As someone who wasn’t that familiar with the wildly popular software platform Roblox, this video by People Make Games was incredibly enlightening. It’s a remarkable piece of journalism that explains how Roblox sells itself as a business opportunity for a whole new generation of developers, while making it almost impossible for games to break out without advertising with Roblox, and paying out in a Roblox-controlled currency with a terrible exchange rate—all while it has become valued at $41 billion.
A few months ago, I volunteered to be interviewed by Italian student Federico Monaco for his thesis project about Web accessibility for the color-blind. (I am red-green color-blind.) The results of his work are now on display as the Colorblind Accessibility Manifesto, which points out that designers must consider that using only color to impart information in user interfaces can be inaccessible to some people.
As a part of his project, Monaco is seeking developers to help create a browser extension to aid in improving web usability for the colorblind.
I was just reminded of the importance of color accessibility earlier today, when I encountered a color-coded interface that didn’t present any alternative method of differentiating itself, such as offering different shaped interface elements—despite the fact that my iPad has the “Differentiate Without Color” setting turned on. (Apple offers a Color Filter feature that makes it easier for me to differentiate between colors—but it also makes all the colors on the device look horrendously unnatural.)
If you’re a web or app developer and you haven’t considered color when you’re considering accessibility, give Monaco’s website a look.
Can anonymity online be a good thing? The first smart home device someone should buy. Our technology collection habits. The “technology anachronisms” in our lives.
But in the months since Apple Podcasts’ announcement, podcasters say the platform has failed them in various ways. For a company that prides itself on functionality, design, and ease of use, the new backend’s bungled launch is a mess. Podcasters say Apple Podcasts Connect, which they’re required to use in order to take advantage of subscriptions, has a confusing interface that often leads to user error scenarios that have them pinging Apple at all hours of the day in a panic — one podcaster’s entire show was seemingly archived until Apple stepped in to help and explain what happened.
I talked to Apple reps about this back in June, and basically made all the points raised in the article. The weaknesses of Apple’s initial subscription offering, most particularly the burdens placed on podcasters to use Apple’s limited back-end tools, were apparent the moment the feature was announced.
This is turning into one of those cases where Apple’s relative inattention to podcasting from 2005 through 2020 is seeming more and more like a golden age.
You’d think that when Apple executives stand on a stage (or on some sort of set in a pre-produced video) and boldly announce all the new features coming to its operating systems in the fall, they’d be highly confident in the features they were rolling out. (They sure seem confident, don’t they?)
But the truth is that Apple’s operating-system announcements aren’t set in stone. There might have been a time when that was true, but these days the company is keenly aware of the power of bad buzz—and it adjusts its direction accordingly.
Whether it’s bad buzz surrounding a feature that isn’t as well thought out as Apple thought, or bad buzz about a feature that’s just too buggy to be worth trying, today’s Apple spends its summer and fall course correcting. And that’s why some of this past June’s WWDC announcements will never come to pass, and others will be missing in action in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey 12.0, only to arrive later in the fall, winter, or even spring.
This week Jason and Myke ponder what it means to be a native Mac app in the era of SwiftUI, Catalyst, and Electron. They also consider the fallout and further disclosures from Apple’s child-protection announcements, celebrate Ted Lasso Christmas, and talk about how they’re traveling with iPads and Macs today.
When you’re a company as big as Apple, the idea of threats starts to evolve. By contrast, when you’re a brand-new startup or a small indie business, or even an established and somewhat successful company, you probably face threats from other companies, from your products just not being successful, or even from mistakes you’ve made.
But at the size Apple has reached, none of these are really existential threats. Competitors exist, certainly, but oftentimes they’re more like peers—you’re as unlikely to take them out as they are to take you out. Unsuccessful products might ding you a bit, but they’re hardly going to sink you. And even big mistakes can’t really do substantial damage when your revenue is in the tens of billions and your cash reserves are measured in twelve digits.
So when Apple has reached a point—where, by some accounts, it is worth more than about 96 percent of the world—are those existential threats, if there are any, coming from? As it turns out, when you’ve reached the size of a country, those threats—perhaps unsurprisingly—often come from countries themselves. And those happen to be several of the biggest threats that Apple is facing at this very moment.
If you can’t move the preferences window because it’s fake, you might be running an Electron app like 1Password 8.
I’ve used AgileBits’s 1Password for more than a decade. I’ve recommended it to friends and family alike. Over time, password management has become more common, and this fall’s operating-system updates will improve Apple’s built-in password management so much that it’s all most people will ever need.
That said, 1Password offers many features Apple doesn’t, and the company has become increasingly active in competing in the enterprise space, with an influx of investment to help it grow rapidly.
