110 posts with category “Tech”

WSJ perpetuating “green bubble” myths

A few points regarding the Wall Street Journal’s recent piece about the social stigma that comes from texting on non-Apple devices:

From the beginning, Apple got creative in its protection of iMessage’s exclusivity. It didn’t ban the exchange of traditional text messages with Android users but instead branded those messages with a different color; when an Android user is part of a group chat, the iPhone users see green bubbles rather than blue.

It’s commonly misremembered that green bubbles were invented for Android and other non-iMessage users, green being chosen explicitly to evoke the color of the Android logo. (It’s also misremembered that it’s the incoming message bubbles that are green, thus branding the sender as an Android user.) But SMS messaging on iPhone used green bubbles for outgoing messages from day one.

Here is the very first moment anybody outside of Apple saw what SMS messaging looked like on the iPhone in 2007:

Green bubbles!

Apple didn’t brand SMS messages with a different color; it branded iMessages with a different color when iMessage was launched four years later, in 2011.

It also withheld certain features. There is no dot-dot-dot icon to demonstrate that a non-iPhone user is typing, for example, and an iMessage heart or thumbs-up annotation has long conveyed to Android users as text instead of images.

The typing indicator and “tapbacks” aren’t withheld from standard SMS conversations; they’re not possible with standard SMS conversations.

I’m not saying Apple isn’t motivated to keep iMessage exclusive to their OSes; this passage in particular is pretty damning:

“In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service for [the] bulk of cell phone users, I am concerned the iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s chief software executive, said in a 2013 email. Three years later, then-marketing chief Phil Schiller made a similar case to Chief Executive Tim Cook in another email: “Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us,” he said. Another warning that year came from a former Apple executive who told his old colleagues in an email that “iMessage amounts to serious lock-in.”

2 Responses

Finally, two new, modern Pinboard apps

Pinboard has been, as far as I know, the de facto online bookmarking tool for nearly a whole decade, which is why I’ve been baffled at how the Pinboard app marketplace has languished for so long. The two frontrunners — Pinner and Pushpin — were last updated 4 years ago and 1 year ago, respectively, and Pushpin has always been slow and unstable for me. Both seemed to have stalled on maintenance and the addition of any new features. I started to assume Pinboard was just too niche of a tool to warrant any serious app development, and that people had maybe just just moved on to a combination of Pocket and Chrome bookmarks.

Every few months, though, my frustration with Pushpin would lead me to search the App Store for alternatives, and finally this weekend I got some! They are both already huge improvements over their predecessors, have both iOS and macOS versions, and for all the tech blogs I read, I hadn’t heard anything about them.

Pinstachio (App Store) by Francisco Cantu is fast and capable, and feels very at-home on both iOS and macOS. Its feature set is relatively limited, and it charges a subscription fee (though an extremely modest one at $7 per year) rather than a one-time purchase, but it’s definitely one to try out and keep an eye on.

Pins for Pinboard (App Store, Twitter) (not to be confused with Pins for Pinboard.in) is by Quang Anh Do, maker of the (now-defunct?) Writing Kit. With clever, unique features — like browsing by domain, “On This Day,” “Random 20” — tag and metadata suggestions, preview images, a development blog and Twitter, and a one-time purchase price, Pins looks like the clear winner to me.

Here’s a quick comparison table:

PinstachioPins for Pinboard
Mac appYesYes
Suggested tags / metadataNoYes
Preview imagesOnly on detail viewYes
Token loginYesYes
Price$7/yr$14 one-time
Data collectionData not linked:
– purchases
– diagnostics
Data not linked:
– purchases
– diagnostics
– usage data
Rating4.3 with 21 reviews4.9 with 192 reviews
First releaseNov 24, 2020Jan 22, 2021
Latest releaseOct 28, 2021Dec 3, 2021
All data as of Jan 3, 2022

Let me know in the comments if I’m missing any feature comparisons or if there are any other Pinboard apps or tools you’d like to recommend.

