For the past few years I have decided to play it safe and wait for a couple of months for new iOS releases to settle in before updating. This year however, I decided to live on the wild side and upgraded on release day.
Well, I paid the price for installing what is essentially beta software on my phone. Somehow when arranging home screen widgets, the springboard application managed to loose all knowledge of the folders I had created, and the applications I had placed into them - a system I had been building up and had carried over from my iPhone 5 when I switched back from Android in 2012.
I happened to be screen recoding at the time. In the video below, keep an eye on the number of home screens (the dots at the bottom) - watch them change from three to fifteen as all of my carefully curated folders are lost.
I could have restored my device from a backup, I didn’t like the thought of having to reauthorise all my Apple Pay cards and wait for hours while my phone sat there restoring (I’d also loose a day’s worth of messages and photos). In the end, I’ve decided to fully embrace iOS 14’s new App Library system, placing a few frequently used apps on the home screen and letting the system sort the other apps into folders for me.
Bugs happen, and while this is technically a data loss bug, the data isn’t that critical. The world’s most valuable company, with all its piles of cash, releasing its software in such a poor state has just served to reenforce the fact that when it comes to software (and possibly products in general), money alone cannot buy success. People and processes are what make successful software. In Apple’s case, I suspect the release date was decided not by engineers, but by the marketing division.
If you own an Apple Watch, I highly recommend turning off the “Notifications Indicator” - the red dot at the top of the screen that indicates something is waiting for your attention. For me, it was an itch I just had to scratch. With it turned off, I am less likely to be distracted when simply checking the time, and therefore more in the moment, and far less stressed. This recommendation of course goes along with the most important piece of advice for Apple Watch users: turn off notifications on the watch for every app except the ones you really care about. For me, this means I mainly have messaging, fitness and authenticator apps going to the watch. Games, Netflix, social networks, and especially news alerts are diverted to my phone (in fact I might just turn off news alerts altogether!). The notifications indicator can be turned off from the Apple Watch app on your iPhone under “Clock Settings”.
When you do the maths, it turns out a man in his 30s has a higher chance of developing a long-term illness than someone in their 60s does of dying.
Now the math: When you multiply the hospitalization rate for 30-something men (about 1.2 percent) by the chronic-illness rate of hospitalized patients (almost 90 percent), you get about 1 percent. That means a guy my age has one-in-100 chance of developing a long-term illness after contracting COVID-19. For context, the estimated infection-fatality rate for somebody in their 60s is 0.7 percent
Back at the end of February I decided I needed to get a pair of over the ear headphones for the office. (Little did I know I’d have only about another 3 weeks left in the office until my recent return at the end of August.)
I originally had my sights (sounds?) set on the Sony WH-1000XM3. These are often considered best noise cancelling headphones on the market - and noise cancellation is what I was after. Office life can be full of interesting distractions, but nothing beats putting on some Radiohead and getting lost in your work for a couple of hours. My AirPods were great, but over-the-ear headphones are even better for really blocking the outside world and being able to focus.
Moments before hitting the trigger on the buy button, I remembered that Apple owns Beats, and that means that newer Beats headphones have the same H1 chip founds in the AirPods Pro - this in turn means seamless pairing with all the Apple devices I own, the ability for new messages to be read out automatically, and handsfree use of ‘Hey Siri’. At the last moment, I changed my mind and went for the Beats Solo Pro instead. At the same price, most reviews has reassured me that the sound was actually pretty decent, unlike previous generations of Beats (which I ended up returning because of this).
First impressions were great. The sound is indeed very good - not as good as the AirPods Pro, but still extremely enjoyable and seemingly optimised more for music than for podcasts or phone calls. Comfort-wise, they can be a bit hot and because unlike the Sony WH-1000XM3 they are on ear not over ear, but are fine for wearing for a couple of hours at a time, but certainly not all day.
So far, so good. Until I took them outside during my government mandated daily lockdown exercise. It turns out that both transparency and noise cancellation modes are pretty much unusable outside due to the fact that even the smallest, most minor breeze will be picked up by the onboard microphone and amplified right into your ears. Imagine someone blowing into a microphone and that’s what it sounds like. While this obviously won’t be a problem in the office, I can imagine a lot of people buying these for use outside - and they will likely be disappointed.
So while the H1 chip and integration with all of my Apple devices is excellent, the sound really punches, they look decent and are OK-ish on the comfort side - this one issue makes me wish I’d gone for the Sonys instead.
This a just a brief review to highlight the issue of wind effecting the Beats Solo Pro. For a more rounded review, I highly recommend this YouTube video.
