Daring Fireball: The Savings Account Is Half Empty
April 19, 2023
Daring Fireball: The Savings Account Is Half Empty:
This is just looking to piss on Apple no matter what the story. A digital state ID stored in Apple Wallet is more secure than a printed card stored in your physical wallet. If one thief takes my iPhone, and another takes my wallet and keys, the first thief needs my device passcode to get anything. The second thief instantly knows everything that’s printed on my driver’s license and credit cards — including the address of my home, where the keys will unlock the doors. The digitization of banking does carry risks, but the pre-digital world of banking revolved around paper checks and signatures.
There’s nothing hard to square about Apple’s initiative in this regard at all. I’ll bet Tim Cook has his driver’s license in Apple Wallet — and I practically guarantee that he has his credit cards in Apple Wallet. Apple Wallet really is more secure that a physical wallet and cards. And the new savings accounts simply offer Apple Card customers a way to earn interest on cash accounts that heretofore did not pay any interest at all. There’s nothing to be cynical about with this.
Spelunking Apple’s Open Source | Bitsplitting.org
March 20, 2023
Spelunking Apple’s Open Source | Bitsplitting.org:
Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page.
This resource is useful primarily to developers, but may also interest curious technophiles who want to take a peek “behind the curtain” to see how much of the magic just beneath our fingertips is made.
If you visit the page today, you’ll see a new emphasis on Apple’s high-level projects, such as Swift and WebKit. At first glance you might wonder if the extensive list of all the open source projects has been removed from the site.
There’s no need to worry: the whole list, indexed by the pertinent platform and OS release to which they belong, is still available on a separate Releases page. Even better, each of these releases now has a corresponding GitHub repository, hosted in a dedicated organization reserved exclusively for open source distributions.
The Practicality of Art in Software – MacStories
February 8, 2023
The Practicality of Art in Software – MacStories:
In bringing this back to software, it’s evident that – again, historically – Apple doesn’t believe in art as a veneer to make something “look good”. Art – whereby “art” we refer to the human care behind the design of software – is intrinsically tied to the technology that powers the computer. It’s the intersection of technology and liberal arts: skew toward one side more than the other, and you risk of losing the balance many of us like about Apple. Art in Apple’s software isn’t some secret ingredient that can just be added at the end of the process, like a spice: great design is the process itself. Case in point: the Dynamic Island.
- via Daring Fireball
Daring Fireball: Report It All, See What Sticks
February 6, 2023
Daring Fireball: Report It All, See What Sticks:
I am once again reminded of the fact that, two weeks prior to its unveiling, Gurman reported that 2021’s Apple Watch Series 7 would be “all about a new design with a flatter display and edges”, when in fact the Series 7 was more rounded.
I suspect some of these wildly wrong reports are Apple floating differential details to certain parties to see what makes it to the media, to help resolve who’s leaking what.
Thought – Apple’s approach to services/Siri is hybrid cloud… Empower devices, though smart software and hardware, to do what is possible local, and only reach out to the cloud when necessary.
The real secrets of iOS and accessibility – Six Colors
January 12, 2023
The real secrets of iOS and accessibility – Six Colors:
There’s a joke I tell a lot: if you encounter an article whose headline includes the words “secret features” and “iOS”, chances are you’re about to be taken on a whirlwind tour of your phone’s accessibility settings. “Did you know you could….?” Or. “Buried deep in iOS settings, you’ll find…”
Truth is, these aren’t secret features at all; they’re just unfamiliar to people whose eyes, ears and hands operate in a typical way. And these “secrets” are rarely written about, even in comprehensive coverage of iOS. “Invisible” might be a more honest way to describe these tools.
Apple’s products make Accessibility a first-class feature, though often below the bar of easy discoverability.
Cryptex: how a custom iPhone is changing macOS updates – The Eclectic Light Company
December 8, 2022
Cryptex: how a custom iPhone is changing macOS updates – The Eclectic Light Company:
Big Sur brought us the immutable boot volume, signed and sealed, with the SSV. This makes it almost impossible for malicious software to change anything in the System, as it’s a snapshot with every last bit verified using its tree of hashes. Its downside is that making wanted changes to update macOS or any components on the SSV is cumbersome: changes have to be written to the System volume, a snapshot made, the tree of hashes rebuilt and verified against Apple’s setting for that build of macOS, and macOS rebooted from the new snapshot.
Initially, the solution for apps like Safari, security data such as that for XProtect, and other components like Rosetta 2 that need to be installed separately from macOS, was to store them on the Data volume, where they can only be protected by SIP. That’s how Big Sur and Monterey worked, but this started to change in late versions of Monterey (in 12.6.1, if not before), and Ventura, with the introduction of the cryptex.
Cryptexes first appeared on Apple’s customised iPhone, its Security Research Device, which uses them to load a personalised trust cache and a disk image containing corresponding content. Without the cryptex, engineering those iPhones would have been extremely difficult.
MarsEdit 5 – Powerful web publishing from your Mac.
December 7, 2022
MarsEdit 5 – Powerful web publishing from your Mac.:
Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online just to use them. Web browsers are wonderful for reading articles, but not for creating them. If you’re writing for the web, you need a desktop blog editor. And if you’re lucky enough to have a Mac, nothing is more powerful, or more elegant than MarsEdit.
Marsedit is such a great app for interacting with weblogs. On every other platform I’ve touched – Windows, Linux, even iOS and iPadOS – I have searched for something similar, or even close, and fallen short.
My only wish in relation to this is that there was an iOS/iPadOS version so I can keep up my workflow across my more personal devices. It would be an insta-buy for me, and I’m sure many others.
Daring Fireball: Report: Amazon Alexa Is a ‘Colossal Failure’ on Pace to Lose $10 Billion This Year
November 22, 2022
Daring Fireball: Report: Amazon Alexa Is a ‘Colossal Failure’ on Pace to Lose $10 Billion This Year:
The thing about Siri is that it was always at heart about making Apple’s platforms more accessible. Siri is there to make iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple TVs, Apple Watches, and even AirPods better. And Apple isn’t losing money on any of those. Siri will serve the same purpose on future platforms from Apple, too. Apple’s investments in Siri are part and parcel investments in their OS strategy for everything they make.
Pocket Realities 