Riccardo Mori

People and resources added to my reading list in 2021

January 31, 2022

Since 2013, come January, I’ve written a recap of the most notable discoveries and additions to my bookmarks and feeds made during the previous year. I’ve also taken the opportunity to talk a bit about what kind of stuff interests me, what’s worth checking on a daily basis, what kind of content annoys me and puts me off, and I’ve also talked about my RSS feeds management. Last year I even added a new section on fun and useful online tools I’ve encountered while browsing the Web or via other people’s suggestions and recommendations.

This year I’ve managed to catch January by the tail, as this month has truly slipped away, what with the general increase of work assignments and personal stuff going on behind the scenes. But here we are, on the last day of January, still honouring the tradition.

As I wrote in January 2020 and January 2021, for the past five years the influx of new, consistently interesting resources to read has been dwindling. And at the same time I’ve noticed previously added people/resources become unfocused and less interesting, with edge cases getting so annoying that I removed them from my feeds or daily reads. When I mention this disappointing trend, usually someone appears in my email inbox telling me that it’s not true, that there’s plenty of great stuff out there, and so forth. I don’t doubt it, but when I talk about the problem of finding resources worth reading and adding to the pool I routinely check, it’s always from a personal standpoint. It’s about what I find and what I stumble upon. And I’m pretty sure that the most impactful factor influencing the disappointing trend I’ve mentioned is having less and less time to dedicate to actively search for new people and resources, and then having less and less time to catch up with everything I put in my RSS feeds.

Blogs: the Cinderella of current media

Again, this is a subjective impression and observation, not a scientifically verified phenomenon, but from where I stand I’m noticing a decrease in the use of blogs as means of personal expression and exposition. On the one hand you have video, whose increase in popularity over the past years has been quite remarkable. On the other hand, the written word is increasingly used in shorter-form capacity. Brief articles, often with little to no substance, often badly written. And then of course ‘micro-blogging’, which for me is a staggering euphemism that makes 280-character-long updates sound better than what they actually are.

Blogs and long-form pieces are increasingly perceived almost as ineffective solutions to explain something or make a point. They’re perceived as the most laborious way a creator/author could choose. When it comes to production, they’ve perceived as time-consuming and slow. When it comes to audience engagement, they’ve perceived as ineffective and requiring too much attention on the part of readers whose attention span has been sorely and steadily diminishing.

But aren’t YouTube videos and video essays (the video counterpart of a long-form written piece) longer to write, shoot, edit and publish? Without doubt, but the final product is perceived as being more rewarding and impactful when it comes to engaging an audience. And if it is indeed well-produced, this is true. There are many narrative devices a YouTube creator can employ to make their point and keep the viewers interested. The video format also has an immediacy and can have a visual impact potent enough to hook viewers from the very start. Video can also put on the foreground subtle elements that add to the general effectiveness, like the creator’s charisma — the way they move, talk, be on video, which sometimes for certain viewers almost becomes more important than what’s being said in the video itself. We tend to trust or at least be more sympathetic towards cool people on video.

Mind you, you can achieve similar results with the written word, it’s not impossible — it’s harder and, at least with long-form content, requires excellent writing skills. Using the written word in shorter formats can be effective at transmitting someone’s quirks, personality, and charisma. It has a different kind of immediacy and it’s something you notice over time: I’ve stumbled on a lot of people on Twitter who have a staggering number of followers and they basically tweet witty remarks, jokes, memes, and little else. If you take a few of their tweets out of context you’ll certainly be wondering why on earth this person has 85,000 followers; but when you zoom out and consider their timeline in progression, you start noticing their personality and — whether you like it or not — you understand why many could find these people’s shitposting relatable.

Tech blogs

Back to blogs, my experience in 2021 has again reinforced the impression that they’re an endangered species. Good tech-oriented blogs in particular. What I find less and less frequently are good tech blogs with meaningful, long-form commentary. Not tech sites or portals, but personal blogs. The kind of content I generally stumble on can be categorised as follows:

Blogs with brief, ‘linked-list’ entries where the author quotes someone else or a piece of news, then adds a couple of sentences in response. Sometimes they even leave the quote without comment, a tacit sign of agreement with what or whom is quoted.
Blogs with infrequent and very technical posts, whose author is evidently a software developer/engineer, and whose content is evidently directed to an audience of peers, not laypeople.
Blogs with infrequent and practical content, like tips tricks tutorials. Useful stuff, no doubt, but everything often feels sterile, and in certain cases the posts read as if they were either AI-generated, or copied from sources in other languages and pasted after a hasty machine translation.
The occasional long-form tech article that is informative and well-written, but it’s published on an external site like Medium, which makes things more impersonal. You can of course start following the article’s author on these platforms, in the hope that they’ll publish more good stuff down the road. Sometimes they do, but you’ll typically wait a long time.
And then you have bigger tech-oriented sites, like Ars Technica, The Verge, or Input, which indeed can offer quality content, long-form features, extended commentary and (gasp) even good examples of tech journalism. But given the sheer amount of content they output daily, I end up missing a lot of stuff.

After this long excursion, at this point it’s hardly surprising that, for the first time in years, 2021 mostly went by without finding anyone to add to my RSS feeds. The sole exception arrived last-minute, in late December, and it’s

Chris Hannah — Chris is the developer of Text Case, a text transformation app available for iOS and Mac OS. As someone who deals with text all the time, I’ve been using it on both platforms since its first release. It’s a good app I warmly recommend. Check its website and its App Store description to understand if it may suit your needs. On the Mac I now use both Text Case and Text Buddy by Tyler Hall, and it’s like having text manipulation superpowers.

But I digress. Chris’s blog is exactly what I look for in a good tech blog: a mixture of technical content, personal commentary, informative articles, software suggestions, more introspective posts. It is updated frequently enough, well written, and it really shows that it’s a product of someone who cares. I discovered Chris’s software before discovering Chris the writer. When I saw him mentioned a few times in Mike Rockwell’s blog Initial Charge (another recommended source you should follow), it took me a moment before I connected the dots and realised that he was the same Chris Hannah who developed an app I’d been happily using for a while!

