Take

Translucent user interfaces is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Aside from movie visual effect trickery, it started out in Mac OS X's Aqua, followed by Windows Vista's Aero, followed by (then) OS X's Vibrancy, followed by Windows 10's Acrylic. Over time, more and more of the user interface has become translucent similar to foggy/privacy-preserving sheets of glass.

The unstated goal has always been to "look cool". The stated goal has always been to "give more pixels to your content".

The sparse, flat aesthetic of iOS 7 and its successors held a tenuous alliance with these transparency effects; being one of few real-world physical effects allowed to be imitated. When waiting for the iOS 7 era to end and the crucible of history to turn once more, the card-like esthetic of some prominent new UI features looked like a hint.

Instead, we got Liquid Glass, which is an ambitious implementation of a visual material and associated effects. They look impressive. They do add both personality and a trademark look. They also, to a first approximation, make the user interfaces worse.

They are not as easy to parse visually - static, predictable positions are eschewed, or maintained under the condition that they do not look static and predictable. They continue the trend of leaving less and less color/ink for definition of the UI itself; text or symbols cast in Liquid Glass have worse legibility and are harder to make out, while user interface elements on top of Liquid Glass are positioned with the primary purpose to make a Liquid Glass UI look like a Liquid Glass UI. Well-known and time tested elements of design are, if not abandoned, then demoted below the desire to have a visually striking, consistent branding user interface.

Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality. I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes from. When multiple layers of different imagery shine through each other, I am not helped by this. The user interface placed on a semi-transparent panel is not more effective because it is set against a smeared mess of colors, nor am I emotionally fulfilled as a human being for knowing that the mess comes from a treasured personal memory.

The problem with the philosophy birthing these ideas, and running rampantly through the manifesto motivating Liquid Glass, is that it insists upon itself.

The world is full of breakthroughs that end up moving the state of the art forward, which have flaws, sharp corners that are then weathered by time and experience. The first decade of Aqua is a great example of this, in going from flashy, jarring, gaudy tech demo to something a bit more toned down, but still elegant, effective, playful, beautiful and with a lot of personality.

Aqua had in its roots that it wanted to be user interface, with clearer and bigger fonts, more prominent key buttons, allowances for pro features, solving issues that classic Mac OS had long suffered. Vibrancy and now Liquid Glass do not hold the same desires; rather, they seem to increasingly want there to be less user interface. Scooting fifty buttons out of your way when someone is trying to read an email, fine - there are many times where that is legitimate. But the pixels previously devoted to assembling a dependable user interface are now automatically made to retreat, to shrink-to-fit.

Even this makes sense in a handful of scenarios. Mixed reality, augmented reality, or the Vision Pro's "spatial computing" does introduce a concern of physically layering UI on top of not just itself, but also physical objects.

What doesn't make sense, no matter how gangbusters these future technologies break through, is painting every problem with this solution. Much has been made recently of the evaporation of usability from macOS's recent System Settings, being made to ape the iOS System Settings. The tools used to fit things in a navigable hierarchy on a screen a handful of inches are cast as the only tools able to solve a similar problem for a platform where a much bigger canvas and two vastly different interactions are always available.

Rather than model Apple's mastery of all their devices, Liquid Glass models the propensity of design at Apple to wag the rest of the dog. Rather than model that design is how it works, translucency-obsessed design in general and Liquid Glass in particular models that job one, two and three are to look impressive and hang the person who ultimately has to get something done.

Liquid Glass is an obsessive focus on visual design, special effects and appearance. Going back roughly a decade, the iPhone X brought a new interaction design breakthough too, with a gestural interface that made it possible to zip through apps, go back and forth with fluid gestures that moved at the speed you drove them, and change your mind midway through. It is possible that for some Apple devices, there is another part ready to drop, that will complete this picture and change what Liquid Glass offers currently.

But I don't think so. The iPhone X's new-style gestural interface was everything Liquid Glass is not; rather than giving the illusion of visual transparency, it gave the tools for control. The two are not directly comparable, but considering all the bluster, it is worth considering why that is. Interfaces are tools to be wielded, that should be predictable, understandable, learnable and conquerable. The misapplication of "chrome" to refer to pixels used to present user interface controls and affordances looks more and more like projection; Liquid Glass is a much better simile to actual chrome on cars: glitzy, shiny, visually effectual and thus emotionally valuable if it's what you're into, but not a terribly efficient surface for other things you have to interact with.

(Written after deep thoughts and actual full-time experience with Liquid Glass UIs. Beta versions are not finished versions nor really fair targets of criticism, but significant changes in philosophy are necessary to invalidate most assumptions. It is, mostly, the intention itself that is at fault.)

John Siracusa:

The preponderance of the evidence is undeniable. Too many times, in too many ways, over too many years, Apple has made decisions that do not make its products better, all in service of control, leverage, protection, profits—all in service of money.

To be clear, I don’t mean things like charging exorbitant prices for RAM and SSD upgrades on Macs or taking too high a percentage of in-app purchases in the App Store. Those are venial sins. It’s the apparently unshakable core beliefs that motivate these and other poor decisions that run counter to the virtuous cycle that led Apple out of the darkness all those years ago.

