From the Use Safari web apps on Mac support page:
A web app functions independently of Safari. It shares no browsing history, cookies, website data, or settings with Safari.
Need to use Facebook to stay in touch with that one contact or group? Seems like web apps are the new best way to do this without exposing your activity to Facebook for every page you come across with one of those “Like” button widgets.
On that note, look for websites who generate revenue with your data to start finding ways to diminish the experience when you’re using them from within a web app.
Had a chance to digest some reviews of the iPhone 15 Pro cameras, and a lot of positive changes have hit this year. The non-Max Pro seemed largely static at first, but software advances outpaced hardware this time around. That means a host of improvements across the line. Colors are more natural, more megapixels outside of RAW modes, smudgy noise-reduction giving way to more natural photographic grain, automatic portrait mode, new configurable focal length breakpoints, and largely just all kinds of work that shows photography is to Apple today what music was in the heyday of the iPod.
While considering these many software changes, a potential basis for the diminished veil of secrecy around Apple’s future phones occurred to me. While it’s always been true that hardware is locked-in many months before an iPhone announcement and launch, owing to things like supply chains and manufacturing pipelines, the deep focus on photography would seemingly require stretching these timelines further.
It’s been ages since we first heard “machine learning” pop in as a talking point in an Apple Event, but it’s clear from recent emphasis that ML hardware and algorithms play a key role in their products. Nowhere is that more plainly seen than the camera pipeline. The success of an ML model relies on training data that is highly representative of what the algorithm might encounter in performing its task. For iPhones to rely on these models in the core systems governing that shutter button and its trillions of descendent operations, they need to train on data from exacting specimens of the hardware they will operate on. That means bringing future-spec hardware to places you might expect people would take pictures, and taking thousands (likely thousands upon thousands) of images so you can train models to a level of confidence customers would expect from a function of our phone tasked with capturing our memories.
For a QA process to back a product shipping tens of millions of units on day one, you can’t truly validate ML algorithms or pipeline stages downstream until you have a strong candidate dataset to train on. That means a massive block of work that can’t earnestly begin until data is in the hands of engineers. The procedural pipeline that makes this happen will likely improve over time, but I don’t expect true surprise from camera hardware revelations in iPhone Events any time soon.
This all calls back to the many software changes for iPhone 15 Pro. Carrying over the “Wide” (24mm equivalent) lens/sensor package from last year definitely provided more full opportunity to push greater value in software from the existing hardware, having no scarcity of data for modeling. Will Apple fall into a tick-tock between hardware and software on iPhone cameras?
It’s 2023, and RSS is still a great way to get content that hasn’t been machine tailored to leverage a click and an ad placement out of you. While we’ve watched algorithms destroy any semblance of media trustworthiness, many reputable sites offer RSS feeds so you can directly choose what sources hit your desk for yourself. Throw them some time to weigh against seeing headlines that will goad interaction by entrenching your point of view, or pushing you into a rage spiral.
Here is a small selection of feeds that I follow, consistently delivering good content for a decade or more:
512 Pixels (feed) – Stephen Hackett delivers links, headlines, and fun takes on Apple and adjacent spaces. His Knowledge Base Article of the Week, is always a fun look in the rearview.
MacRumors (feed) – If you never want to miss a story about the multi trillion dollar fruit company, this is the best single feed to follow. Fast on breaking news, very good coverage, and despite its name, heavily favoring factual content to rumors.
xkcd (feed) – You’ve undoubtedly seen one of these scrawled comic strips before. Don’t just wait for a friend to pull one up contextually, and instead find the latest in your unread feed items.
Tools & Toys (feed) – Far from a daily read, this feed scratches the gadget itch for those of us who like to engage in light, tech-related retail therapy from time to time. Curated by Shawn Blanc “and friends,” you’ll see items ranging from quirky to indispensable.
Daring Fireball (feed) – John Gruber writes words on Apple and technology. For better or worse, he’s a fixture in the Apple community, and usually the central node I branch from to repopulate my social graph when I join a new network. On one occasion, he even linked to this very blog.
If you’re new or returning to RSS, there are a lot of options for subscribing/reading feeds. The closest thing to the imitable Google Reader (rest in peace), is probably Feedly, if you’d like a place to get started. But there are many options to dig through once you’ve gotten your feet wet, and would like to branch out.
It’s true, while writing up this list I came across a troubling number of defunct feeds that have fallen stale. No point in denying technochocolate has had brighter days too. The collapse of Twitter on the heels of some brutal years of misinformation has really shaken up a lot of the status quo again. Perhaps we can revitalize some of the rivers of communication that have been stopped up, and see some new tributaries bring something fresh to our collective conversation again.
It’s probably the longest standing requested feature for Sorta to be able to build your own quizzes, and it just launched into a public (to everyone) beta today! This app is a pet project, and could be described as whatever the opposite of lucrative is.
I’ve had to be creative about how to bring out features. While it might not be perfect, it is a way to get users to follow the same quiz algorithm to power their own quizzes easily. It’s piggybacking off of Mastodon posts, which was fun to interact with while it’s on the rise.
Also, if you haven’t visited in a while, there have been a lot of quality of life improvements for taking quizzes recently. You should check them out.
Anyways, I look forward to seeing what kinds of quizzes people will make. Hope you have fun with it!
Strictly Necessary Cookies, Performance Cookies, Functional Cookies, Targeting Cookies, Store and/or access information on a device, Personalized ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development, Use precise geolocation data, Actively scan device characteristics for identification, Ensure security, prevent fraud, and debug, Technically deliver ads or content, Match and combine offline data sources, Link different devices, Receive and use automatically-sent device characteristics for identification…
This is all awful, the experience makes me cringe (and not in the cool Gen Z kind of way). It kind of sucks what the Internet has become.
I just wanted to read an article.