January 23, 2023 1:25 PM PT
New Macs are here. We’ve got ’em. Jason and Dan provided a live look at the new hardware on YouTube on Monday afternoon, and answered your questions. Here’s an archived video of the event.
January 23, 2023 11:54 AM PT
With today’s release of iOS 16.3 and macOS Ventura 13.2, Apple added yet another additional security feature, allowing users to secure their Apple IDs with hardware security keys.
If you’re not familiar with hardware security keys, they’re small devices that plug in to a hardware port—usually USB, though Lightning models exist—and provide a means of cryptographic authentication.
Apple says security key support is aimed mainly at those who want extra protection from targeted phishing or social engineering attacks. Adding a security key replaces the existing multifactor verification process, where you’re required to provide a six-digit code that appears on your other devices logged into the same Apple ID. So if you want to log in to a new device, manage your Apple ID on the web, or reset your Apple ID password, you’ll need to present your registered security key instead. (If you want to log in to a device that doesn’t have a way to directly connect to a security key—such as an Apple TV, HomePod, or Apple Watch—you’ll need to authenticate with the key on an iPhone or iPad.)
Notably, this feature does not seem to allow the use of a passkey, the security feature rolled out in iOS 16. Many online services that support security keys treat passkeys as essentially the same thing, but it’s possible that such a usage here could present a security vulnerability if a bad actor got access to a device.
Other restrictions include the inability to log in to iCloud for Windows, no support for older devices that can’t update to an OS that allows for security keys, no child accounts or Managed Apple IDs, and no support for other family members Apple Watches paired with a different phone.
I went through the process of adding security keys, which on the Mac can be accessed in System Settings > Apple ID > Password & Security. There’s a new Security Keys section where you can click Add, and the system will walk you through the process. It’s worth noting that Apple requires you have two security keys to set this up, so that you have a backup in case one gets lost. If both your keys are lost, Apple warns that you may be locked out of your account permanently. (In this way, it’s similar to the Advanced Data Protection features for iCloud that Apple added late last year, which put the encryption keys in the hands of users rather than Apple itself.)
Setting up the security keys proved to be straightforward enough, though a bit awkward if you need to connect them to a Mac where the USB ports are out of the way—I plugged mine in to my Studio Display’s ports, but I had to reach behind it to activate the key, which would get old pretty fast if I had to do it several times a day. (I think this is the first time I’ve really wanted a Mac to have an NFC chip built in.)
I’m curious to see how this impacts my day-to-day usage, but I think it will actually be pretty minimal. Now, here’s hoping I can just avoid losing my security keys—maybe it’s time to AirTag them.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
January 23, 2023 10:48 AM PT
As someone who’s recently been spending more time with a MacBook Air both hooked up to an Apple Studio Display and on its own, I’ve definitely noticed that what works in one setup isn’t always the best answer for all display configurations.
Enter HiDock, a new app from Rafael Conde, that attempts to deal with this issue when it comes to macOS’s Dock.
The idea behind HiDock is simple: based on the current display situation, it can automatically change your Dock’s size; whether it’s positioned on the left, right, or bottom of the screen; and whether it’s shown or hidden. So if you prefer to have a left-mounted Dock when you’re connected to an external display, but a bottom Dock when your laptop’s out and about, you can set those options and have HiDock handle it for you. There’s also a configuration for when you have multiple displays active, as opposed to using the MacBook in clamshell mode.
HiDock is exceptionally simple to use and has a very straightforward interface that lets you preview exactly what your screens will look like in various monitor setups. (There’s no option, of course, to set different Docks for the different displays in your setup, given that macOS generally handles that on its own, depending on whether you’re mirroring or extending your display.)
And, for all that, the app is free to download and use, though the developer welcomes donations via his website if you’re so inclined.
[via the old Mac Gemster himself, Dan Frakes]
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
January 23, 2023 6:00 AM PT
Here’s what the new M2 MacBook Pro is not: new. Yes, it’s powered by a new generation of Apple silicon, but it’s very much the same laptop that was updated for the Apple silicon era in 2021. If you’ve seen an M1 MacBook Pro, you know what the M2 MacBook Pro looks like.
