Hey Siri, Call Google
WWDC ’26 biggest winners were Google, Liquid Glass haters, iPhone 11 owners, and foldable-iPhone speculation enjoyers.
Apple
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Make the most of any monitor with BetterDisplay
BetterDisplay fixes the monitor scaling and management problems that macOS leaves unsolved, especially on screens that fall short of 4K.
Why are webcams so cursed?
Reviewers say the camera on Apple’s new display is horrible. Not surprised, tbh.
Panic’s ‘Code Editor’, and the Lack of Pro Apps for iPad
Panic’s discontinued Code Editor exposes how iPad restrictions and App Store economics keep powerful hardware from getting professional software.
Thoughts on Apple’s “Spring Loaded” Event
If you were hoping for Apple to sell you a $350 keychain, I have good news!
Apple Watch Strikes Back
Thoughts on 2015’s most iconic product design, plus more on the Sept 2020 Apple Event
Earlier today I played with iPad Pro at the mall (super briefly because I had a bored toddler waiting for me)
Earlier today I played with iPad Pro at the mall (super briefly because I had a bored toddler waiting for me). These are my impressions:
Apple’s new keyboard and mouse, reviewed
A same-day review of Apple’s 2015 Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse 2.
Ben Thompson on Apple’s Privacy Stance
Ben Thompson makes a good point in today’s Stratechery Daily Update (paywalled) about Tim Cook’s privacy stance, and his comments about Google’s business model that I previously and half-jokingly described as “throwing shade”. Thompson…
Elliot Jay Stocks’ 1 month with the Apple Watch
Elliot begins thus: Yesterday afternoon, I realised that I wasn’t wearing my Apple Watch. In fact, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been wearing it for the entire day. It was back in my bedroom, still attached to its charger and very much…
Apple Watch, 12″ MacBook, and Force Touch Trackpads
On Wednesday I went to the SoHo Apple Store in NYC for an Apple Watch try-on appointment. I signed up two days in advance, but showed up fifteen minutes early to find the try-on area almost empty—I got to start looking at Watches right…
For a few dollars more
Apple Watch pricing, expressed in terms of upgrades relative to other models: Sport models only come with Sport Bands, and both the space gray and silver cost the same. The 42mm cases are always more expensive, but for us mere mortals,…
Notes from the OS X Yosemite beta
About a week ago, I broke one of my own rules and installed an early developer preview of OS X Yosemite on my regular, day-to-day, work-issued Mac laptop. I had previously promised myself I’d at least wait until the public beta, on the…
“Why Nobody Can Copy Apple”
From Charlie Kindel: I assert there’s something else that makes Apple is unique amongst its (asymmetric) competitors (e.g. Google, MS, Samsung): It only focuses on one customer: The Consumer. In my experience, the behaviors and culture of…
Marco Arment reviews the Retina MacBook Pro
He calls it the best computer he's ever used. And he's a hardcore Mac Pro devotee, one of those guys who wants a 12-core monstrosity at home and the tiniest possible Air on the go. Last week work surprised me with an upgrade to a…
TextMate is now open-source
OMFG. This isn't just an interesting move, it was probably the only way the TextMate 2 story could end, apart from the whole project—and TextMate's six-year legacy as the first great OS X-native editor—being abandoned and dying out.…
Google Chrome for iOS
Those are four words I never thought I'd use in the same sentence, unless that sentence went on to say "will never happen". Announced today at Google I/O, Chrome is — like nearly every other third-party browser for iOS — just a wrapper…
Apple Releases “Podcasts” App
Finally. Podcasts is a standalone podcast-listening app similar in concept to Instacast, only instead of 99 cents this one costs nothing. And being from Apple, it's officially the only podcatcher or music app on the App Store that can…
Shawn Blanc Reviews Reeder 3
I've been beta testing this new version for weeks, and pretty much everything Blanc writes is accurate. This is a major upgrade that makes reading RSS feeds on your iPhone a lot nicer. Available now on the App Store for $3; current users…
iPhoto & Aperture Now Use The Same Data Format
