Logitech Rugged Combo 3 Case With Integrated Smart Connector Keyboard For 10.2-inch Ipad

[Torcuato Agravante]

Milan Toth has created a little utility called High Sierra Media Key Enabler that restores the previous behavior, ensuring that the play/pause button always controls your music player of choice. Add it as a login item to make it start automatically, and consider using Bartender or Vanilla if you'd prefer to hide its icon from your menu bar.

At first I thought the triangular symbols for red and blue were too similar, but the ColorADD standard's logo (and Code page) demonstrates how they can be additively combined to create the symbol for the complementary color purple. Clever, and better than no symbol at all.

Take the distracting ColorADD logo off the back of each card, mention color blindness on the regular packaging, possibly de-emphasize or remove the symbols from the central oval of the Wild card (it's already visually distinct), run a bunch of usability tests, and I imagine this would be ready to become the new normal deck without taking anything away from the experience of non-color-blind users.

Unfortunate, but expected. Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode and background audio are two of YouTube Red's most convenient features on mobile, so it's unsurprising to see YouTube snuff out any third party apps that do the same without the subscription.

What I'll miss most is ProTube's implementation of video playback speed. The new YouTube app (finally) includes it, but requires 3 taps to activate and has to be manually turned on every time a new video loads. Even worse is that the audio becomes unpleasantly tinny, similar to the way sped-up YouTube videos sound when watched in Safari versus Chrome on macOS. My guess is that it's an OS-level HTML5 video playback issue that Google will hopefully encourage Apple to fix.

If you've ever tried to precisely crop an image in iOS' Photos app (to remove the top status bar and bottom nav bar out of a screenshot, for example) you may have bumped into this issue that Dr. Drang describes. The gist is that doing so using the draggable corners is nearly impossible without unintentionally zooming the image in slightly, messing up the crop. Thankfully there's a solution:

I should have added this to my iOS 11 wish list. The crop mode in the new quick-access UI that appears after you take a screenshot includes little indicators along the edges, but the UI within the Photos app still doesn't make that affordance clear.

The takeaway is clear; restoring trust requires each of us to create and encourage the conditions necessary to sustain it. Build lasting relationships. Find win-win outcomes. Communicate clearly and honestly. Amplify signals and ignore the noise. Do whatever you can to support the conditions necessary for trust to evolve and spread. That's how the game is won.

A comprehensive yet tightly-condensed piece by Benedict Evans that considers the potential societal and industrial effects of autonomous vehicles. A ton of ideas in here; car repair costs, electricity demand, insurance, bike safety, traffic and parking, road capacity, gas stations, buses, cities, car design, how it feels to commute, always-on movable cameras, and much more.

I visited the Microsoft Store a few days ago to see it in-person. Unfortunately they didn't have the new pen (according to the store rep they might come in on June 15th in time for launch, but June 30th is when they expect them to arrive, which is weird).

Marketing side note: I'm not at all impressed with the images on the preorder and product overview pages. Why on earth would someone on their marketing team use the same weird-looking bird not just once, but 12 times on those pages? Heck, every single image in the product carousel of the preorder page has the same dumb bird on it. Why? How?

Another marketing side note (can't help myself): shots of pen lag and screen jitter aside, the video for the new pen feels like it's trying too hard. Why is there sad piano music backing up this dialogue? Am I supposed to get emotional?

I've been using a budgeting app called YNAB (You Need A Budget) for a few years now. It was originally a desktop app with a barebones mobile client for adding purchases on the go, synchronized via Dropbox, and it worked pretty well. Their site is beginner-friendly and approachable, which I appreciated as a young college student figuring out how to keep track of my finances.

I used that native app combo until 5 weeks ago when I decided to move over to YNAB's relatively new web-based client and pay them a subscription fee. People found a lot to hate about their move to a SaaS (software as a service) business model rather than a one-time purchase, but I'm not mad about that. If I were a small team trying to juggle multiple codebases across multiple platforms, I would see the appeal in switching over to using web technologies and changing to a long-term business model instead. Paying them continuously will also, on paper, help them improve the app more quickly and confidently than they'd be able to otherwise, which I'm happy to support.

All that said, I was pretty disappointed to find myself completely unable to do my weekly checkup and re-balancing at basically any time today because of a large technical failure that brought the entire app down from roughly 10am to 7pm.

