Microsoft is killing the Blue Screen of Death.In my piece for Wired, I take a trip down memory lane to wave goodbye to the iconic screen we all love to hate. (Spoiler: there will still be a BSOD, but the B will stand for something new.)
Even Hades couldn’t save Netflix Games. Is mobile gaming doomed? Betteridge-baiting headline aside, this column for Stuff dives into my thoughts on mobile gaming, from its earliest days to the huge problems this side of gaming now faces. In my view, it’s – as ever – all about money.
The HDMI spec now includes 16K. Which is clearly bonkers. At least, I argue that point in my head-to-head opinion over on Stuff. Fighting on behalf of screens with more pixels than atoms in the universe (or something): Tom Morgan-Freelander.
The Trump Phone keeps changing.Wired notes it’s already a lot different from one week ago. Absurd, given that people are preordering something that still lacks defined specs. A week and change ago, I suggested the following over at Stuff: “It’s also unclear whether the phone will ever exist in reality. But if it does, millions of idiots will buy one. Are you one of them?” I wasn’t expecting to be proved right so quickly.
Apple design now baffles me. The company sometimes claimed it had more taste than it actually had. Brushed Metal won’t go down in history as gorgeous design. But something feels very wrong over Cupertino way. Sure, the macOS Finder icon is now 73% less hideous. But Liquid Glass has so many problems, the new alarm design on iOS is abysmal, and then there are the menu bars. Yikes.
From WFH to WTF.Anuj Ahooja over on Mastodon said: “In the last five years, we’ve gone from ‘employees will never have to go into an office’ to ‘employees need to be in the office because creative and innovative work can only be done face-to-face between humans‘ to ‘lol we don’t need humans’.” It’s an astute observation and the path we’ve travelled is like double whiplash. It’s quite something that while people were fighting managers to retain rights from covid that were one of its few benefits, many managers reasoned they could do away with people entirely.
Blinding lights are bad. It’s been hot in the UK, and so we have fans in almost every room now. And they all appear to have been equipped with an LED that could be redeployed as a floodlight. So it’s a good time to celebrate the one-year anniversary of a Stuff column: Dear all tech companies: stop adding obnoxious eye-searing lights to gadgets. (Reader: they did not stop. They will never stop.)
Sega killed loads of mobile games. You can save them.But, as I write for Stuff, you shouldn’t have to. This piece looks at how Sega Forever became ‘Sega For About Eight Years’, the ephemeral nature of digital games, and how (and why) the industry should embrace emulation.
5 reasons to buy the Trump Mobile T1 Phone 8002 (gold version) was my second column for Stuff this week. Long-time readers might imagine it’s not entirely serious. Indeed, it suggests “[…] millions of idiots will buy one. Are you one of them?” Natch, I got angry ‘fan mail’ from someone who I imagine owns a red cap with MAGA written on it.
Apple Intelligence live translation in iOS 26 is AI done right. Lest anyone think I only moan about Apple, here’s a second positive Apple article in one week. The heat must be getting to me. There are caveats with translation, but for personal use I’m excited about more people being able to communicate. This strikes me as a good use of AI.
Password advice remains terrible. You may have read Cybernews and others reporting on a massive hack. The snag: few concrete details are in the wild and yet publications reported this with clickbait headings and terrible advice. A commonality on the latter was ‘experts’ telling people to regularly update passwords. Genuine expert Kate Bevan said on Bluesky, “Actual experts say you shouldn’t change passwords unless you think they’ve been compromised. Also, SMS is better than no 2FA, but it’s the weakest method of 2FA: use an app to generate codes.” She uses Authy. Other options include Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, and Apple Passwords. Additionally, she points to the NCSC’s guidancefrom 2018 on why you shouldn’t regularly change passwords. Publications need to do better when giving advice on this subject.
I wrote about why it feels hotter in a UK summer than you might think. Unsurprisingly, quite a few people countered that by saying that, actually, where they live, 31°C is like being in a fridge, having not read the piece. Sigh. (I also just checked local humidity readings. For the past week, they bottomed out in the mid-50s and mostly lurked in the mid-80s or higher. Bleh.)
Bluesky is still dying. According to a Spectator columnist, who then adds: “Which is a shame, because I don’t want these people back on Twitter”. Reader, these people do want us all back. To save you a click, this is another piece by someone who doesn’t like Bluesky and didn’t bother to integrate. Increasingly, I hear people countering this narrative, saying that Bluesky is great for engagement and traffic. (Wired said much the same in its most recent print issue.) The Spectator piece does have one important point, though: if the decline in users becomes an ongoing trend, Bluesky might be in trouble. Mastodon might be fine as a quieter, niche online space, but it strikes me that for Bluesky to succeed long-term, it needs scale.