Sure sure, yesterday's Apple announcements — iOS 6, Mountain Lion, the new MacBook Pro with Retina display — were really cool and amazing and all that. But what really made me jump out of my chair with excitement was the news that…
Where to get Retina iPad wallpapers
UI designer Louie Mantia, whose "Andy's Room" background I use on literally all of my devices, has started upconverting his wallpapers to Retina format. Only a few of them have been done so far, including all of the ones in the slideshow…
Mislav Marohnic on Apple in China
Mislav Marohnic: Apple’s staff can design the magical gadgets you have in your hand. They can even program all the software, and run the services such as iCloud and Siri in the U.S. But they can’t produce the hardware fast enough and…
Daring Fireball on China and Mike Daisey
John Gruber: Daisey impugned the integrity of Apple, and the journalism of the New York Times and ABC News in order to work people up regarding problems that don’t exist. This only served to draw attention away from the labor, health, and…
“This American Life” Retracts Mike Daisey/Apple Episode
In short, Daisey made shit up. Not everything, but TAL aired the piece on the basic assumption that things in it were true that it turns out were not. This weekend's new episode of TAL is a full hour detailing the errors in the original…
Objective-C Literals, Part 1
Nice write-up from Mark Dalrymple on a new, very long overdue feature in Objective-C: literal syntax for creating numbers, arrays, and dictionaries. In current Objective-C, to create a NSNumber object you have to write (for example)…
iPhoto’s Mystery Meat Gestures
Great critique by Lukas Mathis of the many confusing, non-obvious buttons and gesture controls in iPhoto for iOS. I haven't used the app on an iPad yet, but I found it maddening to use on an iPhone. Not only is the UI as confusing as…
Byword for iOS
My favorite Markdown writing app for Mac, now available for iPhone/iPad for a introductory price of $2.99. There's iCloud syncing and Markdown preview, but its killer feature so far is its super-nice editing toolbar: you can change…
Two Experiments
I'm trying a couple of new things this week: Last week, after hearing John Gruber talk about his Das Keyboard on The Talk Show, I thought it might be (ironic) fun to get my old Happy Hacking Keyboard out of the closet and use it for a few…
Readability, Revisisted
Last Thursday the folks at Readability finally released their long-awaited iPhone/iPad app. Having switched back to Readability for a few days in order to give the app a fair trial, in general I think it's well executed, with high…
Siri Failures, Illustrated
As a software developer currently working on a search feature, I understand why Siri falls short. I acknowledge it's logical to expect that an electronic brain capable of understanding the semantic relationship between "broke a tooth" and…
Gaug.es for iPhone
A really nice, simple iPhone interface for the really nice, simple website analytics service from GitHub (who acquired it a couple of weeks ago along with its developers, Ordered List). I tried using their web interface to look at my…
No, Siri Isn’t Pro-Life
Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS: In a move reminiscent of how Greenpeace harangued Apple for the PR value, MoveOn.org even sent out email encouraging people to sign a petition asking Apple to modify how Siri works, claiming that Siri…
The Desktop Transition
Michael Lopp, explaining why the Exposé and Spaces features of Mac OS X never really caught on, and why Apple's completely re-imagined them in Lion: How would you react if, whenever you were wondering where something was on your desktop,…
“You Interact with the Content, Not the OS”
Joseph Cohen gets it: They reversed the direction of mouse scrolling! Crazy! But really, they needed to. With Lion, Apple is trying to change the user experience metaphor that has governed OS design since the 80s. It was a symbolic move,…
Focus on my favorite OS X Lion features
The just-released Mac OS X Lion has a lot of killer features, but so far, for me, the most killer is the ability to easily toggle any app that supports it into a distraction-free, full-screen mode. Apple's marketing page for the feature…
Richard Dreyfuss Reads an Apple EULA
Hilarious.
