Paul Adams

Steven Sinofsky:

CES 2019 is a kind of year that sort of screams “we’re ready for the products that really work.” In that spirit, CES 2019 is a year where products are close, but seem a product manager iteration away from being a product that can reach a tipping point of customer satisfaction and utility. Products work in a “thread the needle” sort of way, but a lot of details and real life quickly cause things to become frustrating.

This feeling for me is part of the cycle of CES. I like to think of it as the universal remote problem — everything starts to work but to really work you long for that one simplified control point. The challenge is making that while all the other pieces are still moving. That’s the nature of Consumer Electronics (tech in general) which is that there are many parts moving at different velocities and in slightly different vectors — it means sometimes we go through phases where we seem really close.

I’ve still never attended CES, but if I ever do, my goal would be to do what Sinofksy does in these annual reports — to try to see the forest for the trees, to gauge the gestalt of the tech world at this moment. Figure out what is nonsense (e.g. 3D TV mania a few years ago) and what is a legit trend (voice driven interfaces today).

Sinofsky does this really, really well. It’s a long read but CES is a big show.

Good morning. The next shutdown remains on the horizon. Here’s what our team is watching today.

Stories in Progress

Alice Ollstein has her eye on the looming shutdown, and is looking at how Trump’s frequent attacks on his legislative opponents — including suggesting Democrats who didn’t stand for his applause lines at the State of the Union are “treasonous” — is throwing a wrench in negotiations.

Allegra Kirkland, meanwhile, is looking at what might happen if President Trump refuses to do an interview with Robert Mueller — and Mueller subpoenas him.

Today’s Rundown

9:00 a.m. House gavels in. Votes expected between 11:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

10:00 a.m. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) speaks with the press.

11:00 a.m. Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) speaks with the press.

1:45 p.m. President Trump speaks with the press following a roundtable meeting on MS-13.

2:15 a.m. Senate meets for legislative business.

2:30 p.m. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivers a press briefing.

3:40 p.m. Trump signs a national security memorandum charging the Department of Homeland Security, State Department, Justice Department and intelligence agencies to establish a “national vetting center,” a joint project between the agencies to ramp up scrutiny of visitors to the US. This follows on his campaign promise of “extreme vetting,” CNN reports.

Yes, you can force close iOS apps by double pressing the home button and sliding the app window up, but you shouldn't make a habit out of regularly doing it. Here's why.

MarsEdit 3.6.8 is available now from the MarsEdit home page and the Mac App Store.

This update includes a large number of bug fixes as well as one important change in the way that MarsEdit handles the uploading of images intended to be displayed at a “Retina” compatible resolution.

One of the problems with handling Retina graphics well is that there is a huge variety of solutions in use by different web sites, depending on the priorities for bandwidth, ease of editing, backwards compatibility, etc. My expectation that MarsEdit users would want the app to support this variety has kept me thus far from releasing any solution at all to the problem. In the interim, I have been adopting the workaround myself of uploading images at twice the resolution I wanted them to display at, and hand-editing the HTML to reference them at half-size. So, if I wanted a 400x400pt screenshot on my blog, I’d upload an 800×800 image and hand-edit the HTML to look like:

<img src="..." width="400" height="400" />

As of MarsEdit 3.6.8, a checkbox when uploading or inserting an image to Treat as Retina image will enable behavior like the above, completely automatically.

That is to say, if you want a 400×400 image on your blog to look nice on Retina displays, just supply an image at least 800×800 and check the “Treat as Retina image” checkbox. MarsEdit will produce the expected HTML and upload the image at twice the width and height.

This solution will not meet everybody’s expectations for how Retina images should be handled, but it’s a good step up from what MarsEdit has offered thus far. This solution has the benefits of being both simple and backward-compatible. The main downside is that readers with standard-resolution displays are forced to download a higher resolution image than necessary. As high resolution displays become more and more popular, and bandwidth use becomes a less typically critical issue, I think the adoption of a compromise like this one will be common.

Here is a list of all the specific changes that went into this release:

• Address issues with images being uploaded for display on Retina screens:
  • Images are now uploaded at 2x specified dimensions when Retina checkbox selected
  • Width and height fields now show size as “points” instead of “pixels”
  • Width and height fields now limited based on size of image and Retina setting
• Rich and HTML Editor bug fixes
  • Fix a bug where pressing return in a blockquote could cause a new blockquote to be created
  • Fix a bug where smart quotes, etc. were erroneously allowed in plain HTML
  • Fix a bug that prevented images from being pasted into post editor content
• Other media-related fixes
  • Fix a bug that caused Tumblr images to publish at constrained size even if the size is changed in Media Manager
  • Fix a bug where media style macro was not applied to re-inserted, previously uploaded images
  • Fix a bug where media style macro with prefix and suffix did not wrap the active selection
• Other bug fixes
  • Fix a bug that prevented post documents from showing unsaved changes after changing custom field contents
  • Fix a bug in “Show Text Statistics” sample script that caused inaccurate word count to be shown
  • Fix a bug in Media Manager that failed to show the entire folder name for folders with periods (.) in their names
  • Default newly added Blogspot blogs to “Apply Preview Filter” before publishing, to ensure paragraph tags are added if needed

Let me know if you have any questions or run into any problems!

Wrist detection on the Apple Watch may not work properly for some people with lower-arm tattoos, as they appear to fool the device's sensors, some early adopters of the device have said.