How many of these connectors do you remember? And do you have a drawer somewhere jam-packed with these sorts of cables? I definitely do.
Enjoy the nostalgia.
Business
1990, meet 2018: How far does 20MHz of Macintosh IIsi power go today?
Chris Wilkinson, Ars Technica:
I was browsing a local online classifieds site and stumbled across a gem: a Macintosh IIsi. Even better, the old computer was for sale along with the elusive but much-desired Portrait Display, a must-have for the desktop publishing industry of its time. I bought it the very next day.
It took me several days just to get the machine to boot at all, but I kept thinking back to that article. Could I do any better? With much less? Am I that arrogant? Am I a masochist?
Cupertino retro-curiosity ultimately won out: I decided to enroll the Macintosh IIsi as my main computing system for a while. A 1990 bit of gear would now go through the 2018 paces. Just how far can 20MHz of raw processing power take you in the 21st century?
If you are even mildly curious about this experiment, I urge you to follow the link. It does not disappoint. A geek’s delight, a worthy rabbit hole.
Microsoft Office and the macOS Mojave beta
Microsoft Office blog:
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, Skype for Business, and OneNote will install and run on macOS 10.14 Mojave. No formal support is available for Office when using a beta installation of Mojave, and you may encounter stability issues. Microsoft intends to fully support Office 2016, Office 2019 and Office 365 for Mac on 10.14 Mojave when Apple declares it generally available (GA) for all users.
It’ll run, but no formal support until the official Mojave public release.
Reddit thread on iOS features that make you happy or satisfied
A fun read, some things you might not know. My favorite:
How the clock app icon is actually the correct time. But more importantly that the second hand is accurate. It’s actually really useful to have a place to see the seconds.
If you’ve never noticed this before, find the Clock app on your iPhone. Yup, that second hand is live, a red line scooting around the dial.
But even better, make your way over to the app icon blob on your Apple Watch. The clock app icon in that blob also features a live second hand.
Details!
Monopoly, cheaters edition
New version of Monopoly that offers much shorter game time (about 45 minutes) and is all about cheating. This looks like fun.
watchOS 5 beta now includes ‘Raise To Speak’ Siri
Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:
‘Raise To Speak’ Siri is a new Apple Watch feature included in the watchOS 5 update that allows you to activate the voice assistant without saying ‘Hey Siri’ or pressing any buttons.
And:
Once the feature is present, using Raise to Speak with Siri is super simple — at least when it works. Simply raise your wrist toward your face as if to check the time, then speak when the display turns on and Siri will activate and listen to what you say.
The devil is in the details here. Key is to keep Siri from firing off, unintentionally, if all I do is raise my wrist to check the time and there’s background noise. Is a timer involved? Or will Siri be poised to respond as long as my wrist is raised?
Obviously, this feature would not have risen to the beta if it didn’t already work well in testing. So I am both optimistic and excited.
You can simply raise your wrist and say “Tell Benjamin I’m running a few minutes late” then Siri will send the message for you — super fast and natural.
This is a perfect example. Enables a more natural interaction and reduces friction. Details.
Oh, Samsung
Gizmodo:
Sending pictures to others is one of the most basic functions of a smartphone, but when your phone’s texting app starts randomly pushing out photos without your knowledge, you got a problem.
And unfortunately, according to a smattering of complaints on Reddit and the official Samsung forums, it seems that’s exactly what happened to a handful of Samsung phone users, including owners of late model devices such as the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S9.
And:
Samsung Messages, the default texting app on Galaxy devices, which (for reasons that haven’t been determined), is erroneously sending pictures stored on the devices to random contacts via SMS. One user on Reddit even claims that instead of sending one pic, Samsung Messages sent out their entire photo gallery to a contact in the middle of the night.
And:
The scariest part about this bug is that when Samsung Messages bugs out sends pics to other people, it reportedly doesn’t leave any evidence of it doing so, which means people may not know their photos have been released into the wild until it’s too late.
That is unbelievable.
