Rolandt

Released today, some material on the proposed new medical complex north of Main & Terminal. This would replace the original St. Paul’s, built in 1923.  More HERE on the public consultation process. Hi-res animation (1:03) HERE.

The early-day concepts have been developed by PHC’s redevelopment design team and show the major “building blocks” for the new St. Paul’s campus, potential configurations and heights of buildings on the site, as well as potential roads, entrances, paths, parking, green spaces and more.

Another public open house event is on Wednesday 4 pm to 7 pm at Thornton Park (in front of the train station at Main & Terminal).  Click photo for hi-res version.

 

 

I’ve been on a Docker vision quest for the past week, since Tom Lee made this suggestion in OpenAddresses chat:

hey, slightly crazy idea: @migurski what would you think about defining an API for machine plugins? basically a set of whitelisted scripts that do the sorts of things defined in openaddresses/scripts with configurable frequency (both for the sake of the stack and bc some data sources are only released quarterly).

Mostly, OpenAddresses sources retrieve data directly from government authorities, via file downloads or ESRI feature server APIs. Each week, we re-run the entire collection and crawl for new data. Some data sources, however, are hard to integrate and they require special processing. They might need a session token for download, or they might be released in some special snowflake format. For these sources, we download and convert to plainer cached format, and keep around a script so we can repeat the process.

Docker seemed like it might be a good answer to Tom’s question, for a few reasons. A script might use a specific installed version of something, or some such similar particular environment. Docker can encapsulate that expectation. Using “docker run”, it’s possible to have this environment behave essentially like a shell script, cleaning up after itself upon exit. I am a card-carrying docker skeptic but this does appear to be right in the sweet spot, without triggering any of the wacko microservices shenanigans that docker people seem excited about.

(docker is the future)

Waldo Jaquith followed up to report that it worked well for him in similar situations: “For my purposes, Docker’s sweet spot is periodically running computationally-intensive batch processes in a strictly-defined environments.”

So, I decided to try with three OpenAddresses sources.

Australia

Australia’s G-NAF was my first test subject. It’s distributed via S3 in two big downloadable files, and there is a maintained loader script by Hugh Saalmans. This was easy to make into a completely self-contained Dockerfile even with the Postgres requirement. The main challenge with this one was disk usage. Docker is a total couch hog, but individual containers are given ~8GB of disk space. I didn’t want to mess with defaults, so I learned how to use “docker run --volume” to mount a temporary directory on the host system, and then configured the contained Postgres database to use a tablespace in that directory.

No big challenges with Australia, it’s just a big dataset and takes a lot of time and space to handle.

Here’s the script: openaddresses/scripts/au.

New Zealand

Downloading data from Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) had a twist. The data set must be downloaded manually using an asynchronous web UI. I didn’t want to mess with Selenium here, so running the NZ script requires that a copy of the Street Address data file be provided ahead of time. It’s not as awful as USGS’s occasional “shopping cart” metaphor with emailed links, but it’s still hard to automate. The docker instructions for New Zealand include instructions for this manual process.

With the file in place, the process is straightforward. At this point I learned about using “docker save” to stash complete docker images, and started noting that they could be loaded from cache in the README files.

Here’s the script: openaddresses/scripts/nz.

Tennessee

The Tennessee Property Viewer website is backed by a traditional ESRI feature service, but it requires a token to use. The token is created in Javascript… somehow… so the Tennessee docker directions include a note about using a browser debug console to find it.

The token is passed to docker via the run command, though I could have also used an environment variable.

Here’s the script: openaddresses/scripts/us/tn.

What Now?

These scripts work pretty well. Once the data is processed, we post it to S3 where the normal OpenAddresses weekly update cycle takes over, using the S3 cache URL instead of the authority’s original.

With some basic direction-following anyone can update data dependencies for OpenAddresses. As the project moves forward and manually-created caches fall out of date, we’re going to be seeing an increasing number of sources in need of manual intervention, and I hope that they’ll be easier to work with in the future. Comments (28)

I just finished reading The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, who also writes geek books about Linux and Apache and so on. I enjoyed it, it’s a page-turner. One of the reviewers on Amazon said “This is what Gaiman’s American Gods should have been.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but both address the tricky problem of divine personae lodged in Middle America.

It’s a big sprawling messy book with subdivisions and malls and trucker bars, and then there’s Father, a heartless God who fosters young Americans and trains them up, what business people call “succession planning”. The training involves infinite time and infinite cruelty, and on the occasion of that succession the consequences are really not good for the neighbohood, comprising the Earth.

For all the cosmic fireworks, the story’s mostly tactical and local and suburban. The characters who aren’t divine are compelling and fun, while the deranged-flyover-zone-deity villains ooze terror and, weirdly, pity.

Plus, there are a couple of lions who will leave a mark on you.