Marco Arment on Safari’s Reading List
In short, he's not (too) worried: If Reading List gets widely adopted and millions of people start saving pages for later reading, a portion of those people will be interested in upgrading to a dedicated, deluxe app and service to serve…
WWDC Predictions
There's something a little distasteful about writing an Apple predictions post. Practically, what I'm doing right now is giving one of the richest, best-known companies in the world some free advertising, and at the same time taking an…
Microsoft Buying Skype for Some Reason
David Chartier and some other folks are worried what this will mean for the Skype user experience on Apple platforms, but they may be overstating the problem somewhat. I mean, could Skype 5 for Mac really get any worse? The Office 2011…
Adobe Releases ‘Photoshop Touch’ Apps for iPad
Don't be fooled: Adobe hasn't released a standalone 'Photoshop for iPad' image/photo editing tool, but rather a suite of three add-ons that let you use your iPad as a control pad for Photoshop CS5 running on your desktop computer. Of the…
Introducing Vico
It's a brand-new (and very, very rough) Mac OS X text editor that wraps a slick GUI similar to the semi-abandoned Espresso around an editing engine with support for TextMate bundles and — this is the crazy part — Vim's editing modes and…
Pow! Zero-Config Rack Serving for Mac OS X
There is no non-nerdy way to talk about this, so non-developers feel free to sit this one out. Pow is a Ruby/Rack application server written in Node.js, with CoffeeScript, by Sam Stephenson. Through a series of small hacks, Pow lets you…
WWDC 2011 Announced, Sells Out, May Not Feature a New iPhone
The rumor mill is saying not to expect a new iPhone to be announced at WWDC in June, even though Apple has announced new iPhone models there three years in a row. It's also saying iOS 5 will be announced (not released) at the show, OS X…
New MacBook Pros Have a Freezing Problem
Ars Technica: Numerous owners of the latest 15" and 17" MacBook Pro models have taken to Apple's support forums to report an issue that causes their systems to freeze, with one user going so far as to successfully reproduce the problem on…
Readability’s iOS App Rejected
This is bullshit: under Apple's "new" policy rejecting apps that ask/require users to have a paid subscription, even if the iOS app is clearly a companion UI to a mostly non-mobile product, Readability's app has been rejected. This is the…
The Most Popular Phone in the World
Gizmodo profiles the Nokia 1100, the 7-year-old model used by more than 250,000,000 people in (mostly) developing nations. It's easy for us here in the first world to mock Nokia for being (so far) a non-participant in the smartphone…
Chicago’s “Significant” New Apple Store
Tomorrow Apple is opening its second Chicago retail store, more than seven years after the existing Michigan Ave. location. That's seven years of Chicago residents having only one place to line up on iPhone day, only one Genius Bar to get…
You Can’t Innovate Like Apple (Just Cause You Want To Make Money)
The article is full of great anecdotes and insights, mostly from a Michael Lopp/John Gruber panel at SXSW, but the factoid I've been repeating most this week is this one (bolds mine): Apple designers expect to design 10 different mockups…
Anil Dash on the new Gourmet Live
Speaking of Condé Nast properties, internet hipsters, and the iPad: Anil Dash describes the all-star team of nerds (Paul Ford! Garrett Murray! Andre Torrez! Liz Spiers! And don't forget: Anil Dash!) who brought Gourmet back as a…
‘The Secret to Apple’s Success is That There Are No Secrets.’
