Notices by Marco Arment (marcoarment@mastodon.social), page 2

Apple is not good at negotiating, and never has been.

They're good at dictating, which only works when they have all of the power.

When they actually need to *negotiate*, it's like when I suddenly needed to study in college: they have no idea how, they think they know everything and reject the possibility that they may not, they're not willing to do anything they don't feel like doing, and so they usually fail.
https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/115474768256117682

Glad to see Apple's leaders showing so much courage.

I'm sure their founders, and the historical heroes they love to quote on their homepage on important dates, would've been so proud of the courage and values they practice today.

https://www.theverge.com/news/791170/iceblock-app-store-removed-by-apple

Maybe we can all write letters to Tim about how his support for the Trump administration is affecting our lives while we wear our Apple Watches.

Devs: if you're keeping a device on iOS 18/watchOS 10/etc. for testing, now is a good time to go turn off automatic updates!

If you've instead been using your only non-primary device as a 26 testing device, now's a good time to wipe it and restore the old OS onto it if you need it.

Starting next week, it'll get a LOT harder to install these outgoing OSes. Now's the time.

Tim seemed even more stilted than usual.

Celebrating great new Apple products used to be an unequivocal joy for me.

Fuck Tim Cook for taking that away.

As we head into iPhone-event week, let's celebrate the hard work by all of the people who made these products happen.

And let's not forget the shameless Trump-suckass CEO at the top, who constantly gives the middle finger to everyone in his own company, and the very foundations of our country, that this administration is actively committing violence and waging war against.
https://mastodon.green/@gcluley/115162918845987945

Fun fact: David Karp saved the world from XSLT being Tumblr's blog-theme language.

XSLT was a big part of my previous job, and I liked it. It was weird, but fit certain problems well! (Like me!)

When making Tumblr’s custom-blog-theme template system, I first implemented an XSLT version.

I showed it to David, and he was diplomatic, but he clearly HATED it.

XML is bulky, ugly, formal, and overly structured; Tumblr, and David himself, were none of those things.

(1/2)
https://mastodon.social/@Edent/115048990801167629

“Nobody is coming to help. We’re the help.”

Damn. 🤯
https://mastodon.social/@Gte/115062229958654025

It’s naive to believe Cook can ever satisfy Trump for more than a day. It will never be enough. It never is, for anyone.

There is no lasting peace between Trump and anyone. Once you placate him, the only way to stay in his good grace is to continually ramp it up. You're always one arbitrary bad mood away from him turning on you and ripping your head off, no matter what you've done for him in the past.

It's unwinnable. Tim Cook sold Apple's soul for ten minutes of peace.
https://toot.community/@methodphoto/115026948821298114

So what are everyone’s excuses for Tim Cook’s behavior this time?

Wake up. He’s an overt Trump supporter, and has been the entire time.

Apple should've held Liquid Glass back until next summer, after much more internal testing and editing.

How are we supposed to design our apps for a constantly moving target?

How are *they*?

Great news: Instapaper will replace the (dead) Pocket integration on Kobo e-readers! https://blog.instapaper.com/post/789685899750424576/instapaper-rakuten-kobo-integration

Liquid Glass’ blurred content everywhere is especially cruel to those of us who use reading glasses or progressives.

The reflex to seeing blurry text on our phones is to adjust our sight angle or distance to sharpen it. But, of course, it’s not our fault, doesn’t sharpen, and just causes eyestrain.

Text on my phone should never be blurry.

True. But that's true of every big fandom.

Google's been doing *wildly* unethical things for years, and most nerds never called them out because they made great tech, it worked well, and we liked the nerdy ethos that the founders had.

Like Apple, that ethos left a long time ago, but it's hard for us to stop believing it. We *want* to believe, because we're fans!
https://urusai.social/@nazokiyoubinbou/114739279452257744

This is a core system app interrupting you, promoting a sale by a movie-ticketing company, to push you to go see the platform vendor’s new movie.

Why not just pop up random ads all the time, always creating new channels that everyone’s opted-into by default so you can never keep up with opting out of them all?

Oh wait, that’s already what happens.

Apple’s as bad as everyone else. They don’t respect their customers — we’re fodder.

They truly have no standards anymore.
https://mastodon.social/@caseyliss/114738626109660386

I couldn't remember the name of an iPhone dock I've seen a million times in Instagram ads, and can't find it via web search.

So I figured, let me just open Instagram and scroll a bit, and I'll probably see it.

Upon doing that, within seconds, I found an ad… for the wrong one, that I'd just landed on via web search on my Mac a minute earlier.

And this is the advertising hellscape we live in.

Another example is in Mail, where I'll often train my email provider's spam filter by moving spam into the Junk folder from the Inbox screen.

Before, it was Select, tap message, Move. Three taps.

Now it's four: "…" menu, THEN move finger down to Select, tap message, tap (now-unlabeled) Move icon at the bottom.

Why? What are we using all of that navigation-bar space for?

My "content”?

A hallmark of iOS 26 design seems to be the consolidation of what was previously multiple toolbar buttons into a "…" button that shows a menu.

Which looks fine, I guess, but some VERY common actions are now an additional tap away!

Safari is the worst offender. Want to switch tabs or close the current tab? The all-tabs view, previously the two-squares toolbar icon, is now buried in a menu, adding an extra tap and significant finger movement to possibly the most common action in Safari:

We've known for decades that translucency in UIs looks really cool, but is extremely difficult to design in a way that works with arbitrary content across versatile situations.

With the glass-redesign rumors, many of us thought, “If anyone can do it, it's Apple! They must've finally solved it."

They haven’t.

It still looks cool in some contexts, and utterly fails in others.