Matt Edwards

Lots of new features this year. iOS 16 iPadOS 16 watchOS 9 macOS 13 And also a new Macbook Air using an M2 chip, the next iteration on their M-series processors. A list of thoughts: Lock Screen widgets look awesome. The ability to have a time-bound, floating widget sitting on the bottom of the lock screen showing you sports scores or when your Uber/Lyft arrives could be a killer feature; but I hope it becomes more widespread and successful than App Clips. iCloud Shared Family Photo Library could be a solution to the problem of having to share all family photos manually, through specific albums! Depends how it works in practice, but the fact you can toggle it from the Camera app does make it more discoverable and likely to be used. The killer part of this feature is that the Camera toggle can enable when you’re in close proximity to this in your family? If that works as advertised it is very discoverable and should be convenient to use. Apple Pay Later competes with Klarna, Affirm, and other “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) services. Hmm. This feels like an area where consumer protections/regulation will be landing with a thud, soon. Hello, CFPB? (Update 9 June 2022: high-level explainer coverage on BNPL from The Verge.) Dictation finally has some improvements! I use this a lot when drafting a longer email or text message string on my phone. Very nice to see. watchOS adds heart rate zones. Finally? Also good to see improvements to sleep tracking. I’m not sure if this silent, long-lived collection of health data will ever both worth anything to me in the future, but good to know it’s there, I guess. On the other hand, the privacy implications of having so much health data stored about yourself are…chilling. Medication tracking and reminders, on top of fall detection, irregular heart rhythm detection, medical alerts, etc will make the Apple Watch a good gift from kids to aging parents. The MacBook Air regains MagSafe! The new MacBook Air design looks sick. I’m torn between impulse ordering one (since supply chain delays are rumored), waiting to actually hold one in a store, and just getting a MacBook Pro 14" as I edit more GoPro video footage. Hmm. Please kill the 13" MacBook Pro. They did kill the Series 3 Apple Watch! Finally. Continuity Camera is going to be excellent. I’ve been using an old iPhone 6S with Camo and it has been amazing to make a powerful webcam out of an old and otherwise unused device. Having the ability to do the same thing with my primary iPhone has always been a struggle - I don’t want to have to connect it via wire to my machine, unlock it, put it in the stand, and also use that same phone for taking the call. Apple solved this by allowing the phone to mount magnetically (iPhone 12+) and using no wires to connect it to the machine. That enhanced convenience makes it much more likely I would use it day-to-day. Improvements to Mail on macOS? I use snooze a lot. If these same improvements come to iOS I might be able to stop using the (kinda ugly) Gmail app there. On desktop I use Mimestream, which is frankly fantastic. Not sure Apple’s Mail app is going to win me over from it this year, but I will give it a try. Passkeys! Improving security on the web and killing off passwords are some noble goals. If this implementation of Passkeys can work in a cross-platform, don’t lock me in sort of way, I’ll be happy to embrace it. iPadOS gains external display support! And it’s not just mirroring; it’s a whole separate desktop scaled to the screen you are using. Finally, finally, finally the iPad might become the nifty “naked robotic core” so many power users have been asking for. Some neat-looking features for collaboration on iPad, including the white-boarding tool Freeform. Great for collaboration. Doubt I’ll ever see a mammoth company adopt it, though. Weather on iPad! Guess that SwiftUI stuff is starting to produce fruit. (Apple? Fruit? end bad puns here) Stage Manager for multitasking on iPad and (hopefully optional on) macOS looks…meh? Need to see it more and watch more people react to it before I figure out if this is good (yay external display support!) or bad (they’re killing good multi-window and replacing it with this less powerful alternative). Many things changing in software this year. I wonder how many I will remember come next year? ...

A trip to Key West and riding on the Overseas Highway (US Rt. 1) always makes for a good month in biking! Despite the time off for that vacation, I managed to just barely eclipse my 2021 mileage at this same point last year - 1,005 miles for this year versus 994 for last. Certainly an improvement against where I was in February or March. No video yet from Key West; I am being exceptionally lazy editing that footage. You can find a few photos of the trip and various bike-related activities over on my Pixelfed account. ...

As reported by Bruce Schneier and The Verge: The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a controversial anti-hacking law which bans “exceeding authorized access” on a computer system, was narrowed by the Supreme Court on Thursday in a 6-3 ruling. The court said the law shouldn’t cover people misusing systems they’re allowed to access — and that claiming otherwise would criminalize a “breathtaking amount” of everyday computer use. Great news here on a couple fronts: ...

