Recent Articles

Alex Sherman , Eric Newcomer , and Alex Barinka:

Buying Slack would help Seattle-based Amazon bolster its enterprise services as it seeks to compete with rivals like Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. The company’s cloud-hosting unit, Amazon Web Services, in February unveiled a paid-for video and audio conferencing service — Amazon Chime — that lets users chat and share content.

I’m inclined to say it might even make for a better Slack, but I dunno.

Matt Birchler:

What this chart really shows is that Box is the worst deal in almost all scenarios. Charging $10/month for 100GB of storage is just terrible in 2017. Paying them $15/month gets you unlimited storage, which is really the only place where they are even competitive.

iCloud, contrary to what nerds bitch about, fairs really well in the aggregate.

This really is a “finally” feature. Day One has long asked that you put some of your most private things in the service, then sync it with them. All without proper encryption.

So yeah, fucking finally.

John Gruber on the new iPad Pros with iOS 11:

It feels like a hand has been untied from behind my back, and this amazing hardware has finally been allowed to run free.

Apt description even for current model iPad Pros.

Federico Viticci:

A common misconception about the leather sleeve is that it can only fit the iPad with no cover attached, but it’s actually the opposite. The leather sleeve is best used when the iPad is attached to a Smart Cover or Smart Keyboard; otherwise, the device will be loose and it might slip out (even when the Pencil is in), which happened to me when I was testing the iPad in the sleeve with no keyboard or cover attached to it.

Ordered.

Matthew Panzarino:

Think of every iPad up to this point as a glass of water set on a shelf — in wait for some future moment of need. This iPad is Apple’s “swing away” moment. It executes on the years of insistence that the iPad is the future of light work computers. But that moment is only telegraphed, shadowed, until you see it through the lens of iOS 11.

Good read. I don’t want to spoil is closing statement, so be sure to read it.

Manton Reece:

But it’s almost exactly what I was hoping for a few years ago. This redesign for iOS 11 is one of my favorite things to come out of WWDC.

It’s fantastic.

Amy Wang:

Though the phrase was coined in English, that particular way of sitting — legs splayed apart, with little regard for the personal space of others nearby — is a worldwide phenomenon.

It really is rampant, and disrespectful. I personally take it as an invitation to rub my leg against another. Since I never miss a chance to do that, I can tell you that this oddly stops men from doing it.

Sadly, this is not even remotely the same tale for women.

Dharmendra Bhammu:

With the Geekbench single core, the 2017er iPad Pro is about 30 percent higher than its predecessor. In the multi-core test it is 80 percent faster.

Holy shit, they were already fast.

Peter Kafka:

A new version of Apple’s podcast app will provide basic analytics to podcast creators, giving them the ability to see when podcast listeners play individual episodes, and — crucially — what part of individual episodes they listen to, which parts they skip over, and when they bail out of an episode.

I wonder if this will make podcasters push listeners to Apple’s app so they can get robust data, or if it will force third-party apps to add this kind of analytics as well.

John Paczkowski:

“The 10.5 crosses this really interesting threshold,” Federighi says. “By trimming down the bezels, we were able to maintain a size that’s great to hold in bed while reading, but it’s also got a full-sized keyboard. It’s deceiving to the eye, but when you put your hands down and start typing you immediately feel ‘oh yeah, now I can type just like on my Mac.’”

I can’t wait.

Joe Cieplinski:

Currently, App Store is an app you only use when you already want to buy something, not a destination unto itself. This new design aims to change that. Only time will tell if it works, but I think Monika Gromek and her team have done a tremendous job with it. I’m sure they will adjust and refine the design over time as it gets out into the wild.

I remember having the habit of checking the App Store multiple times per day. I bet this takes me back to at least daily.

Nanette Byrnes:

Cook says the fact that the press doesn’t always give Apple credit for its AI may be due to the fact that Apple only likes to talk about the features of products it is ready to ship, while many others “sell futures.” Says Cook: “We are not going to go through things we’re going to do in 2019, ’20, ’21. It’s not because we don’t know that. It’s because we don’t want to talk about that.”

This is exactly why people believe Apple is behind in AI, because Apple doesn’t tell them what they work on. Does make you wonder, why do people trust what other companies say so much?

Johnny Lin:

So, aside from the obvious moral wrongs of exploiting the vulnerable for profit, it’s extremely disheartening to know that some developers are becoming financially successful the easy and unethical way — by making bogus apps that take a few hours to code, and whose functionality is purely to steal from the less well-informed.

It frustrates me to no end when I see stuff like this, this is the very stuff the App Store was built to protect you from.

A little while ago my wife, Erin, had a chance to shoot a wedding and I think she crushed it. The pictures speak for themselves.

Jonathan Goodman:

It is open to question, however, whether flights operating on a buffered schedule arrive ‘on time’ in the sense that ordinary people use the term. If a flight is scheduled for 2.5 hours and takes, on average, only 1.5 hours to reach its destination, then is any flight that arrives at its scheduled time really on time? Or have the airlines merely redefined the term ‘on time’ to generate more favourable statistics?

I often tell people that statistics are not to be trusted. Then a statistician gets really mad, because statistics actually don’t lie. However, as shown in the example above, they can be gathered in a manner which distorts the truth.

Thus, statistics are not to be inherently trusted.

Bardi Golriz:

Microsoft’s apparent reluctance to make any meaningful improvements to Windows’ tablet mode suggest offering a first-class tablet experience is no longer as important as ensuring users have nothing to learn (or as little as possible) when they switch to it.

Donny Reynolds:

Not being forced to own a car is an empowering privilege, and it’s going to be more and more common. After all, it gives us financial flexibility, time, and freedom of choice. People should not feel afraid, but empowered to have more options to get around.

One of my favorite aspects of traveling is not having to worry about my car. Cleaning it, fueling it, parking it, or hell — even whether it is the right car for the situation.

I’m not sure how this is solved in the suburbs, where I live, but in a city — I doubt I would own a car.

It’s not just the financial impact either. Going somewhere nice, a date perhaps? Get a premium car. Have a lot of people, get a large car. So convenient, even if you factor in the wait.