October 29, 2023

7 Things This Week [#116]

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.


1️⃣ In case you, like me, have wanted to follow the The Verges QuickPosts in your RSS reader, Parker Ortolani pulled through with the elusive link. [🔗 @parkerortolani // threads.net]

2️⃣ If you want your day to be ruined by lines that should line up but don’t, watch this visualization about the irrationality of pi. [🔗 @thechosenmortal // threads.net]

3️⃣ This chessboard doesn’t exist yet (it’s a crowdfunding project) but I hope they succeed because it looks amazing! Magically moving pieces, strategy help, and it spans digital and physical versions of the game. Go watch the promo video! [🔗 indiegogo.com]

4️⃣ I don’t care what anyone says; Thai Food near me’ is a genius name for a restaurant. [🔗 Mia Sato // theverge.com]

5️⃣ I happened across this video of Taylor Swift singing Blank Space” solo, and it’s a gem. Both the preamble and the performance are top-notch. [🔗 Taylor Swift // youtube.com]

6️⃣ Are you any good at Rock, Paper, Scissors? CGP Grey has set up an ingenious competition” through a series of YouTube video breadcrumbs. Start here. [🔗 CGP Grey // youtube.com]

7️⃣ I’ve long been a Hailee Steinfeld fan, but I never realized it was her voice in this version of Starving”. It’s been on repeat for me this week. Queued up next is her Essentials” playlist on Apple Music. [🎤 Hailee Steinfeld // song.link]


Take a Chance


Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know.

7 Things


My wife and I moved into our new home several months ago. I was slow to unpack things and even took a week or so to get my desk together and Mac back up and running. When I finally did, my Magic Mouse wasn’t there in the same box as the rest of the Mac’s accessories. I’ve been a mouse user for years and years, but I needed a pointing device and the Magic Trackpad was right there. I hooked it up and figured I would give it a shot, just until I tracked down the Magic Mouse.

Well, I’m here to tell you that everyone was right. The silent movement and tap-to-click have been a godsend. How could I have lived with that awful clicking noise for so many years? I’ve been more productive than ever by mastering the broad, yet intuitive, gestures to throw windows around, switch spaces, and perform complex macros.

And the ergonomics; oh the ergonomics! My wrist has never felt so free and natural. The improvements to my computational life have been so far-reaching and life-changing, in fact, that when I finally happened upon my old Magic Mouse in a drawer, I chucked it straight in the trash.

Pysch. 😜

I’m back to the Magic Mouse, and loving it. Despite my sarcasm above, I don’t hate the Magic Trackpad. It’s a wonderful piece of tech that works better than any other trackpad on the market. And if I couldn’t use the Magic Mouse, I’d probably switch back over to it rather than get a different mouse. I love that other people love it.

But the Magic Mouse works perfectly for my hand and the way I like to work on a Mac. Despite what folks say about the sushi roll shape of the Magic Mouse, I find it to be the most comfortable mouse I’ve ever used. I did get wrist strain from using the Magic Trackpad. That’s gone with the mouse in my hand.

I’ve got all the gestures I need set up on the touch surface of the Magic Mouse. A two-finger double-tap brings up Mission Control. A two-finger swipe gets me back and forth between my desktop spaces. The scrolling is smooth and effortless. Speaking of effortless, I’ve never found clicking and dragging things around with a trackpad to be particularly easy. With a mouse, there’s no thought or finger acrobatics necessary. I find getting the pointer to the exact spot I want on the screen to be far more precise with a mouse.

I don’t even mind the weird charging mechanism on the bottom of the mouse. When I get a battery warning after god knows how many months of use, I don’t find it onerous to plug it in for 30 seconds. That quick charge gets me plenty of juice to get the rest of my work done for the day before plugging it in to fully charge overnight. And then I’m good again for months. I’m not saying it couldn’t be better, but I am saying that it’s not the horrific design failure to me that it seems to be to everyone else.

The couple of months that I spent with the Magic Trackpad reminded me that there’s really no right or wrong answer here. Different strokes for different folks. I’m so glad that Apple makes a world-class trackpad for people who prefer that type of input. I’m even more glad that, many years after it’s been clear that the laptop form factor is king, they also still make a mouse for people like me.

