Black Lives Matter

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It’s easy to feel powerless living through the current state of affairs. Our leaders are trying to quiet the voices of those who want justice for yet another black man murdered by threatening more police violence. Continued bluster and threats from our president have only pushed things closer to the brink. Everything I feared about Trump being elected has come to fruition, and in some ways even worse. While he isn’t responsible for all of what ails us right now, his promise of to deliver a “law and order” presidency was obviously a lie. And he’s making things worse nearly every time he wades into an issue.

That said, there is work to be done and we can get involved today even if you aren’t marching in the streets.

I think it’s important to make our voices heard, even if it’s via blogs or social media. We can also make our impact felt by donating to causes who think about these issues all day, every day. A few causes you can donate to:

  • ACLU – The ACLU believes in civil liberties, freedom of speech and voting rights amongst other things. I’ve been happily donating to them monthly for years now.
  • Color of Change – Fighting against injustice and racial discrimination.
  • Campaign Zero – We can live in a world where the police don’t kill people by limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability.

You can also get involved in your community. I found this article helpful, as it highlights a lot of local and national causes you can get involved with as well as behavioral changes you can be mindful of:

  • Put pressure on your local police departments to reduce deaths due to excessive force by adopting common-sense de-escalation procedures, using body cameras and opt out of buying used military hardware.
  • Contact state and national officials to work on reducing minimum sentences. Attend town halls, talk about important this is to you.
  • Talk to your children about how slavery, the Civil War, and the Jim Crow era are being taught in your local school.
  • Seek out a diverse group of friends for your kids.
  • Vote for competent leaders who are interested in governing the entire nation, not just the ~45% that voted for them.

I’ll never be able to fully understand what it must be like to live as a black person in America – but I know we all have a job to do to make it better. It will take time – 400 years of racism can’t be changed overnight – but I’m hopeful this generation is the one that turns the tide.

Killer Mike speaks about Atlanta protests

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I’m so tired of seeing police officers murder black people.

Glad to hear Mike give a measured breakdown of how angry he is, but how we can change things without trashing Atlanta. I will say though, if we don’t give folks hope that we can change things by voting, we leave them with no other option but to burn things down.

SpaceX’s 1st Crew Dragon with astronauts docks at space station in historic rendezvous

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From Space.com:

SpaceX launched Behnken and Hurley into space Saturday on a test flight, dubbed Demo-2, that lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Their Crew Dragon docked itself at the station 10:16 a.m. EDT (14216 GMT) as both spacecraft sailed 262 miles (422 kilometers) above the border of China and Mongolia. 

“Dragon, arriving,” NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy said from inside the station as he range a traditional ship’s bell. “Bob and Doug, we’re glad to have you as part of the crew.”

It was so amazing to watch this with my family this weekend. It’s been over 9 years since the USA could launch our astronauts into orbit and the entire SpaceX portfolio is so fascinating to me. It’s nice to have some good news these days.

100,000

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From BBC News:

No country has had more deaths, more infections. Anywhere else, so far, is not even close.

Heartbreaking, embarrassing and infuriating. We deserve better.

Donald Trump’s move against Twitter factchecking could backfire 

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From The Guardian:

But the regulation could backfire, at least in terms of creating the internet Trump desires. By barring social media companies from using the nuanced forms of moderation they currently employ, the executive order could force them to resort to heavy-handed actions: deleting posts, or blocking users, rather than simply factchecking or reducing the reach of the worst material.

Similarly, removing section 230 protections entirely from a technology firm would be unlikely to force it to act as a politically neutral “mere conduit”, since any moderation at all – even simply deleting the vast quantities of automated spam that hit platforms such as Facebook and Twitter each day – would then open them up to lawsuits about the content they had left up.

I feel like this kind of sums up Trump’s presidency. He’s been flailing from one self-induced blunder to the next with no real strategy in mind. Rather than, you know, acting presidential and posting ideas that are truthful, he’s getting emotional yet again and will potentially create a situation that compels social media to disallow or fully censor the sort of hate, lies and misinformation he’s so well known for.

To be clear, I don’t think that a more tightly regulated social media landscape is an overall good thing. However the irony of the President issuing an order that makes it more likely to have his posts outright deleted does bring me some joy.

