Published stuff

Living a fair way north, I experience great variance in daylight across the year. And that’s not ideal in winter, when the nights draw in and it’s also dark when I get up. Daylight trackers can help combat SAD symptoms during the early months of the year, by providing a reminder of how daylight is increasing. Solstice by Dan Eden is my favourite, in part because it can automatically turn offnotifications when the days start getting shorter again.

Solstice and several other daylight trackers – including ones that aid photographers and surveyors – are explored in my daylight trackers round-up for TapSmart. I also wrote an explainer on game streaming for iPhone.

Over at Stuff this week, my column is Nintendo Switch digital game prices are bananas – but beat Ubisoft’s dream future for console gaming. Even my nine-year-old has pointed out how ridiculous the pricing situation is, hence why we’re very much a household centred on physical carts – albeit one that’s aware this option might not be around for much longer.

Other stuff

I’m not sure what’s going on with Apple of late. I get that it’s historically acted with ferocity towards what it perceives as injustice towards the company. But its scrap with the EU is set to cause collateral damage, perhaps so the company can point to problems and say to other jurisdictions: “See‽ This is what happens when you force us to do things we said were bad!”

The latest ‘headdesk’ moment: Apple has reportedly killed PWAs in iOS 17.4 – if you’re in the EU. Users are now asked if the app should open a PWA in Safari or cancel. 

Web apps were Apple’s original ‘sweet solution’ for expanding on base iPhone installs before the arrival of the App Store. And although good examples are rare, there have been cases where PWAs have provided functionality effectively banned by Apple from the App Store, such as retro game emulation and cloud gaming. Now, these experiences will be made worse, by virtue of loading within the browser rather than a more app-like full-screen view.

Defenders of Apple (who too often align with being anti-EU and rabidly pro-anything-American) argue this is a case of ‘careful what you wish for’. Apple, they say, has no choice but to nerf PWA functionality, because a PWA is technically a browser and doesn’t let people switch browser engines – or that only Safari having this functionality would be unacceptable regarding level playing field rules. Naturally, there are counterpoint arguments, claiming PWA functionality doesn’t clash with the EU’s Digital Markets Act. (Also, if you take ‘level playing field’ to its extreme, you may as well argue Safari cannot implement any features at all that a competitor doesn’t have.) If you fancy balance, web expert Bruce Lawson offers a reasoned, thoughtful take.

With Apple remaining tight-lipped, it’s impossible to know whether this change was inevitable or temporary while the company explores how to enable all browsers to create PWAs. The problem is that it’s just not a good look. Even if this isn’t malicious compliance, it sure feels like it. It feels petty. And that doesn’t come so much from the EU’s demands as Apple’s responses to them.

A Mac Plus, much like the one I first used at school. (Image: MARC912374)

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As the Mac hits 40, I’ve been remembering my key ‘firsts’ with the platform.

At school, in around 1989 or 1990, I was plonked in front of a Mac Plus stashed in a cupboard. My English teacher reasoned “You know about computers” and I was tasked, with a few friends, with putting together the first edition of the school magazine. It’s to the credit of Apple and Aldus that the Mac and PageMaker together were usable enough that we managed this with no instructions. Although the teacher was perhaps overly optimistic about how long it would take, since she started getting annoyed after a few hours of us working on it instead of going to class. Even my most hardcore editors would admit putting together a magazine from scratch with dozens of pages takes a bit longer than a single session of double-English.

In 1996, while studying at Cardiff Art School, I was fortunate enough to win the Helen Gregory Memorial Scholarship. I shall remain forever grateful to the Gregory family, whose generosity allowed me to purchase my first Mac. It was a mighty beast – a PowerMac 8600/250AV, optimistically purchased during a period where people wondered whether Apple would wink out of existence entirely. I used this Mac to fashion some pioneering multimedia artwork, even if its dodgy internal HDD and the integrated Jaz drive tried their best to scupper my chances of retaining data for the entire length of my course.

By the time my uni course was done, Steve Jobs was back at Apple, and it looked like the company had turned the corner. The iMac had arrived. Until then, my parents had been fighting with a terrible PC, sold to them by some local cowboy to help run their business. I suggested the Mac. My folks were reluctant, but bought the Bondi Blue – and never looked back. That was my first experience of a ‘modern’ Mac as well.

Clearly, it had an impact, because I’m still writing about Macs regularly over a quarter of a century later!

The Mac was announced 40 years ago. Over at Stuff today, I’ll be writing about this milestone. First up is The Apple Mac at 40 – and 6 of the best desktop Macs. Later on, there will be articles about great modern apps – and much-loved classics that made the Mac. I hope you enjoy reading them.

Over at Stuff, my traditional Apple end-of-year review has been published: Apple’s 2023 in review: the good, the bad and the bubbly. From the highs of the iPhone Pro’s greatness… to the lows of the same iPhone Pro overheating!

See you on the other side.

In 2012, I fell ill. Abrupt dizziness. I felt like I’d been drinking heavily, and had no idea what was going on.

Being a logical type, I looked at changes in my life around that time. It took a full day before I realised the only major change had been updating my Mac to OS X Lion. The full-screen animations were making me sick. Fortunately, I could avoid the worst of Lion’s effects when I knew they were the problem, and third-party apps subsequently dealt with the issue entirely.

And then iOS 7 happened. In an instant, Apple’s smartphone switched its familiar but largely static interface to a minimalist effort packed full of animations. Parallax wobbled about on the Home Screen. Folders blasted towards your face at incredible speed. Within half an hour, I realised I couldn’t use my iPhone.

I wasn’t alone. In a piece for The Guardian, I spoke to several people who were suffering, along with spokespeople for vestibular disorder societies who confirmed this was a real problem that could potentially impact millions. I received personal messages from many more folks desperate for a solution.

The piece was widely shared. Online, I faced significant scepticism. People noted I wrote about mobile games, and so how could these animations affect me? But by that point I’d rapidly learned with vestibular accessibility – in fact, any accessibility – that everyone is different.

With vestibular conditions, some people are floored by parallax, but it doesn’t affect others. Some can cope with iOS folder animations. For others, it might mean being dizzy for a few minutes – or a few days. Personally, I can enjoy motion-based entertainment where I can anticipate what’s next – roller coasters; driving games – but am knocked back by abrupt animation I cannot prepare for and that takes up a significant portion of my field of view.

The article – and presumably other feedback – must have reached suitably senior people at Apple, because fixes subsequently arrived. They weren’t total, but they also weren’t an end point. Over the years since, I’ve swapped quite a few messages with Apple’s accessibility team. One involved slide transitions for nested menus on iPhone. In my sole live WWDC, I was fortunate to attend an accessibility session where it was revealed the animation could be disabled in the Settings app. Reader, I may have shed a tear.

It’s ten years since that Guardian article was published. Accessibility remains an odd beast. Far too many people consider accessibility to be solely about helping people with vision issues to use technology. But increasingly we do see a wider understanding of accessibility, in that it needs to be for everyone – something I wrote about for the dearly departed MacUser back in 2015. That we now have accessible games controllers is a genuinely exciting development.

However, I’d still like more software developers to bake in accessibility as a default. Start with an accessible foundation, rather than plug gaps later. But I do appreciate companies from the tiniest indie to massive corporations increasingly take this subject seriously, including catering for people with vestibular conditions. And I hope if you have any accessibility concerns yourself, you’ll be met with the kindness I’ve received from Apple’s teams.

Speaking of, that action button screen on the new iPhones is a vestibular trigger. Time to write another quick email…