I used to keep the Magic Trackpad to the left of my keyboard to use for some gestures. But I think I’m going to enjoy this one-on-one time with the Magic Mouse for a bit.1


  1. Maybe. It occurs to me that there are some gestures that only work with the trackpad when operating an iPad with Universal Control, which I do quite often. We’ll see if I miss them, but perhaps the Magic Trackpad will return to my desk one day.↩︎


John Gruber, writing for Daring Fireball, after new House Speaker Mike Johnson repeats the old party line following the latest mass shooting (number 560-something this year) here in the good old USA:

This now is not the time argument gets trotted out by Republicans after each and every gun massacre. Right after their tweets offering thoughts and prayers”. Bullshit. The aftermath of a massacre is the time to demand sane gun control measures. That’s when the issue is clarified. Would Republicans argue that October 8 was not the right time” for Israel to discuss Hamas terrorism? Was September 12, 2001 not the right time” to discuss Al-Qaeda? Should FDR have delivered an address to the nation on December 8, 1941, advising that we relax, let cooler heads prevail, because the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was not the time” to consider retaliating?

Every time we say now is not the time”, we’re pushing our mess under the bed, hoping we’ll get away with not cleaning it up. Every time, we get a little more desensitized. The best time for strict gun regulation was 25 years ago. The next best time is today.

Linked


Just this morning, I was listening to Myke Hurley and Jason Snell on Upgrade discuss the dueling rumors for potential Mac updates. Jason seemed to think that something was imminent, but was a bit cagey on what he thought that something would be — be it an event, a press release, or something else. What he did propose, however, is that perhaps Apple would introduce a refresh to the 13” MacBook Pro (the one still with a Touch Bar) and bring the iMac up to the M2 chip generation.

Mere hours later, Apple invited folks to an oddly-timed (we’ll come back to that) event for next Monday, October 30th with the tagline Scary Fast’. Without any iPads updated this year, and few solid rumors about what and when to expect new Macs, most publications I saw hedged their bets on what would be introduced. It appears they missed — probably in their rush to publish — this animation on the event’s page on Apple.com that clues us in on the focus of the event:

That’s right, a spooky Finder face! It looks like we’re getting new Macs. This is perhaps the most concrete hint I’ve ever seen in an Apple event invitation. The next closest one that I can remember was the Time Flies’ tagline on the invitation to what turned out to be the Apple Watch Series 6 and SE (and iPad Air, and 8th-gen iPad, and Fitness+, and Apple One) event.

Okay, so we’ll see some new Macs. But which new Macs, and what will they be running on? That question is now the heart of the conversation around this event.

Until I saw that Scary Fast’ tagline, I had been inclined to agree with Jason. It felt too early for the M3 chip to be announced. In fact, I was with John Gruber, thinking that the M3 surely wouldn’t be introduced until after the Vision Pro came out. I didn’t think Apple would relish introducing a brand-new, cutting-edge product like Vision Pro running on an old” processor. But circumstances now have me questioning that premise. Would Apple put together a whole event — albeit a fully remote one — just to refresh a few models with the M2 chip that has been out for over a year now? My gut says no. That kind of update would be better served as a press release, not the full media hype cycle that comes with an Apple event. Nor an event tagline that specifically calls the speed of the machine into focus.

Okay, so let’s assume that we will be seeing the introduction of a new Mac chip, presumably the M3. What machines would that new SOC go into? Probably not the MacBook Air, seeing as the 15-inch model was just introduced a few months ago with the M2. That leaves the Mac mini, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and iMac that currently run on a base-level M-series chip. The iMac is the most obvious candidate and is what I’d put most of my money on.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro is more of a conundrum. I assumed that Apple would eventually phase that machine out of the lineup as the market shifted over to the redesigned MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. But by positioning that machine as a Pro” laptop that starts at $1300, perhaps Apple has found itself in a similar situation as a few years ago when they clearly wanted to phase out the MacBook Air, but people kept buying them. Perhaps the 13-inch MacBook Pro is now the machine that they just can’t kill — a surprising turn of events seeing as it is the very model that was destined to replace the MacBook Air last time around but couldn’t. If I had to guess, I’d say it sticks around and gets the M3 as well, but without a redesign. The Touch Bar will live on.