And then there’s Carolyn, our protagonist, who’s both human and divine, ruthless and sympathetic, full of surprises; a novelist’s triumph and a character I’m really, really glad to have spent four hundred pages with.

This is my first father’s day without my father. His memories and spirit have been very present with me the past week, but today is still tough. Miss you, Dad, and I will continue to try and make you proud.

I’m a Golden State Warriors fan. Not huge, but big enough to have held season tickets through the Run TMC years. (I grew up a Knicks fan, and liked the Celtics when I lived in Boston, but those are less leveraged these days.) So I do want the Warriors to win tonight.

But I don’t expect them to, because the Cavs make a better story.

LeBron James has made clear, especially over the last two games, that he is the best all-round player of all time. Michael Jordan had no weaknesses, but he wasn’t as strong as LeBron at defense, passing, shot blocking, and treating the other team the way a bowling ball treats pins. Or as strong, period.

Nobody on Earth is playing any game, anywhere ,with more determination, skill and strength than LeBron James is right now. And nobody is better at getting his whole team to play as one. Or at a more ideal time and place.

Kyrie Irving is also playing his best, which means he can pretty much get whatever shot he wants, whenever he wants it. And Tristan Thompson, a near-nobody before the playoffs, is playing like the second coming of Stephen Adams, who gave Thompson and the Cavs coaching staff a clinic on how a big man can take advantage of the Warriors’ weakness in the middle.

Let’s face it: the OKC Thunder figured out the Warriors pretty well. Even though the Thunder failed, they took the Warriors to seven games and gave the Cavaliers a lot of lessons to work with. Now that Bogut is out and Iguodala is slowed by back problems, the Warriors also lack their best shot blocker and their best defense against LeBron. Draymond Green also needs to play cautiously to avoid more technical and flagrant fouls, to which he is highly prone. Harrison Barnes has been subtracting from his free agent value nearly every time he shoots the ball. Even Shawn Livingston, normally a great floor leader when he comes off the bench for Steph, has been shooting bricks.

Four things look good for the Warriors tonight: 1) they’re playing at home, 2) their three best players are healthy, 3) two of those players are the best outside shooters in the game, and 4) one of those two was the unanimous MVP this year for good reasons. Even though Steph hasn’t been his old self enough in this series, it could be lights out if he shows up big tonight. Same goes for Klay.

If a game between two great teams doesn’t stay close to the end, one of the two will melt. That’s what happened in every game so far in this series. In total both teams have the same number of points, but each team has melted before the end three times. The problem for the Warriors is that they melted twice in each of the last two games: first at home, and then in Cleveland. They also melted under tremendous heat from the Cavaliers. Actually it was worse than that. They came apart at the seams. We saw that when Steph Curry pitched a fit after his sixth foul and Klay Thompson walked to the locker room before the game ended. Both moves were weak and childish, inviting no confidence from their teammates and giving plenty to their opponents.

No doubt the Warriors can win. But no doubt they also feel entitled, and that’s a problem too. You get a clear sense in this series that the Cavs want to win the title more than the Warriors want to keep it (along with the legacy of a record-breaking regular season). That legacy isn’t a burden to the Cavaliers. It’s a rooster they want to knock off its shed.

So, again, I don’t want to see King James wear the crown tonight. But either way it goes, he’ll still earn the right to the nickname. And he’ll be the MVP when it matters most.

 

 

The new Voyager 5200 promises protection from wind noise, and boy does it deliver. I tested this today on my bike. At 25 km/h you were unable to hear any wind noise at all at the other end of the phone connection. It sounded exactly like it would if I were inside an office. You could attend a conference call on your bike. How does it deliver that? It has a redesigned microphone boom with four protected microphones and software that detects and eliminates this particular noise. In addition to all the other noise cancellation the previous models provided.

This is my third installment of the Voyager series, not counting the Focus and the Edge. I started with the Voyager Pro, which was replaced with the Voyager Legend, and now the 5200 Series. The Edge is a very comfortable and small device, but I found out that the classic Voyager design renders better sound quality. Only by a small margin, but it is noticeable in dictation.

This Voyager over-ear design is a winning formula, that Plantronics can only improve in small steps. The Legend gave us a dock connector for quick charging inside a case or on a dock. But it lost its microUSB port so you always had to have either the case or a small connector. The new 5200 Series has both:

That means you can buy the bare headset without case and still be able to charge everywhere. The case has grown considerably from the Legend. Like the older model it protects and recharges the headset and has a place to keep the BT600 USB dongle, which presents a sound device to your Mac or PC without pairing the headset to the Bluetooth stack in the operating system. You won't have to reconfigure your softphone when connecting the headset.

The new feature for this case is a desktop dock. Take the headset out, close the lid, connect the case to microUSB so it recharges the case battery. And then place the headset between conference calls into this dock, like you see in the first photo.

