Jeff Johnson (Mastodon): “Every instance of UserDefaults shares the contents of the argument and registration domains.” In other words, the result of calling registerDefaults on the object returned by [NSUserDefaults initWithSuiteName:] is the same as calling registerDefaults on the object returned by [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults]! Yet the documentation for registerDefaults does not mention this fact. How […]

Adam Engst: However, getting that playlist working this year proved intensely frustrating. Even though it contains over 300 songs, only a handful played when we asked Siri to shuffle the playlist on the HomePod. It made no sense—I could cause any song in the playlist to play on the HomePod from my iPhone, and the […]

Juli Clover: iOS 26.3 adds a new “Notification Forwarding” setting that allows incoming notifications on an iPhone to be forwarded to a third-party device. The setting is located in the Notification section of the Settings app under a new “Notification Forwarding” option. Apple says that notifications can only be forwarded to a single device at […]

Danah Boyd (2024): Since the “social media is bad for teens” myth will not die, I keep having intense conversations with colleagues, journalists, and friends over what the research says and what it doesn’t. (Alice Marwick et. al put together a great little primer in light of the legislative moves.) […] Can social media be […]

The letter is typeset in Papyrus, the typeface for which James Cameron’s affection inspired not one but two classic SNL shorts starring Ryan Gosling — which Cameron has a good sense of humor about.

Terrence Malick’s letter accompanying Tree of Life in 2011 was plainly and humbly set in Helvetica. David Lynch’s accompanying Mulholland Drive was also in Helvetica, but in a very Lynchian way. And then there is Stanley Kubrick, whose letter to projectionists that accompanied Barry Lyndon was typeset in Futura — quite the feat in 1975. (It was almost certainly IBM’s Mid-Century typeface, a beautiful adaptation of Futura for their Executive line of typewriters.)