It seems that the Mac mini is the easiest of any Mac to slip a new SOC into without much trouble. The same enclosure held Intel chips, the M1, the M2, and the M2 Pro. I think when the Mac mini gets the M3, it will continue to go into the same classic design. But will it happen next week? I’m not so sure. Partly because of the implications when considering the higher-powered variants of the M-series family.

In the two previous iterations, we saw the base model M1 and M2 introduced months ahead of its beefier Pro, Max, and Ultra siblings. It always seemed to me that it took extra time to develop and produce those more capable models. But if that’s the case this time around and the M3 Pro isn’t ready, we’d be left with a Mac mini that you could order with either an M3 or an M2 Pro chip inside — a bit clunky and confusing for the customer.

But if the M3 Pro is ready, I think and hope we’ll see it go into both the Mac mini and the iMac. That would make this bizarre event a bit more worthwhile. And people love the iMac. Raising the performance ceiling would provide more choice for folks who need more power but love the simplicity of an all-in-one desktop.

My final question regarding the M3 chip is about what process it’s manufactured on. Could Apple have scaled the 3-nanometer process and cores of the A17 Pro up for use on an M3 and M3 Pro? It seems unlikely, but they did scoop up all of TSMCs 3nm manufacturing for the year. With the comparatively low volume of Mac chips needed to be produced, would anyone even notice if a few M3/M3 Pro chips came down the chip line?

More questions than answers, really. But here’s where my predictions stand:

  • M3 chip is introduced, and it is on the 3nm process
  • The M3 chip goes into the iMac, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the Mac mini without any major enclosure redesigns
  • Apple is ahead of schedule on the more powerful chips and also introduces the M3 Pro
  • The M3 Pro is an option for the Mac mini and the iMac
  • The iMac’s color pallet stays the same

Accessories

Of course, with the Lightning port getting phased out of all products, it seems this would be the perfect opportunity for Apple to update its keyboard, mouse, and trackpad with a USB-C port. But the real question is if they’ll also finally give us a Touch ID keyboard option in the compact size but in a color other than silver and white. I’ve been waiting for a silver and black model for a long time now.

About that start time

Alright, let’s get back to the starting time for this event: 5 PM PST next Monday night. It’s the only Apple event that I’ve known to start after noon, much less the evening! But I’m pretty excited about getting to watch it live without having to take time off work, or committing time theft by watching the keynote while I’m supposed to be working. Since no one is traveling to California for a hands-on session this time around, I suppose Apple can be more flexible with the start time. I like the experimentation and hope it goes well. I do feel for the Apple employees who will undoubtedly be working late the night as the world learns about their new products.

All in all, I’m excited to see what’s in store for us at this event next week. Even if the products turn out to be boring, how they’re introduced has already piqued my interest. Let’s see what else Apple has up its sleeve.


Postscript: I just read John Gruber’s postscript to his event thinkpiece, and have to admit that it’s a compelling prediction that makes me question much of what I wrote above. Perhaps the M3 isn’t at all, and this event is all about the iMac getting refreshed with the M2 and the reintroduction of a pro iMac with the M2 Pro and Max chips. Supply chain rumors haven’t indicated that a larger iMac is imminent. But Ming-Chi Kuo, supposed best in the business when it comes to supply chain leaks, has been off the mark lately. Maybe this has slipped by him too.

Either way, this oddball event is going to be an exciting one to watch.


I’m an infrequent user of Discord, but I do hop in there from time to time checking in on various communities I’ve joined that are hosted there. I always used the official Mac app installed right from their website. But for the past several years, I either resisted opening the app or was immediately annoyed when I did because it always prompted me to install the latest update.