YouTube channels

As finding interesting blogs becomes harder, I seem to be finding interesting YouTube channels every week. Say what you want about the intricacies and the whims of YouTube’s algorithm, but as a viewer its effectiveness never ceases to amaze me. Pretty much like Spotify’s algorithm for music discovery.

During the course of 2021 I’ve subscribed to many new channels, and there are many others I keep an eye on without committing too much because they still don’t feel consistent, quality-wise, to deserve a subscription.

I must say, most of my discoveries are channels with a relatively low (or even very low) subscribers’ count. But quantity (of subscribers) doesn’t necessarily correlate with quality of content, as you’ll see if you decide to take a look at these channels.

Since I’ve been verbose enough, I’ll try to be brief in my descriptions and remarks. Of course, channels are listed in no particular order.

Photography

Gear Head — Mostly reviews of camera lenses, but also cameras and accessories. I really like the host: honest, playful, an all-round nice Canadian guy. Videos are short and essential.
Eduardo Pavez Goye — Eduardo is a great street film photographer. In his videos he talks about cameras, lenses and film, but also books. I like his camera reviews a lot because they always include a photowalk and great sample shots. I like his honesty and humility.
GxAce — Mostly camera reviews, but in an unconventional format and more similar to essays. I love the Blade Runner sci-fi æsthetic: in how the videos are edited, in the choice of soundtrack, and even in the host’s studio setup. Visit his channel and you’ll see what I mean.
Shutter Slaps and Snappiness — My recent passion for 2000s-era digicams lead me to encounter these two channels, which are all about low-budget photography and both convey the message that unless you are a pro photographer, there’s no need to resort to expensive gear to get decent-to-great results.
Azriel Knight — Another nice, knowledgeable Canadian. Azriel’s channel focuses almost exclusively on film photography, gear, techniques, reviews, and history.
Brian’s Photo Show — Brian Grossman is a collector and film photography aficionado. Very knowledgeable, especially when it comes to Nikon gear, his videos are informative, useful, to-the-point, never too long, and I’d say he would make a good photography teacher. He has written an ebook, Nikon Film Cameras: Which one is right for you?, available on Amazon for a little more than $3. I purchased it, am reading it, and I recommend it to all those who want to try film photography but don’t know where to begin when it comes to gear.
Vintage Optiks — Lovely little channel focused on reviews of vintage camera lenses. I love the vintage look and feel of the videos themselves, which are usually in two parts: a brief historical overview of a lens, and a gallery of sample photos taken by the host himself to showcase the lens’ capabilities.
Ira Crummey — An older Canadian fellow with a passion for photography. I really love his down-to-earth approach and the healthy dose of common sense he injects in his discussions on various photography-related topics.

Gaming

No notable additions this time. I’m very satisfied with the people I started following 2–3 years ago.

Cooking

J. Kenji López-Alt — Since the pandemic hit, and especially during the initial periods of hard lockdown, I found myself watching more and more cooking videos on YouTube. Kenji López-Alt is perhaps my favourite cook. His style is unique and I love that most of his videos are shot at home, in his kitchen, as he prepares a dish in real time. While cooking, he imparts a wealthy amount of useful culinary information, tips and tricks, all in a very casual, laid-back fashion that makes me like him a lot.

Comedy/Entertainment

Alasdair Beckett-King — Very British humour. If you love British humour, you will love Alasdair.
Joel Haver — Joel is a furnace of ideas. His videos (pardon, short films) are quirky, unpredictable, even when you think you know where he’s going. Sometimes he makes you laugh hard, sometimes he makes you stop and think. He’s one of the good guys.
Caitlin Reilly — She uploads one-minute skits where she often impersonates recurring characters taken from everyday life. She’s exceptional at catching the tiniest details and traits of the personality of the character she’s doing. The characters themselves aren’t particularly likeable (the annoying aspiring actress, the WASP mom, the wellness influencer, various types of ‘L.A. woman’, etc.) but what makes you smile is just how accurately Caitlin portrays them.
Michael Spicer — British humour again. Check his amazing series The Room Next Door, where he plays “a frustrated adviser who is communicating live via an earpiece with a figure speaking in public. The videos cut between the exasperated Spicer and real footage of the public figure at a speaking engagement.” (Thanks, Wikipedia) But my absolute favourite video of his is That Scene in a Christopher Nolan Film When You Give Up Trying to Follow the Story

Other

Thomas Flight — Thomas writes and shoots really insightful video essays on cinema.

Transgender creators

I don’t like to use labels when it comes to people. I don’t like to specify attributes like race, gender, sexual inclinations because for me people are people, no matter where they come from. If I’m specifying here that these creators are trans people is only because a lot of their content focuses on trans issues and is really informative if you are an open-minded person who wants to understand their experience and point of view on societal matters. I’m currently subscribed to ContraPoints (Natalie Wynn), Mia Mulder, and Philosophy Tube (Abigail Thorn). These are all smart, witty creators who favour the long-form video essay format, and whom I recommend without reserve.

Podcasts

In 2019 I unsubscribed from all the podcasts I was following, and I haven’t looked back. I know and respect many people who use podcasts as their main medium for expression. My moving away from podcasts is simply a pragmatic decision — I just don’t have the time for everything. I still listen to the odd episode, especially if it comes recommended by people I trust. You can find a more articulate observation on podcasts in my People and resources added to my reading list in 2019.

Useful/fun Web tools

These are websites/web applications I’ve bookmarked and use when the need arises. You have to keep in mind that single-purpose sites like these may stop working or being maintained without warning. At the time of writing, they all work.

Parcels — Global package tracking — my go-to site for tracking packages. Fast, precise, reliable. It’s also available as an iOS/Android app.
World Time Buddy — From the website: World Time Buddy (WTB) is a convenient world clock, a time zone converter, and an online meeting scheduler. My favourite tool for time zone conversion and time calculations remains Time and Date, but I also love WTB’s simple, immediate interface.
Whitespace characters to copy and paste — A useful place that lets you copy and paste Unicode whitespace characters (zero-width space, em space, en space, figure space, braille blank, etc.). What are whitespace characters and why would you use them? Visit the website for more information.
The previous tool is just one of many Unicode tools available at QWERTY.DEV. Check the whole website for more goodies.

