We’ve all seen them. Notes about a fictional engineer who was hired and then fired. A cute story about something completely irrelevant to the matter at hand. Recipe for ‘squash bug soup’ or something along those lines.
With disturbingly increasing frequency, companies are deciding to let their marketing departments handle their release notes instead of the engineering team or product manager.
All that cruft is gone.
Putting together a newsletter on my Mac is a piece of cake. Even building a list of links with commentary is easy with the Keyboard Maestro macros I have on hand, but on the iPad Pro, or even the iPhone, these tasks were a new challenge to figure out.
Joshua Roberts on iMessage security:
Not only that if Apple’s servers detect a slow or sporadic connection it sends all messages in plain text, meaning it doesn’t use encryption if you have a bad connection.
This reads as more than just the send as an SMS option — and is contrary to my understanding of how the system works.
Much like with 2Do, an astonishing amount of people right now are moving — in one way or another — to iOS as a full time computing platform. Perhaps not ditching the Mac completely, but at the very least declaring iOS ready for most of their work. And it’s not just writers, I’ve been seeing some people who do seriously heavy duty work moving to the likes of the iPad Pro and other iOS devices. Justin Blanton just penned his post on how he is mostly iPhone only:
With that in mind, nearly all of my professional (and personal) consumption can be done enjoyably from my iPhone or iPad; and almost all of my professional output is channeled through either email or Messenger, also easily handled by my iOS devices.
Wow.
Justin Blanton on an iPhone only future:
In fact, the disparity is only going to get greater. Most of our entertainment and communication is sourced, if not experienced, via our phones, and it won’t be big computers that come back from the dead to change that (though it will be something).
Side note: it’s so great he is back to writing.
A fascinating look at smartphone usage. Particularly the lengths they go through to save data.
It’s about the intention you set with “try” versus “do”. I believe, whether you intend it or not, “try” gives you a subconscious escape from the amount of effort you will exert in your attempt. “Try” implies it’s OK to not succeed. “Try” is passive. Even though DOING may still result in failure, and failure is acceptable, when you say, “I am going to DO this,” your intention is fully committed.
A couple of days after Viticci posted his MacStories review of 2Do, I moved everything I had over to the app from OmniFocus. It was a big move for me as I have been a staunch OmniFocus supporter for close to 5 years now. I also wasn’t alone in the move, as a rather large group of nerds I know made the same move.
For some reason, something clicked for all of us. We all were mostly satisfied by OmniFocus, and yet not happy with OmniFocus. Within moments of using 2Do, things felt right — what was once missing was found.
In a post from Chris Bowler responding to my posts about email newsletters, he captures a very interesting argument in favor of them. An argument I think is best summarized by emotion. He feels email newsletters are better and that’s basically that.
His post is really worth a read if this topic is interesting to you — I think he encapsulates “the other side” well in his article. I did chuckle at this bit though:
Much of our email is junk, but I greatly enjoy some of the newsletters I’m subscribed to. This is likely the point that makes all the difference for our opinions: if someone dislikes receiving email newsletters, they’re not likely to find value in creating one.
Only some of the newsletters? Made me smile.
Note: This bag is a pre-production unit, which was provided to me for the purpose of this review.
One of my favorite things to do when I am traveling is to stand next to, or near, someone who is going the same place I am going (and roughly for the same length of time) — typically a co-worker, friend, or family member. I stand near them, look at what they are carrying for luggage, and then smirk as I wait for them to say something like “is that really your only bag?”
I typically respond by asking: “Are both of your bags full?”
I’m completely enamored with using the iPad Pro as my full time computer (as anyone who follows me on Twitter can attest). There are still a good amount of apps that need to be updated to fully support the larger size of the iPad Pro, and to support rotation (looking at you Dropshare). Still, there have been some real gems that I have found, and I wanted to highlight them in no particular order.
Jordan Merrick created a way to generate a static blog on your iOS device using Workflow:
After running the workflow, a ZIP file is generated containing all of the HTML files and can be opened in an app like Transmit, the extracted contents of which can be uploaded to your web server.
This isn’t anything I want or need, but this is still fucking awesome. iOS is just beginning to see its potential as a replacement to OS X and I can’t wait to see what more comes.
This is the final frontier for privacy. It is no longer a matter of our control over exactly how much of our personal life we deign to share with the public — it is a matter of precisely how much of our internal existence is taken from us. If someone can manipulate our thought and emotion based on a stratum of data we willingly and unwillingly contributed to, then there is no real sense of public and private any longer — only an escalating series of intrusions.
Very interesting post.
Hayden told a cybersecurity conference in Florida this week that breaking encryption would not make Americans safer even if encrypted communications do pose new challenges for intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
No shit.
But the intelligence community’s top lawyer was quoted in an email saying that that the administration should be “keeping our options open…in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.
Jackasses.
Bruce Schneier on the failing of most systems:
People believe they know better and deliberately ignore procedure, and invariably forget things.
Emma Brockes on our smartphone addiction:
Even the least neurotic among us is never more than a few moments away from looking up and asking, suspiciously, of the person we’re with, “what are you doing?
And:
If you insist that someone put down their phone to talk to you, you’d better be ready with something to say.”
It’s like she studied me.
As we embrace the post-mobile era, it is time to shift our attention from the smartphone hardware itself to all the new things the smartphone will enable as the most pervasive form of personal computing in the history of our industry.
That’s the most succinct answer to the question of “why are mobile applications such a big deal” that I have ever read.
Manton Reece in response to the Twitter Notes feature:
For all of Twitter’s problems, at least right now most of the good writing we see on Twitter is actually linked out to external blogs (and yes, increasingly Medium posts). To shift that to be stored more on Twitter itself would be a setback for the open web. It would slowly train a new generation of timeline surfers to prefer Twitter-hosted content instead of blogs.
I see this feature being a lot like email newsletters. Some are going to swear by it, and business built around it. Which is a shame because when (and it is always when) Twitter falls to the wayside all these posts will be lost to time.