🔗 Gurman: Tang Tan, Apple’s Departing VP of iPhone and Watch Design, to Join LoveFrom to Work on ‘AI Hardware’ With OpenAI — Daring Fireball // John Gruber

More designers from Ive’s team at Apple now work at LoveFrom than remain at Apple.

A true changing of the guard.

I’m not particularly worried for Apple. Honestly, I’m just more excited to see what comes out of both design groups.

🆕📝 7 Things (Which Are My Favorite Christmas Movies in No Particular Order) This Week [#124]

Merry Christmas!

🔗 The surprising challenge to run the best web apps locally // Matt Birchler

I think it’s fun to think about the first few decades of computers where people were skeptical that desktop software could be made to run well in the browser. Photoshop was often brought up as neigh impossible to ever run as a web app, for example. Today we’re wondering how long it will be until the cutting edge web apps of today can run locally.

Well spotted! Intriguing trend…

🔗 A merging of Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount would be very bad - The Verge // Alex Cranz

It’s the smaller projects that would be threatened, projects often helmed by people of color and queer folks. […]

We know this because it has already happened quite a bit in 2023. Paramount canceled Ziwe, the source of countless viral interview clips starring Black comedienne Ziwe, and entirely removed Rise of the Pink Ladies — a surprisingly good Grease prequel centered on the experience of a butch lesbian in the 1950s.

I confess I hadn’t considered this angle.

🔗 I’m always happy I use Ghost and not Substack, but I’m extra happy today // Matt Birchler

To sum up, Nazis can fuck right off and private companies who write posts that say, “we don’t like Nazis, but we’ll keep taking their money,” are going to have to deal with the fact people are going to see them as the place that welcomes Nazis.

@matt@isfeeling.social said everything on this matter that I wanted to, so you should go read his whole post.

Great explanation, too, about how companies can (and should) limit what they chose to host, but you can still say whatever you want by self-hosting.

🔗 NYT: Apple Explores Licensing Deals With Publishers for Large Language Model Training – Pixel Envy // Nick Heer

If it were necessary to license published materials for training large language models, it would necessarily limit the viability of those models to those companies which could afford the significant expense.

As opposed to the “usual” way of training with data scraped from the web…a legally-contested practice.

It reminds me of when Craig Federighi said something like “We don’t need to train ML algorithms on our users’ photos when we can just buy images elsewhere.”

Me? I approve.

It’s so annoying how beautiful and perfect @nickheer@c.im has made his site.

🔗 Ugly Christmas Sweater Wallpapers (Mac Edition) — Basic Apple Guy

Do that for each band, and I’d be done in a few minutes. Wrong! Because each thread is its layer, the total number of layers in this project quickly grew to over 63,000 (63,158, to be exact), which hammered the Mac’s memory. Oddly enough, my MacBook Air (MBA) handled the project more efficiently than my Mac Studio, which has more cores and memory, making me think something was happening in how the software was optimized for that chip.

Just wild, both in the complexity and which computer performed better. Look great too!

🆕📝 Letters with Austin #2, December 2023

My next letter with Austin!

Found an oopsie.

FB13483727

Screenshot of a smartphone displaying a ‘Wait to Return’ function within the Shortcuts app, explaining that it pauses execution until the user leaves and returns to the app. The screen includes a highlighted typo that reads “take affect” instead of “take effect”.

🔗 My Handwriting Can’t Keep Up // Greg Morris

In reality, I didn’t need to speed up my writing to match my thoughts; instead, I needed to slow my thoughts to match my writing pace.

🔗 GoodLinks Adds Even Deeper Shortcuts Integration […] - MacStories // Federico Viticci

[T]his shortcut gets the current article you’re reading in GoodLinks and extracts different properties from it, such as the title of the story, its author, and URL. Using another action, GoodLinked can see if you’ve selected any text in the article and, if so, save it as your selection. By retrieving the article’s selection as Markdown, I don’t have to do anything else to prepare a blockquote for MacStories.