My RSS management

This is the part that hasn’t never really changed these past years. Here’s a brief rundown of the apps I’m using on my devices.

On my Intel Macs running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra: Reeder and ReadKit.
On my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro running Mac OS 11 Big Sur: NetNewsWire.
On my PowerPC Macs: older versions of NetNewsWire.
On my iPad 8: Unread, Reeder, NetNewsWire for iOS, and ReadKit.
On my iPhone 8, iPhone 5, iPad 3: Unread.
On older iOS devices: Older versions of Reeder, and an older version of Byline.
On my first-generation iPad: an older version of Newsify, Slow Feeds (which is now called Web Subscriber), and the Feedly app itself.
On my ThinkPad T400 and ThinkPad X240 (with Windows 8.1 Pro and Windows 10 respectively): Nextgen Reader.
On my ThinkPad X61T with Windows 7, and my ThinkPad 240X running Windows 2000: FeedDemon 4.5. Discontinued in 2013, it still works well.
On my Windows Phone 8.1/Windows 10 Mobile smartphones: Nextgen Reader and FeedLab.
On my webOS devices (Palm Prē 2, HP TouchPad): FeedSpider. A really great app.
On my Android phone (Xiaomi Mi A2): the official Feedly app.

Addendum: ‘Read later’ services

Eleven years ago I talked about the ways I was dealing with ‘bookmark bankruptcy’, and one of the methods I had devised was to avoid as much as possible the Read It Later routine:

You see, come to think of it, the main factor that led to my bookmark bankruptcy is the ‘Read It Later’ routine: a lot of stuff I’ve bookmarked over the years was filed away for the purpose of reading it later. Let’s save this bit, it might come handy, it might be useful. What really happened is that 90% of the time I’ve never gone back to that bookmarked stuff. It’s been the same as if I filed it in a ‘Read It Never’ folder.

So, what have I been progressively doing? Reading things now.

In that article I was also mentioning how, unlike many other tech geeks at the time, I wasn’t really using Instapaper, relying instead on other services or strategies to accumulate reading materials (which then led to my ‘bookmark bankruptcy’).

I’ve mostly stuck with my ‘Read It Now’ approach over the years; but in recent times, due to an aggressive increase of work, life stuff that gets in the way, and so forth, I found myself in need to save a lot of reading material to peruse later. In an ironic turn of events, I found Instapaper to be the cleanest, most versatile solution. It’s the service that still works on the widest range of devices in my possession — from the first-gen iPad and third-gen iPod touch, to my Kindles, Android phones and Windows Phone devices — and I really like its tastefully minimalistic design that puts content readability first. So yes, here I am, recommending Instapaper 14 years after its creation.

Past articles

In reverse chronological order:

I hope this series and my observations can be useful to you. Also, keep in mind that some links in these past articles may now be broken. And as always, if you think I’m missing out on some good tech writing or other kind of resource you believe might be of interest to me, let me know via email or Twitter. Thanks for reading!

Konfabulations on widgets in Mac OS

January 27, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Software

In a recent post, Apple Should Bring Back Dashboard, Stephen Hackett expresses his wish for Dashboard to make a reappearance in Mac OS:

Apple killed off Dashboard at exactly the wrong time. Just one year after Catalina killed Dashboard, Apple started allowing developers to bring their iOS widgets over to the Mac in macOS Big Sur. Sadly, they all got stuffed into the slide-out Notification Center user interface[.]

Notification Center is a real mess. Even on a Pro Display XDR, you get three visible notifications. That’s it. Anything older is hidden behind a button, regardless of how many widgets you may have in the lower section of the Notification Center column[.]

Apple needs to rethink this and let this new class of widgets breathe, being able to use the entire screen like the widgets of yore could. Bringing back Dashboard is an obvious solution here, and I’d love to see it make a return.

I remember being excited and fascinated by Dashboard when it made its debut back then with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. I remember spending quite a lot of time perusing the Dashboard widgets page on Apple’s website to look for more widgets to add to my collection. I used Dashboard and its widgets quite a lot in the Tiger-Leopard era. In a sense, when the iPhone’s user interface was demoed in January 2007, one of the things that made me instantly love it is that certain apps and interactions fondly reminded me of Dashboard widgets. The Dock in iPhone OS was basically the Dashboard ‘dock’ in its first iterations.

The usefulness of Dashboard and the concept of the ‘desk accessory’ or widget started waning for me as soon as I got my first iPhone in 2008. Ironically enough, for many quick tasks and quick information retrieval, the iPhone has become the tangible desk accessory. In a way, fetching the smartphone to check things like the weather forecast, the status of a package that I should receive soon, or to make a calculation or unit conversion, is less disruptive of the workflow I’m having on the Mac than having an overlay or a dedicated space within the Mac UI itself.

But putting my habits aside for the moment, let’s focus on how widget management could work on the Mac, as it’s a good UI exercise. The crucial aspect to consider, then, is this: where to place widgets? How to handle them is important, too, but the ‘how to handle them’ aspect is intrinsically tied to where they should appear and be placed.

Before Dashboard, there was Konfabulator (those who didn’t know now understand the strange wording of this piece’s title). Konfabulator was an application that, once executed, remained accessible from the menu bar as a menu extra. Its initial offering of a handful of default widgets could be extended by downloading third-party ones created with the same engine.

Konfabulator 1.8 for Mac — Onboarding

Here’s a screenshot of the Widgets folder created by Konfabulator 1.8 with the default widgets that came with it:

Konfabulator Widgets folder

And here’s how some of them look on my iBook G3’s desktop:

The Konfabulator menu extra is that icon with the gears.

Konfabulator’s approach was to embed the widgets in the desktop itself, where they remained, beneath all open windows and apps, always ready to be glanced at when needed, and existing rather unobtrusively when not. If you needed to customise them, you could do so by using the Konfabulator menu extra or by right-clicking on them directly.

