Rolandt

Apple’s path to a home-brewed mapping solution has been long and perilous, but it’s almost arrived.

12 years ago the iPhone launched with Google powering its pre-installed navigation software; five years later, the botched debut of Apple’s own Maps app led to the firing of a key Apple executive; Apple Maps has steadily improved over the years, but seemingly its biggest weakness is that it has never truly contained Apple’s own maps. The app is Apple’s, but the maps have always come from other sources.

Last year, Apple announced a coming change that had been years in the works: Maps would soon contain the company’s own maps, and they would be transformative. The new maps started rolling out in the US last fall with iOS 12, and Apple claims they’ll cover the entire US by the end of 2019.

Timed with the spread of its first-party mapping data, Apple is giving the Maps app a big upgrade in iOS 13 that represents the company’s biggest push yet to overtake Google Maps as the world’s most trusted, go-to mapping service. Apple Maps in iOS 13 represents – if you’re in the US at least – Apple’s purest vision to date for a modern mapping service. Here’s everything that it brings.

Look Around

The hallmark feature of iOS 13’s Maps is Look Around, which serves as a direct competitor to Google’s popular Street View. It enables viewing and moving through a 3D representation of the world from the perspective of a car on the road. Google launched Street View over 12 years ago, so Apple is laughingly late to the game with Look Around, but it aims to atone for its delay by offering a more modern, elegant experience than Google.

Where available, Look Around is engaged by tapping the binoculars icon in the top-right corner of the screen. This loads a sizable thumbnail view of the location you’ve selected, which can be expanded to full-screen with a tap.

With Look Around activated, you can move around the map in a few different ways. If you tap and drag on the map view, not the Look Around preview itself, your touch essentially picks up the binoculars icon on the map, which you can navigate around by moving your finger’s position; every time you pick up and release the binoculars, a nice touch of haptic feedback triggers. The binoculars icon on the map represents a car driving on the road, so if you drop it in, say, a field, it will automatically move itself to the nearest road and display the appropriate Look Around preview there. Also, whenever the binoculars are set in place, they emit a beam of light from their front side representing the current field of vision – a clever parallel to a car’s headlights.

In addition to direct map-based interactions, you can adjust your Look Around view by tapping and panning around inside the Look Around preview, too; you’ll see the binoculars icon on the map follow your motion inside Look Around. Beyond simply scanning your surroundings, though, you can also move locations inside Look Around by tapping anywhere in view. Whichever spot you tap, you’ll immediately start moving toward. The smoothness with which this gesture operates is one area Look Around truly shines.

Unlike the stuttery, distorted experience that Street View provides, as you move through Look Around it feels just like driving in an actual car, including high-quality views of the world around you. The difference is undeniable.

The video above demonstrates how the car-like experience of Look Around isn’t limited to just speeding down the road, it also applies when navigating to specific points of interest. Tapping ‘See’s Candies,’ a business in Saratoga, California, not only moves your view to that location, but the camera even pans from the road to your destination just as you arrive. Here’s another example, demonstrating Look Around navigating into a McDonald’s parking lot.

When viewing Look Around in full-screen, Maps’ modular panel includes the address you’re viewing, with share and issue reporting buttons as usual, but it also contains options to hide or show Labels, and my personal favorite touch: a date informing you of exactly when the imagery you’re seeing was last updated. When exploring a new place via your device ahead of a potential visit there, it can be extremely helpful to know how current the imagery is.

I’ve loved exploring the world with Look Around, it’s a monumental addition to Apple Maps. Unfortunately, it is also the one feature of Maps’ iOS 13 update that requires Apple’s first-party maps, thus making it exclusive to select areas where the new maps are available. Anyone can still try out the new feature, however, by browsing certain locations in the US; Look Around will be available in select US cities in 2019, with a broader rollout over time.

Redesigned Navigation Panel

Outside of Look Around, some of the biggest changes in the new Maps app reside in an improved navigation panel. Favorites have been revamped and made more accessible, while a new Collections feature makes it easy to save groups of locations for revisiting later.

Favorites

In previous versions of Maps, locations you marked as favorites stood out more on the map, accompanied by a small heart icon, but access to your full favorites list was often buried in the navigation panel, typically at the bottom of the panel or hidden within a submenu. It seemed an odd UI decision for places you’ve designated important to hold one of the least prominent spots in the panel. In iOS 13, that issue has been rectified and favorites now live where they belong: in a row near the panel’s very top.

Whereas favorites used to be a catch-all feature for saving any location you might want to remember for later, now it’s primarily focused on offering quick navigation to places you visit regularly. For this reason, there are Home and Work favorites built in by default, so directions to those two key locations are but a tap away. You can technically still mark any location a favorite, but the primary UI for viewing favorites – a single horizontal-scrolling row – encourages being selective with your choices. If you navigate to a location regularly, that makes it a perfect candidate for favoriting.

You can add a new favorite, similarly to before, by viewing a location’s detail screen and hitting the ‘Add to Favorites’ button, which is near the bottom. Alternately, there’s also an ‘Add’ button located right inside the favorites row on the navigation panel’s top level; tap it, and you’ll see Siri Suggestions for places you may want to favorite, and the option to search for a place, then hit the + button next to the appropriate search result.

One compelling new feature of favorites is called Share ETA. With every favorite you save, you can configure automatic ETA sharing that will kick off whenever you start driving or walking navigation to that favorite. So for example, if you set up ETA sharing for home with your partner, they’ll receive a notification every time you navigate there. This notification includes your current ETA, and the recipient can open it to see your current location, the route you’ll be taking, and a live-updating ETA inside of Maps. You can automatically share your ETA with multiple people per favorited location, though only iOS 13 users will receive the full notification and Maps app experience; non-iOS 13 users will instead receive a text containing your ETA. Automatic ETA sharing is configured by tapping ‘See All’ above the favorites row, then hitting the ‘i’ button next to a favorite.

Lastly, I want to mention the visual features of the favorites row. Favorited locations are represented by an icon and color corresponding to their location type. Home and Work have house and briefcase icons in blue and brown, respectively, while restaurants will show a fork and knife on an orange background, bars a martini glass in purple, parks a tree in brown, and so on. Another important visual detail about favorites is that they each display your distance from them, or the time it would take to navigate to them. This further reinforces favorites’ design purpose: Apple intends that you use them for commonly visited locations. If you simply want to mark a spot to remember for later, that’s where collections shine.

Collections

Collections are groups of locations you can save for accessing later. Like favorites, they have the benefit of being displayed more prominently on the map, so they’re easy to spot at a glance, but they also offer a lot of flexibility you won’t find with favorites. A collection is ultimately just a list of locations, so it can serve any purpose you need it to. You can use collections to plan upcoming vacations, keeping track of all the places you want to visit on your trip; you can also have collections dedicated to intriguing coffee shops, prospective date night spots, or restaurants that have been recommended to you. Every collection can have a name and even custom photo set by you, so you can truly make it your own.

I moved to Manhattan last year, and while I previously used favorites as a way to identify different restaurants, parks, and shops to explore in the city, Maps offered no way to further organize those favorites, so I ended up saving those locations inside Apple Notes as well, where I could sort them into different categories. In iOS 13 though, there’s no need for an Apple Notes complement – I’ve been able to set up different collections for different parts of New York City, so the next time I’m in Brooklyn, Chelsea, or the Upper West Side, I can check the collections dedicated to those neighborhoods and find a variety of saved locations worth visiting. Also, because my wife and I love coffee shop dates, I have a dedicated Coffee collection housing different places we want to try in the future; all of these shops are saved in dedicated neighborhood collections too, but that’s the benefit of collections’ flexibility: sometimes I want to view locations by geographic area, and sometimes I simply want to browse places to get coffee – collections let me do both.

All location listings in the new Maps app feature an ‘Add to…’ button near the top, which you can tap to add that location to a new or existing collection; if a location already belongs to one or more collections, it will show that on its listing. You can also add locations to a collection by visiting the collection, hitting the + button in the bottom-right corner, and searching for locations from there.

More than a personal reference source, collections can also be shared in iOS 13. Tapping the share icon when viewing a collection, or swiping left on the collection listing and hitting ‘Share,’ creates an iCloud link that can be accessed by Apple and non-Apple users alike. On an Apple device it will open in the Maps app, where your list of assembled locations will display alongside a blue ‘Add to Collections’ button, enabling those you share with to save your collection with one tap. Non-Apple users will be directed to Maps’ web interface, where they can view the full collection but won’t be able to save it for themselves, since they don’t have an iCloud account. Whether you share with Apple users or not, though, in no case is a shared collection collaborative. When a collection is shared, it becomes static at that point, and any future changes you make won’t be shared with others, nor can those who have added the collection to their own accounts make modifications that are shared with you. It’s an unfortunate limitation, as fully collaborative collections would have been a powerful feature, but perhaps that’s an improvement for iOS 14.

