One of the consistent laments I’ve heard on podcasts over the last couple of months is that there’s not enough “content” specifically for the Vision Pro.
People have pointed towards Apple’s sports push, with live sports offering an opportunity for Immersive Video. All Apple’s put out is a widely-panned, five-minute highlight reel.
It kind of proves that this stuff just really isn’t that easy, or inexpensive, to make. I doubt that anyone at Apple is surprised about the return on their investment.
What little catalog content that exists is mostly a byproduct of 3D movie distribution, which is why it’s the most plentiful source of Vision Pro media. That’s more about negotiating deals, old-school iTunes style, for stuff that has no real home video venue (practically speaking, stereoscopic home video didn’t take off).
The sales pitch of a huge screen (that feels like it’s only a few feet in front of you) hasn’t proven to be all that attractive based on my anecdotal observations. The supply of 2D Film and TV is relatively unconstrained except for the absence of Netflix and YouTube. It’s not especially enticing compared to other devices.
The main benefit for this 2D experience is multi-window viewing for watching several games, or stats, at once. Like a sports bar strapped to your face. I haven’t observed a lot of chatter about it except when new app releases with new viewing modes become available. I’m unsure if people are really continuing to watch games in the Vision Pro after they write up the app updates, or if the pull of screens further from your eyeballs wins out when there’s nothing new.
This is the byproduct of theatrical 3D. It’s still a windowed experience on a big (close-feeling) screen where things mostly recede into the screen, for reasonsI have discussedbefore. I’ve seen some people respond favorably to a handful of viewing experiences, but the limiting factor seems to be the same as 3D theatrical —is there a reason to see this in 3D at all? Or can I just watch it 2D with no downsides?
Remember that Apple has no 3D movies on Apple TV+. Not a thing. They had no reason to have the theatrical stereoscopic byproduct that legacy studios make, so they can’t just drag those files over. Their movies, at present, don’t stand to benefit from stereo-conversion either because unlike Apple TV+ shows, the movies they greenlight aren’t blockbuster spectacles, they’re targeted mainly at securing prestigious awards for talky-dramas.
This isn’t really a thing, because 3D never took off for home viewing in the 2010s, and had no theatrical demand to prop it up. There is no catalog like there is for 3D movies.
However, that doesn’t have to be true. Apple is in an interesting position right now where they need compelling material for the Vision Pro, they have a lot of 2D TV shows they make themselves that have spectacle for 3D, and a VFX market that is almost completely dead because of reduced production following the 2023 strikes, and the potential 2024 IATSE strike. Additionally, Apple TV+ series have short production runs, and few seasons. It is kind of the perfect time to do stereo conversion on some of their popular shows like Foundation, Monarch, or For All Mankind. Where possible the studios that did the original work for CGI scenes could even be contracted for stereo renders because they weren’t produced aeons ago.
Would that make headsets fly off the shelves? Probably not, but it builds a catalog Apple simply doesn’t have from themselves or others. Compare that to live events, where there’s little interest in watching old events, but there is definitely interest in rewatching TV series. Remember only a teeny tiny percentage of people have seen these shows at all to begin with, so it’s also an opportunity for new customers.
Then when new seasons are available they could be available in 3D. Someone could catch up on For All Mankind and spring right in to new, weekly stereo releases.
If they want to create a market, this strikes me as a not-ridiculous candidate.
While people talk about Immersive Video as one thing, I think it’s really worth discussing it based on subject matter, because I think that makes far more of a difference than the technical details of stitched together spherical projections.
This is the one I’ve seen and heard the most requests for. People keep saying you can just stick some white-obelisk camera rigs in stadiums and that’s it.
I’ve never done live TV work, which is a very different pipeline from my job, but it seems that you still have to solve for graphics, and editorial choices that have different constraints from 2D or even 3D. You also have equipment and crew dedicated to this because it is not piggybacking on what the 2D broadcast team is doing. It’s a different medium.
The most obvious evidence of this not being simple as “just” putting camera rigs there, is that if it was that simple, then we wouldn’t be talking about any of this.
The sporting events are also at the mercy of the calendar, what deals have been cut, etc. They have far less value as catalog content (though there are people that watch old games, I don’t think a game from a couple months ago is “old” enough).
Live sports are definitely a way to increase adoption of a technology. Not everyone bought an HD TV when they hit the market, but someone knew a person that had one, and that person might show “The Big Game” or whatever and then when the next person in that friend group could buy a TV they’d buy one, and so on.
The exception, of course, being 3D live sports. Not many people remember ESPN 3D, but let us take a moment to ruminate on it’s lifecycle from it’s 2010 launch with a smattering of 3D broadcasts, to it’s 2013 demise for being too expensive to produce and having low consumer demand.
I’m sure none of that history is relevant to this discussion at all.
There are still a handful of these. Whether or not you like them depends deeply on the subject matter. I was not particularly enraptured during my own demo experience, but that’s not saying much at all. I freely admit that I’m a tough audience.
I’ve heard Casey Liss groan about the dinosaur thing not really being for him. Just like with any other movie or TV show, people have to want to watch it otherwise it might as well not exist. Which is why there needs to be both a high quantity and a high variety.
That’s no simple task. Even though the current immersive video experiences were undoubtedly expensive to produce (especially relative to 2D) it’s going to take even more that what they’re spending, or just a very, very, very, long time to accumulate a catalog.
The problem with slowly producing material on an infinite time scale, is that while Apple certainly has the money to whittle away at this, they don’t have infinite consumer interest over that same period of time.
If the rumors are true and the next headset hardware is going to be released in 2026, then we’re looking at probably 3x what the current library is if they maintain output at this rate. I’m skeptical that will constitute a substantially more impressive catalog.
Spatial Videos don’t have to meet the same standard of quality as studio fare (they also quite literally can’t.) However, Apple has no venue for hosting user-generated video to share with wide audiences so these videos are only hyper-relevant to individual people and entirely reliant on the person choosing to make the videos for themselves.
The upcoming iPhone 16 has their cameras moved around so it’s supposed to be able to shoot Spatial Video too, but it remains to be seen what quality improvements there will be. Sacrificing all the cool stuff that your iPhone can do in 2D, is incredibly unfortunate at present.
It’s important to remember that adding Spatial Video to the regular iPhone 16 doesn’t mean much in terms of Vision Pro adoption, because the people buying iPhone 16s are likely price sensitive. That’s why they’re not buying Pros. So good luck selling them a $3500 headset to look at their own home movies in subpar quality.
Let’s circle back to YouTube, which is absent from the Vision Pro because of pride, business, and all that jazz. People have been uploading 3D videos to YouTube for over a decade, and a VR “immersive” videos since 2015 that are all available on Meta Quests, and whatever monstrosities wind up shipping with Horizon OS.
I’m not going to debate the quality of user-generated video in the abstract, but I will note that the low production values of YouTube creators in any dimension don’t seem to be a huge issue.
When something’s not from a studio, they don’t have the same expectations, or the same para-social relationships for that matter.
Apple should leverage YouTube’s 3D and VR videos here if for no other reason than to have the minimum level of content available to people with headsets.
The problem with Apple’s strategy from the outset is that it relies on the assumption that people will beat down the doors to make something for Apple’s platform, and Apple can collect money from movie rentals, sales, and subscriptions. They’ve got demos.
It’s really on Apple to invest an ungodly amount of money instead of waiting for an external spark of interest from some other studio. There’s no market to entice anything tailored to it, specifically.
Despite Apple and Disney’s special relationship which produced the Disney+ Vision Pro app, Disney’s not going to throw money at a Vision Pro app forever for Apple. The clock is ticking.
Disney didn’t throw money forever at ESPN 3D, but that was waaaaay back when the CEO was Bob Iger so I’m sure it’s different now (checks notes).
In all seriousness, they should have spent the money they didn’t want to spend before. Now they’ll have to spend even more, and they have less time to do it in.
Knowing they don’t have a lot of time I think stereo conversion of their hit action shows is the fastest turnaround. With new episodes also coming out in 3D. That’s not instant, but it’s a lot faster, and more durable than the live sports they’re fumbling.
No external entities are invested in the success of the Vision Pro hardware or visionOS software — unless Apple pays them to be.
