The iPad mini jelly scroll situation taps perfectly into my favorite category of controversy: things that have objective facts mixed with subjective experience. Beware the idea that we all see, hear, and smell the world the same. | Continue reading
Apple will be announcing new Macs next week, and that could mean it’s finally time for them to update their Magic accessories (Mouse, Keyboard, and Trackpad) in some manner. Odds are, they’ll just get revved with USB-C instead of Lightning, but it’s always possible | Continue reading
The Verge is reporting on Joker: Folie à Deux, one of the most derided movies of 2024, coming to digital storefronts less than a month in theaters. The film released in theaters on October 4 this year, and it will be available to buy online October 28, so 24 days | Continue reading
What it was like being a part of my first Apple hardware embargo. | Continue reading
Chris Welch for The Verge: Apple’s AirPods Pro hearing health features are as good as they sound Being able to use Apple’s $250 earbuds as a hearing aid is a huge deal for those who can benefit from this capability. That’s substantially less expensive | Continue reading
Blooper Team’s Jacek Zieba, who just released the Silent Hill 2 remake, in an interview with GameSpot: Bloober Team Says It's Done Making "Shitty" Games And Silent Hill 2 Remake Wasn't A Fluke [P]eople in the studio were like, 'Okay, | Continue reading
Riley Hill: I Bought A Vision Pro After Everyone Said It Was Dead After about two weeks of using the Vision Pro, Riley has some interesting thoughts about using the Vision Pro for the first time many months after the hype cycle has cooled off considerably. He’s pretty | Continue reading
Yesterday I posted this video about a Mac app called Supercharge which adds a number of quality of life features to your Mac, one of which is the ability to cut and paste files in the Finder. I commented how nice this was, as it was something I use all | Continue reading
David Pierce: How Digg helped invent the social internet In its early days, Digg was something like the homepage of the internet. Any user could submit a link, and then any other user could either promote it with a “dig” or demote it with a “bury.” | Continue reading
Lori Glavin: FIDO Alliance Publishes New Specifications to Promote User Choice and Enhanced UX for Passkeys The FIDO Alliance has published a working draft of a new set of specifications for secure credential exchange that, when standardized and implemented by credential provider … | Continue reading
Last night I pushed an update to Quick Reviews to make 2 changes: The reset buttons on the color, text size, and score names settings are now green and actual HTML buttons with aria labels, making them more accessible. I've disabled the "API" that allowed people | Continue reading
Back in May when the latest iPad Pros were announced, there was some consternation about how the Apple Pencil story was still confusing, and I wrote: I think it’s a sure thing that the 11th generation iPad will one day be a thing, and while I’m | Continue reading
Casey Newton many weeks ago: Three apps that made me more productive this year A year ago this week, I wrote here about why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter. In short, it took me too long to learn, software can’t automate your thinking. But I | Continue reading
Kyle Orland for ArsTechnica: Apple study exposes deep cracks in LLMs’ “reasoning” capabilities The results of this new GSM-Symbolic paper aren't completely new in the world of AI research. Other recent papers have similarly suggested that LLMs don't actually perform formal reason … | Continue reading
Steven Aquino writing for Forbes: Home Depot’s Rollout Of Apple Pay Reminds Apple Pay, Accessibility Are One My friend Chance Miller reported this week for 9to5 Mac that Home Depot is ending its laggardness by finally beginning to roll out support for Apple Pay in its stores. Thi … | Continue reading
Mastodon recently added the ability to natively add author labels to links on Mastodon. Basically, when a link is posted, you can have your Mastodon account automatically tagged so people can more easily find you. I would have written up an explainer on how to do it, but Robb Kni … | Continue reading
Last year, I thought Mujjo’s iPhone cases were excellent. I thought they were so good that when I realized I actually wanted the iPhone 15 Pro Max, I bought a second case from them without hesitation. So when they reached out to me this year to see if | Continue reading
Above is a photo I took of the Statue of Liberty last night from a boat. It looks pretty good, right? The colors are nice and there's a decent amount of detail for a pic taken in total darkness. But 2 megapixels?! To give you some context, this | Continue reading
"Good UX" means balancing a lot of (sometimes conflicting) priorities. What's good UX when you can't make everyone happy? | Continue reading
I was getting the feeling lately that I’ve been writing a lot here lately, and I already had an export of all of my blog posts, so I decided to check my word count each year over the last 8 years. As of yesterday, I’d written | Continue reading
Apparently the last week of online discourse around Meta’s new Orion prototype struck a nerve with me because I posted an all-timer in terms of snark recently. This comes after years of two general frustrations with how some people cover and talk about technology online (especial … | Continue reading
Good lord am I seeing a lot people talking about Meta’s new prototype hardware, Orion. Are people losing their minds? Why is this anything of note? Why even comment on this thing at all? It certainly hasn’t caught my attention. No sir, I’m a | Continue reading
NotebookLM is an interesting project from Google that lets you upload a ton of documents about whatever you want, and then "chat" with them. Another thing they just released is the ability to generate a "podcast episode" about the things you've uploaded. The audio | Continue reading
I got Lasik 2 years ago and here’s who it’s going. | Continue reading
