This concept for an iPad Main Menu is a very well put together mockup, and it’s clear a lot of thought has gone into making it. This is a fantastic mock up, and this idea of a main menu is something I could see making iPadOS better than it already is.
I haven’t spent any time working on a counter proposal to this, but one thing I’d definitely want to test is a different way to bring up this menu. I worry that putting it in the dock, something that is out of sight when using the app might not be as discoverable for average users as we’d like. I might test having it at the top right of the screen and be accessible in conjunction with Control Center. Look at how much empty space there is in that view today:
I’d like to consider adding a “menu” indicator of some sort to the top right “menu bar” and piggybacking on this gesture people already know from their iPhone and iPad already. It might be a little weird to combine system settings and app settings in one view, but I like the idea of using a gesture people already know to maximize discoverability of a new feature as substantial as this.
Again, I haven’t had time to mock this up, so this is just me thinking out loud. I may find time to do that later this week, but in the meantime, kudos to Alexander Käßner for putting this mock up together!
What that means, during this pandemic: Trump says we’ve got plenty of tests available, when we don’t. He declares that Google is building a comprehensive drive-thru testing website, when it isn’t. He sends a Navy hospital ship to New York and it proves little more than an excuse for a campaign commercial, arriving and sitting almost empty in the Hudson. A New York hospital executive calls it a joke.
And:
Faced with a historic public health crisis, Trump could have assembled a first-rate company of disaster preparedness experts. Instead he gave the job to his son-in-law, a man-child of breathtaking vapidity.
And:
Trump is genuinely afraid to lead. He can’t bring himself to make robust use of the Defense Production Act, because the buck would stop with him. (To this day, he insists states should be acquiring their own ventilators.) When asked about delays in testing, he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” During Friday’s news conference, he added the tests “we inherited were “broken, were obsolete,” when this form of coronavirus didn’t even exist under his predecessor. This sounds an awful lot like one of the three sentences that Homer Simpson swears will get you through life: “It was like that when I got here.”
Donald Trump talks it up like he inherited the country in the worst state the United States has ever been in. He blames every single thing on other people, never taking responsibility for anything. Ask him how he’d grade himself on anything he’s done and he’ll tell you “A+” or “10/10”.
This guy has enjoyed a cushy time in office and inherited a growing economy and cratering unemployment. He took on a healthcare system that was far from perfect, but was moving in the right direction after the last administration made some of the best reforms to healthcare in a generation (my wife, for example, could likely not even get insurance at all today were it not for the ACA). He took over when the international community generally looked at the US as a leader in the world.
He’s spent his time in office balling crisis after crisis of his own making. The economy continued to grow at the same rate as it had for years before, and unemployment, a metric he thought was dumb in the Obama years suddenly became proof of his clever leadership. He provoked our enemies and then basked in the glory of not having them nuke us or our allies in retaliation.
And he did all this while getting impeached for requesting help from a foreign government in an election…literally right after a massive dump of information about doing just that in the last election.
He’s a man-child who still brags about his “historic” (i.e. middling) electoral college victory and hypes up his own sub-50% approval rate. He has done nothing to even remotely try and unite the country, and even in the current crisis, has proven to be a divider, not a uniter.
He hates the press, and finds even basic challenges to his apparent “A+” work as “nasty questions” and blurts out “fake news” like a sniveling child who thinks he can control what is real.
He is surrounded by a party of cowards who won’t stand up to him and he’s dragged them into the muck with him.
He is am embarrassment to himself, he’s an embarrassment to the office, he’s an embarrassment to the world.
The COVID-19 crisis is the first genuine large-scale crisis he’s had to deal with as President, and he’s of course blowing it. He denied it was a thing for months, decrying it “shut down” on February 2. In late February he said we would be down to zero cases in a matter of days. Now he says it will be a major success if we can only have 200,000 Americans die of this disease. And of course, because he’s a chronic liar, he now says he called it a pandemic long before anyone else. And when his CDC advises people to wear masks when going out in some public places, Trump undermines them by saying it’s optional and he won’t be doing it. You know, because he’s a big strong man, or something.