Apple-Designed Maps

I won’t say much about the new Apple-built maps, and instead largely refer you to Matthew Panzarino’s exclusive feature story on the project and Justin O’Beirne’s in-depth comparison of the old and new maps for Northern California. These two articles, taken together, offer tremendous insight and detail regarding what’s new about Apple’s maps.

I haven’t been able to try out the new maps in my home of New York City, but after considerable time spent digitally traversing the US West Coast, here’s my one-sentence summary of Apple’s in-house maps: they feel far more like the real world than anything that’s come beforehand, beating out both Apple’s former maps and even Google’s.

Personally, I’ve always preferred the presentation of Apple’s maps to Google’s. I’ve found them easier on the eyes, simpler to equate with the world around me, and overall more pleasant to use. That is more true than ever with the new Apple-designed maps. There’s now more greenery, and visual detail for things like beaches, baseball fields, parking lots, and much more. All of this makes it easier to understand the context of your surroundings.

There’s certainly an argument that could be made for a simpler, stripped down map that prioritizes roads and business above all else, making it easier to see those elements to the neglect of a true-to-life view. Each person’s preferences may vary here. But for me, I love the path Apple’s on.

One of Apple’s promises for the new maps is that they’ll be more accurate. Again, I haven’t been able to test that claim, nor would my tests in one city of the world prove sufficient. However, whether that promise holds true or not, one change that’s certainly a net positive is Apple’s newfound ability to make data changes itself, without having to go through a third-party provider. Now when inaccuracies are reported, either by users or via the on-device probing systems Apple’s relying on, those problems can be addressed quickly and efficiently on the spot by Apple’s team.

What I’ve seen in California makes me extremely eager for the new Apple-generated maps to come to my home. The good news is that the end of 2019 will be here shortly; the bad news is that for everyone outside the US, the wait could prove painfully long.

All the Rest

Real-time transit. Transit data in Apple Maps is a whole lot better with iOS 13, because it is given in real time. Though it’s unclear if real-time transit will be limited to only certain areas, or if all existing transit-supported locations will have it, I’ve been using the beta version for nearly two months now in New York City, and it’s been great. When I initiate navigation somewhere, I can see exactly how long it will be before the next several trains or buses arrive. Viewing a particular train station in Maps shows the full list of uptown and downtown trains, their normal schedule, and when the next trains are due; tapping on a train shows its full route, all scheduled departures for the rest of the day, and the exact times each of those respective trains is scheduled to arrive at every station on its route. Real-time transit support has eliminated my need for any other transit-focused apps, as Apple Maps does everything I could want.

Flight status information. Maps now offers a few features related to air travel. Using Siri intelligence, the app can detect flight information from Mail, Wallet, and Calendar and display relevant data like departure times, terminal and gate locations, and even updates for flight delays and cancellations.

Natural guidance from Siri. Along with the more natural-speaking voice Siri’s gaining in iOS 13, Siri will use more natural, human-like vocabulary when giving directions for Maps. For example, rather than saying “In 500 feet turn right,” which a human would never say, Siri will instead say, “Turn right at the next traffic light.”

ETA sharing for non-favorites. Besides the automatic ETA sharing that’s available with favorites, Maps also enables sharing your ETA on a per-trip basis. Unfortunately the option is only available for Drive navigation, not walking, transit, or ride sharing. After you’ve started a Drive route, you’ll see a button in the bottom panel to share your ETA with others.

What’s Missing?

Many users, myself included, have depended on Apple Maps for years. But for long-time Google Maps devotees, who may be wondering if Apple has closed the gap enough in iOS 13 to merit a switch, the following list of Google features remain notably absent from Apple Maps.

Offline maps. Google enables offline downloading of maps for certain areas on-demand, and Apple doesn’t. Any offline caching Apple Maps may perform is entirely invisible to users.

Biking directions. Bicyclists still can’t even consider using Apple Maps, as the service shows no signs of adding support for biking directions. Hopefully the foundation of the new maps that are rolling out will enable that to change in the near future.

Timeline. Some consider Google Maps’ Timeline an invaluable history of where they’ve been, while for others it’s an eerie reminder of technology’s toll on privacy; the latter group of users will be unsurprised to find that the privacy-centric Apple Maps contains no such feature.

Popular Times. Google uses its extensive data to determine which times of day a location is busy or not. This feature, called ‘Popular Times,’ is absent from Apple Maps, which still relies on Yelp for business information.

AR mode. Though its rollout has been slow since first being announced at Google I/O 2018, an augmented reality mode is offered by Google Maps on certain devices for walking directions. We may not see a similar feature in Apple Maps until the company’s long-rumored AR glasses debut, though with Look Around and an increasingly powerful ARKit, the pieces are all there for Apple to do something special with AR.

Events. Google Maps can keep you informed of all the interesting goings-on in your area with its Events feature; Apple offers nothing similar.

---

Apple Maps in iOS 13 is the biggest step forward the app has ever taken. With new and greatly improved maps, Look Around, collections, repurposed favorites, and more, a tremendous level of progress has been made to elevate Maps to new heights. It’s now a more legitimate Google Maps alternative than ever before.

That said, due to the massive amount of work required to accurately map the entire world, the Apple Maps of iOS 13 is fragmented for different geographical areas. While the new Apple-designed maps have been promised for the entire US before 2019’s over, including Look Around in select cities, it’s unclear what availability will be this fall when iOS 13 first launches. And if you’re outside the US, it could be a long, slow road before you’ll enjoy these developments. Strip away Look Around and the new maps and what you’re left with in iOS 13 is an app that’s still markedly improved, but likely not enough to tempt you away from Google.

If building a map was as quick and relatively simple a process as adding features to Notes, Safari, or Files, Apple would no doubt have a better story to tell for iOS 13 users outside the US. Alas, some things take more time.

Whether you get the full new Maps experience, or you’re limited to just a few iOS 13 features like collections and ETA sharing, this remains a truly monumental release. Throughout its lifetime, Maps has been the recipient of small, iterative improvements over long stretches of time. Perhaps now that Apple owns the full stack of mapping data, it can start competing on its own terms and change the common perception that Apple Maps is second-class to Google.

---

Support MacStories Directly

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

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

Join Now

Lisa Hammershaimb, AACE Review, Jul 31, 2019

I think that these results would need to be validated empirically, but the results of this preliminary enquiry into how depression impacts the online learning experience are interesting. "The women in my study spoke about their appreciation for clear and simple design. Because of the cognitive impacts of depression and lack of energy, it is important that courses are designed with essential elements clearly identified with minimal redirection or navigation. Care should be taken to emphasize clarity and readability." So that seems right to me, and it would be interesting were it to be found that cognitive overload isn't the result of processing bottlenecks, as traditionally suggested, but the result of low energy and lack of focus.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A few months back, Mark Guzdial began to ponder a new research question:

I did some literature searches, and found a highly relevant paper: "Task specific programming languages as a first programming language." And the lead author is... me. I wrote this paper with Allison Elliott Tew and Mike McCracken, and published it in 1997. I honestly completely forgot that I had written this paper 22 years ago. Guzdial-past knew things that Guzdial-present does not.

I know this feeling too well. It seems that whenever I look back at an old blog post, especially from the early years, I am surprised to have already thought something, and usually to have thought it better and more deeply than I'm thinking it now! Perhaps this says something about the quality of my thinking now, or the quality of my blogging then. Or maybe it's simply an artifact of time and memory. In any case, stumbling across a link to an ancient blog entry often leads to a few moments of pleasure after an initial bit of disorientation.

On a related note, the fifteenth anniversary of my first blog post passed while I was at Dagstuhl earlier this month. For the first few years, I regularly wrote twelve to twenty posts a month. Then for a few years I settled into a pattern of ten to twelve monthly. Since early 2017, though, I've been in the single digits, with fewer substantial entries. I'm not giving Eugene-2025 much material to look back on.

With a new academic year soon upon us, I hope to write a bit more frequently and a bit more in depth about my programming, my teaching, and my encounters with computer science and the world. I think that will be good for me in many ways. Sometimes, knowing that I will write something encourages me to engage more deeply than I might otherwise. Nearly every time, the writing helps me to make better sense of the encounter. That's one way to make Eugene-Present a little smarter.

