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Beyond the HomePod (#apple #homepod)
Apple needs to release new products to compete in the home. Be it an “Apple TV 6” or “HomeHub,” something needs to change the customer’s perspective in order to get traction in the space.
The article fails to mention a feature a HomePod replacement could and should include: home networking. I wrote about this many times. Apple left home networking market at a time where it was transitioning to WIFI 6 and home automation really started to pick up pace, thanks to things like HomeKit.
Mesh networking is something critical these days with the new work-from-home trend caused by the pandemic. Only Apple could create an easy to use networking product, Ć la Ubiquity or something like the AirPort product line. Speakers like the HomePod mini could evolve to be mesh extenders. I donāt really care if this product does have a screen or multiple mics. Sure it has to be HomeKit integrated. No, I donāT want it to be a successor to the Apple TV. Pricing would be too out of control. It has to be a separate product.
Leaving the home networking space could be one of the worst Apple decision in recent years. We keep seeing the consequences of it now.
Image credit: taken from AppleInsiderās article.
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Fuck Facebook ā Dear Parents RESIST ! (#facebook #masssurveillance)
From BuzzFeed:
Executives at Instagram are planning to build a version of the popular photo-sharing app that can be used by children under the age of 13, according to an internal company post obtained by BuzzFeed News.
Sorry for the bad words, but this is beyond any shit ever spit out by Facebook. They literally scrap anything they touch: Instagram, WhatsApp, society. WTF are Facebookās Instagram leadership thinking? Iām so tired of this shit! Iām utterly angry! Now, since those people canāt figure out reality, whatās good, whatās bad, this message is for parents: RESIST! You hold the destiny of your children, just say NO! Donāt allow your children on social networks. Period. Enough, already.
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Is bloatware coming to iPhone? (#apple #iPhone #russia)
According to 9to5Mac, users from Russia, upon setup of their brand-new iPhone:
Apple users will see a dialog box upon initial setup of new devices that features web browsers, antivirus, messenger, email clients, and more to be installed by default. The list of apps is provided by the government.
At first, I thought it was a bad decision from Apple, to allow this to happen. Bending to state laws from a country like Russia doesnāt look good. Whoās next? China? What about smartphone carriers?
The headlines are scarier than the reality, though. Users will be able to uninstall those state-sponsored apps. Otherwise, it is easy to imagine many scenarios like the dreaded PC bloatware we had to endure in the nineties from Microsoftās OEMs. Or even worse, what about state surveillance applications? How will Apple say no to those? Are PCs subject to the same requirements? If not, why?
On the flip side, I can see some situations where apps could be suggested that would make sense, like contact tracing apps. It could have made a difference if we had this feature implemented before the pandemic. Another case is to suggest a government sponsored app that gives access to services sponsored by the government (immigration, finance, security, etc.). Finally, what are those apps that will make the list when setting up a new iPhone in Russia? I hope someone will share their experience once the law comes into effect.
Photo credits: Steve Harvey on Unsplash
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Something is Going with the iMac (#apple #imac #applesilicon)
Well, rumours abound, changes to the Apple Store options for the iMac, the demise of the iMac Pro, something is really going on with the iMac line. As Apple is currently in the midst of their transition to a full Apple Silicon future for the Mac, we may find whatās coming next, sooner than later.
I always loved the iMac because it is the most truthful version of the Mac original vision. I owned a 24ā 2005 white iMac, then a 2007 aluminum version before my current 2017 iMac, on which I work on every weekday, for my day time work. Iām really looking forward for Apple to inject a new dose of design language in general, but especially for the iMac. The chin, the bezels, the rounded back all feel quite dated and tired. The ultimate form factor is to get a screen, nothing more. Think of it like a big iPad Pro on a svelte stand. The next design has to be iconic. It should differentiate itself from the current iPad Pro or the ProDisplay XDR. Appleās industrial design team must enter new territories, they have to put a clear mark on Jony Iveās era. Everything in Appleās current Mac product lines look and feel like Jony Iveās team work. We are due for a new beginning.
Will this new machine come in April? I feel like Apple should use a more important event like WWDC or one of the fall keynote to release such a landmark product. Current movements on the Apple Store and recent discoveries in Appleās latest beta software points to a sooner than later release. We shall see very soon, I guess.
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About these Read Later apps or services
Thought of the day: read later lists are useless for me. I tend to forget about the items I save in them. It was true with Instalaper, Pocket, Safari and now Reeder. I donāt read more because I save things in them. The trick for me is to read it now or else. Simple. The longer I wait to pick an article out of these lists, the less likely I will read it. So, I end up with a mass of unread and expired content. Are you more successful than me?
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On the upcoming iPad Pro update (#apple #rumour #ipadpro)
As reported by MacRumors:
“Apple has tested āiPadā Pros with a Thunderbolt connector that would make them compatible with additional external monitors, hard drives, and peripherals, plus it brings faster data syncing speeds. Apple’s Mac machines have featured Thunderbolt technology for years now, but current āiPad Proā and iPad Air models have standard USB-C ports.”
