Slide Over is back. Apple has resurrected its popular ‘stashable’ iPad window – ish. It now only holds one app (albeit one per display) but it can now be resized. I wrote about this for Stuff, noting how it gives me hope Apple will fix other aspects of its revised operating systems. *cough Liquid Glass cough*

Sleep Score worries me. Apple isn’t alone in ‘rating’ your sleep. And I know some people thrive on gamifying every aspect of their lives. But over at TapSmart, I explore the damage such systems can cause.

A new Twitter? Not quite. Rather than connecting with people, I spent some happy hours connecting with our feathered friends by way of BirdNET.

EastEnders vs fridge? In a now sadly deleted Reddit post, I learned the Internet of Shit is alive and well. The poster claimed their Samsung fridge was picking up and playing audio from their neighbours, including EastEnders. They couldn’t find a way to disable Bluetooth. Turning off the speaker effectively made many of the fridge’s smart features redundant. Although, frankly, a non-smart fridge that isn’t connected to the internet seems like a good idea to me, given what else Samsung is experimenting with.

Human-centric AI publishing! That’s apparently the latest wheeze, according to a press release I received earlier. This would combat the tide of AI slop by allowing people to create a non-fiction book. In an hour. Uh-huh.

I stole Fairphone’s Moments switch. I was at a tech event last week, where bemused journos are herded into an underground space to bounce around between PRs. Fairphone was the main brand that caught my eye, especially when the Moments switch was demonstrated to me. When I got home, I made something similar for my iPhone, as outlined in Why Apple should steal the Fairphone 6 Moments switch for the iPhone.

Razer is bonkers. I say this on the basis that last year I wrote about ‘hacking’ a GameSir X2s to create an iPad Pro ‘handheld’. But Razer’s Kishi V3 Pro XL now does this in an official capacity.

I love matrix synths. They make it easy for anyone to create music. TonePad was the best. I write about how to bring it back for iPhone.

Retro games on iPhone? Apple pushed back for so long against emulation, but the iPhone emulation scene is slowly improving. My classic games toolkit for TapSmart explores how to get started, apps to check out, and accessories to add.

Keen on the night sky? I added Star Walk to my iPhone classics series. The app first appeared waaaay back in 2008 and has since influenced a whole host of astronomy apps.

Please subscribe! Speaking of TapSmart, its iPhone/iPad incarnation Swipe is a twice-monthly indie publication. Issue 337 is our latest, packed with all sorts of goodies. If you’d like to support us, there’s a free trial, and then subscriptions are just $2/£2 per month, which also unlocks dozens of back issues.

“Your presentation is pedantic and boring.” Ken Segall recalls Steve Jobs using this line, eviscerating a former colleague’s pitch – and then applies the same argument to Apple’s current events, which he thinks are too “slick, repeatable… and safe”. I think they also lack humanity. Pre-covid stage-based stuff was always much warmer. Apple events today come across as a weird combination of polished, sterile and ‘Steve Jobs cosplay’ (in terms of everyone’s delivery).

Galaxy Ring crushes finger. Ouch. I wasn’t excited about the prospect of a smart ring anyway. Even less so now. My Apple Watch strap isn’t going to strangle my wrist.

A playable Lego Game Boy? Someone got it working. And not even with a Pi, which was my assumption of how someone might achieve such a feat. 

Dashy Crashy is back. The remastered version dials down the IAP to a single payment, drip-feeding missions and new cars over the weeks ahead. iOS-only for now, but lots of fun. I added it to my best free iPhone games feature. To grab it right away, head to the App Store.

Xiaomi’s Game Boy-style retro case is bonkers. For Stuff, I suggested it was the maddest smartphone accessory I’ve ever seen. Because it is.

Want some premium Pi? The Raspberry Pi 500+ tries something new, bringing a properly clacky keyboard to its all-in-one. This and the internal SSD ramp up the price, but it’s nice to see the Pi lot exploring new markets.

UK ID cards are back! And just as divisive as ever. I have no issues with ID cards in the abstract, but the Labour Party’s reasoning for them is “because migrants”, which isn’t remotely OK. Also, the government’s obsession with digital-only doesn’t seem a great idea for a national ID card. Just ask people with settled status and that digital-only document…

The new Met Office app is terrible. I love the Met Office. Its forecasts are often excellent. The current app is workmanlike but really good for getting information across. To me, the new one is like a cheap take on Yahoo Weather, totally misunderstanding the benefits of reasonable information density. It just takes longer to do anything and the provided information has less clarity. You can get the betas here. Do provide feedback if you use it.

Immersion has a new album out. WTF?? is a hopeful soundtrack to the times we find ourselves in. Grab a copy.

