Posts in Ios (20 found)
Unsung Today

Max one weird thing

If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence: It’s interesting to me to think how we got here: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/3.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/3.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Long ago, the Player was the only free, consumer-facing part of QuickTime, so it needed special branding. You could purchase QuickTime Pro – you would even get aggressive ad banners for it inside Mac OS! – and its encoding and saving capabilities would then be sprinkled across the entire system. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/4.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/4.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> “New Movie Recording” originally offered recording from external video cameras (like iSight , another cute name). “New Screen Recording” was added later, for recording from internal screens. My guess is that technically, architecturally, or both, it was easier to treat external screens (like iPhone or Apple TV) as external video cameras since the UI and affordances matched them more closely. So that’s why screen recording from external devices ended up under “New Movie Recording.” As a UX historian, this is fun and fascinating! I love tracing back that kind of stuff and learning how certain strange things came to be. As a user… not so much. “If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead.” This feels thrice arbitrary, closer to a magical incantation than a computer command, requiring you to hold a bunch of counterintuitive things in your head, or look them up every time. “Wait, what was the strange name?“ “Yeah, it’s called a player, but that’s ok.” “Hmm, I remember something about not choosing the obvious command.“ I have this internal rule that a flow or a space in the UI should have at most one weird thing. I can’t prove it to you mathematically, and I would be the first to find exceptions to my own rule. But one weird thing makes me nervous, and two or more weird things in concert raise the hair at the back of my neck. Two weird things is when the “launch blocking” bulb lights up in my head. Work needs to happen to bring the weirdness count back to 1 or 0. This is one example of what I dragged Apple earlier for : it’s not just speed that matters. It’s noticing this kind of complexity, places where an easy way was chosen, design debt accumulated, and things got simply too weird. Apple allowed three weird things to accumulate here. (By the way, delightful weird doesn’t count! But it’s hard for me to imagine anyone defending these three things above as delightful or positive in any way.) “If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead.” “If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the Recorder app and click on New Screen Recording.” It’s not trivial to get to this or something similar, but it’s also not really hard . You can get rid of weird things, but you need to want it. #apple #change management #complexity What on earth is “QuickTime”? I am recording with a player ? Why can’t I choose the option that describes exactly what I want to do? QuickTime is a 1990s brand, an offshoot of QuickDraw. Instead of QuickAnimate or QuickPlay, Apple called it QuickTime because it felt cute: time is what separates static images from video. The branding was much more prominent in the 1990s and 2000s, but mostly fell out of use – searching for “quicktime” in system settings today, for example, yields zero results. Long ago, the Player was the only free, consumer-facing part of QuickTime, so it needed special branding. You could purchase QuickTime Pro – you would even get aggressive ad banners for it inside Mac OS! – and its encoding and saving capabilities would then be sprinkled across the entire system. “New Movie Recording” originally offered recording from external video cameras (like iSight , another cute name). “New Screen Recording” was added later, for recording from internal screens. My guess is that technically, architecturally, or both, it was easier to treat external screens (like iPhone or Apple TV) as external video cameras since the UI and affordances matched them more closely. So that’s why screen recording from external devices ended up under “New Movie Recording.”

ios iOS tutorial Tutorial
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Unsung 1 weeks ago

An accident inside an accident

I have never been particularly fond of “shake to undo” on the iPhone. It’s not a pleasant gesture to perform, I feel like typically I don’t have strong enough of a grip on my iPhone to invoke it without fear, and the gesture often undertriggers, requiring an even harder and more cumbersome shake, etc. etc. (One thing I never want to undo is my screen’s pristine surface by having it meet the sidewalk.) I am aware that many years ago, iOS introduced an alternative: a three-finger swipe. But I feel like Apple flubbed that, also – three fingers are hard to plop onto a small screen, and while regular going back navigation means swiping from left to right, undo is inexplicably a three-finger right-to-left swipe. I mean, okay, it’s explicable – it’s the movement of the cursor before and after the typing is undone. But to my brain that feels less strong than the other association, and undo is not always about typing. I also see many people not knowing about this alternative and I must not be the only person struggling, since I see more and more apps throw in the towel and put undo and redo as on-screen actions: = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-accident-inside-an-accident/1-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-accident-inside-an-accident/2-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-accident-inside-an-accident/3-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Curiously, I even spotted Gmail on desktop doing that recently: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-accident-inside-an-accident/4.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-accident-inside-an-accident/4.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> It’s all a welcome improvement under the circumstances, but those are literally all over the place – imagine if on a laptop, each app had a different key shortcut for undo. (We’ve had that, in the 1980s. The 1980s Nostalgia Industrial Complex doesn’t want you to know about stuff like that.) Anyway, some time ago I promised more onboarding content , and here’s a little thing that happened to me recently. The inciting incident is that I accidentally shook my iPad, and then I saw this: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-accident-inside-an-accident/5.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-accident-inside-an-accident/5.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Wait, does it mean there is yet another, third undo shortcut? I swiped through the carousel to see these: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-accident-inside-an-accident/6.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-accident-inside-an-accident/6.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-accident-inside-an-accident/7.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-accident-inside-an-accident/7.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> None of these feel particularly pleasant to use – although they are nicer on the iPad than on the iPhone – but I started playing with them, and I discovered a fourth entry point. Just a single three-finger tap shows a new-to-me onscreen editing menu, sort of the equivalent of the Edit menu on the desktop: This works on the iPhone and the iPad, and since then that’s the one thing I did remember and I find using. So, to summarize: Yeah, even this still doesn’t feel great. But it’s there in a (no pun intended) pinch. So, is this a success story for onboarding? I think not quite. It all started with an accidental iPad shake, after all, and the gesture I ended up using I also discovered accidentally. But to be fair, I also did learn something, and I think there are some bones of the right solution in here somewhere. Onboarding and in-product education generally feel so bad that even this rickety encounter can be counted as a small victory. #apple #onboarding #touch #undo shake to undo – unpleasant double tap with three fingers to undo – unpleasant a three-finger swipe to undo – unpleasant, confusing direction single tap with three fingers to show a menu, then tap to undo – less unpleasant, but stuck with me

design Design ios iOS
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Alex White's Blog 1 weeks ago

