For a while I’ve been trying to automate some of the annoying little things that I have to do to post to my blog. It’s not exactly a hardship, but if I make certain kinds of typos in the front matter of my posts it can result in the post not appearing (a safety feature!) or appearing with the wrong date and time and littering everyone’s RSS feeds.

You might recall this post from March where I was whining about it.

I got that whole date and time thing working in Shortcuts, eventually, but it only worked as a one-way thing where it would spit out the front matter anew every time. It would delete anything I wanted to keep, like the Title: while updating things that might have gotten stale while I was writing, like Date:.

On my Mac I could automate this however I want to, but I ideally want automation that works on my iPhone so I can post while I’m globe-trotting, or on the living room couch far, far away from my desk in the same room.

This meant it was ideal for automation in Drafts.

Drafts is an indispensable app from Greg Pierce with the tagline “Where Text Starts”. That’s very true, but it’s mostly where text stays for me. I do sometimes write in it instead of iA Writer or ByWord because there’s virtually no friction. Friction means something takes time, and then I don’t end up doing it, or getting it done anywhere close to the time it would have been relevant.

The Drafts actions that you can create are really sophisticated, but also intimidating because it’s in JavaScript.

I hate JavaScript –but not as much as I hate Shortcuts!

The nice thing is that unlike Shortcuts, I can search the internet for actual solutions to problems, or ask an LLM, because it’s all just string operations. (Nothing is ever just a string operation.) I can pull apart and reassemble whatever I need to without worrying about a bunch of invisible connections breaking, or drop it into BBEdit or whatever editor I want to, because it’s all just text.

Here’s a gist of what the current action’s JavaScript does. It’s not special, or even useful for anyone else, but I feel like someone’s going to ask to see it.

Six Colors Cross Posts

One point of friction was creating the link posts whenever I have a new post on Six Colors. That’s all set up now where if I have a Six Colors URL in the clipboard it will grab the title from the page, the publish date and time, the first few paragraphs (I can always delete if I made a really long run on post), and then appends a link at the end to continue reading.

That might not sound like a big deal to you, but that kind of formatting and detail leaves a lot of room for error. Now a computer does it, as God intended.

Generic Links

The other nice thing is that I have it set up to accept any other URL on my clipboard and pull out the title for that, and add the link field to make this a link blog post in the blog engine.

I want the date and time for those to be relative to when I post them, because I will be writing additional text, so that’s different from the Six Colors links where it’s only excerpts of what I had written.

Missing Headline Features

The other thing I want to figure out is something to check title casing of what I’m posting so it’s consistent. I’m not great about it and sometimes I will sanity check it. I know that many sites just don’t do titlecase, like Six Colors, but you could say I’ve put too much capital into it in this case.

I don’t want to use some weird JavaScript library for that. I’d rather have something that can deal with natural language. Writing Tools on my iPhone in iOS 18 can’t deal with titlecase, it just capitalizes everything including articles. That might be different with the foundation models in iOS 26, but that wouldn’t help me with my older Mac that can’t run the models.

Something to keep checking on, and in the meantime I get to unreliably do it myself.

Image Problems

I would like to be able to figure out a good workflow for adding images. I want to have a little staging area I can put the images and still have them correctly render. I can do that with iA Writer, but images don’t live in Drafts as elements. That would also really involve changing the Python script on my server that watches the folders to do something with the images in my Dropbox to put them in the correct spot on the server, and to change the paths in my published post to point to those. The way things are going I’ll get to it in 2030.

Sycophantic Scripting Spirals

As for how I got this Drafts action to do what I wanted I have to say that the effort is evenly split between me, Google Gemini, and a smattering of Stack Exchange posts. It definitely isn’t a situation where I put a prompt into Gemini and it spat out exactly what I wanted.

This isn’t vibe coding. If I vibe coded this it wouldn’t do any of the stuff I wanted it to do. This thing really requires babysitting and specific instructions. Even then, it will hallucinate fixes to buggy code which can just be the same exact code with different variable names, or it’ll add another validation variable that doesn’t do anything.

In particular, there was the logic for the Date: YAML where it wouldn’t handle situations with incomplete or invalid field data. Like if I had deleted everything in that field and wanted it to spit out something fresh. It would push that Date: down into the body text and also append a fresh Date: with the date info after it in the YAML.

Pointing this out to Gemini caused it to go into a spiral. It would provide a sycophantic response that I was right, and that the Date: slipping into the body was a sign it wasn’t working, then it would print out a block of code, which it would add a big comment header to. I would tell it that it didn’t work, and it would do it again, and again. I won’t copy and paste the whole exchange, but here are the headers for each “fix” that didn’t fix anything in chronological order:

• CHECK EXISTING YAML (FIXED TO EXCLUDE ALL YAML LINES FROM BODY)
• CHECK EXISTING YAML (FINAL FIX)
• CHECK EXISTING YAML (FINAL, ROBUST VERSION)

This is when it told me, after providing “FINAL, ROBUST VERSION” that this “is becoming too brittle.” Invalidating what it had just output. It then continued:

• CHECK EXISTING YAML (STRICTEST FINAL FIX)

I pointed out that this, and all the code under it, had gotten very convoluted, and reiterated where I thought the problem was (the function that validates the date format passes null which is used for other logic checks).

• CHECK EXISTING YAML (FINAL ROBUST FIX)

It then spat out 1 last attempt at a fix, but didn’t redo the section header, alas, so I just have to imagine that it also called that the final fix. Unfortunately, it didn’t fix anything, so I just made some changes myself until it did what I wanted.

While I wouldn’t have been able to create this automation completely on my own (the REGEX alone, oy vey) I don’t think there’s a being of pure logic, or otherworldly magic, driving this system, and it is instead a very eager (too eager) autocomplete.

Joey Longcuts

Shortcuts defenders would likely point out that nothing in my Drafts action is outside of the realm of possibility in Shortcuts. However, I don’t have a Shortcuts expert on staff here, and I’m not going to read extensively about Shortcuts so I can know how to apply the mostly undocumented functions of Shortcuts actions when there’s simply way more flexibility with text.

If I make a change in Shortcuts sometimes it breaks things that are working. It has almost no debugging assistance whatsoever. There’s no way to temporarily mute or bypass a section of code, which is an absolute travesty when compared to just commenting out a variable to check something.

So that’s that. Insert that XKCD comic about automation saving time here.

Three things really brought this up to the surface for me recently: The neglect of Clips and iMovie, the radio silence regarding Pixelmator/Photomator, and Final Cut Pro being trotted out for demos but not shipping appropriate updates.

Continue reading on Six Colors ►

If you want to skip to the start of the transcript that’s about CarPlay it begins with a kind of rambling question about Google Assistant here.

The big decision there, and I know you know this question is coming, is that you bet against putting smartphone projection in your EVs: there’s no Apple CarPlay or Android Autos in the EVs, but the gas cars still have it. How did you make that decision?

MB: It’s really a question of timing as we look at that, because — and I want to make sure that we get Sterling’s input on this as well — as we looked at it and as we made that decision, we were getting a lot of feedback from customers that it was very clunky moving back. It wasn’t seamless, and frankly, in some cases, it could be distracting to move back and forth if you were doing something that you could do on a phone projection type of system versus if you needed to do something in the vehicle.

We also know that’s only going to increase when you look at some of the things we’re going to talk about that can make your life better and assist you as we move forward. We’re at the very, very early stages of services we can have on a vehicle to improve the overall customer experience and make the journey smoother.

We looked at that and we decided that we needed to have a great system in the vehicle that allowed people to have one system, and we’re going to continue to make that better and add new features.

Allow me to summarize this: Mary really wants to sell services, or have recurring revenue from partnerships and deals with companies in services to earn money over the lifespan of the vehicle. She cites how disorienting it is to jump in and out of CarPlay, but that’s hardly a hurdle that justifies the development work they’re putting into not supporting CarPlay and Android Auto projection systems.

SA: What we’re talking about is the inevitable performance degradation when jumping between S-curves. The first of those S-curves was, for some time, that you and others got attached to phone projection applications largely because the in-vehicle HMI was pretty bad. Your opportunity for doing some of the things was better when you were using that. You’re driving a Vistiq, I understand; you’ve got Dolby surround audio, you’ve got giant screens, you’ve got giant displays. The analog I would use here is we’re on this new S-curve, where there is inevitably a jump that has to happen for you to get over to it. That’s uncomfortable for many.

But frankly, it’s a very Jobsian approach to things. The removal of the disk drive, nobody liked that, everybody on the forums and Facebook was complaining about it, but to that he said, “Look, guys, flash storage really is the future. Get on board, you’ll see that.” That’s kind of what we’re saying here, in fact that’s exactly what we’re saying.

Unbelievable. Sterling continues but I want to stop here for a moment and point out that it is probably one of the worst comparisons anyone’s ever made to something Steve Jobs has done to justify some silly thing that they are currently doing. Also the analogy of the disk drives doesn’t work, because that was the iMac, which did not move to flash storage, it moved to USB where people who needed drives bought them, and eventually included disc burners.

This isn’t about time marching on and replacing projection systems with a superior alternative, but I’ll continue that point in a bit. Let’s go back to Sterling:

Say you’re talking to me about CarPlay. You’ve certainly got an iPhone, you’ve probably got a MacBook, and you have the opportunity to use phone projection on your MacBook, a phone mirroring application. How many of you are accessing online services like email, social media, and otherwise through the phone projection app in your laptop? Almost none of them do. Why? Because you’ve got a much larger screen on your laptop, you’ve got a much more convenient HMI via the keyboard, you’ve got better speakers.

Now, take that same analog to the car and ask the same question. Is it in a car that has not only just laptop speakers, not only a laptop screen, but something better that can move you, and that can integrate with charging infrastructure, with Super Cruise availability on your maps, all of these other things? You are in a much more immersive environment that can do so many more things; why would you use the equivalent of a phone mirroring application on a laptop in your car? So we said, “We’re taking out the disk drive, guys; get on board with flash storage, that’s where the future is.”

Again, it wasn’t flash storage, but that’s not important. The only salient point he raises is that there are features of the car that do not currently integrate with CarPlay, or CarPlay Ultra. It can’t do anything with Super Cruise. Apple, as far as I know, has no real plans for integrating Maps on a phone with any kind of assisted driving, or autonomous technology. I hope that they are working on something for that.

I’m unconvinced that assisted driving and autonomous driving are used more often then the other features of a navigation stack. Like having a device that has your calendar appointment locations, your contacts’ addresses, your recent location searches, etc. Something that is secure on your person and portable with you.

Nilay does push back on this projection analogy and points out that people can switch between computer and phone easily, but they can’t do that while they are driving.

He also mentions that a concern his readers have is being able to use their collection of very niche media apps while they are driving, apps that might not ever be supported by GM’s system. Then he mentions his own, not-so-niche app, Apple Music.

For example, yes, my car has Dolby Atmos in it, the number one provider of Atmos tracks in this industry is Apple Music, and Apple Music will not have an app on your phone, because I’m confident that Apple wants you to have CarPlay, and that is a business dealing that the consumer demand cannot affect. That’s kind of the shape of the puzzle, right?

MB: I would say we have a good relationship with Apple. I mean at the most senior level with Apple, with Google, with all of the tech companies. We’re bringing Apple Wallet. We’ll be announcing that shortly, that we’ll have that and have the ability to do some of the vehicle functions through that. So we’re having continual conversations with Apple, and I would say we’re talking about the opportunity and looking for win-wins. We also have a very good relationship with Google and we don’t enable Android Auto either. So I would say you’re talking about a moment in time versus where the industry is heading from Dolby Atmos and the relationship that we have with Apple. I wouldn’t make some of the broad-based assumptions you’re making.

What iPhone owners loves their iPhone so much they’ll use it to unlock their car but hates to use their iPhone for navigation and audio?

I do think Mary Barra would love to cut a deal with Apple to have Apple Music as an app on their own platform. Apple currently offers Apple Music apps for Tesla and Rivian and neither has ever supported CarPlay, because it is far more important to Apple to get the recurring services revenue than it is for them to use Apple Music as some kind of wedge issue for car shoppers.

Do you think I’m going to get the Apple Music app in my Cadillac?

SA: We don’t have anything to share on that right now, but your first comment really struck at the HMI, the ease of use, and [whether] you have to log into each of these different services and applications in your car. Because if you do, you get some breakage. Some people just will never do that, it’s a pain. We’re looking at that as well. What can we do about federated IDs? What can we do to eliminate that friction of you engaging with your car? I’m not sure I quite follow the whole “it’s illegal to use your phone when you’re driving and not when you’re on your laptop.” I think that cuts against your argument a little bit because–

Emphasis mine. What can we do about federated IDs, Sterling? If the problem is friction then the solution is allowing people to connect to the device that has all of their platform credentials securely and portably saved, which is their phone.

Let me return to the point I was making earlier and that the most secure and portable form of your credentials, media, and information is the device that has all of those things. Building a separate login infrastructure that goes through GM isn’t a simple on-device proposition of just connecting your phone.

I wish Nilay had mentioned this, but I understand that in the moment it can be hard, and it’s probably something he wished he pushed back on after the call rather than having to dwell on projection app experience analogies with Sterling.

After that exchange, Nilay asks Mary again about combustion vehicles being immune to all these shenanigans and she, unfortunately, says that we should all expect major model refreshes for internal combustion vehicles to also ditch CarPlay going forward.

Obviously, I disagree with Mary and Sterling. I don’t think that this improves their products. Much of the interview is spent on rising costs, tariffs, subsidies, consumer demand for inexpensive vehicles, etc. Their solution of owning the platform for services more closely aligns with the direction that TV manufacturers have gone in to try and make money off of buyers after the hardware is sold, rather than just from the sale of the hardware itself. Look no further than their partner, Google, their partner for Android Automotive and for their voice assistant and AI efforts with Gemini.

Naturally, while I wish CarPlay was better, and I am pretty sure CarPlay Ultra has been a colossal waste of everyone’s time and effort, I would want any car I purchase or rent to have CarPlay support.

I have no plan to purchase a GM vehicle, but I do rent cars. GM makes up a sizable portion of rental car fleets. At some point in the future those cars will no longer support CarPlay. I’m not going to sign up for a GM federated ID that stores my login credentials in their cloud. I’m not going to individually sign into apps in the car like Google Maps with my Google ID that I use for way more than just navigation. There’s no chain of trust with me and this random car from GM. No convenience that is achieved in exchange for increased exposure risk for storing my sensitive data in a car I don’t own.

Do enough consumers care that this alters individual sales or rental car fleet composition? I’d say probably not, because the TV market is an excellent example of consumer behavior gravitating towards what’s inexpensive at the expense of personal privacy.

It’s still a stock footage generator, but it’s trained on a significantly larger corpus of video. Video OpenAI does not actually own any rights to. This increase in volume and diversity means there are fewer situations where the model creates something that has an obvious malfunction in those 10 second windows.

There is no logical reasoning or thinking component. No creativity, experience, or crew that went to go shoot something special just for you. This is reconstituted from bits and pieces. The seams may be unrecognizable to most viewers, but the content of the video is always a reworking of something else based on probability.

No better place is that illustrated than the disastrous deal with Runway and Legendary. They’re limited by the model, and their inputs, thus producing nothing but problems.

OpenAI is pulling this off because of a three-prong strategy:

1. Tell the rights-holders that stealing everything is inevitable, so it’s a good thing OpenAI did it first because they have tools for you to ask them politely to have rights and likenesses excluded from output not excluded from training.
2. Generate demand with the public through apps like Sora where people can make brand-safe videos of themselves with corporate characters. You can see it in the name cameo (which I am sure Cameo loves). No marketing team can ever do that without building and troubleshooting their own model.
3. Invite rights-holders to see how they could use the tool to quickly produce “content” or marketing materials without having to pay for employees. Just pay OpenAI where the value is in the model that has stolen the rights.

It’s brilliant in a super-villain kind of way. Like Mr. Burns blotting out the sun.

Sam Altman, on his blog:

First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls.

We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of “interactive fan fiction” and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all). We assume different people will try very different approaches and will figure out what works for them. But we want to apply the same standard towards everyone, and let rightsholders decide how to proceed (our aim of course is to make it so compelling that many people want to). There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration.

Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users. The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we [sic] want both to be valuable.

Hayden Field, writing for The Verge, about a Q&A event with Sam Altman:

He positioned the launch’s speed bumps as learning opportunities. “Not for much longer will we have the only good video model out there, and there’s going to be a ton of videos with none of our safeguards, and that’s fine, that’s the way the world works,” Altman said, adding, “We can use this window to get society to really understand, ‘Hey, the playing field changed, we can generate almost indistinguishable video in some cases now, and you’ve got to be ready for that.’“

Altman said he feels that people don’t pay attention to OpenAI’s technology when people at the company talk about it, only when they release it. “We’ve got to have … this sort of technological and societal co-evolution,” Altman said. “I believe that works, and I actually don’t know anything else that works. There are clearly going to be challenges for society contending with this quality, and what will get much better, with the video generation. But the only way that we know of to help mitigate it is to get the world to experience it and figure out how that’s going to go.”

Inevitability is a terrible justification for anything. It’s a fantastic way to drive a wedge between different stakeholders though! “Oh well if it’s going to happen no matter what then I have to be on top…”

We took all of your control away from you, and we will let you have some of it back, if you agree not to fight us.

Even if rights-holders were to capitulate completely and sell out their intellectual property for access to their intellectual property with fewer employees, then there’s still the question about what value the general public assigns to this slop and the users of it?

In my previous posts on this subject I’ve pointed out that the general public doesn’t especially care for anything that seems artificial. That’s very true of movies where even blockbuster film franchises will talk about trying to get something in-camera, or building all the sets and costumes, even if it’s not entirely true, because it’s just better marketing.

You’re standing next to a person in a Pikachu costume, you pose for a photo, and you have that photo of you with “Pikachu” but now you can have a video of you with cartoon-perfect Pikachu that you don’t need to even record. Instead of a memory of something janky that can only ever be so real, you have a high-fidelity non-memory of an unreality.

I assume Altman is banking on just overwhelming the public consciousness through brute force with these slop videos to the point where the public’s sense of what’s human-made is so unreliable that there can’t be any kind of pushback.

This is a great video —and it has Todd Vaziri! Todd is a smart, talented guy who is very aware of common misconceptions that most people have about what VFX is. People think they see “CGI” when there’s some fantastical element on screen, but they really don’t comprehend the extent to which modern filmmaking —and television— augment photography.

As someone who is intimately familiar with audience misconceptions, it’s heartening to see Vanity Fair take an interest in providing Todd with a venue to impart this information.

From Todd’s short blog post on the video:

I want to thank everyone at Vanity Fair for making me feel so welcome and comfortable, especially director Adam Lance Garcia, editor Matthew Colby and everyone at ILM PR for this opportunity.

In the visual effects world, we frequently gripe about the prevalence of misinformation in the public discourse about “CGI” and the role of visual effects in Hollywood, but rarely do any of us tell our own stories about innovation, creativity, problem solving and teamwork to the general public. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to tell some of our stories about what we do.

Studios have marketing departments that do their very best to minimize discussion about VFX because they know that audiences react poorly to the notion that something isn’t real. They go so far as to despill bluescreen and greenscreen behind-the-scenes photography (look for gray backdrops in BTS stills and photos, it wasn’t gray). I don’t know why there’s a public fascination with the talented deception of “is it cake?” but an aversion to discussing set extensions.

It’s also important to remind moviegoers that there are people —just like Todd— who’s experience and ingenuity solve problems. When people think that it’s all just computers that do this then they think that the creativity is synthetic. It’s not adding and removing things based on probability, but on multi-layered storytelling.

My two favorite parts of the video were things that I didn’t know before, and would have never discovered, if it wasn’t for Todd telling us, and that’s the reconstruction of Sophia Lillis’s performance for a camera move, and the addition of rope in Skeleton Crew.

I’ve had to do similar things with retiming performances for storytelling purposes, and like Todd’s work, no one would ever know about it. Low-tech solutions like the rope are also things that are impossible to convey to the audience even though there’s a huge endorphin rush when you execute it.

Todd also touches on a common lament of film “fans” where they point at Jurassic Park and Transformers and say that things used to look more realistic than they do now. Todd gently bursts that thought bubble by talking about how creating a plan, and sticking to it, have a huge impact.

VFX artists don’t get a special merit badge for doing things that are very difficult, but don’t end up looking great. That happens a lot. We especially don’t get a merit badge for all the invisible work we do on projects great, and small. Kudos to Todd, and Vanity Fair.

Scott McNulty does an excellent monthly round-up of books he’s read, and I like to refer to it for some guidance on books I might like to pick up. This is sort of like that.

• On Vicious Worlds (The Kindom Trilogy #2) by Bethany Jacobs ★★★★★ (Read on Jan 02, 2025) — This is an exceptionally weird space opera. Not weird because of sci-fi stuff, but weird because of the interpersonal relationships. I read These Burning Stars last November, and the third book comes out this December. I’m definitely onboard for it, but I’m not sure it’s everyone’s cup of tea.
• The Mercy of Gods (The Captive’s War #1) by James S.A. Corey ★★★★☆ (Read on Feb 05, 2025) — I was on the fence about this one because everyone in The Incomparable book club said it was kind of a downer, but it’s an interesting downer. I don’t care about any of the characters except The Swarm. The alienness of everything makes it interesting. Obviously the title “(Captive’s War #1)” gives away that there won’t be a satisfying end to the book, and I can confirm that after having read it.
• Architects of Memory (The Memory War #1) by Karen Osborne ★★★★☆ (Read on March 1, 2025) — The Company situation borders on parody -if not for the reality we already live in that also borders on parody. The Vai are interesting, but implausible. Fortunately, most of the story is about these greedy, needy humans. It’s worth mentioned that I tried to pick up the second book in the series, but I did not like point of view character and stopped.
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★★★ (Read on Feb 22, 2025) — I got around to reading a classic, and what can I say? It’s a classic. We get a real sense of an alien world that is distinctly human. Sure, the way gender is used in language is not really how we use gender in language today, but you can map it to what we would say these days and it is very modern.
• Moonbound by Robin Sloan ★★★★★ (Read on March 5, 2025) — I couldn’t put this book down. I’m glad I also got to go on a podcast to talk about how much I like it, because it’s my favorite book that I’ve read so far this year, just as Service Model was my favorite book I read last year. They are very different books. Moonbound is much more of a fairy tale with a far-future framework and Service Model is satire. I don’t love how Moonbound concludes, but the journey is certainly worth taking. It’s like Thundarr the Barbarian meets Ursula K. Le Guin.
• The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★★☆ (Read on April 16, 2025) — This is a very provocative book, but several sections were difficult for me to read because I dislike the protagonist (notably the party when the stuff happened that I won’t get into). I do appreciate that “utopia” is “ambiguous” but that also means the end of the book just kind sputters out after many dramatic situations have occurred. There is nothing to say about the outcome of the decisions, just that they have occurred.
• Not Till We Are Lost (Bobiverse #5) by Dennis Taylor ★★★☆☆ (Read on Jul 09, 2025) — These are very light, easy-to-read books where Dennis Taylor just spins out some weird idea and puts a lot of cringeworthy nerd humor around it. This was not a particularly strong entry.
• The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton ★★★★☆ (Read on Jul 19, 2025) — This is a solid book with a lot of interesting things going on. Our main character doesn’t seem very… bright, but he does have his moments. I like the politics and world/universe building that we witness here.
• Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky ★★★☆☆ (Read on Aug 18, 2025) — Unfortunately, this isn’t my favorite. The alien planet is innovative and intriguing, but the protagonist’s internal monologue is dull. So much of the book is taken up with it. The “Darkness” sections and the “Interludes” deflate some of the tension, because they turn it into a comedy of errors. Misunderstood communications in a farce, but farce isn’t the tone. This doesn’t possess the satirical humor of Service Model, despite how cartoonish The Concern is. It would make it more alien to not have access to Darkness and Interlude sections. Though, that would sadly leave us with more of the main character. This just isn’t my favorite Tchaikovsky novel.
• Human Resources by Adrian Tchaikovsky ★★★★★ (Read Jul 20, 2025) — This is thin, and light. Nothing will shock or surprise, but it was a good palette cleanser when it became available on Libby right after finishing Shroud.
• In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune ★★★★☆ (Read on Jul 27, 2025) — There are some things you just have to go with because they are poetic - not because they really make sense. If you’re going to get hung up on wooden, mechanical hearts, or the function of blood and memory, you’re not going to enjoy the witty banter between the robots, or the touching and tender moments between Vic and those around him. The overall plot does fall apart about 80% of the way into the book when a plan is revealed during a dramatic moment and that reveal really comes out of nowhere. It all came from “off screen” events we should have been witness to.
• Recursion by Blake Crouch ★★★★★ (Read on Aug 6, 2025) — Brilliantly plotted with rich, sorrowful, hopeful characters. The less you know about the book before you read it the better. It’s a twisty thriller with great characters, and that’s all you need to know.
• Murder by Memory (Dorothy Gentleman #1) by Olivia Waite ★★★★★ (Read on Aug 11, 2025) — This was a fun, little detective story on a spaceship.
• Finder (Finder Chronicles #1) by Suzanne Palmer ★★★★★ (Read on Aug 24, 2025) — I loved this fun sort of detective/heist story with the implausibly named Fergus Ferguson. The world/universe building is rich, and also funny. Having just recently read all of them in the series, I would say that the first book remains my favorite.
• Driving the Deep (Finder Chronicles #2) by Suzanne Palmer ★★★★★ (Read on Aug 20, 2025) — If you need all the characters to carry forward from the previous book to the next, this is not the book series for you. Fergus Ferguson is back for another detective/heist story in a very isolated setting.
• The Scavenger Door (Finder Chronicles #3) by Suzanne Palmer ★★★★☆ (Read on Sep 6, 2025) — The previous book was a very isolated, narrow environment for Fergus to operate in, and this book is expansive with a series of ingenious mini-heists. Once all the heists are over the story is less interesting, despite the scale of the problem facing Fergus.
• Ghostdrift (Finder Chronicles #4) by Suzanne Palmer ★★★★☆ (Read on Sep 9, 2025) — More trouble for the trouble magnet. This book has a slow start, and space pirates that talk like the stereotypical seafaring variety are not the most interesting to me, but there’s a shift in locale that makes everything pretty interesting. Particularly the last third of this book. The final resolution doesn’t feel particularly final. I hope there’s more.

I’m currently catching up on some of Dan Moren’s Galactic Cold War short stories that I had bought and downloaded, but somehow never read. Shame on me. Then I got sidetracked when 1984 by George Orwell became available in Libby and now I get to wind down from the stress of the day by reading about that wacky Winston.

Stephen Robles has a good run through of all the new features in tvOS 26 on YouTube. I don’t have the energy, or enthusiasm to detail these features, so please refer to his fine work.

I will never, ever, ever have as much to say about the Apple TV Sing app as Stephen Robles. That’s a promise. It’s a specific piece of nerdy corporate synergy (singergy?) I’m not even sure people will remember the app exists in a few years.

However, astute Apple TV owners will notice this screen when they start up their newly-updated tvOS 26 boxes:

These features are not about improving the TV and movie viewing experience. The “Liquid Glass” updates to design were initially awful, but have been pulled back to the point where you wouldn’t really even register anything beyond some drawn-on highlight edges to things. Strangely, this “did they change anything?” is actually a good thing compared to the first stab Apple took.

The “New” Apple TV App Design doesn’t do anything to fix any of the problems with the “old” TV app design. They made the thumbnails into “cinematic” movie posters, which have lower information density and clarity when compared to the thumbnails that had separate text.

The Profiles don’t do anything useful because how can they? No apps tie into them, and as Dan Moren pointed out they don’t even do anything for siloing off parental controls.

For me, Apple TV is first and foremost a platform for viewing TV and movies. We just passed the 10th anniversary of tvOS, which I will probably write about in another post if I feel motivated enough. A lot of stuff has changed with tvOS, but not the mechanics of how you watch TV.

This is particularly irritating when how we view TV isn’t even the same as it was 10 years ago. There are a lot of FAST channels, and other linear and live TV streams, but tvOS has no awareness of them beyond sporting events.

The strengths of the Apple TV, and tvOS, are that there isn’t generic advertising in the interface. Apple does a ton of irritating self promotion, but it’s very different from what Amazon and Roku do.

It’s still the box I recomend for anyone that wants to stream TV (which is almost everyone) but it’s hard to sell people on the virtues of the Apple TV, especially when it seems like such a listless product.

None of the changes that Apple actually shipped with tvOS 26 (with the exception of the posters) worsened tvOS over the previous version, but they were also a lot of work expended on things that are not the primary focus of the device.

Of course major changes to tvOS seem to align with new models shipping, and if the Apple rumor sites are to be believed a new Apple TV model is right around the corner (or at least they post about it being right around the corner every month so they’ll inevitably get it right). Perhaps the “good” TV app will ship with new hardware, or we’ll get a more integrated live TV experience then?