This is a pretty good time of the year to go outside and appreciate what’s happening in nature. Even if you’re in a major metropolitan city, like me, you’ve still got flowers out the wazoo. Knock back a few antihistamines, grab a camera, on go on a little walk.
It could be the camera on your smartphone, but try to grab something you don’t ordinarily take pictures with just so you stretch some different mental muscles.
You’re unlikely to win any awards, since the subject matter isn’t all that special, but it’s for you more than it is for other people. The act of composing a shot, adjusting your aperture settings, selecting your focus, etc. can clear your head.
The other week I grabbed my cameras and went to The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino (the Beverly Hills of the San Gabriel Valley).
I have a Nikon D80 that I bought used last year, and a used Sigma 17-70 F2.8-4 lens. It is absolutely not what I would take with me if I was worried about flexibility, dynamic range, low-light, lightness, space, etc.
It’s for jaunts. For outings. The thing is a brick that takes lovely 10.2 megapixel photos.
The Desert Garden at the Huntington in Spring.
It doesn’t have to be a botanical garden though. There’s plenty of stuff in the most mundane of urban locations.
Bauhinia variegata, a.k.a. orchid tree. These are blooming all along the streets.
I just went on another little walk around on a nice, sunny, Sunday morning, with the ~lead weight~ D80 and it felt good. None of the photos are impressive or precious memories, but it felt good to do it.
Again, there’s nothing about these photos that’s exciting or novel. The old Nikon D80 CCD sensor isn’t magic. This subject matter isn’t special. These photos aren’t groundbreaking.
You should also go out with a hunk of junk and make your own achingly basic flower photos too.
I cannot tell how little I want THE SOFTWARE FOR MY MOUSE to include features tied to ChatGPT … let alone a mouse with a built-in button to start a prompt.
You need this garbage app to take full advantage of your Logitech hardware. It’s a shame because the MX Master 3S is an excellent mouse. My favorite mouse ever.
What makes it my favorite mouse ever is the thumb-button and its accompanying gestures. Click that paddle-ish button once and you get Mission Control. Hold it down and swipe left and it swipes to the Space “to the left” the same goes for the right.
Most people don’t think they use Spaces, but every full-screen app is a Space. It’s true. I deal with a lot of full screen apps. My employer used remote desktop software, and the best way to use that is full screen.
It’s pretty indispensable to be able to hold and drag to pop from app to desktop to app.
I might have gone for a couple months without even noticing the AI cruft, because I don’t launch Logi Options+, but I would eventually have noticed the folder, or the running process, like Stephen did and waste my time trying to figure it out.
In theory it’s not hurting anything because it’s not doing anything, but in principle my computer is not at Logitech’s disposal. Much like my recent complaints about YouTube, or all the other companies, my devices are mine. It stinks more of Adobe than YouTube though. They’re not angling to sell ads, they’re trying to appear trendy and relevant.
I tried uninstalling Logi Options+, and then installing SteerMouse, like Stephen did, but SteerMouse doesn’t have the gesture support I am accustomed to. I heard some people used the “Chords” to switch spaces, but I didn’t want to relearn how I used the mouse.
I tried to use Karabiner Elements next. Someone with a more sophisticated background in computer programming might be able to figure that out, but there’s nothing more I could seem to do than what SteerMouse did with setting the thumb button to trigger one thing, and no gestures. If anyone happens to figure out how to reproduce the gestures in Karabiner, get in touch.
Fortunately, Stephen updated his post with some reader feedback that it’s possible to edit the JSON file in Logi Options+ and it won’t run the extra process, or create the tmp directory.
I reinstalled Logi Options+, set up my mouse again (because I have always refused to create a Logi account to sync settings. Like they won’t abuse that), edited the JSON file from true to false and turned off automatic updates.
I had also considered downloading the offline version of the Logi Options+ app that Stephen linked to, but at least with the way things are my mods are very undoable if I do need to update the app.
Like I said in my previous posts about why this crap happens, the people at Logitech talked themselves into how this was actually a good thing that they were doing. Why wouldn’t people want this (poorly implemented) additional feature?
To anyone suggesting that I throw the best mouse I’ve ever used in the trash over this, think again. To people that think I should retrain myself to use a $129 Magic Trackpad set up to the left of my keyboard to switch spaces, I ask, “in this economy?”
This is a case where I want my consumer electronics to be an appliance, not a platform. I’ve gotten it back in line, and that’s that.
Increasingly, every pixel in front of our eyes is fought over by a pool of large technology companies that are trying to squeeze fractions of cents out of ads and promotions.
There’s a lack of care and thoughtfulness about all of these moves. Instead, there’s just an assumption that as long as they can pry someone’s eyes open, “Clockwork Orange”-style, then they’ve helped activate those reluctant viewers with brands.
I came across this video from Kyle Erickson on YouTube. The video follows the general YouTube tech video template, and Kyle has some Canadian flare so you’ll see him use apps for services like Crave.
The premise of his video is that he’s fed up with the embedded software in his TVs, specifically Roku and Tizen (Samsung) — though he does briefly mention Fire TV. His solution was to add an Apple TV to those HDMI inputs in his home. You can’t argue with that logic in this day and age.
However, he skips over the TV app in a way that serves the premise of the video, but not potential Apple TV buyers.
He uses the home screen (as I do, and I recommend for everyone) but he doesn’t point out in the video that he’s changed the default behavior of his remote to use the home screen over the TV app.
It would be better, maybe, to detail the steps to go through to get Watch Now to appear on the home screen, for example. When he bemoans the apps in the interfaces of the embedded software systems, he doesn’t mention that the TV app is a billboard for Apple TV+ first and foremost.
He also highlights that Apple supports older hardware with new versions of the OS and that a new version of the OS will be coming at this year’s WWDC. That needs a qualifier that Apple might finally pull the trigger on the TV app being the new home screen, and with the TV apps heavy emphasis on Apple TV+ we might all be in for a rude awakening.
Having said that, I completely agree with Kyle that people should buy an Apple TV these days if they can afford it. Apple TVs are better in a lot of ways thanks mostly to competitors worsening their products, not because of improvementsApple is making. Apple should be doing a better job here, even when, as Kyle notes, the competition is so awful.
Something's distinctly different about this "aerial" still frame.
Yesterday, I had the YouTube app open on my Apple TV in my office. I went to do something else, and when I looked back it wasn’t the Apple TV aerial screensaver, but a YouTube app “screen saver” with a slideshow of heavily compressed still images.
The Apple TV in my living room had an older version of the YouTube app (presumably from April 2nd if the dates in the version names are to be believed.) That version didn’t try to override my screensaver like the one in my office.
It seems the YouTube app, if the app is open, will start a screensaver slideshow of generic still images taken from videos if there isn’t a video that I’ve paused.
Look at the compression shred this still.
If there is a paused video it will be a slideshow of the YouTube thumbnail art endlessly zooming in, fading to black, and starting over.
Some of the worst sins of mankind exist in YouTube thumbnails, and they’re not designed to be screensavers.
You know what is designed to be a screensaver? The Apple TV’s aerial screensaver. Far and away the most lauded feature of the Apple TV platform. Beloved by all (except people that get creeped out by jellyfish) and yet replaced by either chunky-compressed stills from drone footage, or looping thumbnails.
To top it all off, it has static, white text (famously the best to use for screensavers) for video details, static YouTube logo, and a graphic for the directional pad, indicating that pressing the top will start playing the video being used in the screensaver. If you have an older Apple TV in your house (my office Apple TV is the 4th gen one) with the awful touchpad you can even trigger it when you try and pick up the remote from the furniture.
UPATE:Thomas did some further testing of his own, and apparently the fake screensaver will show media controls on devices you have connected to your TV (iPhone for a remote). According to him, if you let the fake screensaver keep running it will eventually revert to the Apple TV screensaver, and then the Apple TV will sleep.
YouTube’s not the first company to “innovate” in the screensaver space, and it’s not exclusive to the Apple TV. A few years ago my boyfriend had a set-top box that would initial start a slideshow of ugly nature photos, and then after a while they started dropping in ads into the slideshow.
