interpol_p

> I will mostly have to take your word for it that hover actions are not observable by the application. Will make games... More amusing than usual, with no memory of being looked at for characters.

It's described in the Keynote. This is the exact quote:

"For example, where you look is very personal. It can give away something about what you're thinking. In Apple Vision Pro, where you look stays private. Eye input is isolated to a separate background process, so apps and websites can't see where you are looking. Only when you tap your fingers do results get communicated, just like a mouse click or tap on other Apple devices."

I can't speak to whether extra controllers are a good idea for Apple. From the impressions I have watched and read from VR enthusiasts (e.g, Norm from Tested) they have very high praise for the input and UI. I agree with you, however. I don't think typical VR games will be big on this device

We shouldn’t crow about people being fired. But I’ve had that anti-Apple attitude leveraged at me in _so many meetings_. Having to smile and be polite to the face of people who keep referring to your choice of hardware as “fisher price” or “a toy” or “for sheep” is tiring and infuriating. I’m an engineer, and I made my decision with as much technical and design knowledge as anyone else

In my experience it’s also extremely one sided. I work with Windows, Android and Apple colleagues and the amount of times I hear “Xcode is crap haha”, “How can they live with such a shitty OS” etc. makes me wonder if all this is rooted in deep insecurity or something? Some Windows-centric people in senior management places I have worked will use me taking my iPhone out of my pocket as an opportunity to criticise the platform, my choice, and so on

I’m sure that some Apple users are quick to do the same, but in my experience they just tend to get on with their lives

The gaze tracking is process isolated. Only when you tap is that location ever communicated to the application process — so they had to build a UI API that supports configurable hover behaviour where that hover behaviour is never readable by developers

They've thought through the accessibility features, how VoiceOver works with the headset, dynamic type sizes, etc.

Designing this sort of consistent API across a whole platform, where it's not only easy to use, but really delightful, is the bit that's exciting to a lot of people

I have collected a bunch of A/VR headsets and developed for them. None of them think deeply about these things, so they just haven't been that interesting. They are more "we supply the hardware, you supply the opinion about how it should be used." I really want the other side of that story

The Disney part of the keynote was all "dreams work." It was complete nonsense with no clear direction. Apple's stuff, while it might be wrong, is at least opinionated and clear

There is a lot of marketing sheen, but there's a clear design opinion about human computer interaction that comes through. That's the exciting bit that I think people react to, sometimes without realising

Oh I totally agree. The scenes with parents/kids were so off, and felt emotionally jarring

> And I am struggling to see any UI design/consideration that was new in this clip. Do you have a rundown on exactly what was amazing?

The State of the Union video has more detail. All of SwiftUI and UIKit now sits on top of their material-based renderer. You can now render a Metal Shader on a SwiftUI view in one line of code. They have consistent and detailed paradigms for how menus, toolbars, productivity apps etc should work on this platform (likely from porting all of their own). 3D models fit seamlessly into the UI view hierarchy. They have detailed design and interaction constraints for all new types of spatial windows, as well as legacy apps. All of this even goes back to their Objective-C APIs, which are updated appropriately

Then they've implemented things like process isolation for eye-gaze tracking. Simply so apps can't read your gaze and abuse that data. No one else makes decisions like this in a v1 product. It probably required a whole team of people to get right, considering that gaze is the primary interaction method a user will be using with your app

It's hard to explain just how much depth of thought has been put into this platform. They have addressed a lot of hard questions with some very good design, and above all, they are opinionated about their platform. In every corner and detail there is a strong design choice about the right way to design and implement that interaction. That opinionated design is why people get so excited, and it can be so jarring when they get it wrong

> The reality-shaping power of Apple's demo maestros is truly admirable.

It really isn't just the demos that wow us, and it isn't just the high-end device. The device is packed with tech, for sure. But 80% of the story here is Apple's strong design choices:

"Here's how you will interact with the world. Here's how other people fit in. This is how UI is going to display. We rewrote our entire UI stack on top of a physically based renderer so developers can comfortably recompile their millions of existing apps. Here's how we process-isolated the gaze tracking so no third-party app will be able to data-mine it for personalised Ads"

They didn't just build a headset and call it a day. They didn't show useless, aspirational demos (though during the keynote, Disney certainly showed a whole lot of rubbish). They developed the UI paradigms, human interface guidelines, put huge thought towards accessibility. Those of us impressed with this are not wowed by just hardware, we're amazed by the amount and strength of design thought put into every aspect of your interaction with this computer. There's so much _opinion_ about what this computer should be, and how we should use it, that's the exciting thing

Their opinions may not pan out in the future. But I'm so glad _someone_ is having strong opinions about human computer interaction in the AR/VR space, because Meta and the rest certainly don't

There's a "boxing" workout, but yeah it tore apart the third-party band I was using. Since then I have used my older Apple bands for boxing workouts and it survives. The watch itself is totally fine

I had no idea that third party straps connected differently! Thanks for the info.

