Juli Clover of MacRumors reports that venerable Mac utility Bartender has apparently been sold by longtime developer Ben Surtees, and that the new owner recently re-signed the app but otherwise hasn’t notified customers about the change:
The transaction came to light after some Reddit users saw a warning from MacUpdater letting them know that the company behind Bartender had been silently replaced. MacUpdater warned users that updates to the app from version 5.0.52 could be potentially unsafe due to the lack of transparency surrounding the situation.
These things happen—no developer should be chained to their software forever—but it’s odd that (anonymous?) new owners could appear without any communication to existing Bartender customers beyond a note saying a certificate had been changed. It’s Apple’s rules around signing app binaries, and the attention of MacUpdater, that brought this out into the open at all.
A glance around the Bartender website does reveal that while Surtees celebrated 12 years of Bartender in a blog post announcing version 5, posts from 2024 read more like SEO spam, with “key takeaways” summaries at the top, followed by unrelated Mac tips, followed by a pitch for Bartender.
Software companies don’t owe their users complete transparency, and it’s possible that there were extenuating circumstances in the transaction (from either side) that led to the lack of communication. But the inverse is also true: customers don’t owe software companies their loyalty.
It’s time for our ninth annual competition regarding what will happen at Apple’s WWDC keynote! What will be announced? Will it be all AI, all the time? And a new wrinkle is added to the draft format!
TV+ is going where few Apple apps have before. But if that news is unexpected, don’t worry. There’s plenty of familiar App Store litigation and AI news to cover.
Yes, soon even Android users will not have to use the “sweet solution” of watching TV+ shows via Apple’s website. Not only will this help sate the god of services revenue that Tim Cook serves, who must be offered blood sacrifice (or cash, cash will do, too), it might also slightly help in defusing arguments that Apple forces customers to be locked in to its ecosystem.
“No, no. Look, you can watch TV+ plus on simply the worst types of phone, too. Absolute garbage. Just terrible.”
I was going to make a joke about being able to run TV+ on a smart refrigerator, but as the person in our house who does most of the cooking, that actually doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
The App Store litigation fad
Yet another country has its eyes set on Apple’s App Store. Two more and Apple gets a free antitrust action! Wow!
There are a lot of problems with the current state of AI, such as the lack of licensing for source material and the fact that it burns a ton of energy only to tell you to put glue on your pizza.
But if it can fix Siri… well.
Imagine a Siri that can do all the functions of any app for you. I wonder if you can.
It’s possible we’re setting the bar for Siri announcements at WWDC a little high by expecting a Siri that can walk, talk, chew gum, and tie its shoes at the same time. We might be better off considering ourselves lucky to get just two of those.
While improving Siri might be the most tantalizing result, AI can be used for other things. The Journal app was largely met with a collective “meh” when it was released, but what if the Journal app journaled for you? Hey, journaling is great, other than all that tedious journaling. With AI, the Journal app could use data already on your iPhone to make entries about what you did that day and you wouldn’t have to type a thing.
“You spent six hours in the bathroom watching YouTube videos of capybaras lounging around in Japanese hot springs.”
HEY. It was five hours at most. Plus, those capybaras really know how to live.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
Considering the different models of iPad, and reviewing the new “What If…?” Vision Pro app. [More Colors and Backstage members get an extra 14 minutes, including Jason getting mad about System Settings on the Mac for one last(?) time.]
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide helps its customers keep their devices in compliance, which keeps their company data safe.
Kolide has seen a rise in cyber liability insurance issues recently. Companies are investing more in security insurance and less in actual security. The result has been a tidal wave of data breaches that have driven up the cost of premiums to the point that they are rapidly becoming unaffordable.
Kolide has seen its cyber insurance premiums go up by 40% in just the last two years. It turns out that insurance companies themselves can help get us out of this crisis, by mandating some (pretty basic) security requirements for their customers–things like MFA, endpoint security, and retiring end-of-life software. Read Kolide’s full blog post to learn more about their findings.
The next live Zoom conversation between Backstage members and Jason and Dan will be Thursday, June 13—WWDC week!
Jason and Dan will both be fresh back from WWDC and ready to answer your questions about the announcements made by Apple at the event.
The event will take place at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. We’ll send more information (including the Zoom link) in an email closer to the event, or you can get the details in the Backstage Announcements channel on the member Discord.
It’s here again: yes, the time of the year when Apple aficionados start circling the company’s ring-shaped headquarters like vultures waiting for someone stranded in the desert to die of thir—you know what, this metaphor got away from me.