Apple, as embodied by its leadership’s decisions over the past decade or more, no longer seems primarily motivated by the creation of great products. Time and time again, its policies have made its products worse for customers in exchange for more power, control, and, yes, money for Apple.

The iPhone is a better product when people can buy ebooks within the Kindle app. And yet Apple has fought this feature for the past fourteen years, to the tune of millions of dollars in legal fees, and has only relented due to a recent court order (which they continue to appeal).

Benedict Evans:

Steve wrote these rules. [email of Steve Jobs insisting on iBooks primacy]

Phil Schiller:

It's not just about Intel Inside. When you buy any off-the-shelf PCs, the boxes are covered with confusing logos and messages and icons. You open it up, there's stickers to peel off displays and keyboards, they're all over the place. And then you start it up and you find junkware all over your desktop and in your menus that they've littered with, they're trying to upsell you on junk and that whole philosophy, you know, we try to just give you a great product that you're gonna love, you don't have to peel stuff off to make it look better.

Gergely Orosz:

Got a new iPhone, paid a lot for it. Even so: as soon as I open Settings, Apple is advertising more stuff they want to upsell.

MacRumors:

The European Commission today announced a long list of changes that Apple is legally required to implement in future iOS 19 and iOS 20 updates.

[..]

We will be publishing an in-depth overview of all of the requirements, but in the meantime we have highlighted some key items below.

• Third-party smartwatches must be able to display and interact with iOS notifications by the end of 2025, which likely means iOS 19.2 or earlier.
• Apple must make its automatic audio switching feature available to third-party headphones by June 1, 2026, which likely means iOS 19.4 or earlier. This is the feature that allows most AirPods and select Beats to automatically switch connection between Apple devices, such as a Mac and an iPhone.
• Apple must make changes to iOS that allow for third parties to offer equivalent AirDrop alternatives by June 1, 2026.

[..]

Apple criticized these requirements as "bad for our products and for our European users."

"Today's decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple's ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don't have to play by the same rules," said Apple, in a statement.

It's like I said. What matters to Apple isn't the products. What's matters to Apple... is Apple.

For all I know, the prospect of audio switching within the existing Bluetooth standard at the time of the original AirPods was a laughable pile of trash. (In fact, I'm almost entirely certain.) That AirPods connect in the way they do, that they work as well as they do, that they carry over from device to device - Apple should be proud of accomplishing that.

Then they should make it a standard, document it and build it in, because that's what it means to be a platform. That's what it means to care for and about the user. That's what it means to be a technology company working not for technology's sake, but for the betterment of the world.

But they sat on their hands and acted like a monopoly. They let sales and marketing make product decisions. They listened to users and developers ask for the same thing more evenly distributed, and they called them names, or dismissed their wishes as lunacy.

And the company borne of an electrical engineer who worked within a community to push the state of the art forward and an earnest visionary who made his bones by constantly learning from those with battle scars and experience in his industry, who gave him time, wisdom and attention for free, now faces the backlash of the things it didn't do.

Not because they never got around to it. Because it weighed their users' interests against their own, and sided with their own control and their own short-sighted wins.

None of these features make life worse for Apple products. None of them weaken an Apple Watch or your AirPods. None of them rob AirDrop of compatibility that was never there to begin with. All of them have been heavily requested, for ages.

As a user, I would have preferred that Apple would just have done the right thing from the beginning. As a user, I do not prefer that this is what happened. Much like, as a user, I do not prefer that car manufacturers are legally held to emission standards, or that factories are forced by regulation instead of driven by ideals to not pollute – or that governmental agencies step in, in the face of monopolistic practices screwing the customer. The world would be much better if there would have to be no intervention at all. Compliance is seldom as passionate and genuine as drive and goals.

But hope springs eternal that Apple will shed its skin and realize the benefits, or that its head has been up its ass. In the meantime, I will take what I can get.

(Starting off with John Gruber's Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino – which is both right and aptly put – but followed by a crazy quilt of reactions.)

My thought after leaving this to fester a bit is that Apple today is focused on being Apple, and some might say on staying Apple. Apple before was focused on building products.

There's an NBC Brian Williams interview with Steve Jobs from 2006 which elucidates this; rather than quoting exact lines, Brian tries to corner Steve into seeing his silhouette as a captain of industry in the annals of history, and Steve is very uncomfortable because he just wants to go on to do the next thing. (And notes that a lot of products are just "technology in search of a problem".)

The things John Gruber noted, pretty much to a T, would not have been issues if Apple was all about just building the product. Most of the hot water that Apple is in, no matter what the reason, it wouldn't be in if it was not first focused on being Apple.

The Dithering contemporary episode to the article contains a good section by Ben Thompson expounding on how Apple has developed organizational scar tissue, about having tried giving less of a shit about what people do and then ending up having a near-death experience by their own third party app developers almost snubbing them in their moment of weakness; all of it worsened by an increasingly self-selecting roster of people to whom this was the original trauma.