I liked them. They looked great. And some were indeed useful. But as you can see from the screenshot above, if you had a Mac laptop at the time, with relatively limited screen real estate, your desktop would get crowded very soon. That may not be a problem in itself, but it’s cumulative when you also have a lot of applications and windows open, and you also like to keep all the important stuff (files, folders, aliases) on your desktop.

Also: widgets don’t all work the same way. There are widgets that display information you want to constantly keep an eye on (such as a CPU/RAM monitor or a network monitor); widgets that serve as controllers for certain apps (like the iTunes mini-player); and widgets you only need to consult occasionally (say, a calculator, dictionary, or weather widget). So, you’ll probably want to keep some widgets permanently visible, while some other widgets you’d like to be easily invoked on demand.

An approach like Konfabulator’s favours the placement of static widgets. While adding/removing widgets isn’t cumbersome in itself, the operation of adding a widget to just glance at its information for 5 seconds to then put it away becomes clunky quickly.

A similar approach can also be seen in Panic’s Stattoo, an app developed in 2004–2006 that certainly didn’t want to replace Konfabulator or Dashboard, but whose idea was to offer a limited selection of widgets that could be placed on your desktop and display useful information like weather, date/time, battery status, song playing in iTunes, email headers, even RSS feeds.

Panic’s Stattoo — widget setup

Like Konfabulator, the selected widgets stayed on the desktop, always visible but in background, of course, so as not to interfere with other apps, windows, and items on the desktop.

Dashboard’s UI when it debuted in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. (Image source: Ars Technica)

Dashboard’s approach was different. The widgets you chose were placed on a transparent layer which — when invoked via a keyboard shortcut — would appear as an overlay on the desktop. This kind of approach tends to favour the use of those widgets you need to just glance at every now and then, over the widgets you’d like to monitor more frequently, but it’s overall more versatile. Given how quickly you could jump in and out of Dashboard, it was easy to keep an eye on things with CPU or Network monitor widgets by frequently tapping F12 (the default shortcut for Dashboard) or the dedicated Dashboard key on certain Apple keyboards. And if you really needed a Dashboard widget to be permanently visible even outside Dashboard, you could use this tip from Mac OS X Hints to do exactly that. This bit from Rob Griffiths’ additional note is worth quoting:

[…] I find it extremely useful — there are certain widgets that you’d just rather see and use all the time, instead of only in Dashboard mode. Note that the widgets float above all windows, so this trick is most useful if you have some spare desktop space.

Another bit that’s worth quoting is this one, by John Siracusa, from his review/essay on Mac OS X Tiger at Ars Technica:

I have one big complaint. Apple has unnecessarily linked two good ideas in Dashboard: the widgets themselves, and the Exposé-style layer where they live. While I really love the idea of a separate window layer for infrequently used items, I’m extremely disappointed that only Dashboard widgets can live there. To a lesser extent, I’m also disappointed that Dashboard widgets can’t be interleaved with regular windows, float on top of all windows, or be embedded in the desktop like Konfabulator widgets can.

I’d like to be able to put any application in the Dashboard layer, and I’d like to be able to pull widgets out of it and place them anywhere I want. This would require rethinking the Dashboard UI a bit (e.g., providing an active menu bar in the Dashboard layer) but I think the benefits would be well worth it.

Observations like these really make you wonder about what would be the best widget placement/interaction model. My impression is that the one that could meet the most disparate user needs would be tricky to design, UI-wise. Imagine an overlay implementation like Apple’s Dashboard, but with widgets that can be freely detached from such overlay and placed on the desktop with the flexibility proposed by Siracusa. How to make all the necessary interactions intuitively discoverable by the user? Tooltips that appear on first use and that can be subsequently toggled or dismissed? These are tricky little details to implement. Even Control Centre on iOS can only be customised by accessing the Settings app instead of via direct manipulation of the controls on the pane itself.

One thing is certain: the current implementation of widgets on the Mac is just poor. It’s bare-bones, it’s stiff, severely limited, and the idea to make them appear in the same interface as Notification Centre (to mimic the behaviour on iOS) is simply misguided. Whatever your Mac’s screen size, you get an unnecessarily cramped interface that feels like the worst of both worlds (Notifications and Widgets), as there is insufficient breathing room for each, and one seems to constantly get in the way of the other.

The original Apple’s Dashboard seems to have the most versatile of all these approaches, if you count the little ‘hack’ suggested in that old Mac OS X Hints entry. By the way, starting with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Dashboard could also be configured as a space instead of a transparent overlay, but I never found this option to be particularly appealing or effective. Mind you, this is a wholly subjective remark; I’m sure having Dashboard widgets on a dedicated space worked for some people. It didn’t work for me because I’ve always wanted widgets to come to me instead of having to go to them by jumping to their space. It’s subtle, but a single shortcut key (F12) is quicker than hitting Ctrl+(space number); more importantly, by having widgets appear on a transparent overlay you can still keep an eye on what’s going on underneath, or even reference it when you’re interacting with a widget. Simple example: you’re looking at an email attachment of a detailed invoice and you want to verify whether the total amount is correct. You invoke Dashboard and use the Calculator widget, and you can input the figures you’re still able to see underneath the overlay.

To conclude, would I want to see a return of Dashboard as it was before being removed by Apple? I’d certainly want an updated solution for widget management, because the current one is inadequate. As a recap, I think it should have the following characteristics:

It should be utterly separated from Notification Centre. Widgets and Notifications are entities that need screen real estate to be really effective, and both demand complex interactions. Having them share the same (meagre) space, and having them appear simultaneously when you need to consult either is just poor UI design.
It should work as an overlay or super-space, like the original Dashboard, more than a separate space you ‘visit’. Let the user control the opacity of the overlay, in case they don’t like transparency.
It should handle widgets in the flexible way John Siracusa wished Dashboard could handle them. Have them appear on their overlay by default, but make them detachable and let users place them at whatever level they want: desktop level, Finder window level, application window level, or constantly in the foreground above all other windows. You may find this flexibility to be a bit excessive, but again, depending on what kind of information a widget displays or what kind of user interactions it entails, the user could prefer a specific placement for such widget. This could also inspire the creation of widgets with very specific uses: imagine a widget you can attach to a Finder window, and it tells you how many JPG files are contained in the currently open folder. (It could be JPGs or whatever kind of file you’re interested in). It’s a basic example, but such flexibility could inspire so many cool, useful widgets.
It should have its own pane in System Preferences. Here, users could be reminded of the necessary gestures to handle widgets, customise shortcuts, and even customise the appearance of this ‘Widget Manager’.

