Rolandt

Over the last few months Tim, Lauren, and I have been building out a new hosting service to complement the work we already do at Reclaim Hosting. You would be surprised how many times over the last 3 years we have heard, “Do you host non-education sites?” In fact, more than a few times folks we know quite well have avoided hosting with us for various projects because they did not want to blur the lines. Up and until now we have been pretty laissez faire about this, we recognize our focus is education (higher ed to be even more specific), but we rarely if ever turn folks away. But given our support is stellar and our prices are quite reasonable, the expected was bound to happen, we continue to grow well beyond higher ed.

This is a good thing, and we’re not complaining by any means. At the same time we want to ensure we can guarantee the same level of support and low prices for our core folks at Reclaim (i.e., faculty and students) while still providing options for those outside education. Hence, the birth of Rockaway Hosting, as I wrote in the About page:

While Rockaway Hosting is a new hosting venue, the folks behind it are veterans. Rockaway was born out of the related, but distinct Reclaim Hosting which is focused on supporting faculty and students in higher education and counts over 15,000 customers to date. The increased interest in hosting with us from a broader, non-academic community resulted in Rockaway Hosting.

Think of it like this: Reclaim is the record label dedicated to higher education, whereas Rockaway is a venue that provides a stage for anyone who wants one.

Speaking of the venue/stage metaphor, Bryan Mathers has done some of his most inspired work for this project. I think “The Rockaway” club image is one of my very favorites.

 

And the “rock on” Rockaway logo is pretty awesome.

We offer two plans (personal and business), additional storage, and extras like video chat training and support:

We will also offer site migrations, and check out that art!

So, Rockaway Hosting is officially a thing, we have tested it in soft launch for the last 6 weeks or so, and all is working well. So if you, or someone you know, is looking for Reclaim-level hosting that is not education specific, Rockaway is now an option.

The future of Canadian jobs may be in the technology sector, according to Indeed Canada.

The job site released its rankings of the top 10 best jobs in Canada, curated by the number of job postings, salary and growth opportunity. Eight of these jobs were tech-related, with Full Stack Developer (those comfortable with tech positions in the front and back end), DevOps Engineer and Back End Developer making up the top three positions.

“Canada is a booming hub for tech innovation, and the demand for workers with highly technical abilities is increasing far faster than supply,” said Indeed senior vice president Paul D’Arcy in a press release. “The result is a rapid growth in open, unfilled jobs and increases in salaries for the talent that can fill these roles.”

The list was compiled with jobs that provide a salary of at least $70,000 and displayed consistent growth in share of postings from 2013-2016.

Some of the highest paying tech positions that made the list include DevOps Engineer (at #2), Android Developer (at #5) and Python Developer (at #10).

Image credit: Pexels 

Source: Business Wire 

The post Tech sector dominates Indeed’s list of best jobs in Canada appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Even though I cannot use Windows 10 S (the only Store app I have is Nextgen Reader), the hardware is pretty appealing – a little bit more RAM in the entry-level combo would make it perfect. The fact that it sports a decent resolution and a touchscreen that can use the Surface Pen is just icing on the cake, and makes Apple look incredibly dated.

Apple’s two-horse strategy only wins in one aspect: ARM is the future, and they’re already there.

The thing is, that is not likely to matter in the long run.

Unbounce recently released a huge report on landing page conversion metrics.

The report includes links to sign up for the product, tweet quotes, visit blog posts, watch demonstrations, follow the authors on Twitter and pretty much everything else except visit their active community.

If I have a question about the metrics, want to share my opinions, or get help applying the knowledge to my work, where should I go?

Should I ask the authors on Twitter? Why not do it in the community where the knowledge can be saved and invite further participation?

The most content companies product today would be better served by integrating it with community activity. Post questions in the community and link to them in the report. Have an AMA with the author and link to it from the report. Mention common problem areas and link to relevant discussions etc…

If you truly value the community, it’s a no-brainer.

Jump Around @JodiesJumpsuit
Everyone out here telling me to love myself but so far I've only been able to flirt and exchange numbers with myself before ghosting

Exosaurs @Exosaurs
Richard Eriksson, Rileyasuchus of WASP-19 b

Jump Around @JodiesJumpsuit
It's really easy to write a letter filled with rage and spite than it is to write a love letter. I'll focus on love letters.

Cam Cavers @camcavers
The Internet is ruining dining—everyone lines up for the same couple dozen hot restaurants then tries to convince themselves it was worth it

Compare incomes for young people from the Millennial generation and the baby boomer generation. Read More

This is an extension to my original three post series on user acquisition.

Today, AirBnB announced that it had reached a settlement with the city of San Francisco on how to effectively register and monitor legal listings in the city. I am a huge fan of the company, and it seems like a positive outcome for both San Francisco and AirBnB.

For many, the issues around many of the sharing economy companies, including AirBnB, are examples of regulators trying to find a way to both control and incorporate rapid, disruptive innovation.  There is, of course, some truth to this point of view.

However, as a product leader, there is another important takeaway that seems to be too often forgotten. Most of us spend too little time thinking carefully about the people who don’t use our products. 

The people who don’t use your product often won’t show up in your core metrics. But if you don’t spend time understanding them, you will eventually feel the negative effects in your growth and your brand.

It’s Natural for Companies to Obsess About Their Users

When a startup launches a new product, it is natural to obsess with every user it touches. Every click, every tap, every piece of data is precious feedback about your features. The data is one of the most objective sources of information about what your users are doing with your product and when they are doing it. In the early days, before finding product/market fit, a huge amount of time tends to be spent on the people you touch but who don’t convert. In fact, that may be where most people at the company spend their time.

As consumer products find product/market fit and hit escape velocity, more and more engineers and designers spend a disproportionate amount of time on users. The people who work on growth & marketing will still often continue to look at the data on leads, trying to find ways of converting those non-users to users. However, as a percentage of the company, fewer and fewer engineers, designers & product managers will be looking at data from non-users.

This makes sense, of course, because as your product grows, almost all feature development is focused on your users. In 2008, when we established the Growth team at LinkedIn, we discovered that of the hundreds of features on linkedin.com, only three features reliably touched non-users. (For those of you who are curious, those features were the guest invitation (email), the public homepage (linkedin.com), and the public profile (in search.))

Customer obsession, of course, is generally a good thing. But as we learned at LinkedIn, if you want to grow a viral product, you have to spend a considerable amount of time thinking about the non-user, where they touch your brand and your service, and find ways to both reach them and convert them to users.

You Have More Non-Users Than Users

Few brands and products could ever claim that their conversion rate for everyone they touch is over 50%. It is even possible that Facebook, with nearly 2 billion users, still has more people in the world who have heard of the company than who use it.

In 2011, I remember talking to the great founders at CardMunch about a new email they were proposing to add to their service. CardMunch was a wonderful app that made it effortless to scan a business card and then have it automatically entered into your address book, with almost no errors. The proposal was to add an email so that the person whose business card you scanned (non-user) received an email from the CardMunch user with their business card in electronic form.

The team was ready to whip something together quickly and test the idea, and the concept was good in principle. But given some of the experience of Plaxo a decade before, it was prudent to ask the simple question: “How many people will see this new email?” Within a few minutes, we figured out that the number of people who would receive this email within the first three months would be 30 to 50 times the total user base of the application.

Some of you are probably thinking, “sounds like a great growth feature!” Others are likely venting about why we have so many emails cluttering our inboxes. Both reactions are fair.

The guidance I gave the team, however, was to consider the fact that, once they launch this feature, most people who have ever heard of CardMunch will have only heard of it through this email. The product and the brand. I asked them to spend a bit more time on the design on the email, in that context, to ensure that all of their hard work on a wonderful product wouldn’t be drowned in an avalanche of poor experience.

