The company plans to end all internal hardware development and will outsource that function to partners,” CEO John Chen said in a statement. “This allows us to reduce capital requirements and enhance return on invested capital.”
We talked about this on today’s episode of Clockwise. It’s really easy to point at BlackBerry executives’ denial upon the announcement of the iPhone and laugh. But BlackBerry was in a tough position—they had all the advantages of a successful incumbent, but that success also made it difficult to change. Even if they had realized months or even years earlier that the iPhone (and soon, Android) was going to destroy their business, I’m not sure if they would have been able to make the changes necessary to compete with those upstarts.
It strikes me that the right strategy for BlackBerry might have been to embrace the idea of BlackBerry as a secure information service provider rather than a hardware maker, and roll out BlackBerry apps on every possible mobile platform. That way, even if a government or enterprise worker wanted to get an iPhone, they’d still be using BlackBerry servers and sending BlackBerry messages.
I don’t think BlackBerry was ever going to be able to compete with the rise of iPhone and Android. But perhaps they could’ve benefited from it anyway.
Bill Atkinson points to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series from the 1980s, in which an artificial sentience called “Jane” lives in a crystal planted in the ear of the main character, Ender. Jane can do millions of computations per second and is aware and responsive on millions of levels. She’s hesitant to make herself known to humans because she’s painfully aware of the dangerous feelings of inferiority she may awaken in them. Pretty brilliant stuff.
Siri is headed for something like Jane, eventually, Atkinson says. “I think of this as Jane 0.1,” Atkinson says. “Within a few years it’s going to be able to do lots of things: It will hear everything you hear, it’s going to be able to whisper in your ear.”
I vividly remember Atkinson giving his presentation at Macworld Expo in 2011 about the future of user interfaces and how he described in great detail how we’d one day put in an earpiece that could talk to us, listen to us, and look at the world around us—and how that would be how the global Internet interacted with us on a moment-to-moment basis. With every passing day his description of that technology seems more accurate.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
The Amazon Kindle Oasis (left) with the Kobo Aura One.
The ebook reader market is funny. After an initial flurry of excitement, we seem to have settled in on the idea that paper books and ebooks are going to coexist, and that some people who choose to read ebooks will just do so on their smartphones and tablets. But that still leaves a really interesting niche for people who do love reading on dedicated reading devices with screens that are more like a book’s pages than a computer’s backlit display.
For pure utility, the $120 Kindle Paperwhite is the ebook reader you should buy. But what’s more interesting are the developments at the high end of this category, where premium ebook readers have become a thing. First was the $290 Kindle Oasis, which is beautiful, small, and thin.
So when Kobo announced the $229 Kobo Aura One, I was intrigued. It’s a premium ebook reader like the Kindle Oasis, but Kobo has made a bunch of different choices about what that means and what features matter to ebook readers.
I bought a Kobo Aura One to try it out and have been using it for a couple of weeks, the first time I’ve used an ebook reader that wasn’t a Kindle. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a lot of the choices Kobo has made, and while I’m not sure it’s better than the Oasis, it’s most certainly different.
Let’s start with the size: The Aura One has a 7.8-inch diagonal screen with a screen resolution of 300 ppi. That’s the same resolution as all but the cheapest of Amazon’s Kindles, but it’s a much larger screen—the Kindle screens are all only 6 inches diagonal. The end result is that reading a book on an Aura One feels like reading a hardcover, while reading on a Kindle feels like reading a paperback. There’s more text on the screen and you need to turn the page much less frequently. The extra reading space isn’t necessary, per se, but it does feel luxurious.
The tiled Kobo Aura One home screen.
Hardcover books can be heavy, though: the last hardcover novel I read before I bought my first kindle weighed 2.8 pounds! The Aura One isn’t like that—at 8.1 ounces, it’s about the same weight as the Kindle Paperwhite. The Oasis, on the other hand, weighs 4.6 ounces. I was comfortable holding the Aura One and reading for long stretches of time, but if you’re looking for the lightest ebook reader around, the Oasis is for you. The Oasis also offers hardware page-turn buttons; to turn pages on the Aura One, you’ve got to swipe or tap on the screen.
