Rolandt

Thanks to our pals at Mobi By Shaw Go for a handy crib sheet of data on the success the bike-share service has enjoyed in the 5 months since launch. These numbers are terrific, for a transportation alternative that soft-launched on July 20, 2016.  And don’t forget having scored a big sponsorship deal with Shaw.

My favourite stat is about the estimated calories burned being roughly equivalent to eating 53, 630 doughnuts.  I wonder if those are the Timmies double-double chocolate doughnut? MMMmmmmm. . . . .

Note these numbers are dated Dec 15, 2016 at 11 pm. [Click for larger version]

Mobi on June 20, 2016; newly-assembled (pre-Shaw) bikes awaiting launch                          [Click for larger version]. Photo by City of Vancouver.

2016 has been the year that I got used to iOS as my primary computing platform. After years of slowly transitioning from macOS, 2016 was all about optimizing my workflows and getting the most out of my iPhone and iPad.

As I documented in two stories – one in February, the other last week – the consolidation of my iOS-only setup revolved around the iPad Pro. I see the 12.9-inch iPad Pro as the ultimate expression of iOS for portable productivity. With my 2011 MacBook Air now used three hours a week exclusively for podcasting, I invested my time in understanding the iPad platform at a deeper level. Thus, following two years spent assessing the viability of working from iOS, 2016 was characterized by the pursuit of better iOS apps for my needs. That effort was most notable on the iPad, but it also affected the iPhone, which I see as the mobile sidekick to my iPad Pro.

Two trends emerged once I began outlining a list of candidates for my annual Must-Have Apps roundup. First, the apps that define how I work on iOS haven't dramatically changed since last year. As you'll see in this year's collection, the core of what I do on iOS is in line with last year; there are some new entries and apps that have left the list, but my overall app usage is consistent with 2015.

The second pattern is more interesting. To be able to accomplish more every week and automate more aspects of my routine, I have increasingly switched to web services in lieu of iOS-only apps. In looking back at the past year of MacStories, I realized that a good portion of new workflows were based on web services, web automations, and open APIs. Some of those web services also offer iOS clients; others are strictly web-only, but I integrated them with iOS apps through Workflow and Zapier.

For these reasons, you'll notice a difference in the 2016 edition of my roundup. In addition to my must-have iOS apps, I've added a section for my must-have web services. Whether I primarily use them with iOS counterparts, in Safari, or via an API, these are the web services that have helped me handle more responsibilities for my two businesses at MacStories and podcasting duties at Relay FM.

As in previous years, you'll find a series of personal awards at the end of the story. These include my App of the Year and Runners-Up, and, for the first time, a Web Service of the Year and winners in other iOS categories.

Table of Contents

• Work Essentials
• Social
• Entertainment
• Reading & News
• Home
• Health
• Images
• Utilities
• Web Services
• Feature of the Year
  • Runners-Up
• 1.0 Release of the Year
  • Runner-Up
• Web Service of the Year
  • Runner-Up
• App of the Year
  • Runners-Up
• 2016

Work Essentials

Ulysses. The Soulmen's text editor has been the revelation of the year. Since late 2014, I've been coping with the apparent demise of Editorial – the app that singlehandedly reinvented how I worked on iOS – but I couldn't find another text editor I truly liked. With Ulysses, I've found my new home.

I was convinced to try Ulysses after reading David's review. As soon as I started using the app, I noticed that its spin on established Markdown paradigms – such as inline links and footnotes – wasn't a problem for me. Ulysses can export as plain text with standard Markdown formatting; the features it implements differently are, effectively, markup additions meant to enhance the writing experience. And because of those decisions, The Soulmen delivered the new best-in-class text editor for iOS.

It's hard to summarize what I like about Ulysses. I can use my favorite monospaced typeface for prose (Nitti) and customized dark theme. Inline links, images, and footnotes are represented as colored tags that expand into contextual menus, which increase the readability of a document. More importantly, Ulysses sets the new standard for text editors that want to integrate with Workflow through URL schemes; its automation features have allowed me to come up with a system dedicated to speeding up content creation for Club MacStories. Thanks to recent improvements to Ulysses' external folders, I migrated my entire plain text library to Dropbox, which I prefer to iCloud because of document revisions and integration with Zapier.

Ulysses 2.5 for iOS was one of the best app launches of 2016, and it's one of the apps I've used the most this year. [Review]

Working Copy. Whatever starts in Ulysses ends up in Working Copy. As I detailed in my iPad Pro story last week, we've moved to a GitHub-based collaborative workflow for every MacStories article, and Working Copy is my favorite GitHub client on iOS.

Working Copy's share extension can receive documents from any text editor and prepare them for a commit; in the app, diffs between commits are displayed with individual word highlights, which is a fantastic way to keep track of changes in the history of a Markdown document. Whether I want to share a personal draft with someone or need to prepare a section of MacStories Weekly, I can write in Ulysses, export a sheet as Markdown, and commit it directly with the Working Copy extension. When I want more control over editing and file management, I can even browse entire repositories stored in Working Copy from Textastic. I've been following this process for the past 10 months, and it's worked incredibly well for us. [Previous Coverage]

Blink. I've been generating iTunes affiliate links with John Voorhees' app since before he joined the MacStories team, and I keep using it because there's nothing else like it. Blink lets you search the iTunes Store and App Store and easily create affiliate links for any product. You can search and read descriptions in the app, or, even better, you can feed any shortened iTunes URL to the Blink extension and the app will resolve the link to turn it into an affiliate one. Blink is the backbone of my app review links. [Review]

Copied. When I want to permanently store bits of text or images and make them available across multiple devices with iCloud, I use Copied. This app is a clipboard manager but, because of iOS limitations, it can't monitor the clipboard in the background like a clipboard app on the Mac. Instead, you can save items in Copied in a variety of ways: with two different extensions, a widget, or a custom keyboard.

Copied is packed with features, including JavaScipt automation and custom text formatters, but I mostly use it to archive text templates I need to insert in articles and newsletters. Copied is particularly effective in Split View on the iPad as it can automatically save what you copy in another app. [Review]

Trello. We've moved the Club MacStories editorial calendar to Trello this year. I spend a lot of time in the Trello app, where I keep dozens of cards sorted into lists for each of the sections of MacStories Weekly we assemble every week. I liked using Trello for Club MacStories so much, it's become my default service for anything that entails collaboration.

Our Trello board to manage Club MacStories content.

Trello works for me because my brain appreciates its Kanban structure. I like splitting projects in multiple stacks that I can either visualize from a bird's eye view or zoom into to get more details. On iOS, Trello is a great choice for project management because its web API integrates with Workflow (which I use, for instance, to create rich cards from the App Store), it has a URL scheme to open specific lists (which I do from Launcher), and it supports Split View and Safari View Controller.

Trello has become the default tool for collaboration at MacStories, but I wish Fog Creek Software would bring support for power-ups to the iOS app.

Todoist. As I shared in an episode of Canvas about task managers, the expansion of MacStories in 2016 made me realize 2Do wasn't cutting it for us anymore. My life and work priorities had changed, and I needed a task manager that could integrate with services I was using to collaborate with other team members. Todoist was an obvious choice.

Todoist lets me set up shared task lists where a team member and I can assign tasks to each other with due dates and comments. There's support for natural language input to create and schedule tasks, and the app was recently updated with the ability to provide scheduling recommendations through artificial intelligence.

More importantly, Todoist isn't an app silo – it's a web service that integrates with my most used web apps. I can create tasks in Todoist directly from Slack, save RSS items as tasks with Zapier automation, and even dictate new tasks while talking with Alexa on my Amazon Echo or via Astra. With Todoist's extensible approach, I can add tasks from anywhere and, as a result, be more productive because I forget less and automate more.

Slack. Speaking of Slack, we've continued to use the service at MacStories over the past year, and, even if I don't love the iOS app (which always feels somewhat buggy and unreliable), I have to use it because it's where team communication happens. This year, I appreciated the ability to send messages to other apps with slash commands, as well as the useful snooze options to put Slack in Do Not Disturb mode. I also discovered that Slack can be automated with URL schemes to open specific channels and DMs. For 2017, I want to test more integrations to interact with services such as Trello and Gmail.

Scrivener. The majority of apps in this roundup are used at least once a day. I only worked in Scrivener for three months in the whole year to prepare my iOS 10 review from June to September. As the biggest project of the year, I effectively lived in Scrivener for an average of 10 hours a day with everything else (email, Twitter, RSS, Slack) shut off.

Scrivener is the only iOS app that can help writers finish book-length projects that involve rich text, research material, and advanced export options to compile a draft and share it with editors. I happily used Scrivener for my iOS 10 review and I plan to do it again for iOS 11 next year. Thanks to the latest improvements for Markdown users, I want to use Scrivener more often for smaller-scale projects, too.

iThoughts. Before my iOS reviews become Markdown drafts, they are mind maps. I've been mind mapping long essays since I was in high school, and I find it to be a great way to evaluate the weight of sections and their relationship to other topics.

iThoughts has fantastic support for keyboard shortcuts and Markdown formatting (which helps when moving content between the mind map and a text editor), and it can attach media and links to individual nodes as research material. I also like the style settings that allow me to adjust a map to my taste. Like Scrivener, iThoughts is another app I don't want to be without for future longform stories.

Dropbox. I include the Dropbox app every year because Dropbox is my cloud filesystem. After using the iPad Pro for a year, Dropbox became even more of a necessity: serious file management on iOS is only possible by going all-in with cloud storage, and Dropbox is where I store all my important files, backups, and shared documents.

1Password. Agile Bits' password manager has gone through lots of changes that have turned it into a service that supports Teams and Families. However, I still use 1Password the old-fashioned way with a single user account synced with Dropbox. The app continues to give me with the peace of mind that all my passwords are unique and I don't need to remember them. [Previous Coverage]

Google Docs. I don't have a stellar relationship with Google Docs, but it remains the best of its kind. I've tried similar services for real-time collaboration on rich text documents, but, in my experience, Google Docs is the fastest and most reliable when it comes to dealing with edits from multiple people at once. The Google Docs iOS app isn't great, and it took Google a long time to support Split View and the iPad Pro, but, unlike other alternatives, it never lost a single edit I made to a document. We use Google Docs for every show that requires real-time collaboration at Relay FM.

Workflow. If I had to identify a single reason why I've been able to get more work done on iOS this year, it'd be Workflow. I've written about the app at length, and anyone familiar with our discussions on Canvas knows why I regard Workflow as the highest point of iOS automation and personal productivity.

With Workflow, I can create automations tailored to my needs. The time saved thanks to Workflow can be invested somewhere else, such as writing more stories or managing a larger team. Workflow is an incredible tool that lets me be creative with tasks that normally bore me. It's the connective tissue between all my most used apps.

Workflow had some terrific updates in 2016, including the ability to interact with any web API and rich lists. Without Workflow, working on iOS would be dramatically worse. I depend on this app. [Previous Coverage]

Editorial. I used to be a heavy user of Editorial a few years ago, but, unfortunately, the app has fallen behind due to a lack of software updates. What Editorial does with Python scripting and Markdown automation, however, is unparalleled and I still use the app daily for MacStories Deals and (occasionally) for editing longform stories. Both my iOS 10 review and One Year of iPad Pro story were edited in Editorial as I needed the advanced Markdown workflows to adjust footnotes, navigate long documents, insert media, and more. Hopefully, the long-awaited update with support for iOS 10 and the iPad Pro will be released next year. [Review]

Textastic. There's one feature that makes Textastic indispensable for me: integration with Working Copy. Earlier this year, Textastic added the ability to bookmark a GitHub repository stored in Working Copy and open it as a folder containing files. This allows me to make changes to a Markdown file in Textastic (which has a superior text editor) and have those edits automatically reflected in Working Copy because there are no duplicate files. No other iOS app can do what Textastic does; the integration with Working Copy has helped us streamline the production of MacStories Weekly sections and articles for the site.