I think this observation is astute and a lot truer than I would hope for it to be, and if nothing else, it's a reminder of how quickly the internally enshrined logic of an organization can turn into maniacal, self-harming nonsense. Soak in that and expose yourself to larger forces demanding things from you and it's hard to imagine a good ending.

(For one thing, what the hell kind of lesson is it to focus on that other actors behaved somewhat rationally when you'd been acting like a fool for years and giving them less and less of a reason to stick with you, and that therefore other actors should be avoided or are nefarious? A more valuable lesson might be: let's listen to our customers, let's work in their best interest, let's not get complacent, let's earn our support and our success, let's make supporting our platform something you would have to be a stupendous idiot to avoid doing. The mix of mostly incorporating those true lessons but still focusing on the scar tissue to the extent that it counteracts the true lessons is just baffling.)

Personally, I've thought about ways for an ineffectively-competing Apple to mount an effective position on generative AI and come up short many times, but both Ben and John again have the sensible angle of just going back to the roots and doing what they do best and leaving what others do best to them.

That said, the ratcheting pressure of being everything to everyone and fulfilling every demand for fear of leaving checkboxes unticked may leave that an even more dangerous position than "being left behind" in a war fought by prognosticators and largely ignored by actual people — but at least then, they might both catch a moment that yearns for technological behemoths to withdraw, and follow an authentic DNA strand of what they did so well.

Anders Hejlsberg is the creator of C# and Turbo Pascal and a core developer and early architect on TypeScript. This video is Dimitri Mitropoulos showing various stumbling blocks on his way to making Doom run on TypeScript's type system.

It's interesting thinking about the push and pull of academia obsessed with (functional) purity and the greasy guts of optimizing for a CPU's inner workings and systemic pipeline with cache lines, branch prediction and mechanical sympathy. Dimitri's project implements a WebAssembly runtime, so it is already ten feet off the ground if you ask some people, but in a way the two ends almost meet here.

Humane/HP fever dr—I mean Corporate Press Release:

"Humane’s AI platform Cosmos, backed by an incredible group of engineers, will help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. This will unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promises of AI." [said Tuan Tran, President of Technology and Innovation at HP.]

The Register:

HP Inc is trying to force consumer PC and print customers to use online and other digital support channels by setting a minimum 15-minute wait time for anyone that phones the call center to get answers to troublesome queries.

The wait time was added on Tuesday, February 18, according to internal communications seen by The Register, and impacts retail patrons in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Italy, though we anticipate more countries could be added.

Almost eight and a half years ago, I switched to using an iPad as my full-time computer, having come from decades of having Macs.

[..]

I’m reminded of YouTubers who say that they tried using something as their main whatever for a whole week; well, I did it for eight years. Allow me to report back.

[..]

The thing is, there’s a lot of momentary waiting with an iPad. Waiting for it to disambiguate a tap from a swipe or a scroll, or from a tap-hold or a drag; waiting for it to do its required ritual animations in the summoning or banishing of an app or a section of UI; waiting for it to thaw or resurrect a process that fell foul of its ferociously aggressive limits on things running in the background. Everything goes at a glitzy demo’s pace, rather than at an I-already-know-what-I’m-doing pace. If you think of your tasks like the words in a sentence, the spaces between them are longer on an iPad, like fully-justified text that’s expanding to fill the line. It’s definitely bearable, but it adds up.

[..]

Presumably because of the legacy and the architecture of iPadOS, many activities simply fail if not kept frontmost. Take Final Cut Pro, for example; a first-party app which you’d assume would have every available privilege and priority, especially given its resource-intensive workflows. After triggering the export of a video project, doing anything which moved Final Cut from frontmost status causes the export to fail, instantly.

John Gruber:

I’ve seen no celebratory tweets or announcements from European Commission officials celebrating the availability of Hot Tub. Just crickets chirping. When it comes to native iOS porn apps, the EU now has an unequivocal advantage over not just the United States but the rest of the world. You’d think they’d want to celebrate the achievement.

Aaron Sorkin (in a manner of speaking):

John van Dyke: May I ask you a question, sir?

President Josiah Bartlet: Of course.

van Dyke: If our children can buy pornography on any street corner for $5, isn't that too high a price to pay for free speech?

President Bartlet: No.

van Dyke: Really?

President Bartlet: On the other hand, I do think that $5 is too high a price to pay for pornography.

I was the tech lead at Apple for making Mac OS X pass UNIX certification, and it was done to get Apple out of a $200M lawsuit filed by The Open Group, for use of the UNIX™ trademark in advertising.

[..]

I was asked if I could lead a team to do #1. I said “Yes, under the condition that I could use the compliance project as a hammer to force other parts of the organization to make changes in their own code base, and that I could play it rather loose with commit rules regarding what it said in the bugs database for a given code change, and what the given code change actually did, in addition to what it said in the bugs database”.

[..]

And Ed Moy and I made a two line change that moved a type definition from <stdio.h> to where it was supposed to be, instead. One line of change in <stdio.h>, and another in the file the type was actually supposed to be located in.

