by the long process of oxidation as the Earth transformed from a primordial melting pot of chemical reactions to a venue suitable for carbon-based life forms. Sources close to the project, but who declined to be named, pointed to the 2007 cancellation of 64-bit Carbon as a low point, leaving the product team scrambling to recontextualize their vision. (The ex-hailed AirPower was a product of the same team, managing only to produce Power, claimed the same source.)

The presentation, clearly choreographed to show off the interplay of Air with greenery and the upcoming Earth Day celebration, also featured a series of special Hermès leather pouches starting at $299, all with special engraving, but in keeping with prior collaborations, functionality equivalent to the standalone Air, available in mid-May for $29.

Air follows the recent introduction of Samsung's Galaxphyx. Neither have been made available to reviewers, but industry followers familiar with both companies' compositions suspect Samsung's offering may be missing vital elements of the Apple offering's user experience.

To me, many of the US "franchise" leagues have always seemed like vain cosplays of athletic enterprise. It's not that there's no talent involved, because I'm sure there are great individual athletes and great coaches, it's that there are no stakes.

In most leagues, in most sports, if you don't do well enough, you fall down one rung of the ladder, or you have to play a qualifier against one of the best performing teams in the division just below. This keeps the sport fresh, the teams giving their all and management and players from resting on their laurels. In a US-style franchise league, if a team collapses totally, they collapse totally, but that's all that happens. A game between two teams near the bottom of the table can be exciting because there are real stakes at hand. A team on the ascent can rise through the leagues quickly, and a team that doesn't know what it's doing can plummet through them.

Today's "European Super League" proposal has been met with near-universal scorn from fans of soccer all over the world. Every team benefits from the mobility of the current system. The top leagues all over Europe (and all over most of the world) are the topmost protrusions of a deep system of similar leagues. It's about advancement and setbacks, it's about solidarity, it's about improvement over time, having goals and meeting them. It's about matching the complementary skills of different players against a tableau of similar choices from the opposite team. It's about working your way to a better place. It's about dealing with the real world, where you get more than five consecutive non-TV-ad minutes, and where sometimes you go head to head for a long time and pour every ounce of energy you've got into the struggle, and the result is a tie. It is also, more than ever, about money, of course, but no one can buy their way out of the fundamental conditions of the game.

Gary Neville, legendary defender at Manchester United with a storied career in the England national team, explains better than I can in the linked clip what the specific problems are with the European Super League.

The ruling.

In short: using compatible APIs is fair use in the non-overlapping magisteria of common sense and US legal doctrine.

Copyright is a subject with vast scope and consequence. Oracle's tradition has always been using aggressive lawyers as their primary source of innovation. (Java was more innovative than anything Oracle's ever done; all Oracle did was to purchase it, which is not nothing, but does not morally justify treating events before their ownership as a personal affront.) Their angle has been the Lion King angle: everything the light touches is our kingdom, indivisible and equally covered by copyright. The majority opinion as well as Justice Thomas' dissent attaches to this train of thought by treating the entire code base as a pile of lines of fungible value.

Consider a copyright case of an affluent painter v. another, with the argument that the wood grain in the frame looks suspiciously familiar, never mind whether that's where the threshold of originality is met. Or one author v. another, about whether a point-by-point debunking of a crackpot theory should be seen as an unlawful derivative because of a similar looking table of contents, never mind whether it is a pedagogical arrangement for the reader.

Software platforms, programming languages, APIs, SDKs, modules and more all have many aspects to their construction and to their use, angles from which the entire thing is considered. As do most creative works, but here made even more complicated not only because of the distinction between library use or library production, but because of the entirely separate class of consumer in the executing computer, which by nature requires similarity to achieve compatibility.

Going back to those books, would simply having the same outward dimensions, typeface and paper stock be enough to call one of them infringing on the other? Or if we're satisfying humans by convention instead of computers by requirement, could a restaurant chain bring another restaurant chain to court over similar room layout and serving flow?

The ruling managed to find its way to a reasonable outcome, but if these are the tools used to chisel fundamental conditions for developers, companies and people the world over, we are all in bad shape for the future.

In September of last year, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) launched an investigation into Apple's ‌App Store‌ and Google's Play Store to examine the experiences of consumers, suppliers, and developers in Australia.

[..]

In a submission to the commission, Apple says that it's "surprised to hear that developers have legitimate concerns about their ability to engage with Apple in the app review process," and that it "invests significant time and resources in engaging with developers directly" to ensure the quality of apps on the platform.

There are no words left.

(It's hard to quote just one part; read all of it.)

An interesting experiment. Even if it is a "fig leaf", it might at least be a fig leaf with sharp edges, so to speak. It will not make a difference in most of the unjust actions taken by the moderators, but neither does every transgression in society turn into a court case, and they are still effective.

