Riccardo Mori

A brief reflection on Mac software stagnation

February 24, 2022

Software

If you’ve been a Mac user for more than a few years, let me ask you a question: what is the newest application you have installed that turned out to be so useful and well-made it’s now part of your essential tools? An app that really got you excited and happy to be a Mac user? For the sake of argument, let’s leave out games (obviously) and single-purpose little utilities.

In my case, it’s TextBuddy by Tyler Hall — but it’s truly an outlier in an otherwise flat landscape. I was reflecting on this a few days ago as I was looking at the Purchased section of my account in the Mac App Store app.

First, as you can see, the apps I’ve purchased or downloaded since 2019 are just a handful. Most are single-purpose utilities, social media clients, or Safari extensions. The biggest apps in this short list are Microsoft Word, flickery, and Pixelmator Pro. None of these is a ‘new app’: Word has been around for a long time; I don’t know when flickery first debuted, but the fact that its minimum system requirement is Mac OS X 10.6.6 suggests that the app has been around since Snow Leopard; Pixelmator Pro is the newest of the three, but still, its first version was released in November 2017, more than four years ago.

And while Pixelmator has indeed become part of my essential tools, I tend to use Acorn more often, and Acorn has been around since 2007. By the way, the impact Acorn had on my workflow can’t be overstated, since it was the application that made me move away from Photoshop back then; it’s currently installed on all my Macs, even old machines running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

In other words, if I open my toolbox with all the essential Mac apps I use on a daily basis for everything I do, what I see are old (some very old), tried-and-trusted applications: BBEdit, Transmit, MarsEdit, Acorn, NetNewsWire, Reeder, Notational Velocity/nvALT, Graphic Converter, Aperture (yes, still using it under Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra), The Unarchiver, Skim (a solid PDF viewer that’s been around since 2007), VLC, Apple’s Image Capture (still the fastest for importing images from an iOS device), xScope, Find Any File, SuperDuper!, AppZapper, f.lux, iA Writer, iStat Menus…

This may be a completely subjective observation, but I’ve been feeling a certain stagnation in Mac software these past few years. There are always exceptions and things I’ve missed, sure, but it seems to me that the landscape appears to be more tired than vibrant. More broadly — and this is an image I’ve already used in the past — the Mac as a platform appears trapped in inertia instead of progressing; it feels as if the Mac software train has reached its final destination, and everyone is just building over and around the terminal station.

Ideally, at this point in my article I should start the next paragraph with The reasons for this perceived stagnation are — followed by a bullet list. But I don’t feel it’s so clear-cut.

There are factors that should be considered when observing the current state of Mac software, factors we could use to paint a picture that is necessarily imperfect and speculative.

The first factor to consider is the iOS platform. Historically it has had a considerable impact on Mac software development, starting within Apple itself. It’s no mystery that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard took so long to be released because Apple internally turned most of its resources to the development of the iPhone and its operating system. When iPhone OS opened to third-party developers in 2008, many third-party Mac developers similarly started concentrating their efforts to come up with fun and useful iOS apps to add to their catalogue.

Did this slow down Mac software innovation? I’m not sure. Certainly not at first. The 2008–2010 years were a period in which iOS meant iPhone and iPod touch. And as revolutionary as the iPhone has been, in its first years it was still perceived as an ancillary device, with the Mac still at the centre of that Jobs-defined ‘digital hub’. But things started to change, again, with the introduction of the iPad in 2010. While many iPhone/iPod touch apps initially had a ‘Dashboard widget’ feel to them, the iPad’s biggest canvas allowed for more Mac-like applications.

During the golden era of iOS — both on iPhone and iPad — it was understandable that they would become the priority for any Apple developer, especially for new developers, since iOS looked more appealing to develop for, both from a financial and technical standpoint.