This is not to say that the Aura One doesn’t have its own advantages. It’s waterproof, for one, which no Kindle has ever been able to claim. If you’re someone who reads in a bathtub or hot tub, or otherwise walks the perilous path between reading and water, this is a huge feature in the Aura One’s favor.
Like the Kindle Voyage (but not, strangely, the Oasis), the Aura One has a light sensor that allows it to dynamically adjust its screen brightness based on your surroundings. (Like most Kindles, the Aura One is illuminated internally by a ring of lights.) Unlike the Kindle, the Aura One has a feature that’s akin to Apple’s Night Shift—it can skew its lighting into warmer tones in the evening. If you’re someone who wants to get blue light out of your eyes at night, that’s another point in the Aura One’s favor.
In the end, though, shopping for an ebook reader comes down to the ecosystem it’s connected to. Kobo readers are wired to buy books from the Kobo store; Amazon readers buy from Amazon. You can’t easily migrate your books from one store to another, so if you’ve invested in the Kindle ecosystem it would be hard to switch to the Aura One. That said, I used the open-source app Calibre to convert some of my Kindle books into DRM-free Epub files and then read them on the Kobo. So it’s not impossible to make the transition if you only occasionally want to dip into the archives.
Pocket on the Aura One.
Amazon still offers daily newspapers for the Kindle, which Kobo doesn’t, though both stores offer magazines. Kobo has a leg up on Amazon in a couple other areas: native support for Pocket and Overdrive.
Pocket is a read-it-later service that lets you save stuff on the Web to read at a later time. It’s a perfect fit for an ereader—I use Instapaper to send stories to my Kindle all the time. But on the Aura One, Pocket is integrated right into the device. Just log in with your Pocket account, and your articles will sync, ready to be read on the device. It couldn’t be easier.
Overdrive is a system (owned by the same company, Rakuten, that owns Kobo) that lets your local library offer ebooks for check-out to patrons. You can check out books from Overdrive and download them to your Kindle, but it’s a multi-step process that involves logging in to the Overdrive web site, picking a book, then linking over to Amazon. On the Aura One, all of that happens on the device, which is much more convenient.
Library check-outs are hidden in a sub-menu.
There’s just one problem: The Aura One doesn’t give you a way to search your local library’s collection of ebooks on the device. If you want to read a book, you can search for it in the Kobo store and then tap a More Options icon to see if it’s available on Overdrive. It reminded me of that Douglas Adams line about an item being put on public display “at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.” Once you find a book that’s offered by your library, it takes a couple of taps to check it out and read it—but Kobo is not making much of an effort to let you find library books or remind you that a particular book is available for free check-out. Two steps forward, one step back.
After years of using the Amazon Kindle interface, I was interested in Kobo’s very different approach. Instead of making a list of your documents the home screen, the Aura One features a set of tiles that highlight books and apps that you’ve used recently. I’m not sure if I prefer it to a no-frills list of what’s on the device, but I generally never needed to go to that list, since the books I was currently reading were always offered on tiles. I also found Kobo’s typography quite good, with several different font choices as well as the ability to turn off forced justification on books. My only complaint on this score is that book text seemed strangely framed on any book that wasn’t bought from the Kobo store or checked out via Overdrive, with almost no white space at the top of the screen and too much at the bottom.
(Update: Thanks to reader Eliot Lovell, I discovered this set of Calibre plugins that gets Epub files in a more Kobo-friendly format, and solves the rendering issues it seems to have with generic, unconverted Epubs.)
In the end, where does the Kobo Aura One rank? If you’re not deeply tied into the Amazon ecosystem and screen size or waterproofing mean more to you than weight, the Aura One’s a better choice than the Oasis—and it’s $60-$80 cheaper. (Unlike Amazon, Kobo doesn’t make you pay $20 to remove ads—and it does the right thing and shows the cover art of the book you’re currently reading when it’s turned off.)
If you want a no-frills ebook reader, I stand by my recommendation of the $120 Kindle Paperwhite. If you’re looking for something more, the $229 Kobo Aura One is an appealing option.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I like a whole lot of what Apple’s trying to do with Messages in iOS 10. Message-sending is the killer app of smartphones, and Apple’s text-and-photos approach to messaging was too basic. With iOS 10, Messages is fun again.
