This time Federico and Myke talk about Speedrunning and how they feel about finishing games. Federico also comes to some startling discoveries.
If you’ve ever felt bad about your videogame backlog, this episode of Virtual is for you. Get the episode here.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about web automation and whether I should keep investing time and money into IFTTT and Zapier when I can’t seem to find problems that need to be fixed. For years, I fiddled with web automation, recipes, and connecting services together, but I’ve never really relied on web automation and I feel like I experimented with it because I liked the idea on principle.
A few months ago, I wrote about trying to capture pieces of text via extensions and merging them in a single note. Given the lack of an iOS 8 extension capable of directly appending text to an existing note, I ended up using NoteBox, which worked well.
Today’s 4.1 update to Drafts contains, among a plethora of fixes and improvements, operations for drafts, which include a Merge mode. This enables me to go back to a single note-taking app on my devices as Drafts can now handle capturing text through the extension and merging of notes.
A fantastic point in an editorial by Jason Snell for iMore:
There are plenty of other examples of Apple’s corporate culture and accepting the inevitability of change. I admire the way the company introduced the iPad with no fear about the possibility that it would cannibalize Mac sales. This was a lesson I learned during the early days of the web, when I was working for media companies focused on print: If you resist change out of fear that you’ll cannibalize your existing business, all you’ll be doing is allowing someone else to cannibalize your business instead of doing it yourself.
Apple announced today that Photos for Mac, first showcased last year, will be included in Yosemite’s 10.10.3 update set to be released later this Spring. As previously explained, Photos for Mac will sync with iCloud Photo Library and replace iPhoto as the single place where users will be able to browse, organize, edit, and share their photos.
A few months ago, I took all my photos and put them into iCloud Photo Library. I’m talking about almost 9 years of photos stored in iCloud. The service (which costs me €0.99/month as everything is under 20 GB) has been working extremely well for me. Photos are available on all my devices and I like that I can take pictures on my phone, come home, and find everything on my iPad when I sit down.
I’m curious to see how Photos for Mac will integrate with the rest of the ecosystem and if performance will keep up. In the meantime, you can read hands-on impressions at The Verge, Re/Code, and Wired.
To celebrate the show’s silver anniversary, the boys talk about Stephen’s shownote museum, Myke’s Mac Pro and Federico’s iPad Air 2.
This week’s Connected includes a discussion about Microsoft’s Outlook app for iOS and an addendum to my iPad story from yesterday. You can listen to the episode here.
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Tapbots announced today that Tweetbot 2.0 for Mac will be released on Yosemite and it’ll be a free update for existing customers.
Tweetbot for Yosemite has been more work than anticipated, but it is coming…and yes, it will be a free update! http://t.co/HOQI4fSdsO
— Tweetbot by Tapbots (@tweetbot) February 4, 2015
My preference on iOS these days may go to Twitter’s official app, but, on the desktop, Twitter for Mac is in a very sad state, whereas Tweetbot is a great client with tons of handy features. I’m curious to see if Tapbots will manage to add support for modern Twitter features, but, overall, the visual refresh is already looking good. Considering that it’ll be a free update, you can buy the app today from the Mac App Store, get your Twitter token in, and wait for the new version to launch.
olloclip 4-in-1 Pocket-Sized Lens Kit for iPhone 6
For convenience and high-quality results, it was hard to beat the Olloclip accessory lenses for the iPhones 4 through 5s. The 4-in–1 model was especially good, cleaning up a lot of the optical aberrations of the earlier models.
Then came the iPhone 6, in regular and plus sizes, and your old Olloclip was suddenly useless.
The Olloclip is a widget that slides over the corner of the phone and places a wide-angle, fisheye or close-up macro lens over the iPhone’s camera. The new iPhones’ design meant that the old Olloclips wouldn’t fit. But did the folks from Olloclip just pull out a Dremel and cut a groove to let the old model slip over the new iPhone’s sticky-out lens?
Of course not. They came up with a whole new design, a design that’s bigger, but which adds support for the front selfie camera. So how does it compare?
Last week, I came across Kyle Vanhemert’s story for Wired about the iPad and pondered, with a bit of fascination and surprise, his conclusion that “nobody knows what the iPad is good for anymore”. In particular, two arguments from the piece stood out to me.
First, Vanhemert argues that iPhone software is unequivocally superior to iPad apps:
An iPad might still be the best option for idly surfing around the web. But if you want to look something up, the iPhone has a huge advantage: It’s right there in your pocket. Today’s iPhones are arguably better than the iPad for reading news and ebooks; they’ve got nice big screens but you can still hold them with one hand. iPhones are certainly better than iPads for taking and sharing photos, if not “enjoying” those photos, which isn’t really something people do anyway.
Then, he makes the case for MacBooks as portable devices that are more comfortable than iPads:
And while iPads are indeed easier to use than Macs in terms of the software they run, as physical devices to be held and manipulated, iPads are often more awkward. MacBooks effectively have built-in kickstands. They can balance on coffee tabs, laps, stomaches. They’re light enough that it isn’t burdensome to move them between these perches. By contrast, you always have to hold a tablet.
I don’t want to elaborate on the particulars of specific apps and use cases, but, in broad strokes, I disagree with the article’s overall assessment of iPads being better suited as “consumption” devices.1 While I see some good points in parts of the article’s thesis – that Apple has struggled to explain the iPad in many ways, for instance – the underlying characterization of the iPad experience strikes me as shortsighted and repetitive.
Therefore, three months after I bought an iPad Air 2 and three years into my iPad-as-a-computer experiment, I’d like to offer some thoughts on my current iPad setup and how the device has changed my computing habits.
Because not only do I know what the iPad is good for in my life – the iPad Air 2 finally let me replace my aging MacBook Air as my main computer.
