I wasn’t satisfied with Apple, and Tim Cook, going into WWDC this year, and I remain dissatisfied after the fact. I don’t have the warm fuzzies when I see Craig on screen. There’s a distinct lack of new ideas in how the event is put together, and in many things in the event itself, despite all prior criticism about these very tame presentations lacking an air of sincerity and feeling incredibly “produced”. At least Apple didn’t fall into the same trap they did last year by promisi...| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Unlike Reel 2 Real, I do not like to move it, move it. I moved a lot when I was a kid and I hate everything about it. I’m generally a pretty anxious person so telling me I have to go through everything I own and squeeze it into a smaller space, or get rid of it isn’t going to relax me.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Apple released a new Apple Watch band for Pride, like they always do. From their press release:| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
9to5 Mac noticed that Apple had an Apple Snapshots page up. There’s no announcement, or statement about what’s it’s supposed to be, or who it is for, so it’s unclear if there’s supposed to be more to this:| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Adobe has a new blog post up outlining their vision for “agentic AI” in Adobe’s products.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
My blog is made by a rube, if you will. This site is a static blog generator that’s basically a single 300-ish line Python script from 2014. I was “inspired” to make it when static site generators were all the rage and I figured it would help me with my Python skills, as Python is a language often used in VFX software. I don’t recommend people use any of my code, or write their own site like this. There are better ways to spend your time.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Here’s another “Joe complains about Shortcuts” post for you. Last time I complained about not being able to reverse a list. This time I’m complaining about how Shortcuts handles time zones. I know time zones are the bane of every programmer’s existence, but I’m not going to give the Shortcuts team a break because they have all the time zone data, they just implemented it in the worst way they could think of.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
It certainly took me by surprise when Apple contacted me, of all people, to be the sole news outlet to run the story about the fifth MacBook Air color being added to the recently updated line-up. Certainly they were contacting me out of deep respect, and not as a prank, right? Second, I didn’t know why this color was released so soon after the line was refreshed.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Today I needed to scan a document I received in the mail and email it to someone. Nothing arduous, I just don’t do it very often so I forgot where the “Scan Document” function lived.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Apple’s statement to John Gruber last week that they are delaying “More Personalized Siri” has certainly sparked some conversation. With Gruber himself going on to write a pretty scathing post about this whole debacle. People certainly took note. A key part of what John wrote was that he believed in the company’s claims, because it would be unlike Present Day Apple to promote something that they couldn’t ship.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
I hate Shortcuts. I don’t ever want to use it. The interface is bad, nothing ever makes any sense, but it’s the only way to do certain things, especially if you want to have some kind of automation that works on iOS too. Yesterday, when I was writing my blog post, I wanted to include screenshots of the ugly PlexAmp interface. The screenshots for iOS are almost always vertical 9:16, so it’s awkward to stack many of those vertically. I usually use Shortcuts’ Combine Images to take a sel...| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Since my previous blogposts on this subject, where I found out that all the streaming services are either bad because of how they treat artists, or bad because how they treat the world, I tried some far less desirable options.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
I wrote about my dissatisfaction with Apple, and Tim Cook, a few weeks ago and said that I would be looking for ways to reduce what I’m spending with Apple. There is no great alternative for all of Apple’s products and services, because many alternatives are run by companies that align themselves with the same authoritarian interests as Apple. If I’m going to change something then there should be a reason why. It can be as simple as evaluating my recurring subscriptions through Apple an...| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
I was recently in New York City and that meant I was juggling Google Maps and Apple Maps to get around. They’re largely comparable products these days, but there are some strengths and weaknesses that make it worth my time to juggle them. I created a Shortcut to help with that.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
I know this is a rather dramatic headline and that some people might incorrectly assume that I’m mad about some particular piece of hardware or software, but it should come as no surprise that I’m hopping mad at Tim Cook for how he’s ingratiating himself to President Trump again. The President has done, and will continue to do, harm to marginalized communities. Harm was a promise of his campaign and underscored by this President’s earlier efforts the last time he was in office. The la...| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Chance Millar at 9to5Mac wrote up the new changes to notification summaries that are in the iOS 18.3 developer beta released today.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
I’ve been very conscious of how much I use Instagram. I deactivated my Facebook account many years ago, and I don’t use any other Meta products, but for a variety of reasons Instagram’s still there.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
