Riccardo Mori

The notch is wrong

July 17, 2022

From John Gruber’s review of the M2 MacBook Air:

There’s a notch. This looks weird at first, I know. But, as someone who’s been using a notched 14-inch MacBook Pro for months, trust me, you stop thinking about it after a few days. It’s a little bit weird when you use an app that has so many menus that one or more of them fall on the far side of the notch, but I don’t regularly use any apps with that many menus. I’ve got 26 apps running on this MacBook Air right now, and not one of them has too many menus to fit on the left of the notch¹.

In that footnote at the end of the paragraph, Gruber adds:

BBEdit and Safari come the closest among my currently-running apps. Safari, because I have both its optional Develop and Debug menus enabled. One app I occasionally use that does have menus that span the notch gap is Safari Technology Preview — because the name of the app itself in the menu bar takes up so much space.

The way he talks about the notch is pretty much the way everyone who has purchased or tested a notched MacBook talks about it, and the way everyone who has ever owned an iPhone with a notch talks about it. It boils down to, Yes, there’s a notch, but you get accustomed to it very quickly and it’s not a big deal.

I am sick and tired of being gaslighted about this. See, the notch is a design detail / design decision that positively angers me, but every time I vent my frustration about it, a lot of tech people out there react as if I were the crazy person, the now proverbial “old man yelling at cloud”, to cite a popular meme.

What also angers me is this casual normalisation of the notch’s presence, like it’s just a little quirk of good old Apple. Heck, in several places across the Web I’ve even read that the notch is what now makes Apple’s devices distinctive. Do you realise how bonkers that sounds? When has an Apple product, especially phones and computers, not been distinctive? Have you ever watched a film or TV series where blatant product placement was not allowed, so they had to use computers and devices with their logos covered or removed? You can recognise a MacBook, an iMac, an iPhone, a mile away. If anything, the notch is what today makes Apple devices distinctively jarring from a design standpoint.

If we look at the notch from a design is how it looks perspective, it is an egregiously hideous detail, both on iPhones and MacBooks. It’s this black strip that looks like someone redacted a part of the display. It’s this dead zone that looks like someone cut off a bit from the display. It’s also a detail that deforms the natural, rectangular shape of any display, of any screen.

If we look at the notch from a design is how it works perspective, it’s a bad design compromise. On iPhones (and on Android phones that copied its design) it has almost completely neutralised the usefulness of the status bar. On Macs, it has split the menu bar in two, creating an unnecessary interference with menus and menu bar icons (or menu extras, as they’re called). And for what? For thinner bezels and a little increase in screen real estate at the top left and top right? (Today’s tech obsession with thinner and thinner bezels deserves a study of its own, by the way). When you go fullscreen, having a MacBook with a traditional display and having a MacBook with a notched display makes no difference, because the usable application space remains essentially the same. You don’t ‘gain’ space.

As I’ve previously written,

If you stop and think about it, it’s utterly ludicrous that a developer should alter their app design to accommodate an element which was arbitrarily put in place by Apple and that is so intrusive it can’t possibly help developers make their app better, UI-wise or usability-wise.

[…]

If my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro had a notch, it would already be problematic and I would be forced to resort to third-party solutions like Bartender to hide most of the menu extras. Don’t get me wrong, Bartender is a great tool, but I want to see those menu extras all the time, because some of them indicate a state, and don’t simply function as a clickable element to access application options.

Again, the notch is an unnecessary hindrance, because even in the best case scenario, it makes you reconsider the way you interact with menu bar elements.

I keep hearing the same song, that the design of the M‑series MacBook Pros and now MacBook Air is the best design we’ve seen from Apple in ages. But I’m not 100% sure about that. (Between you and me, the true peak of MacBook design are the 2015 MacBook Pros). There are certainly praiseworthy details in the industrial design. The hinge’s design, a (finally!) better keyboard, the almost complete disappearance of the Touch Bar from the product line, the overall thermal design on the inside, and the sheer elegance these computers exude when you look at them closed — they look like aluminium slabs carved from a single block of material.

But trackpads are still too big. And that notch is like a gash on the chassis of an otherwise pristine Ferrari. Apple has a decades-long industrial design pedigree. For years their hardware design dictated what was beautiful, functional, cool, and fun in the computer industry. Now I have to read bullshit like The notch is what makes an Apple device distinctive, and I’m the crazy one because I get angry about it? The notch is a design stain in Apple’s reputation. It’s a disgrace that should be repeatedly pointed at and laughed until Apple decides to change course. Exactly like the keyboard with the butterfly mechanism. Too bad that people are opportunistic: they got angry at Apple for that flawed keyboard design because it actually prevented them from using the computer properly. The notch… eh, it can be ignored because wow, look at the fantastic performance of these M‑class MacBooks! Who cares about that black spot? It can be hidden and everyone’s happy!