And we ran the tests again, and one of the header file errors in the tests went away.

So we did a “world build”, where everything that was in Mac OS X, including iTunes, got rebuilt.

That — essentially, one line change — broke 152 (from memory; that number sticks up, but it might have only been 137) projects failed to build.

Including iTunes.

And so Ed and I went through, and fixed every single one of those projects to build with the change, or without the change.

And we did another “world build”, and everything built.

Yes, we had access to all of Apple’s source code, at that point in the game.

And so we submitted high priority bug fixes to the projects, some of which downgraded the priority immediately, and some of which they simply fixed, since we had provided them with the patch already.

And then the VP of engineering, Bertrand Serlet, re-escalated the priority on the ones which had been downgraded.

A fascinating story of the doors opened by certification, the things people have been wanting to do for a long time anyway but never got the chance to, and the arithmetic of several tens of millions of dollars being less than several hundreds of millions of dollars.

John Gruber: "In Defense, I Swear, of the Magic Mouse’s Charging Port Placement"

Yes, with the charging port on the mouse’s belly, you cannot use it while it charges. There are obvious downsides to that. But those positing the Magic Mouse as absurd act as though Apple doesn’t know this. Of course Apple knows this. Apple obviously just sees this as a trade-off worth making. Apple wants the mouse to be visually symmetric, and they want the top surface to slope all the way down to the desk or table top it rests upon. You can’t achieve that with an exposed port.

The Magic Mouse is not inherently a pants-on-head stupid idea, or a pants-on-head stupid implementation of that idea. The problem is just that the Magic Mouse wants to be a mouse with a touch surface, touch surfaces want to be planar, ie basically flat, and good mouse ergonomics entail shapes that are not basically flat.

For most people, comfort means fitting effortlessly in your grip. A flat mouse means that your palm is splayed, and if you palm is splayed, your fingers have to grip it by the side. (Or you have to sort of push it against the desk with your hand, which is perilous with any mouse and doubly so with a touch surface one.) This is not usually terribly comfortable, compared to a mouse shape that more readily adheres to the natural way your hand cups and grips, which most mice adopt to some extent, and some do to a quite large extent.

So, is it worth it? It's obviously a trade-off. If what you want to do all day every day is make touch gestures, and they speed up your work, then yes. I love making touch gestures, and have enjoyed touch scrolling on a Magic Mouse when using it on occasion (I don't own one), but I have also had significant trouble performing those touch gestures compared to on a MacBook trackpad, since you often need to exert force not just by performing the gesture, but by steadying the mouse simultaneously.

These properties of the Magic Mouse are reasonably understood within minutes, if not intellectually then at least vividly. It's possible I'm underestimating the proportion of people whose anatomy allow them complete comfort with a Magic Mouse — that proportion, even if small, is likely at least hundreds of thousands of people at Apple's scale — or the probably decidely bigger proportion who just don't care and consider it a worthwhile trade-off.

The Magic Mouse as a first attempt of a mouse that is usably a touch surface for gestures is not bad. The Magic Mouse as the current attempt of such a mouse, nine years in, is rather dreadful. The solution space may have been exhaustively explored behind the scenes, but it doesn't look like it.

Touch surfaces don't just want to be planar, but they want to be horizontal, lest your hand wants to fall off. But there are designs like the Logitech MX Vertical that lean into a certain grip where your fingers rest, unstrained, in a vertical-ish position. How would touch gestures work on such a mouse?

Even if they did, could Apple ship one by default, considering that it would inherently not be ambidextrous? Probably not. (But Apple have shipped multiple mice before.)

So what about the cable then? A mouse is a tool for creative use. A mouse that is well designed for purpose allows that creativity to continue with as few interruptions and restraints as possible. Plugging in a cable is a small interruption. (And feeling the tug of the cable as you move around is a small-to-medium restraint, depending on the cable; compare to an Apple Pencil theoretically being plugged in at the cap to charge, where it would impede mobility and shift the weight quite drastically.) Forcing a minutes-long break is a larger interruption — an interruption that's not hard to anticipate or plan around or assimilate into regular needs to take a break, to be sure, but an interruption nonetheless.

The Magic Mouse is consistent in its vision of putting its projected image of an outwardly considered object first. It chose a hard set of problems to solve. It is an attempt to solve them, coronated by its maker as a flawless solution. What it isn't is a spectacularly good computer mouse. There are plenty of spectacularly good computer mice out there, and there are even more that have leaps-and-bounds better ergonomics than the Magic Mouse.

New needs friends, and progress is often downstream of a few blind alleys. But at this point I'm more than interested what a Magic Mouse 2, that tries to take the learnings of how Magic Mouse has played out in real life and how people's bodies actually work and do something different, would look like.

To just ship the same thing after nine years, with all the flaws that its trade-offs have lead to would be... well, pants-on-head stupid.

Masahiro Sakurai is best known as the creator of Kirby and the driving force and producer of the Super Smash Bros. series. For the past two years, he has posted a series of high-effort, well produced, high-production value videos on game design philosophy, team dynamics and general hard-won experience - everything he wants to spread to current colleagues, coming generation and just about anyone.