Whether or not Facebook having this kind of power constitutes a monopoly or not, they have an outsized effect on the exposure of speech. Their platform thrives on turning gaming of the human mind into a clinical optimization problem; a "goal seek" that may have ended up radicalizing hundreds of millions of people, torn apart families and communities, upset the causes of science and education and prolonged a pandemic, with death and suffering in its wake. And they make money, all their money, from this behavior and from its consequences.

They're not going to change, because this is all there is to Facebook. If the trickery and manipulation is stripped away, it wouldn't know what it was, because it quite literally never wasn't those things. But if this dulls the edge of their sword while documenting some of the faults, that might be worth something.

I had one movie (The Man From Earth) that I would recommend everyone to see, and see knowing as little as possible going into it; after seeing In Bruges, I now have two.

Objective-C is presumably the mainstream language with the most outsized influence. Along with Ruby and Squeak later on, it carried the values of Smalltalk into the modern programming era. Introspection and messages and dynamism, rather than C++ vtable optimization and trickery inventing seven kinds of memory management/ownership subtlety and delegating all to the programmer. Getting things to work together in a coherent and easy way that befits a small system, rather than spending 90% of your attention making sure no performance is untowardly spilled on the floor.

Brad Cox was a virtual unknown, and Objective-C's origins have been shrouded in mystery to me aside from the words "Brad Cox" and "Stepstone". I wish I'd known more. I hope there are enough people out there who knew more, and who talked to him and wrote it down, and who can tell the story of how he invented a gem that unlocked so much possibility and so much imagination over the years. I hope he got to do many other things (the obituary mentions lecturing about object-orientation and later work on neural networks). I hope he was happy.

Presumably, this site was created to facilitate and promulgate reactions, so why so few of them and why on such odd subjects?

2020 was a terrible year for reasons everyone know. It already occupied my mind as much as it occupied other people's minds. I vowed from early on that I would spend as little time mentioning them as possible. Towards the end, it got difficult and would have strained credulity, and at some point I just decided to not post anything at all until a certain date in early 2021 had passed; a decision that, very recently, I was happy I'd made.

It's not that those things aren't interesting or possible to write about. It's that I wished to spend that energy writing about other things, and many other things started evaporating in lockstep with said energy.

At this point I also need to step away from the idea, and look at it critically, that adding one's opinion just because it's possible is an unequivocal good. Maintaining it as a cultural value has consequences, and personally, striving to always make my own opinions heard to make myself feel validated is a side of me that I feel very icky about right now.

MacRumors: Kuo: New MacBook Pro Models to Feature Flat-Edged Design, MagSafe, No Touch Bar and More Ports

The new MacBook Pro machines will feature a flat-edged design, which Kuo describes as "similar to the iPhone 12" with no curves like current models. It will be the most significant design update to the MacBook Pro in the last five years.

For my money, it's self-explanatory why they would do this.

Both MagSafe and other ports hinge on having the vertical real-estate around the perimeter of the product. Apple has been reticent to put ports on surfaces that aren't flat, and has been (let's call it) interested in keeping the products as thin as possible.

Look at the current MacBook Pro head-on, and a significant portion of the thickness is tapered, leaving only the minimal edge on which to put ports. (For all we know, this is why most all ports were removed in the first place.)

As noted, laptops do need to not be complete bricks, lest you're unable to pick them up off a table without maddeningly pushing them around first. But there are ways to either beef up the rubber feet that still exist, or provide a slight bevel or less pronounced tapering to the side. (Or maybe they realized it wasn't going to kill them to make the thing a millimeter thicker and keep the current form factor, but that's not the current topic.)

It's also possible that, due to the iPad Pro and recent iPad Air that have the same flat-edged design and unlike the new and old flat-edged iPhones are too big to "wrap around to pick up", Apple's just going to use the same radius and go for it the way it is.

As for all the other features: Assuming this thing comes out and has an M2/M1X in it, I'm there. This 16" MacBook Pro is relatively speaking barely unpacked at 14 months, but the combination of voting with one's wallet to mark a step in the right direction and getting what appears to be a significant improvement in performance, battery life, thermal ergonomics and utility is very tempting. Chucking the Touch Bar and the Intel chips should provide enough savings to drop pricing to merely exorbitant.

Why would Facebook take out a huge non-personalized ad to make the point that, for ads to really work, they need to be personalized? Why advertise in a newspaper if they think that personalized ads are so much more effective?

After some trepidation, I updated to Big Sur with 11.1, which may have been too early after all.

All other things notwithstanding, revisiting Podcasts is informative. Nearly all of it seems to still hold true. Someone is awake at the switch somewhere since Cmd+L now does jump to the "show" of the current episode, but it doesn't select the episode and scroll it into view to let you pick neighboring episodes. Indeed, it first loads an empty list and then visibly populates it with data, leaving you at the top.