Spent a solid seven days in Key West, Florida the other week, a wonderful little island at the end of the Florida Keys. For the next time I visit, here’s a nice, quick summary of all the best places to visit for food, drink, or fun. Best Places for… Food Red Shoe Island Bistro. Probably the best meal we had all week. They don’t have a long menu, but each and every item they had was excellent. Beef Stroganoff. Yellowtail Snapper. Seared Scallops. Not a single thing to complain about. Key Plaza Creperie. Without a doubt, the best breakfast we had! Can’t quite walk here from down by Duval, yet it was well worth the short drive over to have some very tasty crepes. The sweet lemon crepe was the best! (It used lemon juice on a sweet crepe dough and was the perfect balance of flavors.) Baby’s Coffee. Found this on a bike ride and stopped in on our way out of town. Excellent coffee, good donuts, and tasty half-bagels with baked toppings. Pizza on a bagel is great! Old Town Bakery. A classic. Still kicking the past five years and I’m happy they are still in business. Ham and cheese croissants are phenomenal. Seaside Cafe. What a gem! Located on the property of the Southernmost House, near the Southernmost Point (what down here is not southern-most??), they made excellent pizza and sandwiches. Homemade bread, grilled, with prosciutto and cheese on top. Will certainly be back. Drink Old Town Tavern & Beer Garden. The best craft beer in Key West; and we tried a lot of places! This one had a two-page deep selection, page one of drafts and page two of cans. A really remarkable list of beers from all across Florida, augmented with a few choices from Maine and the Northeast. With a happy hour from 4-7pm knocking 25% off their beers, we frequented this place quite often. Fogarty’s. For their frozen drinks, of course. Overall, Key West is a drinking destination and not a craft beer destination. Since much of my time traveling is focused on finding great craft beer, I tend to view this trip and most others through a lens of “what do you have on tap?” Key West is really no better than the sports bar you or I have down the street, in that regard. ...

This is a rather long (at 53 minutes) video, but it has some fascinating bits of information about the heat shield deployed by the James Webb Space Telescope. This video focuses on how to precisely measure the dimensions of the heat shield, so that other scientists could model the properties of the shield in diffusing heat away from the delicate instruments in and on the telescope. Really cool tech used to take these measurements, including a laser with a spinning mirror that could blind you fairly quick. ...

Reporting from The Verge: In a joint effort, tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft announced Thursday morning that they have committed to building support for passwordless sign-in across all of the mobile, desktop, and browser platforms that they control in the coming year. … A passwordless login process will let users choose their phones as the main authentication device for apps, websites, and other digital services… … “For example, users can sign-in on a Google Chrome browser that’s running on Microsoft Windows—using a passkey on an Apple device.” ...

One solid weekend of biking in there. The rest…eh. For the long weekend of riding in April, I’ve embedded a YouTube video I cut together of the two days of riding. Scroll past the VeloViewer image to check that out. This was our first attempt at strapping the GoPro onto our bikes and capturing the adventure. Shot using a GoPro Hero 10. On the “do again” list I’ve got a GoPro handlebar mount, and on the “never do that again” list I’ve got the chest mount. I used none of the chest mount footage because, well, you would be looking at my handlebars for however many miles. A very boring viewpoint, and it did not capture the group spirit of the ride. ...

Work on improving the sunroom continues (haven’t yet written about this here!), which means my free hours are dedicated to construction and not getting out on the bike as much. Here’s hoping by the high-summer days of June this whole sunroom project is wrapped up and I can focus more on recreation. Did get in my first long outdoor ride for the year! Beautiful weather combine with rolling along in a group of friends from the Outdoor Club of South Jersey; it feels nice to be back out on the road, breathing in that fresh air. ...

Yesterday, I laid out some concerns with Apple’s App Store model. Here’s a suggestion for how Apple could improve and tackle those challenges: The iOS App Store is reduced to a curated experience of 20,000 apps or less. Sideloading apps is allowed. Optional: Apple sells an “App Platform as a Service” that handles distribution, hosting of app binaries, etc. Curation for the Best By reducing Apple’s iOS App Store to ~20k apps, consumers who visit it know they are getting the best of the best. Think Trader Joe’s-level product selection and curation. ...

While not a brand new story by any stretch, the idea that Apple should open up the iOS computing platform has been constantly simmering in my Twitter feed and across my RSS unread queue. I wanted to take a crack at putting down some thoughts. The impetus to my post here was this post titled “On Sideloading on iPhone — It’s OK, I’m Changing My Mind” by @numericcitizen: ...