Then there’s Apple’s agenda to consider. Remember when Mac OS 10.14 Mojave was previewed at WWDC 2018? Craig Federighi (Apple senior VP of software engineering) said that some iOS apps for iPhone and iPad would also work in Mac OS, then he emphatically added: “Are you merging iOS and Mac OS? I’d like to take a moment to briefly address this question”, and this slide appeared behind him:

“No, of course not,” he continued. “We love the Mac, and we love Mac OS, because it’s explicitly created for the unique characteristics of Mac hardware”.

The problem is that, while it’s true that iOS and Mac OS have remained two separate operating systems, Apple has been really pushing to have them both work in the same way when it comes to their underpinnings.

Let’s take a little step back and try to explain this as simply as possible, mashing together a few lines taken here and there from Wikipedia.

Cocoa is Apple’s native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for its desktop operating system macOS. Cocoa consists of the Foundation Kit, Application Kit, and Core Data frameworks, […] and the libraries and frameworks included by those, such as the C standard library and the Objective‑C runtime.

For end users, Cocoa applications are those written using the Cocoa programming environment. Such applications usually have a familiar look and feel, since the Cocoa programming environment provides a lot of common UI elements (such as buttons, scroll bars, etc.), and automates many aspects of an application to comply with Apple’s human interface guidelines.

For iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS, a similar API exists, named Cocoa Touch, which includes gesture recognition, animation, and a different set of graphical control elements. It is used in applications for Apple devices such as the iPhone, the iPod Touch, the iPad, the Apple TV, and the Apple Watch.

One important framework of Cocoa Touch is called UIKit, which derives from the Mac’s Cocoa framework Application Kit, or AppKit. When Mojave was previewed at WWDC 2018, Federighi said that four new apps would be included in Mojave — Home, Voice Memos, Stocks, and News — and that these apps were ports of their iOS counterparts. Such porting was made easier because Apple was incorporating iOS frameworks into Mac OS.

Such ‘hybrid’ apps, containing both the (Mac) AppKit and (iOS) UIKit frameworks took the name of Catalyst apps. The base concept appears to be practical and developer-friendly: let’s remove the friction of having to deal with platform-specific frameworks, and let’s just have a system where you can effectively build universal apps that can run on iPhone, iPad, and the Mac with little effort. The problem of many such apps, especially those built with too little effort, is that they appear and behave in a way that doesn’t feel very Mac-like, with UI elements that clearly are just cut & pasted from iOS and poorly adapted to offer a good, usable, consistent experience under Mac OS.

Now it’s 2022, more than three years after Mojave and the first Catalyst apps appeared, and while Apple and others have released a few decent Catalyst apps so far, this software transition isn’t going so smoothly. Nick Heer has summed up the situation very aptly and concisely in a recent commentary piece on his blog:

Right now, it feels a little bit like the three main MacOS app frameworks are floating in unanchored space: AppKit is not the future, Catalyst is not ready to replace it, and using SwiftUI remains a long way off for big, complicated apps.

Remember when I was pointing out that iPads were becoming incredibly powerful machines but with an OS that wasn’t capable of taking full advantage of that amazing hardware? Apple has managed to put the Mac in a similar position, in my opinion. The new 14-inch and 16-inch M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros are brutally performant and energy-efficient machines, but with an operating system that instead of aging well has been rendered immature by too many haphazard plastic surgeries. We have once again Mac ’pro’ hardware, but in the meantime the Mac as a device has been effectively demoted and removed from the centre of the digital hub. Now it’s just a device. Conceptually and from a software standpoint, now there’s the iPhone, the big iPhone (iPad), and that other desktop/laptop device that’s kind of a big iPad but without touch (the Mac).

So, back to what Federighi said in 2018 — “We love the Mac, and we love Mac OS, because it’s explicitly created for the unique characteristics of Mac hardware” — I called bullshit then, and I call bullshit now. An operating system (and relative first- or third-party applications) that really embraces the potential and the characteristics of the specific hardware it runs on needs to be built on an equally specific set of frameworks, and does not need to be contaminated by frameworks and paradigms from an operating system that historically is a simplified derivation of Mac OS X itself. It’s like manufacturing a car with the same manufacturing tools and processes of a model car. (Not my best analogy, but you get the idea).

