MultiTimer joins my classic apps series. It’s amazing to think it took until 2023 for Apple’s Clock to support multiple timers. MultiTimer solved this back in 2015 – and remains superior to Apple’s app.
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Apple’s new rings award just gave me the perfect excuse to get moving again. Once more, a shiny badge is all the motivation I need to get started. Don’t @ me…
Apple Arcade is still pretty great. I’ve found it astonishing how much stick this service has got since its inception. And while there have been issues (not least the bizarre rollout and then a shift from ambitious indies to retention), it includes dozens of fantastic titles. My round-up for Stuff explores many of them.
I love em dashes. But are they a sign of AI writing? LinkedIn posters say yes. The linked piece by Watts Martin suggests there are better ways to detect AI-gen text than looking for dashes. Alex von Tunzelmann’s piece for the FT and Bluesky thread also offer a light-hearted exploration of this subject. And made me recall when one editor, years ago, publicly took the piss out of me for filing copy with “dashes as long as your arm”. Tsk.
Samsung Ballie has rolled back into view. This orb-like personal assistant on wheels is now infused with Gemini AI. I wrote about it for Stuff, where the cute little robot, in my mind, was transformed into a human-hating psychopath. But, hey, when you hear it speak in the video, you’ll know where I was coming from.
Photoshop for iPhone would once have excited me. But despite it rocking up for iPhone recently, I’m not sure anyone needs it. I mull this over in a column for TapSmart.
Speaking of, Adobe got hounded off of Bluesky. I’m not a fan of social network pile-ons, but Adobe wading in with its size twelves and going HEY KIDS was never going to end well. I sympathise with the social media person who was swamped with snark, but perhaps Adobe should have had a plan in place for this eventuality beyond “delete everything”.
ArcadeMania got approved. Sort of. I’ve written about the absurd story of iPhone arcade emulator MAME4iOS vs Apple before. The developer has now complied with every Apple demand, including a really stupid one that the app should only run ROMs owned by the dev. So right now, ArcadeMania is a husk. The dev aims to update it to make the functionality more standard. It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple blocks that, in full-on troll mode.
I should note, yet again, that there are plenty of (often dreadful) emulators – including arcade emulators – already on the App Store. And so I really don’t know why Apple has a bug up its arse about this one in particular.
Nintendo officially unveiled the Nintendo Switch 2. You might have noticed. I wrote a few articles for Stuff on the little box of joy:
My daily life is busy – so the Nintendo Switch 2 is the perfect console for me. I’ve been playing games since the early 1980s. But I’m now closer to 80 than when I started playing games. As a busy parent, I don’t have a lot of time. The Switch has been great for keeping my love of games alive, with its slew of cracking bite-sized titles and co-op fare I can play with the nipper after dinner, until she decides she’s too old to play games with dad. Anyway, this column’s all about that.
Switch Virtual Game Cards are a good idea – but I want Nintendo to go further. There’s a tension between physical and digital across all media. Nintendo’s rethought digital games to make them a little more like physical cards. I’m pretty happy with what’s being offered, but, as ever, I wish Nintendo would take things further.
MusicHarbor hit v5 recently. It fills a gap by letting you track your favourite artists in a manner that Apple Music bafflingly doesn’t bother with. The update handily adds a ‘time capsule’ feature, so you can scoot back through the months and find albums you might have missed. The app is currently the lead item in my best free iPhone and iPad apps list for Stuff.
Space Invaders Infinity Gene is back on iPad. Sort of. The original release is my second-favourite Space Invaders game of all time, after Extreme. But it vanished from the App Store during the 32-bit appageddon. EVO is now on Apple Arcade. It looks to be based on the console version, which means it sadly loses the portrait-first set-up that worked so well on mobile. But it’s still pretty great. Also, happily, I still have the original on my first-gen iPad Air anyway.
My innie wrote a review of the Lumon Terminal Pro. Which will mostly sound like gibberish if you’re not a fan of Severance. But if you are, I hope you enjoy my thoughts on a “machine ideally suited for corporations with extremely strict policies on work-life separation”.
AI can be good. And one good AI thing is Arc Search, which on iPhone and Android is a mobile browser that can search the web on your behalf and create magazine-like overviews packed with interesting details and – importantly – sources. If you like the sound of that, check out my Arc Search deep dive for TapSmart.
If Siri can’t handle the basics, what hope is there for Apple Intelligence? I dig into this topic in a column for TapSmart.
Meta is awful. The question is, how easy is it to move on? In another piece for TapSmart, I explore this situation – tricky for many – through the lens of an iPhone user.
Grammarly is busy wrecking websites.David Bushell outlines how its browser extension injects its own CSS that screwed things up for his site. Frankly, there’s no excuse for what Grammarly did. At the very least its custom property names should be obscure to the point they would almost never clash with an existing website’s styles.
Am I afraid of an iOS 19 redesign? Jason Snell asked me this, after I responded to his article mentioning a new consistent design with an XKCD jibe. But I figured that this was worth writing about in fuller fashion. TL;DR: I’m sick of being sick when new designs appear, and really wish more work would be done to make new releases safe for me and the many similar folks who have vestibular conditions.
I learned today that The Entertainer no longer sells Lego. So one of the UK’s biggest toy chains doesn’t stock the world’s biggest toy brand. Online, it’s merely running down stock. That’s wild. But then The Entertainer has long been weird, for example refusing to sell toys relating to witchcraft because they offend the owners’ religious beliefs. I’m not sure why Lego offends them though. Maybe they trod on some bricks late one night.
Veteran Apple expert and commentator Jason Snell asked of me the question that’s the title of this post. This was after I (playfully) responded to his thoughts about Apple working on a “new, consistent design” with an XKCD klaxon jibe.
The actual answer to the question, in true Betteridge’s Law fashion, is no. But really: it’s complicated.
In the full Mastodon thread, Snell suggested we should praise optimism over negativity, and called the latter “no way to live”. Similar sentiments about Apple have recently been expressed by Federico Viticci and David Smith. And, despite my often cynical and curmudgeonly demeanour, I think there’s value in that way of thinking. Being relentlessly negative is no fun.
But.
I’m not keen on recent trends that suggest where Apple might head, hiding or removing yet more UI, including iPhone app tabs and iPad app sidebars. More importantly, every single major Apple redesign – even more so than ‘standard’ annual OS updates – results in a slew of vestibular accessibility issues that slip through the net.
I’m not sure why this is the case. And, to be fair, Apple’s iOS team has been very responsive ever since the iOS 7 days. Multiple requests that I’ve made have been rolled into iOS, which remains far ahead of Apple’s other operating systems in terms of usability for people who have vestibular conditions. (Stern glare @ tvOS team…)
Even so, more proactive support would be welcome. And so, returning to the question posed at the start, I’m not afraid of a major iOS redesign per se, but I am concerned that it will render my devices unusable for weeks or even months until fixes are made. If that’s primarily for a coat of fresh paint, that will be particularly dispiriting.