Timepage. I'm not the kind of person with an extremely tight schedule and lots of calendar events going on every day. On a busy day, I have two events – and that's rare. I've always used my task manager more than my calendar, but I also know that sometimes I do have events that require me to be at specific places at a specific time – I just forget to save them in my calendar.

In trying to be more disciplined about this, I came across Moleskine's Timepage and started using it as my main calendar client. Timepage – which also launched on the iPad – is the most elegant and clever calendar app I've ever used on iOS. By doing away with well-known interaction paradigms, Timepage has brought a breath of fresh air to managing my schedule. The app encourages me to use my calendar more because it's gorgeous and fun to use.

I'm not sure if Timepage would be the best solution for calendar power users and busy people with dozens of daily events, but I've found it to be an ideal companion for my weekly schedule.

Launcher. I haven't set up complex shortcuts in Greg Gardner's launcher, but I enjoy its flexibility for the simple needs I have. With Launcher, I've created custom buttons that take me to specific Slack channels, our Club board in Trello, or frequently visited websites in Safari. Launcher lets me assign personalized icons to each shortcut, and it allows me to add multiple widgets to the Search screen, each with unique appearance settings. Thanks to iOS 10's ubiquitous placement of widgets, I tap on Launcher shortcuts every day. [Review]

Airmail. With one of my favorite app launches of the year, Italian studio Bloop raised the bar for email clients on iOS with the most powerful, integrated, and customizable email app available on the iPhone and iPad.

Airmail is a modern email client designed for people who spend a lot of time dealing with their inboxes. Rather than imposing a single system of managing email, Airmail lets you tweak nearly every aspect of the app – all while supporting popular email features such as push notifications, snoozing, read receipts, and more.

Airmail's biggest strength lies in how it can integrate with other apps you already use to turn email messages into actions. An email receipt from Amazon becomes a tracked package in Deliveries with one tap; a message from a teammate can be saved as a task in Todoist; an attachment can be uploaded to Dropbox and shared with others.

Bloop built Airmail with the assumption that email is a starting point – not a destination. Airmail doesn't lock you into a proprietary system: instead, it helps you tackle messages with dedicated apps and services you're familiar with.

Airmail is unlike any other email client for iOS, and I've never been as happy with email as I am right now. [Review for iPhone and iPad]

Social

Tweetbot. One of my ongoing goals is to reduce the time I spend on Twitter to focus on writing, but I still find great value in the interesting links I discover in my timeline.

Tweetbot is the best app for a timeline completionist who tends to catch up on tweets and mentions on the iPad. Tapbots' client has a brilliant split-view mode that allows me to keep a secondary view on the right while I interact with the timeline on the left. I use this for "reply multitasking" when I want to respond to old mentions but also keep an eye on the most recent ones. With its filtering capabilities, Tweetbot brought some sanity to my US-focused timeline this year. [Review and Previous Coverage]

Twitter. I have mixed feelings about the official Twitter app: I don't despise it like others, but I also believe its iPad version is a joke. I keep Twitter installed to access features that are not available in third-party clients, such as pictures in DMs, polls, and buttons to view retweet and like counts on every tweet. Twitter's historical search is another reason why I keep the app around: whenever I want to find an old tweet, I open the search page in the app and use the advanced syntax to find it.

Telegram. We started using Telegram earlier this year with the MacStories Lounge, a public channel where readers can follow a behind-the-scenes look at what we do for MacStories and Club MacStories. At some point, I even used Telegram as my primary messaging app, but I moved back to iMessage since the first beta of iOS 10. I still use Telegram to post content in the MacStories Lounge, and I'm having fun experimenting with IFTTT integration to send textual commands to bots and connected services.

WhatsApp. Like Twitter, this is another app I have to keep installed even if I'm not a fan. Ideally, all my friends would use iMessage or Telegram instead of WhatsApp, which doesn't even have an iPad version. However, WhatsApp is a de facto standard for cross-platform messaging in Italy (alongside Messenger), and to quit it would mean to prevent people from texting me. I find solace in the fact that WhatsApp did receive some new features this year, but I'm still not enthusiastic about the app.

Linky. This is my default share sheet for sharing links and pictures on Twitter when I'm not in Tweetbot. Linky is a share extension that supports multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts with the ability to send multiple image attachments, format links with titles, and even generate textshots. Every MacStories Deals app discount is shared with Linky from Editorial.

I've been using Linky since it relaunched on iOS 8 and I highly recommend it to anyone who manages multiple social accounts. [Review and Previous Coverage]

Entertainment

Spotify. It's a tough choice between Apple Music and Spotify, and I don't want to choose. Each service excels at features that the other doesn't have, such as lyrics in Apple Music or daily mixes in Spotify. I have an Apple Music family subscription, but I've been using Spotify more this year.

Discover Weekly had a profound impact on how I listen to music and discover new songs, while the aforementioned daily mixes are a great way to shuffle songs I know I'm going to like without thinking too much about it. Spotify's iOS app also features Connect, a faster way to beam music to external speakers such as Sonos and the Amazon Echo. Speaking of which, I enjoy sending song requests to Alexa – another reason why I can't abandon Spotify. At least not until Apple makes their own living room speaker with built-in Siri and Apple Music.

Infuse. I've been using Infuse since the first versions for iPad and Apple TV, but my usage of the app increased exponentially after I bought a Synology NAS to store TV shows and movies. Infuse provides a fantastic interface to browse media items stored on my home server, which are presented with descriptions and posters fetched from the Internet. Infuse can play most video formats, it streams videos to an Apple TV or Chromecast, and a recent update brought automatic subtitle downloads. I relax for couple of hours with Infuse every night, and I'm an annual subscriber. [Previous Coverage]

Shazam. I've been using Shazam to recognize songs for years and I've built an archive of tagged songs that I can easily play in Spotify and Apple Music. The app recently gained a new discovery feature to swipe through music recommendations, which I enjoy looking at every couple of weeks.

YouTube. For the most part, YouTube has become the modern day television. I have tons of subscriptions in my YouTube account and while I don't have time for all their videos every week, I try to spend about 15 minutes every day flipping through channels to see what's new. The official YouTube app isn't a great iOS citizen (it doesn't even support Picture in Picture), and I wish I could subscribe to YouTube Red in Italy, but it's also the only way to enjoy all of YouTube's features on iOS.

Television Time. When I'm not watching YouTube, I catch up on my favorite TV shows. Maximilian Litteral's Television Time is my favorite TV show tracker that integrates with trakt.tv: the app looks nice, it keeps my watch queue in sync with iOS devices and the web, and it lets me read episode synopses and hide spoilers.

Television Time supports the latest iOS technologies such as haptic feedback and 3D Touch, and it's also available on the iPad.

SongShift. As someone who can't decide between Apple Music and Spotify, this is an outstanding utility to move playlists across the two services with minimal effort. SongShift can't always match the same song on another service due to differences in each company's catalogue, but it does a good enough job that I don't care about the occasional issue. A great time saver. [Review]

Overcast. There are several solid options when it comes to podcast apps on the iPhone, but I always go back to Marco Arment's Overcast because of Smart Speed, excellent support for chapter navigation, and tasteful design. Smart Speed saves me time without altering the audio quality of my favorite shows; with proper chapter support, it's easy to jump across sections and re-listen to an important discussion I might have missed. I'm excited to see what 2017 will bring for Overcast. [Review of Overcast 1.0 and 2.0]

PlayMira. Formerly known as PlayCast, PlayMira is a dream come true for people who love both iOS and PlayStation games: this app lets you stream PlayStation 4 games via Remote Play to an iPhone or iPad and play them with MFi controllers.

Yes, this is The Last Guardian on an iPad Pro.

I was floored by PlayMira's implementation when I first tried it in August, and I've continued to use it to play games such as No Man's Sky, Final Fantasy XV, and The Last Guardian on my iPad Pro, both on Wi-Fi and 4G. You won't believe what PlayMira does until you try it. [Previous Coverage]

Reading & News

Pocket. Every article I want to read ends up in Pocket. Granted, I'll never get to read most of them, but it's good to have a place where anything can be archived for later. I switched to Pocket a while back because of its annual stats released at the end of the year; it may sound silly, but I look forward to the insight about my reading habits and patterns over the course of 12 months.

Not much has changed in the Pocket reading experience lately, but the company rolled out recommendations and social features that I've been using regularly. I find Pocket's personalized recommendations to be more interesting than anything Google or Apple suggest in their news apps.

Nuzzel. I think Twitter missed a huge opportunity by not acquiring Nuzzel years ago. This app is based on a deceptively simple concept: it aggregates the most popular links shared by people you follow and it presents you with a list of articles to read. Because of my aforementioned effort to use Twitter less, I've relied on Nuzzel over the past few months to give me a summary of what people I follow are talking about without having to open my timeline. Nuzzel is perfect for news junkies and it helps if you're trying to cut back on your Twitter consumption. [Review]

Fiery Feeds. There's no shortage of RSS services that have cropped up after the demise of Google Reader, and Fiery Feeds is an app that doesn't care about which one you prefer – it supports them all. Fiery Feeds is the Airmail of RSS clients: it's highly customizable and it comes with power user features that include a URL scheme to create actions for third-party apps.

With Fiery Feeds, I can catch up on my subscriptions and save articles as tasks in Todoist. I like the typographic controls available in settings and support for multiple themes, too.

Home

Hue. I wasn't fond of the redesigned Hue app when it launched, but the new look has grown on me and, following updates, I understand why Philips was trying to simplify their light management UI.

I couldn't live without my Philips Hue lights: besides setting the mood for watching movies or having dinner with friends, they're just convenient to use. The official Hue app lets me access my lights from anywhere thanks to my online Hue account, and it's also how I configure scenes for Alexa and the app's widget.

Elgato Eve. Over the past two years, I've bought a handful of Elgato Eve sensors to measure temperature and humidity levels in my apartment. I've recently added an Eve Door sensor to the mix, and I'm considering purchasing a bunch of Eve wall plugs, too. The Eve app is the dashboard that connects all of these accessories.

In the 'At a Glance' section, there are live-updating tiles with the status of each sensor; you can 3D Touch one to peek at measured data, and press harder to open the accessory's dedicated page with historical charts and trends. The Eve app was updated with a colorful new design this year (which I like), and it can also be used to view and control other HomeKit accessories such as Philips Hue lights.

Canary. After using Manything as a home surveillance system for a year, we upgraded to a Canary camera per my friend Myke's recommendation. We liked the first Canary camera so much, we bought a second one within two weeks.

The Canary app for iOS and watchOS is pretty good: it uses rich notifications with video previews to show you if any activity has triggered its motion detection system, and there's support for automatic mode switch based on geolocation and Wi-Fi. If I'm home, the Canary cameras are automatically disarmed; when I walk out and leave, the Away mode is engaged and I can receive notifications for motion activity. I can also browse a timeline of events in the app, rich notifications show video previews on iOS 10, and I can view 'HomeHealth' information captured by the cameras' embedded sensors, which include temperature, humidity, and air quality.

