Alex Heath, on Threads:

At WWDC, Apple execs I met with were ice-cold when I asked about their OpenAI partnership.

Now we know why: Apple just sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to consumer hardware (Apple and OAI senior leaders are in Sun Valley this week. Yikes!)

I noticed the same ice-cold reaction to my questions about ChatGPT and Siri. (In fact, I think Heath and I even talked about it together when we bumped into each other at the end of the day on Monday during WWDC week.) At the time I took it as Apple execs not wanting to distract from the fact that Siri AI with Apple Intelligence, with no third-party plug-in, was truly competitive. But in hindsight their coolness, I think, was about this.

There was no response like, say, “We think ChatGPT is great and we’re happy to keep it available in iOS 27 as an option for our customers who love that experience, but the new Siri AI truly stands on its own.” That’s a typical Apple answer. But what they actually said was just more like “The ChatGPT extension remains available.” I didn’t think much of it at the time but now it stands out.

The AP:

Fellow passengers pulled back a man who was partially sucked out of a dislodged airplane window on Friday, a few minutes after takeoff on a flight from northern Greece to Germany. The plane subsequently returned to the airport in Greece.

The incident happened on a morning flight from the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki to Memmingen, near Munich, operated by Malta Air, a subsidiary of Ryanair, Europe’s largest budget carrier.

Frank Landymore, writing for Futurism:

Look past its gaudiness, though, and you’ll notice some things that’re a little off in the finer details. The talons are horribly deformed and shaped differently from each other. The entire legs are uneven, too, and the base of them are represented as a strange conglomeration of blobs, which are also inconsistent. In fact, the whole thing is slightly asymmetrical. The wings have an uneven number of feathers. The two olive branches — another error in itself, because the eagle is supposed to be clutching a bundle of arrows in its right-side talon — have differing numbers of leaves. And the shield only has eleven stripes, as opposed to the thirteen that the actual Great Seal is supposed to feature.

The fourth star is crooked. What a mess. Perfect logo for Trump Airport.

Cryan.com:

The “View as Buttons” option was a distinctive feature of the Macintosh OS 9 Finder. It allowed users to view the contents of a folder as clickable buttons, each representing a file or application. This view was particularly useful for quickly accessing frequently used programs and documents.

I totally forgot this view existed, despite using Mac OS 9 for many years, because I never used it myself. This didn’t just turn apps into buttons with tiled square backgrounds — it turned every item in the file system into a button. I was reminded of it by a reader who used it in theater class in school to turn a folder full of sound files into, effectively, a soundboard app. Cool.

So many of the best UI ideas are little things like this. Sure, most Mac users didn’t want or need this view. But for those who did, they could do something cool with it.

Another bit of follow-up on squircle jail on MacOS. The most-asked question in my inbox from readers is this: Is mandating the squircle a concession to the much-rumored upcoming touchscreen MacBooks?

No.

The visible shape and appearance of an app icon is unrelated to its clickable — or, perhaps soon, tappable — area. Rendering a visible squircle doesn’t change the shape of the clickable/tappable target area around an icon. In the bygone days when MacOS permitted delicious app icons — and Apple crafted delicious icons for its own apps — you could click in the middle of, say, the QuickTime Player icon and it just worked. It would have been pretty nutty if it didn’t.