Rolandt

You have to start somewhere, if you want to build for ARM64. I take it as a good sign that Microsoft is now building Visual Studio Code for the Surface Pro X and other ARM64-based Windows machines.

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[Thanks for the heads up, Ralf]

You will often hear the terms customer support and customer service used interchangeably to describe a wide variety of activities. Some experts consider customer service to be a subset of support, while others differentiate clearly between the two. Even without a clear industry consensus, we can learn more about quality customer care by taking a look at these terms in more detail.

Perhaps the best way to think about customer service and customer support is that they are equal in value but different in form and function. Both describe work taken to satisfy a customer and keep them engaged with your brand and product offerings. One is no better than the other, but there are a few crucial differences to understand.

What is Customer Support?

Customer support, as the name suggests, is best described as a set of activities undertaken to solve a specific issue that a customer is having with your product or service. It is frequently used in the technology space, especially when referring to IT support help desks. The technical assistance provided to customers can come in many forms, such as support tickets, phone calls, and emails. To summarize, customer support typically involves:

• Technical support and troubleshooting
• Support for a specific product or service
• Reactively responding to a customer issue

Customer support is a prominent function in the SaaS, technology, and e-commerce industries.

What is Customer Service?

Customer service usually refers to all the types of customer-facing activities that support the sale and ongoing use of a product or service. These topics are often non-technical and related to just about any part of the business. For example, customer service may involve resolving billing issues or modifying a shipping arrangement based on a customer request. Customer service is an essential part of the sales process for many products and is directly related to customer experience. We can summarize customer service as:

• Related to nearly any department in a business
• Directly connected to customer experience
• Helping a customer get more value out of the product or service

Customer service is a function present in some form in nearly every industry and every company.

What Are the Differences Between Customer Support and Customer Service?

Based on the descriptions above, there are a few critical differences that begin to emerge. Customer support and customer service activities often have similar goals, which is where much of the confusion lies. As we mentioned earlier, a lot of the subtle differences relate to how the work is done and the type of customer needs the activities address.

Customer Support is Reactive, While Customer Service is Proactive

Effective customer support will be able to solve a customer issue quickly and efficiently. It usually involves being reactive and working diligently to fix a problem once a customer makes the issue known. In some cases, the fix may be as easy as sharing some information, while in others, it may require a unique solution.

On the other hand, customer service requires anticipating customers’ current and future needs and fine-tuning service activities to meet these expectations. Companies can improve the customer experience by expanding opportunities for customers to interact with your brand. Offer additional opportunities for customer engagement by enhancing the communication channels you already have or adding new ways to connect and nurture relationships. More engagement leads to a deeper understanding of your customers, making it easier to anticipate their needs.

Customer Support is Measured by Efficiency, While Customer Service is Measured by Satisfaction

Companies evaluate their customer support processes by focusing on metrics that measure the effectiveness of your help desk and self-service options. Asking customers to complete a brief customer effort score (CES) survey immediately following an interaction can provide valuable insights into customer support performance. Evaluating metrics like time to first response and ticket closure are also useful ways to determine if you are improving over time.

When it comes to understanding the effectiveness of customer service, one of the best metrics is the customer satisfaction score (CSAT). This measurement will give you a high-level picture of how well your customer values the overall experience that you are providing. The CSAT is a valuable metric for customer service since it summarizes feedback related to the entire customer journey.

Customer Support Focuses on Technical Value, While Customer Service is Relationship-Focused

When considering a career path, customer service and customer support job descriptions can differ a great deal. Customer support jobs typically require subject matter expertise and technical skills related to the product or service that the company is selling. As mentioned previously, SaaS companies account for many customer support positions, and customer support representatives who have a deep understanding of the technical aspects of the software are better equipped to handle technical customer issues.

Customer service employees must work to demonstrate value to customers over time. Many customer service jobs are focused on relationship building, fielding customer questions, and directing activities that can help improve the overall experience for the customer.  Some typical job requirements are excellent soft skills and a strong desire to help others.

As integral components of the overall customer experience, customer service and customer support will be forever connected. Most businesses will define their unique customer initiatives and bring in tools, software, and innovative techniques to makes these goals a reality. Perhaps the best advice is to make sure that your employees know how you define customer terms, and what important roles they play in keeping them engaged with your brand.

Refactoring optional chaining into a large codebase: lessons learned

JavaScript now supports foo?.bar?.baz?.() optional chaining syntax across all major browsers. Lea Verou provides the definitive guide to using it to refactor code.

Via @LeaVerou

Hi, this is Gregor, Co-founder and CTO of Datawrapper, with yet another coronavirus chart for you!

When I began thinking about what topic to pick for my Weekly Chart I ruled out charts about the coronavirus. I think we’ve seen too much of them already. We’ve seen the curves, the log scale growth, the doubling time tables, death tolls, etc. And now we’re ready to move on. After all, the crisis is pretty much over, 10,000 Germans are traveling to Mallorca, my kids are back in school, and life finally goes back towards normal.

Then my colleague Jakub wrote a new scraper for Berlin COVID-19 cases, scraped fresh off the Berlin press releases. So I wrote a little R script to look at the data. Day after day, the curve looked more like it’s bending upwards again. I felt like I had no choice but to show it to you for this week’s Weekly Chart:

The curve is bending up again, but it’s important to not fall into the extrapolation trap. Just because a trend line ends in an upwards slope doesn’t mean it has to continue that way. Every day new numbers come in, and there’s nothing that can tell us how the future will look like.

New cases instead of total cases

Let’s take a closer look at what’s in the chart and why I put it there.

It all begins with the question of what data we want to show. Jakub’s dataset lists the total number of COVID–19 cases, deaths, and recoveries for each day. Now I could’ve made a chart of the total cases. But it’s pretty hard to see the growth rate just by looking at the slope or steepness of the line:

And while one could use a log scale to show the growth, I think that just plotting the new cases makes the chart somewhat easier to read.