I’m all for frequent updates of apps. I’m glad to see active development and new features rolling in. But jumping in my way upon launch to get me to download an update, install it, and then relaunch the app is the wrong approach. Usually, I go to Discord trying to kick off a message or join a time-sensitive live event. Those prompts interrupt my flow and minutes spent updating make me miss out on the live stuff. I much prefer the behind-the-scenes updates of apps from the Mac App Store. But Discord isn’t available there, probably because it’s an app that’s based on web technologies (Electron?) rather than native Mac development tools.

But the new ability in macOS Sonoma to add any website to the Dock as a web app has drastically changed my Discord experience for the better. You see, the Discord website, which looks and works exactly like the Mac app, doesn’t ever require an update. That’s because it just loads the webpage fresh every time. By simply logging into Discord in Safari and choosing File → Add to Dock… I now have the web version on my Mac as a pseudo-application.

Discord in a Safari window with the ‘Add to Dock…’ prompt raised.
Any website can be added this way.

Using Discord this way, I get all the benefits of having Discord as a separate app, rather than just running it in a Safari window. It maintains my login state. I can enjoy Discord in its own separate window without extra chrome or controls. I could get notifications, although I have those turned off. I can launch it by typing Discord’ into my app launcher of choice (Raycast these days). I can Command-Tab to the app when it’s open. I can even automate it with the Open App’ action in Shortcuts.

I’ve been using Discord this way for the past several months and it’s been great. There have been zero prompts to update it when I’m trying to use it. And here’s another surprise benefit: the web app uses a tiny 1.2 MB of space on my Mac. The (native-but-not-really) Mac app? A massive 392.6 MB. That’s right, it uses .3% of the space on my system, with nearly the exact same experience in use.

A Discord window open to the direct messages screen, running as a macOS Sonoma web app.
It’s the same Discord you already know, but less annoying and not so much of a space hog.

Don’t forget to give it a macOS-style app icon

The only small downside of using the web app I noticed is that the default app icon doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the macOS aesthetic. It just puts the website’s favicon onto a white background. Like I said, a very minor quibble. Luckily, because this is the Mac we’re talking about, we can easily change an app’s icon to whatever we want.

So I found a high-quality, modern macOS-styled, 3D-esque icon online and saved it to my Mac. Next, I found the app’s home in Finder. (They’re added to the user’s Applications folder at Macintosh HD → Users → [Your User] → Applications, not the system-wide Applications folder, by the way.)

Finder window showing a handful of web apps and shortcuts installed as apps, including Discord, Threads, and YouTube.
I use a handful of web apps this way, including Threads and YouTube. The user’s Applications folder is also where shortcuts live after using the same Add to Dock…’ command from the Shortcuts app.

Selecting the Discord web app and hitting the Command-I keystroke (or right-click → Get Info) opens the info pane. There, you can drag any image file onto the icon space in the top left of the panel to instantly change its icon. That’s it.

Get Info pane with an annotation showing where to drop a new app icon.
Using a custom app icon in macOS is easy-peasy.

Now I have a Discord web app that looks and acts the same as their Mac app, but works way better in several important ways.

Tips


I discovered Bight Gear last year when attempting a summit of Mount Rainer with the RMI Expeditions guiding company. RMI is closely affiliated with Bight Gear, so Bight’s technical clothing was prominently featured in their marketing materials and packing list suggestions. I decided to try out their Solstice sun hoody on the expedition, and am so glad I did. Not only did it perform wonderfully on the trip, but it’s been one of my favorite pieces of clothing ever since and I wear it all the time. I love that it keeps up with wicking away sweat on strenuous backpacking days, and it keeps me warm when it’s chilly out while also magically cooling me down on hot, sunny days.

With that good experience to go off of, I returned often to the Bight Gear website to lust after their other products. And then, just a few weeks ago, I got an email from them with bittersweet news: Bight Gear is getting acquired by Black Diamond. Black Diamond makes quality equipment for outdoor adventurers like me, and I’ve used their rock climbing goods for years. In fact, I recently met a few members from the very highest levels of their executive team — good guys! — and was assured that they’re getting back to their roots of chasing ever-higher standards for their gear.

