1. Oh was there some new Apple stuff?
Apparently there was. I didn’t get chance to watch the keynote live — I was in Amsterdam for a conference — but the only thing that really stood out for me when I saw it later was the feature for AirPods Pro which allows them to function as a proper hearing aid. My old ears will thank Apple for it (and so will my bank manager, as I won’t have to spend around £1,000 on something I don’t need most of the time).2. Private cloud compute
And speaking of new Apple stuff, I’m actually pretty impressed with the way that Apple has implemented its private cloud compute system. Yeah, I know, AI is evil and all that.3. How an iPhone screen repair led to a social media ban
However, back in the world of older Apple stuff, this whole story is likely to make your jaw hit the floor. After Apple replaced Finn Voorhees’ iPhone screen, they found when trying to log into Snapchat they got a an “SS06: Device Banned” error message. It turned out that the phone Finn got was a refurb (which should be fine) but that the previous owner had been banned from the service – and Snapchat uses a little-known feature to lock out not only the user, but the device if someone is banned. Unfortunately this device ban flag persists even if the phone is factory reset.4. The new Reeder
One of the things which keeps pulling back to using the Mac, iPad and iPhone is thethird party developer ecosystem. This, of course, is one of the reasons why I end up getting angry at Apple for wanting their pound of flesh from every developer. It’s not the Mac that keeps me on the Mac. It’s the developers. Apple should be paying them, not the other way round.Anyway, Reeder has been one of my favourite Mac and iOS applications for a long time. It’s an RSS reader (the clue is in the name) that’s a beautiful piece of design.
Silvio Rizzo, its author, has rebuilt the app from the ground up to change its focus and, as he puts it, make it something that’s “rebuilt for today”.
What does that mean? The starting point is that the way we get information is no longer all about RSS. In fact, we get feeds from social media, from YouTube, from podcasts, and many other places.
So Reeder now supports all of the above, putting everything into a single feed. It’s still a lovely design, but I suspect this approach won’t be for everyone. It reminds me of the “river of news” concept that Dave Winer was talking about more than a decade ago. I’m not sure if I like it yet, but I am going to give it a go.
5. iA Writer keeps getting better
Information Architects – iA – are one of my favourite developer teams. Not only do they produce great apps, they’re good people too. iA Writer, which was their first and flagship product, is the best distraction-free Markdown writing application that exists.But it’s had one small weakness which means I don’t use it for as much as I would want: it’s not really designed to handle long-form articles made up from smaller pieces, whether that’s a novel or book-length project of just something composed from small parts. It can do transclusion in writing, and that’s a useful feature, but it’s not quite what I need.
A case in point: although the tools I use to write these linkblog posts vary, I often use Ulysses for it. I will write each of the ten blue links in a separate document, allowing me to go as short or long as I want without distraction. Then I just number them, move them into the right order, and publish direct to Wordpress.
I can’t quite do that with iA Writer — yet. I could create each document separately, but in order to make a single document which I could publish in one click, I would have to create a document, use the transclusion feature to “insert” all the elements, and publish it. It’s just a little less elegant than the same process on Ulysses.
The good news is that it’s moving closer to having the right tools for the job. The latest version includes a “tree view” for files in its sidebar, making it significantly easier to structure texts. I’m really looking forward to what they do next.