Why tech’s favorite color is making us all miserable
FastCoDesign:
When I was 14, I saved up money from my first web design job to trick out a really nice gaming PC. I outfitted my computer with tons of blue LED fans, and I kept it on at night, right next to my bed. Shortly after, I realized my sleep patterns were changing. While I wasn’t staying awake any later, it now took me longer to get to sleep. Was I eating differently? Was it just a part of being a teenager? Was it the light in my room? But the orange light from my ’80s era alarm clock wasn’t keeping me up. I finally determined that it must be the particular shade of blue light from my new computer. It took me some research to realize all this, but once I did, I started turning my computer off at night. Problem solved. And when I bought my next computer, I ordered fans with orange lights.
I think it’s intuitive that lights would interfere with your sleep pattern, but turns out that blue light “inhibits the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates our sleep cycles.”
Apple’s next laptops could be more iPhone than Mac
Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal:
Many manufacturers are already using mobile chips from smartphones in laptops running Google’s Chrome OS, and are starting to put them in laptops running Microsoft Windows. Apple Inc. already designs its own chips, which are arguably the fastest mobile processors in the world—will it use them in its own MacBooks?
And:
Imagine something that looks like a MacBook and works like a MacBook, but has the guts of an iPhone. In addition to things like facial recognition and AR capabilities, it could have longer battery life, built-in always-on connectivity to fast 5G networks, and more.
And:
Last September, Apple declared that its A11 processor, which powers the iPad Pro tablet, was already faster than 80% of the Windows notebooks sold in the past year. The iPhone X’s A11 Bionic is even faster.
And:
“You see Intel delaying new technologies anywhere from six to eight months, and that hurts Apple’s roadmap,” says Ben Bajarin, an analyst at market- research firm Creative Strategies. “Apple in particular doesn’t want to have to be hamstrung.” By using its own silicon, Apple could potentially offer machines that do things other notebook manufacturers might not match for some time, he says.
This is all speculation, not news. Will Apple build a Mac of some stripe with an ARM processor as the main CPU (as opposed to the Touch ID ARM chip in some MacBook Pros, which are task specific)? That does seem to be the way the wind is blowing.
The benefits are clear. More of the stack for Apple to control (though manufactured by TSMC, Apple controls the design of chips like the A10X). An ARM chip would bring longer battery life, and could bring mobile capabilities like Face ID and on-chip AI for blazing fast machine learning and augmented reality processing.
Could this yield even thinner laptops? Before they do that, I’d hope that Apple considers making the keyboards and battery easier to replace. I’d gladly give up thinness for a speedier turnaround to fix a problem like that.
Imagine a keynote slide where Phil Schiller explains how much easier a keyboard or battery swap-out will be. That’d get my vote.
Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up
Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch:
Maps needs fixing.
Apple, it turns out, is aware of this, so It’s re-building the maps part of Maps.
It’s doing this by using first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars packed with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 Beta and will cover Northern California by fall.
Every version of iOS will get the updated maps eventually and they will be more responsive to changes in roadways and construction, more visually rich depending on the specific context they’re viewed in and feature more detailed ground cover, foliage, pools, pedestrian pathways and more.
Read the whole article. It’s comprehensive, as seems to be the reroll of Maps. This is Apple owning the process and the data, all with an emphasis on privacy.
Matthew got to ride in the Apple Maps van and got a close up look at the technology and process used to capture the new Apple Maps data. He also had a few visits with the team to learn about New Maps.
Reading this, I’ve got high hopes for New Maps. Looking forward to seeing it in the wild.
[H/T @Dman228]
Steve Jobs talks about the app store in 1983
This is audio only (embedded in the main Loop post), but a fascinating insight into the germ of an idea that Steve eventually used to (again) change the world.
From the YouTube writeup:
In 1983, Steve Jobs gave a speech to the International Design Conference in Aspen. The theme of that year’s conference was “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”.
Steve presented a concept of an online software store. Where one could purchase software, have it sent over a phone line and pay for it with a credit card. In 1983, few thought of this idea. This concept became the Apple app store decades later in 2007.
Ran into this on Reddit, was originally posted back in 2016.