The English language is changing. Watching a Girl Gone London video about ‘zed vs zee’, she noted globalisation is causing Brits to use more Americanisms. I see this myself and suspect the dominance of US English will eventually win out. Most publishers and companies I work for prefer US-English (Stuff being a rare exception). British children’s books use as much US-English and terminology as they can get away with, to push sales. And Brits taking in so much US media is echoed in vocabulary changes that, honestly, I sometimes find grating. Yes, old man shakes fist at cloud. But when ‘pants’ is being used for outerwear rather than underwear, I grumble a bit. And I’m absolutely going to draw the line at ‘faucet’, because come on.
The new tvOS is a bit rubbish. I was going to write about this, but I’m not sure I need to now. Joe Rosensteel says everything in tvOS brings minor additions and weird priorities, covering Apple’s slew of terrible UI decisions (including glass effects and profile frictions) and the only major new feature being faux-karaoke.
Duolingo is probably dead to me. In three days, my plan renews. But I’m over it. Extended time with it has made me more aware that the system is more about gamification and engagement than learning. Most changes Duolingo has made have been for the worse. And the CEO is an AI bro with no understanding of why people don’t want that infecting their already compromised experience. Babbel is the most recommended alternative, according to people giving me advice. My one concern: mini-G (10) has racked up a streak now well north of 1000. I hope she continues – in Duolingo or elsewhere.
Make your iPhone more minimal! If you want to. This is my selection of cracking apps that get out of your way and four beautifully minimalist, simple games.
Retrospecs is on sale for $0.99/99p. The app lets you load a photo or video and makes it look as if it had been generated on anything from an ancient Commodore PET through to a SNES or a Mega Drive. It’s a wonderful app – easy for newcomers, yet with loads of things to fiddle with for retro geeks. Buy it!
I’m open to work. Sorry to start this weeknote with a blatant plug, but it is what it is. A long-term engagement ended last week, and I’m now looking for what’s next. If you or anyone you know needs someone to smash some words into shape (articles, case studies, press releases, App Store page copy, poems about your favourite giraffe, etc), please let me know.
WWDC25 happened. You probably noticed. I wrote about it:
Here are some of my favourite WWDC25 pieces from others:
Joanna Stern’s superb interview with Apple software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak: full interview | short version.
Fidelity in design by Howard Oakley criticises Apple’s ongoing obsession with windows that have rounded corners. As I’ve said elsewhere, it half feels like the next macOS will have fully circular windows. Even today, rounded corners cause other problems, not least on iPadOS.
Clip got stuck in notarization hell, says creator Riley Testut, with Apple rejecting his app because it didn’t do anything if Full Access wasn’t enabled. Thing is, that’s none of Apple’s business with an app for a third-party app store, like this one is. This is surely yet another DMA violation the EU won’t be happy about.
Craig Federighi sounded like he was taking the piss with this exclamation: “Wow! More windows, a pointier pointer and a menu bar? Who’d have thought? We’ve truly pulled off a mindblowing release!” Maybe he was trying to acknowledge that Apple, after many years, had finally reached an obvious fix for iPad interactions. At best, something got lost in the edit.
Nail the basics: All covered, but sometimes implemented poorly.
Highlight controller support: Surprisingly, yes. But buried (Library > hamburger).
Add landscape support: Yes.
Embrace openness (LOL): Indeed a LOL so far – not even any app pinning, which is insane.
Recommend good games: No better than App Store, alas.
Not get bored after 11 seconds: We shall see…
Also on games, Daryl Baxter argued Apple should draw on the Pippin for a new iPhone gaming controller. Brave bringing up Pippin at all, but I get where he’s coming from in wanting a controller that could have AirPods-like multi-device pairing. However, I’d be concerned Apple would try to reinvent gamepads, like it did during the MFi disaster.
However, I disagree with Baxter’s argument that “other inputs work terribly with gaming”, by which he means non-traditional ones. With conventional gaming, sure, touchscreens aren’t ideal. But when you design specifically for them, that forces you to rethink gaming conventions, which can lead to innovative ideas. The problem today is relatively few games are iPhone-first because Apple pissed off so many devs. Instead, games come to the iPhone from other platforms, where they’re designed for gamepads. That makes the touchscreen’s perceived limitations more apparent.
