Jason has already detailed his favorites from the year that was, but I suppose I owe it to you—to myself really—to see if I can remember the stuff that I loved over the past twelve months.
Games
My gaming habits basically lie in one of two directions: mobile puzzle games or incredibly high-budget blockbuster titles.
Jason’s already extolled the virtues of Knotwords, which despite my usual frustration with anagrams and my love of crosswords, I absolutely adore. I only really do the Daily Puzzle, but I do it pretty much every day. (And the feature that lets you get your broken streaks back if you complete another seven days straight is 😙👌.)
What can I say? It’s compelling!
I’m also one of the people still playing Wordle most days—it helps that it’s built into the New York Times Crossword app, which is another of my daily habits. I just don’t post my scores, because nobody needs to see that anymore.
On the other end of the spectrum, my lovely wife gave me a PlayStation 5 for my birthday this year; it’s the first of the Sony systems I’ve ever owned, so I’ve been working my way through a backlog of great titles that I haven’t been able to play over the years.
Marvel’s Spider-Man was at the top of my list and it was everything I’d hoped for from a game about one of my favorite superheroes. I’ve previously enjoyed the Arkham series of Batman games, which managed to capture the feel of embodying the dark knight, and Spider-Man (and its spinoff featuring Miles Morales) are just as good at nailing the essence of the webhead. In particular, swining through New York and running up buildings? A freaking delight. There’s a sequel reportedly coming later next year and I am here for it.
I also played through the entire Uncharted series, which several people had told me over the years that I’d really enjoy—and guess what? They were right! Yes, they’re highly linear to the point of being basically interactive movies, but they’re done well: extremely fun, solid writing, great voice acting performances.1 Some might be a little dated technologically (even with the remastered versions I played), but at this far a remove, they’re refreshingly spartan: no giant skill tress or endless fetch quests. By comparison I’m currently playing Ghost of Tsushima which, while beautiful and expansive, is riddled with that type of content.
It’s the end of the year, but before we turn the page (or mount a new calendar) and move on to 2023, I thought I’d make a quick list of some of my favorite fun things from the year almost entirely gone by…
Games
I am not great at games. I want to play them… but never quite enough to play them as much as I’d like. Still, I did play and enjoy some games this year.
At the top of my list is Knotwords, which took a lot of my game time this year. It’s a crossword-puzzle-themed game that isn’t a crossword puzzle. It’s a word game, though. I love it.
I still adore the Apple Arcade game Mini Motorways, which got a nice update this year that added more game styles, including an endless mode—for when you just can’t say goodbye to the delightful city you’ve developed from nothing by laying roads, highways, and roundabouts. This one made my list last year and I kept playing it this year.
I spent many hours this year playing Alto’s Adventure: Spirit of the Mountain, an Apple Arcade release that extended my favorite iPad game franchise in new ways. (This was the second Alto’s extension, after last year’s Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City.) It’s an endless snowboard game with challenging tricks, a very simple control scheme, beautiful graphics, and soothing sounds.
This year I got my Panic Playdate, a delightful handheld game toy gadget that I haven’t played nearly enough. But I do want to highlight my favorite Playdate games: Vertex Pop’s HyperMeteor, a spectacularly fun take on Asteroids; and Nic Magnier, Arthur Hamer and Logan Gabriel’s Pick Pack Pup, a delightful match-three puzzle game that manages to also be a critique of Amazon warehouses.
The legacy of 2022 in tech, the tech gifts we’re buying ourselves, the best third-party app replacements, and Apple products we’d like to see but they’ll never make.
People who want the most cutting-edge iPhones will need to pungle up for the privilege. And guess what? A whole lot of people will.
The first time I came into contact with the phrase “pungle up,” I knew what it meant—it was clearly used in the same way as a phrase I was familiar with, “pony up.” It means that you’re going to have to put your hard-earned money on the table, that whatever you’re getting is going to come dear.
My introduction to “pungle up” came from Chris Breen, who was a freelance writer at MacUser and Macworld—later, I hired him full time as a writer at Macworld. Chris used it a lot.
“Pungle” was a word that was thrown about freely when I was growing up, so I was surprised when editors questioned me about its use. I believe Macworld’s copy editors added it to the style guide so future editors wouldn’t query me about it.
True story. And my use of the term on Macworld this week is absolutely intended as an homage to Chris. (Chris works inside at Apple these days, though he does blog occasionally on non-tech topics and is the author of the theme songs for many, many podcasts.)
Anyway, it’s in the dictionary and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Macworld style guide, and that’s good enough for me.
Apple’s 2022 was a little slow on the Mac side, but there are brighter days ahead in 2023 if you ask me. But what about the iPhone, Apple’s most important product? And what about the rest of Apple’s product line-up–including product lines not yet introduced? 2023 promises to be a big one. Here are my predictions for the iPhone, AirPods, HomePod, and Apple foray into an AR/VR headset.