Design is how it works. Liquid Glass doesn’t. At least, that’s the broad consensus in my latest for Wired, Liquid Glass Could Be One of Apple’s Most Divisive System Designs Yet, which includes comments from several app creators and designers.

Elsewhere, I’m seeing plenty more confirming people aren’t impressed with Apple’s latest. Matt Hill’s comments in the first link of those three are especially illuminating, because he switched to Mac in part because of its consistent design language, which Apple is busy atomising. 

Ads are everywhere – and now coming to $2,000 fridges. Good job, Samsung! I’m sure everyone wanted their expensive cooling box to feel as premium as a Kindle With Ads. I bellyache about this trend for Stuff.

I did a podcast. Marketplace Tech asked me to chat about how the new iPadOS brings Apple’s tablet greater flexibility but also kills off Steve Jobs’s original vision for the device. Hopefully I don’t sound too bonkers. 

The camera plateau isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. My column for TapSmart looks into Apple’s ‘rebrand’ of an unfortunate hardware bump, digging into why the bump itself actually a good thing.

The iPhone Air is Apple’s future, hidden in plain sight. Another TapSmart column, this time looking at the ‘compromise iPhone’ and reasons why it might exist beyond being a new shiny shiny to distract people bored with more of the same.

Speaking of, I did a search of local Apple Stores yesterday. This was launch day. I could get an iPhone Air basically anywhere. Most iPhone Pro models too. The iPhone 17? Nope. Curious.

Need a good clock app? Here are some good clock apps for iPhone.

The NES did not save video games. I don’t recall what triggered my grumping online about the ‘video game crash’ and the NES sailing to the rescue. Probably yet another misinformed YouTuber stating this as a global fact. It’s bollocks. And it’s especially irksome when British YouTubers – or the BBC – parrot this line. Doubly so for the BBC, which had its own platform at the time.

I should probably write my own take on this topic at some point, but TL;DR is that even in the US things were more complicated than Atari ET game > things go splat > NES is here > hurrah! In the UK and elsewhere, it’s revisionist nonsense. European markets, for example, were in rude health during the entire 1980s – and the NES was barely a blip on the radar there until the very end of the decade.

Pac-Man is gone from the App Store. And Google Play. This isn’t breaking news – it happened a few months back. I find this wild. I can only assume it wasn’t pulling in enough money for Bandai Namco to bother continuing to support it. But this is also why I’m often all HARD STARE at corporations bellyaching about the evils of retro game emulation. 

I mean, I get it for Switch. When games are being sold right now in stores, it’s not a good thing when emulators are inviting folks to pirate everything. But for products that are decades old? And where companies very specifically have never provided a route to legal ownership in a manner that lets you play the games how you wish? Do better, games industry! (And, yes, I know this won’t happen. Digital music being ‘freed’ from any specific platform wasn’t a lesson learnt in favour of consumer freedom. Corporations decided: we will never let that happen again.)

Alex Andreou wrote about flags. Specifically how they are being weaponised in the UK right now and making immigrants feel unwelcome and unsafe. (My county council seems completely uninterested in taking down the ones across our local area. Some of them are massive too. I suspect when one of the bigger ones comes loose and causes a pile-up, said council might think again.)

Carrot Weather has added a musical. It’s about the Carrot AI’s attempts to overthrow her maker – and the world. Which is… quite something. (And also mildly terrifying, if catchy.)

Lego is releasing a gingerbread AT-AT. That’s it. That’s the piece.

Sometimes, I think I’m going a bit mad. I’ll hear something so often that I start to doubt my own memory, before I realise that, no, I was there at the time. I’m talking about the video game crash.

You’ve probably heard about it. In the 1980s, the industry imploded, and then the NES came to its rescue. After that point, it was all sunshine and roses. Oh, and something something ET for the Atari 2600.

The tiny snag is this is an abbreviated, regional, biased take at best – revisionist bullshit that has permeated the entire internet to become a kind of approved truth. And it’s not just American YouTubers – I’ll often hear British games channels wittering on about how fortunate we are that the NES rescued an industry that was otherwise effectively dead.

Again, I was there at the time. The industry in Europe was a mess – so many platforms – and yet in rude health. And that became increasingly so as we headed to the middle of the decade and beyond. Amazing programmers were performing small miracles on ludicrously underpowered hardware, increasingly trying to one-up each other. The richness of options was insane.

Yet there was barely a NES in sight. I knew precisely one person who owned one. The NES didn’t really register in the UK until the popular 8-bit machines – the ZX Spectrum, the C64, the CPC – were breathing their last. By then, the notion of the NES as an industry ‘saviour’ was absurd, because in the UK and many other countries, gaming never needed saving in the first place.