Before I go further, I should say that I'm not super angry and writing about YNAB's bad day out of spite - the webapp is still barely a year old, technical issues happen even with native apps, and the engineers at YNAB definitely had a far worse start to their weekend than I did.

At this very moment we've pulled the YNAB website into the shop to do some maintenance and improvements. You can check YNAB's status page for more detailed information. Either way, things should be back to (even better than) normal shortly.

Some users like Kelly in the tweets above seem to like the mixtape (I'll admit, I smirked too) and don't mind the app being down. I imagine the majority of YNAB's (probably younger) customers are okay with it too, or maybe just haven't noticed how long the outage has been going on for.

But if I were a small business owner trying to reconcile some important accounts or an employee trying to budget my latest paycheck (on the final Friday of the month) before kicking off a nice weekend with my family, I would probably see the cheekiness of this error message and take it as a cue to investigate my export options.

Unless your app or service is mostly for entertainment or inconsequential to a person's 9-5 productivity, overly-cutesy error messages should be reconsidered, even if they're "on brand" like YNAB's is. I give them credit for linking to their status page, but the text makes it sound like a good thing that their site is down. If they were updating the site at 4am EST with some new features or actual improvements then sure, this message could be appropriate. A message hinting that everything's dandy and some routine maintenance is going on that'll be over "shortly" feels a bit dishonest, especially after the first few hours.

Of course, Occam's razor says that this is just the default error message that's applied any time the site goes down, and that it's intentionally written to cover multiple scenarios (with a positive spin). I'm guilty of doing the same thing, because spending time on error page logic never feels worth doing until a failure occurs, at which point it becomes even less of a priority and gets forgotten until the next time something happens. YNAB is hardly alone in this regard, but YNAB's page feels particularly sugary sweet in today's context.

I write this not because I like to come off as a harda** who complains about happy mixtapes, but because it's a particularly salient example of the importance of copywriting and a brand's disposition unintentionally making things more sour than they need to be. I'm no angel, but if you strive to be one, dear reader, here's what I'd suggest keeping in mind:

The news, reviews and discussion from the gaming media in recent months make it seem like 1, 2, and 3 are well on their way to holding true. 1 is easy and is already hinted at in the Switch's settings. 2 and 3 we're already seeing the results of, and Nvidia's chip seems to be making it super easy for PC indies to bring their games over, particularly if they developed their games using Unreal Engine or Unity. 4, however, is always a coin toss, and yesterday's surprise resurrection of Friend Codes has the gamer crowd a bit worried. Nintendo still hasn't detailed exactly how the Switch's online services and account stuff will work and apparently didn't tell reviewers much of anything new on that front either. That's worrying, but who knows, the tick-tock of Nintendo's pendulum seems to be swinging in the right direction overall.

Second, despite Nintendo's advertising focusing on teenage and young adult gamers, whenever Minecraft hits I think kids are absolutely going to love the thing and buy it in droves, particularly if it has Netflix and other entertainment apps that kids using iPads often use. The iPad (particularly the mini) could start to hurt even more by the end of the year if Nintendo has its way.

Speaking of Apple, I can't help but wonder about what discussions are already beginning to happen behind closed doors. Apple rolled out the reddest, velvetiest carpet Nintendo could have asked for when they decided to make Super Mario Run (spot at the keynote, Apple Store demos, podcast, iOS exclusive at launch, App Store feature and never-before-seen notification system, etc.) and despite the decent sales I can't help but feel like Nintendo is at least somewhat disappointed by Mario Run's long-term revenue. Fire Emblem seems like it'll fare a bit better, and Pokmon GO was a big cash cow, but it's clear that Nintendo doesn't feel like bringing "full" games to iOS.

Does Apple actually understand that Super Mario Run is a Mario game in name and character only? Game Center and their weird policies around the Apple TV's remote indicate that they still don't really get it, but I suspect they'll start to get the picture if the Switch starts eating into their iPad sales. At that point discussions could either go very well - a Joy-Con adapter for iPads, Bluetooth compatibility with iOS, and maybe a partnership for bigger games in exchange for product hardware insight (Nintendo has been better at keeping secrets than Apple recently) - or really poorly - Apple making their own controller, Nintendo letting their iOS strategy lapse, and Apple courting indies and major publishers with big contracts.

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