Apple bumped their standard one month free trial of Apple News+ up to three months over the holidays, so I finally opted to give it a try. I’d been tempted for awhile; surely it’d be great to be able to read The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and others whenever I felt like it, all through the convenience of my tablet?
But in practice I just haven’t made that much use of the trial. Sure, I skim the article headlines in The New Yorker whenever a new issues comes out, but I actually read very few articles. And the weekly publication schedule feels somewhat relentless. I already have a backlog of books to read; piling new content that keeps inexorably arriving on top seems like it’d make me feel wasteful for spending money on content that I didn’t get around to reading. I subscribe to the New York Times and use that subscription every day (I generally read it over breakfast), but I think I’ll just quietly let my News+ trial expire when my three months are up.
We spent the long MLK weekend in Healdsburg, up in Sonoma county. I’ve been curious about it for years, but it never quite crossed the threshold into actually sparking a visit. But the long weekend seemed like a good opportunity, since we didn’t have anything pressing keeping us in town. And with the fires in Sonoma last fall, spending some money in the area seemed like a worthwhile thing to do. We stayed directly in the town, at the Harmon Goest House, roughly half a block from the main town square. It was a good location, since the area around the square is very walkable and has a bunch of shops (including two bookstores!), restaurants, and tasting rooms.
We intentionally made it a low-key weekend, poking around the town, eating some tasty food, and exploring. We did hop in the car to drive roughly 10 minutes to the parking lot for the Fitch Mountain open space preserve. The mountain is really a large hill at the eastern edge of town, but hiking up it got us a bit of exercise (useful after all the food) and provided some nice views of the Russian River and surrounding countryside. I suspect it’d be fun to raft or kayak the river in warmer weather, but that’d be balanced by the increased number of visitors you’d have to endure.
Google generally does a nice job of decoration its buildings for the holidays; I like the aesthetic of the displays they’ve done the last couple of years. They don’t put displays up in every building, but this year they decorated both our old and new buildings.
Our old building’s display is a winter scene with a moose, which seems appropriate for the holidays. Plus the wooden moose sculpture is just cool. Our new building’s display, by contrast, includes a winter scene with koalas, which, just, what? It’s summer in Australia during the holidays; shouldn’t this either be a summer scene or feature a different (northern hemisphere) animal?
This year we finally got around to seeing the holiday lights at Filoli (for that matter, it was our first time seeing Filoli period). We’d heard about the lights before, but we’d never gotten around to catching them. But after 13 years in the Bay Area, we finally got around to it. The lights are definitely worth checking out, and at some point we’ll have to go back and see the house and grounds in the day time (possibly in the spring, when the gardens should be lovely).
We often catch The Nutcracker during the holidays, but this year we decided to try something different, so we got tickets to the American Conservatory Theater’s performance of A Christmas Carol. The show was enjoyable, although I have to confess that my reference for any Christmas Carol performance is still Mickey’s Christmas Carol (likely due to some combination of it being the first one I saw and it also being the variation I’ve seen most often). Who doesn’t enjoy Goofy as Jacob Marley?
Getting to the theater, however, was a pain. Public transit in the Bay Area just kind of sucks; it never seems to run at the right times or to/from the right places, and it’s usually both faster and cheaper to drive. Plus if you’re dressed up a bit (which we were, even though we were catching a matinee performance) you don’t want to have to stand around outside in winter waiting for a train. So we opted to drive, and thought an hour was plenty of extra time to alot to find parking. Unfortunately we failed to reckon with how crowded the Union Square area would be on the weekend before Christmas; it took us almost 40 minutes to find a garage that had open parking spots. So lesson learned: avoid driving to holiday performances in SF right before Christmas.
I bought a Stadia Founder’s Edition because I was curious to try the final version. I’d been skeptical that they’d be able to make the service responsive enough for games to be playable, but I got a chance to try an internal dogfood version and was thoroughly impressed by the quality of the experience. Plus I figured that even if I didn’t stick with Stadia, I could use the game controller for games on my Mac, and we could use the Chromecast Ultra to push content to our TV (which we’ve already done).
In some ways I figure I’m the perfect audience for Stadia. I like playing computer games, but I don’t play that many or that often, and I’m typically a year or two behind the curve when I finally get around to trying a game. And I’ve never bothered to purchase a high-end game console, because I’ll never use it enough to justify the investment in it. But a game platform where I don’t need to invest in a console but can still play console games? That sounds promising.
So far my Stadia experience has been good; high-quality streaming and low-latency input. I’ve mostly played Destiny 2 (access is included in the initial 3 month subscription), but I did take advantage of the initial games sale. My biggest complaint so far, in fact, has been around Destiny’s 2 gameplay: they give you almost zero instruction when you first get into the game, and in fact the story campaign content is essentially hidden (I had to search the Internet to figure out how to start it). Apparently they’ve decided that anyone buying the game at this point is doing so for the multiplayer experiences, but they’ve gone so far in that direction that they’re arguably making the game less fun for new players (they start all new players off with high-powered equipment, and there’s no more need to grow your character by unlocking abilities or subclasses). Since it’s included with the subscription I don’t mind too much, but if I’d actually bought the game I’d feel disappointed.
