Top 5 2016 iOS Apps

I was planning to post this next week, but App Santa includes so many good apps, that I want to share early:

1. Castro: With the release of version 2.0, this is my new default player.
2. Tweetbot: The one and only. Likely I’d quit Twitter if Tweetbot wasn’t around.
3. Day One: I use this app everyday. Version 2.0 shows promise, but speed is lagging. Still, best journaling app out there.
4. Happy Scale: If you’re serious about tracking your weight, there’s no better app. I’ve tried them all.
5. Inbox by Gmail: There’s something about Inbox’s UX that just works for me. Still can’t use it on the Desktop, but on mobile it’s my default mail client.

Finalist¹:

• Launch Center Pro: I always return this app to my homescreen. Even without complex scripts, it’s faster than going through screens and folders (Castro, Tweetbot and Happy Scale are launched from this App)
• The Economist Espresso: At $2.99, it’s how I currently keep up-to-date with non-tech news.
• Morning Reader: For tech news, this site/App has replaced Techmeme as my source.
• Carbo: If it’s in a piece of paper, whiteboard, desk or post-it, I scan it with Carbo.
• Plane Finder: I love looking at planes on final approach or taking off. Even at cruising altitude, this app lets you check everything you’d want to know about the flight.

Encryption App ‘Signal’ Fights Censorship With a Clever Workaround

Andy Greenberg on Wired:

“Now when people in Egypt or the United Arab Emirates send a Signal message, it’ll look identical to something like a Google search,” Marlinspike says. “The idea is that using Signal will look like using Google; if you want to block Signal you’ll have to block Google.”

Smart. Since Signal is not as widely used as WhatsApp, blocking it doesn’t cause same uproar. This workaround ties its fate with Google, which is like using Godzilla for your canary in a coal mine test.

Cars and Trucks and Mac SUVs

Excellent point by Jason Snell:

So maybe it’s a mistake to think that Macs are trucks. Maybe today’s Macs are more like SUVs: they’re more expensive and better appointed cars. It’s a category that’s just as popular as the car, and way more popular than the pickup truck.

Any analogy taken too far always breaks down. But I think this observation works very well.

Books of Summer 2016

Summers in Miami are fairly long — or at least that’s the excuse I’m using for procrastinating on so many reviews. Rather than wait until next year to catch up with them, here are some quick notes from the books I read/heard from July to October:

Fiction

• Grass by Sheri S. Tepper (★★★★☆)
  A great example of Sci-Fi as an unobtrusive setting where a story takes place. Some interesting gender roles topics and religious discussions. A denser than normal book that made me think after closing it on many days.

• Ringworld by Larry Niven (★★★★☆)
  Classic Sci-Fi, which while enjoyable seemed a bit banal after reading Grass. Still, a fun ride in an amazing universe. Not sure I’ll come back for the sequels, but I may re-read it at some point.

• Abomination by Gary Whitta (★★★★★)
  Excellent. A page turner, but with a different twist on many fantasy stories. I felt for a few of the characters and will love to return to this world if follow-up books are published.

• Red Rising (Book 1) by Pierce Brown (★★★☆☆)
  If you like The Hunger Games as a genre, then you may really like this. It felt too similar for me, and I found myself struggling to finish it. It did leave me curious with the setup for the next book in the series, so I’ll likely read one more.

• Steelheart (Book 1) by Brandon Sanderson (★★★★☆)
  Not a great story, but a fantastic world. Some cliché conflicts as a result of the its young adult target. I love the rules and restrictions the characters have, so I’ll read the next book for sure.

• The Fold: A Novel by Peter Clines (★★★☆☆) A solid book with a very intriguing main character in a different setting. This could make a great movie. The story gets weird for the resolution, but it’s a good page-turner.

• Changer (Book 1) by Matt Gemmell (★★☆☆☆)
  I’m glad most reviewers don’t agree with me. I really wanted to love this book — since I’m a fan of @mattgemmell tech writing, but it was predictable without any strong characters.

Non-Fiction

• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown (★★★☆☆)
  This books has a very important message, but it suffers from booktitis. What could have been a short and to-the-point (essential?) booklet, gets inflated with stories that don’t add much and get repetitive. But if you’re interested in the topic, I’d still recommend it.

• The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday (★★★☆☆)
  I thought this book could go two directions: either summarizing stoic principles or bring up some insights from stoicism for today’s age. It rather goes somewhere in between, and it didn’t work that well for me. Still, if the topic is new for somebody, I’ll probably consider this book as a good gift.

• Scrum by Jeff Sutherland, JJ Sutherland. (★★★★☆)
  Sprints, backlog, scrum meetings — if you’ve heard any of these words a few times, I recommend this book. You won’t become a scrum master, or have to do exercises, but it’s a great overview of the reasoning behind the scrum process. Even you don’t practice it religiously, it has some good stories.

• Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff (★★★★★)
  Very surprised how much I enjoyed this book. I thought I knew the RIM story, and how they messed up. But as usual with every topic, the more you dig in, the more you realize the complexity. It’s also a fun reminder of the last 20 years of gadgets.

• As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes, Joe Layden, Rob Reiner (★★★★★)
  This is a total feel good book. If you like the Princess Bride movie, and wanted to hear entertaining stories of how it was made, then have fun storming the castle. For even more fun, listen to the audiobook, is narrated by Cary Elwes, so it feels and an audio commentary.

If you’re curious of what I’m currently reading and plan to read, visit my Book List Trello board, which I keep up-to-date.

The Mac is not dead, maybe. Right?

A self-delusion in three acts:

Act 1 — No surprises.

Almost 7 years ago, I wrote the following regarding the launch of the iPad:

The arrival of the iPad at Apple Stores next month is going to mark the beginning of a deadly fight. Not with Google or Microsoft, but within Apple product lines. This is not a problem for Apple, since Jobs probably believes that if anyone is going to cannibalize Mac sales, it better be Apple itself.

However, for Mac fans, it’s judgement time. It’s now time to pay for sins against the Apple II.

Companies have limited resources. Customers have limited budgets. My dad programmed with punched cards, I used a Newton in high school, and my 1 year old is already bored with my iPhone 7. The deadly fight was likely over before it started in the minds of Jobs and Cook, but iOS sales sealed the deal.

Within the incoming tsunami that iOS devices represent, the Mac is the foamy crest a the top: clearly visible but irrelevant in the context of the wave. The end game is clear: an iPad(ish) device will be on desktops in 10 years. We’re just arguing and lamenting over the minutia of the transition.

Act 2 — (Nice Dream).

A leaked Tim Cook message yesterday:

Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops. If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.

Just the fact that it needs to be made very clear, shows that it’s not completely clear. But while the overall message is dipped in shit, let’s not miss the chocolate filling: the Mac is not dead. Tim Cook wrote this knowing full well it was going to be leaked outside Apple — he wrote it to us.

Act 3 — Everything in its right place.

People-familiar-with-the-matter whisperer, Mark Gurman, today published a fascinating exposé of the alleged state of Mac affairs within Apple.

Gurman has proven to have excellent sources, so there’s little reason to doubt the overall story here. I’m a little skeptic of some of the details — not because they might not be true, but because without context the twists and turns of product development always looks messy in hindsight.

But the main point rings true:

Interviews with people familiar with Apple’s inner workings reveal that the Mac is getting far less attention than it once did. They say the Mac team has lost clout with the famed industrial design group led by Jony Ive and the company’s software team. They also describe a lack of clear direction from senior management, departures of key people working on Mac hardware and technical challenges that have delayed the roll-out of new computers.

On 2017 we will be accept this new reality. Our great expectations will give way for appreciation of at least being invited to the party: AirPods, Apple Pay, Apple Music, TouchID, Siri, APFS; they could not be supported.

The Mac’s are now the trucks Steve predicted. Heavy lifters with basically the same functionality over the years and limited innovation — other than features inherited from other vehicles in the product line. But they’re still needed, because until drones get big enough — you’ll need a pickup to move a stiff dead horse.

Weekly tidbits

→ Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before No numbers, so it’s a marketing statement. But still not surprised.

→ Google Signs Deal With Cuba to Speed Services (Paywall) Now even Cuba will play faster YouTube videos than Venezuela. I’m not bitter.

→ Google has reportedly stopped developing its own self-driving car Not surprising. Seems all self-driving rumored projects are getting a reality check.

→ ‘Apple Support’ App Launches in U.S. App Store Simple app with very useful purpose. Will be testing it soon.

→ Yahoo discloses hack of 1 billion accounts I find it hard to believe that they found out from law enforcement. Irresponsible.

→ Evernote reverses privacy policy that allows employees to read users’ notes There has to be more to this story — maybe an upcoming technical feature poorly explained. Otherwise, this was a stupid change from the start.

Displays for designers and developers

Apple’s interface design in macOS is set up so it is comfortable for most people at a density of about 110 pixels per inch for non-Retina, and about 220 pixels per inch for Retina — text is readable and button targets are easy to hit at a normal viewing distance. Using a display that isn’t close to 110PPI or 220PPI means text and interface elements will either be too big, or too small.

The trick is not to focus in the screen size and assume a 4K resolution is good enough. For true retina you need 4K on a 21.5in or 5k on a 27in. Otherwise it’s better to go for a non-retina 27in at 2560x1440.

##» Does it Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?

The Bay Area in 2016 is to technology as 1930s Detroit was to automobiles or 14th-century Venice was to the European spice trade, except that these and all other historical analogies are unable to capture the magnitude and speed of local tech growth.

I struggle with this every time I go on a job application spree. San Francisco is the place geeky things happen. But the cost of living is very scary.

If, however, you’re looking to maximize your probability of joining the next Google (or Google itself), moving to the Bay Area probably makes sense. The salaries here do cover the higher cost of living, and if you are able to capitalize on the additional opportunities that are uniquely available here, you could end up doing much more than covering costs.