I’m not going to hold my breath. I’m too busy singing.

Continue reading on Six Colors ►

A few people I know have even been evangelizing Project Indigo because they love it so much, especially when they compare it to photos from Apple’s Camera app. My enthusiasm for this product doesn’t match their own. It’s neat but it’s not great.

It isn’t all-purpose (it can only take still photos), and it can’t do panoramas or portrait mode. It doesn’t have the compressed storage of the editable HEIC files Apple introduced with the iPhone 16 Pro, or the new photographic styles pipeline that lets a user control tone mapping and certain processing, both before the photo is taken and after the fact.

There are still a few noteworthy tricks it pulls off that are worth a look.

Continue reading on Six Colors ►

Apple recently announced it would integrate data from Michelin Guide (prestigious/exacting), The Infatuation (trendy/young), and Golf Digest (retirees/executives/awful world leaders). While initial partnerships seemed shrewd for bootstrapping Maps data, Apple now appears content to make the entire platform out of boot straps.

This approach layers on top of existing partners like Yelp, OpenTable, TripAdvisor, and Foursquare, not to mention numerous international partners. Let’s focus on restaurants, the core of the Michelin Guide’s focus.

Continue reading on Six Colors ►

1. I want to do something with Shortcuts because it is Apple’s only cross-platform automation tool.
2. I don’t know how to do it in Shortcuts because the actions are poorly documented and often use oddball names that the incredibly basic search won’t help you connect to.
3. I can’t easily search the internet for exactly what to use because the terms are often too generic to produce useful search results.
4. I can’t use LLMs even though they can handily generate simple code snippets, because Shortcuts are not text-based code, so they frequently describe many steps to create a Shortcut in the Shortcuts app that unfortunately involve hallucinating other terms because they’re used in the english words surrounding descriptions of things.
5. I can’t use any other editor to make changes to Shortcuts, like I could with literally any other kind of automation software or code.

The problem is that the Shortcuts are binary blobs, but they should be text of some variety. When I started learning computer animation at school we used Maya, and Maya had two kinds of scene descriptions: Maya Binary (.mb) and Maya ASCII (.ma).

Our instructors were very specific in telling us that there was no good reason for us to use .mb files. If something went wrong with the binary file while it was being saved, and it was corrupted in some way, that they couldn’t help us recover data or fix the file.

The .ma format, on the other hand, is just text, that uses a simple subset of Maya’s MEL scripting language. You didn’t even need to be an expert in the language if you just needed to nudge some stuff, or ask someone else to help you recover data, or identify a problem. Most importantly: If you don’t want, or need, to hand-edit the text you never, ever, ever have to.

Every compositing package I have worked with, from Shake, to Bonsai, to Katana, to Nuke has been in a format that you can open and edit in any text editor to recover data, or automate scene file creation.

Here’s a neat blog post where someone walks through the anatomy a Nuke script. Knowing the anatomy of a Nuke script has never been part of my job description as a Nuke compositor, but whenever I’ve needed to delete an errant Viewer node, or remove a reference to a malfunctioning plug-in, I can do it without having to use the GUI that might not be happy with the evaluating the buggy file.

You can diff these files, you can do find-and-replace because you changed file paths, you can duplicate complicated script logic more easily than in the GUI. Have you ever made a for loop in Shortcuts? Did you want to throw something across the room afterward?

Of course, I’m sure the Shortcuts team would prefer for you to edit your Shortcuts in Shortcuts, but it should not be the only place. Undoubtedly they don’t want to make something that’s as obtuse as AppleScript, but people are still using AppleScript in 2025 to fill in the gaps. In 2025 LLMs can capably produce AppleScript, ironically negating much of AppleScript’s difficulty.

It would also be incredibly beneficial to Apple to produce text files because then they could train their Foundation models to understand and build the Shortcuts.

Users could tell the LLM of your choice that you want a Shortcut to generate some YAML headers for a blog post, or to convert a Google Maps point of interest URL into an Apple Maps one. Whatever it is you can describe in plain words but can’t easily map to Shortcuts functions without going to Shortcuts Night School for six years.

I’m sure Apple wants to maintain the signed, and relatively safe, status of Shortcuts — which is totally a thing they should do — but they can quarantine Shortcuts files with Gatekeeper until a user inspects them and approves them in Shortcuts.

Say you don’t need to generate one with LLM assistance at all, you just want to write it in BBedit, Coda, VSCode, Emacs (weirdo). You do that too, and it prompts you to check it in the app before you can run it.

That seems far more reasonable to me than expecting the Shortcuts app to be able to service all automation use cases, and experience levels by generating binary blobs of limited scope and complexity. What’s so wrong with text? Let’s do things the write way.

Her questions are often so brief and direct, that you notice how much more Craig is speaking to try and spin his responses. Craig and Joz don’t come off super great here, and its entirely their own words that are responsible for that and not some elaborate trick questions, or editorial slight of hand.

The excuses are more transparent than Liquid Glass.

F1 and Apple TV+

The skits they do are more for them than they are for me, that’s for sure. I would argue that these sorts of skits work better when it’s reminding us of an Apple TV+ show we’ve already seen and liked, rather than forward promotion. F1: The Movie would make more sense at a later event —if the movie’s good and does well. It just feels indulgent here and doesn’t connect.

Then Tim Cook proceeds to talk about how great Apple TV+ quality (subjective) according to Ampere. You really can’t argue with it, except to point out that talking about how your shows at good at your software event isn’t going to do move the needle. I know that the general press is there, and they might write a sentence about it, but buy some commercials, fellas. Pay for air time with CBS to show Shrinking. The F1 sketch, and Ampere chart about your quality isn’t converting people.

Apple Intelligence

This isn’t much of a mea culpa. In fact, it largely consisted of Craig Federighi talking about all the great stuff they did ship, which is basically a lie if you’ve used the features in their shipped state. He even highlighted the notorious notification summaries, a feature where they had to add a carve out for news and entertainment apps.

Liquid Glass

Unfortunately, I strongly disagree with the design choices that Alan Dye, and his team, have made with Liquid Glass. Some of it is the material quality of the elements, but a large part of my disagreement is the construction and arrangement of the elements themselves.

If you follow me on Mastodon you’ll notice I didn’t say anything about the rumors for the redesign, or any theoretical renderings. There’s no point in saying anything about a design until you can see it. I don’t need to be pre-mad about anything.

Material quality is mostly fine with a glossy bevel around certain buttons. However, there is an intense refraction effect that occurs where something with a the bevel of a glass slide somehow has the light-bending abilities of a Coca-Cola bottle. Whatever you scroll, or whatever video is playing back, behind these elements causes huge variations in the refracted image passed through the button or toolbar element. Bright things get diffused and seemingly brighter (scattered light should reduce the intensity) but none of this is physically accurate, it’s about the slick appearance of something.

I happen to like transparency and translucency. The Beats Studio Buds+ were purchased specifically for their translucent plastic. I wouldn’t want to make all the UI elements see-through. There’s a time and a place.

In terms of the design language, I don’t like how everything needs to float above the content as discreet elements which all require padding and all have their own distinct shading effects. The top nav bar is gone in apps and replaced by 2-3 circular objects floating at the top of the screen, and 2-3 circular or pill-shaped objects floating at the bottom of the screen. They take up more space because they’re set farther from the edge, and from each other, creating areas of the screen where you see things behind that are not what you’re interacting with.

This means information density is seriously reduced. Here’s an example from Casey Liss running his Callsheet app in the beta. Above the keyboard, he has the floating search bar, and it’s applying a progressive blur to everything underneath. This means there is a single row of movies that are visible in the app. It’s not exclusive to his app.

There’s less room for what’s in the app because so much space needs to be taken up by things floating over the app. These are very similar problems to the much maligned Safari redesign a few years ago. They also applied this design to Safari and made it worse, again, too.

The appeal of the design choice is that things feel light, and your content feels like it expands beyond the borders, but its a useless feeling.

It’s certainly possible that the design will be reigned in before it ships, but the degree to which it will be reigned in is dependent on feedback, so … don’t be timid.

Of course it’s possible that none of this will matter because everyone will keep making web view apps and react apps. lol.

iOS

Other than the design issues, the thing that stuck out the most for me was the Camera app. Apple has never done more to sell third party camera apps. The current Camera app does have a lot of complex interactions, but this doesn’t resolve them. It just hides more things. I’ll have to see how it feels to use —and if they did anything with Camera Settings that mitigates or alters these UI changes.

At a surface level, the phone features, if not the interface, sound like improvements. Messages seems like even more of an interface mess now that there are ugly backgrounds, but people love that shit. Weird that Apple is so set against people personalizing their devices but adopting the most hideous WhatsApp feature that exists.

Image Playgrounds continues to be an abomination. It’s whole sales pitch was that it was safe and private — even if it sucked — and now they’re like, “sure whatever send your loved ones to ChatGPT and make slop of them there”. I don’t respect the decision at all, even if I do understand it. Apple has put “or ChatGPT” in a lot of places where Apple’s models are failures, but “or ChatGPT” is not a success either because what’s the incentive to go into one of these apps and use one of these features that’s just middleware for another service that has its own app? Apple’s incredibly weak and unconvincing here.

If Apple wanted to lean into IP safe image generation they could work with Adobe which has their Firefly model, but that would probably cost money, and ChatGPT doesn’t cost them any money.

Live translation feels like it’s more than a step behind Google here as well. The examples had a lot of lag and the results felt clumsy — but it’s better than nothing.

Maps learning your common routes is good, but Maps has “learned” my patterns for years and is actually very bad at it. For example, I just moved recently, and I changed my address in Contacts, and edited Home in Maps (why are these separate?) and the Maps widget is still recommending that I drive to the old address every day because I had spent so much time there. It’s things like this that don’t give me much confidence in Maps learning anything.

Visual Intelligence is a middleware wrapper on a screenshot utility. It can do some OCR and use data detectors to figure out if there’s an event in a screenshot, or an address, or now pass images on to other apps that can do image-based searches. This is incredibly weak, and still requires multiple steps. It also sends your whole screen, Messages conversations and all. There’s no smart selection, or magic wand. This has all the whimsy of command+shift+3.

CarPlay

I don’t understand why they went through all the trouble of launching CarPlay Ultra last month when they had an updated design and widgets to unveil for CarPlay this month. The instrument cluster in the Aston Martin didn’t have the liquid glass design language, just the center stack, so it felt a little strange. We know Liquid Glass requires a lot of Metal 4 rendering magic, so is part of the reason for this because of the car’s local OpenGL rendering? If so … why the hell did we design a system like that?

The Tapbacks feel unsafe. I’m pretty puzzled by their inclusion. There should be a better way to communicate Tapbacks with, oh I don’t know, a voice assistant maybe?

watchOS

And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.

If you ask me, and you are because you’re still reading, the software features of watchOS peaked a few years ago. That’s great because they can polish what’s there. The wrist flick is probably going to be pretty good —until I accidentally flick something away and it disappears because there’s no concept of a dismissed notifications folder.

I am the singular person that dislikes the Smart Stack. It gets in the way of my complications. I’ll live with them continuing to push it.

Workout Buddy is a robot voice that tells you several numbers are good numbers and you’re doing great with numbers. I would never in a million years find such a feature appealing. If people want encouragement from a chat assistant, they probably expect a chatbot that they can converse with and develop one of those incredibly problematic social relationships with. Workout Buddy is Clippy for workouts.

tvOS

What tvOS needs is a comprehensive overhaul of the concept of the home screen. For years there have been two competing home screens: the original app-based home screen, and the newer Apple TV+ content-based TV app. Real nerds, like me, know the TV app sucks and use the app-based home screen. The TV app has not been improved in terms of personalization or customization at all.

The sign-on feature once again requires adoption by streaming apps in order to work, and it’s tied to your Apple ID. Good luck with that getting widely adopted over QR codes and authorization URLs.

The user profile picker that’s presented at start-up is also another miss. As I’ve written about before, profiles are an imperfect mechanism for viewing behavior for several reasons, including the fact that most households share services, and those services have profiles, and those profiles aren’t using Apple’s system but their own cross-platform profile systems.

Of all the features to focus on for tvOS — like where the hell is a live TV guide — Apple’s going to bug people about user profiles and talk about yet another sign-in method? What the hell?

For some reason Apple decided to buck industry trends and all the show art tiles are movie posters now. I get it, it seems cinematic to evoke movie posters, but the interface is on a 16:9 screen. Use your noodles. This means that you get to see one row clearly. To make up for that, the show text is overlaid on top of the poster art with stylized fonts, like Photos Memories, making the shows harder to read. This change needs to be reverted.

I have nothing to say about the karaoke, which apparently requires the latest Apple TV 4K, and all your friends to have iPhones. I apologize in advance that I will quickly forget this exists.

The only positive thing I can say about how tvOS is being managed is that they still support the 2015 Apple TV 4th generation a.k.a. the Apple TV HD. It’s too underpowered for liquid glass shaders that refract the video you’re watching through the thin playback timeline bar, but something tells me that’s not a major concern Apple TV HD users have in 2025. Kudos for not dropping them.

macOS

Bill Atkinson, who invented the menu bar, died this weekend, so it just happens to be especially poor timing to try and kill the menu bar again. Apple has tried to reduce the menu bar before and walked it back so I hope there’s some way to do that here. This is not a matter of tradition, but usability. Having places on the screen where things go, and are styled in particular ways, to having meaning is important.

I understand the desire to reduce the heaviness of the menu bar, especially on MacBooks where the menu bar has grown to match the notch — but that’s a notch problem, not an ‘eliminate the concept of the menu bar’ problem.

The Finder window decorations are a real travesty. A bunch of lumpy circles and drop shadows with strange tangents. The Finder windows feel like less of a window and more of a second grader’s button and glue collage.

Shortcuts and Spotlight

This isn’t the time and place for another rant on how editing and creating Shortcuts is bad, but it remains bad. The automation triggers seem like a theoretical good thing, as does access to various models, but Apple still isn’t providing any assistance on the composition and creation of those automations.

The changes to Spotlight are great. RIP Alfred. I’m disappointed that the actions aren’t natural language actions, because the syntax of things seems clumsy. This is in essence what I was complaining about in this Six Colors post but that was Spotlight for iOS.

visionOS

Well, it looks like people are still working hard. So… uh… keep going for another decade and I’ll check back.

iPadOS

This might be the best part of the keynote. Apple delivered on longstanding gripes that iPad power users have had about the platform when it comes to window management, background processes, menu bar (lol), and audio routing. I wonder how well it all works in practice, but on the surface it seems like someone at Apple was finally receptive to years and years of complaints.

It was absolutely hilarious that after all that fuss, and all the failures of trying to rethink windowing, they just did it the Mac way, tiny traffic lights and all.

Unfortunately, there’s still a Files app, and despite the announcements I don’t consider it an improvement. I look forward to WWDC 2035 where iPadOS 36 gets the Finder, which by then will be a mobile of buttons suspended by invisible physics.

Not Six Out of Five Stars

Ending with a song about an app store review felt pretty tone deaf (ha) because of the antagonistic relationship Apple has developed with app developers over the App Store. There was no contrition in the keynote itself over their policies and the things that have come out of court proceedings, it was all, “look at what our greatness provides”.

This WWDC definitely felt more grounded by what was possible, but like I said earlier, that’s also why much of it just met expectations. Hopefully people press Apple on the wild design choices and Apple reels them back in, but I don’t expect Apple to do the reeling all by itself. Try not to shush critics on behalf of Apple.

Jason and I have been together for nearly 16 years. In 2020 we each ditched our one bed, one bath apartments and moved into a large single-family home. It certainly had pros and cons, and one of those pros was that there was ample square footage to store things. I did eliminate almost all of my 2005 furniture (microfiber isn’t quite the fabric of the future that they made it out to be at the time,) but I did retain most of my other possessions. They were boxed up and then most of them were never unpacked. When we moved again this month, it made it pretty easy to determine what things I didn’t really need. However, that didn’t mean that everything was going in the trash or being donated.

I did keep some things, and those things went into a small storage unit. I don’t want to maintain a gargantuan storage unit full of junk. I’m not running a museum for retail decisions I made 20 years ago. I also didn’t want to part with every sentimental thing that I would otherwise like to have in a larger home, assuming that happens again.

This meant unpacking boxes from nearly five years ago, and sifting through them with a more discerning eye than I had originally. All the while I was working 10 hour days on a project. Do not recommend.

Strangely enough, The Verge has a whole slew of articles about moving that they published the week I moved. I have absolutely no idea why they did that, but it didn’t help me in the slightest. Even when I was lying in bed at 4 AM unable to sleep, the posts weren’t what I was looking for.

I couldn’t exclusively listen to tech podcasts, read about tech, and follow social media about tech. There’s not a lot of great news happening in the world of tech at the moment! In my search for good vibes I went back to something that I had used to calm my nerves back in 2020: Total Party Kill.

Ironically, I had stopped listening to TPK because I fell far behind in 2020 and couldn’t figure out the last episode I had listened to due to mixing back and forth between the edited releases and the bootleg recordings which are nowhere near each other in terms of sync. I was a little less concerned about hearing funny puns too many times. I needed puns, stat! I needed to hear someone say, “44” and for Steve Lutz to say, “4 d4!”

Oh, also I guess my “tech angle” for this post is that just like the other items you own, you should also inventory the gadgets and gizmos because you don’t need aplenty. I had whos-its and whats-its galore. The new place was smaller, and had different lighting requirements, so the smart bulbs were retired. The old smart switches that worked — iHome switches, which were discontinued — were dumped and now everything is an Eve switch. There’s only one Apple TV acting as the Home Hub.

Hilariously, Apple makes it very annoying to remove devices in the Home app. Especially grouped devices — like if you have a lamp that takes two smart bulbs. You must ungroup the devices, then edit each individually to remove them. As a matter of cosmic history it has always been easier to destroy than to create — unless it’s in the Home app.

So that’s my big moving advice. Listen to something funny because the rest of the process is grueling and you need to replenish those endorphins so you don’t crumple to the ground. Throw out and donate what you can, but don’t keep something because you feel guilty about it, or you might still be able to use that discontinued smart device. You’ll continue to roll through life collecting more junk.

Based on what we’ve seen of CarPlay Ultra, Apple believes that if it controls the appearance of the displays in cars, then using the car will be a good experience. I’m not sure that’s an assumption I’d make, especially when styling isn’t directly connected to function—as is the case with most of what distinguishes CarPlay Ultra from CarPlay.

There’s so much more Apple needs to do with CarPlay, fixes that would also benefit CarPlay Ultra. I use CarPlay all the time, and there are plenty of issues that don’t seem to be on Apple’s roadmap. If Apple improves CarPlay, it also improves CarPlay Ultra. That being said, here are some of my biggest outstanding issues with CarPlay today.

Continue reading on Six Colors ►

The leaked call also gave some insight into what the device likely won’t be — Altman said that it isn’t a pair of glasses, and that Ive wasn’t keen to make something you’d need to wear on the body, having recently slammed the Humane AI Pin. Altman has also denied rumors that OpenAI is developing a phone. _The Journal_previously reported that Ive and Altman wanted to wean users away from screens, with Ive saying in a recent interview that his next product is driven by owning the “unintended consequences” associated with the iPhone.

The first one is an Apple MacBook with all-day battery life. The second is the revolutionary iPhone. And the third is a breakthrough AI communications device. So, three things: a MacBook with all-day battery life; the revolutionary iPhone; and a breakthrough AI communications device. A MacBook, an iPhone, and an AI communicator. A MacBook, an iPhone … are you getting it? These are three separate devices, this is not one device, and we are calling it Tech Bro Desk. Today, OpenAI is going to reinvent desktop clutter, and here it is.

Featuring a tapestry of rainbow stripes that vary in shape and size, each Pride Edition Sport Band is assembled by hand from individual stripes of vibrant color that are compression-molded together, creating subtle yet striking variations. No two bands are exactly alike, reflecting the individuality of all members of the LGBTQ+ community.

The result is a very abstract approach to Pride where you would not necessarily know what it is you are looking at when you see a band. The Watch face, is easier to clock (wink) but it’s a very busy watch face, and I never use those because they never have enough complications.

iPhone, and iPad wallpapers also have a more recognizable grouping of colored stripes, but there’s no animated Mac wallpaper animated wallpaper to go with them.

Nothing’s been done to address concerns about the consumerism of selling Pride-themed products while the company, and notably its homosexual CEO, doesn’t really behave in a Pride-like way.

For anyone that might ask, “Why focus on Tim?” I would point you toward the Why Focus On Tim? subsection of my blog post critiquing the disparity between Tim’s words and his actions.

This administration has done harm, from day one, and continues to do harm with glee. This is a festering wound and Apple has a band-aid for us to feel better by buying something, just like always.

[UPDATE: You should also read Niléane’s post at MacStories about this as well.]

I would also point people toward Apple’s bold comittment to LGBTQ+ people on May 5, 2025 with this:

Apple is proud to financially support organizations that serve LGBTQ+ communities.

What does it mean, exactly, to support organizations that serve communities? It doesn’t guarantee a percentage of these band sales go toward organizations. It doesn’t say what percentage of the $24 billion in profit Apple made just last quarter go to these organizations. It doesn’t spell out who the organizations are and what kind of support work they do. Is Apple including donation matching from their employees when they say this?

From the 2024 Newsroom post Apple’s 2024 Pride Collection shines light on LGBTQ+ communities:

Through this Pride Collection, Apple is proud to continue its support of LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations whose efforts are bringing about positive change, including ILGA World, a global federation committed to advancing the rights of LGBTQ+ people worldwide; and the Human Rights Campaign, a global advocacy group working to ensure all LGBTQ+ people are treated as full and equal citizens. Additional advocacy organizations Apple supports include Encircle, Equality North Carolina, Equality Texas, GLSEN, Equality Federation, the National Center for Transgender Equality, PFLAG, SMYAL, and The Trevor Project.

As I said before: You are better off giving to any or all of those organizations directly in 2025 –you were always better off giving directly, but people also wanted a fun watch band. I don’t see how a new Pride Collection will provide the necessary fascist-neutral offset for Tim Cook.

Apple doesn’t even bother to spell out anything as meager as what it said last year. What’s changed? Oh right, the thing that changed is an administration threatening LGBTQ+ people. That’s definitely the time to do less when pedalling Pride merch.

Whatever Apple is donating, it is not going to offset the damage being done. Plant some more eucalyptus.

If there was a way people could buy digital Apple Watch faces with 100% of the proceeds going toward an organization then that might be an interesting twist on all of this. Buy the 2025 Trevor Project watch face, the GLSEN one, etc. Buy them all. That’s just not Apple’s business model where they control the watch faces, you get one a year, and they sell a strip of molded plastic that allegedly pairs with it.

Tim Cook is very active in steering Trump away from tariffs and other policies that threaten Apple’s finances directly, but he’s not active in steering Trump away from policies that threaten his LGBTQ+ employees and customers. I would argue that indirect threat will have an effect over time on consumer sentiment, and on employee morale.

Make sure to buy your Pride merch and wave to Tim Cook at the Pride parade. There’s no shame in being who you are, especially if you can insulate yourself with wealth.

https://snapshot.apple.com/

It’s puzzling why it would appear for public consumption in the state that it’s in. It’s already being indexed by search engines, so if they didn’t mean to release it, they might want to change their robots.txt file.

Snap Judgement

First of all, it’s a grid of pre-populated celebrities that slowly translates right to left. You can’t scroll it faster, filter, or reshuffle it. More importantly, there’s no search feature at all. So I hope you like Sabrina Carpenter and Austin Butler, because they’re the most prominently displayed celebs. Maybe Apple will reshuffle these every Tuesday like they reshuffle the TV app Home tab.

The snapshots themselves are very abbreviated artist bios that provide virtually no information about the celebrities as people. You’re better off using literally any other method to look up information on these people. Apple doesn’t even link out to Wikipedia or IMdB. Why would they? You wanted to know where Austin Butler was born and he was born in “US”. Asked and answered!

All the media that’s collected on the snapshot pages is Apple-centric. It’s a funnel to the TV app, Apple Music app, and the Podcasts app. That funnel has very limited utility to people who are not Apple executives.

For instance: Austin Butler has a movie coming soon called Eddington. A title card is displayed for it, and “Coming 17 July”. Tapping it takes you to the TV app where you can watch the trailer. That’s it. There’s no way to go from this to advanced ticket sales, or the movie’s web site, or any social media about the movie. Just that one trailer. That’s all Apple offers.

If you wait more than 30 seconds to get to Cate Blanchett, you can see that her “Newest Release” is promoted — Black Bag. For some reason it took three taps, but I eventually got the Black Bag page to load in the TV app to buy or rent it from Apple.

The Movies & TV shows are not sorted chronologically, and there’s no way to filter or force them to be, either here in the web app or in the TV app.

The same goes for Podcasts, which is even worse because it also doesn’t include podcasts that I know the celebrity was on. Cate Blanchett, for example, did a whole slew of podcasts to promote Borderlands and Black Bag but you wouldn’t know it from what’s listed on her snapshot. Searching the Podcasts app will turn up some of those more recent podcasts, but it doesn’t do it chronologically either. I can’t tell if its weighting some of the results by the popularity of the podcast, or the number of downloads of an episode perhaps?

Are they doing some kind of processing to determine whether or not a celebrity has appeared in a podcast, or merely someone is discussing the celebrity? Tagging? It would be too clumsy to just match against the text of a celebrity’s name.

In any case, Las Culturistas had Cate Blanchett on for a March 19, 2025 episode titled “Huge Fornicators” and it’s not there but episodes of other podcasts from 2020, 2023, and two from 2022. Tapping “More on Apple Podcasts” takes you to a confusing page topped by shows that have had her on, and then a bunch of those stale episodes in the episodes section below.

Curiously, a podcast that you will see come up a lot in the Podcasts section of Snapshot is WTF with Marc Maron, but Apple has no Snapshot of Marc Maron. Is that just because there are so few snapshot pages in total, or because he’s an interviewer of celebrities, but is not worthy of being a celebrity?

Where’s News+ in all of this? I don’t like News+, but I’m pretty sure some people have written about these celebrities at some point. That has a direct connection to an Apple Service, but it’s absent. Wouldn’t it be a good way to surface content locked inside of the magazines?

Beyond Apple, there’s no way to incorporate useful content that isn’t aligned with Apple’s commercial interests. Many of these celebrities have documentaries, or movies, on Netflix. They don’t get mentioned because they’re not aligned with the TV app. Then the question becomes: is the value of Snapshots to users complete information, or is the value of Snapshots merely for the benefit of Apple?

Snap to It

This is all reeks of the half-baked delusions of marketing execs, and the ensuing web app demo that was whipped up to please them. I don’t fault the developers that did the work as much as I fault the vision for the product.

The vision I would like to see, and hopefully what this evolves into, is a more fully featured component that can be used inside of apps. Like if I’m listening to a podcast in the Podcasts app that has Cate Blanchett on it, maybe I can tap through on Cate Blanchett’s name to see a snapshot. If she’s promoting a new movie in theaters I can watch the trailer or tap through to purchase advanced tickets from a ticketing app (like a partnership with Fandango, or better yet, apps can register that they sell tickets and can all be displayed).

That would also be helpful for music artists who maybe want you to buy tickets to their performances. Maybe the music artists have web sites that have additional information and merchandise.

We should also be able to see if the featured celebrity is also in other current podcasts as part of this press tour, meaning that it shows me chronologically what she’s in, not just old episodes where she’s discussing a different movie.

However, having said all of that, it’s still never going to fill the niche of celebrities and artists communicating to their fans that social networks fill. Why would anyone look at a celebrity snapshot when they can follow the celebrity —or general pop culture accounts— on social media?

Did I mention that the URLs for this incredibly unfriendly for celebrities to use elsewhere? Every person is a number at the end of a URL. It’s not their name, or a user name, or anything human. Taylor Swift is person/6667119979 which she is totally going to plug the next time she makes a public appearance.

One Ping Only

Apple half-assed their social network, Ping, which was supposed to be a way to keep tabs on celebrities. Then it tried it again with music artist updates in Apple Music —that also died a quick death.

Apple just never wants to do the work to make the platform for common folk. It seems that the thinking is that if they have Lady Gaga posting then people will visit whatever liminal space Apple creates to host that. They also don’t really have a good way to demarcate who is and is not a celebrity. Celebrity is seemingly a person involved with a commercial endeavor on a platform where Apple financially benefits.

There are a lot of celebrities on YouTube, TikTok, and other fandom groups that have small, but intense followings. Apple has no financial stake in these things. Hot Ones, the show with hot questions and even hotter wings, is going to do more for celebrities than Snapshot ever will. Same goes for Chicken Shop Date, etc.

