Published stuff

Two AI articles this week. For Stuff, I wrote about smartphone photography and Halide’s new Process Zero in Why I’m excited about an anti-AI iPhone camera app that does less, not more. And for TapSmart, I looked at apps that give you AI on any iPhone or iPad right now.

Outside of AI, I wrote up an iPhone toolkit for minimising distractions, griped about the lack of sort options in the iOS 18 Home Screen, and checked out the best upcoming Lego sets. 

Other stuff: new music and old covid

Last week, I caught covid for the first time. I’m still isolating. Day nine now. I’ll take another test this afternoon, but still expect it to be positive. I’m… so over this. And it’s increasingly depressing to be away from my family and confined to a room. But it is what it is. At least neither my wife nor my daughter have caught covid from me. And isolation did spur me on to release a new piece of music for the first time in over a decade. You can listen to Where I Want To Be on YouTube. (I’m pretty happy with that bass line. A good reminder of why I need to write more music with actual instruments, rather than prodding at a screen. Anyway…)

If nothing else, catching covid has also been a reality check. My wife mentioned my covid to our elderly neighbour, who looked shocked and asked how I managed to catch it, as if I’d made a special effort to do so. Friends who’ve caught it recently say they’ve had similar responses from people. In the UK at least, it’s as if covid doesn’t exist, despite us just having had the biggest wave in a long time.

Worse, our medical service has no interest whatsoever in helping anyone who’s not ‘at risk’. So while I hear from people in the US and Switzerland who received medication and boosters in recent years, in the UK it’s a case of “take a couple of paracetamol and hope you can shake it off in a couple of weeks”. Oh, and no boosters again for the majority of the population this autumn either (unless you can find somewhere to buy one, for the first time), because the way to stop covid is still apparently to have people repeatedly catch covid. Bonkers.

Heaven help us if a more dangerous disease ever sweeps this country.

Published stuff

My stuff column this week is: The secret AI prompts at the heart of Apple Intelligence, in which I add to the Apple AI prompts someone revealed on Reddit. I also added Dumb Phone to my best iPhone apps round-up.

Meanwhile, over at TapSmart, I explored great multiplayer party games to play.

Other stuff

iDOS finally got approved, putting an end to this particular slice of App Store idiocy. Note that MAME4iOS remains in limbo, however, being repeatedly rejected for ‘spam’.

Disney’s legal team is using terms and conditions from Disney+ to stop a man suing over a wrongful death at one of its theme parks. Perhaps it’s jealous that Netflix owns Black Mirror.

Covid finally caught me, after four years. My throat felt weird, I did a test, and I got the evil line of doom. Anyone who says this is just like a cold needs their head examined. Only two days in, feeling sick and knackered all the time is getting old.

I’m also kicking myself. I’d long been the last mask standing, and still used it on public transport. But I’d not been using one all the time in stores, nor when we went to Legoland UK this week. Although I’ll never know precisely where I picked this up and if a mask would have helped. Silver lining: my wife and daughter appear to have escaped so far.

Published stuff

Over at TapSmart, I dig into the good, the bad and the ugly of Apple and AI, messaging apps for iPhone and the best Apple TV apps.

My column for Stuff this week: Dumb phones and smart rings won’t help when I need a tech detox. Aka I’m starting to bristle at the notion that to use tech less, we need more tech. No. We just need to know when to put something down.

Other stuff

I have two guilt piles. The first is my eBay pile, which now takes up the entire space under an office desk. And a huge box in a cupboard that we do not speak of. And half a dozen boxes of comics in the garage. This… is not great. And also an excellent example of what happens when I lose eBay momentum.

The bigger guilt pile is the ‘read pile’. Books. Comics. Magazines. I buy a lot of collectible graphic novels and interesting non-fiction titles in print (rather than digital). Beyond that, I buy print magazines, including Wired, Stuff, Retro Gamer and Blocks. And, it turns out, they increase in number when they’re not read. Who knew?

However, while reading through the latest Blocks, I realised I have ‘magazine completism’. I know I should zip over things that don’t interest me. But I feel duty bound to read the things from cover to cover. I suspect this is a manifestation of whatever flavour of OCD I have, which is mostly geared around “but what if I miss this important thing?” (So: I’ll check the front door more times than is strictly necessary, let’s say, in case I somehow missed that it wasn’t locked, thereby leading to nefarious types cleaning us out. Reader: that door has never not been locked on my returning to check it again. And again. Sigh.)

