Published stuff

My column for Stuff this week: I love my Apple TV – so why doesn’t Apple? Apple used to call its little streaming box a ‘hobby’ and all evidence suggests it’s one that the company is losing interest in. I also wrote up some iOS 18 tips and tricks and updated the best upcoming Lego sets list.

Over at TapSmart, I explored 10 great apps for learning new things, updated the site’s iPhone buyer’s guide and added the much-missed Squareball to my classic apps series. That game was so good. It’s also one of the very few 32-bit games I’ve never been able to get running again on my iPad Air. 

Other stuff

Starved of Netflix, the ten-year-old is now mainlining Animal Park. This BBC show is a behind-the-scenes look at British safari park Longleat, and is objectively very good. But it’s driving me bonkers that the voiceover exclusively uses imperial measurements. While this is a family-friendly show (rather than broadcasting on a children’s channel), I think it’s wild in 2024 that this is still happening. At the very least, you’d think the show would use constructions like the giraffe is five metres – or about 16 and a half feet – tall, not least because British children haven’t been taught imperial in about 50 years. It’s not the 1970s, BBC!

As someone who’s been keen on iPhone gaming since the beginning, I always find it sad when sites go away. But TouchArcade shutting down is a really big one. The signs have been ominous for a while, but reading the linked post was nonetheless a gut-punch. Time to double down on supporting remaining iPhone gaming outlets, such as the excellent AppUnwrapper.

Finally, this was the week my follower count on Bluesky sailed past Threads. I’m not obsessive about such numbers – engagement and enjoyment are what really matter on social networks. But numbers are an indication of momentum. 

For me, Bluesky started out way behind every other network when it came to followers. I joined very early (user 40,269 – one of the first one per cent), and it was like typing into the void. Which was oddly freeing. But today it’s the only social network where it feels like a bunch of new and excited people are joining all the time. It’s also fun, with an energy that’s lacking elsewhere.

This shift also means a post-X social landscape has finally clicked into place for me. I ‘abandoned’ about 7,000 followers there. More importantly, I lost hundreds of great accounts that I followed. I miss what it was, but not what it became, and quit posting publicly in 2023. Other networks swirled around, and for a while Mastodon was the only one that mattered. But many people came and went, annoyed at not immediately getting the audience and engagement they’d enjoyed on Twitter but without working for it. Threads threatened to become good but now bibbles along; worse, Meta prioritises what it wants you to see rather than what you want to see.

Right now, I dip into Bluesky first (plenty of friends, writers and comics folks, retro gaming, politics and pundits), still spend a fair chunk of time on Mastodon (great conversation, tech geeks and devs, academics, wonderful photography accounts), and zoom through Threads in about five minutes daily, to catch up with the few friends who’ve landed there and decided to stay.

I still miss those people who have – for whatever reason – decided to stay on X. But I did twice check in and browse through 24 hours of my ‘filter’ feed – a ‘best of’ I put together during more optimistic times. It was mostly empty. I took that as a sign.