So while I’m a little disappointed to see the Bight Gear brand go away — I loved that little bight of rope logo that proudly stated I’m a climber — I’m excited that their expertise is joining such a prominent team at Black Diamond. I’ll be on the lookout for the BD successor to the Solstice Hoody.

Me, wearing a yellow sun hoody in a lush green forest.
The Solstice Hoody works equally in the hot rainforest…
Two men wearing sun hoodies on a frozen landscape.
…as it does on a chilly glacier. (Seen here next to a Black Diamond sun hoody, its future cousin.)

With Bight Gear shutting down, they’re offering all remaining products at 30% off. I picked up a few spare Solstice Hoodies, and their Alpha Ascender Vest that I’ve been eyeing. My one-sentence review so far: It fits well and feels great!

Gear


I wonder if we should consider Apple’s experiment with ludicrously-priced gold Apple Watches as ultimately a success. Perhaps the goal was never to continue to sell solid gold watches, but instead was to guide our first impression of the product into one of luxury and desire. A brute-force method into a mindshare category that was a cut above the Fitbits and Garmins. And even though the precious metal version didn’t last past the Series 0” family, that mindshare extended to down the ~$300 price point watches and into subsequent Series. Get a luxury-caliber watch at a fraction of the price! It does all the same stuff!”

Getting them onto celebrities’ wrists right from the start was a stroke of genius. Maybe the fancy gold was simply the price of admission. I wouldn’t blame them if the entire production budget for the Edition watches that year was lumped under Marketing.


October 22, 2023

7 Things This Week [#115]

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.


1️⃣ What a wonderful home page. 😊 (Or should I say web house?) But don’t stop there, the experimentation on Anh’s site is divine. [🔗 Anh // anhvn.com (via @sod)]

2️⃣ Google opened a new visitor center at its Mountain View campus. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to an Apple Store or the Apple Park Visitor Center. One thing that stuck out to me while watching this news coverage is that the Googlers talking about it almost seemed like they were making up the buzzwords as they went along. Apple execs use buzzwords, but their talking points are always well-rehearsed. [🔗 ABC7 News Bay Area // youtube.com] (via Michael Steeber)

3️⃣ Pete Davidson threaded that needle in his cold open. 🪡 [▶️ SNL // youtube.com] (via Jason Kottke)

4️⃣ This is one Christmas special that I’m pretty excited for! Hannah Waddingham’s singing as Rebecca in Ted Lasso was always a highlight of each season. Now she’ll have a whole show to show off her impressive pipes! [🔗 Apple TV+ // apple.com]

5️⃣ Libraries are awesome. Check out these Binge Boxes’, each with a handful of themed movies for a fun movie night. Clever groupings, too. [🔗 austin.bibliocommons.com] (via Greg Pierce)

6️⃣ This incredible art is all sketched in Apple Notes! [🔗 Chris Silverman // notes.art] (via @gabz@social.lol)

7️⃣ I’m not much of a gamer, but I appreciate and respect their value, and the care that goes into that art form. Zach Gage and the team at the new Puzzmo group lays out a strong case for games in their manifesto. [🔗 puzzmo.com]


Take a Chance


Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know.

7 Things


I recently wrote about my discovery of the Speak Selection’ feature in Accessibility settings. The ability to select the text of an article in Reeder, or anywhere else in the system, and have it read out loud to me while dynamically highlighting the sentence and word as they’re spoken was groundbreaking. It was the final dot to be connected to allow me to build an ideal reading workflow. I could use my preferred RSS sync service (Feedly) and reader app (Reeder), save items for later using my preferred service (Pocket1), read those saved items anywhere (Reeder on Apple devices, the Pocket website on Windows machines, my Kobo e-reader when disconnected or focused), and listen to the articles with a passable voice engine.

There was just one major point of friction. Selecting an entire article in Reeder isn’t particularly easy. It’s a two-handed affair to scroll to the bottom of the page, select the final paragraph, and then tap the top of the screen to scroll back up while still holding the text selection. Then tap Speak’ in the context menu. Oh, and then I also couldn’t switch away from Reeder or turn off the screen because the narration would stop.