In the end, Sid Viswanathan & team did a great job brainstorming ways that they could show the value of a connected addressbook in the email, including LinkedIn features like people you know in common. Once framed properly, it was simple to think about what they wanted non-users to think about their brand and their product.

Non-Users Matter

Marketers, of course, have known this for decades. It is a brand marketing staple that it takes at least three touches of a brand before it will stick with a potential customer.

Somewhere along the way, software companies lost touch with the basic idea that every piece of content that contains their brand is a potential touch. It is not just the users of the core product that matter for long term growth.

Market research and customer development are often essential for discovering and understanding new potential users for your product. The case can be made that viral systems can, in fact, spread to these new pockets automatically. However, truly viral products are few and far between, and in most cases these new markets will not be in the data sets that your product & engineering teams are focused on.

Brand will also impact your company well beyond new user acquisition. With AirBnB, we now know the many ways in which their service and brand touch non-users. Neighbors, for example, have natural questions and concerns when a house or a unit near by is available on the platform.

Software companies, especially successful ones, tend to have passionate and talented designers and product leaders who are eager to find clever solutions to real user problems. Given the right data and focus, there is no question that these teams can also design and build features that address non-user concerns.

Tesla spends time thinking both about the feeling a driver has in the car, as well as the experience of a non-Tesla owner who is watching that car drive by.

Spend more time thinking about all of the people who touch your product & your brand, not just your users.

 

I entered into the knowledge of my own vulnerability via two photographs, images that jostled for the public’s attention in 1955 and still jostle in my mind: an undated photo of Emmett Till as he was in life, with light reflecting off his face so that he looks radiant, sculpted out of clay; and Jet magazine’s 1955 lynch image of Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse, his radiant face turned into a ruin, a warning, a harbinger.

I was seven, maybe eight, when my parents brought home a VHS box set of Eyes on the Prize, the documentary epic of the Civil Rights Movement. As my family had done for so many similar screenings, we gathered before our television and my father loaded the first cassette. The screen transmuted from a serene blue into an uneasy black across which undulating grey lines streaked, and again into a disarticulated field of grey. These mutations kept up their procession a while longer before black faces materialized. These faces parted lips to sing, watched impassively, and winced as they prepared to receive blows. They scowled while recounting daily indignities, and stared exhaustedly into the middle distance. They gazed calmly upon horrors, like Till’s face, that should have made them recoil the way I did.

The impulse that made me avert my gaze from Till’s ruined face was about more than the terror of seeing another black boy whose body had been treated so barbarously, transformed so completely. I felt suddenly and viscerally porous, open to the world in a manner that frightened me. That openness had everything to do with a tension between Mamie Till’s dignified act of defiance in exposing her son’s corpse, and the revelation of black disposability — that is to say, my own disposability — that lurked behind her public gesture. To accept Mamie Till’s demand that her nation really look at racism’s fruits also meant accepting my diminished status in American society. I didn’t understand how circulating such images constituted a form of resistance.

In “Can You Be Black and Look at This?” Elizabeth Alexander cites the Jet photograph as part of a lineage of images that function as versions of Frederick Douglass’ “blood-stained gate”: acts of violence and witnessing that initiate black people into knowledge of their bodies’ vulnerability under a white supremacist racial order. These same images can also initiate us into a black community characterized by creative acts of defiance — such as Mamie Till’s gesture — that create “counter-memories,” or correctives to traumatic histories. As Alexander points out, however, a fundamental antinomy will always linger between these two conceptions of lynching photography, a tension that we might summarize in a single question — can you look at these images and honor black life?

That question sits at the heart of a long running discourse on images of anti-black violence and their functions, one that has accumulated renewed urgency in the last decade. Contemporary technology — most notably the ubiquity of cellphones and access to social media — have increased and accelerated the increased circulation of police shooting footage. This circulation has precipitated a new consciousness of the criminal justice system’s origins in white supremacy, but even as outrage over police shooting footage helped propel Black Lives Matter to greater visibility, disagreement over whether or not watching images of black men and women’s deaths is ethical, or even efficacious, has been percolating at least since the death of Walter Scott in South Carolina.

While some have hailed the effect of bystander videos as a potential check on police misconduct, others have suggested that American society’s relationship to these images is more complex. For example, writing in The New Republic in 2015, Jamil Smith argued that America’s fascination with these images was turning black death into a spectacle Americans consume as easily as they do reality television. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “the increased visibility of trauma and death at the hands of cops isn’t doing as much as it should be. The legacy of increased exposure to black death has merely been the deadening of our collective senses.”

The force of history bolsters Smith’s anxiety over how these images train us to regard anti-black violence. Understanding his perspective requires that we think about contemporary police shooting videos in the context of lynching, whose history is entwined with the advent of photographic technology. Photography enabled the circulation of images of black death, and historically this circulation has helped ensure white supremacy’s stability. Images of destroyed and abject black bodies became instantiations of black people’s inferiority, and warning signs to those who would transgress the racial order of things.

Smith’s comparison of police shooting footage to reality television is devastatingly apt. After all, before civil rights activists used lynching photographs as anti-lynching propaganda tools, such killings were regularly staged for popular consumption. Extralegal executions were often conducted in public, and crowds gathered to gawk at hangings, shootings, beatings, and burnings. Afterward, spectators would swarm the victims’ corpses to take pieces of their clothing — and even their ruined bodies — as gruesome souvenirs. Black death was quite literally a spectacle for these people, one that represented and reinforced their power over black life.

The story of photography as a practice and a consumer technology in early 20th-century America is coextensive with the spectacle of lynching. As historian Leigh Raiford points out in Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, the public’s taste for spectacles of black death created a market demand for lynching photographs as popular commodities that circulated in various media, from trading cards to stereographs. People purchased these images as a way to participate in a form of entertainment and white identity formation that would otherwise have been unavailable to them. The circulation of such images essentially meant the circulation and reproduction of white supremacy.

The story of Henry Smith is instructive here. Smith was a black man suspected of murdering three-year-old Myrtle Vance in Paris, Texas, in February 1893. Vance was white, and her death set in motion white residents’ ritualistic conception of American race and gender politics. Smith became a sacrifice to ensure the sanctity of white womanhood and the invulnerability of white patriarchy. He was paraded about the streets and eventually burned alive before a mob. His murder was particularly shocking in its barbarity, and made headlines across the nation as the press whipped itself into a frenzy alternately condemning and justifying the event. As a result, his death was reproduced endlessly. No matter the reason for his corpse’s display, the effect was the same every time: whether Smith was a victim of white racism or a criminal threatening civilization, his body became a screen upon which the nation projected the drama of American race relations.

As literary critic Jacqueline Goldsby narrates in A Spectacular Secret, Smith’s status as a screen eventually became all too literal. Images of his death were so popular that they coincided with the development of a primitive version of video footage. In a nauseating turn, photographers preserved the event via a ghastly technology: photographs of Smith’s lynching, which had been documented from start to finish, were arranged in chronological order and paired with gramophone recordings from the scene. Spectators could wear earpieces that cast them more fully into the scene of Smith’s death, and in cities as far afield as Seattle, crowds gathered to consume this barbaric event.

