There are intricate 3D CSS animations, I had to learn some linear algebra, a classic Mac game from 1991 has been resurrected, and somewhere around here is a troublesome goose. Also, Seinfeld jokes. So many Seinfeld jokes.
I hope you’ll walk down memory lane with me in the preamble below, but if you’re only interested in the hunt then you can jump right in from here. (You should probably at least read the instructions, though.)
(If you’re reading this through a feed reader or other non-browser medium, you’ll need to open the page in a standard browser view to join the Easter egg hunt.)
My dad ran a small web development shop around the turn of the century, and my earliest memories on the Web are from him showing me the websites he’d created. As I was clicking around, he’d always get a mischievous grin on his face and ask “see anything else?” Inevitably, somewhere on the page, he’d hidden some kind of unexpected surprise.
Often it was the tiniest thing, like the dot of paint on his website’s logo changing color each time the cursor hovered over it. It looked like this:
Other examples were a bit more involved, though these were usually harder to find. When he built a website for my uncle — a screenwriter — there was an image of a typewriter in the nav bar. One of the keys on the typewriter was actually a secret link to a hidden page of the website, full of jokes.
I didn’t know it at the time, but these subtle, sometimes secret little touches had both a name and a storied history. They were Easter eggs.
My dad’s penchant for Easter eggs transferred thoroughly (perhaps better phrased as aggressively) to me. As I grew up, I’d often visit his website just to scroll my mouse back and forth across the logo and see that dot of paint change colors. It’s nothing — who could possibly care about this? And yet the fact that it’s nothing, and that no one should care, is exactly why I find it so fascinating. Hiding an Easter egg is definitionally going above and beyond what is required. When you find one, you know that whoever made it put thought and care into a project that you’re now interacting with.
That brings us to today, and this website which I just finished rebuilding. I know part of the point of Easter eggs is to not explicitly draw attention to them, but I am prepared to sacrifice my subtlety cred to draw attention to this very important issue: the Web should have more Easter eggs.
If you are a web developer, when is the last time you snuck in an Easter egg? If you run a website, what delightful secrets is it hiding? We need more. More! My thirst for Easter eggs knows no bounds.
Hey I’m not sending you to the mines; making Easter eggs is fun. It’s hard to describe how much of a joy it was to hide increasingly elaborate Easter eggs all over this website while keeping things simple, minimal, and generally unadorned. Is it insane that I spent well over half the development time of this website on Easter eggs? Probably. But this is my personal website. I am allowed to toe the line of sanity here.
To be clear, I do not advise spending greater than 50% of a project’s development time on Easter eggs. (If you do though, writing a blog post about it is a great way to convince yourself that it’s a healthy addiction, and that you definitely do not need to seek out some kind of Easter Eggers Anonymous support group.) I do think it’s worth creating at least one, though. If and when someone finds it, they’ll be made aware of the care and attention to detail that you put into your work. A well-placed Easter egg might even be enough to brighten someone’s day.
Anyway, a noxious case of sunk-cost fallacy has mixed dangerously with my Easter egg obsession and led me down the path of creating an elaborate Easter egg hunt for you to chase across this website. All items can be found on every page of the site, so you don’t need to go spelunking around to obscure locations (although progress is safe across pages and reloads if you choose to do so anyway).
Important caveat: the Follow page is a special web feed document and does not function with the hunt.
You may recognize the theme from the wonderful Untitled Goose Game — one of my all-time favorite video games. That blasted goose itself is skulking around here somewhere. I think it’s after my cube.
If you were playing Mac games in the early 90s then I might have some nostalgia in store for you as well, but I was too much of an unborn child at the time to know if anyone else will actually recognize it. It’s the first video game I ever played, and its goofy sound effects have been echoing around in my head for as long as I can remember.
Speaking of sounds effects, I strongly recommend having your volume on for this. If you’re on a mobile device then you should also disable silent mode, or just put in headphones. If you have no headphones and really need your device to not make any noise right now… Maybe come back and do this later. You’ve been warned.
And with that, please enjoy this Easter egg hunt:
(If you’re reading this through a feed reader or other non-browser medium, you’ll need to open the page in a standard browser view to join the Easter egg hunt.)
