Meek Geek

Some sanity from the AI doomerism narratives that’s fueling today’s AI bubble, and causing…

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:19:04 -0800

Some sanity from the AI doomerism narratives that’s fueling today’s AI bubble, and causing politicians and workers to panic and make the wrong choices.

A great life lesson. Always be inclusive even if you think you’re getting a “rejection”. It will…

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 19:33:54 -0700

Always invite Anna

A great life lesson. Always be inclusive even if you think you’re getting a “rejection”. It will still mean a lot to others!

WWDC 2025 Thoughts

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 06:28:37 -0700

Liquid Glass: Shiny things always look great at the store, and this looks like it was designed to look sexy at the Apple Store. It’s an obvious artifact of the Alan Dye UI design factory, with an obsession for how things look (in UI mockups) rather than how they work (in the real world).

A small positive of this design change is that buttons, toolbars and other clickable elements are more prominent than in the flat and border-less iOS 7 design language.

The superfluous animations and reflective glass effects seem ok, even if they’re slightly overdone at first glance. I’m more concerned about recent Apple’s tendency to make animations too slow, such that users have to sit through them, which is especially bad with commonly performed actions. Also, wouldn’t this consume too much resources and battery?

What’s terrible is the legibility. It really needs to be looked at and the opacity dialed back a few notches, especially for the whiter near-translucent elements, Control Center and notifications. Or at least give us a slider to control this aspect.

We’re already at a low bar when it comes to the HIG, so I don’t think Tim Apple has the capacity to fix this significantly before release. What I fear about this design change is that Apple customers would be shoved into at least a decade of low key illegibility and unproductiveness, with content behind bleeding through UI elements and affecting how quickly they can grok the interface.

After some time, users would be desensitized to its terrible-ness. Once this gets out, it would be nice to see objective studies that measure task completion rates across a broad demographic.

Finder: Nice feature updates, but for the love of god don’t mess with the Finder icon, which is literally iconic. The dark blue side of the smiley should be on the left. Fix it!

Spotlight: Finally given some attention. Nice to see new features, the App Library integrated, and wow, a clipboard manager! However, the caveat with this feature has always been that it has been a buggy and flaky mess (suddenly stops working, prolonged reindexing), so it remains to be seen how well this whole thing works in the real world, especially after Apple shoved more stuff in it.

System Settings: Still an unfixed train wreck since macOS Ventura in 2022. My condolences to Xcode, which got hit with the ugly stick too.

iPadOS Multitasking: This got tons of “finally”. Just adopt what’s great about the Mac, duh! But still, it took way too many years of multitasking stagnation, hand-wringing and media shaming to get here.

How well this works remains to be seen in actual use. At first glance, it does seem less restrictive than Stage Manager with freeform window sizing and positioning. An actual mouse pointer instead of a stupid round nubbin. Permitting background processing of long running tasks. I sure hope Apple did not forget to remove the single-tasking relic of allowing only a single app to play audio or video.

Came across some people who installed the first build mention that Stage Manager is also available on all iPads, not only recent iPad Pros. So much for Federighi pretending back in 2022 that this feature required a M1 and 8GB RAM, when it was merely Apple’s greed calling the shots, especially when this new multitasking can handle tons of windows open at the same time on all iPads that support iPadOS 26.

iOS Camera: Nice to see the camera app get a clean and more straightforward redesign, after years of new iPhone camera functionality cluttering up the UI. This is one area that lacks fundamental UI design thinking, so expect this to get copied by Android manufacturers pronto. Oh, and the app icon looks kinda… skeuomorphic?

Stability: Given the huge redesign across all platforms and early feedback, expect a shit show on the stability front, with rendering glitches taken up another notch, as if the current notch isn’t bad enough. Remember the iOS 7 glitches? Apple’s track record is not great.

Continuity: A little disappointed that there’s no big splash here to further tighten the ecosystem lock-in. Given the buzz about iPadOS 26 turning iPads into “real computers”, it would be nice to see the iPhone-to-Mac Continuity features (mirroring, notifications, widgets) appear on iPad.

AirPods: These products are some of the best executed ones in the Cook era, and after featuring them prominently in the WWDC 2023 (Adaptive Audio) and WWDC 2024 (Voice Isolation, gestures) keynotes, it was disappointing that this was left out.

macOS 15 iPhone Notifications & Widgets Mirroring Bug

Wed, 21 May 2025 03:15:16 -0700

If you migrated to a new Mac running Sequoia using Migration Assistant instead of a clean install:

Notifications from iPhone will stop showing up
Widgets from iPhone will still be there based on the state before the migration, but will never update anymore

It’s already macOS 15.5 and this fuck up by Tim Apple remains unfixed, which is just infuriating.

Some threads I managed to find:

MacRumors
Apple Community
A Redditor confirms that widgets only work after switching from Migration Assistant to a clean install

Update (1 day later): I found a fix!

Reading the threads above, I discovered that having 2 iPhones capable of widget mirroring (signed in to the same iCloud account) would show an “iPhone” picker in “System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Widgets”. Perhaps getting an old iPhone updated to iOS 18 would allow me to switch to the old phone, then back to my primary iPhone?

