Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
I've seen other people not get the joke/reference Apple's making with the iPhone 8 to X jump.
There might be a last-generation "iPhone 9" next year, or maybe not.
Probably makes sense for me to wait a couple months for the iPhone X and get the bleeding-edge device rather than a better what-I-already-have.
OK, get back to work.
Every morning I get up, plug in my phone & iPad, make coffee in a French press, and say to my watch, "Hey Siri set a timer for 4 minutes". At least 2, sometimes 3 other devices (finally on Sierra just in time for High-as-in-grass Sierra to come out) beep and try to catch that. Usually they all fail except the watch. If they do succeed, I now get timers going off in multiple places, because despite Continuity nothin communicates this state.
And Apple wants an Apple TV and Apple Home to join that mob of Siris.
☕️
Sort of agreed. Certainly I use it every day and link all my music to it, since that's the easiest way to get a high-quality stream of most every song ever recorded (80% coverage? Based on my somewhat eclectic tastes).
The 3 mixes are doing better, but my daily playlists are now almost exclusively Rock Hits: 1970-1990, Tears Go By, rarely one more curated list, Metal Meets Industrial is today's.
The album choices are far better, a good mix of blues, metal, old rock, and industrial. Since I listen to Howlin' Wolf, today it suggested Bad News is Coming, by Luther Allison, which is pretty goddamned good, I didn't know the man before.
And since they buried Connect instead of putting it on the front page, far fewer bands bother to post to it. Some Shonen Knife merch and 1-2 posts a week from Apple Music {genre}. This is a travesty, they had a real shot at connecting bands to the audience (like Ping, without the distraction of other people with dubious musical taste) and have so far squandered it.
"In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of
military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with
Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly
with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed.
The system goes online August 4th, [2017]. Human decisions are removed
from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It
becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic,
they try to pull the plug."
—Terminator 2: Judgement Day
And there's Wednesday Music, too:
Tragedy: Apple kills the last two iPods
The "iPod touch" should be renamed the "noPhone iPhone". It's a cute device, a good pocket Unix terminal, and 128GB is usable, but iPhone and noPhone iPhone are far less convenient as actual music players, especially for walking.
I know, Kids Today™ don't buy albums, hell, have never sat thru an entire record and flipped to the B-side and back again, listening to every note & word of Black Sabbath or 2112 or The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions. I'm not even sure Drake counts as music. #getoffmylawn
But the noPhone iPhone has no cellular, so they can't stream away from wifi, so they have to download & curate music, which means iTunes and syncing anyway.
I'll be keeping my iPod classic 160GB as long as it keeps spinning. But then what? I can't even get a shit-brown Zune.
I've had the misfortune to work in "war rooms" (no fighting allowed!) and "open plans" before, and for some reason I always think of this, for a moment before the noise distracts me:
Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for
instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in
that clammy month that the H-G [Handicapper-General's] men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-
year-old son, Harrison, away.It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very
hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't
think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his
intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his
ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a
government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would
send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair
advantage of their brains.George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's
cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits
from a burglar alarm.
—Kurt Vonnegut, "Harrison Bergeron" (1961)
Microsoft is deprecating MS Paint. I'm never been a Windows, but on the few times I've had one on a work desk, MS Paint was a cute, useful tool; BMP was a terrible format, but once it could save as PNG or JPG it was fine.
Update 2017-07-27: Paint isn't being killed, but sent to a farm upstate
I'd mock, but oddly OS X has never shipped with a real paint program. The closest is an Xcode sample project Sketch, which IIRC was shipped pre-installed at one time, and you can grab Xcode for free and build (you may have to open the project and set Deployment Target to your OS version, because it'll be too old). And Sketch is just a toy line-drawing program, not a pixel editor. You can sort of draw in Apple Notes now, but don't rely on that, I get terrible results and often lose those sketches.
Obviously, there's plenty of professional software, like GraphicConverter, Acorn, Pixelmator, Sketch - no relation?, Photoshop, etc. I miss Fractal Design Painter, but dislike the way Corel Painter went.
I'm not opposed to leaving this to independent developers, just surprised by Apple not Sherlocking a major application category.
Day One Goes Premium Subscription
and of course the mob outrage in App Store ratings is what you'd expect: MacDrifter.
And this is why I only do bare minimum maintenance of my App Store software now. I released Brigand as free with a $10 unlock, and got savaged for it, so I pulled it. If Nintendo can't make that work with Mario, Apple giving them the front page, and millions in advertising, I sure can't. I love Brigand, but unless I put in more work changing the business model, I can't sell it; sunk cost fallacy tells me not to do that.
Productivity software should cost more than a game, but very few on iOS are willing to pay up front every single new version.
Apple doesn't let you give old customers an upgrade price, and presumably never will; maybe an upgrade killed Phil Schiller's pet/child/Camaro in front of him, or something, given the 9 years he's heard developers request this feature and told us to pound sand. And Apple does nobody any favors by Sherlocking and undercutting developers with "free" or cheap productivity apps.
The older solution of releasing a new numbered version and abandoning the old one every year or so was completely user-hostile. I just refused to do it, and would always switch apps whenever someone tried, and often found a better app by doing this.
Maybe the subscription model is terrible, but it's less terrible than anything else going on.
Michael Tsai wonders if the hostile reviews are from prices going up, but they're just catching up to desktop/web service prices, usually because a subscription gets you cross-platform access now.
Long-term, I think the App Store will be seen as the worst-managed disaster in the history of software. It went from a nice slot machine for indie devs and gallery for a few professional companies, to a predatory flea market full of thieves and frauds. Trying to tell anyone you make real software and here's a reasonable price, in that environment, is a waste of time.
WordPress just told me I have a bunch of updates, so I pushed the button, at my convenience. iPhone has a bunch of updates, but I certainly don't have autoupdate turned on, I'll look at those when I feel like it.
I don't understand how people put up with their software deciding to "update" on them without permission.
Mac is insistent with the "updates waiting" dialog, but you can tell it to fuck off indefinitely.
Linux is like a broken car you have to go dumpster-diving to find new parts for.
But Windows breaks into your home to change your shit around. Just no.