By Dan Moren

July 31, 2019 2:24 PM PT

The Back Page: All that is

Deep within the bowels of Apple Park, there is a place where few ever set foot. There are those who will swear up and down that its location moves, never to be found behind the same door twice. That is as it must be, for this place has existed long before Apple Park was built, and will persist until long after it is dust.

For some, that constant unpredictably is a blessing, for they never wish to knowingly open a door and be dragged, endlessly screaming, into the void that awaits. They say this place changes people. Brings out something…essential in them.

The White Room.

No windows. No doors-not even the one from which you entered. No objects of any kind, except perhaps a stool. Accounts differ. Featureless, soundless, timeless. The White Room exists apart from a world concerned with the mundanity of weather and days of the week.

In the White Room, you are reduced. Stripped down to the very patchwork of your soul. Polished, buffed, chamfered, until all that is left is your basic, intrinsic nature—your essential form. The White Room may bestow great gifts upon you, tapping into something deep and fundamental, plucking a chord within you that resonates with the universe, bringing you into harmony with who you are and who you should be. But such blessings are doled out in equal measure with curses. You will never again be the same: Once you have touched the void, it begins to seep into every pore, becoming more a part of you than you are of yourself.

There are no questions to be asked in the White Room. The answers would not satisfy you anyway. The only words spoken are whispers from all around you, voices of what might be ghosts of those who have come to this place before you. “There is no up or down,” they hum. “Aluminium.”

Many have tried their luck in the White Room, stood before its overwhelming nothingness and somehow summoned the courage to voluntarily step inside. Some were merely feasted upon, ejected with souls stripped no less bare than a skeleton fished from piranha-infested waters, while others, shattered, fled to a life of producing Broadway musicals. The White Room is capricious.

To those who survive, however, the White Room means no less than your eyes opened on an infinite scale. To see each atom in the universe and know precisely where it belongs. To see all the colors that you retinas can perceive. To understand precisely how to construct a gold that is more perfect than even gold.

In all of recorded history, only one person is known to have ever entered the White Room and left again, sanity intact. And now the White Room has relinquished their hollow vessel, sucked dry of every last iota of inspiration, upon the world. Now, the White Room begins its long search for the next unfortunate soul to call its own.

Now, deep within the bowels of Apple Park, the White Room hungers.

[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.]

By Jason Snell

July 31, 2019 2:23 PM PT

Applications Folder: Past meets future

In the fall of 1988 as a new freshman at UC San Diego, I put my high-school newspaper skills to use and volunteered to edit copy for the Revelle College newsletter. This being a serious, science-focused school, the editor instructed me to go to the first floor of the Applied Physics and Mathematics building and get a Unix account, after which he would teach me the basics of editing stories using something called vi.

Learn Unix and vi so you can edit stories for a college newsletter? Talk about overkill. But I was excited to have an excuse to get access to the university computer system, and so I got an account and learned the ins and outs of vi. The next year I moved on to my university-wide newspaper, where we much more sensibly used Macs and Microsoft Word, and my Unix skills remained frozen in time.

Funny how things turn out. What I learned in the fall of 1988 to edit a college newsletter has turned out to be a set of valuable skills that benefit me to this day. When Mac OS X arrived, build atop a Unix layer, I discovered that all my vaguely-remembered skills from more than a decade before were suddenly useful again. (I can edit text in vi in my Mac’s Terminal app to this very day. But I don’t.)

It also turns out that, in all the intervening years, there’s been no operating system that could shake the utility of Unix for things like running a servers on the Internet. Which is why the server that runs Six Colors and The Incomparable is a Unix server. Whenever I need to update software, upload files, or do anything else to configure that server, I end up at a command-line interface that’s not that different from the one I learned on more than thirty years ago.

Back then, if I wasn’t in a cold computer lab in the basement of the Undergraduate Library, I was dialing in to a bank of modems in a terminal program on my Apple II. The tool I use to access the command line has changed a lot in the intervening three decades, even if it’s ultimately still a Unix system: These days I can do it from an iPhone or an iPad. (Yes, those are computing products still made by Apple, but from entirely different epochs.)

This is a long way of saying that I really get a kick out of connecting to Unix systems, these dinosaurs of computing, from tiny little touch devices. I use Panic’s Prompt 2 to connect to my server directly from my iOS devices. There’s nothing like troubleshooting server errors from a table at a bar on an iPhone. I don’t recommend it, but it’s amazing that it’s even possible.

