It’s good to see Glass introduce new methods for discovering photos on its platform. I would love to see percentages relative to each camera and smartphone brand. Searching by lenses tells us that Nikon is way behind Canon regarding diversity and representation. Can’t wait for Glass’s next move. 

For the first in years, I just bought something from eBay. Man, this website design sucks and seems to date back to the early web. Is there anyone who cares about design at eBay? Anyway, they do care about security, though. Upon logging in with my password this morning, there was a popup asking me if I wanted to get rid of my password. I thought it was the eBay website that was about to turn on the Touch ID but instead asked me to confirm the passkey creation. It took me a confirmation with my finger on the Touch ID sensor on my M1 MacBook, and voilà, no more password required! That’s super cool.

Because native software is cool. Because indie developers are cool. Because it supports Micro.blog but not Twitter. Because it is cheap. Because it’s a small company. Because their new Micropost (markdown) editor is nice, perfect for posting on Micro.blog. It is frictionless. Micropost & micro.blog, any coincidence? Mmmm.

Anyways… it’s a great update that I’m currently testing. Returning to normal programming.

Written from the couch, on my M1 MacBook Air.

I read about so many people flocking to Mastodon, leaving Twitter behind. I actually started to see a definitive decline in my followers number. Something is really going on. I myself started to think about the possibility of leaving the platform too. Just like I did with Facebook, Flickr, and Tumblr, only to leave a place where my content is simply cross-posted from another source without a real and active presence of mine. Twitter could be next. Really. I could live without the traffic influx from Twitter, which represents about 15% of all my visitors.

There is one thing that it would be hard for me to leave behind, though. If it wasn’t about the war in Ukraine, it would be an easy decision. The problem is that I follow a few people and news sources that diffuse their content on Twitter. Is there a Twitter equivalent for this type of small blips of nano content? I don’t see that in Mastodon yet. RSS feeds are not a platform but transport. The next Twitter has yet to emerge.

There we have it, a new iPad, a new iPad Pro, joining a growing and more confusing iPad lineup than ever. I won’t repeat the best comments from MacStories (“Apple Announces Strange New iPad and iPad Pro Lineup“) and Six Colors (“The iPad’s erratic odyssey continues”). How are this week’s announcements influencing my buying decisions?

I’m currently using a 2018 11-inches iPad Pro. Going to the 2022 M2 iPad Pro would be a significant step, at least from a processing power perspective. Should I stay on the 11-inches size or go to the 12.9-inches version and get a big screen upgrade? Using this new iPad as a photo-processing machine and as a second screen to any of my Mac would undoubtedly support the bigger iPad. But what a weird setup this would make to use a much-better secondary screen like the 12.9-inches iPad Pro on a 2020 M1-based MacBook Air machine. There is no comparison to be made.

In its video clip of fewer than five minutes, Apple is positioning the latest iPad Pro weirdly and surprisingly: the best machine to experience the “exciting” Stage Manager. What a strange way to present the iPad Pro. It will undoubtedly help but having to buy an expensive iPad to get a different and questionable way to multitask on a tablet is doubtful.

Oh, and what a missed opportunity to have Freeform ready simultaneously and present it as the best way to collaborate in a creative environment! We will have to wait until “later this year” to come to get a sense of Apple’s vision of collaborative work. Oh, and Final Cut is still MIA. Instead, Apple continues to rely on third-party apps to show how powerful the iPad Pro actually is. Thanks to DaVinci Resolve or Affinity, when they ship their new beast of software. Later. Eventually.

I don’t know why but my feeling is that the 2022 iPad Pro is only a transition machine, and the real deal will be next year’s update. Oh, and these keyboard choices are as strange as all the rest.

I’m unsettled. 🤔

The Adobe Max conference was held this week. With each conference comes a slew of new application update releases. I’m not really into Adobe ecosystem except for using Adobe Lightroom on the Mac and the iPad Pro. This is my main photo processing engine, coupled with the excellent Pixelmator Pro. For About a year, Adobe spent some of its development money to “augment” Lightroom, a photo-processing application, with video-processing features. Why? I don’t get it. I don’t want it.

As Adobe is adding video-processing features to Lightroom, I fear they are making it less focused and slowly becoming a bloated piece of software, on the outside but also the inside. Adobe Lightroom’s mission was to start over and make a new solid foundation apart from its aging Adobe Lightroom Classic.

I want Adobe to focus on photography; they already have video-processing apps like Adobe Premiere!