Which brings us to this week, when AgileBits announced the beta version of 1Password 8 for the Mac—and walked into a storm of criticism from Mac users. You see, AgileBits chose to build the new version of its Mac app using Electron, a system based on web technologies that’s used by numerous cross-platform apps, including Slack, Skype, and Discord.
I think it’s fair to say that most users don’t care about the tools that a developer uses to write the apps we use. But using a system like Electron does have consequences: Electron apps have a reputation for being slow, eating up a lot of system memory, and—perhaps most offensively—failing to behave like proper, “native” apps on whatever platform they operate.
Just as there are good and bad Catalyst apps, there are good and bad Electron apps. I’m sure that the very best Electron app isn’t as good a Mac app as one written using Apple’s AppKit frameworks—but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be good. And AgileBits has pointed out that it’s using Rust, a robust programming language, to power everything except the user interface, so performance should be more than you’d expect from “just a web app.”
I’m going to withhold judgment of 1Password 8’s interface, mostly because it’s still in beta and I’m sure AgileBits is going to get plenty of feedback about all the ways it fails to measure up to the standards of Mac users. I hope they’re listening and will adjust accordingly.
What’s really causing all this consternation, I think, isn’t 1Password moving to Electron. Electron is a bit of a bogeyman. The root problem is this: 1Password, originally a Mac-forward software developer, has simply decided that the Mac isn’t important enough.
I know that those are harsh words, and that the people at AgileBits would argue with them. But in a blog post by Michael Fey, AgileBits’s VP of Engineering for Client Apps, the company laid out its entire development strategy. It’s a post meant to explain what the company is up to and tamp down a lot of angry hot takes (and probably should’ve been posted the moment it announced the Mac beta).
Fey’s post clearly spells out AgileBits’s priorities. Android and iOS apps are built with native platform frameworks in order to create the best app experience possible on mobile. For iOS, AgileBits decided to use Apple’s new SwiftUI framework rather than the venerable UIKit, in order to skate “to where the puck was going.” Their plan was to use SwiftUI on the Mac, too. In doing so, AgileBits was buying into the vision Apple has for SwiftUI as a tool to build interfaces across all of Apple’s platforms. Unfortunately, it seems that SwiftUI didn’t measure up on the Mac:
Despite the fact that SwiftUI allowed us to share more code than ever between iOS and macOS, we still found ourselves building separate implementations of certain components and sometimes whole features to have them feel at home on their target OS.
I have to read this as a (gently stated) indictment of the current state of SwiftUI. AgileBits was willing to put in the extra work for iOS, because it’s an important platform and SwiftUI is clearly the future there. But implementing it on the Mac required a lot of duplicate work—and what’s worse, SwiftUI apps aren’t compatible with older versions of macOS. AgileBits was planning on covering the older versions with an Electron version, but once it decided the SwiftUI implementation for the Mac was too much work, it pulled the plug—and now plans to ship an Electron version to all Mac users.
I appreciate that AgileBits was originally planning two separate Mac implementations. That’s a sign that the company cared enough to expend extra resources to have a good experience on the Mac, rather than doing what it did to Windows users in deciding Electron was good enough.
And yet as a longtime Mac user, I find AgileBits’s decision-making process incredibly sad. Because as Fey’s post makes clear, at no point did the company consider keeping the Mac-only version of 1Password alive. AgileBits, once a major Mac developer, decided (for legitimate business reasons, of course) that the Mac’s not a platform that deserves its own bespoke app. Or as Fey put it:
We could support as many versions of macOS as we wanted using Apple’s AppKit framework, but that meant adding another frontend toolkit to the mix.
Translation: The Mac’s important, but not important enough to build a version of the app that only works there.
I get it. 1Password has to cover Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and the web. The Mac is a small platform compared to Windows, and “desktop” is a small platform compared to “mobile.” If I were an engineering manager asking for resources for a bespoke Mac app, I would have a hard time justifying it, too.
And yet, here we are. A banner Mac app and app developer has abandoned a platform-native app for the same web-app wrapper it’s using on Windows. Even if it’s the best Electron app you’ve ever seen, it won’t be the same—and more than that, it says something painful about the future of Mac software.
Apple shares the blame, though. If today’s SwiftUI was truly the One True Tool to unify Apple’s platforms that it’s meant to be in the future, the Mac version of 1Password would be presented in SwiftUI. And perhaps in a year or two, that will happen—after all, the SwiftUI version of 1Password is right over there on iOS, ready to make the move when it’s feasible.