Should you buy a Voyager? If you spend a lot of time in phone calls and conference calls, by all means, yes. The headset connects to both your pc and your smartphone at the same time. Software ties into your softphone and provides call control and presence information. It has sensors that know whether you are wearing the headset, which lets it switch from and to your smartphone without any interaction on the screen, just by putting it on your ear or taking it off. Should you buy a 5200 series if you already have a Pro, Legend, or Edge? Probably not, unless you have this specific wind noise problem. But connect your older headset to Plantronics software and see if you have an update waiting. Plantronics is one of those companies that improve their products in the field.

 

You don't see these devices on the street. They just look too dorky. If you are serious about phone calls or conference calls, you should not care too much about the looks. You should not have to hold a phone to your ear.

I’ve been fighting a cold for nearly 2 weeks, however, I’m finally over the hump and feeling much better. Today, after a morning rain, I walked through the beautiful rainforest at Lighthouse Park in North Vancouver, admiring the old-growth Douglas Fir.

I feel so alive after breathing the fresh air. Nature rocks!

To recap: On Sunday, June 12th, I completed Cycle 18 Week 2. I have Multiple Myeloma and anemia, a rare blood cancer. It is incurable, but treatable. From February to November 2013, I received Velcade chemo through weekly in-hospital injections as an outpatient. Since February 9th 2015, I have been on Pomalyst and dexamethasone chemo treatment (Pom/dex).

Weekly chemo-inspired self-portraits can be viewed in my flickr album.

June 2014: Atrium Clock, Sinclair Centre

The post Week 70 chemo complete: My afternoon at Lighthouse Park appeared first on Fade to Play.

Today was a great Father’s Day:

• Woke up to homemade waffles;
• played Frogger on the Commodore 128 after breakfast;
• went to Burger King for lunch with family;
• went to Obi (Italy’s take on Home Depot) for a surge protector;
• got ice cream and Tessy paid for mine;
• came home to play more on the C128, this time with Tommy
• blogged about the Commodore 128;
• had Anto’s brother and girlfriend over for dinner, which was homemade Chinese stir fry
• Ate an awesome cake Tessy made for Father’s Day—she is becoming a really awesome cook;
• Watched France and Switzerland play a very boring game of soccer with Miles;
• began writing this post

That’s about as American a Sunday as you can have in Italy. Everyone else was having picnics in the mountains….high altitude hippies.  Near perfect day in my mind. Father’s day isn’t really a thing here in Italy, which is refreshing because the trumped up holiday fanfare can overshadow some of the simple joys. That said, it was really awesome to get cards from Tessy and Miles this afternoon celebrating the occasion. They put together a couple of DIY creations, and I love them.

Tessy’s card is a two-sided elaborate collage of animal stickers, it is really quite impressive.

And inside the card a message delivered via a computer design, complete with screen and keyboard. So awesome, and I am glad she is getting the message about money and sees me as a kind of E.T./heart light kinda dad

Whereas Miles has taken the Reclaim branding to a new level. The yellow writing in the four quadrants of this card read as follows “Jim Groom the Reclaimer.”

Also, it seems my 80s music influence is starting to payoff. He re-wrote (or shall we say reclaimed) the Eurhythmics “Sweet Dreams” lyrics very much to my liking:

Sweet dreams are made of these
and who am I to disagree travele
the world and the seven seas
Everybody’s looking to reclaim

Some of them want to reclaim you
Some of them want to get reclaimed by you
Some of them want to host you
Some of them want to be hosted by you

Hold your head up, keep your head up, reclaim along.

I think my marketing is working quite well at home. Yeah, pretty much a perfect Father’s day except for Tommaso—that little bastard—he didn’t give me anything

Some douchebag wrote a thought-leadering rant about the pain of using the open web vs native apps – this is my rebuttal.

The problem with that rant isn’t that it’s false.

The pain is real and the challenges of building amazing web experiences that can compete with native apps are something every company should take into account. That post never claimed it wasn’t possible to build great web experiences, just that the cost was higher and required more developers of higher skill which of course, translates to higher cost and higher risk. All the great innovation in the framework space like React Native solve the overall front end architecture problem, but not the bits and pieces of the actual experience where shit meets fan.

The problem with that rant is that it’s incomplete, and largely misses the point.

With a few – very fucking few exceptions – mobile apps perform really poorly when it comes to installs. I’m too lazy to link to all the research out there – just fucking google it yourself. There are over 2 million apps in the Apple and Android app stores, EACH. That would be like every person in New Mexico had their own app and they were all trying to get you to try it. The babies, the grownups, Jimmy McGill, and even the 73,530 people who voted for Trump. EVERYONE in New Mexico with their own app fighting for attention.

Even if you get someone to install your app, research shows that over 90% stops using it within 90 days. Retention is shit. My 12 year olds have over 100 apps on their phones and tablets. They actively use about 3. The rest just sits there wasting my family data plan when they insist on updating all those fucking useless apps. So much for taking cues from 12 year olds on how to run your business.

