This is very useful context. Especially around Contact Scopes etc. It's never made sense to me that iOS shares if the user is choosing to not share their contacts.
Apple seems to basically do privacy-related things to an 80% level but not bothering with getting it totally correct. This makes business sense because the extra 20% is way more difficult, but it's great to see GrapheneOS going all the way.
100% agreed. I'm a Program Manager and have been writing tooling for my own internal workflows for years (like Monte Carlo-based forecasting tools), or program-adjacent low-stakes stuff (like an API to generate a WSJF score based on a fields inputted into Asana, since it couldn't do that itself).
But I'm not about to send a PR for fixing production bugs even if I have decent high level context. Nobody has better context than the devs working on it every day.
This is correct and also increasingly affecting me as my eyes age. I had to give my Studio Display to my wife because my eyes can't focus at a reasonable distance anymore, and if I moved back further the text was too small to read. I ran the 5K Studio Display at 4K scaled for a bit but it was noticeably blurry.
This would've been easily solved with non-integer scaling, if Apple had implemented that.
(I now use a combo of 4K TV 48" from ~1.5-2 metres back as well as a 4K 27" screen from 1 m away, depending on which room I want to work in. Angular resolution works out similarly (115 pixels per degree).)
All through the 2000s Apple developed non-integer scaling support in various versions of MacOS X under the banner of “resolution independence” - the idea was to use vectors where possible rather than bitmaps so OS UI would look good at any resolution, including non-integer scaling factors.
Some indie Mac developers even started implementing support for it in anticipation of it being officially enabled. The code was present in 10.4 through 10.6 and possibly later, although not enabled by default. Apple gave up on the idea sadly and integer scaling is where we are.
Here’s a developer blog from 2006 playing with it:
There was even documentation for getting ready to support resolution independence on Apple’s developer portal at one stage, but I sadly can’t find it today.
Here’s a news post from all the way back in 2004 discussing the in development feature in Mac OS tiger:
Lots of of folks (myself included!) in the Mac software world were really excited for it back then. It would have permitted you to scale the UI to totally arbitrary sizes while maintaining sharpness etc.
Yep, I played with User Interface Resolution app myself back then in uni. The impact of Apple's choice to skip non-integer scaling didn't hit me until a few years ago when my eyes started to fail...
> This is correct and also increasingly affecting me as my eyes age. I had to give my Studio Display to my wife because my eyes can't focus at a reasonable distance anymore, and if I moved back further the text was too small to read.
> (I now use a combo of 4K TV 48" from ~1.5-2 metres back as well as a 4K 27" screen from 1 m away, depending on which room I want to work in. Angular resolution works out similarly (115 pixels per degree).)
The TV is likely a healthier distance to keep your eyes focused on all day regardless, but were glasses not an option?
Glasses would have been the "normal person" fix, but my eyes are great otherwise (better than 20/20 distance vision). So I could focus closer with glasses, but the lenses were worse quality than just sitting farther back.
If you can get used to using it (which really just requires some practice), the screen magnifier on Mac is fantastic and most importantly it’s extremely low latency (by this I mean, it reacts pretty much instantly when you want to zoom in or out).
Once you get used to flicking in and out of zoom instead of leaning into the monitor it’s great.
As an aside, Windows and Linux share this property too nowadays. Using the screen magnifiers is equally pleasant on any of these OSes. I game on Linux these days and the magnifier there even works within games.
I do something similar: give it a bunch of ideas I have or a general point form structure, have it help me simplify and organize those notes into something more structured, then I write it out myself.
I had an issue with the original Apple Magic Mouse that would not work correctly with NiMH batteries but work fine with disposable AA. The mouse would be fine for a few days then randomly stop working; using fresh NiMH would revive it again. I assumed it was due to 1.2v vs 1.5v but perhaps that particular mouse (or all Magic Mice) was just bad.
I have an acurite 5in1 weather station running on eneloops/laddas. It whines about the batteries being low but runs for about a month in any conditions. I just rotate and recharge them at the start of the month.
Looking at the discharge curve for an alkaline, much of the energy is below 1.2V even under light load. A device that works with alkaline and not NiMH due to voltage is broken as designed.
If you need 1.5V / 3V for some reason, you could maybe insert a tiny boost converter from AliExpress (1€, less than 1 cm in all dimensions). I have done that for a string of fairy lights.
Apple sold their own NiMHs (actually rebadged Eneloops) along with their own AA charger to go along with the Magic Keyboard/Mouse, so my bet would be on a faulty device. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Battery_Charger
I use Mr Chilly to demonstrate to non-SF folks how many microclimates SF (and the Bay Area has).
Only suggestion: separate Inner and Outer Sunset since there can be a massive difference between near Ocean Beach and near Irving/9th Ave in autumn (ie. SF's hottest season).
Edit: nevermind, just saw both inner_sunset and outer_sunset in /neighborhoods. I'd assumed it was merged based on the human readable list on the landing page. Thanks for the fun API!
Same; this was the nicest unexpected surprise about buying this place.
Condo built in 2006 with cat5 . Two bedrooms + living room all wired with rj11 phone jacks. Just snipped those off, wired up rj45, and attached the other ends in my utility closet to a patch panel with rj45 as well.
I don't know if it's just cat5 or 5e, but it saturates a 2.5Gbe link and in-wall cable length is about 15-25 meters.
And you're lucky with that build time, if it was more recent it'd probably be CCA or even CCS. When we redid our place a few years ago I went and bought a drum of plenum cable and told the electricians to use that, so I know what went in there. Overprovisioned slightly but who cares, I had a whole drum of cable and a 48-port switch so may as well use it all.
I was forced to do this as my eyes have aged and I can't focus at 5K 27" at a reasonable distance, and can't read the text when I sit far enough back to focus. Hence why 4K 27" (~160 ppi) has become perfect for me.
Would be nice if Apple supported non-integer scaling so I could just dynamically resize everything (without the current technique and performance hit/blurriness of upscaling then downsizing).
I bought my first car in SF, a 2016 Spark EV. Tiny subcompact, 135 km range, perfect for our family of 4 (including dog + daughter).
I literally can't buy any subcompact car these days in USA or Canada, since Spark (petrol) was discontinued in 2022, Prius C (subcompact hybrid) discontinued, and Bolt EV (bigger but still small) discontinued and will be replaced with something even bigger.
Looking forward to inexpensive BYD Seagulls flooding Canada and hopefully encouraging dealers to bring in existing subcompacts that they sell everywhere else in the world.
Apple seems to basically do privacy-related things to an 80% level but not bothering with getting it totally correct. This makes business sense because the extra 20% is way more difficult, but it's great to see GrapheneOS going all the way.
reply