But when it comes to professional workhorse computers, novelty can be overrated. The M2 MacBook Pro is the product of Apple’s repentance from its confused mid-2010 laptop designs and offers all the benefits of running on Apple’s own processors. The new M2 Pro and Max processors are an incremental improvement over their predecessors but an enormous one over all Intel-based models.
Of course, what makes the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops appealing goes beyond the processor running inside them. From their bright HDR displays to an array of ports and slots, they’ve got functionality that separates them from the lower end of Apple’s laptop line.
I’ve been able to spend nearly a week with a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 Max processor, and it’s been a great experience. But how you view these laptops will depend on who you are, where you’re coming from, and what you’re looking for.
Continue reading “2023 MacBook Pro Review: More of the same, in a good way”…
January 23, 2023 6:00 AM PT
In 2005, when Apple first introduced the Mac mini, it was a carefully designed, strategic product: a low-cost computer aimed primarily at luring customers from the Windows PC hegemony with the promise that they could save even further by using all of their existing accessories, thus putting a dent into the argument that investing in the Mac was by necessity expensive.
Eighteen years after its debut, the Mac mini is, surprisingly enough, still going strong. At its core, however, it remains a machine of contradictions: it has become a bastion of Apple’s lineup, but it’s been updated more sporadically than any other Mac. It was one of the first Macs to make the jump to Apple silicon back in 2020, but at the same time, a more expensive model lingered as one of the last remaining Intel Macs. It’s an entry-level machine, but it’s also been deployed in server farms and modded and smushed into any number of applications.
With the most recent update to the M2 family of processors, the Mac mini is once again doing more than just one thing at the same time. In its base configuration, with an 8-CPU-core/10-GPU-core M2 processor, it’s a respectably performing desktop that can now be had for just $599, a $100 price drop from the M1 mini, solidifying its status as the cheapest Mac around. But bump the mini up to an M2 Pro, and it’s also a high-performing machine that will go up against the more expensive products in Apple’s desktop line, like the Mac Studio.
It’s hard to argue that the mini’s versatility isn’t the biggest part of why the product is still going strong, nigh on two decades after its debut. If the iMac, the Mac Studio, and the still-waiting-in-the-wings Apple silicon Mac Pro are the bricks of Apple’s Mac lineup, the Mac mini is the mortar, with its various configurations filling the gaps in between.
Continue reading “M2 Mac mini Review: Whatever you want it to be”…
Bear with me: this is, on the face of it, a weird idea. But is it possible Apple is making its Macs too powerful?
Okay, okay, I know: how could having a computer that’s too powerful be a bad thing? But after this week’s announcement of the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini, I found myself wondering whether the company has painted itself into a corner, vis-a-vis its impressive hardware.
It is, admittedly, a strange state of affairs when you find yourself wondering if Apple has maybe gotten too good at making computers that are so powerful they are overkill for the purposes of most tasks, but you don’t have to look too far to see another example of this same phenomenon.
This is a struggle that Apple’s long contended with on the iPad. Ask any user pushing the envelope of an iPad Pro and the consensus will likely be that the hardware is awesome and incredibly powerful–if only the software could keep up.
January 20, 2023 3:16 PM PT
This week answered the philosophical question: what if they held an Apple event and nobody came? Even if it was because nobody was invited. And speaking of not invited, some favorite apps have been uninvited to the Twitter party.
Apple decided to make the announcement of new M2-based MacBook Pros and Mac minis, in which the new M2 Pro and Max chips were unveiled, an online-only affair which meant reporters could cover it in their PJs. The company still produced a video featuring talking execs (if not its most senior), lots of camera swooshes through the company’s headquarters, and videos. Yes, videos inside the presentation video. Videos of people making videos.
It’s like a video turducken.
