Day one of holiday break. Starts with not sleeping in, because the kids aren’t on break til Saturday. Then a home energy assessment mid-morning. No one knows excitement like y’boy right here.
Stumbled over this past gem doing a web search for something totally unrelated today… Run Your Business So You’ll Never Need Layoffs from Harvard Business Review.
This piano has been our family for a while. My mother’s grandparents bought it for her and her sister when they were children.
1987’s “It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown” doesn’t get the respect it, and its jazz fusion sound track, deserve.
You could make worse decisions on your lunch break than typing “The Chicken” into your streaming service of choice and listening to every version back to back. Some of my fav versions: Maceo Parker, Dave Weckl, Jaco Pastorius.
Sunday morning: fried egg on toasted sourdough. Tomatoes, fried onions, tomato, jalapeño, parsley and chive, American cheese, side of spicy kim chi. Black tea with ginger. On the speakers: Morning Dew 5/8/77.
I wonder how much of my day is spent waiting for Mural to load. I also wonder if it’s my corp’s SSO, or a mediocre Electron app that’s to blame.
Nice piece on “Post on your own site syndicate everywhere” which includes featuring micro.blog which is my tool of choice — a little surprised to see it on The Verge, to be honest.
Broken
I’ve said it before, the Republican Party is completely broken. To get America functioning there is a not-simple formula—if there was simple formula it would have been fixed by now.
First split the GOP into two: moderates and extremists. The Democrats should probably also do this, moderates and Justice Democrats.
Each state should be un-gerrymandered, and only neutral parties should redraw congressional lines. Lastly every state should implement Rank-choice Voting.
It wouldn’t hurt to update the Voting Rights Act, to keep state legislatures from suppressing voters they disagree with.
It dawned on me this morning that since 2007 when I joined Twitter I would have turned to that frequently during the day to keep up with the latest. But since the Musk takeover, it didn’t even occur to me to open that app for reliable updates. Such a loss.
“We can’t even agree on the leader of our majority in the House of Representatives, but you should absolutely trust our party to run the executive in 2024. Especially with our candidate who is currently facing major indictments across the country.”
This Russian Family Lived Alone in the Siberian Wilderness for 40 Years, Unaware of World War II or the Moon Landing smithsonianmag.com
In 1978, Soviet geologists stumbled upon a family of five in the taiga. They had been cut off from almost all human contact since fleeing religious persecution in 1936
I don’t know why, but I am always draw to stories like these.
WatchOS 10 Timer app Feedback
Apple’s feedback form has a character limit. My feedback on the watchOS 10 Timer app was triple the limit. So I am making this into a blog post instead. As a software designer, I can attest this is not an effective way of providing feedback. Since I have to edit this down by 2/3rds, I will try to make it more effective. But for my blog audience, you get my unedited emotion. Apologies in advance.
It took 9 revisions to get a decent Timer app in the Apple Watch. What happened in version 10? I myself design software for a living, so I am incredibly hesitant to write messages like these. I understand the challenges behind the scenes—unseen by users—that some times cause changes that are sub optimal. But in this case, I cannot recall a time when a new Apple product was released that took such a massive step backwards in usability.
Every time I visit the app the only visible timers are shown to me randomly, because they are arranged by most recently used. For people who set timers frequently, this essentially means I have to learn the layout every time I open the app.
In watchOS 9, I could designate “favorite” timers. This finally made the app useful. Why did you take it away? My timer I use most frequently could always be at the top! This is good! Why remove the feature?
Siri can name a timer. This is important, especially when cooking and setting multiple timers that run simultaneously. But the app doesn’t allow you to name a timer. I don’t always want to use my voice—what if I am cooking breakfast while on a call for work? Should I announce to my call “Siri set a 4 minute 15 second tea timer”?
Just bringing back the watchOS 9 app would be an instant improvement. But really—it’s a watch. Do better. — I know this isn’t a headliner app, but do you actually usability test major changes like these? If not, you should. You have enough employees to have under NDA to do this even before the public beta. I recall the Safari UI debacle of a few years back. Did you not have a retrospective after that to improve your process?
I am not the only one that noticed. Noted Apple developer Craig Hockenberry published a blog post about the Timer debacle, from a different standpoint.
Please don’t make us wait for a year for fixes to this core element of the Watch for your millions of daily users. Thank you.
A real shame to lose Molly Holzschlag at only 60. Made a real impact on the development of the modern web.