Rolandt

I’m with the EFF on this one: there is no way that a sane civilization ought to have let this legal tussle last so long (or even turned into a legal affair in the first place, but I digress).

Google have more on their plate, so they’re going to have an interesting year.

But I found it hilarious that within 5 minutes of my learning of the verdict, this popped up on my computer:

3 billion devices, right? I wonder if that includes the nearly 2 billion devices running on Android, or if there are still SavaJe handsets out there…

While the world has managed to stave off the effects of impending workplace automation for decades, the advent of robots that can complete most manufacturing tasks with greater speed and precision than a human worker is starting to have a major effect on controversialChinese manufacturing powerhouses like Foxconn.

According to the South China Morning Post, over the past two years the iPhone-maker has replaced 60,000 of its assembly line workers with robots.

“The Foxconn factory has reduced its employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000, thanks to the introduction of robots. It has tasted success in reduction of labour costs,” said a Foxconn spokesperson in a statement to the publication.

While the company is best known in the west for assembling the iPhone, it would likely be hard to find a home in Canada that doesn’t have a Foxconn-made electronic in it; the company’s workers build and assemble a number of other notable electronics, including all three eighth generation video game consoles, as well as Amazon’s line of Kindle e-readers.

Foxconn also isn’t the only company investing in workforce automation. Since September 2014, multiple companies that operate in the city of Kunshan, one of China’s major manufacturing hubs, have invested more than 4 billion yuan, approximately $791-million, in robotics. “More companies are likely to follow suit,” said the Foxconn spokesperson.

However, in a subsequent statement to BBC, the company denied the automation of its assembly lines will result in long term job losses.

“We are applying robotics engineering and other innovative manufacturing technologies to replace repetitive tasks previously done by employees, and through training, also enable our employees to focus on higher value-added elements in the manufacturing process, such as research and development, process control and quality control.”

The automation of most manufacturing jobs is expected to have significant economic and societal consequences on the world’s population. In the developing world, in particular, automation is expected to prevent countries from using manufacturing as a way to get their populations out of poverty.

As we get closer to Apple’s annual developer conference in June, rumours regarding upcoming products and services from the company are coming in at a rapid clip.

Earlier in the week, a report stated Apple is working on a toolkit to allow developers take advantage of Siri’s voice control funcionality across Apple’s products. The report also indicated Apple is working on a standalone voice-controlled product similar to the Amazon Echo, or the newly announced Google Home.

However, in a different report from sources talking to VentureBeat, Apple isn’t currently planning to release a standalone device, but is instead working on incorporating additional Siri technology into the Apple TV.  According to the rumour, the new updated Apple TV is poised to feature a built-in speaker and microphone, and will also act as the hub for Apple’s smart home ambitions. Given the Apple TV might not necessarily always be near users, the Siri remote is rumoured to also be able to tap into this voice-activated functionality. Since the remote requires battery power, however, it would likely not be able to listen passively for “Hey Siri” all the time.

There has been a significant amount of speculation surrounding Apple’s HomeKit since it was announced in 2014 at WWDC. While some devices on the market make use of Apple’s smart home tools, there’s no unified way to control all the compatible smart devices in a home so far, apart from Amazon’s efforts with the Echo.

In other smart home hub related news, Google recently revealed its own voice activated device at I/O 2016, Google Home.

Various authors, Reclaim the Internet, May 30, 2016

Several studies have just come out describing the uneasy reality of gender non-parity in social networks:

• First, this study from Pew  sets the stage, reporting that in the U.S. people now get most of their news from the internet. As Mashable reports, "Those surveyed also reported getting news from Yahoo’ s Tumblr, Vine(!) and Snapchat, which didn’ t even make it onto the 2013 survey."
• Second, a study published on PLOS One  reports that men and women conduct themselves differently on social networks. As reported in the New York Times, "women's writing largely reflected compassion and politeness compared with men, who were hostile and impersonal."
• Third, a study published by Demos  reveals a staggering scale of social media misogyny on Twitter. As the Guardian reports, "over three weeks from the end of April.. it found that 6,500 individuals were targeted by 10,000 aggressive and misogynistic tweets."

This link points to a British initiative, Reclaim the Internet.  "Here you'll find questions, discussion, personal testimony and ideas on how we can take a stand against online abuse." I'll make one comment: this is not unique to the internet. Visit any pub or locker room or barracks and you'll find the same. This sort of behaviour is currently socially acceptable; that's why we see it. It shouldn't be. Reports via MediaSmarts.

Before humans took to the skies in metal tubes powered by jet engines, there was a gentler mode of transport that we used to conquer the skies: the humble balloon.

The Montgolfier brothers’ first human-crewed balloon takes off at the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, on November 21, 1783

After the success of last year’s launches, we are giving you another opportunity to blaze a trail across the sky and become a pioneer of aviation with the return of Skycademy, our High Altitude Ballooning (HAB) training programme.

Skycademy is a FREE, two-and-a-half day CPD event that provides experience of HABing to UK-based educators, demonstrating how it can be used as an engaging teaching tool. We’ll help you take ballooning to a whole new level (literally), where the hot air of Victorian era ballooning is replaced with space-age Helium to send your balloon soaring into the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 35 km. Fun fact: that’s around three times the cruising altitude of a Boeing 747!

Attached to the HAB is the payload consisting of a Pi-In-The-Sky GPS tracker board (developed by the wonderful Dave Akerman and Anthony Stirk), and a camera module, both controlled by a Raspberry Pi. You will use these elements to capture the balloon’s epic voyage and collect data to use back in your classroom.

Read more about last year’s adventures, mishaps, and balloons that were lost somewhere over the North Sea here.

See the earth from a whole new perspective.

At this point you might be thinking: “That sounds pretty cool, but I’m new to ballooning and nervous about launching into our airspace. Do we just get the kit and roll with it or do we get training?”

Enter Skycademy. Thirty lucky attendees will be guided through the steps to running a launch and, weather permitting, get hands-on experience of a real flight, so you’ll have all the experience you need before taking it back to the classroom. The event is free to attend and will be held from 8–10 August 2016. While the course is based in Cambridge, launch day will require you to travel to the launch site and then drive to recover your payload.

Training Itinerary

Day 1: Planning and workshop sessions on all aspects of HAB flights.

Day 2: Each team launches their payload, tracks, follows and recovers it.

Day 3: Teams gather together for plenary morning.

A team prepares their HAB for launch.

Sharing the fun

Attendees are supported throughout the course by experienced HAB enthusiasts and the Raspberry Pi Education Team. However, the 2.5 days of training is only the start of a longer process where educators are expected to run launches at their own schools. Skycademy attendees will therefore receive the support and equipment needed to achieve this as part of a twelve-month programme.  The ultimate aim is to get young people excited and inspired by the project, and about all the STEM skills around it. A great example of this came from a successful launch by Queen Margaret’s School for Southbank Centre’s Women of the World Festival 2015:

WOW Near Space Programme – WOW 2016

As part of WOW 2016, a girls school will use weather balloons to send a small payload into near space, at altitudes of around 30km, where atmospheric temperature drops to -50C. The satellite carries a Raspberry Pi computer transmitting images of the WOW hash tag and the curvature of our planet.