I fully expect YouTube’s aim here is to capitalize on all this “free” real estate and start sliding in ads, promoting specific videos from partners, or showcasing movies available to rent or buy. I know that’s cynical, but so is YouTube as a business.
Setting that aside, I pay for YouTube Premium because the ads are so awful I can’t stand them, but because there’s some pretense of this being a screensaver I still get these slideshows that are the future home of ads for other people.
As Janko points out, Roku already monetizes screensavers on its platform. Feel free to peruse Roku’s site where they brag about chunks of the screen they’re willing to sell.
I don’t think advertising, in the abstract, is evil. I do, however, think it’s insidious to inject advertising into every pore —especially when those pores don’t belong to you, like when you’re the YouTube app, not even a platform.
If you want to bypass the YouTube app change, I heard from Rob Bhalla on Mastodon that if you change the screensaver to start at 2 minutes, instead of the Apple TV’s default 5 minutes, then the Apple TV’s screensaver kicks in before the YouTube one and you never see theirs. Thanks to YouTube not having any screensaver controls, and no idea what your actual screensaver settings on the Apple TV are, they hard coded in a start time just prior to the default 5 minutes.
That’s how you know it’s really there to help improve user experience, and not just a craven money grab by absolute hacks.
Sure, they might change this to start even earlier. In which case, we’re at the mercy of Apple to protect customer experience. I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one. App Store rejections are for indie devs, and people trying to skirt giving Apple money, not YouTube overriding the screensaver.
For Jason’s birthday we traveled to Japan for 10 days. It was my first time anywhere in Asia, and it had been a long time since Jason was last in Japan, so we had some experiences that were continuations of what I wrote up last Fall from our trips to Europe, and also things that were quite different.
Just like before, Jason dumped all the trains, flights, hotels, and dinner reservations into Google Sheets. I still have a hard time quickly accessing that data when we’re “in the field” so I’ve made some adjustments.
In America, almost everything is OpenTable, Resy, or Tock for reservations. In Japan, the dominant players seem to be TableCheck and Omakase. The real fancy places tended to use Omakase for reservations. Jason handled booking all the reservations because he was in charge of planning out the schedule for what he wanted to do. For weeks he’d message me, or mention in passing, his frustration at trying to score these reservations. According to his experience (and briefly verified when I went to try to book a few things as a test) the sites are not great. Neither worked for me in desktop Safari on my Mac, with TableCheck only rendering a blank page, and Omakase showing all of the possible menu dropdowns that are hidden by JavaScript, but none of the dropdowns worked. They all worked fine in mobile Safari, and in desktop Chrome. I’m not using an ad blocker or anything.
However, just loading doesn’t mean the site works. For one restaurant using Omakase, the one we went to for Jason’s birthday dinner, dates show in pink that are available for an “instant reservation” but that’s not actually true, and you’ll get “Please choose a different date” so you just need to keep clicking until you find one of the ones labeled to work that actually works. Then you need to select your party size, but SURPRISE, you can get a “Request for this number are not allowed” error because they only have seating for one, not two.
It’s all this weird game of whack-a-mole until you get a working reservation. It is absolutely not how reservation systems in the US work. It would be better if could handle these reservations through another intermediary, like Apple Maps or Google Maps which both have reservations capabilities.
Oh but they do show you a reservation button in Apple Maps for some of these restaurants, like this Omakase one. However it’s OpenTable, not Omakase. The OpenTable sheet errors and says there’s no table found for [date here] and says “Try another date or party size.” However, even if I select exactly the same date and party size that works on the Omakase website the OpenTable one always shows the same error. It’s the same error for any day I tried. It would seem that OpenTable doesn’t actually have the ability to book anything, but instead of not listing the restaurant, they’ve created some sort of psyop against would-be diners.
Google Maps, doesn’t pretend that you can reserve a table for that restaurant in the app. It has “Find a table” lower down in the location listing. That offers up opentable.jp (all in Japanese, and just as non-functional as the embedded OpenTable sheet in Apple Maps), omakase.com (exactly the same function as the mobile site), tablelog.com (all in Japanese, and says to call the restaurant to reserve). So there’s a needle in the haystack here, and that’s the Omakase site with it’s whack-a-mole reservation system, but it’s silly. For a company that gets all its data from scraping the internet, it should be able to see what the restaurant web site actually uses for reservations.
In another example, a less fussy restaurant (Bills Ginza), has a “Reserve” button in Apple Maps that doesn’t work. It does nothing if you press it. In Google Maps the reserve button (up top instead of just the “Find a table” button lower down in the previous example which seems to indicate that there’s an in-app interface to use) brings up a sheet that plausibly shows party size, and times in partnership with Ikyu. The restaurant’s website wants you to use TableCheck, which neither Apple Maps nor Google Maps directs you to.
Variations on this go for every restaurant Jason booked on our trip to Japan. It is entirely possible to book reservations, because Jason managed to do that with grit and perseverance, but there’s room for improvement here from everyone.
Jason was interested in watching a lot of YouTube videos about people currently visiting Japan, since he hasn’t been in many years. We’d get a sense of what was popular, and also the vibes. While we were watching the videos, I entered names of coffee shops, camera stores, or sites to visit, into Drafts tagged with “Tokyo” or “Kyoto” so that while we were watching over the last few months I could add to the running document and reorder things without cluttering the more rigid schedule. You hear that, Greg? I actually used a feature and didn’t just dump text in!
These were all things that would be nice to do, but not requirements. In fact, we weren’t able to go to most of them, but at least I have them saved if there’s a future trip to Japan.
Before, and during, our trip I took all the locations we would be traveling to from the Google Sheets document, and my Drafts lists of possible places to visit, and I created Google Maps lists for each city. It’s very easy. You search for the place, hit the bookmark icon to save it, and pick the list (or create it). You can enter an emoji for each list so that when you’re looking at Google Maps you’ll see that little emoji dotted everywhere. Also you can browse the list, or just start typing the name, and the saved item will come up first.
This is not a revolutionary new technology, but it was something I deployed to great effect on this trip. Jason didn’t hate it!
I’m an Apple Maps apologist in our household. When Jason drives, he uses Google Maps with CarPlay, and when I drive I use Apple Maps. My default is to use Apple Maps. However, when traveling, that’s not the case.
There is a similar “guides” feature in Apple Maps, but it’s not as good. Google Maps lists have a notes field, which is helpful for remembering why the place is saved. Apple Maps guides do not. Lists put that emoji on the map, while guides use the default business type icon (the purple hotel icon, for instance) and places a tiny little white circle badge with a star on it over the upper right corner of the business type icon. It’s visually cluttered, and makes a map that is not glanceable from a high-level.
When searching for a business, like your hotel which is part of a very large hotel chain, Google will show the one saved in your list as the first search result when you start typing. Apple Maps will show you the search results in the same order you’d see them otherwise, but it will write “in your guide” under the hotel that could be further down the list. Thanks?
Most importantly, guides can only be shared one way, like a published document, from me to Jason. Lists can be shared and jointly edited, so Jason is able to add what he wants to the list without me needing to act as a go-between. If he came across something he wanted to stop at, he could just add it to the list and there it was for the two of us.
Apple Maps is also bad if you move the map to an area and want to search within that area. It’ll snap back to where you are and search that area first. Don’t you want to find coffee shops near you? No! I moved the whole view over there! Search there!
Then you have to move the view back to where you wanted to look, and hopefully it will trigger the “search this area” button to appear. Sometimes it doesn’t! This is not an international problem, it’s a global problem, but it’s especially frustrating when planning ahead of the area you’re currently occupying.
Also, if you’re planning weeks before your trip, you’ll be surprised to find an error message when you connect your iPhone to your car that “Directions are not available between these locations.” Not to contradict Charli XCX, but there’s no fast lane from LA to Tokyo, so why would this ever be something I would want? It corrupts both my planning experience, and my current experience, because it’s goofy as hell. I don’t want to keep using the app to plan if it’s going to do that.
After we got back, I updated to the latest version of iOS, and I was greeted to this error message:
Uh…
What?
No, seriously, what?
The whole point of having offline maps is so that I am not at the mercy of a network connection. That’s its raison d’être! It’s downloaded.