Yonomi. I discovered Yonomi thanks to Dan Moren, and I believe it's an under-appreciated home automation gem. Yonomi can connect to a variety of connected home devices like Hue lights, Harmony hubs, WeMo switches and bulbs, Sonos speakers, and more. Once you've configured hardware to be accessed by Yonomi, you can create routines – automations that execute actions if specific conditions are met or if you manually run them.

You can create a routine that plays a favorite item on your Sonos, for instance, or one that turns off all your Hue lights. The best part, though, is that Yonomi can be connected to Alexa, so you'll be able to ask your Echo to perform routines via voice. I set up a few routines that I've used constantly for almost 6 months, but I plan to dig a lot deeper into this next year.

Health

Gyroscope. I track various aspects of my lifestyle and health with the iPhone and Apple Watch, and Gyroscope is the service that brings everything together in a beautiful and informative dashboard. Besides collecting data from HealthKit, Gyroscope connects to services like Moves, Spotify, and Instagram to import different bits of information you either share online (like pictures) or store on web services such as tracked locations and check-ins on Swarm.

Gyroscope wants to build a "complete story of your life", which you can visualize with elegant reports made of charts, cards, and summaries. If you're into the "quantified self" idea as much as I am, Gyroscope is the richest and best-looking dashboard you can find to surface correlations between your habits and health. I highly recommend considering the Pro membership to unlock more Gyroscope functionalities.

HeartWatch. Developed by David Walsh, HeartWatch is the ultimate dashboard for heart rate data captured by the Apple Watch. HeartWatch makes sense of your vitals by displaying sections for low, resting, and elevated heart rate. The more your heart rate stays in the blue zone, the better – unless you've been working out and saving workouts with the Apple Watch, in which case HeartWatch will display workout-related heart rates in their own section.

There's a lot to digest in HeartWatch, but everything is presented clearly and there's even support for sleep tracking. HeartWatch is a natural extension of Apple's tools for HealthKit and watchOS, and it's one of my most used Apple Watch apps. [Review]

AutoSleep. Also by David Walsh, the recently launched AutoSleep turns your Apple Watch into an automatic sleep tracker. It works like a Fitbit: you wear your Apple Watch to bed and that's it. No buttons to press, no special mode to engage. There's not even an Apple Watch app to keep installed – AutoSleep only lives on your iPhone.

It sounds like magic, but under the hood, Walsh created an algorithm based on advanced heuristics using HealthKit data and other iOS frameworks to determine when you're sleeping and at what time you woke up. I've been wearing my Apple Watch Series 2 to bed for the past week, and AutoSleep always calculated my sleep times correctly. There may be variations of a couple of minutes, but the invisible nature of AutoSleep and lack of manual management make it an absolute must-have to build a personal sleep log with minimal effort. [Review]

Images

Google Photos. I keep my primary photo library in iCloud and Apple's Photos app, but I also pay for Google storage because I want to have a secondary layer of backups in Google Photos. I find some of Google's AI-powered features to be more impressive than Apple's version – particularly content search, which yields more results than Photos on iOS 10. Whenever I can't find an old photo in Apple's app, Google Photos usually brings it up in a second.

Pixelmator. I'm no graphic designer and I only use Pixelmator for lightweight modifications to images and photos. The Pixelmator team did a good job in abstracting most of the complexity that comes with desktop image editors, crafting a mobile counterpart that is intuitive and delightful to use.

Pixelmator is my tool of choice whenever I have to work with layered images, change the background of screenshot templates, and other MacStories-related image edits. [Previous Coverage]

Annotable. For quick image annotations, I use Annotable. This app launched as a modern take on Skitch but it evolved into a much more powerful set of tools than its primary source of inspiration. Annotable can apply pixelation effects to hide details of images, overlay magnification loupes, and add shapes with color and size options. Annotable is a must-have for my app reviews and beta-testing needs. [Review]

GIPHY. I recently realized how much I use GIPHY across different apps and services. We have the Slack integration to share random GIFs with our team; I use the GIPHY app on iOS to search for GIFs and paste them in replies with Tweetbot; I also use the iMessage app to find GIFs while I'm talking to friends and want to send funny reactions in conversations. The GIPHY app has received some great updates this year, including the ability to save favorites to your account.

Utilities

Weather Underground. I've tried hundreds of weather apps since the App Store launched in 2008; Weather Underground is the only one I was able to stick with for over a year. In addition to a great UI with a dark theme, Weather Underground is powered by hyper-local data that provides more accurate forecasts than any other app or service I tested.

Weather Underground can even connect to Netatmo weather stations shared by the community, and I happen to have one available at the end of the street where I live. I check the weather with Weather Underground every day, and I like its new widget on iOS 10.

iFinance. Unfortunately, none of the popular finance management apps with automatic bank sync work with my Italian bank, but I've found a great manual alternative in iFinance. To my knowledge, this is the only app that lets you set up import rules that automatically tag and assign transactions based on keywords found in a CSV file. Every month, I download my account's statement, import it into iFinance, and the app categorizes expenses and incomes for me based on keywords and categories I created last year. It's not direct sync, but it works well.

Astra. This recent addition to my Home screen is an Alexa client to issue commands to Amazon's assistant from an iOS device. Alexa Web Services is the same technology that powers the Amazon Echo speakers, and by signing in with your Amazon account you can take advantage of the same skills and commands you'd use at home.

I can create tasks with Todoist, get my news brief, turn on my lights and coffee maker, and ask for anything I'd ask Alexa on my two Echo speakers. With Astra, I have most of the power of the Echo on my iPhone. [Review]

Excel. I'm not a heavy spreadsheet user, but I have to send monthly income and expenses as a spreadsheet to my accountant and I prefer Excel's desktop-like approach to Apple's Numbers. There is no specific design detail or feature that I appreciate; I just feel like every option is where I'd expect it to be, whereas Numbers' interface always confused me. The charts that we publish for Apple's financial results are generated by Excel in combination with Workflow in Split View on the iPad.

Documents. As I detailed last week, Readdle's Documents is my favorite file manager for iOS. Documents combines local storage with web services like Dropbox and Google Drive. Among my favorite features, Documents supports revisions for Dropbox files and it can sync specific folders as favorites, making it easy to retrieve files from a Dropbox folder without having to navigate manually into it.

Pushover. A lot of my web automations on Zapier involve some kind of output message that needs to be delivered to me. My favorite utility for this is Pushover, which is an app dedicated to displaying notifications from other services. Zapier doesn't have an iPhone app, so every time I put together a web workflow that returns a message at the end, I hook it up to Pushover and let the app push the alert to me on iOS. Pushover features various urgency levels for important notifications, custom tones, and it even lets you choose whether a URL appended to a notification should be immediately opened. I also rely on Pushover to tell me when there's a new Apple press release, YouTube video, or online store update.

PCalc. I don't remember what Apple's Calculator app looks like anymore because I've been using James Thomson's PCalc for several years now. I'm not an engineer and I don't need to perform complex calculations on iOS, but I appreciate PCalc's versatility and customization features.

PCalc allows me to create my own layout and mix traditional buttons with custom ones for currency and unit conversion. I use PCalc everywhere, whether it's on the Home screen, from a widget, or on the Apple Watch when I'm grocery shopping.

Opener. This is an excellent utility to open links in third-party clients instead of the official ones that natively support their links. With Opener, a Twitter link can be opened in Tweetbot instead of the Twitter app, and a YouTube video can be easily sent to ProTube. Opener does this with an action extension and a large database of apps that have registered as handlers of specific domains. I've described Opener as "Universal Links for third-party apps" before. Opener does one thing extremely well.

Moves. I used Moves to create an automated archive of my location before Facebook acquired it, and I continue to let it work in the background despite the lack of major updates. I'm too lazy to remember to check into places with Swarm and I prefer Moves' automatic location tracking that follows me constantly.

After years of training and location edits, Moves is accurate in how it tags places and I've never had major issues with battery life. Best of all, Moves has an open API and it integrates with external services: among many, Moves powers location tracking in Gyroscope. When Facebook eventually discontinues Moves, I'll have to look for a replacement.

DS File. I bought a Synology NAS earlier this year, and, of all the apps from the DS line, DS File is the one I use the most because it lets me manage files and folders on the server with a Finder-like interface. It's not the most attractive app, but DS File is functional and it supports logging into a Synology server from a local IP address or through the Internet with the QuickConnect service.

DS Get. Along with DS File, I use DS Get to start download tasks on my Synology, and specifically torrents. DS Get registers as a compatibile receiver of .torrent files on iOS, which makes it the default option in Safari after tapping a torrent in the browser. Like DS File, DS Get can connect to a Synology from anywhere, and it also lets you monitor the status of ongoing downloads.

Google Maps. While Apple Maps has improved, I still use Google Maps for local directions in Rome and to look up nearby businesses with Street View. I like what Apple has been doing, but I prefer the exploration features and integrations that Google Maps offers.

Among the features Google recently rolled out, I found myself using the "busy times" functionality for local businesses a lot: if I know I need to go buy something at a store in Rome, I first check Google Maps to see when it tends be more crowded. This has allowed me to save time and avoid queues, and it's the kind of data-based option that Google does well at scale.

TextExpander. I do a lot of typing on my iOS devices, and there's no better way to save time with words than TextExpander. Smile's app has evolved into a full-blown service with features for team collaboration, but I still use it as a basic snippet manager that holds bits of text I often have to insert into emails and blog posts. TextExpander's web sync makes my snippets available on all my devices (unlike iCloud's unreliable text replacements). TextExpander is a must-have for my longform pieces, especially since it's integrated with Ulysses and other note-taking apps on iOS.

Scanbot. Since the iPhone's camera got very good with the iPhone 5s, I stopped using physical scanners to turn paper documents into PDFs. For the kind of receipts and documents I have to scan, my iPhone is enough. Scanbot is my favorite scanning app for iOS thanks to its elegant design, good performance, and useful integrations. Scanbot can save documents to iCloud Drive, but it can also automatically upload PDFs to Dropbox or send them to Shoeboxed, the service I use to extract expenses from receipts and generate spreadsheets for my accountant.

Deliveries. I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon and the online Apple Store. To keep track of packages and see when they'll show up at my doorstep, I use Deliveries. I've trusted this app with all my tracked packages for years. Deliveries automatically recognizes tracking numbers for popular shipping companies, but, even better, it understands order numbers from the Apple Store. Whenever I buy something from Apple, I can copy the order number in Safari, open Deliveries, and the app will see the number in my clipboard and offer to start tracking a new Apple delivery.

With Deliveries, Junecloud has made the kind of app with dozens of details that I appreciate coming across every time I use it. There's a map preview that tells you where a package is in the world, which you can share as an image by omitting personal details. There's support for 3D Touch, an iOS 10 widget, an Apple Watch app, iMessage stickers, and Safari View Controller to check order webpages without leaving the app. Tracking packages is no fun, but Deliveries makes it enjoyable thanks to its intelligent use of iOS features and a fantastic design. If you buy things online, Deliveries is for you.

Web Services

Zapier. After optimizing how I use iOS apps with Workflow, I turned my attention to web automation and the web services we employ at MacStories every day. Over the past year, I've gone all-in with Zapier and created dozens of web automations that connect services together and automate critical aspects of our collaboration in the background without having to manually trigger them.