Leave a Comment

Even Mark Gurman doesn’t actually think the Apple TV is “pointless”

The click-baitiness of Mark Gurman’s much-linked piece today — titled alternately “Apple’s TV Box Is Now Mostly Pointless” and “Why Should I Buy an Apple TV Instead of Amazon Fire, Google Chromecast?” — is quickly given away when he writes: “In recent years, the Apple TV has become a less obvious purchase for many Apple fans and content junkies.”

Is it “a less obvious purchase” or “pointless”? Or is it indeed “useful,” as per this later line:

“Integration with HomeKit, Fitness+, AirPods and the iOS remote app is useful.”


But for the sake of argument, I’ll assume he really does believe the Apple TV is “pointless,” and I’ll boil down his argument into what I see as his three main points, paraphrased by me.

Continue reading

Leave a Comment

It’s never too late for SharePlay

Twice now I’ve seen the sentiment that SharePlay might not make much sense in the near future, since COVID Is Over™.

Federico Viticci on MacStories:

SharePlay is neat but can feel already dated now that more countries are rolling out vaccinations and returning to a semi-regular social life.

Victoria Song on Gizmodo:

Listen, this would’ve been great at the height of the pandemic, but it’s still useful to watch videos and listen to music with your buds on a FaceTime call.

As though now that pandemic restrictions are lifting, everybody’s going to come over and watch movies with me? I don’t know about you but my friends have kids and lives and aren’t going to schlep across town on a Tuesday night just to watch a movie with me, much less a single episode of a TV show — let alone several friends! (Is this a brutal self-own? Do people really just have hoards of friends swinging by all the time?)

And doesn’t anybody have friends in, like, other cities?

I use Plex regularly to watch things with friends remotely, and it’s a flawed experience. Hulu and others started rolling their own “watch together” solutions that frequently required watching from a browser and other hassles. That SharePlay will be a system-wide API that streaming services can tap into is huge, pandemic or not.

Leave a Comment

“Spatial Audio” and “Dynamic Head Tracking” are two separate things

Ever since Apple brought “Spatial Audio with Dynamic Head Tracking” (emphasis mine) to the AirPods Pro, there has been a lot of conflation between these two distinct features. Recently two Apple experts talked about this with regard to Apple TV. It’s often assumed that Spatial Audio is not possible on Apple TV, because the Apple TV doesn’t have a U1 chip, but this is due to a misunderstanding of what Spatial Audio is.

Spatial Audio mimics having the multiple speakers of a surround sound system by running a 5.1, 7.1, or Atmos audio source through some algorithms to create a binaural audio effect. This is similar to using ear-shaped microphones to capture sound so that when played back on standard headphones, the audio sounds like it’s coming from different directions. Also known as “holophonic sound,” Disney did this at Epcot with an attraction called “Soundsations”:

This is separate from Dynamic Head Tracking, which is what most people seem to think Spatial Audio is. Dynamic Head Tracking is what makes it sound like the audio is coming from the device that is playing the video, even as you turn your head.

Just as it would be possible to have Dynamic Head Tracking without Spatial Audio — basically a flat stereo sound that remained “stationary” while you moved your head — it would be possible to have Spatial Audio without Dynamic Head Tracking.

In fact, for accessibility reasons, you can turn off Dynamic Head Tracking while leaving Spatial Audio on:

By default, spatial audio makes it sound like the audio is coming from your iPhone, even when your head moves. You can change this behavior so that the audio sounds like it’s following your head movement.

What this means is that there seems to be no technological reason that existing Apple TVs couldn’t do Spatial Audio, or that if there is, it’s because they’re not powerful enough to process the surround sound data through the necessary algorithms, which seems unlikely.

Honestly, I don’t know why Apple TV doesn’t support Spatial Audio, but it’s not the lack of a U1 chip.

And as long as I’m talking about Spatial Audio with Dynamic Head Tracking, I’m a bit surprised that things like Apple Fitness+ and Apple Arcade don’t feature them.

Leave a Comment