But the bulk of my connections to my server are file transfers, uploading images or podcasts. For that, I used to use Panic’s Transmit for iOS, which has sadly been deprecated. Now I use a combination of tools. For some tasks, I’ve built a Shortcut that directly uploads a file into the proper directory and places its resulting URL on my Clipboard. For more complicated transfers, though, I’m now trying out two different apps, both of which integrate remote servers directly into the Files app. File Explorer is a server browsing app with Files integration, and Secure ShellFish dispenses with the browsing interface and relies entirely on Files to manage uploads and downloads.

With either tool, putting a file on my remote Unix server is just as simple as copying a file to iCloud Drive or anywhere else in the Files interface. My only complaint is that transfer statuses in the Files app are pretty opaque, so it can be hard to tell if your file is still uploading or if it’s stalled out. Transmit was great at that.

Finally, since our iPhones and iPads are based on the same foundation as macOS, it means that beneath the surface they’re running a variation of Unix too. Wouldn’t it be great to get access to that subsystem, just as you can by opening the Terminal on the Mac?

Well, Apple doesn’t want you getting your grubby hands on its pristine device underpinnings, so forget that. Instead, here’s iSH, an app under development that encomasses an entire emulated unix system on iOS. That’s right, iSH emulates an Intel processor running a Unix variant called Alpine Linux, and gives you the ability to install and run Unix software and even read and write files to the Files app. It’s both brilliant and ridiculous, and it makes me wish Apple would find a way to let us have a real Terminal on iOS as well.

But either way, it’s nice to put the skills I earned in the fall of 1988 to use more than 30 years later, on computer systems beyond the scope of anything we imagined back then. A command line on a touchscreen? Why not. 1988, meet 2019.

By Dan Moren

July 31, 2019 2:22 PM PT

We like: Dr. Mario World

Puzzles are kind of my jam: crossword puzzles, mind puzzles, brain teasers, that kind of thing—I’ve even been known to dabble in video games from time to time. But though there are plenty of puzzle-based mobile games that I’ve enjoyed, the “match three items” sub-genre popularized by CandyCrush has never really been my thing.

Until Dr. Mario World.

I’m not quite sure what it is about Nintendo’s latest mobile game that has absorbed so much of my attention. It could be as simple as the use of the company’s trademark characters on iOS, which began with Super Mario Run a few years ago, and will continue in the upcoming Mario Kart Tour later this year. Or it might be that the interface and gameplay of the mobile version has just charmed me.

Historically, I haven’t been a huge fan of the Dr. Mario franchise, which I always felt was like an inferior Tetris, minus the awesome 8-bit Tchaikovsky renditions. But I’ve found myself playing Dr. Mario World pretty consistently since its release and enjoying the heck out of it.

Unlike the classic Dr. Mario and Tetris, the mobile version of Dr. Mario World doesn’t use the same “falling block” style of gameplay. Instead, you manually drag a capsule into the playing field, where it floats upward, letting you rotate it with a tap or drag it to your desired location. The one restriction is that you can’t drag the capsule back down once it’s passed a row.

As with the classic game, the goal is still to line up multicolored capsules with viruses of the same color. Match three in a row and the virus and any matching capsule halves vanish—any remaining capsule halves float to the top of the screen, but you can drag them, just like original capsules, filling in those hard to reach spots. As you make matches, you’ll fill up a power bar that will let you use your character’s special skill as well as also earn “wild card” capsules that will match any color.

What I particularly like about the changes is that most of the levels in Dr. Mario World aren’t timed and don’t bombard you with constantly falling capsules. Instead, you have a finite number of capsules with which to beat any level, making it more of a challenge of resource deployment than a quick-reaction game. (The fewer capsules you can beat the level in, the better your score.) As you progress through the game, there are more complicated obstacles, including bricks that need to be blown up, cages in which viruses are locked, and viruses embedded in bubbles that float to the top.

I’ve completed seventy-some levels of Dr. Mario World, and I’m still going strong. I’ve so far managed to avoid the siren song of in-app purchases; there are various power-ups that you can buy with real currency, as well as the ability to unlock additional characters and assistants via coins earned in-game. Your progress gets tracked along a map of various “worlds” à la the classic Super Mario Bros. 3, adding a little bit of flavor to the game. There’s also a head-to-head multiplayer mode that I have yet to try, but I suspect I may need to hone my skills a bit more before I venture there.

The only downside I’ve discovered so far is that the game—somewhat perplexingly—requires an always-on network connection, meaning it won’t be too useful during my upcoming travels. But I’m hopeful that Nintendo might decide to change that at some point.

Dr. Mario World is a free download for iPhones and iPads, though it has the previously mentioned in-app purchase options. Just be careful, or you may find yourself unable to put it down.