The area where native apps fail hard is viral distribution. Yeah, Twitter and Facebook have nice UX for showing off your app but those are not links you can easily copy and paste across platforms, in comments, emails, and text messages. Installing those apps can be annoying and time consuming, compared to opening a link in an embedded or external browser. There is no instant satisfaction or immediate follow through. Go through your phone and count how many apps you installed but never actually tried out yet because by the time it was ready, you had to get off the phone to pick up the dogs’ shit (or whatever shit your life is blessed with).

But the biggest area of weakness for native apps is in attracting short term engagement. Yeah yeah, we all worship long term engagement and user acquisition but with the exception of a few major success stories, most of us look for the occasional hit. A news article, a viral video, or an entertaining but otherwise useless rant hitting #1 on hacker news. You collect enough of those, and you can be successful without having acquired permanent users for a while, until you can afford those. You know, how most non-social media works. The media not produced by fucking teenagers.

I don’t care about the future of mankind, the liberation of information, the democratization of technology – the typical guilt-based marketing shit used by open web evangelists. I care about reaching an audience, and making it as easy and lightweight as possible. I want my customers to show up when they want to, and to make their very first visit something they don’t have to think about because it involved opening an app store, reading about the app, making sure it’s safe, clicking to download it, entering a password or their fingerprint, waiting for it to download, finding where the stupid phone decided to place the icon (what’s up with that? Is it a game?), opening the app, learning what is often a new UX because some 20 year old decided conventions are for suckers, creating an account, logging in – then – if you are still interesting, learning how to use a completely new application. By the time you are done, you can’t even remember how the fuck you got here in the first place (or what this sentence was about when it started).

Everything comes with a price and building native apps provide a much better control over the software development cost and risk. But like everything else in life, it’s a tradeoff and this one is probably not the one you want to make. The one where you are trading off instant engagement and faster time-to-first-meaningful-action for a Gantt chart.

Is your new thing so fucking amazing that people are going to install your app and give it a chance? Statistically speaking, unless you are best friend with a famous celebrity or Apple decides to feature your app in one of their top categories or search results, you are pretty much fucked. Again, over 2 million apps – and the joke is, Apple is proud of this milestone. It was the first number they bragged about at their recent event. Remember New Mexico? NEW FUCKING MEXICO of apps.

Building anything online for profit (or where user acquisition is important) requires taking into account a lot of factors. Portraying native apps as some kind of magical technical solution, even a temporary one, to the pains and shortcomings of web development is stupid. Some applications will do better as native apps. Some won’t. If you are producing experiences where the core value is information – news, images, videos, etc. you best chance of reaching the widest audience is still the web.

Sending someone a link is still the best distribution method online. If your content is stuck behind an app, it ought to be fucking incredible for people to go through the hoops required to get into it. Now, is it really that fucking incredible? Are you sure? Oh, and they need to see enough before they install the app to be convinced that’s true. Which means, you are probably going to need to provide some web access to your content.

Oh shit – that means you still have to hire a few of those web developers and deal with the pain. It’s never really app vs native. It’s a complicated tradeoff between multiple factors and no matter how much you read about it, how many statistics you collect, how many experts you talk to, you will still have to figure it out on your own, based on the specific properties of the experience you are building. And keep evaluating your decisions.

The web is the present and it’s a fucking mess. Deal with it.

Surprisingly good adaptation. Not bad!

A story about street spaces and paint, lots of paint, and one artist with a passion to end the road dominance of the car.

In Montreal, a local artist named Peter Gibson has been transforming the city’s summer streets and signs with his love of stencils since 2001. After three years of artistic  interventions without municipal consent, Gibson was left with 53 counts of mischief and potentially $100,000 in fines.

Peter Gibson, also known as as “Roadsworth” had a large gaggle of followers who campaigned to reduce the penalties for his illegal paint activity on city streets to a few community service hours. As one of Montreal’s city planners stated, this was the first time that citizens actually stood up and insisted that a public artist be supported and that the public art should stay. Even better, the community hours that Gibson was required to do were spent painting  murals like these.  Montrealers loved it. An urban legend was born.

 

Roadsworth divides his work into three categories-ground, wall, and street. This artist is a musician by day, and a  true street artist  by night. With Montreal winters, the salt and sand erase the work within four or five winters. But that just creates new opportunities to create art, whimsy and delight within the established parameters of the sidewalk, cross walk, and city street.

Alan Koh has created a short 6 minute documentary called “Roadsworth: Crossing the Line“.  Roadsworth is now in demand around the world to paint in public places, and is currently in Minneapolis as an  artist in residence with the Big Car Collective. He was also part of the 2016 Mural Festival occurring last week in Montreal.