Apple should clearly delineate how all this works. How people can register and control their online image represented and hosted on Apple’s servers. What possible value could it have to known celebrities or relative unknowns?

Barring major revisions to functionality, and a huge expansion in who qualifies as worthy of Snapshot treatment, I don’t see how this will ever be anything more than another dead-end demo. I’ve probably written more about it in this blog post than will ever be written about it in the lifetime of Snapshots before it scrolls offscreen into the sunset.

The platform introduced a “Coming Soon to Theaters” row and personalized sports highlights. It also launched short-form content rows in the All Things Food and All Things Home destinations for users to easily find smaller curated clips, from recipe tutorials to home organization hacks. It also unveiled badges to help users differentiate between free, paid, new and award-winning content.

If you have used Roku devices or TVs recently these announcements seem disproportionate to the scale of the event where Masaharu Morimoto served sushi, and puppies were available for adoption.

Continue reading on Six Colors ►

For the US, the recommendation garnering the most attention is one calling for a 5 percent levy on UK subscriber revenue from streaming video on demand services, such as Netflix. That’s because if streaming services face higher taxes in the UK, costs could be passed onto consumers, resulting in more streaming price hikes. The CMS committee wants money from the levy to support HETV production in the UK and wrote in its report:

The industry should establish this fund on a voluntary basis; however, if it does not do so within 12 months, or if there is not full compliance, the Government should introduce a statutory levy.

Calls for a streaming tax in the UK come after 2024’s 25 percent decrease in spending for UK-produced high-end TV productions and 27 percent decline in productions overall, per the report. Companies like the BBC have said that they lack funds to keep making premium dramas.

This is all very ironic if you have been following the generous tax rebates that the UK provided to lure global production to the UK for pre-production, filming, post-production, etc. They are very generous subsidies that have all kinds of little rules and loopholes that get updated over time.

Instead of lowering those hefty rebates for international productions in the UK they want to tax subscriptions of international streaming services.

In a statement, the CMS committee called for streamers, “such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+, and Disney+, which benefit from the creativity of British producers [Joe: and our enormous tax rebates], to put their money where their mouth is by committing to pay 5 percent of their UK subscriber revenue into a cultural fund to help finance drama with a specific interest to British audiences.[Joe: Unlike the content that they are paying to subscribe to which is definitely of no interest whatsoever to British audiences.]” The committee’s report argues that public service broadcasters and independent movie producers are “at risk,” due to how the industry currently works [Joe: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!]. More investment into such programming would also benefit streaming companies by providing “a healthier supply of [public service broadcaster]-made shows that they can license for their platforms [Joe: Is there a term when something goes beyond double-dipping?],” the report says.

As Scharon notes, the same applies to Canada, which has eye-watering tax rebates in Montreal and Vancouver, but at the federal level, Canada wants to slap a 5% levy on streaming services. It’s just wild.

I know it’s rich for me, a guy in a country that turned tariffs on and off like a child playing with a light switch, to comment on the affairs of other countries, but I do feel at least a little affected by it.

It’s been one year since I was laid off from my VFX studio job after being furloughed for six months due to the dual labor strikes in the US, and a possible third. What production has resumed has mostly resumed abroad. Sound stages in LA are only at 63% capacity. Post production is even easier to do outside of the US, with my former employer exclusively hiring in other countries for positions like the one I did –but I did it in LA. This is a little less like trying to bring back coal mining jobs. I’m talking about jobs that were there 18-24 months ago.

It’s darkly funny (to me, anyway) to distort a market through tax rebates on foreign productions, then swoop in and demand money from subscriptions to foster locally-owned production. If a government wants to fund the production of local culture then they should funnel their money there to begin with by appropriately taxing foreign productions instead of trying to capture the revenue, after the fact, of the foreign system they’re supporting.

At Adobe, our approach to agentic AI is clear, and it mirrors our approach to generative AI: The best use of AI is to give people more control and free them to spend more time on the work they love – whether that’s creativity, analysis or collaboration.

We’ve always believed that the single most powerful creative force in the world is the human imagination. AI agents are not creative, but they can empower people – enabling individuals to unlock insights and create content that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to and enabling creative professionals to scale and amplify their impact more than ever. For people at all levels, agentic AI’s potential makes starting from templates feel stale and old-fashioned. For professionals, it offers a pathway to growing their careers by freeing up time to do more of the things only they can do.

From Abby Ferguson’s post on DPReview covering this:

Last week, Adobe announced that a handful of AI-based features would be moving out of Premiere Pro beta. Now, the company is teasing even more AI tools for Premiere Pro and Photoshop ahead of Adobe Max London on April 24. In a blog post, the company provides a basic overview of what’s coming, promising even faster edits and helpful tools for learning.

We certainly see “agentic” used a lot these days, but most of the time it’s the retail-fantasy scenario that an LLM agent will buy or book things on your behalf. Capitalism, bebe.

This is more like GitHub Copilot in VSCode where there is a back and forth, with a result that is still something the user has control over if they choose to. The work is in layers, with edits applied in a non-destructive fashion in many cases.

Back to Abby Ferguson:

Adobe says this isn’t exclusively about speeding up the editing process. Instead, it also envisions the creative agent as a way to learn Photoshop. Given how complex and overwhelming the software can be for new users, such a resource could be helpful. Plus, Adobe says it could also handle repetitive tasks like preparing files for export.

One of the major problems I have with generative AI for images and video is that the output is basically clip-art or stock footage. It’s smearing together associated patterns it was trained on and delivering a final result. The only way to continue to edit or refine the result is through text commands which can have sweeping changes on things you did not want to change, and have no easy way to control yourself.

Solutions that integrate with an image, or video, editing workflow allow for the level of control a person might need for their job. In many cases, where some doofus on LinkedIn is asking AI to make them look like an action figure package, or for Ghibli art of their dog, they don’t care about control at all, but that’s because it’s not a job. They don’t answer to a client that wants something nudged, not replaced.

There’s no easy way to directly link to the videos from Adobe’s blog post previewing these things, but the video you want to watch is the second one under the Photoshop subhead.

There are, of course, all of the other issues with generative AI, but this type of work from Adobe is far more interesting than making the smearing machine smear better, or adding new “styles” to the smearing machine so we can all have exactly the same “art”.

It’s important to remember that if everyone can “make” the same stuff, and they all have the same level of non-control over it then there’s nothing that really distinguishes that stuff. Here’s the potential to learn and decide on the changes being made branching off using your own brain and your own skills.

I’ve periodically written about the changes to my site over time, like when I made the jump from Python 2 to 3, and transitioned servers back in October of 2023. We’re overdue for an update. Especially as I have been tinkering quite a bit, and it happens to coincide nicely with ATP’s recent episode member’s-only episode on their own sites. I might as well start from the top.

Caddy

Caddy serves the files. I had originally used Twisted on my old server, because it’s in Python, but I could never figure out how to get the certificates working in Twisted and Caddy just works. I don’t even have to know Go. I can’t recommend it highly enough if you’re looking for a simple solution to just serve files.

Yakbarber3

The python script that makes this whole mess is yakbarber.py, and then when I converted it to Python 3, I named it yakbarber3.py so I could run the two versions to make sure the output was the same (it was close enough).

It takes markdown files from /content converts them to HTML and uses mustache templates to wrap the HTML with the necessary headers, and such. Also to generate the RSS/Atom feed. The results went into /output. That’s more or less how it worked for over 10 years, and is basically how it continues to work. You can see the commits for everything as I worked through various parts of it over the past month.

The site settings live in another file and were imported with the imp module. Yes, that module is deprecated in Python 3 and it would generate a warning every time it ran, even though it would run successfully. I asked Gemini or Copilot, I can’t remember which and it suggested switching it out for importlib.util.module_from_spec() and it’s fine.

That’s another thing that’s changed in 11 years. I used to have to search StackOverflow for a problem that matched the problem that I had, or was close enough, and then try to kludge together something that fit my needs. I never figured out how to properly replace imp but I’m sure someone wrote about it somewhere. Now I can query LLMs that have paid StackOverflow and they synthesize something that more closely matches my situation.

They’ve been total horseshit at making things from scratch, and I don’t just blindly accept their output, but they do help me when I get stuck on something I don’t know. More importantly, I can look at their solution and then figure out there’s a better way to do this. I’m not “vibe coding” but it is more of a back and forth.

My feelings on LLMs are nuanced, especially where creativity is concerned. Being able to get me through a roadblock is not the same thing as “make my whole web site” which I think is a valueless proposition. Indeed, I did ask it to write a static blog generator using the same specs as my blog and it wasn’t what I wanted. I don’t see the appeal in just letting LLMs dictate the whole thing.

Watchdog

Case in point: I wanted to add support for yakbarber3.py to monitor for changes to the /content directory, or the mustache templates, and then regenerate the site automatically without me having to run the script. The solutions were to either use inotify outside of my script to run it when files were changed, or to use watchdog (a python module which would be inside the script itself) to monitor for changes. I decided on watchdog because I want to continue to refine what files are read and written to disk in the future, and this seemed like the best way to achieve that.

I used Copilot in VSCode — everyone’s raving about the thing so why not try it? It did a decent job constructing what I asked for. It would monitor those directories for changes, and only for the specified file types.

class ChangeHandler(FileSystemEventHandler):
     def on_modified(self, event):
         if event.src_path.startswith(contentDir) and (event.src_path.endswith('.md') or event.src_path.endswith('.markdown')):
             print(f"Detected change in {event.src_path}. Re-running main()...")
             main()
         elif event.src_path.startswith(templateDir):
             print(f"Detected change in {event.src_path}. Re-running main()...")
             main()

     def on_created(self, event):
         if event.src_path.startswith(contentDir) and (event.src_path.endswith('.md') or event.src_path.endswith('.markdown')):
             print(f"Detected new file {event.src_path}. Re-running main()...")
             main()
         elif event.src_path.startswith(templateDir) and (event.src_path.endswith('.html') or event.src_path.endswith('.xml')):
             print(f"Detected new file {event.src_path}. Re-running main()...")
             main()

I needed to refine the sleep interval between times it started, and I also wanted to make sure that a bunch of successive changes that happened quickly wouldn’t cause the main() loop to be triggered. Copilot suggested a debounce timer.

    def schedule_main(self):
         global debounce_timer
         if debounce_timer is not None:
             debounce_timer.cancel()
         debounce_timer = threading.Timer(3.0, self.run_main)  # 3-second debounce window
         debounce_timer.start()

     def run_main(self):
         global is_running
         if not is_running:
             is_running = True
             try:
                 main()
             finally:
                 is_running = False

Like I could study reference materials about how to implement this, but again, I wouldn’t really know where to start or what I was trying to do without a lot of other programming experience that was not going to be relevant to the rest of my life. This tool doesn’t make me a professional programmer, it just helped me with a hobby project, and I know just enough about it to understand and edit it.

Oops, All Loops

One big problem that I had not anticipated was that the script was original written to modify variables as they fell down through the functions. That meant that when watchdog would start the loop over that several variables wouldn’t be reset and would behave in an unexpected manner. Copilot was no use for debugging this. It suggested I put print statements everywhere, but it was entire blog posts, so that’s too much printing to be useful.

However, I correctly diagnosed that the problem was my poorly written code from my original script. I separated out the parts that were writing over data, and I also reduced the number of places that data was being sorted. That was tricky, like untangling cables from that box of cables that you 100% keep meaning to individually bundle.

I couldn’t have vibe-coded my way through this, but it was useful to be able to highlight a specific line and ask Copilot what the change I made would do, just to double check my work.

Async

One of the recommendations Copilot provided —you can just ask for its “opinion” on things— was that I should asynchronously render the blog post pages (not the index or the RSS feed). This was my first time using Python’s async library so I got to see how my serial scripting turned into async scripting.

It’s mostly the same, but I get to use fun words like with lock and asyncio.gather. Instead of def I get to use async def. This was not as intimidating as I thought it was going to be, and I knew exactly where it would be applied.

Changes I Rejected

There were a lot of changes that Gemini and Copilot suggested that I just didn’t feel like implementing. Gemini would just rewrite swaths of it to where the code was unrecognizable. Copilot had a few occasions where it barfed on a change (it started to reprint the imports all over again in the middle of the file).

Both of them really wanted me to move from mustache templating to jinja2. They don’t really “want” it, exactly. There’s a higher probability that someone recommended jinja2 templating, which means that I get to have that suggested. I saw plenty of people say this online in 2014 when I picked mustache over jinja2. Mustache templating suits my needs and is very easy.

Rejecting the change is simple, but it’s interesting that dogma about template preferences could steer someone who didn’t know what they wanted to jinja2. No shade no lemonade on jinja2, but it can be overkill if your templating needs are relatively simple.

Sync_to_serve

Previously, I used a bash script named site_build.sh to run yakbarber3.py and then copy all the files from output and the template resources to the directory that actually serves the files. I don’t write the files my site generates to the directory that serves them because I want to reduce the chances that something will break and then my site won’t serve any files. Also I didn’t have the mime type and redirect set up correctly for joe-steel.com/feed so the old way I did it was to make a copy of the feed.xml file that just didn’t have a file extension. Very hacky.

This superstition about keeping site generation and site serving separate meant that I wanted to replace the bash script for the always-running, always-looping yakbarber3.py to monitor for changed files to copy over. Since I was already using watchdog to do that in the site generator script, it seemed natural for me to continue with that. Thus, I put together sync_to_serve.py.

import os
import shutil
import time
from watchdog.observers import Observer
from watchdog.events import FileSystemEventHandler
import fnmatch

SYNC_DIRECTORIES = {
    "output/path": "server/path",
    # Add more source-destination pairs as needed
}

FILE_PATTERNS = ["*.html", "*.css", "*.xml"]

class FileSyncHandler(FileSystemEventHandler):
    def __init__(self, source_directory, destination):
        super().__init__()
        self.source_directory = source_directory
        self.destination = destination

    def on_modified(self, event):
        if not event.is_directory and self.matches(event.src_path):
            self.sync_file(event.src_path)

    def on_created(self, event):
        if not event.is_directory and self.matches(event.src_path):
            self.sync_file(event.src_path)

    def matches(self, src_path):
        filename = os.path.basename(src_path)
        for pattern in FILE_PATTERNS:
            if fnmatch.fnmatch(filename, pattern):
                return True
        return False

    def sync_file(self, src_path):
        try:
            relative_path = os.path.relpath(src_path, self.source_directory)
            dest_path = os.path.join(self.destination, relative_path)
            os.makedirs(os.path.dirname(dest_path), exist_ok=True)
            shutil.copy2(src_path, dest_path)
            print(f"Synced: {src_path} -> {dest_path}")

            # Special case for feed.xml
            if os.path.basename(src_path) == "feed.xml":
                feed_dest_path = os.path.join(self.destination, os.path.dirname(relative_path), "feed")
                shutil.copy2(src_path, feed_dest_path)
                print(f"Synced: {src_path} -> {feed_dest_path}")

        except Exception as e:
            print(f"Error syncing {src_path}: {e}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    observers = []
    for source_dir, destination_dir in SYNC_DIRECTORIES.items():
        event_handler = FileSyncHandler(source_dir, destination_dir)
        observer = Observer()
        observer.schedule(event_handler, source_dir, recursive=True)
        observer.start()
        observers.append(observer)

    try:
        while True:
            time.sleep(1)
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        for observer in observers:
            observer.stop()
        for observer in observers:
            observer.join()

This is significantly longer than the bash script, of course, but pretty straight forward in that it does a one-way copy, like the older script did. It just does it continuously.

CSS and JavaScript

The other thing that I’ve changed on the site is the CSS and some JavaScript. I hate JS. It’s this weird thing that looks sort of like python, but behaves in different ways. I had a very specific thing that I wanted to do, which was format the date and time displayed on each post to be localized, and also pleasant to look at. Gemini instantly kicked out the code I needed and I added it to my template.

 function localizeDates() {
  const dateElements = document.querySelectorAll('.date date');

  dateElements.forEach(dateElement => {
    const datetimeString = dateElement.getAttribute('datetime');
    if (datetimeString) {
      const date = new Date(datetimeString);
      if (!isNaN(date)) {
        const localizedString = date.toLocaleString(undefined, {
          year: 'numeric',
          month: 'long',
          day: 'numeric',
          hour: 'numeric',
          minute: 'numeric',
        });
        dateElement.textContent = localizedString;
      } else {
        console.error("Invalid date format:", datetimeString);
      }
    }
  });
}

// Call the function when the DOM is loaded
document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', localizeDates);

That only took me a decade to get around to. It’s much better now.

Likewise the CSS problems on my site were always around. I had separate font-sizes for mobile and desktop. Sometimes people would reach out to tell me that my site was rendering incorrectly, for example when they used StopTheMadness in Safari. The developer, Jeff Johnson, helped me figure out what the problem was. I had never set:

<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1.0">

So in a regular mobile Safari browser it had some weird scale which I had worked around, and now needed to undo that. It felt like a huge relief to clean that up.

Post Formatting Automations

Now that I had a site that could monitor for changes and regenerate itself without me having to sign in through SSH, I needed to make posting easier. One of the irritations with posting is that I have YAML front matter in my blog posts that needs to have certain information present.

Title: My Clever Title Here
Date: YYYY-MM-DD 24:00:00
Author: joe-steel
Category: text

There are optional YAML entries for Link which formats the post as a link-blog post with a permalink, and makes the header point to the original source. The other YAML is Image which sets an opengraph image to use for the post if I want one.

The date and time are the annoying part as the rest of it is just copy and paste. I have repeatedly made silly mistakes when I format the date and time just due to human error.

I don’t want the blog generation to write the date and time for me because I don’t want it to accidentally overwrite things in the files —right now it’s read-only when it works with the markdown.

I do want this to be multi-platform so I can write posts when I’m not with my computer. That means I need iOS support. That means Shortcuts. Sigh.

That was what that whole post complaining about time zone conversion was about. I finally conquered it and it could produce the formatted date and time on command, but it was a pain. Also I couldn’t figure out how to easily do it for a file that I had already written. It was easy to write out this stub, but I didn’t want to do that when I started writing or the date and time would be off by the time I had finished.

Drafts

That’s when I turned to Drafts. Greg Pierce does an amazing job with Drafts, but I use approximately 0.1% of its full potential. I had never successfully automated anything in it before.

Fortunately, Drafts can run JavaScript, and while I hate JavaScript, I know JavaScript can very easily handle the date logic. To protect all of the little babies, Apple doesn’t let us run JavaScript in Shortcuts unless it’s JS on an active page in Safari.

I also know that I don’t even have to write the JS. Just explain the logic to Gemini, or whatever. I also know JS can split the lines to turn the top line of the draft text into the title, and then everything else goes below as the body. It’s also amended so that it can handle the extra YAML, or if I run it again on a file that already has a header.

let options = { timeZone: 'America/Los_Angeles', year: 'numeric', month: '2-digit', day: '2-digit', hour: '2-digit', minute: '2-digit', second: '2-digit', hour12: false };
let now = new Date();

// Round to the nearest 5-minute interval
let minutes = now.getMinutes();
let remainder = minutes % 5;

if (remainder < 3) {
  now.setMinutes(minutes - remainder);
} else {
  now.setMinutes(minutes + (5 - remainder));
}

now.setSeconds(0, 0); // Reset seconds and milliseconds

let date = now.toLocaleString('sv-SE', options).replace(/:[0-9]{2}$/, ':00');

let title = draft.title;
let body = draft.content;
let lines = body.split('\n');

let yamlTitle = null;
let yamlDate = null;
let yamlAuthor = null;
let yamlCategory = null;
let yamlLink = null;
let yamlImage = null;
let nonYamlLines = [];

// Check for existing YAML-like lines
for (let i = 0; i < lines.length; i++) {
  let line = lines[i].trim();
  if (line.startsWith('Title: ')) {
    yamlTitle = line;
  } else if (line.startsWith('Date: ')) {
    yamlDate = `Date: ${date}`; // Update Date
  } else if (line.startsWith('Author: ')) {
    yamlAuthor = line;
  } else if (line.startsWith('Category: ')) {
    yamlCategory = line;
  } else if (line.startsWith('Link: ')) {
    yamlLink = line;
  } else if (line.startsWith('Image: ')) {
    yamlImage = line;
  } else {
    nonYamlLines.push(lines[i]); // Keep all other lines, including empty ones
  }
}

// Remove leading empty lines from nonYamlLines
while (nonYamlLines.length > 0 && nonYamlLines[0].trim() === '') {
    nonYamlLines.shift();
}

// Construct the new YAML section
let newYaml = [];
if (yamlTitle) {
  newYaml.push(yamlTitle);
} else {
  newYaml.push(`Title: ${title}`);
}
if (yamlDate) {
  newYaml.push(yamlDate);
} else {
  newYaml.push(`Date: ${date}`);
}
if (yamlAuthor) {
  newYaml.push(yamlAuthor);
} else {
  newYaml.push(`Author: joe-steel`);
}
if (yamlCategory) {
  newYaml.push(yamlCategory);
} else {
  newYaml.push(`Category: text`);
}
if(yamlLink){
    newYaml.push(yamlLink);
}
if(yamlImage){
    newYaml.push(yamlImage);
}

// Combine YAML and non-YAML lines
let newBody = newYaml.join('\n') + '\n\n' + nonYamlLines.join('\n');

draft.content = newBody;
draft.update();

This took significantly less time than trying to get Shortcuts to do this. It does mean that I have to use Drafts if I want access to this, but if I’m on the go, I’d likely be writing a short post, which could be in Drafts. Then I save that to my /content folder in Dropbox, yakbarber3.py sees the file, and regenerates the site, which sync_to_serve.py copies to the directory that serves the static files. It’s a simple 5-ish step process with most of it automated.

The moment where all this worked was when I wrote my link-blog post yesterday. I was a few thousand feet in the air and it published. I even had a mistake, where there was an errant new-line that pushed the Link: YAML down a line and it processed it as a regular post. I fixed the file, and it just regenerated as the expected link-blog style post it was supposed to be.

Future Plans

In the future, I want to handle draft posts with status in the YAML for draft or published. Then it can generate the page so I can check formatting without it adding to the RSS or index.

I also want to have YAML defaults for certain tags, like author, and category. It is extremely unlikely that anyone else will be writing on my blog, or I’ll use a category other than text. This YAML is a legacy of my original export and import process where I used Pelican to get my very old Tumblr posts. It’s superfluous.

I also want to handle scheduled posts with the date YAML. Where it will hold the site generation step until the time stamp is reached. Sometimes I finish writing something at night but I know no one’s going to read it, and it’ll get buried under new posts in the morning. For that to work, I really can’t have human error in the stamps.

Mastodon integration would also be nice where the blog has its own account. I might use Robb Knight’s echofeed. I couldn’t even explain why I’m not using it already.

Lastly, I need to come up with a better system to handle images. Whenever there are images on this blog I have manually uploaded them to directories on my server and then copied the paths back to put into the blog posts. It’s a very annoying step. I don’t want to just throw a bunch of images into /images because that will just be a mountain of clutter. I can always make more YAML —more YAML, more problems. I could have named subdirectories in /images that use a relative path so I could see the images in draft previews, and count on them to be copied correctly. That creates two copies of all my images though.

The important thing is that I can keep screwing around with this. It is very satisfying when I get some part of this working the way I want it to, and that makes all the frustrations worthwhile.

Again, I don’t recommend anyone do any of this, or use anything that’s here. Use Ghost, or even another off-the-shelf platform that has support so you don’t have things standing in the way of you writing your blog. Think of all the blog posts I could have written if I wasn’t trying to make sure my mustache was asynchronous?

While the ads played on, I began creating a thought experiment: There’s a $10 difference between the ad and ad-free plans. If Mr. Netflix (he wears a top hat) came to my house and said, “Jason, I’ve got a great deal for you. I’m going to pay you $120 a year, and all you have to do is watch ads while you watch Netflix,” what would I do? When I started thinking about it, I thought it might be an interesting intellectual question. What would I accept in exchange for having Mean Mr. Netflix beam ads into every show I watch?

It’s worth also thinking about every other streamer too. I know Jason’s not singling out Netflix as if it’s the only one doing it, but it certainly charges the highest premium to escape its ads.

I absolutely have to pay for YouTube Premium because the quality of the ads is so poor, not because the cuts don’t fit with the drama. Other people are used to the ads in YouTube because that’s what that experience has “always been” for them.

Also consider the gentle buzzing of incessant ads slotted into old reruns made for ad-supported broadcast and cable TV on FAST and AVOD services. It can have a very different feel because of what your personal expectations are, and your level of engagement with the programming. You’re folding laundry, so who cares how many times that Skyrizi jingle runs on the Gunsmoke channel? It’s very different from a show like Adolescence.

We know Mean Mr. Apple (he has a mostly unbuttoned shirt) might offer an ad-supported tier too, and their programming hasn’t been made with that in mind. The Apple brand isn’t really about advertising other products, companies, and services. I remain curious what that experience will be like one day when a tense moment in Silo transitions to an ad for a local accident attorney or pharmaceuticals.

First, let’s talk briefly about the part that’s not Shortcuts so you can understand where it will slot in.

I automated part of the Python script that generates my blog to do so without me having to log in over SSH and run the script myself. More on that in a future post. This was so I could write posts on-the-go. Here I am, posting al fresco, from my iPhone. The thing is, I wanted it to generate the date and time that I include in the YAML front matter of my blog.

Here’s an example of the YAML, a yample, if you will:

Title: [Title Here]
Date: 2025-03-30 14:55:00
Author: joe-steel
Category: text

It’s not a wild date and time format. It’s ISO 8601, and the system is expects it localized to my home time zone, which is in Los Angeles. That can either be PDT or PST, and it’s handled flawlessly by Python’s pytz library without any fiddly intervention from me. I want to be able to write the time out myself by hand if I so choose, and have the time and date be recognizable for me.

Shortcuts can generate the current date and time from the Date action. It can even be formatted to ISO8601 with the Format Date actions built-in “ISO8601” setting. Except there’s one teeny tiny issue: There is no way to get the current time in Los Angeles.

The Convert Time Zone action can only convert from cities in the predefined list of cities that are either capitals, or important cities. It doesn’t understand named time zones, like PST or PDT. So if you thought you were going to be clever about this by using the named time zone from the Format Date’s “Z” output then you’re going to be disappointed. It’ll say EST or EDT and there’s nothing you can do with that information at all in Convert Time Zone.

Who cares about named time zones, amirite? Picking cities is way better. Except, Convert Time Zone can’t understand or interpret just any city either. For example: If I was in Orlando, that is not in the list or preprogrammed cities, and can’t be used, but Miami, New York, Washington D.C., etc can be used. You can’t feed it Orlando as text input or anything. It will fail.

This is extremely unhelpful.

To get around this I used Date which was fed to Format Date, that was set to just get the GMT offset from the current time date-time output with “Z” and then regex (shudders) to get only the hour. That gets multiplied by -1, and fed to Adjust Date which adjusts the original Date object to remove the offset. I now have a date-time object with no offset.

I knew “Los Angeles” was in my previous list of cities so I could now use a Convert Time Zone action to convert to Los Angeles but I couldn’t pick “London” - it has it’s own time shenanigans, and there’s no Greenwich, or GMT. I asked Gemini which city has no offset, and it’s Accra, Ghana.

Save that little nugget for your next trivial pursuit game. Now that it was converted by math to GMT I could convert by “user friendly” Convert Time Zone from Accra to Los Angeles and then format the output any way I liked.

More like Apple Longcuts, amirite?

When I posted about all this on Mastodon, Elliot Shank pointed out that there was no need to use Accra because GMT was an ancient relic and I should be using UTC. There is, in the list of cities, UTC. Sure, when you search GMT it should probably return UTC, but that’s probably incredibly difficult to implement in a search function.

However, all that I got from that was that I could change Accra to UTC. I still needed to do all the rest of this bologna to get the current time in Los Angeles. So… my complaint stands.

Stephen Robles had another suggestion to use a web site’s api, but it’s just another approach that uses as many round-rect blocks of user-friendly time wasting as mine.

Am I asking for too much? Am I reaching for the stars here? Shortcuts is our only first-party automation platform on iOS, and only cross-platform one that can work on all of Apple’s platforms and it’s still lacking in the basics. You can’t find anything you’re looking for, and because of its nature you can’t easily find help.

Shortcuts has the thin veneer of user-friendliness applied to it, but under that it’s not just unfriendly many things simply aren’t possible and there’s no way of knowing. You just have to build a thing and grope around for anything that seems remotely applicable. I can’t believe the future of automation is tied to App Intents which are tied to Shortcuts and Siri. How will any of that help when Shortcuts can’t get the basics right?

So here’s a thought for those who might suddenly find themselves in charge of Siri: Search is a foundational element of smart assistants, and the current state of Apple’s search technologies leaves much to be desired.