Here’s all of Apple’s active promoted tweets
Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:
Whilst several Apple executives regularly share updates on social media, with CEO Tim Cook frequently publicising his meetings with app developers and suppliers, and Apple runs various accounts relating to iTunes, Apple Music and other content stores, Apple as ‘the company’ keeps a relatively low profile on social media.
The @Apple Twitter account is nearing 2 million followers, but it has zero actual tweets on its page. However, Apple regularly posts Promoted Tweets to target advertising to certain demographics. It opts to hide these tweets from the public timeline, but there’s actually a way to see them all now, thanks to Twitter’s newly launched Ads Transparency Center.
The article itself is interesting, talking about Twitter’s new ad transparency center. You can look up any Twitter account you like, just swap the account name for the Apple in this URL:
https://ads.twitter.com/transparency/Apple
Interesting.
iOS 12: How to turn on and use the thesaurus
Leif Johnson, Macworld:
Many past iOS releases let you look up definitions with a built-in dictionary with “Look Up,” but with iOS 12, we get access to a built-in thesaurus as well. As a writer, I find this a godsend. My beloved Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus was one of the casualties of iOS’s transition to 64-bit apps, but now it’s part of the operating system itself.
Even better, the feature works with most iOS word processing apps. The only catch is that you’ll have to turn it on. Here’s how to do it.
Not sure why, but my Thesaurus was enabled already. It might be something I did long ago to add the Thesaurus to my list of iOS dictionaries.
No matter, Leif does a nice walkthrough and if you write on a regular basis, a Thesaurus is a handy thing to have.
That time I had Steve Jobs keynote at Unix Expo
Chris MacAskill tells an anecdote about working at NeXT and trying to convince Steve to give a talk at a Unix conference. This is vintage Steve Jobs and, if Steve Jobs history is your thing, well worth the read.
Niantic shows off a stunning AR demo that lets Pikachu hide behind real-world objects
[VIDEO] To understand why this matters, watch the video embedded in the main Loop post. The first half shows off Standard AR, where all the virtual objects that populate the scene appear in front of everything else.
The big deal is in the second half, where Pikachu goes in front of some people, but behind others, giving the illusion that Pikachu is actually part of the scene, not on top of the scene.
Not sure how this was done, but this is a bit of a holy grail for AR, especially if the scene analysis and object “occlusion” can be done in real time. As is, this is a proof-of-concept, but that’s not nothing.
Apple engineers its own downfall with the MacBook Pro keyboard
At first blush, this might seem like a typical “Apple is doomed” kind of article. There certainly is a bit of that slant.
But this piece goes a lot deeper than that. There is a lot of detail on the construction of the MacBook butterfly keyboard, the difference between the 1.0 and 2.0 revs, and on exactly why these mechanisms fail when they do fail. With pictures.
A few tidbits, from a much longer story:
The basic flaw is that these ultra-thin keys are easily paralyzed by particulate matter. Dust can block the keycap from pressing the switch, or disable the return mechanism. I’ll show you how in a minute.
And:
So you can’t switch key caps. And it gets worse. The keyboard itself can’t simply be swapped out. You can’t even swap out the upper case containing the keyboard on its own. You also have to replace the glued-in battery, trackpad, and speakers at the same time. For Apple’s service team, the entire upper half of the laptop is a single component. That’s why Apple has been charging through the nose and taking forever on these repairs. And that’s why it’s such a big deal—for customers and for shareholders—that Apple is extending the warranty. It’s a damned expensive way to dust a laptop.
And:
Thin may be in, but it has tradeoffs. Ask any Touch Bar owner if they would trade a tenth of a millimeter for a more reliable keyboard. No one who has followed this Apple support document instructing them to shake their laptop at a 75 degree angle and spray their keyboard with air in a precise zig-zag pattern will quibble over a slightly thicker design.
This is design anorexia: making a product slimmer and slimmer at the cost of usefulness, functionality, serviceability, and the environment.
I hope Apple’s next MacBook and MacBook Pro releases learn a lesson from all this. I hope that the next rev of Apple’s laptops are more easily repaired. I just replaced a fan in an old MacBook Air. It cost me $8 for a new fan and took about 10 minutes to do.