 

 

Here’s the Bus Depot on Dunsmuir Street. It was opened in August 1947 on the former Cambie Street Grounds, sometimes used for marching practice by the regiments based in the nearby Beatty Street Drill Hall. It remained until 1993, which is around when we think our image was taken. In the later years it was branded as the Greyhound Bus Station, with Pacific Coach Lines and Maybuck Coach Lines also operating from here, but it started life as the Larwill Terminal of Pacific Stage Lines, a company created in 1922 and originally known as BC Motor Transportation Ltd., a subsidiary of the BC Electric Railway. The coach company ended up in the early 1960s being owned by the BC Government, who sold it in 1979 to Pacific Coach Lines, a new company formed by merging the Stage Lines with Vancouver Island Coach Lines. The Larwill name came from Albert Larwill, whose story we described in an earlier post.

The new moderne style building was opened in August 1947, eight months after construction started. At the time it was said that it was “designed to include the best features in terminal construction, it is Canada’s most modern and efficient transportation center. From this central location at Dunsmuir and Cambie Streets will operate the 116 buses of Pacific Stage Lines, the buses of North Coast Lines and Western Canadian Greyhound lines. From this terminal you may travel to any destination on any highway served by buses on this continent. The experienced staff of the Travel Bureau will advise you on fares, stopover points, accommodation and the attractions of the hundreds of scenic routes served by modern highway buses.”

As we noted, before the 1946 lease deal that saw the bus terminal created, this was The Cambie Grounds. It was a full city block often used as an assembly area, and home to the city’s first public sporting event, a rugby match between New Westminster and Vancouver in 1887, (when the City leased the land from the CPR for $5 a year) . According to a 1943 Vancouver Sun story, a chain gang cleared the remaining trees off the lot and made it into a proper sports field. The City bought the land for $25,000 in 1902, and still own it today. Since the bus depot moved to the ‘Pacific Central’ station in 1993 the land has been used as a parking lot, often partly occupied by a movie shoot. One day some of the site might be home to a new Vancouver Art Gallery.

In my iOS 10 Wishes story from April¹, I wrote:

I heard from multiple sources a few weeks ago that some iPad-only features will be shipped in 10.x updates following the release of iOS 10 in the Fall. I wouldn't be surprised if some iPad changes and feature additions won't make the cut for WWDC.

I didn't have high hopes for major iPad-specific features to be announced at WWDC. Still, I was disappointed to see the iPad return to the backseat² after last year's revitalization. Every time Craig Federighi ended a segment with "it works on the iPad, too", it felt like the iPad had become an afterthought again.

After WWDC, I strongly believe that Apple has notable iPad-only features in the pipeline, but they won't be available until later in the iOS 10 cycle, possibly in early 2017.

What We Did Get

Before delving into what I believe is happening, I want to mention some iPad features that Apple managed to add in the first beta of iOS 10.

On the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, Mail and Notes now support a three-panel interface reminiscent of their Mac versions. This should make it easier to move across mailboxes and folders in Notes, though I suspect I'll end up using it more in Mail.

I'd argue that the biggest change in iOS 10 for iPad is Safari split view. With this new mode, you'll be able to view two webpages at once, which should come in handy for a variety of tasks. Safari split view doesn't simply load two webpages in a single Safari window – it creates two concurrent Safari views. You can have one Safari view in normal browsing and the other set to private, or use Safari Reader in one view and regular Safari on the other side.

Safari split view in normal and private browsing mode.

Safari's in-app split view is solid, and it comes with a nice drag & drop animation to grab one page and drag it to the right side of the screen to create a split view.

You can even tap with two fingers on a link to quickly open it in split view.³ In my first tests on a 9.7-inch iPad Pro⁴, I can already see how Safari split view will save me time on a daily basis.

There are some welcome additions for external keyboard users as well. The behavior of Spotlight search has changed in iOS 10 to be in line with macOS – it opens on top of what you're doing without going back to the Home screen. You can now take a screenshot from a keyboard (using the same shortcut of macOS, CMD-Shift-3), and a 'Home Screen' shortcut has been added to the Command-Tab app switcher.

The updated Command-Tab switcher in iOS 10.

Alas, it's still not possible to interact with Split View and Slide Over via keyboard shortcuts.

Last, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that iOS 10 allows you to set up an iPad for the first time in landscape mode. Finally.

A Note on Playgrounds

We didn't get a full Xcode for iPad at WWDC 2016; unsurprisingly, Apple opted for porting the Playgrounds environment from macOS to iOS with a focus on education and learning Swift. And I think this is just as big a deal.

As someone who's been looking to learn Swift 3, Playgrounds looks fantastic. Apple knocked it out of the park with rethinking Swift editing through touch – the special software keyboard and the way you can enclose code in loops are two of my favorite details. The lessons look great and the use of in-app split view is clever. I have no doubt other companies will start offering code samples and lessons to be imported and used in Playgrounds as well.⁵

I should also point out that Playgrounds is much more than a kids tool for learning how to code with games. During the week of WWDC, I've seen examples of messaging UIs built in Playgrounds, fully functioning web views, and even private APIs imported in the app.⁶ If you know what you're doing and are familiar with Swift, you can build some pretty crazy things in Playgrounds.⁷

I love the idea of Playgrounds. Even if it's not Xcode, it's a bold first step in the right direction.