If I had upgraded from 14.4.0 to 14.4.1 while I was traveling I would need to catch this error with enough time to re-download my offline maps, especially the offline maps for the city I was in.
Google Maps doesn’t do this! Why? Because it’s bonkers as fuck, that’s why! Why am I even getting an error message about this? Why aren’t people just fixing this?
This is still working exactly the same as my other trips. Before the trip I could keep an eye on what the weather would be like for what clothes I needed to pack, and during the trip I could see if there were any drastic changes coming up as we moved through the country. Which days it would rain kept shifting during the trip.
I’d still like something more granular for days with multiple cities, and I would love a system-level trip mode that could understand I’m not a persistent, stationary object when it comes to upcoming calendar events and weather forecasts.
For this trip I planned a little better and downloaded some things ahead of time. I had assigned myself some homework —watching Lost in Translation— so I had that downloaded to the TV app. I had downloaded some music too, unlike last time.
This was a new addition to my life after I had written up about my trips to Europe, but this wasn’t the first trip I used it on. United’s live activities offer a very similar live activity experience to Flighty, but not all air carriers have a live activity, and Flighty’s flight timing info is more extensive if you’re curious about how often a flight is on time, or delayed. Both of them nonsensically show seconds in their countdowns, which not only shifts all the text based on the character width of each number changing every second, but it’s also absolutely useless to know.
It still bums me out that the Watch just thinks I’m in my home time zone through the whole trip until that moment we can activate cell service and then it snaps across the globe.
The Face ID mask+watch combo doesn’t work when your iPhone and Watch are in Sleep focus mode. Which is still annoying. You can drop your mask to get the iPhone to unlock, or you can exit Sleep mode and get pinged by notifications when you do fall asleep. I understand there are security concerns about someone using Face ID while I am sleeping, but I could be asleep when it wasn’t in focus mode too, obviously. The mode doesn’t dictate if I’m conscious.
Roaming is still the way to go for me. Japan has more ubiquitous free public wifi than I’ve seen anywhere else I’ve traveled, and sims are supposedly easy, but I’m there for 10 days. I just want everything to be with my phone number, and for things to work as expected when I need them. Sometimes iCloud Public Relay gets into a fight with Wi-Fi. It’s worth it to just make it easy with a fixed, daily rate.
Like I said above in the section on lists vs. guides, Google Maps is more glanceable if you pre-populate a map with your unique emoji. The Apple business icons are generally too small, and low contrast for my liking. For some reason the ones that always visually stick out in dark mode are the bright pink icons for salons. Salon glanceability really has a time and a place, and it’s generally not on a ten day vacation.
Apple Maps is not very good for English-speaking tourists in Japan. Apple Maps Japanese data is from its partnerships with local Japanese companies. That’s great for locals, but that means things like restaurant reviews are in Japanese. Again, this is helpful if you speak Japanese, and very relevant to the residents of Japan, but far less accessible to me, an English-speaking traveler.
You can tap on the review source, which will open the partner company’s web site, and show the reviews. Then you can tap the “ᴀA” in the upper right corner, and pick “Translate Page”, to have the translated version of the web page. Apple doesn’t offer to translate anything within Maps. The text in the Maps app is not selectable so you can’t use the context menu to translate. You can’t tell it to always translate non-English web site pages.
The Apple Maps info for locations in Japan. The review source web page view in Maps. The translated version of the same page.
You need to do all those steps each time you want to consult reviews.
If you’re trying to compare several restaurants around you, quickly, you’re better off not using Apple Maps.
This is different from Apple Maps in Europe, where the reviews shown to travelers are all from TripAdvisor. I hate TripAdvisor, and don’t find it’s data to be reliable because it’s something that can be easily gamed to provide mediocre places with excessively high scores. It is, however, 100% more readable.
The reviews that Google shows you in Google Maps are all from Google Maps user submissions, not partner sites, and it knows I’m not Japanese so it shows me reviews from other travelers, like TripAdvisor reviews, but for some reason the ratings seem to be more closely aligned with my perceptions than the inflated TripAdvisor scores of Europe. (Google Maps reviews are also better in Europe than TripAdvisor.)
It goes without saying that Japan has a very developed, and robust transit system with multiple rail lines and rail companies. Bustling, massive stations connect these lines. Apple Maps and Google Maps still fall flat on their faces when it comes to mixing walking turn-by-turn directions with transit directions.
The apps will provide the written direction “Walk to Shibuya station”. That’s it. Simply walk to Shibuya station. Here’s a dotted line if you want to look at it. It says “2” for the entrance. Good luck inside! It’s not a sprawling world unto itself!
Both apps really, truly, needs to provide the same level of care that they provide for walking directions to the transit directions.
We had some confusion on one trip in Kyoto because we couldn’t find a line we were supposed to take, but it was a JR line, not a city line, and that wasn’t marked in the apps. We had to look at a laminated piece of paper taped to a column to get the clue. That meant exiting ticket gates, and entering other ticket gates inside the same station because they were different lines. Neither Maps app helped.
Google and Apple both provide diagrams for the train cars, and highlight specific cars. Google says “Boarding position for fastest transfer” or “fastest exit”. Apple just says “Board” without qualifiers. If you’re someone who’s not used to rail you see that and wonder for a second what happens if you get on the wrong car?
I don’t like the ambiguity of why you’re doing a step. Explain it. Does the train car decouple? Is the train too long for the destination platform? Or is it just an ideal I can fail to meet like so many others?
I do appreciate that both apps have accurate calculations for fares. Japan uses IC cards that are pre-paid transit cards where money can only go in. Apple Maps has an edge on Google Maps because it has access to your IC card balance in your Apple Wallet and will warn you if your trip will exceed your balance. Google doesn’t have that integration on iOS, naturally.
The crowds in some of these places in Japan are no joke. Google Maps has had the ability to show a little bar graph for every location for how busy a place is throughout the day, in addition to how busy it currently is. It’s had this feature since 2016.
Not much in Japan is open before 10 or 11 AM, but any culturally important site, like a temple or a shrine will be swamped by tour groups starting around 9 AM. It’s not always the case, and things fluctuate based on rain.
Google also does that for train and subway rides where it will inform you the train will be “Crowded” and you can mentally prepare yourself to be very close and personal with strangers before you get to the train.
Apple Maps has never offered any guidance for how busy a location is. The elastic shield of security and privacy offers Apple no cover here. Apple brags about how it uses anonymized data for real time car traffic. They can anonymize data for busy businesses, and packed-solid subways. No excuses.
We’re a divided household. I say Lyft, he says Uber, let’s call the whole thing off.
In Japan, they don’t have Lyft, but they do have Uber. It’s really a taxi-hailing app. This worked very well for us. We never really had problems hailing a cab anywhere in Tokyo, but we would have a kind of a back and forth about our requested destination that left us unsure if we correctly relayed the info. Uber alleviated that because it the destination was provided to the driver. Also we’d know, roughly, the fare range for our taxi trip.
There are other Japanese taxi apps, but we weren’t moving to Japan so we stuck with the one that already had all the account info, Uber.
Payment was a non-issue. Sure, it was nice that the Uber app took care of the financial transaction so you didn’t have that awkward pause at the end of every cab ride, but it wasn’t like America, or Europe, where you fretted the cab driver telling you his credit card reader you were looking at for the whole cab ride “wasn’t working” at the end of the trip.
When we hailed a cab the old fashioned way, they all took credit cards. Even the old men driving very old Toyota Crowns with lace seat covers had a credit card reader. They’d take more than credit cards, but that varied by cab. There seem to be a profusion of payment apps in Asia, and you’d see a cluster of them on a sticker on the door to every cab. Some indicated that they took IC cards, but we stuck to credit cards so we wouldn’t blow through our Suica card balances and need to reload.
The real downsides to Uber were that you had to meet the cab at a specified pickup point. It couldn’t be an arbitrary pickup. This meant that sometimes we’d have to walk up, or down, the block, or cross the street, and the pickup location had very little to do with the direction the driver was traveling, as no drivers had agreed to the trip yet, so we’d have a 50/50 shot that we were on the wrong side of the street for the pickup.
