Microsoft has actually renewed the suite’s certificate, but the fix can only be delivered through a software update. That means users of Microsoft 365 and Office 2021 are in the clear – they’ll receive the update, so neither will be affected. However, Microsoft stopped offering support for Office 2019 on October 10, 2023, and the suite has received no updates since. As such, it won’t be updated to version 16.83, which is the release that includes the renewed certificate….
Some critics have argued that Microsoft’s deadline is effectively self-imposed because the company renewed the certificate but chose not to provide the update to Office 2019 users. For example, JimmyTech, the IT consultancy that spotted the change, has argued that using the expiry to retire older software rather than quietly renewing it “amounts to a choice.”
Microsoft’s messaging on the subject hasn’t done it any favors, either. Its end-of-support page for Office 2019 for Mac, originally posted in October 2023, once told owners to “Rest assured that all your Office 2019 apps will continue to function.” A revision now dated May 15, 2026 has dropped that line, replacing it with a note that their data “can be accessed in a supported Microsoft 365 or Office product.”
Old software becomes incompatible. It’s a fact of life. But to build it so that it just suddenly stops working one day, and to take no steps to ameliorate that situation, is pretty disgusting. Shame on Microsoft.
Have you ever really looked at your Photos, man? There’s much depth there—just keep looking. I’m not stoned; I’m just thinking about Apple’s two ways of demonstrating depth in Photos to simulate adding a sense of layers or dimensionality to images you took with one or more cameras on your iPhone.
Starting way back in iOS 16, Apple started analyzing images for your Lock Screen to offer a cool in-front/behind split against the clock. In iOS 26, Apple went further, with Spatial Scene photos. I’ve heard from readers and seen online that both ways of spatializing photos leave people confused: Which photos does iOS choose? How does the analysis work? And, importantly for some, how do I disable these effects on a per-photo or overall basis?
Depth Effect
Starting way back in iOS 16 and available on an iPhone XR or XS or later, Depth Effect provides a sense of layering in a photo when used on your Lock Screen when you are pulling images from your Photos library. To access it:
Touch and hold your Lock Screen.
Tap Customize.
Tap the More … button.
If Depth Effect is not checked, select it; if it’s grayed out, see below. Your photos in the current display will be analyzed, which may take a moment; during that time, you will see a progress circle fill clockwise.
Tap Done.
Left: Use the More menu to enable Depth Effect. Right: You can see the hills rising in front of the clock display.
If you want to see how Depth Effect interacts with your images, a handy way is to choose On Tap from the More menu in step 3. When you tap, you can cycle through the current selection of images to see how they appear.
In doing so, you might notice that the Depth Effect doesn’t appear for every image. In fact, if you tap the more button and Depth Effect is grayed out, then the current image didn’t pass the depth analysis test.1 You can still enable the feature, but you have to tap to find another candidate—most qualify for depthifying!
The analysis in step 4 identifies objects and animals (including people) and makes educated silhouette guesses to separate foreground and background images. The clock element may resize to better display foreground elements. The foreground element may also be set to the background if it would obscure too much of the clock display.
Starting in iOS 26, you can adjust the clock’s depth by dragging it to make it taller on the screen. Depth Effect takes advantage of this by resizing the clock as needed.
In controlling Depth Effect, you might have noticed an oddball icon on your Lock Screen: a hexagon, with one tip at zero degrees, with a moon rising over some mountains. That is Spatial Scene, up next.
Spatial Scene
I have mixed feelings about Spatial Scene, new in iOS 26, because it partly invents reality and sometimes makes me a little queasy. Fortunately, I don’t have the motion sickness some iOS 7 users experienced with the long-ago introduction of parallax on wallpapers. But there’s another dale between the uncanny valley and the cliffs of heebie-jeebies that Spatial Scene fits into.
Spatial Scenes were designed for Apple’s Vision Pro, and the feature relies on machine learning to pick apart the depth in a 2D image. When you move your phone around, iOS creates a parallax effect that makes your brain think it’s looking into a 3D scene: the foreground elements remain steady, while background elements move. Spatializing doesn’t require photos captured with a newer camera, nor do you need Apple Intelligence. Any iPhone starting with the iPhone 12 series can generate them.2
Depth Effect shouldn’t make you hallucinate, but this red valerian appears normal at left, and a screen capture glitch may reveal some of the layers of depth that create the parallax effect.