This is better on all sorts of levels. I saved money buying an Apple product, I didn’t lose my laptop for a week, and I was able to keep my laptop alive. I realize that last bit goes against a corporate goal of pushing me to buy, buy, buy, but Apple is better than that. They care about the environment, at the cost of maximizing shareholder value. To me, this is another example of that same tradeoff.
Bottom line, I anxiously await the next generation of MacBooks. I want to believe.
How to divide your Apple Watch workouts into segments
Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:
Using the Segments feature in the Apple Watch Workout app is a great way to track changes in exercise intensity over the course of a workout. It can also help you find out which activities in a mixed session push your body the most.
If your regular running route includes a hilly section, for example, using segments to indicate where it begins and/or ends lets you review how much time it takes to complete compared to the rest of your workout.
Had no idea you could do this. Terrific idea. For me, this would really help with running or swimming, especially if you are doing laps. Perhaps some day we’ll see machine learning that will automatically detect the lap (when you return to the same exact location?) and break your workout into segments automatically.
UPDATE: As it turns out, AppleWatch already does stroke and lap detection (you can tell I am not a swimmer). Yet another reason to appreciate Apple Watch. Take a look at this AppleWatchTriathlete post for details.
Gruber’s rollup of Google’s human-mimicking, restaurant calling Duplex demo
John Gruber:
Google has finally done what they should’ve done initially: let a group of journalists (two groups actually, one on each coast) actually listen to and participate in live Duplex calls.
Journalists from CNN, Ars Technica, The Verge, Wired, and others all got to participate. John does a nice job working through all the different takes, made for a fascinating read.
From the very end:
Right now it feels like a feature in search of a product, but they pitched it as an imminent product at I/O because it made for a stunning demo. (It remains the only thing announced at I/O that anyone is talking about.) If what Google really wanted was just for Google Assistant to be able to make restaurant reservations, they’d be better off building an OpenTable competitor and giving it away to all these small businesses that don’t yet offer online reservations. I’m not holding my breath for Duplex ever to allow anyone to make a reservation at any establishment.
True, but I don’t think that was the point of the demo. My two cents, this was showing off Google’s ability to mimic a human, well enough to pass a primitive Turing test. Being able to make restaurant reservations is more a proof of concept than an end goal.
To me, we’re far more likely to see a product called Google Help Center, the ability to triage 10,000 simultaneous tech support calls, for free, but with the benefit for Google of being able to harvest all the data gleaned from each interactive session.
Mojave and command-shift-5
Jason Snell, Macworld:
You probably already know about Dark Mode and desktop Stacks and Gallery View, but they are just the top-level features in a surprisingly deep update. There are other fun features hiding just beneath the surface.
Here are some of my favorite “hidden” features of the Mojave beta.
Read the post, all good stuff, but this is by far my favorite:
Taking screenshots on the Mac isn’t remotely new, but in Mojave it’s been given a friendly interface, all hiding behind the keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-5.
And:
When you type that shortcut, a floating palette appears that offers you all sorts of options—all of which have been available before, but not in one place. You can grab the entire screen, just a window, or a selection. You can easily change the default folder for saving screenshots, which used to require a trip to the Terminal. You can record video screenshots, which used to require a trip to QuickTime Player. You can take timed screenshots—giving you five or ten seconds to set up the screen exactly as you want it—which was a feature previously available in the venerable Grab utility.
I love this move. The minute you get Mojave installed on your machine (which you’ve carefully backed up), give command-shift-5 a try. Worth it.
We have reached peak screen. Now revolution is in the air.
Farhad Manjoo, New York Times:
Tech has now captured pretty much all visual capacity. Americans spend three to four hours a day looking at their phones, and about 11 hours a day looking at screens of any kind.
So tech giants are building the beginning of something new: a less insistently visual tech world, a digital landscape that relies on voice assistants, headphones, watches and other wearables to take some pressure off our eyes.
And:
Who will bring us this future? Amazon and Google are clearly big players, but don’t discount the company that got us to Peak Screen in the first place. With advances to the Apple Watch and AirPods headphones, Apple is slowly and almost quietly creating an alternative to its phones.
And:
Screens are insatiable. At a cognitive level, they are voracious vampires for your attention, and as soon as you look at one, you are basically toast.