Launch Day Butterflies

Seeing your HAB ascend majestically into the sky is both exciting and nerve-wracking. Skycademy graduate Sue Gray knows this feeling all too well after she launched at Elsworth, Cambridgeshire in May 2016:

“It was quite scary letting it go! Once it was let loose, there was no turning back.  If anything had been forgotten, it would stay that way! The balloon and payload sailed off into the bright blue sky and grew smaller and smaller as it flew away. A fantastic sight indeed.

Then it was time to pack up the launch box, wish the other teams good luck and set off on the chase.  A quick phone call to Mr Verma confirmed that he was receiving the telemetry from the payload and could see it moving across the map.

We got to Bourne a little ahead of the payload but…something was wrong.  It seemed to be hanging in the air just to the east of Peterborough and we hadn’t received any telemetry for over twenty minutes.  We stopped to take stock (and grab some food and drinks), Mr Verma confirmed that he too was not seeing any movement although he’d seen the balloon change to a parachute on the tracker – indicating a burst!”

After tracking the payload to a general area and searching the surrounding farmland, the team had to give up the search. As luck would have it, someone continued searching on their behalf and tracked it down!

Sue on Twitter

FANHAB is found!! Our payload stopped completely but it was joined wiv Steve’s & his sprung into action again & he tracked it! @LegoJames

These are just some of the ups and downs you can expect from a launch. Sounds like fun right? Ready to get involved?

People we are looking for:

• UK-based educators who want to run their own High Altitude project with young people should apply.
• Community members who want to help or support the educator launches, please comment below.

APPLY FOR SKYCADEMY

The post Apply for Skycademy 2016 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Alfred Thompson, Computer Science Teaacher, May 30, 2016

Algebra has once again come under challenge and in response there have been the usual defenses, such as this article on why we need algebra. To me  (as I do things like measure the amount of paint required to cover a four bedroom house) the answer is pretty clear. But people like  Andrew Hacker  argue it should be dropped from the curriculum because it's a leading cause of dropouts. In my own education, the concept of abstraction confounded me; I didn't really get it until graduate school. That's because it was always based on memorization, which renders it pointless and abstruse.  But it doesn't have to be this way. What if we taught it differently,  experientially, by making  people the variables. Imagine, for example, this wonderful technique employed by  Alfred Thompson where students form the variables. He intends it for basic computing algorithms, but there's no reason students couldn't be challenged to create more and more involved and complex 'human machines'. The possibilities are endless. (p.s. have them communicate by email instead of by voice and you've also invented rudimentary people-based service-oriented architecture).

From Peter Robinson at the Suzuki Foundation:

Today’s announcement that the B.C. government will provide one-third of funding for Phase 1 of the Mayors’ Council’s transit plan fails to address a critical gap that must be closed to get projects moving.

Transit is a fundamental issue for our region. It affects everything from the economy to the environment to the length of our daily commutes. The federal government has committed 50 per cent of the funds needed for projects across the country. If the provincial government and regional mayors can’t set aside political differences and create a plan to come up with the full remaining amount, Metro Vancouver risks losing the federal investment to regions that can.

The Mayors’ Council has presented a plan to apply new revenue tools to raise the remaining 17 per cent required, but the province hasn’t committed to implementing it. All today’s announcement does is repeat history by failing to provide a complete solution to the region’s transportation challenges. Our leaders need to move now to implement to the tools needed to generate the required funds. If they fail, we will all pay the price.

Commodore PET running WordPro Four Plus.

I’ve owned a Commodore PET* 8032 for a few years now. I’ve been able to download and run many different programs for it, like WordPro you see above. But one thing always remained elusive. I’ve long wanted to connect it to a standard RS-232 device and use it as a terminal. The PET’s classic shape, green monochrome monitor, and 80 column display all lend itself perfectly as a terminal.

Like it’s much more popular successors, it too lacked proper RS-232 UART hardware. Adding a modem meant you either had to purchase a IEEE-488 enabled modem (Commodore made the 8010), purchase an add-on board for your PET, or use the existing parallel user port to “bit-bang” RS-232 serial signals. The later is exactly what the Commodore VIC-20, C64 and C128 do– simulate RS-232 on user port pins by the CPU rapidly turning outputs on and off. They even have KERNAL ROM code (albeit broken at high speeds) that did the RS-232 handling for you.

The PET lacks this ROM code but it can added to drive RS-232 TTL signals over the user port. I found two methods that did this– a commercial product and a freeware one.

Before we continue, please– if you attempt any of this, make sure you understand the difference between RS-232 TTL level signals (0v to +5v) and proper RS-232 level signals (-13v to +13v or more). Connecting proper RS-232 level signals to your PET will damage your computer and make you sad. See this explanation for SparkFun about the differences in RS-232 levels.

The first was McTerm which was produced by Madison Computer. I knew of this company since I owned their McPen lightpen system for the VIC-20 and C64 but I didn’t know their pedigree went that far back. It was sold as three parts– software on floppy, a ROM chip that had to be installed inside the PET, and a user port cable that connected to the RS-232 device. I located the software and the ROM online [local cached copy] but I’ve never actually seen the user port cable before so this was going to be challenging.

The first step was to create the ROM using an EPROM. On the PET 8032, the ROM slot is UD12 which maps to memory location $9000. The ROM code was only 2 Kbytes but I only had 4 Kbyte EPROMs. That’s OK, I just filled the other half with 0xFF. The next problem was the PET ROM slot expected a 2532 style pinout but my EPROM was a 2732 which has a slightly different pinout. Luckily, this can be overcome by making an adapter carrier to swap the 3 of the pins around. This site was useful in creating the adapter so I won’t go into that here. (Note: There’s two adapters on that site, make sure you’re building the 2732 -> 2532.)

Next was the software, which was easy enough to transfer to a 1541 floppy disk that can be read with the IEEE-488 enabled Commodore 2031 Single Floppy Disk drive. I put it as the first item on the disk so the “shift-run/stop” trick will load and run the first item on the disk.

Finally, I needed to figure out how to make the cable. I was going to need to test the user port pins to locate which ones the program was using. I examined how the VIC-20 and C64 do RS-232 over the serial port first. Immediately, I found that pins B and C were tied together for receive (RX). Pin C is PA0 which is a GPIO pin and B is /FLAG2 which I believe is for an interrupt. This makes sense since you want to immediately begin processing incoming data as soon as possible. The PET user port pin B is CA1 is is also for an interrupt. I had a hunch it may be used the same way.

To test the pins, I tied pins B and C together and connected to a USB RS-232 TTL adapter. I used a terminal program called CoolTerm, set the baud rate properly and tried sending characters. Nothing. I then tried B and D. Nothing. I kept trying until I landed on B and F. This DID give me something on the PET screen. It wasn’t correct, but it was receiving something.

I repeated this hunting for the transmit (TX) pin but this time only on a single pin. I found pin H was being using for transmit but again, it wasn’t recognizable characters from the PET but something was being transmitted.

Next I wanted to troubleshoot the characters not being displayed right. First thing was maybe it was the wrong number of data or stop bits or even parity. I tried many different combinations: 7n1, 7e1, 8e2, etc. None of them seemed to make a different. Typing the alphabet “abcdef..” seemed to return the alphabet but in seemingly reverse order with some other characters interspersed.

I decided to get the scope out and look at the differences between the USB RS-232 and PET signals. I decided on the ‘0’ character since it’s the same for ASCII and PETSCII just in case that might be part of the problem. Below is a comparison of the two.