Update: August 2023
After nearly three years (1,051 days to be exact) the headband snapped, and the Beats went in the bin. A few months later I replaced them with the Sony WH-1000XM5s. The sound quality is remarkably better and make the beats sound awful with the benefit of hindsight.
In a strange move for a Conservative government, it was announced recently that workers will actively be encouraged to return to the office in order to help businesses such as coffee shops, who rely on the custom of office workers. I use the word ‘strange’ because asking the population to behave in a certain way in order to support part of the economy seems like the beginning of a planned economy – the antithesis of free market conservatism - proving it’s not the panacea they often claim. In addition, many local independent shops have actually enjoyed a boost due to people staying at home in places that would usually be deserted during the day.
I recently broke my streak of 115 days of home working and returned to the office for the first time since March. I eagerly anticipated not having to use Microsoft Teams video calls and seeing my colleagues for the first time in person. No more would I have to endure delay, frozen screens, and overhearing partners taking meetings with their own colleagues. I was granted the pleasure of instant conversation without the awkward fumbling of headsets and the repeated ‘Can you hear me now?’ punctuating every call. I thoroughly enjoyed casual chat and felt my wellbeing improve instantly. With a limited number of people allowed in the office, it felt different to the warm buzz that would usually emanate beneath rows of monitors, but it was still hugely valuable.
Working from home has it benefits too. The lack of a long commute meant more exercise, extra pocket money and less road rage. I was able to focus more on completing tasks and I no longer had the regular 10 minute coffee and chat break in the kitchen. You could argue that in knowledge work, taking your mind off the task at hand can actually reap massive rewards, so maybe having a balance between the productivity of home work and the creative head space of office work is probably the way forward.
Whilst for many the future of work will be remote, I believe there will always be a need for a common shared office space. Whether it be a the feeling of awe we get when entering a well designed, bustling office, the motivational speech given by a company leader, the wearing of corporate ID lanyards, or just having lunch with colleagues – these are quasi-religious behaviours that are deep-seated in human history and enforce a sense of ‘togetherness’ that is essential for productive teamwork. That said, some peace and quiet is also important – so my ideal split would be something like 3 days a week at home, and 2 days in the office.
Maybe the government doesn’t need to encourage the complete return to office work quite so earnestly. Maybe those that can remotely work should be given a choice to find the balance that works best for them.
A change discovered in iOS 14 and macOS 11 betas this week suggests that Apple is hoping to quietly hijack and redirect users into its paid Apple News+ service
From various comments I’ve heard of Apple News+, one of the most frustrating aspects of the service is that even after subscribing, when you click a link on the web that’s behind a paywall, but is from a publisher you have access to as part of your Apple News+ subscription, you are still locked out from reading it. The only way to read the article that you’ve paid to access is to search for it within the Apple News app. I’m pretty sure Apple are simply addressing this flaw in the design and common user complaint. If you don’t pay for Apple News, and haven’t started a free trial, this won’t effect you.
So no grand plan, no ‘power move’, and certainly no attempt to ‘hijack’.
That said, I think iOS should have an option to stop all web (http) links launching apps altogether - not just Apple News. I’ve uninstalled apps such as The Guardian because I was fed up of web links opening in the app. Apple already has an elegant way to show you that an app you have installed can be used instead of the web - “Smart App Banners”. One extra tap isn’t really a big deal and would’ve caused less uproar in the case of Apple News+.
Smart App Banners prompt users to install or open a website’s app, and once the app is launched, users are shown the same context within the app.
Another day, another news story about Apple’s App Store policies. This time, it is Microsoft complaining about the fact Apple’s rules mean Xbox Game Pass cannot be made be available on the iPhone or iPad.
While I can see the argument that Xbox Game Pass is simply Netflix for games, as I see it, the key difference is that games are software and videos are content. If Apple allow software to be streamed in the store, could this, in theory, open the floodgates to other developers whose motivations might not be as sincere as Microsoft’s?
Apple already has a struggle on its hands to encourage big application makers to build high quality, native applications for its platforms. Many apps that need a presence on both Android and iOS use some kind of intermediate framework that makes the app cheaper to develop, as there’s only one codebase with minimal changes for each operating system. This usually comes at the expense of usability and inability to take advantage of platform specific features. You can usually tell when this is the case, as the resulting apps often won’t feel quite right - if you’re looking for an example, then maybe try your electricity company’s app (for some reason, utility companies seem to be ripe for this kind of cheaply made app).
Imagine if instead of building a cross platform app using one of these frameworks, there was an even cheaper option - build an app that runs in the cloud. It’s the ultimate option for companies that just need an app with the most minimal expenditure. The user experience would be terrible - but many companies don’t care. Your £1,000+ iPhone would be acting as a thin client.