I have had two third party straps tear off, once during boxing and once while playing with my kids. The (much pricier) Apple ones never have, and so I only use those for sport as well.

The crash popup still asks if you would like to send a report, along with an optional comment. I have used it a number of times to describe the app state prior to the crash

Few people were repairing their Intel MacBooks, even if they were more serviceable. It's not really typical of Apple users to expect to have to open their devices (me included, and I've been using MacBooks since the PPC days)

It's not bad to want to pull apart and service your own laptop, but for me it's a tool to get a job done and if it breaks I'll send it to Apple to fix

My previous Intel Retina MBP lasted from 2012 to 2020, and now my dad uses it because it still works fine. My younger brother uses my ~2008 17" MacBook Pro (it only runs on wall power, though). Repairability has just never been much of a concern in my use of Apple stuff

I use it around 50 - 100 times per day. Mostly playing music, sending messages, controlling lights in the home, weather, timers, and turning on/off/opening apps on the TV

There are definite frustrations, mostly around playing music. Around 5% of the time, Siri will play the wrong album or artist because the artist name sounds like some other album name, or vice versa. I wish, here, that it used my Music playback history to figure out which one I meant

In the case of AirTags, Apple simply does not have that information to give:

> Devices that relay the location of your AirTag also stay anonymous, and that location data is encrypted every step of the way. So not even Apple knows the location of your AirTag or the identity of the device that helps find it.

They can be compelled to spy on you. They have also clearly put systems in place that make it very hard or impossible for them to do so without re-architecting their entire ecosystem of devices

As far as I am aware, they do not sell information to advertisers. Doing so would be a bad business move for them, anyway (ditching long term brand trust for short term profit?)

On AirTag location privacy, from Apple's site [1]:

> Only you can see where your AirTag is. Your location data and history are never stored on the AirTag itself. Devices that relay the location of your AirTag also stay anonymous, and that location data is encrypted every step of the way. So not even Apple knows the location of your AirTag or the identity of the device that helps find it.

I don't think they're lying about this.

[1] https://www.apple.com/airtag/

Just a note that apps are not responsible for that breadcrumb and have no control over it (if you are meaning the little one that lives in the status bar?). The OS adds that in cases where apps link out to other apps

To go back in all cases you can swipe the home indicator to the right to go back to the previous app you were in. Or you can fling it up to about half way to see all previous apps

Side note that these Emacs shortcuts also work on iOS pretty much everywhere (you even get it for free in completely custom text renderers, so long as you adopt the UITextInput protocol)

I get this from other parents.

A few years ago I let my 3 year old ride his bike with his older sister and brother (5 and 7 years old).

I walked with them, but allow them to get ahead of me, up to about 500m - 1km (~0.6mi). My instructions were always "wait at the next road so we can cross together."

Once, when they were out of sight for a while, I rounded the corner to find them surrounded by a concerned couple who proceeded to tell me off for allowing the youngest one out of my sight. I disagreed with them and continued to allow my youngest to ride many hundreds of times since. I got dirty looks from them a few times on subsequent walks.

It is wild that even a company like Panic, as well-loved, and with one of the richest histories on Mac, gets the same treatment as anyone else from App Store Review.

In a way it's kind of good to know that there is no special treatment, but this is poor behaviour towards the developers who made your platform.

Even if they were to somehow show everything up-front, it would be user hostile design. No one wants to read and consider every possible permission prior to granting it to the thing they want to use

Even if there were 20 items in the list, people would hit "OK," it's like accepting terms and conditions. Most people won't read them, they're trained to hit "Agree"

The whole model needs an overhaul. Extensions should be required to ask whenever they need the specific resource, rather than asking up-front. And each gated resource should get its own prompt with its own informative design. Similar to permissions on mobile

I don't understand why Chrome even does up-front permissions.

iOS got this right from the start: ask on the first attempted access of the gated resource, allow the user to grant the permission once or on an ongoing basis, respect the choice. Don't allow permission prompt spam.

Even Android recently moved to this model from up-front permissions, so Google is aware of it.