You can also view images in the Photos app with the spatialization applied. Make sure Settings: Apps: Photos: Spatial Photos and Videos is enabled. This label is awfully confusing because the name of the iPhone feature is Spatial Scene, while the Vision Pro 3D feature is “spatial photo” as well as “spatial video,” both lowercase. Those kinds of media can only be viewed on a Vision Pro in 3D (they look 2D on an iPhone) and can be captured with an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, any model of iPhone 16 or iPhone 17, or Vision Pro.
Now, when you view a qualifying photo, a Spatial Scene hexagon button appears. Tap it, and you see a kind of scanner motion over the image as it’s analyzed. This resembles other scanning simulations in Photos, such as when it identifies plants, people, and buildings. A Spatial Scene version of the image appears, which you can view at simulated angles while moving your photo around. Tap the X to close the view. The analysis is not currently retained, so it’s regenerated each time you use the feature.
At left, this image of peonies is being scanned, with Photos using a wash of shimmering color passing over it to disguise that it’s engaged in a different operation behind the scenes. At right, the spatialized image is somewhat smaller to allow for movement in foreground and background, and has a X close button.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
Apple poorly documents this feature, so I have read people complaining about this, but I can’t get it to turn gray on my iPhone. Apple used to explain why a photo might not support Depth Effect, but it removed that explanation from its documentation a few releases ago. ↩
The iPhone 11 and 2nd-generation iPhone SE can use iOS 26, but they can’t create Spatial Scenes. Apple didn’t say why. ↩
Longtime tech writer and columnist and Friend of the Site Andy Ihnatko, who I have known since I started in this business (he was a columnist at MacUser!), has finally launched his own website, full of stuff he’s been writing for months as he built the site:
One of the disadvantages of adulthood is self-awareness, however. A Close Personal Friend whose encouragement and opinions I value messaged me in response to the morning blog post, and echoed (not for the first time) a thought that I’d been having all morning (also not for the first time): I really should just push the button, already. It’ll be fine…
In the meantime, enjoy the stuff I’ve been writing when I thought nobody was looking and it didn’t matter how frequently I posted. This is the end of a mighty long journey and if it were any more epic, Annie Lennox would be singing over the end credits and making everybody cry.
Emily Lin Zhang makes a real statement in the title of her new 30-minute documentary, “The Unsolved Mystery of Lorem Ipsum“—that it’s unsolved! I’d argue strongly that her dogged research has largely filled in the missing pieces of the story of where the run of seemingly Latin text used by designers to act as placeholder (or “Greeked”) text in mock-ups since the late 1960s came from.
She meets in person with Richard McClintock, a publications director with a background in Latin, who first identified the text’s distorted origin in 1994. She also interviews and emails people who worked at Aldus and Letraset, buys a sheet of dry-transfer type on eBay, and pulls together a great story about graphic design, the classics, and history.
I found it riveting and hilarious, and exactly the kind of Rabbit Hole (her channel name) that I fall down with printing and type history myself.
It’s time for our 11th annual competition regarding what will happen at Apple’s WWDC keynote! What will be announced? For the third straight year, what will Apple’s AI story be? We predict it all! Also, Myke and Jason are starting a new podcast!
Myke and I have been discussing Apple in depth every week for more than a decade on the Upgrade podcast. For Apple’s 50th anniversary earlier this year, I researched many different accounts of that era and wrote a 90-minute special episode of Upgrade. The reception to that episode was phenomenal—and we loved doing it. So we want to fund an entire year of a new podcast that will tell more stories in that vein.
We’re using Kickstarter for this project because researching and writing these scripts is quite labor-intensive, and I was hesitant to make that time commitment in the hope we would eventually build up enough of an audience to justify the large workload. We’ve set a goal that would allow us to generate thirty 30-to-45-minute episodes over the course of a year, with our first stretch goal to raise that number to a full fifty episodes in a year. (Update: Stretch goal met! Fifty episodes it is! We’re on to new stretch goals that add more content to the cast for backers.)