And effects! Don’t get me started. Sending the word balloons, but with the Lasers effect? It’s the best. I really do enjoy sending messages with those effects, though I admit that my enjoyment is almost entirely ironic. It doesn’t matter. They’re silly and fun.
But here’s the thing: Apple has packed tons of fun things into Messages in iOS 10—but the interface itself has broken down. No, Messages isn’t as inscrutable as Snapchat, but it’s not what I’d call a well-designed app. It’s an app that’s full of features, but too many features are impossible to discover. Overall, Messages for iOS 10 is just way too complicated.
Let’s start with the blue up arrow, which has replaced the Send button. Its placement, where the old Send button was, is probably enough to get across what you do when you tap it, but I’ve seen numerous people upgrade to iOS 10 and then get confused how to send a simple text message.
What’s worse than the arrow itself is what’s hidden behind the arrow. If you use 3D Touch (or touch and hold on non-3D-Touch-capable devices), you get access to all those effects—four effects that animate the bubble you’re sending, and five that animate the entire message window. Those effects are fun, and once you know to use 3D Touch they’re pretty easy to send (though if your grip’s not secure, you could find yourself pressing the send button instead of bringing up the effects window).
What about discovery? There’s simply no way, short of trial and error, for someone to figure out how to send effects. This is a problem with a lot of the design of iOS 10, where there are lots of extra features concealed a tap or swipe away, but without any indication that there’s anything more you can do on that screen. (Try to toggle shuffle on and off in Music. You have to know to scroll the album art up to reveal the additional controls, but how would you know? Again, once you know the feature is there, it’s pretty nifty—but it’s just frustrating unless you are in on the secret.)
On the iPad, there’s an ink button parked on the keyboard. Tap it, and you get a white area where you can draw a message as if you were writing in ink. I don’t really understand the rationale for placing that feature inside a software keyboard, and I always forget that it’s there, but that’s where Apple has put it. On the iPhone, it’s even weirder—you get to the interface by turning your phone on its side so it’s in landscape orientation, at which point the writing space appears.
All the other features are located under a gray greater-than symbol to the left of the text input area. Tap that symbol and you’ll see three different symbols—a camera, a heart with two fingers, and the somewhat familiar App Store logo. The camera icon is clear enough, though you have to swipe to the right to reveal that you have access to a full-screen camera view as well as the traditional photo-library picker.
The Digital Touch view (the heart with two fingers) has been imported from the Apple Watch, and combined with a video-camera feature. I’m willing to accept that this is the most Snapchat-like of all Messages features, and that someone my daughter’s age might find it awesome. I find it a little confusing. You can tap a carat icon to take the Digital Touch panel full screen, so you can draw an animated messages in a larger space. There’s an animated panel just above it that shows you what different finger gestures will do, and if you tap it, a help page will slide up. For a simple, fun feature, it’s not so simple.
Then there’s the app store. I like the idea of a Messages app store, full of sticker packs and apps that can integrate the intelligence of standalone apps with the freewheeling conversation of a text message. But the complexity of this interface is pretty breathtaking. Here’s how to direct someone to the Messages App Store: Tap the gray greater-than sign, then the App Store icon, then the four-circles icon in the bottom left corner of the screen, then the icon with a plus symbol that’s labeled Store. Four taps to get to the App Store seems like a lot, but there it is.
Finally, let’s talk about the message window itself. Stickers can very easily cover your conversation, and it’s not obvious how to get them out of the way to read a text. The Tap Back feature, which lets you give a quick reaction of one of six icons to any given message, is invisible unless you go looking for it—or activate it accidentally.
I like Apple’s instincts in transforming Messages like it has in iOS 10. But the interface is in need of a lot of refinement. Some features aren’t at all discoverable, and others are buried behind complex chains of icon taps and slide-up interfaces. (I’m also not sure why Digital Touch and the ink-writing feature are different.) There’s a lot of fun stuff here, but for more people to embrace it, they need to be able to find it and use it with ease. A messaging app shouldn’t be boring—but it also shouldn’t be hard to use. In iOS 10, Apple has traded one problem for another.
