Steven Troughton-Smith:

If you want to pixel-peep on iOS or iPadOS, it also has the Zoom accessibility setting, and can be controlled via touch, keyboard, or trackpad. It works for display mirroring too, and has other options like a minimap and HUD (‘Zoom Controller’).

These settings are in Settings → Accessibility → Zoom. I prefer switching the Zoom Region from the default Window Zoom (which gives you large magnifier glass window to drag around the screen) to Full Screen Zoom, which is more like how zooming works on the Mac.

On iPadOS, you should go into the Keyboard Shortcuts panel (inside Accessibility → Zoom) and turn on Zoom with Scroll Wheel. This lets you zoom Mac-style, using the Control key, when you have a keyboard and trackpad/mouse connected.

(You can, of course, zoom on VisionOS too.)

David Pierce, writing at The Verge (gift link):

The Pixel 10 Pro solidified a feeling I’d been having through all of my tests: Android is a better operating system than iOS. [...]

If all you got from your phone was the out-of-the-box experience, I’d have picked the Pixel. But unfortunately for Android, app stores exist. And the App Store absolutely wipes the floor with the Play Store. Lots of the apps I use every day — apps like Puzzmo, NotePlan, Mimestream, and Unread — either don’t exist on Android at all or only exist as web apps. Most of the ones that do work on both platforms are better on iOS. And forget about the kind of handcrafted, small-developer stuff — apps like Acme Weather, Current, and Quiche, just to name a few recent favorites — that’s all over the App Store and absolutely nowhere to be found on Android.

Put aside your feelings on whether you agree “Android is a better operating system than iOS”. What’s interesting here is that Pierce, who thinks that’s true, still prefers the overall experience of iOS because the apps are so much better. I first wrote about this in 2010, in “Where Are the Android Killer Apps?”:

But, the thing I’ve noticed, eight months after returning a Nexus One I borrowed for six weeks from a friend, is that, well, I don’t seem to be missing much.

I’ve complained, numerous times, about the “how many total apps are in your store?” metric — the idea that Apple is “winning” because there are more iOS apps than there are apps for any other mobile platform. If quantity of app titles were all that mattered, we’d all be using Windows, not Mac OS X, right? Having the most apps matters, but having the best apps matters too. The sweet spot for a platform is to do well in both regards.

And then, more recently, in 2023, “Making Our Hearts Sing”:

I will offer another quote from Kubrick: “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.”

Art is the operative word. Either you know that software can be art, and often should be, or you think what I’m talking about here is akin to astrology. One thing I learned long ago is that people who prioritize design, UI, and UX in the software they prefer can empathize with and understand the choices made by people who prioritize other factors (e.g. raw feature count, or the ability to tinker with their software at the system level, or software being free-of-charge). But it doesn’t work the other way: most people who prioritize other things can’t fathom why anyone cares deeply about design/UI/UX because they don’t perceive it. Thus they chalk up iOS and native Mac-app enthusiasm to being hypnotized by marketing, Pied Piper style.

What’s happened over the last decade or so, I think, is that rather than the two platforms reaching any sort of equilibrium, the cultural differences have instead grown because both users and developers have self-sorted. Those who see and appreciate the artistic value in software and interface design have overwhelmingly wound up on iOS; those who don’t have wound up on Android.

Apple would be wise to cultivate a further widening of this third-party software-quality gulf through radically improved developer relations, rather than attempting to squeeze additional rent from this advantage — which, while penny-wise in terms of juicing its App Store revenue in the near term, is ultimately pound-foolish in the way that it is souring developer sentiment.

The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad. That edge is waning. Not because software on other platforms is getting better, but because third-party software on iPhone, Mac, and iPad is regressing to the mean, to some extent, because fewer developers feel motivated — artistically, financially, or both — to create well-crafted idiomatic native apps exclusively for Apple’s platforms.

Apple should focus its developer relations on cultivating that motivation, and trust that in the end that will continue to prove lucrative for Apple itself. They should do whatever it takes to make their cut of App Store transactions feel like a beneficial bargain to developers, not an oppressive tax.

