Rolandt

Eric Karjaluoto @karj
I didn’t vote for Justin Trudeau. That said, I’m glad he’s our PM.

Get well soon, NYC. Keep transit safe, walk if the need arises.

Plague dinner 10. Homemade baba ganoush, picadillo de Oaxaca, Bordeaux blanc. Salad, brownies.

In five weeks, every school kid will know the quiz question: What was the greatest catastrophe in the history of Malden? Answer: The plague of 2020. Yet, it appears we are doing little or nothing to prepare.

I cannot understand this.

We should be building ventilators. We should be building hospitals. We should be training medics.

We have perhaps 15 days.

• AstroHelp
• Deceptive Practice at iTunes and Amazon

Charles Hodges, Stephanie Moore, Barb Lockee, Torrey Trust, Aaron Bond, EDUCAUSE Review, Mar 30, 2020

This is a good article and I appreciate the intent but it still feels to me like a desperate argument that online learning can only be done properly by learning design specialists working with large budgets and a lot of lead time. "The need to 'just get it online' is in direct contradiction to the time and effort normally dedicated to developing a quality course," the authors write. Well yes, compared to current practice, sure. But here's the question: just how bad are the 'just get it online' courses? How much extra value does all that expertise, time and money buy you? If we could spend less money and expand our access proportionately, would it still be worthwhile? I know that the professionals won't applaud the idea of a whole bunch of amateurs doing the job. But my take is, wouldn't it be great if they could? And where is the evidence that they can't?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Joanne Jacobs, Linking and Thinking on Education, Mar 30, 2020

Short post from the always-negative Joann Jacobs on an issue that has been at the back of my mind since the disruption to in-person classes started: will there be tuition refunds or rebates. The concern is that students are "“being charged the same amount for what is admittedly by the university a lower quality education.” The answer from one school is "no". But instead of focusing on the messenger, as Jacobs does, we can ask the more serious question: how much more value is added by the in-person option, how much of a rebate should be offered, and (after all this is done) is the value for money sufficient to warrant going back to those $50K tuition fees? Also attached to this post is a top-notch diagram by Phil Hill describing the complete conversion to online learning by U.S. colleges, raising again the question, why would we go back?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The flip side of Friday’s post is the change of environment might open up opportunities to explore new ideas and means for members to engage with one another.

I love Seth’s post as a starting point:

“A standard zoom room permits you to have 250 people in it. You, the organizer, can speak for two minutes or ten minutes to establish the agenda and the mutual understanding, and then press a button. That button in Zoom will automatically send people to up to 50 different breakout rooms.

If there are 120 people in the room and you set the breakout number to be 40, the group will instantly be distributed into 40 groups of 3.

They can have a conversation with one another about the topic at hand. Not wasted small talk, but detailed, guided, focused interaction based on the prompt you just gave them.

8 minutes later, the organizer can press a button and summon everyone back together.
Get feedback via chat (again, something that’s impossible in a real-life meeting). Talk for six more minutes. Press another button and send them out for another conversation.
This is thrilling. It puts people on the spot, but in a way that they’re comfortable with.”

Be sure to read the entire post.

When I visited TechFestival in Copenhagen last September I had a conversation with a Swedish NGO representative. She at the end of our conversation quickly pulled out her phone and by answering a handful questions captured she had met me as open data relevant stakeholder, how and why she thought it was of interest. This caught my eye as something useful for my company as well, especially now that we have more people out there bumping into different actors in our field.

I installed a LimeSurvey instance on one of my company’s domain names and created a very simple survey that asks for who did you meet, where/how that happened, the type of stakeholder it is, and why you think it is of interest, plus who is filling the questions out.

The survey, collecting 5 pieces of information.

At the back-end we will look at whether this captures useful info, and how to pipe it into activities. For instance who to follow on social media, or to add to a rss reader. Or who to connect to whom, or whom to approach.

I asked all colleagues to add the little survey as a button on their phone’s home screen, so that capturing is as easy as possible. Like in the white circle on the image below.

Not that we are out and about these days, as we’re as locked down at home as everyone in the Netherlands. However we’ll bump into stakeholders online too, and we’ll start there. In a few weeks we’ll evaluate how things worked or not, what to tweak and what to do as follow up (the mapping part of stakeholder mapping).

The bookmark as button on my phone’s home screen, in the white circle.

Brooke Hammerling @brooke
Do I know anyone who HASN’T made a sourdough loaf this weekend and put it on Instagram? Please, for the love of god, announce yourself.

Want to read this in more detail. (found via Neil Mather)

The generalist/specialist distinction is an extrinsic coordinate system for mapping human potential. This system itself is breaking down, so we have to reconstruct whatever meaning the distinction had in intrinsic terms. When I chart my life course using such intrinsic notions, I end up clearly a (reconstructed) specialist…..I call the result “the calculus of grit.” It is my idea of an inertial navigation system for an age of anomie, where the external world has too little usable structure to navigate by.

Bookmarked The Calculus of Grit (ribbonfarm)

I find myself feeling strangely uncomfortable when people call me a generalist and imagine that to be a compliment.  My standard response is that I am actually an extremely narrow, hidebound specialist…

mkalus shared this story from davidallengreen on Twitter.

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mkalus shared this story from vamuseum's YouTube Videos.

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A few thoughts on this YouTube subscriber swap thing that’s going around… (in case you’ve missed it a LOT of musicians have been promoting the idea that we should reciprocally follow one another to help reach the 1000 subscriber limit so we can start monetising YouTube channels, and then play each other’s videos on mute to gain revenue) 

FWIW, I’ve been on YouTube for 14 years, have just shy of 2K subscribers, have other videos on there posted by bass accounts that have generated hundreds of thousands of views, but IF I’d been monetising my account from the start (that wasn’t even possible back then – at least a third of my views on there were from before there was ANY money in YouTube), my total number of views would’ve made me significantly less than $500. In 14 years. Maybe a few bucks more if I could’ve persuaded people to watch ads on them.

See, you get paid almost nothing on YT for your music. Like, effectively nothing. You get paid for people watching ads. So you’re asking the people who are watching your videos to spend hours and hours collectively watching bullshit so you can make pennies. If that’s a byproduct of you doing what you do anyway, knock yourselves out. Go for it.

But making ‘content‘ so that you can somehow start from scratch while quarantined to make any money at all through YouTube views, AND trying to get that happening through a network of other people who are also trying to make content and aren’t even following anyone based on whether they actually like what they do??? Are you high? If your understanding of who you are is that you are an artist trying to sell your work, this is not your business.

I get that you’re trying to come up with strategies to make this work at a time when we’re REALLY struggling to stay afloat, but getting people to spend hours watching stuff they aren’t invested in so you can make pennies is not a good use of our time in quarantine. It’s not good economically and it’s not good spiritually, and it’s not even remotely likely to make any sensible money for anyone but Google.

If you already have stuff on YouTube and want to earn some scraps for it, sure get registered for ad revenue. But honestly, it’s not worth anything unless THAT’S YOUR BUSINESS. Like, a full time job. A quick google search suggests that 7 MILLION views a year (it’d be a hell of a production/marketing task to get 1% of that on content you own the copyright on – remember, you won’t get paid for videos of cover versions unless you license/register them, the writer will) will pay you LESS than I make a year from 260 Bandcamp subscribers.

I’ve said it god-knows how many times, the streaming economy has no response to this. The major labels and streaming companies COMBINED initially donated less to help musicians through this than Bandcamp earned for them in one day of waiving their fees and promoting it as a day to help. One day. Rihanna has donated more than her entire industry combined, just because she gives a shit. (Spotify have since announced $10M of matched funding donations to three music-focused charities )

An economic model designed to massively prioritise paying people for already-famous music that doesn’t require a marketing or production budget is never going to be a sustainable ecosystem for a mass of creatives to earn a living. Stop trying to make fetch happen. If you’ve had a viral hit on a playlist or two on Spotify and have made some money, that’s brilliant. I want my friends and colleagues to make money, but it’s not sustainable across the system, and trying to game YouTube with some ‘follow for a follow’ nonsense is not going to suddenly get you all the kind of resilient audience who are willing to watch ads to see your stuff that is needed to make money off this.

