eXtensions - Wednesday 7 May 2025
By Graham K. Rogers
We can look forward to updates of Apple's operating systems soon. Looking back there have some notable anniversaries of late. Tariffs on non-Hollywood movies should float like the proverbial lead Zeppelin. Alcatraz was fine for a day trip. Netflix is my main viewing currently, but AppleTV is in the doldrums: who watches this stuff outside California? There is better on the way.
Following last week's court case in which Apple was accused of some less-than-ethical practices, it has been announced that (as expected) an appeal has been filed (Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac). In another development, Chance Miller (9to5 Mac) reports that, following the injunction, a class-action lawsuit has been filed alleging that Apple "penalized developers who sought to use linked payments with fees that rendered it economically non-viable." Like tariffs, this is a story that is going to run (and change) in coming weeks.
Apple has announced the Pride watch band for this year in a press releases and also shown the related wallpaper designs for the Watch, iPhone and iPad. In that press release, as Joe Rossignol (MacRumors) points out, there is a mention of the upcoming release of iOS 18.5. Rossignol expects this to be released in the coming week. Later information tells us that release candidates of Apple's operating systems have just been made available Juli Clover, MacRumors), so that suggests a release of the user versions early next week. I now think it less likely that this will be available this week.
I recently mentioned the 10th anniversary of the Apple Watch. We were reminded of another significant Apple anniversary this week by Luke Dormehl (Cult of Mac) who reports on the open letter from Steve Jobs on Adobe Flash. Not that we missed Flash on the iPhone or iPad, but it was still in use on the Mac and caused no end of problems, as the letter pointed out. One of the annoyances for me was the way that every time I wanted to download one of the all-too-frequent updates, logging in to the Adobe site, clicking down to the relevant page, then accessing the update was tedious and frustrating in itself. That alone was enough to prevent me ever becoming an Adobe fan.
Another anniversary this week is that of the unveiling of the original iMac with its G3 chip. The Bondi blue color, its shape and functionality (as well as the lack of a floppy disk drive) made clear statements in an age of beige boxes (Luke Dormehl, Cult of Mac). Apple pre-sold 150,000 and this was one of the ways that the company came out of its death spiral. I bought a G4 version of this a year or so later (I still have it). It came with System 9, but OS X was pre-installed. When I eventually switched to that - it gave me a fright initially - it was clear that Apple was back.
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Many users (including me) regard the end of the Airport wifi router as one of Apple's dumb decisions. I am still using mine (attached to the internet provider device by ethernet cable) as it is more secure than other routers I have tried, and just keeps working. I know that one day it will stop, so I was interested to see an item by Wesley Hilliard (AppleInsider) on a petition that is calling for Apple to resume updates for these old AirPort routers. I would prefer it for Apple to start making them (or an updated equivalent) again. This particular petition request comes as a result of the Airborne vulnerability. The Airport firmware is not being updated to cover this. Hilliard notes more than once how reliable these are, so apart from mine (and I guess his) there could be many more of these still doing good service worldwide. I am also pleased to see that Hilliard pushes this as "another argument why Apple needs to get back into the router business."
I am not Catholic (although my father was brought up as one), but I recognize the historical significance of the Pope throughout history. I would also recommend, Earthly Powers, by Anthony Burgess, that looks into the life of a fictional Pope, allegedly based on Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, both of whom I can remember. Unlike many of his predecessors, the recently deceased Francis was a man I admired for a number of reasons; and I was sad at his death. A recent posting on X attempted to diminish the Papacy and the work that is done. Despite it being brushed off as a joke, it was not well-received.
As part of my work, I read hundreds of papers each year, and examine fonts and spacing. This is one way, for example, to find work that has been copied and pasted into the content. Line spacing is also a problem that my eyes see easily. This is of particular note here as the Thai fonts have 4 levels (for the "accents" - sa-ra), while English fonts have only 2. When switching from a Thai font to English, the balance can be upset. The use of Justification (equal left and right text alignment) also brings in problems with word and character spacing. Some lines look as if they have been written on elastic that has been stretched across the page. As a note, the work by Glen Fleishman on print sources, particularly his London Kerning (2018) looks at one part of the history of printing.
The title is apposite, as the kerning - the spacing between the characters - of the simple inscription on the tomb of Pope Francisco has caused much negative comment (Mark Wilson, Fast Design). I was drawn to the article by the title, but when I saw the image my jaw dropped. This looks awful, although some are excusing it. An expert says that "each letter appears to be spaced equally from the furthest edge of each glyph" which is a "boneheaded rookie mistake" with the Times New Roman font. This itself is described as a "lazy choice". God is in the details (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe).
I was surprised by the news (I should not have been) that the US Administration is to impose a 100% tariff on all movies from outside the USA (Ambar Warrick, Investing.Com, et al). That is going to upset a lot of film makers in several countries. I expected initially that this was another arrow aimed at China, particularly with the comment, "This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda". However, Ireland, Canada, the UK and other countries have all benefitted from making movies (RTÉ). I am less sure any of these countries have been aiming propaganda at the USA.
There are a number of what-are-thought-of as US movies, such as Mission Impossible that are made outside the country. That includes the original Star Wars (Elstree, with desert shots in Tunisia). A quick look online shows that other movies include Lucy and The 5th Element (Besson, France), Slumdog Millionaire (India), Parasite (S. Korea) and Taken 3 (France). Alejandra Gularte (Vulture) suggests that Jon Voight may have had some influence on the decision behind applying these tariffs. Already, the slippery Administration has begun to prevaricate on this latest move.