Lisa Melton, who ran the team that created Safari, regarding her interactions with Steve Jobs:

When Steve asked you a question? You didn’t ramble and, whatever you did, you didn’t make up an answer. If you didn’t know, you just said that you didn’t know. But then you told him when you’d have an answer. Again, this was just good advice to anyone “managing up,” as they say.

This is A+ advice for dealing with anyone, period. If you don’t know, say “I don’t know.” So many people have a deep aversion to saying that. And if you can say “I don’t know, but I’ll find out in «some short amount of time here»”, say that.

Here’s the bit that’s relevant this week:

Steve didn’t like the status bar and didn’t see the need for it. “Who looks at URLs when you hover your mouse over a link?” He thought it was just too geeky.

Fortunately, Scott and I convinced Steve to keep the status bar as an option, not visible by default. But that meant we had a new problem. Where should we put the progress bar to indicate how much of the page was left to load?

Before, the progress bar lived inside the status bar. So we needed to find it a new home. We discussed all sorts of silly ideas including making it vertical along the edge of the window.

Remember, this was back in the day before the spinning gear or other smaller affordances were widely used to indicate progress. In the age of barber-pole blue Aqua, it had to be a bar.

The room got quiet. Steve and I sat side-by-side in front of the demo machine staring at Safari. Suddenly we turned to each other and said at the same time, “In the page address field!”

Smiles all around. Which I followed with, “I’ll have a working version of that for you by the end of the week.” Over-committing my engineering team, of course.

But I didn’t care. I had just invented something with the Big Guy. True, it was a trifle, but there’s no feeling like sharing even a tiny byline with Steve.

This of course, is contra John Calhoun’s offhand recollection (in a Hacker News thread last month) that Steve Lemay “also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar”. Melton is a direct source, so there’s no reason to doubt her recollection of having conceived of the idea alongside Steve Jobs. These recollections are not, of course, mutually exclusive — perhaps Lemay was a designer assigned to flesh out the idea, and Calhoun remembers him as a proponent of the idea.

Anyway, this whole essay from Melton just goes down like butter. So good.

Shawn Hickman:

A show you started last month. A book on your nightstand. A game you keep meaning to get back to. Finding something new is easy. Remembering where you left off is the hard part.

Sofa 5 helps you keep track of this stuff. Progress rings show up on covers throughout the app so you can see where you stand at a glance. Your home screen shows what’s next with one-tap checkboxes to keep things moving.

Five ways to track, depending on what fits: just enjoy with zero setup, tap to log, count pages, check off episodes, or keep a journal as you go. Pick one and switch anytime.

It’s a well-established cliché that no one ever finds the perfect to-do app or “task management system” unless they create it themselves. That’s certainly true for me (and resulted in my co-creating Vesper). Keeping track of things you want or need to do is too close to codifying how you think and remember things in your own mind, and we all think and remember in unique ways. We thus crave unique apps or systems to manage our tasks, ones that fit our minds just right. That’s why there are a zillion to-do apps, including a bunch that are actually good. And, these days, that’s why there are so many people creating their own personal to-do apps using AI coding systems.

Because media-tracking apps are just a subset of to-do apps, all the same things hold true for them. So, just like how I occasionally flit back and forth between general-purpose to-do apps, or become enamored with a new one, I’ve switched between several media-tracking apps over the years. These are apps where you keep lists of movies and shows you want to watch, books you want to read, and then log them, perhaps with notes or ratings, as you watch them.

It’s an endlessly fascinating app genre. Sofa is a really good example, one that I’ve used on and off for years. (Disclaimer: I started using Sofa when it was the weekly sponsor on DF back in 2022, but I’ve kept using it since then because it’s so good.) I’ve been using Sofa v5 for months now, including while it was in beta, and it is a big improvement to an already very good, very thoughtful app. A lot of people use general-purpose to-do apps to track movies and shows to watch, books to read, and games to play. Sofa 5 goes the other way, and expands what started as a dedicated media tracker into something you can use to track, well, anything you want to do.

Sofa is quite useful for free, and super useful with a paid subscription. If you’re even vaguely unsatisfied with your current app or system for tracking media to watch / read / play, you should check it out.