Basically, if you hit it big, the high living cost will be insignificant… and you’re more likely to hit it big if you’re there.

Agile and Trello project management

This reddit comment is an excellent summary on how to manage projects in Trello.

The Inside Story Behind Pebble’s Demise

Steven Levy:

It was time to sell off what he could, with the priority of protecting his customers, sticking by his developers, and doing the best he could for his employees.

Lots of credit to Migicovsky. It does sound like he played the best hand he could for those around him, with the cards he had.

Weekly tidbits:

→ What is Bitcoin? A Step-By-Step Guide For Beginners I always appreciate a good refresher on Bitcoin.

→ Amazon unveils ‘self-driving’ brick-and-mortar convenience store A mini-mart called Amazon Go. This is kinda amazing.

→ Google’s new Trusted Contacts app lets you share your location during emergencies More or less a relaunch of the old Latitude app. But since it’s Android only, I don’t see any advantage over iOS’s Find My Friend.

→ Google Wifi review: Wi-Fi that works It does appear to be a solid performer vs eero at $200 less for the 3 pack ($299).

→ Instagram will soon let you turn off comments and boot followers from private accounts Both sound like good features.

→ Apple Watch sales to consumers set record in holiday week, says Apple’s Cook A lot of noise of regarding the overall trend of the wearables category.

→ NPR’s Book Concierge: Guide To 2016’s Great Reads Great recommendations in every category.

→ Play music from Spotify straight to Sonos with Spotify Connect Really happy with my Sonos, and this is going to make me even happier.

→ Mac OS X Welcome Videos So many good memories of the excitement for upgrading MacOS X devices.

→ Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood Hacker Hacking is not magic, it’s hard ingenious work.

→ httpster - totally rocking websites. Httpster is an inspiration resource showcasing totally rocking websites.

→ Uber Should Restore User Control to Location Privacy Not cool Uber.

→ Microsoft demonstrates full Windows 10 with Photoshop on ARM chips ARM tablet/notebooks are full of compromises for desktop use, but this is a significant advance.

Pets vs Cattle

Best summary of this server/cloud analogy:

This is how we should treat our servers. If we have pet servers, we have that box in the server room. We patch it, we fix things when they break. We remote in to make changes so that it keeps running correctly.

If we have cattle servers, they are VMs. They are easy to destroy and rebuild from scratch. In the cloud, this VM process is much easier and faster to do, so we should strive to do it.

I somehow hadn’t seen this analogy before. It was mentioned off-handely on the lastest Supertop podcast, and it really got me thinking.

As with any anology, if you take it too far it breaks. But the main impresion is very educational and even mnemonic.

Anil Dash is the new CEO of Fog Creek Software

Joel Spolsky:

In short, we need Anil to help support us with ideas and leadership for HyperDev (now renamed GoMix) and any future products we come up with, and we need his soapbox and industry connections to continue to keep Fog Creek Software relevant. Thus I think the perfect position for him is as CEO of Fog Creek Software.

It’s amazing that Stack Overflow has 300 employees and Trello almost 100. I admire Anil Dash, and Fog Creek is a great company with extremely solid products, so this sounds like a great match.

Apple’s Support Gap

Completely agree with Nick Heer:

I’ve been trying to book some time at my local Apple Store to get my iPhone’s battery swapped, and it has not been easy — at least, not compared to the way it used to be.

I got a hairline screen crack on my iPhone 7 a few weeks back, and it took me a few tries to make the appointment on the website. I had to use the Mac because the Safari on the phone kept timing out, and the soonest date available was 1 week.

Once in the store, it was about 1 hour to turn the iPhone in, and then two and a half hours to get it back. Although it’s still way better than most stores experiences, it’s not Insanely Great by any measurement.

Tidbits of the week

→ Canopy — Keyboard Case and iPad Stand Glad I don’t have one of the new keyboards or iPads, otherwise it would have been hard to talk myself out of this one.

→ Wi-Fi Mesh Systems Compared: eero, Orbi, AmpliFi Good overview, the short version: eero wins when price is discounted, Orbi has the most potential, and AmpliFi is a safe option.

→ Google+ Featured Photos Screensaver for Mac Looks very nice. There must be a — bored — Mac loving product manager in google somewhere.

→ Wired magazine’s creative director is joining Apple If he doesn’t like aluminium and glass, this could get interesting.

→ Netflix finally lets you download shows and movies to watch offline We will never do it. We are not considering it. No comment. It’s coming soon. It’s live! History of a feature announcement.

→ Amazon Polly — Text to Speech in 47 Voices and 24 Languages They don’t sound amazing, but the option of having this as a service is very powerful.

→ More Than 1 Million Google Accounts Breached by Gooligan Android malware is no joking matter.

→ Amazon LightSail — Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS Interesting and competitive. But no reason to run from Digital Ocean.