Even Gruber, in his review of the M2 MacBook Air doesn’t even mention the notch in the section about “What could be better on the Air?” If I had a review unit of that machine, I would lead this part of the review with, The first thing that could be improved on this MacBook Air is the display, starting with the removal of that thing at the top.

The notch should be constantly criticised even if it doesn’t bother you, because it’s bad design; because it’s wrong design. Because there’s nothing essentially advantageous about it. Or beautiful, or functional, or cool, or fun. That part of the MacBook’s display should be treated like a sore spot, where you point and say, There’s room for improvement here.

[Update, 19 July 2022 — Nick Heer points out, both on Twitter and in his piece about the 14-inch MacBook Pro he recently purchased, that the notch allows Apple to put a 14-inch display in a machine that is physically smaller than the 13-inch MacBook Air (the pre-retina model), and that for him this is an acceptable-enough compromise to not make him hate the notch as much as I do. What can I say: while it’s true that the 14-inch MacBook Pro is smaller than the old 13-inch Air, the measurements indicate that the difference is negligible (1.24 cm in width, 0.58 cm in depth), and the presence of the notch to me is more an indicator of Apple’s failure to fit a bigger screen in a smaller lid — the notch itself is a testament to the fact that this couldn’t have been done without sacrificing something. This was not a clean design operation. Again, most Mac users will probably consider this an acceptable sacrifice. I’m not one of them.]

And in case you were wondering, I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I’m still using an iPhone 8, my next iPhone will very probably be a third-generation SE (which has the exact same notchless design as the 8), and I won’t purchase any of the flagship iPhones until the notch disappears from their displays.

On the Mac front things are a bit more problematic. Now that the notch is contaminating the MacBook design, I’m in the same position as I was back in 2018: at the time I didn’t want to get a new MacBook as an upgrade because of the butterfly keyboard fiasco, so I opted for a desktop Mac (iMac 21.5‑inch 4K). Now I refuse to purchase a MacBook with a notch because I simply do not want to reward such an absurd design decision with my money. So I’m once again looking at desktop Macs. An M2 Mac mini paired with a good monitor is definitely going to be a great replacement for my 2017 iMac. And in case I also need an Apple Silicon laptop, an M1 MacBook Air is probably going to be just fine for my needs. Still, it’s a bit of a frustrating situation for someone like me who simply cannot ignore the notch, no matter how loudly you tell me that it’s not a big deal.

Especially you there… yes you, who for years kept telling me how much you hated the design of the iMac G3’s round mouse.

Don’t normalise the notch. Don’t let Apple designers think it’s a good idea. This is not the ‘good’ Think Different of 25 years ago.

“The notch is wrong” was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 17 July 2022.

Sleep Aid app review

July 11, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Software

A few weeks back, I was contacted by Sam Rowlands of Ohanaware, a long-time indie Mac developer (remember Funtastic Photos? I used to have a blast using this editing app back when my main Mac was the 12-inch PowerBook G4). Sam informed me about the imminent release of Ohanaware’s latest application, Sleep Aid, and asked me if I wanted to review it. Of course, was my response. I was then provided with a NFR licence and a link to download the app.

This is not a sponsored review, nor was I given editorial input or anything of the sort. If anything, I was encouraged to be as honest as possible in my observations. I think this is enough of a disclaimer, so let’s proceed with the review.

First and foremost, I have to apologise for the delay. The app’s official launch was June 23. I had hoped to be a bit more prompt with my review, but I’ve been exceptionally busy with my day job these last months. I also didn’t want to rush my impressions or miss anything essential.

What does Sleep Aid do? As the name suggests, the app is meant to monitor your Mac’s sleep and help figure out any sleep-related issues. Specifically — and I quote Ohanaware’s blog:

When the Mac was pretending to be asleep.
When the Mac suffered Unusual Insomnia, Excessive Insomnia and Long Insomnia.
When the Mac awakes directly after being sent to sleep.
When the Mac was woken by Notifications, Bluetooth, Siri and others.
When Sleep Settings, Sleep Aid or the Mac OS was changed.

In theory, this is the kind of very geeky, very specific app that could potentially be abstruse to operate or understand. Quite the contrary. What’s admirable about Ohanaware’s work here is that they’ve created a very Mac-like and user-friendly interface to display and interact with what would otherwise be boring or complex stuff.

