Category: Links

Jason Fried:

It’s just a simple share of a shopping experience I had recently that surprised me. Best Buy feels simple, Apple Stores feels over engineered, too sophisticated. I get why, but why doesn’t matter to the customer experience. It’s either great or it’s not — the why behind the scenes doesn’t matter. Who’s been teaching me that for decades? Apple.

I agree with his thoughts on the Apple Store, but he’s not even close on Best Buy. I don’t doubt he had a good experience now, but I’ve been to Best Buy far more often than I care to admit, and I’d rather stand in line for pictures with Santa Claus than go to Best Buy.

United has a new ticket fare, where no luggage is included in the price (except what fits at your feet). If you want overhead bin space, or to check, you pay. I actually love this, though I would much rather checked luggage be free and overhead charged for everyone.

If you have been on a flight recently (say last 3-4 years) then you likely know how big of a shit show it is when you board a plane. There’s so many people with bags that are clearly too large to carry on, or people with clearly too many bags. Tons of gate checking — in all I think people not following rules, add tremendously to the overall boarding time.

In the past couple of trips I have taken with United I have noticed something I never saw before: gate agents caring about luggage. I’ve seen them using both luggage sizers at the gate and forcing people to check — and I’ve seen them simply telling people they have too many bags. I know this likely annoys a lot of people, but as someone who packs small and light, I commend United for this.

It’s been far to long where people don’t follow very clear rules. And honestly, if you can’t fit all of your stuff in a properly sized carryon, then why wouldn’t you want to check it? It’s so much easier at that point to not drag it all around.

Again it would be great if they flipped things, where checked is free (for one bag) and carryon is charged for anything more than a personal item. You pay for the convenience of not waiting to get your bags back — seems to make sense to me.

Quincy Larson:

To be clear, everything I recommend here is 100% free and 100% legal. If you bother locking your doors at night, you should bother using encryption.

It’s a good set of first steps to take. I am curious how many people use Signal over iMessage… even I don’t use Signal for any messages (though I do have it setup). I am going to see if my wife will move to it with me though and test it out.

Pretty neat research looking into how people type, and how that impacts typing speed. I’d love to see more done with this research — and across keyboard types.

John Voorhees:

Center Stage is great for casual browsing of media in your timeline, but I expect I will use it most at events like WWDC. When I’m in San Francisco for Apple’s developer conference, I don’t want to miss friends’ photos and videos of the event, but I also don’t have time to read every tweet in my timeline. With Center Stage I can go straight to those photos and videos and dip into my timeline later when I have more time.

Twitterrific really is the best Twitter app you can use. Love it. Neat addition too.

Matt Gemmell shares another great thought about the iPad as a computer:

You grab the actual tool itself, and you’re away. It doesn’t care that it’s actually a computer. I’m not sure it even really knows.

Really well put. When your computer is just a glass slab with insane battery life, it basically becomes whatever it is you are doing. One moment it is a scope of my rifle hunting bad guys, another it is a piece of paper showing doodles, and the next a powerful spreadsheet — a wall of cells for you will. I really love that.

Shameless plug: if you are a member, you can read quite a lot of thoughts like this every Monday.

Matthew Green:

On the other hand, you might notice that this is a pretty goddamn low standard. In other words, in 2016 Android is still struggling to deploy encryption that achieves (lock screen) security that Apple figured out six years ago. And they’re not even getting it right. That doesn’t bode well for the long term security of Android users.

Ouch.

John Gruber’s stance on Ive’s role at Apple, which is apparently a thing people are worried about:

I think if you want to argue that Ive is one step out the door at Apple, you also have to argue that he’s one step out the door of being a designer. That doesn’t sound right to me.

You should read his whole post on the matter, as I think it offers good perspective on what must be a debate right now. (Maybe I should read more Apple blogs?) Anyways, here’s the one though which always strikes me when this debate comes up: where the fuck else would he go?

Ive retiring from Apple is not just Ive no longer being a designer, as Gruber states, but it is him being done with work in general. There’s no other company in the world which would give him the resources, control, financial backing, freedom, all the while not having him worry about any of the minutia which comes from running a business. It’s a sweet gig for him, and you’d have to be foolish to leave that to do anything but sit on a beach drunk all day long.

John Gruber on preferring a Mac to iPad:

I think I’m more productive on a Mac than I am on an iPad. I can’t prove it, but even if I’m wrong, the fact that I feel like it’s true matters. I always feel slightly hamstrung working on an iPad. I never do on a Mac (at least once I’ve got it configured with all the apps and little shortcuts, scripts, and utilities I use).

The word you are looking for is “familiarity”. That feeling of being hamstrung on an iPad is not because of the device, but because it requires a mental shift to working in a way you are unfamiliar. Millions of people get a lot of shit done on Windows everyday, but I bet Gruber (or any other dedicated Mac user) would feel hamstrung on Windows. That’s not to say Windows and iOS are similar, but that they both differ from macOS in a way that causes you to have to think, erm, differently about how you compute.

