This is starting to wander deep into sheer QA incompetence territory, and I’m seriously wondering whether I’ll ever upgrade from Mojave at all.

SSH might not be something Apple sees as being essential to most of its user base, but it’s likely the most critical tool for anyone who uses a terminal these days. And they’ve broken it somehow.

How can I trust any of the rest?

A good summary of the reasons why I prefer not to use Zoom at all (and only do it via a private mode web browser now).

This bit of news tickled my newfound interest in music (which has progressed steadily and deserves an update sometime soon).

Although I’ve been pondering using Ableton Live across Windows and macOS, I wouldn’t mind upgrading from GarageBand to Logic Pro X if the new version had promotional pricing…

Multi-user support for the iPad has been around for a while, and this is an excellent reminder that it is entirely feasible (but kneecapped) for consumers.

It’s a bit frustrating to think that in a perfect world, it would be seamlessly tied to Screen Time and Family Sharing and make parents’ lives a lot easier…

Not a surprise at this point, and actually looks pretty decent, even if it doesn’t have an Esc key (good thing we can remap Caps Lock now, right?).

The keyboard is a bit weird, though. I love the detail of placing an USB-C charging port into the hinge itself, but the mechanical aspects of turning the thing into a stand make it… interesting.

But it looks quite distinct from a Surface Pro, and I’m guessing that was part of the point.

I think it’s going to be massively appealing for regular users, but without software improvements that allow for such things as self-hosted development (a point that has been rising in prominence among the technical crowd as lower hanging fruit was fixed over the years), it’s not likely to really replace laptops for quite a few people.

And, lo and behold, we’re finally going to be able to use existing Apple mice and trackpads (at least the 2.0 revisions). That’s going to be interesting.

Update: Revision 1 mice and trackpads cannot use gestures, which is sad. I’m using a Microsoft Arc Mouse without any issues other than being unable to scroll horizontally.

I would love to get my hands on one of these. Even as the iPad’s UX pendulum starts swinging back towards being a “regular” computer, I still think there is untapped potential for taking better notes, especially on something with less distractions.

And, of course, using something with two weeks of battery life would be a dream.

The only thing missing for me is Pocket/Reading List integration, which I think would make a lot more sense than a Chrome plugin (browser plugins are effectively obsolete tech, and this approach feels like a misstep).

Not completely unexpected if you’ve been tracking npm as a company, and definitely a good thing in terms of continuity and workflow.

A bit worrying if you’re into conspiracy theories, granted, but at least now we can be reasonably certain that there will be susbtantial improvements in end-to-end security and transparency, even if JavaScript dependency management is still a dumpster fire.

Best take on this so far? Jessie Frazelle tweeted:

Great to see that npm will finally have some adult supervision!

This is somewhat uplifting amidst the downpour of bad news.

I read the initial leaks and was particularly interested in both the new watch features (blood oxygen monitoring is particularly interesting at this point) and “proper” mouse/trackpad support, but missed the mentions of PencilKit and handwritten input in standard text fields (which is something I already enjoy thanks to MyScript third-party keyboards and would love to keep using into the future).

Let’s hope they don’t bungle it like they did iOS 12 (and most of 13 so far).

This is sad, but it was definitely the right call.

And it is a postponement towards the end of November, not an outright cancellation. For those who have never heard of Pixels Camp, it is the largest and most popular Portuguese hackathon, and one of the few technology events that would lose a lot of impact by moving to an online-only model.

Current Situation

As I type this we have 31 39 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Portugal (all detected within one week), with 300 339 others in various stages of assessment, vigilance or preventive quarantine.

Most notably, the President of the Republic has self-quarantined.

Many of the above are in the northern part of the country (including at least one college campus from which hail many of the hundreds of students that travel to the event every year), and largely linked to trips to Italy (business travel there is common in that part of the country, which caters to fashion and shoe industries).

Both government and the medical establishment have been stepping up public awareness and preventive/reactive measures (field hospitals are already in place, some schools have been closed, etc.), but everything points to figures climbing steeply over the next few days and weeks, and there will certainly be criticism about delays in taking action.

Fortunately, we have a national health system that (mostly) works, doctors at key hospitals/medical faculties are openly sharing internal planning and awareness sessions on YouTube and there is an open debate about remote working and how the government will support people who have to be quarantined–which is a vastly different situation from, say, the United States.

Wash your hands, people. That is the best thing you can possibly do.

Guess what, I’m on a podcast. António Lopes challenged me and Carlos Morgado to go on the Um Sobre Zero podcast and talk (in Portuguese) about Artificial Intelligence, common use cases and current applications, with just enough real life stories to keep things spicy.