Earlier this week, the final video was posted, with a colophon, background story and oral history of the project itself, in the style of all the other videos. It, like every other video, is worth watching in its entirety, but it is humbling to realize that Sakurai took a rare window in his calendar, threw himself into it with his characteristic production mania and spent considerable time and money to make the things he wants to share more accessible and more enduring, and to make games better understood.

In a field overrun by rapacious DLC hawks on one side (who would probably find Sakurai's generosity profoundly stupid) and enduringly immature bullies on the other, it is easy to forget the people who play, design, create and implement games for fun, for entertainment, for an opportunity to partake in an experience in a unique way.

Gaming is a strong bubble, and chances are everyone who would have been interested in this already knows about this, but I implore those who don't to also take a look at a few episodes and see if they don't come away with something worthwhile; they are divided into subject tracks, so you can skip the spline reticulation if you'd like.

Lectures, as a medium, have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation. Yet if we were aliens observing typical lectures from afar, we might notice the implicit model they appear to share: “the lecturer says words describing an idea; the class hears the words and maybe scribbles in a notebook; then the class understands the idea.” In learning sciences, we call this model “transmissionism.” It’s the notion that knowledge can be directly transmitted from teacher to student, like transcribing text from one page onto another. If only! The idea is so thoroughly discredited that “transmissionism” is only used pejoratively, in reference to naive historical teaching practices. Or as an ad-hominem in juicy academic spats.

[..]

Unlike most non-fiction books, textbooks usually are built around explicit cognitive models. For instance, they often alternate between explanations which introduce concepts, and exercises which push students to think about those concepts in specific ways. It’s great that textbooks didn’t choose their cognitive models by accident. That’s an important first step. But it’s not enough: people still struggle to reliably absorb knowledge from textbooks.

This is making something click for me that has always sounded off. The right, and especially the new, anti-woke, née "alt-", right, (but also authoritarian-oriented factions of every stripe), is obsessed with the idea that "things are not being taught anymore". Painting the picture of facts that are then left up to "but we could be completely wrong; what do you think?"

It looks to me as if in what Andy teaches me is known as metacognition in learning science, methods other than sitting there and just patiently absorbing what the person at the front of the blackboard tells you are involved, in the service of actually getting the new concepts and knowledge to be understood.

But taking this in from the outside, or from not seeing it implemented very well, it can turn into a fun-house mirror distortion. A misunderstanding that just because the student should be engaged to enable new learning to occur, and sometimes that even means having some sort of say in what that exercise should look like, that it then means the things to be learned are also fungible or arbitrary or ill-respected. Maybe even that anything but just teaching, unquestionably reading aloud, the raw materials is a dangerous diversion.

Challenging an idea or talking about its validity is a way for curious minds to probe what the idea actually means and to figure out its consequences. Looking at something from the context of another time or culture or set of mores is a way of understanding both perspectives better.

None of this is hopefully news, but the rest of Andy's text is about having to do more than reading to learn something. I've been doing way too much silent reading, and though I rarely stop thinking about things, I've been doing way too little writing and processing.

Apple: iPhone 16 Pro Battery Replacement (2024)

[..]

Step 6. The center of the repair tray has two slots. Position the repair tray and enclosure onto the battery press with the left slot over the pin as shown. ⚠️ Caution: Move the charge port assembly flex cable out of the way of the roller.

Step 7: Flip down the lever at the top of the battery press to lower the roller onto the battery. Slide the repair tray back and forth through the battery press three times to adhere the battery to the enclosure.

Step 8: Flip up the red lever at the top of the battery press.

Step 9: Position the repair tray and enclosure onto the battery press with the right slot over the pin as shown.

Step 10: Repeat steps 7 and 8. Then continue to step 11.

[..]

Apple (1976):

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Nathan_RETRO (comment):

Apple literally gets in trouble, fixes things by adding fees back, gets in trouble again, and add the fees back. I can't even.

Terry Jones and Michael Palin:

Wife: Have you got anything without spam?

Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

In February, game developers began expressing frustration over Apple Arcade. They pointed out that while the service was initially profitable, Apple had begun decreasing upfront payments and the per-play "bonus pool."

Additionally, the tech giant began to axe projects with little to no warning.

[..]

"We can go weeks without hearing from Apple at all and their general response time to emails is three weeks, if they reply at all," one developer told Mobilegamer.biz.

Some have even called Apple's tech support "miserable" and the worst they'd seen anywhere. Even the QA and update process is frustrating, prompting some developers to avoid updating their games altogether.

Apple does not get games. Apple does not respect developers. Apple ships a dictionary defining the word "symbiosis", but chances are the many Apple employees who understand it are not in a position to effect it.

There is a kernel of a good idea inside the vision for Apple Arcade: pay developers to make games that it would be hard to get made otherwise, and let those games have an instant, massive audience. But while you would have to be as headstrong and independent as Apple to try to chart this course and hold onto it, Apple itself is just too caught up in other factors to make it fly.