A moving average

But plotting the new cases means we’re seeing a lot of fluctuations. The number of new cases depends on random events as well as weekly patterns (e.g. fewer tests on the weekends). This makes it harder to see the larger trend. So I decided to help the reader by adding a moving average.

There are two important parameters when computing moving averages: the first is the window size, which is the number of days that should be averaged, and the second is how this window is aligned. Here we see different window sizes:

The larger the window, the smoother the line becomes, but we’re also shrinking the line from both ends. That’s because in order to compute a 14-day average I actually need 14 days of measurements. When using a center-aligned moving average. that means 7 days ahead and 6 days behind. Which brings us to the second parameter.

The second parameter is the alignment with the three options right-, center- and left-alignment:

Right-alignment means that the average for a given day is computed by looking at the preceding two weeks, while a centered-moving average is computed from the the previous seven days, today and the six future days. The alignment does not change the shape of the curve. But it “shifts” it horizontally. There are good arguments for both alignments, but I decided to center.

An uncertain trend line

As mentioned before, we don’t get average values for the end of the line with a centered-moving average, so we can’t see the “trend” for the last few days. This might be confusing but it makes sense: We can’t show the trend because we can’t predict how the next 7 days are going to look like.

Good thing there are methods to compute a trend with some uncertainty, like Loess. Loess takes a bunch of x and y points and tries to find a curve through the data that minimizes the differences from each point to the curve.

And this is where the third layer of the chart comes in: the black dashed line is the Loess prediction that shows the overall trend. It matches pretty closely with the 14-day moving average, but it extends over the entire timespan.

How to make bar/line chart combinations in Datawrapper

While it’s not the first combination of bars and lines that you’ve seen on this blog, it’s worth talking about it really quick. It’s possible to bring bars into a line chart by adding custom area fills. They allow filling the area between two lines in the chart:

So that light green bar chart is actually just an area. However, before today, it wasn’t possible to give the custom area fill a different interpolation than the rest of the chart. We now added a little button that lets you change this.

As German states are lifting the Coronavirus lockdown measures, the big question remains when is it “safe enough” to go back to normal entirely. Unfortunately, that means we can’t stop looking at COVID-19 charts just yet. The charts here update once a day, so feel free to check in again in a few days. If you’re interested, you can also dive into R code I used to compute the moving average and Loess trend. Stay healthy – and we’ll see you next week!

Agile is a verb, not a noun

Ah… projects. There are some people who believe that the One True Way is Agile™. And by that they mean agile development frameworks such as SAFe and RAD and ASD and other awkward acronyms. At least for the kind of work I do with my co-op colleagues, those people are wrong.

The main thrust of the Agile Manifesto is that ‘agile’ is a verb rather than a noun. You don’t “do” agile, you work in an agile way. The difference is important.

Just as a recap, or perhaps for those who haven’t seen this before, here are the twelve principles of agile software from almost 20 years ago:

For me, the five bits that tend to leap out at me are those I’ve highlighted above. I believe agile methodologies can be applied to almost everything, so stripping out the references to software, focusing on the parts I’ve highlighted, and doing a bit of rewriting gives:

• Simplify
• Establish a sustainable pace
• Build projects around motivated individuals
• Create self-organising teams
• Welcome changes based on feedback the audience you’re targeting

I have little time for people who try and impose a particular approach without understanding the context they’re entering into. Instead, and although it may take longer, co-creating an agile approach to the problem you’re tackling is a much better solution.

So, in summary, investing in people who work within a particular context, while being informed by what has worked elsewhere is absolutely the best approach. At least in my experience. But the best of luck to those who think that Industry Best Practices® and blunt implementations of complicated frameworks are going to save them.

I’ll be watching with my co-op colleagues, eating popcorn, getting ready for the inevitable call or email to help. And, you know what? We’ll be happy to.

This post is day three of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Header image by Christopher Paul High

This is an interesting take on the lecture: "I suspect we know that the lecture is not as much of a draw as live music or the big screen – the ‘live’ experience is perhaps too similar to the recorded version. This means that we need to work on our live presence (on-site and online), just as many bands have had to." What's interesting to me is the reason why the live performance is better (online or offline) has less to do with the quality, and much more to do with audience interaction.

This is a classic example of why personal testimony is no evidence at all. A woman writes to Neil Armstrong complaining that the Moon landing was faked. While most people would say, "well I ought to know, I was there," Armstrong responds that he is the last person she should write. "You shouldn't be asking me, because I am clearly suspect, believable." Instead, he offers her some people who conducted experiments that prove the Moon landing was real, including one where they bounced a laser off a mirror Armstrong put intoi place. There's evidenmce, and then there's evidence, and not all evidence is equal.

If you don’t have central air, if a window AC won’t work in your situation, and if a ductless mini-split or heat pump system would be too complex or costly for you, a portable air conditioner is your next best option.

The Midea Duo MAP14HS1TBL is quieter, more powerful, and more efficient than any other portable AC we’ve tested. It’s expensive, like most portable ACs, but it also functions as a heater, and that rare ability makes it a valuable all-season climate controller.

“He is not anti-bike, he said.”

That’s NPA Park Commissioner John Coupar in today’s Sun. 

Seaside in 2001.

Problem is, he’s not pro-bike either.  And as a commissioner for the Board of Parks and Recreation, he’s been an effective opponent, now along with the other NPA park commissioner and the NPA board, of any change to the status quo, circa 1990, when the City (under an NPA Council) began to make this a more cycling-friendly city by building separated bikeways.  (Best example: the Seaside Bikeway).

For John, perhaps angling for another mayoral run, he’s leading a fight of his own manufacture: “the logical thing to do is to open up (Park Drive) just the way it was. If you are going to make changes in the future take your time, talk to everybody, make it public.” (Emphasis added, if ‘just the way it was’ was Stanley Park circa 1990.)