Week 2 of daily driving the iPad

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my new iPad , it’s pretty much replaced my personal laptop in my day-to-day. Surprisingly it’s also replaced my need for a desktop computer. Through the use of my USB-C dock and Apple wireless keyboard/trackpad, this little iPad works perfectly as a desktop machine. It drives my 32” Ultrawide perfectly, and the windowed multi-tasking is excellent. It can even use my webcam! The only downside I’ve really run into is my monitor is pretty old, so the refresh rate is much lower than the iPad making my mouse feel laggy when moving between the two.

hardware Hardware ios iOS
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Unsung 2 weeks ago

“Icons that are iconic”

Apple might have undone the macOS Tahoe menu icons decision , but this wasn’t the only contentious iconography issue in their ecosystem. On his blog, Jim Nielsen writes how Apple filed away so much expression by forcing rigid icon bureaucracy in macOS. Nielsen focuses mostly on distinctiveness; previously, you could make the icon unique by its general shape or the shape of its contents, but one of these two levers has now been taken away: This over-emphasis on “systems” design seems endemic to modern software. Systems prescribe rules because they are the easiest attributes to document, enforce, and automate — “All icons must use this shape, this lighting, this stroke.” Excellence, by contrast, is harder to systematize. It requires judgment, taste, care, experience, and a sensitivity to context — all in service of meaning and purpose, not superficial similarity. However, one also can’t help but notice how ugly and amateurish the Creator Studio icons are, so it all feels absolutely like a net negative – the new system took something away and the proposed replacement feels low quality: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Elsewhere, on Rogue Amoeba’s blog , Paul Kafasis straight up asks Apple to undo the 2025 decision to contain macOS icons inside squircles: Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive. But there’s no technical reason for it. Apple could, and should, once again allow icons to take on a wide variety of shapes. Both these prompted me to think a bit of Apple’s app iconography as a system. Let’s start with iOS: = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/2-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Recently, a new option has been added to remove names of apps, which is another way to disambiguate them. = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/3-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/4-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Also recently, Apple’s generally unpleasant-looking theming options (color tinting and glassification) reduced color coding as a way to recognize a particular icon. = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/5-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/6-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> At the same time, iOS is still highly spatial . Most apps have a specific physical place on a specific page of the Springboard, or inside a specific folder. I believe that this helps a lot even if shape coding, color coding, and name disambiguation are failing or turned off to begin with. Now, for MacOS: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/7.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/7.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/8.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/8.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> However, more recently, the iOS squircle shape has been first strongly suggested ( in 2020 ) and then rigidly enforced (in 2025) for macOS as well. But then, the usage of app icons in macOS is different than in iOS. First of all, macOS isn’t nearly as spatial as it used to be, and I would say not as spatial as iOS. Even Dock is more malleable compared to the memory palace rigidity of the Springboard, and its overflow section with suggestions and hand-off is very fluid. ⌘Tab is completely non-spatial and just like the Dock doesn’t upfront identify apps by their names. App icons also appear in more fluid contexts like Spotlight, Finder, and the right side of the menubar (I know iOS has some of those as well, but I would imagine they’re getting much less use overall). This all increases the pressure on icons to be easily distinguishable. At the same time, there are fewer issues with custom backgrounds on macOS. Most icon surfaces have opaque backgrounds and while you can keep your apps on the desktop or put backgrounds in Finder windows, I don’t think that’s very common. I’m probably missing some other aspects, but this would be my summary of where we’re at: = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/9-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/10-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> People’s trust in Apple’s skillset has deteriorated after the unveiling of horrendous icon redesigns in 2025’s Tahoe , and more recently in the abovementioned Creator Studio (the 2026 updates are nice, but very minor ). This is in some contrast with other controversial visually-motivated changes appearing at the same time. Say what you want about Liquid Glass, but there are moments it looks absolutely gorgeous (see the video below for perhaps my favourite Liquid Glass surface). Forced menu icons felt similar: embarrassingly naïve as a system, but with icons themselves executed well (which you can still appreciate when perusing SF Symbols ). But the app icon changes seem to have been assigned to the team that delivered on neither good visual craft, nor good systems thinking. I think it’s fair to look at Creator Studio specifically, and fear Apple is following in Microsoft’s and especially Adobe’s unforgivable footsteps in prioritizing abstract corporate identity goals over both functional and visual aspects of app iconography. Adobe’s product icons used to be beautiful and distinct before they got all shoved into the same “uppercase + lowercase letter” framework that became a canonical example of a system that took something away from the user but didn’t really give anything in return: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/13.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/13.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> I also feel this feeds right into another fear of Apple’s actions steamrolling over particularly indie app developers where being able to express one’s identity via the app icon feels much more important than it would be for a huge company. I don’t see Apple abandoning their stance on the rigid, distinctive app icon squircle shape. It’s possible that iOS apps will start appearing on touchscreen Macs outside of screen mirroring. Even without that, it just simplifies things for them, even if the jobs for macOS app icons are not the same as those for iOS app icons. At the same time, I could see Apple allowing the app icons to stick out of the basic squircle shape, like some macOS apps did in between 2020 and 2025; I believe it would even be possible to detect programmatically if the basic squircle shape is still there in the background. This would improve shape coding, and give icon designers some clearly much-desired flexibility. The icons below still register as squircles to me – why not allow this as an option? (For both macOS and iOS.) = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/14.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/14.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/15.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/15.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/16.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/icons-that-are-iconic/16.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> I wish Apple standardized app icon changing UI on iOS. Right now, each app offers their own interface in a different place – you could see that above – and rarely links to that place from the Springboard’s long-press menu. But imagine if you could nicely change app icons in situ in the same flow when you’re customizing the Springboard itself! (And then, the same for Dock and macOS.) I think it would also be a nice gesture to allow to rename iOS Springboard apps to whatever you want the same way you can rename folders, to give some users an opportunity to disambiguate by that if everything else fails. #apple #craft #iconography I believe the rigid squircle shape of app icons starting with the first iPhone was to make them look like a grid of buttons, and also to establish apps as a new primitive, particularly with the subsequent arrival of the App Store. (Similarly how over time “a face in a circle” became recognizable as a “personal avatar,” a user proxy primitive.) Soon, the rigid shape also helped when custom Springboard wallpapers arrived in 2010 – it reduced the likelihood of apps blending with the background. Recently, a new option has been added to remove names of apps, which is another way to disambiguate them. Also recently, Apple’s generally unpleasant-looking theming options (color tinting and glassification) reduced color coding as a way to recognize a particular icon. The original Mac OS X followed in the footsteps of the classic Mac OS and allowed arbitrary shapes, allowing for more flexible shape coding , although with some guidance on angles and styling: However, more recently, the iOS squircle shape has been first strongly suggested ( in 2020 ) and then rigidly enforced (in 2025) for macOS as well. Apple has not done a good job shepherding their app iconography system. The system feels too rigid, and some of its ostensible benefits (dark mode, color tinting, glassification) have been executed poorly. You could imagine a better tinting system that doesn’t feel like a cheap CSS filter applied to the icon, or (my dream!) a way to tint individual app icons. I personally love when apps – here Raindrop, Bear, and Retro – give you a lot of icon options in various colors, so I can invest in color coding: People’s trust in Apple’s skillset has deteriorated after the unveiling of horrendous icon redesigns in 2025’s Tahoe , and more recently in the abovementioned Creator Studio (the 2026 updates are nice, but very minor ). This is in some contrast with other controversial visually-motivated changes appearing at the same time. Say what you want about Liquid Glass, but there are moments it looks absolutely gorgeous (see the video below for perhaps my favourite Liquid Glass surface). Forced menu icons felt similar: embarrassingly naïve as a system, but with icons themselves executed well (which you can still appreciate when perusing SF Symbols ). But the app icon changes seem to have been assigned to the team that delivered on neither good visual craft, nor good systems thinking. I think it’s fair to look at Creator Studio specifically, and fear Apple is following in Microsoft’s and especially Adobe’s unforgivable footsteps in prioritizing abstract corporate identity goals over both functional and visual aspects of app iconography. Adobe’s product icons used to be beautiful and distinct before they got all shoved into the same “uppercase + lowercase letter” framework that became a canonical example of a system that took something away from the user but didn’t really give anything in return: I also feel this feeds right into another fear of Apple’s actions steamrolling over particularly indie app developers where being able to express one’s identity via the app icon feels much more important than it would be for a huge company. I don’t see Apple abandoning their stance on the rigid, distinctive app icon squircle shape. It’s possible that iOS apps will start appearing on touchscreen Macs outside of screen mirroring. Even without that, it just simplifies things for them, even if the jobs for macOS app icons are not the same as those for iOS app icons. At the same time, I could see Apple allowing the app icons to stick out of the basic squircle shape, like some macOS apps did in between 2020 and 2025; I believe it would even be possible to detect programmatically if the basic squircle shape is still there in the background. This would improve shape coding, and give icon designers some clearly much-desired flexibility. The icons below still register as squircles to me – why not allow this as an option? (For both macOS and iOS.) I wish Apple standardized app icon changing UI on iOS. Right now, each app offers their own interface in a different place – you could see that above – and rarely links to that place from the Springboard’s long-press menu. But imagine if you could nicely change app icons in situ in the same flow when you’re customizing the Springboard itself! (And then, the same for Dock and macOS.) I think it would also be a nice gesture to allow to rename iOS Springboard apps to whatever you want the same way you can rename folders, to give some users an opportunity to disambiguate by that if everything else fails.