Now, am I optimistic about something like this coming to a future Mac OS release? Of course I’m not. Just look at how Notifications management has visually regressed from Big Sur onward. Just look at how Apple appears to be hell-bent on making certain parts of the user interface work in the same way across operating systems, even when this forced consistency makes little sense. Just look at how brittle and disjointed the user interface flow is becoming especially in Mac OS. Designing a better Notifications interface and a better Widgets interface requires a meaningful rethinking and a commitment to good-design-that-works which Apple doesn’t seem particularly interested in, when you consider the direction Mac OS user interface has been taking after Mac OS 10.15 Catalina.

→ No more security updates for iOS 14

January 20, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Handpicked

Juli Clover at MacRumors, writes:

Last week, MacRumors shared news that Apple had stopped releasing iOS 14 security updates and was pushing those still on iOS 14 to upgrade to iOS 15, an apparent reversal of a promise to allow users to stay on the iOS 14 operating system.

Apple today told Ars Technica that the option to stay on iOS 14 and avoid the iOS 15 upgrade was always meant to be temporary. It is not a mistake that there are no more security updates to iOS 14, and support for the update has essentially ended.

When iOS 15 was released, Apple’s feature page said that the company would provide a choice “between two software update versions” in the Settings app, and that it would offer security updates for iOS 14 until people were prepared to upgrade.

Apple’s original wording was (emphasis mine):

You can update to the latest version of iOS 15 as soon as it’s released for the latest features and most complete set of security updates. Or continue on iOS 14 and still get important security updates until you’re ready to upgrade to the next major version.

Back to Clover:

When iOS 15 was released and this information was published, Apple did not make it clear that this was a temporary option, but the company in September 2021 did publish an updated support document that mentioned the option to stay on iOS 14 would be available “for a period of time.”

And the new wording is:

If you’re using iOS or iPadOS 14.5 or later, you might now see the option to choose between two software update versions. This option allows you to choose between updating to the latest version of iOS or iPadOS 15 as soon as it’s released, or continuing on iOS or iPadOS 14 while still getting important security updates for a period of time.

In December, in my article When dropping support feels like sabotage, I was complaining that Apple was limiting the support of security updates to just the two previous versions of Mac OS, and not extending such support to even older versions like High Sierra or Mojave given the amount of people that are still using them. But I was forgetting that on iOS the situation is even worse.

And I think that dropping security support for anything but the newest iOS version is rather irresponsible, given the amount of security threats targeting mobile operating systems nowadays. Sure, it’s great that iOS 15 can be installed on devices as old as the iPhone 6S, and Apple can always respond that if you want to keep your older iOS device safe, you can do so simply by updating to iOS 15, but once you move away from the tech sphere orbit and enter the everyday world of regular people, things are never so clear-cut. There are still a lot of folks using older versions of iOS on their iPhones and iPads. Maybe they dismiss or don’t notice Apple’s periodical push notifications to update to the latest version. Maybe they have automatic updates disabled. Or, there are more tech-savvy users who still want to use certain apps they’ve come to rely on, apps that have ceased to work on newer iOS versions (or have been removed from the App Store, or whose development has stopped for whatever reason, etc.), and don’t want to update to iOS 15.

Then there are people who have become increasingly hesitant about jumping on the latest iOS version as soon as it’s released. This is a trend I have noticed in my circles in the post-iOS 10 era. I think it must have been the general bugginess of iOS 11 what made people wary. I don’t know. But a lot of friends and acquaintances (and readers who have written me a considerable amount of emails in the past) have started to delay updating iOS, even waiting several months before finally doing it.

These are choices that should be respected, within reason of course. I’m not saying Apple should still publish security updates for iOS 9 and iOS 10 devices. But it wouldn’t hurt to adopt a policy similar to what they’re doing with the Mac — keep releasing at least the most crucial security patches for the two iOS versions prior to the latest one. The forgetful and non-tech-savvy users are also the most vulnerable to security threats, and Apple should do the decent thing and meet them halfway — protect their customers’ interests — instead of always having this indirect way of demanding customers to adapt to whatever decision or stance the company comes up with.

In my article When dropping support feels like sabotage, I wrote:

As I’ve often pointed out, Apple’s behaviour — at least for an outside observer — is to adopt the course that’s more convenient for them. The course that makes things easier for them to manage, streamline, deploy. It’s all very opinionated. It’s not a matter of costs or lack of resources, I don’t believe that for a second. Apple moves forward, doesn’t look back too much, and constantly nudges their users to do the same.

This latest move keeps reinforcing this impression. When they wrote that you can “continue on iOS 14 and still get important security updates until you’re ready to upgrade to the next major version”, maybe there was the idea, behind the scenes, to open up to offering a sort of two-lane upgrade path. But it really feels that, at a certain point, someone in the chain of command said, “Nah, scratch that. Why bother. Make it temporary. Make them update.”

I would be more tolerant of this kind of subtle blackmailing if Apple’s software quality were like it used to be circa ten years ago. Instead here I am, firmly staying off Apple’s treadmill until I decide I’m ready to upgrade. I’m sacrificing security in favour of general stability and using tried-and-true older versions of Mac OS and iOS made by people who know how to design user interfaces. Not an easy trade-off, I know, but at least I’m tech-savvy enough to deal with the consequences.

