The Associated Press Stylebook, on Threads:

We updated our style for telephone numbers in 2024 to drop parentheses. We now recommend the form: 212-621-1500.

For international numbers use 011 (from the United States), the country code, the city code and the telephone number: 011-44-20-7535-1515.

Use hyphens, not periods. No parentheses. The form for toll-free numbers: 800-111-1000. If extension numbers are needed, use a comma to separate the main number from the extension: 212-621-1500, Ext. 2.

I have long been annoyed that U.S. phone numbers are so often formatted in the outdated (123) 555-1234 format. The use of parentheses for the area code dates back to the old days, when you only needed to dial the area code to call a number outside your own area code. (The same era whence comes the verb dial.) Until 10-digit dialing with mandatory area codes started to become standard in the late 1990s, you only needed to dial seven digits to call a local number.

Apple’s Contacts app (and I think the system-wide Contacts framework, used by third-party apps like Flexibits’s excellent Cardhop), will go so far as to reformat numbers entered in 123-555-1234 format as (123) 555-1234. Apple should update the formatting to go the other way, and turn phone numbers with the area code in parentheses into the 123-555-1234 format. It’s only because area codes used to be optional that they were put in parentheses. Given that 7-digit dialing is never going to return, we should abolish the parentheses too.

Michael Friedman (via Abner Li): Today, we’re bringing the Gemini app to macOS as a native desktop experience, designed to live right where you work. It’s always just a keyboard shortcut away, so you can quickly get the help you need without losing your focus. […] With our new native desktop experience, you can share […]

Jeff Johnson: First, Virus Protection for Phone is back in the App Store! The App Store URL is the same, and the developer is the same, Virtual Advisors Limited. The app version history shows a large gap, with version 1.8 released in February 2025, before my blog post, and version 1.9 released just a few […]

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Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

The change began rolling out a few weeks ago, and user frustration is mounting. On Reddit, there’s a growing thread of Netflix subscribers saying they are canceling their subscription because of this change to the Apple TV app. [...]

The change also means you lose access to full payback controls using the Apple TV Remote app on your iPhone. You can’t enable Enhance Dialogue from the video player. That clever Apple TV feature that automatically enables subtitles when you rewind? Gone.

One of my most-used tvOS video player features is the ability to tap the Siri Remote to see when what I’m currently watching will end. It’s great for trying to decide whether you have time for one more episode before bed. That feature is gone in Netflix as part of this change.

FlatpanelsHD has a great roundup of all the features on Apple TV that rely on an app using the native video player.

Someone tried to argue with me when I complained about this horrendous regression that Netflix users somehow want consistency across different platforms — that users want the same Netflix player on Apple TV as on Roku, Amazon Fire, Google TV, and whatever crap is built into their “smart” TV. Nonsense. Why would users of one platform care what the Netflix player is like on other platforms? Apple TV users buy Apple TV boxes because they want the Apple TV experience. Maybe Netflix wants to present the same experience everywhere. Maybe Netflix wants to save on engineering costs by having a write-once-run-like-shit-everywhere video player. That’s a Netflix concern, not a user concern.

From the perspective of users, this change to the tvOS Netflix app just sucks. There’s no upside at all. Nothing is better, much is worse, and a slew of cool platform features are now gone.