Bella Hadid does it, so it can’t be that weird. Right? On 10th December 2020, the model posted a meme created by poet Trista Mateer. In it, someone is standing in the corner of a party, thinking the words, "They don’t know that I just wrote a poem in my Notes app". More than 583,000 people liked the post. A week earlier, a viral trend on Twitter saw people posting a selfie alongside a random note from their phone. People shared stray thoughts, lists of places they wanted to travel, drafted breakup texts, recipes and yeah, poems – so many poems. Poems about love, poems about power, poems about Laika, the Soviet space dog who was the first animal to orbit the Earth.
What compels us to jot down poetry and poetic thoughts in our Notes app, of all places? What do our Notes app poems say about the human impulse to write poetry – and could technology be enabling this impulse on an unprecedented scale? What makes a Notes app poem a poem, instead of a diary entry or a mini therapy session or a rushed jumble of thoughts?
Do we continue as we were, or do we try forging a new path that not only leans on technology but sees it as a primary and necessary part of learning? School boards have embraced iPads and Chromebooks as tools in recent years, but some see them as extensions of, not replacements for, existing book-and-pencil taxonomy, an augmentation of an existing practice.
Despite the limitations, everyone I talked to was glad the labels were there, even if they didn’t personally learn anything new from them.
Several people said they would check the labels before downloading apps, now that they knew they existed and where they were. And some were sufficiently freaked out by what they saw on the labels that they adjusted some of their permissions and even deleted some of their apps.
9to5Mac obtained access to a rejection email shared by a developer that provides a subscription service through their app. It shows a rejection message from Apple telling them that their app would not be approved because the prices of their in-app purchase products “do not reflect the value of the features and content offered to the user.” Apple’s email goes as far as calling it a “rip-off to customers”.
It uses plain English to say, look you’ve got “3 Days Free” in the case of the screenshots below. It’s much better than the way it currently is in iOS 14.4, with small text that separates the name of the trial from the “Free” label. Apple has also substantially increased the size of the price and placed it directly above the confirmation animation.
The function was initially limited to English and Chinese, but iPadOS 14.5 beta expands support to include French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
A new study underway at Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN), a group of working research hospitals in the city, could shift our approach to treatment in an area of growing concern in human health. The study, led by Dr. Heather Ross, will investigate whether the Apple Watch can provide early warnings about potentially worsening health for patients following incidents of heart failure.
A new court filing has revealed that, as part of the ongoing legal battle between Apple and Epic Games, Apple subpoenaed Valve Software in November 2020, demanding it provide huge amounts of commercial data about Steam sales and operations going over multiple years.
German researcher Florian Heller—who beyond being a postdoctoral researcher at Hasselt University in Belgium is also a self-described nerd and percussionist—published a paper this month called "Muffidgets: Detecting and Identifying Edible Pastry Tangibles on Capacitive Touchscreens." In more layman's terms, after discovering that muffins contained enough moisture to be recognized by a touchscreen, he created an app that uses a baking hack to determine which muffins had been placed on top of his iPad Air's screen.
I miss smart playlists.
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Thanks for reading.