While all today’s web search engines are placing sparkly and unreliable AI-synthesized answers above everything else, they still generally deliver solid search results underneath. Refining Siri without bolstering the foundation is a recipe for disaster.

Everyone’s making the magic box on top of their results, and Apple’s trying to only make the magic box, sans search results. Let’s get some ye olde heuristics in here first.

Matt Birchler has a tangentially related blog post about LLMs that he put up yesterday while this was being edited. I’ll link to it here for this passage:

This is one example, but I’ve also seen people try to use ChatGPT as a calculator or Claude to give them the weather at their current location, and I sigh because these aren’t the right tools for the jobs. That said, the Google search box has been super powerful at training people to expect search similar fields to behave the same. It’s not exactly better when these LLM search boxes often look like Google and have “ask anything” as the placeholder text.

The simple fact of the matter is that not everything is best solved by an LLM, but LLM chatbots give the impression that they are good for everything. A further problem is that LLMs have a hard time saying they don’t know something, so they’ll always give you an answer whether it’s right or not. This is why I find Google to be in such a spectacular position to have the best of all worlds. It knows where you are (if you let it) and can tell you the weather right now, it scrapes the web constantly so it can give you news that literally broke a few minutes ago, it can show a calculator if you ask it to do some math, and yes, it can detect if an LLM would be best suited to respond to your query and use the LLM for that specific case. That LLM is also backed by the most powerful search engine ever and can parse real time data just like ChatGPT or Perplexity, but with even better search results.

Substitute LLM for Siri and you have something akin to what I’m saying, so I don’t feel like a total crank.

I’m proud of my post as I think it makes the case well (no string and mashed potatoes). The advantage of writing for Six Colors is that Jason Snell, as Editor Supreme, can tell me what’s not working, especially when it’s the whole thing.

I totally rewrote my piece based on his feedback on an earlier draft that was too scattered and didn’t make the point I was going for. He did a nip and tuck on that draft too. I kept getting bogged down with this example and that example, and it just didn’t need it. If you think I don’t have enough examples then, oh boy do I have a folder full of screenshots for you. I’m always glad to go through this process. Hopefully it’ll make me a better writer someday, and not just a guy who rants on the internet.

My usage of the Fire TV completely fell by the wayside as they overhauled the interface to include more and more advertising. Prime Video also has ads. Everything. Has. Ads.

That Jason Snell was able to get an ad for a local mattress retailer is a pretty clear indicator that Amazon’s insatiable appetite for advertising has only increased. I even thought about reconnecting my Fire TV 4K stick so see how bad it’s gotten, but as Jason pointed out, no one’s paying me to use one.

I’ve never had personal experience with Google’s platform, and that is perhaps the most interesting section in Snell’s overview —from the perspective of someone that mostly uses Apple products. It’s not that I’m considering picking one up, but it’s just interesting.

I would caution Apple fans from skimming this and coming away with only the comforting affirmation that the Apple TV is the frontrunner in TV streaming boxes/dongles. Snell’s clearly demonstrated that the Apple TV isn’t a laggard, but he also outlined where the competition has a leg-up on Apple. Mark Gurman’s original racing analogy doesn’t work when you’re talking about devices with many features that each can excel or fall behind.

Jason’s conclusions about organizing apps and media in the same place, and about the need for a comprehensive live-guide are hardly shocking to me since that’s basically the drum I’ve been banging on for years. Maybe someone at Apple will be receptive to Jason’s comparisons?

While it’s easy for Apple fans (who are predisposed to not like, or expect ads) to point to the ads in Apple’s competition as a sign of poor quality in and of themselves, it’s worth remembering that people have different thresholds for frustration and trade-offs they will tolerate. Like I outlined in my piece for Six Colors about FAST, some people accept ads in an array of forms if their TV viewing experience is easy or inexpensive.

On a person-by-person basis there are certainly lines for what’s too much advertising, but no agreed upon quantitative or qualitative metric. Each person knows the “too much” line when they see it, and the companies all see numbers go up, or down, against other dollar signs, and engagement patterns before they decide to pull back, or push forward.

You know what they say: One man’s trash is another Mancini’s Sleep World.

It certainly took me by surprise when Apple contacted me, of all people, to be the sole news outlet to run the story about the fifth MacBook Air color being added to the recently updated line-up. Certainly they were contacting me out of deep respect, and not as a prank, right? Second, I didn’t know why this color was released so soon after the line was refreshed.

When I hopped on the WebEx call with Apple (my first, and probably only, ever time using WebEx so I savored it) I asked directly why there was a gap in product releases. I’m unclear on what part of their response I’m supposed to say since I just scribbled “Is this on background???” in the margin and never asked. It would seem that Apple wanted to release this color in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, or possibly as a condition of their settlement with the European Commission over using Ireland to dodge taxes. Or maybe it was just a coincidence? As an aside, I told them that I was one quarter Irish on my dad’s side of the family, but they didn’t have much of a reaction.

There was a mild smile, and tiny shake of the head side-to-side when I asked if this was just because people thought all the silvers are too similar. They didn’t say anything though. It was just very tense.

When I looked at the product photos Apple provided me I had to ask if they hue shifted the background and screen to be green in Photoshop or if it really was green. They assured me that there’s no mistaking this “gorgeous new shamrock”. That part they definitely told me to write down.

They were also excited to tell me that there is also a color-matched charging cable for the new hint o’ mint. All of which is available today through the Apple Store to customers.

I wondered if buyers who recently purchased a sky blue MacBook Air would feel left out, and need to trade-in their product soon, but that’s when Apple surprised me with their latest green initiative. Apple said that while a midnight M4 MacBook Air buyer would have to use the traditional product exchange process any customer who bought a M4 MacBook Air will be able to instantly exchange it for shamrock. They won’t have to go to the Apple Store, ship products, or deal with wasteful packaging.

This product swap is entirely carbon neutral and done with energy offsets only. It seemed too good to be true, but any customer that purchased their M4 MacBook Air in sky blue, starlight, or silver will receive a new receipt by email that shows that they bought a shamrock MacBook Air, and also a new green desktop wallpaper. I don’t effectively know how that changes the color, but they said it definitely does, and then said “carbon neutral” again.

I look forward to seeing the machine in person, and especially in the vicinity of other colors, so that the bold new hue will hopefully pop —or seem like it’s more than a fourth silver.

I’m glad that Scan Document function exists, and it works just fine. Bravo to the people at Apple that made it.

First, I opened the Camera app —because this is the app that takes photographs— and it wasn’t there. It’s because I’m thinking Camera -> Photo -> Attachment, when the way it works is Attachment -> Camera -> Photo.

I searched “scan a document” with Duck Duck Go, and it took me to the Apple Support document titled: How to scan documents on your iPhone or iPad. The support document started with detailed instructions on how to scan with the Notes app, and then there were instructions at the bottom for the Files app.

I followed the instructions and then went to attach it to my email with the paperclip icon, where I saw another Scan Document, which that Apple Support document neglected to mention and would have cut out intermediary steps in this instance.

Oh well, I got there in the end.

Thinking back to Apple’s statement to John Gruber boasting about Siri product knowledge, and Gruber rightfully pointing out on Mastodon that product knowledge isn’t very accurate, or helpful. I figured this was a time where I should at least try to use it. I already knew there was a support document, so it should at least send me to that.

That is what product knowledge is, after all, it’s a thing that displays part of the Apple Support document. It’s only display one thing, but it’ll do it with absolute certainty. A deep-link to the Tips app will take you right to the documentation, but you can’t share the document from the Tips app even though it also exists online at Apple’s own website. Also, for some reason, there are differences between Tips and the web, like the part about the Files app is in the web version of the document, but absent from Tips even in the latest iOS 18.3.2. If you’re looking up something on behalf of someone else and plan to send instructions to them it’s better to do that from the web, using a real search engine.

I typed my request to Siri on my iPhone and started typing “Scan” where it presented three suggestions above before I even typed “a document”. Open Simple Scan (an app I forgot I installed which would have done exactly what I wanted, sorry Greg), Open Scan+ (another app I forgot I installed, but appears to be abandoned), and Scan Document with the Files icon. That last one opens the Files app and puts you right in the document scanning interface.

As I already mentioned, that is but one of many routes built in to iOS to scan a document. There’s no way I can discover to request Notes for scanning. Any mention of “note” or “notes” makes Siri start the interface for composing a note with Siri completely ignoring the instruction to scan a document. The same thing happens if you say “mail” or “email” where it will just go right into the on-screen email composition wizard. Neither allow for attachments, which means you can’t get to the menu to scan a document for Notes or Mail.

It was taking everything I typed as a command to act on. It disregarded anything it couldn’t act on in favor of specific keywords. That’s why the mere use of “note” or “mail” made it ignore the rest of what I had said.

Speaking of keywords, in case you’re curious, from Spotlight, “Scan” shows you actions, such as directly scan in Simple Scan (which Siri does not), or directly scan into the Files app (which Siri does). Spotlight has nothing for Mail or Files. There is, however, “Scanned Documents” deep-link in notes to take you directly to things you have previously scanned.

Back to Siri: When I put the word “How” at the start of my request it went through Siri product knowledge and relayed instructions to me on how to accomplish those steps. “How to scan a document” returns the top part of the aforementioned Apple Support document, showing instructions only for Scan Document inside of Notes.

Phrasing the question this way omits the fact that Siri can open Scan Document in Files directly, or even the rest of the support page mentioning at all Files, or any other support page like you’d see if you did a web search.

If I typed “How to scan and email a document?” it gave me some abbreviated, generic instructions from the world famous scannmore.com to open any email app, and add an attachment. This is quite useless because it isn’t relevant.

If I typed “How to scan a document in Mail?” I got the incredibly verbose instructions to do that from a different Apple Support document: Add email attachments in Mail on iPhone.

I don’t know why the instructions aren’t the same, “tap the paperclip” like they are in the document, and Tips. Do any of you know the “>” is called the Expand Toolbar button? I know you know that the “>” moves back and forth every time you tap it and that it takes three taps of that shifting “>” to get to the Attach File button. There also isn’t an “Insert Attachments Action Button” but there is an Attach File, which is not what you want because the Files browser pop-over can’t Scan Documents like the Files app can. Instead of anything with “Attach” in the name you want “Scan Document” which is another tap of “>” —sorry, Expand Toolbar button.

If you scroll down in that original Siri overlay you can tap the “iPhone User Guide” (2 topics)” which shows a pop-up over the modal with truncated titles for the Apple Support documents in Tips. The first is allegedly what Siri is pulling from but the text is totally different, as I said, and the second one contains the Notes app instructions. I have no idea where Siri pulled this from. Did the team that added product knowledge do some weird logic to turn icons into words and thus mess up the meaning?

I mapped out many variations of the request here:

It occurred to me that this is why I so seldom see any of Siri’s product knowledge. I’m typing in the box like it’s a Google or DuckDuckGo search. However it accepts the text as a command, where the overriding logic is to do something —anything— even if it partially ignores the keywords in the rest of the request because certain keywords, like “how”, flip the logic gate and make it behave in a completely different way.

It doesn’t have the logic to know that it isn’t capable of fulfilling my request to both scan and email a document. It can’t revert to displaying the entirety of the support documents. The support documents are inexplicably severed into one that has Notes and Files, and one that has Mail instructions. There’s no way to formulate a request to get instructions to Scan Document in Files, but it’s also the only one that be directly opened by Siri, if you say the incantation exactly so.

This isn’t LLM-AI-AGI-GPT-Multi-Modal stuff. This isn’t trillions in funding and melting a glacier. It’s the kind of logic you’d use in a search engine where relevance comes into play. This doesn’t require years of research into a new field of study. Typing this in the blank address bar of a web browser is the level of technological advancement that outpaces Siri. Siri can’t be this picky about syntax when no one else is.

Sure, typing “Scan” and seeing “Scan Document” which launches the Scan Document function in Files is something only Apple can do, but it’s not what I needed or wanted to do in this particular case, and it is ultimately inflexible. I wanted to scan and email a document, which it can’t do, and won’t tell me about unless I use the magic word: How.

Apple’s statement to John Gruber last week that they are delaying “More Personalized Siri” has certainly sparked some conversation. With Gruber himself going on to write a pretty scathing post about this whole debacle. People certainly took note. A key part of what John wrote was that he believed in the company’s claims, because it would be unlike Present Day Apple to promote something that they couldn’t ship.

Readers of this blog, and my writing for Six Colors, might recall that I’ve been skeptical of Apple’s promises all along. I don’t get to take a victory lap for that skepticism. I’m certainly not cheering myself on for not getting useful software. Woo-hoo, look at me not getting the good stuff!

The announcement about “More Personalized Siri” fit perfectly with my expectations, which has possibly made me the person who is the least rattled by this news. The reason my expectations were so low wasn’t just because of my initial wariness, but because that wariness was confirmed by what Apple has been shipping.

Gruber details some of those features, and how there were demos, which meant that there was some reality to them. I look at it from the other side, where I’m evaluating the quality of what’s available to poke and prod at in public releases to gauge not just those features but Apple’s ability to deliver on future features.

Apple very rarely has the time to refine anything they ship. Version one of a thing tends to stick around for a long time with only extras bolted on, or omitted, because the people involved are simply too busy for a second pass. Because the bar to ship quality software is so low, and the need to revise quickly is nearly nonexistent, there was never any chance that they’d meet expectations for the robust features Apple was promising.

Let’s review what Apple actually shipped as Apple Intelligence.

Text-Based Tools

The scandal that’s received the most attention, prior to this, was the notification summary debacle. Apple tried to defend themselves from criticism by hiding behind the beta label on Apple Intelligence. Jason Snell wrote:

Beta software contains an implicit promise that the developer will actively work to squash bugs and make the product better before it goes final. Adding a warning label in the interim is an easy band-aid, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem. Apple needs to do much more work here, and if it can’t, it needs to turn this feature off until it can release a version it can stand behind.

You’ll never believe it, but the only thing Apple could do was turn the feature off for News & Entertainment apps. There’s no way to refine this to produce the result Apple had promised.

In iOS 18.1 Apple added Priority Mail, which would often prioritize scams because it registered anything with money or a date to be a priority messsage. I saw someone complain about it again today, in March, as a matter of fact.

In 18.2 Apple added categories to mail, which were not really about Apple Intelligence but kinda sorta? Cumulatively, all the changes to Mail have been pretty bad, and it hasn’t been improved. It is a feature that I have turned off. It’s only been recently shipped to the Mac and iPad, and they aren’t any better off with for it. But hey, promise to ship it is fulfilled, amirite?

Then there are Writing Tools, which is something I never think about until I go to use a context menu on iOS to copy, or translate text. Writing Tools is always there. I’ve tried to use it to proofread my writing, but it just spits back out my input and doesn’t explain why it didn’t change anything. It’s also slow, the UI is weird, it’s in a context menu, and it’s only on my iPhone because my Mac can’t run Apple Intelligence. Apple doesn’t use Private Cloud Compute to run this, but any person on earth can open a web browser and use an LLM to do the same thing Apple says you need a thousand dollar phone for.

It’s ironic that the thing that LLM’s are best suited for —mushing up some words— is pegged to hardware, stuffed into a menu, and has an awkward UI. But hey, that shipped!

Lastly, we have Swift autocompletion (which did ship) and Swift Assist (which did not). That this hasn’t shipped isn’t a huge, public-facing issue for Apple, like all the others, but it is another thing that’s damaging Apple’s relationship with developers. OpenAI shipped a ChatGPT integration with Xcode, which should be even more embarrassing. As someone that opens Xcode on occasion, and has taken stabs at writing Swift, the app is so byzantine and strange, with a bloated, overly-decorated language, that assistance isn’t the worst idea in the world.

Image-Based Tools

Image Playgrounds has received a lot of negative press, and deservedly so. The images it produces are quite bad, and because the interface prioritizes selecting photos of you, or someone you know, you get the added benefit of insulting yourself, loved ones, and friends. In fairness to Apple, this feature produces results that are very like what they demoed, because those images were just as wince-inducing. Remember Super Mom? There have been no improvements to the output in any of the styles Apple shipped. You can have “animation” which is a medium not a style, or “illustration” which always makes me look like an angry Willem Dafoe.

Believe it or not, but the image at the top of this post is from Image Playground and it was produced with the playful, bubble inputs of “chickens roosting” and “home”. This is a feature Apple demoed, put in betas, and shipped without every course-correcting. There is absolute confidence that this is what consumers want, and that it benefits them.

The same can be said of Magic Wand, which has a “sketch” style absent from Image Playgrounds. I don’t know why you can’t use sketch in Image Playgrounds, and I don’t know why you can’t draw in Image Playgrounds itself. Whatever! It shipped! It does things and went to customers! Can’t wait to see what you do with it blah blah blah!

In the grand scheme of things Image Playgrounds and Magic Wand are actually pretty insignificant because they are so deeply uncool that no one wants to use them. If you see someone post an image that looks like it came from Image Playgrounds you will judge them for it.

Genmoji, on the other hand, is what Apple has decided to lean heavily on. They can’t lean on Siri, notifications, or even the dorky awkwardness of Writing Tools. It also hasn’t improved in any noticeable way, and you can still get mangled, Cronenberg-esque images out of it, but that doesn’t matter to Apple. It shipped, put the dancing hippo on the billboard!

The feature that’s the most sound is Clean Up. It’s a decent effort from Apple. I evaluated it in a video for Six Colors. It needs more work, but it’s acceptable. As far as I know it’s not been improved since it shipped, or if it has it’s been in a way too subtle for me to notice. It will smear edges, make polygonal hashes, etc. It’s good enough, and it probably won’t be touched again for years.

Lastly, we have Visual Intelligence, which doesn’t generate images, but will tell you about an image. This is so poorly conceived that I don’t even understand how the concept pitch for visual intelligence was green-lit. It relies on using the Camera Control —you know, that mini button/trackpad that does 48 other things you accidentally bump? What’s one more overloaded function between friends? Except if you have an older phone or iPhone 16e, which will use the Action Button.

It doesn’t make it obvious what will happen when you hit the “shutter” button which captures an image for processing, not taking a picture. If there’s text, it can summarize the text, but it will only show you the summarize button once you tap the “shutter”, and won’t indicate that ability beforehand.

The same is true for translation, which is still a better experience in Apple’s own Translate app because it will show a live text translation overlay as you’re moving the camera.

Without hitting the “shutter” it will show you buttons for Ask —which will only ever ask ChatGPT, and you must agree to their privacy permissions— or Search —which will only ever do a Google image search. Both of these are inferior to using those products independently, and neither provides any of the privacy Apple has been promising about their products.

Craig Federighi leaned heavily on Private Cloud Compute in the marketing since WWDC. No one even knows what it does on a practical, applied level. It doesn’t run private image search models, or private instances of ChatGPT.

Apple did add plants and animal recognition, which was something the Photos app could do, but Visual Intelligence could not. However I have been unable to get it to appear at all, and it also killed my iPhone Photos app’s ability to do plant and animal recognition and I don’t know why.

I can take a photo on my iPhone, sync to my Mac, which doesn’t have Apple Intelligence at all, and it will show the plant recognition leaf symbol as it has done for years. So it’s not like I’m taking photos of unrecognizable plants.

This takes us to another thing about Visual Intelligence: you can’t run Visual Intelligence on a photo that you already took. Unlike a Google image search, or similar, it will only accept your fake shutter button non-photos as input. Again, this is worse than existing products.

Promises, Promises

So, just in that little run-through, you can hopefully see what I see. The problem isn’t just “More Personalized Siri” not shipping, the problem is what did ship, and what that portends for all future releases. Software quality is out the window, so for “More Personalized Siri” to not meet the low bar of something like Visual Intelligence…

The thing about “AI” (chatbots) is that it really did take Apple by surprise, but chatbots are merely a tool that can be used. The most logical place to use it is in Siri, the thing you chat with, but people are only clamoring for that because nothing Apple has done to improve Siri has been sufficient. Let’s go back to Apple’s statement, through Jacquelin Roy to Gruber, where they left him holding their bag of empty promises:

Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT.

I said on Mastodon after quoting that part:

I don’t want to minimize this effort but these have not been transformative, and I frequently see these criticized - like the ChatGPT integration getting things wrong that the ChatGPT app gets right (for those who care about ChatGPT). This hasn’t been six months of success.

What they did ship for Siri was as damning as what they didn’t. None of those things matter, or do anything significant. The only thing they did with Siri in the past year that was significant was add the new visual language for Siri. I believe every Apple pundit under the sun has been in agreement that that was a huge mistake because it signaled change where there was no meaningful change.

Last week, I asked my boyfriend what time he wanted to eat lunch. My wrist must have been elevated, and apparently Raise to Speak was enabled, even though I don’t remember turning that back on. Siri responded on my Watch with “I don’t eat or drink. But I always have an appetite for a good conversation.”

That’s conversational Siri. That’s the results of years and years of effort on Siri. That’s because of the writer’s rooms generating canned responses to questions. That’s years and years of shipping updates to Siri. That’s the full power of a fully operational Cupertino brought to bear on misunderstanding what was happening and doing what it shouldn’t.

There was never any world where “More Personalized Siri” was going to ship. Even if they had a demo, I wouldn’t have any faith it would survive in real-world use. Much like I don’t have any faith in Amazon’s Alexa+ that was very carefully announced and demoed.

I know that Apple has made many mistakes in the past —the one that this is the most similar to is Apple Maps, not AirPower— and it’s true that they have runway to continue to work on the execution.

When third party solutions fall short on Apple’s platforms it’s not a problem. When first party solutions fall short on Apple’s platforms it is a very big problem. When Copilot barfs on some code, oh well, you’ll tweak it and run it again, it’s not like it’s built into the platform. Copilot duplicating import statements also isn’t mission critical, like what time your appointment is, or when the flight with your mother arrives. There is a difference between working on a task, and living your life 24/7 with an assistant.

Threats and Partners

I don’t think that Open AI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot are a threat to Apple’s revenue. They’re going after reducing labor in the workplace, which means reducing the workforce so they can collect money from what would have been salaries for employees. That they have a consumer angle is only to reinforce their lead in the workplace with people asking to use those tools, which will cost more and more over time.

Neither one of them would do well with making a smartphone (Microsoft, especially, has learned this lesson). They can, however position themselves to sit in the place that Google occupies for providing services to consumers. This is why ChatGPT is integrated with Siri.

Meta, likewise, is not going to have another fiasco making a phone. They’re angling for synthetic “content” and synthetic accounts that people follow which can be tailored for engagement and advertising purposes. This will also be very lucrative for them without having to ship a phone.

Google’s Gemini is actually the one place where Apple needs to be concerned because Google is putting Gemini into phones. Which was part of the reason it was bizarre to hear Apple executives openly discuss Gemini as a possible candidate for their integration with Siri.

That takes us full circle to Google supplying the Maps data in iOS. A dependency that could be leveraged to get information about Apple customers, and to fortify Android as a competitor that offered the same mapping abilities for less than Apple.

How much of that is Apple hoping to shift its lucrative search deal with Google to a Siri Integration deal where they can capture sales revenue from compromised customer privacy? How much does Apple want to make an App Store for Siri integrations where they can one day financially benefit from being the middle-man?

I’d bet that’s something, but it’s probably mostly because they know they’d be able to ship it and it would look like Apple was doing visible things with Siri that were going out the door.

While no one is really going to take Apple at their word for any Apple Intelligence features they announce at WWDC 2025, they’ll be able to believe in work from third parties that already have products. The cupboards are pretty bare for anything Apple can ship, and they clearly can’t go back and improve anything.

Maybe Apple is hoping that their much-feared visual refresh of each OS will be enticing —just like the Siri glow was dangled in front of customers without Siri improvements to back it up. This turd is still a turd, but it now has an emphasis on transparency and depth.

What I’m mostly anticipating is a continued drop in quality and standards, as evident by what’s been shipped this year. On multiple occasions people have reported Apple Intelligence being re-enabled for them (even in macOS 15.3.2), or there was that time Image Playgrounds was advertised in Settings.

This transformative year, where everything got just a little worse in Apple Land. Where if you complained about Apple Intelligence online some drive-by commenter was as likely to tell you it would get better, or tell you to turn it off. Nothing’s getting better, and turning it off won’t make a problem of this magnitude go away.

The problem is that Combine Images has no control over direction. It does this pretty sophisticated image operation, but it only does it newest (left) to oldest (right). That’s asinine because we’re in a culture where you read left to right so the oldest thing should be on the left. There should at least be a checkbox to reverse the order. There isn’t. It does it that way, and that way only.

If this was Python I’d just images[::-1] and call it a day. I can’t do regex to save my life, but index slicing is a piece of cake. Even if I didn’t know the index slicing off the top of my head there’s both list(reversed(images)) to reverse a list to a new list, and a images.reverse() method to modify your existing list in-place. Any of these things you can find by using Google, or Duck Duck Go, or whatever LLM you want. There is so much good, thorough documentation.

Shortcuts is too sophisticated and user-friendly to offer these solutions.

Unfortunately, I can’t use Python to do it if I want it to work on iOS, I must use Shortcuts. I should be able to build something to reverse the order with these off-brand Duplo blocks, right? Searching inside Shortcuts yields no results for “order”, “reorder”, “reverse”. NO RESULTS, JERRY!

I asked Gemini, and it said that there wasn’t anything either, but I could construct a for loop with a counter to iterate through the list I wanted to reverse. The Dark Ages. Duck Duck Go’s privacy-focused duck.ai offered access to GPT-4o and it simply made-up “Reverse action” in Shortcuts. That’s one way to solve a problem.

I asked on Mastodon, incredulous that there was no way to do this, and Nick Foster recommended the third-party Shortcuts tools from Toolbox Pro and Actions. I didn’t love having to do it with a third party library, but Sindre Sorhus’ Actions was free, so it was worth a shot.

Sure enough, Actions has Reverse List, and it reversed the list, but Combine Images would not accept it and said that it required image data. I thought that this might be a type issue, as data passes through in a variety of formats in Shortcuts, so maybe Reverse List altered it in a way that Combine Images didn’t like. Maybe this was now a list of files? More on this later.

I went to look for something to map paths back to images, which meant I was searching for “files” based operations. That’s when I came across Filter Files.

You’ll never fucking guess what Filter Files can do. Mostly because the description for Filter Files is poorly written.

Given a list of files, this action returns the files that match the given criteria.

Sort by
Optionally, what to sort the files by.

Limit
Whether or not to limit the number of files that are passed as output.

Get
The maximum number of files.

Result
The files that match the criteria.

It’s not reversing the order, it’s Sort by: Creation Date and then the hidden dropdown for Order: Oldest to Newest appears. How did something so simple —reversing the order of a list— get turned into a bunch of hard-coded, and very specific interface elements.

But wait, there’s more! Don’t forget about Filter Images. It has an identical description for what it does. I would argue that if you have two very similar but distinct items that’s precisely when you don’t want their descriptions to match. They are mostly the same, except Filter Images includes width, height, orientation, date taken, time taken, frame rate, and duration. That’s a lot of stuff in both of these filters that would be hard to code for yourself, so it’s not like the Shortcuts team is lazy. They just didn’t execute well on making sure you could know where these powerful functions are or how to use them, or making lesser functions (like a simple reverse).

For my purposes, either Filter can be used interchangeably, but neither showed up when I was trying to find a way to do this with Gemini, searching the internet, or asking online. In fact, when I posted about finding these a couple people thanked me because they never knew these existed.

This raises questions such as:

• Why are there two of these?
• Shouldn’t there just be a way to to reorder or sort any data based on the attributes of the incoming data, and not hardcoding different filter sets that mostly overlap?
• Why don’t either of these turn up when you search for ‘order’, ‘reverse’, or ‘reorder’ when ‘Order’ is the named attribute in the secret menu that appears?

This might sound familiar if you read my rant about Search in Settings, but every part of Apple is inclined to write their own search from scratch, which means they all suck, and they all suck differently. Search is also the primary interface for building any automation in Shortcuts. If you don’t know exactly what you need you might not find it.

Connect the Dots La La La

One of the other many annoying things about Shortcuts is that when you change a block upstream of another it can break the connections that Shortcuts automatically made for you. Even if the names of the variables still match, there is some invisible connection logic that Shortcuts does. This is unlike any other scripting language where you just need to make sure you didn’t make a typo with the variable and you’re all set.

Like if I type:

my_list = [ 1, 2, 3 ]

reverse_list = my_list[::-1]

print(reverse_list)

It won’t break if I change the name of my_list to your_list as long as I do it in both places. Python doesn’t care. It’s just text. It’s not invisibly-connected text. Connection is visible as the matching characters and that’s it.

This is relevant because I noticed that even when I was passing perfectly good images from Filter that Combine didn’t want to work. There was no thin, gray line connecting Filter and Combine, but Combine had the variable pointing to the output of Filter. I even right-clicked on the variable in Combine, and did Select Variable to point it at Filter’s output but it wouldn’t connect. It showed as valid —valid is blue, if you wanted to know— but obviously the data wasn’t flowing.