Estimated pickup times were also… ambitious. Pickups were generally 10-25 minutes and the app would quote you 4-8 minutes. Also some journeys the cab drivers just wouldn’t want to do, like if it was a pickup from a particularly congested part of town. When we left Kiyomizu-dera, the narrow roads were so congested with pedestrians no one accepted Jason’s ride request. We hiked back up to the taxi line and hailed a taxi there.
We did end up using Ubers and Taxis more often in Kyoto than in Tokyo (or our brief, one evening stint in Osaka). Kyoto’s public transit is definitely not as robust.
I wouldn’t say that I would expect to exclusively do a trip to Japan using Uber, but don’t be intimidated or fearful of using it, or having it as a backup.
Speaking of IC cards, Apple Wallet let’s you hit a “+” button in the Wallet, and pick a transit card. It doesn’t explain anything about the cards all being functionally identical, so you need to do that research yourself, but once you pick a card it’s good to go and you can top it off with Apple Pay transactions. The money on the card can be used for transit, or anywhere you see the IC logo, Suica, Passmo, etc.
It’s handy because it uses the express mode, where you don’t need to unlock or authorize the transaction (you can change the mode if you want to). This makes it very easy to swipe when entering and exiting the ticket gates. It also shows that you’ve started a journey, or completed one with your new balance. Because you’re billed based on your entrance and exit points, it’s important to know before your trip how much it will cost. It’s not a flat fare. I managed to get it down to ¥63 (42¢) so I consider that a minor victory.
Also, just like other transit cards it can only exist on either your iPhone (where you probably set it up) or your Apple Watch, not both. It can be transferred between the two.
I’ve never understood this limitation with the transit cards. We do way more complicated things with credit and debit cards, but a prepaid transit card is somehow harder to use and needs to be gingerly passed back and forth between devices.
I’m not a Disney blogger, but we did go to DisneySea for one day with some of Jason’s friends. They had small children so we mostly did rides for small children. Also the app was just generally broken the entire day. As bad as the Disneyland (California) and Disney World apps are, the Tokyo Disney Resort app is worse. I don’t measure a lot of things in life by their iOS App Store rating, but 2.8 stars seems like there’s room for improvement (especially when the five star ratings seem weirdly astro-turfy!)
When you open the app, there’s an animated intro with clouds that reveal the two parks, Disneyland and DisneySea. However, the animation wasn’t animating so I hit the “skip” button, thinking I was just skipping the unnecessary animation. However, the animation is part of a data loading process, so you immediately get an error that because you skipped the intro you need to hit a button to manually refresh the data.
Exasperated sigh.
Surely, if you know that I have skipped the intro, and are providing me with this error message, then you could just load the data instead of telling me I need to do it. What’s this app for if it doesn’t load data?
We tried to book a lunch, but the reservation system wasn’t working. We went and waited in line for the restaurant and then the reservation finally went through so we were able to leave the line and come back later. Presumably the 486DX that handles the reservation system was overloaded by the totally predictable and known quantity of daily park guests.
I also tried to scan my ticket in to the app, but it crashed the app. Seriously. Then when I tried to scan the ticket again it told me that the ticket had already been scanned. However, attempting to do anything like order snacks and drinks with the online order, failed because it said I needed to be in the park. I could not be more in the park.
The only thing I could reliably use the app for was to see ride wait times. Which is not as helpful as you might think without the ability to book rides with Priority Access or Premier Access because it never thought I was in the park.
I don’t know if the boondoggle of an app is the fault of The Oriental Land Company (which is listed as the owner on the iOS App Store, and owns the parks themselves), or The Walt Disney Corporation which seemingly licenses at least the app assets to them, but they should both be motivated to at least bring it up to par with the other bad Disney apps.
It’s a fun park though, with an incredible attention to detail, in all aspects that don’t involve the app you need to use.
No, not the movie. If only Bob Harris had access to Google and Apple’s Translation features he’d probably have been in a better mood.
Google continues to be my preferred translator, especially when using the Google app and the camera to do live translation. It’s just kind of clunkier to use Apple’s Translate app? I can’t explain it. I’m sure someone that’s an expert on user interaction models could articulate it better than I can but everything seems to be more taps than it should be, and also it seems marginally slower at the actual translation process.
Some of that seems to be where the buttons are located in the interface, but also some of it is Apple’s lack of auto-detect for translation so you always need to pick a language and a direction to translate. It can be good to have those explicit overrides, especially when languages have similar words using the same alphabet, but Kanji, Katakana, and Hiragana are very obviously Japanese.
Also each tab in the Translate apps interface needs you to enter the to and from languages. It’s not something you set once in the app. That means Translation, Camera, and Conversation can all have different languages selected making it take more time if you’re switching translation contexts, but not languages.
Because why wouldn’t I want to translate text from english to spanish, from japanese to english, and from french to english all depending on the mode of the app? WHO WOULD NOT WANT THAT, I ASK?
The camera translation in Apple’s app is slower than the camera translation in Google’s —at least on the Japanese product labels I was translating. You’d want to rotate the curved label to get the text as flat to the lens as possible for the best translation.
I wouldn’t say that Google trounces Apple in the quality of the translation, but Apple does tend to be a little more awkward and less helpful. Take this bag of Kit Kats, for example.
Apple on the left, and Google on the right. Which would you pick?
Apple translated the Kit Kat logo, which is just Roman characters in an ellipse, to “Kitkao” which is … unhelpful. Apple failed to translate the vertically oriented characters and instead just transcribed them.
Google translated it as “increase in revenue”. Based on context, it seems there’s an extra Kit Kat in the bag? Apple also translated the description as “The sweetness of adults” and Google translated it as “Adult sweetness”. Both sound bizarre, but I know from Rie McClenny, that Google is the literal translation, and it means the flavor is for an adult palette.
This is just one example, you can do your own research here and figure out how you feel about it, but I don’t see any reason to use the Apple app over the Google one in Japan, just as I don’t see any reason to use the Apple app over Google in France. It’s mostly an exercise with seeing what minimum viable translation you can conceivably get away with when you use Apple’s Translate app, and that’s never what I’m aiming for in any context.
I knew I would need to limit what I was taking, again. That meant my Peak Design 3L sling, that fits my Sony a6400 camera with a lens attached, and one more lens. I put another lens in my carry-on.
Sigma 18-50mm at 37mm.
When I was in Tokyo, I almost exclusively used my 18-50mm Sigma F2.8 mostly with a circular polarizer. My 18-135mm Sony F3.5-5.6 was my secondary lens, but it stayed in the bag. It’s not as good as the sigma at it’s widest and it is a slightly larger, heavier lens than the Sigma.
Monkey over Kyoto. Sony 18-135mm at 76mm.Sony 18-135mm
In Kyoto I switched to 18-135mm and Rokinnon 12mm F2 as my backup. I knew that I would need the extra reach from the 135mm, and I would also find myself in landscape and architecture settings that would benefit from the wider 12mm lens. It’s a completely manual lens, which is why I didn’t want to use it in Tokyo.
Sakura. Rokinnon 12mm.Who says you shouldn't use wide angle lenses for portraits? Rokinnon 12mm.Hokan-ji. Yasaka Pagoda. Kyoto. Rokinnon 12mm.Hokan-ji. Yasaka Pagoda. Kyoto. Sony 18-135mm at 45mm.
Every night I would take the SD card and use the Lightning to SD adapter. The photos were imported into Lightroom mobile. I’d edit and use the flag (quick swipe up or down) to decide if I liked something enough to export it, or if it was something I’d never want to see again (like a shot that missed focus). I’d filter by flag, then select the photos -> Save to my camera roll as JPEG.
The Lightroom HDR editing workflow is, in my opinion as a hobbyist photographer, shit. It can’t export to HEIC/HEIF, DNG, or my original Sony ARW files so you can’t round-trip. The results don’t always look right, and you have no real sense of how they’ll look on an SDR screen. There is an SDR preview, but it makes everything look like trash, and the editing controls for augmenting the SDR preview never align to what the image looks like if I was just working in SDR the entire time.
I know that it can make things look less impressive because highlights, and sunlight, won’t pop, but I’d rather have a more predictable output. If you have an Instagram gallery that mixes HDR iPhone shots and non-iPhone shots and you want to convert the iPhone ones, just slide the brightness slider in Instagram’s editor one percent. Instagram hasn’t updated their editing tools in years so changing anything will convert the photo to SDR.