As always, I hope that whoever is still reading here finds it worth their time, too.

I still fondly remember how fast MORE felt when it first came out.

astray

the pond

I lied to

 

magpie chapter

you can tell whose ‘I’

is ripped

 

let it be

if a mollusk’s pulse

corresponds to a fugue

 

the word “seed”

lodged between

my incisors

 

Under the Basho ku, 2019

UtB-ku 2019 https://underthebasho.com/utb-2019/ku/2633-alegria-imperial.html

[Here’s the press release for my new album, which will also serve as a blog announcement, because hey, why write two different versions of the same thing? Ergo, Steve would like to apologise for egregious use of third person, if you’re not reading this with a view to cannibalising it for your review or the news page in your magazine ] 

The UK’s leading solo bass guitarist, Steve Lawson releases his 30th solo album, The Arctic Is Burning on Sept 2nd 2019. The album thematically picks up where 2018’s celebrated Beauty And Desolation left off, once again weaving a narrative relating to climate change around a set of improvised, unedited solo performances.

“It’d be tough to demonstrate in a concrete way how the theme and the music are linked, if someone was being cynical about the presence of a narrative,” explains Lawson, “but improv is always about something, even if you’re just responding to the things you’ve been recently practicing and how they sit in relation to other music that you consider meaningful. For some people, those ways of relating are technical or genre-specific, but for me the desire is – at least until the technical side falls apart – emotional. I want to make music that makes me feel the way the artists who move me make me feel.” He continues, “I want the brokenness of The Blue Nile or Talk Talk, the sense of place of Bill Frisell, the honesty of Joni Mitchell, the anger of Bruce Cockburn, the wilful naivety of The Minutemen, the pristine poetry of Jonatha Brooke, whose music is such a natural and flowing extension of whatever she’s singing about…”

Indeed, across the four tracks on The Arctic Is Burning, Lawson’s melodic turn is towards a slightly more straightforward rock-based language, in contrast to the some of the obtuse harmonic complexity of Beauty And Desolation. The album is not without it’s moments of dissonance and angularity but they tend to be crescendos to otherwise more pop-oriented melodic adventures, rather than the backbone of the entire track. “I’m not entirely sure how that happened – the subscriber-only album I released in the run-up to making Arctic… has plenty of the more angular freaky melodic stuff on it, as well as some very prominent field recordings that are entirely absent from this album. One of the joys of being ‘pan-idiomatic’ is that I have a dialectical relationship between the continuity of my own voice and the disparate range of genre signifiers I can drop in and out of.”

The role of the Bandcamp subscription is never far from Steve’s explanation of his music, frequently inspiring extended Twitter and Facebook commentary relating to the ongoing sustainability of making niche music.
“It’s SO obvious to me,” he says, “we just don’t have a streaming model that offers anything like sustainable economics to niche artists. It’s a world that doesn’t reward artists who form communities, just those who chase ubiquity. It’s great for people whose music-making aspirations are towards producing fodder for playlists or chasing pop stardom, but if your music practice has no path to a couple of hundred thousand listeners a month, forget being able to feed yourself with it. The Bandcamp subscription is absolutely the economic and social lifeblood of my music making world. The subscribers provide not only the financial resources to make the music, but an orientation – a direction in which to project musical ideas. The myths around creative freedom can end up with artists spouting all kinds of nonsense about just chasing our muse, but ultimately there’s a direction to what we do, whether that’s our peers, radio, our existing audience or the malcontents who post abusive comments on YouTube. For me, it’s been vital to cultivate a space where people who are materially and psychologically invested in what I’m up to get to encounter more of it than I could ever release to the wider public, and where we get to talk about it and go back and forth over its meaning without it clogging up more generic social media forums. The subscriber community is growing steadily and provides a level of continuity to my practice of documenting all the music I make. I get to release upwards of 8-10 albums a year because of them, plus extra video!”

Indeed, being that prolific, it can be a challenge to decide what to release to ‘muggles’ and what to keep just for subscribers, especially with some of Lawson’s own personal favourites still squirrelled away in the subscriber allocation – “My album from 2017 with Bryan Corbett is easily in my top 2 or 3 favourite musical things I’ve ever done, and I’m still waiting for the right time to put it out. I should just get on with it, cos it’s not like it’s suddenly going to be a hit whenever it happens, but I do like to leave a few months between each public release!”

2019 marks the 20th Anniversary of Lawson’s first ‘proper’ solo gig (“I’d played solo tunes in other settings before,” he explains, “but never a whole show to people who’d paid just to see me!”) – so 20 years on and 30 albums in, we get to experience all over again why he’s been one of the most talked about British bass experimenters for those two decades. The musician Bass Guitar Magazine described as ‘Britain’s most innovative bassist, no contest’ is still pushing boundaries, and exploring just how far the scope of live solo performance with nothing pre-recorded can be pushed. The Arctic Is Burning reaches new heights while still being instantly recognisable as a Steve Lawson record. Here’s to the next 20 years!

The Arctic Is Burning will be out on Sept 2nd 2019,
exclusively via Bandcamp at music.stevelawson.net

For interviews contact Steve directly.
For press photos click here.

Image Jason Snell/Six Colors

For the first time in seven years, iPhone revenue is less than 50% and Apple still had a strong quarter. The Wear/Home/Accessories category is growing like crazy (+68 %). That is a lot of Apple Watches, AirPods, and maybe HomePods. Mac, iPad and this category are roughly the same 5 Giga$ in a single quarter, and services a whopping 10.

Considering they are operating in a super-saturated market, the YoY results for this quarter are still remarkable, no matter what the naysayers are raging on about it being “below expectations”.

If you take the long view, yes, the iPhone isn’t selling as much (no smartphone is, in general, and especially not this time of year). And there are some lines doing (surprisingly) better than others. But demand has shifted, and it’s pretty obvious that Services is where growth needs to be.

I’m still skeptical that Apple gets services in general, though.

Ken Case, writing for The Omni Group:

In 2019, we think it’s time to retire our custom document browser in favor of using Apple’s built-in document browser—and with our iOS 13 updates this fall we’ll be doing just that. Instead of seeing our custom file browser, you’ll be presented with the standard iOS document browser—just like in Apple’s own iWork apps. Using Apple’s browser, you’ll be able to store and sync your documents using Apple’s built-in iCloud Drive, or third-party commercial options like Box—or even in cloud- or self-hosted collaborative git repositories using Working Copy.

Syncing through OmniPresence will still be an option, but it will no longer be the only integrated option. In fact, it might be the least privileged option: since OmniPresence isn’t its own separate app, it won’t be listed in the document browser’s sidebar where you find your other document storage solutions. Instead, it will present itself on iOS much like it does on Mac—as a folder of synced documents. We’re not trying to drive people away from using OmniPresence—but in 2019 we don’t think it makes sense to push people towards it either. OmniPresence is not a core part of our apps or business, and in 2019 there are lots of great alternatives. Seamless document syncing is essential to our apps—but exactly where and how those documents are synced is not!

This is an excellent change and one I hope more apps move toward. The document browser in iOS is essentially a special view of the Files app which is used as the root file management UI in document-based apps that adopt it. As Case points out, all of Apple’s iWork apps support the document browser, and several key third-party apps do too such as PDF Viewer, MindNode, and Pretext. The document browser not only enables users to store an app’s files in any file provider they wish, but its other primary benefit is offering a single unified file browsing experience for users on iOS. As more apps adopt the document browser, that unified experience becomes more a reality for iPad and iPhone users.

The timing of the Omni Group implementing the document browser is surely no surprise: this fall Apple’s Files app is being upgraded with support for external storage devices like USB drives, a new Column view, shared iCloud Drive folders, and more. By adopting the document browser in apps like OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle, the Omni Group gets the advantage of having all these new Files features built right into their apps.

→ Source: omnigroup.com

House of Marley just launched Liberate Air, an AirPods alternative that puts an emphasis on eco-consciousness.

Let’s start with the specifications first. The in-ear airbuds support the latest Bluetooth 5.0 protocol, which in this case gives them a wireless range of up to 10 metres. The earbuds also have tap-enabled surfaces to trigger basic playback and phone call controls. Additionally, there is an option to trigger Siri or Google Assistant.

They also come with IPX4-certified water and sweat resistance.

As for battery life, House of Marley quotes a nine-hour long playtime and 32 hours with the storage case that has a built-in 500mAh battery. With USB-C charging, the case can charge to full in two hours.