I started this website on October 16, 2013. It was built from scratch — the first real software project I ever completed. It’s always been my favorite.
Unapologetic was a direct successor to my first website, The Axx, which I’d begun just eight months earlier. I don’t recommend rebranding less than a year after launching a project, but choosing a name that evokes poorly-masked body odor is a great way to back yourself into that particular corner. In my defense, I was 17 years old at the time.
The new name came about from an inside joke among the Apple community on that one time Jony Ive decided he was really into plastic. Jony’s love affair with bright, fun, plasticky colors was, sadly, brief. Mine was not. The goal of this site’s design from the very beginning was to let me play with color — with subtle touches of brightness and fun in an otherwise serious space. I’ve always believed that the Web should bring about joy and whimsy rather than frustration and drudgery.
I’m still quite proud of how well the original design of this website achieved that goal, but I was too green behind the ears to do everything I wanted. (I succeeded with the fun colors, but didn’t really make it on the joy and whimsy.) Thus began a decade of failed attempts at a rewrite, with ambitions always higher than first skill, later time, allowed. All the while, the site languished.
Between The Axx and Unapologetic, I wrote 211 posts in just under two years, concluding on February 9, 2015 with a post about grammar. I never really meant to stop. If I had, grammar would not have been my final word.
This year, I turned 30 years old — a complicated milestone where one grapples melodramatically with the end of their youth despite not being all that old. The existential side won a cheap victory when I tore my hamstring during a rec-league soccer game the very next day.
As they carried my old, broken body off the field, I flashed back to 13 years earlier — when my young, broken body was carried off a soccer field with a brutal arm break. Released from the obligations of competitive sports, my teenage self leveraged his newfound free time to build a website and begin to write.
Couch-bound for the first week of my 30s, I was haunted by the notion that I’d spent the entirety of my 20s thinking about resurrecting a project that I’d successfully accomplished in my teens. Apparently nothing drums up motivation like pain, déjà vu, and a quarter-life crisis. Four months later, I’m back, baby.
In the spirit of its predecessor, this website weaves flashes of bright, brilliant colors into an otherwise serious reading experience. It is written from scratch, lightweight and fast, and loads even with JavaScript disabled. It also fulfills my longtime dream for a joyful, weird, whimsical experience simmering under the surface of an ostensibly ordinary website. Poke around a bit and you just might find some surprises.
I don’t know exactly what I’ll be writing here yet. Nearly a decade into my career now, I’ll likely cover software-related topics a lot more than last time. Beyond that, I’m not sure. The goings-on of the tech industry are still rarely far from mind, but my younger self’s general optimism has sustained some heavy blows. To hazard a guess, those feelings will probably lead to a lot of words. But making promises is a great way to burn out quickly, so I commit to none here.
Maybe I’ll just write about making craft cocktails at home, or finding the best coffee in the Twin Cities. It’s a blog, after all. Figuring it out along the way is the point.
I came across this article last week, which describes one Wikipedia editor's quest to eliminate a single common grammatical error from the entire site. Being a writer myself, I was interested in what this error was so that I could avoid it in my own writing. Turns out, it's pretty simple: the phrase “comprised of” is a grammatical fallacy, in any and all situations. I was surprised by the finality of such a common phrase being completely wrong, so I read the article that Giraffedata (the editor in question's username on Wikipedia) had written about why the phrase is always improper. The article is pretty massive, over 6,000 words. You can read the whole thing here if you're interested, but his main argument is summed up in this fairly small first section:
Many people do not accept “comprised of” as a valid English phrase for any meaning. The argument goes that “to comprise” means to include, as in “The 9th district comprises all of Centerville and parts of Easton and Weston.” Thus, “the 9th district is comprised of ...” is gibberish.
The phrase apparently originated as a confusion of “to comprise” and “to be composed of”, which mean about the same thing, as in “the 9th district is composed of ...” There is a traditional saying to help people remember these two sound-alike words: “The whole comprises the parts; the parts compose the whole.”