Consultation and process have served John and the Parks Board well in ensuring that no significant improvement in cycling in any of the parks has occurred since, well, 1990.  PT has documented that extensively.

For the NPA as a whole, an anti-bike-lane agenda, whether explicitly stated or dog-whistled, has not actually served them well; they haven’t won a mayoral election since 2008.  But even today, as they redrink their bathwater, the NPA board itself, not just the NPA park commissioners, has clearly decided the Park Drive closure to vehicles is the issue they want to brand themselves with.

This letter was circulated to their presumed supporters from the board president:

I do have to admire their strategy to use the language of wokiness – ableism, ageism – to frame the fight as one on behalf of the disabled and seniors against the activists and Lycra-clad.  (Or people like me, for whom Stanley Park is our front yard.  Talk about privileged!)

It’s evident that this a political strategy – and a rather tacky one: proclaim your opponents in favour of something they are not (closure of the park to cars) and then double down on the exaggeration by not correcting the mis-statement when called on it.

Here’s Jeff Leigh, a spokesperson for HUB Cycling:

I have been talking to the media for several weeks now, telling them that I am happy to have a lane allocated for cycling in the park, and for automobiles and delivery vehicles to have a lane, and for people walking to have space to move on the seawall in these times of physical distancing. It is about space for all. Nothing selfish about it.

And their response is typically to post a headline that says something like “cyclists want vehicles banned from Stanley Park permanently” even when the article or interview that follows doesn’t call for that at all. It is tiring.

I’m sure the NPA know their motion won’t pass; it isn’t intended to.  It’s positioning, and it allows them, when staff report back with the modified reallocation (likely opening the park to cars in one lane) to proclaim victory, implying that the inevitable occurred only because of their opposition to something that wasn’t going to happen anyway.

They will appear relevant to their base, but only at the price of reaffirming their backward-looking commitment to a status quo that disappeared utterly when Vancouverites found that cycling was a perfect response to the pandemic: outdoors, separated, low-risk, healthy, local and scenic.  Why, you’d almost think it was a perfect activity for parks.

Bonnie Henry thinks so:

Dr. Henry … on Tuesday gave her implicit backing to the five members of the park board who don’t necessarily want to go back to the way it was.

“I actually think it’s a really good thing, not just for the pandemic, but it encourages active transportation, getting people out there moving,” she said. “Some of the things that have affected us most over the last few months have been that inability to get out and to experience things. So this is a way for more people to be able to use the park safely.

“And I would be in favour, personally, of keeping it that way.”

When you’ve lost Bonnie, you’ve lost the issue.

It’s Bike Week in Charlottetown. In our case this is about celebrating cycling, not celebrating motorcycling as it is to the south (I once called a cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee to inquire about a rental; “you know that’s Bike Week, right?” they asked, as though I should know that was a week to avoid if seeking a quiet family vacation on the lake).

Among other things, you will find:

• an #IBikeCharlotetown billboard on the Confederation Trail near the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market where you can take a selfie in front of a whimsical fox (see below),
• the Charlottetown Cycling Handbook, a remarkably well-designed and useful primer on cycling in the city,
• an updated version of the Bike Map, showing cycle routes through the city, businesses that offer cyclists discounts, places where you can park your bicycle.

Tomorrow, June 19, 2020, is “Bike to Work Day” in the city; while in my case my commute, being 25 seconds across the street, does not lend itself to cycling, many others might consider leaving the car at home and discovering that cycling to work is not only feasible, but also kind of fun.

Cycle on.

TL;DR: The Social Support Program is moving from Buffer Reply to Conversocial per June, 1st 2020. We’re also going to reply from @FirefoxSupport now instead of the official brand account. If you’re interested to join us in Conversocial, please fill out this form (make sure you meet the requirements before you fill out the form). 

We have very exciting news from the Social Support Program. In the past, we invited a few trusted contributors to Buffer Reply in order to let them reply to Twitter conversations from the official account. However, since Buffer sunset their Reply service per the 1st of June, now we officially moved to Conversocial to replace Buffer Reply.

Conversocial is one of a few tools that stood out from the search process that began at the beginning of the year because it focuses on support rather than social media management. We like the pricing model as well since it doesn’t restrict us from adding more contributors because it’s volume-based instead of seat-based.

If you’re interested to join us on Conversocial, please fill out this form. However, please be advised that we have a few requirements before we can let you into the tool.

Here are a few resources that we’ve updated to reflect the changes in the Social Support program:

• Social Support Guidelines
• Roles in the Social Support Program
• Social Support in Conversocial
  • Conversocial escalation process
  • Conversocial tagging guidelines

We also just acquire @FirefoxSupport account on Twitter with the help of the Marketing team. Moving forward, contributors from the social support program will continue to reply from this account instead of the official brand account. This will allow the official brand account to focus on brand engagement and will also give us an opportunity to utilize the greater functionality of a full account.

We’re happy about the change and excited to see how we can scale the program moving forward. I hope you all share the same excitement and will continue to support and rocking the helpful web!

Your manager has a default management mantra. You see it when they are not paying attention and a problem – large or small – presents itself. It’s the sound and shape of their first reaction. Their default reaction. And after a few months, everyone knows their mantra.

Here are a couple of my least favorite mantras. I’m going to first explain the worst-case scenario for each of these mantras. I’ll follow-up with an explanation of why I believe this manager ended up with his approach. Then I’ll explain with empathy the best-case scenario for this practice and why you should squint your eyes when you get the rage and consider, “Ok, how are they trying to help?”

I’m going to use the word manager a lot here, and I’ll tell you why later.¹

Management via Worry

This manager can smell disaster brewing. Their spidey-sense is tingling about… something. Their questions are often perceptive, slightly alarming, but not always headed in a consistent direction.