Top is a Mac and USB Serial TTL cable. Bottom is a Commodore PET transmitting via user port on pin H.

Immediately you can see the issue. The Commodore PET is using a logic low for false and logic high for true (which I’ve learned is called “non-inverse”). Standard RS-232 TTL signals are “inverse” of this using logic high for false and logic low for true. This would explain what I’m seeing since the bits are reversed. I connected the pins through a 7404 inverting IC to invert the singals to and from the PET.

Commodore PET 8032 and inverting circuit.

This yielded partial success. I was now able to send characters to the Commodore PET.

Commodore PET displaying Hello World message sent from a Mac over RS-232.

Sending characters from the PET to the USB RS-232 TTL adapter revealed that it was setting bit 7 high. If bit 7 was set low, it would be working fine. I’ve still yet to figure this out. If you have an idea, leave a message in the comments.

I later found in the BASIC code of McTerm on line 1070 was a way to use inverted RS-232 which does work without the inverting circuit.

1070 sysa :rem ***** use a for regular modems, a+36 to invert


The second method was found in Transactor Magazine issue 3 volume 6. It included a type in terminal program (simply called “Terminal v11”) and simple instructions for building a user port cable. I believe this program was created by Steve Punter, who also created the only known BBS program for the Commodore PET. Being a type-in freebie in a magazine, it wasn’t as full featured as McTerm but it does do automatic PETSCII/ASCII translation and has file transfers using an early version of the Punter protocol. It is locked to 300 baud however.

A portion of the Commodore PET Terminal type in program.

Next up was the software. I really didn’t relish the idea of reliving that part of my childhood and typing all of those DATA statements. Modern technology to the rescue in the form of a free online OCR service. Much to my surprise, this service worked extremely well. I did have to process each column of code separately by extracting each from the PDF as a JPG. The most OCR errors were in the BASIC program but it was still dramatically lower than what I expected. Between the two ML programs with the DATA statements, those only had a single error! I later found version 12 of Terminal was available here [local cached copy].

This time, the PET user port pins were listed. Pins B and L are for RX and pin C is for TX. I swapped my user port adapter cable around to match this pinout, ran the signals through the inverter circuit and tried it. Immediate success in both directions!

Commodore PET and MacBook Air communicating over a RS-232 serial connection.

Now that I have a working RS-232 cable and software for the PET, we can put it to use. I connected it to a SparkFun ESP8266 breakout board. This board connects over WiFi and can support a standard Hayes modem AT command set with the right firmware.

ESP 8266 wired to Commodore PET user port edge connector through a 7404 inverter circuit.

With this adapter, I’m able to “dial” into BBS systems that are accessible via IP. One such board is Level 29 which is run by @FozzTexx.

ATDT bbs.fozztexx.com:23

Commodore PET dialed into Level 29 BBS over WiFi.

So, was non-inverted RS-232 TTL a standard 30 years ago since two separate terminal programs used it? When did inverted RS-232 TTL become the standard?

So, until I can figure out what’s wrong with McTerm transmitting with bit 7 set, use Terminal instead and you can use RS-232 on your PET.

*Actually, Commodore dropped the PET moniker shortly after they introduced the line and changed it to just CBM. The name PET just fits better I think.

Kelly Sinoski writes in the Sun:

The B.C. Liberals are expected to pledge $246 million Thursday to expand Metro Vancouver’s transit system, but property taxes and transit fares will likely have to go up to cover TransLink’s contribution to the plan. . .

. . . Fassbender said the provincial funding was approved after mayors suggested they could cover TransLink’s $124-million share of costs through existing funding sources, such as raising property taxes and fares and selling surplus properties. He would not go into further details, saying that was up to the mayors. TransLink is authorized to collect a certain amount of property taxes each year for transportation.

Mayors acknowledged they have pitched a mix of existing and new funding sources, such as a vehicle levy or regional carbon tax, to fund transportation.

“The fact that they are prepared to look at that is a step in the right direction,” Fassbender said. “My understanding from the mayors’ plan is they will be able to meet the regional share through existing funding sources.”

Once that’s done, he added, the parties can work together on new funding sources, such as creating developer fees for high density along transit corridors. Municipalities already collect charges from developers for amenities such as pools, parks and affordable housing, and have pitched the idea of transportation fees as a way to inject much-needed cash into the beleaguered transit system. 

This is 33% of the expected amount needed in the first round.  It appears to set the funding formula in place (50 – 33 – 17), which should carry over into the distribution of the much larger Federal funding now on the table.

If this initial round ($124M)  is financed by the Mayors through existing funding sources, I expect that funding for the next, much larger round will have to include other, newer sources — perhaps some of them under Provincial control. There is a hint here — in a mention of “transportation fees”.

Meanwhile — just how interested is the public?

Fassbender’s announcement coincides with a new survey by Angus Reid Global that found 90 per cent of Metro Vancouver residents believe a regional multi-year transportation plan should be rolled out immediately to improve housing affordability. The survey suggests two in five residents say transportation is one of the two most important issues facing the region today, second only to housing affordability.

About 88 per cent of those surveyed are worried that high housing prices in Metro are exacerbating regional transportation issues because it forces people to live farther away from work, family and friends, while 39 per cent say they are frustrated getting around the region — whether they drive or take transit — and believe the experience is only going to get worse over the next five years.

Back in 2013 I first heard of Fairphone and was immediately taken by the company’s plans to design and produce a smartphone that is ‘fair to the people producing it’ and ‘fair to the environment’. I gladly prepaid 325 euros to get one when it was finished. In early 2014 I was rewarded with the result of their efforts and I’ve since been a glowing supporter. Today the company reports 100.000 Fairphone owners and availability in stock so there are no waiting times anymore!

I take it that the number is comprised of 60.000 Fairphone 1’s (3G, sold for 325 euros) and 40.000 Fairphone 2’s (LTE, sold for 520 euros). In case you haven’t seen the FP2 in action yet have a look at their technical description. This video shows how the screen of the FP2 can be replaced in just a few seconds, and all other components can be replaced with only a screw driver. Quite spectacular! On top of that it’s got LTE inside and it comes with Android and Google apps, or, for those like me who prefer control and privacy, there’s a stock Android version with root access and without the Google apps. Wonderful!

I’m very happy for everyone at Fairphone that they’ve reached this great milestone and I hope to read about 200.000 Fairphone owners soon!

According to a new study from J.D. Power, your morning game of Words with Friends is stressing out wireless networks more than you’d think.

The international market research firm says overall network problems have risen due to the increased use of data-heavy apps by Canadians. Overall, wireless subscribers now experience 10 issues per 100 network connections, compared to nine in the 2015 study.

“The storage capacity and processing power of new devices provides consumers with an abundance of available apps prompting a rapidly rising consumption of data,” says Adrian Chung, director at J.D. Power, in a release sent to MobileSyrup, “This is placing a great deal of stress on network performance.”

Network strained by heavy data demands

The study examines performance in calling, messaging and data through 10 main criteria, including dropped calls, web connection errors, slow downloads and text message transmission failures. 

Problems with apps and features that use data saw the biggest increase, from 14 to 15 percent, while calling and messaging errors remained stable at 13 and five percent respectively.