My year in the rearview mirror

January 1, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

In 1993 I could have been involved in a terrible car accident. I was the second car in queue at a big intersection. When the light turned green, the car before me hurriedly crossed and cleared the intersection. I followed suit: it was one of those high-volume traffic spots in the city where you’re subtly (or not so subtly) encouraged to move quickly and not dawdle too much. The moment I cleared the intersection I heard the loudest screeching and banging behind me. It startled me so much I struggled to maintain control of my car. I looked in the rearview mirror and more or less realised what had happened: another car, coming from the road crossing the one I was on, didn’t stop at the red light, cut through the intersection at mad speed, and hit the car right behind me with such force as to push it against the external brick wall of a factory about 300 metres off the intersection.

I saw that in my rearview mirror. But it took me about a minute to fully process what had just happened. That’s when I had to stop at a petrol station nearby because I was shaking so much I couldn’t safely drive anymore. It could have been me, the thought kept echoing and rippling in my head for a good while. I don’t remember where I was going — it’s been so long — but I’m pretty sure I forgot where I was going right then and there on that almost-fateful late afternoon. For months thereafter the sound of an ambulance siren gave me chills and flashbacks.

I know that, in the grand scheme of things, going from 31 December of one year to 1 January of the following year is just a convention following a calendar established by someone a few centuries ago. Anyway, there have been years where this symbolic passage has reminded me of that near miss, 28 years ago. At times it’s not a perfect equivalence, because it’s like saying I nearly avoided a catastrophic year, when in fact 2021 did hit me rather forcefully. But it still remains like a shocking image in my rearview mirror, a mess I’m thankfully leaving behind.

Explaining why, in detail, is something that goes beyond the scope of a post on a blog. It’s something that ultimately becomes long-winded, uninteresting, and enters personal levels I don’t really feel like sharing with strangers on the Internet. As for what I can share, I’ll say that 2021 is starting to feel a lot like 2017. In 2017 I lost my father, rather unexpectedly, and that loss didn’t hit like a car — it hit like a bullet train. It destabilised me. It confused me. It crippled my creativity. It blocked me. And as I was starting to recover, here comes 2021 where I lose my mother, in a different way than my father, but again in an unexpected manner.

When one of your parents passes away, you grieve, but you grieve together with the remaining parent, who also helps take care of all the bureaucracy and ‘business’ related to someone’s death. When you’re an only child and the remaining parent passes away, the overwhelmingness of it all feels even heavier. Even though I wasn’t alone in facing this terrible event, and had the help and support of a few dear people, I still had to go through a self-discipline routine to focus and tell myself I needed to do whatever had to be done one thing at time, one thing at a time, because you feel the sky falling down, falling down.

You can’t stay on top of everything

The fundamental thing that 2021 made me painfully aware of is that — unless you live a very simple life, or your life is made simple by the constant help of others — you can’t stay on top of everything.

I have resisted this for years. For years I’ve told myself I can take care of everything my work as translator and localisation specialist throws at me; that I can stay up-to-date on so many things related to technology, photography and other several interests I have (either for personal or work-related reasons); that I can carry out my day-to-day duties in the household; that I can stay creative and cultivate my fiction and literary projects; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

In order to try to do all this, to serve this illusion, I’ve sacrificed hours of sleep, reconfigured my priorities on a daily basis to be malleable and versatile and adaptable. I’ve tried to do this smartly, not with that mindless relentlessness that sometimes overcomes you when you want to achieve a goal at all costs. The only thing I have truly achieved is getting this close to burnout. Or maybe I actually entered burnout territory for a while without realising it. I don’t know. But this — this really feels like the flashback I told you about at the beginning. This feels like a near miss where I’m watching the aftermath unfolding in my rearview mirror.

Age is a factor you can’t just ignore

There’s one aspect that especially baffles me in the way Internet and social media have impacted people’s behaviour. Today, I increasingly feel I’m interacting with fewer and fewer adults and more and more eternal adolescents. It’s like people have found this great, global, big toy in the Internet and related technologies, and don’t want to let it go because it gives them so many dopamine kicks; it gives them the illusion that they’re in full control of their lives and that they can stay on top of everything all the time; that they can hack the world and their own lives to fulfil a sense of forever-young-ness. It’s their own Matrix, their own blue pill.

But age is a factor you just can’t sweep under the rug because it’s not making you look cool. With age, the biggest thing you have to consider is the way you spend your time. Because sooner or later the thought will hit you, and hit you hard. Your time is finite, and when you stop and think of all the time you frittered away, you’ll tell yourself it felt like a good idea at the time, but that won’t really make the taste of regret fade away.

And here’s the thing: today, so many things are designed around us to keep us involved in this big global toy, in this time-wasting Matrix where a lot of people seem to live in a state of eternal adolescence, of forever-young-ness, of ‘it’s all a big exciting game’. Before you think I’m being a holier-than-thou Morpheus who tells Neo to ‘wake up’, know that I myself have fallen for this illusion for a relatively long time. And that it’s not just an illusion that touches on silly things and gamifies our lives only in the leisure department, but it also (and more dangerously) impacts our sense of productivity.

In other, simpler words: if you’re in your late forties you can’t expect to be productive and stay on top of everything like a twenty-something. You may be in good health, you may feel up to it, you may even manage to do it for a while, but the truth is it’s unhealthy. The whole culture around the idea of being a productivity rockstar, of being this relentless productivity machine fuelled by workaholism is simply destructive, and not even in the long run.

Another area where the age factor is overlooked is in the design of user interfaces. (You thought I couldn’t find a way to talk about user interfaces in this context, didn’t you?) I keep seeing this: user interface elements, targets, designs, paradigms that require users to have perfect vision, flawless reflexes, constant adaptability, and time to waste readjusting their workflows and relearning how to carry out the same stuff they were used to carrying out in an operating system, application, device, 2 or 3 iterations ago. Some designers keep making the same error I think Donald Norman talked about in his book The Design of Everyday Things — the mistake of thinking that their target users are like them. They’re not. Often, they’re people who just need to get things done without losing an entire morning trying to figure out how and why the application(s) they rely on for work have changed after the last update. Or they’re people who really need tooltips in an app’s interface in order to understand what that control with the obscure icon does; who really need obvious interface cues and affordances you’re desperately trying to spirit away because your application or environment doesn’t look clean, trendy, or minimalistic enough.