I deleted the Combine and put down a fresh one after Filter, and it connected correctly. It turns out that there’s a bug in Shortcuts (GASP! Shock! Horror!) where Combine Images will permanently lose it’s upstream connection if you put anything above it, no matter what variable you select. However this only happens on my MacBook Pro running 15.3, not my iPhone running iOS 18.3, which does connect Combine Images as expected with it’s phantasmal powers.

Remember when I said I’d get back to Sindre’s Reverse List? Well it fucking works great, as a matter of fact! It wasn’t working when I put it down only because it broke the invisible Shortcuts connection, just like what happened with the Filters. I only figured it out after I went through the other steps.

It’s good to know that there’s a solution that doesn’t require installing third party tools, but the simplicity of a function that does one thing, like reverse, and it’s the thing it’s called, is something the people working on Shortcuts could surely take a lesson from. Rather than Filter Files or Filter Images, which are packed with functionality but don’t explain themselves, and aren’t as universal.

Self-Loathing —I Mean Self-Hosting

PlexAmp

I have been very resistant to using Plex. I used Handbrake a million years ago to rip DVDs for my iPod Video, and iPod Touch. It was a fuss. Plex is a fuss. I don’t want to fuss! However, people kept mentioning it to both me, and to David Pierce, that I tried it for music. After all, music should be a simpler problem than movies, right?

Plex doesn’t read any data from my Music library, or XML files. It looks at the directories and makes up its own database. This means none of my likes, stars, play counts, playlists, etc. go to Plex. I searched and there used to be an iTunes plugin for Plex, but they deprecated it.

The desktop browser interface is bad. Comically awful. They don’t even make an Electron app so you don’t have to look at the localhost address bar stuff.

The really awful part is actually the part people were excited about: PlexAmp. It’s their iOS app that requires a $4.99 subscription. Even though I’m hosting everything, I pay them $5 a month. Surely that means the app is polished? No, of course not.

It’s full of jewel-tone puke gradients. They filled the app with automated playlists that are generated based on moods from some database, and they don’t map to anything meaningful.

That this rose to the level of recommendation is mind-boggling. I can only assume that people have a deep investment in Plex for its other functions, so they are more willingly to go along with this.

Astiga

I have no problem with Astiga in theory, and the developer is a really nice guy. The easiest way to use it is to connect it to your Dropbox, but … that means that Astiga has access to everything in my Dropbox, not just my music. I asked the developer (again, he’s very nice!) and there’s no way to limit the scope like you used to be able to do with app folders for Dropbox. That meant that the next easiest/cheapest thing to do was to use a S3 bucket (not from Amazon, but from another provider) that would cost $4.99, in addition to the $4.99 for Astiga. That’s a lot to self-host music.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work super well for some of the same reasons as Plex. It doesn’t import my library XML, just the files. The web player isn’t very good. For iOS, I used Amperfy, but it also wasn’t a particularly great player, and it all seemed laggy. Either from my storage, or the off-brand bucket.

That’s just too many things that aren’t working for me to continue with it, or to recommend this kind of approach. I know people are very into Navidrome, or Jellyfin with Manet, but this is decidedly not for me.

That Syncing Feeling

I’m back to what I was doing for most of my music listening lifetime and that’s using iTunes Music, but not using Apple Music, and also … doing it in the Finder? That also means I have to deal with large parts of the Music app interface that are just billboards to get me to subscribe to Apple Music.

It’s extremely tacky, and it makes the app annoying. However, it has all my data inside of it, and it works with CarPlay. I just have to have all my music files on my device. Despite paying for iCloud, that’s for files, photos, and data, but not your music library, which is only a cloud product through Apple Music.

It really is a shame about the interface though. I’m not the kind of person that relents just because I’m sick of seeing an ad, it has to be for a reason.

Albums

The other thing that I tried out was Albums, which is not a great name for SEO, but it explains some things about the app’s design. David Pierce had linked to it, and John Voorhees had even reviewed it on MacStories in 2021. It’s really all focused on an album-centric listening experience. For example: The playback timeline is for the album, not just the song you’re listening to (fortunately, you can change that in settings).

It does have little things in the interface to encourage you to pay for a premium subscription ($18.99/year), but not anything like Apple Music does. It also seems to use MusicKit, so it interacts with my Music library without having some other method for syncing or playlists. It does have its own Collections interface if you decided you wanted to invest in that for organization, but good luck getting that data out. I’ll skip it for now.

Albums is much better than Music if you want to browse a non-Apple-Music library without being constantly pestered. It’s what I’m sticking with right now.

Purchase or Stream

As I mentioned at the start of this whole thing I don’t really listen to new music constantly, I will eventually want to listen to new music. That’s one of the things about Apple Music where I could just hit play and there it was. I also still have two subscription services (YouTube, Amazon) that stream music if I’m trying to decide to buy it, they’re just not places I want to keep a music library. As for purchasing music, Amazon still sells unencumbered MP3 files, but I’ll probably try the Qobuz store.

The unexpected thing about this whole experience of having to do library maintenance, moving around files, downloading, uploading, etc. is that I have an experience that’s centered on my library again instead of trying to get me to check out what’s new. I’ve rediscovered a lot of purchases that I had not listened to in a long while, like American Prince’s Other People, Bodies of Water’s A Certain Feeling, or Interpol’s Our Love to Admire. It’s like I cleaned out a closet and found them, except the closet was digital albums I hadn’t scrolled through recently.

Anyway, I saved $10.99 a month, or $131.88 a year which isn’t going to Apple, which is the grand total of my meager protest. I’m still paying them for iCloud+, and AppleCare. They still skim off all the app subscriptions I have (although I have moved everything I could to direct payments). I would still buy Apple products if I had to buy new hardware. There’s no chance that this amounts to anything at all, but didn’t we learn some fun stuff?

David got the same feedback I did, that people love Plex for music with the Plexamp app.

Plexamp and Roon both came up a _lot _as a way to manage and access your music collection from anywhere. (Supersonic also has some fans.) Plexamp in particular was probably the most-recommended piece of software in my inbox this week.

I don’t run a media server, so it doesn’t work for me without buying additional hardware, and managing that hardware as another project in addition to managing the music library itself. I could do that, but I could do a lot of things. Something like Astiga sounds more appealing on the surface, but the screenshots of compatible apps don’t look great, so I’m not sure it will service my needs.

David didn’t mention Deezer, which was one of the apps/services I tested, and liked the most of the three. That’s fine though, because I updated that post to mention that I’m not using Deezer after I found out more about who owns the company that has a controlling interest in it.

My Apple Music subscription is still going to lapse 2/26. I will use David’s list to test some other alternatives.

I was right that Apple Music isn’t special, and I do fee like they take users for granted — as there are a plethora of options. However, the ownership of nearly every one of these is shot through with people that support major anti-democratic politicians, or strong anti-artist policies.

A major reason I used Apple Music is because it used to be the only streaming service that could work with Siri. I’m dependent on using Siri while I’m driving. That exclusivity hasn’t been the case for some time, but Apple dragged its feet on that just long enough to ensnare some of us. Music’s not even a very good app, or service. It’s from the Eddy Cue side of Apple which makes things that never seem fully baked. It worked for a demo; ship it.

I canceled my $10.99 Apple Music subscription, and it will expire at the next renewal period in six days. That gives me a window to evaluate alternatives. If nothing works well enough then I can flip the switch back on, but it puts a certain amount of pressure on me to get off my ass (or really, get on my ass? I have to sit at the computer for a lot of this.)

Replacement Research

Many things have changed with music apps and services since the last time I seriously looked around. I gave Apple Music a go and bailed on it once before in 2015 when it chewed up my iTunes Music Library. I was on Amazon Music Unlimited once before, but they’re also a mess, and a big no-no at the moment so I shan’t be returning.

I get YouTube Music as part of my YouTube Premium subscription (I can’t watch ads on YouTube or I’ll die) but the YouTube Music experience is a mess. It’s not a fully developed product, just something where they noticed they had music and users and smushed the two together. YouTube will soon have a new plan that omits music for a reduced monthly rate that I plan on switching to. It’s called YouTube Premium Lite, which sounds like a terrible beer.

Spotify is the leader in music streaming, but I dislike the company’s treatment of artists, and how it funds people like Joe Rogan. Tidal is majority owned by Block, Jack Dorsey’s company, and there’s very little to distinguish it, and nothing to distinguish Jack Dorsey.

This leaves Deezer (which I had heard of, but don’t know a soul using it) and Qobuz (which I thought was some kind of prank name). I signed up for the free one-month trials of each service. More on that below.

I also wanted to know if I really needed a streaming service at all. When I asked on Mastodon for what alternatives people are using several mentioned Doppler as a music player for their purchased music (from Bandcamp, Qobuz’s store, or other online stores). I decided to give that a go too. It has a free one-week trial but costs $30 to buy the app.

For all three of these experiments I needed to get my data out of Apple Music. There ended up being several routes for that.

Qobuz

Qobuz has a strong focus on audiophiles and music collectors that are interested in a magazine-like approach to discovery. Major Pono vibes.

It’s worth mentioning that the service is is $12.99 a month when purchased directly, and $16.99 a month when you subscribe through Apple. Just another reminder that Apple is anticompetitive in this space. The direct subscription less if you pay directly for a year upfront, but that discount would only come into effect if I liked it after using it for a long while since the year is $129.99.

For importing music they partner with Soundiiz —one of the many music playlist transmutation services that exist— and you can import music from any supported source to Qobuz and only Qobuz without paying Soundiiz for one of their plans. The import was a little glitchy where I wasn’t sure if it had actually finished or not. Because I had started it on my iPhone I wasn’t sure if the long pauses were from the phone going to its locked state periodically, or the servers processing the data. It took a while to collect it.

They can only match music from one service to music on another service, so if the music is absent, or simply not an exact match, from that streaming service it isn’t transferred. They do provide CSV files for what it did, but it’s not very friendly at summarizing exactly what didn’t import from the songs in the browser.

The resulting library in Qobuz is mostly indistinguishable from my Apple Music Library at first glance. That’s the fun part about subtle data loss. However, I know full-well that there are many things in my library that aren’t things I listen to, or have alternate versions, so having a one-to-one copy on Qobuz is less important than it might seem.

I’m disappointed that Qobuz doesn’t offer anything for handling this import on the desktop themselves and you have to use this service they partnered with, but at least it isn’t an additional fee, and it’s not something you do often.

The Qobuz desktop app is a chromium blob thing. Fine, whatever, but on initial launch it has a modal dialog telling the user that they need to go to settings and grant the Qobuz app accessibility permissions so media playback keys will work for the app. That’s a big “no” from me. As near as I can tell, the keys work for the app while it is open, so this is more about those times you hit media playback keys when the app is not open and it would otherwise launch Music. I guess? Anyway, I’m never turning that on.

Surprisingly, Siri can’t find or playback anything from Qobuz. That’s pretty important while I’m driving the car. Articles talk about how there’s CarPlay support, and all the Siri toggles are turned to on in the preferences, but they don’t have support?

That’s an immediate dealbreaker for a music streaming service. I’m not going to pursue evaluating their music store right now, but I’d have to put those tracks in another app that has Siri compatibility to get anything out of it.

Deezer

I know, the name, but we must look past that. I would say that Deezer is more like Spotify in appearance. They want to be cool and fun. Frustratingly, they make you pick 15 artists that you like before you can do anything at all. That’s not cool and fun. Once I was through that roadblock it was obvious that the reason why they do that is so their “Flow” dynamic playlist system can work. Flow picks based on mood or genre, and uses your favorites for weighting the selections.

Deezer has an ad-supported plan with some limitations, like Spotify, but I hate ads interspersed with my music. The premium tier has more options, and comes in at $11.99 when purchased directly, or $14.99 for Apple to wet its beak. Deezer has a yearly plan for $107.99, which is a decent discount (about $9 a month) if I decide I like it.

As for importing, it’s just like Qobuz where the apps can’t import anything, but they partner with a playlist transmuting service to do that. In this case it’s TuneMyMusic. Curiously, when I tried to import from Apple Music using desktop Safari it didn’t work… It let me authorize the access, but the button to proceed after that was endlessly stuck on “Processing”. The iOS version got past that step but it wanted me to sign up for a paid TuneMyMusic plan. That’s wrong. I tried in desktop Safari again, and then I noticed there was the option to upload iTunes XML. That’s a horse of a different color! I exported a fresh XML from iTunes Apple Music, and dragged it in. Like Soundiiz, there were songs it didn’t match, but it would let you filter to show only the ones that didn’t match. It also had a single CSV export option.

Deezer does have Siri integration and works just fine with CarPlay. I do have to say, “Play Mona Lisa Overdrive by Juno Reactor on Deezer” which is quite a mouthful, but it works. You can’t argue with results.

The iOS app is quite good, and clearly where Deezer spent the majority of their time and effort. The interface is thoughtful, fun, but still very functional. I have no serious ding other than the aforementioned weirdness with the import I initiated on iOS not working.

They provide a desktop app, like Qobuz, but it’s also a steaming pile of Chromium. I’m not someone who’s an elitist about using native Mac apps, but there’s just simply nothing that the desktop app does that the browser version can’t do. Well, except for one thing: It adds itself to the login items. Yes, that’s right, every time you open the Deezer app it’ll re-add itself to the login items. You always want to have the Deezer Chromium app running at all times, don’t you?

Fortunately, because this is just a web app, I can very easily use “Add to Dock” in Safari to create an identical Deezer “app” but one that won’t insist on launching at startup. The app icon is the Deezer purple heart on a white background but its easy enough to pull the purple heart on black background from the Deezer app bundle.

Unfortunately it doesn’t have the unified playback experience of Spotify, but Apple Music didn’t have that either. Each instance of Deezer that you’re running will remember the last thing you were doing in it before it was closed, not the last thing you played on any Deezer client. There is a Deezer Connect option but it’s kind of quirky in my limited experience testing it. When I connected from my iPhone to my Mac and hit play, it played the last track I had played in the Mac client, but showed album info for something completely different in the iOS app. When I picked something new on the desktop app, while connected, then they were both in sync. Disconnecting let the iOS resume playing, but now they’re not in sync. This makes it into a strange kind of remote control. I’ll need to play with that more. Ultimately, my life will go unchanged.

Disappointingly, Deezer does default to some extremely hostile marketing defaults for your notifications.

To its credit: all the bullshit is in one spot, as opposed to Apple sprinkling different notification settings throughout the apps and Settings panes like the world’s worst Easter egg hunt.

Doppler

I’ll level with you right from the start: I absolutely do not see myself using Doppler. There’s a moment of excitement where you think about how you have total control over your library and have no recurring fees, but then it sets in that you have to manage cover artwork, metadata, and most importantly: transfer files.

I did give it a try though. After all, it’s free for seven days. I downloaded the Mac app. On launch it wanted to import my data from Apple Music. That’s great!

It only imported what was downloaded to my computer, which was hardly any of my music. That left me with a handful of tracks and only three incomplete playlists that the tracks happened to be in. I wasn’t going to listen to James Horner’s “Surprise Attack” on a loop for the rest of my life so there had to be something else I could do, right?

Well, I can force Apple Music to download all my purchased music. I didn’t want to bother downloading the tracks I don’t own, because those will stop working next week. I made a smart playlist of all my “Purchased” tracks and I hit download. Apple Music spat out a bunch of errors. Most of the tracks it was having trouble with were ones I had purchased from Amazon’s MP3 store. Amazon had a DRM-free store (technically they still do) and so I had made many purchases through them over many years. I don’t know why Apple Music won’t let me get my “matched” files back. I know it’s not a backup solution, but I wouldn’t have expected it to be a one way trip, especially since I want to keep my playback metadata that Apple Music does have.

From your Amazon Orders page you can search for “MP3” and it will bring up every order you have. If you try and click on the album it will redirect you to Amazon Music’s streaming service with its tier for Prime subscribers, and the tier for Amazon Music Unlimited. That will show you your purchased music but not everything had a download button, and didn’t have one for the whole album. It wasn’t helpful.

However, if you click on “View order details” instead of the album, then you’ll get a button to download a zip file containing all the MP3s in that order. If you bought two albums in the same order, they will be in the same zip.

I know that Sam Davis’ TypeScript project to bulk download Kindle files has making the rounds lately, in no small part thanks to Jason Snell, but I was not going to be able to modify it to bulk-download the MP3 files.

I manually downloaded each zip file, expanded them, and consolidated any artists (they have an artist hierarchy before album). Once that was done I needed to get Apple Music to point to those files instead of the “Cloud” location. I couldn’t figure that part out so I dragged the new files in and had duplicates. Yay!

There is a menu option to show duplicates in your library, but that doesn’t offer anything for merging duplicates. Instead, I went to “File” > “Library” > “Update Cloud Library” and waited for it to complete. Then closed and reopened the app. Remember all the work Apple had to do to get the Cloud Library to stop fucking up peoples’ libraries? Well, a side effect of that work is apparently that it correctly consolidated the file location with the playback information from the cloud. Perfecto.

I did a fresh XML export at this stage too.

That left me with a weird problem: There was no way to trigger that Apple Music import that I got the first time I opened the app. I could manually import the tracks, but that’s just files, not playlists. I couldn’t import the XML, it was grayed out.

Deleting the Doppler library from ~/Music didn’t do anything. However, I found in the support documents that there was a location for where you could back up your library database and that was in ~/Library/Application \Support/Doppler. Simply delete Library.dopplerdb then relaunch Doppler and it’ll give you that onboarding screen. I pointed it at Apple Music again and this time it got all my purchased music files from both Apple and Amazon.

Unfortunately, this is when I realized I couldn’t go back to files. Doppler on the Mac uses a completely separate app called Doppler Transfer to send files to the iOS version of the Doppler app.

Doppler doesn’t have any kind of cloud syncing, and it can’t use iCloud for seamless storage. This was like handing me a butter churn and a tricorn hat. This is why we all got away from files. There isn’t even a sync, where I can make some set list of what to transfer and what not to like you used to do in iTunes.

I did all this work, so at least I have this at the ready, if the world ends, but I still have electricity, I can listen to the album “Ta Dah” by the Scissor Sisters.

Everyone Loves XML

Another benefit of the XML export still existing in the Music app is that it retains so much data that can be transformed into ways to put your mind at ease about transitioning to other platforms. The XML itself is not particularly helpful to look at, but I know that it can be transformed into something else I can sort more easily.

I asked Gemini for a python script to turn the XML file into a CSV.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import csv

def xml_to_csv(xml_file, csv_file):
    """Converts iTunes XML to CSV."""
    try:
        tree = ET.parse(xml_file)
        root = tree.getroot()
        tracks = []

        for track in root.findall('.//dict/dict'):
            track_data = {}
            for item in track:
                if item.tag == 'key':
                    key = item.text
                elif item.tag == 'string' or item.tag == 'integer' or item.tag == 'date' or item.tag == 'true' or item.tag == 'data':
                    track_data[key] = item.text if item.tag != 'true' else True # Store True as boolean, data as string

            if track_data:  # Ensure there's data for this track
                tracks.append(track_data)

        # Get all possible keys (columns) for the CSV. This handles cases where
        # not every track has the same fields.
        all_keys = set()
        for track in tracks:
            all_keys.update(track.keys())
        keys_list = sorted(list(all_keys))  # Sort keys for consistent column order

        with open(csv_file, 'w', encoding='utf-8', newline='') as csvfile:
            writer = csv.DictWriter(csvfile, fieldnames=keys_list)
            writer.writeheader()
            writer.writerows(tracks)

        print(f"CSV file '{csv_file}' generated successfully.")

    except FileNotFoundError:
        print(f"Error: XML file '{xml_file}' not found.")
    except ET.ParseError:
        print(f"Error: Could not parse XML file '{xml_file}'.")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"An error occurred: {e}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    xml_file = "YouriTunesLibrary.xml"  # Replace with your XML file
    csv_file = "itunes_tracks.csv"  # Output CSV file name
    xml_to_csv(xml_file, csv_file)

I modified that to handle the files better and put it inside of a Shortcut that works as a quick action. There’s unnecessary stuff in the python, but I didn’t want to waste time dicking around with it. I can open the CSV in Numbers and create a pivot table of any of the attributes in the data that I want to sort or filter by.

Like lets say that I want to know what songs I had in my Apple Music library that I did not purchase. These would be pure streaming adds. Purchased is either “TRUE” or no value. In the pivot table, I just collapse “TRUE” and I have everything else. There’s more I can do to sort and filter. Like if I want to see ones that I played often, or recently.

I have no plans to make purchase decisions based on this right now, especially since I’m using Deezer for the time being, but it feels a little comforting to have something I can look through more easily than the XML file. Even if you don’t have any plans of leaving Apple Music you can export and look through the XML. Kieran Healy and Doctor Drang could make some graphs or something.

Win Me Back, Apple

I absolutely won’t rule out returning to Apple Music —after all, I did it once before! Right now though, it makes me feel a little more in-control of expressing my dissatisfaction with a company. I don’t owe Apple fealty. They have to convince me to give them money, particularly if its for something as generic and uncompetitive as Apple Music.

No one at Apple will care about me unsubscribing, or even notice in the aggregate of users joining and canceling every month. This isn’t an “every vote counts” situation.

Surely, once I publish this, I’ll find out Deezer has contracts with Elon Musk, or murders babies, or something.

UPDATE: I was right. While I knew that 41% of Deezer was owned by Access Industries Investment Fund I didn’t go to the next level of research, as Patrick Toomey pointed out, the owner of Access is Len Blavatnik. See, I knew something bad would surface! I will not be pursuing Deezer further. Blavatnik also mostly owns Warner Music Group, and finances films for A24. Fun!

There’s never going to be a pure, saintly, capitalistic streaming service. I don’t want to pirate anything. I don’t really want to manage files. All I can do is make a choice that works best, not perfectly, for my circumstances and goals.

If anyone else feels similarly, you’re free to use this to help guide you in any way that it benefits you. If not, I hope my woke-flailing is at least entertaining.

They may very well turn it on later, like, let’s say if Apple is actually shipped a tvOS update that completely displaces the old home screen, and reduces visibility of their app at all. However such a move is just as likely to hurt the commercial appeal of the Apple TV for customers that find Netflix’s mediocrity essential. This “error” may never see the light of day again, or it could be flipped back on any minute now.

Google Maps is where my boyfriend and I go to check location information, and to collaboratively edit the Google Maps List of places we plan on visiting. I have talked about this extensively in my travel posts. Apple has walking direction previews for the Apple Watch so you can keep your phone in your pocket while you walk around the gray slush of New York City in the winter.

There I was, entering the long name of a place in Apple Maps that I had just entered in Google Maps, with my capacitive-friendly gloves that don’t work well for small tap targets, and it occurred to me that there had to be some way to automate this. That meant my old nemesis, Shortcuts.

Google Maps doesn’t immediately expose a traditional Share Sheet when you share a location. In the upper right corner of the location information is the sharrow which brings up a modal preview card for the location, and three buttons to share this place, copy link, or share as a collaborative list. Sharing this place finally brings up the Share Sheet.

What the app shares is a shortened URL, like this one:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/8YUvDPbQPrasqC528?g_st=ic

Fortunately, Shortcuts has a URL expander. The expansion of that example URL gives us this:

https://www.google.com/maps?q=Aux+Merveilleux+de+Fred,+37+8th+Ave,+New+York,+NY+10014&ftid=0x89c259957da502cd:0xed3eb58a4ca08a95&entry=gps&lucs=,94255440,94242598,94224825,94227247,94227248,94231188,47071704,47069508,94218641,94203019,47084304,94208458,94208447&g_ep=CAISEjI1LjA1LjMuNzIwMTgwNTk0MBgAIJ6dCip1LDk0MjU1NDQwLDk0MjQyNTk4LDk0MjI0ODI1LDk0MjI3MjQ3LDk0MjI3MjQ4LDk0MjMxMTg4LDQ3MDcxNzA0LDQ3MDY5NTA4LDk0MjE4NjQxLDk0MjAzMDE5LDQ3MDg0MzA0LDk0MjA4NDU4LDk0MjA4NDQ3QgJVUw%3D%3D&g_st=com.apple.shortcuts.Run-Workflow.(null)

What an ugly, but extremely useful URL. The name of the location is in the URL with + in the place of whitespace. Unfortunately, this meant I needed to use regex, and even worse still, use regex in Shortcuts, which for some reason requires two steps: Match Text (for the regex), and Get Group From Matched Text (because Match Text returns a list, even if it’s only one item).

The one thing LLM’s are good for is writing regex. I asked one to write me some of The Devil’s Language, and I got (?<=q=)([^&]+). I do a simple replace on + to and I have a totally normal location string.

Aux Merveilleux de Fred, 37 8th Ave, New York, NY

This is fed to the the Open in Maps Shortcut block. I have it set to walking directions because that it is my use case, and I wanted to reduce prompts, but it could just as easily ask the user. All I have to do is tap those share buttons, the shortcut, hit “Go” when Apple Maps appears, and then I’m off to the races. No typing things over again.

The shortcut works great, although there’s no easy way to only surface the Shortcut only when the Google Maps Share Sheet is up. Because it’s a URL, any other sharing function that uses a URL will display this. I did build an if statement to make sure the input is the expected URL format, but that’s not the same thing as only showing the button when it’s applicable to do so.

It was a little disappointing that I built this on the very last day I was in New York, but I’ll have it ready for the next time I travel, and you can too.

I tried not to be too wordy, but if you’re following this blog I assume it’s because you’d like me to elaborate on my comments, so I shall. The two things I would like to talk more about are the Apple TV, and Apple’s impact on the world, because I feel like I have a little more to say about both.

Apple TV

The full text of what I submitted about the platform:

Apple really isn’t making any progress on tvOS. I use my Apple TV every day, and it is the only set-top box I would recommend to people, but that doesn’t mean Apple perfected the form. Things are more or less in the same state they were in at the end of 2023 when the Home app was updated with that sidebar that mostly can’t be customized. We still don’t have a unified Home and TV app experience. We don’t have anything for live entertainment short of sports notifications. We don’t have any kind of firm policy on pause screen ads (see the YouTube screensaver controversy from 2024). Apple hasn’t enticed anyone new to add support for the jog wheel they introduced on the remote in 2021.

Sometimes people mention me in regards to my critiques of the Apple TV, and tvOS, but I honestly don’t talk about the platform much these days because there’s nothing worth discussing. My last major post about any of it was prior to WWDC 2024 where I talked about all the things that I didn’t think would be announced. It was quite an extensive list of tvOS shortcomings. I don’t see any reason to repost that every time a point update comes out for tvOS merely to say none of it has been accomplished.

It’s the only smart TV I use, or currently recommend, and the only one I would buy if I had a sudden need for coverage in another room with a new TV. I wouldn’t even consider the built-in software from any TV manufacturer. Most of the world is perfectly content to use those built-in options though instead of paying Apple.

Jason Snell announced on Upgrade that he’s doing a deep dive on all the other streaming platforms right now and I look forward to hearing more about his thoughts. I gave up using the Fire TV because they’ve made the home screen experience worse with every software update, but it does have things like a universal live TV guide that Apple doesn’t. Apple skipping live TV continues to be a huge mistake.

Apple’s Impact On the World

This part of the survey is incredibly broad and encompasses many disparate parts of how Apple runs its company. Maybe it really should be four questions about our perception of: company culture (union-busting, return to office, etc.), green initiatives (carbon neutral Apple Watch), geopolitical issues (DMA, China, Trump), and accessibility. I feel like I, and many of the respondents, have conflicting feelings that kind of all cancel each other out when these things are mixed together like various acids and bases. It leaves us with foamy mess.

I’m of two minds when it comes to Apple’s green initiatives. I think they’re great, but they do design systems where the whole thing has to be recycled instead of upgraded or easily repaired. I believe political and policy stances are really where Apple fell short in 2024. Notably with the European Commission and the trials involving the justice department. Like when we all found out how many billion dollars Google pays Apple to be the default search engine. At present, I can’t say I’m optimistic about the direction things are heading in terms of other political and policy decisions.

That’s an uncharacteristically wishy-washy answer from me. In fairness to me, I was treating it like a review of 2024, not everything that bled into January 2025. To quote another response from Philip Michaels:

Given the current state of affairs in our new kleptocracy, I imagine this score will be very different in a year.

Certainly, if I was responding to “Apple’s impact on the world” for January 2025 alone then I would have written a shorter version of my Tim Cook failing us blog post. The survey was completed before that.

Allow me to digress for a moment to address some feedback that I have received along the lines of, “What do you expect? He’s a CEO.” I expect exactly what I wrote: that Tim Cook meets the ideals he expresses.

When people shrug off things like the inauguration it lets the good stuff people say about Apple’s global impact (carbon neutral products, accessibility, etc.) stick to them, but the bad stuff (being associated with the administration erasing of trans people from existence, persecution of immigrants, using the social platform of an unelected private citizen ransacking the government to post about being in a Severance promo, etc.) roll right off.

