Notices by Craig Hockenberry (chockenberry@mastodon.social), page 2

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.

Sometimes, it feels great to be wrong.

https://furbo.org/2025/06/08/history-repeats/

A new generation is going to learn that putting strong UI elements behind text is a lot harder to get right than you first think.

This is a hell of a thing to write on the eve of WWDC.

But I had to because I truly fear where Apple is headed.

https://furbo.org/2025/06/08/history-repeats/

I don't have a lot of heroes, but Bill Atkinson was one of them.

I had the good fortune of meeting him while we were both working on our first iPad apps. He was as gracious, smart, curious, and funny as you'd think.

A few years after that I wrote him a love letter:

https://iconfactory.com/bc.html

He's no longer with us, but his ideas will live on forever, and for that I'm grateful.

Slack > Settings > Accessibility > Tab previews > OFF

The new location to get rid of the super annoying mouse-over panels.

You're welcome.

The Apple Design Awards is the greatest casualty of the new WWDC format.

It was the most exciting evening of the week. A room packed with developers, each of which thought their app had a chance to win, and equally excited to see which of their peers would win.

And when John Geleynse & Shaan Pruden called you up, it was magic. You felt the love in the room, held a cube, and saw your hard work on screen.

Now it's basically a press release. The work is still awesome, the recognition is not.