I’m not saying applications, interfaces, and operating systems shouldn’t change and evolve. Only that they should do so by actually taking into account that end users aren’t this homogeneous mass that moves in perfect sync with your fancy designs and redesigns. But the kind of approach to do things right by many different types of end user involves more work and a generally slower pace of development, which is a big no-no for the stupid breakneck pace technology wants to move — and wants us to move today. And this seamlessly brings me to my next point.

2021 left me weary again, tech-wise

I wanted to write more articles here in the past year. On several occasions life and work got in the way. But I’ve also realised that many of the articles I would have published would have ended up being rants about how disappointed and unenthusiastic I feel towards an increasing number of tech-related things.

Lately I was afraid I was losing my enthusiasm for technology in general, no matter what, but that’s not true. There are still things that excite me and pique my interest, so that’s a good self-check. It means that I’m not becoming a bitter curmudgeon after all (though I know I sound like one every now and then). But today everything seems to revolve around Big Tech, and that’s wearing me down. I’m tired of Big Companies having an increasingly deeper control of our lives, I’m tired of people stupidly letting them have it, tired of arguing that no, Apple are not the good guys you think they are, only maybe the lesser evil.

And speaking of Apple, I’m tired of arguing with people who will defend the company whatever stunt they pull with their products or designs. Tired of being considered the crazy one because I think a computer display should not have a fucking notch in the middle of the top bezel. Tired of being considered averse to change only because I dare point out that a new design in an application just does away with years of usability research and tried-and-true practices that used to make the application very intuitive and self-evident in use.

This of course doesn’t mean I’m going to stop talking about these subjects and these issues. Only that I won’t pay too much attention to people whose interest clearly isn’t to be open-mindedly engaged in a conversation, but to just waste my time. And time is getting ever so precious to me. It’s an age thing, one day you’ll understand.

New Year’s resolutions

I have none. Nothing specific. I just want to move at my own pace, not at the pace dictated by someone else, or by some vague notion of ideal lifestyle, or of how to be a rockstar of productivity. Have you looked at actual rockstars once they’re past their prime? Yeah, not a pretty picture, generally speaking.

When dropped support feels like sabotage

December 22, 2021

by Riccardo Mori

Software

If you know me, you know I’m a packrat when it comes to older devices. Sometimes it’s for sentimental reasons, as silly as it may look to some. Sometimes I keep and/or acquire vintage devices on purpose because there’s something about them that fascinates me, or I feel it’s important for computing history reasons, or to study their user interface. Whatever the case may be, one thing I always do with such devices is to put them to good use, as I’m not the kind of collector who accumulates stuff to put it on display.

So, when it comes to Apple mobile devices specifically, I still have older iPhones, iPads, and a few iPod touch models going back to iOS 4 and iPhone OS 3. Naturally, the uses of a first-generation iPod touch (2007) or iPhone 3G (2008) are quite limited today. Many applications have features that no longer work, or rely on discontinued APIs to communicate with related services, and are therefore practically useless (though I still open them every now and then to be reminded of how great certain user interfaces were on older iOS versions).

But there are devices on slightly more modern iOS versions that keep retaining a certain degree of usefulness to me. In many respects, my first-generation iPad (2010) with iOS 5.1.1 is still a good device to use — remarkably more efficient and responsive than my third-generation iPad (2012) with iOS 9.3.5. And my fourth-generation iPod touch (2010) with iOS 6.1.6 is still very much in use: not only can I experience on a retina display the great user interface that iOS 6 had, but the extremely compact size of this iPod touch makes it a fantastic music player when I’m out and about, and when travelling it’s the main device I connect with a Libratone Bluetooth speaker and I have a very portable yet good-quality setup to listen to music.

And there’s more: both the iPad 1 and the iPod touch 4 can still run certain apps that have been discontinued, or run older versions of apps whose interface has worsened update after update, and so those older versions are still ‘the good ones’ in my eyes. Like Snapseed and Penultimate, to make a couple of examples off the top of my head.

Something I’ve been doing in recent years has been to occasionally go back to my catalogue of purchased apps and try to install some of the older ones, hoping to trigger the Download last compatible version feature. It has worked well: I can still use Microsoft’s OneNote app, the official Gmail app, or the excellent x2y by Joe Cieplinski on the iPod touch under iOS 6. These things make me happy because I feel that both the hardware and the software are not being wasted. Sure, they’re ancient devices by current tech nerd standards, but I prefer having them working on my desk or in my backpack or in my pockets, rather than thrown in an e‑waste bin where I’m not even sure whether they’re going to be fully recycled or not.

Well, long story short: it appears that recently (I don’t know exactly when, I just found out the other day) devices running iOS 5 and iOS 6 have stopped connecting to the App Store. Which means that I can no longer install older versions of apps I paid to use. Yes, I can still use those apps (some of those, at least) on more recent devices, but I should be able to install them wherever the hell I want.

Speaking of managing apps: until recently — let’s say a year ago or even less — I’ve used the last version of iTunes that lets you manage App Store apps. It’s version 12.6.5.3 and Apple still provides a separate download of it at this page. With this version I used to be able to keep purchasing iOS apps from the App Store, download them on my MacBook Pro, and install them on my iOS devices via a direct connection. This had the added benefit of letting me have a local copy of the app’s .ipa file so that I could quickly reinstall it in case I deleted the app from the device only to change my mind later. And whenever an app update was issued, I could copy the previous version of an app in a different folder, let iTunes download and update the app, and keep older versions backed up in case I didn’t like the changes in the app (often UI-related), or in case the update stopped supporting a previous version of iOS.

This was a great plan, though admittedly this backup strategy was only reserved for the apps I cared the most and utilised the most; otherwise things would have got cumbersome pretty quickly. Anyway this, too, doesn’t matter now, because for the past — uh, 10 months? — iTunes hasn’t been able to download anything from the iOS App Store. It still connects, I can still browse, and even go through my list of purchased apps, but I can’t purchase — download — install anything. Not even copies of purchased apps from iCloud.