The iOS Photos app does a better job with HDR, because it handles HDR images from the iPhone’s cameras. It’s just a significantly worse photo editor, and organizer, than Lightroom.
There was dust on my lens in a few shots I needed to touch up, and Lightroom is the best place to do it. Retouch, an app I’ve used for iOS for years, has a resolution limit so I only ever use it for iPhone shots, and it bakes in changes when you use it. Pixelmator can touch up photos too, but it also bakes in changes. If I decide to revisit something about the photo I can do it as much as I want to in an app like Lightroom. Photos for iOS has no retouching tool, even though one exists on the Mac (it sucks ass, but it’s there).
I didn’t end up using any new apps on this trip. Things were going by fast so I either got the shot with my Sony a6400, or my iPhone’s Camera app.
I’m still grateful I can travel, and that Jason drags me unwillingly to places that I end up enjoying. I can only imagine my trip would have been a little more difficult without an IC card in my Apple Wallet, or Google Maps to help me organize navigating the immense metropolis of Tokyo.
I absolutely want to go back to see, and experience more. If the apps all stagnated and stayed exactly the same, I’d be perfectly comfortable (except for the Tokyo Disney Resort app!) Ideally, things will keep improving, and maybe someday we’ll have AirPods that translate like Star Trek’s Universal Translator, and augmented reality glasses that do text translation when we’re looking at something. I would generally settle for things being 10% better next time.
This blog post from YouTube’s Official Blog —authored by Joe Hines (interaction designer for YouTube on TV) and Aishwarya Agarwal (Product Manager for YouTube on TV)— is really something. I am not directing my ire toward Joe or Aishwarya, but to the awful business culture that fosters this kind of hot garbage.
More than ever before, viewers are turning to the largest screen in their homes – their TVs – to watch their favorite YouTube content from vlogs, to video games, to sports highlights and more.
And while watching television has historically been considered a passive experience, one where you can sit back and enjoy your favorite programs, we’re building one that is uniquely YouTube that gives viewers the opportunity to engage with the content they’re watching, even on the big screen. As watchtime on TVs has grown to more than 1 billion hours per day, we’re faced with a fun challenge: How can we bring familiar YouTube features and interactivity to the living room while ensuring that the video remains at the center of the experience?
Translation: They noticed people are watching more videos on their TV, and they want those people to multitask —not as a second screen experience that might not be tethered to YouTube, but directly to YouTube itself, on the TV.
When they refer to interaction it’s either about direct, or indirect clicks that turn into dolla dolla bills ya’ll. This is not “interaction” like a game interface, or some kind of 90s multimedia CD-ROM.
Interaction includes the indirect monetization, which is growing platform engagement by highlighting comments. A person watching a YouTube video on their TV is blissfully unaware that comments even exist.
Which is a way to steer the person posting the video into moderating and cultivating conversation, and that drives up views, as well as the transparent pursuit of money in the form of increased shopping links.
Lean in, lean back
While the living room has traditionally been a place for “lean back” experiences, we’ve learned through our user research that when a viewer is excited about the content, they like to multitask: they flow between leaning back to watch, and leaning in to enhance their experience. As a result, viewers want a richer, distraction-free TV experience that they feel in control of. With this in mind, our team sought to find a way to add greater engagement to the living room, while still striking the right balance between interactivity and immersion.
Translation: We had a mandate to increase engagement that could be monetized, so we have decided that we reached a compromise we can live with, because we have to.
To gather insights, we tapped into user feedback provided by participants who could interact with these three different approaches to watch different types of content directly on a TV with a remote.
What we learned from our users was:
The new design works for features that require equal or more attention than the video itself (e.g. comments, description, live chat) but obscuring the video would be detrimental to the viewing experience.
We need to continue to prioritize simplicity over the introduction of additional lightweight controls.
A one size fits all solution may not be the best approach, as features such as live chat and video description benefit from different levels of immersion.
This research allowed us to gauge the usability of each prototype and better understand if this overall new design aligned with our goal to enable a more interactive experience on TV.
I like how they stress that the most important feedback is feedback that aligns with the goal. I would be interested to hear how much feedback did not align with the goal.
Other companies have tried these kinds of approaches, of just cramming stuff around a video and making it smaller, since webTV. That the video can be encrusted with extra value.
Take the old Twitter Apple TV app launched in 2016 for example. That shrank the video down so a scrolling feed of related tweets could be shoved in there, like YouTube shoving in their toxic comments in their TV app.
The real success of doing anything involving social engagement, and the coveted online shopping, is from a second screen experience, not on the actual TV itself, because interacting with those kinds of experiences with a TV remote sucks ass and when you use those interfaces, you not only make your viewing experience worse, you degrade the experience of everyone else watching the TV.
Not to mention things like personal expression. One of the desired outcomes for YouTube’s system is to use it for sports, but why would chatting using the single account that’s logged in to YouTube, and your TV’s remote, be more desirable than discussing that live event on something like a real-time microblogging platform from a phone? This was part of Twitter’s problem with their TV app (along with other problems).
So a year after Twitter unveiled their tvOS app they pivoted to permitting a second screen experience. It wasn’t enough to make any of this desirable, but let’s keep thinking about how the premier place to trash talk live TV failed to capitalize on integrating live TV app into their live TV trash-talking app.
YouTube already has a second screen experience where you can link your phone to your TV and control what’s playing. You can read the cesspool comments, visit links in a description, and do your low-quality shopping without having to use a TV remote, or altering anything about your playback.
Except they have a bug that ignores the do-not-autoplay setting in both the mobile app and the TV app and autoplays at the conclusion of a video if you started it from your phone. Maybe they should work on that.
In the new TV app interface —they don’t talk about this in their blog post, but if you look at the video examples you’ll see— you can’t add a comment or reply. There’s a button to “Open the YouTube mobile app to add comments and replies”. This is identical to the current functionality, this just elevates that button to be side-by-side with the playing video.
You can “access” the text description, which you can already do in the YouTube app on your TV, but you can’t do anything with the description. In their example, the description is some filler text, but almost everyone knows that any value in a description comes from links. Either time code links, or links to a little thing called the World Wide Web. However, the existing TV app has no way to render those links as anything useful to someone watching this on their TV, and no mention is made of any improvements, so I assume it’s like the rest where I’ll be able to read the text URLs to myself but now side-by-side with the video.
You’ll see a “products in this video” section appear whenever creators include what’s being featured in their content. But YouTube hasn’t quite reached the stage of letting you complete an entire transaction from your TV; instead, the app will display a QR code that you can scan to finish buying an item on your phone. Not exactly seamless.
Well that’s certainly not a passive viewing experience.
Perhaps, they will eventually add a button to open the shopping link from the YouTube mobile app, like they’re doing for comments. However, at that point, why are we bothering to put any of this cruft on the TV screen at all instead of just having one big button that opens the mobile app?
My guess is because it’s entirely optional as to whether or not you pick up the phone to do that, and maybe that’s what YouTube views as the real problem? The lack of any consumer desire to watching a rolling feed of spam and commerce like this is the new HSN or QVC. Just watch their demos in their blog post.
The whole thing repulses me.
There are commercial realities to the “creator economy” where sponsorships, ads, merch, affiliate links, etc. are all very important to funding the production the video people are idly enjoying, and we should acknowledge that. However, video that’s on equal footing with the commerce, and the “engagement” isn’t much of a video, the whole thing becomes undifferentiated noise.
A little while ago I wrote about why Apple News, and Apple News+ suck. I’m very confident that I’m not in the minority with my opinion that it sucks. I would like to detail some things that I think would help to make the News app and News+ service more appealing.
Abandon the misguided concept that the Apple News team can present an immutable layout of general interest stories with a centrist, non-partisan viewpoint. If a news outlet has risen to the level of ire where it’s been blocked then omit it. Don’t have that gray box, with this condescending text:
Blocking isn’t supported in Top Stories and other groups curated by the Apple News editors. [Publication] is blocked in the rest of your feed.
That dialog shouldn’t exist in the interface. The curation of the editors is not sacrosanct over my value as a reader. There’s no editorial board that can be written to, or people working at Apple News that do any writing. This is simply a highfalutin aggregator!
