Notices by Craig Hockenberry (chockenberry@mastodon.social)

Fun Fact: Next Sunday is both the Day of the Dead and the end of Daylight Saving Time.

Seems appropriate.

@cabel About 1 in 4 of my screenshots don't even appear in that view - it's like the system itself can't decide and just says "fuck it" and dumps it in recent photos.

I'm not going to say anything nasty about non-native apps, because I use many of them throughout the day.

I will, however, say nasty things about using private API, causing a huge clusterfuck within your ecosystem, and then me getting blamed for it.

https://furbo.org/2025/10/06/tahoe-electron-detector/

/cc @mjtsai

Here's something happening with our software:

Bugs are being reported in OS 26.0.

And we fix them.

And then they break again in a point release.

This is why releasing an OS in such a broken state is so harmful - there is no incentive for third-parties to fix things that are clearly works-in-progress.

It's shitty to not be proactive about these issues that customers are experiencing, but it's really our only course of action.

Here’s my guess what happened in the lead up to WWDC25:

Apple realized it was deep in the weeds with Apple Intelligence (and associated PR) and needed a tentpole feature that wasn't AI.

Liquid Glass was in development for some upcoming edgeless hardware. It needed another year of work, but management/marketing was fucked.

A thing that wasn't ready got moved up. Bug fixing took a back seat. Everyone grabbed paint brushes, not screwdrivers.

The next year is going to be rough for EVERYONE.

Qwaulity.

And, of course, customers think it’s our code that’s at fault.

One of the things I hate about AI is how it makes everyone lower their standards with regard to user privacy.

Including companies like Apple that have a well deserved reputation for protecting it.

Yesterday I got a push notification about a new feature in the Feedback app that everyone in the iOS beta has installed. There’s a new “Rate Your Experiences”.

Which is a cleverly named function that sends your and your friends private data to Apple in plain text.

There’s a new purple button:

@tantramar @WarnerCrocker @gedeonm put something colorful behind it. The effect is very subtle in light mode.

I don’t watch a lot of videos on YouTube. But yesterday I watched one that was four hours long.

This is an amazing story that traverses the period from the First World War to the beginnings of the Voyager missions.

It’s the history of JPL and puts everything we learned from the first interplanetary missions into context. With bonus side quests like explaining the etymology of “Africa” while discussing plate tectonics.

Highly recommended.

/via @SwiftOnSecurity

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qjx3u9_FZHo

Consistency applies to branding colors, too.

You don't break a promise that you've cultivated for the past century.

https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/coca-cola-red-our-second-secret-formula

Imagine that you're a developer at a company that has had a certain shade of red as a part of their branding for the past 134 years. It's a red that's known worldwide.

You pop that color into your iOS app and quickly realize two things:

1) The red you specified is not the red that's displayed.
2) Your brand color is secondary to the chrome that Apple has imposed.

Marketing blows a gasket so you start implementing your own controls: without accessibility, device traits, etc.

Good one, Alan.

When independent developers, who tend to be the biggest advocates of standard system components, start thinking about abandoning native UI, you have a problem.

Worse, when brands start to realize that it’s basically impossible to make a UI that fits into a corporate theme, those developers will lean into React and other non-native web frameworks.

The more Apple strives for consistency, the less they will get. It’s going to be a mess. https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/115061443407584501

It’s really hard to stay upbeat about a platform where you can’t express your own unique vision of a product.

You only get to implement Alan Dye’s vision.

@adamrice @thomasfuchs Did you ever use a NeXT machine?

(Hint: you’ve been using one since 2001.)

@WarnerCrocker Damn.

We all have opinions on WHAT Liquid Glass is...

And I have opinions on WHY it is.

https://furbo.org/2025/08/17/liquid-glass-why/

Huh. So there’s a new ADA?

Apple Dictator Award

I'm convinced it's impossible to "learn Unix".

I've been using BSD since 1984 (with a fork where we added distributed file systems) and just now learned about the `realpath` command.

It was exactly the thing I needed, and I had no idea that it even existed.

@band Connection Doctor in Mail app.

I found it! The last NSDrawer in macOS!

P.S. Fastmail seems better now.