As technology enthusiasts, we’re all too often accustomed to looking forward to the next thing, to the feature that’s just over the horizon. And sometimes that means forgetting the amazing things we’ve already got—until they pop up, perfect for the job at hand.
When the original Apple Watch came out, one of its many (perhaps too many) whizbang features was the ability to look through the camera of the paired iPhone and take a photo with it. But the real-time image was jerky and imprecise and the screen was so small and grainy that it felt like more of a novelty than a real utility.
Fast forward to the year 2022 and I’m trying to take a picture of myself, my wife, and our kid in front of the Christmas tree. There’s only the three of us, so how to best capture the shot? I guess I could prop the phone up, hit the timer in the Camera app and scurry over in the hopes that I’ve posed correctly. But that sounds like a nightmare, especially with a squirming baby.
Happy holidays to all! Photo courtesy of the Apple Watch’s Camera app.
To the rescue flew the Apple Watch’s Camera app. I’ve probably used this feature a handful of times since the first Apple Watch, and probably not at all since I got my Series 7, and frankly I was blown away with just how much better the experience is than I remembered. A modern Apple Watch is now more than capable of showing a live, full-frame video stream with almost zero lag, and the screen is large enough that you can actually use it to tell if everything’s framed the way you want. You can easily take a shot and quickly check it on the watch to make sure that everybody’s eyes are open.
The current version even provides an icon indicating whether or not the pictures will be going into your iCloud Photos Shared Library. If I have a complaint about the feature, it’s that I wish it would let me toggle between the camera’s various zoom levels. You can switch between front and rear-facing cameras, activate or deactivate features like the flash, HDR, and Live Photos, but not choose the ultra wide lens or a 2x or 3x zoom.
This still isn’t a feature I’m going to use everday, or even every month, but it’s absolutely perfect when the need arises. Honestly, it kind of makes me wonder what other things the Apple Watch can do that I haven’t checked in on in a while.1
Have I missed out on not sending people my heartbeat in seven years?! ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
We’ve made it to the end of 2022! Well, nearly. And barring any more last-minute announcements out of Cupertino, we’ve seen everything that Apple has to offer for the year that was. Which, of course, means that we can turn our eyes to the horizon, to the undiscovered country that is…2023.
With the biggest moves of 2022 in our rearview mirror, it’s time to pontificate on what Apple might have in store for the year ahead. What will we be looking back at, a year hence, as the company’s biggest moves in 2023?
Here then are my picks for the areas that most deserve your attention over the next 12 months.
As the year comes to an end, it’s time for the Ninth Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2022, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.
The 30th birthday of PCalc makes us consider how long-lived tech products must constantly change and adapt, Dan is forced to power cycle a Caseta hub, and we celebrate some holiday traditions.
[This is the last episode of the year. We’ll be back January 6. Happy New Year to all!]
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
Speaking of James Thomson, he and John Voorhees and I celebrate the holidays with our annual gift exchange, and then it’s time to make predictions for what will happen in 2023—but first, it’s time to score our picks from the past year and crown a new champion. Typical episode of Connected.
The built-in Mac OS calculator of the day was a very simple affair, and so I decided I would write a calculator that could do binary and hex, to help me with my programming. And so the idea for PCalc was born. I bought the books Inside Macintosh, Volumes I, II, and III, and sat down to figure it all out. We didn’t have the Internet back then – well, no web at least – so that was basically all I had to go on. Eventually, I started to get the internal logic working, and built a user interface around it all. System 7 was new, so I eventually got a copy of the massive Volume VI to see what had changed there. I didn’t think I needed any of the stuff in the middle.
In its life PCalc has been many different code bases, lived on a huge number of Apple platforms, and gone from being just for fun to a major moneymaker to a low priority to the highest priority to an incubator for a driving game. A lot can happen in thirty years.
(Disclaimer: I appear in James’s story as the guy who made an innocuous suggestion that turned into a PCalc spin-off app.)
We’ve reached the end of the year, and just like last year that means it’s time for me to look ahead at what’s coming for us in 2023. These are my fearless predictions! Okay, maybe there’s a slight bit of fear. Don’t look directly into my eyes. I’m sensitive that way.
While this year’s Mac lineup was a little less than I expected–probably due to supply-chain issues–I suspect that’s going to result in a huge 2023 for the Mac. And on the iPad side, while I expect a quiet year, there’s still a wild card that might make a bit of noise.
Someone bought the bar we were all hanging out in, and they started interrupting the music with edicts about bar rules, fired most of the staff, aren’t paying their bills, installed a velvet rope where VIPs can spit on the other bar patrons, had bouncers start to randomly remove people, and are bricking over the fire exits.
I’ll get my coat.
There are other bars, of course. There are communities on Discord or Slack, and microblogging services like Mastodon and micro.blog. People with big audiences might build their own Substack, or ask people to follow their Tumblr, or set up a blog via WordPress.