I’ve been less than impressed with Apple’s fall software updates. iOS 13 has been buggy, and Mail just seems to get worse year over year rather than better. I haven’t tried Catalina yet, but I generally wait for the .2 or .3 version of any new MacOS version. iPadOS is the one I have the most issues with, though. I realize Apple is trying to make the iPad more of a productivity device with increased support for window management. That’d be fine if the new capabilities didn’t interfere with my existing habits; I have zero interest in using my iPad that way, but I don’t care if they’re pushing in that direction either. But with iPadOS Apple has made it way too easy to accidentally open content in a new popover window, which is then a pain to dismiss.
One of the main things I use my iPad for is to read content (via the excellent Reeder). All I really need to be able to do it tap on articles to open them, scroll through them as I read them, and then swipe to back to the article list. Straightforward. And yet with iPadOS, I keep accidentally opening content in new windows. Typically it happens when I’m trying to scroll an article. I’ll put my finger down and drag the content, but it’ll often be over an image with an associated link. iPadOS ends up interpreting it as drag-to-open-window, rather than drag-to-scroll. And then I’m stuck with a window that I have to remember how to dismiss (swiping the window up or down, which feels natural because I dragged up to accidentally open the window, of course doesn’t work). It got annoying enough that I went looking for a way to disable drag-to-open, but I couldn’t find a way to do it.
Given that’s there’s already a way to open content in a new window (long-press and then select open in new window), I dearly hope that Apple removes drag-to-open-in-window in a future update.
The Mail app on iOS 13 exhibits a behavior that drives me nuts: iOS will show notifications for new email messages, but if I actually open Mail to read those messages there will be a pause, often of 10-15 seconds, while the Mail application downloads those messages. It’s possible that iOS 12 also exhibited this behavior and iOS 13 made it annoying enough that I finally took note of it, but I suspect it’s something new. And it’s probably battery-saving related: with push notifications the phone can show that I have new email available, but to save power it doesn’t actually download the messages until I open the mail client.
Regardless, the behavior drives me nuts. The phone knows I new email available, so if it’s going to show the notification then it should have pre-downloaded the message so that I can read it immediately. I’d rather have the phone hold off showing the notification until it’s downloaded the message if it wants to save power. I don’t get email that’s so time-critical that I need notifications delivered just as soon as they’re available; that’s what messaging is for.
iOS 13 is having a pretty rocky start; it feels like Apple should maybe have skipped over 13 and gone straight from 12 to 14.
The end of the year is approaching, and companies are working hard to get their new offerings out in time for the holiday season. The beginning of this month brought us Apple TV+, which I’m mildly interested in but not enough to actually pay for yet. Although perhaps I should more accurately say there’s nothing I’m interested in enough to spend the time setting up Family Sharing and then actually watching; in theory my wife’s new iPhone qualifies her for a free year, and you can share subscriptions with family members.
I’m a bit more interested in Disney+, primarily because I’d like to watch The Mandalorian. I would consider subscribing immediately for that reason, but apparently Disney is only releasing one episode a week, instead of making them available all at once. So I’ll probably waiting until all the initial episodes are available and then subscribe for a month to watch them, and then ditch the subscription.
And then we’ve got Stadia coming on the 19th. I was initially skeptical; latency is a killer for interactive games, and the Internet isn’t known for providing reliably low-latency experiences. But I got to try an early version, and I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised. The success of the experience will still depend on the quality and quantity of games available, but from a purely technological perspective I’m optimistic that Google will deliver a good experience. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens on the 19th.
The Pixel 4 got dinged by the tech press for the fact that its facial authentication works if your eyes are closed. On the one hand, sure, ideally it would detect that you’re awake, alive, and consenting before it unlocks the phone. On the other hand, I wonder a bit about people for whom this is a concern. If you’re seriously worried about people unlocking your phone while you sleep, you might have bigger issues to contend with in your life.
Security driven by biometrics (face, voice, fingerprint, etc.) is always probabilistic, and the goal is to find an appropriate balance between false positives (letting the wrong people authenticate) and false negatives (not letting the right people authenticate). In practice mobile operating systems tend to err on the side of false positives; what are the odds you’re really going to go around verifying that the security is really as robust as the developers claim? While you’ll immediately notice if your phone repeatedly refuses to let you authenticate.
Apple, for example, likes to brag that there’s only a one in a million chance that someone else’s face can unlock your iPhone. Well, my wife recently got a new iPhone 11, and my daughter can reliably unlock it with her own face. I suspect it’s because they both were glasses, which complicate face recognition (my daughter can only unlock my wife’s iPhone when she’s wearing her glasses; if she takes them off it doesn’t work). Sure, she could be that one-in-a-million outlier. Or Apple could be overstating the quality of its face authentication. Finding an appropriate balance between false positives and false negatives is hard.
jeff pierce 