The editors can weight stories that are of interest to surface in that region, but those weights should be overridden by any blocking, or content filtration, that a user wants to employ. Surface something else to fill the area, if that’s the main concern. It’s not like Fox News articles offer structural support or tie the whole interface together. This space is an inbox, not publication in and of itself.
Also allow the user to weight what’s important to them. The editors select for breaking national, and world news, with one little round rect for local news at the bottom of Top Stories. It is very rarely, if ever, a top story in local news.
This is surely, without a doubt in my mind, not the most important local news story in all of Los Angeles.
I can tap the “More local news” and I’m taken to a Los Angeles “topic” which aggregates any publication that has something to do with Los Angeles, that includes the LA Times, LAist, Hollywood Reporter, Variety, NBC4, ABC7, Infatuation, Eater Los Angeles, etc. However, those publications are not always writing about Los Angeles so you get state, national, world, general entertainment news, and celebrity gossip. It doesn’t present anything as coherent as the LA Times front page, or the LA Times app.
It does have its own menu for sections, like a newspaper, but it’s still in the purview of the Apple News editors so I can’t suppress the content mill firehose of The Infatuation. It gets the same blocked channel treatment as Top Stories so I get clumps of gray boxes. Again, suggest less doesn’t do anything.
The editors do a good job of mixing in sources that are not exclusively for Apple News+ subscribers in the Top Stories section, but that also means it might be from a lower-quality source, or one that I could access more easily from the web, or social media.
People might not remember this feature, but if you have a subscription for a publication outside of the Apple News app - like my subscription for the LA Times - I can authenticate my subscription and see all the LA Times stories in the app, but it doesn’t remove the “Apple News+” banner from the story headers to distinguish it from the stories I can’t read from Apple News+. Because I can read the LA Times, I would like to weight it higher than other lower-quality, free publications.
Instead of voting on individual stories with thumbs that don’t seem to mean a goddamn thing, or blocking an entire news outlet, what if we could filter by words, or phrases. You know, like in ye olden days? I can filter email, surely I can filter news, which we’ve already established is an inbox.
Apple could even jazz it up for 2024 with some ✨machine learning✨ to understand when we don’t want to hear about specific people who always seem to worm their way into the news. Not everyone wants to block specific people, and it hardly seems like it would topple any particular personal brand, but it could pacify some cantankerous people (like myself).
Throw some ML filters at stories that amount to little more than a collection of Amazon affiliate links. Let people who want to see deals-deals-deals see them, and maybe corral them into a specific section. Let the rest of us be blissfully unaware.
That also goes for filtering news stories that do little else than gnaw on a fragment of an interview, or bulk up one quote, into some big reaction.
Surely a network can be trained to identify what percentage of a story is out of context crap from the original source, because I can do it. It usually involves skipping anything from ScreenRant or Inverse! If anything, use those stories to weight the importance of the original news item, and then shove these bottom feeders under it, where those publications can look for their crumbs of attention.
None of this seems like impossible Jetsons technology. Artifact was doing stuff in this space with rewriting headlines. Jay Peters, writing last June for The Verge:
Clickbait headlines aren’t just annoying for Artifact users, though: they can also mess things up for Artifact’s recommendation systems. Sometimes, clickbait headlines can tell the systems that “you’re interested in things you may not actually be interested in because you’ve clicked to find out some key bit of information that was left out of the title,” Systrom says.
Systrom showed me a demo of the AI-driven rewriting process. When a user marks something as a “clickbait title” (you can find the option by long-pressing the article in your feed), they’ll see a little loading animation show up where the offending headline used to be, and then the new headline will appear. Next to the headline, there’s a little star indicating that it’s not the original title. Artifact isn’t able to rewrite headlines in articles themselves; it can only rewrite them from the feed.
Artifact failed because they couldn’t grow, and didn’t have a clear way to make money. Apple doesn’t have the same financial concerns Artifact had, obviously, but Apple would be concerned with profitability. Which is why the personalized filters could be for News+ subscribers. Some degree of server side quality filtration would be beneficial to even non-subscribers (as it would be very difficult to pitch someone to spend more if the base experience was as poor as it is right now).
Apple will send out email newsletter digests curated by the same people who curate your Top Stories. I’m sure someone turned that feature on on purpose, and didn’t turn it off.
People love newsletters! Apparently! They can catch up on stuff anywhere they can read their email, and they can organize it with the same tools they’re used to for their day to day life.
There are also people who have begrudingly picked up an assortment of newsletters over the last few years of the newsletter expansion who don’t relish reading their newsletters interspersed with their other email. I’m in this latter group.
I already use iCloud Hide My Email addresses to subscribe to newsletters for some layer of privacy, how nice would it be to have an iCloud email address that ingested newsletters into Apple News? Not to be interspersed with Stuff Magazine, and all that garbage, but in a newsletter section.
What if we did the exact same thing for RSS feeds?
We all have sites we value reading more than some of the detritus floating in Apple News. If Apple wants us to spend more time in the app put the stuff we value reading in the app. We’re not always on a quest to browse for just whatever happens to be there. We all already have our own sources and habits.
Create a home for those. In Safari’s Reader View, add a button to bring something into News, by finding the feed tag and importing it, or just that one-off item instead of leaving news items stranded in the browser. That publication might even already have that article in Apple News and then News could reduce the friction of getting to it.
Instead of someone feeling trapped under 100 pounds of sweltering JavaScript and boiled alive in autoplaying video ads, they could see a better reading experience, and those publications could see conversions to Apple News, and they could figure out if they wanted to be in Apple News+.
It’s very difficult to get people to want to open Apple News, which means it’s more difficult to convert them to News+ subscribers inside there. The publications in News+ aren’t especially interested in promoting News+ because they benefit more from your direct interaction on their site, or subscribed to their newsletter. They want to convert you into a subscriber for themselves. One of the ways that publications have had success with this is with gift links. Where a story can be shared with a filthy non-subscriber.
Apple News+ should have gift links. Instead of wincing when someone sends me a News link, I could be interested because it’s a gift link to read a story I otherwise would not. I could then experience the new and improved News app (seriously, Apple can’t skip the rest of what I’m saying and just slap gift links on the existing app, that won’t do anything).
It’s not rocket science. No one wants to share links to Apple News because the app sucks and it hijacks links and traffic. What if it the app was good and the link made you happy and grateful? What a comeback.
Flat out we need to get rid of the round rectangles that are too small to show an entire headline. That can’t be a thing. I don’t care if you need to do a brick layout, or shrink the image that accompanies most stories, but I’m not tapping on some mystery-meat headline that’s cut off with an ellipsis. We certainly don’t need towering images that take the entire screen up at the expense of clarity. If Apple wants to evoke print publications with those “spreads” in here, they should also evoke print publications in having the entire headline.
The News app, and News+, operate from the assumption that you’re just going to start at Top Stories and scroll down forever. When you drill into an article or publication, it’s not like macOS column view, or iPod navigation, where there’s some logical breadcrumb trail, because you might have picked a “section” from a menu.
The sections that are crammed vertically on top of each other are not ordered by you, or set based on your preferences. The “For You” section is stocked with stuff that’s never been for me. A parade of suggested topics and sections shuffle up and down and can only be dismissed outright.
Do I want to follow “Technology”? Uh… I mean… I guess that seems like something I would like to follow, but it seems very broad, and a lot of it seems poorly written? I can’t increase that section’s size, or decrease it, but I can leave the infinitely chopped up vertical to drill down into the topic, and be presented with the “For You” for each topic.
Sigh.
Which in “Technology” is still overly broad. Assuming I liked any of what I’m seeing here, I can’t rearrange the “Today” view to include more of it, and I can’t navigate to this topic on the “Today” view because it has no sections menu, like the publications and topics like “Local news” do. I can’t just see an outline of the whole shebang.
If you want to jump directly to anything that may or may not be on this page you have to go to the “Following” tab in the interface which shows you Special Coverage, Favorites, Local News, Channels & Topics, Suggested by Siri, and a grab bag of everything else that isn’t Sports.
