Recent Articles

Shawn Blanc:

My biggest quibble with Ulysses right now is the way it handles images. If the image is inline with a note, you see an IMG markdown tag. Or, an image can be attached to a note, but otherwise not shown inline. It’d be great to be able to have images displayed inline.

I see this complaint a lot. I don’t disagree with it, but I also don’t agree with it. When I am focused on writing — not having to scroll by a bunch of images makes editing much easier. However, when I am editing, sometimes I like to see the images to make sure they flow properly.

You can do this with previewing the page, which is nice, but then you can’t easily edit the text (especially not on iOS). I’d propose something like Slack’s collapse command, where you can toggle showing images inline with a keyboard shortcut. That would be killer.

M.G. Siegler:

In a weird way, I almost feel like the 10.5″ iPad seems more like a smaller 12.9″ iPad versus a larger 9.7″ one.

Patrick Lucas Austin:

Participants with phones in another room greatly outperformed those with phones in pockets or on desks in all tasks.

Wow.

Tracy Chou :

It worries me that so many of the builders of technology today are people like me; people haven’t spent anywhere near enough time thinking about these larger questions of what it is that we are building, and what the implications are for the world.

And maybe just visit an area which isn’t the “Bay Area” every once and a while. I dunno.

Cory Bohon on the 10.5” iPad Pro:

Nearly every task I do with the iPad and the attached Smart Keyboard feels magical and natural — this is clearly the future of personal computing.

The Surface line has taken off like gangbusters in the past because it was the middle choice — it’s not really a tablet, but it’s not really a laptop. It’s for that very reason the device sucks. As this article points out, Windows is the problem with Surface devices.

But, Windows is also the only reason Surface devices have been adopted as fast as they have been. It’s why iPads run iOS, and not macOS.

Kai-Fu Lee:

So if most countries will not be able to tax ultra-profitable A.I. companies to subsidize their workers, what options will they have? I foresee only one: Unless they wish to plunge their people into poverty, they will be forced to negotiate with whichever country supplies most of their A.I. software — China or the United States — to essentially become that country’s economic dependent, taking in welfare subsidies in exchange for letting the “parent” nation’s A.I. companies continue to profit from the dependent country’s users.

Hell of a thought.

Matt Gemmell writing about iPads and the notion of replacing a laptop:

I’m not sure what they’re afraid of.

Fantastic post, especially for people who get real mad at the idea that iPads work well for people.

Justin Searls:

I’ve found that virtually any painful-to-accomplish task can be automated away to some extent with the excellent (and recently Apple-acquired) Workflow app, so I’ve been pretty aggressive in creating an automated workflow as soon as I recognize a certain action is more awkward than necessary

Love that description, and I think for most people it’s not so much needing workflow as it is thinking a tad, shall we say, newly? Hmm, need to think of a catchier phrase there.

Brian Renshaw:

The text is larger enough to read easily and the writing window is plenty sufficient. This is a similar feeling I’ve had with the keyboard. Its just big enough, which, at the end of the day, makes a massive difference.

Apt description of the keyboard size.

What you see, is not what you get.