→ Why all world maps are wrong Ever since seeing the bit on West Wing I’ve been fascinated by the UI of maps. Great overview video of the issues.

→ Inside the world of Chinese science fiction, with “Three Body Problem” translator Ken Liu The Three Body Problem trilogy has been one of the most mind-bending books I’ve read recently. I’ve since added a few more Chinese Sci-Fi books to my queue.

reMarkable — The paper tablet for people who prefer paper.

The paper tablet for people who prefer paper. Here to replace your notebooks, sketchbooks and printouts. Paper-like reading, writing and sketching with digital powers.

This is truly remarkable. It must be using some next-gen eInk display to achieve the refresh and draw rates in the videos. The device itself looks well thought-off and designed. I wish them the best of luck, since I’ve daydreamed about this sort tablet ever since my Newton days.

However, it’s going to be a hard sell against the iPad. The $379 pre-order price (with cover and pen) could be interesting, but the $716 launch price will need to find a niche market to succeed.

Fitbit is buying Pebble for $34-40 million

Fitness wearable creator Fitbit is in the process of acquiring smartwatch maker Pebble in a deal that will likely spell the end of the Pebble brand. VentureBeat has learned that the sale price will be between $34 million and $40 million.

I have gone through my stages of grief on this. It makes sense as a company — given the reckoning the wearables industry is going through. Still, kinda a sad to see Pebble as a brand and company go.

Although geeky, they did start the wearables trend.

Tidbits of the week

→ Amazon Prime Ad — Priest and Imam In a world that feels more like an episode of 24 rather than West Wing, I appreciate this ad.

→ Eero’s WiFi hubs get faster, smarter and now support Alexa My apartment is perfectly covered by our ASUS router, but I dream of the day I’ll need one of these new mesh ones.

→ Apple Will Replace iPhone 6s Batteries in Phones That Unexpectedly Shut Down My 6s suffered from shut downs — seemed to happen under heavy loads. Should have taken it in at the time.

→ Apple Abandons Development of Wireless Routers Sadly unsurprising. I undestand the economics behind this, but I still think it’s a strategic risk: Apple’s home automation solution will have less leverage.

→ Apple - Frankie’s Holiday Awww Apple, I can’t stay mad at you.

→ Worldwide Market for Used Smartphones Forecast to Grow to 222.6 Million Units in 2020, According to IDC Always take these with a greain of salt, but it does sound like the normal progression of mass market products.

→ Microsoft brings Solitaire to iOS and Android And now it’s official… the desktop is dead.

→ Alter — Turn text into an image. Useful for Twitter and even email code examples.

→ Giki is a Markdown-powered Wiki Wiki and markdown? What sort of sexy talk is this?

Arq saves me a headache

Setting up a new MacBook — more in this soon — and I hastily deleted a symlink that uploads my work MBP Desktop to Dropbox. A minute too late I realized the delete action was propagating to the new Mac. Really bad planning on my part.

Since I use the Desktop as a sort of current projects folder, this wasn’t my brightest moment. I knew in the back of my mind that everything was going to be alright since I have a trifecta of tools: Dropbox, Backblaze and Arq.

Initially I went to Dropbox to restore the folder, but since I had deleted the folder on both Mac’s, not everything was there. I then logged into Backblaze, and while waiting for the data restore selection — it can take a while — I checked out how easy the Arq restore process was. Mind blown.

In all honesty, I run Arq as the last line of defense — in case all of the above fails. I was surprised how easy it was to restore the file. Also, how fast the 900MB downloaded from Dropbox ¹

Everything is now restored and my stupidity forgiven.

I am left wondering about my backup plans cocktail. The current setup does give peace of mind — specially when thinking about my wife’s MacBook. But maybe Backblaze plus Arq might be an overkill when I’m trying to cut down on expenses.

Tidbits of the week

→ Amazon editors — Best science fiction and fantasy of 2016. Death’s End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past), is fanstastic and a great ending to the series.

→ PhotoScan printed photo scanner app. I’ve tried lots of apps that do this, and still I haven’t scanned my parents collection.

→ Drop — A beautiful color picker for macOS. Why would you pay for this? because a good designed is obsesive about all her tools.

→ WhatsApp launches video calling. A new default for most people. So long Duo.

→ Casey Neistat MacBook Pro with TouchBar video review. Fun review with some valid points. He still bought it, which proves Apple is right though.

→ PoisonTap, a $5 tool that invades password-protected computers. If you’re careful (use a Mac, have firevault, don’t leave it unlocked), not as bad as it sounds. If you’re not careful, that same password you use for everything is going the be the least of your problems.

→ OnePlus 3T released. More battery, megapixels, processor and bit higher price. Still the best bang of the buck in Android. Just wish it had a smaller 5in screen.

→ You can now check Due Dates as Done is Trello.
Best news of the week. If you organize your team in Trello in some sort of pseudo-sprint setting, this is very helpful.

→ Barnes & Noble debuts $50 Nook tablet to take on Amazon. Lifeboat for the 5 users they have left. Still, a persuasive price.