I’d love Adobe to focus on making the camera feature compete with a dedicated camera app like Apple’s camera app or Halide or Camera+. I cannot remember when the last release of Adobe touched this portion of Lightroom in significant ways. Why is it important? As a subscriber of an Adobe photography plan, I would use the Lightroom camera more, and my images would directly go to the Adobe Cloud, just like the Apple camera app saved photos in iCloud. It would be so much more convenient. I prefer Adobe cloud for my RAW images instead of having to transit my RAW photos through the Apple Photos library. The more Adobe improves the built-in camera module of Lightroom, the more I’ll stay within Lightroom while in a photography moment.

What. The. Fuck.

This podcast example about a fake interview between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs is a blatant example of where some more thoughts should take place before putting high tech to work. What is the purpose of this? Is this a tech demo or some bad-taste proof-of-concept? It’s not hard to imagine how it could derail in the future when used in politically-heated contexts. Oh, and no, I didn’t waste my time listening to this garbage, and I won’t share the link to this podcast, either.

Image credits: generated using Dall-E with the following phrase: “an hand drawn Mac computer that never existed digital art”

As I write this, rumours are pointing to an imminent release of some updated iPads today. What is novel this time is not the CPU to be used, the screen attributes, or the long-awaited app called Freeform. What is novel is the fact that there won’t be an Apple event for the announcement but a few well-crafted press releases. Apple judges the updates as not worth tech pundits’ time, flight to Cupertino, or even a secret press briefing.

I would argue that we are officially entering the iPad commodity era. Thanks to Apple, who neglected to show the iPad’s true potential with a ported version of powerful apps like Final Cut Pro, a real multitasking experience, the iPad is becoming a mundane device. Putting an M2 processor in it won’t change the story here. Freeform, a low-profile app that Apple quickly demonstrated at the WWDC conference last June, won’t probably appeal to many, being late in the game of collaborative work and creativity. Even long-time bloggers and iPad believers like Matt Birchler are no longer waiting for the iPad to ignite the personal computing segment.

We will see shortly if Apple has a few surprises in-store today.

Photo credits: Photo by Niklas Hamann on Unsplash

In case you didn’t know, I’m a big fan of Apple (from the corporation, the products to the company’s history). Here’s a little secret: I maintain a document of possible upgrade paths for all my current Apple products. It’s fun. Yes, I’m a bit crazy.

Each year, during the fall, Apple releases a slew of new products. Each year, I spend some time updating my document to reflect my analysis of possible product upgrades. Take the iPhone for example. I’m currently using last year’s iPhone 13 Pro. I’m super happy with but I’m pondering the idea of upgrading to the iPhone 14 Pro Max. So, I list all the reasons why I should do it and all the reasons why I should refrain from doing the upgrade. It’s the same drill for my aging 2018 11-inches iPad Pro. Or my Apple Watch Series 6. It’s quite fun and educative because for each product, I spend quite some time studying it and pondering their technical advances over my current product. It’s really fun. And crazy.

This year, it’s a bit different for some reasons. There’s still nothing in the Apple tech landscape that could trigger a purchase. Not yet. Rumours about an upcoming iPad Pro refresh and a more powerful Mac mini with an M2 are aplenty. Things could change in a few weeks.

But, seriously, what is more fun than anything else is the waiting game. Pleases come while waiting for something to happen. I read somewhere that people who wait patiently to get something are more happy in life than those who succumb rapidly to fill their immediate needs. I must be quite happy then.

Header photo credits: Photo by Zhiyue on Unsplash

A recent Twitter thread about the possible iPhone Dynamic Island inception by Matt Birchler caught my attention a few days ago but couldn’t find the required time to write my take.

How long could Dynamic Island have been in gestation at Apple? A few weeks, a few months? I think this has been in the works for quite some time. Besides the visual appearance, the API goes with it and needs a design period too. I’m sure Matt understands and knows about that. I would argue that Apple worked on this way before this year’s announcement. Best integration between hardware and software takes time because of how Apple is internally structured. Secrecy plays a significant role in making things longer to achieve too. Apple plan’s for the long run, and I think the pill shape was set in stone last year.

The second thing that caught my attention is this: How long will Dynamic Island be with us? What if Apple can make the camera disappear under the iPhone’s display? Would this make Dynamic Island pointless? No. My take is that the feature is here for the long run, even though the camera and all other sensors could disappear entirely. Apple is training us to accept Dynamic Island as a fundamental part of the iPhone experience. We may even expect the feature to be the de facto standard of the best iPhone user experience. I don’t think we will revert to the previous design that Dynamic Island is taking care of. The black pill share could be dynamically removed when not required but could then pop up to respond to the current context dictated by the user interaction.

The Dynamic Island is such a terrible name but the feature in itself is brilliant, so Apple.