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.

Summer happened. It was on Thursday. Spring before. Autumn now.

Published stuff

Over at Stuff, I wrote What is X, why does Elon Musk want an everything app, and why did Twitter have to die? Technically, it’s an X explainer. (An X-plainer?) But, erm, I may have added snark.

This week’s column is: Packing tech for your summer holiday? Hell-o-day, more like. Which has me reminisce about watching the top third of an in-flight movie while surrounded by smoke, and then moving to modern-day trips, where there’s less smoke, more screens, and – surprisingly – just as much ‘Tetris’ packing.

For TapSmart, I wrote about why Apple should take OS parity seriously and macOS Sonoma features I want on iPhone and iPad.

Other stuff

Despite having had two days off this week, I’m knackered. Primarily because the days off involved packing in summer holiday things for the youngling, in the final days before our Merlin pass runs out. On Thursday, we were at a weirdly empty Chessington. Today: London. All good. But I’m now apparently Gets Tired Too Easily years old, and also Knee Randomly Goes Sproing On London Bridges years old. Tsk.

One major plus this week was that our Chessington trip aligned precisely with the south of England’s ‘summer’. It lasted one day and was glorious. Given that we’d planned the trip weeks in advance, I felt grateful. But I do imagine I’m going to head into autumn feeling robbed about this year’s non-summer. I’ll take it over the horrors of fires and such in the south of Europe, but as someone who has trouble with lack of light, I’m already feeling the evenings drawing in. And there have been so few bright ones this year.

Not-summer in the UK continues. Hoping at some point the rain and cold might stop. In the meantime, send canoes. And fleeces.

Published stuff

Given that it’s the summer holidays and I have a nine-year-old, I’ve been battling Screen Time. So I wrote about it for Stuff: Screen Time = scream time. Parents need more human device tracking.

The latest issue of the print magazine is out, which features my round-up of last-minute holiday apps, a primer on animation with a phone, features on creative kit for illustrators and musicians (which includes my review of the oddball CMPSR joystick thing for making noise), and a fond/snarky look back at the very first Chromecast.

Over at TapSmart, I – with some irony – dig into barbecue apps, and I pit Apple Maps against Google Maps. Issue 281 of our sister mag, Swipe for iPhone, is also out, if you’d like to support our little indie venture.

Upcoming stuff

Next week, I’ll be fully immersed in the murky waters of beta operating systems, as I start work on my annual overviews for what’s coming to iPhone, iPad and Mac. Expect grumbles as I discover Stage Manager still doesn’t do quite what I’d like it to.

Other stuff

A stark reminder, today, about the nature of social media. I read through my Mastodon feed, which was pleasant, chatted to friends on Messenger, and caught up with Threads. Then I opened X/Twitter, and the first DM was from someone who told me to “get f——ed” for some article I’d written. I’ve no idea which one. I suspect it was probably this one.

I do miss what Twitter was, but I don’t care for what it’s become. Musk is making it easier and easier to cut ties with the service, even though many friends still post, and quite a lot of work came my way through it. I don’t have anywhere near the same level of outreach elsewhere (my Threads follower count is tiny). But X feels so angry all the time, and I don’t want to have to deal with that anymore.