→ Firefox Focus — a free, fast and easy to use private browser for iOS. Why not? Privacy is going the pop-up blocker of the next few years.

→ How Stephen Wolfram invented interstellar travel for Arrival. I wanna see this move, I wanna see this movie.

→ Asana introduces Boards — similar to Trello Kanban rules the world.

→ iPhones Secretly Send Call History to Apple, Security Firm Says I’m much more worried about my mobile operator having my call history.

→ MacBook Pro Bulbs ad I might be missing something, but this is a cool video and then an basic MacBook Pro ad.

→ Apple’s Chip Choices May Leave Some iPhone Users in Slow Lane Lets not forget these are still glorified walky talkies. Real world performance in the context of mobile operators has many variables.

Democracy Tax

Gabe Weatherhead on his blog:

My tactic was to avoid pay sites. I avoided following and sharing links to paywalls. I wrongly refused even the steepest of discounted access. We can argue about the path that brought us to this point. We can frame the denials of market forces and the effect of an open Internet however we like. But, what we can’t do is insist that democracy survives without paid journalism.

Emphasis mine. I’ve always knew in the back of my mind that journalism needs some sort of payments. But the cheapo in me always screams when something goes above $10 a month.

I currently subscribe to The Economist Espresso and used to NYT Now, before it went free and then was closed. For Venezuelan news, I try to “regularly” contribute to Caracas Chronicles and Efecto Cocuyo — if yearly counts as regularly.

This post reminded me that the price good journalism is not only about the value I get, but the responsibility of believing in real information. And that costs more than a yearly contribution.

Nest app for Apple TV

From Version 5.9 release notes:

Have an Apple TV 4th Generation? Download the new Nest app from your Apple TV and enjoy the convenience of monitoring your home and viewing all of your Nest Cam live video feeds right from your TV.

Been waiting a year for this. The use case for us is simple: you place semi-concious primate on crib, cross fingers, and then stare into TV instead of iOS apps for heavenly signs of sleep

Super Mario Run launches for iPhone & iPad on Dec. 15

Nintendo:

Super Mario Run can be downloaded from the App Store at no cost, and players can try elements of the game’s three modes for free. Once the game has been downloaded, a one-time payment of $9.99 will grant unlimited access to each of the three modes in this release.

Love that it’s pay one and play. Regardless of being a gamer or not, this is going to be big.

“Designed by Apple in California” coffee table book

Apple today announced the release of a new hardbound book chronicling 20 years of Apple’s design, expressed through 450 photographs of Apple products.

At $199 and $299 for the small and large one, respectively, I’m pretty sure most geeks are thinking: nice, but I hope nobody buys me this instead of some AiPods.

If you do want an Apple designs book, I can easily recommend:

• ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation

• Keep It Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple

Ana has given me both as a gift, and I love them — and both are under $50.

Dear Robie, don’t panic

While we go through the bureaucracy of your parents country to get you a Venezuelan passport, your birth country had an election. It was a surprise to us that the good candidate didn’t win. We weren’t alone. Probably half of those who voted were surprised with the results — which in hindsight seems like the obvious outcome for any election.

There are many reasons why I dislike the candidate that won, but mainly it’s because he’s a bully, and bullies don’t use ideas to make their point.

But this letter is not about why somebody won or lost. It is about trying to teach you that if you’re unhappy with an election result you have remember that this didn’t happen to you, it just happened.

It may be unfair, sad, or worrying. But unless you were the candidate, grieving is not the best option to balance out the winners celebration.

Telling you to disconnect after loosing an election is borderline laughable if you inherited your mom’s passion or my OCD, but it’s still the best advise I can give you.

See, at 35, your dad has lost every presidential election he has ever voted on. And from my point of view, the consequences have been catastrophic for Venezuela. But becoming frustrated by the individual decisions of millions of people doesn’t help at all.

So, go watch a movie. Or just meet with your friends to have a drink and talk through what happened. But don’t let your heart darken, or your life get blue. Take a deep breath every couple of minutes, and start trying to answer why it happened?. And how you’re going to help fix it.

Gmail and Google Calendar updated on iOS

Matthew Izatt:

When you get the next Gmail iOS app update, you’ll notice some exciting changes: The biggest overhaul of the app in nearly four years.

I use Google Inbox as my main email client on my iPhone, and leave the Gmail app for when I have to do grown up searches or email thread paleontology.

This update brings the Gmail App to where it should have been 4 years ago:

https://twitter.com/rmateu/status/112126613952532480

For Calendar on my iPhone, I constantly switch between Fantastical and Google Calendar. If you don’t mind the non-native look, Google Calendar is an excellent alternative.

What’s up Mac?

With the poorly named Hello, Again Apple event behind, it’s now easier to take a look at what changed in the Mac lineup.