Yes, WWDC is just around the corner! And you know what that means. So. Many. New. Software. Features. Now everybody and their mother is out with their predictions what Apple will announce1, but come on—that’s too easy: just copy whatever Mark Gurman says and add AI to it.
So, let’s try something a little different: I’m going to lay out the features that I think Apple will not touch at all in its announcements this year—much as users might want them to. And why? Because the company famously says a thousand no’s for every yes, so the odds are, frankly, against them. Besides, it doesn’t need to! These are problems that the company has already solved and their solutions are so much better than what you think you want, so stop harping on, would you?
Switching home hubs: Apple’s smart home system is like magic: lots of smoke and every once in a while something disappears. For example, it might occasionally forget which of your various HomePods and Apple TVs should be acting the hub for your smart home, like three outfielders letting a ball drop between them, and everything from your lighting to your thermostat just stops responding. But that’s no reason to let you just pick the hub manually—what, you think you can do a better job than a computer? Anyway, it’s more of a feature than a bug because how are you ever going to close those stand rings on your Apple Watch without getting up to turn on the lights?
Mail improvements: Electronic…mail? Delivered by, what, electronic ponies? Look, Apple has to prioritize what it’s doing these days, and it’s not about to spend its valuable time on something as boring and outdated as “email.” Why aren’t you just using Messages? Unless…can they stick some AI in there? Maybe just have it write emails for you? Read emails for you? Maybe take you entirely out of the email process? Could be something there, I guess.
Multiple users for Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s Guest Mode is the perfect way to let somebody else try out your Vision Pro, after several minutes of set up and with very limited functionality. How else are you going to convince people to buy their own $3500 goggles if not by making them want the very features that you won’t let them try? That’s just math.
Emoji reactions: You already have hundreds of stickers at your disposal—soon to be an infinite number of AI-generated emoji—that you can slap haphazardly across someone’s message bubble. No, just because you can do it in Slack and Discord and WhatsApp and Google Messages and probably Microsoft Teams, but who really knows because people only use it when their company forces them, that doesn’t mean Apple’s going to just blindly follow them. In fact, only Apple has the courage to do something different, which is why people totally forget this feature exists.
Virtualized macOS on iPad: Who let you in here? Security!
Mom, I appreciate the thought, but, I don’t think Apple’s going to make a feature that comes around and cleans all of its childhood toys out of the attic. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
…batteries eventually need replacing on all devices. They are a consumable good with a finite — though not always predictable — lifespan, most often shorter than the actual lifetime usability of the product. The only reason I do not use my AirPods any more is because the battery in each bud lasts less than twenty minutes; everything else is functional. If there is any repair which should be straightforward and doable without replacing unrelated components or the entire device, it is the battery.
There are a lot of trade-offs when it comes to the design of mobile devices, but making it easy to replace a device’s battery should always be a high priority.
I loved the Brr blog, which was written by an IT expert during a year in Antarctica. The author is home now, but here’s a surprise bonus post, full of information about how slow the Internet is in Antarctica and why modern software is terrible at working over slow connections:
Downloads are possible at the South Pole, but they are subject to unique constraints. The biggest constraint is the lack of 24×7 Internet. While I was there, I knew we would lose Internet access at a certain time!
It’s a frustrating reality: with most apps that do their own downloads, we were powerless to do anything about this known break in connectivity. We just had to sit there and watch it fail, and often watch all our progress be lost.
The details in this post are fantastic, though they won’t be surprising to anyone who has tried to use conventional apps and websites on a very slow satellite link. Apple’s method of doing macOS updates comes in for some justified criticism, as does the caching server built into macOS. I was surprised at just how many ways Apple’s processes failed under the strain of the slow connections at the South Pole.
Other strategies for WBD if it loses the NBA, we answer a bumper crop of listener letters, and Julia has some big career news. [Downstream+ subscribers also get to hear us discuss Netflix potential sports futures and the changing face of broadcast TV.]
Our video gaming preferences and habits, thoughts on Nomad’s new thin Qi-rechargeable tracking card with Find My, how we connect non-iPhone devices on the go, and our top three software wishes for the upcoming WWDC.
Fascinating blog post from Panic designer Neven Mrgan about the feeling of getting a letter from a friend written by AI:
Where exactly would I draw the line between helpful features (“make this red shirt green instead”) and offensive takeovers (“generate an album cover in the style of barney bubbles, award-winning”)? As I said, until this email I was more bored than enraged by AI, so I didn’t have an immediate answer. I use computer crap all the time—it’s pretty cool! So what was different here? I thought I’d come up with some comparisons that capture different aspects of my friend’s AI email, in order to see how I feel about them.