[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.]

By Stephen Hackett

July 31, 2019 2:20 PM PT

The Hackett File: On the possible return of the six-color Apple logo

There’s a (somewhat sketchy) rumor going around about a very specific detail about (possible) future Apple hardware. Here’s Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:

Apple may be planning to reintroduce its classic rainbow logo on some of its new products as early as this year, according to a well-connected MacRumors tipster, who in turn cites a corporate Apple employee in Cupertino.

When I said this one is a bit shaky, I wasn’t joking. Rossignol goes on:

To be clear, this rumor could very well be untrue. We have elected to share it since it comes from a tipster who has longstanding connections to both Apple and related industries, but no other sources have shared similar information that we know of. And, even if true, the plans could certainly change.

Even with all of that couching, I love this idea.

Of course, there’s the historic use of the six color logo when it comes to Apple hardware. The colorful logo graced just about every computer, keyboard and printer from Apple for more than 15 years, from the Apple II and original Macintosh until the return of Steve Jobs ushered in the Bondi Era.

It even showed up on the QuickTake line of cameras:

This logo has quite the history, as Jens Hofman Hansen writes:

It appears that Steve Jobs was in charge of a large part of the work, designing the apple logo. It is difficult to print a logo in several colors, placed close to each other. The four color print technique, that is done in several steps, brings the risk that the different layers may be displaced and thereby overlapping. [Rob Janoff, art director of the advertising company Regis McKenna Advertising] suggested that the colored stripes should be separated by thin black lines, that would solve the problem and make the printing of the logo cheaper. Steve Jobs didn’t care and decided firmly that the logo should be without the marring lines. For the same reason Michael M. Scott of Apple has called the logo “the most expensive bloody logo ever designed.”

Of course, even if the six color logo comes back in 2019 or 2020, most of that history won’t be known to the masses buying the next iPhone, but I think that’s okay. As the color has been drained from most of Apple’s products, they’ve become less whimsical and more utilitarian. The iPhone XS and iMac Pro are stunning products from an industrial design perspective, but they are far from fun. A dose of six colors could help change that in a very Apple-like way.

[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]

By Jason Snell

July 31, 2019 2:19 PM PT

Displays on the edge

I have this feeling that we haven’t explored display technologies enough.

I was thinking this the other day as I tried out the new version of the Kindle Oasis, which (like every Kindle) uses a wacky screen technology called E Ink to create a reflective surface that feels more like ink on paper than the other screens in our lives.

I appreciate that Apple is pushing new advances in display technology like screen refresh rates (the ProMotion display on recent iPads must be seen to be believed, but it’s gloriously smooth when scrolling and I love it). I like how OLED technology is creeping in, and color gamuts are widening, and have some hope that Apple’s time spent developing a product as bananas as the Pro Display XDR will have some follow-on benefits to those of us who don’t need a $6,000 reference display.

Meanwhile on the other side of the ledger, Samsung is experimenting with foldable displays, and it seems like it will finally ship the Galaxy Fold this fall. Foldable designs bring up any number of other design decisions about screens, too, in terms of where they go when folded and what shape, size, and location of screen is appropriate.

A couple of years ago a backed a Kickstarter (which ultimately crashed and burned) that purported to be designing an iPhone case with an E Ink display on its back. I loved the idea, because the back of my iPhone is a featureless slab, and the advantage of E Ink displays is that they’re easily readable in bright light and they only use power when you change what’s on them. What better place for a static set of information—like a to-do list or a calendar—than on the back of my iPhone?

I doubt Apple will be making any device with an E Ink display anytime soon, using my Kindle reminds me that there are plenty of contexts in which the brightest, fastest refreshing, widest color gamut display is not necessarily the right one. Different technologies have different advantages, and that’s often what I’m thinking when I get that nonspecific feeling that our display technologies have gotten a little bit too samey. Sometimes a black-and-white 300dpi screen with a low refresh rate is the right display for the job. What else are we missing in the tech industry’s rush to ever-higher resolutions, refresh rates, and brightness levels?

Maybe the weird technology required to make foldable screens will force a new burst of creativity into the design of tech products. I’m not entirely sure that foldable screens will be mainstream as quickly as Samsung might like, but I’m excited that somewhere inside Apple’s design lab, there are designers considering what happens to product design when the screen isn’t a single, fixed shape. Who knows where those considerations might take the iPhone, or iPad, or even the Mac?

In the meantime, I am not giving up my Kindle, which is still the best screen around for pure reading enjoyment.