But according to Engadget, what sets Liberate Air apart from the pack is its choice of construction material. From the case to the earbuds, House of Marley opted for eco-friendly materials such as recyclable aluminum, bamboo, wood composite and more. Other than that, the company has a track record of planting trees and raising public awareness of environmental preservation.

Liberate Air is currently on sale in the U.S. for $149.99 USD.

Source: House of Marley Via: Engadget

The post House of Marley launches eco-friendly AirPods alternative in the U.S. appeared first on MobileSyrup.

mkalus shared this story from The Guardian.

---

Customizations can simultaneously make your community unique and costly.

Yet, every customization you add to a community website is also a liability.

It’s something you have to develop and maintain. If it extracts data, you have to worry about its security. If your platform vendor releases an update, your customizations can suddenly break (or find themselves unsupported).

Yet, customizations are also what can make a community unique.

Our work helping develop and design the BecomeAnEx community involved customizations. They weren’t easy but made the community unique and invaluable for members.

Some rules here.

• Only use customizations when it is an absolute, critical, deal-breaker for the success of your community. Bodybuilding.com, for example, has customizations which allow members to share their before/after photos. What is the one (or maybe two) completely game-changing customizations for your audience?

• Show precisely how it looks (literally, sketch out every screen). Before you begin developing anything you should have the idea fully formed and tested with the audience.

• Describe precisely how it works (write every action which takes place – even those behind the scenes). Where is the data entered, how does the event-tracking work, where does the data go, etc? What happens when members delete their profiles? Update their names? Or things change?

• Budget as much for maintenance as development. Treat customizations like mini nuclear reactors. Building them is one thing, but maintaining them in a state of constant updates/flux will cost equally as much. Assume they will take a lot more time and resources than you’re first quoted.

Customizations can help you stand out from the crowd, deliver value no other community can easily match, and ensure you’re supporting members with exactly what they need.

But be aware of the costs. Some companies find they have so many customizations to maintain it’s more effective to develop their own platform.

My last blog post here was back in March, at the beginning of a colossal few months of travel and work during which I was away from home and working in the Netherlands, Germany, northern Ontario, New York City, Vancouver Island, and several locations in Japan. In the course of my travels I was away from home for 64 days, had two major airline cancellations (one airline went bankrupt, one couldn’t get me home without massively creative re-routing). I probably doubled the number of foods I’ve tasted in my life, just from the 28 day trip to Japan alone, and I’ve come back to find myself taking stock of where I am these days.

Summer is good for that.

In reflecting on my work offerings these days, I find myself doing these kinds of things:

• Helping organizations and communities by facilitating large scale meetings and participatory processes to understand and act in complexity. I do this through meeting design and facilitation. That’s the bread and butter.
• Using technology to support strategic work in complexity. This year I’m working with both Sensemaker and NarraFirma in different projects to help groups collect, analyse, and act from stories. I love this work and it has taken me into the realm of deep developmental evaluation. The software is helping us to be able to generate deeply informed strategic insights with our clients and to create innovative ways to address stuck problems. It’s amazing and powerful participatory research and support for strategy.
• To that end, I have been also been working closely with evaluators in some interesting emerging community projects as well as developing teaching modules to run workshops on participatory methods and evaluation.

That’s the basic strategic work. There is lots of capacity building work I’m doing as well. For me that focuses on teaching, first and foremost:

• Teaching Art of Hosting workshops, including upcoming ones in the next year on Bowen Island, and in the Whitehorse, Montreal, and Calgary.
• Teaching complexity courses. One with Bronagh Gallagher focused on complexity for social activists, and one with Caitlin Frost on complexity basics, using Human Systems Dynamics, Cynefin, The Work and dialogue methods. I’ve taught several one and two day complexity course this past year, and feel like we’ve really got a good introductory course.
• A one day workshop on dialogic containers that I gave to good reviews at Nanzan University in Japan. It is based on two papers I wrote over the past few years on Hosting and Holding Dialogic Containers, and one Dave Snowden’s ABIDE framework (now mooshed with Glenda Eoyang’s CDE framework) as a way of using containers to work with complexity. At Nanzen, Caitlin added a neat little piece on Self as Container as well.
• A course on evaluation, which I first offered online with Beehive Productions this past winter, and then has developed into a two day course offered in New York with Rita Fierro and Dominica McBride. That might morph again and meet the Art of Hosting, so if you’re and evaluator, look out for an offering that joins up those two worlds.
• Leadership 2020, a nine month participatory leadership program for leaders in the Social Services Sector and child and family services ministries in British Columbia. We are coming up on ten years of this work, with a redesigned program so that we can get more leaders through it in a slightly compressed time frame.
• I continue to offer a one-day course at Simon Fraser University on World Cafe and Open Space Technology as part of the certificate in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. You can come to that if you like.
• And I have a few coaching clients as well, folks I spend an hour or so with here and there, thinking through issues in their own practice, working on workshop designs and supporting their confidence to take risk.

As for writing, I have long promised a book on Chaordic Design, and that may still come to pass, but I can see it now being a joint effort with my partner Caitlin Frost. We have been using the Chaordic Stepping Stones tool in every context imaginable and have a ton of stories of application to share. The basic model on my website is due for a revision as well, so perhaps I’l have a chance to do that in the coming few months. When Caitlin and I can find some time to go away and write, we might actually get some stuff on the page.

And here is the blog, my old friend, the place I have recorded thoughts and insights and ideas and events over the past 17 years or so. It needs a bit of attention and it needs to be used, so look for more blog posts more frequently. And they won’t all be well crafted essays – could be just more musings, things that are longer than tweets, and that properly belong free in the world and not locked into the blue prison of facebook. Maybe you’ll even see something of the other passions that are in my life, including my love of soccer, music, and some of the local community projects I’m up to.

Does any of that grab your interest? Is there anything you’d like to hear more about? Can I support your organization or community, or individual practice in any way? Wanna play?

The link was great, really enjoyed reading the article.

The fact that speed is important is attested to everyone who purchases a new computer/device, because it has become to "slow" (a relative term). I also wonder whether the increase of higher level languages and frameworks invariably require more processing power in what they produce. The article linked to an interesting debate on Electron apps. It did make me think wider about software in general. The faster, cleaner, and more secure you want your software the more it's going to cost you. You only need to look at embedded systems in a camera as opposed to an airplane. It could be the reason why people are buying software that does one thing well and ditching software that is feature rich, but slowed by that richness. To make an app do one thing well with speed is less of a problem than to make a feature rich app that does everything well. I can easily see that the cost could be prohibitive. How much would it cost evernote to totally rewrite their app for every platform rather than patch it up. I can also see why Java is so popular as its code once run everywhere, but the experience tends to be less than pleasant in my experience.

In the end software; as in every other area of life; is driven by cost and profit. We no longer live in a world where people in general are proud of their work.

Clark Quinn, Learnlets, Jul 30, 2019

The phrase used to be "eat your own dog food," and it refers to the idea that people should actually use the products they create. I definitely agree with that one. Quinn here is changing the expression to "drink your own champagne," presumably because eating dog food is objectionable. But to many people, so is drinking champagne. Maybe the expression should be changed to "use your own product" in celebration of internationalism and direct language.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Jul 30, 2019

I'm not sure whether the world needs more apps, but if this product works as advertised it will certainly get them. "LiveCode is where you can create native applications for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, Server & now The Web all from the same code... LiveCode is packed full of ready made widgets and libraries to make light work of common tasks and if you can't find what you are looking for, check out our extensions store or you can even write your own. New in LiveCode 9 you can now access the native feature set on all supported platforms." There are demo apps, including ScreenSteps, a learning app. LiveCode has been around since 2017; here is the most recent weekly update. And yes, it's open source.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The media has largely bought into Huawei’s ‘strong’ half-year results today, but there’s a major catch in the report: the company’s quarter-by-quarter smartphone growth was zero.

I love when somebody pulls out the rug under all those news outlets that just parrot the press release.

More >

>Andy Brice wrote:
>As a professional software developer for over 30 years, it shocks me how
>bloated a lot of modern software is. I would be ashamed to write
>bloatware like that. Do these developers know what a profiler is? Maybe
>their bosses don't care?
>

As an end user, thank you!

It's really frustrating to remember using software 15 years ago that was more responsive than today, knowing the hardware is infinitely faster. Now most 'apps' are slow to load and pause often...I assume they are phoning home to the mother ship for ads, tracking, software updates, syncing, whatever.

