📰 NewsMonitor

Molly White, at Web3 Is Going Just Great: After a fake version of the Ledger cryptocurrency wallet app made it onto the normally highly curated Apple App store, customers lost $9.5 million dollars to the malicious product. Believing it was a genuine Ledger product, people entered their seed phrases into the app, then discovered their wallets were immediately drained. One victim, a musician who goes by G. Love, wrote: “I lost my retirement fund in a hack/Scam when I switched my Ledger over to my new computer and by accident downloaded a malicious ledger app from the Apple store. All my BTC gone in an instant.” According to him, he lost 5.9 BTC (~$445,000). The legit (if that adjective can be used for cryptocurrency apps) Ledger Live Mac app is only available as a direct download from Ledger’s website. They also do have an app in the App Store, but it’s iPhone-only.  ★

Tim Hardwick, last week at MacRumors: Apple’s first foldable iPhone may not carry the speculative media-derived “Fold” branding after all, according to Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station. In a new post on Weibo, the oft-accurate leaker claimed that Apple’s book-style foldable could launch as the “iPhone Ultra.” Meanwhile, domestic Chinese manufacturers are allegedly deciding whether to follow Apple’s lead by tentatively branding their own upcoming foldables as “Ultra” models, but likely with a lighter price tag — Apple’s version is expected to cost between $2,000 and $2,500. I have no inside knowledge about what Apple plans to name this device, but I’ll eat my proverbial hat if they name it “iPhone Fold”. That name is so dumb it’s what Samsung calls their foldables. You don’t name a device for what it does, you name it for what it connotes. A good name conveys feeling, not just function. “iPhone Ultra” or “iPhone Max” would both work, and Ultra sounds more luxe. So while unsurprising, that’s probably the best bet, even without the reliable word of Mr. Digital Chat Station. But if you want my take on a wildcard name, one with some history, how about “iPhone Duo”?  ★

The Houston Chronicle: Kristin Tips, the longtime presiding officer of the embattled Texas Funeral Service Commission, is no longer on the board. “Governor Abbott appreciates Kristin Tips’ service,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, said in an email Tuesday. “An announcement on a replacement will be made at a later date.” [...] Tips, who has run San Antonio’s prestigious Mission Park Funeral Chapels, Cemeteries & Crematories with her husband, Dick Tips, was appointed to the board by the governor in 2017 and made the presiding officer in May 2024. Tips did not respond to a request for comment. I don’t have any questions for her, but I have at least one for her husband.  ★

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac: On the iPhone and iPad, Apple made the new Creator Studio features available as updates to the existing App Store releases. On the Mac though, the rollout was a lot more confusing. Apple kept the old iWork apps for Mac available on the App Store and launched entirely separate iWork versions with the Creator Studio features. Starting today, though, that oddity is no more. Per Aaron Perris, Apple has officially removed the old Pages, Keynote, and Numbers apps from the App Store. If you’ve previously downloaded these apps, you’ll still find them in your download history and can re-download from there. But new users will only see one option on the App Store: the Creator Studio-compatible apps. One reason — perhaps the reason? — this was necessarily more complex on MacOS is that the iWork apps used to have different bundle identifiers on iOS and Mac. On the Mac, the old (classic?) version of Keynote has the bundle identifier com.apple.iWork.Keynote. On iOS, it was always just com.apple.Keynote, without the iWork part. To make the single-subscription bundle work across both platforms, Apple seemingly needed to unify the bundle IDs, and they unified them using the iOS versions, sans the iWork part. The new Creator Studio versions of the Mac apps now have the same bundle IDs as the iOS versions. You can see this using Terminal, if, like me, you currently have both versions of these apps installed side-by-side: % mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r
/Applications/Numbers.app

Result: com.apple.iWork.Numbers
% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r
/Applications/Numbers\ Creator\ Studio.app

Result: com.apple.Numbers You can also see from the above that while the display names for the new versions remain just “Keynote”, “Numbers”, and “Pages”, the actual names of the .app bundles in the file system are now “Keynote Creator Studio.app”, “Numbers Creator Studio.app”, and “Pages Creator Studio.app”. That’s how two apps that both appear to have the same name can exist next to each other in the same Applications folder. I’ll leave the final word to Basic Apple Guy: Goodbye Keynote, Numbers, and Pages, and long live Keynote: Design Presentations, Numbers: Make Spreadsheets, and Pages: Create Documents  ★

Google, on their Search Central Blog: Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions. What is back button hijacking? Why are we taking action? Good for Google to penalize sites playing such dirty tricks, but, if they believe the user experience comes first, why are they only addressing this now in 2026? Here’s a Reddit thread from 15 years ago: “Why the fuck do websites hijack the back button? Its fucking annoying”. And why are they waiting until June to enforce it? Penalize these dickheads now. I don’t see much back-button hijacking personally, perhaps because I don’t visit sketchy websites, but this entire issue only exists because of JavaScript. If web pages were documents, this wouldn’t even be possible.  ★