In all probability (one hopes), the tariff will be adjusted, removed from or reduced for some countries (particularly if big names are involved), or those in the USA will just not be able to see some excellent movies. Doubtless it will be challenged, but if China makes a comment or adjusts its own tariffs on popular US movies the 100% may be increased.
In another announcement this week (RTÉ), Alcatraz is to be reopened, we are told. Since ending life as a Federal prison, it has been open for a while as a tourist attraction, and is currently run by the US Parks Service. I visited there (a bucket-list item) a couple of days before the original iPhone was announced, but I am unable to find my original photographs. The one I have here was from 2008 (MacBook Air announcement) and was taken from the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge (the H. Dana Bowers Rest Area).
As the buildings and island had been turned into a tourist attraction, and many of the prison facilities removed, it would take a major effort to reconvert the place to a jail, but that is not the point. It would also have to be transferred back to the Justice Department. This is something akin to a vanity project that, with its limited accommodation of around 260, is hardly going to make a dent in the prison population. It is a statement about illusory toughness.
I knew that I had taken several photographs of Alcatraz and other parts of San Francisco during my trip to MacWorld that year, but they were not in my Photos library. I could find none of the original images from that visit. I wondered if they had been in an older Aperture library that I had imported into Photos, but kept on a separate disk. I restarted Photos while holding the Option key. That allowed me to access other libraries listed. Unfortunately, the images were not in that old Aperture library. This spurred me to try the two iPhotos libraries that I had saved but never imported into Photos: long overdue.
I quit Photos and restarted, again holding the Option key, but this time, selected Import and specified New Library. I also located this new library on the external disk with the old Aperture libraries imported into Photos. I reviewed the contents of the Library I was importing and within a few minutes, 8 GB of photographs were available. As I had 2 iPhotos libraries, I repeated the Import process - this time using the same library - and added another 12 GB of images. Unfortunately none of the photographs from January 2007 were there (see below). I can only find a few small versions that I exported at the time for the web.
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I had wondered if the missing photographs were on a disk, but mea culpa, this was a time before I religiously backed up my Macs and the 13" PowerBook I was using at the time had been stolen in a burglary. I learned a couple of hard lessons that night.
Most of my television viewing in the last month or so has been via Netflix, with one or two visits to AppleTV, which has been a little bland of late. A recent arrival, Carême livened things up slightly. It lives up to the promise of the trailers, although is a little fantastical. It is a French language series, so has an Apple health warning. Of the two French series recently on AppleTV, La Maison is slightly ahead for me. I find the indexing of Apple TV frustrating. I watched 2 episodes of Carême last week, but can only find it using Search. When that came up (and La Maison) there was also another fashion-based series I had not seen before, but will now watch.
I gave up on Hollywood and am just about tolerating Your Friends & Neighbors (East coast, not California), but could not quite figure out what was bothering me about this feather-light fiction that had clearly been made at considerable expense. The main character drives a Maserati for instance, and everyone lives in massive houses all within their own grounds. Throwing money at something does not always produce a great result. Rebecca Shaw (Guardian) put her finger on it: "I am sick of seeing the rich and powerful on my screen. Where are all the TV shows about normal people?" She has a point.
But Drops of God, Franklin, Silo, Slow Horses, Ted Lasso, Prime Target Bad Monkey, Trying (just renewed for a 5th season MacDaily News), Dark Matter, Sugar, Criminal Record, The Morning Show, Lessons in Chemistry, Defending Jacob and more are about extraordinary people. They all had power - something that makes me sit on the edge of my seat or groan as an episode ends and I have to wait for the next week. That was a trick of Saturday morning pictures in the UK, when series such as Rocket Man, Charlie Chan or Flash Gordon left us wondering each week if the hero would really die this time. Apple can produce exceptional movies and TV series: just not right now. The cavalry may be on its way, however; and I am certainly looking forward to Murderbot arriving on 16 May. The trailer is on YouTube.
Although some of my favorite movies and series, do sometimes have rich people in them, the stories around them may be compelling: Joe Lampton in Man at the Top (Lawrence Harvey) and the subsequent Life at the Top TV series. Around the same time, there were 2 series I rather liked about rich and powerful people: The Planemakers and the follow up, The Power Game (Jack Watling, Patrick Wymark): from industry into politics. Some of these last two series are available on YouTube This discussion is bit of a rabbit hole as we all have our favorites from UK, USA (The Wire) and other countries. Denzel Washington is to star in a new movie on AppleTV, Highest 2 Lowest, a Spike Lee remake of a Kurosawa movie (High and Low). David Snow (Cult of Mac) writes that "The new movie hits theaters August 22 before streaming on Apple TV+ September 5." The trailer is available in the body of the article.
Last week I watched Kes a major British movie from the 1960s: a period that brought some absolute greats like A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Blow Up, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, The Killing of Sister George, Up the Junction and many more. There were also a number of spy films (Bond of course), particularly those starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer. There is a scene in Billion Dollar Brain in which troops and trucks are are sent across a frozen lake, but the ice breaks and down they go (also used in the recent Napoleon released on AppleTV): a parody of Eisenstein's work in Alexander Nevsky when the invading Teutonic Knights disappear below the ice. I saw that on the BBC in the early 1960s and it had made a lasting impression on me. This scene is on YouTube. The battle begins at around the 5-minute marker.
Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. After 3 years writing a column in the Life supplement, he is now no longer associated with the Bangkok Post. He can be followed on X (@extensions_th). The RSS feed for the articles is http://www.extensions.in.th/ext_link.xml - copy and paste into your feed reader.
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