Smith’s lynching echoed in my mind when I watched the footage of Philando Castile’s murder at the hands of Officer Jeronimo Yanez, in no small part because Castile’s death felt like a traumatic repetition of history. The shooting’s public nature — Diamond Reynolds live streamed the killing to thousands of spectators via Facebook Live — echoed the hideousness of Smith’s unending lynching. What’s more, Reynolds’ flat affect — she repeatedly responds to Yanez’s panicked orders with eerily automatic variations on “Yes, sir” — struck me as a reminder not only of the trauma such violence inflicts upon black people, but the way that its reproduction and circulation broadens its reach in order to traumatize entire populations. Though the footage served as a rallying cry to renewed struggle against police brutality, I couldn’t help but feel that technology had circled back around to some of its earliest purposes: broadcasting anti-black violence as widely as possible, as both entertainment and warning. It was difficult for me to conceive of a use for these images that didn’t re-instantiate the spectacle of anti-black violence and empty black bodies of subjectivity.

The entwined histories of photography and lynching demand that we consider how looking at and reproducing images of racist violence might conjure up ghosts of a past that still haunts our contemporary moment. This past circumscribes every attempt to expose anti-blackness via visual evidence, and invites a few questions: How do you “expose” a history that the nation has never been shy about exhibiting in the first place? More crucially, how do you look at these images without reproducing these deaths in perpetuity, thus re-enacting violence and extending white supremacy’s reach into our collective psyche?

Despite the dangers inherent in putting damaged black bodies on display, black thinkers and artists have returned to such images compulsively. This abiding return to lynching photography and its contemporary successor, the police shooting video, seems intent on answering my earlier question: Can we look at these images and simultaneously honor black life? Jamil Smith’s language echoes for me. The increased visibility of trauma and death … isn’t doing as much as it could be. Even as Smith condemns the way in which these images’ circulation might normalize black death, he holds out hope that there is something more these images could be doing. It’s as if Smith is straining to locate a third function that these images might perform, one that doesn’t reduce black bodies to objects for lurid display.

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Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, currently on exhibit in New York as part of the Whitney Museum’s biennial, triggered a conflict over the history that it simultaneously engages and is circumscribed by, and raised a series of knotty questions: Is it right to circulate depictions of anti-black violence? If so, who has the right to represent that violence?

The black British artist and writer Hannah Black had a few hypotheses in mind. In an open letter to the Whitney that appeared on the popular “Black Contemporary Art” Tumblr, she accused Schutz of interloping in a conversation to which she was not invited, and appropriating black racial pain as raw material for an ill-guided exploration of white shame. For Black, Schutz’s painting was insensitive not only to anti-black violence’s foundational role in securing white supremacy. It was also blind to and complicit in the history of lynching photography. But while conversation about Schutz’s painting hinged on matters of racial proprietorship — a strange approach to an image that Mamie Till always intended to galvanize national rather than racial soul searching — the reaction that Open Casket prompted among black artists and activists is more interesting for what it says about a certain tradition of black self-representation, and the seminal role that lynching photography plays in that tradition.

It’s not coincidental that Hannah Black’s letter first appeared on Black Contemporary Art, a blog that the writer and curator Kimberly Drew founded in 2011. The blog is striking in the sheer range of representations that it assembles under the rubric of “black.” From photography of contemporary black culture that evokes social realist portraiture, to paintings that recall Jacob Lawrence’s Cubist experiments, to GIFS culled from music videos, the blog collects so many varied genres and styles that one can only describe its ethos as one of indiscriminate joyfulness in blackness’ capacity for shape shifting. Rather than delineating particular schools or policing blackness’ boundaries, the blog settles into the incessant and recursive proliferation that Tumblr enables. If lynching photography fixes the black body to a few predetermined meanings, or turns it into a screen onto which we project our fears, Black Contemporary Art insists upon possibility.

It’s a mistake to think that such logic inheres solely in social media, though. I think we find its earliest instantiation in black people’s re-appropriation of lynching photography, especially in the image of Emmett Till’s brutalized face. When Mamie Till decided to display her son’s corpse for the world to see, the display itself was not a revolutionary gesture in the history of American race relations. Though historians credit the photograph of Emmett Till’s mangled face with precipitating a new national attitude that facilitated the Civil Rights Movement’s success, the photograph’s existence did little to upend white Americans’ relationship to images of destroyed black bodies. As Henry Smith’s fate teaches us, such technology owed its prevalence in part to its promotion of anti-black violence. The sense of awed reverence that people reserve for Mamie Till’s gesture, and the pride of place that history has bestowed on it — we think of Emmett’s funeral as a genesis moment for the Civil Rights Movement — lies in something other than the technology through which that image was circulated, or the sheer fact of its display.

Mamie Till knew how to use technology. More specifically, she knew that photography could reconfigure how we see black people, rather than simply reproduce oppression. She understood that photographic technology was often a tool of representation through which white supremacy deposited meaning and terror into black bodies; she also understood that the same technology could help subvert those meanings and combat that terror. Her gesture is an origin story for an entire tradition of contemporary black visual culture that disrupts the visual codes governing black life. She presented us with the possibility that a technology previously complicit in constricting black life’s range of possibilities might become a space for artful self-fashioning.

In Eyes on the Prize, the camera pulls back to reveal the entirety of Emmett Till’s casket, and you realize that the undated photo of his face as it was in life hangs just above his corpse. You see hundreds of people filing past the corpse, circulating in the church, crying and looking on stoically and embracing one another. This dense proximity — Till’s corpse, the counter-image, the live bodies arrived to mourn lost life — generates a friction between white supremacy’s enforced violence and the sociality it unsuccessfully seeks to stamp out. In displaying her son’s body, Mamie Till turned the Roberts Temple Church into a theater, a space in which black people could come together to reassert and honor the value of black life rather than simply witness death. It’s in this friction that we find Mamie Till staking out new ground, a space wherein blackness cannot be reduced to her son’s shattered body.

Blackness is that friction, the tireless impulse towards constantly multiplying kinds of representation, and the indefatigable assertion of the right to self-representation in oppression’s shadow. As art historian Darby English argues in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, this kind of visual strategy reformulates blackness as a set of social relations rather than something that inheres in the black body. It’s a capacious, improvisatory sociality that is always “falling outside and between bodies and peoples and culture … [something] commingled with its contraries, contradictorily populated, the yield of a certain theatricalization.”

In this sense, Emmett Till’s funeral was a precursor to digital spaces like Black Contemporary Art. Similarly, these digital spaces want to multiply the images by which we accommodate ourselves with the restless, shape-shifting sociality we know by shorthand as “blackness.” They are theaters in which we gather to dramatize and celebrate how endlessly generative this thing we call black is.

But Mamie Till’s gesture has something else to tell us. There is no way to attenuate accumulated history of the violence that always circumscribes these images and the technology that produces them. And we shouldn’t desire such a thing; without that history, the centrifugal force of blackness would never have come into existence. In returning to such images, we recuperate them, transforming them into stages upon which we perform our own resilience. And so when I think back to the night when I first saw footage of Emmett Till’s funeral, I now recognize it as an initiation into a way of looking at the world, one that assembles commingled tragedies and triumphs into an assertion of my own humanity, and contextualizes the spectacle of black death as merely one of blackness’ iterations.

The post Moto G5 Review: A $250 smartphone with everything you need appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Google’s latest distribution numbers for a 7-day period ending May 2, 2017 shows that Android Nougat has continued its impressive gains. Compared to a month ago, Nougat showed an increase of 2.2 percent — a sizeable improvement considering just how vast the Android ecosystem is. Continue reading →

Yascha Mounk is perhaps one of the most eloquent defenders of ‘liberal democracy’, and he’s concerned with the rise of populist ‘right wing’ parties and leaders, like Trump, Le Pen, and Orbán. However, where he and many others seem to stub their toe is the right versus left dimension, which he and others are blinded by.