Before I share what I’m going to get, some thoughts on the new MacBook Pro’s:

Price

The new MacBook Pro’s are priced out of my range. Even the base (no Touch Bar) MacBook Air replacement model at $1499 is not an easy model to recommend: 8Gb of RAM is perfectly acceptable, but 256GB too limited imho. However, that’s a typical Apple move as this reddit thread shows:

In 2012 the newly-introduced 13-inch rMBP cost 1699$ - within half a year it dropped to 1499$ and six months later to 1299$

Further down p_giguere1 explains:

See, completely redesigned Macs usually have pretty poor production yields at launch. Making them more affordable would only make demand exceed offer, which is effectively a profits loss.

That’s why they have high prices at first, then lower them when yields are good. Some of those price reductions are associated with reducing specs on the base model. Apple could already be offering cheaper variants (13” with 128GB, 15” with iGPU) but they likely couldn’t make them fast enough.

Basically, I expect this to be fixed at some point in 2017. When the baseline model falls to $1299 it would fall again in MacBook Air pricing territory and be the clear recommendation for someone looking for a Mac.

Features

Touch Bar:

Although I initially complained about this, I’m slowly understanding that this can be a very useful improvement in the Mac’s I/O model. However, for it to be a consistent interface, it has to be available for Desktop Mode users. Not necessarily the iMac, but anyone that connects their MacBook to a monitor and doesn’t use the MacBook keyboard — which anecdotally is how most people I know use it.

Touch ID:

Lost in all the noise from the event, the Touch ID is one of the coolest things about these machines. More than anything is has to be one of the features that once you use it, it’s absence pains you. And the ability for third-party apps like 1Password to have access to it, makes me want it even more.

USB-C/Thunderbolt Ports (Lack of everything else)

I’m perfectly OK with this. USB-C is the future, and Thunderbolt is the PRO future. Yes, there’s going a painful time with dongles, but even with the current MacBook Pro and its multiple ports, I have to carry some.

If you’re confused about the USB-C/Thunderbolt dual meaning, the short version is: The conector is USB-C, and it works with all USB-C devices. But if you have a Thunderbolt device, you can take advantage of a ~5x speed increase — at about ~2x price. Best of both worlds, and a very practical solution by Apple¹.

Keyboard

I haven’t used the MacBook or new MacBook Pro keyboard a lot, but from playing with it on the store, the limited travel doesn’t bother me. While the no-clickiness of a glass screen might be too millennial for me, the reduction of key travel since the original iMac has resulted in keyboards I actually prefer.

Size, weight and design

Take my money². While not huge changes, they are noticeable if you compare against the current MacBook Pro, or even the MacBook Air 13in. For anyone that carries their computer home everyday, or travels, the small change is very appreciated.

So, which of the new MacBook Pro’s am I getting?. Sadly, I’m pretty sure none of them. With my $1800 budget, even the no-Touch Bar model would be compromised by either 8GB of RAM or 256GB of SSD space.

I’m entertaining three options, all of which are used MacBook’s³:

1. 2014 MacBook Pro 13in, 16Gb + OWC 1TB SSD Upgrade ~$1500
2. 2015 MacBook Pro 13in, 8Gb, 512gb ~$1150
3. 2016 MacBook 12in, 8Gb, 512gb ~$1200

The last two are specially compromising, and I’m mostly considering them as a temporary solution while the new MacBook Pro prices come down next year. I’m also holding hope for Black Friday — but don’t expect any of the prices to come down within my budget.

I’m switching back and forward among these options everyday, but today I’m leaning on #3. The MacBook Air 11in was one of my favorite laptops ever, and since I will only be using it for personal stuff, I may not need the Pro power — or so I tell myself.

Adobe prototypes Photoshop for audio

Craig Stewart:

Demonstrating the software, Jin took a clip of speech and by simply typing new text into an edit box was able to add that text into the speech, in exactly the same voice. In other words, he ‘redubbed’ what the speaker has actually said.

This is amazing. Fascinating that they claim to be working on the watermarking to identify fakes at the same time. That’s how good the technology is going to be.

Castro 2 podcast player

I have been using Castro 2 a lot over the past two weeks. Don’t know if I’m completely switching over from Overcast — my main podcast app for the last two years — but I haven’t opened it in a while.

What I like most about Castro is how you can have a stream of feeds (called inbox), but only download/queue that ones you’re interested in. This makes subscribing to a lot of podcast a better experience.

I’m sure you can approximate this behavior with Overcast and other podcast players, but there’s something very clean about the way Castro does it.

There’s two things I miss from Overcast: 1) trim silence, 2) the ability to subscribe to podcast from the web.

Subsisting on Soylent for a Month

Martin Cizmar, a food critic Willamette Week on Soylent:

For a month, I mostly subsisted on it. For 30 days in September and early October, the period where we do the bulk of our Restaurant Guide magazine, I consumed Soylent for my meal unless I was reviewing a restaurant. […]

And I felt great. I rarely craved “real” food, I lost a few pounds, I had lots of energy and I was rarely hungry.

Good approximation to my experience, with the exception that he liked Coffiest.