According to my Zapier stats, I use about 8,000 zaps every month. I have automations that go off daily for a variety of reasons: I count how many new Twitter followers we get on our site accounts and save them to a digest delivered every morning; questions submitted by Club MacStories members via Google Forms are converted to Trello cards; Google Calendar events are logged as time entries in Toggl; emails, RSS feeds, Stripe disputes, and anything else I might otherwise forget gets saved as an urgent task in Todoist. Zapier makes these connections easy thanks to its complex multi-action workflows – a big difference from IFTTT's limited applets – and there's a lot of depth to the service that I plan to write about in the future.

Zapier is one of the reasons I was able to complete more and bigger projects this year, and it's redefined my idea of web automation and API integrations.

Kraken. Every image you see on MacStories has been optimized with Kraken and then uploaded to our CDN. Kraken is based on the same concept of ImageOptim: it reduces the file size of images with minimal loss in quality on the final product. Kraken has a web API that we can use with Workflow to upload images from iOS. Kraken's API comes with settings for lossy and lossless optimization; it can even handle direct uploads to Rackspace Cloud Files (our CDN). We make hundreds of requests to Kraken every month, and this service has saved me thousands of dollars in CDN costs.

MailChimp. We've used MailChimp for every newsletter we've sent since the humble beginnings of Classic MacStories Weekly in 2014. I don't use MailChimp much myself – John does the heavy lifting in the web interface – but there's no doubt that Club MacStories wouldn't have been possible without it. The company has an iOS app I use to check stats, but I wish they also provided an API to save templates with Markdown support and a proper campaign editor for iOS.

Shoeboxed. This is a recent discovery of mine, and I'm amazed by what the service does. Shoeboxed uses artificial intelligence and human employees to extract information from receipts and categorize them for you. I'm okay with their privacy policy and I have a business account because Shoeboxed has improved my relationship with my accountant. Thanks to this service, he likes me now.

Every time I get a receipt or an invoice for something I bought, all I have to do is forward the PDF to Shoeboxed's email address, which will analyze the document, extract bits such as dates and amount, and save it in my account. Expenses can be exported en-masse as spreadsheets or original documents, which is what I've been doing for my accountant, who appreciates my newfound precision and timeliness. Furthermore, if Shoeboxed finds an expense in a different currency than the main one, it'll automatically convert it using historical exchange rates. I used to do this manually until last year, and I hated the whole process. Shoeboxed has saved me weeks I would have spent throughout the year to verify my receipts, file them (often incorrectly), and convert them from USD to EUR. I wish I knew Shoeboxed existed sooner.

SaneBox. I covered my SaneBox setup in detail in my story on one year of iPad Pro. SaneBox is an email intelligence that lives in the cloud and connects to any email provider to separate important messages from the rest. Anything that isn't deemed important ends up in a SaneLater folder, while newsletter-type emails are filed into a SaneNews folder; everything else stays in the inbox because it's important.

What makes SaneBox special is that, unlike similar proprietary features of iOS email apps, its cloud-based brain can be integrated with any email client. SaneBox is simply a system that moves messages across folders independently of the email app you use. You can train SaneBox, create custom forwarding rules, mark contacts as VIP, and lots more. I should have started using SaneBox years ago – I've never been as efficient and satisfied with my email as I am with SaneBox.

Toggl. To better understand how I'm spending my work hours and surface patterns in my daily habits, I started tracking my time with Toggl in October. Of all the time tracking services I considered, Toggl caught my attention because it looked nice, featured integrations with other services (including Zapier), and had an API for apps to plug into.

I'm religious about tracking any work-related activity with Toggl. The service doesn't have an iPad app and their iPhone client is a barebones timer with several bugs, so I created my own workflows to start new timers and check for how long an existing one has been running. I mostly interact with the Toggl web app in Safari for iPad when I want to check timers and visualize reports about my projects. Toggl has made me more aware of my bad habits and it's helping me get better at managing responsibilities.

GitHub. Most people know GitHub as a code hosting platform for developers. GitHub repositories, however, can be much more than code: we've been using GitHub to store Markdown files and collaborate on revisions of text files with multiple writers making changes to the same draft over time. GitHub has an excellent diff tool that highlights changed paragraphs and individual words, which we leverage to quickly see which edits have been made to a document.

Since switching to a GitHub-based workflow in February, we've set up a private repository for each writer, as well as a general repository for Club MacStories. This has allowed everyone on the team to check out each other's stories in advance, suggest edits, and leave comments. After seeing the benefits of shared Markdown hosting with GitHub, I wouldn't go back to any other system.

Inoreader. I stuck with the RSS service I mentioned at the beginning of the year. Inoreader is RSS for power users: it's integrated with some of the best clients for iOS, and it supports server-side rules for articles. Rules can perform a variety of actions on your behalf: for example, you can automatically mark as read articles that contain a certain keyword, forward starred articles to someone else, or receive a notification for a story that matches pre-defined criteria. In my case, a rule that marks articles with specific keywords in the title as read ensures those items don't get pushed to Fiery Feeds on iOS – thus, I never see them.

There is a lot of power to Inoreader, and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what this service offers. I haven't had the time to explore the Bundles and the Teams functionalities yet, let alone text highlighters and integration with IFTTT. I plan to build more Inoreader workflows in 2017.

Feature of the Year

Spotify Discover Weekly

No software feature has brought as much joy into my life as Discover Weekly did this year. With its weekly assortment of songs I never heard before, Discover Weekly rekindled my love for mixtapes and the thrill of falling in love with a new band. I've learned to appreciate dozens of new artists thanks to Discover Weekly. I look forward to it every Monday.

Runners-Up

Workflow Web API Actions

With the ability to interact with any web API, Workflow has extended the power of its automation features beyond iOS apps. Workflow's 1.5.3 release has been an important milestone for the app and the entire iOS automation landscape.

Ulysses Automation

Thanks to one of the richest implementations of x-callback-URL, Ulysses' automation features have redefined how deeply an iOS text editor can be integrated with other apps. Over the past several months, I've integrated Ulysses with Todoist, Trello, and Workflow. Ulysses' Markdown automation has raised the bar for other text editors on iOS.

1.0 Release of the Year

Scrivener

I wasn't particularly excited about Scrivener when I first heard it was coming to iOS. After taking the app for a spin, though, I realized that its combination of desktop-class research tools and native iOS features were exactly what I needed for my iOS 10 review. Scrivener is the best 1.0 version I tried this year, and I trusted the app with my most important project for three months.

Runner-Up

PlayMira

I had my jaw-dropping moment on the iPad Pro this year when I was on vacation and successfully connected to my PlayStation 4 at home, woke it up from sleep, and started playing No Man's Sky 400 miles away. PlayMira feels like sorcery. If you have a PS4, a fast Internet connection, and an MFi controller, you should spend some time setting up PlayMira over the holidays.

Web Service of the Year

Todoist

Todoist has fundamentally altered my idea of what a task manager should be. By embracing the web and integrations with other apps and services I use, Todoist is more than my todo app – it's an interconnected and automated task management system that works everywhere.

Todoist's extensible approach helped me accomplish more, collaborate more efficiently with my team, and overcome my productivity anxiety. Todoist perfectly encapsulates the advantages of flexible web services over app sandboxes.

Runner-Up

Zapier

Zapier's hundreds of integrations and power-user functionalities made me realize that there's a world of possibilities for web automation and connecting multiple services together. The most important aspects of our workflow at MacStories have been sped up by Zapier this year.

App of the Year

Airmail

The unique blend of modern email features, integrations with iOS apps and web services, and power-user options makes Airmail the most powerful email client for iOS, which deserves to be my App of the Year.

Airmail allowed me to reimagine the way I process and act on email messages. Despite some minor bugs, it's a deeply customizable email client that adapts to my needs and works with the apps I already use to get work done. Airmail is a power-user email app with no equal.

I have tried several email clients over the past year, but I always go back to Airmail for a simple reason: it's my favorite way to process email and get back to work.

Runners-Up

Ulysses

The Soulmen managed to distill the power and elegance of Ulysses for Mac into an uncompromising iOS text editor that offers a fantastic writing and editing environment. Behind its minimalistic appearance, Ulysses hides a set of advanced Markdown tools that make it my go-to text editor for MacStories articles and Club MacStories content. It's rare to find a balanced combination of simplicity and power-user features, but Ulysses hits all the right notes while simultaneously abstracting much of the cruft of traditional Markdown text editors.

Timepage

Through a spectacular mix of attractive UI design and engaging user interactions, Timepage succeeds where other apps fall short – making the calendar fun to use and informative at the same time. Timepage exudes care and a willingness to subvert the classic metaphors of calendar client design for iOS, providing a standout calendar experience unlike anything else.

2016

Looking back at how I used my iPhone and iPad in 2016, I realize now that the tenets of my iOS workflow haven't significantly changed. Some apps may be different – the App of the Year and Runners-Up are all new this year – but the fundamentals of how I work on iOS are consistent with 2015. The past year was mostly about optimization: I tried to find better apps for tasks I was already handling on iOS.

I wouldn't say that iOS is a mature platform for productivity yet – there's still a long list of aspects to improve, especially on the iPad. But I also feel like iOS 10 didn't open groundbreaking possibilities for the apps I use every day – it was, as I wrote in September, a lifestyle update focused on consumers and our relationship with the iPhone. From this standpoint, it doesn't surprise me that my favorite apps don't appear drastically different from last year – it's almost as if both users and developers are waiting for what's coming next to iOS productivity and iPad multitasking.

Deeper automation with Workflow and the shift to web services are two trends I expect to continue in 2017. I see automation as an essential trait of how I like to work on iOS, but it'll be interesting to measure the impact of iPad updates on my usage of Workflow and app automations. I suspect that web services and API integrations will keep gaining an important role for assistants by Google and Amazon, but I'm also waiting for Apple's second wave of SiriKit extensions and a stronger integration with the iOS apps I use.

I think it's going to be a fascinating 2017 for iOS productivity, and I'm excited for what's next in iPad software.

As always, let's check back in a year.

Support MacStories Directly

Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.

Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.

By Gord Price

The Sun has been running a series on the state of Motordom.  Today: driverless cars, or AVs – automated vehicles.

A quote from Clark Lim, adjunct prof at UBC:

Lim foresees a future with lightweight electric engines and smaller, perhaps thinner models that save space; gaps on the roads between vehicles will be a thing of the past because computers see the world at 1,000 times a second — instant reaction times, in effect — and are able to tailgate without colliding, he says. “An autonomous car can drive very closely behind because there are instantaneous reactions,” he says.

Which means that they have to be failsafe, since even a single accident could have catastrophic consequences.  And not just in lives and injuries.  The liability consequences to the owner or those determined to be negligent would be financially catastrophic too.

So (1) how likely is it that all AVs will work perfectly all the time?  And (2) in order to assure that AVs are as close to perfection as possible in design, construction and maintenance, how expensive will they have to be?

If only a minority of people and businesses can afford them (and especially to maintain them at liability-proof standards), how likely is it that they AVs will replace the far-less-than-perfect but affordable non-automated car in sufficient numbers for the above scenario to work?

And what happens to liability insurance for them?

Just asking.

	mkalus shared this story from Consumerist:
	Guess the "Disrupters" got disrupted. Also of note is that the DMV actually tried to help them get the proper licensing in place, but they don't want to. Because if they did, they would have to report any accident to the DMV, and thus the public.

Uber announced Wednesday evening that it has pulled the plug on its controversial self-driving car program in San Francisco after only one very contentious week of operation.

“We have stopped our self-driving pilot in California as the DMV has revoked the registrations for our self-driving cars,” reads a statement emailed to Consumerist. “We’re now looking at where we can redeploy these cars but remain 100% committed to California and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules.”