If there’s nothing that can be said about Apple’s impact on the world to persuade anyone at Apple to pursue a different course then why do we talk about their developer relations, or image playgrounds, or anything else related to Apple? Of course we want them to change what they are doing. When people complain about Tim Cook transacting with Trump, it’s not because they’re naive.

Last week, I asked the hosts of The Rebound podcast a few loaded questions about Tim Cook, and I thought there was a good conversation that ensued from it. Lex Friedman, Dan Moren, and John Moltz all had thoughtful things to say. (No, I didn’t just ask so they’d mention my blog post.)

I hope we can all think more about Apple’s impact on the world, whether or not we participate in this survey specifically. Much like Phil, I imagine the score will be very different next year, it’s already different for January.

I don’t have any way of knowing what Tim Cook’s thought process was when he agreed to give a million dollars to the inauguration fund, or to know with any certainty why he agreed to travel to Washington to sit shoulder to shoulder with the other CEOs all vying for preferential treatment from the President.

In absence of knowledge there is supposition. Maybe he’s doing it to persuade certain favorable conditions on tariffs with China? Maybe he wants to the DOJ antitrust litigation to fizzle out, or be undermined? Maybe he wants retaliatory threats against the EU for DMA troubles?

In 2017, under the last Trump administration, Tim Cook wanted the corporate tax rate reduced so Apple could bring all the money it was holding overseas back to the US. To “invest” in America without investing in the institution of America by paying taxes. Apple knows best what to do with Apple’s money —especially when it is stock buybacks.

In 2019 we were all treated to the infamous “Tim Apple” sideshow as well as the Mac Pro assembly plant in Texas. Tim Cook debased himself for this publicity stunt about American manufacturing in an attempt to dodge tariffs. Don’t forget that that was while impeachment proceedings were moving forward against the sitting President.

Tim is not subtle about these transactions with Trump. They are transactions where he gives Trump something and he gets something in return. Various pundits might analyze who really got the most out of each of these transactions but Tim certainly isn’t getting something for nothing.

Another charitable reading of Tim Cook’s actions, that I heard put forward by John Siracusa on ATP the other week, is that Tim is minimizing damage that Trump can do. I don’t personally believe that to be the case, since we can easily look back to Tim’s previous transactions with the Trump administration and see they’re primarily about tax avoidance and tariff dodging for Apple specifically. There is no evidence that any damage has been minimized or will be minimized in the future.

One could compartmentalize it and say that Tim has a fiduciary duty to his employees and his shareholders to transact with the President. However, I would counter that Tim has a duty to his employees and shareholders when it comes to protecting their rights and personhood here in America. Something that Trump has sworn to threaten, and has already moved forward with in his executive orders which his cabinet is enacting. Also, don’t forget that between the last time Tim cozied up to Trump and this most recent occasion, there was that whole insurrection. That has to be in the calculus somewhere.

Why Focus On Tim?

They’re all doing it! I know that, you know that, so why do I care so much about Tim specifically? Tim is a gay man who came out in 2014. It was huge news at the time and even deeply moved me. From Tim in 2014:

Throughout my professional life, I’ve tried to maintain a basic level of privacy. I come from humble roots, and I don’t seek to draw attention to myself. Apple is already one of the most closely watched companies in the world, and I like keeping the focus on our products and the incredible things our customers achieve with them.

At the same time, I believe deeply in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, who said: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’ ” I often challenge myself with that question, and I’ve come to realize that my desire for personal privacy has been holding me back from doing something more important. That’s what has led me to today.

Gay men, particularly cisgender white gay men, like Tim and I, have an amazing ability to abandon support for everyone else in the LGBTQIA+ community. Tim purports to celebrate and support the entire community.

Being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day. It’s made me more empathetic, which has led to a richer life. It’s been tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple.

Apple has sold Pride Apple Watch bands since 2017, and they program in little Pride Apple Watch faces every year. Apple has participated in the San Francisco Pride Parade since 2014.

How should people reconcile Tim’s explicit support of Trump with his support of trans and enby people working at Apple, buying products from Apple, and attending pride parades with Apple?

For those unfamiliar with the specific language of Trump’s executive order on Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government it is a really thorough dismantling of federal support for trans and enby people through the fun-house mirror of women’s rights. It is a reprehensible piece of work that will be fought in courts that have a lot of Trump appointees in them, especially at the highest level thanks to Mitch McConnell and Trump’s first term appointments.

Back to Tim in 2014:

The world has changed so much since I was a kid. America is moving toward marriage equality, and the public figures who have bravely come out have helped change perceptions and made our culture more tolerant. Still, there are laws on the books in a majority of states that allow employers to fire people based solely on their sexual orientation. There are many places where landlords can evict tenants for being gay, or where we can be barred from visiting sick partners and sharing in their legacies. Countless people, particularly kids, face fear and abuse every day because of their sexual orientation.

I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.

Don’t worry though! The San Francisco Pride Parade will be June 28th-29th this year so go to that and watch Tim smile and wave! Don’t forget to buy this year’s hottest new Pride band showing Apple’s support for the community!

From the 2024 Newsroom post Apple’s 2024 Pride Collection shines light on LGBTQ+ communities:

Through this Pride Collection, Apple is proud to continue its support of LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations whose efforts are bringing about positive change, including ILGA World, a global federation committed to advancing the rights of LGBTQ+ people worldwide; and the Human Rights Campaign, a global advocacy group working to ensure all LGBTQ+ people are treated as full and equal citizens. Additional advocacy organizations Apple supports include Encircle, Equality North Carolina, Equality Texas, GLSEN, Equality Federation, the National Center for Transgender Equality, PFLAG, SMYAL, and The Trevor Project.

You are better off giving to any or all of those organizations directly in 2025 —you were always better off giving directly, but people also wanted a fun watch band. I don’t see how a new Pride Collection will provide the necessary fascist-neutral offset for Tim Cook.

Sam Altman and Peter Thiel are gay so why don’t I give them a hard time? Because no one expects Sam Altman or Peter Thiel to be good people with any kind of conscience. They don’t pretend to be at all. They are cisgendered homosexual men that insulated from any anti-LGBTQIA+ bullshit by their wealth. Being gay is not something they use to understand others in the world, but a taunt they assert because they have so much money that there’s nothing anyone can do to them.

Tim is also insulated by wealth. The thing about Tim is that he clothes himself in caring about these issues. Merch isn’t caring.

Likewise, we turn to the Republican war on DEI, where they are aggrieved about not being able to get their unqualified white kids into schools as legacy admissions, and handing them jobs, but they frame this as “merit based”. Zuckerberg readily, and quickly complied with dismantling Facebook’s DEI efforts to win favor with Trump.

Apple has not done that, and some people think not dismantling things counts as action. It doesn’t count when you show up to lend credibility to these policies and these people. Apple bloggers pointed to Apple issuing guidance against the anti-DEI shareholder petition recently as positive, but again, Apple doesn’t want anyone telling Apple what to do regardless of subject matter.

Again, there’s Tim, figuratively clothing himself in the quotes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Monday. Clothing Apple’s home page in it. Then showing up to Trump’s inauguration like the words of MLK can do the work that he will not.

Another thing Dr. King wasn’t too fond of was police sweeps. Let’s not forget the efforts to secure the border through Trump’s other executive orders which have resulted in an increase in ICE raids in an attempt to see if they can catch some people.

One of the detainees was a U.S. military veteran “who suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned,” Baraka said in a statement. “Newark will not stand by idly while people are being unlawfully terrorized.”

In response, ICE said, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may encounter U.S. citizens while conducting field work and may request identification to establish an individual’s identity.” The agency added that this was the case during the Newark raid.

These ICE raids terrorize people, intentionally so. They drag US citizens as collateral damage like a net trolling for fish. Here’s a heartwarming story about ICE agents being turned away from an elementary school. I wonder how many of the elementary school kids use Apple products?

So yes, I do hold Tim to a higher standard than these other robber barons, but that’s because Tim claims he holds himself to those high standards. I am measuring him against the ruler that he has provided and he comes up short.

What To Do

I’ve seen people call for Tim Cook to resign. I stop short of that at the moment. While I am pissed off, I am also pragmatic. What would be the result of his resignation? Would someone better equipped to protect Apple’s interests while also protecting Apple’s customers and employees? I’m not so sure there is.

No, what I would like to see is Tim standing up for what he purports to believe in. Not speaking about things that have inspired him, or donating to charities as some kind of fascist-neutral offset, but devising a way to argue for the protection of human dignity for his customers and employees from this federal government. If he can transact a tax holiday, or tariff carve-outs, he can figure out what to wheel and deal to protect people. Many of whom are his employees and customers.

If that is too hard, or he’s worried the board would oust him, then I wonder what the point of his wealth and power is if he will only use it for more wealth and power? It is not easy to stand up for people on a national stage, but it is orders of magnitude easier for him than it is for people down here where we are.

I know that things are tricky internationally. Apple operates in places that have had policies in place for a long time that aren’t like what we have (had) in America, but I would say the distinction is that people had access to things that are being taken away from them now. America is also where Apple is headquartered. Pointing at other, more restrictive countries is not an excuse to stand with Trump.

Tim concluded his 2014 Bloomberg Businessweek column with:

When I arrive in my office each morning, I’m greeted by framed photos of Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy. I don’t pretend that writing this puts me in their league. All it does is allow me to look at those pictures and know that I’m doing my part, however small, to help others. We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.

You can afford more bricks, Tim.

There is, unfortunately, no effective way for us to persuade Tim with anything other than our words of criticism. Because none of these tech CEOs are any better. We can’t take our stuff and go somewhere that’s speaking out to protect us. We can reduce spending, sign up for fewer Apple services, but that’s not going to move the needle. Again, as futile as it sounds, we should rely on accurate, incisive criticism.

I don’t mean name calling, or throwing pies (although pies would be kinda funny), but serious critiques of Tim’s statements and actions, as I did above when pointing out his hypocrisy.

When Tim posts on X Apple bloggers should write about how Tim continues to use Elon Musk’s propaganda machine instead of publishing through other means. Every time he does it. They should not uncritically produce a blog post for their content mills that’s just an exercise in padding out the X post into something they can run some ads against. If you’re writing anyway you can spend that time productively instead of being a passive funnel.

When Tim is in a promo video for Severance - a show about people severing themselves to compartmentalize their work and personal lives — we should be able to say something about how Cook has compartmentalized his belief in equality with his belief in Trump. We can especially do that when all of those things happened in the same week.

For some reason Apple fans are much more comfortable discussing the minutiae of Apple Products than they are discussing Tim’s and Apple’s political maneuvers. I know they are not politically savvy pundits (I include myself in that), and they may not like politics but they’re not AI experts, and that doesn’t stop them from spilling ink about AI.

It is incumbent upon me, and you, and all the other Apple podcastoblogosphere nerds who have read this far to not just take Apple’s press releases and media events as things to cover that exist in a vacuum outside politics, and in isolation of the dignity of the people using the products and services. Particularly when Tim Cook starts to get what he wants from his transactions with Trump. We should ask if it was worth it and remember what Tim has condoned to get it.

The very least that Tim can do is endure valid criticism. He is undeserving of adulation or being placed on a pedestal as a role model to gay men. That is part of the price he is paying here. We will not give him his flowers.

That might seem meager but unlike Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and especially Elon Musk, I believe it is possible Tim Cook does care about how both he, and Apple are perceived. Definitely not as much as he cares about Apple’s finances and ability to exert control, but it’s in there somewhere. That is part of the marketing, after all. If there is no truth in that, and he doesn’t care, then that would be worth knowing as well.

Will anything rise to the level that Tim uses his wealth and power to protect us from the inevitable further erosion of our rights? I don’t know. The one area where it is possible is privacy. Possible, but not guaranteed.

Where’s the line for Tim? I’m not sure Tim knows. We should help point it out to him, because he’s standing on the other side of it.

• When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature – like all Apple Intelligence features – is a beta.
• You can now disable notification summaries for an app directly from the Lock Screen or Notification Center by swiping, tapping “Options,” then choosing the “Turn Off Summaries” option.
• On the Lock Screen, notification summaries now use italicized text to better distinguish them from normal notifications.
• In the Settings app, Apple now warns users that notification summaries “may contain errors.”

Additionally, notification summaries have been temporarily disabled entirely for the News & Entertainment category of apps. Notification summaries will be re-enabled for this category with a future software update as Apple continues to refine the experience.

In my opinion this doesn’t go far enough in addressing the problems that will persist with this headline feature of iOS. Let me run through the bullet points again.

• Making it clear that it is a beta is not a solution, but a deflection of blame. As Jason Snell has noted, this is a shipping, heavily advertised feature of iOS and of the iPhone in particular. This is not a feature confined to the beta releases of Apple software where it’s kept until it works. The beta distinction is meaningless, particularly to the general public.
• Will Apple go through the effort to explain to the general public that they added an option to disable the summarization per app from a notification? That doesn’t seem particularly discoverable since it didn’t previously exist. Also the ability to turn off summarization for an app does not improve summarization in any way — like reporting an error to humans at Apple would do.
• Italicizing the text is drawing a more noticable distinction between the LLM output, and the straight-up notification when placed side-by-side, but how many people will directly connect, “sometimes my notifications are italic” with summaries?
• Putting a “may contain errors” warning label in Settings is an ass-covering move and doesn’t do anything to help people make a decision. They don’t articulate anything about error rate, or what inputs might be prone to error. This is as ineffectual as the beta tag, which it is synonymous with.
• Speaking of categories of apps: The decision to omit the news and entertainment categories from summarization is an effort to reduce the criticism from news organizations. It doesn’t mean the other categories of apps fare any better at summarization.

Also, it doesn’t help that these notification summary errors have persisted for months and have only received these surface-level adjustments in a developer beta that might not come out for one or two more months to the general public. Despite the heavy coverage that this post from Chance Miller will get, current events are not materially any different for the news organizations like the BBC, or for users.

Treating the Symptoms, Not the Cause

The 18.3 changes don’t really address the root issue which is not, “how can we use this LLM that summarizes things to reduce notifications?” But rather, “How can we reduce unnecessary and disruptive notifications?” Remember that the software features allegedly exist to solve problems, so we should take a step back and look at the problem before we keep picking apart the solution they shipped.

People receive notifications from apps that are a mix of relevant, and irrelevant. They could be something time-sensitive, or just some idle chatter. Apple makes no real attempt to weight those notifications, other than when it tries to determine if something is time-sensitive (it’s usually because the message has a time or date).

It doesn’t filter anything unless you use the Reduce Interruptions Focus Mode. That doesn’t actually filter or otherwise reduce your notifications, but delay when some notifications are shown to you. This is like having an email client where you can toggle on spam filtering for a bit, but when you toggle it off all the spam just shows up in your inbox. You wouldn’t expect an email service or client to do that, but that’s how Reduce Interruptions works, and you’ll get those notifications poorly summarized to boot!

For example: I, along with almost everyone else in California, got a spam text message from a +63 phone number (that’s the Philippines) that was summarized as “FasTrak Lane fee payment due on January 14, 2025 to avoid late fees and legal action.” The full message included a scam URL and all that, but Apple saved the day by summarizing the scam as if it was genuine. Another iPhone owner in the Six Colors Discord got the same message with tiny all-caps gray text “MAYBE IMPORTANT” at the top.

The solution isn’t to summarize the scam. It is not to deliver the scam later based on Focus Mode settings. It is to not deliver scam at all. Even the most basic email spam filters wouldn’t fall for the stuff that Messages passes on. The Messages app knows better and doesn’t make the URL a tappable link, and it has “Report Junk” right there, but Apple can’t connect the dots.

When I wrote about the changes to the Mail app, and it guessing Priority all wrong, it was also for a spam message. Don’t summarize or otherwise lend legitimacy to scams by operating on them as if they were any other input, or worse, getting tricked into thinking there’s something time sensitive about it just because they included a date.

There’s also spam promotional marketing notifications from apps you have installed on your system. If an app doesn’t have specific settings for specific types of notifications then you get to make the totally binary choice of turning notifications on or off for that app. This is like completely deleting all correspondence from a company, or allowing everything they ever wanted to send you to reach you. Again, Apple doesn’t do anything to help users here. It’ll just summarize all of the notifications without any kind of screening.

In that category of wanted notifications, there’s apps that send quite a few in succession as status changes occur, like Flighty. Summarizing isn’t helpful because the older statuses are no longer relevant or accurate.

Attempting to collapse all the old status updates with the current status produces a totally useless summary. I could selectively remove Flighty from summarization, but now we’re back to Apple not solving the problem.

Apple applied every “AI” thing they could to their iOS 18 release cycle, and that included this heavy reliance on summarization as a feature. I really hoped that they wouldn’t, but they did.

Putting warning labels, italicizing, removing news apps, etc. doesn’t solve the problem Apple claims they set out to solve. I don’t suddenly have a bunch of free time because summarization has unburdened me from junk notifications. It hasn’t.

Conversational Unawareness

Apple isn’t just attempting to summarize automated messages and scams, but also back-and-forth conversations. It’s about getting a vibe of what’s happening in the conversation and how important it is that you open the app to read what’s going on. The summary will never be able to replace the conversation in total.

For Ivory, my Mastodon client of choice, I have notification summaries enabled. Apple Intelligence has no insight into the conversation at all, or even that there might be concurrent conversations. It can only operate on what comes through as an unread push notification while the app was closed. Ivory helpfully displays the avatar of the user replying, but Apple Intelligence can only condense that down to show the most recent avatar, making it look like Jason Snell said all of this.

I had asked for book recommendations on Mastodon, and Cory recommended The Expanse. I told Cory I read most of it and stopped. I closed the app. Along comes Austin, he recommends The Expanse again, and he says that the “borrow in times” instead of “borrowing times” in Libby are over-inflated. Then he sees what I said to Cory, and replies again to say “nevermind” about The Expanse. Jason Snell separately replied to the original post and recommended Kaiju and Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Apple mushed that all together.

Again, I can see how it happened, and this isn’t even an offensive example of a summary, but it isn’t helpful either. If I had a human assistant to read and summarize these messages the human wouldn’t have mentioned The Expanse at all, and would have corrected “borrow in” to “borrowing” as well as concoct a viable sentence. A human might go a step further to attribute the statements to the different people making them and not displayed the avatar or implied it was all from Jason. For example:

Austin: Borrowing times in Libby are over-inflated.
Jason: Kaiju and Starter Villain recommended.

Apple’s less-than-helpful summary is 100 characters and 14 words. My more useful version is 97 characters and 14 words. Why string together everything with semicolons? Go with the full colon, I always say.

The model has no insight into the conversation taking place, like a human observer would, and it can’t omit part of the conversation (The Expanse). It can’t understand that “John Scalzi’s books” is way more than the two Jason singled out, but it knows John Scalzi is an author of books. Thanks? This is stuff Apple could tweak with weights and training data, but it might just result in slightly different mush since there’s no access to the full, and concurrent, conversations. There’s no understanding that this is a conversation and should be treated differently from unassociated notifications from the same app.

Just Turn It Off

Let us not forget that the solution to disable the feature selectively, or whole, just makes people wonder what it even is we’re all doing here? If you turn off every iOS 18 feature that’s Apple Intelligence related (or loosely related like Mail Categories) then what is Apple Intelligence for? What is iOS 18? Where’s the software edge that Apple has to justify their premium pricing?

Maybe the target market is people that don’t notice when things are wrong, and won’t be adversely affected by factually incorrect notifications. I certainly have pretty exacting standards, but not everyone is so fussy. Perhaps we should all lower our standards while Apple slaps “beta” on their headline features? It’s only Apple’s brand on the line, not mine, I can always turn it off. I can always skip buying the next iPhone that has more neural engine cores, because from where I’m sitting they’re not being applied in any way that benefits me.

What Do I Use It For?

It’s the primary venue for finding out about what’s happening in the lives of friends and family —that might sound familiar because that was allegedly what Facebook was for. It’s also a place where I can find relevant information on a business or restaurant —how many other people checked a restaurant’s Instagram to see if they had special holiday hours, or menus for this past holiday season? Most important of all, it’s a place where I can go to see photos of nice architecture, cute dogs, and an algorithmic spray of filler.

I seldom post to Instagram, unless something good, and visually interesting is going on. My Instagram has been private for many years. The prospect of strangers liking a photo I took is less appealing than battling bots and spammers.

The place where I socialize on social media is Mastodon. It used to be Twitter two years ago. I want to figure out what to replace Instagram with, just like I did with Twitter.

Some people socialize through Instagram Stories, but not me. I’ll watch the things to find out what’s happening, but it’s really more of an inbox than an outbox.

Why Do I Want to Leave?

Mark Zuckerberg has proven himself, time and time again, to be unscrupulous. He’s got no scruples. Not a single scruple. Scruples see Mark and hide.

He responds to external pressures on his company by complying with what he thinks will make people ease-up, or respond more favorably to the company. There’s no shortage of news about the changes that are being made right now. None of the changes are good, or even neutral.

One thing I didn’t mention above is that Instagram wants ad dollars and engagement (more ads). It profiles users not just to match ads to, but it attempts to match posts, and reels to as well. Any gay man on Instagram has been served up a bevy of thirst traps in sponsored posts, and the Explore tab. Meta is very comfortable monetizing LGBTQ+ users, even though they are quick to sell them out.

The worst outcomes of Zuckerberg’s policy changes won’t be immediate, and other cis, gay men might think they’ll just wait around and see how bad it gets, but we should all have learned a valuable lesson already about these social platforms.

What I’m Looking For

The replacement should be a federated network (likely fediverse) with data portability. I don’t want to invest in a closed social network ever again. That means no Glass, or Retro.

Pixelfed was not something I felt compelled to try previously because it was web-only and felt very much like a Linux app clone of a Windows app. Today, they launched their iOS app so I finally signed up to give it a go.

It has some bugs and isn’t really ready to take on Instagram right this minute. The app flat out ate two posts I tried to make without even serving an error message. The photo selector only lets you pick one photo at a time to attach. It doesn’t faithfully preview the attached images. It doesn’t seem to have any HDR support. The app can’t upload videos, but the web site can. You can’t upload images from your Camera app via a Share Sheet extension.

Some of the bugs, and shortcomings of the new Pixelfed iOS app can be routed around by using Ivory (thanks for the tip). Ivory logs into pixelfed just like a Mastodon account. It can’t attach as many photos to a post as the Pixelfed app or site can, but it worked for posting four photos, and didn’t eat the post like the app and site did.

The biggest problem, as a photo-centric network and app, is that the uploaded photos are low-res and compressed to hell. I know that media storage and bandwidth are expensive, but there isn’t any kind of “pay more for full quality” option like you’d have with Flickr’s freemium model.

To go along with that, it’s got the same problem Mastodon has. The main server, pixelfed.social, is taking the brunt of new sign-ups. Just like mastodon.social takes the brunt of new Mastodon sign-ups. It is extremely unclear which community server to join. When I mentioned this on Mastodon I was chided for not setting up my account on gram.social run by Stux the admin of mstdn.social, but… how could I be expected to know any of that to make a decision about account creation?

The server problem on Mastodon was solved when some of my friends banded together to get managed Mastodon hosting from masto.host. We have duck.haus for our Mastodon server needs, and don’t have to worry about having a second career as a server admin. I don’t see managed hosting options for Pixelfed right now (my duckduckgo search turned up one from elestio, but I didn’t see any other mentions of them so I’m not confident enough to give them a spin).

It also has an issue that’s typical of Mastodon as well. I can’t specify a “close friends” group. I can post something that only followers can see, but then I’m back to individually screening my followers to figure out how much personal information, like photos of family members, I want people I don’t know very well to have access to.

Lastly, Pixelfed.org, and Pixelfed.social are owned by Daniel Supernault, in a very similar way to how WordPress.org and WordPress.com are Matt Mullenweg’s. That gives me pause because Daniel has posted some things that didn’t fill me with confidence about him running a thing I’m investing my time into. There was apparently a dust-up as recently as two weeks ago over Loops (Daniel’s fediverse TikTok clone) that was mostly deleted. Daniel did leave up a poll on Mastodon.

So many ppl want me to quit or otherwise not participate in the fediverse.

Do you agree?

That… is not inspiring.

Like WordPress, if things ever got bad people can take stuff and go, but that portability doesn’t mean that it’s going to be smooth, and drama free —look at Matt again.

Why Not Mastodon?

While I was able to use Ivory to post to Pixelfed, and while I have managed hosting for Mastodon, Mastodon and Ivory are not made for Image galleries, and their social feeds are not optimized to show you that media exclusively. I’m a big believer in siloing what I’m doing by app.

Having said all of that, Pixelfed is currently the frontrunner, but that’s mostly because there’s not a lot else in this field that I am aware of. I’m hopeful that if someone starts up a dependable, managed-hosting business that it will help. Possibly another iOS app, too.

I’ve been doing a little blog post series on travel that’s mainly focused on the technology side of things. There was France, Japan, Switzerland, and now Hong Kong.

Planning Ahead

Drafts

Jason didn’t prepare a detailed itinerary for this trip like we had for the others so there was no Google Sheets document to deal with. I collected names of coffee shops, cafes, etc. as we watched travel vloggers on YouTube by just adding them to notes in Drafts. I used a tag to filter for the notes when it was time to incorporate them into a Google Maps list. Drafts is so nice.

Google Maps Lists

The Lists feature in Google Maps is indispensable at this point. I created a Hong Kong list, where I added the places from my Drafts, or any other place that seemed interesting, along with a note about the place to jog my memory about why it was included. Jason was able to collaborate and view everything in the list, and the way the list is visible on the map as little emoji dots is always helpful to see if something else you wanted to do is nearby.

Apple Maps Is Still For Planning

This isn’t breaking news at this point, but just like before, the Guides feature remains awful. You can’t collaborate, or do anything you can do with Google Maps Lists. The whole thing is still built under the assumption that you’re a publisher arranging a travel brochure.

Also, every time I go to LAX I get a push notification about how I can “Explore a detailed airport map” but the other than zooming and panning the map can’t actually be used for any kind of navigation. Searching for gates does really bizarre stuff, but for some reason you can flip through a list of all gates? I don’t get it. If you can’t tell me how to move from my location to another location inside the airport than this hardly merits buzzing my wrist —once again. Google can’t do walking directions in the airport either, but it doesn’t send me push notifications claiming it can.

Mercury Weather

This is a must for any upcoming travel. It’s in my Smart Stack widget on my iPhone and when we start to get close to the travel dates I can see what the weather forecast will be in that other location to begin adjusting my expectations ahead of packing, or other considerations. I prefer Carrot to Mercury for my actual weather, but Carrot doesn’t offer a comparable trip feature.

Octopus

No, not the cephalopod, but the Hong Kong transit card. Like the transit cards in Japan, you can load up a transit card with money and then use it for everything from transportation to vending machines, or even restaurants. In fact, several restaurants we ended up going to would only take cash or Octopus.

Unlike Japan, you can’t simply add an Octopus card to your Apple Wallet and fill it up with money via ApplePay. Well, Apple has instructions that say you can, but Octopus requires a Hong Kong issued credit card for that. It has the most confusing error if you try to do this without a HK credit card in your Wallet because it says you need to add a credit card. I do have credit cards, of course, so this was a pretty bad error that the documentation doesn’t make very clear.

There is an Octopus for Tourists app — no, that’s really what it’s called. That app can be used with international credit cards to load up an Octopus card and then add that to your Apple Wallet, which you can then transfer to your Apple Watch. Remember that these cards have the ridiculous restriction of only being on one of your devices.

I used the Octopus for Tourists app, and I wasn’t phished, which was great. Jason, however, couldn’t get it to work for him with any of his credit cards. The Ocotopus for Tourists app has a pretty low rating in the App Store with many reviewers running into this, or other, issues.

We were a little concerned that only one of us had an Octopus card before the trip, but we were hopeful that he would be able to at least get a physical one when we got there.

Turns out, that we never did, because some of the turnstiles (all of the Star Ferry ones, and a couple per MTR station) take tap-to-pay international credit cards for fares. That would have been really useful to know before we messed with Octopus for Tourists, etc. I’m imparting this knowledge to you, dear reader. Just know that if you don’t get an Octopus card that you should plan on withdrawing some Hong Kong dollars to use on your trip for certain restaurants, etc.

Up in the Air

Flighty

All the flights go in Flighty. We were flying United, and United has done a pretty good job with Live Activities in their app. So much so that it’s not worth keeping both the Flighty Live Activity and the United Live Activity going at the same time. Each one does the silly thing were it counts down the flight time to the second. Sure.

