I spend a lot of time thinking about what Apple should be doing differently. I wrote Apple Turnover because so many of my notions kept running into a dead end: I could no longer bring myself to believe Apple would do these things without a change in leadership.| Hypercritical
Two months ago, I launchedHyperspace, a Mac app for reclaiming disk space without removing files. The feature set of version 1.0 was intentionally very conservative. As I wrote in my launch post, Hyperspace modifies files that it did not create and does not own. This is an inherently risky proposition.| Hypercritical
Love, Death & Robots is an animated anthology series on Netflix. Each episode is a standalone story, though there is the barest of cross-season continuity in the form of one story featuring characters from a past season.| Hypercritical
My interest in file systems started when I discovered how type and creator codes1 and resource forks contributed to the fantastic user interface on my original Macintosh in 1984. In the late 1990s, when it looked like Apple might buy Be Inc. to solve its operating system problems, the Be File System was the part I was most excited about. When Apple bought NeXT instead and (eventually) created Mac OS X, I was extremelyenthusiastic about the possibility of ZFS becoming the new file system for t...| Hypercritical
The recent Beeper controversy briefly brought the “blue bubbles vs. green bubbles” topic back into the mainstream. Here’s a brief review for those of you who are (blessedly) unaware of this issue. Messages sent using the iMessage service appear in blue text bubbles within the Messages app. Messages sent using something other than the iMessage service (e.g., SMS, or (soon) RCS) appear in green text bubbles.| Hypercritical
The graphical user interface on the original Macintosh was a revelation to me when I first used it at the tender age of 8 years old. Part of the magic was thanks to its use of "direct manipulation." This term was coined in the 1980s to describe the ability to control a computer without using the keyboard to explain what you wanted it to do. Instead of typing a command to move a file from one place to another, the user could just grab it and drag it to a new location.| Hypercritical
While the utility of Generative AI is very clear at this point, the moral, ethical, and legal questions surrounding it are decidedly less so. I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not sure how the many current and future legal battles related to this topic will shake out. Right now, I’m still trying to understand the issue well enough to form a coherent opinion of how things should be. Writing this post is part of my process.| Hypercritical
I first read about the “blue ocean” strategy in a story (probably in Edge magazine) about the Nintendo Wii. While itscompetitors were fighting for supremacy in the game-console market by producing ever-more-powerful hardware capable of high-definition visuals, Nintendo chose not to join this fight. The pursuit of graphics power was a “red ocean” that was already teeming with sharks, fighting over the available fish and filling the water with blood.| Hypercritical
“The Plumber Problem” is a phrase I coined to describe the experience of watching a movie that touches on some subject area that you know way more about than the average person, and then some inaccuracy in what’s depicted distracts you and takes you out of the movie. (This can occur in any work of fiction, of course: movies, TV, books, etc.)| Hypercritical
It is said that every fiveyears, Hypercritical t-shirts return. The last sale was in 2018, so the time has come! This sale ends on Saturday, August 12th, so if you want a shirt, don’t delay. Last time, I hinted that it would be five years before the shirts were sold again, and some people didn’t believe me. But it was true then, and it’s true now. If you want a shirt, buy it now, or resign yourself to waiting until 2028!| Hypercritical
I’m part of the MTV generation. If you can immediately picture the videos for Hey Mickey, The Safety Dance, You Might Think, Money For Nothing, and Take On Me, you might be too. I was transfixed from day one, not just by the bands and the music, but by the format. Some videos told a story (of varying levels of coherence). Others were more ofa vibe, as the kids say these days. But always, the combination of sound and images, intertwined, synchronizing and diverging, pressed all my buttons.| Hypercritical
SwitchGlass 2.0, the first major update to my customizable app switcher for macOS, is now available on the Mac App Store. It’s a free update for existing SwitchGlass users.| Hypercritical
In the Spring of 2019, I was looking for a way to promote one of our time-limited merchandise sales for Accidental Tech Podcast.| Hypercritical
