Many Tricks:

Key Codes displays information about the characters you type, as you type them into the log window. For each key, you’ll see its Unicode value, key code, and any modifiers.

Unless you’re a developer or script/macro tinkerer, you probably don’t need Key Codes. But when you do need it, it’s a godsend. There’s nothing else like it (anymore). Just a perfect little utility that the clever folks at Many Tricks have made available free of charge for a long time. (Available in the Mac App Store, too.)

Allison Johnson, writing at The Verge:

Samsung’s Galaxy S-series is in its software era. Maybe the whole smartphone industry is, too, save for a few phones with hinges (Samsung’s included). But overall, we have exited the hardware-driven innovation cycle and are firmly in the midst of a software-based one. If you want proof, the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus are a good place to start. [...]

This was all true of the S24 and S24 Plus and the S23 and S23 Plus. I couldn’t give you a good reason why the S25 stands out compared to Samsung’s last three generations of S-series phones. I don’t think Samsung can, either, because its entire sales pitch for the S25 revolves around software and AI capabilities — much of which will almost certainly be ported to previous S-series phones in short order.

When an innovative device form factor settles into maturity, the shift from groundbreaking new hardware dropping every few years to iterative evolution stands out. The heady, go-go years of iPhone-derived touchscreen smartphones (including iPhones themselves) weren’t that long ago. Iterative evolution is, let’s face it, more boring. Or at least it’s not exciting. But it’s inevitable.

The laptops that established the form factor were the PowerBook 100 series, which Apple shipped at the end of 1991. (Before the PowerBooks, laptops generally lacked built-in pointing devices, and were more like briefcases. Apple’s own 1989 Macintosh Portable was more like a suitcase.) Steve Jobs pulled the original MacBook Air out of its manila envelope in January 2008. Everything since then, for laptops, has been iterative.

The stretch from PowerBook 100 series to MacBook Air was about 15 years, give or take. The “smartphones are boring now” complaints really started to hit a few years ago — about 15 years after the 2007 original iPhone. Somewhere in the second decade is when year-over-year changes start to become more and more iterative. But compound interest generates tremendous wealth over time. People wrongly think Apple’s success is forged mostly by spectacular groundbreaking products, but the true key to their success is nonstop iterative improvement. That, as I wrote in 2010, is how Apple actually rolls. You wouldn’t want to use a 2010 MacBook Pro today. There will be small generational leaps and innovations to come (including, perhaps, an “iPhone Air” this year — and future leaps like 2020’s debut of Apple Silicon), but the wheels of technological progress are mostly done wowing us with one-, two-, and maybe even three-year improvements to phones. But trading in a phone older than that should continue to pack a significant amount of wow. So it goes.

Johnson:

Maybe this says more about what passes for a “small” phone in 2025, but the Galaxy S25 is secretly the best small Android phone you can buy in the US. That’s probably not intentional — more like a victory in a war of attrition. Google’s phones since the Pixel 5 only come in big and bigger, and niche small phone options like the Asus Zenfone have dropped out of the race. By merely continuing to exist with a 6.2-inch screen, the smaller S-series model has become the default option if you don’t want a huge Android phone.

Google’s Pixel 9 and 9 Pro have 6.3-inch displays, not too much bigger than the S25, but the trend is clear. All phones are getting bigger. Everyone knows the 5.4-inch iPhone 12 and 13 Minis weren’t hits, sales-wise, but the people who preferred them absolutely loved them. I’ll bet some of you are reading this, nodding your heads, with your aging 12/13 Minis still in your pockets, dreading the day you upgrade — knowing that the longer you wait, the ever-larger the “smallest” new iPhone will be. Maybe this year’s much-rumored thin-is-in “iPhone Air” will take some of the sting out of that.

Google, in an announcement on X:

We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.

For geographic features in the U.S., this is when Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated. When that happens, we will update Google Maps in the U.S. quickly to show Mount McKinley and Gulf of America.

Also longstanding practice: When official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name. Everyone in the rest of the world sees both names. That applies here too.

Jennifer Elias, reporting for CNBC:

Google’s maps division on Monday reclassified the U.S. as a “sensitive country,” a designation it reserves for states with strict governments and border disputes, CNBC has learned. [...]

Some team members within the maps division were ordered to urgently make changes to the location name and recategorize the U.S. from “non-sensitive” to “sensitive,” according to the internal correspondence. The changes were given a rare “P0” order, meaning it had the highest priority level and employees were immediately notified and instructed to drop what they were doing to work on it.

Google’s order states that the Gulf of America title change should be treated similar to the Persian Gulf, which in Arab countries is displayed on Google Maps as Arabian Gulf.

No word from Apple on how Apple Maps will handle this. (I’ve asked for comment; will update if I get an answer.) Re-renaming Denali back to Mount McKinley seems like a no-brainer for the maps to comply with. A country names its own mountains. If Obama could rename it, Trump can re-rename it.

The Gulf of Mexico, though, is an international body of water, and its name wasn’t even debated until Trump started talking about it a few weeks ago. Google (and perhaps Apple) having a policy where they simply follow the naming conventions of the GNIS seems not merely sensible but utterly uncontroversial ... until now.