The Degenerate Case Your manager likely (hopefully?) has more experience than you. One of the reasons they got the gig is that they’ve successfully managed through a variety of complicated situations. That experience has given them a useful playbook, and it’s that playbook that’s backing their seemingly random questions about your project.

But are they?

Are their questions heading anywhere?

Or are they just asking worrisome questions because they know that is their role in this meeting?

Ask questions, manager. Ask lots of questions because I know you have the playbook, and I don’t. However, if your questions are hazily framed pointless worry rather than a slowly refined somewhat opaque journey, then I am suspect. I worry that you believe your job is to worry pointlessly, to assume the worst without facts, because that’s worked for you in the past. This teaches me nothing, this does not move the project forward, and your worry is a useless productivity tax on the team.

There is a particularly virulent strain of Worry Management that I think of as Got’cha Management. This manager isn’t as worried as they are motivated to find errors in your product, strategy, or thinking. They search for weakness in logical reasoning, and when they find it, there is an omnipresent silence in the room where you silently wonder, “Am I any good at this?”

The Empathetic Case: The empathetic version of Management via Worry is one of my favorite parts of the job: Tasting the Soup. As I wrote in the original article:

In a meeting where an individual or team is presenting a complex idea or project, my job as the leader is soup tasting. It’s sampling critical parts of the idea to get a sense of how this soup was made. Who are the critical people? What are the critical parts? Which decisions matter? I don’t know. I do believe that a pre-requisite for leadership is that you have experience. You’ve had trials that have resulted in both impressive successes and majestic failures. These aggregate lessons define your metaphoric soup tasting ability. When your team brings you a topic to review, it is this experience you apply to ask the critical soup questions.

The key with proper Soup Tasting is collective learning. As you taste, you explain to the team, “This taste… I’ve tasted this before, and this is what I learned from that particular soup.” This practice both gives you signal and explains to the team what you are learning. The sharing of your experiences as lessons is what changes their perception from being critiqued to being supported.

Management via Crisis

This manager appears hugely motivated when the sky is falling. They thrive on the thrill of disaster. They love stopping everyone in their tracks and throwing them into a war room where they personally manage the crisis into a predictable calm.

The Degenerate Case The Crisis Manager loves the crisis because they get feel like they are actually doing something measurably valuable. It appears that since the sky just fell that their Crisis Services are required.

Are they?

Really, did the sky fall?

Or is your manager just bored? Or uninformed about the actual situation?

The degenerate case of the Crisis Manager is that Crisis Management becomes their only strategy for affecting change quickly. When they detect even a hint of crisis, they rush to press the big red STOP button, invite everyone to the Crisis Slack Channel, fire up the war room video conference, and begin, “This is the only thing we’re working on until further notice.”

The Empathetic Case: Process is documented culture. How a team gets a familiar thing done should be broadly understood by the team. This is how we fix a bug. This is how we do a code check-in. This is how a feature is designed. This is how executive sign-off occurs.

Process comfortably and efficiently describes the common path. Process does not define what to do when the indescribable occurs. A crisis or a disaster does not neatly fit into the common path; it’s when you need someone to swoop in, break the glass, and put out the fire.

Can confirm. It’s a thrill to have everyone’s attention. Can confirm. Disasters are often the best way to burn down and reinvent old dusty process. Can confirm. Reputations are built when the sky falls.

A Coping Mechanism

We done? Good. That was a hard article to write. Partially because I’ve first hand seen all of these mantras in play, but, worse, I can pinpoint moments in my management career where I’ve fallen back on Gotcha management or when I’ve thought Worry management was just what this meeting needed from me. Once I created a Crisis because I believed I had specialized knowledge of the situation, but really I was just bored.

All of these mantras are habits developed as a coping mechanism for the increasing loss of control managers feel over their growing organizations. It’s the hardest part of becoming a manager, the giving away of your legos to allows others to do the actual satisfying building combined with the necessity to guide that building at an increasingly hazy distance.

There is a reason I used the word management throughout this article. These mantras, these defaults ways of managing in their degenerate cases, aren’t leading; they are managing. They are getting by with the strategic move that worked for you years ago but has now developed into a boring, predictable tactic.

In this moment of rapid change, we recognize that the relics of racism exist. The actions we have seen most recently are not isolated actions. Racial injustice affects all aspects of life in our society, our collective progress has been insufficient, Mozilla’s progress has been insufficient. As we said earlier this month, we have work to do.

Today, we are sharing a set of commitments that are a starting point for three areas where we will drive change across Mozilla:

1. Who we are: Our employee base and our communities

To begin, we are committed to significantly increasing Black and Latinx representation in Mozilla in the next two years. We will:

• Double the percentage of Black and Latinx representation of our U.S. staff. This is a starting point for what Mozilla should look like, not an aspirational end point, and it applies to all levels of the organization.
• Increase Black representation in the U.S. at the leadership level, aiming for 6% Black employees at the Director level and up, as well as representation on Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation boards.
• Create dedicated and comprehensive recruiting, development and inclusion efforts that attract and retain Black and Latinx Mozillans.

These commitments are not just about numbers, but about people, and that means having an environment that is diverse, inclusive and welcoming and addresses issues in people’s lives. Our work ahead is in hiring and retaining and also in providing the resources to mentor, develop and advance diverse employees, as well as ongoing education and reflection for our full staff, so that we can create the environment that reflects our mission and our users.

2. What we build: Our outreach with our products

Educating ourselves is how we can begin dismantling systemic racism, and to do that we started with surfacing content via Pocket through Firefox. These collections of works by Black writers and thought leaders are being distributed through our Pocket product with companion promotion through Firefox product messaging. It was new for us to use our products in this way. We will continue to explore how we can leverage the functionality and reach of our products and services to advance change.

Our user research and understanding of our users, their stories and problems also need broadening. We see this as a journey, with undoubtedly other ways that our products can contribute more.