AI is still doing bad things. I enjoyed a quote from planetmatt on Bluesky: “AI looks impressive in every area in which you are not a subject matter expert. In that area, it’s always a joke.”
Bank warnings have jumped the shark. It’s bad enough when I get scary warnings when making purchases on national retailer websites. But this week I got one when transferring money between two accounts with a bank, while using the bank’s own website. Naturally, this is banks shifting responsibility on to customers. When a customer gets scammed, the bank will say they were warned. But they’re training users just to click OK for everything.
New coeliac tests incoming.A report claims this will remove the need for a ‘gluten challenge’, where you test for coeliac disease by consuming loads of gluten over a period of weeks. Despite many years of increasingly serious issues that may map to coeliac, I’ve never had a test. I’d be too scared, because it would leave me bedridden and unable to function. So this new news is very good news.
Twitter isn’t coming back – ever. I’m still seeing people on Bluesky (and, very occasionally, Mastodon) sad that Twitter is gone. To be fair, when I left in 2023, it was a wrench. Lots of friends and communities were lost to me. But even then, I missed what Twitter was, not what it had become. Today, I very rarely venture on to X, but have sanity-checked my ‘filter’ feeds, and most of the folks I followed have gone too. Maybe half are now on Bluesky and Mastodon. I’ve no idea about the others.
There still seems to be this idea we can somehow press a magic button to bring Twitter back, but it was a moment in time. Even if X wasn’t a hellhole today, the way the world has changed would make it a very different place from back in 2015. And, as it is, X is a ghoul wearing Twitter’s bloody corpse as a onesie. Enough.
No-mow May has become no-mow June. Again. And I’m fine with that. I enjoy letting the front garden grow and just seeing what happens. It feels alive, unlike gardens mown like a buzzcut every week. We have crickets and gigantic Oxeye daisies. The mow-happy… don’t.
iCloud Photos sync is a joke. So my Stuff column this week is: All I want from WWDC25 is for iOS 26 and iCloud to finally sync my photos properly. Although after I wrote this, I discovered Apple Music had eaten half of one of my uploaded digital-only albums. And that iCloud Drive hadn’t bothered to sync a column I’d written on another computer while abroad. Why is iCloud still such a disaster? Come on, Apple.
Ruark released some new speakers. That in itself isn’t news. But it made me think about the piece I wrote, because I have two of this system’s predecessors and I love them. So this is a fairly rare example of one of those “my favourite” headlines that’s actually fully genuine.
I spent last week in Spain. Which, for a range of reasons I may write about later, was much-needed. We arrived in a deluge, which was surreal, given how little rain the UK saw in May. But after that, it was sunny bliss. The one negative: the THUNK of having my passport stamped. I still hate that abrupt reminder of the stupidity of Brexit. Perhaps one day Brits will, en masse, finally recognise that freedom of movement was a gift, in all its forms, and embrace it.
Doctor Who’s latest series ended. I’m not going to get into the pros and cons of the latest episodes, but I am going to gripe about the BBC website immediately throwing up a massive headline that spoiled the final twist. Yeah, yeah, SEO blah blah blah. But it’s rubbish these days that the second a show is over, major publications clamour to get on their front pages what happened. Heaven forbid people not watch shows the second they are broadcast.
Workers are losing their jobs to AI.The Guardian interviewed a bunch of folks who’ve been hit. What depresses me most about this is companies are using AI to cut out creatives rather than to deal with the boring stuff. And the UK government’s response is to try to enshrine in law no protections for said creatives, while the Lords fights back. Absurd, really, that we’re relying on an unelected house to battle elected representatives and force the Labour Party to protect a labour market.
Covid is back, says the i. Although, of course, it never went away. I got my first dose last August and it was hideous. Naturally, the UK government is doing the square root of fuck all to prepare, as it has from the time Boris Johnson’s lot declared they’d somehow beaten an ever-evolving virus and that the threat was over. I’m not suggesting we lockdown or anything. But we could prep for autumn with air filters in workplaces and schools. We could expand booster take-up and dramatically lower their price for those who can’t get one for free. We could restart proper UK-wide monitoring and encourage mask use during spikes. But no. Let’s all bury our heads and wonder why we have more and more long-term sick.
Non-shock as study shows 20mph limits result in fewer deaths. We have a few 20mph streets in my town. Years after they were introduced, entitled muppets are still screaming about them on Facebook, eradicating any notion of further changes. Astonishingly, we still have 40mph limits in some residential parts of town. But, hey, so long as people can save 23.7 seconds driving the full length of a street, I suppose that’s somehow better than reducing injuries and deaths? Gah at these people. Hashtag Team Twenty. Etc.