These reports are particularly interesting, since the perennial defense of app store-encumbered platforms are to refer to them as game consoles but for apps. Apple Arcade games are headliners flying closer to the Apple brand than other games; they should be getting ultra deluxe treatment compared to App Store apps, and yet it doesn't measure up to the levels delivered by game consoles or independent storefronts like Steam.

Spectacular take on, well, you guessed it.

The section about the OLPC project is especially informative.

I don't design for other cultures, but I've been in plenty of projects where no thought at all is given to how what's being built will be used by the person who will be using it.

All of "enterprise" software is a jousting match of checklists, evaluated only by people who either do not know or do not care whether the product will be of any use whatsoever. (By inference, this extends to most Microsoft software.)

Even with that in mind, it's still surprising how something can go so sideways.

An interesting coda is a comment by what looks like a fellow Swede:

I rarely comment , but had to. My father Lars (RIP) worked for SIDA to develope road construction in developing countries. What he saw was that western aid in Africa always failed by bringing european engineers and their ordinary road construction techniques to their world. It failed because it was dependant on the workers from europe, their machinery breaking down waiting for spare parts for months, and most importantly - that the road built was not the "property" or the work done by the locals themeselves - which resulted in the roads never being used or being poorly maintained after the aidworkers had left.

My dad changed that completely with what he called "labour intensive road construction"... which was; doing away with all the machinery, employing the locals with shovels and wheelbarrows building the road going past their village. Then an elder in each village was appointed "Road Chief" to be responsible for the upkeeping and maintenance of their designated stretch with salary from the aid-program.

This proved to be a very successful model, gaining roads in good quality that the locals considered their road (since they'd built it) and would use and maintain with pride. An example that aid has to be IN CONTEXT with where it is applied.

An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends. The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media.

Legal petitions are live in several countries, and the process of making it an EU citizen initiative is underway.

Compared to the sale of a banana, a cupboard or even a DVD of Liar Liar, many games are complicated enough that it is not necessarily straight-up fraud if they stop working for reasons besides material degradation. But that shouldn't be the last word, it should be a known concern that is carried into the design process and sorted out, to the amount that the technical tradeoffs would allow it.

Margethe Vestager, EC commissioner:

Today, we are opening a sixth [non-compliance case]: we will look into Apple's new business model: the commercial terms Apple imposes on app developers who want to reach end users on the iOS platform. The criteria these app developers have to meet to even be allowed to operate as alternative marketplaces or make apps available via sideloading. And the complex user journey for those users who want to download and install alternative marketplaces and sideloaded apps.

In the DMA, the ground rule is for sideloading apps to be allowed, and to only very minimally be reigned in under very specific conditions. Apple chose to take these conditions and lawyer them into "always, unless you pay us sums of money that are plainly prohibitive for most actors". Apple knew the rules and understood the intent and chose to evade them, in order to retain additional income.

In the App Store Guidelines, as written and period appropriate, the ground rule was for in-app purchases to be allowed only through the App Store's native in-app purchase system, at the penalty of removal from the App Store. Epic chose to take those conditions, break them and lawyer up. Epic knew the rules and understood the intent and chose to evade them, in order to retain additional income.

It is completely fair to look at what Epic did and say "that was kind of a dick move". (I personally think it was kind of a dick move, even as I agree with some downwind consequences.) But any argument that what Epic did was wrong and what Apple did was right hinges on distinctions that do not make sense to me. That Apple's App Store Guidelines are less of a mess of what could charitably be defined as emergent praxis than the DMA is, is a fascinating theory.

Apple seems to treat written law with roughly the same level of respect as the actions that would cause one of its developers to be violently and with prejudice ejected from all its programs. Yes, I know what you're thinking, "regulation bites corporation"; film at 11. (And yes, for that matter, "regulation fails to manifest intended outcome, free of side effects, by sheer will, in the face of a commercial marketplace".)

But Apple has a significantly easier time silently assenting to the qualms of dictatorships than to simply stop reaching into the pockets of customers, many of which have funneled tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for the most consistently successful high margin product in the history of mobile telephony, or developers who have largely made those devices attractive in the first place.

What does that have to do with anything? Apple has two modes when it comes to compliance: actual compliance and fighting by lashing out. It's not clear to me that actual compliance is always the right way. Apple's prerogative is to participate in the civic discourse, and to push back. Indeed, Apple has even a larger claim than most to have actually shown backbone, wisdom and (dare I say) courage. When Apple fought the FBI order to corrode the integrity of its OS, under the mistaken (FBI) theory that a compromised system would not be compromised if the master key was in good hands, and that the mathematics of encryption cared one whit about FBI, I was appreciative of their stand.

But when Apple chooses to blithely follow along with demands from regimes that do not have free, independently verified and secret elections and are using as much data and intel as they can get to maintain a vast social credit database, all the while taking a new legal framework in the EU as an excuse to a) make a few bucks in ways completely foreign to that framework while b) denying most of the freedoms mandated by it, I worry about the standing of any argument that the reason Apple should be allowed to get its way is because of their moral purity and piety.

