You might have seen reports about a heatwave in the UK. Then you might have looked at the temperatures and thought: what? What? Readings this week have been in the high 20s, and where I live are predicted to top out at 31°C on Saturday. (That’s high 70s to high 80s in old money.) Surely that’s just… lovely? Bit of sun. Bit of warmth. Get over yourselves, wimpy British people!
But no. Because various factors add up to make things pretty uncomfortable here. We don’t, as a rule, have air conditioning. It’s increasingly common in cars. Some offices and shops (mostly supermarkets) will have some kind of cooling units. Often ineffective ones, mind. Homes? Vanishingly rare. And those homes? They’re designed to keep heat in. Mostly brick-built. Heavily insulated. Smallish windows. No air flow. And speaking of air flow, there’s not much of that either right now. No breeze at all. Plus, it’s humid, due to the UK being a weirdly shaped island surrounded by sea.
There’s no time to prepare and build resilience either. If you live in a place that’s very regularly hot, you become acclimatised. The UK, though, frequently flips seasons at almost any time of year. A week and change ago, we were tempted to put the heating back on in our house. With wind chill, the ‘feels like’ factor outside was in single figures (mid 40s, in ye olde degrees). During evenings, we were wearing fleeces and wrapping up in blankets. Now I’m sitting in my office, just after 9am, with a fan blasting into my face, watching the temperature readings on our smart radiator gadgets tick ever upwards. The windows are open and that’s doing nothing. Fans are on, which is basically blowing hot air around. Even nights aren’t helping, with their lack of breeze and temperatures stubbornly only briefly bottoming out in the high teens (mid 60s). And sunrises before 5am mean if you do leave the windows and curtains open, you’re going to wake up at stupid o’ clock.
Despite all this, I personally would take heat over murk. We often have ‘summers’ in the UK that amount to six weeks of cool grey. I am solar powered. I love the sun. But the heat can be tricky to deal with. And because of the various factors outlined above, not least the fact that for many people there’s just no ‘escape’, it can feel an awful lot more uncomfortable, stifling and intense than you’d otherwise realise from the temperature numbers alone. In short, it’s hotter than you might think. So maybe think a bit before rattling off yet another “pfft – the Brits are just wimps” post when, here in the UK, we all feel like we’re melting.
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.
To say iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have been divisive is putting things mildly. Much of that is down to Liquid Glass, which at best needs a lot of optimisation before these operating systems ship later this year. But look beyond that and there’s a lot to like, the most notable revamped feature being vastly improved iPad windowing.
Often, though, it’s smaller changes that can make or break an operating system. And one change has me doing a happy dance: the Home indicator no longer scythes across the bottom of the screen, above the app you’re using. I’ve grumbled about the Home indicator foryears. I wanted an off switch – the means to get rid of it for good. Because the last thing I need when playing a game, using a music app, or reading, is a distracting line lurking at the bottom of the screen.
In the ’26’ dev betas, Apple hasn’t provided an off switch in Settings, but it has introduced the next best thing. Actually, it’s arguably created something better. When you switch to an app, the Home indicator now elegantly fades. Further interaction with the app doesn’t make it reappear. Instead, you have to make a deliberate upwards swipe from the bottom of the screen to bring it back.
I’m no fan of hidden UI. Apple seems a bit obsessed with hiding settings, menus and tabs away, and that can make things difficult for people. But just this once, I’m going to make an exception, because the interface element I least liked on iPhone and iPad is no longer an irritant and a nuisance – it’s there when I need it and gone when I don’t.
Edit: As per a comment I received, I should note that the ability to switch between apps with a swipe at the very bottom of the display remains, regardless of whether the Home indicator is visible. So what Apple has removed is the visual distraction, not the functionality. When you swipe, the indicator immediately reappears.
The keynote for Apple’s developer conference was held yesterday. Much of it involved Apple executives hyping Apple’s “delightful and elegant new software design”. In short, it’s like Windows Vista, visionOS and the interfaces in Minority Report had a baby. As I explain in a column for Stuff, I’m not thrilled about this new direction.
Online, I’ve seen plenty of pushback against those complaining. A common thread appears to be that Apple is a leader in accessibility and there are options to turn some Liquid Glass elements off. But there are problems with that point of view.
While I’m more writer than designer these days, I was trained in the visual arts. I was always taught that clarity and legibility should be at the forefront of anyone’s mind when designing. Surely, that’s even more the case when creating an operating system for many millions of users. Yet even in Apple’s press release, linked earlier, there are multiple screenshots where key interface components are, at best, very difficult to read. That is the new foundational point for Apple design. And those screenshots will have been designed to show the best of things.
Furthermore, Apple may be a leader in accessibility, but it is far from perfect. I first wrote about vestibular issues on this blog, back in 2012. But it was the following year, with a piece for The Guardian (Why iOS 7 is making some users sick) that the word got out there regarding major accessibility issues with a new design language. To Apple’s credit, it did listen. Changes happened. The iOS team in particular has been very responsive to my recommendations – and I’m sure also to those from others.
But the key word is responsive. Apple is still very often reactive rather than proactive regarding vision accessibility. Even today, there are major problems with the previous versions of its operating systems (one example being the vestibular trigger if you tap-hold the Focus button in Control Centre). One year on, they aren’t fixed. And now we have an entirely new design language that will upend everything and that starts from a place where clarity has been eroded, animations are even more prevalent, and broad accessibility is seemingly an afterthought.
My hope is that there will be time in this beta run for enough fixes to be made. My fear is that many of us will be waiting months for a fully usable OS, if that ever occurs. So, sure, argue against what I and others are concerned about. State, correctly, that Apple is a leader in accessibility. But stop assuming that just because this new design might be OK for you and because Apple has controls in place that might help people avoid the worst effects of design changes, everything is just peachy. Because it isn’t. Millions of people are now a coin flip away from whether or not they’ll be able to comfortably use their devices in just a few short months from now.
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.
