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 didn’t 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, I’m really enjoying it.

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. I’ve 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. I’ll 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.

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:

“I can’t really identify anything that I’ll be nostalgic for in ten or twenty years.”

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.

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.

Since last year, I’ve been making a major cleanup of my Twitter account. I came from following more than 2000 people down to less than 300… and my goal is to drop below 100. I’m slowly getting there. Here are a few take outs from this major cleanup of my accounts following list.

First, there are a lot of stale accounts on Twitter, which tends to artificially increase “followship”. It looks like people stopped tweeting a while ago — they left the building. Second, a bunch of accounts were iPhone developers that I started following during my indie developer era, back in 2009-2013. My interests have since then shifted to writing and blogging. I no longer need to get in touch with the developers community. Third, and this coud be the most troubling take out: Twitter has become less and less useful in my numeric life. Articles readings happens more and more though RSS feeds and Mailbrew. So, what’s left for me from Twitter? Getting reactions from people during specials events, related to Apple’s announcements. That’s pretty much it.

A recent poll ran by 9To5Mac gives surprising results about what people would like to see if Touch Id is to return to the iPhone. Touch ID under the screen wins popular favour… personally, I would prefer Touch ID to go on the power button, just like the iPad Air because it is easily accessible while holding the phone.

In the following screenshot taken this morning on my iPad screen, how many ellipsis signs to you catch? I highlighted them for you to make it easier. To all developers, to all designers, to Apple: please, stop this shit NOW and find a better way, use your imagination, stop being lazy at design. Thank you.