Or, if maintaining a separate set of frameworks is too cumbersome for everybody, at least Apple should commit to improving this unified set of tools — by making it at least more complete, more versatile, and more clearly documented — in order for developers to create good applications that feel at home and UI-consistent whether they’re used on an older iPhone 8 or on an M1 24-inch iMac. The current stagnation of Mac software, I think, boils down to developers who now find themselves with having to decide which path to take, when all paths are unclear, incomplete, or awkward to follow through.

As a Mac power user and observer, I’m not optimistic. I’m not saying we won’t see great Mac apps in the future, don’t get me wrong. But I have the feeling that they’ll be the notable exception in a software landscape that will share all the worst traits of iOS — an overabundance of mediocre-to-crappy apps, the same race to the subscription model, the lack of very sophisticated software applications that can tackle more than a handful of tasks. All this on increasingly powerful Macs that could run an entire power plant alone… if only they had the right software.

A brief reflection on Mac software stagnation was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 24 February 2022.

This is my next main browser: a review of Orion

February 8, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Software

Introduction

Back in late March 2021, among the many feedback emails I was still receiving after the little Mac OS X Snow Leopard retrospective I had published in February, I received a message from Vladimir Prelovac, asking me if I wanted to try Orion, a new browser for Mac his company Kagi was working on, and if I wanted to share my observations and criticism with him.

Full disclosure here: Since March 2021 I’ve been an Orion beta tester and I was also asked to provide feedback and insights on user interface-related matters. I have nonetheless approached writing this review by trying to be as unbiased as possible. Whether you think I’ve succeeded or not, I invite you to try Orion and judge for yourselves.

I’ve always loved trying browsers out, because I’ve always been curious to see how developers would approach such type of software tool which is fundamentally designed to accomplish a ‘simple’ task — browsing the Web. The fun part with indie-developed browsers has always been to see how developers would decide the browser’s structure. Which features they would give precedence to. Which feature they would elevate as the defining characteristic of the browser. And which features they would either put in the background or eliminate entirely as part of the specific approach they intended for their browser.

The Shiira Project back in 2004 released a WebKit-based open source browser called Shiira. From its Wikipedia page:

Since the browser was developed with Safari in mind, the main characteristics of the two browsers are similar. For example, Shiira employs private browsing options so that history and cookies are not recorded when activated. However, the search engines search field on the toolbar includes many search engines. Shiira also uses Cocoa programming to provide users with a customizable drawer extending from the left or right of the window. The drawer includes bookmarks, history, downloads, and an RSS reader. In version 2.0, the sidebar was replaced by a series of palettes opened and closed from the main window toolbar. Shiira natively supports in-browser PDF viewing.

Shiira was perhaps the first indie attempt to bring new UI ideas to the browser, and I liked the idea of that side drawer. If I remember well, it was also used for browser tab management, and you could actually see thumbnails of the other pages you had opened. Another browser that implemented tabbed browsing using a side drawer at about the same time as Shiira was OmniWeb in its version 5.0, released in August 2004. (OmniWeb’s historical importance can’t be overlooked, of course, but at this point in the timeline its development was starting to slow down).

The Barbarian Group in 2008 created a WebKit-based browser called Plainview whose defining characteristic was its being a truly full-screen browser, and, since it was a full-screen browser, they also devised a Presentation mode so that, say, a Web developer could showcase a few websites they built by essentially bookmark them and show them one by one like in a sort of slideshow.

