The Nintendo 64 was the console of my childhood and I could not put my email address into this website fast enough.
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Teaching Cyberdog New Tricks⇢
Cameron Kaiser has written the most in-depth article I’ve ever read about Apple’s long-defunct Cyberdog product. The dive into OpenDoc is just a sweet bonus.
Sponsor: Unite 5 Turns Web Apps Into Supercharged macOS Apps⇢
Unite 5 for macOS takes your web experience to the next level, transforming websites into feature-rich Mac apps. Powered by a completely redesigned WebKit browser, Unite 5 offers a more immersive and customizable browsing experience.
What sets Unite 5 apart? We’ve gone beyond just app conversion. Our new intricate link-forwarding rules give you unparalleled control over web interactions, making your web apps smarter and more integrated than ever before.
Mac Power Users #714: Catching up with John Siracusa⇢
This week on MPU, John Siracusa returns to the program to discuss his iPhone usage, window management philosophies, best practices for troubleshooting and a lot more.
The History of Cover Flow
Over the last decade or so, Apple has been hard at work in simplifying the user interfaces that power its myriad platforms. I’ve welcomed most of that work, but it’s hard to deny that we’ve all lost some things along the way.
Today, we look at a UI element that started life in iTunes, but spread to the iPod, iPhone and Mac over time: Cover Flow.
Cover Flow’s Early Days
We’ll get to that in a moment, but first we should recognize Andrew Coulter Enright, the inventor of Cover Flow. In December 2004, he published a blog post proposing a new way to skim media in iTunes:
Twitter Wasn’t Worth the Effort⇢
Gabe Bullard at Nieman Reports, reporting an internal memo from NPR, which left Twitter back in April:
Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.
The Story of a 22-Year-Old Firefox Bug⇢
Kevin Purdy, writing at Ars Technica about a fun Firefox story:
Back in June 2002, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was experiencing space for the first time, the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Microsoft was reaching its final arguments, and Adam Price, using what was then called Mozilla on a Mac, had an issue with persistent tooltips.
“If I mouseover a toolbar link, and wait for a second, a little yellow box with the description of the link appears. If I now use command-tab to move Mozilla to the background, the little yellow box stays there, in the foreground. The only way to get rid of it is to put mozilla in the foreground again, and move the mouse off the toolbar,” Price wrote on June 2. There were a few other bugs related to this issue, but Price set down a reproducible issue, confirmed by many others in the weeks to come—and months to come, years to come, and more than two decades to come.
Connected #471: Nightcore Titanium⇢
It’s October, and Myke brings two mysteries to the show to enhance the spooky vibes. In other news, Federico is slipping into the future with the XREAL Air glasses and Stephen is keeping an eye on Spotify.
On Connected Pro, beach and environmental reports were heard. Connected Pro is the longer, ad-free version of the show and it’s pretty great.
Kbase Article of the Week: Mac Computer Status Indicator Light Behavior⇢
The status indicator light (SIL) on Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro has different patterns based on the state of your Mac. These patterns also occur on some earlier MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iMac models, though not all Macs have a SIL. If you have a Mac Pro, learn about the status indicator light behavior on Mac Pro (2023) or Mac Pro (2019).
I still wish Macs would show a pulsing LED when asleep. Even the machines listed in this document just show a solid LED when running and sleeping. I miss that little touch of useful whimsy.
Sponsor: TextExpander⇢
TextExpander’s customizable and shareable snippets of text allow your team to fly through repetitive tasks quickly by expanding the things you type regularly — all you have to do is type a short abbreviation and TextExpander does the rest of the work for you.
Here’s How It Works:
- Create It: Collect your most commonly used emails, phrases, messaging, URLs, and more to create snippets and templates in TextExpander that are always accessible with a quick search or abbreviation.
- Share It: Give your team or different departments across your company access to the content they need to use every day.
- Use It: Expand the content you need with just a few keystrokes on any device, across any app you use — no APIs or integrations needed.
- Optimize It: Add customizations like fill-ins and optional sections to keep that human touch. Anytime you make changes to snippets they update everywhere so your team is always on the same page.
It’s that easy!
$775,375.54
We just closed down Relay’s annual St. Jude campaign, at an all-time high of $775,375.54. That puts our total over the lifetime of the campaign at $2.98 million.
I’ve said for a long time that Relay has the best community on the Internet, and each September, y’all prove it.
Thank you.
How Sonoma’s Web Apps Work⇢
Howard Oakley, writing at The Eclectic Light Company:
Safari’s new Web Apps in macOS Sonoma are a convenient way of gaining ready access to your most-used websites in the Dock. They’re deceptively simple to make, and apparently work without all the fuss and overhead of Safari itself.
I love the details behind this feature.