Justin Blanton:

Much of what makes this possible is that I can delegate in one way or another most of what I think of, and can get away with being extremely terse in my emails. At this stage of my career my day-to-day job requires minimal work-product; if I was coding all day, designing websites, or researching, I probably wouldn’t be able to leverage my pocket computer the way I do, but I wouldn’t want to either.

The more people you manage, in general, the less computing power you need. That’s not to say the iPhone 7 isn’t powerful — it is — but to point out that you don’t need all the niche tools on Macs in order to run entire parts of companies, hell to run entire companies even.

As a follow-up to my member’s post this week, here’s an article where Jason Snell better articulates what he still needs a Mac for:

It’s all gotten a lot better, and for maybe 90 percent of what I need to do, my iPad Pro can do it–in many cases as good or better than my Mac. But when I ran into something in the other 10 percent, this week I was happy that a Mac was nearby.

He didn’t layout anything which is impossible to do on iOS, but I get why those things are easier on the Mac — because they still are easier on the Mac. However, even as a power user of computing tools, he could still be iPad only if he wanted to.

Snell does bring up one thought which sits badly with me:

And when the iPad can match the functionality of the Mac, sometimes it comes only via a bunch of weird third-party apps, workflows, and workarounds.

Really? Most Mac apps are from weird third-party developers, with odd workflows, and workarounds. I wish he’d edited out this thought, because it’s absurd. Perhaps he’s never heard of some of the people making the current power iOS apps, but that’s only because they haven’t yet been around as long as Mac developers. And the terminal/Automator stuff he talks fondly of are far more cumbersome and weird than something like Workflow on iOS.

(hat tip to: Mark Crump)

Piotr Gorecki Jr:

Most people agree that iPad software is not ready for its prime in terms of desk usage (with keyboard). There are still many glitches, bugs and inconveniences — like support for landscape mode, oversimplified clipboard or between-app communication. But it’s just software. That’s not a hardware limitation. Nor kernel/runtime limitation. I can’t see a problem with the iPad Pro that can’t be solved by OS or app update.

This is an older post, but absolutely spot on.

Bradley Chambers:

Apple’s model of renting me $5 movies or selling $2 TV shows seems archaic compared to Netflix, Hulu, or Sling TV.

I actually really love the Apple TV — it’s the primary way I watch all TV. However, I agree so much with the above statement. I hate constantly having to rent new release movies for $5 a pop. Just let me pay a monthly fee and be done with it. Same with the TV Shows Apple “sells”. So annoying.

Fantastic post from Sarah Perez:

The social media network has become an outsize player in crafting our understanding of the events that take place around us. We’ve known for some time that its echo chamber could be an issue in terms of exposing us to differing viewpoints. But only today are some realizing how powerful its influence has become.

Read the whole thing.

Strongbody Apparel reached out to tell me about their new Gastown Jacket which is already fully funded on Kickstarter. I personally think it looks like a great jacket — especially for the more casual wardrobes.

As a way for me to get to know the brand, Strongbody sent me over their essential workout tank, which is more like a sleeveless t-shirt than a traditional tank. Given the short amount of time I’ve had with the shirt, what I can say is:

• This is a very comfortable shirt. It has a vented mesh channel down the back of it and overall I found the shirt to breathe very well and retain comfort all day long.
• After a full day wearing the shirt as an undershirt and doing yard work in it, it didn’t stink. I smelled it myself and nothing, smelled clean. I was a bit amazed by that.

If the quality of this shirt is any indication, then I really look forward to seeing the Gastown jacket in person.

Finding one good jacket which will cover 90% of the travel I do, and still stuff down small is something I am still struggling with. Glad to see more and more jackets like this coming out.

I find it terrifying when one of my favorite and most used apps goes Freemium — so I mean it when I say that I really hope this works out for 2Do. What a great app.

Andy Baio on blogging in general:

Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.

While I may cross-post some content to Apple News, Medium, and other services as they spring up — I won’t cross post everything and I certainly don’t trust those sites to ever be more than a passing fad. Having my own site gives me complete control to do whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want. I don’t understand why people ever want it any other way.

My god, that’s a pretty PC. Like with Xiaomi products and Android, it’s too bad it runs Windows.

Some good other thoughts on it: here, here, and here.

My god, that’s a pretty phone. The other bonus of watching this video is that I finally found out how to pronounce “Xaiomi”. Like Microsoft products though, it’s too bad it runs Android.

John Gruber on iMessage and how it locks people into iPhones, yet it insanely useful:

iMessage is an exception. With iMessage you get to connect both with iPhone users in the Google ecosystem and iPhone users in the Apple ecosystem. For a lot of us here in the U.S., that’s just about everyone we know.

He’s right — it’s almost unsettling to me when I see green bubbles (indicating SMS) instead of the blue iMessage bubbles. It’s also a. clusterfuck anytime someone who was previously an iMessage person switches to Android without jumping through all of Apple’s hoops.

But beyond that, iMessage is easily the best messaging platform I have tried. I get to try a lot of different ones all the time, and every time I am just glad when I can go back to iMessage. It’s such a seamless and perfect tool.