Now it is the beginning of a fantastic story!

Published stuff

For Stuff’s 300th issue, I wrote a gargantuan feature that covered the best gadgets released during the magazine’s long life. It’s now online, with our picks from 1996 to the present day.

I also wrote about Lego Animal Crossing (or, given my age, what looks like The Revenge of Fabuland), and the mobile gaming revolution that wasn’t – the N-Gage.

This week’s column: I’ve had it with new streaming tiers. ‘Good enough’ subs are the way forward for me. Which goes a bit Black Mirror in several different ways.

Over at TapSmart, Blackbar is added to my classic apps series, and I take a look at the best interactive widgets for iOS 17.

Upcoming stuff

Aside from my regular features for the next issue of Stuff, I’m immersed in yet more mini-console shenanigans. This time, I’m digging into two Super Pocket units. These are essentially mini Evercades with a bunch of built-in games – either Taito or Capcom.

They’ve proven divisive among the Evercade community, which I understand. Evercade creators Blaze went big on physical media, and yet now has two consoles out with built-in games. (The Capcom titles are also bundled with the EXP). But I see the Super Pockets as perfect gift fodder for people keen on a bit of retro, with the cart slots being a bonus for anyone who fancies exploring further afield than the dozen or so titles that come with the handheld.

Still, more as and when I’ve put them through rather more rigorous testing than firing up and cooing at Bubble Bobble and Puzzle Bobble.

Other stuff

Before smashing out these words, I was supposed to be working on articles and sorting taxes. So naturally I spent half an hour arranging a loop that’s been sitting around forever (with the catchy title ‘chiangmai 48 – in-between track to work on — edit’) into a full track. It turned out really well. That made me feel… relaxed. Happy. Whole. Clearly, I need to be doing more of this music thing again…

Hello. And welcome to Jazz Club.

Published stuff

Reviews week! Over at Stuff, I reviewed the iPhone 15 Pro Max, during which I spent far too much time having fun with the USB-C port. I plugged the phone into SSD drives, my TV, a clunky PC keyboard I found in a drawer, and more. And, er, I checked out some other things too.

Helpfully, the device also got an OS update to deal with its overheating problem a couple of days after my review went live. Tsk! Anyway, it’s a great phone – the best of Apple. And the overheating fix meant I got to write about that too.

I also reviewed the Apple Watch Series 9. This was less exciting, primarily because its biggest user-facing feature didn’t join it for the launch. I’m also not thrilled about Apple having messed around with all the gestures. Sure, stop folks being able to swipe between watch faces by default, but not allowing people to bring that feature back via a setting is maddening.

Finally, my column this week is I think Apple should steal these killer Google Pixel 8 Pro features for the iPhone 16. I select four things from Google’s recent keynote that struck me as needing to be mashed into the iPhone with a fork. Features cameo appearances from phone snark, a Ford Fiesta, a terrifying dystopia, and the heat death of the universe, as is perfectly normal for a tech gadgets column.

Over on TapSmart, I’m more serious, mulling over why Dynamic Island won’t be another Touch Bar and looking at the best apps, accessories and tips for iPhone bookworms.

Upcoming stuff

I’m still wading through a pile of iOS 17 interactive widgets for an upcoming piece. Thanks to all the app creators who pitched their products. This initial selection likely won’t be the end, but I had to cut it down to an initial 17.

Spoiler alert: my favourites of all of them are from Longplay. If you’ve not used this app, it presents your music collection as a scrolling feed of cover art and emphasises playing albums rather than tracks. The main interactive widget is like a streamlined version of the app itself. It’s remarkable. And then there’s a second widget for firing off a random album. I wish Apple Music had that. Thinking about it, I now need to try seeing whether Longplay will talk to the Mac version of Music…

Other stuff

Speaking of Home Screen widgets, I find them very weird on both Android and iOS. Android had the lead and then, as far as I can tell, did almost nothing with it. Current widgets on that platform are a mess and woefully inconsistent from a design and interaction standpoint.

Apple, meanwhile, upended the entire system fairly recently, atomising interactivity. And now it’s brought interactivity back. So that’s good. But the system itself has never worked for me reliably.

I can install the same apps on a bunch of devices. The widgets system will then seemingly randomly decide whether or not to allow access to widgets from said apps. Even when they are listed, they might appear as blanks. Sometimes, a device restart fixes this. Or an uninstall/reinstall dance. But this has been going on since the revamped widgets first appeared and, judging by online grumbles elsewhere, it seems like a common problem.

Like everything else, it’s another case where the closed nature of the system makes it impossible for you to figure out any potential solution. The same’s true for iCloud, which when it breaks leaves you with no means to fix it. Worse, devs often can’t do anything either. Just this week, Dan Moren outlined an iCloud issue that should never happen. And back in August, it was doing weird things for me.