In a statement to the press, the DMV confirmed that it had revoked Uber’s 16 registrations for its autonomous vehicles in the state, while leaving the door open for the self-driving cars to eventually return after Uber complies with state rules.

“The registrations were improperly issued for these vehicles because they were not properly marked as test vehicles,” explains the agency. “The department invited Uber to seek a permit so their vehicles can operate legally in California.”

For those who missed this story because you had countless better things to worry about, Uber began a small-scale test of its self-driving Volvo SUVs in San Francisco on Dec. 14. Problem is, the ridesharing company didn’t even file an application with the state for the special permits needed to test autonomous cars on California roads.

The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles responded immediately, letting Uber know that the DMV said these Volvos were operating illegally. Uber was ordered to halt the test and apply for the permits, or face further action from the state.

Uber responded by claiming that these particular vehicles don’t need the special permits.

The company’s stance is that the permits are only required for truly autonomous vehicles that are operating without the involvement of any driver. Uber’s tricked-out Volvos were not rolling the streets unmanned; each vehicle had a person sitting in the driver’s seat ready to take control of the car, and a second person in the front passenger seat. This is the same configuration Uber has used since launching self-driving cars in Pittsburgh.

While Uber maintained in its statements to the press and the state that the “driver” in these self-driving vehicles has their hands placed lightly on the steering wheel at all time, the company’s own promotional video for the San Francisco service clearly shows the folks in the driver’s seat removing their hands while the vehicles navigate the San Francisco roads on their own:

It didn’t help Uber’s case that its self-driving vehicles were also caught on camera running red lights and rolling too far into intersections. The company even acknowledged this week that these SUVs have an issue recognizing bike lanes; a not-insignificant concern given the number of cyclists in San Francisco.

On a Wednesday back in mid-March, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) was experiencing drastic delays along its various lines in the region. Predictably, passengers whose schedules were stagnated voiced their aggravation by tweeting @SFBART. But instead of issuing stock, profuse apologies, the agency responded to its passengers with thorough — at least as much as possible in 140 characters or less — albeit pessimistically tinged transparency. “BART was built to transport far fewer people,” spokesman Taylor Huckaby wrote in his paramount tweet, which was retweeted and liked each a thousand times, “and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality.”

Huckaby explained that the transit system was clogging mainly because of its inability to keep up with unprecedented population growth in the area. Among some of the more specific issues he addressed: “Our system was built to last about 45 years and we’ve reached the limit”; “The number of people who exit at 19th street in Oakland has doubled in less than a decade”; “Planners in 1996 had no way of predicting the tech boom — track redundancy, new tunnels & transbay tubes are decades-long projects.” His frankness became a hot topic for newsrooms both regional and national, and the subject of general praise. Days afterward, he wrote a retrospective on the incident for Popular Mechanics, in which he play-by-played how he and the communications team decided to respond as distinctly as they did, and further delineated the years-long process and budget necessary for scheduled repairs and updates.

In the end, his message received much less attention than his approach: Here was a public institution, daring not to think positively. Huckaby’s strategic spokesmanship via social media embodied a disconcerting trend: the illusion of transparency through pessimism, even while only a fraction of the truth was being revealed, and only a fraction of the institution (a single person typing from a company device) was doing the revealing; also, the commodification of transparency as a catalyst for virality.

Huckaby’s manner of response felt endemic to Twitter, tapping into a particular brand of pessimism associated with accounts like @SoSadToday. Authored by Melissa Broder (who revealed her identity in 2015, three years after starting the account), @SoSadToday has helmed a form of internet parlance that expounds anxiety, self-hate, panic attacks, and other symptoms related to common depression within digestible, distinctly humorous quips — a process that reflects the cultural simplification of depression and disregard for its complexities. Broder humorizes low expectations and self-doubt: “I perceive everything as a rejection just to be safe.” And she illustrates how swiftly depression can subsume and ruin a particle of normalcy: “Me: hi. Weight of the world: It’s your fault.”

Followers hold Broder and familial tweeters as alternatives to the naive, shallow media that sugarcoats the insidious, but @SoSadToday has accrued over 400,000 followers; and Broder, after she went public, amassed coverage in major outlets like Rolling Stone, Elle (where she now writes a column), and the New Yorker, in which Haley Mlotek wrote that she speaks “collectively for a certain demographic of young, female Twitter users, those who felt emotions very deeply and were also interested in curating a distinct expression of those emotions online.” Broder’s feed floats within a deluge of accounts that humorously expound pessimistic subject matter. @ShutUpMikeGinn, for example, who has over 150,000 followers, tweets quips like “[Finishing meal at rooftop restaurant] I’m ready to jump off whenever you guys are.” Others include @jonnysun, with over 250,000 followers (“Hello darkness my old friend, why are u here it’s 4 p.m.”); and @dubstep4dads, with over 150,000 (“Yo yo mic check 1, 2, I’m depressed”).

While it would’ve been completely inappropriate for Huckaby to write about issues like social anxiety and self-scrutiny through BART’s account, he managed to channel that beloved internet nihilism in four resigned words, “This is our reality,” which sounds as much like a pinned tweet as an official statement. Although Huckaby employs this frankness without the inherent humor of @SoSadToday or @ShutUpMikeGinn, his tone is the antithesis of reassurance and adopting a “positive attitude.” Broder and Ginn are individuals expressing genuine emotions through blunt humor, not to patronize the sentiments but to render them accessible and palatable to the public: Their style is a mannered, intensely concise directness that draws attention to the taboo expression of these particular sentiments. By invoking their approach, Huckaby gave the synecdochic impression that a whole institution was acting bravely and irreverently — even if, in the objective, surface-level sense, Huckaby was merely expressing what’s true, and even if that expression should be a given.

In the New York Times, writer Jonah Bromwich described the BART incident as “a peek behind the institutional curtain, but the tweets were online for all to see.” This transparency was a sign of benevolence, in other words; passengers were finally granted a glimpse into the machinations of the transportation system upon which they — that is, over 400,000 passengers daily — depend. But exalting this incident as something exemplary forgets the fact that transparency is supposed to be standard ethical protocol, not an occasional capitulation worthy of praise.

“The Bay Area is historically characterized as the most liberal place in the United States,” Huckaby was quoted in the Times piece, “but there’s an antigovernment sentiment, that government can do no right, that government is broken, that government doesn’t answer to anybody, is unaccountable and doesn’t care.” The reason for this sentiment, of course, is a lack of accountability among government institutions; this reality is what made Huckaby’s Twitter tone, quite apart from his press statements, so remarkable. In the end, BART was only as transparent as it was willing to be: While the company could have followed up the incident with a proper document going more in depth on the issues Huckaby addressed surface-level on Twitter and in Popular Mechanics, his 140-character statements demonstrated the intention of transparency. And for readers, that was enough.

Media coverage didn’t provide much analysis of the BART incident’s causes; instead, it demonstrated an infatuation with its narrative — a “stars: they’re just like us!” mentality expanded and applied to an entire institution. A public address was compressed into a social media spectacle as Twitter eliminated the context for Huckaby’s unfettered divulgence, just as @SoSadToday’s blunt, lucid confession becomes bite-sized comedy, moving with the feed.

“It’s sort of the secret sauce of virality,” Huckaby told the Verge about his first tweet. He hoped, in his retrospective, that the media attention would inspire a “much-needed national conversation about the stark reality of America’s deteriorated railways, roads, bridges, airports, sewer systems and electrical grid.” But trends on social media — in spite of their textual indelibility — have inherently transient lifespans; to expect lasting results from such ephemera is oxymoronic.

Journalists didn’t wonder much about the aftermath of BART’s breakdown, the event that spawned the campaign in the first place — about whether BART had made any progress in mitigating the systemic malfunctions that Huckaby addressed back in March. Outlets of Times-proportions failed to follow up on the transportation system’s fate (like when, on November 28, voters in the Bay Area approved $3.5 billion to go to the agency, a bond that Huckaby made reference to in his retrospective). Such conversations just don’t attract the same kind of audience.

Shadows cast by buildings affect the feel and flow of a city, and lack of sunlight can change aspects of daily living, such as rent. In a place like New York City, where there are tall buildings aplenty, the effects are obvious. Quoctrung Bui and Jeremy White for The New York Times mapped the darkness.

The results are based on research from the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University:

Calculating the length and shape of a shadow cast from a simple object can be easily done with pen, paper and some basic math. But architects use a more sophisticated method known as ray tracing; it simulates the effects a ray of light can have on a building and its surroundings. Most analyses of shadows study just a few buildings at a time. What made it an interesting problem for the researchers at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University was how to do it at a scale so you could quickly study whole neighborhoods.

Tags: New York Times, shadows

One Infinite Loophole

An R user asked a question regarding whether it’s possible to have the RStudio pipe (%>%) shortcut (Cmd-Shift-M) available in other macOS applications. If you’re using Alfred then you can use this workflow for said task (IIRC this requires an Alfred license which is reasonably cheap).

When you add it to Alfred you must edit it to make Cmd-Shift-M the hotkey since Alfred strips the keys on import (for good reasons). I limited the workflow to a few apps (Safari, Chrome, Sublime Text, iTerm) and I think it makes sense to limit the apps it applies to (you don’t need the operator everywhere, at least IMO).

I can’t believe I didn’t do this earlier. I use R in the terminal a bit and mis-hit Cmd-Shift-M all the time when I do (since RStudio is my primary editor for R code and muscle memory is scarily powerful). I also have to use (ugh) Jupyter notebooks on occasion and this will help there, too. If you end up modifying or using the workflow, drop a note in the comments.

US steel industry lost 400K/75% of jobs between ‘62 and '05 but shipments did not decline https://t.co/X23P6VqO40 Automation, not China

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) December 22, 2016

‘00 to '10 had the largest decline in manufacturing jobs in U.S. history https://t.co/74FiDOxbUN 88% of job lost due to productivity growth

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) December 22, 2016

The problem with giving people movie-theater gift cards is that they might not be moviegoers. The problem with giving someone a Starbucks card is that they may not drink coffee. The problem with a Macy’s card is that they may not live near a Macy’s.

Here’s a little tip: Give your loved one a gift card that’s redeemable anywhere. Any store, any restaurant.

And that would be prepaid Visa cards. You can get them at drugstores, gas stations, convenience stores, banks, and grocery stores.

But you can also get them online. At GiftCards.com, for example, the card costs $3 or $4 extra, but you can have them printed with a photo of your choice, which makes them a much more personal gift.

The beauty of prepaid Visa cards is that you can use them as regular credit cards, to spend wherever you like. They’re as universal as cash. (Actually, more universal, since you can spend your Visa card on the Web, too.) And yet they don’t have the impersonal, “I didn’t put much effort into this” feel of an envelope full of bills.

They don’t expire, and there are no fees. How great is that?

More from Pogue:

iOS 10 Hidden Feature: Bedtime-consistency management

Pogue’s Basics: Money – The Amazon card

iOS 10 Hidden Feature: Do Not Disturb Emergency Bypass

Pogue’s Basics: Money – Extended warranties

Pogue’s cheap, unexpected tech gifts #2: ThinOptics glasses

A dozen iOS 10 feature gems that Apple forgot to mention

GoPro’s most exciting mount yet: a drone

Professional-looking blurry backgrounds come to the iPhone 7 Plus

Pogue’s Basics: Turn off Samsung’s Smart Guide

Pogue Basics: Touch and hold Google Maps

The Apple Watch 2 is faster, waterproof—and more overloaded than ever

We sent a balloon into space — and an epic scavenger hunt ensued

Now I get it: Snapchat

The new Fitbits are smarter, better-looking, and more well-rounded

Apple has killed every jack but one: Meet USB-C

Secure Shell, of course. Besides the obvious OpenSSH link, this page will hold some of the less obvious (and more useful) stuff:

Resources

Essentials

• fail2ban – block script kiddies and other pests from trying to do dictionary-based attacks on your server (on the internet, nobody knows that you only use key-based authentication – not even morons).