In his attempted takedown of Ross Douthat, who has opened a can of worms by trying to drive a reassessment of Le Pen as a populist nationalist, Mounk fails to really make a dent, and instead, simply marshals the ‘metropolitan’ talking points that others (like Sylvie Kauffman) have made recently. Mounk starts by praising Douthat for being able to pose alternative ways of looking at what’s going on, but in his efforts to see Le Pen as part of tectonic realignment at the foundation of political order, Younk says Douthat has gone too far:

Yascha Mounk, No, There Is No Case For Le Pen

That changed [his regard for Douthat] when Douthat penned his latest column, in which he puts his considerable skills in the service of defending the indefensible: the election of a post-fascist who presents a clear and present danger to ethnic and religious minorities in France.

Younk is focused on the threat to the established order that Le Pen represents, and his arguments are principally with her parties continued alignment with a fascist and xenophobic history in her party, and, it must be said, in France as a nation. France is the nation of Vichy, too, and not just De Gaulle. He argues that her policies on issues of the public square – like women wearing headscarves in public – are slightly more draconian that those of Sarkozy. But this election is not about headscarves, or even anti-islamism: it’s about globalism.

Mounk’s counter to Douthat never really touches on the deep changes going on, the realignment of politics away from right versus left toward the new up/down split, between the ‘open society’ stance of globalist urban elite (Macron in France, Clinton in the US), and the ‘closed society’ of nationalist working class in flyover country (Le Pen and Mélenchon n France, Trump in the US, May in the UK).

When you unthread the xenophobia and cryptofascism from the closed society arguments, what is left is a coherent political response to the deep problems of our time, a rejection of the globalist hypercapitalism that has led to huge inequality of income and opportunity across the industrialized world, and across Europe. It is a rejection of the transfer of political and economic control to technocratic EU functionaries in Brussels, and immigration policies that favor immigrants over natives.

In Douthat’s Op-Ed piece today, when responding to Mounk and others who have attacked him for acknowledging Le Pen’s position in this realignment, he mentions Christopher Caldwell’s recent article on Christophe Guilluy as the best characterization of what is actually going on in France, and I agree. I wrote about this last week (see Christoper Caldwell, The French, Coming Apart). 

Guilluy says that the workings of globalization have left no room for the marginalized working class of France, and the traditional rivalry/collusion of the two wings of the neoliberal globalist ‘party’ – center right versus center left – has failed to include the interests of those on the periphery, out in the hinterlands away from the knowledge workers in the major metropolitian areas. So the Socialists and Republicans are out of the running, rejected by what looks like ‘extremists’ when viewed in the old left-versus-right perspective. But the realignment has already happened, and is blindsiding those stuck in the right-versus-left mindset, like Mounk, and he attacks Douthat (not one of my favorite people) for ‘defending the indefensible’. However, Douthat is attempting to shift to the new paradigm, discussing open versus closed societies, suggesting that the anti-globalist, anti-elite, marginalized Left Behinds have a case. And they have to pick someone to make that case. They have to follow someone, after all.

Denying the legitimacy of the Left Behind’s grievances led to a Trump victory in the US and Brexit in the UK, and it could lead to an upset of the established order in France, if not in this election, then in the next.

Meanwhile, the other extremist, Mélenchon can’t bring himself to support Macron, because to do so is to deny the primacy of the antiglobalist agenda, and to place the aspirations of the elite above the needs of the Left Behinds. Unlike Sanders’ support for Clinton, in the US, which pissed off many of his most ardent followers.

So, where will the center of gravity fall in France?

Noah Millman, Why not Le Pen?:

Noah Millman makes very similar arguments to those I offered in Douthat, Mounk, and the Fate of France:

[…] it is true that a Le Pen victory would likely be welcomed in Moscow and in Washington, and would be a terrible blow to those who see themselves as the liberal vanguard. But there are other threats to liberal democracy than populist nationalism, and the technocratic order that Macron runs to vindicate may well be one of them. Brussels rules not so much with the consent of the governed as with the conviction that it alone is capable of properly balancing the continent’s manifold interests — which is precisely what ordinary democratic politics is supposed to be for. Is it so unthinkable to prioritize the latter threat over the threat of populism?

[…]

I am not a populist-nationalist. I am far too liberal to be a nationalist and far too conservative to be a populist. Nor do I believe that the advocates of populist-nationalism actually have solutions to the profound economic and demographic transformations that are powering their rise across the globe. But I do believe that populism plays an important part in the ecosystem of democracy. And if that banner is going to advance, I might just rather it be carried by someone who cares about our common liberal heritage than by someone hostile or indifferent to them.

In the end, I can’t say that I actually hope for a Le Pen victory. But I can say that I don’t really look forward to a triumph by Macron. The future is not a fixed star, and the center will only hold if it is responsive to the concrete needs of the people, and not merely the abstract demands of a hypothesized future. Before he wins, I’d like to see Macron acknowledge that. And if he won’t, well … why not Le Pen?

Exactly. Another person thinking the unthinkable. 

The situation in France is not a simple choice of good versus evil. It is a dilemma, with no simplistic solution.

mostlysignssomeportents:

@matttomic’s Sandwich Alignment Chart isn’t just an amusing and thought-provoking taxonomy of sandwiches (though it certainly is that!).

It’s also seemingly calculated to shatter the mental equilibrium of @hodgman, who has waged a multi-year war on the notion that the hot-dog is a sandwich.

I just like the idea (as does JWZ) that there’s a Radical Sandwich Anarchy camp I can join.

https://boingboing.net/2017/05/03/taxonomies-of-carbs.html

I was fine up to ‘pop-tart is a sandwich’. Sorry. No way.

Just in time for warm summer months, Toronto-based Kobo has announced its latest e-reader, the Kobo Aura H20.

It’s an updated version of last year’s Aura One that trades in its predecessor’s 7.8-inch screen for a more manageable 6.8-inch display. At $200 CAD, it’s also $50 less expensive than the Aura One at launch.

Otherwise, this is the same premium e-reader MobileSyrup liked a lot last year. Like the Aura One, it’s IP8X certified, which means it can survive under two metres of water for up to 60 minutes. It also features, just like the Aura One, 8GB of internal storage — enough to hold 6,000 simultaneously, according to Kobo — and a feature called ComfortLight PRO, which reduces the display’s blue-light output at night.

Like every Kobo device, the Aura H20 includes a variety of software customization options that allow each user to tailor the device’s reading experience to their preference. In all, users can choose from 50 different font sizes and 11 different font styles.

Canadians can pre-order the Kobo Aura H20 starting on May 15. Select retailers across the country will start stocking the e-reader on May 22.

Source: Kobo

The post Kobo’s new Aura H20 e-reader is a smaller, more affordable take on the waterproof Aura One appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Zita Meirina, A. Saragih, Antara News, May 06, 2017

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It's easy to forget that Indonesia is the  sixth largest in the world in number of internet users, and the fouth largest in terms of Facebook users. This isn't a country known for its literacy rates, coming in second-last among  ASEAN member countries, with a low demand for books and newpapers. The result is that people believe what they read on the internet. "A survey showed that Indonesian people believe in 65 percent of internet information. This is bad. The percentage is quite high in comparison with people in many other countries," says  Informatics Ministry official Samuel Abrijani Pangerapan. The problem is, the needed  investment in traditional media would cost billions. Indonesians need to make their internet better - because at least it is reaching the people - instead of trying to replace it.

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While Microsoft’s Surface laptop is impressive looking and sleek, it does have a few drawbacks.

Beyond the fact that the laptop runs Microsoft’s new somewhat limited education-focused version of Windows called Windows 10 S — though upgrading to Windows 10 Pro is free — the laptop also doesn’t feature any USB-C ports.