When this whole thing is over, and god knows when that will be, the President will have blood on his hands, and I am sure he won’t take any responsibility, nor will his party level the slightest criticism of his performance. He’s a historically bad president, and he’s a reprehensible human being. You may be reading this and think I’m being too hard on him or suggest that “I don’t know what’s in his heart,” but I would contend that this man has shown us exactly what he is about. The presidency accentuates all of your characteristics, both good and bad, and the guy in the office right now is proving that all too well.
The Logitech MX Keys is my current favorite desktop keyboard, and it's a brilliant keyboard for me during the great work from home adventure of 2020. Even if you're switching between a Mac and an iPad in your normal day-to-day, this is a great keyboard.
Compatibility
The MX Keys works great with macOS, Windows, and iPadOS, and acts like a first class citizen on each platform. The modifier keys are all printed with Mac and Windows symbols, so pairing with either system is intuitive, and the special function buttons at the top right for taking screenshots, opening the calculator, and locking the screen all do exactly what you'd expect on each platform.
Logitech makes this multi-device support a breeze too, as you can have it paired with up to 3 devices at once. It will only connect to one at a time, but you can toggle between your devices in literally a second by using the 1, 2, and 3 buttons on the top of the keyboard. The change takes no time at all, and it's really a matter of how quickly your new device sees the new Bluetooth signal, which for me has been a second or less almost every time.
My current working situation has me at home and I'm using the same monitor for work as I am for my gaming PC. So at night my keyboard is paired with a Windows computer and does all the Windows things you'd expect, and then I work in the morning and all I have to do is tap the "2" button to switch to my Mac and I'm immediately switched over and all the keys work like they should on a Mac. At the end of the work day, just press "1" and I'm back to the PC.
Feel and Layout
Alright, this is not a mechanical keyboard, nor will it trick you into thinking it's mechanical. That said, it feels quite nice to type on and there is more than enough key depth here. For context, the keys go down a little more than the Magic Keyboard. Apple's excellent Magic Keyboard has about 1mm of travel, and the MX Keys has 1.8mm, which is solid. Which you prefer will be a matter of taste, of course.
And these keys feel excellent! The keyboard is surprisingly heavy and acts as a solid base for these keys to plunk down into. They're less "sharp" than the Magic Keyboard, but I actually find that to be a little easier on my finger tips. The concave key caps were a concern going in, but I'm happy to report that they actually feel really nice and help me know where on each key I'm pressing so I can more easily find the center of each key. I just love it.
In terms of sound, it's a very quiet keyboard, so while I get a little tactile bump when I press a key, my office-mates (well, my one day office-mates) don't have to be bothered. This is a membrane keyboard, yes, but it's not a mushy one.
And the layout is pretty much just what you'd expect, which is a good thing. The only real complaint I have is that the top right of the keyboard is devoted to special function buttons. I made great use of the F13-19 keys on my Magic Keyboard using Keyboard Maestro, and I can't do the same thing with this keyboard. I lose F13-15 to the device switching buttons, and F16-19 turn into special functions.
Software
This is something that bothers a few people, but I like the Logi Options app, and it's what helps me make the keyboard (and mouse) behave more how I'd like. While I can't customize every key, I can change all of the function keys, as well as the 4 special action keys to do other things. You can change them to open specific applications or to simulate any keyboard combination you want.
I mapped mine to Ctrl+Opt+Cmd+Q and a few other letters which I then mapped to automations in Keyboard Maestro. This is a bit of a hack, and I suspect the vast majority of users will just stick with the default behavior, but I like that I had an easy-to-use UI to change these my way. I would love it if Logitech updated this app to let me map these to simply F16-19, but I doubt they'll do that.