You recognise the experience and expertise of a long-time Mac developer from that attention to detail Apple used to teach everyone and then forgot after Steve Jobs’s passing. An important detail in Sleep Aid is the onboarding. Ohanaware knows that the app could be a bit hard to interpret for a regular user, so when you first run Sleep Aid, you’re presented with a series of (skippable) Welcome screens that give you an overview of the app.

These six screens are brief, well-designed, and manage to tell you everything you need to know to use Sleep Aid. I can’t overstate how good an idea this is. Too many apps today just throw their user interface in your face, explain little about how to navigate it, often present controls and UI elements users have to decipher/test themselves in a trial-and-error fashion, and most crucially lack a meaningful in-app Help system. On this front, Sleep Aid makes for an excellent first impression. I mean, just look at its in-app Help homepage:

Here’s Sleep Aid’s main interface (in Dark Mode):

I’ve chosen to feature an image provided with the press kit because it shows a variety of sleep/wake situations that I simply couldn’t reproduce in my testing (I tested Sleep Aid on two Macs, one that is specifically set to not go to sleep, and a laptop that has no real sleep problems, so both their outputs didn’t make for a representative, encompassing UI example).

Sleep Aid’s interface isn’t really that different from a calendar or agenda app. But instead of recording your appointments and events, it keeps track of your Mac’s sleep/wake cycles, every hour of every day, and retains the last two weeks of sleep history, so that you can have a broader picture of what’s happening with your Mac’s sleep. In case of issues and anomalous periods of insomnia, by having the possibility to check over such an extended interval, you could take note of possible patterns and unwanted events that trigger insomnia on a regular basis.

Of course, you can select a specific chunk of activity and see detailed information about it. Here, I have selected the activity for the morning of Saturday 9 July on my iMac:

Note that, as I was hinting before, my iMac is specifically set to avoid sleep when the display is turned off (I had to do this because too often my Razer BlackWidow Elite keyboard was unresponsive after waking up the iMac), that’s why you’re seeing all those red blocks in my calendar. If there were an application or process preventing my iMac from sleeping, Sleep Aid would show it under the Potential software causes section.

In any case, when you’re in this view, by pressing the Suggestions button in the right sidebar you’re directed to Sleep Aid’s Help and offered an explanation of the possible causes preventing your Mac from sleeping, and relevant solutions you can try to see whether things improve.

Two important sections of Sleep Aid are invoked by pressing the Sleep Check and Sleep Settings buttons above the calendar view.

Sleep Check shows Settings and Applications that prevent idle sleep. As you can see, on my voluntarily insomniac Mac, I get a warning that the “Mac is set to stay awake when the display is off” — and the great thing about this is that if I had set this up accidentally, the app can help correct the issue by providing a Fix button on the right.

Sleep Settings both incorporates settings you normally access via the Energy Saver preference pane, and also offers additional features that are specific to Sleep Aid, and these are very useful: you can, in fact, disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth during sleep, and pause Apple Music during sleep. This removes the risk of Bluetooth devices accidentally waking up your Mac (Sleep Aid will, of course, re-enable all wireless connections on wake). If any setting that’s already in place will prevent the Mac from going to sleep, the Sleep Settings panel will tell you about it. Again, my iMac is set to not sleep when the display is off, and I get the warning here as well:

On laptops, you also get additional useful information regarding battery discharge when you select a specific monitored interval. Battery discharge is always a useful additional indicator, both of battery performance as a whole, and of possible anomalous behaviour triggered perhaps by some rogue background process. My 11-inch MacBook Air’s battery looks normal during a regular period of ‘screen off’:

Of course, not all periods of insomnia have to be anomalous. Here, this red block of insomniac activity may be concerning at first blush, but clicking on it reveals that the reason for the insomnia was the AppleFileServer process. In other words, the MacBook Air had File Sharing active, and I had mounted a couple of MacBook Air’s folders on my iMac’s Desktop. With such a connection between the two Macs, the MacBook Air was not allowed to sleep. After unmounting the folders and closing the connection, things went back to normal.

Conclusion

Thankfully, none of the Macs I currently use suffer from strange sleep issues. (My Power Mac G4 Cube does, and I wish there were some vintage Sleep Aid equivalent to diagnose that!) But even if you, like me, have well-behaved Macs with reliable sleep/wake cycles, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy this app. Sometimes (especially in recent times), a minor Mac OS update could be enough to disrupt a good sleep cycle, maybe because of a bug or a change in the OS that makes an otherwise innocuous background system process behave erratically.

Sleep Aid is a tool that does something powerful behind the scenes while presenting a clear, straightforward user interface. There is no other sleep analysis tool like this for the Mac. It’s disarmingly simple to use: you open the app and leave it running. It doesn’t install anything anywhere, no Login Items, daemons, extensions, nothing of the sort. And the app itself is extremely lightweight as a process, so leaving it open won’t impact your Mac’s performance at all.