css CSS design Design ios iOS
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Alex White's Blog 2 weeks ago

New iPad

After my last post , I pulled the trigger and went with an iPad Pro 11” with Apple Pencil Pro and Magic Keyboard case. Thankfully I got it the night before the massive Apple price hikes (although it still cost way too much). I gotta say, I love this thing! Obviously it’s a huge upgrade, I jumped forward 6 years in tech from my last iPad. The form factor is much nicer as well, the 12.9” was simply too big. 11” is perfect for getting work done, sketching, gaming and using it as an e-reader. I’m planning to sell off my Kindle Oasis and Supernote Nomad, the new iPad has easily replaced both. In addition to the iPad, I super splurged and grabbed a new lens for my Sony camera. Both purchases are in preparation for our trip to China in August. My goal is to pack light, since we’ll be traveling with two kids. The iPad replaces the need for a computer + e-reader + game console (hey, it’s a long trip)! The camera lens is significantly smaller and less bulky than my other lenses, increasing the likelihood I’ll carry the camera and snap more photos. I’ve already tested out photo editing on the iPad with Pixelmator Pro and the RAW files from my Sony. The experience is excellent, especially with the Apple Pencil in the mix. The M5 processor rips through any task I throw at it (it’s funny my iPad is now significantly more powerful than my MacBook Pro). Outside of our trip, I expect my traditional computers (desktop + laptops) will see a lot less usage. At this stage in my life, the iPad does 90% of what I need. For example, my entire blog publishing flow is now possible on this tablet. I can connect my SD card, edit photos with Pixelmator Pro, write the post and upload a draft with iA Writer, then attach the photos and publish via the Micro Blog website (yes, I changed again in preparation for the trip). I’m excited to use this setup in the “field”. I’ll have to find a nice cafe in Baotou to write and edit photos from 😜.

ios iOS hardware Hardware
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Unsung 3 weeks ago

“If you can’t stand by a feature, you shouldn’t launch it.”