I dislike the desktop implementation of push permission request in macOS Safari

It presents a modal popup asking for permission. A few times I have accidentally clicked "Allow" only to have to hunt through my notification settings for the offending website to remove it

Web sites should not be allowed to present modal, native UI that can interrupt the browser. They should be contained to their window

A better implementation would be to allow the browser to show a bell or other icon in the main UI indicating the website offers push notifications. Clicking on that would inform and allow the user to opt-in

Great to see sol2 mentioned. We use it in Codea[1] to bind to our game/render engine. The article is right about the lack of safety and inscrutable messages, though. Recently we bound almost the entire iOS Objective-C APIs into Lua, though not using sol2, this used the Obj-C runtime headers and a lot of Lua C-hackery.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/codea/id439571171

To find the RAW feature you need to do two things:

Go to Settings -> Camera -> toggle Apple ProRAW on

Then in the Camera app there will be a "RAW" button that you can tap on to enable RAW capture

Third party camera apps like Halide (https://halide.cam) focus on just using the RAW capabilities by default

I have never used the MagSafe connector for my 14" MBP. It either sits docked with my monitor which provides power over USB-C, or when I take it, I don't take the power brick. I've taken it camping over three days and never had to charge, so having a dedicated charging port doesn't really suit my use (also not a fan of them adding HDMI back to the machine)

I have the same complaint about weight

I upgraded from the 13" M1 Air to the 14" MacBook Pro M1 Max

While Blender performance (rendering especially) is much faster, I sorely miss the MacBook Air's portability. The 14" is built like a brick. Compile times are faster, video editing is nicer with more RAM in the Pro, but it's a really tough call given just how different the weight is

I've had that replacement (the -> thé) and have never even enabled or used a French language keyboard on my device. At this point I disable autocomplete and autocorrect completely, on macOS and iOS.

In general I find macOS very stable. Though I do not use any of the same apps you do aside from Sublime Text and qBittorrent

On qBittorrent specifically the application can often "feel" like it is hanging because it brings up modal windows behind the main window, meaning you need to drag the main window away to interact with the modal and the main window will be unresponsive in that time. This may make it feel like it is hanging, when really it's just down to a non-native macOS application not using the correct APIs to display modal sheets

I do occasionally get other application crashes, maybe a couple per month, usually it's down to the application doing something it shouldn't. My current macOS uptime is 28 days, which is when I last installed an update that required a restart

I had my 2012 MacBook Pro for 8 years, before giving it to my dad where it continues to be used (though under far less load than when I had it).

I did get the battery replaced once, it was free. The screen got replaced twice, also for free (the second time they just did it when replacing the battery because the person at the Apple Store noticed a slight wear on the edge anti-reflective coating)

Notes is one of my favourite apps on iOS. I just realised recently I could drag-and-drop recordings from Voice Memos right inline into a note on iPad and it synced everywhere, with playback controls right under my text

It also looks nice, syncs and collaborates well. I have everything from my shopping lists, to scans of all my kids' artwork, to design documents for coding projects

I have to use OneNote at work and it is abysmal. It is plain how little care and love appears to go into that product

People keep saying this but I have never found it to be the case for me. I meet and collaborate with amazing engineers on Twitter, and often get help with tricky problems. I have also had a lot of success using it to spread the word about my own projects.

I think this is less about control, and more about avoiding the 15-30% fee charged for selling through the App Store

As a user, I have always been able to run what I want on Apple devices. Most recently I found my kids were seeing bad recommendations on the YouTube app on Apple TV. I did not like the recommendations, or the adverts. I was able to clone Yattee[1] from Github and build it to the Apple TV from my laptop on the couch

Not as easy as side-loading, but also not difficult. Now when you want to _sell_ something like this, you can't. I'm fine with that. Freedom to run code is different from the freedom to package it up and sell it on a platform you don't own

Google makes side-loading hard[2] on Android for exactly the same reasons. They give preferential treatment[3] to big apps to prevent them from starting competing stores

I have the level of control that I like over my devices. I can't install my own OS on an iPhone, but there's great developments on Mac[4]. Given the hardware is now basically identical, this seems OK

[1] https://github.com/yattee/yattee

[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/fortnite-android-sideloadin...

[3] https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/08/30/google-allegedly-of...

[4] https://asahilinux.org

You're right. I confused two APIs, there is also `defersSystemGestures(on: edges)` which allows an app to prevent a swipe to go home initially. A lot of fullscreen apps do this so I thought it was the same API