This isn’t an issue right now, but could become a problem in a few years when the relatively new port technology becomes more common. This move is also in stark contrast to Apple’s new line of USB-C MacBook Pro laptops, which only feature USB-C ports. This has resulted in an often frustrating cottage industry of hubs, ports and various adapters for Apple’s laptops.

In a promotional video showing off the laptop’s ‘craftmanship,’ The Verge spotted what looks like a prototype Surface Laptop that includes two USB-C ports in the location where the current Surface Laptop’s power connector is.

In an interview with MobileSyrup’s Rose Behar, Ralf Groene, Microsoft’s head of industrial design said that his company believes that “the USB connector is a connector in transition.”

“If you take a snapshot of now and the next four years, people have a ton of stuff that they’ve bought and want to hold onto, that is USB-A,” said Groen.

For more detail on the Surface Laptop, check out our extensive hands-on with Microsoft’s laptop.

Source: The Verge

The post Surface Laptop prototype with two USB-C ports shows up in promotional Microsoft video appeared first on MobileSyrup.

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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It seems like quite the technological ouroboros: Apple is having a bit of a tough time convincing people to buy its current iPhone model because they’re too focused on the next version of the device, even before the company has had a chance to reveal any details about it.

During a phone call to discuss Apple’s most recent earnings yesterday, the company noted a slight drop in iPhone sales, down from 51.9 million in the same quarter a year ago to 50.7 million.

In the question-and-answer section of the call with CEO Tim Cook, an analyst noted a recent survey that found that the “purchase intent” — a metric for the likelihood of consumers to buy a product — for the iPhone is at a nine-year low. Additionally, the rate at which Apple is retaining U.S. iPhone users is reportedly on the decline. Is Cook concerned by these numbers?

Cook said that while he only “glanced” at that survey, in general, the company is seeing “what we believe to be a pause in purchases on iPhone,” which he says the company believes is “due to the earlier and much more frequent reports about future iPhones.”

Among those rumors that have been bouncing around already for months — more than half a year before the next iPhone models will be announced — is that the new versions of the phone will feature wireless charging.

Apple is known for its quality hardware and software, but services are another story.

Cloud-based services are the future – there's no denying that. And Apple historically has struggled with its cloud offerings. From MobileMe, to the early growing pains of iCloud, to the Apple Maps fiasco, the company gained a poor reputation in the area of services.

Only in the last two years has Apple publicly touted services as a core part of its business. Company press releases as recent as May 2015 ended with the following self-definition:

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

There's a lot that feels outdated here, including the fact that both Mac and iPod are highlighted before the iPhone. But one major way this paragraph fails to describe the Apple of today is that the word 'services' is nowhere to be found.

Amid a variety of other changes, Apple's current self-definition includes the following:

Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud.

Services are a key component of modern Apple. The way the company defines itself, along with the numerous services shoutouts in quarterly earnings calls, prove that.

Despite Apple's increased focus on services, the common narrative that the company "can't do services" still hangs around – in online tech circles at least.

But is that narrative still true, or has it grown outdated?

I want to share how I use Apple services in my everyday life across three important contexts of life:

• As I work,
• On the go, and
• Around the house.

My aim is not to perform an in-depth comparison of Apple's cloud offerings and competing products. Though competitors and their features will come up occasionally, the focus here is on my experiences in everyday living – my experiences, not yours. I understand that just because something does or doesn't work for me, the same isn't necessarily true for you. The point of this piece is not to try proving anything; instead, I simply want to assess and share my current experiences with Apple's services.

As I Work

My work for MacStories consists of researching and writing about Apple, while my day job involves a wide array of different tasks such as public speaking and a variety of administrative functions.

iCloud Mail

My work day usually begins each morning with email, and iCloud Mail is used both for my day job and my personal correspondence. For years I was a Gmail user, but eventually I left it for iCloud out of a desire to use Apple's Mail app on iOS. Gmail works mostly fine in Mail.app, except that it has never been able to serve push notifications. Whether that's Apple's fault or Google's, I don't know – all I know is that it's a problem.

The switch from Gmail to iCloud resulted in minimal noticeable changes. In fact, the only real changes were positive ones. The setup process on new devices was easier because iCloud is baked into iOS; no more need for a separate Google login before things would work properly. And of course, as previously mentioned, after the change I was able to receive push notifications in my app of choice. But there were no negative changes. Apparently I was never a prolific user of Gmail's power user features, because iCloud's lack of said features didn't make a difference to me.

In the past I had heard Gmail's spam filtering talked up as more effective than iCloud's, but that anecdote has not proven true for me. I can't remember ever getting spam in my iCloud inbox; and perhaps Gmail was too aggressive at filtering for me anyways, as there were multiple occasions when something was sent to my Gmail spam when it shouldn't have been.

I continue to use iCloud Mail with Apple's Mail app, and have found no reason to even consider looking elsewhere. It's been reliable for me, and reliability is key in the area of work.

Apple Notes

Another app and service that's used heavily in my workday is Apple Notes. Though I recently flirted with the idea of switching to Evernote, there's too much about Apple Notes that I love.

For MacStories, I have notes where I keep track of ideas for upcoming Club MacStories issues, story ideas, and other reference information. I also have several notes that are shared among MacStories team members using iOS 10's collaboration features. I've found Notes to have one of the most simple, easy-to-use forms of text collaboration.

Before iOS 9, the syncing in Apple Notes was its biggest liability; now, sync is one of the service's strengths. I've never had data loss or conflicted copies of notes; everything is always synced just as it should be, usually in an instant. Sometimes I'll have a note open on my iPad, then put the device to sleep and work in the same note on my iPhone while on the go. When I get back to my iPad and unlock it, if I'm quick enough I can see the app write over the old contents with my revisions; blink and I've missed it.

Rich link previews are one of my favorite little touches in Notes. I keep a database of notes pertaining to different topics where I store quotes, book references, and links to related articles. Rather than being an eyesore in those topical notes, links stand out as one of the more attractive elements of each note. This feature may seem inconsequential, but it's one of the things I missed most when trying out Evernote. I'm hoping that future versions of Notes will adopt the expanded rich link support found in iOS 10's Messages app where tweets, YouTube videos, and other specific types of links receive special formatting inside the app. It makes for a more functional and attractive note.

I currently have over 800 notes stored in Apple Notes, and the app hasn't slowed down a bit. While I would appreciate some more power user features and organization options, even without those things, I can optimize the app so it serves me best.

Reading List

Safari Reading List is another Apple service I use constantly throughout my workday. I've tried options like Pocket and Instapaper, but Reading List remains my favorite. I prefer reading articles in their original native format, enjoying the extra flavor that's found with each website's unique design. And for those rare occasions when a site's ads are overwhelming, I can use the Reader options for a clutter-free reading environment. The fact that Reading List is built-in to Safari is a plus as well.

Whether in the full Safari app, or Safari View Controller inside an app like Tweetbot, saving articles to Reading List is quick and easy. I use Reading List both to save stories that look interesting, but that I don't have time to read right away, and to save articles related to a news story I'm working on for quick reference. Though alternative read-later services may be more full-featured, Reading List best suits my needs and preferences.

iCloud Calendar

While I don't have a job that relies heavily on appointments, I do have a handful of meetings that go on the calendar each week. There's not much to say about iCloud Calendar other than that it does what it needs to do. It keeps track of my events, syncs to all my devices, and does so free from hiccups.