On the most recent episode of The Talk Show podcast , this monologue from Jason Snell made me nod my head (the passage starts at 1:35:47): [… Apple] decides to do a big feature. The circus comes to town, they build the feature, they launch it, they leave town, and that feature sits there. And the problem is, there’s bugs, things are broken, and in Year Two, you’re like, “You’re going to fix all the things that were broken in the thing you shipped last year, right?” And in the last decade, I would say, a lot of times what happens is they just don’t. And if you’re lucky, they’ll fix it Year Three or Year Four, […] give it a polish. The thing that troubles me most about Apple software quality in general is the feeling like they don’t have the people to own the thing that they launch. They build the thing that they launch, and then those people go off and do something else, and nobody is maintaining and improving the thing that’s there. And whether it’s Time Machine, things that are often really system critical but that are super quirky, then they will do a brush up and you’ll be like “yay,” but… there’s still this bug, and then it’s “good luck, wait three more years.” Or I think the one that we’re all thinking of this year is Screen Time, which they have a big revamp of. […] On one level, it’s great, but on another level, if you’ve talked to anybody who’s tried to use Screen Time, it’s broken. And so what they’re really doing here is trying to fix it, and we’ll see how they do. […] The new features with problems is not a crime. It happens. The crime is: they never fix the problems. And that’s the part that I would like to see Apple get better at: if you’re going to launch something, you got to maintain it. Sometimes I feel like Apple is willing to spend the money and time and effort to launch something, but then they’re not really willing to do anything other than walk away. And I think that’s irresponsible. If you can’t stand by that feature, you shouldn’t launch it. I think this is spot on, and said really well. Are you honest with yourself about resourcing and focus for right after the launch and then later on ? Have you really thought about worst case and best case scenarios vis-à-vis bug reports, latency, user feedback, and craft/​quality however you define it? Have you actually started to make room for those outcomes ahead of time? For me, an ongoing tension with Apple is Finder, so central to my (and I imagine many people’s?) use of a Mac, but rewritten at some point eons ago in a new framework that caused all sorts of problems, and then pretty much abandoned like a proverbial American city’s downtown. (I gave up listing stuff on this blog because it didn’t feel like fun, but I also see 100% of what Ilya Birman sees in his “Finder” section, many times every day.) It’s not a story unique to Apple – I’ve seen many a designer and engineer quitting their jobs when an empty promise of a “fast follow” never materialized – but you’d expect them to do better here. #apple #maintenance #podcast #process

ios iOS programming Programming business Business
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Unsung 4 weeks ago

Clicking, fast and slow

In iPhone’s accessibility settings you can choose the allowed speed of double- and triple-taps on its side button (why is it important? we talked about it once ), and the interface does something nice – after you make a choice, it shows the expected speed in a sort of a preview: To be honest with you, I was surprised that I liked it. This feels like it’d be a perfect example of cheapness , especially given the iPhone has this delightful animation that could be reused here: But, I don’t know. Somehow, this one feels like it’d be too complicated. Maybe cheap is okay if one cannot think of a better “bespoke” interface? Cheap here also has an added benefit of reusing existing patterns, which might feel nicer in the more utilitarian surroundings of settings. But my favorite thing that elevated this was that with each visual blink there is also an accompanying haptic buzz. I think this is really clever. A haptic buzz is much “closer” to your fingers than onscreen blinking, and can help you feel the speed rather than just see it. Unfortunately, the same clever preview is not present here in the otherwise very similar AirPods menu… = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/clicking-fast-and-slow/3-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> …and I also found myself wondering what would it take for it to make its way here as well: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/clicking-fast-and-slow/4.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/clicking-fast-and-slow/4.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> #apple #ios

mobile Mobile ios iOS design Design
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Unsung 1 months ago

“They had the simplest task in the world.”

This is a really nice set of transitions when pinching in and out in Photos in iOS 26. This is trickier than it seems, because it’s not just a linear zoom (like it would be in Maps or Sketch, for example). It’s a zoom and reflow – from 3 items to 1 item per column – which makes things a lot more complicated. Here are a few nice details about this transition: Nikita Prokopov on his blog published other examples of problematic transitions , and it seems most of them are struggle in the same way, as transitions that cannot simply be linear. The above transition in iOS shows it’s possible to do it well if you care. And it’s not just about smoothness or nice feelings. Prokopov: […] Desynchronization can lead to a lot of confusion. For example, in Photos, when switching between Crop and Adjust mode, picture snaps into place immediately but the crop border is animated. This creates a false feeling that something subtly changes when you switch between modes. And you know what? I don’t want my UI to give me false feelings. I want it to be a precise instrument, not an animated toy. The above iOS transition feels very precise to me. #apple #ios #motion design #nikita prokopov It reacts to your fingers rather than being a rigid transition with a fixed duration. It always prioritizes the photo you’re pinching in and out, assuming that’s where you look. It smoothly transitions the aspect ratio (from always square when the items are smaller, to native when items are bigger). It crossfades the other photos. Cross-fade is the “cheap” answer for transitions, but here it feels appropriate, as it happens in the periphery – actually trying to move the other items linearly between their respective positions would feel unpleasant and distracting. In contrast to the other transitions, these crossfades are not fully tied to fingers, meaning you cannot stop in the middle of a crossfade.

ios iOS mobile Mobile design Design
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Unsung 1 months ago