The virtual event was not entirely Tim-less (Apple’s VP of Platform Architecture Tim Millet represented the Tims of Apple) but it was Cook-less. Still, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t sizzle.
The new M2 Pro Mac mini beats the M1 Max. If you can’t figure out Apple’s weird naming conventions, that means the new third-best thing beat the old second-best thing. Apple touts the M2 Pro and Max as “20 percent faster”, which makes sense because they have 20 percent more transistors.
Until you get smaller in nanometers, just keep throwing more transistors at the problem.
One weird footnote: the new Mac minis are a hair bigger than the old ones while the new MacBook Pros are a hair smaller. Not to split hairs.
After Twitter pulling the keys for several third-party apps including Tweetbot and Twitterrific with no notice, the company announced this week that the apps were suspended as part of an effort to “enforce its long-standing API rules”. (To which Jason had a succinct response.) These would be the same rules that the company hastily re-wrote later in the week to ban all third-party apps. That’s some Star Trek-level causality bending, there.
“You violated the rules… from the future!”
A new clause under Restrictions says that developers are not able to “create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.”
“We’re tired of you making a better user experience for our service!”
In fairness to Elon Musk, his copy of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” may have been consumed in a tragic car fire. We just don’t know.
On top of having a steady revenue stream yanked out from under them with absolutely no warning or communication, Tapbots and The Iconfactory, makers of the aforementioned apps, will now be faced with people asking for refunds because, through no fault of their own, their apps don’t work anymore.
Instead of requesting a refund, might I suggest going to Tapbots’ and The Iconfactory’s websites and buying one of their other apps (personally, I picked Pastebot and a Wallaroo subscription). All of these are nicely priced apps that won’t get the rug pulled out from under them by a capricious billionaire.
It’s time to play “Return of the Mack” on your HomePod because Apple has brought back the big HomePod (also known as the HomePod HomePod, the HomePod Prime, and the BigBoi), now slightly cheaper and with fewer tweeters (ironic, considering the previous story).
Of course, this had to happen. In terms of pure deductive reasoning, the existence of a HomePod mini implied the existence of a HomePod. Therefore, Apple was logically bound to bring the device back. That’s just simple quantum mechanics. It was only a matter of time.
It remains to be seen if the new $299 price point will make the device any more successful than it was before, which was not that successful. Color-wise it seems Apple considers it the HomePod Pro as it only comes in two colors. I’m not sure where Apple got the idea that pros don’t like colors, but they’re sure sticking to it.
Early reports suggest the device sounds about as good as the old one did, which is good because the old one sounded great. Meanwhile, if you have a HomePod mini, you can look forward to some additional features such as temperature and humidity sensing being added in a few weeks when 16.3 ships. It’s a little something for everyone (HomePod purchase required, void where prohibited).
Pour one out for Twitterrific and Tweetbot. At least we’ll have faster Macs and bigger HomePods to console ourselves with.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
There were new MacBook Pro and Mac mini announcements. Chip speeds are out, but core counts are back in? Also, a familiar HomePod returns.
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Sean Heber of The Iconfactory makes the death of Twitterrific official:
Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world!
With the silent retroactive banning of Twitter clients, this is the end of the road for an app that I’ve used for fifteen years, first on macOS, then on iOS. I know that Tweetbot is the golden child of the indie Twitter app world, but for whatever reasons, I always preferred Twitterrific. It just worked the best for the way I wanted to use Twitter.
I’ll miss it, and I look forward to the work The Iconfactory does out from under the service that never seemed to love it as much as it should have.
Hansen Hsu, Curator of the Software History Center at the Computer History Museum, in a press release:
The release of the Apple Lisa was a key turning point for the history of personal computers. Without the Lisa, today’s computers might not use mouse-driven GUIs, and perhaps the Macintosh, and even Microsoft Windows, might not exist either. We’re thrilled to publicly release the source code for the Apple Lisa—for the first time—and thank Apple, Inc. for their permission and support that led to this release.”