Another experimental browser that appeared in 2008 was Stainless, by Danny Espinoza. Its defining feature was stated right in its tagline: A multi-process browser for OS X inspired by Google Chrome. In the final version of the browser’s official website when the developer announced he couldn’t keep developing Stainless and released its source code (circa 2013), you can read what made Stainless a very interesting browser:

Stainless started out as a technology demo to showcase my own multi-processing architecture in response to Google Chrome (Stainless 0.1 was released three weeks after Google released Chrome for Windows). Sensing an opportunity and inspired by a growing fanbase, I decided to craft Stainless into a full-fledged browser and work on features that I hadn’t seen before in other browsers.

A prime example is parallel sessions, which allow you to log into a site using different credentials in separate tabs at the same time. This new technology is woven throughout Stainless, from the private cookie storage system, to session-aware bookmarks that remember the session in which they were saved. I still believe this is a true browser innovation (and I’d love to see this implemented in Chrome).

I was a fan of Stainless. It was a rather bare-bones browser, but I really took advantage of its parallel sessions feature which, for example, allowed me to log into two (or more) different Gmail accounts at the same time, by keeping each login in its own tab.

Around 2014 a group of developers released Breach, “a new modular browser written entirely in JavaScript”. This was clearly a more geeky project, but the modularity concept intrigued me. As you can read in the archived site homepage for Breach, “Everything in the browser is a module, a web-app running in its own process. Construct your own browsing experience by selecting the right modules for you.” I only spent a limited time trying out Breach back then, but I was generally impressed by how lightweight and fast it felt.

These are just a few examples. Over time, many other experimental indie browsers have come and gone, but these are perhaps the ones I’ve used the most and that made me look beyond the official browsers built by larger tech companies.

Back to Orion

The Orion project is decidedly more ambitious. In a previous version of the browser’s website FAQ Page, the first question was “What is Orion’s goal?” and the answer was We want Orion to be the best browser for Apple devices. It sounds bold but, after using Orion for several months, and seeing it grow and mature update after update, I think Orion is on its way to fulfil that goal.

Orion’s approach is utilitarian. It doesn’t want to win users with a fancy UI or quirky æsthetics to appear ‘different’. Its user interface is not that different from Safari. Its design philosophy has to do with how the browser works, not how it looks. And today a browser should be fast (in a Web that’s getting progressively bloated and dragged down by intrusive, resource-consuming scripts), privacy conscious, and adhering to the web’s standards. And that’s what Orion is and does.

This, at first sight, sounds simplistic and unassuming. On paper, all major browsers are like that. What makes Orion noteworthy? Several things you only notice by actually using it.

It’s fast

Like, really fast. On my Mac, it feels perceptibly faster than Safari. It feels lighter, less encumbered, more responsive. In Safari, when I type an URL and then press Enter to load the website, there’s often a small but noticeable delay before Safari actually starts loading the website. With Orion the loading starts immediately. I’ve tested Orion on an Intel MacBook Pro, so perhaps the difference in performance between Orion and Safari is more nuanced on faster, Apple Silicon Macs. On this MacBook Pro I also have Brave and Firefox, and Orion is faster than those as well, in case you were wondering.

It’s energy-efficient

Speed is important, but of course it’s not everything. Orion is also a very energy-efficient browser. It’s certainly less memory-hungry than Chrome, Brave or Firefox, plus it has a Low Power Mode that really works and really saves battery life. The MacBook Pro I’m using as a test machine has an old battery with a lot of cycles (the Battery status is ‘Service recommended’), so, with medium-to-heavy use the MacBook never lasts more than 3 hours.

When its battery is running low (say, around 20%), I close all non-essential apps and keep Orion as the sole open browser. On more than one occasion I noticed how the MacBook’s battery took more time to discharge to the point where you get the warning to connect the Mac to a power source, or else it’ll go to sleep. In short, thanks to Orion I’ve managed to squeeze almost half an hour more out of a session on a single charge. And this with an old battery, imagine on better-performing machines.

It’s extremely respectful of your privacy

Read the privacy-related FAQ on Orion’s FAQ Page, because it really explains everything you need to know about Orion’s privacy features. I can simply confirm, by personal experience, that it does what it says on the tin. The very short version is: it’s at the very least as privacy-minded as Safari (same underlying technologies), and more.