Or maybe just chill out and read a book? Imagine a main character who isn’t getting milkshake-ducked or bean-dad-ed into oblivion, for once.
Gather up your jackets, move it to the exits
One reason a lot of people have a hard time walking away from Twitter is because it’s where we’ve invested all our valuable time and resources crafting bespoke non sequiturs, and hewing reaction memes from the finest 12th generation copies of JPEGs.
Fortunately, the previous management at Twitter offered us all archives of our posts, and no one has removed, or broken it yet. Get that archive, if you haven’t already. That archive works locally, except all the URLs are t.co URLs, and those will stop working if you delete your Twitter account, but it has important things like media. It’s not easy to share anything from this archive, if you have something old you want to link to elsewhere.
One solution, from Darius Kazemi, is a lightweight static site generator that can be uploaded basically anywhere on the internet and work, his example is here. You don’t have to upload it at all, and it can just live on your hard drive. Like I just used it to find the time I uploaded an image of a shark from Jaws with the human-like teeth from the original Sonic: The Hedgehog trailer. Normal stuff I tweeted.
The whole thing runs in javascript in your browser and doesn’t upload your archive to any service, or require you to install node or python or anything. If you have a large archive, like I do, you’ll need to unzip it, move the media directory out, and re-zip it. Instructions are straight forward. The result works as expected, and you can modify the CSS however you see fit. Like I commented out the height restrictions in the CSS because that’s just how I wanted to see it.
This is also useful for preserving my very long Twitter thread of all the times the iOS Photos widget has put text over my boyfriend’s face. Now that important work can live forever anywhere I decide to host it.
I hope you have found a friend
A difficulty with moving to new services, that has basically stifled all newcomers in social media, is that there’s no easy way to coordinate where you’re moving to without losing people along the way. There’s too much friction and people give up, or even if they all move, they don’t see each other. There are solutions to that which require some data to be present in your Twitter profile to work out what other people also have that data and draw that connection elsewhere. You need to periodically check because someone might show up, but hopefully if they’re late to the party they’ll check and find you first.
One of the heavily recommended services for finding friends on Mastodon, movetodon.org by Tibor Martini, works pretty well for this. Of course, at any moment this app could break. (If, for example, Twitter crafted another sudden policy decision to kill links to other social media sites.)
Use this time to follow people to other sites they link to besides Mastodon instances. Mastodon isn’t a crowd pleaser—so don’t expect, or demand, that people try Mastodon just so you can mirror your relationship from Twitter to Mastodon.
Time for you to go out to the places you will be from
No matter where you go after Twitter, it’s important to not try and reproduce the same social patterns from Twitter. As tempting as it is to blame Elon Musk for everything, it’s not like Twitter was the optimum social experience beforehand. We’ve all been trained to take a photo, screenshot, or link and post it to dunk on. Certainly one of the difficult things to get used to with Mastodon is the design decision to not have quote tweets because of the bad behavior that they can, but don’t always, encourage.
If you’re logging into your Discords to throw in a link and ask “can you believe this?”, maybe you should also think about how you’ve got the space, and the social skills to talk about it with appropriate context and nuance. To treat the space you’re going into like it’s for conversation with people that also want to talk with you, and not just be outraged.
We should also all be conscious of moderation in all of these other social settings. Moderation was a nebulous thing that Twitter management hired contractors to do to other people, but in smaller social settings, it can be the thing your buddy has to say to you about your behavior. People of a certain age know something about that from Usenet, BBSes, and various web forums. We might all be so used to shouting in overcrowded spaces we’re not paying attention to how we talk in the smaller ones.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end
I met some great friends, acquaintances, and interesting people through Twitter. I’ll find more in other places too—we all will. No one owns that, even if they buy up and ruin the spot where it happened in the past.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
Upgrading the Home architecture requires that all devices accessing the home be updated to the latest operating system version, so many users have yet to take the leap, but users who have upgraded have reported some issues. Amidst those reports, it now appears Apple has removed the option for users to upgrade their Home app architecture.
I hadn’t yet taken the plunge, mainly as I was waiting for my wife to update her Apple devices. But reports seem to be that the upgrade has not been smooth sailing for many folks.
The improved Home architecture has been touted as a major feature of iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, even though it didn’t arrive until the latest updates. It’s one that I’ve been looking forward to, since we’ve been a HomeKit-only household for some time, and the reliability has been less than stellar. Just the other day, I ran into an issue where none of my Lutron Caseta lights would respond in HomeKit until I restarted the hub (the first time I’ve ever had to do that).
I’ve reached out to Apple for comment and will update this story when and if they reply.
Whether TikTok’s algorithm explanations will ruin the magic. How we collect and share our holiday gift ideas. The weather app(s) we’re using in light of the end of Dark Sky. The coolest gifts we’ve bought for ourselves this holiday season.