Not slow and not steady

Adam Engst at TidBits did the lord’s work of transforming the “sweating details” slide from WWDC26’s opening keynote … = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/not-slow-and-not-steady/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/not-slow-and-not-steady/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> …into a nice, human-readable list of 264 items . It’s an impressive list that garnered universally positive reactions, but I have one observation: It’s true that everything could be faster and a whole many things should. Speed is paramount to great user experience. Speed is also more than just speed; there are nonlinear aspects when latency or delays cross invisible thresholds that can drastically change app usage for the better. But in my experience, much more often the things that frustrate me about using Apple’s products are not issues of speed, but issues of reliability : It’s not just me. 15 out of 17 bugs listed on the Bugs Apple Loves site are about reliability. None seem to be directly about speed, although more on that in a second. Or, here’s a recent list from Ilya Birman – different issues, but a similar shape. I’m going to say it: Speed is an easier problem. Not easier in an engineering sense; I’ve seen an engineer try to carve ten milliseconds out a busy computer’s schedule, and in that moment, one must truly imagine Sisyphus happy. But it’s easier as a problem : it often comes with a lot of pre-built telemetry, plus a clear goal of “here’s Xms and X now needs to be smaller.” Reliability is much harder, more difficult to debug, reproduce, agree on metrics for, even find ownership of – just generally fuzzy around the edges, and less obviously thrilling as a challenge. It needs more champions and structures. I know a simple marketing slide is not meant to be an accurate representation of Apple’s efforts. I wasn’t at WWDC so perhaps the vibe in the room was different than what this slide represents. Yet, the slide exists and I’m allowed to judge it. (And yeah, I know in some cases speed and reliability are correlated. After all, if you have a timeout, making something finish faster and do so before the timeout will turn it from unreliable to reliable. But hey, I wasn’t the one choosing the words on the slide.) I just… I would be a lot more excited if the 3:1 ratio of fast-to-reliable on that slide went the other way. #apple #flow #performance “Fast” and variants thereof appear on this list 59 times. “Reliable” and similar words appear 22 times. I don’t need faster network connectivity in Finder, but I struggle with computers not appearing, a pizza cursor that occasionally just dies spinning, or randomly being thrown to the root of the networking volume. I don’t need AirDrop to be faster. I just want it to connect reliably every single time, give me consistent and understandable UI feedback, and stop forgetting I’m not just “everyone” when sending stuff to myself. I don’t need Messages to be faster. I need them to just, you know, not haphazardly stop syncing across computers on occasion. We just talked about undo being profoundly broken , and I have many more examples like that. (Often from apps like Finder and Settings that are not on the list at all.)

performance Performance ios iOS
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Unsung 1 months ago

“I’ve lost entire sentences of text to this incompetent implementation.”

John Gruber at Daring Fireball talks about a problem in SwiftUI-based macOS and iOS apps where undo is completely broken during text editing : Basic stuff that’s worked reliably for decades — some things that heretofore had worked forever — are dangerously broken. If you’re running MacOS 26 Tahoe, open Journal and make a new dummy entry. Type something like “The quick brown fox.” Then double-click on the word “brown” and delete it. Now invoke Undo. What you expect is for the word “brown” to reappear. What happens is ... the whole sentence disappears . Gone. Invoke Redo and you only get back to “The quick fox.” The word “brown” is just gone forever. It’s nowhere in the Undo stack. That’s just profoundly fucked up. I couldn’t believe it, but I reproduced it myself just now on my phone (my backup Tahoe-running Mac is in a closet not responding to pings, I am now assuming out of embarrassment): Gruber adds: Apple’s developer message used to be that it was not just easy to develop apps for their platforms, but that it was easy to develop good idiomatically native apps. You got the correct complex behavior — for things like Undo/​Redo — out of the box. That’s still true for AppKit and UIKit, but it’s never been true for SwiftUI, and SwiftUI is now seven years old . That’s too long for any excuses to hold water. I don’t want to automatically assume that this problem has existed for seven years (vs. being a more recent deterioration), and I don’t know exactly which native apps use SwiftUI, but either way, this reflects very poorly on Apple. Software engineering typically has some categories of bugs and failures that result in immediate action – a night shift, a war room, “sevs,” and so on. Those are, in my experience, things like: Depending on what you work on, this list will also likely include security problems, regulatory considerations, privacy-leaking bugs, and so on. In a more mature organization, these are all well documented, but even in early startups there is some shared understanding that some bugs are bigger than life and they take immense priority over pretty much anything else. At any company, a version of this list needs to exist for front-end and user-experience problems, and undo problems should be on top of that list. If you break undo, you drop what you’re doing to fix it . #apple #process #undo the app crashes, the site doesn’t load, there is data loss.

ios iOS programming Programming swift Swift
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Unsung 1 months ago

Face with symbols over mouth, apparently

A nice moment in the iOS emoji keyboard – after selecting an emoji from the grid, its name shows up for a second: I have small reservations here, as reusing a placeholder like this trips up my “ this is cheap ” alarm. But otherwise I like that this – just like keyboard shortcuts in menus or tooltips – ambiently teaches you the alternative representation of the emoji that you can use later to get to it faster. (Another way of looking at it: This is a tooltip in a place where tooltips cannot exist.) #search #touch #typography

ios iOS design Design
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Justin Duke 1 months ago

Back to Overcast

In what is certainly the least consequential update in this blog's history: I have boomeranged back from Apple Podcasts to Overcast. None of my gripes with Overcast have been fixed, or even assuaged. But paper cuts are less annoying than other forms of pain. If I really wanted to, I could sit down for thirty minutes and assemble a meaningful list of everything that bothers me about the first-party app — but instead I'll present only the two that are actually load-bearing. The first, and the trivial one: there is no easy way to search for episodes within a given podcast feed. I'm not talking about clever, fancy, transcription-based search — just searching by title. Apple Podcasts' search functionality has many oddities, but this one is bizarre, and it is crucial for me whenever I'm trying to dredge up an old episode. This probably reveals something idiosyncratic about my listening habits: there are very few podcasts I subscribe to — exactly one of them technical — that aren't evergreen. The second point is less about features and more about existential positioning. Compare the home screen for Apple Podcasts to the home screen for Overcast. One of these apps is designed with the primary goal of letting me listen to the podcasts to which I've subscribed. The other is designed with the primary goal of getting me to listen to a podcast to which I have not. I could make grand sweeping gestures about how this reflects various pricing models and success criteria — and maybe I'll do that in some future essay — but I actually don't care about the bigger picture. My point is narrower: Apple Podcasts pursues goals that result in a worse experience for me. And so I'm not back on Overcast out of any solidarity for a fellow independent developer, nor because of some vague, abstract sense of it being capital-B Better. I'm back on Overcast because I like it.