I’ve been watching Murderbot.It’s on Apple TV+. My recommendation is: watch Murderbot. Because it’s really good.
Arc browser is dead.A blog post outlines the company behind it is pivoting to new product Dia. Two things. First, I’ll be sorry to see mobile app Arc Search mothballed. It was an excellent example of the potential in AI-assisted search, serving up magazine-like synopses with full source links. Secondly, when you’ve built a niche product that commands a loyal audience and pull the rug out from underneath them, what makes you think they’ll be back for more?
I asked ChatGPT to be Jimmy Carr. This in response to his arrogant bullshit about AI being better than art and design. Doubtless, he’d argue it was a joke. But, hey, people might argue that about Carr. Anyway, my thread suggested his quippy one-liners can be adequately replaced by ChatGPT. (Or can they? Probably not! But I’m not a comedian and so don’t fully know what good looks like in the context of new puns. Which is the entire bloody point. If you don’t have humans in the loop with relevant knowledge in the subject matter at hand, GenAI is mostly some level of bad.)
AI discourse needs nuance. Following on from the above, Steve Klabnik wrote about the pros and cons of AI/LLMs and how he’s disappointed in the discourse. On Bluesky, Prof. Christina Pagel suggested LLMs have benefits and that public comms arguing against them mostly comes from AI-hating journos.
I’d say there are intertwined issues here. LLM creators oversell. Consumers and managers assume LLMs can do everything and replace humans when they ultimately need expertise at each end of the process – and for those people to know what good looks like. Much of the pushback I’m seeing about GenAI/LLMs is actually from educators rather than tech hacks like me, because students are using this tech as an alternative to thinking. But also, many creators are staring aghast at LLM output making it to public eyes and asking: why? (Answer: if an LLM can churn out, say, some text that’s better than what the prompt author could write themselves, it looks good to them. And right now, that seems to be what many folks are going with. Which means a massive WOMP WOMP for writers like me who actually care about quality output.)
What we need is more nuanced discussion. GenAI and LLMs can be beneficial. They can also be terrible. Often, they’re somewhere in between. But you get way more eyeballs online when you argue something is the Best Thing Ever™ or evil incarnate. As ever: sigh.
However, Nick Clegg discourse needs no nuance. Following on from the above and the ‘above above’, Nick Clegg can go fuck himself. As can the current Labour government when it comes to AI policy. Constant whining (the latest being from Clegg, but various Labour figures have said the same) that the AI industry cannot survive if it has to ask permission to use the content it ingests and recycles (or even be transparent about what content is used) is irksome beyond belief. If your business model depends on mass copyright infringement, maybe you don’t have a business model.
Again, I feel the need to point out that the UK’s copyright laws are so strict that it in almost all circumstances remains illegal for a consumer to rip a CD they’ve bought to their own computer, for entirely personal use. Yet every single thing you’ve ever created should be freely available for a handful of AI companies, because their business model depends on that? Pfft. Anyone else up for starting a company whose business model depends on giving away Nick Clegg’s stupid book for free? Something tells me he wouldn’t be so supportive of that.
Bluesky is dying. Apparently. There was a lot of THE SKY IS FALLING this past week, with people posting stats that show the site trending towards approx minus fifty billion users by next Friday. Reality: things there seem… fine? There still seem to be many folks happily nattering away, rather than slinking back to Musk’s bosom. But author Jarrett Walker’s post caught my eye, basically being an argument that he should stay on X because 40% of his audience wouldn’t follow him if he quit. My take: if I were still posting in the Nazi bar and half my followers said they’d scoot over to somewhere else, I’d take that as a win. But then I don’t care much about numbers.
Just as well, TBH, given my actual numbers. Then again, I’ve always thought it’s about who is reading rather than how many people. This blog’s stats will never set the world on fire, and yet my writing here is the reason I’m writing for Stuff. (An ex-editor was – maybe still is – a reader.) Over on Bluesky and Mastodon, I’m not posting there in an attempt to amass an audience that can fill Wembley Stadium. I’m just parping out random thoughts and having nice chats with lovely folks. That’s enough for me. (Unless, you know, you’re an editor who’d like to employ me. Because I wouldn’t say no to that right now.)
The Phoenix Comic reached 700 issues. A phenomenal achievement in a tough market. If you’re in the UK and have/know a kid in the 7–12 range (or fancy reading fun comics yourself), there’s a zero-risk trial that nets you six issues for a quid. Barg.