Another thing I love about Sleep Aid is that, unlike an awful lot of new Mac apps released nowadays, it has very generous system requirements: it supports Mac OS versions as old as Mac OS 10.13.6 and is of course compatible with both Intel and Apple silicon Macs.

You can download it from its dedicated product page on Ohanaware’s website. A 14-day free trial is available, and it’s enough to evaluate the app. There is no subscription (another plus, in my book): a licence costs $25 ($15 as a Launch promotion price until August 12, 2022) and it gives you one year’s worth of updates and support. Licences are renewed manually, which means that if you don’t renew your licence, you can continue using the last version of the app you’re entitled to.

I think Sleep Aid is well worth its price, and in all honesty I would have purchased it even if I hadn’t been generously given a free licence for testing and reviewing purposes. Talented Mac developers capable of delivering ingenious apps that are also very Mac-like and thoughtfully designed from a UI standpoint, are an endangered species, and in my view they deserve all the support we can give.

Note: The good folks at Ohanaware have provided readers of this blog an extra $5 off Sleep Aid’s launch promotion price: just enter the coupon code MORRICK when purchasing your licence to apply the discount.

A few passing notes on Stage Manager, then I’m done with the subject

June 22, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Software

1.

This post on the always-excellent Michael Tsai’s blog is an encompassing must-read to grasp the whole debate about Stage Manager and its bafflingly restrictive system requirements.

2.

I’m insisting on this Stage Manager brouhaha, not because I particularly care about this feature — I still believe it’s an unnecessarily convoluted multitasking UI for a tablet — but because it’s just maddening that the previous iteration of a product is just cut off from it. I understand that in the past Apple has done the same — putting out a major OS release with certain features not being able to run on older hardware — but it usually was the case of much older hardware, not the immediately previous iteration. (Going from memory here; I may be wrong). I find this to be consumer-hostile. And I often have the impression that people at Apple are so insulated that they end up handling these things with a bit of tone-deafness.

In turn, what always baffles me is how some Apple fans and/or pundits just side with Apple on these things. I realise that technology is constantly moving forward, but sometimes tech companies should stop and think more about their customers’ pace and the time (and money) they need to adapt, to upgrade, to change habits, to adopt new features or different workflows. I’m not necessarily advocating the constant hand-holding of customers. I’m aware that any tech company must always be moving in order to keep their products relevant and alluring, but sending customers who purchased an A12Z iPad Pro in 2020 the message that their quite premium device is already not good enough is kind of preposterous.

Josh Centers at TidBITS writes:

In the bluntest terms: Apple could have engineered Stage Manager to work on non-M1 iPads; it just didn’t want to degrade the overall experience to make that happen. This isn’t necessarily nefarious plotting on Apple’s part but rather the standard way Apple makes business decisions. From Apple’s perspective, it’s a total win. Stage Manager:

Provides a rich multitasking experience that makes people want iPads

Encourages users with non-M1 iPads to upgrade

Justifies the purchase of customers who already own M1 iPads

See, I don’t even think Apple “didn’t want to degrade the overall experience to make that happen”. I think Apple didn’t want to waste resources to engineer a separate, optimised implementation of Stage Manager for non-M1 iPads — while being well-aware that most people don’t upgrade their iPads every 1–2 years. Optimising means you work hard to provide an equally seamless experience on a technically less powerful device.

And those hardcore Apple fans who keep backing Apple even when the company makes unpopular decisions display the same kind of tone-deafness. After reading my numerous tweets where I vented my frustration about Stage Manager being restricted to M1 iPads, someone wrote me an email message basically telling me, If you want Stage Manager, just get an M1 iPad, man.

My reply? Hey, just send me 1,200 Euros via PayPal and I’ll get an M1 iPad, man.

These people just think we all have the money tree (Ficus Pecunia) growing in a corner of our living-room.

3.

When Dashboard was introduced in Mac OS X 10.4.3 in 2005, it featured certain effects and animations that not all Macs were able to perform. To enjoy the full experience, your Mac had to be equipped with a powerful-enough graphics card supporting CoreImage. Still, Dashboard was made available for all Macs, and those models with lesser graphics cards simply didn’t show those effects and animations. There was no true loss of functionality, just an absence of further eye candy.

I think Stage Manager could use a similar approach in order to be made available on slightly older iPads. At least on iPad Pros with an A12X and A12Z Bionic chips and 6 GB of RAM, which are inarguably still very powerful devices. Deliver the core experience, strip down the eye candy.