David Pierce, last week in his Installer column/newsletter for The Verge, singing the praises of the version 5.0 update to Sofa (the praises of which I just sang):

Sofa 5. A huge update to an Installerverse favorite, this app is now a great way to manage everything you want to watch, read, play, and even do IRL. I never quite made it stick when it was mostly just movies and shows, but now I think of it as like a Notion for my personal life. Apple devices only, alas, but boy do I love this app.

Pierce, I just noted today, also just wrote a feature story at The Verge about his decision to buy a new iPhone — after trying an array of new Android phones and admitting to a (questionable, IMO) personal preference for Android over iOS — because there are so many better apps on iOS that don’t have equivalent-quality counterparts on Android. In that earlier piece, Pierce wrote:

Lots of the apps I use every day — apps like Puzzmo, NotePlan, Mimestream, and Unread — either don’t exist on Android at all or only exist as web apps. Most of the ones that do work on both platforms are better on iOS. And forget about the kind of handcrafted, small-developer stuff — apps like Acme Weather, Current, and Quiche, just to name a few recent favorites — that’s all over the App Store and absolutely nowhere to be found on Android.

These apps don’t just happen to be both exquisitely crafted and exclusive to iOS (and in some cases, MacOS). They’re exquisitely crafted because they are idiomatic native apps designed to adhere to Apple’s platforms. Not all native apps are great, of course, but most great apps are native — and most great native apps are native to iOS or MacOS.

So there ought be no “alas” to describe Sofa being exclusive to Apple devices, but instead a “thank you” to developer Shawn Hickman for keeping it exclusive, and thus keeping it great.

Feature story and short film, well worth watching, from Apple:

One winter day in January 2024, 16‑year‑old Rory Goss experienced something jarring while in construction class at Abbey Christian Brothers’ Grammar School in Newry, Northern Ireland. He could no longer see the whiteboard at the front of the room.

As a straight‑A student in 11th grade, Rory was in the midst of studying for his A‑levels and was about to start applying to university. Passionate about golf and cars, and eager to start driving lessons, he had no idea what was happening to his eyesight.

Within weeks, he was diagnosed with Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy, a rare genetic condition that damages the optic nerve and can lead to sudden, severe vision loss. Over the next six months, his vision deteriorated by 95%, meaning he was legally blind as he began his 12th grade exams.

Apple just posted this feature this week, but it’s serendipitously aligned with my recent (and not-so-recent) posts about the screen zooming features in MacOS and iOS. Goss zooms in and out with extraordinary dexterity and fleetness. It’s quite extraordinary. Particularly moving for me is his illustration — created on an iPad, using Apple Pencil — where he attempts to illustrate what his vision now looks like.

One more thought re: the item I posted this week speculating on what Apple will name their much-rumored two-screen folding iPhone this year. If they do name it “iPhone Ultra”, I think Apple using that name for the folding iPhone will imply that they have no plans whatsoever to ever make a “rugged” iPhone — a model akin to Apple Watch Ultra.

I suspect Apple has no plans for a dedicated rugged iPhone. People who want that just buy extra-thick cases for regular iPhones. A watch is different. I know some people put their Apple Watches in ungainly protective “cases”, but they look hideous, which is why you see so few people using them. For aesthetically pleasing ruggedness, the watch case itself needs to be designed for it. But maybe there is a large enough potential market for such an iPhone — especially if such a device had significantly longer battery life than any regular iPhone, as an Apple Watch Ultra does relative to a regular Apple Watch.

But if Apple calls the folding iPhone “Ultra”, stop holding your breath for such an Apple-Watch-Ultra-style iPhone. In the same way that “Air” means very different things on Mac, iPad, and iPhone, so too might “Ultra”.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

The process requires the victim to have Express Transit Mode enabled for payments, and a Visa card linked for those payments, among other steps. As it turns out, it’s a Visa-related security loophole rather than an iPhone issue, and it doesn’t work with a Mastercard or an American Express card because other cards use different security methods. It also doesn’t work with Samsung Pay on Samsung devices, and it requires the specific combination of a Visa card and an iPhone. Apple told Veritasium that it’s an issue with the Visa system, but something unlikely to occur in the real world.

The video, hosted by the Veritasium YouTube channel, but starring Marques Brownlee as the victim, takes over 15 minutes before clarifying that the exploit only works with Visa cards, and only when a Visa card is set as your card for Express Transit Mode. Until then, the video implies that the exploit can work against any iPhone that has Apple Pay configured, with any sort of credit card. The technical explanation of how the hack works is pretty good though.