This isn’t ideal, because the pile grows faster than I can get through it. Just as well I don’t have the symmetry/orderliness aspect of OCD, or I’d be really done for. On the bright side, I’m squeezing every last drop of value out of these magazines, and so that’s something.

Published stuff

My Stuff column this week was ‘They don’t make Olympic video games like they used to – which might be for the best’ – exploring classics from my childhood and comparing them to the horror inflicted on the masses for Paris 2024. I also wrote about the new BurgerTime Quarter Arcade and refreshed the best upcoming Lego sets round-up.

For TapSmart, I explored one of my favourite apps, with a deep dive of Soulver. I also recommended 10 great creativity apps for iPhone and wrote a HomePod buyer’s guide.

And for this blog, I covered my ongoing frustration with Apple’s approach to emulators in ‘Apple isn’t serious about retro game emulation on iPhone – nor level playing fields for developers’.

Other stuff

Curious rumours this week about Apple TV+ being scaled back. Would that make it just Apple TV? Or Apple TV-? The argument is that Apple has chucked loads of cash at its streaming service, but the numbers no longer justify it.

Right now, this is the only streaming service our household has running. The movies seem very hit and miss, but there are a lot of great shows. Will that still be the case in two years?

Today, Apple TV+ has a solid reputation – almost the HBO of streaming. But Apple Arcade initially had a run of being a ‘premium’ take in its sector. Apple’s since dumbed that down, filling it full of me-too casual fare and giving dozens of old App Store favourites another airing.

Is Apple about to do an ‘Apple Arcade’ with TV+? If so, what would that look like, and how would Apple differentiate the service from its rivals if it’s increasingly packed full of lowest-common denominator telly and bought-in series from elsewhere?

I recently wrote about iDOS for iPhone. In June, iDOS was rejected for not emulating a “retro game console”. This despite multiple emulators being approved for the App Store that don’t emulate retro game consoles. However, having initially rejected it, Apple subsequently approved UTM SE, essentially a PC emulator. Logically, then, you’d think Apple would change its mind regarding iDOS. Well, no. On 16 July, the app’s creator said his appeal had been rejected.

It’s surely now clear Apple isn’t serious about allowing emulators on the App Store. But worse: it’s not serious about level playing fields for apps either. Instead, it’s inviting emulator developers to coin-flip approvals, and perhaps (on the basis of the course of events we’ve so far witnessed) changing its mind when not doing so could cause regulatory problems, or when an app could threaten the App Store in some way by causing more people to look elsewhere. UTM, notably, was first rejected for an external app store, Apple sticking up a middle digit to EU regulation. And then when someone at Apple realised that was a very bad idea and UTM was finally approved, it was approved for the App Store as well, which dents any advantage the third-party store has.

However, that UTM is now allowed but iDOS is not is indefensible. They’re both PC emulators. Apple has been inconsistent in the past with App Store rules and approvals, but this pairing is especially stark and egregious. At this point, I wouldn’t spend a single second developing an emulator for iOS. Which is probably how Apple wants it anyway. If I were the iDOS developer, I’d lob the app at AltStore and see what happens. Or, you know, just give up, like so many other ex-iOS devs I hear from these days have already done.

What gets me is this is all so stupid and unnecessary. There’s clearly reluctance from somewhere senior in Apple about emulators. But then the company sort of changed its mind, yet provided no rules. It instead went for the developer-hostile “we’ll know it when we see it”. Only ‘it’ doesn’t mean anything specific. If it did, we wouldn’t currently have ZX81, C64 and MSX emulators on the App Store, given that they emulate hardware platforms that are not retro gaming consoles.

Another thing that’s also come under harsh criticism (and affects UTM’s performance) is Apple blocking support for JIT. This is essential for strong performance when emulating more modern systems and further hamstrings iPhone and iPad in this space. For once, I’m actually OK with this decision. And that’s because Apple has with this decision by accident ended up in a reasonably moral space regarding emulation, making it impossible to emulate modern systems that remain commercially viable. I’m very aware emulation as a whole is a grey area, but there’s a world of difference between firing up Drelbs on my iPhone and loading up a phone with Nintendo Switch titles.

So, frustrating as it might be to some people, that outcome (if not, perhaps, the mechanism) is defensible. But so much else surrounding Apple’s current approach to emulators is, at best, deeply cynical or horribly incompetent. Neither of those things is a great look.