Kickstarter backers will help make the podcast happen. And backers at the Founding Producer tier or higher will get access to a special backers-only podcast feed for the show’s first year. This includes:
Ad-free episode
All episodes on a topic will drop at once in the backer feed so that you can hear the whole story; in the public feed, those episodes will release weekly
Access to the Relay podcast network membership plan, which includes access to a Discord community and an exclusive Relay members-only podcast
Bonus content that will be created if we hit stretch goals
We’ve already planned more than enough topics to get through year one. It’s all subject to change, but right now these include:
The earliest days of Apple, including the release of the Apple II, the fraying of the Jobs/Wozniak friendship, and the calamitous reign of Apple’s first CEO
How Steve Jobs ended up being ejected from the company he founded and his time in the wilderness, including the founding of NeXT
Apple’s Mac OS crisis of the late 1990s, which ultimately led to Apple’s buying NeXT, creating Mac OS X, and bringing back Steve Jobs
A history of Apple’s TV commercials, good and bad
The origins of the iPod and iTunes, and how they changed how we listen to music forever
The secret project that ultimately led to the creation of the iPhone
The story behind why Apple is obsessed with controlling its own destiny, what’s now commonly called the “Tim Cook doctrine”, but is firmly from the era of Steve Jobs
The long and complicated relationship between Apple and its arch-frenemy, Microsoft
During June, we’ll also be releasing several preview episodes of Designed in California as Upgrade special installments, so you can get an even clearer sense of what this podcast will be like.
One of our inspirations for this project is The Rest Is History, one of our favorite podcasts and one that has proven that an enthusiasm for history and storytelling can make for a magical experience. We want to bring this sensibility and excitement to the incredible variety of stories connected to Apple, the people who have worked to bring Apple products to life, and all the aspects of our lives that have been touched by the technology that has emerged from a few square miles near the south end of San Francisco Bay.
I realized when writing about Apple’s 50th that I’ve covered the company for roughly two-thirds of its existence. I’m looking forward to digging deep into research on topics that were before my time, and getting the chance to bring my own personal experience to bear on events I witnessed personally. And I’m hoping to tap the knowledge of many of my friends and colleagues as the project rolls along.
This will be unlike your other tech podcasts. Myke and I have built a story list that can feed several years of the show, so we know we won’t run out of material. We’d love for you to take the journey with us.
You know that thing where you see a black cat twice? It’s just like when you see the same iPhone foldable rumor twice. We’ll catch up on the latest AI shenanigans before Ferrari and Rivian try to take us for a ride.
Re-foldable
If you loved last week’s foldable iPhone production stall that was not expected to affect the fall launch then you’ll love this week’s foldable iPhone production stall that is not expected to affect the fall launch. It’s time to admit it! You have a fetish for foldable iPhone production stalls that aren’t expected to affect the launch!
Tl;flyrtlw?1 This one has to do with the surface-mount technology, whatever that is. We’ve had the hinge and the front, presumably next week’s will either be about the sides or the back.
Before you destroy yet another perfectly good Member’s Only jacket (that’s an oxymoron) in a fit of garment-rending over this:
The leaker framed the situation as somewhat concerning, stopping short of suggesting the fall launch is at risk.
Buckle up! Batten down the hatches! Hold on! Assorted other metaphors! WWDC, RIGHT AHEAD!
Yes, we’re about to crash headlong into the iceberg of Apple’s annual developer conference—or should I say, the AI-ceberg.
No? I shouldn’t? Well, tough. It’s been said.
Anyway, now is the time for all good developers to come to the aid of the party, and line up to hear what Apple’s going to announce. Or, I guess, you could just ask Mark Gurman.
Man, he really takes the fun out of these things.
Well, even if we know all the technical details, WWDC isn’t just a time for listing APIs and features. It’s a show. Some have gone so far as to call it the greatest show on Earth.1
And while I may not have the deep sources that other reporters have when it comes to the actual substance of what Apple will discuss, I do have unparalleled and much envied access to information about how they will make those announcements.…
9to5Mac reports on an X post from a “reliable source” that provides some new images of the four colors rumored to be available on the iPhone 18 Pro:
A new set of iPhone 18 Pro dummy units is giving us our best look yet at the all-new colors Apple has planned for this year. The dummy units corroborate that the iPhone 18 Pro will be available in dark cherry, black, silver, and light blue.
This color information has been floating out there for a while. I point to this item in particular because I think these photos are the best illustration I’ve seen yet about why Apple would think they’re appealing. The Dark Cherry is really appealing, and Light Blue is a proper, nice blue.
Perhaps Apple’s aggressively monochrome era is over?