Last thing – every person I know who is making SERIOUS money off YouTube (or is using YouTube as a significant part of their marketing funnel to a business that makes money – not the same thing) has studied this stuff to a significant level. They aren’t just great musicians or teachers or gamers or whatever. They are deep into marketing techniques, into the kind of video they need to make to get views, they study click through rates and patterns, interpret YouTube stats about viewer retention, they are constantly tweaking that shit to make it work.

My advice? Make the best art you can. Focus on the art right now. YouTube aren’t throwing anyone a lifeline. Everyone’s at home watching video, and you’re competing with people who’ve been in this game for a decade, have teams and a strategy. Just make great art, and make a case for the people in your audience who REALLY CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU DO and have the means to pay for it to help support it.

Reciprocal follow-me-back strategies have been around since MySpace, and they always suck. They are never pro-art, and result in a bunch of pushy, aggressive people seeming way more popular than their art deserves because they chase the follow-backs, not because they have anything worthwhile to share.

In short, the massive problem with this is that it assumes the the number of followers that it says you have on your YouTube page is more significant than the community of interest that the number is supposed to represent. Follow for a follow is a low-grade simulacrum of an actual community that are invested in what you do and care about it. It represents how many people were needy enough for their own follower count to go up that they would also click yours. You and your art deserve much, much better.

Do your art
Shout about the stuff you love
Invite the people who can afford to to support art – not just your art.
Stay safe.
Wash your hands.

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article by Jonathan Zimmerman on March 10 arguing that we should use the dramatic shift to online classes due to Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to research online learning (see article here).

For the first time, entire student bodies have been compelled to take all of their classes online. So we can examine how they perform in these courses compared to the face-to-face kind, without worrying about the bias of self-selection.

It might be hard to get good data if the online instruction only lasts a few weeks. But at institutions that have moved to online-only for the rest of the semester, we should be able to measure how much students learn in that medium compared to the face-to-face instruction they received earlier.

To be sure, the abrupt and rushed shift to a new format might not make these courses representative of online instruction as a whole. And we also have to remember that many faculty members will be teaching online for the first time, so they’ll probably be less skilled than professors who have more experience with the medium. But these are the kinds of problems that a good social scientist can solve.

I strongly disagree with Zimmerman’s argument. There is a lot to study here. There is little to claim about online learning.

What we are doing right now is not even close to best practice for online learning. I recommend John Daniels’ book Mega-Universities (Amazon link). One of his analyses is a contrast with online learning structured as “correspondence school” (e.g., send out high-quality materials, require student work, provide structured feedback) or as a “remote classroom” (e.g., video record lectures, replicate in-classroom structures). Remote classrooms tend to have lower-retention and increase costs as the number of students scale. Correspondence school models are expensive (in money and time) to produce, but scales well and has low cost for large numbers. What we’re doing is much closer to remote classrooms than correspondence school. Experience with MOOCs supports this analysis. Doing it well takes time and is expensive, and is carefully-structured. It’s not thrown together with less than a week’s notice.

My first thought when I read Zimmerman’s essay was for the ethics of any experiment comparing to the enforced move to online classes versus face-to-face classe. Students and faculty did not choose to be part of this study. They are being forced into online classes. How can we possibly compare face-to-face classes that have been carefully designed, with hastily-assembled online versions that nobody wants at a time when the world is suffering a crisis. This isn’t a fair nor ethical comparison.

Ian Milligan recommends that we change our language to avoid these kinds of comparisons, and I agree. He writes (see link here) that we should stop calling this “online learning” and instead call it “emergency remote teaching.” Nobody would compare “business as usual” to an “emergency response” in terms of learning outcomes, efficiency, student satisfaction, and development of confidence and self-efficacy.

On the other hand, I do hope that education researchers, e.g., ethnographers, are tracking what happens. This is first-ever event, to move classes online with little notice. We should watch what happens. We should track, reflect, and learn about the experience.

But we shouldn’t make claims about online learning. There is no experiment here. There is a crisis, and we are all trying to do our best under the circumstances.

mkalus shared this story from Das Kraftfuttermischwerk.

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Ich gehe davon aus, dass wir früher oder später alle mit Atemschutzmasken durch die Gegend laufen werden. Zumindest beim Einkaufen sollten wir sie jetzt schon tragen, um andere nicht nicht zu gefähren. Und wenn wir schon Maske tragen, warum dann nicht so eine außergewöhnliche, die der Wirkung einer N95 Maske nahekommt und somit besser ist als gar keine. Anleitung und Beschreibung hat Danger Ranger hier ins Netz gestellt. Mit Schnurrhaaren!
(via BoingBoing)

After five days of cooking burgers, barbecue, and chicken on seven top-rated grills—and weeks of researching the dozens available—we’ve decided that the Weber Spirit II E-310 is our pick as the best gas grill for most people. No grill matches its combination of exceptional performance, usability, durability, and value.

Photographer Ken Ohrn captures Sylvia Ohrn walking in local blossom splendour.

I have previously written about Cherry Blossom Madness  and the one street on the east side of Vancouver that explodes with a canopy of cherry blossoms, and tourists who are themselves the main event. Residents of the street have even had to enlist the City of Vancouver to keep the calm while car drivers jockey to visit the blooms.

There are over 43,000 cherry trees in Vancouver with fifty different varieties. You can take a look at this interactive map by the Vancouver Sun that shows the location of 16,000 cherry trees.

Normally there is a cherry blossom festival in Vancouver and you can take a look at the history of cherry trees here on their website. While many of the events for the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival are cancelled, there are still some online events which you can look at here.

You can also view  this YouTube video of images taken from previous Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival events.

Fresh from the Pixelmator oven, we’ve just released Pixelmator Pro 1.6 Magenta, a major update you’re sure to love.

The all-new color picker

Pixelmator Pro now has a brand new color picker, designed to be incredibly powerful and full-featured, yet amazingly easy to use.

We love the Colors window, so why did we decide to make our own color picker? Well, for an app like Pixelmator Pro, it falls a little short in a few small ways. And those small things often make a big difference.

We wanted to give you an easy way to pick colors using the classic hue, saturation, and brightness control, hex and and RGB color codes, and good old color swatches. And we wanted everything to be in one place so it’s all super easy to find. We also wanted to have a beautiful and informative eyedropper for when you’re picking colors from your image. And this is the result:

We’ve also added a dedicated Color Picker tool, where the eyedropper is always active so you can quickly pick a series of colors from an image. You can also customize how the eyedropper works everywhere else in Pixelmator Pro. For example, you can change its sample size (so it picks an average color, rather than an exact sample), change which color code is displayed, or turn off displaying color names. We hope you’re as excited about this new picker as we are!

An easier way to select multiple objects

This is another great improvement to make Pixelmator Pro even easier to use — you can now drag over multiple objects to select them. Hint: to make this easier to use with illustrations and other images, lock the background layer.

Identify and replace missing fonts

Whenever you open an image with fonts that you don’t have installed on your Mac, you’ll see a handy notification letting you know. And, using the Replace Fonts feature, you’ll be able to replace those missing fonts in a snap!

Performance improvements and other goodies

Along with all this, we’ve also included some performance improvements. The image overlay — which includes things like guides, selection outlines, layer handles, and others — has been rewritten to use Metal, bringing obvious speed improvements. What’s more, you can now press the Shift  – Command  – h keyboard shortcut to hide or show it!

We’ve also improved the speed of layer strokes, added the ability to apply inside and outside strokes to text layers, and made a range of improvements the the shape tools, making it easier to create illustrations and drawings. All in all, it’s a pretty awesome update, even if we do say so ourselves.

Download Now

If you want to know every detail about the update, head down to our What’s New page, where you’ll find the release notes and more. Otherwise, visit the Mac App Store to make sure you’re all up to date. And don’t hesitate to let us know what you think!

Yesterday (March 29), Zoom updated its privacy policy with a major rewrite. The new language is far more clear than what it replaced, and which had caused the concerns I detailed in my previous three posts:

1. Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act,
2. More on Zoom and privacy, and
3. Helping Zoom

Those concerns were shared by Consumer Reports, Forbes and others as well. (Here’s Consumer Reports‘ latest on the topic.)