3. What we do beyond products: Our broader engagement with the world

How Mozilla shows up in the world and engages to uplift and increase Black voices in the broader efforts to build a better internet, beyond just our own teams, is equally important. We have supported organizations working at the intersection of tech and racial justice such as the ACLU, Color of Change and Astraea Foundation. We’ve already committed to further work at the intersection of technology and racial justice in 2020 because it helps us build a bigger and stronger movement for a healthy internet.

Beyond those existing partnerships, we are also committing to:

• Direct at least 40% of Mozilla Foundation grants in 2020 to Black-led projects or organizations, with specific targets to come for 2021 and beyond. We see this as critical to the transformation of our organization and the broader healthy internet movement we are part of.
• Develop and invest in new college engagement programs with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Black student networks. We will work closely with professors and students on topics like open source and trustworthy AI, and connect them to the Mozilla community. Mozilla is committed to a culture shift in tech.
• Focus Mozilla’s brand and social media efforts on lifting up people and organizations standing for Black lives and communities, especially where they’re working at the intersection of technology and racial justice.

By committing to change who we are, what we build and what we do beyond our products, we are talking about transforming how Mozilla shows up in the world in fundamental ways. Making this change will require us to support each other, to allow for mistakes and to embrace learning. But most of all it will require us to focus tenaciously on our values and lean into the idea that we’re creating an open internet for all. This isn’t just essential for this moment in time. It’s critical for the future of Mozilla, the future of the internet and the future of our society.

The post First Steps Toward Lasting Change appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

A new tweet from notable Apple leaker Jon Prosser suggests that Apple is going to release the AirPower wireless charging mat after all.

The image shows a mat that looks basically the same as the one Apple showed off in 2017, but the exciting part is that it can charge AirPods and an Apple Watch at the same time.

Well, you guys wanted a better picture of “C68”…

Remember how I said that the main problem was that current prototypes didn’t support Apple Watch?

Yeah.
Well.

They got the Watch working… pic.twitter.com/LvBeNAAtt3

— Jon Prosser (@jon_prosser) June 18, 2020

Apple officially canned the project during March of last year, but it seems like the company was still tinkering away on it behind the scenes. Rumours have been swirling that the main reason it was cancelled was that the company was having difficulties supporting both the Qi wireless standard and the proprietary Qi method used for the Apple Watch.

However, if this leaked image is real, then Apple appears to have solved that problem.

Other reports claim Apple was having a hard to keeping the heat down in the charger, and that was the reason for its cancellation. However, Prosser has a fix for that, too. In a tweet from mid-April, he said that Apple had built the A11 chip into the pad to help manage power and heat.

Prosser says these prototypes are called ‘C68’ and are on track for a release in late 2020 or early 2021.

Beyond that, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in January that Apple was working on a more standard single device wireless charger, so it’s unclear whether both of these chargers will come out or if Apple is going to fully commit to AirPower.

Source: Jon Prosser (@jon_prosser)

The post It looks like Apple might release the AirPower wireless charger after all appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The government of Ontario is going to roll out a voluntary Bluetooth-based COVID-19 contact tracing app next month called “COVID Alert.”

Premier Doug Ford noted during his daily press briefing on June 18th that protecting people’s privacy was the number one priority when choosing a potential app. The app is expected to be available on iOS and Android on July 2nd.

“Privacy was our number one issue, and we will continue to promote it. The app’s going to protect you, it’s going to protect families,” he said, stating the importance of tracing and tracking the spread of COVID-19.

This comes a few hours after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated that a nationwide COVID-19 contact tracing app will be available in the coming weeks, after beginning testing in Ontario. He noted that the government worked with Shopify and BlackBerry to create the app.

The contact tracing app is based on Shopify’s “COVID Shield,” which is a tool that was created to help governments launch their own exposure notification systems.

Shopify’s model utilizes Apple and Google’s ‘Exposure Notification System,’ which uses Bluetooth technology to share randomized codes with other nearby smartphones, which can’t identify users. Other smartphones are then able to access these codes and check for matches against the codes stored on devices.

If someone has tested positive for COVID-19, a healthcare professional will help them upload their status anonymously to a national network. Other users who have downloaded the app and have been in close proximity to them will be alerted that they’ve been exposed to someone who has tested positive.

The app will then provides public health advice and notify the user on what steps they should take next. Prime Minister Trudeau stated earlier that the federal government will maintain the database of randomized codes associated with phones that download the app.

The government has stressed that the app will be completely voluntary, and it is up to Canadians to decide if they want to download it, but that the app will be most effective if as many people as possible use it.

Image source: Government of Ontario

The post Ontario to launch voluntary ‘COVID Alert’ contact tracing app next month appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Last week, a report indicated that Apple would start an in-store trade-in program for Macs, and now, Apple had made it official.

In Canada, Apple retail stores have started Mac in-store trade-ins. Previously, Apple only allowed in-store trade-ins of devices like iPhones, iPads and the Apple Watch. Customers would have to trade Macs online. It seems that in-store trade-ins launched a day earlier in the U.S.

When a user trades in their Mac, they’ll get an in-store credit on a gift card that can be used to lower the cost of a new Mac. Considering some Apple Stores in Canada are still closed or only offering pick-up services, not everyone can take advantage of this just yet.

For those interested, looks like this is now official. Macs no longer listed as online only. https://t.co/uHr8VKG9as pic.twitter.com/VAOFadrXJ0

— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) June 17, 2020

This news was first spotted by Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman.

With Apple reportedly preparing to reveal an updated iMac at WWDC next week that features an entirely new design, it makes sense that the company would be looking for a way to boost Mac sales through an in-store trade-in program.

Source: Mark Gurman (@markgurman), 9to5mac

The post Apple officially launches in-store Mac trade-in program in Canada appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Vancouver-based national carrier Telus has launched its initial 5G network in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.