J.D. Power links this increase to another insight it turned up: the incidence of people who use apps on smartphones has risen 86 percent from 84 percent in 2015.

Telus ranks high in every region

The study’s data is based on survey results from three geographical areas, drawing in approximately 2,300 respondents from the eastern region, 2,300 respondents from Ontario and 2,700 respondents from the western region. 

The regional studies provide a snapshot of the carriers with the least reported network issues, with Telus ranking high in every area.

In the east, Telus is tied with Bell and Videotron for best network quality, while in the west it’s tied with SaskTel, and in Ontario it takes the top spot alone. All of the high-ranking carriers had nine issues per 100.

Device-based performance

The study also gleaned an interesting insight based on devices, revealing that LG users seem to be the most pleased with their data speeds. According to J.D. Power, 12 percent of those who own an LG device indicate their data speeds are faster than expected, compared with 10 percent of HTC owners and 9 percent of Apple iPhone owners, Blackberry owners, and Samsung owners who indicate the same.

Related reading: CCTS telecommunications report reveals drop in consumer complaints, singles out Rogers’ efforts

From The Tyee, by Patrick Condon:

Vancouver’s future is dimming due to unaffordable housing and overloaded public transit. How the University of British Columbia builds student housing could make a major dent in both problems.

But not if the university sticks to its current plans.

For starters, not only is UBC building too few units on campus, the new projects it proposes will force students to pay more than top dollar, even by Vancouver standards. …

Putting far more students on campus could be done in the “street and courtyard” style found in cities like Paris, Berlin, Oslo and Barcelona — and in university settings like those at Yale and Oxford. The design allows students to circulate on active, energizing streets, or find rest and contemplation in quiet courtyards only a few steps away. Trips to classes or other on-campus destinations would be shorter if housing were mixed throughout campus instead of distilled into a few high-rise hubs. Female students might feel safer after dark because a more densely inhabited campus creates more “eyes on the street” and fewer hidden, lonely pathways. …

Build enough housing on campus the right way, and UBC will reap another great reward. The campus which now often feels like a glorified office park, would finally reflect its stated aspirations. UBC would become a true community of learning — one worthy of joining the ranks of other great mixed use university towns like Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg and Bologna. All are mid-rise, all are vital, walkable, safe, and sustainable.

Full column here.

I wouldn’t read too much into this, really. Considering that people have been trying to get Android running on the Raspberry Pi since the very beginning and that full-blown hardware acceleration for graphics has always been a blocking issue, I’d wait until there’s actually something in that code repository before raising hopes…

A pretty good summary, and uncharacteristically mild for Thurrott.

(TW: misogynistic slurs)

Earlier today Tauriq pointed me to a Demos study on online harassment that's been doing the rounds recently (and Katherine linked me to a copy of the report. Credit to the both of them).

TL;DR actually a really good study but the core assertion in all the media coverage doesn't hold up, because media.

The press coverage on the study (which is actually ~2 years old) is pretty strong in its claims, because that's how headlines work; Buzzfeed says that the study shows half of misogynistic abuse on twitter comes from women, as does the Telegraph and Aunty Beeb.

Whenever I see super-strong claims I tend to brace for a poorly designed study, doubly-so when the strong claims turn what we "know" on its head (extraordinary claims require blah blah blah), but I was actually pleasantly surprised.

The study covered the use of "whore" and "slut", as words, on Twitter, from January-February 2014. Looking specifically at tweets from the UK, the authors applied a classifier to filter out irrelevant tweets ("rape seed oil"). This left about 108k tweets in total, which were both quantiatively and qualitatively analysed (read: a classifier, and going through samples by hand to feed the classifier and check its workings).

The authors took this hand-coded-and-or-classified data and broke it down even further. So direct abuse and harassment (@tweeting slurs at someone) is distinguished from general misogyny (tweeting a slur about someone, but not at them) is distinguished from conversational ("I was such a [slur] 10 years ago").

The paper is really good. The breakdowns are logical and make sense; the accompanying of automated classification with hand-coding is vital (machines are really really bad at identifying context or emotional tone), and they even published the classifier accuracy data in an appendix so you can check they aren't just phoning it in. The one open question I have is how gender was identified (and what you do, in identification, with twitter eggs).

The media coverage is total shite, though.

The BBC, the Telegraph, Buzzfeed - they all ran with the premise that misogynistic abuse is equally distributed by gender. That's what the study found, they say. Except actually that's not what the study found at all, and the authors know it; their conclusion is:

Women are as almost as likely as men to use the terms ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ on Twitter. Not only are women using these words, they are directing them at each other, both casually and offensively; women are increasingly more inclined to engage in discourses using the same language that has been, and continues to be, used as derogatory against them.

Sounds like the same thing - it's not. Women are almost as likely to use the term, but the context might be very very different. While the study's methodology decomposed tweets to look at context - directed abuse and invective versus generally-broadcasted abuse versus casual conversation - the actual gender-breakdown bit doesn't.

This is vital. There's a big difference between those slurs as reclaimed terms (for example, the slutwalk), or to refer to oneself in a self-deprecating way, and pointing those slurs at specific individuals. There's also a big difference between making a claim about individuals into the aether and @tweeting it at the target. Both are toxic and misogynistic, but the actual experience of having it happen about you is very, very different.

The conclusion does say that women offensively direct the slurs at each other, and I believe it (there's a lot of internalised misogyny lying around, although it's not my job to critique it directly) - but there's nothing in the actual body of the paper indicating the rate of that, or performing any fine-grained breakdown of men-vs-women tweeting patterns here.

It's like one of those bad logic questions. “Half of all slurs come from women and 20% of all slurs are used as abuse, what percentage of abusive slurs come from women?” To which the answer is “I don't know, you need more data than that to reach a conclusion”.

When you factor in all the author-admitted caveats to the study (and there are quite a few, because all studies have caveats, but it says good things about the scientists that they mentioned them because not everyone does), what the study actually shows is:

1. Men and women use those slurs in equal-ish amounts;
2. Well, men and women in the UK;
3. In early 2014;
4. Without any drawable conclusions about whether they use them in an abusive or harassing manner at the same rate;
5. And admitting that this is really a tiny microcosm of the forms that slur-driven online misogyny, let alone online misogyny generally, can take.

It's a great paper for what it's designed for, which is to look at language use as it relates to gender and media coverage. It's a terrible paper for what the media seems to have decided to shoehorn it in for - the claim that half of online misogyny comes from women. But that's not something where the paper draws deep conclusions, and so you probably shouldn't cite it as an excuse to draw your own.

Pixelmator 3.5 Canyon is now available from the Mac App Store! This is a major update with two brand new and really smart selection tools, a powerful Retouch Extension for the Photos app, and a bunch of other great improvements.

A smart Quick Selection Tool

The biggest new features inside the app are the Quick Selection Tool and the Magnetic Selection Tool.

First, let me tell you about the Quick Selection tool. This is something we spent 6 months perfecting and, honestly, it’s so fun, so precise and so easy to use.

Let’s face it, making selections can sometimes be tricky, especially if you don’t have a bunch of experience with different selection tools and selection modes. So, we wanted to create a selection tool that is intuitive and easy to use but also incredibly powerful.

To work its magic, the Quick Selection Tool uses some amazing features and technologies and an innovative and sophisticated algorithm, which makes it possible to select areas really precisely with just a few simple brushstrokes.