I think that more than maybe any other technology in my lifetime, AI is going to be profoundly divisive in how it’s received by users.
Marvel Studios and ILM’s “What If…? – An Immersive Story” for Vision Pro, launching Thursday as a free app, isn’t an immersive video or a game. It’s something in between—a mixed-media experiment, roughly an hour long, that tries to use every feature of the Vision Pro to make a compelling entertainment experience.
Based on the Disney+ animated series (and, more distantly, the Marvel comic), “What If?” is built around the premise of variant versions of famous Marvel characters. The “What If?” comic was doing multiverse stories decades before they were cool.
In the new “What If?” immersive story, you’re called by The Watcher (the narrator and main character of the TV series, filling Rod Serling’s shoes but with a bit more agency) to intervene in various multiversal crises, aided by Sorcerer Supreme Wong, who equips you with magic spells to use during your adventure.
The scenes with The Watcher and Wong don’t take place in a fantasy world—they’re augmented reality scenes set in wherever you’re using the Vision Pro. It’s pretty funny to see The Watcher towering above Wong, his head clearly too tall to fit in my house (but somehow doing it anyway). In addition to augmented reality, the app contains extended animated scenes (very much like segments from the TV show, but in 3-D and displayed via a sort of crystal shard floating in front of you) and quite a few immersive environments.
Watching TV on a crystal shard, as you do.
I really enjoyed the environments, which are cleverly designed to resemble the style of the animated “What If?” TV series, but upgraded a bit so that they make sense in a 3-D, 360-degree context. I was especially impressed by a few surprising easter eggs littered around, and the design of a see-through pod containing something very interesting.
The environments are interactive in the sense that you can look around and drink them in, but you don’t really interact with them directly beyond that. You don’t move around, and your only interaction that effects the scene is when you cast spells. (If you want to revisit those environments later, and just look around, you can—the app lets you revisit any of its “chapters” from the main menu.)
Spellcasting works well with Vision Pro’s hand tracking.
Oh, casting spells: The app makes the clever choice of building the entire interactive mechanic around magic, which makes sense because—like the Vision Pro itself—Marvel Universe magic is controlled via hand gestures. Wong will train you to shield yourself, fire power blasts, seal away dangerous objects, and collect others.
If this all sounds very much like a video game… it’s not. There’s a reason the app is subtitled An Immersive Story: Your actions (while very fun!) are really just there to make the story move along. There’s no way to lose. The story will wait for you to complete your task, and then it continues on. It’s all done in a very subtle way—the music plays, the action continues—but “What If?” is trying to be an engaging story that you’re present in, not a game. Consider that this app is from two Disney-owned companies, and consider it sort of like an interactive theme park ride. You can do stuff, but you can’t really change the ride.
That is, except for one point in the story, where you’re offered a choice. It’s a real, legitimate “final choice” that results in different endings depending on what you choose. It’s the lightest dollop of branching on a story that otherwise goes in a straight line—clearly the budget of this project was not high enough to create numerous scenes that will only be seen by the fraction of the viewers who make those specific choices—but it’s a fun moment nonetheless.
It’s hard to judge “What If?” overall, because it really does seem like a sampler platter of ways this sort of entertainment could evolve in the future. Is there room for something that’s more interactive than watching TV, but less interactive than a full-on video game? I have no idea. But I do know that the hour I spent with “What If?” was maybe the best hour I’ve spent on the device since I got it. If Apple is looking for a single app that demonstrates all the features of the Vision Pro at its best, “What If?” may be the answer.
The making of “What If…?”
I got a chance to briefly talk to two people involved in making the app — Indira Guerrieri, technical art director, and Joe Ching, lead experience designer.
Guerrieri on translating the animated series to full environments: “At the beginning, it was all, ‘we’ve got this gorgeous artwork and these gorgeous characters, and we got to make them right.’ And then all sorts of discussion started happening around how much do we actually make it a little more realistic so that it feels like you’re in a 3D space? I remember the discussions were, do we want to make it more sort of toonish, do we want to add marks of a pencil from a toon-rendered drawing, or do you want to leave it? So we went somewhere in between.”
Ching on the level of interactivity in the app: “It was actually a very conscious decision that we made… we did not want any kind of a health bar where you say, ‘Oh, I died, and now I have to start this thing over.’ We really wanted it to be where the player could just do whatever they wanted in this world and not really have any sort of consequence to either not engaging or engaging. So that way, anybody at any skill level could really get through and sort of get the entire storyline.