Furthermore, I am now thrilled to discover that hitting Space in Podcasts no longer play/pauses. The Controls menu lists this as option+Space, and is not remappable via the System Preferences Keyboard Shortcuts functionality, since such shortcuts require modifier keys (for good reason). This breaks with convention for basically any media playback application of any form where a keyboard is available – even the full-screen media player on iPadOS reacts the right way to Space. The Music app definitely still does.

There have been changes made to Catalyst to make it a less horrible choice for building Mac applications (like opting into native or at least native-seeming controls like buttons and checkboxes), and certainly the cavalcade of odd UI choices all across the OS make the particular ones in Catalyst or Podcasts seem less weird. But it still looks, feels and behaves more like a poorly written web app, a mélange of UI goo scraped out of a foreign metaphor and allowed to set without much customization or supervision.

And regardless of UI framework, it doesn't seem like the Podcasts team has any interest in going further than making it the weak not-quite-anything port that it is. The iOS Podcasts app is redesigned more years than not, with custom interactions, animations and flows. That the macOS version can't even get to a coherent, serviceable, purpose-appropriate app is bewildering.

Oh, and the aforementioned Controls menu, when opened, beachballs for a handful of seconds – significantly more time than to launch the entire application – and then presents the menu, because when a company has only been doing pull-down menus for 36 years there's only so much you can expect.

I had the original iPhone, and could not have used it if Cydia and jailbreaking wasn't around. Apple doesn't imbue its developer community with creativity, it largely constrains it.

🍿

The Nintendo Switch is a wonder at this point. Applying Gunpei Yokoi's Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology, Nintendo took an ARM SoC that was already on the market and made it into the platform they needed – a cheap, semi-portable platform that was good enough and easy to port games to, and that right now fills the niche as the mainstream, Wii-like console for people who don't want mobile games and don't want to play the exclusives lottery with the Xbox or PlayStation consoles and can't afford to get both.

The OS, or in Nintendo's words "System Software" is a lot better in the Switch than in the Wii consoles. For the Wii U, much was made of an early slash of boot-up time to get it down to a half minute delay, and most of the user interface felt like swimming through corn starch. But some of the OS is still the weakest link of the Switch.

v11.0 is a great example of what's wrong. It introduces two features I've been waiting for since launch – the ability to send screen captures (images and video) to a phone or tablet, and to a computer over USB. Both of the implementations have striking flaws.

Sending to a phone does not involve using any of the Switch apps available. Instead, it involves a two-part QR code process: First, you scan a QR code to join an ad-hoc hosted Wi-Fi network. Then, when it detects that you have connected, it shows a second QR code, which is a link to a locally hosted web server which has a page with the media. This is brilliant and inspired – but it's brilliant and inspired in a 24-hour hackathon, look-what-we-can-do, proof-of-concept kind of way. It's what you do when you can't do anything else, to show that anything is possible. But it's a thoroughly horrible user experience. To make matters worse, you can only do this with up to 10 screenshots or 1 video at a time.

Sending to a computer via USB is less concerning, since it involves connecting a USB cable between the Switch and the computer and lets you have at the entire contents. The problem here is that you can't use a USB cable in the Switch Dock. You have to pull out the Switch and use the USB-C port on the Switch itself. If you could use the Dock's port, you could leave a cable in there and just connect it to your computer when you wanted to take a look. Now, it's more involved.

Both of these are advances over the state of the Switch from launch date to just over a week ago, where you were resigned to posting to Facebook or Twitter, or powering down the console and removing the micro-SD card (inserted behind the kickstand) respectively. And the Switch was launched under infamous hard deadlines, because of preannouncements about an "NX" console to be launched within that fiscal year. But these are features that could have been added much sooner, and could have been done much better.

The idea that comes to mind for phone/tablet sharing is to let you select as many items as possible, establish a local network connection or maybe even Bluetooth and send them over to a new department of one of the Switch apps. (There are a few variants on how to do this and what goes where, like maybe you can argue that the gallery should be streamed over to the app and the device user should handle picking and saving; but it's hard to choose a model that isn't significantly simpler, more efficient and less disruptive.) For USB connections, maybe design choices made during the construction of the Dock mean they really are prevented from making the connection directly to the Dock work, which means it's hard to patch after the hurried launch.

Either way, I hope the upcoming Switch refresh has spent more time thinking through these features. The Switch project wasn't rushed in all aspects, considering the intricate detail of its DRM, extending through the game cards. When it comes to basic features, responsiveness and loading times, though, Nintendo's habit of acting bumfuzzled has yet to wear off.

Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years. With the announcement of Apple’s new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple’s notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we’re announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.