Mainly the changes clarify the difference between Zoom’s services (what you use to conference with other people) and its websites, zoom.us and zoom.com (which are just one site: the latter redirects to the former). As I read the policy, nothing in the services is used for marketing. Put another way, your Zoom sessions are firewalled from adtech, and you shouldn’t worry about personal information leaking to adtech (tracking based advertising) systems.

The websites are another matter. Zoom calls those websites—its home pages—”marketing websites.” This, I suppose, is so they can isolate their involvement with adtech to their marketing work.

The problem with this is an optical one: encountering a typically creepy cookie notice and opting gauntlet (which still defaults hurried users to “consenting” to being tracked through “functional” and “advertising” cookies) on Zoom’s home page still conveys the impression that these consents, and these third parties, work across everything Zoom does, and not just its home pages.

And why call one’s home on the Web a “marketing website”—even if that’s mostly what it is? Zoom is classier than that.

My advice to Zoom is to just drop the jive. There will be no need for Zoom to disambiguate services and websites if neither is involved with adtech at all. And Zoom will be in a much better position to trumpet its commitment to privacy.

That said, this privacy policy rewrite is a big help. So thank you, Zoom, for listening.

 

The trouble with looking back over a long period is that time has a way of compressing history. The clarity of hindsight makes it easy to look back at almost anything and be disappointed in some way with how it turned out years later.

We certainly saw that with the anniversary of the introduction of the iPad. Considered in isolation a decade later, it’s easy to find shortcomings with the iPad. However, the endpoints of the iPad’s timeline don’t tell the full story.

It’s not that the device is short on ways it could be improved; of course, it isn’t. However, the path of the iPad over the past decade isn’t a straight line from point A to point B. The iPad’s course has been influenced by countless decisions along the way bearing consequences that were good, bad, and sometimes unintended.

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Concepts

Concepts: Where ideas take shape

The 10th anniversary of the iPad isn’t a destination, it’s just an arbitrary point from which to take stock of where things have been and consider where they are going. To do that, it’s instructive to look at more than the endpoints of the iPad’s history and consider what has happened in between. Viewed from that perspective, the state of the iPad ten years later, while at times frustrating, also holds reason for optimism. No single product in Apple’s lineup has more room to grow or potential to change the computing landscape than the iPad does today.

Just a Big iPhone

No product is launched into a vacuum, and the origin of the iPad is no different. It’s influenced by what came before it. In the ten years since April 3, 2010, that context has profoundly affected the iPad’s adoption and trajectory.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that the iPad would follow in the footsteps of the iPhone’s design, but that was far from clear in 2010. Take a look at the gallery of mockups leading up to the iPad’s introduction that I collected for a story in January. The designs were all over the place. More than two years after the iPhone’s launch, some people still expected the iPad to be a Mac tablet based on OS X.

However, after spending over two years acclimating consumers to a touch-based UI and app-centric approach to computing, building on the iPhone’s success was only natural. Of course, that led to criticisms that the iPad was ‘just a big iPhone/iPod touch’ from some commentators, but that missed one of the most interesting and overlooked part of the iPad’s introduction. Sure, Apple leaned into the similarities between the iPhone and the iPad, but even that initial introduction hinted at uses for the iPad that went far beyond what the iPhone could do.

Apple walked a careful line during that introductory keynote in January 2010. Steve Jobs’ presentation and most of the demos were a careful mix of showing off familiar interactions while simultaneously explaining how the iPad was better for certain activities than the iPhone or the Mac. That went hand-in-hand with UI changes on the iPad that let apps spread out, flattening view hierarchies. The company didn’t stop there, though.

Apple also provided a glimpse of the future. Toward the end of the iPad’s debut keynote, Phil Schiller came out for a demo of iWork. It was a final unexpected twist. Up to this point, the demos had focused primarily on consumption use cases, including web and photo browsing, reading in iBooks, and watching videos.

The iWork demo was a stark departure from the rest of the presentation. Schiller took the audience on a tour of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. They weren’t feature-for-feature copies of their Mac counterparts. Instead, each app included novel, touch-first adaptations that included innovative design elements like a custom software keyboard for entering formulas in Numbers. Apple also introduced a somewhat odd combination keyboard and docking station accessory for typing on the iPad in portrait mode.

What stands out most about this last segment of the iPad keynote isn’t that the iPad could be used as a productivity tool, but the contrast between how little time was spent on it compared to how advanced the iWork suite was from day one. As I explained in January, I suspect that to a degree, Apple was hedging its bets. Perhaps, like the original Apple Watch, the company knew it had built something special, but it wasn’t sure which of the device’s uses would stick with consumers.

The iPhone was still a young product in 2010. It was a hit, but consumers were still new to its interaction model. The App Store was relatively new, too, and filled with apps, many of which would be considered simple by today’s standards.

By tying the iPad closely to the iPhone, Apple provided users with a clear path to learning how to use its new tablet. Spotlighting familiar uses from the iPhone and demonstrating how they were better on the iPad tapped into a built-in market for the company’s new device. But the more I look at that first iPad keynote in the context of the past decade, the more I’m convinced that there was something else happening during that last segment.

Apple knew it was on to something special that went beyond finding better ways to do the same things you could already do on an iPhone. If that was the extent of the iPad’s potential, the company wouldn’t have invested the considerable time it must have taken to adapt the iWork suite to the iPad, and later update the Mac versions to align better with their iOS counterparts. iWork was a harbinger of the more complex, fully-featured pro apps on the iPad that have only recently begun to find a foothold on the platform.

However, there’s no doubt that it was the emphasis on consumption apps that set the stage for the iPad’s early years.

The First Five Years

Initial sales of the iPad were strong. The first day it was available, Apple sold 300,000 iPads. After four weeks, that number climbed to one million. Adoption was faster than the iPhone. In fact, it was faster than any non-phone consumer electronic product in history, surpassing the DVD player.

The sales results were a vindication of the iPad’s launch formula. So when it was time to roll out the iPad 2, Apple sought to capture lightning in a bottle again by using the same playbook, right down to the black leather chair used for onstage demos in the first keynote.

The structure of the iPad 2 presentation was the same too, closing with a demo of new, sophisticated apps from Apple that was reminiscent of Schiller’s iWork demo. This time, the company showed off iMovie and GarageBand. iWork had been impressive the year before, but something about the creative possibilities of making movies and music on a device you held in your hands recaptured the excitement and promise the iLife suite had ignited on the Mac years before. In 2010, Apple showed that you could get work done on an iPad, but in 2011, the company showed customers they could make art.

In the wake of the iPad 2 keynote, the iPad seemed poised to jump-start a computing revolution, but instead, Apple’s iPad efforts appeared to stall. Steve Jobs’ passing in late 2011 may have been a contributing factor, but paradoxically, it was Apple’s successful strategy of tying the iPad so closely to the iPhone that also held it back.

iPad sales continued to climb in 2011 and 2012. Apple responded by rapidly iterating on the device and expanding the lineup. In 2012 alone, Apple released the third and fourth generation iPads, plus the iPad mini. By the time the ultra-thin iPad Air debuted in late 2013, though, things had begun to take a turn for the worse.

After those first two keynotes, Apple’s push into productivity and creativity apps on the iPad slowed. At the same time, iPads were built to last. Users didn’t feel the same sense of urgency to replace them every couple years as they did with iPhones. Coupled with the fact that few apps were pushing the hardware, sales began to decline.

The picture wasn’t completely bleak, though. Third parties took up the cause and pushed the capabilities of the platform with apps like Procreate, Affinity Photo, Editorial, and MindNode, and for some uses, the iPad was a worthy substitute for a Mac. However, with the iPad still moving in lockstep with the iPhone, developers and users began to run up against limitations that made advancing the iPad as a productivity and creativity platform difficult.

Chief among the stumbling blocks were the lack of file system access and multitasking. The app-centric nature of iOS worked well for the iPhone, but as apps and user workflows became more sophisticated, the inflexibility of tying files to particular apps held the iPad back. The apps-first model was simple, but processing a file in multiple apps meant leaving a trail of partially completed copies in the wake of a project, wasting space, and risking confusion about which file was the latest version.

