quitit

Didn't Icon Factory make that? https://iconfactory.com/bc.html

Since you have a lot to say about these icons, I took a moment to look at your app icons.

Why are all of your icons terrible?

Google's icons are basically just different shapes of the same rainbow camouflage.

While I agree that Google's is not a good approach, that is not what has gone on here.

The original inkpot Pages icon was beautiful, it looked great when steve jobs had it large on screen at macworld 2005 stating that Pages was "Word processing with an incredible sense of style". At the time this made sense for the Pages icon.

However there are 3 things I notice about this discussion:

1. Gorgeous detailed renderings aren't symbols, nor are they necessarily good icons. Symbols are mentally quicker to understand, and that makes them ideal as the foundation of an icon, where their purpose is to communicate, not just be pretty. The new icons do this better than the older icons. Secondly the detailed illustrations aren't effective at small sizes, to use the ink pot example: the pen is lost in the detail of the ink pot, at typical viewing size it's a visually noisy design. I recall a criticism at the time being that people didn't know what they were looking at.

2. People such as John Gruber who referenced this post don't have the self-awareness to recognise that they are neither an expert on the topic nor the target demographic. Watching Gruber riot about unimportant minutae over the last few months has been an interesting case study. At no point does he show a modicum of charity whereby he tries to understand why the changes were made, instead his response can be summarised as a whiney/bratty version of "it's the children who are wrong".

3. There is an amusing and unpredictable cross over between people who think the ink pot is peak icon design, but have argued in the past that the much more recent floppy disk is too old to be used as a save icon.

There may be an arrogance that we're not vulnerable to these tactics because the topics of conversation are science and tech focused, rather than celebrity culture.

However this post and the comments really debunk that - here we have a clear example of the author turning these people into characters, archetypes of reality tv, and inviting the reader to have an emotional response to what is potentially interesting, but actually just the mundane business matter of dealing with demand spikes.

A normal conversation might take a step back, above the emotional baiting, and instead lament on how TSMC weren't able to develop sufficient supply capacity in time to maximise yield across not just these clients, but many others whom are looking to get involved in the AI hype train. Instead we're seeing something quite different, and quite uninformed. It's reading like a gossip post from an instagram thread.

I notice that HN is actually more vulnerable to these types of conversations. Maybe it's because HN likely weights towards an ASD audience, which has less experience in handling socially driven narratives. I do definitely see here more of the "one-sided" conversation that is typical of ASD.

It’s for you sunshine.

I didn't expect this website would double as an intelligence test.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBRtbdVquWF/

Neither American nor from the UK, but I knew what this was about because it's possible to go online and seek out information. Neat.

What I didn't do was become some entitled see you next tuesday and complain that a .com should be reserved for the american audience and the site should use a .co.uk – As if american businesses don't utilise foreign TLDs to create cutesy URLs. Maybe now is a good time to note that the fashionable .AI TLD belongs to Anguilla, a British territory.

That's tiny in comparison to the FTC fine. Epic settled with the FTC for more than half a billion.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...

While SparkFun may feel entitled to air their grievances as an "Official response", these types of public statements aren't productive for business nor useful/respectful to consumers.

Public notices for the consumer should serve the consumer. I.e. they should only relate to matters that directly concern them, such as notice of availability, warranty, support or the fulfilment of other consumers' rights. Those statements should be unambiguous and not allude to blame or personal tiffs.

While Sparkfun's statement touches on availability it merely does so as a vehicle for grandstanding and retaliation through gossip and drama. The fact that SparkFun notes it's a "private matter" yet chose to involve the public also makes SparkFun look unprofessional, even if they are 0% at fault for the circumstances.

Consumers put their trust in a company, it is disrespectful of that trust when trying to embroil them in personal affairs, they never agreed to that.

Keynote is completely underrated, likely because people assume it's just a Powerpoint clone, but it's more like a highly templated motion graphics app with a UI that steers people into using it as Powerpoint replacement.

So not only is it a far quicker way to make a PPT than using Powerpoint. I also see it used for making presentation videos, interactive PDFs and even animated GIFs/HTML5 animations.

The number of motion graphics marketing videos I see which are actually just Keynote files exported to video is impressive.

Oh that riled you up? Too bad. Better get out your alt accounts to address this great injustice.

The scroll bars for those curious: https://imgur.com/a/uhVO8IA

It's pretty clear they tried their best to miss or reinterpret the points I made so they could talk about something else.

