Meteorological autumn is here. Bah. Shouldn’t be allowed. *waves fist at sky*

Published stuff

My column for Stuff this week is: Apple endorses right to repair – here’s why it’s not the big win you might think. It is a win of sorts, but from some coverage, you’d think tinkerers had won the lottery. In reality, we’re seeing demands for making the system more equal, not making the system better. And, of course, the proposed legislation does nothing for those who want to truly make devices their own.

Over at TapSmart, I dig into Apple reinventing answering machines. Warning: may contain snark.

Issue 283 of TapSmart’s sister mag, Swipe, is now available too. We offer a free trial and then it costs $2/£2 per month, for which you get two issues. If you can support our indie journalism, please do.

Upcoming stuff

As Retro Gamer gears up for issue 250, I recently realised how much I miss talking to people who created ancient games. Over at Mastodon, I scratch my retro itch with #DailyRetroGame, but… it’s not quite enough. And so I’ve been noting down gaps in Retro Gamer’s making-ofs and looking at what I might be able to do with games I’m keen to explore.

No guarantees. In my experience, it’s quite random whether people who put together amazing games back in the day will talk about them decades later. But I’m hopeful to at least get one or two new articles in this space out sometime over the coming months.

Other stuff

Quite a few apps I’ve written about in the past have abruptly moved to subscriptions. What’s interesting is how they’ve done this and what they’ve decided to charge.

One, notably, appears to be charging an annual fee equivalent to the original one-off price. That seems reasonable for something you use often. But others have decided on annual figures that are many multiples of the original one-off price. In one case, the annual cost rivals six months of a streaming TV service, for an app that’s good but not anywhere near a daily driver.

I do struggle with this. I get that devs need to make a living. But I’m also one of many people with subscription fatigue. I’m not sure what the solution is. Really, Apple should long ago have allowed devs to offer upgrade pricing, but it obviously prefers subscriptions, because that means ongoing revenue. The question is how many subscriptions an individual can tolerate, and what levels of pricing can be sustained for anything beyond apps and services people consider vital. Alas, I’m not sure I have any answers.

Now back in the land of the living. Mostly.

Published stuff

It was bizarre-o-week in games land. I wrote about the Atari 2600+, which mimics the ancient console and lets you plug in original carts and controllers. And then I wrote for Stuff: What unites the PlayStation Portal and Atari 2600+? They’re confusing, weird and very niche.

Both of these products baffle me, for different reasons, as you’ll find out in the column. I know some folks are enamoured by them, mind. There’s a big nostalgia factor to the Atari, and a convenience one to the PSP, as noted by Matt Tate for Stuff, who is eager to throw 200 quid Sony’s way. Even so, both of these for me have ended up filed under ‘no need to exist’.

Over at TapSmart, I look into better and friendlier streaks apps (Apple, take note!), Home Screens eroding app usage, and Monument Valley, which is the latest entry in my classic apps series.

A new issue of sister mag Swipe went out recently too, if you fancy supporting our work for the tiny sum of two bucks per month.

And finally: for this blog, I smashed out some cathartic words: iCloud sucks and it really shouldn’t.

Other stuff.

I was very ill recently and could barely move, let alone exercise. My streaks all went away. It’s almost a relief, and yet I noticed yesterday that when I got to the end of the day, having forgotten to do my 30 minutes on the elliptical, I just thought: sod it.

I’m going to try and rewire my brain using the Streaks app, with settings more generous than Apple’s YOU MUST BE A ROBOT line of thinking. Perhaps that will give me a sweet spot closer to motivation than drudgery. (Also good: Gentler Streak, which when I first tried it basically told me to chill for a bit, on the basis of my stats nose-diving. Nice.)

Elsewhere, I’ve started digging into the guilt piles, which in this house mostly comprise Lego and comics. Two recommendations. Tales of the Space Age is a gorgeous display set for fans of, well, space. And Saga is wonderful comics. I’m about to delve into the third deluxe hardcover. Here’s hoping the fourth will rock up before the heat death of the universe. (The creative team’s hiatus last time was impressive in terms of duration, but a touch frustrating for fans – if understandable, given the creators’ workloads!)

Hello. Rant time. I hate iCloud. I’m so sick of it. Of everything I’ve ever used by Apple, there’s no single other thing that’s this awful. And that includes Game Center, which literally didn’t work for months, because Apple apparently forgot it existed. (Games didn’t – they failed to load when Game Center itself failed.)

iCloud is great when it works. Seamless. You don’t notice it’s there. But it’s dire when it fails. Last year, it broke for a whole lot of people. Widgets and apps stopped working. And because iCloud is opaque, it wasn’t possible for users to do anything to fix the problems.

During that period, I suffered unrecoverable data loss for the first time in over a decade. I now cannot trust iCloud to house documents created by one of my key daily driver apps. It’s just too risky.

There are other niggles. Last week, iCloud populated my shared Downloads folder with dozens of empty folders, making me temporarily freak out until I found they were folders I’d deleted months ago. (Thanks, Time Machine! At least you work.) When you move a folder, iCloud sometimes (not always) inexplicably updates its creation date. And then there are times when it just won’t sync data.