The iOS for iPad Cycle

We should be looking at what Apple did earlier this year with iOS 9.3 to understand the future of iOS for iPad.

While major iPad features such as Split View and Picture in Picture shipped with iOS 9.0 in September, iOS 9.3 was another milestone for the iPad in education. A release big enough that it deserved its own mini-site on Apple.com.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple move from a monolithic iOS release cycle to two major iOS releases in the span of six months – one focused on foundational changes, interface refinements, performance, and iPhone; the other primarily aimed at iPad users in the Spring.

I think it'd make sense for Apple to dedicate more time and engineering resources to a separate, more focused iPad release. If history is of any indication, it'd be reasonable to expect more iPad changes coming with a big mid-cycle software update⁸ and an iPad media event in the Spring to refresh the 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch models.

Looking at the first beta of iOS 10, we can also infer what could be coming to the iPad during the iOS 10 cycle.

The three-panel Notes and Mail on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro and the redesigned Apple Music with a vertical music player suggest that Apple has been thinking on how to further optimize their UI for the iPad's bigger screen. There are still too many instances of the iPad's interface being an unimaginative and sloppy adaptation of its iPhone counterpart. The few changes in iOS 10 are welcome, and I expect to see more of them across the iPad line.

The key functionality missing from the iPad at this point is drag & drop between apps in Split View. The consensus from people I spoke with at WWDC is that Apple has been laying the groundwork for a proper drag & drop system framework. I've always found it odd that Apple hasn't been pushing for more drag & drop features on iOS – a platform naturally suited for direct manipulation of content. I hope the ability to drag & drop stickers in iMessage threads and the new Safari drag & drop tab behavior are signaling changes coming down the road.

Speaking of Safari and tabs, I expect to see more in-app split views in Apple's apps. In theory, nothing is stopping third-party developers from doing that today – just look at what iCab does for split web browsing, for instance – but I feel like Apple should set an example for others to follow. Apple should bring in-app split view to more apps where it'd make sense (Pages, Mail, Numbers, etc.).

Finally, 3D Touch. It's safe to assume that it hasn't been brought to the iPad yet because of simple ergonomics: the larger the surface, the harder it gets to apply the right amount of pressure while still holding the device. 3D Touch was designed with one-handed operation in mind, so your hand can hold the iPhone in the back as you apply pressure on the screen. That would be uncomfortable (or downright impossible) on an iPad. I'd be extremely surprised to see 3D Touch come to the iPad next year.

With the focus on 3D Touch for notifications and the Home screen in iOS 10, it'll be interesting to see how Apple will adapt the interaction for devices without 3D Touch like the iPad. Apple has already confirmed that rich notifications will be available to iPhone models without 3D Touch in future betas. Perhaps some kind of vertical swipe to expand notifications will be added in the next beta seeds for iPads and older iPhones.

---

iOS 10 is shaping up to be a solid release, even if it doesn't necessarily appeal to some parts of the indie developer community.

Messages is going to be a blockbuster – it is, for me, the single biggest announcement from WWDC 2016. SiriKit has been built very consciously and deliberately, and we can only imagine that more domains and intents are coming after the first initial seven. There are hundreds of refinements throughout the OS, and the general takeaway from Apple engineers I talked to is that the first iOS 10 betas will be the most stable in a while thanks to the work that went into performance improvements and reworked animations.⁹

I'm sad that we won't see major iPad changes in September, and Apple still has a lot of questions to answer about the future of the iPad and pro apps. But if this means that iPad users will get more attention during the entire iOS 10 cycle – I think it's a good move, and I'm curious to see what's coming.

---

Like MacStories? Become a Member.

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.

Join Now

 

The Economist in their June 18th edition has an article describing the changing face of retailing. Price Tags has been exploring the creation of the new Tsawwassen Mills, a mega mall which will also be a “fashion experience”. The mega mall announced they were hiring 1,000 employees in Business in Vancouver, with an expected 3,000 employees to be their full staff.

But something is happening on Britain’s commercial fashion streets that may impact the new Tsawwassen Mills mega mall, and other retailing as well. The example used is the Hard Rock Cafe-Britons like eating at the cafe, but patronage of the clothing side of the business has fallen off.