The lack of multitasking became a speed bump in the iPad’s path too. The larger screen of the device made multitasking a natural fit. However, even though the hardware practically begged to run multiple apps onscreen, the OS wasn’t built for it, and when it finally was, the first iterations were limited in functionality.

We don’t know what the internal dynamic was at Apple during this time, but the result was that, despite early optimism fueled by the iWork apps, GarageBand, and iMovie, the iPad failed to evolve into a widely-used device for more sophisticated productivity and creative work. It was still a capable device, and increasing numbers of users were turning to it as their primary computer. However, that only added to the building frustration of users who sensed the platform’s progress leveling off just as they were pushing it harder.

Pro Hardware

As the first five years of the iPad concluded, sales continued to decline. However, 2015 marked the first signs of a new direction for the iPad with the introduction of the first-generation iPad Pro, a product that began to push the iPad into new territory.

The original iPad Pro was a significant departure from prior iPads. Not only was it Apple’s most powerful iPad, but it introduced the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard cover.

The Pencil added a level of precision and control that wasn’t possible using your finger or a third-party stylus to draw or take notes. With tilt and pressure sensitivity and low latency, the Pencil opened up significantly more sophisticated productivity and creative uses. The Smart Keyboard did the same for productivity apps, turning the iPad into a typing-focused workstation.

The hardware capabilities of the iPad Pro have continued to advance steadily, outpacing desktop PCs in many cases. However, sophisticated hardware alone wasn’t enough to propel the iPad forward. It was certainly a necessary first stop, but Apple still had to convince developers to build more complex pro apps that made use of the iPad’s capabilities.

Pro Apps and Business Models

As the first decade of the iPad comes to a close, Apple continues to grapple with fostering a healthy ecosystem of pro-level apps. For most of the past decade, the iPad app ecosystem has been treated the same as the iPhone’s. The company, however, seems to have recognized the differences and has made adjustments that have substantially improved the situation.

The challenge of the iPad market is that it’s much smaller than the iPhone market. At the same time, pro-level apps are inherently more complex, requiring a substantially greater investment than many iPhone apps. That makes embarking on these kinds of iPad-focused pro app projects far riskier for developers.

However, Apple’s recent moves have significantly improved the situation. The first step was to implement subscriptions. Although they aren’t limited to the iPad, subscription business models have provided developers with the recurring revenue necessary to maintain sophisticated apps long term. Subscriptions haven’t been popular with some consumers, especially when a traditionally paid up front app transitions to a subscription. Still, the developers I’ve spoken with who have made it through the transition are doing better than before.

The second and less obvious move Apple made was the introduction of Mac Catalyst apps, which allow iPad developers to bring their apps to macOS. To be sure, Mac Catalyst is designed to breathe new life into the stagnant Mac App Store, but it also benefits the iPad. As I wrote last summer, Mac Catalyst aligns the iPad more closely with the Mac than ever before. By facilitating simultaneous development for both platforms, Mac Catalyst significantly increases the potential market of users for those apps and encourages the use of the latest iPadOS technologies, both of which promise to advance the platform.

A good example of this in action is Twitter’s Mac and iPad apps. Twitter’s iPad app languished for years; however, last fall Twitter launched a Mac Catalyst version of its app. Although the app had some rough edges, it included features you’d expect on the Mac like extensive keyboard shortcuts. Less than three weeks later, the iPad app was updated with extensive keyboard support too.

The third software piece of the puzzle Apple has addressed is iPadOS. Going into WWDC 2019, significant iPad-specific updates to iOS were anticipated, but no one saw a separate OS coming. Currently, the overlap between iPadOS and iOS is extensive, but the introduction of iPadOS sent a message to developers that Apple was ready to start differentiating the feature sets of its mobile OSes to suit the unique characteristics of each platform. Over time, I expect we’ll see even more differences between the platforms emerge, such as the cursor support added to iPadOS with iPadOS 13.4.

It’s still too early to judge whether the software-side changes to the iPad will succeed in encouraging widespread adoption of the latest hardware capabilities. However, early signs are encouraging, such as Adobe’s commitment to the platform with Photoshop and the announced addition of Illustrator. My hope is that with time, Apple’s substantial investment in both hardware and software will create a healthy cycle of hardware enabling more sophisticated apps and apps pushing hardware advancements.

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The trajectory of the iPad is one of the most interesting stories of modern Apple. Taking off as strongly as the device did in the aftermath of the iPhone made it look, for a time, like Apple had repeated the unbounded success of the iPhone.

Although the company managed to jump-start sales of the iPad by tying it to the iPhone, it became clear after a couple of years that the iPad wasn’t another iPhone. That doesn’t make the iPad a failure. It’s still the dominant tablet on the market, but it hasn’t transformed society and culture to the same degree as the iPhone.

With the introduction of advanced hardware, new accessories, iPadOS, Mac Catalyst, and new business models, the iPad has begun striking out on its own, emerging from the shadow of the iPhone. That’s been a long time coming. Hitching the iPad to the iPhone’s star was an undeniably successful strategy, but Apple played out that thread too long.

Fortunately, the company has begun to correct the iPad’s course, and I couldn’t be more excited. The hardware is fast and reliable, and soon, we’ll have an all-new, more robust keyboard that can double as a way to charge the device. Perhaps most intriguing, though, is the introduction of trackpad and mouse support in iPadOS 13.4. Although it was rumored, most people didn’t expect to see trackpad support until iPadOS 14. I’m hoping that means there is lots more to show off in the next major release of iPadOS.

Ten years in, the iPad is still a relatively young device with plenty of room to improve. Especially when you consider that the iPad Pro with its Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard is only five years old, there is lots of room for optimism for the future. The iPad may have been pitched as a big iPhone at first, but its future as a modular computing platform that is neither a mobile phone nor traditional computer is bright.

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With the global spread of the coronavirus pandemic, many people are cooking from home more than ever before. Though you’re probably doing your best to practice social distancing and stay inside, you may be wondering if the food, packaging, and grocery bags you bring into your home need to be sanitized. It’s a valid concern, considering all of the hands that have touched the apples in your fridge or the cans of tuna in your pantry.

Once-popular mobile trivia game HQ Trivia has been resurrected after shutting down in mid-February.

On March 29th, the app sent out a push notification to players stating that a new game would be going live that night. HQ co-founder Rus Yusupov also confirmed on Twitter that HQ was indeed making a return.

Bringing @hqtrivia back tonight with @mattwasfunny!! 9p ET on the HQ app

— Rus (@rus) March 29, 2020

According to a subsequent report from The Wall Street Journal, HQ is back thanks to an acquisition by an anonymous investor. As a result, HQ is reportedly planning to air consistent games, although a specific schedule has yet to be confirmed.

On February 14th, HQ announced that it would be ceasing operations effective immediately, citing a lack of investors. The app has also faced a number of hurdles over time, including a steady decline in downloads and reported company turmoil following the death of co-founder Colin Kroll.

At the time of shutdown, fans who had any outstanding cash prizes to redeem were seemingly out of luck. However, HQ host Matt Richards confirmed on Twitter that the show’s revival means players will be able to claim their earnings starting this week. Specific details as to how this will work haven’t yet been mentioned.

Yo. You heard??!? @hqtrivia is back tonight at 9pm eastern! Download the app now! Also if you been waiting to cash out, you’ll be able to this week!

— Matt Richards (@mattwasfunny) March 30, 2020

As part of its return, HQ also confirmed that it is donating $100,000 USD (about $141,000 CAD) to non-profit World Central Kitchen, which is providing food to people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, HQ says it will match players’ cash prizes with donations to other organizations with philanthropic efforts related to COVID-19.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

The post HQ Trivia is officially back, less than two months after shutting down appeared first on MobileSyrup.

I sometimes listen to branding "experts" talk and wonder if they live on the same planet I do. I hear them say...

• Consumers want to “join the conversation” about brands.
• Consumers want to co-create with brands.
• Brands need to create communities of engaged consumers to be successful.
• Consumers want a relationship with brands.
• Consumers want brands that align with their values.

I suspect that the more these branding experts can link "branding" to business success, the more of a market they are creating for their services.

