This article is in fact from 2023, the only thing from 2024 was an update on 03-11 that confirms the detected issue was addressed in macOS 14.3.1 (and likely earlier versions).
The plaintext TSS/ECID and the plaintext OCSP issues have been fixed, which IMO were the only meaningful security gripes of the article.
The iMessage/ADP/Metadata stuff I think is more of an implementation decision than a meaningful attempt at data collection. Using clear text file names and hashes for dealing with collisions and deduplicating is a reasonable first pass at something like this. Sure, they could probably roll some end-to-end obfuscation for this, but with how big their stack and cloud integrations are, I’m sure that’s non-trivial.
I've found the heuristics streaming apps use to determine whether or not to show "play next episode" or "continue watching" to be very hit or miss (sometimes due to a bad heuristic, other times due to a given episode having an unusual end point). Providing an accessible means for the user to quickly course correct when this heuristic inevitably breaks would be handy.
As a concrete example, I frequently find Funimation's app recommends I "continue watching" an episode that I'd consider already completed, and unfortunately the quickest way to "fix" instead of backing back out and browsing around is to frantically scrub through to the end so it auto-plays to the next episode.
I think this all ties back to listening habits. I find individuals who share this opinion are typically stream-primary listeners who mostly listen to playlists, singles, and generated "radio" stations (which is entirely valid! Not to mention that's the way most people listen to music, nowadays.)
However, there are nonetheless lots of people like myself that primarily listen to albums, maintain their own digital libraries, and use streaming platforms as a glorified "trial" platform for new music. I find those who tend to listen to music like I do really care about high resolution album art (and by extension the quality and accuracy of track metadata).
Frankly, since both needs are so widely different, I'm not sure there's any one solution for both. Goodness knows Apple Music tries, but to OP's point, it's clearly not succeeding in this effort.
Give it a try. You will find there is a lot to discover and close connection to the music. Then try looking at the booklet of an album. Pro level: read the liner notes.
It will be amazing how much information there is and to learn about the thought process of the artist while creating the album.
Like this comment [0] elsewhere on this post so very well points out, everything digital is skeuomorphic....
> use streaming platforms as a glorified "trial" platform for new music
... and it seems like the skeumorphism has changed from being a digital analog of a personal record library, to being of a record store. The "library" aspect of it has become more like just the featured section of the store.
Not necessarily true, I'd argue the "perfect" dark mode uses the system's theme by default like you said, but still allows visitors to manually set light or dark should they wish to view the site a particular way (perhaps they prefer the light mode, etc.)
Agreed. S.O. recently added dark mode and for some reason my eyes couldn't focus on it. No idea why. I run my editors and my terminal in dark themes. Maybe they didn't have enough contrast. Maybe the fonts are too small or too thin. I have my browser set to "prefer dark mode" but I'm really happy S.O. let me opt out.
I think the only reason someone who likes dark theme would opt out of your dark mode is because it's not as nice/readable as your light theme, or vice-versa. You should fix that instead. Once your dark mode support is perfect, or at least as good as your light theme, then the toggle serves no purpose.
And still no movement on finally getting Bug 1178764 out the door, despite every other major browser supporting it. Nope, instead they'd rather faff about with the address bar to resounding universal disgust.
Not sure what this has to do with ui changes. What do you think you are going to accomplish by whining about how a project providing free software is not prioritizing your pet feature request?
Well, evidently they implemented backdrop-filter about 8 months ago, but only for the new WebRender stack. And apparently they don't intend to implement it in legacy stacks.
So I guess your feature is tied to the support for WebRender. And that is pretty much limited to some Windows environments, if this article[1] is up-to-date. Both of the Firefox installs I checked don't seem to use it, Linux/X11/Ubuntu and Android (where it's apparently tied to e10s aka Electrolysis, which I could not tell if they even intend to implement for Android any time soon).
If nothing else, I really appreciate the summary, with all the comments and various threads on this it's a bit hard to follow exactly what the hold up is.
It looks like you currently need to go to about:config and enable layout.css.backdrop-filter.enabled. It worked for me without enabling web render. Not that this does much good until it's on by default.