This, but for Reeder would be so good. Pretty please @rizzi@gloria.social?

🔗 Apple’s Next Generation CarPlay Shown with Aston Martin and Porsche - COOL HUNTING // Josh Rubin

This version of CarPlay appears the moment the car is turned on and combines locally rendered content with features powered by the iPhone’s wireless connection to the car. Today Apple announced the first two partners on board to integrate this new generation, Aston Martin and Porsche, and showed us preliminary screens.

Well, I’ll be! They got next-gen CarPlay out the door before the end of the 2023. I really didn’t think they’d get it done.

Superb app alert! I love TextSniper and have it mapped to cmd-shift-7. Get it for free today.

🎅🏼 TextSniper is free today, thanks to IndieAppSanta.

Code, in case it doesn’t get applied automatically is FREEFOR24H.

Thank you, Marco, for the tip.

It really tickles me when text-to-voice readers pronounce Bluesky as “blue-ski”. 🤭

🔗 iOS 17.2 and tvOS 17.2 Kills TV Show and Movie Wishlists - Initial Charge

A warning on this would have been nice, but I hate that they’re doing it regardless. If I want to browse TV shows or movies to purchase on my Apple TV, all the iTunes Store content is commingled with media that’s only available on streaming. Even if you stick to the “Store” section, you’ll see plenty of movies and shows that require Apple TV+ or another streaming app and subscription to view.

I haven’t played with the new Store section myself, but this sounds crappy. It should be purchasable stuff only.

🆕📝 Crashing Clockwise #533: ‘I’m the App’

Kind of short and sweet this week. 😊

🆕📝 7 Things This Week [#123]

Two podcasts, three articles, and two videos this week, plus a game if you Take a Chance this week.

Reading a social timeline that doesn’t have threaded conversations from top to bottom, newest to oldest, is bananas in my mind. Makes absolutely no sense. I’m reading conversations in reverse, Memento-style. But without a timeline sync, it’s a fool’s errand to try to find where I last left off.

🔗 Adam Mosseri on the Threads’ Fediverse Rollout

Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week.

I’m fascinated by how Threads is dogfooding their Fediverse rollout. Not with fly-by-night test accounts, but with the head of the platform’s personal account — one of the more popular and watched ones on all of Threads. Kudos to them.

🔗 Happy Monday! Enjoy this dumpamine from the past week — Keenan

Anyway, Astronaut Time. It’s a system, I suppose, an agreement between two or more people to easily inform the other(s) of when you anticipate being in the zone (like I am right now, I’m in Astronaut Time) and just need minimal distractions. Particularly helpful if you […] work from home […]

The solution my wife and I decided to try was setting up automations on our phones. We created a Focus in iOS called “Astronaut Time” that would automatically send an iMessage to the other person when it’s enabled/disabled.

🔗 Here are a bunch of games I played this year to distract me from the fact that one day the Sun will swallow our planet whole — Keenan

This is the end of the post. Tell me which games you think I missed in the comments section.³

[…]

³ The comments section can be found by clicking the Trash icon on your computer’s desktop.

🤣

🔗 Artifact’s new Links feature brings more than news to the reading app - The Verge // David Pierce

Systrom says the idea for Links came out of conversations about what Artifact might do with food blogs, or photo essays, or video, none of which felt quite right next to news articles from news publications. […] He cites Delicious, the social bookmarking app, as [an] example. There was plenty of news in the mix, but mostly people just shared stuff they liked on the internet.

If I didn’t already have RSS dialed, I think I would turn to Artifact for my news source / web discovery engine.

I had a premonition that I would poke a hole through my climbing pants with my crampons today, and sure enough… Luckily just a scratch underneath.

A close-up of a black fabric with a small, jagged tear, held between fingers for better visibility.

Also, potentially new options (or at least new iconography) for a long-press on a Reminders notification.

Reminders notification context menu with options for reminding tonight and tomorrow.