There seems to be a Moore's law about software bloat that cancels out Moore's law for CPU power. My Dad always told me that no matter how big of a tackle box you get, that your existing collection of fishing stuff WILL fill it up. Our wardrobe increases with our closet sizes, and our general stuff increases with home size as the ratio of how much of it is useful day-to-day decreases. Speed and storage increases are just more rooms in a house for software engineers to stash more crap that is only tangentially related to the core purpose of the software.

I will never forget my first smartphone, a Palm Treo 650. As an 'extended brain' where I want to QUICKLY jot a note, appointment, todo, grocery item etc....I've never used something faster or more reliable. Of course I wouldn't trade my Android for it today, but I do miss that snappiness several times a day.

Craig Modi wrote an excellent essay on “Fast Software: The Best Software,” which has been widely praised in the software world. As usual, Michael Tsai has an excellent overview of the commentary.

You’d think this was all self-evident. “I love this essay so much,” writes Jon Gruber, “I wish I could kiss it.” Why shouldn’t software be faster?

First: some speed changes are illusions. Lots of things we do on today’s computers seem slower than the corresponding operations we did ten or twenty years ago, but often that’s because “the same thing” is thousands of times harder. We assume elegant typography everywhere; that takes lots of work where we used to think the VT-100’s monospaced fonts were elegant.. We want to open a document: where a folder back then might have a dozen documents on a disk with thousands, now the folder has a thousand documents and document-versions on a disk with millions.

Second: how much speed do you want to pay for? I was driving home the other day, and noticed that the car ahead of me was a Lamborghini. That driver had 691 horsepower, my Honda Fit has 130, and it took us precisely the same amount of time to get from Watertown to Arlington.

Let’s look at the back of the proverbial envelope and estimate the numbers on an actual success story. I’ve spent the last few days in the (brand-new) profiler, looking at ways to speed up Tinderbox. This went unusually well: I reduced the load time for a big document — the Tinderbox planning notes — from almost eight seconds to just over 3.

At 3,700 notes, 700 links, and a quarter of a million words, this is not an atypical Tinderbox document, but lots of people don’t need documents this big. Significantly, no new Tinderbox user and no sales prospect is likely to encounter a document this big: it takes times to make that many notes. We can’t expect the speed bump to have much impact on sales. So, the cost of the speed improvement has to be born either by Eastgate or, through upgrades, by the Tinderbox community.

It’s hard to know exactly how many beneficiaries there are. On any given day, there are a few thousand Tinderbox users. (There are lots more Tinderbox owners, but some of them are on vacation, and some of them only use Tinderbox in the winter, and some of them are between projects or switched jobs or have decided to raise lambs instead.) Let’s say a thousand users/day have documents this big, that they save 5 seconds per load, one load per day, and that their marginal cost is $50/hr. I’ve saved the community about $70/day, or a little less than $25,000/yr. That’s a nice return on a long weekend.

But the news is not quite that good. At the same $50/hr, we spent about $2,000 on my groceries, and about $2,000 on the cost of the office, equipment, support, taxes, and such. In my experience, between 30-50% of improvements like this one turn out to be illusions: they work for simple cases but overlook some edge case that either requires lots more engineering or that vitiates the whole thing. We need to amortize the failures, so we probably should halve the community’s profit. I’d also like to budget perhaps $1000 for future maintenance and support. So, we’ve got $12,500 of savings and about $5,000 in costs.

This is good news (and better than I’d expected) but it’s not overwhelmingly good. We’re not considering the costs of selling and distributing upgrades, which will eat up a big chunk of that mildly-attractive gross margin.

Some of the time, you’re just better off waiting a few seconds for the result. Better to have a slow tool and the right answer than a fast one that makes mistakes or that gives you the answer to someone else’s problem.

Among artisanal software developers, we’re something of an outlier — through upgrades, we do have a way to share at least part of those community savings. That’s by no means a given: see this excellent presentation on the state of Twine for a counter-example.

Today we’re announcing that Dark has raised $3.5M in seed funding. We actually raised our funding back in 2017, and have been quietly building Dark for the last two years.

Our team has developed a holistic programming language, editor, and infrastructure. You write in the Dark language, using the Dark editor, and your program is hosted on Dark’s infrastructure. As a result, developers can code without thinking about infrastructure, and have near-instant deployment, which we’re calling deployless.

We’re in the process of coming out of stealth. So far you can read What is Dark, how Dark is a functional language, and how Dark allows deploys in 50ms.

We’ve been working closely with some early Dark customers over the last year, who have shipped entire products on Dark. Chase Olivieri built Altitude, a subscription SaaS providing personalized flight deals: “As a bootstrapper, Dark has allowed me to move fast and build Altitude without having to worry about infrastructure, scaling, or server management.”

Jessica Greenwalt’s team built Birb, a project tracking tool: “It only took us minutes to get started, and their tooling allowed us to understand how our application worked in production.”

Dark’s holistic combination of programming language, editor and infrastructure completely changes how developers code. For example, Dark records traces of production execution that developers use in the Dark editor. Chase says: “I love the traces feature, which allows me to see live data while creating new endpoints or making changes on the backend. There is nothing else like it out there.”

We raised the $3.5m to develop Dark from an experienced set of investors. The round was led by Cervin Ventures with participation from Boldstart, Data Collective, Harrison Metal, XFactor, Backstage, Nextview, Promus, Correlation, 122 West, and Yubari. We’ve also been lucky to have a great set of angel investors who have provided guidance and feedback, and support, including James Tamplin (founder and CEO of Firebase), Eric Ries (Lean Startup, CEO LTSE), Edith Harbaugh (CEO of LaunchDarkly), Erica Brescia (COO of GitHub, founder Bitnami), Greg Brockman (Founder and CTO of OpenAI, former CTO of Stripe), and Andrew Miklas (founder of Pagerduty).*

We’d like to highlight XFactor and Backstage Capital. These funds see investing in underrepresented founders as an economic opportunity. We share their values and are proud to have their participation.

We’re excited to show the community what we’ve been building with this support. In September, we’ll be transitioning into beta. If you’re attending Strangeloop, we’d love to see you at our launch party on Friday September 13th: https://darklang.com/launch. Otherwise, we’ll be unveiling the product publicly on September 16th. Sign up at https://darklang.com to get notified when we release.

*Thank you to all of the angels who invested in Dark’s seed round: David Eckstein, Christina Cacioppo, Paul English, Pete Koomen, Hiten Shah, Nitesh Banta, Phillip Bond, Darragh Buckley, Albert Ni, Greg Brockman, Andrew Miklas, Sam Stokes, Russ Smith, Bryan Jowers, David Chang, Jean-Denis Greze, Kyle Wild, Thomson Nguyen, Mathew Johnson, Teck Chia, Lucas Nealan, Edith Harbaugh, James Tamplin, Dave Concannon, Eric Ries, Brendan Ciecko, Elizabeth Dobrska, Brad Flora, Jon Dahl, Shalini Agarwal, Sheel Mohnot, John McGugan, Jon Scherr, Jonathan Siegel, and our AngelList syndicate led by Ed Roman.

---

Dark Announces $3.5M in Seed Financing was originally published in Darklang on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve been researching, testing, and recommending window air conditioners since 2012, and we think the LG LW8017ERSM is the best choice for most rooms because it cools effectively and it’s quiet, efficient, and affordable.

If you're currently paying high interest on credit card debt, a balance transfer credit card could allow you to pay less in interest and help you raze your debt faster than you otherwise could.

Sunday evening, fighting through a stupefied daze of jet lag, powered by half a gallon of cold brew coffee — a glass of which I sipped at the podium like bourbon — I gave the opening keynote to the Yale Publishing Course for the ninth time. I spoke for ninety minutes, mainly about who I perceive to be our “adversaries” in publishing, and ended with a breakdown of my recent big walk, the SMS experiment, and, most relevantly, the single book that came out of it all.

comic by Reza Farazmand

“It’s entirely up to us. If we fail — if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us — nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.”      — Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

I’ve spent a fair amount of time of late with conservatives. This is a rather rare occurrence for me, since the circles I am part of are almost all far-left of centre, progressive groups.

I’ve never been conservative, so it’s always been hard for me to figure out what makes conservatives tick. There are of course many different flavours of conservative, but at this juncture, since they are a minority numbers-wise in most of the world’s anglophone countries, yet firmly in control of political power throughout the anglophone world, it’s the commonalities of anglophone political conservatives I’m most interested in.