There are studies that bear this out. One, by a team led by Adrian Ward, a marketing professor at the University of Texas’ business school, found that the mere presence of a smartphone within glancing distance can significantly reduce your cognitive capacity. Your phone is so irresistible that when you can see it, you cannot help but spend a lot of otherwise valuable mental energy trying to not look at it.
And:
By placing interior controls on touch screens rather than tactile knobs and switches, carmakers have made vehicles much more annoying and dangerous to interact with. The Tesla Model 3, the most anticipated car on the planet, takes this to an absurd level. As several reviewers have lamented, just about every one of the car’s controls — including adjustments for the side mirrors — requires access through a screen.
This is a terrific read. One quibble for me is the motivation behind moving from real-world, tactile controls to screens. In my mind, it’s not laziness, it’s cost savings. Replacing a knob with a screen setting saves the cost of the knob, as well as the wiring and harness costs, and saves real estate where that button lived. Not to mention the potential for breakage of a moving part.
Follow the money.
That aside, Farhood makes the case for less screens, like so:
If Apple could only improve Siri, its own voice assistant, the Watch and AirPods could combine to make something new: a mobile computer that is not tied to a huge screen, that lets you get stuff done on the go without the danger of being sucked in. Imagine if, instead of tapping endlessly on apps, you could just tell your AirPods, “Make me dinner reservations at 7” or “Check with my wife’s calendar to see when we can have a date night this week.”
To me, that’s the real takeaway. Less screen time without any loss of functionality.
How to mark an emoji as a Favorite in macOS and (apparently not in) iOS
Ever since emoji made their way into the iOS keyboard, I’ve long wanted to create and manage my own list of favorites. Jump to the main Loop post to read up on what I’ve found, what works and what, I hope, is the logical next step. […]
macOS Mojave: What is Dynamic Desktop and how to use it
In a nutshell, once you have macOS Mojave installed:
- Bring up System Preferences
- Select Desktop & Screen Saver
- Click the Desktop tab
- Find a picture with the dynamic desktop icon (a circle with a parabola in the middle) in the upper left corner. Click to select.
As of beta 2, there is only one dynamic desktop set, the one they demoed in the WWDC keynote. But other people have successfully created their own, and seems likely to me we’ll see more before the final Mojave release.
As always, this is beta software, so backup before you install, then proceed with caution.
macOS Mojave: Back to the Mac
Jason Snell:
For a few years now, it’s seemed that any forward movement macOS might make was coming in lockstep with Apple’s other platforms, most notably iOS. What was new to the Mac was generally something that was also new to iOS, or was previously available on iOS.
With macOS Mojave, available today to the general public as a part of a public beta, the story is different. macOS Mojave feels like a macOS update that’s truly about the Mac, extending features that are at the core of the Mac’s identity. At the same time, macOS Mojave represents the end of a long era (of stability or, less charitably, stagnation) and the beginning of a period that could completely redefine what it means to use a Mac.
Is macOS Mojave the latest chapter of an ongoing story, the beginning of a new one, or the end of an old one? It feels very much like the answer is yes and yes and yes.
This is a remarkable walkthrough of the macOS Mojave beta: well written, well organized, and nicely peppered with illustrations and animated GIFs. Terrific job by Jason Snell.
Amazon’s Alexa app for iOS finally gets voice control
Brian Heater, TechCrunch:
Users who’ve downloaded the smart assistant on iOS will be able to ask the app for assistance starting today. It’s not baked-in natively, of course (turns our Apple’s got a smart assistant of its own it’s pretty fond of), so that interaction requires a tap of the button.
From there, however, you can ask Alexa questions, listen to music, access skills and control smart devices — you know, the standard Alexa fare. Queries like weather, sports, calendar and movies will also offer up a visual component in the app. The update will be rolled out to users in “the coming days” as a free download.
Key to me is the fact that Alexa is playing on Siri’s home turf. Alexa will never have access to the Home button, or to a gesture at the top of the iPhone interface. Same story on Android, where Alexa takes a back seat to Google-person.