ios iOS
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Unsung 1 months ago

The surprising richness of GarageBand

Do you remember the video I once shared about making a song in Strudel ? I recently stumbled upon this 20-minute YouTube video by iSongs of someone recreating Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” in GarageBand on their iPhone: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-surprising-richness-of-garageband/yt1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-surprising-richness-of-garageband/yt1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Like the previous video, I believe this is so tight as it was previously rehearsed/​prepared, which makes for an interesting watch if you even just check out a fragment of the video. I can’t speak for the verisimilitude/​quality of the composition, but it was fascinating to witness because The. UI. Just. Kept. Coming. I had no idea Garage Band is so fully-featured on the iPhone, and that there is so much going on! Maybe my fascination is this: it’s amazing that “power users” come in various shapes and forms. Would I recommend using the iPhone to do this? Not really. Is it cool that this is possible, for people who might not have access to other platforms? Yeah. (The channel has a lot more different songs if this one is not to your liking.) #touch #youtube

ios iOS music Music entertainment Entertainment
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Unsung 1 months ago

“Accents are an opportunity, not a burden.”

The iOS 26 update introduced a bug in the Czech keyboard. Instead of the customary háček (ǍǎĚěǦǧǏǐǑǒǓǔY̌y̌) in the bottom row, another key was duplicated, removing access to the accent character (or, a diacritic ) very popular in that language. Here is the before and after of this situation: = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/1-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/2-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Ordinarily, this can be frustrating but not insurmountable; you can always copy/​paste, rely on autocorrect to help out, or even add some topical text replacements for common phrases. The problem is that this bug only appeared on the keyboard used for logging on, and at least a few people used that character in their password. There, none of these workarounds were available – and so those people were now completely locked out of their iPhones. The Register reported on this on April 12 , and a few days later suggested that Apple was working on a fix. I won’t keep you in suspense; I just verified that the fix landed with the recent May 11 update. This is, in an of itself, not a fascinating story, but with interesting things to talk about at its periphery. First of all, The Register never showed a single screenshot. This led to a lot of confusion and speculation in the comments. Turns out, screenshots are valuable not just with bug reporting, but also with bug reporting . Second, check out this Czech keyboard. Even within the limitations of the ancient QWERTY, there’s a lot of cool stuff happening here. Two new accented keys just appear on the top layer when you switch to Czech. Both have magical properties, too. They’re the modern “ dead keys ” that either stand alone, or get combined with the previous letter if that makes sense. This is the stuff typewriters, and even desktop keyboards, could only dream of. But, as always, more software means more bugs, including some with unforeseen consequences; a typewriter could never break this way. Thirdly, there is this interesting tension between us being led to believe “more interesting passwords are safer,” but then sometimes being penalized for actually making them interesting. A decade ago someone used emoji in their password without realizing they won’t be able to input it, and I’m sure there were other examples. But the most interesting, to me, part? It’s the diacritic itself. Under one of the posts, a commenter wrote: Stick with the 7-bit ASCII subset. You will never go wrong. 7-bit ASCII basically means “26 Western letters and nothing else.” I hate this. I know it’s objectively true – in the late 1980s I felt a sense of relief my name didn’t have any of Polish language’s nine diacritics, which would complicate my life. Even just yesterday in Germany, I spotted this: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/4.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/4.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/5.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/5.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Software still struggles beyond ASCII. But this is why we need to keep pushing. Diacritical characters are to be found everywhere in the world. They’re detailed, and varied, and filled with histories. Umlaut is not diaeresis . Kreska is not the acute. A háček is not a breve. They’re rarely optional decoration, and often not even decoration at all; learning about Turkish dotless i might completely upend your understanding of what’s an accent and what is not. If you don’t have a favourite diacritic , you are missing out. Even the names – grave! ogonek! horn! – are beautiful. (Háček is also known as caron and a wedge depending on context, and in other regions referred to with beautiful words kvačica and strešica.) If you’re interested, here is David J. Ross’s 22-minute talk about getting to love diacritics from the perspective of a type designer. It’s filled with craft and playfulness: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/yt1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/yt1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> My favourite accent is, obviously, ogonek. Just looking at Adam Twardoch’s guide on how it should be drawn fills my heart with joy: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/6.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/6.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> #bugs #david jonathan ross #localization #security #typography #youtube

mobile Mobile ios iOS
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Unsung 2 months ago

“They did the bare minimum and moved on.”

Since the early 2000s, Mac OS X had a few orientations of icons depending on whether they were applications, files, utilities and so on : = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/they-did-the-bare-minimum-and-moved-on/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/they-did-the-bare-minimum-and-moved-on/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> In 2020, macOS Big Sur unified those styles and made them more iOS-like: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/they-did-the-bare-minimum-and-moved-on/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/they-did-the-bare-minimum-and-moved-on/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> A few years later, Jim Nielsen revisited the icon “Big Sur-ification” , and showed examples of apps that did the transition really well, but also those where the transition felt… lazy, essentially shoving their previous icon into a roundrect. For those, Nielsen proposes some alternatives that are delightful to see: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/they-did-the-bare-minimum-and-moved-on/3.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/they-did-the-bare-minimum-and-moved-on/3.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> The Word/​Excel/PowerPoint/​Outlook explorations are particularly nicely done. #iconography

design Design ios iOS
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Unsung 2 months ago

“The system is so twisted that even Apple itself begs for these reviews from its own apps.”