Watch

I still wish that the Apple Watch had some understanding of the flight I was on. For the full duration of the flight it thinks I’m in Los Angeles, which is just absurd. On this trip I decided it would be best to set the Watch to Do Not Disturb and put it in Theater mode so I wouldn’t see the watch face. I wanted it to record data, but the notifications for standing reminders never come through at a good time, so why buzz my wrist for them?

Roaming

I’m still roaming when I travel. I’m too spooked to use eSIMs. Sorry if you think I should, or just want me to write about it, but I’ll continue to just pay a ton of money to not deal with it.

Apple Maps and Google Maps

Google still beats out Apple for us, most of the time, but I still give Apple Maps a try periodically while traveling. Having all the data in Google Maps because I used Lists for planning, means I’m more likely to use Google Maps.

Pedestrian Bridges

Both Apple and Google provide adequate walking directions in Hong Kong, but they could both be better about pedestrian bridges. Hong Kong Island has a ton of pedestrian bridges and in some cases they are the only way to cross at an intersection. Both maps apps show little stair step things and mention going up or down, but they draw the route as if it was a flat line, and a flat walk. This tripped us up a few times where we’d look at an intersection in a map app and then get there to find out we had passed the staircase entrance for the pedestrian bridge.

It was good that we were never truly lost, or stuck anywhere, but this could be better. My favorite shot classification in VFX is CBB - could be better. It’s good enough to be final if we can’t get something else in time. That’s certainly what both feel like when it comes to pedestrian bridges.

Ferry

The Star Ferry operates out of Tsim Sha Tsui on the Kowloon Peninsula and either takes you to Central or Wan Chai on Hong Kong Island.

A curiosity of both Apple and Google Maps apps is that the Star Ferry is considered walking directions, not transit. If you put in a destination on one side of Victoria Harbor and starting point on the other, then both apps will show you walking across the harbor along a Star Ferry route. If you pick transit, both apps will show the subway (MTR) routes only.

The only other times I’ve taken a ferry have all been about getting to a ferry terminal and waiting, as if it was a train station or airport, so I’ve never seem it used like this. I couldn’t say if this was typical but it certainly wasn’t my expectation when I was wondering why the Star Ferry wasn’t showing up for routing in transit.

Because this counts as walking, it also doesn’t describe anything about the ferry fares in the app. Not that it should really expect anyone who thought they were going to walk across water that they needed to pay for that, but it’s just odd.

MTR

The metro subway system in Hong Kong is very, very busy –especially the Island Line— and the facilities are all much more like my experience in Tokyo than Paris, London, or New York.

Above ground, you have multiple entrances and exits that have an assigned letter and number. Every subway station has two kinds of turnstiles. Both types accept the aforementioned Octopus travel card (or virtual Octopus card), but there are usually only a couple that can accept tap to pay credit cards.

Because I had an Octopus card in my Apple Wallet on my Watch, I was able to use any turnstile. Unfortunately, because Jason didn’t have an Octopus card he always needed to look for the specific tap-to-pay turnstiles which were sometimes around a corner. Not a big problem, just something to be aware of when you’re in a big crowd of people rushing through the station.

There are numbered gates for entry and exit from the subway cars. Everything is very clearly labeled inside the station.

Google Maps still offers an advantage over Apple Maps where it says how crowded the trains are expected to be. Unlike Tokyo, Apple doesn’t integrate with the transit card to tell me about my card’s balance. A feature Google can’t compete with, but since it’s absent, it’s a win for Google.

Apple and Google still have the weirdest system for walking directions to and from transit stations. I really wish that it treated the train station interiors, and the walking direction portions, like it treats those types of directions in the walking mode. In transit mode it’ll show a path and say walk to the station. Simply walk to the station!

It’s a baffling choice, in all cities. On a few occasions I’ve set the destination as the train station for walking directions, then switched to transit directions once I got there, and back to walking directions when I exited the station. It should really be a seamless experience.

Reviews

This is still a major point of contention between me and Apple Maps fanboys. I prefer to use Apple Maps for CarPlay, and it’s great for walking directions on my Apple Watch, but when it comes to accessible location information while I’m traveling, Google Maps trumps it every time. It’s a good thing that Apple works with local providers, when available, to surface local review web sites. In Hong Kong, Apple works with OpenRice, and that’s a good thing for Hong Kong residents with iPhones.

However, I am traveling, and there is a language barrier to reading OpenRice reviews that I can not easily get around. Just like I said in the Tokyo blog post. Unfortunately, it seems that because of something about how the OpenRice pages are encoded, I can’t translate the web page like I was able to do in Japan. OpenRice also has a very junky site full of pop-over web ads so it’s no fun to navigate around on either.

Apple still doesn’t offer the ability to translate a review inside of the Apple Maps app, despite showcasing that possibility in a demo app in the Translation API video from this past year’s WWDC. It’s a real shame.

Google, however, has a very accessible set of reviews for every location. Reviews aren’t just if a place is “good” or “bad”. I don’t watch movies based on their Rotten Tomatoes score.

I didn’t come across a single place that uses Apple’s absurd Ratings system in Apple Maps. In Switzerland that was infrequently, and unreliably used. If Apple is accumulating any kind of useful information from Ratings, I don’t know what it is, or what it will ever be used for. Maybe they can average the scores for entire cities, or just average out all those thumbs up and thumbs down for a rating of Earth.

Macau For a Day

We took the ferry to Macau and experienced some oddities that we didn’t encounter while we had been in Hong Kong. Both are special administrative regions that have (theoretically) their own government systems, but they are separate from one another as well. When we arrived in Macau and left Hong Kong data behind, I got an error message from Apple Maps that my offline map for “Los Angeles” is not available in this region. Weird!

My offline map data for the Hong Kong and Macau region was available to me in Google Maps, but I neglected to set up offline maps in Apple Maps for the area. It was a good thing I had the Google ones, because despite having that roaming cellular reception, we couldn’t get either Maps app to work with live maps data, like to pull up reviews, or business hours. We did at least have addresses and our Google Maps Lists. Neither of us had ever experienced this before, but the second the ferry got back into range of Hong Kong cell towers everything was back to normal.

Hong Kong Disneyland

I’m convinced that Disney’s international apps are bad on purpose to make the US ones seem good in comparison. The Tokyo Disneyland app is terrible, even though Tokyo Disneyland isn’t run by Disney. The HK Disneyland app is bad even though Disney theoretically has ownership. The HK Disneyland app requires setting up a separate Hong Kong Disneyland account. It also uses Baidu for the interactive map of the park, so you either agree to let Baidu have access to your location data, or you don’t get the map. I elected not to get the map.

This is all immaterial though because nothing actually uses the app. Everything is done with QR codes. Your ticket, and any additional passes you purchase, are in PDFs. Every ticket taker and ride employee scans the various QR codes that you have. I couldn’t perceive any benefit to using the HK Disneyland app, or even bothering to download it. You might as well not have it.

We didn’t even need to know the ride wait times because nothing ever got busier than 35 minutes, and the park is so small you can easily do everything once in the morning before things even get that busy.

HK PhotoPass

Jason had booked early entry for the park, so we did the ride that seemed like would get the most crowded later first, the Frozen ride. There is a nice little drop in the water boat thing, and they take a picture. Not a foreign concept to theme park attendees at this point. They have a video wall where they show the photos of people from the ride, and you can pay extra for a photo pass. We made several incorrect assumptions that lead me to purchase the pass. We thought that other rides took photos —none did, not even the roller coaster. The only other use for the photo pass was to line up to take photos with characters, or to line up to take photos with the castle, or the Christmas tree. We didn’t want to do any of that so I really overpaid for one photo.

The other thing to know is that you have to download the HK PhotoPass app, and create another account. None of this stuff is linked! Fortunately, I’m using Hide My Email for all of it, but it’s really sloppy.

Translation

Both Apple’s Translate app, and Google’s app with its camera translation worked just fine. In contrast to the Japan trip, the translations from Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese, both worked fine whenever either or both were present. We didn’t seem to have any peculiar idioms or expressions. This was, of course, probably aided by us not needing to rely on translation as much as we did Japan. It’s a former British colony so English is pretty pervasive in signage, and menus.

I still have a slight preference for Google’s app over Apple’s, but that’s a very unscientific preference. I do wish both saved their results to the camera roll though instead of needing to screenshot the translation I was seeing. Especially when you tap that “shutter” button.

Apple and Google also default to the text based Translation view when I open the app, even if I was last in the Camera view. If either remembered what I was doing the last time I used the app then I’d award 10 points for that.

iOS 18.2 wasn’t released until weeks after my trip, but I’m glad I didn’t install the beta expecting Visual Intelligence to do anything translation related, because it doesn’t.

Photos

I’m still taking my Sony a6400 with me, and my Sigma 18-50mm lens, along with Rokinnon 12mm. I only really used the Sigma on this trip. The big thing that’s different is that I had an iPhone 16 Pro this time. That changed my photography quite a bit from the prior trips that all used my iPhone 13 Pro.

Camera Control had no impact on this trip, or how I use my iPhone whatsoever, but the ability to edit photographic styles after I take a photo did make a big difference. The iPhone’s default settings are too aggressive at tone mapping and evening things out. I have found that I generally prefer Amber, with a lower tone setting, but that’s not always true, and I don’t want to fiddle around with it while I’m take a photo.

HDR, Lightroom, and Instagram

I mostly didn’t care about HDR output before the iPhone 16 Pro because everything was so even the highlights didn’t pop. You just had a generally bright image with more bright stuff. Bright with extra bright. Since I can get more contrast through the tone controls, and adjusting the various color settings, I can get more of a “pop” in HDR now with the iPhone 16 Pro than I felt like I was able to get previously.

Instagram also supports importing HEIC files, and if you mix and match HDR HEIC files with SDR files then you get odd-looking results.

This made me try to get HDR output from Lightroom again. Lightroom has supported HDR editing for a while, but the formats you can export to are not ones Instagram is friendly with. It can’t export to HEIC, but will export to tone mapped JPEG, JPEG-XL, and AVIF. I can get something exactly like I like it with HDR editing but then export it to (non-HEIC HDR Format Here) and Instagram will read it as if it was SDR. Which is better than what it used to do when it would render JPEG-XL and AVIF files as green and magenta streaks. Progress.

I’m not quite sure what to do about that because I do like to edit my photos in Lightroom’s iOS app. That’s not just out of habit, it really is actually a good editor. I even bought a USB-C to SD Card adapter to replace my Lightning one for this purpose.

Photomator

This is a strange time to get on the Photomator bandwagon, what with Apple recently acquiring it and all. It’s future as anything like the current app seems uncertain. However, I had downloaded it for the Clean Up comparison test video I made, and found myself giving it another try.

I’m a big fan of siloing things for different purposes, and I liked having my heavy camera raw files somewhere else (CreativeCloud Storage) instead of in my iCloud storage, mixed in with all my other photos of receipts and grocery store shelves.

This time around I found that I liked the iOS app more than the Mac app, once I figured out that there was a toggle to get it to handle HDR. This meant I could edit iPhone 16 Pro HEIC files with more precision than the Photos app without having to send them to Lightroom, and then back to my Camera Roll in a totally different format. It also meant when I uploaded them places it would be treated like the rest of the iPhone HDR photos.

I feel pretty certain that Apple will keep a standalone pro-editor of some sort that’s outside of Photos. It can do so much more than what people need (like the subject masks). I definitely see a case for selectively taking features and putting them in the Photos editor instead of what’s there now, but it would be overkill to do all of this.

Calculator

I am a huge fan of James Thomson’s PCalc, but there’s a new trick in the Calculator app I didn’t know about. It can handle currency conversion. I hadn’t heard anyone mention this in the Apple podcastoblogosphere, but my boyfriend told me about it because he saw it in an Instagram Reel. This was a huge help in Hong Kong because currency conversion is not the kind of thing I can do in my head easily, and I didn’t want to memorize the rate.

I didn’t actually use the Calculator app to calculate anything. It just sits in currency conversion mode now. That’s more use than the Calculator app’s seen in years from me.

Back Home

I’m always pretty anxious about traveling, but I do like to experience being somewhere new. I am greatly appreciative of any technological advances that alleviate some of the stresses travel can bring me. I look forward to doing more travel in the future.

Make Fetch Happen

Since iOS 18.0 I have been experiencing an issue where I will receive a Mail notification for a new email, but when I open the Mail app it hasn’t fetched the message. It’ll take 30 or so seconds for it to connect to the mail servers and fetch them. I have no idea why I have a notification, with part of the message text, for mail that I don’t have in hand.

This didn’t appear to be widespread, so I thought it might just be server hiccups. Then my boyfriend started complaining about the same issue with his Gmail in Mail, which isn’t the same service I was having a problem with, and our accounts are not shared.

While he was still on 18.1 last week he had a day where he wondered why he hadn’t gotten any emails, or notifications. He opened Mail and it downloaded 28 unread messages.

Both of us have our email accounts set to fetch every 15 minutes. I have no explanation for why it wouldn’t have downloaded messages from hours ago, nor an explanation for why it would have notifications that it would summarize but no mail downloaded for it.

I kept thinking that the updates that would roll out this fall would just iron it out, but they haven’t. In fact, my friend Ry complained that Mail in 18.2 was failing to fetch his Mail until he opened the app too, and that was working for him prior to 18.2.

Apple Unintelligence in Mail 18.1

Before complaining about my new woes in iOS 18.2, it’s worth remembering that because of the rush to release the promised Apple Intelligence features iOS 18.1 dropped with email preview summaries, notification summaries, and an Apple Intelligence Priority feature that would highlight important messages you should read first.

The notification summarization was typically pointless for me, but harmless. I left it on out of curiosity, and it never did anything too weird. Huge win.

However, the Priority feature spectacularly malfunctioned on its first run and picked The Most Obvious Spam Email That Ever Existed to highlight as a Priority.

It’s a bummer that this spam got through the spam filters to make it to my inbox, but the decision to put it in the limelight wasn’t helpful. Bestowing Priority status to spam is an egregious error because in less-completely-obvious circumstances it makes it appear as if Apple is vouching for the credibility of the email.

We can argue about semantics, because Mail isn’t saying the message is Verified, Certified, Official, or anything of the sort. Apple is merely saying it’s Priority, which implies importance only in the order you deal with your mail. However, I would definitely argue that declaring it Priority is an endorsement of the message and the sender, because the opposite of Priority is the stuff in my Junk folder, which the system does not notify me about in the slightest, and it is where this message should be. Elevating it in any way is wrong, and potentially harmful over leaving it as a peer with other unread mail.

MindNode founder and developer Markus Müller-Simhofer reported that he’s getting Priority fraudulent email in the macOS 15.2 version of Mail, which didn’t get the same alterations as iOS 18.2 so who can tell if this feature is even in sync across Apple’s platforms? As Craig Hockenberry notes, “Apple is adding legitimacy where there is none.”

I haven’t received another Priority scam email in iOS 18.1, or 18.2. Mostly it highlighted routine emails that were of no importance, but harmless. Its performance as both unimpressive, and unreliable means I’ll always hesitate over anything this system declares as a Priority.

If only there had been some kind of beta program that this thing could go through until it was ready for release. Not simply until an arbitrary, calendar-based goal for “good enough” was hit. More on that in a second…

I am watching films that were made for TCL, the largest TV manufacturer on Earth as part of a pilot program designed to normalize AI movies and TV shows for an audience that it plans to monetize explicitly with targeted advertising and whose internal data suggests that the people who watch its free television streaming network are too lazy to change the channel. I know this is the plan because TCL’s executives just told the audience that this is the plan.

This is, of course, related to what I wrote about yesterday. TCL is not using Sora and Veo to achieve their goals, but a mix of generative AI tools piped through other generative AI tools by people to achieve a final output.

You can check out the credits on the YouTube videos to see how many people worked on it, and their roles. Times are tough, and I know we all have to find work where we can, even if it’s this stuff.

As Jason notes, the level and degree of involvement of human beings is not guaranteed, and this must be the bare minimum TCL execs felt they could get away with. The shorts largely contain mostly static or movement that I would describe as sliding/warping. They take advantage of output that is generic, mushed together from other imagery. Like when that disturbing girl in “Sun Day” looks at her swole father slowly drift towards her and only his mouth warps to give the semblance of a lip-synced performance.

I will not mince words in my thoughts about the final pieces produced: They’re vile, lifeless things. They illustrate exactly the shortcomings of this approach, and the bankrupt motivations behind it.

Not to get too personal, but based solely on Chris Regina’s words in this piece, I’m not a big fan of Chris Regina.

A few weeks after the screening, I called Chris Regina, TCL’s chief content officer for North America to talk more about TCL’s plan. I told him specifically that I felt a lot of the continuity errors were distracting, and I wondered how TCL is navigating the AI backlash in Hollywood and among the public more broadly.

“There is definitely a hyper focused critical eye that goes to AI for a variety of different reasons where some people are just averse to it because they don’t want to embrace the technology and they don’t like potentially where it’s going or how it might impact the [movie] business,” he said. “But there are just as many continuity errors in major live action film productions as there are in AI, and it’s probably easier to fix in AI than live action … whether you’re making AI or doing live action, you still have to have enough eyeballs on it to catch the errors and to think through it and make those corrections. Whether it’s an AI mistake or a human mistake, the continuity issues become laughter for social media.”

Chris, and his fellow TCL employees, are aligned in what I can only describe as career motivated delusion. They believe people want the TCL TV to be on, producing motion and sound of indeterminate quality or meaning. They picked some numbers that show that. There’s no commitment to make anything good, as much as there is to make the minimum viable product they can use with advertising. Many advertisers, of course, would like to pay for placement in things that have personal appeal to a specific audience, so I don’t understand why TCL execs are so excited that their TVs are used so indiscriminately.

As for the obviously terrible quality, Jason brings up the ol’ “this is the worst it will ever be” chestnut, and Chris agrees, and elaborates. What’s left unsaid with TCL’s approach is that this is the best the TCL Channel will ever be, because it’s optimizing for this quality level. They’re setting this as the bar. If Chris is to be believed, and that TCL will always employ roughly this same number of people to make something, then that would indicate to me that they’ll simply be able to make more videos of this quality, not the same number of videos at a higher quality.

We’ll have to check back in on this prediction of mine, but nothing TCL is putting out there tells me that their ambition exceeds the minimum effort.

The release was also five days after Google made their video generator, Veo, “available” by launching a private preview. I thought it was already privately previewed for Donald Glover who they said was making something with it at Google I/O.

Hilariously, The Verge published this waaaaay back last week:

With Google’s video model now in the wild, OpenAI is notably behind its competitors and running out of time to make good on its promise to release Sora by the end of 2024. We’re already seeing AI-generated content appearing in ads like Coca-Cola’s recent holiday campaign, and companies have an incentive not to wait around for Sora – according to Google, 86 percent of organizations already using generative AI are seeing an increase in revenue.

Oh no! Everyone who can’t be in the Veo preview, or missed the ability to sign up for the few minutes Sora was available is missing out on the random factoid of an 86% increase in revenue! That’s a big percentage of things that are definitely related!

I’m concerned with the breathless way that people discuss these products. That the application of these technologies themselves will have a positive monetary impact, and that there is a race where people are already behind in doing that. This kind of talk pushes the people involved with the money-side of things (like producers) to consider these unreliable tools as replacements for shooting video, or doing effects work. Like we’ve seen in that awful Toys”R”Us video made of lies with Sora and visual effects, and the recent Coca-Cola ad.

These things make stock footage from other stock footage and whatever other material they scraped, licensed, or were fed. The models didn’t go to film school, they don’t have conflicted feelings about Steven Spielberg’s later career, they can’t go shoot their first movie with a 27mm lens, they just mush stock footage together to make new stock footage.

The ad spots (with VFX intervention) still look like sizzle reels for a pitch, and not a finished product. Even that Coca-Cola one, which was based on a previous ad, but now with random moments inserted.

There’s nothing wrong with stock footage, but you have to be pretty incompetent to assume that Sora and Veo are currently replacements for material shot for a particular purpose any more than stock footage is. You use stock footage as supplementary assets, not the whole enchilada.

Morally and creatively bankrupt people might excuse these stock footage montages by saying that the public doesn’t mind them, and can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. That critics are looking for faults (Disclosure: I’m absolutely looking for faults, but I don’t have to look very hard). They might correctly surmise that the tools will improve, like all “AI” tools have improved, and will require less artist intervention. However, that improvement is in temporal stability, or weights on physics, not in creativity or originality.

The final result of this endeavor is not merely flooding the market with very similar, and indistinct, ads of slow-motion smiles.

As for narratives longer than a typical ad? I’d send you right back to what I wrote initially about Sora because I see nothing in these demos that changes my mind about that at all.

Marques Brownlee has a YouTube video where he posts about his thoughts, and notes the areas where he feels it performs well, and doesn’t (like the leg swapping thing still happening, and object permanence). He is somehow wowed by the garbled footage of two news anchors discussing a “TRAVEL ADDIAVISTOfRIEY” for “CARA NEWS NEWS” but … I don’t know why? From his Threads thread:

This video has a bunch of garbled text, the telltale signs of AI generated videos. But the cutaways, the moving text ticker, the news-style shots… those were all things SORA decided to do on its own, and those news anchors looked very… real

Sora didn’t decide to do them, the footage Sora sourced news anchors from likely had those elements. It’s pattern matching and those things are part of the pattern. You’re unlikely to ever reverse engineer exactly what material went into making the Sora news anchor video, but ask yourself why it’s better than the stock footage of news anchors from iStock or Shutterstock? You can even get those with assets to make your own specific pieces if you needed it for storytelling. Like if you needed specific text or the client wanted to change the color of the graphics. Is Sora better because it’s technology?

Remember that this kind of news stock footage is the stuff that goes in an out-of-focus TV in the background of a shot, or tiled in some TV wall with the audio muted. We’ve all seen that sort of thing used on TV and film mixed in with news stuff that was shot specifically for the story being told. Something fun, like the intro to a dystopia, or what have you.

These kinds of stock elements cost $60, and you can have them in any resolution you like without having to wait for anything other than a download. AI isn’t really saving money, and all those graphics need to be replaced so it’s not like it made something uniquely suited to your needs.

Potentially, in the future there will be audio synced to synthetic voices, it will have non-garbled text that can exactly match the prompt, and then it wouldn’t be used as stock footage. That future, purpose-built performance will be in place of news anchors that would have been filmed specifically for a project, and motion graphics put together by an artist. It also assumes a whole other level of this technology that is not being shown at all, and has many other ramifications I’ll discuss later.

Right now, when tech reporters and finance journalists write about the impact of video generators, it’s as if we’re in a mad rush to get to that state of labor-less money-generation. That the end goal is replacing actors with smiling simulacra. A grinning kid assembled from the finest training data from other grinning kids that they would have ordinarily had to pay.

The reality is that this is a race to make more expensive stock footage that might malfunction and need to be repaired under time and budgetary constraints dictated by what someone reckoned the technology could do. Then the money people will need to find money in their project budgeted for Sora to have very expensive last minute work under a time crunch.

Oh the director wanted to change the color of something which made the model associate it with a different colored object that it was trained on, and they don’t like the new shape of the stuff in the output even though it’s the right color?

There’s no file to open and edit. All the work has to be done on top of the Sora output as if it was photography, or as a total replacement. Maybe they can extract and change the color from the prior version.

How could anyone have foreseen difficulty in making a blackbox product spit out final imagery to exact specifications? No one could have known! They watched that MKBHD video where he added a golf course to the cliffs, and that worked in that instance.

From my prior Sora post:

OpenAI and Google are both selling these video generators as technological breakthroughs in filmmaking. The reality is that it’s artifacting stock footage.

Bad clients, and bad producers will tell their editors to put Sora or Veo output in to the initial edit, then they’ll turn to a VFX house and say that the shots are “90% there” and they “just need someone to take it across the finish line.”

How do I know this? Because that happens with stock footage and weird composites and retimes that editors make in Avid when clients want to have something in the edit so they can figure it out. Even if the client agrees to replace it, they can get married to how the stock footage or temp looked, or how it was timed (remember that playback speed is a factor).

Ill-conceived ideas about what this technology is currently capable of based on news coverage, or the financier messing around with Sora for a few minutes, is not only a threat to the people that work on film, TV, and commercials, but a threat to those very bozos that want to push hard into these tools as total replacements.

Sure, But It’ll Get Better

I would implore the bozos to look no further than how the majority of the movie-making industry (and self-proclaimed “film nerd” dipshits with social media accounts) have trained the public to devalue “CGI” (ironically, computer generated imagery is generated by people).

Herculean effort has gone into marketing materials about how a movie really built (1/4) of the set, and even the silly things that they do like turn bluescreen and greenscreen gray in those marketing materials to try and obfuscate anything artificial (great job with that, by the way).

From that ridiculous Guardian piece last year, “‘It’s exactly as they’d have done it in the 1910s’: how Barbenheimer is leading the anti-CGI backlash”. The one that opens with a bluescreen photo:

For the past 12 months, Hollywood has been facing a serious case of CGI fatigue, with critics tearing into would-be blockbusters for their over-reliance on it. In the New Yorker, Richard Brody wrote that heavy effects work in Ant-Man 3 “instead of endowing the inanimate with life, subtract it”, while Ellen E Jones wrote in the Guardianthat Little Mermaid was “rendered lifeless” by CGI. The Netflix rom-com You People, starring Jonah Hill, made headlines when it was revealed that the final kiss in the film was done with CGI and the actor Christian Bale didn’t mince words when he said working exclusively in front of green screens on Thor: Love & Thunder was “the definition of monotony”.

As if in response, 2023 has delivered a buffet of practical-effects-driven films to the multiplex. Greta Gerwig used techniques dating back to silent film and soundstage musicals to bring her fantastical, hot-pink vision of Barbieland to life, Christopher Nolan reconstructed Oppenheimer’s Trinity test using miniatures, and Christopher McQuarrie hoisted a train carriage 80ft into the air in order to film Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’sstomach-churning final stunt. Indie films have been getting in on the fun, too: Wes Anderson turned a piece of Spanish farmland into a real town, complete with plumbing and electricity, for Asteroid City; the “penis monster” in Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid was made entirely with prosthetics; and the buzzy horror film Talk to Me has been praised for its gory and “disturbingly real” prosthetics.

Never mind that there’s VFX used in every one of those movies (you can check the credits if you don’t believe me) the backlash in public perception is real. The ability to leverage that “discerning” moviegoer to your own project’s benefit has been deemed valuable.

If there’s ever a perfectly stable, perfectly editable, perfectly lip-synced synthetic performance —instead of mushy stock footage— why would the public embrace such a thing when they won’t embrace CGI?

Riddle me this, bozos: What advantage could synthetic performances have in any form of movie marketing, or in winning any awards which are often about knowledge of the actor outside of their performance, or appearance, in the specific project they worked on?

Andy Serkis, who is definitely a real person, has been after an Oscar for years in his “motion capture” roles and no one can stomach the thought of it.

Humans want to see humans perform. They want them to do well. They want to be attracted, or repulsed by them. All our stars start with small roles, and if those small roles are synthetic, how can we have stars? Do the bozos want to market synthetic stars? Good luck. The same goes for TV, and there’s never been more crossover between TV and film than there’s been in the last few years.

Commercially Viable

I don’t think the public is willing to go along with a sea of ads that are all like the Toys”R”Us and Coca-Cola commercials —that are brand marketing montages with a music bed. However, if this gets super-duper stable, and editable then the place I see it most likely being used is endorsements from dead celebrities.

Not living celebrities, mind you, but people who no longer have control over their own image. Here’s a local Fox station talking about the Audrey Hepburn Dove chocolate commercial 10 years ago:

They really capture the full spectrum of responses in that local news coverage, don’t they?

What if it was really cheap to make those ads with Sora or Veo, and didn’t require shooting anything? It was just the generative fees and the licensing rights to the cash-strapped heirs. All the booing and hissing from the people that think it’s creepy won’t really matter. It’ll be “worth a shot” because the barrier to entry will be so low, and if people hate it at least they’ll circulate it widely on social media. What’s the worst that can happen? Free publicity?

AIttention Shoppers

People would probably either ignore influencers, or place them at the bottom of the stack under brand marketing as the most replaceable form of video, but that’s not true at all. If anything influencers are the hardest thing to replace since their whole business proposition is their “authentic selves” as a brand. They live a life beyond any particular brand endorsement which they either perform for their audience, or maybe they’re a comedian with a schtick and they pick brands that align with that.

There’s a more direct retail side of things with accounts that chop up videos from other influencers, rip some product photography, and make scammy sites to sell drop-shipped items. These are run by people that are not influencers but take advantage of the theft of their image. They have no issue with acquiring the likeness, or being generally duplicitous, with today’s technology. They don’t even need Sora or Veo — but think about how they could more precisely tailor their duplicity.

Safiya Nygaard has a good video on this that I’m embedding below because I really think you should watch and it, and not dismiss it out of hand. Influencers are the best at critiquing this kind of commerce.