One aspect worth mentioning is that Orion is, by default, a zero-telemetry application. You may have read this in the FAQ page, but what does it mean? In hopefully simple words, telemetry is the automated process of recording and transmission of data from one site to another that is capable of monitoring and analysing such data. One example could be a weather station, collecting information via an array of sensors, and transmitting such data to a meteorological institute to be processed, analysed, and archived.

When it comes to software, an application can collect a series of data about the machine it is installed on and the way the application is being utilised (how frequently, what kind of settings and preferences are selected, etc.). Subsequently, the application sends the data elsewhere, typically back to who developed it (hence the expression “to phone home”), so that they can analyse the behaviour of the user base when engaging with the app.

In theory this may not entirely be a bad thing, as a developer could use this data to improve their application, for example. But as it’s pointed out on Orion’s FAQ page, Most browsers regularly send dozens or even hundreds of requests. Each request poses a security risk, no matter what information it sends, by potentially exposing your IP address and your browser fingerprint. Telemetry can also inadvertently leak personally identifiable information or corporate intelligence.

Therefore, the fact that Orion does not have built-in telemetry means that the browser does not collect any kind of data about its users that could potentially expose them. Then how can Orion’s developers direct its development, how can they make Orion better if they don’t receive any usage data? Vladimir Prelovac gave me a simple answer via email:

[Orion’s development is] directed by user feedback and nothing else. People share with us an incredible amount of information, more valuable than any telemetry could tell us.

Orion supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions

This is because Orion natively supports the Web Extensions API. I think it’s a rather impressive goal and it’s unquestionably a very powerful feature. A lot of people are hesitant to stop using Chrome because, as they say, they don’t want to lose access to certain functionalities tied to some of their favourite extensions. But knowing that Orion supports them, they could potentially make the switch. And that would be great, since Orion consumes much fewer resources than Chrome, and it’s certainly more privacy-focused. At the time of writing, Orion’s extensions support is not yet 100%, but it’s getting there. I’m not a heavy extensions user, typically, but I’ve tried some of the most popular and they seemed to work just fine.

I like how extensions are managed. It’s all quite straightforward. I like that there’s a quick way to find and install the most popular. The first extension I usually look to install on any browser I use is uBlock Origin. In Orion, I went to Tools → Extensions → Manage, clicked on Add Extension, then Popular Extensions, and there it was. (At the time of writing, the other popular extensions offered in this panel are Dark Reader, Bypass Paywalls Clean, 1Password, Bitwarden, Grammarly, and Honey). You also have the additional option of allowing the extensions on all websites, allowing them for one day, or having the browser ask for each website.

Some personal favourites

The Tools menu contains a couple of features I really love. Edit Text on Page is very useful to me as a translator. Sometimes I get assignments like translating a block of text that is positioned in a certain way on a website. And the translated text often needs to fit in the same space (give or take a line or two) as the original. Being able to easily edit the text on a webpage, I can preview how my translation will look directly on the page. Take Screenshot of the Entire Page is something I’ve wanted in a browser since finding this feature in an old app called LittleSnapper. To me, it’s quite useful, especially when I’m exploring archived sites in the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. (LittleSnapper also let you edit text on page directly, by the way).
The use of a separate panel to manage Bookmarks and Extensions, to see the History and the saved passwords, is another welcome feature in my book. I’ve always disliked how Safari handles History. When in Safari you select History → Show all History, it loads the History in the same tab you’re viewing — it’s annoying, because more often than not, when you’re finished examining the History, you close the tab, and with it the site you had open before loading the History. The separate panel on Orion is a much tidier solution.
Focus Mode is nice. When you need to read a long-form article, for example, and you don’t want anything in your way, you select View → Focus Mode, and both the Address bar and the Tab bar disappear. (By the way, whether you’re in Focus Mode or not, if you put Orion in full-screen mode, the whole application chrome goes away, leaving you with just the webpage contents. If you prefer to keep seeing the toolbar in full-screen mode, like it happens in Safari, you can tell Orion by ticking the Always show toolbar in full screen option in Orion → Preferences → Appearance).
Vertical Tabs is another interesting option. If one is browsing on a particularly big screen (say, on iMacs, or Mac laptops with a bigger external display attached), I can see the appeal of having tabs stacked within a sidebar on the left. But even on a laptop the feature can be useful. When selecting View → Toggle Vertical Tabs, Orion defaults to showing just the website favicons on a sidebar that slides from the left and can be extended to progressively reveal each website’s title. For many users, favicons are so distinctive that are enough to make a site recognisable, therefore using vertical tabs minimised this way ends up being both a vertical and horizontal space saver, in my opinion.
I like the fact that Orion doesn’t have a default search engine. Instead, the first time you click on the address bar after installation, the browser prompts you to set (or not) the default search engine of your choice.