A good post by John Gruber on Daring Fireball investigating why apps pester you with the annoying “enjoying this app?” windows and attendant semi-shady practices (choose 5 stars and you get sent to App Store, but choose anything less, and your review will get redirected to Mr. Dev Null ). The answer? They don’t really have a choice: “[Steven Troughton-Smith:] Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positive reviews, and thousands of positive reviews. […]” You have to play the game as the game stands, and Apple controls the game. And in the game as it stands, apps need 5-star reviews to gain traction in the App Store, perhaps especially so for apps in crowded categories. And for most apps, the only way to achieve that is through prompting. But the right thing to do, for the user experience in the app, is never to prompt for reviews. I think it’s worth knowing about stuff like this for another reason. Absent understanding or institutional memory, any exception gets normalized and ceases being an exception. If specifically iOS apps have to do this for reasons explained in the post, this is still not an excuse for web apps or websites to indiscriminately pester people with prompts like these , too.

mobile Mobile ios iOS
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Cassidy Williams 3 months ago

Deep Dish Swift 2026 recap

I gave the opening keynote at Deep Dish Swift 2026 today! It was so fun. The event is very iOS-oriented and nearly 300 people in the Chicago area, and it was cool meeting so many folks who I hadn’t met in person before. Before the event, I actually spoke on the podcast for the event, called Slices ! I love all of the pizza puns this event has so much. The vibe throughout the podcast and the conference was fun, indie, and just cool. My talk, speaking of pizza puns… started with a pizza pun, where I led with, “I thought this conference was about eating deep dish swiftly…” and my slides were literally just about pizza. The talk itself was actually about AI, the state of the industry, and how we need to share our knowledge and support others… but again the visuals were all pizza. This was honestly one of the hardest-to-write talks I’ve ever done. Doing the technical AI part of the talk while making my slides plausibly like a real talk about pizza was far more challenging than I expected it to be. But, I’m happy with the outcome! I’ve never actually had so many people approach me just to ask me about my talk-writing process before, with one attendee saying, “I’ve never seen a metaphor so gracefully navigated,” which is the most flattering thing I’ve ever heard someone say to me while I’m wearing a shirt covered in pepperoni.

ios iOS swift Swift ai AI
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Danny McClelland 3 months ago

Moving my mobile numbers to VoIP

For the last year or so I’ve been running three eSIMs on my iPhone: personal, work, and a data-only travel SIM that swaps in whenever I’m abroad. iOS only lets two eSIMs be active at any one time, which meant a small but constant dance of enabling and disabling profiles depending on what I was doing that day. I’ve now ported both my personal and work mobile numbers to VoIP, and the eSIM juggling is gone. The nudge came from Michael Bazzell’s Extreme Privacy: What It Takes to Disappear , which recommends moving your “real” numbers off a carrier and onto a VoIP provider as part of a broader privacy strategy. For Bazzell the point is untangling your identity from the mobile network. For me it’s almost entirely convenience. Whichever phone I pick up in the morning rings for both numbers, and the data SIM can sit wherever it’s most useful without me having to decide which mobile identity to sacrifice for the day. I’m using Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) as the VoIP provider. I’ve used them for broadband on and off for years and they remain one of the few ISPs I’d actively recommend: technically competent, refreshingly honest, and perfectly happy for you to do slightly unusual things with your service. Porting two mobile numbers to them was painless. For the client I’m using Groundwire from Acrobits. I’ve been through plenty of SIP clients over the years and most of them are either ugly, flaky on push, or weirdly hostile to the idea of multiple accounts. Groundwire is the first one that’s felt like a proper phone replacement. Push notifications actually work, call quality is good, and it handles multiple accounts without any drama. AAISP exposes SMS through a plain-text HTTP API, and Groundwire expects messages to be delivered via its own web service hooks in XML. The two formats don’t match, so out of the box sending and receiving text messages just didn’t work: calls were fine, but SMS was effectively dead. I ended up writing a small PHP proxy that sits between them. Outbound messages go from Groundwire into the proxy, get reshaped, and hit the AAISP API. Inbound messages arrive via an AAISP webhook, get stored in SQLite, and are picked up the next time Groundwire polls. It also pokes Acrobits’ push service when something arrives, so iOS actually surfaces the notification rather than silently waiting on the next poll cycle. It’s called aaisp-sms-proxy and it’s on GitHub if anyone else is in the same boat. AAISP credentials stay server-side, each number gets its own token so they’re properly isolated, and there’s a tiny bit of rate limiting and log sanitisation in there because it’s on the public internet. I use it every day now and mostly forget it’s there. The other reason this matters is that I’m planning to move my daily driver to GrapheneOS . If your numbers live on a physical or embedded SIM, switching devices is a faff: SIM swaps, eSIM transfers, carrier-app dances, the lot. With VoIP the numbers live in an account, so I install Groundwire on whichever phone I’m carrying and it just rings. Pixel one day, iPhone the next, both at the same time if I want. The one remaining puzzle is Signal. Signal still treats the phone as the primary device and the desktop clients as tethered secondaries, which is fine for a single-phone setup but doesn’t quite fit mine. I want something closer to proper multi-device: two phones, both independently functional, one potentially offline for weeks at a time without losing messages when it comes back online. That isn’t how Signal is designed to work today, so figuring out a sensible workaround is next on the list. If you’re reading Bazzell and coming at this from a privacy angle, AAISP isn’t the answer. They’re a UK telco and they verify you like any other provider, so the number is still firmly tied to your legal identity. Moving off a SIM buys you some separation from the mobile network itself, but not the kind of disappearance the book describes. For that you’d want a provider willing to sell you a number without identity checks, and AAISP explicitly doesn’t. My goal was never to vanish, just to stop playing eSIM Tetris every time I landed in another country. The juggling is gone.

ios iOS php Php Xml
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HeyDingus 3 months ago

