News from Six Colors

The latest in the world of Apple

Six Colors Apple, technology, and other stuff by Jason Snell & Dan Moren

  • (Sponsor) Magic Lasso Adblock: YouTube ad blocker for Safari
    by Six Colors Staff on March 18, 2024 at 4:00 pm

    Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?

    Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.

    It’s easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and now blocks all YouTube ads.

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    It blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.

    The app also blocks over 10 types of YouTube ads; including all:

    • video ads
    • pop up banner ads.
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    • plus many more

    And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.

    So, join over 300,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.

  • (Sponsor) Kolide
    by Jason Snell on March 15, 2024 at 6:00 pm

    My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.

    None of us are as good at clocking deepfakes as we think we are. Even your mom, or your boss, or anyone in your IT department might not be able to tell the difference. We all think we’re clever enough to spot a fake, but in real life, people only catch voice clones about 50% of the time.

    That makes us all extremely vulnerable to attacks. They might be seeking an immediate payout or working a more sophisticated social engineering attack. A friend of a friend was almost convinced her son had been arrested and was in jail before they realized that it didn’t add up.

    But the good news is that we can be trained to look past our vulnerabilities and recognize a suspicious phone call, even if the voice sounds just like someone we trust. Kolide has a blog post all about it. It’s a frank and thorough exploration of what we should be worried about when it comes to audio deepfakes.

  • Former Meta exec Hugo Barra on Vision Pro ↦
    by Jason Snell on March 14, 2024 at 10:17 pm

    Hugo Barra, former head of Oculus at Meta, has a lengthy review of his Vision Pro experience that’s well worth reading. Don’t let the somewhat inflammatory first headline (of four?!) put you off:

    But in the case of VR at Oculus, we also never really felt like the world had a Northstar that could truly capture human hearts and minds, and without that it would be impossible to transition VR from being a niche gamer tech to the incredible spatial computing paradigm that we always thought it potentially represented…

    The Vision Pro launch has more or less done exactly what I had always hoped for, which is to build a huge wave of awareness and curiosity that elevates the spatial computing ecosystem and could ultimately lead to mass-market consumer demand and a lot more developer interest that VR has ever had. Now it’s up to the industry to create enough user value and demonstrate whether this is in fact the future of computing.

    Barra makes some smart observations about the hardware—most first-generation hardware is over-engineered because it’s being built before the final needs of the product are clear—and when he’s impressed by what Apple has done, he is very impressed.

    Barra also makes a point similar to the one I’ve been making for a while now: For all of Mark Zuckerberg’s protests and insistence that his own product, the Quest 3, is “better” than the Vision Pro—I mean, it’s his product, of course he’s going to say that—the truth is that the Vision Pro is great for Meta:

    Wile working at Meta/Oculus I used to semi-seriously joke that the best thing that could ever happen to us was having Apple enter the VR industry…. I knew Apple would do the best job of any company making people really want VR through its unparalleled brand, design and marketing…. For Meta, the Vision Pro launch is the best marketing tool for Quest VR that the company could have dreamed of but could have never achieved on its own.

    The Vision Pro validates Meta’s interest, makes more people aware of the category, helps establish the strengths and weaknesses in the format, and helps give Meta a competitor to focus on. Similarly, Meta’s existence in the category will hopefully prevent Apple from getting complacent.

    Go to the linked site.

    Read on Six Colors.

  • Using Panic’s Nova for remote Python scripting
    by Jason Snell on March 14, 2024 at 9:14 pm

    Sticky scrolling through a Python project in Nova, complete with a terminal tab and an SFTP sidebar.

    I’ve been writing scripts in Python for a few years now, and it’s taken over a lot of my remote automation. I’ve got a calendar in my kitchen driven by a bunch of Python scripts, and numerous automations running on a remote linux server for Six Colors and The Incomparable.

    Up to now, I’ve been doing all of my Python work in BBEdit, an app I use as my default tool for so much of the work on my Mac. But to be accurate, I have to say that I do all my work in BBEdit and Terminal, because these are scripts running on remote devices that I need to be able to control.

    The other day it hit me: While I think of Panic’s $99 Nova as a web development tool (I used it when I moved Six Colors into WordPress, which required rebuilding the site’s entire theme using PHP), it’s also a code tool, with SFTP and a terminal built in. An hour later I had created Nova projects for all my remote Python tools and was happily able to access remote directories and the command line from a single tabbed window. Nova also has some pretty great code editing features of its own that go a little bit beyond BBEdit, including sticky scroll, which helps me know what function(s) I’m inside of while editing.

    I know a lot of people swear by Microsoft’s free Visual Studio Code, but every time I look at it I realize that it is made for people who are not me. Nova’s outside my comfort zone, but it’s closer—and seems to want to work the way I work.

    This will show you how much of a sicko I am. A recent Nova update added support for debugging features, which I’ve only ever used in Script Debugger, the definitive AppleScript development tool. That’s right, programmer nerds, my only debugging experience ever is with AppleScript.

    Anyway, I can’t entirely understand how to set up debugging (and remote debugging?!) in Nova, but I’m going to give it a go because it would be nice to stop debugging by printing various things to the log and waiting for things to break.

    I’m sure I’m still only using a fraction of the tools available to me in Nova, but for my projects writing scripts on remote Linux servers, it’s found a place in my tool chest.

  • (Podcast) The Rebound 486: I’m Eating a Turtleneck
    by Six Colors Staff on March 13, 2024 at 10:33 pm

    Eating before podcasting was a mistake.

    Go to the podcast page.

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