Lights and Power
The MX Keys uses Bluetooth (awesome) and USB-C to charge (double awesome). You can also pair it via Logitech's classic(?) USB dongle if you'd prefer. As far as I can tell, it does not have a wired mode, and pluggin in the USB-C cable only charges it, it does not actually set up a wired connection to your computer. This is slightly frustrating for those times you need to press a button during boot up as this keyboard simply will not do.
If you use it unplugged, it will last for a couple weeks on a charge, which is actually very short. I have the backlight on and I get about 2 weeks of power out of it, so I have been charging it over the weekend. When the Magic Keyboard (which is what this replaced for me, if you were curious why it keeps being my reference point) lasts for months, this feels like a big downgrade.
The keyboard also has some sensors to turn the backlight on when you bring your hands towards the keyboard, and turn them off when you take your hands away. It's pretty clever, and is a way to save battery life, but my 2 week number is when using this power-saving feature. I have to think it's even shorter with it off.
Oh, and those backlights? They're fine. They are not RGB and just come in a nice white, and they immuninate the keyboard well. I don't know what else to say here, they're backlights that don't suck.
Buying Advice
The MX Keys is $99 which is objectively expensive for an accessory that comes for free with the computer you're using this with. But considering the nice key feel, great construction, good software integration, and easy device switching, it makes a really compelling case for that price tag.
And if you're looking for a good Mac keyboard, this $99 price tag isn't that crazy. The Magic Keyboard, which I've referenced all over this review, goes for $30-50 more than this, and mechanical offerings like the Keychron line are only $10-20 cheaper. From what I have used, this is the best balance of features, price, and delight.
Birch Bark has been going strong for 7 issues now, and I wanted to share another issue here to give everyone a better idea of what it entails since it's changed style a bit since launching in February. Head on over here if you'd like to see this in your inbox every Friday morning!
I'd never heard of Waxahatchee before, but after this record she is permanently on my radar. I get sort of Kacey Musgraves vibes from this, if that helps you get an idea of if you want to listen to this or not.
I've only seen 18 of these, and most of them are the newer ones, but this list was a nice reminder than indies can be so successful that we forget they were indies in the first place.
I never left RSS, even when all the cool kids were getting their news from Twitter (I think I won the long game on that one), and this article is a good primer on getting back into it in 2020. Only omission is that they didn't mention Inoreader, my favorite web reader and sync service.
I love hearing (reading) everything Bill Gates has to say these days. He's incredibly sharp, and communicates extremely well. Oh, and the advice in here is good too!
I got this keyboard from work, and fully expected to love it. After all, tons of YouTubers and tech bloggers out there seem to love it, so it had to be good, right? Well, it may be good for some people, but it's not the right keyboard for me. Here's why.
The Left
Things start out so promising on the left side of the keyboard. The bown and gray keys look fantastic, and the orange accent on the escape key is perfection. The function row also defaults to things like screen brightness, volume, and media controls, which this Mac fan likes. And the keys on this model are Gateron Yellows, which are not my favorite feeling (browns by a mile) but they are pretty decent.
So far so good.
The Middle
Then we get to the middle of the keyboard and things fall down a bit. The scrunched Command and Control keys are a bit annoying, but not the end of the world, but the space bar is a real chonker and takes a lot of effort to press down. I know these are yellow key switches and that may be expected, but I didn't love how this felt.
But still, nothing to kill it for me.
The Right
As is so often the case in my life, the right is where all things just go crazy ;)
I hate everything about this side of the keyboard. The killer here is the positioning of the arrow keys. They feel like every other key on the board and they are wedged in there so it's impossible to know where they are by touch, you need to just know. I don't want to think about my hand placement when it comes to arrowing around my computer, and this made me have to think and look down every time.
I also could not get on board with the placement of the delete key, the home/end layout, or the small zero on the number pad.
The Height
Which finally brings us to the wrist killer: the height of this keyboard. It sits so freaking high that I needed to get a tall wrist rest to type on it. I tend to prefer flatter keyboards and while I knew this was teller going in, my wrist pain tells me I either need to adapt to this or go back to something a lot shallower.