Hsu also wrote a blog post about the Lisa, which turns 40 today. The source code is available under an Apple academic license agreement, which limits its use to “non-commercial, academic research, educational teaching, and personal study purposes only.”
January 19, 2023 8:45 AM PT
Subscriber Josh wrote on Mastodon:
6C member here. Hopefully simple request: a RSS feed that does not include your regular podcasts, Upgrade, Clockwise, etc. I already subscribe to all those in Overcast, so they just clutter up NNW for me. Apologies if there is already a way to do this. I can’t find it if there is. 👍🏻
I had to think about this for a bit, but the answer is yes. If you’d like to modify your Six Colors RSS feed so that it only displays certain post types, you can do that. It’s all based on the categories we use for posts on the site. So please join me behind the curtain as I reveal them:
Each of you has your own, individual RSS feed in with a URL that looks like: sixcolors.com/?member-feed=[a very long string of characters]. If you append &category= to the end of that URL, your RSS feed will be filtered by category. (This is actually how the Six Colors Podcast feed is generated—it’s just the regular feed, filtered on the category “Member Podcast”.)
If you append a (comma-delimited, URL-encoded) list of categories to that URL, the feed will only display items in those categories. So, for example, Subscriber Josh might end up with an RSS URL that looks like this:
https://sixcolors.com/?member-feed=xxxx&category=Link,Post,Offsite,Member,More%20Colors,Feed%20Only
So yes, if you want to customize your RSS feed, you can. (If you do, I would strongly recommend keeping the Offsite category in your feed, for reasons I can’t yet reveal.)
Whether we’re using AirTags and other item-tracking tech, how we have (or haven’t) used ChatGPT for work, our thoughts on a touchscreen Mac, and the discontinued tech we’d like to see revived.
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January 18, 2023 6:33 AM PT
The HomePod…lives! In a surprise announcement on Wednesday, Apple announced the second-generation HomePod with support for spatial audio, smart home automations using Siri, and a slightly refined design. Apple’s powered up the second-generation HomePod with an S7 chip, the same model that powered the Apple Watch Series 7. (The first-generation had an A8 processor.)
The full-size speakers also borrows some features from its smaller sibling, the HomePod mini, adding Ultra Wideband technology to allow you to hand off audio between your iPhone and the speaker and a Thread radio for connecting to smart home devices. Apple’s also added temperature, humidity, and accelerometer sensors to the device. Like previous HomePods, the second-gen model can be paired with a second speaker for a stero pair, and can share audio throughout a home via AirPlay.
And, in a feature that I’ve been advocating for, Siri on the HomePod can now use Sound Recognition to listen for specific noises, like a fire alarm or carbon monoxide detector going off, and alert you—though Apple says that feature will arrive in a software update later this spring and requires the new Home architecture (which the company has temporarily suspended).
Of course, one of the tricky selling points of the previous HomePod was the price—it debuted at $349, though it could often be found for cheaper. The second-generation HomePod starts at $299, but there are apparently some tradeoffs to hit that point: for example, the new model includes five tweeters to the first-generation’s seven, four microphones as opposed to the previous six, and (strangely) the older 802.11n Wi-Fi, as opposed to the 802.11ac found in the first model.
Like the first-generation model the second-generation HomePod is available in two colors: white, and what Apple is calling “Midnight”, which the company says is made from 100 percent recycled mesh-fabric. The new model is shipping on February 3, and is available to order today.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
TidBITS’s Adam Engst does yeoman’s work in breaking down what looks suspicious about emails with annotated screenshots:
I’ve been examining phishing attempts for so long that it’s hard for me to imagine what might fool someone else, so I wanted to share some recent attempts that slipped past Gmail’s filters. For each message, I’ve called out some of the ways I identified it as phishing. I suspect that most of you will assume that you would also easily have identified the message as fake, but remember, many people move rapidly through their email without reading carefully. Perhaps my calling out of some of the hallmarks of phishing attempts can help you or the people to whom you forward this article avoid being drawn in.