When we talk about planned obsolescence we often refer to hardware: computers, devices, accessories. But what makes a device obsolete equally often is something that starts with the software. Features are dropped, certain operating system versions are no longer supported, certain functionalities are only recognised by newer versions (or even just the latest version) of the operating system. And while this may be justified in the case of smaller software companies and third-party indie developers who might not have the means to afford a deep level of backward compatibility, in my opinion it’s harder to excuse when bigger companies with many more resources are involved. And then there are very big companies making both hardware and software whose interest is for their customers to always — how can I put it? — to always be in the mood for upgrading their devices.

I can hear you loud and clear from here. But Rick, Apple is possibly the company that is most user-friendly when it comes to maintaining old devices functional! You can install iOS 15 on a device as old as the iPhone 6S from 2015! And like you said before, until recently you still were able to download and install apps on your iOS 5 and iOS 6 devices!

Yes, that’s great and all. But that’s not the kind of support I’m talking about.

Why prevent iOS 5 and iOS 6 devices from accessing the App Store? The possible answer, Because it’s come the time to drop support for these old devices, leaves a lot to be desired. While I agree that currently more than 95% of iOS developers have long moved on, and finding apps that can still run on iOS 5 and 6 means stumbling on abandonware most of the times, one might want to still be able to access their purchased apps and download older versions that still run on older versions of iOS. Why remove that capability?

If, for example, it’s a matter of updated Web security protocols that the vintage device cannot handle, then why not 1) let the user know, and 2) keep allowing iTunes 12.6.5.3 to manage iOS apps, so the user can still download and install their purchased apps from a Mac that can handle any updated Web security protocol that’s been put in place?

Let’s make another example: why limit the support of security updates to just the two previous versions of Mac OS? There are still a lot of people running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra and 10.14 Mojave. In a lot of professional environments, the actual Mac OS system upgrade doesn’t happen when Apple releases the new version of Mac OS; it happens when the third-party software companies making the applications or plug-ins a studio or a firm relies on, release an update or fix any compatibility issues with the new version of Mac OS (or the new Apple Silicon architecture). In these environments, users are not willing to screw up their production setups just to try out the shiny, buggy new version of Mac OS. This particular issue is exacerbated by the fact that Apple is releasing incredibly powerful Apple Silicon Macs aimed at these professionals among others, Macs that these professionals would purchase in a heartbeat, but they come with the latest version of Mac OS, and some of the software applications these professionals depend upon don’t work well (or even at all) with the latest version of Mac OS. But I’m digressing slightly here. The question remains: why not extend security coverage to at least one more previous version of Mac OS? What is so technically unsurmountable that prevents you from packaging for Mac OS 10.14 Mojave the same security patches you’re releasing for Mac OS 10.15 Catalina?

And another example: with iOS updates, why is the path always forward? Why not allow users to perform a clean, legitimate downgrade if they want to or need to? Back when iOS 9 came out, allowing the iPhone 4S and the third-generation iPad to update to it was a mistake, as iOS 9 impacted their performance noticeably. I was initially okay with iOS 9 on my iPad 3, but as time passed I regretted not staying on iOS 8.4.1. I would have loved to just be able to re-download iOS 8.4.1 and downgrade without hassle. And another thing: suppose you have an iPhone with iOS 12, you skip both iOS 13 and iOS 14, then iOS 15 comes out and nags you to update. If you do, your device will go from iOS 12 to the latest minor update of iOS 15. But what if for some reason you want to update from iOS 12 to iOS 14 instead? You can’t. Why? Because Apple. (You’re rolling your eyes and want a good reason why one would want that? How about to keep using a few great apps that you love and still want to use, but they got retired some time ago, and stopped working under iOS 15?)

Again, what is so technically unsurmountable that prevents Apple from providing an easy way to reinstall an earlier version of iOS on a device that can run it?

I may be wrong, but the answer to all these questions is, Nothing, for it hardly looks like a technical issue. It’s a matter of policy. As I’ve often pointed out, Apple’s behaviour — at least for an outside observer — is to adopt the course that’s more convenient for them. The course that makes things easier for them to manage, streamline, deploy. It’s all very opinionated. It’s not a matter of costs or lack of resources, I don’t believe that for a second. Apple moves forward, doesn’t look back too much, and constantly nudges their users to do the same. So, Mac OS and iOS updates move forward, and your only alternative — if you don’t want to switch to another platform altogether — is to pause everything and step down from the Apple treadmill, to get back on it when you are ready. Non-Apple users often call Apple users sheep. It’s offensive, for sure, but increasingly often I’m left with the feeling that Apple treats their users just like that, behaving a bit like a shepherd dog.

Circling back to the title of this article, I’m aware that sabotage is a somewhat strong choice of word. I had no intention of writing a clickbaity title. It’s simply how I felt when I realised that my devices on iOS 5 and iOS 6 couldn’t access either the App Store or my Purchased apps; and how I felt a few months ago when I realised that I couldn’t use iTunes anymore to manage iOS apps, apart from the ones I’ve already downloaded (and thankfully stored) on my Macs over the years.

And I’m perfectly aware that some people will see this simply as a silly, whiny rant. They’ve perhaps joined the school of thought that considers software as a short-lived, disposable thing that has value until it works — strike that — until it’s allowed to work. Then who cares if the apps you paid money for can’t be used anymore on an older device that cost a non-trivial amount of money when you purchased it. And you know, shrugging and telling me that I bought that stuff years ago and it’s not worth getting worked up about it, is a reaction that would really open an interesting debate about what you value and what’s worth for you. I give tremendous value to software and to hardware that still works and still has a purpose. As I wrote in my previous piece On sideloading, I grew up in an era when software was just software and was valued very differently than today. It was software that cost more money but was also ‘allowed to work’ for longer. You were more in control of its lifespan, so to speak.

Well, my rant is over, make of it what you want. I needed to get this out of my system and I hope it’s been at least a little thought-provoking in the process.