The one noteworthy feature I enjoy most is Calendar's sharing options. My wife and I each have our own personal calendars in iCloud, and we share those calendars with each other. What makes iCloud's sharing so useful is that we each receive a notification when changes are made to the other person's calendar. So when my wife adds, changes, or deletes an event from her calendar, I get a notification. And when it's my calendar being updated, she gets notified. This is a great feature, particularly in the context of keeping up with work events. If there's a social event one or both of us are going to attend, we'll always discuss that with each other first, but as my often-fluid work schedule changes, my wife being immediately notified means a lot less work on my part; no need to continually communicate those changes to keep her informed. When I've tried setting up similar notifications with Google Calendar in the past, both with native options and using IFTTT, it was unreliable and ultimately frustrating. iCloud's sharing features have been flawless.

iCloud Storage

As an iPad-first user, cloud storage is an essential part of my computing. And most of my files live in iCloud. There are issues with iCloud Drive the app – most notably the way its document picker makes navigation difficult by showing all sub-folders – but overall the service works fine. It became a lot easier to use on iOS this past year when the 'Add to iCloud Drive' action extension became available systemwide, and over time I've actually grown fond of the partly-sandboxed, app-centric folder structure.

Besides a revision to iCloud Drive's document picker on iOS, sharing features are my biggest request for the service. The only files I don't keep in iCloud Drive are in Dropbox, and that's largely because iCloud has no concept of shared files. There are hacks that allow file sharing, but a native option is needed. Give me that, and my Dropbox would be reduced to nothing but a few Microsoft Word files.¹

I have heard horror stories involving iCloud's new features in macOS Sierra, so that sounds like an area that needs improvement. But working exclusively on iOS means I've been able to avoid those issues.

Apple Photos

Apple Photos is an essential part of my work as I take lots of screenshots of apps I write about. Much of the time those screenshots are taken on my iPhone while I'm writing on my iPad, so having images sync between devices is crucial, and Photos has been rock-solid in that area. Another thing I'll do at times is upload images using my iPhone rather than iPad. I run a workflow that uploads the image to our MacStories CDN then copies the image's URL to my clipboard. With the aid of Universal Clipboard I just hit paste on my iPad, and the URL is added to my working document in Ulysses. I've heard that Universal Clipboard isn't as reliable on the Mac, but on my iOS devices it's always worked well for me.

On the Go

I don't travel often, so this section focuses not so much on big trips, but more on the Apple services that I use regularly when out and about locally.

Apple Maps

I have a terrible – you could say non-existent – sense of direction. As such, anytime I go somewhere I've never been before, or haven't been in a while, I rely on my phone to keep me from getting hopelessly lost.

Ever since Apple Maps launched with iOS 6, I've preferred it over Google Maps. Even in its debut version, it was the best looking maps app I'd ever used; Google Maps never appealed to me from a visual standpoint, while Apple Maps instantly did. Obviously, attractive visuals are useless when paired with faulty directions, but fortunately the mapping data in my area has always been generally fine. Apple's well-publicized issues of faulty data only bit me once; for a while afterward I often double-checked directions in Google Maps to be safe, but the service has long since regained my trust.

One of my favorite ways to use Apple Maps is on the Apple Watch. It's become regular practice for me to start navigation on the Watch without touching my iPhone. This works well because I include location data with my calendar events when possible, so I can tap the Calendar complication on my watch face, select the correct event, then Force Touch to bring up the option for directions.

iOS 10's update to Maps included a number of improvements, a couple favorites of which include the option to pan around during navigation and end navigation from the Lock screen. My most used new feature though, and one I initially didn't anticipate using too much, is Maps extensions – specifically, the extensions that allow booking rides from Uber and Lyft within Apple Maps. It has always been my habit to look up information about places from inside Maps, and the option to get pricing for a ride and book a ride without ever leaving Maps is great.

Google Maps does seem to update its data more frequently than Apple Maps,² and its new lists feature is tempting, but those advantages don't come close to outweighing Apple's in my mind.

Apple Pay

Apple Pay is one of the most delightful Apple services and also one of the most frustrating. The frustration comes not with the service itself, but with its lack of adoption and poor implementation among many locations in the U.S.

The two retail stores I frequent most – Target and Wal-Mart – refuse to support it; their new standard payment readers encourage chip-equipped cards and chirp loudly at you at the end of each transaction. The knowledge that a simpler, more pleasant payment option exists makes that chirping all the more painful.

Along with places that don't accept Apple Pay, there are also the places that do, but in a poor way – fast food drive-thrus, I'm looking at you. The common method of NFC deployment in a drive-thru requires employees to hold a bulky payment unit out the window for you. After my first couple experiences with this, I decided it's easier on everyone to just pull out my wallet and hand over a credit card.

Though Apple Pay fails in those major areas, I don't know how much blame Apple deserves for that. Competitors like Android Pay and Samsung Pay are in the same boat, subject to the whims of retailers who won't prioritize customers' wishes.

The places where Apple Pay does work, it's fantastic. I still get excited every time I see the symbol that indicates I can use Apple Pay to complete my purchase. One such place is a gas station built this past year that's right on my way to work. Apple Pay is accepted at the pump, a fact that quickly made it my most-frequented place to fill up. My first experience using Apple Pay on the web in Safari was great as well. The service is solid – it's just time for U.S. retailers to catch up.

Around the House

Leisure time around the house tends to be media time in one form or another, whether television, music, or news.

iTunes and TV

If my wife and I are relaxing together at the end of a busy day, there's a good chance we're putting the Apple TV to use. Although Apple has never come out with a formal television service a la DIRECTV Now or YouTube TV, there are a few Apple-created TV options that do exist. We use iTunes for movie rentals and purchases, and Apple's TV app handles nearly all of our video watching.³ Whether we're watching content from Hulu, CBS, PBS, or another video app, it all comes through the TV app, and we love how simple that makes things.

The streaming services we use, although not made by Apple, do come with the benefit of being App Store subscriptions. So rather than needing to create accounts for each service, it all funnels through my Apple ID. Just as the TV app consolidates those services' content, the App Store consolidates their administrative aspects. This is especially useful in a day and age where subscription services abound, and it can be hard to keep track of them all. Thanks to the App Store, those various services can be powered by just one account, with one source of payment, and each subscription can be cancelled or restarted with a visit to one place.

Apple Music

Apple Music is my streaming music service of choice. I switched away from Spotify upon Apple Music's debut because of the way it merged my iTunes library with streaming music. In its original form the service was okay, but not great; I really appreciate the iOS 10 revamp from last year, though, as it made both For You and Browse more useful than before.

I've heard that Spotify has better tools for new music discovery, but Apple Music has been fine for me, probably because I spend a below-average amount of time listening to music. When I do need something new to listen to, I'll usually discover it through the 'A-List,' 'Best of the Week,' and 'Today's Hits' playlists; the featured new releases under Browse often contain new music I want to try as well. If there's one feature request I have, it's an option to save music into a Favorites list that will show up at the top of Library. When you can have all the music in the world, it can be easy to lose track of some of it; a favoriting option would solve that.

Apple News

I catch up on news using the Apple News app each day. I've never been a fan of most RSS-type apps because I prefer to read news stories in their native format on the web. Apple News has been an exception to that rule, likely thanks to the Apple News Format. News outlets that have adopted the ANF have stories that look beautiful without all looking the same; each site's stories have their own distinct features, which I appreciate. Apple News Format also showcases stories in ways that just couldn't be done on printed paper, like this one from Vox. Curling up in bed or on the couch with Apple News on an iPhone or iPad creates just the kind of experience I want from a modern digital news service.

The Big Three

There are three Apple services I have failed to properly address so far, and that's because they all serve such diverse roles in my everyday life – in work, travel, and home life – that it wouldn't feel right to try lumping them into one of the previous categories. Those services are iMessage, Siri, and the App Store.

iMessage

Until last year, iMessage was both one of Apple's most widely used services and also one of its most neglected.

