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Excited for aā¦ keyboard
I got the new Magic Keyboard with Touch ID. I chose the one without the numeric keypad; the desk space being scarce. Setting this thing up took one minute. I had to read the (slim) manual as I wasnāt sure how the pairing would work: connect the keyboard to my M1 Mac mini with the provided USB-C to Lightning cable, quickly press the M1 Mac mini power button two times to trigger the setup process for Touch ID configuration (Bluetooth is automatically configured). The Touch ID setup screen looks similar to the one on the iPhone when settings up Touch ID for the first time. Itās one of the best Apple keyboard; keys feeling is similar to the previous generation. Touch ID is the star of the show here, and I love it. Only works with M1 Macs. This Magic Keyboard brings to the Mini, a feature otherwise only available to the MacBooks (and the M1 iMac). Thatās why I bought the keyboard. Itās not cheap, but convenience has a price for Apple.
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About the Store, the Store Tab.
There is so much to think or write about a simple “Store” tab. Something so “obvious” can lead to weird design decisions, even for Apple. I love this (rare) blog post from Ken Segall.
Sarcasm ON: “Iām feeling inspired by Appleās new way of thinking. Itās liberating. Who needs āAppleā when you have āStoreā? Generic is just so much easier, donāt you think?” - Ken Segall
To be honest, I don’t remember when there was a dedicated Store section on the Apple.com website. Apple brought it back, leaving “Buy” buttons scattered around every single product pages. It is now so much easier to buy something from Apple these days.
Sarcasm OFF
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(Re)Introducing the Store Tab
Yesterday, Apple made some changes to their website with the introduction of a new Store tab at the top of their website. Not only that, but the store design has been completely redone. I find it a bit disorienting at first, but after a few minutes, I think the elements and general reorganization make sense; I find it easier to navigate in general. Apple chose the horizontal scrolling sections instead of going vertical. Iām not always sure this is the best way to go, though. The bouncing effect is inconsistent, itās there while going to the right but not when hitting the limit on the left. AirTags have their section, which is surprising for such a small device.
Itās interesting to note that Appleās top navigation bar is now spanning a store, physical products, services, support, search, and a shopping cart.
Apple is getting ready for this fall slew of new products. Oh, one of the first thing I noticed is that the Magic Keyboard With Touch ID that is bundled with the 24ā iMac is now sold separately. I ordered one for my M1 Mac mini. It will take less space on my desk and Touch ID will so much more convenient for the mini. One last thing: convenience has a price: 179 CAN$. Ouch.
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I Love This Machine
It is light, fast and an absolute design gem. Small, but not too small. It runs a powerful operating system. Itās highly portable. It is venerable. It is a rare āspeciesā. There is something really special about it. Furthermore, it has a real keyboard that I can trust. Battery life is good. It is out of the way. Itās the perfect device for writing and blogging.
Itās a 2013 11ā MacBook Air.
Iāll explain in the coming week or so.
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Documenting past home screen arrangements
Matt Birchler had an interesting blog post this week about a screenshot of his 2013 iPhone home screen. There are a few interesting things to note. In 2013, it was the arrival of the controversial iOS 7 redesign. It’s interesting to look at the Camera+ icon design which was still not updated for the new style. The dock design style was pretty basic and felt out of place. A few apps are not longer among us these days: Path (which was really a great design example) but most of the third-party apps are still available today.
I wish I had kept screen shots of previous home screen arrangements in the past. Something that I have kept is many screen shots of my password manager user interface dating back pre-iOS 7 era. Here is an example below. When I saw iOS 7, I didnāt have the courage to rework my design. The development of my app stopped right there. I made five thousands dollars with this adventure, between 2009 and 2013. Now Iām using a combinaison of 1Password and Appleās passwords vault.
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On Safari 15 in iPadOS 15 Beta 4
Apple is slowly but surely getting there with this release of beta 4 of iPadOS 15 and Safari 15. I like what Iām seeing, on the iPad. Yet, āwhen you donāt know what is best, just add an option to Settings so the user can decideā strategy seems to be the way to go this time. You know whatās my choice, donāt you?
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Iāve been invited to test Safari 15 Preview on Big Sur
Iām going to jump in because on macOS, I donāt see the change as controversial as on iOS 15. I find it surprising that Apple seeks feedback on the new design. Itās a good thing but also surprising has they tend to do their thing alone. Now, they look a bit in distress while searching for a solution.
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Four days week day? We can only dream it seems
Again, Matt Birchler:
technology and improved general productivity always had the promise of letting us work less, and yet today we work more than ever and have less than before Source: A Four Day Work Week? Yes, Please!