Tonight, I solved all those problems with a very clever workaround. And by clever workaround, I mean I happened to try the very obvious toggle beneath the Speak Selection’ option in Settings: the one called Speak Screen’. 🤦‍♂️

The Speak Screen option enabled in Settings → Accessibility.
Hiding in plain sight.

The Deets

Speak Screen is absolutely great. I guess I overlooked this option before because I incorrectly assumed it would start speaking out everything onscreen, such as button labels and other UI elements like it does for VoiceOver. But no, those are separate features for a reason. Speak Screen does (almost) exactly what I want it to do. With one gesture (a two-finger swipe down from the top of the screen), the system starts reading the primary content displayed.

In Reeder, where I use it primarily, it starts reading and highlighting the article, just as if I had selected it all manually. The voice is fairly smooth and conversational. I’ve chosen one of the Siri voices because I think they’ve had the most work put into them. Here’s an example:

It also pops up the Speech Controller’ overlay which contains controls for play/pause, playback speed (I like 1.2-1.3x), and skipping sections. Crucially, the speech continues to play even if I switch away from the being-spoken content, the app, or even if I turn off the screen.

Three iPhone screenshots that show the full playback display with buttons for skipping and pausing, and then how the display minimizes and fades out of the way.
The Speech Controller overlay minimizes and fades out of the way but remains available to expand if you want to pause or skip around paragraphs.

Almost…

I hedged above saying it does almost” exactly what I want because there are still a few quirks. For instance, the auto-scrolling screen sometimes jumps around or prevents scrolling the text manually. List items will inexplicably sometime be read out at 1x despite the speed being set to something faster. Also, in Drafts on my iPad, after reading out the current onscreen text draft, the system does continue to read the draft list and other UI stuff. But for 90% of my text-to-speech needs — RSS, webpages, email, and articles saved to Pocket — Speak Screen is pretty much perfect.

The landscape for human-like voice replication is changing rapidly with advances in AI/machine learning. I expect that Apple’s voice options, although already good when set to one of the modern Siri voices, will likewise improve in short order. Maybe — crosses fingers — it could even get as good as Omnivores Ultra Realistic Voices. Hell, with Personal Voice I could even have everything read back to me in my own voice!

Between the swipe gesture and being available system-wide, Speak Screen actually gets pretty close to matching Android’s Reading Mode’ app, which I previously admired. But Reading Mode still has the upper hand with a more fully-featured and functional interface, including a scrub bar, a clean reading view, and showing the estimated reading time.

(Triple) Click Button to Read

Here’s a little peek behind the curtain here at HeyDingus HQ. I wrote this whole piece a couple of weeks ago. But I wanted to have some real time with the feature to make sure that it stuck and worked as well as I thought it would. I’m so glad that I waited because now I can share with you an extra improvement to this setup that has changed the game for me. You can kick off Speak Screen with a press of a physical button on your devices! Nope, this is not the Action Button that’s all the rage these days. It’s actually, like a lot of the coolest things I’m discovering these days, another accessibility feature called Accessibility Shortcut’.

At the bottom of the Accessibility pane in the Settings app, the second-to-last item is the one we want. Tapping into this setting reveals this description:

Configure and then triple-click the Side Button to toggle accessibility features on or off.

Below that you’ll find a list of the common accessibility features that you might want to toggle on and off throughout the day.2 And what’s on that list but our newly beloved Speak Screen.3 Select that as the Accessibility Shortcut and you’re off the races.4

The Accessibility pane in Settings, showcasing the Accessibility Shortcut option.
Make that Side Button even more useful!

With that enabled, at any time I can triple-click the Side Button of my iPhone (or Top Button of my iPad) and it’ll start reading out whatever’s on screen using the settings I’ve set in Speak Screen. It does the same thing as that two-finger swipe down gesture, but it’s way easier to initiate! Rather than pulling down the Notification Center half the time when I’m trying to start a reading session, I can very easily hammer on the Side Button a few times and move on.