Nor was such a thing implied. The information in the various news articles about it also don't make that claim.

This is a bit of a layer cake:

1. The first issue is that there is significant momentum in calling Siri bad, so even if Apple released a higher quality version it will still be labelled bad. It can enhance the user's life and make their device easier to use, but the overall press will be cherrypicked examples where it did something silly.

2. Basing Siri on Google's Gemini can help to alleviate some of that bad press, since a non-zero share of that doomer commentary comes from brand-loyalists and astroturfing.

3. The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm. To help illustrate that point: We even have the likes of John Gruber making stony-faced comparisons between Apple's on-device image generator toy (one that produces about an image per second) versus OpenAI's server farm-based image generator which makes a single image in about 1-2 minutes. So if a long-running tech blogger can't find charity in those technical limitations, I don't expect users to.

Yes, the scroll bars settings affects the scroll bars.

There is an imbalance between the harms you're pretending to endure versus:

1. The trivial ability it is to resolve, and

2. The existence of an easily accessible user setting to enable the behaviour that you desire.

Fundamentally your complaint thus comes down to a gripe that the OS's defaults don't match your completely subjective idea of how just one of many OS elements should work.

Which raises such an interesting question, because of all of the UX behaviours present on macOS - this is your hill?

Many of the complains surrounding the former iOS7 and today's Liquid Glass are tied to the requirement of the interface never moving. Which isn't just an unreasonable requirement, but a ridiculous one.

Just like iOS7+ it is possible to position and layer interface elements in a way where the visual effects will render a screenshot difficult to read, but in practice the elements are frequently in motion or as you've already pointed out easy to make them move. That motion is what negates the layering problems, thus making visual occlusions rare, short-lived and easily resolved.

There is a certain unreasonableness in ignoring that reality, and also ignoring that there is a user setting to keep a full-sized version of the scroll bars always visible.

This isn't to take away from legitimate criticisms such as the issue with the resize hotbox not being updated to match the more rounded corners, but rather highlight that not all online forum criticisms comes from a bona fide place.

If one chooses "Always" under the "Show scroll bars" option on the Appearance System Settings panel. They will be rewarded with thick*, always-on scroll bars that do not disappear.

*They're the same thickness as Aqua.

This headline is a touch misleading as it gives the impression of being across all US households, the quote is:

Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%. Among higher-income households, the drop is even steeper, at more than 8%. Spending at fast-food restaurants, coffee shops and other limited-service eateries falls by about 8%.

You're right, it's difficult to get "left behind" when the tools and workflows are being constantly reinvented.

You'd be sage with your time just to keep a high-level view until workflows become stable and aren't advancing every few months.

The time to consider mastering a workflow is when a casual user of the "next release" wouldn't trivially supersede your capabilities.

Similarly we're still in the race to produce a "good enough" GenAI, so there isn't value in mastering anything right now unless you've already got a commercial need for it.

This all reminds me of a time when people were putting in serious effort to learn Palm Pilot's Graffiti handwriting recognition, only for the skill to be made redundant even before they were proficient at it.

If your job involves detailed text review (such as coding) then splash out on a display with a pixel density of at least 250 PPI.

The screen shown in this blog looks like it's ~140 PPI. Sure these screens are cheap, but they're best used for moving graphical content.

In the demonstration image the text is just 9 pixels tall, while thatis legible, it is unacceptable for long term reading and is completely reliant on subpixel rendering to produce an impression of smoothness.

There is nothing wrong with obtaining additional, even false, information from any source that is available to you. (AI, Search, Websites/Blogs, Podcasts, influencers, word-of-mouth, etc)

It's what you do with that information that is important - the correct path is to take your questions to a medical professional. Only a medical professional can give you a diagnosis, they can also answer other questions and address incorrect information.

ChatGPT is very good for providing you with new avenues to follow-up upon, it may even help discover the correct condition which a doctor had missed. However it is not able to deliver a diagnosis, always leave that to a medical professional.

This actually differs very little from people Googling their symptoms - where the result was the same: take the new information to your medical professional, and remember to get a second opinion (or more) for any serious medical condition, or issues which do not seem to be fully resolved.

I just read the post about Japan.

Great, now let's stack what you've written in both of your comments directly against what Gruber has written, and not what an imaginary strawman wrote.