The carrier also announced that it has selected Samsung as one of its network infrastructure partners. Telus previously announced its 5G partnerships with Nokia and Ericsson.

“Businesses, consumers, and students with 5G network access will experience a network with peak speeds reaching up to a blistering 1.7Gbps to support remote work, virtual heath, and distance education,” Telus stated in a press release.

It notes that network speeds vary with location, signal and customers’ devices. Telus says that its 5G service will be available at no additional cost on its Peace of Mind plans with endless data and no overage fees.

Eligible 5G-enabled devices currently available to Telus customers include the Samsung Galaxy S20 series, LG V60 ThinQ 5G Dual Screen and Motorola Edge+.

“As the first phase of our 5G rollout, we are pleased to offer citizens access to the next generation of wireless technology that will profoundly enhance the way we connect to information, resources and one another,” said Telus CEO Darren Entwistle, in a press release.

It’s important to note that the carrier’s 5G service will not be available to customers who are on its flanker brand, Koodo Mobile, according to documents obtained by MobileSyrup.

The carrier says it will continue to expand its 5G service to 26 additional markets throughout the rest of the year. It notes that it has committed to investing $40 billion over the next three years to support the roll out of its 5G network.

Telus’ launch comes roughly a week after Montreal-based national carrier Bell launched its 5G network. Toronto-based Rogers launched its 5G network earlier this year in January. All three national carriers are currently offering their initial 5G access for free.

Rogers is offering its 5G service for free until March 2021, after which it will charge an additional $15 per month for it. Bell is also offering it for free until March as well, and will charge $10 per month for it afterwards. It’s unknown when Telus plans to charge for its 5G access.

The post Telus launches initial 5G network in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Google has launched a new extension on Chrome that’ll let users add links to text on any webpage.

This extension works by highlighting a selection of text you’d want to link to and then right-click and select “Copy Link to Selected Text” this will generate a link that gets added to your clipboard that the user can share.

When someone clicks on the URL it leads them to the specific selected text, and the browser will emphasize the text. On Chrome, for example, the selected text will be highlighted yellow.

This new browser makes it possible to link to any selected text on Chrome. Google reportedly used similar technology to highlight specific terms you’re looking for directly on the page, according to Android Police. 

This feature only seems to work on versions 80 and higher of Chromium-based browsers. If you open these links in a non-Chrome browser it’ll open the page, but it will not highlight the term or scroll to the picked term either.

This feature seems especially helpful for professors assigning work to students for online teaching.

Source: Web.Dev Via: Android Police

The post Google-made Chrome extension lets users link to text on any webpage appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The electric Volkswagen ID 4 has leaked, showing off a seemingly pretty standard crossover/SUV type of vehicle that looks modern without being too flashy.

Many electric vehicles (EVs) that are coming out often feature ‘futuristic’ accents that, to some, might look childish or out of place on a car. It really comes down to preference, but it’s nice to see VW put out something that seems aimed at the mass North American market.

The ID 4 is slated to be the second major EV from the automaker after last year’s ID 3 hatchback went on sale in Europe. What’s notable about the ID 4 is that it’s supposed to come to Canada and the U.S. when it launches.

This car is based on the ID Cozz we’ve seen at auto shows over the last few years, but as I said above, it drops a lot of the ‘futuristic’ styling and accents in favour of looking normal. The ID 4 is slated to arrive sometime in 2021, but there still isn’t a solid release date.

However, these leaks may point to an official announcement coming soon. Overall, I’m a fan of the look, and these pictures are getting me even more excited to see the rest of the vehicle, especially the interior.

Source: VWIDTALK 

The post Electric Volkswagen destined for North America has leaked appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Hey is a new approach to email that was launched earlier this week by Basecamp. The service, which comes with its own hey.com email address, has a number of unique features for managing messages with an emphasis on screening tools. Hey does not, however, allow you to use its client app with other email services like Gmail, which is important to keep in mind.

Equally important to this story as it unfolded over the past several days is the fact that Hey does not offer an In-App Purchase for its service. The service is available from Basecamp only. As a result, if you download Hey’s iOS app, but have not yet purchased a license from Basecamp, the app doesn’t do anything except request your Hey login credentials.

The service launched on Monday with access provided via the web and native Windows, Android, Linus, Mac, and iOS apps. At the same time, Hey was being launched, an update to its iOS app, which fixed bugs, was rejected by Apple. The timing is unclear, but TechCrunch reports that Hey’s Mac app was rejected too.

The story of Hey’s rejection and the subsequent back and forth between App Review and Basecamp was reported in detail by David Pierce at Protocol. App Review cited Guideline 3.1.1 of the App Review Guidelines for the rejection, which reads:

If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase. Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, etc. Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase.

The only written exception to Guideline 3.1.1 is for ‘Reader’ apps like the Netflix app, which are not required to offer In-App Purchases for digital goods. In a subsequent exchange with Apple, Hey’s reviewer noted that the service did not qualify as a Reader app.

The impasse led Basecamp founder and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, an outspoken critic of Apple in the past, to complain publicly about the rejection on Twitter and to the press.

David Pierce reached out to Apple as part of his Protocol piece and got a curious response:

Apple told me that its actual mistake was approving the app in the first place, when it didn’t conform to its guidelines. Apple allows these kinds of client apps — where you can’t sign up, only sign in — for business services but not consumer products.

Nowhere do the App Review Guidelines draw a distinction between business services and client services.

As the week wore on, the story picked up momentum on social media and a debate erupted over questions such as:

• Was Apple properly applying the rules it had created?
• Were Apple’s rules fair and equitably applied to all developers?
• More broadly, should Apple be allowed to charge a 30% fee for services like Hey in the first place?