My friend Stephen Hackett has a child with cancer. Josiah’s story is sad and inspiring and scary and amazing and pretty much all the emotions wrapped together in one big ball. I got to meet Josiah and the rest of Stephen’s family last month in Memphis. That is a house filled with love. (And old Macs.)
This month is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. I encourage you to learn more about it and donate to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in honor of Josiah, and Stephen, and the Hackett family, and all children who face this disease.
More accurately, I wrote an entirely new edition of my old Take Control ebook about Photos. The old book covered Photos for Mac 1.0 and was updated last fall with the changes to Photos that came with El Capitan.
This year’s macOS Sierra release includes the biggest update to Photos yet, and there were huge additions to the Photos app on iOS, as well. Since Apple really does seem to view Photos as a single app that spans all of its platforms, it made sense to update the book to cover not just all the changes to Photos on the Mac, but also to cover the features of Photos on iOS. So this book does both, along with giving a nod to watchOS and tvOS.
You can buy the book here for $10. (If you bought my old book about Photos, check out your email—you should’ve received an upgrade offer to the new version.)
My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring Six Colors this week to promote Loopback.
Loopback is an audio utility that lets you route Mac audio where you want it to go. Believe it or not, if you want to route sound from one app (say, Garageband or QuickTime Player) to another app (say, Skype), you can’t. You can input audio from hardware devices, but not from software. Loopback changes this, so you can send audio to and from another apps (as well as hardware), mixing and matching as needed. It’s the missing link in building Mac audio workflows entirely in software that would previously have required routing audio out of the Mac into a mixer and then back into the Mac.
I use Loopback in conjunction with Audio Hijack to record podcast audio and stream it live using another Rogue Amoeba app, Nicecast. (Similarly, if I want to play audio from my Mac and have it heard by the people on a Skype call, Loopback is what I use.)
If you need to route audio around your Mac from app to app, check out Loopback. It’s free to try, and you can save $20 when you purchase by using coupon code SIXCOLORS1609. Act fast, because this deal only lasts until the end of the month!
Verizon apparently does use a SIM card for LTE phones: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080722202849AAT51WZ
Apple has released iOS 10.0.2 which is supposed to fix problems with controls on Lightning headphones: https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/23/ios-10-0-2-lighting-headphone-bug-iphone-7/
How did Dan get a Sonos and Lex and Moltz didn’t know about it? https://www.sonos.com/en-us/home
You can get AirPlay working on a Sonos but it ain’t pretty: https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/02/getting-sonos-to-work-with-airplay-and-overcast/
Apple’s reportedly working on an Echo competitor: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-23/apple-said-to-step-up-plans-for-echo-style-smart-home-device-itfnod11
Dan got the SoundBot SB517 for listening to podcasts in the shower: https://www.amazon.com/SB517-Speakerphone-Waterproof-Rechargeable-Dust-proof/dp/B00KUSZ81I
Twitter is reportedly looking to sell to maybe Google or Salesforce: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-m-a-idUSKCN11T1GT
Yahoo’s data breach of 500 million accounts: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/info-500-million-accounts-stolen-yahoo-state-sponsored/story?id=42286309
Google has backed off on Allo’s privacy feature: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/21/12994362/allo-privacy-message-logs-google
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Over the last several years, Apple has taken a number of opportunities to present itself in stark contrast against one of its chief rivals, Google, but nowhere more in the firm position Cupertino takes against collecting any more data than it needs to about its customers.
Privacy is obviously a major concern in the digital age, and Apple’s stance is largely applauded–and with good reason. But at the same time, that choice doesn’t come without its costs, both to Apple and to its users. By taking such a hardline stance, the company has hindered the development of some of its features, and perhaps even negated some of the advantages of its ecosystem.
There are places, it seems, where a balance is not only desirable but necessary. This isn’t to say Apple should sacrifice security and privacy in favor of capabilities, but that the company should be able to make use of its immense talent to find a middle ground that maintains users’ privacy and provides the features that people want.
