Once Hollywood studios wrap their heads around what’s possible, we’ll start to see waves of new experiences getting produced that take advantage of the extended canvas. Content creators have always been sensitive to the audience’s “second screen” experience (the idea that people are watching TV while looking at their iPad or iPhone for contextual information). Apple’s Vision Pro might be described as an “infinite screen” experience.
But at the same time, because the contextual content can be 3D and integrated into your environment, it could feel more like a “zero screen” experience to users. That may be what people have been looking for to handle the cognitive load we face from all the devices in our lives. Over the past year, a lot of filmmakers have expressed an interest in developing their experiences “beyond the screen.”
With extensions, you can just click a checkbox in Mail’s settings. And the places to hook into Mail are now stable, rather than changing with each macOS version and with the specter of extension points disappearing as Mail was rewritten with more static Swift code. In theory, I will be able to spend more time improving the app rather than just keeping it working as Mail and macOS evolve. The downside of extensions, though, in addition to the limited functionality, is that we are dependent on Apple to fix bugs, because we can no longer patch them in Mail ourselves.
Apple’s hope is that developers will use the Game Porting Toolkit as a jumping-off point to optimize the game code and shaders to make the experience really work for Mac gamers. The unsaid (but very clear insinuation) would be for those developers or studios to then submit the newly “converted” titles to the Mac App Store, where Apple enjoys a 30 percent revenue cut. And sure, some studios and developers may choose to do just that, depending on the work involved and the potential for the user base. But even without that, this new technology, wrapped in a developer toolkit, is the best thing to happen to the Mac gaming market in at least 30 years.
In a support document published today, Apple said certain SATA hard drives might unexpectedly disconnect from the 2023 Mac Pro after the computer wakes from sleep. Apple said it is “aware of this issue” and will fix it in a “future macOS update.”
Capture One has brought its eponymous photography app to the iPhone. Photographers can connect their camera to their phone and shoot images directly to the app. Capture One works with more than 500 cameras, the company says, including Canon, Sony, Nikon, Fujifilm, Leica and Sigma models.
If Gimlet was meant to last, to become a household name like the other three-letter media companies before it, if it was meant to make narrative podcasts for the foreseeable future, it failed at all of those goals. But Gimlet also succeeded in all the ways it was supposed to. When Blumberg and Lieber pursued VC funding right at the beginning of this story, they wrote that story’s end, too. This is because venture-backed companies have an obligation to chase profit at any cost—even the journalism, even the livelihood of the employees, even the life of the company itself. That story only ever ends one way. As I watch ad revenue for podcasts dry up and hear from friends and colleagues who have lost their jobs, and from even more who hate their jobs but have nowhere to go, I wonder what it means that the sun at the center of our universe was always designed to be a flash in the pan.
Since, if I remember correctly, 2005, I had never have a single day when I run out of podcasts to listen.
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Thanks for reading.