As you can see in the comparison above, by mechanical keyboard I use at home is just over half as high as this one and I find it way more comfortable to type on.
The Verdict
This keyboard may be perfect for some people, and that's totally fine by me. It's an $80 mechanical keyboard that looks nice, has good switches, is lit for dark rooms, comes in an RGB version (for $10 more), uses Bluetooth, and works great with a Mac. But sadly for me, the layout and height of this keyboard make it a no-go for me.
I sheepishly had to ask my IT department to let me return this one and get what I use at home: the Logitech MX Keys, which is definitively not a mechanical keyboard, but works so much better for what I like in a keyboard.
Before anything else, make a folder called "nytimes" inside your Shortcuts iCloud folder. Otherwise the shortcut will error out because it doesnt know where to save the file.
You can run this from the Shortcuts app, or you could run it from the home screen widget, or you could even set it up on an automation to run every day automatically. iOS still requires you to confirm you want it to happen, but it gives you a persistent notification on your iOS devices to make it happen.
What it Does
Downloads today’s front page of the New York Times
Saves the file to iCloud Drive (/Shortcuts/nytimes/2020-03-29.pdf, for example)
And that’s it…it’s pretty darn simple. My contribution was simply to make this a little cleaner and save the file named nicely with no usr input: simply tap the shortcut and it will be done in a second. Forgot if you ran it already today? No worries, just run it again and it will overwrite today’s PDF if it exists already.
Saving the file as a PDF takes up a little more space than the JPEG version in Brian’s version, but it also means you get high quality, indexable text you can use to find things at a later date. I don’t use Day One anymore, but I suspect the reason for the JPEG was because Day One doesn’t support PDFs for diary entries, but I’m not sure.
Bonus Shortcut
This one is embarrassingly hacky, but I used it to get all of the 2020 covers in one go.
If you know of a better way to do this, please let me know! Better yet, update it yourself and share it so more people can enjoy it.
UPDATE: Jimmy Little improved this version of the shortcut to return however many days of results you'd like. This is way better, so use it instead!Download here.
Ok, so this is a kinda vague request, but it’s something that’s bothered me more since I’ve adjusted my watch notifications while going through this COVID-19 mess. Let me try to explain…
Default Notification Behavior
All notifications are mirrored to your watch. This means that everything that buzzes your phone will now tap your wrist. Effectively, you will never feel your phone vibrate because your watch is doing it all for you.
I like this because it makes it so that when I’m wearing my watch, I have one place to get notifications, and when I take it off to charge, my phone seamlessly takes over.
Getting Watch and Phone out of Sync
In order to stay a little more disconnected, I’ve turned off watch notifications for a bunch of apps. Twitter notifications, for example, are not important enough to tap my wrist, but I still want to get them, so I show them on my phone.
The problem here is that now my watch taps me for some things and my phone buzzes for other things. This is not what I personally want, as this introduces two devices that are trying to get my attention.
What I Want
What I would love is for any app that I do not have sending notifications to my watch to switch to “deliver quietly” while I’m wearing my watch. Still send them to my phone and let me see them on the lock screen, but don’t buzz for each one. Then when I take off my watch, start buzzing for all notifications again.
I could accomplish this by making all the notifications I don’t put on my watch deliver quietly, but that’s a decent amount of up front effort and ultimately isn’t what I want all the time, so I don’t think it’s quite right.
This is not a fully formed idea, and there are surely complexities around this, not to mention people who like the current behavior just fine, but for me this is something that annoys me and I wish I could improve more easily.
I’ve been home more in the past 2 weeks than any point in my adult life, and in that time, I’ve come to appreciate the Apple Watch more than ever.
I love the activity tracking for helping me make sure I maintain a healthy amount of activity throughout the day.