Just because these are decisions made with the cold, hard reality of business priorities and budgets and the current state of developer tools doesn’t make me any less sad, though. A long-running and beloved Mac app is getting thrown in the trash and replaced with a web app. It’s not the first—and unfortunately, it won’t be the last.
My thanks to TextSniper for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
TextSniper is a bit like the Live Text feature that will be rolling out with macOS Monterey, but with fewer limitations—and you can use it on any Mac running macOS Catalina or Big Sur, today. TextSniper can extract text anywhere on your Mac’s screen and automatically save it to your clipboard so that you can paste it anywhere you need it. TextSniper can even read the text to you.
TextSniper doesn’t collect your data. The OCR is done on your Mac and does not require an internet connection. If you’re tired of re-typing text from images, can’t wait for Live Text, or aren’t planning on updating to Monterey, TextSniper will help speed up your workflow right now. Use the promo code SixColors to get 20% off this week.
August 13, 2021
How Apple’s technical ambition and corporate focus on privacy turned into a PR disaster.
Stern does a great job of breaking down the technology as they discuss it, and while Federighi lays out Apple’s case pretty well, it certainly won’t allay all the fears that have arisen as the result of this announcement.
More notable to me is the escalation in the response from Apple. We’ve gone from nameless press statements to interviews with Apple’s privacy chief to pulling out the big guns. Federighi is probably the second most recognizable Apple executive; we’ll see if this continues ramping up to the point that Tim Cook has to give an interview. I wouldn’t bet against it.
If you’re thinking of cutting the cord—or if you’re on one over-the-top TV service and considering alternatives—I highly recommend Suppose, which will let you list all the channels that matter to you, and will then present the over-the-top services that match your priorities.
I was able to boil down the many choices to just a handful by entering in my local channels, regional sports network, and a couple of specific sports cable channels. That’s how I got to Fubo TV with YouTube TV as a close runner-up.
Though I’ve just cut the cord and dumped traditional cable TV, the truth is, I’m cheating. I’ve subscribed to what’s called an “over the top” TV service, which provides a bundle of live TV channels—essentially, it’s a cable TV plan that’s done entirely via streaming. This has required me to replace my venerable TiVo with an app that runs on my Apple TV.
The service is Fubo TV, for which I’m paying $60 a month. I can’t give up live TV, mostly because of sports, so it’s fitting that I ended up with Fubo TV—it originated as a sports streaming service, though it now also carries local channels and cable entertainment channels.
I chose Fubo TV because of its channel lineup, which included all the sports channels I required. (YouTube TV came close, and I intend to test-drive YouTube TV in the future and write about it here when I do.) But channels are only part of the equation when it comes to TV service: There’s the TV interface itself. How can an app measure up to an old-fashioned TiVo box attached to a cable plan?
The short answer is, it’s a step back in terms of functionality, with a lot of room for improvement. It’s usable, but can be frustrating. Let’s get into it.
The tech we can’t seem to let go of, what annoyances we’d fix with $50, our feelings on smart TVs, and how automated photo-surfacing apps work (or don’t) for us.
There are plenty of whiz-bang features in Apple’s upcoming OS updates, but to my mind, Live Text is the one poised to fundamentally change our interactions with technology. Once upon a time pictures were pictures and text was text, but now that boundary has been blown away; it’s time to rethink a lot of our assumptions.
Jason’s already documented how “useful” Live Text can be when interpreting handwritten recipes, but just in the handful of weeks that I’ve been using beta software on my iPhone, iPad, and M1 MacBook Air, I’ve already found a few unexpected applications of the technology (and at least one missed opportunity).
Low-tech definition
Reading ebooks has spoiled me. No, not because of the ability to cram a 1000-page epic tome onto a device the size of a pamphlet. Not even because of the ability to download books onto without leaving the comfort of my couch.
It’s the definitions. It may surprise, shock, and otherwise stagger you that I’m a bit of a language nerd, but there’s no better feature for me than being able to tap and hold on an unfamiliar word and have a definition presented.1
Recently, however, I requested a book from the library that was only available in hard copy. The horror! While I do enjoy reading paper books, this particular title happened to be rife with unusual words that I’d either never encountered or couldn’t remember. But no tapping for definitions for me! Sure, I suppose I could have simply typed the words into my phone to look them up, but it also occurred to me that this was the perfect place to use Live Text.
So, instead, I pointed my iPhone’s camera at the page and tapped the Live Text button. Without even having to take a photo, I was able to highlight the word in question and tap iOS’s Look Up button to get the definition. No wading through Google searches or scrolling through Spotlight to find the Dictionary section. It may not be that much faster, but it has definitely decreased my cognitive load, and I found myself using this approach several times throughout the book.