I sure wish we had this four days work week. I cannot see the day it will become reality. The problem in IT where I work, there is a worsening trend of a lack of qualified people for many IT fields. This trend puts pressure on those who are qualified to do more working hours.
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Do you remember when you switched to Apple's ecosystem?
Matt Birchler writing about Apple ecosystem stickiness:
“As I buy more and more Apple products, all of those Apple products get better. My iPhone is more valuable because of the HomePod Mini I AirPlay my podcast to while Iām working. My iPad gets more valuable because it has seamless file sync with my Mac. Reminders is better because it works with Siri in a way no other app is allowed. The list goes on. But this is of course also a bit of a trap. I canāt really get an Android phone, even if I think I would enjoy it more than my iPhone, because then my HomePods become worse, my Mac gets worse, my iPad gets worse, and my Apple services get worse. Because each additional Apple product makes all my other Apple products better, likewise removing something from that mix brings down everything else.”
You cannot use an Apple Watch with an Android smartphone. In Apple’s garden, every product has an extension that takes the form of a service or another physical product from Apple. Did we forget that once upon a time we made a switch from platforms like Windows or OS/2? When a new offering is really making a difference, we tend to switch. Back in the days, a Windows PC was an island, leaving it for the Mac meant that you had to re-buy new software, a few accessories. All things equal, the switch wasn’t necessarily funny. Today’s digital world is quite different, for sure, but pose a similar kind of challenge when switching.
Photo by Miguel TomƔs on Unsplash
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On iPadOS 15 Photos improvements
Iāve been using Photos in iPadOS 15 since beta 2 and I must say that Apple is in fact offering a major update to their photos application. Beyong the updated Stories automatic creation and management improvements, face recognition has become quite impressive. According to a published article by Apple, people faces should be more detectable and recognizable in more extreme conditions. I can confirm this is actually the case. A large number of new photos were surfaced by Photosā improved algorithms which brings more potential content for new stories creation. Managing tagged faces is easier too and provides a refined experience overvall. Photos enhancements in iPadOS 15 is a big reason to upgrade.
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Moving Adobe Lightroom from one machine to another
I’m finally done moving Adobe Lightroom Classic from my iMac to my M1 Mac mini. A few takeaways: it’s a tricky process involving many folders to copy (presets, settings, photos, catalog, etc.). Lightroom is bad at managing digital assets when things need to be reorganized. The Apple Silicon optimized version is faster but not as much as I thought it would be. My Mac mini never stop to impress me, it’s such a fast device. I’m close to being able to put my 2017 iMac for sale.
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iPhone 13 Pro Max or iPhone 13 Pro ā That is the question
Iām planning to go big screen this fall with the iPhone 13 Pro (12s?) Max (I currently own an iPhone 11 Pro). I never owned the biggest iPhone (Plus or Max). There is one thing that makes me pause: information density of the Max seems about the same if not a bit higher compared to the non-Max model. There are six row of icons on the home screen on both models (Max and non-Max), which is kind of lame. Am I getting this wrong?
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When a 2013 MacBook Air is > than a two-years old Chromebook
Iāll be getting a old 2013 MacBook Air for one of my son to replace an aging Chromebook that I bought about two years ago. Think about it. This eight years old MacBook Air is faster, much better design, much better screen quality, more memory and will be able to run macOS Big Sur and all other apps like iWorks et al. I find this incredible that we can read and hear people saying Apple gear is expansive and that is under Appleās obsolescence progamming. I call this bullshit.
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Moving from Castro to Pocket Cast: 100% completed. šØš»āš»āļøšš»š
I waited for close to a year for Castro to bring its podcasts app to the iPad. Today, with the announcement of Automattic buying Pocket Cast, it came back on my radar. It didnāt take too long to make the switch. Pocket Cast is a real multi-platform player, feature rich and has an as good design as the other players. After Tumblr, DayOne, now Pocket Cast, I want to give it a try and see how Automattic will build on it. Meanwhile, Iām really enjoying it.
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On PC in the cloud
Microsoft announced their PC in the cloud offerings this week. While it is probably based on their previous offering, Windows Virtual Desktop service, it does look like a milestone to me. Iāve been in IT for more than 25 years. I saw the migration from the mainframe to the client-server applications architecture. After that, it was about virtualization taking over with the popular VMware hypervisor. In the last five years, I saw the cloud taking over the IT world. The latter has a much more profound impact than any trend I witnessed or was part of in my career.
