The infamous green bubble—my personal Scarlet Letter—is just the tip of the iceberg. As I mentioned earlier, video clips captured on an iPhone and texted to an Android are compressed beyond legibility, and those cute little hearts and thumbs-ups you attach to someone’s messages in a group thread have yet to be made fully compatible between the two operating systems. (If I text my girlfriend, an iPhone owner, “I love you,” there’s a good chance I’ll receive a text in response that says “Rebecca loved ‘I love you,’ ” instead of just seeing a pink heart appear on my message. What! Why?) Other times, the texts from my friends simply aren’t delivered—due to some unknowable machinations beyond the veil—a happening which, to be honest, can be both a blessing and a curse.
Microsoft’s new AI-powered Copilot summarized my meeting instantly yesterday (the meeting was with Microsoft to discuss Copilot, of course) before listing out the questions I’d asked just seconds before. I’ve watched Microsoft demo the future of work for years with concepts about virtual assistants, but Copilot is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to them coming true.
“In our minds this is the new way of computing, the new way of working with technology, and the most adaptive technology we’ve seen,” says Jon Friedman, corporate vice president of design and research at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge.
It’s been 4 weeks since the v2.0 update for Music Library Tracker launched so I thought now was a good time for a retrospective to detail how I promoted the app and how well it performed.
Over the past couple years, Apple’s been rolling out its “Detailed City Experience” in Maps to cities across the world and finally, at long last, those improved maps and better landmarks have come to my hometown of Boston, as first noted by Frank McShan on Twitter.
As a lifelong resident of this fair city, I thought it my responsibility—nay, my duty—to take a spin through all these new landmarks and judge them on their fidelity to the reality (and the spirit)
Without further ado, let’s take a look.
Over the last several months, Apple has been slowly adding a handful of unlisted apps to the App Store, covering things like CarKey, GymKit, and more. Now, Apple has launched the “Accessory Developer Assistant” app as its latest unlisted offering on the App Store.
In 2006, an 18-year-old blogger and coder named Jaroslaw Rzeszótko emailed a series of unsolicited questions to a group of famous developers. Among his questions was a future looking solicitation: “What will be the next big thing in programming?” Most of his audience rejected the basis of the question or demurred, but Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, took the bait. He predicted the importance of incremental improvements in programming, specifically “tools to help make all the everyday drudgery easier.”
“For example, I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did,” Torvalds wrote, “yet people laugh at VB and say it's a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for decades. And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy DB interfaces in VB were fundamentally more important than object orientation is, for example.”
Torvalds, as it turns out, was right: it was primarily the tools, ecosystems, integrations, and frameworks that would define the near future, not the design of the languages themselves.
Today, I've deposited the contact-tracing bluetooth token into an e-waste recycle bin. This was the little device that we had to carry around outside of home, when we need to go to almost any places -- shops, malls, wherever -- in the past couple of years. (Instead of the token, you can also use an app. But, I always worried my phone not working at moments, so I carried the token.)
This country stopped using this contact-tracing device last year, and the program was shut down earlier this year.
So, in another way, another icon of these strange times have been rid of. (There are plenty of masks and test kits in my home, still.) This strange times may not be over yet, but it is getting less strange.
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Thanks for reading.