“Star City,” Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” spin-off, has just premiered. I’ve seen the first five episodes and really like it. It’s accessible even if you haven’t seen “For All Mankind” or if you’ve stopped watching that show.
“Star City” is set in the same world as “For All Mankind,” but it’s told from the perspective of the Soviet Union during the height of the space race in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just after the USSR has landed the first people on the moon. Rhys Ifans is great as the enigmatic Chief Designer who runs the space program, and Anna Maxwell Martin is menacing as Lyudmilla, the head of Star City’s security. (“For All Mankind” fans will notice much younger versions of a few familiar characters from the Soviet side, too.)
The whole show is about space, sure, but it’s also a cold war spy thriller set in a locked-down secret city in the heart of the Soviet Union. There are space heroics, bugged apartments, mysterious contacts, forbidden books, and even smuggled rock and roll records.
Dan Moren and I are covering each episode over at The Incomparable as a part of our NASA Vending Machine podcast. The first two episodes of “Star City” are available now, as are our podcasts covering those first two episodes.
Every year at WWDC, Apple kicks off a new cycle of operating system updates that will change the faces of the devices we use every day for the next year. On June 8, we’ll get our first glimpse at what the “27” operating systems will bring, which will lead to their arrival in the fall and numerous major updates all the way through next May, when the cycle will begin again.
I’ve been attending Apple’s WWDC since sometime in the 90s, which is… a long time. But this year’s event promises to be one of the most interesting ones yet, mostly because Apple really stepped in it in 2024, promising a bunch of features it didn’t deliver. Last year was a bit of an apology tour, but it didn’t directly address what had been promised the previous year.
Which means that Apple has really piled two years of promises on the agenda of WWDC 2026. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Here’s what I’ll be watching for at this year’s event, especially when it comes to its AI do-over.
Whether we’ve bought anything from social media ads, if we’d use a dumb phone, our thoughts on screenless fitness trackers like Whoop and Fitbit Air, and tech hardware that feels purpose-built for us.
It’s our 600th episode and we are very on top of it, we assure you! This episode is two — TWO (2) — episodes running the length of three! First, Dan, Lex and Moltz discuss seltzer, running webinars and Google AI mistakes. And then stay tuned! After the music, the real show begins! James Thomson and Guy English take over the show to discuss hair styling, WWDC predictions, video games and Star Wars.
I keep finding this old dog can learn new tricks—or, if not quite new, ones that were hiding in plain sight. The other night, using Messages on my iPhone to send a good-night text to my spouse and older child, off on a brief getaway to the coast, I noticed that orange highlighting had invaded my message!
I text a couple of friends: “Have you seen this before?” One had not; the other remembered it vaguely, but had no idea why it had occurred. Some googling later, I discovered that Apple had added the feature recently…on the geologic scale. This feature, which I’ll explain in greater depth, first appeared in iOS 10, released in fall 2016.
Well.
The orange-highlight emoji replacement feature in iOS Messages turns words that match emoji names into tapping targets from which you can select an appropriate symbol.
Here’s how it works:
Type any part of your message.
Tap the emoji icon at the lower-left corner of the keyboard on an iPhone or iPad.
If any text within the message matches emoji descriptions, a wash of orange glowing illumination passes over the text, leaving orange highlighting behind where you can tap.
Tap any orange text, and options for emojis appear.
Tap an emoji to have it replace the orange-highlighted text.
Slap me with a fish, and call me Terry, I had no idea. The “feature” isn’t available on the Mac, yet it can’t be disabled on your iPhone or iPad!
There are several other ways to insert emoji into conversations, if you’re so inclined. I used to be quite resistant, but I find that I use a dozen or more with some regularity. (Most emoji are rarely used.)
Use the emoji icon. The most obvious solution is often the best. Tap or click the emoji icon, then choose an emoji. That icon appears in the lower-left corner of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch keyboard, switching the keyboard layout, and at the right edge of the message field in Messages on the Mac. Apple organizes these into tabs of what I’ve always felt are slightly arbitrary categories, but which conform to the Unicode Consortium’s ordering. The clock icon is what you tap or click to view your most recently used emoji. Tap or click in the search field to enter search terms or to shudder create a Genmoji.1
Dictate. You can dictate emoji by name on all platforms, and it is kind of fun to say “pizza emoji” or “getting a haircut emoji” and have it pop into place. On an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, tap the microphone icon in the message field to start dictation. On a Mac, invoke dictation when your text focus is in the message field. (Check that Mac dictation is enabled in System Settings: Keyboard: Dictation.)