Bit of a disappointing read for me. Given the title, I was expecting more "meat" to the topic, like more details about why and how the author is now warming up to unit tests, anything to get the article beyond a surface-level summary of events. Right now, it simply reads "I didn't previously unit test, then I read some books, and now I do".
Seems to me writing like this is best served with a few book recommendation tweets and doesn't really make sense in this format.
Mostly, I think it's down to having a better understanding of where to try to break dependencies, specifically trying to abstract away from the outside world (akin to how they did it in the Moonpig billing system).
The how is still in progress. Perhaps the most notable instance I can think of it is that recently, due to work on breaking dependencies, I was able to stub out a RabbitMQ connection for an in-memory class, so that I was able to easily test how two components interacted without having to stand up an external service.
For me, looking back, I think it was the Moonpig article that's had the most influence on how I think about things.
Funnily enough, I recognize this image from The Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" soundtrack liner notes (the image itself is from the movie). Why it's included in this article is lost on me.
While I agree iOS 13’s Music.app is pretty shoddy in many respects, there’s plenty of alternatives other than Spotify that might better fit their requirements. (Marvis Pro, Soor, etc.)
Good page, I agree that Marvis is really excellent and is probably the single best reason to subscribe to Apple Music. It has a level of customisability kind of reminiscent of foobar2000, which is unusual for iOS apps, and at the same time it's the most visually smooth and polished of the lot (I also tried them all :)
While you're here, every time I try to load that page my browser (Firefox on Android) hangs with most of the page rendered, and then Android crashes. It's not my adblocker (uBO in default deny mode, still happens with it disabled), but I haven't yet nailed down what it is. Maybe some default flag I've switched, e.g. to disable notifications or block autoplay video?
Whoa, that's bad. I don't currently have an Android device to test with, but I will get an emulator set up this weekend to see if I can reproduce and fix whatever's causing this. Thanks so much for letting me know about this, I really appreciate it!
This looks incredible! I've bookmarked this to check out later, but as an immediate question: do any of these support Apple Music/Spotify as a backend for downloading music? I'd prefer to stick with a monthly subscription for access to all music if at all possible.
Edit: also, you have an incredibly pretty website.
Some support acting as a client for Apple Music, including Marvis. The API is quite comprehensive, they can do most stuff the official app can do, including libary curation and discovery stuff. One exception is downloading songs in advance (you can add new music to your library, but not download it to your device; however if you go back to the Apple app to kick off the downloads, the downloaded songs are played through the 3rd party app after that). If you just add to your library and stream, you wouldn't need to do that.
Thanks for the kind words, Sam :) Unfortunately, I don't believe there's any third-party offering on iOS that supports downloading music within the app from Apple Music or Spotify, I'm fairly certain you'd need to kick off downloads from the first-party player itself. If any folks here are aware of a third-party player that does support this, I'd be interested to know as well.
Genuinely curious, why did so many developers ask for the return of the physical Escape key when you could easily re-map it to caps lock? Before this was an officially supported option, I always hated having to do big hand-shimmies every time I needed to press the escape key, which is quite often for programs like vim!
That's fascinating, I didn't realize that key serves multilingual support in some countries. Is that the standard configuration in China or a common setting for that key there?
It's been the macOS default for a few yeas. Before that, we usually assign Cmd+Space for this (in Windows it was Ctrl+Space for switching language and Shift for toggling between English and Chinese). Then Siri came so the combo stopped working. Possibly it was then when Caps Locks became the default.
Speaking for myself - I find hitting the normal escape key location natural and easy. Especially when I'm typing fast, I can hit it without accidentally hitting another key (e.g. tab).
This might be in part because I'm a tall man, with large hands and long fingers, and also Esc normally has more of a separation from adjacent keys than capslock does.
But another reason I don't want to remap caps lock is that when I am typing on a coworker's computer, odds are high they don't have things remapped the same way. Imagine looking like an idiot in front of your peers, because your muscle memory makes you not know how to type :)
(Also, I'm not sure if people who do that remapping swap caps lock with a different key? Personally, I fully utilize the caps lock key - it wouldn't be much of an improvement to put it in an unusual location, and getting rid of it is not something I'd consider.)
tl;dr - Different people have diverse habits, preferences and needs. Apple's challenge is to design a keyboard layout that works well for as many as possible.