MacBook between the lines

Tomorrow Apple is set to have a Mac event. New MacBook Pro’s have already leaked, and there’s rumors of an updated MacBook Air.

While the 13in MacBook Pro is sure to capture my heart, I hope the updated in between MacBook Air has a chance to make its case.

What I want: 13in Retina MacBook with 16gb and a 1TB SSD.

This is a machine that I could have gotten today, but upcoming version greed and price have gotten in the way. I’ve been toying with the idea of the ultra minimal MacBook, but with Robie, my Photos library has been growing exponentially — and I want my library in my personal Mac.

I really need want a personal MacBook again. I’ll be happy tomorrow if there’s a Retina/16gb/1TB tomorrow in the Apple Store in the $1,799.00 range. Otherwise I’ll be doing some soul-searching on ebay.

Judging a book by its content

One my favorite audiobooks this year was Scott Adams’ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Which led me to start reading his blog — which was fine, until politics came in.

Can’t say he’s right or wrong about his point of view, I just know I disagree with him. Also, in my mind’s eye, he went from someone I enjoyed listening in the audiobook, to someone I kind of dislike.

Same is the case with Orson Scott Card’s and his anti-gay views. Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead are among my favorite Sci-Fi books, but I find it sad that in later books I feel watchful to catch an agenda.

But don’t burn the books. Writing is about expressing something. You don’t have to agree with it, or even less, be persuaded by it automatically.

Reading stuff that you don’t agree with — from someone you share a passion — is great way to fight sampling bias in twitter, blogs and other stuff you read online.

The joy in boring weather

Hurricane Matthew strolled past Miami yesterday. A day in stressful preparing and wondering completely wasted in a non-event. And I couldn’t be happier.

Coffiest fails at everything Soylent 2.0 succeeds - Updated.

Soylent’s breakfast drink came out just as I was running out of my first Soylent 2.0 box. I was already adding cold brew coffee to half a Soylent 2.0 bottle for breakfast, so it seemed like a great time to tried.

First, a Soylent 2.0 review

I love Soylent 2.0. It delivers on everything I was looking on a meal replacement drink: price, ingredients¹, simplicity and taste.

A note on taste: Soylent 2.0 doesn’t taste good, but it doesn’t taste bad. It has an absence of taste, which I appreciate after trying many shakes that either fail at faking a flavor, or do taste great — which is explained when you check the ingredients.

Soylent 2.0 flavor is inline with what it is: a meal replacement meant to simplify your life. You’re not drinking it to suppress hunger with a peanut butter flavored shake, you’re eating a balanced lunch quickly to get back to work and leave early.

And now, the Coffiest disappointment

Coffiest also doesn’t taste good, but the coffee with a hint of chocolate flavor is not subtle. So basically you end up with most disagreeable cold mocha you have every tried. To make matters worse for me, unlike Soylent 2.0, Coffiest seems to have an aftertaste.

Now, being clear that my objectivity is blown, I also experienced some stomach discomfort with Coffiest that I didn’t had during the previous month with Soylent 2.0. But this could be a nocebo effect, so YMMV.

Even though Coffiest is not for me (and I can’t recommend it) I will continue to buy Soylent 2.0 — as soon as I struggle through the remaining 9 Coffiest bottles.

Update: Emailed Soylent about returning my remaning 9 Coffiest bottles and exchanging for Soylent 2.0. In a few hours they emailed back saying that they will refund the order and:

Feel free to keep the remaining Soylent with our compliments, or you can share it with interested family and friends.

And that’s how you make a customer happy.

Sold my Apple Watch

With the new Apple event on the horizon, I sold my Apple Watch Sport last week on Swappa before it depreciates further.

I expect Apple to announce new Apple Watch’s, and keep the old Apple watches at a $199/$249 price point. My guess is the original Apple Watch will receive a minor silent update of the internal components to fix any number of issues of the original design.

In truth, the main reason I sold it was because I wasn’t using it. For about 3 months I choose the Pebble Time over the Apple Watch. It got even more consistent when I took up swimming again and I was surprised how well the Swim.com Pebble app worked — even compared to my Garmin Swim watch.

I’m sure I’ll be drooling over the new Apple Watch next week. But the I think the upcoming Pebble Time 2 (which I preordered) is going to be closer to the original Apple Watch in build quality, which is the one area it really doesn’t even compare.

At $199/$249 and with WatchOS 3, the original Apple Watch may make some sense for more people, but it continues to be my least recommended of the Apple devices I’ve owned.

Review: Star Trek Beyond

Ana’s parent are visiting so we did a mid-week movie night. Heard so many bad things about Suicide Squad that I settled for the new Star Trek.

5 word review:

Good Sci-Fi setup and… boom.

What I’m always disappointed with these movies is with how dumb they end being… and they can’t help tacking on ending after ending.

By dumb, I mean how everything is spelled out. I don’t think Star Trek needs to be Inception, but it can at least have a little of Wall-E.