To perfect the algorithm, we used machine learning techniques to analyze over 200 images. More than half of these had a person as the main object, because that’s what you’ll want to select most often, right? Plus, people can be quite challenging objects to select.

The algorithm tried out thousands of ways to select the objects in every one of those images. Then, we took that information and used it to adjust over 100 different parameters in the Quick Selection Tool algorithm to make it as accurate as possible. And then we tweaked them. Over and over again.

In short, the Quick Selection Tool really is the most advanced selection tool we’ve ever made. And it’s incredibly fun and easy to use.

A precise Magnetic Selection Tool

Another great addition to the Pixelmator Tools palette is the Magnetic Selection Tool. The way this tool works is it finds the object edges you’re trying to trace and automatically snaps a selection around them, which lets you make very accurate selections really quickly.

There’s a whole bunch of great features and technologies behind the tool, and one of the most powerful is the so called A* pathfinding method, which is mainly used to develop navigation algorithms in video games. Put simply, it’s an incredibly smart way to perfect (or optimise) the selection outline.

Pixelmator Retouch Extension for Photos

And now, here’s something many of you have been waiting for since we released Pixelmator 3.4 Twist, which included the Pixelmator Distort Extension for Photos. Back then, you told us you’d also love to have Pixelmator Retouch Tools inside your Photos app. So, in this update, we’ve done just that – Pixelmator 3.5 Canyon features the Pixelmator Retouch Extension, which brings a full set of Pixelmator retouching tools to your Photos app, including the magical Pixelmator Repair Tool.

By the way, the Pixelmator Retouch Extension is powered by Metal, Apple’s powerful graphics-processing technology. This allows Pixelmator to make the most of the graphics card in your Mac and means that the tools are both lightning fast and incredibly powerful.

Make sure to visit the Pixelmator Retouch Extension page to learn all about the tools, under the hood features, powerful technologies and more.

New Pixelmator Tutorials Page

Speaking of awesome content on our website, today we’re also releasing a new Pixelmator Tutorials page!

It’s really easy to navigate, has a great search bar, a whole lot of short and useful tips, and more neat details. Also, we’ve added some new tutorials and we’re planning to bring more videos soon, so take time to explore the new page and come back occasionally.

Other great improvements and fixes

Whew! Congratulations if you managed to get through all that.

And those were just the main new features in Pixelmator 3.5 Canyon. Check out the Release Notes to find out more about other great improvements and bug fixes, such as a much faster Stroke effect and improved smoothing with the Color Selection, Paint Bucket and Magic Eraser tools.

By the way, just like always, this update is free for existing Pixelmator users, so visit the Mac App Store, download the latest version and enjoy!

Stumped at work? I can help. Today I launch “Ask Dr. Wobs.” Use my form or email me with your toughest problems about communicating at work. Special offer: between now and when my book is published in September, if I select your question to answer, I’ll send you a free pre-release copy of the book. If … Continue reading Dr. Wobs is on duty to solve your writing problems. Try me! →

The post Dr. Wobs is on duty to solve your writing problems. Try me! appeared first on without bullshit.

We’ve compiled collision data from ICBC and BikeMaps.org to develop a list of dooring caution zones in the City of Vancouver. Doorings were the most prevalent type of cycling collision reported through official reports (Urban Systems, 2015). In the five dooring incidents reported to BikeMaps.org, three of the five cyclists were injured, and two sustained injuries serious enough to require an emergency department visit or overnight hospital stay.

Have a look at the dooring caution-zones map and accompanying table of dooring caution-zones. If you cycle in these zones, be sure to keep adequate space from parked cars, or use a nearby designated cycling facility. A map of Vancouver’s cycle routes is available here.

When I talk about dynamic programming on iOS and Mac, I mean this:

1. An app can learn about its structure at runtime.

2. An app can do things based on what it knows about its structure.

3. An app can make changes to its structure.

The first is things like knowing what methods an instance implements, or getting a reference to a protocol, class, or method from a string. (As in NSSelectorFromString and so on.)

The second is things like being able to instantiate a class where the name wasn’t known at compile time, or to call a method or reference a property that wasn’t known at compile time. (As with performSelector:, KVC, the responder chain, and xib and storyboard loading.)

The third is things like adding methods at runtime (a la Core Data) or adding classes — for instance, by loading compiled code from disk (plugins).

(Note — because people sometimes misread what I write — this definition is not advocacy for a particular style of programming, nor is it a judgment of Swift, which, I repeat, I love, and is my preferred language. It’s to help us know what we’re talking about when we talk about dynamic programming.)

	mkalus shared this story from Consumerist:
	It's okay, homeopathy will save us all! /s

Welcome to the post-antibiotic world. Doctors say that a 49-year-old woman in Pennsylvania was infected with a “truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” in other words, a bacteria that will not respond to any known antibiotics.

Earlier this year, reports indicated that bacteria containing a gene (MCR-1) that makes them resistant to colistin — an antibiotic of last resort that had largely gone unused because of its potential for collateral damage to the patient — had spread to 19 countries on four different continents, but that it hadn’t been identified here in the U.S.

That was until, according to a report published today in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, on April 26 a woman who believed she had a urinary tract infection provided a urine sample at a Pennsylvania clinic.

It was subsequently passed on to researchers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which — in response to concern over MCR-1 — now looks at all E. coli samples that meet certain red-flag criteria for antibiotic resistance.

The E. coli cultured from this patient’s urine sample — genetically linked to a strain first found in the UK in 2008 — was found to be carrying the MCR-1 gene, plus an additional 14 different antibiotic resistance genes.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of mcr-1 in the USA,” reads the report, which notes that the patient had not done any traveling in the five months leading up to providing the sample.

The researchers at Walter Reed have now tested 21 E. coli samples. All the others have tested negative for MCR-1 and are sensitive to treatment with colistin. But as they note, this testing program has only been up and running at Walter Reed for three weeks, so “it remains unclear what the
true prevalence of mcr-1 is in the population… Continued surveillance to determine the true frequency for this gene in the USA is critical.”

In a statement to the Washington Post, CDC Director Tom Frieden says that the discovery of MCR-1 in a human patient “basically shows us that the end of the road isn’t very far away for antibiotics — that we may be in a situation where we have patients in our intensive-care units, or patients getting urinary tract infections for which we do not have antibiotics.”

Frieden says this is already a problem for some strains of tuberculosis: “I’ve cared for patients for whom there are no drugs left. It is a feeling of such horror and helplessness.”

Two announcements today, one by the Mayors Council and the other by the Provincial Gov’t on transit funding.

The difference that matters is the timeframe — the span of interest, of vision, of commitment.  Short message:  it ain’t even close.

The Mayors want to settle funding for the full 10-year plan, and secure priority access to the massive Federal funding that is on the table.  The Province will only discuss their share of the current Phase 1 money in play — $370 M from the Feds, $246 M from the Province and the remaining $124 M from the region.

Noteworthy ideas from the Mayors:  Increase property tax (rejected by Mayors in earlier discussions).  Return control of Translink to the Mayor’s Council.  Move towards mobility pricing. Try again for a share of carbon tax, or another provincially-controlled revenue source.