First of all, I don't like the word branding. It's like so many words in the dreadful lexicon of marketing -- far too open to interpretation to mean anything specific. There is nothing stupid you can do with a logo that can't be excused as "branding."

Yet, despite my misgivings about branding "experts," I believe that creating a well-known, desirable brand is the highest achievement of advertising. So what the hell are we talking about here? Let's do a little thinking.

As stated above, creating a well-known, desirable brand is the highest attainment of advertising. There are people who would disagree and say that creating a best-selling product is advertising's highest attainment. They are wrong. Advertising alone cannot create a best-selling brand or product. There are far too many elements in marketing, and business in general, that influence product sales. Advertising cannot affect product quality, distribution, pricing, product design, etc. As Mark Ritson often points out, marketing is a lot more than communication.

In the long run, no amount of brilliant advertising and its concomitant brand value can overcome a shitty, ugly product that tastes bad, is hard to find and is unaffordable or unprofitable.

And yet brand babblers seem to think that every business problem is a branding problem. They rattle on and on about the power of "the brand" until you want to shoot yourself. Or them. They inflate the importance of what they do and disguise their ignorance of the complex nature of business success, behind a vague, non-specific curtain - the magical mystery module of "branding."

Many well-known and respected brands have died ignominious deaths (e.g., Polaroid, Oldsmobile, Kodak) -- not necessarily because their "branding" sucked, but because either their products couldn't cut it anymore, or they fell behind the competition, or their financials were cockeyed, or some non-communication aspects of their marketing strategy were inadequate.

To wit, I suspect that one of the economic consequences of the current CV tragedy will be the demise of several "major brands" who have been living on investor money instead of operational income.

Successful "branding" can help make a product more desirable and it can raise the perceived value of a product. In general it can raise the likelihood that a business or product will be successful.

Yes, creating a desirable brand is the highest achievement of advertising, but...
No, creating a desirable brand is not nearly a guarantee of business success.

There are a lot of contingencies in creating a successful business. There are nuts and bolts, and wind, rain, and snow, and salt and pepper, and a little of this and a lot of that.

Despite the implications and assertions of brand babblers, in no way does successful "branding" lead inexorably to a successful business. Getting "the brand" right is a significant component of marketing success, but you gotta get a whole lot of other things right first.

3Blue1Brown goes into more of the math of SIR models — which drive many of the simulations you’ve seen so far — that assume people are susceptible, infectious, or recovered.

Tags: 3Blue1Brown, coronavirus, epidemic, simulation

Price Tags really is about active transportation advocacy but I have had a reminder from a few health care providers that during the COVID-19 pandemic things are a bit different.

People working in the Emergency and Critical Care sections of hospitals that are potentially exposed to COVID-19 should NOT be taking transit, and physical distancing by walking/cycling at night is often not an option. Couple that with a reduced transit schedule and longer hours, and the question becomes~should we be charging these health care workers for parking during the crisis?

There is already a local petition circulating asking for free parking for health care workers who are now working longer hours than a normal twelve hour shift, and dealing with stressful situations related to the pandemic.

Joe Pinkstone of the Daily Mail reports on the JustPark app in Great Britain that allows hospital staff to park close to hospitals for free during the Covid-19 crisis. That company has 2,000 spaces listed for health care workers at 150 different hospitals in the country. In 48 hours 250 health care workers took advantage of the free parking.

Just Park is the most used parking app in Britain and allows drivers to reserve a space in advance.  The company is waiving all fees in connection to creating more parking space for health care workers. JustPark went one step further asking people and businesses with available parking spaces  near hospitals to also donate their space to these healthcare workers during the pandemic.

Of course it is British National Health Service policy to charge for parking at hospitals, and there already is some free car parking for staff “through a pre-approved list”.  But in Britain there has been increasing usage of all available hospital parking by staff and by  patient families.

In Sydney Australia Mayor Clover Moore is asking her Council to provide free 24 hour access to parking for all essential workers including those in health care.

As Mayor Moore wrote on twitter, “This an unprecedented health emergency. We stand ready to support our residents, businesses, cultural and vulnerable communities through this challenging time.”

 

UPDATE March 31~B.C. Hospitals are now providing free parking at hospitals. The City of Vancouver is no longer charging for using meter space during pandemic.

 

The province of Nova Scotia has come up with the slogan “Exercise, don’t socialize” to describe the new behaviour required of people in public. During the Covid-19 crisis everyone is being asked to practice physical distancing, staying  two meters or six feet away from people when outside your home.

But as anyone that has tried to walk or roll  with the required physical distancing of two meters will know, the sidewalks in Vancouver are just not wide enough. The standard for new sidewalks varies from 1.2 meters wide to 1.8 meters wide and does not offer enough space for two people to pass each other safely with  the Covid-19 required distance.

Walking is good for  you to maintain physical and mental health, and is encouraged by Dr. Bonnie Henry, the Province’s Medical Health Officer in this video clip by Emad Agahi with  CTV News.

The Globe and Mail’s Oliver Moore has written that both Toronto and Vancouver are examining ways to make some parts of the street network  closed to vehicular movement to allow pedestrians to spill out into some streets for recreation and to maintain the required physical distancing.

The thinking behind walking on connected streets has already been done in Vancouver where 25 years ago the Urban Landscape Taskforce composed of interested citizens, several who were landscape architects, came up with the ambitious Greenways Plan.

I have previously written about this extraordinary plan that came from the work of these citizens. What they termed “greenways” are actually a network of “green streets” that link traffic calmed ability accessible streets with good amenities to schools, parks, shops and services. There are 140 kilometers of greenways, with a network of fourteen city greenways that go boundary to boundary in Vancouver. The pattern language was derived from the Seawall and the Seaside Greenway route which provides Vancouverites with routes near water and forms one quarter of the whole network.

The original intent was to have a city greenway go through each neighbourhood and be a 25 minute walk or a ten minute bike ride from every residence.

The Greenway network plan was quietly backburnered  during Vision’s political reign at city hall in favour of bike routes.  But these traffic calmed routes that have sidewalks, connections to parks with restrooms, curb drops on corners to facilitate accessibility , wayfinding and public art still exist. You may have walked or biked down Ontario Street or 37th Avenue (the Ridgeway Greenway from Pacific Spirit Park to Central Park in Burnaby)  which form two of the routes. Downtown, Carrall Street is also a greenway.

These streets lend themselves well to closure for all but local traffic and emergency vehicles. That was the intent when they were first conceived, that they could be closed for pedestrian and biking use. And as the city develops, these streets may be permanently closed in the future,  forming new linear parks in a densifying city fifty years in the future.

The folks at the Vancouver Public Space Network have also recommended greenways as publicways closed to traffic during Covid-19, and have some of their own recommendations as well.

New York City’s Mayor de Blasio  has announced a plan to close two streets to traffic in each of the city’s neighbourhoods which Streetsblog calls “completely underwhelming”. There’s no indication if the City is thinking of a short street or a grand gesture like closing Broadway.

The lack of information suggests that there’s not been much thought put into the creation of a connected street network for sidewalk users that now need more space, not only to exercise, but be able to get somewhere while maintaining the ever crucial physical distancing.

Images: radiocms, businessday.ng, sightlines

 

 

 

Current CoVid-19 deaths for North America West Coast jurisdictions to [EDIT] April 9th per the nCoVid2019 Dashboard, and projected most likely (95% confidence intervals: +/- 50%) total deaths to the end of this wave of the pandemic for each jurisdiction per U of Washington IHME projections as at [EDIT] April 7th. Interpolations of this data for Canadian jurisdictions are mine. Click on image for larger version.  Download the latest version of this Excel chart and data. (I plan to keep it current until at least June 1.)

Caveat 1: I am not an expert in this subject, and these are only my wild informed guesses, subject to drastic future change and possibly great retroactive embarrassment. But I thought I’d try to summarize how it looks to me at this pivotal point, based on my experience and research.

Caveat 2: The above IHME projections are much more optimistic than just a week ago (1/3 fewer projected total deaths). But this assumes no further waves and no slackening of social distancing until either (1) resources exist to do exhaustive ongoing testing, or (2) an effective vaccine is fully implemented. In my opinion (and that of other models) this is an extremely optimistic assumption, and death rates 3-10x this level over the next two years are more likely. It is also likely that actual deaths have been and will be much higher than official reports due to inadequate testing and inconsistent certifications and data collection processes. 

