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Last night, I finished reading a fascinating book by Brian Dear titled The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture.

The book covers the history of PLATO, a computer system initially designed to bring computers into the classroom back in the 1960s and 1970s. As Dear writes, the culture that came up around PLATO took the technology much farther than spelling tests and multiplication tables.

Before reading this, I had never heard of PLATO, but the truth is that it birthed many of the things we take for granted on the Internet today. PLATO is perhaps the most amazing “it was ahead of its time then it died” stories I’ve ever come across. The Friendly Orange Glow is a long read, but I was engrossed the entire time. Had history been knocked off course by just a few degrees, PLATO would have been the backbone of the early Internet, without a doubt.

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The more I see of it, the more I love this newest iteration of Apple’s retail design.

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Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit-powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.

Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource-hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.

Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:

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On this feedback episode, David and I keep unpacking WWDC, talk about their time with the new betas and work through some listener feedback.

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David Ingram of NBC News:

In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted “a handful of times” with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform.

Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.

“Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.

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Apple Support:

Certain models of internal SATA drives might unexpectedly disconnect from your computer after your Mac wakes from sleep. This can occur if your Mac automatically goes to sleep or if you manually put your Mac to sleep. If you see a message that your disk was not ejected properly, you can restart your Mac to reconnect to the drive.

Apple is aware of this issue and resolution is planned for a future macOS update.

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This week on Connected:

Stephen breaks some shocking news on the show. Federico had feelings about the Apple Vision Pro. Myke messed up the points. All of this and then a Round Robin of some smaller announcements from WWDC.

Don’t miss the first installment of Smell Talk.

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For the last two years, I’ve successfully created beautiful wall calendars focusing on parts of Apple’s business. For 2022 I did hardware, and for 2023, software.

The 2024 Apple History Calendar will complete the trilogy, focusing on Apple retail and the company’s services business.

These dates cover everything from Apple’s earliest ideas about the Internet to the latest in it’s growing collection of services, complete with key dates in the history of the Apple Store as well.

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Federico, writing at MacStories:

I’m going to be direct with this story. My 30-minute demo with Vision Pro last week was the most mind-blowing moment of my 14-year career covering Apple and technology. I left the demo speechless, and it took me a few days to articulate how it felt. How I felt.

It’s not just that I was impressed by it, because obviously I was. It’s that, quite simply, I was part of the future for 30 minutes – I was in it – and then I had to take it off. And once you get a taste of the future, going back to the present feels … incomplete.

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The Apple Vision Pro may be ushering in the era of spatial computing, but like many other Apple products, it’s using a name steeped in history.

Ok, steeped may be a little strong, but Apple has had other products with “vision” in their names over the years. Seven products, to be exact, and all of them are long-forgotten CRT displays:

• AudioVision 14 Display
• AppleVision 1710 & AppleVision 1710AV
• AppleVision/ColorSync 750 & AppleVision/ColorSync 750AV
• AppleVision/ColorSync 850 & AppleVision/ColorSync 850AV

The AudioVision 14 Display came out in 1993, and was built around a Sony Trinitron CRT, as were all the other products in that list. The AudioVision 14 Display was Apple’s first “multimedia display,” and was equipped with a microphone, stereo speakers and two ADB ports for plugging in accessories.

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I had the pleasure of hosting the latest episode of Charlie Chapman’s podcast to interview him about the history of Dark Noise and its recent business model change.

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Apple Support:

Question: I purchased two AppleVision Monitors and am trying to set them up, but my computer only has one ADB port on the back. I tried connecting the ADB cable from the first monitor to the side of the second monitor, but that did not work. Then I tried using a third party ADB splitter cable and the second monitor came up in 640x480 only. How do I set them up correctly?

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