I had that happen this morning. I was happily populating an app with a bunch of data, and the iPad and Mac versions were oblivious to this. And also each other. The solution? Turn iCloud off and on again for all those apps, which naturally nuked the new data. It was only half an hour of time wasted, but this shouldn’t happen. It should just work. Why iCloud is still as flaky as it is, despite being the backbone of dozens of Apple services – and instrumental to countless Mac and mobile apps – baffles me.

Summer holidays! Sun! So naturally the entire house comes down with THE PLAGUE. Sigh. Fortunately, at least, not that plague. Anyway…

Published stuff

My Stuff column this week is The Apple Watch X I want is one that’ll stop me doing stupid things, partly written in a haze. In what’s undoubtedly a journalist prize-winning first, the opening line is “CRANK CRANK KA-CHUNKK FRRRRRRRRPPP!” That’s a good thing, right?

Over at TapSmart, I explored study aids for iPhone and inducted 1Blocker into my classic apps series.

And for this very blog, I… posted something that wasn’t a weeknote. I know. I’m as surprised as you are. Threads and Mastodon are not doomed. What is: an expectation they can replace Twitter is quite self-explanatory, I think.

I get the feeling lots of people are looking for that single social network solution where they chat with friends, laugh at jokes, follow breaking news, get customer support from brands, have exchanges with celebs, and so on. Those days are gone, atomised in a whiff of Musk.

Upcoming stuff

For once, I don’t have an office full of hardware that’s not mine (hurrah!), but I do have a new Apple TV I’ll be putting through its paces for a proper explainer. I’m sure there are many others in the wild, but I’m writing one, so there.

It would be hilarious to suggest I’ll release a new album soon, but I did at least make some progress this week on a few tracks. I now try to avoid looking at the ‘date created’ stamp on all of them, mind. I suspect by the time I’m done, streaming will be too, and we’ll be having music injected directly into our brains. On the plus side, music is my happy place. So I should do more of it, regardless of whether it goes anywhere .

Other stuff

Last Sunday, on the way home from having sat in a field for four hours with some friends, I started to feel… not good. I then spent roughly the next ten hours making sure I was within running (and, later, desperate zombie-like staggering) distance from the bathroom. The dreaded noro had got me.

Still, it made me appreciate anew is the basics in life. That first moment of not being in crushing discomfort. Being able to tolerate the slightest sip of cold water. (The best thing I’d ever tasted, I thought, at that moment.) The flat lemonade I found I could carefully drink the following day. Half a banana: the meal of kings.

I’m still recovering now, and slowly returning to normal. But I am looking around and wondering a little more what normal should be. Not that I’d wish noro on anyone to end up in a similar space.

‘Threads is doomed’ articles are doing the rounds, based on sometimes questionable stats around how many users the site’s lost since its dramatic debut. Mastodon has gone through the same story at least twice. Although, bizarrely, some folks on that platform crow about Threads’ misfortunes, missing that the basic ‘Twitter and closed will still win’ narrative affects that service too.

The more interesting numbers in Time’s Tech Brief come from people who abruptly stopped posting. Again, the same happened on Mastodon. There was a huge influx of people, many posting there because they claimed staying on Twitter didn’t align with their integrity. And then they inevitably mostly scurried back to Twitter. Why?

Much of this feels like entitlement. They expected everyone to follow them, instantly, to somewhere new. And when they broadcast and realised the audience wasn’t there, they didn’t want to build again and so returned to the House of Musk  – even though the audience there is diminishing.

I get it. Starting again is hard. It can feel too much. Doubly so if your career/income in some way relies on a larger audience you’ve spent years painstakingly building without the brand/visibility advantage afforded to a major celebrity. And if you’re used to engagement, it can be quite humbling to suddenly be surrounded by silence. I found this myself when I first joined Mastodon in 2018. Since then, things have changed, in part because I invested time in the service, but also because I wrote a piece on Mastodon that was widely shared. I don’t see the same thing happening on Threads, where, I dunno, B-list tech journo doesn’t exactly give you any creds with the algorithm. But whatever. I still have the occasional nice exchange with folks there. That’s enough.

What I miss more is the diverse and fun group of people I read and chatted with on Twitter. Mastodon covers part of that and is good in its own right, but it’s not the same. I miss comics artists and comedians, news anchors and specific creators of oddball little projects. Then again, nothing is going to be the same as Twitter – perhaps ever again.

Twitter was a strange one-off where lots of different people came together from a huge range of fields, and that was combined with breaking news and brands wanting to help you (via DM) rather than just sell to you (as on Threads). Now, Twitter is increasingly a hideous bloodbath of extremism, Mastodon is a haven for geeks, creatives are over at Bluesky, various folks are trying to make the best of Threads, and so on.

I don’t think any of these services is doomed. Some might not last. What is doomed is the notion that Twitter can be replaced, because it can’t – not even by the current Musk incarnation of Twitter.