In any case, if you’re a Star Trek fan, this is another fun adventure in the universe. Not the best, not the worst. For the rest, if/when this makes it to Netflix, it worth a mid-week date at home.

Twelvety — Back to One Master TaskPaper File:

I know, though, that the attraction of that app for me is to have a perfect relational database of tasks. The flaw in that idea is that a perfect task structure may help get things off your mind, but it can be so perfect that you go numb to it and just gaze at its perfection.

Phil Nunnally is talking about Todoist here (great app), but he crystallizes my procrastinating habit with all productivity tools.

It reminded me of my mindset when I wrote about broken workflows being a good thing… which I should circle back to more often.

Cheeseburger hosting

One of the reasons I like my current blog host so much is the price. At $20 a year it comes out at less than $2 a month — that’s about the price of 2 basic cheeseburgers at most fast food chains in the US.

I’m currently looking at helping two projects that need a quick and nice looking site. It used to be that I’d host them at one of my servers, but experience¹ has taught me that projects need their own infrastructure so they can move on without you.

The typical setup for a simple website is always a Wordpress blog, but the bottom price for a reliable host is around $6 a month. Yes, that’s low, but it does add up.

Even with the ability to use Google Cloud, or Amazon Web Services, the basic budget starts at $5. For all the talk about the web democratizing content creation, that’s still too high for the next 2 billion people.

It may be that content managers like Wordpress require resources that cost $5, but then we’re doing content hosting wrong. If you only pay $1 for gigabytes of podcast downloads in S3, then text content should be less.

I hope not to be turning in an old guy for having to clarify that I’m talking about the web: accessible to all, backwards and forwards compatible as it can be. It’s great that you can post in Twitter, Medium, Snapchat and Facebook for free, but these are just like doing a graffiti in a neighbors wall, you shouldn’t be surprised if your content disappears. It’s your graffiti, but it’s their wall.

I’ll keep looking for a solution before breaking down and paying the $5, but something doesn’t add to me.

Google’s Gboard

After trying the Gboard keyboard for about a week, I’m a bit disappointed with it. I had first thought its multi-language implementation was going to be like SwiftKey or iOS 10; the ability to have two languages at the same time. No dice, it works like current iOS 9 where you switch between the two languages.

The way it works kinda forces you to have Gboard as the only keyboard configured, otherwise you have to go through all keywords before arriving back to the second language.

I set it up as my only keyboard, but the speed improvements never came. It was useful to have Google search right from the keyboard, but not enough overcome my slowness typing either it.

As I wait for iOS 10, going to give SwiftKey a try again. My friend Christian likes it, a Microsoft is probably working on some cool stuff for it.

Date: 2016-08-09 15:32

A traffic light without green

As Venezuela falls deeper into a disaster movie scenario, the Electoral Board threw another obstacle in the path to a referendum this year — saying there might be a pre-referdum step by late October. This implies no referendum until next year, which would mean that Maduro could be revoked, but the VP would finish the term¹.

I can only explain the frustration with an analogy:

Imagine you’re waiting for your turn at a traffic light, and the lights keeps switching from red to yellow, and immediately back to red. The traffic moves forward sometimes, but not always. You’d be awed by the injustice — if you’re Venezuelan you’d likely comment it with a laugh with the cars around you. But after enough turns, you’d start to get pissed.

Every time the cycle skips green again, you’re more likely to disregard the light altogether. But fear of the police/military in the corner and some common sense holds you back. Someone in twitter keeps saying that a green light is our right and some are talking to the traffic cop.

How does this bad analogy end? your guess is as good as mine. I trust the guy in Twitter. But each time the green light is skipped, scenarios become more complex, and the likelihood of people getting hurt approach certainty.

Stranger Things

Finished Stranger Things last night. It’s among the best TV shows I’ve seen in a long time.

While I’m not a fan of the 80’s horror genre, the series is light on the horror and heavy on the 80’s — which works great for me. Give the first episode a chance if not into scary moments, the show is so much more than that.

Also worth mentioning how well made and amazingly acted the show is. Probably since Battlestar Galactica I hadn’t felt as connected to characters and their lives.

Highly recommended.

The “Apple” one

After 7 months with the Apple TV, I’m a little disappointed to say that it’s the streaming box you should get if you want the Apple one.

I’ve grown to accept the remote¹ — but had to get a case for it. The UI is fluid, the box itself is un-intrusive, and Apps are good for some fun. Overall the Apple TV 4 is the best streaming box for me, but just like the Apple Watch, I struggle to recommend it to anyone who already doesn’t want one.

The above is the high bar this version of Apple TV misses. It’s the streaming box for the Apple ecosystem, but it falls short on both features and price to become the box everyone one wants to have.

The golden age of Apple fanboism where the answer to any consumer device question was: go to the Apple Store, is now a nice recent memory. On the summer of 2016, the answer to any question not regarding a smartphone, tablet or coolest laptop, is either depends or I’d wait a bit.