@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

frankreiff

@frankreiff@mastodon.social

I'm Frank Reiff, #mac #indiedev since 1996. I am mostly known for A Better Finder Rename, A Better Finder Attributes (bad names that stuck), Vitamin-R & Big Mean Folder Machine.

I endlessly toot about #indiedev, #mac, #ukPolitics, #climateEmergency, #games & #scifi.

Living in Luxembourg with my wife & 2 teenagers.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

Apple believes it is complying with the letter of the law; from the DMA workshop that took place today, the European Commission made it clear that Apple needs to also comply with the spirit of the law. Apple’s tying of alternate app stores to App Store Connect, and its Core Technology Fee payment model were brought up as areas of key concern today. It's an iterative process, and Apple is expecting to update its compliance plan as the details are hashed out in coming weeks/months

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith I saw a few lines of the workshop taking place and Apple giving their users first! spiel.. but nothing else.

Do you have any links to more news about this?

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

See also: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/03/04/fowler-google-search
https://mastodon.social/@daringfireball/112091364240112220

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith @daringfireball It’s very reminiscent of Trump’s bathroom tweets, but with a ghost writer.

finestructure, to random
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

It’s endearing how the DMA is making some tech journalists grapple with the concept of a cent that isn’t a dollar-cent.

(I know they’re trying to be funny but I don’t think the joke is landing quite the way they think it is.)

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@finestructure @rene That’s an excellent observation. After ATP, it was Hard Forked, Core Intuition, the Verge Cast.. “50 cents of a euro”.. honestly if I was unsure about what it’s called I’d have gone with “half a euro”.

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

Apple's reversal on the Epic situation is all well and good, but it doesn't prevent this kind of thing from happening again to a smaller developer who doesn't have a ton of PR or the ear of the EC. And it does highlight that Apple still has all the control to do whatever it wants, with little oversight, under its proposed DMA plan. They have forcibly inserted themselves in between third party app stores/payment providers and those services’ users, free to turn the screws as they wish

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith that’s why I doubt they are complying at all.. maliciously or not.

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

"Apple said one of the reasons they terminated [Epic’s] developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan”

It is time for Apple's App Store leadership to go.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith Let’s be honest here. It’s Tim Apple and nothing is going to change until he leaves.. and even then he will make sure that his replacement is indistinguishable from him.

siracusa, to random
@siracusa@mastodon.social avatar

Last night, I dreamed about working on and eventually coming up with a complete solution to a (simple) programming problem. When I woke up, I realized the problem was entirely fictional, so the solution is useless.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@siracusa No! It’s a solution in search of a problem. Our business is full of them 😀.

frankreiff, to random
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

Not “owning” the customer makes it hard to provide good support.

Not being able to communicate freely with customers makes it hard to build a relationship and ultimately killed the “Mac community“ where users and devs lived quite happily: devs built the apps that users wanted and users bought the software that they wanted. Apple made its money by selling hardware at often enormous premiums.

The Mac App Store killed that entire scene.

/3

jamesthomson, to random
@jamesthomson@mastodon.social avatar

Well this is fun! I finally got my Apple Vision Pro in Glasgow, but it turns out it's not actually my Apple Vision Pro.

It's in the right box, but it's a 256GB model, not a 512GB, and the serial number of the device doesn't match my order. I have to assume that the store in San Francisco mixed up devices when they were packing them. And somebody in SF got a free upgrade to a 512GB one.

I suspect they would say “just bring it back”, but that's kinda hard now that I'm 5,000 miles away. Fuck.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@tapforms @jamesthomson Today developer-targeted items like the Apple Vision Pro Developer Strap come at an extra special 30x mark up because they know we are the real duces that buy their most expensive hardware, pay a subscription, make software to sell their gear, pay them 30% of the money we make, then use the rest to buy ads so that people can find our software, so that we can continue buying their stuff.. 😮‍💨

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

Vision Pro needs strong competition, to improve it for the better. iPad was so far out ahead in software that its competition never really caught up before losing interest. Right now, Meta has the VR game library and input fidelity, and Apple really has nothing on that front. A potential SteamOS-based headset, as rumored, could make this fight very interesting. The question is can Apple improve visionOS gaming quicker than the other platforms can build and populate a regular-app ecosystem

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith I think it’s more likely that Apple will continue trying to make a productivity headset, Steam & Sony a gaming headset and Meta a gaming-while-waiting-for-the-metaverse-to-catch-anybody’s-interest headset.

I don’t think either Meta’s, nor Apple’s grand ambitions will go very far.

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

(The internet is wrong)

https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/111930047815817709

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith Indeed.

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

The younger people here might not remember how dramatically better a form factor the iPad 2 was over the original iPad. It was hard to believe it was a year-over-year update; at the time, Samsung even halted its imminent Galaxy Tab 10.1 launch in a panic and went back to the drawing board to try and achieve something closer to the iPad design.

I think perhaps Vision Pro 2 needs to be an iPad 2; make the [inevitable] competitors panic.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith I do remember and it was dramatic.. that being said the conceptual step that needed to be taken was very much within Apple’s playbook: “make it thinner”.

My opinion on the AVP isn’t popular amongst all the marketing hype, but making the current model 50% lighter and 50% cheaper isn’t going to solve the reason why people are returning it: it needs a killer app.

It’s not a device that is a little (or a lot) too heavy and expensive: it’s a device looking for a purpose.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith ..and the things that would need to be done to solve this are not within Apple’s comfort zone.

They should be kissing AAA game developers’ bottoms to make a must play game. They should add physical controllers for games and fitness apps, they should let vertical market players sideload and configure, send devs free units, PAY people to port their software to make it a viable platform, court streaming services and music platforms to make content for it, … not going to happen

frankreiff, to random
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

Hertz’s decision to buy fewer EVs spells trouble.

