Weeknote: 30 August 2025 – iPhone (Hot) Air, phone security, Wonderputt, and Llamasoft
The iPhone Air is imminent. If the rumours are right, the result is going to be an odd duck. I dig into that in my latest Stuff column, I want the iPhone 17 Air to slim down the iPhone – not dumb it down.
Secure your stuff! When it comes to iPhones and data, I outline how in the latest TapSmart toolkit.
Wonderputt was great. And it’s now the latest entry in my long-running iPhone classics series.
Liquid Glass is locked. We’re at dev beta 8 now with this year’s Apple operating systems, which means any changes from this point will be minimal. The visual design and UX still sucks, so much so that a print mag I occasionally write for has provided new guidelines for screenshots. Contributors must turn Reduce Transparency ON. Why? Because otherwise grabs wouldn’t be legible enough.
I’ve never seen this kind of direction before. Until now, every tech/Mac magazine I’ve written for demanded you shoot grabs with default settings. But we’re now at the point with Apple design where the default UI isn’t suitable for a long-running print publication unless a buried accessibility setting is activated. Good work, everyone! Everything is fine dot gif.
Google Pixel’s AI Zoom makes shit up. Shocker, eh? There’s a good piece about it from John Scalzi. All of which reminded me of a Stuff column I wrote in 2023: Samsung Space Zoom promised the moon but gave us an AI ‘fake’ – and I don’t care. The end bit seems rather chilling now:
In the future, everyone in a photo will smile, because that’s friendly, whether they were actually smiling or not. Litter will be eradicated and every street will be clean, unless you’re looking at the real street. You won’t be able to believe anything you see in any picture, but that’s OK, because by then the screens will be on your face. You’ll swim around in an unreality uncanny valley AR metaverse forever, while the real world is on fire. But at least the moon will look perfect.
Llamasoft is coming to Evercade. 27(!) games on a single cart. Really happy to see Jeff Minter getting some love, what with this and the Digital Eclipse effort. Great also that both of these products enable you to explore multiple versions of key Llamasoft games. What Jeff managed to get out of the humble VIC-20 is astonishing, and VIC Gridrunner is possibly still my favourite version (perhaps tied with the sadly long-gone iPad release).
This AI upscaling feature shares the same issue as the recent YouTube AI sharpening feature: if you make real footage look like AI-generated footage, it becomes impossible to distinguish between the two. But as AI images get better, that’s the end result of all of this, anyway.
I used to think that this was a minor issue, since people would just have to rely on other ways (e.g., the image’s source) to determine what is real. Unfortunately, I have now realized that a surprising number of people care much less about knowing what is true than they care about having their opinions validated.