But, as Josh Centers points out in the afore-quoted bit, [This is] the standard way Apple makes business decisions. Business decisions, not technical decisions. Technically, I don’t think a ‘Stage Manager Lite’ isn’t feasible. Technically, an M1 iPad is indeed more powerful than an iPad with an A‑series chip. It’s just that Apple wants M1 iPads to be also perceived as more powerful and desirable. It’s all about creating artificial differences. A maxed out 2020 iPad Pro with an A12Z Bionic chip and a 2021 iPad Pro with an M1 chip are basically indistinguishable in normal use. Only stress tests and the resulting benchmarks reveal differences. When last year the M1 iPad Pro was introduced, many people asked, What’s the point of this machine? when there’s probably just Final Cut Pro and maybe another app out there that would make the purchase of an M1 iPad Pro at least a bit worthwhile.

Apple can make M1 iPads perceivably superior by developing M1-only features. Makes strategic sense. Still a dick move, though, if you ask me (and the people in my Inbox who bought an iPad Pro in 2020).

4.

File under: “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass!” but the joke’s on you, Apple.

This is dedicated to those who messaged me with snarky comments saying (with a straight face, I suppose) that Apple’s innovation can’t be stopped or hampered!

Thanks to @teknisktsett, I was made aware of Tech Reflect, a great blog by a former Apple employee, who has been sharing a few memories, personal stories, and bits of Apple history (at the time of writing, some of them have already been removed, a clear sign that Apple noticed the blog and wasn’t pleased about them — sigh). In a post that has now been taken down (but here’s an archived version), The author of Tech Reflect talks about how in 2006 they created the ancestor of what is now Stage Manager, but the project was scrapped at a later date.

As you can see in the picture, apart from the obvious changes in appearance, the functional changes between that 2006 project and the 2022 version of Stage Manager appear to be rather minimal. So very innovative of Apple to regurgitate a 16-year-old concept. How lazy and unimaginative this company has become software-wise is absolutely depressing.

Reconquering Gmail on older iOS devices

June 14, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Software

Back in April, Google sent me this email:

On 30 May, you may lose access to apps that are using less secure sign-in technology

To help keep your account secure, Google will no longer support the use of third-party apps or devices which ask you to sign in to your Google Account using only your username and password. Instead, you’ll need to sign in using Sign in with Google or other more secure technologies, like OAuth 2.0. Learn more

What do you need to do?

Email software, like Outlook 2016 or earlier, has less secure access to your Gmail. Switch to Office 365, Outlook 2019 or newer, or any other email software where you can sign in using Sign in with Google.

An iOS or macOS device has less secure access to your account info like email, calendars and contacts. To keep using your Google Account on that device:

Remove your Google Account in your device’s settings

Sign in again using Sign in with Google, or select Google as the account type

If that doesn’t work, you may need to update your device’s operating system.

As someone who still own several iOS devices of various vintages, as far back as a first-generation iPod Touch running iPhone OS 3.1.3, this was concerning. You see, as technology progresses and older devices get obsoleted in the most creative ways, their usefulness is also reduced. APIs get deprecated, security protocols get updated, services get discontinued. As time passes, only old apps that let you do stuff locally seem to remain relevant.

Browsing the Web is a pain point. While I still can visit a lot of sites using various browsers on my first-generation iPad with iOS 5.1.1, things are progressively getting hit-or-miss, and more and more often, even sites that do load are now so bloated by crapscripts and stuff that checks if you have an ad-blocker activated, etc., that you either end up with a broken or partially-loaded website, or whatever outdated browser you’re using just crashes. The experience gets frustrating quickly.

Given that email is older than the Web, one of the things these older iOS devices are still good at is handling email. I’ve been relying on them a lot mainly because over the years I’ve been accumulating a lot of email accounts, and it’s nice to have that old iPhone 4 or iPod Touch 4 to quickly check some of the least-used accounts, or those accounts I keep only to receive newsletters and messages from mailing lists.

On all my iOS devices (older and newer), I tend to use Apple’s Mail app because it’s simply good at its job. It’s nothing fancy, but it works. After May 30, all Gmail accounts configured through Mail on older iOS devices have stopped working, because on those older iOS devices, when you configure a Gmail account, it is done in a way Google considers not secure (enough) — i.e. with a username/password method.

This is true for iOS 7 and earlier versions. From iOS 8 onward, when you want to add a new Google email account, you do get redirected to the Sign In with Google Web interface, but I’ve noticed that sign in fails under iOS 8, iOS 9, and iOS 10 (with different errors). I have no way to check what happens under iOS 11. On iOS 12 and newer versions, there are no problems.

Now, since I still use iOS devices running versions as old as iOS 5, I wanted to see if I could find a solution to be able to keep working with my Gmail accounts with an email client, instead of resorting to the Web interface. (Nothing wrong with using a browser, I just prefer dedicated email apps).

