Doloresz Katanich: An error almost led to a Citigroup account being credited with $81tn (€77.8tn) - an amount that is about 5 times the total wealth of the UK, which was estimated at €14.7tn in 2023 by ONS. […] The erroneous internal transfer, which occurred last April, was initially missed by two employees, one of […]

Mishal Shah: This post describes the release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 6.1. Donny Wals: The Xcode 16.3 beta is out, which includes a new version of Swift. Swift 6.1 is a relatively small release that comes with bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and some features.[…]Starting in Swift 6.1, Apple has made it […]

Jeff Johnson: There’s now a Safari web extension version of Noir specifically for Safari web apps, in addition to the Safari app extension version of Noir for Safari. Of course, this solution is non-ideal, because it’s confusing to users, and you’ll notice in the above screenshot that Noir for Web Apps has to warn users—with […]

AppleVis: Overall, survey participants expressed satisfaction with the VoiceOver features available on iOS. Several participants expressed a desire for deeper AI integration for functionality like image description, photo labeling, voices, and screen recognition. Multiple participants expressed dissatisfaction with the VoiceOver features available on macOS, particularly when compared to iOS. People who use devices in languages […]

Jeremy Keith, writing at Adactio:

Ask anyone about their experience of using websites on their mobile device. They’ll tell you plenty of stories of how badly it sucks.

It doesn’t matter that the web is the perfect medium for just-in-time delivery of information. It doesn’t matter that web browsers can now do just about everything that native apps can do.

In many ways, I wish this were a technical problem. At least then we could lobby for some technical advancement that would fix this situation.

But this is not a technical problem. This is a people problem. Specifically, the people who make websites.

There are mobile web proponents who are in denial about this state of affairs, who seek to place the blame at Apple’s feet for the fact that WebKit is the only rendering engine available on iOS. But WebKit’s limitations have nothing to do with the reasons so many websites suck when experienced on mobile devices. The mobile web sucks just as bad on Android. Apple’s WebKit-only rule on iOS is just a useful scapegoat for the fact that most websites, as experienced on phones, are designed and engineered to suck. It’s not whatever features WebKit lacks that Chrome-myopic web developers want. It’s all the crap that web developers add — tens of megabytes of JavaScript libraries and frameworks; pop-ups and pop-overs all over the screen; scrolljacking and other deliberate breakage of built-in UI behavior — that makes the experience suck. We should be so lucky if the biggest problems facing the web experience on iPhones were the technical limitations of WebKit.

And the app experiences from the same companies (whose websites suck on mobile) are much better. Not a little better, but a lot better — as I wrote in a piece in January. The truth hurts, just like the experience of using most websites on mobile.