Jeremy Toeman and Greg Franzese: Apple is dominating its competition in customer service because the company cares about creating a quality customer experience at every brand touchpoint. And they do this for a reason – it’s called…
iOS 4.2 Beta Drops, and Apple Announces ‘AirPrint’
The first developer beta of iOS 4.2—the first 4.x release that's compatible with the iPad—is now available to registered iOS Developer Program members. The new software will include a new wireless printing technology called 'AirPrint';…
Gruber Breaks Down Today’s Big App Store Changes
The new developer agreement and App Store Guidelines are now live on Apple's developer portal. In short: third-party developer tools are fine (but using private APIs still isn't), interpreted code is fine (but downloading it at runtime…
Apple Shocks The World, Announces Big, Helpful Policy Changes for App Store
Apple has revised some of the most controversial provisions of the App Store developer agreement — including section 3.3.1, which banned apps created using third-party tools like Flash. Executing JavaScript, Python, or other code on the…
Eight Ways to Completely Misunderstand the Economics of App Stores
FastCompany "expert blogger" Aaron Shapiro says we're in an "app bubble", based on crackerjack analysis like this: Apps don't generate profit for developers. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said, the App Store has generated more than $1 billion…
Motorola Buys 280 North, Whose Technology is Basically Apple Stuff Ported to JavaScript, to Help “Foster the Android Ecosystem”
280 North's products are: 280 Slides, a web-based clone of Apple's Keynote slideshow app Atlas, a web-based clone of Apple's Interface Builder tool Objective-J, a port of Apple's Objective-C language to JavaScript And Cappuccino, a…
Neven Mrgan Compares iMac, HP & Dell’s Websites
Turns out almost everything you need to know about the differences between these companies can be found out by just looking at how differently they show off their flagship products on the Web. Apple's iMac site is clean, focused, and…
Meditations in a 4.0-mergency
All of my biggest iPhone OS feature wishes were, let's face it, pretty boring: Multiple Exchange accounts (or: wanting Google to ActiveSync my calendars without getting cockblocked by work meetings) Unified e-mail inbox And, no kidding,…
Ad hoc custom templates in Pages for iPad
This morning I've been writing a longer post about the fact that I've not really been using my iPad as much as I expected. There are a few explanations, some more valid than others. One of them is that I love using Pages to add a touch of…
Big Changes to AT&T’s 3G Data Plans
In a nutshell: AT&T is expanding the iPad 3G's fair, easy-to-understand data pricing to their entire network, tethering will cost $45/mo (including the required 2 GB data plan), and iPhones will finally finally finally be able to tether…
Before You Get Too Excited About A Verizon iPhone…
Matt Drance: Right now, every iPhone in the world uses GSM technology, regardless of the carrier. Adding Verizon [who use a different technology, CDMA] would mean building, testing, and forecasting new hardware for a CDMA model. It would…
Steve Jobs vs. Gawker Blogger
Gawker's Ryan Tate e-mailed Steve Jobs to ask him a simple, direct, incredibly inane question: if Bob Dylan were 20 today, how would he feel about Apple's iPad "revolution"? "Revolutions are about freedom," wrote Tate. Jobs, to his…
How Wired.com Found the iPhone Finder
Brian X. Chen tells the inside story of how they found Brian Hogan, and determined he was the guy who took Gray Powell's iPhone out of the Gourmet Haus Staudt.
Microsoft Cancels ‘Courier’ Tablet Project
Remember right before the iPad was announced, when Microsoft was all like, "whoa, dude, hold on there—what about our secret tablet project?" Yeah, that's been cancelled. (Though they say technically they never planned to ship it as a…
iPhone 4G “Finder” Has Been Found
The guy who originally found Gizmodo's infamous iPhone 4G prototype has spoken: Brian J. Hogan, a 21-year-old resident of Redwood City, California, says although he was paid by tech site Gizmodo, he believed the payment was for allowing…
Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Flash”
The boss speaks: Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever…
Apple Announces WWDC ’10 Dates: June 7–11
First thing I thought when I saw this: "huh, so for all that trouble Gizmodo only beat the iPhone 4G announcement by what, 7 weeks?" (It's expected Steve Jobs will announce the next iPhone at WWDC, as he's done the last two years in a…
No, Actually, It’s Not Like That At All
Last night I had the following brief Twitter exchange with a fellow about the whole Gizmodo-stolen iPhone affair: ddemaree_old: @esoneill @chartier Property != information. If the seller had sold them photos of the stolen iPhone, they…
Ten Weeks Later…
Yesterday was the iPad's launch day. It's a new beginning, and the consensus so far seems to be that the iPad really is a new kind of device, that the future of computing will look more like this magical multi-touch gadget than the clunky…
The Soloist
Zach Holman hypothesizes that the iPad's lack of multitasking as we know it — its single-window UI paradigm — isn't a bug, or just a feature, but the secret sauce that makes iPhone OS apps so tasty. You play differently when you're on…
Simple Elegance.