Launchpad was great for uninstalling apps; Spotlight is not

Apple published this video to their Support channel on YouTube yesterday, and it motivated me to get this off my chest: Uninstalling apps on macOS is not as easy as it should be. Yes, I know, I know that you can just drag an app to the trash and technically it’s gone. That’s what Apple recommends doing in its video. But then why do are apps like Raycast , CleanMyMac , and AppCleaner able to find leftover files scattered around your system by the deleted app? Maybe it’s just the completionist in me, but I don’t want those files left behind! One thing — the only thing? — I liked about Launchpad was that it made it super obvious how to uninstall (Mac App Store) apps. 1 Just like on your iPad/iPhone, you could click and hold on the app’s icon to send it into “ jiggle mode” and then click the ‘ X’ would remove it. I could be confident that all the app’s associated bits and bobs would be removed from my system. But that changed with Tahoe. While Spotlight got a huge boost in capability as a whole with clipboard history and actions, it also subsumed Launchpad’s role as the main, well, launcher for apps. But there are no affordances in Spotlight for removing apps like Launchpad had. AppCleaner was my go-to tool back in the day, but now I use Raycast to get the job done with confidence. Raycast’s implementation could offer some inspiration for Apple. After searching for an app within Raycast, a simple ⌘K shortcut reveals a host of actions that can be taken on the app. You can open an app, reveal it in the Finder, quit it, and, yes, uninstall it — among other things. Apple could follow this model and provide an ‘ Uninstall App’ action to take within Spotlight. Spotlight’s interface, seeing as it replaced Launchpad, should offer the same capability for removing apps. And it should be as thorough as on an iPhone or iPad. P.S. I also occasionally use Raycast to quit apps that stubbornly have no icon in the Dock or menu bar and therefore make it tricky quit completely. Apps installed outside of the Mac App Store would not display the ‘ X’ to remove it. You had to do it the “ old fashioned” way of dragging the app to the trash and then hunt down its system files. ↩︎ HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts , shortcuts , wallpapers , scripts , or anything — please consider leaving a tip , checking out my store , or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated! I’m always happy to hear from you on social , or by good ol' email . Apps installed outside of the Mac App Store would not display the ‘ X’ to remove it. You had to do it the “ old fashioned” way of dragging the app to the trash and then hunt down its system files. ↩︎

programming Programming design Design ios iOS go Go
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Andre Garzia 3 months ago

Apple Just Lost Me

# Apple Just Lost Me Apple has just lost me as an user. It will take me a while before I can fully migrate away from their devices, and I suspect I might need to keep a mac around for my work, but I will move all my personal computing to Linux and Android again. I been an Apple user since MacOS 8. I had both a Newton MessagePad 2000 and an eMate 300. I got the original blue toilet-seat iBook G3. I was there for the developer road show introducing MacOS X. I paid for my developer account since then. Recently, I had a Macbook Air, iPhone 17, iPad Mini. I'm gonna throw all of them away — not literally ofc — because of recent slop this company been shipping. It is death through a thousand papercuts. To summarise for yous there are three main issues for me and the last one happened today and is what pushed me through the threshold. ### Gatekeeper I absolutely hate Apple quarantine and gatekeeping of software. As a developer, I should just be able to ship software to those interested in my apps. Be aware that I don't give a flying fuck about mobile development, I'm talking about desktop apps here. I gave in to the Apple racketering scheme and got myself a developer account from the very start. I had to *fax my card details to them*, that is how long I had my account. Even though my software is packaged and notarised as per their requirements, they still show my users a dialog box confirming they want to run my app, something they do not for apps installed through their walled garden. This is just friction to punish developers outside their store. I am very tired of it. ### macOS 26 That has been an absolute fiasco. Liquid glass is completely broken from a design point of view. I have no idea how that got out of the door, and now multiple updates in, it still just as bad. Not only it looks ugly, and that is subjective of course, but it is visually broken. Interfaces built with AppKit or SwiftUI that rendered perfect, are now overlapping controls and clipping stuff. They have no consistency at all in terms of icons, placement, corners... I am not a designer, I don't even care about design much, but when a bad design spreads like ink on a glass of water poisoning my workflows, it is when I notice it. ### Age verification My iPhone updated last night and per UK laws, it introduced age verification. The way Apple decided to implement this is through credit card checking. First it attempted to check my Apple Wallet, it failed even though I have five cards in it and am able to use the App Store fine. Then it moved onto wanting me to manually add a card to verify myself. It failed with all my five cards. Four were debit cards, and one was a credit card from another country, cause you know I am an immigrant who has accounts still in my own original birth place. So it failed age verification and locked me out of many features. Bear in mind, I am 45 years old. I have an Apple account for 25 years, the age of my personal account alone should already verify my age. Credit cards are not documents. Many people don't have them. Apple don't provide any other way to verify your age because they are a stupid American company with American values in which you're just as human as your credit score. Age verification is a scam, but checking it with a credit card is even worse. ## Next steps for me I was already done with Apple for some months now, but due to that happening today, I am angry af and will speed up my plans. I'm tired of devices that are not actually mine, of workflows that without blessing from a higher corporate authority won't work. I'm gonna move back to Linux and Android. > Yeah, I know Google gonna fuck Android soon the same way, but at least with Android you tend to have more options. For my computing needs, I purchased a [MNT Pocket Reform](https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/pocket-reform). It will take them a while to assemble and send it to me, but once I have it, my macbook will become a work laptop only. All software I make already ships for Linux. I am considering getting a [Fairphone Gen 6](https://www.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6). Not sure if I will go with stock Android or their Murena /e/OS version. It depends how the degoggled version handles my banking apps. I might need to go with stock Android. After those two, I plan to assemble a little *homelab* using either a TinyMiniMicro form factor PC running Linux and if I have the budget an ugreen NAS. On those machines, I want to have something to handle my photo backup and shared drive. Will probably use either tailscale or some cloudflare bullshit to connect them to each other. This is it, moving back towards taking control of my computing again.

ios iOS hardware Hardware
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