Apple is increasingly dependent on services revenue. It forces people to increasingly rely on iCloud. It should be rock solid rather than unreliable and flaky. We should be able to trust it. Right now, I half the time feel like I can trust iCloud as far as I could throw an iCloud server. (Which might have fixed Dan’s problems and my own. Perhaps I should suggest this cunning plan to Apple tech support. It’d be cathartic for them if nothing else.)

Boys will be boys. I’m not sure there’s another phrase that infuriates me quite so much. Since my daughter’s attended school, that’s only cemented the phrase’s place in making me fume.

The first specific moment was during a pre-school open day. Parents could attend the grounds. Outside, boys were zooming along on cars and trikes, directing them at girls and scaring the life out of them. A member of staff looked on, smiling. “Boys will be boys”, she said.

In infant (5–7) school, I became aware for the first time of how girls were used to moderate the behaviour of boys. Classes were broadly evenly split by gender. When possible, a boy and a girl would be paired for tasks. My daughter is now in juniors (8–11) and this continues. The argument for this pairing is boys otherwise misbehave. Throughout, my daughter has complained that most (not all) boys muck around while she’s trying to complete a task. She and other girls are regularly told off for trying to tell boys to be quiet.

At her infant school leaving event, the teachers sweetly said something positive about every child. But it was notable how many adjectives along the lines of ‘funny’ and ‘silly’ were used for boys. For girls, ‘sensible’ was far more common.

And through to yesterday. My daughter came home from school quite upset. During lunch, some boys had decided to throw horse chestnuts at a group of girls. My daughter was hit in the leg repeatedly by their spiny cases, to the degree she was bleeding and this morning has marks that look like a horrible rash down one leg from all the puncture wounds. The initial response from a teacher she told: boys will be boys.

Talking to other parents, all the above isn’t ubiquitous but it’s far from uncommon. And while I’m not an advocate of single-gender education, I can see why it has advocates. As it is, the attitude elsewhere that so often pervades is to our wider detriment. Boys are taught that they can get away with things girls can’t, and push the limits. Girls are scolded when they step out of line and for a moment are not ‘sensible’. And any response to physical harm that’s casually dismissed as ‘boys will be boys’ isn’t setting anyone up for a good future. Society needs to do better.

So. Very. Tired.

Published stuff

Presumably reasoning that I’m getting on a bit, an editor at TechRadar asked me to dig into Life before Google: 7 retro services that helped us survive, from Altavista to Hotmail. This went down very well on Mastodon and Facebook, probably saying more about the audiences/my followings there than anything. Nostalgia, eh? That said, I still do have and use some of those ‘retro’ services, and am attempting to wean myself off of Google, because, well, Google.

For Stuff, I wrote about the Raspberry Pi 5, massive Lego kits to make your bank account scream, and playing the phone upgrade lottery, where your new phone resembles the old one, but has things that are temporarily or permanently missing. Tsk.

The latest issue of the print mag is out too. Within, you’ll find words from me on the Atari 2600+, weather alert apps, Android 14, and the very first version of Microsoft Word.

Over at TapSmart, I wrote about essential apps for a new iPhone and a new Apple Watch, along with asking whether the death of the iPhone mini signals the end of small iOS devices.

Finally, for this blog, I wrote Apple, Reduce Motion and the battle for vestibular accessibility. This celebrates ten years since I wrote a piece for The Guardian that spread far and wide and helped more people (and Apple) better understand issues relating to vestibular disorders. Honestly, it’s not often in tech journalism that I feel I’ve written something truly meaningful. This was an exception. That piece mattered. I know it made a difference, potentially to an awful lot of people. That felt really good.

Upcoming stuff

I’m mostly immersed in hardware right now, putting the iPhone 15 Pro Max and Apple Watch Series 9 through their paces. I’ll admit that while I was sceptical about the new zoom on the Pro Max, a trip to our local pond yesterday left me converted, with me capturing some shots I’d otherwise have missed when using Apple hardware.

Other stuff

I’ve mostly been knackered this past week, as some kind of bug swept through our household. As our kid’s class WhatsApp exploded with notifications about covid, we hoped it wasn’t that. Fortunately, it wasn’t, but we’ve still had a rough few days.

Covid itself is back on my mind as well. Last winter was miserable as we mostly avoided going out, not least given that almost everyone in the UK has ditched masks and decided covid no longer exists. I feel quite envious of friends overseas who are getting boosters, since the UK government has decided only folks over 65 can have one this year, unless you’ve an immune disorder or another condition on a very short list. And school policy remains ludicrous, forcing children back after three days, even when still testing positive, unless they have a high fever. It’s all deeply weird.

On a more positive note, we’ve been digging into Welcome to Wrexham, which is back on Disney+. I can take or leave football, but thought this show might be mildly amusing. I wasn’t prepared for a show that would have so many powerful stories and so much humanity at its core. The second series continues in this light, getting you right in the feels in the many moments between the manager swearing at his team and goals hitting the back of the net. Top of the table stuff.

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…