TechCrunch says the upcoming Foursquare app for Windows Phone 7 “destroys” its iPhone counterpart with its “simple elegance.” I have to admit, the WP7S version is a lot simpler. None of that pesky “information” to clutter the display,…
37signals Launches Highrise for iPhone
I've only used the app for 5 minutes, and it's obvious how much thought they put into the design. The feature set and presentation are exactly right; when I say they left room for improvement, I mean they did a great job and left me…
Steve Jobs Fires Up iPad For E-mail
Never let it be said Apple's CEO doesn't use his own products: for the second time recently an Apple customer reports having gotten a one-word e-mail answer to a question from Jobs himself. The latest question: will the iPhone OS get a…
No more computers.
Most people wouldn't even think of file management as a feature of traditional computers; files are just always there, like grass or rocks, part of the landscape. It's not just that filesystems are ubiquitous. From a technical standpoint,…
Apple Lets Out a Few More iPad Details
Not only can you now [pre-order][ippo] or [reserve][ipr] the iPad, Apple has updated their site with some fresh info about the device. The biggest news is about the iBooks app: yes, it will support DRM-free ePub books from any publisher,…
iPad Has a Ship Date: April 3
That's just the regular Wi-Fi model; Wi-Fi + 3G ones aren't out until "late April." Both versions will be available for pre-order (either for shipping, or for in-store pickup at an Apple Retail Store) starting next Friday, March 12. Note…
The iPad is smaller than you think.
Dave Pell: “I Can’t Read Anything Longer Than This Headline” The introduction of the iPad has re-energized an ongoing technology debate. Is it better to have one device that does a whole lot of things, or do certain activities require a…
Adobe’s CTO: Flash Player is Fine, Thank You, We’re Fixing It Anyway
So, they don't have any known crashing bugs, and until now haven't seen much need to actually write a Mac-optimized version of Flash Player. Except now they're rewriting Flash's graphics engine, going from a direct port of the Windows…
Zeldman: Flash, iPad, Standards
Jeffrey Zeldman: Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to…
DF: What if Flash Were an Open Standard?
Gruber, in discussing the current blogstorm over Apple's continued non-support for Adobe Flash in iPhone OS, touches on why Apple—who certainly have no problem with proprietary technology so long as it's theirs—are being such champs about…
OmniGroup: iPad or Bust
Omni CEO Ken Case: We’re really excited about Apple’s iPad, and we want to make all of our products available for it as soon as we can. Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product…
Jason Calacanis Says Apple Gave Him A Tablet
Calacanis says it has an OLED screen, a solar panel for recharging, an HDTV tuner and a DVR built-in. He also says there's a Farmville app for the Tablet, that Steve Jobs himself is going to demo it onstage today, and it's "insane." (Note…
Predictions for Wednesday’s Apple Event
When writing about things I'm passionate about, such as Apple products, I tend to be long-winded in a misguided attempt to demonstrate just how much I know about the subject at hand. This usually results in me spending days crafting a…
Show and Sell
Joel Johnson on the secret to Apple’s magic: Outwardly Apple’s showmanship is competent, workmanlike. Jobs-as-performer wears an understated uniform that does not distract from the act. His humor, when it exists, is subtle. The closest an…
Apple Sees New Money in Old Media
The WSJ: Apple has recently been in discussions with book, magazine and newspaper publishers about how they can work together. The company has talked with New York Times Co., Condé Nast Publications Inc. and HarperCollins Publishers and…