But “comprised of” is in common use and some people defend it as a fully valid additional definition of “to comprise”. Even dictionaries acknowledge this usage, though they all tell you it's disputed and typically discourage writers from using it. See for example Wiktionary.
Here is my view of why “comprised of” is poor writing:
It's completely unnecessary. There are many other ways to say what the writer means by “comprised of”. It adds nothing to the language.
It's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things.
The etymology of the word does not support “comprised of”. It comes from Latin words meaning to hold or grasp together. Other English words based on those same roots are “comprehensive” and “prehensile” (as in a monkey's prehensile tail: it can grab things). Comprise's French cousin also makes this clear.
It's new. Many current Wikipedia readers learned to write at a time when no respectable dictionary endorsed “comprised of” in any way. It was barely ever used before 1970. Even now, style manuals frequently call out this particular usage as something not to do.
It's imprecise. English has a variety of ways to say things the writer means by “comprised of”. “Composed of”, “consists of”, and “comprises” are subtly different. In sentences I edit, it often takes careful thought to decide just which one of these things the article should say. Thus the sentence with “comprised of” isn't quite as expressive.
Many writers use this phrase to aggrandize a sentence -- to intentionally make it longer and more sophisticated. In these, a simple “of”, “is”, or “have” often produces an easier-to-read sentence. (Example: “a team comprised of scientists” versus “a team of scientists”).
Apple said Monday it will invest $2 billion over 10 years to open a data center in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa that will be the company's fifth in the U.S. and serve as a control facility for its global networks.
This is using the same facility that Apple had been using as a saphire glass manufacturing plant before GT Advanced, the company they had been partnered with, suddenly declared bankruptcy and ended the agreement.
“This multi-billion dollar project is one of the largest investments we've ever made, and when completed it will add over 600 engineering and construction jobs to the more than one million jobs Apple has already created in the U.S.,” Apple said in a statement. “Like all Apple data centers, it will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy, much of which will come from a new local solar farm.”
An Apple spokesman said construction on the new data center should start late next year, if not earlier. GT is storing advanced furnaces it planned to use in its Apple venture at the plant while the furnaces are being liquidated, delaying the immediate use of the plant.
Unfortunately, not all content and applications providers have embraced openness and neutrality. Unlike BlackBerry, which allows iPhone users to download and use our BBM service, Apple does not allow BlackBerry or Android users to download Apple’s iMessage messaging service. Netflix, which has forcefully advocated for carrier neutrality, has discriminated against BlackBerry customers by refusing to make its streaming movie service available to them. Many other applications providers similarly offer service only to iPhone and Android users. This dynamic has created a two-tiered wireless broadband ecosystem, in which iPhone and Android users are able to access far more content and applications than customers using devices running other operating systems. These are precisely the sort of discriminatory practices that neutrality advocates have criticized at the carrier level.
Therefore, neutrality must be mandated at the application and content layer if we truly want a free, open and non-discriminatory internet. All wireless broadband customers must have the ability to access any lawful applications and content they choose, and applications/content providers must be prohibited from discriminating based on the customer’s mobile operating system.
At this point, a post like this is just sad. BlackBerry is begging for successful companies like Apple, Google, and Netflix to be forced by the government to give it life support so that its remaining users don't have to suffer so much.
Maybe it's a good thing that Amazon is so slowly rolling out the Echo to customers — you can only get it by invitation, and if you do so you should know what you're getting into. Right now, once the honeymoon ends, I suspect most people will stop using the Echo for anything other than occasional music and podcast listening. After a few days of trying to come up with things to ask Alexa just for the fun of the thing, my Echo became mostly a slightly faster way to set a timer or do quick conversions while I cook. It’s great for those things, but those are small things.
Yet this is the future, I’m sure of it. Several times a day, the Echo blows me away with how well it converses, and how natural it feels to interact with a machine this way. I just hope Amazon can marshal the considerable time, support, and developer firepower to one day turn this odd black cylinder into the smartest thing in my apartment.
This is exactly what I expected from the Echo. It's a great idea, almost definitely the future, but an extremely primitive implementation of what that idea is and that future will be.