Adding a layer of complexity to the story, the entire debate over Hey has played out against the backdrop of news that the European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation of Apple over the App Store and Apple Pay. Also today, the US House of Representatives antitrust subcommittee chairman David Cicilline called Apple’s App Store fees ‘highway robbery’ on the Vergecast podcast. Of course, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference begins next week too.

Today, the dispute between Basecamp and Apple appears to have come to a head with a decision from Apple’s App Review Board, which has determined that the rejection of Hey’s app was valid. In an interview with Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller explained:

“You download the app and it doesn’t work, that’s not what we want on the store,” says Schiller. This, he says, is why Apple requires in-app purchases to offer the same purchasing functionality as they would have elsewhere.

Schiller elaborated that Apple is not considering any rule changes, noting that there are “…many things that they [Basecamp] could do to make the app work within the rules that we have. We would love for them to do that.” The complete text of the letter regarding the App Review Board’s decision is reproduced in Panzarino’s story, laying out the App Review Guidelines that Apple says have been violated and making suggestions about how the app could be modified to comply with them.

Apple’s decision strikes me as consistent with its rules and policies, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right decision. Rules correctly applied that lead to unfair results should be changed. Apps that don’t do anything until a user goes somewhere else to sign up for a service are a poor user experience. There’s also a cost to Apple maintaining the App Store, but is 30% an appropriate fee for addressing those sorts of issues? It doesn’t feel fair and hasn’t for quite some time.

Apple should reevaluate its App Store policies. A lot has changed in the years since the App Store opened. Apple is a far bigger company with a tighter grip on the flow of the digital goods we consume. As a result of its growing services business, Apple also competes with a wider range of companies that use its store than ever before. It’s no longer 2008, and I expect that if Apple doesn’t take the lead in implementing meaningful changes to how it runs the App Store, governments around the world will do so for it.

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I celebrated Catherine’s 30th, 40th, and 50th birthdays with her; today would have been her 57th.

Her 30th was momentous: we were young and wild and free, and had landed on Prince Edward Island just a few months earlier. I have little recollection of what we did that day, other than that it was warm and sunny and we were very very happy.

Her 40th went sideways: she was in a funk, Oliver (age 2) and I tried our best to make it epic, but failed. 

Her 50th was much better: we booked a table at The Dunes, about which I wrote, in part:

By way of celebrating Catherine’s birthday we headed out to The Dunes for supper midweek and had what turned out to be an excellent meal. The highlight was an appetizer they call “The Grazing,” which was, as it turned out, almost enough to feed all three of us for the night: sausage, olives, spiced almonds, salad, roasted onion jam, fresh bread and more. It was the kind of dish that makes Catherine swoon, so, only by coincidence and not by plan, the perfect dish to celebrate her birthday.

I remember that meal like it was yesterday.

There were, of course, other birthdays in there: I celebrated 28 of them with her, maybe 29 if you factor in the birthday going on next door while I was but her shy next-door neighbour in Peterborough. I wrote here about her birthday in 2006, 2010, and 2016. Because late June was often time to travel, more than a few of them were celebrated while en route to some exotic foreign locale; in 2014–The Last Great Summer–we were en route to Germany for our caravanning vacation, and that wasn’t the only time that happened. To the point where, just now, as I write this, I received a text from Oliver:

Catherine was never averse to aging, and generally greeted her birthday with enthusiasm, but she never wanted to be the centre of attention, and there was a standing order, from the time we first met, that there should be No Surprise Parties. I followed that order strictly, and tried to work magic, as best I could, in other ways.

Tonight Oliver and I will go to Richard’s for fish & chips, and will think of her. By happenstance I had a grief support group meeting this afternoon, and halfway through, talking about “what rituals will you uphold?”, I realized that every single time we’d ever been to Richard’s as a family, I’d go and get a table with Oliver, and Catherine would order. Tonight I will have to order.

Later in the evening we’ll gather with family on Zoom to remember Catherine–it’s one of a punishing cavalcade of family Zooms that Oliver has arranged for this week of memorializations.

I answer the question “how are you and Oliver doing?” a lot these days. “We’re okay,” I generally reply. And, most of the time, that’s honest: it’s been five months and two days since Catherine died, and we’re slowly starting to find our sea legs. I am not sad all the time (but I am sad some of the time). We made it through the worst of the lockdown together and emerged unscathed. We planted a tomato and some peppers. We’re about to plant some patchouli in Catherine’s honour. We eat. We sleep. We do the laundry. Some nights I look over at the rocking chair and am surprised to not see Catherine there, and some nights the loneliness reaches out to bite me something fierce. But most nights I’m okay. I’ve learned a lot about grief, most notably that it’s largely indescribable in words, and that it’s different from being sad (which is why it’s not simply called “the sadness”). 

I’m starting to tentatively hold out hope that maybe 2014 was not, in fact, The Last Great Summer. Tentatively.

Wherever this June 18th finds you, please take a moment to raise a glass to Catherine, who is, no doubt, sitting on a stool at God’s microbrewery, enjoying tapas, and wondering why we’re making such a fuss about her.

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

“He is not anti-bike, he said.”

That’s NPA Park Commissioner John Coupar in today’s Sun. 

Seaside in 2001.

Problem is, he’s not pro-bike either.  And as a commissioner for the Board of Parks and Recreation, he’s been an effective opponent, now along with the other NPA park commissioner and the NPA board, of any change to the status quo, circa 1990, when the City (under an NPA Council) began to make this a more cycling-friendly city by building separated bikeways.  (Best example: the Seaside Bikeway).

For John, perhaps angling for another mayoral run, he’s leading a fight of his own manufacture: “the logical thing to do is to open up (Park Drive) just the way it was. If you are going to make changes in the future take your time, talk to everybody, make it public.” (Emphasis added, if ‘just the way it was’ was Stanley Park circa 1990.)

Consultation and process have served John and the Parks Board well in ensuring that no significant improvement in cycling in any of the parks has occurred since, well, 1990.  PT has documented that extensively.