The Economist describes the retail market as “soggy”. Non-food sales and clothing sales been contracting. And remember the mention of Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks making his coffee shops “experiences” that you will go to the mall for?  Here is what the The Economist surmises:

One profound change is that consumers now want to spend their money on “experiences”, such as eating out, holidays, cinema or going to the gym, rather than products such as clothes or food—hence the differing fortunes of the restaurant and retail businesses at the Hard Rock Café. Figures show a strong rise in spending on recreation and culture in the first nine months of last year, compared, for instance, with the fall in spending on food and drink. ..Online shopping is also transforming the high street. Consumers, especially the young, now expect “omnichannel” retailing, to be able to switch seamlessly between purchasing on their laptops, on their mobiles and in bricks-and-mortar stores. Retailers that are slow to develop a good online offering will struggle, or worse.

So despite disposable household income rising, leisure time is not being spent shopping but rather shopping for items for a leisure experience elsewhere.

In terms of struggling grocery stores, Britain’s online grocery market is worth $12.2 billion USD and is growing. Online retailing looks like a disruptive technology for the typical bricks and mortar commercial stores. A British lobby group, Women in Retail have recently published research showing that even though 85 per cent of all retail purchases are made or influenced by women, only 20 per cent of the executive teams and only 10 per cent of executive boards are female. To adapt to a quickly changing retail market, retail boards must represent who their product purchasers are, and be more inclusive of women decision makers.

The implications of what is happening in Britain are serious for Metro Vancouver retailing. The British studies show that switching between on-line and in-store purchases is valued, and also illustrates how quickly the concept of commercial retailing is changing.  The Starbucks “experience” may be the first morphing of the traditional storefront concept.

 

The Vancouver Sun has published Vancouver’s Million Dollar Map .  This series of maps was produced by Acting Director of Simon Fraser University’s  City Program Andy Yan, who wanted to understand when real estate prices for single-family homes started to skyrocket upward.

Andy found that in 2006, only 19 per cent of single-family homes in Vancouver were worth more than one million dollars. By 2016, 91 per cent of single-family homes in Vancouver were worth more than one million. And by the way, that figure includes land and improvement values and is based upon B.C. Assessment figures.

Andy Yan states “It’s a convergence of factors . There is a limited supply, low-interest rates, global capital. You also then have this both in Vancouver and outside of Vancouver, a rippling to places like Victoria and Kelowna. You have a real estate market that isn’t isolated, but that is spurring a (wider) land market.”

The map below shows the spread of million dollar residences eastward from 2010 to 2015. Those residences are in blue. It is interesting to see that residences along the commercial arterials were the last properties under one million dollars on the west side in the 2010 map. By 2015, most westside single-family properties were  worth over one million dollars.

 

 

A new study of Vancouver’s real estate published in the Georgia Straight has preliminary results indicating that while investment from offshore is impacting home prices in Metro Vancouver, the impact is far less than many think.

The two researchers, Simon Fraser University’s Andrey Pavlov and University of British Columbia’s Tsur Sommerville analyzed price changes in certain Vancouver neighbourhoods for three months after the July 2012 end of the federal immigrant investors program.

This program which ran from 1986 to 2014 allowed immigrants to move to Canada in exchange for a five-year loan to the federal government of $800,000. Approximately 120,000 people used this program to move to British Columbia.

The researchers found that when the program closed, property prices in the neighbourhoods studied declined by 2.5 per cent. However, the benchmark price for all residential properties in the region increased by 48.3 per cent  from 2012 to 2015

The Georgia Straight’s reporter Travis Lupick  stated in the article “Pavlov listed a number of other factors he suggested are contributing to Metro Vancouver’s hot market. He said those forces include low mortgage rates, low property taxes, burdensome development-permit processes, and infrastructure shortcomings that slow the construction of housing throughout the larger region. He also did not discount the impact of foreign money, stating that it certainly has an effect, though exactly how great remains unknown. (On June 15, the Straight reported that speculative buyers also likely have an increasingly strong hand in the Vancouver market.)

An earlier March 2016 study by the City of Vancouver found that single-family and duplex homes have a vacancy rate of just one percent, suggesting that foreigners living abroad are not buying homes and leaving them empty, as some reports have suggested.”

We are now starting to get some well researched studies on what is going on in the single-family housing market and why. The conclusions of this research work will be published in academic journals and should be available in the next few months.

Joel Gascoigne, CEO of social media tool startup Buffer, shared a 3500-word post in which he explains why he’s laying off 10 of his 94 employees. In contrast to bloodless posts from the likes of Intel and Microsoft, it indulges a different sin: oversharing. A lot of my correspondents forwarded Gascoigne’s post to me, hoping … Continue reading Problematic oversharing in a post from Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne →

The post Problematic oversharing in a post from Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne appeared first on without bullshit.

In the last few decades – particularly in Downtown South – a lot more attention has been paid to the treatment of lanes.  They’re no longer just places to store garbage dumpsters, string hydro lines and handle parking entrances.  They’re considered the back entrances to buildings, and as such treated more appropriately, particularly with landscaping.

Here’s an example of the lane south of Davie between Seymour and Richards.

Other examples welcome.