What if I could collapse and expand sections? Maybe a mini-map of all the sections? Reorder and scale them like widgets on the home screen? You can reorder the publications under the Channels & Topics section but… it doesn’t do anything other than move them in this list, not your “Today” view.
Imagine if the order of the page changed based on time of day and I could choose to see important breaking news in the morning, topic-based writing during the day, and more thoughtful, ruminative pieces in the evening.
What if I could change the button for “Sports” and “Audio” to literally any other topic? Ivory, Tapbots’ Mastodon client, has an innovative feature to long-press on one of those bottom tab buttons, and swap it to something else so you can see mentions, faves, bookmarks, etc.
Eddy Cue could have like twice as many sports crammed into that “Sports” at the bottom as long as I could pick something else, like take me directly to the LA Times, or that baffling “Technology” topic.
Pushing users entirely to an uncontrollable, vertical scroll in “Today”, or making them dig in “Following” isn’t providing those readers with an experience that’s an improvement over other news sources. Despite the worst ad-tech out there, it’s often more likely I’m going to run into something I want to read on a site junked up with ad-tech, not in the difficult to peruse, or personalize abyss of News. It certainly doesn’t sell people on News+, despite the high percentage of the interface dedicated to teasing News+ articles.
I know that I’m pitching changes with that “just do this” attitude that people love to be on the receiving end of, but someone’s gotta change something in that app. It doesn’t have to be any of the stuff I’ve said, but these areas I’m hitting on need some kind of work. There are financial ramifications to any kind of change, and the folks in charge of Apple News and Apple News+ might value getting new publications onboard more than improving the app. However, improving the app improves all the good publications, and shows people that they’re worth paying for.
Instead of chasing old ambitions around editors and institutions, I would like to see an approach that takes the reader into account.
One feature of the Vision Pro that reviewers and buyers alike seem to really appreciate is the ability to dial in an environment. Casey Liss joked on Mastodon:
How long until a YouTuber goes to Haleakala, Joshua Tree, Yosemite, and Mount Hood, and finds the exact points the Vision Pro environments were captured?
Bonus points for the moon, obviously.
I’m sure someone is going to do it (definitely not the moon part), but the environments aren’t purely photographic things. That’s not a judgement just that if you got as close as you could to what was depicted you’d still never get it exact, so don’t sweat it.
It does make me think about how much I love the places on the environments list that I have been to. When I did my demo I didn’t really feel like I was in those environments. That’s only because I’m viewing that environment in the context of my own experience, and faulty memories. I’ve been to Haleakalā, Joshua Tree, and Yosemite, but I didn’t feel as direct a connection to those places as I would have liked. The exception being Joshua Tree, which was the closest to matching my feelings about the place even if I didn’t feel like I ever stood in that exact spot.
It’s like looking at a good publicity photo of places you’ve vacationed as opposed to a personal photo you took which have attached meaning, but aren’t as cleanly executed or specific.
Maybe we should all go to Joshua Tree? I’ve been a lot, but you’re probably some East Coast bum, like Casey, and haven’t really thought about going. Let me give you some travel tips.
The best months to go to Joshua Tree are between October and May. The summers are simply too hot. It can get very, very cold, especially at night, in the winter, but it’s much more comfortable. It can, occasionally, snow, but you really have to race to catch a glimpse because it won’t stick.
Snow! December 2008
Joshua Tree National Park, and the adjacent Yucca Valley, sit above Palm Springs and the rest of the Coachella Valley. You can fly in to Palm Springs, and rent a car for the short drive up to Joshua Tree, you can travel from Ontario (California, not Canada) International Airport, or one of the further Los Angeles area airports, and sit in a snarl of traffic for hours.
Even if you’re local enough that you’ll want to drive to Joshua Tree, you’re better off not going there and back in the same day. Definitely plan to spend the night in Yucca Valley. There’s no great, big lodge inside of the National Park, like some of the others, but you can camp, if you’re the weird type of person who wants to camp in a desert and use chemical toilets.
Pioneertown Motel check-in. January 2023.
Pioneertown Motel is a great place to crash for those funky desert vibes, and it even has Joshua trees on the property. It’s great for stargazing at night because it’s beyond the light pollution (and pollution-pollution) of the LA Metro area.
Pioneertown Motel at night. January 2022.
Pioneertown itself is a collection of old west facades from when the area was used to make Westerns. They have stores selling various tchotchkes, but it’s not a grandiose theme park.
For food you have The Red Dog Saloon, and Pappy and Harriet’s. Both are in Pioneertown itself, and easy walks. Taking the road back to 29 Palms Highway lands you at Frontier Cafe which is a good (but potentially busy!) spot to get coffee, breakfast, and sandwiches to take with you to the park, or just stroll around the shops at the highway intersection.
Arrive at Joshua Tree National Park early and use your National Parks pass to enter. There are three entrances, and only the most popular West Entrance on Quail Springs Road has an entry booth. They usually have one lane set aside for passholders, but when the non-passholder lane backs it up it backs up down the road that leads to the park and you’re just stuck.
The other two park entrances don’t have booths monitoring entry because they’re far less popular, but you must display your pass or pay for entry. Sometimes we’ll start at Cottonwood Springs Road off the 10 and wind through to Quail Springs Road, or vice versa. Usually we’ll just go in and out of the Quail Springs Road entrance since it’s the closest to where we’d be staying, and other services. Those other entrances do have visitor centers.
Cellphone service in the park is almost non-existant except for the area by the West Entrance, and the Quail Springs picnic area, so get your offline maps downloaded.
My boyfriend’s favorite (and punishing) hike is Ryan Mountain Trail. You are completely exposed to the elements so remember your sunscreen, and windbreakers in the winter. The view from the top is fantastic, but it’ll really wipe you out to get up there. Unless you’re an avid hiker you’ll probably be done for the day after that. This is also a popular trail so you’ll be stopping to let people pass, or listening to assholes lugging bluetooth speakers on the trail.
The peak of Ryan Mountain looking back towards the west. You can't even see the Joshua trees from this height, they're just dots. January 2023.Panorama from the most of the way to the peak of Ryan Mountain. November 2020.
My favorite stuff is all the stuff that’s not really a hike. Which is a cop out, I know, but it’s nice to just experience the place without hitting cardio goals. That includes the Cap Rock Nature Trail where you meander around a winding trail that has little placards explaining what various plants are, and there are huge boulders up around you.
The Cap Rock Nature Trail.
The Baker Dam Nature Trail is similar, if a little larger, and includes an old, not-that-impressive dam.
Minerva Hoyt Trail (but mostly just its parking lot) is probably the largest expanse of Joshua trees you’re going to see. You’re just surrounded by the towering things.
Minerva Hoyt parking lot. January 2020.
Keys View is far out of the way, and really only offers a vantage point looking down at the Coachella Valley and San Jacinto Mountains. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just a long drive and then you’ll get back in the car and drive back the way you came, so you might not be satisfied if you have limited time.
Another quiet spot for a snack, or just a rest, is where Live Oak Road comes off of Park Boulevard (Quail Springs Road turns into Park Boulevard inside the park). There’s nothing impressive here but it’s quiet because most people don’t have a reason to stop here. You might also see some ground squirrels.
My favorite spot in the whole park is the Cholla Cactus Garden. It’s closer to the Cottonwood Springs entrance than the West Entrance so it’s quite a drive, but worth it, especially in the late afternoon when the sun starts to get low, or just dip, behind the mountains. This spot in the park is covered with cholla cactus (and bees, a lot of bees). Which gives you a very different vibe from the towering Joshua trees. I’d love it if Apple captured the Cholla Cactus Garden as an environment for the Vision Pro, but only if you could walk around it’s little path.
Cholla Cactus Garden. November 2020.
Maybe let us change viewpoints along the path? Like Myst, or the real estate web site version of Myst: Matterport. Anyway, walking through something more human-scale is part of the experience.
You can spend a few days in the Joshua Tree going in and out of the park, and the area vibing to the funky desert. Have a spiritual awakening, or whatever, I don’t care. When you finish you can pop down to Palm Springs for tiki cocktails and a swim before you head home.
I’m not sure it will increase the connection you have when you look at the Joshua Tree environment in visionOS, but it’ll certainly give you a more three dimensional view of the place.
