2025-12-20 05:11:23
The Computer History Museum:
Thomas Knoll, a PhD student in computer vision at the University of Michigan, had written a program in 1987 to display and modify digital images. His brother John, working at the movie visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, found it useful for editing photos, but it wasn’t intended to be a product. Thomas said, “We developed it originally for our own personal use … it was a lot a fun to do.”
Gradually the program, called “Display”, became more sophisticated. In the summer of 1988 they realized that it indeed could be a credible commercial product. They renamed it “Photoshop” and began to search for a company to distribute it. About 200 copies of version 0.87 were bundled by slide scanner manufacturer Barneyscan as “Barneyscan XP”.
The fate of Photoshop was sealed when Adobe, encouraged by its art director Russell Brown, decided to buy a license to distribute an enhanced version of Photoshop. The deal was finalized in April 1989, and version 1.0 started shipping early in 1990.
Along with the 1.0 source code (mostly Pascal, with some 68K assembler), CHM has PDFs of Adobe’s excellent Photoshop 1.0 User Guide and Tutorial. CHM trustee Grady Booch, chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research Almaden, on the source code:
There are only a few comments in the version 1.0 source code, most of which are associated with assembly language snippets. That said, the lack of comments is simply not an issue. This code is so literate, so easy to read, that comments might even have gotten in the way. [...] This is the kind of code I aspire to write.
A little birdie who works at Adobe today told me, regarding the lack of comments, “Let me assure you, that trend continued for the next 35 years.”
Jason Snell, at Six Colors, notes:
The only shame is that this release doesn’t include the code from the MacApp applications library, which Photoshop used and is owned by Apple. It would sure be nice if Apple made that code available as well.
Says my little birdie, “Turns out Adobe got a perpetual license to MacApp and a heavily modified version of it is still the basis of the UI code. It is only recently starting to get replaced. Even more crazy is that parts of that MacApp code are running on iOS and Android and the web versions.”
Quite the legacy for what started as a personal project between two brothers.
2025-12-20 04:51:32
Apple TV’s press page has stories this month announcing release dates and first looks for a bunch of shows: Imperfect Women (a “psychological thriller”), Beat the Reaper (“dreamed”), a still-untitled Monarch: Legacy of Monsters spinoff, Widow’s Bay (“blends genuine horror with character-driven comedy”), season 2 of the Idris Elba thriller Hijack, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a series from David E. Kelley starring Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicole Kidman, and Nick Offerman (good cast!).
But not a word about Jessica Chastain’s The Savant, which was supposed to be debut in September, was postponed after the Charlie Kirk shooting (against Chastain’s wishes), and has been in “At a later date” scheduling limbo ever since.
2025-12-20 03:31:44
Alexander Smith and Claire Cardona, NBC News:
Online tipsters have had a mixed record when it comes to providing information about mass casualty incidents. But Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said this Reddit user “blew the case wide open” after posting about their encounter on Saturday with the suspect.
“I’m being dead serious,” wrote the Reddit user, identified in an affidavit as “John,” three days after the shootings at Brown. “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental.”
2025-12-20 03:23:15
Yesterday I wrote:
For the last 40 years Apple has only gone through three identity fonts: Garamond → Myriad → San Francisco.
DF reader CM emailed to observe: “It strikes me that Apple changes CPU architectures (68K → PowerPC → Intel → ARM) more often than identity fonts. They’d sooner re-engineer their products’ deepest technical building blocks than change typefaces. I suspect that’s rare among tech companies.”
I wish I’d thought to mention that yesterday.
I’ll add that I suspect San Francisco might effectively be Apple’s “forever font”. Forever is a long time, but San Francisco, in its default appearance, strives for the sort of timelessness that Helvetica achieved. And San Francisco offers a wide (no pun intended) variety of widths and weights. This is San Francisco. This is too. (Screenshots for posterity, when Apple’s website changes: iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air.)
I also suspect that Apple Silicon is Apple’s “forever architecture”.
2025-12-20 02:52:37
In Juli Clover’s aforelinked rundown of what’s new across the whole system in iOS 26.2, I misunderstood this item regarding the Passwords app:
In the Settings section of the Passwords app, there’s an option to manage websites where passwords are not saved when signing in.
This new setting is about managing sites that you have previously excluded from having a password entry saved. (In the Settings app, go to Apps → Passwords and then tap “Show Excluded Websites”.)