 

Wandering around the Main/Kingsway area (Mount Pleasant)

From the South China Morning Post, via Colin Brander:

 

Andy Greenberg, writing for Wired, has a good explanation of differential privacy:

Differential privacy, translated from Apple-speak, is the statistical science of trying to learn as much as possible about a group while learning as little as possible about any individual in it. With differential privacy, Apple can collect and store its users’ data in a format that lets it glean useful notions about what people do, say, like and want. But it can’t extract anything about a single, specific one of those people that might represent a privacy violation. And neither, in theory, could hackers or intelligence agencies.

And:

Differential privacy, Roth explains, seeks to mathematically prove that a certain form of data analysis can’t reveal anything about an individual—that the output of an algorithm remains identical with and without the input containing any given person’s private data. “You might do something more clever than the people before to anonymize your data set, but someone more clever than you might come around tomorrow and de-anonymize it,” says Roth. “Differential privacy, because it has a provable guarantee, breaks that loop. It’s future proof.”

→ Source: wired.com

@band:

@stoweboyd “meritocracy (~1958) - predatory, pathological ….” And here we are. - https://t.co/c9u9fEPozw

— William L. Anderson (@band) June 18, 2016

“The truth is that, despite what the sex-position-industrial complex would have you believe, there is not an endless number of ways to get it on. There is no Isaac Newton of fucking who’s suddenly going to emerge from his laboratory with a drawing of two stick figures doing it in a previously undiscovered way that will cause an orgasm that rips a hole in the space-time continuum.”

- Gabriella Palella, Sorry, There Are Actually Only Six Sex Positions

Michael Erard, Remote? That’s No Way to Describe This Work:

‘work in place ‘ and ‘in-place worker’.

mapsontheweb:

Percentage of People who don’t identify with a Religion in the United States, 2014

Notice that the precipitous decline in real GDP per capita started in 2005: the start of the postnormal, once again.

N. Gregory Mankiw, One Economic Sickness, Five Diagnoses

There is no simple way to gauge an economy’s health. But if you had to choose just one statistic, it would be gross domestic product. Real G.D.P. measures the total income produced within an economy, adjusted for the overall level of prices.

Here is the sad fact: Over the last decade, the growth rate of real G.D.P. per person has averaged just 0.44 percent per year, compared with the historical norm of 2.0 percent. At a rate of 2.0 percent, incomes double every 35 years. At a rate of 0.44 percent, it takes about 160 years to double.

He offers five possible explanations: 1/ a statistical mirage (measuring the wrong things or the right things wrong), 2/ hangover from the 08-09 crisis, 3/ secular stagnation (a la Larry Summers), 4/ slowing innovation (a la Robert Gordon), 5/ policy missteps (by Obama and others). 

Mankiw says “I have no idea which one is right. The truth may well involve a bit of each.’ 

We have everything wrong with us.

Matt Turck, Jun 22, 2016

---

I'm linking to this mostly so I have a reference to the image, which is the latest landscape for big data. If you're working in data and analytics you're working in a very crowded field.  Specialized Big Data applications have been popping up in pretty much any vertical, from healthcare (notably in genomics and drug research) to finance to fashion to law enforcement (watch Scott Crouch, CEO of Mark43  here).

[Link] [Comment]

Michael del Castillo, Coindesk, Jun 22, 2016

---

Not long ago I linked to and described  the DAO, a bockchain-based corporation employing a system called Ethereum to create 'smart contracts' to crowd-source startup funding. This week the system was hacked barely weeks after being launched, with millions of 'ethers' worth $US 50 million  drained from its accounts. Today a second attack  drained even more money. More. Now, maybe -  maybe - the transactions can be rolled back. "A 'soft fork' in the code that would essentially blacklist the address with the 3.6m ether in question; a 'hard fork' that would actually return the funds to their state prior to the attack; or do nothing and let the system sort itself out." If this works, the overall result could actually be good for Ethereum  - you can't profit from hacking  if it can simply be rolled back? In the short term, though, the value of Ethereum currency is collapsing. Related: transcript of an interview  with the alleged attacker.

[Link] [Comment]

Bryan Alexander, Jun 23, 2016

---

Bryan Alexander offers a lukewarm review for this forward-looking book by Google's  Jared Cohen    and  Eric Schmidt, The New Digital Age. In a way, he says, the book is more about politics than technology. "Put Google and the Department of State together and you have a glimpse of emerging and aspirational American hyperpower: confident, thoroughly global, combining virtual technology with soft and very hard power," he writes. "Or that’ s the vision offered by these two authors." Alexander also cites Julian Assange, who writes that the book is "is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism." He continues, "This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing."

[Link] [Comment]

mkalus shared this story from SMBC.

---

Hovertext: I promise - when the kids aren't talking about philosophy, I let them play hopscotch and eat cake.

New comic!
Today's News:

If you've ever wondered if it's fun to spend 4 days signig 15,000 books, nonstop, I have the answer.