When iMessage was first introduced, its primary competition came from SMS. And as a basic way to send and receive messages, it has always worked better than SMS, which may explain the lack of attention it has historically received from Apple. But in recent years, more feature-rich messaging services have presented serious competition for iMessage. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and more threatened one of the iPhone's greatest lock-ins. So Apple fought back.

iOS 10 made Messages the centerpiece of its improvements. The app received not just a few changes, but more like everything you could think of and then some – rich link support, message effects, tapbacks, emoji enhancements, iMessage apps, and on the list goes. Though Apple went overboard in some ways, there's no denying that the service is vastly improved despite growing a bit bloated.⁴

I use iMessage all day, every day. As with other messaging services, iMessage works best when communicating with people on the same platform. I wish everyone was a blue-bubble person – a sentiment most of you probably agree with – but Apple will likely never bring iMessage to platforms like Android or Windows. Fortunately, the vast majority of people I communicate with use iMessage; it's the premier digital contact method with my wife and nearly all work colleagues, friends, and family members. Some features I appreciate most are read receipts, tapbacks, rich links, stickers, and delivery confirmation. Another key benefit I wouldn't want to go without is the ability to read and respond to messages on whichever device is most convenient; messaging via Apple Watch using tapbacks, emoji, or default replies is especially enjoyable.

iMessage apps show great potential, and I use them every day in the form of stickers, but Apple has a lot of work to do to realize that potential. The interface for iMessage apps is clunky, with too many taps required to use them, and poor options for organizing them. With some changes, apps could become valuable additions that make Messages a central hub for communication of many kinds. As it stands now though, my use of non-sticker apps is sporadic; sending payments with Square Cash, gift cards with Starbucks, or files with Dropbox is convenient, but those are currently rarely used apps, not tools I depend on.

Billions of messages are sent each day through iMessage. Apple recently revealed that during the Super Bowl this year, up to 380,000 messages were sent per second. This nearly doubles the previous high quoted by an Apple executive of 200,000 per second. My hope is that Apple continually improves the service rather than letting last year's enhancements grow stale; but even if they don't, in light of how crazy the messaging situation is on Android, I'll remain thankful for iMessage.

Siri

Siri tends to be the butt of Apple jokes. If you want to find an example of Apple not doing services well, most likely you'll point at Siri. Much of that blame is deserved, but some of it isn't. Siri has been vastly improved over the years, and while it still has occasional flubs, I've grown to depend on it more than ever.

In the area of work, Siri doesn't do too much for me. I use it more in other areas of my life. My only consistent work-related use is setting time-based reminders. Although I could use the time-setting features in my preferred task manager, Todoist, pairing Siri with Reminders accomplishes the task much quicker. I also appreciate how for time-sensitive items, a due Reminder will stick around on my devices' Lock screens until I snooze or complete it. This helps ensure that I don't forget about it altogether in the rush of working.

Siri is used in my car almost daily – to kick off navigation, to play music, and to message my wife when I'm heading home. Unfortunately Siri over Bluetooth in the car isn't great, with long delays and the need to speak unnaturally loudly. Another issue that may be unique to my car is that Siri gets cut off whenever I activate a turn signal. None of these problems are Apple's fault, but they can be frustrating nonetheless. As such, I sometimes resort to using Siri on my Watch rather than bother with Bluetooth.

Around the house is where Siri gets the most usage because it's where the service is at its best; the quiet environment makes misunderstandings less likely, and the private space eliminates the social awkwardness that comes with talking to computers in public.

At home I use Siri on just about all the platforms it's available, though in different ways. When listening to podcasts through AirPods, I use Siri for playback controls when my hands are tied up, and I've even asked Siri several times to define words I heard in a podcast. My iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch are the more general-purpose Siri devices, with the iPad being used the least of the three.⁵ I use Siri to add items to my grocery list, set timers, call and text people, get information about an upcoming event – e.g. an awards show or football game – or the weather, play music, and make general Q&A inquiries. On the Apple TV I ask "Who stars in this?" to see actor information and "What did she say?" to rewind and have subtitles temporarily turned on. If I know what I want to watch already, I'll also use Siri to avoid navigating any menus.

My main complaint against Siri involves its limited awareness of conversational context, i.e. sequential inference. While some follow-up questions are handled well, most often Siri gets very dumb all of a sudden if I make a request that assumes knowledge of my prior inquiry. I understand that this isn't an easy problem to solve, but it is a problem nonetheless.

I don't own an Amazon Echo, but I've heard that Alexa is far more reliable than Siri, and I believe it. Siri needs to get better. It needs to work reliably every time, otherwise people will quickly abandon it. But it seems to be getting there, and that's been evident with my increased Siri use of late.

App Store

As has been made clear up to this point, I use a lot of Apple's stock apps. But I can do more thanks to the App Store. Third-party apps open up the possibilities of what my device can do almost infinitely so; there's an app out there for virtually everything. And how do I get those apps? Through the App Store.⁶

We may not often think of the App Store as a service, but it is. It's a service in itself, and it's also a store full of other services. Financially speaking, the App Store is Apple's biggest line item in the area of services; it's where the most money comes in for Apple's soon-to-be Fortune 100-level department.

From the average user's perspective, the App Store has chugged along over the years as an efficient, dependable service. It faces the occasional hiccup of downtime, but that's true of all cloud services. New apps are added frequently, and Apple has done a commendable job with editorial curation. Since the App Store has access to my Apple ID's primary payment method, purchasing apps only requires a quick finger placement on the Home button of my iPhone or iPad. It's like Apple Pay in retail stores, but even easier. Apps update silently in the background, so all the software remains fresh.

These are all things we take for granted as givens, but before the App Store existed, the world of software was far less elegant. The App Store is by no means perfect, but it is an example of a massive service that, in general, works well.

One of the primary complaints about the App Store comes from app developers who saw the store sit unchanged for years. But even that complaint has been letting up recently due to the work being done under Phil Schiller's supervision. More than ever before, the App Store has been changing in big and small ways. It has also seen record-setting growth of late. There is more that can be done to help indie developers create healthy, sustainable businesses, but the recent App Store changes are encouraging.

The Mac App Store needs more help currently than the iOS App Store, but since my primary computer is an iPad, not a Mac, I almost never visit the Mac App Store. For those of you who do, I hope Apple doubles down on the Mac App Store and makes it a place worthy of developer's creations.

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One of my biggest personal takeaways as I worked on this story was surprise at how many Apple services I use each day, and how well those services fare for me.

Some of the services I mentioned aren't commonly designated as services, and I wonder why that is. If they were rolled out as separate products, each with an accompanying price tag, would they then deserve the 'service' brand? Consider the following list:

• Dropbox
• Google Photos
• Evernote
• Instapaper
• Google Calendar
• WhatsApp

Each of these are commonly thought of as services, yet their Apple-made equivalents are commonly thought of simply as apps. Just because Apple throws many of its services in with the cost of hardware doesn't mean their name should change; these services live in apps, but at their core run in the cloud.

The Apple of today has made services a core part of its business. Not only from a financial standpoint, but also in the area of user experience. The experience Apple sells is not merely one of hardware, or software – it includes services. And it's that Apple experience that helped make the iPhone one of the most successful products in the history of the world.

Imagine an iPhone without many of Apple's services available on it. It wouldn't be as complete a package. Perhaps many in the tech community wouldn't mind losing Apple's first-party services from their phones, but my guess is that the vast majority of iPhone users sure would. I'd be willing to bet that a surprisingly large portion of the iPhone's hundreds of millions of users never go looking for a third-party photo service, note-taking service, or the like. And guess what? They still love the iPhone. In those users' minds, services are not a weakness of Apple, they're a core part of the iPhone experience.