When I graduated college in 1997, I started a full-time job with the same dot-com startup that I had been working for part time during my senior year. In the twenty-five years that have followed, I’ve had a series of jobs in the same field ("full-stack web development," in today’s parlance).| Hypercritical
My unsolicited streaming app spec has garnered a lot of feedback. I’m sure streaming app developers already gather feedback from their users, and I’m also sure that the tone of my post has skewed the nature of the feedback I received. Nevertheless, for posterity, here’s how people are feeling about the streaming video apps they use.| Hypercritical
I subscribe to a lot of streaming video services, and that means I use a lot of streaming video apps. Most of them fall short of my expectations. Here, then, is a simple specification for a streaming video app. Follow it, and your app will be well on its way to not sucking.| Hypercritical
Thanks to either my opinionated nature or the fact that I have voiced my opinions on various podcasts for years, people often ask me to recommend products. Which Mac should I buy? What’s the best microwave oven? What kind of car should I get for a family of four?| Hypercritical
Ever since the storybroke, I’ve had one overriding thought about the Hey.com App Store rejection controversy. It’s a point I’ve already tried to make on a recent episode of ATP and on Twitter. Before WWDC arrives with its own wave of Apple-related news, I’d like to take one more run at it. Here goes.| Hypercritical
When DragThing was finally left behind—after 24 years of service—by macOS Catalina’s lack of support for 32-bit apps, I knew I’d miss many of its features. I missed its (optional) modification of the Mac’s window-layering policy so much that I made my first Mac app, Front and Center, to replace it. My second Mac app, SwitchGlass, also replaces a feature I miss from DragThing. (Thank you, James Thomson, for unwittingly kickstarting my Mac development efforts.)| Hypercritical
For a few years now, I’ve tracked the TV shows I’m watching using the iOS app Couchy, which integrates with the Trakt.tv service. Sadly, Couchy ceased development last year. I’ve kept using it since then, but in the past few weeks it’s finally started to fail.| Hypercritical
By the time Mac OS X was first released in 2001, I had been using what would eventually be known as “classic” Mac OS for seventeen years. These were seventeen formative years for me, from the ages of 9 to 26. The user interface of classic Mac OS was as ingrained in me as Star Wars or any other cultural institution.| Hypercritical
The upcoming sequel to the 1986 classic Top Gun has reminded me of a favorite memory from my youth. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time looking over the TV listings. Each daily newspaper had the TV listings for that day, but there was also a weekly TV guide that came with the Sunday paper. This was the one I’d pore over while eating breakfast each morning.| Hypercritical
According to any reasonable set of quantifiable measures, Jony Ive departs Apple as the greatest product designer who has ever lived. His hit products sold in vast numbers and were fundamentally transformative to both the company he worked for and the world at large. We all know their names: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad. Together, these products helped set the direction for the most consequential industry of the last century.| Hypercritical
These are some of my favorite video games. They also happen to be truly great games, though they vary widely in terms of the required time commitment and gaming experience.| Hypercritical
Five years ago, I sold t-shirts commemorating my first podcast, Hypercritical, which ran for 100 episodes in 2011–2012. The shirts also celebrated this website, which is updated nearly once per year. Thanks to everyone who purchased a shirt all those years ago.| Hypercritical
Fumito Ueda’s first game, Ico, was a beautiful, moody masterpiece. Its spare depiction of a boy attempting to escape from a vast castle with the help of a mysterious companion discarded the gameplay and interface conventions of its day, delivering an almost meditative sense of immersion. Ueda’s next game, Shadow of the Colossus, added the bare minimum of status indicators to the screen to support its complex boss battles that required the player to clamber up and onto a succession of gian...| Hypercritical
These are the canonical bagel flavors:| Hypercritical
Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote my first review of Mac OS X for a nascent “PC enthusiast’s" website called Ars Technica. Last fall, I wrote my last. Though Apple will presumably announce the next major version of OS X at WWDC this coming June, I won’t be reviewing it for Ars Technica or any other publication, including the website you’re reading now.| Hypercritical