Amazon: Today Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add direct-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite network and extend cellular coverage to customers beyond the reach of terrestrial networks. In addition, Amazon and Apple announced an agreement for Amazon Leo to power satellite services for iPhone and Apple Watch, including Emergency SOS via satellite. [...] Greg Joswiak, quoted in Amazon’s press release: “Apple and Amazon have a long and proven track record of working together through Amazon’s core infrastructure services, and we look forward to building on that collaboration with Amazon Leo. This ensures our users will continue to have access to the vital satellite features they have come to rely on, including Emergency SOS, Messages, Find My, and Roadside Assistance via satellite, so they can stay safe and connected while off the grid.” The Verge’s headline catches my initial reaction: “Apple and Amazon Are Teaming Up to Challenge Starlink’s Smartphone Ambitions”. Apple owned a 20 percent stake in Globalstar, so they were more than a bystander. But I think the deal speaks to the fact that amongst the tech titans, Apple and Amazon are more allies than rivals.  ★

Speaking of John Calhoun, he chimed in on a Hacker News thread last month regarding his experience working with Steve Lemay at Apple: I think Steve Lemay is a good guy. I kind of fought with him when I was an engineer, he was a young, new designer (at Apple). But I always respected his point of view — even when we argued. When Jobs came back to Apple in the latter 1990’s “Design” slowly came to have an outsized role. I was one half of the engineering team that owned Preview (the application) when Steve Lemay became a seemingly regular presence in the hallway. As the new “Aqua” UI elements arrived in the OS like the “drawer” and toolbar, Steve and his boss (forgetting his name right now — Greg Somebody?) were often making calls about our UI implementation. I guarantee that was Greg Christie, who is in my opinion the least-known-but-most-missed person at Apple. Steve Lemay insisted the drawer live on the right side of the window. This was inexplicable to me. I saw the layout of Preview as hierarchical: the left side of the content driving the right side. You click a thumbnail on the left (in the drawer) the window content on the right changes to reflect the thumbnail clicked on. Steve said, no, drawer on the right. “Why? Why the hell would we do that?” Steve was quick: “The Preview app is about the content. The content is king.” I admit that I still disagreed with him after the exchange, but I had a new respect for him as a designer because he was able to articulate a rationale for his decision. I suppose I was prejudiced to expect hand-waving from designers. It’s a good sign when you lose an argument but gain respect for those arguing the opposing side. (And, Calhoun notes, the Preview sidebar eventually did move to the left, after split views replaced drawers in AppKit.) (Addendum: Steve also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar. Instant hate from me when I saw it: it was as if the text of the URL you entered was being selected as the page loaded. So I’m old-school and Steve had some new ideas…) I had the same reaction as Calhoun when I first wrote about Safari, two days after it was announced and released as a public beta at Macworld Expo in January 2003. (That was a year before I created Markdown, so I had to edit raw HTML just now to update a few broken links to working versions at the Internet Archive.) I wrote then: Progress Bar Behind Location Field But by 2009, reviewing the public beta of Safari 4, I had changed my mind, and admitted I was wrong in my initial assessment of the progress-bar-in-location-field combo control: But I quickly grew accustomed to it, and soon grew to miss it when using other browsers. It was, I soon decided, a damn clever way to show progress in a way that was prominent while the page was actually loading, and without taking up any additional space on the screen after loading was complete. That innovation is a nice feather in Lemay’s cap.  ★

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Richard Moss, back in 2010: John Calhoun’s Glider games hold a special place in the history of Mac gaming, acting almost as an icon of the platform through much of the 1990s. They spawned a hugely dedicated fan base, which produced a ridiculous amount of original content both for and about Glider — especially Glider 4 and Glider PRO, the later versions. I caught up with Calhoun over email recently, and quizzed him on the origins and development of the series. This is the first part of that interview. Read on to discover where the idea for Glider originated, how the game came to exist, and how it dramatically altered Calhoun’s future. Here’s the updated working link to part 2 of the interview, and to Moss’s feature story, “Dreaming of a Thousand-Room House: The History and Making of Glider”. The links to those pages in part 1 of the interview are both out of date and result in 404s. Moss, of course, is the author of the excellent book The Secret History of Mac Gaming, which features an entire chapter on Calhoun and Glider, aptly titled “Quintessentially Mac”.  ★

John Calhoun, on Bluesky (and also a new blog): I re-made Glider some years back for MacOS/iOS. It broke at some point (perhaps an Apple change for Retina displays?) so I pulled it from the App Store. (Claude looked at the code — found some minor coordinate issues. Thanks!) Glider Classic for MacOS is back on. 11 years between version 1.0.4 and yesterday’s 1.1 looks like a long time. But when you consider that Calhoun shipped the original Glider back in 1988, that puts things in perspective. If you’ve never used Glider, it remains an all-time great procrastination tool. There aren’t many Mac apps still in development from that era. (Calhoun, you will recall, in addition to making a slew of early Mac games, went on to a long career as an engineer at Apple, where, amongst other things, he worked on Preview for many years. He now makes cool personal projects like SystemSix and this excellent model of the Pan Am Orion that was in some old movie.)  ★