You can draw your own conclusions from this story, but mine is that Apple's services get a bad rap they generally don't deserve; the company's reputation for not doing services well is outdated. Are things perfect? Of course not. But they're a lot better than the common narrative says.

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China-based tech developer Unihertz has created what is says is the smallest 4G smartphone ever made.

Offered on Kickstarter, the Jelly smartphone has a minuscule 2.45-inch display and is designed to fit in a pocket without losing any functionality.

Featuring Android 7.o Nougat, Jelly is said to be able to run nearly any app from the Google Play Store.

As of now, the project has received over $151,000 USD in funding, far surpassing its $30,000 USD target. Over 1,700 people have backed the phone, which still has 34 days left on Kickstarter.

The full specs of the tiny smartphone are:

• 4G LTE
• 2.45-inch display with 240 x 432 resolution
• 950mAh battery
• 2-megapixel front-facing camera, 8-megapixel rear-facing camera
• dual SIM cards
• 1GB (standard version) or 2G RAM (pro version, higher tier pledge)
• 8GB storage (standard version) or 16GB (pro version)

The phone ships worldwide, with orders expected to go out starting in August.

Source: Kickstarter

The post The smallest 4G smartphone ever is available on Kickstarter appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Microsoft has unveiled its new Windows 10 S operating system designed to rival Google’s lightweight Chrome OS.

Among other limitations, Windows 10 S is only capable of running apps found in the Windows store. This means that users can just download web browsers found in the Windows store, severely impacting their options. As of right now it also looks like Windows 10 S users won’t even be able to use Chrome unless Google opts to add the browser to Microsoft’s Windows Store.

Furthermore, Microsoft will not allow users to change the default browser from Microsoft Edge or Windows Explorer with Windows 10 S.

“Microsoft Edge is the default web browser on Windows 10 S,” reads Windows 10 S’ FAQ. “You are able to download another browser that might be available from the Windows Store, but Microsoft Edge will remain the default if, for example, you open an .htm file.”

Not only can users not set Chrome as the default browser, but they also can’t change the OS’ default search functionality either. When a user searches in the browser, it’s automatically sourced from Microsoft’s Bing. Users will have to go to Google.ca if they want to search using Google’s platform.

Windows 10 S brings unique features to Microsoft’s standard Windows 10 operating system, but being locked to using Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer might dissuade many people from using the OS.

Source: The Verge

The post Windows 10 S FAQ says users can’t change the OS’ default browser appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The Alberta Koch Automotive Group, the province’s largest Ford dealer, has launched an e-commerce dealership.

Using a new website, consumers can browse inventory, chat with live operators or reserve or purchase vehicles, all from outside any dealership location.

With the online ‘Reserve’ option, consumers reserve a vehicle by placing a refundable one percent deposit. Prior to final payment, consumers will then be able to book a test drive, negotiate pricing, read all of the terms and conditions or speak to an operator regarding any questions or concerns.

The ‘Purchase Vehicle’ option directs consumers to use a major credit card or a Paypal account to complete their transaction. There is an option to either pay in full online or to speak with a representative to complete the transaction.

The new service will begin its provincial rollout starting in Edmonton’s Koch Ford Lincoln and DK Ford in the city of Leduc.

It’s worth noting that while the press release calls this Canada’s first e-commerce dealership, consumers are able to purchase Tesla vehicles online and have them shipped country-wide.

More information can be found here.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons 

Source: Canada Newswire

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In a press release from the Musqueam Nation, Chief Wayne Sparrow stated  “Musqueam has not been meaningfully consulted nor accommodated for the GMT (George Massey Tunnel)  project. This project is in the core of our exclusive territory and the Provincial and Federal government have not received Musqueam’s consent.” Other media have picked up this unfulfilled duty to consult where indigenous  rights and title exists.

This lack of consultation is a gaping omission given the Province’s claim through the Minister of Transportation  that they have undergone a robust consultation process, even though this seems very slim on their website. And the Musqueam Nation have a  very valid reason to be listened to and accommodated in any  process impacting the Fraser River at this location-they have inhabited this land for thousands of years.

The proposed Massey Bridge lies squarely in the “heart of Musqueam territory and the BC (British Columbia) government has not received consent from Musqueam to proceed. It is in an area that has been occupied by Musqueam since time immemorial. GMT is surrounded by heritage sites, and other culturally important sites, including fishing areas in the Lower Fraser River that Musqueam has Aboriginal rights to fish, which are protected by the Canadian Constitution after a Supreme Court of Canada ruling (R. v Sparrow, 1992).

The Musqueam note that the tunnel removal “will add to the negative cumulative effects in Musqueam’s territorial waters in the Fraser River. BC and Canada have not considered these effects as they continue to approve projects like this”. And the First Nations is quite clear about what they think of this project: “Musqueam will not stand for the continued degradation of our lands and waters. The BC and Canadian government have much work to do with us to ensure the GMT project can proceed according to Musqueam conditions”, said Chief Sparrow. He added, “Musqueam is leading in areas of stewardship and management in our territory, and will raise the bar on all future projects in Musqueam territory. We are not against development, but it must be done in ways that include Musqueam values, and ensures the protection of our rights.”

The Musqueam values are being echoed by others who have done their due diligence and realize the ecological degradation of the lands and the river that will occur, including the damage to the river in the removal of the tunnel and further dredging to accommodate larger ships.The Province will say they are not doing this work which is partially right, because in this shell game the dredging would be under the auspices of the Port which is a federal authority.

When the stewards of the land, the Nation that has solidly lived here for thousands of years before Canadian Confederation speak, we all should be listening. The fact that this First Nation was not actively consulted is surprising. As the Musqueam First Nation says on their website,  colonization resulted in  “our traditional and customary system of authority quickly became secondary without the awareness of native leadership“.

It looks like the Province is still going bull-headedly on that same path, regardless of the devastating impacts on the Agricultural Land Reserve, the sensitive eco-system of the Fraser River delta and its shoreline, the wishes of the Metro Vancouver Mayors’ Council and the interests of the First Nations who have rights to this Territory.

 

mkalus shared this story from EU referendum and Brexit | The Guardian.

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mkalus shared this story from EU referendum and Brexit | The Guardian.

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Related: Juncker will find me 'bloody difficult woman' in Brexit talks, says May

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mkalus shared this story from EU referendum and Brexit | The Guardian.

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Setting out for the first time the locations which that will be beneficiaries of the UK’s exit from the EU, one of the bank’s most senior executives also indicated that other roles would follow once the outcome of the negotiations was known.

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mkalus shared this story from EU referendum and Brexit | The Guardian.

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Michel Barnier says he hopes to reach an entente cordiale with UK and refuses to confirm reports of possible €100bn exit bill

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In his first press conference since EU leaders agreed a tough opening stance for the Brexit talks on Saturday, Michael Barnier said he was not asking for a blank cheque from the UK and refused to confirm reports that the divorce bill could be as high as €100bn (£84.5bn).

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mkalus shared this story from EU referendum and Brexit | The Guardian.

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If the prime minister thinks she she can retain the best bits of the European Union without any of the obligations, she really is living in another galaxy

Leaders of Britain’s 27 EU partner countries have now thrown down the gauntlet: no discussions on a trade deal will take place until there’s progress on the UK’s divorce bill, the Ireland-UK border and the rights of EU citizens.

We are told there is a document on the table relating to UK citizens living in Europe and those of citizens from other EU countries who live in Britain, but the UK is not prepared to sign. No reason has been given as to why.

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