Mark Gurman’s latest for Bloomberg is mainly about Apple working on an Amazon Echo competitor that may or may not materialize, but I was fascinated about this bit near the end on the roadmap for Siri:
Beyond the home device, Apple is researching new ways to improve Siri on iPhones and iPads, two people said. With an initiative code-named “Invisible Hand,” Apple hopes to give users the ability to fully control their devices through a Siri command system within three years, one of the people added. Currently, the voice assistant is able to respond to commands within its application, but Apple’s goal is for Siri to be able to control the entire system without having to open an app or reactivate Siri.
For example, a user would be able to ask their iPhone to open a web page and then share it with a friend without the need to ever launch the Siri interface. Other examples from Apple’s current research include being able to print a PDF by speaking “print” while reading it or saying “help” in order for the system to help the user navigate a particular task or application. Apple has also been researching opening this ability to third-party apps, the person said.
First of all, if there’s a codename creepier than “Invisible Hand,” Apple hasn’t found it yet. More to the point, though, this seems like a natural evolution of Siri, and also seems like it would be a powerful boon to those looking for a more accessible iPhone.
The whole piece is worth a read, and certainly seems to support the hypothesis that a Siri-powered speaker is in the making–even if it might not find its way to market.
When people ask me for the single best reason to upgrade to macOS Sierra, the answer I give them doesn’t involve Siri or Auto Unlock or iCloud Drive. It’s version 2.0 of Photos, the biggest update to Apple’s photo-management utility app since it debuted in the spring of 2015.
I’ve been using Photos 2.0 extensively all summer as a part of my testing of macOS Sierra. My six favorite features make Photos almost singlehandedly worth the upgrade to Sierra.
I spent a little bit this afternoon shooting some pictures with Portrait mode. My first impression is that it’s the most interactive shooting mode Apple has provided: A text overlay will tell you if you need to “Move farther away” or if there’s “More light required” or if you should “Place subject within 8 feet.” If it can’t produce a depth effect, it just takes a regular picture when you press the button. (If it can produce an effect, it saves both images—one without the effect, and one with.)
When the alerts vanish, however, the depth effect happens live, on your screen, so you can see what you’re about to capture. Shooting appears to happen with the telephoto lens; the range finding is happening on the wide-angle lens.
I was pretty impressed by the results of many of the pictures. Not all of them turned out, which I’d expect in general—and certainly consider this is a beta feature on a beta iOS release. When they turned out, they looked great. Pictures of my cat (like the one up top) managed to keep his head, upper body, and a stuck-out paw in clear focus while gradually blurring his lower body and completely blurring the scene outside my back door.
On Twitter, I heard from numerous people who noticed issues in the foreground (some blurred splotches, for instance, but no real blurred foreground). I’m not sure whether Apple is particularly concerned about pleasing people who know how a real depth-of-field blur effect would work, though, or just making an image with a pleasant effect. I’d say this beta is well on the way to doing the latter.
There’s much more to play with here. But I’ve got to say, seeing these initial results, I think this is going to be a really crowd-pleasing feature.
Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch took the new iPhone 7 Plus portrait mode for a spin in a preview of the iOS 10.1 beta. It’s a really good story, explaining how the feature works, where it excels, and where it falls down. With lots of image samples!
A few shows on The CW have begun tweeting out a confirmation that the network’s Apple TV app will arrive sometime “next week,” along with apps on Roku, Chromecast, Xbox, and Amazon Fire TV (via iDigitalTimes). The hint of an incoming Apple TV app was discovered last week, but an official Apple TV app for The CW — and not just the clip-based “Seed” platform — has been in the works for over three years. The Apple TV app will also support AirPlay.
I noted on Twitter a couple weeks back that the CW had started to tease this on its website. Good thing, too, since the network has pulled its content from Hulu and struck a deal with Netflix to have seasons appear on that service shortly after they finish. It seemed obvious that it would need some sort of streaming solution for folks to watch the shows as they air.
(This is a sort of private vindication for me, too. I wrote an article more than three years ago that a CW channel was imminent for the old Apple TV—a development that never came to pass. And, uh, I could really use that bumped down the Google Search results…)
Dodger announcer Vin Scully is a national treasure, the best that ever was. He’s retiring at the end of this season, after 67 years broadcasting for the team in both Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Here’s a great tribute to Scully assembled by ESPN’s Jayson Stark from two dozen of his colleagues:
So how do we capture the magnitude of Vin Scully, the meaning of Vin Scully, the miracle of Vin Scully? Not with our words, but with the words of the men and women who have known him best, whose company he has shared, whose lives he has touched, whose careers he has described and even transformed.