At the time of writing this (14 June 2022), on iOS 7 one third-party app that allows you to add Gmail accounts using Google’s more secure method is myMail. As you can see on the App Store page, the app requires iOS 13 or later, so to bring it to your older device with iOS 7, you can use the old trick of downloading it on the supported device, then opening the App Store app on your older device, going to Purchased apps, tapping on the app, and finally you’ll be prompted if you want to download the last compatible version.

The last compatible version of myMail for iOS 7 still works (again, at the time of writing), and I was able to configure a few Gmail accounts on my iPhone 4.

On iOS 8 and newer versions, a better alternative that still works with these older iOS versions is Spark. Again, it requires iOS 13.4 or later, so the trick to have it on your older iOS device is the same outlined above. I was able to successfully configure Gmail accounts on my devices running iOS 8.4.1, iOS 9.3.5 / 9.3.6, and iOS 10.3.6.

Unfortunately, at the moment, I still haven’t found a workaround for iOS 5 and iOS 6. I had an older version of Google’s iOS Gmail app on my iPod Touch 4 running iOS 6.1.6, but it doesn’t work anymore: when you open it, you get a prompt telling you to ‘Update Gmail to continue’ — which obviously you can’t.

It’s only Gmail, at least for now

Note that all this is exclusive to Gmail. If you, like me, use Apple’s iOS Mail app on older devices to handle email with other accounts, these will still work. It’s Google that now wants you to log in to your email by using a ‘more secure’ method. I’m using quotes here because at first glance Sign In with Google to me still looks like you’re signing in with username and password, only on the Web instead of via iOS’s Settings. Maybe it’s because it’s using a more secure HTTPS protocol.

I’m glad there are workarounds, of course, and that, overall, it’s not the end of the world. Surely, I’m also an edge case by still having all these vintage iOS devices around, although I know a few people who are still using iPhone models like the 4S and 5 because they prefer smaller devices, and are therefore stuck on iOS 9 and iOS 10 (which remain great iOS versions, by the way, and a lot of stuff keeps working on them to this day).

Though not a severe issue, I still find it mildly annoying:

In case you don’t receive or miss that warning email from Google I quoted at the beginning, you suddenly start getting authentication errors when trying to access your Gmail account(s) and don’t know what’s happening. And if you’re not much tech-savvy, you may even think the worst (Has my account been hacked!?)
Then, if you’ve always used only Apple’s Mail to handle all your email, you’ll have to start looking for alternatives — third-party clients that have been around long enough that an older version will still work under older iOS releases and it lets you configure a Gmail account using Google’s sanctioned secure method.

It is annoying that tech companies are less and less interested in providing workable fallbacks for older devices or system software versions. To be fair, Google has allowed what they call Less Secure Access for years, though the irritating detail of such implementation was that after a relatively short time, Google would auto-disable it in your account, and you had to manually go back and activate it again (you usually noticed when Google disabled Less Secure Access because logging in to your Gmail account would fail).

Anyway, I hope this article may be of assistance to those who have experienced the same issues. And if you know of older iOS email clients that still work under iOS 5 or 6, and let you configure Gmail accounts properly, get in touch and I will update the information provided here.

Some musings just before WWDC 2022

June 5, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

It’s that time of the year again. Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference is about to begin. Rumour sites share rumours and what-might-happen, with various degrees of trustworthiness. And tech pundits share their wishes. I have been thinking about what to write for at least two weeks. My first half of 2022 has been much busier than expected, both work-wise and in my private life, and the months of March-April-May have been particularly messy, as you may have guessed by the scarcity of updates here. Add to this the fact that, as of late, I’ve been finding writing about tech harder than usual, and I think you won’t have trouble believing that I was very close to not writing anything about the upcoming WWDC at all.

But why has writing about tech been harder than usual? Because as time goes on, the gap between what I want from tech and what tech companies are doing and their priorities just keeps widening. With Apple, it’s largely no different. That’s why writing a piece about my ‘wishes’ with regard to what Apple will present at the WWDC keynote felt utterly pointless — because what I want from Apple is something the company doesn’t seem interested in pursuing, or can’t do because that would imply a course correction that involves too much effort on their part.

Mac OS and iOS/iPadOS

While I have been for the most part pleased with what Apple has done with the hardware since the Apple Silicon transition started, their software keeps being underwhelming at best. It’s not just software quality or questionable design decisions in their operating systems’ UIs. It’s their — how to call it? — lack of platform vision, maybe.