An iPhone with an arrow pointing to the Side Button.
This button already turns on and off the device, launches Siri and Apple Wallet, and calls for emergencies…how about one more thing? 😅

It’s so much better than using the two-finger swipe. I can do it one-handed! I’ve found this to be particularly handy when reading late into the night. In Reeder, I can reach over to my phone on the nightstand and make an imprecise swipe to the next article, triple-click the Side Button, and start listening. I can do it with my eyes closed.

That’s a Wrap…For Now

I’m happy to have pieced together a reading system that lets me use the devices and apps that I love, without leaving behind any major features. I can save anything from RSS with a single swipe in Reeder, or elsewhere with the Pocket extension. I can flit between reading in Reeder, Pocket, the web, or my Kobo with all of them staying in sync. I can listen to my beloved auto-scrolling, highlighted, and versatile text-to-speech with the (triple) click of a button. Finally, my reading flow is feeling settled.

At least until the next app or challenge (👀) comes along. 😉


  1. Yeah…that Instapaper experiment didn’t last very long. I valued having the option to read things on my Kobo too much to give up that integration with Pocket. But by using Pocket as the syncing service with Reeder as the frontend reading experience 99% of the time, I meet almost all of my ideal read-later service criteria. So now I’m still catching up on things that I saved in Readwise Reader and Instapaper, while all the current stuff goes into Pocket. It’s a whole thing.↩︎

  2. Funnily enough, I actually used to use Accessibility Shortcut back in the day. Before system-wide dark mode was a thing, it was somewhat popular to use the Invert Colors’ (now called Classic Invert’) to flip the colors of the screen at night so that they’d be less blinding in dark environments. A quick triple-click flipped the colors so you wouldn’t have to go diving into the stark white Settings app to enable it.↩︎

  3. One option missing from this list: good ol’ Shortcuts. If I could set a custom shortcut from the Shortcuts app as an Accessibility Shortcut (yes, I know how ridiculous this sentence sounds), I could create my very own pseudo-Action Button and keep my physical Mute Switch.↩︎

  4. If you want, you can turn on multiple Accessibility features for the Accessibility Shortcut. When you have more than one enabled, the triple-click presents a menu for you to choose from.↩︎

Tips


I like collecting reactions to product announcements on Apple Event days. But today’s deluge of opinions about the new $79 USB-C Apple Pencil took me by surprise. The undisputed King of Hot Takes this time round is certainly Parker Ortolani, who seems to have taken personal offense at Apple’s strategy with this newest member of the Apple Pencil family.

As a side note, Threads was a way more entertaining stage to watch as the press release mania unfolded today than Micro.blog/Mastodon. You’ll notice in the makeup of the collection below. I can’t wait for Threads to implement ActivityPub so that I can see everything all in one place.

Alright, got your popcorn? Disregard the Caution: Hot!’ sign, and let’s dive in.

Post by @parkerortolani
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(By the way, this absolutely seems to be the case as Apple updated apple.com with a new hero image of the iPad (10th gen) with the newest Pencil magnetically attached to the camera side. Also the iPad page calls it out specifically.)

Post by @chrislawley_
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Post by @mgsiegler
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Post by @thebasicappleguy
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Post by @tomwarrenuk
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A sobering thought from Devon Dundee regarding future iPads Pro:

Post by @devondundee
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Post by @ajvizz
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After the FineWoven charging port snafu, now I’m wondering how many USB-C cables are not going to fit in that sliding cap-revealed channel of the new Apple Pencil. Or how many people will try a charging-only, no data cable and have issues with pairing. Going all USB-C will have its own pains.

We make fun of other companies’ poor product-naming choices, but are we really doing that much better over here in Apple-land?

This glorious paragraph had to be in a product announcement’s press release — in the main body text!

Screenshot of text: “Apple Pencil (1st generation) supports pressure sensitivity, delivering a remarkably fluid and natural drawing experience. Apple Pencil (1st generation) works with iPad (10th generation), and the Lightning port on iPad (9th generation) makes it easy to quickly connect Apple Pencil (1st generation) for pairing and charging.”

There’s THREE versions of the Apple Pencil??

Just realized…the Pencil got USB-C before Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and AirPods Max 🫠