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Australia played Japan in the AFC Women’s Asian Cup Final on Saturday. It unfortunately wasn’t being broadcast on any free-to-air channels (I think it was possible to watch on the streaming service DAZN) but I was able to get the Apple TV app for the Australian broadcaster, Ten, to work and we watched it that way. It was a little bittersweet that Australia lost (ABC News) but the Japanese goal was so good and their defence at the end of the game so impressive that it was impossible not to recognise the better team won. I hope the disappointment doesn’t dent the enthusiasm girls in Australia have for soccer (and the broader viewing public for watching it).
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I updated my iOS devices to iOS 26 under protest. My friend sogaiu drew my attention to the DarkSword exploit (Google Cloud Blog) and I was frustrated to discover that my phone cannot be protected by upgrading to iOS 18.7.4 or higher. This is because Apple has gated iOS 18 releases after 18.7.3 so that they can only be installed on devices that cannot run iOS 26. In other words, if I were rocking an iPhone XS, I could install 18.7.7 but since I’m on an iPhone 14 Pro Max, I can’t. With extreme reluctance, I put iOS 26 on the iPhone and the iPad and my personal customer satisfaction with Apple decreased further. I live in hope that JD Power reaches out to me so that this information can be aggregated into a metric to which Tim Cook might pay attention.
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Speaking of frustration with Apple, I ran into one of those iOS 26 bugs that developers have been complaining about since last June. After Eugenia expressed frustration that there wasn’t a way to delete all the items in Listless, I replaced the Settings button with an ‘overflow’ button that opens a pop-over menu. So what’s the problem? In iOS 26, buttons that open pop-over menus contain a morphing animation between the button and the menu. This works fine if you have the button located in a navigation toolbar. If you don’t do this (I don’t do this) then the morphing animation is broken. As the pop-over menu morphs back into the button, certain effects that have been applied to the button (e.g. a drop shadow) do not appear until a few frames after the morph has finished. After some searching around, I did discover a way to mitigate things but it was still surprising to discover that extremely noticeable visual glitches like this are still part of iOS 26. Fingers crossed for iOS 27, I guess.
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I mentioned sogaiu above and he also told me about a documentary from the studio Noclip about Rocket League that’s distributed freely on YouTube (part 1, part 2). I liked them but actually preferred the extended interview with Dave Hagewood, the founder and, at the time, CEO of Psyonix. It is a little disappointing that the documentary was made relatively recently after Rocket League’s release; I’d be curious for an update, particularly one that covers the acquisition of Psyonix by Epic Games.
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Did you realise that the 20th anniversary release of the soundtrack to the Bourne Identity is called the ‘Tumescent Edition’ (Apple Music)? Did you know that ‘tumescent’ means swollen or expanded? I assume this is the kind of stuff you all read this to learn.
