Jeff Johnson

RE: @mjtsai@mastodon.social

"They made it emphatically clear that Liquid Glass is absolutely moving forward, evolving, and expanding across the ecosystem."

This is fine.

RE: @verge@mastodon.social

I think they’ve achieved BS

IMO Apple history is a lot more complicated than the mythology:

1. Apple II continued to be the main financial driver long after Macintosh was introduced
2. Sculley was not as bad a portrayed, and Jobs not as good
3. Everyone including Jobs underestimated IBM PC and Microsoft
4. Michael Spindler was a total disaster and should be view much more unfavorably than Sculley
5. Mike Markkula was the ultimate decision-maker until 1997
6. Apple did not start to become the behemoth it is now until 2005

Here’s my WWDC 26 wishlist:

• lots of new bugs
• performance regressions
• longtime features removed
• new features preannounced but not available until Spring 2027
• additional macOS lockdown

Worldwide Developer Claw

The always-meaningless WWDC graphics are so generic this year that nobody can read anything into them, right?

Right?

RE: @markgurman@mastodon.social

Enshittification intensifies

Add-on incorrectly blamed for slowing down Firefox:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2025327

RE: @macrumors@mastodon.social

I honestly don't know what in the world "reversing a trend of declining product quality" is supposed to be referring to.

RE: @daringfireball@mastodon.social

The size is mostly autoplaying videos.

Which of course you can stop with StopTheMadness.

RE: @lapcatsoftware@mastodon.social

I'm thinking now that April 1 would be the perfect day to publish this, yes?

I would really love it if Apple TV did not have trailers at the beginning of every episode.

I’m already subscribed. You don’t have to sell me anything!

Amazon reviewer wants a free update for a ten year old book.

This person must be an App Store user.

Sometimes I regret releasing StopTheScript, because nobody knows how it works except me, and people want it to work in a different way, but it can’t.

My solution was too clever.

RE: @markgurman@mastodon.social

“If you think Tim Cook’s doing a good job, then you’ll think John Ternus is going to do a good job.”

Fuck.

In my opinion, the Pogue book needed to be longer, or else it needed to spend more pages on the “middle years” and fewer pages on the stories that are already fairly well-known.

RE: @lapcatsoftware@mastodon.social

git commit message from October 2024:

"Increase height of popup window to make room for more options.

This is the maximum height!”

There’s an old video of Steve Jobs going around now, and I’m not sure what the big deal is.

Ok, it’s rare to have an on-campus speech. But I tried to watch the video and got bored, gave up. Nothing groundbreaking or special in there. It’s a damn company meeting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

RE: @daringfireball@mastodon.social

My browser extension StopTheMadness Pro stops autoplaying videos and hides Sign in with Google on all sites. It also hides sticky videos and notification requests on many sites.

For more extreme measures, try my Safari extension StopTheScript. It kills JavaScript dead on websites you select. For example, from the blog post, it makes The Guardian readable.

https://underpassapp.com/

I was finally able to generate a promo code this morning, but then crApp Store Connect decided a few hours later to generate four more for good measure.

Publicly owned corporations may be the worst invention in history. Indeed they may destroy the future, if they haven’t already wrecked the present.

The diffuse and ephemeral ownership tends to eliminate all elements of humanity from a company, turning into an impersonal profit machine. And the prospect of an IPO corrupts company founders, enticing them with an unholy grail.

RE: @daringfireball@mastodon.social

Read this with “Stop CSS animation” enabled in StopTheMadness Pro

RE: @verge@mastodon.social

Sue these thieves out of existence.

The beginning of the Pogue book shows a map of Cupertino, including the Jobs and Wozniack family homes.

If I grew up living that close to Woz, I might have been a billionaire today.

I think I’m going to start reading the Pogue book now.

Before the snowstorm I forgot to open the screen door just in case. Now it’s impossible to open.

Can you generate App Store promo codes from the Connect iOS app?

I’m not seeing it.

I always knew that the “Giving Pledge” was BS PR.

These billionaires received credit for doing nothing. You can promise whatever you want, but unless and until you deliver, it’s empty.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/15/the-billionaires-made-a-promise-now-some-want-out/

App Store Connect promo code generation is hanging this morning, so that’s fun.

In practically every way, App Store Connect is the worst website I’ve ever used regularly. Good thing it’s not important to me…

Could the long App Store review wait times be due to AI slop submissions?

That would suck. And that’s not a situation going away anytime soon.

RE: @macrumors@mastodon.social

Do I have to say it?

You know my spiel by now.

My Mac App Store update still hasn’t been reviewed, but now I need to start over in the review queue for all platforms because of a new fix.

At this rate, the update will never be shipped.

RE: @macrumors@mastodon.social

Apple's new software design chief, Steve Lemay, was "a driving force" behind Liquid Glass and was "deeply involved in its development."

Welp, so much for the savior.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Season 2 of Platonic is still really good. It’s my favorite show currently on Apple TV.

I subscribed to Netflix for one month.

Now I’m subscribing to Apple TV for one month.

That’s the way you do it.

LLM access is relatively cheap now because the LLM vendors are discounting their price at a massive loss, subsidized by VC, in order to get you addicted and to drive as much skilled human labor as possible out of the workforce permanently.

The goal is monopolization, and if they’re successful, you’ll see monopolistic pricing in the future.

RE: @pxlnv@mastodon.social

This is obviously terrible, but I find it strange that all or most of the criticism is going to Sweeney, letting Google off the hook. Sweeney cynically agreed to the terms for financial benefit, but clearly the terms were demanded by Google, not by Sweeney.

One of the largest corporations in world history is a bunch of fucking snowflakes who can’t tolerate criticism.

Enshittification has become enstupidification.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/05/execs_rely_on_ai/

New blog post:

macOS Tahoe windows have different corner radiuses

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/3/1.html

Any credential system that makes it impossible to write something down on a piece of paper, take it to a new computer, and login to a website is just a gateway to vendor lock-in.

And don’t tell me that we can “securely transfer” the credential from one vendor to another, because that’s just a lock-in syndicate.

The “something” doesn’t have to be a password! It could be a UUID. It could be Base64. But “you’ll get nothing and like it” is not an acceptable alternative.

The Tahoe squircle jail is in the crApp Store too!

The reason we can ask "What would Steve do?" is that the question is simply a stand-in for "What would we do?" Steve wasn't Einstein or Newton, wasn't even an engineer or a designer. At best, Steve was a representative of intelligent, informed, attentive, thoughtful users.

We wield Steve rhetorically, but in that way we hide behind him. Steve was far from perfect, and in any case he's gone now; we who remain need to fight for the living, not for the dead. The point was always about the users.