And it worked! iPhone widgets started showing up on macOS. And I managed to get notifications mirroring working again after some shenanigans. This were the steps I took:

Update old iPhone to iOS 18.5
Switch from primary iPhone to old iPhone in "System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Widgets > iPhone” and switch it back
iPhone Widgets will start to show up in macOS

If the iPhone notifications mirroring option in “System Settings > Notifications > Allow notifications from iPhone” still does not show up:

In iPhone Mirroring settings, revoke access to primary iPhone
Setup the iPhone again with iPhone Mirroring, this time enabling Notifications when prompted
The "Allow notifications from iPhone” setting should show up, and it should be “On” by default

Once again, shame on Tim Apple for their pathetic state of software quality.

Text editing on mobile needs to be fixed but mobile platform owners are not incentivized to rethink…

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 11:40:48 -0700

The invisible problem: text editing on Android and iOS sucks – OSnews

Text editing on mobile needs to be fixed but mobile platform owners are not incentivized to rethink fundamental problems. A very common blind spot in the industry.

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 17:03:39 -0700

Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions - Competitive Enterprise Institute

Plausibility But Not Science Has Dominated Public Discussions of the Covid Pandemic ⋆ Brownstone Institute

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 04:34:57 -0800

Plausibility But Not Science Has Dominated Public Discussions of the Covid Pandemic ⋆ Brownstone Institute:

This body of fake knowledge has been promulgated at the highest levels, by the NSC, FDA, CDC, NIH, WHO, Wellcome Trust, AMA, medical specialty boards, state and local public health agencies, multinational pharma companies and other organizations around the world that have violated their responsibilities to the public or have purposely chosen not to understand the fake science.

Censorship is the tool of the undefendable, since valid science inherently defends itself. Until the public begins to understand the difference between plausibility and science and how large the effort has been to mass-produce science “product” that looks like science but is not, the process will continue and leaders seeking authoritarian power will continue to rely on it for fake justification.

If you meet a person and they act a certain way, you learn to recognize that pattern in them. If you…

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 17:11:39 -0700

If you meet a person and they act a certain way, you learn to recognize that pattern in them. If you develop for Apple platforms and every year is a series of new inconveniences to manage just as much as it is new technology to consider adopting, you learn to assume a negative progression in convenience, utility and freedom, just as much as you have hopes for the advances in frameworks and hardware.

The “tools” Craig’s talking about have all seen the beginning of, effectively, the closing of the Mac as a platform.

This bed is of Apple’s own making. By never copping to imperfection, by never really listening to and answering the detractors who are in its own camp, by avoiding humility and the taking of other perspectives than its own, the only method of communication left is loud and clear dissent.

On Tools and Developers

Time to Put China on Lockdown for Its Dishonesty Amid Coronavirus Crisis

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 22:32:30 -0700

Time to Put China on Lockdown for Its Dishonesty Amid Coronavirus Crisis:

The world needs to decouple and put China in it’s place.

A message that seems alarmist may actually be prescient.

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 04:13:47 -0700

A message that seems alarmist may actually be prescient.

Why Did an Expert Who Warned About COVID-19 Have So Much Trouble Being Heard?

Lessons to learn.

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 17:51:25 -0700

Lessons to learn.

Bill Gates: “The Corona Virus… is sent to remind us of the important lessons that we seem to have forgotten and it is up to us if we will le

China Boomeranging | National Review

Sun, 22 Mar 2020 23:54:40 -0700

China Boomeranging | National Review:

“China will rue what it begat.”

What Happens if a Pandemic Hits?

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 07:13:13 -0800

What Happens if a Pandemic Hits?:

Sane advice. Be prepared, don’t panic!

Ghosts in the Clouds: Inside China’s Major Corporate Hack

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 23:59:13 -0800

Ghosts in the Clouds: Inside China’s Major Corporate Hack:

Beware, China.

Apple Keeps Telling Governments It’s Pro-Consumer, but That’s Not True

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 03:06:50 -0800

Apple Keeps Telling Governments It’s Pro-Consumer, but That’s Not True:

The best description of Apple’s motivations which I’ve seen in a while:

“Apple generally does what’s best for itself, taking competitors and supplier constraints into account, and then markets the most consumer-friendly spin on that action to the public.”

The Final Word on Gun Control

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 20:18:00 -0700

Jim Jefferies has the final word on gun control. Let’s consider this debate closed, shall we?

Watch: Part 1 and Part 2

Brilliant!

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 06:25:57 -0700

Brilliant!

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 19:27:53 -0700

You Need To Consider The Possibility Your Religion Is Mythology

It could be true! Look at all the ridiculous coincidences.

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 05:50:53 -0700

Are we living in a simulated universe? Here’s what scientists say.

It could be true! Look at all the ridiculous coincidences.

VR & AR seem more like a sci-fi pipe dream than anything practical. Tim Cook’s Apple and Facebook…

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 01:14:47 -0800

Antti Oulasvirta on Twitter

VR & AR seem more like a sci-fi pipe dream than anything practical. Tim Cook’s Apple and Facebook (Occulus) are barking up the wrong tree, as usual.