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The Recorded-While-Walking Edition Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Apple Unveils ‘Time To Walk’ For Fitness+, by John Voorhees, MacStories

Each workout is around 25-40 minutes long and includes stories told by well-known guests who tell inspirational and entertaining stories about their lives. The stories, which were recorded while the guests walked, are coupled with images that automatically play on the Apple Watch and a short playlist of songs at the end of each story that is meaningful to the guest. Also, as soon as you start playing a Time to Walk story, your Watch will begin a walking workout. If you use a wheelchair, Time to Walk changes to Time to Push and starts a Wheelchair Walk Pace workout.

Apple Launches Time To Walk Feature For Fitness+, by Dan Moren, Six Colors

But what I find really fascinating about this is that it’s essentially a paywalled podcast, available only to Fitness+ subscribers. [...] Given that rumor has the company considering its own paid “Podcasts+” service, this might help the company suss out whether or not that idea has legs.

Stuff

How To Fix Apple News Download Bug On macOS Big Sur, by Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac

The Apple News app seems to have a flaw in macOS Big Sur that’s causing very large background downloads for some users. While Apple hasn’t issued a patch to the app itself, there is another way to fix the Apple News download bug that’s causing background downloads of up to 60GB+ a day.

Develop

Gus Mueller And Ken Kocienda On Brad Cox And Objective-C, by John Gruber, Daring Fireball

When I listen to my favorite app developers speak of Objective-C and its runtime, they almost never talk of the source code they wrote. They speak about it like Kocienda does, like it gave them the ability to put their fingers on the apps themselves. Like they weren’t writing instructions to make the app, but that they were writing the app itself. Not writing a recipe for baking a cake, but somehow baking a cake directly, and tweaking it to taste better and look prettier as it’s cooking. And if you needed to write ungainlier-looking recipes to get that on-the-fly dynamic feel for the cake as it’s being made, so be it, because the cake is the thing, not the recipe.

Notes

Apple Announces That Dan Riccio Moving To A New Role At The Company, And John Ternus Is Stepping In As Senior VP Of Hardware Engineering, by John Voorhees, MacStories

Apple has announced its senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, Dan Riccio, is leaving that role to work on unspecified projects. Stepping into the gap left by Riccio is John Ternus, who has appeared as a presenter at recent Apple events covering the M1 Macs, for example.

Apple Suppliers Fear COVID Surge Over Chinese New Year, by Lauly Li and Cheng Ting-Fang, Nikkei Asia

A string of Apple's most important suppliers in China are trying to quash fears of renewed coronavirus outbreaks by offering extra handouts to workers if they do not travel home for the upcoming Lunar New Year festivities.

[...]

Tech suppliers are desperate to avoid a repeat of last year, when they struggled to keep manufacturing sites housing tens of thousands of workers virus-free while dealing with labor shortages brought on by strict quarantine measures and traffic restrictions during the first phase of the pandemic.

Bottom of the Page

There are stronger and stronger indications that this strange times is going to last for years, from both scientists and non-anti-science governments. 2021 is not going to be like 2020, but we are still very far from the post-2020 that we imagined back in 2020.

It seems very likely I will still be wearing a mask at the end of this year. I will still not be eating out. And I will still trying to stop myself from doomscrolling.

What I don't know is whether I will still be staying at home working, or whether I will still be staying at home but looking for a job.

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Stay safe, everyone. And thanks for reading.