PC in the cloud is only offered to business customers, for now. I can see Microsoft offering the service to the general public in a not too distant future. Iāll probably subscribe to an instance for my personal needs. Being able to run the PC in a browser means being able to use it on any of my current Apple devices, from the M1 Mac mini to my iPad Pro. This is something Apple will never enable itself, certainly not within Safari. The future looks interesting.
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User Interface design dark age era
We are in the dark age (not dark mode!) of user interface design for sure. We get excited for new animated UI elements (example here), but overall, delight has been lost in translation a long time ago. As Mike Rockwell is a link post say:
āI canāt really identify anything that Iāll be nostalgic for in ten or twenty years.ā
I wouldn’t go back to pre-iOS 7 days but there has to be some delightful in-between degree of crafted user interface that had some real joyful elements in them. Apple is not the only one at fault here. It looks like it is a design trend spanning many mediums (print, TV, web, etc.).
Has the industry decided that our devices have reached a level of maturity that warrants making everything minimal, sterile, and utilitarian to help “do work” and “get stuff done”?
Excellent question, Tyler Hall.
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Googleās openness isnāt enough apparently (#antitrust #security #cybersecurity)
Wow, that one is close to being hilarious. Big tech companies are the target of hate these days. Google was hit by another antitrust lawsuit by no less than 36 states about their handling of applications side loading on Android. In summary, it is so cumbersome to side load an app on Android, thanks to security measures, that it makes it hard for competing App Store to compete.
Google makes the sideloading process unnecessarily cumbersome and impractical by adding superfluous, misleading, and discouraging security warnings and by deterring users by requiring them to grant permission multiple times for a single app installation (discussed in more detail in Sections I.C. and I.D. below). The effect of Googleās conduct is to practically eliminate competition in Android app distribution.
Android is supposedly more permissive than Appleās App Store and yet, it looks like itās not enough. This lawsuit is a prime example on why I donāt like the current trend. People want more open platforms but itās never enough. If Apple is ever forced to make profound changes to their App Store business, it will be the beginning of a worrisome trend that I prefer wouldnāt happen. I recently wrote about not wanting another Android platform. Now, I should say that I donāt want another Windows platform disguised in a mobile device. To me, it is scary and close in nature to the same problem of who should own encryption keys. Raging ransomeware cyberattacks are signs of what is coming on mobile devices if we open them up too much, just like Windows.
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Bye Bye Skylum - I barely knew you
In preparing to move off my 2017 Intel iMac (and put if for sale), I must make sure to re-install remaining applications on my M1 Mac mini. Photography-related apps were the last to be updated for the M1 chip. Lightroom CC is now fully optimized, but none of the Skylum apps I was (rarely) using: Luminar 4 and Aurora 2019 HDR. After spending some time on their support forums, I found out that none of their apps are optimized for the M1 chip. I had to make the call: bye bye Skylum. I barely knew you.
If a software vendor like Skylum is unable to update their apps in a timely matter, more than a year after the M1 chip has been announced, I give up. It is sad because these are the kind of applications that would take advantage of the power of the M1 chip. Too bad. My photography workflow will focus on Adobe applications, for good or for worse.
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What comes before the right to repair? (#apple #righttorepair)
The next step for Apple is to design for repairability which goes beyond recycling. AirPods are the worst example of this. When the battery life on these is reached, there is no practical way to replace them without throwing it to the trash and buying a new one. So for me, the right to repair goes way beyond having a choice of where Iām going to take a device for repair. It is about buying a device that was designed for and built to use recycled materials, but also it is about buying a device that can be repaired for basic things like battery replacement.
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Going to spaceā¦ to watch a burning planet.
So Richard Branson went to space. Next, Jeff Bezos. And then, what? Is there any scientific purposes in these flights to space? Nope, not directly at least. Is this a publicity stunt? Yes and no. Iām not at ease seeing billionnaires spending their pretty money on something that donāt bring value to a community except for themselve. Oh, they want to start a new commercial flight in space business apparently, for billionaires:
Branson’s flight ā which came just nine days before Amazon bilionaire Jeff Bezos is slated to rocket into suborbital space aboard his own company’s spacecraft ā is a landmark moment for the commercial space industry. The up-and-coming sector has for years been seeking to make suborbital space tourism (a relatively simple straight-up-and-down flight, as opposed to orbiting the Earth for longer periods) a viable business with the aim of allowing thousands of people to experience the adrenaline rush and sweeping views of our home planet that such flights can offer.
Is there a better way to spend our resources to see the burning planet from space? Gosh.