I reviewed OS X 10.10 Yosemite for Ars Technica. This is the eleventh major release of OS X, and I've reviewed them all. There are several ways to read my review.| Hypercritical
Most of the nonfiction books I read these days fall into two broad categories: books about people I admire and books about the creation of things I admire. Good books about the latter often turn into the former by the end.| Hypercritical
Thirty years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced Macintosh. It was the single most important product announcement of my life. When that upright beige box arrived in my home, it instilled in me an incredible sense of urgency. I greedily consumed every scrap of information about this amazing new machine, from books, magazines, audio cassettes, and any adult whose ear I could bend. This was the future—my future, if I could help it.| Hypercritical
Ask a room of computer geeks how they came to deserve this appellation and you’ll likely hear many similar stories. “I got my first computer when I was very young. By the time I was a teenager, I’d logged thousands of hours at the keyboard doing everything imaginable with my computer: gaming, programming, networking, upgrades, the works.”| Hypercritical
Ship OS X 10.9 and iOS 7.Done and done, with only a few minorbumps in the road. A-| Hypercritical
On two recentepisodes of Accidental Tech Podcast, I talked about calibrating my new TV. The reactions of my co-hosts and the feedback from listeners has made it clear that the entire concept of calibrating a home TV is foreign to most people.| Hypercritical
I reviewed OS X 10.9 Mavericks for Ars Technica. I’ve been reviewing OS X since 1999, and this is the tenth major release. There are several ways to read my review.| Hypercritical
When Apple was on the ropes sixteen years ago, there was no shortage of advice about what the company should do to save itself, much of it fueled by a deep love for Apple’s products. It takes a diehard Apple fanatic to create something like the iconic “Pray” cover from the June 1997 issue of Wired magazine—coupled with the faith that there are enough like-minded readers to appreciate the sentiment. A decade later, those of us who spent the 1990s worrying about Apple felt relieved, a...| Hypercritical
Hypercritical t-shirts 2.0, clockwise from the top-left: Silver, Gold, Black, and Navy.| Hypercritical
Now that the Xbox One has been revealed, joining the already-released Wii U and the previously announcedPlayStation 4, we can finally get a sense of what the next generation of game consoles will look like.| Hypercritical
Hypercritical t-shirts, clockwise from the top-left: Silver, Gold, Black, and Navy.| Hypercritical
The prevailing wisdom about software design at Apple is that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of simulated real-world materials, slavish imitation of physical devices, and other skeuomorphic design elements, producing a recent crop of applications that suffer from an uncomfortable tension between the visual design of the software and its usability and features. After the executive reshuffle six months ago, we Apple fans have been hoping that Jony Ive, now in charge of Human In...| Hypercritical
In a recent podcast, I rejected the idea of a lottery system for selling WWDC tickets as too random. I wanted to preserve at least some aspect of the process that rewarded the most enthusiastic Apple fans: the people who are willing to be roused from bed at 2 a.m. and rush to their computers to buy tickets; the crazy ones; the people who just want it more.| Hypercritical
When Apple decided to make its own web browser back in 2001, it chose KHTML/KJS from the KDE project as the basis of its rendering engine. Apple didn’t merely “adopt” this technology; it took the source code and ran with it, hiring a bunch of smart, experienced developers and giving them the time and resources they needed to massively improve KHTML/KJS over the course of several years. Thus, WebKit was born.| Hypercritical
Technology can be a surprisingly ideological topic. In politics, the spectrum of belief is right on the surface: conservative/liberal, right/left. In tech, that same spectrum exists, but it’s rarely discussed. What’s more, unlike political beliefs, I’m not sure most people are even aware of their own core ideas about technology.| Hypercritical
The mobile market, everyone agrees, is the technology industry’s future. What’s not so clear is which company is best positioned to thrive in that future.| Hypercritical
The xMac has been back in the news lately—the idea, if not necessarily the name. Whether it’s called a “Mac minitower" or a “Mac Pro mini,” we long-suffering Mac Pro fans are all looking forward to the “really great” thing Tim Cook told us to expect this year.| Hypercritical