I was invited on this week's episode of Tech Douchebags. Among other things we discuss iOS automation and URL schemes, the pain of watching “normal” (non-geek) people use their devices, iOS 8 extensions, and consistency and quality throughout Apple's software.
It was a good time, and I hope you enjoy listening. You can find the episode through the title link.
Overall, I’m very satisfied with Overcast’s finances so far. It’s not setting the world on fire, but it’s making good money. For most people, the App Store won’t be a lottery windfall, but making a decent living is within reach for many.
After the self-employment penalties in taxes and benefits, I’m probably coming in under what I could get at a good full-time job in the city, but I don’t have to actually work for someone else on something I don’t care about. I can work in my nice home office, drink my fussy coffee, take a nap after lunch if I want to, and be present for my family as my kid grows up. That’s my definition of success.
Follow the title link to check out his actual numbers.
Last week Carlos Ribas published a refreshing take on making it as an indie developer in the App Store:
There’s been a lot of talk about how indie developers can’t make any money on the App Store. It’s been said that being indie is just working extra hours for no pay. That we are better off working a regular job.
Well, I think a lot of us are out there, quietly doing just fine. HoursTracker had its best year ever in 2014, and five years of best ever years before that. If you can solve an important problem in a way that resonates with a sizable group of people, you can find success. There’s always room for a fresh take on an already well-served problem, too.
This is an interesting juxtaposition to the recent 2014 Panic Report, in which the much loved independent studio revealed some dismaying data:
This is the biggest problem we’ve been grappling with all year: we simply don’t make enough money from our iOS apps. We’re building apps that are, if I may say so, world-class and desktop-quality. They are packed with features, they look stunning, we offer excellent support for them, and development is constant. I’m deeply proud of our iOS apps. But… they’re hard to justify working on.
51% of Panic's sales in November 2014 were iOS apps, yet that only converted to 17% of their total revenue that month. Even producing amazing, desktop-quality apps, Panic is not making enough money on the iOS App Store to justify the time they're spending on it.
Ribas' story seems to be at odds with this testimony. According to him, the iOS App Store is still a great place to make money. Maybe Panic just isn't using the right business model, but I think it has mostly to do with the unfortunate race-to-the-bottom pricing culture in the iOS App Store.
Panic made its name producing high caliber Mac applications, and on the Mac they're able to sell those applications at whatever price they see fit. On iOS, Panic sells the same apps, built to the same degree of quality, but they're forced to mark their prices down by huge margins to avoid an uproar.
Ribas makes the argument, which seems to be widely accepted these days, that the best way to make money in this environment is by offering apps for free, then getting people to pay to unlock more advanced features through in-app purchases:
Users prefer to download an app for free, and maybe spend money when they are sure it is worth it to them. As developers, we often bemoan the low prices of apps. We say “Come on! It costs less than a cup of coffee!” But, if we’re being honest, that’s a false comparison. People spend their money on coffee every morning knowing what they are getting. The fact is, people don’t buy unproven goods with no guarantees. It’s not about the price.
I agree with his position here, and it does seem likely that Panic could find a way to get more revenue by adopting this type of model (▼)(▲)I'm not saying this would be a simple change. If Panic switched to a free with in-app purchase business model they would have to do a ton of thinking to determine the proper balance of free versus paid features. That said, I think they could figure it out, and I would be surprised if it didn't make them somewhat more revenue overall., but even if they did I highly doubt it would make enough extra to significantly change their revenue distribution. The most obvious option then is to raise their prices closer to those of their Mac apps, but prices like that are simply not accepted in the iOS App Store, in-app purchase or not.
So how is HoursTracker doing it? Ignoring the fact that HoursTracker is just a one person business (▼)(▲)Jared Sinclair's Unread was a single app supporting a single person as well, but he couldn't make it work either despite a lot of media attention from the tech press on launch and throughout updates., its success comes from the fact that the market it is selling to is an order of magnitude larger than the one Panic is selling to. Professionals trying to edit their web pages or use FTP or SSL from an iPad are simply not a huge market. Tracking hours, while not something that everyone needs to do, is still a significantly broader use case than that of the Panic apps. This leads to a market big enough to compensate for a low price tag through shear volume of sales. HoursTracker is the kind of app built to thrive in the race-to-the-bottom pricing culture of the iOS App Store.