I love the stand notifications, yes the stand notifications, for letting me know how much less I get up from my desk chair while working from home. Office work is not very aerobic, but apparently it’s a workout compared to sitting in one’s office all day.
I appreciate the breath notifications because yeah, despite being pretty darn calm most of the time, there have been a a few times these weeks where a couple minutes to collect my thoughts was a welcome reminder.
I love having weather on my wrist and being able to see a t a glance that “hey, it’s pretty nice out now, I should take a walk to get some air and maybe fill those rings.”
I love being able to partially disconnect from Twitter and the news more easily by leaving my phone in the bedroom while I go about other things around the house. If an important notification comes through, I get it on my wrist and can reply either right away or go get the phone if it’s going to be more than a quick reply.
I love being able to have a productivity-based watch face that I can look at at any time and see my next task in Things available if I just need a reminder of what I can work on next.
I love that if I don’t want to have all that productivity stuff front and center then I’m a simple swipe away from my numerals duo watch face that just tells me the time in the most beautiful digital numbers I’ve ever seen on a watch.
Maybe this isn’t fair, but I love seeing notifications of messages from friends and family on my watch. I know, they’re also on my phone, but there’s something about seeing them on my wrist that makes them feel more personal somehow. I can’t logically explain this one, but it’s a thing.
And as an odd thing, I of course enjoy seeing the time on my Series 5 model without raising my wrist. You can lose track of the day when you’re outside your normal rhythm and while many devices in my life have clocks on them, none as as readily accessible as the one on my wrist.
The currently world is a mess, and we don’t know when things will get back to normal. There are also so many things more important than a watch going on right now, from doctors, nurses, other medical professionals, scientists, couriers, mailmen/women, delivery drivers, grocers, pharmacists, police, firefighters, retail workers, and more all making sure that the world keep functioning. These people are doing more than my watch will ever do for me, but my niche is the Apple Watch, and even with all this going on, my appreciation for it continues to grow.
Ok, so let’s all agree not to make this post reach too far and wide and let the powers that be know about it, but if you ever wanted your work day to feel more like Animal Crossing and less like…well, normal work, this is just the ticket for you.
Animal Crossing New Horizons has 24 tracks of music that play throughout the day, one song per hour. My compilation plays all 24 tracks for 20-ish minutes each, clocking in at almost exactly 8 hours. Start this when you log on for the day and hopefully you’ll be wrapping up work as soon as it finishes.
The best flow seemed to be to start at the 6AM track, which feels very warm and welcoming, and concludes all the way around at 5AM with some very chill night time music to wrap up the day.
Download the 8 hour MP3 here (462 MB) and put it on in the background while you work. Just make sure to turn it off before jumping on a conference call.
And if you would prefer them as individual tracks in the music player of your choice, there is also a 24 track version you can download here (80 MB).
A quick update on backward compatibility – With all of the amazing games in PS4’s catalog, we’ve devoted significant efforts to enable our fans to play their favorites on PS5. We believe that the overwhelming majority of the 4,000+ PS4 titles will be playable on PS5.
The fact that PS5 will not have full backwards compatibility with PS4 games is a disappointment, even though I've seen some people express joy in this update. I'm sure most big games will still run, and that's great, but it feels like they should have done better here.
What's really disappointing is that as far as we know, there is zero PS1, PS2, or PS3 compatibility. With all this power at their disposal, emulating PS1 and PS2 games should be a breeze. The PS3 was notoriously complicated, but PCs are able to do this really well today, so it seems like it should be there too.
Sony has a remarkable collection of games on their 4 major consoles, and it's a shame that it currently looks like you will only be able to enjoy PS4 and 5 games on this new machine. Unleashing that libraary of games on the new console would make this The PlayStation and would help them get the gamers who want the new, as well as those who want to relive the classics. Maybe Sony has a summer announcement where they'll reveal expanded compatibility, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I should mention that PlayStation Now lets you play some PS2 and PS3 games, but only via streaming and it is only an average experience in my time with it.