Growl was famously hard to explain succinctly to people in my experience, but I think it speaks a lot to the community that before Mac OS X contained an infrastructure for this, people banded together and built something that was widely adopted. In this way it's not dissimilar from Internet Config by Quinn! the Eskimo et al or the External Editor protocol implemented by many FTP-like applications.

Growl made notifications bearable when Mac OS X was Mac OS X – thanks, Chris.

When Apple announced the upcoming App Store Small Business Program, under which some business will have to give up 15% of their app's price to Apple instead of 30%, I posted something brash in response to it. It contained humorous allegations that Apple was acting like organized crime towards those so successful as to escape the bounds of the program, had it existed at the time they did so. (Realistically, the imputed partner would have exceeded the volume within days, if not hours.)

I still maintain that within the context of the joke, and knowing the background, it's more right than it is wrong, but that's not to say that people at Apple working with marketing or the App Store or developing the underlying infrastructure go to work with the intent to do harm, repress creativity or spoil livelihoods. I regret any discomfort that I have caused in those people, especially when there are both individuals and organizations that are explicitly hell-bent on exploitation. But that said, what are we to do when that's what the end-result nevertheless is?

Seen from one perspective, Apple heard the feedback from developers and launched the program with clear and pure intent to build a better relationship with them. Seen from almost every other perspective, it is one in a series of ploys intended to protect, tooth and nail, a monopoly from being taken from them – a monopoly which ostensibly provides a marketplace for the enjoyment of developers and users, but which consistently serves themselves above any other party. Apple is as sincere in its determination going to war against anyone who would change that as its previous "thermonuclear war" against Android being "a stolen product".

In the subject of accessibility, I have heard of a scale of "situational, temporary, permanent". Making colors contrast enough or text sizes bigger, for example, helps the people with vision problems, but it also helps those who are trying to work an outdoor touch screen with fogged glasses from mask-wearing, those whose medical issues may flare up and ruin their vision temporarily or those who have misplaced their reading glasses. By improving an aspect of software for some, you also end up improving that aspect of it for many others. Or in other words: actions have consequences, and it's hard to wall them off.

Apple's desire for control is intended to stem some permanent behaviors seen as unseemly, like pornography, gambling or ethically murky business propositions. But the net cast by those controls also end up catching the situational and the temporary. Do you want to release an application under a pen name? No, fat chance, you must have something to hide, go live your life on Android instead. Do you want to use a behavior or technique that, in the wrong hands, could be abused? Nuh-uh. Do you want to just plain not be subservient to the consequences of these rules and the capriciousness emergent in their application; or disagree with their definition of what is unseemly or not because you are not the lowest common denominator by which the rules are applied? Build your own damn platform.

Jamie Zawinski has long posted a message to Facebook employees to the effect that being at Facebook is being complicit in the consequences of the platform. While I wouldn't go so far, as I tried to disengage from Google (the search engine itself), I ended up using DuckDuckGo, which although a privacy conscious provider, also enlists the floundering search engine from Microsoft, which is also one of the companies trading blows for the world's highest market cap, which helps itself to various and sundry data from every Windows 10 user (and shows them Start menu advertisements even if you paid hundreds of dollars for an operating system license). This is Alice in Wonderland.

In short, it is becoming incredibly hard to not surrender some part of your life to five-to-ten technology companies. So, no, maybe going by a particular letter interpretation of a particular definition of a particular law, what Apple has is not a monopoly. But by any sane way of looking at the status quo, it's not a healthy, customer-serving market either. Apple is acting the way they do because they get away with it, and mix semi-serious fealty to community-minded activities and values with bog standard profit-maximizing-at-all-costs tax planning and only caring about their own house and their own situation.

The pragmatic way to go for Apple, if it still believes it can keep this house of cards standing, might be to allow App Stores themselves into the App Store. For example: get Steam, and you can download any game or app from Steam that Valve has their own approval process for, which may include games not otherwise allowed by the App Store, and neither Steam nor the Steam-sourced apps would have to use Apple's In-App Purchase platform. It would also presumably be heavily policed to ensure that it wasn't letting misleading, dangerous or fraudulent apps through – an idea so good, it is second only to the idea that the App Store itself might competently enforce those policies on the App Store's own listings. But speaking of that, this would also open for a pet theory of mine, that with other app stores allowed and available, the Apple App Store itself could be free to truly only allow the apps matching a higher standard.

Ingredients:

• 20% long overdue but underpowered adjustment
• 30% confusing and capricious rules
• 30% opportunistic PR
• 20% Fuck Everyone Big Enough That They'd Be Able To Have An Effect In Public Opinion, You Know Who You Are, Epic Spat That Shit and You Didn't Kiss The Ring, Now Eat Shit You Bunch of Cocksuckers, Except For You League of Legends But We Already Have That Backroom Deal