The problem? Resale values keep going down.

The big culprit is no doubt Tesla who are using their enormous (IMHO absurd) market capitalization to cut prices in an effort to obtain (unsustainably) high delivery numbers to push their stock higher.

This destroys both resale value and any chance of anybody making organic profits on EVs.

The good old days of the market working to balance supply and demand are well and truly over.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@janl haven’t heard of any big problems with maintenance issues. My own car over its 5 years has had the small battery for the infotainment and a cable replaced, but has otherwise been maintained free. Most manufacturers also give 5 years of free repairs, so it would be more of a problem for manufacturers than for Hertz.

jamesthomson, to random
@jamesthomson@mastodon.social avatar

As I await my Vision Pro, I dream of playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on a virtual screen the size of my living room. Then maybe I’ll be able to read the tiny text.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@jamesthomson .. not sure how that works with the limited field of view.. will you have to move your head to see the sides ? 😎

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

I thought Vision Pro coming to other countries was an 'end of the year' thing, but no, I've had a whole bunch of people tell me it might be coming a lot sooner, like ‘pre-WWDC’ sooner https://mastodon.social/@macrumors/111884222560373013

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith .. which would put me in an awkward position.. am I really not going to get the latest Apple platform just because I think it won’t go anywhere? and will I really pay 4000+ euros for the pleasure?

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

There's a convergence point for AR and AI: glasses. That's why I think AI devices intended to replace your phone are a dead end; Apple, and its peers, may not get there first, but they will get there with their entire ecosystems in tow. Glasses make the most sense of all the form factors because they're socially acceptable, see what you see, and you don't have to give up another device to slot them into your life. Whether you think AVP is dumb or not, it is a very clear preview of the final form

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith You are certainly right that glasses that just look like glasses would be cool and socially acceptable.. but are they physically possible in a truly useful way? and in anything resembling what AVP shows us today.

Let’s take opaque floating windows.. what do you do about light coming in from all sides? glare? how do you bend light without pancake lenses so that the focal point is not a few millimeters from your eye balls?

1/2

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith I’m not sure whether this is simply a matter of iterative refinement and technological advances.. or like FTL travel.. something that’s cool in a SciFi movie, but is actually physically impossible to build.

Apple sure hit the limits of what’s doable with current technology hard and there’s no clear path from AVP to Apple Glass that I can see.

The way our eyes work isn’t great for enabling this. 2/2

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith that’s a different approach altogether and sounds interesting.. until you think about how you do black pixels.

Holo Lens did some interesting stuff but as far as I can see they can’t do dark colors which kind of limits what you can do to marking up the world, as long as it’s not already too bright.

PHIL_FISH, to random
@PHIL_FISH@mastodon.social avatar

the vision pro looks like a wonderful toy and i would like one please but i’ve also never seen a more obvious stopgap technology. it’s like if the first iphone required a landline. but the moment they manage to fit one in regular-enough glasses, reality as we know it is over.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@PHIL_FISH ..always assuming that this is not a dead end.

In my opinion the pass-through idea is fundamentally flawed: camera to screen is never going to be as good as “normal” sight because both cameras and screens have inherent technological limitations.

Projecting onto normal glasses won’t work because physics. Selectively transparent screens sound good, but our eyes don’t really work like that.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@ratkins @PHIL_FISH I don’t think so. This is already OLED, so better than micro-LED and the screens are pushing what can be done to the extent that few people would have thought it possible. Cameras and screens just have inherent limitations and iterative refinements are unlikely to blast past those anytime soon, if ever.

It’s just hard when the fidelity benchmark is reality.

Apple have done an amazing job already. It’ll get slowly cheaper but I don’t expect giant strides in fidelity.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@ratkins @PHIL_FISH I guess we will see what happens.

Personally I think a fortnight from now, most of those Vision Pros are going to be gathering dust, in 18 months Apple will release a cheaper version that’s worse and will gather a small amount of hype, then iterative improvements will be largely ignored by the mass market.. eventually it’ll be a drag on Apple’s profitability and be updated every few years.

..or I could be completely wrong and someone does come up with a killer app.

harrymccracken, to random
@harrymccracken@mastodon.social avatar

It’s possible to see so much spreadsheet at once on the Apple Vision Pro that a screen grab can’t capture it all.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@harrymccracken @asymco I guess that’s the killer app right there. Might even make Tim Cook consider swapping from his Lenovo workhorse.. the “spreadsheet room” would be his “white room” à la Jony Ive.

rene, to random German
@rene@social.fouquet.me avatar

Listening to the latest @atpfm, I’m kind of flabbergasted that they are unsure that 0,50 Euros is called “50 cent”. Or this some kind of joke that I don’t get? 🤔

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@siracusa @rene Yes, this one is on Mr Fahrenheit 😀.

frankreiff, to random
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

The use case for Apple Vision Pro’s Spatial Computing still eludes me.

It’s definitely not casual mobile, eg checking your messages while waiting at the checkout.

It’s not working from home where you have big display(s), keyboard and mouse handy.

It’s not working in a coffee sho, because you’d have to bring your MacBook, keyboard, trackpad and AVP and look nerdy.

It’s not communal media consumption because you can’t share it.

It’s not sports.. because it’s heavy and unwieldy.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@kcase I’ve played HL Alyx and really enjoyed it, but it also showed me the limits of VR headsets regarding nausea and comfort.

Grand Tourismo 7 with PSVR2 is also very impressive.

I still have trouble believing that AVP has overcome all those comfort issues to the extend that I’d rather be in-there than out-here to work.

Admittedly I hardly use iOS for work, preferring my XDR, Studio & DualUp triple display on my trusty Mac Studio.
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