So while I think streaming makes sense for games (I can’t wait to play Flight Simulator 2020 and streaming it over Xbox Game Pass might be the only way I can, due to its stringent hardware requirements) - I can kind of understand Apple’s reluctance to allow software streaming, and making an exception for games seems kind of arbitrary. If Microsoft can stream games, why shouldn’t Adobe be allowed to stream their Creative Cloud applications?
Will the future of software be in the cloud, a future where we all use low-specification thin clients? We’re not there yet, and Apple’s investment in low powered CPU and GPU technologies, coupled with the fact they make their money selling premium hardware, tells me that they see a future where our computing power is in our pockets, not the cloud.
This is Cambridge University, though, in Silicon Fen, where there has been a department of computer science since 1937 (when it was called the Mathematical Laboratory), home of computing pioneer Alan Turing, home of one of the world’s earliest digital computers (EDSAC in 1949). It saw email evolve from a system called Phoenix in the early days to Hermes running on a Unix-based system from 1994.
It’s sad that the inevitable commoditisation of Internet services has to lead to this cost cutting exercise - a true piece of Internet history will be switched off. The trend towards centralisation of the Internet continues…
If you’re paying for something with your data, then that makes data a currency.
So it seems New Zealand is at it again when it comes to leadership on the world stage. The government has released an ‘algorithm charter’ that aims to tackle the lack of transparency and potential bias in automated systems.
This is a long time coming, and other countries need to pay attention.
Whilst the document is a great start, its language is somewhat vague and aspirational - perhaps intentionally so, given it is early days for this kind of scheme.
As AI and automated systems become evermore present in our daily lives, with the potential to decide your next job or even the next US president - I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect companies to be more transparent about how their AI works.
Just as we expect companies to file accounts and keep records, we should ask companies to answer a few basic questions about how their algorithms work. This will give consumers confidence that they’re not subject to unfair bias when decisions that affect them are made by AI.
To make AI more transparent, I’d ask companies for:
A high level description of the type of algorithms in use - most machine learning algorithms are not written from scratch - so just tell us for example whether the algorithm is a Logistic Regression or a Transformer Network etc.
The source of the data used to train the model - did the company collect it themselves, if so, where from? Or did they buy it from a 3rd party, if so, who, and where did they get it from?
The features used to train the model - knowing for example that ‘sex’ or ‘age’ are fed into the model would tell us where to look for potential bias.
The methods, and datasets used to validate their model’s effectiveness - this is critical - a company without a good validation strategy is obviously going to have unconscious bias in their systems.
I’ve picked the questions carefully as I think companies have a right to maintain their trade secrets. The data itself can remain secret, as should the various parameters and other specifics about the algorithm.
While I’m not expecting the average consumer to understand the different between machine learning algorithms and the consequences of different testing strategies, having this information in the public domain would enable journalists and the tech community to better hold big tech companies to account.
The privacy invasion is the result of the apps repeatedly reading any text that happens to reside in clipboards, which computers and other devices use to store data that has been cut or copied from things like password managers and email programs
I love that Apple have started to notify users when an app reads the clipboard without the user explicitly pressing ‘Paste’, however I worry that adding yet more warnings and notifications will result in users becoming fatigued and eventually ignoring them.
Instead, why not allow apps that need to store sensitive data on the clipboard (LastPass, for example) to set a specific data type indicating that the information should be classed as sensitive data - much like they can set the data type to text or image at the moment. In order to paste this “secure object”, users would have to press the system ‘Paste’ button - any app just reading the clipboard by itself would just see it as empty.
This of course wouldn’t solve for cases where data is not known to be sensitive - how many people store their passwords as a simple note instead of in a password manager, for example? Still, fewer notifications and stopping any app from reading passwords from the clipboard might be the right balance.
If you own an Apple Watch, I highly recommend turning off the “Notifications Indicator” - the red dot at the top of the screen that indicates something is waiting for your attention. For me, it was an itch I just had to scratch. With it turned off, I am less likely to be distracted when simply checking the time, and therefore more in the moment, and far less stressed. This recommendation of course goes along with the most important piece of advice for Apple Watch users: turn off notifications on the watch for every app except the ones you really care about. For me, this means I mainly have messaging, fitness and authenticator apps going to the watch. Games, Netflix, social networks, and especially news alerts are diverted to my phone (in fact I might just turn off news alerts altogether!). The notifications indicator can be turned off from the Apple Watch app on your iPhone under “Clock Settings”.
