New iPhone week is over! *collapses in a heap*

Published stuff

A busy week for me at Stuff. I had guides published for iOS 17, iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma and Apple TV/tvOS 17.

Two columns: USB-C for iPhone was nerfed by Apple – but does that matter? (Spoiler: this aligns with Betteridge’s law of headlines.) And Ultra Wideband chips in iPhone 15 and Apple Watch sound great – I want one in everything, where I reason I want Ultra Wideband chips in all tech because I once hid some SSDs in a hat beneath a pile of shoes.

Oh, and I celebrated the return to iPhone of the excellent Coolson’s Pocket Pack by adding it to Stuff’s best free iOS games list.

Over at TapSmart, I wrote an explainer about USB-C for iPhone, looked at replacements for Apple’s pre-loaded stock apps, and added a third tier to my classic apps series with ‘bring back’. This looks at a long-gone favourite and how to approximate it on your iPhone and iPad today. First up: the much-missed Status Board by Panic.

Upcoming stuff

Hopefully I’ll be transitioning soon from hands-on with Apple’s new software to hands-on with its new hardware. In the meantime, I just filed a piece for iMore that should be up soon, and am from a personal perspective getting slightly more serious about finally releasing some new music and figuring out what to do with over 250,000 words of retrogaming interviews.

What I discovered, to my surprise, was my monstrous Scrivener document is actually full of holes. So I’m going back through my email and document archives to find the original interviews I did with a whole bunch of people. I have considered various outlets for this stuff. But I’m still not sure what to do with it.

My thinking is the interviews should be available in as lightly edited form as possible. But even that will require many hours of work. The notion of Kickstarting a book fills me with dread. A Substack is a possibility, but I’ve no idea if enough people would be interested. So this and the music thing are both moving forward at a snail’s pace for now. Still, that’s better than not moving at all.

Other stuff

So, that Apple event. Judging by my Mastodon and NetNewsWire feeds, it was divisive. Personally, I thought it was a rare Apple event (of late) that lagged. The most recent ones have felt so crammed full of information that it was like being sandblasted with data. This one was more like a movie where you get to the end and feel like they could have cut a third of the runtime and lost nothing.

I’ve written more about the event here.