HOWTOs

• An Illustrated Guide to SSH Agent Forwarding – everything but SOCKS, but pretty useful to hand out to newbies.
• Restricted Shell for scp/sftp
• scponly
• Using ssh-agent

Tools

• secretive, a tool to store keys in the macOS Secure Enclave
• sshrc – take your environment with you
• “Gnome”:Wikipedia:GNOME SSH Tunnel Manager

Clients

• PuTTY, Symbian port (updated on Mar 5 for S60)
• SSH Tools – includes a secure VNC client in Java, “sources”:SourceForge:projects/sshtools
• MindTerm – oldie but goodie Java applet
• JavaSSH – another (smaller) applet
• MIDP SSH

Libraries

• org.keyphrene – Python wrapper
• sshfs, a FUSE / VFS -based filesystem layer atop SSH (FUSE has a BSD port, and there are now plenty of equivalents for Mac OS X)

Useful tricks

macOS keychain

SSH key handling has been changing throughout the years, but in Sierra (10.12.2) things can be restored to a modicum of sanity with these settings:

Host *
  UseKeychain yes
  AddKeysToAgent yes

Automatic session forwarding

If you routinely need to access a host behind another (or a VM inside a host), this is a relatively painless way to do so (won’t allow you to do SFTP, though, since that’s a different subsystem):

cat ~/.ssh/authorized_keys | grep command
command="ssh user@host" ...rest of key

Keepalives

Using the built-in keepalive feature to maintain tunnels with a TCP keepalive and a 30s internal (in-band) client active check (will try 10 times before disconnecting):

KeepAlive yes
ClientAliveInterval 30
ClientAliveCountMax 10

Speeding up connections to the same host (thanks to Melo):

$ head -3 ~/.ssh/config
Host *
  ControlMaster auto
  ControlPath /tmp/501/mux-%h-%p-%r

(on my machine the socket file is in 502 – more similar tips here)

If you listen to tech podcasts, you’ll likely already be familiar with curse of the keyword.  When a presenter says ‘Ok Google’ or ‘Hey Siri’ on their podcast, thousands of listeners’ devices all over the world automatically initiate a search.  It has been especially prevalent in 2016, as frequent updates to Google, Apple and Amazon’s voice assistants have provided commentators with plenty of opportunities to talk about these products.

I recently experienced the perfect storm when a podcast, the ‘Ok Google’ keyword, Android Auto and my in-car audio system combined to keep me locked in a 21st century version of Groundhog Day.  The presenter mentioned the keyword, my Huawei phone initiated a Google search and the podcast app (in this case, Pocket Casts) paused the audio stream playing via Android Auto to my car’s sound system.

I realised what had happened, smiled, and just waited for it to resume.

However, I’d forgotten Pocket Casts has a ‘convenience feature’, which rewinds the podcast by a few seconds when you resume listening.  This is something I usually appreciate as it enables me to regain the thread of the discussion.  In this instance, it meant restarting the audio just before the presenter uttered the fateful keyword.

The result: a never ending feedback loop.

With Android Auto running on my phone the interface is purposely simplified to reduce distractions while driving.  Manual intervention was impossible at 70 miles per hour on the motorway.

I pulled over at the next junction to fix it and sat for a moment to consider my brief encounter with this dystopian soundscape.

Individually, none of the components were guilty of poor experience design:

• Pocket Casts had likely implemented its ‘rewind on resume’ feature in response to user research.
• Google’s ‘Ok Google’ was simply performing as it was supposed to.
• The sensitivity of the in-car and smartphone microphones is usually a virtue.
• Android Auto’s interface minimises distractions and keeps me focused on the road.

However, despite all of these individual virtues, I – as an end user – had become locked in a poor experience.

I was reminded of Louisa Heinrich’s talk at MEX/15 on the etiquette of robot user experience, in which she shared her concern about the looming prospect of smart appliances engaged in domestic warfare.  In her scenario, arguments raged between the smart windows, the smart refrigerator and the smart house plants over the optimal temperature, while the smart thermostat tried in vain to keep the peace.

Problems like these arise when the experience design process assumes a product to be an individual entity, rather than part of an unpredictable, connected eco-system of multiple touchpoints.

This isn’t a new issue.  We began exploring this notion as far back as the MEX/6 cycle in 2009, when MEX Manifesto point number 3 stated:

We believe the number of platforms in users’ lives will continue to increase, leading to exponential growth in the quantity of potential user pathways and creating ever more complex usage scenarios to challenge user experience designers.

I’ve since spoken frequently – at MEX conferences, for our private advisory clients and in university lectures – on the need for a ‘natively neighbourly’ approach to experience design.  It is impossible to anticipate every permutation of user context, app, environment and touchpoint (or even a tiny proportion of the billions of possible combinations).  Instead, we must assume each experience to be multi-touchpoint by default and consider how it will relate to the gaps between its own experiential sphere and the properties of other digital spheres it may encounter.

Perhaps the most productive way to think about this challenge is how, at its best, an education in early life prepares us not just for specific tasks, but with a set of values and behaviours which allow us to adapt to new scenarios.  How might we apply the same principle to designing for the ever multiplying number of digital touchpoints in users’ lives, such that each product or service knows what it means to be a good citizen of the network?

Seven years after we first raised the issue during MEX/6, it remains the most pressing macro design challenge facing digital practitioners.  The MEX community has since uncovered and shared numerous techniques to illuminate multi-touchpoint design.  Here are some of the most frequently cited to get you started:

1. A touchpoint is an individual element, digital or analogue, which contributes to the users’ experience. It may be visible and interactive, such as a touchscreen, or hidden and passive, such as an environment sensor.
2. User tasks are increasingly migrating back and forth across touchpoints. User research must reflect this behaviour.
3. Multi-touchpoint design should respond first to user intent, prioritising it over more obvious differences such as display size. For instance, user intent when viewing photos changes little regardless of whether it is conducted on a 4 inch phone or a 10 inch tablet.
4. Users should always understand their relative position in an overall multi-touchpoint experience. Some applications thrive as linear stories, where progress made on one touchpoint is used to unlock features on the next, others favour more dynamic flows.
5. Multi-touchpoint experiences are most effective when bridging the physical and digital worlds. As more of users’ life achievements become virtual, bridges convert virtual achievements into real world benefits become more important. For instance, turning virtual currency into real money.
6. A systematic approach to multi-touchpoint design separates the experience into functional, aesthetic and emotional elements, allowing building blocks to construct consistent, but action-specific, experiences across touchpoints.
7. Employ consistent language across each touchpoint and user mission. Tone should reflect conversational characteristics to aid ease of use.

Do you use others in your own work?  I’d love to hear from readers with additional examples.  Feel free to post them as comments below or, better still, include a link to case study.

A view of the entrance into PortMiami through Government Cut between Fisher Island and Miami Beach. Image courtesy of Bhakti Baxter and Coral Morphologic

Last week, Dan Rather had an art idea: "I think we should erect a monument built from materials impervious to the elements and list the names of all the elected officials and others in positions of power today in the United States who refuse to stand with the science on climate change," the former face of CBS Evening News wrote on Facebook.  

"We can put this monument on the coast—say off Miami—and have its base equal to the lapping waves of high tide. As sea levels rise, the monument will begin to be submerged, at increasingly greater depths. It will become a symbol of the cynicism, stupidity, and folly of our age. And it will be important for future generations to know who was responsible for this failure of action and imagination as this global crisis crescendoed."

The post was shared by longtime friends of The Creators Project, Coral Morphologic, the subjects of our 2015 documentary, Coral City. The marine bio-art duo, in fact, had already come up with a proposal for a project that sounded quite a bit like Rather's monument. We think the monument is a wonderful idea, so we reached out to Coral Morpho for more info, and also commissioned a few of The Creators Project's favorites—Marlon Preuss, Michael Kerbow, kyttenjanae + Philip Rugo, and Grace Miceli, a.k.a., @artbabygirl—to come up with alternate takes on what a marvelous, melancholy monument to climate change deniers might look like. 

Marlon Preuss (@marlonpruz)

by Marlon Preuss for The Creators Project

Marlon Preuss: This is how I envision this monument. We start with an off shore oil rig and add cranes to the sides of it that act as legs and add barrels for eyes to show the oil rig's true form: a huge water arachnid that sucks the nectar from the earth. This will be the base for the globe that sits on top of it. At the top of this Earth, Donald Trump can be seen playing golf on the holes of the ozone layer. The evidence of the ozone depleting is right next to him, yet he decides to treat it as a game. The huge EXXXXON sign consuming the Earth represents the former C.E.O of Exxon, Rex Tillerson, being appointed as Secretary of State. He is using the fate of the world for business and profit, branding our entire planet with greed, ignorance, and the logo of one of the corporations that run things. Also, EXXON just sounds like an evil company that exterminates things. 

Michael Kerbow (@michaelkerbow)

by Michael Kerbow for The Creators Project

Michael Kerbow: The Sinker is a symbolic figurative monument. I see it being made of limestone, or some other soft material, so it would gradually dissolve away in the increasingly acidic ocean. The names of climate change deniers could be carved into the sculpture deeply enough that it would take some time for their names to disappear.

The sculpture is a somewhat punny take on Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, or in this case, The Non-Thinker. The sculpture would be of a businessman or politician sitting on a rock with his arms crossed and a bag placed over his head. Perhaps a number of these statues could be installed together in a group, each figure posed slightly differently. Each one could be a “portrait” of a specific climate change denier.

kyttenjanae (@kyttenjanae) x Philip Rugo (@philiprugo)

by kyttenjanae + Philip Rugo for The Creators Project

kyttenjanae: This piece is a physical iteration of a kyttenjanae virtual avatar, adapted as a landmark and data gathering device. Unlike the virtual avatars, which live infinitely in coded image, the physical sculptures will decay and become a part of the environment they are placed in. The sculptures will evolve with the wildlife they surround, mirroring the warm embrace of the two figures.

Grace Miceli (@artbabygirl)

by Grace Miceli for The Creators Project

Grace Miceli: I designed a 200' tall monument made of recycled plastic in the shape of a thermometer/gravestone hybrid that will track rising tides as it would rising temperatures. The names of climate change deniers are engraved along the sides in a bright pink color and there is a cute landscape and background because humor is the only way I know how to deal with the impending apocalypse.

Coral Morphologic (@coralmorpho)

A yacht passes through the spiral monuments for scale. Image courtesy of Coral Morphologic

A basic rendering of Bhakti Baxter’s conch/propeller spiral monument marking a post-Panamax PortMiami reaching at least 60’ above mean high tide, and extending 20’ below the surface. Image courtesy of Coral Morphologic

To captains and passengers aboard approaching ships, they would appear on the horizon like a pair of spiralling Colossuses. As part of our collaboration, we proposed the idea to Baxter that his design should offer a significant surface area for corals to colonize, so that when the sea levels rose, the corals would encrust upward over time. 