The Mayors have proposed to provide 100% of life-cycle operating costs, estimated at $3.9 billion, and the remaining 17% of the Vision’s capital costs, estimated at $1.9 billion over 10 years, by generating new revenues from the:

1. sale of TransLink surplus property, generating $150 million total towards the Vision.
2. one-time 2% transit fare increase in 2018, resulting in an average impact of 5¢ – 20¢ per single use product, and generating $106 million, over 10 years
3. incremental fare revenues from expanded service generating $454 million over 10 years
4. new Regional Development Cost Charge for Transit, generating $216 million, over 10 years with a representative impact of $1,000 per residential unit, and with the potential to apply benefitting area rate(s), with more analysis and options to explore.
5. Adjustment of the existing 3% cap on the TransLink Property Tax so it applies to existing owners, with an added annual impact of $4 per average house, generating $339 million over 10 years
6. allocation of a portion of the region’s federal Gas Tax Fund worth $391 million, over 10 years
7. introduction of mobility pricing by 2021, generating a net $326 million, over 5-6 years
8. Vancouver and Surrey will contribute land and other in-kind services to partially off-set costs of the major projects planned in their municipalities.

And suggested the Province contribute:

• $3 billion over 10-15 years for a 33% share of capital costs of the 10-Year Plan
• Redistribute and return $50 million in Provincial Carbon Tax subsidy provided to households outside Metro Vancouver back to the region to fund transportation improvements (or another provincially-controlled regional revenue source) 
• Support for the Mayors’ Council’s efforts to implement regional mobility pricing 
• Return governance of TransLink to Mayors

While these discussions go on, the Feds are watching, and a long line of others jostle for position at their door.

Update

Report from Frances Bula in the Globe and Mail

The proposal is also the latest salvo between the province and cities as they figure out how they will come up with the $370-million needed to tap into the matching $370-million on the table from the federal government.

Both sides say they need to come to an agreement within weeks or they risk going to the end of the line behind other cities and provinces that have put together their agreements faster.

Report from Jeff Nagle in the Surrey Leader.

 “We feel we’re in striking distance of making this mayors’ plan a reality but we need a partner with the provincial government and so far we haven’t had that,” New Westminster Mayor Jonathan Coté said. “We know there’s going to be substantial federal money available for transit, the type of money we haven’t seen in a generation. My big concern is if the mayors and the province can’t get together to get an agreement in the very near term the reality is I think that’s going to be a lost opportunity for our region.”

My Facebook feed has lit of with people on both sides of the Peter Theil/Gawker revelation, but that’s because I personally know many of the people involved and have lived and worked in a tech bubble for the last 16 years.

Sadly, Half of them need to venture out of it for a bit to understand why this is an issue to the other 99.9%.

In the meantime, I guess this means I to be posting about how I work in the salt mines with a six figure salary, how the homeless need to get out of MY city, or something… Because here in the bubble, I’m the one that is “out-of-touch.”

(Hint: all the links above are to articles about Silicon Valley that are/were among the most-emailed articles in the New York Times at the time. Half my friends clearly misunderstand why they proved so popular.)

Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform, Classroom Practice, May 29, 2016

At a certain point of overuse a word loses its meaning. "Transform" is one such word, according to Larry Cuban. "When it comes to school reform, as the quotes above indicate, the word 'transform' hits the jackpot of overhyped words in reformers’ vocabulary....  Yes, I have gotten allergic to the word 'transform' when it is applied to schooling. That allergy has prompted me to ask any policymaker, researcher, practitioner, high-tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist, or parent using the word, certain questions about what he or she means." What follows is a lost of questions that should be asked of people promoting transformation. What does it mean? What problems are being solved? What exactly is transformed? What does it become? How fast? Why is it better? But, of course, these questions could be asked against any of our buzzwords today - analytics, reform, open, online, whatever. And they should be asked. Slogans aren't plans.

Pixelmator 3.5 was released today with three new tools - Quick Selection, Magnetic Selection, and a retouch extension for Apple’s Photos app. Pixelmator has been my go-to image editor for a long time. I use if for everything from screenshot editing for MacStories and creating assets for my own website, to retouching family photos. As many readers may know, we started a Telegram channel a couple months ago called The MacStories Lounge. One of Telegram’s strengths is its media integration. I figured, what better way to test the new Pixelmator selection tools than to create a Telegram sticker – of Federico.

I have some artwork that Frank Towers created that includes a version of the cartoon Federico used for the upcoming Relay FM meetup in London. I opened the image in Pixelmator and created a sticker first using quick selection and later, magnetic selection to cut the image of Federico from the background. Quick selection lets you paint over an image to select it. When I made the sticker, quick selection had a little trouble where the white of Federico’s shirt overlapped with the white background, but otherwise worked very well.

Magnetic selection worked a little better overall because the edges of the image are sharp. Magnetic selection grabs the outline of an object based on anchor points you create as you trace around the object. When I got to the white-on-white portions of the image using magnetic selection, I held down the Option key to temporarily switch the selection tool from the magnetic selector to the polygonal lasso tool, which let me extend the selection in those areas using a straight line.

In addition to the new selection tools, Pixelmator 3.5 adds a handy photos extension that can be accessed directly from the editing window of Apple’s Photos app so you can use Pixelmator’s retouch tools on your photos without opening Pixelmator.

For video demonstrations of the features covered above and a complete list of other improvements in Pixelmator 3.5, check out Pixelmator’s website.

Pixelmator 3.5 is a free upgrade to existing customers and $29.99 for new users, which is a great bargain for an app that can replace Adobe Photoshop for many users.

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.

In seven years of MacStories, few iOS apps fundamentally changed how I get work done as much as Workflow. Pythonista, Editorial, and Tweetbot are in that list, but Workflow, with its ongoing improvements and deep iOS integrations, continuously makes me question how I can optimize my setup further.

Nearly two years (and an Apple Design Award) later, Workflow is reaching version 1.5 today, an important milestone towards the road to 2.0. Unsurprisingly for the Workflow team, this release adds over 20 new actions and dozens of improvements. Some of them are new app actions based on URL schemes, while others introduce brand new system integrations (such as iTunes Store, App Store, and Safari View Controller) and web actions for the popular Trello team collaboration service. Workflow 1.5 is a packed release that is going to save heavy Workflow users a lot of time.

After testing and playing with Workflow 1.5 for the past month, I've been able to streamline key aspects of writing for MacStories and managing Club MacStories. With a bigger team and more Club responsibilities, we've been thinking about how to improve our shared tasks and creative process; Workflow 1.5 has played an essential role in it.

Get the Workflows

• App Store Markdown Link
• Copy App Release Notes
• App Store Artwork
• App Store Screenshots
• App to Trello
• FormatClub
• ClubAppend
• Image to Ulysses Sheet
• MP3 to Telegram
• Publish Ulysses to WordPress
• Resize Safari Image & Share

App Store and iTunes Store Actions

One of the highlights of Workflow 1.5 is the ability to search for content on the App Store and iTunes Store, fetch results, and get rich details that can be combined with other actions. This is one of my new favorite additions to the app as it has allowed me to automate a large part of what I do for new app releases and updates.

The most important action is 'Search App Store', which lets you look for apps on the iOS and Mac App Store with four different parameters: a keyword for the app's name; search by product ID, developer, or "all"; platform (iPhone, iPad, Mac); and country. Similarly, the 'Search iTunes Store' action lets you look up iTunes Store products, replacing Platform with Category for music, movies, podcasts, and every other product type available on iTunes. I've mostly played with the Search App Store action to automate app-related tasks for MacStories.