What has emerged from hours of conversations is a portrait of a hard-edged (at once sensitive and desensitized) group of people from diverse economic, educational and ethnic backgrounds that seem to have two things in common — they are overwhelmingly older males, and they all seem to be struggling with severe trauma (with a wide variety of origins) that they are emotionally unable to cope with (perhaps because they seem emotionally un-self-aware).

That’s not to say a lot of my fellow lefties aren’t traumatized too. It’s just that they (we) seem a little better at figuring out how to recognize, self-manage and cope with our trauma, and hence tend to be somewhat less reactive to stressful news and situations, and less prone to be triggered by opportunists who exploit reactivity. So, where liberals tend to just not want to hear about 45’s latest inarticulate nonsense, conservatives seem powerfully (and angrily) energized by the mere mention of words like Hillary, Ocasio, Pelosi, immigrants or socialism.

Racism and sexism seem to underlie this almost autonomic, unthinking reactivity (often accompanied by the rote reciting of cliché right-wing “talking points”), but, as I’ve mentioned before in these pages, the real root of it is, I’m coming to realize, anger and fear, underneath which, in most cases, seems to lie unmanageable, often-unconscious trauma. These people are seriously hurting, angry and terrified, and in denial of it (or, worse, quietly ashamed or completely oblivious to it).

Perhaps because I am a reactive, older male who spent most of my life in an un-self-conscious reactive state, I can kind of relate to this. Although I am becoming more equanimous with age and practice and wise counsel from sensitive, intelligent friends, when I was at my most reactive my rage was directed at what I saw as dangerous right-wingers — Reagan, Cheney, Thatcher, Mulroney, environmentally ruinous billionaire corporatists and inflammatory, fear-mongering mass media.

Some of my conservative acquaintances are very intelligent, and to me their support for people and ideas that are clearly destructive, divisive, dangerous and deluded makes no sense. This is of course what George Lakoff has been writing about for years.

What the hate- and fear-mongering politicians, media pundits and business mouthpieces are saying (to themselves and their audiences) is: You’re right to be afraid, lost, and angry. Conservatives react to the above trigger-words (Hillary, immigrants etc) in a very similar, conditioned way to the way the victims of abuse react to descriptions and depictions of the kind of violence they have suffered from.

The people who have done the conditioning have almost certainly been traumatized themselves by what is, to them, a frightening, bewildering, dangerous, out-of-control and infuriating world. In such a traumatized world, fear is infectious, especially so thanks to mass media and social media outlets that present an oversimplified, focused, blame-y, twisted perspective of reality that amplifies, supports and sustains such fear.

The conservative echo chamber of fear reinforces conservatives’ innate fear that the safe, unchanging, god-fearing, hierarchical, everyone-knows-their-place world they thought they were growing up in, and want to live in and leave for their children, is constantly under threat from forces they don’t trust or understand, forces that make them feel intimidated, undermined, blind-sided, ill-equipped and even helpless to deal with. All it takes is one of those trigger-words to set them off.

This of course is precisely what happened in countries demoralized by brutal poverty, economic collapse, military disgrace, social disintegration and hopelessness in the last century in Germany, Russia, China, Rwanda, Yugoslavia and a host of other places, leading to wars, genocides, and racial, economic and political atrocities that resulted in the murder of nearly a quarter of a billion people.

So what are we to do now to prevent yet another slide into the kind of massive reactionary hysteria that made the last century our civilization’s bloodiest?

My regular readers won’t be surprised to hear that I don’t think there is anything we can do. Although it is our nature to try to reason out our emotional reactions, this has nothing to do with reason, and reasoning with conservatives (as Lakoff has said) won’t solve anything. Progressives are mistaken to think that this is just a blip before we resume the inevitable humanist trajectory towards endless betterment. Conservatives are right to see progress as a myth, and the current system that hold us in thrall as hopelessly broken. They are wrong in thinking that their religions and their patriarchal, fear-based moral values offer anything better.

What we are seeing in the shift of racism, sexism, self-deluded lying, and scapegoating (of immigrants, liberals, modern urban life and “others’ of all stripes) from the whispered margins to the political mainstream, is a mass collective expression of endless, hopeless, unbearable trauma. It is the self-loathing death throes of our failed industrial civilization.

Our reaction to constant stresses with no end, no solution in sight, is, as it has always been, an unmanaged and uncontrollable outpouring of feelings of anger, hatred, shame, fear, helplessness, hopelessness, powerlessness and grief, that finds an outlet in blaming others (racism, sexism, anti-immigrant hysteria), in war and other acts of violence, in denial and lies, and in self-justification for the monstrous emotional derangement that consumes us and makes us crazy enough to commit abuses and atrocities (to others, and to ourselves) in unbearable situations and times.

This is who we are under chronic stress.

But we are also, when not overwhelmed by stress, a generous, loving, altruistic, peaceful species instilled with biophilia, creativity, curiosity, and a love of beauty. When our self-domesticated, imprisoning, desolating global industrial culture collapses (and that collapse is already in full swing) the remnants of our species will, instinctively and naturally, exhibit these positive, evolutionarily-healthy qualities. Evolution’s response to extreme stress is radical change — collapse and then rest and heal; its response to ecosystems in joyful balance is to let everything be as it is. There is nothing moral in this.

We are by nature neither conservative nor progressive. The conservative is an emotionally wracked, traumatized human unable to cope with a seemingly hopeless reality, longing for a (usually imagined or invented) better time. The progressive is a lost, bewildered idealist driven by a constantly-disappointing faith in the inevitability of humanity’s collective advancement through collaborative effort. Both worldviews are deluded.

The fact that extreme conservatives have ascended to power and are consolidating it further should neither dismay or surprise us. Their ascendancy will make collapse more difficult, but their failure to create anything enduring is as inevitable as ours. We will make the best of it, and in so doing conservatives and progressives alike will show much of our better stuff as collapse intensifies — as we see living and working together as best we can through the dark times ahead as, ultimately, the only way forward. We will rediscover our humanity just as we seemingly are losing it.

And millennia from now, as our planet once again flourishes, civilization-free, the foolish experiment with apes running the laboratory will be long forgotten.

mkalus shared this story from Gizmodo.

---

After many months of back and forth with the U.S. Department of State, my new U.S. passport arrived in the mail yesterday, c/o Canada:

I hold a U.S. passport, as well as a Canadian one, by virtue of having been born in the U.S. to Canadian parents. For years I resisted taking out a U.S. passport because to apply for a passport required a Social Security Number, and to apply for a Social Security Number required registering for Selective Service. Eventually I aged out of the Selective Service requirement, and so the path was clear.

For my first passport, I made the application at the federal building in Bangor, Maine, in person, in 1999. It was a bracing experience that involved metal detectors. Subsequently I’ve been able to renew my passport by mail.

This time, 20 years on, was much less smooth than the previous.

Things first went off the rails when my application was rejected because I sent a U.S. dollar Canada Post money order in payment, and this was not acceptable. The letter I received on May 22 explained:

The payment you submitted is not acceptable because it is not payable through a United States bank. Please submit a new check (personal, certified, cashiers or travelers) or money order (U.S. Postal, commercial, currency exchange) payable to “U.S. Department of State” that is payable through a United States bank.

Super-convenient for Canadians, those options, what with United States banks being on every corner here. Not. Ultimately I was able to get a U.S. dollar draft drawn on a U.S. bank, from CIBC in Charlottetown.

Problem solved?

Not yet.

A month later I received another letter:

Thank you for your recent passport application. However, the identification you provided is not sufficient for passport purposes.

This was strange, as there was no requirement to submit identification, other than my old passport. The only items on the application form were:

• Your most recent U.S. passport book and/or card;
• A certified copy of your marriage certificate or court order if your name has changed;
• Fees; and
• A recent, color photograph.

Nonetheless, I was required to better identify myself. And with some intriguing options; the letter continued:

Please complete the enclosed DS-5520, Supplemental Questionnaire to Determine Identity for a U.S. Passport, and submit the form with photocopies of five (5) or more personal documents, which are five (5) years or older. For your information we have included a list of acceptable forms of personal documents that may assist our office in establishing your identity.

The list was long, and included things like “military identification” and “traffic ticket” and “school yearbook photograph with your name and photo, also with school’s name and year that it was issued.”

The challenging hurdle was the requirement that these pieces of ID needed to be five years or older.

