In startups, roles are fluid. Everyone wears many hats: what’s important isn’t one’s job description but the problems which need to be solved. ​ If you’re going to have a team with continuously negotiated roles, you need a context for that continuous negotiation. These demos unified the “tests” with the real work. Eventually, I came to understand that they put themselves into these terrible situations as a way to force themselves to innovate, that the desperation was productive, not destructive. It was desperation, but by design. ​ We worked from deep desperation, but as Vaughn describes, it was absolutely one of the most exhilarating and dynamic periods of my life. But these big-picture problem statements shatter fractally into a hundred sub-problems, and most of the progress in my work comes from identifying and improving articulations these sub-problems.

Let's start discussing Apple's Combine framework by discussing what's missing

What’s left, then, is “something I am” along with the increasingly important object that is also increasingly unusable by anyone but me, and therefore more a part of me than ever. No wonder it’s so hard to put it down.

AirPods foster a different approach to detachment: Rather than mute the surrounding world altogether, they visually signal the wearer’s choice to perpetually relegate the immediate environment to the background. ​ AirPods, then, express a more complete embrace of our simultaneous existence in physical and digital space, taking for granted that we’re frequently splitting our mental energy between the two. ​ AirPods have externalities — penalizing non-wearers while confining the value they generate to their individual users. ​ Once everyone has earbuds that are always in, physical proximity will no longer confer a social expectation of shared experience. ​ subordinate our in-person sociality to the privatized infrastructure of networked communication ​ Now, the kind of space that suffices instead is a pleasant backdrop for solitary device usage, a relatively blank slate that doesn’t compete with the phone’s foreground — conditions that places like Sweetgreen and Equinox supply. ​ A dominant aural information platform could have a similar effect, fostering a world where we might as well leave our headphones on because there’s nothing around us worth hearing.

Being willing to ignore the weird appearance of AirPods makes a statement: if you’re okay with overlooking how strange-looking they are, then you must be somewhat proud to be wearing them. ​ Commodities like AirPods are social products. AirPods display the social message of wealth because AirPods derive their value from the invisible, social chain of production that’s necessary to make them in the first place. Thus, AirPods strategically glue together an ecosystem of luxury products. They are only so “convenient” because, by eliminating the headphone jack, Apple made the iPhone less user-friendly. ​ AirPods are disposable products that are also impossible to throw away. ​ On a global scale, our economic system is predicated on a disregard for longevity, because it’s more profitable for companies to make products that die than it is to make products that last. ​ They’re physical manifestations of a global economic system that allows some people to buy and easily lose $160 headphones, and leaves other people at risk of death to produce those products. If AirPods are anything, they’re future fossils of capitalism.

that, more or less, for some reason the machine learning algorithm for autocorrect was learning something it never should have learned.

It’s a collection of small functions and properties without a linear story. ​ Part of me does not want to encourage people to use RxSwift for the reasons I’ve outlined. But part of me very much wants to encourage people to use RxSwift — because change comes, in part, from the community pushing the state of the art. ​ But if you do use it, and some time in the future there’s a nice, declarative way of handling events and dealing with state, then I’ll have you to thank for helping make that come true.

The articles are often very well done and beautifully illustrated — and it would be to the benefit of Apple, and app developers, if these articles were findable and readable by people sitting in front of a computer.

Bijan Stephen, the Verge: Records should have good art. For albums as diverse as London Calling, Horses, and Fear of a Black, the images on their covers were as recognizable as the music on the wax. While Apple Music isn’t a record label (yet), it did recently decide to add original art to its playlists. […]

Shortcuts are not making Siri smarter, in fact they are dumber than pretty much anything Siri has done to date. Shortcuts put the burden on the user to do the legwork of synthesising data sources and integrating the apps into the voice service.

Peter Bright, Ars Technica: Fulfilling its 2017 promise to make Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free, Intel has given the specification for its high-speed interconnect to the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that develops the USB specification. The USB-IF has taken the spec and will use it to form the basis of USB4, the next iteration […]

FindTheLongestIdentifierNameInCocoaFramework. Contribute to Quotation/LongestCocoa development by creating an account on GitHub.

The typical audio environment for HomePod has many challenges — echo, reverberation, and noise. Unlike Siri on iPhone, which operates close…

“Want to see a really bad bug? You can FaceTime any iOS device running 12.1 and listen in remotely—WITHOUT THE OTHER PERSON ANSWERING THE CALL. (via @bzamayo) https://t.co/Zd4DSeM1WV”

The key to the watchOS user interface needs isnu2019t getting the attention it deserves from Apple.

Every September since Apple released the Apple Watch, we’ve seen a brand new version of watchOS come out that improves the experience. Here’s a brief recap: * watchOS 1 (Apr 2015): way more functionality than needed, and super slow * watchOS 2 (Sep 2015): slightly faster, and better APIs for

“They’re winning, but they don’t just want to win the race. They want to win the race while driving the best-looking car on the track.”

“it’s precisely because such fervent competition exists that these companies and so many others have been pushed to build their best-in-breed products: Kindle is better because of iBooks, Spotify is better because of Apple Music, and iOS is better because of Android. This list goes on and on and on”

“The rise in communication options has turned what was confined by four walls into something more porous and fluid. And perhaps that is why I argue, that we need to think of time differently.”

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CocoaLove focuses on talks which don’t deprecate as soon as you leave. In 2015, Matt gave this talk. Matt lead teams that make software at Tumblr, and makes software himself with his partners at Lickability. His talk was about why you might want to step away from the keyboard and into leadership, and what happens when you do. It’s about the difference between managing programs and managing people.