Lee Peterson: Sometimes It Takes Just One Random Post to Grow Your Blog This was completely random and it shows that sometimes you don’t need some sort of plan, just write what comes to mind and that you want to share. You’ll get found and readers | Continue reading
Elizabeth Lopatto writing for The Verge: X blocks links to hacked JD Vance dossier X is preventing users from posting links to a newsletter containing a hacked document that’s alleged to be the Trump campaign’s research into vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The journalist wh … | Continue reading
This might be the longest quote ever on Birchtree, but stick with me here. This is Matt Mullenwerg, CEO of Automattic, writing on the official WordPress blog (emphasis his): WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, … | Continue reading
Earlier today I saw a post from someone who has had their iPhone stop charging at 80% for the past year and they didn’t see much, if any difference in battery health than their coworkers who didn’t do anything, and let the iPhone do its “ | Continue reading
I saw a post on Threads recently that is of a general genre of conversation I see on a regular basis. The first post was: Just going on purely laptop tech reviews you would think 90% of the US population were employed as video editors. Which got the reply: You | Continue reading
The above screenshot is from my computer. There are 16 apps that have screen recording permissions, and each one of them not only needs that permission, I intentionally gave them that permission when I installed them. I've been carrying along with my life, happy with how these ap … | Continue reading
I recently posted this on Threads: My regular reminder that anytime someone says “99% of users” is completely making things up and has done precisely zero investigation outside of their own experience. Once you notice this, you start to see it everywhere. People have a very bad h … | Continue reading
Last year I cancelled a bunch of subscriptions to see what was actually worth my money. That went great, so this year I'm doing it again! | Continue reading
There are several things I would like to see improve with the Vision Pro (and VR hardware in general), but it’s recently hit me that the main issue I have with using it is that despite all of the video passthrough and digital eyes on the outside of | Continue reading
There are a billion things in iOS 18 this year, and I highly suggest checking out Federico Viticci’s review over on MacStories tomorrow, but here are a few things that have actually been impactful for me since installing the beta back in June. This is addressing things in | Continue reading
Nicole Sperling for the New York Times: Apple Rethinks Its Movie Strategy After a String of Misses Apple executives in Cupertino were already questioning the entertainment units over the amount of money being spent on movies, and the people said there was a thought within the com … | Continue reading
Long time Birchtree readers know I love data, and love data even more when I can throw it into a graph. I’m also a fan of testing things that everyone generally agrees are true, but no one seems to have any data to back up. That brings us | Continue reading
I was researching for my last article when I stumbled upon this post from John Gruber in 2011 where he responds to a bad article on Time.com about Windows 8. What was interesting to me was this bit about how Excel on an iPad with the ability to open | Continue reading
Apple on their developer site today: Set Up Win-Back Offers If your app offers auto-renewable subscriptions, you have the option to set up win-back offers to encourage lapsed subscribers to re-subscribe on the App Store. You can configure offers in App Store Connect to be display … | Continue reading
There’s a trope online where someone will post pictures of the iOS screen when alarms and timers are going off and they’ll lament, “why are the actions reversed, it’s confusing!” This post will get lots of engagement with people agreeing, but there | Continue reading
I have an evolving theory that buttons are amazing and people love them. There were rumors Apple was going to remove all physical buttons from the iPhone. As recently as April of this year, there was reporting that the iPhone 16 lineup would have no physical buttons! But in 2 | Continue reading
Immediately following the presidential debate last night, Taylor Swift announced her endorsement of Kamala Harris on Instagram: Recently I was made aware that Al of 'me' falsely endorsing Donald Trump's presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears aroun … | Continue reading
It’s been said Apple cares about themselves first, then their users, then their developers in that order. In this post, I explore whether I think corporate or individual freedoms should be prioritized. | Continue reading
I’ve been off the internet all day and wanted to share some gut reactions to the updates Apple just announced before being influenced by others. So, in the general order they talked about things, let’s go! Apple Watch Series 10 This looks like a nice update | Continue reading
We're 24 hours away from Apple announcing new iPhones and Watches, and I'd love it if I can resist the unending urge to always keep up with the latest and greatest. | Continue reading
Zack Zwiezen: It's Really Nice That Astro Bot Just Has One Release Date Astro Bot is a really good video game and a great reason to own a PS5. Its colorful visuals, myriad gaming references, and excellent platforming have already made it one of 2024's best | Continue reading
Press release from the US Justice Department: Two RT Employees Indicted for Covertly Funding and Directing U.S. Company That Published Thousands of Videos in Furtherance of Russian Interests “As alleged in today’s indictment, Russian state broadcaster RT and its employees, includ … | Continue reading
David Wallace-Wells in an op-ed for the New York Times: What Will We Do With Our Free Power? In 2023, the world installed 444 gigawatts of new solar photovoltaic capacity, according to Bloomberg. While that figure can be hard for normie brains to process, it represents a staggeri … | Continue reading