“There are going to be particular players who are going to be focused on the narrative and going to want to sit there and watch everything that happens in front of them, and then there are going to be people who just want to, you know, take the time to look around. And that goes back to the no-consequences of, ‘If I don’t do anything, I’m not going to die.’ So that if a player only has 10 minutes and they just want to take a look at the environments, they can do that. There are some Easter eggs here and there. So, it’s really how the player wants to go through there, if they want to engage, and also the idea of replayability. You can play through the storyline the first time and then just go through and just appreciate everything that Indira and the art team have done. So, it’s sort of a play as you like.”
Guerrieri on targeting the Vision Pro: “We designed the project for a device that has so much range, that was the beauty of it. It’s like, you can go, ‘Yeah, I can do color. I can do, you know, nuance in the way things look.’ It’s pretty cool. That was a joy, to work with that range.”
Technology improvements are a bit like going to a movie or a magic show: you want to be wowed, but it works best when you don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes. You don’t want to know about the trapdoor, or the strings holding people up as they soar through the air—even if it gives some appreciation for the difficulty of the production, it robs it of some of its power and awe.
Apple ends up having to ride this line a lot. At the root of its ethos has been the desire to provide technology that feels magical and amazing to its customers. With every year that goes by, every new device that comes out, Apple wants to boast about its impressive new functionality, but some of its biggest technological breakthroughs happen at a level that is totally invisible to its users.
It’s cases like that where the company has the difficult task of impressing how advanced some of these technologies are without belaboring the point. And with the onslaught of artificial intelligence features, it also means that the company has its work cut out for it if it wants to continue being the best example of magical, invisible technology.
All my computing devices, save one, have color displays. The last time I regularly used a computer without a color display was probably in the mid-1990s. The only exception is my e-reader, which—since the very first Kindle I bought—has been a black-and-white E Ink screen that excelled at the boring job of displaying text. But… what if an e-reader added color?
We’ve reached the point where E Ink technology—which is unlike normal display technology found in our phones and computers, but allows low-power reflective displays that work more like actual ink on paper—can actually display color decently and affordably. And so now I’ve spend the last few weeks with my first color e-reader, the $219 Kobo Libra Colour.
In theory, color adds a new dimension to the e-reader. Highlights can be color coded, and book covers finally appear in full color. This is especially fun when I turn off the reader and a boldly colored book cover, designed for maximum marketing appeal, appears on the device’s screen. Unfortunately, a moment later the device’s backlight turns off and the colors become muted unless the screen is in bright light.
I love e-readers, and for the last few years my e-reader of choice has been the Kobo Libra 2. It’s a small (7-inch diagonal) device that’s easy to hold, with physical page turn buttons. It’s a winner. And now, there’s one in color!
But the truth is, most of what I use an e-reader for is text on a page. Color isn’t really part of the equation. I spent some time reading a color comic book using the Libra Colour, and it worked—but it wasn’t fun. The screen is just too small to read comfortably, and the colors were muted, feeling more like I was reading on newsprint (or a very old comic book) than on a bright, modern iPad display.
You can read comics on the Kobo Libra Colour, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
And the ugly truth is that as miraculous as it is that E Ink displays can do color, the Libra Colour’s screen is actually inferior to the screen on the Libra 2. Up close, it’s clear that there’s some sort of visible background texture on the Libra Colour (sort of a yellowish-gray wash) that reduces contrast. And when I cranked the brightness up to 100% to read in bright sunlight, it was clear that the Libra 2 was brighter and clearer than the Libra Colour.
It’s hard to see, but the Kobo Libra 2 screen (left) is brighter and offers higher contrast, while the screen of the Kobo Libra Colour (right) has a patterned background that reduces contrast.
Physically, the Libra Colour is almost identical to the Libra 2. It’s a little thicker at the grip edge and there’s a different plastic texture on the back of the case (which I found more pleasant) and it’s a few grams lighter than the previous model. Unfortunately, it’s still got a recessed screen, meaning dust and hair can collect around the edges of the bezel. That’s a negative, but it makes it easy to find the edge of the display to slide your finger up and down to adjust brightness without fiddling with a more complex user interface. I’d still rather have a flush screen, though.
In terms of software, Kobo has seen fit to enable Dropbox support on the Libra Colour—it was previously only available on higher-end Kobos, not the Libra—and added support for Google Drive as well. This means it’s a lot easier to sideload books, comics, and random PDFs from your collection without having to attach the Kobo via USB-C. In practice, though, I found myself still using the Calibre app to sideload files to my Kobo unless I was really in a pinch, because Kobo’s own Dropbox import doesn’t “dress up” ePub files in any way, while Calibre has some nice plug-ins that convert generic ePubs to use some Kobo-specific extensions that improve the presentation of the books.