Such an iPad feature has to come with much improved operating system support for external devices, like external monitors, which is currently very limited under iPadOS 14.4. Expect an iPadOS 14.5 surprise support (something along he line of mouse support with iPadOS 13.4 at around the same time last year) or iPad 15 with profound improvements compared to iPadOS 14 which was limited in new features.
Personally, the key for a possible upgrade from my 2018 iPadPro lies in the software, not only the hardware. Also, rumours all points to the 12.9ā iPad Pro, what about the 11ā? I highly wish that Apple will make the 11ā, just a smaller version of the 12.9ā version.
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Dear Justin ā Youāre So Funny (#apple #intel #ads #advertising)
Honestly, I like these Intel ads with Justin Long. The one with the dongle, at the very end, is priceless. These ads are fun. Not as fun as the āoriginalsā, though, but still. Intel hits the nerves. Intel is playing the Apple playbook, simple as that. Itās an interesting moment, a blip, in the advertising world. Nothing more. Will it make a difference? I doubt it.
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RIP iMac Pro, HomePod (#apple #imacpro #homepod)
What does the iMac Pro and the HomePod, two entirely different products, have in common? Itās not the fact that they are no longer being sold. The iMac Pro and the HomePod were created by Apple when they were caught off guard by market trends. In the case of the iMac Pro, Apple tried to answer pro users who were demanding a replacement to the aging trash can Mac Pro. Apple didnāt read the temperature room correctly. They acted urgently and responded with the wrong answer, the iMac Pro. The right answer would have been to fix the Mac Pro instead by creating another more modern version of the expandable Mac Pro, which they finally did later in 2019. The HomePod was created when Apple (finally) realized the smart speakers market was a thing. Apple misread the room temperature again with a high-end smart speaker which wasnāt that smart but sounded good. In such a market, pricing is everything.
Apple is at its best when they create products they want to use for themselves, just like they did with the iPhone. The Apple Car is such a thing really exists), the AR glasses (if such a thing really exists) are a potential case of such products. The Apple Watch was also built on the same principles of the iPhone: something they really want to use themselves.
I own two HomePod, paired together and two HomePod mini, placed in two different rooms. I love them all, but I prefer the mini for hard to explain reasons. It is sad to see the HomePro go. It could have played so differently.
Whatās the next Apple product to be killed? The iPod touch?
Afterthought: what is Apple comes out with a new HomePod with an integrated wifi 6 router and maybe some storage, something along the line of the AirPort Extreme a few years ago? A new HomePod mini could also be released with wifi extender built-in. I would buy that in a heartbeat.
Image credit: Basic Apple Guy. I love this guyās blog.
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Not one but two newsletters (#news)
For those who didnāt know, I have two newsletters. One available from Substack available at https://numericcitizien.substack.com on a monthly basis and the other one entirely made with Mailbrew. On every Saturday morning, a newsletter is built using the RSS feeds of my blogs as a source to create a summary of all my publications in the last week. So, take a look at the latest issue of “Numeric Citizen Newsletter”. There are currently 30 subscribers to this newsletter.
If you plan to subscribe to Mailbrew to build your own newsletter, please, do me a favour and consider using the affiliated link to do so.
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Guilty of Digital Consumerism (#apps #services #workflow)
Greg Morris on digital consumerism:
The level of consumerism and marketing tricks being used to sell apps and services is growing over time. They all promise to fix that gap in your work life, just like adverts promise to fix the one in your love life, or improve your happiness, or whatever it is. Itās all lies.
I cannot talk for others, but for me, when Iām jumping on another service or a new app, itās because it offers a seizable improvement. Going from Notion to Craft is my latest example of such move. Iāll elaborate on this at length in a feature post in the very near future.
I recently wrote āAre we digital nomads?ā My answer is yes. It seems we cannot stay in one place for a very long time, looking for the new, the latest and greatest, all the time. Weāre bored. This is what it is. Form takes over function. Or is it? Again, my blogger workflow is full of moving parts and I consider it is an ongoing experiment.
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About those WebP images (#google #usertracking #nonstandard)
WebP image format goal, according to Google:
WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.
Iāve seen more and more WebP images in recent months when I try to download an image from Safari. Itās frustrating. Itās not a standard. Making the web load faster so tracking scripts can run more easily, that the reason behind all those āinitiativesā from Google. WebP is a terrible idea. AMP pages was a terrible idea. And FLOC is a terrible idea. Google is full of terrible ideas. Even for searching, Google is bad. Boy, I hate Google.
Iāve been using WebP Converter recently.