For the NPA as a whole, an anti-bike-lane agenda, whether explicitly stated or dog-whistled, has not actually served them well; they haven’t won a mayoral election since 2008.  But even today, as they redrink their bathwater, the NPA board itself, not just the NPA park commissioners, has clearly decided the Park Drive closure to vehicles is the issue they want to brand themselves with.

This letter was circulated to their presumed supporters from the board president:

I do have to admire their strategy to use the language of wokiness – ableism, ageism – to frame the fight as one on behalf of the disabled and seniors against the activists and Lycra-clad.  (Or people like me, for whom Stanley Park is our front yard.  Talk about privileged!)

It’s evident that this a political strategy – and a rather tacky one: proclaim your opponents in favour of something they are not (closure of the park to cars) and then double down on the exaggeration by not correcting the mis-statement when called on it.

Here’s Jeff Leigh, a spokesperson for HUB Cycling:

I have been talking to the media for several weeks now, telling them that I am happy to have a lane allocated for cycling in the park, and for automobiles and delivery vehicles to have a lane, and for people walking to have space to move on the seawall in these times of physical distancing. It is about space for all. Nothing selfish about it.

And their response is typically to post a headline that says something like “cyclists want vehicles banned from Stanley Park permanently” even when the article or interview that follows doesn’t call for that at all. It is tiring.

I’m sure the NPA know their motion won’t pass; it isn’t intended to.  It’s positioning, and it allows them, when staff report back with the modified reallocation (likely opening the park to cars in one lane) to proclaim victory, implying that the inevitable occurred only because of their opposition to something that wasn’t going to happen anyway.

They will appear relevant to their base, but only at the price of reaffirming their backward-looking commitment to a status quo that disappeared utterly when Vancouverites found that cycling was a perfect response to the pandemic: outdoors, separated, low-risk, healthy, local and scenic.  Why, you’d almost think it was a perfect activity for parks.

Bonnie Henry thinks so:

Dr. Henry … on Tuesday gave her implicit backing to the five members of the park board who don’t necessarily want to go back to the way it was.

“I actually think it’s a really good thing, not just for the pandemic, but it encourages active transportation, getting people out there moving,” she said. “Some of the things that have affected us most over the last few months have been that inability to get out and to experience things. So this is a way for more people to be able to use the park safely.

“And I would be in favour, personally, of keeping it that way.”

When you’ve lost Bonnie, you’ve lost the issue.

A relatively quiet week this week, compared to last week's massive push to ship Datasette 0.44 with authentication, permissions and writable canned queries. I can now ship alpha releases, such as today's Datasette 0.45a1, which means I can preview new plugin features before they are completely ready and stable.

Datasette alphas and betas

I want to be able to iterate on plugin hooks more effectively, which means embracing release early, release often. I also want plugin authors to be able to trust Datasette not to break their work - a major focus for Datasette 1.0.

Releasing alpha preview versions can really help here. I have two plugin hooks in the pipeline for Datasette 0.45 already: startup and canned_queries. These are still under development but are now available to preview in Datasette 0.45a1. Install it like so:

pip install datasette==0.45a1

Please post any feedback on the design of these hooks to the startup hook or canned_queries hook issue threads.

Another compelling reason to ship alphas: it means I can release alpha versions of my own plugins that themselves depend on a Datasette alpha, and still have their unit tests pass in continuous integration. I expect to take advantage of that ability a lot in the future.

Figuring out how to safely ship an alpha took a little bit of work, because I wanted to make sure that alphas wouldn't become the default version installed from PyPI, mess up my existing CI configuration or end up accidentally published to Docker Hub. You can follow my research on this in this issue, including my experiments shipping an alpha for datasette-render-images first.

Those new plugin hooks

startup() (documentation) is a hook that gets called on Datasette server startup, and passed the datasette object. The initial use-case was plugins that might want to validate their own configuration, but I imagine other interesting uses for it will emerge over time.

canned_queries() (documentation) lets plugin authors dynamically generate new canned queries for a given database. It gets passed the datasette object, the current database name and the currently authenticated actor, if there is one. This means you can do fun things like include a user's own saved queries loaded from another database table:

from datasette import hookimpl

@hookimpl
def canned_queries(datasette, database, actor):
    async def inner():
        db = datasette.get_database(database)
        if actor is not None and await db.table_exists("saved_queries"):
            results = await db.execute(
                "select name, sql from saved_queries where actor_id = :id", {
                    "id": actor["id"]
                }
            )
            return {result["name"]: {
                "sql": result["sql"]
            } for result in results}
    return inner

I'm using a pattern here that's shared by a number of other Datasette plugin hooks: rather than returning the results directly, this plugin function returns an async def inner() function.

The code that calls the hook knows that if an asyncio awaitable function is returned it should await it. This is my trick for using awaitable functions with Pluggy, which wasn't initially built with async in mind.

Shooting naturalist videos with Natalie

Natalie has started a new YouTube channel to put her various science communication courses at Stanford into action. I've been helping out as camera-person, which has been really interesting. I'm currently shooting with FiLMiC running on an iPhone 11 Pro on a tripod, using audio from an AirPod (until we can get our hands on something better).

Natalie's been editing the videos on her iPhone and these early results are really good! Here's the video we shot for Sea Lion Birthday on 15th June, a day when 50% of all California Sea Lions celebrate their birthday. Watch the video to find out why.

The close-up footage of the sea lions was shot by Natalie on a Canon DSLR with a 100-400mm lens. I love that lens so much for wildlife photography.

TIL this week

Just one new TIL this week but it's a good one: Using LD_PRELOAD to run any version of SQLite with Python. I've been wanting to figure out a good way to replace the SQLite version used by the Python standard library for ages - pysqlite3 helps a lot here, but I also need the ability to run arbitrary older versions to help respond to bug reports. The LD_PRELOAD trick works perfectly for that.