The best that can be said is that Apple is as aggressive as it deems allowed within the particular market. The choice of aggression compared to assent seems to have hinged on the DMA being toothless or its enforcement being hapless. Time will tell whether they were right.

John Gruber:

My basic theory is that what the EC has wanted all along is to force Apple not merely open up iOS to other methods of distribution, but to force Apple to allow apps to be distributed through those non-App-Store channels free of charge. But they don’t want to come out and say, flatly, that they seek to forbid Apple from monetizing its IP from all developers on the platform, because that’s so radically anti-capitalist.

The biggest flaw of the European Commission's stewardship of the Digital Markets Act is that the EC's flagship is to do with the fairness and openness of the internal market. The EC couches everything it does in terms of maintaining latitude for EU commercial actors, because that is its purview and purpose. Going back to its progenitor the European Coal and Steel Community, the market was the end goal.

(I am not an expert in trade policies, but I understand there are many such organizations who, in working towards fairer and freer trade in open markets, find exceptions and take actions in individual cases. I'm hopeful all such endeavors will be labelled as "radically anti-capitalist".)

The EC is not the ideal horse, and other multi-billion dollar technology firms are not the ideal cheerleaders. In a world where the phone is the dominant computing device for most people and nearly everything involves it, the case against monopolistic rent seeking and corporatist distribution restrictions should be to protect not only customers but individual freedoms. Nevertheless, the horse has been saddled and does work roughly towards the same goals.

The clumsiness of a legal mandate to force changes in an authoritarian system which itself dictates how millions of people are allowed to express themselves is regrettable, but the regret serves as a self-similar illustration of the discomfort. Apple's squirming, thrashing and whinnying paints a hypocrite's portrait, either incapable of seeing in its own new hardship the impact of its policies on others, or content to reject the notion and scurry off into a smug bubble of faux self-deprecation.

There are still ways Apple, say, in its approach to privacy and compared to some of its competitors, are exceptional. But dying on this hill, to squeeze out the same money that putatively is not the primary driver behind the company anyway, to maintain a ridiculous charade wherein no developers were successful before a distribution model that not uncommonly was a significant downgrade, is just exceptionally stupid.

Spectacular.

I’m excited to share swift-playdate-examples, a technical demonstration of using Swift to build games for Playdate, a handheld game system by Panic.

I am terribly upset that at no point did Panic get the chance to charge Apple $99 for developer tools, scrutinize every byte in their executable and toss it back in their face after Review as being "redundant", since games already exist on the Playdate.

Of course I kid — this is a fantastic achievement and a great post. It's interesting how many programming languages have modes explicitly targeting embedded scenarios these days.

To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must:

• Be enrolled in the Apple Developer Program as an organization incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the EU (or have a subsidiary legal entity incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the EU that’s listed in App Store Connect). [..]
• Be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.

Apple of 2024: asymptotically approaching reasonableness.

To be honest, the remaining requirements are not as terrible. Sideloading should mean completely open, completely allowed (including from an airgapped computer), for anyone, by anyone. But it's not the notarization that's the main issue as long as notarization is purely technical (which it is on Mac, but isn't on the current iOS DMA plan, where manual review is involved).

Let's list the additional changes that would make this offer something less than sideloading but still ultimately be somewhat palatable.

• No "freedom is for rich, successful people". No limits on "2 continuous years of good standing", no requirements of "1 million annual installs of single app".

• No Core Technology Fee.

  (Dude, you sell tens of millions of phones for $1,500+ and pride yourself on being the margin leader of the entire phone industry, millions of developer accounts for $99 and skim 30% (or sometimes 15%) off of the entire collective App Store revenue. And you operate the entire company on one Profit/Loss statement. You're good.

  No "business unit" will imminently capsize, except possibly PR or Developer Relations from how badly you're screwing all this up so far, but if that's financial, it's not from lack of Core Technology Fee income, it's from people getting fed up with your bullshit and not feeling quite so happy about shoveling money into your gaping maw while you treat them as degenerate freeloaders.)

• A purely technical notarization process without manual review, or at least a shortened process past the first release or so.

...you know what, that's basically it. That still wouldn't make it DMA compliant, since rights in the regulation are still being held ransom, but it's helpful in plotting their movement across the spectrum of possible options.

Putting Phil Schiller in charge of the App Store is going to be a hundred billion dollar mistake that all-told leaves Apple with a pile of legal, perhaps criminal, liability and a raft of draconian regulations around the world that massively compromise the iOS experience. This was clear years ago; it is unimaginable that he’s still calling the shots

Apple of 2024: repeatedly jamming a fork in the wall socket, proudly proclaiming their company policy of not being electrocuted.

Steve Jobs, January 7th, 1997, 18 days after the Apple acquisition of NeXT:

We've got to get the spark back with the developers. [..] We've got to get the developers back. Now, how are we going to do that? What's our strategy to do that?

