I Love This Machine

It is light, fast and an absolute design gem. Small, but not too small. It runs a powerful operating system. It’s highly portable. It is venerable. It is a rare “species”. 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. It’s the perfect device for writing and blogging.

It’s a 2013 11” MacBook Air.

I’ll explain in the coming week or so.

It’s always saddening me a bit when, on the day of a new issue of my newsletter is being published, a few people decide to unscubscribe. I know, I cannot please everyone, people are busy, etc. And yet… 😒 oh well. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’m mostly done with the latest issue of my Numeric Citizen Introspection newsletter. It’s been a year since I started this free monthly newsletter and I still love it. While waiting for the next issue tomorrow, why not give a look at the previous one here. Subscribe, it’s free!

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 didn’t 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 I’m using a combinaison of 1Password and Apple’s passwords vault.

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 I’m seeing, on the iPad. Yet, “when you don’t know what is best, just add an option to Settings so the user can decide” strategy seems to be the way to go this time. You know what’s my choice, don’t you?

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.