Platforms are disincentivized to sniff out scams because the scammers pay them, and the people who have been wronged don’t. It seems like the perfect place to apply complex pattern matching software instead of turning a blind eye to collect money from sponsored placements.

Will Sora and Veo make a big difference here? The ability to scam people with copied work hinges on what was copied seeming somewhat authentic, because they are stealing that. Sora and Veo can’t generate authenticity, but they could be used to obfuscate where video clips are sourced from, because they are designed to obfuscate their sources. The over-all quality of the video spots from fake influencers is certainly of very little consequence if they can make sales to a certain level with the rubbish they already use.

OpenAI has a bunch of checkboxes where you agree you have rights to use what they’re uploading, but unless they’re trying to run a scam on intellectual property from a large company then there’s no way to catch it. Finger printing the output would also require the social networks care about those finger prints. It really is mostly the honor system, and would benefit a fly-by-night company if they decided they wanted to take advantage of these tools.

It remains to be seen if the level of work required to to mush together stuff from Sora or Veo is less effort than the current way that they exploit the system.

There’s also the possibility that these “legit” tech companies will fully integrate the falsified shopping experience into their system under some kind of safe harbor excuse.

One of the things to come out of Google I/O 2024 was Product Studio. They show off online merchants generating product photography, videos, 3D assets, and linking to relevant social accounts. From Google’s blog post in May:

Product Studio will also give you the ability to generate videos from just one photo. So, with just the click of a button, you can animate components of still product images to create short videos or playful product GIFs for social media. Product Studio is now available in Australia, Canada, U.K. and U.S. in Merchant Center Next and the Google & YouTube app on Shopify and coming to India and Japan in the next few weeks.

Yay, (awkward laugh) the future we’ve all dreamed of.

Eliminate the labor from entertainment. Eliminate the labor from commerce. Eliminate the labor from lifestyle as entertainment and commerce. Let’s try to slim down the pipeline to just be people with a twinkle in their eye, and a scheme in their hearts.

Here’s to the Idea Guys

Those are the three things that I see bozos using Sora and Veo for to generate entire videos when the technology gets stable enough. Stock footage montages, dead celebrities, and masquerading as a real retail company.

There are many other applications for AI in video, and just like I wrote about before, it’s far more attractive when it’s applied as a step in a process that can be adjusted instead of as a final result. Where I really think the AI bubble is in that misconception that executives can sit in offices and just dash off a prompt to make an ad then go grab some lunch. It appalls me that people want a way to optimize our whole world for “idea guys”.

We’ll just need to continue our breathless coverage of how behind everyone is in getting to these unpalatable futures geared solely towards bozos.

I apologize if the person running Apple Music Replay cares deeply about it, and is under resourced by someone above them who doesn’t care. Somewhere in that organization is a person, or group of people, who sees having Apple Music Replay as a feature to check off on a list, and they feel like they checked the box again for 2024. That’s mostly evident from the lack of progress from last year, which lacked progress from the year before, which was a sluggish and inadequate response to Spotify Unwrapped.

This year I was surprised to see that Apple Music on iOS didn’t send me to a web browser to authenticate for access to participate in what is essentially a marketing exercise. But of course it’s a web view that’s loaded within the Music app complete with a “close” button that I keep accidentally mashing when I meant to navigate back.

Obviously, this made me deeply suspicious of the macOS Music app experience. Sure enough, on my Sonoma MacBook Pro it’s the same experience as before. Nothing says “fun you personally identify with” like biometric authorization in a Safari window and agreeing to Music information collection policies in a web 2.0 modal in the browser.

Why even make a Music app for the Mac at this point? Just send me to Safari when you want me to use your music subscription service so I can live the dream year-round.

Who needs to develop native apps for Apple’s platforms at all? Apple says the web is the way to go.

Of course, I later found out that it’s only iOS and iPadOS 18.1 users that get to experience the glory of the embedded web view, and that anyone with an older OS gets the ol’ biometric browser how-do-you-do.

Perhaps there’s some account authorization permission enabled by 18.1 that let’s this “magic” modal work, but this is the third year of Replay and this is the best that could be done? Upgrade to the latest and greatest OS so you can see numbers and text in an app?

Reel Fun

As for the experience, there is still this weird unspoken agreement that Apple will present subscribers with vertical videos in the style of Snapchat and Instagram Stories, along with a share button so the vertical videos can be downloaded individually and then presumably uploaded to those social networks.

Some using Replay might be wondering why you can’t just download all seven at once, but it seems like that’s because they’re canvas elements? I guess? Apple seems to be rendering each one to a video when you ask to save it. This also explains some of the stuttering and performance issues I was infrequently experiencing on my computer and my brand new iPhone 16 Pro. There is no central server where you’re streaming these moving pictures from.

I bet someone thought that was really clever, except that if the goal is to download and share the videos then it shouldn’t require this level of effort or use this much of a person’s time.

Most importantly, the music element that Apple added to each highlight reel is not saved with the video. Presumably this is because of licensing rights. This might also explain why they’re canvas elements because then they can stream the music separately?

I don’t know why things are the way they are, but I do know that if you’re going to play the music, and pretend like you can save a video to upload it to the social media apps you’re trying to ape that they expect the excerpt of the music to go along for the ride. Otherwise people are watching silent, flying text and album artwork.

It’s just as exciting as a PowerPoint slide deck from someone who forgot to unmute themselves on Zoom. What energy and dynamism this music service has.

Of course, the desktop version still doesn’t have video sharing controls to render these videos. You can watch the vertical videos in a very tiny region of your monitor, but there are no desktop playback controls or download buttons. Hilariously, there are playback control icon images included with the page assets if you inspect the page, even though they are unused.

If the excuse for failing to provide video export is that you’re not supposed to upload to social media from a filthy computer, then show us graphics and video formatted for a filthy computer.

A bizarre bonus of the bad desktop browser experience is that you can tap on the artists and songs from the lists Replay provides and it takes you to that artist or song, but unfortunately it’s in the Safari version of Apple Music. If only Apple had some kind of linking URL scheme they could use to open these links in their apps. What a fantastical invention such a thing would be.

This is still somehow better than the iOS experience where tapping furiously on a song or artist on the same list in the web view embedded inside of the iOS Apple Music app doesn’t do a damn thing. It doesn’t open it in the web view, and it doesn’t open it in the app. You’re essentially looking at a list with large fonts and circle boolean artwork that can’t functionally do anything.

The only functional link is the one that takes you to your Replay ‘24 playlist.

You can’t share this information within Apple Music on your profile. God knows why we even have them at this point. Someone who knows how to get to my profile can in theory see who I’m listening to but the social graph seems to largely only be used to generate nonsensical friends playlists to torture my ears with.

Numb to Numbers

The real sin, beyond all the interface and interaction mishegoss, is that the actual thing all this is trying to communicate is terribly boring. The very first whizz-bang slide is:

You listened to 3,464 minutes of music.

WOW! Let me download this silent video and upload it to Instagram POST HASTE!

Out of 282 artists one stood out. Top Artist Tycho 550 Minutes

I can’t believe I didn’t make it to 283 artists. For shame. At least I didn’t embarrass myself with 549 minutes of Tycho.

What really got me was:

You played 602 songs, one was your anthem. Top Song Good Luck, Babe Chappell Roan 8 Plays First Play: April 8

Uh, eight plays seems way lower than my recollection, and also way lower than anything that deserves to be called my anthem. At least I know I first played it on April 8th. I’ll note that special day on my calendar.

The Highlight Reel just goes on and on like this. Database queries with utterly generic text set to extremely corporate graphics. String replacement is great and all, but it doesn’t hide the fact that this thing just spits out numbers every year and it goes into a sentence in such a mindless way.

Replay isn’t just the Highlights Reel, it also has ordered lists of albums, artists, and songs that can each be saved as a PNG. However, it seems no one checked what happens when the names for things are longer than the space Apple chose to allocate so the very special things the lists commemorate get cut off with an ellipsis. How long have we been formatting text, folks? Shouldn’t we be better at this?

Scroll further down in Replay and you get your Milestones. Just like last year, they seem to mean nothing. It’s like a fitness goal, or airline status qualification, but it’s just a circle with a number in it and a date you reached the milestone. What are the milestones, and why would anyone, especially me, care about it? Am I working towards something? Am I competing against someone else? What does this commemorate other than “number big on day”?

Well, if you tap on “See All Milestones” you get a screen that has no share button, so take a screenshot of it, and it shows that I am “In Progress” to hit “5,000” minutes listened, “1,000” songs played, and “500” artists played. These are seemingly just arbitrary numbers based on doubling the numbers in the circles that it says that I have reached. So … this is just arbitrary filler and doesn’t offer any insights.

From my post about last year’s Replay:

This whole thing feels like someone was very excited to animate things, move album artwork around, and transform data, but no one really gave much thought to what this whole thing is supposed to mean to someone. How it makes someone feel.

I still don’t feel anything this year. The musical backing to the highlight reels gives the illusion of feeling something, because I feel something about that fragment of music while it plays, but not about the statistics on display. It’s very easy to double check that by rendering out the video without that music and see that it really is just a PowerPoint on mute. It’ll be the same thing next year, and the year after that, but with different numbers, gradients, and milestones.

In fact, not long after I read the piece Sarah Perez from TechCrunch posted about the TV Time app being pulled from the App Store because a rights holder was abusing the DMCA takedown system and no one at the App Store seemed to mind until Tech Crunch came knockin’.

That bureaucratic failure of a developer falling between the cracks is merely one of many that have happened over the years. Anyone following Apple blogs is pretty used to seeing these kinds of stories about apps getting pulled, and put back because of the inconsistent nature of Apple’s App Store review process. Jason deftly critiqued that in his column, along with apps that have to leave the store because they can’t function under the sandboxing rules, or bizarre accessibility catch-alls that they used to. He also touted the advantages of notarization for safety, and flexibility.

Devil’s Appvocate

I am loathe to pretend that I agree with defending the status quo of the iOS App Store, but let’s just pretend I hate myself a whole lot so we can proceed, OK?

Jason talks about the Mac being a model, and points to the ability to run App Store apps, notarized apps, and non-notarized apps.

However, fans of the locked down iOS App Store will note that without people being forced to use the Mac App Store Mac developers can steer users away from it, and into suboptimal situations for users (cough, and Apple). They can do things like have people buy software from a weird web site they may not 100% trust, and get a license key in their email. What will that developer do with their email address, billing info, and other data? Can they even be sure that the app they downloaded from a site is the genuine one and not an opportunistic bit of SEO hackery?

Add to that the complication of developers doing things they shouldn’t do. Without the stick of App Review on iOS how can Apple keep developers in line? What’s to keep developers from scribbling massive files all over your drive? There’s not much of a carrot to encourage good behavior as the App Store doesn’t really help with discovery or marketing like it used to.

On the Mac, Apple gave up competing with software from outside of the Mac App Store years ago, and all the developers that have pulled their apps out of the store are a testament to that. In many cases it’s because of functionality, or things as simple as upgrade pricing. Apple won’t make the Mac App Store an attractive alternative to notarization.

Surely, that’s some kind of punishment for the failure of Mac users and developers to get with Apple’s program, and not the other way around, right?

Jason notes the ways that Apple has made non-notarized apps unattractive and scary, as he says, “It may scare you, cajole you, and hide the button that allows you to run that app in the basement in a disused lavatory behind a door with a sign on it that says ‘Beware of the Leopard,’ but it will let you run it.”

However Apple hasn’t put any effort into the opposite scenario of sticking to apps from the Mac App Store. There’s no gilded courtyard in the walled garden where sunbeams gently glow and singing birds alight on your finger. The Mac App Store is a Staples in a bad part of town with ancient, often irrelevant inventory lining dusty shelves. Sure, it’s better than the leopard lavatory, but it’s not a particularly enticing alternative.

That old, and irrelevant inventory is a key problem. The apps people want to really use generally aren’t going to be found in the Mac App Store unless they’re apps Apple makes. Think about how many times you’ve seen Apple demo Cinema4D, Blender, or anything from Adobe that isn’t Photoshop Elements or Lightroom. There’s a void where the Mac App Store is missing the apps they use to show off their own hardware’s capabilities. But they still demo that software because it’s the software that gets people to spend money on Apple’s hardware.

Surely, we don’t want this disinterest to fall on iOS? We don’t want another disused, gray, box of a store. If people aren’t held by force inside of this magical font of app development then no one will ever use it!

Not Today, Satan

The real solution is to dissolve those barriers to the iOS App Store, as Jason argues, going even further than the EU, and towards that imperfect Mac model. The reason that the Mac App Store gathers cobwebs is because Apple gave up on caring if it earns money when compared to its far more profitable predecessor. It couldn’t come close to the money the iOS App Store made, which is why Apple today expends so much effort arguing for iOS to remain as it is. It’s not because apps outside the App Store kill the App Store, it’s because the App Stores need to compete for business and if you don’t compete, well, you’re an office supply store owner hoping someone just doesn’t know how to shop on the internet.

I don’t like to do anything at all with video, which is ironic considering I’ve been a visual effects artist for film, TV, and commercials for 19 years. That’s different because someone else has to set up the shot, set up the camera, manage the files, record the audio, conform, cut, color, and export. The little part I do for VFX is near the end of the process, and as critical as I can be of choices other people have made when shooting a thing, I can be even harder on myself.

If I’m so bad at it, and so unhappy with the results, why go through all the fuss? It’s typically not worth it, but words can only convey so much.

I previously made a little video demo for this post on Shake, and that was easier because I knew I wasn’t going to be on screen very much and that it would be mostly voice over with screen recordings, to supplement what I was writing. I personally don’t like videos that are exclusively video with voice over because it feels impersonal in some weird way. I’d like to see who’s talking at some point.

When I recorded that Shake video I could show that I wasn’t trying too hard by using my Logitech C920e webcam —the webcammiest of webcams— to get the little snippet of me heaving the box of Shake 4.1 software aloft. See, look at me, I’m not a try-hard making video about compositing software! I’m hip, daddy-o!

This time, however, I couldn’t quite get away with that. I was going to be demoing software on a 9:16 iPhone screen, which meant I had three options:

• Make a portrait 9:16 video
• Make a landscape 16:9 video with a portrait 9:16 video centered in the middle over a generic background
• Make 9:16 video where I was on part of the screen taking up the 16:9 landscape portion.

I chose the last option, but that meant I had to be on screen the whole time. I didn’t have a lot of options for other footage to cut away to. I know some people on YouTube will cut to the iPhone in their hands for B-roll coverage, but I don’t have another suitable camera to use for that, or place to overhead mount one. I have a lot of cameras, but only one suitable for recording video, my Sony a6400. That’s barely passable by modern standards, and in many ways my iPhone 16 Pro is a better video camera —but that was the device I was working on so it wasn’t an option.

Knowing that I had one angle, I figured I would frame it with the vertical video on the screen left-ish third of the frame. My animated hand gestures are visible flicking to the left every now and then but I thought it looked weird if I crammed the screen recording all the way to the left edge of the frame.

I had my script, but I couldn’t read from my script because it looked like a hostage video where Clean Up was holding me for ransom. Instead, I tried to get the gist of what I wrote, even if it wasn’t exact. That also meant I had to do many takes. I really didn’t want to do a lot of jump cuts, but since there was no coverage, and there were occasions where technical issues came up (camera overheating, screen recording just randomly stopping) jump cuts would be unavoidable.

The audio was recorded with my Shure SM5B through my Elgato Wave XLR to my Mac. The mic was on an arm I tried to keep low in frame. The Sony recorded audio on it’s mic, but that was what I used to align my higher quality audio to.

My camera was on a Joby GorillaPod I’ve had for years balanced on top of the box my Elgato Wave XLR came in (yes, I keep the boxes my electronics come in, sue me). The lens on the camera was my Sigma 19-50 F2.8.

The a6400 can’t record any higher than 8-bit video. This put me at a disadvantage when it comes to flexibility in exposure and dynamic range.

Fine, whatever, but what I forgot to do was turn off auto white balance and auto exposure. Rookie mistake! The a6400 kept jerking the exposure around not only from the bounce light coming in through the windows, but from the whites of my eye or teeth being aimed at camera. I didn’t want to reshoot the whole thing, so I did what anyone else would do and tried to use DaVinci Resolve’s color stabilize.

Unfortunately, that’s locked to DaVinci Resolve Studio which is $299 and out of the budget of $0 so I went back into Premiere Pro and hand keyed the exposure changes every few seconds. There is lingering light fluctuation, of course, but the big swings in exposure correction are gone. Bespoke, hand-crafted, color-correction isn’t going to fix that.

I didn’t have enough room to work on my Mac’s hard drive so I did it on my external spinning disk that I mostly use for archiving old podcast recordings. I was worried that the project would be a stuttering mess to work on, but Premiere smartly cached enough material that I would playback at speed.

Oh, I forgot to mention the part where I recorded wrote this Tuesday, and recorded it Wednesday. Then I tried to make that edit work Thursday and Friday, before I scrapped it and re-recorded everything Sunday morning, then scrapped that, and recorded again Sunday afternoon. Yes, I recorded it all of these times and forgot the auto white balance and auto exposure every time I did it. I’m not very smart.

That last recording session Sunday is what makes up the final video. None of the earlier takes were used, but because I performed the actions, and said the words, so many times there are instances where the words I use seem to indicate that I had done something before (because I had) and the two times that I say, “last example”. Which, if you’re counting, is not how the word “last” works.

I have a greater appreciation of the “talking head” videos that YouTubers put together regularly. I know that if you do something repeatedly things get easier (except turning off AWB/AE) but speaking into camera and then having to review how you spoke to camera is draining.

Writing about these examples of using the software really doesn’t work as well as video, so I think that this was necessary to go into the detail I wanted to, but I’m not envisioning a new career of making videos instead of writing things. Text is significantly more forgiving.

I don’t have it in me to try and digest why people could have faith in this man, and the people he surrounds himself with. What short, convenient memories some of us have.

What I do have it in me to do is to keep living life. As a gay man, I’m both historically, and personally familiar with the way that government can be manipulated to do harm, and how we need to find it in ourselves to keep going.

In 2008 —when we were all full of hope and change— my fellow Californians were convinced that marriage was under threat and passed Proposition 8 to amend the state constitution with “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

There was no marriage on my personal calendar, but the Yes on 8 campaign had run some vile homophobic ads in the lead up to the 2008 election, and I found out people held some very homophobic views about me, whether they thought they did or not. I made the mistake of looking at the list of Prop 8 donors and a coworker was on it. I don’t recommend doing that.

I was a guest on a movie podcast where I picked Enchanted to talk about, and the host turned around on twitter a few weeks later to talk about his strict Christian views on marriage, but he didn’t have a problem with me. A ton of other weird interactions, and my fear over the possibility of those interactions, can be inserted here.

This year Proposition 3 was on the ballot which changed the language in the California constitution to enshrine same sex marriage in the event Trump’s Supreme Court undoes Obergefell as they undid Roe with the Dobbs decision. Proposition 3 lacked the disgusting campaign of Yes on 8, and really just sailed right on to success. Not all of California’s votes are counted yet, but a large majority of voters changed their minds from one extreme to the other. A strange, but encouraging, bookend to 2008.

There were other California propositions that didn’t fare so well on the ballot, and I won’t get into those here, because our proposition system is so obviously a shit way to pass important stuff.

The point is that nothing is forever. That cuts both ways, obviously. A second Trump presidency will be much worse, and awful things will be passed into law, or protections and regulations overturned by his appointed judges. None of these people doing these terrible things will be immortal, and nothing they put in place can last forever any more than what they wish to tear down.

That’s not to be callous or pretend we’ll just flip the legislature in the midterms for some Classic American Divided Government, or some of these voters will pick the other party that’s not in power to express their dissatisfaction in a Classic American Send a Message to Washington maneuver as possibly occurred Tuesday. It will take proactive work, but it’s important to underscore that nothing is eternal through some self-sustaining power.

I have to keep reminding myself of that, and I’m writing it here, to sit along my critiques of the Apple TV, AI, Siri responses, and the general life I wish to preserve for myself.

I am fortunate in that way, and fortunate to live in California for some of the protections my state can afford me. Not everyone has that same privilege, of course, but it would really be a waste to throw it away and flog myself. None of us can be a heatsink for all the pain people will feel. However, we can try to radiate perseverance in defiance of an oppressive regime to help others persevere too.

It’s really not that hard, okay? Our topic once again is iOS 18.2. We’re taping it now, and it airs when the iOS 18.3 beta comes out. Okay, so if you’re watching me talk about iOS 18.1, don’t call to talk about it. It’s too late. Instead, call about iOS 18.3, which is next episode’s topic. Okay. If you wanted to talk about iOS 18.1, you should have called when our iOS 17.6 show was airing, but we were taping the iOS 18.0 show. Okay, so here we go.

Hello.

Hi Ken, great show. I just tried to use Clean Up and it needed WiFi to install—

Okay, okay, there you go. That’s boo-boo number one. If you wanted to talk about iOS 18.1, you should have called last week during the iOS 18.0 show. We’re talking about iOS 18.2 now. If you see me talking about the genmoji and Image Playgrounds waitlist then it’s too late to talk about those. We’ve moved on.

It’s really not that hard.

Alright, okay, here we go.

Yes, I’d like to talk about the changes to Mail.

Yes, okay! Good.

Well, it’s got these new notification summaries that combine what all the emails are about—

Well, sir, sir. Can I just say that difficulty with categorizing mail is a common problem with 18.2 of today.

I really think that the poor quality of the summaries is the problem. They’re really unhelpful—

Obviously, the Mail categories are the problem because that’s what this week’s iOS 18.2 show is about!

I’m watching this show now and—

Idiot! It’s simple! This is what’s airing right now! The iOS 18.1 show! Everything that I’m saying happened last episode! This is 18.2!

Don’t worry, everything seems to be under control now, it was never anything serious as much as it was a lingering nuisance. It seemed I had something viral (likely flu), which turned into chest congestion, and doctor’s don’t rush to prescribe antibiotics any more like they did in the old days (for all the obvious reasons). That meant a week where I was taking a medication that needed to be inhaled four times a day, and a pill that needed to be taken three times a day.

Splitting up my day in a way where that made sense was much easier to do with Medications. However, what I really appreciated was that I was able to just take a photo of the prescription paperwork and the app picked up everything relevant, and promised to warn me of drug interactions (there were none for those two). It doesn’t store the image of the paperwork, or provide an OCR version of it in the app, it’s just automatically picking out the few words it needs.

Also, similar to Shortcuts, you can pick what the medication looks like (inhaler, circular tablet, elliptical pill, etc.) and also pick a color background (the symbol representing your medication is inside a circle with color). This can help distinguish the medication more easily than reading the name, which I’m grateful for.

I was a little surprised that it doesn’t grab information like the total number of pills, and the number of pills per day, and set an end date on the prescription, or ask me to set an end date. These aren’t long term medications with refills, but even if they were shouldn’t it note when I would run out? I don’t know. Seems a little weird.

My illness kind of improved, but then took a step backward so the next week I went to the doctor again. This time it was an antibiotic prescription, and another drug. Each only needed to be taken once a day, so I didn’t really need my day rigidly divided up like the previous week, but I still appreciate having a reminder to take the stuff so I’m not distracted.

I scanned the paperwork again, and this time it did note a drug interaction, but it was just a warning that the doctor had already told me about and assured me would be fine. It doesn’t list interactions for things that are not in the medication app, like vitamin supplements, antacids, NSAID painkillers, etc. All of which had very clear, urgent warnings in the prescription paperwork, but because they aren’t the two medications in the app there’s no warning.

There are warnings for lactation and pregnancy, which is important for people that are lactating or pregnant, but I don’t quite know what the usefulness of the warnings are for me. I would like to be able to personalize that, but it’s very important to have those available.

It did surprise me that the Medications app doesn’t provide anything for possible side effects that don’t have to do with lactation or pregnancy. Apparently the antibiotic that I was prescribed had six pages of paper concerning possible side effects and warnings. I could really see why taking this particular antibiotic wasn’t step one. Medications didn’t mention any of those (dire) warnings, or list them anywhere. Despite being able to OCR the prescription info, there’s nothing to OCR the side effects info and log that.

I get why Apple might not want to be legally responsible for referring me to side effects from their own database based on my prescription, and in the cases where they noted an interaction between the two medications, or the lactation and pregnancy warnings it couches the warning with “refer to your care team”. Having said that, if the pharmacy is providing the side effects at least let me OCR those pages for my own reference with some disclaimer that these side effects are from my pharmacy, not from Apple.

Also, with the non-antibiotic medication, I needed to take it once a day but the number of pills started high and tapered off twice over the following days. The app lets you put in a dosage to schedule, but I couldn’t find any way to vary it over time. Instead, in the notes field for the drug, I typed in the dosage information, and when the dosage needed to step down I manually edited the prescription info to lower the number of pills.

That’s not ideal because it’s very easy to forget what day of that medication you’re on. Also, if I refer to the log of medications I’ve taken it shows the reduced dosage on the previous days instead of what the dosage was when I took the drug. I don’t know why it retroactively changes that. When I finish this prescription the log will show I only took one pill a day, which is wrong if I have to refer to this log.

This was also a drug that should be taken with food, but there’s not a “hey, eat something” notification you can configure to come up before it’s time to take the drug. The antibiotic should really not be taken at a time anywhere near when you’re going to eat certain things, or even have most vitamin supplements, so I also have to mentally track when I do those things too. I don’t love that since it’s not represented on my Calendar with a before and after medication buffer. I can see the logged time I took the medication, if I forget, and do the math. The point of this app is to not to rely on me to remember this though, right?

Another quirk is that the notification to take your medications comes through on the Watch without mention of which medication you need to take, only “Time to log your 1:00 PM medications” and a button to log the them as taken. It’s also always plural, even if you’re only taking one medication at 1:00 PM, which is confusing. Drop the “s” it’s cleaner.

The iPhone notification displays the medication, and the little shape/color circle you selected. When I was doing the three/four week I would generally refer to my iPhone to make sure I was taking the right one, but during the once-a-day week I remember which time is which medication, but I shouldn’t have to.

Perhaps there are people that are more skilled with using the Health app’s Medications feature, and they have tips and tricks, but I haven’t come across people writing about what those are. I do appreciate having Medications, and it has helped reduce some stress and uncertainty (especially in the three/four week) so I would absolutely use it again in the future. I hope it continues to improve for things like scheduling doses that vary, and helping to store all the prescription information in one place.

The Smart Stack asserts itself on two occasions: Media playback, of any sort, where it takes over the screen to show you the card-stack thing of the media playback controls with the date and time. The other occasion is during live activities, like when I took a Lyft ride today and it decided all I wanted to know was the ETA from Lyft, the date and time.

When I complained about the media thing before I was directed by some people in the Relay or Six Colors Discord to the Watch app on the iPhone to Smart Stack -> Media Apps -> and then change it from “Smart Stack” to “App” if you wanted the old Now Playing behavior, or just turn it off completely.

The Apple Watch, for some reason, has never included a Now Playing complication. I don’t know why. You can add a complication for Music, or a complication for Overcast, but you can’t have a complication for Now Playing that covers all media playback.

You have to tap that tiny, impossible-to-hit dot of an icon for what’s currently playing at the top of your screen if you want to get to the playback controls. A mind-boggling decision, surely, but you get to have your Watch face be your Watch face and not a Smart Stack.

I know people like the Smart Stack, it’s just not what I want at all and there aren’t any helpful accommodations made for people that want to always keep their Watch face at the forefront. I would give up one of my Modular complication spots for a Live Activities spot if that’s something they wanted to offer, but it seems like that’s not in the cards.

Of course, that goes back to the whole mess of the Apple Watch’s poor Watch face selection. New Watch faces come out, and old ones wither. Pride Watch faces come out every year, and every year someone at Apple decides to be homophobic and not let gay people have complications (or more than one) on the Pride faces. Give us Pride Modular (I know you can pick the rainbow gradient in Modular but that’s not a Pride rainbow, that’s a ClarisWorks 2.0 radial gradient.)

The way Apple decided to get around their graveyard of old Watch faces it to simply override the current Watch face with the Smart Stack. Problem solved! Whatever it was you liked or found useful about your Watch face gets completely overridden by something that can only display the date, the time, and one card that it thinks is most important. You have to scroll through the Smart Stack to see if what you want is in there, or dismiss it each time. This completely ruins the glanceability of the device turning it into a thing you have to fiddle with like you’re tuning a tiny violin.

This is totally different from how I feel about my iPhone 16 Pro with the Dynamic Island showing Live Activities —because everything else on the screen is what it should be so it’s win-win. I know the Watch is too small for a “Dynamic Island” but those clever boffins at Apple have to have another idea to retain the current Watch face while supplementing it with Live Activities in some fashion (like my suggestion of making it a type of complication).

For now, I’ve actually turned Live Activities off on my Watch, which seems like cutting off my nose to spite my Watch face.