I’ve been doing a little blog post series on travel that’s mainly focused on the technology side of things. There was France, Japan, Switzerland, and now Hong Kong.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Yesterday marked the “public release” of Sora, OpenAI’s video generator. Of course they had to almost immediately shutdown signups so was it released? We’ll need a team of philosophers to weigh in on that.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
OK?I apologize if the person running Apple Music Replay cares deeply about it, and is under resourced by someone above them who doesn’t care. Somewhere in that organization is a person, or group of people, who sees having Apple Music Replay as a feature to check off on a list, and they feel like they checked the box again for 2024. That’s mostly evident from the lack of progress from last year, which lacked progress from the year before, which was a sluggish and inadequate response to Spo...| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
My post for Six Colors yesterday is a video demo of Clean Up and other photo retouching tools for iOS. It’s not an embarrassing video, even though it isn’t exactly how it turned out.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
This isn’t always a “tech” blog, but it’s not always a personal blog. I might as well put a marker here for the cornucopia of negative emotions I’ve been living with since Tuesday night. I keep trying not to think about the many ways in which this presidency will definitely, absolutely be bad, but I’d be lying if I said those intrusive thoughts weren’t constantly percolating up.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Good evening, and welcome to the pre-taped iOS call-in show where we tape all our shows about iOS releases, one release in advance. I’m your host, Ken Doral, and let’s try it again.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
There are many features of Apple’s Health app that I don’t have a reason to use, or to use frequently. One of the ones I had never tried before was Medications. However, I’ve basically been sick for nearly all the month of October, and have had a few different medications I needed to take on a consistent schedule for the first time over the course of this month.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
For a long time there was the Siri face, and now there’s this Smart Stack face which is basically the same thing. However, now it claims my Watch in ways that are frankly irritating. When I look at my Watch I want to see my Watch face. I use Modular, and it’s laid out with complications in specific places so I can glance at my Watch and see what I want without having to interact with it. Things like the weather. The Smart Stack can’t show me the Weather and my Lyft ride at the same time...| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Something I’ve been thinking about since Apple released Submerged for the Apple Vision Pro the other week is that almost no one is going to get to experience Submerged. I would like to see it, certainly, but I’m not buying a $3500 headset to see a single short film. Certainly, the pace at which Apple releases Vision Pro specific experiences doesn’t warrant such a thing.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Look, the titles can’t all be fun ones, sometimes I need to just cut to the chase. For a more complete overview of the iPhone 16, check out Jason Snell at Six Colors, or Nilay Patel and Vjern Pavic talking about the camera-related changes for The Verge. That level of detail is beyond the scope of this essay from some guy with a blog.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
The past two weeks have provided a steady stream of news all related to Apple’s Services revenue. The company announced their earnings, where Services takes up an even bigger slice of the earnings pie chart. The Google anti-trust trial will probably impact the biggest component of Apple’s services revenue because it’s coming from anti-competitive behavior (on Google’s part). Apple revised it’s European Union super-special rules again, with an amazing section on how they’re entitle...| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Years ago, I bought my first Beats product, Beats X bluetooth headphones. They’re the kind that are earbuds linked together with a piece of linguine and two pill-shaped plastic bits that sit around your collarbone when you’re wearing them. Those house the battery, lightning charging port, microphone, and play/pause button. They also had magnets in the ends of the earbuds so they’d snap together when you took them off making a closed loop instead of just a floppy noodle.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Dan Moren, and Jason Snell both traveled to the UK for the Relay anniversary event, and each of them spent some time beforehand in Scotland.| Unauthoritative Pronouncements
We’ve had this concept of files based on physical documents since before there was a GUI. The innovation of the desktop GUI environment is that you could have those files represented in a way that could be manipulated more like those physical documents. That icon of a piece of paper could be dragged and dropped into a folder that represented a way to collect and organize files like their physical counterparts. They weren’t the same, but the visual metaphor made sense to people that still ...| joe-steel.com
I acknowledge this is a pretty strange complaint when you think about all the other ways that Shortcuts could be improved (so, so many) but allow me to walk you through my thinking:| joe-steel.com
I acknowledge this is a pretty strange complaint when you think about all the other ways that Shortcuts could be improved (so, so many) but allow me to walk you through my thinking:| joe-steel.com
Netflix deeply regrets accidentally making Netflix a better product for its customers. It temporarily pushed out a change that let people see Netflix shows in the Apple TV app, a change people have been asking for since the debut of the Apple TV app in 2016 with its Up Next queue and content aggregation features. Fortunately, Netflix swiftly corrected the error before too many of its users could experience anything approaching joy, or satisfaction with Netflix. Customers should definitely dro...| joe-steel.com