The most important things to keep in mind right now IMO:

CoVid-19 deaths in North America are going to skyrocket by an order of magnitude over the first two weeks of April. That doesn’t mean the disease is out of control; in fact the rate of infection and death is already starting to decelerate and will likely continue to do so per the charts above. While high and tragic, the projected death rates are astonishingly low for such a pandemic. This is due to (a) relatively rapid implementation of social distancing (“flattening the curve”), which has likely reduces death rates by a factor of 10-20x, [here’s why: thanks to Tree Bressen for the link]; (b) learning from the Chinese early hospitalizations about timing of use of invasive ventilators in serious cases, which may well halve the death rate here; and (c) our good luck — this strain seems to have a relatively short and fragile life before it dies unless it finds new hosts, and a relatively low morbidity rate. If the American president relaxes social distancing, isolation and travel restrictions before the summer, all bets are off: Death rates more than an order of magnitude higher could then be entirely possible unless saner governance is put in place. (Same is true for other dangerous populist national leaders.) There may well be more waves of this virus, perhaps with wildly different human vulnerability profiles and morbidity rates. The first wave of a pandemic is not always the worst.

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LEARNING FROM PAST PANDEMICS

When I worked 12 years ago with the Ministry of Health with a special group hired to learn the lessons of SARS so there would be no repetition of the mistakes made then, we studied the epidemiology not only of SARS (CoV-1) but of various bird flus (H5N1, H7N9), swine flus (H1N1), and the 1918 pandemic (“Spanish flu”, also an H1N1). 

What was so remarkable about this work is that most of what we would ideally like to know/learn about these diseases we could not learn, for a number of reasons — mostly about how incredibly little we really understand viruses and how they proliferate, but also because the history is still unclear. You would think, for example, that by now we would know where the 1918 pandemic arose, but we remain utterly clueless, with at least 3 major theories, all of them somewhat suspect.        

We also can’t yet agree on how many died from the 1918 virus, with estimates varying by more than an order of magnitude. 

Nevertheless, there is much to learn from that pandemic, and I’d commend this New Yorker video to you — an interview with John Barry, a writer who’s spent much of his life studying it.

 Some things that we did learn, that now seem to have become lost in the shuffle:

1. Flu pandemics come in waves. The severest wave in 1918 was the second, not the first. And it wasn’t (so much) because people got complacent and eased restrictions when the first wave abated; it was because viruses can mutate incredibly quickly, and the second wave arose from a much, much more virulent strain.
2. Unlike most flu viruses, including the first 1918 wave virus, the second wave 1918 mutation struck almost entirely young people. It did this by inciting what is called a cytokine storm in the bodies of its victims. It wasn’t the virus or any side effects of the virus (like pneumonia) that killed the second wave victims, it was the victims’ own immune systems. So those with autoimmune disorders (hyperactive immune systems) were devastated, while those with suppressed immune systems were almost entirely spared (fewer than 1% of second wave victims were over 65). 
3. There were several waves of the 1918 virus after the second one, but a peculiar paradox made them much milder: The second mutation essentially ran short of available hosts, and had to mutate to survive. The second mutation was simply too potent for its own good, and essentially eradicated itself by mutating into a much milder form. 

MODELS OF WHAT TO DO NEXT TIME

The economic impact of this virus, due to our unpreparedness for it, will be staggering. There is a significant risk of a long and deep economic depression (more on that in a future article). But this didn’t have to be.

Some jurisdictions have been largely spared both the health and economic costs of this virus, notably Taiwan. Lessons from their experience and preparedness:

1. A process must be in place to enable rapid and repeat testing of every citizen, to quickly isolate the disease. The cost of being ready with swabs, masks, sanitizers, protective shields and test equipment pales in comparison with nationwide economic shutdowns, and such shutdowns are needed only because we have no idea who has the virus now. It is very likely that actual positive cases (if we had the tools to test for them) would be about an order of magnitude (10x) the current “official” figures, which have resulted from testing only those who already exhibit strong symptoms.
2. In Taiwan, spreading fake news, hoarding, price-gouging and other actions that exploit and inflame the situation are indictable offences and considered shameful, not shrewd, behaviours. There, businesses and schools and restaurants are re-opened and life is nearly normal, and there’s been very little effect on the national economy.
3. The town of Vo, in Italy, had the luxury of having the equipment and political will to test and retest every one of its 3,300 residents and isolate those who tested positive, even if asymptomatic. Their experience is a model for every community in the world to follow, if we’re willing to learn from it.

PREVENTING PANDEMICS IN THE FIRST PLACE

While the above models can dramatically mitigate the impact of pandemics when they first occur, it would be even better if we were to prevent them happening in the first place. When Dr Michael Gregor was working in epidemiology a decade ago, he published his findings on the history of human pandemics and their causes. He revealed that virus transmission to humans only became possible with the domestication of animals 10,000 years ago, and all known human viral infections (poxes etc) have their origin in domesticated animals or the consumption of bushmeat — without it there is no way for viruses to move from their endemic animal hosts to humans who have no immunity to them (hence leading to pandemics).

Two centuries ago pandemics became more prevalent again, commensurate with the intensification of “industrial” agriculture. Then with the development of vaccines, infectious diseases were almost eradicated from the planet by the 1970s, causing some health leaders to predict that such diseases would never again cause pandemics. 

But then suddenly there was a third huge upswing in novel infectious diseases, starting just 30 years ago.  This corresponded with the order-of-magnitude increase in CAFEs (factory farming) of both domesticated and “exotic” birds and mammals for human food. Pangolins may the source of SARS CoV-2 (the current coronavirus that is expressed as CoVid-19). 

There is nervous laughter around the room when Michael says, at the end of the 2009 presentation linked above, that “we could well face a situation in the near future where every American might have to shelter in place for as much as three months to prevent spread of a global lethal pandemic”. 

It is to be hoped that, along with all the other learnings from this current horrible outbreak, we take to heart that only by completely ending the three sources of the recent upsurge in pandemic risks — (1) disturbance of the last wild places on the planet that harbour viruses for which there is no natural human immunity, (2) the bushmeat trade including domestication of “exotic” species for food, and (3) factory farming — will there be any chance that situations like that we are currently facing will not become increasingly frequent and dangerous.

But I would be surprised if there’s even an acknowledgement of this cause, outside an increasingly censored and silenced scientific and medical community.

MORE INFO

• The charts at the top of this post came from IHME projections, and the underlying data is available here if you want to make your own or track the accuracy of them. They’re especially useful if you’re in a state that will likely face severe hospital bed, ICU or ventilator shortages and hence excess preventable deaths: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, Vermont and Massachusetts.
• The IHME used in its modelling information on other countries’ death rates after the number of deaths and infections reached a certain base level (“trajectories”). Our World in Data is maintaining excellent charts on trajectories. So is John Burn-Murdoch for the UK Financial Times.
• The data suggest that the mortality rate, on average, is converging on a rate of 1% of those infected. But the number of people testing positive (due to drastically limited testing stemming from unavailability of test kits and testing resources) is wildly underestimated (the actual number of those who would be testing positive if everyone had been tested is likely 8-20x the reported numbers). That means, if the projections pan out, that only 1.5-2.5% of North Americans would actually test positive at some point during the current wave, if the test were available. Without social distancing, it was estimated that 25-50% of the population would eventually contract the disease. This is the power of social distancing: It is almost certainly saving tens of millions of lives worldwide. It is these tens of millions of lives saved that we must weigh against the horrific economic cost of this pandemic, which is only beginning to emerge.

