A blog post for a second week in a row? This could become a habit.

Published stuff

My column on Stuff this week is about Telly giving away 500,000 TVs – and selling your privacy. The company’s marketing appears to be aiming for fluffy, but instead keeps hurling darts into ‘terrifying dystopia’. The CEO in an interview saying “we know who you are, we know where you live” is a red flag you can see from space, although you might argue that at least he’s being up-front about the horror.

Elsewhere, I brought my upcoming iPads piece up to date and wrote about Lego’s baffling Bat-box set.

Meanwhile, over on TapSmart – sister publication to our wee indie iPhone mag, Swipe – I outlined what I’d like to see at WWDC23 and explored interior design apps that’ll make me guilty about having done nothing with my home office for years.

In-progress stuff

I filed a piece on noise apps for Stuff, which will feature in an upcoming issue. I hadn’t dipped into these for a while, and was surprised how many quality apps were around. Endel has some really great stuff inside it, even if you only stick with the free version.

Beyond that, I’m still trying to figure out how much I like the Retroid Pocket Flip. (Never let it be said my reviews aren’t thorough!) The fan inside it is a total waste of time – it’s noisy and doesn’t impact on performance. Fortunately, it can be turned off. And the sliders are a bit weird. But… it’s a really nice thing.

Russ over at Retro Game Corps – a YouTube channel I highly recommend if you like retrogaming hardware – suggested is was down to its form factor making it feel like a console rather than an Android phone with controls bolted on. There’s definitely something in that.

Other stuff

Having been getting guilt-trip messages from Yousician, I headed back this week, and improved my score on a couple of vocal tracks.

I’m not a good singer, which isn’t ideal when it comes to getting vocals down for my songs. I adore Yousician’s view that lets you track your pitch, live, against a piano roll and dearly wish Logic had something similar, to help me improve what I input rather than fiddling about with it afterwards.

Still, if I can get my vocals somewhat into shape, this year might be the one where I – finally – release a new album. The first since 2012. Hopefully it’ll be worth the wait…

It’s fair to say this blog isn’t getting the love it once did, and so I’m ripping off Ian Betteridge and writing a weeknote, to get me back into the habit of sharing what I’ve been up to and some hopefully interesting reads.

Assuming anyone’s still reading, of course. (Hello, if so!)

Published stuff

Last weekend on Stuff’s website, I celebrated the iMac’s 25th by remembering when rivals glued bits of transparent plastic on to beige PCs and wondered why Apple’s success didn’t rub off. I said I wanted Apple Arcade to include classic arcade games (and noted why it will never happen). I scared wallets worldwide by updating my guide to upcoming Lego sets. And I today added: Find My iPhone! Google Find My Device! Why not Find My Everything? (Spoiler: because ecosystems.)

And in Stuff’s June 2023 print edition, I round-up six free (including from ads/IAP) mobile games, dig into image editing on phones, and lob a load of snark at the App Store as it approaches its 15th anniversary.

I’m also still plugging away for tiny indie iPhone mag Swipe. Every fortnight, we release a new issue. The latest, #275, has my round-up on photo filter apps, a toolkit for parents wanting to make devices work for kids, and a piece on how AR could change the future of museums.

Online this week, TapSmart reprinted my tutorials on customising Carrot Weather and improving reading habits with Alfread.

In-progress stuff

Among other things, I’m currently buried in weather apps for an upcoming mag round-up, and discovered with a little shock just how inaccurate most of them are locally. For where I live, if I want to know what the weather will do more than a day out, forget it. And even within the next 24 hours can be spotty.

I’m also exploring yet another retro handheld. This time, it’s the Retroid Pocket Flip. I liked the Pocket 3+ a lot, and this one’s more or less the same guts, but in a clamshell that evokes the GPD XD (or, to some degree, the Nintendo DS).

As someone who is VERY OLD, and has taken to writing up a daily retro game over on Mastodon, it’s quite something to see how even very affordable modern tech lets you cart around a huge chunk of gaming history in your pocket. Alas, as I wrote for Stuff a while back, when a lot of modern games are retro, we might not be able to revisit them so easily. (See also: Game history needs to be preserved and made accessible to all, over at the rebooted Wireframe.)

Personal stuff

This has been quite a difficult and tiring week. Not much spare time. Too much work. Lots of juggling. (Well, not actual juggling. That’d be more fun.)

I’ve started Duolingo, primarily for a feature, and partly because my 8-year-old now has a 400+ day streak. I barely managed four. Tsk. I’ve also not been keeping up with my Yousician. (I’ve written music since my teens, and yet can I play instruments properly? Apparently not.)

But the main life thing this week was going to the local hospital about a foot problem and being told I have “possibly reversible” arthritis in my big toes. And then being told about another condition I didn’t know I even had (to do with a weak tendon). This… all gets better once you hit 50, right?

I remember years ago a loved one getting all excited about a letter they were sent about a book publishing deal. Someone was offering to publish their book. All they needed was a bit of money. Or, rather, a lot of money. It made said loved one sad, but a swift intervention and explanation of the scam that is ‘vanity publishing’ stopped a costly mistake. Twitter now apparently exists in broadly the same space.

Making good on an unsaid promise to destroy everything that was once good about the service, Musk has ordered his underlings to simultaneously destroy Twitter’s USP and discover how many gullible users it has. This all comes by way of a new character limit that will be exclusive to subscription tier Twitter Blue.