The Character Viewer on the Mac appears here in its floating window mode, with the Emoji category selected.
Character Viewer (Mac). The Mac has a nifty Character Viewer that can be enabled in the same Keyboard system setting: enable “Show Input menu in menu bar” to get a wee rounded-corner icon that has a more button above a hamburger button (three horizontal lines) next to a Command icon (⌘). From that menu, choose Show Emoji & Symbols. The Emoji link in the left navigation bar reveals the usual subjects, and you can search here, too (with no Genmoji horrors).
You can also use keys or keyboard shortcuts:
Mac: Press the Globe/fn key or type Command-Control-Space also brings up the viewer: it’s the same as Emoji & Symbols on a Mac.
iPad or iPhone: On an iPhone or iPad with a physical keyboard attached, press Control-Space. You can also use the Mac key/keystroke when you use an iPad with a linked keyboard and mouse (System Settings: Display, select iPad). Whatever the method, an emoji-only pop-over picker appears.
Extra tip: Click the viewer icon in the upper-right corner to convert the viewer into an iPhone/iPad-like pop-over picker on your Mac! Dismiss the picker, then invoke it again, and click the viewer icon in its lower-right corner to turn it back into a floating palette.
This Mac Text Replacement entry maps :shrug: to the man-shrugging emoji—you can do it on a Mac, but not on an iPhone or iPad?
Text Replacements. If there are frequent emoji you want to insert with the least effort on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, use the Keyboard: Text Replacements view to map short text strings to an emoji. A convention for emoji shortcuts is to put a colon on either side to make it straightforward to invoke. You might use :shrug: to have 🤷 inserted. (There’s a similar Settings: General: Keyboard: Text Replacement in iOS and iPadOS, but at least in version 26, I was scolded by the operating system that “The shortcut cannot contain any Emoji”!)
Tapbacks. Tapbacks are another way you can insert emoji into a message. In Messages, press and hold on a message you’ve received on an iPhone or iPad, or Control-click/right-click or long-click on a message on a Mac, and you see the Tapback options. Several will appear; tap or click the emoji icon to then choose from the picker.
LaunchBar’s Emoji index is a built-in list of nearly 1,900 emoji that can be inserted into a document by typing part of their name.
Third-party replacements. I use Launchbar to type a few characters of an emoji set that’s part of a built-in shortcut list in Index: Show Index: Emoji. You can configure macros/shortcuts apps, like TextExpander and Keyboard Maestro, to swap out emoji for things you type. If you are a serious keyboard emoji warrior, Rocket is a great way to invoke emoji without any clicking.
Left: Rocket’s inline emoji picker is activated by typing a colon and the start of an emoji name. Here, I was aiming for broccoli. Right: Disable unwanted emoji replacements in macOS by disabling Edit: Substitutions: Emoji Replacement in each affected app.
Contrary to the above, do you hate having emoji replace emoticons in Messages or elsewhere as you type on a Mac?2 Apple used to have an option in the Keyboard preferences/settings that let you disable substitution. Starting in Tahoe (I believe), you can now toggle this in any app that supports it in Edit: Substitutions: Emoji Replacement.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
Emoticons are text-based sequences that construct a symbol. They may date back to Abraham Lincoln (linked article written by emoji guru Jennifer 8. Lee). Emoji are drawn symbols that can be inserted into a text stream. ↩
This week Federico Viticci of MacStories launched Shortcuts Playground, which brings natural language automation to Apple’s platforms:
Today, I’m pleased to introduce something I’ve been working on for the past six months: Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that can create any shortcut for Apple’s Shortcuts app using natural language. With Shortcuts Playground, you can simply prompt Claude Code or Codex with a sentence requesting a shortcut of any kind; a few minutes later, you’ll end up with a real shortcut in Finder, ready to be imported into the Shortcuts app. It’s as simple as that.
As you might expect, there is a lot of complexity behind this simplicity. Also, Viticci expects his approach to be eclipsed by Apple’s announcements at WWDC. This doesn’t make this any less of an accomplishment, and it’s especially exciting to consider that we are entering an era where building user automations now requires nothing more complex than a text-entry field.