As I wrote a year ago (when Apple was looking for a new partner to replace Goldman Sachs as the bank for Apple Card), Visa is the most popular credit and debit card in the U.S., by a significant margin. If you don’t use Express Transit Mode, you’re safe. If you do use Express Transit Mode, I suggest any card other than a Visa.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

The change began rolling out a few weeks ago, and user frustration is mounting. On Reddit, there’s a growing thread of Netflix subscribers saying they are canceling their subscription because of this change to the Apple TV app. [...]

The change also means you lose access to full payback controls using the Apple TV Remote app on your iPhone. You can’t enable Enhance Dialogue from the video player. That clever Apple TV feature that automatically enables subtitles when you rewind? Gone.

One of my most-used tvOS video player features is the ability to tap the Siri Remote to see when what I’m currently watching will end. It’s great for trying to decide whether you have time for one more episode before bed. That feature is gone in Netflix as part of this change.

FlatpanelsHD has a great roundup of all the features on Apple TV that rely on an app using the native video player.

Someone tried to argue with me when I complained about this horrendous regression that Netflix users somehow want consistency across different platforms — that users want the same Netflix player on Apple TV as on Roku, Amazon Fire, Google TV, and whatever crap is built into their “smart” TV. Nonsense. Why would users of one platform care what the Netflix player is like on other platforms? Apple TV users buy Apple TV boxes because they want the Apple TV experience. Maybe Netflix wants to present the same experience everywhere. Maybe Netflix wants to save on engineering costs by having a write-once-run-like-shit-everywhere video player. That’s a Netflix concern, not a user concern.

From the perspective of users, this change to the tvOS Netflix app just sucks. There’s no upside at all. Nothing is better, much is worse, and a slew of cool platform features are now gone.

The Associated Press Stylebook, on Threads:

We updated our style for telephone numbers in 2024 to drop parentheses. We now recommend the form: 212-621-1500.

For international numbers use 011 (from the United States), the country code, the city code and the telephone number: 011-44-20-7535-1515.

Use hyphens, not periods. No parentheses. The form for toll-free numbers: 800-111-1000. If extension numbers are needed, use a comma to separate the main number from the extension: 212-621-1500, Ext. 2.

I have long been annoyed that U.S. phone numbers are so often formatted in the outdated (123) 555-1234 format. The use of parentheses for the area code dates back to the old days, when you only needed to dial the area code to call a number outside your own area code. (The same era whence comes the verb dial.) Until 10-digit dialing with mandatory area codes started to become standard in the late 1990s, you only needed to dial seven digits to call a local number.

Apple’s Contacts app (and I think the system-wide Contacts framework, used by third-party apps like Flexibits’s excellent Cardhop), will go so far as to reformat numbers entered in 123-555-1234 format as (123) 555-1234. Apple should update the formatting to go the other way, and turn phone numbers with the area code in parentheses into the 123-555-1234 format. It’s only because area codes used to be optional that they were put in parentheses. Given that 7-digit dialing is never going to return, we should abolish the parentheses too.

Anton Troianovski, reporting for The New York Times under the headline “Trump’s Portrayal of the War in Iran Collides With Reality”:

President Trump is trying to cast his Iran war as all but over, a done-and-dusted success.

But after years of trying to impose his own reality on the world, he has now run into a crisis that is not bending to his narrative.

On the one hand, I’m loath to complain about the Times finally stating the obvious and treating Trump like they would any other official. Same goes for a Peter-Baker-bylined piece this week, “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate”. Finally. It was good that the Times’s reporting on Biden’s mental acuity two years ago was sharp enough to draw the ire of the Biden administration. But Biden never once said anything crazy. Forgetful? Slightly confused? Sure. But Trump is saying and tweeting crazy-ass stuff every day now. A steady stream of abject unhinged nuttiness. For chrissake he badgered kindergarteners at the White House Easter egg roll about Biden’s use of an autopen.

But on the other hand, when exactly has Trump “run into a crisis” that did “bend to his narrative”? He’s a bullshitter, and so good at bullshitting that his bullshit often flies. That’s very different from reality bending to meet the bullshit.