Apple’s butterfly keyboard failed by prioritizing form over function

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From Chaim Gartenberg at The Verge:

But the deeper issue isn’t that the butterfly switches often break; it’s the flawed design goals that led Apple to make a bad button in the first place. Apple chose to make an entire keyboard full of buttons that resulted in a more aesthetically pleasing design with shorter travel and a thinner overall laptop, rather than making ones that are mechanically functional. And it nearly wrecked an entire generation of Apple’s laptops.

Apple is a massive company that has a ton of stakeholders but I honestly believe that one of the biggest mistakes Tim Cook made was to give the reigns to Jony Ive with no real counterweight. With a lot of the other voices in the room silenced or gone (such as Scott Forstall), Apple leaned way too hard into form over function, and many of their products have suffered as a result. iOS 7 was a mess and many of the hardware products from 2015-2020 were also way too focused on how something looked rather than how people used them.

Ive was a visionary in a ton of ways and he’s not completely to blame for many of the issues Apple have had with their hardware and software design in the last half decade. But with strong leadership at the top, a team of rivals approach tends to get better results. Let’s hope the next 5 years are more focused on users and their needs as opposed to just making things as thin as possible.

Spotify Finally Removes 10k Song Limit

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From Felipe Carvalho on Twitter:

After today, you can add as many songs as you like to your Liked Songs on @Spotify I’ve been working with a small team on the refactoring necessary to pull this off for a while now. Very happy to see this finally out.

This definitely falls into the Finally™ territory, as I’ve been complaining about this for years now. Really happy they finally listened to users who hit the cap a long time ago and have had to come up with creative ways to get around it.

A little too late for me though as I recently moved back to Apple Music and have been very happy there.

Thoughts on Spotify’s podcast push

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Joe Rogan, one of biggest podcasters out there, is going to be exclusively on Spotify starting next year. This is a huge get for Spotify, who is trying to become a bigger player in the podcast space.

Spotify is making a move to be more like Netflix in a lot of ways. With music licensing costs rising proportionate to their user growth, Spotify is still bleeding cash despite being a leader in the streaming music space. However, if they can start pushing users toward original content, insert their own ads into those podcasts and skim some off of that, they have another revenue stream that isn’t tied to licensing content. Additionally, it might give them an even larger user base to sell ads against. Good for Spotify! However, I worry about what it means for the future of podcasting.

If Spotify is successful, what does this mean for a further splintering of the market? Is the podcast world moving to a place where you’ll need 3-5 different apps just to listen to the shows you want? Even if they remain ad-supported and won’t require yet another monthly subscription, that’s just a lot for most people to deal with.

Not to be melodramatic about it, but this feels like we’re entering a new phase where “independent” podcasting is at risk. I think that the good news for me personally is that most of the shows I listen to aren’t candidates to get tempted by Spotify’s siren song any time soon and seem to take pride in being niche, indie shows. That said, once the ad money starts to dry up and all go to one place, it will indirectly affect the shows I listen to as well. Will some of the larger sponsors pour their money into Spotify’s ad platform or continue to pay for ad reads by the hosts? It’s yet to be seen, but marketing folks love their metrics.

The best thing you can do right now? Be sure to support the open, decentralized podcasting world by using apps like Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro and even Apple’s Podcast app.

WWDC 2020 Wishlist

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WWDC is about a month away! You know what that means – wishlist time!

Becky Hansmeyer has a great breakdown of her WWDC wishlist.  David Smith’s WatchOS 7 list has a ton of great nuggets too.

So, in that spirit I thought I’d throw in my WWDC wishlist for iOS/iPadOS/MacOS updates. If I get even a low double digit percentage of these it’ll be a good year.