Panic is selling high-quality apps to a niche market in an environment tailored for apps being sold to a mass market, regardless of quality. There's no easy solution to this problem because the problem is with the marketplace, not the apps being sold there. If nothing is able to shift this mentality and make the idea of high priced apps (where high prices are warranted) in the iOS App Store more acceptable, I think the number of developers building high-quality iOS apps targeted at a small market of professionals is going to remain sadly low. We're finally at a point in which iOS devices are powerful enough to run desktop-quality professional apps, but in the time it's taken to get there, the market for such apps has all but disappeared.
Andrew Watts wrote up a great post on Medium detailing social media from a teenager's perspective:
I read technology articles quite often and see plenty of authors attempt to dissect or describe the teenage audience, especially in regards to social media. However, I have yet to see a teenager contribute their voice to this discussion. This is where I would like to provide my own humble opinion.
This article brings me back to my old piece from The Axx, On Teens and iPhones, which picked up a lot of steam when I wrote it back in 2013. That post was written in response to a Pew Research Center survey that was attempting to quantify the enthusiasm that the teen demographic had for iPhones at the time.
The fact that my piece in 2013 and Watts' piece today both took off, despite neither of us being particularly well known authors, is interesting to me. People outside of this demographic seem to be craving insight into teenagers' thoughts, yet they consistently seem surprised when a teen steps forward and just tells them.
In 2013 this didn't surprise me. Services like Squarespace were just gaining popularity, and Medium did not even exist. But now it's 2015, three years later, and a post with similar insights that mine gave is still being picked up as if it's amazing that a teenager is contributing relevant information to the media.
Particularly now, with the advent of Medium creating an amazing platform for anyone of any age to write on and immediately distribute their ideas everywhere, I think it's overdue for the idea of teenagers contributing their voices to the media to be accepted as normal. Watts and myself are heading out of the expressly teen demographic this year, but there will be many more teenage writers behind us. I hope their ideas and creative endeavors will be accepted on their own merits, rather than simply because of their age. (▼)(▲)I'm not implying that Watts' or my own piece did not merit the attention they recieved, I think they did. But both of those pieces are from teens, about teens. Where are all the pieces that are written by teenagers, but regarding some topic besides teenagers? It seems like the only topic that the media deems teens to have relevant knowledge about is other teens.
CBS RADIO and CBS Local Digital Media today announced the launch of Play.it®, a new podcast network that brings together digital-exclusive programming from major brands and publishers as well as content from CBS RADIO shows on demand. Play.it offers more than 300 premium content podcasts at launch, including podcasts from well-known CBS RADIO personalities like Boomer Esiason & Craig Carton, Carson Daly, and Kevin & Bean, as well as content from leading news, lifestyle, sports and media brands including 48 HOURS, 60 MINUTES, CBS Sports Radio, Vox, Deadspin, Simon & Schuster and Foursquare, among others.
This ought to bring some more attention to the podcast medium.
Craig Hockenberry, on Marco Arment's piece that exploded all over the news earlier this week:
The reasons Marco’s piece got a lot of initial attention was because the basic message resonated with a lot of people in our community. But as usual, idiots with ulterior motives twisted the original message to suit their own purposes.
The good news is that none of the problems us geeks are seeing are show stoppers. We’re not complaining about software quality because things are completely broken. There’s still a lot to love about OS X and iOS.
But this good news is also bad news. Our concerns come from seeing the start of something pernicious: our beloved platform is becoming harder to use because of a lot of small software failures.
Craig is spot on here. The discontent arises from a slow creep of bugs, not some epoch of crippled software. iOS and OS X still function, they just aren't as solid as they've been in the past, and if the current trend isn't routed they will continue to degrade further.
Apple is trapped between a rock and a hard place. If they slow down to patch the bugs they will be eviscerated by the media, feeding the same Apple-is-doomed pundits that just devoured Marco's piece. If they don't, the current bugs will fester as new ones join them, and both platforms will continue to chip away at the longstanding ideal that Apple's products, unlike those of their competitors, “just work.”