(You can listen to us on iTunes, Overcast or Spotify, and we’re not alone - this is the fourth episode so far, and there will be more coming…)

Time to get a second one. I have settled on the 3A+ as my go-to board while this was getting fixed (and still hope to see a variant with more RAM), but the Pi 4 I use as a lab is as fast (from a UX perspective) as a low-end Intel box, and I quite like it as a container build box.

I’m not using arm64 on it yet, hence thinking of getting a second one for trying out a 64 bit kernel and starting to move my ARM stuff across.

I don’t really need it (I can do multi-architecture builds in the cloud already), but I think it’s time to think about setting one of these up as a thin client (and possibly get a new ultrawide monitor for it).

Everyone is going ballistic about this being “soon”, but if you consider the typical 5-7 year hardware development cycle Apple seems to be on lately, it’s pretty much right on the dot.

I’m curious as to the migration/cutoff strategy this time around. Windows on ARM provides an emulation layer, and Apple did the same before, but what if they just make it mandatory for developers to use bitcode on the Mac App Store?

Either way, I hope this means we get a new 12” MacBook. I absolutely love that form factor.

While we’re on a nostalgia trip, this bears mentioning: a brand new, under development, NeXT-like desktop environment for Linux.

It’s based on CentOS (which is sad, since it severely limits the amount of people who can take immediate advantage of it and makes it a pain to, for instance, port it to the Raspberry Pi), but is nevertheless remarkable–I miss the NeXT UX (and its brutalist aesthetic), and would love to see a modern Linux desktop based on it.

Worth revisiting in a year or so.

This is the second installment in John Siracusa’s Mac app development saga, now that he’s focused on bringing back selected portions of the “quintessential” Mac experience to today’s machines.

As usual, you can expect it to have been painstakingly polished to a micrometer of UX tolerance–and then some.

I used to attend this back in the day, and even though it devolved fairly quickly into a semi-random technology showcase after smartphones took over, it is still a landmark event.

But I think they made the right call, regardless of industry impact (and Marketing budgets). Some things are not to be trifled with.

I haven’t used Editorial in a while (although I initially wrote a bunch of workflows to aid my writing, I eventually decided to go back to non-scriptable editors), but I am very worried about Pythonista’s future, for two reasons:

The first is that my eldest kid pretty much lives inside it and has coded various apps, many using the bindings to UIView and the like.

He’s even ported bits of Tk across to do UI layouts, and it would be terrible to lose the one programming environment he really likes (Codea is nice too, but there is nothing else that even comes astronomically close in terms of “native”-ish Python development).

The second is that Pythonista is utterly unique in so many regards. It is an unstated masterpiece, and (at least in my view) pushed the envelope of what it is actually possible to do on an iPad beyond anything anyone else (even Apple) has done, so I really it needs to be future-proofed somehow.

I don’t think open sourcing it would be enough - there would have to be a team willing to keep it going, and even though I’d certainly roll up my sleeves and contribute (there are a few libraries I’d like to port over, for instance), Ole Zorn would still have to find a way to get actual income from it.

Apple, in particular, should take note. Swift Playgrounds were cute to begin with, but none of my kids used them after the first couple of weeks because they are too limited to do anything remotely useful, and this pushes forward the notion that the platform itself is, if not borderline hostile to developers, at least fundamentally unsuited for programming in general, even at the most basic levels.

“Beating” the Swiss watch industry, apparently.

This is interesting, but to be fair, the Swiss might not be that good a reference given the way precision manufacturing works these days, so let’s assume we’re talking about the premium watch tier.

Will need to investigate further, but it’s kind of weird that traditional watch manufacturers haven’t yet come up with competing products (yes, there are some, but tradition carries so much weight that they don’t really hold a candle to what the Watch can do).

And I wonder what Swatch is doing. They would be the perfect company to tackle fitness wearables in terms of both hardware and trust on how your health data is processed (which is the biggest gripe I have about things like the Xiaomi Mi Band).

And yet, after a full decade, it is still nigh on impossible to use an iPad for self-hosted development of anything but JavaScript. Pythonista, Codea and the like are amazing, but for me the lack of a shell (and a UNIX userland, even if sandboxed) is something I just can’t quite get over.

(As an example, I spent last evening compiling Janet inside the emulated x86 environment provided by iSH because I would really like to run some things locally instead of on a Raspberry Pi sidecar…)

Chris McCormick did a great presentation on piku at linux.conf.au 2020–and it’s jam-packed with working demos, which is always fun to watch.

Also, gotta love that tagline.