The height of the sculpture would attract seabirds to perch on... and poop on it. Rain would wash the spiral then would act like a slide, channeling the bird poop down to the sea below where it would fertilize the corals with nitrogen and phosphorous which will fuel their growth. As the sea levels rise, the intertidal ‘Vice’ Zoanthus will begin slowly creeping up the spiral. Stony corals and sea fans would encrust the subtidal parts of the sculpture, and the open spaces beneath the ‘legs’ of the spiral would attract fish large and small to create a genuinely diverse artificial coral reef. A permanent 360-degree webcam installed on the monument below the waterline would livestream the reef view directly to the internet, while scientific probes would log water temperature, pH, pollution, and tidal height to better analyze the biological, chemical, and physical status of Miami’s coastal waters. For several hours after sunset, blue LED lights trained downward into the water will activate the fluorescence of the corals for the camera. Atop one of the monuments, a weather station and webcam would livestream the marine conditions, as well as offer the world an aerial view of sunrises and sunsets over an iconic city. Appropriate red and green US Coast Guard navigation lights at the top of the monuments will serve to delineate the ends of the hazardous jetties at night.  

Follow Dan Rather, @marlonpruz, @michaelkerbow, @kyttenjanae, @philiprugo, @artbabygirl, and @coralmorpho for more. 

Related:

At COP22, Young Photographers Give a Face to Climate Change

A Paddleboarding Muralist Painted a Warning on a Melting Iceberg

Art Mimics Life in a Dying Coral Reef Installation

It's kind of weird writing a first impressions for a product that is already more than a year old. But as it so happens, I just started using one today. I am a Mac user but I have a good background in using Windows, all the way back to the very first version. In fact, I have more PCs running Windows than I have Macs. The machine I have used the most during the last 18 months has been a Surface 3 with 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. It’s still working fine, but I wanted a better keyboard. And I got way more than I thought I would. Surface 3 runs on a mobile CPU which was mostly fine for me. So I was looking at using the same configuration with Surface Pro 4. But then the opportunity for a much faster machine arose.

So here we are: Surface Pro 4 with Intel Core i7-6650U running at 2.2 GHz with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. I never had issues with not enough RAM or not enough storage. My workloads are simple and I don't keep much data on the device. It’s always somewhere else in the background, in my own storage or in cloud storage. I travel light. That means I would have been fine with 128 GB of storage as well, but 256 is the minimum for i7 machines. Think of it as a two-seater sports car. And a sports car it is. Man, this thing is fast.

The thing I was worried about is fan noise. If you have a big engine, you need big cooling. Surface 3 has a tiny engine and no fans, so does the entry level Surface Pro 4 with an Intel m3 CPU. But now I am glad that I have the fast engine, because the fans only turned on during the initial load when Surface was installing updates, pulling down files from cloud storage and similar background tasks. I have not heard it since. And when it was on, it was rather quiet.

Three things happened today:

1. I was blown away by the keyboard. It's no compromise. This is the real deal, especially compared to Surface 3, but also compared to many other keyboard I use. It’s completely transparent to me. I don’t notice it at all. I just type without thinking about it. And that experience includes the trackpad on the keyboard. It feels natural to me as a Mac user, unlike the Surface 3 trackpad, which is barely usable at all.
2. When I set up the machine, it activated Windows Hello. That means it asks you to look at the camera and then it remembers your face through the infrared camera that sits left of the real camera. It also asks you for a backup PIN so you have another means to unlock the machine, if Hello fails. And that never happened. Surface recognizes me immediately, even before I sit down in front of it. This trumps a fingerprint reader by a margin.
3. The pen I used with Surface 3 was my favorite after Apple Pencil. The pen that comes with Surface Pro 4 however plays on a whole new level. There are no buttons at your fingertips, which were always kind of tricky to hit. It does have a button at the top for launching OneNote, taking a screenshot or calling Cortana. And it also works as an eraser, like you would with a pencil eraser. It has a flat side, there is a strong magnet and you can attach it to the left side of Surface, or the top, depending on how you hold it.

Better pen, much better keyboard and trackpad, very useful Windows Hello. And having that faster CPU has already made a big difference. I can finally use Flipboard on Windows which was way too slow on Surface 3.

For now, vowe is a very happy camper.

At 140 characters, tweets lack context. Without context, there is no truth. So tweets are lies. Donald Trump’s tweets are lies, and so are mine. But they reveal a lot about what’s going on in our respective heads. What do I mean when I say that the truth demands context? Let’s start with one of my … Continued

The post Tweets are lies — and not just from Donald Trump appeared first on without bullshit.

Laura Fleming, Worlds of Learning, Dec 24, 2016

Fun toys: a list. I like the one where you saw your own balsa wood planks and build stuff. "We noticed an important shift in Maker Education.   Once driven by STEM and makerspace in a box types of kits, we are seeing much more of an emphasis on open-ended exploration and stocking makerspaces with materials that foster that. "

We’d all been hearing the chatter for half a year that TransLink had sold this prime site at 41st and Oak for a significant sum, far more than it had originally anticipated five years ago.

That was seen as one more piece of good news for the agency, giving it a lot more money to put into transit improvements in the 10-year plan, helping to leverage in provincial and federal dollars.

The official announcement came late yesterday, causing many of us to scramble. Strange they put out such an important piece of news so late in the day. My story here, after having managed to get hold of a few people by deadline.

The announcement mostly confirmed what Bob Mackin and Frank O’Brien enterprisingly winkled out of someone back in mid-October for Business in Vancouver, though no mention in the TransLink announcement of the Kunyuan involvement they detailed.

This is obviously a huge windfall for TransLink. I did see people commenting on Twitter that it was another lost opportunity to provide affordable housing, with some suggestion that TransLink should have turned over all or part of the site for social housing.

I’m always interested in hearing my own arguments shot down by those more knowledgeable, but that seems so problematic to me — asking a transit agency to accept less money for desperately needed transit improvements in order to house more low-income people.

Both accessible transit and cheap housing benefit poor people. Forcing governments or their agents to choose between the two is some kind of cruel game. In a better world, one with a strong stream of tri-government support for housing and the same for transit, presumably we wouldn’t even be discussing that Sophie’s Choice.

For the record, the developer will be required to provide 20 per cent of the buildable space for affordable housing. What that means, exactly, is still to be defined. And it’s an open question who will build it.

Shaadi Faris, the vice-president of Intergulf (one of the two partners), said currently the developer isn’t required to build the units, just provide the land. However, he said it’s still possible that the city will work something out with the developers where they do in fact build it for some negotiated price, as that would be an efficient way to proceed.

BTW, for those thinking there is NO provision for affordable housing on the site, here is the city policy that was passed last December. As you’ll see, it calls for a mix of housing that provides for seniors, families, people with mental health and/or addictions problems, rental and more. I expect people will be holding feet to the fire on this.

You think your power cable nightmares are bad, imagine what it’s like in the GeekGirlfriends.com real-world labs? In addition to all the gear that comes through here for review, there are two adults, one college student, and one chaos-spewing teen. Last week, I dug around the tech archives here looking for a laptop to use for design work and 3D modeling. I found two options. Each was much-loved in its day, but both had been sitting on a bookshelf for some time, long separated from their charging cables.

I dug through a tangled mess of old cables in a cardboard box, squinting my eyes to read the fine print on each one. I tried to match up various plug styles with voltages and amperage. No luck.

Then Christina handed me the Dart Universal AC Adaptor, made by FINsix. This amazing little charger comes with an array of interchangeable tips. Locate the plug tip that fits your laptop, plug the Dart into the wall, and it automatically runs a test to figure out what voltage you need and how much power to deliver. Then it does it.

This thing is incredible.

Even if you haven’t lost your power cable, the Dart is smaller and lighter than the cable that came with your laptop, and it includes a USB port so you can charge your laptop and phone at the same time from the same outlet.

Yesterday, the FINsix Dart rescued two dormant laptops. I highly recommend you add it your laptop travel kit.

Over the past few months I read Hannah “Banality of Evil” Arendt’s difficult and idiosyncratic (somewhat unnecessarily so) but highly rewarding 1958 classic The Human Condition. This slide-deck is a deep-dive attempt to apply her philosophy to the post-software-eats-world human condition, which I call the computational condition. Maybe digital condition or post-technological condition would be better, but I like alliteration.

This deck should serve as a decent introduction to Arendt’s philosophy of action, which is already part of the zeitgeist to a much greater degree than you probably recognize. It is dense and wordy, 88 slides long and full of big (thematically bucketed and curated) block quotes along book-ended and interrupted by my own heavy-handed commentary and summary sections, but trust me, it’s a 100x easier to digest than the book itself. But that’s not my main purpose in creating it.

The main purpose is this: With some significant augmentations and modifications (a few of them drastic enough to alter her basic philosophical posture in an irreversible and unforgivable way, the irony of which she’d have appreciated as you’ll see), her ideas actually work really well as a foundation for constructing what I think Silicon Valley needs badly right now: a solid political philosophy built on the foundation of the folk philosophy that already defines tech culture: doerism. So here’s my stab at it. Post a comment if you are interested in a sort of video salon on the topic, in either seminar or discussion format (specify which interests you more). I haven’t yet decided whether to do one, or attempted to present this deck. I suspect it would take me 2-4 hours to present this depending on how prepared people are.

In my own modest way, what I’m trying to do here is get a stone soup going, to cook up a political philosophy for Silicon Valley that is not embarrassingly juvenile/sophomoric. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, this should be a good starting point for you. Even if you dislike doerism (in the sense of the lived political philosophy of Silicon Valley), dislike Arendt (there is much to dislike about her), and are suspicious of any attempt to combine the two, this is in a way the most obvious steel-manning of what is already the tacit political philosophy of Silicon Valley. So your alternatives to it should probably understand what it might possibly be right about.

A friend of mine recently shared a link to Radio Garden on a mailing list (remember those?), and in the ensuing conversation, another friend wrote:

I remember when I was a kid playing with my Dad's shortwave radio and just being flabbergasted when late one night I tuned in a station from Peru. Today you can get on your computer and communicate instantly with any spot on the globe, and that engenders no sense of wonder at all.

Such is the nature of advancing technology. Everyone becomes acclimated to amazing new things, and pretty soon they aren't even things any more.

Teachers face a particularly troublesome version of this phenomenon. Teach a subject for a few years, and pretty soon it loses its magic for you. It's all new to your students, though, and if you can let them help you see it through their eyes, you can stay fresh. The danger, though, is that it starts to look pretty ordinary to you, even boring, and you have a hard time helping them feel the magic.

If you read this blog much, you know that I'm pretty easy to amuse and pretty easy to make happy. Even so, I have to guard against taking life and computer science for granted.

Earlier this week, I was reading one reading one of the newer tutorials in Matthew Butterick's Beautiful Racket, Imagine a language: wires. In it, he builds a DSL to solve one of the problems in the 2015 edition of Advent of Code, Some Assembly Required. The problem is fun, specifying a circuit in terms of a small set of operations for wires and gates. Butterick's approach to solving it is fun, too: creating a DSL that treats the specification of a circuit as a program to interpret.

This is no big deal to a jaded old computer scientist, but remember -- or imagine -- what this solution must seem like to a non-computer scientist or to a CS student encountering the study of programming languages for the first time. With a suitable interpreter, every dataset is a program. If that isn't amazing enough, some wires datasets introduce sequencing problems, because the inputs to a gate are defined in the program after the gate. Butterick uses a simple little trick: define wires and gates as functions, not data. This simple little trick is really a big idea in disguise: Functions defer computation. Now circuit programs can be written in any order and executed on demand.