I’ve got lots of forms of current ID, but I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to assemble a suite of half-decade-old ID, and so I included things like my ID for the PEI Archives and Records Office (signed, more than 5 years old) and, because “Newspaper/Magazine articles (with your photo & name, news paper’s name & date)” was one of the acceptable forms of ID, this article from The Guardian from 2014:

I received no further communication from the State Department after sending in my packet of aged ID.

My passport arrived in the post yesterday. I’m good until 2029.

I’m going to save all my expiring ID cards in a bucket for use then.

“Why does Amazon ask me to review something the day it arrives?” Amy asks. “I usually don’t know if it’s any good for a couple of weeks. They should email you again a hundred days later.”

We’re walking the dog on the Ashuwillticook rail trail, which runs along side Cheshire Lake, a few miles from our house. When we manage to get our schedules in sync, this is one of my favorite rituals. We walk four miles in a little more than an hour. The doggo gets properly exercised and we get the chance to talk about whatever’s on our minds.

Amy has been sewing new cushions for our patio furniture since the previous ones decayed. Her mind is on reviews of patio furniture. You have no idea if your patio furniture is any good until you’ve had it for at least one season, and it should be possible to sort reviews on Amazon and find only the ones by folks posting after they’ve owned things and lived with them for a while.

What’s on my mind is a talk Tim Berners-Lee gave about Solid, and decentralized models for rebuilding the web. And because we’re walking the dog, these trains of thought merge on the rail trail, and we start designing a new product review site based on Solid.

Amazon reviews work by keeping track of what products you’ve ordered and when they’ve been delivered. A day or two after Amazon believes they’ve been successfully delivered, they ask you to review the product, giving it between 1-5 stars and a short review.

There’s all sorts of things wrong with this system. Only 3-10% of consumers rate any given purchase, and only about 40% of consumers rate at all. We’re more likely to review a product that we loved, or one we really, really hated, so reviews tend towards binary extremes – ones and fives, with very few twos, threes and fours. And while Amazon requires you to purchase an item before it will let you review it, there’s still a vast ecosystem of review fraud, in which sellers refund the cost of an item and send a bonus in exchange for five star reviews. This practice is so common that as many as one in three online reviews may be fake in some product categories (inexpensive electronics, in particular), and a group of watchdogs, including ReviewMeta and FakeSpot have sprung up to combat fake reviews. Amazon reports that it’s putting significant resources into combatting review fraud.

These are real problems, and none of these are the problem Amy wants to fix. Amazon could implement her suggestion – it knows when you purchased outdoor cushions and could email you in 100 days and then again at 400 days for “lifetime” reviews of a product. It’s not clear whether they would. Imagine that reviews submitted months later were more negative than those made at time of purchase. Amazon needs some negative reviews – most consumers are smart enough to grow suspicious when they encounter only positive reviews – but a consistent pattern in which purchases become more disappointing over time might retard sales. Independent review sites like TrustPilot – which has its own serious review fraud problems – could build this service, but they lack key pieces of information: the date that you purchased something, and the ability to verify that you actually paid for it.

Turns out Amy’s service is very easy to build in a Solid world. In Solid, you store data in a “pod”, a data store you control either on your own server at home, or cloud space you control. When you buy something from Amazon, you make a record in your pod of the transaction; Amazon does the same, so they can update their inventory, send you your shipment, etc. Because you have access to your transaction records, you can write a simple tool to ping you 100 days after you’ve bought something to review it. You could write the review on Amazon, TrustPilot, or a new Solid-compliant LifetimeReviews, which would allow you to keep the contents of your review in your Pod, but would include it in a search on the LifetimeReviews.solid site for reviews of patio furniture (with your permission, of course.) In fact, LifetimeReviews.solid would invite you to share a subset of the data stored in your pod so it could prompt you 100 days later about every purchase you’ve made on any different Solid-compliant platform and collect reviews on any product you were willing to evaluate. You’d own those reviews – they’d be stored on your pod – but it would provide a useful service in indexing those reviews and making them available to the rest of the web.

Building a novel product review service in the contemporary Web can feel both impossible and futile. If it were worth building, Amazon would have a massive advantage in building it, given the amount of transactional data they already control… and they’d probably block you from using “their” (your) data to build such a service. And if you succeeded, they’ll just implement their own version of your feature, putting you out of business. And if it were widely used, it would almost certainly be filled with fraud much as Amazon’s system already is. Why bother?

I’m trying to remember what the web felt like in the early 1990s, when there was so much left to build and such low barriers to building it. We built silly and frivolous shit all the time, and occasionally, it turned out to be useful and important. The homepage builder, the product that ultimately attracted users to Tripod, was built essentially on a lark. It took months for us to realize that it was going to be popular and years to realize it would become the heart of our business.

I think Solid has me thinking about those early days because it promises a world of permissionless innovation. Obtaining Amazon’s permission to build a new type of review site feels essentially impossible; the idea that I might build something new – possibly cool, possibly frivolous – and only need the permission of the people who want to use it feels liberating.

Here’s what I really want to build: a news-factchecking tool that lets me control what’s considered a reliable source, rather than giving Facebook that control. And I know how to build it. And I can’t.

Gobo.social lets you integrate posts from different social media – Twitter, Mastodon and parts of Facebook – into a single feed, which you can sort and filter as you’d like. A team in my lab built it so we could experiment with two ideas:
– People should have the ability to filter their newsfeeds as they choose, not as Facebook chooses.
– We need social media browsers that let us manage our different identities, communities and preferences with a single tool, instead of through dozens of incompatible silos.

In one sense, Gobo has been a success – it’s generated some robust discussion about how social media could work better for its users. But in another sense, it’s been an uncomfortable reminder that innovation these days is anything BUT permissionless. Thus far, Gobo has played by the rules – we’ve used the documented APIs offered by social media platforms, which has meant we have full access to Twitter and Mastodon content, but only very limited access to Facebook. The Facebook API gives us access to the Pages you follow, but not to the posts from any of your friends. (I don’t know about you, but I don’t follow a lot of pages, which tend to be run by marketing departments, not by real people.) It could be worse – we just spent six months trying to get permission from LinkedIn to access their API and were flat-out denied.

We could – and may – integrate social media another way. We could ask you to give us your Facebook or LinkedIn username and password. Using those credentials, we could then access your unfiltered timeline, scrape it and present it to you to filter as you’d like. But that’s a terrible idea – it makes us responsible for managing your credentials, which has all sorts of dangers. (We can create a Tinder account for you, for instance…) And Facebook would demand we shut the service immediately, citing Facebook vs. Power Ventures as precedent.

I’d love to hook Gobo up to Factmata, a very cool new company that evaluates online content and provides scores for believability based on nine different signals. Rather than giving a compound score, or a binary “fake/true” distinction, Factmata offers scores on the different signals, so we could give you – through Gobo and Factmata – the ability to filter out news it thinks is clickbait, or thinks is politically biased, insulting or sexist. Would Factmata do a perfect job of filtering out bogus news? Almost certainly not, but Facebook is extremely unlikely to do the job perfectly either, and while you’d know the ways in which Gobo and Factmata failed, the inner workings of Facebook are entirely opaque.

Would Solid solve this problem? Not immediately, of course. In a world where Facebook, LinkedIn and everyone else chose to make their services Solid-compatible, it would be trivial to pipe these services together. But Sir Tim has made it clear that his goal is not to challenge Facebook, but to invite innovators to experiment with a new way of building websites.

My fear is this – that we need to experiment with tools like Solid and start working to pry open Facebook at the same time. There’s immense amounts of human effort going into closed, silo’d, non-interoperable platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. I’m not comfortable ceding that accumulation of creativity to those who’ve moved fast and fenced off their corner of the web. We need to create new social media platforms, but we need to understand that 99% of what people want to do at present is communicate with friends on existing platforms, and we need tools that bridge that gap. We need the ability to innovate around huge, existing services like Amazon, if only so Amy can stop sewing couch cushions and start her new review business.

A year ago, we became the first major tech company to adopt high-density SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology for our storage drives. At the time, we faced a challenge: while SMR offers major cost savings over conventional PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) drives, the technology is slower to write than conventional drives. We set out on a journey to reap the cost-saving benefit of SMR without giving up on performance. One year later, here’s the story of how we achieved just that.

The Best Surprise Is No Surprise

When the first production machines started arriving in September, it was only natural to have a little apprehension and think, “Does this actually work? What if it breaks?!” It was raw, completely new technology—it was terrifying. And then … nothing happened. That is, everything simply worked.

Not that this was much of a surprise. The lead-up to this event was the classic Dropbox story: Sweat the details, build confidence by relentlessly bashing out the bugs—and then roll the project out on a large scale.