There are three countries in the world that don’t use the metric system as their official units of measure: the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar. I expect there will be fewer — namely, one — who go along with calling it the “Gulf of America”.

Just after New Year’s some sort of underground cable screw-up resulted in our home, along with an irregular swath of our neighborhood, losing electricity for 26 hours. We don’t lose power often, and when we do, the outages are usually brief, but 26 hours felt pretty long — especially with the outside temperature below freezing and daylight hours near their calendric nadir. The icing on this particular outage’s frustration cake was that our power company, PECO¹, seemingly had no idea what exactly was wrong or how long it might take to fix.

The power went out around 10:30 am on January 2, and soon thereafter PECO was estimating that power would be restored by 2 pm. Then it was 4 pm, then it was briefly 2 pm again (despite the actual time then being after 2 pm — which is when I got the sinking feeling I should get the flashlights out), then they were claiming there were no known outages in our area, until eventually they just stopped providing any estimates at all of when our power might return. I’d have given PECO some credit for honesty if they’d simply replaced the estimated time for power restoration with the shrug emoji.

I was following along with these updates and checking the outage map from my iPhone, on PECO’s website. Which website I wasn’t at all familiar with, because our power really doesn’t go out very often, and my wife takes care of the bill. PECO’s is one of the worst websites I’ve ever had the misfortune to need to use. Among its faults:

• It is incredibly slow to load. (This slowness couldn’t be explained by overwhelming demand — the power outage was not widespread.)
• Pages often finished loading incompletely. Just some page header chrome at the top and nothing but white underneath. In fact I just tried right now, today, and got this.
• Navigation is confusing, and even once I figured it out, it took multiple taps and page loads to get to the pages I wanted to return to. And those page loads were all slow to load.
• Worst of all, most tasks you might want to do, including just checking on the status of an outage, seemingly require you to be signed in as a customer, but the website signs you out automatically after a few minutes. So each time I returned, I had to start by signing in again. Which, you’ll be surprised to hear, was slow and sometimes wouldn’t take on the first try, despite my credentials being auto-filled.

Basically, PECO’s mobile website feels like it was developed using and exported from Microsoft Excel. You might say, “Well that makes no sense, because you’ve never been able to build or export websites using Excel.” To which I’d respond, “Yes, exactly.”

So, every time I wanted to see if there was an updated estimate on our power being restored, it took at least a minute or two of waiting for pages to load, signing back in (which was always slow), and poking around their inscrutable site navigation. The website did prompt me, occasionally, to install their mobile app, but I was like “Fuck that, it’s probably just their website in a wrapper.”

It was a cold and dark night, but our power was restored the next day just after noon,² and it stayed restored, so I metaphorically dusted my hands and thought to myself, “I hope I never need to use that fucking website ever again.”

Last night, our power went out again. This time, thankfully, it was only out for about 80 minutes. When the outage hit, before even once trying PECO’s cursed website, I went to the App Store and installed their iPhone app. It was a revelation. PECO’s iOS app is everything their website is not: fast, well-organized, and, blessedly, keeps you signed in.³

I’d go so far as to describe PECO’s website, at least as experienced from a phone, as utterly incompetent. I’d describe their native iOS app as — I can’t believe I’m going to use this word — good. It’s hard to believe the website and app are from the same company.

This makes no sense to me. A utility company is the sort of thing where I’d expect most people would use them via the web, even from their phones. Who’d think to install an app from their electric company on their phone? But it’s a night and day difference. I feel like a chump for having suffered through the previous 26-hour outage obsessively checking their terrible, slow-loading (I just can’t emphasize how fucking slow it is), broken website when this app was available.

There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around. I suspect that my instinctive belief that a service company or utility should focus its customer service efforts on the web first, and native apps second, is every bit as outdated as my stubborn belief that invite ought not be used as a noun. (Invitation is sitting right there.)

I won’t hold up this one experience as a sign that the web is dying, but it sure seems to be languishing, especially for mobile devices.⁴ And the notion that mobile web apps are closing the gap with native apps is laughable. The gulf between them is widening, not narrowing.

A few weeks ago, in a post primarily complaining about Google’s disingenuous claims about their Messages app’s support for encryption (they suggest, heavily, that it encrypts every message or most messages, but in fact only supports encryption for RCS message sent between users of Google Messages on Android devices), I also complained about the fact that Google’s own Google Voice doesn’t support RCS at all.

Turns out Google Fi doesn’t support RCS fully either. Google Fi is Google’s cellular phone service. I actually use it to provide service to my Android burner phone. The prices are excellent and the service is fine for my minimal needs for a phone I barely use. But Google Fi offers something called “call and voicemail sync” that lets Fi users make and answer voice calls through the web. If you enable this, you lose RCS. See Reddit threads here and here with Fi fans complaining about it.

It’s just wild to me that Google would spend years waging a campaign urging Apple to support RCS, yet Google itself doesn’t support RCS in its own products.