The core feature of Apple’s ecosystem, what has made me choose Apple’s devices over decades and stick with them, is what Apple has generally done better than the competition: hardware-software integration. Apple’s advantage, of course, is that unlike most PC manufacturers the company builds both the hardware and the software.

This integration used to be tight, and it was the main reason behind the It Just Works motto. But over the past… hmmm ten years maybe? Over the past ten years it’s like there have been two distinct companies inside Apple, Apple Hardware and Apple Software, which have communicated with each other less and less frequently and less and less effectually. Apple Hardware has been accelerating over time, sometimes making mistakes but apparently willing to learn from them and correcting them over time. And with the innovation of Apple Silicon, they have done an excellent job at delivering breathtakingly powerful Macs, iPads, iPhones.

Apple Software hasn’t kept up with the pace at all. It has been moving in circles. It has been trying to fix what was not broken. It has introduced regressions in the user interface. It has seemingly un-learnt some good lessons of the past; lessons, I should point out, imparted by Apple Software themselves… only the older guard, people who clearly better understood the importance of software and the role it plays in powering a platform.

So here we are today, with insanely powerful Macs and iPads driven by inadequate operating systems. And as I was writing in Raw power alone is not enough, not only has Apple not been a source for software inspiration and innovation in years, but with their overbearingly protective attitude, they’ve been stifling many third-party developers, especially on iOS/iPadOS. They have been — inadvertently or not — obstructing innovation in software. What’s the point of having iPad Pros that are more powerful than a lot of non-Apple PCs, and then have third-party developers jump through so many hoops and restrict their movements so much that the apps they eventually create are miraculous constructions which have to balance so many things internally that sometimes even a minor OS update is enough to cause disruption.

Platform trajectory

A perhaps unpopular opinion I’ve been holding for a while is that the convergence of Mac OS and iOS/iPadOS as platforms has been a bad idea, and that ideally it should be rethought. I’ve been saying this for years: to have the best of Mac OS and the best of iPadOS, Apple should focus on the particular strengths each platform has. The focus should be to double down on the differences between a Mac and an iPad so that you can one day provide the best computer and the best tablet experience. All these attempts at homogenising Mac OS and iPadOS for the sake of having ‘a familiar environment’ has only been hurting the usability of each operating system.

Remember the iPad at its heyday, when it was essentially a consumption device where you could consume content like you would on an iPhone, but more comfortably due to the iPad’s bigger screen? At that point in time iOS worked perfectly as the operating system for a device with that purpose.

But it was only natural to want to do more with a tablet. It was a device that just asked for creativity and creation. Things came to a crossroads, and in my opinion Apple took the wrong road. Instead of creating ‘iPadOS’ then (let’s say around the time iOS reached version 6), and start working on making a truly tablet-oriented OS, they let the software stagnate on the iPad. For years. For years what ran on an iPad was big iPhone OS and little more. Until the pressure from the more creative and iPad-first users got unbearable and iPadOS was officially created in 2019. And at that point, after not going anywhere for years, what can you do to make the iPad a more versatile and creative device? Have its OS ape Mac OS, essentially. Maybe not quite in a literal or slavish manner, but certainly conceptually.

The Newton’s operating system didn’t want to be ‘Mac OS on a PDA’. NewtonOS was/is an OS built for and around the hardware it ran on. iPadOS’s path seems to be destined to increasingly borrow from Mac OS. This is misguided. And not because I don’t want the iPad to get Mac OS features. That’s not the point.

But this is what you get when you leave a potentially computing-changing device stagnate for years OS-wise. Now its operating system can only go from being big iPhone OS to being little Mac OS because it’s too late to make a U‑turn and rethink the whole software paradigm. “Ooh, but multitasking on the iPad is getting better and will get better!” — Yeah, it only took 12 years to be able to run 3 apps simultaneously. As I said on Twitter recently, even by giving a better multitasking UI to the iPad, it’s not doing the iPad much justice, and it’s still a type of multitasking whose execution is very computer-like, but crammed into a tablet’s interface. The lazy thinking here is, It’s intuitive because it’s like on computers, people are used to that. But imagine making a tablet OS that’s really built around the characteristics, the form factor, and the applications (use cases) of a tablet. Imagine a tablet OS that fully embraces touch but also the stylus/pencil, with gestures and paradigms borrowed from writing and drawing. It could be just as intuitive, but it naturally would require more effort at the design and execution stages. Yet you may have a groundbreaking OS that treats the iPad like the tablet that it is and builds on its strengths as a not-computer, or as an untraditional computer, if you like.