The difference with Iran is that war is about as close as anything gets to being bullshit-proof. Trump created a crisis that can’t be bullshitted.

(Also, take it easy on the Oompa-Loompa makeup, sir.)

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

If you’ve been on TikTok this year, you’ve more than likely encountered ads for Freecash. The app has been marketed as a way to make money just by scrolling TikTok — and jumped to the top of the app stores in recent months, peaking at the No. 2 position in the U.S. App Store.

In truth, Freecash pays users to play mobile games — all the while collecting a heaping amount of sensitive data, according to cybersecurity company Malwarebytes. [...]

On Monday, after being contacted by TechCrunch for comment, Apple pulled Freecash from its App Store. As of Monday afternoon, the app was still listed in the Google Play store. (It has since been removed).

As I have repeatedly written, it boggles my mind why Apple doesn’t have an App Store “bunco squad” that targets scam and fraud apps that are popular and/or high-grossing. It’s folly to think that the App Store could ever be completely free of scam apps. But it’s absurd that this app Freecash rose to #2 in the App Store, with millions of downloads, and Apple only took a look at and removed it after TechCrunch asked about the app.

Pieter Arntz, writing at Malwarebytes:

The landing pages featured TikTok and Freecash logos and invited users to “get paid to scroll” and “cash out instantly,” implying a simple exchange of time for money. Those claims were misleading enough that TikTok said the ads violated its rules on financial misrepresentation and removed some of them.

Once you install the app, the promised TikTok paycheck vanishes. Instead, Freecash routes you to a rotating roster of mobile games — titles like Monopoly Go and Disney Solitaire — and offers cash rewards for completing time‑limited in‑game challenges. Payouts range from a single cent for a few minutes of daily play up to triple‑digit amounts if you reach high levels within a fixed period.

The whole setup is designed not to reward scrolling, as it claims, but to funnel you into games where you are likely to spend money or watch paid advertisements.

Dystopian. And it’s gross that the follow-the-money chain here ultimately leads to pay-to-win games from established brands like Hasbro (Monopoly Go) and, of all companies, Disney (Disney Solitaire). Look at these games’ App Store listings, and you’ll see: (a) their in-app purchases are clearly meant to capitalized on addicts, and (b) their privacy report cards are appalling. And Apple is taking 30 percent of all this. Honest to god, how would it be any worse if Apple started selling cigarettes in its retail stores? Because there’d be butts to clean up outside the glass doors?

Terry Godier:

For example, if you have a 4.1 star rating in the App Store, any 4 star review is going to decrease that average. In other words, leaving a 4 star review is essentially leaving a negative review. [...]

You will see a lot of 4 star reviews that say things like, “This is my favorite app!” or “Gamechanger!” The apps that tend to have these types of reviews are often over a 4.0 in the store and are being actively harmed average-wise by having them, even though the intent was clearly not to do so.

Problem #1 is that star-rating systems absolutely suck for aggregation. If you’re going to collect and average ratings from users, the system that works best is binary: thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Netflix switched from stars to thumbs in 2017, and YouTube switched all the way back in 2009. The App Store should switch to thumbs.

The logical endpoint of apps optimizing for a 5 star review invalidates the system as meaningful on the store. The system becomes a better representation of the sophistication at review prompt execution than it does an accurate reflection of app product quality. The incentive isn’t to create an actual 5 star app, but rather to create a robust system that transmits only 5 star reviews.

Problem #2 is that even if the App Store switched from stars to thumbs, the system would still be gamified by developers, rewarding, as Godier aptly puts it, not the best apps but instead the apps that are best at “review prompt execution”. Apple should remove the APIs that allow apps to prompt for reviews, and forbid the practice of prompting for them. Nothing good, and much bad, comes from these prompts. Imagine being in a restaurant, and in the middle of your entree, the server comes to your table and hands you an iPad and asks you to rate the joint on Yelp. That’s what using most apps is like. And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized.

Every time I see one of these prompts it’s like getting hit up by a panhandler — and some of the prompts come from Apple’s own apps. It’s all so greasy. One of the advantages of a walled garden ought to be keeping panhandlers and solicitors out.