WHAT TO DO NOW

• Depends on your situation, of course. If you’re needed in the food, health care and other essential fields, thank you for continuing to do what you do. If you have things you can give away safely to people who would benefit from them, of course please do so. If you’re in financial peril as a result of the economic shutdown, the resources available to help differ in each jurisdiction.
• [Edit: Added Mar 30] If you can, please get involved in the various “mutual aid networks” that have sprung up since the pandemic started. Here’s a summary of how they work. Here’s a US directory. Here’s a global directory. Most communities have something like this going for peer-to-peer support, as governments are often overwhelmed, too distant, underprepared or in some cases in denial. [Thanks to Kevin Jones for reminding me about this.]
• If you’re like most of us, the next few weeks especially will bring a lot of anxiety, and feelings of anger, being trapped, feeling shameful etc. These are all manifestations of grief (thanks to Maureen Nicholson for the link). There are many online resources on coping psychologically with this. Here’s one (thanks to John Graham for the link) that I find useful.
• Keep up the pressure to sustain social distancing on your government, if it’s dragging its heels or proposing to relax the rules. Here are the worst offenders globally. Likewise if your peers are flaunting the rules (the link above also has a tab on citizen behaviours, which largely parallels their governments’). Millions of lives are at stake.
• Limit your time on useless social media and other media that are mostly or entirely unsupported opinion, useless information and misinformation. If it’s not actionable, and doesn’t give you any sense of comfort that you’re doing the right things by being overcautious, and that it’s going to be OK, then there’s really no benefit in reading it.

And for the vast majority of us, it is going to be OK.

Next articles here will be on the economic fallout, which is likely to be longer and deeper than the health impact, but was overdue to happen anyway, and on why this horrible event may be a useful wake-up call that might get us started addressing some of the more profound and permanent challenges ahead.

Stay safe, everyone.

mkalus shared this story from internetofshit on Twitter.

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mkalus shared this story .

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[This is the third of four posts. The last of those, Zoom’s new privacy policy, visits the company’s positive response to input such as mine here. So you might want to start with that post (because it’s the latest) and look at the other three, including this one, after that.]

I really don’t want to bust Zoom. No tech company on Earth is doing more to keep civilization working at a time when it could so easily fall apart. Zoom does that by providing an exceptionally solid, reliable, friendly, flexible, useful (and even fun!) way for people to be present with each other, regardless of distance. No wonder Zoom is now to conferencing what Google is to search. Meaning: it’s a verb. Case in point: between the last sentence and this one, a friend here in town sent me an email that began with this:

That’s a screen shot.

But Zoom also has problems, and I’ve spent two posts, so far, busting them for one of those problems: their apparent lack of commitment to personal privacy:

1. Zoom needs to cleanup its privacy act
2. More on Zoom and privacy

With this third post, I’d like to turn that around.

I’ll start with the email I got yesterday from a person at a company engaged by Zoom for (seems to me) reputation management, asking me to update my posts based on the “facts” (his word) in this statement:

Zoom takes its users’ privacy extremely seriously, and does not mine user data or sell user data of any kind to anyone. Like most software companies, we use third-party advertising service providers (like Google) for marketing purposes: to deliver tailored ads to our users about Zoom products the users may find interesting. (For example, if you visit our website, later on, depending on your cookie preferences, you may see an ad from Zoom reminding you of all the amazing features that Zoom has to offer). However, this only pertains to your activity on our Zoom.us website. The Zoom services do not contain advertising cookies. No data regarding user activity on the Zoom platform – including video, audio and chat content – is ever used for advertising purposes. If you do not want to receive targeted ads about Zoom, simply click the “Cookie Preferences” link at the bottom of any page on the zoom.us site and adjust the slider to ‘Required Cookies.’

I don’t think this squares with what Zoom says in the “Does Zoom sell Personal Data?” section of its privacy policy (which I unpacked in my first post, and that Forbes, Consumer Reports and others have also flagged as problematic)—or with the choices provided in Zoom’s cookie settings, which list 70 (by my count) third parties whose involvement you can opt into or out of (by a set of options I unpacked in my second post). The logos in the image above are just 16 of those 70 parties, some of which include more than one domain.

Also, if all the ads shown to users are just “about Zoom,” why are those other companies in the picture at all? Specifically, under “About Cookies on This Site,” the slider is defaulted to allow all “functional cookies” and “advertising cookies,” the latter of which are “used by advertising companies to serve ads that are relevant to your interests.” Wouldn’t Zoom be in a better position to know your relevant (to Zoom) interests, than all those other companies?

More questions:

1. Are those third parties “processors” under GDPR, or “service providers by the CCPAs definition? (I’m not an authority on either, so I’m asking.)
2. How do these third parties know what your interests are? (Presumably by tracking you, or by learning from others who do. But it would help to know more.)
3. What data about you do those companies give to Zoom (or to each other, somehow) after you’ve been exposed to them on the Zoom site?
4. What targeting intelligence do those companies bring with them to Zoom’s pages because you’re already carrying cookies from those companies, and those cookies can alert those companies (or others, for example through real time bidding auctions) to your presence on the Zoom site?
5. If all Zoom wants to do is promote Zoom products to Zoom users (as that statement says), why bring in any of those companies?

Here is what I think is going on (and I welcome corrections): Because Zoom wants to comply with GDPR and CCPA, they’ve hired TrustArc to put that opt-out cookie gauntlet in front of users. They could just as easily have used Quantcast‘s system, or consentmanager‘s, or OneTrust‘s, or somebody else’s.

All those services are designed to give companies a way to obey the letter of privacy laws while violating their spirit. That spirit says stop tracking people unless they ask you to, consciously and deliberately. In other words, opting in, rather than opting out. Every time you click “Accept” to one of those cookie notices, you’ve just lost one more battle in a losing war for your privacy online.

I also assume that Zoom’s deal with TrustArc—and, by implication, all those 70 other parties listed in the cookie gauntlet—also requires that Zoom put a bunch of weasel-y jive in their privacy policy. Which looks suspicious as hell, because it is.

Zoom can fix all of this easily by just stopping it. Other companies—ones that depend on adtech (tracking-based advertising)—don’t have that luxury. But Zoom does.

If we take Zoom at its word (in that paragraph they sent me), they aren’t interested in being part of the adtech fecosystem. They just want help in aiming promotional ads for their own services, on their own site.

Three things about that:

1. Neither the Zoom site, nor the possible uses of it, are so complicated that they need aiming help from those third parties.
2. Zoom is the world’s leading sellers’ market right now, meaning they hardly need to advertise at all.
3. Being in adtech’s fecosystem raises huge fears about what Zoom and those third parties might be doing where people actually use Zoom most of the time: in its app. Again, Consumer Reports, Forbes and others have assumed, as have I, that the company’s embrasure of adtech in its privacy policy means that the same privacy exposures exist in the app (where they are also easier to hide).

By severing its ties with adtech, Zoom can start restoring people’s faith in its commitment to personal privacy.

There’s a helpful model for this: Apple’s privacy policy. Zoom is in a position to have a policy like that one because, like Apple, Zoom doesn’t need to be in the advertising business. In fact, Zoom could follow Apple’s footprints out of the ad business.

And then Zoom could do Apple one better, by participating in work going on already to put people in charge of their own privacy online, at scale. In my last post. I named two organizations doing that work. Four more are the Me2B Alliance, Kantara, ProjectVRM, and MyData.

I’d be glad to help with that too. If anyone at zoom is interested, contact me directly this time. Thanks.

 

 

 

I’ve been using my most recent side project, a cocktail browser called Old Fashioned, as an opportunity to learn some new technology. Every component – the frontend, backend, and server – let me explore something new. This post is about the backend, which I created with Dark.

Dark describes itself as a holistic programming language, editor, and infrastructure that’s trying to simplify the construction of backends. It pulls together a lot of futuristic concepts that I will summarize in my experience, but the overall goal is that Dark should feel like a new and properly better way to do backend programming.

This is a view that I’m sympathetic to: in my opinion, the software stack for backend development has stagnated in the last decade or more. The code that we write in Rust or Go is doing the same sorts of things as the code we wrote in Node.js, as the code in Ruby as in PHP. The same basic abstractions – how servers relate to databases, instrumentation, deployment – have stayed mostly fixed. The major deployment advance, Docker, is fundamentally regressive in my opinion. And many of the changes in server technology, like the movement to clouds, has moved complexity around but not truly reduced it. So I’m hungry for a change.

So let’s dive into Dark.

That’s the source code for Old Fashioned – all of it, including the database configuration. Granted, the backend of Old Fashioned doesn’t have much responsibility: it provides passwordless login and storage of which ingredients you have in your liquor cabinet. But I started on enough other approaches to be confident that this one is simpler and better than the rest: everything else required database configuration, setting up schemas, migrations, and convoluted local development environments.