Amazon tried to enter the phone market with Fire Phone back in 2014, but (from the Fire Phone Wikipedia page):
The phone received mixed reviews. Critics praised the Dynamic Perspective, Firefly and, to a lesser extent, the packaged headphones, but derided the build, design, Fire OS version of Android, specifications, and exclusivity to AT&T. Amazon did not release sales figures for any of its devices, but based in part on its quickly declining prices and an announced $170 million write-down, analysts have judged it having not been commercially successful. Amazon ceased production of the Fire Phone in August 2015 and discontinued sales soon after.
They’ve since relied on their own in-home devices, to great success, but they’ve conceded the mobile space, forced to hide Alexa in an app.
Will this matter in the long run? I think it will, assuming Siri continues to improve and that Apple matches Amazon’s in-home solutions over time. For example, Amazon has a low priced in home speaker. Apple does not.
Amazon makes a TV box that can be controlled by Alexa, hands-free. AppleTV is a better product, no question, but it does not, out of the box, allow you to use your voice to control your TV.
As an example, once you’ve set up your Fire TV Cube, you can ask Alexa to change the channel, to lower the volume, or go back 2 minutes in the movie, all with your hands immersed in some messy cooking project. HomePod does not yet offer that sort of control.
If and when Siri and HomePod add the capabilities demonstrated by Amazon, I see Amazon’s lack of a phone as an advantage that will tilt the playing field in Apple’s direction.
Apple hires YouTuber Mark Rober to develop self-driving car VR
[VIDEO] Variety:
Mark Rober, who is best known for his YouTube videos of spectacular science stunts, has been quietly working as an engineer for Apple’s secretive special projects group, Variety has learned. Rober’s work for Apple includes contributions to the company’s virtual reality projects, with a focus on using VR as on-board entertainment for self-driving cars.
And:
In March, Apple filed a patent application for an “immersive virtual display” as well as one for an “augmented virtual display.” Both describe VR systems that could be used by passengers of self-driving cars, who ostensibly weren’t needed to observe traffic anymore.
To get a sense of Mark’s work, and why Apple would make this move (assuming Variety is correct), check out the video embedded in the main Loop post. Amazing work.
Deliberately inconvenient objects
Scrolling through these images, I just had to laugh. Cleverly uncomfortable design.
Federico’s favorite iOS 12 tidbits (so far)
Federico Viticci lays out his favorite new iOS 12 shiny. All worth reading, but my favorite:
Previously available only on 3D Touch-enabled iPhones or with a two-finger swipe on the iPad’s keyboard, trackpad mode can be activated in a much easier way in iOS 12: just tap & hold on the space bar until the keyboard becomes a trackpad. This mode (seemingly inspired by Gboard and other custom keyboards with a similar implementation) gives owners of iPhones without 3D Touch a way to more precisely control the cursor in text fields.
This is one of my favorite new features and, to me, feels much more responsive, the cursor much easier to control.
iOS 12 Preview: Audacious new proactivity meets fierce new privacy
This is a long read, with an accompanying long video. I truly don’t know how Rene Ritchie finds the time to do all this, but he does, and it’s good stuff.
I’d start off by scrolling down, just a bit, to the section titled iOS 12 In Brief. Rene breaks down his review into 12 (cause iOS 12, get it?) key takeaways. Read those, and you’ll have a good sense of what’s coming, can cherry pick your way through the rest of the piece, dive deep into the areas that interest you.
Nice job, Rene.
Apple issues first public betas of iOS 12, tvOS 12
I’m running the developer betas. My experience is that iOS 12 beta is very solid. I’ve not run into any issues that get in the way. Not crazy about the change to the camera icon in Messages (explained in this tweet), but that’s design, not a beta issue.
As always with beta software, make sure you have a solid backup (in iOS, make sure you archive the backup, so it doesn’t get overwritten) before you make the move.
Here’s the link to Apple’s beta program page.
[VIDEO] Tim Cook speaking at the Fortune CEO Initiative conference on Apple core beliefs, values
[VIDEO] Tim Cook weighs in on the idea of a CEO speaking out. Wonderful video (embedded in the main Loop post), goes right to the heart of Tim’s beliefs and Apple core values.