Color book covers are fine (when they’re in bright light), but is that enough? (Pictured: Sarah’s Kobo Clara Colour.)
The Libra Colour is not a bad e-reader, but it feels like a misstep by Kobo. Color isn’t really very necessary for reading text, and the color display offers a warmer color temperature and worse contrast. All for a $40 higher list price—though at least cloud syncing isn’t being withheld from the Libra line anymore. I wouldn’t mind the move so much—I’m sure some people want to view color comics and PDFs and would be willing to put up with the small screen, and users of the optional Kobo Stylus 2 might enjoy having different ink colors for their markup—if Kobo kept a non-color model around at a lower price. But as I write this, the Libra 2 is not available from Kobo.
If you’re a casual reader of eBooks and are barely motivated to buy a dedicated e-reader at all, the $120 base-level Kindle ($20 less if you let Amazon stick ads on it) is probably good enough, though it doesn’t have a flush screen, isn’t waterproof, and has no page-turn buttons, which I consider essential for pleasurable reading. The $130 Kobo Clara BW is similar, and has similar drawbacks. (My friend Sarah Hendrica Bickerton upgraded to the $150 Kobo Clara Colour, which was released at the same time—and she had the same issues with the screen being dimmer and off-color that I saw.) The Kindle Paperwhite also doesn’t have buttons, but it’s got a flush screen and is slightly cheaper than the Libra—$150 with ads, $170 without.
(Reader, I am filled with despair at the current state of e-reader options. More on this soon.)
In the end: I don’t mind the Kobo Libra Colour. It definitely fills a niche. But adding $40 to the price and degrading the screen quality a bit, all in the name of nice-but-not-necessary color is really frustrating. The Libra 2 was my go-to recommendation for the discerning eBook reader; the Libra Colour might still take that crown, but it’s an all-around worse value than its predecessor, and that’s really a shame.
Apple pushes back against regulators as photos come back from the dead. Lastly, I should apparently not write about streaming service bundles around lunchtime.
Not going gentle into that good night
Apple is hoping that the path of legal recourse is a two-way street.
“Your honor, what even is a ‘lawsuit’? Dresswear for bills that have passed Congress? I ask you, have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? Why, even the Bill in the Schoolhouse Rock video upon which our entire system of governance is founded was naked but for a ribbon and a button.”
Apple was happy to pony up for previous fines, which were in the paltry hundreds of millions, but a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon Tim Cook is walking down to Apple Legal asking what the hell is going on.
While Apple may be trying to stem the flood, the waters still seem to be rising.
Of course, in Japan it’s considered unusual to not be able to get apps from talking vending machines, clean and well-stocked 7-11s, and capybara cafes so this was probably inevitable.
Shutter bug
Apple recently introduced a new Photos feature allowing you to revisit magic moments that you might have forgotten about because you mistakenly deleted them.
Oh, wait, that’s not a feature, it’s a bug.
Well, now it’s patched, but not after it kind of freaked people out. Thursday afternoon, Apple elaborated to 9to5Mac about the bug, explaining that it was a database corruption problem and affirming that:
The bug only hit a small number of devices and photos.
If a device was properly reset before sale, photos would not magically return to it after it was sold (no matter what that dude on Reddit said).
Photos are not in a state of quantum flux in which they are both deleted and not deleted depending upon the act of observation. It’s just a bug.
Speaking of changing the state of things, remember how it seemed like every company from HBO to Paramount to Carl’s Jr. was making their own streaming service? Laugh if you want, but the show in which the Big Angus El Diablo Combo was a good cop on the edge was really good and deserved better than to be canceled after two seasons.
Chief: “Turn in your badge, Big Angus El Diablo Combo!”
Big Angus El Diablo Combo: “I’ll turn in my badge… after justice is served! Hot and spicy. With a Coke and fries. See local details for offer.”
Chief: “You’re out of line, Big Angus El Diablo Combo!”
Big Angus El Diablo Combo: “You’re out of line! This whole town is out of line! But get in line for charbroiled burger and breakfast combos daily.”
I could write this all day. His partner is Chicken Tender Wraps. There’s a lot of sexual tension between them.
Anyway, instead of every company having a separate streaming service, what if instead we combined the streaming services into some sort of, oh, package or bundle?
So, if you’re already paying for Comcast, you can get Netflix, Apple TV+ and the streaming service equivalent of a player to be named later for $8 less a month, as long as you don’t mind ads on two of them.
Honestly, of the two combos I’ve mentioned here, I’d rather have the Big Angus El Diablo.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
