Notices by Craig Hockenberry (chockenberry@mastodon.social)

Why is “Writing Tools” the first thing shown in Safari’s context menu? It’s pointless and makes it harder to get at the things I actually use: “Lookup” and “Translate”.

Some manager at Apple decided that showing off a new feature was more important than usability. That’s bullshit.

/cc @gruber

The only use case I can see for this feature is plagiarism.

Select a passage in Wikipedia or wherever, and change it to make it your “own”.

Geezus. What a thing to put front and center.

Normal folks are going to trust Apple to be making good choices, when in reality it’s just a machine doing some statistical analysis.

We’ll soon have another holiday task while visiting family. After you turn off the motion smoothing, you’ll be turning off the email summaries.

Apple is adding legitimacy where there is none.
https://mastodon.cloud/@markusms/113646640546326913

@film_girl You could say it was Seoul crushing.

@Gargron @jstepien Actually, it’s our new app in that screenshot. Sounds like we need to do some conversion on the source data.

Also, in the Mastodon web view it looks like the punycode is leaking through in the status text.

Unicode is hard!

@jstepien @Gargron And you can add Mastodon link previews now 😉

(The punycode is exposed in the preview, it’s fine in the status text.)

You know what would be a great feature on an iPhone?

The ability to turn off Silence Unknown Callers for a specific time period.

I turn it off all the time for callbacks, deliveries, and other random phone calls that I know are going to be happening in the next few hours. You have to turn off the firewall sometimes.

And then I forget to turn it back on and get a stupid telemarketer the next day.

Pretty sure this little computer could remember to do it for me.

It’s my opinion that generative AI will find a place where it aids in a task.

I don't want it to write a blog post for me; I want help rephrasing a passage.

I don't want it to produce code for me; I want assistance digging through the web for examples of what I need.

And contrary to what you may think, satisfying these human needs are at least a generation away:

https://stratechery.com/2024/enterprise-philosophy-and-the-first-wave-of-ai/

Here's something that happened yesterday:

My wife photoshopped a person's head onto another photo to make a funny image. Many of us have done something similar.

But here's the thing I noticed: she was laughing and giggling the WHOLE time she was making it. It was 20 minutes of pure fun.

Could she have made a better image in a fraction of the time using generative AI? Of course.

But often the journey is the reward.

And all of the folks who are promoting this technology just don't get that.

If it takes 10,000 hours to achieve expertise in a skill, you can cut that down to 20,000 hours with the help of AI.

Waking up this morning after a nice holiday weekend.

(via viralfrog on Tumblr)

Another week, another letter telling me about a “privacy event” (aka data breach).

Here's a simple way to fix this problem: legislation that says every customer who's affected gets a check for $100. No more of this check-your-credit weak sauce - instead, a real cost to the business.

If you have data on 100 million customers, paying out $10 BILLION is a hell of an incentive to keep your fucking data protected.

Or better yet, maybe it's not worth $100 to store it in the first place…

When you start seeking rent on the livelihood of artists, I don’t think you get to claim you work at the intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts anymore.

https://news.patreon.com/articles/understanding-apple-requirements-for-patreon

I’ve always been proud that xScope is a tool that sits quietly in the background, ready when you need it.

So much for the “quietly” part…

https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/112916905882020099

You'd think that Apple would have figured out that letting developers know about Security changes ahead of time would be a good idea.

Instead, we get intrusive dialogs that cause everyone to (rightfully) freak out:

https://furbo.org/2023/07/09/an-alerting-vista-of-sonoma/

A friend pointed me to this the other day and it feels like a solution to the (justified) uproar over the screen sharing nag:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/entitlements/com_apple_developer_persistent-content-capture

The issue here is that Apple has provided no documentation or any other guidance on how to get this entitlement and prevent an app from becoming nagware.

/cc @9to5Mac

Trump being forced to talk about abortion rights?

That's called Karmala.

Meanwhile Apple Music on my Apple Watch can’t remember what it was playing when it gets kicked out of memory. Which happens with every day with every workout.

It’s never going to happen, but our industry would be much better served by making basic things work really well instead of constant, and often half-assed, innovation. https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/112807798133371559

If you're a young developer at Apple you have no idea how hard this feedback hits.

So many of your points-of-view change after the first death in the immediate family. That's not likely to happen until your fifties or sixties.

The memorials on our devices are important: I have a weekly reminder to “Check in on mom” that will never be removed because it has a whole new purpose since her death.
https://mastodon.social/@agiletortoise/112718541856786929