Apple is preparing an all-new MacBook Air for 2015 with a radically new design that jettisons standards such as full-sized USB ports, MagSafe connectors, and SD card slots in favor of a markedly thinner and lighter body with a higher-resolution display.
This is a good looking machine. It's still only a rumor, but Mark Gurman's sources are historically pretty solid. As Gurman notes, the final product could easily change (perhaps to dial back the radical notion of replacing all USB, MagSafe, SD card, and Thunderbolt ports with a single USB type-C port), but the overall design should be similar to the specifications he gives. I'm eager to find out the tech specs and see what kind of power Apple can fit into something this slim.
Cromulent Labs, developer of the rejected iOS app Launcher:
During [a conversation with someone at App Review], I also asked specifically why Launcher was removed from the App Store after 9 days when other similar apps are still available weeks later. The answer to this question was the most interesting and informative response I had ever heard from them. They basically said that Launcher was a trailblazer in uncharted territories and that they felt that they needed to make an example of it in order to get the word out to developers that its functionality is not acceptable without them having to publish new specific guidelines. And they said that the fact that they aren’t seeing hundreds of similar apps submitted every day is proof to them that taking down Launcher was successful in this regard.
This was a pretty big revelation to me. After Launcher was rejected and the press picked up on it and started writing articles which painted Apple in a bad light, I was afraid that Apple might be mad at me. But it turns out that was actually the outcome they were looking for all along. They acted swiftly and made me the sacrificial lamb. And after that, removing other apps with similar functionality became a low priority for them.
Obama was on The Colbert Report yesterday, and delivered one of the best performances I’ve seen from him. In this bit he kicks Colbert out of his chair and takes over to do “The Decree,” pretending to be Colbert. Similar to his performance on Between Two Ferns earlier this year, he has a specific message to get out, so it's not just comedy, but he's much more relaxed and natural this time and the result is hilarious.
Colbert comes back for a formal interview afterword, which is also great. You can see the whole thing on Comedy Central.
This morning Apple released their “Best of 2014” App Store and iTunes Store lists. Graham Spencer has a great overview on MacStories, so instead of repeating him I'll just send you over there.
MacStories has the full lists, but here are the best of the best:
Some of the winners in the other categories include 1989 by Taylor Swift as the best music album, Guardians of the Galaxy as the best blockbuster movie, Fargo as TV show of the year, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr as the best fiction book, and Serial as the best new podcast. Although keep in mind that some of these lists vary from country to country.
After receiving much criticism for its handling of threats on the service, Twitter is announcing some improvements to its process for reporting abuse. Starting today, the company is rolling out what it says is a more streamlined process for reporting accounts that harass or threaten other users.
[...]
The changes announced today include reporting abuse with fewer steps, letting people who are not directly involved in the abuse flag it more easily, giving users a page where they can view and edit those whom they have previously blocked, and preventing blocked users from viewing the profiles of the people who blocked them. “The changes we're announcing today to our harassment reporting process and to our block feature are representative of our broader focus on giving people more control over their own Twitter experience, including their interactions with others,” said Del Harvey, Twitter's vice president of trust and safety, in a statement. “We're also working to take advantage of more behavioral signals — including reports from bystanders — and using those signals to prioritize reports and speed up our review process.”
Great to see that Twitter has listened to the criticism and is moving to protect people being harassed and threatened on its service.
In my latest article over at MacStories, I go in depth on how to get started writing JavaScript for Automation scripts to automate your Mac. If you know JavaScript and are interested in speeding up some of your common Mac tasks, you should give it a read.
Aereo has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after months of grasping at straws in attempts to stay afloat following its loss to cable giants in the Supreme Court this June. Aereo says that the proceedings will allow it “to maximize the value of its business and assets without the extensive cost and distraction of defending drawn-out litigation in several courts.” Aereo doesn't state whether it hopes to emerge from the proceedings, but it doesn't seem like there are many places it can go from here.