Even after all these years, computing's most mundane ideas can still astonish me sometimes. I am trying to keep my sense of wonder high and to renew it whenever it starts to flag. This is good for me, and good for my students.

~~~~

P.S. As always, I recommend Beautiful Racket, and Matthew Butterick's work more generally, quite highly. He has a nice way of teaching useful ideas in a way that appreciates their beauty.

P.P.S. The working title of this entry was "Paging Louis C.K., Paging Louis C.K." That reference may be a bit dated by now, but still it made me smile.

I spent the last day of Western Civilization addressing the very phenomenon that caused our collective downfall: email.

On November 8th—Election Day—I spent six hours in a rented studio in Manhattan, taping a new class for Skillshare. Email Productivity: Work Smarter with Your Inbox is a forty-minute video class made up of bite-sized lessons that show how you can conquer email overload with mail rules so that you spend less time on email, and have more time for the work that matters most.

Watching the class now is like watching a time capsule from a previous, better lifetime?—?one in which the worst thing that could happen on email was missing a message, or getting distracted at the dinner table. The mistake I made, back in that other world, was in thinking of email as a tool that each of us could use as we saw fit.

But now I know that email is something we all have to tackle together. That’s because somewhere along the way, email became our collective id: the repository of our pleas for attention, our flimsiest marketing gimmicks, our furtive love affairs.

Email became the thing we looked at when we first woke up in the morning, and just before we went to sleep at night. As the conduit for our work, our schedules, our ideas and our relationships, email acquired the essence of our culture, and became Us Personified: email became Email.

And now, Email is having its revenge.

Email launched its first assault in a form that will be familiar to anyone who has done battle with corporate email policy. If you’ve ever worked in an organization that forced you to use its crappy mail system instead of your own carefully chosen mail provider, you may relate to Hillary Clinton’s decision to set up her own private server instead of the account provided by the State Department. Or you might sweep that justification aside in favor of the theory that she just wanted to shield her communications from Freedom of Information requests.

In either case, we know what was really at work behind the scenes: Email, that sower of fear. Fed by our contradictory desires for privacy and connection, for discretion and for accountability, Email has grown into a vengeful beast that can destroy the best of us. We have imbued Email with so much power and mystery (what exactly is a private email server, many people wondered) that we are filled with terror at the sight of a woman in charge of her own inbox.

One among us dared to imagine that we could master Email. So Email decided to show us who’s boss.

But raking a candidate over a few mid-election coals was not enough to satisfy Email’s wrath. Four decades of abuse could not be avenged by dragging a single leader through the mud: it required large-scale, mass humiliation. The kind of humiliation you get when tens of thousands of messages are freed from their confinement, and set loose on WikiLeaks.

Sure, Russia played a role, but Vladimir Putin was Email’s bitch. It’s Email that destroyed not only Hillary but the entire DNC leadership, consoling us with little more than a questionable risotto recipe.

Now that Email has delivered the US Presidency to Donald Trump, it is poised to deliver its final blow. In Donald Trump, Email has the ultimate ally: a ruler so feared, and so fearless, that he renders online communication suspect.

No more can we use Email to circulate news, secure in the knowledge that it will be read and believed. No more can we trust our Email providers the way we trust our priests, placing faith in the sanctity of the user-ISP relationship. No more can we burden Email with our secrets, secure in the expectation that our messages will go unread by government eyes.

Yet I have good news for you, my fellow citizens. We may have created this creature known as Email; this perfect avatar of our secrets, our fears and our cravings. We may have imbued this demon with such mystical, all-encompassing power that the mere phrase “email scandal” inspires greater derision than a cumulative record of tax evasion, discrimination and sexual assault. We may fear the Email beast so much that we have reconciled ourselves to spending hours and hours in its service, each and every day.

But we need not accept Email defeat. We can resist the Email onslaught, and even bend Email to our will.

We can wrestle Email to the ground with mail rules, and reclaim our time and attention.

We can use encryption to secure the messages that Email (or the NSA, or Mother Russia) might choose to turn against us.

We might even make peace with Email, so that its mysterious, fear-inducing powers can never again drive us into the arms of those who would destroy the very foundation of free communications.

First, we retake our inboxes. Tomorrow, America!

Nokia, a company that was once the top cellphone maker in the world, has seen better years.

In April of 2014 Nokia’s hardware devision was purchased by Microsoft for roughly $7.2 billion USD, with the transaction in the end providing little to no benefit to Redmond, Washington-based company. The tech giant eventually wrote off the acquisition, but only Nokia’s hardware division, not the manufacturer as a whole.

Since then Nokia has reportedly been working on bolstering its patent portfolio by acquiring Alcatel-Lucent last year.

In a press release Nokia has stated the following regarding the legal action it’s taken against Apple:

“Since agreeing a license covering some patents from the Nokia Technologies portfolio in 2011, Apple has declined subsequent offers made by Nokia to license other of its patented inventions which are used by many of Apple’s products.”

Ilkka Rahnasto, Nokia’s head of patent business said that the company has contributed to “fundamental technologies” that are still utilized in the modern mobile phones we use today, including Apple’s various mobile devices.

Nokia does not reveal exactly what patents Apple is infringing on in the press release, but it does state where the filings were initially made. Nokia is filing its case against Apple in the Regional Court of Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Munich in Germany, and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The filing states that Apple reportedly infringed on 32 of Nokia’s patents.

It’s important to keep in mind that this is just the first stage in Nokia’s recently launched patent case against Apple. and if we know anything about these cases, they can often take a very long time to materialize.

A new study by Tefficient, a Swedish telecom consulting firm, indicates that Canadians pay the most per megabyte (MB) for mobile data. This is the firm’s 14th survey, but the first time the company has included Canada in a report.

The study shows that data use is growing sharply  in countries where operators commonly offer unlimited data. In markets like Canada, where most carriers are more miserly with their data buckets, data usage is growing extremely slowly. The study suggested that Canadian carriers lead the world in revenue per MB, at approximately 45 Euros (about $62 CAD) per GB.

In raw data usage, Finland led the pack with the average user consuming 7.2GB of mobile data per SIM. The survey found that 47 percent of Finnish SIMs were on unlimited data plans. Canada was near the bottom of the list in data usage per SIM, at around 1GB.

There is a “be careful what you wish for” component to unlimited data around the globe, however. Many carriers offer unlimited data on all plans but limit the available speeds. Entry-priced plans may be 3G-only, and LTE-capable plans will often have transfer speeds throttled unless you opt for the most-expensive plans.

Many unlimited plans (as is generally the case with unlimited plans in the U.S., and with Freedom Mobile in Canada) have a limited amount of full-speed data, after which speeds are further slowed. Canadians, in contrast, are accustomed to getting the best available speeds at all times, but having limits put on how much data can transferred before overages kick in, or before data just stops working, in the case of prepaid options like Public Mobile.

An interesting trend in parts of the world is wireless networks attempting to supplant traditional “terrestrial” networks (such as cable, DSL, and fibre-optic) by offering fixed wireless plans in the home, again with limits on the bandwidth (AKA speed) rather than on the throughput.

Wi-Fi usage varied across the globe, according the study. In countries with unlimited data, Wi-Fi usage was lower, whereas countries like Canada showed higher use of Wi-Fi.

The study notes that a “truly unlimited plan doesn’t exist — operators limit throughput, tethering, video resolution, time or even volume,” but that marketing something as unlimited tends to significantly increases usage.

The SIMs that moved the most data were typically data-only, such as those you might purchase for a tablet or a PC, and that the operators with the highest data usage generally also had the highest proportion of data-only SIMs. Almost 20 percent of one Finnish operator’s SIMs were data-only, and their customers used nearly 10GB per SIM, far above the average of 7.2GB per SIM for Finland as a whole.

It will be interesting to see how mobile data usage evolves in the coming years with the likely expansion of Freedom Mobile, and recent Black Friday activity suggesting that the big-3’s flanker brands might be beginning to compete more than in the past.

Find the full study at this link.

To help us get through the next couple of colder months, dandyhorse is going to be profiling cyclists from around the world! Folks who love to cycle, here in Toronto and further afield, will give us insight into what it's like to cycle in their cities. Want to add your voice to the bikespotting series? Get in touch with us at: cayley@dandyhorsemagazine.com

Marieke - Student

What is it like biking in your city? 
At the moment I live in Amsterdam, and cycling around the city can be difficult. Mostly because it's not clear to tourists where they can and cannot walk. Tourists on bikes don't know how to cycle.

How are the bike lanes?
Apart from the tourists it's pretty great. There are cycle lanes, and cars are very careful.

What can the city do better?
I heard the council of Amsterdam is somehow going to cut down on rental places for tourists, that will be great for the locals!

What is the relationship between cars and bikes? 
Like I said people are pretty aware. I'm originally from Arnhem and everyone is even more careful with bikes! It's a privilege to live in the Netherlands when it comes to cycling.

If you could summarise city cycling in one word what would it be?
Easy!

Bram - Student

What is it like biking in your city? 
I have lived in the city of Leiden for quite some time now, and getting around by bike here is quite fun.

My folding bik, the one you see on the photo, is my personal favourite when getting around cities. They're not as fast or slick as a full size bike but they make up for this because they're less likely to be stolen (you can take them indoors more easily) and they are free for charge when traveling by train! You can get a used one for just a few bucks.
How are the bike lanes?
In the centre of Leiden there are way too many bikes and sometimes it's hard to get around. I also have a racing bike.

What can the city do better?
I think the city council of Leiden treats cyclists very good. We have great bike lanes and cars take cyclists seriously. Bikers in the Netherlands have a place on the road and are respected. 

What is the relationship between cars and bikes? 
Cars are less likely to give you right of way, or be gentle on my racing bike. On my city bike it's easier. It's pretty clear that they're not used to racing bikes yet, but that will be a matter of time.

If you could summarise city cycling in one word what would it be? 
City cycling in one word: fun and easy.

Jan Willem - Amsterdam

What is it like biking in your city?
It sucks, there's too many people, there's not enough space for pedestrians and cyclists, too much space for cars.

How are the bike lanes?
Bike lanes are separated, which is good for the slow cyclist, they can commute easily to work or school, if you want to go faster than 20km you really want to be on the roads. School kids in the morning are a deathtrap because they go so slowly. Usually around those times I take the roads, which is a risk because you can be fined up to 220 Euros.

What can the city do better?
 Get rid of the tourist-bike, no cars, absolutely none, (except for emergency services) and fast/slow bike lanes.

What else would you like to see?
I would like to have a city "ring" around and above the city. Just like an innercity highway, superfast with highway rules for entering/ getting off.

What is the relationship between cars and bikes?
My relationship with cars is really love hate. If they are friendly and notice me I always smile or put my hand up in a friendly wave. When they don't see me and they almost hit me, I usually slap the bonnet.

If you could summarise city cycling in one word what would it be?
A fight (towards tourists, cars, slower cyclists, traffic lights and time)

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Looking for the best gifts for the best people in your life? We can help! We've spent the year testing a lot of great (and some not-so-great) products to figure out our absolute favorite tech of 2016. And we've brought it all here, together, in one easy wish list, just for you!

I visit Windows Central almost every day. I understand that being a fan site means there's less objectivity involved in their reporting as their reader's personal preferences take priority. However, I really don't get how there's three Windows phones on their 2016 holiday gift guide. At the top too! If you're looking for a new phone these holidays, look elsewhere. I switched this time last year, and I felt pretty stupid for having waited so long to do so. Don't be stupid.