posts

Much Love to the Drang Family⇢

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Heart-breaking news in our community this evening from Dr. Drang:

Four years ago, my wife was diagnosed with stage IV endometrial cancer. Today, after many treatments — some quite helpful for a while, others that just did nothing for her — she passed away. She was the bravest and best person I knew, and I don’t understand how she could possibly be gone.

I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Dr. Drang personally over the years, and this Mastodon post really hurt to read. Send some love in the direction of Doc and his kids this evening.

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On Vision Pro Accessibility⇢

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Shelly Brisbin, writing at Six Colors:

I know a number of blind or visually impaired folks who are excited about the Vision Pro. They’re Apple enthusiasts and embracers of new tech like most of us hanging out at Six Colors. But when I’ve asked blind colleagues what they want from Vision Pro, the conversation almost always moves to the future—not the opportunity to do computing tasks on a head-mounted device or even to watch a movie in the headset. Many blind people want Vision Pro to be an eyesight alternative or assistant, a way to see the world, identifying both the wondrous and the mundane.

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Apple Vision Pro Privacy Overview⇢

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As pointed out by Chance Miller, Apple has published a new white paper about the privacy it has built into the Vision Pro. Here is a bit from its introduction:

We built visionOS from the ground up to protect your privacy and the privacy of people around you. Apple Vision Pro is the first Apple product that uses advanced always-on camera streams of your eyes and the world around you to enable spatial experiences. And where you look can reveal what you are thinking, such as links you almost clicked or apps you thought about downloading. To keep your thought process private, where you look before you interact with content is not shared with Apple or the apps you are using, and does not leave your device. Similarly, because Apple Vision Pro blends digital content with your physical space on-device, the apps you use cannot access information about your surroundings by default.

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Apple Vision Pro Review: It’s a Carousel

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Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong era; coming along in 1986 meant that I missed a lot of the early days of personal computing. Sure, my dad had a Windows 3.1.1 notebook built by NEC, and yeah, we ended up with a Windows 95 tower from Packard Bell a few years later, but the closest I got to an Apple II as a kid was seeing a few stacked up in the corner of my elementary school library.

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Project Star Trek⇢

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Ernie Smith has the best article I’ve ever read about Apple’s near miss with Novell in 1992:

With the growing success of Novell NetWare and its acquisition of DR-DOS (later called Novell DOS), perhaps Novell was feeling nervous about the idea that Microsoft Windows would eventually dominate the market, harming its good-guy position in the industry. It was going around at the time, after all.

(It came out years later that Novell had plenty to worry about, as Microsoft had intentionally added a fake error into Windows that only appeared when using DR-DOS … at the behest of Bill Gates.)

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iTunes for Windows is Gone⇢

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Juli Clover:

The Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Devices apps that Apple has been testing for Windows machines have officially launched, ending a long preview period and bringing an end to the iTunes app on some computers.

This comes almost 21 years since iTunes for Windows initially launched. Here’s a bit from the 2003 press release:

Apple today launched the second generation of its revolutionary iTunes Music Store for both Mac and Windows users. The new iTunes Music Store offers Windows users the same online music store that Mac users love—with the same music catalog, the same personal use rights and the same 99 cents-per-song pricing. Since its launch six months ago, music fans have purchased and downloaded more than 13 million songs from the iTunes Music Store, making it the number one download music service in the world. With music from all five major music companies and over 200 independent music labels, the iTunes Music Store catalog is growing every day and will offer more than 400,000 songs by the end of October.

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The Reason for Apple Retail⇢

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Michael Steeber:

Without Apple Retail, I’m not convinced Apple Vision Pro could work. Don’t get me wrong: the device could physically exist, but it would have no product story, no voice. It couldn’t capture the hearts and minds of the public. Think about it: people understood portable music players before the iPod, cell phones and touchscreens before the iPhone, iOS devices before the iPad, and watches before the Apple Watch. How many people do you know that own VR headsets?

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