Mac updates

  • Make Catalyst apps just decent. The text still renders in a way that seems blurry, keyboard shortcuts I expect to work won’t work, and it all just feels half baked. I think that Catalyst apps can be a solution for cross platform games and such but most productivity style apps just don’t work well (yet?).
  • Make Messages on par with the iOS counterpart
  • Continue to invest in breaking Music apart from other apps on the Mac. Fix some of the nitpicks I have from a previous post.

iOS updates

  • Vidoeconferencing fixes (side/side still uses video, same for switching video). You would imagine the pandemic has raised this as a huge blocker for iPads in particular.
  • Apple Music should have the ability to make smart playlists, edit metadata etc.
  • Better privacy settings around photos and location. I’d love to give weather apps city-level GPS data but not specific location data. Additionally, I would love to allow to grant photo upload permission but not to view my entire library.
  • Homescreen customization. Doesn’t have to be full-on Android style but it’s time to make managing and organizing apps less of a pain.
  • Connecting multiple Google Drive accounts to the Files app should be possible. I have a personal and work account, but can’t access both buckets in Files.
  • Fix the selection cursor! The new way without the magnification was a mistake and they should either go back or enhance what they have now.
  • Open up the system to set some default apps. I’d love to be able to set a default music service (I switched back to Apple Music recently but would love the option to have more future flexibility), reminders app (for use with Siri), email and web browser.
  • Allow users to do more with ‘now playing’ screen for media. Let me love tracks, add them to my library, etc. Oddly, a form of this used to exist for Apple Music and was dropped. Even more oddly, some apps still have a form of this (Pocket Casts, Spotify) but it seems very limited.
  • Devtools for Safari
  • Revamp the Siri interface and put more of it on device, like Google announced last year. Siri shouldn’t take over the entire screen, nor should basic requests require the cloud.
  • “Smart unlock” style features – when paired to a watch, don’t require touch / face ID. Same goes for when you’re on a WiFi network or at a geofenced area. Make this optional but would be another great selling point for the Apple Watch.
  • Make a smarter dialer – use data about frequent calls to auto populate a favorites list. Allow users to select a standard notification for incoming calls instead of a full-screen takeover.
  • Better management of caches etc. Sometimes apps get so bloated and there’s little we can do to fix it other than delete the app and reinstall.
  • Offline Maps mode

iPadOS specific updates

  • Better tab persistence in Safari. One of the biggest differences between using a Mac and the iPad Pro is how quickly tabs get dropped from memory and I expect better.
  • Control center on iPads needs a rethink.  It currently looks and acts just like the tiny iPhone version. 
  • Make better use of the status bar. I get it on the iPhone, real estate is limited. But on the 11” and 12.9” iPad Pros in particular, there’s tons of wasted space up there.
  • More keyboard shortcuts. I currently use an older external Bluetooth keyboard with my iPad and if I ever went the Magic Keyboard route I’d really miss the function row for brightness and media playback. I’d love shortcuts to show slideover apps as well.
  • While in Split View, allow me to change which app I’m focused on so that I can use keyboard shortcuts for that app.
  • When performing a spotlight search, let me choose from the application list instead of just the first result.
  • More advanced keyboard & trackpad settings. I want to adjust key repeat rate, tracking speed, etc.
  • Some sort of way to invoke widgets quickly. The scenario I’m thinking of is being able to quickly add a task in Things. Maybe allow a keyboard shortcut to invoke a widget or all widgets. Dashboard 2.0!
  • True external monitor support for the iPad. I’d love to be able to plug a monitor in, have the monitor be the “app” UI and maybe leave the iPad as a second screen with the home screen showing by default?
  • Use Apple Watch to unlock the iPad as well as FaceID

Other updates

  • 3rd party Siri integrations. Music is the obvious first step here.
  • Allow for multiple queries to Siri like the other guys allow. Queries like “turn off the lights AND play Rick Astley” should be possible. Same goes for Siri listening for your next command after finishing the current one.
  • Kill the paper texture on Notes.
  • Collaborative playlists on Apple Music. DO IT.
  • Invest in Apple Mail on all platforms. Better priority/VIP notification settings, snoozing emails etc would go a long way to making the default ‘good enough’ for most folks.

Square announces permanent work-from-home policy

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From The Verge:

“We want employees to be able to work where they feel most creative and productive,” a company spokesperson told The Verge. “Moving forward, Squares will be able to work from home permanently, even once offices begin to reopen. Over the past several weeks, we’ve learned a lot about what it takes for people to effectively perform roles outside of an office, and we will continue to learn as we go.”

Another one.

More and more tech companies seem to be moving in this direction. Very interested to see what it means for commercial real estate, tech company salaries and the future of Silicon Valley as the “hub” for a lot of these companies.