This is fantastic. Many of us probably deal with these attempts at getting our personal information all the time and have grown used to discounting them, but we also all have people in our lives who may just not know what to look for. Moreover, as Adam points out, phishing attempts are only getting more complex, sophisticated, and tricky, thanks to innovations like AI-written copy. Adam’s piece is a great overview of what to look for, and definitely one that I’ll be bookmarking to send to some people in my life.
January 17, 2023 5:21 PM PT
At some point, when I was reconstructing the automation that turns on and off the floor lamp in my living room for the third or fourth time, it dawned on me that I was sold a bill of goods regarding HomeKit.
I had set the bar for HomeKit so low: It just needed to turn on a switch at a time of day, and turn off the switch at another time of day. Even that stopped working, and here I was trying to coax it, to massage it, to just tell me what I could do to fix it. Pleading with the invisible force that controls my home to just give me an error message, to show a notification, anything at all.
That was how I closed out my relationship with Apple’s Home app, and HomeKit, in December of 2022. I hadn’t even upgraded to the new Home architecture that was breaking other people’s home setups. No, I was too smart to ever do anything like that, but I was unprotected from whatever piece of code of was introduced to iOS, or tvOS, that borked some but not all of my Home automation in December. Whatever “we did it guys, we hit our 2023 roadmap target, let’s pack up for Christmas” software release that was put out into the world messed things up.
Last week, my two Apple TVs updated to the latest tvOS update available and then the automation for the floor lamp started working again. Why? I don’t know. Was the code fixed? Was it just because the Apple TV devices restarted and reshuffled something completely intangible? I’ll never really know.
Fixes for Home, and HomeKit, are always just around the corner too. Not in a “this thing that works great is getting more stuff” way but in a “this thing that doesn’t work as advertised will work a little more like it’s advertised, maybe” way.
We’re coming up on nine years of this. For all that time we’ve been suckered into thinking that some future software update, a bit of firmware, a new device with new radios would somehow fix what ails our abodes. There’s not much to show for it other than broken promises and haunted electronics.
We don’t have a full grasp on how large or small problems are, because all we ever have to rely on is anecdotal statements from all the other suckers using this stuff. When something breaks for me, I can ask around—but unless someone somehow has my exact combination of devices, then nobody has an answer. I can’t take my home (or its constituent bits) into the Apple Store. There’s no error reporting, so I can never tell if something is failing because of a third-party device, Apple, my network, or all of the above.
In 2022 we were promised that new Home app—which we unfortunately got. And we were promised that new Home Architecture with Matter support—which some people also briefly had.
Continue reading “How many Home updates does it take to turn off a light bulb?”…
January 17, 2023 6:50 AM PT
As expected, Apple on Tuesday took the wraps off updates to its MacBook Pro and Mac mini lines, featuring as their centerpiece the new M2 Pro and M2 Max processors.
The MacBook Pro update is basically a speed bump: the base level $1999 14-inch model moves to a M2 Pro 10-core CPU/16-core GPU configuration, with build to configure options for M2 Pro 12-core with a 19-core GPU, or to M2 Max with 12 cores and either 30 or 38 cores of GPU. Options at $2499 and $3099 come with the higher M2 Pro and the M2 Max, respectively. Meanwhile, the 16-inch model’s base configuration, at $2499, starts with a 12-core CPU/19-core GPU M2 Pro, while the $2699 and $3499 models feature the 12-core/19-core M2 Pro and 12-core/38-core M2 Max options.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro is a hair thinner at 0.6 inches, compared to the previous generation’s 0.61 inches, and while the M2 Pro configurations weigh the same, the 14-inch M2 Max adds 0.1lbs. There’s also a skosh more battery life, with Apple reporting an hour more for both Apple TV app movie playback and wireless web across all models. Specs are otherwise unchanged across the line.