You wrote:

1. I have no doubt that Gruber will find reasons why the EU is bad and regulation is bad.

2. The EU has already gone through the hard work of drafting the law, working with a non-cooperative Apple, and then actually seeing it implemented and the practical issues that arise.

3. Most of his description of what Japan does better is simply “mutual respect”.

Addressing point 1 (again):

I wrote words to the effect of (they're just above): Gruber's writing is not as black and white as you assert and then I made reference to the Japan regulation article as an example where Gruber again makes nuanced arguments towards regulated changes.

That article does not make a blanket statement that regulation is bad, and Gruber points to a long-standing idea that he has which neither the EU nor Japan have regulated, which he believes should be. He's also stated (repeatedly) that he's in favour of link-outs and other commonly requested changes to the app store terms, and believe's Apple are too slow to change on these.

So does Gruber believe all regulation is bad as you have asserted: no. His views are demonstrably in favour of well-minded regulation.

Addressing point 2: The belief that the EU bears the brunt of regulation teething, and that's why it goes well in other regions.

Maybe you skipped the part where Gruber points to a 2021 regulation requirement from Japan, which Apple in fact did not provide resistance to, but worked with the regulatory authority to achieve their goal - then Schiller himself (the overseer of the App store at the time) came out and spoke in public with supportive language. That is an example Gruber provided, however there are plenty more examples of the app store changing policies long before the EU took notice. The EU gets all the attention here because they seem to be uniquely incapable of foreseeing unintended consequences.

So is the EU's leading the source of friction. No and they're not even first in many respects.

Addressing point 3: Gruber makes only immaterial "mutual respect" comparisons between DMA/MSCA.

I'm guessing you skimmed this bit too - Gruber talks at length to MSCA and DMA's approach to regulation, stating that MSCA's changes prioritise privacy and security in contrast to the DMA, and practical aspects such as user safety (that's a wee bit more than "mutual respect"). Secondly that users are not presented with onerous choice screens (see end note 1) which is making reference to the EU's requirement that browser selection screens must be repeatedly shown when the user's default browser is Safari (but not if it's any other browser), Japan doesn't take this approach to a browser selection screen.

So is it true that Gruber makes immaterial comparisons between the two: again no.

中国制造2025 aka MIC 2025

https://jamestown.org/civil-military-fusion-and-the-plas-pur...

Now read, since you clearly haven't.

I don't think it's as black and white as you suggest.

He just wrote about Japan's implementation of a similar set of laws rather favourably - the theme is that Japan's implementation looks very much like a genuine attempt at protecting users and benefitting end users and developers.

While I don't agree with what a lot of what Gruber has to say. A point I do agree with is that the DMA is being sold (by Margrethe Vestager, Thierry Breton and Ursula von der Leyer) as a set of consumer protections, when it's plainly not that, and in some clear ways does the opposite.

There's also persistent transparency questions like why the EU has excessive meetings with Spotify, or why there is not a "music" gatekeeper in the DMA, or the requirement to easily move music libraries between music services - things that would actually help consumers and prevent genuine lock in.

(Note this isn't to excuse the behaviour of big tech.)

I keep an unofficial record of instances where police and similar authorities have abused their access to these types of systems. The list is long. It's almost exclusively men stalking ex-partners or attractive women they don't know, but have seen in public.

What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-tracking.

So now with Flock and data brokers we have authorities having access to information that was originally held behind a judge's signature. Often with little oversight, and frequently for unofficial, abusive purposes.

This reality also ties back to the discussion about providing the "good guys" encryption backdoors. The reality is that there are no "good guys", everyone exists in shades of grey, and I dare say there are people in forces whom are attracted to the power the role provides, rather than any desire for public service.

In conclusion it's a fundamental design flaw to rely on the operator being a "good guy", and that's before we get into the problem of leaks, bugs, and flaws in the security model, or in this case: complete open access to the public web - laughable, farcical, and horrifying.

that's comically* naive, and plainly false - China itself has already stated their objectives.

* Actually, wilfully naive would be a better fit.

If they want to position themselves with a point of difference from competitors, they could provide a settings list of AI features with check boxes for each.

This would tap into the insight that not everyone dislikes the same AI features. For many AI isn't a dirty word, but rather they've seen plenty of examples where it's simply annoying or over-taxing resources.

For example some like AI to build a quick reference summary from a set of web results, but don’t want a full agenic-style AI to extend beyond that.

This could potentially entice users not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and maybe even make a few converts.