When my pal Scott and I finally released Bumpr last week, it was both a moment of pride and a great relief. As I mentioned in my launch post we had been working on it as a side project for years. It was the first collaboration he and I talked about after we sold our company Mixel way back in 2013. Mixel had been a big effort with big ambitions; we were both very proud of what we had done but its ultimate failure was exhausting. So we picked a tiny project just to get us back in the swing of things quickly. Cut to: four years later.
That’s the nature of side projects, though. Somtimes they come together very quickly, sometimes they trundle along aimlessly for many moons until they die quiet, unnoted deaths, and sometimes they manage to drag themselves across the finish line.
I was curious to know if another email app used paper airplanes to represent drafts before Apple Mail did. I went out Googling and found all manner of representations, usually employing the paper envelope, or another snail-mail related symbol. None of them, except mail, uses a paper airplane.
Starting Thursday, Apple Music launched a new user-driven promotional program on Twitter with the hashtag "#MusicForEveryMinute", promoted by student ambassadors who will be rewarded with an extra three months of free subscription.
In the last few years, and with greater intensity in the last 12 months, people started paying for online content. They are doing so at an accelerating pace, and on a dependable, recurring schedule, often through subscriptions. And they’re paying for everything.
You’ve already heard about the rise of subscription-based media platforms — things like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Spotify and Apple Music. But people are also paying for smaller-audience and less-mainstream-friendly content. They are subscribing to podcasters, comedians, zany YouTube stars, novelists and comic book artists. They are even paying for news.
Why are tech’s biggest players stepping away from this brief after supporting the last one? We don’t know. The companies won’t provide explanations.
One of the more frustrating thing I encounter on Microsoft Windows is the modal nature of modifier keys. Two of the four modifier keys -- Alt and Windows -- switch modes when pressed. Worse still, if I didn't notice that I have accidentally invoked either the menu bar (by pressing Alt) or the Start menu (by pressing Windows key), not only the next few keystrokes be lost to my document, they may even trigger commands. When this hapens, it will usually take me quite a while to figure out what's wrong, and what need to be undone.
(And, yes, in both the macOS and Windows machines that I use daily, I've turned off Caps Lock key.)
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Thanks for reading.