✉️ Double Tap

The macOS, iOS, and iPadOS betas are... good!

Jul 11

Okay, after much internal debate, I now have the latest builds of macOS, iOS, and iPadOS running on most of my machines. And I’m… happy? Happy to confirm that they all seem to be generally stable releases, yes. But more so, they’re also just good.

Sure, there aren’t a ton of new features for any of the releases. It’s more like new coats of paint for each (I include widgets in this category, as they existed before on iOS, they just look better now, and yes, you can put them anywhere) operating system. But they also just feel snappy and fresh. Again, even in the early beta stages. They’re nice. I enjoy using each of them more than I enjoyed using their predecessors.

I should caveat that yes, there are some bugs. Twitter in particular seems problematic on iOS/iPadOS. But these are minor nits. I just don’t want you to upgrade thinking these are fully polished. There’s some work to do, but they feel reasonably close.

By far my favorite feature of iOS is one I thought I might love: Settings -> Accessibility -> Touch -> Back Tap. Basically, you can set actions which are triggered by double- tapping and/or triple-tapping the back of the iPhone. It’s brilliant. So brilliant that this feels like one of those things that is going to be a standard setting in future iOS releases. The options seem mildly limited, until you realize you can use Shortcuts with it as well to do basically anything.

Personally, I have double-tap set to ‘Speak Screen’ — an old “hack” of mine for reading on the move. And I have triple-tap set to Siri. Yeah, I’ll probably change this to Google Assistant, but I keep holding out hope that Siri will miraculously be better one of these days. See, I couldn’t be fully positive here.

5ish

🛍 Microsoft’s “New Approach” to Retail

Which means *quitting* retail and taking a ~$500M write-down

📰 All the News That's Fit To Aggregate

The New York Times pulls out of Apple News

👨🏻 Being Charlie Kaufman

"Studios ruined movies, and that's the truth..."

⚽️ Premier League+

The network/cable and streaming overseas hybrid model

🤳 Don't Tell, Don't Show

The unbearable lightness of using Instagram in quarantine

Asides

The early benchmarks for the dev kit ARM Mac mini are unsurprisingly good. And this is a completely unoptimized, one generation old chip, mind you. 🖥
Meanwhile, those 5G iPhones may be coming a bit later than usual this year… October? November? 📲
If Apple jumped off a bridge, would Samsung? The answer is likely yes. 🔌
Holy shit, Ready Player Two is real and coming in November! 🎮
Speaking of blasts from the past, The Far Side is back too! With Gary Larson using digital tablets! 🎨
Do you like beer? Might I interest you in four new Fort Point Beer beers? I mean, just look at these beautiful cans. 🍺
It’s hard to imagine going back to a movie theater any time soon. So Tribeca imagined teaming up with Walmart to do drive-in movies in their massive parking lots. Brilliant. 📽
I’m a sucker for all retro gaming, of course. But I’m even more of one if you make it a mini arcade cabinet as Sega is doing. 🕹
Steven Levy sat down with Larry Brilliant for an update on how he things the COVID-19 battle is going. Hint: not well. 🦠
From Steve Jobs to Marvin Minsky to Yo-Yo Ma to Bill Nye to Mount Everest to Larry Page, Michael Hawley had quite the incredible life. Ended far too soon. 😔