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HEY World, it's now official! (#hey #heyworld #blogging)
They flipped the switch to ON. HEY World is LIVE! I’m so glad, curious and already excited to use this other channel to share my written content with the world. I’m already thinking about my first post on this new platform. Furthermore, I think this addition brings even more value to an already useful service, on which I depend every single day. Recently, I asked: How many websites can a blogger have? Well, as soon as a newcomer doesnāt add too much friction when publishing content, itās ok to have many. HEY World seems to be such a service. Count me in.
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On Spoonbill (#twitter #mailbrew)
I recently published a long piece about transforming your Twitter experience by using Twitter lists instead of following a bunch of accounts. As noted in the article, one side effect of this approach is that services that look for your Twitter accountās list of people you follow wonāt really work. Thatās the case for a new service called āSpoonbillā.
Keep updated on your friends’ and family members’ bios, websites, locations, and names.
Spoonbill will send you a summary of changes that occurred on Twitterās bio of people you follow. I wonder if this service can be tweaked to use Twitterās lists instead. What about Mailbrew, maybe they could come up with a similar feature, which would be really cool.
In the meantime, Iām not coming back to following two thousands people.
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On iCloud Photo Library migration (#keyword)
In a surprising move, Apple starting today allows people to export their iCloud Photo Library to Google Photos. Why not provide a download to a local computer, outside the Photos app. I can see many use cases for doing so: backup purposes or simply to dump photos in a structure of directories for archiving purposes.
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Bye Bye Weather Line (#weather #weatherapps #iOS #iosdev)
Breaking news from 9To5Mac, but official announcement here:
In recent months, we were approached by a buyer. They saw the uniqueness of Weather Line and the strong foundation weāve built. While we arenāt able to provide further details on their future plans for the app, we hope you can understand, and will look forward to it.
Iām kind of in shock right now. I recently posted an article about my āgo-toā weather applications. Weather Line wasnāt part of the line up, but I did have it installed on my iPhone, and Iām currently a paying subscriber. Too bad to see the application go. But, why? The same happened to Spend Stack recently.
Whatās going on? How many developers invoked paid subscription model as being the only road to sustainability? Does it work or not? Is this the start of a new trend? There is something going on here.
When, as users, invest money and time in using applications or service, the last thing we want is to see our beloved apps go like this. Iām currently heavily investing in Craft (coming from Notion). What if the same happens to Craft?
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Dear Google, this time you win (#google #YouTube)
This shouldnāt be this way. Thanks to the numerous ads, my YouTube experience was a calculated nightmare. As my usage grew in the last few weeks because of my daytime job, my time on YouTube felt light a nightmare with no end. I decided to put an end to all this by subscribing to YouTube Premium. I feel in full contradiction to my values.
YouTube Premium so much better. But it shouldnāt be this way. Yet, it is. I feel that Iām sleeping with the enemy. Tell me that it is ok, will you?
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The state of non-optimized apps on my M1-Mac mini (#m1chip #applesilicon #universal)
Here is the current state of yet to be updated apps to fully support Apple Silicon Macs. Itās been close to six months now and yet, those apps arenāt yet universal. Surprising to see things like 1Password 7 still not there yet. Notion, an Electron-based app, not surprising. The Mac client for HEY hasnāt been updated for a while. Many of those apps are subscription-based, a model toward development sustainability. Can we say they are failing to meet their obligations, now?
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Appleās impressive traction (#apple #ios14 #ipados14)
Two very telling graphs from Appleās development portal:
A few takeouts. First, iOS 13 is close to become a bad souvenir. Second, people keeping their iPad longer, it is reflected in the percentage of people still using devices with iPadOS prior to version 13.
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Quick Poll on Writing During the Pandemic (#blogger #writer #poll)
Today, I would like to do a quick poll among my blogger / writer friends here on Micro.blog. How did the pandemic influence your writing habits? Do you write more? Less? What could be the reasons behind the change of habit?
To help you out and start the thread, Iāll answer to my own poll. The pandemic brought me closer to be what we call āa writerā. I write a lot more. I do put more efforts into each piece. I use more tools to help me. My research goes deeper. I have many pieces in the works, all the time. I spend around 5-10 hours for writing each week.
Now, why do I write more? Because there is less noise in my life in general, thanks to the restrictions (no travels, curfew, work from home: no commute). This āsilenceā created a pool of free time. My creativity took over. So, I write. And I love it.
Tell me your story? Letās discuss.
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I Tested HEY World! (#hey #heyworld)
Today, I tested HEY World. This is my non-review. It could have worked great, but itās not ready yet. One could say āNice try, buddyā.
I love their response to my test message. One thing stands out from their response, though:
āFor now, HEY World is just an experiment. ā¦
āAssuming thereās demand, weāll begin opening it up for more people soon. And then, hopefully, for all HEY for You customers. Personal blogs will finally be as easy as sending an email.ā
It seems to me that they are on the fence. They already have their tag line. They keep the door wide open. Could it be closer than we think or want to say it?
Now, what Iād like to see is how many emails like mine they get each day and what are they saying?
If they actually turn the switch on, count me in. Iāll find a use of it. For sure.