Working with App Store results in Workflow 1.5.

The iTunes and App Store actions provide an interface for the iTunes Search API that I used to access via Python until Workflow 1.5. Search actions by themselves, though, are only part of the story: you'll have to combine them with their respective 'Get Details' actions to extract specific information from results to use in other actions and variables. The Workflow team have outdone themselves with a powerful set of actions that enable users to parse details of apps and iTunes products without having to know a single line of code.

Once you load a list of App Store results, this is what you can access with the new 'Get Details of App Store App' action:

• Artist (developer)
• Price
• Currency Code
• Formatted Price
• Release Date
• Category
• Description
• Rating
• Number of Ratings
• Rating (current version)
• Number of Ratings (current version)
• Version
• Last Updated
• Release Notes
• Content Rating
• Minimum OS Version
• Is Universal
• Supports Game Center
• Supported Devices
• Supported Languages
• Screenshot URLs
• iPad Screenshot URLs
• Download Size
• Store ID
• Store URL
• Artwork
• Artwork URL
• Name

As someone who's worked with the iTunes API and JSON results before, I can't stress enough how much these actions simplify the process of looking up iTunes content and reading specific information. More importantly, Workflow's new actions allow you to combine results and relevant details with hundreds of other actions and apps. These actions bring the power of an API previously accessible only to people who knew some basics of scripting to everyone thanks to their visual approach.

The first workflow I've built is a straightforward one: given an app's name as input text, Workflow brings up a series of results, so I can pick one and create an affiliate link (in Markdown) to paste in a text editor.

The workflow can be used after selecting an app's name in a text editor and hitting 'Share' in the copy & paste menu to invoke the Workflow action extension. You can also run the workflow manually if you don't need to call it from the extension.

Adding app links from Ulysses with Workflow's App Store actions.

The workflow has some nice touches made possible by the new App Store actions. When searching for an app, you can choose the platform from a segmented control. Then, with a series of Get Variable-Get Details-Set Variables steps, the workflow isolates values for the app's URL and formatted price. Using the different URL parameters of iOS and Mac apps, the workflow also understands if an app is available on the App Store or the Mac App Store.

At the end, the workflow outputs a sentence formatted in Markdown as follows:

Tweetbot is available on the App Store at $9.99.

This is a sentence I use to close most of my app reviews, which I can now automate without leaving my text editor. You can download the workflow here.

But we can do more than Markdown links with Workflow's App Store actions. Want to copy the release notes for an app update because text can't be selected on the App Store? Easy: search for an app, hit the share link, and run this workflow. You'll see an alert for what's changed in the latest update and the release notes will be copied to the clipboard as plain text.

You can now fetch and copy app release notes thanks to Workflow.

Behind the scenes, the workflow grabs the App Store short URL for the selected app, it expands it into a full itunes.apple.com link, and it uses a regular expression to extract the app's ID from it (more on new regex actions in a bit). Thanks to Product ID App Store search, the workflow returns information for the selected app alone, and it then extracts information for release notes, app name, and last updated date. This could be done through the iTunes API before, but it was never this simple.

We can build on the same concept (share from App Store, get app ID, get details of apps) to access other product details that would otherwise require a knowledge of programming and JSON. Want to save the full-resolution version of an app icon? It can be done with this workflow. How about saving all screenshots to your photo library? Same idea.

Apply this to the App Store and the iTunes Store, for the dozens of details Workflow exposes, for all the deep system and app integrations Workflow supports, and you can see how the Workflow team essentially reinvented how bloggers, podcasters, artists, and developers can save time accessing iTunes product information on iOS.

Apple Music Actions

I haven't used these much, but Workflow 1.5 also comes with Apple Music actions to create playlists and add songs to an existing playlist in your Apple Music library.

The new Playlist actions are based on the API Apple introduced with iOS 9.3, which, after a permission prompt, enable apps to manage playlists. I have played around with the 'Add to Playlist' action: given items from your music library or the results of a 'Search iTunes Store' action, you'll be able to add songs to a specific playlist without having to pick it manually.

If you manage a lot of playlists in Apple Music and would like a way to automate them, this is something you should check out.

Trello Actions

One of the (many) strengths of Workflow is that it integrates with native iOS apps (through URL schemes) as well as services with web APIs. The latest web service to be supported in Workflow is Trello, the popular project management tool based on boards, lists, and cards.

This was good timing for us: we've recently begun using Trello for Club MacStories and I was looking for ways to automate the creation of cards. I'm still thinking about what else I could do with Workflow and Trello, but I have a workflow I want to share today.

Workflow's Trello integration is quite extensive. You can:

• Create boards;
• Create lists;
• Add cards to a list;
• Get Trello items from a board, list, or card;
• Get details of Trello items.

There are controls for the position of cards, as well as due dates and attachments. Alas, you cannot assign members and labels with the Trello actions, but this hasn't turned out to be an issue in my case.

Jake and I share a board where we keep track of apps he's considering for review and articles that are currently in progress. I was looking for a way to quickly add an app from the App Store to our "App Ideas" list, and Workflow's 'Add Trello Card' action was perfect for our needs.

The Trello board Jake and I share.

With the same combination of Product ID and App Store search from the actions above, the workflow extracts information for an app's name, price, link, platform, description, and artwork. With a single action, I can then create – without leaving the App Store – a rich Trello card that contains everything Jake should know about an app.

From App Store results to a rich Trello card.

Trello cards even show the app's icon as artwork, so they look nice and they're easy to identify on a board. You can download the workflow here.

Improved Regex and Ulysses Actions

On our MacStories Weekly newsletter for Club MacStories members, we have two regular sections in which we create custom workflows for readers and answer their questions. For almost a year, each request was submitted manually over email, which meant that each message was formatted differently.

After some recent changes on our end, requests are now submitted with Google Forms; this allows us to apply the same formatting and structure to each message, which has considerably reduced the amount of time we spend adding and editing requests in the newsletter. The best part, in fact, is that I've built this workflow so that, through various Zapier automations¹, I end up with input text formatted in a specific way passed to Workflow on iOS.

Here's what a member request looks like:

CLUB_USERNAME: Mark Miller
CLUB_TWITTERNAME: @MarkDMill
CLUB_REQUEST: In my work as a teacher, I need to generate student handouts that match my slideshow that, in turn, matches my lecture notes. So far, I've been manually maintaining three files for each lecture so that if I change one document, I have to go and change the other two so that they stay in sync. It's incredibly time-consuming and error-prone. Do you know of any solution where I could link together text from a Word/Pages/Docs document to a Powerpoint/Keynote/Slides slideshow so that changes in one auto-change in the other?

Why the uppercase tags before each sub-section? Simple: Workflow 1.5 finally brings proper support for regex matching groups, which can be extracted individually after a successful match.

With the new 'Get Group from Matched Text' action, Workflow can return a group at a specific index of all groups found in a match as a list. Groups are indicated by parentheses in a regular expression, and they can be used to highlight parts of a match you'd like to extract to reuse somewhere else.

