Another Day, Another CoreText Bug

Buckle up, here we go again.

Font Gylph Rendering On The GPU

The “can we offload font gylph rendering from the CPU to the GPU” CoreText thing again. I don’t think it is going away.

macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 still leaks encryption passwords in plain text

Thank goodness that Howard Oakley and friends are staying on top of APFS bugs and security issues:

If you have erased an existing unencrypted APFS volume to change it into an encrypted APFS volume in the last 20 days or so, then you can be certain that the passphrase to that encrypted volume is stored in your unified log, and accessible to anyone who can access your Mac as an admin user (or when an admin user is logged on).

Just like the last security problem, the actual APFS format is not the problem, a Disk Utility bug is. Hopefully Apple will fix this ASAP.

Something Went Wrong in Siri’s and Apple Maps Development, Again

Tech writers keep coming back to Siri again and again. The latest being The Information’s scoop on, yet again, what went wrong with Siri’s development.

John Gruber on Siri September 2017:

Siri, as it stands today, is at best a halfway product. Again, I’m pro-Siri in the voice assistant debate, but even so I think it’s generous to describe it as “halfway”. The whole category is garbage, Siri included. And frankly, it just doesn’t feel like Apple has made as much progress in six years as they should have.

Something went wrong in Siri’s development, and it wasn’t the voice quality.

John Gruber on Siri March 2018:

The gist of The Information’s story is that Siri has existed for seven years without cohesive leadership or product vision, and the underlying technology is a mishmash of various systems that don’t work well together.

I wrote back in September that Siri’s and Apple Maps problems are one and the same. Gruber didn’t agree. That’s OK but the approaches and resulting organizational problems, where to focus and execute, really are one and the same DNA.

To paraphrase Steve Jobs, yet again, mistakes and problems are not a problem if Apple can find ’em and fix ’em. There is an important point in The Information’s story that Gruber mentions but fails to recognize:

Several former employees said Mr. Williamson made a number of decisions that the rest of the team disagreed with, including a plan to improve Siri’s capabilities only once a year….Team members said they argued in vain that that model was wrong for Siri, which they believed needed to be an online service that continuously improved, not updated annually.

Siri and Apple Maps never learned to walk and chew gum at the same time. Improvements are kept for the annual WWDC rollout, a strategic mistake that only adds to the public perception that Siri and Apple Maps never improve, which is not true.

If Apple simply ditched the annual improvement cycle for Siri and Apple Maps public perception would change for the better. The real work is long term but fixable. Mobile Me was a disaster and iCloud had a difficult birth, but iCloud did eventually learn how to walk and chew gum. Siri and Apple Maps can too.

egword Universal 2 Available for Download

After a 10 year absence the best macOS Japanese word processor app has finally returned. egword Universal 2.1 is available for download from the Mac App Store in Japan. The price is ¥7,800 with a special offer of ¥3,800 until April 30.

egword Universal was a major re-write of the original Japanese DTP workhorse app and the world’s first macOS word processor built top to bottom with the then brand new CoreText framework in 2007 featuring the very best Japanese typography. Norihito Hirose of MONOKAKIDO bought the rights to his program in late 2017 and has been hard at work bringing the code up to date.

Read my profile of egword Universal and its long journey back to the marketplace. I look forward to reviewing it, again.

Congratulations Hirose san!