Like any of the other apps it supports, Handoff should just pop up a Music app icon in your iOS device’s lock screen or the iTunes icon in your Mac’s Dock; slide or click on that, and your audio should just keep playing where you left off.
This feature would be amazing. Seems doubtful that we will get it though, at least until Apple finally decides to do something about the syncing problems that already exist between Macs and iOS devices. Mainly: I don't understand why playlists are not synced over iCloud. When I change a playlist on my iPhone, it doesn't sync to any other devices. Then I plug it into my Mac, and I get two playlists, the old version and the new version, and both have the same title except for a 1 being appended to the old one.
At the moment, I avoid plugging my iPhone in if at all possible because anytime I do, my Mac removes “Carried Away” by Passion Pit from my main playlist. I have no idea why it has picked this song, there is nothing special about it. I purchased it through iTunes. The song does successfully sync onto the phone, it just gets cut out of the playlist. Thus, every time I plug in my iPhone and sync it, i have to manually edit the playlist on my phone and add that single song back in. I've tried deleting and remaking the playlist, but the same thing occurs with the same song. In the past, I've had this problem with other songs too, and eventually it just stopped happening and they would sync properly, but I've never been able to determine the cause.
Random, unsolvable issues with syncing music have always been a problem with Apple devices, and until these longstanding issues are solved, I doubt we'll be seeing handoff for songs, as amazing of a feature as that would be. Maybe a third party music app will manage it and we won't be stuck waiting for Apple to fix problems it should have fixed years ago.
Apple Watch represents a new chapter in the relationship people have with technology. Starting early 2015, you will be able to deliver innovative new experiences to your customers on their wrist. Learn how your existing app notifications can easily show up on Apple Watch. And by leveraging WatchKit, you can take your apps even further by extending and enhancing their functionality on Apple Watch.
Exciting news for developers. I can't wait to see what people start cooking up.
Pamela Ribon reviewed Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer. This book is a mockery of the recent efforts by many to encourage more girls to take an interest in technology. Ribon rightfully tears it to sheds for every horrible gender stereotype it exemplifies.
Just a taste:
“Your robot puppy is so sweet,” says Skipper. “Can I play your game?”
“I’m only creating the design ideas,” Barbie says, laughing. “I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game!”
Ribon goes through the whole book with screenshots and quotes in the linked article, and you need to read it to believe it.
Next year, artist Mark Farid wants to give up a month of his life to virtual reality. If a crowdfunding campaign succeeds, he’ll spend 28 days in a gallery, wearing a VR headset and a pair of noise-canceling headphones. For the duration of the show, all he’ll experience will be video and audio captured by a complete stranger, going about their daily life. When they eat, he’ll eat. When they sleep, he’ll sleep. As much as modern technology permits, he will let his individual identity evaporate.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes next year. The rest of The Verge's article goes more in depth on the plans and previous similar experiments. Interesting read.
It surprises me that the company that came out with the unique and well designed Lumia phones is the same one behind this new product, which is the most shameless rip off of an Apple product I've seen from anyone except Xiaomi.
AT&T has backed away from a controversial tracking technique that landed the carrier and rival Verizon Wireless in hot water with consumers and privacy advocates last month. Both providers were quietly inserting unique identifiers into the web activity of their customers — who were given no way to opt out or disable the tracking. The program, which AT&T says it's now halted after a test run, served as a powerful tool for advertisers, but understandably drew the ire of subscribers. “It has been phased off our network,” a company spokesperson told ProPublica.
I posted about this a few weeks ago. Glad to see enough people got angry that AT&T is backing down on this. Hopefully Verizon will follow suit.
iOS 8.1.1 is out for the public. I've been using it since it entered beta and it's really solid. If you've been experiencing the nasty iCloud bug that causes some apps to crash on launch, this fixes that. Share menus will also now remember when you move extension icons around, so you can reorder them and they won't change back when you exit the menu.
The only issue I've seen is that my iPad has experienced a few crashes when I enter multitasking. The kind of crashes that were rampant in iOS 7 and which I have not seen at all since iOS 8. Hopefully they'll get that taken care of in the next update, but regardless, it's only occurred a few times for me.
