Crazy winds here in the UK right now, where a scorching June somehow gave way to April. There’s a 50:50 chance my house will be blown into the North Sea. So I’d best get on with it.

Published stuff

A busy week over at Stuff. First up, I took a look back at the App Store’s launch 15 years ago – and 15 notable launch day apps. This then took me down a rabbit-hole of trying to find a list of every launch-day iPhone app, which doesn’t exist. I chatted with PCalc creator James Thomson and a cunning plan was formed to crowdsource the list. At the time of writing, there are almost 350 items on the spreadsheet. Nice.

In similar territory, I then mulled: Most of the original 500 iPhone apps and games have gone – and that’s good news. Mostly. The ‘mostly’ there is doing heavy lifting. This is really a piece about the inherent tension that has long existed in the App Store between evolution and its own history, with the former winning out. It was stark when making my list to discover how few of the original App Store entries remain – something John Voorhees also dug into over at MacStories.

With Elon Musk continuing to set fire to Twitter, I also took the opportunity to suggest eight Twitter alternatives and spruce up my Mastodon explainer.

Finally, Blaze Entertainment announced two new pocket-sized devices, which I just had to write about. The Super Pocket has proved controversial, though. Some folks are angry the people behind Evercade have moved away from a physical carts only policy.

I don’t see it that way. Clearly, Capcom and Taito won’t allow cart versions of these games. But Blaze saw an opportunity to create inexpensive handhelds they could add value to by way of Evercade compatibility. And it’s not like Blaze isn’t churning out new Evercade carts anyway – most of which comprise collections of rare and interesting stuff. So I think the Super Pocket is a win-win.

Anyway, TapSmart published some pieces by me this week as well: a round-up of text-based ‘AI’ apps, a column on Apple thinking iOS 17 has the solutions to help you relax, a gripe about the lack of multi-user mobile devices from Apple, and a piece on Procreate, the latest entry in my classic apps series. Phew!

Other stuff

It’s been an odd week of things rattling around my brain. In part, this has been down to post-birthday season. (Our entire family’s birthdays are squashed together into a three-week space.) And also because it’s now very grey and dull here on Normal Island. Lots of time for thinking.

The horrors of Prime Day got me thinking about advertising, given that Amazon still wants me to buy an electric toothbrush every time I visit. Because I bought an electric toothbrush a few years ago. Electric toothbrush ads follow me around the internet. They won’t leave me alone.

It never used to be this way. When I read mags in the 1980s, they were packed full of ads, but they felt relevant and you’d often refer back to them. Now, websites bombard you with ads in an obnoxious manner, driven in part by the immediate, ephemeral nature of the medium. But dumb tracking systems creepily bug you about goods ads think you want.

I this week figured out what this is: web ads are the uncanny valley of personalised advertising. You can have that one for free.

I last week wrote about Threads, but this week one thing has changed with the social network: Meta is clamping down heavily on usage in the EU, attempting to turn it off.

I get that Meta blocking access in the EU frustrates people. But the anti-EU takes from primarily US-based people are astonishing. The EU prioritises guardrails and safety. Yes, that can sometimes lower agility. But it does mean eg food quality and safety tend to be higher. And it means tech companies have less opportunity to ride roughshod over its population.

The other tech concern causing a row is ChatGPT, with discussions trending towards extremes. In many people’s eyes, it’s either magic or evil. For me, it’s neither. ChatGPT remains fancy autocomplete.

What it kicks out is generic boilerplate mush that’s full of errors. Which means it’s useless, right? Well, no. Throw a short outline at it and ChatGPT can sometimes output a workable draft a skilled editor can quickly bash into shape.

I don’t often use ChatGPT myself. It doesn’t work for consumer media outlets (I’ve done A/B tests* with articles I’ve already filed.) It can sometimes be useful, though, for rewording a specific paragraph that sounds clunky, if you’re tight for time and having a brain fart.

But I do work with a company that is very keen in its use in workflow. And for corporate copy, it can help you quickly blaze through ideas. That’s not a bad thing.

* One of the most stark of these was for the Wired Space Invaders origin feature. Once that was live, I threw the original interview with Tomohiro Nishikado into ChatGPT’s maw and prompted the service to write a piece.

The result was eye-wateringly awful. It was too short, despite me providing a word count. The copy was dull. The quotes were messed up. It included made up ‘facts’. It would have taken me longer to bash it into shape than write from scratch. But if I were a PR putting together some boilerplate emails…