In my case, I wanted to parse a member's details for name, Twitter username, and request text separately. I had been waiting for Workflow to add support for regex groups just to create a new setup for our Workflow Corner and Weekly Q&A sections.

Here's how it works: after members submit questions via Google Forms, each request is saved as a Trello card in our team board.

How Club MacStories newsletters are made behind the scenes.

Thanks to Zapier, I've formatted Trello cards to embed a tappable URL scheme that launches Workflow on iOS and passes the plain text request as input. In about a second, Workflow extracts every variable from the request, reformats it in Markdown, and asks me to append it to a Ulysses sheet so I can start writing my responses there. It works the same way for Graham and John.

After the workflow extracts each variable and reformats everything in Markdown, it asks me where it should be saved in Ulysses.

This works incredibly well: we have gone from several minutes spent editing and reformatting member requests each week down to seconds. Best of all, questions no longer suffer from inconsistency issues due to manual editing because Workflow takes care of it.

Under the hood, the new 'Get Group from Matched Text' action is used to match text for different variables; the workflow supports multi-line matching for requests that span multiple paragraphs, and it knows it doesn't need to include a Twitter link when a member prefers to stay anonymous.

Regex and match groups in Workflow 1.5.

At the end, the workflow launches a second workflow (with the app's URL scheme), which takes the pre-formatted Markdown input and, also with a URL scheme, appends everything to an existing Ulysses sheet.

Ulysses integration is based on actions introduced in version 1.5: Workflow can now do everything that's possible with Ulysses' x-callback-url (documented here), only in a visual way, so you never have to deal with URL schemes. This makes it easy to create new sheets with pre-filled Markdown text, append or prepend to sheets, and more. If you use Ulysses, you'll be happy about the new actions in Workflow 1.5.

If you're interested, you can download both of my workflows here and here (though I doubt they'll be useful as they're very specific to our setup).

I realize that better support for regular expressions isn't something the majority of Workflow users cares about. However, in big and small ways, the ability to extract specific groups from matched text has enabled me to create more advanced workflows that are now saving me a lot of time on a daily basis. If you haven't looked at Workflow's regex support before, take a few minutes to experiment with it now. I bet there's something you can automate with capture groups.

Attaching Images to Ulysses Sheets

A while ago, I submitted a minor feature request to the Ulysses team:

@ulyssesapp Would you consider extending the URL scheme to support adding base64-encoded attachments to an existing sheet?

— Federico Viticci (@viticci) May 6, 2016

The idea was – Ulysses' most unique feature is the ability to include images alongside text while writing, and it would be nice to automate the process of sending images to the app with a URL scheme.

Images appended to a Ulysses sheet with Workflow.

In version 1.5, Workflow's new Ulysses actions also include support for the improved Ulysses URL scheme (introduced earlier this week), which lets you send images and keywords to a sheet. Workflow's new 'Attach to Ulysses Sheet' action doesn't require you to encode an image in base64; it takes care of everything automatically. All you need to do is fill in the identifier of a Ulysses sheet, and Workflow will open the sheet and put an image in its attachment list.

This is going to be a terrific addition to my writing process going forward. For both stories and app reviews that take me a while to put together, I've always tended to keep screenshots related to them in the Photos app. Inevitably, those screenshots get lost among the clutter of my photos and I lose their context and information. With Workflow, I can automate the task of sending screenshots to a sheet I'm working on. I can even pick images manually from Workflow with an image picker, or I can share them from other apps with the action extension and save them in a Ulysses sheet anyway.

I can see how this will play a big role for my iOS 10 review this summer (especially thanks to the combination of text notes and images in Ulysses' attachment list) and I've already taken advantage of it quite a bit for this very article. You can download my workflow here.²

Encoding Audio with Metadata

For the past couple of months, we've been sharing daily behind-the-scenes and personal messages with our readers on a Telegram channel we call The MacStories Lounge. Every week, we try to post a few audio clips to update readers on what we're working on and things we're thinking about. As you may have noticed, those audio messages show up with correct audio metadata for artwork and author information:

The MacStories Lounge on Telegram.

That's because of Workflow 1.5 and its new options to include metadata with a file when encoding it to MP3. When encoding to audio using the 'Encode Media' action, you can now tap on a Metadata field to reveal options for title, artist, year, genre, and artwork. This extra information will be embedded in the file and displayed by most audio players on any platform.

From recording to sharing as MP3 with Workflow.

In my case, after recording an audio clip with the Shure MV88 microphone in the Motiv app for iPhone, all I have to do is hit Share on the file and run my workflow. The lossless file will be encoded to MP3, metadata will be added, and our Telegram followers will enjoy a pretty audio message with proper artwork³ and author details. It takes one tap and it saves me time every day. You can download my workflow here.

Everything Else

There are several more changes in Workflow 1.5 worth mentioning. They're not major additions to the app, but they do make the overall experience better for everyone.

You can now preview webpages with Safari View Controller inside Workflow. This works both in the app and the action extension, which means you can bring Safari View Controller to any app as long as it's got a share sheet. It even supports automatic activation of Safari Reader.

Safari Reader inside Safari View Controller inside Safari. It's possible.

For example, I can now preview my published posts with Safari without leaving Ulysses. My workflow to extract an image from a Safari selection and re-upload it has also been updated to use Safari View Controller.

Finding and running workflows is easier than ever, too. A search bar has been added to the app and the extension; plus, the following keyboard shortcuts are supported on the iPad:

• ⌘R to run a workflow;
• ⌘. to stop a workflow;
• ⌘F to search for an action;
• ⌘Z to undo;
• ⌘⇧Z to redo;
• ⌘W to close a workflow.

And speaking of workflows, the composer – perhaps one of the weakest areas of the app – has been improved with better performance and the ability to drag long blocks of actions around along with the actions they contain. The performance improvements are noticeable and I like how creating workflows and editing them benefits from these tweaks.

Finally, Workflow 1.5 lets you filter videos by frame rate. Using the 'Filter Images' action, you can narrow down subsets of videos by their frame rate in addition to resolution. This opens up some interesting use cases for videographers who shoot their videos on iPhones and would like a quicker way to filter and organize them.⁴

To the Future

Workflow is in the Top 5 of my favorite iOS apps ever made. I wouldn't be able to work efficiently on my iOS devices without it.

At this point of its road to 2.0, it's fair to wonder which big features the Workflow team should tackle next. Despite hundreds of additions and refinements, the underlying foundation of Workflow has stayed the same since 1.0, and there are some major changes that could take Workflow to an even higher level. In no order of importance:

• The ability to organize workflows in folders;
• Global variables to define data to be shared across multiple workflows, such as a file stored in Dropbox, the ID of a Ulysses sheet, or links to a website;
• "Instant Variables" to get details of a macro variable without doing the Get Variable-Get Details-Set Variable dance every time. You could save a lot of time if instead of fetching details of a variable multiple times you could use a single master variable and only specify where necessary which sub-details to use;
• Action presets to save and reuse actions you often add to your workflows. There are some actions I always use with the same settings, and I'd like to have a way to import them with one tap. Editorial gets this right.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Workflow team is already working on all of these features. Workflow is a relatively young app with immense potential, and it feels like its foundation is still being built.

Day after day, Workflow allows me to work better, experiment, and help readers who want to save time on their iOS devices. Version 1.5 makes everything better. Now's a good time to get on board the Workflow train if you still haven't.

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