For the past three years, the Dropbox teams involved in the change over to SMR have been doing a lot of innovation—and more testing than any of us care to remember. The hardware team worked very tightly with the Magic Pocket software team, envisioning each possible edge case and running through every imaginable scenario. That diligent work helped ensure that the migration to the SMRs went off without a hitch.

Software Updates

To prepare for running SMR, we had to make substantial changes to the software layer. We optimized the software by improving the throughput of the networking stack to the disk. We also added an SSD cache: since you can only write to the SMR disks in fixed-size zones, and you can only write to them sequentially, we knew we needed an area to stage the writes. Adding support for this SSD staging layer to the software was specifically targeted for our transition to SMR, but it has helped latency in other cases, as well.

Fortunately, we worked on a significant portion of the necessary software changes required for sequential writing ahead of time, testing our existing fleet of PMR disks. Before we even began to build the new architecture, we made sure it would support both PMR and SMR. This meant that the whole stack was thoroughly tested by the hundreds of thousands of installed disks before we even started bringing the SMR machines online. This removed a considerable amount of risk from the equation. All we had to do once we received the new machines was change the actual disk we were writing to.

In the end, one aspect of our original design helped smooth the transition to SMR. The generic Dropbox infrastructure handles data in immutable blocks up to 4MB in size, which was convenient for SMR, since it allows random writes onto the disk sequentially into a new block. And the size of the write zones we’ve set up in Magic Pocket, with 1 GB extents of data, fit perfectly with the 256 MB zones used to split up SMR drives.

Hardware

Initially, SMR was a proof-of-concept case: can we actually make it function the way we want? From a hardware point of view, turning to SMR would help us build data storage density quicker than with PMR. What we found was that the use-case for SMR matched up very well with the way we’ve already architected Magic Pocket.

But in comparison to the control we have over our own software stack for SMR, the hardware team had a massive hill to climb in terms of learning everything that went on in the background. One of the biggest challenges in enabling SMR for Dropbox was that it is a new technology in the data-center context. It was the healthy working relationship between the hardware team and the Magic Pocket team that allowed the project to be as successful as it turned out to be.
Dropbox is not the only large tech company that’s working on calibrating and fine-tuning their software for SMR, but the use-case is so natural for us that we’ve been motivated to move quickly.

Still, being first had its challenges—not least being the sheer amount of data we already manage. Our hardware team had very limited support when it came to preparing for SMR. The vendors selling the drives didn’t have the chassis configuration that we have—our current test cluster is about six racks, and there are 48 systems, or close to 5,000 drives. So when we iterated through our revisions, we were able to obtain a far better signal, which led to a stronger test process. And that helped put us at the bleeding edge of the technology: few companies have really invested in SMR, so we often ended up doing a lot of the testing for our vendors, which kept us a step ahead.

Increasing Our Density

One of our goals when embarking on the SMR initiative last year was to have 25 percent of our data storage capacity on SMR drives in 2019. Since September, all new drives for our storage servers are now SMR. Meanwhile, we’ve been able to continuously increase the density of our disk capacity faster than the growth of the data itself. At this rate, close to 40 percent of Dropbox’s data will be on SMR by the end of 2019, surpassing our predicted goal.

Cost Savings

Much like our data storage goals, the actual cost savings of switching to SMR have met our expectations. We’re able to store roughly 10 to 20 percent more data on an SMR drive than on a PMR drive of the same capacity at little to no cost difference. But we also found that moving to the high-capacity SMR drives we’re using now has resulted in more than a 20% percent savings overall compared to the last generation storage design. And we’re also realizing savings in part due to other new lower cost hardware. Meanwhile, our efforts to work with multiple vendors for the SMR drives will further benefit the entire Dropbox supply chain and Dropbox’s future storage cost structure.

Energy Savings

The transition to SMR has also made Dropbox a much more efficient energy consumer. SMR drives have a lower power footprint, so we’re realizing savings by using the new 14-terabyte drives compared to the previous 8-terabyte drives. In essence, we are working with much denser racks, but our power draw has increased only marginally. And we have been able to increase the number of storage disks from 60 to 100 on a single machine while maintaining the same CPU and memory. Thanks to these efficiencies, we expect to realize even further energy savings as we eventually move to 18, 21 and 24-terabyte drives.

Open Source

The library we use to write to the SMR drives is the open-sourced libzbc, and through the process of working with it and running into the occasional issue, we’ve made 13 contributions to the library. What’s more, we developed our own testing tool called SMRtest which generates synthetic workloads to write/read verify, and benchmark read/write throughput performance on SMR drives. We’ve already shared this tool with our ecosystem partners, suppliers, and vendors, to ensure they have what they need to enable SMR. And we’ll deploy SMRtest as open-source software in the coming months to benefit the wider community.

Specific Challenges

On the software side of things, we opted for more capacity, performance and flexibility by writing directly to the disks without a filesystem. Some operating systems are adding support for that, but when we were working with it, it wasn’t an option. So in order to talk to the disk, we used Libzbc— which is essentially a wrapper to send commands directly to the disk, without going through the Linux device or a block device stack. But during testing, we ran into the issue of the disk simply failing, over and over. It turned out the failures were due to a hardcoded loop—since we weren’t using Linux, whose kernel code includes retry logic, we had to implement our own retry logic around accessing the disk.

Firmware was also another issue when it came to getting the SMR drive technology to work on the existing platform, largely because the components came from various vendors. We work with multiple hard-drive vendors, as well as various kinds of intermediary technologies, such as the host bus adaptor, to connect multiple drives to a system. Each one of these vendors—as well as the server chassis itself—operated with its own firmware.

There were a lot of moving pieces, so the first initiative on the hardware side was to get our various partners and vendors to talk to each other. We then worked with each individual vendor to identify and resolve any issues early on, and all of the vendors have come forward and engaged with us.

But we are convinced that this will pay dividends in the long term. Opting to be multi-source across all the components, for example, insulates us against any single points of failure or too much reliance on a single supplier from a supply chain perspective.

Cold Storage and SMR

One of the latest developments at Dropbox is the incorporation of a new cold storage tier, designed for less frequently accessed data. Depending on the replication scheme, we’ve managed to cut down on disk usage by 25 to 33 percent with no noticeable change to the end-user experience. Similarly, our cold storage system uses our current mix of SMR and PMR drives, which translates to additional cost-savings without any difference in performance.

If you want to learn more about how we set up the cold tier, read Preslav Le’s recent blog post.

What the Future Holds

The simplicity of our infrastructure has also set us up to take advantage of all future innovations in data storage technology. The beauty of this approach, we believe, is that future technologies will likely use the same or similar API as SMR, where disks will be able to achieve greater densities by writing continuously to a limited number of zones of the disk at any given time. They may be microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) drives or heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) drives—but they will have the same interface and we’ll be able to use the same software architecture.

We’re already working on further improving densities with our 2020 storage designs. By jumping to SMR, we’ve opened the door for whatever emerging technologies are coming. For Dropbox, the end result is more cost-efficient storage with a smaller energy footprint without sacrifice in reliability or performance. For the industry overall, our efforts will pay dividends as the underlying architecture is adopted for future enhancements in HDD technology.

Acknowledgements: Refugio Fernandez, Preslev Le, Victor Li, and Alexander Sosa contributed to this article.

Interested in how our SMR technology will change the future of cloud storage? We’re hiring!

The latest Microsoft Edge for macOS Dev Channel build brings support for ‘Read Aloud,’ an accessibility feature that reads the text content of a webpage for visually-impaired users.

For those who might enjoy hearing content instead of reading it, it’s possible to right-click at the start of a paragraph and select ‘Read Aloud From Here.’ The feature will then read everything from that point unless the user pauses the session using the dedicated button.

Sitting next to the ‘play/pause’ button are the skip buttons for jumping back and forth between paragraphs.

Furthermore, there’s a speed adjustment tool, as well as a plethora of synthetic voices to suit different tastes. The Edge browser also added webpage translation back in April.

That said, the new accessibility feature came after Microsoft migrated its browser to Google Chromium for Insider builds(Beta, Dev and Canary). Early hands-on tests at MobileSyrup showed promising results even compared to Google Chrome.

To try Microsoft Edge for macOS, head over to the official page and download the Dev Channel version for Mac.

Source: Mike Tholfsen Via: iMore

The post Microsoft Edge for macOS beta adds Read Aloud accessibility feature appeared first on MobileSyrup.