I must confess, I was neither surprised nor disturbed by last month’s announcement that the Opera web browser was switching to the WebKit rendering engine. But perhaps I’m in the minority among geeks on this topic.| Hypercritical
I’ve been watching House of Cards, the new TV series available exclusively on Netflix, which reportedly outbid HBO, Showtime, and others for the rights to the show. This is part of Netflix’s ongoing effort to “become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” That quote, from Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos, neatly draws the battle lines between the old and new worlds of TV.| Hypercritical
The iPhone 5 caughtsomeflak for being “too light.” Similarly, some consider the latest revision of the iMac to be “too thin.” You’ll find some incredulity in the articles that address this topic. It’s a little silly, right? After all, what’s the alternative? Thicker and heavier? Stagnation? But these complaints are not entirely unreasonable.| Hypercritical
I didn’t just lead Apple to a record quarterly profit of $13.1 billion on sales of $54.5 billion, so I don’t expect to be consulted. But were Tim to ask me, here’s what I would tell him Apple should do in 2013—in broad strokes, and in no particular order. (We’ve got people to work out the details—right, Tim?) This is not a fantasy wish list. These are things I think Apple can and should do this year. This list is not exhaustive.| Hypercritical
The highlight of Nintendo’s video presentation this week was the announcement of a Wii U remake of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a GameCube game originally released in the US a decade ago. As a dedicated Zelda fan, my reaction was predictably enthusiastic.| Hypercritical
Watching the CES coverage out of the corner of my Internet eye, I’m reminded of exactly how bad most hardware makers are at writing software. Mat Honan summed it up nicely last month: No One Uses Smart TV Internet Because It Sucks. Amen to that. But it’s not just TVs. Who really likes the “software” in their car, microwave, or blu-ray player?| Hypercritical
This article originally appeared in issue 2 of The Magazine on October 25, 2012.| Hypercritical
As I have for the past 13 years (yikes!), I wrote a review of the latest major release of the Mac operating system, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, for Ars Technica. There are several ways to read it.| Hypercritical
I like pasta. I’d like to help people make better pasta. It pains me to think about all the poorly prepared pasta being served and eaten in America. My advice will focus on plain old store-bought dried pasta. Nothing fancy. You’ve probably made some yourself.| Hypercritical
I started a weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin, named after this blog (which, in turn, was named after something I wrote for Ars Technica in 2009). I’ve been amazed by the popularity of the show and the quality of the listener feedback and participation. Special thanks to Jeremy Mack, creator of showbot.me, and Justin Michael, creator of 5by5illustrated.com.| Hypercritical
The following movies were released in the summer of 1982.| Hypercritical
Here’s my brief entry in the speculation derby surrounding the departure of Mark Papermaster from Apple. Assuming Papermaster is out at least partially due to the iPhone 4 antenna and not some completely unrelated matter, and assuming Apple really did know about the iPhone 4’s antenna problems even before Papermaster was hired, it may seem strange or even unfair that he’s ended up as the fall guy. I won’t comment on the fairness of the decision, but I can certainly imagine a scenari...| Hypercritical
Many years ago, I recall talking with some of my Mac-nerd friends about how strange it was, after Apple’s near-death experiences of the late 1990s, to be living in a world where it’s just assumed that any tech luminary will mostly likely use a Mac. A year or two later, Tim O’Reilly gave a name to this prognostication technique: watching the “alpha geeks.”| Hypercritical
2012 is an awful movie. I knew this when I added it to my Netflix queue, but I wanted to stay up to date on the latest in computer-generated apocalyptic destruction. I’m a fan of special effects in general and stories about the end of the world in particular.| Hypercritical
I’ve never considered Obama a very good speaker. It may be because he speaks slowly and pauses a lot, all of which drives my fast-talking-Italian-New-York-native self up a wall. Whatever the reason, my low opinion of his speaking ability meant that I was willing to believe that the Obama teleprompter gibes could very well be indicative of a real problem. Those jokes fed my fear that Obama lacked substance, that he was just a pretty voice able to dazzle people (though not me, apparently) ...| Hypercritical
There are three steps to using Hyperspace: Scan, Review, and Reclaim.| hypercritical.co