Having apparently fired all the copywriters, Twitter announced in a block of text that would make even the sternest production editor cry that you’ll now be able to send up to 4000 characters in a single tweet – if you pay to do so. By default, the tweet will collapse to the standard 280 and add a ‘show more’ link – perhaps the sole sensible decision Twitter has made since Musk’s takeover.

The broader picture here, though, is nonsensical. Twitter was a place where ideas spread, but not necessarily where they lived. People typically linked to longform content elsewhere. And, yes, although some folks on the site craft threads comprising a dizzying number of linked tweets, those communications have a distinct rhythm of their own, and are shareable on an individual basis.

4000 characters upends what makes Twitter unique, and welding it to Twitter Blue suggests Twitter thinks content creators should pay Twitter for the privilege of posting original content on to Twitter’s platform – a platform currently run by a man who showcases a flagrant disregard for rules, and presumably can be trusted with IP roughly as far as you can throw a Tesla. That sounds like a pretty crappy deal to me.

Last summer, I wrote a piece for Stuff magazine: AI is primed to eat the world – but it’s dining on what people already created. Within, I explored the then largely nascent world of consumer-accessible creative AI, digging into the visuals and text output these systems could crank out in seconds.

Since then, things have moved on. Not a day goes by now where we don’t see someone mulling over a bleak future for creative industries, as AI becomes smarter – and in some cases, more human – in terms of what it can produce.

Political commentator and columnist Ian Dunt today mulled on Twitter: “About 50% of the time I get excited with AI stuff, 40% I get worried about my career/the general economic implications and 10% entering a state of baffled existential terror.” Marina Evans then responded: “It feels like it’s being used to replace humans in exactly the wrong way.”

I have a lot of sympathy for both viewpoints. It is exciting to see what AI tech can do, but also deeply worrying thinking about how AI can now be used for everything from political disinformation to revenge porn. And in the creative space, I do find it sad that certain people are rubbing their hands with glee, considering AI primarily to be a cost-saving shortcut that removes swathes of paid creative types entirely.

Ideally, AI should be used to offload routine work so humans can do more interesting, useful and creative things. This is happening in, for example, machine learning operations. You often see AI employed in largely automated systems, poring though data at extreme speeds, and then alerting humans to handle key decision points. Without AI, these systems would be unviable or even impossible.

But AI has created a ticking time bomb within certain creative industries. There are already publications using AI to write routine articles – only sometimes bringing in human editors to make corrections. The internet is awash with AI-generated art and pseudo-photography, making illustrators fear for their very livelihoods while AI systems eat these people’s entire creative histories to use as the basis of their own output. There are exceptions – AI is good at dealing with mechanics. In video, it can sometimes sort a rough edit to give an editor a head start. And even in the aforementioned creative spaces, it has value as a trigger for inspiration.

The bigger concern is when higher-ups determine that mediocre/derivative output (which is where a lot of AI is right now) will do. But that misses the snag that when you run out of data to feed into the system, you get a kind of endless remix of grey. And it also glosses over what happens when humans are removed entirely or where key data is missing in the first place. AI can currently write, say, a review of a software product that a layman would read and think is OK. But an expert would spot errors. For an app, whatever. But for something critically important? That’s not good.

I’m not sure where things will go from here, but I’m not optimistic. Today, we exist in a strange space, where people are wowed by AI or hand-wave it away. The Ryan Reynolds ChatGPT Mint ad is a case in point. Reynolds offers good acting – at least, I hope that’s the case because what the AI comes up with is box-ticking mediocrity. However, if everyone does this again in a year, what will the AI come up with by then?

If nothing else, there’s one lesson we all need to learn – yet again – when it comes to disruptive technology: things never quite shake out as you might expect. Technology – and the world in general – is unpredictable. And AI may well turn out to be the most disruptive technology we will see in our lifetimes.

It looks like there’s growing consensus that Dynamic Island’s primary interaction model is wrong. Michael Tsai compiles commentary across two posts, which include people grumping about how a tap on Dynamic Island opens an app, whereas a long-press is required to expand what’s in the island to use its controls. Everyone from Nilay Patel at The Verge to John ‘Daring Fireball’ Gruber seems to want the opposite.

I’ve taken a contrary viewpoint. The iOS Home Screen has long had a similar interaction model. Whether you’re interacting with an icon or a widget, a tap opens an app, whereas a long press (and, previously, Force Touch) exists for actions. To my mind, Dynamic Island follows this existing convention, rather than making up new ones. So if a timer’s in the island, you tap-hold to perform a contextual action, or tap to open the item’s app. Even if you take a more desktop analogy of minimising to a ‘dock’ (which is in some ways how Dynamic Island presents), Apple is being consistent in this regard.

Rob Jonson on Twitter disagrees, arguing we’re effectively talking about a long press for a quick interaction and a tap for a deeper one (that is, opening the app), which “doesn’t seem right to me”. He asks: “Put it another way – is the dynamic island primarily the holder of the full app, or the holder of the expanded dynamic island?”

I’m clearly in the minority here (albeit, at present, a minority that includes Apple), but it’d feel odd to me if a long-press in Dynamic Island was the route to launching an app, just the same as it’d be weird elsewhere in the operating system.