I have friends who live in the house that longtime Giants broadcaster Russ Hodges built. I sometimes imagine who might have come to cocktail parties in that house. Maybe Vin Scully came by one night. That’s fun to think about.
(Also, if you are someone who doesn’t care about baseball, but enjoys other nerdy stuff, I will leave you with this: Who do you think Dana Scully of “The X-Files” is named for?)
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
So that’s it for the era of the big X. Version 10.12 of the operating system that runs the Mac is here, and with it, a new/old name: macOS. Though the name has changed, macOS Sierra follows Apple’s Mac gameplan of recent years, adding features in sync with updates to iOS, and expansion of iCloud integration. There’s also an intriguing new integration with iOS hardware, a major update to Photos, and a whole lot more. I’ve spent the last couple of months using Sierra almost every day. The X is gone, but the beat goes on.
The issue, which I’ve also experienced a few times while testing the iPhone 7, happens after you’ve left the EarPods plugged into the iPhone 7’s Lightning port for a few minutes. Audio continues to play, but the volume control dongle stops working, meaning you can’t adjust the volume, activate Siri, or answer calls.
…
An Apple spokesperson told me the problem will be fixed in a future software update.
I’ve been experiencing the same problem with the Lightning-to-analog headphone adapter. Sometimes I just pause music and forget to turn it back on. I’ve even heard a faint electronic “click-buzz” after a few minutes of sitting there with the headphones plugged in but no music playing. Developer Scott O’Reilly documented the behavior on video. The current fix is to unplug the Lightning adapter and plug it back in.
I figured–as some others did–that this was some sort of power-saving routine, but if Apple’s going to fix it, then it seems that this isn’t the intended behavior. I’ve definitely found it annoying over the last few days, though hardly a deal-breaker. Perhaps it’ll just accelerate my adoption of Bluetooth headphones for everyday use.
I’ve been dabbling in smart home and automation for a while, so I’ve been keeping tabs on Apple’s HomeKit. It had a bit of a false start with iOS 9, which introduced the protocol but didn’t provide a real front end interface for your gadgets.
With iOS 10, Apple’s moved to correct that with the Home app, which adds not only controls for your devices, but also a feature to automate them—provided you have an updated Apple TV or an iPad to use for the purpose. (Automation routines are run on the devices themselves; your iPhone’s probably going to be leaving the house with you, so it’s not going to be able to turn on the lights for you while you’re away.)
For me, one of the frustrating weaknesses of HomeKit automation thus far is the lack of granularity in some of its timing triggers. Specifically, I have a light in my office that comes on around sunset. I used to automate that with a Belkin WeMo switch, which let me create a rule to say “turn on one hour before sunset.” That way, it adjusted with the shift in daylight hours over the course of the year, and never required any re-programming. Great.
When I switched to a Hue bulb in that lamp, I ran into a problem. The Hue app would allow me to set a rule to trigger at sunset—but not a specified time before. Given where my office windows face, by the time it’s sunset, my office is already on the darker side, so I’ve generally manually turned on the light already.
HomeKit’s automation has the same problem. I can choose Sunset (or Sunrise, for that matter) as a trigger time, but I can’t set an offset. For that, I ended up having to turn to a third-party app recommended by some folks on Twitter, iConnectHue. It provides a lot of features, but honestly the only thing I really use it for is this one particular use case.
This speaks to one of the larger problems with home automation right now: the fragmentation. It’s possible for me to have a half dozen apps with different features, each running different rules. If you’re not careful, those can collide with one another. Depending on how many places you create rules, that means a frustrating process of tracking down exactly what actions are happening in what app or service.
(Not to suggest that this is all bad: the reason this problem exists is because there’s an API that apps can easily access. Arguably, that’s far better than having a closed system where you would have to be all-in from a single vendor.)
My feeling is that Apple has only just scratched the surface with HomeKit, and that we’ll see more features as the market itself becomes a little better defined. iOS 10’s implementation is already far more mature than what we got with iOS 9—here’s hoping for further improvement in iOS 11.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