Here are some of the main parts of the ‘Dark development experience’ as I experienced them. Your mileage may vary: I, for one, was already fairly prepared for the language itself because of its similarities to Elm and might be more sensitive than most to development environment quirks.

Trace-driven development

This idea, and its implementation in Dark, is incredible. When you make a request against some endpoint of your project, Dark records that request and then lets you re-run the code in that endpoint, as you type, against that last request. And you can look at previous requests, re-run them against your code and see the response content and the values in the code as it runs. You can check out their documentation for more information.

Trace-driven development is a hit. It’s remarkable because it’s useful for the earliest stages of development and also for development and debugging. The implementation must require close cooperation between the server tracing infrastructure and the editor, and Dark has nailed it. Developing the logging-in functionality and the API was so much easier when I could see all of the requests flowing in and retry certain parts.

This part of the product is a massive leap forward. It ‘just works’ and is so helpful that it’ll make development in any other environment feel like you’re “flying blind” without the rich information that live traces grant you.

The language

Dark is written in OCaml and has its own language, which looks a lot like OCaml or Elm. I’m not an expert in functional programming languages, but this family of languages has been much more helpful than Haskell, the language that a lot of people think of when they think of ‘functional programming’, and, I suspect, the reason why a lot of people are turned off by the culture.

There are a few places where the language is significantly different than Elm.

Polymorphism

First, it has an ‘Any’ type, so you can use a generic toString method with any sort of value and the same with equality and other methods. Elm, famously, does not support ‘higher-kinded type polymorphism’, so if you want to map a Set in Elm you use Set.map and if you want to map a List, you use List.map. This limitation of Elm which angers functional programmers has never annoyed me at all, but having generic methods is a nice perk.

Errors

Next, the Dark language hides the two side-effect categories by default: asynchrony and errors. Dark has this idea of railway-oriented programming: each let statement can fail, and if it fails, the statement yields None and the HTTP handler returns some error status. Similarly, calls to a database are probably asynchronous, but you aren’t exposed to that detail at all.

Live evaluation

A really neat detail of the language is that Dark knows which methods have side effects, and this works with the editor to do live evaluation extraordinarily well. I’ve been on the implementing side of live evaluation a few times - with mistakes and then, years later, at Observable. The essence of the biggest live-evaluation quandary is this:

1. If you’re coding arithmetic or some algorithm, it’s awesome to see values and results live-update
2. If you’re interacting with some API, database, or long-running process, you really do not want to see values live-update because that means you’re hammering the external resource and potentially modifying data

This is a tough problem! Functional languages like Elm have a neat way to differentiating functions that mutate data or talk to the outside world, but most other languages don’t.

Dark knows which methods affect the outside world, puts a play or replay button next to them, and disables as-you-type live evaluation if you use one of them. For example, here I use an HttpClient method. If Dark didn’t know that it was special, then it would try to re-run that request every keystroke, both making the live evaluation results slow and blowing through any kind of rate limit on the external service.

Documentation

My biggest gripe with the language is the reference documentation. There’s pretty good narrative documentation for concepts like Trace-driven development, but the function reference documentation is, in short, dismal. It’s not just terse - it leaves out information like infix notation: it documents the method for combining strings as ++, which you can use as Str ++ Str, and does not differentiate it from methods that use prefix notation, like DB::count 10. It also doesn’t differentiate methods that Dark knows produce side-effects, so, as in the section above, will change live-evaluation results. Also, Dark has special formatting for versioned functions (as you can see in the screenshot above, where HttpClient::get has a gray v4 after it), but the documentation shows the raw names.

It’s the part that reminds me the most of Haskell culture, where even wildly popular modules have documentation consisting of one sentence and a type signature per method. The current reference docs are obviously low-effort and an unfortunately neglected essential part of making this language accessible. Luckily – as far as I can tell – improving them is feasible and would be well worth the effort.

The editor

The final bit of Dark uniqueness that I’ll cover is the structured editor. See the section on structured editing for an overview. When you write code in Dark, your code will often look something like this:

The Dark editor isn’t a text editing component like CodeMirror, which is what practically all online editors use. Instead, it’s structured. You generally don’t type much of the program flow - you’ll type if and Dark will create an if/else statement for you and give you blanks to fill in. This way, it’s nearly impossible to create a syntax error, and your changes to the Dark program are represented in some system that’s more efficient than chunks of text. The ‘blanks’ that Dark generates also have really nice hints for what they should contain: if you type a +, it’ll hint that you need numbers on its left and right.

It’s important to emphasize how different this is from text editing. There are systems like Emmet or snippets that are commonplace and look similar in the writing phase. But those are trying to solve the non-issue of typing. Once the snippet is generated, it’s just text in an editor that you can edit character by character.

Structured editing is completely different: if you have an if/else clause, there’s no way you’re going to be able to delete the e on the keyword ‘else’ and get a non-compiling els unknown keyword. It’s made impossible by the system.

There are other systems for structured editing like Hazel and a lot of enthusiasm around them. I think there’s some potential there - and having taught a programming class, I gained a real appreciation for how hard punctuation is for people starting programming. I was excited when Isomorf was introduced and dreamt about something similar for JavaScript. Future-of-coding folks also tend to complain about how we’re still writing code as plain text, using the great abilities of our computers as if they’re typewriters. We should be doing more with their ability to handle structured or graphical content.

For now, I disagree.

Conventional text editing is probably a local maximum. Technology for typing letters into an unstructured text box has been tuned for decades: vim, VS Code, Microsoft Word, iA Writer, and so many more. Technology for processing unstructured text, like diff, git, and compilers. It all might belong to the old ways, but the problems around text editing are either solved or thoroughly understood.

There might be a structured editor which is a strictly better experience than this status quo, but I’m not sure it exists yet.

There are a few cases where the Dark structured editing feels right, like when you’re writing code and it helpfully creates blanks for the right number of function arguments. That’s cool, and much nicer than any other editor’s inline help. Similarly, the structured editor takes care of indentation and formatting. We can get something similar in other languages using Prettier and other formatters, but prettier-as-you-type is impossible.

But there are many other cases where it’s frustrating.

In this example, I have invalid code: to concatenate strings, I need to use ++ instead of +. But if I put the cursor before the +, typing has no effect: the cursor needs to be after it. In a conventional text editor, the two are equivalent.

Here I’m trying to delete a line of code. The first try works. If I try again, it deletes some of the lines right before. Then it deletes from the end of the line. I think that there’s an internal representation of cursor state, but unfortunately the browser’s selection UI doesn’t match it.

Here I’ve added two numbers and I want to subtract them instead. I delete the +, thinking I’ll replace it with a -. But because (as far as I can tell) functions cannot be ‘holes’ in the structured model, the numbers are concatenated, and because 1-2 is invalid code, I can’t type a - to subtract the numbers.

Here I’m going to append two strings, but I neglect to press Enter to accept the ++ suggestion. I’ve typed the ++, but accepting the suggestion isn’t the same as it is in an unstructured editor: it’s not a command to add the code, it’s a command to add the structure. So now I’m in a broken state where I have ++" and can’t type.

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My frustration with the editor was outweighed by the good ideas in Dark, and how productive I was able to become with very little time to ramp up. The innovations in Dark – or the innovative user-friendly implementation of ideas that were previously relegated to research languages – feel like a real vision of the future. They work together in a beautiful way that makes the approaches to evaluation, tracing, programming, and workflow even stronger.

I think that the issues with reference documentation are solvable. The structured editor was the most frustrating part for me, and unfortunately building editors is very hard and time-intensive. How much the structured editor plays into the product is something hidden behind the scenes. It might be essential for Dark’s incredible 50-millisecond deploys. The structured code might be stored as a tree with diffs that gives them awesome efficiency gains. But for the developer experience, structured editing takes away a lot of the predictable and invaluable attributes of programming and, at this stage of development, gives little in return.

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Dark is in private beta but they’re accepting signups, and are very responsive and helpful - big thanks to Ellen for answering questions as I worked on this project. What they’re doing is inspiring and radical.