I’ll add that this also works a treat on menus. We’ve all spotted a food we’ve never heard of and wondered “Do I want to eat that?” Well, pull out your phone, point it at the menu and tap on the word to look it up and discover that it’s delicious and, yes, you do want to eat it.
Photographic memory
A few years ago, Apple’s Photos app added the ability to search for specific items—dogs, for example, or cars. Now, with the advent of Live Text, you can search for specific text inside a photo. This is great if, for example, you can’t remember when you took that picture of that new restaurant.
Recently I was on vacation and had to call a store about an order I’d placed. This being the Dark Ages, the order had been placed in person and I had only a paper receipt. So before I went on vacation, I snapped a picture of that receipt. Only problem was it was mixed in with a bunch of screenshots I’d been taking for a freelance piece, so it didn’t exactly pop out when I scrolled back through my Photo Library.
Puzzlingly, searching for text in your photos works in Spotlight, but not in the Photos app.
Live Text to the rescue, I figured: I could search for the name of the store on the invoice and it ought to show up. But when I tried it, no dice: Photos told me there were no images that matched my search.
So I complained about this in our very own Six Colors slack, and eagle-eyed reader Mihir pointed out that searching for text in Spotlight does surface photos that contain those words.
Perhaps this is just an oversight, a bug, or something that Apple hasn’t implemented yet, but it seems puzzling. Gratified as I am the this functionality exists, it would never occur to me to search for a photo in Spotlight. It’s a tremendously useful feature, and here’s hoping the continuing beta process puts it where it belongs: in the Photos app.
Comincaptcha
So, yes, Live Text has its handy uses, but it also has some pretty big potential implications. Take CAPTCHAs, for example. We’re all familiar with these insidious tests to prove our humanity when logging on to websites.
While a lot of places online have switched to Google’s reCAPTCHA system that—which is really designed to train the company’s autonomous driving system2—there remain some sites that rely on other methods, including strangely formatted text that’s hard for a person to read, but supposedly impossible for a computer.
Or, at least, it was. While testing out another feature of iOS 15, I discovered that Live Text can sometimes now understand said strangely formatted text. Tapping on the CAPTCHA let me select the text, so it clearly recognized it as letters, and in some caess, it correctly parsed the text as well.
Which, okay, great for those of us who have trouble sussing out what those weird squiggles are supposed to be, but also not particularly great because now computers are helping us prove our humanity, which seems to kind of obviate the point of these tests in the first place. (Granted, as Live Text didn’t nail the CAPTCHA 100 percent of the time, there’s still hope for us humans—at least for now.)
Given that machine learning models have also gotten better at identifying the items in images—in large part because we have trained them to recognize those items—it seems as though the effectiveness of CAPTCHAs is on the verge of diminishing. So what next: do we have to push these tests on to something else in an ever-escalating arms race? Or perhaps every website will start requiring tests that ask us why we haven’t helped a tortoise lying on its back.
Much as I miss that truly enormous Webster’s dictionary we had in my house growing up. I can still remember the smell of it. ↩
Come on: crosswalks? Bicycles? Stop lights? Fire hydrants? All things you don’t want your autonomous cars driving into or through. ↩
[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.]
Apple’s out-of-the-blue announcement last week that it was adding a bunch of features to iOS involving child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) generated an entirely predictable reaction. Or, more accurately, reactions. Those on the law-enforcement side of the spectrum praised Apple for its work, and those on the civil-liberties side accused Apple of turning iPhones into surveillance devices.
It’s not surprising at all that Apple’s announcement would be met with scrutiny. If anything is surprising about this whole story, it’s that Apple doesn’t seem to have anticipated all the pushback its announcement received. The company had to post a Frequently-Asked Questions file in response. If Q’s are being FA’d in the wake of your announcement, you probably botched your announcement.
Such an announcement deserves scrutiny. The problem for those seeking to drop their hot takes about this issue is that it’s extremely complicated and there are no easy answers. That doesn’t mean that Apple’s approach is fundamentally right or wrong, but it does mean that Apple has made some choices that are worth exploring and debating.
This is a good interview between Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch and Erik Neuenschwander, head of Privacy at Apple, about Apple’s announced child-abuse-related features. A highlight:
We have two co-equal goals here. One is to improve child safety on the platform and the second is to preserve user privacy. And what we’ve been able to do across all three of the features is bring together technologies that let us deliver on both of those goals.
You can see this in how the features were designed—Apple is trying to balance these two goals. (How well it did remains the subject of discussion.) Not all of Neuenschwander’s answers are entirely satisfying, but they’re still informative about how Apple is approaching this issue.