What I was hoping this was about is a feature Passwords doesn’t have, but that I want. There are many sites — and the trend seems to be accelerating — that do not use passwords (or passkeys) for signing in. Instead, they only support signing in via expiring “magic links” sent by email (or, sometimes, via text messages). To sign in with such a site, you enter your email address, hit a button, and the site emails you a fresh link that you need to follow to sign in.1 I despise this design pattern, because it’s inherently slower than signing in using an email/password combination that was saved to my passwords app and autofilled by my web browser. My password manager is Apple Passwords and my browser is Safari, but this is true for any good password manager and web browser. It’s not just a little slower but a lot slower to sign in with a “magic link”. It sometimes takes minutes for the email to arrive, and even in the best case, it takes at least 15 seconds or so. Saved-password autofill, on the other hand, happens instantly.2
To make matters worse, when you create a new account using a “magic link”, nothing gets saved to Apple Passwords. I don’t have many email addresses in active use, but I do have several. Sometimes I don’t remember which one I used for my account on a certain site. It doesn’t get autofilled by Apple Passwords because account entries in Apple Passwords require a password. I was hoping the above feature mentioned by Clover was a way to address this — that you could now enable a setting to get Passwords to save just your email address for websites and services that exclusively use “magic links” for signing in. No dice. Apple Passwords team, if you’re reading this, please give this some thought. I can’t be the only person irritated by this.
One workaround I’ve used for a few sites with which I keep running into this situation (Status, I’m looking in your direction) is to manually create an entry in Apple Passwords for the site with the email address I used to subscribe, and a made-up single-character password. Apple Passwords won’t let you save an entry without something in the password field, and a single-character password is a visual clue to my future self why I did this. When I do this, I also put a note to myself in the notes field for the entry. And by using just a single character for the made-up password, I can tell what I did even when the password is displayed using bullets to obscure its actual characters. (Screenshot.) If you feel like I do about “magic links”, the 🖕 emoji is a good “password” for such entries.
Once saved like this, my email address still doesn’t autofill on such sites in Safari, but the list of my saved email addresses in the suggestion list that appears when I click in the Email text field will have a “saved password” label next to the one for which I made this entry in Apple Passwords. This at least solves the problem when I can’t remember which address I used to create my account on a site.
Better would be a way for Passwords to ask if you want to save just your email address for sites with “magic link” sign-ins, and then for Safari to autocomplete that address just like it does for username/password combinations. I can see how this would be a tricky problem for Apple Passwords to solve in a way that makes clear to the user why certain entries do not have passwords, but it’s a problem worth solving.
This design pattern is common with paywalled subscription content sites, like email newsletters, to cut down on password sharing. Let’s say someone pays $10/month for a subscription-based newsletter. If they can sign in using an email/password combination, they might be willing to share their email/password combination for that particular site with a few friends or colleagues, to give them access to the same paywalled content without paying for their own subscriptions. Same goes for sharing email/password combinations for streaming services like Netflix. Well, you can’t share a password if there is no password to share. If the only way to log in to a subscription-based account is via a magic link that expires within minutes, it’s a lot harder for person A to share their account with person B (let alone with persons C, D, E, and F...). Person B has to tell person A that they’re signing in again, then person A has to wait for the email to arrive, and then person B needs to wait for person A to copy and paste the “magic” link, and hope it arrives before it expires. This pattern adds a significant convenience cost to account sharing — but it also makes signing in more annoying for honest users who aren’t sharing their account. ↩︎
Proponents of “magic links” argue that they’re beneficial for technically befuddled users who don’t use a password manager. That’s a good argument for offering “magic links” as an option, but it’s not a good argument for making them the exclusive way to sign in to a site or service. Good password managers are built into modern OSes and web browsers. Those of us who use them should not be punished with a significantly worse experience just because some users do not. When “magic links” are offered as an alternative to a saved password or passkey, there’s a path for all users. When “magic links” are the exclusive method for signing in, all users get the slowest experience.
(And yes, Passport, the subscription system behind Dithering and the rest of Ben Thompson’s Stratechery media empire, exclusively uses “magic links” for sign-in. I don’t like it, but, in Passports’s defense, once you’re signed in, Passport keeps you signed in for a very long time. Other CMSes tend to expire sign-ins far too quickly, which makes for a particularly frustrating experience with “magic links” because you need to keep using them every few weeks.) ↩︎︎
2025-12-20 01:30:35
Apple released all of its OS 26.2 updates a week ago today. A little unusual for Apple to release OS updates on a Friday, but I think they wanted to get these out before Christmas week. And I don’t think it was rushed — for iOS 26.2 at least, there were two release candidate builds during beta testing. I suspect Apple had hoped to release them earlier.
I know it seemed weird back at WWDC when Apple announced that they were re-numbering all their OS versions to start with 26. But now that the change has settled in for a few months, it seems very natural. It’s so easy now to remember that the current major version for each OS is 26. It’s also easier to talk about new features that span across OSes. And, in the future, when you see a reference to, say, iOS 26, you’ll know exactly when that version came out without having to think, because it’s right there in the version number itself.
A few other notes:
Lastly, iOS 26.2 seems to be the release that Apple is starting to suggest as an upgrade for users who hadn’t already installed it by choice. Be prepared for questions and complaints from non-nerd friends and family who’ve never even heard of “Liquid Glass”.