On the Mac mini side, Apple has finally axed the Intel Mac model and now offers three configurations of mini, starting with the same 8-core CPU/10-core GPU M2 configuration in the MacBook Air at $599—$100 less than its M1-powered predecessor.1 While a $799 model features more storage with the same chip configuration, there’s also for the first time an option for Apple’s more powerful M2 Pro chip, in a $1299 10-core CPU/16-core GPU option, with a build to order configuration also offering a bump to a 12-core/19-core GPU M2 Pro. The M2 Pro configuration also offers four Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back, up over just two on the M2 configurations.
Apple’s clearly positioning the M2 Pro mini as a replacement for the 27-inch iMac, as in its press release it specifically stacks up the M2 Pro’s performance against a 27-inch Intel Core i7, suggesting once again that a larger iMac isn’t likely to appear anytime soon.
Interesting, the new mini is slightly larger than the old model: 7.75 inches on a side and 1.41 inches high, as opposed to 7.7 inches and 1.4 inches for the M1 model. And the M2 Pro model just a bit heavier too, at 2.8 pounds instead of 2.6.
While the M2 Pro chip still supports up to 32GB of RAM, the M2 Max offers both 64GB and now—in the highest, 38-core GPU configuration, 96GB of RAM. The external display support of the MacBook Pros have been improved as well, with both the M2 Pro and M2 Max now supporting a single external display at 8K resolution at 60Hz over the HDMI port as well as 4K displays up to 240Hz. In the case of the M2 Max, that’s in addition to two two external displays at 6K.
In addition, there’s a slight bump in wireless capabilities as well, with all new models getting Wi-Fi 6E support and Bluetooth 5.3.
The new models go on sale today, and will arrive starting next Tuesday, January 24 in most regions, including the US; Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, New Zealand, and Singapore won’t see them until February 3.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
Does the report that Apple may build a touchscreen Mac laptop mean that the futures of the Mac and iPad are about to converge—or is nothing much really going to change? Then Jason and Myke then pour one out for third-party Twitter apps. It was a good run.
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Last Thursday evening, Twitter shut off API access to many of the most popular third-party Twitter client apps. It’s an unsurprising, but ignominious, end. Here’s The Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry, who thought up the now-disabled Twitterrific app and materially contributed to fundamental concepts of Twitter:
What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in their ongoing shit show.
As Ben Thompson wrote on Monday, allowing third-party clients that don’t show ads is something that doesn’t make business sense, so it’s not surprising that Twitter’s new management decided to pull the plug. (The company could’ve decided to build on a concept involving third-party clients and an API, but it would require a level of technical commitment it has never really been able to spare—and there are few if any examples of peer social-media companies offering unfettered APIs to create alternate interfaces to their services.)
What’s infuriating is how clueless, classless, and cowardly this move was. Not only does pulling the plug without any announcement or explanation—let alone any warning!—disrespect the developers who worked with Twitter for years, but it directly disrespects Twitter’s own customers, many of whom contribute a lot of free content to the overall platform. Why do this quietly one evening and never make a public announcement? Why not just announce that the API would be shut off for client apps next week, or at the end of the month?
And they couldn’t even do it right. Numerous third-party client apps are still functional… just not the biggest names on the biggest platforms. A classless operation, an unnecessary PR own-goal, and a botched technical roll-out. Sounds par for the course for today’s Twitter.
Here’s a moment of hope, again from Hockenberry:
One thing I remember from these early days: no one had any idea what they were doing. It was all new and things like @screen_name, #hashtags, or RT hadn’t been invented yet. Heck, we didn’t even call them “tweets” or use a bird icon at first! The best ideas came from people using the service: all of the things mentioned above grew organically from a need.
That’s where I want to be in the future. Exploring unknown territory that empowers others and adapts to the needs of a community.
I hope to see what was great about Twitterrific turn into something new and exciting and interesting. I would love to see Craig, developer Sean Heber, and the rest of the Iconfactory help define the next generation of social media as much as they did the last generation.
(And in the meantime, if you’re looking for a replacement for a third-party Twitter app, I recommend investigating Ivory by Tapbots, which builds on that company’s Tweetbot app—now shut down, of course—to build a world-class Mastodon/fediverse client.)