Instead we’ll soon face a sort of ‘OS confusion’ and conflation, and the differences and distinctions will be more superficial, i.e. driven by hardware. iPads will increasingly become touchscreen Macs. And if Apple one day introduces a Mac with a touchscreen, what kind of differences will we be able to appreciate between, say, a 12.9‑inch touchscreen Mac and a 12.9‑inch iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard? Not many, I’d say. And that’s disappointing. Make this thought experiment: if Apple were to introduce a convertible 2‑in‑1 ‘MacPad’, with touch screen and Pencil support, would you buy an iPad? This MacPad would theoretically have it all: the same touch capabilities of current iPads, and a Mac OS that can effectively run both Mac and iOS apps. Maybe some nerds will even think this is the best of both worlds, while it’s probably going to be the worst of both worlds, mainly because of the compromises you’ll have at the user interface level when you ultimately mix up a traditional computer interface with a touch interface.

Based on what I’m seeing today, it’s hard not to think that Mac OS and iPadOS as platforms are on a path to become Apple’s version of Microsoft’s Surface ecosystem. Yes, it’s possible that Apple could end up making a better job at it, but it’s disappointing to think that the future of the iPad is to resemble something Microsoft did about ten years ago. Not because what Microsoft did and is doing with the Surface is a bad thing, not at all. It’s that doing a similar thing now doesn’t strike me as being particularly innovative or groundbreaking.

Here’s one thing I’d like Apple to do: give third-party developers a more Mac-like access to iPadOS. Yes, I think Apple should start differentiating policies between iOS and iPadOS. iPadOS shouldn’t be locked-down like iOS. It should allow for a little more breathing room like Mac OS does. Keeping a tighter control on what iOS allows to be put on an iPhone could still make sense in order to protect users from malware, etc., given that the smartphone user base is all over the place in the tech-savvy spectrum. But iPad users are generally a more tech-savvy bunch, with more sophisticated needs and creative demands. They could only benefit from a more open iPadOS. It would have the same security protections Mac OS has, and things wouldn’t certainly become ‘the Wild West’ Apple fears so much. If Apple has little to offer, software-wise, to push innovation on the iPad, they should at least avoid standing in the way of developers who potentially could. What’s the point of telling developers, Here’s this new amazing iPad, we can’t wait to see what you can do with it if the reality actually translates into, We can’t wait to see what you can do with it, provided you don’t do this, and this, and this, and this, and this.

Last-minute additions before wrapping up

All this talking about iPad, I was forgetting about the Mac. The thing I’d love to see in the next iteration of Mac OS is something I was mentioning at the beginning of this piece: I wish Apple UI designers would stop messing with the user interface and stop confusing ‘simple UI’ with ‘dumb UI’. I wish they started loving usability more than minimalism. Look at this tweet from Mario Guzman and its follow-up. The progress indicator is small and unhelpful as it is. The fact that you can obtain more information by clicking on it doesn’t make things better: such information should be given by default because it’s meant to be glanceable. I should be able to have Photos in a window on the side and check on the import progress while doing something else without having to click anywhere.

And don’t get me started on the icons themselves: at first glance, I didn’t even know that part of the UI was from Photos. Conversely, you could screenshot any part of the old iPhoto and Aperture’s main interface and you would recognise where you were and what that was. The art of making things discoverable and intuitive is to visually state the obvious in whatever environment you are. And to know whether something is obvious enough (an icon, a slider, a control), you ought to test it with users that are outside your design team and their collective hallucinations.

The other, more specific thing I’d love to see on Mac OS is “Time Machine 2”. Time Machine is a great feature that truly made backups easier for regular folks. But since its introduction back in the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard era, the Time Machine interface (and I daresay its performance) has essentially remained the same. I’m not asking too much here, I think — just a less black-box‑y interface, something a bit more interactive so that you’re not left wondering if the entire backup process has frozen or if it’s still in progress when all you get is Preparing backup…. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to have the option of more easily checking older backups and trashing them manually if you need or want it. And performance-wise, well, er, maybe having speedier backups wouldn’t be bad either. Not too long ago I witnessed a Time Machine backup of a Mac’s internal SSD to an external SSD backup drive, both APFS-formatted, and the experience was more underwhelming than expected.

Wrapping up

Now you understand why it felt pointless to write a pre-WWDC ‘list of wishes’. Simply put, Apple is moving in a direction I feel less and less compatible with, generally speaking. The more I want Apple to slow down, do fewer things but better and with a sharper focus, the more Apple seems to do exactly the opposite. I always hope to be proven wrong one day, and that Apple can surprise everyone with some unexpected left-field idea. The way I’d love Apple to operate is perhaps too developer- and consumer-friendly, maybe too countercurrent in relation to the tech landscape surrounding us today. That’s because I was sort of taught to think this way by Apple themselves when they were the industry brilliant underdog when Steve Jobs was still around.