iOS and iPadOS, too

Another exciting thing is that Orion is also being developed for iOS/iPadOS. My review has focused exclusively on the Mac side of things because when it comes to browsers, Mac OS still offers a more versatile environment than iOS. But even at this stage, Orion for iOS already has unique features, like the ability to support web extensions, something other browsers don’t have. Orion for iOS is still in beta, so this kind of support is still at a preliminary stage at the time of writing, but this is undoubtedly excellent news.

Closing thoughts

Would I recommend Orion? Without a doubt. I was positively impressed right from the start. When I first launched Orion back in March 2021, the first reaction was that it felt a bit bare-bones and with a very ‘Safari lite’ look and feel. But its speed and stability were astounding for a beta. And Orion has been getting better and maturing at a staggering pace. This is not a passion project from a single developer who updates it intermittently, and ends up abandoning it for lack of resources, increased inertia, loss of interest. This is a solid piece of software that’s being developed by a company of competent people who have an ambitious goal — to make the best browser for Apple devices — and a business plan.

If you’re wondering “how will Orion make money?” there is, again, an answer to this exact question on the FAQ page: Our Pro version will allow users to support Orion’s development. Will it generate revenue? That’s up to you. Regardless, all funding for Orion will come from its users rather than ads, tracking, data monetization or any other indirect way. […] We believe this project will deliver an experience that its users value enough to support. We believe that enough to promise that we’ll never resort to ads or other such funding methods.

On a personal level, Orion is certainly going to be my next default browser on every Mac that can run it (it currently supports Mac OS 10.14 and higher, but there are plans to make it work on Mac OS 10.13 too). And it couldn’t have come at a more serendipitous moment. Apple’s recent tendency to experiment with software design and Mac user interface in a way that seems increasingly forgetful of good design and usability practices has got me worried and disappointed. The butchering of Safari 15’s design and user interface was averted and reverted at the last minute, but who knows what Apple will pull next.

The existence of Orion, in this regard, is a relief. I can forget about the next Safari entirely and make Orion my primary browser — it looks and feels like the ‘good old’ Safari, and adds more interesting and useful features on top of it. The fact that Orion is designed to prioritise being a powerful tool to navigate today’s Web, rather than being a cool app with an ‘opinionated’ UI, is truly refreshing to me, because it’s exactly what I expect from a Web browser in this day and age.

And I suspect Orion will attract a lot of users who share my perspective — people disappointed in Apple’s software quality and UI design direction; people who love their extensions but maybe don’t love Chrome or Firefox as much; people who love to browse this bloated, ad- and tracker-ridden Web unhampered and with as much privacy as possible. With a browser made by a company that’s quite transparent about its intentions and goals — to be on the user’s side and give users the best possible tool for the job. It reminds me of Apple, a few years back.

This is my next main browser: a review of Orion was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 8 February 2022.

People and resources added to my reading list in 2021

January 31, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

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.