I'm not going to go back to the Apple ][ days, so we'll start off with DOS. If you're a developer, you can build an app, let's use a metaphor of the floors of a building, you can build an app that's three floors tall, but you can't build an app that's 10 floors tall, because you all read The Mythical Man-Month, what happens is as your software team starts getting bigger it kinda collapses under its own weight, like a building built of wood. You can't build a building built of wood that high. So, let's say you can build a three story app, well, that means if you start off with DOS you're on the first floor, you can deliver a fourth story app.

Well, what we did with the Mac was, we had an OS that was about the same as DOS, but then what we did was we put this thing called the Toolbox on top of it that lifted the developer up to the fifth floor, so that they could write an app like PageMaker and deliver an eight floor app on Mac, because they started at the fifth floor, that they could never, ever, ever deliver on DOS. And that's why all these wonderful apps propelled Apple into this exciting markets over the years.

But, there's a problem now. And the problem is a very simple one. It's called: Windows. The Mac didn't progress much beyond the fifth floor, and over ten years, Microsoft copied it. And now they can offer developers, you know, you squint your eyes, one's a little better than the other in some areas, but you squint your eyes and they're basically both fifth floor. That's not good for us. It's even a little worse. Because they've been a little ahead of us in getting a multi-threaded, multi-tasking operating system underneath Windows. And that's arguably even better for the developer.

So, here's what we have to do. What we have to do is bring out an operating system that's even more advanced than NT. And this is not easy. This is not easy to do because these operating systems are very complex. We forget many times that it's taken NT eight years to get where it is today. Eight years. So to do this, we can't do this overnight. Fortunately, we've got one that's been battle tested and is ready for the challenge. But on top of that, we're going to put something called OpenStep, and OpenStep lets you start developing your apps on the 20th floor. And the kinds of apps you can deliver are phenomenal.

What does it mean to be a platform?

A platform is both its own foundation, the starting point for everything built on top of it, and the collective embodiment of those things.

The original Mac and its line of successors did not invent Desktop Publishing. It provided an environment that was conducive to graphical applications, where you could put up bitmapped graphics, and through the metaphor of windows and zooming and moving around, could render printer quality typesetting. (It had not been completely impossible to produce such typesetting, but doing so while limited to a monospaced 80 column terminal was an arduous process.) The system provided the cultural foundation as well as the technical foundation to put you a few floors up, in Steve's metaphor, and the combination of production-quality, production-ready apps and more and more capable hardware invented and made the industry.

Similarly, the original Apple ][ a few years earlier did not invent computerized spreadsheets. It seems hard to grasp now, but Apple ][ was one of the first instances of a computer and a "user terminal" being co-habitated. This made personally interactive applications possible to a larger degree and within two years, Dan Bricklin had started work on VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet as we know it.

Science describes a Cambrian explosion when all of a sudden, due to an available niche, organisms adapt and change shape on a time scale that is, relatively speaking, overnight. When the right circumstances exist, great things will emerge.

Platforms understand this and seek this synergy. Using the capabilities and the culture and the code in the base, the application can solve problems that it is built to solve in the best way it knows how to. The platform becomes a world teeming with life, with new possibilities, with problems solved in unimaginable ways. Without the world, no friendly, helpful, earnest critters floating freely in unoccupied interstellar space. Without the organisms, the world is essentially dead.

Apple: Update on apps distributed in the European Union

Apple is sharing changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store, impacting developers’ apps in the European Union (EU) to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). These changes create new options for developers, including how they can distribute apps on iOS, process payments, use web browser engines in iOS apps, request interoperability with iPhone and iOS hardware and software features, access data and analytics about their apps, and transfer App Store user data.

There really is a lot to cover, and you could spend a lot of time trying to summarize it and still miss things. Here are some thoughts in no particular order.

• This is part actually honestly well-meaning, part malicious compliance, part intricate machinery. Many components have all three parts present.

• This has been a long time coming and I'm sure a lot of people have been working very hard for a long time to make these things happen. I appreciate their hard work; particularly I know that untangling assumptions built up over the past 15 years does not come without headaches. If Apple leadership had just designed a less ass-backwards platform, fewer changes, maybe even none, may have been required.

• This is not sideloading in any commonly used term. Particularly with the financial requirements and the Core Technology Fee, it is devolved monopoly. A third-party marketplace is required to have significant amounts of cash on hand, and driven to be able to recoup €0.50 per first annual install of its own marketstore app (which do not get the one million "grace" window).

  On the other hand, there is a sliver of a legitimate point that for aspiring actual marketplaces, being able to provide all the things that such a marketplace should provide. But marketplaces are the answer to a not-locked-down App Store. Sideloading is the answer to a not-locked-down Ad Hoc Distribution; this quadrant is as missing now as it ever was.

• App Notarization is required and includes some form of abridged manual App Review where a bare selection of guidelines, relatively speaking, are applied. (It is possible that this lighter review process is a variant of Testflight pre-release scanning.) Following notarization, the signed app is delivered to the marketplace backend directly.

• Apple is digging in on its world view that no developer can ever be trusted, even directly by a user. Shipping a bug fix update straight to users, without having someone on Apple QA it, is not possible.

• It is not ideal. It is a start. Even when the monopolist is trying to fight back, it is better than the monopoly.